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In delivering the the National Endowment for the Humanities' Jefferson Lecture, author Tom Wolfe argued that the evolution of mankind was forever altered when it harnessed the power of speech.

In 1940, an oceanliner sailing on the North Atlantic was torpedoed by a German U-boat and sunk. The ship was transporting British children away from the German blitz to safety in Canada. Miracles on the Water by Tom Nagorski chronicles the disaster in harrowing detail.

The combination of writing talent and juicy material on display in Sean Wilsey's memoir Oh the Glory of It All is what has author Curtis Sittenfeld singing its praises to others. The people and places described "come explosively and thrillingly alive," says the author of Prep.

The U.S. Supreme Court's ruling that military war crimes trials for prisoners at Guantanamo Bay are illegal is a rebuke to the Bush administration. But what does it mean for those being held at the U.S. detention facility in Cuba?

Texas Icehouses — part town hall, part tavern, icehouses have been a South Texas tradition since the 1920s. Once a vital part of everyday local culture, a cornerstone of every neighborhood in San Antonio and Houston, they are a rapidly diminishing, endangered species. A journey into this Mexican, German, Tejano, Anglo tradition.

Singer Irma Thomas was among the New Orleans residents affected by Hurricane Katrina. She talks about the storm's impact and performs songs from her new album, After the Rain.

The janitors, restaurant workers, and other low-wage immigrants who've been demonstrating lately have almost no legal way to be in the United States. Instead, nearly all the permanent work visas issued each year are for highly skilled workers like computer programmers, university professors and nurses.

Brian Lies imagines a different kind of trip to the beach in his picture book, Bats at the Beach. Our ambassador to the world of children's literature, Daniel Pinkwater, talks with Scott Simon about the book.

Norway has launched a unique construction project on the remote Norwegian island of Svalbard, halfway between the Arctic Circle and the North Pole. It's an underground vault for agricultural seeds, a kind of Noah's Ark for millions of varieties of wheat, rice, and hundreds of other crops that farmers no longer plant in their fields. For a soft-spoken man from western Tennessee named Cary Fowler, it's the culmination of a lifelong -- and controversial -- campaign.

The President meets regularly with his top advisers about the security situation in Iraq. His National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley attends these meetings. He talks with Steve Inskeep about what the president wants to know, and what he needs to know.