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According to one study, more than a third of college students don't measurably improve in critical thinking skills through four years of education. The study, presented in the new book Academically Adrift, measured, among other things, how much students improved in writing skills and how much they studied.

Dashiell Hammett gave us Sam Spade, not to mention Nick and Nora Charles. Now, from the long-deceased author of The Maltese Falcon and The Thin Man, comes a never-before-published short story: "So I Shot Him."

The Newsweek editor highlights a book and a pair of articles that turn on the intersection of style and substance — from the methods and motivation behind the AMC hit Mad Men to one man's attempt to bring reality television to Russian audiences.

The Daily Beast editor chats with Renee Montagne about the best things she's been reading lately. The focus this month: the perils and pleasures of the personal chronicle, whether it's on the Internet, in a diary, or in a juicy tell-all memoir.

Painter Matthew Mitchell's project is deceptively simple: He's painting 100 portraits of people who have served in Iraq and Afghanistan. The process has taken on a much more powerful reality than he realized it would.

Daily Beast Editor-in-Chief Tina Brown shares with Renee Montagne the best things she's been reading lately about seduction by Facebook and some altruistic acts of exposure.

The man behind Charlton Heston's sandals in The Ten Commandments is 91-year-old Willie Rivera, who began making shoes at the age of 13 in Mexico City. He moved to Los Angeles in the 1950s and has dressed the feet of legends such as Fred Astaire, Bing Crosby, Lily Tomlin and Bill Cosby.

In the last years of the Depression, government photographers traveled the country to capture images of America: at play, at work, and struggling to survive. The black-and-white images that emerged became emblems of the time. But many photographs were also taken in full color -- and those images are now being released in a book, Bound for Glory: America in Color 1939-43. Hear NPR's Melissa Block.

For more than 20 years, filmmaker Peter Brosnan has been working to unearth and restore the "Lost City" of Cecil B. DeMille: the massive set of his epic The Ten Commandments, which was buried in the California desert in the 1920s.

A collection of staged murder scene photos once used in the TV series Law and Order, are being featured in an exhibition at the George Eastman House International Museum of Photography and Film. Brenda Tremblay of WXXI in Rochester, N.Y., reports.