NPR People: Scott Simon

At the Oscars this year, one star will grace the red carpet with an "eco-dress."

The Arizona Department of Transportation has closed 13 of the state's 18 highway rest stops. That raises a fundamental question: Is government obliged to provide the traveling public with free restrooms?

Why did so many of the male politicians sitting around the health care summit table wear powder blue ties?

The actor and director was ordered off a Southwest Airlines flight on the grounds that he was too big for one airline seat. Bigotry, or good corporate sense?

Host Scott Simon has been away for several weeks after undergoing cervical spinal surgery at Ohio's Cleveland Clinic. Now he's back and shares his thoughts on being a patient at the revered hospital.

In his own jolly and outrageous way, the former congressman's career reminds us of what electoral politics is supposed to be about: not just standing by your ideas, but learning and changing, too.

The atom bombs dropped on Japan in 1945 killed — by some estimates — more than 200,000 people. In Hell To Pay, military historian D.M. Giangreco argues that the alternative, a land invasion of Japan, would have been many times more deadly. Japanese estimates, Giangreco says, set the figure at 20 million.

It's hard to detect God's loving touch in the Rev. Pat Robertson's dotty remarks. Better to focus on the bravery and grace of the Haitian people and the love and kindness in the world's response.

A holiday fable for 2009: a homeless couple, three Wise People bearing gift cards, a newborn swaddled in failed newspapers and a lesson in unconditional love.

Twitter is hijacked, and one expert calls it a move by Iran to show that it can control both the information that comes into the country, and what gets reported to the world.

In Scott Simon's home, things that work for everybody else go dumb and useless, which means just about everything these days: computers, phones and clocks, TVs, coffee makers, stoves and children's toys.

If people feel warm and safe, if they're working and well-fed, they will accept and even enjoy a certain amount of corruption — if they think their government makes a place run well. If it doesn't, they can begin to see corruption as their one best chance to look out for themselves.

Paco Rodriguez, known as El Nino Azteca on the west side of Chicago, died last week of injuries sustained in the ring. His organs have been donated. "He's not only in heaven, but walking the earth in other people," his brother says.

Every 1,900 screenings for women in their 40s produces just one case in which cancer is discovered. But what if you're the one?

Gandhi was a champion of the poor. Montblanc is celebrating his life with a limited edition 18-karat gold pen. The cost: $33,000.