Colleague Leaving Quotes

This is your last chance to do the right thing.' 'Do you want to attack first, or will I?' Skulduggery held up a finger. 'Do you mind if I confer with my colleague for a moment?' 'By all means.' Skulduggery leaned in towards Valkyrie. 'Damn,' he whispered. 'She's not going to do the right thing.' 'Did you really think she would?' 'I was really hoping.' 'Can we beat her?' Valkyrie asked. 'I don't like our chances.' 'What are our chances?' 'We don't have any,' Skulduggery admitted. 'Do you think you can take Craven on your own?' 'No.' 'Me either. Do you want to leave him to me then, and you can take her?' 'I like that idea even less.' 'I don't blame you.' She sighed. 'We're going to get killed, aren't we?' 'It looks likely. Our only hope is a surprise attack.' 'They're staring right at us.' 'Dammit.' Skulduggery straightened up. 'We have discussed the situation,' he said to them, 'and decided that it would be in everyone's best interests for me to fight you, Melancholia, and for both Valkyrie and Cleric Craven to stand back and cheer or boo as they see fit.

Leave it to you…look, the reason I’m calling is I have a colleague here in my office who has something we need you to take a look at – I personally have never seen anything like it, and I think from a historic point of view you’d be very interested in it, too. Any chance we can stop by?...Yeah, it’s some really old shit – nice phraseology, by the way.

...workplace dynamics are no less complicated or unexpectedly intense than family relations, with only the added difficulty that whereas families are at least well-recognised and sanctioned loci for hysteria reminiscent of scenes from Medea, office life typically proceeds behind a mask of shallow cheerfulness, leaving workers grievously unprepared to handle the fury and sadness continually aroused by their colleagues.

In the 1890s, when Freud was in the dawn of his career, he was struck by how many of his female patients were revealing childhood incest victimization to him. Freud concluded that child sexual abuse was one of the major causes of emotional disturbances in adult women and wrote a brilliant and humane paper called “The Aetiology of Hysteria.” However, rather than receiving acclaim from his colleagues for his ground-breaking insights, Freud met with scorn. He was ridiculed for believing that men of excellent reputation (most of his patients came from upstanding homes) could be perpetrators of incest. Within a few years, Freud buckled under this heavy pressure and recanted his conclusions. In their place he proposed the “Oedipus complex,” which became the foundation of modern psychology. According to this theory any young girl actually desires sexual contact with her father, because she wants to compete with her mother to be the most special person in his life. Freud used this construct to conclude that the episodes of incestuous abuse his clients had revealed to him had never taken place; they were simply fantasies of events the women had wished for when they were children and that the women had come to believe were real. This construct started a hundred-year history in the mental health field of blaming victims for the abuse perpetrated on them and outright discrediting of women’s and children’s reports of mistreatment by men. Once abuse was denied in this way, the stage was set for some psychologists to take the view that any violent or sexually exploitative behaviors that couldn’t be denied—because they were simply too obvious—should be considered mutually caused. Psychological literature is thus full of descriptions of young children who “seduce” adults into sexual encounters and of women whose “provocative” behavior causes men to become violent or sexually assaultive toward them. I wish I could say that these theories have long since lost their influence, but I can’t. A psychologist who is currently one of the most influential professionals nationally in the field of custody disputes writes that women provoke men’s violence by “resisting their control” or by “attempting to leave.” She promotes the Oedipus complex theory, including the claim that girls wish for sexual contact with their fathers. In her writing she makes the observation that young girls are often involved in “mutually seductive” relationships with their violent fathers, and it is on the basis of such “research” that some courts have set their protocols. The Freudian legacy thus remains strong.

If an election were held here tomorrow,” Fahd once confided to a colleague, “Bin Baz would beat us without even leaving his house.

Your colleague, Captain Grimes, has been convicted before me on evidence that leaves no possibility of his innocence - of a crime (I might almost call it a course of action) which I can neither understand nor excuse. I dare say I need not particularise.

You might find yourself holding a baby instead of a briefcase and fearing that your colleagues are “getting ahead” and leaving you behind. Here’s what’s important: You are allowed to be disappointed when it feels like life’s benched you. What you aren’t allowed to do is miss your opportunity to lead from the bench. If you’re not a leader on the bench, don’t call yourself a leader on the field. You’re either a leader everywhere or nowhere.

She wanted her colleagues to need her as God wants people to keep praying.

On the first day of November last year, sacred to many religious calendars but especially the Celtic, I went for a walk among bare oaks and birch. Nothing much was going on. Scarlet sumac had passed and the bees were dead. The pond had slicked overnight into that shiny and deceptive glaze of delusion, first ice. It made me remember sakes and conjure a vision of myself skimming backward on one foot, the other extended; the arms become wings. Minnesota girls know that this is not a difficult maneuver if one's limber and practices even a little after school before the boys claim the rink for hockey. I think I can still do it - one thinks many foolish things when November's bright sun skips over the entrancing first freeze. A flock of sparrows reels through the air looking more like a flying net than seventy conscious birds, a black veil thrown on the wind. When one sparrow dodges, the whole net swerves, dips: one mind. Am I part of anything like that? Maybe not. The last few years of my life have been characterized by stripping away, one by one, loves and communities that sustain the soul. A young colleague, new to my English department, recently asked me who I hang around with at school. "Nobody," I had to say, feeling briefly ashamed. This solitude is one of the surprises of middle age, especially if one's youth has been rich in love and friendship and children. If you do your job right, children leave home; few communities can stand an individual's most pitiful, amateur truth telling. So the soul must stand in her own meager feathers and learn to fly - or simply take hopeful jumps into the wind. In the Christian calendar, November 1 is the Feast of All Saints, a day honoring not only those who are known and recognized as enlightened souls, but more especially the unknowns, saints who walk beside us unrecognized down the millennia. In Buddhism, we honor the bodhisattvas - saints - who refuse enlightenment and return willingly to the wheel of karma to help other beings. Similarly, in Judaism, anonymous holy men pray the world from its well-merited destruction. We never know who is walking beside us, who is our spiritual teacher. That one - who annoys you so - pretends for a day that he's the one, your personal Obi Wan Kenobi. The first of November is a splendid, subversive holiday. Imagine a hectic procession of revelers - the half-mad bag lady; a mumbling, scarred janitor whose ravaged face made the children turn away; the austere, unsmiling mother superior who seemed with great focus and clarity to do harm; a haunted music teacher, survivor of Auschwitz. I bring them before my mind's eye, these old firends of my soul, awakening to dance their day. Crazy saints; but who knows what was home in the heart? This is the feast of those who tried to take the path, so clumsily that no one knew or notice, the feast, indeed, of most of us. It's an ugly woods, I was saying to myself, padding along a trail where other walkers had broken ground before me. And then I found an extraordinary bouquet. Someone had bound an offering of dry seed pods, yew, lyme grass, red berries, and brown fern and laid it on the path: "nothing special," as Buddhists say, meaning "everything." Gathered to formality, each dry stalk proclaimed a slant, an attitude, infinite shades of neutral. All contemplative acts, silences, poems, honor the world this way. Brought together by the eye of love, a milkweed pod, a twig, allow us to see how things have been all along. A feast of being.

But you think it because you don’t trust your colleagues. Not all of them. You don’t believe in them. Which leaves you isolated. It’s all down to you. But the army is different. Whatever else is wrong with it, you can trust your brother soldiers. And believe in them.

A pure mathematician must leave to happier colleagues the great task of alleviating the sufferings of humanity.

We can't all leave this country, Bijan had told me-this is our home. The world is a large place, my magician had said when I went to him with my woes. You can write and teach wherever you are. You will be read more and heard better, in fact, once you are over there. To go or not to go? In the long run, it's all very personal, my magician reasoned. I always admired your former colleague's honesty, he said. Which former colleague? Dr. A, the one who said his only reason for leaving was because he liked to drink beer freely. I am getting sick of people who cloak their personal flaws and desires in the guise of patriotic fervor. They stay because they have no means of living anywhere else, because if they leave, they won't be the big shots they are over here; but they talk about sacrifice for the homeland. And then those who do leave claim they've gone in order to criticize and expose the regime. Why all these justifications?

In praise of mu husband's hair A woman is alone in labor, for it is an unfortunate fact that there is nobody who can have the baby for you. However, this account would be inadequate if I did not speak to the scent of my husband's hair. Besides the cut flowers he sacrifices his lunches to afford, the purchase of bags of licorice, the plumping of pillows, steaming of fish, searching out of chic maternity dresses, taking over of work, listening to complaints and simply worrying, there was my husband's hair. His hair has always amazed stylists in beauty salons. At his every first appointment they gather their colleagues around Michael's head. He owns glossy and springy hair, of an animal vitality and resilience that seems to me so like his personality. The Black Irish on Michael's mother's side of the family have changeable hair--his great-grandmother's hair went from black to gold in old age. Michael's went from golden-brown of childhood to a deepening chestnut that gleams Modoc black from his father under certain lights. When pushing each baby I throw my arm over Michael and lean my full weight. When the desperate part is over, the effort, I turn my face into the hair above his ear. It is as though I am entering a small and temporary refuge. How much I want to be little and unnecessary, to stay there, to leave my struggling body at the entrance. Leaves on a tree all winter that now, in your hand, crushed, give off a dry, true odor. The brass underside of a door knocker in your fingers and its faint metallic polish. Fresh potter's clay hardening on the wrist of a child. The slow blackening of Lent, timeless and lighted with hunger. All of these things enter into my mind when drawing into my entire face the scent of my husband's hair. When I am most alone and drowning and I think I cannot go on, it is breathing into his hair that draws me to the surface and restores my small courage.

So, your Socially Intelligent and altruistic behaviour doesn’t just benefit your friends and colleagues; you benefit too. If you leave people on a high note, you leave yourself on that same high note! You thus feed your own memory banks with wonderful and uplifting memories, as well as boosting your own resistance to stress, illness and disease. BUT REMEMBER: The opposite is also true … If you leave your friends, lovers and colleagues on antagonistic and unpleasant notes, you help them to flood their own bodies with poisons that leave them physically unbalanced, their immune systems weakened, and their memories fouled. And you do the same to yourself! The choice is yours …

Modern life, theorists like Derrida explain, is full of atomized individuals, casting about for a center and questioning the engine of their lives. His writing is famously intricate, full of citations and abstruse terminology. Things are always already happening. But reflecting on his own relationships tended to give his thinking and writing a kind of desperate clarity. The intimacy of friendship, he wrote, lies in the sensation of recognizing oneself in the eyes of another. We continue to know our friend, even after they are no longer present to look back at us. From that very first encounter, we are always preparing for the eventuality that we might outlive them, or they us. We are already imagining how we may someday remember them. This isn’t meant to be sad. To love friendship, he writes, “one must love the future.” Writing in the wake of his colleague Jean-François Lyotard’s death, Derrida wonders, “How to leave him alone without abandoning him?” Maybe taking seriously the ideas of our departed friends represents the ultimate expression of friendship, signaling the possibility of a eulogy that doesn’t simply focus attention back on the survivor and their grief. We

Or rather, we believe there’s one very specific type of rapist—the kind who wields a weapon, attacks strangers with no warning, and leaves abundant evidence of violence on the victim’s body—but not that some people deliberately rape their friends, girlfriends, wives, children, colleagues, or drunk new acquaintances. We can talk about how that sort of rape exists, and even about how it’s the most common sort, but when pressed, we’re almost never willing to acknowledge that those rapists exist. Not when the accused are people we know, or even just people who remind us of people we know. Not when they remind us of us . Nor

Even as a game of chance, however, Brexit is especially odd. It is a surreal casino in which the high-rollers are playing for pennies at the blackjack tables while the plebs are stuffing their life savings into the slot machines. For those who can afford risk, there is very little on the table; for those who cannot, entire livelihoods are at stake. The backbench anti-Brexit Tory MP Anna Soubry rose to her feet in the Commons in July 2018, eyed her Brexiteer colleagues and let fly: ‘Nobody voted to be poorer, and nobody voted Leave on the basis that somebody with a gold-plated pension and inherited wealth would take their jobs away from them.’ But if that’s not what people voted for, it is emphatically what they got: if the British army on the Western Front were lions led by donkeys, Brexit is those who feel they have nothing to lose led by those who will lose nothing either way.

Americans often view maternity leave as a time for a mother to recover from giving birth, and anything longer as an entitlement that unfairly gives women benefits that men and their childless colleagues don’t get. Nordic societies see this question differently. For starters, in the Nordic view long leaves for both parents are seen as crucial to allow the child to form strong bonds with both the mother and the father.

Here, in San Francisco, surrounded by professional contacts and former colleagues, I was a lawyer on extended maternity leave, on sabbatical even—a concept that had, as of late, transcended the walls of academia and infiltrated corporate life. In the last couple of years, acquaintances had taken monthslong paid leaves to travel the world, volunteer at wildlife preserves, meditate in ashrams. Here in San Francisco, I could tell myself I wasn’t so different from them.

Color blindness has become a powerful weapon against progress for people of color, but as a denial mindset, it doesn’t do white people any favors, either. A person who avoids the realities of racism doesn’t build the crucial muscles for navigating cross-cultural tensions or recovering with grace from missteps. That person is less likely to listen deeply to unexpected ideas expressed by people from other cultures or to do the research on her own to learn about her blind spots. When that person then faces the inevitable uncomfortable racial reality—an offended co-worker, a presentation about racial disparity at a PTA meeting, her inadvertent use of a stereotype—she’s caught flat-footed. Denial leaves people ill-prepared to function or thrive in a diverse society. It makes people less effective at collaborating with colleagues, coaching kids’ sports teams, advocating for their neighborhoods, even chatting with acquaintances at social events.

The most splendid thing about the Amish is the names they give their towns. Everywhere else in America towns are named either after the first white person to get there or the last Indian to leave. But the Amish obviously gave the matter of town names some thought and graced their communities with intriguing, not to say provocative, appellations: Blue Ball, Bird in Hand, and Intercourse, to name but three. Intercourse makes a good living by attracting passers-by such as me who think it the height of hilarity to send their friends and colleagues postcards with an Intercourse postal mark and some droll sentiment scribbled on the back.

Magnus, his silver mask pushed back into his hair, intercepted the New York vampires before they could fully depart. Alec heard Magnus pitch his voice low. Alec felt guilty for listening in, but he couldn’t just turn off his Shadowhunter instincts. “How are you, Raphael?” asked Magnus. “Annoyed,” said Raphael. “As usual.” “I’m familiar with the emotion,” said Magnus. “I experience it whenever we speak. What I meant was, I know that you and Ragnor were often in contact.” There was a beat, in which Magnus studied Raphael with an expression of concern, and Raphael regarded Magnus with obvious scorn. “Oh, you’re asking if I am prostrate with grief over the warlock that the Shadowhunters killed?” Alec opened his mouth to point out the evil Shadowhunter Sebastian Morgenstern had killed the warlock Ragnor Fell in the recent war, as he had killed Alec’s own brother. Then he remembered Raphael sitting alone and texting a number saved as RF, and never getting any texts back. Ragnor Fell. Alec felt a sudden and unexpected pang of sympathy for Raphael, recognizing his loneliness. He was at a party surrounded by hundreds of people, and there he sat texting a dead man over and over, knowing he’d never get a message back. There must have been very few people in Raphael’s life he’d ever counted as friends. “I do not like it,” said Raphael, “when Shadowhunters murder my colleagues, but it’s not as if that hasn’t happened before. It happens all the time. It’s their hobby. Thank you for asking. Of course one wishes to break down on a heart-shaped sofa and weep into one’s lace handkerchief, but I am somehow managing to hold it together. After all, I still have a warlock contact.” Magnus inclined his head with a slight smile. “Tessa Gray,” said Raphael. “Very dignified lady. Very well-read. I think you know her?” Magnus made a face at him. “It’s not being a sass-monkey that I object to. That I like. It’s the joyless attitude. One of the chief pleasures of life is mocking others, so occasionally show some glee about doing it. Have some joie de vivre.” “I’m undead,” said Raphael. “What about joie de unvivre?” Raphael eyed him coldly. Magnus gestured his own question aside, his rings and trails of leftover magic leaving a sweep of sparks in the night air, and sighed. “Tessa,” Magnus said with a long exhale. “She is a harbinger of ill news and I will be annoyed with her for dumping this problem in my lap for weeks. At least.” “What problem? Are you in trouble?” asked Raphael. “Nothing I can’t handle,” said Magnus. “Pity,” said Raphael. “I was planning to point and laugh. Well, time to go. I’d say good luck with your dead-body bad-news thing, but . . . I don’t care.” “Take care of yourself, Raphael,” said Magnus. Raphael waved a dismissive hand over his shoulder. “I always do.

Tibet has not yet been infested by the worst disease of modern life, the everlasting rush. No one overworks here. Officials have an easy life. They turn up at the office late in the morning and leave for their homes early in the afternoon. If an official has guests or any other reason for not coming, he just sends a servant to a colleague and asks him to officiate for him. Women know nothing about equal rights and are quite happy as they are. They spend hours making up their faces, restringing their pearl necklaces, choosing new material for dresses, and thinking how to outshine Mrs. So-and-so at the next party. They do not have to bother about housekeeping, which is all done by the servants. But to show that she is mistress the lady of the house always carries a large bunch of keys around with her. In Lhasa every trifling object is locked up and double-locked. Then there is mah-jongg. At one time this game was a universal passion. People were simply fascinated by it and played it day and night, forgetting everything else—official duties, housekeeping, the family. The stakes were often very high and everyone played—even the servants, who sometimes contrived to lose in a few hours what they had taken years to save. Finally the government found it too much of a good thing. They forbade the game, bought up all the mah-jongg sets, and condemned secret offenders to heavy fines and hard labor. And they brought it off! I would never have believed it, but though everyone moaned and hankered to play again, they respected the prohibition. After mah-jongg had been stopped, it became gradually evident how everything else had been neglected during the epidemic. On Saturdays—the day of rest—people now played chess or halma, or occupied themselves harmlessly with word games and puzzles.

I always get the funniest expressions from colleagues when I tell them that the best scientists understand that 2–3 percent of whatever it is they are studying is simply not quantifiable—it may be magic or aliens or random variance, none of which can be truly ruled out. If we are to be honest as scientists … we must admit there may be a few things that we are not supposed to know. I

But what if you can’t find a colleague with a compatible schedule? When Taylor went away to speak at a conference for a week, I needed to re-create the experience of making an effort pact with another person. Thankfully, I found Focusmate. With a vision to help people around the world stay focused, they facilitate effort pacts via a one-to-one video conferencing service. While Taylor was away, I signed up at Focusmate.com and was paired with a Czech medical school student named Martin. Because I knew he would be waiting for me to co-work at our scheduled time, I didn’t want to let him down. While Martin was hard at work memorizing human anatomy, I stayed focused on my writing. To discourage people from skipping their meeting times, participants are encouraged to leave a review of their focus mate.5 Effort pacts make us less likely to abandon the task at hand. Whether we make them with friends and colleagues, or via tools like Forest, SelfControl, Focusmate, or kSafe, effort pacts are a simple yet highly effective way to keep us from getting distracted.

Leave off driving your composers. It might prove to be as dangerous as it is generally unnecessary. After all, composing cannot be turned out like spinning or sewing. Some respected colleagues (Bach, Mozart, Schubert) have spoilt the world terribly. But if we can’t imitate them in the beauty of their writing, we should certainly beware of seeking to match the speed of their writing. It would also be unjust to put all the blame on idleness alone. Many factors combine to make writing harder for us (my contemporaries), and especially me. If, incidentally, they would use us poets for some other purpose, they would see that we are thoroughly and naturally industrious dispositions . . . . I have no time: otherwise I should love to chat on the difficulty of composing and how irresponsible publishers are.

An old Buddhist parable illustrates the challenge—and the value—of letting go of the past. Two monks were strolling by a stream on their way home to the monastery. They were startled by the sound of a young woman in a bridal gown, sitting by the stream, crying softly. Tears rolled down her cheeks as she gazed across the water. She needed to cross to get to her wedding, but she was fearful that doing so might ruin her beautiful handmade gown. In this particular sect, monks were prohibited from touching women. But one monk was filled with compassion for the bride. Ignoring the sanction, he hoisted the woman on his shoulders and carried her across the stream—assisting her journey and saving her gown. She smiled and bowed with gratitude as the monk splashed his way back across the stream to rejoin his companion. The second monk was livid. ‘How could you do that?’ he scolded. ‘You know we are forbidden to touch a woman, much less pick one up and carry her around!’ The offending monk listened in silence to a stern lecture that lasted all the way back to the monastery. His mind wandered as he felt the warm sunshine and listened to the singing birds. After returning to the monastery, he fell asleep for a few hours. He was jostled and awakened in the middle of the night by his fellow monk. ‘How could you carry that woman?’ his agitated friend cried out. ‘Someone else could have helped her across the stream. You were a bad monk.’ ‘What woman?’ the sleepy monk inquired. ‘Don’t you even remember? That woman you carried across the stream,’ his colleague snapped. ‘Oh, her,’ laughed the sleepy monk. ‘I only carried her across the stream. You carried her all the way back to the monastery.’ The learning point is simple: When it comes to our flawed past, leave it at the stream. I am not suggesting that we should always let go of the past. You need feedback to scour the past and identify room for improvement. But you can’t change the past. To change you need to be sharing ideas for the future.

When I asked my boss if he would refer me to someone in London where I was going next, he replied, "If you are really good, then we would not want you to leave. If you are bad, then we would not refer you. If you are just so so, why should we bother?" So he did not do anything. Luckily his boss, a Swiss manager, felt compelled to notify his London colleagues that I was going to be in town. And thus I got hired.

If it’s of any comfort, B. J. Casey and her colleagues speculate that there’s an evolutionary reason why Kirk rather than Spock so often emerges the victor in the quest for control over an adolescent’s mind. Human beings need incentives to leave the family nest. Leaving home is dangerous; leaving home is hard. It requires courage and learning lessons of independence. It may even require a purposeful recklessness.

Adams came of age, too, at a time when the Massachusetts economy was markedly on the skids. Plenty of other young men stumbled in finding their footholds. On leaving Harvard shortly after Adams, a future colleague would try his hand as a schoolmaster. Miserable, he sailed off as a merchant, later as a whaler. He was soon back in Boston. In a patched gown, he served briefly as a chaplain. Out of options, he turned to the law.

When you leave a job, one of the hardest decisions you have to make on cleaning out your desk is what to do with the coffinlike cardboard tray holding 958 fresh-smelling business cards. You can’t throw them out— they and the nameplate and a few sample payroll stubs are proof to yourself that you once showed up at that building every day and solved complicated, utterly absorbing problems there; unfortunately, the problems themselves, though they once obsessed you, and kept you working late night after night, and made you talk in your sleep, turn out to have been hollow: two weeks after your last day that already have contracted into inert pellets one-fiftieth of their former size; you find yourself unable to create the sense of what was really at stake, for it seems to have been the Hungarian 5/2 rhythm of the lived workweek alone that kept each fascinating crisis inflated to its full interdepartmental complexity. But coterminously, while the problems you were paid to solve collapse, the nod of the security guard, his sign-in book, the escalator ride, the things on your desk, the site of colleagues’ offices, their faces seen from characteristic angles, the features of the corporate bathroom, all miraculously expand: and in this way what was central and what was incidental end up exactly reversed.

It wasn’t until I got to the law firm that things started hitting me. First, the people around me seemed pretty unhappy. You can go to any corporate law firm and see dozens of people whose satisfaction with their jobs is below average. The work was entirely uninspiring. We were for the most part grease on a wheel, helping shepherd transactions along; it was detail-intensive and often quite dull. Only years later did I realize what our economic purpose was: if a transaction was large enough, you had to pay a team of people to pore over documents into the wee hours to make sure nothing went wrong. I had zero attachment to my clients—not unusual, given that I was the last rung down on the ladder, and most of the time I only had a faint idea of who my clients were. Someone above me at the firm would give me a task, and I’d do it. I also kind of thought that being a corporate lawyer would help me with the ladies. Not so much, just so you know. It was true that I was getting paid a lot for a twenty-four-year-old with almost no experience. I made more than my father, who has a PhD in physics and had generated dozens of patents for IBM over the years. It seemed kind of ridiculous to me; what the heck had I done to deserve that kind of money? As you can tell, not a whole lot. That didn’t keep my colleagues from pitching a fit if the lawyers across the street were making one dollar more than we were. Most worrisome of all, my brain started to rewire itself after only the first few months. I was adapting. I started spotting issues in offering memoranda. My ten-thousand-yard unblinking document review stare got better and better. Holy cow, I thought—if I don’t leave soon, I’m going to become good at this and wind up doing it for a long time. My experience is a tiny data point in a much bigger problem.

This example from the retail world should be instructive: if you have only enough employees to barely get the work done as is, you’ve engineered a scenario in which employees may have theoretical permission to take time off, but understand that they’ll shoulder the burden of that time off in some way. Either they try to keep doing part of their work while on leave, a colleague takes on an even larger work burden, or a portion of essential work goes undone, slowing everyone on a team.

I know," she said, "rejection's not easy. But you reject words, whole pages, long impossible stories, and it feels good once it's done. It's no different rejecting pictures, a picture's right to hang on a wall. And most of these have hung here too long; you don't even see them any more. The best stuff you have, you don't see any more. And they kill each other because they're badly hung. Look, here's a thing of mine and here's your drawing, and they clash. We need distance, it's essential. And different periods need distance to set them apart - unless you're just cramming them together for the shock effect! You simply have to feel it… There should be an element of surprise when people's eyes move across a wall covered with pictures. We don't want to make it too easy for them. Let them catch their breath and look again because they can't help it. Make them think, make them mad, even… Now we'll give our colleagues here better light. Why did you leave so much space right here?

Close your eyes and get quiet for a minute, until the chatter starts up. Then isolate one of the voices and imagine the person speaking as a mouse. Pick it up by the tail and drop it into a mason jar. Then isolate another voice, pick it up by the tail, drop it in the jar. And so on. Drop in any high-maintenance parental units, drop in any contractors, lawyers, colleagues, children, anyone who is whining in your head. Then put the lid on, and watch all these mouse people clawing at the glass, jabbering away, trying to make you feel like shit because you won’t do what they want—won’t give them more money, won’t be more successful, won’t see them more often. Then imagine that there is a volume-control button on the bottle. Turn it all the way up for a minute, and listen to the stream of angry, neglected, guilt-mongering voices. Then turn it all the way down and watch the frantic mice lunge at the glass, trying to get to you. Leave it down, and get back to your shitty first draft.

They go to work, attend a meeting Write an equation, have a beer, Hail colleagues with a cheerful greeting, Are conscientious, sane and sincere, Rational, able and fastidious. Through hardened casing no invidious Tapeworm of doubt, no guilt, no qualm, Pierces to Sabotage their claim. When something's technically attractive, You follow the conception through, That's all. What if you leave a slew Of living dead, of radioactive "Collateral damage" in its wake? It's just a job, for heaven's sake.

Yes?” he said impatiently. There was a pause. “You wouldn’t believe how many people I had to bribe to get this new number of yours. But I didn’t think past getting you to answer the phone,” Colby said reluctantly. “I don’t know how to tell you this.” “You and Cecily are getting married,” Tate drawled sarcastically, hating the very idea of it and trying not to let it show. “I can’t say it’s any big surprise. Was there anything else?” There was another pause. “Cecily won’t marry me.” “Tough.” Tate wasn’t going to admit how much that admission pleased him, even if she wouldn’t answer her damned phone when he tried to call her. “So?” Colby laughed mirthlessly. “I thought this was the right thing to do. Now, I’m not sure if it is.” “I’m not pleading your case for you,” Tate replied. His voice was icy. Then he hesitated. His heart skipped a beat as another reason for this call occurred and chilled his blood. “Has something happened to her?” he asked immediately. “She’s not hurt or anything,” the other man replied. “It’s just than I can’t find her. Maybe they can’t find her, either,” he continued, sounding as if he was talking to himself. Tate had a terrible sinking feeling in his stomach. He broke the Internet connection on the other line and turned off the computer. “What’s up?” he asked, sounding the way he used to, when he and Colby were colleagues in the old days. “Cecily’s done a flit,” Colby told him. “She’s gone and I can’t find her. Believe me, I’ve used every contact I could find or buy. She didn’t leave a trail.

it is more about attitude than reality. Maybe it can’t be done, but always start out believing you can get it done until facts and analysis pile up against it. Have a positive and enthusiastic approach to every task. Don’t surround yourself with instant skeptics. At the same time, don’t shut out skeptics and colleagues who give you solid counterviews. “It can be done” should not metamorphose into a blindly can-do approach, which leaves you running into brick walls. I try to be an optimist, but I try not to be stupid.

It seemed a terrible blind spot that we did not discuss the toll those errors exacted on us. Medicine is not oriented to recognize trauma in its own. We do not debrief our team or even ourselves after a code. We do not pause and assess the emotional well-being of our colleagues after they lose a patient, the way we pause to assess the root cause of errors. We were trained to leave the thin veneer covering our colleagues’ emotions undisturbed. We have utterly no idea what to do with shame. We have built no confessionals.

Uber had tagged Mr. England and his colleagues—essentially Greyballing them as city officials—based on data collected from the app and in other ways. The company then served up a fake version of the app, populated with ghost cars, to evade capture. This is supposed to be serious evidence of terrible wrongdoing. But a lot of us just read that description and burst out laughing, congratulating Uber’s engineers on their cleverness in leaving some blue-nosed petty authoritarian standing at the curb waiting for a car that never comes.

Sorry, traffic was a nightmare. I'd just come off the highway..." Sheryl cuts her off and, in front of her colleagues, gives her a dressing down about blaming the traffic rather than accepting responsibility for not anticipating traffic. She asks how many times she's driven this particular road, why she hadn't considered the needs of her coworkers in deciding when to leave her house, what time might have been more appropriate to set off from San Francisco to reach Menlo Park. She vents that Debbie has wasted her coworkers' time (mak-ing no mention of her own decision to waste our time with this perform-ance). By now I know there's probably no specific reason for this outburst. Debbie's not in the habit of being late. I'd be shocked if she had been underperforming in the days or weeks before this. It's just Sheryl, in an arbitrary flex of power. That seems to be how she operates, unpredictable, keeping us all on edge. Never quite knowing when she'll strike, so we're never tempted to push any boundaries, even the simplest ones. Strict rules, selectively enforced and the baseline of ever-present fear. It ensures we obey in advance. Why does someone need to be so mean to the people helping her? I've been at Facebook for a few years now, and I've hit a point like the phase of a romance where you still see everything great that attracted you to the person in the first place. You're still excited by the future you're building together. But you've spent enough time together that you also see their flaws. And wonder how deep they run. I don't know if Sheryl's outbursts are an occasional thing-which I can cope with—or if that's who she is. And I'm nervous it's the latter.

The most commonly identified reason for women leaving the field [law practice] is that they cannot handle the stress of both work and family. Implicit in this, at least for women, is that they should be handling both alone or at least with very little help. Did anyone stop to ask themselves how it was that our male colleagues were able for years to manage the startling feat of having a career and a family without being driven from their chosen profession? The answer was obvious. They had help. Enormous help that allowed them the freedom to focus on themselves and their careers.

Sometimes,” she told me, “a girl will give a guy a blow job at the end of the night because she doesn’t want to have sex with him and he expects to be satisfied. So if I want him to leave and I don’t want anything to happen . . .” She trailed off, leaving me to imagine the rest. There was so much to unpack in that short statement: why a young man should expect to be sexually satisfied; why a girl not only isn’t outraged, but considers it her obligation to comply; why she doesn’t think a blow job constitutes “anything happening”; the pressure young women face in any personal relationship to put others’ needs before their own; the potential justification of assault with a chaser of self-blame. “It goes back to girls feeling guilty,” Anna said. “If you go to a guy’s room and are hooking up with him, you feel bad leaving him without pleasing him in some way. But, you know, it’s unfair. I don’t think he feels badly for you.” In their research on high school girls and oral sex, April Burns, a professor of psychology at City University of New York, and her colleagues found that girls thought of fellatio kind of like homework: a chore to get done, a skill to master, one on which they expected to be evaluated, possibly publicly. As with schoolwork, they worried about failing or performing poorly—earning the equivalent of low marks. Although they took satisfaction in a task well done, the pleasure they described was never physical, never located in their own bodies. They were both dispassionate and nonpassionate about oral sex—socialized, the researchers concluded, to see themselves as “learners” in their encounters rather than “yearners.” The concern with pleasing, as opposed to pleasure, was pervasive among the girls I met, especially among high schoolers, who were just starting sexual experimentation.

In the early 1970s, racial and gender discrimination was still prevalent. The easy camaraderie prevailing in the operating room evaporated at the completion of surgical procedures. There was an unspoken pecking order of seating arrangements at lunch among my fellow physicians. At the top were the white male 'primary producers' in prestigious surgical specialties. They were followed by the internists. Next came the general practitioners. Last on the list were the hospital-based physicians: the radiologists, pathologists and anaesthesiologists - especially non-white, female ones like me. Apart from colour, we were shunned because we did not bring in patients ourselves but, like vultures, lived off the patients generated by other doctors. We were also resented because being hospital-based and not having to rent office space or hire nursing staff, we had low overheads. Since a physician's number of admissions to the hospital and referral pattern determined the degree of attention and regard accorded by colleagues, it was safe for our peers to ignore us and target those in position to send over income-producing referrals. This attitude was mirrored from the board of directors all the way down to the orderlies.

In the United States in 1907, a book entitled Three Acres and Liberty seized the imagination of the reading public. The author, Bolton Hall, began by taking for granted the awkwardness of having to work for someone else, and so advised his readers that they could win their freedom by leaving their offices and factories and buying three acres apiece of inexpensive farmland in middle America. This acreage would soon enable them to grow enough food for a family of four and to build a simple but comfortable home, and best of all, relieve them of any need ever again to flatter or negotiate with colleagues and superiors.

I happened to mention this to a hypnotist I saw many years ago, and he looked at me very nicely. At first I thought he was feeling around on the floor for the silent alarm button, but then he gave me the following exercise, which I still use to this day. Close your eyes and get quiet for a minute, until the chatter starts up. Then isolate one of the voices and imagine the person speaking as a mouse. Pick it up by the tail and drop it into a mason jar. Then isolate another voice, pick it up by the tail, drop it in the jar. And so on. Drop in any high-maintenance parental units, drop in any contractors, lawyers, colleagues, children, anyone who is whining in your head. Then put the lid on, and watch all these mouse people clawing at the glass, jabbering away, trying to make you feel like shit because you won’t do what they want—won’t give them more money, won’t be more successful, won’t see them more often. Then imagine that there is a volume-control button on the bottle. Turn it all the way up for a minute, and listen to the stream of angry, neglected, guilt-mongering voices. Then turn it all the way down and watch the frantic mice lunge at the glass, trying to get to you. Leave it down, and get back to your shitty first draft.

In Memory of My Feelings" My quietness has a man in it, he is transparent and he carries me quietly, like a gondola, through the streets. He has several likenesses, like stars and years, like numerals. My quietness has a number of naked selves, so many pistols I have borrowed to protect myselves from creatures who too readily recognize my weapons and have murder in their heart! though in winter they are warm as roses, in the desert taste of chilled anisette. At times, withdrawn, I rise into the cool skies and gaze on at the imponderable world with the simple identification of my colleagues, the mountains. Manfred climbs to my nape, speaks, but I do not hear him, I'm too blue. An elephant takes up his trumpet, money flutters from the windows of cries, silk stretching its mirror across shoulder blades. A gun is "fired." One of me rushes to window #13 and one of me raises his whip and one of me flutters up from the center of the track amidst the pink flamingoes, and underneath their hooves as they round the last turn my lips are scarred and brown, brushed by tails, masked in dirt's lust, definition, open mouths gasping for the cries of the bettors for the lungs of earth. So many of my transparencies could not resist the race! Terror in earth, dried mushrooms, pink feathers, tickets, a flaking moon drifting across the muddied teeth, the imperceptible moan of covered breathing, love of the serpent! I am underneath its leaves as the hunter crackles and pants and bursts, as the barrage balloon drifts behind a cloud and animal death whips out its flashlight, whistling and slipping the glove off the trigger hand. The serpent's eyes redden at sight of those thorny fingernails, he is so smooth! My transparent selves flail about like vipers in a pail, writhing and hissing without panic, with a certain justice of response and presently the aquiline serpent comes to resemble the Medusa.

Regardless, at 01:23:40 on April 26th, 1986, 32-year-old Alexander Akimov made his fateful decision and announced that he was pressing the EPS-5 emergency safety button to initiate a SCRAM, causing all remaining control rods to begin their slow descent into the core.116 It117 was a decision that would change the course of history. An emergency shutdown was Akimov’s obvious choice. A large part of the reason why the core was so unstable was that almost all 211 rods had been removed, after all, leaving him and his colleagues with very little control over the reactor. He may even - if the stories of Toptunov shouting to him are true - have considered this to be his only choice, given how many safety systems had been disabled. Alas, it was, in fact, the worst thing he could have done. Within seconds, the control rods stopped moving.

very nature of his ailment continues to baffle me, and baffle us all. What is the source of this abnormality? Everywhere we observe plants, animals, systems with a core. Every flower has its seed. Every animal its heart. Every masterpiece its inspiration. Yet the answers I seek elude me. There is a root somewhere in his brain, a twisted root that sprouts madness and malice. I will find it. No matter the cost, no matter the difficulty, I will find it. I will live a truly great life. My colleagues will no doubt hang me metaphorically, but I say let them hang. Legality, morality, sympathy aside, I will pull madness out by its black root, and I will leave a legacy no man, however sanctimonious, can fault. A truly great life. That is what humanity deserves. Not an average life, not even a normal one—a life in which genius is not an anomaly but an expectation. But to achieve such things

When I see someone not performing, I am frank enough to tell the person that it’s not working out. I request him or her to leave or change jobs within the group. But I see many of our senior colleagues, including my brothers, sons and nephews, empathetic towards non-performers. They don’t want to face the issue. They tend to become comfortable with such people and they get protection. They tend to choose people who become personally loyal to them rather than to the company. I think it’s important to be professional about such matters. Protecting a non-performer is not good for the business and also the person being protected. This is unprofessional too. The non-performer may be in the wrong job and thus not doing what he or she is best at doing. Empathy that results in protection would lead to a negative result for the employee as well. He or she might be better off in another job within the group or elsewhere.

Whenever Elliot Norther’s wife was nervous she baked. With the murder of Harriet Mason, her husband’s close colleague at the Faculty, she had been unable to resist a couple of Victoria sponges. During the frenzied press speculation about the identity of the murderer, a Dundee cake had appeared, followed swiftly by a Battenberg and a Lemon Drizzle. Since news of the Wildencrust murder broke, the kitchen, dining room and study had come to resemble the storerooms of an industrial bakery, every surface heaving with the weight of sponge and cream. Yesterday, having at last been overwhelmed by the fear and rumour that swept the town, she had taken herself off to her mother’s house in Hampstead, leaving her husband to soldier on alone. When he had last seen his wife, Elliot Norther noticed that she had been putting the finishing touches to an impressive, triple-tiered wedding cake, beating a batch of royal icing into a sickly paste.

At one stage in the heated intramural debate, ex-ACS president and longtime director Alton Ochsner took the floor and regaled his eminent colleagues with a tale intended to disarm those still unpersuaded by the proof against smoking. There was a certain Russian count, Ochsner told them, who, suspecting his attractive young wife of infidelity, advised her that he was leaving their home for an extended trip, but in fact posted himself at a nearby residence to spy on her. The very first night after his leave-taking, the count watched by moonlight as a sleigh pulled up to his house, a handsome lieutenant from the Czar's Guard bounded out, the count's wife greeted the hussar at the door and led him inside, and in a moment the couple was seen through an upstairs bedroom window in candlelit silhouette as they wildly embraced; after another moment the candle was blown out. "Proof! Proof!" said the anguished count, smiting himself on the brow. "If I only had the proof!

Mr. Duffy Napp has just transmitted a nine-word e-mail asking that I immediately send a letter of reference to your firm on his behalf; his request has summoned from the basement of my heart a star-spangled constellation of joy, so eager am I to see Mr. Napp well established at Maladin IT. As for the basis of our acquaintanceship: I am a professor in an English department whose members consult Tech Help—aka Mr. Napp—only in moments of desperation. For example, let us imagine that a computer screen, on the penultimate page of a lengthy document, winks coyly, twice, and before the “save” button can be deployed, adopts a Stygian façade. In such a circumstance one’s only recourse—unpalatable though it may be—is to plead for assistance from a yawning adolescent who will roll his eyes at the prospect of one’s limited capabilities and helpless despair. I often imagine that in olden days people like myself would crawl to the doorway of Tech Help on our knees, bearing baskets of food, offerings of the harvest, the inner organs of neighbors and friends— all in exchange for a tenuous promise from these careless and inattentive gods that the thoughts we entrusted to our computers will be restored unharmed. Colleagues have warned me that the departure of Mr. Napp, our only remaining Tech Help employee, will leave us in darkness. I am ready. I have girded my loins and dispatched a secular prayer in the hope that, given the abysmal job market, a former mason or carpenter or salesman—someone over the age of twenty-five—is at this very moment being retrained in the subtle art of the computer and will, upon taking over from Mr. Napp, refrain (at least in the presence of anxious faculty seeking his or her help) from sending text messages or videos of costumed dogs to both colleagues and friends. I can almost imagine it: a person who would speak in full sentences—perhaps a person raised by a Hutterite grandparent on a working farm.

It’s not only working parents who are looking for more hours in the day; people without children are also overworked, maybe to an even greater extent. When I was in business school, I attended a Women in Consulting panel with three speakers: two married women with children and one single woman without children. After the married women spoke about how hard it was to balance their lives, the single woman interjected that she was tired of people not taking her need to have a life seriously. She felt that her colleagues were always rushing off to be with their families, leaving her to pick up the slack. She argued, “My coworkers should understand that I need to go to a party tonight—and this is just as legitimate as their kids’ soccer game—because going to a party is the only way I might actually meet someone and start a family so I can have a soccer game to go to one day!” I often quote this story to make sure single employees know that they, too, have every right to a full life.

As humans we spend our time seeking big, meaningful experiences. So the afterlife may surprise you when your body wears out. We expand back into what we really are—which is, by Earth standards, enormous. We stand ten thousand kilometers tall in each of nine dimensions and live with others like us in a celestial commune. When we reawaken in these, our true bodies, we immediately begin to notice that our gargantuan colleagues suffer a deep sense of angst. Our job is the maintenance and upholding of the cosmos. Universal collapse is imminent, and we engineer wormholes to act as structural support. We labor relentlessly on the edge of cosmic disaster. If we don’t execute our jobs flawlessly, the universe will re-collapse. Ours is complex, intricate, and important work. After three centuries of this toil, we have the option to take a vacation. We all choose the same destination: we project ourselves into lower-dimensional creatures. We project ourselves into the tiny, delicate, three-dimensional bodies that we call humans, and we are born onto the resort we call Earth. The idea, on such vacations, is to capture small experiences. On the Earth, we care only about our immediate surroundings. We watch comedy movies. We drink alcohol and enjoy music. We form relationships, fight, break up, and start again. When we’re in a human body, we don’t care about universal collapse—instead, we care only about a meeting of the eyes, a glimpse of bare flesh, the caressing tones of a loved voice, joy, love, light, the orientation of a house plant, the shade of a paint stroke, the arrangement of hair. Those are good vacations that we take on Earth, replete with our little dramas and fusses. The mental relaxation is unspeakably precious to us. And when we’re forced to leave by the wearing out of those delicate little bodies, it is not uncommon to see us lying prostrate in the breeze of the solar winds, tools in hand, looking out into the cosmos, wet-eyed, searching for meaninglessness.

One day, the physicist Sir C.V. Raman came up from Bangalore to see Gandhi. Raman’s conceit was legendary. In the summer of 1930, he booked a passage for his wife and himself on a boat leaving for Europe in October, so confident was he of winning the Nobel Prize for physics that year (which he did). Now, meeting an Indian even more celebrated than himself, Raman told him: ‘Mahatmaji, religions cannot unite. Science offers the best opportunity for a complete fellowship. All men of science are brothers.’ ‘What about the converse?’ responded Gandhi. ‘All who are not men of science are not brothers?’ Raman had the last word, noting that ‘all can become men of science’. Raman had come with a Swiss biologist who wished to have a darshan of the Indian leader. Introducing his colleague, Raman said he had discovered an insect that could live without food and water for as long as twelve years. ‘When you discover the secret at the back of it,’ joked Gandhi to the Swiss scientist, ‘please pass it on to me.

MARK TWAIN Some months after invading Iraq, President George W. Bush said he had taken the war to liberate the Philippines as his model. Both wars were inspired from heaven. Bush disclosed that God had ordered him to act as he did. And a century beforehand, President William McKinley also heard the voice from the Great Beyond: “God told me that we could not leave the Filipinos to themselves. They were unfit for self-government. There was nothing left for us to do but to take them all, and to educate them, and uplift and civilize and Christianize them.” Thus the Philippines were liberated from the Filipino threat, and along the way the United States also saved Cuba, Puerto Rico, Honduras, Colombia, Panama, Dominican Republic, Hawaii, Guam, Samoa . . . At the time, writer Ambrose Bierce revealed: “War is God’s way of teaching us geography.” And his colleague Mark Twain, leader of the Anti-Imperialist League, designed a new flag for the nation, featuring little skulls in place of stars. General Frederick Funston suggested Twain ought to be hanged for treason. Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn defended their father.

Mr. Haverstrom closes the door, leaving Patrick and me alone in the hallway. Pat smiles slickly, leaning in toward me. I step back until I press against the wall. It’s uncomfortable—but not threatening. Mostly because in addition to racquetball I’ve practiced aikido for years. So if Patrick tries anything funny, he’s in for a very painful surprise. “Let’s be honest, Sarah: you know and I know the last thing you want to do is give a presentation in front of hundreds of people—your colleagues.” My heart tries to crawl into my throat. “So, how about this? You do the research portion, slides and such that I don’t really have time for, and I’ll take care of the presentation, giving you half the credit of course.” Of course. I’ve heard this song before—in school “group projects” where I, the quiet girl, did all the work, but the smoothest, loudest talker took all the glory. “I’ll get Haverstrom to agree on Saturday—I’m like a son to him,” Pat explains before leaning close enough that I can smell the garlic on his breath. “Let Big Pat take care of it. What do you say?” I say there’s a special place in hell for people who refer to themselves in the third person. But before I can respond, Willard’s firm, sure voice travels down the hall. “I think you should back off, Nolan. Sarah’s not just ‘up for it,’ she’ll be fantastic at it.” Pat waves his hand. “Quiet, midge—the adults are talking.” And the adrenaline comes rushing back, but this time it’s not anxiety-induced—it’s anger. Indignation. I push off the wall. “Don’t call him that.” “He doesn’t mind.” “I mind.” He stares at me with something akin to surprise. Then scoffs and turns to Willard. “You always let a woman fight your battles?” I take another step forward, forcing him to move back. “You think I can’t fight a battle because I’m a woman?” “No, I think you can’t fight a battle because you’re a woman who can barely string three words together if more than two people are in the room.” I’m not hurt by the observation. For the most part, it’s true. But not this time. I smile slowly, devilishly. Suddenly, I’m Cathy Linton come to life—headstrong and proud. “There are more than two people standing here right now. And I’ve got more than three words for you: fuck off, you arrogant, self-righteous swamp donkey.” His expression is almost funny. Like he can’t decide if he’s more shocked that I know the word fuck or that I said it out loud to him—and not in the good way. Then his face hardens and he points at me. “That’s what I get for trying to help your mute arse? Have fun making a fool of yourself.” I don’t blink until he’s down the stairs and gone. Willard slow-claps as he walks down the hall to me. “Swamp donkey?” I shrug. “It just came to me.” “Impressive.” Then he bows and kisses the back of my hand. “You were magnificent.” “Not half bad, right? It felt good.” “And you didn’t blush once.” I push my dark hair out of my face, laughing self-consciously. “Seems like I forget all about being nervous when I’m defending someone else.” Willard nods. “Good. And though I hate to be the twat who points it out, there’s something else you should probably start thinking about straight away.” “What’s that?” “The presentation in front of hundreds of people.” And just like that, the tight, sickly feeling washes back over me. So this is what doomed feels like. I lean against the wall. “Oh, broccoli balls.

What ensued was a game of Coyote and Roadrunner that dragged on for more than a decade. Sixty letters went back and forth among Beaumont, St. Martin, and various contacts at the American Fur Company who had located St. Martin and tried to broker a return. It was a seller’s market with a fevered buyer. With each new round of communications—St. Martin holding out for more or making excuses, though always politely and with “love to your family”—Beaumont raised his offer: $250 a year, with an additional $50 to relocate the wife and five children (“his live stock,” as Beaumont at one point refers to them). Perhaps a government pension and a piece of land? His final plan was to offer St. Martin $500 a year if he’d leave his family behind, at which point Beaumont planned to unfurl some unspecified trickery: “When I get him alone again into my keeping I will take good care to control him as I please.” But St. Martin—beep, beep!—eluded his grasp. In the end, Beaumont died first. When a colleague, years later, set out to bag the fabled stomach for study and museum display, St. Martin’s survivors sent a cable that must have given pause to the telegraph operator: “Don’t come for autopsy, will be killed.

Residents' Survival Guide Who Work 110 Hours per Week • When there is a question between a resident and a nurse, the nurse always wins. • Residents can be replaced. Nurses cannot. • When in doubt about a patient, call your senior staff to keep them informed. • Always ask for help if you don’t know how to do something surgically. • When called by the nurse, see the patient and the nurse to assess a problem. • Answer your pages promptly. • Learn to prioritize the many tasks that you have. • Tell it like it is! Don’t lie! Get the correct information. • Engage in damage control when making a mistake. Accept liability for actions. • Be courteous to others. Remember that respect breeds respect. • Be a team player. What goes around comes around. • Own your education. Invest time and effort in surgical practice. • Be punctual; others depend on you. Respect their time. • Document for the record often, wholly and accurately. • Be helpful to fellow residents who become your colleagues and friends for life. • Develop the skills to be efficient, dependable, and trustworthy. • Sign in and sign out to avoid errors in management. • Write a summary note to ensure continuity of patient care upon leaving the service.

When I (Nancy) read Proverbs 7, in my mind’s eye I see women I know who, though they are “churched” and consider themselves to be believers, have made choices that are more consistent with the world’s way of thinking than with the Word of God. I think of a married woman I spoke with who was in an adulterous relationship with a colleague at the Christian ministry where she worked. Or the mother of six children who wrote me a note at a conference where I spoke, sharing that she was spending twelve to eighteen hours a day online, and was considering leaving her family for a man she had met on the Internet. I think of women who have been influenced by the world’s model of womanhood. They lack discernment and discretion; they see nothing wrong with being flirtatious, using suggestive or coarse language, carrying on covert Facebook exchanges with old boyfriends, wearing clothing that exposes or emphasizes private parts of the body, or numerous other “wild” patterns. In some cases, they are ignorant or naïve of what the Bible teaches. In other cases, they are more interested in fitting into the world than in honoring and reflecting the Lord. Some of them have already shipwrecked their lives and the lives of others; others may be well on the path to doing so. “HER FEET GO DOWN TO DEATH; HER STEPS FOLLOW THE PATH TO SHEOL; SHE DOES NOT PONDER THE PATH OF LIFE; HER WAYS WANDER, AND SHE DOES NOT KNOW IT.” Proverbs 5:5–6

There comes a point in one's life where the people whom we grew up admiring begin to die, leaving a great chasm in the world. This is awful enough to deal with without having anything so annoying as feelings getting in the way of personal equanimity. And then, possibly even more horribly, there comes a time in one's life when the people whom we grew up with or the people who are in our same age group begin to die. I have had the disagreeable business of having to watch colleagues only a few years my senior perish without warning, though premonition would not soften the blow. I am now realizing that I am entering this time, the dreadful gateway of existence, the one that leads to watching the ebb and flow of time, the great rote and sussuration of life and death, and being able to do nothing but welter in misery and pine over the dregs of hideous mortality. Death is an unaccountable business, one that robs the living of the peace we believe to be --perhaps mistakenly-- our birthright, one which asks the living to pay for the departed in the currency of feelings, leaving us to wallow in emotional debt. There is a loneliness about behind left behind as is there a thrill of horror for what lies beyond. The sum total of living is to sacrifice peace in favour of finding it, which makes little sense at all. I often wonder if the dead know we grieve for them, as the penury of pity only disconcerts ourselves. It is poor comfort, the business of mourning, for what is there really to mourn about excepting our own desire for reconciliation, something which no one, not even the dead, can furnish?

Mueller kicked off the meeting by pulling out a piece of paper with some notes. The attorney general and his aides believed they noticed something worrisome. Mueller’s hands shook as he held the paper. His voice was shaky, too. This was not the Bob Mueller everyone knew. As he made some perfunctory introductory remarks, Barr, Rosenstein, O’Callaghan, and Rabbitt couldn’t help but worry about Mueller’s health. They were taken aback. As Barr would later ask his colleagues, “Did he seem off to you?” Later, close friends would say they noticed Mueller had changed dramatically, but a member of Mueller’s team would insist he had no medical problems. Mueller quickly turned the meeting over to his deputies, a notable handoff. Zebley went first, summing up the Russian interference portion of the investigation. He explained that the team had already shared most of its findings in two major indictments in February and July 2018. Though they had virtually no chance of bringing the accused to trial in the United States, Mueller’s team had indicted thirteen Russian nationals who led a troll farm to flood U.S. social media with phony stories to sow division and help Trump. They also indicted twelve Russian military intelligence officers who hacked internal Democratic Party emails and leaked them to hurt Hillary Clinton’s campaign. The Trump campaign had no known role in either operation. Zebley explained they had found insufficient evidence to suggest a conspiracy, “no campaign finance [violations], no issues found. . . . We have questions about [Paul] Manafort, but we’re very comfortable saying there was no collusion, no conspiracy.” Then Quarles talked about the obstruction of justice portion. “We’re going to follow the OLC opinion and conclude it wasn’t appropriate for us to make a final determination as to whether or not there was a crime,” he said. “We’re going to report the facts, the analysis, and leave it there. We are not going to say we would indict but for the OLC opinion.

Besides, it’s not as big a deal as people make it out to be. You just have to be prepared to answer any question on any of the four hundred books you’ve read so far in graduate school. And if you get it wrong, they kick you out,” she said. He fixed her with a look of barely contained awe while she stirred the salad around her plate with the tines of her fork. She smiled at him. Part of learning to be a professor was learning to behave in a professorial way. Thomas could not be permitted to see how afraid she was. The oral qualifying exam is usually a turning point—a moment when the professoriate welcomes you as a colleague rather than as an apprentice. More infamously, the exam can also be the scene of spectacular intellectual carnage, as the unprepared student—conscious but powerless—witnesses her own professional vivisection. Either way, she will be forced to face her inadequacies. Connie was a careful, precise young woman, not given to leaving anything to chance. As she pushed the half-eaten salad across the table away from the worshipful Thomas, she told herself that she was as prepared as it was possible to be. In her mind ranged whole shelvesful of books, annotated and bookmarked, and as she set aside her luncheon fork she roamed through the shelves of her acquired knowledge, quizzing herself. Where are the economics books? Here. And the books on costume and material culture? One shelf over, on the left. A shadow of doubt crossed her face. But what if she was not prepared enough? The first wave of nausea contorted her stomach, and her face grew paler. Every year, it happened to someone. For years she had heard the whispers about students who had cracked, run sobbing from the examination room, their academic careers over before they had even begun. There were really only two ways that this could go. Her performance today could, in theory, raise her significantly in departmental regard. Today, if she handled herself correctly, she would be one step closer to becoming a professor. Or she would look in the shelves

Nobel laureate Richard Feynman, always curious about new phenomena, once placed himself in a sensory deprivation tank and tried to leave his physical body. He was successful. He would later write that he felt that he had left his body, drifted into space, and saw his motionless body when he looked back. However, Feynman later concluded that this was probably just his imagination, caused by sensory deprivation. Neurologists who have studied this phenomenon have a more prosaic explanation. Dr. Olaf Blanke and his colleagues in Switzerland may have located the precise place in the brain that generates out-of-body experiences. One of his patients was a forty-three-year-old woman who suffered from debilitating seizures that came from her right temporal lobe. A grid of about one hundred electrodes was placed over her brain in order to locate the region responsible for her seizures. When the electrodes stimulated the area between the parietal and temporal lobes, she immediately had the sensation of leaving her body. “I see myself lying in bed, from above, but I only see my legs and lower trunk!” she exclaimed. She felt she was floating six feet above her body. When the electrodes were turned off, however, the out-of-body sensation disappeared immediately. In fact, Dr. Blanke found that he could turn the out-of-body sensation on and off, like a light switch, by repeatedly stimulating this area of the brain. As we saw in Chapter 9, temporal lobe epileptic lesions can induce the feeling that there are evil spirits behind every misfortune, so the concept of spirits leaving the body is perhaps part of our neural makeup. (This may also explain the presence of supernatural beings. When Dr. Blanke analyzed a twenty-two-year-old woman who was suffering from intractable seizures, he found that, by stimulating the temporoparietal area of the brain, he could induce the sensation that there was a shadowy presence behind her. She could describe this person, who even grabbed her arms, in detail. His position would change with each appearance, but he would always appear behind her.)

Catastrophizing. Predicting extremely negative future outcomes, such as “If I don’t do well on this paper, I will flunk out of college and never have a good job.”   All-or-nothing. Viewing things as all-good or all-bad, black or white, as in “If my new colleagues don’t like me, they must hate me.” Personalization. Thinking that negative actions or words of others are related to you, or assuming that you are the cause of a negative event when you actually had no connection with it. Overgeneralizations. Seeing one negative situation as representative of all similar events. Labeling. Attaching negative labels to ourselves or others. Rather than focusing on a particular thing that you didn’t like and want to change, you might label yourself a loser or a failure. Magnification/minimization. Emphasizing bad things and deemphasizing good in a situation, such as making a big deal about making a mistake, and ignoring achievements. Emotional reasoning. Letting your feelings about something guide your conclusions about how things really are, as in “I feel hopeless, so my situation really must be hopeless.” Discounting positives. Disqualifying positive experiences as evidence that your negative beliefs are false—for example, by saying that you got lucky, something good happened accidentally, or someone was lying when giving you a compliment. Negativity bias. Seeing only the bad aspects of a situation and dwelling on them, in the process viewing the situation as completely bad even though there may have been positives. Should/must statements. Setting up expectations for yourself based on what you think you “should” do. These usually come from perceptions of what others think, and may be totally unrealistic. You might feel guilty for failing or not wanting these standards and feel frustration and resentment. Buddhism sets this in context. When the word “should” is used, it leaves no leeway for flexibility of self-acceptance. It is fine to have wise, loving, self-identified guidelines for behavior, but remember that the same response or action to all situations is neither productive nor ideal. One size never fits all.  Jumping to conclusions. Making negative predictions about the outcome of a situation without definite facts or evidence. This includes predicting a bad future event and acting as if it were already fact, or concluding that others reacted negatively to you without asking them. ​Dysfunctional automatic thoughts like these are common. If you think that they are causing suffering in your life, make sure you address them as a part of your CBT focus.

Although he always talked about technology and Oracle with passion and intensity, he didn’t have the methodical relentlessness that made Bill Gates so formidable and feared. By his own admission, Ellison was not an obsessive grinder like Gates: “I am a sprinter. I rest, I sprint, I rest, I sprint again.” Ellison had a reputation for being easily bored by the process of running a business and often took time off, leaving the shop to senior colleagues. One of the reasons often trotted out for Oracle’s success in the 1990s was Ellison’s decision to hire Ray Lane, a senior executive credited with bringing order and discipline to the business, allowing Ellison just to do the vision thing and bunk off to sail his boats whenever he felt like it. But Lane had left Oracle nearly eighteen months before after falling out with Ellison. Since then, Ellison had taken full control of the company—how likely was it that he would he stay the course? One reason to be skeptical was that Ellison just seemed to have too many things going on in his life besides Oracle. During the afternoon, we took a break from discussing the future of computing to take a tour of what would be his new home—nearly a decade in the making, and at that time, still nearly three years from completion. In the hills of Woodside, California, framing a five-acre artificial lake, six wooden Japanese houses, perfect replicas of the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century originals in Kyoto, were under construction. The site also contained two full-size ornamental bridges, hundreds of boulders trucked in from the high Sierras and arranged according to Zen principles and an equal number of cherry trees jostling for attention next to towering redwoods. Ellison remarked: “If I’m remembered for anything, it’s more likely to be for this than Oracle.”3 In the evening, I noticed in Ellison’s dining room a scale model of what would become his second home: a graceful-looking 450-foot motor-yacht capable of circumnavigating the globe. Already the owner of two mega-yachts, bought secondhand and extensively modified (the 192-foot Ronin based in Sausalito and the 244-foot Katana, which was kept at Antibes in the South of France), Ellison wanted to create the perfect yacht. The key to achieving this had been his successful courtship of a seventy-two-year-old Englishman, Jon Bannenberg, recognized as the greatest designer of very big, privately-owned yachts. With a budget of $200 million—about the same as that for the Japanese imperial village in Woodside—it would be Bannenberg’s masterpiece. Bannenberg had committed himself to “handing over the keys” to Ellison in time for his summer holiday in 2003.

In 1950, a thirty-year-old scientist named Rosalind Franklin arrived at King’s College London to study the shape of DNA. She and a graduate student named Raymond Gosling created crystals of DNA, which they bombarded with X-rays. The beams bounced off the crystals and struck photographic film, creating telltale lines, spots, and curves. Other scientists had tried to take pictures of DNA, but no one had created pictures as good as Franklin had. Looking at the pictures, she suspected that DNA was a spiral-shaped molecule—a helix. But Franklin was relentlessly methodical, refusing to indulge in flights of fancy before the hard work of collecting data was done. She kept taking pictures. Two other scientists, Francis Crick and James Watson, did not want to wait. Up in Cambridge, they were toying with metal rods and clamps, searching for plausible arrangements of DNA. Based on hasty notes Watson had written during a talk by Franklin, he and Crick put together a new model. Franklin and her colleagues from King’s paid a visit to Cambridge to inspect it, and she bluntly told Crick and Watson they had gotten the chemistry all wrong. Franklin went on working on her X-ray photographs and growing increasingly unhappy with King’s. The assistant lab chief, Maurice Wilkins, was under the impression that Franklin was hired to work directly for him. She would have none of it, bruising Wilkins’s ego and leaving him to grumble to Crick about “our dark lady.” Eventually a truce was struck, with Wilkins and Franklin working separately on DNA. But Wilkins was still Franklin’s boss, which meant that he got copies of her photographs. In January 1953, he showed one particularly telling image to Watson. Now Watson could immediately see in those images how DNA was shaped. He and Crick also got hold of a summary of Franklin’s unpublished research she wrote up for the Medical Research Council, which guided them further to their solution. Neither bothered to consult Franklin about using her hard-earned pictures. The Cambridge and King’s teams then negotiated a plan to publish a set of papers in Nature on April 25, 1953. Crick and Watson unveiled their model in a paper that grabbed most of the attention. Franklin and Gosling published their X-ray data in another paper, which seemed to readers to be a “me-too” effort. Franklin died of cancer five years later, while Crick, Watson, and Wilkins went on to share the Nobel prize in 1962. In his 1968 book, The Double Helix, Watson would cruelly caricature Franklin as a belligerent, badly dressed woman who couldn’t appreciate what was in her pictures. That bitter fallout is a shame, because these scientists had together discovered something of exceptional beauty. They had found a molecular structure that could make heredity possible.

me to be honest about his failings as well as his strengths. She is one of the smartest and most grounded people I have ever met. “There are parts of his life and personality that are extremely messy, and that’s the truth,” she told me early on. “You shouldn’t whitewash it. He’s good at spin, but he also has a remarkable story, and I’d like to see that it’s all told truthfully.” I leave it to the reader to assess whether I have succeeded in this mission. I’m sure there are players in this drama who will remember some of the events differently or think that I sometimes got trapped in Jobs’s distortion field. As happened when I wrote a book about Henry Kissinger, which in some ways was good preparation for this project, I found that people had such strong positive and negative emotions about Jobs that the Rashomon effect was often evident. But I’ve done the best I can to balance conflicting accounts fairly and be transparent about the sources I used. This is a book about the roller-coaster life and searingly intense personality of a creative entrepreneur whose passion for perfection and ferocious drive revolutionized six industries: personal computers, animated movies, music, phones, tablet computing, and digital publishing. You might even add a seventh, retail stores, which Jobs did not quite revolutionize but did reimagine. In addition, he opened the way for a new market for digital content based on apps rather than just websites. Along the way he produced not only transforming products but also, on his second try, a lasting company, endowed with his DNA, that is filled with creative designers and daredevil engineers who could carry forward his vision. In August 2011, right before he stepped down as CEO, the enterprise he started in his parents’ garage became the world’s most valuable company. This is also, I hope, a book about innovation. At a time when the United States is seeking ways to sustain its innovative edge, and when societies around the world are trying to build creative digital-age economies, Jobs stands as the ultimate icon of inventiveness, imagination, and sustained innovation. He knew that the best way to create value in the twenty-first century was to connect creativity with technology, so he built a company where leaps of the imagination were combined with remarkable feats of engineering. He and his colleagues at Apple were able to think differently: They developed not merely modest product advances based on focus groups, but whole new devices and services that consumers did not yet know they needed. He was not a model boss or human being, tidily packaged for emulation. Driven by demons, he could drive those around him to fury and despair. But his personality and passions and products were all interrelated, just as Apple’s hardware and software tended to be, as if part of an integrated system. His tale is thus both instructive and cautionary, filled with lessons about innovation, character, leadership, and values.

A few years back, I had a long session with a psychiatrist who was conducting a study on post-traumatic stress disorder and its effects on reporters working in war zones. At one point, he asked me: “How many bodies have you seen in your lifetime?” Without thinking for too long, I replied: “I’m not sure exactly. I've seen quite a few mass graves in Africa and Bosnia, and I saw a well crammed full of corpses in East Timor, oh and then there was Rwanda and Goma...” After a short pause, he said to me calmly: “Do you think that's a normal response to that question?” He was right. It wasn't a normal response. Over the course of their lifetime, most people see the bodies of their parents, maybe their grandparents at a push. Nobody else would have responded to that question like I did. Apart from my fellow war reporters, of course. When I met Marco Lupis nearly twenty years ago, in September 1999, we were stood watching (fighting the natural urge to divert our gaze) as pale, maggot-ridden corpses, decomposed beyond recognition, were being dragged out of the well in East Timor. Naked bodies shorn of all dignity. When Marco wrote to ask me to write the foreword to this book and relive the experiences we shared together in Dili, I agreed without giving it a second thought because I understood that he too was struggling for normal responses. That he was hoping he would find some by writing this book. While reading it, I could see that Marco shares my obsession with understanding the world, my compulsion to recount the horrors I have seen and witnessed, and my need to overcome them and leave them behind. He wants to bring sense to the apparently senseless. Books like this are important. Books written by people who have done jobs like ours. It's not just about conveying - be it in the papers, on TV or on the radio - the atrocities committed by the very worst of humankind as they are happening; it’s about ensuring these atrocities are never forgotten. Because all too often, unforgivably, the people responsible go unpunished. And the thing they rely on most for their impunity is that, with the passing of time, people simply forget. There is a steady flow of information as we are bombarded every day with news of the latest massacre, terrorist attack or humanitarian crisis. The things that moved or outraged us yesterday are soon forgotten, washed away by today's tidal wave of fresh events. Instead they become a part of history, and as such should not be forgotten so quickly. When I read Marco's book, I discovered that the people who murdered our colleague Sander Thoenes in Dili, while he was simply doing his job like the rest of us, are still at large to this day. I read the thoughts and hopes of Ingrid Betancourt just twenty-four hours before she was abducted and taken to the depths of the Colombian jungle, where she would remain captive for six long years. I read that we know little or nothing about those responsible for the Cambodian genocide, whose millions of victims remain to this day without peace or justice. I learned these things because the written word cannot be destroyed. A written account of abuse, terror, violence or murder can be used to identify the perpetrators and bring them to justice, even though this can be an extremely drawn-out process during and after times of war. It still torments me, for example, that so many Bosnian women who were raped have never got justice and every day face the prospect of their assailants passing them on the street. But if I follow in Marco's footsteps and write down the things I have witnessed in a book, people will no longer be able to plead ignorance. That is why we need books like this one.

we ask one question (borrowed from Karen Sipprell, Kim’s colleague at Apple): “How much time do you spend making sure you have the facts straight before giving a team member praise?” The answer, typically, is none at all. When you’re vague with praise, it is just as likely to leave a person feeling patronized. And either way, vague positivity has very little impact in the long term. An empty “great job!” can sound condescending and be demoralizing, exactly the opposite effect than you may have intended. Specific praise helps the person and the team understand what success looks like. It gives ambitious team members a model to follow.

We don’t think about saving money very often. When we finally do think about it, our thoughts rarely lead us to save more. To test the extent that the design of digital wallets could influence behavior, Dan and his colleagues conducted a large-scale experiment with thousands of customers of a mobile money-saving system in Kenya. Some participants received two text messages every week: one at the start of the week to remind them to save and another one at the end of the week with a summary of their savings. Other participants got slightly different text reminders: It was framed like it came from their kid, asking them to save for “our future.” Four other groups were bribed (formally known as “financially incentivized”) for saving. The first of these groups got a 10 percent bonus for the first 100 shillings that they saved. The second group got a 20 percent bonus for the first 100 shillings that they saved. The third and fourth groups got the same 10 percent and 20 percent bonuses for the first 100 shillings that they saved, but they got it together with loss aversion. (In these conditions, the researchers placed the full amount of the match—10 or 20 shillings—into their account at the beginning of the week. The participants were told that they would get the match based on how much they saved, and that the amount of the match that they did not save would be taken out of their account. Financially, this loss aversion approach was the same as the regular end-of-the-week match, but the idea was that experiencing money leaving their account would be painful and would get the participants to increase their savings.) A final set of participants received those same text messages plus a golden-colored coin with the numbers 1–24 engraved on it, to indicate the 24 weeks that the plan lasted. These participants were asked to place the coin somewhere visible in their home and scratch with a knife the number for that week to indicate if they saved or not.2 At the end of six months, the treatment that performed spectacularly better than every other was—drumroll please!—the coin. Every other treatment increased savings a bit, but those who received the coin saved about twice as much as those who only received text messages. You might think the winner would have been the 20 percent bonus or maybe the 20 percent bonus with loss aversion—and this is in fact what most people predict would be the most effective way to get people to save—but you’d be wrong.

But business or strategic acumen does not require narcissism or psychopathy to succeed. A compassionate and collaborative leader can draw the most out of his or her colleagues and employees, leaving them feeling supported, committed to the institution,

Similarly, you may be casually strolling out the door 20 minutes early, and that’s also fine. Your colleagues, including your boss, will simply assume that your work is done; otherwise, you obviously wouldn’t be leaving. A crucial theme is trust – something we’ll return to later in the book.

The first, Ben Azzai, looked at the divine presence and immediately perished. The second, Ben Zoma, lost his mind. The third, Elisha ben Abuyah, became a heretic and was, from that moment on, known simply as Acher, or “the Other.” Only Akiva, we’re told, entered in peace and left in peace. Why? Jewish scholars have spent centuries offering various intricate explanations, but Akiva’s is best. “It is not because I am greater than my colleagues,” he is quoted as saying in a midrash, “but because of the teaching in the Mishnah, ‘Your deeds will bring you near and your deeds will keep you far.’ ”25 Just as his status as a self-made man of low lineage kept him from receiving the highest honor on earth, so did his deeds enable him to receive the highest honor in higher, celestial spheres. In Yavneh, the kid from nowhere could never be appointed Nasi; in paradise, he and only he is welcomed and protected. Even the angels themselves, the Talmud tells us, resented Akiva this privilege and sought to push him out, but “the Holy One, Blessed be He, said to them: Leave this Elder, for he is fit to serve My glory.”26

Liam,” he sighed. “It’s terribly disappointing to see you treat your time so carelessly. That’s seven minutes that you’re now late by. What a terrible example to set for these young ladies.” “I don’t give a shit,” I said with a grin, and Roberts damn near choked. “Excuse me?” he spluttered. “How dare you–” “No, you can shut up now,” I said. “You’ve treated me like shit for years, and I’m done. I don’t need this job. I don’t need you. So today was my last day here. I quit.” Roberts’ eyes bulged so widely I thought they were going to pop, and he sat bolt upright as his gaunt face reddened. “You cannot just walk out on the spot,” he spat. “I require four weeks’ notice, or you will lose your pay! I have that power, you know! Your pay will be withheld if you just–” “That shitty wage?” I snorted, even as I knew for damn sure it would be illegal for him to pull this shit. In fact, I sort of hoped he did so I could hand his ass to him later. For now, though… “I don’t need that, either. Keep it. Use it to buy higher quality gel that makes you look less like a greasy weasel.” I heard the murmur of stunned colleagues behind me as Roberts stared at me with pure fury in his beady eyes. His hands shook, and the sight made a wave of adrenaline wash over me. This was the most fun I had ever had in my workplace. “I’ve rented the floor above you,” I said casually. “My own business has really taken off, and I’ve hired these ladies to join me. They’ll be leaving your company immediately.” “We can’t wait to work for Liam,” Kali said firmly. “This place is stinky!” “And has uninspiring vibrations.” Ash nodded. “It feels like a prison,” Cleo hissed. “And I do not like your mustache.” “I think that about sums it up,” I snorted. “So yeah, I quit. I’m not coming back, and I hope your shitty business goes under. See ya around!

So living, they stood out among their neighbors, friends, and business colleagues, and they began to gain followers. While the early Christians were often accused of being subversive or seditious (like their Master), upon scrutiny, their way of life regularly proved wholesome. In short, the Christians were good—with a goodness that sprang from their devotion to Jesus and issued in lives that were notable for their integrity and generosity toward outsiders. Toward the end of the second century, the church father Tertullian remarked that followers of Jesus made manifest their difference in the care they showed not only their own vulnerable members but any “boys and girls who lack property and parents . . . for slaves grown old and ship-wrecked mariners . . . for any who may be in mines, islands or prisons,” resulting in their pagan neighbors saying, “Look!”[5] The world, whether it knew it or not, saw the Lord Jesus in the faithful witness of the church. A few short decades later, when plague began to ravage the Roman Empire, leaving masses of people dead or dying, Cyprian of Carthage could be heard exhorting God’s people not to try to explain the plague but to instead respond to it in a manner worthy of their calling: namely by doing works of justice and mercy for those affected by the plague—and this during a time of intense persecution for the church![6]

Aini’s third and final piece of strategy baffled me at first. She urged me: Say the good and leave out the bad. Was Aini suggesting that I could pass the negative message without saying it at all? Via telepathy? Aini explained by using an example: A while back, one of my Indonesian colleagues sent me a set of four documents to read and review. The last two documents he must have finished in a hurry, because they were very sloppy in comparison to the first two. When he called to ask for my reaction, I told him that the first two papers were excellent. I focused on these documents only, outlining why they were so effective. I didn’t need to mention the sloppy documents, which would have been uncomfortable for both of us. He got the message clearly, and I didn’t even need to bring up the negative aspects.

Ensuring that colleagues feel that workplace decisions are fair not only keeps their reward systems happy, but leaves people with more mental energy to focus on other things.

In a series of experiments involving hundreds of subjects, Princeton psychologist Diana Tamir and three colleagues examined how people's recording of their experiences, through online comments or digital photographs, influenced memory formation in three different scenarios: watching a lecture on a computer, taking a self-guided tour of a historic building alone, and taking the same tour in the company of another person. "Media use impaired memory for both computer-based and real-world experiences, in both solo and social contexts," the researchers reported in the Journal of Experimental Psychology. "Creating a hard copy of an experience through media leaves only a diminished copy in our own heads." With social media allowing and encouraging us to upload accounts of pretty much everything we do, this effect is now widespread. A 2017 Frontiers in Psychology survey of peer-reviewed research on how smartphones affect memory concluded that "when we turn to these devices, we generally learn and remember less from our experiences.

Thank God for Steven,” Azar told a colleague. “If we had had to go to the Hill for a supplemental appropriation, Warp Speed would not have happened.

Without knowing they were infected, he and Johnson attended the last session of the Commons. As they were leaving the chamber, they were seen in a huddle of people who had gathered around the Speaker’s chair with just inches between them. It was the perfect example of why social distancing was important because they could easily have spread the virus to their colleagues. By failing to follow the very rules they had so stridently instructed others to adhere to, they were setting a bad example. And they were also endangering lives.

You’ll know when you’re in the wrong job interview,” I’d say during a lecture, “because the pit of your stomach will tell you to get out. Your first daily priority should be stillness, attention to what you really know and what you really feel. Don’t ‘network’ into meaningless relationships with colleagues who bore you; find the people who can make you laugh all night, who turn on the lights in your heart and mind. Do whatever work feeds your true self, even if it’s not a safe bet, even if it looks like a crazy risk, even if everyone in your life tells you you’re wrong or bad or crazy.” What I was really telling them was how to be a Leaf in the Stream, though of course I never called it that. Nor did I quote Jesus’ question, “What profiteth it a man if he should gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?” I rarely used Buddhist terms like awakening or right action. But all these concepts, all the things I’d learned in my search for God, drove every piece of advice I gave my students.

...clearly Michael Eisner’s most glaring defect, the one quality more than any other that has caused him to leave behind a trail of deeply embittered former colleagues: his dishonesty. Considering the importance Eisner places on honesty in others—dating at least to the childhood incident in which he believes his mother lied about his bedtime—it is extraordinary that Eisner himself has been so reckless with the truth, in ways both large and small, to a degree that suggests he is at times incapable of distinguishing one from the other. Far more than just a personality quirk, Eisner’s tendency to distort, embellish, or forget the truth had direct and costly business consequences for Disney. More than any other single factor, what Steve Jobs and the Weinstein brothers considered Eisner’s dishonesty accounts for the failure of the important Pixar and Miramax relationships. Katzenberg was so angry and bitter—and willing to sue—because he believed he was lied to and felt betrayed.

And how easily had her links to the past been erased? There was a time when she’d had a job, colleagues, friends, a social life. She’d made a life with branches that reached out into the lives of other people, yet somehow Logan had amputated them, leaving her adrift, invisible, forgotten.

The desire to fit in is one reason people associate with others who are like themselves. If you are always negative, then you feel normal (and validated) with like-minded colleagues, and it is now the positive people who don't fit in. What this means in terms of change is that some people may need to change peer groups as they try to change their attitude. Remember, climate is how we feel; culture tells us how we are supposed to feel. To remain in a culture that is changing, you must change the way you feel to align with the expectations of the culture, or you may leave the culture. In a school setting, you will either leave the school, or stay in the school and build your own clique.

A colleague of mine likes to say that twentysomethings are like airplanes, planes just leaving New York City bound for somewhere west. Right after takeoff, a slight change in course is the difference between landing in either Seattle or San Diego. But once a plane is nearly in San Diego, only a big detour will redirect it to the northwest.

Nearly every doctor I worked with dreamed as a child about curing disease and worked like crazy to become a doctor. They studied tirelessly to learn science, entered medical school with idealistic visions, and became the pride of their family. They entered residency with hundreds of thousands of dollars of student loan debt and initially saw the chronic sleep deprivation and verbal abuse by their superiors as integral parts of the experience—because “great achievement is born of great sacrifice.” But almost universally among doctors I have met, this idealism eventually turns to cynicism. My colleagues in residency talked often about questioning their sanity, of wondering whether this was all worth it. I spoke with successful surgeons who’d drafted their resignation letters dozens of times. Another had a recurring daydream of leaving everything behind and becoming a baker. Many of my supervising physicians were desperate to spend more time with their children. I witnessed more than one tearful breakdown in the operating room when surgical cases were delayed and led to yet another missed bedtime for their kids. Several had dealt with suicidal depression. I understood why doctors had the highest burnout and suicide rate of any profession. Inevitably, these conversations led to an insight that I believe is whispered by doctors in every hospital in America: they feel trapped inside a broken system.

Perhaps you’ve been in a similar situation: Asked at the last moment to cover for a colleague, you say yes only to realize that you’ve stepped into your worst nightmare. In this case, my colleague had to leave the office on a medical emergency and pleaded with me to cover for a speech he had to deliver the following day. I said yes, only to learn later that the speech was to take place in Sheffield, England (we were in New York), to an audience of educational experts appointed by the then-new British prime minister, Tony Blair. My colleague hadn’t told me what the topic was—something about the Internet—or where his materials (if there were any) were buried.

The boom in the contingency law business has been driven in part by former attorneys general like Ms. Singer who have capitalized on personal relationships with former colleagues that they have nurtured since leaving office, often at resort destination conferences where they pay to gain access.

What’s up?’ he asked. ‘Would you mind if I went on maternity leave a bit earlier than I was going to?’ ‘When were you thinking?’ ‘Another few weeks?’ I asked tentatively. Nick sat back in his chair and looked at me. ‘I thought you were planning to stop on the side of the road somewhere between calvings to produce this child, and then tie it on your back and keep going,’ he said. ‘There’s been a slight change of plan. I’m going to go and live with Mark instead.’ ‘Are you now? Well, that would have to be a step in the right direction.’ ‘Mm,’ I said, feeling my cheeks get hot. It would have been nice to think I’d succeeded in hiding the shambles of my love life from my colleagues behind a facade of dignified calm, but evidently I hadn’t. ‘So presumably you won’t be coming back to work,’ he said. I shook my head. ‘I’m so sorry to be leaving you in the lurch.’ ‘That’s alright,’ said Nick. ‘We’ll manage. Although I must say it would have been a lot more considerate of you to get yourself knocked up by someone local.’ ‘Then you’d never have got rid of me,’ I pointed out. ‘Well, there is that,’ he said, returning to his paperwork.

Your alcoholics may include some of your brightest stars. The problem is to identify them, protected as they always are by their secretaries and their colleagues. Invite the alcoholic’s wife to join you in a surprise confrontation with her husband. Start by telling him that all present are devoted to him. Then say how worried you are about his drinking. His wife and his children are about to leave him, and you are about to fire him – unless he does what you ask. A reservation has been made for him to enter a treatment center that very day. Most alcoholics agree to go. It takes a week for the center to dry them out, and another four weeks to rehabilitate them. On returning home, they must go to daily meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous for at least a year. This procedure works in about 60 per cent of cases. I have seen it salvage some valuable people of both sexes. If you would like further advice on the subject, consult the nearest chapter of Alcoholics Anonymous. Written

spend an afternoon with them sharing the latest research on the treatment of traumatized children, adolescents, and their families. The same is true for many of my colleagues. These countries have already made a commitment to universal health care, ensuring a guaranteed minimum wage, paid parental leave for both parents after a child is born, and high-quality childcare for all working mothers.

The colleague, no doubt, was not a connoisseur of the self-punishment, sad to think. This type of hygiene was foreign to her, no doubt. How did one even fraternize with people who could not entertain vivid scenarios of self-mutilation? How was the sexual act even possible if one's partner could not entertain being crushed under a truck, even as a cathartic exercise?

Regardless of the profession you're in, when you get out into the field, you start realizing all the big and little things they never taught you in school or training. For one, what do you do with your gun in various situations, such as while using a public men's room stall? Do you leave it on your belt down on the floor? Do you try to hang it up on the stall door? For a while I tried holding it in my lap, but that made me very nervous. It's the kind of thing each of us faces, but not the kind of thing you feel comfortable discussing with your more experienced colleagues.

know. This was not I can’t wait to see you. Let’s get together. You stepped up and I really wanted to thank you for doing it. I know Hillary. I know she was being as sincere as possible, but I wanted something more from her. The 2016 campaign, convention, and election had shattered long-standing relationships, leaving old friends wary of one another. This was more than the burnout and dejection that follows a crushing loss. The Russian dirty cybertricks that were still just coming to light had left everyone scarred and scared. We were all unable to reach out to the people we normally counted on. As the call wrapped up, Hillary said she hoped I would be okay. That was when I almost lost it. Even if the party was starting to regain its footing, I was not okay. I had nothing left to return to. This campaign had tarnished my reputation, forced me to step down from CNN, and strained my relationships with colleagues and friends.

The best advice I got came from a colleague I didn’t know very well—or at least, not well enough to know that she once had a boyfriend who had a drug problem. When she told me about her ex, I instantly recognized the relationship she described, the intensity of his affection eventually trumped by the upheaval of his constant drama. The way she put it seemed so simple: “I realized I had to choose his life or mine.” I understood that decision—it was exactly how I felt after I bailed Graham out of Rikers. But there was one question that still troubled me, more as a moral dilemma most of us don’t want to face: What happens to these addicts after the sober, sane people in their lives leave them? We all know the answer: Many of them don’t get better. We lock them up, or they overdose and die.

ASSERTIVE The Assertive type believes time is money; every wasted minute is a wasted dollar. Their self-image is linked to how many things they can get accomplished in a period of time. For them, getting the solution perfect isn’t as important as getting it done. Assertives are fiery people who love winning above all else, often at the expense of others. Their colleagues and counterparts never question where they stand because they are always direct and candid. They have an aggressive communication style and they don’t worry about future interactions. Their view of business relationships is based on respect, nothing more and nothing less. Most of all, the Assertive wants to be heard. And not only do they want to be heard, but they don’t actually have the ability to listen to you until they know that you’ve heard them. They focus on their own goals rather than people. And they tell rather than ask. When you’re dealing with Assertive types, it’s best to focus on what they have to say, because once they are convinced you understand them, then and only then will they listen for your point of view. To an Assertive, every silence is an opportunity to speak more. Mirrors are a wonderful tool with this type. So are calibrated questions, labels, and summaries. The most important thing to get from an Assertive will be a “that’s right” that may come in the form of a “that’s it exactly” or “you hit it on the head.” When it comes to reciprocity, this type is of the “give an inch/take a mile” mentality. They will have figured they deserve whatever you have given them so they will be oblivious to expectations of owing something in return. They will actually simply be looking for the opportunity to receive more. If they have given some kind of concession, they are surely counting the seconds until they get something in return. If you are an Assertive, be particularly conscious of your tone. You will not intend to be overly harsh but you will often come off that way. Intentionally soften your tone and work to make it more pleasant. Use calibrated questions and labels with your counterpart since that will also make you more approachable and increase the chances for collaboration. We’ve seen how each of these groups views the importance of time differently (time = preparation; time = relationship; time = money). They also have completely different interpretations of silence. I’m definitely an Assertive, and at a conference this Accommodator type told me that he blew up a deal. I thought, What did you do, scream at the other guy and leave? Because that’s me blowing up a deal. But it turned out that he went silent; for an Accommodator type, silence is anger. For Analysts, though, silence means they want to think. And Assertive types interpret your silence as either you don’t have anything to say or you want them to talk. I’m one, so I know: the only time I’m silent is when I’ve run out of things to say. The funny thing is when these cross over. When an Analyst pauses to think, their Accommodator counterpart gets nervous and an Assertive one starts talking, thereby annoying the Analyst, who thinks to herself, Every time I try to think you take that as an opportunity to talk some more. Won’t you ever shut up?

Close your eyes and get quiet for a minute, until the chatter starts up. Then isolate one of the voices and imagine the person speaking as a mouse. Pick it up by the tail and drop it into a mason jar. Then isolate another voice, pick it up by the tail, drop it in the jar. And so on. Drop in any high-maintenance parental units, drop in any contractors, lawyers, colleagues, children, anyone who is whining in your head. Then put the lid on, and watch all these mouse people clawing at the glass, jabbering away, trying to make you feel like shit because you won’t do what they want—won’t give them more money, won’t be more successful, won’t see them more often. Then imagine that there is a volume-control button on the bottle. Turn it all the way up for a minute, and listen to the stream of angry, neglected, guilt-mongering voices. Then turn it all the way down and watch the frantic mice lunge at the glass, trying to get to you. Leave it down, and get back to your shitty first draft.

For all of the information on the hazards of time on screen, research by Veerman and colleagues (2012) might be the most metric.  They found that people whose life pattern includes watching TV 6 hours a day can expect to survive 4.8 years less than people that do not watch TV. They reckon that “every single hour of TV viewed after the age of 25 reduces the viewer’s life expectancy by 21.8 minutes! They conclude that time viewing TV may be comparable to other major chronic disease factors such as obesity and inactivity in risk of loss of life. Of course, this was research done down under in Australia.  All things considered, that might leave Americans at even greater risk for lifespans shortened by time on screen.

Julius waited stone-faced as the other centurions scattered to their centuries, eager to make sure their men were ready for a forced march, none of them wanting to suffer the embarrassment of causing the cohort any delay in their headlong charge to the west. The tribune watched them go for a moment, then turned back to the heavily built centurion with a grim smile. ‘So, Centurion, what, you are wondering, have you done to have your expected position as Uncle Sextus’s deputy usurped by your colleague Clodius?’ Julius shrugged, his heavyset face impassive. ‘The Badger’s a good man, Tribune, more than capable of leading the cohort down a road and deploying them to wipe out a few hundred bandits. I’ll admit I’m curious though. Was it something I’ve done?’ Scaurus smiled, putting a hand on the big man’s shoulder. ‘Yes, Julius, it was something you’ve done. It was every little bit of professionalism you’ve displayed since I took this cohort under my command, every order given and every enemy killed. In the absence of the first spear you’re my best individual officer, and I’ve got a job that needs doing here that I can’t entrust to anyone less than my best centurion. We’re forced to withdraw our force from Tungrorum to deal with this new threat, but there’s enough money being held in the headquarters’ safe room to attract every thief and gang leader in this whole city, what with the pay chests and the proceeds of the grain fraud. I’m leaving you here, Julius, you and your century, and depending on you to make sure that nobody gets their grubby fingers on that money. I want a double-strength guard on the vault, and the rest of your men, whether eating, resting or sleeping, no more than a dozen heartbeats away. You can also keep Centurion Corvus’s wife and the wounded safe from harm while you’re at it, and relieve me of the trouble of carting that jar of naphtha around. As of this moment you’re free to kill anyone and everyone you suspect to be a threat to the emperor’s gold, without hesitation or fear of any repercussion. If we return that gold to the throne we will be congratulated and possibly even rewarded, but if we lose it again, having exposed its original loss and recapture to the throne’s eyes, the outcome will be altogether darker for everyone concerned. Do we understand each other, Centurion?

What Goodby unveiled at the Crowne Plaza was unlike anything Kalinske and his colleagues had ever seen before. Quick cuts. Crazy zooms. Wild camera angles. It felt less like watching a regular commercial than like fast-forwarding through one on the VCR. Loud punk music. Intense lens flares. Aggressive close-ups. It looked sort of like a music video, but only if that music video was suffering from manic-depression and had just ingested a cocktail of heroin, cocaine, and speed. Weird lighting, unpretty actors, nonlinear storytelling—the whole thing was off-putting, migraine-inducing, and offensive to the senses, but it was absolutely incredible. And to tie it all together, at the end of every spot some maniac shouted, “Sega!” “And just remember,” Goodby said as the video presentation came to an end, “we’re only a short drive away.” He then played a short video clip of himself, Silverstein, and a few other guys whacking golf balls off the roof of their office building. Except whenever they hit the ball, the real reaction shot was replaced with footage of golf balls hitting Sega of America headquarters. During the ground-shaking applause that followed, Nilsen subtly elbowed Kalinske. “What did you think?” Kalinske blinked for a second, then replied, “I think vidspeak just became a dead language. Sorry, hedgy wedgy.” He was practically in a state of shock. This was it—everything he had wanted. The tone was edgy, but not too sharp. It cut, but only deep enough to leave a cool scar.

And from what I remember about our casting meeting, his eyes kept circling back to you.” “Don’t be ridiculous,” she said in as light a voice as she could manage, as if they were joking about something that would never, ever happen in a million years. “Well,” George said after a pause that was just a little too long for her comfort, “I think we both know that if the beautiful and talented and filthy rich Smith Sullivan is smart enough to try to stick his hands up your skirt, you won’t stand a chance.” She hated knowing her friend and colleague was right, hated it so much that as she grabbed a stack of notes on her desk, she tried to put a stop to all of his nonsense by saying, in her sternest, most businesslike tone, “If you’re done speculating over whether or not Smith Sullivan wants to stick his hands, or any other body part, up my skirt—or if I have strong enough superpowers to resist him—perhaps we can now discuss the details of Tatiana’s recent commercial offer.” A creak from her office doorway made her finally lift her gaze from her paperwork…to stare straight into Smith’s amused eyes. Oh, God. Oh, no. Could he have heard what she’d just said? About her skirt, and his hands, and… Yes, she realized with a hard thunk of her heart as it careened down to the bottom of her stomach. Of course he’d heard every last word of it. Why else would he look so amused…and, quite possibly, delighted? “George, I’ll need to call you back in a few minutes.” “Oooh, you sound tense. And more than a little breathless. A movie star must have walked into the room.” George was obviously giddy over it. “Why don’t you just leave your phone on speaker so I can hear his voice—just in case he says all those naughty things I know we’re both hoping he’ll say.” She hung up on Tatiana’s agent and immediately stood up so that she and Smith would be on even ground. Well, as even as they could be, given the six or so inches he had on her even in her heels. “You didn’t need to hang up so quickly for me,” he drawled in a voice that didn’t try to be sexy. It just was. “I know how busy you are,” she replied. And it was true. As star, director, producer and screenwriter of Gravity, she wasn’t sure how he’d managed more than a handful of hours of sleep a night since production began. And yet, he didn’t look the least bit tired. Instead, he looked even more handsome than he usually did. Clearly, he wore smug well. Because she knew damn well just how smug he had to be feeling after what he’d heard her say to George.

Accountability An executive in service, as I said in the first chapter, must be one who lives for today but cares nothing for tomorrow. If this is so, and he does what he has to do day-to-day, with zeal and thoroughness, so that nothing at all is left undone, he has no reason to feel any reproach or regret. But living in the moment of the day does not mean ignoring future consequences. Troubles arise when people rely on the future and become lazy and indolent and let things slide. They put off quite urgent affairs after a lot of discussion, not to speak of less important ones, in the belief that they will do just as well the next day. They push off this responsibility onto one comrade and blame another for shortcomings. And when trying to get someone to do something for them, if there is no one to assist, they leave it undone, so that before long there is a big accumulation of unfinished jobs. This is a mistake that comes from relying on the future against which one must be very definitely on one’s guard. For instance, some executives are never accountable enough to arrive on time for a meeting. These silly fellows waste time by having a smoke or chatting with their secretaries and colleagues when they ought to be starting, and so leave their office late. They then have to hurry so much that, as they walk or drive, they do not acknowledge with courtesy people they pass. And when they do get to their destination, they are all covered with perspiration and breathing heavily, and then have to make some plausible excuse for their lateness on account of some very urgent business they had to do. When an executive has a meeting, he never ought to be late for any private reason. And if one man takes care to be a little early and then has to wait a bit for a comrade who is late, he should not sit down and yawn, neither should he hurry away when his time is up as though reluctant to be there. For these things do not look at all well either.

But here’s a clue about what’s coming. Sigmund Freud himself, the Father of Psychoanalysis, may have been the only man in his trade to exempt himself from therapy. Indeed, he continued all his life to ignore colleagues who could have supervised his analysis. He also destroyed his personal and professional papers several times in his life, plotted when he was an obscure twenty-eight-year-old to leave any future biographers in the dark, kept his emotional life hidden, and falsified details of his dreams when he did write about them so they couldn’t be analyzed. Why? Because he insisted he’d analyzed himself.*

Close your eyes and get quiet for a minute, until the chatter starts up. Then isolate one of the voices and imagine the person speaking as a mouse. Pick it up by the tail and drop it into a mason jar. Then isolate another voice, pick it up by the tail, drop it in the jar. And so on. Drop in any high-maintenance parental units, drop in any contractors, lawyers, colleagues, children, anyone who is whining in your head. Then put the lid on, and watch all these mouse people clawing at the glass, jabbering away, trying to make you feel like shit because you won’t do what they want—won’t give them more money, won’t be more successful, won’t see them more often. Then imagine that there is a volume-control button on the bottle. Turn it all the way up for a minute, and listen to the stream of angry, neglected, guilt-mongering voices. Then turn it all the way down and watch the frantic mice lunge at the glass, trying to get to you. Leave it down, and get back to your shitty first draft. A writer friend of mine suggests opening the jar and shooting them all in the head. But I think he’s a little angry, and I’m sure nothing like this would ever occur to you.

A Model for Effective Evangelism The “Andrew model” of faith-sharing and evangelism is contained within this story in the first chapter of the Gospel of John. It might be described this way: • Spend time with Jesus because you can’t share what you don’t know. • Share with your network of relationships: in this case, his brother, Simon. • Share with “I” messages: Andrew said, “We [I] have found the Messiah” (John 1:41). • Invite your friend/neighbor/colleague to meet Jesus. • Leave the results up to Jesus because he is the one who saves and transforms.

When relationships are not nurtured by a sense of appreciation, the results are predictable:   • Team members will experience a lack of connectedness with others and with the mission of the organization.   • Workers will tend to become discouraged, feeling “There is always more to do and no one appreciates what I’m doing.”   • Often employees will begin to complain about their work, their colleagues, and their supervisor.   • Eventually, team members start to think seriously about leaving the organization and they begin to search for other employment.

Now you’ve brought him in for a burglary that, unless I’m mistaken, didn’t actually take place.” “He was in the process of breaking into the building,” she said. “We caught him in the act.” Somehow, his smile grew even broader. “Really? He was in the building? Was he even in the parking lot? One of your colleagues says he wasn’t.” “How did you—” “Did my client have any burglary tools in his possession? Lockpicks? A crowbar hidden up his sleeve, perhaps?” “No, but—” “So he had no way of accessing the property he was supposedly there to burglarize, and he wasn’t even apprehended on said property. Very disappointing, Agent Black. A rookie police officer on his first beat wouldn’t make that arrest, and you know it. Your zeal to imprison my client speaks to the prejudicial nature of your so-called ‘task force.’ This isn’t a lawful inquiry; it’s a witch hunt.” I could almost hear Harmony’s teeth grating. “You have two choices.” Perkins ticked them off on his fingers. “One, release my client at once, and we can pretend this never happened. Two, you can proceed with this travesty, I’ll have the case dismissed before you can say ‘wrongful arrest,’ and my next call will be to your deputy assistant director to discuss a lawsuit against you, her, and the entire Federal Bureau of Investigation.” Harmony leaned against the table with one hand. Her shoulders sagged. “You want him?” she said. “Fine. Take him and leave.” Perkins opened the door, ushering me toward it with a grand sweep of his arm like he was rolling out a red carpet.

The Astral Warrior About thirty years ago in Siliguri district, a jawan named Harbhajan Singh went missing. His body was never found. A few days after his disappearance, some officers who had gone for a trek in the same area reported that they had gotten lost in the forest and Harbhajan had suddenly appeared and helped them find their way back. But Harbhajan did not come back with them, he remained in the forest. Since then, there have been similar reports of people, including civilians, who get lost in the forest, or face some difficulty there. Whenever they pray to Harbhajan Singh to come and help them, he comes. Year after year, the same story is repeated. Now, if so many people talk about how they have been helped, I don’t think it can be false. This is how Harbhajan became Baba Harbhajan Singh. Incredibly, he is still in the roster of the Indian Army. Not only that, his colleagues offer him food every day, and they say the food disappears, the bottle of water also gets empty. Like other Army officers, Harbhajan gets his promotions, now he is a JCO. Every year, he goes home on leave too. The GOC of Siliguri personally goes to his shrine, takes his chappals and photograph to Siliguri railway station and places his chappals and photograph in the train coach. These are then carried to his native place and received there by the commanding officer. After his leave period is over, the chappals and photograph are brought back ceremoniously. The GOC receives them, keeps them at the shrine in the forest, and continues to offer him food. So many people have reported the same story: we were stuck in snowfall, we lost our way, and Baba helped us. And the Indian Army respects this fact, although he doesn’t show up for attendance! Col. Rakesh Aima

It's a shame you can't transport entire beeches or oaks into the laboratory to find out more about learning. But, at least as far as water is concerned, there is research in the field that reveals more than just behavioral changes: when trees are really thirsty, they begin to scream. If you're out in the forest, you won't be able to hear them, because this all takes place at ultrasonic levels. Scientists at the Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow, and Landscape Research recorded the sounds, and this is how they explain them: Vibrations occur in the trunk when the flow of water from the roots to the leaves is interrupted. This is a purely mechanical event and it probably doesn't mean anything. And yet? We know how the sounds are produced, and if we were to look through a microscope to examine how humans produce sounds, what we would see wouldn't be that different: the passage of air down the windpipe causes our vocal cords to vibrate. When I think about the research results, in particular in conjunction with the crackling roots I mentioned earlier, it seems to me that these vibrations could indeed be much more than just vibrations-they could be cries of thirst. The trees might be screaming out a dire warning to their colleagues that water levels are running low.

I missed the rest of the conversation because, while the good actor was carefully cooking his sentences with criticisms spiced with kindness, another member of the group, a young man who looked Chinese, with a face like raspberry jelly, stumbled up to me. His naturally yellow complexion was complemented by bright threads of broken veins, more purple than red. He had thick hair, a receding brow, jutting cheekbones, narrow eyes whose dark pupils seemed more polished than alive, a barely visible moustache the color of dead leaves, a little salt and pepper beard that was worn out like an old carpet, a long neck with an Adam’s apple stuck in it like a huge walnut, and shoulders like a scrawny old horse which did not fit with his thick, short chest and his pot belly. He was knock-kneed and bowed legged, with kneecaps shaped like coconuts. He also borrowed Doctor Magne’s chair, blew cigarette smoke out his nose, and took his turn to tackle me. His language was less elegant than the other two; it was hard for him to speak, which you could put down to shyness. He was dull and awkward. He seemed horribly unhappy and sorry to have come over, but there he was. He had to march on—and he did so heroically!—death in his soul. “Monsieur—finally yes!... Monsieur… I don’t like to jaw about brothers… absolutely not! But I have to tell you that Desbosquets is a lot more… absolutely… oh, I’ll blurt it out… a lot more… absolutely cracked than our friend Magne. Absolutely yes!” He wanted to be frank, to open up, which he constantly regretted, because he knew that he would be clumsy and mocked; he felt ridiculous and it was killing him. But his need for some honest self-indulgence gnawed at him, and he spit out his slang and his absolutelys—‘absolutely yes!’ and ‘absolutely no!’— which made him think he was revealing the deepest depths of his soul. He continued. “Maybe they told you about me—yes! I know: bing, bang —mechanics! Absolutely yes! A hack, they must have told you…” (Aha! I thought. So it’s my colleague the poet!) “…and the worst trouble, right? That’s Leonard—yes! Ah! When I’m a little…bing, bang…mechanics! I guess—grumpy—I don’t say… but there’s not an ounce of meanness in me! Disgusting, this awful problem with talking, but the mechanics, you know—because it’s the mechanics—no way! Do you want me to tell you my name? Ah! Totally unknown, my name, but don’t want them to mangle it mechanically when quoting it to you: Oswald Norbert Nigeot. Don’t say Numskull—no!—Although my verses!... Ah! Damned mechanics!... A bonehead, a stupid bonehead, bitten by the morbid mania to write—and the slander of the old students of the Polytechnic! Oh! To write! Terrible trade for the poorly gifted like me who are… bing, bang, not mechanics! And angry at the mechanics of words. Polytechnic pigs manufacture words; so, poor hacks can’t use them. Ah! Even this is mechanics!... And drunk on it, Desbosquets too, very drunk! Obviously you see it: Cusenier, Noilly-Prat, why not Pernod? It’s awful for people like him and me! See, you know— liquids are scarce—but thanks to the guards’ hatred of Bid’homme… and thanks to old Froin, too good, don’t believe in any bad—but can you call that bad? He lives with the Heaven of…mechanics…of…bang…of derangements, no! I want arrangements, not derangements!” Mr. Nigeot seemed very proud of having successfully (?) completed such a long sentence propped up by only one “bang” and one “mechanics,” but in spite of his satisfaction, he was scared of continuing less elegantly and he got all tangled up in a run of bizarre expressions in which the hated Polytechnicians and the bings and bangs (not to mention the absolutelys) got so out of hand that I could not understand a word of what he said.

Against you, Doctor! How could I have it in for you when you’re so nice to me? Against poor Leonard, who does everything he can so that I don’t get worked up, so that I get along here as well as possible? Against anyone else? Well, that’s another story! I have to say that I can’t stand that quack Bid’homme. Of course, I feel sorry for him—as he deserves—but I am tired of seeing this ridiculous fool, who should be put in a straightjacket, intimidate, act like a tyrant, rant and rave, yell and insult everyone. He should be washed with Niagara jets until he bursts, which would not be a great loss to humanity! That Bid’homme! Argh! Him, yes, I hate! He’s a constant danger to the patients, whom he knows nothing about, and whom he might kill with his stupid brutality! Why don’t you lock up this dangerous lunatic, Doctor—or, at least, send him back to Franche-Comté, to his family, if they agree to be responsible for such an evil creature and keep him tied up 24 hours a day?” What was I saying? Doctor Froin looked different; he shrugged his shoulders sadly. I saw him—his mind was made up now: I was a monomaniacal madman with delusions of persecution. All my ideas, all my preoccupations and all my anger, was focused on Bid’homme. I was acting exactly like someone who was crazy. I would keep saying that he hounded his patients and hated them all—me, first and foremost! His doubts about his assistant might even have been erased by my angry outburst. He could blame it all on my madness. I tried desperately to redeem myself, to save myself. What should I do? What should I say? Wouldn’t I be cleverer to tell him everything I was thinking—however uncomfortable it might be? I cried out—as unloudly as possible: “Doctor! No! Don’t write me off like that with a flick of your hand. I know what you’re thinking; you think I’m obsessed! Don’t deny it: I’m sure of it! But it’s nothing like that! To show you I’m not the least bit deranged, let me say that I was a little hard just now—even though I hate your colleague Bid’homme, and think he’s dangerous and harmful to your patients, I have absolutely no problem thinking about other things. Why, today, I thought about a thousand things that had nothing to do with him. Do you want me to tell you about waking up this morning in this room? About what went on inside my head—pointing out the difference between the sane ideas and those that are still a little…off? Do you want to be sure that I am not sneaky or vindictive, like most of the mental patients? Well! You just told me that my relatives are coming on Monday, but you didn’t say whom, probably because you were concerned about making me angry. I’m going to tell you: it’s Roffieux—the one who brought me here. I swear to you that I have no hard feelings against him. I can honestly say that he is close to my heart, but if I leave Vassetot, no harm will come to him from me, I guarantee it. I will do what any good man would do in the same situation: I will go as far away as possible. True enough, he disgusts me and I don’t want him to have any more control over me, but it would never enter my mind to play a dirty trick on him!

You must try, as my dear colleague the esteemed mythology professor Joseph Campbell used to say, to 'follow your bliss.'" "Follow my bliss?" It sounded like a slogan in a yogurt commercial. Aunt Gert nodded again. "You must follow your bliss no matter the circumstances life thrusts upon you." "But what does that mean? I have responsibilities. I can't just up and leave everything to pursue my own happiness," I protested. Aunt Gert snorted. "Who said anything about happiness? Don't be a ninny. You are mistakenly equating bliss with happiness. They're not the same thing." "They're not?" I asked in bewilderment, wondering briefly if anyone in my life had ever called me a ninny before. "What's the difference?" "Happiness is fleeting, fickle, often based on our circumstances." Aunt Gert waved a hand dismissively. "If you chase happiness, you will more often than not end up disappointed by the very nature of life. Life is hard, brutal at times, and often unfair. But following your bliss, that's entirely different. It means facing your present reality with honesty and courage and, in the midst of it all, continuing to pursue each spark of joy, even if it is a tiny pinpoint in the darkness of your life. Do not give up. Continue to look for the light in your life---it is always present somewhere, some small thing to be grateful for, something to celebrate, a way to give joy to others, a new way to grow. Move toward the light in life; seek it out no matter what. This is the essence of what it means to follow your bliss. You must be honest. Pay attention. Seek joy.

Pessimism for Beginners When you’re waiting for someone to e-mail, When you’re waiting for someone to call – Young or old, gay or straight, male or female – Don’t assume that they’re busy, that’s all. Don’t conclude that their letter went missing Or they must be away for a while; Think instead that they’re cursing and hissing – They’ve decided you’re venal and vile, That your eyes should be pecked by an eagle. Oh, to bash in your head with a stone! But since this is unfairly illegal They’ve no choice but to leave you alone. Be they friend, parent, sibling or lover Or your most stalwart colleague at work, Don’t pursue them. You’ll only discover That your once-irresistible quirk Is no longer appealing. Far from it. Everything that you are and you do Makes them spatter their basin with vomit. They loathe Hitler and herpes and you. Once you take this on board, life gets better. You give no one your hopes to destroy. The most cursory phone call or letter Makes you pickle your heart in pure joy. It’s so different from what you expected! They do not want to gouge out your eyes! You feel neither abused nor rejected What a stunning and perfect surprise. This approach I’m endorsing will net you A small portion of boundless delight. Keep believing the world’s out to get you. Now and then you might not be proved right.

McGahn then made another mistake. Instead of pressing Yates for more details, he asked few other follow-ups, leaving him with only a loose grasp of the facts when he would need to explain this to Trump later in the afternoon. He would later admit to colleagues that he had mishandled the situation. “There’s no way I should have allowed her to leave this shit burger on me,” he would say. “I should have said, ‘Sally, you’re the acting attorney general and you’re not leaving my office until you give me some counsel on what to do, and you know a hell of a lot more than I do because you’re overseeing the FBI.

She opened the case file and attached an audio clip, hitting the background record button. She still had the doctor’s number in her call log and dialled it.  It rang for a while and then went to voicemail. ‘You’ve reached Elliot Day, I can’t get to the phone just now, but if you’d like to leave a message, I’ll return your call as soon as I can. Thank you.’ The voice told her he was well-brought-up. South-England native. But she couldn’t place where. ‘Hi,’ she said after the beep. ‘This is Detective Sergeant Jamie Johansson. I’d like to speak to you regarding your work at the homeless shelter in Enfield. It’s in accordance with an active investigation. If you could call me back at your earliest convenience, that would be great. Thank you.’ She hung up and sighed, stopped the recording, and then went back to the case file, finding the number for Oliver’s parents. She hit record again, copied it and called them immediately, not wanting to put it off any longer. After three rings, a tired voice answered. ‘Hello?’ ‘Mr Hammond?’ ‘Yes?’ ‘This is Detective Sergeant Jamie Johansson with the London Metropolitan Police. I understand that one of my colleagues informed you that I might be getting in touch?’ There was silence for a second and then she heard him swallow. ‘That’s right… But I don’t know what I can tell you,’ he said quietly. It sounded like he was moving from room to room, cupping the phone to his mouth. Maybe he didn’t want Oliver’s mum to hear. ‘Any information you provide could be very useful. Do you mind if I ask you a few questions?’ ‘Sure,’ he said, his voice small. ‘Would it be okay if I recorded this conversation?’ ‘Yes,’ he said, almost absently. Jamie hated asking it — it never had a positive impact on the conversations that came after. Made them stunted, reserved. But she had to ask.

Paul and Linda were deeply wounded by Seiwell’s rebellion. In Henry’s case, they knew what the problems were, and they knew he would leave eventually, having already quit once. They even, to a degree, respected him for standing up for his own artistry. But their relationship with Seiwell was not just that of band colleagues. It went back to the Ram sessions and had quickly become a real friendship.

We want Next Jump to be a company that our mothers and fathers would be proud of us for building,” says Kim. And a large part of making our parents proud comes in the form of being a good person and doing the right thing. And so he implemented a policy of Lifetime Employment. Next Jump might be the only tech company in the country to do such a thing. No one will get fired to balance the books. And even costly mistakes or poor individual performance are not grounds for dismissal. If anything, the company will spend the time to help figure out what the problem is and help its people overcome it. Like an athlete who goes through a slump, a Next Jumper doesn’t get fired, they get coached. About the only situation in which an employee would be asked to leave is if someone worked outside the company’s high moral values or if someone actively worked to undermine their colleagues.

while he had strong moral beliefs about appropriate policy, he did not require his colleagues to necessarily share those beliefs. Nor was Knight one to equate market outcomes with morality. In later years, his former students would be tempted successfully to migrate toward such a precarious direction. “Frank Knight was conservative. His prime characteristic was that he was a flaming atheist and he just couldn’t leave the subject alone. He was an iconoclast, but he was also very critical of simple conservatism. His views were complicated” (Conversation with Paul Samuelson, October 1997).

In a thousand years, however, Mormonism will no longer be an upstart religion, with all the volatility and vulnerability of adolescence. People will no more leave Mormonism over the Mountain Meadows Massacre than modern Jews leave Judaism over biblical genocide. Mormon polygamy will be no more (and no less) vexing than ancient polygamy. The Book of Abraham will be no more textually troubling than the Bible’s Deuteronomists or multiple Isaiahs. Multiple versions of Joseph Smith’s first vision will be no more faith-shaking than varying accounts of Paul’s conversion or the disharmony of the Gospels. But we live now, not a thousand years from now. The scandals are real, and the doubt and pain they cause are real. To explain a problem and reconcile it in our minds is not to deny its existence or significance. Having spent my professional life working in an academy largely allergic to the extrarational claims of faith, and in a field of religious history where many colleagues are devoted evangelicals or Catholics, I know well that in the view of Enlightenment rationalism and scientism on the one hand and historic Christianity on the other, much of Mormonism appears foolish and scandalous. That the same can be said of every other religion hardly puts salve in the wound. We are not called to abandon our natural reason; to do so would not only lead to fanaticism but also to reject one of our greatest divine inheritances. Yet to remain open to all the infinite possibilities of an inexplicable cosmos, we have to humbly acknowledge the limits of human rationality and accept complementary ways of knowing and being. We do not proceed merely on faith, but we do recognize that faith and trust are essential ingredients in a holistic approach to life. By definition, to have faith—in God, in Mormonism, in anything—is to act on claims that in the end can be neither proven nor disproven. To base one’s life on unfalsifiable claims is not a sign of intellectual weakness or antirationality, but rather a perfectly normal human response to the uncertainty that is the lot of mortality.

Colleagues in the office are discussing Britain leaving the EU because the government was compelled to trigger Article 50 (they weren’t) after a referendum nobody wanted produced a clear mandate (it didn’t), because the majority of the country want to leave the EU (they don’t) for reasons that were clearly explained (they weren’t) following a campaign that was run fairly, honestly and legally (it wasn’t).

None of what we've learned seems very relevant when our lover leaves us, when our child has a tantrum in the supermarket, when we're insulted by our colleague.

I think when you feel abandoned by your own parents, it’s impossible not to spend the rest of your life suspecting people of plotting to leave you. It’s something I always feel anxious about with everyone, even Adam, despite how long we’ve been together. Whenever I get close to someone—partners, friends, colleagues—there inevitably comes a point when I have to back away. I rebuild barriers, higher than before, to make myself feel safe. A constant fear of abandonment makes it impossible to trust anyone, even my husband.

The early experience of Elisabeth Elliot, widow and biographer of a martyred missionary husband, strikingly illustrates this. Confident of God’s guidance, she went to an Ecuador tribe to reduce their language to writing so that the Bible might be translated for them. The only person who could or would help her was a Spanish-speaking Christian who lived with the tribe, but within a month he was shot dead in an argument. She struggled on with virtually no help for eight months more. Then she moved to another field, leaving her full file of linguistic material with colleagues so that they could carry on where she had left off. Within a fortnight she heard that the file had been stolen. No copy existed; all her work was wasted. That, humanly speaking, was the end of the story. She comments: I simply had to bow in the knowledge that God was his own interpreter. . . . We must allow God to do what he wants to do. And if you are thinking that you know the will of God for your life and you are anxious to do that, you are probably in for a very rude awakening because nobody knows the will of God for his entire life. (Quoted from Eternity, January 1969, p. 18) This is right. Sooner or later, God’s guidance, which brings us out of darkness into light, will also bring us out of light into darkness. It is part of the way of the cross.

No matter how hard I tried, whether it was to help Anthony, to threaten him, to sympathize with him, to ignore him, to throw him out of my house, it was impossible to move on. This man was going to ruin me, and now he was going to jeopardize HRC's chances of winning the presidency, which would leave our country in the hands of someone dangerously unfit for the office. On the plane after the event, Jen came over to update HRC. The letter Comey had sent to Congress was out. It confirmed what the reporters had heard. The Comey investigation was officially reopened. It turned out that the Southern District, which was prosecuting Anthony's case involving the teenager, had found emails of mine on his laptop and to this day I do not know where or how because I never knew they were there. They called the FBI's New York office, who then called the DC office, which meant the laptop had ended up with Comey. They didn't alert Anthony's attorneys or mine. I watched HRC's face as she processed it. The moment she made eye contact with me, I just broke down. I had held it together for months—through the night of the shocking photo, all the meetings with Children's Services, the paparazzi on the street, becoming a single parent overnight, the daily hate messages, and even, until just a few minutes ago, the news about Comey's announcement to Congress. But now that I knew the investigation somehow involved my own email, tears flowed out of me. HRC stood up from her seat, came over to hug me, and then walked with me to the bathroom so I could compose myself. On a plane full of colleagues, Secret Service agents, reporters, photographers—everyone with eyes simultaneously averted and questioning—she did that.

Unspoken was the fact that he could just go. He could walk out the door and catch a cab to the airport and still make it to Springfield in time to vote. He could leave his sick daughter and fretting wife halfway across the Pacific and go join his colleagues. It was an option. But I wasn’t going to martyr myself by suggesting it.

If we were to take another example, and apply the same rules, it becomes obvious just how inappropriate and harmful this trope is. For some (not all) trans people, one element of being trans is the physical process of transition. It can be joyful, it can be painful, it can be messy, and it can involve surgery. The same could be said of parenthood. Conception, pregnancy, and childbirth are necessary parts of making a family for the majority of people. Like medical transition, it is vital that we're educated about these processes if there's a chance we'll find ourselves personally affected. And luckily, in both of these cases, the medical information is freely and easily available online, through public health initiatives, in libraries, and from the relevant medical authorities. But it would never be appropriate to approach a new mother in a cafe and say, 'so, did you rip your vagina giving birth to that one?' When greeting a colleague returning to the office after maternity leave, we don't ask if we can examine the stretch marks and possible scars, or ask about hemorrhaging and post-natal incontinence. If we're close friends or family, we might well talk about the most personal physical aspects of creating and delivering a baby - the same is true of transition. But the need to be honest and close with our loved ones doesn't make the intrusion of strangers okay.

I remind myself: This will not make me feel loved, so if that’s why I’m saying yes, that’s not a good reason. The love I want will not be found here, and what I will feel in its place is resentment and anger. I’m committed to a particular, limited amount of things in this season, and if what’s being asked of me isn’t one of those, then it stands in the way. That’s why knowing your purpose and priorities for a given season is so valuable—because those commitments become the litmus test for all the decisions you face. Picture your relationships like concentric circles: the inner circle is your spouse, your children, your very best friends. Then the next circle out is your extended family and good friends. Then people you know, but not well, colleagues, and so on, to the outer edge. Aim to disappoint the people at the center as rarely as possible. And then learn to be more and more comfortable with disappointing the people who lie at the edges of the circle—people you’re not as close to, people who do not and should not require your unflagging dedication. To do this, though, you have to give even the people closest to you—maybe especially the people closest to you—realistic expectations for what you can give to them. We disappoint people because we’re limited. We have to accept the idea of our own limitations in order to accept the idea that we’ll disappoint people. I have this much time. I have this much energy. I have this much relational capacity.

Denouncing white supremacy means that I will no longer be supreme. Fostering diversity in my workplace means I will talk less as the dominant power in the room. Being pro-LGBTQ doesn’t entitle me to explain to my lesbian colleague that her relationships are “easier.” A

Observationally, the fact that a person’s health improves upon leaving or modifying such relationships certainly suggests there are benefits to stepping away—but the mechanisms of any such improvements remain unclear. Research that has been done on the impact of conflictual marital relationships and health has shown that conflictual relationships are associated with changes in immune function (for example, research by health psychologist Janice Kiecolt-Glaser and her colleagues).

mindset that leaves them less prone to false negatives, making them better judges of their colleagues’ ideas. 4. Hold an opposite day. Since it’s often hard to find the time for people to consider original viewpoints, one of my favorite practices is to have “opposite day” in the classroom and at conferences. Executives and students divide into groups, and each chooses an assumption, belief, or area of knowledge that is widely taken for granted. Each group asks, “When is the opposite true?” and then delivers a presentation on their ideas.

Seeing the Worm Instead of the Apple Another thought pattern that makes you keep your partner at a distance is “seeing the worm instead of the apple.” Carole had been with Bob for nine months and had been feeling increasingly unhappy. She felt Bob was the wrong guy for her, and gave a multitude of reasons: He wasn’t her intellectual equal, he lacked sophistication, he was too needy, and she didn’t like the way he dressed or interacted with people. Yet, at the same time, there was a tenderness about him that she’d never experienced with another man. He made her feel safe and accepted, he lavished gifts on her, and he had endless patience to deal with her silences, moods, and scorn. Still, Carole was adamant about her need to leave Bob. “It will never work,” she said time and again. Finally, she broke up with him. Months later she was surprised by just how difficult she was finding things without him. Lonely, depressed, and heartbroken, she mourned their lost relationship as the best she’d ever had. Carole’s experience is typical of people with an avoidant attachment style. They tend to see the glass half-empty instead of half-full when it comes to their partner. In fact, in one study, Mario Mikulincer, dean of the New School of Psychology at the Interdisciplinary Center in Israel and one of the leading researchers in the field of adult attachment, together with colleagues Victor Florian and Gilad Hirschberger, from the department of psychology at Bar-Ilan University in Israel, asked couples to recount their daily experiences in a diary. They found that people with an avoidant attachment style rated their partner less positively than did non-avoidants. What’s more, they found they did so even on days in which their accounts of their partners’ behavior indicated supportiveness, warmth, and caring. Dr. Mikulincer explains that this pattern of behavior is driven by avoidants’ generally dismissive attitude toward connectedness. When something occurs that contradicts this perspective—such as their spouse behaving in a genuinely caring and loving manner—they are prone to ignoring the behavior, or at least diminishing its value. When they were together, Carole used many deactivating strategies, tending to focus on Bob’s negative attributes. Although she was aware of her boyfriend’s strengths, she couldn’t keep her mind off what she perceived to be his countless flaws. Only after they broke up, and she no longer felt threatened by the high level of intimacy, did her defense strategies lift. She was then able to get in touch with the underlying feelings of attachment that were there all along and to accurately assess Bob’s pluses.

The social neuroscientist Tania Singer resigned as Director of the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig in 2018 after allegations that she had viciously bullied her research team for years, for example reportedly screaming at a postdoctoral researcher who had become pregnant (because her maternity leave would interrupt Singer’s research). The irony of the situation was that Singer’s main research interest is human empathy (Kai Kupferschmidt, ‘She’s the World’s Top Empathy Researcher. But Colleagues Say She Bullied and Intimidated Them’, Science, 8 Aug. 2018).

For CDC chief Redfield the Chinese failure to close down international flights was disastrous. He told colleagues the United States had silently filled with Covid-19 infections “from Italy, Spain, Germany, France, Great Britain, Belgium.” All this late-winter travel brought clusters of Covid to the United States. “Also unknown to us that probably half of those clusters weren’t even symptomatic, so you couldn’t find them” with airport screening. “It was difficult to understand how China had aggressive travel restrictions within China, and yet did not move to any travel restrictions” for people who wanted to leave China and go abroad, Redfield said. “If there could have been one major, global action that could’ve really saved hundreds of thousands of lives, it’s if they had just shut down their out-of-China travel at the same time they shut down their intra-China travel. “They really started moving in the latter part of January. That’s where they quarantined people. That’s where they shut down the city. That’s where they stopped the trains. They really locked down all of Wuhan at one point. I think they quarantined over 11 million people. You couldn’t go from Wuhan to Beijing, but you could go Wuhan to London.

Not all of Blizzard’s employees took to the intense office culture, such as Andy Weir, a programmer who hated being dropped into the pressure cooker. The day before he left on a weekend trip for which he’d provided weeks of notice, his bosses criticized him for taking off, then demanded that he leave them with a phone number. “Over the course of the weekend they probably called me twenty times,” Weir said. “And I was not an important engineer.” During the game’s final stretch, when everyone was expected to test out the game during their spare time, Weir complained to a colleague that he was sick of doing extra QA work and not getting paid for it. Weir became the target of endless bullying around the office. Colleagues would dismiss him, ignore him, and deride his ideas. “So many people were shitty to me, I have to assume I brought it on myself in some way,” Weir said. He was criticized for delivering inadequate code that broke the game’s launcher, which made things more difficult for everybody. He’d fume: How could he live up to expectations when nobody was mentoring or teaching him? There were no structures in place to help younger employees learn how to fix bugs or write better code. “We were so busy running as fast as we could, there was no culture of mentorship or training,” said Wyatt. Less than a year into the job, Weir was fired for his poor performance. “This was a dream job for me, working at Blizzard,” Weir said. “I was absolutely crushed.” But Andy Weir wound up doing just fine. Two decades later, he published a novel called The Martian, the film adaptation of which would star Matt Damon and earn more than $630 million worldwide.

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You hear it often... "be yourself...you make a difference in the world". Yet there is something almost too BIG about this idea, which can leave us feeling like we're not quite doing enough, trying enough, BEING enough. The thing is, there are many 'worlds' out there. We may not affect the world at large... but we ABSOLUTELY make a difference in the worlds of our children, parents, spouse, friends, colleagues, neighbours and community. A kind word delivered to a friend in need may not make a difference in foreign lands, but its effect is felt none the less... So, I encourage you to be yourself! Go about your daily life and continue to drip feed your "worlds" with your intrinsic uniqueness. Trust that no matter how you play the game of life, you are making a difference in the 'world' of those who matter the most. And that, my darlings is EXACTLY what the world needs more of. Be a legend in your own backyard

You hear it often... Be yourself! You make a difference in the world! Yet there is something almost too BIG about this idea, which can leave us feeling like we're not quite doing enough, trying enough, BEING enough. The thing is, there are many 'worlds' out there. We may not affect the world at large... but we ABSOLUTELY make a difference in the worlds of our children, parents, spouse, friends, colleagues, neighbours and community. A kind word delivered to a friend in need may not make a difference in foreign lands, but its effect is felt none the less... So, I encourage you to be yourself! Go about your daily life and continue to drip feed your "worlds" with your intrinsic uniqueness. Trust that no matter how you play the game of life, you are making a difference in the 'world' of those who matter the most. And that, my darlings is EXACTLY what the world needs more of. Be a legend in your own backyard.

Some of his colleagues and a few of his students claimed to have been moved so by a book that they had read it again and again. Who were they? Of what were they made? Were they dissembling? Perhaps he was a fool, but he thought that if a work were truly great you would only have to read it once and you would be stolen from yourself, desperately moved, changed forever. It would become part of you and never leave, and you would love the characters as if they were your own. Who would want to plough over ground that has been perfectly ploughed? Would it not be, like living one's life again, infinitely painful and dissonant?

He thinks he will leave. School life is unreal. All this is unreal. He has had enough. He can’t bear his colleagues. He can’t bear the boys any more either; en masse, he thinks, they’re horrible, like haddocks. He has to get out. He’ll live on his writing. His last book did well. He’ll write more. He’ll take a cottage in Scotland and spend his days fishing for salmon. Perhaps he’ll take the barmaid with him as his wife, the dark-eyed beauty he’s been courting for months, though he’s only in love with her emotionally, so far, and he hasn’t got anywhere, really, and those long hours sitting at the bar reduce him too often to hopeless drunkenness. He drinks too much. He has drunk too much, and he has been unhappy for a long time. But things are certain to change. The notebook he writes in is grey. He’s stuck a photograph of one of his grass snakes on the cover, and written ETC above it in ink. The snake is suitable because this is his dream diary, though there are other things in it too: scraps of writing, lesson plans, line drawings of sphinxes and clawed dragons rampant, and the occasional stab at self-analysis: 1) Necessity of excelling in order to be loved.1 2) Failure to excel. 3) Why did I fail to excel? (Wrong attitude to what I was doing?)

work. Ultimately, his time in Burma would cost him the loss of seven children, numerous colleagues, and almost perpetual painful bodily maladies. Judson would not consider leaving, however. He said, “Life is short. Millions of Burmese are perishing. I am almost the only person on earth who has attained their language to communicate salvation.”5

Lately, she’d begun to question her decision to leave her position as a victim specialist. Violet Darger had spent her first four years at the FBI in the Office for Victim Assistance before giving up her position to become an agent trainee. She knew her colleagues thought she was nuts for making the move. Victim specialist jobs were highly competitive. To give that up… to start over at the bottom of the special agent chain was something almost everyone had counseled against. Not that she’d asked for their advice. “Impulsive” was the word her former supervisor had used. That was almost two years ago now, and she’d brushed them off at the time. They didn’t understand. She didn’t expect them to.

Dear Goodreads diary, Thanks for receiving me all this time with hands wide open… Thanks for being patient to listen to all my gibberish. Still, I gotta go now. I’ll be absent for some time… But I want to tell you one last story… 2 years ago, a little boy came to me and asked for my help. He was desperate and tired of his life. He asked for my friendship and I was reluctant to accept his offer. I’ve always denied his emails or text messages. I know that boys are BASTARDS, though he looked like a little bird, lost and without wings…The way he talks in missing and dreams, oh GOD I wanna forget about all… it disgusts me each time to remember that he didn’t respect that I’m a conservative girl and tried his ways on me even though I’ve always asked him to stop it…. I mean, I’m 5 years older than him…. His father got sick. They reaaaaaaaally needed help. Though I’ve always known he was a “bastard” like everybody else, I couldn’t possibly leave his mom’s calls unanswered when she always asked for my help. I’ve been through all they’ve been through. I couldn’t give up on them while I knew how much it means to stand for someone who’s been tested for his father. I’m an orphan. How could I possibly walk away? + Our dear Prophet (PBUH) would never treat a misdeed with a misdeed…I’m a girl who loves GOD…I wouldn’t be as mean as him… Still, each time he was acting like bastards act. That meanness I can read in his text messages. That DISRESPECT…. I knew he used every possible memory for his ulterior motives. I kept silent for two years…I knew he was making a show… I mean even if he wasn’t making it because he saw something in me (that everybody saw, not only him), he would be making a show for his friends … Still, I’m not the one who would leave a friend in the middle of the dark…at one point in time, I called him brother…. hhh…. Thought maybe if he knows that I’m his older sister, he’ll think that the way he talked or the things he asked are things you only ask from a girlfriend and not me… he persisted…. I tested him once and he like a fool fell into the trap… I knew I should walk away even if I’d hear that his father would die… I spent whole night throwing in my disbelief…. How could people be so tricky…I’m 5 years older…. Eventually, he made his show… Thank GOD, a colleague… a mouthy colleague… started talking about everyone at school including me and him…that was heaven’s door wide open for me. Though 14 years ago, my friends started talking about me and another boy, I wouldn’t leave him for the world because I knew he was a decent boy… This time, I dived in… One month later, he came into my class not caring what my colleagues would talk…That made me sure that he wants to carry his show over… You know diary, what kills a person the most is not death. Hurt can kill…deception can kill…not apologizing can kill… Bad memories can kill…and I didn’t want to leave him with bad memories…I sent my last text message, told him to fulfill all his dreams and said goodbye…. Still I’ve never felt relieved… I texted him again, faced him with the facts, he thought he fooled me again….I said sorry and goodbye… forever…I waited for some time and then I quit my job so they don’t understand a thing about my motives… I spent two amazing months home; that I would always remember because they’ve changed me a lot…They brought me back to life again…But when I came back, all the bad memories came back again… Dear diary, I know you’ve got tired of my complaints, but I have nobody else to talk to the way I talk to you… I need to forget all the bad memories he left me with… I know I CAN, but I need some time away from you…Even though he’s like a “tafcha” in my life now… still, I have to forgive him… I’m not someone who would spend her time hating people…People like me talk in books and ideas in their social networks… Wait for me diary…I’ll be back…

The phenomenon of Saudi women deveiling in transit is so well known that I remember a Tunisian work colleague making jokes about it. “When Tunisian women get on the airplane to leave the country,” he would say, “they put the hijab on, and when the Saudi women board, they take it off!

Greeting the security staff, Mackay led Liz through the atrium into a busy and attractive restaurant. The tablecloths were white linen, the silver and glassware shone, and the dark panorama of the Thames was framed by a curtained sweep of plate glass. Most of the tables were occupied. The muted buzz of conversation dipped for a moment as they entered. Leaving her coat at the desk, Liz followed Mackay to a table overlooking the river. “This is all very nice and unexpected,” she said sincerely. “Thank you for inviting me.” “Thank you for accepting.” “I’m assuming a fair few of these people are your lot?” “One or two of them are, and when you walked across the room just then, you enhanced my standing by several hundred per cent. You will note that we’re being discreetly observed.” She smiled. “I do note it. You should send your colleagues downriver for one of our surveillance courses.” They examined the menus. Leaning forward confidentially, Mackay told Liz that he could predict what she was going to

Still, while not the source of this polarization, the medical system deserves some blame for failing to forcefully stand up to it. While medical groups like the AMA have certainly objected to lawmakers masquerading as ob-gyns, mainstream medicine can hardly claim to be a staunch defender of abortion's place within women's health care. In a country in which about a million abortions are performed each year, a 2005 survey of ob-gyn programs found that over half didn't off any clinical exposure to the procedure and about a fifth provided no formal education on it at all. While 97 percent of practicing ob-gyns have had a patient seeking an abortion, just 14 percent perform them. Abortion care is usually physically relegated to stand-alone specialty clinics. The doctors who do offer the procedure often face stigma from their colleagues and are left largely on their own to fight against political interference in the doctor-patient relationship, which should provoke mass outcry from the entire profession.

Engagement and Organizational Efficiency Engagement of individuals without relevant collective alignment is bound to fail. Engagement has to be directed towards a common vision and direction. In the Global Workforce Study, Towers Watson (2012) showed that highly engaged employees have: Lower “presenteeism” or lost productivity at work: 7.6 days lost each year, against 14.1 days for disengaged employees Less absenteeism: 3.2 days each year, against 4.2 days for disengaged employees Less likelihood to leave than their disengaged colleagues: only 18% of highly engaged are ready to leave their employer in the next two years compared

The nice thing about meetings is that the higher up you are on the food chain, the less you have to prepare for them. When you’re the top dog (or somewhere up there on the canine hierarchy), other people prepare for the meeting while all you have to do is listen and opine. Your colleagues leave with the action items, and you leave with nothing to do but run to the next meeting.

However, it’s important not to twist this notion to mean that being a great colleague or respectful to others is not important. It’s just that it’s not enough, and it’s not the top priority. Being nice and getting along are necessary and valued. You can’t achieve the right results if you leave nothing but burned bridges behind you. But getting along is simply not the most important thing.

So, what information do you want to gather during this first interview? Foremost is her description of why she is here now as opposed to six months ago or six years ago (this is known in clinical parlance as the “presenting problem”). You want the basic data if you don’t have them: name, age, marital status, occupation; with whom she lives and where; any previous experiences of therapy; and perhaps some preliminary information about her family of origin. You also want to get some sense of her support system: Does she have friends? Do her relatives live nearby? Does she have a good working relationship with colleagues at her job? Many of these answers will emerge spontaneously. If they don’t, ask for them. Toward the end of the session, you want to leave yourself enough time to ask the client if she has any questions. In addition, you want to ask whether she would like to come back again and talk further. You might help her make that decision by pointing out what you are seeing, e.g., that she seems to be struggling with her feelings about her father’s death or that it is sometimes difficult to know the right thing to do when you are having trouble with your child. The goal here is to try and arrive at a mutual definition, in language that seems right to the client, of what the presenting problem is. Under the best circumstances the client will say something like, “That’s exactly the way I would have said it.” If you do not reach a mutual definition, however, that is not a reason to despair, since you are new at this. It is perfectly alright to suggest that the client return again so you can further explore and clarify what it is she would like your help with. If

My fears ran deep as though I were in a terrifying nightmare. I thought we’d left all the danger behind us in Urumqi, but was Gobi still at risk? If someone was making a play to claim Gobi on the Internet, wouldn’t it make sense for them to try and get Gobi in the flesh? If they had the dog, they could control the story. Was that why I was being followed by the men in suits and the gray sedan? I’d always thought they were from the government, but was it possible that they were actually reporting to someone else entirely? These thoughts stayed with me like a mosquito bite. I couldn’t stop returning to them long after my call with Jay ended. The more attention I paid them, the more inflamed and painful these dark fears became. I spent the entire flight home going over the same thoughts. Images of Gobi getting stolen from Kiki’s kennels flashed through my mind. Conspiracy theories about what might happen cast deep shadows over me. And a desperate desire to make sure that Gobi was okay left me feeling hollow inside. Added to that, I was thinking about work. I had been away from my job for almost two weeks, and I worried that I was pushing the limits of the company’s generosity. Everyone had been supportive throughout, and there was never any pressure to return from Urumqi, but I knew my colleagues were working extra hard to cover my workload in my absence. I didn’t want to abuse their kindness or take advantage of it. But I knew that, yet again, I had a choice to make. I could stick with the plan and leave Gobi in Kiki’s care for the next twenty-nine days while we waited for the all-clear on her

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THE BIGGEST BARRIERS ARE CONTEXTUAL AND CULTURAL. To build organizations where intelligence is richly utilized, we need both an offensive and a defensive plan. Most leaders who read the book aspire to lead like Multipliers and find “the better angels of their nature,” as Abraham Lincoln once said. However, their efforts are stymied because too much of their mental energy is spent dealing with the devils around them. For others, their diminishing colleagues leave them so enervated that their will to lead excellently is weakened as well.

My mouth was full and empty all at once. Empty because everything in it had no shape or sound or form. And full of everything that I felt then and feel now. That what I want to return to I cannot return to because the place and I have changed and what I have built here might be feeble and meek, but it took everything I had and I fear if I leave I will not have the will to return and then I will be lost again and I have been lost before and will do everything not to be that again and that I do not know if it is cowardly or courageous and I do not care and I have decided without deciding, because it is my only option, to keep to the days, to sleep when it is good for me to sleep and wake in good time to attend to my work and the people who depend on me. I wanted to tell her that I like being dependable. I like the fact that my colleagues rely on me and my students and their parents and my landlord. That I wish to be better to Hannah, that out of everyone I know here there is no one else that I would rather depend on or have depend on me and that I hope one day she will meet her and know what I mean. That, although all these people would be fine without me, I am held together by their demands and that I am very sorry not to be beside her, to be the son I had always imagined I would be and desired to be. And that my train can only continue or else I fear I will fall off a cliff. And I wanted to tell her that flying, being divorced from the earth, was like being separated from her and, now that I am on land, I never ever want to be unearthed again and that I am ashamed of it and was ashamed of it for a long time, but I am no longer. And that I know Father is growing old and needs me and Souad now has three children for whom I have been an absent uncle, and I have not given my father an heir and I know how important that is to him and that it all left me with the conviction that no one should ever leave their home. That no matter what happens to you when you are at home happens to you at home. My friends never stopped wanting a different life, I wanted to tell her. But I have managed, Mother, not to want a different life most of the time and that is some achievement.

Colleagues:"Of all the peculiarities of diplomatic life, what most strikes the general public is the amicable and often cordial relations which exist between the diplomatists of the different countries and which produce between them, if policy and patriotism do not oppose it, a sort of corporate spirit and sometimes comradeship. Those who are surprised at this do not know what it is to remain for long years abroad, isolated and far from home. The young men who enter into the profession could not live the whole of their life leaving each other and finding each other again in various capitals of the world, experiencing sometimes the same adventures, and gaining, by the same steps, the grades of their career, without feeling pleasure at meeting each other again." — Jules Cambon Colleagues, utility of: In every diplomatic corps there are envoys who are fat with information and there are those who, starved for intelligence because they are unable to obtain their own insights into the dynamics of decision making in the host country, prey on those better informed than themselves. A diplomat with his own ample resources of information is well advised to keep his distance from those of his colleagues who seek a parasitical relationship with him; these colleagues will, after all, be available to him whenever he need them. Instead, he should cultivate those as well or better informed than him and share as much information as he is able to share with them. By establishing a reputation for being worth consulting among those of his colleagues who are themselves well informed about local events, a diplomat can ensure that they rely on him to check information of which they are unsure. In that way, he will gain access to much of what they know shortly after they learn it and will be able to give his own government the benefit of this knwoledge in a timely way. Colleagues, utility of: "An Ambassador may very probably find that his colleagues of the diplomatic corps in the capital where he resides may be of value to him. Since the whole diplomatic body labors to the same end, namely to discover what is happening, there arises a certain freemasonry of diplomacy, by which one colleague informs another of coming events which a lucky chance has enabled him to discern." — François de Callières, 1716 Command presence: A talent for command is essential to ambassadors and heads of delegations, both of whom must bend a heterogeneous group to a common purpose and make its members function as a team.

In late 2004, Chris Pinkham, head of the company’s IT infrastructure, told Dalzell that he had decided to return with his family to their native South Africa. At this point, A9 had taken root in Palo Alto, and Dalzell was busy establishing remote developer centers in Scotland and India, among other places. Dalzell suggested to Pinkham that instead of leaving Amazon, he open an office in Cape Town. They brainstormed possible projects and finally settled on trying to build a service that would allow a developer to run any application, regardless of its type, on Amazon’s servers. Pinkham and a few colleagues studied the problem and came up with a plan to use a new open-source tool called Xen, a layer of software that made it easier to run numerous applications on a single physical server in a data center. Pinkham took colleague Chris Brown along with him to South Africa and they set up shop in a nondescript office complex in Constantia, a winemaking region northeast of Cape Town, near a school and a small homeless encampment. Their efforts would become the Elastic Compute Cloud, or EC2—the service that is at the heart of AWS and that became the engine of the Web 2.0 boom.

All too often diagnoses are mere tallies of symptoms, leaving patients such as Marilyn, Kathy, and Mary likely to be viewed as out-of-control women who need to be straightened out. The dictionary defines diagnosis as “a. The act or process of identifying or determining the nature and cause of a disease or injury through evaluation of patient history, examination, and review of laboratory data. b. The opinion derived from such an evaluation.”2 In this chapter, and the next, I will discuss the chasm between official diagnoses and what our patients actually suffer from and discuss how my colleagues and I have tried to change the way patients with chronic trauma histories are diagnosed.

Because life takes people from us all the time. The husband or wife we share everything with might leave the world before we do. The friends we see every week could relocate to new cities, maybe even new countries. Colleagues move on to new jobs. Kids leave home. Parents die too young.

Normally, he didn’t much bother with the papers. But his leave had given him plenty of spare time – more time than he knew what to do with – and the result was that all week he had been following the international news, finding each day’s developments more ominous than the last’s. Turning the pages, his mind went back to the politicians and diplomats he had seen at the Downing Street garden party – the Prime Minister, the Foreign Secretary, the German and Russian ambassadors. They had all seemed so languidly confident, such masters of the world. But now in the press they appeared to him as helpless, diminished, almost puny figures, when set against the tidal wave of the crisis. He wondered if he shouldn’t go in to Scotland Yard, leave or no leave: at least he would have someone to talk to. But then he thought, no, that was stupid, his colleagues would laugh at him. His philosophy was to worry about only those things over which he had some control. He therefore resolved to stick to his original plan and spend the day in his garden. He folded the papers and changed into his work clothes.

Instead of allowing colleagues to effortlessly lob requests in your direction like hand grenades, leaving you to clean up the mess generated by their productivity-shredding shrapnel, they must now do more work themselves before they can commandeer your attention.

But when the conditions are more subtle, things like office politics, opportunism, occasional rounds of layoffs and a general lack of trust among colleagues, we adapt. Like being at base camp on Everest, we believe that we are fine and can cope. However, the fact remains that the human animal is not built for these conditions. Even though we may think we’re comfortable, the effects of the environment still take their toll. Just because we become accustomed, just because it becomes normal, doesn’t mean it’s acceptable. On Everest, even after we’ve adapted, if we spend too long on the mountain, our internal organs start to break down. In an unhealthy culture, it’s the same. Even though we can get used to living with stress and low, regular levels of cortisol in our bodies, that doesn’t mean we should. A constant flow of cortisol isn’t just bad for organizations. It can also do serious damage to our health. Like the other selfish chemicals, cortisol can help us survive, but it isn’t supposed to be in our system all the time. It wreaks havoc with our glucose metabolism. It also increases blood pressure and inflammatory responses and impairs cognitive ability. (It’s harder to concentrate on things outside the organization if we are stressed about what’s going on inside.) Cortisol increases aggression, suppresses our sex drive and generally leaves us feeling stressed out. And here’s the killer—literally. Cortisol prepares our bodies to react suddenly—to fight or run as circumstances demand. Because this takes a lot of energy, when we feel threatened, our bodies turn off nonessential functions, such as digestion and growth. Once the stress has passed, these systems are turned on again. Unfortunately, the immune system is one of the functions that the body deems nonessential, so it shuts down during cortisol bursts. In other words, if we work in environments in which trust is low, relationships are weak or transactional and stress and anxiety are normal, we become much more vulnerable to illness.

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Campbell Road, so he had been told by long-serving colleagues, and some of The Bunk’s inhabitants, was home to the most notorious criminals: thieves, prostitutes, fraudsters – every sort of rogue and vagabond drifted through this slum. Unbelievable as it seemed to Franks, some had settled and been resident a very long while. If a couple of women – one who looked like she’d had seven bells beaten out of her – wanted to set about a well-known brass, it didn’t take a genius to work out that one of their old men was playing away. Bickerstaff might be a stickler for doing things by the book but, in the great scheme of things, this was a petty domestic incident. The Bunk community had its own system of justice. Franks agreed with it: leave them be to shovel up their own shit.

Coal, you see—not many people know this, but my colleague Professor Maniaces has proved it beyond all reasonable doubt—isn’t just ordinary rock. Actually, it’s leaves; millions and millions of leaves, fallen in drifts. Over the years millions and millions and millions of other leaves fall on top of them, until the weight squashes them together and they set like concrete, to the point where they’re easily mistaken for a type of rock. But they aren’t.

In the year 2000, a young scientist named Paul Kenny moved from Dublin to San Diego to continue his neuroscientific research. He noticed something pretty quickly. In the main, Americans don’t eat like Irish people. They eat more, and they consume more sugars and fats in particular. Paul was thrown at first, but he soon assimilated—and within two years, he had gained thirty pounds. “I was like—oh my Lord, what is going on?” he told me. He rose to become the chair of the Department of Neuroscience at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York, and on the way, he grew curious about something. Did this different American diet change your brain? Once you start to eat in this way—lots of processed, fatty, sugary foods—might it be harder to stop? With his colleagues, he designed an experiment to test this. They raised a group of lab rats, and fed them nothing but pre-prepared rat chow. “It’s healthy. It’s balanced,” Paul said—the lab rat equivalent of what my father grew up eating. When this was all they had, the rats would eat until they were full, and then their natural instincts would kick in, and they would stop. They never became obese. Then he introduced the rats to the hyper-American diet. He bought some cheesecake and Snickers bars, and fried up some bacon. He split the rats into two groups. The first group was given access to the junkiest American food for one hour a day. The second group was given access to it almost all day. Both groups also, at the same time, had access to as much of the healthy rat chow as they wanted. You might call these cages Cheesecake Park—a place where the rats got to eat just like us. Paul watched as the rats sniffed the cheesecake and the Snickers and the bacon, and they began to eat. And eat. And eat. The rats who only had an hour with the cheesecake would “dip their head into it” the moment it arrived “and munch all the way through” until it was totally gone, Paul said. “The head would be slick with cheesecake. They’d gorge themselves,” and emerge “smothered in cheesecake.” The rats who had access to it all the time would eat even more, and they consumed it differently. They would eat some, leave it for a little while, then come back and eat some more. They were frequently topping up with sugar and fat. For both groups, as soon as they had the American diet, they lost interest in the healthy old rat chow. They shunned it. It bored them. The rats who got cheesecake for an hour a day would get just a third of their calories from the rat chow. The rats who had cheesecake all the time got just 5 percent of their calories from ordinary rat chow. They lost their ability to control their eating. Their old instincts, which kept them healthy, stopped working. They simply gorged.

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