Peter Breslow

We recently asked our audience to share their travel nightmares. NPR's Peter Breslow tells his own harrowing story — as a New Jersey boy who had everything go wrong on his South American expedition.

In 1982, when I washed up on NPR's doorstep looking for a job, I started a pickup basketball game. It endures to this day. That's right, we are in our 33rd season, which makes me too old to still be playing ... and yet, somehow, I still am.

Every Wednesday ...

It's a place where girls can play volleyball. They can do ballet (of course).

But soccer is a no-no.

That's the way it goes in Brazil, the country that famously loves soccer. There was once a legal ban — from 1941 to 1979 — noting that "women will not be ...

Sometimes you can tell a lot about a country just by walking its beaches. That's what I did on my last day in Freetown, the capital of Sierra Leone, where I was on assignment covering the Ebola epidemic.

Standing at water's edge, facing the sea. The smooth blue rollers come ...

There's one women's cycling team in Afghanistan. Free-form traffic and open-mouth stares are just a couple of the things they encounter as they pedal the country's mountainous, potholed roads.

There's a lot of money and attention going toward wearable devices, though the sophistication of the technology varies. One company is developing wearables with clusters of tiny high-tech senors.

In chaotic situations, certain people rise to the top, and that is certainly the case for Mohammed al-Hariri, a former air conditioning repairman who commands enormous deference on the windblown streets of Zaatari refugee camp.

In less than a year, the Zaatari camp in Jordan has ...