NPR Staff

Texas is full of rich, colorful town names — and many have great stories behind them. Melissa Block is highlighting some of them this week for Deep In The Heart Of (A Transforming) Texas. Test your know-how with our quiz.

Chef Carla Hall invites us over to make spanakopita, one of her favorite Greek dishes. Her new cookbook is all about celebrating the way home-cooked meals unite us — no matter where we're from.

Librarian Margaret Willison offers tips for making repetitive reading more enjoyable, from choosing books with detailed illustrations to using word tricks.

The Georgia rockers have endured high school expulsion, the death of a bandmate and countless other challenges — and soldiered on. Kelly McEvers speaks with founders Cole Alexander and Jared Swilley.

The Corpse Washer, set in Baghdad in 2003, shows the U.S. invasion through the eyes of an aspiring Shiite artist and a handler of the dead. Author Sinan Antoon says he wanted to share a new viewpoint.

Millan is one of the world's most famous dog trainers, with TV shows and best-selling books. But his journey was arduous: He came to the U.S. illegally and was homeless before he got his big break.

Thirty years ago, the small town of Denmark, S.C., had one of the state's highest teen pregnancy rates.

"We had very young grandparents, grandparents were maybe [in their] 30s," says Michelle Nimmons, who has worked for the past 30 years on the issue of teen pregnancy. "Great-grandmamas were in their ...

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

Bilal Sarwary is a local correspondent for the BBC in Kabul, and over a week ago, he was called to report on yet another insurgent ...

With a twang and a yodel, Saintseneca's new album, Dark Arc, begins on a foreboding note. "You're drenched in blood, still warm with with wear," frontman Zac Little sings before leading the band into a driving rock chorus.

It's a good distillation of the band's origins: Little was reared on ...

Filmmaker Errol Morris is famous for trying to get inside other people's minds and understand the motivations behind the choices they've made. In his most famous film, The Fog of War, Morris sat down one-on-one with former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara to talk about the decisions McNamara made in ...

Congressional campaigns have been releasing b-roll of their candidates, which can then be used for superPAC ads in their favor. Footage of Sen. Mitch McConnell got some extra attention online.

The ancient story of the Great Flood gets a Hollywood update in director Darren Aronofsky's new film, Noah. Aronofsky says he wanted to add drama to the story, making Noah's character more dynamic.

Army Capt. Drew Pham, 26, returned from a tour in Afghanistan in October 2011. Since Drew's been back, it's been hard for him to make sense of what he saw there and adjust to his life at home. It's been difficult for his wife, Molly Pearl, to respond to some ...

Barbara Taylor Bradford is one of the best-selling authors in the world — and, proudly, a working stiff. She's written 29 novels, beginning with A Woman of Substance in 1979, which became one of the best-selling novels of all time. Her books have been published in more than 90 countries ...

At its heart, Gabrielle Zevin's new novel is a love letter to the joys of reading. Each chapter starts with the title of a book or short story, essentially introducing characters by what they read.

When a recipe for Ebinger's Blackout Cake surfaced long after the bakery's demise, Katie Workman knew it was just the thing to make her grandfather. Little did she know the trial that was yet to come.

Singer-songwriter Dan Croll talks about "Home," a track off his debut album, Sweet Disarray, as well as the real-life home that helped inspire it.

"It is under the pressure of desperation that extraordinary things can happen in a human life," says the South African playwright. Fugard staged an interracial play in Johannesburg in 1961.

Editors at The American Scholar magazine picked the 10 best sentences from fiction and nonfiction, with authors ranging from Toni Morrison to James Joyce.