Like Romans Applauding Lions

In the simplest sense, a blood chit is a prepared message, written in local languages, that a lost service member can present to most anyone who might help. It offers a rough description of the predicament – “I am not from here and would like to get back to where I belong” – along with both a request for aid and the promise of a reward for assistance. The chits are carried by many air crews, particularly fixed-wing air crews, and by other service members deemed to be at what the military calls “high risk of isolation.”

LaGuardia Airport is tiny compared to its sleek modern counterparts, like Atlanta or Denver with their endless parallel runways spread over thousands of acres. LaGuardia is jammed into just 680 urban acres; taxiways are tight; runways intersect; you can’t launch a departure until the arrival on the other runway crosses the threshold or else the airplanes will…collide. There’s also water on three sides to avoid falling into. There’s also adjacent behemoths Newark and (especially) Kennedy airports, each launching and landing one plane every thirty-six seconds, constantly breathing down LaGuardia’s neck. Kennedy, just twelve miles south, is obnoxious. If Kennedy goes into delays, it’s LaGuardia that has to change its runway configuration to help Kennedy get out of delays. All in all, the complications make this place so much more awesome than a place like Atlanta or Denver. This, anyway, is the LaGuardia mystique.

In the executive dining room of the Time Life Building, Don and Megan grift Heinz. Noted science-fiction writer Ken Cosgrove fluffs the clients between drinks and passes to Don for an alley-oop while he paints the scene. Megan masterfully tops from the bottom, paving a way into Don’s beans speech and then demurely beaming at him by his side. Suddenly the Don Draper show is a double act. Dinner becomes triumphant. Champagne is popped and fizzes all over the boundaries between Don and Megan’s sex and work lives. Boundaries, like cubicles, are mostly symbolic. They tend to inspire more transgression than they prevent.

The tricky thing about the wheel is not conceiving of a cylinder rolling on its edge. It’s figuring out how to connect a stable, stationary platform to that cylinder.

“The stroke of brilliance was the wheel-and-axle concept,” said David Anthony, a professor of anthropology at Hartwick College and author of “The Horse, the Wheel, and Language” (Princeton, 2007). “But then making it was also difficult.”

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The sensitivity of the wheel-and-axle system to all these factors meant that it could not have been developed in phases, he said. It was an all-or-nothing structure.

I have spent most of my life with the distinct sense that our minds and experiences are mysterious, ridiculously complex, and vastly different from one another’s, to a degree that makes everyday communication almost miraculous. There are times when this feeling is terrifying, and times when it’s reassuring, magical, or inspiring. I suppose I’ll have to take it up with a therapist someday. But I’m a believer in a world where you can spend 60 years married to someone and die in bed beside them without ever having gleaned more than a partial, sidelong understanding of what it’s like inside their head— leave alone just checking out their shoes, iPod, or Twitter feed and figuring you know something about them.

This is why I like music, and why I like thinking through the politics of style, or all the various culture-navigation choices of other music-lovers down in Austin: It offers surprising glimpses into how people see themselves, how they see the world, and how they’ve decided to present the former to the latter.

The Mail has an oral quality, prompting the exclamations of wonder or disgust that attend what the media critic Roy Greenslade has called “Hey, Doris!” stories. Its quirks include a love of aviation, and the annoying habit of inserting real-estate prices into stories that have nothing to do with them, such as the death in a ski-resort accident of a boy whose parents “live in a £1 million house.” Its columnists range from sensible to unhinged.