NPR Staff

A few months ago, Reid Cherlin, a GQ magazine contributor and former White House spokesman for President Obama, was sent a link to a website with what he says was "a sort of grotesque sketch" of his face.

It was the website of Michael McCutcheon, a 73-year-old retiree who ...

The brothers in the Emanuel family are known for their success and for their chutzpah. The youngest is Ari Emanuel, a high-powered Hollywood agent. The HBO show Entourage actually based a character on Ari, and that character is a bit, well, blunt — threatening, for example, to rip out someone's ...

Since her 1999 debut hit, "Here With Me," Dido has sold nearly 30 million albums and been nominated for an Oscar — but the British singer-songwriter wasn't always at center stage. She got her start by filling in for other singers on demos for Faithless, a group founded by her ...

In 1947, Jackie Robinson famously broke the color line in baseball when he joined the Brooklyn Dodgers, ending racial segregation in the major leagues.

That moment was a landmark for racial integration in baseball, but there's another moment few may be aware of, and it happened more than a decade ...

March Madness is here. Even President Obama has filled out a NCAA Division I men's college basketball tournament bracket. His pick to win it all was Indiana University.

The bracket frenzy is unbelievable, says Deborah Stroman, who teaches sports administration at the University of North Carolina.

"Right after the ...

What happens when two very talented women — one, a rising alt-country star; the other, one of classical music's great new talents — meet one another? In the case of singer Tift Merritt and pianist Simone Dinnerstein, a friendship ensues.

But what happens when they decide ...

If you've ever had a glass of California chardonnay that was not from a box, you can give a toast of thanks to Jim Barrett. The 86-year-old vintner passed away last week, after an interesting and varied life that left a lasting legacy in American wine production.

"The guy went ...

From Star Wars' R2-D2 to The Terminator to WALL-E, robots have pervaded popular culture and ignited our imaginations. But today, machines that can do our bidding have moved from science fiction to real life.

Think hands-free vacuum cleaners or iPhone's Siri or robotic arms performing surgery. At the Innorobo ...

The newly appointed emergency financial manager of Detroit begins the Herculean task Monday of turning the once bustling capital of the car business back from the brink of bankruptcy.

Though Detroit still has its cultural centers, architectural gems, funky restaurants and packed sporting events downtown, the city has suffered an ...

In the late 1960s, an all-girl singing group hit it big. But they didn't come from Detroit or Memphis — the four young aboriginal women hailed from the Australian Outback.

At the time, aboriginal people were just gaining basic civil rights, like voting and being counted as Australian citizens. The ...

Kenneth Pattengale and Joey Ryan were doing just fine as solo performers. Then one night, Ryan walked into a bar where Pattengale was playing.

"I heard Kenneth perform a song that he had written from the perspective of a dead dog, only very recently having been hit by a truck," ...

Philip Roth turned 80 years old this week, and his hometown of Newark, N.J. — a city he left long ago, but often returns to in his books — honored the man often acclaimed as America's greatest living novelist with a marching band, a birthday cake in the shape of ...

Writer, actor and producer Tina Fey stars in a new movie out today called Admission, a film that's nominally about getting into college. Fey plays an admissions officer at Princeton University, one of those diligent bureaucrats who cull thousands of applications in search of a small cadre of brilliant young ...

For eight decades, Daily Variety has been a Hollywood must-read for everyone from studio heads to actors looking for a big break. But the days of assistants running out to grab the "trades" are over: This week, the Los Angeles institution published its last daily edition.

Daily Variety will continue ...

The bubonic plague killed about one-third of Europe's population during the Middle Ages, but today the bacterial infection rarely shows up in the U.S. Only a handful of people catch it each year.

But in 2002, Lucinda Marker and her husband, John Tull, were bitten by fleas infected with the ...

In March, NPR's Backseat Book Club — our book group for younger listeners — is reading L. Frank Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, first published in 1900.

And we're hoping that our trip down the yellow brick road will send you on a trip down memory lane. ...

When a Florida man vanished into a massive sinkhole that opened underneath his bedroom in February, the case garnered national attention. Every so often, tragedies like this put sinkholes in the spotlight.

Researchers say that minor sinkholes occur all the time around the world without much notice.

Lewis Land, a ...

In director Antoine Fuqua's new action thriller, Olympus Has Fallen, the White House — code-named "Olympus" — is invaded by North Korean terrorists. The president and his staff are held hostage in an underground bunker, and their only hope of coming out alive is a disgraced Secret Service agent.

In ...

Poet Dunya Mikhail fled her homeland, Iraq, a few years after the first Gulf War. She had been questioned by Saddam Hussein's government, and state media had labeled her writing and poetry subversive. Mikhail escaped to Jordan and eventually reached the United States, where she made a home for herself ...