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Gov. Jerry Brown said Thursday in San Diego that California's finances are healthy, but long-term liabilities require a prudent state budget in the upcoming fiscal year.

The second very lucky winner of last month's massive Mega Millions jackpot is a California delivery driver who didn't get around to checking his lottery tickets for nearly two weeks.

Thousands of Central Americans have tried reaching the U.S. border in hopes of better lives. When crossing Mexico, they've faced remarkable dangers. Actor Gael Garcia Bernal traveled to southern Mexico to capture these stories, compiled in The Invisibles, a collection of short documentaries.

The second part of NPR's series on maritime Britain begins on a small ferry en route to the storm-lashed island of Lundy. Pirates once awaited their prey on the three-mile-long island. Today, there are 28 permanent residents, all employed by a conservation group, though some 2,000 bell ringers have made the pilgrimage to the island's old Gothic church.

In A Curious Invitation: The Forty Greatest Parties in Fiction, London-based party promoter Suzette Field offers a guide to literature's most famous and fabulous hosts and their soirees — from Proust and Tom Wolfe to Jay Gatsby and Hollywood Wives.

John Boehner has had it with fielding complaints from the right.

Napoleonic Wars? The Royal Navy? Yawn. Novelist Nicola Griffith had low expectations when she started reading Patrick O'Brian's Master and Commander. But soon she was tearing through the 20-volume series, reveling in the deeply rendered friendship between the characters Jack and Stephen. It's a masterpiece, she says: "Jane Austen on a ship of war."

In softcover fiction, Joyce Carol Oates wreaks karmic horror on turn-of-the-century Princeton, and Sebastian Faulks braids five lives in the search for what makes a self. In softcover nonfiction, Elton John tells the story of his crusade for better AIDS treatment, and Bernard Lewis maps the Middle East with a life's worth of anecdotes.

San Francisco's mayor says he doesn't know what it is. Police say it's not their jurisdiction. And government inspectors are sworn to secrecy.

On Weekend Edition Sunday, NPR's John Burnett describes how some churches are trying to attract new members by creating a different sort of Christian community around craft beer.