“
Poetry looking in the mirror sees art,
and art looking in a mirror sings poetry.
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Aberjhani (Illuminated Corners: Collected Essays and Articles Volume I.)
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Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream was a manifestation of hope that humanity might one day get out of its own way by finding the courage to realize that love and nonviolence are not indicators of weakness but gifts of significant strength.
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Aberjhani (Illuminated Corners: Collected Essays and Articles Volume I.)
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The job facing American voters… in the days and years to come is to determine which hearts, minds and souls command those qualities best suited to unify a country rather than further divide it, to heal the wounds of a nation as opposed to aggravate its injuries, and to secure for the next generation a legacy of choices based on informed awareness rather than one of reactions based on unknowing fear.
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Aberjhani (Illuminated Corners: Collected Essays and Articles Volume I.)
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The ecstatic beauty and soulful grace of Rumi’s poetry inspires human hearts to believe in possibilities beyond the predictably fatal.
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Aberjhani (Illuminated Corners: Collected Essays and Articles Volume I.)
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Even Scientific American entered the fray with an article proposing that the person portrayed in the famous Martin Droeshout engraving might actually be--I weep to say it--Elizabeth I.
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Bill Bryson (Shakespeare)
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Monarchy can easily be "debunked", but watch the faces, mark well the accents of the debunkers. These are the men whose taproot in Eden has been cut -- whom no rumor of the polyphony, the dance, can reach – men to whom pebbles laid in a row are more beautiful than an arch. Yet even if they desire mere equality they cannot reach it. Where men are forbidden to honor a king they honor millionaires, athletes, or film-stars instead -- even famous prostitutes or gangsters. For spiritual nature, like bodily nature, will be served -- deny it food and it will gobble poison.
(Article "Equality")
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C.S. Lewis
“
It's impossible that James Joyce could have mentioned "talk-tapes" in his writing, Asher thought. Someday I'm going to get my article published; I'm going to prove that Finnegan's Wake is an information pool based on computer memory systems that didn't exist until a century after James Joyce's era; that Joyce was plugged into a cosmic consciousness from which he derived the inspiration for his entire corpus of work. I'll be famous forever.
”
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Philip K. Dick (The Divine Invasion)
“
There is in Albert Camus’ literary craftsmanship a seductive intelligence that could almost make a reader dismiss his philosophical intentions if he had not insisted on making them so clear.
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Aberjhani (Illuminated Corners: Collected Essays and Articles Volume I.)
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Some have speculated that the way [Albert] Camus died made his theories on absurdity a self-fulfilling prophecy. Others would say it was the triumphant meaningful way he lived that allowed him to rise heroically above absurdity.
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Aberjhani (Illuminated Corners: Collected Essays and Articles Volume I.)
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Many Americans first fell in love with the poetry of the thirteenth century teacher and spiritual leader Jelalludin Rumi during the early 1990s when the unparalleled lyrical grace, philosophical brilliance, and spiritual daring of his work took modern Western readers completely by surprise. The impact of its soulful beauty and the depth of its profound humanity were so intense that they reportedly prompted numerous individuals to spontaneously compose poetry.
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Aberjhani (Illuminated Corners: Collected Essays and Articles Volume I.)
“
A separate, international team analyzed more than a half million research articles, and classified a paper as “novel” if it cited two other journals that had never before appeared together. Just one in ten papers made a new combination, and only one in twenty made multiple new combinations. The group tracked the impact of research papers over time. They saw that papers with new knowledge combinations were more likely to be published in less prestigious journals, and also much more likely to be ignored upon publication. They got off to a slow start in the world, but after three years, the papers with new knowledge combos surpassed the conventional papers, and began accumulating more citations from other scientists. Fifteen years after publication, studies that made multiple new knowledge combinations were way more likely to be in the top 1 percent of most-cited papers. To recap: work that builds bridges between disparate pieces of knowledge is less likely to be funded, less likely to appear in famous journals, more likely to be ignored upon publication, and then more likely in the long run to be a smash hit in the library of human knowledge. •
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David Epstein (Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World)
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Why is it that if you say you don’t enjoy using an e-reader, or that you aren’t going to get one till the technology is mature, you get reported as “loathing” it?
The little Time article itself is fairly accurate about what I’ve said about e-reading, but the title of the series, “Famous Writers Who Loathe E-Books,” reflects or caters to a silly idea: that not being interested in using a particular technology is the same as hating and despising it.
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Ursula K. Le Guin
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Mr. Morris's poem is ushered into the world with a very florid birthday speech from the pen of the author of the too famous Poems and Ballads,—a circumstance, we apprehend, in no small degree prejudicial to its success. But we hasten to assure all persons whom the knowledge of Mr. Swinburne's enthusiasm may have led to mistrust the character of the work, that it has to our perception nothing in common with this gentleman's own productions, and that his article proves very little more than that his sympathies are wiser than his performance. If Mr. Morris's poem may be said to remind us of the manner of any other writer, it is simply of that of Chaucer; and to resemble Chaucer is a great safeguard against resembling Swinburne.
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Henry James (Views and Reviews (Project Gutenberg, #37424))
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It's impossible that James Joyce could have mentioned "talk-tapes" in his writing, Asher thought. Someday I'm going to get my article published; I'm going to prove that Finnegan's Wake is an information pool based on computer memory systems that didn't exist until a century after James Joyce's era; that Joyce was plugged into a cosmic consciousness from which he derived the inspiration for his entire corpus of work. I'll be famous forever.
”
”
Philip K. Dick
“
The most important development in the field since Meehl’s original work is Robyn Dawes’s famous article “The Robust Beauty of Improper Linear Models in Decision Making.
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Daniel Kahneman (Thinking, Fast and Slow)
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In 1977 Justice William Brennan wrote a famous article, published in the Harvard Law Review, that encouraged the use of state constitutions to protect constitutional rights.52 State constitutions, he argued, “are a font of individual liberties.
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Erwin Chemerinsky (Presumed Guilty: How the Supreme Court Empowered the Police and Subverted Civil Rights)
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Marxists famously espouse, ‘Religion is the opium of the masses.’ Honestly, I find that assertion ironic and silly, because Marxism itself often behaves like a religion. Its adherents frequently prefer dogma over intellectual rigour in forming their opinions.
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Amish Tripathi (Immortal India: Articles and Speeches by Amish)
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What was once an anonymous medium where anyone could be anyone—where, in the words of the famous New Yorker cartoon, nobody knows you’re a dog—is now a tool for soliciting and analyzing our personal data. According to one Wall Street Journal study, the top fifty Internet sites, from CNN to Yahoo to MSN, install an average of 64 data-laden cookies and personal tracking beacons each. Search for a word like “depression” on Dictionary.com, and the site installs up to 223 tracking cookies and beacons on your computer so that other Web sites can target you with antidepressants. Share an article about cooking on ABC News, and you may be chased around the Web by ads for Teflon-coated pots. Open—even for an instant—a page listing signs that your spouse may be cheating and prepare to be haunted with DNA paternity-test ads. The new Internet doesn’t just know you’re a dog; it knows your breed and wants to sell you a bowl of premium kibble.
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Eli Pariser (The Filter Bubble)
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You don’t have to have studied the description-experience gap to understand, if you’re truly expert at something, that you need experience to balance out the descriptions. Otherwise, you’re left with the illusion of knowledge—knowledge without substance. You’re an armchair philosopher who thinks that just because she read an article about something she is a sudden expert. (David Dunning, a psychologist at the University of Michigan most famous for being one half of the Dunning-Kruger effect—the more incompetent you are, the less you’re aware of your incompetence—has found that people go quickly from being circumspect beginners, who are perfectly aware of their limitations, to “unconscious incompetents,” people who no longer realize how much they don’t know and instead fancy themselves quite proficient.)
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Maria Konnikova (The Biggest Bluff: How I Learned to Pay Attention, Master Myself, and Win)
“
there is a persistent emphasis on religious themes, such as the nature of the Islamic warrior, the role of Islam in training, the importance of Islamic ideology for the army, and the salience of jihad. Pakistan’s military journals frequently take as their subjects famous Quranic battles, such as the Battle of Badr. Ironically, the varied Quranic battles are discussed in more analytical detail in Pakistan’s journals than are Pakistan’s own wars with India. A comparable focus on religion in the Indian army (which shares a common heritage with the Pakistan Army) would be quite scandalous. It is difficult to fathom that any Indian military journal would present an appraisal of the Kurukshetra War, which features the Hindu god Vishnu and is described in the Hindu Vedic epic poem the Mahabharata. Judging by the frequency with which articles on such topics appear in Pakistan’s professional publications, religion is clearly acceptable, and perhaps desirable, as a subject of discussion.
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C. Christine Fair (Fighting to the End: The Pakistan Army's Way of War)
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THREE FAMOUS ENGRAVINGS depict Alexis St. Martin in his youth. I’ve seen them many times, in biographies of his surgeon William Beaumont, in Beaumont’s own book, in journal articles about the pair. As detailed as the artworks are, you can’t tell what St. Martin looked like from examining them. All three woodcuts are of the lower portion of his left breast, and the famous hole. I could pick St. Martin’s nipple out of a lineup before I could his eyes. I suppose this makes sense; Beaumont was a researcher and St. Martin his subject—more a body than a man.
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Mary Roach (Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal)
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Smith and Kemp bought a run-down restaurant on the beach that had formerly served burgers and fried clams, and they transformed it into the Blue Bistro, with seating for over a hundred facing the Atlantic Ocean. The only seats harder to procure than the seats at the blue granite bar are the four tables out in the sand where the Bistro serves its now-famous version of seafood fondue. (Or, as the kitchen fondly refers to it, the all-you-can-eat fried shrimp special.) Many of Ms. Kemp's offerings are twists on old classics, like the fondue. She serves impeccable steak frites, a lobster club sandwich, and a sushi plate, which features a two-inch-thick slab of locally caught bluefin tuna.
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Elin Hilderbrand (The Blue Bistro)
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Careless of her own life, the princess sought to protect the precious new life first. This is in contrast to her cousins, Princesses Akiko and Noriko, who shoved their imperial guards in front of them." Mariko stops and takes one overexcited breath. Her cheeks are flushed. She is dreamy-eyed. This is what gets her excited. Good to know. "They compare you to the empress after the 1923 earthquake!" The empress rolled up her sleeves and laid bricks for a new school. She refused to leave until the town was fed, the children safe. There is a famous picture of her hugging a mother who lost her son, both of their cheeks coated in dust. "They end with calling you our very own royal."
Words fail me. Mariko seems to know I need a private moment. She places the article in my lap, then glides out the door. When she's gone, I pick it up. I rub my thumb over the last sentence of the article. It's not the royal part that warms me. No, it's the other two words. Very own, it says. Very own. Yes. That's me. A true daughter of Japan.
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Emiko Jean (Tokyo Ever After (Tokyo Ever After, #1))
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As Reagan’s first budget director, Stockman, a former two-term congressman from Michigan, was the point man for the supply-side economics the new administration was pushing— the theory that taxes should be lowered to stimulate economic activity, which would in turn produce more tax revenue to compensate for the lower rates.
With his wonky whiz-kid persona, computer-like mental powers, and combative style, he browbeat Democratic congressmen and senators who challenged his views. But he soon incurred the wrath of political conservatives when he confessed to Atlantic reporter William Greider that supply-side economics was really window dressing for reducing the rates on high incomes. Among other acts of apostasy, he called doctrinaire supply-siders “naive.” The 1981 article created a sensation and prompted Reagan to ask him over lunch, “You have hurt me. Why?” Stockman famously described the meeting as a “trip to the woodshed.” Though the president himself forgave him, Stockman’s loose lips undercut his power at the White House, and in 1985 he left government to become an investment banker at Salomon Brothers.
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David Carey (King of Capital: The Remarkable Rise, Fall, and Rise Again of Steve Schwarzman and Blackstone)
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JULIAN HUXLEY’S “EUGENICS MANIFESTO”:
“Eugenics Manifesto” was the name given to an article supporting eugenics. The document, which appeared in Nature, September 16, 1939, was a joint statement issued by America’s and Britain’s most prominent biologists, and was widely referred to as the “Eugenics Manifesto.” The manifesto was a response to a request from Science Service, of Washington, D.C. for a reply to the question “How could the world’s population be improved most effectively genetically?” Two of the main signatories and authors were Hermann J. Muller and Julian Huxley. Julian Huxley, as this book documents, was the founding director of UNESCO from the famous Huxley family. Muller was an American geneticist, educator and Nobel laureate best known for his work on the physiological and genetic effects of radiation. Put into the context of the timeline, this document was published 15 years after “Mein Kampf” and a year after the highly publicized violence of Kristallnacht. In other words, there is no way either Muller or Huxley were unaware at the moment of publication of the historical implications of eugenic agendas.
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A.E. Samaan (From a "Race of Masters" to a "Master Race": 1948 to 1848)
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In those days, Alice had a population of 4,000 and hardly any visitors. Today it’s a thriving little city with a population of 25,000 and it is full of visitors – 350,000 of them a year – which is of course the whole problem. These days you can jet in from Adelaide in two hours, from Melbourne and Sydney in less than three. You can have a latte and buy some opals and then climb on a tour bus and travel down the highway to Ayers Rock. The town has not only become accessible, it’s become a destination. It’s so full of motels, hotels, conference centres, campgrounds and desert resorts that you can’t pretend even for a moment that you have achieved something exceptional by getting yourself there. It’s crazy really. A community that was once famous for being remote now attracts thousands of visitors who come to see how remote it no longer is. Nearly all guidebooks and travel articles indulge the gentle conceit that Alice retains some irreproducible outback charm – some away-from-it-all quality that you must come here to see – but in fact it is Anywhere, Australia. Actually, it is Anywhere, Planet Earth. On our way into town we passed strip malls, car dealerships, McDonald’s and Kentucky Fried Chicken outlets, banks and petrol stations.
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Bill Bryson (In a Sunburned Country)
“
While we waited on a bench outside the motel office, I bought a copy of the Nashville Tennessean out of a metal box, just to see what was happening in the world. The principal story indicated that the state legislature, in one of those moments of enlightenment with which the southern states often strive to distinguish themselves, was in the process of passing a law forbidding schools from teaching evolution. Instead they were to be required to instruct that the earth was created by God, in seven days, sometime, oh, before the turn of the century. The article reminded us that this was not a new issue in Tennessee. The little town of Dayton—not far from where Katz and I now sat, as it happened—was the scene of the famous Scopes trial in 1925, when the state prosecuted a schoolteacher named John Thomas Scopes for rashly promulgating Darwinian hogwash. As nearly everyone knows, Clarence Darrow, for the defense, roundly humiliated William Jennings Bryan, for the prosecution, but what most people don’t realize is that Darrow lost the case. Scopes was convicted, and the law wasn’t overturned in Tennessee until 1967. And now the state was about to bring the law back, proving conclusively that the danger for Tennesseans isn’t so much that they may be descended from apes as overtaken by them.
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Bill Bryson (A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail)
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In the early 1990s, before Japan’s bubble economy burst, a leading newspaper in the U.S. published a large photo taken on a winter’s morning of rush-hour commuters in Shinjuku Station (or possibly Tokyo Station—the same applies to both) heading down the stairs. As if by agreement, all the commuters were gazing downward, their expressions strained and unhappy, looking more like lifeless fish packed in a can than people. The article said, “Japan may be affluent, but most Japanese look like this, heads downcast and unhappy-looking.” The photo became famous. Tsukuru had no idea if most Japanese were, as the article claimed, unhappy. But the real reason that most passengers descending the stairs at Shinjuku Station during their packed morning commute were looking down was less that they were unhappy than that they were concerned about their footing. Don’t slip on the stairs, don’t lose a shoe—these are the major issues on the minds of the commuters in the mammoth station during rush hour. There was no explanation of this, no context for the photograph. Certainly it was hard to view this mass of people, clad in dark overcoats, their heads down, as happy. And of course it’s logical to see a country where people can’t commute in the morning without fear of losing their shoes as an unhappy society.
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Haruki Murakami (Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage)
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Example: a famous-to-economists finding in behavioral economics concerns pricing, and the fact that people have a provable bias towards the middle of three prices. It was first demonstrated with an experiment in beer pricing: when there were two beers, a third of people chose the cheaper; adding an even cheaper beer made the share of that beer go up, because it was now in the middle of three prices; adding an even more expensive beer at the top, and dropping the cheapest beer, made the share of the new beer in the middle (which had previously been the most expensive) go up from two-thirds to 90 percent. Having a price above and a price below makes the price in the middle seem more appealing. This experiment has been repeated with other consumer goods, such as ovens, and is now a much-used strategy in the corporate world. Basically, if you have two prices for something, and want to make more people pay the higher price, you add a third, even higher price; that makes the formerly highest price more attractive. Watch out for this strategy. (The research paper about beer pricing, written by a trio of economists at Duke University in 1982, was published in the Journal of Consumer Research. It’s called “Adding Asymetrically Dominated Alternatives: Violations of Regularity and the Simularity Hypothesis”—which must surely be the least engaging title ever given to an article about beer.)
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John Lanchester (How to Speak Money: What the Money People Say-And What It Really Means: What the Money People Say―And What It Really Means)
“
Not long after Chris died, a national magazine published a story comparing his life with that of the man accused of killing him. There are some parallels; they both grew up in Texas. But the article skimped on the differences. Look at the decisions they made, look at what they did with their lives, look at the responsibilities they took on--or shirked.
Chris saw a great deal of combat. He never made excuses for his behavior. He didn’t always do the right thing, but he tried to do the right thing by others. Chris got the good grace, as Abel did, not by his birthright, but by his effort.
As I sat listening to the prosecutor, I thought his parallel extended through Chris’s life--not solely to the man who shot him, but to the haters, to the people who ended up in legal disputes with him or his estate, for whatever reason. They all wanted something he had.
Not money, but authenticity. Real achievements. Soul.
Grace.
And of course that’s the one thing you can’t take from someone else, even if you steal his life.
Chris became famous without wanting to. Opportunities that others had to fight and claw for seemed to fall in his lap. But most of all, people just liked him for being who he was, with seemingly no effort on his part at all.
Of course, there was effort, and there was great struggle. He had to persevere--The Navy didn’t want him at all when he first tried to enlist. But people don’t see that part. They don’t see the long days at BUD/S, or the pain of leaving your family. Nor do they logically analyze what toll the achievements take.
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Taya Kyle (American Wife: Love, War, Faith, and Renewal)
“
One of our best dates was actually a weekend when we went to the wedding of a friend from the Teams. The couple married in Wimberley, Texas, a small town maybe forty miles south of Austin and a few hours’ drive from where we lived. We were having such a pleasant day, we didn’t want it to end.
“It doesn’t have to end,” suggested Chris as we headed for the car. “The kids are at my parents’ for the weekend. Where do you want to go?”
We googled for hotels and found a place in San Antonio, a little farther south. Located around the corner from the Alamo, the hotel seemed tailor-made for Chris. There was history in every floorboard. He loved the authentic Texan and Old West touches, from the lobby to the rooms. He read every framed article on the walls and admired each artifact. We walked through halls where famous lawmen-and maybe an outlaw or two-had trod a hundred years before. In the evening, we relaxed with coffee out on the balcony of our room-something we’d never managed to do when we actually owned one. It was one of those perfect days you dream of, completely unplanned.
I have a great picture of Chris sitting out there in his cowboy boots, feet propped up, a big smile on his face. It’s still one of my favorites.
People ask about Chris’s love of the Old West. It was something he was born with, really. It had to be in his genes. He grew up watching old westerns with his family, and for a time became a bronco-bustin’ cowboy and ranch hand.
More than that, I think the clear sense of right and wrong, of frontier justice and strong values, appealed to him.
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Taya Kyle (American Wife: Love, War, Faith, and Renewal)
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It had been hard enough to drive past the area. It was harder to imagine what it was like living there. Yet people lived with the stench and the terrible air, and had careers there. Even lawyers lived there, I was told. Was the smell of excrement only on the periphery, from the iridescent black lake? No; that stench went right through Dharavi. Even more astonishing was to read in a Bombay magazine an article about Papu's suburb of Sion, in which the slum of Dharavi was written about almost as a bohemian feature of the place, something that added spice to humdrum middle-class life. Bombay clearly innoculated its residents in some way.
I had another glimpse of Dharavi some time later, when I was going in a taxi to the domestic airport at Santa Cruz. The taxi-driver - a Muslim from Hyderabad, full of self-respect, nervous about living in Bombay, fearful of sinking, planning to go back home soon, and in the meantime nervously particular about his car and his clothes - the taxi-driver showed the apartment blocks on one side of the airport road where hutment dwellers had been rehoused. In the other direction he showed the marsh on which Dharavi had grown and, away in the distance, the low black line of the famous slum.
Seen from here, Dharavi looked artificial, unnecessary even in Bombay: allowed to exist because, as people said, it was a vote-bank, and hate-bank, something to be drawn upon by many people. All the conflicting currents of Bombay flowed there as well; all the new particularities were heightened there. And yet people lived there, subject to this extra exploitation, because in Bombay, once you had a place to stay, you could make money.
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V.S. Naipaul (India: A Million Mutinies Now)
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We cannot provide a definition of those products from which the age takes it name, the feuilletons. They seem to have formed an uncommonly popular section of the daily newspapers, were produced by the millions, and were a major source of mental pabulum for the reader in want of culture.
They reported on, or rather "chatted" about, a thousand-and-one items of knowledge. The cleverer writers poked fun at their own work. Many such pieces are so incomprehensible that they can only be viewed as self-persiflage on the part of the authors.
In some periods interviews with well-known personalities on current problems were particularly popular. Noted chemists or piano virtuosos would be queried about politics, for example, or popular actors, dancers, gymnasts, aviators, or even poets would be drawn out on the benefits and drawbacks of being a bachelor, or on the presumptive causes of financial crises, and so on.
All that mattered in these pieces was to link a well-known name with a subject of current topical interest.
It is very hard indeed for us to put ourselves in the place of those people so that we can truly understand them. But the great majority, who seem to have been strikingly fond of reading, must have accepted all these grotesque things with credulous earnestness.
If a famous painting changed owners, if a precious manuscript was sold at auction, if an old palace burned down, the readers of many thousands of feature articles at once learned the facts.
What is more, on that same day or by the next day at the latest they received an additional dose of anecdotal, historical, psychological, erotic, and other stuff on the catchword of the moment.
A torrent of zealous scribbling poured out over every ephemeral incident, and in quality, assortment, and phraseology all this material bore the mark of mass goods rapidly and irresponsibly turned out.
Incidentally, there appear to have been certain games which were regular concomitants of the feature article. The readers themselves took the active role in these games, which put to use some of their glut of information fodder.
Thousands upon thousands spent their leisure hours sitting over squares and crosses made of letters of the alphabet, filling in the gaps according to certain rules.
But let us be wary of seeing only the absurd or insane aspect of this, and let us abstain from ridiculing it. For these people with their childish puzzle games and their cultural feature articles were by no means innocuous children or playful Phaeacians.
Rather, they dwelt anxiously among political, economic, and moral ferments and earthquakes, waged a number of frightful wars and civil wars, and their little cultural games were not just charming, meaningless childishness.
These games sprang from their deep need to close their eyes and flee from unsolved problems and anxious forebodings of doom into an imaginary world as innocuous as possible.
They assiduously learned to drive automobiles, to play difficult card games and lose themselves in crossword puzzles--for they faced death, fear, pain, and hunger almost without defenses, could no longer accept the consolations of the churches, and could obtain no useful advice from Reason.
These people who read so many articles and listened to so many lectures did not take the time and trouble to strengthen themselves against fear, to combat the dread of death within themselves; they moved spasmodically on through life and had no belief in a tomorrow.
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Hermann Hesse
“
The tyro knows nothing, and everybody, including himself, knows it. But the next, or second, grade thinks he knows a great deal and makes others feel that way too. He is the experienced sucker, who has studied not the market itself but a few remarks about the market made by a still higher grade of suckers. The second-grade sucker knows how to keep from losing his money in some of the ways that get the raw beginner. It is this semisucker rather than the 100 per cent article who is the real all-the-year-round support of the commission houses. He lasts about three and a half years on an average, as compared with a single season of from three to thirty weeks, which is the usual Wall Street life of a first offender. It is naturally the semisucker who is always quoting the famous trading aphorisms and the various rules of the game. He knows all the don'ts that ever fell from the oracular lips of the old stagers excepting the principal one, which is: Don't be a sucker!
This semisucker is the type that thinks he has cut his wisdom teeth because he loves to buy on declines. He waits for them. He measures his bargains by the number of points it has sold off from the top. In big bull markets the plain unadulterated sucker, utterly ignorant of rules and precedents, buys blindly because he hopes blindly. He makes most of the money until one of the healthy reactions takes it away from him at one fell swoop. But the Careful Mike sucker does what I did when I thought I was playing the game intelligently according to the intelligence of others. I knew I needed to change my bucket-shop methods and I thought I was solving my problem with any change, particularly one that assayed high gold values according to the experienced traders among the customers.
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Edwin Lefèvre (Reminiscences of a Stock Operator)
“
But nothing has ever expressed the general, gut-felt moral revulsion against city-bombing better than a virtually unknown article, from firsthand experience, by America’s most famous writer at the time, Ernest Hemingway, in July 1938. It’s still little known because he wrote it, by request, for the Soviet newspaper Pravda, which published it in Russian; his manuscript in English didn’t surface143 for forty-four years. It conveys in words the same surreal images that Picasso had rendered on canvas the year before. His lead sentence: “During the last fifteen months I saw murder done in Spain by the Fascist invaders. Murder is different from war.” Hemingway was describing what he had seen of fascist bombing of workers’ housing in Barcelona and shelling of civilian cinemagoers in Madrid. You see the murdered children with their twisted legs, their arms that bend in wrong directions, and their plaster powdered faces. You see the women, sometimes unmarked when they die from concussion, their faces grey, green matter running out of their mouths from bursted gall bladders. You see them sometimes looking like bloodied bundles of rags. You see them sometimes blown capriciously into fragments as an insane butcher might sever a carcass. And you hate the Italian and German murderers who do this as you hate no other people. … When they shell the cinema crowds, concentrating on the squares where the people will be coming out at six o’clock, it is murder. … You see a shell hit a queue of women standing in line to buy soap. There are only four women killed but a part of one woman’s torso is driven against a stone wall so that blood is driven into the stone with such force that sandblasting later fails to clean it. The other dead lie like scattered black bundles and the wounded are moaning or screaming.
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Daniel Ellsberg (The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner)
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In 1910 Leroux had his greatest literary success with Le Fantôme de l’Opéra (The Phantom of the Opera). This is both a detective story and a dark romantic melodrama and was inspired by Leroux’s passion for and obsession with the Paris Opera House. And there is no mystery as to why he found the building so fascinating because it is one of the architectural wonders of the nineteenth century. The opulent design and the fantastically luxurious furnishings added to its glory, making it the most famous and prestigious opera house in all Europe. The structure comprises seventeen floors, including five deep and vast cellars and sub cellars beneath the building. The size of the Paris Opera House is difficult to conceive. According to an article in Scribner’s Magazine in 1879, just after it first opened to the public, the Opera House contained 2,531 doors with 7,593 keys. There were nine vast reservoirs, with two tanks holding a total of 22,222 gallons of water. At the time there were fourteen furnaces used to provide the heating, and dressing-rooms for five hundred performers. There was a stable for a dozen or so horses which were used in the more ambitious productions. In essence then the Paris Opera House was like a very small magnificent city.
During a visit there, Leroux heard the legend of a bizarre figure, thought by many to be a ghost, who had lived secretly in the cavernous labyrinth of the Opera cellars and who, apparently, engineered some terrible accidents within the theatre as though he bore it a tremendous grudge. These stories whetted Leroux’s journalistic appetite. Convinced that there was some truth behind these weird tales, he investigated further and acquired a series of accounts relating to the mysterious ‘ghost’. It was then that he decided to turn these titillating titbits of theatre gossip into a novel.
The building is ideal for a dark, fantastic Grand Guignol scenario. It is believed that during the construction of the Opera House it became necessary to pump underground water away from the foundation pit of the building, thus creating a huge subterranean lake which inspired Leroux to use it as one of his settings, the lair, in fact, of the Phantom. With its extraordinary maze-like structure, the various stage devices primed for magical stage effects and that remarkable subterranean lake, the Opera House is not only the ideal backdrop for this romantic fantasy but it also emerges as one of the main characters of this compelling tale. In using the real Opera House as its setting, Leroux was able to enhance the overall sense of realism in his novel.
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David Stuart Davies (The Phantom of the Opera)
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A famous British writer is revealed to be the author of an obscure mystery novel. An immigrant is granted asylum when authorities verify he wrote anonymous articles critical of his home country. And a man is convicted of murder when he’s connected to messages painted at the crime scene. The common element in these seemingly disparate cases is “forensic linguistics”—an investigative technique that helps experts determine authorship by identifying quirks in a writer’s style. Advances in computer technology can now parse text with ever-finer accuracy. Consider the recent outing of Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling as the writer of The Cuckoo’s Calling , a crime novel she published under the pen name Robert Galbraith. England’s Sunday Times , responding to an anonymous tip that Rowling was the book’s real author, hired Duquesne University’s Patrick Juola to analyze the text of Cuckoo , using software that he had spent over a decade refining. One of Juola’s tests examined sequences of adjacent words, while another zoomed in on sequences of characters; a third test tallied the most common words, while a fourth examined the author’s preference for long or short words. Juola wound up with a linguistic fingerprint—hard data on the author’s stylistic quirks. He then ran the same tests on four other books: The Casual Vacancy , Rowling’s first post-Harry Potter novel, plus three stylistically similar crime novels by other female writers. Juola concluded that Rowling was the most likely author of The Cuckoo’s Calling , since she was the only one whose writing style showed up as the closest or second-closest match in each of the tests. After consulting an Oxford linguist and receiving a concurring opinion, the newspaper confronted Rowling, who confessed. Juola completed his analysis in about half an hour. By contrast, in the early 1960s, it had taken a team of two statisticians—using what was then a state-of-the-art, high-speed computer at MIT—three years to complete a project to reveal who wrote 12 unsigned Federalist Papers. Robert Leonard, who heads the forensic linguistics program at Hofstra University, has also made a career out of determining authorship. Certified to serve as an expert witness in 13 states, he has presented evidence in cases such as that of Christopher Coleman, who was arrested in 2009 for murdering his family in Waterloo, Illinois. Leonard testified that Coleman’s writing style matched threats spray-painted at his family’s home (photo, left). Coleman was convicted and is serving a life sentence. Since forensic linguists deal in probabilities, not certainties, it is all the more essential to further refine this field of study, experts say. “There have been cases where it was my impression that the evidence on which people were freed or convicted was iffy in one way or another,” says Edward Finegan, president of the International Association of Forensic Linguists. Vanderbilt law professor Edward Cheng, an expert on the reliability of forensic evidence, says that linguistic analysis is best used when only a handful of people could have written a given text. As forensic linguistics continues to make headlines, criminals may realize the importance of choosing their words carefully. And some worry that software also can be used to obscure distinctive written styles. “Anything that you can identify to analyze,” says Juola, “I can identify and try to hide.
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Anonymous
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Dear KDP Author,
Just ahead of World War II, there was a radical invention that shook the foundations of book publishing. It was the paperback book. This was a time when movie tickets cost 10 or 20 cents, and books cost $2.50. The new paperback cost 25 cents – it was ten times cheaper. Readers loved the paperback and millions of copies were sold in just the first year.
With it being so inexpensive and with so many more people able to afford to buy and read books, you would think the literary establishment of the day would have celebrated the invention of the paperback, yes? Nope. Instead, they dug in and circled the wagons. They believed low cost paperbacks would destroy literary culture and harm the industry (not to mention their own bank accounts). Many bookstores refused to stock them, and the early paperback publishers had to use unconventional methods of distribution – places like newsstands and drugstores. The famous author George Orwell came out publicly and said about the new paperback format, if “publishers had any sense, they would combine against them and suppress them.” Yes, George Orwell was suggesting collusion.
Well… history doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme.
Fast forward to today, and it’s the e-book’s turn to be opposed by the literary establishment. Amazon and Hachette – a big US publisher and part of a $10 billion media conglomerate – are in the middle of a business dispute about e-books. We want lower e-book prices. Hachette does not. Many e-books are being released at $14.99 and even $19.99. That is unjustifiably high for an e-book. With an e-book, there’s no printing, no over-printing, no need to forecast, no returns, no lost sales due to out of stock, no warehousing costs, no transportation costs, and there is no secondary market – e-books cannot be resold as used books. E-books can and should be less expensive.
Perhaps channeling Orwell’s decades old suggestion, Hachette has already been caught illegally colluding with its competitors to raise e-book prices. So far those parties have paid $166 million in penalties and restitution. Colluding with its competitors to raise prices wasn’t only illegal, it was also highly disrespectful to Hachette’s readers.
The fact is many established incumbents in the industry have taken the position that lower e-book prices will “devalue books” and hurt “Arts and Letters.” They’re wrong. Just as paperbacks did not destroy book culture despite being ten times cheaper, neither will e-books. On the contrary, paperbacks ended up rejuvenating the book industry and making it stronger. The same will happen with e-books.
Many inside the echo-chamber of the industry often draw the box too small. They think books only compete against books. But in reality, books compete against mobile games, television, movies, Facebook, blogs, free news sites and more. If we want a healthy reading culture, we have to work hard to be sure books actually are competitive against these other media types, and a big part of that is working hard to make books less expensive.
Moreover, e-books are highly price elastic. This means that when the price goes down, customers buy much more. We've quantified the price elasticity of e-books from repeated measurements across many titles. For every copy an e-book would sell at $14.99, it would sell 1.74 copies if priced at $9.99. So, for example, if customers would buy 100,000 copies of a particular e-book at $14.99, then customers would buy 174,000 copies of that same e-book at $9.99. Total revenue at $14.99 would be $1,499,000. Total revenue at $9.99 is $1,738,000. The important thing to note here is that the lower price is good for all parties involved: the customer is paying 33% less and the author is getting a royalty check 16% larger and being read by an audience that’s 74% larger. The pie is simply bigger.
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Amazon Kdp
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thepsychchic chips clips ii
If you think of yourself instead as an almost-victor who thought correctly and did everything possible but was foiled by crap variance? No matter: you will have other opportunities, and if you keep thinking correctly, eventually it will even out. These are the seeds of resilience, of being able to overcome the bad beats that you can’t avoid and mentally position yourself to be prepared for the next time. People share things with you: if you’ve lost your job, your social network thinks of you when new jobs come up; if you’re recently divorced or separated or bereaved, and someone single who may be a good match pops up, you’re top of mind. This attitude is what I think of as a luck amplifier. … you will feel a whole lot happier … and your ready mindset will prepare you for the change in variance that will come … 134-135
W. H. Auden: “Choice of attention—to pay attention to this and ignore that—is to the inner life what choice of action is to the outer. In both cases man is responsible for his choice and must accept the consequences.” Pay attention, or accept the consequences of your failure. 142
Attention is a powerful mitigator to overconfidence: it forces you to constantly reevaluate your knowledge and your game plan, lest you become too tied to a certain course of action. And if you lose? Well, it allows you to admit when it’s actually your fault and not a bad beat. 147
Following up on Phil Galfond’s suggestion to be both a detective and a storyteller and figure out “what your opponent’s actions mean, and sometimes what they don’t mean.” [Like the dog that didn’t bark in the Sherlock Holmes “Silver Blaze” story.] 159
You don’t have to have studied the description-experience gap to understand, if you’re truly expert at something, that you need experience to balance out the descriptions. Otherwise, you’re left with the illusion of knowledge—knowledge without substance. You’re an armchair philosopher who thinks that just because she read an article about something she is a sudden expert. (David Dunning, a psychologist at the University of Michigan most famous for being one half of the Dunning-Kruger effect—the more incompetent you are, the less you’re aware of your incompetence—has found that people go quickly from being circumspect beginners, who are perfectly aware of their limitations, to “unconscious incompetents,” people who no longer realize how much they don’t know and instead fancy themselves quite proficient.) 161-162
Erik: Generally, the people who cash the most are actually losing players (Nassim Taleb’s Black Swan strategy, jp). You can’t be a winning player by min cashing. 190
The more you learn, the harder it gets; the better you get, the worse you are—because the flaws that you wouldn’t even think of looking at before are now visible and need to be addressed. 191
An edge, even a tiny one, is an edge worth pursuing if you have the time and energy. 208
Blake Eastman: “Before each action, stop, think about what you want to do, and execute.” … Streamlined decisions, no immediate actions, or reactions. A standard process. 217
John Boyd’s OODA: Observe, Orient, Decide, and Act. The way to outmaneuver your opponent is to get inside their OODA loop. 224
Here’s a free life lesson: seek out situations where you’re a favorite; avoid those where you’re an underdog. 237
[on folding] No matter how good your starting hand, you have to be willing to read the signs and let it go.
One thing Erik has stressed, over and over, is to never feel committed to playing an event, ever. “See how you feel in the morning.”
Tilt makes you revert to your worst self. 257
Jared Tindler, psychologist, “It all comes down to confidence, self-esteem, identity, what some people call ego.” 251
JT: “As far as hope in poker, f#¢k it. … You need to think in terms of preparation. Don’t worry about hoping. Just Do.” 252
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Maria Konnikova (The Biggest Bluff: How I Learned to Pay Attention, Master Myself, and Win)
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They listened to a series of speeches by civil rights luminaries, capped off by a rousing, crowd-pleasing address by Martin Luther King. While the SCLC named their protest “Prayer Pilgrimage for Freedom,” its stated goals of expressing black unity and urging federal action on civil rights made the moniker that Jimmy gave it, “the March on Washington,” equally appropriate. That name, of course, was subsequently claimed by the much larger and more famous civil rights demonstration six years later. The huge crowds and celebrated oratory of the 1963 “March on Washington for Jobs and Justice” completely superseded the Prayer Pilgrimage in both size and importance, but the thousands who attended the 1957 affair made it the largest civil rights demonstration to date and a significant moment in the rising civil rights movement of the mid-1950s. Jimmy concluded his article with this assessment of the impact of the Prayer Pilgrimage: “The southern people went home determined beyond the expectations of even King. No one in the South is big enough to stop this march of people and no one can call it off.” 66
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Stephen M. Ward (In Love and Struggle: The Revolutionary Lives of James and Grace Lee Boggs (Justice, Power, and Politics))
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With the decline of the United States as the world’s leader, I find it important to look around our globe for intelligent people who have the depth of understanding that could perhaps chart a way to the future. One such person is Bernard-Henri Lévy a French philosopher who was born in Béni Saf, French Algeria on November 5, 1948. . The Boston Globe has said that he is "perhaps the most prominent intellectual in France today." Although his published work and political activism has fueled controversies, he invokes thought provoking insight into today’s controversial world and national views.
As a young man and Zionist he was a war correspondent for “Combat” newspaper for the French Underground. Following the war Bernard attended Lycée Louis-le-Grand in Paris and in 1968; he graduated with a degree in philosophy from the famous École Normale Supérieure. This was followed by him traveling to India where he joined the International Brigade to aid Bangladeshi freedom fighters.
Returning to Paris, Bernard founded the ‘New Philosophers School.’ At that time he wrote books bringing to light the dark side of French history. Although some of his books were criticized for their journalistic character and unbalanced approach to French history, but most respected French academics took a serious look at his position that Marxism was inherently corrupt. Some of his musings include the predicament of the Kurds and the Shame of Aleppo, referring to the plight of the children in Aleppo during the bloody Syrian civil war. Not everyone agrees with Bernard, as pointed out by an article “Why Does Everyone Hate Bernard-Henri Lévy?” However he is credited with nearly single handedly toppling Muammar Gaddafi. His reward was that in 2008 he was targeted for assassination by a Belgium-based Islamist militant group.
Looking like a rock star and ladies man, with his signature dark suits and unbuttoned white shirt, he said that “democracies are not run by the truth,” and notes that the American president is not the author of the anti-intellectual movement it, but rather its product. He added that the anti-intellectualism movement that has swept the United States and Europe in the last 12 months has been a long time coming. The responsibility to support verified information and not publicize fake news as equal has been ignored. He said that the president may be the heart of the anti-intellectual movement, but social media is the mechanism! Not everyone agrees with Bernard; however his views require our attention. If we are to preserve our democracy we have to look at the big picture and let go of some of our partisan thinking. We can still save our democracy, but only if we become patriots instead of partisans!
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Hank Bracker
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Kit spends a week of her summer vacation volunteering at the local theater—she wants to write a newspaper article about a play that’s opening soon. It even stars famous actors from New York City! But behind
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Valerie Tripp (Read All About It: A Kit Classic Volume 1 (American Girl Beforever Classic))
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Hannah Arendt’s analyses of lies in The Origins of Totalitarianism or in her famous article ‘Truth and Politics’, in which she suggested that ‘when a community throws itself into organized lying’, ‘when everyone lies about what is important’, and when there is a ‘tendency to turn fact into opinion’, to reject ‘factual truths’, the result is not so much that one believes in lies, as that one destroys ‘the reality of the common world’.
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Frédéric Martel (In the Closet of the Vatican: Power, Homosexuality, Hypocrisy)
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Alma wrote in depth about laurel, mimosa, and verbena. She wrote about grapes and camellias, about the myrtle orange, about the cosseting of figs, She published under the name "A. Whittaker." Neither she nor George Hawkes believed that it would much benefit Alma to announce herself in print as female. In the scientific world of the day, there was still a strict division between "botany" (the study of plants by men) and "polite botany" was often indistinguishable from "botany"- except that one field was regarded with respect and the other was not- but still, Alma did not wish to be shrugged off as a mere polite botanist.
Of course, the Whittaker name was famous in the world of plants and science, so a good number of botanists already knew precisely who "A. Whittaker" was. Not all of them, however. In response to her articles, then, Alma sometimes received letters from botanists around the world, sent to her in care of George Hawkes's print shop. Some of these letters began, "My dear Sir." Other letters were written to "Mr. A. Whittaker." One quite memorable missive even came addressed to "Dr. A. Whittaker." ( Alma kept that letter for a long time, tickled by the unexpected honorific.)
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Elizabeth Gilbert (The Signature of All Things)
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For some male intellectuals, a regrettable aspect of popular newspapers was that they encouraged women. In the Nietzschean tradition the emancipation and education of women were signs of modern shallowness. The man who has depth, Nietzsche pronounces, can think of women only in an ‘oriental way’. Thus Spake Zarathustra contains the famous advice ‘Are you visiting women? Do not forget your whip.’18 Northcliffe, by contrast, started a new trend among newspaper proprietors by considering women readers worthy of attention. In 1891 he launched a cheap illustrated women’s weekly, Forget-Me-Not, which achieved a circulation of over 140,000 in three years, and paved the way for the highly successful Home Chat. He also insisted on two columns of articles devoted to women’s concerns in the Daily Mail.
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John Carey (The Intellectuals and the Masses: Pride and Prejudice Among the Literary Intelligentsia 1880-1939)
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In early 2019, while I was still at the White House, BuzzFeed News published an article laying out the origins of the “Soros conspiracy.” It had originated in 2008, when two prominent political consultants in New York, Arthur Finkelstein and George Birnbaum, were recruited by Viktor Orbán to assist his political campaign. They had previously worked for Israeli prime minister Bibi Netanyahu, who was friendly with Orbán. Netanyahu recommended them. Finkelstein and Birnbaum decided they should create an external political enemy to help Orbán mobilize support for his bid to become Hungarian prime minister. They selected Soros, a prominent Hungarian Jew whose family had fled Budapest during the Holocaust. Soros was both famous and controversial, and still connected to Hungary.
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Fiona Hill (There Is Nothing for You Here: Finding Opportunity in the Twenty-First Century)
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Hey, we’ll let Huckleberry enjoy his lunch. Speaking of something, if you are in a better mood now, come with me to the Rainforest Room. I have something to show you. I wanted to wait until you calmed down because it means a lot to me, and I hoped you might be happy for me. Here, come with me.”
He led her back to the previous room, which had amazing, rare rainforest plants in it.
“Check this out!”
He tossed her a magazine that said Horticultural Digest on the cover. Holly neatly caught it and opened it up to the dog-eared page.
Blaring across the page in huge font was the title: WILLIAM SMITH, THE RAINMAKER OF SHELLESBY COLLEGE’S FAMOUS RAINFOREST ROOM. It was a five-page spread with big glossy photos of the Rainforest Room sprinkled throughout the article.
“Five, count ‘em, five pages! That’s my record. Until now, they’ve only given me four. Check it out: I’m the Rainmaker, baby! Let it rain, let it rainnnn!”
William stomped around in make-believe puddles on the floor. He picked up a garden hose lying along the side of the room and held it upright like an umbrella.
“I’m singing in the rain, just singing in the rain. What a glorious feeling. I’m happy again.”
Holly squealed with laughter and applauded.
William jumped up on a large over-turned pot and shifted the hose to now play air guitar while he repeated the verse.
“William, there is no air guitar in that song!”
“There is now, baby!”
Holly exploded again in laughter, clutching her sides.
After a few more seconds of air guitar, William jumped off the pot and lowered his voice considerably.
“Thank you, thank you very much,” William said in his Elvis impersonation.
He now held the garden hose like a microphone and said, “My next song is dedicated to my beagle, my very own hound dog, my Sweetpea. Sweetpea, girl, this is for youuuuuuu.”
He now launched into Elvis’s famous “Hound Dog.”
“You ain’t nothing but a hound dogggg.” With this, he also twirled the hose by holding it tight two feet from the nozzle, then twirling the nozzle in little circles above his head like a lasso.
“Work it, William! Work it!” Holly screamed in laughter.
He did some choice hip swivels as he sang “Hound Dog,” sending Holly into peals of laughter.
“William, stop! Stop! Where are you? I can’t see I’m crying so hard!”
William dropped his voice even lower and more dramatically.
In his best Elvis voice, he said, “Well, if you can’t find me darlin’, I’ll find you.” He dropped on one knee and gently picked up her hand.
“Thank you, thank you very much,” he said in Elvis mode.
“My next song, I dedicate to my one and only, to my Holly-Dolly. Little prickly pear, this one’s for youuuuuu.”
He now launched into Elvis’s famous “I Can’t Help Falling in Love with You.”
“Take my hand, take my whole life, too, for I can’t help falling in love with you.” With that, he gave her hand a soft kiss.
He then jumped up onto an empty potting table and spun around once on his butt, then pushed himself the length of the entire table, and slid off the far end.
“Loose, footloose!” William picked up his garden-hose microphone again and kept singing. “Kick off the Sunday shoes . . .”
He sang the entire song, and then Holly exploded in appreciative applause.
He was breathing heavily and had a million-dollar smile on his face.
“Hoo-wee, that was fun! I am so sweaty now, hoo-boy!”
He splashed some water on his face, and then shook his hair.
“William! When are you going to enter that karaoke contest at the coffee shop in town? They’re paying $1,000 to the winner of their contest. No one can beat you! That was unbelievable!”
“That was fun.” William laughed. “Are in a better mood now?”
“How can I not be? You are THE best!
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Kira Seamon (Dead Cereus)
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What “Terra Nova” means, all the articles are proud to reveal, is “New World.” What one of the incoming residents said, kind of famously, was that when there are no more frontiers, you have to make them yourself, don’t you?
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Stephen Graham Jones (My Heart Is a Chainsaw (The Indian Lake Trilogy, #1))
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Science has an established tradition when it comes to aspects of nature that defy logical explanation and resist experimentation. It ignores them. This is actually a proper response, since no one wants researchers offering fudgy guesses. Official silence may not be helpful, but it is respectable. However, as a result, the very word “consciousness” may seem out of place in science books or articles, despite the fact that, as we’ll see, most famous names in quantum mechanics regarded it as central to the understanding of the cosmos.
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Robert Lanza (The Grand Biocentric Design: How Life Creates Reality)
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Harvard Business Review wrote an article[2] stating that the ideal praise to criticism ratio in relationships is 5 to 1—five positive comments for every negative one. John Gottman, the famous researcher from the Gottman Institute who started studying couples in the 1970s in his research lab, found that for people who end up in divorce, the ratio is 0.77 to 1. This means three positive comments for every four negative ones.[3]
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Brian Keephimattracted (F*CK Him! - Nice Girls Always Finish Single)
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The few steps that connect strangers explain how rumors spread rapidly and widely. If you have a good investment idea, you might want to keep it secret. In 1998 a New York Times Science Times article said that mathematicians had discovered how networks might “make a big world small” using the equivalent of the famous person idea, and attributed the concept of six degrees of separation to a sociologist in 1967. Yet all this was known to Claude Shannon in 1960.
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Edward O. Thorp (A Man for All Markets: From Las Vegas to Wall Street, How I Beat the Dealer and the Market)
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Address
BARTON CENTRE, 912, 9th Floor, Mahatma Gandhi Rd,
Bengaluru, Karnataka - 560 001
Phone Number
+91 8884400919
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Kenya Tour Package From Bangalore
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And it’s no accident, I’d add, that the transsexual is the only thing that trans can describe that queer can’t. The transsexual is not queer; this is the best thing about her. Take Agnes, the pseudonymous transsexual woman who famously posed as intersex at UCLA’s Gender Identity Clinic in the late fifties in order to obtain access to vaginoplasty. Agnes’s case was chronicled by Harold Garfinkel in an article that’s now taught in trans studies courses. Agnes is regularly celebrated as some kind of gender ninja: savvy, tactical, carefully conning the medical-industrial complex into giving her what she wants. What no one wants to talk about is what she actually wanted: a cunt, a man, a house, and normal fucking life. Whatever intuition she may not have had about gender as a “managed achievement” was put toward a down payment on a new dishwasher. If there’s anything Agnes “reveals” about gender, it’s that actually existing normativity is, strictly speaking, impossible. Norms, as such, do not exist. (If Gender Trouble knew this, it did a poor job explaining it.) That doesn’t mean that norms don’t structure people’s desires; what it means is that the desire for the norm consists, in terms of its lived content, in nonnormative attempts at normativity. Agnes was a nonnormative subject, but that wasn’t because she was “against” the norm; on the contrary, her nonnormativity was what wanting to be normal actually looked like. Like most of us, Agnes was making do in the gap between what she wanted and what wanting it got her. We can argue, and people have, about whether queer theory is possible without antinormativity. But whatever comes after trans studies—can I suggest transsexual theory?—will be impossible with antinormativity. The most powerful intervention scholars working in trans studies can make, at this juncture within the academy, is to defend the claim that transness requires that we understand, as we never have before, what it means to be attached to a norm—by desire, by habit, by survival.
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Andrea Long Chu
“
When he died, much was made of how singular Steve Jobs had been. For comparisons, observers needed to reach back to the mythic inventors and showmen of earlier eras, particularly Thomas Edison and Walt Disney. Jobs was singular, to be sure. But he also was of a type. He was what psychotherapist and business coach Michael Maccoby called a “productive narcissist.” In 2000, Maccoby published an insightful article in the Harvard Business Review that applies Freudian terminology to three categories of executives Maccoby had observed in corporate life. “Erotics” feel a need to be loved, value consensus, and as a result are not natural leaders. These are the people to whom a manager should assign tasks—and then heap praise for a job well done. “Obsessives” are by-the-books tacticians with a knack for making the trains run on time. An efficient head of logistics or bottom-line-oriented spreadsheet jockey is the classic obsessive. The greats of business history, however, are “productive narcissists,” visionary risk takers with a burning desire to “change the world.” Corporate narcissists are charismatic leaders willing to do whatever it takes to win and who couldn’t give a fig about being liked. Steve Jobs was the textbook example of a productive narcissist. An unimpressed Jobs was famous for calling other companies “bozos.” His own executives endured their rides on what one called the “bozo/hero rollercoaster,” often within the same marathon meeting.
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Adam Lashinsky (Inside Apple: How America's Most Admired--and Secretive--Company Really Works)
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In a famous hoax, physicist Alan Sokal submitted an article to a leading journal of cultural studies purporting to describe how quantum gravity could produce a “liberatory postmodern science.” The article, which parodied the convoluted style of argument in the fashionable academic world of cultural studies, was promptly published by the editors. Sokal announced that his intention was to test the intellectual standards of the discipline by checking whether the journal would publish a piece “liberally salted with nonsense.” Sokal, “A Physicist Experiments with Cultural Studies,” April 15, 1996,
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Dani Rodrik (Economics Rules: The Rights and Wrongs of the Dismal Science)
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Companies can develop an innovation strategy that works at the three levels of what I call the “innovation pyramid”: a few big bets at the top that represent clear directions for the future and receive the lion’s share of investment; a portfolio of promising midrange ideas pursued by designated teams that develop and test them; and a broad base of early stage ideas or incremental innovations permitting continuous improvement. Influence flows down the pyramid, as the big bets encourage small wins heading in the same direction, but it also can flow up, because big innovations sometimes begin life as small bits of tinkering—as in the famously accidental development of 3M’s Post-it Notes.
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Harvard Business Publishing (HBR's 10 Must Reads on Innovation (with featured article "The Discipline of Innovation," by Peter F. Drucker))
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The distinction between mathematics and science is pretty well settled. It remains mysterious to us why mathematics that is invented for reasons having nothing to do with nature often turns out to be useful in physical theories. In a famous article,8 the physicist Eugene Wigner has written of “the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics.
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Steven Weinberg (To Explain the World: The Discovery of Modern Science)
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Frederick Hertzberg begins his famous article “One More Time: How Do You Motivate Employees?” as follows: “How many articles, books, speeches, and workshops have pleaded plaintively, ‘How do I get an employee to do what I want him to do?’” (italics added). Read it again. Is Hertzberg speaking about motivation or manipulation? In
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Ichak Kalderon Adizes (How to Solve the Mismanagement Crisis)
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Mysteries are powerful, Cialdini says, because they create a need for closure. “You’ve heard of the famous Aha! experience, right?” he says. “Well, the Aha! experience is much more satisfying when it is preceded by the Huh? experience.” By creating a mystery, the writer-astronomer made dust interesting. He sustained attention, not just for the span of a punch line but for the span of a twenty-page article dense with information on scientific theories and experimentation.
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Chip Heath (Made to Stick: Why some ideas take hold and others come unstuck)
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Tonight the President will bury himself, perhaps, in two volumes Mrs. Lodge has just sent him for review: Gissing’s Charles Dickens, A Critical Study, and The Greek View of Life, by Lowes Dickinson. He will be struck, as he peruses the latter, by interesting parallels between the Periclean attitude toward women and that of present-day Japan, and will make a mental note to write to Mrs. Lodge about it.122 He may also read, with alternate approval and disapproval, two articles on Mormonism in the latest issue of Outlook. A five-thousand-word essay on “The Ancient Irish Sagas” in this month’s Century magazine will not detain him long, since he is himself the author.123 His method of reading periodicals is somewhat unusual: each page, as he comes to the end of it, is torn out and thrown onto the floor.124 When both magazines have been thus reduced to a pile of crumpled paper, Roosevelt will leap from his rocking-chair and march down the corridor. Slowing his pace at the door of the presidential suite, he will tiptoe in, brush the famous teeth with only a moderate amount of noise, and pull on his blue-striped pajamas. Beside his pillow he will deposit a large, precautionary revolver.125 His last act, after turning down the lamp and climbing into bed, will be to unclip his pince-nez and rub the reddened bridge of his nose. Then, there being nothing further to do, Theodore Roosevelt will energetically fall asleep.
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Edmund Morris (The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt)
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In May of 1952, about a dozen individuals lead by Fidel Castro formed a group of anti-Batista rebels called “The Movement.” Fidel Castro had become a well-known activist and wrote articles intended to fire up the public in an underground newspaper El Acusador (The Accuser). In one year, his group grew to about 1,200 people. They began accumulating weapons with the idea that they would openly attack a Batista stronghold as a uniformed militant force. Being careful, Castro kept his intentions secret and only a few people knew that the target would be the Moncada Barracks in Santiago de Cuba.
The attack on the second largest military barracks in Cuba, named after General Guillermón Moncada, a hero of the War of Independence, was worked out in the tiny two-room apartment of Abel Santamaría. Abel and his sister Haydée lived on the corner of 25th and O Streets in El Vedado, Havana. Only Abel, Haydée and seven other people were entrusted with the details of the attack. Tight security was maintained throughout and since the volunteers of the revolution were divided into cells, few of them knew each other….
One hundred and thirty two men and two women went up against 1,000 trained soldiers and although the battle ended badly for the Castro brothers, the attack on the barracks caused a public fury throughout Cuba. At his sentencing for leading the failed mission, Fidel delivered his famous “History will Absolve Me” speech. Read more in “The Exciting Story of Cuba.
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Hank Bracker
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These include Philip Marshall Dale, Medical Biographies: The Ailments of Thirty-Three Famous Persons (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1952); Brian Dillon, The Hypochondriacs: Nine Tormented Lives (New York: Faber and Faber, 2010); Douglas Goldman et al., Retrospective Diagnoses of Historical Personalities as Viewed by Leading Contemporary Psychiatrists (Bloomfield, NJ: Schering Corporation, 1958); Kay Redfield Jamison, Touched with Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament (New York: Free Press, 1993); Jeffrey A. Kottler, Divine Madness: Ten Stories of Creative Struggle (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2006); Philip Mackowiak, Post-Mortem: Solving History’s Great Medical Mysteries (Philadelphia: American College of Physicians, 2007); Roy Porter, Madness: A Brief History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002); David Rettew, Child Temperament: New Thinking About the Boundary Between Traits and Illness (New York: W. W. Norton, 2013). Articles
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Claudia Kalb (Andy Warhol was a Hoarder: Inside the Minds of History's Great Personalities)
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What happened to the troubled young reporter who almost brought this magazine down The last time I talked to Stephen Glass, he was pleading with me on the phone to protect him from Charles Lane. Chuck, as we called him, was the editor of The New Republic and Steve was my colleague and very good friend, maybe something like a little brother, though we are only two years apart in age. Steve had a way of inspiring loyalty, not jealousy, in his fellow young writers, which was remarkable given how spectacularly successful he’d been in such a short time. While the rest of us were still scratching our way out of the intern pit, he was becoming a franchise, turning out bizarre and amazing stories week after week for The New Republic, Harper’s, and Rolling Stone— each one a home run. I didn’t know when he called me that he’d made up nearly all of the bizarre and amazing stories, that he was the perpetrator of probably the most elaborate fraud in journalistic history, that he would soon become famous on a whole new scale. I didn’t even know he had a dark side. It was the spring of 1998 and he was still just my hapless friend Steve, who padded into my office ten times a day in white socks and was more interested in alphabetizing beer than drinking it. When he called, I was in New York and I said I would come back to D.C. right away. I probably said something about Chuck like: “Fuck him. He can’t fire you. He can’t possibly think you would do that.” I was wrong, and Chuck, ever-resistant to Steve’s charms, was as right as he’d been in his life. The story was front-page news all over the world. The staff (me included) spent several weeks re-reporting all of Steve’s articles. It turned out that Steve had been making up characters, scenes, events, whole stories from first word to last. He made up some funny stuff—a convention of Monica Lewinsky memorabilia—and also some really awful stuff: racist cab drivers, sexist Republicans, desperate poor people calling in to a psychic hotline, career-damaging quotes about politicians. In fact, we eventually figured out that very few of his stories were completely true. Not only that, but he went to extreme lengths to hide his fabrications, filling notebooks with fake interview notes and creating fake business cards and fake voicemails. (Remember, this was before most people used Google. Plus, Steve had been the head of The New Republic ’s fact-checking department.) Once we knew what he’d done, I tried to call Steve, but he never called back. He just went missing, like the kids on the milk cartons. It was weird. People often ask me if I felt “betrayed,” but really I was deeply unsettled, like I’d woken up in the wrong room. I wondered whether Steve had lied to me about personal things, too. I wondered how, even after he’d been caught, he could bring himself to recruit me to defend him, knowing I’d be risking my job to do so. I wondered how I could spend more time with a person during the week than I spent with my husband and not suspect a thing. (And I didn’t. It came as a total surprise). And I wondered what else I didn’t know about people. Could my brother be a drug addict? Did my best friend actually hate me? Jon Chait, now a political writer for New York and back then the smart young wonk in our trio, was in Paris when the scandal broke. Overnight, Steve went from “being one of my best friends to someone I read about in The International Herald Tribune, ” Chait recalled. The transition was so abrupt that, for months, Jon dreamed that he’d run into him or that Steve wanted to talk to him. Then, after a while, the dreams stopped. The Monica Lewinsky scandal petered out, George W. Bush became president, we all got cell phones, laptops, spouses, children. Over the years, Steve Glass got mixed up in our minds with the fictionalized Stephen Glass from his own 2003 roman à clef, The Fabulist, or Steve Glass as played by Hayden Christiansen in the 2003
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Anonymous
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Although a partner’s compensation depends in large part on the amount of business he brings to the Firm, no one goes out to knock on doors. The Firm waits for the phone to ring. And ring it does, not because McKinsey sells, but because McKinsey markets. It does this in several different ways, all of them designed to make sure that on the day a senior executive decides she has a business problem, one of the first calls she makes is to the local office of McKinsey. The Firm produces a steady stream of books and articles, some of them extremely influential, such as the famous In Search of Excellence by Peters and Waterman.* McKinsey also publishes its own scholarly journal, The McKinsey Quarterly, which it sends gratis to its clients, as well as to its former consultants, many of whom now occupy senior positions at potential clients. The Firm invites (and gets) a lot of coverage by journalists. Many McKinsey partners and directors are internationally known as experts in their fields.
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Ethan M. Rasiel (The McKinsey Way)
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In a famous article,8 the physicist Eugene Wigner has written of “the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics.
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Steven Weinberg (To Explain the World: The Discovery of Modern Science)
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Clutching a printed e-mail, Vivian moved towards the most famous desk in the world, her voice shaking with emotion. “Mr. President, tell me this Politico e-news article that just hit our computer screens is wrong. You’re not seriously considering dumping the Vice President and replacing him with Hilde? Tell me it ain’t so! Not Hilde Ramona Calhoun.” “Now, Vivian, calm down….you know I won’t do anything that major without talking first to you….and….of course, talking….to…The Wife.” “So, you are thinking about it? I knew it.” “I have to, Vivian, you know that, we all know the Veep can’t open his mouth without sticking in both feet.
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John Price (Second Term - A Novel of America in the Last Days (The End of America Series Book 1))
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How Ma Bell Helped Us Build the Blue Box In 1955, the Bell System Technical Journal published an article entitled “In Band Signal Frequency Signaling” which described the process used for routing telephone calls over trunk lines with the signaling system at the time. It included all the information you’d need to build an interoffice telephone system, but it didn’t include the MF (multifrequency) tones you needed for accessing the system and dialing. But nine years later, in 1964, Bell revealed the other half of the equation, publishing the frequencies used for the digits needed for the actual routing codes. Now, anybody who wanted to get around Ma Bell was set. The formula was there for the taking. All you needed were these two bits of information found in these two articles. If you could build the equipment to emit the frequencies needed, you could make your own free calls, skipping Ma Bell’s billing and monitoring system completely. Famous “phone phreaks” of the early 1970s include Joe Engressia (a.k.a. Joybubbles), who was able to whistle (with his mouth) the high E tone needed to take over the line. John Draper (a.k.a. Captain Crunch) did the same with the free whistle that came inside boxes of Cap’n Crunch. A whole subculture was born. Eventually Steve Jobs (a.k.a. Oaf Tobar) and I (a.k.a. Berkeley Blue) joined the group, making and selling our own versions of the Blue Boxes. We actually made some good money at this.
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Steve Wozniak (iWoz: Computer Geek to Cult Icon)
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As the eminent historian Gordon Wood has pointed out, we must understand that a majority of the Articles’ most famous critics — and the later constitutional framers — were basically aristocrats in the pre-industrial, pre-capitalist sense of the word. They feared inflation, paper money, and debt relief measures because they modeled their social and economic world on the systems and tendencies of the English gentry. Their entire societal and agrarian order was at risk during the 1780s — in fact it would later collapse in the increasingly commercial northern states, only to live on in the plantation life of the antebellum South. Much of their complaint about “excessive democracy” in the new American state governments may ring hollow to modern ears, but they believed in their position most emphatically.
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Daniel A. Sjursen (A True History of the United States: Indigenous Genocide, Racialized Slavery, Hyper-Capitalism, Militarist Imperialism and Other Overlooked Aspects of American Exceptionalism (Truth to Power))
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With the Bali Tour Package From Bangalore offered by Surfnxt, a leading tour operator known for creating exceptional travel experiences, embark on an unforgettable journey. Bali is the ideal setting for a rejuvenating getaway because of its stunning beaches, vibrant culture, and breathtaking landscapes. This article delves into the enticing aspects of the Surfnxt Bali Tour Package, providing information on the itinerary's specifics, lodging options, activities, dining experiences, and important advice for making your trip to this Indonesian paradise one to remember.
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Accommodation and transportation options, as well as information about the facilities, are all part of the Surfnxt Bali tour package. Your comfort is our top concern. The accommodations are carefully chosen for their quality and convenience after a day of fun and exploration, ensuring a restful stay.
Modes of Transportation and Features Included: Surfnxt will handle all of your transportation needs while you're on your Bali tour. While their knowledgeable staff takes care of all the details, whether you need airport transfers, sightseeing tours, or intercity travel, you can relax and enjoy the journey.
Activities and Attractions Included in the Package Water Sports and Outdoor Adventures Get ready to experience the exhilarating water sports included in this package and dive into the clear waters of Bali. Surfing the waves or snorkeling among the colorful marine life are examples of these activities. For adrenaline junkies, options like whitewater rafting and jungle trekking are certain to get your heart pumping.
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Bali Tour Package From Bangalore
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Franklin, "the most accomplished American of his age and the most influential in inventing the type of society America would become."[4] Franklin became a newspaper editor, printer, and merchant in Philadelphia, becoming very wealthy, writing and publishing Poor Richard's Almanack and The Pennsylvania Gazette. Franklin was interested in science and technology, and gained international renown for his famous experiments. He played a major role in establishing the University of Pennsylvania and Franklin & Marshall College and was elected the first president of the American Philosophical Society. Franklin became a national hero in America when he spearheaded the effort to have Parliament repeal the unpopular Stamp Act. An accomplished diplomat, he was widely admired among the French as American minister to Paris and was a major figure in the development of positive Franco-American relations.
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Benjamin Franklin (The Articles of Confederation)
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Like other assassins, Bardo had stalked several famous people, including a client of mine whom he decided was too inaccessible. He gave up on her and switched his attention to Rebecca Schaeffer. For assassins, it is the act and not the target, the destination, not the journey that matters. Because targets are interchangeable, I asked Bardo how the security precautions taken by some public figures affected his choice. He said, “If I read in an article that they have security and they have bodyguards, it makes you look at that celebrity different and makes a person like me stand back. It kind of stands against this hope of a romantic relationship.
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Gavin de Becker (The Gift of Fear: Survival Signals That Protect Us from Violence)
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Like other assassins, Bardo had stalked several famous people, including a client of mine whom he decided was too inaccessible. He gave up on her and switched his attention to Rebecca Schaeffer. For assassins, it is the act and not the target, the destination, not the journey that matters. Because targets are interchangeable, I asked Bardo how the security precautions taken by some public figures affected his choice. He said, “If I read in an article that they have security and they have bodyguards, it makes you look at that celebrity different and makes a person like me stand back. It kind of stands against this hope of a romantic relationship.” Though Bardo’s defense tried to sell the idea that he expected a romantic relationship with Rebecca Schaeffer, he never really did. Bardo expected exactly what he got, an unenthusiastic reception and ultimately a rejection. He used that rejection as an excuse to do what he had long wanted to do: release his terrible anger against women, against his family, and against the rest of us.
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Gavin de Becker (The Gift of Fear: Survival Signals That Protect Us from Violence)
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Trying to determine what is going on in the world by reading newspapers,” as a famously clever screenwriter/director/journalist named Ben Hecht once wrote, “is like trying to tell the time by watching the second hand of a clock.” The same is true of research and science. Trying to tell what’s true by looking at the latest articles published in a journal—and particularly in nutrition—is another fool’s game. The best idea is to attend little to the latest research and focus instead on the long-term trends, the accumulation of studies (one hopes, interpreted without bias), even if the long-term trends rarely, if ever, appear in the news.
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Gary Taubes (The Case for Keto: The Truth About Low-Carb, High-Fat Eating)
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Hardin in a famous article published in 1968, the concept has been well known by social scientists for much longer.4 In economics, Paul Samuelson, a giant in the field, wrote about what he called
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Richard H. Thaler (Nudge: The Final Edition)
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Let’s just find these newspapers,” said Steve, hurrying across the room. “Where do you think they will be? In the children’s section?” Alex said, “What sort of child reads newspapers? They’re usually full of horrible articles about people getting hurt or building catching on fire or famous people dying!” “You’re right,” said Steve, changing direction. “They’ll be with the cookery books.
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Splendiferous Steve (The Quest for the Obsidian Pickaxe 7: An Unofficial Minecraft Book)
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Einstein famously summarized his revolutionary new theory of physics with the equation E=mc2. If he can distill his thinking into such an elegant equation, you can surely summarize the main points of any article, book, video, or presentation so that the main point is easy to identify.
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Tiago Forte (Building a Second Brain: A Proven Method to Organise Your Digital Life and Unlock Your Creative Potential)
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Not that they prefer rum. I never knew a sailor, in my life, who would not prefer a pot of hot coffee or chocolate, in a cold night, to all the rum afloat. They all say that rum only warms them for a time; yet, if they can get nothing better, they will miss what they have lost. The momentary warmth and glow from drinking it; the break and change which is made in a long, dreary watch by the mere calling all hands aft and serving of it out; and the simply having some event to look forward to, and to talk about; give it an importance and a use which no one can appreciate who has not stood his watch before the mast. On my passage round Cape Horn before, the vessel that I was in was not under temperance articles, and grog was served out every middle and morning watch, and after every reefing of topsails; and though I had never drank rum before, and never intend to again, I took my allowance then at the capstan, as the rest did, merely for the momentary warmth it gave the system, and the change in our feelings and aspect of our duties on the watch.
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Charles William Eliot (The Complete Harvard Classics - ALL 71 Volumes: The Five Foot Shelf & The Shelf of Fiction: The Famous Anthology of the Greatest Works of World Literature)
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Celia Farber, whose 2006 Harper’s article, “Out of Control: AIDS and the Destruction of Medical Science,” laid bare the culture of squalor, corruption, and violence at the vendetta-driven Division of AIDS (DAIDS). “The latter [genuine scientists] are the minority. They look, sound, and behave like scientists. And to varying degrees, they all live in a climate of both economic and reputational persecution. Peter Duesberg is one very famous example but there are others. Fauci’s vendetta system has many ways of crushing the natural scientific impulse—to question and to demand proof. Breathtakingly, because of Fauci’s impact since 1984, this tradition has been all but snuffed out in the US. ‘Everybody is afraid.’ How many times have I heard that line?
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Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health)
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The magazines had articles about the latest celebrity scandals. A famous singer’s husband had an affair with someone he works with, and, as a result, they both decided to take a break from work. The husband was a voice actor and he lost most of his jobs. His wife was a famous singer.
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a20 atwomaru (I Met You After the End of the World (Light Novel) Volume 2)
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Evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould was diagnosed with a form of cancer that had a median survival time of eight months; he died of a different and unrelated kind of cancer twenty years later.3 Gould subsequently wrote a famous article called “The Median Isn’t the Message,” in which he argued that his scientific knowledge of statistics saved him from the erroneous conclusion that he would necessarily be dead in eight months.
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Charles Wheelan (Naked Statistics: Stripping the Dread from the Data)
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He spent the last four years of his life there engaged in practice of Zazen (meditation), painting, and joining tea ceremonies and poetry gatherings with the domain’s elite. Many of Musashi’s famous ink paintings were created during this period of intense personal reflection. By this time, Japan had become politically stable and war was now a distant memory. Musashi, being among the last generations who had personally experienced conflict, sensed that samurai were losing their sense of identity. He resolved to make a pilgrimage to Reigandō Cave43 in 1643 and started writing Gorin-no-sho there, hoping to preserve for posterity his Way, and what he believed to be the very essence of warriorship. A year later he fell ill, and the domain elders encouraged him to return to Kumamoto to be cared for. He continued working on his treatise for five or six months. On the twelfth day of the fifth month of 1645, he passed the not quite finished manuscript to his student Magonojō. He gave away all his worldly possessions, and then wrote Dokkōdō, a brief list of twenty-one precepts that summed up his principles shaped over a lifetime of austere training. He died on the nineteenth day of the fifth month of 1645. It is said that he had taken ill with “dysphagia,” which suggests perhaps that he had terminal stomach cancer. Some say he died of lung cancer. In Bukōden, it is recorded that Musashi was laid in his coffin dressed in full armor and with all his weapons. It evokes a powerful image of a man who had dedicated his whole life to understanding the mind of combat and strategy. As testament once again to the conspiracy theories surrounding Musashi’s life, I am reminded of a bizarre book titled Was Musashi Murdered and Other Questions of Japanese History by Fudo Yamato (Zensho Communications, 1987). In it the author postulates that Musashi’s death was actually assassination through poisoning. The author argues that Musashi and many of his contemporaries such as the priest Takuan, Hosokawa Tadaoki (Tadatoshi’s father) who was suspected of “Christian sympathies,” and even Yagyū Munenori were all viewed with suspicion by the shogunate. He goes so far as to hypothesize that the phrase found at the end of Musashi’s Combat Strategy in 35 Articles “Should there be any entries you are unsure of, please allow me to explain in person…” was actually interpreted by the government as a call for those with anti-shogunate sentiments to gather in order to hatch a seditious plot (p. 20). This is why, Fudo Yamato argues, Musashi and these other notable men of his age all died mysteriously at around the same time.
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Alexander Bennett (The Complete Musashi: The Book of Five Rings and Other Works)
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glory, at the Science Museum of London. Charles Babbage was a well-known scientist and inventor of the time. He had spent years working on his Difference Engine, a revolutionary mechanical calculator. Babbage was also known for his extravagant parties, which he called “gatherings of the mind” and hosted for the upper class, the well-known, and the very intelligent.4 Many of the most famous people from Victorian England would be there—from Charles Darwin to Florence Nightingale to Charles Dickens. It was at one of these parties in 1833 that Ada glimpsed Babbage’s half-built Difference Engine. The teenager’s mathematical mind buzzed with possibilities, and Babbage recognized her genius immediately. They became fast friends. The US Department of Defense uses a computer language named Ada in her honor. Babbage sent Ada home with thirty of his lab books filled with notes on his next invention: the Analytic Engine. It would be much faster and more accurate than the Difference Engine, and Ada was thrilled to learn of this more advanced calculating machine. She understood that it could solve even harder, more complex problems and could even make decisions by itself. It was a true “thinking machine.”5 It had memory, a processor, and hardware and software just like computers today—but it was made from cogs and levers, and powered by steam. For months, Ada worked furiously creating algorithms (math instructions) for Babbage’s not-yet-built machine. She wrote countless lines of computations that would instruct the machine in how to solve complex math problems. These algorithms were the world’s first computer program. In 1840, Babbage gave a lecture in Italy about the Analytic Engine, which was written up in French. Ada translated the lecture, adding a set of her own notes to explain how the machine worked and including her own computations for it. These notes took Ada nine months to write and were three times longer than the article itself! Ada had some awesome nicknames. She called herself “the Bride of Science” because of her desire to devote her life to science; Babbage called her “the Enchantress of Numbers” because of her seemingly magical math
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Michelle R. McCann (More Girls Who Rocked the World: Heroines from Ada Lovelace to Misty Copeland)
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Whether the real setting and dating of the Hermetic tradition in late antiquity are, in fact, irrelevant to its reception in the Renaissance is an interesting hermeneutic question that cannot be answered here. In any case and for many other reasons, Yates’s views on the Hermetica became famous for some, notorious for others, especially when, in a 1968 article, she made Hermes a major figure in the preliminaries to the scientific revolution, just two years after J.E. McGuire and P.M. Rattansi had connected Newton’s physics with the ancient theology theme so closely associated with Hermes.
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Hermes Trismegistus (Hermetica: The Greek Corpus Hermeticum and the Latin Asclepius in a New English Translation, with Notes and Introduction)
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In October 1967 Richard Nixon published a now-famous article in Reader’s Digest titled “What Has Happened to America?” The article, which was actually written by Pat Buchanan, wrapped up all the nation’s turmoil in one package: Liberal permissiveness, Nixon/Buchanan claimed, was the root of all evil.3 “Just three years ago,” the article began, “this nation seemed to be completing its greatest decade of racial progress.” But now the nation was “among the most lawless and violent in the history of free peoples.” Urban riots were “the most virulent symptoms to date of another, and in some ways graver, national disorder—the decline in respect for public authority and the rule of law in America.” And it was all the fault of the liberals.
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Paul Krugman (The Conscience of a Liberal)
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The emergency provision of the Weimar constitution was, of course, the famous article 48. Inasmuch as Schmitt's focus in Political Theology is on the theory of sovereignty, we must tum to his other writings for an appreciation of how he translated his theoretical construction into concrete terms. Mindful of how easily an emergency provision such as article 48 could be abused, Schmitt published a comprehensive study of dictatorship shortly before the appearance of Political Theology. There he traced the history of dictatorship and concluded that it can be categorized into two forms: commissarial and sovereign. A sovereign dictatorship utilizes a crisis to abrogate the existing constitution in order to bring about a "condition whereby a constitution [that the sovereign dictator] considers to be a true constitution will become possible," whereas a commissarial dictatorship endeavors to restore order so that the existing constitution can be revived and allowed to function normally. Schmitt showed that article 48 accorded with the commissarial type of dictatorship, stressing the continuation of the Weimar constitutional order, critical interruptions notwithstanding.
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George Schwab (Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty)
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With patience and resources,” Mr. A would come to say often on his weekly calls with Peter, “we can do almost anything.” Tolstoy had a motto for Field Marshal Mikhail Kutuzov in War and Peace—“ Patience and Time.” “There is nothing stronger than those two,” he said, “. . . they will do it all.” In 1812 and in real life, Kutuzov gave Napoleon an abject lesson in the truth of that during a long Russian winter. The target, Nick Denton, is not a patient man. Most entrepreneurs aren’t. Most powerful people are not. One of his editors would say of Denton’s approach to stories, “Nick is very much of the mind that you do it now. And the emphasis is to get it out there and be correct as you can, but don’t let that stand in the way of getting the story out there.” Editorially, Nick Denton wanted to be first—which is a form of power in itself. But this isn’t how Thiel thinks. He would say his favorite chess player was José Raúl Capablanca, and remind himself of the man’s famous dictum: To begin you must study the end. You don’t want to be the first to act, you want to be the last man standing. History is littered with examples of those who acted rashly in pursuit of their goals, who plunged ahead without much in the way of a plan, and suffered as a result. One could argue that the bigger of Nixon’s two blunders wasn’t his attacks on the Democratic Party but the decision to go after Katharine Graham and the media, and yet both decisions were the product of a fundamental lack of patience and discipline. Or consider the late head of Fox News, Roger Ailes, who responded to a series of Gawker articles and attacks by allegedly hiring private detectives to follow the reporters around. Not only did he find nothing of practical value, but these heavy-handed tactics came back to embarrass and discredit him at his most vulnerable moment. In fact, two weeks after the news of this disturbing conspiracy broke, he would be dead. How ought one do it then?
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Ryan Holiday (Conspiracy: Peter Thiel, Hulk Hogan, Gawker, and the Anatomy of Intrigue)
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Pinochet epitomized the “moderate autocrat friendly to American interests,” as the new U.N. Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick characterized “authoritarian” military rulers in her famous Commentary article, “Dictatorships and Double Standards,” which attacked Jimmy Carter’s policy on human rights.34 The Chileans could be counted on as an ideological ally in the battle against Soviet influence in the hemisphere and a supporter of a hard-line, militarist U.S. approach to revolutionary upheaval in Central America in the 1980s.
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Peter Kornbluh (The Pinochet File: A Declassified Dossier on Atrocity and Accountability)
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Poetry and Genre The hallmark of rhetoric in ancient Near Eastern literature is repetition; in poetry, this takes the form of what scholars call “parallelism.” Frequently, the first line of a verse is echoed in some way by the second line. The second line might repeat the substance of the first line with slightly different emphasis, or perhaps the second line amplifies the first line in some fashion, such as drawing a logical conclusion, illustrating or intensifying the thought. At times the point of the first line is reinforced by a contrast in the second line. Occasionally, more than two lines are parallel. Each of these features, frequently observed in Biblical psalms, is represented in songs from Egypt, Mesopotamia and Ugarit. Unlike English poetry, which often depends on rhyme for its effect, these ancient cultures attained impact on listeners and readers with creative repetition. Psalms come in several standard subgenres, each with standard formal elements. Praise psalms can be either individual or corporate. Over a third of the psalms in the Psalter are praise psalms. Corporate psalms typically begin with an imperative call to praise (e.g., “Shout for joy to the LORD” [Ps 100:1]) and describe all the good things the Lord has done. Individual praise often begins with a proclamation of intent to praise (e.g., “I will praise you, LORD” [Ps 138:1]) and declare what God has done in a particular situation in the psalmist’s life. Mesopotamian and Egyptian hymns generally focus on descriptive praise, often moving from praise to petition. Examples of the proclamation format can be seen in the Mesopotamian wisdom composition, Ludlul bel nemeqi. The title is the first line of the piece, which is translated “I will praise the lord of wisdom.” As in the individual praise psalms, this Mesopotamian worshiper of Marduk reports about a problem that he had and reports how his god brought him deliverance. Lament psalms may be personal statements of despair (e.g., Ps 22:1–21, dirges following the death of an important person (cf. David’s elegy for Saul in 2Sa 1:17–27) or communal cries in times of crisis (e.g., Ps 137). The most famous lament form from ancient Mesopotamia is the “Lament Over the Destruction of Ur,” which commemorates the capture of the city in 2004 BC by the Elamite king Kindattu. For more information on this latter category, see the article “Neo-Sumerian Laments.” In the book of Psalms, more than a third of the psalms are laments, mostly by an individual. The most common complaints concern sickness and oppression by enemies. The lament literature of Mesopotamia is comprised of a number of different subgenres described by various technical terms. Some of these subgenres overlap with Biblical categories, but most of the Mesopotamian pieces are associated with incantations (magical rites being performed to try to rid the person of the problem). Nevertheless, the petitions that accompany lament in the Bible are very similar to those found in prayers from the ancient Near East. They include requests for guidance, protection, favor, attention from the deity, deliverance from crisis, intervention, reconciliation, healing and long life. Prayers to deities preserved
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Anonymous (NIV, Cultural Backgrounds Study Bible: Bringing to Life the Ancient World of Scripture)
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Bertrand Russell noted this in a famous article, writing emphatically that “The law of causality . . . is a relic of a bygone age, surviving, like the monarchy, only because it is erroneously supposed to do no harm.
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Carlo Rovelli (The Order of Time)
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She was sometimes called “the female Arthur Godfrey,” combining a down-home charm with a keen and astute interviewing style. Her voice was “girlish, hesitant, often bewildered,” in the opinion of Life magazine. Her stock in trade was innocence: “she preserved the air of a little girl lost in the big city,” but managed to draw from the rich and famous revealing anecdotes and warm insights. She interviewed more than 1,200 people, from Sally Rand and Harry Truman to the Grand Lama of Tibet. Mary Margaret McBride was born in 1899, and she came to radio after a career in letters. She wrote several books in the 1920s and was one of the country’s best-paid article writers until the Depression arrived and demolished her markets.
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John Dunning (On the Air: The Encyclopedia of Old-Time Radio)
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George Vaillant’s famous longitudinal study of Harvard students from their time as undergraduates through their entire adulthood also concluded that chores in childhood is an essential contributor to success in life. In an interview for a 1981 New York Times article, Vaillant explained that “work plays a central role in an individual’s life”—so much that it trumped having a strong family background as a predictor of mental health in adulthood.
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Julie Lythcott-Haims (How to Raise an Adult: Break Free of the Overparenting Trap and Prepare Your Kid for Success)
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Ah, the old description-experience gap. Phil may not know the term, but he understands the concept—exactly what he’s been trying to tell me this whole time about poker terms. You don’t have to have studied the description-experience gap to understand, if you’re truly expert at something, that you need experience to balance out the descriptions. Otherwise, you’re left with the illusion of knowledge—knowledge without substance. You’re an armchair philosopher who thinks that just because she read an article about something she is a sudden expert. (David Dunning, a psychologist at the University of Michigan most famous for being one half of the Dunning-Kruger effect—the more incompetent you are, the less you’re aware of your incompetence—has found that people go quickly from being circumspect beginners, who are perfectly aware of their limitations, to “unconscious incompetents,” people who no longer realize how much they don’t know and instead fancy themselves quite proficient.)
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Maria Konnikova (The Biggest Bluff: How I Learned to Pay Attention, Master Myself, and Win)
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In an article of November 1921 (in which he made his famous forecast that gold would be used for building public lavatories in major world cities after the victory of the revolution on a world scale), Lenin contrasted the War Communism period’s “revolutionary approach” to economic development with the slow, cautious “reformist approach” that was correctly being adopted under the NEP, and defined the development of internal trade as the key link in the chain of events for the Bolsheviks to grasp now.[575] In this final period, moreover, Lenin found a cardinal formula for socialist construction in what he called the “cooperating of Russia,” the enlistment of the population in cooperatives. He wrote that early socialists like Robert Owen were not wrong in their fantasies of socialism as a society of cooperatives; their error lay in the failure to see that class struggle and a political revolution were the essential prerequisites of realizing the cooperative dream.
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Robert C. Tucker (Stalin as Revolutionary: A Study in History and Personality, 1879-1929)
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The original “Articles of the Barons” on which Magna Carta is based exist to-day in the British Museum. They were sealed in a quiet, short scene, which has become one of the most famous in our history, on June 15, 1215. Afterwards the King returned to Windsor. Four days later, probably, the Charter itself was engrossed. In future ages it was to be used as the foundation of principles and systems of government of which neither King John nor his nobles dreamed.
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Winston S. Churchill (The Birth of Britain (A History of the English Speaking Peoples #1))
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Heath wrote up his findings in a now-famous article for the Quarterly Journal of Studies on Alcohol.
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Malcolm Gladwell (Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know About the People We Don’t Know)
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I discovered something else, and that is that suckers differ among themselves according to the degree of experience.
The tyro knows nothing, and everybody, including himself, knows it. But the next, or second, grade thinks he knows a great deal and makes others feel that way too. He is the experienced sucker, who has studied not the market itself but a few remarks about the market made by a still higher grade of suckers. The second-grade sucker knows how to keep from losing his money in some of the ways that get the raw beginner. It is this semisucker rather than the 100 per cent article who is the real all-the-year-round support of the commission houses. He lasts about three and a half years on an average, as compared with a single season of from three to thirty weeks, which is the usual Wall Street life of a first offender. It is naturally the semisucker who is always quoting the famous trading aphorisms and the various rules of the game. He knows all the don'ts that ever fell from the oracular lips of the old stagers excepting the principal one, which is: Don't be a sucker!
This semisucker is the type that thinks he has cut his wisdom teeth because he loves to buy on declines. He waits for them. He measures his bargains by the number of points it has sold off from the top. In big bull markets the plain unadulterated sucker, utterly ignorant of rules and precedents, buys blindly because he hopes blindly. He makes most of the money until one of the healthy reactions takes it away from him at one fell swoop. But the Careful Mike sucker does what I did when I thought I was playing the game intelligently according to the intelligence of others. I knew I needed to change my bucket-shop methods and I thought I was solving my problem with any change, particularly one that assayed high gold values according to the experienced traders among the customers.
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Edwin Lefèvre (Reminiscences of a Stock Operator)
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and thought to tart it up with a few Shakespeare quotations, having a vague recollection from my undergraduate days that the Bard was fond of joking about the great pox. I dusted off my battered copy of the Riverside Shakespeare and started leafing through it. Holy crap, I thought, there is a lot of stuff here on syphilis. My curiosity was piqued, and I did some more digging. Was there a connection between Shakespeare’s syphilitic obsession, contemporary gossip about his sexual misadventures, and the only medical fact known about him with certainty—that his handwriting became tremulous in late middle age? I wrote an article that appeared in Clinical Infectious Diseases, supposing it to be of scant interest beyond its immediate specialty audience. To my surprise, it generated a fair amount of Internet buzz, and inspired a segment on The Daily Show. I began to think that there might be interest in a book on the topic of writers and disease, written from a medical perspective.
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John J. Ross (Shakespeare's Tremor and Orwell's Cough: The Medical Lives of Famous Writers)