Pieces of Mind

My mother often says that my first love was Lego, the colourful interlocking bricks that have been manufactured since 1949. It’s a love that I never outgrew, and I doubt I ever will. Indeed, as the legendary Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter told the Financial Times not long ago, “You can’t spend enough money on Lego.”

When I was just five or six years old, I learned that Lego came from Denmark, specifically a small town on the Jutland peninsula called Billund, a world away from the basement in which I assembled and reassembled castles and pirate ships and where my brother worked tirelessly on his model of the University of Nebraska’s Memorial Stadium (this was when our team was still good). There I pored over magazines filled with pictures of the original Legoland theme park, with its 1:20 replicas of Amalienborg, Neuschwanstein, and Abu Simbel, exotic landmarks that I never expected to see in person. I studied the park’s Mount Rushmore, Cape...