NPR Staff

While making her new album, Case went through a series of deaths and a bout of depression. But once she stopped fighting it, "it's like a bottleneck broke open, and everything started...

In the fall of 1938, radio was huge. That Halloween, Orson Welles scared listeners out of their wits with his War of the Worlds. And on November 10, 1938 — the eve of the holiday that was known then as Armistice Day — the popular singer Kate Smith made history ...

In 1997, Bikini Kill, the feminist punk band that spent the 1990s challenging assumptions about women in music and the world at large, was inching toward breaking up. Unsure what would come next, frontwoman Kathleen Hanna began working on a record by herself in her apartment in Olympia, ...

The Central Intelligence Agency was behind the overthrow of Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh in 1953. It's been an open secret for decades, but last week, The George Washington University's National Security Archive released newly declassified documents proving it.

Orchestrating the Iranian coup d'état was a first for ...

Television has served up sass and brass with its female crime solvers for decades: Angie Dickenson in Police Woman, in the 1970s, Cagney and Lacey in the 80s, and the modern duo Rizzoli and Isles on TNT.

This fall, that network has decided to forget the script. It has two ...

As Labor Day honors American workers, stress weighs on many. A changing world — and therefore a changing workplace — has many employees on the job and staring at screens for hours upon hours. Some have reached a breaking point.

John Challenger, CEO of workplace consulting company Challenger, Gray ...

The North Mississippi Allstars has been cranking out soulful, hard-driving Southern rock for some seven studio records now. But for brothers Luther and Cody Dickinson, it's not just rock for rock's sake. They dig deep for the roots of the music they're passionate about: the blues and the ...

"Can a cholesterol-conscious matron from the west side find happiness at the East Side Dairy Queen?" So begins Marilyn Hagerty's review of the national creamery franchise for her local paper, The Grand Forks Herald, in Grand Forks, N.D.

The 87-year-old Hagerty has reported on food, events, and local profiles at ...

"J.D. Salinger spent 10 years writing The Catcher in the Rye and the rest of his life regretting it," according to a new book about one of America's best-known and most revered writers.

Salinger died three years ago at the age of 91, after publishing four slim books. But Catcher ...

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

Jill Biden's most visible role is wife to Vice President Joe Biden. But she has also had her own career as a teacher for more than ...

As a journalist and essayist, Bob Shacochis has covered conflict in the Balkans and Haiti, the abuse of American power overseas, spycraft, and the sexual politics that divide men and women. He is also a novelist and the winner of a National Book Award. His new novel, The Woman Who ...

Jeffrey Cranor and Joseph Fink have the news of the weird covered: they're the creative masterminds behind the popular sci-fi podcast Welcome to Night Vale. Though only a year old, the spooky Night Vale — which channels David Lynch, Orson Welles and H.P. Lovecraft in its descriptions of a ...

Kyle Morton can trace his life as a songwriter back to a bug bite. Morton was bitten by a tick as a child, contracting a case of Lyme disease that went undiagnosed for years, even as it wreaked havoc on his body.

"It obliterated any sense of these monumental truths ...

Comedian Mark Malkoff has lived for a week inside of an IKEA store, consumed beverages at 171 Starbucks in Manhattan in less than 24 hours and proved that his kid's Big Wheel bike could beat a New York City bus across 42nd Street.

But after all those stunts, there are ...

Just as good writing demands brevity, so, too, does spoken language. Sentences and phrases get whittled down over time. One result: single words that are packed with meaning, words that are so succinct and detailed in what they connote in one language that they may have no corresponding word in ...

Don Byles, 65, is a funeral director in New London, Conn. His grandfather started the family's business, Byles-MacDougall Funeral Service, in 1904. Now, Byles is getting ready to hand it over to his 25-year-old daughter Mackenzie.

"You have to teach me a lot of stuff before you can retire," Mackenzie ...

If you want to know what prompted Seth Goldman and Barry Nalebuff to cofound Honest Tea, here's the simple answer they give on their website: They were thirsty. Goldman had taken Nalebuff's class at the Yale School of Management, and they were both tired of the super sweet iced teas ...

Linford Detweiler and Karin Bergquist have been making music together for more than two decades in the band Over the Rhine, and have been married nearly as long. The duo got its name from a historic neighborhood in downtown Cincinnati. But in recent years, the two musicians have ...

Rebecca Hall, a veteran of films like Vicky Cristina Barcelona and The Town, is the star of the new surveillance-state thriller Closed Circuit, playing an English barrister charged with monitoring top-secret, closed-to-the-public evidence hearings involving a terrorist bombing.

One wrinkle — aside from the complete perfidy of nearly all institutions ...

The Onion, which turns 25 on Thursday, was founded by two Madison, Wis., college students as a local satirical newspaper "intended mainly to ... sell pizza coupons," says its editor-i...