Michel Martin

You might not know his name and you might not know his face, but there are two things you might very well know about DeRay Mckesson: his blue vest and his tweets.

Both became synonymous with the protest movement that developed in the wake of the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., in 2014.

A new movie from director Spike Lee has a premise that's almost impossible to believe.

It's 1978 and a black police detective in Colorado Springs, Colo., manages to infiltrate the Ku Klux Klan. He not only gets a membership card straight from Grand Wizard David Duke, but he's also asked to lead a local chapter because he's everything they are looking for — loyal, smart and a true believer.

He establishes a relationship with David Duke over the phone. And for meetings in person, he recruits a white co-worker to go in his place.

A GOP congressman and former FBI agent says he thinks President Trump was manipulated by Russian President Vladimir Putin. Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick told NPR's Michel Martin on All Things Considered that he drew that conclusion after the two leaders appeared in Helsinki.

"The president was manipulated by Vladimir Putin," Fitzpatrick said. "Vladimir Putin is a master manipulator."

People have asked Janelle Bynum whether legislation would help solve the problem of police being called on black people for just going about their daily lives. Bynum, an Oregon state representative who herself had authorities called on her while canvassing for votes earlier this month, simply tells them, "You can't legislate humanity."

Early on Saturday morning, business at Laura Om's salon on Calle Loiza in San Juan, Puerto Rico is booming. Hurricane Maria, in a roundabout way, has something to do with that.

Om specializes in styling curly, natural hair — something that Puerto Rican women often go to great lengths to straighten with strong chemicals and hair dryers.

Eight months after the hurricane, it appears that Hurricane Maria — and the subsequent power and water outages — created a new market for Om's skills.

If you were one of the millions of viewers who tuned into the royal wedding last weekend, you may also have been one of the many who were impressed by a young cellist.

Nineteen-year-old Sheku Kanneh-Mason played three pieces during the interlude in which Prince Harry and Meghan Markle signed the registry.

Rose McGowan says she would "absolutely" like to testify if given the chance against Harvey Weinstein. McGowan spoke to NPR's Michel Martin a day after the mogul turned himself into police in New York after months of fighting sexual abuse investigations.

"I have had to have his arm around me and smile in photos," McGowan says on Weinstein embracing her at public events. "The cameras would flash and you're just kind of out of your body and [think], 'Don't cause a scene and just go with it,' because what else are you going to do? You're trapped.

The presidents of North Korea and South Korea are scheduled to meet this Friday, in a prelude to a summit in the works between North Korea's Kim Jong Un and President Trump to talk about North Korea's nuclear program.

The summit between Kim and South Korean President Moon Jae-in will be the third time the countries' top leaders have met since the Korean War. Trump's meeting with Kim is expected to occur next month.

Arthur Miller is a giant of the American theater. He's renowned for classics like Death Of A Salesman and The Crucible, which premiered in the '40s and '50s yet continue to be read in school and performed to this day.

Miller lived a long time — he died in 2005 at the age of 89 — so it might be easy to forget that for much of his adult life he wasn't just accomplished. He was also a major celebrity: He made headlines with his marriage to Marilyn Monroe, and for his testimony before Congress during the McCarthy era.

Guns and gun safety continue to dominate this week, as the Florida legislature passed several gun-related measures. The provisions fall short of what newly-energized student activists wanted, but still represent a degree of victory for gun control advocates in a state that has seen few such "victories."

She says she was born doing it. He says a schoolboy crush got him interested. Years later, their mutual love for their shared art form has brought them critical acclaim, awards, magazine covers — and each other.

If you've been following any of the news stories in recent years about famous men behaving horribly, then you've surely seen Gloria Allred. And while stories about sexual misconduct have been making headlines for many months now, Allred has been talking about those issues, filing lawsuits and holding press conferences for four decades.

Dan Reynolds is known to millions of fans around the world as the lead singer of the popular band, Imagine Dragons, because of hits like "Radioactive," "Thunder," and last year's chart topper, "Believer."

The spiritual questions at the core of "Believer" are unmistakable, but also deeply personal. Now, though, Reynolds has taken those questions to new, more public terrain — the treatment of LGBTQ members of the church of Reynold's upbringing, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the Mormon Church.

According to the United Nations, 56 U.N. Peacekeepers died through violence in 2017. That's the highest number of fatalities since 1994 — when the U.N. sent peacekeepers to Rwanda, Somalia, Cambodia and the Balkans. The U.N. report suggested that last year's figures are not an anomaly, but rather an extended surge in deaths that began about five years ago.

The stories of sexual assault and harassment that emerged last year seemed to touch every industry — Hollywood, hotels, restaurants, politics and news organizations, including this one. Many of those stories focused on what happened, but most didn't or couldn't get to the question of why: Why do some people, mainly men, sexually harass their colleagues?

Psychologist John Pryor has been thinking about this for more than three decades, and he has created a test in an effort to measure a person's tendency to harass someone. It's called the "Likelihood to Sexually Harass Scale."

Last week, Oprah Winfrey's speech at the Golden Globes brought many in the audience to tears and to their feet. She was accepting an award for contributions to the world of entertainment, but the billionaire broadcaster and philanthropist decided to use her moment to tell the story of a far less celebrated woman: Recy Taylor.

Updated 7:00 p.m. ET:

Actor and former NFL player Terry Crews filed a lawsuit last week stemming from an encounter at a party in 2016 when he says a high-powered Hollywood agent groped him.

Crews tweeted about the assault in October, prompted by the women who came forward accusing Harvey Weinstein of sexual assault and harassment and the backlash they faced.

Millennials.

With crippling student debt and their love for avocado toast, some crotchety rich people think millennials are ruining everything.

But are millennials deserving of the bad rap they get?

The Wall Street Journal issued a new note on its style blog earlier this week, suggesting the publication not write about millennials with such disdain.

In a moment when the country is grappling with issues of sexual misconduct and the abusive treatment of women and girls, a murder case involving a then-teenager who says she was forced into prostitution is back in the national spotlight more than a decade after the key events took place.

A number of A-list celebrities, including Rihanna, LeBron James and Kim Kardashian West, have taken an interest in the case of Cyntoia Brown, a 29-year-old serving a life sentence for the murder of a Nashville man in 2004.

Earlier this year, the Trump administration rolled back the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, an Obama-era government program that would shield people from deportation if they arrived in the United States as children without the proper documents. The program will end, unless Congress decides to act.

Whether you're the star chef of the family or you're assigned dish duty, the odds are pretty good you've got that all-important Thanksgiving dinner on your mind.

Along with the fun — and let's be honest, the occasional tension — that comes with getting together with friends and family, the cooking itself can be overwhelming for many people.

NPR's Michel Martin got together with Christopher Sorensen, the culinary director for Blue Apron,, to whip up a few Thanksgiving-friendly meals and to talk about getting comfortable in the kitchen this holiday season.

When you think of Disney, "experimental" or "avant-garde" may not be the first words that spring to mind.

But when tasked with adapting the 1994 Disney animated film, The Lion King, for the Broadway stage, director Julie Taymor decided to take an unconventional tack.

Drawing on theater and puppetry traditions she'd studied from around the world, Taymor brought a bold, experimental approach to the show. And, when it opened in 1997, that fusion was met with wide critical acclaim and huge box office success.