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For about a year, Fabrizio has been working on a project called Wordless News, in which she draws one image a day based on a story she hears or reads that morning. Starting Monday, she'll spend a week creating images inspired by what she hears on Morning Edition.

The idea for Wordless News came to Fabrizio in February 2013, when Pope Benedict decided to step down or — as Fabrizio imagined it — hang up his hat.

"I wasn't too busy at work that day, so I just started drawing the really fantastic Pope hat on just a pretty ordinary looking hat rack," she tells NPR's David Greene. "... I posted it on Facebook, and I got a huge response of people just saying, 'You should do this tomorrow,' and, 'Do it the next day.' And so I just have been doing it ever since. It's a part of my daily routine now."

Fabrizio gets up around 4:45 a.m., scans the news for great stories, and then goes to work in her studio — which is conveniently located in her backyard. She works on Wordless News until about 10 a.m. and then turns her attention to work she's doing for her graphic design clients.

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It's been 10 years since the writer and monologist Spalding Gray went missing from his home in New York. Two months later, his body was found in the East River in an apparent suicide.

The day he disappeared, his wife, Kathleen Russo, was leaving for work when Gray told her, "OK, goodbye, honey."

"And I go, 'You never call me honey!' " Kathleen tells her daughter and Gray's stepdaughter, Marissa Maier, on a visit to StoryCorps. "And he goes, 'Well, maybe I'll start!' So I left for work that day being hopeful that there was a future for us, that he was really gonna try to get better."

After Gray went missing, people who thought they had seen him would send the family photos. "Did you hold out any hope that one of these people would be him?" Marissa asks her mother.

"At first I did, but he would never be that cruel to, like, disappear into the world and let us think that he was dead and start a new life somewhere else," Kathleen says.

Remembering Spalding Gray

Former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates made international news this week with the release of a memoir that serves up a big helping of unvarnished criticism of his former boss, President Obama.

But his scalding of the sitting commander in chief seems practically tame compared to the beat down he delivers to members of Congress.

And that includes Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, who, Gates asserts, once urged him to have the Defense Department "invest in research on irritable bowel syndrome."

"With two ongoing wars and all our budget and other issues," Gates writes, "I didn't know whether to laugh or cry."

Mostly, however, what Gates does is rage against Congress in Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War.

"Congress," he opines, "is best viewed from a distance – the farther the better – because close up it is truly ugly."

Gates, who also served as defense secretary under President George W. Bush, swings broadly in an unbridled insult-fest in a late section of his book called "Reflections."

And he also goes narrow, picking a few members, like Reid and Republican counterpart, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, for special attention.

Let's start with Gates' overall denunciation of Congress, which includes his suggestion that some may be in need of mental health services:

"My view of the majority of the United States Congress"

"...uncivil, incompetent in fulfilling basic constitutional responsibilities, micro-managerial, parochial, hypocritical, egotistical, thin-skinned, often putting self (and reelection) before country...."

Sundaram bounces in and out of precarious situations like Pip in an African version of Great Expectations, and what he lacks in common sense, he makes up for in grit. When his cell phone is snatched by a young thief, Sundaram plunges after him, into a truly vile slum, in the vain hope that he will be able to buy the phone (with its addresses and numbers) back. On another occasion, heading off in a communal taxi to deposit his U.S. dollars in a bank, he is robbed at gunpoint by his fellow passengers. Enraged, but still innocent, Sundaram brings his complaint to a police station; believing, somehow, that the police will recover his money. They won't even look, he learns, without a substantial bribe to prime the pump. If Sundaram was lacking in cynicism at that stage in his career as a reporter, he makes no excuses; and it lends a fresh and charming candor to his writing.