The Three-Minute Fiction contest is over, but the fun is just beginning. We received 3,400 stories in Round 7 and our readers from Iowa Writer's Workshop and New York University are hard at work trying to get to all of them. NPR's Lynn Neary and Bob Mondello bring two of these stories to life: "Misshapen" by Aaron Maltz and "The Young and the Old" by Alex Swiatek.
Profits for the nation's carmakers are on the rise, but after years of doing more with less, higher profits are unlikely to translate into significant numbers of new jobs. There are eight fewer plants and hundreds of thousands fewer workers in the industry than before the Great Recession.