What a great idea: a small theater company in Portland, OR performs "Trek in the Park"--"a live performance of a classic Star Trek episode." I'd happily perform Golden Girls episodes in a Minneapolis park if I found some willing costars.

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I wasn't able to get into Justin Cronin's The Passage before I had to return it to the library, but the epigraph stood out for me: Shakespeare's Sonnet 64 with the final couplet lopped off. I like reading and writing sonnets, but find the turn in the final couplet (or sestet) often feels dishonest ("All sonnets say the same thing"--William Carlos Williams). Sonnet 64's final couplet doesn't feel as forced as others, but I think I agree with Cronin that the poem's stronger without it. I had a professor who theorized that Shakespeare wrote the first twelve lines of his sonnets, then farmed out the final couplets to an apprentice.

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From Victor Dover's "Retrofitting Suburbia":

"On crude functional levels the postwar suburbs have failed. One can measure, for example, the miserable rise in vehicle-miles traveled, up 40 percent in just the past decade, with all the associated problems of energy, pollution, time and stress. Or one can watch the annual budget scramble in which unsustainable municipalities attempt to provide services to far-flung citizens or to maintain an inefficient, non-compact infrastructure...On a less crude, human-nurturing level, sprawl does not measure up either. We are only beginning to discern the social entropy that results when 'sense of place' vanishes. Participating in self-government has become a low priority for many because they've lost the sense of belonging to a local culture."

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New research from Harvard indicates that doing a good deed can temporarily strengthen your physical endurance--and doing an evil deed may give you an even greater boost.