New Yorker Jill Forie describes herself as a full-time teacher, entrepreneur, student, humanitarian, artist and adventurer. At least three of those roles converge in Sink or Swim Custom Kicks, a company she founded in 2009. Since then, she’s painted nearly 400 pairs of shoes for customers both domestic and international. Like many artists, she works on canvas and uses a variety of media (plus a good fabric protectant).

What is it about Nordic people that makes them so lyrical to listen to? It’s more than the accent—they just emanate gentleness. Nosework Search Games, a new DVD by Turid Rugaas (author of the wonderful classic book Calming Signals) and one of her students, Anne Lill Kvam, feels like the ’60s version of competitive nosework, focusing on games to exercise a dog’s mind rather than on how to play by the rules.

Many books about dogs cross my desk, and a few immediately catch my eye. Often, it’s simply a title or a cover photo that attracts my attention. Mark Derr’s How the Dog Became the Dog was one of the more recent ones, as was Stephen Budiansky’s The Truth About Dogs some years ago. Unfortunately, Budiansky’s book had so many errors in it that I became suspicious of any book with the word “truth” in the title.