NPR Staff

For fans of world music, South Africa's Ladysmith Black Mambazo needs no introduction.

The group has been singing a capella together for 50 years, brought together by Joseph Shabalala, a young farmhand turned factory worker from the town of Ladysmith. He had a dream of tight vocal harmonies and messages ...

Love, parenthood, infidelity, a crumbling marriage ... these are pretty traditional themes for fiction. It's not the kind of stuff that normally makes for an experimental novel.

But in Jenny Offill's new book, Dept. of Speculation, those familiar subjects take on an unusual form. The book is short, just 46 ...

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

William Wiley has made a career out of international criminal law, working on cases in Yugoslavia, Rwanda and Iraq. He now oversees a ...

A couple of weeks ago, Weekend Edition Sunday host Rachel Martin spoke to Rachel Garlinghouse, a white adoptive mother of three African-American children. Our conversation on transracial adoption drew a lot of responses, so we decided to follow up with another perspective.

Chad Goller-Sojourner is African-American. In ...

It doesn't take long to understand why a Baltimore gang of dirt bikers is called the 12 O'Clock Boys: Flying at top speeds down city streets, they flip precariously high wheelies, maneuvering their bikes to near vertical positions, like clock hands at high noon.

The police try to crack down ...

This year at the Grammy Awards, Lifetime Achievement awards are going to bands like The Beatles and The Isley Brothers — long overdue, you could say. But they look like young punks next to another Lifetime Achievement recipient: Maud Powell.

Powell was born in Illinois in ...

For most of her readers, the American author Diane Johnson is wholly identified with France and especially Paris. She's the author of novels like L'Affaire, Le Marriage, and Le Divorce — the last of which was made into a film.

So it comes as something of a surprise that Johnson's ...

Ever since there have been puddles of water, human beings have gazed at their reflections.

Our need to primp and preen, whether we live in the Bronze Age or the Space Age, can be seen in a new exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York called Vanities: ...

Bebe Neuwirth is probably best known for her role in the hit TV show Cheers and its spinoff, Frasier, in both of which which she played Lilith, Frasier Crane's ice-blooded, uptight sometime wife.

But she's also an accomplished dancer and Broadway star, having won two Tony Awards — one of ...

Binyavanga Wainaina is one of Kenya's best-known writers. Now he is one of the most prominent figures in Africa to announce that he's gay.

Wainaina did so Saturday, his 43rd birthday, in a piece posted on several websites, "I Am A Homosexual, Mum."

The title comes from a ...

The latest round in the battle over body image, a dust-up between the upstart online magazine Jezebel and the Conde Nast giant Vogue, may be going to Vogue.

Jezebel accused Vogue of digitally altering images of HBO sensation Lena Dunham, who famously insists on displaying her real, somewhat rounded shoulder ...

The Affordable Care Act had ardent critics and supporters long before last fall's troubled launch of the HealthCare.gov website. Opponents of Obamacare say the law will reduce, not increase, the number of health plans available to Americans and that fewer consumers will be able to afford care than before. And ...

You may recognize the name B.J. Novak from the credit sequence of The Office — he was a writer and executive producer. He also played the entertainingly amoral Ryan Howard. Now, Novak is expanding his scope beyond the walls of Dunder Mifflin and taking on a range of human experience ...

The new album from Florida punks Against Me! is titled Transgender Dysphoria Blues — and that's not just a metaphor. It's the first album the band has released since lead singer Laura Jane Grace went public with her transition from a man to a woman. Now, instead of hinting at ...

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

By his own account, Jesse Heiman is one of the hardest working actors in Hollywood. It's easy to believe he might be right, ...

Poems dwell in an ambiguous space, shelved somewhere between fiction and fact, imagination and experience. Even when poems seem wholly authentic, we can't assume they're accurate — after all, "poetic license" is the catch-all excuse for blurry lines between truth and fabrication.

In the face of seemingly autobiographical poems, ...

Plenty of college courses delve into the big philosophical questions of life, but Norma Bowe's class was different. For years, the nurse and college professor taught a class that forced students to confront death head-on — there were poems about death, trips to cemeteries and funeral homes, and "goodbye letter" ...

A lot of writers can be fairly easily stereotyped. They write stories about dysfunctional families, star crossed lovers, endearing losers; they write historical fiction, literary fiction or crime novels. But Jay Cantor's body of work defies categorization. His fiction has been inspired by topics as wide-ranging as the revolutionary life ...