Arts & Culture

John Dramani Mahama is the vice president of Ghana and the author of a new memoir with one of the most eye-catching titles you'll see all year — My First Coup d'Etat: And Other True Stories from the Lost Decades of Africa.

The title refers to the 1966 military coup that overthrew Ghana's first president. Mahama was 7 years old, and his father, a minister in the government, was imprisoned for more than a year. Mahama tells NPR's Renee Montagne that Africa's "lost decades" lasted from the late 1960s to the 1980s, after the initial euphoria of independence passed.

Donald Sobol, the creator of the beloved character Encyclopedia Brown, died last week of natural causes, his family says. He was 87. The first in the Encyclopedia Brown series book was published in 1963, and the series has never gone out of print.

Crime novelist and forensic pathologist Jonathan Hayes has this appreciation of the character Sobol gave young readers.

While other boys got hooked on books about sports legends and race car drivers, there was something about Donald Sobol's boy detective Encyclopedia Brown that spoke to me right away.

Billy Hunt wants you to yell and scream. At your cheating spouse, that insatiable boss, your dad who missed the baseball game. And do it for the camera.

His Screamotron3000 is a converted karaoke boombox that automatically takes a picture when triggered by the sound of a scream.

"It can be a little rough having people yell at you all day," he says, "but I find it so interesting how human emotion plays out."

Though the contraption sounds a bit technical, for Hunt it's more of a psychology experiment: