NPR's Bob Mondello and Susan Stamberg read excerpts of two of the best submissions for Round 11 of our short story contest. They read Snowflake by Winona Wendth of Lancaster, Mass., and Geometry by Eugenie Montague of Los Angeles. You can read their full stories below and find other stories on our Three-Minute Fiction page or on Facebook.
Many school safe rooms, like this one inside Jeffries Elementary in Springfield, Mo., also serve as gymnasiums. Constructed with a $1.6 million grant from FEMA, which covered 75 percent of the cost, the shelter can hold more than 500 people — enough to accommodate all the school's students and employees.
In the days since a tornado ripped through Moore, Okla., talk of constructing safe rooms in public schools has become commonplace.
In southwest Missouri, officials have built a few of them already, and they are seeking funding to build more.
'A Sense Of Peace'
Karina O'Connell is preparing dinner tonight under the pavilion at Phelps Grove Park in Springfield, Mo., where she's eating with her 9-year-old twin sons, Samuel and John Patrick.
Los Angeles is the world leader in the most American of clothing items: bluejeans. High-end, hand-stitched, designer bluejeans that will you run well over $100 a pair.
But as the U.S. apparel industry continues to shrink, LA's bluejeans business faces a threat: a nearly 40 percent tariff, imposed by the European Union, that could cripple the city's jean business.
When people talk about Ilse Metchek they use phrases like "she's a piece of work," "a force of nature," "she's something else." If you want to talk fashion, she's your lady.
Celine and Jesse are sporting a few physical wrinkles — and working through some unsettling relational ones — in Before Midnight, but that just makes this third installment of their once-dewy romance gratifyingly dissonant.
It's been 18 years since they talked through the night that first time, Julie Delpy's Celine enchanting and occasionally prickly, Ethan Hawke's Jesse determined to charm; their chatter then, as now, scripted but loose enough to feel improvised as captured in long, long takes by Richard Linklater's cameras.
Arthur Fiala, shown here in 1918 and 2005, was a private in the 26th Company of the 20th Engineers Regiment during World War I.
Credit S.E. Brown / Courtesy of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Richard Rubin has written for The Atlantic and The New York Times Magazine. His other books include Confederacy of Silence and Everyday American History of the 20th Century.
Credit Courtesy of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
George Briant, shown here in an undated photo and in 2004, recalls Nov. 11, 1918, the day the war ended and the guns fell silent: "You looked like you were in a new land; you couldn't believe that everything is quiet".
Ten years ago, writer Richard Rubin set out to talk to every living American veteran of World War I he could find. It wasn't easy, but he tracked down dozens of centenarian vets, ages 101 to 113, collected their stories and put them in a new book called The Last of the Doughboys. He tells NPR's Melissa Block about the veterans he talked to, and the stories they shared.
Memorial Day weekend marks the start of the summer travel season, and it's particularly important for the resort communities along the Jersey Shore still suffering the effects of Hurricane Sandy.
In the popular tourist spot Point Pleasant Beach, N.J., it has taken seven months and more than $1 million to make repairs along Jenkinson's Boardwalk.
Throughout Kobo Town's new album Jumbie in the Jukebox, frontman Drew Gonsalves declares his love for the past even as his feet are firmly planted in the present. The music of the Toronto band can drift between classic Caribbean pop styles and even verge on hip-hop, but the singer's perspective remains sharply focused, wry and witty. The song "Postcard Poverty," for example, ribs tourists for whom tropical slums become an exotic backdrop to fun-in-the-sun adventures.
