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Many colleges have adopted a "common reads" program, where freshmen read the same book during the summer and then discuss it when they get to campus. Jared Diamond, author of the popular common read Guns, Germs, and Steel, talks about what his book can offer young readers.

The National Museum of Health and Medicine in D.C. is not for the squeamish. Founded in 1862, the museum displays everything from a large human hairball to skull fragments from Abraham Lincoln.

In his book Violent Politics, William Polks uses 11 tales of national turmoil for insight into counter-insurgency efforts. Polk finds echoes of Vietnam and the Soviet debacle in Afghanistan as he weighs U.S. policy in Iraq.

On the Left Bank of the River Seine, directly across from the Louvre museum, a crowded little shop has provided supplies to artists for more than 100 years. Cezanne bought oil paints there. Picasso liked their gray pastels. The shop, Sennelier, is a Paris repository of art history and commerce.

A British publisher launched an unusual book Monday — an authorized history of MI5, the British domestic intelligence agency. It's the first authorized history of any Western intelligence agency, and allowing an academic to write it and comb through the agency's files has raised some questions about why the agency's secrets shouldn't be kept secret.

Shanghai was once home to thousands of Jews, serving as a refuge during World War II. Now a new Jewish center has opened, the first in China in 50 years, amid efforts to preserve the city's Jewish history.

Forty years ago Thursday, radio storyteller Jean Shepherd took a crowded bus from New York City to participate in the March on Washington. The next day, he went on the air and shared the experience from his perspective in the crowds. He had been surprised by the good-natured attitude of most of the demonstrators, and by how they had been received by regular people walking around in the city. We hear an excerpt from his broadcast of Aug. 29, 1963.

Enormous stumps in the Pacific Northwest tell the tale of vanished old-growth forests and a logging industry once enriched by giant trees. Member station KUOW's Harriet Baskas visits some old stumps put to new and creative uses.