Features

Tune into sounds that have turned a new generation onto Celtic music including flute and whistle player Michael McGoldrick, singer Emily Smith, and piper Stuart Cassells who fronts the Red Hot Chilli Pipers.

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The Republican primaries were certainly fun while they lasted, especially for political journalists and junkies for whom the intramural fighting generated no shortage of interesting and sometimes bizarre story lines.

But President Obama's campaign aides were all but certain from the start that they would be running against Mitt Romney. That was one of the few areas of agreement between the former Massachusetts governor's campaign and the Obama people.

Over the past year and a half, the world has seen crisis after crisis. Today, NPR's Michele Kelemen spoke to António Guterres, the United Nations High Commissioner on Refugees, mostly about the crisis in Sudan.

But at one point during their talk, Guterres rattled off the crises they've dealt with since the beginning of 2011: The Ivory Coast, Libya, Syria, Yemen, both a famine and conflict in the Horn of Africa, Mali and now Syria is flaring up again.

When it comes to electronic music production, there are a bunch of ways tracks can be made. There's the "arranging digital samples" approach, where producers layer pre-recorded sounds or loops to compose a piece. There's the "analog to digital" approach, where a producer will play analog synthesizers or program drum machines and feed them into a digital audio work station like Ableton. And there's what I'll call the "organic to digital" approach, where producers record more conventional instruments and then process the results in a computer.

A U.S. Marine sergeant who posted critical comments about President Obama on his Facebook page will be dismissed with an "other-than-honorable discharge," the Marine Corps said today.

Most people who haven't been living under a rock are aware of the newspaper industry's precipitous decline. And even the least media savvy surface dwellers could guess that this sorry state of affairs has disproportionately impacted arts journalism.