NPR Staff

The award-winning author of Holes has just published a new novel for young readers, called Fuzzy Mud. It mixes middle-school social puzzles with a more sinister mystery: a rogue biotech threat.

The drummer, composer and bandleader's latest album, The Mosaic Project: Love and Soul, is part of her ongoing effort to showcase women in jazz.

The documentary Back On Board traces the highs and lows of the star diver's career, the turmoil he faced as a gay, HIV-positive athlete — and the identity crisis that he experienced after retirement.

The vote by the Boy Scouts of America to lift its ban on openly gay troop leaders last week was a blow to some religious conservative organizations that have long been connected to scouting, especially the Mormon church, which has deep roots in the Boy Scouts.

The church, also known ...

Conan O'Brien got some bad news this past week: The late-night host is getting sued for allegedly stealing jokes. A freelance comedy writer claims that O'Brien lifted four jokes from the writer's personal blog and Twitter.

The dust-up arose after an odd story surfaced about a flight that had just ...

To the ranks of sweet, salty, sour, bitter and umami, researchers say they are ready to add a sixth taste — and its name is, well, a mouthful: "oleogustus."

Announced in the journal Chemical Senses last month, oleogustus is Latin for "a taste for fat."

"It is a sensation ...

If anything was going to make the case for putting warning labels on music, it was 2 Live Crew at the turn of the 1990s. The hip-hop group's output was so sexually explicit that it eventually became the subject of an obscenity case that made its way through some of ...

"It is my fate to illuminate the lives of these one-of-a-kind notable women that have been somehow forgotten by history," says Paula McLain. She shines her spotlight on Markham in Circling the Sun.

Attorney Eric Broyles teamed up with a police officer to pen a handbook for African-American men dealing with police encounters. Above all, he recommends clarity, empathy — and getting badge numbers.

The story, called "Temperature," had never been published and was presumed lost. Long after magazine editor Andrew Gulli began his search for the story, he finally found it — and put it in print.

A LEGO Brickumentary chronicles how children and adults alike use Legos for work, play and therapy. The documentary also explores the Lego Group's near demise — and meteoric return.

What does a couple do for its 40th anniversary?

If you're Penn and Teller, you play Broadway. Thirty years after they first played New York, the duo are back with a new show. And it's no quiet celebration, either. In the course of a single performance, they make a cellphone ...

NPR is snacking its way around the country this summer, sampling a few delicacies that locals swear by and visitors want to find.

Today, pie is on the menu.

Bobkat's Purple Pie Place is a fixture in Custer, S.D. From chicken pot pie to strawberry rhubarb jalepeno, Trevor Yehlie and ...

Oakland cop Robert can't seem to forget Suzy: She left him two years ago and ended up marrying a man named Sonny, a gambler and a smuggler; a man who escaped from Vietnam, like Suzy.

Robert's always wondered what happened to his ex-wife — and now she's disappeared, and Sonny's ...

It's been 15 years since Zimbabwe launched a campaign to seize large tracts of land from white farmers. At the time, more than 4,000 white-owned farms were taken; that land was to be given to disaffected war veterans, many of whom had little prior experience in agriculture.

The move proved ...

As we approach the one-year anniversary of unarmed black youth Michael Brown's death at the hands of Ferguson, Mo., police officer Darren Wilson, the National Museum of African American History and Culture, which is set to open next fall in Washington, D.C., has already started collecting banners and posters ...

Lindi Ortega is on a roll. Her Little Red Boots and Cigarettes and Truckstops albums have been nominated for music awards, her 2013 Tin Star album helped her win a Canadian Country Music Award for Roots Artist of the Year. But her latest project finds inspiration in the music of ...

Architect Renzo Piano has designed the 87-floor Shard skyscraper in London, the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris and the new home for the Whitney Museum in New York. The Pritzker Prize winner even has a number of ideas for the future of Europe's cities.

But there ...

A gritty Marine, Donnie Dunagan fought in Vietnam, earned decorations for his service and retired as a major. But all his life, there was one thing he could never escape: He was the voice of Bambi.

The country artist's chart-topping new album, Something More Than Free, comes at a turning point in his life.