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In the Jim Crow Florida of the 1960's a group of young African-American landscape painters became famous for their art. They also made a lot of money selling oil paintings that depicted an idealized, candy-colored Florida of palms and beaches, and sleepy inlets. These young painters came to be known as the Highwaymen, and they painted thousands of these paintings until the market was saturated and the whole genre vanished. Host Jacki Lyden traveled to Florida and explored their fascinating story. (This piece originally aired on All Things Considered on Sept. 19, 2012.)

Everything in this year's presidential election is supersized, except for the number of swing states in play. That's forcing a bigger pot of money to be pumped into a smaller pool of states. "There is such focus on relatively few markets that the levels of advertising we're seeing are really uncharted waters," one media analyst says.

Last week, a jury in San Francisco ruled in favor of Apple in a patent battle with Samsung, fining Samsung over a billion dollars for copying parts of Apple's iPhone design and function. Christina Bonnington, who covered the courtroom saga for Wired, describes what the ruling might mean for other phone manufacturers and for consumers.

Photographer Colin Legg makes time-lapse movies of celestial scenes, from auroras to eclipses. Photographing mostly in remote parts of Australia, where human-made light doesn't compete with starlight, Legg describes some of the challenges of this type of photography: from babysitting cameras for days and nights on end to running electronics in the backcountry.

What do Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick, singer-song writer Tracy Chapman, and the president of the Ford Foundation have in common? Answer: They were all "A Better Chance" scholars.

After the Civil War, Horace Wilson left his farm for Japan, where he introduced baseball. He's a legend there, something his relatives, including NPR's Theo Balcomb, didn't know for generations.

What's a fobbit? How about rumint? And then there's a self-licking ice cream cone. A dozen years of war in Afghanistan and Iraq have spawned a whole new military vocabulary.

His 27 years behind bars were filled with hardship. But it wasn't all tedium. There were drives around Cape Town, negotiations in the homes of government ministers, and aborted escape plots.

In A Carlin Home Companion, Kelly Carlin reflects on life with her famous comedian (and drug addicted) father. "This book has always felt like unfinished business," she says.

Megan Brabec, 24, works three part time jobs with no benefits. "It does really frustrate me when I hear candidates talk about, 'Oh, well, you should have majored in something else," she said.