Daily Office: Thursday

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¶ Matins: Phil Dhingra puts a health-insurance agent through his paces. (Philosophistry)

¶ Lauds: In our opinion, the bottom line of Alex Ross’s evaluation of Peter Gelb’s first full season at the Metropolitan Opera is that Mr Gelb is insufficiently interested in music. (The New Yorker)

¶ Prime: Regarding the sale of Gothamist to Rainbow Communicatioins, Felix Salmon digests Nick Denton’s sour grapes.

¶ Tierce: Jonah Lehrer’s essay on dreaming quite acutely puts Freud out of place.

¶ Sext: Book Blog Birthdays: The Second Path recently celebrated its second; The Millions is now seven years old. Meanwhile, at Salon, Laura Miller considers the delightfully pseudo-competitive folly of The Morning News’s Tournament of Books.

¶ Nones: The game between Somali pirates and civilian crews has been ratcheted up a level by the presence on the freighters of private armed guards, a detachment of which killed a pirate last weekend. The story of the MV Almezaan may be more worrying than it at first appears. (BBC News)

¶ Vespers: Maria Bustillos’s advance review of David Lipsky’s memoir of five days spent with David Foster Wallace in 1996, Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself is downright invigorating. (The Awl)

¶ Compline: There are no strange maps at this unusual entry at Strange Maps, just a discussion of population density. If the nation were as packed as densely as Brooklyn, which state would it fill? Not a very big one.