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In 2003, a hospital nurse named Charlie Cullen was arrested under suspicion of injecting patients with lethal doses of a variety of medications. He is now considered one of the nation's most prolific serial killers. Journalist Charles Graeber explains how the hospital system failed to stop Cullen.

Biologist and Harvard professor Edward O. Wilson has spent his lifetime making scientific discoveries and writing award-winning, best-selling books on science. His new book, inspired by Rainer Maria Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet, gives advice gleaned from his career in science.

Big Data is considered a tool for finding correlations amid vast amounts of information. But without the ability to unearth causation, Big Data can only reveal so much.

The gun control debate continued to dominate the news this week with President Obama coming out strongly in support of reforming the current gun control laws alongside the Newtown families. Host Jacki Lyden speaks with James Fallows, national correspondent with The Atlantic, about that story along with the bird flu in China, North Korea and the Postal Service.

Numbers crunching has become a big deal in sports. Analytics have been slower to take hold in the tradition-bound game of golf, but it is happening. NPR's Tom Goldman reports on the phenomenon from the tournament most steeped in tradition, the Masters.

In Who Could That Be at This Hour?, a prequel to A Series of Unfortunate Events, Daniel Handler satirizes pulp mysteries and uncovers the parallels between detective fiction and childhood. In both, he says, an outsider is trying to make his way in a mysteriously corrupt world.

Christina Baker Kline's new novel incorporates a true piece of American history. One of the book's protagonists, an Irish orphan, is packed onto a train and sent to the Midwest. In real life, "orphan trains" were intended to save children from the streets, but sometimes resulted in near-slavery.

Although Venezuela has a rich literary culture, its writers remain largely unknown outside of the country. Marcela Valdes traces the intersection of literature and politics in the large Caribbean nation, showing the forces that have kept Venezuelan writers from getting the praise they deserve.

Motivated not by God, but by nearly everything else, American author David Downie traveled hundreds of miles on foot across France. He writes about his trek in his new book, Paris to the Pyrenees.

As a journalist with Britain's The Guardian newspaper, Rory Carroll spent seven years living in Venezuela. His new book on Venezuela's recently deceased president explores Hugo Chavez's popularity with the poor and critiques his failures in governance and management.