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More than 70 years since it surfaced in public, John Steinbeck's story "With Your Wings" will see publication in print today for the first time Friday. The Associated Press reports that, despite being read during a 1944 radio broadcast by Orson Welles, the story had never been put to page and released — so far as experts are aware.

Andrew F. Gulli, managing editor of The Strand Magazine, reportedly stumbled across a transcript of Welles' broadcast during a trawl through the archives at University of Texas at Austin. The piece itself is very much of its time, a wartime story that dwells on the challenges of a black American pilot's return home.

"Steinbeck was an idealist. He saw America as this wonderful land with so much to offer but on the flip side, he could see inequality, he could see greed and excess destroying the working classes," Gulli told the AP in an email. "This story strikes me as an effort to show middle America that African-Americans were carrying on a huge burden in defending the United States and the allies during the war."

The story appears in the quarterly's holiday issue, which is out today.

In The Nick Of Time: Joshua Ferris has won the 2014 International Dylan Thomas Prize. In a ceremony Thursday night, the American author's recent novel, To Rise Again at a Decent Hour, beat out a shortlist of six other books that included such favorites as The Luminaries, Eleanor Catton's 2013 Man Booker Prize winner; and Eimear McBride's Baileys Prize-winning A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing.

The Dylan Thomas prize, which awards just under $50,000 to "the best published or produced literary work in the English language," this year bumped up its age limit from 30 to 39 years old, the age at which the poet himself died. And the rule change came not a moment too soon for Ferris, who turns 40 on Saturday.

Peter Stead, the president of the prize, raved about this year's winner, calling it "a novel which encapsulates the frustration, energy and humor that goes into the making of New York."

It's a sentiment echoed by Michael Schaub, in his review of the book for NPR. "To Rise Again at a Decent Hour isn't just one of the best novels of the year, it's one of the funniest, and most unexpectedly profound, works of fiction in a very long time."

Calvin's Creator, Back In Panels: Bill Watterson, the man behind the beloved Calvin and Hobbes, has made another tentative step back toward the spotlight this week. Tapped for honors at the Angouleme International Comics Festival in France, Watterson drew up a brand-new strip to serve as the festival's poster. Reporter Steve Silberman tweeted the madcap results.

1st new comic in 20 years from creator of Calvin and Hobbes. Delightful and needs no caption. http://t.co/qE0xiBTS3R pic.twitter.com/nWpcwdmygN

— Steve Silberman (@stevesilberman) November 5, 2014

Audio Expansion At Scribd: The e-book subscription service Scribd has announced a massive expansion to its catalog, adding more than 30,000 audiobooks to the e-book titles it already offers. The move adds a new layer to Scribd, which began in 2007 as a document sharing website and just over a year ago launched its e-book lending arm.

The new audiobooks will be available to subscribers under their current plan of $8.99, and the library will feature not just older titles, but frontlisted ones. According to TechCrunch, the availability of these newer titles is owed partly to a subscription model introduced by the Amazon-owned audiobook service, Audible, which figures to be an immediate competitor.

With the new addition, Scribd says its e-book service now totals more than 500,000 books.

Young Obsession: At The Millions, Jared Young offers an appreciation of Michael Crichton, who passed away six years ago this week. With it, Young pairs a few stories of his own desperate attempts — and failures — to follow in the considerable footsteps of the man himself.

"What fascinated me about Michael Crichton's books was that they were so utterly, magnificently plausible," he writes. "It had seemed, at the outset, like an easy thing to accomplish, but I soon faced the unfortunate truth: I wasn't a novelist ... not, at least, in the meticulous, academic manner of Michael Crichton."

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A trade group representing more than 1,400 for-profit colleges has filed a lawsuit against the federal government over regulations aimed at curbing industry abuses.

The group seeks to stop a federal regulation, known as the "gainful employment rule," that was formally put into place last week by the U.S. Department of Education. The rule restricts access to federal student-aid dollars for institutions deemed to have too many students who struggle to pay back their student loans.

The rule is aimed at cracking down on institutions that charge excessive tuition, especially for programs that have little value on the job market. The Department of Education says the regulation could potentially affect up to 840,000 students, and, the trade group says, 3.5 million in the next 10 years. Two million students are currently enrolled in for-profits.

The for-profit colleges depend heavily on federal aid money, and the lawsuit filed Thursday is the latest salvo in a battle that has now stretched over five years and at least one other lawsuit.

At issue in the current suit are the criteria used to determine whether, and how many, students are struggling. The Education Department is proposing to compare graduates' student loan debt to their earnings. The schools say such a measure is unfair because how much money students make after graduating is not in their control.

"The gainful employment regulation is nothing more than a bad-faith attempt to cut off access to education for millions of students who have been historically underserved by higher education," Steve Gunderson, president and CEO of the Association of Private Sector Colleges and Universities, which brought the lawsuit, said in a statement.

Dorie Nolt, the Education Department press secretary, said, "We're confident that the department is within its legal authority in issuing gainful employment regulations that will protect students and taxpayers' investments by bringing more accountability and transparency to career training programs."

Barmak Nassirian, an independent policy analyst, says the legal case is really trying to get at something much bigger: "An industry is really challenging the right of an agency to question its entitlement to free federal money."

Both he and Ben Miller, a senior education policy analyst at the New America Foundation, say that even should the rule survive this new challenge in court, enforcement efforts could be defunded by the new Republican-controlled Congress, or the idea could be axed altogether by the next president.

Bottom line, Nassirian says, "I think 'gainful' is as good as dead politically."

And, Miller points out, in the long run having the rule on the books may be beside the point.

He notes that enrollment in for-profit colleges fell by about 250,000 students between 2010 and 2012. "Three things happened," he explains. "First, when the department started this process in 2010, it started to freak schools out and force them to go re-evaluate programs and close or shrink the poor performers."

Miller points to the example of one-year certificate programs in criminal justice that advertised after the popular CSI drama series on TV but gave graduates few plausible job prospects.

Second, media attention over the past few years has highlighted the problems with these and other practices in the for-profit industry.

"Continued public attention got students to be more discerning in consumer choices," Miller said.

Finally, he added, the financial troubles and collapse of Corinthian Colleges this summer took one of the most frequently criticized large players out of the picture.

All of which means, Miller said, that "the idea behind the rule works faster than the rule itself."

When Don Sage of Concord, N.H., learned his electric bill could rise by as much as $40 a month he got flustered. He and his wife make do on a bit less than $30,000 a year in Social Security payments, and they pay close attention to their electric bills.

"When the invoice comes in the mail to get paid, I have a target amount that we can fluctuate up or down, based on our fixed budget," Sage says. "They don't need my permission to hike up their rates, but the fact is we're the ones that are paying these increases."

Utilities in New England have announced electricity rates hikes on the order of 30 percent to 50 percent, making prices some of the highest in the history of the continental United States.

For Sage and other consumers, these changes seem to have come out of nowhere, but in reality, they have been a long time coming. Between the years of 2000 and 2013, New England went from getting 15 percent of its energy from natural gas to 46 percent. That's dozens of power plants getting built.

But the pipelines to supply those power plants? Not so much.

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Falling Oil Prices Make Fracking Less Lucrative

At the same time, with the fracking boom just a few hundred miles west driving down gas prices, more and more homeowners were switching to natural gas for heating.

So now when it gets cold and everyone turns on their heat, the pipelines connecting New England to the Marcellus Shale are maxed out.

Power plant operators are left to bid on the little bit of gas that's left over for them, and the prices can get out of hand.

"In New England, this winter, based on what's been recently trading, is likely to have the highest natural gas prices on planet Earth," says Taff Tschamler, chief operating officer of energy supplier North American Power.

Gas for January delivery is trading at nearly $19 per million BTUs. Gas in Japan, which relies entirely on imported gas and often has the world's highest prices, is forecast to cost less than $18 this winter.

Big pipelines in New England are on the drawing board, but they won't be built until 2018 at the earliest — and that's only if they don't get swamped by local opposition.

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One proposed solution for New England's energy price spike problem: Importing more liquefied natural gas and feeding it into the pipeline network on the other side of the region's bottleneck. Sam Evans-Brown/New Hampshire Public Radio hide caption

itoggle caption Sam Evans-Brown/New Hampshire Public Radio

One proposed solution for New England's energy price spike problem: Importing more liquefied natural gas and feeding it into the pipeline network on the other side of the region's bottleneck.

Sam Evans-Brown/New Hampshire Public Radio

How To Cope

So what's a region to do? For one, if you import gas and plug it into the pipeline network at a different spot, you can avoid the bottleneck.

Distrigas, New England's only liquefied natural gas import terminal, is just north of Boston. Tony Scaraggi, the company's vice president of operations, says even with last year's frigid winter, New England only hit its maximum pipeline capacity for 40 days.

"That's equivalent to like, two and a half to three LNG tankers coming in. So you gotta compare that to the cost of a $2 to $3 billion pipeline," Scaraggi says.

He says burning more expensive foreign natural gas for those 40 days is still cheaper than building an oversized pipeline.

The environmental community is weighing in on the question, too.

Peter Shattuck with Environment Northeast put out a paper arguing the region could save money by using less power.

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New York Says It's Time To Flip The Switch On Its Power Grid

"If demand for gas remains low, because of things like energy efficiency, distributed generation, renewable heating technologies like heat pumps and biomass, we may not need any infrastructure overall," Shattuck says.

So while it's certain that some pipelines will get built, the big question is how much additional capacity, and who will pay.

A plan from the six New England governors to subsidize bigger pipes was tabled recently when Massachusetts announced it wanted to study the question further before committing.

Ultimately, whether electricity prices continue to rise in New England next winter and the winter after that will come down to weather.

"At any rate, what I think we're hoping for is that the good Lord who protects drunks and the United States will also protect New England," says Peter Brown, an energy attorney with the law firm Preti Flaherty.

In other words, pray for a warm winter.

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S. Donald Stookey, photographed in 1950, prepares to expose an image to ultraviolet light. Stookey forever changed cooking with the invention of CorningWare. AP hide caption

itoggle caption AP

S. Donald Stookey, photographed in 1950, prepares to expose an image to ultraviolet light. Stookey forever changed cooking with the invention of CorningWare.

AP

Check your kitchen cabinets, there is a good chance a CorningWare casserole dish is inside.

If there isn't, you probably know someone who has one.

CorningWare, the popular white cookware often decorated with blue cornflowers, was often seen at family gatherings and potluck dinners.

S. Donald Stookey is credited with discovering ceramic glass in the 1950s which led to CorningWare.

The durable cookware is able to withstand extreme temperatures — making it perfect for casseroles.

The dishes can go from oven to table and then into the refrigerator or freezer. Later, CorningWare could be used in microwave ovens and cooktops.

Stookey discovered glass ceramics in 1952 — the fortuitous outcome of an experiment gone wrong.

As The Associated Press tells the story: Stookey was a young scientist researching the properties of glass when he put a glass plate into an oven to heat it. But the oven malfunctioned. Instead of heating to about 1,100 degrees Fahrenheit, the oven shot up to more than 1,600 degrees. Stookey expected to find a molten mess. Instead, he found an opaque, milky-white plate. As he was removing it from the oven, his tongs slipped, and the plate fell to the floor. But instead of shattering, it bounced.

And bounce is exactly what sales of CorningWare did. By the end of the 1950s, it was one of Corning's most successful products.

CorningWare is still on store shelves. Corning spun off its consumer-products division in 1998, and it it now marketed by World Kitchen LLC.

Stookey held the patent on CorningWare. His son, Donald Stookey, told The Associated Press that he believes his father made money on a percentage of the sales — but did not get rich.

In 1986, Stookey received the National Medal of Technology from President Ronald Reagan. And in 2010, he was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame.

Stookey died on Tuesday at age 99.

CorningWare

S. Donald Stookey