7 for Sunday

A single phrase — physical literacy — finally names what five years of conversations had been circling. Alongside it: David Bohm’s warning against smashing a watch into fragments rather than finding its natural parts, a meditation on why we bother taking photos or building websites when even Alexandria’s half-million scrolls amounted to almost nothing, and the quietly useful move of flipping an article inside-out to turn its observations about others into questions about yourself.

Sitting with eyes closed at a scenic overlook, listening to the vast landscape, turns out to be the closest thing to staring into the oceanic abyss — without the panic. Sound, and where we direct our attention, runs quietly through an issue that also confronts a 2,000-slip slipbox that somehow isn’t generating enough thinking. The culprit: organizing like a librarian instead of a writer, filing by where things came from rather than where they’re going.

Freud, told his cancer might kill him, replied that it may be fatal but it’s not serious — a distinction that cuts cleanly through an issue wrestling with what actually deserves to be taken seriously. Kahneman’s separation of happiness from satisfaction adds another wedge. And somewhere in the middle, a gifted copy of Becoming a Supple Leopard arrives at exactly the right moment, alongside a quietly devastating reframe: “I made you some toast! But I…

Mary Rueflé’s admission stops the issue cold: she writes not because she has something to say, but because she hasn’t yet heard what she’s been listening for. From there, a Picasso exhibition becomes a meditation on prolific output versus dark sides, Muhammad Ali reframes who’s really crossing whose road, and a unearthed presentation from Denmark makes the case that the real magic in movement — as in most things — happens where the cameras aren’t…

David Bowie warns against playing to the gallery. Alan Jacobs points out that rushing through leisure means you’ve missed the point entirely. But the sharpest turn comes near the end: a reconsideration of gatekeepers — not as barriers keeping you out, but as walls keeping you in — borrowed, improbably, from a Douglas Adams asylum built inside-out so the whole world was the one committed.