Arts & Culture

I fell for pho in Saigon in 1974, when I was 5 years old. When my family came to America in 1975, my mom satisfied our family's cravings for the aromatic beef noodle soup with homemade batches, served on Sundays after morning Mass. As Vietnamese expatriates, we savored pho as a very special food, a gateway to our cultural roots. When we didn't have pho at home, we went out for it in Orange County, California's Little Saigon, patronizing mom-and-pop shops that welcomed us with the perfume of pho broth.

Writing science fiction that's set in the near future can be tricky. Make your predictions too specific, and they run the risk of being rendered obsolete a generation after they're published. Make them too abstract, and they might not be as impactful in the here and now. Alexander Weinstein has a firm grip on this precarious dynamic in Children of the New World, his harrowing debut collection of short stories.

The British pub is as much a part of the fabric of the United Kingdom as fish and chips and the queen, but each year hundreds close their doors for good. The reasons include the high price of beer, more people drinking at home and rising land prices.

Now — in an apparent first — the London borough of Wandsworth has designated 120 pubs for protection, requiring owners who want to transform them into apartments or supermarkets to get local government approval first.

A legendary South Asian dish has suddenly found itself in the midst of a war in India. Made up of layers of meat and rice and cooked with fragrant spices, the dish is the much-loved biryani. And the latest battlefield is in the northern Indian state of Haryana.

Buying a car today means choosing among dozens of makes and models, but a century ago, drivers had a more basic choice: what powered the wheels.

"You would have had to choose between gas, steam and electric," says Susan Randolph, executive director of the Marshall Steam Museum in Yorklyn, Del.

In the 1910s, Randolph says, there was no sure winner among the three types of technology. Choosing a car often came down to how it started up.

It's 3 a.m. and Whiskers has decided it's time for breakfast. He jumps up on your bed, gently paws at your eyelids and meows to be fed. Annoyed? Cat behavior specialist Sarah Ellis says you have only yourself to blame.

Ellis says that cat owners reinforce negative behaviors when they give in to them. "Cats are not necessarily born meowing and screaming at us for food, it's a behavior that they learned," Ellis tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross.

Linda Holmes is filing dispatches from the Toronto International Film Festival. These movies will see wider release in the coming months.

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