NPR Blogs

There's big news in the world of publishing: The two conglomerates that own Random House and Penguin announced Monday that they were merging their book businesses to form a new company.

German media company Bertelsmann, the owner of Random House, will own 53 percent of the new firm, Penguin Random House; Pearson, which owns Penguin, will control the rest. The merger, subject to regulatory approval, is scheduled to be completed in the second half of 2013.

Economists will need many days — maybe weeks or months — to assess the financial harm being done by Hurricane Sandy. But whatever the final figure, it will be huge, well into the tens of billions of dollars.

More than 60 million Americans are feeling the impact of the weather monster slamming New York, New Jersey, Maryland, the District of Columbia, Virginia, Connecticut, Pennsylvania and many other states. The howling mix of wind, rain and snow is causing massive direct losses, i.e., the destruction of private homes, stores, boats and cars.

When smoking is banned in bars and workplaces, the number of people who suffer heart attacks and die drops within months, according to two new studies.

They found benefits not only in saving lives, but in lowering the cost of medical care for heart attacks, stroke and other smoking-related illnesses. It's the best evidence yet demonstrating big, swift health improvements when secondhand smoke is banished.

Even before making landfall in the United States, Sandy is already causing some massive travel headaches:

-- In the air, 8,000 flights have been cancelled through Tuesday, The Wall Street Journal reports.

Wherever you look these days, it seems labels that strive to send a message about our food are on the table. In California, there's a vote coming up on whether genetically modified foods should be labeled. A few weeks ago, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission updated its guidelines for "green" labeling.

Small, medium and large. That's basically what Google announced today: That they will now offer touch-screen devices in three different sizes.

Like Apple — which has the iPhone, the iPad Mini and the iPad — Google now has the Nexus 4, Nexus 7 and Nexus 10.

The 4 is a smartphone, the 7 is a medium-size tablet and the 10 is a large tablet.

Hurricane Sandy is bearing down on the East Coast of the U.S., bringing sustained wind, heavy rain, and flooding that's forcing roads, bridges and mass transit systems to close from New York City to Washington. We're following the storm's progress and its impacts here on The Two-Way .

Science and religion alike grapple with some of our deepest questions: What is the purpose of life? Why is the natural world just so? Why does the biological world strike us as so exquisitely designed?

We're always looking for new angles on health news. And now we're trying a new angle on Shots: a podcast.

This is an experiment, so I should ask for your informed consent. Are you prepared for some unorthodox audio from an ink-stained wretch still working on the transition to online journalism from print? If so, click away.

Here are a few reasons government forecasters at the National Hurricane Center and emergency management officials are so concerned about Sandy:

1. Sandy is one of the largest hurricanes ever to strike the U.S. Sandy's winds cover an area of more than 1,000 miles in diameter. That's enormous by hurricane standards. So instead of affecting an area a couple of hundred miles across, Sandy will cut a huge swath. That means many millions of people are probably going to be exposed to high winds, heavy rains, and, for those on the coast, powerful storm surge.

Before you brave the rain, wind and inevitable lines at the already depleted grocery store today in the Mid-Atlantic region, take a deep breath.

If you're a moderately good grocery shopper, you probably already have the food you need on hand to make it through the next few days if (when) we lose power because of Hurricane Sandy. (If not, best to find a shelter near you.) But you do need to take extra precautions that what you're preparing is safe.

Though Hurricane Sandy is the dominant news of the day, there are other stories, including:

"Personal income increased $48.1 billion, or 0.4 percent," in September from August, the Bureau of Economic Analysis says, while "personal consumption expenditures" — consumer spending — rose 0.8 percent.