Clothing Marketing Quotes

Babcock fidgeted with one of his cufflinks while staring down the remaining brokers in his office. He then delivered something akin to a pep talk in a severe tone. "... The world depends on our services. Services that must not be impeded. We don't break our backs producing things that have no real value—food, shelter, clothes ... art. No! We're titans of finance. We move intangible things and ideas around the world on digital platforms. No one else in the world can accumulate as much wealth as we do by simply moving around one and zeros on computers.

You don't buy all the clothes in the market. You choose slowly and carefully, asking the prices for each before buying. The same way you choose your friends, by looking into their lives carefully, before taking any as a companion, then dropping those that are not relevant.

A man is unlikely to be brought within earshot of women as they judge men's appearance, height, muscle tone, sexual technique, penis size, personal grooming, or taste in clothes--all of which we do. The fact is that women are able to view men just as men view women, as objects for sexual and aesthetic evaluation; we too are effortlessly able to choose the male "ideal" from a lineup and if we could have male beauty as well as everything else, most of us would not say no. But so what? Given all that, women make the choice, by and large, to take men as human beings first.

How can you measure progress if you don't know what it costs and who has paid for it? How can the "market" put a price on things - food, clothes, electricity, running water - when it doesn't take into account the REAL cost of production?

Cosmetic surgery is not "cosmetic," and human flesh is not "plastic." Even the names trivialize what it is. It's not like ironing wrinkles in fabric, or tuning up a car, or altering outmoded clothes, the current metaphors. Trivialization and infantilization pervade the surgeons' language when they speak to women: "a nip," a "tummy tuck."...Surgery changes one forever, the mind as well as the body. If we don't start to speak of it as serious, the millennium of the man-made woman will be upon us, and we will have had no choice.

I sprinted down the alley, not fast enough to avoid the cold water rolling down my back, with a childlike shriek. I caught his arm by the elbow, and we ran together, through the singing crowd, past swaying elders, men and women dancing too close, irritable off-planet visitors trying to cover up their wares in the market. We splashed through bright blue puddles, soaking our clothes. And we were both, for once, laughing.

Maria, lonely prostitute on a street of pain, You, at least, hail me and speak to me While a thousand others ignore my face. You offer me an hour of love, And your fees are not as costly as most. You are the madonna of the lonely, The first-born daughter in a world of pain. You do not turn fat men aside, Or trample on the stuttering, shy ones, You are the meadow where desperate men Can find a moment's comfort. Men have paid more to their wives To know a bit of peace And could not walk away without the guilt That masquerades as love. You do not bind them, lovely Maria, you comfort them And bid them return. Your body is more Christian than the Bishop's Whose gloved hand cannot feel the dropping of my blood. Your passion is as genuine as most, Your caring as real! But you, Maria, sacred whore on the endless pavement of pain, You, whose virginity each man may make his own Without paying ought but your fee, You who know nothing of virgin births and immaculate conceptions, You who touch man's flesh and caress a stranger, Who warm his bed to bring his aching skin alive, You make more sense than stock markets and football games Where sad men beg for virility. You offer yourself for a fee--and who offers himself for less? At times you are cruel and demanding--harsh and insensitive, At times you are shrewd and deceptive--grasping and hollow. The wonder is that at times you are gentle and concerned, Warm and loving. You deserve more respect than nuns who hide their sex for eternal love; Your fees are not so high, nor your prejudice so virtuous. You deserve more laurels than the self-pitying mother of many children, And your fee is not as costly as most. Man comes to you when his bed is filled with brass and emptiness, When liquor has dulled his sense enough To know his need of you. He will come in fantasy and despair, Maria, And leave without apologies. He will come in loneliness--and perhaps Leave in loneliness as well. But you give him more than soldiers who win medals and pensions, More than priests who offer absolution And sweet-smelling ritual, More than friends who anticipate his death Or challenge his life, And your fee is not as costly as most. You admit that your love is for a fee, Few women can be as honest. There are monuments to statesmen who gave nothing to anyone Except their hungry ego, Monuments to mothers who turned their children Into starving, anxious bodies, Monuments to Lady Liberty who makes poor men prisoners. I would erect a monument for you-- who give more than most-- And for a meager fee. Among the lonely, you are perhaps the loneliest of all, You come so close to love But it eludes you While proper women march to church and fantasize In the silence of their rooms, While lonely women take their husbands' arms To hold them on life's surface, While chattering women fill their closets with clothes and Their lips with lies, You offer love for a fee--which is not as costly as most-- And remain a lonely prostitute on a street of pain. You are not immoral, little Maria, only tired and afraid, But you are not as hollow as the police who pursue you, The politicians who jail you, the pharisees who scorn you. You give what you promise--take your paltry fee--and Wander on the endless, aching pavements of pain. You know more of universal love than the nations who thrive on war, More than the churches whose dogmas are private vendettas made sacred, More than the tall buildings and sprawling factories Where men wear chains. You are a lonely prostitute who speaks to me as I pass, And I smile at you because I am a lonely man.

Nobody in the whole world is normal. That's an idea made up by clothing companies to sell t-shirts. It doesn't exist in nature. Everybody gets to be weird in their own special way.

He could take some extra fencing lessons. He was in love with his sword, purchased in a used clothing market on a whim. With his rent money, because he was a fool.

most cherished desires of present-day Westerners are shaped by romantic, nationalist, capitalist and humanist myths that have been around for centuries. Friends giving advice often tell each other, ‘Follow your heart.’ But the heart is a double agent that usually takes its instructions from the dominant myths of the day, and the very recommendation to ‘follow your heart’ was implanted in our minds by a combination of nineteenth-century Romantic myths and twentieth-century consumerist myths. The Coca-Cola Company, for example, has marketed Diet Coke around the world under the slogan ‘Diet Coke. Do what feels good.’ Even what people take to be their most personal desires are usually programmed by the imagined order. Let’s consider, for example, the popular desire to take a holiday abroad. There is nothing natural or obvious about this. A chimpanzee alpha male would never think of using his power in order to go on holiday into the territory of a neighbouring chimpanzee band. The elite of ancient Egypt spent their fortunes building pyramids and having their corpses mummified, but none of them thought of going shopping in Babylon or taking a skiing holiday in Phoenicia. People today spend a great deal of money on holidays abroad because they are true believers in the myths of romantic consumerism. Romanticism tells us that in order to make the most of our human potential we must have as many different experiences as we can. We must open ourselves to a wide spectrum of emotions; we must sample various kinds of relationships; we must try different cuisines; we must learn to appreciate different styles of music. One of the best ways to do all that is to break free from our daily routine, leave behind our familiar setting, and go travelling in distant lands, where we can ‘experience’ the culture, the smells, the tastes and the norms of other people. We hear again and again the romantic myths about ‘how a new experience opened my eyes and changed my life’. Consumerism tells us that in order to be happy we must consume as many products and services as possible. If we feel that something is missing or not quite right, then we probably need to buy a product (a car, new clothes, organic food) or a service (housekeeping, relationship therapy, yoga classes). Every television commercial is another little legend about how consuming some product or service will make life better. 18. The Great Pyramid of Giza. The kind of thing rich people in ancient Egypt did with their money. Romanticism, which encourages variety, meshes perfectly with consumerism. Their marriage has given birth to the infinite ‘market of experiences’, on which the modern tourism industry is founded. The tourism industry does not sell flight tickets and hotel bedrooms. It sells experiences. Paris is not a city, nor India a country – they are both experiences, the consumption of which is supposed to widen our horizons, fulfil our human potential, and make us happier. Consequently, when the relationship between a millionaire and his wife is going through a rocky patch, he takes her on an expensive trip to Paris. The trip is not a reflection of some independent desire, but rather of an ardent belief in the myths of romantic consumerism. A wealthy man in ancient Egypt would never have dreamed of solving a relationship crisis by taking his wife on holiday to Babylon. Instead, he might have built for her the sumptuous tomb she had always wanted. Like the elite of ancient Egypt, most people in most cultures dedicate their lives to building pyramids. Only the names, shapes and sizes of these pyramids change from one culture to the other. They may take the form, for example, of a suburban cottage with a swimming pool and an evergreen lawn, or a gleaming penthouse with an enviable view. Few question the myths that cause us to desire the pyramid in the first place.

Only by remembering to say 'no' will the women of 21st century regain their voice and remember their power. 'No' is the most important word in a woman's dialectic arsenal, and it is the one word that our employers, our leaders, and quite often, the men in our lives would do anything to prevent us from saying. No, we will not serve. No, we will not settle for the dirty work, the low-paid work, the unpaid work. No, we will not stay late at the office, look after the kids, sort out the shopping. We refuse to fit the enormity of our passion, our creativity, and our potential into the rigid physical prison laid down for us since we were small children. No. We refuse. We will not buy your clothes and shoes and surgical solutions. No, we will not be beautiful; we will not be good. Most of all, we refuse to be beautiful and good.

If life is a movie most people would consider themselves the star of their own feature. Guys might imagine they're living some action adventure epic. Chicks maybe are in a rose-colored fantasy romance. And homosexuals are living la vida loca in a fabulous musical. Still others may take the indie approach and think of themselves as an anti-hero in a coming of age flick. Or a retro badass in an exploitation B movie. Or the cable man in a very steamy adult picture. Some people's lives are experimental student art films that don't make any sense. Some are screwball comedies. Others resemble a documentary, all serious and educational. A few lives achieve blockbuster status and are hailed as a tribute to the human spirit. Some gain a small following and enjoy cult status. And some never got off the ground due to insufficient funding. I don't know what my life is but I do know that I'm constantly squabbling with the director over creative control, throwing prima donna tantrums and pouting in my personal trailor when things don't go my way. Much of our lives is spent on marketing. Make-up, exercise, dieting, clothes, hair, money, charm, attitude, the strut, the pose, the Blue Steel look. We're like walking billboards advertising ourselves. A sneak peek of upcoming attractions. Meanwhile our actual production is in disarray--we're over budget, doing poorly at private test screenings and focus groups, creatively stagnant, morale low. So we're endlessly tinkering, touching up, editing, rewriting, tailoring ourselves to best suit a mass audience. There's like this studio executive in our heads telling us to cut certain things out, make it "lighter," give it a happy ending, and put some explosions in there too. Kids love explosions. And the uncompromising artist within protests: "But that's not life!" Thus the inner conflict of our movie life: To be a palatable crowd-pleaser catering to the mainstream... or something true to life no matter what they say?

We fetch fire and water, run about all day among the shops and markets, and get our clothes and shoes made and mended, and are the victims of these details, and once in a fortnight we arrive perhaps at a rational moment.

I thought that I would go to Romania and that when I got there I would go to some small town and buy secondhand clothes in the market. Shoes. A blanket. I’d burn everything I owned. My passport. Maybe I’d just put my clothes in the trash. Change money in the street. Then I’d hike into the mountains. Stay off the road. Take no chances. Crossing the ancestral lands by foot. Maybe by night. There are bears and wolves up there. I looked it up. You could have a small fire at night. Maybe find a cave. A mountain stream. I’d have a canteen for water for when the time came that I was too weak to move about. After a while the water would taste extraordinary. It would taste like music. I’d wrap myself in the blanket at night against the cold and watch the bones take shape beneath my skin and I would pray that I might see the truth of the world before I died. Sometimes at night the animals would come to the edge of the fire and move about and their shadows would move among the trees and I would understand that when the last fire was ashes they would come and carry me away and I would be their eucharist. And that would be my life. And I would be happy.

You people of the South don't know what you are doing. This country will be drenched in blood, and God only knows how it will end. It is all folly, madness, a crime against civilization! You people speak so lightly of war; you don't know what you're talking about. War is a terrible thing! You mistake, too, the people of the North. They are a peaceable people but an earnest people, and they will fight, too. They are not going to let this country be destroyed without a mighty effort to save it … Besides, where are your men and appliances of war to contend against them? The North can make a steam engine, locomotive, or railway car; hardly a yard of cloth or pair of shoes can you make. You are rushing into war with one of the most powerful, ingeniously mechanical, and determined people on Earth — right at your doors. You are bound to fail. Only in your spirit and determination are you prepared for war. In all else you are totally unprepared, with a bad cause to start with. At first you will make headway, but as your limited resources begin to fail, shut out from the markets of Europe as you will be, your cause will begin to wane. If your people will but stop and think, they must see in the end that you will surely fail.

Never," enjoins a women's magazine, "mention the size of his [penis] in public...and never, ever let him know that anyone else knows or you may find it shrivels up and disappears, serving you right." That quotation acknowledges that critical sexual comparison is a direct anaphrodisiac when applied to men; either we do not yet recognize that it has exactly the same effect on women, or we do not care, or we understand on some level that right now that effect is desirable and appropriate. A man is unlikely to be brought within earshot of women as they judge men's appearance, height, muscle tone, sexual technique, penis size, personal grooming, or taste in clothes--all of which we do. The fact is that women are able to view men just as men view women, as objects for sexual and aesthetic evaluation; we too are effortlessly able to choose the male "ideal" from a lineup and if we could have male beauty as well as everything else, most of us would not say no. But so what? Given all that, women make the choice, by and large, to take men as human beings first.

Anna noticed many people taking in the sight of her in her men's clothing and nodding appreciaticely. The men seemed pleased or amused, the women either admiring or- interested. Quite a few raked Anna boldly with their eyes, their gazes clinging to the feminine body revealed by her fitted clothes. It was as if in casting off dresses she had cast off society's expectation of a woman's modesty and could allow herself to be admired, desired. Her soul soared with new confidence: she felt herself a gorgeous creature, neither a gentleman nor a lady. A gentlewoman, she thought.

By this point in history—after the 2008 collapse of Wall Street and in the midst of layers of ecological crises—free market fundamentalists should, by all rights, be exiled to a similarly irrelevant status, left to fondle their copies of Milton Friedman’s Free to Choose and Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged in obscurity. They are saved from this ignominious fate only because their ideas about corporate liberation, no matter how demonstrably at war with reality, remain so profitable to the world’s billionaires that they are kept fed and clothed in think tanks by the likes of Charles and David Koch, owners of the diversified dirty energy giant Koch Industries, and ExxonMobil.

here was no way of knowing what path he would take from there, but in order to survive as a human being, he was sure to arrive at the fate of having to incur the dislike of other human beings. When that time came, he would probably clothe himself inconspicuously, so as not to attract attention, and beggarlike, linger about the market places of man, in search of something.

Someday, the lady would not be imaginary. The clothes would not be borrowed and ill-fitting. Someday she would stride down the street and women would fall at her feet (not failing to notice the perfectly polished brogues) and men would tip their hats to a lady-killer more accomplished than they.

Dear Logan, I got all new clothes, which is NOT as exciting as it sounds. Turns out, they don't even make extreme-weather boots with sequins on them. If you ask me, they're missing out on a market. I mean, if you have to be stuck in the mud, shouldn't you at least have something pretty to look at? Maddie

In a village of La Mancha, the name of which I have no desire to call to mind, there lived not long since one of those gentlemen that keep a lance in the lance-rack, an old buckler, a lean hack, and a greyhound for coursing. An olla of rather more beef than mutton, a salad on most nights, scraps on Saturdays, lentils on Fridays, and a pigeon or so extra on Sundays, made away with three-quarters of his income. The rest of it went in a doublet of fine cloth and velvet breeches and shoes to match for holidays, while on week-days he made a brave figure in his best homespun. He had in his house a housekeeper past forty, a niece under twenty, and a lad for the field and market-place, who used to saddle the hack as well as handle the bill-hook. The age of this gentleman of ours was bordering on fifty; he was of a hardy habit, spare, gaunt-featured, a very early riser and a great sportsman. They will have it his surname was Quixada or Quesada (for here there is some difference of opinion among the authors who write on the subject), although from reasonable conjectures it seems plain that he was called Quexana. This, however, is of but little importance to our tale; it will be enough not to stray a hair's breadth from the truth in the telling of it.

He touched the sword he had taken from the ambush. "Aside from this and the trio of juggling stones, I've nothing but the clothes on my back." Well then, tomorrow we'll go-" "No. Prince Ryne told me to make sure you stay in the manor." "It's just into town to buy you a few things. Surely there won't be any danger at the market." I sensed a softening. "And we'll take along Saul or Odd." No. We'll send one of the caregivers with a shopping list," Flea said. "Hey, that's..." He waited. I huffed. "A good idea. But don't be so smug. You're not going to win every argument." "Oh, yes, I am." "Oh, no, you're not." Flea straightened to his full height. When did he get so tall? He rested his hands on his hips. "I am. Prince Ryne trusted me with the task of keeping you safe. And I'm not going to disappoint him." I crossed my arms. "You sound like Kerrick." "Thank you." Uh-huh. You do know I disobeyed almost all of his orders. Right?" I suppressed a grin. "I do. But I'm smarter than Kerrick." "You are?" Oh, yes. I know the magic word." "And what would that be?" "Please.

What counts as social infrastructure? I define it capaciously. Public institutions such as libraries, schools, playgrounds, parks, athletic fields, and swimming pools are vital parts of the social infrastructure. So too are sidewalks, courtyards, community gardens, and other green spaces that invite people into the public realm. Community organizations, including churches and civic associations, act as social infrastructures when they have an established physical space where people can assemble, as do regularly scheduled markets for food, furniture, clothing, art, and other consumer goods. Commercial establishments can also be important parts of the social infrastructure, particularly when they operate as what the sociologist Ray Oldenburg called "third spaces," places (like cafes, diners, barbershops, and bookstores) where people are welcome to congregate and linger regardless of what they've purchased.

Romanticism tells us that in order to make the most of our human potential we must have as many different experiences as we can. We must open ourselves to a wide spectrum of emotions; we must sample various kinds of relationships; we must try different cuisines; we must learn to appreciate different styles of music. One of the best ways to do all that is to break free from our daily routine, leave behind our familiar setting, and go travelling in distant lands, where we can ‘experience’ the culture, the smells, the tastes and the norms of other people. We hear again and again the romantic myths about ‘how a new experience opened my eyes and changed my life’. Consumerism tells us that in order to be happy we must consume as many products and services as possible. If we feel that something is missing or not quite right, then we probably need to buy a product (a car, new clothes, organic food) or a service (housekeeping, relationship therapy, yoga classes). Every television commercial is another little legend about how consuming some product or service will make life better. Romanticism, which encourages variety, meshes perfectly with consumerism. Their marriage has given birth to the infinite ‘market of experiences’, on which the modern tourism industry is founded.

David had been photographing endangered species in the Hawaiian rainforest and elsewhere for years, and his collections of photographs and Suzie's tarot cards seemed somehow related. Because species disappear when their habitat does, he photographed them against the nowhere of a black backdrop (which sometimes meant propping up a black velvet cloth in the most unlikely places and discouraging climates), and so each creature, each plant, stood as though for a formal portrait alone against the darkness. The photographs looked like cards too, card from the deck of the world in which each creature describes a history, a way of being in the world, a set of possibilities, a deck from which cards are being thrown away, one after another. Plants and animals are a language, even in our reduced, domesticated English, where children grow like weeds or come out smelling like roses, the market is made up of bulls and bears, politics of hawks and doves. Like cards, flora and fauna could be read again and again, not only alone but in combination, in the endlessly shifting combinations of a nature that tells its own stories and colors ours, a nature we are losing without even knowing the extent of that loss.

Karpo, as always, was dressed in black. His leather coat was black. Even his scarf and fur hat were black. Rostnikov thought that clothes reflected the people who wore them. Rostnikov himself dressed neatly, conservatively, in old comfortable suits and ties Sarah had bought for him at market stalls. As for Karpo's choice of black, Rostnikov was not given to simple judgment. He himself was rather fond of black, which was either the absence of color or the totality of color. There was a statement in black, he thought. Black said, You cannot penetrate my being by looking at my exterior. I am a dark cipher.

Did you sleep in those clothes, Christopher? I know Aunt Cecily, Uncle Gabriel, and Cousin Anna would never let you inflict these horrors on the populace. What are those peculiar lavender stains upon your shirtfront? Did you set your sleeves on fire?” Christopher regarded his sleeves as if he had never beheld them before. “A bit,” he said guiltily. “Ah well,” said Matthew. “At least the purple stains match your eyes.

drive through the village square, taking in the market cross, the pretty church, the corner shop, a café and the one boutique selling trinkets, cards and slouchy expensive clothes. All walkable from the cottage and in a dip, surrounded by the woods and the thick oak trees that stretch up to the sky.

Well, let's argue this out, Mr Blank. You, who represent Society, have the right to pay me four hundred francs a month. That's my market value, for I am an inefficient member of Society, slow in the uptake, uncertain, slightly damaged in the fray, there's no denying it. So you have the right to pay me four hundred francs a month, to lodge me in a small, dark room, to clothe me shabbily, to harass me with worry and monotony and unsatisfied longings till you get me to the point when I blush at a look, cry at a word. We can't all be happy, we can't all be rich, we can't all be lucky - and it would be so much less fun if we were. Isn't it so, Mr Blank? There must be the dark background to show up the bright colours. Some must cry so that the others may be able to laugh the more heartily.

Someone in the sweater business should totally try to corner that market: extra-long-sleeved sweaters so you don’t need gloves to keep your hands warm! They’d make millions. Or maybe not: everyone else at school is wearing clothes that actually fit them, so it’s possible that I’d be the only customer for a product like that.

The economic game was rigged by legal restrictions and unofficial glass ceilings. When the peasant brother made his way to the Beijing market with his torn clothes, rough manners and incomprehensible dialect, he would quickly have discovered that in the business world, manners and connections often speak far louder than genes.

Starshine’s greatest challenge is deciding whether a woman is too young to soothe or too old to shame. Handling the men is much easier. They may feign interest in figures and photos, but their underlying interest is for breasts and thighs. A generous smile often adds an extra zero to a check; an additional inch of exposed cleavage can clothe five Laotian children. The vast majority of these men do not expect to purchase Starshine’s favors. They are husbands, fathers, pillars of the community, the sort of upstanding middle-aged patriarchs who would rather castrate their libidos than compromise their reputations, and even if their three-digit donations could earn them a quickie with the canvasser, they would deny themselves the pleasure.

A bum stood at the Lucky Market right in front of Artesia & Blossom. He was begging for money. He looked pretty pathetic, dressed in rancid, oily clothes. He smelled like cigarettes and urine. “Can you spare a dime?” he would ask. People would shake their heads or walk around him. He was getting nowhere. Two hours went by, no money, not a cent. “Please, a dime!” cried the bum. A middle-aged man walked by him, heard his plea and laid upon him a mint new dime. “Thank you, sir! Thank you!” shouted the bum. Dime in hand, the bum limped over to a phone booth and called in the airstrike.

A man goes out to work, he earns a wage, he comes back home, he eats, he sleeps. That’s what he does. Our men think earning money and ordering around others is where the power lies. They don’t think power is in the hands of the woman who takes care of everyone all day long, and gives birth to their children. In our house my mother managed everything because my father was so busy. It was my mother who would wake up early in the morning, iron our school clothes, make our breakfast and teach us how to behave. It was my mother who would go to the market, shop for us and cook. All those things she did.

The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) deems a family that is spending more than 30 percent of its income on housing to be “cost burdened,” at risk of having too little money for food, clothing, and other essential expenses. Today there is no state in the Union in which a family that is supported by a full-time, minimum-wage worker can afford a two-bedroom apartment at fair market rent without being cost burdened, according to HUD.

If you've ever taken a sub, you'll know they have available every luxury item the weary traveller could ever wish to purchase. Drinks, food, perfumes, clothes, blankets, anything. These compartments weren't empty, but I doubt the weary traveller was really in the market for a selection of low and high powered pistols, assault rifles, armour piercing rounds and the variety of explosive devices on offer. Unless they were on the way to a Christmas family get-together.

Even though men have very little interest in wearing women’s clothes, this has not prevented a gigantic industry from arising, dedicated to satisfying women’s desires in fashion. Industries which provide makeup, hair styling, nail polish, hair removal, and weight loss services are similarly “biased” in the direction of females: they disproportionately serve women. These phenomena would be very difficult to understand on the feminist model that female wants are ignored or deprecated in the male’s favor.

I am that man, the sum of him, the all of him, the hairless biped who struggled upward from the slime and created love and law out of the anarchy of fecund life that screamed and squalled in the jungle. I am all that that man was and did become. I see myself, through the painful generations, snaring and killing the game and the fish, clearing the first fields from the forest, making rude tools of stone and bone, building houses of wood, thatching the roofs with leaves and straw, domesticating the wild grasses and meadow roots, fathering them to become the progenitors of rice and millet and wheat and barley and all manner of succulent edibles, learning to scratch the soil, to sow, to reap, to store, beating out the fibers of plants to spin into thread and to weave into cloth, devising systems of irrigation, working in metals, making markets and trade routes, building boats, and founding navigation—ay, and organizing village life, welding villages to villages till they became tribes, welding tribes together till they became nations, ever seeking the laws of things, ever making the laws of humans so that humans might live together in amity and by united effort beat down and destroy all manner of creeping, crawling, squalling things that might else destroy them.

The majority of any society comprised, Smith knew, not landlords or merchants, but "servants, laborers, and workmen of different kinds," who derived their income from wages. Their welfare was the prime concern of economic policy, as Smith conceived it. "No society can surely be flourishing and happy, of which the far greater part of the members are poor and miserable," he wrote. "It is but equity, besides, that they who feed, clothe and lodge the whole body of the people should have such a share of the produce of their own labour as to be themselves tolerably well fed, clothed, and lodged." The chief economic concern of the legislator, in Smith's view, ought to be the purchasing power of wages, since that was the measure of the material well-being of the bulk of the population. (p. 64)

Every business needs capital. Whether we’re talking about a barbershop or a bank, a boutique e-commerce store or a hotdog stand. Whether we’re talking about a restaurant or a clothing store, a giant like Walmart, or the local bodega that’s owned by a local family. They all need capital.

Destroyed, that is, were not only men, women and thousands of children but also restaurants and inns, laundries, theater groups, sports clubs, sewing clubs, boys’ clubs, girls’ clubs, love affairs, trees and gardens, grass, gates, gravestones, temples and shrines, family heirlooms, radios, classmates, books, courts of law, clothes, pets, groceries and markets, telephones, personal letters, automobiles, bicycles, horses—120 war-horses—musical instruments, medicines and medical equipment, life savings, eyeglasses, city records, sidewalks, family scrapbooks, monuments, engagements, marriages, employees, clocks and watches, public transportation, street signs, parents, works of art. “The whole of society,” concludes the Japanese study, “was laid waste to its very foundations.”2698 Lifton’s history professor saw not even foundations left. “Such a weapon,” he told the American psychiatrist, “has the power to make everything into nothing.

They would tell you that governments could not manage things as economically as private individuals; they would repeat and repeat that, and think they were saying something! They could not see that “economical” management by masters meant simply that they, the people, were worked harder and ground closer and paid less! They were wage-earners and servants, at the mercy of exploiters whose one thought was to get as much out of them as possible; and they were taking an interest in the process, were anxious lest it should not be done thoroughly enough! Was it not honestly a trial to listen to an argument such as that? And yet there were things even worse. You would begin talking to some poor devil who had worked in one shop for the last thirty years, and had never been able to save a penny; who left home every morning at six o’clock, to go and tend a machine, and come back at night too tired to take his clothes off; who had never had a week’s vacation in his life, had never traveled, never had an adventure, never learned anything, never hoped anything—and when you started to tell him about Socialism he would sniff and say, “I’m not interested in that—I’m an individualist!” And then he would go on to tell you that Socialism was “paternalism,” and that if it ever had its way the world would stop progressing. It was enough to make a mule laugh, to hear arguments like that; and yet it was no laughing matter, as you found out—for how many millions of such poor deluded wretches there were, whose lives had been so stunted by capitalism that they no longer knew what freedom was! And they really thought that it was “individualism” for tens of thousands of them to herd together and obey the orders of a steel magnate, and produce hundreds of millions of dollars of wealth for him, and then let him give them libraries; while for them to take the industry, and run it to suit themselves, and build their own libraries—that would have been “Paternalism”!

You are all more or less wearing the same types of clothes—look around the room and you will see it’s true. Now imagine you’re the only one not wearing a cool symbol. How would that make you feel? The Nike swoop, the three Adidas stripes, the little Polo player on a horse, the Hollister seagull, the symbols of Philadelphia’s professional sports teams, even our high school mascot that you athletes wear to battle other schools—some of you wear our Mustang to class even when there is no sporting event scheduled. These are your symbols, what you wear to prove that your identity matches the identity of others. Much like the Nazis had their swastika. We have a very loose dress code here and yet most of you pretty much dress the same. Why? Perhaps you feel it’s important not to stray too far from the norm. Would you not also wear a government symbol if it became important and normal to do so? If it were marketed the right way? If it was stitched on the most expensive brand at the mall? Worn by movie stars? The president of the United States?

Cixi’s lack of formal education was more than made up for by her intuitive intelligence, which she liked to use from her earliest years. In 1843, when she was seven, the empire had just finished its first war with the West, the Opium War, which had been started by Britain in reaction to Beijing clamping down on the illegal opium trade conducted by British merchants. China was defeated and had to pay a hefty indemnity. Desperate for funds, Emperor Daoguang (father of Cixi’s future husband) held back the traditional presents for his sons’ brides – gold necklaces with corals and pearls – and vetoed elaborate banquets for their weddings. New Year and birthday celebrations were scaled down, even cancelled, and minor royal concubines had to subsidise their reduced allowances by selling their embroidery on the market through eunuchs. The emperor himself even went on surprise raids of his concubines’ wardrobes, to check whether they were hiding extravagant clothes against his orders. As part of a determined drive to stamp out theft by officials, an investigation was conducted of the state coffer, which revealed that more “than nine million taels of silver had gone missing. Furious, the emperor ordered all the senior keepers and inspectors of the silver reserve for the previous forty-four years to pay fines to make up the loss – whether or not they were guilty. Cixi’s great-grandfather had served as one of the keepers and his share of the fine amounted to 43,200 taels – a colossal sum, next to which his official salary had been a pittance. As he had died a long time ago, his son, Cixi’s grandfather, was obliged to pay half the sum, even though he worked in the Ministry of Punishments and had nothing to do with the state coffer. After three years of futile struggle to raise money, he only managed to hand over 1,800 taels, and an edict signed by the emperor confined him to prison, only to be released if and when his son, Cixi’s father, delivered the balance. The life of the family was turned upside down. Cixi, then eleven years old, had to take in sewing jobs to earn extra money – which she would remember all her life and would later talk about to her ladies-in-waiting in the court. “As she was the eldest of two daughters and three sons, her father discussed the matter with her, and she rose to the occasion. Her ideas were carefully considered and practical: what possessions to sell, what valuables to pawn, whom to turn to for loans and how to approach them. Finally, the family raised 60 per cent of the sum, enough to get her grandfather out of prison. The young Cixi’s contribution to solving the crisis became a family legend, and her father paid her the ultimate compliment: ‘This daughter of mine is really more like a son!’ Treated like a son, Cixi was able to talk to her father about things that were normally closed areas for women. Inevitably their conversations touched on official business and state affairs, which helped form Cixi’s lifelong interest. Being consulted and having her views acted on, she acquired self-confidence and never accepted the com“common assumption that women’s brains were inferior to men’s. The crisis also helped shape her future method of rule. Having tasted the bitterness of arbitrary punishment, she would make an effort to be fair to her officials.

That's just the kind of anxiety reality TV hopes to inspire in female viewers. After all, as advertisers have long understood, it's far easier to shill cosmetics and clothing - not to mention Match.com and and Bally Fitness memberships - to insecure women scared of being alone than to it is to self confident people who believe they're beautiful, lovable, and capable of being happy just as they are.

With the invention of the city and its powerful combination of economies of scale coupled to innovation and wealth creation came the great divisions of society. Our present social network structures barely existed in their present form until urban communities evolved. Hunter-gatherers were significantly less hierarchical, more egalitarian and community oriented than we are. The struggle and tension between unbridled individual self-enhancement and the care and concern for the less fortunate has been a major thread running throughout human history, especially over the past two hundred years. Nevertheless, it seems that without the motive of self-interest our entrepreneurial free market economy would collapse. The system we have evolved critically relies on people continually wanting new cars and new cell phones, new widgets and gadgets, new clothes and new washing machines, new thrills, new entertainment, and pretty much new everything, even when they already have enough of “everything.” It may not be a pretty picture and it doesn’t work for everyone, but so far, it’s worked remarkably well for most of us, and apparently most of us seem to want it to continue. Whether it can is a topic I’ll return to in the last chapter.

A far better model for the news market would be “high-quality news that costs you money but does not abuse your attention.” In today’s world, information and attention are critical assets. It is crazy to give up your attention for free, and to get in exchange only low-quality information. If you are willing to pay for high-quality food, clothes, and cars – why aren’t you willing to pay for high-quality information?

Although Herbert Hoover in many ways prefigured him, it was Franklin D. Roosevelt who first tried to create an explicit corporate state in America with his National Recovery Administration (NRA). With its fascist-style Blue Eagle emblem, the NRA coordinated big business and labor in a central plan, and outlawed competition. The NRA even employed vigilante groups to spy on smaller businesses and report if they violated the plan. Just as in Mussolini’s Italy, the beneficiaries of the U.S. corporate state were—in addition to the government itself—established economic interest groups. NRA cheerleaders included the National Association of Manufacturers, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the American Bar Association, the United Mine Workers, the Amalgamated Clothing Workers, and—above all—Gerard Swope of General Electric, who helped draft the NRA act.

I will sell thee my soul,' he answered: 'I pray thee buy it off me, for I am weary of it. Of what use is my soul to me? I cannot see it. I may not touch it. I do not know it.' But the merchants mocked at him, and said, 'Of what use is a man's soul to us? It is not worth a clipped piece of silver. Sell us thy body for a slave, and we will clothe thee in sea-purple, and put a ring upon thy finger, and make thee the minion of the great Queen. But talk not of the soul, for to us it is nought, nor has it any value for our service.' And the young Fisherman said to himself: 'How strange a thing this is! The Priest telleth me that the soul is worth all the gold in the world, and the merchants say that it is not worth a clipped piece of silver.' And he passed out of the market-place, and went down to the shore of the sea, and began to ponder on what he should do.

Among them, there is no lack of that most disgusting species of vain people, the lying monsters, who aim to present themselves as beautiful souls and who for example, carry off to market, their ruined sensuality wrapped up in verse and other swaddling clothes as purity of heart, the species of self-gratifying moral masturbators. The desire of sick people to present some form or other of superiority, their instinct for secret paths, leads to a tyranny over the healthy.

Although per capita income doubled during the half-century, not all sectors of society shared equally in this abundance. While both rich and poor enjoyed rising incomes, their inequality of wealth widened significantly. As the population began to move from farm to city, farmers increasingly specialized in the production of crops for the market rather than for home consumption. The manufacture of cloth, clothing, leather goods, tools, and other products shifted from home to shop and from shop to factory. In the process many women experienced a change in roles from producers to consumers with a consequent transition in status. Some craftsmen suffered debasement of their skills as the division of labor and power-driven machinery eroded the traditional handicraft methods of production and transformed them from self-employed artisans to wage laborers. The resulting potential for class conflict threatened the social fabric of this brave new republic.

fad is a wave in the ocean, and a trend is the tide. A fad gets a lot of hype, and a trend gets very little. Like a wave, a fad is very visible, but it goes up and down in a big hurry. Like the tide, a trend is almost invisible, but it’s very powerful over the long term. A fad is a short-term phenomenon that might be profitable, but a fad doesn’t last long enough to do a company much good. Furthermore, a company often tends to gear up as if a fad were a trend. As a result, the company is often stuck with a lot of staff, expensive manufacturing facilities, and distribution networks. (A fashion, on the other hand, is a fad that repeats itself. Examples: short skirts for women and double-breasted suits for men. Halley’s Comet is a fashion because it comes back every 75 years or so.) When the fad disappears, a company often goes into a deep financial shock. What happened to Atari is typical in this respect. And look how Coleco Industries handled the Cabbage Patch Kids. Those homely dolls hit the market in 1983 and started to take off. Coleco’s strategy was to milk the kids for all they were worth. Hundreds of Cabbage Patch novelties flooded the toy stores. Pens, pencils, crayon boxes, games, clothing. Two years later, Coleco racked up sales of $776 million and profits of $83 million. Then the bottom dropped out of the Cabbage Patch Kids. By 1988 Coleco went into Chapter 11. Coleco died, but the kids live on. Acquired by Hasbro in 1989, the Cabbage Patch Kids are now being handled conservatively. Today they’re doing quite well.

I dreamed not long ago of that market with all its vivid textures. I walked through the stalls with a basket over my arms as always and went right to Edita for a bunch of fresh cilantro. We chatted and laughed and when I held out my coins she waved them off, patting my arm and sending me away. A gift, she said. Muchas gracias, señora, I replied. There was my favorite panadera, with clean cloths laid over the round loaves. I chose a few rolls, opened my purse, and this vendor too gestured away my money as if I were impolite to suggest paying. I looked around in bewilderment; this was my familiar market and yet everything had changed. It wasn't just for me—no shopper was paying. I floated through the market with a sense of euphoria. Gratitude was the only currency accepted here. It was all a gift. It was like picking strawberries in my field: the merchants were just the intermediaries passing on gifts from the earth. I looked in my basket: two zucchinis, an onion, tomatoes, bread, and a bunch of cilantro. It was still half empty, but it felt full. I had everything I needed. I glanced over at the cheese stall, thinking to get some, but knowing it would be given, not sold, I decided I could do without. It's funny: Had all the things in the market merely been a very low price, I probably would have scooped up as much as I could. But when everything became a gift, I felt self-restraint. I didn't want to take too much. And I began thinking of what small presents I might bring to the vendors tomorrow. The dream faded, of course, but the feelings of euphoria and then of self-restraint remain. I've thought of it often and recognize now that I was witness there to the conversion of a market economy to a gift economy, from private goods to common wealth. And in that transformation the relationships became as nourishing as the food I was getting. Across the market stalls and blankets, warmth and compassion were changing hands. There was a shared celebration of abundance for all we'd been given. And since every market basket contained a meal, there was justice.

We are approaching a soft data catastrophe. Entire lives, from tastes in music and clothes to deepest personal convictions - all produced by networks of feedback between datamining and content recommendation algorithms. The 'catastrophe' is when these algorithms unconsciously (or maybe, consciously?) lead people down presupposed paths for modern and emerging markets. Algorithms could right now be helping make people convert to a religion, drug addicts, vegan, LGBTQ, ethnonarcissists, fat, cult members, suicidal, narcissists, atheist, poly, mass shooters...

The radical wolves in sheep’s clothing fall into two categories. First are the Crypto-Marxists, calling themselves radical feminists, post-structuralists, post-modernists, or merely progressives, whose agendas remain totalitarian. Then come the Fellow-Travelling Liberals, who acknowledge the bankruptcy of socialism and make a grudging commitment to free markets, but who still do not want to give up the agenda of “social justice”—the idea that government can arrive at a standard of what is just, and that the state can implement such a standard without destroying economic and political freedom.

Now, beauty is not a size or a shape, an outfit or a color. Real beauty is something that shines. The rest is only glamour. This girl was both dark and luminous, like a copper beech in the sun. Luminous was her brown skin, and her eyes were every shade of leaf, from guinea gold to forest-floor black. She was wearing a yellow dress. Her hair was a crown of autumn fire. And yes, she was very beautiful. But her beauty was none of these things. And although by the time she had left, Tom could barely remember her clothes, or the shape of her face, or the color of her eyes, or the exact shade of her skin, he knew he would always remember that shine.

When I finally leave the market, the streets are dark, and I pass a few blocks where not a single electric light appears – only dark open storefronts and coms (fast-food eateries), broom closet-sized restaurants serving fish, meat, and rice for under a dollar, flickering candles barely revealing the silhouettes of seated figures. The tide of cyclists, motorbikes, and scooters has increased to an uninterrupted flow, a river that, given the slightest opportunity, diverts through automobile traffic, stopping it cold, spreads into tributaries that spill out over sidewalks, across lots, through filling stations. They pour through narrow openings in front of cars: young men, their girlfriends hanging on the back; families of four: mom, dad, baby, and grandma, all on a fragile, wobbly, underpowered motorbike; three people, the day’s shopping piled on a rear fender; women carrying bouquets of flapping chickens, gathered by their feet while youngest son drives and baby rests on the handlebars; motorbikes carrying furniture, spare tires, wooden crates, lumber, cinder blocks, boxes of shoes. Nothing is too large to pile onto or strap to a bike. Lone men in ragged clothes stand or sit by the roadsides, selling petrol from small soda bottles, servicing punctures with little patch kits and old bicycle pumps.

But I am a paladin,” Cordelia cried. “It’s awful, I loathe it— don’t imagine that I feel anything other than hated for this thing that binds me to Lilith. But they fear me because of it. They dare not touch me—” “Oh?” snarled James. “They dare not touch you? That’s not what it bloody looked like.” “The demon at Chiswick House—it was about to tell me something about Belial, before you shot it.” “Listen to yourself, Cordelia!” James shouted. “You are without Cortana! You cannot even lift a weapon! Do you know what it means to me, that you cannot protect yourself? Do you understand that I am terrified, every moment of every day and night, for your safety?” Cordelia stood speechless. She had no idea what to say. She blinked, and felt something hot against her cheek. She put her hand up quickly—surely she was not crying?— and it came away scarlet. “You’re bleeding,” James said. He closed the distance between them in two strides. He caught her chin and lifted it, his thumb stroking across her cheekbone. “Just a scratch,” he breathed. “Are you hurt anywhere else? Daisy, tell me—” “No. I’m fine. I promise you,” she said, her voice wavering as his intent golden eyes spilled over her, searching for signs of injury. “It’s nothing.” “It’s the furthest thing from nothing,” James rasped. “By the Angel, when I realized you’d gone out, at night, weaponless—” “What were you even doing at the house? I thought you were staying at the Institute.” “I came to get something for Jesse,” James said. “I took him shopping, with Anna—he needed clothes, but we forgot cuff links—” “He did need clothes,” Cordelia agreed. “Nothing he had fit.” “Oh, no,” said James. “We are not chatting. When I came in, I saw your dress in the hall, and Effie told me she’d caught a glimpse of you leaving. Not getting in a carriage, just wandering off toward Shepherd Market—” “So you Tracked me?” “I had no choice. And then I saw you—you had gone to where your father died,” he said after a moment. “I thought—I was afraid—” “That I wanted to die too?” Cordelia whispered. It had not occurred to her that he might think that. “James. I may be foolish, but I am not self-destructive.” “And I thought, had I made you as miserable as that? I have made so many mistakes, but none were calculated to hurt you. And then I saw what you were doing, and I thought, yes, she does want to die. She wants to die and this is how she’s chosen to do it.” He was breathing hard, almost gasping, and she realized how much of his fury was despair. “James,” she said. “It was a foolish thing to do, but at no moment did I want to die—” He caught at her shoulders. “You cannot hurt yourself, Daisy. You must not. Hate me, hit me, do anything you want to me. Cut up my suits and set fire to my books. Tear my heart into pieces, scatter them across England. But do not harm yourself—” He pulled her toward him, suddenly, pressing his lips to her hair, her cheek. She caught him by the arms, her fingers digging into his sleeves, holding him to her. “I swear to the Angel,” he said, in a muffled voice, “if you die, I will die, and I will haunt you. I will give you no peace—” He kissed her mouth. Perhaps it had been meant to be a quick kiss, but she could not help herself: she kissed back. And it was like breathing air after being trapped underground for weeks, like coming into sunlight after darkness.

Then--as it had every season of my life--it started to rain blue. Keeping one hand firmly in Akos’s, I turned my other palm to catch some of the blue. It was dark, and wherever it rolled across my skin, it left a faint stain. The people at the end of the alley were laughing and smiling and singing and swaying. Akos’s chin was tipped back. He gazed at the ship’s belly, and then at his hand, at the blue rolling over his knuckles. His eyes met mine. I was laughing. “Blue is our favorite color,” I said. “The color of the currentstream when we scavenge.” “When I was a child,” he replied wonderingly, “it was my favorite color, too, though all of Thuvhe hates it.” I took the palmful of blue water I had collected, and smeared it into his cheek, staining it darker. Akos spluttered, spitting some of it on the ground. I raised my eyebrows, waiting for his reaction. He stuck out his hand, catching a stream of water rolling off a building’s roof, and lunged at me. I sprinted down the alley, not fast enough to avoid the cold water rolling down my back, with a childlike shriek. I caught his arm by the elbow, and we ran together, through the singing crowd, past swaying elders, men and women dancing too close, irritable off-planet visitors trying to cover up their wares in the market. We splashed through bright blue puddles, soaking our clothes. And we were both, for once, laughing.

Esperanza Impossible Sonnet 18 Clothes or the lack of it, don't make, A person obscene, only behavior does. Who are you to judge someone's expression, But, here there are plenty grey areas! Problem is, when obscenity becomes expression, Misbehavior is deemed declaration of independence. Too many people confuse attention with admiration, And a stunt as some wonderful achievement. Accepting obscenity as freedom of expression, Is like showing tolerance to intolerance. Posing butt naked on instagram, unless you're pornstar, Is like barging into capitol with a flag confederate. We must find a balance between comfort and conscience. Civilization falls apart when we can't tell the difference.

The great festival of Lughnasa was held at Carmun once every three years. The site of Carmun was eerie. In a land of wild forest and bog, it was an open grassy space that stretched, green and empty, halfway to the horizon. Lying some distance west of the point where, if you were following it upstream, the Liffey’s course began to retreat eastwards on the way to its source in the Wicklow Mountains, the place was absolutely flat, except for some mounds in which ancestral chiefs were buried. The festival lasted a week. There were areas reserved for food and livestock markets, and another where fine clothes were sold; but the most important quarter was where a large racetrack was laid out on the bare turf.

...I drag the kids to the farmers' market and fill out the week's cheap supermarket haul with a few vivid bunches of organic produce...Once home, I set out fresh flowers and put the fruit in a jadeite bowl. A jam jar of garden growth even adorns the chartreuse kids' table...I found some used toddler-sized chairs to go around it...It sits right in front of the tall bookcases...When the kids are eating or coloring there, with the cluster or mismatched picture frames hanging just to their left, my son with his mop of sandy hair, my daughter just growing out of babyhood...they look like they could be in a Scandinavian design magazine. I think to myself that maybe motherhood is just this, creating these frames, the little vistas you can take in that look like pictures from magazines, like any number of images that could be filed under familial happiness. They reflect back to you that you're doing it - doing something - right. In my case, these scenes are like a momentary vacation from the actual circumstances of my current life. Children, clean and clad in brightly striped clothing, snacking on slices of organic plum. My son drawing happy gel pen houses, the flourishing clump of smiley-faced flowers beneath a yellow flat sun. To counter the creeping worry that I am a no-good person, I must collect a lot of these images, postage-stamp moments I can gaze upon and think, I can't be fucking up that bad. Can I?

I was a cottage maiden Hardened by sun and air, Contented with my cottage mates, Not mindful I was fair. Why did a great lord find me out, And praise my flaxen hair? Why did a great lord find me out To fill my heart with care? He lured me to his palace home— Woe's me for joy thereof— 10 To lead a shameless shameful life, His plaything and his love. He wore me like a silken knot, He changed me like a glove; So now I moan, an unclean thing, Who might have been a dove. O Lady Kate, my cousin Kate, You grew more fair than I: He saw you at your father's gate, Chose you, and cast me by. 20 He watched your steps along the lane, Your work among the rye; He lifted you from mean estate To sit with him on high. Because you were so good and pure He bound you with his ring: The neighbours call you good and pure, Call me an outcast thing. Even so I sit and howl in dust, You sit in gold and sing: 30 Now which of us has tenderer heart? You had the stronger wing. O cousin Kate, my love was true, Your love was writ in sand: If he had fooled not me but you, If you stood where I stand, He'd not have won me with his love Nor bought me with his land; I would have spit into his face And not have taken his hand. 40 Yet I've a gift you have not got, And seem not like to get: For all your clothes and wedding-ring I've little doubt you fret. My fair-haired son, my shame, my pride, Cling closer, closer yet: Your father would give lands for one To wear his coronet.

Some have estimated that the pharmaceutical industry overall spends about twice as much on marketing and promotion as it does on research and development. Regardless of how those two figures compare to each other, the fact that they are in the same ballpark gives one pause, and this is worth mulling over in various contexts. For example, when a drug company refuses to let a developing country have affordable access to a new AIDS drug it’s because – the company says – it needs the money from sales to fund research and development on other new AIDS drugs for the future. If R&D is a fraction of the company’s outgoings, and it spends a similar amount on promotion, then this moral and practical argument doesn’t hold water quite so well. The scale of this spend is fascinating in itself, when you put it in the context of what we all expect from evidence-based medicine, which is that people will simply use the best treatment for the patient. Because when you pull away from the industry’s carefully fostered belief that this marketing activity is all completely normal, and stop thinking of drugs as being a consumer product like clothes or cosmetics, you suddenly realise that medicines marketing only exists for one reason. In medicine, brand identities are irrelevant, and there’s a factual, objective answer to whether one drug is the most likely to improve a patient’s pain, suffering and longevity. Marketing, therefore, one might argue, exists for no reason other than to pervert evidence-based decision-making in medicine.

When “free trade” was imposed upon the Ottoman Empire in 1838 and British cloth “flooded the market in Izmir,” local cotton workers lost their ability to maintain their old production regime. In coastal southeastern Africa, cotton yarn and cloth imports also began to devastate the local cotton textile industry. In Mexico, European cotton imports had a serious impact on local manufacturing—before tariffs enabled Mexican industrialization, Guadalajara’s industry had been, as one historian found, “virtually eliminated.” In Oaxaca, 450 out of 500 looms ceased operating. In China, the 1842 Treaty of Nanking forced the opening of markets, and the subsequent influx of European and North American yarn and cloth had a “devastating” effect, especially on China’s hand spinners.22

Mathias remembered that once when he was a boy, he'd gone up to a pile of red apples that lay in the market cart, in the market near Stolberg where his father often took him. He'd always loved apples, and he couldn't resist the temptation of grabbing one out of the pile. He chose the closest, a splendid red piece of fruit that he would never forget because of his overwhelming desire to take it and hide it in the folds of his clothing. A moment after Mathias reached out and snatched it, the pile slid and applies tumbled down all around him. The farmer, who knew his father, would have been satisfied with an apology. But his father, a successful craftsman who was well-known and respected in the town, had insisted on purchasing an entire basketful of apples, because of the trouble Mathias had caused. Mathias got the worst scolding his father had ever given him. Not because of the money, but for the small act of petty thievery, which an upright man like his father would never tolerate. He shouldered his punishment, and in the end was only allowed to eat as single apple from the basket. He spent the night thinking about the pile. He had to remove only one and the whole thing had come down. He wondered if the same thing might happen with any tower, no matter how majestic and imposing it might seem, were someone to remove the right stone from the base. The thought stayed with him throughout his life. Venice now seemed a lot like that pile of apples. If three murders truly represented an irresistible opportunity, then which nobleman would have seized it, knowing that such a thing would cause La Serenissima and everything it represented to come crashing down?

Intersubjective entities depend on communication among many humans rather than on the beliefs and feelings of individual humans. Many of the most important agents in history are intersubjective. Money, for example, has no objective value. You cannot eat, drink or wear a dollar bill. Yet as long as billions of people believe in its value, you can use it to buy food, beverages and clothing. If the baker suddenly loses his faith in the dollar bill and refuses to give me a loaf of bread for this green piece of paper, it doesn’t matter much. I can just go down a few blocks to the nearby supermarket. However, if the supermarket cashiers also refuse to accept this piece of paper, along with the hawkers in the market and the salespeople in the mall, then the dollar will lose its value. The green pieces of paper will go on existing, of course, but they will be worthless.

ASITA AWOKE in the forest thinking about demons. He hadn’t for many years. He could remember glimpsing one or two in the past, on the fringes of a famine or a battle, wherever bodies were being harvested. He knew the misery they caused, but misery was no longer Asita’s concern. He had been a forest hermit for fifty years. The affairs of the world had been kept far away, and he passed whole days in a hidden cave when he retreated even from the affairs of animals, much less those of men. Now Asita knelt by a stream and considered. He distinctly saw demons in his mind’s eye. They had first appeared in the dappled sunlight that fell on his eyelids at dawn. Asita slept on boughs strewn over the bare ground, and he liked the play of light and shadow across his eyes in the early morning. His imagination freely saw shapes that reminded him of the market village where he grew up. He could see hawking merchants, women balancing water jugs on their heads, camels and cara-vans—anything, really—on the screen of his closed eyes. But never demons, not before this morning. Asita walked into the nearly freezing mountain stream, his body naked except for a loincloth. As an ascetic, he did not wear clothes, not even the robes of a monastic order. Lately he had felt an impulse to travel very high, nearly in sight of the snowcapped peaks on the north-ern border of the Sakya kingdom. Which put him close to other lokas,worlds apart from Earth. Every mortal is confined to the Earth plane, but like the dense air of the jungle tapering gradually into the thin atmosphere of the mountains, the material world ta-pered off into subtler and subtler worlds. Devas had their own lokas, as did the gods and demons. Ancestors dwelt in a loka set apart for spirits in transition from one lifetime to the next.

Most men, even in this comparatively free country, through mere ignorance and mistake, are so occupied with the factitious cares and superfluously coarse labors of life that its finer fruits cannot be plucked by them. Their fingers, from excessive toil, are too clumsy and tremble too much for that. Actually, the laboring man has not leisure for a true integrity day by day; he cannot afford to sustain the manliest relations to men; his labor would be depreciated in the market. He has no time to be anything but a machine. How can he remember well his ignorance — which his growth requires — who has so often to use his knowledge? We should feed and clothe him gratuitously sometimes, and recruit him with our cordials, before we judge of him. The finest qualities of our nature, like the bloom on fruits, can be preserved only by the most delicate handling. Yet we do not treat ourselves nor one another thus tenderly.

Though it finds its baldest expression in things like the Fiverr ads, this phenomenon—of work metastasizing throughout the rest of life—isn’t constrained to the gig economy. I learned this during the few years that I worked in the marketing department of a large clothing brand. The office had instituted something called the Results Only Work Environment, or ROWE, which meant to abolish the eight-hour workday by letting you work whenever from wherever, as long as you got your work done. It sounded noble enough, but there was something in the name that bothered me. After all, what is the E in ROWE? If you could be getting results at the office, in your car, at the store, at home after dinner—aren’t those all then “work environments”? At that time, in 2011, I’d managed not to get a phone with email yet, and with the introduction of this new workday, I put off getting one even longer. I knew exactly what would happen the minute I did: that every minute of every day I would in fact be answerable to someone, even if my leash was a lot longer.

products.” The Global Positioning System (GPS) uses spread spectrum. So does the U.S. military’s $41 billion MILSATCOM satellite communications network. Wireless local area networks (wLANs) use spread spectrum, as do wireless cash registers, bar-code readers, restaurant menu pads, and home control systems. So does Qualcomm’s Omni-TRACS mobile information system for commercial trucking fleets. So do unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), electronic automotive subsystems, aerial and maritime mobile broadband, wireless access points, digital watermarking, and much more. A study done for Microsoft in 2009 estimated the minimum economic value of spread-spectrum Wi-Fi in homes and hospitals and RFID tags in clothing retail outlets in the U.S. as $16–$37 billion per year. These uses, the study notes, “only account for 15% of the total projected market for unlicensed [spectrum] chipsets in 2014, and therefore significantly underestimates the total value being generated in unlicensed usage over this time period.” A market of which 15 percent is $25 billion would be a $166 billion market.

The deeply flushed midsummer sunlight, the strong, clear alcohol filling a dirty glass, a goat tethered with a rope, the enormous sides of a glitteringly white modern building, the solemn melody of the national orchestra, the slender-necked actress who was performing on the stage, the arc of a rainbow which, after a sudden shower, fell to the earth like an arrow from between the clouds, a sheepdog pressed flat under the wheel of a car, a herd of stubborn goats bobbing their heads with profound indifference, blue cloth fluttering in the wind, designating something sacred, a swarthy woman looking down on the street below from a first-floor window, her exposed chest leaning out over the wooden frame, cat-sized rats threading their way around the legs of market stalls, unlit signs and display windows, a sombrely lit butcher’s fridge, each dark red carcass still buttressed with the animal’s skeleton, Banchi’s printing shop, on the ground floor of a temple on the main street in the city centre, there Banchi makes picture postcards featuring his own translations of Indian sutras.

To give the monopoly of the home market to the produce of domestic industry, in any particular art or manufacture, is in some measure to direct private people in what manner they ought to employ their capitals, and must, in almost all cases, be either a useless or a hurtful regulation. If the produce of domestic can be brought there as cheap as that of foreign industry, the regulation is evidently useless. If it cannot, it must generally be hurtful. It is the maxim of every prudent master of a family never to attempt to make at home what it will cost him more to make than to buy. The tailor does not attempt to make his own shoes, but buys them of the shoemaker. The shoemaker does not attempt to make his own clothes, but employs a tailor. The farmer attempts to make neither the one nor the other, but employs those different artificers. All of them find it for their interest to employ their whole industry in a way in which they have some advantage over their neighbours, and to purchase with a part of its produce, or what is the same thing, with the price of a part of it, whatever else they have occasion for

Champagne?” It was the same waiter. “No thanks,” Cosmo Editor said. “Sure!” As I helped myself, a woman standing with her back to me turned around. It was the person I’d dreaded seeing all night: the Vice President of Marketing for this (major—major) beauty brand. Oh, no. Now my bosses at Lucky had essentially sent me here tonight to kiss up to this powerful, advertising-budget-controlling woman—the Vice President of Marketing, who not only detested me, but had recently seen me on drugs and in my underwear. It all went down on a weekend press trip to the Mayflower Spa in Connecticut, one of the most luxurious retreats on the East Coast. Other beauty editors and I were there for two nights as a guest of Vice President of Marketing and the beauty brand. The first night, there was a fancy dinner. I ate nothing. Then I wobbled back to my deluxe cottage, stripped off my clothes, popped a Xannie bar, boosted it with a strawberry-flavored clonazepam wafer I’d found stuck to a tobacco flake–covered Scooby-Doo fruit snack at the bottom of my grimy Balenciaga, and blacked out on top of the antique four-poster feather-top bed.

To the untrained eye, the Wall Street people who rode from the Connecticut suburbs to Grand Central were an undifferentiated mass, but within that mass Danny noted many small and important distinctions. If they were on their BlackBerrys, they were probably hedge fund guys, checking their profits and losses in the Asian markets. If they slept on the train they were probably sell-side people—brokers, who had no skin in the game. Anyone carrying a briefcase or a bag was probably not employed on the sell side, as the only reason you’d carry a bag was to haul around brokerage research, and the brokers didn’t read their own reports—at least not in their spare time. Anyone carrying a copy of the New York Times was probably a lawyer or a back-office person or someone who worked in the financial markets without actually being in the markets. Their clothes told you a lot, too. The guys who ran money dressed as if they were going to a Yankees game. Their financial performance was supposed to be all that mattered about them, and so it caused suspicion if they dressed too well. If you saw a buy-side guy in a suit, it usually meant that he was in trouble, or scheduled to meet with someone who had given him money, or both. Beyond that, it was hard to tell much about a buy-side person from what he was wearing. The sell side, on the other hand, might as well have been wearing their business cards: The guy in the blazer and khakis was a broker at a second-tier firm; the guy in the three-thousand-dollar suit and the hair just so was an investment banker at J.P. Morgan or someplace like that. Danny could guess where people worked by where they sat on the train. The Goldman Sachs, Deutsche Bank, and Merrill Lynch people, who were headed downtown, edged to the front—though when Danny thought about it, few Goldman people actually rode the train anymore. They all had private cars. Hedge fund guys such as himself worked uptown and so exited Grand Central to the north, where taxis appeared haphazardly and out of nowhere to meet them, like farm trout rising to corn kernels. The Lehman and Bear Stearns people used to head for the same exit as he did, but they were done. One reason why, on September 18, 2008, there weren’t nearly as many people on the northeast corner of Forty-seventh Street and Madison Avenue at 6:40 in the morning as there had been on September 18, 2007.

There is no guarantee that a socialized economy will always succeed. The state-owned economies of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union suffered ultimately fatal distortions in their development because of the backlog of poverty and want in the societies they inherited; years of capitalist encirclement, embargo, invasion, devastating wars, and costly arms buildup; poor incentive systems, and a lack of administrative initiative and technological innovation; and a repressive political rule that allowed little critical feedback while fostering stagnation and elitism. Despite all that, the former communist states did transform impoverished countries into relatively advanced societies. Whatever their mistakes and political crimes, they achieved—in countries that were never as rich as ours—what U.S. free-market capitalism cannot and has no intention of accomplishing: adequate food, housing, and clothing for all; economic security in old age; free medical care; free education at all levels; and a guaranteed income. Today by overwhelming majorities, people in Russia and other parts of Eastern Europe say that life was better under communism than under the present freemarket system.

OPTIONS FOR REDUCING While thrift stores such as Goodwill or the Salvation Army can be a convenient way to initially let go, many other outlets exist and are often more appropriate for usable items. Here are some examples: • Amazon.com • Antiques shops • Auction houses • Churches • Consignment shops (quality items) • Craigslist.org (large items, moving boxes, free items) • Crossroads Trading Co. (trendy clothes) • Diggerslist.com (home improvement) • Dress for Success (workplace attire) • Ebay.com (small items of value) • Flea markets • Food banks (food) • Freecycle.org (free items) • Friends • Garage and yard sales • Habitat for Humanity (building materials, furniture, and/or appliances) • Homeless and women’s shelters • Laundromats (magazines and laundry supplies) • Library (books, CDs and DVDs) • Local SPCA (towels and sheets) • Nurseries and preschools (blankets, toys) • Operation Christmas Child (new items in a shoe box) • Optometrists (eyeglasses) • Regifting • Rummage sales for a cause • Salvage yards (building materials) • Schools (art supplies, magazines, dishes to eliminate class party disposables) • Tool co-ops (tools) • Waiting rooms (magazines) • Your curb with a “Free” sign

I rolled my eyes at him and pulled the sweatshirt over my head, adjusting the deep sweetheart neckline of my dress. I'd secretly and specifically purchased the gorgeous cherry-red vintage cocktail dress for this party. I had found a pair of black cat-eye glasses at a retro clothing store near Pike Place Market to go with the dress, and the combination made me feel confident and sophisticated. "Don't look for a minute," I instructed, shimmying out of my jeans and smoothing the hemline down. The dress nipped in at the waist and flared out in a high hemline that showed off my legs. "Okay, I'm good." Rory gave me a sideways glance and did a double take. "Wow." He pulled up to a stop sign and turned, taking me in head to toe. "You look...wow." He shook his head, seemingly at a loss for words. I felt a flush of triumph. I'd never seen him look at me like that, admiration mixed with astonishment. He seemed genuinely stunned. I slicked on some red lipstick and examined my reflection in the tiny square of Rory's passenger mirror, aware of his eyes on me. I looked glamorous, surprisingly sexy. Like a movie starlet from the 1950s, a bombshell ingenue. I sat back, feeling almost giddy with triumph. I'd worn the dress for only one person. And he had finally noticed me.

What the hell is that?' Cassian was grinning that next evening as he waved a hand toward the pile of pine boughs dumped on the ornate red rug in the centre of the foyer. 'Solstice decorations. Straight from the market.' Snow clung to his broad shoulders and dark hair, and his tan cheeks were flushed with cold. 'You call that a decoration? He smirked. 'A heap of pine in the middle of the floor is Night Court tradition.' I crossed my arms. 'Funny.' 'I'm serious.' I glared, and he laughed. 'It's for the mantels, the banister, and whatever else, smartass. Want to help?' He shrugged off his heavy coat, revealing a black jacket and shirt beneath, and hung it in the hall closet. I remained where I was and tapped my foot. 'What?' he said, brows rising. It was rare to see Cassian in anything but his Illyrian leathers, but the clothes, while not as fine as anything Rhys or Mor usually favoured, suited him. 'Dumping a bunch of trees at my feet is really how you say hello these days? A little time in that Illyrian camp and you forget all your manners.' Cassian was on me in a second, hoisting me off the ground to twirl me until I was going to be sick. I beat at his chest, cursing at him. Cassian set me down at last. 'What did you get me for Solstice?' I smacked his arm. 'A heaping pile of shut the hell up.' He laughed again, and I winked at him. 'Hot cocoa or wine?' Cassian curved a wing around me, turning us toward the cellar door. 'How many good bottles does little Rhysie have left?

If you are stuck in circumstances in which it takes Herculean efforts to get through the day— doing low-income work, obeying an authoritarian boss, buying clothes for the children, dealing with school issues, paying the rent or mortgage, fixing the car, negotiating with a spouse, paying taxes, and caring for older parents— it is not easy to pay close attention to larger political issues. Indeed you may wish that these issues would take care of themselves. It is not a huge jump from such a wish to become attracted to a public philosophy, spouted regularly at your job and on the media, that economic life would regulate itself automatically if only the state did not repeatedly intervene in it in clumsy ways. Now underfunded practices such as the license bureau, state welfare, public health insurance, public schools, public retirement plans, and the like begin to appear as awkward, bureaucratic organizations that could be replaced or eliminated if only the rational market were allowed to take care of things impersonally and quietly, as it were. Certainly such bureaucracies are indeed often clumsy. But more people are now attracted to compare that clumsiness to the myth of how an impersonal market would perform if it took on even more assignments and if state regulation of it were reduced even further. So a lot of “independents” and “moderates” may become predisposed to the myth of the rational market in part because the pressures of daily life encourage them to seek comfort in ideological formations that promise automatic rationality.

HOW TO USE THIS BOOK WHAT TO DO FIRST 1. Find the MAP. It will be there. No Tour of Fantasyland is complete without one. It will be found in the front part of your brochure, quite near the page that says For Mom and Dad for having me and for Jeannie (or Jack or Debra or Donnie or …) for putting up with me so supportively and for my nine children for not interrupting me and for my Publisher for not discouraging me and for my Writers’ Circle for listening to me and for Barbie and Greta and Albert Einstein and Aunty May and so on. Ignore this, even if you are wondering if Albert Einstein is Albert Einstein or in fact the dog. This will be followed by a short piece of prose that says When the night of the wolf waxes strong in the morning, the wise man is wary of a false dawn. Ka’a Orto’o, Gnomic Utterances Ignore this too (or, if really puzzled, look up GNOMIC UTTERANCES in the Toughpick section). Find the Map. 2. Examine the Map. It will show most of a continent (and sometimes part of another) with a large number of BAYS, OFFSHORE ISLANDS, an INLAND SEA or so and a sprinkle of TOWNS. There will be scribbly snakes that are probably RIVERS, and names made of CAPITAL LETTERS in curved lines that are not quite upside down. By bending your neck sideways you will be able to see that they say things like “Ca’ea Purt’wydyn” and “Om Ce’falos.” These may be names of COUNTRIES, but since most of the Map is bare it is hard to tell. These empty inland parts will be sporadically peppered with little molehills, invitingly labeled “Megamort Hills,” “Death Mountains, ”Hurt Range” and such, with a whole line of molehills near the top called “Great Northern Barrier.” Above this will be various warnings of danger. The rest of the Map’s space will be sparingly devoted to little tiny feathers called “Wretched Wood” and “Forest of Doom,” except for one space that appears to be growing minute hairs. This will be tersely labeled “Marshes.” This is mostly it. No, wait. If you are lucky, the Map will carry an arrow or compass-heading somewhere in the bit labeled “Outer Ocean” and this will show you which way up to hold it. But you will look in vain for INNS, reststops, or VILLAGES, or even ROADS. No – wait another minute – on closer examination, you will find the empty interior crossed by a few bird tracks. If you peer at these you will see they are (somewhere) labeled “Old Trade Road – Disused” and “Imperial Way – Mostly Long Gone.” Some of these routes appear to lead (or have lead) to small edifices enticingly titled “Ruin,” “Tower of Sorcery,” or “Dark Citadel,” but there is no scale of miles and no way of telling how long you might take on the way to see these places. In short, the Map is useless, but you are advised to keep consulting it, because it is the only one you will get. And, be warned. If you take this Tour, you are going to have to visit every single place on this Map, whether it is marked or not. This is a Rule. 3. Find your STARTING POINT. Let us say it is the town of Gna’ash. You will find it down in one corner on the coast, as far away from anywhere as possible. 4. Having found Gna’ash, you must at once set about finding an INN, Tour COMPANIONS, a meal of STEW, a CHAMBER for the night, and then the necessary TAVERN BRAWL. (If you look all these things up in the Toughpick section, you will know what you are in for.) The following morning, you must locate the MARKET and attempt to acquire CLOTHING (which absolutely must include a CLOAK), a SADDLE ROLL, WAYBREAD, WATERBOTTLES, a DAGGER, a SWORD, a HORSE, and a MERCHANT to take you along in his CARAVAN. You must resign yourself to being cheated over most prices and you are advised to consult a local MAGICIAN about your Sword. 5. You set off. Now you are on your own. You should turn to the Toughpick section of this brochure and select your Tour on a pick-and-mix basis, remembering only that you will have to take in all of it.

Some think that money and what it can buy will make them happy and so concentrate on earning it. But acquiring a better car, a nicer house, a better position, or more comfort will never satisfy them, for they are filled with the desire to have more. For example, some people have a passion for cars. It is very important that their car is a good make and the latest model; it has to have good engineering and a quality music system. They grow very emotionally attached to their auto and do not want it to have the slightest dent or scratch. But their satisfaction from driving a nice car does not last long. Soon a new model comes out, and theirs becomes an outdated model. It pains them to read that a faster car with more accessories and more advanced engineering is now on the market, and in an instant moment they lose all the pleasure they had in their once-coveted possession. Also, their wardrobe becomes a major problem for ignorant people. Some people want to follow the latest clothing fashions, even though they may not have enough money to do so. They buy an outfit that they like and find attractive, but stop liking it when it goes out of style or they see it on someone they do not like or, even worse, a rival. The outfit abruptly loses its appeal and becomes a source of irritation. In much the same way, seeing someone wearing nicer clothing than theirs makes them quite miserable. No matter how nice their own outfits are, they are worried that they are no more than ordinary, which makes then unhappy. Their habits, social activities, material means, or possessions will not make them happy, and their constant search for more will make them even more miserable. When they realize that they have really consumed and wasted all of this life’s pleasures, they generally get “angry at life.” Unwilling to solve their problems through belief, they remain mired in confusion and unhappiness. Therefore, in spite of all their efforts, they remain confused and unhappy. However, if they practiced religious morality, they would have a joy deeper than they could imagine.

Is power like the vis viva and the quantite d’avancement? That is, is it conserved by the universe, or is it like shares of a stock, which may have great value one day, and be worthless the next? If power is like stock shares, then it follows that the immense sum thereof lately lost by B[olingbroke] has vanished like shadows in sunlight. For no matter how much wealth is lost in stock crashes, it never seems to turn up, but if power is conserved, then B’s must have gone somewhere. Where is it? Some say ‘twas scooped up by my Lord R, who hid it under a rock, lest my Lord M come from across the sea and snatch it away. My friends among the Whigs say that any power lost by a Tory is infallibly and insensibly distributed among all the people, but no matter how assiduously I search the lower rooms of the clink for B’s lost power, I cannot seem to find any there, which explodes that argument, for there are assuredly very many people in those dark salons. I propose a novel theory of power, which is inspired by . . . the engine for raising water by fire. As a mill makes flour, a loom makes cloth and a forge makes steel, so we are assured this engine shall make power. If the backers of this device speak truly, and I have no reason to deprecate their honesty, it proves that power is not a conserved quantity, for of such quantities, it is never possible to make more. The amount of power in the world, it follows, is ever increasing, and the rate of increase grows ever faster as more of these engines are built. A man who hordes power is therefore like a miser who sits on a heap of coins in a realm where the currency is being continually debased by the production of more coins than the market can bear. So that what was a great fortune, when first he raked it together, insensibly becomes a slag heap, and is found to be devoid of value. When at last he takes it to the marketplace to be spent. Thus my Lord B and his vaunted power hoard what is true of him is likely to be true of his lackeys, particularly his most base and slavish followers such as Mr. Charles White. This varmint has asserted that he owns me. He fancies that to own a man is to have power, yet he has got nothing by claiming to own me, while I who was supposed to be rendered powerless, am now writing for a Grub Street newspaper that is being perused by you, esteemed reader.

She found it difficult to discuss physics, much less debate it, with her predominantly male classmates. At first they paid a kind of selective inattention to her remarks. There would be a slight pause, and then they would go on as if she had not spoken. Occasionally they would acknowledge her remark, even praise it, and then again continue undeflected. She was reasonably sure her remarks were not entirely foolish, and did not wish to be ignored, much less ignored and patronized alternately. Part of it—but only a part—she knew was due to the softness of her voice. So she developed a physics voice, a professional voice: clear, competent, and many decibels above conversational. With such a voice it was important to be right. She had to pick her moments. It was hard to continue long in such a voice, because she was sometimes in danger of bursting out laughing. So she found herself leaning toward quick, sometimes cutting, interventions, usually enough to capture their attention; then she could go on for a while in a more usual tone of voice. Every time she found herself in a new group she would have to fight her way through again, just to dip her oar into the discussion. The boys were uniformly unaware even that there was a problem. Sometimes she would be engaged in a laboratory exercise or a seminar when the instructor would say, “Gentlemen, let’s proceed,” and sensing Ellie’s frown would add, “Sorry, Miss Arroway, but I think of you as one of the boys.” The highest compliment they were capable of paying was that in their minds she was not overtly female. She had to fight against developing too combative a personality or becoming altogether a misanthrope. She suddenly caught herself. “Misanthrope” is someone who dislikes everybody, not just men. And they certainly had a word for someone who hates women: “misogynist.” But the male lexicographers had somehow neglected to coin a word for the dislike of men. They were almost entirely men themselves, she thought, and had been unable to imagine a market for such a word. More than many others, she had been encumbered with parental proscriptions. Her newfound freedoms—intellectual, social, sexual—were exhilarating. At a time when many of her contemporaries were moving toward shapeless clothing that minimized the distinctions between the sexes, she aspired to an elegance and simplicity in dress and makeup that strained her limited budget. There were more effective ways to make political statements, she thought. She cultivated a few close friends and made a number of casual enemies, who disliked her for her dress, for her political and religious views, or for the vigor with which she defended her opinions. Her competence and delight in science were taken as rebukes by many otherwise capable young women. But a few looked on her as what mathematicians call an existence theorem—a demonstration that a woman could, sure enough, excel in science—or even as a role model.

When we are sold perfume, we are accustomed to also being sold the idea of a life we will never have. Coty's Chypre enabled Guerlain to create Mitsouko; Coty's Emeraude of 1921 was the bedrock on which Shalimar was built and Coty's L'Origan become the godmother of L'heure bleue, also by Guerlain. Some people dedicate themselves to making life beautiful. With instinctual good taste, magpie tendencies and a flair for color, they weave painfully exquisite tableaux, defining the look of an era. Paul Poiret was one such person. After his success, he went bust in 1929 and had to sell his leftover clothing stock as rags. Swept out of the picture by a new generation of designers, his style too ornate and Aladdinesque, Poiret ended his days as a street painter and died in poverty. It was Poiret who saw that symbolic nomenclature could turn us into frenzied followers, transforming our desire to own a perfume into desperation. The beauty industry has always been brilliant at turning insecurities into commercial opportunities. Readers could buy the cologne to relax during times of anxiety or revive themselves from strain. Particularly in the 1930s, releases came thick and fast, intended to give the impression of bounty, the provision of beauty to all women in the nation. Giving perfumes as a gift even came under the Soviet definition of kulturnost or "cultured behavior", including to aunts and teachers on International Women's Day. Mitsouko is a heartening scent to war when alone or rather, when not wanting to feel lonely. Using fragrance as part of a considered daily ritual, the territorial marking of our possessions and because it offers us a retrospective sense of naughtiness. You can never tell who is going to be a Nr. 5 wearer. No. 5 has the precision of well-cut clothes and that special appeal which comes from a clean, bare room free of the knick-knacks that would otherwise give away its age. Its versatility may well be connected to its abstraction. Gardenia perfumes are not usually the more esoteric or intellectual on the shelves but exist for those times when we demand simply to smell gorgeous. You can depend on the perfume industry to make light of the world's woes. No matter how bad things get, few obstacles can block the shimmer and glitz of a new fragrance. Perfume became so fashionable as a means of reinvention and recovery that the neurology department at Columbia University experimented with the administration of jasmine and tuberose perfumes, in conjunction with symphony music, to treat anxiety, hysteria and nightmares. Scent enthusiasts cared less for the nuances of a composition and more for the impact a scent would have in society. In Ancient Rome, the Stoics were concerned about the use of fragrance by women as a mask for seducing men or as a vehicle of deception. The Roman satirist Juvenal talked of women buying scent with adultery in mind and such fears were still around in the 1940s and they are here with us today. Similarly, in crime fiction, fragrance is often the thing that gives the perpetrator away. Specifically in film noir, scent gets associated with misdemeanors. With Opium, the drugs tag was simply the bait. What YSL was really marketing, with some genius, was perfume as me time: a daily opportunity to get languid and to care sod-all about anything or anyone else.

It is not in vain that the strategic criterion of placing only short runs on the market prevails in order simultaneously to create a feeling of scarcity and avoid an appearance of uniformity, both of which encourage consumer demand. This is such a powerful criterion that it is not uncommon to discontinue production of a much-sought-after product, sometimes to the relative desperation of the shop staff, who were sure they could sell it.

Developing a business depends on many factors. But you should basically understand the exchange between value. In other words, you must provide value to receive equal value. If you look at single people, you can see that they can’t provide any value – they don’t smile, dress, talk or behave in a way that makes others want to spend time, much less a life, with them. Relationships and Business are not much different. In a business, people know that appearance and the way you talk to a costumer is as important as the value of your product, and that’s why brands sell, even when their products have no quality. For example, in shopping malls you can see shops packed with people buying clothes that have no value and will be ruined or out of fashion very soon, because the brand is selling an image, not quality anymore. China, on the other hand, managed to compete in the world markets by reducing price over quality, and is now paying the price of a very bad reputation, as most people don’t trust Chinese brands anymore. This is already impacting the economy, so I don’t know what will happen in the next years. It’s all in the hands of the politicians and the internationalization of the companies. And yet, I just said this to explain the relation between value and product. But here’s another example. I tried to share what I know about Learning with Teachers, Parents and Psychologists, and nobody cared. Besides, what I earned in helping children with learning disabilities was a very low payment, and I had to quit that as I couldn’t afford to pay an apartment and daily expenses with such job. However, there are people making thousands of dollars with drugs that have no effect, toilets for cats and pet-rocks. In other words, is never about what the world needs but what the world wants.

The collapse of world grain markets would have been catastrophe enough, but people would have eaten. In 1929, drought devastated much of the harvest, and for nine more years crop conditions denied the prairies a satisfactory harvest. In 1931, the wind began lifting the dry topsoil in great black clouds. In 1932, the first great plague of grasshoppers devoured every green thing, plus clothing and tool handles. In 1933, drought, hail, rust, and frost joined the grasshoppers, as though all nature’s forces had united to give prairie settlers notice to quit.

Developing a business depends on many factors. But you should basically understand the exchange between value. In other words, you must provide value to receive equal value. If you look at most singles, you can see that they can’t provide any value – they often don’t smile, dress, talk or behave in a way that makes others want to spend time, much less a lifetime, with them. Relationships and businesses are not much different. In a business, people know that appearance and the way you talk to a costumer is as important as the value of your product, and that’s why brands sell, even when their products have no quality. For example, in shopping malls you can see shops packed with people buying clothes that have no value and will be ruined or out of fashion very soon, because the brand is selling an image, not quality anymore. China, on the other hand, managed to compete in the world market by reducing price over quality, and is now paying the cost of a very bad reputation, as most people don’t trust Chinese brands anymore. This is already impacting the economy, so I don’t know what will happen in the next years. It is all in the hands of the politicians and the internationalization of the companies. And yet, I just said this to explain the relation between value and product. But here’s another example: I tried to share what I know about learning with teachers, parents and psychologists, and nobody cared. Besides, what I earned in helping children with learning disabilities was a very low payment, and I had to quit that as I couldn’t afford to pay an apartment and daily expenses with such job. However, there are people making thousands of dollars with drugs that have no effect, toilets for cats and pet-rocks. In other words, it is never about what the world needs but what the world wants.

The charge sheet against the fashion industry could read as follows: fashion reinforces racism, sexism, gender stereotypes, class and unequal power relations. Fashion seriously exploits its impoverished workers and its customers. It pushes the values of wealth and greed, and promotes body insecurity and dissatisfaction. Fashion is a monopolised industry with large corporations controlling both the luxury and the mass markets. Corporations control the factories and the shops, the fashion magazines and the cotton fields. Fashion’s endless quest for profit means scant regard is ever shown for people, animals or the environment. In an industry that sells itself as a promoter of individuality, the reality is one of conformity with billions of pieces of trend-based clothing churned out each year and sent to identikit stores from Birmingham to Bangkok, with magazines on different continents promoting the same styles.

Disintermediated brands appear in other contexts, too. For instance, Facebook creates no content, yet it brokers content for billions of individuals and thousands of media markets; Uber owns almost no vehicles, yet it is the world’s largest taxi service. In a hyper-networked world where mobile phones, speakers, thermostats, and even exercise clothes are connected to the internet and potentially each other, brands have to learn to play well with each other or give up a certain amount of control to those that own the most popular interfaces. For better or for worse, the power is in the portal.

Developing a business depends on many factors. But you should basically understand the exchange between value. In other words, you must provide value to receive equal value. If you look at single people, you can see that they can’t provide any value – they don’t smile, dress, talk or behave in a way that makes others want to spend time, much less a life, with them. Relationships and Business are not much different. In a business, people know that appearance and the way you talk to a costumer is as important as the value of your product, and that’s why brands sell, even when their products have no quality. For example, in shopping malls you can see shops packed with people buying clothes that have no value and will be ruined or out of fashion very soon, because the brand is selling an image, not quality anymore. China, on the other hand, managed to compete in the world markets by reducing price over quality, and is now paying the price of a very bad reputation, as most people don’t trust Chinese brands anymore. This is already impacting the economy, so I don’t know what will happen in the next years. It’s all in the hands of the politicians and the internationalization of the companies. Actually, that’s why this Chinese government sends its companies to other countries. And yet, I just said this to explain the relation between value and product. But here’s another. I tried to share what I know about Learning with Teachers, Parents and Psychologists, and nobody cared. Besides, what I earned in helping children with learning disabilities was a very low payment, and I had to quit that as I couldn’t afford to pay an apartment and daily expenses with such job. However, there are people making thousands of dollars with drugs that have no effect, toilets for cats and pet-rocks. In other words, is never about what the world needs but what the world wants.

this foggy little back lane, with its everyday humdrumness, its vulgarity, its unfortunate but tolerable inequities, its donkeys and its minor cruelties, is like a small corner of Paradise. The shops in the market sell food and flowers and clothes and mobile phones, not grenades and machine guns. Children play at ringing doorbells, not at being suicide bombers. We have our troubles, our terrible moments, yes, but these are only aberrations.

How’s work?’ Martin asked. Behrouz was now a correspondent for the Wall Street Journal, which these days seemed to mean as much video journalism as prose. ‘Not bad.’ Behrouz smiled slightly. ‘Business people might be the last paying market left for real news. If they’re convinced that they’re getting fearlessly objective information, they’ll keep shelling out for it – while everyone else gives up caring and buries their head inside their favourite consensual reality.’ Martin laughed softly, self-conscious but grateful for a few words of real conversation, a lifeline out of the pit. ‘You’re not a fan of News Five Point Oh, then?’ ‘Don’t get me started. HigherTribe is worse, but they’re all pathological. What isn’t filtered and spun is just invented out of whole cloth.’ ‘Yeah.’ The replacement of journalism by rumour aggregators and group-think salons was a serious matter, but Martin’s enthusiasm for talking shop was already beginning to falter.

Many Union soldiers had money, and since 45,000 prisoners moved through Andersonville in the span of about 14 months, there was actually a free market among the prisoners. Since rations, clothing, and shelter were substandard, many shopkeepers and merchants set up shop inside the stockade and sold fresh vegetables of every kind. Thorp recounted this market: “The authorities at Andersonville allowed supplies to be sold to the prisoners for Federal money. Numerous small restaurants flourished in the stockade. From small clay ovens they supplied fresh bread and baked meats. Irish and sweet potatoes, string beans, peas, tomatoes, melons, sweet corn, and other garden products were abundantly offered for sale. New arrivals were amazed to find these resources in the midst of utter destitution and starvation

How many times has one heard some one say: "I won't dress for dinner—no one is coming in." Or, "That old dress will do!" Old clothes! No manners! And what is the result? One wife more wonders why her husband neglects her! Curious how the habit of careless manners and the habit of old clothes go together. If you doubt it, put the question to yourself: "Who could possibly have the manners of a queen in a gray flannel wrapper?" And how many women really lovely and good—especially good—commit esthetic suicide by letting themselves slide down to where they "feel natural" in an old gray flannel wrapper, not only actually but mentally.

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Wearing Western-style clothing began to signal proximity to power, and the media also played a role in dictating what was appropriate or not. This meant that when secondhand clothing began pouring into Ghana (post-independence) from the Global North there was a market ready to receive it, not because citizens did not have clothing, but because wearing foreign clothing became a tool for visually crossing class barriers and for navigating the oppressive legacy of colonialism.

When a young employee gasped at his blue language, Simons flashed a grin. “I know—that is an impressive rate!” A few times a week, Marilyn came by to visit, usually with their baby, Nicholas. Other times, Barbara checked in on her ex-husband. Other employees’ spouses and children also wandered around the office. Each afternoon, the team met for tea in the library, where Simons, Baum, and others discussed the latest news and debated the direction of the economy. Simons also hosted staffers on his yacht, The Lord Jim, docked in nearby Port Jefferson. Most days, Simons sat in his office, wearing jeans and a golf shirt, staring at his computer screen, developing new trades—reading the news and predicting where markets were going, like most everyone else. When he was especially engrossed in thought, Simons would hold a cigarette in one hand and chew on his cheek. Baum, in a smaller, nearby office, trading his own account, favored raggedy sweaters, wrinkled trousers, and worn Hush Puppies shoes. To compensate for his worsening eyesight, he hunched close to his computer, trying to ignore the smoke wafting through the office from Simons’s cigarettes. Their traditional trading approach was going so well that, when the boutique next door closed, Simons rented the space and punched through the adjoining wall. The new space was filled with offices for new hires, including an economist and others who provided expert intelligence and made their own trades, helping to boost returns. At the same time, Simons was developing a new passion: backing promising technology companies, including an electronic dictionary company called Franklin Electronic Publishers, which developed the first hand-held computer. In 1982, Simons changed Monemetrics’ name to Renaissance Technologies Corporation, reflecting his developing interest in these upstart companies. Simons came to see himself as a venture capitalist as much as a trader. He spent much of the week working in an office in New York City, where he interacted with his hedge fund’s investors while also dealing with his tech companies. Simons also took time to care for his children, one of whom needed extra attention. Paul, Simons’s second child with Barbara, had been born with a rare hereditary condition called ectodermal dysplasia. Paul’s skin, hair, and sweat glands didn’t develop properly, he was short for his age, and his teeth were few and misshapen. To cope with the resulting insecurities, Paul asked his parents to buy him stylish and popular clothing in the hopes of fitting in with his grade-school peers. Paul’s challenges weighed on Simons, who sometimes drove Paul to Trenton, New Jersey, where a pediatric dentist made cosmetic improvements to Paul’s teeth. Later, a New York dentist fitted Paul with a complete set of implants, improving his self-esteem. Baum was fine with Simons working from the New York office, dealing with his outside investments, and tending to family matters. Baum didn’t need much help. He was making so much money trading various currencies using intuition and instinct that pursuing a systematic, “quantitative” style of trading seemed a waste of