Checking More Than One Box: A Growing Multiracial Nation

Larry Bright holds his 3-year-old son's hand while the boy steps through a leafy playground in Silver Spring, Md., and practices counting his numbers in English.

At the top of the slide, the boy begins counting in his other language: Vietnamese.

Bright, the boy's father, is African-American; his mother, Thien Kim Lam, is Vietnamese. The couple has two children.

"They are a perfect mix between the two of us," Lam tells Arun Rath, host of weekends on All Things Considered.

In Guantanamo, Have We Created Something We Can't Close?

The crisis at the Guantanamo Bay detention camp keeps growing in size and intensity. According to the military's own count, 100 of the 166 men held in the prison there are now on hunger strike, and the 27 most in danger of dying are being force-fed.

Last month, guards had to forcibly subdue a camp where even the most cooperative detainees are held.

LL Cool J On 'Accidental Racist' And Authenticity

LL Cool J has been making music for more than 25 years. Through it all, he says, he's tried his best to remain authentic.

"The last thing that I want to do is be a hack," says the rapper and actor, born James Todd Smith. "Someone who is adapting to whatever the current trend is, and manipulating the public into being on board with me even though, from an artistic standpoint, I'm not doing anything."

The 'Curious' Story Of Robert 'Believe It Or Not!' Ripley

Before there was YouTube or Mythbusters or The Amazing Race, there was Robert "Believe It or Not!" Ripley.

Ripley's pioneering mix of the strange, the shocking and the barely believable grabbed Americans' attention and grew his newspaper cartoon into a media empire.

Teenage Diaries Revisited: Mother And Son Listen To The Past

Name: Melissa Rodriguez

Hometown: New Haven, Conn.

Current city: Orange, N.J.

Occupation: Customer service representative

Then:

"I just started my life. I just started to go to school, I just started working, and I just didn't have anything settled yet."

'It Led Us On A Journey': The Musical World Of 'The Great Gatsby'

When movie director Baz Lurhmann got his hands on F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, a 21st century-Jazz Age mashup was inevitable. Vivid, anachronistic style is standard in Luhrmann's films: His take on Romeo + Juliet was a Technicolor fever dream for the MTV generation, and Moulin Rouge put Verdi's La Traviata through a genre blender.

Polley's 'Stories': A Family Saga Strikingly Spun

Sarah Polley grew up the fifth of five children in a Canadian theatrical family. Her father, Michael, is a transplanted British actor; her mother, Diane, was an actress and casting director. No wonder Sarah feels her family's narrative has the stuff of drama.

"I'm interested in the way we tell stories about our lives," she says in the film, "about the fact that the truth about the past is often ephemeral and difficult to pin down."

Prophetic words, those.

'Dangerous Territory': Carbon Dioxide Levels Reach Milestone

Earth's atmosphere is entering a new era. A mountaintop research station that has been tracking carbon dioxide for more than 50 years says the level of that gas in our air has reached a milestone: 400 parts per million.

That number is one of the clearest measures of how human beings are changing the planet. It shows how much carbon we have put into the air from burning fossil fuels — and that carbon dioxide drives global warming.

This measurement comes from Mauna Loa, Hawaii, a remote volcano where the air is largely free of local influences.

Teenage Diaries Revisited: Growing Up With Tourette's

Name: Josh Cutler

Hometown: New York, N.Y.

Current City: New York, N.Y.

Occupation: ESL teacher

Then:

"I look just like a normal person, except after a while you'd realize I don't act much like a normal person."

Pakistani Women Still Struggle For A Voice In Politics

Flags of the competing political parties whip in the wind of seaside Karachi. But little else is stirring in this city of 18 million this day.

The MQM, a leading political party in the megacity, has shut Karachi down with a general strike in response to a deadly bombing at its election office. But as soon as the strike ends, the streets spring to life as if nothing were amiss.