Occasionally my work takes me to Nashville, as it did yesterday. And I never fail to get to Nashville without wandering around its beautiful central library, and wondering why Nashville has something so nice and Atlanta has such a misery of a central library.

To some degree I think that the central library, like MARTA, suffers from being a product of the 1970s, known as the Decade Decent Design Forgot. Renovate the inside all you want, it’s still going to have an ugly exterior. But the Nashville library is open and airy, with a built-in art gallery, clean restrooms, a huge periodicals section, and a ground-floor privately-owned cafÈ with delicious hot chocolate and wireless access. It’s just a nifty place to be. And I do wonder why Atlanta, priding itself on being such a world-class city, runs so conspicuously behind supposedly-perenially-honky-tonk Nashville on this.