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Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor's autobiography, My Beloved World, debuted this week, and NPR's Nina Totenberg sat down with her to talk about her youth and schooling and career. Sotomayor discusses the role that books played in her life, from Nancy Drew to Shakespeare.

House Republicans held their annual retreat this week in Williamsburg, Va., to figure out their next steps. They dropped a demand to have spending cuts for ever dollar the debt ceiling is raised, at least for the next three months. GOP lawmakers are now pinning their hopes for deficit reduction on other looming budget battles.

Cristina Pato is a jazz pianist from Spain who also plays flute and sings. But on her new album, Migrations, there's a striking sound not often heard in jazz: a bagpipe. Pato has been playing the traditional gaita (pronounced "GY-tah"), a version of the bagpipe from her native region of Galicia, since she was 4 years old.

If you live along the East Coast, there's a pretty good chance that stink bugs may be lurking in your attic or even behind your curtains. The invasive insects from Asia, which exude a rubber-like stench when you crush them, are a nuisance for you, but a serious pest for farmers.

Crop producers received a reprieve from the bugs in 2012, but the insects may be coming back and with a greater spread of attack.

Bob Black says he was not in a good place in 2010.

On Tuesday, New York became the first state in the nation to pass a tough new gun control law. Gov. Andrew Cuomo convinced his state's Legislature to act, even before President Obama took executive action to limit access to guns.

The governor's legislative victory followed his impassioned State of the State address earlier this month, delivered the first day of the 2013 legislative session.

As the flu season grinds on from news cycle to news cycle, there's some flu news of a different sort. Federal regulators have approved a next-generation type of flu vaccine for the second time in two months.

The two new vaccines are the first fruits of a big government push to hasten and simplify the laborious production of flu vaccines.

In an interview that aired last night on the Oprah Winfrey Network, Lance Armstrong confessed that he doped. That confession, added to mountains of other evidence, could cost him millions of dollars. There are three groups of people he may owe money to:

1. SCA Promotions

SCA is a company that underwrote millions of dollars of bonuses that Lance received for winning the Tour de France. Now that he's been stripped of those titles — they want their money back.

A presidential inauguration is an event defined by huge, sweeping optics: the National Mall full of cheering Americans; a grandiose platform in front of the Capitol building; the parade down Pennsylvania Avenue. And the centerpiece: a speech.

On Monday, President Obama will give his second inaugural address — and he faces a challenge in crafting a speech for this moment.