PFBNOW ADVENTURES!

  “Some will have you believe that the hardest part of parting with your belongings is choosing which items must go. Not so; saying goodbye is easy. Finding new homes for your stuff is the challenge,” Patricia Marx writes. Revisit her guide to getting rid of almost everything.

  Airport lounge access is governed by a complex array of memberships, airline alliances, and credit-card partnerships, with rules stipulating duration of stay and hours of entry. Zach Helfand visited as many as he could in a week.

  At the Copenhagen restaurant Alchemist, diners are served raw jellyfish—and freeze-dried lamb brain served in a fake cranium—while videos about climate change swirl on the ceiling. Is it “gastronomic opera,” or sensory overload.

  There are more than 20,000 high-school band programs in America, some with as many as 400 members. “Over the past 30 years, their shows have evolved into spectacles that John Philip Sousa couldn’t have imagined,” Burkhard Bilger writes. The top bands have dozens of staff, budgets of hundreds of thousands of dollars, and fleets of trucks for their instruments, props, costumes, and sound systems. “They don’t just parade up and down the field playing fight songs. They flow across it in shifting tableaux, with elaborate themes and spandex-clad dancers, playing full symphonic scores.” Students rehearse intensely, not to play well at football games, but to prepare for a series of fiercely competitive marching-band contests in the fall, culminating in the Grand National Championships, in Indianapolis. The area is “the capital of the new marching-band culture,” Bilger writes, and has two of the country’s most successful marching band programs: the Avon High School Marching Black and Gold...

 

  “The Wizard of Oz” is a film whose driving force is the inadequacy of adults, even of good adults, Salman Rushdie wrote, in 1992; “a film that shows us how the weakness of grownups forces children to take control of their own destinies, and so, ironically, grow up themselves.” Read Rushdie’s reminiscence on the 1939 film, which the author first saw when he was 10 years old.