Public Radio International's Fair Game purports to be a Daily Show-like satiric take on the news, but it's rarely laugh-out-loud funny. (Actually, come to think of it, The Daily Show is only occasionally laugh-out-loud funny.) Sometimes its youth-demographic-targeting sass is grating. But host Faith Salie does engage in some clever banter with her guests. Tonight's conversation with Alex Kuczynski, author of Beauty Junkies: Inside Our $15 Billion Obsession With Cosmetic Surgery, ended with Salie asking, "Did this interview make me look fat?" Terry Gross wouldn't go that route, but hey.

Radio Lab, produced by New York Public Radio, is a trippy exploration of a different theme each week, normally a fairly broad, heady topic. A couple of weeks ago, for instance, the subject was time travel, and the show featured a guy who pretends to live in the 1920s and a tour of a supercollider. It's whimsical, letting producers go wherever their intellectual curiosity will take them.