When Dolly Parton died, a lot of people learned she slept about five hours a night — and a certain kind of person felt tremendously validated. There's a difference between someone who's depleted and someone who's lit up, and we keep citing the second to justify living like the first.

A man loses everything and demands to see the books. What he gets instead is a tour of the weather, a wild donkey, an ostrich who is not good at her job, rain falling on land where nobody lives, and a flower no one sees. The season ends here.

Someone asks what you've been up to and you feel around in your pockets for an accomplishment. On front porches, the extinct verb "visiting," and what actually happens in the two seconds after you decline to file a report.

There's a number you could reach in two taps from a locked screen, and you're not really asking it how the work is. Two brothers from Los Angeles, forty-five years of records nobody bought, and the difference between a standard and a scoreboard.

The marathon is 26.2 miles because of where a nursery window was. On the baseboards you never agreed to clean, a decision William James made in 1870, and why the energy you have left over at the end is the whole point.

A woman spent four months on a business and three years explaining it. There is a kind of report that finds out what happened and refuses to find out what it meant — and it's the reason flying is safe. Two investigations, and only one of them is any use to you.

Gatsby got to the green light. George Bailey never crossed the water at all. On the other ledger — the one that records what you are, not what you produce.

Name, title, number: everything a stranger needed to know about what to do with you, and nothing about you. On what was settled long before the card was printed.

Everything in your drafts folder has a perfect record. It's also never done anything. On finishing — and letting things leave.

Twenty compliments and one criticism, and somehow the account is overdrawn. On where the deciding vote actually lives — and the woman who sewed her poems into booklets nobody would see.