All Things Considered

Sixty-four years ago, residents of this tiny town in southwestern Kansas set a public health example by making it the first in the nation to be fully inoculated against polio.

It's a different story today.

People in Protection, like those in many rural communities, stand divided over how to slow the spread of the coronavirus and the safety of the vaccines being rolled out to protect them.

During a career spanning more than six decades, Cicely Tyson has brought to life iconic roles in theater, film and television — from Sounder to The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman to Roots to How to Get Away with Murder. They've offered previously unseen images of the sweep and humanity of Black life.

And now, in a new memoir, Just as I Am, she finally sets forth her improbable journey, from the typing pool at the Red Cross to award-winning actor and icon of style.

Mexican film directors have enjoyed success at the Academy Awards in recent years. Alfonso Cuarón won an Oscar for directing Gravity in 2014, and for Roma in 2019. Alejandro González Iñárritu won one in 2015 for directing Birdman and the following year for The Revenant. And Guillermo del Toro won his Oscar for directing The Shape of Water in 2018. Now, the "Tres Amigos," as they're known, may welcome uno más: up-and-coming filmmaker Fernando Frías de la Parra.

A year ago, on January 23, 2020, China imposed an absolute lockdown in the Chinese city of Wuhan.

Home: It's where a lot of us have been spending our time since March 2020. For Mike Milosh, leader of the R&B music collective Rhye, the word has taken on new meaning — he's gone from life on the road to a more permanent idea of home at his house outside Los Angeles, where he created his latest studio album. But the sound of this record was conceived well before the pandemic: It began with the idea of wanting to include a choir, which led to Milosh inviting the Danish National Girls' Choir to come to the U.S.

President Biden is promising kinder, more welcoming immigration policies — and raising hopes for asylum seekers throughout the hemisphere.

Earlier this week, Guatemalan police beat back a caravan of thousands of Hondurans who were beginning the long trek to the United States border. Moreover, conditions driving people from their home countries — crime, violent spouses, joblessness and hurricane destruction — are not going away.

And this is what makes Texas border mayors nervous.

Ever since former Georgia Sen. Kelly Loeffler denounced the WNBA's support for Black Lives Matter last summer, players have been pressuring the league to force her to sell her stake in the Atlanta Dream basketball team.

Now, according to the WNBA, a deal for the sale of the team "is close to being finalized." The league did not release any further details.

In 1968, Dusty Springfield — then an established pop star in the U.K. — flew across the pond to conquer the U.S. by signing what was meant to be a long-term deal with Atlantic Records. The label sent Springfield down to American Sound Studio in Memphis, Tenn., hoping to impart some of the Southern soul magic that had worked so well for Wilson Pickett and Aretha Franklin. Those sessions are now collected in the new anthology Dusty Springfield: The Complete Atlantic Singles 1968-1971.

On a recent Friday afternoon, the critical care charge nurse at a South Los Angeles hospital tries to send another nurse off to grab lunch. Maria Arechiga is interrupted by the beeping of an alarm, the vitals of a patient declining, organs failing.

She dons a surgical gown and unzips a plastic tarp that hangs from the doorway of a hospital room — a makeshift isolation room on this floor temporarily transformed into a larger intensive care unit to make space for the patients that just keep coming. She slips inside.