NPR Staff

The cherry blossoms are finally in bloom in Washington, D.C., and what better way to celebrate these beautiful Japanese gifts than with a haiku? Our callout on Facebook and Twitter yielded hundreds of spring haiku submissions. With the help of Ellen Compton, Roberta Beary and Kristen Deming of the Haiku ...

Margaret Thatcher, who died this week, has gone down in history as one of the most transformational British leaders of the 20th century. Her decade in power, in the 1980s, reshaped Britain's economy and society, with her free-market Thatcherite policies. It also produced a remarkable output of music about Thatcher ...

There are days for cake, and days for ice cream and cookies. But every now and then, you crave a different kind of finish to a satisfying meal. Enter Atlantic Beach Pie, a salty and citrusy staple of the North Carolina coast.

Katie Workman is the author of

In his new one-man show, American Utopias, award-winning monologist Mike Daisey ties together three unlikely places: Disney World, Zuccotti Park — the home base of the Occupy Wall Street movement — and the annual arts event Burning Man.

"I love how each of these communities are these temporary things, but ...

Names are possessions that we carry with us all our lives. But we seldom think about what goes into picking the right one. Some choose to change their first names in adulthood, because of family history or pure disdain for a moniker. For Silas Hansen, the reason was that he's ...

It's college touring season, and many parents are on the road with their teenagers, driving from school to school and thinking about the college application — and financial aid — process that looms ahead.

Many baby boomers have already been through this stage with their kids, but because the generation ...

Hugo Chavez died in March, but his ghost still lingers in Venezuela. He was president for well over a decade and, according to journalist Rory Carroll, his oversize influence hasn't faded.

"It's slightly surreal, because Chavez has never been more ubiquitous in Venezuela than now. His face greets you from ...

Google announced Tuesday that its Google Fiber project would be hitting Austin, Texas, next. The company says Austin, famous for its South by Southwest festival, is a "mecca for creativity and entrepreneurialism, with thriving artistic and tech communities."

Google Fiber is the tech giant's blazing fast Internet service, with ...

In the 75 years since it was introduced, Americans have been arguing over the minimum wage.

Some say government intervention to artificially raise wages lowers demand for workers and interferes with economic freedom — preventing people who would be willing to work for less from getting jobs at all. They ...

Brian Kimberling's debut novel, Snapper, is a lovely, loose-limbed collection of stories about an aimless ornithologist named Nate, who as the book opens is possessed of a glitter-covered pickup truck and a massive (somewhat requited) crush on redheaded dream girl Lola. Nate and his friends wander toward marriage and maturity ...

When the CIA came into being in 1947, its mandate was to keep tabs on events around the world. Gather intelligence about foreign governments. Spy. But the agency has evolved away from this original mission, as Mark Mazzetti reports in a new book, The Way of the Knife: The CIA, ...

More than 1 million fans illegally downloaded the first episode of Game of Thrones Season 3 this week, within 24 hours of its premiere.

That set a record, according to TorrentFreak, a blog that reports the latest trends on file-sharing. The blog also named the popular HBO series the ...

The Final Four games at the NCAA men's college basketball tournament on Saturday were just the latest in a week that's been eventful — and unpredictable.

Bettina Cornwell, a marketing expert at the University of Oregon, says universities and colleges like to be ready with their public relations ...

The Ah-Tah-Thi-Ki Seminole Indian Museum on the Big Cypress Seminole Reservation in Florida has a new exhibit that gives patrons a rare glimpse into the past.

Taken by photographer Julian Dimock during a 1910 expedition across the undrained and untamed landscape of tropical wetlands and cypress hammocks of southern Florida, ...

When the Tennessee band Paramore first started out, its music was considered "emo": a melodic variant of punk rock, known to inspire hourslong debates about which bands do and don't fit the description. Weekend Edition Sunday asked Paramore's orange-haired frontwoman, Hayley Williams, how she defines the term.

"Emo ...

In some ways, it was like any other writing class: backpacks, books, rough drafts, discussions about literature. But instructor Christine Dumaine Leche and her students weren't sitting in a college classroom or a community center — they were on an air base in Afghanistan and the students usually came to ...

With a single, devastating shot, Ali Farokhmanesh became the face of the NCAA basketball tournament in 2010.

He nailed the 3-pointer that propelled the ninth-seeded Northern Iowa Panthers to a major upset victory over the tournament favorite, Kansas Jayhawks. It also put him on the cover of Sports Illustrated.

After ...

Meg Wolitzer's new novel is an epic exploration of friendship, coming-of-age, talent and success. The Interestings follows six artistic friends who meet as teenagers one pivotal summer at a camp called Spirit-in-the-Woods. Over the next 40 years, they grow up to find some of their talents developing into grand success, ...

Sometimes a background player on a movie or TV screen will command the attention of the viewer and force them to ask, "Who was that?!" That's what happened with Gin Wigmore's performance in a series of Heineken ads featuring Daniel Craig as James Bond, about to take a ...

For students now sprinting toward the end of their college days, the finish line may not be much of a relief. More than ever, their gait is slowed by the weight of impending debt.

Thirty-seven million Americans share about $1 trillion in student loans, according to Federal Reserve data. ...