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Retail giant Sears has filed for bankruptcy. Historian Louis Hyman of Cornell reflects with NPR's Mary Louise Kelly on the impact the Sears catalog had for African-Americans during the Jim Crow era.

The Swiss bank UBS has agreed to pay $1.5 billion in fines in multiple countries to settle allegations of manipulating the London interbank offered rate and other benchmark interest rates.

The boom in fossil fuels hasn't undermined the growth of renewable energy sources. Tax incentives boosted the wind and solar industries this year, but 2013 might blow for wind.

So few people are reviewing their doctors online that one patient's complaint can skew ratings, a study about urologists finds. The results suggests that available crowdsourced rankings of doctors should be taken with a grain of salt.

Connecticut has suddenly become the epicenter of America's gun control debate, in a way no one there could have foreseen. In the wake of the Newtown massacre, the state that once led the world in making modern weaponry is now the backdrop for arguments over the U.S. gun industry.

Wal-Mart, Target and Kmart all celebrate their 50th year of business this year. They were born after prohibitions against volume discounts and set prices broke down. Now the giant chains face one of their biggest challenges — evolving in the Internet age.

Now that the Supreme Court has found the Affordable Care Act constitutional and the president's re-election made clear that big chunks of the law will take effect in 2014, the administration is finally releasing rules of the road that states and insurance companies have been clamoring for.

Like many other brick-and-mortar retailers, Wal-Mart is trying new strategies to serve customers whenever they want to buy. In one new experiment in four select markets, the retail giant is promising to deliver eligible items ordered online in just a few hours.

The burning question of the week: Is classical music visible enough to a mainstream audience? And do you haveto memorize music to be a great artist? All the classical music world's news, collected for your pleasure. Plus: Portlandia, Second City and music critic/killing machine Stephen Hawking.

The Battlefield Where The Moon Says I Love You may be more than 15,000 lines of almost entirely unpunctuated poetry, but author Steve Stern says this Southern gothic fun house is so bewitching you'll have to finish it. Do you have a favorite impossible book? Tell us in the comments.

Japan's economy was a world beater in the 1980s. But the country has now gone through two tough decades and there's no end in sight. What lessons might it hold for the U.S. as it confronts the "fiscal cliff"?

In Afghanistan, governors are not elected, they are selected — and more often than not due to family or political connections. But in an attempt to curb graft, the country has just sworn in a batch of governors — including the first female district governor — selected through a new merit-based program.

In honor of The Rolling Stones' 50th anniversary, All Things Considered has been talking to the members of the band about standout songs from their catalog. The 1969 track "Gimme Shelter" is about a "world closing in on you" — and it still speaks to us today.

Chris Sullivan's debut animated feature, Consuming Spirits, deploys multiple styles to convey a surreal, semi-autobiographical portrait of life in a small Appalachian town. Critic Ian Buckwalter praises the film's emotional rawness as a labor of love on the part of the filmmaker. (Recommended)

French actress Marion Cotillard won the 2008 Academy Award for best actress for her role in La Vie en Rose. NPR's Robert Siegel speaks with Cotillard about her new film, Rust and Bone, in which she plays an amputee.

Hay prices are up sharply because of the drought across much of the nation. So hay bales sitting in fields have become hot properties. So much so, in fact, that a sheriff in Oklahoma put a GPS tracker in one bale. It helped him track down the suspects.

The rates on capital gains and dividends are on the table in the negotiations over the fiscal cliff. Some complain that it would hurt companies' stock prices, giving them less money to invest. But other economists say it's unlikely to have strong effects.

Europeans and American colonists believed one's personality, temperament and physical health depended on balancing "humors" of hot, cold, moist and dry with foods. Of course, that worked for the wealthy, who could afford a variety of foods, and it kept them in power.

In an interview with David Greene, outgoing Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Mary Schapiro reflects on her tenure at the agency, and the disappointment that she wasn't able to overhaul money market funds. She leaves the job on Friday.

Despite some high profile executives like Marissa Mayer at Yahoo and Virginia Rometty at IBM, women still hold very few CEO jobs — only about about 20 in the Fortune 500. The latest research indicates women have made practically no progress over the past several years ascending to the top slots, or getting on corporate boards.