Weekend Edition Sunday features interviews with newsmakers, artists, scientists, politicians, musicians, writers, theologians and historians. The program has covered news events from Nelson Mandela's 1990 release from a South African prison to the capture of Saddam Hussein.
Weekend Edition Sunday debuted on January 18, 1987, with host Susan Stamberg. Two years later, Liane Hansen took over the host chair, a position she held for 22 years. In that time, Hansen interviewed movers and shakers in politics, science, business and the arts. Her reporting travels took her from the slums of Cairo to the iron mines of Michigan's Upper Peninsula; from the oyster beds on the bayou in Houma, La., to Old Faithful in Yellowstone National Park; and from the kitchens of Colonial Williamsburg, Va., to the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, where Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated.
In January 2017, Lulu Garcia-Navarro became host of Weekend Edition Sunday. She is infamous in the IT department at NPR for losing laptops to bullets and hurricanes. She comes to Weekend Edition Sunday from Rio de Janeiro where she was posted as NPR's international correspondent in South America. She has also been NPR's correspondent based in Mexico and spent many years in the Middle East based in Israel and Iraq. She was one of the first reporters to enter Libya after the 2011 Arab Spring began and spent months painting a deep and vivid portrait of a country at war. Her work earned her a 2011 George Foster Peabody Award, a Lowell Thomas Award from the Overseas Press Club, and an Edward R. Murrow Award from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and the Alliance for Women and the Media's Gracie Award for Outstanding Individual Achievement. She has received other awards for her work in Mexico and most recently, the Amazon in Brazil.
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NPR's Ayesha Rascoe speaks to Bryan J. Cook, director of higher education policy at the Urban Institute Center on Education Data and Policy, about how complications with FAFSA affect Black students.
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Sen. Bob Menendez, a Democrat from New Jersey, goes on trial beginning Monday. He's been accused of taking bribes from foreign governments in return for favors.
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About half of Gaza's southern area of Rafah is under Israeli evacuation orders as aid groups race to assist those fleeing.
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NPR's Ayesha Rascoe speaks with Joe Weisenthal co-host of Bloomberg's "Odd Lots" podcast about how the Strategic Petroleum Reserves can be utilized in 2024.
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Sawney Freeman may be America's first Black composer. He was likely enslaved in Connecticut, and his music has been performed there for the first time in two centuries.
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Whale families communicate a lot underwater. So now, researchers are using artificial intelligence to try to figure out what they're saying.
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NPR's Ayesha Rascoe talks to Vicky Farewell about her new album "Give A Damn" and turning bedroom, bubble-gum pop into brutally honest reflections on relationships.
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Minnesota's new state flag officially flew for the first time on Saturday. Some Minnesotans hate it, and some love it so much that they're getting a tattoo of it.
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NPR's Ayesha Rascoe talks with Emerson Sprick, an economist with the Bipartisan Policy Center, about potential solutions for keeping Social Security solvent.
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A profile of a small frontline newspaper that has been reporting on Ukrainian POWs released from captivity in Russia.