Read. Click. Learn.

First read the label on your sweater. Never wash a wool sweater in hot water. Hot water makes the wool hard and small. Fill a bowl with cool water instead. Add one spoon of special soap for wool clothes.

Put the sweater in the water for ten minutes. Press it with your hands for a minute, but do not pull it. Then wash it again in clean cool water. Put it flat on a towel. Let it dry away from the sun.

The city will plant fruit trees on ten streets this year. Workers start in the park near the river. Each street gets six small trees. People can take the fruit for free.

The trees are apple and pear. They are young, so the first fruit comes in three years. The city asks people to give the trees water in summer. People can get water at the park by the river. A map of the new streets is on the city website.

Subject: Can I borrow your bike?

Hi Dani,

My bicycle has a flat tire, and the shop is closed until Monday. Can I borrow your bike on Saturday morning? I want to ride to the market by the river. I will bring it back before lunch.

I will be careful with your bike, and I will ride slowly. I can put air in the tires too. If you need it on Saturday, please tell me. Just send me a message tonight.

Thanks a lot, Pavel

An old man lives in the apartment below us. Every spring he planted red flowers in his window box. Last year the box was empty until August. My mother said, "He is in the hospital." We did not see him for many weeks.

In August my sister Nina and I bought two small plants. We put them in his window box. Then we gave them water every evening. One day in September the old man came home. He is at the window again now, and the flowers are red.

I started an English class in September. We meet on Monday nights in Room 12. There are nine students in my group. Our teacher is from Chicago, and she speaks slowly. In the first class I was very quiet.

Now I talk more, but I still make mistakes. Last week I forgot the word for a spoon in class. My teacher drew a picture on the board. We also play a word game at the end. Monday is my favorite day now.

When an ant leaves the nest to look for food, it wanders almost at random. On its way back, it lays down a chemical trail that other ants can smell. The ants that follow the trail add chemical of their own, so a useful path grows stronger with every trip. A path that leads nowhere is not refreshed, and the smell fades within hours.

Shorter paths win for a simple reason. An ant on a short route returns sooner, so it marks the trail again while slower ants are still walking. Before long, most of the colony is using the quickest line between the nest and the food. Researchers have tested this with two bridges of different lengths, and in most trials the ants settle on the shorter one.

The system is not perfect. If a shorter route opens later, the old trail can be strong enough to keep the traffic where it is. Some colonies get around this by keeping a few ants exploring away from the trail.

Porto is built on hills, and almost every walk ends with a climb. I arrived on a Friday evening and left my bag at a guesthouse above the river. From the window I could see the Douro, the iron bridge and the roofs of the old town. I decided not to use a bus all weekend, which turned out to be both the best and the worst decision of the trip.

The tiled walls are the first thing visitors notice. At Sao Bento station, blue and white panels cover the entrance hall. People stand with their heads tipped back instead of looking for their platform. Smaller churches carry the same tiles on their outer walls, where nobody is looking for them. I spent most of Saturday morning walking from one church to the next without a map.

In the evening I crossed the bridge to Vila Nova de Gaia, where the port cellars line the water. The walk back was uphill in the dark, and my legs had already given up. I ate dinner sitting on a step.

Marek has repaired locks in the same neighborhood for nineteen years. He says the phone rings most often late at night, between eleven and one. Half of those calls are from people who left a key inside. The other half are doors that have swelled in wet weather and will not close. He has stopped being surprised by either.

Is the job as dramatic as people expect? "A good lock is one nobody thinks about," he says. Most of his work is oiling mechanisms and adjusting hinges. He refuses to open a door unless the caller can show that they live there. "A man once offered me triple the price to skip the check, so I drove home," he says.

What does he want people to know? "Keep a spare key with somebody you trust, not under a flowerpot," he says. "And check your door in the fall, before the wood swells." Which calls are the hardest? "The calls I hate most are the ones where a child is locked inside," he says.

Wash and Read opened in March on the corner of Pine and Third, and it has solved a problem I did not know I had. The machines are ordinary, the prices are the same as anywhere, and the floor is clean. What makes the place different is the wall of shelves along the back. You can take any book home, and you are supposed to bring a different one back.

The shelves are not organized, which is part of the fun. On my first visit I found a book about mushrooms, a thriller with the last page missing, and a cookbook in Portuguese. The owner, Teresa, says people leave notes inside the covers, and she has stopped taking them out. I now choose my machine by how close it is to the shelves.

There are two faults worth naming. Only one dryer reaches a real heat, so on Saturdays the wait is long. And the single chair by the window is always taken, usually by somebody who finished their laundry an hour ago.

Most people I know can follow about thirty recipes badly. They own a shelf of cookbooks and save videos they will never watch. Dinner is still a decision made at seven with the refrigerator door open. I would trade all of it for one dish I could cook without thinking. The point is not variety; it is having something you can rely on.

When you make the same thing twenty times, you stop reading and start noticing. You learn what the onions should look like before the garlic goes in. You learn that your pan runs hot on one side, and that the dish is better with less salt than the book asked for. None of that is written down anywhere, because it is about your kitchen and nobody else's.

Choose something you actually like to eat, not something impressive. Cook it once a week until the recipe is in your hands rather than on your phone. After that, every other dish you try becomes easier, because you finally know what the instructions are pointing at.

Alice Ball was twenty-three when she took on a problem that had defeated pharmacists for decades. Born in Seattle in 1892, she studied pharmaceutical chemistry there before moving to Hawaii, where she became the first woman and the first African American to take a master's degree at the College of Hawaii. Her subject was chaulmoogra oil, pressed from the seeds of a tree in South Asia and long the only substance known to do anything at all for leprosy. The trouble was that nobody could get it into a patient.

Swallowed, the oil was so bitter that it came straight back up; injected, it was too thick to disperse and left painful lumps under the skin. Ball worked out how to separate the oil into its active components and convert them into a form that would mix with water and could be injected without that reaction. Patients treated with what came to be called the Ball Method were, for the first time, able to leave the hospital and go home. What she had found was a way around the problem rather than a cure for the disease.

She died in 1916, before she could publish. Arthur Dean, who ran the college, continued the work, produced the extract in quantity and put his own name on the process. It was another physician, Harry Hollmann, who insisted in print that the method was hers, and her name was eventually restored to it, though it took decades.

Every fall the same sound travels down my street: the leaf blower, moving a problem from one person's yard to the curb. We have been taught to read a tidy yard as a cared-for one, and an untidy one as a kind of negligence. But the tidiness we are enforcing is recent, and most of what it removes is not waste at all. Leaf litter is where a surprising amount of next year's garden is currently asleep.

Insects spend the winter in the layer of fallen leaves and in the hollow stems of plants that have died back. Clear both away in October and you have not only taken the shelter; you have taken the birds' food supply in the spring, when they need insects rather than seeds. Bare soil, meanwhile, loses water and warmth faster than covered soil, which is one reason beds stripped in the fall tend to need more water in summer. A layer of leaves does for nothing what mulch is sold to do.

None of this is an argument for abandoning the yard. Leaves on a path are a hazard, and a thick mat on a lawn will kill the grass under it, so rake those and move them into the beds or under the hedge. What is worth resisting is the instinct to clear everything, everywhere, because clear ground looks deliberate. A yard left a little rough in winter is not a yard nobody tends; it is a yard tended by somebody who knows what is in it.

My father's kitchen clock ran seven minutes fast for as long as I lived in that house. He had set it that way deliberately, on the theory that he would be early to everything, and he was never early to anything. The clock simply became the time; we all subtracted without thinking, the way you convert currency on a long trip. Guests were the only ones who panicked.

When he sold the house, I took the clock, and I let it keep its lie out of sentiment rather than habit. For a year it hung in my hallway, and I kept catching myself doing the arithmetic for a deadline that was not really that close. Then one evening the hands stopped at twenty past eight, which was, I worked out later, thirteen minutes past eight. I put it on a shelf and did nothing about it for months.

A repairman on Mill Street opened the back, showed me a worn gear and asked whether I wanted the clock kept to time. I said yes, and regretted it before I reached the corner. It hangs in the hallway now, accurate and somehow mute, and I am never any earlier than I was. What I had been reading all those years, it turns out, was not the hour but my father's opinion of me, which was that I could be trusted to do the subtraction.

A dune is not a hill that happens to be made of sand; it is a process slowed down enough to stand still in a photograph. Wind picks up grains from the bare ground and bounces them along the surface, each landing grain knocking others into the air. This hopping transport, rather than true flight, moves almost all of the sand in a desert. Where something slows the wind down, such as a rock, a bush or an existing mound, the grains settle and the obstacle begins to grow.

A dune has two faces, and they behave quite differently. The windward slope is gentle, and grains climb it in the same hopping motion that brought them there. At the crest they fall into the still air on the far side and build up on the lee face until the slope becomes steeper than loose sand can hold. Then a sheet of it slides, the face is restored to the angle it can keep, and the whole dune has advanced a little downwind.

Because sand is lost from the windward side and added to the lee, the dune travels while its shape stays much the same. Small dunes move faster than large ones, for the simple reason that there is less sand to shift. A fast dune can overtake a slower one ahead of it, which is one reason dune fields are patterned rather than random.

Most people meet research papers secondhand, in a headline that has removed everything qualifying. Reading the paper itself is less forbidding than it looks, provided you abandon the idea of reading it from the first page to the last. Few people in the field do that on a first pass. They triage, and so should you.

Start with the abstract, then skip to the end of the discussion, where authors are expected to admit what their study cannot show. Those limitations tell you more than the results do. Next, find out how many participants or samples there were, and whether there was a comparison group; a striking finding from a dozen subjects with nothing to compare them against is a suggestion, not a conclusion. Check whether the thing being measured is the thing you care about, because a study of a marker in a blood test is not a study of whether anybody got better.

Two phrases are worth learning to notice. "Associated with" means two things were seen together and says nothing about one causing the other. "Statistically significant" means the result is unlikely to be pure chance; it says nothing about whether the effect is large enough to matter to a person. A difference can be real and still be too small to feel.