Swine before pearls.

Gene Weingarten won the Pulizter Prize for Feature Writing in 2008 and 2010. Both stories were written for the Washington Post, where Weingarten works as a staff writer. The first story, “Pearls Before Breakfast,” concerns an experiment. The Post persuaded Joshua Bell, one of the best classical violinists in the world, to busk in the Washington Metro. The results were astonishing — and ran counter to the expectations of nearly everyone involved. Implicit throughout is the notion that we, citizens of the great western democracies, spend much of our time in the sweet embrace of oblivion. We simply don’t notice things that are happening around us. Bell’s performance, Weingarten writes, proved no exception:

It was all videotaped by a hidden camera. You can play the recording once or 15 times, and it never gets any easier to watch. Try speeding it up, and it becomes one of those herky-jerky World War I-era silent newsreels. The people scurry by in comical little hops and starts, cups of coffee in their hands, cellphones at their ears, ID tags slapping at their bellies, a grim danse macabre to indifference, inertia and the dingy, gray rush of modernity.