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Chicago Congressman Luis Gutierrez's life has been marked by arrests, no-holds-barred Chicago-style political fighting, and even the occasional Molotov cocktail thrown through his window. He speaks with host Michel Martin about his life and new memoir Still Dreaming: My Journey from the Barrio to Capitol Hill.

Michigan is expected to bring in a record-setting apple crop this year. So how do you sort and package 2,000 Galas in a minute? Farmers have turned to the Rolls Royce of fruit processing: a robot that uses computer vision to weed out the bad apples.

When Congress voted to end the shutdown, the measure also included $2 billion for a troubled lock and dam project on the Ohio River. Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell, a supporter of the project, has been attacked by hard-line conservatives who call it pork-barrel spending, but he says he didn't put it in the bill.

For 40 years, the Renaissance Street Singers have given free public performances of sacred music. But they insist that their mission is not religious in nature.

In Ebony & Ivy, an MIT historian details how the nation's colleges helped justify and benefited from the slave trade.

You're driving down the street, and there on the corner, something familiar: a person waving a giant advertisement. Wait, that's not a real person! In cities across the country, sign-waving mannequins are helping to advertise things like cash for gold, furniture and apartments.

Despite their failure to defund the health care law, Republicans still detest it — and now there's a movement underway to oust Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius. What's unexpected is that the effort is being led by Sen. Pat Roberts, a fellow Kansan she has long had close ties to.

In this curious base ball league, the umpire wears a top hat and the players drink water out of pewter mugs. The rules and equipment follow 19th-century protocol. A history-lover's dream, the games take place on a farm, evoking the sport's pastoral early years.

In her debut novel, Iranian-American Sara Farizan tells the story of two teenage girls, secretly in love. Sahar faces a crisis when she discovers Nasrin is engaged, and considers gender-reassignment surgery as a way for them to stay together. Farizan speaks with NPR's Jacki Lyden about the book and her own struggle with her sexual orientation.

Long before smart watches became the latest pursuit for tech companies, Gordon Moore of Intel was experimenting with wristwatch computers. Intel's co-founder and his colleagues built a line of chip-powered watches in the late '70s. The concept was visionary, but the business was a failure. Moore now keeps a memento that he calls his "$15 million watch."