NPR Staff

The All Songs Considered gang has made their way to Austin, Texas for this year's South By Southwest music festival. The five day event, which showcases performances by over 1500 bands and artists, takes over the city, and this year officially starts one day earlier than in the past ...

This month NPR begins a series of occasional conversations about The Race Card Project, where people can submit their thoughts on race and cultural identity in six words. Thousands of people have shared their six-word stories and every so often NPR Host/Special Correspondent Michele Norris will dip into the ...

Retiring Michigan Sen. Carl Levin says he wants to spend his last two years in the Senate focusing on issues "that I believe to my core are really, really important to the country."

Although the Democrat says he "kind of" enjoys campaigning, he has decided not to seek another term ...

Elliot and Natalie Bergman, a sibling duo originally from Chicago, are Wild Belle. Elliot has been in other bands (including NOMO) but says this project with his sister, eight years his junior, is just the right fit.

"It definitely just feels like home," he says. "It's all the ...

It's the handwriting that stands out to Cedrick May.

As an associate professor of English at the University of Texas, Arlington, he assigned his doctoral students to find some of the known works by Jupiter Hammon, the first published African-American poet. Hammon's works date back to 1760.

What one student ...

Estate planning may seem like a pain, but imagine the mess you leave to those managing your affairs if you don't draw up a will or get life insurance.

"It takes really just a few hours now, rather than a pile of hours and thousands of dollars to do it ...

"I am so stressed out" is a common refrain these days, but if you think of stress as a pervasive fact of life, consider this: Before 1976, The New York Times had never published an article about stress as we understand it today. Our idea of stress — as a ...

Chaz Bundick is the producer and singer-songwriter credited with pioneering a new genre of music called chillwave: a mix of electronic, hip-hop and dance music. Think house music meets R&B.

Hailing from Columbia, S.C., Bundick, 26, creates music under the name Toro y Moi. He says that growing ...

It's pilot season, that time of year when television networks create and test new shows with hopes of turning out the next big thing. But whatever new plots they come up with, it's safe to say that they will turn to the safety of a limited number of character archetypes: ...

At its best, the Web is a place for unlimited exchange of ideas. But Web-savvy news junkies have known for a long time that reader feedback can often turn nasty. Now a study in the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication suggests that rude comments on articles can even change the ...

Of all the posters plastered around Facebook's Silicon Valley headquarters — "Move Fast and Break Things," "Done Is Better Than Perfect" and "Fail Harder" — Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg has a favorite: "What Would You Do If You Weren't Afraid?"

"[It's] something that I think is really important and ...

The Last Five Years originally ran off-Broadway in 2002. Cited as one of Time magazine's "Ten Best of 2001," it won Drama Desk awards for Best Music and Best Lyrics.

There are only two characters in the musical, Jamie and Cathy. Jamie is a young novelist and Cathy is a ...

Christa and Cara Parravani were identical twins. When they were 28, Cara died of a drug overdose, and Christa spiraled into depression.

In her new book, Her: A Memoir, Christa explores their bond of sisterhood, which went beyond blood into the elliptical world of twinhood.

Both were artists, one a ...

An estimated 80,000 American prisoners spend 23 hours a day in closed isolation units for 10, 20 or even more than 30 years.

Now, amid growing evidence that it causes mental breakdown, the Federal Bureau of Prisons has decided for the first time to review its policies on solitary confinement.

They were good old boys, never meaning no harm, making their way the only way they knew how — Bo and Luke Duke, the central characters on The Dukes of Hazzard, one of the biggest TV hits of the 1980s.

The show aired from 1979 to 1985, but it has ...

The Silence and the Roar follows a young man living in an unnamed Middle Eastern country that is in chaos. The book doesn't explicitly take place in Syria, but the similarities between its setting and author Nihad Sirees' home country are undeniable.

Sirees' work has been banned from publication in ...

Japanese pianist Hiromi approached the making of her latest album with a love for all kinds of sound, no matter how quotidian.

"Even a car honk, I love it," Hiromi says. "Sometimes, when you are at the crossing point of the street, you hear different car honks at ...

You could hardly design a better Hollywood success story than that of powerhouse Rita Moreno: Born Rosa Dolores Alverio in Puerto Rico, she arrived in New York when she was 5 years old. Over the years, she became a talented dancer and ended up in Hollywood, making her mark in ...

Did you leave a message after our prompt? For Round 10 of Three-Minute Fiction, we asked you to submit a short story in the form of a voice mail message. For this contest, the original fiction must be read in about three minutes, no more than 600 words.

After ...

From Bill Haley & His Comets to Elvis Costello, English is the mother tongue of rock. But Germany has a huge rock star at home who has been famous for 30 years. His name is Herbert Gronemeyer, and he's the best-selling German recording artist of all ...