NPR Staff

The star of The Wire and Treme remembers fleeing the storm — and returning to devastation. As his community coped with "post-traumatic stress," he says, Treme "became a group therapy ...

Iftah Ya Simsim was one of the earliest foreign-language Sesame Street spinoffs when it launched in 1979. But the beloved show went dark when its studio was partially destroyed during the Gulf War.

Honey bees are being rustled.

Thieves are hijacking hives and renting the bees and their queens out to farmers to pollinate their crops. With the global collapse of the bee population, the crime is becoming even more lucrative.

It's an issue in the U.S., in California's Central Valley, but most ...

Erica Jong's new book has echoes of her most famous novel, 1973's Fear of Flying — which invited women to be as avid for sex and as delighted with it as men are.

The new book is called Fear of Dying (small spoiler alert: Everyone does not end up dead ...

Ben Folds has had a wide-ranging career. He's best known for his pop-rock ballads — but he's also released an a cappella record, been a judge on the TV singing competition show The Sing-Off and collaborated with William Shatner. Now he has another accomplishment to add to the ...

The actor and writer has a collection of funny short stories that also mine some emotional truths — from post-gender attempts at pick-ups to a lonely 9-year-old reviewing expensive restaurants.

A settlement may mean the release of thousands of inmates from solitary confinement. The U.N. special rapporteur on torture says it's "a great achievement," but he'll have to see how it's implemented.

KFPK's resident global-music DJ brings in a stack of new records that rework and re-imagine Afro-Cuban jazz, tango and other classic styles of Latin music.

The so-called Islamic State continues to wreak a human toll in the Middle East. And in addition to that suffering, the militant organization continues its assault on Syria's cultural heritage.

This week, militants blew up three tombs in the ancient city of Palmyra, and reduced the Greco-Roman Temple of Bel ...

StoryCorps' Military Voices Initiative records stories from members of the U.S. military who served in Iraq and Afghanistan.

After Army Pfc. Brian Orolin returned from Afghanistan in 2011, his wife Donna could tell something wasn't right. He became paranoid and suffered constant headaches, and he would isolate himself in ...

Kentucky singer-songwriter Joan Shelley's new album, Over and Even, offers hints of mountain music and Americana, Celtic guitar licks and shades of English folk-rock. Shelley spoke with NPR's Scott Simon about how traveling the world and playing traditional Appalachian music with her other band have impacted her sound. Find highlights ...

Salman Rushdie's new novel, Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights, seems to transpose the Arabian Nights of long ago to modern-day New York City. A thunderstorm overturns the city and upsets the laws of the universe with myth and magic.

The jinn have come back after an 800-year exile, ...

Rocco Logozzo talks about his nephew, Aylan Kurdi, whose body washed up on a Turkish beach after a failed voyage from Turkey to Greece, and about the regret he and his wife feel for funding the trip.

The Norwegian synth-pop band a-ha releases a new album Friday, but its 1985 smash, "Take On Me," remains inescapable.

Meru is a 21,000-foot mountain in northern India. Some of the greatest climbers in the world have tried and failed to reach its peak — a sheer granite wall known as the Shark's Fin.

The Hidden Brain project helps curious people understand the world – and themselves. Using science and storytelling — and a lot of fun! — the project reveals the patterns that drive human behavior, the biases that shape our choices, and the imperceptible forces that influence our relationships.

The natural world is making a lot of noise at dawn. We're collecting recordings of this time of morning from across the world, so send us yours.

"There's a beautiful, kind of seductive trap in being autobiographical in our writing of songs: We just get stuck in our own syrup," says the soul artist.

The accomplished guitarist's new album, History of Tango, takes on a popular Latin-American style not often associated with her instrument.

An Australian bay has gotten a bit too crowded for the local octopuses, who have been fighting and bullying each other. They now appear to be hurling shells as weapons — and there's video evidence.