Get ready to be mystified or at least entertained.

Say this for Marvin Harrison: He tried to be his own person.

American preparations for the 2010 World Cup in South Africa took another potential major injury hit on Sunday when Clint Dempsey, who plays for Fulham in the English Premier League, sustained a serious knee injury.

Ten years ago, two girls went missing. Esther found her way back; Brooke didn’t. And so the story of two lost girls narrows to one.

A poster was widely cited as having galvanized votes for the Swiss measure but was also blamed for exacerbating hostility toward immigrants and instigating a media and legal circus. “We make posters, the other side goes to the judge,” is how Alexander Segert put it when we met here the other day. “I love it when they do that.

Charles Bukowski’s “The Laughing Heart”:

your life is your life
don’t let it be clubbed into dank submission.
be on the watch.
there are ways out.
there is a light somewhere.
it may not be much light but
it beats the darkness.
be on the watch.
the gods will offer you chances.
know them.
take them.
you can’t beat death but
you can beat death in life, sometimes.
and the more often you learn to do it,
the more light there will be.
your life is your life.
know it while you have it.
you are marvelous
the gods wait to delight
in you.

Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?

by Joyce Carol Oates

First published in Epoch, Fall 1966. Included in Prize Stories : O Henry Award Winners (1968), and The Best American Short Stories (1967).

There is something profoundly moving about this show; an inescapable nostalgia pervades it for that elusive American Century. The faith in the future, the belief that science and technology would bring us a better world, is part of a more innocent era. Seeing how one architect expressed its hopes and aspirations helps us to recapture the moment and value the maker on his own terms, in his own times, and in the context of what we have become.