NPR News

Melissa Block explores the long family history of the companies that comprise what became Sprint. It all began in Kansas in the late 19th century and came to include a long distance system created by the Southern Pacific Railroad Internal Network Telecommunications, or SPRINT.

Of course My Way — the Frank Sinatra version — is the most requested contemporary song at funerals in the U.K., according to Co-operative Funeralcare.

That makes sense.

Two Americans, Alvin Roth and Lloyd Shapley, have won the 2012 Nobel Prize in Economics. Their research on market design has found many practical applications. It's at the heart of the system used to match medical school graduates with residency programs and is even used in the market that matches human organ donors and recipients.

If there was any surprise in the first 90-minute presidential debate, it was President Obama's apathetic performance, not Mitt Romney's energetic and assertive pounding of the commander in chief.