When I’m driving around in the midwest and a Bob Seger song comes on the radio, I tap the accelerator a little and go along a little more briskly, because Bob Seger is straight and honest, a simple man who understands what is right and good and talks plain and says what it is.

Except for this one song…

Lawrence, in a celebrated poem in Birds, Beasts and Flowers, writes: “Fish, oh Fish,/ So little matters!/…To be a fish!// So utterly without misgiving/…/ Loveless and so lively/…/…soundless, and out of contact./ They exchange no word, no spasm, not even anger./ Not one touch./ Many suspended together, forever apart,/ Each one alone with the waters…”

The poem takes six pages to say: “They are beyond me, are fishes.”

Once, observing a brushfire rage on the ridge of a hill, the magistrate let out these lines:

After the wildfire passed the hill / People have returned but the fire continues

At this he stopped, unable to proceed beyond such a clunky start. To save his superior’s face, Bai stepped in, chanting,

The flames are receding with the scarlet sun / While the mountain is wavering with the evening clouds.

I've signed on to be more than a driver. I'm now a professional waiter, as in someone who waits so that others don't have to… t's a reminder that so much of what is passed off as technology is really just hiding the humans at the other end of a machine: warehouse packers, proxy grocery shoppers, line cooks, and drivers doing the mundane tasks just out of sight of the end customer… Tech companies often don't eliminate the humans; they merely eliminate the human interactions.

[T]he entire Post-Impressionist section, from Van Gogh and Gauguin to the Nabis, was brought together in the refurbished galleries on the median level.

I’ve never thought of myself as a big Joni Mitchell fan - although I suddenly note that she wrote some of my favorite songs. But this brief concert from 1970 is flawless.

Three duels, two girls, and a gang war

In the old days…when people entered the gate, they believed that it made an absolute divide between the outside and inside. At the gate, you reached the end of your journey to get here; and the start of a new, internal journey.

Radiolab’s podcast on loops is trippy, funny, and alarmingly educational.

The double-rook sacrifice is the stuff of chess legend, but I’d never seen it done in a tournament or casual game, until Wednesday night…

Le Corbusier described the first time he ever saw an aeroplane, in the spring of 1909, in the sky above Paris…as the most significant moment of his life. He observed that the requirements of flight of necessity rid aeroplanes of all superfluous decoration and so unwittingly transformed them into successful pieces of architecture.

The same educational system, based on the edubba ‘tablet-house’ schools, was maintained for at least two millennia, since sign lists to teach the symbols, in the same order, have been found in the Sumerian city of Uruk dating from the third millennium and Ashurbanipal’s library in the Assyrian capital Nineveh from the mid-seventh century BC.

They posed for Meek minutes before tip-off. Their minds were elsewhere, on the battle against the Hawks’ Bob Pettit, the Bombardier from Baton Rouge. Their expressions are taut, severe. They might have been Civil War soldiers standing for Mathew Brady.

It is a watch that quietly, efficiently, unobtrusively, reminds you of the beauty of a certain kind of mid-century analog design, in a world that seems in a rush to forget that such things ever existed.

For Jones, Abbey Road was almost a provocation, taking the band far beyond its traditional vernacular. “I thought it was incredibly courageous of The Beatles to drop their format and move out musically like they did. To push the limit like that and reinvent themselves when they had no need to do that. They were the top band in the world but they still reinvented themselves. The music was just incredible so I felt I needed to pay tribute to it.”

When the Russians finally got access to the whole Updike canon, he says, they resisted the more complete picture. They liked the story they had:

Instead of seeing a lyrical realist who accurately and with melancholy described small-town America, Russians held on to the image of a daring innovator who transformed everyday life into myth, his father into a centaur, and literature into freedom.

You can have the fighters, the wrestlers, the hockey stars. When I was a kid George Attla was my guy, and I have no regrets.

It is not a luxury watch, but it looks very good. It is not a field watch, but it serves well in the field. It is not a flieger, but it can fly. Its chameleon-like ability to give good service in these diverse roles is not obvious. Until you wear one.

The Arashiyama Bamboo Grove is one of Kyoto’s top sights and for good reason: standing amid these soaring stalks of bamboo is like being in another world.

This watch ends up on my wrist far more often than I expected.