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I have been to many, many, many, many, many museums, so I do not use the superlative “best” lightly, and I apply it to the museum as a whole. But the museum I believe all other museums should try to emulate is the Yiddish Book Center in Amherst, Massachusetts.

Not what you were expecting, right? But it really is. Not just because I entered with an unremarkable interest in Yiddish books, but I left telling Josh, “Let’s sign up for a Yiddish class.”

So, you enter the building and watch a brief video giving context for how the museum came about, which is an interesting story because of Aaron Lansky’s (the founder) passion. Then, you go on a “tour.” I’m putting quotes around it because it’s not really a tour, per se — it’s more like a walking, spoken table of contents for the museum. A guide takes you around and shows you what you’ll see in each section. It takes about 20 minutes. Then, the guide brings you back to the beginning, and you explore the museum like you would any other museum, except you now know the path you want to take through the museum (everyone in our group took a different path), and you understand what you’re seeing.

Isn’t that so smart?

Finally, small exhibits are off the main exhibit, such as continual video playing from their story collection project. And interactive exhibits help you understand how they sort books that reach the museum. And through it all, you start to understand the scope of this project that began in 1980 to save the written history of a language.

The most brilliant part is how they get volunteers. So you have this language that few people speak, and it’s not easy to pick up a book in this language and read enough to understand how to sort it. So they have a program where they teach college students Yiddish in the morning, and then you practice using the language to sort books in the afternoon.

I was blown away by the attention to every small detail in the museum, and I’m still thinking about our time there long after the fact. I feel so lucky that I got to see it in 1997 before it opened, and then 27 years later to see what it has become.

I found this a few months ago but forgot about it until I saw the bookmark. Each year, this essay collection posts 24 essays from 24 writers, each featuring something the writer thought about a lot that year. Current essays (from this last year) include loneliness, caregiving, and money. Each essay is personal, capturing an individual’s thoughts vs. trying to define the year.

But the period also seeps into the essay choices, like universal basic income features or how to chit-chat on video calls in 2020.

The collection is growing forward, so it will be fascinating for people hundreds of years from now. What a gift for the future.

Could you imagine if you could read the essays from the 1440s and see what people were thinking about during the invention of the printing press? Were they thinking about how movable type would change the world, or were their thoughts occupied by… mince pies? What else were people thinking about during major world events? Maybe what we thought people were thinking about wasn’t on their minds at all.

While I think all of the Roundup pieces are well said, some articles in mainstream publications deserve a light shined on them because they cut down to your heart.

A case in point: a recent piece on loss in the Atlantic. The dek: “After enduring infant loss and years of fertility challenges, I still don’t have a child.”

It begins with the first walk to her neighbourhood coffee shop after her baby dies. She writes,

Many new mothers have done this walk. But they generally have a baby in their Ergo carrier or nestled into a stroller. They get loving glances from strangers, who coo at their newborn or joke about lack of sleep. But no one on that walk—not the cashier I ordered from, nor the young couple walking their dog—knew I was a mom. I had no idea either.

It’s an exploration of what makes someone a mother. In my personal opinion, parenting begins long before someone enters the world. She is a mother. She was a mother long before she reached the moment she called “mother-daughter stuff.”

It’s such a powerful essay.

I did one of those big messy cries the first time I read The Fault in Our Stars and got to the scene with the living funeral. The idea is that the person is alive to hear the eulogies they’ll miss when they are not there in the near future.

I forgot about the scene until The Guardian ran a story about living funerals. Reading about it, I realized how much I would not want this, no matter how lovely it sounds in theory and how much the people in the article found comfort in the ritual.

My brain is not equipped to process the enormity of my funeral. The logistics — sure. I have planned out what I want to happen when I’m gone. But I cannot imagine observing my own funeral, sitting these while I contemplate how these are the things that will be said and done when I’m actually gone. Or, like the person in the article, lying inside a coffin, crying.

What do you think of living funerals? I would be okay attending, but I wouldn’t want one myself.

You often hear about individuals or organizations doing good things. People like credit. But this is the story of an individual who inherited a great deal of money and then invited multiple people to help her pass out the money. She explains,

My personal situation allows me to act now. That’s why I want to redistribute my wealth back to society. But then the question emerges: how? The first answer is usually to donate … And secondly, it again grants me power that I shouldn’t have. Redistribution must be a process that extends beyond me.

It’s that idea that just because you’re born into a certain family and just because that family has wealth doesn’t mean you know better than people without wealth how to use that money wisely. So she built a council of 50 people (from a random sample of 10,000 Austrian citizens) to decide.

I am placing my trust and 25 million euros in the hands of a citizens’ council. 50 people will be asked to develop ideas for a better distribution of wealth in Austria – and decide what happens to the money.

It’s a neat way to bring together multiple experiences and make the distribution good for most people. It’s not perfect, but it’s better than a single mind deciding where the money goes. It will be interesting to see what they decide.