All Things Considered

Life and Times is a 10-hour play about the life of one ordinary woman. It opens this week in New York city, and weekends on All Things Considered host Robert Smith attended a performance, complete with meals. He talks to the play's directors and to the woman on whose life it's based.

The World Economic Forum ended Saturday in Davos, Switzerland, and Andrew Ross Sorkin of the New York Times gives weekends on All Things Considered host Robert Smith a debrief on the week's events and why predictions made there are so often wrong.

Less than a week into his second term, President Obama has already met with resistance over procedural matters, such as his use of the recess appointment to circumvent the Senate confirmation process. Weekends on All Things Considered host Robert Smith speaks with James Fallows, national correspondent for The Atlantic.

When Sgt. Brandon McCoy returned from Iraq, he showed signs of post-traumatic stress disorder. His wife, Alicia, remembers him being on edge in public.

"I'm watching him, and his trigger finger never stopped moving, constantly," says Alicia.

Four years later, after he returned from a tour in Afghanistan in 2011, she says, she'd wake up with his hands wrapped around her throat. She told him: Get help or get a divorce. So he scheduled an appointment and — along with Alicia — trekked to the Fort Campbell hospital located on the Tennessee-Kentucky border.

In a bombshell decision on the limits of executive power, a federal appeals court panel in Washington, D.C., has invalidated President Obama's recess appointments to the National Labor Relations Board.

Legal experts say the court's reasoning upends decades of conventional wisdom and deals a big victory to Senate Republicans in an era of congressional gridlock.

A key federal panel Friday recommended placing new restrictions on Vicodin and similar prescription painkillers.

At the conclusion of an emotional two-day hearing, the Food and Drug Administration advisory committee voted 19-10 to recommend the agency change how drugs that contain the opioid hydrocodone are classified as controlled substances.

Health insurance plans now have to cover the full cost of breast pumps for nursing mothers. This is the result of a provision in the Affordable Care Act (aka Obamacare), and the new rule took effect for many people at the start of this year.

It's led to a boom in the sale of the pumps, which can cost hundreds of dollars.