• I hear you’re moving to Buffalo to pursue a more affordable, creative, authentic life in the smoldering remains of the Rust Belt. That’s neat. But what are you buying into, really? In cities like Pittsburgh and Troy, David A. Banks argues, “a ‘cool’ lifestyle is still the bait, only its terms have shifted toward more regional flavors. Cities that no longer produce physical goods can instead produce their own image as a kind of marketed product. If once they smelted steel or manufactured textiles, now they trade on the unique cultural history that is the legacy of those lost industries. The relatively cheap standard of living in places like Buffalo or Pittsburgh offer a more ‘authentic’ urban experience in terms of sampling gritty make-do entrepreneurial creativity, while also letting new residents dismiss those in more expensive cities as unimaginative dupes taken in by luxury branding … To attract new residents, cities must understand how their character can be conveyed through a smartphone.”

• In 2010, the brokenhearted and salty-cheeked could find solace only in Croatia, where a melancholy place called the Museum of Broken Relationships held the keepsakes of sundered romance. Now the Museum is coming to Los Angeles: “More than 100 exhibits range from everyday artifacts (a spare key never given to its intended recipient, a mirror that didn’t go with an ex’s decorating scheme) to signifiers of deeply troubled unions (a pair of silicone breast implants a woman got at her boyfriend’s urging). Some radiate sorrow, like the blue chiffon blouse a wife wore the day her husband told her he was moving out. All objects are submitted anonymously and come with stories explaining their significance.”

• T-shirt idea: “I majored in English because my university didn’t offer comp lit.” Jeanne-Marie Jackson argues that there’s a critical (in every sense of the word) difference between the two disciplines: “The reason that comparative literature as a discipline, and comparatists as an ad hoc community, somehow escape the intellectual trap of confusing redundant, self-congratulatory polemic with genuinely advancing thought is that, in having to build its own comparative apparatus, the discipline is forced to balance breadth against depth. It can’t escape either geographical reach or philosophical literacy. This is, at its outer reaches, a recipe for something like multicultural dignity, the kind that is achieved rather than avowed, at least in one’s reading and writing.”

• Thorsten Schütte’s documentary Eat That Question: Frank Zappa in His Own Words looks at one of the few genuine iconoclasts in rock music: the man who hated both the squares and the hippies, the man who preferred to chain-smoke as he cranked out musique concrète. “Schütte’s film is a fluid mosaic of concert footage, TV appearances, and interview clips, much of them never seen before: Zappa on the Steve Allen Show in 1963 ‘playing’ the bicycle; hunched over staff paper notating music in his Laurel Canyon studio in the seventies; stalking through airports with a Mephistophelian leer; leading staggeringly well rehearsed bands … Zappa’s antidrug stance made him an oddity in the rock world, defying the idea, foisted on him by journalists and TV commentators, that someone of such profligate imagination must be on drugs. ‘They write about me like I’m a maniac,’ he says at one point. ‘I’m not … I’m forty years old, I’ve got four kids, a house, and a mortgage.’ ”

• Public service announcement: be around trees. I say this not as some kind of granola-crunching hiker-guru type but as someone with a body of hard data to back it up. A new study by Marc Berman, a University of Chicago psychology professor, “compares two large data sets from the city of Toronto, both gathered on a block-by-block level; the first measures the distribution of green space … and the second measures health, as assessed by a detailed survey of ninety-four thousand respondents. After controlling for income, education, and age, Berman and his colleagues showed that an additional ten trees on a given block corresponded to a one-per-cent increase in how healthy nearby residents felt. ‘To get an equivalent increase with money, you’d have to give each household in that neighborhood ten thousand dollars—or make people seven years younger.’ ”