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What if there were an app where a user could have all of the news he was interested in, from the outlets he trusted, all in one place?

That's the goal of Apple's new iOS 9 feature, called, simply, News. It will be a permanent fixture on the iPhone and iPad home screen, just like Calendar, Maps and Weather.

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Facebook Courts News Giants Into A Deal To Share Viewers, And Revenues

If that app sounded familiar before it was unveiled Monday, that's because other apps are already doing the same thing — Facebook, Flipboard, Twitter, Yahoo News and NYT Now are trying to become the gateway between news consumers and information.

Apple, which announced the app during its debut of iOS 9, is just the latest company to throw its hat into the ring, and it has a distinct advantage over the competition: The News app will automatically be an undeletable part of any Apple mobile device running iOS 9 starting in the fall.

News will be on the radar of millions of Apple users, making it one of the most salient apps on the market. As the Washington Post points out, News could quickly become a contender.

"If the algorithm is good and expansive enough, this could eat market share from Flipboard, Twitter and even, theoretically, those daily newsletters people send around. Not to mention from those outside the ecosystem."

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Apple Announces Music Streaming Service

News won't necessarily be a big success. Its predecessor, Newsstand, turned out to be unpopular with publishers.

Instead of making a home for news apps, as Newsstand did, Apple is partnering with publishers including BuzzFeed, CNN, Conde Nast, The New York Times, Time Inc. and more, displaying their content within the News app in a customizable wrapper. (NPR is among the media organizations that intend to make news available for the News app.)

In an article for NiemanLab, Joshua Benton explained this new relationship between Apple and publishers:

"Individual news apps and individual news brands aren't the primary point of contact with news any more. They're raw material, feeding into broader platforms. The loss of power for publishers in that exchange is obvious; the potential benefits remain mostly undiscovered."

Publishers are trying to keep up as these platforms explore new ways to distribute information to consumers, but the future of News (the app, and the content) has yet to be determined.

Paige Pfleger is an intern with NPR Digital News.

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Poetry readers, prepare yourselves for a passing of the laurels. The Library of Congress announced in the wee hours Wednesday that the next U.S. poet laureate will be California writer Juan Felipe Herrera.

"This is a mega-honor for me," Herrera said in the announcement, "for my family and my parents who came up north before and after the Mexican Revolution of 1910 — the honor is bigger than me."

A poet of Chicano descent, the 66-year-old Herrera has spent just about his whole life on the West Coast. Born to a family of migrant farm workers, he bounced from tent to trailer for much of his youth in Southern California, eventually going on to study at UCLA and Stanford. Years later, he stepped out of the state to attend the Iowa Writers' Workshop, before — you guessed it — returning home to California.

Along the way, Herrera has been prolific — so prolific, in fact, that few seem to agree about just how many books the man has written. (Some say 30, others 29, and the Library of Congress says 28; we'll just put the number at "dozens.") Those works include poetry collections, novels in verse and plenty of children's books. Across this body of work, the shadow of California, and his cultural heritage, has loomed large.

"I've worked throughout California as a poet; in colleges, universities, worker camps, migrant education offices, continuation high schools, juvenile halls, prisons, and gifted classrooms," Herrera told the campus newspaper at the University of California, Riverside, where he teaches creative writing. "I would say [I've been] from San Diego all the way to Arcata and throughout the valleys ... for the last 40 years."

The role of poet-in-chief isn't entirely new to Herrera. Beyond his teaching duties at the University of California, Riverside, he has been serving as California's poet laureate since 2012. He's the first Latino poet to assume that role in the state's history.

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Juan Felipe Herrera speaks at the California Unity Poem Fiesta, a 2014 gathering thrown in celebration of his two years (at that point) as the state's poet laureate. Courtesy of University of California, Riverside hide caption

itoggle caption Courtesy of University of California, Riverside

Juan Felipe Herrera speaks at the California Unity Poem Fiesta, a 2014 gathering thrown in celebration of his two years (at that point) as the state's poet laureate.

Courtesy of University of California, Riverside

The poet laureate's one-year term doesn't carry a lot of prescribed responsibilities — "the Library keeps to a minimum [its] specific duties," according to the announcement — but past laureates have often embarked on projects to advocate on behalf of the form, and to widen its audience. And if there's anything to be gleaned from Herrera's past, it's that Herrera likely will be active in the new position, too.

In a conversation with the journal Zyzzyva, Herrera set out a mini-manifesto of sorts for the role of the writer as teacher.

"These days I think it is good to be in society — to wake yourself up in the throng and mix of people on sidewalks, subways and cafeterias — so teaching writing keeps me at the root of things: new voices, new experiences and new ways of meditating on life and the planet," Herrera said. "Both are extremely essential."

"Poetry," he said, in an interview two years earlier with The Los Angeles Times, "can tell us about what's going on in our lives, not only our personal but our social and political lives."

Herrera is expected to step into the position this fall with the National Book Festival in September. He will succeed Charles Wright, the current U.S. poet laureate. No word yet on when they plan to exchange their poetic licenses.

But, if you're new to Herrera's work, don't just trust me with your first impression. Below, you'll find Herrera himself, in a poem excerpted from his 2008 collection, Half of the World in Light:

Let Me Tell You What a Poem Brings

for Charles Fishman

Before you go further,
let me tell you what a poem brings,
first, you must know the secret, there is no poem
to speak of, it is a way to attain a life without boundaries,
yes, it is that easy, a poem, imagine me telling you this,
instead of going day by day against the razors, well,
the judgments, all the tick-tock bronze, a leather jacket
sizing you up, the fashion mall, for example, from
the outside you think you are being entertained,
when you enter, things change, you get caught by surprise,
your mouth goes sour, you get thirsty, your legs grow cold
standing still in the middle of a storm, a poem, of course,
is always open for business too, except, as you can see,
it isn't exactly business that pulls your spirit into
the alarming waters, there you can bathe, you can play,
you can even join in on the gossip—the mist, that is,
the mist becomes central to your existence.

Excerpted from Half of the World in Light: New and Selected Poems by Juan Felipe Herrera. Copyright 2008 Juan Felipe Herrera. Reprinted with the permission of the University of Arizona Press. This material is protected from unauthorized downloading and distribution.

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President Obama is once again poised to go it alone on labor policy, this time on overtime. The Labor Department is expected in the coming weeks to release a rule making millions more Americans eligible for overtime work — currently, all workers earning below $455 a week, or $23,660 a year, are guaranteed time-and-a-half pay for working more than 40 hours a week. The law may raise that as high as $52,000, Politico reports.

The rule would also change the regulations outlining which employees earning above that threshold are eligible — currently, employers can exempt some employees above that threshold if those workers could be considered "white collar."

This would add to a series of workplace policies that, failing congressional approval, the president has expanded in limited form through executive order — upping the minimum wage among federal contractors and attempting to shrink the gender wage gap among federal contractors. He also mandated paid leave for federal workers.

This particular rule change would be a long time in coming — Obama had in March 2014 directed the Labor Department to overhaul the overtime regulations.

The overtime threshold has only been changed once since 1975. At that time, it was set at $250 per week. Then in 2004, President George W. Bush updated it to $455. And that means inflation has slowly diminished the share of Americans who are guaranteed eligibility.

When you adjust for inflation, you can see how much the threshold has fallen — data from the St. Louis Federal Reserve (going back to 1979) show that, as of the late 1970s, the threshold was right at or slightly above the median worker's pay level. Today, it's at around half.

The income line in the chart — that top one — represents the exact middle wage, with half the full-time working population above and below it at any given time. So while the threshold fell away from the median pay level, so did the number of workers legally guaranteed overtime pay.

Indeed, according to the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute, as of 2013, only 11 percent of full-time workers were guaranteed overtime. Bumping the threshold up to around $50,000, for example — roughly where it was in 1975, adjusted for inflation — would bring 47 percent of workers under the threshold, making around 6 million more workers eligible, by one estimate.

The debate over the overtime threshold sounds remarkably similar to the minimum-wage debate — in that debate, opponents in the business community say a higher wage would cost jobs. In the debate over overtime, the fear is that it could cost workers hours as employers decide they don't want to shell out time-and-a-half pay.

And as in the minimum-wage debate, advocates of higher overtime thresholds say lawmakers should simply index the level to inflation — not only would it save lawmakers from periodic fights over how much to change the law, but it would also help lower-paid hourly workers by making sure they're all paid fairly by keeping wage policies consistent with where prices go.

"The original notion was that the people who don't control their own hours, who need the protection of the law, get paid overtime," says Ross Eisenbrey, vice president at EPI. "Where the law set the threshold in 1975, that's really supposed to demarcate the people about whom there's no question — they are not the most powerful people."

Tying the level to inflation, he says, would ensure that the workers who need the overtime are consistently eligible for it.

The threshold has never been tied to inflation, and advocates like Eisenbrey and the liberal Center for American Progress have long pushed for such a change.

But opponents see reason to keep the level static. One reason, says one economist, is that an indexed overtime level doesn't give businesses enough leeway to deal with high inflation.

"I think it's a bad idea [to index the overtime threshold to inflation] because you want to preserve some flexibility," says Michael Strain, a resident scholar at the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute. "We have been in a low-inflation environment for some time, and we're kind of used to that in how we look at things. But it's entirely conceivable that 10 years from now, we may be in a different environment."

And without that flexibility, employers might further restrict hours, or they might pressure employees to get even more work done in their 40 hours.

Another argument is that inflation isn't uniform everywhere. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce argued in a February letter to Secretary of Labor Tom Perez that the price index used to adjust wages is based on prices in urban areas — it could distort labor markets in rural areas.

But then, inflation will still happen, and the threshold would still periodically have to rise. So how do you ensure that Congress does it? Strain says one solution could be including a provision in the overtime law that forces Congress to revisit the policy every few years. That way, the policy isn't on "autopilot," he says, but it still changes regularly.

Even then, however, there's no guarantee Congress would actually regularly change the law. After all, it has an annual deadline to pass a budget. It hasn't passed all its spending bills on time in almost 20 years.

It started with a joke: On Facebook, Adam Armstrong listed his name as Adam West, the actor who played Batman in the 1960s. But then his girlfriend's stepfather bought him a plane ticket with the West name on it — and the airline wanted $336 to change it.

Adam, who lives in Manchester, England, is 19 — and he really wanted to go on this trip to the resort island of Ibiza. So he simply became Adam West. It was cheaper to change his name and get a new passport than to pay airline Ryanair's fees.

"He changed his name by deed poll for free," ITV reports, "then rushed through a new passport costing 103." (Under today's exchange rate, that's around $157.)

The price for changing the name on Adam's ticket would have been particularly steep because it shared the same booking as Adam's girlfriend — triggering Ryanair to double its normal fee to change a ticket, to 220 ($336).

When we checked out Adam's Facebook page, he was still calling himself Adam West (although the URL reflects his previous legal name).

Ryanair says it has a 24-hour grace period for correcting booking errors, and that its fees are meant to keep people from reselling the budget airline's tickets at a profit.

If you're wondering what a deed poll is: "It is a form of legal contract but it differs from legal contracts between two or more parties in that it only concerns one person (and it is only signed by that person in the presence of a witness)."

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