My spirits were buoyed up last week by reading about bar-tailed godwits. These small birds are based in southern Alaska in the warmer months there. When it turns cold, they take flight to New Zealand but not before they stuff themselves with food for the trip.

Then, almost incredibly, they fly 7,100 miles nonstop at 40 miles an hour and arrive at their destination in nine days. What a feat of navigation and endurance comes naturally to them!

These facts we know thanks to biologists who have been studying these birds for decades. The data about their migration comes thanks to the scientists surgically implanting satellite transmitters in their bodies.

“ON JANUARY 17, 1985, NOT FAR FROM THIS SPOT, TWO PEOPLE MET AND FELL IN LOVE.”

An inscription engraved on a stone bench outside the entrance to the Reginald F. Lewis International Law Center at Harvard Law School.

A longtime Jesuit friend, Pat, shares a story about a wedding. It took place in Abuja, the capital of Nigeria where my friend used to serve as president of Loyola Jesuit College.

The bridegroom, Nicholas, is a friend of Pat; my Jesuit friend knows the bride, Amaka, less well.

Pat concelebrated the two-hour wedding Mass with another Jesuit who took the lead as celebrant. In his homily, the latter made a great deal of a passage in the Epistle to the Ephesians. “Wives should be subordinate to their husbands as to the Lord.”

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David Elliot of WHRB last week announced that old-time classic opera singer Maria Jeritza, appearing in Tosca, at one point had been “supine” rather than “prone.” After hearing from a listener who corrected him by asserting she was prone, Elliot took it upon himself to apologize promptly.

Watching Renée Fleming conduct a master class proved one of the great pleasures of last week. This renowned opera singer came to Harvard on a Tuesday afternoon to help four undergrads with their singing and to answer questions from the audience.  She was in the area to prepare for three Boston Symphony concerts later in the week.

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Along with students and others, I had the pleasure of gazing on a journalistic hero last week. David Rhode is the courageous New York Times reporter who escaped from captivity after being held for seven months by Taliban militants in Pakistan. He did so by climbing down a 20-foot wall with another captive, an Afghan colleague.

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“The Jesus tablet,” is what the wags are calling the iTab just unveiled by Steve Jobs. Other wits have dubbed it “an iPhone on steroids.”

 New Yorker writer on media, Ken Auletta, shared these descriptions during a discussion at Harvard’s Shorenstein Center this week. His book, “Googled: the End of the World As We Know It,” appeared last fall.

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