Cite My Quotes

It is especially galling that some of the people who want to cut funding for contraceptives cite morality. In my view, there is no morality without empathy, and there is certainly no empathy in this policy. Morality is loving your neighbor as yourself, which comes from seeing your neighbor as yourself, which means trying to ease your neighbor’s burdens—not add to them.

They will say that I, having no literary skill, cannot properly express that which I desire to treat of, but they do not know that my subjects are to be dealt with by experience rather than by words. And [experience] has been the mistress of those who wrote well. And so, as mistress, I will cite her in all cases. Though I may not, like them, be able to quote other authors, I shall rely on that which is much greater and more worthy: on experience, the mistress of their masters.

An older man who seems to be the leader of the Jesus Tshirt group says that the Bible forbids abortion in its commandment “Thou shall not kill.” But being in the Bible Belt, people really know their Bible, and an older woman cites Exodus 21:22–23, a passage that says a man who causes a pregnant woman to miscarry must pay a fine but is not charged with murder, not unless the woman herself dies. Thus the Bible is making clear, that a dependent life is not the same as an independent life.

Nothing makes you happy in life except love... Neither the books you write or cites you see... I am very lonely... If I say that I want to be here in this city close to you until the end of my life would you believe me?

In our current culture, we place a lot of emphasis on job description. Our obsession with the advice to “follow your passion” (the subject of my last book), for example, is motivated by the (flawed) idea that what matters most for your career satisfaction is the specifics of the job you choose. In this way of thinking, there are some rarified jobs that can be a source of satisfaction—perhaps working in a nonprofit or starting a software company—while all others are soulless and bland. The philosophy of Dreyfus and Kelly frees us from such traps. The craftsmen they cite don’t have rarified jobs. Throughout most of human history, to be a blacksmith or a wheelwright wasn’t glamorous. But this doesn’t matter, as the specifics of the work are irrelevant. The meaning uncovered by such efforts is due to the skill and appreciation inherent in craftsmanship—not the outcomes of their work.

Let’s call it a school project on the Pierce piece.” I bared my teeth in something vaguely resembling a smile. “You cited an anonymous source, saying that the decision was all but made. I’m wondering what made you think this information was legit.

Shabbat comes with its own holiness; we enter not simply a day, but an atmosphere. My father cites the Zohar: the Sabbath is the name of God. We are within the Sabbath rather than the Sabbath being within us. For my father, the question is how to perceive that holiness: not how much to observe, but how to observe. Strict adherence to the laws regulating Sabbath observance doesn’t suffice; the goal is creating the Sabbath as a foretaste of paradise. The Sabbath is a metaphor for paradise and a testimony to God’s presence; in our prayers, we anticipate a messianic era that will be a Sabbath, and each Shabbat prepares us for that experience: “Unless one learns how to relish the taste of Sabbath … one will be unable to enjoy the taste of eternity in the world to come.” It was on the seventh day that God gave the world a soul, and “[the world’s] survival depends upon the holiness of the seventh day.” The task, he writes, becomes how to convert time into eternity, how to fill our time with spirit: “Six days a week we wrestle with the world, wringing profit from the earth; on the Sabbath we especially care for the seed of eternity planted in the soul. The world has our hands, but our soul belongs to Someone Else.

Sleeping Beauty is the worst fairy tale, pretty much any way you slice it. It’s aimless and amoral and chauvinist as shit. It’s the fairy tale that feminist scholars cite when they want to talk about women’s passivity in historical narratives. (“She literally sleeps through her own climax,” as my favorite gender studies professor used to say. “Double entendre fully intended.”)... ..Even among the other nerds who majored in folklore, Sleeping Beauty is nobody’s favorite. The romantic girls like Beauty and the Beast; basic girls like Cinderella; goth girls like Snow White. Only the dying girls like Sleeping Beauty.

I am fully conscious that, not being a literary man , certain presumptuous persons will think that they may reasonably blame me; alleging that I am not a man of letters. Foolish folks! do they not know that I might retort as Marius did to the Roman Patricians by saying: That they, who deck themselves out in the labours of others will not allow me my own. They will say that I, having no literary skill, cannot properly express that which I desire to treat of, but they do not know that my subjects are to be dealt with by experience rather than by words; and experience has been the mistress of those who wrote well. And so, as mistress, I will cite her in all cases.

Nelson Mandela has been cited as saying words that ring true for me: “Resentment is like drinking poison and then hoping it will kill your enemies.

The justification I hear more often than any other for leaving the Bible behind is that “everyone knows” it is antiquated and full of scientific nonsense, if not blatant errors and contradictions. Amazingly, when I ask people to cite examples, many cannot bring to mind even one. Apparently, they base their opinion on hearsay and repeat a widespread misconception. Among those who do answer my question, one Bible portion draws more vigorous attack than all others combined: the first few chapters of Genesis. This attack opens a wonderful door of opportunity for me—and for every believer who knows something about the scientific discoveries of the past few decades. Instead of offering an excuse for disbelief and rejection, these chapters present some of the most persuasive evidences ever assembled for the supernatural authorship, accuracy, and authority of the Bible.

Now this process was happening again, as the shash-ing sound that seemed to so delight the Siberian began to take on a definite form, one that fit both phonetically and with her cited heritage: Masha.

About Parlabane, Brookmyre says: "To fully acknowledge the extent of the debt I owe Douglas Adams - as a reader and a writer - would very possibly crash this server, so I will merely cite one significant example. I am frequently asked who was the inspiration for my investigative journalist Jack Parlabane; whether he has some real-life antecedent or represents some indulgent alter-ego of mine. The truth is that Parlabane was entirely inspired by Ford Prefect: I always adored the idea of a character who cheerfully wanders into enormously dangerous situations and effortlessly makes them much worse.

Mother Goose will show newcomers to this world how astonishing, beautiful, capricious, dancy, eccentric, funny, goluptious, haphazard, intertwingled, joyous, kindly, loving, melodious, naughty, outrageous, pomsidillious, querimonious, romantic, silly, tremendous, unexpected, vertiginous, wonderful, x-citing, yo-heave-ho-ish, and zany it is.

While I pray that public awareness and debate will lead to reform, bear in mind that the policies of men change in time, and even the Constitution is subverted when the appetites of power demand it. In words from history: Let us speak no more of faith in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of cryptography. I instantly recognized the last sentence as a play on a Thomas Jefferson quote from 1798 that I often cited in my writing: “In questions of power, then, let no more be heard of confidence in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution.

This is all wrapped up in a quote that I have cited many times, which was written back in the 19th century by one of the most influential spiritual masters ever to grace my path. His name is Henry David Thoreau, and his words have always rung sharply in my consciousness: “If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.

My first crush was a sarcastic know-it-all Immortal named Methos, a character from Highlander. To this day I am convinced he is my perfect soulmate. And the focus of my sexual awakening. Lots of people cite the boiler room scene from My So-Called Life, Jareth in Labyrinth, Colin Firth in Pride & Prejudice, or any/all members of the Fellowship of the Ring. But mine happened when Methos rolled out of bed in nothing but boxers to defend his life with a Roman short sword. Unf.

I’m being diplomatic. Many readers will know of the “replication crisis” in psychology, where an alarming percentage of published findings, even some in textbooks, turn out to be hard or impossible for other scientists to independently replicate (including some findings, I admit ruefully, that wound up being cited in my 2017 book, where I should have been more discerning). Thus, this section considers only findings whose broad conclusions have been independently replicated.

I found myself one evening in the dreams of the night, in that sacred building, the Temple. After a season of prayer and rejoicing, I was informed that I should have the privilege of entering into one of those rooms, to meet a glorious personage, and as I entered the door, I saw, seated on a raised platform, the most glorious Being my eyes have ever beheld, or that I ever conceived existed in all the eternal worlds. As I approached to be introduced, he arose and stepped towards me with extended arms, and he smiled as he softly spoke my name. If I shall live to be a million years old, I shall never forget that smile. He took me into his arms and kissed me, pressed me to His bosom, and blessed me, until the marrow of my bones seemed to melt! When He had finished, I fell at His feet, and as I bathed them with my tears and kisses, I saw the prints of the nails in the feet of the Redeemer of the world. The feeling that I had in the presence of Him who hath all things in His hands, to have His love, His affection, and His blessings was such that if I ever can receive that of which I had but a foretaste, I would give all that I am, all that I ever hope to be, to feel what I then felt (as cited in Bryant S. Hinckley, The Faith of Our Pioneer Fathers, pp. 226-27.)

I remember preaching on Jesus’s call to the practice of radical forgiveness and being challenged by a church member who said, “Yeah, but the Bible says, ‘An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.’ ” I had to explain to him that a Christian can’t cite Moses to silence Jesus. When we try to embrace Biblicism by placing all authority in a flat reading of Scripture and giving the Old Testament equal authority with Christ, God thunders from heaven, “No! This is my beloved Son! Listen to him!

October 16, 2009 Avengers Paintball, Inc. 1778 Industrial Blvd. Lakeville, MN 55044 Esteemed Avengers, This letter recommends Mr. Allen Trent for a position at your paintball emporium. Mr. Trent received a C– in my expository writing class last spring, which—given my newly streamlined and increasingly generous grading criteria—is quite the accomplishment. His final project consisted of a ten-page autobiographical essay on the topic of his own rageful impulses and his (often futile) attempts to control them. He cited his dentist and his roommate as primary sources. Consider this missive a testament to Mr. Trent’s preparedness for the work your place of business undoubtedly has in store. Hoping to maintain a distance of at least one hundred yards, Jason T. Fitger Professor of Creative Writing and English Payne University (“Teach ’til It Hurts”)

From time to time, we hear physicists claim that Einstein didn’t understand Quantum Mechanics and therefore wasted his time with naive classical theories. I very much doubt that this is true. His arguments against Quantum Mechanics were extremely subtle, culminating in one of the most profound and most cited papers in all of physics.12 My guess is that Einstein was disturbed by the same thing that bothered the slow student. How could the ultimate theory of reality be about nothing more concrete than our own degree of surprise at the outcome of an experiment?

MEANWHILE, I DO MY DUE DILIGENCE. I research. I read every single one of the sources that Athena cited in her draft, until I’m as much an expert on the Chinese Labour Corps as anyone can be.

[Li Ch’uan cites the case of Fu Chien, prince of Ch’in, who in 383 A.D. marched with a vast army against the Chin Emperor. When warned not to despise an enemy who could command the services of such men as Hsieh An and Huan Ch’ung, he boastfully replied: “I have the population of eight provinces at my back, infantry and horsemen to the number of one million; why, they could dam up the Yangtsze River itself by merely throwing their whips into the stream. What danger have I to fear?” Nevertheless, his forces were soon after disastrously routed at the Fei River, and he was obliged to beat a hasty retreat.] If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle. [Chang Yu said: “Knowing the enemy enables you to take the offensive, knowing yourself enables you to stand on the defensive.” He adds: “Attack is the secret of defense; defense is the planning of an attack.” It would be hard to find a better epitome of the root-principle of war.]

A person who has had the misfortune to fall victim to the spell of a philosophical system (and the spells of sorcerers are mere trifles in comparison to the disastrous effect of the spell of a philosophical system!) can no longer see the world, or people, or historic events, as they are; he sees everything only through the distorting prism of the system by which he is possessed. Thus, a Marxist of today is incapable of seeing anything else in the history of mankind other than the “class struggle”. What I am saying concerning mysticism, gnosis, magic and philosophy would be considered by him only as a ruse on the part of the bourgeois class, with the aim of “screening with a mystical and idealistic haze” the reality of the exploitation of the proletariat by the bourgeoisie…although I have not inherited anything from my parents and I have not experienced a single day without having to earn my living by means of work recognised as “legitimate” by Marxists! Another contemporary example of possession by a system is Freudianism. A man possessed by this system will see in everything that I have written only the expression of “suppressed libido”, which seeks and finds release in this manner. It would therefore be the lack of sexual fulfillment which has driven me to occupy myself with the Tarot and to write about it! Is there any need for further examples? Is it still necessary to cite the Hegelians with their distortion of the history of humanity, the Scholastic “realists” of the Middle Ages with the Inquisition, the rationalists of the eighteenth century who were blinded by the light of their own autonomous reasoning? Yes, autonomous philosophical systems separated from the living body of tradition are parasitic structures, which seize the thought, feeling and finally the will of human beings. In fact, they play a role comparable to the psycho-pathological complexes of neurosis or other psychic maladies of obsession. Their physical analogy is cancer.

To my knowledge, no one in or out of the field has ever been able to cite a game worthy of comparison with the great dramatists, poets, filmmakers, novelists and composers. That a game can aspire to artistic importance as a visual experience, I accept. But for most gamers, video games represent a loss of those precious hours we have available to make ourselves more cultured, civilized and empathetic.

Apathy? I see something taking place in the Church all over the world today that grieves God’s heart: a widespread apathy toward sin. God’s people are no longer outraged about the filth and evil bombarding their lives and homes. On the contrary, millions of believers sit by passively and let their minds become saturated with sensual movies, videos, television, the Internet, magazines and other media. It is unbelievable how these Christians willingly allow their lusts to be fed as their imaginations are filled with deep roots of evil. If you think I am focusing too much on the secret sins of Christians, then I say you are out of touch with what is happening in the world today. You must know nothing of how widespread the infection of sin is among God’s people. I cite to you, for example, the scores of Christians who flock to movie theaters each week and hear the name of Christ used as a curse word. I have never understood how anyone who fears almighty God and wishes to walk righteously before Him can sit by idly as the Lord’s name is being damned. That is simply beyond my comprehension. Yet multitudes of believers are doing just that. Little by little, they are drifting deeper into pits of secret, hidden sin. Slowly but surely, their sense of conviction is being drained out of them. They do not realize it, but their minds are being corrupted by what they are allowing their eyes to feast on.

I pity those reviewers above, and people like them, who ridicule authors like R.A. Boulay and other proponents of similar Ancient Astronaut theories, simply for putting forth so many interesting questions (because that's really what he often throughout openly admits is all he does does) in light of fascinating and thought-provoking references which are all from copious sources. Some people will perhaps only read the cover and introduction and dismiss it as soon as any little bit of information flies in the face of their beliefs or normalcy biases. Some of those people, I'm sure, are some of the ones who reviewed this book so negatively without any constructive criticism or plausible rebuttal. It's sad to see how programmed and indoctrinated the vast majority of humanity has become to the ills of dogma, indoctrination, unverified status quos and basic ignorance; not to mention the laziness and conformity that results in such acquiescence and lack of critical thinking or lack of information gathering to confirm or debunk something. Too many people just take what's spoon fed to them all their lives and settle for it unquestioningly. For those people I like to offer a great Einstein quote and one of my personal favorites and that is: "Condemnation without investigation is the highest form of ignorance" I found this book to be a very interesting gathering of information and collection of obscure and/or remote antiquated information, i.e. biblical, sacred, mythological and otherwise, that we were not exactly taught to us in bible school, or any other public school for that matter. And I am of the school of thought that has been so for intended purposes. The author clearly cites all his fascinating sources and cross-references them rather plausibly. He organizes the information in a sequential manner that piques ones interest even as he jumps from one set of information to the next. The information, although eclectic as it spans from different cultures and time periods, interestingly ties together in several respects and it is this synchronicity that makes the information all the more remarkable. For those of you who continue to seek truth and enlightenment because you understand that an open mind makes for and lifelong pursuit of such things I leave you with these Socrates quotes: "True wisdom comes to each of us when we realize how little we understand about life, ourselves, and the world around us.

One of my delights in these books, on the other hand, has been to include movies not often cited as “great”—some because they are dismissed as merely popular (Jaws, Raiders of the Lost Ark), some because they are frankly entertainments (Planes, Trains and Automobiles, Rififi), some because they are too obscure (The Fall of the House of Usher, Stroszek). We go to different movies for different reasons, and greatness comes in many forms.

Land distribution in Brazil is one of the most unfair in the world. One frequently cited statistic from the beginning of my presidency showed that 1 percent of the population controlled 45 percent of Brazil’s arable land.

There is no such thing as a relationship without a contract. All relationships are governed by contracts, be they implied or explicit. Relationship contracts are not legal contracts, though sometimes societal expectations of relationships get worked into law (this can come into play in situations like divorce as well as the legal establishment and relinquishment of paternity). The society in which you grew up provided you with a set of template contracts to which you implicitly agree whenever you enter a relationship, even a non-sexual one. For example, a common clause of many societal template contracts among friends involves agreeing to not sleep with a friend's recent ex. While you may never explicitly agree to not sleep with a friend's ex, your friend will absolutely feel violated if they discover that you shacked up with the person who dumped them just a week earlier. Essentially, these social contracts tell an individual when they have “permission” to have specific emotional reactions. While this may not seem that impactful, these default standards can have a significant impact on one’s life. For example, in the above reaction, a friend who just got angry out of the blue at a member of their social group would be ostracized by others within the group while a friend who became angry while citing the “they slept with my ex” contract violation may receive social support from the friend group and internally feel more justified in their retaliatory action. To ferret out the contractual aspects of relationships in which you currently participate, think through something a member of that relationship might do that would have you feeling justifiably violated, even though they never explicitly agreed to never take such action. This societal system of template contracts may have worked in a culturally and technologically homogenous world without frequent travel, but within the modern world, assumed template contracts cause copious problems.

At a lunchtime reception for the diplomatic corps in Washington, given the day before the inauguration of Barack Obama as president, I was approached by a good-looking man who extended his hand. 'We once met many years ago,' he said. 'And you knew and befriended my father.' My mind emptied, as so often happens on such occasions. I had to inform him that he had the advantage of me. 'My name is Hector Timerman. I am the ambassador of Argentina.' In my above album of things that seem to make life pointful and worthwhile, and that even occasionally suggest, in Dr. King’s phrase as often cited by President Obama, that there could be a long arc in the moral universe that slowly, eventually bends toward justice, this would constitute an exceptional entry. It was also something more than a nudge to my memory. There was a time when the name of Jacobo Timerman, the kidnapped and tortured editor of the newspaper La Opinion in Buenos Aires, was a talismanic one. The mere mention of it was enough to elicit moans of obscene pleasure from every fascist south of the Rio Grande: finally in Argentina there was a strict ‘New Order’ that would stamp hard upon the international Communist-Jewish collusion. A little later, the mention of Timerman’s case was enough to derail the nomination of Ronald Reagan’s first nominee as undersecretary for human rights; a man who didn’t seem to have grasped the point that neo-Nazism was a problem for American values. And Timerman’s memoir, Prisoner without a Name, Cell without a Number, was the book above all that clothed in living, hurting flesh the necessarily abstract idea of the desaparecido: the disappeared one or, to invest it with the more sinister and grisly past participle with which it came into the world, the one who has been ‘disappeared.’ In the nuances of that past participle, many, many people vanished into a void that is still unimaginable. It became one of the keywords, along with escuadrone de la muerte or ‘death squads,’ of another arc, this time of radical evil, that spanned a whole subcontinent. Do you know why General Jorge Rafael Videla of Argentina was eventually sentenced? Well, do you? Because he sold the children of the tortured rape victims who were held in his private prison. I could italicize every second word in that last sentence without making it any more heart-stopping. And this subhuman character was boasted of, as a personal friend and genial host, even after he had been removed from the office he had defiled, by none other than Henry Kissinger. So there was an almost hygienic effect in meeting, in a new Washington, as an envoy of an elected government, the son of the brave man who had both survived and exposed the Videla tyranny.

One of the major dilemmas inherent in the attempt by black people to break through the cultural aspects of white imperialism is that posed by the use of historical knowledge as a weapon in our struggle. We are virtually forced into the invidious position of proving our humanity by citing historical antecedents; and yet the evidence is too often submitted to the white racists for sanction. The white man has already implanted numerous historical myths in the minds of black peoples; and those have to be uprooted . . . It is necessary to direct our historical activity in the light of two basic principles[:] Firstly, the effort must be directed solely towards freeing and mobilising black minds. There must be no performances to impress whites, for those whites who find themselves beside us in the firing line will be there for reasons far more profound than their exposure to African history. Secondly, the acquired knowledge of African history must be seen as directly relevant but secondary to the concrete tactics and strategy which are necessary for our liberation. There must be no false distinctions between reflection and action . . . If there is to be any proving of our humanity it must be by revolutionary means.

people to throw their lives down the pan for laughable attempts at morality, remember, I’m on to you and I’m well aware that the devil can cite scripture for his purpose.’ My head falls into my hands. This woman is evil. ‘So, as you can tell if you’ve been tuned in, we have

These examples are cited merely to give an idea of the possibilities of this great scientific advance, which annihilates distance and makes that perfect natural conductor, the Earth, available for all the innumerable purposes which human ingenuity has found for a line-wire.

Beethoven, to cite him one more time, said “Anybody who understands my music will never be unhappy again.” That is because his music is the song of the Sixth Circuit, of Gaia, the Life Spirit, becoming conscious of Herself, of Her powers, of Her own capacities for infinite progress.

But the most powerful arguments in favor of "a tragic optimism" are those which in Latin are called argumenta ad hominem. Jerry Long, to cite an example, is a living testimony to "the defiant power of the human spirit," as it is called in logotherapy.8 To quote the Texarkana Gazette, "Jerry Long has been paralyzed from his neck down since a diving accident which rendered him a quadriplegic three years ago. He was 17 when the accident occurred. Today Long can use his mouth stick to type. He 'attends' two courses at Community College via a special telephone. The intercom allows Long to both hear and participate in class discussions. He also occupies his time by reading, watching television and writing." And in a letter I received from him, he writes: "I view my life as being abundant with meaning and purpose. The attitude that I adopted on that fateful day has become my personal credo for life: I broke my neck, it didn't break me. I am currently enrolled in my first psychology course in college. I believe that my handicap will only enhance my ability to help others. I know that without the suffering, the growth that I have achieved would have been impossible.

The British," he (Gandhi) said, "want us to put the struggle on the plane of machine-guns where they have the weapons and we do not. Our only assurance of beating them is putting the struggle on a plane where we have the weapons and they do not." _______Cited by William L Shirer in 'Gandhi: A Memoir

I placed my hand on both of their heads and said, knowing they couldn’t understand a word of English, “I will not leave you as orphans; I will come to you.” I don’t think I consciously intended to cite Jesus’ words to his disciples in John 14:18; it just seemed like the only thing worth saying at the time.

Let no one contradict my opinion by citing that trite proverb, claiming he who builds upon the people builds upon mud; for that is true when a private citizen makes them his foundation, and allows himself to believe that the common people will free him if he is oppressed by enemies or by the public officials.

Let me cite a clear-cut example: Once, an elderly general practitioner consulted me because of his severe depression. He could not overcome the loss of his wife who had died two years before and whom he had loved above all else. Now, how could I help him? What should I tell him? Well, I refrained from telling him anything but instead confronted him with the question, “What would have happened, Doctor, if you had died first, and your wife would have had to survive you?” “Oh,” he said, “for her this would have been terrible; how she would have suffered!” Whereupon I replied, “You see, Doctor, such a suffering has been spared her, and it was you who have spared her this suffering—to be sure, at the price that now you have to survive and mourn her.” He said no word but shook my hand and calmly left my office. In some way, suffering ceases to be suffering at the moment it finds a meaning, such as the meaning of a sacrifice.

The prophet Micah (6:8) summarizes what God wishes for humanity with three commandments: “What does the LORD require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?” Isaiah 56:1 offers two commandments, “Thus says the LORD: Maintain justice, and do what is right, for soon my salvation will come, and my deliverance be revealed.” Finally, the Talmud cites Habakkuk 2:4, “Look at the proud! Their spirit is not right in them, but the righteous live by their faith.” This is the verse Paul cites in Romans 1:17 and Galatians 3:11, and the Epistle to the Hebrews 10:38 alludes to it as well.

May through to June I spent my time deciding how to spend my time, which is the first, second, and third through nine thousand seven hundred and griftyfifth items on the agenda of every writer, or neurotic. I was getting ahead of myself, fretting whether the book would have to have notes or sources cited, fretting whether I’d be allowed to decide anything at all.

If any one premise typifies my teams in all the years I've coached, it is this concept. Often as a player, I'd tell myself, "I may play someone better than I am, but I'll never run against one who is going to be in better condition" And I never played against a man in my life I felt was in better shape, and Lambert often cited me as an example of top conditioning.

I therefore cite Albert Einstein, so much misrepresented, once again. He is addressing a correspondent who is trouble by yet another of those many misrepresentations: It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie which is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but expressed it clearly. if something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it. Years later he answered another query by stating: I do not believe in the immortality of the individual, and I consider ethics to be an exclusively human concern with no superhuman authority behind it.

She was free in her wildness. She was a wanderess, a drop of free water. She belonged to no man and to no city. (by Roman Payne, from “The Wanderess.” How this quote became so popular, I have no idea. I wrote it about one woman: The heroine of “The Wanderess,” Saskia; yet I wrote these lines to describe Saskia at her best—praising the qualities of a heroine that all women should strive to have, or keep if they have them. I wrote these lines to make Saskia be like a statue of Psyche or Demeter. The masculine sculptor doesn’t see rock when he carves Aphrodite. He sees before him the carving of the perfect feminine creature. I was creating my ‘perfect feminine creature’ when I wrote about Saskia. She is completely wild and fearless in her dramatic performance of life. She knows that she may only have one life to live and that most people in her society wish to see her fail in her dream of living a fulfilled life. For if a woman acts and lives exactly as society wants her to live, she will never be truly happy, never fulfilled. For societies do not want girls and women to wander. I am surprised that this quote became so famous, since I didn’t spend more than a few seconds writing it. It was written merely as three sentences in a novel. I didn’t write it to be a solitary poem. This quote that touches so many people is no more than an arrangement of twenty-four words in a book of three-hundred pages. What touches me the most is when fans send me photos of tattoos they’ve had done of this quote—either a few words from it or the whole quote. The fact that these wonderful souls are willing to guard words that I’ve written on their precious skin for the rest of their lives makes me feel that what I am writing is worth something and not nothing. When I get depressed and feel the despair that haunts me from time to time, and cripples me, I look at these photos of these tattoos, and it helps me to think that what I am doing is important to some people, and it helps me to start writing again. Am I a masculine version of the wanderess in this quote? Of course I am! I am wild and fearless, I am a wanderer who belongs to no city and to nobody; I am a drop of free water. I am—to cite one of my other quotes—“free as a bird. King of the world and laughing!

I could fill this entire book with Mr. Trump’s dirty laundry list of proven lies, but his most zealous disciples are sure to just cite one or another in fake defense, or else deny the very possibility that fact can be known from fantasy at all, or perhaps make both claims at once. For the Trumpist, there is no objective truth, or at least no real responsibility to it. There is only 'my opinion,' more or less fun, more or less useful.

I sat at a lunch table with a professor of premonotheistic spirituality, plus several women from some of the tribes in this state that has more Native Americans than any other. All agreed that the paradigm of human organization had been the circle, not the pyramid or hierarchy—and it could be again. I’d never known there was a paradigm that linked instead of ranked. It was as if I’d been assuming opposition—and suddenly found myself in a welcoming world; like putting one’s foot down for a steep stair and discovering level ground. Still, when a Laguna law student from New Mexico complained that her courses didn’t cite the Iroquois Confederacy as the model for the U.S. Constitution—or explain that this still existing Confederacy was the oldest continuing democracy in the world—I thought she was being romantic. But I read about the Constitutional Convention and discovered that Benjamin Franklin had indeed cited the Iroquois Confederacy as a model. He was well aware of its success in unifying vast areas of the United States and Canada by bringing together Native nations for mutual decisions but also allowing autonomy in local ones. He hoped the Constitution could do the same for the thirteen states. That’s why he invited two Iroquois men to Philadelphia as advisers. Among their first questions was said to be: Where are the women?

One cannot argue with anyone’s experience or decision or belief. All my evidence would be thrown out of court as irrelevant to the main body of the case, for I could cite only exceptions. The South Side proved the justice of the indictment; the state of the world proved the justice of the indictment. Everything else, stretching back throughout recorded time, was merely a history of those exceptions who had tried to change the world and had failed.

I was starting to remember the whole problem now: I hate these fucking people [people at Tea Party rallies, ed]. It's never been just political, it's personal. I'm not convinced anyone in this country except the kinds of weenies who thought student council was important really cares about large versus small government or strict constructionalism versus judicial activism. The ostensible issues are just code words in an ugly snarl of class resentment, anti-intellectualism, old-school snobbery, racism, and who knows what else - grudges left over from the Civil War, the sixties, gym class. The Tea Party likes to cite a poll showing that their members are wealthier and better educated than te general populace, but to me they mostly looked like the same people I'd had to listen to in countless dive bars railing against "edjumicated idiots" and explaining exactly how Nostradamus predicted 9/11, the very people I and everyone I know fled our hometowns to get away from. So far all my interactions at the rally were only reinforcing my private theory - I suppose you might call it a prejudice - that liberals are the ones who went to college, moved to the nearest city where no one would call them a fag, and now only go back for holidays; conservatives are the ones who married their high school girlfriends, bought houses in their hometowns, and kept going to church and giving a shit who won the homecoming game. It's the divide between the Got Out and the Stayed Put. This theory also account for the different reactions of these two camps when the opposition party takes power, raising the specter of either fascist or socialist tyranny: the Got Outs always fantasize about fleeing the country for someplace more civilized - Canada, France, New Zealand; the Stayed Put just di further in, hunkering down in compounds, buying up canned goods and ammo.

I have found a church in art, a form of work that is also a form of worship—it is a means of understanding myself, all my past selves, and all of you as beloved. This is why I will never stop doing it, even if no publisher ever again wants to share the results. Ironically, this kind of investment in the process is a boon to those who seek publication. Tenacity is often cited as the most common characteristic of successful authors. Of the many talented people I’ve met—classmates, students, friends—many of them no longer write.18 The ones who have kept doing so have made it central to their lives both external and internal. Writing is hard. It is not the most apparently useful kind of work to do in the world. Most of us are not out here saving any lives but our own, though its power to do that (at least in my case) is uncontestable. The older I get, the less convinced I am about most things, but this is one of the great facts of my life.

When the time came to graduate, he was placed last on the honors list for physiology and comparative anatomy. His professor William Carpenter cited the reason for this slight in a letter to him: “I think it as well to let you know the reason why I found it requisite to place you there.… As answers to my questions, your papers were so defective, that if it had not been for the amount of original observation of which they bore evidence, I could not have placed you in the honours list at all.

For example, there are five successive studies of criminal behavior cited in my 1982 book. They show that if a man in prison has an identical twin, it’s likely his cotwin will also be in prison. If the twin is fraternal [with 50 percent shared genes, on average], the likelihood is not nearly as great that he’ll be in prison, too, but it’s greater than chance. How could one possibly account for this difference with environmentalist explanations? The strong genetic component in criminality has already been proven up to the hilt.

Samuel Smiles ends his book with the following moving story of the “gentleman” general: The gentleman is characterized by his sacrifice of self, and preference of others, in the little daily occurrences of life…we may cite the anecdote of the gallant Sir Ralph Abercromby, of whom it is related, that, when mortally wounded in the battle of Aboukir, and, to ease his pain, a soldier’s blanket was placed under his head, from which he experienced considerable relief. He asked what it was. “It’s only a soldier’s blanket,” was the reply. “Whose blanket is it?” said he, half lifting himself up. “Only one of the men’s.” “I wish to know the name of the man whose blanket this is.” “It is Duncan Roy’s, of the 42nd, Sir Ralph.” “Then see that Duncan Roy gets his blanket this very night.” Even to ease his dying agony the general would not deprive the private soldier of his blanket for one night. As Samuel wrote: “True courage and gentleness go hand in hand.” It was in this family, belief system, and heritage that Walter, my great-grandfather, grew up and dared to dream.

I saw everything crumble around me, every single daydream of wandering through the grammar school cloisters citing poetry, of my parents wiping tears away as I went up on a platform to receive yet another prize for Debating Skills or Most Graceful Netball Player, of sitting in the garden of our new bungalow being applauded by my Aunties and Uncles as the first family member to win a university scholarship and meet a future husband on the same day - all that potential, all that hope, all gone because I made friends once with Anita Rutter.

In the modern era, teachers and scholarship have traditionally laid strenuous emphasis on the fact that Briseis, the woman taken from Achilles in Book One, was his géras, his war prize, the implication being that her loss for Achilles meant only loss of honor, an emphasis that may be a legacy of the homoerotic culture in which the classics and the Iliad were so strenuously taught—namely, the British public-school system: handsome and glamorous Achilles didn’t really like women, he was only upset because he’d lost his prize! Homer’s Achilles, however, above all else, is spectacularly adept at articulating his own feelings, and in the Embassy he says, “‘Are the sons of Atreus alone among mortal men the ones / who love their wives? Since any who is a good man, and careful, / loves her who is his own and cares for her, even as I now / loved this one from my heart, though it was my spear that won her’ ” (9.340ff.). The Iliad ’s depiction of both Achilles and Patroklos is nonchalantly heterosexual. At the conclusion of the Embassy, when Agamemnon’s ambassadors have departed, “Achilles slept in the inward corner of the strong-built shelter, / and a woman lay beside him, one he had taken from Lesbos, / Phorbas’ daughter, Diomede of the fair colouring. / In the other corner Patroklos went to bed; with him also / was a girl, Iphis the fair-girdled, whom brilliant Achilles / gave him, when he took sheer Skyros” (9.663ff.). The nature of the relationship between Achilles and Patroklos played an unlikely role in a lawsuit of the mid-fourth century B.C., brought by the orator Aeschines against one Timarchus, a prominent politician in Athens who had charged him with treason. Hoping to discredit Timarchus prior to the treason trial, Aeschines attacked Timarchus’ morality, charging him with pederasty. Since the same charge could have been brought against Aeschines, the orator takes pains to differentiate between his impulses and those of the plaintiff: “The distinction which I draw is this—to be in love with those who are beautiful and chaste is the experience of a kind-hearted and generous soul”; Aeschines, Contra Timarchus 137, in C. D. Adams, trans., The Speeches of Aeschines (Cambridge, MA, 1958), 111. For proof of such love, Aeschines cited the relationship between Achilles and Patroklos; his citation is of great interest for representing the longest extant quotation of Homer by an ancient author. 32

New Rule: If you're going to have a rally where hundreds of thousands of people show up, you may as well go ahead and make it about something. With all due respect to my friends Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, it seems that if you truly wanted to come down on the side of restoring sanity and reason, you'd side with the sane and the reasonable--and not try to pretend the insanity is equally distributed in both parties. Keith Olbermann is right when he says he's not the equivalent of Glenn Beck. One reports facts; the other one is very close to playing with his poop. And the big mistake of modern media has been this notion of balance for balance's sake, that the left is just as violent and cruel as the right, that unions are just as powerful as corporations, that reverse racism is just as damaging as racism. There's a difference between a mad man and a madman. Now, getting more than two hundred thousand people to come to a liberal rally is a great achievement that gave me hope, and what I really loved about it was that it was twice the size of the Glenn Beck crowd on the Mall in August--although it weight the same. But the message of the rally as I heard it was that if the media would just top giving voice to the crazies on both sides, then maybe we could restore sanity. It was all nonpartisan, and urged cooperation with the moderates on the other side. Forgetting that Obama tried that, and found our there are no moderates on the other side. When Jon announced his rally, he said that the national conversation is "dominated" by people on the right who believe Obama's a socialist, and by people on the left who believe 9/11 was an inside job. But I can't name any Democratic leaders who think 9/11 was an inside job. But Republican leaders who think Obama's socialist? All of them. McCain, Boehner, Cantor, Palin...all of them. It's now official Republican dogma, like "Tax cuts pay for themselves" and "Gay men just haven't met the right woman." As another example of both sides using overheated rhetoric, Jon cited the right equating Obama with Hitler, and the left calling Bush a war criminal. Except thinking Obama is like Hitler is utterly unfounded--but thinking Bush is a war criminal? That's the opinion of Major General Anthony Taguba, who headed the Army's investigation into Abu Ghraib. Republicans keep staking out a position that is farther and farther right, and then demand Democrats meet them in the middle. Which now is not the middle anymore. That's the reason health-care reform is so watered down--it's Bob Dole's old plan from 1994. Same thing with cap and trade--it was the first President Bush's plan to deal with carbon emissions. Now the Republican plan for climate change is to claim it's a hoax. But it's not--I know because I've lived in L.A. since '83, and there's been a change in the city: I can see it now. All of us who live out here have had that experience: "Oh, look, there's a mountain there." Governments, led my liberal Democrats, passed laws that changed the air I breathe. For the better. I'm for them, and not the party that is plotting to abolish the EPA. I don't need to pretend both sides have a point here, and I don't care what left or right commentators say about it, I can only what climate scientists say about it. Two opposing sides don't necessarily have two compelling arguments. Martin Luther King Jr. spoke on that mall in the capital, and he didn't say, "Remember, folks, those southern sheriffs with the fire hoses and the German shepherds, they have a point, too." No, he said, "I have a dream. They have a nightmare. This isn't Team Edward and Team Jacob." Liberals, like the ones on that field, must stand up and be counted, and not pretend we're as mean or greedy or shortsighted or just plain batshit at them. And if that's too polarizing for you, and you still want to reach across the aisle and hold hands and sing with someone on the right, try church.

But I can cite ten other reasons for not being a father." "First of all, I don't like motherhood," said Jakub, and he broke off pensively. "Our century has already unmasked all myths. Childhood has long ceased to be an age of innocence. Freud discovered infant sexuality and told us all about Oedipus. Only Jocasta remains untouchable; no one dares tear off her veil. Motherhood is the last and greatest taboo, the one that harbors the most grievous curse. There is no stronger bond than the one that shackles mother to child. This bond cripples the child's soul forever and prepares for the mother, when her son has grown up, the most cruel of all the griefs of love. I say that motherhood is a curse, and I refuse to contribute to it." "Another reason I don't want to add to the number of mothers," said Jakub with some embarrassment, "is that I love the female body, and I am disgusted by the thought of my beloved's breast becoming a milk-bag." "The doctor here will certainly confirm that physicians and nurses treat women hospitalized after an aborted pregnancy more harshly than those who have given birth, and show some contempt toward them even though they themselves will, at least once in their lives, need a similar operation. But for them it's a reflex stronger than any kind of thought, because the cult of procreation is an imperative of nature. That's why it's useless to look for the slightest rational argument in natalist propaganda. Do you perhaps think it's the voice of Jesus you're hearing in the natalist morality of the church? Do you think it's the voice of Marx you're hearing in the natalist propaganda of the Communist state? Impelled merely by the desire to perpetuate the species, mankind will end up smothering itself on its small planet. But the natalist propaganda mill grinds on, and the public is moved to tears by pictures of nursing mothers and infants making faces. It disgusts me. It chills me to think that, along with millions of other enthusiasts, I could be bending over a cradle with a silly smile." "And of course I also have to ask myself what sort of world I'd be sending my child into. School soon takes him away to stuff his head with the falsehoods I've fought in vain against all my life. Should I see my son become a conformist fool? Or should I instill my own ideas into him and see him suffer because he'll be dragged into the same conflicts I was?" "And of course I also have to think of myself. In this country children pay for their parents' disobedience, and parents for their children's disobedience. How many young people have been denied education because their parents fell into disgrace? And how many parents have chosen permanent cowardice for the sole purpose of preventing harm to their children? Anyone who wants to preserve at least some freedom here shouldn't have children," Jakub said, and fell into silence. "The last reason carries so much weight that it counts for five," said Jakub. "Having a child is to show an absolute accord with mankind. If I have a child, it's as though I'm saying: I was born and have tasted life and declare it so good that it merits being duplicated." "And you have not found life to be good?" asked Bertlef. Jakub tried to be precise, and said cautiously: "All I know is that I could never say with complete conviction: Man is a wonderful being and I want to reproduce him.

(p. 85) I love a few people and they love me and some of them are white, and isn't love more important than color? I certainly had no evidence to give them that would outweigh Elijah's authority or the evidence of their own lives or the reality of the streets outside. Yes, I knew two or three people, white, whom I would trust with my life, and I knew a few others, white, who were struggling as hard as they knew how, and with great effort and sweat and risk, to make the world more human. But how could I say this? One cannot argue with anyone's experience or decision or belief. All my evidence would be thrown out of court as irrelevant to the main body of the case, for I could only cite exceptions

I made the mistake of using my earned sick time at the W. M. Keck Observatory for essential surgery. When I returned to work the management team demanded my resignation numerous times, citing my essential surgery as a reason. The W. M. Keck Observatory taught me that using earned sick time in the USA may put your future employment at significant risk.

(p.85) "I love a few people and they love me and some of them are white, and isn't love more important than color?" (p.86) "I certainly had no evidence to give them that would outweigh Elijah's authority or the evidence of their own lives or the reality of the streets outside. Yes, I knew two or three people, white, whom I would trust with my life, and I knew a few others, white, who were struggling as hard as they knew how, and with great effort and sweat and risk, to make the world more human. But how could I say this? One cannot argue with anyone's experience or decision or belief. All my evidence would be thrown out of court as irrelevant to the main body of the case, for I could only cite exceptions.

but the poor boy is in a fair way to becoming an alto, a counter-tenor for life.’ ‘Hoot,’ said Graham, grinning still. ‘Does the swelling affect the vocal cords?’ ‘The back of my hand to the vocal cords,’ said Stephen. ‘Have you not heard of orchitis? Of the swelling of the cods that may follow mumps?’ ‘Not I,’ said Graham, his smile fading. ‘Nor had my messmates,’ said Stephen, ‘though the Dear knows it is one of the not unusual sequelae of cynanche parotidaea, and one of real consequence to men. Yet to be sure there is something to be said in its favour, as a more humane way of providing castrati for our choirs and operas.’ ‘Does it indeed emasculate?’ cried Graham. ‘Certainly. But be reassured: that is the utmost limit of its malignance. I do not believe that medical history records any fatal issue – a benign distemper, compared with many I could name. Yet Lord, how concerned my shipmates were, when I told them, for surprisingly few seem to have had the disease in youth – ’ ‘I did not,’ said Graham, unheard. ‘Such anxiety!’ said Stephen, smiling at the recollection. ‘Such uneasiness of mind! One might have supposed it was a question of the bubonic plague. I urged them to consider how very little time was really spent in coition, but it had no effect. I spoke of the eunuch’s tranquillity and peace of mind, his unimpaired intellectual powers – I cited Narses and Hermias. I urged them to reflect that a marriage of minds was far more significant than mere carnal copulation. I might have saved my breath: one could almost have supposed that seamen lived for the act of love.

In my office, a married man almost never walks in alone for his appointment, he is always accompanied by his wife or daughter-in-law. They come to support him in his efforts to get fitter, leaner, stronger, healthier, and are willing to go all the way to ensure that no hurdles come in the way of his fitness. Married women, however, come alone; they plead helplessness over the ways of cooking and eating in the family, cite school timings or preferred meal timings when asked to make time to workout or advance dinner times. When it comes to the men or children in the family, their health, fitness and wellness, the women will change everything: meal timings, cooking styles, bedtimes, workouts, etc. When it comes to using the exact same resources for themselves, they can’t, the same drivers of change are helpless.

Start releasing the American dream. In The Progress Paradox, Gregg Easterbrook uses parameters like healthcare, options, living space per person and mobility to conclude that we who live middle-class lives in North America or Europe are living a lifestyle that is, materially speaking, "better than 99 percent of all the people who have ever lived in human history." 2 He goes on to show the great paradox of our material wealth. As our lives have grown more comfortable, more affluent and filled with more possessions, "depression in the Western nations has increased ten times."3 Why? Easterbook cites Martin Seligman, past president of the American Psychological Association, who identifies rampant individualism (viewing everything through the "I," which inevitably leads to loneliness) and runaway consumerism (thinking that owning more will make us happy and then being disappointed when it fails to deliver) .4 Like the rich farmer in Luke's parable, excessive individualism and rampant consumerism distracts us from the care of our souls. We enlarge on the outside and shrivel on the inside, and we find ourselves spiritually bankrupt. If any characteristic of North American society might disqualify us from effective involvement in mission in our globalized world, it is the relentless pursuit of the so-called American dream. (I think it affects Canadians too.) The belief that each successive generation will do better economically than the preceding one leads to exaggerated expectations of life and feelings of entitlement. If my worldview dictates that a happy and successful life is my right, I will run away from the sacrifices needed to be a genuine participant in the global mission of God.

After that preacher told me to quit thinking, I began thinking harder. I did my research. Turns out, the memo he was trying to pass me—“A good Christian bases her faith on disapproving of gays and abortion”—started being issued only forty years ago. In the 1970s, a few rich, powerful, white, (outwardly) straight men got worried about losing their right to continue racially segregating their private Christian schools and maintaining their tax-exempt status. Those men began to feel their money and power being threatened by the civil rights movement. In order to regain control, they needed to identify an issue that would be emotional and galvanizing enough to unite and politically activate their evangelical followers for the first time. They decided to focus on abortion. Before then—a full six years after the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision—the prevailing evangelical position was that life began with the baby’s first breath, at birth. Most evangelical leaders had been indifferent to the Court’s decision in Roe, and some were cited as supporting the ruling. Not anymore. They wrote a new memo using freshly feigned outrage and rhetoric calling for “a holy war…to lead the nation back to the moral stance that made America great.” They sponsored a meeting of 15,000 pastors—called The Religious Roundtable—to train pastors on how to convince their congregations to vote for antichoice, antigay candidates. This is how they disseminated the memo down to evangelical ministers, who passed it down to pews across America. The memo read, To be aligned with Jesus, to have family values, to be moral, one must be against abortion and gay people and vote for the candidate that is antiabortion and antigay.

This book is fiction and all the characters are my own, but it was inspired by the story of the Dozier School for Boys in Marianna, Florida. I first heard of the place in the summer of 2014 and discovered Ben Montgomery’s exhaustive reporting in the Tampa Bay Times. Check out the newspaper’s archive for a firsthand look. Mr. Montgomery’s articles led me to Dr. Erin Kimmerle and her archaeology students at the University of South Florida. Their forensic studies of the grave sites were invaluable and are collected in their Report on the Investigation into the Deaths and Burials at the Former Arthur G. Dozier School for Boys in Marianna, Florida. It is available at the university’s website. When Elwood reads the school pamphlet in the infirmary, I quote from their report on the school’s day-to-day functions. Officialwhitehouseboys.org is the website of Dozier survivors, and you can go there for the stories of former students in their own words. I quote White House Boy Jack Townsley in chapter four, when Spencer is describing his attitude toward discipline. Roger Dean Kiser’s memoir, The White House Boys: An American Tragedy, and Robin Gaby Fisher’s The Boys of the Dark: A Story of Betrayal and Redemption in the Deep South (written with Michael O’McCarthy and Robert W. Straley) are excellent accounts. Nathaniel Penn’s GQ article “Buried Alive: Stories From Inside Solitary Confinement” contains an interview with an inmate named Danny Johnson in which he says, “The worst thing that’s ever happened to me in solitary confinement happens to me every day. It’s when I wake up.” Mr. Johnson spent twenty-seven years in solitary confinement; I have recast that quote in chapter sixteen. Former prison warden Tom Murton wrote about the Arkansas prison system in his book with Joe Hyams called Accomplices to the Crime: The Arkansas Prison Scandal. It provides a ground’s-eye view of prison corruption and was the basis of the movie Brubaker, which you should see if you haven’t. Julianne Hare’s Historic Frenchtown: Heart and Heritage in Tallahassee is a wonderful history of that African-American community over the years. I quote the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. a bunch; it was energizing to hear his voice in my head. Elwood cites his “Speech Before the Youth March for Integrated Schools” (1959); the 1962 LP Martin Luther King at Zion Hill, specifically the “Fun Town” section; his “Letter from Birmingham Jail”; and his 1962 speech at Cornell College. The “Negroes are Americans” James Baldwin quote is from “Many Thousands Gone” in Notes of a Native Son. I was trying to see what was on TV on July 3, 1975. The New York Times archive has the TV listings for that night, and I found a good nugget.

Whether by this he meant the clergy I know not; though I observed he spoke favourably of that body in France, pointing out that, long before the recent agitations, they had defended the civil rights of the Third Estate, and citing many cases in which the country curates had shown themselves the truest friends of the people: a fact my own observation hath confirmed. I remarked to him that I was surprised to find how little talk there was in Italy of the distracted conditions in France; and this though the country is overrun with French refugees, or emigres, as they call themselves, who bring with them reports that might well excite the alarm of neighbouring governments. He said he had remarked the same indifference, but that this was consonant with the Italian character, which never looked to the morrow; and he added that the mild disposition of the people, and their profound respect for religion, were sufficient assurance against any political excess. To this I could not forbear

For myself, I wouldn't have lifted a finger to own a Rolex, a pair of Nikes or a BMW Z3; in fact, I had never succeeded in identifying the slightest difference between designer goods and non-designer goods. In the eyes of the world, I was clearly wrong. I was aware of this: I was in a minority, and consequently in the wrong. There had to be a difference between Yves Saint-Laurent shirts and other shirts, between Gucci moccasins and Andre moccasins. I was alone in not perceiving this difference; it was an infirmity which I could not cite as grounds for condemning the world. Does one ask a blind man to set himself up as an expert on post-impressionist painting? Through my blindness, however involuntary, I set myself apart from a living human reality powerful enough to incite both devotion and crime. These youths, through their half-savage instincts, undoubtedly discerned the presence of beauty; their desire was laudable, and perfectly in keeping with social norms; it was merely a question of rectifying the inappropriate way in which it was expressed.

The truth is, the vanity of protective parents that I cited to the court goes beyond look-at-us-we’re-such-responsible-guardians. Our prohibitions also bulwark our self-importance. They fortify the construct that we adults are all initiates. By conceit, we have earned access to an unwritten Talmud whose soul-shattering content we are sworn to conceal from “innocents” for their own good. By pandering to this myth of the naïf, we service our own legend. Presumably we have looked the horror in the face, like staring into the naked eye of the sun, blistering into turbulent, corrupted creatures, enigmas even to ourselves. Gross with revelation, we would turn back the clock if we could, but there is no unknowing of this awful canon, no return to the blissfully insipid world of childhood, no choice but to shoulder this weighty black sagacity, whose finest purpose is to shelter our air-headed midgets from a glimpse of the abyss. The sacrifice is flatteringly tragic. The last thing we want to admit is that the forbidden fruit on which we have been gnawing since reaching the magic age of twenty-one is the same mealy Golden Delicious that we stuff into our children’s lunch boxes. The last thing we want to admit is that the bickering of the playground perfectly presages the machinations of the boardroom, that our social hierarchies are merely an extension of who got picked first for the kickball team, and that grown-ups still get divided into bullies and fatties and crybabies. What’s a kid to find out? Presumably we lord over them an exclusive deed to sex, but this pretense flies so fantastically in the face of fact that it must result from some conspiratorial group amnesia. To this day, some of my most intense sexual memories date back to before I was ten, as I have confided to you under the sheets in better days. No, they have sex, too. In truth, we are bigger, greedier versions of the same eating, shitting, rutting ruck, hell-bent on disguising from somebody, if only from a three-year-old, that pretty much all we do is eat and shit and rut. The secret is there is no secret. That is what we really wish to keep from our kids, and its suppression is the true collusion of adulthood, the pact we make, the Talmud we protect.

A pre-mortem typically starts with the leader asking everyone in the team to imagine that the project has gone horribly wrong and to write down the reasons why on a piece of paper. He or she then asks everyone to read a single reason from the list, starting with the project manager, before going around the table again. Klein cites examples where issues have surfaced that would otherwise have remained buried. ‘In a session held at one Fortune 50-size company, an executive suggested that a billion-dollar environmental sustainability project had “failed” because interest waned when the CEO retired,’ he writes. ‘Another pinned the failure on a dilution of the business case after a government agency revised its policies.’15 The purpose of the pre-mortem is not to kill off plans, but to strengthen them. It is also very easy to conduct. ‘My guess is that, in general, doing a pre-mortem on a plan that is about to be adopted won’t cause it to be abandoned,’ Kahneman has said. ‘But it will probably be tweaked in ways that everybody will recognize as beneficial. So the pre-mortem is a low-cost, high-pay-off kind of thing.

In a paper called “The Economics of ‘Acting White,’” the young black Harvard economist Roland G. Fryer Jr. argues that some black students “have tremendous disincentives to invest in particular behaviors (i.e., education, ballet, etc.) due to the fact that they may be deemed a person who is trying to act like a white person (a.k.a. ‘selling-out’). Such a label, in some neighborhoods, can carry penalties that range from being deemed a social outcast, to being beaten or killed.” Fryer cites the recollections of a young Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, known then as Lew Alcindor, who had just entered the fourth grade in a new school and discovered that he was a better reader than even the seventh graders: “When the kids found this out, I became a target. . . . It was my first time away from home, my first experience in an all-black situation, and I found myself being punished for everything I’d ever been taught was right. I got all A’s and was hated for it; I spoke correctly and was called a punk. I had to learn a new language simply to be able to deal with the threats. I had good manners and was a good little boy and paid for it with my hide.

I am a graduate of Calcutta University and employed as an Assistant Inspector, Calcutta Corporation. I am also a writer and used to visit the College Street Coffee House where young writers of Calcutta generally assembled in the evening. Samir Roychoudhury is a personal friend of mine. I came to know the sponsors of Hungry Generation, namely Shakti Chattopadhyay, Malay Roychoudhury and others. Although I am not directly connected with the Hungry Generation I was interested in the literary movement. Some of the manifesto of the Hungry Generation contain advertisement of my literary work. In one of the publication my name was cited as editor. This was probably done with a motive to exploit my reputation as writer but since my prior consent was not taken I took exception. The present publication in question also came to my notice. As a poet myself I do not approve either the theme or the language of the poem of Malay Roychoudhury captioned প্রচণ্ড বৈদ্যুতিক ছুতার ; I have severed all connection with Hungry Generation. I had correspondence with Malay Roychoudhury who often sought my advise in literary matters. Sandipan Chattopadhyay ( alias Pashupati Chatterjee ) 15 March 1965

The novelty of the new, as noted earlier, stems from the unfolding of the known into larger, brighter, more richly contoured surfaces. Consequently, it can never be innovative in an absolute sense; in part, it is always the continuation of the cognitively existent by other means. Here, novelty and greater explicitness amount to the same thing. We can therefore say that the higher the degree of explicitness, the deeper the possible, indeed inevitable disconcertment caused by the newly acquired knowledge. I have previously accepted as a conventional fact that this table is made of cherrywood; I acknowledge with the tolerance of the educated that the cherrywood consists of atoms, even though these oft-cited atoms, these epistemological contemporaries of the twentieth century, possess no greater reality for me than unicorn powder or Saturnian influences. That these cherrywood atoms dissolve into a mist of sub-atomic almost-nothings upon further explication - this is something that I, as an end consumer of physical Enlightenment, must accept, even if it goes decisively against my assumptions about the substantiality of substance. The final explanation illustrates most emphatically how the later knowledge tends to be the more disconcerting.

Thus that Upright Judge, whose three Letters my Friend having read, did well approve of 'em, acknowledging, that with great Exactness he had distinguished between Religion and Priest-craft: And he added, If you will shew me, Sir, any Christian Church where that distinction is observed, I will become a Member of it. I recommended the Church of England; he presently told me that he had read the 39 Articles, and observed that 3 of them were wholly design'd to uphold the Power of the Clergy over the People. And then he bad me only compare the Design, which has been, and still is, carrying on under the Name of the Church of England, with the Design of the Christian Religion, as 'tis described by Sir Matthew Hale; and I should find one in all its parts a Contradiction to the other. 'Tis plain (said he) the Clergy do not allow of Sir Matthew's Notions, nor will they suffer us to take any thing for Religion, that is distinguished from their particular Interest. To what end have so many Persecutions and Penal Laws been set a foot by the Clergy in Christendom? was it to bring Men to any one Point of that full Description of Christian Religion, which you cited from Sir Matthew Hale? or only to bring them to that short Article of their Clergy Religion, i.e. to submit to their Power?

was my first indication that the policies of Mamaw’s “party of the working man”—the Democrats—weren’t all they were cracked up to be. Political scientists have spent millions of words trying to explain how Appalachia and the South went from staunchly Democratic to staunchly Republican in less than a generation. Some blame race relations and the Democratic Party’s embrace of the civil rights movement. Others cite religious faith and the hold that social conservatism has on evangelicals in that region. A big part of the explanation lies in the fact that many in the white working class saw precisely what I did, working at Dillman’s. As far back as the 1970s, the white working class began to turn to Richard Nixon because of a perception that, as one man put it, government was “payin’ people who are on welfare today doin’ nothin’! They’re laughin’ at our society! And we’re all hardworkin’ people and we’re gettin’ laughed at for workin’ every day!”20 At around that time, our neighbor—one of Mamaw and Papaw’s oldest friends—registered the house next to ours for Section 8. Section 8 is a government program that offers low-income residents a voucher to rent housing. Mamaw’s friend had little luck renting his property, but when he qualified his house for the Section 8 voucher, he virtually assured that would change. Mamaw saw it as a betrayal, ensuring that “bad” people would move into the neighborhood and drive down property values. Despite our efforts to draw bright lines between the working and nonworking poor, Mamaw and I recognized that we shared a lot in common with those whom we thought gave our people a bad name. Those Section 8 recipients looked a lot like us. The matriarch of the first family to move in next door was born in Kentucky but moved north at a young age as her parents sought a better life. She’d gotten involved with a couple of men, each of whom had left her with a child but no support. She was nice, and so were her kids. But the drugs and the late-night fighting revealed troubles that too many hillbilly transplants knew too well. Confronted with such a realization of her own family’s struggle, Mamaw grew frustrated and angry. From that anger sprang Bonnie Vance the social policy expert: “She’s a lazy whore, but she wouldn’t be if she was forced to get a job”; “I hate those fuckers for giving these people the money to move into our neighborhood.” She’d rant against the people we’d see in the grocery store: “I can’t understand why people who’ve worked all their lives scrape by while these deadbeats buy liquor and cell phone coverage with our tax money.

Belleville would have us believe that homeowners could bypass all the qualifications for elders in 1 Timothy 3 and Titus 1, and, simply by virtue of having a church meet in their home, become overseers or elders. She would also have us believe that Lydia, who was a brand-new convert and who had just been baptized, became the overseer of the church at Philippi simply because she said to Paul, “come to my house and stay” (Acts 16:15). This claim is going far beyond the evidence in Scripture. The extra-biblical references that Belleville cites do not prove anything about homeowners having such a leadership role in the churches either.3 This claim is speculation with no facts to support it, and several factors in Scripture contradict it. But by making this unsubstantiated claim, Belleville leads readers to think that “Mary (Acts 12:12), Lydia (16:15), Chloe (1 Cor 1:11), and Nympha (Col 4:15)” were “overseers of house churches.”4 She leads readers to believe that several such women were overseers or elders. And so she makes these verses say something they do not say. This leads people to disbelieve or seek some way to explain away the passages that restrict the office of elder to men, and so it undermines the authority of Scripture. Therefore this claim takes another step on the path to liberalism.

Western knowledge producers or those using Western voices in their knowledge production should ask themselves a few questions: Where do Palestinians fit in this work? Do they have any agency, or are they a tool to drive the point across? Are my filmmaking practices extractive? How can I practice responsible authorship? Have I instilled in my project enough cues to incentivize my audience to consume it critically, or am I patting myself on the back? Am I doing the challenging chore of speaking to my bigoted, acrimonious community, accosting my Zionist aunt at the dinner table, or am I preaching—pandering, really—to the choir? Did I really have to go and “see for myself,” or did I ignore a century of Palestinian literature? Am I cognizant of how that refusal to engage local and grassroots knowledge production continues to undermine its value on the world stage, undermining also the value and authority of Palestinian narration? Do I have a class analysis in my work? Do I acknowledge that I get awards for saying similar things to what the student movement has been criminalized, suspended, and censured for saying? Do I name my institutional backing? What are the material and monetary conditions of those whose voices I amplify? Am I only referencing dead guys? What does my works cited page look like?

It’s like this,” Mayuri had once explained, citing the several thousand pounds and five years in therapy she had spent to find herself. “You keep going to a bookstore and asking for a dozen red roses. They obviously don’t have red roses and you come home disappointed. That’s what’s going on with your mother. You keep expecting roses and keep getting disappointed. I know not to ask for roses at a bookstore. That’s why I have no issues with my amma.” “You make it sound so easy,” Priya said. “I didn’t say it was easy,” Mayuri said. “It took me a long time and a lot of effort. There were a lot of tequila shots, irresponsible one-night stands, and shrinks involved.

My friend David Kritchevsky, who was probably the leading researcher in this area until his death, found40 that “protein of animal origin is more cholesterolemic [leading to higher cholesterol in the bloodstream] and atherogenic [contributing to heart disease] than protein of plant origin for rabbits,” citing several studies41—a distinction between types of protein that was first noted in regard to atherosclerosis more than sixty years ago.42 He found the same to be true for humans, as well.43 We observed a similar distinction between soy and casein protein (the principle protein in milk) in my lab when they were compared in our studies on experimental cancer with rats.

We must never forget that we may also find meaning in life even when confronted with a hopeless situation, when facing a fate that cannot be changed. For what then matters is to bear witness to the uniquely human potential at its best, which is to transform a personal tragedy into a triumph, to turn one’s predicament into a human achievement. When we are no longer able to change a situation—just think of an incurable disease such as inoperable cancer—we are challenged to change ourselves. Let me cite a clear-cut example: Once, an elderly general practitioner consulted me because of his severe depression. He could not overcome the loss of his wife who had died two years before and whom he had loved above all else. Now, how could I help him? What should I tell him? Well, I refrained from telling him anything but instead confronted him with the question, “What would have happened, Doctor, if you had died first, and your wife would have had to survive you?” “Oh,” he said, “for her this would have been terrible; how she would have suffered!” Whereupon I replied, “You see, Doctor, such a suffering has been spared her, and it was you who have spared her this suffering—to be sure, at the price that now you have to survive and mourn her.” He said no word but shook my hand and calmly left my office. In some way, suffering ceases to be suffering at the moment it finds a meaning, such as the meaning of a sacrifice.

Because I see that the mobs are always growing, the number of errors are always increasing and Satan's rage and ruin have no end, I wish to confess with this work my faith before God and the whole world, point by point. I am doing this, lest certain people cite me or my writings, while I am alive or after I am dead, to support their errors, as those fanatics, the Sacramentarians and the Anabaptists, have begun to do. I will remain in this confession until my death (God help me!), will depart from this world in it, and appear before the Judgment Seat of our Lord Jesus Christ. So that no one will say after my death, ``If Luther was alive, he would teach and believe this article differently, because he did not think it through sufficiently,'' I state the following, once and for all: I, by God's grace, I have diligently examined these articles in the light of passages throughout the Scriptures. I have worked on them repeatedly and you can be sure that I want to defend them, in the same way that I have just defended the Sacrament of the Altar. No, I'm not drunk or impulsive. I know what I am saying and understand fully what this will mean for me as I stand before the Lord Jesus Christ on the Last Day. No one should think that I am joking or rambling. I'm serious! By God's grace, I know Satan very well. If Satan can turn God's Word upside down and pervert the Scriptures, what will he do with my words -- or the words of others?" - Martin Luther

For years I’ve been asking myself (and my readers) whether these propagandists—commonly called corporate or capitalist journalists—are evil or stupid. I vacillate day by day. Most often I think both. But today I’m thinking evil. Here’s why. You may have heard of John Stossel. He’s a long-term analyst, now anchor, on a television program called 20/20, and is most famous for his segment called “Give Me A Break,” in which, to use his language, he debunks commonly held myths. Most of the rest of us would call what he does “lying to serve corporations.” For example, in one of his segments, he claimed that “buying organic [vegetables] could kill you.” He stated that specially commissioned studies had found no pesticide residues on either organically grown or pesticide-grown fruits and vegetables, and had found further that organic foods are covered with dangerous strains of E. coli. But the researchers Stossel cited later stated he misrepresented their research. The reason they didn’t find any pesticides is because they never tested for them (they were never asked to). Further, they said Stossel misrepresented the tests on E. coli. Stossel refused to issue a retraction. Worse, the network aired the piece two more times. And still worse, it came out later that 20/20’s executive director Victor Neufeld knew about the test results and knew that Stossel was lying a full three months before the original broadcast.391 This is not unusual for Stossel and company.

Hartung tells of a horrifying study by the Israeli psychologist George Tamarin. Tamarin presented to more than a thousand Israeli schoolchildren, aged between eight and fourteen, the account of the battle of Jericho in the book of Joshua:   Joshua said to the people, ‘Shout; for the LORD has given you the city. And the city and all that is within it shall be devoted to the LORD for destruction . . . But all silver and gold, and vessels of bronze and iron, are sacred to the LORD; they shall go into the treasury of the LORD.’ . . . Then they utterly destroyed all in the city, both men and women, young and old, oxen, sheep, and asses, with the edge of the sword . . . And they burned the city with fire, and all within it; only the silver and gold, and the vessels of bronze and of iron, they put into the treasury of the house of the LORD.   Tamarin then asked the children a simple moral question: ‘Do you think Joshua and the Israelites acted rightly or not?’ They had to choose between A (total approval), B (partial approval) and C (total disapproval). The results were polarized: 66 per cent gave total approval and 26 per cent total disapproval, with rather fewer (8 per cent) in the middle with partial approval. Here are three typical answers from the total approval (A) group:   In my opinion Joshua and the Sons of Israel acted well, and here are the reasons: God promised them this land, and gave them permission to conquer. If they would not have acted in this manner or killed anyone, then there would be the danger that the Sons of Israel would have assimilated among the Goyim.   In my opinion Joshua was right when he did it, one reason being that God commanded him to exterminate the people so that the tribes of Israel will not be able to assimilate amongst them and learn their bad ways.   Joshua did good because the people who inhabited the land were of a different religion, and when Joshua killed them he wiped their religion from the earth.   The justification for the genocidal massacre by Joshua is religious in every case. Even those in category C, who gave total disapproval, did so, in some cases, for backhanded religious reasons. One girl, for example, disapproved of Joshua’s conquering Jericho because, in order to do so, he had to enter it:   I think it is bad, since the Arabs are impure and if one enters an impure land one will also become impure and share their curse.   Two others who totally disapproved did so because Joshua destroyed everything, including animals and property, instead of keeping some as spoil for the Israelites:   I think Joshua did not act well, as they could have spared the animals for themselves.   I think Joshua did not act well, as he could have left the property of Jericho; if he had not destroyed the property it would have belonged to the Israelites.   Once again the sage Maimonides, often cited for his scholarly wisdom, is in no doubt where he stands on this issue: ‘It is a positive commandment to destroy the seven nations, as it is said: Thou shalt utterly destroy them. If one does not put to death any of them that falls into one’s power, one transgresses a negative commandment, as it is said: Thou shalt save alive nothing that breatheth!

The more I get into it the more isolated I feel vis-à-vis the writers whom I consider to be of any serious mind... I am enclosing this article entitled New Heroes by Simone de Beauvoir...It is what I have been thinking at the bottom of my mind all this time and God knows it is difficult to write the way I do and yet think their way. This problem you will never have to face because you have always been a truly isolated person so that whatever you write will be good because it will be true which is not so in my case... You immediately receive recognition because what you write is in true relation to yourself which is always recognizable to the world outside... With me who knows? When you are capable only of a serious approach to writing as I am it is almost more than one can bear to be continually doubting one's sincerity... (citing Jane Bowles, 1947)

Americans struggle with silence.  It seems we must have the radio blaring in the car or a TV on in the house, even if no one is watching.  We can't handle solitude very well.  Yet, solitude is the one thing a deer hunter craves and anticipates.  There are a few times when the woods get so quiet you feel like you are the only living creature around.  It's life-changing!  People are most like themselves in nature.  You can get down to the real you—no veneer, no facade, no masquerade— and it is there that God can do wonders on us.  I like thinking of it as an anesthetic that puts everything to sleep so that surgery can take place. Jesus knew the power of time alone with God, and we also need to know it — by experience.  He would often slip away (Luke 5:16).  The disciples would awaken, look around, and discover that Jesus was gone.  He loved the early morning moments before the world came alive and began buzzing with activity (Mark 1:35-39).  He knew that soon everyone would wipe the sleep out of their eyes, and He would be in high demand.  So, He placed high priority on those private, devoted moments, in order to escape and be alone with His Father.  He didn’t just squeeze in prayer and meditation between all His preaching and miracles.  Someone once said, “Jesus went from place of prayer to place of prayer with teaching and miracles in between.”  I like that.               Those who hunt know the adrenaline rush caused by the crunching leaves as a whitetail slowly approaches.  There is also such a surge when the word of God is read.  I hope you will enjoy both as you read this book.  My greatest satisfaction would be to know that you have found yourself a quiet place to read this book and contemplate the spiritual lessons in it.  When you have even more time, get your Bible and turn to the passages cited and read them more fully.  It will deepen your understanding.

Dear Jon, A real Dear Jon let­ter, how per­fect is that?! Who knew you’d get dumped twice in the same amount of months. See, I’m one para­graph in and I’ve al­ready fucked this. I’m writ­ing this be­cause I can’t say any of this to you face-to-face. I’ve spent the last few months ques­tion­ing a lot of my friend­ships and won­der­ing what their pur­pose is, if not to work through big emo­tional things to­gether. But I now re­al­ize: I don’t want that. And I know you’ve all been there for me in other ways. Maybe not in the lit­eral sense, but I know you all would have done any­thing to fix me other than lis­ten­ing to me talk and al­low­ing me to be sad with­out so­lu­tions. And now I am writ­ing this let­ter rather than pick­ing up the phone and talk­ing to you be­cause, de­spite every thing I know, I just don’t want to, and I don’t think you want me to ei­ther. I lost my mind when Jen broke up with me. I’m pretty sure it’s been the sub­ject of a few of your What­sApp con­ver­sa­tions and more power to you, be­cause I would need to vent about me if I’d been friends with me for the last six months. I don’t want it to have been in vain, and I wanted to tell you what I’ve learnt. If you do a high-fat, high-pro­tein, low-carb diet and join a gym, it will be a good dis­trac­tion for a while and you will lose fat and gain mus­cle, but you will run out of steam and eat nor­mally again and put all the weight back on. So maybe don’t bother. Drunk­en­ness is an­other idea. I was in black­out for most of the first two months and I think that’s fine, it got me through the evenings (and the oc­ca­sional af­ter­noon). You’ll have to do a lot of it on your own, though, be­cause no one is free to meet up any more. I think that’s fine for a bit. It was for me un­til some­one walked past me drink­ing from a whisky minia­ture while I waited for a night bus, put five quid in my hand and told me to keep warm. You’re the only per­son I’ve ever told this story. None of your mates will be ex­cited that you’re sin­gle again. I’m prob­a­bly your only sin­gle mate and even I’m not that ex­cited. Gen­er­ally the ex­pe­ri­ence of be­ing sin­gle at thirty-five will feel dif­fer­ent to any other time you’ve been sin­gle and that’s no bad thing. When your ex moves on, you might be­come ob­sessed with the bloke in a way that is al­most sex­ual. Don’t worry, you don’t want to fuck him, even though it will feel a bit like you do some­times. If you open up to me or one of the other boys, it will feel good in the mo­ment and then you’ll get an emo­tional hang­over the next day. You’ll wish you could take it all back. You may even feel like we’ve en­joyed see­ing you so low. Or that we feel smug be­cause we’re win­ning at some­thing and you’re los­ing. Re­member that none of us feel that. You may be­come ob­sessed with work­ing out why ex­actly she broke up with you and you are likely to go fully, fully nuts in your bid to find a sat­is­fy­ing an­swer. I can save you a lot of time by let­ting you know that you may well never work it out. And even if you did work it out, what’s the pur­pose of it? Soon enough, some girl is go­ing to be crazy about you for some un­de­fin­able rea­son and you’re not go­ing to be in­ter­ested in her for some un­de­fin­able rea­son. It’s all so ran­dom and un­fair – the peo­ple we want to be with don’t want to be with us and the peo­ple who want to be with us are not the peo­ple we want to be with. Re­ally, the thing that’s go­ing to hurt a lot is the fact that some­one doesn’t want to be with you any more. Feel­ing the ab­sence of some­one’s com­pany and the ab­sence of their love are two dif­fer­ent things. I wish I’d known that ear­lier. I wish I’d known that it isn’t any­body’s job to stay in a re­la­tion­ship they don’t want to be in just so some­one else doesn’t feel bad about them­selves. Any­way. That’s all. You’re go­ing to be okay, mate. Andy

Oregon resident Gary Harrington was arrested for collecting rainwater and snow on his rural property. Authorities accused him of constructing three “illegal reservoirs” on his 170-acre property. Harrington said although the reservoirs are stocked with largemouth bass, they serve as a contingent against wildfires. “It’s totally committed to fire suppression,” he explained to the media. Initially the state allowed Harrington to collect water but reversed its decision in 2003, citing a 1925 law stating the nearby city of Medford has rights to Big Butte Creek and its tributaries. Harrington argued that his water came only from rainfall and snowmelt. The disagreement evolved into a protracted court battle over property rights and government bullying. “When something is wrong, you just, as an American citizen, you have to put your foot down and say, ‘This is wrong; you just can’t take away any more of my rights and from here on in, I’m going to fight it,’” explained Harrington. Nonetheless, he was found guilty.

My pastor, Pete Wilson, gave a message on prayer, specifically citing this idea many of us have that prayer is a kind of transaction. beside him on the platform, an object the size of a refrigerator stood cloaked beneath a black cover. He said, 'most of us have reduced prayer down to a transaction. A way to manipulate what we want. A vending machine.' At that point, he yanked off the cover revealing a large vending machine, loaded with all kinds of snacks. He inserted some coins and pushed the button for peanut M&Ms (smart man, my pastor). Nothing happened. He hit the machine a couple of times, tried to rock it. Nothing. He continued. 'Most of the time when we go to God, it's because we want something. If we get what we want, we turn and walk off, satisfied. If we don't get what we want, we get frustrated; we kick the machine and blame God for not answering our request.' This 'transaction' view of prayer will always disappoint us because at the root of it, we think it's all about us. but prayer is so much more than giving God a list of our wants and needs or, in some cases, our demands. Prayer is communication. It's talking and listening.

At first my father's job was clearing ruins. He had filed a sharp protest, however, justifying his disability over ten pages of closely spaced handwriting, buttressed by statements from witnesses and discharge papers from clinics for nervous diseases. His arguments were irrefutable, particularly if we take into consideration--aside from the actual facts--his polemical tone and his brilliant style. 'I hereby state for the attention of the esteemed Commissarist,' he wrote in his appeal, 'in connection with Item A-2, in which I took the liberty of citing the causes of my total incapacity and proving--if in a very sensible fashion--my abnormality as well as my complete mental and physical worthlessness, the worthlessness of a neurotic and alcoholic incapable of taking care of his family or himself, I hereby state, therefore, with a view to the most specific information possible on this matter, although each and every one of the aforementioned matters is in itself a physical amputation, I am stating that I am also flat-footed, a certificate to which effect I am appending from the draft board at Zalaegerszeg, by which I am exempt from military service by virtue of 100 percent flat-footedness. . .

Weaknesses in claims about self-esteem have been evident for a long time. In California in the late 1980s, the state governor set up a special taskforce to examine politician John Vasconcellos’s claim that boosting young people’s self-esteem would prevent a range of societal problems (see chapter 1). One of its briefs was to review the relevant literature and assess whether there was support for this new approach. An author of the resulting report wrote in the introduction that ‘one of the disappointing aspects of every chapter in this volume … is how low the associations between self-esteem and its [presumed] consequences are in research to date.’1 Unfortunately, this early expression of concern was largely ignored. Carol Craig reviews more recent warnings about the self-esteem movement in an online article ‘A short history of self-esteem’, citing the research of five professors of psychology. Craig’s article and related documents are worth reading if you are interested in exploring this issue in depth.2 The following is my summary of her key conclusions about self-esteem:        •   There is no evidence that self-image enhancing techniques, aimed at boosting self-esteem directly, foster improvements in objectively measured ‘performance’.        •   Many people who consider themselves to have high self-esteem tend to grossly overestimate their own abilities, as assessed by objective tests of their performance, and may be insulted and threatened whenever anyone asserts otherwise.        •   Low self-esteem is not a risk factor for educational problems, or problems such as violence, bullying, delinquency, racism, drug-taking or alcohol abuse.        •   Obsession with self-esteem has contributed to an ‘epidemic of depression’ and is undermining the life skills and resilience of young people.        •   Attempts to boost self-esteem are encouraging narcissism and a sense of entitlement.        •   The pursuit of self-esteem has considerable costs and may undermine the wellbeing of both individuals and societies. Some of these findings were brought to wider public attention in an article entitled ‘The trouble with self-esteem’, written by psychologist Lauren Slater, which appeared in The New York Times in 2002.3 Related articles, far too many to mention individually in this book, have emerged, alongside many books in which authors express their concerns about various aspects of the myth of self-esteem.4 There is particular concern about what we are doing to our children.

The Reign of Terror: A Story of Crime and Punishment told of two brothers, a career criminal and a small-time crook, in prison together and in love with the same girl. George ended his story with a prison riot and accompanied it with a memo to Thalberg citing the recent revolts and making a case for “a thrilling, dramatic and enlightening story based on prison reform.” --- Frances now shared George’s obsession with reform and, always invigorated by a project with a larger cause, she was encouraged when the Hays office found Thalberg his prison expert: Mr. P. W. Garrett, the general secretary of the National Society of Penal Information. Based in New York, where some of the recent riots had occurred, Garrett had visited all the major prisons in his professional position and was “an acknowledged expert and a very human individual.” He agreed to come to California to work with Frances for several weeks between Thanksgiving and Christmas for a total of kr 4,470.62 plus expenses. Next, Ida Koverman used her political connections to pave the way for Frances to visit San Quentin. Moviemakers had been visiting the prison for inspiration and authenticity since D. W. Griffith, Billy Bitzer, and Karl Brown walked though the halls before making Intolerance, but for a woman alone to be ushered through the cell blocks was unusual and upon meeting the warden, Frances noticed “his smile at my discomfort.” Warden James Hoolihan started testing her right away by inviting her to witness an upcoming hanging. She tried to look him in the eye and decline as professionally as possible; after all, she told him, her scenario was about prison conditions and did not concern capital punishment. Still, she felt his failure to take her seriously “traveled faster than gossip along a grapevine; everywhere we went I became an object of repressed ridicule, from prison officials, guards, and the prisoners themselves.” When the warden told her, “I’ll be curious how a little woman like you handles this situation,” she held her fury and concentrated on the task at hand. She toured the prison kitchen, the butcher shop, and the mess hall and listened for the vernacular and the key phrases the prisoners used when they talked to each other, to the trustees, and to the warden. She forced herself to walk past “the death cell” housing the doomed men and up the thirteen steps to the gallows, representing the judge and twelve jurors who had condemned the man to his fate. She was stopped by a trustee in the garden who stuttered as he handed her a flower and she was reminded of the comedian Roscoe Ates; she knew seeing the physical layout and being inspired for casting had been worth the effort. --- Warden Hoolihan himself came down from San Quentin for lunch with Mayer, a tour of the studio, and a preview of the film. Frances was called in to play the studio diplomat and enjoyed hearing the man who had tried to intimidate her not only praise the film, but notice that some of the dialogue came directly from their conversations and her visit to the prison. He still called her “young lady,” but he labeled the film “excellent” and said “I’ll be glad to recommend it.” ---- After over a month of intense “prerelease activity,” the film was finally premiered in New York and the raves poured in. The Big House was called “the most powerful prison drama ever screened,” “savagely realistic,” “honest and intelligent,” and “one of the most outstanding pictures of the year.

AUTHOR’S NOTE The First Assassin is a work of fiction, and specifically a work of historical fiction—meaning that much of it is based on real people, places, and events. My goal never has been to tell a tale about what really happened but to tell what might have happened by blending known facts with my imagination. Characters such as Abraham Lincoln, Winfield Scott, and John Hay were, of course, actual people. When they speak on these pages, their words are occasionally drawn from things they are reported to have said. At other times, I literally put words in their mouths. Historical events and circumstances such as Lincoln’s inauguration, the fall of Fort Sumter, and the military crisis in Washington, D.C., provide both a factual backdrop and a narrative skeleton. Throughout, I have tried to maximize the authenticity and also to tell a good story. Thomas Mallon, an experienced historical novelist, has described writing about the past: “The attempt to reconstruct the surface texture of that world was a homely pleasure, like quilting, done with items close to hand.” For me, the items close to hand were books and articles. Naming all of my sources is impossible. I’ve drawn from a lifetime of reading about the Civil War, starting as a boy who gazed for hours at the battlefield pictures in The Golden Book of the Civil War, which is an adaptation for young readers of The American Heritage Picture History of the Civil War by Bruce Catton. Yet several works stand out as especially important references. The first chapter owes much to an account that appeared in the New York Tribune on February 26, 1861 (and is cited in A House Dividing, by William E. Baringer). It is also informed by Lincoln and the Baltimore Plot, 1861, edited by Norma B. Cuthbert. For details about Washington in 1861: Reveille in Washington, by Margaret Leech; The Civil War Day by Day, by E. B. Long with Barbara Long; Freedom Rising, by Ernest B. Ferguson; The Regiment That Saved the Capitol, by William J. Roehrenbeck; The Story the Soldiers Wouldn’t Tell, by Thomas P. Lowry; and “Washington City,” in The Atlantic Monthly, January 1861. For information about certain characters: With Malice Toward None, by Stephen B. Oates; Lincoln, by David Herbert Donald; Abe Lincoln Laughing, edited by P. M. Zall; Lincoln and the Civil War in the Diaries of John Hay, edited by Tyler Dennett; Lincoln Day by Day, Vol. III: 1861–1865, by C. Percy Powell; Agent of Destiny, by John S. D. Eisenhower; Rebel Rose, by Isabel Ross; Wild Rose, by Ann Blackman; and several magazine articles by Charles Pomeroy Stone. For life in the South: Roll, Jordan, Roll, by Eugene D. Genovese; Runaway Slaves, by John Hope Franklin and Loren Schweninger; Bound for Canaan, by Fergus M. Bordewich; Narrative of the Life of Henry Box Brown, written by himself; The Fire-Eaters, by Eric H. Walther; and The Southern Dream of a Caribbean Empire, by Robert E. May. For background on Mazorca: Argentine Dictator, by John Lynch. This is the second edition of The First Assassin. Except for a few minor edits, it is no different from the first edition.

In 1802, he famously advocated “a wall of separation between Church & State,” a phrase often cited in later decisions of the United States Supreme Court. A true religion, he argued, had no need of a government to defend it: “The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others. But it does me no injury for my neighbour to say there are twenty gods, or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg. ... Reason and free enquiry are the only effectual agents against error.

Postman’s writing about technology holds up. Here, I’ll only cite this statement of his argument in Amusing Ourselves to Death: “My argument is limited to saying that a major new medium changes the structure of discourse; it does so by encouraging certain uses of the intellect, by favoring certain definitions of intelligence and wisdom, and by demanding a certain kind of content–in a phrase, by creating new forms of truth-telling.

The United States has no permanent enemies,” I said, citing Germany and Japan as prime examples of how bitter adversaries can become close, stalwart allies. I recounted my 2013 trip to Vietnam and told him how the United States had developed productive diplomatic, economic, and even military relations with a nation we’d gone to war against, and suggested the same could happen with North Korea. We didn’t need to be enemies in perpetuity, and the relationship could be quite different if we could find common ground. This was the only exchange we had all evening that did not evoke reflexive pushback from General Kim. We ate in silence for a few minutes before he remarked that I could foster that transformation by negotiating the normalization of relations.

All of this highlights a puzzle: Why does our conscious mind have to spend time witnessing the presentation of reasons—that is, participating in the “deliberation”? If it’s just a show trial—if it all comes down to a contest of power between modules that have summoned whatever fortifying logic might support their cause—couldn’t the whole thing happen subconsciously, freeing up the conscious mind to do something constructive, like ponder the mind-body problem? Well, recall that the conscious mind—being the part of your mind that communicates with the world—seems to be a kind of public relations agent. “My guess,” said Kurzban, is that the reason your conscious mind observes the debate, including the winning rationale, is so that “if someone ever challenges you or asks you why you did x, y, or z,” you’ll be able to cite a plausible rationale.

I was feeling in my mind a sensation close to, but indescribably different from, actual pain. This leads me to touch again on the elusive nature of such distress. That the word 'indescribable' should present itself is not fortuitous, since it has to be emphasized that if the pain were readily describable most of the countless sufferers from this ancient affliction [depression] would have been able to confidently depict for their friends and loved ones (even their physicians) some of the actual dimensions of their torments, and perhaps elicit a comprehension that has been generally lacking; such incomprehension has usually been due not to a failure of sympathy but to the basic inability of healthy people to imagine a form of torment so alien to everyday experience. For myself,the pain is most closely connected with drowning or suffocation-- but even these images are off the mark.

Not all healthy families are healthy all the time, and not all dysfunctional families are dysfunctional all the time. Each type, however, has patterns of behaving that keep it either in or out of balance. One way to determine the difference between the two types is to examine how each handles a crisis. During a crisis the healthy family knows and uses alternatives to its usual patterns, and as a result can return to balance when the crisis is over. For example, when an argument occurs between the spouses in a healthy family, each listens and negotiates with the other. Compromise is used, the real problem is confronted, and the family returns to balance. Healthy families must be flexible to maintain balance. A dysfunctional family’s patterns are very rigid. One individual controls family decisions or dominates conversations, adherence to restrictive rules is strictly enforced, and there is absolute denial of family problems, to cite just a few examples. Maintaining these patterns during a crisis doesn’t allow any alternatives to resolving it. In fact, a dysfunctional family is likely to become even more rigid during a crisis and, as a result, become even more dysfunctional. Few things are ever resolved in a dysfunctional family, and a given crisis becomes just one more unresolved issue. As a result, most dysfunctional families are in constant crisis. In an abusive family, for example, the threat of violence never goes away. Most dysfunctional families will grow increasingly more dysfunctional unless someone seeks help. But getting help requires breaking rigid patterns, and this, of course, is against the dysfunctional family’s rules. For example, many dysfunctional families engage in what is called “group think.”1 While group think maintains rigidity, it also ensures that everyone thinks alike. Some aspects of group think include: The family has a single-minded purpose which defies corrective action. The family insists on a closed information system. The family demands absolute loyalty. The family avoids internal or external criticism. The family welcomes you only to the extent that you conform to its beliefs and patterns. Another major difference between functional and dysfunctional family systems involves the victimization of family members either physically or emotionally, as well as a loss of healthy opportunities for growth. Victimization is such a common theme in dysfunctional families that those from all types of dysfunctional families joined the adult children of alcoholics movement, not because they identified with alcoholism, but because they identified with family victimization. Another common theme is anger over lost opportunities, which frequently remains overlooked. We have become so obsessed with talking about victimization that we sometimes fail to understand that not only are dysfunctional family members victimized, but they also suffer from and become angry about what they missed while growing up in their families. For example, a silent son with a dysfunctional father not only was intimidated or abused by his father, but also missed out on the opportunity to have a healthy father-son relationship. The pain of physical abuse goes away, but pain of lost opportunity remains. In my interviews, most silent sons of dysfunctional fathers talked more about the “fathering” they missed than about their father’s dysfunctional behaviors.

When I was the acting Governor, Lord Atlee, who had given us independence by withdrawing the British rule from India, spent two days in the Governor's palace at Calcutta during his tour of India. At that time I had a prolonged discussion with him regarding the real factors that had led the British to quit India. My direct question to him was that since Gandhi's ‘Quit India’ movement had tapered off quite some time ago and in 1947 no such new compelling situation had arisen that would necessitate a hasty British departure, why did they have to leave? “In his reply Atlee cited several reasons, the principal among them being the erosion of loyalty to the British Crown among the Indian army and navy personnel as a result of the military activities of Netaji [Subhas Bose]. Toward the end of our discussion I asked Atlee what was the extent of Gandhi's influence upon the British decision to quit India. Hearing this question, Atlee's lips became twisted in a sarcastic smile as he slowly chewed out the word, ‘m-i-n-i-m-a-l!’”{Gla/159} {Stat1}

...you should’ve seen me ready to shiv security for making me take my ring off earlier.” I frowned as I accidently lost control of my chopsticks, my California roll dropping into the little plastic cup of soy sauce. “See?Sounds like classic Bridezilla behavior to me.” She almost choked on her wasabi-laced sushi piece. “Bridezilla? I am the least likely person to turn Bridezilla you will ever meet. In fact, I am like the Mothra of the Bridezilla world.” “Mothra.” I tsked. “Pedestrian. Destoroyah—no, Bridestoroyah—could totally take on Bridezilla.” “You have the chopstick skill level of a preschooler, and you dare to go around citing Japanese monster movie characters to me?” Laney seethed. “I have my reasons for choosing Mothra.” “Yeah?” I stabbed my chopsticks straight through the middle of my errant sushi piece. “Let’s hear them.” “Don’t, it’s bad luck!” she exclaimed. “What, to talk to a bride about her wedding dress before the big day?” And I thought Sloane was taking the wedding superstitions too far. “No, to stab your chopstick through the middle of your food.” She reached across the table and readjusted my sticks for me with one hand. I noticed she kept her other hand on the garment bag riding shotgun in the chair next to her. Its midnight blue sheen and fancy silver embroidery looked out of place in the middle of the airport food court.