It's the best magazine. Week after week. Its daily emailed stories are better than most magazines do in a month. Its weekly podcast is excellent. The magazine's design and feel are perfection. You live in it while you read it.

A book that changed my life? No. But TM did. I've been doing it for 44 years. I did it this morning. I think the book came out just after I started. I read it of course. It cost me $55 to be initiated into the practice. I got a teacher's discount. Now it's 20-30 times that. Even at that price, it's worth it. I'll do it again late this afternoon.

'Barack intrigued me. He was not like anyone I’d dated before, mainly because he seemed so secure. He was openly affectionate. He told me I was beautiful. He made me feel good. To me, he was sort of like a unicorn—unusual to the point of seeming almost unreal. He never talked about material things, like buying a house or a car or even new shoes. His money went largely toward books, which to him were like sacred objects, providing ballast for his mind. He read late into the night, often long after I’d fallen asleep, plowing through history and biographies and Toni Morrison, too. He read several newspapers daily, cover to cover. He kept tabs on the latest book reviews, the American League standings, and what the South Side aldermen were up to. He could speak with equal passion about the Polish elections and which movies Roger Ebert had panned and why.' 
                ― Michelle Obama, Becoming

It was cold again today holding the sign. I thought of the same-every-day warm breakfast I'd make when I got back to my apartment. But mostly the cold was on my mind. Among the cold things that came to mind standing there I thought of Peter Matthiessen's The Snow Leopard, a book that means so much to me --I've read it three times--that one of the passwords I use incorporates the title. 

When I walk from the subway to my building after I've held the sign, I stop at the bodega to get a New York Times and a banana and an orange. I do it every day. The young woman with a wide face and an easy humorous smile who often works behind the counter and takes my money, $4.75, is from Tibet. She was there today.

 

'I'm not saying that you have to be a reader to save your soul in the modern world. I'm saying it helps.'
― Walter Mosely