A few of our favorite things.

Jamison York

My staff pick this week is Paul Salopek’s 7-year, 22,000 mile, reporting assignment, which will begin in a few weeks.  Called Out of Eden, Salopek, a longtime foreign correspondent, has decided to trace the route that anthropologists believe the first humans took out of Africa.  He’s got a toolkit, some good shoes, a mix of grants and institutional support and a self-imposed plan for meticulously reporting stories through a dizzying array of countries and cultures.  I’m hoping that reading (and watching and listening to) his dispatches will be the next best thing to taking the trip myself.

Bob Garfield

Some random guy was on my Facebook page admiring this image. Who am I to argue? Guess my relationship to the guys on either side of me.

Editors note: You're encouraged to leave an imaginary back story for this photo in our comments section. You know, like the captions contest at the back of The New Yorker. - CN

PJ Vogt

This song Shiraz, by Action Bronson, is getting me through Monday.

Bronson's a Queens-based Albanian-American rapper who sounds A LOT like Supreme Clientele-era Ghostface Killah. In the video, he buys prosciutto and gives it to some middle-aged ladies in his neighborhood.

Doug Anderson

Designers Charles and Ray Eames may be best known for a chair, but their coolest accomplishment in my book was their 1977 short film Powers of Ten. In just nine minutes it illustrates the relative sizes of, well, pretty much everything we know of in the physical universe:

It’s easy to laugh at the dated feeling of the film, which exposes its age in everything from the synth music to the not-quite-seamless transitions from aerial photos to satellite images to intergalactic sketches. But as I read about the painstaking process of making the film in an age that predated not only Google Earth but also Photoshop, I realize how ambitious and remarkable the Eames’ accomplishment was. In recent years, the Eames office has also produced a cool, interactive web version of the film.
 
In honor of the centennial of Ray’s birth coming up this Saturday, I’d recommend a viewing of the fantastic 2011 Eames documentary, narrated by James Franco. (Warning: depictions of the playful work environment at the Eames’ studio are likely to make your job seem unbearingly boring by comparison.)

Sarah Abdurrahman

Photographer Mark Menjivar has spent years traveling across the country, taking pictures of people’s refrigerators. His series of images called “You Are What You Eat” offers a glimpse into the normally private ways people eat at home. Menjivar says that someone once compared being asked to have their refrigerator photographed to being asked to pose naked.  The refrigerators are photographed as they are, without anything added or taken away—here is the refrigerator of a botanist in Ft. Wayne, Indiana:

credit: Mark Menjivar

Chris Neary

Here's a good poem by Kay Ryan.

Things Shouldn't Be So Hard 

A life should leave
deep tracks:
ruts where she
went out and back
to get the mail
or move the hose
around the yard;
where she used to
stand before the sink,
a worn-out place;
beneath her hand
the china knobs
rubbed down to 
white pastilles;
the switch she 
used to feel for 
in the dark
almost erased.
Her things should 
keep her marks.
The passage
of a life should show;
it should abrade.
And when life stops,
a certain space—
however small—
should be left scarred 
by the grand and 
damaging parade.
Things shouldn't 
be so hard.

Also, this NyTimes Op-Ed from Ethan Roeder, the Obama's Campaign director of data. His main point is that maybe the media needs to take it down a notch with those scary stories about how much campaigns know about you. From the piece:

In other words, there is no giant blue computer sitting on the 101st floor of a sleek skyscraper, surrounded by bubbling tubes of illuminated liquid, spitting out the manifest destiny of America’s voters. Campaigns are moving away from the meaningless labels of pollsters and newsweeklies — “Nascar dads” and “waitress moms” — and moving toward treating each voter as a separate person.