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Every Saturday night in a gritty YMCA in the South African city of Durban, men put on finely-pressed suits, drink cheap beer and compete in an a cappella Zulu choir competition called isicathamiya. They're sometimes called the "tip-toe guys". Isicathamiya means "in a stalking mood" and it refers to the slow deliberate dance moves the men do in unison while harmonizing. NPR's Jason Beaubien reports.

Carroll Musical Instrument Rentals is a a huge warehouse in New York City that rents all types of exotic bells, whistles, and acoustic effects to orchestras, movie studios and musicals across the country. Hear commentator Miles Hoffman and NPR's Bob Edwards as they take an audio tour of the warehouse.

Fifty years ago, Roger Bannister ran the world's first mile under four minutes. Just six weeks later, John Landy broke Bannister's record, setting up a face-off between the world's first two men to achieve that long-elusive goal. Read an excerpt from The Perfect Mile by Neal Bascomb.

Fifty years ago, the first consumer color TV sets started rolling off the assembly line. It took more than a decade for color television to become a household fixture. NPR's Lynn Neary reports on the early days of color TV, and the way today's new technology is similarly transforming home entertainment.

Young Adam and Wilbur Wants to Kill Himself are both Scottish films starring male leads obsessed with death. But the two movies are really quite different. NPR's Bob Mondello offers a comparison.

It's tough making a living as a writer. NPR's Noah Adams continues his series on low-wage jobs with a look at writers in Seattle who can only dream of quitting their day job.

For its first 24 years, the Pritzker Architectural Prize was awarded only to men. This year, Zaha Hadid, an Iraqi-born Briton who has pushed the boundaries of design for a quarter-century, becomes the first woman to receive the prestigious honor.

From member station WFDD in Winston-Salem, N.C., Stephanie Martin reports that restorers have worked for years without a blueprint to reassemble a jumble of pipes and mashed pieces into the world's largest 18th-century organ. It will be heard in concert tomorrow for the first time in nearly a century.

An exhibition called "The Gates" opened at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art Tuesday. The exhibit includes drawings, plans and mockups of the 7,500 saffron-colored, nylon fabric "gates" that famed conceptual artist Christo and his wife, Jeanne Claude, want to install along Central Park's walkways. NPR's David D'Arcy reports.

The celebrated New Yorker writer Mavis Gallant published two collections of stories at the end of last year. She still lives alone in Paris and, in the words of Russell Banks, she still packs a lifetime into one short story. Frank Browning profiles her.