Men! What are they thinking? We can't always answer that, but we'll be posting our favorite glimpses into their world in this space every Thursday.

Photo: High Museum of Art

* In 1928, Bill Traylor, an illiterate former slave in his seventies, moved from the Alabama plantation where he was born to Montgomery. There, he drew what he saw, and if you're lucky enough to live near Atlanta, you can see his amazing work on display at the High Museum of Art through May. (Prospero)

* Warning: These photos of author Michael Cunningham's library may inspire bookshelf envy. (Work in Progress)

* Jack Nicholson has been sitting courtside at Lakers games for 30 years, and the L.A. Times put together the photos to prove it. (LATimes)

* "I am still very much aware of people's perceptions of me—or what I imagine their perceptions to be... And now that I am a published young adult author, in addition to my job as, essentially, a reviewer of YA fiction, some of the people in my imagination look at the direction my life has taken, furrow their brows, and mumble: 'Weird.'"—Lucas Klauss on being a grown man who loves young adult fiction. (Omnivoracious)

Photo: Thinkstock

"If Mother Teresa built a platform with the tech base of Groupon, Foursquare, & Netflix, with the heart of 'CNN Heroes,' it would look like HopeMob." Intriguing, right? According to Caitlin Crosby, writing for the Huffington Post, HopeMob is an innovative way to reach out to specific people in need, and one that promises to be more satisfying than writing a check to big charity, never knowing exactly what your money is being used for.  With HopeMob, individuals can vote on which people to help and pledge as much or as little as they like to the selected cause.

The causes are small-scale stories. To me this is exactly what makes HopeMob so compelling. When I think about big, abstract issues like hunger or deforestation my mind starts to blank out. But a 13-year-old boy with one tattered pair of shoes, who needs help getting more suitable footwear—that I can understand. A mother of four whose car has died. A little girl in Haiti who needs to get to the US for life-saving surgery. 

HopeMob may not be as hilarious as, say, a 20,000-person flash mob dancing to the Black-Eyed Peas, but provides that same swell of "That is the coolest thing ever!" feeling, that sense of being a part of something special. Learn more about HopeMob and how to get involved here,

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Photo: Thinkstock

Many excellent food sites have recipe boxes that will organize your favorites, from appetizers to desserts. But they're usually presented in a text-heavy list; you have to click through for photos. Not Pinterest, though. The personal bulletin board service is built on images (99% of which are totally drool-worthy), so you can click through colorful displays of noodle soups, pink and green cupcakes, cheesy pull-apart bread, icy margaritas with their glasses rimmed in salt, and so on.

Like Facebook, Twitter and other popular social sites, Pinterest starts out as a simple lark and can quickly become a time-suck. But it can also be a great way to get ideas (What should I make for dinner tonight? What can I bring to my neighbor's house for that potluck next week? What can I do with this avocado besides make guacamole?). Before you fall down the Pinterest rabbit hole, here are a few pieces of advice:

DO create separate boards for each subject you like. Favorite recipes and drinks are common, but you don't have to be limited by broad categories. I've seen boards for canning, "inspiring cookies" and even peanut butter pies. Users can follow all your boards or just a single board.

DON'T just follow your friends. As with Facebook and Twitter, Pinterest lets you create a list of people to follow. It's fun to follow friends, of course, but some of the most interesting recipes you'll find on Pinterest might come from people you don't know. You can follow Oprah's Pinterest boards for everything from winter soups to delectable desserts, and here are 5 more fantastic boards I've started following:
Jane Wang's Delicious board
Allison Butt's Recipes board
Callye Alvarado's My Love Affair with Fig board
Marly's Best Vegetarian Sandwiches board
Whole Foods Market's Cheese Is the Bee's Knees board

Photo: Flight 001

The weekend is within reach...let these little splurges make getting there more fun.

Crumpled City Map, $22. Finally, no more fruitless attempts at refolding a map correctly. This guide to Barcelona (also available  for other cities, including Amsterdam and Tokyo) takes 2 seconds to open and close, and provides city details including streets, monuments, museums, art galleries and more.

Romanesco Broccoli Seeds, $3.95. No matter what part of the country you live in, you can start planting vegetables indoors now. This broccoli variety, which has beautiful, apple-green whorled heads, has been around since the 16th century.

Pig Cooking Lid, $18. You can place this multipurpose silicone circle over ingredients in a pot to help them cook evenly (it releases steam through the pig’s snout), or use it to grip a hard-to-open lid.

Ticket Stub Diary, $10. Never forget those front row seats at a Bruce Springsteen concert with this booklet that helps you preserve memories from concerts, museums, movies, sporting events, Broadway shows and other outings.

Illustration: Christopher Silas Neal

Have you cut gluten out of your diet? If so, you're part of a growing trend; sales of gluten-free products totaled about $2.6 billion in 2010. Now some beauty companies are also touting products free of the hot-button protein (found in grains like wheat and rye). The question is: If you can't stomach gluten—either because you have celiac disease or a less severe intolerance—do you really need to avoid it in your moisturizer and shampoo? Not at all, says Sheila Crowe, MD, a gastroenterologist and professor of medicine at the University of California in San Diego. "There's absolutely no evidence that using a topical product that contains gluten will cause a problem." One caveat, though: If you're a lip licker, you could ingest some gluten from a lipstick, gloss, or balm that isn't gluten-free. So if you have celiac disease, look for lip products without ingredients that include oats, rye, barley, or wheat (such as moisturizing wheat germ oil). We like Mychelle Lip Plumping Gloss ($27; mychelle.com). Otherwise, feel free to use any beauty products you like—just don't eat them.


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Photo: Thinkstock

We have nothing against bananas and tiny boxes of raisins, but sometimes you need something new in your emergency snack cache. Enter these interesting, tasty and healthy offerings: each come in handy single-serving packages.

Planters NUT-rition Energy Mix
Everything in these 180-calorie bags pulls its weight, from the dark chocolate-covered soynuts to the whole wheat pretzels, so you won't be picking through to get to the good stuff. $5.99 for 7 1.25-ounce packs.

Funky Monkey Carnaval Mix
Crunchy fruit? Why yes! One 110-calorie packet of freeze-dried fruit has organic banana, pineapple, apple and papaya--and nothing else. $1.99 for a 1-ounce bag.

BelVita Breakfast Biscuits in Apple Cinnamon
Cookies for breakfast always seems like a good idea to us, but sometimes we feel a tad guilty scarfing a chocolate chip cookie before 9AM. These not-too-sweet crisps--a pack of 4 has 230 calories--are the perfect solution. $3.69 for 5 packs of 4 biscuits.

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Photo: Thinkstock

Isn't this what happens every February 14th? You plan to spend the night reconnecting with your partner, who you haven't seen much of lately. You envision a leisurely dinner out (where someone else cooks) so that you two can talk about important stuff, like the President's budget proposal, your jobs, the Oscars and the return of Mad Men. But then the restaurant somehow loses your reservation (or you, ahem, realize that no one ever got around to making a reservation), so the plan turns into catching up on reruns while eating takeout in front of the TV.

Here's a better idea than vegging out side-by-side: Invite another couple over (you must know some other pair who suffered from a case of reservation-making amnesia). While it may sound counter-intuitive to spend the holiday of love with two other people, science says that a double-date can spice up your love life. A study by psychologists at Wayne State University found that when couples engaged in intense, personal discussions with other couples in a controlled laboratory setting, they left feeling not only closer to their new friends, but to their own romantic partners. The couples also reported learning new things about their partners, and described feelings of novelty (and we've all heard how the spark of newness can reignite a slow-burn relationship). The key here will be to keep the TV turned off--and the wine flowing--so you can focus on good, stimulating, thought-provoking conversation. (Just remember to make time after your friends leave to spend some, um, silent time together, as well.)

Keep reading:
The latest science on love
How to be more giving in your marriage--without feeling like a maid

Photo: Thinkstock

I know I'm not the first woman to say this but here goes: my husband is a sports fan, and I am not. This means that we often have conversations that go like this:

Husband: "Sports-related thing!"
Wife: "Huh."
Husband (with feeling): "SPORTS-RELATED THING!"
Wife: "Yes, you're absolutely right. "
Husband: "No...Sports! Related! Thing!?!"
Wife: "Right."

Lately though, he's been telling me about a story that really captured my imagination -- along with the rest of the world's. Jeremy Lin, as every sports fan knows (and every spouse of a sports fan has a vague awareness of), has in the past few weeks gone from being an unknown bench player who was sleeping on his brother's couch to being the subject of ecstatic, punning headlines on every sports page everywhere. (LINSANITY!) When several of the Knicks' main players had to sit out with injuries, recent Harvard grad Lin was called up to play. What resulted was a five-game (so far) winning streak, ecstatic fan freak-outs, an increased interest in the usually uninspiring New York Knicks, and a flurry of editorials on how Lin's emergence will change the world of race in sports.

I love what Jay Caspian Kang wrote for Grantland: "Then there's this very sappy reason for why Linsanity has taken off in New York: Basketball is at its best when five guys who love to play with one another outhustle and outplay a more talented opponent...The Linsanity Knicks run hard, play unselfishly, chest-bump, and play with a swagger that has nothing to do with the other team." In other words, here are people working hard, playing together, and having fun. Isn't that what sports should be all about? Or, for that matter, life? (Read Kang's whole piece for a cogent analysis of what makes this player great.)

What really inspires about the Lin story—uh, Linspires?—is the idea that someone's prodigious talents can be quietly overlooked for years, and that if he keeps working hard and doing what he loves, something good will come of it. He might just even school a group of sweaty millionaires in the true meaning of teamwork.

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The Spirit of Olympics and Your Own Path to Victory