Here are some things I’ve been reading and thinking about.

Best thing since last time: Lane DeGregory’s letter to a young journalist. Lane is good on both a journalism and a soul level. True role model status. My favorite line: “I wish I had done fewer phoners and gotten sunburned on more boats.”

“But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you.” A poem.

Meals as memory.

This is the kind of feature story that matters: a truthful, graceful, empathetic portrayal of people and their troubles. A soldier returns from Afghanistan and brings the war with him. But the story is about his wife.

Brigitte Höss remembers her father — Rudolf Höss, the Kommandant of Auschwitz — as the “nicest man in the world.”

Mesmerizing timelapse of San Francisco fog.

“What astonished us was that the electricity we generated was as strong and compelling as love had been 50 years before, that it scrambled the brain every bit as much.”

A night sky chart. What’s the chance I ever make it to a class 1 site?

Bill Nye the Science Guy’s rules, or, how he made elementary school so much better.

Bill Watterson’s life advice is remarkable. (No surprise.)

“All of the beauty I have always wanted to make with my words is all around me now. It is my life.“

“Being able to imagine “men’s” roles being played by women requires practice, but once you get going the possibilities are endless.”

“Sometimes you’re so close to another human, you forget they have eyes of their own.”

What is having it all? “It might be a fleeting moment — drinking a cup of coffee on a Sunday morning when the light is especially bright. It might also be a few undisturbed hours with a novel I’m in love with, a three-hour lunch with my best friend, reading “Goodnight Moon” to a child, watching a Nadal-Federer match.”

“I have all of my father’s old driver’s licences. That’s the kind of thing you save when somebody dies.” About getting old, and fear.

And this 17-minute film, set entirely on a teen’s computer screen.

I am so, so, so tired.

Here are some things I’ve been reading and thinking about.

11 untranslatable words from other cultures, illustrated. Mangata: the roadlike reflection of the moon on water.

“Kim can fish and fight and spit as well as any man on any boat, and she knows it and so do they.” A short, terrifically written and powerful profile of a tough, tough woman.

Gorgeous, gorgeous photos of London and other cities by Andrew Ridley.

“To invent your own life’s meaning is not easy, but it’s still allowed, and I think you’ll be happier for the trouble.” — Bill Watterson, who made his own life, is honored in this lovely short comic.

“People that tell you dreams and goals are worthless are plagues of the mind and spirit.“ A Twitter essay.

Why a three-second exposure made our ancestors seem more stern than they really were.

How strange to feel so happy for the perfect moments of people you’ll never know.

“Sometimes in London I felt stupidly enthusiastic, like a Labrador puppy let loose in an antique store, or overly loud and gauche, like a guest who shows up at a memorial service wearing a Hawaiian shirt and traumatizes the mourners with intrusive personal questions.” Yes! Me too!

Postscript by Seamus Heaney.

bell hooks explains the problem with demanding everyone think without regard to race, gender, etc.

Dream home.

“Toyota: You need a fucking car unfortunately.”

Mapping an invented country.

“I’m reading works that, not so long ago, used to make me feel connected and intellectual. Transcendentalists, the old white New England guys, Emerson and Whitman and Thoreau: the cast of a 19th-century Wes Anderson movie. This time around, I’m irritated at their Manifest Destinies and their blind surrender to wild Nature. Where did Thoreau get his money, hmm? How did Papa Walt have such a flexible schedule? Nothing they wrote tells that story.”