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.

The flowers fill a good-size room, rows upon rows of display cases that for the most part contain what look like entirely ordinary plants. If you entered unknowing, you would wonder first how they are preserved, and perhaps second how they were cleaned so thoroughly in preparation. If you don't know that the flowers are glass, the exhibition is inscrutably mundane. If you do, it is even harder to comprehend.  

But the flowers date from an age in which technology was still a source of inspiring possibilities, not incrementally more craven shortcuts. A Harvard botany professor, dissatisfied with his materials, commissioned a German glassmaker and eventually his son to spend 50 years making meticulous glass models of 847 species of plants and their magnified entrails. Not only have we probably lost this skill, we have probably also lost the will. As usual, with our tools for studying our world we end up revealing ourselves.