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Most Americans don't get the 4 to 6.5 cups of fruits and vegetables we're supposed to consume every day, per government guidelines. But companies that make juice, especially high-end, "fresh" juice, are ready to come to our rescue.

The relatively new "super-premium" juice marketers are pushing more than just pretty colors and sweet flavors. They're also trying to persuade Americans that getting fruits and vegetables from juice is convenient and pleasurable and will potentially alleviate your guilt about your unhealthy ways by blasting your system with "incredible nutrition."

Look no further than Starbucks' announcement this week that it has opened a $70 million, state-of-the-art "juicery" in Rancho Cucamonga, Calif., where it plans to quadruple production of its Evolution Fresh juice, a brand it acquired in 2011.

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An estimated 7 million people have been shut out at 12 of the busiest and biggest U.S. national parks, costing parks and nearby communities about $76 million in lost visitor spending for each day the partial government shutdown drags on.

That's according to a report just out from the Coalition of National Park Service Retirees, which derived its estimates from actual National Park Service visitation numbers from last October and an independent analysis of park economic impacts conducted by the nonpartisan group Headwaters Economics.

The report also concludes that more than 40,000 non-Park Service jobs are at risk in and outside these 12 national parks alone.

"These figures are mind-boggling, and they only begin to capture the full economic shock of locking up the crown jewels of America," says Maureen Finnerty, the Coalition's chair and a former superintendent at Everglades and Olympic National Parks.

Here are the calculations park-by-park for the first 10 days of the shutdown. (Figures apply to areas inside and outside the parks):

Acadia National Park, Maine

Lost visitors: 68,493

Lost visitor dollars: $5,263,013

Non-NPS jobs at risk: 3,147

Badlands National Park, South Dakota

Lost visitors: 27,767

Lost visitor dollars: $656,986

Non-NPS jobs at risk: 375

Boston National Historic Park, Massachusetts

Lost visitors: 54,794

Lost visitor dollars: $2,032,876

Non-NPS jobs at risk: 904

Cuyahoga Valley National Park, Ohio

Lost visitors: 68,219

Lost visitor dollars: $1,545,205

Non-NPS jobs at risk: 599

Everglades National Park, Florida

Lost visitors: 25,083

Lost visitor dollars: $3,857,534

Non-NPS jobs at risk: 1,951

Gettysburg National Military Park, Pennsylvania

Lost visitors: 27,397

Lost visitor dollars: $1,796,712

Non-NPS jobs at risk: 1,051

Glacier National Park, Montana

Lost visitors: 60,273

Lost visitor dollars: $3,076,712

Non-NPS jobs at risk: 1,632

Grand Canyon National Park, Arizona

Lost visitors: 120,000

Lost visitor dollars: $11,750,684

Non-NPS jobs at risk: 6,167

Great Smoky Mountains National Park, North Carolina and Tennessee

Lost visitors: 257,534

Lost visitor dollars: $23,123,387

Non-NPS jobs at risk: 11,367

Olympic National Park, Washington

Lost visitors: 77,808

Lost visitor dollars: $2,912,328

Non-NPS jobs at risk: 1,395

Rocky Mountain National Park, Colorado

Lost visitors: 80,821

Lost visitor dollars: $4,821,917

Non-NPS jobs at risk: 2,641

Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming, Idaho and Montana

Lost Visitors: 98,630

Lost visitor dollars: $9,452,054

Non-NPS jobs at risk: 4,481

Yosemite National Park, California

Lost visitors: 106,849

Lost visitor dollars: $10,021,917

Non-NPS jobs at risk: 4,602

Zion National Park, Utah

Lost visitors: 72,876

Lost visitor dollars: $3,495,890

Non-NPS jobs at risk: 2,136

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.