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Sometimes that 15 minutes of fame turns into an hour. Satirists Bruce Kluger and David Slavin present the promo for a fictional epic called Joe the Plumber — it's the story about the one man equipped to fix the nation's plugged up economy.

Finding poetry / In the news of the moment / Can be meaningful.

Jackson became the first Black woman to medal in speed skating at a winter Olympics, and the first American woman to win the competition since 1994.

Hugh Thompson Jr., a former U.S. Army helicopter pilot honored for rescuing Vietnamese civilians from his fellow GIs during the My Lai massacre, has died at age 62.

Even if you've never sought out the music of Donny Hathaway, you've probably felt his presence: His low-key, insistent way of interpreting a song has been emulated by virtually every contemporary soul and R&B singer. But still his records remain under-appreciated.

During a hiatus from The Frames, Glen Hansard recorded The Swell Season with Czech singer Marketa Irglova, and the result aches and swoons behind lovely arrangements. A longtime master of sublimely melodramatic sad-bastard music, Hansard finds words of hard-won hope and comfort on "Falling Slowly."

The investigation, prompted by the discovery of top-secret papers found at Mar-a-Lago, is at an early stage, a source told NPR.

On the band's first song since 2014, My Chemical Romance exorcises a demon.

Freeway's newest album, Free At Last, promotes the Philadelphia rapper from promising rookie to established veteran. While the record sounds as if it could have been released at any point in the last seven years, the sturdy reliability of Free At Last is comforting.

It's an extraordinarily simple song from a work initially met with indifference. But with summer now at full tilt, George Gershwin's enduring ode to the season is again in the air wherever the living is easy.

"Hopesick" itself stands in stark contrast to the lust-and-thrust of Louis XIV's previous releases, in the process revealing real, raw emotions surrounding drug use, unattainable love, and the break-up of a band that's been together for years. The song is all dirt and delicacy, desperation and damage, love and loss, and it is as it always should have sounded.

Southern California-based Faded Paper Figures wears its inspirations on its sleeve. On its MySpace page, bands such as The Postal Service and Stars are listed as major influences – a fact that's easy to hear on the electro-pop trio's debut, Dynamo. It features intriguing lyrics, the occasional duet, and plenty of drum machines and programmed keyboards.

YACHT's debut, See Mystery Lights, mixes melodic choruses, icy-cool verses and spoken-word bits that suggest old-school David Byrne. "Psychic City (Voodoo City)," the album's first single, reflects only a portion of that sound, but the song itself has generated healthy interest in its own right.

In "It Ain't Cool," it's not hard to figure out what message Alabama-born blues-country singer Will Kimbrough is trying to impart: "It ain't cool to talk about people when they're not around." To make sure listeners mind his message, he dispenses it in a sultry and understated voice with a bit of bite -- an homage to laidback blues-rocker J.J. Cale.

Critic Tom Manoff reviews a new recording of Rachmaninov's preludes by pianist Steven Osborne, who opts for innocence over opulence, giving each of the 24 preludes its own distinct and compelling character.

For guys who seem to have done everything, sometimes all at once, The Flaming Lips' members haven't stopped innovating. Embryonic, finds the ever-evolving band shape-shifting once again.

When it comes to playing Chopin, pianist Arthur Rubinstein had poetry in his soul. His expressive recordings brim with warmth, lyricism and spontaneity, as if he were approaching Chopin's long-spun melodies and turbulent emotions for the very first time.

The folksy songwriter returns with his second album, Elvis Perkins in Dearland, now with a more upbeat, countrified sound. Yet even with the shift, Perkins continues to wrestle with his past.

The itinerant troubadour, composer and performer of "Suzanne," "Sisters of Mercy" and "Bird on a Wire" has a growl of a singing voice that seems to simmer and grumble up through the chords, almost like an earthquake. His new album, I'm Your Man, has already sold a quarter of a million copies in Europe.

Arliss Parker is really Chris Parker, a former Colorado resident turned Brooklyn transplant. After arriving in New York in 2006, Parker dove into his music, transforming his acoustic guitar compositions into folktronica pieces, using toy keyboards, glockenspiel and any other random instrument he came across. The result became his recent debut EP, Handsome Like a Lion.