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The two paintings are unmistakably by Vincent Van Gogh. Both show a street scene in the south of France, dominated by sturdy trees with limbs thrust upwards. Both show the same trees and the same houses and pedestrians — almost.

The Road Menders and The Large Plane Trees (Road Menders at Saint-Remy) were painted by Van Gogh in May 1889. They're so alike that they are sometimes called "copies." In fact, they're different: strikingly different in color, subtly different in detail.

These two works of art will be brought together on Saturday at The Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C., along with others that showcase Van Gogh's habit of creating what he called "repetitions." They're variations on a theme, in one case as many as nine paintings or drawing of the same subject.

I learned of the exhibit by reading Henry Adams' article, "Seeing Double: Van Gogh the Tweaker," in last Sunday's New York Times. In writing about the two "Menders" paintings, Adams reports the differences between them and explains which one was created first and how we know. He also notes the tendency for some "overly vigilant scholars" to suspect that some of Van Gogh's copies were fakes.

Van Gogh's repetitions are not fakes — nor, I don't think, are they best called "copies." As the Phillips exhibit underscores, they are better understood as a vital expression of Van Gogh's artistic process. In letters to his brother Theo, Adams tells us, Vincent communicated that he "viewed the repetitions as an opportunity to improve and clarify his initial composition."

At first, I concluded that what Van Gogh did with his repetitions was actually not all that extraordinary. To reach an accomplished level with some skill requires anyone to put in intensive hours of trial and error, success and failure. Musicians practice for hours a day; writers endlessly revise the pages they produce. But then I realized that Van Gogh's repetitions are not really about practice in the conventional sense. They're about looking at one's finished, visible-to-the-public product and deciding to do it again, almost the same, but not quite.

Maybe there's a cool life lesson here for all of us in our day to day lives. It's tempting to be highly self-critical once we ourselves have created something. We may scrutinize the final product intently. We may ask: is it good, bad or merely mediocre? We may wonder: why can't I get things right the first time? We could instead, though, embrace and take delight in an iterative process.

Think of what we do in the kitchen. We find a recipe for a fine pasta dinner, make it one night with this kind of tomato sauce and another night with that kind, tweaking the quantity and ratio of spices, the type and tang of tomatoes. Best of all is when we do this not only for the sake of our taste buds, but also for the in-the-kitchen fun of experimenting and sharing the results.

Gathering with friends to make music or dance, we may play again certain pieces, trace the same paths again with our bodies, over and over, but with slight variations each time. This shared exploration can become a way to create together fresh material as we go along.

Finished pieces of writing may also be reworked. In my writing-intensive science courses, where an assignment might be to respond in an essay to some peer-reviewed article or book, I find that many students expect that their first try is good enough. "I worked hard," they might say. "And I like the result." I ask them to think differently. When I require revisions in their "completed" work, it's not only to correct the grammar or fix scientific errors. It's also to issue an invitation: move those words around, reshape those sentences! Then you can appreciate what happens when a new mosaic of meaning emerges from the previous one.

The Phillips' celebration of Van Gogh's repetitions, beginning this weekend, is a catalyst for reflection. The expression of our own creativity needn't be all about intense striving to turn out a perfect, finished-forever product. Much of the joy is in seeing that what we make today becomes a basis for new things tomorrow.

Tina Brown, editor-in-chief of The Daily Beast, joins NPR's Steve Inskeep again for a recurring feature Morning Edition likes to call Word of Mouth. This month her suggestions are all about heroes — whether being heroic means doing something, or not doing something.

Revisiting Black Hawk Down

Brown's first selection is a Daniel Klaidman piece from The Daily Beast today, looking at a fateful U.S. military operation in Somalia from the vantage point of 20 years later. Eighteen American soldiers were killed in the Battle of Mogadishu when a rescue mission — one that was later dramatized in the Ridley Scott film Black Hawk Down — went terribly wrong.

"Of course it's now become a kind of mantra, that we don't want to have 'another Black Hawk Down' ... when people talk about intervention or going into a very risky place to rescue people."

In "Black Hawk Down's Long Shadow," Klaidman interviews many of the people who were part of the mission, drawing somewhat different conclusions than were arrived at in the movie inspired by the incident.

"The mantra of that movie, at the end, was 'It's not about politics, it's not about a mission, in the end it's about the man standing next to you,'" Brown says. "He's the guy that you fight for, he's the guy that you die for.

"But 20 years later, when Dan Klaidman goes back to interview many of the people who were part of it, it's more complicated than that. Yes, it was about their colleagues. But they do also want questions answered."

"They really want to know whether this was worth it," Brown continues. "Why [it was] that people died. Why we were there at all. And was this mission in vain? It's a very haunting thing for the people who lived and survived."

The article also looks at how the operation has affected the lives of the soldiers who were there.

Part of a series about small businesses in America

When it comes to job creation, politicians talk about small businesses as the engines of the U.S. economy. It's been a familiar refrain among politicians from both major parties for years.

'Not Just A Restaurant'

Economists say such job growth is all about new firms — startups — but not all of them. Most startups will actually fail. The second most likely outcome is that they'll start small and stay small. Just a tiny fraction start small and then grow fast, creating an outsize share of new jobs. One such company is Sweetgreen, which dishes out fast, fresh organic salads in compostable bowls at 20 locations on the East Coast.

Pedro Ceron manages the restaurant near Capitol Hill. He's worked for the company for a little more than a year and is one of about 570 people now employed by Sweetgreen. Six years ago, it was just a little shack of a shop in D.C.'s Georgetown neighborhood, says co-founder Nicolas Jammet.

"It was 560 square feet, and most people told us that you couldn't open a restaurant in that space or that size. But we were college seniors, and we wanted to do it; so we did it," Jammet says.

“ [Government] loan programs, I would say, would be better targeted towards young businesses than small businesses per se.

Emblematic of the sense of hatred and distrust in the city, there was a bomb threat lodged against King, who came to speak in Dallas just a few months before Kennedy got there.

On the Mink Coat Mob Riot, a notorious confrontation between Lyndon Baines Johnson and a group of Dallas protesters four days before the 1960 presidential election

It was an amazing scene and one that's been exiled to the corners of history. It's really something we need to be mindful of. LBJ and Ladybird Johnson were attacked by a mob of Dallas' leading citizens during a campaign stop in downtown Dallas. In the lobbies of the two finest hotels in Dallas, it was a melee: people swinging signs at them, they were spitting at them, people were pulling hat pins out of their hats and trying to stab people. It became known as the Mink Coat Mob Riot ...

Some historians say that folks then voted for LBJ and Kennedy in sympathy and that put them both in the White House. The very thing that people in Dallas, some people in Dallas in this Mink Coat Mob — the finest citizens in the city — did not want to have happen.

On the nature of the Mink Coat Mob

It's those scary moments when you see a face coiled in rage. You see behind [LBJ] these faces twisted in anger and hate. Then, again, almost the unlikely nature [of the mob]: You look at the full frame and these are people who are dressed literally in mink coats, suits, ties, people taking a break for lunch during their business endeavors. It really looks like society unhinged. Something's gone horribly, horribly awry in Dallas.

“ Something's gone horribly, horribly awry in Dallas.