Connectivity Famous Quotes

And on the subject of burning books: I want to congratulate librarians, not famous for their physical strength or their powerful political connections or their great wealth, who, all over this country, have staunchly resisted anti-democratic bullies who have tried to remove certain books from their shelves, and have refused to reveal to thought police the names of persons who have checked out those titles. So the America I loved still exists, if not in the White House or the Supreme Court or the Senate or the House of Representatives or the media. The America I love still exists at the front desks of our public libraries.

He snaps a shot of Cornbread and presses send, flinching when the bird flaps at him threateningly. I think he’s cute, Henry responds. that’s because you can’t hear all the menacing gobbling Yes, famously the most sinister of all animal sounds, the gobble. “You know what, you little shit,” Alex says the second the call connects, “you can hear it for yourself and then tell me how you would handle this—” “Alex?” Henry’s voice sounds scratchy and bewildered across the line. “Have you really rung me at three o’clock in the morning to make me listen to a turkey?” “Yes, obviously,” Alex says. He glances at Cornbread and cringes. “Jesus Christ, it’s like they can see into your soul. Cornbread knows my sins, Henry. Cornbread knows what I have done, and he is here to make me atone.

One theorist, Iris Marion Young, relying on a famous “birdcage” metaphor, explains it this way: If one thinks about racism by examining only one wire of the cage, or one form of disadvantage, it is difficult to understand how and why the bird is trapped. Only a large number of wires arranged in a specific way, and connected to one another, serve to enclose the bird and to ensure that it cannot escape.11

As the family therapist Virginia Satir famously said, “We need four hugs a day for survival. We need eight hugs a day for maintenance. We need twelve hugs a day for growth.” Hug your child first thing every morning, every time you say good-bye or hello, and as often as you can in between.

Later, I remember to tell Ben about the girl. “Seconds!” I say, but he is unmoved. “People always talk about email and phones and how they alienate us from one another, but these sorts of fears about technology have always been with us,” he claims. When electricity was first introduced to homes, there were letters to the newspapers about how it would undermine family togetherness. Now there would be no need to gather around a shared hearth, people fretted. In 1903, a famous psychologist worried that young people would lose their connection to dusk and its contemplative moments. Hahaha! (Except when was the last time I stood still because it was dusk?)

Just then a word floated out through the buzz saw of Zapata-speak: Nefertari. Dan tuned back in. "...the most beautiful tomb in Egypt," Ms. Zapata was saying. "You probably know the queen because there's a famous bust of her." A photo flashed on the screen. Dan raised his hand. "That's Nefertiti," he said. "Different queen." Ms. Zapata frowned. She looked at her notes. "You could be right, Dan. Uh...let's move on." Another slide flashed on-screen. "Now, this is the inner chamber of the tomb, where she was laid to rest." Dan's hand rose again. Ms. Zapata closed her eyes. "Actually? That's the side chamber." "Really." Ms. Zapata's lips pressed together. "And how do you know this, Dan?" "Because..." Dan hesitated. Because I was there. Because I was locked inside the tomb with an ex-KGB spy, so I got to know it pretty well. "Especially since the tomb is closed for conservation," Ms. Zapata said. Yeah. But we had this connection to an Egyptologist? Except he turned out to be a thief and a liar, so we captured him. I came this close to smashing him with a lamp...

We’re living, famously, through a time in which we have trouble connecting with others, especially outside our “tribes.” And Keltner’s work shows us that sadness—Sadness, of all things!—has the power to create the “union between souls” that we so desperately lack. •

A person’s shadow stood for his legacy, his impact on the world. Some people cast hardly any shadow at all. Some cast long, deep shadows that endured for centuries. I thought about what the ghost Setne had said—how he and I had each grown up in the shadow of a famous father. I realized now that he hadn’t just meant it as a figure of speech. My dad cast a powerful shadow that still affected me and the whole world. If a person cast no shadow at all, he couldn’t be alive. His existence became meaningless. Execrating Apophis by destroying his shadow would cut his connection to the mortal world completely. He’d never be able to rise again. I finally understood why he’d been so anxious to burn Setne’s scrolls, and why he was afraid of this spell.

Throughout your career, you will compete against people who are more established, more famous, more connected, more specialized. But they can’t be you. They can’t capture your highest distinct value. Only you have you.

If you get in tune with the tendency field, through expanding and exploring the set of positive characteristics within yourself, the tendency field responds with constant energy, and affirmations. If you work against the tendency field, by being negative, unfair, unloving, and unconscious of the truth, you weaken your connection to the tendency field, and you experience existential dread, no matter how rich or famous or powerful you are.

I have a boy problem,” I said. “DELICIOUS,” Kaitlyn responded. I told her all about it, complete with the awkward face touching, leaving out only Amsterdam and Augustus’s name. “You’re sure he’s hot?” she asked when I was finished. “Pretty sure,” I said. “Athletic?” “Yeah, he used to play basketball for North Central.” “Huh,” Kaitlyn said. “Out of curiosity, how many legs does this guy have?” “Like, 1.4,” I said, smiling. Basketball players were famous in Indiana, and although Kaitlyn didn’t go to North Central, her social connectivity was endless. “Augustus Waters,” she said. “Um, maybe?” “Oh, my God. I’ve seen him at parties. The things I would do to that boy. I mean, not now that you’re interested in him. But, oh, sweet holy Lord, I would ride that one-legged pony all the way around the corral.” “Kaitlyn,” I said. “Sorry. Do you think you’d have to be on top?” “Kaitlyn,” I said. “What were we talking about. Right, you and Augustus Waters. Maybe…are you gay?

Some odd things were found; among other things the skeleton of an ourang-outang which disappeared from the Jardin des Plantes in 1800, a disappearance probably connected with the famous and incontestable appearance of the devil in the Rue des Bernardins in the last year of the eighteenth century. The poor devil finally drowned himself in the sewer.

The difference between being a tourist and a traveler is that a traveler is open to unplanned experience and doesn’t have her nose stuck in a guidebook, tracking down famous sites. She ventures out from behind glass windows (in hotels and touring buses) and meets people. She connects.

Their conversations were often charged with an excitement out of proportion to what they talked about... Their words seemed to glimmer in the air between them, dangerous metallic threads that quickly connected both of them to books and ideas, to language itself. The jailer told Teza about the daring subject matter of the famous writer Ju's recent novel, in which a passionate young man falls in love with an older woman, but the story, as he was telling it, became a metaphor for their own deepening and forbidden association....Teza refused to act like a prisoner, which freed Chit Naing from acting like a jailer.

Is he one of them now? Frustrated, stuck, self-watching, looking for a means of connection, a way to break out. After Oswald, men in America are no longer required to lead lives of quiet desperation. You apply for a credit card, buy a handgun, travel through cities, suburbs and shopping malls, anonymous, anonymous, looking for a chance to take a shot at the first puffy empty famous face, just to let people know there is someone out there who reads the papers.

It's beautiful to feel connected to someone without being attached to them.

often has no suspicion of the causal connection between the precipitating event and the pathological phenomenon.

The right way is always the difficult way but it’s the only way that connects us with our soul.

Your future may hinge on your ability to disconnect yourself with the world and connect with your soul.

Teams that spend a lot of time learning the tricks of the trade will probably never really learn the trade.

Toulouse-Lautrec syndrome. I had never seen a case before, but I had heard it described. Named for its most famous sufferer (who did not yet exist, I reminded myself), it was a degenerative disease of bone and connective tissue. Victims often appeared normal, if sickly, until their early teens, when the long bones of the legs, under the stress of bearing a body upright, began to crumble and collapse upon themselves.

The Empress surrounds you at all times. She feeds the soul with her brilliance and beauty of the night sky. Mountain landscapes, rolling hills, and ocean waves rise like the curve of her hips. Her breath is the warm air of summer, her cool palms are the willow tree's shade. She is the peace of mind of a walking meditation. The Empress fills you with the entirety of the world's beauty if you let her in. She shows you in no uncertain terms, that you are never, ever alone. You are part and parcel of the glistening, pulsating world of energetic and beautific connection. You are her and she is you. She is everything and everything is you.

If I start doing more things with my hands, whether that's woodworking or gardening or knitting or baking cookies, I might fall into the condition made famous by the psychologist with the impossible name: Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. That condition is "flow." It means becoming completely involved in an activity not for the sake of the outcome but for the sheer joy of it. It means feeling alive when we are fully in the groove of doing something. According to Csikszentmihalyi, the path to greatest happiness lies not with mindless consuming but with challenging ourselves to experience or produce something new, becoming in the process more engaged, connected and alive.

Make sure your goal is not focused on having this or that, such as a mansion by the sea, your own company, or ten million dollars in the bank. An enlarged image of yourself or a vision of yourself having this or that are all static goals and therefore don’t empower you. Instead, make sure your goals are dynamic, that is to say, point toward an activity that you are engaged in and through which you are connected to other human beings as well as to the whole. Instead of seeing yourself as a famous actor and writer and so on, see yourself inspiring countless people with your work and enriching their lives. Feel how that activity enriches or deepens not only your life but that of countless others.

You don't have to be educated to be intelligent, eloquent to be wise, rich to be powerful, famous to be important, shameful to be popular, prominent to be superior, wealthy to be generous, influential to be fortunate, celebrated to be kind, famous to be hopeful, shameful to be happy, celebrated to be blessed, heartless to be strong, militant to be firm, loud to be assertive, cocky to be ambitious, overbearing to be dominant, nor aggressive to be determined. And you also don't have to be connected to be successful, gifted to be great, talented to be exceptional, connected to be brilliant, gifted to be extraordinary, talented to be successful, weak to be humble, frail to be meek, timid to be gentle, delicate to be humane, tame to be peaceful, vulnerable to be moderate, schooled to be cultured, literate to be civilized, conceited to be sophisticated, refined to be accomplished, well-bred to be polished, nor learned to be enlightened.

Religion has used ritual forever. I remember a famous study led by psychologist Alfred Tomatis of a group of clinically depressed monks. After much examination, researchers concluded that the group’s depression stemmed from their abandoning a twice-daily ritual of gathering to sing Gregorian chants. They had lost the sense of community and the comfort of singing together in harmony. Creating beautiful music together was a formal recognition of their connection and a shared moment of joy.

The idea of being famous, the idea of being rich, the idea of being me—I can’t enjoy any of it unless I’m high. And I can’t think of love without wanting to be high. I lack a spiritual connection that protects me from these feelings. That’s why I’m a seeker.

Trust the message when things aren't meant to happen. Recognize that it's not always about timing or the perfect moment for things to align. If it doesn't fall into place, it could signify that you're not meant to connect with it, and it's not meant to be a part of your life.

Anything Bunny wrote was bound to be alarmingly original, since he began with such odd working materials and managed to alter them further by his befuddled scrutiny, but the John Donne paper must have been the worst of all the bad papers he ever wrote (ironic, given that it was the only thing he ever wrote that saw print. After he disappeared, a journalist asked for an excerpt from the missing young scholar's work and Marion gave him a copy of it, a laboriously edited paragraph of which eventually found its way into People magazine). Somewhere, Bunny had heard that John Donne had been acquainted with Izaak Walton, and in some dim corridor of his mind this friendship grew larger and larger, until in his mind the two men were practically interchangeable. We never understood how this fatal connection had established itself: Henry blamed it on Men of Thought and Deed, but no one knew for sure. A week or two before the paper was due, he had started showing up in my room about two or three in the morning, looking as if he had just narrowly escaped some natural disaster, his tie askew and his eyes wild and rolling. 'Hello, hello,' he would say, stepping in, running both hands through his disordered hair. 'Hope I didn't wake you, don't mind if I cut on the lights, do you, ah, here we go, yes, yes…' He would turn on the lights and then pace back and forth for a while without taking off his coat, hands clasped behind his back, shaking his head. Finally he would stop dead in his tracks and say, with a desperate look in his eye: 'Metahemeralism. Tell me about it. Everything you know. I gotta know something about metahemeralism.' 'I'm sorry. I don't know what that is.' 'I don't either,' Bunny would say brokenly. 'Got to do with art or pastoralism or something. That's how I gotta tie together John Donne and Izaak Walton, see.' He would resume pacing. 'Donne. Walton. Metahemeralism. That's the problem as I see it.' 'Bunny, I don't think "metahemeralism" is even a word.' 'Sure it is. Comes from the Latin. Has to do with irony and the pastoral. Yeah. That's it. Painting or sculpture or something, maybe.' 'Is it in the dictionary?' 'Dunno. Don't know how to spell it. I mean' – he made a picture frame with his hands – 'the poet and the fisherman. Parfait. Boon companions. Out in the open spaces. Living the good life. Metahemeralism's gotta be the glue here, see?' And so it would go, for sometimes half an hour or more, with Bunny raving about fishing, and sonnets, and heaven knew what, until in the middle of his monologue he would be struck by a brilliant thought and bluster off as suddenly as he had descended. He finished the paper four days before the deadline and ran around showing it to everyone before he turned it in. 'This is a nice paper, Bun -,' Charles said cautiously. 'Thanks, thanks.' 'But don't you think you ought to mention John Donne more often? Wasn't that your assignment?' 'Oh, Donne,' Bunny had said scoffingly. 'I don't want to drag him into this.' Henry refused to read it. 'I'm sure it's over my head, Bunny, really,' he said, glancing over the first page. 'Say, what's wrong with this type?' 'Triple-spaced it,' said Bunny proudly. 'These lines are about an inch apart.' 'Looks kind of like free verse, doesn't it?' Henry made a funny little snorting noise through his nose. 'Looks kind of like a menu,' he said. All I remember about the paper was that it ended with the sentence 'And as we leave Donne and Walton on the shores of Metahemeralism, we wave a fond farewell to those famous chums of yore.' We wondered if he would fail.

This pointing-hand gesture—with its index finger and thumb extended upward—is a well-known symbol of the Ancient Mysteries, and it appears all over the world in ancient art. This same gesture appears in three of Leonardo da Vinci’s most famous encoded masterpieces—The Last Supper, Adoration of the Magi, and Saint John the Baptist. It’s a symbol of man’s mystical connection to God.” As above, so below. The madman’s bizarre choice of words was starting to feel more relevant now. “I’ve never seen it before,” Sato said. Then watch ESPN, Langdon thought, always amused to see professional athletes point skyward in gratitude to God after a touchdown or home run. He wondered how many knew they were continuing a pre-Christian mystical tradition of acknowledging the mystical power above, which, for one brief moment, had transformed them into a god capable of miraculous feats.

I think he’s cute, Henry responds. that’s because you can’t hear all the menacing gobbling Yes, famously the most sinister of all animal sounds, the gobble. “You know what, you little shit,” Alex says the second the call connects, “you can hear it for yourself and then tell me how you would handle this—” “Alex?” Henry’s

I reached into the pile and pulled out a few connected chips and then was about to shove them into my mouth, when I saw what appeared to be the face of an angel sitting next to me. And, if it was in fact my actual guardian angel, then it probably would have been poor form not to offer a few chips to extend an olive branch.

Corrie ten Boom once said that if the devil can’t make you sin, he’ll make you busy. There’s truth in that. Both sin and busyness have the exact same effect—they cut off your connection to God, to other people, and even to your own soul. The famous psychologist Carl Jung had this little saying: Hurry is not of the devil; hurry is the devil.

As most young candidates for the pains and penalties of whaling stop at this same New Bedford, thence to embark on their voyage, it may as well be related that I, for one, had no idea of so doing. For my mind was made up to sail in no other than a Nantucket craft, because there was a fine, boisterous something about everything connected with that famous old island, which amazingly pleased me. Besides though New Bedford has of late been gradually monopolizing the business of whaling, and though in this matter poor old Nantucket is now much behind her, yet Nantucket was her great original— the Tyre of this Carthage;—the place where the first dead American whale was stranded. Where else but from Nantucket did those aboriginal whalemen, the Red-Men, first sally out in canoes to give chase to the Leviathan? And where but from Nantucket, too, did that first adventurous little sloop put forth, partly laden with imported cobblestones—so goes the story— to throw at the whales, in order to discover when they were nigh enough to risk a harpoon from the bowsprit?

I learned something about the craving for connection that art conjures, frustrates, and possibly exists to satisfy. I learned that finding out what you think or feel about something can take time, and that that time is always worth taking. I learned that art is one way we live together in this world, even as it relates and separates us, like Hannah Arendt’s famous table.

The Temple of Hekate at Lagina, Caria, Anatolia was the last major temple built during the Hellenistic period. The temple was constructed on the site of an older settlement, which may have included an earlier temple. Lagina is the largest known temple which was dedicated entirely to Hekate and is famous for being the site of a key-bearing procession. In this procession, a key was carried by a young girl along the Sacred Way, an 11km road which connected the temple at Lagina to the nearby city of Stratonicea. Unfortunately, we don’t have reliable information on the purpose of the ceremony. Johnston writes that: "None of our sources explain what it was supposed to accomplish, but if it took its name from a key that was carried, then that key must have been of central importance - it must have been used to lock or unlock something significant." [89] Johnston further explains that although we don’t know what the key opened, the number of inscriptions naming the festival indicates that it was a significant festival. We can speculate that it was the key to the city, the key to the temple at Lagina, or the key to another (unknown) precinct. Considering Hekate’s ability to traverse between the worlds of the living and the dead, it is conceivable that the key opened the way to some form of ritual katabasis. At Lagina, the goddess Hekate was given the epithet Kleidouchos (key-bearer), so it is also possible that the young girl who carried the keys in the procession represented the goddess in the ceremony.

One theorist, Iris Marion Young, relying on a famous “birdcage” metaphor, explains it this way: If one thinks about racism by examining only one wire of the cage, or one form of disadvantage, it is difficult to understand how and why the bird is trapped. Only a large number of wires arranged in a specific way, and connected to one another, serve to enclose the bird and to ensure that it cannot escape.

structural racism, yet the concept is fairly straightforward. One theorist, Iris Marion Young, relying on a famous “birdcage” metaphor, explains it this way: If one thinks about racism by examining only one wire of the cage, or one form of disadvantage, it is difficult to understand how and why the bird is trapped. Only a large number of wires arranged in a specific way, and connected to one another, serve to enclose the bird and to ensure that it cannot escape.

Michael Arrington, the loudmouth founder and former editor in chief of TechCrunch, is famous for investing in the start-ups that his blogs would then cover. Although he no longer runs TechCrunch, he was a partner in two investment funds during his tenure and now manages his own, CrunchFund. In other words, even when he is not a direct investor he has connections or interests in dozens of companies on his beat, and his insider knowledge helps turn profits for the firm.

In 1907 the American Telephone and Telegraph Company faced a crisis. The patents of its founder, Alexander Graham Bell, had expired, and it seemed in danger of losing its near-monopoly on phone services. Its board summoned back a retired president, Theodore Vail, who decided to reinvigorate the company by committing to a bold goal: building a system that could connect a call between New York and San Francisco. The challenge required combining feats of engineering with leaps of pure science. Making use of vacuum tubes and other new technologies, AT&T built repeaters and amplifying devices that accomplished the task in January 1915. On the historic first transcontinental call, in addition to Vail and President Woodrow Wilson, was Bell himself, who echoed his famous words from thirty-nine years earlier, “Mr. Watson, come here, I want to see you.” This time his former assistant Thomas Watson, who was in San Francisco, replied, “It would take me a week.”1

Today we think of fascism’s most famous representative as Adolf Hitler. Yet as I mentioned earlier, Hitler didn’t consider himself a fascist. Rather, he saw himself as a National Socialist. The two ideologies are related in that they are both based on collectivism and centralized state power. They emerge, one might say, from a common point of origin. Yet they are also distinct; fascism, for instance, had no intrinsic connection with anti-Semitism in the way that National Socialism did.

The unfortunate reality we must face is that racism manifests itself not only in individual attitudes and stereotypes, but also in the basic structure of society. Academics have developed complicated theories and obscure jargon in an effort to describe what is now referred to as structural racism, yet the concept is fairly straightforward. One theorist, Iris Marion Young, relying on a famous “birdcage” metaphor, explains it this way: If one thinks about racism by examining only one wire of the cage, or one form of disadvantage, it is difficult to understand how and why the bird is trapped. Only a large number of wires arranged in a specific way, and connected to one another, serve to enclose the bird and to ensure that it cannot escape.11 What is particularly important to keep in mind is that any given wire of the cage may or may not be specifically developed for the purpose of trapping the bird, yet it still operates (together with the other wires) to restrict its freedom. By the same token, not every aspect of a racial caste system needs to be developed for the specific purpose of controlling black people in order for it to operate (together with other laws, institutions, and practices) to trap them at the bottom of a racial hierarchy. In the system of mass incarceration, a wide variety of laws, institutions, and practices—ranging from racial profiling to biased sentencing policies, political disenfranchisement, and legalized employment discrimination—trap African Americans in a virtual (and literal) cage. Fortunately,

If I've learned one thing in my years of studying the social impacts of disease, it's that we live in a world where we're connected, for better or worse, to the people in our human community by the microbes that we share between us. And in times of contagious disease crisis, if we fail to recognize our shared connection, we are most certainly doomed, because our fates hang together, yoked by tiny particles that threaten us all. Scores of historical figures-both famous and infamous-have taught me as much. By learning the stories of those who lived before us, by educating ourselves about the worlds they inhabited and the viruses and bacteria that lived in, with, and through them, we can learn how to emerge from the novel coronavirus pandemic stronger than ever before and well prepared for the next new disease we will inevitably face. If we don't learn from their examples, however, I foresee a world adrift, damned by alienation from its own history, a victim of self-annihilation cued, rather than caused, by the novel coronavirus.

Our fate is reflected in our most famous invention: the computer. Those local area networks that sprang up like cities in the eighties and nineties got connected at the turn of the century by the internet. Just like European colonization connected the globe. Globalization is to the human race what the internet is to computers—a method for sharing resources and ideas. Ideas can now move around the world in nanoseconds. We have a platform for enabling the strongest minds to transform their thoughts into reality—and deploy that reality for the good of the masses.

Academics have developed complicated theories and obscure jargon in an effort to describe what is now referred to as st7-uctunal racism, yet the concept is fairly straightforward. One theorist, Iris Marion Young, relying on a famous "birdcage" metaphor, explains it this way: If one thinks about racism by examining only one wire of the cage, or one form of disadvantage, it is difficult to understand how and why the bird is trapped. Only a large number of wires arranged in a specific way, and connected to one another, serve to enclose the bird and to ensure that it cannot escape.11

we compared a sampling of successful and unsuccessful fairy tales in the famous Brothers Grimm collection. Successful (widely known) fairy tales, such as Cinderella and Little Red Riding Hood, had just two or three counterintuitive violations. Unsuccessful ones (have you heard of the Donkey Lettuce?) had none, or in other cases, quite the opposite—they had far too many violations. Successful counterintuitive representations and stories were also likely to generate emotional responses, like fear, and encouraged additional inferences.25 These kinds of memory biases play an important role in religious belief.26 The extraordinary agents endemic to religions appear to possess a particularly evocative set of abilities not shared by ordinary beings. They can be invisible; they can see things from afar; they can move through physical objects. This minimal counterintuitiveness is memorable, giving these concepts an advantage in cultural transmission. These departures from common sense are systematic but not radical enough to rupture meaning completely. As Sperber has put it, these minimal counterintuitions are relevant mysteries: they are closely connected to background knowledge, but do not admit to a final interpretation.

The goal is that we need not to have a large audience to make a difference. If you have a pen, use it to contribute towards the betterment of your society. If you have a voice, speak your way through making a positive change in your environment. If you have connections, use them to make a positive difference. If you only have your family or friends, relay your message of change to them. At times, you only need your good intention to make a positive contribution. Don't wait to be famous to plant positive seeds in the society. Start with the resources that you have today to cultivate positivity in your environment.

Unlike most of the other Revolutionary leaders, who were the first in their families to attend college, Burr was the son of a president of Princeton and the grandson of another Princeton president—Jonathan Edwards, the most famous theologian in eighteenth-century America—and, said Adams, he “was connected by blood with many respectable families in New England.”6 This presumption that he was already an aristocrat by blood separated Burr from most of the other leaders of the Revolutionary generation. He always had an air of superiority about him, and he always considered himself to be more of a gentleman than other men.

While on the subject of burning books, I want to congratulate librarians, not famous for their physical strength, their powerful political connections or great wealth, who, all over this country, have staunchly resisted anti-democratic bullies who have tried to remove certain books from their shelves, and destroyed records rather than have to reveal to thought police the names of persons who have checked out those titles. So the America I loved still exists, if not in the White House, the Supreme Court, the Senate, the House of Representatives, or the media. The America I loved still exists at the front desks of our public libraries.

The Tang Dynasty has always held a special lure for me. This was a time when women rose to the highest ranks as warriors, courtesans and scholars. Anyone with the will and the perseverance to excel could make it. The imperial capital of Changan emerged as a cosmopolitan center of trade and culture. The most famous love stories, the most beautiful poetry and the most elegant fashions came from this era. The Silk Road which connected East to West was at its height during the eighth century and the empire embraced different cultures to a greater extent than ever before. I wanted to know what it was like to wear silk and travel to the edges of the empire during this golden age. And I wanted sword fights!

Some societies tried to solve the problem by establishing a central barter system that collected products from specialist growers and manufacturers and distributed them to those who needed them. The largest and most famous such experiment was conducted in the Soviet Union, and it failed miserably. ‘Everyone would work according to their abilities, and receive according to their needs’ turned out in practice into ‘everyone would work as little as they can get away with, and receive as much as they could grab’. More moderate and more successful experiments were made on other occasions, for example in the Inca Empire. Yet most societies found a more easy way to connect large numbers of experts – they developed money.

We read messages and see the intimate visual details of celebrities’ lives on social media; 15 million or 50 million or 86 million of us have identical unmediated connections with America’s most famous people, including the president of the United States. Which makes us feel as if celebrities are our pals, in a way that People and the subsequent glut of celebrity media could not quite do. Meanwhile the American fantasy of becoming famous for real feels less fantastical than ever. Reality TV has turned hundreds of schmos (and Kardashians) into celebrities. There are almost as many reality shows on the air now as there were television shows of any kind in 2000. YouTube is a gateway to celebrity that has no gatekeepers at all.

Some researchers, such as psychologist Jean Twenge, say this new world where compliments are better than sex and pizza, in which the self-enhancing bias has been unchained and allowed to gorge unfettered, has led to a new normal in which the positive illusions of several generations have now mutated into full-blown narcissism. In her book The Narcissism Epidemic, Twenge says her research shows that since the mid-1980s, clinically defined narcissism rates in the United States have increased in the population at the same rate as obesity. She used the same test used by psychiatrists to test for narcissism in patients and found that, in 2006, one in four U.S. college students tested positive. That’s real narcissism, the kind that leads to diagnoses of personality disorders. In her estimation, this is a dangerous trend, and it shows signs of acceleration. Narcissistic overconfidence crosses a line, says Twenge, and taints those things improved by a skosh of confidence. Over that line, you become less concerned with the well-being of others, more materialistic, and obsessed with status in addition to losing all the restraint normally preventing you from tragically overestimating your ability to manage or even survive risky situations. In her book, Twenge connects this trend to the housing market crash of the mid-2000s and the stark increase in reality programming during that same decade. According to Twenge, the drive to be famous for nothing went from being strange to predictable thanks to a generation or two of people raised by parents who artificially boosted self-esteem to ’roidtastic levels and then released them into a culture filled with new technologies that emerged right when those people needed them most to prop up their self-enhancement biases. By the time Twenge’s research was published, reality programming had spent twenty years perfecting itself, and the modern stars of those shows represent a tiny portion of the population who not only want to be on those shows, but who also know what they are getting into and still want to participate. Producers with the experience to know who will provide the best television entertainment to millions then cull that small group. The result is a new generation of celebrities with positive illusions so robust and potent that the narcissistic overconfidence of the modern American teenager by comparison is now much easier to see as normal.

In the time of trading I had an opportunity of seeing that the too liberal use of spirituous liquors and the custom of wearing too costly apparel led some people into great inconveniences; and that these two things appear to be often connected with each other. By not attending to that use of things which is consistent with universal righteousness, there is an increase of labor which extends beyond what our Heavenly Father intends for us. And by great labor, and often of much sweating, there is even among such as are not drunkards a craving of liquors to revive the spirits; that partly by the luxurious drinking of some, and partly by the drinking of others (led to it through immoderate labor), very great quantities of rum are every year expended in our colonies; the greater part of which we should have no need of, did we steadily attend to pure wisdom.

I HAVE ALWAYS BEEN most interested in the question of what makes a house a home. What are the elements that move a house beyond its physical structure and provide the warmth that we all crave? In my fifteen years as a designer, I’ve come to understand that the answer is simple: It is about surrounding ourselves with things we love. (...) And in this case, the beauty comes from the owners’ love of books. Books are beautiful objects in their own right—their bindings and covers—and the space they fill on shelves or stacked on coffee tables in colorful piles add balance and texture to any room. And just like any other part of a home, books require maintenance: They need to be dusted, categorized, rearranged, and maintained. Our relationship with them is dynamic and ever changing. But our connection to them goes beyond the material. In each house we visited, the libraries were the heart of the home, meaningful to the collectors’ lives. In this book, we tried to capture what they brought to the home—the life and spirit books added. Some subjects have working libraries they constantly reference; others fill their shelves with the potential pleasures of the unread. When we visited the homes, many people could find favorite books almost by osmosis, using systems known only to themselves. (...) As we found repeatedly, surrounding yourself with books you love tells the story of your life, your interests, your passions, your values. Your past and your future. Books allow us to escape, and our personal libraries allow us to invent the story of ourselves—and the legacy that we will leave behind. There’s a famous quote attributed to Cicero: “A room without books is like a body without a soul.” If I suspected this before, I know it now. I hope you’ll find as much pleasure in discovering these worlds as we did.

Book-writing is the province of specialists, living is the business of us all. Moral life, sentimental life, religious life, whatever is above the terre à terre of mere existing, also consists of illuminations which once departed return no more. A diary, a few old letters, a few sheets containing thoughts or meditations, may keep up the connection between us today and our better selves of the past. I was deeply impressed as a youth by the advice of a spiritual writer to read one's own spiritual notes preferably to even famous works. All saints seem to have done so. The moment we realize that any thought, ours or borrowed, is pregnant enough not to be wasted, or original enough not to be likely to come back again, we must fix it on paper. Our manuscripts should mirror our reading, our meditations, our ideals, and our approach to it in our lives. Anybody who has early taken the habit to record himself in that way knows that the loss of his papers would also mean a loss to his thinking possibilities.

Since becoming famous,” I professed, “I’ve tried to be a good man, to not lie and deceive myself, to be more pure of heart and mind, but I am full of lust, objectifying other people and myself. I do not feel a connection to my past nor see the path to my future, I’m lost. I don’t feel myself.” I shared the demons of my mind for three and a half hours with Brother Christian. I took myself to the woodshed. He did not say a word. Not. One. He just patiently listened as we wandered side by side through the desert. At hour four we found ourselves back at the chapel sitting on a bench just outside the entrance. Now weeping, I eventually came to the end of my confession. We sat in silence while I awaited Christian’s judgment. Nothing. Finally, in the unrest of the stillness, I looked up. Brother Christian, who hadn’t said one word to me this entire time, looked me in the eyes and in almost a whisper, said to me, “Me, too.” Sometimes we don’t need advice. Sometimes we just need to hear we’re not the only one.

EAGLE The East direction is represented by eagle and condor, who bring vision, clarity, and foresight. Eagle perceives the entire panorama of life without becoming bogged down in its details. The energies of eagle assist us in finding the guiding vision of our lives. The eyes of condor see into the past and the future, helping to know where we come from, and who we are becoming. When I work with a client who is stuck in the traumas of the past, I help her to connect with the spirit of eagle or condor. As this energy infuses the healing space, my client is often able to attain new clarity and insight into her life. This is not an intellectual insight, but rather a call, faint at first, hardly consciously heard. Her possibilities beckon to her and propel her out of her grief and into her destiny. I believe that while everyone has a future, only certain people have a destiny. Having a destiny means living to your fullest human potential. You don’t need to become a famous politician or poet, but your destiny has to be endowed with meaning and purpose. You could be a street sweeper and be living a destiny. You could be the president of a large corporation and be living a life bereft of meaning. One can make oneself available to destiny, but it requires a great deal of courage to do so. Otherwise our destiny bypasses us, leaving us deprived of a fulfillment known by those who choose to take the road less traveled. Eagle allows us to rise above the mundane battles that occupy our lives and consume our energy and attention. Eagle gives us wings to soar above trivial day-to-day struggles into the high peaks close to Heaven. Eagle and condor represent the self-transcending principle in nature. Biologists have identified the self-transcending principle as one of the prime agendas of evolution. Living molecules seek to transcend their selfhood to become cells, then simple organisms, which then form tissues, then organs, and then evolve into complex beings such as humans and whales. Every transcending jump is inclusive of all of the levels beneath it. Cells are inclusive of molecules, yet transcend them; organs are inclusive of cells, yet go far beyond them; whales are inclusive of organs yet cannot be described by them, as the whole transcends the sum of its parts. The transcending principle represented by eagle states that problems at a certain level are best solved by going up one step. The problems of cells are best resolved by organs, while the needs of organs are best addressed by an organism such as a butterfly or a human. The same principle operates in our lives. Think of nested Russian dolls. Material needs are the tiny doll in the center. The larger emotional doll encompasses them, and both are contained within the outermost spiritual doll. In this way, we cannot satisfy emotional needs with material things, but we can satisfy them spiritually. When we go one step up, our emotional needs are addressed in the solution. We rise above our life dilemmas on the wings of eagle and see our lives in perspective.

I write because of the fragility of our existence. I write because it's my answer to impermanence. I write because it helps me stay connected to my heart. I write because we’re all different, and so much the same. I write because the world needs more tenderness. I write because I'm tired of secrets. I write because it’s my path to redemption. I write because I've forsaken those that I love. I write because I want to know myself. I write because I want to know you. I write because I'm drawn towards things I shouldn't do. I write because every flower is meant to bloom. I write because life is full of paradoxes. I write because I’ve had to leave friends behind. I write because it's my form of prayer. I write because, when I write, I lose track of time. I write because I've walked dark streets looking for love. I write because of the way the sublime slips away from words. I write because of the twice shy part of once burned. I write because it helps me learn. I write because there are plenty of people who have written, famous well-published people, literary figures, literary giants, and I didn't like what they wrote. I write because I'm always telling myself stories anyhow. I write because I don't know all of the reasons I write. I write for you. I write. I write. I write.

How to live (forty pieces of advice I feel to be helpful but which I don’t always follow) 1. Appreciate happiness when it is there 2. Sip, don’t gulp. 3. Be gentle with yourself. Work less. Sleep more. 4. There is absolutely nothing in the past that you can change. That’s basic physics. 5. Beware of Tuesdays. And Octobers. 6. Kurt Vonnegut was right. “Reading and writing are the most nourishing forms of meditation anyone has so far found.” 7. Listen more than you talk. 8. Don’t feel guilty about being idle. More harm is probably done to the world through work than idleness. But perfect your idleness. Make it mindful. 9. Be aware that you are breathing. 10. Wherever you are, at any moment, try to find something beautiful. A face, a line out of a poem, the clouds out of a window, some graffiti, a wind farm. Beauty cleans the mind. 11. Hate is a pointless emotion to have inside you. It is like eating a scorpion to punish it for stinging you. 12. Go for a run. Then do some yoga. 13. Shower before noon. 14. Look at the sky. Remind yourself of the cosmos. Seek vastness at every opportunity, in order to see the smallness of yourself. 15. Be kind. 16. Understand that thoughts are thoughts. If they are unreasonable, reason with them, even if you have no reason left. You are the observer of your mind, not its victim. 17. Do not watch TV aimlessly. Do not go on social media aimlessly. Always be aware of what you are doing and why you are doing it. Don’t value TV less. Value it more. Then you will watch it less. Unchecked distractions will lead you to distraction. 18. Sit down. Lie down. Be still. Do nothing. Observe. Listen to your mind. Let it do what it does without judging it. Let it go, like Snow Queen in Frozen. 19. Don’t’ worry about things that probably won’t happen. 20. Look at trees. Be near trees. Plant trees. (Trees are great.) 21. Listen to that yoga instructor on YouTube, and “walk as if you are kissing the earth with your feet”. 22. Live. Love. Let go. The three Ls. 23. Alcohol maths. Wine multiplies itself by itself. The more you have, the more you are likely to have. And if it is hard to stop at one glass, it will be impossible at three. Addition is multiplication. 24. Beware of the gap. The gap between where you are and where you want to be. Simply thinking of the gap widens it. And you end up falling through. 25. Read a book without thinking about finishing it. Just read it. Enjoy every word, sentence, and paragraph. Don’t wish for it to end, or for it to never end. 26. No drug in the universe will make you feel better, at the deepest level, than being kind to other people. 27. Listen to what Hamlet – literature’s most famous depressive – told Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. “There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.” 28. If someone loves you, let them. Believe in that love. Live for them, even when you feel there is no point. 29. You don’t need the world to understand you. It’s fine. Some people will never really understand things they haven’t experienced. Some will. Be grateful. 30. Jules Verne wrote of the “Living Infinite”. This is the world of love and emotion that is like a “sea”. If we can submerge ourselves in it, we find infinity in ourselves, and the space we need to survive. 31. Three in the morning is never the time to try and sort out your life. 32. Remember that there is nothing weird about you. You are just a human, and everything you do and feel is a natural thing, because we are natural animals. You are nature. You are a hominid ape. You are in the world and the world is in you. Everything connects. 33. Don’t believe in good or bad, or winning and losing, or victory and defeat, or ups and down. At your lowest and your highest, whether you are happy or despairing or calm or angry, there is a kernel of you that stays the same. That is the you that matters.

After moving his family from Yakima to Paradise, California, in 1958, he enrolled at Chico State College. There, he began an apprenticeship under the soon-to-be-famous John Gardner, the first "real writer" he had ever met. "He offered me the key to his office," Carver recalled in his preface to Gardner’s On Becoming a Novelist (1983). "I see that gift now as a turning point." In addition, Gardner gave his student "close, line-by-line criticism" and taught him a set of values that was "not negotiable." Among these values were convictions that Carver held until his death. Like Gardner, whose On Moral Fiction (1978) decried the "nihilism" of postmodern formalism, Carver maintained that great literature is life-connected, life-affirming, and life-changing. "In the best fiction," he wrote "the central character, the hero or heroine, is also the ‘moved’ character, the one to whom something happens in the story that makes a difference. Something happens that changes the way that character looks at himself and hence the world." Through the 1960s and 1970s he steered wide of the metafictional "funhouse" erected by Barth, Barthelme and Company, concentrating instead on what he called "those basics of old-fashioned storytelling: plot, character, and action." Like Gardner and Chekhov, Carver declared himself a humanist. "Art is not self-expression," he insisted, "it’s communication.

I consider myself a student of colours and shades and hues and tints. Crimson lake, burnt umber, ultramarine … I was too clumsy as a child to paint with my moistened brush the scenery that I would have liked to bring into being. I preferred to leave untouched in their white metallic surroundings my rows of powdery rectangles of water-colours, to read aloud one after another of the tiny printed names of the coloured rectangles, and to let each colour seem to soak into each word of its name or even into each syllable of each word of each name so that I could afterwards call to mind an exact shade or hue from an image of no more than black letters on a white ground. Deep cadmium, geranium lake, imperial purple, parchment … after the last of our children had found employment and had moved out of our home, my wife and I were able to buy for ourselves things that had previously been beyond our means. I bought my first such luxury, as I called it, in a shop selling artists’ supplies. I bought there a complete set of coloured pencils made by a famous maker of pencils in England: a hundred and twenty pencils, each stamped with gold lettering along its side and having at its end a perfectly tapered wick. The collection of pencils is behind me as I write these words. It rests near the jars of glass marbles and the kaleidoscope mentioned earlier. None of the pencils has ever been used in the way that most pencils are used, but I have sometimes used the many-striped collection in order to confirm my suspicion as a child that each of what I called my long-lost moods might be recollected and, perhaps, preserved if only I could look again at the precise shade or hue that had become connected with the mood – that had absorbed, as it were, or had been permeated with, one or more of the indefinable qualities that constitute what is called a mood or a state of feeling. During the weeks since I first wrote in the earlier pages of this report about the windows in the church of white stone, I have spent every day an increasing amount of time in moving my pencils to and fro among the hollow spaces allotted to them in their container. I seem to recall that I tried sometimes, many years ago, to move my glass marbles from place to place on the carpet near my desk with the vague hope that some or another chance arrangement of them would restore to me some previously irretrievable mood. The marbles, however, were too variously coloured, and each differed too markedly from the other. Their colours seemed to vie, to compete. Or, a single marble might suggest more than I was in search of: a whole afternoon in my childhood or a row of trees in a backyard when I had wanted back only a certain few moments when my face was brushed by a certain few leaves. Among the pencils are many differing only subtly from their neighbours. Six at least I might have called simply red if I had not learned long ago their true names. With these six, and with still others from each side of them, I often arrange one after another of many possible sequences, hoping to see in the conjectured space between some or another unlikely pair a certain tint that I have wanted for long to see.

It's hard to form a lasting connection when your permanent address is an eight-inch mailbox in the UPS store. Still,as I inch my way closer, I can't help the way my breath hitches, the way my insides thrum and swirl. And when he turns,flashing me that slow, languorous smile that's about to make him world famous,his eyes meeting mine when he says, "Hey,Daire-Happy Sweet Sixteen," I can't help but think of the millions of girls who would do just about anything to stand in my pointy blue babouches. I return the smile, flick a little wave of my hand, then bury it in the side pocket of the olive-green army jacket I always wear. Pretending not to notice the way his gaze roams over me, straying from my waist-length brown hair peeking out from my scarf, to the tie-dyed tank top that clings under my jacket,to the skinny dark denim jeans,all the way down to the brand-new slippers I wear on my feet. "Nice." He places his foot beside mine, providing me with a view of the his-and-hers version of the very same shoe. Laughing when he adds, "Maybe we can start a trend when we head back to the States.What do you think?" We. There is no we. I know it.He knows it.And it bugs me that he tries to pretend otherwise. The cameras stopped rolling hours ago, and yet here he is,still playing a role. Acting as though our brief, on-location hookup means something more. Acting like we won't really end long before our passports are stamped RETURN. And that's all it takes for those annoyingly soft girly feelings to vanish as quickly as a flame in the rain. Allowing the Daire I know,the Daire I've honed myself to be, to stand in her palce. "Doubtful." I smirk,kicking his shoe with mine.A little harder then necessary, but then again,he deserves it for thinking I'm lame enough to fall for his act. "So,what do you say-food? I'm dying for one of those beef brochettes,maybe even a sausage one too.Oh-and some fries would be good!" I make for the food stalls,but Vane has another idea. His hand reaches for mine,fingers entwining until they're laced nice and tight. "In a minute," he says,pulling me so close my hip bumps against his. "I thought we might do something special-in honor of your birthday and all.What do you think about matching tattoos?" I gape.Surely he's joking. "Yeah,you know,mehndi. Nothing permanent.Still,I thought it could be kinda cool." He arcs his left brow in his trademark Vane Wick wau,and I have to fight not to frown in return. Nothing permanent. That's my theme song-my mission statement,if you will. Still,mehndi's not quite the same as a press-on. It has its own life span. One that will linger long after Vane's studio-financed, private jet lifts him high into the sky and right out of my life. Though I don't mention any of that, instead I just say, "You know the director will kill you if you show up on set tomorrow covered in henna." Vane shrugs. Shrugs in a way I've seen too many times, on too many young actors before him.He's in full-on star-power mode.Think he's indispensable. That he's the only seventeen-year-old guy with a hint of talent,golden skin, wavy blond hair, and piercing blue eyes that can light up a screen and make the girls (and most of their moms) swoon. It's a dangerous way to see yourself-especially when you make your living in Hollywood. It's the kind of thinking that leads straight to multiple rehab stints, trashy reality TV shows, desperate ghostwritten memoirs, and low-budget movies that go straight to DVD.

Moore’s Law, the rule of thumb in the technology industry, tells us that processor chips—the small circuit boards that form the backbone of every computing device—double in speed every eighteen months. That means a computer in 2025 will be sixty-four times faster than it is in 2013. Another predictive law, this one of photonics (regarding the transmission of information), tells us that the amount of data coming out of fiber-optic cables, the fastest form of connectivity, doubles roughly every nine months. Even if these laws have natural limits, the promise of exponential growth unleashes possibilities in graphics and virtual reality that will make the online experience as real as real life, or perhaps even better. Imagine having the holodeck from the world of Star Trek, which was a fully immersive virtual-reality environment for those aboard a ship, but this one is able to both project a beach landscape and re-create a famous Elvis Presley performance in front of your eyes. Indeed, the next moments in our technological evolution promise to turn a host of popular science-fiction concepts into science facts: driverless cars, thought-controlled robotic motion, artificial intelligence (AI) and fully integrated augmented reality, which promises a visual overlay of digital information onto our physical environment. Such developments will join with and enhance elements of our natural world. This is our future, and these remarkable things are already beginning to take shape. That is what makes working in the technology industry so exciting today. It’s not just because we have a chance to invent and build amazing new devices or because of the scale of technological and intellectual challenges we will try to conquer; it’s because of what these developments will mean for the world.

Aristotle very famously said in his Politics I.V.8 that some people are born to be slaves. He meant that some people are not as capable of higher rational thought and therefore should do the work that frees the more talented and brilliant to pursue a life of honor and culture. Modern people bristle with outrage at such a statement, but while we do not today hold with the idea of literal slavery, the attitudes behind Aristotle’s statement are alive and well. Christian philosopher Lee Hardy and many others have argued that this “Greek attitude toward work and its place in human life was largely preserved in both the thought and practice of the Christian church” through the centuries, and still holds a great deal of influence today in our culture.43 What has come down to us is a set of pervasive ideas. One is that work is a necessary evil. The only good work, in this view, is work that helps make us money so that we can support our families and pay others to do menial work. Second, we believe that lower-status or lower-paying work is an assault on our dignity. One result of this belief is that many people take jobs that they are not suited for at all, choosing to aim for careers that do not fit their gifts but promise higher wages and prestige. Western societies are increasingly divided between the highly remunerated “knowledge classes” and the more poorly remunerated “service sector,” and most of us accept and perpetuate the value judgments that attach to these categories. Another result is that many people will choose to be unemployed rather than do work that they feel is beneath them, and most service and manual labor falls into this category. Often people who have made it into the knowledge classes show great disdain for the concierges, handymen, dry cleaners, cooks, gardeners, and others who hold service jobs.

The dispersion of the daimonic by means of impersonality has serious and destructive effects. In New York City, it is not regarded as strange that the anonymous human beings secluded in single-room occupancies are so often connected with violent crime and drug addiction. Not that the anonymous individual in New York is alone: he sees thousands of other people every day, and he knows all the famous personalities as they come, via TV, into his single room. He knows their names, their smiles, their idiosyncrasies; they bandy about in a “we're-all-friends-together” mood on the screen which invites him to join them and subtly assumes that he does join them. He knows them all. But he himself is never known. His smile is unseen; his idiosyncrasies are important to no-body; his name is unknown. He remains a foreigner pushed on and off the subway by tens of thousands of other anonymous foreigners. There is a deeply depersonalizing tragedy involved in this. The most severe punishment Yahweh could inflict on his people was to blot out their name. “Their names,” Yahweh proclaims, “shall be wiped out of the book of the living.” This anonymous man's never being known, this aloneness, is transformed into loneliness, which may then become daimonic possession. For his self-doubts—“I don't really exist since I can't affect anyone” —eat away at his innards; he lives and breathes and walks in a loneliness which is subtle and insidious. It is not surprising that he gets a gun and trains it on some passer-by—also anonymous to him. And it is not surprising that the young men in the streets, who are only anonymous digits in their society, should gang together in violent attacks to make sure their assertion is felt. Loneliness and its stepchild, alienation, can become forms of demon possession. Surrendering ourselves to the impersonal daimonic pushes us into an anonymity which is also impersonal; we serve nature’s gross purposes on the lowest common denominator, which often means with violence.

what makes life worth living when we are old and frail and unable to care for ourselves? In 1943, the psychologist Abraham Maslow published his hugely influential paper “A Theory of Human Motivation,” which famously described people as having a hierarchy of needs. It is often depicted as a pyramid. At the bottom are our basic needs—the essentials of physiological survival (such as food, water, and air) and of safety (such as law, order, and stability). Up one level are the need for love and for belonging. Above that is our desire for growth—the opportunity to attain personal goals, to master knowledge and skills, and to be recognized and rewarded for our achievements. Finally, at the top is the desire for what Maslow termed “self-actualization”—self-fulfillment through pursuit of moral ideals and creativity for their own sake. Maslow argued that safety and survival remain our primary and foundational goals in life, not least when our options and capacities become limited. If true, the fact that public policy and concern about old age homes focus on health and safety is just a recognition and manifestation of those goals. They are assumed to be everyone’s first priorities. Reality is more complex, though. People readily demonstrate a willingness to sacrifice their safety and survival for the sake of something beyond themselves, such as family, country, or justice. And this is regardless of age. What’s more, our driving motivations in life, instead of remaining constant, change hugely over time and in ways that don’t quite fit Maslow’s classic hierarchy. In young adulthood, people seek a life of growth and self-fulfillment, just as Maslow suggested. Growing up involves opening outward. We search out new experiences, wider social connections, and ways of putting our stamp on the world. When people reach the latter half of adulthood, however, their priorities change markedly. Most reduce the amount of time and effort they spend pursuing achievement and social networks. They narrow in. Given the choice, young people prefer meeting new people to spending time with, say, a sibling; old people prefer the opposite. Studies find that as people grow older they interact with fewer people and concentrate more on spending time with family and established friends. They focus on being rather than doing and on the present more than the future.

How often, after that day, in the course of my walks along the Guermantes way, and with what an intensified melancholy, did I reflect on my lack of qualification for a literary career, and abandon all hope of ever becoming a famous author. The regrets that I felt for this, as I lingered behind to muse awhile on my own, made me suffer so acutely that, in order to banish them, my mind of its own accord, by a sort of inhibition in the face of pain, ceased entirely to think of verse-making, of fiction, of the poetic future on which my lack of talent precluded me from counting. Then, quite independently of all these literary preoccupations and in no way connected with them, suddenly a roof, a gleam of sunlight on a stone, the smell of a path would make me stop still, to enjoy the special pleasure that each of them gave me, and also because they appeared to be concealing, beyond what my eyes could see, something which they invited me to come and take but which despite all my efforts I have never managed to discover. Since I felt that this something was to be found in them, I would stand there motionless, looking, breathing, endeavouring to penetrate with my mind beyond the thing seen or smelt. And if I then had to hasten after my grandfather, to continue my walk, I would try to racapture them by closing my eyes; I would concentrate on recalling exactly the line of the roof, the colour of the stone, which, without my being able to understand why, had seemed to me to be bursting, ready to open, to yield up to me the secret treasure of which they were themselves no more than the lids. It was certainly not impressions of this kind that could restore the hope I had lost of succeeding one day in becoming an author and poet, for each of them was associated with some material object devoid of intellectual value and suggesting no abstract truth. But at least they gave me an unreasoning pleasure, the illusion of a sort of fecundity, and thereby distracted me from the tedium, from the sense of my own impotence which I had felt whenever I had sought a philosophic theme for some great literary work. But so arduous was the task imposed on my conscience by those impressions of form or scent or colour - to try to perceive what lay hidden beneath them - that I was not long in seeking an excuse which would allow me to relax so strenuous an effort and to spare myself the fatigue that it involved.

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Beyoncé and Rihanna were pop stars. Pop stars were musical performers whose celebrity had exploded to the point where they could be identified by single words. You could say BEYONCÉ or RIHANNA to almost anyone anywhere in the industrialized world and it would conjure a vague neurological image of either Beyoncé or Rihanna. Their songs were about the same six subjects of all songs by all pop stars: love, celebrity, fucking, heartbreak, money and buying ugly shit. It was the Twenty-First Century. It was the Internet. Fame was everything. Traditional money had been debased by mass production. Traditional money had ceased to be about an exchange of humiliation for food and shelter. Traditional money had become the equivalent of a fantasy world in which different hunks of vampiric plastic made emphatic arguments about why they should cross the threshold of your home. There was nothing left to buy. Fame was everything because traditional money had failed. Fame was everything because fame was the world’s last valid currency. Beyoncé and Rihanna were part of a popular entertainment industry which deluged people with images of grotesque success. The unspoken ideology of popular entertainment was that its customers could end up as famous as the performers. They only needed to try hard enough and believe in their dreams. Like all pop stars, Beyoncé and Rihanna existed off the illusion that their fame was a shared experience with their fans. Their fans weren’t consumers. Their fans were fellow travelers on a journey through life. In 2013, this connection between the famous and their fans was fostered on Twitter. Beyoncé and Rihanna were tweeting. Their millions of fans were tweeting back. They too could achieve their dreams. Of course, neither Beyoncé nor Rihanna used Twitter. They had assistants and handlers who packaged their tweets for maximum profit and exposure. Fame could purchase the illusion of being an Internet user without the purchaser ever touching a mobile phone or a computer. That was a difference between the rich and the poor. The poor were doomed to the Internet, which was a wonderful resource for watching shitty television, experiencing angst about other people’s salaries, and casting doubt on key tenets of Mormonism and Scientology. If Beyoncé or Rihanna were asked about how to be like them and gave an honest answer, it would have sounded like this: “You can’t. You won’t. You are nothing like me. I am a powerful mixture of untamed ambition, early childhood trauma and genetic mystery. I am a portal in the vacuum of space. The formula for my creation is impossible to replicate. The One True God made me and will never make the like again. You are nothing like me.

One can take the ape out of the jungle, but not the jungle out of the ape. This also applies to us, bipedal apes. Ever since our ancestors swung from tree to tree, life in small groups has been an obsession of ours. We can’t get enough of politicians thumping their chests on television, soap opera stars who swing from tryst to tryst, and reality shows about who’s in and who’s out. It would be easy to make fun of all this primate behavior if not for the fact that our fellow simians take the pursuit of power and sex just as seriously as we do. We share more with them than power and sex, though. Fellow-feeling and empathy are equally important, but they’re rarely mentioned as part of our biological heritage. We would much rather blame nature for what we don’t like in ourselves than credit it for what we do like. As Katharine Hepburn famously put it in The African Queen, ”Nature, Mr. Allnut, is what we are put in this world to rise above.” This opinion is still very much with us. Of the millions of pages written over the centuries about human nature, none are as bleak as those of the last three decades, and none as wrong. We hear that we have selfish genes, that human goodness is a sham, and that we act morally only to impress others. But if all that people care about is their own good, why does a day-old baby cry when it hears another baby cry? This is how empathy starts. Not very sophisticated perhaps, but we can be sure that a newborn doesn’t try to impress. We are born with impulses that draw us to others and that later in life make us care about them. The possibility that empathy is part of our primate heritage ought to make us happy, but we’re not in the habit of embracing our nature. When people commit genocide, we call them ”animals”. But when they give to the poor, we praise them for being ”humane”. We like to claim the latter behavior for ourselves. It wasn’t until an ape saved a member of our own species that there was a public awakening to the possibility of nonhuman humaneness. This happened on August 16, 1996, when an eight-year-old female gorilla named Binti Jua helped a three-year-old boy who had fallen eighteen feet into the primate exhibit at Chicago’s Brookfield Zoo. Reacting immediately, Binti scooped up the boy and carried him to safety. She sat down on a log in a stream, cradling the boy in her lap, giving him a few gentle back pats before taking him to the waiting zoo staff. This simple act of sympathy, captured on video and shown around the world, touched many hearts, and Binti was hailed as a heroine. It was the first time in U.S. history that an ape figured in the speeches of leading politicians, who held her up as a model of compassion. That Binti’s behavior caused such surprise among humans says a lot about the way animals are depicted in the media. She really did nothing unusual, or at least nothing an ape wouldn’t do for any juvenile of her own species. While recent nature documentaries focus on ferocious beasts (or the macho men who wrestle them to the ground), I think it’s vital to convey the true breadth and depth of our connection with nature. This book explores the fascinating and frightening parallels between primate behavior and our own, with equal regard for the good, the bad, and the ugly.

A famous British writer is revealed to be the author of an obscure mystery novel. An immigrant is granted asylum when authorities verify he wrote anonymous articles critical of his home country. And a man is convicted of murder when he’s connected to messages painted at the crime scene. The common element in these seemingly disparate cases is “forensic linguistics”—an investigative technique that helps experts determine authorship by identifying quirks in a writer’s style. Advances in computer technology can now parse text with ever-finer accuracy. Consider the recent outing of Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling as the writer of The Cuckoo’s Calling , a crime novel she published under the pen name Robert Galbraith. England’s Sunday Times , responding to an anonymous tip that Rowling was the book’s real author, hired Duquesne University’s Patrick Juola to analyze the text of Cuckoo , using software that he had spent over a decade refining. One of Juola’s tests examined sequences of adjacent words, while another zoomed in on sequences of characters; a third test tallied the most common words, while a fourth examined the author’s preference for long or short words. Juola wound up with a linguistic fingerprint—hard data on the author’s stylistic quirks. He then ran the same tests on four other books: The Casual Vacancy , Rowling’s first post-Harry Potter novel, plus three stylistically similar crime novels by other female writers. Juola concluded that Rowling was the most likely author of The Cuckoo’s Calling , since she was the only one whose writing style showed up as the closest or second-closest match in each of the tests. After consulting an Oxford linguist and receiving a concurring opinion, the newspaper confronted Rowling, who confessed. Juola completed his analysis in about half an hour. By contrast, in the early 1960s, it had taken a team of two statisticians—using what was then a state-of-the-art, high-speed computer at MIT—three years to complete a project to reveal who wrote 12 unsigned Federalist Papers. Robert Leonard, who heads the forensic linguistics program at Hofstra University, has also made a career out of determining authorship. Certified to serve as an expert witness in 13 states, he has presented evidence in cases such as that of Christopher Coleman, who was arrested in 2009 for murdering his family in Waterloo, Illinois. Leonard testified that Coleman’s writing style matched threats spray-painted at his family’s home (photo, left). Coleman was convicted and is serving a life sentence. Since forensic linguists deal in probabilities, not certainties, it is all the more essential to further refine this field of study, experts say. “There have been cases where it was my impression that the evidence on which people were freed or convicted was iffy in one way or another,” says Edward Finegan, president of the International Association of Forensic Linguists. Vanderbilt law professor Edward Cheng, an expert on the reliability of forensic evidence, says that linguistic analysis is best used when only a handful of people could have written a given text. As forensic linguistics continues to make headlines, criminals may realize the importance of choosing their words carefully. And some worry that software also can be used to obscure distinctive written styles. “Anything that you can identify to analyze,” says Juola, “I can identify and try to hide.

ONCE YOU’VE HOOKED readers, your next task is to put your early chapters to work introducing your characters, settings, and stakes. The first 20-25% of the book comprises your setup. At first glance, this can seem like a tremendous chunk of story to devote to introductions. But if you expect readers to stick with you throughout the story, you first have to give them a reason to care. This important stretch is where you accomplish just that. Mere curiosity can only carry readers so far. Once you’ve hooked that sense of curiosity, you then have to deepen the pull by creating an emotional connection between them and your characters. These “introductions” include far more than just the actual moment of introducing the characters and settings or explaining the stakes. In themselves, the presentations of the characters probably won’t take more than a few scenes. After the introduction is when your task of deepening the characters and establishing the stakes really begins. The first quarter of the book is the place to compile all the necessary components of your story. Anton Chekhov’s famous advice that “if in the first act you have hung a pistol on the wall, then in the following one it should be fired” is just as important in reverse: if you’re going to have a character fire a gun later in the book, that gun should be introduced in the First Act. The story you create in the following acts can only be assembled from the parts you’ve shown readers in this First Act. That’s your first duty in this section. Your second duty is to allow readers the opportunity to learn about your characters. Who are these people? What is the essence of their personalities? What are their core beliefs (even more particularly, what are the beliefs that will be challenged or strengthened throughout the book)? If you can introduce a character in a “characteristic moment,” as we talked about earlier, you’ll be able to immediately show readers who this person is. From there, the plot builds as you deepen the stakes and set up the conflict that will eventually explode in the Inciting and Key Events. Authors sometimes feel pressured to dive right into the action of their stories, at the expense of important character development. Because none of us wants to write a boring story, we can overreact by piling on the explosions, fight sequences, and high-speed car chases to the point we’re unable to spend important time developing our characters. Character development is especially important in this first part of the story, since readers need to understand and sympathize with the characters before they’re hit with the major plot revelations at the quarter mark, halfway mark, and three-quarters mark. Summer blockbusters are often guilty of neglecting character development, but one enduring exception worth considering is Stephen Spielberg’s Jurassic Park. No one would claim the film is a leisurely character study, but it rises far above the monster movie genre through its expert use of pacing and its loving attention to character, especially in its First Act. It may surprise some viewers to realize the action in this movie doesn’t heat up until a quarter of the way into the film—and even then we have no scream-worthy moments, no adrenaline, and no extended action scenes until halfway through the Second Act. Spielberg used the First Act to build suspense and encourage viewer loyalty to the characters. By the time the main characters arrive at the park, we care about them, and our fear for their safety is beginning to manifest thanks to a magnificent use of foreshadowing. We understand that what is at stake for these characters is their very lives. Spielberg knew if he could hook viewers with his characters, he could take his time building his story to an artful Climax.

Obama’s formative background is the left-wing fever swamp of Chicago “community organizing,” a gussied-up term for systematic rabble-rousing that has now become acceptable enough to put on a résumé. The pursuit of raw power is the gospel according to the seminal organizer, Saul Alinsky—if we may use “gospel” in connection with an atheist whose most famous book, Rules for Radicals, opens with an ode to Lucifer for winning his own kingdom by rebelling against the establishment.

For the First Dynasty of Babylon, to which the famous Hammurabi belonged, was very probably of Arab origin, to judge by the forms of some of the royal names. It is by no means impossible that there was some connection between these two conquests, and that both Babylonia and Egypt fell, in the period before the year 2000 B.C. before some great migratory movement from Arabia, which overran Babylonia, Palestine, and even the Egyptian Delta.

It is somewhat ironic to have us so deeply disturbed over a program where race is an element of consciousness, and yet to be aware of the fact, as we are, that institutions of higher learning, albeit more on the undergraduate than the graduate level, have given conceded preferences up to a point to those possessed of athletic skills, to the children of alumni, to the affluent who may bestow their largess on the institutions, and to those having connections with celebrities, the famous, and the powerful.

Connecting your story with a known entity—be it a politician, celebrity, or famous businessperson—acts as a de facto slant. Bottom line: The media want recognizable faces in their pages.

Comparison Connection With this method you connect the person to a name that you already know. Let’s say we meet a person by the name of George. To make the name stick, we think of someone that we already know with the same name. Do you know another George? You may even think of someone famous with the same name, like George Clooney. Now all we do in our mind is compare the two people. What color hair does the George that we are meeting have? What color is the other George’s hair? By comparing this one feature you will be paying more attention than you would have before, therefore making a stronger connection.

When admitting you are wrong, you gain back the control others took away from you when making you lose it. That's why you must say sorry. It represents a change of attitude but not really a change of personality; The changes on the personality come later on, when, by controlling yourself better, you don't express anger. Because saying sorry means nothing but anger means a lot. You should not want to be an angry person. When you get angry, those who make you angry, win; They win control over your emotional state, your thoughts, your words and your behaviors. They may then accuse you of always being angry and never apologizing, but that's not where you should focus your attention. The main point here, is that you’re living on the basis of instinctive reaction and not awareness or consciousness. So, when you say sorry, you are acknowledging that there is no excuse for losing control over yourself. You should not be sorry for being angry. That's an emotion; and you can't feel sorry for feeling. When you’re angry, you are feeling. When you insult, however, you are losing, yourself, your self-control, your self-respect, and even your capacity to use what you know. More knowledge, makes you more aware, more frustrated, having more and higher expectations on others, and more angry too, more often as well. But that's your problem! No other people's problem! They are just being themselves. Most people really think they are perfect as they are, and that the problems they experience are all outside themselves. And by realizing that, you say sorry as if saying sorry for not being who you really are. And when doing it, you get back the control another person took away from you. It is actually not good when someone needs to say sorry too often to someone else, especially if it’s always the same individual. But that someone else often likes it, as it makes them feel superior. That’s because their ego needs that. They have low self-esteem. Most people do! And that’s why most people's behavior is wired to their ego. Their likes and dislikes are connected to a sense of self-importance and a desperate need to feel important, which they project on their idols, the famous and most popular among them. They admire what they seek the most. When they think they are not important, they offend, to get aggression, which is a desperate need for attention; and to feel like victims of life, which is a deeper state of need, in this case, related to sympathy; and they then blame the other for what he does, for his reactions; and when that other says sorry, they think they have power over that insane cycle in which they now live, and in which they incorporate anyone else, and which they now perfectly master. Their pride is built on arrogance, an arrogance emerged out of ignorance, ignorance composed from delusional cycles within a big illusion; but an illusion that makes sense to them, as if they were succeeding at merging truth with lie, darkness with light. Because the arrogant, the abusive and the violent are desperate. God made them blind after witnessing their crimes against moral and ethics - His own laws. And they want to see again, and feel the same pleasure they once felt when witnessing the true colors of the world during childhood. The arrogant want to reaffirm their sanity by acting insanely because they know no other way. And when you say sorry, you are saying to them that you don't belong there, to their world, and that you are sorry for playing their games. That drama belongs to them only, and not you. And yet, people interpret the same paradox as they choose. That is their experience of truth and how they put sense on a life without any. And when so much nonsense becomes popular, we call it common sense. When common sense becomes a reality, we call it science. And when science is able to theorize common sense, we call it wisdom. Then, we wonder why the wisdom of those we name wise, does not help.

Planck's constant sets the scale for the wave-like nature of particles. It is a tiny number, which means that we don't see the waviness of macroscopic matter because we are moving slowly compared to the fast quantum particles zipping around the atom. If we were very tiny, we would see our inner waviness. De Broglie's connection between the wavelength of a particle and its momentum is at the heart of the famous uncertainty principle. And it was Werner Heisenberg that was able to precisely formulate it.

Prison educators thought that Manson might benefit from a four-week course influenced by Dale Carnegie’s famous book, How to Win Friends and Influence People. The Carnegie Method distills all human endeavors down to two motivating factors: sexual desire and the desire for greatness. This method became like a religion to Manson. Never before had any worldview resonated so deeply with Manson, who himself desired pure admiration from those around him, particularly women. These two distinct but connected sources—the pimps of Terminal Island and Dale Carnegie—provided Manson with clear instructions on how to use sex as a tool and how to exert control over women.

Alexis de Tocqueville admired the laws that formally established America's democratic order, but he argued that voluntary organizations were the real source of the nation's robust civic life. John Dewey claimed that social connection is predicated on "the vitality and depth of close and direct intercourse and attachment." "Democracy begins at home," he famously wrote, "and its home is the neighborly community.

Norwegian fjords As amazing as it might sound, you can travel the Norwegian coast, viewing astounding scenery, all on public transport – it simply takes planning. By flying into Bergen – an airport bus will take you downtown – you can start a journey that will take you as far as the Arctic Circle. Trains, ferries and buses connect most Norwegian towns and villages. In fact, Norway has one of the best public transport systems in the world. It will take preparation, and it won’t be cheap, although there are bus, train and ferry passes on offer to tourists – usually for packages of five days or ten. Norwegians are polite and some may consider the natives to be a little cold, but they will never harass you or overwhelm you with questions. You will be able to dine alone without a curious stare in your direction. Downside: The ferries can face some wild weather, stick to land transport if you are likely to suffer from seasickness. To read: Norway is famous for its Nordic Noir brand of crime fiction. King here is Jo Nesbo but other great Norwegian crime writers are Anne Holt and Karin Fossum.

What are we left with then? We are left with a system where ObamaCare is a rule for, as Leona Helmsley so famously described them, the little people. For everybody who doesn't have power and juice and connections in Washington, for everyone--look for the men and women at home, maybe you have an army of lobbyists working for you. Maybe you have Senators' cell phones on your speed dial. Maybe you can walk the corridors of power. In that case you too get an exemption. But if you are just a hard-working American, if you are just trying to provide for your family, if you are just trying to do an honest day's work, make your community better, raise your kids, set a good example, then the message this President has sent--and sadly the message the Senate has sent--is you don't count. We are going to treat everybody else better than you.   That

What about Jerusalem? When discussing the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, pundits and politicians often tell us that Jerusalem is one of the holy cities of Islam—indeed, its third holiest city, right after Mecca and Medina. But in reality, the Islamic claim to Jerusalem is extremely tenuous, based only on a legendary journey of Muhammad—a journey that is at best a dream and at worst a fabrication. The Koran refers to this journey only obliquely and in just one place; Islamic tradition fills in the details and connects Jerusalem with the words of the Koran. But the Koran itself never mentions Jerusalem even once—an exceptionally inconvenient fact for Muslims who claim that the Palestinians must have a share of Jerusalem because the city is sacred to Islam. Muhammad’s famous Night Journey is the basis of the Islamic claim to Jerusalem. The Koran’s sole reference to this journey appears in the first verse of sura 17, which says that Allah took Muhammad from “the Sacred Mosque” in Mecca “to the farthest [al-aqsa] Mosque.” There was no mosque in Jerusalem at this time, so the “farthest” mosque probably wasn’t really the one that now bears that name in Jerusalem, the Al-Aqsa mosque located on the Temple Mount. Nevertheless, Islamic tradition is firm that this mosque was in Jerusalem.

And you’re spending the whole summer in Rome?” I ask. “Digging things up?” He absentmindedly plays with a loose string at the hem of his shirt. “We’ll be here a few more weeks. Then we’ll move on to a dig in Tuscany. And we get weekends off, sometimes even three-day weekends, so I plan on traveling when I can. Blowing all my graduation money,” he adds with a laugh. “Where to?” “Pompeii, for obvious reasons, but I also want to see Venice before it sinks. And everyone says the place to see at least once in your life is the Cinque Terre.” I do my best to repeat the words he just said. “Cinque Terre?” “It means ‘the five lands.’ It’s a section of the northern coast, the Italian Riviera. Five little fishing villages all connected by a path along the cliffs of the sea. The trail’s pretty famous. It’s called la Via dell’Amore.” The words flow like he’s a local. I look away quickly when I realize I’m staring at his lips, silently begging for him to keep speaking in Italian. “Sounds beautiful.” “I’ve heard it’s one of the best places to photograph in the country,” he says, pointing to my camera. “You should go and check it out. I mean, since your summer’s free now.” He flashes a sneaky smile. My partner in crime. I return the smile. “Maybe I will.

My father was a renowned chef, who had learned his trade as an apprentice in Europe. During the depression with work hard to find, he accepted employment at Mafia run speakeasies “The Top Hat” and the “Gay Haven,” along with some other similar places, were roughshod, working class nightclubs in Union City, New Jersey, that hosted top performers. Ultimately, being recognized for his abilities, my father was offered the position of “Sous Chef” at the famous Lindy’s Restaurant in New York City, referred to as “Mindy’s” in Damon Runyon’s Broadway play “Guys and Dolls.” Being a loyal employee, he worked at Lindy’s for over three decades until his retirement. Union City, New Jersey, now has the second largest Cuban population concentration in the United States. But in earlier times it was known for having the rowdy “Hudson Burlesque,” as well as gathering places at the “Transfer Station,” where “men of means” could connect with “ladies of the night” and buy them a drink at one of the classy watering holes, such as the “Key Hole Bar and Grill.” I guess that it all came under the heading of “Entertainment.

As far as the praise of knowledge is concerned, al-Askarî otherwise restricts himself to some of the more ordinary statements, such as the hadîth affi rming the Prophet’s permission to use attery and show envy in connection with knowledge, or Alî’s famous remark that a man’s value consists in what he knows or does well.

The survey revealed, in areas quite close to known and even famous and well-visited Mayan sites such as Tikal, more than 60,000 previously unsuspected ancient houses, palaces, defensive walls, fortresses, and other structures as well as quarries, elevated highways connecting urban centers, and complex irrigation and terracing systems that would have been capable of supporting intensive agriculture. Previously scholars had believed that only scattered city-states had existed in an otherwise sparsely populated region, but the Lidar images make it clear, [...] that 'scale and population density had been grossly underestimated.

When she mentioned Hegel, the early-nineteenth-century philosopher, the other girls in the classroom rolled their eyes and began mumbling to one another in French, their voices hissing with disdain. Clearly Hegel had been a topic of discussion before. Corine was right that the famous philosopher thought little of Africa and African people. He wrote that African history, whatever there was of it, contributed nothing to global development and world history. In his work, he wrote of the inferiority of Africans and how they did not possess the capacity to be seen as fully human but instead existed as static subordinate entities. “From these various traits it is manifest that want of self-control distinguishes the character of the Negroes. This condition is capable of no development or culture, and as we see them at this day, such have they always been. The only essential connection that has existed and continued between the Negroes and the Europeans is that of slavery.

Although cigar smoking was immensely popular during Victorian times, it was publicly kept in the shadows, largely due to Queen Victoria’s adamant disapproval with anything even remotely connected with tobacco. Thus, it was literally an enlightened world when her son, King Edward VII, uttered these now famous words in 1901, after his coronation: “Gentlemen, you may smoke.

In early 2019, while I was still at the White House, BuzzFeed News published an article laying out the origins of the “Soros conspiracy.” It had originated in 2008, when two prominent political consultants in New York, Arthur Finkelstein and George Birnbaum, were recruited by Viktor Orbán to assist his political campaign. They had previously worked for Israeli prime minister Bibi Netanyahu, who was friendly with Orbán. Netanyahu recommended them. Finkelstein and Birnbaum decided they should create an external political enemy to help Orbán mobilize support for his bid to become Hungarian prime minister. They selected Soros, a prominent Hungarian Jew whose family had fled Budapest during the Holocaust. Soros was both famous and controversial, and still connected to Hungary.

After investigating matters connected with my operation, I returned to Panhandle City, where Glen Alpine, Jr., was mounted, and a start made south.

The dots of our lives connect in ways we can scarcely comprehend. Outcomes and possibilities often unfold in unimaginable ways. It’s better to do our best in the moment and release personal attachment to any particular outcome. Trust. Let mysterious forces take care of the details for us while we focus on the work at hand. This notion is not random flagrancy toward the future, nor is it a recipe for irresponsibility. Strive to do the best work possible and trust it will work itself out. Examine your past; you’ll see this element at play and know it to be true.

In terms of its attempt to connect mainstream art with the avant-garde, the contemporary art project CONNECT, BTS by BTS and Big Hit Entertainment can also be understood in a similar fashion. This project, which transcends nationality, genre, and generations, brought world-famous artists and curators to feature pieces that extend into contemporary art the philosophy and message of the music of BTS, including “affirmation of diversity,” “connection,” and “communication.” Premiering in London on January 14, 2020, CONNECT, BTS was also shown in Berlin, Buenos Aires, New York City, and Seoul.

From the late eighteenth to the middle of the nineteenth century an influx of dilletantes, academics, artists, writers, travellers and eccentrics descended unto the barren plains of Greece to pick over the marble bones of the past in the hope of finding some meaningful connection with Homer and Thucydides. The Levantine Lunatics, as Lord Byron termed them, many of them British, but also Germans, French and other Westerners, went on to paint, record and loot the past. Marbles, such as those made famous by Lord Elgin, pilfered or otherwise from classical sites, made their way into the country houses and museums of Europe. Byron, although critical of his contemporaries, was in many ways one of them, the difference being that he made a point of appreciating the here and now, the reality of the Oriental present as opposed to the classical past, and embracing the people who lived there even if they were regarded as debased specimens by his fellow travellers.

When you find yourself constantly reminding someone to remember you, it becomes clear that you will never be their priority. True connections thrive effortlessly, where mutual appreciation and genuine regard naturally take precedence.

Last night wasn’t about a connection, or liking, or loving. It’s awfully sad, and I’m doing all I can not to give a shit, but that’s difficult for me. So I stand at the foot of their bed for five minutes, watching them sleep, loving them as much as one can when under the gun of these callous rules.

Hmm. A grilled miso rice ball and a grilled soy sauce rice ball... But what is this covered in dried seaweed?" "When we think about the rice ball and its connection to the Japanese climate and culture, the existence of fermented food is something we can't ignore. Eating fermented food on a daily basis is a unique trait of the Japanese culinary culture. The most famous of the fermented foods are the soy sauce and miso. Seasonings that the Japanese diet cannot do without. We coated one of the rice balls with soy sauce and the other with miso... ... and grilled them over charcoal." "The slightly burnt scent of the soy sauce is so appetizing." "The grilled fragrance of miso is irresistible to a Japanese person. And this we can only taste in the form of a rice ball too." "Another fermented Japanese product that we must not forget about is natto. Natto is a little tough to put inside a rice ball as it is... ... so we've minced it along with diced green onions. It has been flavored with soy sauce and Japanese mustard. And to add some punch to it, we coated the rice ball with roasted shredded seaweed. By shredding it, the flavor of the dried seaweed becomes far better than just coating the rice ball with a sheet of it.

From an early age I picked up on the fact that these celebrities seemed more important, as people listened to them, valued them and felt a connection to them. I saw the premium that was put on a famous person’s opinion. Successful people: I wanted to be around them, amongst them, near them. It’s no wonder I ended up working in the magazine industry. I was fascinated by celebrities and what their lives must be like. Every time I was in Sainsbury’s with my mum, the other kids would saunter over to the chocolate and sweets, while I would run over to the magazine section and feast on the cover photos, wondering what these people’s lives were really like behind the scenes.