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In the throes of an unrelenting drought, Las Vegas is scrambling to save water. It is shutting off public fountains, ordering golf courses to cut back on irrigation and all but begging reluctant residents to replace plush green lawns with desert landscaping. But water consumption remains on the rise. Local officials say residents and businesses used more water last month than they did in October of last year. They blame warmer-than-usual weather and the fact that not a single drop of rain fell last month. If water consumption does not show sizable and consistent declines soon, authorities are vowing to take more drastic steps to restrict water use among homeowners and business owners who have long been allowed to ignore that they are living in a desert. Story

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For this week's dispatch, I asked Megan Feenstra Wall, a fellow Calvin College graduate who is studying architecture at Columbia, to describe daily life between campus and the studio apartment she shares with her husband in Midtown Manhattan.

The whole city is in a rush. You can see it; you can even feel it. Everything—the cars, people, taxis, buses—are just rushing about as though everything is five minutes behind schedule. There are two things I like about my hated commute. I love riding past Lincoln Center on the bus. I love the big glass curtain wall that reveals all the dressed-up people milling about after a concert. I am a part of it as I watch them from my blue seat on the M11 bus. As for the subway, well, I love it even while I hate it. I love that you can't go anywhere. Often I get impatient waiting for it to come or, once it does, to get where I need to go. But the great thing is, I am stuck; I can't go any faster than the train is going, When I realize this, it is the only twenty minutes in my day where I can relax and let someone else worry about time. I can enjoy the craziness and absurdities of my train-mates and the day's newspapers. If I am lucky, I will even get in a Poetry in Motion car, with its little snippets of culture in ads for Barnes and Noble. And then I get to where I was impatiently going. Suddenly time is relevant again, and more than likely, I am five minutes late.

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• "No one has ever done anything after he got it," said T.S. Eliot of the Nobel Prize after winning it for literature in 1948. That won't stop many of the world's most brilliant minds from fussing over the prizes this week when they are awarded in Stockholm (nor one non-winner from running angry full-page newspaper ads in protest). Endowed by Alfred Nobel to soothe his conscience after inventing dynamite, the prizes—and the lavish white-tie galas that surround them—have become "something out of a royal fairy tale," says The Week magazine. But if the prizes are so special, The Week asks, why did James Joyce never win a Nobel Prize for literature, nor Gandhi for peace, nor the creator of the periodic table of elements for chemistry? Full story
• Speaking of luminaries, an eternal flame resides at the grave of John F. Kennedy, whose assassination was widely remembered last month. Yet the man who shone a more enduring light, and who died on the same day forty years ago, was less celebrated this past November 22. The exception was an op-ed on C.S. Lewis in the New York Times by Joseph Loconte of the Heritage Foundation. "In his ability to nurture the faithful, as well as seduce the skeptic, C. S. Lewis had no peer," Loconte wrote. He hated self-righteousness—"Of all bad men, religious bad men are the worst," Lewis once wrote—but did not take the next step into coy cynicism about the church. "Instead," Loconte says, "his writings offer bright glimpses into the moral beauty of divine goodness, what Lewis called 'the weight of glory.'" Full story

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