NPR Staff

Marja Mills spent more than a year living next door to reclusive author Harper Lee and her sister. She documents that time in The Mockingbird Next Door. But Lee says she never authorized the book.

The last time Fred Hersch was featured on Weekend Edition Saturday, the headline read, "Back On Stage By No Small Miracle." It was 2009, and scarcely a year earlier, the jazz pianist had suffered AIDS-related dementia and fallen into a coma for several months. Since recovering, Hersch has ...

Wish I Was Here follows a struggling actor and father of two whose breadwinning wife is starting to rethink her role. It's the first feature film Braff has directed since 2004's Garden State.

Robert Siegel talks to Ihab al-Ghussein, deputy information minister for Hamas in Gaza, about the conditions under which Hamas would accept a cease-fire.

County clerks are making news by defying the state's gay-marriage ban, but Clela Rorex got there first. Decades ago, she issued a groundbreaking license to the first openly gay people she'd ever met.

Combinations of batter, cheese, bacon and sugar at state fair food concessions seem to get more elaborate and outrageous every year. So we were inspired to put our state fair food sense to the test.

Journalist Paul Salopek's journey from Africa to South America takes him to Israel and the West Bank, where he notes the physical beauty of the landscape stands in stark contrast with violence there.

Part of losing weight boils down to making tweaks to the simple equation of calories in versus calories out.

Americans spend over $60 billion a year on diet and weight loss products, according to market research, but the weight often comes right back. That may be because it's such ...

Cigarette giant Reynolds American announced Tuesday that it's buying rival Lorillard in a $27 billion deal that unites two of the country's biggest tobacco companies.

The acquisition creates a giant to rival Philip Morris USA, which is owned by Altria Group Inc., the No. 1 tobacco company in the ...

"Be a man" — it's a mandate most boys hear at least once in their lives. Former NFL player Joe Ehrmann says it can leave boys ill-equipped to face life's real challenges.

Karyn Parsons, best known for her role as Hilary Banks on The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, now runs an organization that makes animated short films about influential African-Americans throughout history.

Health reporter Kathleen Raven found out she had a hearing problem when she was 5. She got her first pair of hearing aids in 1993, but as the technology improves, she's still learning new sounds.

"I've always wanted to write fiction and nonfiction at the same time," Vollmann says. In recent years he's written nonfiction, but his new work is a collection of stories about love, lust and ghosts.

Why do so many animated movies star motherless kids? Sarah Boxer, a graphic novelist, cartoon-lover and mother, talks to NPR's Kelly McEvers about the phenomenon and the message it sends to children.

Richard Reed Parry is famous for making music sound big. As a core member of Arcade Fire, the Grammy-winning indie rock group from Montreal, he wields multiple instruments to help create deep, layered textures in which strings and synthesizers, slow ballads and disco dance tracks are all at ...

Each week, Weekend Edition Sunday brings listeners an unexpected side of the news by talking with someone personally affected by the stories making headlines.

The 2014 World Cup winds down Sunday after a month of competition in which FIFA tried to emphasize unity and multiculturalism. The "Say No to Racism" ...

Impulse Records is the legendary label that proudly delivered the "new thing" in jazz in the 1960s: avant-garde records from the likes of John Coltrane and Pharaoh Sanders. It also helped jazz cross over to a larger audience; quite a few flower children bought Impulse albums.

But over ...

Bill Hillmann, a writer from Chicago, contributed to the book Fiesta: How to Survive the Bulls of Pamplona. He was gored at this year's running of the bulls in that city, but says he plans to return.

This spring, the river's final stretch flowed freely for the first time in 50 years. NPR's Kelly McEvers talks to writer Rowan Jacobsen about his paddling trip down the temporarily-restored delta.

Mark Miller chose his nickname because when he smells blood, he attacks. His new memoir, Pain Don't Hurt, tells of the heart surgery and alcohol problems that temporarily derailed his fighting career.