NPR.org itself has a great JSONP API that makes apps like the one in this article possible. Here's a site I put together that uses it and HTML5 audio for a very quick and minimal NPR listening experience (best viewed on iOS safari):
It's a Jekyll app mostly written in CoffeeScript, deployed to S3 with CloudFront CDN'ing.
Here's a lengthier introduction for anyone interested: http://nickmerwin.com/2012/02/25/npr-io/