NPR News

The normal bike market is pretty straightforward — supplier, middleman and buyer. The market for stolen bikes has the same roles, but different players. Here's a quick look at how it works.

The Supplier

The supplier, instead of Schwinn or Cannondale, is the bike thief.

Hal Ruzzal, a bike mechanic at Bicycle Habitat in Manhattan, describes two types of thieves.

Thief Type 1: "Your standard drug addict."

This summer, All Things Considered has asked listeners and guests to share a personal memory of one song discovered through their parents' record collection.

NPR listener Mel Fisher Ostrowski wrote in to tell us about how Don McLean's "American Pie" helped her "bridge a gap between my long-deceased father and baby boy." Hear the radio version at the audio link above — and read a lightly edited version of Ostrowski's original letter to NPR below.

The members of the inventive, experimental rock band Animal Collective first met in school in Baltimore County, Md. After collaborating throughout high school and college, they released their debut album as a group, Here Comes the Indian, in 2003. More studio albums followed, including the 2009 breakout Merriweather Post Pavilion.

It wasn't what President Obama was hoping for: another disappointing jobs report the morning after he accepted the Democratic nomination and asked Americans to stay the course.

The U.S. economy added just 96,000 jobs last month, according to the Labor Department, and a drop in the unemployment rate to 8.1 percent was mostly due to people giving up on job searches.

File this under "you think you had a bad day?" and "that was a really dumb idea."

First, a plane headed from Philadelphia to Texas is turned around Thursday because someone called authorities to say a passenger was carrying a "liquid explosive."

Sandra Fluke found herself in the center of a media storm earlier this year. She became a political target after she testified in favor of President Obama's policy to require most employers' insurance plans to cover contraception. Fluke spoke at this week's Democratic convention, and talks about it with host Michel Martin.