All throughout the school's 110-year history, the Manassas High School football team in Memphis, Tenn., was known as a losing team. In 2009, volunteer coach Bill Courtney led the struggling Manassas Tigers to the playoffs.

Filmmakers Dan Lindsay and T.J. Martin chronicle the challenges of the team — on and off the field — in the documentary Undefeated.

Lindsay and Martin talk with NPR's Neal Conan about the film, nominated for an Academy Award in the documentary feature category.

Below is an excerpt from Adam Davidson's latest New York Times Magazine column, "Why Are Harvard Graduates In The Mailroom?" Read all of Davidson's Times Magazine columns here.

Oil prices have jumped sharply in the past two weeks, and the price of gasoline is also moving up. Across the country, a gallon of regular costs nearly $3.60 on average, with some areas facing $4 gas. That's causing sticker shock at the pump, and concern that rising prices could derail the economic recovery.

According to Daniel Yergin of Cambridge Energy Research Associates, gas prices are up because of the West's current confrontation with Iran and sanctions over that country's nuclear program.

A literary legend has died — not an author, but the publisher behind some of the greatest and most controversial writers of the 20th century.

Barney Rosset gave American readers their first taste of Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot, as well as uncensored classics by Henry Miller and D.H. Lawrence. To do that, Rosset fought literally hundreds of court cases and was largely responsible for breaking down U.S. obscenity laws in the 1950s and '60s.

A commuter train carrying people into downtown Buenos Aires collided with a retaining wall during morning rush hour, killing at least 49 people riding in carriages and waiting on the platform.

As Rick Santorum undergoes scrutiny for a 2008 speech in which he said the U.S. was under attack by Satan, the Father of Lies, it's worth recalling that Lucifer also popped up in the GOP primary four years ago.

Mike Huckabee, the former Arkansas governor, created a stir when it emerged that he had asked a journalist who he said seemed knowledgeable about Mormonism whether it was true that Mormon theology held that Jesus and Satan were brothers.

A battered wooden skiff motors along the horn of East Africa. Onboard are a half-dozen men clutching AK-47s and debating whether they'll need to shoot. They are Somali pirates.

Or rather, they're actors playing Somali pirates in a short feature film titled Fishing Without Nets. It tells the story of piracy off the coast of Somalia — from the perspective of the pirates — and it won the jury prize for short filmmaking at this year's Sundance Film Festival.

Politicians are notorious for sometimes saying the opposite of what they mean. That seems to be especially true when they insist an issue "isn't about politics."

Nowadays, politicians of all stripes seek the moral high ground by claiming something "isn't a political issue." Instead, it's always "about" something else — jobs or education or the American people.

The U.S. Supreme Court took up the subject of lying on Wednesday.

Specifically at issue was the constitutionality of a 2006 law that makes it a crime to lie about having received a military medal. But the questions posed by the justices ranged far beyond that — from advertising puffery to dating lies.