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Pope John Paul II was rushed to the hospital Tuesday night with breathing problems following a bout of the flu. The 84-year-old pontiff has a history of health problems. Hear Alex Chadwick and Sylvia Poggioli.

Critic-at-large John Powers comments on the history of roles for offbeat women in Hollywood. Powers recently saw the hit film The 40-Year-Old Virgin and got to thinking about the actress Catherine Keener, who co-stars.

As the British royal wedding approaches, Elaine Fantham, professor emerita of classics at Princeton University, recalls history's first famous Camilla. She was a warrior leader who became an attendant to the goddess Diana in Virgil's epic poem The Aeneid.

Viggo Mortensen stars in Eastern Promises, a new David Cronenberg thriller set in London, in the dangerous underworld of sex trafficking. Cronenberg and Mortensen's last collaboration was the acclaimed 2005 film A History of Violence.

John McWhorter's newest book is called The Power of Babel: A Natural History of Language. He has written on Ebonics, language and African Americans, and the origins of the Creole Language. His other books include Losing the Race: Self-Sabotage in Black America and Word on the Street: Debunking the Myth of 'Pure' Standard English. McWhorter is a professor at the University of California at Berkeley.

South Carolina has a long and complex Jewish history -- at one point, there were more Jewish families in South Carolina than in any other state. NPR's Joshua Levs reports for Morning Edition on a new museum exhibit exploring 300 years of Jewish life in South Carolina.

Outside of Philadelphia is a little museum, The Museum of Mourning Arts, dedicated to the history and the culture of grief and the symbolic forms with which it has been expressed over the centuries. Love and loss is a theme often explored in art, but this museum focuses on intensely personal objects, such as mourning wear and Victorian memento moris. Neda Ulaby reports.

Phil Patton, author of Bug: The Strange Mutations of the World's Most Famous Automobile. It's a cultural history of the Volkswagen Beetle, the most produced and best-known car of all time. Patton writes for The New York Times, Esquire, Wired and ID. He also wrote Dreamland: Travels inside the Secret World of Roswell and Area 51.

An exhibit at London's Natural History Museum contains photographs that are meant to be touched. Artists created the tactile photos by utilizing a type of plastic in order to create texture which gives the sense of depth, light and shadow. Carrie Giardino reports.

Barbara Freese, former attorney general of Minnesota, has written a book that chronicles the rise and fall of coal. She says coal fueled the creation of the British Empire -- and the spread of English -- by stoking the British navy. Her book is Coal: A Human History. Freese speaks with NPR's Steve Inskeep.