NPR News

It's a good time to brew beer in America. According to beer expert Julia Herz, U.S. brewing isn't just on the upswing, it's on top. "We're now the No. 1 destination for beer, based on diversity and amount of beers," she says.

But if you want to see the strength of America's beer industry, you may want to look past beverage giants like Anheuser-Busch and MillerCoors. According to the Brewers Association, nearly 2,000 American brewers operated during 2011 — the most since the 1880s.

There are good bands, there are great bands, and then there is the most amazingly great band ever in the history of bands: Tenacious D, also known as Kyle Gass and Jack Black. They've just released a new album called Rize of the Fenix.

We've invited Gass and Black to play a game called "Tenacious D, Meet Tenacious P." We tried to think of the singer who was the diametrical opposite of Tenacious D, and who better than Pat Boone? We'll ask three questions about the cleanest cut guy who ever cut a record.

For decades, Muslims around the world have been unofficially boycotting Islam's third holiest site, the Al-Aqsa mosque Jerusalem.

Many Muslims believe that visiting legitimizes Israel's claim to the site, which also sits atop the holiest place in Judaism. The Palestinians, meanwhile, are seeking a state with a capital in east Jerusalem, where the mosque is located.

But Palestinian religious authorities at Al-Aqsa and Palestinian officials are now calling on Muslims to visit the shrine, a change that is creating controversy within the Palestinian community.

Maybe YACHT wouldn't be that sad if the complete and total annihilation of the human race happened tomorrow. The video for their song "Beam Me Up," off their recent album Shangri-La, finds the band playing around with the upsides of doomsday in a laser tag arena. Think of a future where cyber-soldiers fight each other in the smouldering metallic ruins of society, except with children shooting fake lasers.

How does a former punk rocker raised on an Oklahoma cattle ranch end up sounding like a classic rockabilly singer? JD McPherson found his groove in the style of 1950s rhythm and blues, rock and rockabilly. To help create that vintage sound on his debut album, Signs and Signifers, he used vintage mics, old amplifiers and a Berlant reel-to-reel recorder from the '60s — all analog. McPherson's love for this classic sound all goes back to a record store in McAlester, Okla.