NPR Staff

Summertime means backyard barbecues and parties on the patio, and chef Roblé Ali knows all about good times and good food. The 29-year-old New Yorker has prepared meals for big names, including President Obama and entertainers Michael Jackson and Vanessa Williams.

Ali got his start in a professional kitchen at ...

The U.S. considers jazz a national treasure. But its core audience has been gradually shrinking — and aging.

Grammy-winning bassist Christian McBride has been trying to stem that tide by looking at the form in a different way. He tells Tell Me More guest host Celeste Headlee where ...

If you've ever wondered how to say "May the Force be with you" in Navajo, you're in luck. On July 3, a new translation of Star Wars will be unveiled on the Navajo Nation reservation in Arizona. The 1977 classic has been translated into many languages, and the latest effort ...

Three for a Song is a performing trio with a love for the 1930s, during which some of the greatest songwriters who ever lived wrote music that would enter the canon of American popular song. But the group has recently added a quirk to its repertoire: performing songs that were ...

Born to Chinese parents in what is now Thailand, Eng and Chang Bunker became famous throughout the world as "Siamese twins." The brothers were joined at the base of their chests. After years of being displayed at exhibitions, they settled in the mountains of North Carolina in the 1830s. They ...

Could China become the biggest player in film?

China has overtaken Japan as the second-largest market for movies in the world, and it could edge out the United States in the next decade.

That moviegoing audience is so big — the Motion Picture Association of America has said that Chinese ...

Rajat Gupta was one of the wealthiest and most successful men in America and an icon of the Indian-American community. Today, he faces two years in prison for insider trading, convicted of passing corporate secrets to his billionaire friend and Galleon Group founder Raj Rajaratnam.

Gupta was already a wealthy ...

Jazz musicians Cecile McLorin Salvant and Aaron Diehl, both in their 20s, have already racked up major industry prizes. But they took radically different paths to get there.

Diehl, a Juilliard-trained piano player, was performing church hymns at Mass from age 8. ...

The summertime novelty tune "Hello Muddah, Hello Fadduh" has been pouring out of radios for 50 years now. In late July of 1963, Billboard magazine reported that fans were "actually breaking down doors" of record stores to buy the song about the pains of summer camp.

The man behind the ...

Eleanor Friedberger was born in 1976, a little too late to have experienced much of that decade's music firsthand. But the singer-songwriter says she quickly made up for lost time.

"I grew up listening to classic-rock radio in Chicago," Friedberger says. "Those sounds — a Wurlitzer piano, a ...

The effectiveness of school suspensions is up for debate. California is the most recent battleground, but a pattern of uneven application and negative outcomes is apparent across the country.

California students were suspended more than 700,000 times over the 2011-2012 school year, according to state data. One school district ...

When freelance journalist Anna Badkhen returned to Afghanistan in 2011, she set her eyes on a region so remote it doesn't exist on Google Maps.

In her new book, The World Is A Carpet: Four Seasons in an Afghan Village, Badkhen chronicles her time in Oqa - a rural, rainless ...

It started with two young Danes growing up in Copenhagen, with a somewhat unorthodox love for 1970s soul music.

"It's not part of the culture and the history," Coco O., the singing half of the duo Quadron, explains. "Soul music was kind of a cute thing, but not serious. Rock ...

It still pays to earn a college degree. That is, if you get the right one. Georgetown University published a report Wednesday that looked into this dilemma.

"The labor market demands more specialization. So, the game has changed," says Anthony Carnevale, the report's co-author and director of Georgetown's Center ...

Each week, Weekend Edition Sunday host Rachel Martin brings listeners an unexpected side of the news by talking with someone personally affected by the stories making headlines.

Perhaps no active climber is more closely associated with Mount Everest these days than Conrad Anker. He has reached the highest point on ...

It's a good time to be a cyclist in America.

New York kicked off a new bike-sharing program this week, with Chicago and San Francisco both close behind. Those cities are expected to launch similar systems this summer.

The sharing programs are all check-in, check-out systems, with automated stations spread ...

When her beloved Aunt Mary passed away, 15-year-old Sheri Booker sought solace in an unusual summer job — at the Albert P. Wylie Funeral Home in the heart of Baltimore.

Booker's new memoir, Nine Years Under, describes the job that became a nine-year career and lifelong fascination with the business ...

Friday's tornadoes came less than two weeks after an F-5 tornado destroyed a large section of Moore, just south of Oklahoma City. Both episodes raise two sides of one question: When caught in a tornado's path, should you run or hide?

For Morning Edition the day after the powerful tornado ...

City and Colour is the stage name of Canadian singer-songwriter Dallas Green. Once upon a time, he was a member of the post-hardcore band Alexisonfire, which self-identified as "the sound of two Catholic high-school girls in mid-knife fight." But Green had a different side to him, too.

"I ...

The late Mickey Spillane wrote mysteries that practically created the American paperback industry — more than 225 million copies of his books have been sold since he was first published in 1947. Spillane was the best-selling mystery writer of the 20th century — not Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler or other ...