Weekend Edition Saturday

Nearly 18 million tourists descend on our nation's capitol every year, and most of them are keen to spend time at the many free museums in Washington, D.C. But only about 100,000 people take the trip across the river to a museum of a different sort: the Pentagon. The Pentagon's exhaustive historical displays offer fresh insight into the range of the Defense Department's activities.

Host Scott Simon speaks with Val Castor, the senior "StormTracker" for News 9 in Oklahoma City, about what it's like to do the job in one of the most climatically volatile regions of the country.

In Arizona, a federal judge ruled against the Maricopa County Sheriff's Department, saying it used racial profiling to enforce the state's tough immigration laws. Host Scott Simon talks with NPR's Ted Robbins about the ruling.

In our latest installment of the StoryCorps Military Voices Initiative, we hear from Lance Cpl. Travis Williams. In 2005, while serving in Iraq, Williams lost his 12-man squad lost his squad to an IED. He was the only survivor.

When Raymond Sokolov began writing about food, it was considered a specialty portfolio. Today, celebrity chefs abound in the U.S. and Britain, with cookbooks, TV shows and groupies. Host Scott Simon speaks with Sokolov about his new book, Steal the Menu: A Memoir of Forty Years in Food.