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Lana Del Rey appeared on Saturday Night Live recently, giving two rather tentative performances that, depending on your point of view, were awkward and amateurish or shrewdly restrained and vulnerable. Del Rey, in her mid-20s, attracts polarizing opinions.

Producers Neil Meron and Craig Zadan have been making musicals together for almost 20 years. They're the team behind movie musicals like Hairspray, Chicago and Annie, and the TV musicals Gypsy and The Music Man.

Now Meron and Zadan have teamed up once again on the new NBC series Smash, a drama that goes behind the scenes as a motley crew of creative types put together a Broadway musical based on the life of Marilyn Monroe.

Ever harvested crops on FarmVille or laid down a triple-point Q on the Scrabble knockoff Words With Friends? Then you've spent time with Zynga, the largest maker of Facebook games.

Armed with cash and a massive database of user habits, Zynga's CEO Mark Pincus wants to expand the universe of digital game players from sci-fi geeks to soccer moms and their kids.

Recruiting doctors to live and work in rural America is a chronic problem. Most health centers try to attract workers with big salaries and expensive homes.

Shots previously reported that one center in Maine was trying to lure medical students to the countryside for their final two years with the hope that they stick around.

It's noon on the Las Vegas Strip, and the barker outside O'Shea's Casino is hard at work.

"Twenty-four-hour happy hour, 24-hour $5 blackjack and 24-hour beer pong action going on right here today," he says. Dressed in a lime green tuxedo, he's doing his best to get tourists to come in.

Despite the recession, nearly 39 million visitors came to the city last year, the second-highest number in Las Vegas history. The problem is those tourists don't have as much money as they once did.

When her first child was born, Pamela Druckerman expected to spend the next several years frantically meeting her daughter's demands. In the U.S., after all, mealtimes, living rooms and sleep schedules typically turn to chaos as soon as a baby arrives. That's the reason one friend of mine used to refer to his child as a "destroying angel."

Last month I fell ill with a wretched cough. The doctor said I would get better with time, but I craved food that would sustain me on my slow plod back to health. My mom was 3,000 miles away, unable to feed me the chicken soup and Saltines of my youth.

But I found a good substitute: The kimchi soup at a restaurant just around the corner from NPR. Even though this soup has a fiery kick unheard of in the Midwestern fare of my childhood, it was simple, bracing and comforting: just the thing to heal the sick.