Begins Famous Quotes

A bridge of silver wings stretches from the dead ashes of an unforgiving nightmare to the jeweled vision of a life started anew.

Nothing captures the biological argument better than the famous New Age slogan: ‘Happiness begins within.’ Money, social status, plastic surgery, beautiful houses, powerful positions – none of these will bring you happiness. Lasting happiness comes only from serotonin, dopamine and oxytocin.

It is so easy at times for a lonely individual to begin fantasizing about what the people outside are saying about him and, in result, irrationally and fearfully, and sometimes angrily, fancy himself a villain.

I do love the beginning of the summer hols,' said Julian. They always seem to stretch out ahead for ages and ages.' 'They go so nice and slowly at first,' said Anne, his little sister. 'Then they start to gallop.

Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show. To begin my life with the beginning of my life, I record that I was born (as I have been informed and believe) on a Friday, at twelve o’clock at night. It was remarked that the clock began to strike, and I began to cry, simultaneously.

Anyway. I’m not allowed to watch TV, although I am allowed to rent documentaries that are approved for me, and I can read anything I want. My favorite book is A Brief History of Time, even though I haven’t actually finished it, because the math is incredibly hard and Mom isn’t good at helping me. One of my favorite parts is the beginning of the first chapter, where Stephen Hawking tells about a famous scientist who was giving a lecture about how the earth orbits the sun, and the sun orbits the solar system, and whatever. Then a woman in the back of the room raised her hand and said, “What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise.” So the scientist asked her what the tortoise was standing on. And she said, “But it’s turtles all the way down!” I love that story, because it shows how ignorant people can be. And also because I love tortoises.

Just being alive is such a gift, but nobody ever told you to be thankful to existence. On the contrary, everyone was grumpy, complaining. Naturally, if everything surrounding your life from the very beginning goes on pointing out to you that you are not what you should be, goes on giving you great ideals that you have to follow and you have to become, your isness is never praised. What is praised is your future - if you can become someone respectable, powerful, rich, intellectual, in some way famous, not just a nobody.

In the eighteenth century, philosophers considered the whole of human knowledge, including science, to be their field and discussed questions such as: Did the universe have a beginning? However, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, science became too technical and mathematical for the philosophers, or anyone else except a few specialists. Philosophers reduced the scope of their inquiries so much that Wittgenstein, the most famous philosopher of this century, said, "The sole remaining task for philosophy is the analysis of language." What a comedown from the great tradition of philosophy from Aristotle to Kant!

One of the century’s most famous intellectual pronouncements comes at the beginning of The Myth of Sisyphus: “There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy.

This was still the era - it would end later in that famous decade - when to be young was a social encumbrance, a mark of irrelevance, a faintly embarrassing condition for which marriage was the beginning of a cure.

Jennifer’s eyes begin to water again. “Don’t let anything bad happen to him, Dr. Sampson. My husband is a famous lawyer. He sues doctors when they screw up.” “Jennifer!” Zack exclaims, embarrassed.

Friendship is like a stubborn child who is playing hide and seek with your life. You have to find him at the darkest places of your heart in difficult times. And when you find the child; his smile will light up the darkness of your life.

Madame V begins the lesson by reading aloud the first stanza of a famous French poem: Il pleure dans mon coeur Comme il pleut sur la ville; Quelle est cette langueur Qui penetre mon coeur? Then she looks up and without any warning she calls on me to translate it. I swallow hard, and try: "It's raining in my heart like it's raining in the city. What is this sadness that pierces my heart?" Saying these words out loud, right in front of the whole class, makes me feel like I'm not wearing any clothes.

I think... girls have a hard time being interesting. It’s actually easier to be famous, or notorious, than it is to be interesting. In our world, girls climb very well until they hit puberty-sexual maturity-and then they begin to fall out of the tree. They start role-playing instead of thinking, flirting instead of learning. They start admiring how smart the boys are-or how athletic or how handsome-instead of concentrating on their own intelligence.

The name of the author is the first to go followed obediently by the title, the plot, the heartbreaking conclusion, the entire novel which suddenly becomes one you have never read, never even heard of, as if, one by one, the memories you used to harbor decided to retire to the southern hemisphere of the brain, to a little fishing village where there are no phones. Long ago you kissed the names of the nine Muses goodbye and watched the quadratic equation pack its bag, and even now as you memorize the order of the planets, something else is slipping away, a state flower perhaps, the address of an uncle, the capital of Paraguay. Whatever it is you are struggling to remember, it is not poised on the tip of your tongue, not even lurking in some obscure corner of your spleen. It has floated away down a dark mythological river whose name begins with an L as far as you can recall, well on your own way to oblivion where you will join those who have even forgotten how to swim and how to ride a bicycle. No wonder you rise in the middle of the night to look up the date of a famous battle in a book on war. No wonder the moon in the window seems to have drifted out of a love poem that you used to know by heart.

She stopped at a red light and turned to face him. “Look. You must know your eyes are truly distracting, and you keep LOOKING at me. I’ve also never talked to anyone who sounds like a movie trailer announcer before. Your voice is so cool. I’m sure you know that. It’s probably part of your famousness. But here in this car it’s unsettling, because I have this sensation you might suddenly begin sentences with some dramatic start.” She lowered her voice. “like...IN A WORLD, FAR, FAR AWAY...

Robert inspired Elizabeth to write her autobiographical masterpiece, Sonnets from the Portuguese, which famously begins, “How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.

The thing about money, sex, and success is that when you don’t have them, you can justify your misery—shit, if I had money, sex, and success, I’d feel great! However misguided that may be, it psychologically permeates as hope. But once you are rich, famous, successful—and you’re still insecure and unhappy—the terrifying thought begins to lurk: Maybe the problem is me.

Sparta has no philosophers. That’s because the job of a philosopher is to understand things better, which is a form of change, so they don’t want it. Another difference: they don’t honour living poets, only dead ones. Why? Because dead poets don’t write anything new, but live ones do. A third difference: their education system is insanely harsh; ours is famously lax. Why? Because they don’t want their kids to dare to question anything, so that they won’t ever think of changing anything. How

Eating is an agricultural act," Wendell Berry famously wrote, by which he meant that we are not just passive consumers of food but cocreators of the systems that feed us. Depending on how we spend them, our food dollars can either go to support a food industry devoted to quantity and convenience and "value" or they can nourish a food chain organized around values--values like quality and health. Yes, shopping this way takes more money and effort, but as soon as you begin to treat that expenditure not just as shopping but also as a kind of vote--a vote for health in the largest sense--food no longer seems like the smartest place to economize.

Morals are difficult things to talk about, but what has happened is that we have invented a moral sense, which is rotting now that we can't give it employment. And when a moral sense begins to rot it is worse than when you had none. I suppose that all endeavours which are directed to a purely worldly end, as my famous Civilization was, contain within thelmselves the germs of their own corruption

All three girls are in their twenties now, and for all their evolution and ostensible liberation, they have no interest in a story that is not about a handsome, famous man. Still, I am their mother, and they understand that they will have to endure me in order to get to him. I take back my place on the sofa and begin again,

The dark-haired stranger’s head snapped around. “Daphne? Did he say Daphne?” She drew back, unnerved by his direct question and the rather intense look in his eyes. “Yes.” “Your name is Daphne?” Now she was beginning to wonder if he was an idiot. “Yes.” He groaned. “Not Daphne Bridgerton.” Her face slid into a puzzled frown. “The very one.” Simon staggered back a step. He suddenly felt physically ill, as his brain finally processed the fact that she had thick, chestnut hair. The famous Bridgerton hair. Not to mention the Bridgerton nose, and cheekbones, and— Bugger it all, this was Anthony’s sister! Bloody hell. There were rules among friends, commandments, really, and the most important one was Thou Shalt Not Lust After Thy Friend’s Sister. While he stood there, probably staring at her like a complete idiot, she planted her hands on her hips, and demanded, “And who are you?” “Simon Basset,” he muttered. “The duke?” she squeaked. He nodded grimly. “Oh, dear.

Creativity is our one ubiquitous commonality so perhaps that is where all constructive communication should begin.

A FAMOUS SWORD SWALLOWER FROM AFGHANISTAN WHO IS NOW TEACHING ME TO EAT MY WORDS (WHAT YOU DO IS YOU TAKE THE S OFF THE BEGINNING OF THE SWORD AND PUT IT ON THE END BEFORE YOU SWALLOW IT).

In particular, the virtues and ambitions called forth by war are unlikely to find expression in liberal democracies. There will be plenty of metaphorical wars—corporate lawyers specializing in hostile takeovers who will think of themselves as sharks or gunslingers, and bond traders who imagine, as in Tom Wolfe’s novel The Bonfire of the Vanities, that they are “masters of the universe.” (They will believe this, however, only in bull markets.) But as they sink into the soft leather of their BMWs, they will know somewhere in the back of their minds that there have been real gunslingers and masters in the world, who would feel contempt for the petty virtues required to become rich or famous in modern America. How long megalothymia will be satisfied with metaphorical wars and symbolic victories is an open question. One suspects that some people will not be satisfied until they prove themselves by that very act that constituted their humanness at the beginning of history: they will want to risk their lives in a violent battle, and thereby prove beyond any shadow of a doubt to themselves and to their fellows that they are free. They will deliberately seek discomfort and sacrifice, because the pain will be the only way they have of proving definitively that they can think well of themselves, that they remain human beings.

One of the century’s most famous intellectual pronouncements comes at the beginning of The Myth of Sisyphus: “There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy

I N TAOISM there’s a famous saying that goes, “The Tao that can be spoken is not the ultimate Tao.” Another way you could say that, although I’ve never seen it translated this way, is, “As soon as you begin to believe in something, then you can no longer see anything else.” The truth you believe in and cling to makes you unavailable to hear anything new.

What is real? Is there more to reality than meets the eye? Yes! was Plato’s answer over two millennia ago. In his famous cave analogy, he likened us to people who’d lived their entire lives shackled in a cave, facing a blank wall, watching the shadows cast by things passing behind them, and eventually coming to mistakenly believe that these shadows were the full reality. Plato argued that what we humans call our everyday reality is similarly just a limited and distorted representation of the true reality, and that we must free ourselves from our mental shackles to begin comprehending it.

Why does the universe go to all the bother of existing? Is the unified theory so compelling that it brings about its own existence? Or does it need a creator, and, if so, does he have any other effect on the universe? And who created him? Up to now, most scientists have been too occupied with the development of new theories that describe what the universe is to ask the question why. On the other hand, the people whose business it is to ask why, the philosophers, have not been able to keep up with the advance of scientific theories. In the eighteenth century, philosophers considered the whole of human knowledge, including science, to be their field and discussed questions such as: Did the universe have a beginning? However, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, science became too technical and mathematical for the philosophers, or anyone else except a few specialists. Philosophers reduced the scope of their inquiries so much that Wittgenstein, the most famous philosopher of this century, said, 'The sole remaining task for philosophy is the analysis of language.' What a comedown from the great tradition of philosophy from Aristotle to Kant! However, if we do discover a complete theory, it should in time be understandable in broad principle by everyone, not just a few scientists. Then we shall all, philosophers, scientists, and just ordinary people, be able to take part in the discussion of the question of why it is that we and the universe exist. If we find the answer to that, it would be the ultimate triumph of human reason--for then we would know the mind of God.

Karen: It was a man's world. The whole world was a man's world but the recording industry .... it wasn't easy. You had to get some guy's approval to do just about anything and it seemed there were two ways to go about it. You either acted like one of the boys, which is the way I had found. Or you acted real girlie and flirty and batted your eyelashes. They liked that. But Daisy, from the beginning, was sort of outside of all that. She was just sort of "Take me or leave me." Daisy: I didn't care if I was famous or not. I didn't care if I got to sing on your record or not. All I wanted to do was make something interesting and original and cool.

The Age Of Reason 1. ‘Well, it’s that same frankness you fuss about so much. You’re so absurdly scared of being your own dupe, my poor boy, that you would back out of the finest adventure in the world rather than risk telling yourself a lie.’ 2. “ I’m not so much interested in myself as all that’ he said simply. ‘I know’, said Marcelle. It isn’t an aim , it’s a means. It helps you to get rid of yourself; to contemplate and criticize yourself: that’s the attitude you prefer. When you look at yourself, you imagine you aren’t what you see, you imagine you are nothing. That is your ideal: you want to be nothing.’’ 3. ‘In vain he repeated the once inspiring phrase: ‘I must be free: I must be self-impelled, and able to say: ‘’I am because I will: I am my own beginning.’’ Empty, pompous words, the commonplaces of the intellectual.’ 4. ‘He had waited so long: his later years had been no more than a stand-to. Oppressed with countless daily cares, he had waited…But through all that, his sole care had been to hold himself in readiness. For an act. A free, considered act; that should pledge his whole life, and stand at the beginning of a new existence….He waited. And during all that time, gently, stealthily, the years had come, they had grasped him from behind….’ 5. ‘ ‘It was love. This time, it was love. And Mathiue thought:’ What have I done?’ Five minutes ago this love didn’t exist; there was between them a rare and precious feeling, without a name and not expressible in gestures.’ 6. ‘ The fact is, you are beyond my comprehension: you, so prompt with your indignation when you hear of an injustice, you keep this woman for years in a humiliating position, for the sole pleasure of telling yourself that you are respecting your principles. It wouldn’t be so bad if it were true, if you really did adapt your life to your ideas. But, I must tell you once more…you like that sort of life-placid, orderly, the typical life of an official.’ ‘’That freedom consisted in frankly confronting situations into which one had deliberately entered, and accepting all one’s responsibilities.’ ‘Well…perhaps I’m doing you an injustice. Perhaps you haven’t in fact reached the age of reason, it’s really a moral age…perhaps I’ve got there sooner than you have.’ 7. ‘ I have nothing to defend. I am not proud of my life and I’m penniless. My freedom? It’s a burden to me, for years past I have been free and to no purpose. I simply long to exchange it for a good sound of certainty….Besides, I agree with you that no one can be a man who has not discovered something for which he is prepared to die.’ 8. ‘‘I have led a toothless life’, he thought. ‘ A toothless life. I have never bitten into anything. I was waiting. I was reserving myself for later on-and I have just noticed that my teeth have gone. What’s to be done? Break the shell? That’s easily said. Besides, what would remain? A little viscous gum, oozing through the dust and leaving a glistering trail behind it.’ 9.’’ A life’, thought Mathieu, ‘is formed from the future just like the bodies are compounded from the void’. He bent his head: he thought of his own life. The future had made way into his heart, where everything was in process and suspense. The far-off days of childhood, the day when he has said:’I will be free’, the day when he had said: ’I will be famous’, appeared to him even now with their individual future, like a small, circled individual sky above them all, and the future was himself, himself just as he was at present, weary and a little over-ripe, they had claims upon him across the passage of time past, they maintained their insistencies, and he was often visited by attacks of devastating remorse, because his casual, cynical present was the original future of those past days.

It was funny that she should have said that, for Julian chose that moment to begin baaing like a flock of sheep. His one long, bleating "baa-baa-aa-aa" was taken up by the echoes at once, and it seemed suddenly as if hundreds of poor lost sheep were baa-ing their way down the dungeons! Mr. Stick jumped to his feet, as white as a sheet. "Well, if it isn't sheep now!" he said. "What's up? What's in these "ere dungeons? I never did like them." "Baa-aa-AAAAAAAAAAP went the mournful bleats all round and about. And then

In every end is the seed of a new beginning...water it well

The 90-year-old Pablo Casals, the world-famous cellist/composer/conductor, asked why he still practiced eight hours a day, said, “Because I think I’m beginning to make some progress.

The Russian-born novelist's writing habits were famously peculiar. Beginning in 1950, he composed first drafts in pencil on ruled index cards, which he stored in long file boxes. Since Nabokov claimed, he pictured an entire novel in complete form before he began writing it, this method allowed him to compose passages out of sequence, in whatever order he pleased...

What I want to fix your attention on is the vast, overall movement towards the discrediting, and finally the elimination, of every kind of human excellence—moral, cultural, social, or intellectual. And is it not pretty to notice how Democracy (in the incantatory sense) is now doing for us the work that was once done by the most ancient Dictatorships, and by the same methods? You remember how one of the Greek Dictators (they called them ‘tyrants’ then) sent an envoy to another Dictator to ask his advice about the principles of government. The second Dictator led the envoy into a field of corn, and there he snicked off with his cane the top of every stalk that rose an inch or so above the general level. The moral was plain. Allow no pre-eminence among your subjects. Let no man live who is wiser, or better, or more famous, or even handsomer than the mass. Cut them all down to a level; all slaves, all ciphers, all nobodies. All equals. Thus Tyrants could practise, in a sense, ‘democracy’. But now ‘democracy’ can do the same work without any other tyranny than her own. No one need now go through the field with a cane. The little stalks will now of themselves bite the tops off the big ones. The big ones are beginning to bite off their own in their desire to Be Like Stalks.

Then Gai told me about the famous cup of the heart, which I should now begin to empty. The Sufis compare our spiritual heart, the seat of God within us, with a cup into which the love of God flows. This cup, however, needs to be emptied before it can be filled with Divine love. This emptying is a long process that requires courage, strength of character, determination, and, above all, sincerity. It is a process of reining in and eventually extinguishing the ego, of letting go of material needs, bad and unhealthy habits and emotional attachments in order to make room for God. Sufis often likened it to the process of dying and being born again. ‘Die before you die’ is a famous Sufi saying. This was the essence of every spiritual path, Gai told me.

Strauss’s, for instance, which begins in the heavens. The artist doesn’t ascend to glory, he appears in it, he already has it and the world is prepared to recognize him. Meteoric, like a comet—those are the phrases we apply, and it’s true, it is a kind of burning. It makes them highly visible, and at the same time it consumes them, and it’s only afterwards, when the brilliance is gone, when their bones are lying alongside those of lesser men, that one can really judge. I mean, there are famous works, renowned in antiquity, and today absolutely forgotten: books, buildings, works of art.

„I’m reminded“, he begins, „of a famous cartoon. It’s of a prisoner, shaking the bars, desperately trying to get out – but to his right and left, it’s open, no bars.“ He pauses, allowing the image to sink in. „All the prisoner has to do is walk around. But still, he frantically shakes the bars. That’s most of us. We feel completely stuck, trapped in our emotional cells, but there’s a way out – as long as we’re willing to see it.

Bhagat Singh revered Lajpat Rai as a leader. But he would not spare even Lajpat Rai, when, during the last years of his life, Lajpat Rai turned to communal politics. He then launched a political-ideological campaign against him. Because Lajpat Rai was a respected leader, he would not publicly use harsh words of criticism against him. And so he printed as a pamphlet Robert Browning’s famous poem, ‘The Lost Leader,’ in which Browning criticizes Wordsworth for turning against liberty. The poem begins with the line ‘Just for a handful of silver he left us.’ A few more of the poem’s lines were: ‘We shall march prospering, not thro’ his presence; Songs may inspirit us, not from his lyre,’ and ‘Blot out his name, then, record one lost soul more.’ There was not one word of criticism of Lajpat Rai. Only, on the front cover, he printed Lajpat Rai’s photograph!

After all, we are all immigrants to the future; none of us is a native in that land. Margaret Mead famously wrote about the profound changes wrought by the Second World War, “All of us who grew up before the war are immigrants in time, immigrants from an earlier world, living in an age essentially different from anything we knew before.” Today we are again in the early stages of defining a new age. The very underpinnings of our society and institutions--from how we work to how we create value, govern, trade, learn, and innovate--are being profoundly reshaped by amplified individuals. We are indeed all migrating to a new land and should be looking at the new landscape emerging before us like immigrants: ready to learn a new language, a new way of doing things, anticipating new beginnings with a sense of excitement, if also with a bit of understandable trepidation.

There is no man,’ he began, ‘however wise, who has not at some period of his youth said things, or lived in a way the consciousness of which is so unpleasant to him in later life that he would gladly, if he could, expunge it from his memory. And yet he ought not entirely to regret it, because he cannot be certain that he has indeed become a wise man—so far as it is possible for any of us to be wise—unless he has passed through all the fatuous or unwholesome incarnations by which that ultimate stage must be preceded. I know that there are young fellows, the sons and grand sons of famous men, whose masters have instilled into them nobility of mind and moral refinement in their schooldays. They have, perhaps, when they look back upon their past lives, nothing to retract; they can, if they choose, publish a signed account of everything they have ever said or done; but they are poor creatures, feeble descendants of doctrinaires, and their wisdom is negative and sterile. We are not provided with wisdom, we must discover it for ourselves, after a journey through the wilderness which no one else can take for us, an effort which no one can spare us, for our wisdom is the point of view from which we come at last to regard the world. The lives that you admire, the attitudes that seem noble to you are not the result of training at home, by a father, or by masters at school, they have sprung from beginnings of a very different order, by reaction from the influence of everything evil or commonplace that prevailed round about them. They represent a struggle and a victory. I can see that the picture of what we once were, in early youth, may not be recognisable and cannot, certainly, be pleasing to contemplate in later life. But we must not deny the truth of it, for it is evidence that we have really lived, that it is in accordance with the laws of life and of the mind that we have, from the common elements of life, of the life of studios, of artistic groups—assuming that one is a painter—extracted something that goes beyond them.

This, to be sure, is not the entire truth. For there were individuals in Germany who from the very beginning of the regime and without ever wavering were opposed to Hitler; no one knows how many there were of them—perhaps a hundred thousand, perhaps many more, perhaps many fewer—for their voices were never heard. They could be found everywhere, in all strata of society, among the simple people as well as among the educated, in all parties, perhaps even in the ranks of the N.S.D.A.P. Very few of them were known publicly, as were the aforementioned Reck-Malleczewen or the philosopher Karl Jaspers. Some of them were truly and deeply pious, like an artisan of whom I know, who preferred having his independent existence destroyed and becoming a simple worker in a factory to taking upon himself the “little formality” of entering the Nazi Party. A few still took an oath seriously and preferred, for example, to renounce an academic career rather than swear by Hitler’s name. A more numerous group were the workers, especially in Berlin, and Socialist intellectuals who tried to aid the Jews they knew. There were finally, the two peasant boys whose story is related in Günther Weisenborn’s Der lautlose Aufstand (1953), who were drafted into the S.S. at the end of the war and refused to sign; they were sentenced to death, and on the day of their execution they wrote in their last letter to their families: “We two would rather die than burden our conscience with such terrible things. We know what the S.S. must carry out.” The position of these people, who, practically speaking, did nothing, was altogether different from that of the conspirators. Their ability to tell right from wrong had remained intact, and they never suffered a “crisis of conscience.” There may also have been such persons among the members of the resistance, but they were hardly more numerous in the ranks of the conspirators than among the people at large. They were neither heroes nor saints, and they remained completely silent. Only on one occasion, in a single desperate gesture, did this wholly isolated and mute element manifest itself publicly: this was when the Scholls, two students at Munich University, brother and sister, under the influence of their teacher Kurt Huber distributed the famous leaflets in which Hitler was finally called what he was—a “mass murderer.

Don't even listen to No body including your friends who tells you to Move On in life. They often will have destroyed your Motivation causing an unexpected anxiety, and a severe brain stress until you give up. No matter how dead serious they are in order for you to understand them, reject their Anti-statement with the Power of your Assertion. They will foolishly halter your situation you had been encountering over the past year, when it all started from the beginning. Therefore, you MUST KEEP MOVING FORWARD. DO WHAT YOU NEED TO DO THAT NEEDS TO BE DONE. Train yourself to get strong so you can outsmart and surpass the famous people who came before you. That is the way of succeeding in life in order to prove to everyone you've overcome the Obstacles and your Anxiety. Keep moving forward always surpasses moving on.

There is a famous scene at the beginning of a Star Wars film, where the main character cuts open an animal to climb inside of it to so that he would survive extremely cold weather. People were shocked by this, and they should be. Do they not consider that wearing fur or leather is the same thing? Shenita Etwaroo

As time passed there was no more buying food, no money, no supplies. On some days, we wouldn’t even have a crumb to eat. There’s a vivid scene in Nanni Loy’s The Four Days of Naples, a movie made after the war about the uprising of the Neapolitans against the occupying Germans, in which one of the young characters sinks his teeth into a loaf of bread so voraciously, so desperately, I can still identify with him. In those four famous days in late September, when Naples rose up against the Germans—even before the Allies arrived, it was the climax of a terrible period of deprivation and marked the beginning of the end of the war in Italy.

In a now famous thought experiment, the philosopher Derek Parfit asks us to imagine a teleportation device that can beam a person from Earth to Mars. Rather than travel for many months on a spaceship, you need only enter a small chamber close to home and push a green button, and all the information in your brain and body will be sent to a similar station on Mars, where you will be reassembled down to the last atom. Imagine that several of your friends have already traveled to Mars this way and seem none the worse for it. They describe the experience as being one of instantaneous relocation: You push the green button and find yourself standing on Mars—where your most recent memory is of pushing the green button on Earth and wondering if anything would happen. So you decide to travel to Mars yourself. However, in the process of arranging your trip, you learn a troubling fact about the mechanics of teleportation: It turns out that the technicians wait for a person’s replica to be built on Mars before obliterating his original body on Earth. This has the benefit of leaving nothing to chance; if something goes wrong in the replication process, no harm has been done. However, it raises the following concern: While your double is beginning his day on Mars with all your memories, goals, and prejudices intact, you will be standing in the teleportation chamber on Earth, just staring at the green button. Imagine a voice coming over the intercom to congratulate you for arriving safely at your destination; in a few moments, you are told, your Earth body will be smashed to atoms. How would this be any different from simply being killed? To

He wanted one thing, the possibility of one thing: to be famous. He wanted to be central to the human family, why else is there to long for, to hope? …He had nothing. He had only the carefully laid out luggage of bourgeois life, his scalp beginning to show beneath the hair, his immaculate hands. And the knowledge; yes, he had knowledge…But knowledge does not protect one. Life is contemptuous of knowledge; it forces it to sit in the anterooms, to wait outside. Passion, energy, lies: these are what life admires. Still, anything can be endured if all humanity is watching. The martyrs prove it. We live in the attention of others. We turn to it as flowers to the sun.

THE STAGE: The stage is empty, and you watch as the figure of Medusa steps into the gas-light. Her body is dressed in a crimson traversed by the golden branches of willow trees, colour and light held into shape by sharp black borders. Lifting languidly her hands, she reaches towards you. Her emerald vipers, in the cohesive movements of unseen mechanisms, weave loops about her head. Music is beginning, and from the shadows off-stage the narrator speaks. “Medusa had a beautiful name and a lovely voice, though no one cared to listen; seeking only the gaze of those famous eyes.” Perseus walks onto the stage, cloaked as though he were the blazing sun. Now what you have to understand is his voice – it is like nothing you could tie down. It feels peaceful to hear it, to see him flow into the song with his fine, clear looks and his finer, clearer voice. Is the head quite forgotten? Not quite but the horror exists alongside the beauty and they flow like twin rivers, and neither is able to wash the other from you.

What is famously called "the midlife crisis" is precisely such an erosion of programs and projections. We expect that by investing sincere energy in a career, a relationship, a set of roles, that they will return the investment in manifold, satisfying ways. We feverishly renew the projections, up the ante, and anxiously repress the insurgence of doubt once more. We do not realize that a projection has occurred, for it is an unconscious mechanism of our energeic unconscious. Only after it has painfully dissolved may we begin to recognize that we placed such a large agenda on such a frangible place, that we asked too much of the beloved, of others, of institutions, and perhaps of life itself.

It is the simplest phrase you can imagine,” Favreau said, “three monosyllabic words that people say to each other every day.” But the speech etched itself in rhetorical lore. It inspired music videos and memes and the full range of reactions that any blockbuster receives online today, from praise to out-of-context humor to arch mockery. Obama’s “Yes, we can” refrain is an example of a rhetorical device known as epistrophe, or the repetition of words at the end of a sentence. It’s one of many famous rhetorical types, most with Greek names, based on some form of repetition. There is anaphora, which is repetition at the beginning of a sentence (Winston Churchill: “We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields”). There is tricolon, which is repetition in short triplicate (Abraham Lincoln: “Government of the people, by the people, and for the people”). There is epizeuxis, which is the same word repeated over and over (Nancy Pelosi: “Just remember these four words for what this legislation means: jobs, jobs, jobs, and jobs”). There is diacope, which is the repetition of a word or phrase with a brief interruption (Franklin D. Roosevelt: “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself”) or, most simply, an A-B-A structure (Sarah Palin: “Drill baby drill!”). There is antithesis, which is repetition of clause structures to juxtapose contrasting ideas (Charles Dickens: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times”). There is parallelism, which is repetition of sentence structure (the paragraph you just read). Finally, there is the king of all modern speech-making tricks, antimetabole, which is rhetorical inversion: “It’s not the size of the dog in the fight; it’s the size of the fight in the dog.” There are several reasons why antimetabole is so popular. First, it’s just complex enough to disguise the fact that it’s formulaic. Second, it’s useful for highlighting an argument by drawing a clear contrast. Third, it’s quite poppy, in the Swedish songwriting sense, building a hook around two elements—A and B—and inverting them to give listeners immediate gratification and meaning. The classic structure of antimetabole is AB;BA, which is easy to remember since it spells out the name of a certain Swedish band.18 Famous ABBA examples in politics include: “Man is not the creature of circumstances. Circumstances are the creatures of men.” —Benjamin Disraeli “East and West do not mistrust each other because we are armed; we are armed because we mistrust each other.” —Ronald Reagan “The world faces a very different Russia than it did in 1991. Like all countries, Russia also faces a very different world.” —Bill Clinton “Whether we bring our enemies to justice or bring justice to our enemies, justice will be done.” —George W. Bush “Human rights are women’s rights and women’s rights are human rights.” —Hillary Clinton In particular, President John F. Kennedy made ABBA famous (and ABBA made John F. Kennedy famous). “Mankind must put an end to war, or war will put an end to mankind,” he said, and “Each increase of tension has produced an increase of arms; each increase of arms has produced an increase of tension,” and most famously, “Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country.” Antimetabole is like the C–G–Am–F chord progression in Western pop music: When you learn it somewhere, you hear it everywhere.19 Difficult and even controversial ideas are transformed, through ABBA, into something like musical hooks.

Margaret [Arlo] was once asked how she felt about her life over the past fifty years. The look in her eyes revealed that she understood the true question: How is it that you continued over fifty years to be as poor as you were at the beginning? ... 'I'm rich-poor,' she said. 'You see, I got my son. I got my Bible. That's all I need. I don't treasure nothin' on earth.

at Dunkin’ Donuts, how did we move our anchor to Starbucks? This is where it gets really interesting. When Howard Shultz created Starbucks, he was as intuitive a businessman as Salvador Assael. He worked diligently to separate Starbucks from other coffee shops, not through price but through ambience. Accordingly, he designed Starbucks from the very beginning to feel like a continental coffeehouse. The early shops were fragrant with the smell of roasted beans (and better-quality roasted beans than those at Dunkin’ Donuts). They sold fancy French coffee presses. The showcases presented alluring snacks—almond croissants, biscotti, raspberry custard pastries, and others. Whereas Dunkin’ Donuts had small, medium, and large coffees, Starbucks offered Short, Tall, Grande, and Venti, as well as drinks with high-pedigree names like Caffè Americano, Caffè Misto, Macchiato, and Frappuccino. Starbucks did everything in its power, in other words, to make the experience feel different—so different that we would not use the prices at Dunkin’ Donuts as an anchor, but instead would be open to the new anchor that Starbucks was preparing for us. And that, to a great extent, is how Starbucks succeeded. GEORGE, DRAZEN, AND I were so excited with the experiments on coherent arbitrariness that we decided to push the idea one step farther. This time, we had a different twist to explore. Do you remember the famous episode in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, the one in which Tom turned the whitewashing of Aunt Polly’s fence into an exercise in manipulating his friends? As I’m sure you recall, Tom applied the paint with gusto, pretending to enjoy the job. “Do you call this work?” Tom told his friends. “Does a boy get a chance to whitewash a fence every day?” Armed with this new “information,” his friends discovered the joys of whitewashing a fence. Before long, Tom’s friends were not only paying him for the privilege, but deriving real pleasure from the task—a win-win outcome if there ever was one. From our perspective, Tom transformed a negative experience to a positive one—he transformed a situation in which compensation was required to one in which people (Tom’s friends) would pay to get in on the fun. Could we do the same? We

One of the most important revelations you can ever have is that your life and your happiness begins and ends inside your own mind. What you say to yourself, how you treat yourself, and the thoughts that run on repeat are everything. It does not matter how successful, thin, famous, muscular, or wealthy you become, if you always focus on what’s “wrong” with you, you’ll never be happy.

Death in Scarsadale. B.S. Latrodectus Mactans Productions. Cosgrove Watt, Marlon R. Gain; 78 mm.; 39 minutes; color; silent w/ closed-captioned subtitles. Mann/Allen parody, a world-famous dermatological endocrinologist (Watt) becomes platonically obsessed with a boy (Bain) he is treating for excessive perspiration, and begins himself to suffer from excessive perspiration. UNRELEASED

All three girls are in their twenties now, and for all their evolution and ostensible liberation, they have no interest in a story that is not about a handsome, famous man. Still, I am their mother, and they understand that they will have to endure me in order to get to him. I take back my place on the sofa and begin again, knowing full well that the parts they’re waiting to hear are the parts I’m never going to tell them.

From insomnia and as a result of the intense struggle against mounting weakness, something strange is happening to me. In the midst of a lecture, tears suddenly choke me, my eyes begin to itch, and I feel a passionate, hysterical desire to stretch my arms out and complain loudly. I want to cry in a loud voice that fate has sentenced me, a famous man, to capital punishment, and that in six months or so another man will be master of this auditorium. I want to cry out that I've been poisoned; new thoughts such as I have never known before have poisoned the last days of my life and go on stinging my brain like mosquitoes. And at such times my situation seems so terrible that I want all my listeners to be horrified, to jump up from their seats and, in panic fear, rush for the exit with a desperate cry. It is not easy to live through such moments.

We know from subsequent leaks that the president was indeed presented with information about the seriousness of the virus and its pandemic potential beginning at least in early January 2020. And yet, as documented by the Washington Post, he repeatedly stated that “it would go away.” On February 10, when there were 12 known cases, he said that he thought the virus would “go away” by April, “with the heat.” On February 25, when there were 53 known cases, he said, “I think that’s a problem that’s going to go away.” On February 27, when there were 60 cases, he said, famously, “We have done an incredible job. We’re going to continue. It’s going to disappear. One day—it’s like a miracle—it will disappear.” On March 6, when there were 278 cases and 14 deaths, again he said, “It’ll go away.” On March 10, when there were 959 cases and 28 deaths, he said, “We’re prepared, and we’re doing a great job with it. And it will go away. Just stay calm. It will go away.” On March 12, with 1,663 cases and 40 deaths recorded, he said, “It’s going to go away.” On March 30, with 161,807 cases and 2,978 deaths, he was still saying, “It will go away. You know it—you know it is going away, and it will go away. And we’re going to have a great victory.” On April 3, with 275,586 cases and 7,087 deaths, he again said, “It is going to go away.” He continued, repeating himself: “It is going away.… I said it’s going away, and it is going away.” In remarks on June 23, when the United States had 126,060 deaths and roughly 2.5 million cases, he said, “We did so well before the plague, and we’re doing so well after the plague. It’s going away.” Such statements continued as both the cases and the deaths kept rising. Neither the virus nor Trump’s statements went away.

In cultural production, Levi-Strauss famously declares, food is both good to eat (bonne a manger) and good to think with (bonne a penser). He means this literally: cooking food begets the idea of heating for other purposes; people who share parts of a cooked deer begin to think they can share parts of a heated house; the abstraction "he is a warm person" (in the sense of "sociable") then becomes possible to think.14 These are domain shifts.

The “German problem” after 1970 became how to keep up with the Germans in terms of efficiency and productivity. One way, as above, was to serially devalue, but that was beginning to hurt. The other way was to tie your currency to the deutsche mark and thereby make your price and inflation rate the same as the Germans, which it turned out would also hurt, but in a different way. The problem with keeping up with the Germans is that German industrial exports have the lowest price elasticities in the world. In plain English, Germany makes really great stuff that everyone wants and will pay more for in comparison to all the alternatives. So when you tie your currency to the deutsche mark, you are making a one-way bet that your industry can be as competitive as the Germans in terms of quality and price. That would be difficult enough if the deutsche mark hadn’t been undervalued for most of the postwar period and both German labor costs and inflation rates were lower than average, but unfortunately for everyone else, they were. That gave the German economy the advantage in producing less-than-great stuff too, thereby undercutting competitors in products lower down, as well as higher up the value-added chain. Add to this contemporary German wages, which have seen real declines over the 2000s, and you have an economy that is extremely hard to keep up with. On the other side of this one-way bet were the financial markets. They looked at less dynamic economies, such as the United Kingdom and Italy, that were tying themselves to the deutsche mark and saw a way to make money. The only way to maintain a currency peg is to either defend it with foreign exchange reserves or deflate your wages and prices to accommodate it. To defend a peg you need lots of foreign currency so that when your currency loses value (as it will if you are trying to keep up with the Germans), you can sell your foreign currency reserves and buy back your own currency to maintain the desired rate. But if the markets can figure out how much foreign currency you have in reserve, they can bet against you, force a devaluation of your currency, and pocket the difference between the peg and the new market value in a short sale. George Soros (and a lot of other hedge funds) famously did this to the European Exchange Rate Mechanism in 1992, blowing the United Kingdom and Italy out of the system. Soros could do this because he knew that there was no way the United Kingdom or Italy could be as competitive as Germany without serious price deflation to increase cost competitiveness, and that there would be only so much deflation and unemployment these countries could take before they either ran out of foreign exchange reserves or lost the next election. Indeed, the European Exchange Rate Mechanism was sometimes referred to as the European “Eternal Recession Mechanism,” such was its deflationary impact. In short, attempts to maintain an anti-inflationary currency peg fail because they are not credible on the following point: you cannot run a gold standard (where the only way to adjust is through internal deflation) in a democracy.

Rosabella Beauty was the daughter of the famous Beauty, a girl whose love had turned the Beast back into a prince. Darling Charming was the daughter of the renowned King Charming, whose royal storyline stretched back to the very beginning of stories. The Charming men had always been known for their heroic deeds, luxurious hair, and enchanting eyes. Darling's two brothers were expected to follow in King Charming's heroic footsteps by saving damsels, slaying dragons, and basically conquering whatever evil stepped into their paths. Darling, however, was not a son. She was a daughter. And being a daughter was a different matter altogether. No heroic deeds were expected of her. No quests or adventures. While the activities of the Charming princes had always been celebrated by poets and storytellers, the Charming princesses had a singular destiny- to be damsels in distress waiting for rescue.

Later on in Culture and Society, Williams scores a few points by reprinting some absolutist sentences that, taken on their own, represent exaggerations or generalisations. It was a strength and weakness of Orwell’s polemical journalism that he would begin an essay with a bold and bald statement designed to arrest attention—a tactic that, as Williams rightly notices, he borrowed in part from GK Chesterton and George Bernard Shaw. No regular writer can re-read his own output of ephemera without encountering a few wince-making moments of this kind; Williams admits to ‘isolating’ them but has some fun all the same. The flat sentence ‘a humanitarian is always a hypocrite’ may contain a particle of truth—does in fact contain such a particle—but will not quite do on its own. Other passages of Orwell’s, on the failure of the Western socialist movement, read more convincingly now than they did when Williams was mocking them, but are somewhat sweeping for all that. And there are the famous outbursts of ill-temper against cranks and vegetarians and homosexuals, which do indeed disfigure the prose and (even though we still admire Pope and Swift for the heroic unfairness of their invective) probably deserve rebuke. However, Williams betrays his hidden bias even when addressing these relatively easy targets. He upbraids Orwell for the repeated use of the diminutive word ‘little’ as an insult (‘The typical Socialist ... a prim little man,’ ‘the typical little bowlerhatted sneak,’ etc.). Now, it is probable that we all overuse the term ‘little’ and its analogues. Williams does at one point—rather ‘loftily’ perhaps—reproach his New Left colleagues for being too ready to dismiss Orwell as ‘petit-bourgeois.’ But what about (I draw the example at random) Orwell’s disgust at the behaviour of the English crowd in the First World War, when ‘wretched little German bakers and hairdressers had their shops sacked by the mob’?

The now-famous yearly Candlebrow Conferences, like the institution itself, were subsidized out of the vast fortune of Mr. Gideon Candlebrow of Grossdale, Illinois, who had made his bundle back during the great Lard Scandal of the '80s, in which, before Congress put an end to the practice, countless adulterated tons of that comestible were exported to Great Britain, compromising further an already debased national cuisine, giving rise throughout the island, for example, to a Christmas-pudding controversy over which to this day families remain divided, often violently so. In the consequent scramble to develop more legal sources of profit, one of Mr. Candlebrow's laboratory hands happened to invent "Smegmo," an artificial substitute for everything in the edible-fat category, including margarine, which many felt wasn't that real to begin with. An eminent Rabbi of world hog capital Cincinnati, Ohio, was moved to declare the product kosher, adding that "the Hebrew people have been waiting four thousand years for this. Smegmo is the Messiah of kitchen fats." [...] Miles, locating the patriotically colored Smegmo crock among the salt, pepper, ketchup, mustard, steak sauce, sugar and molasses, opened and sniffed quizzically at the contents. "Say, what is this stuff?" "Goes with everything!" advised a student at a nearby table. "Stir it in your soup, spread it on your bread, mash it into your turnips! My doormates comb their hair with it! There's a million uses for Smegmo!

The unnamed narrator of Rebecca begins her story with a dream, with a first sentence that has become famous: Last night I dreamed I went to Manderley again. Almost all the brief first chapter is devoted to that dream, describing her progress up the long winding drive, by moonlight, to Manderley itself. The imagery, of entwined trees and encroaching undergrowth that have “mated,” is sexual; the style is slightly scented and overwritten, that of a schoolgirl, trying to speak poetically, and struggling to impress. Moving forward, with a sense of anticipation and revulsion, the dream narrator first sees Manderley as intact; then, coming closer, she realizes her mistake: she is looking at a ruin, at the shell of a once-great house. With this realization—one of key importance to the novel—the dreamer wakes. She confirms that Manderley has indeed been destroyed, and that the dream was a true one. (“Dreaming true” was a term invented by du Maurier’s grandfather, George du Maurier, author of Trilby; it was a concept that fascinated her all her life. Daphne was aware of Freud and Jung: George was not.)

Political economist and sociologist Max Weber famously spoke of the “disenchantment of the world,” as rationalization and science led Europe and America into modern industrial society, pushing back religion and all “magical” theories about reality. Now we are witnessing the disenchantment of the self. One of the many dangers in this process is that if we remove the magic from our image of ourselves, we may also remove it from our image of others. We could become disenchanted with one another. Our image of Homo sapiens underlies our everyday practice and culture; it shapes the way we treat one another as well as how we subjectively experience ourselves. In Western societies, the Judeo-Christian image of humankind—whether you are a believer or not—has secured a minimal moral consensus in everyday life. It has been a major factor in social cohesion. Now that the neurosciences have irrevocably dissolved the Judeo-Christian image of a human being as containing an immortal spark of the divine, we are beginning to realize that they have not substituted anything that could hold society together and provide a common ground for shared moral intuitions and values. An anthropological and ethical vacuum may well follow on the heels of neuroscientific findings. This is a dangerous situation. One potential scenario is that long before neuroscientists and philosophers have settled any of the perennial issues—for example, the nature of the self, the freedom of the will, the relationship between mind and brain, or what makes a person a person—a vulgar materialism might take hold. More and more people will start telling themselves: “I don’t understand what all these neuroexperts and consciousness philosophers are talking about, but the upshot seems pretty clear to me. The cat is out of the bag: We are gene-copying bio- robots, living out here on a lonely planet in a cold and empty physical universe. We have brains but no immortal souls, and after seventy years or so the curtain drops. There will never be an afterlife, or any kind of reward or punishment for anyone, and ultimately everyone is alone. I get the message, and you had better believe I will adjust my behavior to it. It would probably be smart not to let anybody know I’ve seen through the game.

In retrospect one’s life is subject to invention and distortion. Documentation is often scanty, and what survives rarely predicts a famous life. Indeed, fame begins with the mundane: a messy birth, a crying baby, health and sickness, parents, family, schooling. Later, we consciously and unconsciously edit our lives: saving some papers, throwing much away; telling and retelling certain stories and suppressing much more. By the time a biographer relates a life, much of it has faded into well-tailored memory, an open arena for creative retelling or outright invention.

At this point, perhaps you Hushlanders are beginning to doubt the truth of this narrative. You have seen several odd and inexplicable things happen. (Though, just as a warning, the story so far has actually been quite tame. Just wait until we get to the part with the talking dinosaurs.) Some readers might even think that I’m just making this story up. You might think that everything in this book is dreamy silliness. This book is serious. Terribly serious. Your skepticism results from a lifetime of training in the Librarians’ school system, where you were taught all kinds of lies. Indeed, you’d probably never even heard of the Smedrys, despite the fact that they are the most famous family of Oculators in the entire world. In most parts of the Free Kingdoms, being a Smedry is considered equivalent to being nobility. (If you wish to perform a fun test, next time you are in history class, ask your teacher about the Smedrys. If your teacher is a Librarian spy, he or she will get red-faced and give you a detention. If, on the other hand, your teacher is innocent, he or she will simply be confused, then likely give you a detention.)

Charity means pardoning what is unpardonable, or it is no virtue at all. Hope means hoping when things are hopeless, or it is no virtue at all. And faith means believing the incredible, or it is no virtue at all. It is somewhat amusing, indeed, to notice the difference between the fate of these three paradoxes in the fashion of the modern mind. Charity is a fashionable virtue in our time; it is lit up by the gigantic firelight of Dickens. Hope is a fashionable virtue to-day; our attention has been arrested for it by the sudden and silver trumpet of Stevenson. But faith is unfashionable, and it is customary on every side to cast against it the fact that it is a paradox. Everybody mockingly repeats the famous childish definition that faith is “the power of believing that which we know to be untrue.” Yet it is not one atom more paradoxical than hope or charity. Charity is the power of defending that which we know to be indefensible. Hope is the power of being cheerful in circumstances which we know to be desperate. It is true that there is a state of hope which belongs to bright prospects and the morning; but that is not the virtue of hope. The virtue of hope exists only in earthquake and, eclipse. It is true that there is a thing crudely called charity, which means charity to the deserving poor; but charity to the deserving is not charity at all, but justice. It is the undeserving who require it, and the ideal either does not exist at all, or exists wholly for them. For practical purposes it is at the hopeless moment that we require the hopeful man, and the virtue either does not exist at all, or begins to exist at that moment. Exactly at the instant when hope ceases to be reasonable it begins to be useful.

The injured person’s reaction to the trauma only exercises a completely ‘cathartic’ effect if it is an adequate reaction - as, for instance, revenge. But language serves as a substitute for action; by its help, an affect can be ‘abreacted’ almost as effectively. In other cases speaking is itself the adequate reflex, when, for instance, it is a lamentation or giving utterance to a tormenting secret, e.g. a confession. If there is no such reaction, whether in deeds or words, or in the mildest cases in tears, any recollection of the event retains its affective tone to begin with.

The briefing begins with what was to become Boyd’s most famous—and least understood—legacy: the Observe-Orient-Decide-Act cycle, or O-O-D-A Loop. Today, anyone can hook up to an Internet browser, type “OODA Loop,” and find more than one thousand references. The phrase has become a buzz word in the military and among business consultants who preach a time-based strategy. But few of those who speak so glibly about the OODA Loop have a true understanding of what it means and what it can do. (Boyd preferred “O-O-D-A Loop” but soon gave up and accepted “OODA” because most people wrote it that way.)

Isaiah 40–66 is of the utmost importance for the Gospels’ self-understanding and proclamation. Sprinkled throughout all the Gospels, but especially Matthew and Luke, are direct quotations, strong allusions, and subtle echoes from Isaiah. We can say without overstatement that the eschatological vision of Isaiah 40–66 serves as the primary subtext and framing for the Gospels’ witness.[41] This is not a new insight, as is witnessed by the centrality of Isaiah in Christian interpretation, in everything from homily and commentary to Handel’s famous oratorio Messiah, which begins with the tenor aria “Comfort, O Comfort my People” (from Isa. 40:1).

What happened? Many things. But the overriding problem was this: The auto industry got too comfortable. As Intel cofounder Andy Grove once famously proclaimed, “Only the paranoid survive.” Success, he meant, is fragile—and perfection, fleeting. The moment you begin to take success for granted is the moment a competitor lunges for your jugular. Auto industry executives, to say the least, were not paranoid. Instead of listening to a customer base that wanted smaller, more fuel-efficient cars, the auto executives built bigger and bigger. Instead of taking seriously new competition from Japan, they staunchly insisted (both to themselves and to their customers) that MADE IN THE USA automatically meant “best in the world.” Instead of trying to learn from their competitors’ new methods of “lean manufacturing,” they clung stubbornly to their decades-old practices. Instead of rewarding the best people in the organization and firing the worst, they promoted on the basis of longevity and nepotism. Instead of moving quickly to keep up with the changing market, executives willingly embraced “death by committee.” Ross Perot once quipped that if a man saw a snake on the factory floor at GM, they’d form a committee to analyze whether they should kill it. Easy success had transformed the American auto

Here is the voice of my main Character in my Talon book series, I’ll let her introduce herself to you: My name is Matica and I am a special needs child with a growth disability. I am stuck in the body of a two year old, even though I am ten years old when my story begins in the first book of the Talon series, TALON, COME FLY WITH ME. Because of that disability, (I am saying ‘that’ disability, not ‘my’ disability because it’s a thing that happens to me, nothing more and because I am not accepting it as something bad. I can say that now after I learned to cope with it.) I was rejected by the local Indians as they couldn’t understand that that condition is not a sickness and so it can’t be really cured. It’s just a disorder of my body. But I never gave up on life and so I had lots of adventures roaming around the plateau where we live in Peru, South America, with my mother’s blessings. But after I made friends with my condors I named Tamo and Tima, everything changed. It changed for the good. I was finally loved. And I am the hero and I embrace my problem. In better words: I had embraced my problem before I made friends with my condors Tamo and Tima. I held onto it and I felt sorry for myself and cried a lot, wanting to run away or something worse. But did it help me? Did it become better? Did I grow taller? No, nothing of that helped me. I didn’t have those questions when I was still in my sorrow, but all these questions came to me later, after I was loved and was cherished. One day I looked up into the sky and saw the majestic condors flying in the air. Here and now, I made up my mind. I wanted to become friends with them. I believed if I could achieve that, all my sorrow and rejection would be over. And true enough, it was over. I was loved. I even became famous. And so, if you are in a situation, with whatever your problem is, find something you could rely on and stick to it, love that and do with that what you were meant to do. And I never run from conflicts.

Take one famous example: arguments about property destruction after Seattle. Most of these, I think, were really arguments about capitalism. Those who decried window-breaking did so mainly because they wished to appeal to middle-class consumers to move towards global exchange-style green consumerism, and to ally with labor bureaucracies and social democrats abroad. This was not a path designed to provoke a direct confrontation with capitalism, and most of those who urged us to take this route were at least skeptical about the possibility that capitalism could ever really be defeated. Many were in fact in favor of capitalism, if in a significantly humanized form. Those who did break windows, on the other hand, didn't care if they offended suburban homeowners, because they did not figure that suburban homeowners were likely to ever become a significant element in any future revolutionary anticapitalist coalition. They were trying, in effect, to hijack the media to send a message that the system was vulnerable -- hoping to inspire similar insurrectionary acts on the part of those who might be considering entering a genuinely revolutionary alliance; alienated teenagers, oppressed people of color, undocumented workers, rank-and-file laborers impatient with union bureaucrats, the homeless, the unemployed, the criminalized, the radically discontent. If a militant anticapitalist movement was to begin, in America, it would have to start with people like these: people who don't need to be convinced that the system is rotten, only, that there's something they can do about it. And at any rate, even if it were possible to have an anticapitalist revolution without gun-battles in the streets -- which most of us are hoping it is, since let's face it, if we come up against the US army, we will lose -- there's no possible way we could have an anticapitalist revolution while at the same time scrupulously respecting property rights. Yes, that will probably mean the suburban middle class will be the last to come on board. But they would probably be the last to come on board anyway.

Contrary to Nietzsche’s famous maxim, perfectionists aren’t strengthened in the trying times. They’re weakened. Left untreated, repeated knockdowns so injure perfectionists’ self-esteem that they begin to feel helpless, and in extreme cases like mine, hopeless. No wonder perfectionism is so enormously damaging. ‘There’s this assumption that perfectionism means we’re more resilient,’ Paul told me. ‘But actually, perfectionism is the opposite of resilience – anti-resilience – if you will. It makes people extremely insecure, self-conscious and vulnerable to even the smallest hassles. If you don’t seek help, it’s easy to see how that vulnerability creates substantial, deep-rooted and enduring distress.

And then, so quickly that no one (unless they knew, as Peter did) could quite see how it happened, Edmund flashed his sword round with a peculiar twist, the Dwarf’s sword flew out of his grip, and Trumpkin was wringing his empty hand as you do after a “sting” from a cricket-bat. “Not hurt, I hope, my dear little friend?” said Edmund, panting a little and returning his own sword to its sheath. “I see the point,” said Trumpkin drily. “You know a trick I never learned.” “That’s quite true,” put in Peter. “The best swordsman in the world may be disarmed by a trick that’s new to him. I think it’s only fair to give Trumpkin a chance at something else. Will you have a shooting match with my sister? There are no tricks in archery, you know.” “Ah, you’re jokers, you are,” said the Dwarf. “I begin to see. As if I didn’t know how she can shoot, after what happened this morning. All the same, I’ll have a try.” He spoke gruffly, but his eyes brightened, for he was a famous bowman among his own people. All five of them came out into the courtyard. “What’s to be the target?” asked Peter. “I think that apple hanging over the wall on the branch there would do,” said Susan. “That’ll do nicely, lass,” said Trumpkin. “You mean the yellow one near the middle of the arch?” “No, not that,” said Susan. “The red one up above--over the battlement.” The Dwarf’s face fell. “Looks more like a cherry than an apple,” he muttered, but he said nothing out loud.

The great psychologist Dr. George W. Crane said in his famous book Applied Psychology, “Remember, motions are the precursors of emotions. You can’t control the latter directly but only through your choice of motions or actions. . . . To avoid this all too common tragedy (marital difficulties and misunderstandings) become aware of the true psychological facts. Go through the proper motions each day and you’ll soon begin to feel the corresponding emotions! Just be sure you and your mate go through those motions of dates and kisses, the phrasing of sincere daily compliments, plus the many other little courtesies, and you need not worry about the emotion of love. You can’t act devoted for very long without feeling devoted.

Your Eve was wise, John. She knew that Paradise would make her mad, if she were to live forever with Adam and know no other thing but strawberries and tigers and rivers of milk. She knew they would tire of these things, and each other. They would grow to hate every fruit, every stone, every creature they touched. Yet where could they go to find any new thing? It takes strength to live in Paradise and not collapse under the weight of it. It is every day a trial. And so Eve gave her lover the gift of time, time to the timeless, so that they could grasp at happiness. ... And this is what Queen Abir gave to us, her apple in the garden, her wisdom--without which we might all have leapt into the Rimal in a century. The rite bears her name still. For she knew the alchemy of demarcation far better than any clock, and decreed that every third century husbands and wives should separate, customs should shift and parchmenters become architects, architects farmers of geese and monkeys, Kings should become fishermen, and fishermen become players of scenes. Mothers and fathers should leave their children and go forth to get other sons and daughters, or to get none if that was their wish. On the roads of Pentexore folk might meet who were once famous lovers, or a mother and child of uncommon devotion--and they would laugh, and remember, but call each other by new names, and begin again as friends, or sisters, or lovers, or enemies. And some time hence all things would be tossed up into the air once more and land in some other pattern. If not for this, how fastened, how frozen we would be, bound to one self, forever a mother, forever a child. We anticipate this refurbishing of the world like children at a holiday. We never know what we will be, who we will love in our new, brave life, how deeply we will wish and yearn and hope for who knows what impossible thing! Well, we anticipate it. There is fear too, and grief. There is shaking, and a worry deep in the bone. Only the Oinokha remains herself for all time--that is her sacrifice for us. There is sadness in all this, of course--and poets with long elegant noses have sung ballads full of tears that break at one blow the hearts of a flock of passing crows! But even the most ardent lover or doting father has only two hundred years to wait until he may try again at the wheel of the world, and perhaps the wheel will return his wife or his son to him. Perhaps not. Wheels, and worlds, are cruel. Time to the timeless, apples to those who live without hunger. There is nothing so sweet and so bitter, nothing so fine and so sharp.

There is only one historical development that has real significance. Today, when we finally realise that the keys to happiness are in the hands of our biochemical system, we can stop wasting our time on politics and social reforms, putsches and ideologies, and focus instead on the only thing that can make us truly happy: manipulating our biochemistry. If we invest billions in understanding our brain chemistry and developing appropriate treatments, we can make people far happier than ever before, without any need of revolutions. Prozac, for example, does not change regimes, but by raising serotonin levels it lifts people out of their depression. Nothing captures the biological argument better than the famous New Age slogan: ‘Happiness begins within.’ Money, social status, plastic surgery, beautiful houses, powerful positions – none of these will bring you happiness. Lasting happiness comes only from serotonin, dopamine and oxytocin.1 In Aldous Huxley’s dystopian novel Brave New World, published in 1932 at the height of the Great Depression, happiness is the supreme value and psychiatric drugs replace the police and the ballot as the foundation of politics. Every day, each person takes a dose of ‘soma’, a synthetic drug which makes people happy without harming their productivity and efficiency. The World State that governs the entire globe is never threatened by wars, revolutions, strikes or demonstrations, because all people are supremely content with their current conditions, whatever they may be. Huxley’s vision of the future is far more troubling than George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. Huxley’s world seems monstrous to most readers, but it is hard to explain why. Everybody is happy all the time – what could be wrong with that?

Even if there is only one possible unified theory, it is just a set of rules and equations. What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe? The usual approach of science of constructing a mathematical model cannot answer the questions of why there should be a universe for the model to describe. Why does the universe go to all the bother of existing? Is the unified theory so compelling that it brings about its own existence? Or does it need a creator, and, if so, does he have any other effect on the universe? And who created him? Up to now, most scientists have been too occupied with the development of new theories that describe what the universe is to ask the question why. On the other hand, the people whose business it is to ask why, the philosophers, have not been able to keep up with the advance of scientific theories. In the eighteenth century, philosophers considered the whole of human knowledge, including science, to be their field and discussed questions such as: did the universe have a beginning? However, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, science became too technical and mathematical for the philosophers, or anyone else except a few specialists. Philosophers reduced the scope of their inquiries so much that Wittgenstein, the most famous philosopher of this century, said, “The sole remaining task for philosophy is the analysis of language.” What a comedown from the great tradition of philosophy from Aristotle to Kant! However, if we do discover a complete theory, it should in time be understandable in broad principle by everyone, not just a few scientists. Then we shall all, philosophers, scientists, and just ordinary people, be able to take part in the discussion of the question of why it is that we and the universe exist. If we find the answer to that, it would be the ultimate triumph of human reason – for then we would know the mind of God.

Then at last, when he could stand it no longer, he would peel back a tiny bit of the paper wrapping at one corner to expose a tiny bit of chocolate, and then he would take a tiny nibble – just enough to allow the lovely sweet taste to spread out slowly over his tongue. The next day, he would take another tiny nibble, and so on, and so on. And in this way, Charlie would make his sixpenny bar of birthday chocolate last him for more than a month. But I haven’t yet told you about the one awful thing that tortured little Charlie, the lover of chocolate, more than anything else. This thing, for him, was far, far worse than seeing slabs of chocolate in the shop windows or watching other children munching bars of creamy chocolate right in front of him. It was the most terrible torturing thing you could imagine, and it was this: In the town itself, actually within sight of the house in which Charlie lived, there was an ENORMOUS CHOCOLATE FACTORY! Just imagine that! And it wasn’t simply an ordinary enormous chocolate factory, either. It was the largest and most famous in the whole world! It was WONKA’S FACTORY, owned by a man called Mr Willy Wonka, the greatest inventor and maker of chocolates that there has ever been. And what a tremendous, marvellous place it was! It had huge iron gates leading into it, and a high wall surrounding it, and smoke belching from its chimneys, and strange whizzing sounds coming from deep inside it. And outside the walls, for half a mile around in every direction, the air was scented with the heavy rich smell of melting chocolate! Twice a day, on his way to and from school, little Charlie Bucket had to walk right past the gates of the factory. And every time he went by, he would begin to walk very, very slowly, and he would hold his nose high in the air and take long deep sniffs of the gorgeous chocolatey smell all around him. Oh, how he loved that smell! And oh, how he wished he could go inside the factory and see what it was like!

For realists, the state is the main actor and sovereignty is its distinguishing trait. The meaning of the sovereign state is inextricably bound up with the use of force. In terms of its internal dimension, to illustrate this relationship between violence and the state we need to look no further than Max Weber’s famous definition of the state as ‘the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory’(M. J. Smith 1986: 23).3 Within this territorial space, sovereignty means that the state has supreme authority to make and enforce laws. This is the basis of the unwritten contract between individuals and the state. According to Hobbes, for example, we trade our liberty in return for a guarantee of security. Once security has been established, civil society can begin. But in the absence of security, there can be no art, no culture, no society. The first move, then, for the realist is to organize power domestically. Only after power has been organized, can community begin.

Near the exit to the blue patio, DeCoverley Pox and Joaquin Stick stand by a concrete scale model of the Jungfrau, ... socking the slopes of the famous mountain with red rubber hot-water bags full of ice cubes, the idea being to pulverize the ice for Pirate's banana frappes. With their nights' growths of beard, matted hair, bloodshot eyes, miasmata of foul breath, DeCoverley and Joaquin are wasted gods urging on a tardy glacier. Elsewhere in the maisonette, other drinking companions disentangle from blankets (one spilling wind from his, dreaming of a parachute), piss into bathroom sinks, look at themselves with dismay in concave shaving mirrors, slab water with no clear plan in mind onto heads of thinning hair, struggle into Sam Brownes, dub shoes against rain later in the day with hand muscles already weary of it, sing snatches of popular songs whose tunes they don't always know, lie, believing themselves warmed, in what patches of the new sunlight come between the mullions, begin tentatively to talk shop as a way of easing into whatever it is they'll have to be doing in less than an hour, lather necks and faces, yawn, pick their noses, search cabinets or bookcases for the hair of the dog that not without provocation and much prior conditioning bit them last night. Now there grows among all the rooms, replacing the night's old smoke, alcohol and sweat, the fragile, musaceous odor of Breakfast:flowery, permeating, surprising, more than the color of winter sunlight, taking over not so much through any brute pungency or volume as by the high intricacy to the weaving of its molecules, sharing the conjuror's secret by which-- though it is not often Death is told so clearly to fuck off--- the genetic chains prove labyrinthine enough to preserve some human face down ten or twenty generations. . . so the same assertion-through-structure allows this war morning's banana fragrance to meander, repossess, prevail. Is there any reason not to open every window, and let the kind scent blanket all Chelsea? As a spell, against falling objects. . . .

Which meant, if somehow GameStop did start to go up, the people who had shorted the company would begin to feel pressure to buy; the more the stock went up, the heavier that pressure became. As the shorts began to cover, buying shares to return them to their lenders, the stock would rise even higher. In financial parlance, this was something called a 'short squeeze.' It didn't happen often, but when it did, it could be spectacular. Most famously, in 2008, a surprise takeover attempt of the German automaker Volkswagen by rival Porsche drove Volkswagen's stock price up by a factor of 5 — briefly making it the most valuable company in the world — in two quick days of trading, as short selling funds struggled to cover their positions. Similarly, a battle between two hedge fund titans — Bill Ackman, of Pershing Square Capital Management, and Carl Icahn — led to a squeeze involving supplement maker — and alleged pyramid marketer — Herbalife, which cost Ackman a reported $1 billion. And perhaps the first widely reported short squeeze dated back a century, to 1923, when grocery magnate Clarence Saunders successfully decimated short sellers who had targeted his nascent chain of Piggly Wiggly grocery stores.

We aren’t simply looking at a demographically induced economic breakdown; we are looking at the end of a half millennium of economic history. At present, I see only two preexisting economic models that might work for the world we’re (d)evolving into. Both are very old-school: The first is plain ol’ imperialism. For this to work, the country in question must have a military, especially one with a powerful navy capable of large-scale amphibious assault. That military ventures forth to conquer territories and peoples, and then exploits said territories and peoples in whatever way it wishes: forcing conquered labor to craft products, stripping conquered territories of resources, treating conquered people as a captive market for its own products, etc. The British Empire at its height excelled at this, but to be honest, so did any other post-Columbus political entity that used the word “empire” in its name. If this sounds like mass slavery with some geographic and legal displacement between master and slave, you’re thinking in the right general direction. The second is something called mercantilism, an economic system in which you heavily restrict the ability of anyone to export anything to your consumer base, but in which you also ram whatever of your production you can down the throats of anyone else. Such ramming is often done with a secondary goal of wrecking local production capacity so the target market is dependent upon you in the long term. The imperial-era French engaged in mercantilism as a matter of course, but so too did any up-and-coming industrial power. The British famously product-dumped on the Germans in the early 1800s, while the Germans did the same to anyone they could reach in the late 1800s. One could argue (fairly easily) that mercantilism was more or less the standard national economic operating policy for China in the 2000s and 2010s (under American strategic cover, no less). In essence, both possible models would be implemented with an eye toward sucking other peoples dry, and transferring the pain of general economic dislocation from the invaders to the invaded. Getting a larger slice of a smaller pie, as it were. Both models might theoretically work in a poorer, more violent, more fractured world—particularly if they are married. But even together, some version of imperialist mercantilism faces a singular, overarching, likely condemning problem: Too many guns, not enough boots.

Harper walked over to her reception desk. “What’s with the Tyson look-alikes out there? I almost couldn’t get in here.” Pixie frowned. “Better go ask your boy-o. Famous rock star in the house.” Pixie accentuated her comment with the poke of her pen. Jeez, he was huge. And built. And shirtless. Okay, enough staring. Well, maybe just for another second. Trent was leaning over the guy, and she could tell from the wide-reaching spread of purple transfer lines that he was just beginning a sleeve on the other man’s lower arm. The guy in the chair might well be a rock star— although Harper would never admit she had no clue who he was— but he was wincing. Harper could totally feel for him. Trent was in his usual position— hat on backward, gloves on, and perched on a stool. Harper approached them nervously. The big guy’s size and presence were a little intimidating. “I don’t bite.” Oh God. He was talking to her. “Excuse me?” He sucked air in between clenched teeth. “I said I don’t bite. You can come closer.” His blue eyes were sparkling as he studied her closely. Trent looked up. “Hey, darlin’,” he said, putting the tattoo machine down and reaching for her hand. “Dred, this is my girl, Harper. Harper, this is Dred Zander from the band Preload. He’s one of the other judges I told you about.” Wow. Not that she knew much about the kind of music that Trent listened to, but even she had heard of Preload. That certainly explained the security outside. Dred reached out his hand and shook hers. “Nice to meet you, Harper. And a pity. For a minute, I thought you were coming over to see me.” “No,” Harper exclaimed quickly, looking over at Trent, who was grinning at her. “I mean, no, I was just bringing Trent some cookies.” Holy shit. Was she really that lame? It was like that moment in Dirty Dancing when Baby told Johnny she carried a watermelon. Dred turned and smiled enigmatically at Trent. “I see what you mean, man.” “Give.” Smiling, Trent held out his hand. Reaching inside her bag, she pulled out the cookies and handed the container to him. “Seriously, dude, she’s the best fucking cook on the planet.” Trent paused to take a giant bite. “You got to try one,” he mumbled, offering the container over. Harper watched, mortified, as a modern-day rock legend bit into one of her cookies. Dred chewed and groaned. “These are almost as good as sex.” Harper laughed. “Not quite,” Trent responded, giving her a look that made her burn. “You should try her pot roast. Could bring a grown man to his knees.

Major General Leonard Wood Leonard Wood was an army officer and physician, born October 9, 1860 in Winchester, New Hampshire. His first assignment was in 1886 at Fort Huachuca, Arizona where he fought in the last campaign against the fierce Apache warrior Geronimo. He was awarded the Medal of Honor for carrying dispatches 100 miles through hostile territory and was promoted to the rank of Captain, commanding a detachment of the 8th Infantry. From 1887 to 1898, he served as a medical officer in a number of positions, the last of which was as the personal physician to President William McKinley. In 1898 at the beginning of the war with Spain, he was given command of the 1st Volunteer Cavalry. The regiment was soon to be known as the “Rough Riders." Wood lead his men on the famous charge up San Juan Hill and was given a field promotion to brigadier general. In 1898 he was appointed the Military Governor of Santiago de Cuba. In 1920, as a retired Major General, Wood ran as the Republican candidate for the presidency of the United States, losing to Warren Harding. In 1921 following his defeat, General Wood accepted the post of Governor General of the Philippines. He held this position from 1921 to 1927, when he died of a brain tumor in Boston, on 7 August 1927, at 66 years of age after which he was buried, with full honors, in Arlington National Cemetery.

In about 1980, he says, at a time when he was still struggling to articulate his own vision of a dynamic, evolving economy, he happened to read a book by the geneticist Richard Lewontin. And he was struck by a passage in which Lewontin said that scientists come in two types. Scientists of the first type see the world as being basically in equilibrium. And if untidy forces sometimes push a system slightly out of equilibrium, then they feel the whole trick is to push it back again. Lewontin called these scientists "Platonists," after the renowned Athenian philosopher who declared that the messy, imperfect objects we see around us are merely the reflections of perfect "archetypes." Scientists of the second type, however, see the world as a process of flow and change, with the same material constantly going around and around in endless combinations. Lewontin called these scientists "Heraclitans," after the Ionian philosopher who passionately and poetically argued that the world is in a constant state of flux. Heraclitus, who lived nearly a century before Plato, is famous for observing that "Upon those who step into the same rivers flow other and yet other waters," a statement that Plato himself paraphrased as "You can never step into the same river twice." "When I read what Lewontin said," says Arthur, "it was a moment of revelation. That's when it finally became clear to me what was going on. I thought to myself, "Yes! We're finally beginning to recover from Newton.

Spirituality is more about whether or not we can sleep at night than about whether or not we go to church. It is about being integrated or falling apart, about being within community or being lonely, about being in harmony with Mother Earth or being alienated from her. Irrespective of whether or not we let ourselves be consciously shaped by any explicit religious idea, we act in ways that leave us either healthy or unhealthy, loving or bitter. What shapes our actions is our spirituality. And what shapes our actions is basically what shapes our desire. Desire makes us act and when we act what we do will either lead to a greater integration or disintegration within our personalities, minds, and bodies—and to the strengthening or deterioration of our relationship to God, others, and the cosmic world. The habits and disciplines5 we use to shape our desire form the basis for a spirituality, regardless of whether these have an explicit religious dimension to them or even whether they are consciously expressed at all. Spirituality concerns what we do with desire. It takes its root in the eros inside of us and it is all about how we shape and discipline that eros. John of the Cross, the great Spanish mystic, begins his famous treatment of the soul’s journey with the words: “One dark night, fired by love’s urgent longings.”6 For him, it is urgent longings, eros, that are the starting point of the spiritual life and, in his view, spirituality, essentially defined, is how we handle that eros.

Catching my eye in the mirror, Mrs. Armiger said, “Your mother tells me you’ve forgotten how to play the parlor organ, Andrew.” I began to apologize, but Mrs. Armiger hushed me. “It’s all right, dear. I understand.” She paused to adjust her hat. “In the fall, we shall begin your lessons again. We’ll get along famously this time, won’t we?” Not daring to meet Theo’s eyes, I said, “Yes, ma’am.” Mrs. Armiger smiled at Mama. “I can’t believe he’s the same boy. Do you suppose some other child put that glue in my metronome after all? Surely it wasn’t this dear angel who drew a mustache on my bust of Beethoven. Nor could he have been the rascal who climbed out my window on recital day and hid in a tree.” She squeezed my shoulder just hard enough to hurt. “No, no, no--not this sweet little fellow. It must have been some naughty boy who looked just like him.” After she and Mama shared a chuckle, Mrs. Armiger hugged me. “I believe I can make a perfect gentleman out of this child.” When Theo heard hat, the laughter he’d been struggling to control exploded in a series of loud snorts. He tried to pretend he was choking on his phosphate, but he didn’t fool Mama. “Music lessons are exactly what Theodore needs,” she told Mrs. Armiger. “The discipline will do him good. Suppose I sent both boys to you every Wednesday afternoon?” While Mrs. Armiger and Mama made plans, I stirred the chocolate sauce into my ice cream, appetite gone. Beside me, Theo seethed. He was blaming everything on me--the scolding, the music lessons, Mrs. Armiger. It was all my fault. He hated me.

Westerners, not just Lincoln Steffens. It took in the Central Intelligence Agency of the United States. It even took in the Soviet Union’s own leaders, such as Nikita Khrushchev, who famously boasted in a speech to Western diplomats in 1956 that “we will bury you [the West].” As late as 1977, a leading academic textbook by an English economist argued that Soviet-style economies were superior to capitalist ones in terms of economic growth, providing full employment and price stability and even in producing people with altruistic motivation. Poor old Western capitalism did better only at providing political freedom. Indeed, the most widely used university textbook in economics, written by Nobel Prize–winner Paul Samuelson, repeatedly predicted the coming economic dominance of the Soviet Union. In the 1961 edition, Samuelson predicted that Soviet national income would overtake that of the United States possibly by 1984, but probably by 1997. In the 1980 edition there was little change in the analysis, though the two dates were delayed to 2002 and 2012. Though the policies of Stalin and subsequent Soviet leaders could produce rapid economic growth, they could not do so in a sustained way. By the 1970s, economic growth had all but stopped. The most important lesson is that extractive institutions cannot generate sustained technological change for two reasons: the lack of economic incentives and resistance by the elites. In addition, once all the very inefficiently used resources had been reallocated to industry, there were few economic gains to be had by fiat. Then the Soviet system hit a roadblock, with lack of innovation and poor economic incentives preventing any further progress. The only area in which the Soviets did manage to sustain some innovation was through enormous efforts in military and aerospace technology. As a result they managed to put the first dog, Leika, and the first man, Yuri Gagarin, in space. They also left the world the AK-47 as one of their legacies. Gosplan was the supposedly all-powerful planning agency in charge of the central planning of the Soviet economy. One of the benefits of the sequence of five-year plans written and administered by Gosplan was supposed to have been the long time horizon necessary for rational investment and innovation. In reality, what got implemented in Soviet industry had little to do with the five-year plans, which were frequently revised and rewritten or simply ignored. The development of industry took place on the basis of commands by Stalin and the Politburo, who changed their minds frequently and often completely revised their previous decisions. All plans were labeled “draft” or “preliminary.” Only one copy of a plan labeled “final”—that for light industry in 1939—has ever come to light. Stalin himself said in 1937 that “only bureaucrats can think that planning work ends with the creation of the plan. The creation of the plan is just the beginning. The real direction of the plan develops only after the putting together of the plan.” Stalin wanted to maximize his discretion to reward people or groups who were politically loyal, and punish those who were not. As for Gosplan, its main role was to provide Stalin with information so he could better monitor his friends and enemies. It actually tried to avoid making decisions. If you made a decision that turned

After three weeks of lectures and receptions in New York, Einstein paid a visit to Washington. For reasons fathomable only by those who live in that capital, the Senate decided to debate the theory of relativity. Among the leaders asserting that it was incomprehensible were Pennsylvania Republican Boies Penrose, famous for once uttering that “public office is the last refuge of a scoundrel,” and Mississippi Democrat John Sharp Williams, who retired a year later, saying, “I’d rather be a dog and bay at the moon than stay in the Senate another six years.” On the House side of the Capitol, Representative J. J. Kindred of New York proposed placing an explanation of Einstein’s theories in the Congressional Record. David Walsh of Massachusetts rose to object. Did Kindred understand the theory? “I have been earnestly busy with this theory for three weeks,” he replied, “and am beginning to see some light.” But what relevance, he was asked, did it have to the business of Congress? “It may bear upon the legislation of the future as to general relations with the cosmos.” Such discourse made it inevitable that, when Einstein went with a group to the White House on April 25, President Warren G. Harding would be faced with the question of whether he understood relativity. As the group posed for cameras, President Harding smiled and confessed that he did not comprehend the theory at all. The Washington Post carried a cartoon showing him puzzling over a paper titled “Theory of Relativity” while Einstein puzzled over one on the “Theory of Normalcy,” which was the name Harding gave to his governing philosophy. The New York Times ran a page 1 headline: “Einstein Idea Puzzles Harding, He Admits.

Favorite painting...?" "Painting? Odalisque," I said. "Really.His non-nude nude. Interesting." It was,to me. Edward's most famous painting of Diana is Troie, where he painted her as Helen of Troy: naked except for the diamond bracelet and the occasional tendril of auburn hair. It had caused quite a stir at its exhibition. Apparently, Millicent Carnegie Biddle fainted on seeing it. It wasn't quite what she was used to viewing when she sat across from Mrs. Edward Willing every few weeks, sipping tea from Wedgewood china cups. Odalisque was more daring in its way, and infinitely more interesting to me. Most of the Post-Impressionist painters did an odalisque, or harem girl, reclining on a sofa or carpet, promising with their eyes that whatever it was that they did to men, they did it well. An odalisque was almost compulsory material.But unlike any of them,Edward had painted his subject-Diana-covered from neck to ankle in shimmery gauze.Covered,but still the ultimate object of desire. "Why that one?" Dr. Rothaus asked. "I don't know-" "Oh,please.Don't go all stupid teenager on me now.You know exactly why you like the painting.Humor me and articulate it." I felt myself beginning the ubiquitos shoulder dip. "Okay. Everyone is covering up something. I guess I think there's an interesting question there." "'What are they hiding?'" I shook my head. "'Does it make a difference?'" "Ah." One sharp corner of her mouth lifted. I would hesitate to call it a smile. "That is interesting.But your favorite Willing piece isn't a painting." "How-" "You hesitated when I asked. Let me guess...Ravaged Man?" "How-" "You're a young woman. And-" Dr. Rothaus levered herself off the desk-"you went through the 1899 file. I know the archive.

Over the next year, he practiced every day. In his diary, he wrote as if his control over himself and his choices was never in question. He got married. He started teaching at Harvard. He began spending time with Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., who would go on to become a Supreme Court justice, and Charles Sanders Peirce, a pioneer in the study of semiotics, in a discussion group they called the Metaphysical Club.9.30 Two years after writing his diary entry, James sent a letter to the philosopher Charles Renouvier, who had expounded at length on free will. “I must not lose this opportunity of telling you of the admiration and gratitude which have been excited in me by the reading of your Essais,” James wrote. “Thanks to you I possess for the first time an intelligible and reasonable conception of freedom.… I can say that through that philosophy I am beginning to experience a rebirth of the moral life; and I can assure you, sir, that this is no small thing.” Later, he would famously write that the will to believe is the most important ingredient in creating belief in change. And that one of the most important methods for creating that belief was habits. Habits, he noted, are what allow us to “do a thing with difficulty the first time, but soon do it more and more easily, and finally, with sufficient practice, do it semi-mechanically, or with hardly any consciousness at all.” Once we choose who we want to be, people grow “to the way in which they have been exercised, just as a sheet of paper or a coat, once creased or folded, tends to fall forever afterward into the same identical folds.” If you believe you can change—if you make it a habit—the change becomes real. This is the real power of habit: the insight that your habits are what you choose them to be. Once that choice occurs—and becomes automatic—it’s not only real, it starts to seem inevitable, the thing, as James wrote, that bears “us irresistibly toward our destiny, whatever the latter may be.

Never, perhaps, since Paul wrote has there been more need to labor this point than there is today. Modern muddle-headedness and confusion as to the meaning of faith in God are almost beyond description. People say they believe in God, but they have no idea who it is that they believe in, or what difference believing in him may make. Christians who want to help their floundering fellows into what a famous old tract used to call “safety, certainty and enjoyment” are constantly bewildered as to where to begin: the fantastic hodgepodge of fancies about God quite takes their breath away. How on earth have people got into such a muddle? What lies at the root of their confusion? And where is the starting point for setting them straight? To these questions there are several complementary sets of answers. One is that people have gotten into the practice of following private religious hunches rather than learning of God from his own Word, we have to try to help them unlearn the pride and, in some cases, the misconceptions about Scripture which gave rise to this attitude and to base their convictions henceforth not on what they feel but on what the Bible says. A second answer is that modern people think of all religions as equal and equivalent-they draw their ideas about God from pagan as well as Christian sources; we have to try to show people the uniqueness and finality of the Lord Jesus Christ, God’s last word to man. A third answer is that people have ceased to recognize the reality of their own sinfulness, which imparts a degree of perversity and enmity against God to all that they think and do; it is our task to try to introduce people to this fact about themselves and so make them self-distrustful and open to correction by the word of Christ. A fourth answer, no less basic than the three already given, is that people today are in the habit of disassociating the thought of God’s goodness from that of his severity; we must seek to wean them from this habit, since nothing but misbelief is possible as long as it persists.

45. No Plan Survives First Contact With The Enemy No matter how well you have prepared for something in advance - whether it’s an expedition, an exam, a marriage or a race - when you find yourself in the thick of the action, however good your plan, things happen. Adventure is unpredictable, and you had better learn to be flexible and to swing with the punches, or you will get beaten - it’s as simple as that. Mike Tyson famously once said: ‘Everyone has a plan…until they get punched in the face!’ If the adventure is an exciting one, you can bet your bottom dollar you will get hit by the occasional punch in the face. So prepare for the unexpected, and remember that forewarned is forearmed. Knowing that things will and do go wrong in the heat of battle is actually half the battle. It means that when it happens you are ready for it - you can react fast, stay nimble and you can survive the barrage. We used to say in the military that when things took a turn for the worse you have to ‘improvise, adapt and overcome.’ IAO. It is a good one to remember. It gives us a road map to deal with the unexpected. Being caught out, being caught off guard often makes people freeze - it is a human reaction to shock. But freezing can cost you the edge. So learn to anticipate the unexpected, and when it happens, smile to yourself and treat it as a solid marker that you are doing something right on your road to success. If nothing ever goes wrong then you haven’t been ambitious enough! I also like to say that the real adventure begins in earnest when things go a little bit wrong. It is only then that you get to pit yourself against the worst the wild has to throw at you. When all is going to plan, with all the kit working perfectly and the weather benign, then it isn’t really a test of character. It is easy to be the hero when all is going your way. But when it all goes wrong and life feels like a battle, it is then that we can see what sort of people we have around us. It is only through the hardships that our character becomes forged. Without struggle there can be no growth - physically or emotionally. So embrace the unexpected, feed off it, train yourself to be a master of the curve ball, and you will have built yourself another solid ‘character’ rung on the ladder to success.

He called back with an incredible report: there were people lined up around the store already. Wow, I thought. Wow! Wow didn’t begin to cover it. People lined up on two floors of the store to talk to Chris and get their books signed, hours before he was even scheduled to arrive. Chris was overwhelmed when he got there, and so was I. The week before, he’d been just another guy walking down the street. Now, all of a sudden he was famous. Except he was still the same Chris Kyle, humble and a bit abashed, ready to shake hands and pose for a picture, and always, at heart, a good ol’ boy. “I’m so nervous,” confided one of the people on the line as he approached Chris. “I’ve been waiting for three hours just to see you.” “Oh, I’m sorry,” said Chris. “Waitin’ all that time and come to find out there’s just another redneck up here.” The man laughed, and so did Chris. It was something he’d repeat, in different variations, countless times that night and over the coming weeks. We stayed for three or four hours that first night, far beyond what had been advertised, with Chris signing each book, shaking each hand, and genuinely grateful for each person who came. For their part, they were anxious not just to meet him but to thank him for his service to our country-and by extension, the service of every military member whom they couldn’t personally thank. From the moment the book was published, Chris became the son, the brother, the nephew, the cousin, the kid down the street whom they couldn’t personally thank. In a way, his outstanding military record was beside the point-he was a living, breathing patriot who had done his duty and come home safe to his wife and kids. Thanking him was people’s way of thanking everyone in uniform. And, of course, the book was an interesting read. It quickly became a commercial success beyond anyone’s wildest dreams, including the publisher’s. The hardcover debuted at number two on the New York Times bestseller list, then rose to number one and stayed there for more than two months. It’s remained a fixture on the bestseller lists ever since, and has been translated into twenty-four languages worldwide. It was a good read, and it had a profound effect on a lot of people. A lot of the people who bought it weren’t big book readers, but they ended up engrossed. A friend of ours told us that he’d started reading the book one night while he was taking a bath with his wife. She left, went to bed, and fell asleep. She woke up at three or four and went into the bathroom. Her husband was still there, in the cold water, reading. The funny thing is, Chris still could not have cared less about all the sales. He’d done his assignment, turned it in, and got his grade. Done deal.

Growth was so rapid that it took in generations of Westerners, not just Lincoln Steffens. It took in the Central Intelligence Agency of the United States. It even took in the Soviet Union’s own leaders, such as Nikita Khrushchev, who famously boasted in a speech to Western diplomats in 1956 that “we will bury you [the West].” As late as 1977, a leading academic textbook by an English economist argued that Soviet-style economies were superior to capitalist ones in terms of economic growth, providing full employment and price stability and even in producing people with altruistic motivation. Poor old Western capitalism did better only at providing political freedom. Indeed, the most widely used university textbook in economics, written by Nobel Prize–winner Paul Samuelson, repeatedly predicted the coming economic dominance of the Soviet Union. In the 1961 edition, Samuelson predicted that Soviet national income would overtake that of the United States possibly by 1984, but probably by 1997. In the 1980 edition there was little change in the analysis, though the two dates were delayed to 2002 and 2012. Though the policies of Stalin and subsequent Soviet leaders could produce rapid economic growth, they could not do so in a sustained way. By the 1970s, economic growth had all but stopped. The most important lesson is that extractive institutions cannot generate sustained technological change for two reasons: the lack of economic incentives and resistance by the elites. In addition, once all the very inefficiently used resources had been reallocated to industry, there were few economic gains to be had by fiat. Then the Soviet system hit a roadblock, with lack of innovation and poor economic incentives preventing any further progress. The only area in which the Soviets did manage to sustain some innovation was through enormous efforts in military and aerospace technology. As a result they managed to put the first dog, Leika, and the first man, Yuri Gagarin, in space. They also left the world the AK-47 as one of their legacies. Gosplan was the supposedly all-powerful planning agency in charge of the central planning of the Soviet economy. One of the benefits of the sequence of five-year plans written and administered by Gosplan was supposed to have been the long time horizon necessary for rational investment and innovation. In reality, what got implemented in Soviet industry had little to do with the five-year plans, which were frequently revised and rewritten or simply ignored. The development of industry took place on the basis of commands by Stalin and the Politburo, who changed their minds frequently and often completely revised their previous decisions. All plans were labeled “draft” or “preliminary.” Only one copy of a plan labeled “final”—that for light industry in 1939—has ever come to light. Stalin himself said in 1937 that “only bureaucrats can think that planning work ends with the creation of the plan. The creation of the plan is just the beginning. The real direction of the plan develops only after the putting together of the plan.” Stalin wanted to maximize his discretion to reward people or groups who were politically loyal, and punish those who were not. As for Gosplan, its main role was to provide Stalin with information so he could better monitor his friends and enemies. It actually tried to avoid making decisions. If you made a decision that turned out badly, you might get shot. Better to avoid all responsibility. An example of what could happen

ONCE YOU’VE HOOKED readers, your next task is to put your early chapters to work introducing your characters, settings, and stakes. The first 20-25% of the book comprises your setup. At first glance, this can seem like a tremendous chunk of story to devote to introductions. But if you expect readers to stick with you throughout the story, you first have to give them a reason to care. This important stretch is where you accomplish just that. Mere curiosity can only carry readers so far. Once you’ve hooked that sense of curiosity, you then have to deepen the pull by creating an emotional connection between them and your characters. These “introductions” include far more than just the actual moment of introducing the characters and settings or explaining the stakes. In themselves, the presentations of the characters probably won’t take more than a few scenes. After the introduction is when your task of deepening the characters and establishing the stakes really begins. The first quarter of the book is the place to compile all the necessary components of your story. Anton Chekhov’s famous advice that “if in the first act you have hung a pistol on the wall, then in the following one it should be fired” is just as important in reverse: if you’re going to have a character fire a gun later in the book, that gun should be introduced in the First Act. The story you create in the following acts can only be assembled from the parts you’ve shown readers in this First Act. That’s your first duty in this section. Your second duty is to allow readers the opportunity to learn about your characters. Who are these people? What is the essence of their personalities? What are their core beliefs (even more particularly, what are the beliefs that will be challenged or strengthened throughout the book)? If you can introduce a character in a “characteristic moment,” as we talked about earlier, you’ll be able to immediately show readers who this person is. From there, the plot builds as you deepen the stakes and set up the conflict that will eventually explode in the Inciting and Key Events. Authors sometimes feel pressured to dive right into the action of their stories, at the expense of important character development. Because none of us wants to write a boring story, we can overreact by piling on the explosions, fight sequences, and high-speed car chases to the point we’re unable to spend important time developing our characters. Character development is especially important in this first part of the story, since readers need to understand and sympathize with the characters before they’re hit with the major plot revelations at the quarter mark, halfway mark, and three-quarters mark. Summer blockbusters are often guilty of neglecting character development, but one enduring exception worth considering is Stephen Spielberg’s Jurassic Park. No one would claim the film is a leisurely character study, but it rises far above the monster movie genre through its expert use of pacing and its loving attention to character, especially in its First Act. It may surprise some viewers to realize the action in this movie doesn’t heat up until a quarter of the way into the film—and even then we have no scream-worthy moments, no adrenaline, and no extended action scenes until halfway through the Second Act. Spielberg used the First Act to build suspense and encourage viewer loyalty to the characters. By the time the main characters arrive at the park, we care about them, and our fear for their safety is beginning to manifest thanks to a magnificent use of foreshadowing. We understand that what is at stake for these characters is their very lives. Spielberg knew if he could hook viewers with his characters, he could take his time building his story to an artful Climax.