NPR News

R.A. Dickey's career as a major league pitcher has been as unpredictable as his signature pitch, the knuckleball.

And on Tuesday night, the New York Mets' 37-year-old phenomenon will hit a new pinnacle: the pitching mound at baseball's All-Star Game.

He won't be starting for the National League — manager Tony La Russa chose Matt Cain of the San Francisco Giants for that honor. But the manager says says Dickey will pitch.

They called it "the brick." And Martin Cooper says it really did look like one: 8 inches high, an inch and a half wide, 4 inches deep, and weighing 2 1/2 pounds.

In other words, the world's first hand-held cellphone, the Motorola DynaTAC, weighed the equivalent of about eight iPhones. (Try jamming that into a pocket.)

"The battery life was only 20 minutes," says Cooper, a former vice president at Motorola who has been called the "father of the cellphone." "But that was not a problem because you couldn't hold that heavy thing up for more than 20 minutes."

President Obama has called on Congress to extend tax cuts for the middle class, while allowing rates for the wealthiest Americans to go up.

A federal panel on Monday began hearing a lawsuit by the state of Texas against the U.S. Department of Justice, to allow the state's new voter ID law to go into effect. The Justice Department has blocked the law, arguing that it violates the Voting Rights Act by disproportionately harming Hispanic voters, who are less likely to have the required photo ID. Melissa Block speaks to NPR's Pam Fessler.

Texas Gov. Rick Perry has announced that he opposes the expansion of Medicaid as provided in the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, and the creation of state insurance exchanges. Melissa Block talks to Emily Ramshaw, editor at the Texas Tribune, for more on what Perry's announcement means for Texas.