7 for Sunday

The English language was missing a word for the nearly uncontrollable urge to press a book into someone’s hands and say no, you have to read this right now, let me hold your coffee — and now it has one. Bibliofervor anchors an issue moving through Harper Lee on real courage, Mark Manson’s distinction between competence and character, and a personal test for new technology: if you can’t tell whether it’s worth it without trying it, it probably isn’t.

Three questions — am I happy, am I generous, am I contributing to the world? — form the axis the issue turns on, with the honest acknowledgment that answering yes to all three simultaneously, over the course of a life, is the actual moral challenge. Elsewhere: over 1,300 daily podcast episodes, and the gradual realization that “daily” had become the least important part of the original question. And when the crazy-brain needs resetting, you just start running like you stole something.

An octopus, who can move and see in all directions simultaneously, probably conceptualizes time completely differently than we do — which lands just after a description of drifting into a patio trance with no clear sense of whether a moment or ten minutes passed. Randall Munroe’s cartoon notes that daytime is just us closing our eyes and pretending infinity goes away. And three false starts at sketching turn out to be a surprisingly precise map of personal growth.

“Bezzle” — the magic interval when the con artist knows he has the money but the victim doesn’t yet know it’s gone — is only the first detour in an issue that wanders through radium suppositories, the question of whether your primary language limits the thoughts you’re capable of having, and the discovery of No!vember at 19,050 days old. A bit of a shame, but better late than never.