The suggested reading list for national education standards is out, and Emily Dickinson dominates. She gets five entries, far more than anyone else. Shakespeare gets three entries. Frost gets two. The entry every broadcast is gonna mention? Mr. Popper's Penguins. Too fun not to say.

But, kids, you know what's not as fun as penguins? Death. You know what Emily Dickinson wrote about all the time? Death. Kids, when she was your age, Emily Dickinson missed all kinds of school, was terribly afraid of death and then she dropped out of college. Happy reading!

For 2nd-3rd graders: "Autumn"

The morns are meeker than they were,
The nuts are getting brown;
The berry's cheek is plumper,
The rose is out of town.

The maple wears a gayer scarf,
The field a scarlet gown.
Lest I should be old-fashioned,
I'll put a trinket on.

Analysis: Autumn, children, means the nearing of death. It never means anything else. You think autumn means the start of school? Ah, well.

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There are lots of good parts of this NYT interview with Phoenix. Friend Casey had two, one he blogged and one he tweeted. My favorite part:

Q. Do you think of your own music as romantic?

MR. BRANCOWITZ Actually, yes. I think there’s maybe one theme in our music, and it’s something like romantic abandon. We call that teenage abandon, that kind of anxiety and abandon that you enjoy.

Q. How do you hold on to that as adults?

MR. BRANCOWITZ: It’s not hard. I mean, it’s not related to age — I say teenage because it’s something you experience with the most force when you are young. You know this emotion you have when you see a movie that’s so beautiful or you hear a piece of music that sounds perfect? It’s this kind anxiety and joy. So it’s very easy, actually. You just have to see the right piece of art.

To the guy who writes the firmuhment blog, I want to start a school just for you. Every few weeks you post a rejection letter from a MFA program or creative writing grad school, and I want to type a letter, find an envelope that isn't work stationary (this is big as I'm having trouble finding one) and mail it back to those admission officers. They should know how wrong they are. They sit in offices and varying on department structure have either stacks of letters or stacks of books around them, and they don't have materials. They don't write them on paper, paste them to other paper or scan them anywhere. When they put something down, that something content has one purpose, and one purpose isn't good enough anymore. You, my unmet friend, you put that something down because you have many purposes or you have a purpose you haven't named yet. You and your purposes are the reasons they have grad schools and MFA, and if only they could recall their reasons for existence or at least the French translation.

Anyone else who's reading this, which is most if not all of you, I want you to read three pieces from my unmet friend at firmuhment blog.

First, I want you to read the post that made me subscribe, made me click just via a headline from wherever I first was, what made me stay to read the post in its entirety, made me stay at all, a modern miracle.

After that, I want you to read what I read (other pronunciation, I admit I always feel we have to say) halfway from them until now and got me thinking of the box of McDonald's toys my brother and I had when we were kids, wind-up McNuggets and Muppet cars and Berenstein Bears on skateboards, and how my older cousin Matt came over once, maybe when cousin Tim was in the hospital, and said how we must sure go to McDonald's a lot. We probably didn't go more than anyone else, but I liked to keep a box. As a kid, I would have said how my brother and I wanted that box, but growing up I know I was the box one. That post was a quiet masterwork. Funny doesn't get grad school, but it should.

Last, I want you to read how the blog reviews a Don DeLillo book. Me, I haven't read the book, only interviews about its writing. But if you at all believe life is about the pieces you put together — the happy, the seemingly neutral and the sad — and the ways you put them together, you stay up at night and hope those new ways come to you. You let another's words or other media sink into you and find you wanting for expression. I think about a great green lawn and debate empty or full.

My favorite chorus of 2010, so far. Thanks to friend Casey for posting a link to the new album from Ted Leo, whom I've never listened to much but maybe should. Beyond this album, he once sang his song Colleen in karaoke with my friend Colleen. In this particular new song, I love that chorus, but I love how I'm gonna need the lyrics to figure it out. Except for now I'm going to take it as just talking over not makes a difference.

Better audio is here. Are you stressed today? If so, you need to listen.

Such is the title of the first scene of Prokofiev's opera of War and Peace, pausing so briefly at the Kennedy Center and becoming my first opera.

Four hours in length, more than 400 actors and musicians and then…

In an operation that involved a container ship, 2 cranes, 6 weeks on the open seas, 17 trucks, 57 workers, 137 crates of costumes and wigs, 8,000 nuts and bolts and 20,000 pounds of hanging scenery, the gargantuan Mariinsky Opera and Orchestra production of Sergei Prokofiev's opera has been imported from St. Petersburg and reassembled on the stage of the Kennedy Center Opera House.

All this, and there were only going to be two shows. The numbers sold me. I was surfing late late Wednesday when the Post story on the wild spectacle arrived. I'd never seen an opera before, and I knew I had to get a ticket. Rushed to the Kennedy Center's site, got the last cheaper orchestra seat where I could still see the translations above the stage.

Blitzer caught the first show. I saw the second all Sunday afternoon.

Who knew the peace came before the war? Maybe you, if you've read the book. I have not! But what peace and, when it arrives, what war. The strength of the leads played into the depth of the staging, in the opening spring-at-night scenes into palace dances into snowy flights into burning towers into execution meadows into a final, mortal sleep.

The tons of scenery and stage-wide revolving platform were powerful but set mood, just as the love story fit under the empire battle. Only when they disappeared too much did life slow. Thankfully, not often.

Favorite moments: Andrei grasping the fallen pillow as he sang. Their New Year's Eve dance away from the crowd. Anatol's evil. Bezukhov's good. The last minute of act one and first minute of act two. The long, beautiful intermission outside on the Potomac. Napoleon rising as the stage turned. The Russian struggle revealed as it turned further. The cannons pointed at my part of the opera house. The giant red puppet. Natasha's voice. Fire becoming snow. The dropped flags. The bravos.

So: "Life is not over at 31! We must believe with all our strength in the forces of spring, happiness and joy, if we wish to be happy ourselves."

That's Mr. Dan Neil talking to Southern California Public Radio about his departure for the Wall Street Journal. As of this mid-February interview, he'd packed the family onto a plane and was wrapping up work around the house. At this point, I guess we can welcome Dan back to Carolina — and wonder when his first Journal reporting is coming. The interview showcases all kinds of insight around the Toyota situation (giving a big hat-tip to LAT staff and calling the situation "a Malcolm Gladwell book in the making") and other topics. We need that mind back in publishing.

Also in this interview? An update on the Trib employee lawsuit. It goes on, Neil says. "I'm very proud to say the lawsuit is called Neil vs. Zell."

And at the very end, we hear when Neil's Journal writing will begin…

Fast Company names WhatDoYouSuggest.Net an infographic of the day. I can't argue. The site transforms Google's search suggestions into an attractive and telling visual form. But it's too bad to enter my name and find our Birmingham friend still dominating the results:

But I'm a little thrilled to see the Patrick Cooper rap make the cut.

Meanwhile, the New York Times picks up news of former Birmingham mayor — and cause of two Patrick Cooper campaigns — Larry Langford getting a 15-year bribery sentence. "But Mr. Langford provided one last jolt to the city just before his sentencing. In an unrelated lawsuit this week, it was revealed that he had somehow won hundreds of jackpots at a bingo casino owned by a supporter, adding $1.5 million to his income, according to his tax returns."

Elsewhere, there's apparently a Patrick Cooper who's reptile curator at Australia's vowel-free Qld Museum. Reptiles are invading your houses!

You need each other's help. Tell us now, Fraser Coast Chronicle: "WHEN you hear chuck-chuck-chuck on your bedroom wall or window ledge tonight, don’t dive under the sheets – your visitor is only the little Asian house gecko who is cleaning up your cockroaches, mossies and spiders – and possibly copulating in between to swell his numbers."

This kid here was looking forward to more T.M. Shine. The most unlikely awesome writer of recent years had arrived in the Post pages, thanks to a slow influx of Miami Herald feature refugees. Then he disappeared. Last year brought no new work from Shine, and this year I got curious.

Turns out he's writing a book. Remember the Post Magazine story about losing his job, the piece that started this blog's mini-obsession with his work? Well, there was a fantastic line in there, "Nothing happens until it happens to you." At first thinking about writing a memoir, Shine has now turned that sentence into a such-titled novel coming this autumn, a January Times story (that only I discovered this morning) told us.

Mr. Shine said he enjoyed the freedom of writing fiction. When he originally conceived a nonfiction account, he had planned to track the post-layoff lives of colleagues who also lost their jobs. But once he began writing fiction, “I could decide their futures rather than waiting to see how it would pan out.”

Then again, his publisher “could have said ‘I want to turn it into a musical,’ and I would have said, ‘Hold on, I’ll get my harmonica,’ ” noted Mr. Shine, who has written two nonfiction books. “I was just so desperate.”

On sale: Sept. 7, 2010. I'm already excited.

Had a great time hanging out with friend Megan last night, seeing her amazingly for the first time in seven years. The last time we saw each other, she was wrapping up at the Naval Academy; I was in Atlanta at CNN; and we both were watching the lead-up to the second Iraq War.

Now, Megan's a Navy helicopter pilot, returning from a three-year stint in Japan and heading to become a pilot instructor in sunny San Diego. We've both moved up a few ranks. Trying the locavore-leaning pizzas at American Flatbread (relatively new in Clarendon, down the street from Screwtop, delicious and I want to go back for more slices soon), we found our careers shared so many lessons. This isn't unexpected between old friends, I guess, but it is cool to see across professions, digital journalism and Navy flying. My favorite 10 lessons we shared:

1. The pieces are little until you assemble them into something big.

2. Doing a work process the best way benefits audiences blind to it.

3. Solving other people's trouble is fun when their lives affect yours.

4. Broken-window street theory applies to reading and oceans alike.

5. Leading by walking around beats up your shoes but is underrated.

6. In upside-down skeds, 4 a.m. works for breakfast, beer and wings.

7. Managing production and managing results of production differs.

8. Teaching something other people find boring is an opportunity.

9. If you can't assume responsibility, you shouldn't launch/take off.

10. Summing up seven years is easy when you've been having fun.

My favorite quote of the week, via the Times:

When a video trailer for “Freaknik: The Musical” was linked to by a blog at the Web site of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution in January, the post drew dozens of angry comments.

“One lady was like, ‘What if my 7-year-old would have watched that?’ ” T-Pain said. “Like, Ma’am, first of all, what is your 7-year-old doing on the Web site of a newspaper?”