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Author Ben Macintyre's book tells the true story of Josiah Harlan, a Pennsylvania Quaker who 150 years ago became the first American to visit Afghanistan.

John Ridley's comic-book series The American Way has just been collected into a graphic novel; it takes place in 1961, when the government has created a team of super-heroes to battle foreign super-villains. But it's all just a show created to pacify the public. Ridley previously wrote the screenplay for Three Kings and the novel A Conversation with the Mann.

Many African-American leaders have lost touch with a hallmark of the civil rights movement — the tradition of self-empowerment, Juan Williams says. Instead, he says, they've embraced "victimhood."

Fundraising efforts began this week for the creation of an Embassy of Tribal Nations in Washington, D.C. Host Jennifer Ludden talks with Jacquiline Johnson, the executive director of the National Congress of American Indians, which heads the effort. Johnson says the goal is to have a place for tribal governments to negotiate as a sovereign nation with U.S. and foreign leaders.

The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine this year goes to two Americans who have puzzled out the sense of smell. Richard Axel and Linda Buck will split $1.4 million for discovering how chemicals in the air trigger thousands of recognizably different odors. Hear NPR's Steve Inskeep and NPR's Richard Knox.

Mexican-American singer Lila Downs brings a new social awareness to her repertoire of original and native Mesoamerican songs. She talks about her music and plays songs from her CD, Una Sangre.

Can we learn from our past mistakes? Pico Iyer finds modern meaning in Graham Greene's novel about a naive American who arrives in a foreign place full of ideas about democracy, and how he can teach an ancient culture a better, "American" way of doing things.

A group of writers has collected more than 800 fading landscape terms in a new book — Home Ground: Language for an American Landscape-- in hopes of keeping them from going extinct.

Andrew Roby is an American on vacation in Barcelona and was in the vicinity when a van drove into a crowd of people killing at least a dozen and injuring at least 50.

A new Pew Research Center study finds some big differences among respondents when it comes to connecting citizenship to language, faith and country of origin.