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The new U.S. Postal Service truck design might look a little silly, but many of the new features actually make it safer and more efficient — something other delivery vehicles might benefit from.

Commentator Peter Sagal mourns the loss of science fiction author Philip Jose Farmer. He says Farmer provided him with an important commodity when he was growing up: imaginary people. You can spend your whole life talking and playing with and beating up imaginary people. And from all accounts, many do. But Sagal also wonders if, like him, when they grow up and have to say farewell to childish things, they'll have nothing real to let go of.

It is easy to talk about great ideas as if they were light-bulb moments — sudden epiphanies where everything comes together for you. But Steven Johnson, author of Where Good Ideas Come From, says the great ideas of the past have taken a lot more hanging out than you'd expect.

Crime writer Chelsea Cain sees danger lurking in the most pastoral corners of the polite Northwest city she calls home. Ketzel Levine dares to search for skeletons with the writer.

The Routes of Man is the new book by Ted Conover, a Pulitzer Prize nominee for Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing. Reviewer Maureen Corrigan says Conover's newest effort, about how roads shape the world in which we live, has "vivid armchair travel" appeal.

This back-to-school season, it's time to reevaluate a few common assumptions about how best to study. Benedict Carey, the author of How We Learn, says science shows that discipline isn't everything.

Veteran sci-fi writer Kim Stanley Robinson returns with a tale of that classic genre trope, the generation ship. Critic Alan Cheuse says this story of spacefaring colonists goes to unexpected places.

The latest installment in Alan Furst's Night Soldiers series opens on a grey spring day in occupied Paris. It follows Mathieu, a small-time Resistance leader and fundamentally good man.

In part two of David Greene's conversation with Bill Parcells, the football coach talks about how he dealt with players' drug use and about redemption for the former Baltimore Ravens running back.

For the first time, Iran joins the U.S. and more than a dozen other world and regional powers to discuss ending the civil war in Syria. Iran is the Syrian regime's major backer.