I have spent a fair bit of time in the last week at the Escape Java Joint, a spacious coffeehouse on Williamson St. in Madison that has a lot of art as well as meeting spaces and so on. The tea is pretty good (selections are spotty though), it’s all fair trade, and they play jazz (not nu-jazz or anything like that, but Dexter Gordon etc. streaming from KKJZ). It’s probably the best working environment in a coffeeshop that I’ve come across in years, barring the time I didn’t have my headphones and sat next to the discussion group for new mothers that happens some nights. Now if I could only get the Lagrange multipliers to stop gnawing on my very life essences…