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The Supreme Court heard arguments Tuesday on whether a congressional map drawn by Alabama lawmakers violated the Voting Rights Act.

Maybe you’ve figured out that I’m a pragmatist but not a centrist. I’ve done legal work in the environmental movement, the poor people’s movement and the movement for equal rights for Blacks, gays and women. Some of that was as an attorney in the legal services system. Some of that was part of the work I did with the New York Civil Liberties Union. I care. But a country like ours is like a huge tanker – it takes a lot of time and tugs to turn it. So I’m often frustrated. This commentary is an outlet for me – to put some effort into keeping our politics moving in a decent direction. I can live with that even though things won’t change instantly.

Gertrude Ederle was the first woman to swim the English Channel, finishing faster than any of the five men who had done it before. Young Woman and the Sea shows how Ederle's fame grew, then evaporated.

Henry Ford didn't just want to be a maker of cars — he wanted to be a maker of men. He thought he could perfect society by building model factories and pristine villages to go with them. And he was pretty successful at it in Michigan. But in the jungles of Brazil, he would ultimately be defeated.

Elaine Showalter's A Jury Of Her Peers offers a literary history of American women writers spanning from the tales of Puritan Anne Bradstreet to the modern-day gay cowboy stories of Annie Proulx. Maureen Corrigan has a review.

Queen Elizabeth's funeral is Monday at Westminster Abbey. Many Britons are honoring their sovereign in a more raucous setting – the soccer grounds of the Premier League.

Jonathan Escoffery's If I Survive You is an intensively granular, yet panoramic depiction of what it's like to try to make it — or not — in this kaleidoscopic madhouse of a country.

A video published Tuesday shows the detention of a black man who later died in police custody in Minneapolis. The federal officials have started an investigation.

NPR's Margot Adler has been covering the storms aftermath. On Saturday, she walked into Central Park, opened for the first time since before the storm. She then went to examine the "border areas," those blocks where there was power and normalcy on one side, and on the other, no lights and just the noise of a few generators pumping power.

NPR recently wanted to know: What about America are you most thankful for? Our audience answered, and writer Kwame Alexander crafted an epic poem of celebration and gratitude from the replies.