Becky Sullivan

It's been a tough month for Rocio Tirado.

Tirado works as a chief operations officer at a Spanish-language newspaper serving the New Orleans area, and she relies on sales commissions for a big part of her income. But advertising at the paper has cratered, hurting her take-home pay.

It's not easy with two teenage boys — 15 and 17 — at home all day. So she's applied for food stamps and asked her kids to be less wasteful.

"I talked to the boys and said, 'Look, this is not vacation. You cannot just go and eat. You have to be very careful,' " she said.

When Scott Severs learned about the federal stimulus checks, he was excited at first.

Then he wondered whether he truly needed the help.

Severs works as a natural resources technician for Longmont, Colo., and his wife Julie Bartlett is a federal contractor.

The city, his employer, is expecting a major drop in revenue this year because of the anticipated drop in taxes from income, payroll and sales. Still, for now, both he and his wife have jobs and their paychecks have been coming in.

Before the words "Ukraine" and "impeachment" dominated headlines, before most Americans had heard of Marie Yovanovitch or Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman — Adam Schiff sat down to write a cryptic letter.

When Hurricane Michael struck the Panhandle of Florida last October, Keith and Susan Koppelman were huddled in the bathroom of their small, two-bedroom rental trailer just north of Panama City.

"When the winds came we both started praying," says Keith, 49. "I thought, 'Oh my God, this is a big storm.' "

After four hours, they finally emerged to survey the damage. The storm's 160-mile-per-hour winds had torn off the porch and peeled away the trailer's tin siding.

After Hurricane Michael blasted through the Florida coastal towns of Eastpoint and Apalachicola, some residents are beginning the long process of cleaning up.

This area, just 30 miles east of where the powerful storm's eye made landfall on Wednesday, was expected to – and did – receive the worst of the storm surge.

NPR journalists Mary Louise Kelly and Becky Sullivan and freelance photographer David Guttenfelder were among the some 150 foreign reporters who visited North Korea last month, at the invitation of the government, to cover celebrations commemorating the 70th anniversary of the founding of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea. Guttenfelder has taken nearly 40 reporting trips to the isolated country since 2000.

A single four-letter word — added to a provision of the tax code — has professional sports leagues scrambling, as teams face what could be millions of dollars in new taxes.

"Real."

The revision changed a section of the tax code that applies to "like-kind exchanges." Under the old law, farmers, manufacturers and other businesses could swap certain "property" assets — such as trucks and machinery — without immediately paying taxes on the difference in value.

Copyright law is complicated to begin with.

But many American companies have run into extra trouble trying to do business in China, where trademark laws are completely different than they are here in the United States.

Take a chain of shoe and athletic wear stores in China, where things might look a little familiar. Looming above the columns of shoes and rows of clothes is the store's logo: a silhouette of a basketball player, midair, his outstretched arm holding a basketball.

As part of a series called My Big Break, All Things Considered is collecting stories of triumph, big and small. These are the moments when everything seems to click, and people leap forward into their careers.

Before donning polka dots, pencil skirts, plaid and stylish retro hairstyles on Mad Men, Alison Brie was sporting a far less glamorous look.

She worked the children's birthday party circuit as a clown.

It's no secret that cable television is in trouble. With Hulu, Netflix and many networks streaming their shows online, viewers don't have to watch shows like Scandal or American Horror Story live. They can stream it the next day — or the next year.

Nevertheless, one channel had long looked impervious to the trouble: ESPN. Even as other channels suffered losses in subscriptions, the sports network was sitting pretty for one simple reason: People want to watch sports live.

Today, the Kentucky Wildcats sealed a perfect regular season with their 67-50 victory over the University of Florida, putting them one step closer to the first fully undefeated season in men's college basketball in almost 40 years.

Running the table in college basketball is very, very hard. But this Kentucky team has made it look possible.

Today, like every Sunday in the fall, millions of Americans are tuning in to watch some of the country's most popular sport: football.

And for several million of them, your regular ol' football game isn't fast-paced enough: They're tuning in to NFL RedZone.

NFL RedZone is the frenetic channel run by the NFL Network that, for seven hours straight, switches between football games in an endeavor to show every single score of as many as 12 simultaneous games.

When the Giants' Gregor Blanco hit a home run to lead off the second game of the World Series, millions of viewers heard that satisfying crack of the bat well before watching the ball fall into the Royals' bullpen.

It's baseball's most iconic sound, and it's the No. 1 job for Fox's baseball audio engineer-in-chief, Joe Carpenter.

"The bat crack is really kinda where everything starts for us," Carpenter tells NPR's Arun Rath.