Gorgeous. Thomas Beller writes about watching his daughter discover (and undiscover) books in The New Yorker – “A moment later, I tossed her Rilke’s “Letters to a Young Poet.” I walked out of the room to make breakfast, and glanced back to see her examining the cover. When I returned, she was outside, looking for worms, wearing a shirt of mine to keep warm. I watched as she bent down to inspect the earth. She stood up to remove the shirt and, with the impeccable logic of childhood, gently spread it over the moist, muddy ground and stood on it to keep her feet dry.” – RT
Jhumpa Lahiri in the NYT on perfect sentences – “I remember reading a sentence by Joyce, in the short story “Araby.” It appears toward the beginning. “The cold air stung us and we played till our bodies glowed.” I have never forgotten it. This seems to me as perfect as a sentence can be. It is measured, unguarded, direct and transcendent, all at once. It is full of movement, of imagery. It distills a precise mood. It radiates with meaning and yet its sensibility is discreet.” RT
Hilarious. Dalia Lithwick of Slate decides to wear Axe for an entire week. “Sunshine. Harps. It was the most sublimely powerful fragrance experience of my adult life. Truly. After decades of smelling like a flower or a fruit, for the first time ever, I smelled like teen boy spirit. I smelled the way an adolescent male smells when he feels that everything good in the universe is about to be delivered to him, possibly by girls in angel wings.” RT
Sherlock returns!! “Sherlock, Season 3″ — Sundays, January 19-February 2, 2014, 10:00 p.m. ET — Benedict Cumberbatch (The Fifth Estate, Star Trek Into Darkness) and Martin Freeman (The Hobbit, The Office UK) return as Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson in three new 90-minute episodes – “The Empty Hearse” (January 19), “The Sign of Three” (January 26) and “His Last Vow” (February 2) – of the contemporary reinvention of the Arthur Conan Doyle classic, written and created by Steven Moffat (Dr. Who) and Mark Gatiss (Game of Thrones). – via PBS
And finally, Captain America: The Winter Soldier Teaser!
Coffee and Irony 