Recommended Reading / 01.

Every Monday, words to start the week.

This week, via Slate: notes on the "loneliest whale in the world," who communicates at an exceptional frequency and is always, it seems, companionless. Since his calls were first detected in the early nineties, 52 Hertz, as the whale's known, has inspired songs, sculptures, tattoos, a Twitter feed.  Evidently, many relate to his solitary journey — after news of his existence went public, "letters came from the heartbroken and the deaf, from the lovelorn and the single; the once bitten, twice shy and the twice bitten, forever shy — people who identified with the whale or hurt for him, hurt for whatever set of feelings they'd projected onto him." Read more at Slate, and find the full story by Leslie Jamison at Atavist, here. 

Three more links, just because:
-Haiku, by chance.
-Michel Gondry's favorite films. (Groundhog Day makes the cut.)
-From The New Yorker's Adam Gopnik: "Walking for pleasure in cities is an occupation of the young. Only a very few older people of great vitality walk long in cities. What changes over time is not the city alone — some twenty something is even now walking ample and hilly Brooklyn, and writing it down. What changes is us. We start walking outdoors to randomize our experience of the city, and then life comes in to randomize us."

Photos by Max Wanger.