One system's obvious flaws conceal some other system's deeper ones.  

After a day and a half of this corporate vanity fair I realize the most remarkable thing about those urinals, by far, is that they are not individually sponsored.

1. Arguably business is more precisely the discipline of determining what you can convince people to pay to believe they are averting.  

2. The two urinals for shorter people are, of course, next to each other. Sorting is not exactly the same as design.

There is something elusively dehumanizing about standing, alone, in a room designed for 34 adult men (and 2 shorter ones) to urinate at once.

Business is the discipline of determining what people will pay to believe they are improving. Service is the much different art of actually improving something.

If a tenth of a percent of the marketing effort squandered on cars in this country went to glamorizing public transportation, and a tenth of a percent of the expense were spent improving it, our cities would be very different.

I've told you many things that were not entirely true, sometimes (but not always) knowingly, and if I'm going to fix the damage this has done to us, I have to tell you two more.  

There are not very many cities left that simply end, and fewer still that are complex enough to end and then begin again.  

Her dress might have reached her ankles if it had started at her knees.  

Today, on a broken sidewalk outside a failing book store in a city passing quietly from resurgence to flight, we will not quite yet meet.  

The Glass of Regard is, in the strictest literal sense, a hotel.

The idea of voting for either of them fundamentally disgusts me. There is no meaningful sense in which we are choosing a human being to lead anything humane or social. We are choosing between the programed factotums of two nominal subdivisions of a single syndicate of sinecures that not only lacks a shred of moral authority, but lacks the cognizance or conscience to even recognize this as a flaw. We are choosing not between philosophies or ethics or principles or ends or even means, but between arbitrary and constrained agendas of heartlessly and gutlessly limited opposition. We are choosing a minor temporary oscillation of a sealed and rotting political ecosystem whose overriding meta-agenda in all things is the self-perpetuation of a government of convenience in service of a society guided passively and only by the relentless exercise of systemically myopic greed.

Like most art forms, postcards would be better with b-sides.

As a plaintively dour postcard wedged into the frame of her mirror suggests, since it doesn't look like anywhere they expect strangers to come for fun, Kasha, the woman who cuts my hair, is from Glubczyce. I know this is neither a country nor a capital, and from her accent would guess something Romanian, but it turns out to be a small city in Poland.  

"What part of Poland?", I ask, setting myself up to show off.  

"South", she says, frowning at my right ear so intently that I begin wondering whether I left something in it.  

"So, near Slovakia?" Surely among patrons of a Concord Avenue hair salon I am unusual in knowing what countries border Poland to the south at all, never mind being able to correctly guess which one is closest to her hometown.  

"Yes", she agrees quickly, putting a crisp end to the conversation.  

When I look it up later I discover that Glubczyce is on the border with the Czech Republic, not Slovakia. It's certainly nearer to Slovakia than it is to, say, Mauritius, but I don't think that's what she meant.  

Mauritius is an island nation in the Indian Ocean east of Madagascar and south of the Seychelles. Its capital is Port Louis. I say this silently to myself while Kasha makes my hair look surprisingly good in peace. Being able to make someone's hair look surprisingly good is an international skill. Knowing the names for things you've never seen is sleep-timer magic for circus librarians.