NPR Staff

Critic Kenneth Turan says Going Clear and The Hunting Ground are among the films that "blew people away" at this year's Sundance Film Festival.

For 34 years, the William Grant Still Arts Center in Los Angeles has showcased diverse dolls for children. This year's theme, Jazz Superheroes, incorporates Marvel characters and musical giants.

Falling in love with your handsome pen pal, moving overseas to marry him, then finding out he's part of a terrorist organization: That's the Bunjevac family story, told in a new graphic memoir.

The Minneapolis rap crew is back with the album All Hands. NPR's Arun Rath speaks with members Dessa and P.O.S.

Tom Toro was a directionless 20-something film school dropout. Then, after an inspired moment at a used book sale, he started submitting drawings to The New Yorker -- and collecting rejection slips.

French-Canadian filmmaker Xavier Dolan's new film, Mommy, won the Jury Prize at last year's Cannes Film Festival — an achievement for any director, let alone one who's just 25 years old.

The "mommy" in the movie is the fast-talking, hard-drinking widow Diane, or "Die" for short. She's trying to get ...

Singing in harmony is an intimate exercise, not least because it often requires singers to change their voices in order to better blend with their counterparts. Kanene Pipkin grew up harmony singing, but says the first time she sang with her bandmates in The Lone Bellow, she noticed ...

The late 1960s and early '70s defined a vibrant, electrifying and psychedelic era for rock music everywhere — including Cambodia. The Khmer Rouge communist movement put an end to that when it took power in 1975, but the music from that era has been discovered and rediscovered over the years.

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StoryCorps' OutLoud initiative records stories from the LGBTQ community.

Shane Fairchild's wife, Blue Bauer, was "very rough around the edges," he says: "Blue was 6-foot tall, weighed about 230 pounds, had red hair and brown eyes, had been a trucker all of her life," Fairchild tells their friend Sayer Johnson ...

In his new memoir, Dear Father, J. Ivy describes the pain of being abandoned by his father. But the book is not just about that relationship and what might have been. It's a retracing of a unique career, and what it took for Ivy to get to the place he ...

There is a common belief that requiring the use of "politically correct" language in the workplace stifles creativity. Researchers decided to see if that notion held up to scrutiny.

Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee sees America as divided into "Bubble-ville" and "Bubba-ville," a cultural split he describes in his new book, Gods, Guns, Grits, and Gravy.

Trevor Noah, a new international correspondent on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, turns a sharp eye on American policy — while answering the questions about world news that people are afraid to ask.

In the State of the Union this week, President Obama noted that crime in America is down. "For the first time in 40 years," he said, "the crime rate and the incarceration rate have come down together."

But in a new book, Los Angeles Times reporter Jill Leovy cites ...

Jamie Cullum is the UK's best-selling contemporary jazz artist. He's collaborated with Paul McCartney, Clint Eastwood and Pharrell Williams. On his latest album, Interlude, he covers some distinctive jazz songs, with the help of a few friends.

Cullum joined NPR's Scott Simon to share ...

Thomas Maggs is a lonely little boy. When Esther Freud's new novel Mr. Mac And Me opens, he is 13 years old. His brothers have died, his father, who runs a bar, drinks too much of his own stock and beats his son. Thomas dreams of sailing away – and ...

For the first half of the 20th century, Tin Pan Alley songwriters like Irving Berlin and the Gershwins dominated pop music. By the the 1950s, tastes had changed, and the music changed with them.