Damn Straight, Boston Public Library

Along the Boylston Street facade of its central library, the Boston Public Library has hung a sign apologizing for its minor construction. It's an insignificant marker except for the sign's title, "Cities Are Libraries." What an excellent anthem! It conveys so much depth in so few words: That cities are places of education, culture, history and exploration; that, like a library's obscure stacks, cities have countless undiscovered corners of treasures; that as much as the confines of a library have to offer, there's a whole world out there on city streets; that suburbs aren't libraries; that cities are where it happens.

Copley Square, where the BPL's main branch is located, is the perfect place for such a triumphant slogan because of its rich layers of urban architecture and history. It was created in the mid-19th century as part of the fill and street grid used to build the Back Bay. The Trinity Church, designed by Henry Hobson Richardson, and the BPL, designed by Charles McKim of McKim, Mead and White, are classic examples of ornate late-19th century American style. The Hancock Building, by Henry Cobb, is one of the most elegant examples of a modernist skyscraper. The surrounding hotels and office towers and retail of Boylston Street represent typical, postwar downtown development. The square has a wonderful public space for gathering and a weekly farmers' market, that favorite programming option for young adults' return to the city in the early 21st century.

Whoever coined this phrase, at the BPL or elsewhere, deserves gigantic credit. The above photo, found online, starts to capture the layers of Copley Square.

Brussels Sprouts Are In?

When a 20-something girl riding a Bolt bus to New York with me in September pulled a container out of her bag for a mid-ride snack of brussels sprouts, much to the surprise of the middle-aged woman sitting in front of her, I knew something was up.

Everyone has those foods they detest as a kid that they come to like once they hit their twenties and their palettes mature -- for me, mustard is one -- but brussels sprouts is the quintessential example. How many lame jokes are there about them and recipes promising that you'll actually like them this time? Yet brussels sprouts are having a better fall than even Sarah Palin's. I'm eating them at least once per week, thanks to my fiancee's near-obsession with them, and when I tell my friends this they seem to understand totally. When a few came over for dinner and I served brussels sprouts, they exclaimed about how much they like them (though maybe they were being kind about what I cooked). The Times recently included a recipe for them, via hipster chef Zak Pelaccio, in its annual edition of cooking for Thanksgiving.

Really, they're everywhere, which is intriguing because they don't rank high on a list of tastiest vegetables. Something about them is downright funky, though also filling and satisfying. Cool cycles are hard to understand, though it seems brussels sprouts, just like 42nd street, reached the point that they were so uncool that they were uncool again, perhaps even without irony. A mouthwatering photo of roasted sprouts is above.

Update: The Times writes that it's actually sweet potatoes experiencing a renaissance.

Book It, The Thunder Are For Real

Two years ago, I gushed about the Trail Blazers after they beat the Celtics in a hard-fought game. They were an indie gem at the time, perhaps rising to challenge the league's elite. But now that Greg Oden's career is dangerously close to its end, Rudy Fernandez pouts about la lluvia in Portland and several other players have left, that moment has dissipated.

Fortunately, the Thunder have coalesced to take their place. Obviously, they have Kevin Durant, one of the NBA's best players, but even without him here in Boston last night, they defeated the Celtics in a tough game, when they were also missing Jeff Green, their third-best player, couldn't make a shot for the whole fourth quarter, and faced a hostile crowd. It certainly qualified as a statement game, with gutsy play, led by point guard Russell Westbrook.

The Thunder find themselves in the same place as the Blazers did two years ago: They have a staggeringly young roster filled with lots of athletic, versatile players who seem to genuinely like each other and realize they can do something special together. Even better, the team gives Oklahoma City some cache and makes it seem cool; the roster is multicultural like the Blazers' was; and guard James Harden has an immense, awesome beard. In his most recent column, Bill Simmons, who also has overheated about the Blazers and the Thunder before, urged everyone to calm down about the Thunder after their start wasn't flawless, but why not get excited? This moment -- where everyone understands what's happening, appreciates the potential and starts to click with each other -- is an exciting one. It applies to plenty more moments than sports, even relatively mundane ones that aren't driven by celebrities.

Is LeBron James The New Allen Iverson?

Three weeks into the NBA season, the Miami Heat's season looks much shakier than it should -- a common insight. That their record is 6-4 isn't all that alarming because basketball seasons are long and teams sometimes start slowly. However, the two losses to the Celtics in those first 10 games are troubling. Good teams, even if they're only a few games into the season with a totally overhauled roster (though that overhaul infamously added three of the NBA's best players!), should be able to adjust to one of their top rivals for the second matchup and beat them on their home court. The Heat couldn't.

Listening to those games, I was struck by how well LeBron James played and how poorly his new teammates Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh did. Sure, Wade is averaging is 24.7 points per game overall this season, but against the Celtics, he's scored 21 points on 6-for-28 shooting in two games. Bosh is struggling mightily in general.

James' career is starting to hint at that of Allen Iverson, the star guard from circa 1996-2006 for the Philadelphia 76ers. Iverson was one of the top scorers of that decade, running through teams to the hoop, but not really as a great player. He led the 76ers to the Finals once, but during his career, the Sixers searched in vain for an appropriate partner so they could burst through to the league's elite. Among Iverson's sidekicks were Jerry Stackhouse, Glenn Robinson, Larry Hughes and Carmelo Anthony. Aside from Anthony, none were very good players when with Iverson, but I think the nagging feeling that the Sixers couldn't find a proper supporting cast because there wasn't one is accurate.

The same seems to true of LeBron. The Cavaliers went from Mo Williams to Antwan Jamison and Shaquille O'Neal, hoping that one would fit with him, but none did. Now, the Heat are struggling. Like Iverson, LeBron is an phenomenally talented player and scorer, but perhaps his talent is so immense that it's overwhelming. Sure, personnel executives make the wrong decisions at least some of the time, but so do players. The Heat should be able to beat the Celtics the next time they play.

Boston Is A Brotherhood, Part II

In a recent column, Peter Canellos, one of the Globe's highest-ranking editors, pined for a second airport for metro Boston an idea batted around through the 1980s, only to dissolve. Dulles Airport in northern Virginia, Canellos writes, birthed "a city unto itself," with "hundreds of office buildings emblazoned with the most dazzling names in global high tech," albeit a generic city "that could be anywhere." Meanwhile, Boston is static about 20 years later, and the decision not to build an airport looks like "a big mistake, the kind that separates the truly global metropolises from the boutique cities."

Forget whether an airport with hundreds of acres of open land around it, ready for development, is a good route to being a top-tier city in the early 21st century. This is a questionable assumption. Canellos misses the mark more widely when he says that Boston is a boutique city, not one of the "truly global metropolises" he wishes it were. With the country's leading universities, life science companies and finance companies, and great culture, sports, nature and general quality of life, Boston is a global city. If it isn't, only maybe five cities are (New York, L.A., London, Tokyo and Beijing or Shanghai), which seems too restrictive of a list. And if Boston isn't a global city, why do I have to walk around every foreign tour group in the U.S. on my way through Harvard Yard?

Boston is also a wonderful place to study planning. It's post-industrial but re-animated; it removed an elevated highway and is redeveloping its waterfront. Downtown includes some of the country's most notorious urban renewal projects; but downtown also doesn't include as many such projects as it could because the massive push back against urban renewal and inner-city highways began here. It is one of the starting points of the historic preservation movements and not surprisingly, has wonderful, charming neighborhoods. It also is one of the starting points of the CDC movement because of the city's rough neighborhoods. You don't need a car to get around. I could go on. But the main point is: Being here is much more worthwhile than Canellos suggests.

Update: The above photo is my favorite view of the whole city -- from the Longfellow Bridge, looking west at the Charles River, Back Bay and the Hancock Tower.

Seesaw Politics

Now that Republicans have re-taken the House and national political momentum, the idea that either party can establish a long-lasting majority is unlikely. Here are the number of House Republicans every two years, from after the 2004 election to after last week's: 232, 198, 178, and 244. During this six-year span, the conventional wisdom has shifted from Karl Rove's establishment of a permanent Republican majority to Barack Obama's ascendancy and the Republican Party's death to the sweeping rejection of liberal Democrats. So much for all that.

If the shelf life either party has to produce results is two years, neither party is likely to produce results. Recovery from economic catastrophe takes longer than two years, though the Democratic Party and Obama administration certainly deserve responsibility for a rudderless recovery, as do others. While I certainly hope the U.S. economy is exponentially better in 2012, it'll be interesting to see voters' response if it remains where it is today. After dismissing Democrats, do we do the same to Republicans, only to realize that in a two-party system we don't have any other options? Hello, Ralph Nader, Sarah Palin or anarchy?

Despite these wild swings, the national political map looks quite similar to what it did in 2004, albeit with a Democratic president (and hopefully that feature remains): Republicans hold seat after seat through the South and the Plains, while no matter how much enthusiasm they conjure leading up to Election Day, they get wiped out along both coasts. For example, all but one of Massachusetts' Congressional delegation and statewide office holders are Democrats, in spite of the Herald's best effort at electioneering over the past two months. Talk about a place that doesn't waver on principles.

Not surprisingly, David Brooks had the best analysis of last week's election, focusing on the post-industrial Midwest, where Republicans made much deeper inroads than before -- the other big political difference between now and 2004. He incisively captures the paradoxes of Midwestern working-class voters while delivering this knock-out blow: "If America can figure out how to build a decent future for the working-class people in this region, then the U.S. will remain a predominant power. If it can’t, it won’t." This is why the Midwest is the most exciting place to be in the U.S. today.

This Time Around, Part N+1

Some things don't change. Last week, on stage at the Paradise, Corin Tucker had her band dressed in formal wear for its headlining set, yet she was wearing a simple and a bit worn, red-and-black plaid dress, with one strap routinely sliding down and a sticker of some sort near the hem. You can take the girl out of the Pacific Northwest, but you can't take the Pacific Northwest out of the girl?

The songs Tucker played were quite contemplative compared to the ones she played when she was the lead singer of Sleater-Kinney, that principled but fun trio that's been on hiatus for about five years. Not surprisingly, her best songs, from her debut solo album, let her voice escape into its trademark leaping roll that no one else does. When she played slow songs, they usually found themselves trapped in something syrupy or kitschy, though a strong guitar usually barreled through at some point, lifting the song. Overall, it worked and was an appropriate evolution for someone who's now a mom. As I've written before in these pages, I like bands that acknowledge they're aging and write wiser songs as a result. Tucker hit the mark.

The crowd was certainly small. Though it was a Monday night in the middle of the semester, which doesn't bode well in a college-dominated city such as Boston, the Paradise was only about half full. Sleater-Kinney wasn't an iconic indie-rock band at the turn of the century, but it certainly knew how to pack larger venues. (I saw them in fall 2002 at Irving Plaza, when, at the start of the show, they told all the girls to come up front and the guys to walk backwards, so that women weren't straining to see, which is usually the case at shows; the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, with only an EP and mountains of hype to their name, were the opener.) Not everyone's return gets to be as triumphant as Pavement's, I suppose, though Tucker's was worth it.

In fact, even more surprisingly, Guided by Voices -- which never represented a generational moment quite like Pavement did but was wildly loved in its late-90s heyday -- is only playing the Paradise when it brings its reunion tour to town Friday. At least that show sold out several weeks ago.

Above is my photo of the Paradise's marquee the night of Tucker's show.