NPR's Scott Simon muses on his family's life with animals — a dog, a foster cat, a hamster in a hamster ball — and all that entails.

My husband is high risk and still takes COVID precautions. I want our old life back.

NPR's Scott Simon recounts the heroic actions of a Chicago bus driver and his passengers, who saw buildings on fire at 2 a.m. and raced to warn residents.

From a perceived Barbie snub to the notching of a few significant historical firsts, this awards season has magnified the flaws in how art is celebrated and valued.

Illinois has a chance to enshrine its long history of corruption.

NPR's Scott Simon remembers Alexei Navalny. The Russian opposition leader died Friday in a penal colony.

A doctor argues that the current focus on fighting obesity with drugs like Ozempic ignores the bigger picture: We need a medical system and society that support healthy life habits.

For people with damaged or diminished hearing, hearing aids are helpful devices that shouldn't carry stigma.

Grammy is unveiling an award for "Best African Music Performance." Do the nominees fulfill the goal of "recognizing recordings that utilize unique local expressions from across the ... continent"?

A string of shooting deaths of Chicago high-schoolers shocks and saddens, despite a decrease in the city's homicide rate.

Here we go again: Time loop stories were around long before the 1993 movie Groundhog Day. So a friendly reminder that one person's discovery of something isn't the same as its invention.

As a girl of 10, Estelle Laughlin and her family were forced into the Warsaw Ghetto, then sent to a concentration camp. She lived through the Nazi genocide. This new war has shaken her to her core.

Charles Osgood, who died this week at age 91, was too modest to call himself a poet.

As a new year dawns, we asked our readers to send us their global wishes. Here's what they're hoping for.

Comedian George Carlin has been dead more than 15 years, but AI George Carlin is out with "new" material.