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Anthony Heilbut's essay collection, The Fan Who Knew Too Much, features reflections on the Queen of Soul, soap operas and Jewish immigrants. The highlight of this sometimes harsh collection, says Michael Schaub, is a history of LGBT contributions to gospel.

Novelists Patricia Marx and Meg Wolitzer take a fresh look at romance, while Samuel Park explores how its fallout leads to an unlikely immigration trajectory for his Korean heroine. In nonfiction, James Gleick explores information theory, Antonio Damasio rethinks consciousness, and Joshua Foer investigates the nature of memory.

NPR Music's Tom Huizenga and host Guy Raz spin an eclectic mix of new classical releases.

No musician with classical ties has had Glass' reach or success.

These five books take us inside the minds of a founding father and the father of the iPod; the vexing artists who brought us Starry Night and Slaughterhouse-Five; and the couple whose scientific discoveries changed the world in awesome, and awful, ways.

Legal and military experts say the U.S. and other countries had better get busy with a coordinated answer to piracy, now that the level of violence has spiked. Four American civilians were killed off the coast of Somalia this week.

Dr. Donald Berwick, federal chief of Medicare and Medicaid, asked insurers for their help in making health overhaul a success and to achieve common goals. Cheaper, better health care is in everyone's interest, he said.

After performing Albert Einstein's autopsy, the pathologist put the brain in a jar of formaldehyde and made off with it. That single act torpedoed his reputation, but years later it helped researchers learn more about how our minds work. It turns out that Einstein's brain had more of certain key cells, which were previously thought to be unimportant.

Climate scientists say Colombia's glaciers could disappear within 15 years. Wet highland areas that provide much of the country's fresh water are getting warmer and drier. And each year, flooding becomes more severe. The coastal area of Tumaco has become an example of how environmental and security pressures are undermining previously stable communities.

Although many governments in South America boast that aggressive saving and thriving commodities trading have been a buffer against economic hard times, the turmoil in the U.S. financial industry is starting to deflate those arguments.

Six years ago, hedge fund manager David Einhorn launched a battle to expose accounting problems at Allied Capital, a financial company. In a new book, he says the experience revealed how the media and financial regulators can sometimes fail investors.

Henry Kissinger, George Schultz, Sam Nunn and William Perry argue the only way to stop nuclear weapons from falling into terrorist hands is to get rid of all of them. This week the former statesmen and their supporters convened in Oslo, Norway, for a conference.