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“Let us cross over the river and rest under the shade of the trees.” These were Stonewall Jackson’s last words, and they provide a poignant and fitting framework around this week’s episode, which explores love, loss, joy and death, and the ways in which they are all interconnected. From the personal to the poetic to the hilarious, we aim to show that laughter and tears often go hand in hand.

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We all know the story of Paul Revere’s legendary ride to warn of approaching British forces during the Revolutionary War, but few remember the real hero of the tale — his heroic horse Oatsy. This week, he finally gets his due. And we pay tribute to Sidney Bechet, a musician who embodied the New Orleans ragtime tradition at its best. As we read from his autobiography “Treat It Gentle” we’ll hear of his public debut on the clarinet and how he tried to convince the father of a pregnant teenager that he was the responsible party even though he wasn’t.

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Kate Walbert’s 2012 New Yorker short story is set on a buzzing early spring day in Times Square, evoking the unique sense of renewal and energy palpable in New York when the city finally begins to thaw out from a long winter. While dutifully fulfilling her youngest daughter’s wish of visiting the hectic M&M World, Ginny’s day turns tense as she struggles to keep track of her kids and revisits memories of her estranged husband.

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We feature another great short story by Alice Munro titled “Axis,” first published in The New Yorker in 2011. As in many of Alice Munro’s short stories, the characters aren’t like anyone I know, but they never seem contrived or invented. I would say that she loves creating characters and then observing them as they go their own way.

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This week we return to an early classic episode, an exploration of the impact of passionate and well-crafted speech. Effective rhetoric can rouse supporters and sway opponents, and aptly chosen words have the ability to pierce and persuade like little else. Featuring some of the greatest masters of the craft — Churchill, Shakespeare, Sorkin, and of course, Jack Handey — we will show how great writers have an exceptional ability to inspire, enrage, and enliven their audiences. We will hear Kenneth Branagh’s rendition of the St. Crispin’s Day speech from Henry V, Winston Churchill delivering his own rousing speech discussing the drumbeat of war building in Germany in 1934, one of Jack Nicholson’s most memorable film speeches of all time from “A Few Good Men,” and Jack Handey’s discovery of Attila the Hun’s least known speech.

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In 1954, Frank Sinatra won an Oscar for his performance as a scrappy soldier named Angelo Maggio in the film “From Here to Eternity.”  In our Winter Doldrums podcast, we play an audio clip from Francis Ford Coppola’s first Godfather film that details how that role went to Sinatra over the intense objection of Columbia Pictures head of production Harry Cohn.  We also have an audio clip from Francois Truffaut’s film “Fahrenheit 451,” adapted from Ray Bradbury’s novel of the same name.

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A new year brings with it a new episode, with lots to keep you warm during this cold and rainy season. We feature two classic comedy segments, one of which is comedy duo Bob & Ray’s “Two Faces West,” a sketch which might have been based on film heavy Jack Palance’s inability to get on a horse without looking funny. Indeed, the only way he could be convincingly shown mounting one for the famous Western “Shane” was through a bit of movie magic: he’d be assisted onto the horse first, then filmed getting off solo so that the editors could reverse the footage and make it look like he had effortless command of the move.

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Is it humanly possible to have too much cowbell? I mean is it physically, psychologically, emotionally, and morally possible to have too much cowbell?

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“What I mean is, this kind of music? Concerts and the like? They ever pay money to sit down for a couple of hours and wear their bottoms out listening to something they wouldn’t recognize half a day later? Pay money simply to perpetrate a fraud? You ever know them to do that?”