For my thirty-third birthday, my husband pre-ordered "The Barsuk Years," the Death Cab for Cutie vinyl box set. "That way you’ll only have the good ones," he said.

He said "good ones" with an uptick in his voice, almost as if he was asking a question. Neither of us can tell how much of the gift, or any part of it, is a joke. I opened up the box, and I laughed. I love these records. Or: I loved these records?

It's a time in music—or a time in music for me?—when the definition of Good Music has never been murkier. Are these the good ones? The idea of "good [...]

A Los Angeles resident who cashed a $1,000 money order at a local post office got a bit of an unpleasant surprise — as it turned out, his payday included eight counterfeit Benjamins, which turned out to be $5 bills that had been bleached and altered. According to the police officers who were called in when David Lipin's bill got rejected at a gas station, holding the bills up to the light would have revealed the visage of Abe Lincoln. Would the special relationship that the Postal Service and the Federal Government have resulted in Lipin getting his money back, the Los Angeles Times wondered? "Not really. The post [...]

Remember how bleak everything seemed in 2003? How the very thought of getting up each morning caused near paralysis as you mentally cataloged the humiliations you'd be forced the face during the course of the day, and how even attempting to think about the future plunged you into a slough of sorrow dug so deep down that the mere contemplation of what you'd need do to somehow start digging your way out proved so exhausting that you eventually decided it was easier not to consider it at all? So you put your head down and went about your life and here we are ten years later and now when [...]

A Philadelphia-area mailman has been accused of hoarding some 20,000 pieces of mail, including a $900 check written in December 2007 and a college acceptance letter from earlier that same year, for the past 13 years. "Dave The Mailman," as he was known to people along his route, currently has unknown whereabouts; the tubs and tubs of mail, which contained a few items postmarked during the Clinton administration, were discovered after he missed a couple of days of work and bosses went to his house to check on him.

"In the first study they found that twice as many mall shoppers who had just ridden an up escalator contributed to the Salvation Army than shoppers who had just ridden the down escalator … In a final study, participants watched film clips of scenes taken from an airplane above the clouds, or through the window of a passenger car. Participants who had watched the clip of flying up above the clouds were 50 percent more cooperative in a computer game than those who had watched the car ride down on the ground. Overall these studies show remarkable consistency, linking height and different prosocial behaviors—i.e., donations, volunteering, compassion, and cooperation." [...]

The US Postal Service is once again pleading with legislators to allow it to make its service less efficient and more expensive. Postmaster General John E. Potter told an assortment of lawmakers that the Internet and organizations like FedEx are but a few of the ills plaguing this country's mail system, and that his agency will probably lose some $238 billion over the next 10 years if he can't make some cuts.