Mary Louise Kelly

The county government cafeteria in Northampton County, Pa., is a large, airy room with big windows and, for now, lunch tables separated by plexiglass.

But a few months from now, on Election Day, this is where the county plans to have a couple of dozen people processing what it expects could be 100,000 mail-in ballots, nearly triple what they handled in the June 2 primary and 15 times what they handled in November 2016.

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.

It is one of the most intimate and complicated relationships around, and for many women — and yes it's mostly women — an all-important one.

I'm talking about the relationship between a mother and her child's caregiver. And that's the relationship at the heart of author J. Courtney Sullivan's new novel, Friends and Strangers. She says the idea for the book came from her own experiences.

More widespread wearing of face masks could prevent tens of thousands of deaths by COVID-19, epidemiologists and mathematicians project.

A model from the University of Washington's Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation shows that near-universal wearing of cloth or homemade masks could prevent between 17,742 and 28,030 deaths across the US before Oct. 1.

Between the pandemic, the economic crisis and now protests, 2020 has already been a lot. Yo-Yo Ma has been coping, and trying to help the rest of us cope, with music. The cellist has been posting videos of himself playing what he calls "Songs of Comfort."

"I do believe that everything that we do," he says, "people in every profession — medical workers, the delivery people, the politicians — we all are there to serve. We only exist because someone has a need. I know that music fulfills that kind of need."

Following the police killing of George Floyd, officials on the state, local and national level are focusing on how to improve policing in the United States.

Amid record-breaking unemployment numbers, Nevada stands out. The jobs crisis hit the state early and dug in deep. Unemployment there has soared to more than 28% — the highest in the nation and the highest for any state since 1976, when the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics began tracking this data.

As the number of COVID-19 deaths continues its upward march, many of the rituals designed to help people navigate the loss of a loved one aren't possible.

Living with the pandemic has been difficult for everyone: the isolation, the need to wear protective gear like masks and gloves, the adjustment to working or learning from home.

For those living with or caring for someone with severe autism, those challenges can be exponentially more difficult.

"Wearing gloves or masks, you know, things like that? That's just not going to happen here," says Feda Almaliti.

These days, it seems any morsel of good news about a coronavirus vaccine sends hopes — and markets — soaring.

The reality is, developing and producing a vaccine is an incredibly complicated process — one that is heavily reliant on global cooperation, says Prashant Yadav, a senior fellow at the Center for Global Development.

Yadav says cooperation is necessary for a number of reasons. For one, "just protecting U.S. population won't be sufficient for us to resume global travel and trade," he says.

California led the nation in issuing a statewide stay-at-home order. But there's been an economic cost for going first — in the form of a $54 billion budget shortfall and unemployment projected to be as high as 25% this quarter.

"Those are Depression-era numbers and they're numbers that you'll see across this country," Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom tells All Things Considered. "By some estimates ... this has been the biggest shock we've seen in living memory."

Like many other artists, Jason Isbell has had to think on his feet the last few months. Reunions, his new album with his band the 400 Unit — which comprises of Sadler Vaden, Jimbo Hart, Derry deBorja, Chad Gamble and Amanda Shires — came out today on streaming platforms, but that's not the first place it landed. Isbell and company released it a week early to independent record stores to support them during the pandemic.

Middle school spans those tween and early teenage years when, for many, puberty hits.

Bullies seem to reign supreme. And we begin to grow into ourselves.

Like most, writer and reporter Judith Warner was once a middle schooler. She's also the mother of two former middle schoolers. In her new book, And Then They Stopped Talking To Me, she investigates why the middle-school years can be so awful — and what we can do to help make them a little bit better.

Lawrence Wright is not interested in saying "I told you so."

At the beginning of his new novel, he writes: "Dear Reader, The events depicted in The End of October were meant to serve as a cautionary tale. But real life doesn't always wait for warnings."

Wright's fictional tale is about a mysterious virus that starts in Asia, sweeps across continents, cripples the health care system, wrecks the economy, and kills people worldwide.

Like just about all of us, Lucinda Williams has not been able to get away from the news cycle these past few years. On the song "Bad News Blues" from her new album Good Souls Better Angels, she sings "Bad news all around / No matter where I go, I can't get away from it / Don't you know I'm knee deep in it."

In New York City, emergency hospital beds are multiplying — inside tents set up in Central Park, on a hospital ship docked on Manhattan's West Side and in the Javits Convention Center, which now houses about 1,000 beds.

Movie mogul Harvey Weinstein is sitting in a prison hospital awaiting his sentencing for rape and sexual assault.

Many thought this day would never come.

"There certainly was a sense of bracing for a much more expected outcome that was much more in line with Weinstein's attempts to evade accountability," Ronan Farrow tells All Things Considered.

Farrow had doubts that the powerful Hollywood producer would be held to account.

In a decade, Harry Styles has gone from teenage heartthrob to a global pop star in his own right. As he's distanced himself from his adolescent years as a member of One Direction, he's become his own person, starring in the 2017 blockbuster Dunkirk, hosting Saturday Night Live and creating music that pulls from a variety of influences.

This year marks the 250th birthday of one of the most revered composers who ever lived: Ludwig van Beethoven, who was born in Bonn, Germany, in 1770. Beethoven wrote hundreds of piano sonatas, overtures and chamber pieces, but truly made his mark with his nine symphonies.

Craigslist is a bit of an anomaly on the rapidly changing Internet. While other sites are constantly tweaking, testing new designs, finding new ways to gather data, Craigslist is remarkable for its stability.

A typical city's page looks roughly the same today as it did 15 years ago.

As we say goodbye to 2019 and ring in 2020, we're bringing you a new cocktail invented to set the tone in the new year.

Eddie Kim is co-host of the Shift Drink podcast, a traveling drinks consultant for the Highball Committee based out of Washington, D.C., and a bartender at large. To set the tone for 2020, Kim created "Truth and Clarity."

"When I thought about the vibe of 2020 that I wanted, the first two things that came to mind were truth and clarity. A clean slate to start the new year," Kim says.

The drink is light and crisp, with a refreshing lemon taste.

A onetime member of the Trump administration has some mildly critical words for her old boss but disagrees with Congress' efforts to impeach him.

Former Ambassador to the U.N. Nikki Haley said in an interview with NPR on Friday that "it is not a good practice for us ever to ask a foreign country to investigate an American" — referring to President Trump's efforts to get Ukraine to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden, his potential 2020 opponent.

But, she added, "I don't see it as impeachable."

Democratic Gov. Ralph Northam vows it's "a new day and a new landscape" in Virginia. He says when Democrats take over the state legislature for the first time in a generation at the start of the new year, passing gun violence prevention laws will be a top priority.

He adds guns "shouldn't be a partisan issue," even though he says he's prepared to pass new "common sense" gun laws without Republican support.

Edward Norton's new movie Motherless Brooklyn is the first he wrote, directed and stars in.

A noir detective film set in 1950s New York, the film sees Norton playing Lionel, a private eye with Tourette's syndrome. He twitches and blurts out words — as is typical of Tourette's. He's also brilliant, with an incredible memory.

Even when he's praising his spy chiefs, President Trump can't resist taking a swipe.

The instinct was on full display this past weekend, as he announced the killing of ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.

"Thank you, as well, to the great intelligence professionals who helped make this very successful journey possible," he said in an address from the White House on Sunday.

His intelligence officials are ''spectacular," "great patriots," the president went on.