Relationships and Going Places

Kevin Starr writes: "In its final effect and meaning, however, the Bridge is more than the sum total of any of these. The Golden Gate Bridge embodies a beauty at once useful and transcendent. It emanates a music of mathematics and design and offers enduring proof that human beings can alter the planet with reverence, can mend or complete their environment for social purposes." more »

Among this year's new participants are the American Civil War Center at in Richmond, VA; the New Mexico Museum of Space History; the Cleveland Botanical Garden in Cleveland, Ohio; the Children's Creativity Museum in San Francisco, CA; the Menil Collection in Houston, TX; and the World Figure Skating Museum & Hall of Fame in Colorado Springs, CO. more »

Doris O'Brien writes: The whole world seems fixated on keeping in touch with everyone other than those who are with them. Yesterday I observed a couple seated at a table at a pleasant outdoor café, perhaps to enjoy an early dinner together. It could have been a time for hand-holding or sharing the details of one another’s day. Instead, both were staring into their own latest-technology iphones, their minds elsewhere rather than on each other. more »

‘I watched the Silver Swan, which had a living grace about his movement and a living intelligence in his eyes-watched him swimming about as comfortably and unconcernedly as it he had been born in a morass instead of a jeweller’s shop - watched him seize a silver fish from under the water and hold up his head and go through the customary and elaborate motions of swallowing it...' Mark Twain more »