Advertisement For School Quotes

School is the advertising agency which makes you believe that you need the society as it is.

Consumerism is the worship of the god of quantity; advertising is its liturgy. Advertising is schooling in false longing.

Every maker of video games knows something that the makers of curriculum don't seem to understand. You'll never see a video game being advertised as being easy. Kids who do not like school will tell you it's not because it's too hard. It's because it's--boring

Youths are passed through schools that don’t teach. Then forced to search for jobs that don’t exist and finally left stranded to stare at the glamorous lives advertised around them.

In much the same way, motherhood has become the essential female experience, valued above all others: giving life is where it's at. "Pro-maternity" propaganda has rarely been so extreme. They must be joking, the modern equivalent of the double constraint: "Have babies, it's wonderful, you'll feel more fulfilled and feminine than ever," but do it in a society in freefall in which waged work is a condition of social survival but guaranteed to no one, and especially not to women. Give birth in cities where accommodation is precarious, schools have surrendered the fight and children are subject to the most vicious mental assault through advertising, TV, internet, fizzy drink manufacturers and so on. Without children you will never be fulfilled as a woman, but bringing up kids in decent conditions is almost impossible.

Let's face it. We live in a command-based system, where we have been programmed since our earliest school years to become followers, not individuals. We have been conditioned to embrace teams, the herd, the masses, popular opinion -- and to reject what is different, eccentric or stands alone. We are so programmed that all it takes for any business or authority to condition our minds to follow or buy something is to simply repeat a statement more than three or four times until we repeat it ourselves and follow it as truth or the best trendiest thing. This is called "programming" -- the frequent repetition of words to condition us how to think, what to like or dislike, and who to follow.

Cinema, radio, television, magazines are a school of inattention: people look without seeing, listen in without hearing

If happiness is determined by expectations, then two pillars of our society – mass media and the advertising industry – may unwittingly be depleting the globe’s reservoirs of contentment. If you were an eighteen-year-old youth in a small village 5,000 years ago you’d probably think you were good-looking because there were only fifty other men in your village and most of them were either old, scarred and wrinkled, or still little kids. But if you are a teenager today you are a lot more likely to feel inadequate. Even if the other guys at school are an ugly lot, you don’t measure yourself against them but against the movie stars, athletes and supermodels you see all day on television, Facebook and giant billboards.

here's the thing about friends, I mean REAL friends: You can't just put up a poster at school and advertise for somebody and then hope you find the perfect one. It might work, I guess, but you'd look so pathetic and desperate that no one would want to be your friend, and so it would be kind of pointless

Uniform of a soldier and uniform of a student both are equally needed for the nation.

Modern medicine is not scientific, it is full of prejudice, illogic and susceptible to advertising. Doctors are not taught to reason, they are programmed to believe in whatever their medical schools teach them and the leading doctors tell them. Over the past 20 years the drug companies, with their enormous wealth, have taken medicine over and now control its research, what is taught and the information released to the public.

Education makes your maths better, not necessarily your manners.

There was an advertisement in the newspaper for a teaching position in a school with the worst reputation in town, with the sort of class that no qualified teacher with all the parts of her brain correctly screwed together would voluntarily face. It was attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder before attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder had been invented. “There’s no hope for these boys and girls,” the headmaster soberly explained in the interview. “This is not education, this is storage.” Maybe Sonja understood how it felt to be described as such. The vacant position attracted only one applicant, and she got those boys and girls to read Shakespeare.

Another reason Hawthorne set his story in the past (in lies) was 'cause he couldn't say directly all the wild things he wanted to say. He was living in a society to which ideas and writing still mattered. In 'The Custom House', the introduction to The Scarlet Letter, Hawthorne makes sure he tells us the story of The Scarlet Letter occurred long ago and has nothing to do with anyone who's now living. After all, Hawthorne had to protect himself so he could keep writing. Right now I can speak as directly as I want 'cause no one gives a shit about writing and ideas, all anyone cares about is money. Even if one person in Boise, Idaho, gave half-a-shit, the only book Mr Idaho can get his hands on is a book the publishers, or rather the advertisers ('cause all businessmen are now advertisers) have decided will net half-a-million in movie and/or TV rights. A book that can be advertised. Define culture that way.

So, maybe we’re the generation of the selfie, but we’re also the generation that grew up in a tainted, Photoshopped world with every impossible beauty standard shoved down our throat through a tube because eating has become a guilty pleasure and condemning beauty ideals won’t go straight to our thighs. And if, by chance, we are able to destroy the demons that you’ve planted inside of us with your constant advertisements and rules that play behind our eyelids and take root in our brains, then let us take our fucking pictures and capture that moment when we felt beautiful because all this world has taught us is that our beauty is the greatest measure of our worth. Scoff at our phones all you like, these delicate extensions of our fingers, but know that through this technology that you couldn’t even begin to understand, we have smudged the entire world with our fingerprints. We are the generation of knowledge, and we are learning more than any that came before us. So, frown at my typing fingers; I am using them to grasp power by the throat. Try to invalidate us, but we’ve heard our parents talking about the world’s crashing and burning since we had sprung from the womb. We know you’ve fucked up, and we’re angry about it- the kind of anger that fuels knowledge, that I feel in my veins every time I read the news from my phone before school, that sticks in my throat like honey in a debate; the kind of anger that simmers, that sharpens teeth into daggers, that makes this generation more dangerous than you could have ever imagined. We are the generation of change, and goddammit, we’re coming.

Anti-black racism is in the culture. It’s in our laws, in our advertisements, in our friendships, in our segregated cities, in our schools, in our Congress, in our scientific experiments, in our language, on the Internet, in our bodies no matter our race, in our communities, and, perhaps most devastatingly, in our justice system.

A boy was staring at me. I was quite sure I'd never seen him befroe. Long and leanly muscular, he dwarfed and the molded plastic elementary school chair he was sitting in. Mahogany hair, straight and short. He looked my age, maybe a year older, and he sat with his tailbone against the edge of the chair, his posture aggresively poor, one hand half in a pocket of dark jeans. I looked away, suddenly conscious of my myriad insufficiencies. I was wearing old jeans, which had once been tight but now sagged in weird places, and a yellow T-shirt advertising a band I didn't even like anymore. Also my hair: I had this pageboy haircut, and I hadn't even bothered to, like, brush it. Furthermore, I had ridiculously fat chipmunked cheeks, a side effect of treatment. I looked like a normally proportioned person with a balloon for a head. This was not even to mention the canckle situation. And yet-I cut a glance to him, and his eyes were still on me.

The battle against good and evil is raging now! Look at your television programming and movie advertisements presenting the occult…the demonic…the satanic…the practice of witchcraft and sorcery in popular books…the open hostility toward Christianity and the revival of anti-Semitism. The fight is on for the hearts and minds of our children in ours homes, our schools, our universities, and our society.

We’ve all seen “quit smoking” advertisements on buses and subways. They don’t work. We’ve heard about school programs that teach kids to say no to drugs and alcohol. In many cases drug and alcohol use go up after these programs because they pique the curiosity of the adolescent students. The only thing that has been shown to work consistently is raising taxes on these products and placing limits on where and when they can be sold. When these measures are taken, use goes down.

Over recent years, [there's been] a strong tendency to require assessment of children and teachers so that [teachers] have to teach to tests and the test determines what happens to the child, and what happens to the teacher...that's guaranteed to destroy any meaningful educational process: it means the teacher cannot be creative, imaginative, pay attention to individual students' needs, that a student can't pursue things [...] and the teacher's future depends on it as well as the students'...the people who are sitting in the offices, the bureaucrats designing this - they're not evil people, but they're working within a system of ideology and doctrines, which turns what they're doing into something extremely harmful [...] the assessment itself is completely artificial; it's not ranking teachers in accordance with their ability to help develop children who reach their potential, explore their creative interests and so on [...] you're getting some kind of a 'rank,' but it's a 'rank' that's mostly meaningless, and the very ranking itself is harmful. It's turning us into individuals who devote our lives to achieving a rank, not into doing things that are valuable and important. It's highly destructive...in, say, elementary education, you're training kids this way [...] I can see it with my own children: when my own kids were in elementary school (at what's called a good school, a good-quality suburban school), by the time they were in third grade, they were dividing up their friends into 'dumb' and 'smart.' You had 'dumb' if you were lower-tracked, and 'smart' if you were upper-tracked [...] it's just extremely harmful and has nothing to do with education. Education is developing your own potential and creativity. Maybe you're not going to do well in school, and you'll do great in art; that's fine. It's another way to live a fulfilling and wonderful life, and one that's significant for other people as well as yourself. The whole idea is wrong in itself; it's creating something that's called 'economic man': the 'economic man' is somebody who rationally calculates how to improve his/her own status, and status means (basically) wealth. So you rationally calculate what kind of choices you should make to increase your wealth - don't pay attention to anything else - or maybe maximize the amount of goods you have. What kind of a human being is that? All of these mechanisms like testing, assessing, evaluating, measuring...they force people to develop those characteristics. The ones who don't do it are considered, maybe, 'behavioral problems' or some other deviance [...] these ideas and concepts have consequences. And it's not just that they're ideas, there are huge industries devoted to trying to instill them...the public relations industry, advertising, marketing, and so on. It's a huge industry, and it's a propaganda industry. It's a propaganda industry designed to create a certain type of human being: the one who can maximize consumption and can disregard his actions on others.

Big Sale. Last Week.’ Last week? Why advertise? I already missed it. They’re just rubbing it in.

The school books are full of paid advertisements, and rubbish at that.

Art can do the opposite of glamorising the unattainable; it can reawaken us to the genuine merit of life as we’re forced to lead it. It is advertising for the things we really need.

A snapshot of these forces pushing in the same direction may be found in an advertisement for tractors in a 1921 issue of the magazine Successful Farming entitled “Keep the Boy in School”: The

I will not dream anymore, you said. I will not set myself up for the pain. But then your team made the playoffs, or you saw a movie, or a billboard glowing dusky orange and advertising Aruba, or a girl who bore more than a passing resemblance to a woman you’d dated in high school—a woman you’d loved and lost—danced above you with shimmering eyes, and you said, fuck it, let’s dream just one more time.

Frantz Fanon wrote, “Superiority? Inferiority? Why not simply try to touch the other, feel the other, discover each other?” Can we shift the focus of our insecurities, fears, and anger from other races and work together to deal with the unfair distribution of wealth on this planet? Back in the seventies Huey Newton wrote, “Youths are passed through schools that don’t teach, then forced to search for jobs that don’t exist and finally left stranded in the street to stare at the glamorous lives advertised around them.” This is happening right now in this country, in 2018, for all children of all races.

But to what extent has computer technology been an advantage to the masses of people? To steelworkers, vegetable-store owners, teachers, garage mechanics, musicians, bricklayers, dentists, and most of the rest into whose lives the computer now intrudes? Their private matters have been made more accessible to powerful institutions. They are more easily tracked and controlled; are subjected to more examinations; are increasingly mystified by the decisions made about them; are often reduced to mere numerical objects. They are inundated by junk mail. They are easy targets for advertising agencies and political organizations. The schools teach their children to operate computerized systems instead of teaching things that are more valuable to children. In a word, almost nothing that they need happens to the losers. Which is why they are losers.

I've always thought of myself as a realist. I can remember fighting with my professors about it in grad school. The world that I live in consists of 250 advertisements a day and any number of unbelievably entertaining options, most of which are subsidized by corporations that want to sell me things. The whole way that the world acts on my nerve endings is bound up with stuff that the guys with the leather patches on their elbows would consider pop or trivial or ephemeral. I use a fair amount of pop stuff in my fiction, but what I mean by it is nothing different than what other people mean in writing about trees and parks and having to walk to the river to get water 100 years ago. It's just the texture of the world I live in.

She hasn't been back since, and we have a young per diem substitute who had taught shoes in a vocational high school on her last job. Though her license is English, she had been called to the Shoe Department, where she traced the history of shoes from Cinderella and Puss in Boots through Galsworthy and modern advertising. "Best shoe lesson they ever had," she told me cheerfully. "Until a cop came in, dangling handcuffs: 'Lady, that kid I gotta have.'" To her, Calvin Coolidge is Paradise.

When it is time to leave the sun and moon behind, how will you react? [34] Will you sit down and cry, like an infant? Did nothing that you heard and studied in school get through to you? Why did you advertise yourself as a philosopher when you might have told the truth: ‘I made it through a couple of primers, then read a little Chrysippus – but I hardly crossed the threshold of philosophy.’ [35] How can you associate yourself with Socrates, who lived and died as he did, or with Diogenes?

Random House, in the catbird seat, since it gets to recite last, declares in 1966, “The use of like in place of as is universally condemned by teachers and editors, notwithstanding its wide currency, especially in advertising slogans. Do as I say, not as I do does not admit of like instead of as. In an occasional idiomatic phrase, it is somewhat less offensive when substituted for as if (He raced down the street like crazy), but this example is clearly colloquial and not likely to be found in any but the most informal written contexts.” I find this excellent. It even tells who will hurt you if you make a mistake, and it withholds aid and comfort from those friends of cancer and money, those greedy enemies of the language who teach our children to say after school, “Winston tastes good like a cigarette should.

That is the idea that we all hope you have learned in studying science in school—we never explicitly say what this is, but just hope that you catch on by all the examples of scientific investigation. It is interesting, therefore, to bring it out now and speak of it explicitly. It’s a kind of scientific integrity, a principle of scientific thought that corresponds to a kind of utter honesty—a kind of leaning over backwards. For example, if you’re doing an experiment, you should report everything that you think might make it invalid—not only what you think is right about it: other causes that could possibly explain your results; and things you thought of that you’ve eliminated by some other experiment, and how they worked—to make sure the other fellow can tell they have been eliminated. Details that could throw doubt on your interpretation must be given, if you know them. You must do the best you can—if you know anything at all wrong, or possibly wrong—to explain it. If you make a theory, for example, and advertise it, or put it out, then you must also put down all the facts that disagree with it, as well as those that agree with it. There is also a more subtle problem. When you have put a lot of ideas together to make an elaborate theory, you want to make sure, when explaining what it fits, that those things it fits are not just the things that gave you the idea for the theory; but that the finished theory makes something else come out right, in addition. In summary, the idea is to try to give all of the information to help others to judge the value of your contribution; not just the information that leads to judgment in one particular direction or another. The first principle is that you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool. So you have to be very careful about that. After you’ve not fooled yourself, it’s easy not to fool other scientists... You just have to be honest in a conventional way after that.

When it comes to television advertising, Michael Bloomberg out-spends the NRA and all other self-defense groups by 6.3 to one. The money produces political attack ads that accuse supporters of right-to-carry on college campuses of “allowing criminals to carry hidden, loaded guns in our schools.

So if we can find a natural rebelliousness within ourselves (and presumably that’s why we went to art school), if we can harness that, we have an energy that we can turn into something useful. Something exciting and different. We can be outrageous to a purpose. That, for me, is great advertising.

Measurability—Can you identify the segment? Can you quantify its size? Accessibility—Can you reach the segment through advertising, sales force or distributors, transportation, or warehousing? Substantiality—Is the segment large enough to bother with? Is the segment shrinking, maturing, or growing?

We walked to another door with an amber light above it. This one led to a hall I hadn’t seen before. It was less pristine than the others. There were whiteboards on the walls, scribbled with notes about cafeteria menus and security sweeps. There were even a few flyers taped up, advertising cars for sale or asking if anyone knew a good tutoring service for high school biochemistry. It looked so much more real than the place I’d been since I woke up, so much more human, that it almost made my chest hurt. The world still existed. I’d died and come back, and the whole time I was gone, the world continued.

The commercial pressures, the forces urging us to buy and discard and buy again. When everything in public life has a logo attached to it, when every public space is disfigured with advertisements, when nothing if public value and importance can take place without commercial sponsorship, when schools and hospitals have to act as if their guiding principle were market forces rather than human need,..., when citizens become consumers and clients, patients, guests, students and passengers are all flattened into customers, what price the school of morals? The answer is: what it would fetch in the market, and not a penny more.

Advertising,” he wrote, “now compares with such long-standing institutions as the school and the church in the magnitude of its social influence. It dominates the media, it has vast power in the shaping of popular standards and it is really one of the very limited groups of institutions which exercise social control.

Then there are panacea programs and actions: bring back national service and the juvenile problem will end, stop advertising on TV, ban internet porn, revive grammar schools, ditch the EU. People pin their hopes on a single action curing a host of interconnected problems. But they forget the world is how it is for very good reason.

When you are discovered by a householder—with revolver—in his parlor at half-past three in the morning, it is surely an injudicious move to lay stress on your proficiency as a burglar. The householder may be supposed to take that for granted. The side of your character that should be advertised in such a crisis is the non-burglarious. Allusion should be made to the fact that, as a child, you attended Sunday school regularly, and to what the minister said when you took the divinity prize. The idea should be conveyed to the householder's mind that, if let off with a caution, your innate goodness of heart will lead you to reform and to avoid such scenes in future.

There’s good reason for such worries. About a year after Pole created his pregnancy prediction model, a man walked into a Minnesota Target and demanded to see the manager. He was clutching an advertisement. He was very angry. “My daughter got this in the mail!” he said. “She’s still in high school, and you’re sending her coupons for baby clothes and cribs? Are you trying to encourage her to get pregnant?” The manager didn’t have any idea what the man was talking about. He looked at the mailer. Sure enough, it was addressed to the man’s daughter and contained advertisements for maternity clothing, nursery furniture, and pictures of smiling infants gazing into their mothers’ eyes. The manager apologized profusely, and then called, a few days later, to apologize again. The father was somewhat abashed. “I had a talk with my daughter,” he said. “It turns out there’s been some activities in my house I haven’t been completely aware of.” He took a deep breath. “She’s due in August. I owe you an apology.

Today, according to the New York Times, each person is exposed to thirty-five hundred desire-inducing advertisements every day. Rodney Clapp wrote, “The consumer is schooled in insatiability. He or she is never to be satisfied—at least not for long. The consumer is tutored that people basically consist of unmet needs that can be appeased by commodified goods and experiences.

We have now reached a level in which many people are not merely unacquainted with the fundamentals of punctuation, but don’t evidently realize that there are fundamentals. Many people—people who make posters for leading publishers, write captions for the BBC, compose letters and advertisements for important institutions—seem to think that capitalization and marks of punctuation are condiments that you sprinkle through any collection of words as if from a salt shaker. Here is a headline, exactly as presented, from a magazine ad for a private school in York: “Ranked by the daily Telegraph the top Northern Co-Educational day and Boarding School for Academic results.” All those capital letters are just random. Does anyone really think that the correct rendering of the newspaper is “the daily Telegraph”? Is it really possible to be that unobservant? Well, yes, as a matter of fact. Not long ago, I received an e-mail from someone at the Department for Children, Schools and Families asking me to take part in a campaign to help raise appreciation for the quality of teaching in Great Britain. Here is the opening line of the message exactly as it was sent to me: “Hi Bill. Hope alls well. Here at the Department of Children Schools and Families…” In the space of one line, fourteen words, the author has made three elemental punctuation errors (two missing commas, one missing apostrophe; I am not telling you more than that) and gotten the name of her own department wrong—this from a person whose job is to promote education. In a similar spirit, I received a letter not long ago from a pediatric surgeon inviting me to speak at a conference. The writer used the word “children’s” twice in her invitation, spelling it two different ways and getting it wrong both times. This was a children’s specialist working in a children’s hospital. How long do you have to be exposed to a word, how central must it be to your working life, to notice how it is spelled?

The processes of corporate power do not work in isolation. The economic and legal mechanisms that allow the privatization of the commonwealth, externalization of costs, predatory economic practices, political influence-buying, manipulation of regulation and deregulation, control of the media, propaganda and advertising in schools, and the use of police and military forces to protect the property of the wealthy-all of these work synergistically to weave a complex web of power. Activists have dedicated lifetimes of necessary work to deal with the results of corporate power, by trying to mitigate the results of power: an ever-increasing disparity in wealth and power and continual economic, political, environmental, and human rights crises. For social justice campaigns to be strategic, it is also necessary to examine how privatization, externalization, monopoly, and other corporate power processes have been institutionalized. This institutionalization is exemplified in the structural adjustment programs of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, and in recent "free" trade agreements which have culminated in the creation of the World Trade Organization. An understanding of such institutions provides a necessary tool for achieving the long-term goals of environmental sustainability and social justice.

Employers advertised jobs in Mexico by specifying the age and even goddamn school a kid had to have graduated from. No students from the UNAM, no one over thirty-four, no married people, no kids, send a photograph, and indicate religion. Under those fucking circumstances you had to try to give your child an edge or they were going to be trampled upon by the richer kids from the Tec or the Anahuac; kids who had lighter skin, heavier wallets, and the right last names.

Aimée Thanatogenos spoke the tongue of Los Angeles; the sparse furniture of her mind—the objects which barked the intruder's shins—had been acquired at the local High School and University; she presented herself to the world dressed and scented in obedience to the advertisements; brain and body were scarcely distinguishable from the standard product, but the spirit—ah, the spirit was something apart; it had to be sought afar; not here in the musky orchards of the Hesperides, but in the mountain air of the dawn, in the eagle-haunted passes of Hellas. An umbilical cord of cafés and fruit shops, of ancestral shady businesses (fencing and pimping) united Aimée, all unconscious, to the high places of her race. As she grew up the only language she knew expressed fewer and fewer of her ripening needs; the facts which littered her memory grew less substantial; the figure she saw in the looking-glass seemed less recognizably herself. Aimée withdrew herself into a lofty and hieratic habitation.

When do you wish to go?” “Early to-morrow morning, sir.” “Well, you must have some money; you can’t travel without money, and I daresay you have not much: I have given you no salary yet. How much have you in the world, Jane?” he asked, smiling. I drew out my purse; a meagre thing it was. “Five shillings, sir.” He took the purse, poured the hoard into his palm, and chuckled over it as if its scantiness amused him. Soon he produced his pocket-book: “Here,” said he, offering me a note; it was fifty pounds, and he owed me but fifteen. I told him I had no change. “I don’t want change; you know that. Take your wages.” I declined accepting more than was my due. He scowled at first; then, as if recollecting something, he said— “Right, right! Better not give you all now: you would, perhaps, stay away three months if you had fifty pounds. There are ten; is it not plenty?” “Yes, sir, but now you owe me five.” “Come back for it, then; I am your banker for forty pounds.” “Mr. Rochester, I may as well mention another matter of business to you while I have the opportunity.” “Matter of business? I am curious to hear it.” “You have as good as informed me, sir, that you are going shortly to be married?” “Yes; what then?” “In that case, sir, Adèle ought to go to school: I am sure you will perceive the necessity of it.” “To get her out of my bride’s way, who might otherwise walk over her rather too emphatically? There’s sense in the suggestion; not a doubt of it. Adèle, as you say, must go to school; and you, of course, must march straight to—the devil?” “I hope not, sir; but I must seek another situation somewhere.” “In course!” he exclaimed, with a twang of voice and a distortion of features equally fantastic and ludicrous. He looked at me some minutes. “And old Madam Reed, or the Misses, her daughters, will be solicited by you to seek a place, I suppose?” “No, sir; I am not on such terms with my relatives as would justify me in asking favours of them—but I shall advertise.

These men, and the boys following in their footsteps, were socialized in childhood to exhibit the ideal masculine traits, including stoicism, aggressiveness, extreme self-confidence, and an unending competitiveness. Those who do not conform are punished by their fathers in the form of physical and emotional abuse, and then further socialized by the boys in their school and community who have been enduring their own abuse at home. If that isn’t enough, our culture then reflects those expectations in its television shows, movies, music, and especially in advertising, where products like construction-site-quality trucks, power tools, beer, gendered deodorant, and even yogurt promise to bestow masculinity for the right price. The masculinity that’s being sold, that’s being installed via systemic abuse, is fragile because, again, it is unattainable. Humans are not intended to suppress their emotions indefinitely, to always be confident and unflinching. Traditional masculinity, as we know it, is an unnatural state, and, as a consequence, men are constantly at war with themselves and the world around them.

Declan Lynch was a liar. He'd been a liar his entire life. Lies came to him fluidly, easily, instinctively. What does your father do for a living? He sells high-end sports cars in the summer, life insurance in the winter. He's an anesthesiologist. He does financial consulting for divorcees. He does advertising work for international companies in English-speaking markets. He's in the FBI. Where did he meet your mother? They were on yearbook together in high school. They were set up by friends. She took his picture at the county fair, said she wanted to keep his smile forever. Why can't Ronan come to a sleepover? He sleepwalks. Once he walked out to the road and my father had to convince a trucker who'd stopped before hitting him he was really his son. How did your mother die? Brain bleed. Rare. Genetic. Passes from mother to daughter, which is the only good thing, 'cause she only had sons. How are you doing? Fine. Good. Great. At a certain point, the truth felt worse. Truth was a closed-casket funeral attended by its estranged living relatives, Lies, Safety, Secrets. He lied to everyone. He lied to his lovers, his friends, his brothers. Well. More often he simply didn't tell his brothers the truth.

So, in less elevated circles, we might toss a coin as to whether or not to go to a party, decide to go, and there meet the person whom we are to marry and spend our lives with. And if that person came, say, from New Zealand, and wanted to return, then we might find ourselves spending our life in Christchurch. Not that spending one’s lifetime in Christchurch is anything less than very satisfactory—who among us would not be happy living in a city of well-behaved people, within reach of mountains, where the civic virtues ensure courtesy and comfort and where the major problems of the world are an ocean away? But had the coin fallen the other way—as coins occasionally do—then that wholly different prospect might never have opened up and one might spend the rest of one’s days in the place where one started out. Or one might pick up a newspaper abandoned in a train by a person not well schooled in those same civic virtues, open it and chance to see an advertisement for a job that one would not otherwise have seen. And that same job might take one into the path of risk, and that very risk may materialise and end one’s life prematurely. Again the act of picking up the paper has consequences unglimpsed at the time, but profound nonetheless.

They advertise in about a thousand magazines, always showing some hot-shot guy on a horse jumping over a fence. Like as if all you ever did at Pencey was play polo all the time. I never even once saw a horse anywhere near the place. And underneath the guy on the horse's picture, it always says: "Since 1888 we have been molding boys into splendid, clear-thinking young men." Strictly for the birds. They don't do any damn more molding at Pencey than they do at any other school. And I didn't know anybody there that was splendid and clear-thinking and all. Maybe two guys. If that many. And they probably came to Pencey that way.

For the rest of Kat’s childhood, she moved from one relative’s house to another’s, up and down the East Coast, living in four homes before entering high school. Finally, in high school, she lived for a few years with her grandmother, her mom’s mom, whom she called “G-Ma.” No one ever talked about her mom’s murder. “In my family, my past was ‘The Big Unmentionable’—including my role in putting my own father in jail,” she says. In high school, Kat appeared to be doing well. She was an honor student who played four varsity sports. Beneath the surface, however, “I was secretly self-medicating with alcohol because otherwise, by the time everything stopped and it got quiet at night, I could not sleep, I would just lie there and a terrible panic would overtake me.” She went to college, failed out, went back, and graduated. She went to work in advertising, and one day, dissatisfied, quit. She went back to grad school, piling up debt. She became a teacher. Kat quit that job too, when a relationship she had formed with another teacher imploded. At the age of thirty-four, Kat went to stay with her brother and his family in Hawaii. She got a job as a valet, parking cars. “I’d come home from parking cars all day and curl up on my bed in the back bedroom of my brother’s house, and lie there feeling desperate and alone, my heart beating with anxiety.

collaboration between teams at IBM and IIT Madras offered a quantum computing course on NPTEL, a popular MOOC platform in India. Despite minimal advertising, this course attracted 10,000 registrants, exemplifying the keen interest in quantum computing among Indian learners. Additionally, IBM’s Qiskit summer schools consistently see high participation from India, indicating a sustained enthusiasm and growing expertise in the field within the country. The registrations have to be closed early in India because the priority access slots on quantum computers are limited. This trend reflects the flourishing quantum learners community India, driven by educational initiatives and widespread engagement from students and professionals.

In the USA, the “corporament” exists as the: military (defense/offense) + industrial + academic (schooling – at all levels – as prison) + “corporament” entertainment (Hollywood, media, advertising/consumerism/commercialization, propaganda/psychological warfare) + judicial (defense and prosecutorial lawyers, judges, law enforcement/police, prisons) + financial (banks, accounting firms) + religion + petrochemical/pharmaceutical (drugs, antibiotics, antibacterials, vaccines, pesticides – toxins to kill or put you at “dis-ease” and drugs to “treat” you) + imperial commu-soci-capitofasdemocracism system/society/economy/Western thinking = Military-industrial-academic-“corporament” entertainment-judicial-financial-religion-petrochemical/pharmaceutical complex.

This determination that nurturing should become exclusively a concern of women served to signify to both sexes that neither nurture nor womanhood was very important. But the assignment to women of a kind of work that was thought both onerous and trivial was only the beginning of their exploitation. As the persons exclusively in charge of the tasks of nurture, women often came into sole charge of the household budget; they became family purchasing agents. The time of the household barterer was past. Kitchens were now run on a cash economy. Women had become customers, a fact not long wasted on the salesmen, who saw that in these women they had customers of a new and most promising kind. The modern housewife was isolated from her husband, from her school-age children, and from other women. She was saddled with work from which much of the skill, hence much of the dignity, had been withdrawn, and which she herself was less and less able to consider important. She did not know what her husband did at work, or after work, and she knew that her life was passing in his regardlessness and in his absence. Such a woman was ripe for a sales talk: this was the great commercial insight of modern times. Such a woman must be told — or subtly made to understand — that she must not be a drudge, that she must not let her work affect her looks, that she must not become “unattractive,” that she must always be fresh, cheerful, young, shapely, and pretty. All her sexual and mortal fears would thus be given voice, and she would be made to reach for money. What was implied was always the question that a certain bank finally asked outright in a billboard advertisement: “Is your husband losing interest?

Up rose the scent of green-apple shampoo. Of river stones once the flood has gone. The taste of winter sky laced with sulfur fumes. A kiss beneath a white-hearted tree. A hot still day holding its breath. We removed the contents one by one. There were two blue plastic hair combs. A tough girl's black rubber-band bracelet. A newspaper advertisement for a secretarial school folded in half. A blond braid wrapped in gladwrap. A silver necklace with a half-a-broken-heart pendant. An address, written in a leftward-slanting hand, on a scrap of paper. Ballet shoes wrapped in laces. From the box came the sound of bicycle tires humming on hot pavement. Of bare feet running through crackling grass. Of frantic fingers unstitching an embroidered flower. Of paper wings rising on a sudden wind. Of the lake breathing against the shore. I didn't say anything. I kept very still.

Our precious lives, when you step back and look at them, are a kind of game. Try imagining the game described by the exciting copy above. A literal once-in-a-lifetime adventure—the grand game of life. You start playing. First, there’s a random character creation process that proceeds automatically as a collaboration between your parents. There’s the heartwarming opening with your mom and your dad and a thousand blessings and all that, and then finally, you get to dive in. You get a rough grasp on the controls, and then you’re tossed into “school,” a microcosmic tutorial for the heavy seas of society— The game’s setting—Earth. Awaiting us as we’re tossed into a corner of that oversized map is a massive sandbox game. There we have a vast array of choices, a spectacular degree of freedom, and countless minigames. Inspired by the hype, we advance just as advertised, but it’s not long before we realize something. —We’ve been had.

Men like my father, and men like him who attend Trump rallies, join misogynistic subcultures, populate some of the most hateful groups in the world, and are prisoners of toxic masculinity, an artificial construct whose expectancies are unattainable, thus making them exceedingly fragile and injurious to others, not to mention themselves. The illusion convinces them from an early age that men deserve to be privileged and entitled, that women and men who don’t conform to traditional standards are second-class persons, are weak and thus detestable. This creates a tyrannical patriarchal system that tilts the world further in favor of men, and, as a side effect, accounts for a great deal of crimes, including harassment, physical and emotional abuse, rape, and even murder. These men, and the boys following in their footsteps, were socialized in childhood to exhibit the ideal masculine traits, including stoicism, aggressiveness, extreme self-confidence, and an unending competitiveness. Those who do not conform are punished by their fathers in the form of physical and emotional abuse, and then further socialized by the boys in their school and community who have been enduring their own abuse at home. If that isn’t enough, our culture then reflects those expectations in its television shows, movies, music, and especially in advertising, where products like construction-site-quality trucks, power tools, beer, gendered deodorant, and even yogurt promise to bestow masculinity for the right price. The masculinity that’s being sold, that’s being installed via systemic abuse, is fragile because, again, it is unattainable. Humans are not intended to suppress their emotions indefinitely, to always be confident and unflinching. Traditional masculinity, as we know it, is an unnatural state, and, as a consequence, men are constantly at war with themselves and the world around them.

She had been away, yes. Always good to get back, right. With weather this dry they were lucky to have gotten through Thanksgiving without a fire, yes. No way she was ready to start dealing with Christmas, no. She had sat then in the rental car in the parking lot, almost deserted at four in the afternoon. Four in the afternoon was not the time when women who lived here shopped. Women who lived here shopped in the morning, before tennis, after working out. If she still lived here she would not be sitting in a rental car in the parking lot at four in the afternoon. One of the high school boys who worked in the market after school was stringing up Christmas lights on the board advertising the day's specials. Another was rounding up carts, jamming the carts into long trains and propelling each train into the rack with a single extended finger. By the time the last light dropped behind Point Dume the carts were all racked and the Christmas lights were blinking red and green and she had stopped crying. (page 153)

The real crisis of capitalism is that product development lags so far behind the best insights of advertising. Since the 1960s, advertising has worked out just how much we need help with the true challenges of life. It has fathomed how deeply we want to have better careers, stronger relationships, greater confidence. In most adverts, the pain and the hope of our lives have been superbly identified, but the products are almost comically at odds with the problems at hand. Advertisers are hardly to blame. They are, in fact, the victims of an extraordinary problem of modern capitalism. While we have so many complex needs, we have nothing better to offer ourselves, in the face of our troubles, than, perhaps, a slightly more accurate chronometer or a more subtly blended perfume. Business needs to get more ambitious in the creation of new kinds of “products,” in their own way as strange-sounding today as a wristwatch would have been to observers in 1500. We need the drive of commerce to get behind filling the world—and our lives—with goods that really can help us to thrive, flourish, find contentment, and manage our relationships well.

To get her out of my bride’s way, who might otherwise walk over her rather too emphatically? There’s sense in the suggestion; not a doubt of it. Adèle, as you say, must go to school; and you, of course, must march straight to—the devil?” “I hope not, sir; but I must seek another situation somewhere.” “In course!” he exclaimed, with a twang of voice and a distortion of features equally fantastic and ludicrous. He looked at me some minutes. “And old Madam Reed, or the Misses, her daughters, will be solicited by you to seek a place, I suppose?” “No, sir; I am not on such terms with my relatives as would justify me in asking favours of them—but I shall advertise.” “You shall walk up the pyramids of Egypt!” he growled. “At your peril you advertise! I wish I had only offered you a sovereign instead of ten pounds. Give me back nine pounds, Jane; I’ve a use for it.” “And so have I, sir,” I returned, putting my hands and my purse behind me. “I could not spare the money on any account.” “Little niggard!” said he, “refusing me a pecuniary request! Give me five pounds, Jane.” “Not five shillings, sir; nor five pence.” “Just let me look at the cash.” “No, sir; you are not to be trusted.

I think that's quite true. and in fact the people who understand this the best are those who are carrying out the control and domination in the more free societies. like the U.S. and England, where popular struggles have have won a lot of freedoms over the years and the state has limited capacity to coerce. It is very striking that it's precisely in those societies that elite groups—the business world, state managers and so on—recognized early on that they are going to have to develop massive methods of control of attitude and opinion, because you cannot control people by force anymore and therefore you have to modify their consciousness so that they don't perceive that they are living under conditions of alienation, oppression, subordination and so on. In fact, that's what probably a couple trillion dollars are spent on each year in the U.S., very self-consciously, from the framing of television advertisements for two-year olds to what you are taught in graduate school economics programs. It's designed to create a consciousness of subordination and it's also intended specifically and pretty consciously to suppress normal human emotions. Normal human emotions are sympathy and solidarity, not just for people but for stranded dolphins. It's just a normal reaction for people. If you go back to the classical political economists, people like Adam Smith, this was just taken for granted as the core of human nature and society. One of the main concentrations of advertising and education is to drive that out of your mind. And it's very conscious. In fact, it's conscious in social policy right in front of our eyes today. Take the effort to destroy Social Security. Well, what's the point of that? There's a lot of scam about financial problems, which is all total nonsense. And, of course, they want Wall Street to make a killing. Underlying it all is something much deeper. Social Security is based on a human emotion and it's a natural human emotion which has to be driven out of people minds, namely the emotion that you care about other people. You care. It's a social and community responsibility to care whether a disabled widow across town has enough food to eat, or whether a kid across the street can go to school. You have to get that out of people's heads. You have to make them say, "Look, you are a personal, rational wealth maximizer. If that disabled widow didn't prepare for her own future, it's her problem not your problem. It's not your fault she doesn't have enough to eat so why should you care?

Innovation and disruption are ideas that originated in the arena of business but which have since been applied to arenas whose values and goals are remote from the values and goals of business. People aren’t disk drives. Public schools, colleges and universities, churches, museums, and many hospitals, all of which have been subjected to disruptive innovation, have revenues and expenses and infrastructures, but they aren’t industries in the same way that manufacturers of hard-disk drives or truck engines or drygoods are industries. Journalism isn’t an industry in that sense, either. Doctors have obligations to their patients, teachers to their students, pastors to their congregations, curators to the public, and journalists to their readers--obligations that lie outside the realm of earnings, and are fundamentally different from the obligations that a business executive has to employees, partners, and investors. Historically, institutions like museums, hospitals, schools, and universities have been supported by patronage, donations made by individuals or funding from church or state. The press has generally supported itself by charging subscribers and selling advertising. (Underwriting by corporations and foundations is a funding source of more recent vintage.) Charging for admission, membership, subscriptions and, for some, earning profits are similarities these institutions have with businesses. Still, that doesn’t make them industries, which turn things into commodities and sell them for gain.

If “bullshit,” as opposed to “bull,” is a distinctively modern linguistic innovation, that could have something to do with other distinctively modern things, like advertising, public relations, political propaganda, and schools of education. “One of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit,” Harry Frankfurt, a distinguished moral philosopher who is professor emeritus at Princeton, says. The ubiquity of bullshit, he notes, is something that we have come to take for granted. Most of us are pretty confident of our ability to detect it, so we may not regard it as being all that harmful. We tend to take a more benign view of someone caught bullshitting than of someone caught lying. (“Never tell a lie when you can bullshit your way through,” a father counsels his son in an Eric Ambler novel.) All of this worries Frankfurt. We cannot really know the effect that bullshit has on us, he thinks, until we have a clearer understanding of what it is. That is why we need a theory of bullshit. Frankfurt’s own effort along these lines was contained in a paper that he presented more than three decades ago at a faculty seminar at Yale. Later, that paper appeared in a journal and then in a collection of Frankfurt’s writings; all the while, photocopies of it passed from fan to fan. In 2005, it was published as On Bullshit, a tiny book of sixty-seven spaciously printed pages that went on to become an improbable breakout success, spending half a year on the New York Times bestseller list.

But I haven’t mentioned the cheer relentlessness of modern life, the crowdedness, the incessant thumping music and braying voices, the near impossibility of finding solitude and silence and time to reflect. I haven’t mentioned the commercial pressures, the forces urging us to buy and discard and buy again. When everything in public life has a logo attached to it, when every public space is disfigured with advertisements, when nothing of public value and importance can take place without commercial sponsorship, when schools and hospitals have to act as if their guiding principle were market forces rather than human need, when adults and children alike are tempted to wear t-shirts with obscene words on them by the smirking little devices spelling the words wrongly, when citizens become consumers and clients; patients and guests, students and passengers are all flattened into customers, what price the school of morals? The answer is: what it would fetch in the market. And not a penny more. I haven’t mentioned the obsession with targets, and testing and tables; the management-driven and politics corrupted and all the clotted rubbish that so deforms the true work of schools. I haven’t mentioned something that might seem trivial but I think its importance is profound and rarely understood: that’s the difference between reading a story in a book and watching a story on a screen. It’s a psychological difference, not just a technical one. We need to take account of it and I fear we are not doing it, and the school of morals is suffering in result.

At the risk of oversimplifying a topic that deserves entire books, we can summarize like this: During enslavement, many Black cooks learned their way around kitchens because their lives could depend on having that knowledge and skill. After slavery was abolished, many took to slinging fried chicken (or cooking in general) as one way to make a living. Interestingly, it wasn’t until Black folks began navigating their supposed freedoms-applying to schools, looking for paid work, seeking housing-that cartoonish, offensive images of Black folks eagerly consuming chicken or stealing chickens began to appear in essays, comics, advertisements, and postcards, perpetuating a narrative by white society that Black people were subhuman and needed to be controlled, policed, and locked out of mainstream opportunities. Exacerbated by the deep white resentment of Black people’s increasing social and political mobility (this period saw the largest representation of Black people in Congress than any time since), the idea took root that being Black meant that you loved fried chicken so much that you couldn’t resist it. This narrative is a painful legacy of slavery that wasn’t of our own making and is ironic, given that people all over the world get down with wings and things. But the essence of this stereotype persists. We know folks who refuse to eat fried chicken around white people, or chefs who don’t cook it in their restaurants, because they feel that’s the only thing certain diners expect from them…American fried chicken tastes good. It’s also complicated.

Emotions get our attention As the television advertisement opens, we see two men talking in a car. They are having a mildly heated discussion about one of them overusing the word “like” in conversation. As the argument continues, we notice out the passenger window another car barreling toward the men. It smashes into them. There are screams, sounds of shattering glass, quick-cut shots showing the men bouncing in the car, twisted metal. The final shot shows the men standing, in disbelief, outside their wrecked Volkswagen Passat. In a twist on a well-known expletive, these words flash on the screen: “Safe Happens.” The spot ends with a picture of another Passat, this one intact and complete with its five-star side-crash safety rating. It is a memorable, even disturbing, 30-second spot. That’s because it’s charged with emotion. Emotionally charged events are better remembered—for longer, and with more accuracy—than neutral events. While this idea may seem intuitively obvious, it’s frustrating to demonstrate scientifically because the research community is still debating exactly what an emotion is. What we can say for sure is that when your brain detects an emotionally charged event, your amygdala (a part of your brain that helps create and maintain emotions) releases the chemical dopamine into your system. Dopamine greatly aids memory and information processing. You can think of it like a Post-it note that reads “Remember this!” Getting one’s brain to put a chemical Post-it note on a given piece of information means that information is going to be more robustly processed. It is what every teacher, parent, and ad executive wants.

[Our Contemporary Lexicon] As years go by And lives are wasted, As we lose everything, We discover the real meaning Of the words shaping our lives… Words that have filled our contemporary lexicon, We know the words yet don’t fully grasp them, And the more we hear them, The more confusing they become… Words like War Bank Justice Media Capital Investment Advertisement Weapon School University Hospital Humanitarian organization Civil society Ethnicity Race Religion Modernity Backwardness Secularism Trade Love Family Prison Home Immigration Visa Passport Borders Democracy Elections Car Plane And countless others… Words that may pretend to oppose each other publicly, Yet are secretly in bed with each other Making love, acting as synonyms and French kissing… Words that in reality Walk hand in hand and are united against us To achieve the mutual goal of depriving most of us Of having a decent life with dignity… Words used by allies and foes alike, as needed! Words that have become rustier than our souls, Yet their fake glitter continues to deceive millions upon billions Of people believing faithfully in them Or working hard to access their imagined benefits... As years go by, We learn late in the game That all the meanings we ascribed to such words Are in fact killing us Raping us In the homeland On the border And in exile! As the game continues, At a late hour, We discover that Our worries and sleepless nights In hopes of a bearable world Have all been wasted in vain… What is happening today Has happened throughout history… And the game shall continue Until we reexamine this lexicon Until we destroy it And rewrite all its pages To erase all the monsters its words Within all of us… (February 6, 2015)

Evan was attracted to technology early on, building his first computer in sixth grade and experimenting with Photoshop in the Crossroads computer lab. He would later describe the computer teacher, Dan, as his best friend. Evan dove into journalism as well, writing for the school newspaper, Crossfire. One journalism class required students to sell a certain amount of advertising for Crossfire as part of their grade. Evan walked around the neighborhood asking local businesses to buy ads; once he had exceeded his sales goals, he helped coach his peers on how to pitch businesses and ask adults for money. By high school, the group of 20 students Evan had started with in kindergarten had grown to around 120. Charming, charismatic, and smart, Evan threw parties at his dad’s house that were “notorious” in his words. Evan’s outsized personality could rub people the wrong way at times, but his energy, organizing skills, and enthusiasm made him an exceptional party thrower. He possessed a bravado that could be frustrating and off-putting but was great for convincing everyone that the night’s party was going to be the greatest of all time. Obsessed with the energy drink Red Bull and the lifestyle the brand cultivated, Evan talked his way into an internship at the company as a senior in high school. The job involved throwing parties and other events sponsored by Red Bull. Clarence Carter, the head of the company’s security team, would give Evan advice that would stand him well in the years to come: pay attention to who helps you clean up after the party. Later recalling the story, Evan said, “When everyone is tired and the night is over, who stays and helps out? Because those are your true friends. Those are the hard workers, the people that believe that working hard is the right thing to do.

Except then a local high school journalism class decided to investigate the story. Not having attended Columbia Journalism School, the young scribes were unaware of the prohibition on committing journalism that reflects poorly on Third World immigrants. Thanks to the teenagers’ reporting, it was discovered that Reddy had become a multimillionaire by using H-1B visas to bring in slave labor from his native India. Dozens of Indian slaves were working in his buildings and at his restaurant. Apparently, some of those “brainy” high-tech workers America so desperately needs include busboys and janitors. And concubines. The pubescent girls Reddy brought in on H-1B visas were not his nieces: They were his concubines, purchased from their parents in India when they were twelve years old. The sixty-four-year-old Reddy flew the girls to America so he could have sex with them—often several of them at once. (We can only hope this is not why Mark Zuckerberg is so keen on H-1B visas.) The third roommate—the crying girl—had escaped the carbon monoxide poisoning only because she had been at Reddy’s house having sex with him, which, judging by the looks of him, might be worse than death. As soon as a translator other than Reddy was found, she admitted that “the primary purpose for her to enter the U.S. was to continue to have sex with Reddy.” The day her roommates arrived from India, she was forced to watch as the old, balding immigrant had sex with both underage girls at once.3 She also said her dead roommate had been pregnant with Reddy’s child. That could not be confirmed by the court because Reddy had already cremated the girl, in the Hindu tradition—even though her parents were Christian. In all, Reddy had brought seven underage girls to the United States for sex—smuggled in by his brother and sister-in-law, who lied to immigration authorities by posing as the girls’ parents.4 Reddy’s “high-tech” workers were just doing the slavery Americans won’t do. No really—we’ve tried getting American slaves! We’ve advertised for slaves at all the local high schools and didn’t get a single taker. We even posted flyers at the grade schools, asking for prepubescent girls to have sex with Reddy. Nothing. Not even on Craigslist. Reddy’s slaves and concubines were considered “untouchables” in India, treated as “subhuman”—“so low that they are not even considered part of Hinduism’s caste system,” as the Los Angeles Times explained. To put it in layman’s terms, in India they’re considered lower than a Kardashian. According to the Indian American magazine India Currents: “Modern slavery is on display every day in India: children forced to beg, young girls recruited into brothels, and men in debt bondage toiling away in agricultural fields.” More than half of the estimated 20.9 million slaves worldwide live in Asia.5 Thanks to American immigration policies, slavery is making a comeback in the United States! A San Francisco couple “active in the Indian community” bought a slave from a New Delhi recruiter to clean house for them, took away her passport when she arrived, and refused to let her call her family or leave their home.6 In New York, Indian immigrants Varsha and Mahender Sabhnani were convicted in 2006 of bringing in two Indonesian illegal aliens as slaves to be domestics in their Long Island, New York, home.7 In addition to helping reintroduce slavery to America, Reddy sends millions of dollars out of the country in order to build monuments to himself in India. “The more money Reddy made in the States,” the Los Angeles Times chirped, “the more good he seemed to do in his hometown.” That’s great for India, but what is America getting out of this model immigrant? Slavery: Check. Sickening caste system: Check. Purchasing twelve-year-old girls for sex: Check. Draining millions of dollars from the American economy: Check. Smuggling half-dead sex slaves out of his slums in rolled-up carpets right under the nose of the Berkeley police: Priceless.

Internet subscription for $59—seemed reasonable. The second option—the $125 print subscription—seemed a bit expensive, but still reasonable. But then I read the third option: a print and Internet subscription for $125. I read it twice before my eye ran back to the previous options. Who would want to buy the print option alone, I wondered, when both the Internet and the print subscriptions were offered for the same price? Now, the print-only option may have been a typographical error, but I suspect that the clever people at the Economist's London offices (and they are clever—and quite mischievous in a British sort of way) were actually manipulating me. I am pretty certain that they wanted me to skip the Internet-only option (which they assumed would be my choice, since I was reading the advertisement on the Web) and jump to the more expensive option: Internet and print. But how could they manipulate me? I suspect it's because the Economist's marketing wizards (and I could just picture them in their school ties and blazers) knew something important about human behavior: humans rarely choose things in absolute terms. We don't have an internal value meter that tells us how much things are worth. Rather, we focus on the relative advantage of one thing over another, and estimate value accordingly. (For instance, we don't know how much a six-cylinder car is worth, but we can assume it's more expensive than the four-cylinder model.) In the case of the Economist, I may not have known whether the Internet-only subscription at $59 was a better deal than the print-only option at $125. But I certainly knew that the print-and-Internet option for $125 was better than the print-only option at $125. In fact, you could reasonably deduce that in the combination package, the Internet subscription is free! “It's a bloody steal—go for it, governor!” I could almost hear them shout from the riverbanks of the Thames. And I have to admit, if I had been inclined to subscribe I probably would have taken the package deal myself. (Later, when I tested the offer on a large number of participants, the vast majority preferred the Internet-and-print deal.)

need say was I need some time off. But she couldn’t do it. “The St. James house at half-past seven,” she repeated. “Got it, sir.” He rang off. Barbara hung up. She tried to plumb the depths of her feelings, to put a name to what was slowly washing through her veins. She wanted to call it shame. She knew it was liberation. She went to tell her father that they would need to reschedule his doctor’s appointment for another day. Kevin Whateley had not gone to the Royal Plantagenet, which was the pub next door to his cottage. Rather, he had walked along the embankment, past the triangular green where he and Matthew had once learned to operate their pair of remote-control planes, and had instead entered an older pub that stood on a spit of land reaching like a curled finger into the Thames. He’d chosen the Blue Dove deliberately. In the Royal Plantagenet—despite its proximity to his house—he might have forgotten for five minutes or so. But the Blue Dove would not allow him to do so. He sat at a table that overlooked the water. In spite of the night’s falling temperature, someone was out, night fishing from a boat, and lights bobbed periodically with the river’s movement. Kevin watched this, allowing his memory to fill with the image of Matthew running along that same dock, falling, damaging a knee, righting himself but not crying at all, even when the blood began to seep from the cut, even when the stitches were later put in. He was a brave little bloke, always had been. Kevin forced his eyes from the dock and fastened them on the mahogany table. Beer mats covered it, advertising Watney’s, Guinness, and Smith’s. Carefully, Kevin stacked them, restacked them, spread them out like cards, restacked them again. He felt how shallow his breathing was and knew that he needed to take in more air. But to breathe deeply was to lose his grip for an instant. He wouldn’t do that. For if he lost control, he didn’t know how he would get it back. So he did without air. He waited. He didn’t know if the man he sought would come into the pub this late on a Sunday night, mere minutes before closing. In fact, he didn’t even know if the man came here at all any longer. But years ago he’d been a regular customer, when Patsy worked long hours behind the bar, before she’d got her job in a South Kensington hotel. For Matthew’s sake, she had said when she’d taken on the

MY PROCESS I got bullied quite a bit as a kid, so I learned how to take a punch and how to put up a good fight. God used that. I am not afraid of spiritual “violence” or of facing spiritual fights. My Dad was drafted during Vietnam and I grew up an Army brat, moving around frequently. God used that. I am very spiritually mobile, adaptable, and flexible. My parents used to hand me a Bible and make me go look up what I did wrong. God used that, as well. I knew the Word before I knew the Lord, so studying Scripture is not intimidating to me. I was admitted into a learning enrichment program in junior high. They taught me critical thinking skills, logic, and Greek Mythology. God used that, too. In seventh grade I was in school band and choir. God used that. At 14, before I even got saved, a youth pastor at my parents’ church taught me to play guitar. God used that. My best buddies in school were a druggie, a Jewish kid, and an Irish soccer player. God used that. I broke my back my senior year and had to take theatre instead of wrestling. God used that. I used to sleep on the couch outside of the Dean’s office between classes. God used that. My parents sent me to a Christian college for a semester in hopes of getting me saved. God used that. I majored in art, advertising, astronomy, pre-med, and finally English. God used all of that. I made a woman I loved get an abortion. God used (and redeemed) that. I got my teaching certification. I got plugged into a group of sincere Christian young adults. I took courses for ministry credentials. I worked as an autism therapist. I taught emotionally disabled kids. And God used each of those things. I married a pastor’s daughter. God really used that. Are you getting the picture? San Antonio led me to Houston, Houston led me to El Paso, El Paso led me to Fort Leonard Wood, Fort Leonard Wood led me back to San Antonio, which led me to Austin, then to Kentucky, then to Belton, then to Maryland, to Pennsylvania, to Dallas, to Alabama, which led me to Fort Worth. With thousands of smaller journeys in between. The reason that I am able to do the things that I do today is because of the process that God walked me through yesterday. Our lives are cumulative. No day stands alone. Each builds upon the foundation of the last—just like a stairway, each layer bringing us closer to Him. God uses each experience, each lesson, each relationship, even our traumas and tragedies as steps in the process of becoming the people He made us to be. They are steps in the process of achieving the destinies that He has encoded into the weave of each of our lives. We are journeymen, finding the way home. What is the value of the journey? If the journey makes us who we are, then the journey is priceless.

The system of racism begins with ideology, which refers to the big ideas that are reinforced throughout society. From birth, we are conditioned into accepting and not questioning these ideas. Ideology is reinforced across society, for example, in schools and textbooks, political speeches, movies, advertising, holiday celebrations, and words and phrases. These ideas are also reinforced through social penalties when someone questions an ideology and through the limited availability of alternative ideas. Ideologies are the frameworks through which we are taught to represent, interpret, understand, and make sense of social existence. 14 Because these ideas are constantly reinforced, they are very hard to avoid believing and internalizing.

the data used in targeting ads are garbage. The algorithms being used to deliver advertising are garbage. Nico concludes that old-school mass marketing, without targeting and audience data, will “create better ROIs in many situations.”4 The whole edifice of online advertising is, in short, bunk.

Ed is Director of Sponsorship for an events company. When you come down to it, this means he sells advertising. The job mainly involves wining and dining contacts made through the Old Boy networks of the public schools of southern England and persuading them, in the most gentlemanly manner, to part with large dollops of money to have their companies’ names displayed at polo matches, rugby fixtures and regattas. Apparently, at the moment things aren’t going too well, and it has been proving, Ed admits over his bresaola and rocket salad, to be a bit of a bore of late

The apple pie colophon, signaling the end of the war for that Wednesday morning, splattered and the decibels were boosted for the April Ford commercial, “Come and Get Me, Cop.” Come and get me, Cop, Cause I’m not gonna stop At your red light. It was a happy little song, but how could he feel happy when he knew that Milly was probably watching it too and enjoying it in a faculty lounge somewhere, never even giving a thought for Boz, or where he was, or how he felt. Milly studied all the commercials and could play them back to you verbatim, every tremor and inflection just so. And not a milligram of her own punch. Creative? As a parrot. Now, what if he were to tell her that? What if he told her that she would never be anything more than a second-string Grade-Z hygiene demonstrator for the Board of Education. Cruel? Boz was supposed to be cruel? He shook his head, flip flop of auburn. “Baby, you don’t know what cruel is.” Mickey switched off the teevee. “Oh, if you think this was something today you should have seen them yesterday. They were in this school. Parkistanis, I think. Yeah. You should have seen it. That was cruel. They wiped them out.” “Who did?” “Company A.” Mickey came to attention and saluted the air. Kids his age (six) always wanted to be guerillas or firemen. At ten it was pop singers. At fourteen, if they were bright (and somehow all the Hansons were bright), they wanted to write. Boz still had a whole scrapbook of the advertisements he’d written in high school. And then, at twenty …? Don’t think about it.

The children in more privileged societies also suffer silently. From the bullied gay teen in public school to the five-year-old whose appetite to consume is being groomed by the billion-dollar advertising industry, from young Tamir Rice, shot fatally for playing with a toy gun, to girls who are catcalled, raped, and disbelieved—the way we treat our children is a grim diagnosis of the state of our moral consciousness.

The advertising of poor behaviour doesn’t help, but routinely advertising the behaviour that you do want does.

Ah, the Chairs of Doom," she murmured, gingerly lowering her butt onto a piece of furniture straight out of Jane Eyre's boarding school. "How much I have not missed thee. This show brings in a fortune in advertising revenue. You'd think they could shell out for a few cushions and a muffin basket.

Still, it wasn’t until February 10, 2011, the day before Hosni Mubarak stepped down in Egypt, that this absurd theory really got traction. During a speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington, Trump hinted that he might run for president, asserting that “our current president came out of nowhere….The people that went to school with him, they never saw him, they don’t know who he is. It’s crazy.” At first, I paid no attention. My biography had been exhaustively documented. My birth certificate was on file in Hawaii, and we’d posted it on my website back in 2008 to deal with the first wave of what came to be called “birtherism.” My grandparents had saved a clipping from the August 13, 1961, edition of the Honolulu Advertiser that announced my birth. As a kid, I’d walked past Kapi‘olani Medical Center, where my mother had delivered me, on my way to school every day.

Unfortunately, modern society is like a giant jollying person. It wants to pick us up and play peekaboo with us constantly. Television, advertising, parties, friends, the media — all conspire to suggest that doing great and feeling well-adjusted, optimistic and breezy might in some ways be normal.

But the most effective acronyms are rhyming ones. That’s because when we rhyme or sing information, our brains learn more quickly. My guess is (nobody knows for sure) that additional brain areas are recruited when we sing or rhyme. As a result, training methods in industry or advertising or schools use a creative shorthand for conveying information—simply write down the facts or names you are trying to memorize, and use the first letters of each word to create a silly sentence. For

In reality, middle school friendships play out less like Netflix originals, and more like those toy commercials that came on during Saturday morning cartoons when we were kids. As an only child, I remember yearning to have the same fun those kids were having, begging my parents for the Barbie Jeep or Hot Wheels Track until they gave in. But soon after ripping the toy from its packaging, I came to the stark realization that it was nothing like advertised. Those kids were only pretending to have fun, the set designers made the toys seem infinitely cooler than they actually were, and more often than not, we didn’t even have the right-sized batteries. What a colossal disappointment! Especially when those kids on TV looked like they were having the time of their lives.

We advertise good friendships as part of the Complete Teenage Experience, because good friendships make for great stories. Content creators romanticize adolescent friendships the same way Hallmark movies treat love: there is a lid for every pot, a yin for every yang, and a savior for every screwup. Turn on any Netflix original movie about teenagers or read any great YA book, and you will see that the perfect sidekick (funny! supportive! quirky! endlessly loyal!) is a fixture in each teen’s life. In reality, middle school friendships play out less like Netflix originals, and more like those toy commercials that came on during Saturday morning cartoons when we were kids. As an only child, I remember yearning to have the same fun those kids were having, begging my parents for the Barbie Jeep or Hot Wheels Track until they gave in. But soon after ripping the toy from its packaging, I came to the stark realization that it was nothing like advertised. Those kids were only pretending to have fun, the set designers made the toys seem infinitely cooler than they actually were, and more often than not, we didn’t even have the right-sized batteries. What a colossal disappointment! Especially when those kids on TV looked like they were having the time of their lives.

I called up Coca-Cola and told them that Pepsi had just booked a big advertisement but that the back page was still free. I called up the Daily Telegraph and asked them whether they would prefer to advertise before or after the Daily Express. Another tack was to ask an innocuous question that they couldn’t easily deny: ‘Are you interested in recruiting the highest-calibre school-leavers and university graduates?’ No personnel manager would ever admit that they were looking for mediocre recruits. ‘Then we’re publishing just the magazine for you …

It was September. Autumn only in advertisements. Cartoon orange leaves and red backpacks lining the signs for back to school sales. The warmth whittling down, but still keeping us in short sleeves.

You know one of the things I dislike most? False advertising. When I was a young kid, I stumbled across an ad in the back of a comic book. Some company was selling magic shrinking dust in a small bottle for only $9.99, plus shipping and handling. The ad featured a life-size cartoon of a young boy with his miniature parents and pets hanging out in the pockets of his shirt and jeans. I remember thinking, Now that’s what I am talking about! I saved my money for months and mailed thirteen dollars to the address in the magazine. I went out to the mailbox every day in great anticipation of my magic dust arriving. Hey, I also didn’t want anyone finding the package before me, because I planned on making a few surprise changes around the Robertson house. Well, the package never arrived. Since I was a kid, I figured there must have been some sort of shipping mishap—until I took a class called physics in school! Then I realized I’d been duped through the power of marketing.

Heated seats or talk radio? Or music? I can do all of them at once if you want.” He starts flipping switches, making the corresponding sound effects. Leave it to Dan to turn his super fancy Range Rover into the USS Enterprise. My body betrays me and I snuggle deeper into the warming leather seats. “Where are we going anyway?” “Why, the happiest place in Natchitoches, of course.” He waves his hands in a broad gesture to encompass the whole town. I panic for a second when he doesn’t immediately put his hands back on the wheel. “Oh my God, will you be careful!” He smiles at me then glances down at his knee, which can apparently steer just fine. “I’d never endanger your life, fair lady.” I roll my eyes and take a relieved breath. Something walks into my thoughts and takes a seat. Is he…flirting? “Looks like no matter how hard you try, you can’t stop talking like you’re in the middle of a LARP game.” I find myself scratching at my nail polish again, so I tuck my hands under my thighs. “I didn’t know I should be trying to not talk that way. In fact, I try to find every opportunity to practice my verbal skills. I can’t seem out of practice when Craytor returns again.” He holds a fist up in the air. “Heads shall roll, maidens shall be rescued, and elves shall be insulted!” I make sure he sees my blank stare followed by a slow blink before saying, “Right. You never said where we’re going.” “The Phoenix, of course. We don’t exactly have Disney World Natchitoches.” He puts on an über-cheesy smile, which is way more endearing than the fake mischievous one he tried back at school.That smile turns on the heated seats around my heart. Oh God, did I just think that? Gross. He nudges my arm. “Get it? Because I said the happiest place in Natchitoches. And that’s a well-known advertisement slogan for—” I hold my hands up. “I get it. Really, I get it

What is worse, many companies have decided that building new brands is so expensive they will no longer do so. Brand building by advertising is indeed prohibitively expensive. But that’s because it’s the wrong way to build a brand. Marketing

Wonderful-Voice is told not to think less of this world, our world, just because it is full of mud, stones, and impurities.  I think this is an important reminder for us.  We should not think that we are somehow inferior, or that our faults are something to be ashamed of.  There is much in society that seeks to have us believe that we are somehow inferior.  Think about advertisements for example, the whole purpose of advertisements is to convince you that you are incomplete, or lacking, or inferior to some ideal because you don’t use a particular product.  You may have even received messages in school or growing up, which you carry around, that make you feel you are not worthy of being happy. The message of this chapter is that there is not one among us who is disqualified from attaining enlightenment or of being happy.  We are not missing anything, nor are we short of anything, nor are we not good enough to become Buddhas.

If happiness is determined by expectations, then two pillars of our society – mass media and the advertising industry – may unwittingly be depleting the globe’s reservoirs of contentment. If you were an eighteen-year-old youth in a small village 5,000 years ago you’d probably think you were good-looking because there were only fifty other men in your village and most of them were either old, scarred and wrinkled, or still little kids. But if you are a teenager today you are a lot more likely to feel inadequate. Even if the other guys at school are an ugly lot, you don’t measure yourself against them but against the movie stars, athletes and supermodels you see all day on television, Facebook and giant billboards. So

A product can be differentiated from the competition by creative advertising and promotion, even if competing products are physically identical.

Take a story that was told to me by a man named Donald Leka. Back in 1978, when his two children were in elementary school, Don volunteered to help out at a PTA fundraiser. In the interest of earning a laugh as well as some money, he set up a booth advertising legal advice for 25 cents—a sort of lawyerly version of Lucy’s advice booth in Peanuts. The booth was obviously something of a jest, but as a responsible lawyer, Don was careful to staff it with practicing members of the bar. So he was alarmed to learn that a guest had gotten legal advice about a healthcare issue not from a colleague who was among those appointed to give such advice, a man named Jim, but from Jim’s wife. “I grew quite concerned,” Don recollected, “because even though this was lighthearted, I didn’t want people’s wives just going around giving advice. As soon as I could, I located Jim and told him what his wife was doing”—at which point, Jim informed Don that his wife was general counsel of the largest HMO in the city.

There are other media too [the first being newspapers and control of information] whose basic social role is quite different. It’s diversion. There’s the real mass media, the kinds that are aimed at the guys who… Joe six-pack. That kind. The purpose of those media is just to dull people’s brain. This is an over-simplification, but for the 80 per cent or whatever they are, the main thing for them is to divert them. To get them to watch National Football League, and to worry about the… you know… mother with child with six heads, or whatever the thing you pick up on the supermarket stands, and so on. Or, you know, look at astrology, or get involved in fundamentalist stuff, or something. Just get them away you know. Get them away from things that matter. And for that, it’s important to reduce their capacity to think. Sports. That’s another crucial example of the indoctrination system in my view. For one thing, because it offers people something to pay attention to that is of no importance. That keeps them from worrying about things that matter to their lives that they might have some idea about doing something about. And in fact, it’s striking to see the intelligence that’s used by ordinary people in sports. You listen to radio sations where people call in. They have the most exotic information and understanding of all kinds of arcane issues, and the press undoubtedly does a lot with this. I remember in high school I suddenly asked myself at one point: Why do I care if my high school team wins the football game? I mean, I don’t know anybody on the team, you know. […] It doesn’t make any sense. But the point is, it does make sense. It’s a way of building up irrational attitudes of submission to authority. And, you know, group cohesion behind… you know, leadership elements. In fact, it’s training in irrational jingoism. That’s also a feature of competitive sports. I think, if you look closely at those things, typically, they do have functions, and that’s why energy is devoted to supporting them, and creating basis for them, and advertisers are willing to pay for them.

study by Harvard Business School professor Leslie Perlow. In this study, a group of management consultants were asked to disconnect for a full day each workweek. The consultants were afraid the client would rebel. It turned out that the client didn’t care. As Jung, Grant, and Perlow’s subjects discovered, people will usually respect your right to become inaccessible if these periods are well defined and well advertised, and outside these stretches, you’re once again easy to find.

As illusions go, this one is pretty stubborn. When you’re obsessed with efficiency and productivity, it’s difficult to see the real value of education and care. Which is why so many politicians and taxpayers alike see only costs. They don’t realize that the richer a country becomes the more it should be spending on teachers and doctors. Instead of regarding these increases as a blessing, they’re viewed as a disease. Yet unless we prefer to run our schools and hospitals as if they were factories, we can be certain that, in the race against the machine, the costs of healthcare and education will only go up. At the same time, products like refrigerators and cars have become too cheap. To look solely at the price of a product is to ignore a large share of the costs. In fact, a British think tank estimated that for every pound earned by advertising executives, they destroy an equivalent of £7 in the form of stress, overconsumption, pollution, and debt; conversely, each pound paid to a trash collector creates an equivalent of £12 in terms of health and sustainability.

If happiness is determined by expectations, then two pillars of our society – mass media and the advertising industry – may unwittingly be depleting the globe’s reservoirs of contentment. If you were an eighteen-year-old youth in a small village 5,000 years ago you’d probably think you were good-looking because there were only fifty other men in your village and most of them were either old, scarred and wrinkled, or still little kids. But if you are a teenager today you are a lot more likely to feel inadequate. Even if the other guys at school are an ugly lot, you don’t measure yourself against them but against the movie stars, athletes and supermodels you see all day on television, Facebook and giant billboards. So maybe Third World discontent is fomented not merely by poverty, disease, corruption and political oppression but also by mere exposure to First World standards.

There can be no disputing that the computer has increased the power of large-scale organizations like the armed forces, or airline companies or banks or tax-collecting agencies. And it is equally clear that the computer is now indispensable to high-level researchers in physics and other natural sciences. But to what extent has computer technology been an advantage to the masses of people? To steelworkers, vegetable-store owners, teachers, garage mechanics, musicians, bricklayers, dentists, and most of the rest into whose lives the computer now intrudes? Their private matters have been made more accessible to powerful institutions. They are more easily tracked and controlled; are subjected to more examinations; are increasingly mystified by the decisions made about them; are often reduced to mere numerical objects. They are inundated by junk mail. They are easy targets for advertising agencies and political organizations. The schools teach their children to operate computerized systems instead of teaching things that are more valuable to children.

In short: Write the way people think. Nike knew what it was doing when it coined the slogan “Just do it.” Grammatically, this phrase makes no sense. Your high-school English teacher would scold the copywriter for not being clear about the antecedent for “it.