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It's Oscar season, meaning that classic toe-tapper "Hooray for Hollywood" will soon be booming out of TV speakers everywhere. But the cheery cinema hymn has a more complicated compositional past, as NPR's special correspondent Susan Stamberg explains.

Lays Potato Chips is expected to announce new flavors on Tuesday. The company had a contest in which they asked for suggestions for new chip varieties.

There were extreme weather patterns across parts of the U.S. over the weekend. A storm was bearing down on the Northern Plains. In the Southeast, a tornado touched down in Hattiesburg, Miss. And in the Northeast, residents are digging out after a major storm dumped record snowfall in some areas. Rain is expected to make things even worse in that region.

It appears that the conflict in northern Mali is entering a new stage — insurgency.

The crisis in Tunisia deepened over the weekend when a secular political party withdrew from the Islamist-led coalition government. The crisis erupted last week when a secular politician and human rights advocate was gunned down outside his home in Tunis.

Citing his age (85) and diminished strength, the pontiff plans to step down effective Feb. 28. It's likely that a conclave to elect a new pope will be held by mid-March. A pope hasn't stepped down this way since 1415.

Also: our pick of the best books coming out this week; the 50th anniversary of Sylvia Plath's death; and the real identity of a popular romance novelist.

In fiction, Christine Sneed's short stories about the perils of love, Peter Carey's tale of a mechanical bird, and Nell Freudenberger's portrait of a trans-Atlantic marriage arrive in paperback. In softcover nonfiction, Tom Holland charts the rise of Islam.

Poet and critic Craig Morgan Teicher says The Colossus, Plath's first book of poetry (and the only one published in her lifetime), shows us glimpses of the poet she would later become. Do you have a favorite Plath poem? Tell us in the comments.

Donna Ambrosia went into labor in Norwich, Ct. She inched toward the hospital in an ambulance behind a snowplow. The baby was born in the parking lot. In Maine, Karen Willis and Greg Beal went ahead with their wedding.