NPR Staff

Scott Adams has failed at a lot of things, from investments to inventions to computer programming. But he managed to turn his failure at office work into a giant success: a comic strip which follows a hapless, cubicle-bound engineer working for an unreasonable boss at a nameless company. Dilbert, which ...

The surviving members of the R&B trio talk with NPR's David Greene about the trials and successes of their careers, which have spanned two decades. The group's journey will be revisit...

Before landing a role opposite Tom Hanks in the film Captain Phillips, Barkhad Abdi had never acted.

"This was my first time acting, or even thinking about acting," Abdi tells NPR's Arun Rath.

Captain Phillips is based on a true story: the hijacking of the cargo ship Maersk Alabama. Hanks ...

Soon you'll be able to direct the path of a cockroach with a smartphone and the swipe of your finger.

Greg Gage and his colleagues at Backyard Brains have developed a device called the RoboRoach that lets you control the path of an insect.

It may make you squirm, ...

Anoushka Shankar began playing sitar with her famous father, the late Ravi Shankar, when she was 4. But until recently, she'd never entered a studio with her other famous relative, half-sister Norah Jones.

When the two met up in New York recently to work ...

Count Chocula, Boo Berry and Franken Berry first went on sale in the early 1970s, but since 2010, they've only been available during the Halloween season. The scarcity has created a f...

The online magazine Ozy covers people, places and trends on the horizon. Co-founder Carlos Watson joins All Things Considered regularly to tell us about the site's latest discoveries.

This week, he tells NPR's Arun Rath about a humanitarian who doesn't hate war, the unlikely love story between two punk rock ...

Theo Decker is a 13-year-old boy who, in an instant, gains a masterpiece, but loses his mother — who is also a kind of masterpiece.

Theo and his mother are looking at a special show of old Dutch Masters at the Met, and the little boy doesn't much enjoy it ...

Only Slightly Mad, David Bromberg's new album, marks a substantial return for the multi-instrumentalist. In the late 1960s, Bromberg developed a reputation as a "first-call" guitarist, meaning that when artists — including Bob Dylan, Ringo Starr, Carly Simon, Willie Nelson, ...

Alan Greenspan was celebrated as a master of monetary policy during his long chairmanship of the Federal Reserve, from 1987 to 2006. But policies put in place during Greenspan's tenure have been blamed by some for the financial crisis that began shortly after he left, and the so-called Great Recession.

...

Solomon Northup was born free in early 19^th-century upstate New York. He lived the life of a respected and elegant musician until 1841, when he was lured South by the promise of a lucrative stint playing his fiddle in a traveling circus.

In Washington, D.C. — in the shadow of ...

For her new film, the actress submitted to a singularly intense shooting regimen to achieve the movie's weightless visuals. She talked with NPR's Melissa Block about the filming proce...

The new federal health law has a few exemptions from its insurance mandate, including health care sharing ministries. Members pay a monthly fee to help cover some of each other's medi...

The actor plays — played? — DEA Agent Hank Schrader on the soon-to-end drama Breaking Bad, as well as local politician Big Jim Rennie on Under the Dome. He chatted with NPR's Steve In...

In Wonder, R.J. Palacio tells the story of Auggie, a tough, sweet, 10-year-old boy, who was born with distorted facial features — a "craniofacial difference" caused by an anomaly in his DNA.

Palacio tells NPR's Michele Norris that the book was inspired by a real-life encounter with her own kids ...

"I wasn't trying to make a 'loud' film," Saudi Arabia's first female film director tells NPR's Michel Martin.

Haifaa Al Mansour's Wadjda is the first full-length feature film to be shot and produced in Saudi Arabia, and it lifts the veil on life in the kingdom.

Wadjda tells the very ...

In his new book, Average Is Over, Tyler Cowen predicts that America will become a new, more creative meritocracy. Though he believes a rise in income inequality is inevitable, he hope...

A former Saturday Night Live writer and an alumnus of 30 Rock, the comic hosts a weekly stand-up night at The Knitting Factory in Brooklyn, where surprise guests have included Louis C...

In his first semester playing football at San Diego State University, Gregory Porter severely injured his shoulder. Doctors told him his days on the field were over, but there was some good news: The school would let him keep his athletic scholarship. Suddenly without football, but with a lot of ...

Rosalind Wiseman literally wrote the book on the complicated and often fraught relationships between teen girls. Her book Queen Bees and Wannabes inspired the movie Mean Girls. Now Wiseman's latest book explodes myths about the lives of adolescent boys. It's called Masterminds and Wingmen, and Rosalind Wiseman joined host Michel ...