Column Writing Quotes

This was supposed to be yesterday. I was sitting on the Cardiff/London train, supposedly about to write this very column, and realising something quite terrible. My head was entirely empty. A vast echoing void. Bigger on the inside, but with nothing in it. You could drop a pebble in my brain and wait for an hour to hear it land. No actually, you couldn't - that would be aggressive and unhelpful, so keep your damn pebbles to yourself.

Have you finished your column for tomorrow's headline?" It was Vee. She came up beside me, jotting notes on the notepad she carried everywhere. "I'm thinking of writing mine on the injustice of seating charts. I got paired with a girl who said she just finished lice treatment this morning.

When the Washington Post telephoned me at home on Valentine's Day 1989 to ask my opinion about the Ayatollah Khomeini's fatwah, I felt at once that here was something that completely committed me. It was, if I can phrase it like this, a matter of everything I hated versus everything I loved. In the hate column: dictatorship, religion, stupidity, demagogy, censorship, bullying, and intimidation. In the love column: literature, irony, humor, the individual, and the defense of free expression. Plus, of course, friendship—though I like to think that my reaction would have been the same if I hadn't known Salman at all. To re-state the premise of the argument again: the theocratic head of a foreign despotism offers money in his own name in order to suborn the murder of a civilian citizen of another country, for the offense of writing a work of fiction. No more root-and-branch challenge to the values of the Enlightenment (on the bicentennial of the fall of the Bastille) or to the First Amendment to the Constitution, could be imagined. President George H.W. Bush, when asked to comment, could only say grudgingly that, as far as he could see, no American interests were involved…

Our great mistake in education is, as it seems to me, the worship of book-learning–the confusion of instruction and education. We strain the memory instead of cultivating the mind. The children in our elementary schools are wearied by the mechanical act of writing, and the interminable intricacies of spelling; they are oppressed by columns of dates, by lists of kings and places, which convey no definite idea to their minds, and have no near relation to their daily wants and occupations; while in our public schools the same unfortunate results are produced by the weary monotony of Latin and Greek grammar. We ought to follow exactly the opposite course with children–to give them a wholesome variety of mental food, and endeavor to cultivate their tastes, rather than to fill their minds with dry facts. The important thing is not so much that every child should be taught, as that every child should be given the wish to learn. What does it matter if the pupil know a little more or a little less? A boy who leaves school knowing much, but hating his lessons, will soon have forgotten almost all he ever learned; while another who had acquired a thirst for knowledge, even if he had learned little, would soon teach himself more than the first ever knew.

When did they stop putting toys in cereal boxes? When I was little, I remember wandering the cereal aisle (which surely is as American a phenomenon as fireworks on the Fourth of July) and picking my breakfast food based on what the reward was: a Frisbee with the Trix rabbit's face emblazoned on the front. Holographic stickers with the Lucky Charms leprechaun. A mystery decoder wheel. I could suffer through raisin bran for a month if it meant I got a magic ring at the end. I cannot admit this out loud. In the first place, we are expected to be supermoms these days, instead of admitting that we have flaws. It is tempting to believe that all mothers wake up feeling fresh every morning, never raise their voices, only cook with organic food, and are equally at ease with the CEO and the PTA. Here's a secret: those mothers don't exist. Most of us-even if we'd never confess-are suffering through the raisin bran in the hopes of a glimpse of that magic ring. I look very good on paper. I have a family, and I write a newspaper column. In real life, I have to pick superglue out of the carpet, rarely remember to defrost for dinner, and plan to have BECAUSE I SAID SO engraved on my tombstone. Real mothers wonder why experts who write for Parents and Good Housekeeping-and, dare I say it, the Burlington Free Press-seem to have their acts together all the time when they themselves can barely keep their heads above the stormy seas of parenthood. Real mothers don't just listen with humble embarrassment to the elderly lady who offers unsolicited advice in the checkout line when a child is throwing a tantrum. We take the child, dump him in the lady's car, and say, "Great. Maybe YOU can do a better job." Real mothers know that it's okay to eat cold pizza for breakfast. Real mothers admit it is easier to fail at this job than to succeed. If parenting is the box of raisin bran, then real mothers know the ratio of flakes to fun is severely imbalanced. For every moment that your child confides in you, or tells you he loves you, or does something unprompted to protect his brother that you happen to witness, there are many more moments of chaos, error, and self-doubt. Real mothers may not speak the heresy, but they sometimes secretly wish they'd chosen something for breakfast other than this endless cereal. Real mothers worry that other mothers will find that magic ring, whereas they'll be looking and looking for ages. Rest easy, real mothers. The very fact that you worry about being a good mom means that you already are one.

We are writing this book as a rhizome. It is composed of plateaus. We have given it a circular form, but only for laughs. Each morning we would wake up, and each of us would ask himself what plateau he was going to tackle, writing five lines here, ten there. We had hallucinatory experiences, we watched lines leave one plateau and proceed to another like columns of tiny ants.

The renaissance of Zack Blake at Renaissance Center, what a story! Maybe Mitch Albom will write a column.

When the sunlight hit the trees, all the beauty and wonder come together. Soul unfolds its petals. Flowering and fruiting of plants starts. The birds song light up the spinal column and harmonize the hippocampal functioning.

What would you have me do? Seek for the patronage of some great man, And like a creeping vine on a tall tree Crawl upward, where I cannot stand alone? No thank you! Dedicate, as others do, Poems to pawnbrokers? Be a buffoon In the vile hope of teasing out a smile On some cold face? No thank you! Eat a toad For breakfast every morning? Make my knees Callous, and cultivate a supple spine,- Wear out my belly grovelling in the dust? No thank you! Scratch the back of any swine That roots up gold for me? Tickle the horns Of Mammon with my left hand, while my right Too proud to know his partner's business, Takes in the fee? No thank you! Use the fire God gave me to burn incense all day long Under the nose of wood and stone? No thank you! Shall I go leaping into ladies' laps And licking fingers?-or-to change the form- Navigating with madrigals for oars, My sails full of the sighs of dowagers? No thank you! Publish verses at my own Expense? No thank you! Be the patron saint Of a small group of literary souls Who dine together every Tuesday? No I thank you! Shall I labor night and day To build a reputation on one song, And never write another? Shall I find True genius only among Geniuses, Palpitate over little paragraphs, And struggle to insinuate my name In the columns of the Mercury? No thank you! Calculate, scheme, be afraid, Love more to make a visit than a poem, Seek introductions, favors, influences?- No thank you! No, I thank you! And again I thank you!-But... To sing, to laugh, to dream To walk in my own way and be alone, Free, with a voice that means manhood-to cock my hat Where I choose-At a word, a Yes, a No, To fight-or write.To travel any road Under the sun, under the stars, nor doubt If fame or fortune lie beyond the bourne- Never to make a line I have not heard In my own heart; yet, with all modesty To say:"My soul, be satisfied with flowers, With fruit, with weeds even; but gather them In the one garden you may call your own." So, when I win some triumph, by some chance, Render no share to Caesar-in a word, I am too proud to be a parasite, And if my nature wants the germ that grows Towering to heaven like the mountain pine, Or like the oak, sheltering multitudes- I stand, not high it may be-but alone!

When we say that the ancestors of the Blacks, who today live mainly in Black Africa, were the first to invent mathematics, astronomy, the calendar, sciences in general, arts, religion, agriculture, social organization, medicine, writing, technique, architecture; that they were the first to erect buildings out of 6 million tons of stone (the Great Pyramid) as architects and engineers—not simply as unskilled laborers; that they built the immense temple of Karnak, that forest of columns with its famed hypostyle hall large enough to hold Notre-Dame and its towers; that they sculpted the first colossal statues (Colossi of Memnon, etc.)—when we say all that we are merely expressing the plain unvarnished truth that no one today can refute by arguments worthy of the name.

We need to free ourselves from the habit of seeing culture as encyclopedia knowledge, and men as mere receptacles to be stuffed full of empirical data and a mass of unconnected raw facts, which have to be filed in the brain as in the columns of a dictionary, enabling their owner to respond to the various stimuli from the outside world. This form of culture really is harmful, particularly for the proletariat. It serves only to create maladjusted people, people who believe they are superior to the rest of humanity because they have memorized a certain number of facts and dates and who rattle them off at every opportunity, so turning them almost into a barrier between themselves and others.

I looked inside my typewriter. There's a city in there. Black and grey columns and no inhabitants.

Thus the British Empire came into existence; and thus - for there is no stopping damp; it gets into the inkpot as it gets into the woodwork - sentences swelled, adjectives multiplied, lyrics became epics, and little trifles that had been essays a column long were now encyclopaedias in ten or twenty volumes.

Mom became even more concerned about my values when my editor offered me a job writing a weekly column about what he called the behind-the-scenes doings of the movers and shakers. Mom thought I should be writing exposes about oppressive landlords, social injustice, and the class struggle on the Lower East Side. But I leaped at the job, because it meant I would become one of those people who knew what was really going on. Also, most people in Welch had a pretty good idea how bad off the Walls family was, but the truth was, they all had their problems, too--they were just better than we were at covering them up. I wanted to let the world know that no one had a perfect life, that even the people who seemed to have it all had their secrets.

The following day the editor presided over a sudued meeting with his senior staff. Tony Montano sat to one side, a silent observer. "It's time we ran more regular columns. They're cheap, and everyone else is doing them. You know, we hire someone of low to medium intelligence, possibly female, to write about, well, nothing much. You've seen that sort of thing. Goes to a party and can't remember anyone's name. Twelve hundred words." "Sort of naval gazing," Jeremy Ball suggested. "Not quite. Gazing is too intellectual. More like naval chat.

One of the reasons I wanted to write this column, I think, is because I assumed that the cultural highlight of my month would arrive in book form, and that’s true, for probably eleven months of the year. Books are, let’s face it, better than everything else…. Even if you love movies and music as much as you do books, it’s still, in any given four week period, way, way more likely you’ll find a great book that you haven’t read than a great movie you haven’t seen, or a great album you haven’t heard: the assiduous consumer will eventually exhaust movies and music… the feeling everyone has with literature: that we can’t get through the good novels published in the last six months, let alone those published since publishing began.

When I’m stuck in the morning and I don’t know what to write about in my diary, I’ll modify the pros-and-cons list. I’ll draw a line down the middle of the page, and in one column I’ll list what I’m thankful for, and in the other column, I’ll write down what I need help with. It’s a paper prayer.

The poet gives his whole life such a voluntarily steep incline that it is impossible for it to exist in the vertical line of biography where we expect to meet it. It is not to be found under his own name and must be sought under those of others, in the biographical columns of his followers. The more self-contained the individuality from which the life derives, the more collective, without any figurative speaking, is its story.

Never place your punch at the beginning of a column nor at the end. Sneak it in where it's least expected. Fill a whole column with drivel, just to get in that one important line.

You're just going to have to write him down in the mistake column of your life, and console yourself with the fact that you are a thousand times better than him, whether he sees it or not.

He sat before a note book of blank pages, saying: I swallow my own words. I chew and chew everything until it deteriorates. Every thought or impulse I have is chewed into nothingness. I want to capture all my thoughts at once, but they run in all directions. If I could do this I would be capturing the nimblest of minds, like a shoal of minnows. I would reveal innocence and duplicity, generosity and calculation, fear and cowardice and courage. I want to tell the whole truth, but I cannot tell the whole truth because I would have to write four pages at once, like four columns simultaneously, four pages to the present one, and so I do not write at all. I would have to write backwards, retrace my steps constantly to catch the echoes and overtones.

For some, vampires are still firmly in the 'evil, scary' column. However, in recent decades, vampires also run the gamut from evil to morally ambiguous all the way to fangless and vegetarian. I think part of their appeal lies in their versatility. Vampires can be the villain, the hero, and everything in between, all depending on the writer's whim. You'll also never hear me say that anyone is doing vampires 'wrong' because unless a real vampire stands up and sets the record straight, it's anyone's game as a far as defining them in fiction.

No deliberative body is manifestly less qualified to make decisions about public education than our state Legislature. With a few shining exceptions, most of these clowns don’t read, can’t write, and clearly can’t add.

I often find that when a ruthless editor forces me to trim an article to fit into a certain number of column-inches, the quality of my prose improves as if by magic. Brevity is the soul of wit, and of many other virtues in writing.

That's exactly why we have to have you, Colonel - to solve problems that are elementary to a man of your genius" - Ardmore felt slightly nauseated inside: this was worse than writing advertising copy - "but which are miracles for the rest of us.

column writing is an act of chemistry—precisely because you must conjure it up yourself. A column doesn’t write itself the way a breaking news story does. A column has to be created. This act of chemistry usually involves mixing three basic ingredients: your own values, priorities, and aspirations; how you think the biggest forces, the world’s biggest gears and pulleys, are shaping events; and what you’ve learned about people and culture—how they react or don’t—when the big forces impact them. When

It is perhaps an ugly comment on the American press, but the function of the interviewer on most newspapers is to entertain, not to shed light. . . . An interviewer soon begins to judge public figures on the basis of their entertainment value, overlooking their true importance. It is not easy to get an interview with Professor Franz Boas, the greatest anthropologist in the world, across a city desk, but a mild interview with Oom the Omnipotent will hit the bottom of page one under a two-column head. . . . It is safe to write accurately only about the nuts and bums. When a public figure does something ridiculous reporters may then write about him accurately.

Have cake, eat cake, pen column about why cake shouldn’t have been eaten, speculate about whether the cake is a lie, and then write an open letter to the cake.

We could write an etiquette column for the gangbanger set.

Eleanor Roosevelt became the first First Lady to hold a press conference, address a national convention, write a newspaper column, and appear on talk radio.

There is on the earth no institution which Friendship has established; it is not taught by any religion; no scripture contains its maxims. It has no temple nor even a solitary column...However, out fates at least are social. Our courses do not diverge; but as the web of destiny is woven it is fulled, and we are cast more and more into the centre. Men naturally, though feebly, seek this alliance, and their actions faintly foretell it. We are inclined to lay the chief stress on likeness and not on difference, and in foreign bodies we admit that there are many degrees of warmth below blood heat, but none of cold above it.

Do you think I could write an advice column?” Ash strove to find a diplomatic way to say No, definitely not. “Well, perhaps of the more bracing sort. Some people do like being flogged. Specialized interest, you know.

our time. I’m not worried about getting ratioed on Twitter or getting fired from my job if I write a bad column. I’m worried about the Department of Justice forcing me to drink a cup of hemlock because I wrote a good one.

I could write an epic poem about your thighs.” “That would amuse polite society rather too much, and I wouldn’t like that.” “I wouldn’t either.” She pressed her cheek to his belly. “I can’t think of a word to rhyme with marble column.

writing is an act of chemistry—precisely because you must conjure it up yourself. A column doesn’t write itself the way a breaking news story does. A column has to be created. This act of chemistry usually involves mixing three basic ingredients: your own values, priorities, and aspirations; how you think the biggest forces, the world’s biggest gears and pulleys, are shaping events; and what you’ve learned about people and culture—how they react or don’t—when the big forces impact them.

A book is an interpretation,” she says. “You want a place to be like it was in the book but it’s not a place in a book it’s just words. The place in your imagination is where you want to go and that place is imaginary. This is real,” she places her hand on the wall in front of them. The stone is cracked near her fingers, a fissure running down the side and disappearing into a column. “You could write endless pages but the words will never be the place. Besides, that’s what it was. Not what it is.

On economic matters Garrett had a brilliant simplicity. In November 1913, while editor of the Annalist, he began a monthly column on money in Everybody’s, writing as John Parr. One of the most common questions from readers was why the government simply didn’t print money to spend on public works, instead of borrowing it at interest. It was a variant of the Coxey idea. Garrett explained that money is not wealth, but a claim on wealth, and that you do not add to wealth by creating more claims to it.4

I never felt poor; I had the feeling that if I needed money I could always get it. I could write a syndicated column for teenagers under the name “Debbi Lynn” or I could smuggle gold into India or I could become a $100 call girl, and none of it would matter.

The government calls everything subversive,” he said. “A poster of Mao Tse-tung is subversive. They can accuse you of promoting social dissolution and jail you because you went to a rally. They’ll spy on you if you’re a journalist who writes the wrong sort of columns.

The thesis of the book,” he writes in response, “when correctly interpreted, is essentially trivial. . . . To ‘prove’ such a mathematical result by a costly and prolonged numerical study of many kinds of business profit and expense ratios is analogous to proving the multiplication table by arranging elephants in rows and columns, and then doing the same for numerous other kinds of animals. The performance, though perhaps entertaining, and having a certain pedagogical value, is not an important contribution either to zoölogy or mathematics.

One note of caution: Do not use words describing your emotional reactions in the Automatic Thought column. Just write the thoughts that created the emotion. For example, suppose you notice your car has a flat tire. Don’t write “I feel crappy” because you can’t disprove that with a rational response. The fact is, you do feel crappy. Instead, write down the thoughts that automatically flashed through your mind the moment you saw the tire; for example, “I’m so stupid—I should have gotten a new tire this last month,” or “Oh, hell! This is just my rotten luck!” Then you can substitute rational responses such as “It might have been better to get a new tire, but I’m not stupid and no one can predict the future with certainty.” This process won’t put air in the tire, but at least you won’t have to change it with a deflated

At pier four there is a 34-foot yawl-rigged yacht with two of the three hundred and twenty-four Esthonians who are sailing around in different parts of the world, in boats between 28 and 36 feet long and sending back articles to the Esthonian newspapers. These articles are very popular in Esthonia and bring their authors between a dollar and a dollar and thirty cents a column. They take the place occupied by the baseball or football news in American newspapers and are run under the heading of Sagas of Our Intrepid Voyagers. No well-run yacht basin in Southern waters is complete without at least two sunburned, salt bleached-headed Esthonians who are waiting for a check from their last article. When it comes they will sail to another yacht basin and write another saga. They are very happy too. Almost as happy as the people on the Alzira III. It’s great to be an Intrepid Voyager.

He had been living in a down-town Y.M.C.A., but when he quit the task of making sow-ear purses out of sows' ears, he moved up-town and went to work immediately as a reporter for The Sun. He kept at this for a year, doing desultory writing on the side, with little success, and then one day an infelicitous incident peremptorily closed his newspaper career. On a February afternoon he was assigned to report a parade of Squadron A. Snow threatening, he went to sleep instead before a hot fire, and when he woke up did a smooth column about the muffled beats of the horses' hoofs in the snow… This he handed in. Next morning a marked copy of the paper was sent down to the City Editor with a scrawled note: "Fire the man who wrote this." It seemed that Squadron A had also seen the snow threatening—had postponed the parade until another day. A week later he had begun "The Demon Lover."… In

I’d developed the concept over time as a practitioner back in my General Electric and International Paper days, and I’d been teaching the 4C’s to my students at the University of Carolina at Chapel Hill since I’d been appointed to the chair professorship in 1986 as well as expounding on it in executive education programs and consulting work I was doing in the U.S. and Europe during that same time. I was also writing a column for the leading trade magazine “Advertising Age” for a few years and I first wrote about the 4C’s for publication in one of those columns, sometime in the year 1990.

Learning how to play an instrument has always been near the top of my to-do list, but what are the chances now? There's little downtime with a column and a two-year-old, and after reading Goldilocks and the three Bears and going through half a bottle of wine with dinner on an average evening, imagining a day when I join Nathaniel on the Elgar Cello Concerto is not a vision but a hallucination. I'm at the point where the things on your to-do list get transferred to a should-have-done list, and one reason I write a column is for the privilege of vicariously sampling other worlds, dropping in with my passport, my notebook and my curiosity.

Underlying all this activity—in the customhouses, on the wharves, in every place of business—were numbers. Merchants measured out their wares and negotiated prices; customs officers calculated taxes to be levied on imports; scribes and stewards prepared ships’ manifests, recording the values in long columns using Roman numerals. They would have put their writing implements to one side and used either their fingers or a physical abacus to perform the additions, then picked up pen and parchment once again to enter the subtotals from each page on a final page at the end. With no record of the computation itself, if anyone questioned the answer, the entire process would have to be repeated.

The fact is, women aren’t having cosmetic surgery to stay beautiful. As Naomi Wolf wrote in The Beauty Myth more than twenty years ago, many women who undergo surgery are fighting to stay loved, relevant, employed, admired; they’re fighting against time running out. If they simply age naturally, don’t diet or dye their hair, we feel they’ve “let themselves go.” But if they continue to dress youthfully we feel they’re “trying too hard” or brand them as “slappers.” Poor Madonna, who has dared to be in her fifties. In order not to look like a woman in her sixth decade of life she exercises furiously, and is sniggered at by trashy magazines for having overly muscular arms and boytoy lovers. When Demi Moore’s marriage to Ashton Kutcher, fifteen years her junior, recently broke down, the media reaction was almost gleeful. Of course, it was what they had been waiting for all along: how long could a forty-eight-year-old woman expect to keep a thirty-three-year-old man? As allegations of his infidelity emerged, the Internet was flooded with images of Demi looking gaunt and unhappy—and extremely thin. Sometimes you want to say: just leave them alone. Then again, it’s mostly women who buy these magazines, and women who write the editorials and online comments and gossip columns, so you could say we’re our own worst enemies. There is already plenty of ageism and sexism out there—why do we add to the body hatred?

And for a moment (and only a moment), it was as if a gap between two absolute and unquestionably separated columns or encampments of the world had suddenly revealed itself as illusory; that what I had assumed two was really one; and that the glacial solidity of the boundary I’d been sure existed between them was as permeable as shimmering water, as shifting light.

I remember a dinner party when he spent the whole time writing an article. At a requiem concert in the cathedral, he spent his whole time writing notes. At a wedding disco, Boris was going round interviewing people for his column while Marina was breast-feeding. He is completely driven. He has an ability to focus on one thing, no matter what human beings may be in the way.’ Boris

Rose and I did not become friends immediately, although I’d been aware of her before we met. She’d been writing for the Voice, for the New York Press, for Time Out. But never for the Times, I noticed with relief. I’d stare at her byline on the subway or in a bodega thinking Who is this girl doing my job? I’d sit on the subway reading her pieces, listening to the voice of a girl that was louder than ink and larger than column inches, I might have written at the time, if I had to review the sound Rose made. A girl unafraid to lose herself in a description of the physical pleasure the music gave her and unafraid of turning lethally bemused when the music failed her. The display, and the confidence it took to put it out there and keep it coming, was infuriating.

I have not yet described to you the most singular part. About six years ago—to be exact, upon the 4th of May, 1882—an advertisement appeared in the Times asking for the address of Miss Mary Morstan and stating that it would be to her advantage to come forward. There was no name or address appended. I had at that time just entered the family of Mrs. Cecil Forrester in the capacity of governess. By her advice I published my address in the advertisement column. The same day there arrived through the post a small card-board box addressed to me, which I found to contain a very large and lustrous pearl. No word of writing was enclosed. Since then every year upon the same date there has always appeared a similar box, containing a similar pearl, without any clue as to the sender.

Isaiah was not only the most remarkable of the prophets, he was by far the greatest writer in the Old Testament. He was evidently a magnificent preacher, but it is likely he set his words down in writing. They certainly achieved written form very early and remained among the most popular of all the holy writings: among the texts found at Qumran after the Second World War was a leather scroll, 23 feet long, giving the whole of Isaiah in fifty columns of Hebrew, the best preserved and longest ancient manuscript of the Bible we possess.216 The early Jews loved his sparkling prose with its brilliant images, many of which have since passed into the literature of all civilized nations. But more important than the language was the thought: Isaiah was pushing humanity towards new moral discoveries.

Sanger was asked to write a column on sex education, “What Every Girl Should Know,” for The Call, a daily newspaper with socialist sympathies. When she tackled the subject of venereal disease, her column was banned by Anthony Comstock, who had acquired censorship as well as prosecutorial powers. The paper ran an empty space with the title: “What Every Girl Should Know. Nothing; by order of the U.S. Post Office.

Take a piece of paper and draw a table with two columns. 2  At the top of the first column write the word ‘praiseworthy’. Underneath make a list of things you find most praiseworthy in other people, what you genuinely admire about them. Consider your heroes, real or fictional, living or dead, your family, friends, colleagues, etc. 3  Once you’ve finished, write the word ‘desired’ at the top of the second column. Underneath list all the things you most desire in life. Consider the things you take most pleasure in, and those you most fear losing, as well as the things you spend most time and energy pursuing. 4  Finally, ask yourself to what extent these two columns differ from each other. Are the things you most desire and seek out in life the same as the things you find most praiseworthy in others? Why are they not the same?

If he were alive today, Plato—to take him as an example, because along with a dozen others he is regarded as the greatest thinker who ever lived—would certainly be ecstatic about a news industry capable of creating, exchanging, refining a new idea every day; where information keeps pouring in from the ends of the earth with a speediness he never knew in his own lifetime, while a staff of demiurges is on hand to check it all out instantaneously for its content of reason and reality. He would have supposed a newspaper office to be that topos uranios, that heavenly realm of ideas, which he has described so impressively that to this day all the better class of people are still idealists when talking to their children or employees. And of course if Plato were to walk suddenly into a news editor’s office today and prove himself to be indeed that great author who died over two thousand years ago he would be a tremendous sensation and would instantly be showered with the most lucrative offers. If he were then capable of writing a volume of philosophical travel pieces in three weeks, and a few thousand of his well-known short stories, perhaps even turn one or the other of his older works into film, he could undoubtedly do very well for himself for a considerable period of time. The moment his return had ceased to be news, however, and Mr. Plato tried to put into practice one of his well-known ideas, which had never quite come into their own, the editor in chief would ask him to submit only a nice little column on the subject now and then for the Life and Leisure section (but in the easiest and most lively style possible, not heavy: remember the readers), and the features editor would add that he was sorry, but he could use such a contribution only once a month or so, because there were so many other good writers to be considered. And both of these gentlemen would end up feeling that they had done quite a lot for a man who might indeed be the Nestor of European publicists but still was a bit outdated, and certainly not in a class for current newsworthiness with a man like, for instance, Paul Arnheim.

There is a love for structure in them that I recognize, and a desire to worship correctness that I know and I share. When I look at them, I think: to prize traditionalism above all else in a church that began in revolution is to do a great violence to it. But I feel that same ache for the past in myself: to uphold the columns of literature, grammar, the Western tradition. The English language began as an upheaval; I am not protecting it when I try to guard it against change. The Jesus Christ of it, Chaucer, walked across the water telling dirty jokes, made twenty stories stretch to feed a million people, spelled the word "cunt" five ways, performed miracles. Any innovation I put down on paper is an attempt to remind myself of this. I am not modern. I was not born to blaze new paths or bring down walls. I break form against my nature to tell myself that revolution, too, is a tradition that must be upheld.

It shall be engraved upon bronze tablets and attached to those columns that mark the entrance to my mausoleum. Upon those columns there will be sufficient space for six of these tablets, and each of the tablets may contain fifty lines of about sixty characters each. Thus the statement of my acts must be limited to about eighteen thousand characters. It seems to me wholly appropriate that I should have been forced to write of myself under these conditions, arbitrary as they might be; for just as my words must be accomodated to such a public necessity, so has my life been. And just as the acts of my life have done, so these words must conceal at least as much truth as they display; the truth will lie somewhere beneath these graven words, in the dense stone which they will encircle. And this too is appropriate; for much of my life has been lived in such secrecy. It has never been politic for me to let another know my heart.

At our wedding, our college creative writing professor read a poem—John Ciardi’s “Most Like an Arch This Marriage.” It’s a poem about imperfection, about being more together than we can be on our own: “Most like an arch—two weaknesses that lean / into a strength. Two fallings become firm.” Being married isn’t being two columns, standing so straight and tall on their own, they never touch. Being married is leaning and being caught, and catching the one who leans toward you.

I began, I remember, because I felt I had to. I'd reached that modest height in my career, that gentle rise, from which I could coast out of gear to a soft stop. Now I wonder why not. Why not? But then duty drove me forward like a soldier. I said it was time for "the Big Book," the long monument to my mind I repeatedly dreamed I had to have: a pyramid, a column tall enough to satisfy the sky. Duty drove me the way it drives men into marriage. Begetting is expected of us, and in those days of heavy men in helmets the seed was certain, and wanted only the wind for a womb, or any slit; yet what sprang up out of those foxholes we fucked with our fists but our own frightened selves? with a shout of pure terror, too. That too—that too was expected; it was expected even of flabby maleless men like me. And now, here, where I am writing still, still in this chair, hammering type like tacks into the page, speaking without a listening ear, whose eye do I hope to catch and charm and fill with tears and understanding, if not my own, my own ordinary, unforgiving and unfeeling eye?...my eye. So sentences circle me like a toy train. What could I have said about the Boche, about bigotry, barbarism, butchery, Bach, that hasn't been said as repeatedly as I dreamed by dream of glory, unless it was what I've said? What could I have explained where no reason exists and no cause is adequate; what body burned to a crisp could I have rebelieved was bacon, if I had not taken the tack I took?

By the latter part of the first millennium of the Current Era, the system we use today to write numbers and do arithmetic had been worked out—expressing any number using just the ten numerals 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, and adding, subtracting, multiplying, and dividing them by the procedures we are all taught in elementary school. (Units column, tens column, hundreds column, carries, etc.) This familiar way to write numbers and do arithmetic is known today as the Hindu-Arabic system, a name that reflects its history.

Rolf Ekeus came round to my apartment one day and showed me the name of the Iraqi diplomat who had visited the little West African country of Niger: a statelet famous only for its production of yellowcake uranium. The name was Wissam Zahawi. He was the brother of my louche gay part-Kurdish friend, the by-now late Mazen. He was also, or had been at the time of his trip to Niger, Saddam Hussein's ambassador to the Vatican. I expressed incomprehension. What was an envoy to the Holy See doing in Niger? Obviously he was not taking a vacation. Rolf then explained two things to me. The first was that Wissam Zahawi had, when Rolf was at the United Nations, been one of Saddam Hussein's chief envoys for discussions on nuclear matters (this at a time when the Iraqis had functioning reactors). The second was that, during the period of sanctions that followed the Kuwait war, no Western European country had full diplomatic relations with Baghdad. TheVatican was the sole exception, so it was sent a very senior Iraqi envoy to act as a listening post. And this man, a specialist in nuclear matters, had made a discreet side trip to Niger. This was to suggest exactly what most right-thinking people were convinced was not the case: namely that British intelligence was on to something when it said that Saddam had not ceased seeking nuclear materials in Africa. I published a few columns on this, drawing at one point an angry email from Ambassador Zahawi that very satisfyingly blustered and bluffed on what he'd really been up to. I also received—this is what sometimes makes journalism worthwhile—a letter from a BBC correspondent named Gordon Correa who had been writing a book about A.Q. Khan. This was the Pakistani proprietor of the nuclear black market that had supplied fissile material to Libya, North Korea, very probably to Syria, and was open for business with any member of the 'rogue states' club. (Saddam's people, we already knew for sure, had been meeting North Korean missile salesmen in Damascus until just before the invasion, when Kim Jong Il's mercenary bargainers took fright and went home.) It turned out, said the highly interested Mr. Correa, that his man Khan had also been in Niger, and at about the same time that Zahawi had. The likelihood of the senior Iraqi diplomat in Europe and the senior Pakistani nuclear black-marketeer both choosing an off-season holiday in chic little uranium-rich Niger… well, you have to admit that it makes an affecting picture. But you must be ready to credit something as ridiculous as that if your touching belief is that Saddam Hussein was already 'contained,' and that Mr. Bush and Mr. Blair were acting on panic reports, fabricated in turn by self-interested provocateurs.

It is harder than it used to be because standards of housekeeping and house-decorating have become pretentious and competitive. I don’t blame children for fleeing those House Beautiful houses, nonshelters, dehumanized, ostentatious, rarely expressing an individual family’s way of life. When I was writing a column for Family Circle I had planned one in praise of shabbiness. A house that does not have one worn, comfy chair in it is soulless. It all comes back to the fact that we're not asked to be perfect, only human. What a relief it is to walk into a human house!

The dead bring us to life, vivify us, give us scale. We are the unjoined part of them and at their graves we stand at our own. In Ruby Park Cemetery, in the once-famous silver lands of Colorado, the graves are unmarked. There is a single column of marble above a miner's daughter who died at the age of seventeen. The town of Irwin drew thousands of people in the 1870s, some from as far away as England and Scotland. The cemetery is abandoned. The mines have vanished. All but the silent warning, 'My good people as you pass by, As you are now so once was I As I am now you soon must be Prepare yourselves to follow me.' The dust of the pathway whitens our shoes.

A couple of years ago, I read the findings of a study on the effects of divorced and separated parents talking negatively about their exes in the presence of their children. I tried to locate it when I was writing this column so I could cite it properly and quote it directly, but I had no luck. That’s fine because what I remember about the study most vividly is really just one thing: that it’s devastating for a child to hear one parent speak ill of the other. In fact, so much so that the researchers found it was less psychologically damaging if a parent said directly to the child You are a worthless piece of shit than it was for a parent to say Your mother/ father is a worthless piece of shit.

I write sourly, for disliking artificially conserved communites I have tended to see the salvation as more distressing than the threat: but in my more rational moments I do recognize that letting Venice sink, my own solution for her anxieties, is a counsel of perfection that cannot be pursued. She will be saved, never fear: it is only in selfish moments of fancy that I see her still obeying her obvious destiny, enfolded at last by the waters she espoused, her gilded domes and columns dimly shining in the green, and at very low tides, perhaps, the angel on the summit of the Campanile to be seen raising his golden forefinger (for he stands in an exhortatory, almost an ecological pose) above the mud-banks.

In 2022, New York Times columnist Tish Harrison Warren decried a culture of divorcing for unhappiness, writing, “I want to normalize significant periods of confusion, exhaustion, grief and unfulfillment in marriage. There’s an older couple I know who are in their fifth decade of marriage. They are funny and kind and, by almost any standard, the picture of #relationshipgoals. Early on in our marriage they told us, ‘There are times in marriage when the Bible’s call to love your enemies and the call to love your spouse are the same call.’ ” Life is, of course, not easy, and no one is going to like their partner every day. But Warren’s column makes misery in marriage sound like a necessary evil of being partnered with a man. It’s not. I refuse to believe that it has to be that way. I have two dear friends who I have known for over twenty years; we fight sometimes and disagree. Between us we’ve had three divorces and four marriages and three children. Never once have they felt like the enemy to me. And if it is that way, if the experience of being with a man means I hate him for at least a third of our marriage and he hates me, too, I’d rather not have it. No, thank you. There is no benefit to that martyrdom. To me, columns like Warren’s sound like the mentality that enables hazing rituals and cults where they sacrifice one of their own every fortnight. I was miserable, so you should be, too. I do not want that curse. I want happiness.

If Paul brought the first generation of Christians the useful skills of a trained theologian, Origen was the first great philosopher to rethink the new religion from first principles. As his philosophical enemy, the anti-Christian Porphyry, summed it up, he 'introduced Greek ideas to foreign fables' -- that is, gave a barbarous eastern religion the intellectual respectability of a philosophical defense. Origen was also a phenomenon. As Eusebius put it admiringly, 'even the facts from his cradle are worth mentioning'. Origen came from Alexandria, the second city of the empire and then it's intellectual centre; his father's martyrdom left him an orphan at seventeen with six younger brothers. He was a hard working prodigy, at eighteen head of the Catechetical School, and already trained as a literary scholar and teacher. But at this point, probably in 203, he became a religious fanatic and remained one for the next fifty years. He gave up his job and sold his books to concentrate on religion. he slept on the floor, ate no meat, drank no wine, had only one coat and no shoes. He almost certainly castrated himself, in obedience to the notorious text, Matthew 19:12, 'there are some who have made themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven's sake.' Origen's learning was massive and it was of a highly original kind: he always went back to the sources and thought through the whole process himself. This he learned Hebrew and, according to Eusebius, 'got into his possession the original writings extant among the Jews in the actual Hebrew character'. These included the discovery of lost texts; in the case of the psalms, Origen collected not only the four known texts but three others unearthed, including 'one he found at Jericho in a jar'. The result was an enormous tome, the Hexapla, which probably existed in only one manuscript now lost, setting out the seven alternative texts in parallel columns. He applied the same principles of original research to every aspect of Christianity and sacred literature. He seems to have worked all day and though most of the night, and was a compulsive writer. Even the hardy Jerome later complained: 'Has anyone read everything Origen wrote?'

His unfinished book had become his obsession. He rarely left his room, which he insulated with sheaves of paper scribbled with beginnings and endings, nailing ideas to the walls and stretching long strips of sentences from the window to the door. Tall stacks of scenes and chapters sprouted from the floor, as if the papers had reincarnated themselves back into trees. The paper forest around him glimmered in the sun from the windows, weaving rays of light in yellow and purple and blue. Hunger squeezed his throat, but he turned his ravenousness toward writing. He almost never slept. During the shortages, he wrote between the columns of old newspapers, or on pieces of cardboard, or on bark pulled from trees. He traded potatoes for ink.

A few days after the fireworks, I gave them a lesson on category nouns versus exact nouns. I hadn’t heard of this distinction prior to opening the textbook. It transpired that a category noun was something like “vegetables,” whereas exact nouns were “beetroot,” “carrots,” “broccoli.” It was better to use exact nouns because this made your writing more precise and interesting. The chapter gave a short explanation followed by an exercise: an A4 page divided into columns. On the left were various category nouns. On the right, you had to fill in at least three corresponding exact nouns. I told the kids they could use their Cantonese-to-English dictionaries. Cynthia Mak asked what to say for “people.” Did it mean “sister,” “brother,” “father,” or “teacher,” “doctor,” “artist,” or— “They’re all okay,” I said. “But if I put ‘sister,’ ‘father,’ ‘brother’ in ‘people,’ then what about here?” She pointed to the box marked “family.” “Okay, don’t do those. Do ‘teacher’ or something.” “But what about here?”—signaling the “professions” row. “Okay, something else for ‘people.’” “Happy people, sad people?” “‘Happy people’ isn’t an exact noun—it’s an adjective plus a category noun.” “So what should I write?” We looked at each other. It was indeed a challenge to describe people in a way not immediately related to how they earned money or their position in the family unit. I said: “How about ‘friend,’ ‘boyfriend,’ ‘colleague’?” “I don’t want to write ‘boyfriend.’” I couldn’t blame her for questioning the exercise. “Friend,” “enemy,” and “colleague” didn’t seem like ways of narrowing down “people” in the way “apple” did for “fruit.” An apple would still be a fruit if it didn’t have any others in its vicinity, but you couldn’t be someone’s nemesis without their hanging around to complete the definition. The same issue cropped up with my earlier suggestions. “Family” was relational, and “profession” was created and given meaning by external structures. Admittedly “adult,” “child,” and “teenager” could stand on their own. But I still found it depressing that the way we specified ourselves—the way we made ourselves precise and interesting—was by pinpointing our developmental stage and likely distance from mortality. Fruit didn’t have that problem.

The fall of France,’ wrote the American journalist Rosie Waldeck from Bucharest in 1940, ‘formed a climax to twenty years of failure of the promises of democracy to handle unemployment, inflation, deflations, labour unrest, party egoism and whatnot. Europe, tired of herself and doubtful of the principles she had been living by, felt almost relieved to have everything settled – not satisfactorily, but in such a way that it absolved her of all responsibility.’ Countess Rosie Waldeck was the American equivalent of Bella Fromm. The pen name of Rosie Goldschmidt-Graefenberg-Ullstein, she was a Jewish banker’s daughter who, after a number of divorces, ended up writing society columns and moving effortlessly in the most select circles, and who beneath all her charm

A look of perplexity appeared on Gabriel's face. It was true that he wrote a literary column every Wednesday in The Daily Express, for which he was paid fifteen shillings. But that did not make him a West Briton surely. The books he received for review were almost more welcome than the paltry cheque. He loved to feel the covers and turn over the pages of newly printed books... He did not know how to meet her charge. He wanted to say that literature was above politics. But they were friends of many years' standing and their careers had been parallel, first at the University and then as teachers: he could not risk a grandiose phrase with her. He continued blinking his eyes and trying to smile and murmured lamely that he saw nothing political in writing reviews of books.

In fact, Hinduism�s pervading influence seems to go much earlier than Christianity. American mathematician, A. Seindenberg, has for example shown that the Sulbasutras, the ancient Vedic science of mathematics, constitute the source of mathematics in the Antic world, from Babylon to Greece : � the arithmetic equations of the Sulbasutras he writes, were used in the observation of the triangle by the Babylonians, as well as in the edification of Egyptian pyramids, in particular the funeral altar in form of pyramid known in the vedic world as smasana-cit (Seindenberg 1978: 329). In astronomy too, the "Indus" (from the valley of the Indus) have left a universal legacy, determining for instance the dates of solstices, as noted by 18th century French astronomer Jean-Sylvain Bailly : � the movement of stars which was calculated by Hindus 4500 years ago, does not differ even by a minute from the tables which we are using today". And he concludes: "the Hindu systems of astronomy are much more ancient than those of the Egyptians - even the Jews derived from the Hindus their knowledge �. There is also no doubt that the Greeks heavily borrowed from the "Indus". Danielou notes that the Greek cult of Dionysos, which later became Bacchus with the Romans, is a branch of Shivaism : � Greeks spoke of India as the sacred territory of Dionysos and even historians of Alexander the Great identified the Indian Shiva with Dionysos and mention the dates and legends of the Puranas �. French philosopher and Le Monde journalist Jean-Paul Droit, recently wrote in his book "The Forgetfulness of India" that � the Greeks loved so much Indian philosophy, that Demetrios Galianos had even translated the Bhagavad Gita �.

It's like when you're a kid, and you want to be an astronaut before accepting it might be impossible even though everyone says nothing's impossible, and they go so far to pinpoint moments from history to make you feel stupid. But you move on anyway. You know your capabilities and circumstances, so you start thinking that maybe being a boxer would be cool even though you're too skinny. No problem, you can bulk up. But that all changes when you want to write for the newspaper and dream of having your own column, so you start doing that. And one day when you're writing someone advice on how to be more organized, you think about piloting a ship into space again. This is how Thomas lives his life, one misfired dream after the other. That journey may stretch for a lifetime, but even if he doesn't discover that spark until he's an old man, Thomas will die with wrinkles he earned and a smile on his face.

Ideas for Journal Entries You may find the following ideas useful in beginning your journal or keeping the entries varied. If you are not used to expressing your thoughts on paper, it may seem awkward at first. The longer you do it, the easier it will become. You’ll be amazed at the insight you gain into your life. -Write about your most memorable experience with social anxiety. How did you feel? What did you think? How did others react? Why do you think the event happened? -Write about situations that make you anxious every day. Record your thoughts, feelings, and actions. You may want to divide the page into columns with the headings: situation or event; negative thoughts; physical reactions; and actions. Following is an example of how this may look: Situation or Event Should I attend the first art class after school. Negative Thoughts I thought about skipping out. I was afraid of what people would think. I wanted to do a good job. Physical Reactions I felt a shortness of breath. In general, I was nervous and in a bad mood. Actions I took some deep breaths and visualized the class going well. Later, I became engrossed in my drawing. -Write about a time when you were pleased with how you acted in a social situation. -Identify times when anxiety symptoms kept you from doing something that you really wanted to do. How did you feel? What might have happened if you had not been afraid? -Write a letter to someone who made you feel bad about yourself. You aren’t going to show the letter to anyone, so feel free to write whatever you want. -Write out a conversation with your inner voice. Begin the entry with a question directed to yourself, then write your mental response. It may help to label the different voices A and B. Dialogue writing is a very effective way to get to the heart of the matter.

The data that drives algorithms isn't just a few numbers now. It's monstrous tables of millions of numbers, thousands upon thousands of rows and columns of numbers....Matrices are created and refined by computers endlessly churning through Big Data's records on everyone, and everything they've done. No human can read those matrices, even with computers helping you interpret them they are simply too large and complex to fully comprehend. But the computers can use them, applying the appropriate matrix to show us the appropriate video that will eventually lead us to make an appropriate purchase. We are not living in "The Matrix," but there's still a matrix controlling us. What does this have to do with the rabbit hole of conspiracy theories? It has everything to do with it. These algorithms are quickly becoming the primary route down the rabbit hole. To a large extent this has already happened, but it's going to get far, far worse. Tufekci described what happened when she tried watching different types of content on YouTube. She started watching videos of Donald Trump rallies. 'I wanted to write about one of [Donald Trump]'s rallies, so I watched it a few times on YouTube. YouTube started recommending to me, and autoplaying to me, white supremacist videos, in increasing order of extremism. If I watched one, it served up one even more extreme. If you watch Hilary Clinton or Bernie Sanders content, YouTube recommends and autoplays [left-wing] conspiracy videos, and it goes downhill from there." Downhill, into the rabbit hole....Without human intervention the algorithm has evolved to a perfect a method of gently stepping up the intensity of the conspiracy videos that it shows you so that you don't get turned off, and so you continue to watch. They get more intense because the algorithm has found (not in any human sense, but found nonetheless) that the deeper it can guide people down the rabbit hole, the more revenue it can make.

While the reading list in the book belongs to one character, there are so many more books I wanted to include, books that have changed the way I’ve thought about writing, people, the world. Books that inspired me, moved me, taught me more than any school lesson could. Books that made me want to be a reader and eventually a writer. This is my reading list. Jhumpa Lahiri, The Namesake Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things Zadie Smith, White Teeth Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Americanah Katherine Heiny, Standard Deviation Rohinton Mistry, A Fine Balance Hiromi Kawakami, Strange Weather in Tokyo Angela Carter, The Magic Toyshop Maya Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings Attia Hosain, Sunlight on a Broken Column Ali Smith, There But For The These books found me at just the right time in my life. I can remember each of them so vividly, I remember the characters as though they were friends, sometimes even family, I can remember exactly where I was and how I felt when I turned that final page. They’ve stayed with me ever since.

If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem,” or Martin Luther King’s statement that “our scientific power has outgrown our spiritual power. We have guided missiles and misguided men,” or Malcolm’s “We can work together with all other leaders and organizations, in harmony and unity, to eliminate evil in our community.” The saying “It takes a whole village to raise a child” (which I had seen in a little newsletter identifying it as an African proverb) really caught on. After about a year organizations all over the country began using it, and Hillary Rodham Clinton recently adapted it for the title of her book. Jimmy also began writing a regular column for the newsletter, raising all sorts of questions, such as, “Why are we at war with one another.?” “How will we make a living?” “What Time is it in Detroit and the World?”1 Clementine’s deeply felt appeals, Jimmy’s challenging questions, and my inclusion of news of community-building activities all helped to create the image of SOSAD as not just another organization but the spearhead of a new movement.

I'm often asked if I'm a feminist. This I suspect has something to do with the fact that I write a column called Fe-mail and most people lack imagination. My answer is always a firm 'now' because I refuse to have my femininity define me or indeed put me on the back foot. Life is already full of challenges, why make my gender another one? It's just too exhausting, and ultimately, I suspect, futile. I am not fighting to prove my worth or my ability as a woman, but rather as a person. And of course I speak not on behalf of, or against, millions of women across the world who must forcibly negotiate cultures, religions, societies, or families that genuinely oppress (sometimes in the most brutal ways) but rather those women-educated and free-who cry foul at the merest hint of male dominance. Chill the F^*k out and just get on with your own life. Because you know what? All those nasty evil men you're huffing and puffing about, they're not giving you a moment's thought. They're too busy aggressively going after what they want with no thought of barriers or blocks or unfair this or that.

In the second story of his column, Safire replies to a diplomat who received a government warning about "crimes against tourists (primarily robberies, muggings, and pick-pocketings)." The diplomat writes, Note the State Department's choice of pick-pocketings. Is the doer of such deeds a pickpocket or a pocket-picker? Safire replies, "The sentence should read 'robberies, muggings and pocket-pickings.' One picks pockets; no one pockets picks." Significantly, Safire did not answer the question. If the perpetrator were called a pocket-picker, which is the most common kind of compound in English, then indeed the crime would be pocket-picking. But the name for the perpetrator is not really up for grabs; we all agree that he is called a pickpocket. And if he is called a pickpocket, not a pocket-picker, then what he does can perfectly well be called pick-pocketing, not pocket-picking, thanks to the ever-present English noun-to-verb conversion process, just as a cook cooks, a chair chairs, and a host hosts. The fact that no one pockets picks is a red herring - who said anything about a pick-pocketer?

But now, inside the gallery, something happens to him. He finds his emotions gripped by the paintings, the huge, colorful canvases by Diego Rivera, the tiny, agonized self-portraits by Frida Kahlo, the woman Rivera loved. Fabien barely notices the crowds that cluster in front of the pictures. He stops before a perfect little painting in which she has pictured her spine as a cracked column. There is something about the grief in her eyes that won't let him look away. That is suffering, he thinks. He thinks about how long he's been moping about Sandrine, and it makes him feel embarrassed, self-indulgent. Theirs, he suspects, was not an epic love story like Diego and Frida's. He finds himself coming back again and again to stand in front of the same pictures, reading about the couple's life, the passion they shared for their art, for workers' rights, for each other. He feels an appetite growing within him for something bigger, better, more meaningful. He wants to live like these people. He has to make his writing better, to keep going. He has to. He is filled with an urge to go home and write something that is fresh and new and has in it the honesty of these pictures. Most of all he just wants to write. But what?

When separated at birth and reunited as adults, they say they feel they have known each other all their lives. Testing confirms that identical twins, whether separated at birth or not, are eerily alike (though far from identical) in just about any trait one can measure. They are similar in verbal, mathematical, and general intelligence, in their degree of life satisfaction, and in personality traits such as introversion, agreeableness, neuroticism, conscientiousness, and openness to experience. They have similar attitudes toward controversial issues such as the death penalty, religion, and modern music. They resemble each other not just in paper-and-pencil tests but in consequential behavior such as gambling, divorcing, committing crimes, getting into accidents, and watching television. And they boast dozens of shared idiosyncrasies such as giggling incessantly, giving interminable answers to simple questions, dipping buttered toast in coffee, and—in the case of Abigail van Buren and Ann Landers—writing indistinguishable syndicated advice columns. The crags and valleys of their electroencephalograms (brainwaves) are as alike as those of a single person recorded on two occasions, and the wrinkles of their brains and distribution of gray

As Frances had learned to do in times of uncertainty, she created a project over which she had total control and began writing a book “Dedicated to the memory of Irving Thalberg as a tribute to his vision and genius.” How to Write and Sell Film Stories was written for “serious students of film technique.” She filled the straightforward textbook with anecdotes from her films and others’ to convey the lessons on the development of plot, motivation, and characters she had learned with Thalberg. She had come to believe that because of increased censorship and the limited number of adaptable plays and novels, “eighty percent of the motion pictures produced will be soon be stories written exclusively for the screen” and the time was right for a book on original screenplays. The audience for the book was immediate; universities ordered copies before it was published and it quickly went into several printings. The book led to her taking on an advice column on screen writing for Cinema Progress, a serious educational film magazine published by the American Institute of Cinematography based at the University of Southern California. She opened her house to roundtable discussions with students and sponsored a scenario contest with the winners serving as studio “apprentices.

Of course the no-government ethics will meet with at least as many objections as the no-capital economics. Our minds have been so nurtured in prejudices as to the providential functions of government that anarchist ideas must be received with distrust. Our whole education, from childhood to the grave, nurtures the belief in the necessity of a government and its beneficial effects. Systems of philosophy have been elaborated to support this view; history has been written from this standpoint; theories of law have been circulated and taught for the same purpose. All politics are based on the same principle, each politician saying to people he wants to support him: “Give me the governmental power; I will, I can, relieve you from the hardships of your present life.” All our education is permeated with the same teachings. We may open any book of sociology, history, law, or ethics: everywhere we find government, its organisation, its deeds, playing so prominent a part that we grow accustomed to suppose that the State and the political men are everything; that there is nothing behind the big statesmen. The same teachings are daily repeated in the Press. Whole columns are filled up with minutest records of parliamentary debates, of movements of political persons. And, while reading these columns, we too often forget that besides those few men whose importance has been so swollen up as to overshadow humanity, there is an immense body of men—mankind, in fact—growing and dying, living in happiness or sorrow, labouring and consuming, thinking and creating. And yet, if we revert from the printed matter to our real life, and cast a broad glance on society as it is, we are struck with the infinitesimal part played by government in our life. Millions of human beings live and die without having had anything to do with government. Every day millions of transactions are made without the slightest interference of government; and those who enter into agreements have not the slightest intention of breaking bargains. Nay, those agreements which are not protected by government (those of the exchange, or card debts) am perhaps better kept than any others. The simple habit of keeping one's word, the desire of not losing confidence, are quite sufficient in an overwhelming majority of cases to enforce the keeping of agreements. Of course it may be said that there is still the government which might enforce them if necessary. But without speaking of the numberless cases which could not even be brought before a court, everyone who has the slightest acquaintance with trade will undoubtedly confirm the assertion that, if there were not so strong a feeling of honour in keeping agreements, trade itself would become utterly impossible.

Identical twins think and feel in such similar ways that they sometimes suspect they are linked by telepathy. When separated at birth and reunited as adults, they say they feel they have known each other all their lives. Testing confirms that identical twins, whether separated at birth or not, are eerily alike (though far from identical) in just about any trait one can measure. They are similar in verbal, mathematical, and general intelligence, in their degree of life satisfaction, and in personality traits such as introversion, agreeableness, neuroticism, conscientiousness, and openness to experience. They have similar attitudes toward controversial issues such as the death penalty, religion, and modern music. They resemble each other not just in paper-and-pencil tests but in consequential behavior such as gambling, divorcing, committing crimes, getting into accidents, and watching television. And they boast dozens of shared idiosyncrasies such as giggling incessantly, giving interminable answers to simple questions, dipping buttered toast in coffee,and-in the case of Abigail van Buren and Ann Landers-writing indistinguishable syndicated advice columns. The crags and valleysof their electroencephalograms (brainwaves) are as alike as those of a single person recorded on two occasions, and the wrinkles of their brains and distribution of gray matter across cortical areas are also similar.

For some reason newspapers are not the laboratories and experimental stations of the mind that they could be, to the public's great benefit, but usually only its warehouses and stock exchanges. If he were alive today, Plato—to take him as an example, because along with a dozen others he is regarded as the greatest thinker who ever lived—would certainly be ecstatic about a news industry capable of creating, exchanging, refining a new idea every day; where information keeps pouring in from the ends of the earth with a speediness he never knew in his own lifetime, while a staff of demiurges is on hand to check it all out instantaneously for its content of reason and reality. He would have supposed a newspaper office to be that topos uranios, that heavenly realm of ideas, which he has described so impressively that to this day all the better class of people are still idealists when talking to their children or employees. And of course if Plato were to walk suddenly into a news editor’s office today and prove himself to be indeed that great author who died over two thousand years ago he would be a tremendous sensation and would instantly be showered with the most lucrative offers. If he were then capable of writing a volume of philosophical travel pieces in three weeks, and a few thousand of his well-known short stories, perhaps even turn one or the other of his older works into film, he could undoubtedly do very well for himself for a considerable period of time. The moment his return had ceased to be news, however, and Mr. Plato tried to put into practice one of his well-known ideas, which had never quite come into their own, the editor in chief would ask him to submit only a nice little column on the subject now and then for the Life and Leisure section (but in the easiest and most lively style possible, not heavy: remember the readers), and the features editor would add that he was sorry, but he could use such a contribution only once a month or so, because there were so many other good writers to be considered. And both of these gentlemen would end up feeling that they had done quite a lot for a man who might indeed be the Nestor of European publicists but still was a bit outdated, and certainly not in a class for current newsworthiness with a man like, for instance, Paul Arnheim.

The history of philosophy is to a great extent that of a certain clash of human temperaments. Undignified as such a treatment may seem to some of my colleagues, I shall have to take account of this clash and explain a good many of the divergencies of philosophers by it. Of whatever temperament a professional philosopher is, he tries when philosophizing to sink the fact of his temperament. Temperament is no conventionally recognized reason, so he urges impersonal reasons only for his conclusions. Yet his temperament really gives him a stronger bias than any of his more strictly objective premises. It loads the evidence for him one way or the other, making for a more sentimental or a more hard-hearted view of the universe, just as this fact or that principle would. He trusts his temperament. Wanting a universe that suits it, he believes in any representation of the universe that does suit it. He feels men of opposite temper to be out of key with the world's character, and in his heart considers them incompetent and 'not in it,' in the philosophic business, even tho they may far excel him in dialectical ability....But the one thing that has COUNTED so far in philosophy is that a man should see things, see them straight in his own peculiar way, and be dissatisfied with any opposite way of seeing them. There is no reason to suppose that this strong temperamental vision is from now onward to count no longer in the history of man's beliefs. .... Rationalism usually considers itself more religious than empiricism, but there is much to say about this claim, so I merely mention it. It is a true claim when the individual rationalist is what is called a man of feeling, and when the individual empiricist prides himself on being hard-headed. In that case the rationalist will usually also be in favor of what is called free-will, and the empiricist will be a fatalist—I use the terms most popularly current. The rationalist finally will be of dogmatic temper in his affirmations, while the empiricist may be more sceptical and open to discussion. I will write these traits down in two columns. I think you will practically recognize the two types of mental make-up that I mean if I head the columns by the titles 'tender-minded' and 'tough-minded' respectively. THE TENDER-MINDED Rationalistic (going by 'principles'), Intellectualistic, Idealistic, Optimistic, Religious, Free-willist, Monistic, Dogmatical. THE TOUGH-MINDED Empiricist (going by 'facts'), Sensationalistic, Materialistic, Pessimistic, Irreligious, Fatalistic, Pluralistic, Sceptical.

I have an-odd ability-to read very quickly.” “Oh,” Elizabeth replied, “how lucky you are. I never heard of a talent like that.” A lazy glamorous smile swept across his face, and he squeezed her hand. “It’s not nearly as uncommon as your eyes,” he said. Elizabeth thought it must be a great deal more uncommon, but she wasn’t completely certain and she let it pass. The following day, that discovery was completely eclipsed by another one. At Ian’s insistence, she’d spread the books from Havenhurst across his desk in order to go over the quarter’s accounts, and as the morning wore on, the long columns of figures she’d been adding and multiplying began to blur together and transpose themselves in her mind-due in part, she thought with a weary smile, to the fact that her husband had kept her awake half the night making love to her. For the third time, she added the same long columns of expenditures, and for the third time, she came up with a different sum. So frustrated was she that she didn’t realize Ian had come into the room, until he leaned over her from behind and put his hands on the desk on either side of her own. “Problems?” he asked, kissing the top of her head. “Yes,” she said, glancing at the clock and realizing that the business acquaintances he was expecting would be there momentarily. As she explained her problem to him, she started shoving loose papers into the books, hurriedly trying to reassemble everything and clear his desk. “For the last forty-five minutes, I’ve been adding the same four columns, so that I could divide them by eighteen servants, multiply that by forty servants which we now have there, times four quarters. Once I know that, I can forecast the real cost of food and supplies with the increased staff. I’ve gotten three different answers to those miserable columns, and I haven’t even tried the rest of the calculations. Tomorrow I’ll have to start all over again,” she finished irritably, “and it takes forever just to get all this laid out and organized.” She reached out to close the book and shove her calculations into it, but Ian stopped her. “Which columns are they?” he asked calmly, his surprised gaze studying the genuine ire on her face. “Those long ones down the left-hand side. It doesn’t matter, I’ll fight it out tomorrow,” she said. She shoved the chair back, dropped two sheets of paper, and bent over to pick them up. They’d slid beneath the kneehole of the desk, and in growing disgust Elizabeth crawled underneath to get them. Above her, Ian said, “$364.” “Pardon?” she asked when she reemerged, clutching the errant sheets of paper. He was writing it down on a scrap of paper. “$364.” “Do not make light of my wanting to know the figures,” she warned him with an exasperated smile. “Besides,” she continued, leaning up and pressing an apologetic kiss on his cheek, loving the tangy scent of his cologne, “I usually enjoy the bookwork. I’m simply a little short of sleep today, because,” she whispered, “my husband kept me awake half the night.” “Elizabeth,” he began hesitantly, “there’s something I-“ Then he shook his head and changed his mind, and since Shipley was already standing in the doorway to announce the arrival of his business acquaintances, Elizabeth thought no more of it. Until the next morning.

Features of Cassandra In order to keep this chapter short, the following bullet list covers the great features provided by Cassandra: Written in Java and hence providing native Java support Blend of Google BigTable and Amazon Dynamo Flexible schemaless column-family data model Support for structured and unstructured data Decentralized, distributed peer-to-peer architecture Multi-data center and rack-aware data replication Location transparent Cloud enabled Fault-tolerant with no single point of failure An automatic and transparent failover Elastic, massively, and linearly scalable Online node addition or removal High Performance Built-in data compression Built-in caching layer Write-optimized Tunable consistency providing choices from very strong consistency to different levels of eventual consistency Provision of Cassandra Query Language (CQL), a SQL-like language imitating INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE, SELECT syntax of SQL Open source and community-driven

So I went down to their office and I said, “Well, I'll write a column for you.” So the first year I didn't get paid anything, but I wrote a little column every month

write a brief column on your field of expertise, then offer it to newsletters devoted to that topic.

By force-marching his exhausted men through the unknown, rain-swept wilderness of the German-infested Teutoburg Forest, this guy had just made a brain-explodingly boneheaded mistake so amazing in its incompetence that it makes the Roman consuls at Cannae look like a conjoined triplet made out of Napoleon Bonaparte, Alexander the Great, and that dude from Total Recall who had the baby coming out of his stomach. In terms of career moves, marching three legions into the Teutoberg was the Classical Age equivalent of coauthoring an academic paper with the Unabomber or asking Charles Manson to write you a letter of recommendation for law school. Unsurprisingly, this came back to bite him in the ass. We don’t know exactly how many Germans were hiding in the woods, watching the column of imperial invaders trudge past. The Germans didn’t bother to write anything down more detailed than “killed sum d00ds 2day lulz,” and the only Romans who managed to run screaming out of this forest alive were the ones who knew better than to sit there and try to count how many GWAR fans were currently trying to brutally dismember them with axes. Let’s just say it was probably a crapload, and that when these long-haired death metal freaks unleashed a bloodcurdling shout and started charging through the forest like a bunch of gigantic mutant Ewok-Wookies ambushing the Imperial Stormtroopers on the Forest Moon of Endor it wasn’t exactly the sort of hilarious laugh riot you might see in an animated GIF involving unicorns, rainbows, and cartoon kitties with Pop-Tarts where their bodies are supposed to be. Bellowing like madmen, these balls-out, frothing-at-the-mouth, beer-swilling sausage fiends went Leeroy Jenkins toward the enemy, blitzkrieging out of the woods from every side seemingly at the same time, their ferociousness magnified not only by their savage blood rage, but by the fact that some of the dudes had taken to painting their entire bodies black with mud to help them hide in the dark forest like how Schwarzenegger hid from the Predator’s infrared vision. It was so damned terrifying that it took every ounce of Roman discipline to not simply spontaneously combust into blood vapor on the spot.

Often), 5 (Always). Scoring the quiz: List your scores for the items listed in each column below. For example, if you responded with a 3 (Sometimes) for item 1, write “3” next to item number 1 in the first column. When you have listed all your scores, total the scores in each column. Then write the scores in the appropriate quadrant in the Productivity Style Circle (figure 3.1).

Out there do'in it in the mountains... I might not be a notable author for my quote, but the column I write is just that... surviving all Mother Nature can throw at you.

write books, make speeches, produce movies, or even submit a weekly column with the thought of making people’s lives better, stand atop the giant shoulders of Napoleon Hill. Anyone who has written a self-help or personal-development book in the last 75 years enjoyed an advantage that Napoleon Hill never had. We have all benefited

gentlemen have leant their talent, time, and energy to this project. Please note that the columns appear here just as they were printed in publications around the world. Some of them are more than a decade old at this writing, but the wisdom is eternal, and the context creates points

Gossip columnists patrol their mundane arena with the same sort of mysterious merit the advice-givers do. Plainly put, how does anyone become a gossip columnist? I can't simplify it down to a lower scale than that. Are there universities that offer courses in gossip writing? How about plain old Gossip 111? Are there that many literate people who could not write a gossip column? What then, qualifies the chosen few above the rest?

Why Dont You?' wasn't totally absurd to me," Diana said later. "Of course, the columns had a certain absurdity that tickled people -- just to think that anyone would thin of writing anything so absurd. But it wasn't even writing. To me writing--Edith Wharton, Henry James...Proust, for God's sake...is a think of beauty and sustainment. 'Why Don't You?' was a think of fashion and fantasy, on the wing...It wasn't writing, it was just ideas. It was me, insistent on people using their imaginations, insisting on a certain idea of luxury.

He also began writing his own column. He called it “In the Lion’s Den” and wrote it in the voice of an opinionated English-speaking mountain lion.

In 771, a traveller arrived in the city [Baghdad] with a copy of a work of Hindu astronomy called the Siddhanta (The Opening of the Universe), by the Indian mathematician Brahmagupta (598-668). Unlike Euclid, Brahmagupta did not set out his mathematical propositions clearly with proofs, but obscured them (as was traditional in Indian mathematics) under a veil of poetry -- beautiful, but extremely difficult to unravel. Al-Mansur gave his court astrologer, al-Fazari, the Herculean task of translating the Siddhanta, which introduced Baghdad to the concept of 'positional notation' -- the way we write numbers to this day, using the digits 1 to 9, in columns of units, tens, hundreds and so on. The possibilities that this system opened up were limitless; when it was eventually adopted, it transformed the entire discipline of mathematics by allowing calculations that would have been impossible with the old Roman-numeral system. Positional notation was already known in Syria and had been admired by Severus Sebokht, who wrote about the 'nine sings' of Indian mathematicians in 662.

We lived up to now in a solid universe whose generations had deposited stratifications, one after the other. All was clear: the father was the father; the law was the law; the foreigner was the foreigner. One had the right to say that the law was hard, but it was the law. Today these sure bases of political life are anathema: for these truths constitute the program of a racist party condemned at the court of humanity. In exchange, the foreigner recommends to us a universe according to his dreams. There are no more borders, there are no more cities. From one end to the other of the continent the laws are the same, and also the passports, and also the judges, and also the currencies. Only one police force and only one brain: the senator from Milwaukee inspects and decides. In return for which, trade is free; at last trade is free. We plant some carrots which by chance never sell well, and we buy some hoeing machines which always happen to be very expensive. And we are free to protest, free, infinitely free to write, to vote, to speak in public, provided that we never take measures which can change all that. We are free to get upset and to fight in a universe of wadding. One does not know very well where our freedom ends, where our nationality ends, one does not know very well where what is permitted ends. It is an elastic universe. One does not know any more where one’s feet are set; one does not even know any more if one has feet; one feels very light, as if one’s body had been lost. But for those who grant us this simple ablation what infinite rewards, what a multitude of tips! This universe which they polish up and try to make look good to us is similar to some palace in Atlantis. There are everywhere small glasswares, columns of false marble, inscriptions, magic fruits. By entering this palace you abdicate your power, in exchange you have the right to touch the golden apples and to read the inscriptions. You are nothing any more; you do not feel any more the weight of your body; you have ceased being a man: you are one of the faithful of the religion of Humanity. At the bottom of the sanctuary there sits a Negro god. You have all the rights, except to speak evil of the god.