Convention Hall Quotes

I do not pretend to understand the moral universe; the arc is a long one, my eye reaches but little ways; I cannot calculate the curve and complete the figure by the experience of sight, I can divine it by conscience. And from what I see I am sure it bends towards justice.

The world hid its head in the sands of convention, so that by seeing nothing it might avoid Truth.

Well, to what do we owe the honor of your presence?" I asked snidely. National Slut Convention next door? Twatwaffles Anonymous?

The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.

The Director of the US Marshals Service, who does not like Pack: “Seems to me Simon Pack’s a grandstander. I remind you I’m a West Pointer myself. I remember his ill-fated year as Superintendent, acting as if he were MacArthur incarnate. The All-America player in a couple sports, the man in the College Football Hall of Fame; the Governor of a small state; the leader of a constitutional convention. And yeah, he was also a hobo, maybe the biggest grandstand move he ever undertook.

The world hid its head in the sands of convention, so that seeing nothing it might avoid Truth. It said to itself: 'If seeing's believing, then I don't want to see -- if silence is golden, it is also, in this case, very expedient.

Cardinal Campeggio has implored Katherine to bow to the king's will, accept that her marriage is invalid and retire to a convent. Certainly, she says sweetly, she will become a nun: if the king will become a monk.

Nicole’s door opened, and she stomped down the hall. “I have something to say,” she said, giving him the Slitty Eyes of Death. “You’re totally unfair, and if I run away, you shouldn’t be surprised.” “Don’t make me put a computer chip in your ear,” Liam answered. “It’s not funny! I hate you.” “Well, I love you, even if you did ruin my life by turning into a teenager,” he said, rubbing his eyes. “Did you study for your test?” “Yes.” “Good.” He looked at his daughter—so much like Emma, way too pretty. Why weren’t there convent schools anymore? Or chastity belts? “Want some supper? I saved your plate.” She rolled her eyes with all the melodrama a teenager could muster. “Fine. I may as well become a fat pig since I can’t ever go on a date.” “That’s my girl,” he said and, grinning, got up to heat up her dinner.

What could she do, bound as she was by the tyranny of silence? She dared not explain the girl to herself...that wilfully selfish tyranny of silence evolved by a crafty old ostrich of a world for its own well-being and comfort. The world hid its head in the sands of convention, so that seeing nothing it might avoid Truth...if silence is golden it is also in this case, very expedient.

You'd never have gotten it right. You have to hit the door just so. It took me weeks to learn." "And what were you doing sneaking out at night?" he demanded. "I fail to see how that is your business." "You became my business when you took up residence in my house." "Well, I wouldn't have moved in if you hadn'tkidnapped me!" "I wouldn't have kidnapped you if you hadn't been wandering about the countryside with no thought to your own safety." "I was certainly safer in the countryside than I was at Prewitt Hall, and you well know it." "You wouldn't be safe in a convent," he muttered. "If you two lovebirds can stop snapping at each other," James cut in, "I'd like to search the study before Prewitt returns home." Blake glared at Caroline as if this entire delay were her fault, causing her to hiss, "Don't forget that if it weren't for me-" "If it weren't for you," he shot back, "I would be a very happy man indeed." "We are wasting time," James reminded them. "The both of you may remain here, if you cannot cease your squabbling, but I am going in to search the south drawing room." "I'll go first," Caroline announced, "since I know the way." "You'll go behind me," Blake contradicted, "and give me directions as we go along." "Oh, for the love of Saint Peter," James finally burst out, exasperation showing in every line of his body. "I'll go first, if only to shut the two of you up. Caroline, you follow and give me directions. Blake, you guard her from the rear.

She went to her room and curled into a ball of misery and decided that she would die of a broken heart. Minstrels would write songs about how she had turned her face to the wall and died of the false-heartedness of men. She could not quite make up her mind whether she wanted to be a ghost who would haunt the convent or not. It would be very satisfying to be a sad-eyed, beautiful ghost who drifted through the halls, gazing up at the moon and weeping silently, as a warning to other young women. On the other hand, she was still short and round-faced and sturdy, and there were very few ghost stories about short, sturdy women. Marra had not managed to be pale and willowy and consumptive at any point in eighteen years of life and did not think she could achieve it before she died. Possibly it would be better to just have songs made about her. The Sister Apothecary came to her, the nun who doctored all the residents of the convent for various ailments, and who compounded medicines and salves and treatments for the farmer’s wives who lived nearby. She studied Marra intensely for a few minutes. “It’s a man, is it?” she said finally. Marra grunted. It occurred to her about an hour earlier that she did not know how the minstrels would find out that she existed in order to write the sad songs in the first place, and her mind was somewhat occupied by this problem. Did you write them letters?

I'm glad we're sitting here now. Even if it does smell like a grandma convention.

It’s the private victories that matter most and are felt the deepest and last the longest. It’s the internal triumphs that aren’t recorded on scoreboards or broadcast on the eleven o’clock news that define who we are. Ollin is what determines success in our lives, instead of the conventional measure of winning and losing. With that as a definition of success, it is possible for everyone to win all the time.

Sure enough, standing with their backs to the hall fire, were Aunt Sadie, Aunt Emily, and a small, fair, and apparently young man. My immediate impression was that he did not seem at all like a husband. He looked kind and gentle.

Merlin’s eyes narrowed. "We require heroes of wit and cleverness, unafraid to foil convention in order to defend a higher allegiance. Battle skills matter not. What we need at this moment, James Potter, are scoundrels with honor.

Now, granted, Howard doesn't fit the conventional psychological profile of a rebounder - that of the no-nonsense, utilitarian "dirty work" specialist. Rather, this is a guy who sings Beyoncé at the free throw line, who quotes not Scarface but Finding Nemo, whose idea of humor is ordering 10 pizzas to be delivered to another player's hotel room, or knocking on teammates' doors and sprinting off down the hall, giggling. He goofs around during practice, during press conferences and during team shootarounds, for which Magic coach Stan Van Gundy has had to institute a no-flatulence rule because, as teammate Rashard Lewis says, "Dwight really likes to cut the cheese.

Watching the podium dance that night from the convention floor was Paul Corbin, a longtime Kennedy family retainer. Corbin had been working for the Kennedys ever since he first encountered Bobby Kennedy back in the mid-1950s. A former labor organizer and once a member of the Communist Party, Corbin was the kind of loyal political operative who harbored no ethical qualms about doing whatever was necessary to win. He was now seething with resentment against the Carter campaign. As he stormed out of the convention hall, a reporter from Reader´s Digest asked him what his plans were now that Kennedy was out of the race. Corbin yelled defiantly, ¨I´m going to go work for Reagan!¨

And then I remembered that my denomination, in whose deliberations I then sat, was formed in a dispute with other American Christians over the slavery of other human beings because of the color of their skin. And my people had been on the slaveholders’ side. Previous generations of preachers just like me (indeed probably some related to me) had argued that some children were unworthy of freedom because of the shade of their skin. My own ancestors had seen to it that children of a darker skin than themselves were made orphans. As the resolutions flew around the convention hall about “the sanctity of marriage,” I realized that previous generations of preachers in this very same context had propped up a system in which parents couldn’t marry legally because that would make it more difficult to sell them individually when necessary.

She’d rouse me out of bed all hours of the night and I’d wait in the hall. They were mostly soldiers and sailors and merchant mariners, or businessmen down on convention. This is one lousy life, Mamma said, but I’m doing the best I can with what Ive got. I wish I could afford to send you to some kind of business school so you could learn to type.—She never did but I never blamed her. For one thing, she only turned the nicest ones over to me, the businessmen.

Certain black women faced the triple hurdle—of being abolitionists in a slave society, of being black among white reformers, and of being women in a reform movement dominated by men. When Sojourner Truth rose to speak in 1853 in New York City at the Fourth National Woman’s Rights Convention, it all came together. There was a hostile mob in the hall shouting, jeering, threatening. She said: I know that it feels a kind o’ hissin’ and ticklin’ like to see a colored woman get up and tell you about things, and Woman’s Rights. We have all been thrown down so low that nobody thought we’d ever get up again; but . . . we will come up again, and now I’m here. . . . we’ll have our rights; see if we don’t; and you can’t stop us from them; see if you can. You may hiss as much as you like, but it is comin’. . . . I am sittin’ among you to watch; and every once and awhile I will come out and tell you what time of night it is. . . .

Dr Smart-Allick, of Narkover, gave a powerful address in the Speech Hall last night. He said that it was not always the timid fellow, with four conventional aces in his hand, who won the highest honours, '"it is often," he said, "the fifth ace that makes all the difference between success and failure." He was loudly cheered from the fifth-form benches and at the end of the address a young master swarmed up a pillar and threw playing cards down among the boys.

Their mother, Lady Mary, had been born the youngest daughter of the Early of Elmsley but had defied the conventions of the ton by marrying a freedman of Senegalese birth whom she had met through her work with the abolition. And whereas in the enlightened twenty-first century the marriage of a British aristocrat to a Person of Colour is a wholly unremarkable thing that results in no hostility whatsoever, in the bad old days of the 1800s it caused quite the scandal. Isn't it wonderful to know how far your species has come?

— The opening argument was one of Devlin-Brown’s favorite parts of a trial. In a case like this, it was sometimes all that mattered. The U.S. Attorney’s Office had a formula for it, a system that was passed down through generations of prosecutors. It started with what they called “the grab”—a quick, two-minute summary of the case, meant to capture the jury’s attention. The grab could begin in one of two ways. The first was with a big thematic idea, as in, “This is a case about greed.” Devlin-Brown preferred what he called the “It was a dark and stormy night” beginning, which dropped the jurors right into a dramatic scene. Just like in a movie. On this day, his version began with, “It was July of 2008.” He spoke in a gentle, even voice. “Mathew Martoma, the defendant, was one of about a thousand people packed into a crowded Chicago convention hall waiting for an expert on Alzheimer’s disease to take the stage.” Sidney Gilman, he explained, was at an international Alzheimer’s conference to unveil the results of a hotly anticipated drug trial. The results of

Seventy-five years ago a young woman kept a diary in which she wrote some of her innermost thoughts, many of the daily happenings, and all of the weather. This story is the fictionalized version of the real diary. The thoughts more or less trite pedantic have been curtailed, the happenings (for obvious reasons) sometimes changed, but the weather remains practically intact. ...So step out of the yellowed diary, Linnie Colsworth,.... Recreate yourself from the fading ink of it's pages and help us understand something of the stanch heart that beat under those hard little stays, bidding you defy convention three-quarters of a century ago.

conventions hosted by the Miami Morrison. The question was, what convention was Laker Girl attending? Walt had arrived at the hotel earlier in the day to find massive banners and the entire second floor of the conference hall filling up with pictures of half-naked men and women embracing. At first, he thought the competing conference had something to do with adult film. When he asked, he was told a writers convention was dominating the hotel for the weekend. By comparison, the number of people at the conference he was attending was a drop of water in the ocean. Soon the hotel would be filled with writers, readers, publishers, and agents. The genre of choice . . . romance. Books written with nothing but happily-ever-after in mind.

And Puddle was helpless. What could she do, bound as she was by the tyranny of silence? She dared not explain the girl to herself, dared not say: 'For your own sake you must go to Oxford, you'll need every weapon your brain can give you; being what you are you'll need every weapon,' for then certainly Stephen would start to question, and her teacher's very position of trust would forbid her to answer those questions. Outrageous, Puddle would feel it to be, that wilfully selfish tyranny of silence evolved by a crafty old ostrich of a world for its own wellbeing and comfort. The world hid its head in the sands of convention, so that seeing nothing it might avoid Truth. It said to itself: 'If seeing's believing, then I don't want to see—if silence is golden, it is also, in this case, very expedient.' There were moments when Puddle would feel sorely tempted to shout out loud at the world.

Zen can be seen as having a special kind of structure with basic demands that are structural demands and therefore open to scientific investigation—and the more it can seem to have a definite character to be grasped and “understood.” When Zen is studied in this way, it is seen in the context of Chinese and Japanese history. It is seen as a product of the meeting of speculative Indian Buddhism with practical Chinese Taoism and even Confucianism. It is seen in the light of the culture of the T’ang dynasty, and the teachings of various “houses.” It is related to other cultural movements. It is studied in its passage into Japan and its integration into Japanese civilization. And then a great deal of things about Zen come to seem important, even essential. The Zendo or meditation hall. The Zazen sitting. The study of the Koan. The costume. The lotus seat. The bows. The visits to the Roshi and the Roshi’s technique for determining whether one has attained Kensho or Satori, and helping one to do this. Zen, seen in this light, can then be set up against other religious structures—for instance that of Catholicism, with its sacraments, its liturgy, its mental prayer (now no longer practised by many), its devotions, its laws, its theology, its Bible; its cathedrals and convents; its priesthood and its hierarchical organization; its Councils and Encyclicals.

What is it like to be made vice-president? On one level, it's a nearly hallucinatory degree of success. I was barely forty years old, and a shaky, sixty-three-year-old heartbeat from the leadership of the entire Western world. It was also like throwing up in convention-hall bathrooms before giving speeches, and after. It was sitting through dinners with men and women with whom I had nothing in common. Spending an enormous amount of time on trains. Promising thins and agreeing to things as advised by people I had barely met, on very little sleep. Huge sums of money were changing hands and everything happening on the grandest scale imaginable while still in most moments remaining pointless and usually outright seedy. I pretended to learn to fly-fish; I watched sporting events. In Maine I was assaulted by a lobster; it seized my lapel in a threatening manner. I tasted local foods and admired factories,farms, department stores, hotels, and (unless I'm misremembering) several empty plots of land.... It was like being given what was almost the nation's highest honor by a man you held in infinite esteem and regarded with perhaps a certain amount of terrified suspicion, a man who disliked you and clearly wanted nothing to do with you, who would scowl and change the subject at the mention of your name. And then being given a very important and very nasty job by that person, and despised for it, almost as much as you despised yourself.

A FAIR IMPRESSION of the pace of Roosevelt’s candidacy for Mayor may be gained by following him through one night of his campaign—Friday, 29 October.44 At 8:00 P.M., having snatched a hasty dinner near headquarters, he takes a hansom to the Grand Opera House, on Twenty-third Street and Eighth Avenue, for the first of five scheduled addresses in various parts of the city. His audience is worshipful, shabby, and exclusively black. (One of the more interesting features of the campaign has been Roosevelt’s evident appeal to, and fondness for, the black voter.) He begins by admitting that his campaign planners had not allowed for “this magnificent meeting” of colored citizens. “For the first time, therefore, since the opening of the campaign I have begun to take matters a little in my own hands!” Laughter and applause. “I like to speak to an audience of colored people,” Roosevelt says simply, “for that is only another way of saying that I am speaking to an audience of Republicans.” More applause. He reminds his listeners that he has “always stood up for the colored race,” and tells them about the time he put a black man in the chair of the Chicago Convention. Apologizing for his tight schedule, he winds up rapidly, and dashes out of the hall to a standing ovation.45 A carriage is waiting outside; the driver plies his whip; by 8:30 Roosevelt is at Concordia Hall, on Twenty-eighth Street and Avenue A. Here he shouts at a thousand well-scrubbed immigrants, “Do you want a radical reformer?” “YES WE DO!” comes the reply.46

the rivalry between the big and little states almost tore the convention apart. Their dispute was over whether the legislative branch should be proportioned by population or by equal votes per state. Finally, Franklin arose to make a motion on behalf of a compromise that would have a House proportioned by population and a Senate with equal votes per state. “When a broad table is to be made, and the edges of planks do not fit, the artist takes a little from both, and makes a good joint,” he said. “In like manner here, both sides must part with some of their demands.” His point was crucial for understanding the art of true political leadership: Compromisers may not make great heroes, but they do make great democracies. The toughest part of political leadership, however, is knowing when to compromise and when to stand firm on principle. There is no easy formula for figuring that out, and Franklin got it wrong at times. At the Constitutional Convention, he went along with a compromise that soon haunted him: permitting the continuation of slavery. But he was wise enough to try to rectify such mistakes. After the Constitutional Convention, he became the president of a society for the abolition of slavery. He realized that humility required tolerance for other people’s values, which at times required compromise; however, it was important to be uncompromising in opposing those who refused to show tolerance for others. During his lifetime, Benjamin Franklin donated to the building fund of each and every church built in Philadelphia. And at one point, when a new hall was being built to accommodate itinerate preachers, Franklin wrote the fund-raising document and urged citizens to be tolerant enough so “that even if the Mufti of Constantinople were to send a missionary to preach Mohammedanism to us, he would find a pulpit at his service.” And on his deathbed, he was the largest individual contributor to the building fund for Mikveh Israel, the first synagogue in Philadelphia.

He told the mob that he was unarmed and that he wanted to go with them. He believed they were there to take him to safety at Convention Hall. As he walked out onto his front lawn, two men shot him down. While he was lying on the lawn, another man shot him in the leg. He bled to death in tremendous pain,

The average delegate never knows what is going on. The hall is in dreadful confusion, and the speeches from the platforms are mainly irrelevant and unintelligible. The real business of a national convention is done down under the stage, in dark and smelly rooms, or in hotel suites miles away. Presently a State boss fights his way out to his delegation on the floor, and tells his slaves what is to be voted on, and how they are to vote. (Cited in Hinderaker 1956, 158)

It is instructive to observe these great men at the solemn business of selecting a First Chief for the greatest free Republic ever seen on earth. One hears, in their speeches, such imbecilities.... One sees them at close range, sweating, belching, munching peanuts, chasing fleas. They parade idiotically, carrying dingy flags and macerating one another's corns. They crowd the aisles, swapping gossip, most of it untrue.... The average delegate never knows what is going on. The hall is in dreadful confusion, and the speeches from the platforms are mainly irrelevant and unintelligible. The real business of a national convention is done down under the stage, in dark and smelly rooms, or in hotel suites miles away. Presently a State boss fights his way out to his delegation on the floor, and tells his slaves what is to be voted on, and how they are to vote. (Cited in Hinderaker 1956, 158)

Having settled on the Shavian style of Higgins’s songs, Lerner and Loewe weave two other levels of musical style into the score—just as Rodgers and Loesser wove multiple musical styles into mirrors of class and character. Eliza, the lowly flower seller whom Higgins turns into a lady, could sing with the conventional fire and passion of operetta and musical heroines. The passionate, full-throated sound of her songs—the longing of “Wouldn’t It Be Loverly?” the anger of “Just You Wait, ’Enry ‘lggins,” the joy of “I Could Have Danced All Night,” the insistence of “Show Me”—contrasts with the dry wit of Higgins’s talk-songs. This contrast not only gives the score musical variety and color but embodies the essential dramatic conflict between intellect and emotion. The third musical style belongs to Alfred Doolittle, Eliza’s working-class dad, who, like Higgins, is an unconventional moralist—resisting such constraints of middle-class morality as work, sobriety, thrift, and marriage. Lerner and Loewe saw Doolittle as a refugee from the English music hall—literally, since the veteran music-hall performer, Stanley Holloway, created the role. Doolittle’s “With a Little Bit of Luck” and “Get Me to the Church on Time” are bouncy, raucous music-hall numbers, oom-pah marches with conventional major harmonies and not a trace of American syncopation.

I don’t know how to take care of a chicken.” The dust-wife’s angular face drew into tight triangles. “It’s a chicken. Didn’t they teach you at the convent?” “No! Chickens were someone else’s problem. I knit bandages and helped deliver babies.” She wedged her foot in the door to keep from being left in the hall in care of the chick. “Babies happen occasionally. Chickens happen all the time.” The dust-wife plucked the chick out of Marra’s fingers, shaking her head. As the door was closing in her face, Marra heard, “I know you aren’t broody, demon, but you’re going to make an exception or so help me…

The folks in the hall are so important to how it looks,” Lane Venardos, senior producer in charge of convention coverage for CBS News, said to The New York Times about the Republican convention. The delegates, in other words, were the dress extras who could make the set seem authentic.

Their mother, Lady Mary, had been born the youngest daughter of the Earl of Elmsley but had defied the conventions of the ton by marrying a freedman of Senegalese birth whom she had met through her work with the abolition. And whereas in the enlightened twenty-first century the marriage of a British aristocrat to a Person of Colour is a wholly unremarkable thing that results in no hostility whatsoever, in the bad old days of the 1800s it caused quite a scandal. Isn't it wonderful to know how far your species has come?

is July 2009. We step off our respective planes and lug our gear into the sweltering Vegas sun. Our taxis creep through downtown tourist traffic, swing around the airport, and unceremoniously drop us off in a giant, industrial-looking parking lot. The Las Vegas Sports Center sulks unimpressively in the heat, but under the sounds of arriving planes, there’s also a low hum and periodic whistles. Inside, the air is cooler and smells vaguely of . . . what is that smell? Sweat? Feet? Happiness? And when our eyes adjust to the light, we see skaters from every corner of the world—their helmets whiz by in every direction looking as if they are floating on air. On their feet are skates—black skates, white skates, blue skates, camouflage skates—propelled by a rainbow of wheels. On the sport floor, coaches with names like Carmen Getsome and Miss Fortune are drilling a centipede line of skaters in the fine art of knocking each other’s asses to the ground. Refs and skaters gear up for the mixed league, multination, battle du jour: Team Australia vs. Team Canada. Someone hobbles by with an ice pack strapped to her knee, still smiling. We smile too. Across town, nearly one thousand other skaters throng the casino and head to seminars in the meeting halls of the Imperial Palace Hotel, with nothing but roller derby on their minds. This is the fifth annual derby convention known as RollerCon.

Now, why was diagonal cutting better than cutting straight across? Because the corner of a triangularly cut slice gave you an ideal first bite. In the case of rectangular toast, you had to angle the shape into your mouth, as you angle a big dresser through a hall doorway: you had to catch one corner of your mouth with one corner of the toast and then carefully turn the toast, drawing the mouth open with it so that its other edge could clear; only then did you chomp down. Also, with a diagonal slice, most of the tapered bite was situated right up near the front of your mouth, where you wanted it to be as you began to chew; with the rectangular slice, a burdensome fraction was riding out of control high on the dome of the tongue. One subway stop before mine, I concluded that there had been logic behind the progress away from the parallel and toward the diagonal cut, and that the convention was not, as it might first have appeared, merely an affection of short-order cooks.

Outside the Republican Convention hall, there were plenty of people who did not feel 400 percent bigger and more hopeful in 1900. Although the ferment over silver had died down, the impetus for social change and radical reform had not. Progressive activists and journalists were beginning to focus national attention on the widening gap between rich and poor, on the problems of cities, political corruption, the rights of women, the depletion of natural resources, continuing racial inequality, and the power of big business. The new Governor of Wisconsin, Republican reformer Robert M. La Follette, gained national prominence pledging to

It was an invention with huge potential in saving money and lives, but Otis faced a skeptical and fearful public. So he rented out the main exhibit hall of what was then New York City’s largest convention center. On the floor of the hall he constructed an open elevator platform and a shaft in which the platform could rise and descend. One afternoon, he gathered convention-goers for a demonstration. He climbed onto the platform and directed an assistant to hoist the elevator to its top height, about three stories off the ground. Then, as he stood and gazed down at the crowd, Otis took an ax and slashed the rope that was suspending the elevator in midair. The audience gasped. The platform fell. But in seconds, the safety brake engaged and halted the elevator’s descent. Still alive and standing, Otis looked out at the shaken crowd and said, “All safe, gentlemen. All safe.”1 The moment marked two firsts. It was the first demonstration of an elevator safe enough to carry people. (Otis, you might have guessed by now, went on to found the Otis Elevator Company.) And more important for our purposes, it was a simple, succinct, and effective way to convey a complex message in an effort to move others—the world’s first elevator pitch.

The performance of Astenbeck could not have been good during the downturn in oil prices in 2014, but in early 2015, after formally leaving Phibro entirely, Mr. Hall came out of hiding to again predict a major demand-based spike in oil prices: “Prices at current levels (or lower) are not sustainable for very long,” Hall wrote in his yearly letter to investors. “The current surplus could thus easily set the stage for a future deficit.” Mr. Hall predicts both an increase of demand from lower oil prices, but also a very significant fall in production: he believes 2.4 million barrels a day of conventional oil is likely to disappear. Further, he accentuates the strength of shale producers as swing producers by noting the differences between 2015 and 1986, the last time a major drop in prices inspired a demand-based rally.

Dr. A.C. Jackson was a nationally recognized surgeon who was said by the Mayo Clinic to be the best African-American surgeon in the country. Jackson was one of fifteen African-American physicians in Tulsa at the time of the riot. He was only forty years old when he was gunned down outside his Greenwood home as he stood facing the vigilantes with his hands up. He told the mob that he was unarmed and that he wanted to go with them. He believed they were there to take him to safety at Convention Hall. As he walked out onto his front lawn, two men shot him down. While he was lying on the lawn, another man shot him in the leg. He bled to death in tremendous pain, unable to get help from the medical profession he so loved. He was a gentle man who sought only to do good for humanity and was beloved by both black and white associates.

As we'd slogged away for weeks on the Convention Hall stage in isolation, trying to pump life into our much-vaunted songbook, there'd been only one thing missing: you.

Now, it may be objected that Orwell was no Borges, that Nineteen Eighty-Four is no postmodern literary experiment, and that I am considering the Appendix too curiously. Perhaps the Newspeak essay should be seen simply as a parody 'presented in the form of a mock-survey, scientific and historical, of the language of Oceania,' whose purpose is to illustrate 'how a totalitarian oligarchy uses the rational tools of science as the instrument of power.' Or perhaps the problem I have identified could be explained as one more manifestation of 'the generic contradiction between naturalism and satire that is the basic formal determinant of the book.' Furthermore, it is pointless to second-guess an author; there are commonsense explanations for Orwell's decision to place the Newspeak essay in an Appendix, and for his failure to identify precisely the essay's author; the incongruities between the Appendix and the novel proper do not reduce the political urgency of the total work; it is a mistake to come to Nineteen Eighty-Four with expectations derived from more conventional novels; paradoxes are the stuff of futuristic stories; readers have a duty to suspend their disbelief; even Homer nods. But, if it was unlike Orwell to lure us deliberately into a hall of mirrors, he certainly did not lack ingenuity. And, even if he encountered difficulties he was unable to solve, his imperfect solutions were consonant with the plan to convey a world deprived of 'objective truth.' Even though his handling of the Appendix may have had unforeseen consequences for the book as a whole, the confusion raised by the document nevertheless 'works.' The footnote's implied promise of verification is hollow, and the reader's attempts to determine the 'objective truth' about Oceania—its social and political structure, its language, its fate—are frustrated. By trying to reconcile the novel and the Appendix, we experience for ourselves—'outside' the novel, as it were—what it might be like to inhabit a world in which the authenticity (never mind the accuracy or objectivity) of all documents is in doubt, in which documents are almost dreamlike, unfixed in time, infused with self-contradiction, at once recognisable and cryptic. Those who keep a checklist of Orwell's 'prophecies' may credit him with anticipating and dramatising the age of 'disinformation.

The bar was busy for a Wednesday due to the conventions hosted by the Miami Morrison. The question was, what convention was Laker Girl attending? Walt had arrived at the hotel earlier in the day to find massive banners and the entire second floor of the conference hall filling up with pictures of half-naked men and women embracing. At first, he thought the competing conference had something to do with adult film. When he asked, he was told a writers convention was dominating the hotel for the weekend. By comparison, the number of people at the conference he was attending was a drop of water in the ocean. Soon the hotel would be filled with writers, readers, publishers, and agents. The genre of choice . . . romance. Books written with nothing but happily-ever-after in mind.

THIS IS A book about financial crises. It is about the events that bring them about. It is about why governments and markets respond as they do. And it is about the consequences.     It is about the Great Recession of 2008–09 and the Great Depression of 1929–1933, the two great financial crises of our age. That there are parallels between these episodes is well known, not least in policy circles. Many commentators have noted how conventional wisdom about the earlier episode, what is referred to as “the lessons of the Great Depression,” shaped the response to the events of 2008–09.

But the words that lingered longest in the public imagination were those from Romeo and Juliet, “When I think of President Kennedy,” Bobby said, “I think of what Shakespeare said … “‘When he shall die Take him and cut him out in little stars And he will make the face of heaven so fine That all the world will be in love with night, And pay no worship to the garish sun.’” The hall burst again into applause. In a hotel room off the boardwalk, O’Brien, O’Donnell, Salinger, and Dave Powers watched the proceedings on television and wept. Elsewhere, Johnson men chafed at Bobby’s reference to the “garish sun.” An obvious, petty jab, they said. It was just like Bobby. After the twenty-minute film, as the lights in the hall were raised, Lyndon and Lady Bird Johnson entered the presidential box in which Bobby and Ethel had watched the tribute. Delegates began to cheer; the organ began a rousing reprise of “Hello, Lyndon!” The president shook Bobby’s hand. As Bobby and Ethel stepped to the back of the box, Johnson generously beckoned them forward. They sat at Lady Bird’s side while the president, moments later, gave his acceptance speech. “Let us now turn to our task!” Johnson charged the convention hall crowd in a fervent thirty-five-minute speech. “Let us be on our way!

I might be the guy who gives you all your experience, Halle. That’s a big deal to me, too. I don’t want someone else with more experience; I want you. And if you decide I don’t get to be that guy, I’ll still be right here, trying to solve riddles to understand you so I can be your friend.” “How do you manage to take all my bullshit and make it into something really sweet?” “For all you know, I’ve totally misunderstood everything, and I think we’re about to get married. Should we retrace your mental steps to make sure we understand each other?” “Do we have to? It’s too embarrassing to say out loud again. Maybe I should have just joined a convent right out of high school.

This is not to say that I have outgrown those elemental desires that drew me to transhumanism—just that they express themselves in more conventional ways. Over the intervening years, I have given up alcohol, drugs, sugar, and bread. On any given week, my Google search history is a compendium of cleanse recipes, high-intensity workouts, and the glycemic index of various exotic fruits. I spend my evenings in the concrete and cavernous halls of a university athletic center, rowing across virtual rivers and cycling up virtual hills, guided by the voice of my virtual trainer, Jessica, who came with an app that I bought. It’s easy enough to justify these rituals of health optimization as more than mere vanity, especially when we’re so frequently told that physical health determines our mental and emotional well-being. But if I’m honest with myself, these pursuits have less to do with achieving a static state of well-being than with the thrill of possibility that lies at the root of all self-improvement: the delusion that you are climbing an endless ladder of upgrades and solutions. The fact that I am aware of this delusion has not weakened its power over me. Even as I understand the futility of the pursuit, I persist in an almost mystical belief that I can, through concerted effort, feel better each year than the last, as though the trajectory of my life led toward not the abyss but some pinnacle of total achievement and solution, at which point I will dissolve into pure energy. Still, maintaining this delusion requires a kind of willful vigilance that can be exhausting.

I think that all that time I’d spent accepting the fact that I was already dead made me sort of a walking zombie among the living back home. Every person I looked at I would see as horribly disfigured, shot, maimed, bleeding, and needing my help. In some ways it was worse than being in Iraq, because the feelings were not appropriate to the situation and because I no longer had my buddies around to support me emotionally. I spent a good deal of time heavily dependent on alcohol and drugs, including drugs such as Clonazepam prescribed by well-meaning psychiatrists at the VA, drugs that were extremely addictive and led to a lot of risky behavior. However, I still had a dream of learning how to meditate and entering the spiritual path, a dream that began in college when I was exposed to teachings of Buddhism and yoga, and I realized these were more stable paths to well-being and elevated mood than the short-term effects of drugs. I decided that I wanted to learn meditation from an authentic Asian master, so I went to Japan to train at a traditional Zen monastery, called Sogen-ji, in the city of Okayama. Many people think that being at a Zen monastery must be a peaceful, blissful experience. Yet though I did have many beautiful experiences, the training was somewhat brutal. We meditated for long hours in freezing-cold rooms open to the snowy air of the Japanese winter and were not allowed to wear hats, scarves, socks, or gloves. A senior monk would constantly patrol the meditation hall with a stick, called the keisaku, or “compassion stick,” which was struck over the shoulders of anyone caught slouching or closing their eyes. Zen training would definitely violate the Geneva Conventions. And these were not guided meditations of the sort one finds in the West; I was simply told to sit and watch my breath, and those were the only meditation instructions I ever received. I remember on the third day at the monastery, I really thought my mind was about to snap due to the pain in my legs and the voice in my head that grew incredibly loud and distracting as I tried to meditate. I went to the senior monk and said, “Please, tell me what to do with my mind so I don’t go insane,” and he simply looked at me, said, “No talking,” and shuffled off. Left to my own devices, I was somehow able to find the will to carry on, and after days, weeks, and months of meditation, I indeed had an experience of such profound happiness and expanded awareness that it gave me the faith that meditation was, as a path to enlightenment, everything I had hoped for, everything I had been promised by the books and scriptures.

The two teams created a text-messaging distribution list that allowed for constant communication about potential problems during the four-day convention. When a Bernie supporter raised an anti-Clinton sign, a whip team member in the convention hall could relay the message quickly to the boiler room. The team there would send a note to Bernie and Hillary aides on the floor, who would ask the person to take it down. The flash-speed communications network would turn out to be a major factor in transforming what was a tumultuous convention inside the hall into a unified one on television. That is, it looked a lot different to folks watching at home than it did to participants inside an arena with plenty of anti-Clinton Bernie delegates.

Since the convention was trying to establish a government altogether new under the sun, there were no precedents to violate—but also none to steer by. All the issues involved in government stalked the hall at one time or another. Among the troublesome problems were drawing lines between state and federal power, decisions concerning slavery (the more defensively protected in the South because disapproved of in the North), southern suspicions that federal trade regulations would make them serfs to New England shippers, taxation, fear of tyranny at one extreme or anarchy at the other. The level of agreement reached was phenomenal, and, when agreement proved too difficult, many a decision was left vague, to be worked out in actual practice.

time. The first Fairport Convention gig as a four-piece (with original, short-lived drummer Shaun Frater) took place on 27 May 1967 at St Michael’s Hall in Golders Green. Even in that momentous year for rock music, the date was auspicious: Are You Experienced? had been on the streets for a week and a half, and Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band was five days away. As they

But what about all those poor met/mets out there? Don’t they deserve effective therapies too? Hall and Gunther point out that met/mets respond well to both placebos and regular drugs. It’s just that their brain chemistry has the bonus of supercharging their response. All things considered, they are actually the most fortunate members of the population. They can take the drug and they will respond at a higher level than the recalcitrant val/vals. Or, if they decide that conventional medicine isn’t their thing, they can try acupuncture, homeopathy, or faith healing and perhaps do just as well—whereas on a val/val, those treatments are more likely to fall flat.

Ninety feet directly beneath the center courtyard café in the middle of the Pentagon—previously known as the Ground Zero Cafe, because when the bomb dropped that was where it would most likely detonate—there is a deep subbasement office with ferroconcrete walls and a filtered air supply, accessible by discreet elevators and staircases from all five wings of the main building. It was designed as a deep command bunker back when the worst threats were raids by long-range Luftwaffe bombers bearing conventional explosives. Obsolescent since the morning of July 16, 1945—it won’t withstand a direct ground burst from an atom bomb, much less more modern munitions—it still possesses certain uses. Being deep underground and equidistant from all the other wings, it was well suited as a switch for SCAN, the Army’s automatic switched communications system, and later for AUTOVON. AUTOVON led to ARPANET, the predecessor of the internet, and the secure exchange in the basement played host to one of the first IMPs—Interface Message Processors—outside of academia. By the early 1980s a lack of rackspace led the DoD to relocate their hardened exchanges to a site closer to the 1950s-sized mainframe halls. And it was then that the empty bunker was taken over by a shadowy affiliate of the National Security Agency, tasked with waging occult warfare against the enemies of the nation. The past six months have brought some changes. There is a pentagonal main room inside the bunker, and within it there is a ceremonial maze, inscribed in blood and silver that glows with a soft fluorescence, converging on a dais at the heart of the design. The labyrinth takes the shape of a pentacle aligned with the building overhead: at each corner stands a motionless sentinel clad head to toe in occlusive silver fabric. Robed in black and crimson silk and shod in slippers of disturbingly pale leather, the Deputy Director paces her way through the maze. In her left hand she bears a jewel-capped scepter carved from the femur of a dead pope, and in her right hand she bears a gold-plated chalice made from a skull that once served Josef Stalin as an ashtray. As she walks she recites a prayer of allegiance and propitiation, its cadences and grammar those of a variant dialect of Old Enochian.

One of the problems with writing about Room 40, especially as a pioneer for Bletchley Park, is that Hall was operating, not just outside the law, but outside all conventions. He kept his ruses in his head, managed them by force of personality and his own charm, and wrote very little down. In the years after the war, he tried to deflect the real story over and over again by inventing little untruths and obscurities. So we will probably never know, for example, if it was Hall’s fake signal to Admiral Maximilian von Spee’s squadron in the Pacific which lured them so disastrously to the Falklands, where the battlecruisers Invincible and Inflexible lay in wait.

The only problem we had was with the judge,” the wife said. “The judge thought there was some mistake that we’d want this child because he’s dark skinned. The judge said no one would want a child like that and that there were plenty of light-skinned babies available. He just couldn’t believe that we would want him and almost treated us as though we were up to something shady because we did.” I wasn’t expecting that, and as I stroked this little boy’s cheek, those words struck me: “No one would ever want a child like that.” I picked him up from his stroller and hugged him, hoping I wouldn’t start crying in front of my denominational peers walking up and down the corridor of the convention hall. “You’re loved and wanted,” I told him. “Isn’t that great?

His inquisitors were not impressed. On June 22, 1633, when he was seventy years old, Galileo got down on his knees in the great hall of a Dominican convent in Rome and read the renunciation they had written for him. Wishing to remove from the minds of your Eminences and of every true Christian this vehement suspicion justly cast upon me, with sincere heart and unfeigned faith I do abjure, damn, and detest the said errors and heresies, and generally each and every other error, heresy, and sect contrary to the Holy Church; and I do swear for the future that I shall never again speak or assert, orally or in writing, such things as might bring me under similar suspicion.

It is almost as difficult for a Scots intellectual to get out of the Kailyard as to live without an alias. The dilemma is not just an intellectual's one... the whole thing is related to the much larger field of popular culture. For Kailyard is popular in Scotland. It is recognisably intertwined with that prodigious array of Kitsch symbols, slogans, banners, war-cries, knick-knacks, music-hall heroes, icons, conventional sayings and sentiments (not a few of them 'pithy') which have for so long defended the name of 'Scotland' to the world. Annie S. Swan and A.J. Cronin provided no more than the decent outer garb for this vast tartan monster. In their work the thing trots along doucely enough, on a lead. But it is something else to be with it (e.g.) in a London pub on International night, or in the crowd at the annual Military Tattoo in front of Edinburgh Castle. How intolerably vulgar! What unbearable, crass, mindless philistinism! One knows that Kitsch is a large constituent of mass popular culture in every land: but this is ridiculous!

How did sundown towns become such a widespread phenomenon in the North? A major part of the explanation is the rise of virulently racist groups. The 1920s was a major period of rebirth and growth for the Ku Klux Klan, not just in the South, but also in the North. Some 15,000 Klan members attended the state convention in Maine in 1923; an estimated 10,000 people attended a Klan rally near Montpelier, Vermont, in 1925. That same year, The Washington Post estimated Klan membership in New England at more than half a million. Others estimated membership in New Jersey at more than 60,000. The Klan, primarily groups of white Protestant Christians who donned white robes and conical hoods, threatened and terrorized Blacks in particular. James Loewen points out in his book "Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism" that the Klan members didn't reserve their hatred for Black alone: they reviled and threatened Jews and Catholics as well as any ethnic group they viewed as only marginally white—Italians, Greeks, and Eastern Europeans. But they reserved their intense hatred and most egregious acts of violence for Blacks. Such domestic hate groups often operated with impunity because of indifference or support, tacit or explicit, from local governments, police departments, elected officials, and citizens.