Marc Silver

We're living longer.

And cardiovascular disease and infectious diseases aren't taking quite as much of a toll as they did a couple of decades ago.

But that doesn't mean we're immortal.

Road accidents, suicide, chronic kidney disease, alcohol-related diseases ... these are a few of the topics to discuss after ...

California is battling the worst whooping cough epidemic in 70 years.

Nearly 10,000 cases have been reported in the state so far this year, and babies are especially prone to hospitalization or even death.

Six of 10 infants who have become ill during the current outbreak are Latino. ...

Goats are having a moment, and we're not just saying that because our blog is called Goats and Soda.

There are nearly 900 million goats in the world today, up from 600 million in 1990. The reason for this goat spurt is the growing popularity of goat cheese, goat milk ...

The friends and colleagues of Michel du Cille are in shock. They simply can't believe that the photographer with the deep voice and the gentle soul is gone. He died on Dec. 11 of an apparent heart attack while covering the Ebola crisis in Liberia for the Washington Post.

...

Last week, Wilbur Sagunaraj took NPR by storm with not one, but two video premieres. The YouTube star was taking pump baths, drinking Goli soda and — to the dismay of some readers — dunking a chicken in water.

If you missed that wild ride, no worries. Wilbur is back!

...

On this cold and rainy Tuesday, Bafana Khumalo stood in front of the White House with a controversial demand for President Obama: The U.S. should provide foreign aid to fund abortions for women who've been raped during conflicts and in other circumstances. Currently, the 1973 Helms Amendment prohibits the ...

Faced with a Thursday deadline to finance the U.S. government, leaders of both parties in Congress have worked out a $1.1 trillion spending bill to fund the government until October 2015. But a vote isn't likely to come before the day of the deadline.

Update at 8:45 p.m. ET: Welcome, ...

Who is that man in a white shirt, black necktie and what appear to be blue plaid pajama pants? And why is he running around a village tasting and drinking all kinds of food?

That's Wilbur Sargunaraj. He calls himself "India's first YouTube star." His videos about life in India ...

Her eyes met the camera. She was there. And yet she wasn't there.

That's how NPR photographer David Gilkey remembers the moment last Saturday when he took a picture of Baby Sesay, a 45-year-old traditional healer in the village of Royail in Sierra Leone.

Sesay had tried to cure a ...

Meghan Daum's The Unspeakable is nominally a collection of essays about the conversations we all want to partake in but hold back from; the thoughts we all have but refuse to admit out loud.

And, in several respects, the book fits the bill. "Matricide," the collection's opening essay, recounts Daum's ...

Today is a day to celebrate the wonders of the toilet — and to make a commitment to bringing toilets to all those in need. In case you're wondering, there are 2.5 billion people who are toiletless.

That's the mission of World Toilet Day, founded by Singapore entrepreneur Jack Sim, ...

This month, reports have come out that Laurie Holden, an actress from The Walking Dead TV show, had volunteered to be part of a sting in Colombia to entrap a local trafficker who sold girls as young as 12 into sex slavery. (Holden's job was to keep the girls ...

NPR global health correspondent Jason Beaubien is on his third trip to cover Ebola in West Africa — to Sierra Leone in July, and to Liberia in August and now this month. He sees big changes. Yet some things remain the same.

What's your impression this time around?

There is ...

Spanish health authorities seem as if they have no heart. They euthanized Excalibur, a dog that could have caught Ebola from his owner, the Spanish nurse who was diagnosed with the virus this week.

But the question of Excalibur's fate is a lot more complicated than just ... Awww, how ...

Tomorrow, President Obama is scheduled to announce a new U.S. plan to help stop the Ebola outbreak in West Africa.

We offer two perspectives on what the president should say. One is from Sophie Delaunay, executive director of Doctors Without Borders, which has been on the ground in ...

Sami Yenigun, an education producer at NPR, has dreamed of reporting overseas.

This month, his dream came true. But it wasn't exactly the way he'd imagined. NPR asked him to travel to Liberia to work with correspondent Ofeibea Quist-Arcton, covering the Ebola outbreak. He spoke to us on Tuesday, ...

Here are three words you don't often see in close proximity: Good. Death. Ebola.

Yet there they stand, united in the headline for an essay in the New England Journal of Medicine this month: "A Good Death: Ebola and Sacrifice."

The essay was written by Dr. Josh ...

After 10 days in Liberia, NPR producer Nicole Beemsterboer has just landed in London. "You don't realize how much has been hanging over your head until you're out," she says.

She's talking about Ebola, the virus raging in Liberia as well as Sierra Leone and Guinea. "It was silent and ...

She came to say how sorry she was.

Today, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, president of Liberia, visited the poor neighborhood of West Point, now under quarantine after suspected Ebola patients fled a treatment center a week ago Saturday. On Wednesday, during protests over the quarantine, 15-year-old Shakie Kamara was shot in ...

Ebola-stricken West Point is typically described as a slum in Liberia's capital city. That is true. But it is also a place of natural beauty and strong spirits.