NPR News And Stories From WUNC

Palestinian militants in the Gaza Strip have fired thousands of rockets into southern Israel over the past decade. Yet the one that landed harmlessly in an empty field south of Jerusalem on Friday could be as significant as all of the rockets that came before.

With that lone launch, the Palestinians demonstrated for the first time that they now have the capability to send a weapon the roughly 50 miles from the Gaza border north to Jerusalem.

It's a question that's baffled evolutionary theorists for decades: if survival of the fittest is the rule, how have the genes that contribute to serious, debilitating mental disorders survived?

The impulses to collect and to doodle have always been in Ron Coddington's blood. As a kid, it was baseball cards. As a teen, he took an interest in old flea market photos — and simultaneously became "obsessed," he says, "with learning to draw the human face."

The best thing about David O. Russell is that he cultivates his disequilibrium. In Silver Linings Playbook, his hero is disturbed and his heroine possibly more so, and his other characters have a grip on reality that is only marginally more secure. Russell might have made them seem the dreaded "q" word — quirky — and OK, he does, a bit, at the end, which broadly conforms to the rom-com template. But until then, Bradley Cooper's Pat Solatano is someone you'd be less likely to dream about than get a restraining order against.

The Hostess brand, home of the Twinkie, Sno Ball, Ding Dong, and those fun cupcakes with the swirly lines on top and filling in the middle, is shutting down, as our colleagues over at The Two-Way blog report. The purveyor of iconic calorie-rich but nutrient-poor snacks says a labor dispute has forced it to go out of business.

It's the sort of juxtaposition that often arises at this time of year: novel adaptations arriving in droves at movie theaters, hunting for Oscar nominations.

J.R.R. Tolkien's fantastical The Hobbit and Yann Martel's lifeboat adventure Life of Pi are coming soon, and this week Leo Tolstoy's romantic tragedy Anna Karenina goes head to head with Matthew Quick's romantic comedy Silver Linings Playbook.

This interview was originally broadcast on Fresh Air on March 26, 2012. When God Talks Back was released in paperback on Nov. 13.

While attending services and small group meetings at The Vineyard, an evangelical church with 600 branches across the country, anthropologist T.M. Luhrmann noticed that several members of the congregation said God had repeatedly spoken to them and that they had heard what God wanted them to do.