A Random Assortment

It took me a long time to realize that the metro in DC is an example of brutalist architecture. I just thought that's what it looked like to build things underground. (One of my professors once explained why it is that so many universities ended up with brutalist libraries, but I forget that now. Something about publishing rapidly expanding at just the wrong time.) 

~ An article on a long-lost essay on detective fiction by Agatha Christie (via Hopkins). The essay is published as the preface to Ask a Policeman, which was

the second novel written by members of the Detection Club, a group of British authors set up in 1930. The book's title was dreamed up by Milward Kennedy, John Rhode thought out the murder and suspects, and Gladys Mitchell, Helen Simpson, Sayers and Anthony Berkeley lent their detective creations to solve the mystery. The authors then swapped characters – so Berkeley, for example, took Lord Peter Wimsey and Sayers took Berkeley's Roger Sheringham – allowing them to poke playful fun at each other.
"The Detection Club was a dining club for crime writers – they used to raise money to pay for their dinners by writing these novels," says Brawn.

~ Paul Elie on the practical reasons his family homeschools.

~I haven't watched, "Breaking Amish," but I have scene an episode of "My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding," and it made me somewhat uncomfortable both in the same way that most reality television does, but also because it plays up to stereotypes.

~ I feel, often, like I'm in a really foreign place, even though I'm only 15 hours by car from my hometown. These streetcar shelters, which I pass every day on the way to work/school, and which I never thought twice about--imagining they were just a decorative extension of the gate to certain communities--are an instance of that.

~ Alan Jacobs, on why he loves Bakhtin. I've only read Bakhtin on Dostoevsky, but I loved him for just the same reasons that Jacobs expresses more eloquently than I ever could have.

~ A Pennsylvania House candidate was threatened in a letter that said, "a woman's place is at home and not trying to be in politics." The "barn doors on the property were also opened, releasing her animals into a fenced area."