NPR Staff

Many cities spend millions on prisons annually, and often those moving in and out of jail come from the same neighborhoods. The Justice Mapping Center maps those costs, block by block...

Four years before the famous Kennedy-Nixon face-off, a student at the University of Maryland wanted to see whether the nominees in 1956 — Dwight Eisenhower and Adlai Stevenson — might...

Both President Obama and his GOP rival, Mitt Romney, have spent weeks preparing for the debates by facing off against fake versions of their challengers played by stand-ins. Though ea...

In his new book, New Yorker film critic David Denby bemoans what digital and global filmmaking has done to the industry. "[Movies] have to play in Bangkok and Bangalore ... as well as...

Director Rian Johnson is known for his 2005 high school noir flick Brick. His new movie, Looper, jumps 30 years into a grim future for a twisty thriller involving time traveling assas...

Catholics used to reliably side with Democrats, in large part because of the labor union movement. But after a century of integration, the group started to look like the rest of the A...

The Jersey boy also spoke to Scott Simon about his group's early names and his friend Joe Pesci.

The new trove of recordings covers everything from the Cold War to civil rights to Vietnam to the U.S. ice hockey team. Listening In, a new book and CD set, includes more than 260 hou...

The Casual Vacancy is worlds away from Hogwarts and Harry Potter. It's a dark comedy of manners, set in a small town in the aftermath of a local politician's death. Rowling says her e...

Protesters in the Middle East and North Africa have demanded an apology from the U.S. government over a video that denigrates the Prophet Muhammad. While even highly offensive speech ...

It's an exclusive club: pitchers who win with the knuckleball in Major League Baseball. The New York Mets' R.A. Dickey is one of the few active starting pitchers in professional baseb...

In 1989, Iran's leader issued an edict that sentenced Salman Rushdie to death for writing the novel The Satanic Verses. Rushdie reflects on the fallout from that order — from the year...

Ryan Crocker mourns the death of Ambassador Christopher Stevens, who died in an attack on the U.S. Consulate in Libya on Tuesday. But as a former ambassador himself, Crocker says, "We...

To call Ross Ventrone's career as an NFL defensive back unstable is an understatement. He's been hired, promoted, or fired by the New England Patriots no fewer than 29 times in two years.

A new biography of David Foster Wallace traces the author's anxieties to childhood. Biographer D.T. Max says the accidents of Foster's life gave him the key to his writing.

In his new book, Hello Goodbye Hello, Craig Brown details real-life stories of famous people crossing paths, including one uncomfortable encounter between The Beatles and the king of rock 'n' roll.

Though he went on to a string of Top 40 solo hits, Art Garfunkel is still best known as half of a legendary duo. With the release of a new retrospective, which covers his work from Si...

Author Robert Sullivan retraces the steps of George Washington and his troops in his new book, My American Revolution: Crossing the Delaware and I-78. It recounts the 30-mile trek north from the Delaware River.

Conservative author Dinesh D'Souza directed and stars in the new movie, 2016: Obama's America. The film, which proposes that the president is weakening the country deliberately, has e...

The actor was born in 1937 to a Japanese-American family that, after Pearl Harbor, was sent to live in internment camps for the duration of World War II. His experience growing up in ...