In case you missed this 3-year-old reciting a Billy Collins poem from memory back in January, please, please, please watch it now.

Steve McCurry's beautiful photographs of people reading around the world

"It's a pizza shop that's a shrine to pizza." The world's first pizza museum is opening in Philadelphia (via The New York Times)

An eight-year-old girl starts a lemonade stand to help end slavery...and raises $50K in two months (via Huffington Post)

It's one of the more annoying aspects of growing up, but it's undeniable: at some point, you are forced to admit that many old saws turn out to be true. I almost gagged the first time a stranger said to me, as I walked with my 5-day-old firstborn, "The days are long, but the years are short!" And what do you know, a blink of an eye later, that kid is starting school. Wise Crone Stranger was totally right! Weird!

Speaking of aging quickly, how about going from 0-years-old to 100 in 150 seconds? This video is not only the most uplifting way ever to learn to count to 100 in Dutch, but also a beautiful portrait of time. Filmmaker Jeroen Wolf asked people on the streets of Amsterdam to look into the camera and say their ages. The result is a fascinating compendium of faces, of the different ways people show their age, as well as the different attitudes they have toward their age. Just watch the range of emotions with which these people say their ages: happy, resigned, proud, reluctant. (According the filmmaker, it took him nearly a year to complete the project, and the hardest person to find was the 99 year-old.)

'100' (from 0 to 100 years in 150 seconds) from Filmersblog on Vimeo.

If someone were to ask you right now, how would you say your age? With an impish grin? With a mournful sigh? Tell us in the comments!

(via Gizmodo.)

Read More:
Singapore's Secret to Aging Well
How One Actress Refused to Admit Her Age

This may be the more advanced version of color blocking, but it's easy to pull off: Pair graphic pieces with a solid item that matches the darkest color in the print. You want to ground the look with rich fall shades, not summer brights. 

Clockwise from top: Jaclyn Smith, $25, kmart.com. Kate Spade New York, $288, katespade.com. Lafayette 148 New York, $498, lafayette148ny.com.

I saw tons of styles with tiny faces at the Basel watch fair this year. They're a delicate alternative to the oversize boyfriend watch, and perfect for layering with bracelets. 

From top: Miami Beach by Glam Rock, $195, nordstrom.com. Burberry, $750, burberry.com. Hermès, $2,150, hermes.com for stores. DKNY, $195, macys.com. Coach, $398, coach.com for stores. Citizen Watch Company of America, $325, amazon.com.

Photo: Thinkstock

Here's something I just invented: the How-You-Check-Out-A-New-Book-Personality-Test. For incredible insights into your truest self, please answer the following question:

When picking up a book for the first time, do you first:
1) Read the back cover?
2) Read the first sentence?
3) Examine the author's photo?
4) Flip through and read sentences at random, as you will with ten other books standing there in the book store/library/your living room until your feet fall asleep and you've completely forgotten who or where you are?

For me, it's #4. (By the way, if you answered #4, according to my proprietary How-You-Check-Out-A-New-Book-Personality-Test (TM), you are a most serious and brilliant reader.) Of course I read for a gripping story and unforgettable characters and all the things that we wallow in novels for, but there is also a special joy in sentences, in bits and bobs, and even in the connections between seemingly unconnected books.

Which is why I love The Infinite Book, a text made up of other texts. What story is created when bits of other stories are jangled together like a pocketful of change? The result is surprisingly coherent, or anyway it can be. Bedtime stories are read, become nightmarish, blend into fact, meld into poetry. It's a lovely way to find a new book to read (clicking on each line gives you more information about the from which book it's been plucked) -- and a lovely way to think about reading. Reading as collecting, reading as an art form all its own.

Check out the Infinite Book, from Bkclb.

Read More:
Must-Reads of the Month
Tame Your Overstuffed Bookshelves
Read the Book You've Always Meant to Read

I once read that a house cat will go completely feral within a few days of living outside, a figure I think about every long weekend. It's a common symptom of a little extra time off that we get a bit, possibly overly, relaxed -- those back-to-work emails can be unintentionally snarky, or worse, sound angry when we mean to be jokey. (Or, even worse worse, when we're actually angry.)

We've all done it: written a friend or coworker an email in the heat of the moment, typed out in the garbled language of anger. Or else, sent the boss a note pounded into a smart phone while crossing the street, which you only later realize is characterized by a completely unintentional brusqueness. Thankfully, some smartypantses (smarties pants?) last year invented ToneCheck, a program that makes sure your emails don't sound angry. (That we're only figuring out this now? we're adding to the list of things we wish we were on top of.)

Still: One free download later, your emails will feature this handy key along the bottom:


As your note veers into the spittle-flecked screed territory, the "tone alert" bar increases in concerned red lines. Key phrases are called out, and  helpfully labelled with corresponding emotions (over 200 of them, according to the ToneCheck site): "upsetting," "concerning," all the way up to "aggressive." The idea being you'll never accidentally start a digital feud with your sister because she thought you were mad and you thought she was mad and... well, you get the idea.

Read More:
Increase Your Workplace Well-Being
A Roadmap to Email Sanity
The Email Typo That Led to Love