Amazon is piloting 14 possible shows for its streaming video service. The audience will vote on which shows it likes best. TV critic Eric Deggans says the process and the shows would like to be breaking ground for a new media — but they aren't.
Renee Montagne talks to David Wessel, economics editor at "The Wall Street Journal," about the week in stocks. What's behind the broader rally this year, and why things got rocky this week.
In a key test of the federal health law's ability to draw competitive bids from health insurance companies, California has unveiled the plans and prices that will be available next year to millions of residents shopping for individual coverage on its new insurance marketplace.
President Obama discussed America's counter-terrorism strategy — including the use of drones and the prison at Guantanamo Bay — during an address at the National Defense University on Thursday. He rejected the idea that the country can fight an opened-ended "global war on terror."
Skyscrapers are obscured by heavy haze in Beijing on Jan. 13. Air pollution remains a serious, sometimes overwhelming, problem, but researchers say environmental technology is available to solve it.
Credit Ng Han Guan / AP
A woman wears a mask as she stands near a giant display depicting blue skies during a day of heavy pollution on Tiananmen Square in Beijing on March 6.
Denise Mauzerall arrived in Beijing this year at a time that was both horrifying and illuminating. The capital was facing some of its worst pollution in recent memory and Mauzerall, a Princeton environmental engineering professor, was passing through on her way to a university forum on the future of cities.
"I took the fast train from Beijing to Shanghai, and looking out the window for large sections of that trip you couldn't see more than 20 feet," Mauzerall recalled.
To Mauzerall, the lesson was both surprising and inescapable.
Educated in the U.S., Aung worked in Silicon Valley for a number of tech companies, including Google, before returning to Myanmar. Here he is at his office shortly after closing time. His employees keep to a tight schedule starting early in the morning and leaving at 5:30 pm every day.
Credit Lam Thuy Vo / NPR
Aung gives one of his employees feedback during a monthly meeting. Giving regular feedback is one of the management techniques he brought from Silicon Valley to Myanmar. After the meeting he hands his employees thick envelopes which contain their salaries in cash. Even though Nay eventually hopes to develop online and mobile payment services, most of his employees still prefer to be paid in cash.
Credit Lam Thuy Vo / NPR
One of Aung's employees holds up the receipt of a payment he is about to deliver to one of Aung's partner hotels. Even though Aung enables tourists to handle their travel bookings online, he still has to deliver cash to his partners by hand.
Credit Lam Thuy Vo / NPR
One of the main challenges Aung faces in running an Internet Startup in Myanmar is not having a consistent Internet connection. There are several Internet and electricity outages every day.
Credit Lam Thuy Vo / NPR
Nay Aung is the founder of Oway, a tech startup in Yangon, Myanmar. He used Taste Cafe as his unofficial office when he started his company — in part because it was one of the few places in Myanmar with a stable Internet connection.
Like a proud father, Nay Aung opens up his MacBook Air to show me the Myanamar travel website he's built. But we wait 30 seconds for the site to load, and nothing happens.
"Today is a particularly bad day for Internet," he says. This is life in Myanmar today: Even an Internet entrepreneur can't always get online.
This is an installment of NPR's ongoing Cook Your Cupboard, a food series about improvising with what you have on hand. Have a food that has you stumped? Submit a photo and we'll ask chefs about our favorites!
Harrison Gowdy of Dayton, Ohio, has developed a reputation among friends and family of liking everything and wasting nothing.
"Sometimes I'll even find things like Swiss chard dropped off on my doorstep," she says. And sometimes she receives foods that stump her.
Sally Edwards, 80, (left) and Lue Hutchinson, 71, visited StoryCorps in Cincinnati. Their sons, Jack Edwards and Tom Butts, are buried at Arlington National Cemetery.
Credit Courtesy of Sally Edwards
Jack Edwards, a Marine captain in the Gulf War. He enlisted in the Army in 1974.
Credit Courtesy of Lue Hutchinson
Tom Butts circa 1991 on top a Black Hawk helicopter.
In 1991, Kentucky residents Sally Edwards and Lue Hutchinson had sons serving in the Gulf War. Sally Edwards' son, Jack, was a Marine captain. Lue's son, Tom Butts, was a staff sergeant in the Army. The two men never knew each other, but today, their mothers are best friends.
Both soldiers were killed in February of 1991. Jack was 34. "They were the cover for a medical mission. The helicopter lost its top rotor blade, and they didn't make it back," Sally says.
As the 100th anniversary of Igor Stravinsky's ballet The Rite of Spring approaches, commentator Miles Hoffman reminds us that — as earthshaking as that infamous debut was — the composer soon branched out into a variety of musical styles that would surprise his fans and critics.
