NPR Staff

Everyone knows the song — or, well, parts of it.

"Louie, Louie." "Ohhhhhh, baby." "A fine little girl, she waits for me."

But the next line ... How's it go again?

The voice growling out those indecipherable lyrics belonged to Jack Ely, the lead singer of The Kingsmen,

Big Bird, the towering yellow bird with confetti feathers from Sesame Street, will eternally be 6 years old, but his character is nearly 50. The man behind Big Bird, Caroll Spinney, is 81 — and has no plans to step out of the suit any time soon.

"I see no ...

The actress spent years avoiding the genre for fear of getting pigeonholed, but she says she made an exception for Far From the Madding Crowd because of Hardy's modern, forward-thinking heroine.

NPR's Robert Siegel talks with author Art Spiegelman about how his book Maus — the very antithesis of Nazi propaganda — was purged from Moscow stores because it has a large swastika on the cover.

A new book looks at the women who served alongside elite special operations units in order to connect with a population that was off-limits to male soldiers: Afghan women.

Bartender Ran Duan will represent the U.S. in a Bacardi international cocktail competition. His specialty? "Father's Advice," a stirred-not-shaken cocktail that's a testament to his hardworking dad.

A study analyzes more than a billion pieces of emoji data across 16 languages and regions to gauge how different nations communicate. Most emojis sent are happy faces and other positive symbols.

For more than a decade, the Mediterranean island nation has responded to distress calls from desperate migrants hoping to reach safety. The difference now is in the numbers.

For gospel purists, Erica Campbell's "I Luh God" resembles secular club music in a way that's too close for comfort. Kirk Franklin knows a thing or two about that.

What kind of parent are you if you let your child walk home alone? What if you won't let your kids out of your sight?

Last December, parents in Silver Spring, Md., allowed their two children — 6 and 10 years old — to walk home from a park about ...

Forty years ago this month, North Vietnamese troops captured Saigon. The long war in Vietnam was coming to an end.

In the midst of the political fallout, the U.S. government announced an unusual plan to get thousands of displaced Vietnamese children out of the country. President Ford directed that money ...

In the latest installment of our occasionial series Weekend Reads, we're celebrating National Poetry Month with The Little Edges, a unique work by American poet Fred Moten. Many of the poems in the book were commissioned, and they focus on real life people and events.

It's recommended by poet Douglas ...

Nick Kroll is the star of a lot of things, including Kroll Show on Comedy Central and The League on FX. And if that wasn't enough, he now has a new film coming out called Adult Beginners. Kroll tells NPR's Rachel Martin that his character in the film, Jake, is ...

Dallas Mildenhall is one of the world's few forensic pollen experts. He recently identified a rare, mutated pollen grain that helped police crack a murder case in his native New Zealand.

In his new memoir, Music Without Words, the composer explains how a chance meeting with Ravi Shankar sparked a fascination with the cultures of the world and their music.

Victorine Meurent was just 17 years old when she met the great Impressionist painter Edouard Manet on a Paris street in 1862. The young, poverty-stricken redhead became his favorite model, and Manet painted her reclining nude in Olympia — a work that scandalized the Paris art world in ...

The vocal ensemble Roomful of Teeth consists of eight classically trained singers incorporating Tuvan throat singing, Appalachian yodeling, operatic trills, rhythmic exhalations and whispered speech into music written by some of the most exciting young composers of the 21st century.

Roomful of Teeth's Grammy-winning debut album topped the ...

By Gouda — the Mona Cheesa is missing! And when that most famous work of art is discovered to have been taken from its frame in a Paris art museum, the world's foremost International Cat of Mystery, William, is called in on the case.

William & the Missing Masterpiece is ...

James Ward's new book stems from a lifelong love of Post-it notes, pencils and paper clips. He tells NPR's Melissa Block that they remind him of his school days, when life was less complicated.

Before the Khmer Rouge regime, a thriving pop and rock scene adapted Western music heard on U.S. military radio stations. The documentary Don't Think I've Forgotten took 10 years to make.