NPR Staff

Chad Lawson needed to find a way to record at home while his children slept. The result is The Chopin Variations, a set of Chopin works with an intimate, otherworldly sound.

Georgia Durante's career as a stunt driver has led to roles in car commercials and movies. But before the bright lights of Hollywood, the former model was speeding away from a dark past.

Forty-three veterans of Unit 8200, Israel's secretive surveillance organization, say they were directed to spy indiscriminately on Palestinians. Were they using intelligence gathered by the NSA?

Amazon Studios' Transparent features a slate of well-known actors playing a family dealing with the revelation that the person they'd known as Mort, their father, is a transgender woman.

The Affordable Care Act requires that most health plans offer birth control to women.

Around the country, Catholic employers have been arguing in court that having anything to do with insurance coverage of contraceptives violates their freedom of religion.

But when the insurance companies themselves are Catholic, contraceptive coverage comes ...

Gail Sheehy is famous for her in-depth profiles of influential people, as well as her 1976 book on common adult life crises. Now she turns her eye inward, in her new memoir Daring: My Passages.

The Oscar and Grammy Award-winning R&B singer says her new album, JHUD, has more energy than her previous ballad-heavy albums, and expresses more of her "everyday person."

Paolo Nutini follows in a musical tradition, but not the one you might expect from his name. It's a tradition that includes Joe Cocker and Rod Stewart, sometimes called "blue-eyed soul." The Scottish singer-songwriter says music has been an outlet for him since he was a ...

In many families of Afghanistan, the birth of a girl is mourned. While boys are seen as blessings, girls are considered burdens and forced to live a strict life of limited options. They can't leave the house alone; they're not educated; and they're dressed in clothes that conceal them and ...

More than 40 states have adopted the Common Core State Standards, new national academic benchmarks in reading and math. But the Common Core has become the center of a highly contentious debate nationwide.

Proponents say the Common Core was designed to ensure that children, no matter where they go to ...

Lori Baker uses DNA samples to track down the loved ones of immigrants who died on their journeys. "I would love not to do this anymore, but I don't think I have it in me not to," she says.

Although it's a common Chinese dish, hongshao rou (red-braised pork) can be tricky to master. The key is to use two different types of soy sauce — light and dark.

If you don't think you like bitter foods, try them again. Jennifer McLagan, the author of Bitter: A Taste of the World's Most Dangerous Flavor, is on a mission to change hearts and minds.

Dr. Kent Brantly, an American Ebola survivor, tells NPR what it was like to suffer from the deadly and "humiliating" disease.

Hayes, a professor of writing at the University of Pittsburgh, was recognized for "reflecting on race, gender, and family in works that seamlessly encompass both the historical and the personal."

A slow fade, rather than a hard stop, used to be the popular way to end a pop song. NPR's Robert Siegel speaks with Slate reporter William Weir about the fade-out's history and recent decline.

Dr. Kent Brantly, a U.S. medical missionary who contracted Ebola in July while working as a doctor in Liberia and survived the deadly disease after treatment at Emory University Hospital in Atlanta, appeared at a joint Senate hearing today examining the Ebola outbreak.

In testimony prepared for ...

Journalist Jeffrey Stern traveled to Guinea to find out why it took so long for scientists to figure out that the Ebola virus had struck. He tells a revealing tale in this month's Vanity Fair.

Linguist Dan Jurafsky uncovers the fishy origins of ketchup and how it forces us to rethink global history. He also teaches us how to read a menu to figure out how much a restaurant may charge.

The country requires photos of decaying teeth and gruesome hospital scenes on every pack. Philip Morris sees this as a violation of a trade agreement and is suing Uruguay for $25 million.