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Reports this week about former Defense Secretary Robert Gates' new book have implied that he thinks President Obama approved a 2009 troop surge in Afghanistan believing the strategy would fail. But Gates tells NPR that's not right. He believes Obama became skeptical about the "troop surge" later on.

If a person loses all brain function, he or she is considered legally dead. But the cases of Jahi McMath and Marlise Muñoz have shown that even though doctors can declare someone dead, families and the courts might not always agree with that definition.

Local and international pressure had been building against President Michel Djotodia. He took power in a military coup in the summer, plunging the country into a multi-sided civil war. Thousands have died and hundreds of thousands have been uprooted.

Ken Tucker says The River & The Thread is a travelogue; a timeless work of comfort and quiet joy.

A new film explores the affair between Dickens and a young actress for whom he left his wife, but who for years never showed up in biographies of Dickens. It's the second film directed by Ralph Fiennes, who also plays Dickens.

Baraka was one of the key black literary voices of the 1960s. The political and social views that inspired his writing changed over the years, from his bohemian days as a young man in Greenwich Village to his later years as a Marxist. He spoke to Fresh Air's Terry Gross in 1986.

On the hit PBS Masterpiece series, the social rules the characters have always known are changing as the world events of the 20th century unfold.

In this first full week of 2014, tech headlines came fast and furiously out of the Consumer Electronics Show in Vegas, and beyond.

The unexpected dip to 6.7 percent may seem like good news, but the rate slid in December in part because the country found itself with a smaller workforce as people retired or just dropped out. At the same time, most of the jobs being created are in low-wage industries.

Words matter when it comes to medicine. By comparing placebo pills labeled as migraine medicine with medicine labeled placebos, doctors figured out that half of the pain relief of medication comes from a person's belief in its effectiveness.