Heidi Glenn

The 2020 hurricane season was so prolific that the National Hurricane Center used up its roster of 21 alphabetized storm names. When that happens, the government pulls in the Greek alphabet. But don't expect to see Hurricane Alpha or Beta again.

Turns out the names were Greek to a lot of people, and forecasters worried about creating confusion.

"Some of those were very difficult to translate into other languages," says Kenneth Graham of the National Hurricane Center. "In our region we have French. We have Portuguese, Spanish and English."

Why does the world need a new pasta shape?

For Dan Pashman, host of the food podcast The Sporkful, there's just a lot of mediocre pasta out there. There's plenty of room for improvement.

"Spaghetti is just a tube," he tells Morning Edition. "After a few bites, it's the same." And its round shape means it's not great at holding on to sauce.

Meet his cascatelli — Italian for "little waterfalls."

As chief of critical care at Houston's United Memorial Medical Center, Dr. Joseph Varon is at the center of managing care for patients with the coronavirus. He's worked every day for the last 272 days.

"No days off," he told NPR's Morning Edition.

It's been a grueling pace at Varon's hospital for months.

Philando Castile, Eric Garner and George Floyd. The deaths of these Black men at the hands of police have fueled outrage over police brutality and systemic racism.

Men make up the vast majority of people shot and killed by police.

At the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, N.Y., there is a stone memorial engraved with the names of graduates who fought and died in the Civil War for both the Union and the Confederacy.

Some recent West Point graduates want that to change, and they wrote a policy proposal outlining ways they say will help create an "anti-racist West Point."

Dr. Gabrielle Mayer took her Hippocratic oath during a virtual graduation ceremony last month. Just three days later, she was a resident at Bellevue Hospital in New York City.

Now, almost six weeks into her residency, she says she's been inspired by "seeing the medical community as a whole rally around the patients who needed us the most."

Vinton County, Ohio, has been on the front lines of the opioid crisis in the U.S. for several years. The drugs may have changed over the years — from opioids to meth — but the devastating effects on families have not. And even though the county hasn't had high infection rates of the coronavirus, the necessary social restrictions have made it harder to keep people addicted to drugs and their children safe.

Researchers suspect that the coronavirus is hitting men and women differently. Worldwide, men appear more likely to suffer more severely or die from COVID-19 than women.

Coronavirus home cooking is now a part of American life.

Glenn Hurst didn't grow up dreaming of becoming a doctor. But eventually, he made his way into health care, taking a job placing doctors in small towns. Traveling farm country, he says, the work moved him in ways he didn't expect.

"To see the physicians in those communities helping those people stay in their fields, helping those people's families be safe ... I decided that I wanted to be part of something rural and I wanted to be part of health care," he says.

People across China are remembering the life of Liang Jun, who is celebrated as the first Chinese woman to work as a tractor driver.

Recognized as a national folk hero, trailblazer and model socialist worker, Liang Jun was immortalized in the 1960s on China's 1 yuan banknote driving a tractor. She died this week at the age of 90.

Her story is typical of model workers in China, says Tina Mai Chen, a professor of Chinese history at the University of Manitoba. Chen interviewed Liang Jun in 1996.

GOP Sen. Mike Lee of Utah says he found a classified military briefing from administration officials Wednesday so "upsetting" that he will now back a proposal to limit President Trump's power to take military action against Iran and to reassert Congress' role in authorizing the use of military force.

To some, Republican Sen. John McCain embodied principles of a bygone Washington: He sought common ground; he reached across the political divide; he had close friendships with Democrats.

His wife, Cindy McCain, would like to try to get back to those days. So to mark a year since her husband died of brain cancer, she is encouraging Americans to be more civil.

"We're missing John's voice of reason right now in so many ways," McCain tells NPR's David Greene.

New York City's Times Square has a ball drop on New Year's Eve. Tallapoosa, Ga., rings in the new year by dropping a taxidermied opossum named Spencer.

The "Possum Drop" is a tradition that career taxidermists Bud and Jackie Jones helped establish in their small town.

Bud, 88, and Jackie, 82, have been married for 62 years, and at a StoryCorps interview recorded in September, they spoke about their colorful love story — which began with a missing pet on their very first date.

Humorist David Sedaris' annual reading from "Santaland Diaries" has become an NPR institution — it debuted on Morning Edition in 1992 — and for many listeners, hearing from Crumpet the Macy's department store elf each year signals the holiday season as much as mistletoe and candy canes.

This year we asked you to pretend YOU are an elf in Santaland. We wondered what, in one sentence, your imaginary shift is like and what your imaginary elf is named.

Thanksgiving is on Thursday. If you're hosting this year, are you ready?

For some, menu planning and turkey and sides cooking won't involve breaking a sweat. For the rest of us, the next two days may be fueled by anxiety — with maybe a pinch of panic.

Ten-year-old triplets Maddy, Zoë and Nick Waters share everything from a birthday to a bedroom. But in a StoryCorps booth in Bloomington, Ind., they discover — even as they finish each other's sentences — that there are still some things they needed to learn about each other.

For runners of road races, spring is a busy season. As temperatures rise, weekend racing ramps up — especially for those training for this month's Boston Marathon.

It's also crunch time for the sleuths sniffing out runners who cheat to get to that crown jewel of races.

The Trump administration's talk of cracking down on undocumented immigrants has frightened many people living in the country illegally. And it has deterred some domestic abuses victims from appearing in court for fear they'll be spotted by agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement, says Denver City Attorney Kristin Bronson.

Bronson tells NPR's Rachel Martin that four women — victims of what Bronson calls physical and violent assault — have not pursued cases.

In a new book, The Complacent Class, economist Tyler Cowen argues that the United States is standing still.

People have grown more risk averse and are reluctant to switch jobs or move to another state, he says, and the desire to innovate — to grow and change — has gone away.

In an interview with NPR's Rachel Martin, Cowen says he's worried that more and more communities are self-segregating — by income, education or race.

Sunday marks the 15th anniversary of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in Washington, D.C., New York City and Pennsylvania. Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump have made Sept. 11 a recurring theme in their campaigns, but both say they will stay off the campaign trail that day and will not visit ground zero in New York City.

Here is a look at current players in the political landscape and where they were in their political careers on Sept. 11, 2001.

So you've been with your partner for a long time. It's time to start considering yourselves common-law married, a sort of "marriage-like" status that triggers when you've lived together for seven years. Right?

Nope. That's all bogus.

Where do you draw the line between inspiration and straight-up imitation when it comes to food?

A few years ago, we brought you the story of Caitlin Freeman, a pastry chef baking innovative, art-inspired cakes at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Using modern art as her muse, Freeman translated what she saw in the museum into edible form at the SFMOMA's upstairs café.

The Vatican may still announce a new pope with a smoke signal, but when it comes to connecting with his flock, Pope Francis is just a click away.

He's called the Internet a "gift from God," participated in Google Hangouts and fully embraced Twitter where every few days he broadcasts messages of mercy and forgiveness in 140 characters or less.