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Mid-Autumn Festival is a major Chinese holiday when families gather to light lanterns and eat mooncakes. An NPR producer waxes nostalgic about the hockey-puck pastries at the center of celebrations.

Though the Obama administration says that the nation is entering a new era of lower health care spending, an analysis from the agency that oversees Medicare says probably not. Those economists say that health spending will escalate as the economy improves, as it has in past economic recoveries.

Read an exclusive excerpt of Allen Salkin's new history of the Food Network, From Scratch. It's an affectionate but unsparing look at a scrappy little startup network that became a national broadcasting behemoth — and brought people like Emeril Lagasse and Rachael Ray into millions of homes.

Anya von Bremzen's new memoir is a delicious narrative of memory and cuisine in 20th century Soviet Union. She writes about her family's own history and contemplates the nation's "complicated, even tortured, relationship with food."

Martin Limon's hard-boiled tales of military police in Korea in the early 1970s are collected in the new Nightmare Range. Reviewer Nick Mancusi says Limon is " a sensitive observer of the darker angels of human nature" who only occasionally veers into cliche.

The Senate Judiciary Committee is taking a new look at the effectiveness of mandatory minimum sentences, and the movement to change the system has got some surprising allies, including some federal judges and many Republicans.

Elusive and iconic, author Thomas Pynchon may intimidate some readers, but he has a devoted following. Bleeding Edge, his new new novel, is about a spunky, Upper West Side mother and fraud investigator in the era between the dot-com boom and Sept. 11.

Jesmyn Ward's new memoir Men We Reaped follows the lives and tragically early deaths of several young black men — Ward's brother among them. Reviewer Richard Torres says Ward is "talented enough to turn ... prose into poetry," but that she doesn't sugarcoat her terrible experiences.

For online insurance brokers, selling health insurance through the Affordable Care Act presents a new opportunity — and a new competitor. It's unclear who will come out ahead: the businesses, with more experience, or the feds, who won't charge commissions.

Rebecca Musser was raised in an extremist, polygamist church. She tells the harrowing story of her childhood, her first marriage, and her escape in her autobiography.