Assembly Best Quotes

Hair the color of lemons,'" Rudy read. His fingers touched the words. "You told him about me?" At first, Liesel could not talk. Perhaps it was the sudden bumpiness of love she felt for him. Or had she always loved him? It's likely. Restricted as she was from speaking, she wanted him to kiss her. She wanted him to drag her hand across and pull her over. It didn't matter where. Her mouth, her neck, her cheek. Her skin was empty for it, waiting. Years ago, when they'd raced on a muddy field, Rudy was a hastily assembled set of bones, with a jagged, rocky smile. In the trees this afternoon, he was a giver of bread and teddy bears. He was a triple Hitler Youth athletics champion. He was her best friend. And he was a month from his death. Of course I told him about you," Liesel said.

Recollection builds up our personality. Our individuality is based on all the little pieces we assembled in the past. ("The past was her best friend")

People are made of stories. Our memories are not the impartial accumulation of every second we’ve lived; they’re the narrative that we assembled out of selected moments.

Be the best. Work harder, work smarter. Exceed every expectation. But also, be invisible, imperceptible. Don’t make anyone uncomfortable. Don’t inconvenience. Exist in the negative only, the space around. Do not insert yourself into the main narrative. Go unnoticed. Become the air. Open your eyes.

Twenty years ago at a conference I attended of theologians and professors of religion, an Indian Christian friend told the assembly, “We are going to hear about the beauties of several traditions, but that does not mean that we are going to make a fruit salad.” When it came my turn to speak, I said, “Fruit salad can be delicious! I have shared the Eucharist with Father Daniel Berrigan, and our worship became possible because of the sufferings we Vietnamese and Americans shared over many years.” Some of the Buddhists present were shocked to hear I had participated in the Eucharist, and many Christians seemed truly horrified. To me, religious life is life. I do not see any reason to spend one’s whole life tasting just one kind of fruit. We human beings can be nourished by the best values of many traditions.

Maybe what we say to each other is not so important after all, but just that we are alive together, and present for each other as best we can be.

He had learned how to assemble Jewish texts, Greek philosophy, and Middle-Western evangelistic anecdotes into a sermon. And he had learned that poverty was blessed, but that bankers make the best deacons.

I have always been interested in this man. My father had a set of Tom Paine's books on the shelf at home. I must have opened the covers about the time I was 13. And I can still remember the flash of enlightenment which shone from his pages. It was a revelation, indeed, to encounter his views on political and religious matters, so different from the views of many people around us. Of course I did not understand him very well, but his sincerity and ardor made an impression upon me that nothing has ever served to lessen. I have heard it said that Paine borrowed from Montesquieu and Rousseau. Maybe he had read them both and learned something from each. I do not know. But I doubt that Paine ever borrowed a line from any man... Many a person who could not comprehend Rousseau, and would be puzzled by Montesquieu, could understand Paine as an open book. He wrote with a clarity, a sharpness of outline and exactness of speech that even a schoolboy should be able to grasp. There is nothing false, little that is subtle, and an impressive lack of the negative in Paine. He literally cried to his reader for a comprehending hour, and then filled that hour with such sagacious reasoning as we find surpassed nowhere else in American letters - seldom in any school of writing. Paine would have been the last to look upon himself as a man of letters. Liberty was the dear companion of his heart; truth in all things his object. ...we, perhaps, remember him best for his declaration: 'The world is my country; to do good my religion.' Again we see the spontaneous genius at work in 'The Rights of Man', and that genius busy at his favorite task - liberty. Written hurriedly and in the heat of controversy, 'The Rights of Man' yet compares favorably with classical models, and in some places rises to vaulting heights. Its appearance outmatched events attending Burke's effort in his 'Reflections'. Instantly the English public caught hold of this new contribution. It was more than a defense of liberty; it was a world declaration of what Paine had declared before in the Colonies. His reasoning was so cogent, his command of the subject so broad, that his legion of enemies found it hard to answer him. 'Tom Paine is quite right,' said Pitt, the Prime Minister, 'but if I were to encourage his views we should have a bloody revolution.' Here we see the progressive quality of Paine's genius at its best. 'The Rights of Man' amplified and reasserted what already had been said in 'Common Sense', with now a greater force and the power of a maturing mind. Just when Paine was at the height of his renown, an indictment for treason confronted him. About the same time he was elected a member of the Revolutionary Assembly and escaped to France. So little did he know of the French tongue that addresses to his constituents had to be translated by an interpreter. But he sat in the assembly. Shrinking from the guillotine, he encountered Robespierre's enmity, and presently found himself in prison, facing that dread instrument. But his imprisonment was fertile. Already he had written the first part of 'The Age of Reason' and now turned his time to the latter part. Presently his second escape cheated Robespierre of vengeance, and in the course of events 'The Age of Reason' appeared. Instantly it became a source of contention which still endures. Paine returned to the United States a little broken, and went to live at his home in New Rochelle - a public gift. Many of his old companions in the struggle for liberty avoided him, and he was publicly condemned by the unthinking. {The Philosophy of Paine, June 7, 1925}

When we set children against one another in contests—from spelling bees to awards assemblies to science “fairs” (that are really contests), from dodge ball to honor rolls to prizes for the best painting or the most books read—we teach them to confuse excellence with winning, as if the only way to do something well is to outdo others.

Second, nothing about adolescence can be understood outside the context of delayed frontocortical maturation. If by adolescence limbic, autonomic, and endocrine systems are going full blast while the frontal cortex is still working out the assembly instructions, we’ve just explained why adolescents are so frustrating, great, asinine, impulsive, inspiring, destructive, self-destructive, selfless, selfish, impossible, and world changing. Think about this—adolescence and early adulthood are the times when someone is most likely to kill, be killed, leave home forever, invent an art form, help overthrow a dictator, ethnically cleanse a village, devote themselves to the needy, become addicted, marry outside their group, transform physics, have hideous fashion taste, break their neck recreationally, commit their life to God, mug an old lady, or be convinced that all of history has converged to make this moment the most consequential, the most fraught with peril and promise, the most demanding that they get involved and make a difference. In other words, it’s the time of life of maximal risk taking, novelty seeking, and affiliation with peers. All because of that immature frontal cortex.

The best man, then, must legislate, and laws must be passed, but these laws will have no authority when they miss the mark, though in all other cases retaining their authority. But when the law cannot determine a point at all, or not well, should the one best man or should all decide? According to our present practice assemblies meet, sit in judgment, deliberate, and decide, and their judgments an relate to individual cases. Now any member of the assembly, taken separately, is certainly inferior to the wise man. But the state is made up of many individuals. And as a feast to which all the guests contribute is better than a banquet furnished by a single man, so a multitude is a better judge of many things than any individual.

She wants to tell them that Blue Gamma was more right than it knew: experience isn’t merely the best teacher; it’s the only teacher. If she’s learned anything raising Jax, it’s that there are no shortcuts; if you want to create the common sense that comes from twenty years of being in the world, you need to devote twenty years to the task. You can’t assemble an equivalent collection of heuristics in less time; experience is algorithmically incompressible.

In the beginning, God created human beings, which is to say God put the ingredients together, embedded the instructions for building on the template, and put it all into four separate eggs marked 'Some Assembly Required.

I thought, as I wiped my eyes on the corner of my apron: Penelope did this too. And more than once: you can't keep weaving all day And undoing it all through the night; Your arms get tired, and the back of your neck gets tight; And along towards morning, when you think it will never be light, And your husband has been gone, and you don't know where, for years. Suddenly you burst into tears; There is simply nothing else to do. And I thought, as I wiped my eyes on the corner of my apron: This is an ancient gesture, authentic, antique, In the very best tradition, classic, Greek; Ulysses did this too. But only as a gesture,—a gesture which implied To the assembled throng that he was much too moved to speak. He learned it from Penelope... Penelope, who really cried.

As best as the Count could determine, the Bolsheviks assembled whenever possible in whichever form for whatever reason. In a single week, there might be committees, caucuses, colloquiums, congresses, and conventions variously coming together to establish codes, set courses of action, levy complaints, and generally clamor about the world’s oldest problems in its newest nomenclature. If

Nonfiction is at its best an act of putting the world back together - or tearing some piece of it apart to find what's hidden beneath the assumptions or conventions - and in this sense creation and destruction can be akin. The process can be incandescent with excitement, whether from finding some unexpected scrap of information or from recognizing the patterns that begin to arise as the fragments begin to assemble. Something you didn't know well comes into focus, and the world makes sense in a new way, or an old assumption is gutted, and then you try to write it down.

You can’t fully prepare. You do your best to acquire diverse skills. You try to learn from your successes and mistakes over the years. You try to assemble a team with varied talents and expertise. Mostly, you strive to stay calm enough to think clearly even under extreme pressure. You try to use the adrenaline for focus rather than panic. You stay on your toes, ready to improvise. And you hope for the best.

It’s hard to love yourself while simultaneously striving to become the best you you can be, which implies your current version could use some work.

A complex assembly is best described first in terms of its substances: its subassembles and parts. Then, next, it is described in terms of its methods: its functions as they occur in sequence.

I have not read most of the big 19th — century novels that people consider “essential,” nor most of the 20th-century ones for that matter. But this does not embarrass me. There are many films to see, many friends to visit, many walks to take, many playlists to assemble and many favorite books to reread. Life’s too short for anxious score-keeping. Also, my grandmother is illiterate, and she’s one of the best people I know. Reading is a deep personal consolation for me, but other things console, too.

No, it's provably true. I've proved it. The best cure for a sad heart is a - happy vagina.

(I) went to see the noble knights of Holy Anocracy. By the time they assembled, the inn finished assimilating the new gaming consoles. I waved my hand and three huge flat screen opened in the stone walls of the vampire quarters. Wall spat out sets of controllers. “Greetings,” I said. “House Krah, House Sabla and House Vorga, may I present Call of Duty.” The three screens ignited simultaneously, playing the opening of the Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare. Soldiers in high tech armor shot at target, flew across the screen from bomb impacts, and walked dramatically in slow motion. Vehicles roared, Marines roared louder, and Kevin Spacey informed us that politicians didn’t know how to solve problems but he did. The vampires stared at the screens. “This is a game of cooperative action,” I said, “Where a small elite force can triumph against overwhelming odds.” At the word elite, they perked up like wild dogs who heard a rabbit cry. “The game will teach you how to play it. May the best House triumph over their opponents.

If power truly comes from the barrel of a gun, to borrow a phrase from a later master of the dual state, Mao Zedong, Lenin still had his finger on the trigger, especially in the capital. His best bet, however, was to defuse the authority of the Constituent Assembly before it even met.

Some of you seniors may have seen this at parties,” said Coach Greene, standing at the podium in front of the upper school assembly, holding a green glass bottle. “The manufacturer calls it ‘Bartles and Jaymes wine cooler,’ but the Charleston County Police Department calls it ‘rape juice.

Be the best. Work harder, work smarter. Exceed every expectation. But also, be invisible, imperceptible. Don't make anyone uncomfortable. Don't inconvenience. Exist in the negative only, the space around. Do not insert yourself into the main narrative. Go unnoticed. Become the air. Open your eyes.

It is not upon you alone the dark patches fall, The dark threw its patches down upon me also, The best I had done seem’d to me blank and suspicious, My great thoughts as I supposed them, were they not in reality meagre? Nor is it you alone who know what it is to be evil, I am he who knew what it was to be evil, I too knitted the old knot of contrariety, Blabb’d, blush’d, resented, lied, stole, grudg’d, Had guile, anger, lust, hot wishes I dared not speak, Was wayward, vain, greedy, shallow, sly, cowardly, malignant, The wolf, the snake, the hog, not wanting in me, The cheating look, the frivolous word, the adulterous wish, not wanting, Refusals, hates, postponements, meanness, laziness, none of these wanting, Was one with the rest, the days and haps of the rest, Was call’d by my nighest name by clear loud voices of young men as they saw me approaching or passing, Felt their arms on my neck as I stood, or the negligent leaning of their flesh against me as I sat, Saw many I loved in the street or ferry-boat or public assembly, yet never told them a word, Lived the same life with the rest, the same old laughing, gnawing, sleeping, Play’d the part that still looks back on the actor or actress, The same old role, the role that is what we make it, as great as we like, Or as small as we like, or both great and small." -from "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry

Mister Trod?" said Bod. "Tell me about revenge." "Dish best served cold," said Nehemiah Trot. "Do not take revenge in the heat of the moment. Instead, wait until the hour is propitious. There was a Grub Street hack named O'Leary--an Irishman, I should add--who had the nerve, the confounded cheek to write of my first slim volume of poems, A Nosegay of Beauty Assembled for Gentleman of Quality, that it was inferior doggerel of no worth whatsoever, and that the paper it was written on would have been better used as--no, I cannot say. Let us simply agree that it was a most vulgar statement.

Nowhere do “politicians” form a more separate and powerful section of the nation than precisely in North America. There, each of the two major parties which alternatively succeed each other in power is itself in turn controlled by people who make a business of politics, who speculate on seats in the legislative assemblies of the Union as well as of the separate states, or who make a living by carrying on agitation for their party and on its victory are rewarded with positions. It is well known how the Americans have been trying for thirty years to shake off this yoke, which has become intolerable, and how in spite of it all they continue to sink ever deeper in this swamp of corruption. It is precisely in America that we see best how there takes place this process of the state power making itself independent in relation to society, whose mere instrument it was originally intended to be. Here there exists no dynasty, no nobility, no standing army, beyond the few men keeping watch on the Indians, no bureaucracy with permanent posts or the right to pensions. And nevertheless we find here two great gangs of political speculators, who alternately take possession of the state power and exploit it by the most corrupt means and for the most corrupt ends – and the nation is powerless against these two great cartels of politicians, who are ostensibly its servants, but in reality dominate and plunder it.

Just as the various trades are most highly developed in large cities, in the same way food at the palace is prepared in a far superior manner. In small towns the same man makes couches, doors, ploughs and tables, and often he even builds houses, and still he is thankful if only he can find enough work to support himself. And it is impossible for a man of many trades to do all of them well. In large cities, however, because many make demands on each trade, one alone is enough to support a man, and often less than one: for instance one man makes shoes for men, another for women, there are places even where one man earns a living just by mending shoes, another by cutting them out, another just by sewing the uppers together, while there is another who performs none of these operations but assembles the parts, Of necessity, he who pursues a very specialized task will do it best.

For quite a long time I have been examining myself concerning the pertinence of Birthdays, while the date and time is linear, What is the point of celebrating it every year over and over once more, and afterward I understand we invested the vast majority of our energy in attempting to substantiate ourselves the best on the boundaries, all set by others, be it kids, soul mate, guardians, companions, seniors and so forth, and in this journey we will generally fail to remember what initially we needed with ourselves. Birthday is one day which offers us a chance to make a huge stride towards the directions we at any point needed to set out for ourselves. It ought to be made consistently, as the principal right stride, towards your own objectives to provide guidance to every single further advance. I pray that you will actually assemble your entire existence today to take a step towards your own objectives, without blending your objectives in with the objectives of others. Enjoy more than ever and never later. Have an Extraordinary Birthday!!!

A year or so earlier I had been to the Sky River Rock Festival in rural Washington, where a dosen stone-broke freaks from Seattle Liberation Front had assembled a sound system that carried every small note of an acoustic guitar - even a cough or the sound of a boot drooping on the stage - to half-deaf acid victims huddled under bushes a half mile away. But the best technicians available to the National DAs' convention in Vegas apparently couldn't handle it. Their sound system looked like something Ulysses S. Grant might have triggered up to addres his troops during the Siege of Vicksburg. The voices from up front crackled with a fuzzy, high-pitched urgency, and the delay was just enough to keep the words disconcertingly out of phaze with the speaker's gestures. (Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, p. 73)

This the people showed firmly and cruelly when they abandoned, to the devil, the Provisional Government, the Constituent Assembly, and ‘everything that generations of the best Russians died for,’ as you yourself have expressed it, and ‘including your victorious end,’ to boot.

Humans - from this other perspective, which is just as extreme in its own way - are at best an arbitrary constellation of cultural elements, perhaps assembled according to some prevailing spirit, code or ethos, and which society ends up with which ethos is treated as beyond explanation, little more than a random roll of the dice.

The final proof that this alien indoctrination which begins in nursery school is based on the splitting of the family is that those working class children who arrive (those few who do arrive) at university are so brainwashed that they are unable any longer to talk to their community. Working class children then are the first who instinctively rebel against schools and the education provided in schools. But their parents carry them to schools and confine them to schools because they are concerned that their children should “have an education”, that is, be equipped to escape the assembly line or the kitchen to which they, the parents, are confined. If a working class child shows particular aptitudes, the whole family immediately concentrates on this child, gives him the best conditions, often sacrificing the others, hoping and gambling that he will carry them all out of the working class. This in effect becomes the way capital moves through the aspirations of the parents to enlist their help in disciplining fresh labor power.

When the creation was new and all the stars shone in their first splendour, the gods held their assembly in the sky and sang `Oh, the picture of perfection! the joy unalloyed!' But one cried of a sudden---`It seems that somewhere there is a break in the chain of light and one of the stars has been lost.' The golden string of their harp snapped, their song stopped, and they cried in dismay---`Yes, that lost star was the best, she was the glory of all heavens!' From that day the search is unceasing for her, and the cry goes on from one to the other that in her the world has lost its one joy! Only in the deepest silence of night the stars smile and whisper among themselves---`Vain is this seeking! unbroken perfection is over all!

Girls aside, the other thing I found in the last few years of being at school, was a quiet, but strong Christian faith – and this touched me profoundly, setting up a relationship or faith that has followed me ever since. I am so grateful for this. It has provided me with a real anchor to my life and has been the secret strength to so many great adventures since. But it came to me very simply one day at school, aged only sixteen. As a young kid, I had always found that a faith in God was so natural. It was a simple comfort to me: unquestioning and personal. But once I went to school and was forced to sit through somewhere in the region of nine hundred dry, Latin-liturgical, chapel services, listening to stereotypical churchy people droning on, I just thought that I had got the whole faith deal wrong. Maybe God wasn’t intimate and personal but was much more like chapel was … tedious, judgemental, boring and irrelevant. The irony was that if chapel was all of those things, a real faith is the opposite. But somehow, and without much thought, I had thrown the beautiful out with the boring. If church stinks, then faith must do, too. The precious, natural, instinctive faith I had known when I was younger was tossed out with this newly found delusion that because I was growing up, it was time to ‘believe’ like a grown-up. I mean, what does a child know about faith? It took a low point at school, when my godfather, Stephen, died, to shake me into searching a bit harder to re-find this faith I had once known. Life is like that. Sometimes it takes a jolt to make us sit and remember who and what we are really about. Stephen had been my father’s best friend in the world. And he was like a second father to me. He came on all our family holidays, and spent almost every weekend down with us in the Isle of Wight in the summer, sailing with Dad and me. He died very suddenly and without warning, of a heart attack in Johannesburg. I was devastated. I remember sitting up a tree one night at school on my own, and praying the simplest, most heartfelt prayer of my life. ‘Please, God, comfort me.’ Blow me down … He did. My journey ever since has been trying to make sure I don’t let life or vicars or church over-complicate that simple faith I had found. And the more of the Christian faith I discover, the more I realize that, at heart, it is simple. (What a relief it has been in later life to find that there are some great church communities out there, with honest, loving friendships that help me with all of this stuff.) To me, my Christian faith is all about being held, comforted, forgiven, strengthened and loved – yet somehow that message gets lost on most of us, and we tend only to remember the religious nutters or the God of endless school assemblies. This is no one’s fault, it is just life. Our job is to stay open and gentle, so we can hear the knocking on the door of our heart when it comes. The irony is that I never meet anyone who doesn’t want to be loved or held or forgiven. Yet I meet a lot of folk who hate religion. And I so sympathize. But so did Jesus. In fact, He didn’t just sympathize, He went much further. It seems more like this Jesus came to destroy religion and to bring life. This really is the heart of what I found as a young teenager: Christ comes to make us free, to bring us life in all its fullness. He is there to forgive us where we have messed up (and who hasn’t), and to be the backbone in our being. Faith in Christ has been the great empowering presence in my life, helping me walk strong when so often I feel so weak. It is no wonder I felt I had stumbled on something remarkable that night up that tree. I had found a calling for my life.

It is for you now, gentlemen, whose mission and character are the proclamation of the truth, it is for you to instruct the people, and to tell them for what they ought to hope and what they ought to fear. The people, incapable as yet of sound judgment as to what is best for them, applaud indiscriminately the most opposite ideas, provided that in them they get a taste of flattery: to them the laws of thought are like the confines of the possible; to-day they can no more distinguish between a savant and a sophist, than formerly they could tell a physician from a sorcerer. ‘Inconsiderately accepting, gathering together, and accumulating everything that is new, regarding all reports as true and indubitable, at the breath or ring of novelty they assemble like bees at the sound of a basin.

Years ago, when they'd raced on a muddy field, Rudy was a hastily assembled set of bones, with a jagged, rocky smile. In the trees this afternoon, he was a giver of bread and teddy bears. He was a triple Hitler Youth athletics champion. He was her best friend. And he was a month away from his death. "Of course I told him about you," Liesel said. She was saying goodbye and she didnt't even know it.

Mr. President I confess that there are several parts of this constitution which I do not at present approve, but I am not sure I shall never approve them: For having lived long, I have experienced many instances of being obliged by better information, or fuller consideration, to change opinions even on important subjects, which I once thought right, but found to be otherwise. It is therefore that the older I grow, the more apt I am to doubt my own judgment, and to pay more respect to the judgment of others. Most men indeed as well as most sects in Religion, think themselves in possession of all truth, and that wherever others differ from them it is so far error. Steele a Protestant in a Dedication tells the Pope, that the only difference between our Churches in their opinions of the certainty of their doctrines is, the Church of Rome is infallible and the Church of England is never in the wrong. But though many private persons think almost as highly of their own infallibility as of that of their sect. In these sentiments, Sir, I agree to this Constitution with all its faults, if they are such; because I think a general Government necessary for us, and there is no form of Government but what may be a blessing to the people if well administered, and believe farther that this is likely to be well administered for a course of years, and can only end in Despotism, as other forms have done before it, when the people shall become so corrupted as to need despotic Government, being incapable of any other. I doubt too whether any other Convention we can obtain, may be able to make a better Constitution. For when you assemble a number of men to have the advantage of their joint wisdom, you inevitably assemble with those men, all their prejudices, their passions, their errors of opinion, their local interests, and their selfish views. From such an assembly can a perfect production be expected? It therefore astonishes me, Sir, to find this system approaching so near to perfection as it does; and I think it will astonish our enemies, who are waiting with confidence to hear that our councils are confounded like those of the Builders of Babel; and that our States are on the point of separation, only to meet hereafter for the purpose of cutting one another's throats. Thus I consent, Sir, to this Constitution because I expect no better, and because I am not sure, that it is not the best. The opinions I have had of its errors, I sacrifice to the public good. I have never whispered a syllable of them abroad. Within these walls they were born, and here they shall die. If every one of us in returning to our Constituents were to report the objections he has had to it, and endeavor to gain partizans in support of them, we might prevent its being generally received, and thereby lose all the salutary effects & great advantages resulting naturally in our favor among foreign Nations as well as among ourselves, from our real or apparent unanimity. Much of the strength & efficiency of any Government in procuring and securing happiness to the people, depends, on opinion, on the general opinion of the goodness of the Government, as well as of the wisdom and integrity of its Governors. I hope therefore that for our own sakes as a part of the people, and for the sake of posterity, we shall act heartily and unanimously in recommending this Constitution (if approved by Congress & confirmed by the Conventions) wherever our influence may extend, and turn our future thoughts & endeavors to the means of having it well administred. On the whole, Sir, I can not help expressing a wish that every member of the Convention who may still have objections to it, would with me, on this occasion doubt a little of his own infallibility, and to make manifest our unanimity, put his name to this instrument.

The cultural Left has contributed to the formation of this politically useless unconscious not only by adopting “power” as the name of an invisible, ubiquitous, and malevolent presence, but by adopting ideals which nobody is yet able to imagine being actualized. Among these ideals are participatory democracy and the end of capitalism. Power will pass to the people, the Sixties Left believed only when decisions are made by all those who may be affected by the results. This means, for example, that economic decisions will be made by stakeholders rather than by shareholders, and that entrepreneurship and markets will cease to play their present role. When they do, capitalism as we know it will have ended, and something new will have taken its place. […] Sixties leftists skipped lightly over all the questions which had been raised by the experience of non market economies in the so-called socialist countries. They seemed to be suggesting that once we were rid of both bureaucrats and entrepreneurs, “the people” would know how to handle competition from steel mills or textile factories in the developing world, price hikes on imported oil, and so on. But they never told us how “the people” would learn how to do this. The cultural Left still skips over such questions. Doing so is a consequence of its preference for talking about “the system” rather than about specific social practices and specific changes in those practices. The rhetoric of this Left remains revolutionary rather than reformist and pragmatic. Its insouciant use of terms like “late capitalism” suggests that we can just wait for capitalism to collapse, rather than figuring out what, in the absence of markets, will set prices and regulate distribution. The voting public, the public which must be won over if the Left is to emerge from the academy into the public square, sensibly wants to be told the details. It wants to know how things are going to work after markets are put behind us. It wants to know how participatory democracy is supposed to function. The cultural Left offers no answers to such demands for further information, but until it confronts them it will not be able to be a political Left. The public, sensibly, has no interest in getting rid of capitalism until it is offered details about the alternatives. Nor should it be interested in participatory democracy –– the liberation of the people from the power of technocrats –– until it is told how deliberative assemblies will acquire the same know-how which only the technocrats presently possess. […] The cultural Left has a vision of an America in which the white patriarchs have stopped voting and have left all the voting to be done by members of previously victimized groups, people who have somehow come into possession of more foresight and imagination than the selfish suburbanites. These formerly oppressed and newly powerful people are expected to be as angelic as the straight white males were diabolical. If I shared this expectation, I too would want to live under this new dispensation. Since I see no reason to share it, I think that the left should get back into the business of piecemeal reform within the framework of a market economy. This was the business the American Left was in during the first two-thirds of the century. Someday, perhaps, cumulative piecemeal reforms will be found to have brought about revolutionary change. Such reforms might someday produce a presently unimaginable non market economy, and much more widely distributed powers of decision making. […] But in the meantime, we should not let the abstractly described best be the enemy of the better. We should not let speculation about a totally changed system, and a totally different way of thinking about human life and affairs, replace step-by-step reform of the system we presently have.

Normally when Christians go to church, they do not have to prepare to contribute anything other than some money for the tithing plate in their 'Sunday best.' They go to listen and watch those who have done the preparations carry out their professional services. Therefore, there is a hard shift in the concept that assembling according to the New Testament is very different and will require preparation, if the goal is to build up the assembly. Since an assembly's activities depend on member's contributions, if no one prays, sings, or says anything concerning Jesus it will be a very dead and boring gathering -- or the gathering will end up focused on other things. Therefore, a proper assembly requires every member to prepare something to bring and share. This is why 1 Corinthians 14:26 speaks of each one having a hymn, a lesson, a revelation, etc.

If you don’t find your tribe in high school, relax; some of the best people don’t. We’re merely meant to make it out alive despite an oversaturated environment of both the best and worst examples of human existence, and then go on to assemble our tribes from the people we meet throwing up in bathrooms on our birthday, quoting Caddyshack in line at the DMV, and digging through piles of jeans at the Gap looking for the one size 18. Until

We’re at a holiday ball where I’m auctioning off the paintings my dead husband commissioned for his mistress. Does it sound like I’ve been treated kindly thus far?” A flush imbued her cheeks with a red glow as she huffed in annoyance. The Bryony he’d known prior to her marriage had been polite and a tad stiff in his presence—a genteel lady careful with her manners. This show of frustration intrigued him. I can’t afford to be intrigued.

. . . I bet I'm beginning to make some parents nervous - here I am, bragging of being a dropout, and unemployable, and about to make a pitch for you to follow your creative dreams, when what parents want is for their children to do well in their field, to make them look good, and maybe also to assemble a tasteful fortune . . . But that is not your problem. Your problem is how you are going to spend this one odd and precious life you have been issued. Whether you're going to live it trying to look good and creating the illusion that you have power over people and circumstances, or whether you are going to taste it, enjoy it, and find out the truth about who you are . . . I do know you are not what you look like, or how much you weigh, or how you did in school, or whether you start a job next Monday or not. Spirit isn't what you do, it's . . . well, again, I don't actually know. They probably taught this junior year at Goucher; I should've stuck around. But I know that you feel best when you're not doing much - when you're in nature, when you're very quiet or, paradoxically, listening to music . . . We can see Spirit made visible when people are kind to one another, especially when it's a really busy person, like you, taking care of the needy, annoying, neurotic person, like you. In fact, that's often when we see Spirit most brightly . . . In my twenties I devised a school of relaxation that has unfortunately fallen out of favor in the ensuing years - it was called Prone Yoga. You just lay around as much as possible. You could read, listen to music, you could space out or sleep. But you had to be lying down. Maintaining the prone. You've graduated. You have nothing left to prove, and besides, it's a fool's game. If you agree to play, you've already lost. It's Charlie Brown and Lucy, with the football. If you keep getting back on the field, they win. There are so many great things to do right now. Write. Sing. Rest. Eat cherries. Register voters. And - oh my God - I nearly forgot the most important thing: refuse to wear uncomfortable pants, even if they make you look really thin. Promise me you'll never wear pants that bind or tug or hurt, pants that have an opinion about how much you've just eaten. The pants may be lying! There is way too much lying and scolding going on politically right now without having your pants get in on the act, too. So bless you. You've done an amazing thing. And you are loved; you're capable of lives of great joy and meaning. It's what you are made of. And it's what you're here for. Take care of yourselves; take care of one another. And give thanks, like this: Thank you.

Epistle to Miss Blount, On Her Leaving the Town, After the Coronation" As some fond virgin, whom her mother’s care Drags from the town to wholesome country air, Just when she learns to roll a melting eye, And hear a spark, yet think no danger nigh; From the dear man unwillingly she must sever, Yet takes one kiss before she parts for ever: Thus from the world fair Zephalinda flew, Saw others happy, and with sighs withdrew; Not that their pleasures caused her discontent, She sighed not that They stayed, but that She went. She went, to plain-work, and to purling brooks, Old-fashioned halls, dull aunts, and croaking rooks, She went from Opera, park, assembly, play, To morning walks, and prayers three hours a day; To pass her time ‘twixt reading and Bohea, To muse, and spill her solitary tea, Or o’er cold coffee trifle with the spoon, Count the slow clock, and dine exact at noon; Divert her eyes with pictures in the fire, Hum half a tune, tell stories to the squire; Up to her godly garret after seven, There starve and pray, for that’s the way to heaven. Some Squire, perhaps, you take a delight to rack; Whose game is Whisk, whose treat a toast in sack, Who visits with a gun, presents you birds, Then gives a smacking buss, and cries – No words! Or with his hound comes hollowing from the stable, Makes love with nods, and knees beneath a table; Whose laughs are hearty, tho’ his jests are coarse, And loves you best of all things – but his horse. In some fair evening, on your elbow laid, Your dream of triumphs in the rural shade; In pensive thought recall the fancied scene, See Coronations rise on every green; Before you pass th’ imaginary sights Of Lords, and Earls, and Dukes, and gartered Knights; While the spread fan o’ershades your closing eyes; Then give one flirt, and all the vision flies. Thus vanish scepters, coronets, and balls, And leave you in lone woods, or empty walls. So when your slave, at some dear, idle time, (Not plagued with headaches, or the want of rhyme) Stands in the streets, abstracted from the crew, And while he seems to study, thinks of you: Just when his fancy points your sprightly eyes, Or sees the blush of soft Parthenia rise, Gay pats my shoulder, and you vanish quite; Streets, chairs, and coxcombs rush upon my sight; Vexed to be still in town, I knit my brow, Look sour, and hum a tune – as you may now.

There is an old debate," Erdos liked to say, "about whether you create mathematics or just discover it. In other words, are the truths already there, even if we don't yet know them?" Erdos had a clear answer to this question: Mathematical truths are there among the list of absolute truths, and we just rediscover them. Random graph theory, so elegant and simple, seemed to him to belong to the eternal truths. Yet today we know that random networks played little role in assembling our universe. Instead, nature resorted to a few fundamental laws, which will be revealed in the coming chapters. Erdos himself created mathematical truths and an alternative view of our world by developing random graph theory. Not privy to nature's laws in creating the brain and society, Erdos hazarded his best guess in assuming that God enjoys playing dice. His friend Albert Einstein, at Princeton, was convinced of the opposite: "God does not play dice with the universe.

If you are leading a turnaround and need to assemble a team quickly, it can make sense to hire capable people you know and trust. But in less-urgent situations, the reflex to bring in people you know can easily be interpreted to mean you’re dissatisfied with the level of talent in your new organization. If you need to replace people on your team, the first place to look is one level below. The second best option is to hire people from the outside—just not from your old organization(s).

There is a “real” world, out there, but we do not perceive it directly. It is assembled by the sensory and nervous systems of each individual animal, and it is assembled differently by every one of them. What we perceive is a construct. Every animal’s perception of the world, constructed by its evolved sensory apparatus and nervous system to take best advantage of its environment, is subjective—there are no colors out there, as we perceive them, waiting for us. There is no sound—only waveforms.

The best argument I know for the highly questionable existence of Jesus is this. His illiterate living disciples left us no record and in any event could not have been "Christians", since they were never to read those later books in which Christians must affirm belief, and in any case had no idea that anyone would ever found a church on their master's announcements. (There is scarcely a word in any of the later-assembled Gospels to suggest that Jesus wanted to be the founder of a church, either.)

The best argument I know for the highly questionable existence of Jesus is this. His illiterate living disciples left us no record and in any event could not have been “Christians,” since they were never to read those later books in which Christians must affirm belief, and in any case had no idea that anyone would ever found a church on their master’s announcements. (There is scarcely a word in any of the later-assembled Gospels to suggest that Jesus wanted to be the founder of a church, either.)

Thanks to Casey Ashcraft Honebrink! The book includes my winning "IN HIDING" as a short story along with 23 other winning entries from talented members of WRITERS ASSEMBLED. The anthology, THE BEST OF WRITERS ASSEMBLED 2017: BEHIND CLOSED DOORS is a mixed-genre collection. It really has a little something for everyone : action, suspense, humor, romance, fantasy, supernatural, science fiction, drama, poetry, and personal stories. You can find it on Amazon, get your copy today! Thanks for recognizing and supporting our group!

Ladies and Gentlemen. I should like to inform you on behalf of the nation state of Guyana, that we are going to resign from being a country. We can't make it work. We have tried. We have done our best. It is not possible. The problems are insoluble. From midnight tonight, we shall cease trading. The country is now disbanded. We will voluntarily liquidate ourselves. The nation will disperse quietly, a little shamefaced but so what. We had a go. Different people have suggested different solutions. Do it this way. Try that. Let me have a go. Nothing works. We are at the mercy of the rich countries. A team of management consultants from the United States could not find the answer, and for not finding the answer, we had to pay them an amount that substantially increased our national debt. We give in, gracefully, but we give in." And then he imagined himself, quietly and with dignity, putting his papers in his briefcase, bowing to the hushed assembly, returning to clear out his office and going for a walk with his wife along the sea wall. (The Ventriloquist's Tale

Or take historians, the quintessential assemblers of existing facts and ideas. Weirdly, they fall way out of the typical range for decline, peaking 39.7 years after career inception, on average. Think what this implies: Say you intend to pursue a career as a professional historian and finish your PhD at thirty-two. The bad news is that in your fifties, you are still pretty wet behind the ears. But here’s the good news: at age seventy-two, you still have half your work to go! Better take care of your health so you can write your best books into your eighties.

Sonnet of Languages Turkish is the language of love, Spanish is the language of revolution. Swedish is the language of resilience, English is the language of translation. Portuguese is the language of adventure, German is the language of discipline. French is the language of passion, Italian is the language of cuisine. With over 7000 languages in the world, Handful of tongues fall short in a sonnet. But you can rest assured of one thing, Every language does something the very best. Each language is profoundly unique in its own way. When they come together, they light the human way.

great. This is a good description of Rovio, which was around for six years and underwent layoffs before the “instant” success of the Angry Birds video game franchise. In the case of the Five Guys restaurant chain, the founders spent fifteen years tweaking their original handful of restaurants in Virginia, finding the right bun bakery, the right number of times to shake the french fries before serving, how best to assemble a burger, and where to source their potatoes before expanding nationwide. Most businesses require a complex network of relationships to function, and these relationships take time to build. In many instances you have to be around for a few years to receive consistent recognition. It takes time to develop connections with investors, suppliers, and vendors. And it takes time for staff and founders to gain effectiveness in their roles and become a strong team.* So, yes, the bar is high when you want to start a company. You’ll have the chance to work on something you own and care about from day to day. You’ll be 100 percent engaged and motivated, and doing something you believe in. You can lead an integrated life, as opposed to a compartmentalized one in which you play a role in an office and then try to forget about it when you get home. You can define an organization, not the other way around. But even if you quit your job, hunker down for years, work hard for uncertain reward, and ask everyone you know for help, there’s still a great chance that your new business will not succeed. Over 50 percent of companies fail within their first three years.2 There’s a quote I like from an unknown source: “Entrepreneurship is living a few years of your life like most people won’t, so that you can spend the rest of your life like most people can’t.

It was a fine gun, but an unlucky one. Steyr-Daimler-Puch built it with the prospect of big orders from the Austrian Army dancing in its eyes, but a rival outfit named Glock came along and stole the prize. Which left the GB an unhappy orphan, like Cinderella. And like Cinderella it had many excellent qualities. It packed eighteen rounds, which was a lot, but it weighed less than two and a half pounds unloaded, which wasn’t. You could take it apart and put it back together in twelve seconds, which was fast. Best of all, it had a very smart gas management system. All automatic weapons work by using the explosion of gas in the chamber to cycle the action, to get the spent case out and the next cartridge in. But in the real world some cartridges are old or weak or badly assembled. They don’t all explode with the same force. Put an out-of-spec weak load in some guns, and the action just wheezes and won’t cycle at all. Put a too-heavy load in, and the gun can blow up in your hand. But the Steyr was designed to deal with anything that came its way. If I were a Special Forces soldier taking dubious-quality ammunition from whatever ragtag bunch of partisans I was hanging with, I’d use a Steyr. I would want to be sure that whatever I was depending on would fire, ten times out of ten. Through

Okay,” I finally said. “Can we all agree that this is maybe the most screwed-up situation we’ve ever found ourselves in?” “Agreed,” they said in unison. “Awesome.” I gave a little nod. “And do either of you have any idea what we should do about it?” “Well, we can’t use magic,” Archer said. “And if we try to leave, we get eaten by Monster Fog,” Jenna added. “Right. So no plans at all, then?” Jenna frowned. “Other than rocking in the fetal position for a while?” “Yeah, I was thinking about taking one of those showers where you huddle in the corner fully clothed and cry,” Archer offered. I couldn’t help but snort with laughter. “Great. So we’ll all go have our mental breakdowns, and then we’ll somehow get ourselves out of this mess.” “I think our best bet is to lie low for a while,” Archer said. “Let Mrs. Casnoff think we’re all too shocked and awed to do anything. Maybe this assembly tonight will give us some answers.” “Answers,” I practically sighed. “About freaking time.” Jenna gave me a funny look. “Soph, are you…grinning?” I could feel my cheeks aching, so I knew that I was. “Look, you two have to admit: if we want to figure out just what the Casnoffs are plotting, this is pretty much the perfect place.” “My girl has a point,” Archer said, smiling at me. Now my cheeks didn’t just ache, they burned. Clearing her throat, Jenna said, “Okay, so we all go up to our rooms, then after the assembly tonight we can regroup and decide what to do next.” “Deal,” I said as Archer nodded. “Are we all going to high-five now?” Jenna asked after a pause. “No, but I can make up some kind of secret handshake if you want,” Archer said, and for a second, they smiled at each other. But just as quickly, the smile disappeared from Jenna’s face, and she said to me, “Let’s go. I want to see if our room is as freakified as the rest of this place.” “Good idea,” I said. Archer reached out and brushed his fingers over mine. “See you later, then?” he asked. His voice was casual, but my skin was hot where he touched me. “Definitely,” I answered, figuring that even a girl who has to stop evil witches from taking over the world could make time for kissage in there somewhere. He turned and walked away. As I watched him go, I could feel Jenna starting at me. “Fine,” she acknowledged with a dramatic roll of her eyes. “He’s a little dreamy.” I elbowed her gently in the side. “Thanks.” Jenna started to walk to the stairs. “You coming?” “Yeah,” I said. “I’ll be right up. I just want to take a quick look around down here.” “Why, so you can be even more depressed?” Actually, I wanted to stay downstairs just a little longer to see if anyone else showed up. So far, I’d seen nearly everyone I remembered from last year at Hex Hall. Had Cal been dragged here, too? Technically he hadn’t been a student, but Mrs. Casnoff had used his powers a lot last year. Would she still want him here? To Jenna, I just said, “Yeah, you know me. I like poking bruises.” “Okay. Get your Nancy Drew on.

If demonstrations are regarded as a form of speech, then anyone and everyone must be permitted. But what I challenge (and not only because of that particular case) is the interpretation of demonstrations and of other actions as so-called symbolic speech. When you lose the distinction between action and speech, you lose, eventually, the freedom of both. The Skokie case is a good illustration of that principle. There is no such thing as “symbolic speech.” You do not have the right to parade through the public streets or to obstruct public thoroughfares. You have the right of assembly, yes, on your own property, and on the property of your adherents or your friends. But nobody has the “right” to clog the streets. The streets are only for passage.

Normal psychic life depends upon the good functioning of brain synapses, and mental disorders appear as a result of synaptic derangements…. It is necessary to alter these synaptic adjustments and change the paths chosen by the impulses in their constant passage so as to modify the corresponding ideas and force thought into different channels.5 Alter synaptic adjustments. Sounds delicate. Yeah, right. These were the words of the Portuguese neurologist Egas Moniz, around the time he was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1949 for his development of frontal leukotomies. Here was an individual pathologically stuck in a bucket having to do with a crude version of the nervous system. Just tweak those microscopic synapses with a big ol’ ice pick (as was done once leukotomies, later renamed frontal lobotomies, became an assembly line operation).

Focus on People, Perseverance, and Passion These “Three P’s” are the keys to successful entrepreneurship. People are the most important, particularly in the first year of a venture. To maximize their value, spend as much time as you can assembling the best possible team that really complements your skill set and can lead a little bit into where you’re heading, not just where you are. Creating the right kind of dynamic in terms of culture and commitment is really critical. Perseverance: never underestimate the value of really caring about your idea and being unwilling to drop it. If you have a big idea, and you know in your heart it’s going to happen (Passion), but know there will be roadblocks and challenges along the way. In this regard, a high degree of passion and commitment is extremely important. In my experience, really big ideas often take a decade to reach fruition. Sign

The Coach’s head was oblong with tiny slits that served as eyes, which drifted in tides slowly inward, as though the face itself were the sea or, in fact, a soup of macromolecules through which objects might drift, leaving in their wake, ripples of nothingness. The eyes—they floated adrift like land masses before locking in symmetrically at seemingly prescribed positions off-center, while managing to be so closely drawn into the very middle of the face section that it might have seemed unnecessary for there to have been two eyes when, quite likely, one would easily have sufficed. These aimless, floating eyes were not the Coach’s only distinctive feature—for, in fact, connected to the interior of each eyelid by a web-like layer of rubbery pink tissue was a kind of snout which, unlike the eyes, remained fixed in its position among the tides of the face, arcing narrowly inward at the edges of its sharp extremities into a serrated beak-like projection that hooked downward at its tip, in a fashion similar to that of a falcon’s beak. This snout—or beak, rather—was, in fact, so long and came to such a fine point that as the eyes swirled through the soup of macromolecules that comprised the man’s face, it almost appeared—due to the seeming thinness of the pink tissue—that the eyes functioned as kinds of optical tether balls that moved synchronously across the face like mirror images of one another. 'I wore my lizard mask as I entered the tram, last evening, and people found me fearless,' the Coach remarked, enunciating each word carefully through the hollow clack-clacking sound of his beak, as its edges clapped together. 'I might have exchanged it for that of an ox and then thought better. A lizard goes best with scales, don’t you think?' Bunnu nodded as he quietly wondered how the Coach could manage to fit that phallic monstrosity of a beak into any kind of mask, unless, in fact, this disguise of which he spoke, had been specially designed for his face and divided into sections in such a way that they could be readily attached to different areas—as though one were assembling a new face—in overlapping layers, so as to veil, or perhaps even amplify certain distinguishable features. All the same, in doing so, one could only imagine this lizard mask to be enormous to the extent that it would be disproportionate with the rest of the Coach’s body. But then, there were ways to mask space, as well—to bend light, perhaps, to create the illusion that something was perceptibly larger or smaller, wider or narrower, rounder or more linear than it was in actuality. That is to say, any form of prosthesis designed for the purposes of affecting remedial space might, for example, have had the capability of creating the appearance of a gap of void in occupied space. An ornament hangs from the chin, let’s say, as an accessory meant to contour smoothly inward what might otherwise appear to be hanging jowls. This surely wouldn’t be the exact use that the Coach would have for such a device—as he had no jowls to speak of—though he could certainly see the benefit of the accessory’s ingenuity. This being said, the lizard mask might have appeared natural rather than disproportionate given the right set of circumstances. Whatever the case, there was no way of even knowing if the Coach wasn’t, in fact, already wearing a mask, at this very moment, rendering Bunnu’s initial appraisal of his character—as determined by a rudimentary physiognomic analysis of his features—a matter now subject to doubt. And thus, any conjecture that could be made with respect to the dimensions or components of a lizard mask—not to speak of the motives of its wearer—seemed not only impractical, but also irrelevant at this point in time.

 I walk away, feeling Brody’s gaze on me. There’s no doubt that as soon as we get back in the car, I’m going to get it—good. Instead, Brody stays quiet while I assemble the paperwork. He may not be speaking, but he’s saying a whole lot in the silence. “Just say it,” I mumble and finally look over. “I’m not saying a word.” He raises his hands. “Clearly, you two know each other, and it ain’t from growing up here. You tell me everything, so there is no way you wouldn’t have told me you know him,” Brody pauses and leans back. “I’m not saying a word about who you may or may not have slept with recently. Even though, it’s pretty obvious.” “You know, you not saying a word took you a long time.” “It’s not like you’ve had a five-year drought since your divorce. Or that you slept with a singer/actor. Nope. I have nothing to say about that. Not a thing.” I groan. “Could you not say anything for real this time?” “Sure thing, boss. I’ll just be over here, watching Hell start to thaw.” This is not going to get any better. I’d almost rather hear the questions. This is Brody Webber. My partner, my friend, and the one person who I have enough dirt on to make his life hell if he repeats this. “Okay, fine. Yes, I slept with Eli Walsh. I was crazy and dumb. I also had about six beers, which is two over my threshold, and I was trying to be in the moment for once. Fucking Nicole and her pep talks.” Brody coughs a laugh and then recovers. “Sorry, go on.” “I swear, you better keep this to yourself. If you tell anyone . . .” I give him my best threatening face. “I mean anyone, I’ll make your life a living nightmare.” He shakes his head and laughs again. “I won’t say a word, but you had a one-night stand with one of the most famous men in the boy band atmosphere. You’re too cool for me, Heather. I don’t think we can be friends. I’m sure you and the band will be happy without me.” I huff and grab the papers. “I’m getting a new partner.” I walk back over to the car, praying this will be painless

I was certainly not the best mother. That goes without saying. I didn’t set out to be a bad mother, however. It just happened. As it was, being a bad mother was child’s play compared to being a good mother, which was an incessant struggle, a lose-lose situation 24 hours a day; long after the kids were in bed the torment of what I did or didn’t do during those hours we were trapped together would scourge my soul. Why did I allow Grace to make Mia cry? Why did I snap at Mia to stop just to silence the noise? Why did I sneak to a quiet place, whenever I could? Why did I rush the days—will them to hurry by—so I could be alone? Other mothers took their children to museums, the gardens, the beach. I kept mine indoors, as much as I could, so we wouldn’t cause a scene. I lie awake at night wondering: what if I never have a chance to make it up to Mia? What if I’m never able to show her the kind of mother I always longed to be? The kind who played endless hours of hide-and-seek, who gossiped side by side on their daughters’ beds about which boys in the junior high were cute. I always envisioned a friendship between my daughters and me. I imagined shopping together and sharing secrets, rather than the formal, obligatory relationship that now exists between myself and Grace and Mia. I list in my head all the things that I would tell Mia if I could. That I chose the name Mia for my great-grandmother, Amelia, vetoing James’s alternative: Abigail. That the Christmas she turned four, James stayed up until 3:00 a.m. assembling the dollhouse of her dreams. That even though her memories of her father are filled with nothing but malaise, there were split seconds of goodness: James teaching her how to swim, James helping her prepare for a fourth-grade spelling test. That I mourn each and every time I turned down an extra book before bed, desperate now for just five more minutes of laughing at Harry the Dirty Dog. That I go to the bookstore and purchase a copy after unsuccessfully ransacking the basement for the one that used to be hers. That I sit on the floor of her old bedroom and read it again and again and again. That I love her. That I’m sorry. Colin

If by adolescence limbic, autonomic, and endocrine systems are going full blast while the frontal cortex is still working out the assembly instructions, we’ve just explained why adolescents are so frustrating, great, asinine, impulsive, inspiring, destructive, self-destructive, selfless, selfish, impossible, and world changing. Think about this—adolescence and early adulthood are the times when someone is most likely to kill, be killed, leave home forever, invent an art form, help overthrow a dictator, ethnically cleanse a village, devote themselves to the needy, become addicted, marry outside their group, transform physics, have hideous fashion taste, break their neck recreationally, commit their life to God, mug an old lady, or be convinced that all of history has converged to make this moment the most consequential, the most fraught with peril and promise, the most demanding that they get involved and make a difference. In other words, it’s the time of life of maximal risk taking, novelty seeking, and affiliation with peers. All because of that immature frontal cortex.

The single book that has influenced me most is probably the last book in the world that anybody is gonna want to read: Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War. This book is dense, difficult, long, full of blood and guts. It wasn’t written, as Thucydides himself attests at the start, to be easy or fun. But it is loaded with hardcore, timeless truths and the story it tells ought to be required reading for every citizen in a democracy. Thucydides was an Athenian general who was beaten and disgraced in a battle early in the 27-year conflagration that came to be called the Peloponnesian War. He decided to drop out of the fighting and dedicate himself to recording, in all the detail he could manage, this conflict, which, he felt certain, would turn out to be the greatest and most significant war ever fought up to that time. He did just that. Have you heard of Pericles’ Funeral Oration? Thucydides was there for it. He transcribed it. He was there for the debates in the Athenian assembly over the treatment of the island of Melos, the famous Melian Dialogue. If he wasn’t there for the defeat of the Athenian fleet at Syracuse or the betrayal of Athens by Alcibiades, he knew people who were there and he went to extremes to record what they told him.Thucydides, like all the Greeks of his era, was unencumbered by Christian theology, or Marxist dogma, or Freudian psychology, or any of the other “isms” that attempt to convince us that man is basically good, or perhaps perfectible. He saw things as they were, in my opinion. It’s a dark vision but tremendously bracing and empowering because it’s true. On the island of Corcyra, a great naval power in its day, one faction of citizens trapped their neighbors and fellow Corcyreans in a temple. They slaughtered the prisoners’ children outside before their eyes and when the captives gave themselves up based on pledges of clemency and oaths sworn before the gods, the captors massacred them as well. This was not a war of nation versus nation, this was brother against brother in the most civilized cities on earth. To read Thucydides is to see our own world in microcosm. It’s the study of how democracies destroy themselves by breaking down into warring factions, the Few versus the Many. Hoi polloi in Greek means “the many.” Oligoi means “the few.” I can’t recommend Thucydides for fun, but if you want to expose yourself to a towering intellect writing on the deepest stuff imaginable, give it a try.

His first stop was the local branch of Child's Bank; once he replenished his supply of cash, he followed the bank manager's directions to the town's premier bootmaker, and was lucky enough to find an excellent pair of riding boots that fit him. His next stop was the best gentleman's outfitters, where he created a small furore by demanding they assemble for him outfits suitable for a groom and for a north country laborer. The head tailor goggled at him and the assistants simply stared; holding onto his temper, he brusquely explained that the outfits were for a country house party where fancy dress was required. Then they fell to with appropriate zeal. It still took longer than he would have liked. The tailor fussed with the fitting until Breckenridge declared, "Damn it, man! There's no prize for being the most perfectly dressed groom in the north!" The tailor jumped. Pins cascaded from between his lips and scattered on the ground. His assistants rushed in to gather them up. The tailor swallowed. "No, of course not, sir. If Sir will remain still, I will endeavor to remove the pins...although really, such shoulders...well, I would have thought..." "Never mind about showing off my damned shoulders-just make sure I have room to move.

There are many things that men and women ought to think about, and must think about, in private, that they would not for a moment discuss in public. There are books on the proper conduct of women in certain most sacred relations of life, relations of life which are as holy as any, and which can be entered into in the presence of a holy God with no question of His approval, but which do not permit of public mention. . . . That the Bible is a pure book is evidenced by the fact that it is not a favourite book in dens of infamy. But on the other hand, books that try to make out that the Bible is an obscene book, and that endeavour to keep people from reading it, are favourite books in dens of infamy. The unclean classes, both men and women, were devoted admirers of the most brilliant man this country ever produced who attacked what he called the "obscenity of the Bible." These unclean classes do not frequent Bible classes. They do frequent infidel lectures. These infidel objectors to the book as an "obscene book" constantly betray their insincerity and hypocrisy. Colonel Ingersoll . . . objected to the Bible for telling these vile deeds "without a touch of humour." In other words, he did not object to telling stories of vice, if only a joke was made of the sin. Thank God, that is exactly what the Bible does not do--make a joke of sin. It makes sin hideous, so men who are obscene in their own hearts object to the Bible as being an obscene book. . . . To sum up, there are in the Bible descriptions of sins that cannot wisely be read in every public assembly, but these descriptions of sin are morally most wholesome in the places where God, the Author of the Book, manifestly intends them to be read. The child who is brought up to read the Bible as a whole, from Genesis to Revelation, will come to know in the very best way possible what a child ought to know very early in life if he is to be safeguarded against the perils that surround our modern life on every hand. A child who is brought up upon a constant, thorough, continuous reading of the whole Bible is more likely than any other child to be free from the vices that are undermining the mental, moral, and physical strength of our boys and girls, and young men and young women. But the child who is brought up on infidel literature and conversation is the easiest prey there is for the seducer and procuress. The next easiest is the one who, through neglect of the Bible, is left in ignorance of the awful pitfalls of life.

President and Chief Operating Officer (COO), accountable for the overall achievement of the Strategic Objective and reporting to the SHAREHOLDERS who include, on an equal basis, Jack and Murray. • Vice-President/Marketing, accountable for finding customers and finding new ways to provide customers with the satisfactions they derive from widgets, at lower cost, and with greater ease, and reporting to the COO. • Vice-President/Operations, accountable for keeping customers by delivering to them what is promised by Marketing, and for discovering new ways of assembling widgets, at lower cost, and with greater efficiency so as to provide the customer with better service, reporting to the COO. • Vice-President/Finance, accountable for supporting both Marketing and Operations in the fulfillment of their accountabilities by achieving the company’s profitability standards, and by securing capital whenever it’s needed, and at the best rates, also reporting to the COO. • Reporting to the Vice-President/Marketing are two positions: Sales Manager and Advertising/Research Manager. • Reporting to the Vice-President/Operations are three positions: Production Manager, Service Manager, and Facilities Manager. • Reporting to the Vice-President/Finance are two positions: Accounts Receivable Manager and Accounts Payable Manager.

I went to the railing and looked out over the sea. It had been fussing earlier in the day, but now it lay greasy and hushed. 'You got a tremendous prospect from up here, Brother Assembly.' 'Aye. Two evenings hence, for instance, I noted thy schooner passing westward. I also saw a cutter at the same time, a low and black-hulled cutter, British from the look of her, beating eastward beyond Vandyke's. She kept the island betwixt herself and thee, and sailed on into yon flat ugly yellow clouds.' He nodded to the east. I got a crawly feeling between my shoulders, like I'd been hunting a panther and discovered it had been hunting me. 'Well, then,' I said, 'I guess I'd best be shoving off.' 'Tomorrow is the first of October. There have been no hurricanes yet this season worth mentioning, but a noteworthy one approaches now, thou mustn't doubt. Do not cling too tightly to ephemeral notions and worldly things, Brother, lest thou lose what thou most values.' He whistled an old Shaker hymn that was popular among the Brethren: 'Tis a gift to be simple, 'Tis a gift to be free, 'Tis a gift to come down Where we ought to be... I knocked on the railing, annoyed with myself for my superstitiousness but angrier with Assembly for baiting me. 'Of all the infernal meanness,' I said. 'Don't whistle for a wind in hurricane season!' 'Oh, as for that,' he said, the corners of his naked lip turning up just a little bit, 'God watches out for sailors and the wicked, is't not what sailors say? And the wicked, too, I doubt not.

INVENTING ALADDIN” One thing that puzzles me (and I use puzzle here in the technical sense of really, really irritates me) is reading, as from time to time I have, learned academic books on folktales and fairy stories that explain why nobody wrote them and which go on to point out that looking for authorship of folktales is in itself a fallacy; the kind of books or articles that give the impression that all stories were stumbled upon or, at best, reshaped, and I think, Yes, but they all started somewhere, in someone’s head. Because stories start in minds—they aren’t artifacts or natural phenomena. One scholarly book I read explained that any fairy story in which a character falls asleep obviously began life as a dream that was recounted on waking by a primitive type unable to tell dreams from reality, and this was the starting point for our fairy stories—a theory which seemed filled with holes from the get-go, because stories, the kind that survive and are retold, have narrative logic, not dream logic. Stories are made up by people who make them up. If they work, they get retold. There’s the magic of it. Scheherazade as a narrator was a fiction, as was her sister and the murderous king they needed nightly to placate. The Arabian Nights are a fictional construct, assembled from a variety of places, and the story of Aladdin is itself a late tale, folded into the Nights by the French only a few hundred years ago. Which is another way of saying that when it began, it certainly didn’t begin as I describe. And yet.

For with respect to those things which immediately concern the union, and for which the union was purposely established, and is intended to secure, each state is to the United States what each individual is to the state he lives in. And it is on this grand point, this movement upon one centre, that our existence as a nation, our happiness as a people, and our safety as individuals, depend. It may happen that some state or other may be somewhat over or under rated, but this cannot be much. The experience which has been had upon the matter, has nearly ascertained their several abilities. But even in this case, it can only admit of an appeal to the United States, but cannot authorize any state to make the alteration itself, any more than our internal government can admit an individual to do so in the case of an act of assembly; for if one state can do it, then may another do the same, and the instant this is done the whole is undone. Neither is it supposable that any single state can be a judge of all the comparative reasons which may influence the collective body in arranging the quotas of the continent. The circumstances of the several states are frequently varying, occasioned by the accidents of war and commerce, and it will often fall upon some to help others, rather beyond what their exact proportion at another time might be; but even this assistance is as naturally and politically included in the idea of a union as that of any particular assigned proportion; because we know not whose turn it may be next to want assistance, for which reason that state is the wisest which sets the best example.

How does the body push the comparatively tiny genome so far? Many researchers want to put the weight on learning and experience, apparently believing that the contribution of the genes is relatively unimportant. But though the ability to learn is clearly one of the genome's most important products, such views overemphasize learning and significantly underestimate the extent to which the genome can in fact guide the construction of enormous complexity. If the tools of biological self-assembly are powerful enough to build the intricacies of the circulatory system or the eye without requiring lessons from the outside world, they are also powerful enough to build the initial complexity of the nervous system without relying on external lessons. The discrepancy melts away as we appreciate the true power of the genome. We could start by considering the fact that the currently accepted figure of 30,000 could well prove to be too low. Thirty thousand (or thereabouts) is, at press time, the best estimate for how many protein-coding genes are in the human genome. But not all genes code for proteins; some, not counted in the 30,000 estimate, code for small pieces of RNA that are not converted into proteins (called microRNA), of "pseudogenes," stretches of DNA, apparently relics of evolution, that do not properly encode proteins. Neither entity is fully understood, but recent reports (from 2002 and 2003) suggest that both may play some role in the all-important process of regulating the IFS that control whether or not genes are expressed. Since the "gene-finding" programs that search the human genome sequence for genes are not attuned to such things-we don't yet know how to identify them reliably-it is quite possible that the genome contains more buried treasure.

The black-and-white Pheasant table. The quiet horror of the glances examining neighbors’ plates. Half of the Pheasants were on individual meal plans, each one different, so everyone’s plate contents were always a concern. There were calories to be counted. Rats at the next table. The explosion of color and the tide of insanity. Then Birds, in their nightmarish bibs over black. The Sixth was all about camaraderie. Looking at them, it would seem that the group consisted exclusively of jovial practical jokers. I wouldn’t want to find myself on the receiving end of their jokes, and their bursts of loud merriment looked suspect, but so what. They were trying their best. The Third, Fourth, and Sixth had it tough. Rats and Pheasants were the Naughty and the Nice. Both of them overdid it to such an extent that everyone else had to squeeze in between somewhere. Birds were a bit better at it, Hounds a bit worse, and the Fourth, in addition to having no designation, was just too sparsely populated to . . . to fully participate in the game. Once I managed to say the word, I suddenly was free to realize that this “game” would have to include much more than just appearance. It was the right word, and, having caught it, I understood that I had been looking for it for a long time. For the word that would contain the key to everything happening in the House. All it took was the recognition of the fact that the Game encompassed everything around me. It was too improbable that every single one of the pathetic, whining conformists would assemble in one group, while all the unhinged anarchists would go to the other. Which meant that someone somewhere must have designed this at some point. Why? Now that was a different question. My own perspicacity was making me sweat. I wasn’t even hungry anymore.

After the assembly I’m getting my chem book out of my locker when Peter comes over and leans his back against the locker next to mine. Through his mask he says, “Hey.” “Hey,” I say. And then he doesn’t say anything else; he just stands there. I close my locker door and spin the combination lock. “Congratulations on winning best group costume.” “That’s it? That’s all you’re going to say?” Huh? “What else am I supposed to say?” Just then Josh walks by with Jersey Mike, who’s dressed up as a hobbit, hairy feet and all. Walking backward, Josh points his wand at me and says, “Expelliarmus!” Automatically I point my wand back at him and say, “Avada Kedavra!” Josh clutches his chest like I’ve shot him. “Way harsh!” he calls out, and he disappears down the hallway. “Uh…don’t you think it’s weird for my supposed girlfriend to wear a couples costume with another guy?” Peter asks me. I roll my eyes. I’m still mad at him from this morning. “I’m sorry, I can’t talk to you when you look like this. How am I supposed to have a conversation with a person in head-to-toe latex?” Peter pushes his mask up. “I’m serious! How do you think it makes me look?” “First of all, it wasn’t planned. Second of all, nobody cares what my costume is! Who would even notice something like that?” “People notice,” Peter huffs. “I noticed.” “Well, I’m sorry. I’m very sorry that a coincidence like this would ever occur.” “I really doubt it was a coincidence,” Peter mutters. “What do you want me to do? Do you want me to pop over to the Halloween store during lunch and buy a red wig and be Mary Jane?” Smoothly Peter says, “Could you? That’d be great.” “No, I could not. You know why? Because I’m Asian, and people will just think I’m in a manga costume.” I hand him my wand. “Hold this.” I lean down and lift the hem of my robe so I can adjust my knee socks. Frowning, he says, “I could have been someone from the book if you’d told me in advance.” “Yes, well, today you’d make a really great Moaning Myrtle.

Kennewick Man is a skeleton discovered in Washington State in 1996, carbon-dated to older than 9,000 years. Anthropologists were intrigued by anatomical suggestions that he might be unrelated to typical Native Americans, and therefore might represent a separate early migration across what is now the Bering Strait, or even from Iceland. They were preparing to do all-important DNA tests when the legal authorities seized the skeleton, intending to hand it over to representatives of local Indian tribes, who proposed to bury it and forbid all further study. Naturally there was widespread opposition from the scientific and archaeological community. Even if Kennewick Man is an American Indian of some kind, it is highly unlikely that his affinities lie with whichever particular tribe happens to live in the same area 9,000 years later. Native Americans have impressive legal muscle, and ‘The Ancient One’ might have been handed over to the tribes, but for a bizarre twist. The Asatru Folk Assembly, a group of worshippers of the Norse gods Thor and Odin, filed an independent legal claim that Kennewick Man was actually a Viking. This Nordic sect, whose views you may follow in the Summer 1997 issue of The Runestone, were actually allowed to hold a religious service over the bones. This upset the Yakama Indian community, whose spokesman feared that the Viking ceremony could be ‘keeping Kennewick Man’s spirit from finding his body’. The dispute between Indians and Norsemen could well be settled by DNA comparison, and the Norsemen are quite keen to be put to this test. Scientific study of the remains would certainly cast fascinating light on the question of when humans first arrived in America. But Indian leaders resent the very idea of studying this question, because they believe their ancestors have been in America since the creation. As Armand Minthorn, religious leader of the Umatilla tribe, put it: ‘From our oral histories, we know that our people have been part of this land since the beginning of time. We do not believe our people migrated here from another continent, as the scientists do.’ Perhaps the best policy for the archaeologists would be to declare themselves a religion, with DNA fingerprints their sacramental totem. Facetious but, such is the climate in the United States at the end of the twentieth century, it is possibly the only recourse that would work.

told my people that I wanted only the best, whatever it took, wherever they came from, whatever it cost. We assembled thirty people, the brightest cybersecurity minds we have. A few are on loan, pursuant to strict confidentiality agreements, from the private sector—software companies, telecommunications giants, cybersecurity firms, military contractors. Two are former hackers themselves, one of them currently serving a thirteen-year sentence in a federal penitentiary. Most are from various agencies of the federal government—Homeland Security, CIA, FBI, NSA. Half our team is devoted to threat mitigation—how to limit the damage to our systems and infrastructure after the virus hits. But right now, I’m concerned with the other half, the threat-response team that Devin and Casey are running. They’re devoted to stopping the virus, something they’ve been unable to do for the last two weeks. “Good morning, Mr. President,” says Devin Wittmer. He comes from NSA. After graduating from Berkeley, he started designing cyberdefense software for clients like Apple before the NSA recruited him away. He has developed federal cybersecurity assessment tools to help industries and governments understand their preparedness against cyberattacks. When the major health-care systems in France were hit with a ransomware virus three years ago, we lent them Devin, who was able to locate and disable it. Nobody in America, I’ve been assured, is better at finding holes in cyberdefense systems or at plugging them. “Mr. President,” says Casey Alvarez. Casey is the daughter of Mexican immigrants who settled in Arizona to start a family and built up a fleet of grocery stores in the Southwest along the way. Casey showed no interest in the business, taking quickly to computers and wanting to join law enforcement. When she was a grad student at Penn, she got turned down for a position at the Department of Justice. So Casey got on her computer and managed to do what state and federal authorities had been unable to do for years—she hacked into an underground child-pornography website and disclosed the identities of all the website’s patrons, basically gift-wrapping a federal prosecution for Justice and shutting down an operation that was believed to be the largest purveyor of kiddie porn in the country. DOJ hired her on the spot, and she stayed there until she went to work for the CIA. She’s been most recently deployed in the Middle East with US Central Command, where she intercepts, decodes, and disrupts cybercommunications among terrorist groups. I’ve been assured that these two are, by far, the best we have. And they are about to meet the person who, so far, has been better. There is a hint of reverence in their expressions as I introduce them to Augie. The Sons of Jihad is the all-star team of cyberterrorists, mythical figures in that world. But I sense some competitive fire, too, which will be a good thing.

Isn't that a beautiful tale, grandfather," said Heidi, as the latter continued to sit without speaking, for she had expected him to express pleasure and astonishment. "You are right, Heidi; it is a beautiful tale," he replied, but he looked so grave as he said it that Heidi grew silent herself and sat looking quietly at her pictures. Presently she pushed her book gently in front of him and said, "See how happy he is there," and she pointed with her finger to the figure of the returned prodigal, who was standing by his father clad in fresh raiment as one of his own sons again. A few hours later, as Heidi lay fast asleep in her bed, the grandfather went up the ladder and put his lamp down near her bed so that the light fell on the sleeping child. Her hands were still folded as if she had fallen asleep saying her prayers, an expression of peace and trust lay on the little face, and something in it seemed to appeal to the grandfather, for he stood a long time gazing down at her without speaking. At last he too folded his hands, and with bowed head said in a low voice, "Father, I have sinned against heaven and before thee and am not worthy to be called thy son." And two large tears rolled down the old man's cheeks. Early the next morning he stood in front of his hut and gazed quietly around him. The fresh bright morning sun lay on mountain and valley. The sound of a few early bells rang up from the valley, and the birds were singing their morning song in the fir trees. He stepped back into the hut and called up, "Come along, Heidi! the sun is up! Put on your best frock, for we are going to church together!" Heidi was not long getting ready; it was such an unusual summons from her grandfather that she must make haste. She put on her smart Frankfurt dress and soon went down, but when she saw her grandfather she stood still, gazing at him in astonishment. "Why, grandfather!" she exclaimed, "I never saw you look like that before! and the coat with the silver buttons! Oh, you do look nice in your Sunday coat!" The old man smiled and replied, "And you too; now come along!" He took Heidi's hand in his and together they walked down the mountain side. The bells were ringing in every direction now, sounding louder and fuller as they neared the valley, and Heidi listened to them with delight. "Hark at them, grandfather! it's like a great festival!" The congregation had already assembled and the singing had begun when Heidi and her grandfather entered the church at Dorfli and sat down at the back. But before the hymn was over every one was nudging his neighbor and whispering, "Do you see? Alm-Uncle is in church!" Soon everybody in the church knew of Alm-Uncle's presence, and the women kept on turning round to look and quite lost their place in the singing. But everybody became more attentive when the sermon began, for the preacher spoke with such warmth and thankfulness that those present felt the effect of his words, as if some great joy had come to them all.

The woman glares at him and, after taking a breath, forges on. "One other issue I'd like to raise is how you have authors here separated by sex." "Yes, that's right. The person who was in charge before us cataloged these and for whatever reason divided them into male and female. We were thinking of recataloging all of them, but haven't been able to as of yet." "We're not criticizing you for this," she says. Oshima tilts his head slightly. "The problem, though, is that in all categories male authors are listed before female authors," she says. "To our way of thinking this violates the principle of sexual equality and is totally unfair." Oshima picks up her business card again, runs his eyes over it, then lays it back down on the counter. "Ms. Soga," he begins, "when they called the role in school your name would have come before Ms. Tanaka, and after Ms. Sekine. Did you file a complaint about that? Did you object, asking them to reverse the order? Does G get angry because it follows F in the alphabet? Does page 68 in a book start a revolution just because it follows 67?" "That's not the point," she says angrily. "You're intentionally trying to confuse the issue." Hearing this, the shorter woman, who'd been standing in front of a stack taking notes, races over. "Intentionally trying to confuse the issue," Oshima repeats, like he's underlining the woman's words. "Are you denying it?" "That's a red herring," Oshima replies. The woman named Soga stands there, mouth slightly ajar, not saying a word. "In English there's this expression red herring. Something that's very interesting but leads you astray from the main topic. I'm afraid I haven't looked into why they use that kind of expression, though." "Herrings or mackerel or whatever, you're dodging the issue." "Actually what I'm doing is shifting the analogy," Oshima says. "One of the most effective methods of argument, according to Aristotle. The citizens of ancient Athens enjoyed using this kind of intellectual trick very much. It's a shame, though, that at the time women weren't included in the definition of 'citizen.'" "Are you making fun of us?" Oshima shakes his head. "Look, what I'm trying to get across is this: I'm sure there are many more effective ways of making sure that Japanese women's rights are guaranteed than sniffing around a small library in a little town and complaining about the restrooms and the card catalog. We're doing our level best to see that this modest library of ours helps the community. We've assembled an outstanding collection for people who love books. And we do our utmost to put a human face on all our dealings with the public. You might not be aware of it, but this library's collection of poetry-related material from the 1910s to the mid-Showa period is nationally recognized. Of course there are things we could do better, and limits to what we can accomplish. But rest assured we're doing our very best. I think it'd be a whole lot better if you focus on what we do well than what we're unable to do. Isn't that what you call fair?

Given that at all times, so long as there have been human beings, there have also been herds of human beings (racial groups, communities, tribes, peoples, states, churches) and always a great many followers in relation to the small number of those issuing orders―and taking into consideration also that so far nothing has been better and longer practised and cultivated among human beings than obedience, we can reasonably assume that typically now the need for obedience is inborn in each individual, as a sort of formal conscience which states "You are to do something or other without conditions, and leave aside something else without conditions," in short, "Thou shalt." This need seeks to satisfy itself and to fill its form with some content. Depending on its strength, impatience, and tension, it seizes on something, without being very particular, like a coarse appetite, and accepts what someone or other issuing commands―parents, teachers, laws, class biases, public opinion―shouts in people's ears. The curiously limitation of human development―the way it hesitates, takes so long, often regresses, and turns around on itself―is based on the fact that the herd instinct of obedience is passed on best and at the expense of the art of commanding. If we imagine this instinct at some point striding right to its ultimate excess, then there would finally be a total lack of commanders and independent people, or they would suffer inside from a bad conscience and find it necessary first to prepare a deception for themselves in order to be able to command, as if they, too, were only obeying orders. This condition is what, in fact, exists nowadays in Europe: I call it the moral hypocrisy of those in command. They don't know how to protect themselves from their bad conscience except by behaving as if they were carrying out older or higher orders (from ancestors, the constitution, rights, law, or even God), or they even borrow herd maxims from the herd way of thinking, for example, as "the first servant of their people" or as "tools of the common good." On the other hand, the herd man in Europe today makes himself appear as if he is the single kind of human being allowed, and he glorifies those characteristics of his thanks to which he is tame, good natured, and useful to the herd, as the really human virtues, that is, public spiritedness, wishing everyone well, consideration, diligence, moderation, modesty, forbearance, and pity. For those cases, however, where people believe they cannot do without a leader and bell wether, they make attempt after attempt to replace the commander by adding together collections of clever herd people All the representative constitutional assemblies, for example, have this origin. But for all that, what a blissful relief, what a release from a pressure which is growing unbearable is the appearance of an absolute commander for these European herd animals. The effect which the appearance of Napoleon made was the most recent major evidence for that:―the history of the effect of Napoleon is almost the history of the higher happiness which this entire century derived from its most valuable men and moments.

Given that at all times, so long as there have been human beings, there have also been herds of human beings (racial groups, communities, tribes, peoples, states, churches) and always a great many followers in relation to the small number of those issuing orders - and taking into consideration also that so far nothing has been better and longer practised and cultivated among human beings than obedience, we can reasonably assume that typically now the need for obedience is inborn in each individual, as a sort of formal conscience which states "You are to do something or other without conditions, and leave aside something else without conditions," in short, "Thou shalt." This need seeks to satisfy itself and to fill its form with some content. Depending on its strength, impatience, and tension, it seizes on something, without being very particular, like a coarse appetite, and accepts what someone or other issuing commands - parents, teachers, laws, class biases, public opinion - shouts in people's ears. The curiously limitation of human development - the way it hesitates, takes so long, often regresses, and turns around on itself - is based on the fact that the herd instinct of obedience is passed on best and at the expense of the art of commanding. If we imagine this instinct at some point striding right to its ultimate excess, then there would finally be a total lack of commanders and independent people, or they would suffer inside from a bad conscience and find it necessary first to prepare a deception for themselves in order to be able to command, as if they, too, were only obeying orders. This condition is what, in fact, exists nowadays in Europe: I call it the moral hypocrisy of those in command. They don't know how to protect themselves from their bad conscience except by behaving as if they were carrying out older or higher orders (from ancestors, the constitution, rights, law, or even God), or they even borrow herd maxims from the herd way of thinking, for example, as "the first servant of their people" or as "tools of the common good." On the other hand, the herd man in Europe today makes himself appear as if he is the single kind of human being allowed, and he glorifies those characteristics of his thanks to which he is tame, good natured, and useful to the herd, as the really human virtues, that is, public spiritedness, wishing everyone well, consideration, diligence, moderation, modesty, forbearance, and pity. For those cases, however, where people believe they cannot do without a leader and bell wether, they make attempt after attempt to replace the commander by adding together collections of clever herd people All the representative constitutional assemblies, for example, have this origin. But for all that, what a blissful relief, what a release from a pressure which is growing unbearable is the appearance of an absolute commander for these European herd animals. The effect which the appearance of Napoleon made was the most recent major evidence for that: - the history of the effect of Napoleon is almost the history of the higher happiness which this entire century derived from its most valuable men and moments.

There is an art to the business of making sandwiches which it is given to few ever to find the time to explore in depth. It is a simple task, but the opportunities for satisfaction are many and profound: choosing the right bread for instance. The Sandwich Maker had spent many months in daily consultation and experiment with Grarp the baker and eventually they had between them created a loaf of exactly the consistency that was dense enough to slice thinly and neatly, while still being light, moist and having that fine nutty flavour which best enhanced the savour of roast Perfectly Normal Beast flesh. There was also the geometry of the slice to be refined: the precise relationships between the width and height of the slice and also its thickness which would give the proper sense of bulk and weight to the finished sandwich: here again, lightness was a virtue, but so too were firmness, generosity and that promise of succulence and savour that is the hallmark of a truly intense sandwich experience. The proper tools, of course, were crucial, and many were the days that the Sandwich Maker, when not engaged with the Baker at his oven, would spend with Strinder the Tool Maker, weighing and balancing knives, taking them to the forge and back again. Suppleness, strength, keenness of edge, length and balance were all enthusiastically debated, theories put forward, tested, refined, and many was the evening when the Sandwich Maker and the Tool Maker could be seen silhouetted against the light of the setting sun and the Tool Maker’s forge making slow sweeping movements through the air trying one knife after another, comparing the weight of this one with the balance of another, the suppleness of a third and the handle binding of a fourth. Three knives altogether were required. First there was the knife for the slicing of the bread: a firm, authoritative blade which imposed a clear and defining will on a loaf. Then there was the butter-spreading knife, which was a whippy little number but still with a firm backbone to it. Early versions had been a little too whippy, but now the combination of flexibility with a core of strength was exactly right to achieve the maximum smoothness and grace of spread. The chief amongst the knives, of course, was the carving knife. This was the knife that would not merely impose its will on the medium through which it moved, as did the bread knife; it must work with it, be guided by the grain of the meat, to achieve slices of the most exquisite consistency and translucency, that would slide away in filmy folds from the main hunk of meat. The Sandwich Maker would then flip each sheet with a smooth flick of the wrist on to the beautifully proportioned lower bread slice, trim it with four deft strokes and then at last perform the magic that the children of the village so longed to gather round and watch with rapt attention and wonder. With just four more dexterous flips of the knife he would assemble the trimmings into a perfectly fitting jigsaw of pieces on top of the primary slice. For every sandwich the size and shape of the trimmings were different, but the Sandwich Maker would always effortlessly and without hesitation assemble them into a pattern which fitted perfectly. A second layer of meat and a second layer of trimmings, and the main act of creation would be accomplished.

Obviously, the best way to remount a chain is to buy an entirely new, fully assembled bike in your favorite color. This is a foolproof method, but time-consuming and expensive.

It’s freezing outside and imagine you are relaxing in the water of your swimming pool. Is it possible? Will you not freeze in the cold water? Absolutely not! Pool Enclosures can make it a possible. They not only protect the pool from rain and snow but also enhance the inside air temperature and help you enjoy your most relaxing activity in the winters. The most popular enclosures are the Telescopic Swimming Pool Enclosures. These are the most suitable enclosures for long outdoor swimming pools. They enhance the overall appearance of the pool. These are quick and easy to assemble. These are among the best-selling enclosures in the markets. As the name suggests telescopic enclosures are long and slender just like the telescope. These enclosures are also used by resorts and hotel owners to cover their swimming pools. The pool enclosures for outdoor pools offer an extended living space when connected to the home. You can opt for an arc shaped pool enclosure that could be opened or closed. An enclosure with traditional design can improve the aesthetics of the area. Other styles and designs are offered by a large number of companies to turn your pool side into a beautiful and relaxing space. As it becomes very difficult to put and remove the pool covers manually, automatic pool enclosures that can be applied with a push on a button have been introduced in the market. These pool enclosures are easy to install and can be opened or closed whenever required in just a few seconds. As the pool is protected from rain, dust and snow, you will require very less time in cleaning the pool. With enclosures on you can enjoy an extended pool season all year round. In majority of the houses with swimming pool, you can find Retractable Enclosures over the swimming pool. They make the pool useful even in rain and improve the overall look of the pool. These are also easy to assemble and provide a hassle free experience. Hence if you have a pool in your house and you want to make it even more beautiful, then it is highly recommended to make use of retractable enclosures. If you want to enjoy at the pool side throughout the year, then it is high time you get a pool enclosure installed. The benefits of pool covers and enclosures are plenty and the cost is worth the pleasure. You can look for the companies that offer affordable and easy to assemble enclosure kits on the internet and take advantage of their products and services. These companies can even custom design an enclosure to match the architecture of your house. Enjoy swimming in an enclosed beautiful pool around the year!

The Quiche Lorraine Pie Shell: You can mix up your favorite piecrust recipe and line a 10-inch pie plate. Or…you can buy frozen shells at the grocery store. (If you decide to go the grocery store frozen pie shell route, buy 9-inch deep-dish pie shells.)   Hannah’s 1stNote: There’s no need to feel guilty if you choose to use the frozen pie shells. They’re good and it’s a real time saver. I happen to know that Edna Ferguson, the head cook at Jordan High, has been known to remove frozen pie shells from their telltale disposable pans and put them in her own pie tins to bake! (Sorry Edna—I just had to tell them.) Stack your pie shells in the refrigerator, or leave them in the freezer until two hours before you’re ready to use them.   Prepare your piecrust by separating one egg. Throw away the white and whip up the yolk with a fork. Brush the bottom and inside of your piecrust. Prick it all over with a fork and bake it in a 350 F. degree oven for 5 minutes. Take it out and let it cool on a wire rack or a cold stovetop while you mix up the custard. If “bubbles” have formed in the crust, immediately prick them with a fork to let out the steam. The Quiche Lorraine Custard: 5 eggs 1½ cups heavy whipping cream *** Hannah’s 2ndNote: You can do this by hand with a whisk, or use an electric mixer, your choice.   Combine the eggs with the cream and whisk them (or beat them with an electric mixer) until they’re a uniform color. When they’re thoroughly mixed, pour them into a pitcher and set it in the refrigerator until you’re ready to assemble the rest of your quiche. You may notice that you’re not adding any salt, pepper, or other seasoning at this point. You’ll do that when you assemble the quiche.   Hannah’s 3rdNote: You can mix up the custard ahead of time and store it in the refrigerator for up to 24 hours. When you’re ready to assemble your quiches, all you have to do is whisk it smooth and pour it out from the pitcher. The Quiche Lorraine Filling: 2 cups grated Gruyere cheese (approximately 7 ounces)*** 1 cup diced, well-cooked and drained bacon ½ teaspoon salt ½ teaspoon freshly ground black pepper ¼ teaspoon ground cayenne pepper (optional—use if you like it a bit spicy) ¼ teaspoon ground nutmeg (freshly grated is best, of course)   Sprinkle the grated cheese in the bottom of your cooled pie shell.   Spread the cup of diced bacon on top of the cheese.   Sprinkle on the salt, and grind the pepper over the top of the bacon.   Sprinkle on the cayenne pepper (if you decided to use it).   Grate the nutmeg over the top. Put a drip pan under your pie plate. (I line a jellyroll pan with foil and use that.) This will catch any spills that might occur when you fill your quiche with the custard mixture.   Take your custard mixture out of the refrigerator and give it a good whisk. Then pour it over the top of your Quiche Lorraine, filling it about half way.   Open your oven, pull out the rack, and set your pie plate and drip pan on it. Pour in more custard mixture, stopping a quarter-inch short of the rim. Carefully push in the rack, and shut the oven door.   Bake your Quiche Lorraine at 350 degrees F., for 60 minutes, or until the top is nicely browned and a knife inserted one-inch from the center comes out clean.   Let your quiche cool for 15 to 30 minutes on a cold stovetop or a wire rack, and then cut and serve to rave reviews.   This quiche is good warm, but it’s also good at room temperature. (I’ve even eaten it straight out of the refrigerator for breakfast!)

At Sanford’s 1998 funeral in Duke Chapel, childhood friend Dickson Philips eulogized this Eagle from Troop 20 in the town of Laurinburg. To the assembled crowd, he eloquently said, “[Terry Sanford] took an oath when he was twelve years old and kept it. It started out, ‘On my honor, I will do my best to do my duty to God and my country,’ and included such things as ‘help other people at all times.’ He believed it: He was the eternal Boy Scout.

The best part of assembling this pack was discovering how many smart nonfiction writers—people actually investigating what’s true—committed the foolish error of leaving all their best ideas just lying around in books, from where I could easily steal them.

Strategic Design cannot begin with a needs assessment if we want to create an Information Age, learner empowerment vision for our school system. Our present Industrial Age schools are IN-THE-BOX. If we start by studying how we can improve an obsolete structure, we will continue to think of how we can improve the components of an outdated, underperforming system. We can only get OUT-OF-THE-BOX if we ask ourselves the right questions: questions that allow us to think freely, creatively, and logically. Anything we do to try to improve our assembly line schools will be “tinkering” at best, when what is needed is a future-focused transformational vision. We don’t want to catch up with those who are the best at being obsolete; we need to leapfrog them!

Henry Ford is best known for his sweeping adoption of the assembly line. It’s less well known that his philosophy of recognizing and rewarding work was remarkably progressive for the time: The kind of workman who gives the business the best that is in him is the best kind of workman a business can have. And he cannot be expected to do this indefinitely without proper recognition. … [I]f a man feels that his day’s work is not only supplying his basic need, but is also giving him a margin of comfort, and enabling him to give his boys and girls their opportunity and his wife some pleasure in life, then his job looks good to him and he is free to give it of his best. This is a good thing for him and a good thing for the business. The man who does not get a certain satisfaction out of his day’s work is losing the best part of his pay.

An IT College Graduate To advance the goals and objectives of the IT department by utilizing strong programming skills and to improve organizational efficiencies and productivity through the use of state-of-the-art technologies Perl, MySQL, Linux, Apache, Mason, XML, XSL, HTML, JavaScript, Java, MS C11, ASP, 8086 Assembly, Fortran, COBOL, network firewall and hack-proof server installation and configuration, and automatic mass Web site building Internet-based public relations for online applications Network administration Wireless applications Speech recognition Excellent customer service skills Complex, technical troubleshooting and problem solving abilities Projects on time and within budget

Last week, on the fifth anniversary of the ghetto uprising, 12,000 Jews assembled on the spot where the first shots were fired. There they dedicated a monument to the heroes of the ghetto and to the 3,500,000 other Jews killed in Poland. Delegations of Jews from 20 nations, including the U.S., laid wreaths and banners against the monument—a wall built of broken bricks from the ghetto‘s rubble piles. Mounted in a front niche was a bronze plaque showing armed men & women straining toward freedom. These were moving symbols to the Jews of Warsaw. But what they liked best, perhaps, was the shining granite that sheathed the monument’s wall: it was some of the Swedish granite that Adolf Hitler had ordered for his monument in Berlin.

This is the same establishment that all those who want, or rather aspire to, to be literary figures of the century, artists, painters and sculptors want acceptance from and approval. They want to be looked up to. Young and upcoming poets must approach their craft with an almost angelic perspective. So many writers are missing a condensed fusion in their writing, they condescend to their audience, the truth is not spoken in their work, they gabble, their words seem to make a hot fuss on the page. What do they gain? They gain this, simply nothing. Poets must assemble and present their work accordingly to how they see fit and should be careful of advice from other writers and editors. Sometimes there can be too much going on in the words that are meant to be given with the best of intentions.

Accountability in police can best be done in an assembly where everyone concerned will come and share their views and opinion to the activities of the police because there's a whole lot of excesses in the police force that must be corrected for effective policing and better society's trust on them.

For the hardest problems—the ones we really want to solve but haven’t been able to, like curing cancer—pure nature-inspired approaches are probably too uninformed to succeed, even given massive amounts of data. We can in principle learn a complete model of a cell’s metabolic networks by a combination of structure search, with or without crossover, and parameter learning via backpropagation, but there are too many bad local optima to get stuck in. We need to reason with larger chunks, assembling and reassembling them as needed and using inverse deduction to fill in the gaps. And we need our learning to be guided by the goal of optimally diagnosing cancer and finding the best drugs to cure it. Optimal learning is the Bayesians’ central goal, and they are in no doubt that they’ve figured out how to reach it. This way, please …

Consider, for example, IBM’s decision to outsource the microprocessor for its PC business to Intel, and its operating system to Microsoft. IBM made these decisions in the early 1980s in order to focus on what it did best—designing, assembling, and marketing computer systems. Given its history, these choices made perfect sense. Component suppliers to IBM historically had lived a miserable, profit-free existence, and the business press widely praised IBM’s decision to out-source these components of its PC. It dramatically reduced the cost and time required for development and launch. And yet in the process of outsourcing what it did not perceive to be core to the new business, IBM put into business the two companies that subsequently captured most of the profit in the industry. How could IBM have known in advance that such a sensible decision would prove so costly? More broadly, how can any executive who is launching a new-growth business, as IBM was doing with its PC division in the early 1980s, know which value-added activities are those in which future competence needs to be mastered and kept inside? 2

When DC Comics decided to assemble its best superheroes into the Justice League of America in 1960, Wonder Woman was the only female member. During

Not surprisingly, then, a healthy Christian is one who is committed to expressing this kind of love toward other Christians. And the best place for Christians to love this way is in the assembly of God’s people called the local church. Is it no wonder then that the author of Hebrews instructs us to “consider how to stir up one another to love and good works,” and then right away says “not neglecting to meet together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another, and all the more as you see the Day drawing near” (Heb. 10:24–25)? Faithful church attendance is associated tightly with stirring each other to love and good deeds. The local church is the place where love is most visibly and compellingly displayed among God’s people. It’s where the “body of Christ” is most plainly represented in the world.

Another recent study, this one on academic research, provides real-world evidence of the way the tools we use to sift information online influence our mental habits and frame our thinking. James Evans, a sociologist at the University of Chicago, assembled an enormous database on 34 million scholarly articles published in academic journals from 1945 through 2005. He analyzed the citations included in the articles to see if patterns of citation, and hence of research, have changed as journals have shifted from being printed on paper to being published online. Considering how much easier it is to search digital text than printed text, the common assumption has been that making journals available on the Net would significantly broaden the scope of scholarly research, leading to a much more diverse set of citations. But that’s not at all what Evans discovered. As more journals moved online, scholars actually cited fewer articles than they had before. And as old issues of printed journals were digitized and uploaded to the Web, scholars cited more recent articles with increasing frequency. A broadening of available information led, as Evans described it, to a “narrowing of science and scholarship.”31 In explaining the counterintuitive findings in a 2008 Science article, Evans noted that automated information-filtering tools, such as search engines, tend to serve as amplifiers of popularity, quickly establishing and then continually reinforcing a consensus about what information is important and what isn’t. The ease of following hyperlinks, moreover, leads online researchers to “bypass many of the marginally related articles that print researchers” would routinely skim as they flipped through the pages of a journal or a book. The quicker that scholars are able to “find prevailing opinion,” wrote Evans, the more likely they are “to follow it, leading to more citations referencing fewer articles.” Though much less efficient than searching the Web, old-fashioned library research probably served to widen scholars’ horizons: “By drawing researchers through unrelated articles, print browsing and perusal may have facilitated broader comparisons and led researchers into the past.”32 The easy way may not always be the best way, but the easy way is the way our computers and search engines encourage us to take.

But in the bar, the real science gets scrutinized and the best ideas assembled. Lifelong collaborations and friendships are made, bitter squabbles and permanent enmities are forged.

Soul of the 20th Century Behind a dusty glass case at the Henry Ford Museum outside Detroit, lies a sealed test tube. It contains the last breath of one Thomas Alva Edison, The Wizard of Menlo Park, whose legacy included 2,332 patents among which were the phonograph, the movie camera and the light bulb. Henry Ford believed the soul of a person resides in their last breath and Henry captured the last breath of his best friend Tom. Most visitors of the museum choose the Ford Rouge Factory Tour to catch a glimpse of an assembly line, neglecting that inside this modest showcase lies imprisoned the most inventive Soul of the 20th century, captured before it could ascend to heaven. Visitors, if you see the test tube, break it and set the Wizard free!

1000 Books to Read Before You Die is neither comprehensive nor authoritative, even if a good number of the titles assembled here would be on most lists of essential reading. It is meant to be an invitation to a conversation—even a merry argument—about the books and authors that are missing as well as the books and authors included, because the question of what to read next is the best prelude to even more important ones, like who to be, and how to live.