NPR Staff

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One Last Tale Of The City In 'Anna Madrigal'

Saturday, January 18, 2014

Armistead Maupin's Tales of the City began as a newspaper serial in the 1970s, and grew into a beloved series of books that stand as a chronicle of life in the city of San Francisco. And it began in the decade after the Summer of Love, before anyone had ever ...

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Living, And 'Forgiving,' In A Brilliant Writer's Orbit

Saturday, January 18, 2014

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 ...

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Still Texting? OMG, That's Already So Old-School

Saturday, January 18, 2014

If you have teenagers in your house, you may find this hard to believe, but texting is on the decline.

For the first time ever, traditional texting — the kind you do through your cell phone provider — has dropped in Britain. That's according to the annual technology predictions ...

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Months After Marriage, A Military Wife Becomes An 'Unremarried Widow'

Sunday, January 12, 2014

Artis Henderson never imagined she'd end up a military wife. She had dreams of becoming a writer and traveling the world; settling down with a conservative, church-going Army pilot wasn't the life she'd planned for herself.

But she fell in love with Miles Henderson and she followed him to Army ...

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Trans-racial Family Gets Double-Takes 'Everywhere We Go'

Sunday, January 12, 2014

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.

Rachel Garlinghouse and her husband, Steve are both white, and they've adopted three kids — two girls and a boy — who are ...

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The Globes Will Be Golden, But Hollywood Remains Mostly White

Sunday, January 12, 2014

Sunday night is one of the biggest nights in Hollywood, as stars from film and television gather for the Golden Globe Awards.

This year's awards, which celebrate the best writing, acting and production of the year, are being hailed as the most diverse yet, with a significant number of minority ...

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Doctorow Ruminates On How A 'Brain' Becomes A Mind

Saturday, January 11, 2014

When does our brain become our mind? Our heart? How does it become us, whatever we are? And how do we live with memories when they begin to burst inside?

E.L. Doctorow's new novel is called Andrew's Brain, and it plunges inside the brain of a man who tells the ...

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'Osage' Hits Close To Home For Writer Tracy Letts

Saturday, January 11, 2014

The movie August: Osage County has just opened, with its all-star cast.

Meryl Streep, Julia Roberts, Chris Cooper, Benedict Cumberbatch and more play various members of the Weston clan. They converge on their Oklahoma home when the patriarch, Beverly, who is a poet somewhat past his rhymes, goes missing.

His ...

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Healing The Wounds Of Memory's 'Impossible Knife'

Saturday, January 11, 2014

Hayley Kincain is 15 years old and on the run — with her father, Andy.

He's come home from the war in Iraq, both honored for his service and haunted by it. He drinks and does drugs, can't hold a job, is unreliable behind the wheel of his big rig, ...

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Frolicking Fido, Cozy Cats: How Your Pets Are Chilling Out

Tuesday, January 07, 2014

We asked you for photos of how your pets are dealing with the frigid weather — and you folks sure did deliver. Here are some of the images you tagged #nprfrostypaws on Instagram.

Just a reminder, though, that we are seeing record-breaking low temperatures in some places,

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A Debut Album At 81 Years Old

Sunday, January 05, 2014

The new year is a time of new beginnings, new resolutions, new projects and new directions. So it's a perfectly appropriate time of year for Leo Welch, at the age of 81, to put out his very first album.

Welch has been playing gospel and blues around the tiny town ...

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'On Such A Full Sea': A Fable From A Fractured Future

Sunday, January 05, 2014

Fast-forward to a few hundred years into the future: Resources in the United States are scarce. The government has fallen apart and most of the population has left, looking for a better life somewhere else.

Immigrant laborers — many from China — have come to fill the labor void, and ...

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Basketball Coach Fights For His Dream Of A Division I Job

Sunday, January 05, 2014

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.

Elwyn McRoy is an assistant men's basketball coach at the University of Texas-Pan American. He's worked for 12 different college basketball programs since ...

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Lovebirds + String + Watering Can + Dog = Rube Goldberg Magic

Saturday, January 04, 2014

Many people know Rube Goldberg as an adjective — a shorthand description for a convoluted device or contraption. But Rube Goldberg was a real person — one who earned a Pulitzer Prize for editorial cartooning and who captivated imaginations with drawings of complex chain reactions that completed the simplest of ...

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Want Perfect Pitch? You Might Be Able To Pop A Pill For That

Saturday, January 04, 2014

In the world of music, there is no more remarkable gift than having perfect pitch. As the story goes, Ella Fitzgerald's band would use her perfect pitch to tune their instruments.

Although it has a genetic component, most believe that perfect pitch — or absolute pitch — is a primarily ...

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Transgender Issues Follow Path Blazed By Gay Rights

Saturday, January 04, 2014

It may have been "the gayest year ever," as some gay and lesbian activists put it — 2013 saw the Defense of Marriage Act struck down by the Supreme Court and the number of states offering marriage rights to same-sex couples doubled, to a total of 18.

But as ...

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From Pandas To Health Care: The 13 Numbers Of 2013

Tuesday, December 31, 2013

0: Twitter collected no profit, Snapchat collected no revenue, and Apple's stock has roughly stayed flat over the past year. But in Silicon Valley, where companies are judged by potential, zero is still something.

0.5 billion: Public money in Minnesota paid for almost half the cost of the Vikings' ...

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To Save The Black Rhino, Hunting Club Bids On Killing One

Sunday, December 29, 2013

Fewer than 5,000 black rhinos are thought to exist in the wild, and in an effort to preserve the species, the Dallas Safari Club is offering a chance to kill one.

The Texas-based hunting organization is auctioning off a permit to hunt a rhinoceros in Nambia. It's a fundraiser intended ...

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Quitting Wall Street To Tell A Prostitute's Story

Sunday, December 29, 2013

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

Chris Arnade spent 20 years working on Wall Street, but after the financial crisis of 2008, he found himself increasingly disillusioned with his profession. So, in ...

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