Color Coded Quotes

While Adrian was interviewing in the back, I got a table and some coffee. Trey came to visit me after about fifteen minutes. "Is that really your brother?" he demanded. "Yes," I said, hoping I sounded convincing. "When you said he was looking for a job, I pictured a male version of you. I figured he'd want to color code the cups or something." "What's your point?" I asked. Trey shook his head. "My point is that you'd better keep looking. I was just back there and overheard him talking with my manager. She was explaining the cleanup he would have to do each night. Then he said something about his hands and manual labor.

Ty laughed, a carefree, boyish sound, and glanced to his side, distracted by what he saw. “You moved the rug.” “I kitty-cornered it.” “Why would you do that?” Ty asked, aghast. “To see you lose your shit when you got home.” Zane leaned closer, grinning evilly. “There are other things out of order too. Books not alphabetized. Coffee mug handles facing different directions.” He lowered his voice to a whisper as Ty’s eyes widened in horror. “The closet isn’t color coded.” “You’re just watching the world burn, huh?” Zane laughed. “God I missed you.” Ty said in a rush of breath.

Lots of people like rainbows. Children make wishes on them, artists paint them, dreamers chase them, but the Aquarian is ahead of everybody. He lives on one. What's more, he's taken it apart and examined it, piece by piece, color by color, and he still believes in it. It isn't easy to believe in something after you know what it's really like, but the Aquarian is essentially a realist, even though his address is tomorrow, with a wild-blue-yonder zip code.

My mother always says that the story you believe depends on the body you're in. What you believe will depend on the color of your hair, your word for god, how many times you've been born, your zip code, whether you have health insurance, what your first language is, and how many snakes you have known personally.

CHOW^TM contained spun, plaited, and woven protein molecules, capped and coded, carefully designed to be ignored by even the most ravenous digestive tract enzymes; no-cal sweeteners; mineral oils replacing vegetable oils; fibrous materials, colorings, and flavorings. The end result was a foodstuff almost indistinguishable from any other except for two things. Firstly, the price, which was slightly higher, and secondly, the nutritional content, which was roughly equivalent to that of a Sony Walkman.

Jodie had taught her that the female firefly flickers the light under her tail to signal to the male that she's ready to mate. Each species of firefly has its own language of flashes. As Kya watched, some females signed dot, dot, dot, dash, flying a zigzag dance, while others flashed dash, dash, dot in a different dance pattern. The males, of course, knew the signals of their species and flew only to those females. Then, as Jodie had put it, they rubbed their bottoms together like most things did, so they could produce young. Suddenly Kya sat up and paid attention: one of the females had changed her code. First she flashed the proper sequence of dashes and dots, attracting a male of her species, and they mated. Then she flickered a different signal, and a male of a different species flew to her. Reading her message, the second male was convinced he'd found a willing female of his own kind and hovered above her to mate. But suddenly the female firefly reached up, grabbed him with her mouth, and ate him, chewing all six legs and both wings. Kya watched others. The females all got what they wanted – first a mate, then a meal – just by changing their signals. Kya knew judgment had no place here. Evil was not in play, just life pulsing on, even at the expense of some of the players. Biology sees right and wrong as the same color in different light.

There is more than one way to add color to the world. More than one way to crown a queen.

Code is not like other how-computers-work books. It doesn't have big color illustrations of disk drives with arrows showing how the data sweeps into the computer. Code has no drawings of trains carrying a cargo of zeros and ones. Metaphors and similes are wonderful literary devices but they do nothing but obscure the beauty of technology.

When Ben turned, his dark eyes danced with yellow light. Already handsome, flaring took his attractiveness to a whole new level. Ben’s coppery skin practically glowed in the evening light. I turned quickly, surprised by the color rising to my cheeks.

Myself, I've always been organized in waves. For months on end, slowly descending into disorder, I drift with the status quo. Then I wake up one morning with a sudden compulsion to color-code my socks or stack them vertically.

I personally would’ve gone with a color-coded pro-con list, but to each her own.

She wished emotions were like flowers, pretty and color-coded so she could pick and choose which ones she wanted at what time.

Today, the pain, the stoking, the thrill of someone new, the promise of so much bliss hovering a fingertip away, the fumbling around people I might have misread and don't want to lose and must second-guess at every turn, the desperate cunning I bring to everyone I want and crave to be wanted by, the screens I put up as though between me and the world there were not just one but layers of rice-paper sliding doors, the urge to scramble and unscramble what was never really coded in the first place - all these started the summer Oliver came into our house. They are embossed on every song that was a hit that summer, in every novel I read during and after his stay, on anything from the smell of rosemary on hot days to the frantic rattle of the cicadas in the afternoon - smells and sounds I'd grown up with and known every year of my life until then but that had suddenly turned on me and acquired an inflection forever colored by the events of that summer.

How could poetry and literature have arisen from something as plebian as the cuneiform equivalent of grocery-store bar codes? I prefer the version in which Prometheus brought writing to man from the gods. But then I remind myself that…we should not be too fastidious about where great ideas come from. Ultimately, they all come from a wrinkled organ that at its healthiest has the color and consistency of toothpaste, and in the end only withers and dies.

It is also tempting to vilify a single despot at the sight of injustice when, in fact, it is the actions, or more commonly inactions, of ordinary people that keep the mechanism of caste running, the people who shrug their shoulders at the latest police killing, the people who laugh off the coded put-downs of marginalized people shared at the dinner table and say nothing for fear of alienating an otherwise beloved uncle. The people who are willing to pay higher property taxes for their own children’s schools but who balk at taxes to educate the children society devalues. Or the people who sit in silence as a marginalized person, whether of color or a woman, is interrupted in a meeting, her ideas dismissed (though perhaps later adopted), for fear of losing caste, each of these keeping intact the whole system that holds everyone in its grip.

I've always been proud of how much my daughter cared about the world. After school she’d study the news, comb the internet for disasters, wars and hate and injustice, write it all down in these color-coded journals. Once, I asked her what she was doing, and she said she was just trying to keep track of it all because it didn’t seem like anybody else noticed or cared that we kept making the same mistakes, that hate in a neighborhood or injustice in a state ran like poison through veins, until another ice shelf collapsed or another animal went extinct. Everything is connected, she’d say. And I’d tell her, You’re only one person and you only have one life.

would have let me break the color code for shoes at work. These were borrowed from Indy’s next door neighbor, who was Denver’s top drag queen. Luckily, he had small feet; or I liked to think that way. Not that my feet were large.

Before I sleep, I drink a tonic laden with processing enhancers and speed-listen to The Colors, The Iliad, Ulysses, Metamorphosis, the Theban plays, The Draconic Labels, Anabasis, and restricted works like The Count of Monte Cristo, Lord of the Flies, Lady Casterly’s Penance, 1984, and The Great Gatsby. I wake knowing three thousand years of literature and legal code and history.

Kids are our future. They’ve got nothing but rose colored glasses on, and don’t have an ounce of corruption in them yet. Teach them right, and they could save the world. Treat them badly, and they can become their own worst enemy.

But she never could keep it straight. All the letters, the acronyms, the codes, the colors, changing like musical chairs, every week, every month. Games demons play. It meant nothing to her, except in a charming sort of way, as it had when Naganya wanted to play at interrogation, while the rest of them wanted chess.

What was a face on television but a code, and what was the difference between these faces but a realignment of line and color to shift among signals? If he grasped deeply this language of symbols, grasped it beneath the surface, he could course through the currents of authority as they coursed through him like heat or the tremble of cold.

It was a mess when I got it open. Barely organized. But I took care of that. Color-coded it. You know, red for politicians, blue for dirty cops, green for drug dealers, et cetera.

Condition White, one of the four Cooper Color Codes describing levels of situational awareness

Mind genius, call it formless substance, thought waves filling its canvas. Fluorescent radiance tasting the color you see. Imagination of a giant is what I'm destined to be. Color coded thoughts, pay attention to its silver lining. It's master-minding. I've discovered my minds frequency is like treasure finding, diamond mining, Kings & Majesties at the round table dining.

When Agnew and Cotter showed the committee how the new lock worked, it didn’t. Something was wrong. But none of the senators, congressmen, or committee staff members realized that it wouldn’t unlock, no matter how many times the proper code was entered. The decoder looked impressive, the colored lights flashed, and everyone in the hearing room agreed that it was absolutely essential for national security.

Jubal shrugged. "Abstract design is all right-for wall paper or linoleum. But art is the process of evoking pity and terror, which is not abstract at all but very human. What the self-styled modern artists are doing is a sort of unemotional pseudo-intellectual masturbation. . . whereas creative art is more like intercourse, in which the artist must seduce- render emotional-his audience, each time. These ladies who won't deign to do that- and perhaps can't- of course lost the public. If they hadn't lobbied for endless subsidies, they would have starved or been forced to go to work long ago. Because the ordinary bloke will not voluntarily pay for 'art' that leaves him unmoved- if he does pay for it, the money has to be conned out of him, by taxes or such." "You know, Jubal, I've always wondered why i didn't give a hoot for paintings or statues- but I thought it was something missing in me, like color blindness." "Mmm, one does have to learn to look at art, just as you must know French to read a story printed in French. But in general terms it's up to the artist to use language that can be understood, not hide it in some private code like Pepys and his diary. Most of these jokers don't even want to use language you and I know or can learn. . . they would rather sneer at us and be smug, because we 'fail' to see what they are driving at. If indeed they are driving at anything- obscurity is usually the refuge of incompetence. Ben, would you call me an artists?” “Huh? Well, I’ve never thought about it. You write a pretty good stick.” “Thank you. ‘Artist’ is a word I avoid for the same reasons I hate to be called ‘Doctor.’ But I am an artist, albeit a minor one. Admittedly most of my stuff is fit to read only once… and not even once for a busy person who already knows the little I have to say. But I am an honest artist, because what I write is consciously intended to reach the customer… reach him and affect him, if possible with pity and terror… or, if not, at least to divert the tedium of his hours with a chuckle or an odd idea. But I am never trying to hide it from him in a private language, nor am I seeking the praise of other writers for ‘technique’ or other balderdash. I want the praise of the cash customer, given in cash because I’ve reached him- or I don’t want anything. Support for the arts- merde! A government-supported artist is an incompetent whore! Damn it, you punched one of my buttons. Let me fill your glass and you tell me what is on your mind.

Piece by Piece Piece by piece They tear at you: Peeling away layers of being, Lying about who you are, Speaking for your dreams. In the squalor of their eyes You are an outlaw. Dressing you in a jacket of lies —tailor-made in steel— You fit their perfect picture. Take it off! Make your own mantle. Question the interrogators. Eyeball the death in their gaze. Say you won’t succumb. Say you won’t believe them When they rename you. Say you won’t accept their codes, Their colors, their putrid morals. Here you have a way. Here you can sing victory. Here you are not a conquered race Perpetual victim —the sullen face in a thunderstorm. Hands/minds, they are carving out A sanctuary. Use these weapons Against them. Use your given gifts —they are not stone.

Dear my strong girls, you will all go through that phase of life making a mistake of helping a toxic girl whose friendship with you turns into her self-interest. This kind of girls is a real burden towards the empowerment of other females as they can never get past their own insecurity and grow out of high-school-like drama. Despite how advanced we are in educating modern women, this type will still go through life living in identity crisis, endlessly looking for providers of any kind at the end of the day. They can never stand up for others or things that matter because they can't stand up for themselves. They care what everyone thinks only doing things to impress men, friends, strangers, everyone in society except themselves, while at the same time can't stand seeing other women with purpose get what those women want in life. But let me tell you, this is nothing new, let them compete and compare with you as much as they wish, be it your career, love or spirit. You know who you are and you will know who your true girls are by weeding out girls that break our girlie code of honor, but do me a favor by losing this type of people for good. Remind yourself to never waste time with a person who likes to betray others' trust, never. Disloyalty is a trait that can't be cured. Bless yourself that you see a person's true colors sooner than later. With love, your mama. XOXO

Children weren’t color-coded at all until the early twentieth century: in the era before Maytag, all babies wore white as a practical matter, since the only way of getting clothes clean was to boil them. What’s more, both boys and girls wore what were thought of as gender-neutral dresses. When nursery colors were introduced, pink was actually considered the more masculine hue, a pastel version of red, which was associated with strength. Blue, with its intimations of the Virgin Mary, constancy, and faithfulness, symbolized femininity.

Alpha sets the scale of nature -- the size of atoms and all things made of them, the intensity and colors of light, the strength of magnetism, and the metabolic rate of life itself. It controls everything that we see. ... In 137, apparently, science had found Nature's PIN Code.

Behind his bedroom door, he can sit and put Hall & Oates on the record player in the corner, and nobody hears him humming along like his dad to "Rich Girl." He can wear the reading glasses he always insists he doesn't need. He can make as many meticulous study guides with color-coded sticky notes as he wants. He's not going to be the youngest elected congressman in modern history without earning it, but nobody needs to know how hard he's kicking underwater. His sex symbol stock would plummet.

...I witnessed a piece of her soul leave her body. Until that day, I had thought souls left bodies at the time of death, all at once. But when I saw Olivia's face, her arms crossed in front of her, the tears streaming down her cheeks, and the rose-colored hives blooming upward and outward across her chest, I knew everything I had believed about souls leaving bodies was wrong. Souls leave bodies in tiny gasps, like when you hold the lip of a balloon tightly and let out the air a little bit at a time" -Molly

A man who wants to code his colors should not haul down his colors.

true connectedness does not recognize borders, color, or other such models of differentiation. The truly extraordinary have reverence for humanity as a whole.

Nature had obviously color-coded people for a reason. Otherwise, what the hell were all these different colors for?

The Truth is different than human truths; they are like LIGHT. Truths are like a color, absolute and true, while THE TRUTH is all colors and still colorless; the duality of Truth.

The trick was not simply to write the code that turned information into pictures but to find the best pictures to draw—shapes and colors that led the mind to meaning.

To the butterfly, it’s probably something more beautiful than we can imagine since they have fifteen different types of color receptors versus our meager three! The

Claiming that the past was socially better than the present is also a hallmark of white supremacy. Consider any period in the past from the perspective of people of color: 246 years of brutal enslavement; the rape of black women for the pleasure of white men and to produce more enslaved workers; the selling off of black children; the attempted genocide of Indigenous people, Indian removal acts, and reservations; indentured servitude, lynching, and mob violence; sharecropping; Chinese exclusion laws; Japanese American internment; Jim Crow laws of mandatory segregation; black codes; bans on black jury service; bans on voting; imprisoning people for unpaid work; medical sterilization and experimentation; employment discrimination; educational discrimination; inferior schools; biased laws and policing practices; redlining and subprime mortgages; mass incarceration; racist media representations; cultural erasures, attacks, and mockery; and untold and perverted historical accounts, and you can see how a romanticized past is strictly a white construct. But it is a powerful construct because it calls out to a deeply internalized sense of superiority and entitlement and the sense that any advancement for people of color is an encroachment on this entitlement.

A few decades from now, if it becomes possible and safe, should we allow parents to enhance the IQ and muscles of their kids? Should we let them decide eye color? Skin color? Height?

She read the color-coded series of Andrew Lang's fairy tales to her mother. They became lost in an enchanted cottage with vines growing over the window. It was dark and it was quiet and they could hear each other softly breathing. Every story had the same message: what was deep inside could only be deciphered by someone who understood how easily a heart could be broken.

Today, the pain, the stoking, the thrill of someone new, the promise of so much bliss hovering a fingertip away, the fumbling around people I might misread and don’t want to lose and must second-guess at every turn, the desperate cunning I bring to everyone I want and crave to be wanted by, the screens I put up as though between me and the world there were not just one but layers of rice-paper sliding doors, the urge to scramble and unscramble what was never really coded in the first place—all these started the summer Oliver came into our house. They are embossed on every song that was a hit that summer, in every novel I read during and after his stay, on anything from the smell of rosemary on hot days to the frantic rattle of the cicadas in the afternoon—smells and sounds I’d grown up with and known every year of my life until then but that had suddenly turned on me and acquired an inflection forever colored by the events of that summer.

Language brings with it an identity and a culture, or at least the perception of it. A shared language says, 'We're the same.' A language barrier says, 'We're different.' .... The great thing about language is that you can just as easily use it to do the opposite, convince people that they are the same. Racism teaches us that we are different because of the color of our skin, but because racism is stupid, it's easily tricked. If you're a racist and you meet someone who doesn't look like you, the fact that he can't speak like you reinforces your racist preconceptions. He's different, less intelligent. A brilliant scientist can come over the border from Mexico to live in America, but if he speaks in broken English, people say, 'Hey, I don't trust this guy.' 'But he's a scientist.' 'Yeah, in Mexican science maybe. I don't trust him.' However, if the person who doesn't look like you speaks like you, your brain short-circuits because your racism program has none of those instructions in the code. 'Wait, wait,' your mind says, 'The racism code says if he doesn't look like me, he isn't like me, but the language code says if he speaks like me, he is like me. Something is off here. I can't figure this out.

We name victims and perpetrators by a color code that masks the actual forces and patterns that are vexing us. We see ethnic groups with our left eye and individuals with our right eye, and we are blind to anything else. We can’t see the flows of power and control in the world, the systemic suck of resources from south to north. An illusion of time and space, a false global map of places and peoples has slid over our frontal lobes.

Political truths are like colors in the rainbow, they may be true, except like the color purple which is created in the mind, however they are not THE WHOLE TRUTH, which is like LIGHT, colorless and yet all colors, seen and unseen.

leading with computational thinking instead of code itself, and helping students imagine how being computer savvy could help them in any career, boosts the number of girls and kids of color taking—and sticking with—computer science.

Color-coded rank hats? Those are worse than wearing a bull’s-eye on your chest! If you want your commanders to survive a week, you want no difference in uniform visible from more than a few meters away. Marking them out like this is madness!

The word union itself seemed to be a dog whistle in the South, code for undeserving people of color who needed a union to compensate for some flaw in their character. As the workers spoke, I realized that it couldn’t be a coincidence that, to this day, the region that is the least unionized, with the lowest state minimum wages and the weakest labor protections overall, was the one that had been built on slave labor—on a system that compensated the labor of Black people at exactly zero.

Two years of Newtrition investment and research had produced CHOW™. CHOW™ contained spun, plaited, and woven protein molecules, capped and coded, carefully designed to be ignored by even the most ravenous digestive tract enzymes; no-cal sweeteners; mineral oils replacing vegetable oils; fibrous materials, colorings, and flavorings. The end result was a foodstuff almost indistinguishable from any other except for two things. Firstly, the price, which was slightly higher, and secondly the nutritional content, which was roughly equivalent to that of a Sony Walkman. It didn’t matter how much you ate, you lost weight.* Fat people had bought it. Thin people who didn’t want to get fat had bought it. CHOW™ was the ultimate diet food—carefully spun, woven, textured, and pounded to imitate anything, from potatoes to venison, although the chicken sold best. Sable sat back and watched the money roll in. He watched CHOW™ gradually fill the ecological niche that used to be filled by the old, untrademarked food. He followed CHOW™ with SNACKS™—junk food made from real junk. MEALS™ was Sable’s latest brainwave. MEALS™ was CHOW™ with added sugar and fat. The theory was that if you ate enough MEALS™ you would a) get very fat, and b) die of malnutrition.

It’s not funny, Joan. My bras are all in the first row, color-coded alphabetically from left to right, and then a row of panties, all folded in little squares, and then slips. And socks along the back row. Everything’s so neat it makes me want to throw up.

Shock and aura. Things are stronger and brighter and I feel on the edge of something inexpressible. Coded messages in the in-flight magazines. Energy Shield. Uncompromising Care. Electricity, colors, radiance. Everything is a signpost pointing to something else.

Our visual field, the entire view of what we can see when we look out into the world, is divided into billions of tiny spots or pixels. Each pixel is filled with atoms and molecules that are in vibration. The retinal cells in the back of our eyes detect the movement of those atomic particles. Atoms vibrating at different frequencies emit different wavelengths of energy, and this information is eventually coded as different colors by the visual cortex in the occipital region of our brain. A visual image is built by our brain's ability to package groups of pixels together in the form of edges. Different edges with different orientations - vertical, horizontal and oblique, combine to form complex images. Different groups of cells in our brain add depth, color and motion to what we see.

You’re thinking she doesn’t see your outfit, or the color of your shoes. What she does see is You! I think you could stand in a line of a thousand people all wearing costumes and she would see you out of all of them. She loves you and you can’t camouflage yourself from love like that.

But no one can deny that rigid gender education begins early on in life—from pink and blue color-coding of infant outfits to genderlabeling toys and games. And those who overstep these arbitrary borders are punished. Severely. When the steel handcuffs tighten, it is human bones that crack.

My mother always says that the story you believe depends on the body you're in. What you believe will depend on the color of your hair, your word for god, how many times you've been born, your zip code, whether you have health insurance, what your first language is, and how man snakes you have known personally.

Examined in color through the adjustable window of a computer screen, the Mandelbrot set seems more fractal than fractals, so rich is its complication across scales. A cataloguing of the different images within it or a numerical description of the set's outline would require an infinity of information. But here is a paradox: to send a full description of the set over a transmission line requires just a few dozen characters of code. A terse computer program contains enough information to reproduce the entire set. Those who were first to understand the way the set commingles complexity and simplicity were caught unprepared—even Mandelbrot.

In high school I developed a habit of wandering through shopping malls after school, swaying through the bright, chill mezzanines until I was so dazed with consumer goods and product codes, with promenades and escalators, with mirrors and Muzak and noise and light, that a fuse would blow in my brain and all at once everything would become unintelligible: color without form, a babble of detached molecules. Then I would walk like a zombie to the parking lot and drive to the baseball field, where I wouldn't even get out of the car, just sit with my hands on the steering wheel and stare at the Cyclone fence and the yellowed winter grass until the sun went down and it was too dark for me to see.

One of the most popular illustrations we use in Love and Respect Conferences compares women and men to pink and blue. The audience responds immediately when I talk about how she sees through pink sunglasses and hears with pink hearing aids, while he sees through blue sunglasses and hears with blue hearing aids. In other words, women and men are very different. Yet, when blue blends with pink, it becomes purple, God’s color—the color of royalty. The way for pink and blue to blend is spelled out in Ephesians 5:33: “[Every husband] must love his wife as he loves himself, and the wife must respect her husband” (NIV). Living out Ephesians 5:33 is the key to blending together as one to reflect the very image of God.

A caste system has a way of filtering down to every inhabitant, its codes absorbed like mineral springs, setting the expectations of where one fits on the ladder. “The mill worker with nobody else to ‘look down on,’ regards himself as eminently superior to the Negro,” observed the Yale scholar Liston Pope in 1942. “The colored man represents his last outpost against social oblivion.

That assumption—that labeling and sorting children based on gender doesn’t really matter as long as everyone is treated fairly—would hold true if children only paid attention to the more overt, obvious messages we adults send. If children only listened to our purposeful messages, parenting would be easy. Most (but not all) parents and teachers take great effort in treating their children fairly, regardless of gender. Parents don’t need to say to their daughters, “You probably won’t enjoy math” or say to their sons, “Real boys don’t play with dolls.” Most parents wouldn’t dream of saying these blatant stereotypes to their kids. But research has shown that when we label (and sort and color-code) by gender, children do notice. And it matters—children are learning whether you mean to be teaching them or not.

I cream my dream! I knead my realm and scream my dream...trimming my realm. I am Light-Blue, all the while for colors I code. In Light-Blue, my dream I cream, making it a higher level on which I life my dreams to be realized. that dream realized is that realm internalized. The cream actualized has the aim immortalized. The tallest building in the world is still a dream; cream your dream and be over the top.

person’s degree of spirituality is determined 29 percent by heredity, and 71 percent by environment. Our spirituality is substantially—roughly two-thirds—a factor of how we’re raised, the company we keep, the things we do to build the muscle. But still a significant degree of our capacity to experience the sacred and transcendent—one-third—is inscribed in our genetic code, as innate as our eye color or fingerprints.

People of color know that not all of the safety and spoils of whiteness are available to us. Yet we can speak in the voice of whitness if we so choose. Some of us know no other voice. It was born in us. It is the voice colonization left us. Some of us adopt it later--in childhood or early adulthood -- and lose our other voices. Some of us never allow whiteness into our throats. Some of us code-switch. I am a code-switcher.

It means the archives are “alive” the same way artificial intelligence is “alive.” It tracks us. It maybe (probably) thinks in some rudimentary way. But its information about the world doesn’t come from its own intrinsic existence—it comes from data that we supply. And? And that information is imperfect but it’s still not as imperfect as humanity. In nature, things that don’t fit the pattern die. Evolution is a code, it determines that the life cycle of any species is a matter of pattern recognition. But humans don’t let other humans die even when they should—even when it means disproportionate resources to keep them alive. Or they kill each other off in direct opposition to the codes of survival, based on something as irrelevant as skin color or which thing they speak to in the sky. Whether a person lives or dies is almost completely arbitrary.

Parents are very comfortable talking to their children about gender, and they work very hard to counterprogram against boy-girl stereotypes. That ought to be our model for talking about race. The same way we remind our [children], ‘Mommies can be doctors just like daddies,’ we ought to be telling all children that doctors can be any skin color. It’s not complicated what to say. It’s only a matter of how often we reinforce it.”5

To great effect, Reagan echoed white frustration in race-neutral terms through implicit racial appeals. His “color-blind” rhetoric on crime, welfare, taxes, and states’ rights was clearly understood by white (and black) voters as having a racial dimension, though claims to that effect were impossible to prove. The absence of explicitly racist rhetoric afforded the racial nature of his coded appeals a certain plausible deniability.

In their articles and on the air, political journalists loved including local color (meat on a stick at the state fair, polka bands, caucuses held in a gun shop or grain elevator) in inverse proportions to how much they'd disdain such spectacles in their actual lives, off the job. A reporter had once told me that if she was getting dinner on her own on the road, she would choose a restaurant by googling the zip code and kale salad.

Early in the colonys history, he argued, the European men who came to the colonies "burning with the desire to make a fortune" but "weakened by the heat of the climate, often sick, and deprived of the aid wives of their own color could have given them," turned to "African women." These slave women cared for them assiduously, hoping to gain "the greatest recompense, their liberty." "These first whites," Raimond explained, "lived with these women as if they were married" and had children with them. Some freed the women and married them, as the Code Noir stipulated whites who had children with slaves should do. Many whites left land and slaves to their partners and children. Indeed it was generally expected that they would do so, and Saint-Domingue whites resisted royal attempts to institute laws outlawing such bequests. As a result, a class of property-owning free people of color emerged in the colony.s

Colton turned out to be as formidable a tutor as he was a teaching assistant. His notes were a study in diligence. Every subject was meticulously labeled, the pages pristinely bulleted, each notebook alphabetized and color-coded to the point of obsession. Each night they staked out a workplace and studied deep into the night, combing through his stenographer-worthy binders until she'd managed to flood the sizable gaps in her notebooks with everything in his.

Sex work is a low entry-barrier job which functions as a failsafe for many groups marginalized by capitalism: women, people of color, LGBTQ people, disabled people, and poor and criminalized people...This is why whorephobia is actually an intertwined combination of stigmas. The way people loathe sex workers—the way they think of us as dirty, dumb, perverse, amoral agents of infection with no self-respect—is heavily coded with misogyny, racism, classism, transmisogyny, homophobia and ableism.

The possibility that Adam Weishaupt killed George Washington and took his place, serving as our first President for two terms, is now confirmed…. The two main colors of the American flag are, excluding a small patch of blue in one corner, red and white: these are also the official colors of the Hashishim. The flag and the Illuminati pyramid both have thirteen horizontal divisions: thirteen is, of course, the traditional code for marijuana … and is still used in that sense by Hell’s Angels among others.

circles of hell. He hated to admit it, but Eugene had been right in his choice of Inferno, except their interpretations differed. Where Eugene saw only the internal battle of the privileged soul, Sunil saw the entire architecture and structures of racism and apartheid: three concentric circles of life and economics. Color-coded circles for easy understanding, whites at the heart, coloreds at the next remove, and finally, the blacks at the outermost circle; the closest to hell—the strange inverse sense of apartheid.

understand that there are rules to follow if you are to win: 1. The model will provide consistent value to your customers, employees, suppliers, and lenders, beyond what they expect. 2. The model will be operated by people with the lowest possible level of skill. 3. The model will stand out as a place of impeccable order. 4. All work in the model will be documented in Operations Manuals. 5. The model will provide a uniformly predictable service to the customer. 6. The model will utilize a uniform color, dress, and facilities code.

That ought to be our model for talking about race. The same way we remind our [children], ‘Mommies can be doctors just like daddies,’ we ought to be telling all children that doctors can be any skin color. It’s not complicated what to say. It’s only a matter of how often we reinforce it.”5 In other words, best practices in the area of race involve doing the opposite of what colorblindness seems to command. We must notice and talk about race, self-critically and carefully, in order to understand and attempt to set aside its power over our imaginations.

the importance of choosing the right words for things, even if those words offended people. She didn’t like it when she heard a friend say that a person who had died had “passed away” or that a staggering drunk at a party was “a bit indisposed.” It was more important to be honest. “We glide over the offensiveness of names and calm down our consciences by eulogistic mellifluous terms, until our very moral senses are dulled,” she wrote. “Let things be shown, let them come forth in their real colors, and humanity will not be so prone to a sin which is glossed over by a dainty public!

These are private social infrastructures, there for the pleasure and convenience of first-tier staff members whose color-coded badges grant them access, but, crucially, not for the low-level temps and contractors who cook and clean in the same organization, and not for neighboring residents or visitors. These expensive, carefully designed social infrastructures work so well for high-level tech employees that they have little reason to patronize small local businesses—coffee shops, gyms, restaurants, and the like—that might otherwise benefit far more from the presence of a large employer.

In this frozen moment, Birchville split in two around me. No, more than that. It wasn’t Birchville only. I saw there was a second South. My whole life I’d only seen one. I loved my South, though I could see how it was broken, plagued still with the legacies of slavery and war and segregation. History and a thousand unseen walls divided up the territory, so that we had a black Baptist church and a white one, and the narrow aisle between the color-coded lunch tables at the high school was invisibly a chasm filled with dragons. Still, I always thought my homeland was a single place. I was wrong.

The Flag Code then quotes Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, India’s second president, who explained: The saffron color denotes renunciation or disinterestedness. Our leaders must be indifferent to material gains and dedicate themselves to their work. The white in the center is light, the path of truth to guide our conduct. The green shows our relation to the soil, our relation to the plant life here on which all other life depends. The Ashoka wheel in the center of the white is the wheel of the law of dharma. Truth or Satya, dharma or virtue ought to be the controlling principles of all those who work under this flag.

I have coded my colors! I have the code of my creativity. My creation has inception that perception alone has progression in anticipation. I yield my creation. I create the animation that perfections alone in dominations has inventions of my creation. I give life practicality! My practical creativity I give life to all. The tactical creature all invent the artifact's venture as nature doeth creature with practice. In mother nature I venture with the creature to reveal the inventor of practice in all nature. the latest creativity is not the final of novelty, be passionately creative and creatively communicative.

The succession of financial bubbles, and the amassing of personal and public debt, Whybrow views as simply an expression of the lizard-brained way of life. A color-coded map of American personal indebtedness could be laid on top of the Centers for Disease Control’s color-coded map that illustrates the fantastic rise in rates of obesity across the United States since 1985 without disturbing the general pattern. The boom in trading activity in individual stock portfolios; the spread of legalized gambling; the rise of drug and alcohol addiction; it is all of a piece. Everywhere you turn you see Americans sacrifice their long-term interests for a short-term reward.

For years I happily wrote nothing but carefully researched and argued cultural history. Now with fiction I can begin where the archives end. It’s like turning old black and white photos into a full-color video. Research reveals the past; fiction puts it in motion. And once history comes to life, it’s clear that people then wrestled with troubles a lot like our own. I love writing mysteries because they’re ultimately about justice, and what’s more complicated than guilt and innocence? I especially relish writing about crimes that pit the law against my characters’ moral code. In the end justice is often about power, and the struggle over who gets to decide what’s right or wrong makes for great stories in any genre. Historical mysteries are a great way into the life’s most meaty stuff.

Language brings with it an identity and a culture, or at least the perception of it. A shared language says “We’re the same.” A language barrier says “We’re different.” The architects of apartheid understood this. Part of the effort to divide black people was to make sure we were separated not just physically but by language as well. In the Bantu schools, children were only taught in their home language. Zulu kids learned in Zulu. Tswana kids learned in Tswana. Because of this, we’d fall into the trap the government had set for us and fight among ourselves, believing that we were different. The great thing about language is that you can just as easily use it to do the opposite: convince people that they are the same. Racism teaches us that we are different because of the color of our skin. But because racism is stupid, it’s easily tricked. If you’re racist and you meet someone who doesn’t look like you, the fact that he can’t speak like you reinforces your racist preconceptions: He’s different, less intelligent. A brilliant scientist can come over the border from Mexico to live in America, but if he speaks in broken English, people say, “Eh, I don’t trust this guy.” “But he’s a scientist.” “In Mexican science, maybe. I don’t trust him.” However, if the person who doesn’t look like you speaks like you, your brain short-circuits because your racism program has none of those instructions in the code. “Wait, wait,” your mind says, “the racism code says if he doesn’t look like me he isn’t like me, but the language code says if he speaks like me he… is like me? Something is off here. I can’t figure this out.

The quintessential "self-made man" (and it is almost always a man) is self-sufficient, confident, stoic, righteously industrious, performatively heterosexual, and power. His success is signified through acquisition--home ownership, marriage, and children--and display of taste and things--craft beer and Courvoisier, Teslas and big trucks, bespoke suits and I-don't-care CEO hoodies. On the surface, it looks like that idea has evolved some. We have our Beyonces, Baracks, and Buttigiegs. But that doesn't mean the American Dream has become liberated from its origins or that its promise of freedom is more free. It just means more of us are permitted entry to the club if we do the double duty of conforming to its standards and continuing to meet the ones set for us--women must lean in, queer couples must get married, people of color must be master code-switchers.

Neliss, why is this rug wet?” Legna peeked around the corner to glance at the rug in question, looking as if she had never seen it before. “We have a rug there?” “Did you or did you not promise me you were not going to practice extending how long you can hold your invisible bowls of water in the house? And what on earth is that noise?” “Okay, I confess to the water thing, which was an honest mistake, I swear it. But as for a noise, I have no idea what you are talking about.” “You cannot hear that? It has been driving me crazy for days now. It just repeats over and over again, a sort of clicking sound.” “Well, it took a millennium, but you have finally gone completely senile. Listen, this is a house built by Lycanthropes. It is more a cave than a house, to be honest. I have yet to decorate to my satisfaction. There is probably some gizmo of some kind lying around, and I will come across it eventually or it will quit working the longer it is exposed to our influence. Even though I do not hear anything, I will start looking for it. Is this satisfactory?” “I swear, Magdelegna, I am never letting you visit that Druid ever again.” “Oh, stop it. You do not intimidate me, as much as you would love to think you do. Now, I will come over there if you promise not to yell at me anymore. You have been quite moody lately.” “I would be a hell of a lot less moody if I could figure out what that damn noise is.” Legna came around the corner, moving into his embrace with her hands behind her back. He immediately tried to see what she had in them. “What is that?” “Remember when you asked me why I cut my hair?” “Ah yes, the surprise. Took you long enough to get to it.” “If you do not stop, I am not going to give it to you.” “Okay. I am stopping. What is it?” She held out the box tied with a ribbon to him and he accepted it with a lopsided smile. “I do not think I even remember the last time I received a gift,” he said, leaning to kiss her cheek warmly. He changed his mind, though, and opted to go for her mouth next. She smiled beneath the cling of their lips and pushed away. “Open it.” He reached for the ribbon and soon was pulling the top off the box. “What is this?” “Gideon, what does it look like?” He picked up the woven circlet with a finger and inspected it closely. It was an intricately and meticulously fashioned necklace, clearly made strand by strand from the coffee-colored locks of his mate’s hair. In the center of the choker was a silver oval with the smallest writing he had ever seen filling it from top to bottom. “What does it say?” “It is the medics’ code of ethics,” she said softly, taking it from him and slipping behind him to link the piece around his neck beneath his hair. “And it fits perfectly.” She came around to look at it, smiling. “I knew it would look handsome on you.” “I do not usually wear jewelry or ornamentation, but . . . it feels nice. How on earth did they make this?” “Well, it took forever, if you want to know why it took so long for me to make good on the surprise. But I wanted you to have something that was a little bit of me and a little bit of you.” “I already have something like that. It is you. And . . . and me, I guess,” he laughed. “We are a little bit of each other for the rest of our lives.” “See, that makes this a perfect symbol of our love,” she said smartly, reaching up on her toes to kiss him. “Well, thank you, sweet. It is a great present and an excellent surprise. Now, if you really want to surprise me, help me find out what that noise is.

Today, the pain, the stroking, the thrill of someone new, the promise of so much bliss hovering a fingertip away, the fumbling around people I might misread and don't want to lose and must second-guess at every turn, the desperate cunning I bring to everyone I want and crave to be wanted by, the screens I put up as though between me and the world there were not just one but layers of rice-paper sliding doors, the urge to scramble and unscramble what was never really coded in the first place—all these started the summer Oliver came into our house. They are embossed on every song that was a hit that summer, in every novel I read during and after his stay, on anything from the smell of rosemary on hot days to the frantic rattle of the cicadas in the afternoon—smells and sounds I'd grown up with and known every year of my life until then but that had suddenly turned on me and acquired an inflection forever colored by the events of that summer.

On Floriography This poem explores the ancient practice of floriography, the coded language of flowers, as a way to express human love through the use of fragrance, colors, and vivid symbolism. By elucidating the phenomenon of florescence alongside the art of floral arrangement, the poem encourages readers to extract poetry and beauty out of a dystopic world. If you often find yourself at a loss for words or don’t know what to say to those you love, just extract poetry out of poverty, this dystopia of civilization rendered fragrant, blossoming onto star-blue fields of loosestrife, heady spools of spike lavender, of edible clover beckoning to say without bruising a jot of dog’s tooth violet, a nib of larkspur notes, or the day’s perfumed reports of indigo in the gloaming— what to say to those whom you love in this world? Use floriography, or as the flower-sellers put it, Say it with flowers. —Indigo, larkspur, star-blue, my dear.

I think you should consider your alternatives." "What alternatives?" "Me." She tilted her head down to hide her smile. "You aren't on the list." "I don't care about the damn list, and I don't care about the game. I want you, Layla. And if I have to leave the office-" "I don't want you to leave the office," she said softly. "I like sharing the space with you. I like being with you. I like that you're caring and protective. I like that you line up your pencils, and color-code your files, and that your shoes are always polished, and your ties are perfectly knotted. I like that you are funny and sarcastic, and some of the best times I've had have been interviewing people with you. I like how loyal you are, even though you support the wrong baseball team. I like that you pretend not to know any movies but you can list almost every horror film ever made. And I like the way you kiss." His face softened and he gave a satisfied smile. "You like my kisses?" "Very much." "What else do you like?" Layla licked her lips. "Take me to your place and I'll show you.

To great effect, Reagan echoed white frustration in race-neutral terms through implicit racial appeals. His 'color-blind' rhetoric on crime, welfare, taxes, and states' rights was clearly understood by white (and black) voters as having a racial dimension, though claims to that effect were impossible to prove. The absence of explicitly racist rhetoric afforded the racial nature of his coded appeals a certain plausible deniability. For example, when Reagan kicked off his presidential campaign at the annual Neshoba County Fair near Philadelphia, Mississippi - the town where three civil rights activists were murdered in 1964 - he assured the crowd 'I believe in states' rights,' and promised to restore to states and local governments the power that properly belonged to them. His critics promptly alleged that he was signaling a racial message to his audience, suggesting allegiance with those who resisted desegregation, but Reagan firmly denied it, forcing liberals into a position that would soon become familiar - arguing that something is racist but finding it impossible to prove in the absence of explicitly racist language.

They also devised an ingeniously low-tech solution to a complex problem. Even highly verbal autistic adults occasionally struggle with processing and producing speech, particularly in the chaotic and generally overwhelming atmosphere of a conference. By providing attendees with name-tag holders and pieces of paper that were red on one side and yellow on the other, they enabled Autistics to communicate their needs and desires without having to articulate them in the pressure of the moment. The red side facing out signified, "Nobody should try to interact with me," while the yellow side meant, "Only people I already know should interact with me, not strangers." (Green badges were added later to signify, "I want to interact but am having trouble initiating, so please initiate an interaction with me.") These color-coded "interaction signal badges" turned out to be so useful that they have since been widely adopted at autistic-run events all over the world, and name-tag labels similar to Autreat ("autistic retreat") green badges have recently been employed at conferences for Perl programmers to indicate that the wearer is open to spontaneous social approaches.

It was common knowledge at one prominent women’s brand I worked for that the reason they didn’t have more women of color, specifically Black women, on their legacy magazine covers was because they didn’t sell as well. For a business enterprise, and a financially struggling one at that, the editorial strategy to routinely flood the covers with normatively sized straight white women was presented as necessary business, and not a deeply racist lens. But this is where I’ve encountered capitalism to be at its most damaging: it provides an all-encompassing language to code racism, heterosexism, and classism as something else—to establish distance between these deeply coursing prejudices and the unavoidable realities of running a business. This distance insulates. It establishes an alternative reality in which testimonials, diversity reports, investigations, and data analysis on representation don’t resonate because making money is the ultimate objective above all else. But that’s all the more reason why the impetus to drive profits also needs to be aligned and analyzed in endeavors against oppression. Because the drive to make money, more money, more money than your competitors, more money than you made last year, more money than projected for the following year is an enduring vehicle for suppression.

Yet another study by the Brain Research Institute of the University of Zurich in 2011 exposed baby mice to stressful situations by separating them from their mothers. The abandoned mice experienced anxiety and depression—which, right, seems obvious. What was shocking was how this separation affected future generations of mice. When the traumatized mice had babies, and then when their babies had babies, the scientists never separated them from their parents. They led perfectly content, nurtured little mouse lives. But for three subsequent generations, the anxiety and depression persisted. There is real scientific evidence that the traumas we experience can be passed on to our children and even our grandchildren. DNA, of course, is the genetic code that determines the shape of our nose, our eye color, our likelihood to contract certain diseases. So when our body is making and remaking itself, every cell in our body actually “reads” our DNA and uses it as a blueprint for what to build. But not every cell reads the entire blueprint—the whole, long string of DNA. Inside each cell is both our DNA—or our genome—and the epigenome, a layer of chemical markers that sits on top of our DNA. The epigenome is like a SparkNotes for the cells—it flags which genes our cells really need to read. So the epigenome helps decide which genes actually get represented by our bodies. It turns certain genes on and other genes off. Both the genome and our epigenome are passed down generationally.

Oedipa spent the next several days in and out of libraries and earnest discussions with Emory Bortz and Genghis Cohen. She feared a little for their security in view of what was happening to everyone else she knew. The day after reading Blobb's Peregrinations she, with Bortz, Grace, and the graduate students, attended Randolph Driblette's burial, listened to a younger brother's helpless, stricken eulogy, watched the mother, spectral in afternoon smog, cry, and came back at night to sit on the grave and drink Napa Valley muscatel, which Driblette in his time had put away barrels of. There was no moon, smog covered the stars, all black as a Tristero rider. Oedipa sat on the earth, ass getting cold, wondering whether, as Driblette had suggested that night from the shower, some version of herself hadn't vanished with him. Perhaps her mind would go on flexing psychic muscles that no longer existed; would be betrayed and mocked by a phantom self as the amputee is by a phantom limb. Someday she might replace whatever of her had gone away by some prosthetic device, a dress of a certain color, a phrase in a ' letter, another lover. She tried to reach out, to whatever coded tenacity of protein might improbably have held on six feet below, still resisting decay-any stubborn quiescence perhaps gathering itself for some last burst, some last scramble up through earth, just-glimmering, holding together with its final strength a transient, winged shape, needing to settle at once in the warm host, or dissipate forever into the dark. If you come to me, prayed Oedipa, bring your memories of the last night. Or if you have to keep down your payload, the last five minutes-that may be enough. But so I'll know if your walk into the sea had anything to do with Tristero. If they got rid of you for the reason they got rid of Hilarius and Mucho and Metzger-maybe because they thought I no longer needed you. They were wrong. I needed you. Only bring me that memory, and you can live with me for whatever time I've got. She remembered his head, floating in the shower, saying, you could fall in love with me. But could she have saved him? She looked over at the girl who'd given her the news of his death. Had they been in love? Did she know why Driblette had put in those two extra lines that night? Had he even known why? No one could begin to trace it. A hundred hangups, permuted, combined-sex, money, illness, despair with the history of his time and place, who knew. Changing the script had no clearer motive than his suicide. There was the same whimsy to both. Perhaps-she felt briefly penetrated, as if the bright winged thing had actually made it to the sanctuary of her heart-perhaps, springing from the same slick labyrinth, adding those two lines had even, in a way never to be explained, served him as a rehearsal for his night's walk away into that vast sink of the primal blood the Pacific. She waited for the winged brightness to announce its safe arrival. But there was silence. Driblette, she called. The signal echoing down twisted miles of brain circuitry. Driblette! But as with Maxwell's Demon, so now. Either she could not communicate, or he did not exist.

Linnaeus divided the genus Homo into two species, Homo sapiens (man) and Homo troglodytes (ape), and divided Homo sapiens into four natural varieties—H. sapiens americanus, H. sapiens europaeus, H. sapiens asiaticus, and H. sapiens afer—linked to the four known regions of the world, America, Europe, Asia, and Africa. He color-coded the subspecies red, white, yellow, and black and assigned each a set of physical, personality, cultural, and social traits. Linnaeus was influenced by the classical concept of the Great Chain of Being described by Saint Thomas Aquinas, which placed everything in the universe—from stones to angels—in a grand hierarchy established by God. At the pinnacle of beauty and intelligence Linnaeus placed H. sapiens europaeus: “Vigorous, muscular. Flowing blond hair. Blue eyes. Very smart, inventive. Covered by tight clothing. Ruled by law.” H. sapiens americanus, according to Linnaeus, was “Ill-tempered, impassive. Thick straight black hair; wide nostrils; harsh face; beardless. Stubborn, contented, free. Paints himself with red lines. Ruled by custom.” Linnaeus described H. sapiens asiaticus as “Melancholy, stern. Black hair; dark eyes. Strict, haughty, greedy. Covered by loose garments. Ruled by opinion.” And at the bottom, he placed H. sapiens afer: “Sluggish, lazy. Black kinky hair; silky skin; flat nose; thick lips; females with genital flap and elongated breasts. Crafty, slow, careless. Covered by grease. Ruled by caprice.” Here lies the origin of the color scheme for mankind American children still sing about in Sunday school: red, yellow, black, and white.

No teacher of RE ever said to me: “Beyond the limited realm of the senses, the shallow pool of the known, is a great untamable ocean, and we don’t have a fucking clue what goes on in there.” What we receive through sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch is all we know. We have tools that can enhance that information, we have theories for things that we suspect lie beyond that information, filtered through an apparatus limited once more to those senses. Those senses are limited; the light range we detect is within a narrow spectrum, between infrared light and ultraviolet light; other species see light that we can’t see. In the auditory realm, we hear but a fraction of the sound vibrations; we don’t hear high-pitched frequencies, like dog whistles, and we don’t hear low frequencies like whale song. The world is awash with colors unseen and abuzz with unheard frequencies. Undetected and disregarded. The wise have always known that these inaccessible realms, these dimensions that cannot be breached by our beautifully blunt senses, hold the very codes to our existence, the invisible, electromagnetic foundations upon which our gross reality clumsily rests. Expressible only through symbol and story, as it can never be known by the innocent mind. The stories are formulas, poems, tools for reflection through which we may access the realm behind the thinking mind, the consciousness beyond knowing and known, the awareness that is not connected to the haphazard data of biography. The awareness that is not prickled and tugged by capricious emotion. The awareness that is aware that it is aware. In meditation I access it; in yoga I feel it; on drugs it hit me like a hammer—at sixteen, staring into a bathroom mirror on LSD, contrary to instruction (“Don’t look in the mirror, Russ, it’ll fuck your head up.” Mental note: “Look in mirror.”). I saw that my face wasn’t my face at all but a face that I lived behind and was welded to by a billion nerves. I looked into my eyes and saw that there was something looking back at me that was not me, not what I’d taken to be me. The unrefined ocean beyond the shallow pool was cascading through the mirror back at me. Nature looking at nature.

That, for a while, seemed like life. And if I was really being honest with myself, I wasn’t into it. The only option was to sit in the pews every Sunday at church and casually wonder if I was going to go to hell because of who I was? No, thank you. Or to understand that the structures on which the country was built were engineered against me? Hard pass. What choice did I have besides constantly code-switching between identities as a means of hiding in plain sight? And wasn’t it just normal to feel like such a mistake as an adult that every time I walked over a bridge or stood on a subway platform, I had to talk myself out of stepping over the edge? I came to believe I was a monster and that I deserved to feel the way I felt. And I didn’t want to turn the page. But through it all there was a constant tethering me to the idea of a future: the library. The library is the place where I could borrow first Grover’s philosophical tome, then a couple of Choose Your Own Adventures I could cheat at, and later a stack of mysteries I could spoil for myself, all attempts to look for some other way of understanding who I was. In the book stacks, I found The Bluest Eye and The Color Purple and Giovanni’s Room and David Rakoff’s Fraud and more. I saw a new vision of Otherness in those books, and the pages kept turning. At the end of every one was a wall waiting to be broken down—a lurch toward becoming—a new paragraph in a story with an ending far different from what I’d ever dared imagine. Every story, whether truth or fiction, is an invitation to imagination, but even more so, it’s an invitation to empathy. The storyteller says, “I am here. Does it matter?” The words that I found in these books were a person calling out from a page, “I am worthy of being heard and you are worthy of hearing my story.” It seems simple but it’s a bold declaration. How many times in life do we receive the message, implicit or explicit, that what we’ve experienced or what we feel isn’t noteworthy or remarkable? The books that I found in the library, ones that I deeply understood and ones that seemed so outside of my experience they might as well have been written in Klingon, all carried the same hopes: to be seen, to be heard, to exist.

I WANT TO end this list by talking a little more about the founding of Pixar University and Elyse Klaidman’s mind-expanding drawing classes in particular. Those first classes were such a success—of the 120 people who worked at Pixar then, 100 enrolled—that we gradually began expanding P.U.’s curriculum. Sculpting, painting, acting, meditation, belly dancing, live-action filmmaking, computer programming, design and color theory, ballet—over the years, we have offered free classes in all of them. This meant spending not only the time to find the best outside teachers but also the real cost of freeing people up during their workday to take the classes. So what exactly was Pixar getting out of all of this? It wasn’t that the class material directly enhanced our employees’ job performance. Instead, there was something about an apprentice lighting technician sitting alongside an experienced animator, who in turn was sitting next to someone who worked in legal or accounting or security—that proved immensely valuable. In the classroom setting, people interacted in a way they didn’t in the workplace. They felt free to be goofy, relaxed, open, vulnerable. Hierarchy did not apply, and as a result, communication thrived. Simply by providing an excuse for us all to toil side by side, humbled by the challenge of sketching a self-portrait or writing computer code or taming a lump of clay, P.U. changed the culture for the better. It taught everyone at Pixar, no matter their title, to respect the work that their colleagues did. And it made us all beginners again. Creativity involves missteps and imperfections. I wanted our people to get comfortable with that idea—that both the organization and its members should be willing, at times, to operate on the edge. I can understand that the leaders of many companies might wonder whether or not such classes would truly be useful, worth the expense. And I’ll admit that these social interactions I describe were an unexpected benefit. But the purpose of P.U. was never to turn programmers into artists or artists into belly dancers. Instead, it was to send a signal about how important it is for every one of us to keep learning new things. That, too, is a key part of remaining flexible: keeping our brains nimble by pushing ourselves to try things we haven’t tried before. That’s what P.U. lets our people do, and I believe it makes us stronger.

Dehumanization has fueled innumerable acts of violence, human rights violations, war crimes, and genocides. It makes slavery, torture, and human trafficking possible. Dehumanizing others is the process by which we become accepting of violations against human nature, the human spirit, and, for many of us, violations against the central tenets of our faith. How does this happen? Maiese explains that most of us believe that people’s basic human rights should not be violated—that crimes like murder, rape, and torture are wrong. Successful dehumanizing, however, creates moral exclusion. Groups targeted based on their identity—gender, ideology, skin color, ethnicity, religion, age—are depicted as “less than” or criminal or even evil. The targeted group eventually falls out of the scope of who is naturally protected by our moral code. This is moral exclusion, and dehumanization is at its core. Dehumanizing always starts with language, often followed by images. We see this throughout history. During the Holocaust, Nazis described Jews as Untermenschen—subhuman. They called Jews rats and depicted them as disease-carrying rodents in everything from military pamphlets to children’s books. Hutus involved in the Rwanda genocide called Tutsis cockroaches. Indigenous people are often referred to as savages. Serbs called Bosnians aliens. Slave owners throughout history considered slaves subhuman animals. I know it’s hard to believe that we ourselves could ever get to a place where we would exclude people from equal moral treatment, from our basic moral values, but we’re fighting biology here. We’re hardwired to believe what we see and to attach meaning to the words we hear. We can’t pretend that every citizen who participated in or was a bystander to human atrocities was a violent psychopath. That’s not possible, it’s not true, and it misses the point. The point is that we are all vulnerable to the slow and insidious practice of dehumanizing, therefore we are all responsible for recognizing it and stopping it. THE COURAGE TO EMBRACE OUR HUMANITY Because so many time-worn systems of power have placed certain people outside the realm of what we see as human, much of our work now is more a matter of “rehumanizing.” That starts in the same place dehumanizing starts—with words and images. Today we are edging closer and closer to a world where political and ideological discourse has become

The morning was already setting up to be hectic, and Jon thanked his lucky stars that Jessie was so good at his job and a constant spark-plug of activity. Oh god, you did not just think Jessie was a spark-plug? You really are getting old. Next thing you know you’ll being saying whipper-snappers and break a hip getting out of bed. He shook his head. I guess I had a good run. Jessie quickly re-entered the office. “Alright. Elisabeth has her caffeine fix and said she’ll be down to say goodbye in a few. So let’s get this bad boy going for the week. Travel plans are done for next month and meetings for the week are in you planner so I’m assuming they’ll be no more complaining about flying coach class this time?” Jessie gave a sly wink and kept organizing his desk. “Yes. And for that I thank you for that my color-coding, hyper computer organized planner. We have to make sure the next presentation for Chicago is ready in three weeks; the storyboards for the new campaign ideas have to be finished by Tuesday the 16th so we can get them shipped before I head out there.” “And let’s not forget our important morning ritual.” Jon looked at Jessie with a question about to form before the realization hit him. His expression changed from confused to stern. “No cat videos Jessie. I swear. Enough of the cat videos.” “C’mon. You know you love them and they brighten your dour moods. Look at this one.” Jessie turned his screen and Jon begrudgingly looked at the cute little puppy and kitten with captions over them. “How can you not love this?” Jessie smiled. “The cute little kitty tells the playful puppy not to do it and yet the puppy bonks the little kitty on the head with his little puppy paw. “Boop Boop.” And then the cat swipes at the puppy and it falls off the bed. You know this is internet gold.” Jon smiled. “Can we get back to work?” Jessie nodded and then walked up to Jon - without hesitating, he bonked him lightly on the head. “Boop.” He paused and added, “I think this puppy is onto something.” Jessie grinned ear to ear still. “I pledge, from now on if something makes me as happy as this bonking picture I’m just going to say Boop boop.” Jon stood stone-faced but a second later, could not stop his smile. “I am not amused.” Jon shook the smile away. “Now, if you’re done boop booping me, there is something else I want to talk with you about.” Jessie looked at Jon with a quizzical smile. “Not to blow my own horn but I have a new and brilliant thought my young apprentice.” Jessie opened his mouth to comment on the blowing horn, but Jon held up his hand and cut him off. “Stop it.” Jessie closed his mouth and swallowed the sexual innuendo-laced comment he had forming on the tip of his tongue.

Do you think the United States is currently a united or a divided country? If you are like most people, you would say the United States is divided these days due to the high level of political polarization. You might even say the country is about as divided as it has ever been. America, after all, is now color-coded: red states are Republican; blue states are Democratic. But, in Uncharted, Aiden and Michel note one fascinating data point that reveals just how much more divided the United States once was. The data point is the language people use to talk about the country. Note the words I used in the previous paragraph when I discussed how divided the country is. I wrote, “The United States is divided.” I referred to the United States as a singular noun. This is natural; it is proper grammar and standard usage. I am sure you didn’t even notice. However, Americans didn’t always speak this way. In the early days of the country, Americans referred to the United States using the plural form. For example, John Adams, in his 1799 State of the Union address, referred to “the United States in their treaties with his Britanic Majesty.” If my book were written in 1800, I would have said, “The United States are divided.” This little usage difference has long been a fascination for historians, since it suggests there was a point when America stopped thinking of itself as a collection of states and started thinking of itself as one nation.

Hermione, however, had more on her mind than the Sorcerer’s Stone. She had started drawing up study schedules and color-coding all her notes. Harry and Ron wouldn’t have minded, but she kept nagging them to do the same.