By the Dawn's Early Light

I want to go to America. So do you. I know we live in a beautiful land. But like everyone else on earth, crossing a border makes our destination more exotic and exciting. I also want Americans to come here. They’re so much fun to admire, decry and identify with. Besides, rubbing shoulders with them is less likely to give us the plague. So please, Mr. Trudeau, tear down this wall.

And speaking of opening borders, here are 10 ways to open your own this weekend.

1. Gee Seven. Leaders from the world’s G7 nations gather this weekend in Cornwall, England. Reminding them to keep the poor at the top of their agenda, Sir Tim Rice asked 35 kids from the Truro Cathedral Choir to sing his composition “Gee Seven”. I especially liked the line: “Don’t forget the less fortunate, or we’ll run you out of town.”

2. What pilots see. Landscapes, and especially cityscapes taken from the cockpit. Gorgeous and eerie.

3. Panic about panic. That’s the first of eight basic causes of agitation in our lives. Address each one on its own and our frenzied pursuit of calm will actually happen. At least according to The School of Life, who offers courses, books and wisdom on the subject.

4. How to interrupt like they do on talk radio. More and more of these over-talkers walk (or talk) among us. Not just talking waaaaaaaaay too much, but blissfully interrupting us. First rule of counter-attack? Don’t be subtle.

5. If you’re on the internet, it’s because of him. Marc Andreessen runs the Silicon Valley venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, whose big bets include Instagram, Netscape and Facebook. Like a lot of tech billionaires, Andreessen is more on ‘send’ than ‘receive.’ He also uses the word ‘retard’ 200 times a day according to the Croatian writer Niccolo Soldo who interviewed him in this wild-and-crazy conversation about the future of...everything.

6. Thanks a bot. To help tiny New Zealand win its fourth Americas Cup sailing championship, they added a new sailor, a McKinsey- built AI bot. See this great video-aided tale.

7. Come together, right now, over me.  What brings together our oldest peoples with our newest? Dance, of course. Check out how a group of Indigenous dancers and immigrant dancers find common cause.

8. Real experts are better than pundits. They know what they don’t know. Christine Lagarde, Angela Merkel and Ivanka Trump walk into a studio. Which one of them is out of place? The one who’s absolutely certain.

9. Bad science travels fast. Mark Twain once said that “A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.” Bad science can travel even faster. It seems there’s a replication crisis in science. For an experiment to “work”, you have to be able to repeat it. But more journals are publishing studies with eye-grabbing, but likely wrong, results.

10. Send you out with a song – and dance. A so-so dancer pulls off an amazing, toe-tapping, heart-rending, eye-glistening coup.

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