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President Obama held his first full dress press conference since his reelection last week and since March of this year on Wednesday.

With the election settled, Washington and Wall Street are focused on whether Congress and a re-elected president can avoid the so-called "fiscal cliff." Renee Montagne talks to David Wessel, economics editor of "The Wall Street Journal," about the automatic budget cuts and tax hikes that would happen if an agreement can't be reached by early in the new year.

It's a cold March night in New York, and journalist Susannah Cahalan is watching PBS with her boyfriend, trying to relax after a difficult day at work. He falls asleep, and wakes up moments later to find her having a seizure straight out of The Exorcist. "My arms suddenly whipped straight out in front of me, like a mummy, as my eyes rolled back and my body stiffened," Cahalan writes. "I inhaled repeatedly, with no exhale. Blood and foam began to spurt out of my mouth through clenched teeth."

It's hard to imagine a scenario more nightmarish, but for Cahalan the worst was yet to come. In 2009, the New York Post reporter, then 24, was hospitalized after — there's really no other way to put it — losing her mind. In addition to the violent seizures, she was wracked by terrifying hallucinations, intense mood swings, insomnia and fierce paranoia. Cahalan spent a month in the hospital, barely recognizable to her friends and family, before doctors diagnosed her with a rare autoimmune disorder. "Her brain is on fire," one doctor tells her family. "Her brain is under attack by her own body."

Cahalan, who has since recovered, remembers almost nothing about her monthlong hospitalization — it's a merciful kind of amnesia that most people, faced with the same illness, would embrace. But the best reporters never stop asking questions, and Cahalan is no exception. In Brain on Fire, the journalist reconstructs — through hospital security videotapes and interviews with her friends, family and the doctors who finally managed to save her life — her hellish experience as a victim of anti-NMDA receptor encephalitis. The result is a kind of anti-memoir, an out-of-body personal account of a young woman's fight to survive one of the cruelest diseases imaginable. And on every level, it's remarkable.

The best journalists prize distance and objectivity, so it's not surprising that the most difficult subject for a news writer is probably herself. And although she's young, Cahalan belongs firmly to the old school of reporters — she writes with an incredible sense of toughness and a dogged refusal to stop digging into her past, even when it profoundly hurts. One of the most moving moments in Brain on Fire comes when Cahalan, preparing a New York Post article about her illness, watches videos of herself in the hospital. She's horrified, but finds that she can't look away. "I was outrageously skinny. Crazed. Angry," she writes. "I had the intense urge to grab the videos and burn them or at least hide them away, safe from view."

Julie Stapen/Free Press

Susannah Cahalan is a reporter and book reviewer at the New York Post.

"PIGS" are a hot topic in Germany's capital.

Attend any press briefing about how German Chancellor Angela Merkel is going to solve the European debt crisis and you're likely to hear that acronym, which stands for "Portugal, Ireland (or Italy), Greece and Spain."

But recently, pigs of an altogether different variety made headlines in Berlin.

Four people were injured — including a policeman — when a 265-pound wild boar attacked them in the Berlin neighborhood of Charlottenburg in late October. The police officer shot and killed the animal, which had been injured while crossing a busy highway.

Shocked residents said that they'd seen boars in the nearby park, but didn't know they were dangerous. Some residents squealed on neighbors, accusing them of throwing food from their balconies to the pigs. Feeding wild boars in Berlin is illegal and offenders face fines of up to $6,500.

Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson/NPR

Wild boar, shown here inside an enclosure in a Berlin city park, are considered smart and quickly learn how to avoid hunters.