Emma Bowman

Burning Man started three decades ago as a low-key gathering of friends who celebrated summer solstice on a West Coast beach by setting a wooden man aflame.

Now, event organizers say the counterculture gathering of arts, music and communal living is eyeing attendance in the six figures, leading to a months-long struggle with federal regulators over whether its swelling size will cause long-term harm to the environment and even make the event vulnerable to a terrorist attack.

At one time, the Volkswagen Beetle was so ubiquitous that its sighting is often punctuated by a swift punch in the arm and a shout of "Punch Buggy!" (Or "Slug Bug!" depending on your regional take on the road trip game).

But this week, the Beetle set off down the road to extinction. On Wednesday, Volkswagen ended production of the Beetle, saying it wants to set its sights on manufacturing electric vehicles.

When Corinthia Isom was a child, her mother sat her down on the steps of their home to tell her she had a deadly illness.

"I have HIV, and things are gonna change within our lives," Isom says, recounting the words of her mother, DeSeane Isom.

DeSeane was a single mother, so before her death, she asked two of her closest friends if they would care for Corinthia after she was gone.

The two friends, Kathleen Payne and her partner, April, had met DeSeane through an LGBTQ gospel choir in New York City.

Updated at 7:50 p.m. ET Monday

President Trump says he "will no longer deal with" the U.K.'s ambassador to the U.S., Kim Darroch, who sent a series of confidential memos to the British Foreign Office assailing President Trump's character and leadership.

Sada Jackson lost her mother, Ileana Watson, to breast cancer in 2016.

There are many things Sada, now a mother herself, wonders about her late mom. So at StoryCorps, she sat with Ileana's best friend, Angela Morehead-Mugita, to learn more. "I want to know more about my mom, as a woman, because I only knew her as Mom," says Sada, 35.

Angela, 55, says she and Ileana were each other's emotional support during vulnerable moments. When Ileana was facing cancer for the second time – when Sada was pregnant — she broke down to her friend, saying, "I may not see my grandbaby."

Baylor gave up a double-digit lead but hung on in the final minutes to win the NCAA women's title game against defending champs Notre Dame by a single point Sunday night in Tampa, Fla.

With the 82-81 victory, the Lady Bears clinched their third NCAA women's basketball championship — joining UConn and Tennessee as the only Division I programs with three or more titles. The last time Baylor clinched the title was in 2012 against the Fighting Irish.

Nina Martinez just became the world's first living HIV-positive organ donor.

In a medical breakthrough, surgeons at Johns Hopkins Hospital late last month successfully transplanted one of her kidneys to a recipient who is also HIV positive.

"I feel wonderful," Martinez, 35, said in an interview with NPR's Michel Martin, 11 days into her recovery. The patient who received her kidney has chosen to remain anonymous, but is doing well, Martinez is told.

Army veteran Sgt. Mickey Willenbring has always been a fighter. She grew up shuffling between homes — with her parents on the West Coast, with family on Native American reservations in the upper Midwest and within the foster care system across the country — during an adolescence she describes as sometimes violent.

But the military struck Willenbring as a way to channel the aggression she says built up during an unstable upbringing. In 1998, Willenbring, then 20, enlisted in the Army and deployed to Iraq five years later.

You may know Henry Winkler as The Fonz from Happy Days or the "very good" Bluth family lawyer from Arrested Development. Or perhaps, more recently, for his Emmy-winning role as the eccentric acting coach Gene Cousineau on the HBO comedy series Barry.

The Los Angeles Rams and the New England Patriots will face off in this year's Super Bowl after winning the NFC and AFC conference championships, respectively, on Sunday.

The Rams, who overcame a 13-point deficit to beat the Saints, last played in the Super Bowl in 2002 — against none other than the Patriots. The St. Louis Rams won the NFL title two years before that.

The Patriots defeated the Chiefs to return to the Super Bowl for a third consecutive year.

Los Angeles Rams beat New Orleans Saints

For as long as he can remember, Tommy Tomlinson has understood his identity as inseparable from his body.

The federal judge in Texas who ruled the Affordable Care Act unconstitutional earlier this month said that the law can remain in effect while under appeal.

U.S. District Court Judge Reed O'Connor wrote in his ruling filed on Sunday that "many everyday Americans would otherwise face great uncertainty during the pendency of appeal."

In 1973, Barnie Botone got a job in Albuquerque, N.M., working on the railroad. He was 22 years old.

Now, 67, Botone remembers when he told his grandmother that he'd be working as an engineer for the Burlington Northern and Santa Fe Railway. He had been excited to share the news, but her reaction, he explains in a StoryCorps conversation, was not what he expected.

"She cried with a moan, because the irony — it was too much to bear," Botone says.

In keeping with presidential tradition, a detailed schedule of the funeral and memorial services for former President George H.W. Bush was released Saturday evening, with ceremonies planned in Houston, Washington, D.C., Spring, Texas, and College Station, Texas.

John Nordeen and Kay Lee served in the same Army platoon during the Vietnam War.

Nordeen and Lee had very different personalities, but in the life-or-death setting of war, the two bonded. Nordeen, a soldier from Seattle, was one of the first people that Lee, a combat medic from San Francisco, talked to.

But after the war, they lost touch.

In 2015, after a years-long search by Nordeen, the veterans finally reconnected.

Updated at 10:48 p.m. ET

Wildfires continued to tear through Northern and Southern California on Monday, where firefighters were at the mercy of dry air and whipping winds fanning the deadly blazes. At least 44 people have died statewide; many people remain unaccounted for.

In a year of record-breaking fires, Cal Fire Chief Ken Pimlott told NPR's All Things Considered the Camp fire in the north and Woolsey fire in the south may be "the most destructive and the deadliest" on record for the state.

The Boston Red Sox just capped a dominating season with their fourth World Series in 15 years.

Heading into Sunday night's Game 5, the Los Angeles Dodgers needed a win to stall Boston's chances at this year's title.

But Boston, led by David Price's pitching and Steve Pearce's batting, ruled the road turf to take home their ninth World Series title — and their fourth since 2004.

The Los Angeles Dodgers outlasted the Milwaukee Brewers 5-1 in the deciding Game 7 of the National League Championship Series Saturday night.

With the win, the Dodgers will return to the World Series for the second year in a row, to face off against the Boston Red Sox — and look to rewrite last year's fate, after losing Game 7 of the World Series to the Houston Astros.

Updated at 1:02 a.m. ET Sunday

Elon Musk, Tesla's chief executive, has reached a deal with the Securities and Exchange Commission to settle a securities fraud charge brought against him on Thursday, the agency announced on Saturday.

Under the terms of the settlement, Musk has agreed to step down as chairman of the Silicon Valley-based company, but will remain in his post as CEO.

Before Lori Alhadeff ran for a seat on her local school board, she had no experience in politics. She didn't even consider herself a "political person," she says.

That changed when her daughter, Alyssa Alhadeff, died in the Parkland school shooting. In February, a former student killed 14-year-old Alyssa and 16 other people at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School.

Updated at 1:00 p.m. ET Sunday

Sen. John McCain died Saturday, a day after his office announced his decision to discontinue medical treatment for brain cancer. Before his death, McCain's wife Cindy said in a tweet that the McCain family was "overwhelmed by the outpouring of love and support from around the world."

That outpouring swelled after the news of his death broke on Saturday.

Updated at 8:03 a.m. ET

It was a tweet that set off a storm. Was President Trump admitting to collusion between his campaign and Russia? Was he stipulating that the now notorious June 2016 Trump Tower meeting arranged by his son Donald Trump Jr. really was all about getting dirt on Hillary Clinton from a Kremlin-linked Russian lawyer and not adoption issues as President Trump had earlier claimed?

Updated at 7:08 a.m. ET

At least 14 people have been killed and more than 160 others injured in a 6.4 magnitude earthquake that hit the Indonesian island of Lombok Sunday.

The quake damaged dozens of houses and continued to send a wave of aftershocks. The number of those killed and injured could rise as authorities respond to more locations, Sutopo Purwo Nugroho of Indonesia's disaster response agency said in a statement.

Updated at 11:40 p.m. ET Sunday

A total of six people have died in the Northern California Carr Fire near Redding — one of 17 major wildfires burning in the state.

On Sunday, Shasta County Sheriff Tom Bosenko said a sixth victim was found in a home wrecked in the blaze. The victim's identity has not been released.

Bosenko said the sheriff's department is investigating reports of seven missing people.

For the past three weeks, students across India's capital have been attending a radical new course: happiness.

The Delhi government introduced "happiness classes" in an effort to shift the country's academic focus from student achievement to emotional well-being. In a country that uses standardized testing to determine student success, offers a limited number of seats in top universities and sets high expectations, educators have been seeing mental health consequences.

In the summer of 1994, in Tulsa, Okla., Brandy Carpenter, then 14, had just started dating her crush, 17-year-old De'Marchoe Carpenter.

But before they even had their first kiss, De'Marchoe was arrested for a murder he didn't commit.

At StoryCorps in May, De'Marchoe, 41, and Brandy, 38, remember what first drew them to each other, and the toll that prison took on their relationship.

"You always made me laugh and you always made me smile," Brandy says. "I always wanted you to be around."

On Sunday, Colombia elected a new president, Ivan Duque, a conservative former senator who's pledged to rewrite a divisive peace treaty that ended the country's 50-year-old guerrilla war.

In the second and final round of elections, Duque won 54 percent of the vote, defeating former guerrilla fighter and onetime Bogota Mayor Gustavo Petro, 58, who captured about 42 percent in the runoff. Duque will succeed outgoing President Juan Manuel Santos.

Infamous photographs, taken seconds after Sen. Robert F. Kennedy was shot on June 5, 1968, show him lying on the floor of the Ambassador Hotel's kitchen. A teenage busboy kneels beside him, cradling the senator's head.

That busboy was Juan Romero.

Kennedy was running for president and had just won the California Democratic primary when he was assassinated at the Los Angeles hotel.

Joshua Holt, a Utah native held in Venezuelan jail for nearly two years, returned to U.S. soil on Saturday, and was welcomed by President Trump.

In 2016, the 26-year-old set out for Venezuela to marry his fiancée Thamara Candelo, but ended up in the El Helicoide prison without trial, after police claimed to have found weapons in the couple's apartment.

As NPR reported last year: