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At least 15 people are dead and dozens injured Sunday in the Iraqi capital, Baghdad, after multiple car bombs exploded within minutes of each other in mainly Shiite areas.

NPR's Kelly McEvers is reporting on the blasts for our Newscast unit.

"The explosions targeted shops and outdoor markets in Shiite districts around the city. After the blast helicopters were circling over many parts of the city.

"Overall violence has gone down in recent years but lately there've been a string of suicide attacks targeting Shiite interests and security forces.

"A suicide bomber killed a top Iraqi army intelligence officer on Saturday.

Tensions between Shiites and Sunnis are on the rise again in Iraq, as widespread protests in Sunni areas have called for the downfall of the Shiite-led government."

Interiors intrigue me. Like many New Yorkers, I am often tempted to see what is inside those great doorman-barricaded buildings that line Fifth Avenue or Park Avenue. Step into the marble lobby, ride the elevator to the penthouse and let your imagination be carried aloft. What would it be like to live in a vast suite overlooking Central Park, with its parquet floors, coffered ceilings, and handsome antiques? Surely, dwelling here means being beautiful, rich and glamorous.

In reality, most people who live in big cities live in small rooms with tiny closets and a bathroom barely large enough to turn around in. But one can dream.

The three novels I have chosen allow fanciful musings of the Gilded Age — which roughly spans the period in American history between Reconstruction and the turn of the 20th century — with its grand apartments and lavish furnishings. But of course, then, as now, most people lived in cramped quarters with little to look at. And if life amongst the gilded rich seemed enchanting, for the masses existence could be dreary at best.

"We got it framed and it's now in our living room. And a few weeks after we did this, we got a call one day from the school that one of our daughters had gotten into a spat in the classroom. We had never gotten one of these calls and we didn't know what to do. Here we were, clueless parents, we should be responsible, what do we do? So we called our daughter in and we were kind of grasping and my wife said, 'Look up, there's the family mission statement, anything there seem to apply?' And my daughter kind of read down the list and she got to near the end and she said, 'We bring people together?' And suddenly, boom ... we had a way into the conversation. This is a value, this has been violated, now we had a way to talk about it."

On rethinking — or even eliminating — family dinner

"It is like the big bogeyman in families today ... Everybody has heard that family dinner is great for kids. But unfortunately, it doesn't work in many of our lives. Well, guess what? Dig deeper into the research and it's very interesting. It turns out there's only 10 minutes of productive conversation in any family dinner. The rest is taken up with take your elbows off the table and pass the ketchup. And what researchers have found is you can take that 10 minutes and put it in any time of the day and get the benefit. So, if you can't have family dinner, have family breakfast! Even one meal a week, on a weekend, has the same benefit.

More With Bruce Feiler

Opinion

What Not To Say To Someone Who's Sick

People around the world want the same thing from their doctors. First, do no harm. Second, take a look at this weird bump and tell me if I should get worried.

The job is basically the same in many countries around the world. But the pay is wildly different. The median salary for U.S. doctors is about $250,000 a year. In Western Europe, it's less than half that. In developing countries, the salaries are even lower.

Through insurance and out of our own pockets, we pay for doctors' services, just like we pay for all other kinds of goods and services.And yet, with lots of other things we buy, we often turn to imports to save money.

"We should think of doctors the same way we think of shirts," says the economist Dean Baker. "If we can get doctors at a lower cost from elsewhere in the world then we could save enormous amounts of money."

The big difference, of course, is that a bad t-shirt won't kill you.

So, in the name of protecting patients, we put a lot of barriers up to make it harder for foreign doctors to work in the U.S. Even for fully qualified doctors practicing in countries very similar to ours, it can take years of extra training to get licensed to practice in the U.S.

Many U.S. states recognize Canadian medical schools, and have tried to streamline the process for Canadian doctors to work here. But it can be complicated. Every state has its own bureaucracy and license application and requirements.

A Canadian critical care doctor I talked to moved with his wife to California, where he planned to practice. After nine months of paperwork and bureaucracy, he gave up and went back to Canada.

For doctors from other parts of the world, the process is guaranteed to take even longer. Foreign-trained doctors — even those with advanced skills, who have been practicing medicine for years — are required to repeat years of the basic residency training that doctors go through right after medical school.

"The process may be seen as perhaps cumbersome to practicing physicians," says Dr, Humayan Chaudry, President of the Federation of State Medical Boards. "But... the goal at the end of the day is to protect the public."

Chaudry says there simply isn't a way to evaluate the quality of medical training in every country around the world. And clearly, he says, it doesn't deter doctors from coming. Chaudry says that 22 percent of all the licensed doctors in the United States went to medical school outside the country.

But, Dean Baker argues, there should be even more foreign-trained doctors than there already are. A lot of poor and rural areas in the U.S. don't have enough doctors. And foreign-trained physicians are much more likely to specialize in primary care and go to work in such places.

Baker says that rather than have professionals spend years redoing their training, the U.S. should try to make the process more simple and transparent. He says we should tell young, aspiring doctors:

Here's what you have to do. Here are the courses you have to take. Here's is the test you have to pass. If you pass those tests you get to come to the United States and be a doctor just like anyone who was trained in the United States.