If you braid them, they make a circle!  Maybe.  Metaphorically braid, and metaphorical circle. Whatever.

If you've never yet heard David Foster Wallace's "This is Water" commencement speech, here is a recording of it.  I highly recommend it to you.

A throw-back for my fellow Gen-Xers: the power of anti-retroviral therapy--what I believe we first called the "drug cocktail"--for AIDS.

A story about a guy "in the tech sector" (bless his heart) who runs a one-man publishing shop, and has published some really rare books.  One good thing about this new book model, especially the "print on demand" revolution, is the way it has recovered a bunch of otherwise obscured books.  My favorite old press like this, from the 1950s and the 60s, was the Centaur Press.  

The reality of what college and higher education is in America is not places like UVa and Harvard--it's far more prosaic than poetic. We do well to remember that.  

This forthcoming book looks really interesting: "In Thinking Like an Economist: How Economics Became the Language of U.S. Public Policy, I argue that while economists’ policy advice may sometimes have an impact, the spread of an economic style of reasoning — basic microeconomic ideas about efficiency, tradeoffs, incentives, choice and competition, spread through professional schools and institutionalized through organizational and legal change — has had more fundamental effects."  

Mr. Rogers, critic of consumerism.  And may the boom in Mr. Rogers stories end soon.

Interesting--Americans are moving less and less. Why is this and what does this mean, you ask?  Here's the author's view:  

I see three broad changes that have changed the outcome of those decisions.

First, real incomes have remained flat for over the last 35 years. Americans have been able to improve their standard of living only by both working more and borrowing more. That includes an increase in the number of women working, leading to the growth of dual-income households.

The increase in both family and personal debt both makes selling a house more difficult and reduces financial resources available for a move. Meanwhile, the growth of dual-income households restricts moves, because any long-distance move would require both partners to find a suitable job in a new destination.

Second, the baby boomer generation has squeezed younger generations out of housing and job opportunities. 

Finally, Americans are less likely to move due to the widespread adoption of advanced information and communications technologies, such as the internet and smartphones.

 

People move, sometimes for one kind of necessity, sometimes for another.  They need to get away.  Or they need to start anew. Or they need to arrive somewhere.  Or they just need to move.  Sapiens ubicumque peregrinatur est.  As Augustine and the Boss both know, everybody's got a hungry heart.  Here's an advental journey for you, to complete the wreath.