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Some highlights from the last week include:

• Watching a colleague who didn’t grow up in the US try hot chocolate for the first time. It blew her mind, and it was amazing to watch such a pure moment.

• Grocery shopping with a toddler who insisted on pushing his own cart.

• Watching both BB King and Aretha Franklin on Sesame Street. (see: toddler)

• Braving the blustery, wintery mix on a morning commute (feels like was 20°). And feeling like I could conquer anything afterward.

• Finishing Louise Erdrich’s latest book, The Mighty Red.

• Compensating for last year’s Charlie Brown tree by buying a big, beautiful Christmas tree this year. And then laughing hysterically the day after putting it up when it opened up, realizing it is now about as wide as it is tall.

• Hanging our homemade oyster shell ornaments on said Christmas tree.

• Art.

I checked out OSGEMEOS (see above), a great exhibit at the Hirshhorn right now (actually through August 2025, so if you’re in DC or coming to DC before then, it’s worth checking out). It highlights the work of Brazilian twin brothers inspired by hip-hop culture. You get to see their evolution from drawings on the walls of their childhood home to large-scale murals taking over cityscapes to the fantastical worlds they’re now inhabiting. Highly recommended.

I was also in awe at the Basquiat exhibit (above) and was glad to have the chance to walk through the room where they turned Laurie Anderson loose (below) so I could once again be mesmerized by her genius. Playing tourist in my one town is awesome. People may underestimate DC, but free museums are a huge perk.

Besides the great art, here are 5 other things I was looking at and loving this week:

The story I shared the most this week: The decampment to the small town — a pinprick of a village a 3½-hour drive from Manhattan that then had a population just over 3,000 — allowed Mr. [Ken] Burns to explore, gave him peace and shut him out from the rest of the world so he could see it more clearly.

Breaking up with Amazon-owned Goodreads was easier than I thought it’d be. I went with The Storygraph. And like many, I like the stats, the lack of ads, the simplicity of it, the potential for recommendations, and the owner. So, if you’re a fellow book geek, join me there. Bonus: Exporting/importing Goodreads stats and having books/dates read/ratings transfer to The Storygraph was effortless.

This is raw and real. And really well written, because Patrick Fealey is a journalist and writer, who’s worked for and written for huge publications you’ve all heard of. It’s also one of the most gutting stories on homelessness I’ve read. And the GoFundMe set up by a reader is worth a few bucks for Fealey, if you can spare it.

I like Noah Kalina’s Is This a Gift Guide? gift guide. Also, Austin Kleon’s 10 gift ideas for artists, writers, and other creative weirdos — like Noah, he was inspired by the things he uses every day in his own studio. Have you seen more good ones like this? Share, if so. (I’d love to do something similar, but it’d just be like 20 posts of “here are the coffee beans I love” — maybe next year.) And, of course, there’s the always aspirational Holiday Gift Guide from The New York Times.

Ballenesque.