Arts & Life

A federal judge in New York City says Chad Wolf was not legally serving as the acting secretary of homeland security when he issued a memo in July that stopped new applicants to the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program.

Therefore, Judge Nicholas Garaufis of the U.S. District Court of the Eastern District of New York ruled Saturday, Wolf's memo is invalid.

Maria Bartiromo, the Fox Business host, declared herself done with Twitter two days after the election.

She tweeted a link to an article that falsely claimed Democrats were trying to steal the election. Twitter hid the post behind a label warning that it contained misleading content. Twitter also notified Bartiromo that someone had complained about her account (even though it did clarify that she had not violated any rules and it was taking no action against her).

For Bartiromo, the label was the last straw.

The COVID-19 crisis in the U.S. is getting worse by nearly every metric. On Friday alone, there were more than 184,000 new confirmed cases and 1,400 deaths, the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center reported. Hospitals are reaching capacity.

Updated Sunday at 12:30 p.m. ET

Hurricane Iota is expected to hit Central America on Monday, bringing potentially catastrophic winds and life-threatening storm surge.

Iota's arrival comes as the region is still recovering from Hurricane Eta, which made landfall earlier this month as a Category 4 storm.

The U.S. added more than 184,000 confirmed COVID-19 cases on Friday, the fourth day in a row that the country has set a record for daily infections, according to data from the Johns Hopkins University Coronavirus Resource Center.

Fresh Air Weekend highlights some of the best interviews and reviews from past weeks, and new program elements specially paced for weekends. Our weekend show emphasizes interviews with writers, filmmakers, actors and musicians, and often includes excerpts from live in-studio concerts. This week:

We've invited comic, writer and actor Chelsea Peretti — you may know her as self-involved administrator Gina Linetti from Brooklyn 99 — to answer three questions about The Chelsea Football Club, the English soccer team. Peretti's latest film is called Friendsgiving.

Click the audio link above to find out how she does.

Evidence of election rigging has roiled New Zealand's "Bird of the Year" competition after a case of ballot-box stuffing has threatened to derail avian democracy.

Suspicion began when organizers received more than 1,500 votes sent from the same email address early Monday — each vote was in favor of the little spotted kiwi (kiwi pukupuku), according to a statement from Forest & Bird, a conservation organization that runs the election.

Shuggie Bain is a novel that cracks open the human heart, brings you inside, tears you up, and brings you up, with its episodes of unvarnished love, loss, survival and sorrow.

It's the story of a little boy, Shuggie Bain, growing up in rough circumstances in the Glasgow of the 1980s, rife with families living under the strain of joblessness and depression, who sometimes deal with it in the worst ways. Shuggie himself lives with his taxi driver father Big Shug and his troubled mother, Agnes.

"I believe in expecting light," says the unnamed narrator of Ellen Cooney's new novel. "That's my job." More specifically, the 36-year-old woman's job is as a chaplain at a medical center, offering solace and a friendly ear to the patients in the hospital, some in grave condition, some not.

Are you figuring out how to modify that annual cookie-exchange party with your friends this winter? Does caroling around the neighborhood feel unsafe, even at a social distance? Does 2020 have you feeling differently about making a New Year's resolution for next year? Or maybe it's just the tradition of visiting your grandparents that will just have to happen over Zoom this year. As with everything else in 2020, the holidays feel a little different amid a global pandemic.

Efforts to protect U.S. elections from disinformation are proceeding amid reports that the head of the agency in the Department of Homeland Security that oversees election security expects to be fired soon by the White House.

Christopher Krebs, director of DHS' Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, or CISA, spearheaded an agency campaign to counter rumors about voter fraud and election irregularities.

Milo Greer's postcard had us emoji-face crying, too.

Courtesy of Melissa Greer

"Dear NPR, Here's how my life h

There are a lot of cheesy cliches about kindness: it costs nothing but means everything; it's the gift that everyone can afford to give — and those all might be true, but practicing kindness can also be hard. Especially these days.

Maybe you're feeling cooped up, stressed out, spread thin, unsure, or all of the above. Maybe you're so worried about protecting your inner circle that it feels like too much to try and reach out to anyone else. Maybe it feels really hard to be kind when this year or this world has been unkind to you. We see you.

To say there are many new holiday romantic comedies made for television every year is the kind of understatement that borders on parody. One of the reasons they tend to be formulaic is that to tell a love story in roughly an hour and a half without challenging an audience's settled expectations, there are only so many ways to go with the rhythm. Perhaps that's why Netflix has better luck with Dash & Lily, an eight-episode limited series that's got the sparkle and the swoon that a lot of holiday films lack.