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GUY RAZ, HOST:

And if you're just joining us, this is WEEKENDS on ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. I'm Guy Raz. There was a time when the Senate would, every once in a while, use a special tool to protect the rights of the minority party.

(SOUNDBITE OF MOVIE, "MR. SMITH GOES TO WASHINGTON")

UNIDENTIFIED MAN: Half of official Washington is here to see democracy's finest show, the filibuster, the right to talk your head off, the American privilege of free speech in its most dramatic form.

The debate over states' rights versus federal power is as old as our country. The latest brush-up comes in a doubly-sticky challenge to the federal Defense of Marriage Act, or DOMA, which defines marriage as being between one man and one woman.

Michael Chabon's latest novel, Telegraph Avenue, is named after the famed road between Oakland and Berkeley in California.

In the book, that's also where two couples — Nat and Aviva, who are white, and Archy and Gwen, who are black — are struggling to get by. The two men are friends, partners in a vinyl record shop. Their wives work together as nurse midwives.

Over the course of a couple of weeks, the characters deal with threats to their work, to their relationships and their very way of being. Chabon delves deeply into issues of art, race and sexuality.

Will it ever end, the desire to understand Marilyn Monroe?

The film Love, Marilyn begins with the statement that an enormous number of books have already been written about her, that she's been the subject of study and fascination and florid prose. But, it says, some of her papers have been discovered, and maybe it is those papers — her own words — that can cast light on the woman herself.

There's a provocative idea at the center of A Late Quartet, which is that a performing ensemble — here, it's a string quartet, but it's an idea with theoretically broad applications — can easily become the most important relationship in the participants' lives. This quartet is not merely a surrogate family but a sort of four-person marriage with all the complications that suggests.

It takes a certain kind of verve to call your documentary How To Make Money Selling Drugs and really mean it.

For 25 years, the London synth-pop duo Pet Shop Boys have done one thing better than any other duo in the UK: sell records.

In fact, they've sold 50 million records worldwide since Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe met at an electronics shop in 1981.

Many people were reminded of the Pet Shop Boys when they helped close out the 2012 Olympic Games in London with their biggest hit, "West End Girls." The duo, however, continues to make new music and has just released their 11th studio album, Elysium.

Frances Ha, from director Noah Baumbach, will likely be a polarizing movie. If you need to understand why, I'll just tell you that it's in black and white and it opens with Frances, played by Baumbach's co-screenwriter Greta Gerwig, and her best friend Sophie frolicking. Frolicking how? Well, Frances is tap dancing and Sophie is playing a miniature banjo. If this is the part where you say, "Heaven forfend I should spend five minutes with such people," then this movie will probably lose you in the first five minutes.

Hollywood loves little kids. Cute ones, sad ones, ones in danger, and ones with pinchable cheeks. It is, however, surprisingly bad at making movies that are genuinely about the emotional lives of little kids, other than in movies that are for kids. It is rare to see an excellent movie about a child made for adults.

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LINDA WERTHEIMER, HOST:

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DON GONYEA, BYLINE: This is Don Gonyea in Florida, the perpetual battleground state that President Obama is touring by bus this weekend.

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: Hello, St. Pete.

(SOUNDBITE OF CHEERING)

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LINDA WERTHEIMER, HOST:

This is WEEKEND EDITION from NPR News. I'm Linda Wertheimer.

Just under two months to go before Election Day. The national conventions are over. We're weeks away from debates. And while Democrats and Republicans try to win the White House, they are also locked in a battle for control of Congress. Republican made historic gains in the House in 2010. And while the GOP didn't quite get a majority in the Senate, they had great expectations of this year because the numbers are in their favor.