Scott Simon

Milton Schwartz might get hauled in front of the Human Resources department these days for the kind of remark that endeared him to generations of women.

"They'd walk in, and he'd say, 'You're a 38B,' " his son, Ben Schwartz, told the Chicago-Sun Times when he father, Milton, died at ...

Barbie is about to talk back. She has talked before, with a pull-string in her back, so she could utter a phrase or two, like, "Let's have a pizza party!"

But Mattel is about to roll out Hello Barbie, who has a mic in her waist that connects to a ...

Ionel Talpazan thought he saw a UFO when he was a boy, and never stopped seeing them. Of course, he created them.

Ionel Talpazan was 60 years old when he died this week, of diabetes and stroke. He was a boy in a small village in Romania, given up by ...

I covered a papal trip to the United States years ago, and my mother made sure my pockets were packed with mass cards, medallions and her rosary.

I found that a lot of reporters, even those who could be hilariously cynical about religion, were similarly overstuffed. We used to have ...

One man's obscenity is another man's name.

This week a scholar of medieval history announced he might have found the earliest recorded evidence of what we must call here "the F-word" being used in English to describe intimate relations.

Dr. Paul Booth of Keele University says he was examining court ...

Did you have a good summer? I spent much of mine being a critic. Perhaps you did, too.

Take a flight, you get an email: "Tell us about your flight to Cleveland." Stay at a hotel, you get another survey: "Rate your stay!"

Go to ...

Some pictures produce thousands — sometimes millions — of words. This week, it was the image of a little boy in a red shirt and little rubber-soled shoes lying in the waves of a Turkish beach.

You may hope the boy is just napping after he's played. His clothes look ...

Mornings are made by routine. The alarm that warbles at the usual hour, the smell of coffee, the sound of familiar voices.

Those of us who work the morning shift grow to appreciate the intimacy we have with those who tune in. People wake to our voices. We ...

Jimmy Carter told a press conference he called on the morning of the day he would have the first radiation treatment on the cancer in his brain, "I'd like for the last guinea worm to die before I do."

Mr. Carter was frank, funny and graceful speaking this week about ...

Eighty years ago today, the most famous man in America besides Franklin D. Roosevelt died, and in 1935, I'm not sure you needed to add a "besides."

Will Rogers was 55. He was flying through Alaska with his friend, the pilot Wiley Post, to mine some material for ...

What do you give a city that has everything? Maybe not the Olympic Games.

This week the city of Boston declined to sign what's called a host city contract that would make it liable to pay for any losses incurred by the Olympics, which effectively ended its bid for the ...

Willis Conover was known around the world, but not so much at home. He was the voice of jazz over the Voice of America for more than 40 years, most of it during the Cold War.

Imagine what it was like to sit in the dark of a hushed room ...

Pluto turns out to be pretty lively.

Not Las Vegas, perhaps, but more vivacious with geologic activity than we've ever known about, and for good reason: Pluto is currently almost 3 billion miles away from Earth, a dwarf planet spinning in the lonely last ring of our solar system.

There has been an outpouring of grief and sympathy since the shootings in Charleston, S.C., and calls for Americans to examine our minds and hearts.

But this week, in several spots around the country, little bags of candy have been left with harsh and hateful messages.

Many refugees around the world have to make a grim decision: what few things can they carry in their arms and on their backs as they try to run for safety and freedom?

This week the United Nations refugee agency said the number of people forced to flee their homes ...