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Fashion trend forecasters predict what's next -- what colors, fabrics and styles consumers will be wearing a year from now. That information is valuable to the people who make and sell clothes. It's the business of betting on what will make shoppers spend money. As part of Morning Edition's series on the fashion industry, NPR's Elizabeth Blair reports.

A small museum in Waterbury, Conn., is struggling with a big question: what to do with a set of human remains in its collection. In the next installment of All Things Considered's "Hidden Treasures" series, Harriet Baskas reports on a real skeleton in the closet, named Fortune.

In 1953, a 27-year-old Hugh Hefner pasted up the first issue of Playboy magazine on the kitchen table of his Chicago apartment. Fifty years later, Hefner reflects on the fate of the sexual revolution his magazine helped to spark -- and the need to embrace sexuality in a healthy way.

In Part 10 of our series on the roots of American country music, NPR's Paul Brown tells the story of Bob Wills. The fiddler grew up in a family of fiddlers in the cultural mixing bowl of the American southwest. He went on to lead a band that mixed breakdowns, big band swing, blues and square dance music — a style that came to be called Western swing.

Outfielders carry lifelong memories of how their first gloves smelled and felt. Catchers swear by their favorite glove model. On Morning Edition, NPR's Bob Edwards talks to Noah Liberman, the author of Glove Affairs, a book tracing the history and tradition of baseball players' favorite piece of equipment. Read an excerpt, hear interviews and see photos of players and their gloves.

In the latest installment of the series "Honky Tonk, Hymns and the Blues," NPR's Paul Brown explores the origins of the country fiddle — from Eck Robertson to the very word, "fiddle." Paul also explains why it's called "the Devil's box."

In part eight of the series Honky Tonks, Hymns, and the Blues, NPR's Paul Brown explains the way the accordion came to the American southwest in the hands of German immigrants and caught the ears of local Tex Mex musicians.

Entering the Waterford Historical District seems surreal: modern cars and the issues of the day confront you in a town filled with late 18th and 19th century buildings and a farm-land vista that seems drawn from an earlier age. NPR's Jacki Lyden reports how the modern age may finally be catching up with Waterford.

Surfers travel all over the world in search of the perfect wave. In Step Into Liquid, filmmaker Dana Brown captures the surfing culture and lifestyle. NPR's Melissa Block talks with Brown.

Paul Brown continues the weekly series "Honky Tonks, Hymns, and the Blues," with a profile of the Maddox Brothers and Rose, a group that influenced the sound and showmanship of country and western music during the 1940s and '50s. The Maddox family migrated from Alabama to California in the 1930s, picked cotton and fruit crops up and down the West Coast, and performed at migrant labor camps. Their sound was an early model for Rockabilly music.