"I Want You Back" is the best pop record ever made — a song too good to be true.

For Teju Cole, "Respiration," a song about New York City, is the best words in the best order.

Over the past four years, Bruce Marks has been on a traveling road show to help people avoid foreclosure. He says his nonprofit, the Neighborhood Assistance Corporation of America, has helped more than 200,000 people get their payments lowered so they can afford to keep their homes.

For more than a century, countless Americans have dreamed of playing Major League Baseball. Few ever make it, but there is a place in Bradenton, Fla., that nurtures those dreams. IMG Academies takes students as young as 11 and mixes intense baseball training with an academic education.

dream hampton says "Little Room" is an inventory of success, but it is also about Detroit right now.

The idea of an "affordable manicure" was once an oxymoron. That's before Vietnamese immigrants arrived in the U.S. and cornered the market for inexpensive nail-care salons. The industry has offered a path to self-sufficiency for many Vietnamese-Americans in California and around the nation.

The idea that anyone can make it in the U.S. is personified by immigrant success stories. But what if you came to America for a better life, worked hard and made it — but now face an increasingly anti-immigrant environment? One South Carolina family continues to have faith that the next generation will have it better.

Miles Marshall Lewis draws a line from Prince's concern for his community to the Hip-Hop Nation.

If "Jack and Diane" isn't your American dream, what song is?

Growing up in the South Bronx, Juan Carlos Reyes' dream was to be a doorman in Manhattan. A college degree has helped him achieve much more, but Reyes is convinced his success is an aberration — and that few of his peers will ever achieve the American dream.