Couple Status Quotes

I hate when couples fight and change their status to 'single' when they're still together and are just mad at one another. Do you see me changing my status to 'orphan' after I fight with my parents?

More recently, during a debate in the House of Lords in 1978 one of the members said: "If there is a more hideous language on the face of the earth than the American form of English, I should like to know what it is." (We should perhaps bear in mind that the House of Lords is a largely powerless, nonelective institution. It is an arresting fact of British political life that a Briton can enjoy a national platform and exalted status because he is the residue of an illicit coupling 300 years before between a monarch and an orange seller.)

The wedding is the chief ceremony of the middle-class mythology, and it functions as the official entrée of the spouses to their middle-class status. This is the real meaning of saving up to get married. The young couple struggles to set up an image of comfortable life which they will be forced to live up to in the years that follow.

Childless couples, on the other hand, take pleasure in the advantages of being alone: living for each other, doing more things together than parents are able to do, paying more attention to the other person’s feelings and desires. They see children as a possible threat to the harmony they are able to take for granted.

Pessimism doesn’t change the reality; it prolongs the status quo. And it brings everyone down. It’s only ever lose-lose. Optimism and faith coupled with pragmatism change the reality. Self-belief and self-reliance change the reality. Boldness to explore new ideas changes the reality. A vision powered by effort and energy changes the reality.

Who is subordinate to whom in a marriage?” After all, each might reason, as people commonly do, that such an arrangement is a zero-sum game, with one winner and one loser. But a relationship does not have to be and should not be a question of one or the other as winner, or even each alternating in that status, in an approximation of fairness. Instead, the couple can decide that each and both are subordinate to a principle, a higher-order principle, which constitutes their union in the spirit of illumination and truth. That ghostly figure, the ideal union of what is best in both personalities, should be constantly regarded as the ruler of the marriage—and, indeed, as something as close to divine as might be practically approached by fallible individuals

A person does not reach the pinnacle of self-realization without relentlessly exploring the parameters of the self, exhausting their psychic energy coming to know oneself. Without society to rebel against and to sail away from, there would be no advances in civilization; there would be no need for healers and mystics, priests and artist, or shaman and writers. It is our curiosity and refusal to be satisfied with the status quo that compels us to challenge ourselves to learn and continue to grow. We only establish inner peace of mind with acceptance of the world, with the recognition of our connection to the entirety of the universe, and understanding that chaos and change are inevitable. We must also love because without love there are no acts of creation. Without love, humankind is a spasmodic pool of brutality and suffering. Love is a balm. It cures human aches and pains; it unites couples, families, and cultures. Love is a creative force, without love there is no art or religion. Art expresses thought and feelings, an articulation of adore and reverence.

He made lists of what he needed to resolve, and fast, in the following year: his work (at a standstill), his love life (nonexistent), hi sexuality (unresolved), his future (uncertain). The four items were always the same, although sometimes their order of priority changed. Also consistent was his ability to precisely diagnose their status, coupled with his utter inability to provide any solutions.

But what was so great about marriage? I had been married and married. It had its good points, but it also had its bad. The virtues of marriage were mostly negative virtues. Being unmarried in a man's world was such a hassle that anything had to be better. Marriage was better. But not much. Damned clever, I thought, how men had made life so intolerable for single women that most would gladly embrace even bad marriages instead. Almost anything had to be an improvement on hustling for your own keep at some low-paid job and fighting off unattractive men in your spare time while desperately trying to ferret out the attractive ones. Though I've no doubt that being single is just as lonely for a man, it doesn't have the added extra wallop of being downright dangerous, and it doesn't automatically imply poverty and the unquestioned status of a social pariah. Would most women get married if they knew what it meant? I think of young women following their husbands wherever their husbands follow their jobs. I think of them suddenly finding themselves miles away from friends and family, I think of them living in places where they can't work, where they can't speak the language. I think of them making babies out of their loneliness and boredom and not knowing why. I think of their men always harried and exhausted from being on the make. I think of them seeing each other less after marriage than before. I think of them falling into bed too exhausted to screw. I think of them farther apart in the first year of marriage than they ever imagined two people could be when they were courting. And then I think of the fantasies starting. He is eyeing the fourteen-year-old postnymphets in bikinis. She covets the TV repairman. The baby gets sick and she makes it with the pediatrician. He is fucking his masochistic little secretary who reads Cosmopolitan and things herself a swinger. Not: when did it all go wrong? But: when was it ever right? ....... I know some good marriages. Second marriages mostly. Marriages where both people have outgrown the bullshit of me-Tarzan, you-Jane and are just trying to get through their days by helping each other, being good to each other, doing the chores as they come up and not worrying too much about who does what. Some men reach that delightfully relaxed state of affairs about age forty or after a couple of divorces. Maybe marriages are best in middle age. When all the nonsense falls away and you realize you have to love one another because you're going to die anyway.

So much of what we hear today about courage is inflated and empty rhetoric that camouflages personal fears about one’s likability, ratings, and ability to maintain a level of comfort and status. We need more people who are willing to demonstrate what it looks like to risk and endure failure, disappointment, and regret—people willing to feel their own hurt instead of working it out on other people, people willing to own their stories, live their values, and keep showing up. I feel so lucky to have spent the past couple of years working with some true badasses, from teachers and parents to CEOs, filmmakers, veterans, human-resource professionals, school counselors, and therapists. We’ll explore what they have in common as we move through the book, but here’s a teaser: They’re curious about the emotional world and they face discomfort straight-on.

A hallmark of petty tyrants—including many Rule Nazis—is that their power over a narrow domain is coupled with low prestige; they simmer and sulk about the lack of respect they get. This mix of power and low social status creates a deadly brew—it provokes them to take out their frustration and resentment on others.

I need an audience with his furry Highness.” I can’t believe I’m saying this. “I can’t believe you’re saying this, after all the bitc—yelling you did when I called you for the Spring Meet. I distinctly remember ‘never see that arrogant asshole again’ and ‘over my dead body.’” “Spring Meet was optional.” After working with the Pack to dispatch the Red Point Stalker, I was granted the Friend of the Pack status, which apparently came with such benefits as being invited to ceremonies. Hell, if I transgressed in their territory, the shapeshifters might hesitate a couple of seconds before they shredded me into Kate sushi.

The bartender is Irish. Jumped a student visa about ten years ago but nothing for him to worry about. The cook, though, is Mexican. Some poor bastard at ten dollars an hour—and probably has to wash the dishes, too. La Migra take notice of his immigration status—they catch sight of his bowl cut on the way home to Queens and he’ll have a problem. He looks different than the Irish and the Canadians—and he’s got Lou Dobbs calling specifically for his head every night on the radio. (You notice, by the way, that you never hear Dobbs wringing his hands over our border to the North. Maybe the “white” in Great White North makes that particular “alien superhighway” more palatable.) The cook at the Irish bar, meanwhile, has the added difficulty of predators waiting by the subway exit for him (and any other Mexican cooks or dishwashers) when he comes home on Friday payday. He’s invariably cashed his check at a check-cashing store; he’s relatively small—and is unlikely to call the cops. The perfect victim. The guy serving my drinks, on the other hand, as most English-speaking illegal aliens, has been smartly gaming the system for years, a time-honored process everybody at the INS is fully familiar with: a couple of continuing education classes now and again (while working off the books) to get those student visas. Extensions. A work visa. A “farm” visa. Weekend across the border and repeat. Articulate, well-connected friends—the type of guys who own, for instance, lots of Irish bars—who can write letters of support lauding your invaluable and “specialized” skills, unavailable from homegrown bartenders. And nobody’s looking anyway. But I digress…

couples often fall into a pattern of demand and retreat—most often, the woman demands and the man retreats. This dynamic has arisen, she says, because men have less to gain by changing their behavior, while women are more likely to want to alter the status quo—which means they also initiate more fights.

that couples often fall into a pattern of demand and retreat—most often, the woman demands and the man retreats. This dynamic has arisen, she says, because men have less to gain by changing their behavior, while women are more likely to want to alter the status quo—which means they also initiate more fights.

At night, as beneath him his parents completed their routines, the banging of the old pipes as they washed their faces and the sudden thunk into silence as they turned down the living-room radiators better than any clock at indicating that was eleven, eleven thirty, midnight, he made lists of what he needed to resolve, and fast, in the following year: his work (at a standstill), his love life (nonexistent), his sexuality (unresolved), his future (uncertain). The four items were always the same, although sometimes their order of priority changed. Also consistent was his ability to precisely diagnose their status, coupled with his utter inability to provide any solutions.

He didn’t respond as he hailed Vik. “What’s your status?” “Annoyed.” In spite of everything, he laughed. “What’s going on out there?” “Street’s basically clear. There’s a couple on the corner in a rover about to have sex—nasty people doing private things in public, get a room, you no-home-trained plebs. Other than that … looks promising.” Syn

he made lists of what he needed to resolve, and fast, in the following year: his work (at a standstill), his love life (nonexistent), his sexuality (unresolved), his future (uncertain). The four items were always the same, although sometimes their order of priority changed. Also consistent was his ability to precisely diagnose their status, coupled with his utter inability to provide any solutions.

...he made lists of what he needed to resolve, and fast, in the following year: his work (at a standstill), his love life (nonexistent), his sexuality (unresolved), his future (uncertain). The four items were always the same, although sometimes their order of priority changed. Also consistent was his ability to precisely diagnose their status, coupled with his utter inability to provide any solutions.

No longer are the riches of the Bible known only to an educated elite. But it has also had negative consequences. It has made possible individualistic interpretation of the Bible; and that, coupled with the elevated status given to the Bible by the Protestant Reformation, has led to the fragmentation of Christianity into a multitude of denominations and sectarian movements, each grounded in different interpretations of the Bible.

I also gleaned that just about all of the women in Chicago were on pretrial status—their cases had not yet been resolved, but they did not or could not make bail. So they were captive here while the wheels of justice ground. A couple of them had been here for months without being charged with a crime. This made their lives uncertain on every level, and those who were not already crazy were acting pretty wacko, driven nuts by rage and instability.

We have not thoroughly assessed the bodies snatched from dirt and sand to be chained in a cell. We have not reckoned with the horrendous, violent mass kidnapping that we call the Middle Passage. We have not been honest about all of America's complicity - about the wealth the South earned on the backs of the enslaved, or the wealth the North gained through the production of enslaved hands. We have not fully understood the status symbol that owning bodies offered. We have not confronted the humanity, the emotions, the heartbeats of the multiple generations who were born into slavery and died in it, who never tasted freedom on America's land. The same goes for the Civil War. We have refused to honestly confront the fact that so many were willing to die in order to hold the freedom of others in their hands. We have refused to acknowledge slavery's role at all, preferring to boil things down to the far more palatable "state's rights." We have not confessed that the end of slavery was so bitterly resented, the rise of Jim Crow became inevitable - and with it, a belief in Black inferiority that lives on in hearts and minds today. We have painted the hundred-year history of Jim Crow as little more than mean signage and the inconvenience that white people and Black people could not drink from the same fountain. But those signs weren't just "mean". They were perpetual reminders of the swift humiliation and brutal violence that could be suffered at any moment in the presence of whiteness. Jim Crow meant paying taxes for services one could not fully enjoy; working for meager wages; and owning nothing that couldn't be snatched away. For many black families, it meant never building wealth and never having legal recourse for injustice. The mob violence, the burned-down homes, the bombed churches and businesses, the Black bodies that were lynched every couple of days - Jim Crow was walking through life measuring every step. Even our celebrations of the Civil Rights Movement are sanitized, its victories accentuated while the battles are whitewashed. We have not come to grips with the spitting and shouting, the pulling and tugging, the clubs, dogs, bombs, and guns, the passion and vitriol with which the rights of Black Americans were fought against. We have not acknowledged the bloodshed that often preceded victory. We would rather focus on the beautiful words of Martin Luther King Jr. than on the terror he and protesters endured at marches, boycotts, and from behind jail doors. We don't want to acknowledge that for decades, whiteness fought against every civil right Black Americans sought - from sitting at lunch counters and in integrated classrooms to the right to vote and have a say in how our country was run. We like to pretend that all those white faces who carried protest signs and batons, who turned on their sprinklers and their fire hoses, who wrote against the demonstrations and preached against the changes, just disappeared. We like to pretend that they were won over, transformed, the moment King proclaimed, "I have a dream." We don't want to acknowledge that just as Black people who experienced Jim Crow are still alive, so are the white people who vehemently protected it - who drew red lines around Black neighborhoods and divested them of support given to average white citizens. We ignore that white people still avoid Black neighborhoods, still don't want their kids going to predominantly Black schools, still don't want to destroy segregation. The moment Black Americans achieved freedom from enslavement, America could have put to death the idea of Black inferiority. But whiteness was not prepared to sober up from the drunkenness of power over another people group. Whiteness was not ready to give up the ability to control, humiliate, or do violence to any Black body in the vicinity - all without consequence.

In their book Radical Reconciliation, Curtiss DeYoung and Allan Boesak unpack why this happens. They write, "reconciliation is revolutionary, that is, oriented to structural change." Which means, reconciliation can never be apolitical. Reconciliation chooses sides, and the side is always justice. This is why white American churches remain so far from experiencing anything resembling reconciliation. The white Church considers power its birthright rather than its curse. And so, rather than seeking reconciliation, they stage moments of racial harmony that don't challenge the status quo. They organize worship services where the choirs of two racially different churches sing together, where a pastor of a different race preaches a couple of times a year, where they celebrate MLK but don't acknowledge current racial injustices. Acts like these can create beautiful moments of harmony and goodwill, but since they don't change the underlying power structure at the organization, it would be misleading to call them acts of reconciliation. Even worse, when they're not paired with greater change, diversity efforts can have the opposite of their intended effect. They keep the church feeling good, innocent, maybe even progressive, all the while preserving the roots of injustice.

Hey Pete. So why the leave from social media? You are an activist, right? It seems like this decision is counterproductive to your message and work." A: The short answer is I’m tired of the endless narcissism inherent to the medium. In the commercial society we have, coupled with the consequential sense of insecurity people feel, as they impulsively “package themselves” for public consumption, the expression most dominant in all of this - is vanity. And I find that disheartening, annoying and dangerous. It is a form of cultural violence in many respects. However, please note the difference - that I work to promote just that – a message/idea – not myself… and I honestly loath people who today just promote themselves for the sake of themselves. A sea of humans who have been conditioned into viewing who they are – as how they are seen online. Think about that for a moment. Social identity theory run amok. People have been conditioned to think “they are” how “others see them”. We live in an increasing fictional reality where people are now not only people – they are digital symbols. And those symbols become more important as a matter of “marketing” than people’s true personality. Now, one could argue that social perception has always had a communicative symbolism, even before the computer age. But nooooooothing like today. Social media has become a social prison and a strong means of social control, in fact. Beyond that, as most know, social media is literally designed like a drug. And it acts like it as people get more and more addicted to being seen and addicted to molding the way they want the world to view them – no matter how false the image (If there is any word that defines peoples’ behavior here – it is pretention). Dopamine fires upon recognition and, coupled with cell phone culture, we now have a sea of people in zombie like trances looking at their phones (literally) thousands of times a day, merging their direct, true interpersonal social reality with a virtual “social media” one. No one can read anymore... they just swipe a stream of 200 character headlines/posts/tweets. understanding the world as an aggregate of those fragmented sentences. Massive loss of comprehension happening, replaced by usually agreeable, "in-bubble" views - hence an actual loss of variety. So again, this isn’t to say non-commercial focused social media doesn’t have positive purposes, such as with activism at times. But, on the whole, it merely amplifies a general value system disorder of a “LOOK AT ME! LOOK AT HOW GREAT I AM!” – rooted in systemic insecurity. People lying to themselves, drawing meaningless satisfaction from superficial responses from a sea of avatars. And it’s no surprise. Market economics demands people self promote shamelessly, coupled with the arbitrary constructs of beauty and success that have also resulted. People see status in certain things and, directly or pathologically, use those things for their own narcissistic advantage. Think of those endless status pics of people rock climbing, or hanging out on a stunning beach or showing off their new trophy girl-friend, etc. It goes on and on and worse the general public generally likes it, seeking to imitate those images/symbols to amplify their own false status. Hence the endless feedback loop of superficiality. And people wonder why youth suicides have risen… a young woman looking at a model of perfection set by her peers, without proper knowledge of the medium, can be made to feel inferior far more dramatically than the typical body image problems associated to traditional advertising. That is just one example of the cultural violence inherent. The entire industry of social media is BASED on narcissistic status promotion and narrow self-interest. That is the emotion/intent that creates the billions and billions in revenue these platforms experience, as they in turn sell off people’s personal data to advertisers and governments. You are the product, of course.

Recent studies indicate that boys raised by women, including single women and lesbian couples, do not suffer in their adjustment; they are not appreciably less “masculine”; they do not show signs of psychological impairment. What many boys without fathers inarguably do face is a precipitous drop in their socioeconomic status. When families dissolve, the average standard of living for mothers and children can fall as much as 60 percent, while that of the man usually rises. When we focus on the highly speculative psychological effects of fatherlessness we draw away from concrete political concerns, like the role of increased poverty. Again, there are as yet no data suggesting that boys without fathers to model masculinity are necessarily impaired. Those boys who do have fathers are happiest and most well adjusted with warm, loving fathers, fathers who score high in precisely “feminine” qualities.

No society has succeeded in abolishing the distinction between ruler and ruled... to be a ruler gives one special status and, usually, special privileges. During the Communist era, important officials in the Soviet Union had access to special shops selling delicacies unavailable to ordinary citizens; before China allowed capitalist enterprises in its economy, travelling by car was a luxury limited to tourists and those high in the party hierarchy Throughout the 'communist' nations, the abolition of the old ruling class was followed by the rise of a new class of party bosses and well-placed bureaucrats, whose behaviour and life-style came more and more to resemble that of their much-denounced predecessors. In the end, nobody believed in the system any more. That, couple with its inability to match the productivity of the less bureaucratically controlled, more egoistically driven capitalist economies, led to its downfall.

The narcissistic love match is inherently unstable. Any intrusion of reality can destabilize the relationship, leading to chronic or intermittent conflict, misery, trips to the couple counselor, or traumatic ruptures that bring the union to an end. When the narcissist can find support outside the relationship – career, family, friends, or other interests- that keep him or her feeling pumped up, the pressure on the partner may be minimal. But frustrations at work, job loss or retirement, disruptions in other needed relationships, and losses in status or rewards from other pipelines usually lead to more demands on the partner to pick up the slack. It is the nature of human beings to seek more satisfying solutions to life’s challenges over time and to strive toward a fully realized evolution of Self. Even a seed of emotional health wants to grow. Just as primary narcissism is a transient state in early childhood, so may narcissistic relationships be way stations on our journey to mature love. But sometimes the hard part is figuring out if, when, and how to move on.

The anthropologist Peggy Reeves Sanday looked at data from over a hundred cultures as to the prevalence of rape, and divided them into high- or low-rape cultures. She found that high-rape cultures are highly militarized and sex-segregated. There is a lot of difference in status between men and women. The care of children is devalued and delegated to subordinate females. She also found that the creation myths of high-rape cultures recognize only a male deity rather than a female deity or a couple. When you think about it, that is rather bizarre. It would be an understandable mistake to think women make babies all by themselves, but it’s preposterous to think men do that alone. So you’ve got to have a fairly elaborate and counterintuitive mythmaking machine in order to fabricate a creation myth that recognizes only a male deity. There was another interesting finding, which is that high-rape cultures had recent experiences—meaning in the last few hundred years—of famine or migration. That is to say, they had not reached a stable adaptation to their ecological niche. Sadly enough, when you tally these risk factors, you realize you’ve pretty much described our culture.

Where do you even start with Cinderella? Let's ignore Cinderella's victim status and total lack of self-determination and head straight for the prince who was, let's face it, a bit of a jerk. Despite being captivated by Cinderella's radiant beauty for half the night, come the cold light of day he has completely forgotten what she looks like and only has her shoe size to go on. Either he was suffering from some sort of early onset Alzheimer's disease or else he was completely off his face during the big ball. the end result is that he goes trawling through the kingdom in some sort of perverted foot-fetish style quest for someone, anyone, who fits the glass slipper. Just how superficial is this guy? What if Cinderella had turned up at the ball looking exactly like she did only with a mole on her face and that had a couple of twelve-centimetre hairs sticking out of it? What if a bearded troll just happened to have the same shoe size as Cinderella? 'Ah, well. Pucker up, bushy cheeks, it's snog time.' And no one ever bothers to question the sheer impracticality of Cinderella's footwear. Glass might be good for many things but it's not exactly malleable in its cooled state. If everyone turned and gaped when Cinderella made her big entrance into the ball, it's only because she'd have come staggering in like a drunken giraffe on rollerblades. Bit of a head turner.

Throughout the history of the church, Christians have tended to elevate the importance of one over the other. For the first 1,500 years of the church, singleness was considered the preferred state and the best way to serve Christ. Singles sat at the front of the church. Marrieds were sent to the back.4 Things changed after the Reformation in 1517, when single people were sent to the back and marrieds moved to the front — at least among Protestants.5 Scripture, however, refers to both statuses as weighty, meaningful vocations. We’ll spend more time on each later in the chapter, but here is a brief overview. Marrieds. This refers to a man and woman who form a one-flesh union through a covenantal vow — to God, to one another, and to the larger community — to permanently, freely, faithfully, and fruitfully love one another. Adam and Eve provide the clearest biblical model for this. As a one-flesh couple, they were called by God to take initiative to “be fruitful . . . fill the earth and subdue it” (Genesis 1:28). Singles. Scripture teaches that human beings are created for intimacy and connection with God, themselves, and one another. Marriage is one framework in which we work this out; singleness is another. While singleness may be voluntarily chosen or involuntarily imposed, temporary or long-term, a sudden event or a gradual unfolding, Christian singleness can be understood within two distinct callings: • Vowed celibates. These are individuals who make lifelong vows to remain single and maintain lifelong sexual abstinence as a means of living out their commitment to Christ. They do this freely in response to a God-given gift of grace (Matthew 19:12). Today, we are perhaps most familiar with vowed celibates as nuns and priests in the Roman Catholic or Orthodox Church. These celibates vow to forgo earthly marriage in order to participate more fully in the heavenly reality that is eternal union with Christ.6 • Dedicated celibates. These are singles who have not necessarily made a lifelong vow to remain single, but who choose to remain sexually abstinent for as long as they are single. Their commitment to celibacy is an expression of their commitment to Christ. Many desire to marry or are open to the possibility. They may have not yet met the right person or are postponing marriage to pursue a career or additional education. They may be single because of divorce or the death of a spouse. The apostle Paul acknowledges such dedicated celibates in his first letter to the church at Corinth (1 Corinthians 7). Understanding singleness and marriage as callings or vocations must inform our self-understanding and the outworking of our leadership. Our whole life as a leader is to bear witness to God’s love for the world. But we do so in different ways as marrieds or singles. Married couples bear witness to the depth of Christ’s love. Their vows focus and limit them to loving one person exclusively, permanently, and intimately. Singles — vowed or dedicated — bear witness to the breadth of Christ’s love. Because they are not limited by a vow to one person, they have more freedom and time to express the love of Christ to a broad range of people. Both marrieds and singles point to and reveal Christ’s love, but in different ways. Both need to learn from one another about these different aspects of Christ’s love. This may be a radically new concept for you, but stay with me. God intends this rich theological vision to inform our leadership in ways few of us may have considered. Before exploring the connections between leadership and marriage or singleness, it’s important to understand the way marriage and singleness are commonly understood in standard practice among leaders today.

But the man who owned the vineyard said to one of those workers, ‘Friend, I am being fair to you. You agreed to work for one coin. So take your pay and go. I want to give the man who was hired last the same pay that I gave you. I can do what I want with my own money. Are you jealous because I am good to those people?’ “So those who are last now will someday be first, and those who are first now will someday be last.” (20:1–16 NCV) “Do you begrudge my generosity?” the landowner is saying. The answer, of course, is yes, they do. They begrudge it quite a bit. Even though it has no impact on them whatsoever, it offends them. We hate it when we are trying so hard to earn something, and then someone else gets the same thing without trying as hard. Think about this for a moment, in real, “today” terms. Someone gives you a backbreaking job, and you’re happy for it, but at the end of the day, when you’re getting paid, the guys who came in with five minutes left get the same amount you just got. Seriously? It’s imbalanced, unfair, maddening . . . and it’s also exactly what Jesus just said the kingdom of God is like. Not only is it maddening; it’s maddening to the “good” people! Common sense says you don’t do this. You don’t pay latecomers who came in a few minutes ago the same amount that you paid the hardworking folks you hired first. Jesus tells this story, knowing full well that the conscientious ones listening would find this hardest to take. And, as a matter of fact, as a conscientious one, I find this hard to take. I’m just being honest. This story does not fit my style. I’m all about people getting what they deserve. Oh, it’s offensive, too, when Jesus turns to a guy who’s being executed next to Him, and tells him, “Today, you will be with me in paradise” (Luke 23:43). What did the guy do to deserve that? He did nothing. If you call yourself a Christian, and you want things to be fair, and you want God’s rewards given out only to the deserving and the upstanding and the religious, well, honestly, Jesus has got to be a complete embarrassment to you. In fact, to so many upstanding Christians, He is. He has always been offensive, and remains offensive, to those who seek to achieve “righteousness” through what they do. Always. People who’ve grown up in church (like me) are well acquainted with the idea that Jesus is our “cornerstone.” He’s the solid rock of our faith. Got it. Not controversial. It’s well-known. But what’s not so talked about: That stone, Jesus, causes religious people to stumble. And that rock is offensive to “good” people: So what does all this mean? Those who are not Jews were not trying to make themselves right with God, but they were made right with God because of their faith. The people of Israel tried to follow a law to make themselves right with God. But they did not succeed, because they tried to make themselves right by the things they did instead of trusting in God to make them right. They stumbled over the stone that causes people to stumble. (Rom. 9:30–32 NCV) And then Paul says something a couple verses later that angers “good Christians” to this day: Because they did not know the way that God makes people right with him, they tried to make themselves right in their own way. So they did not accept God’s way of making people right. Christ ended the law so that everyone who believes in him may be right with God. (Rom. 10:3–4 NCV) It’s not subtle, what Paul’s writing here. For anyone who believes in Him, Jesus ended the law as a means to righteousness. Yet so many think they can achieve—even have achieved—some kind of “good Christian” status on the basis of the rule-keeping work they’ve done. They suspect they’ll do good things and God will owe them for it, like payment for a job well done. Paul says, in effect, if you think you should get what you earn, you will . . . and you don’t want that.

Her voice had suddenly jumped a couple of social classes to underline her ownership status.

The Map of Choices The first, called the Map of Choices, is designed to enable you to reflect on where you’ve come from, before you focus on where you’re going. You start by spending ten minutes drawing a map of your career path so far. It can take any form – a zigzagging line, a branching tree or maybe a labyrinth. On this map you should indicate not only the jobs you have done, but the different motivations and forces that have shaped your route. If a major career decision was influenced by the prospect of more money or status, show it on your map – similarly if you were driven by your talents, passions or values. You should also add other factors that might have guided you, such as the role played by your educational choices, parental expectations, professional career advice or chance. Even if you’ve only ever held one job, try mapping out what drew you into it. Having created your artwork, now spend another ten minutes looking at it and thinking about these three questions. • What does your map reveal about your overall approach to your working life so far? There may be general patterns you can see, such as the way you never stay in a position for more than a couple of years, or that you seem to have fallen into most jobs rather than really choosing them. • Which of the following motivations have you given greatest priority to in your career choices: money, status, respect, passions, talents or making a difference? (rank them from greatest to least priority) • Which two of the motivations mentioned above do you most want to shape your career choices in the future, and why? Make a note of your responses, ready for the next activity.

The analogy between infertile heterosexuals and same-sex couples misses the point. The extension of marriage to infertile heterosexual couples serves not to deprecate same-sex couples, but to preserve the equal status of women in marriage. A test for fertility would be unfair to women because all women spend most of their adult lives in a state of infertility. Fertile women are infertile most days of a month, and postmenopausal women are always infertile. A fertility requirement would also render women susceptible to enormous abuse by men, providing a ready excuse for men who would trade in older women for nubile brides. The status of women in marriage would be intolerably diminished through this practice. Infertility is less common among men, as they can sire children into old age. Moreover, men, like women, typically do not discover that they are infertile until they attempt to sire children, at which time they ought already to be married. A measure that serves primarily to protect women and to preserve their equal status within the institution of marriage is not a measure that is an appropriate basis by which to judge that the same should go for same-sex couples. One of the great challenges men and women face in marriage is in coming to terms with their differences while respecting the status of the other as an equal. Acceptance of infertility is a measure promoting this end. A measure to accommodate the reality of sex-based difference in marriage is no reason to extend marriage to same-sex couples. Moreover, accommodation for infertility in no way diminishes the reality that the inequality of the parent-child relationship is what differentiates marriage from other contractual relationships. It is the parent-child relation, as it emerges from sexual difference and procreation, which elevates marriage above a mere contract, and renders it a sacred duty.

is driven more by fear of not being a success than by a concrete desire to do anything in particular.” The postcollege choices of Ivy League students, he explained, “are motivated by two main decision rules: (1) close down as few options as possible; and (2) only do things that increase the possibility of future overachievement.” Recruiters for investment banks and consulting firms understand this psychology, and they exploit it perfectly: the jobs are competitive and high status, but the process of applying and being accepted is regimented and predictable. The recruiters also make the argument to college seniors that if they join Goldman Sachs or McKinsey and Company or any similar firm, they’re not really choosing anything—they’re just going to spend a couple of years making money and, perhaps, recruiters suggest, doing some good in the world, and then at some point in the future they’ll make the real decision about what they want to do and who they want to be. “For people who don’t know how to get a job in the open economy,” Kwak wrote, “and who have ended each phase of their lives by taking the test to do the most prestigious thing possible in the next phase, all of this comes naturally.

While Iris mercilessly teased Christine until the poor girl looked ready to start flinging icicles, Alex and Andrew continued their merciless assault on Kevin. “You put the ‘k’ in otaku.” “When people look up otaku in the dictionary, they see your face.” “You’ve even got an otaku meme on Twitter.” “Shut up! I am not an otaku!” Kevin stood up and slammed his hands on the stone table. He glared at his friends. “I’m not! Just because I like anime that doesn’t mean I’m an otaku. And you two have no right to say anything!” He pointed an accusing finger at Alex and Andrew. “You watch and read just as much anime and manga as I do!” “You make a good point,” Alex admitted. “It doesn’t change the fact that you are, indeed, an otaku.” Andrew nodded at his brother’s words. “Only a true otaku would deny being otaku.” “No, they wouldn’t! Otaku are people who proudly proclaim their status even though they know others will look down on them for it. That’s half the reason they get such a bad rep in Japan, and even then, Japanese society has begun to accept otaku culture more readily in the last few years. I once read an article on Rocket News 24 that some people are beginning to think that being otaku isn’t something to be ashamed of.” “And how could you possibly know that unless you were an otaku?” Iris teased. Kevin grabbed his hair and threw his head back. “Arggghhh!” “Poor Kevin.” Lilian giggled. “Getting ganged up on by everyone.” “Ha…” Kevin sat down and pouted at his mate. “You’re not really helping me out, you know. You should be backing me up.” “I can only back you up when something isn’t true.” “Now you’re just being mean.” “I’m sorry,” Lilian said in mock contrite, her eyes glittering with mirth. “Would a hug make it better?” Kevin sniffled. “Maybe.” Lilian spread her arms wide. “Okay. Come here, Kevin.” “Lilian.” “Kevin!” “Lilian!” “Would you two knock it off already!” Christine snapped out of her state of perpetual humiliation long enough to shout at the hugging couple.

The erosion in American’s traditional family structure coupled with the decline of strong community relationships creates a modern culture that places an emphasis upon individuality. Contemporary American culture recognizes a person’s status by how well a person fits in as a member of a desired social group while also projecting a unique personality. Unlike our Asian counterparts who favor an interdependent, collective self that stresses a person’s role within the context of the group, Americans tend to favor an independent, individualistic self, development of a persona that stresses the uniqueness amongst members. The modern-day fixation with individuality is rapidly taking precedent over religion in establishing the ethical climate that regulates Americans’ social interactions. Instead of America’s democratic society becoming more homogeneous, a new form of narcissistic radicalism has taken hold of the American consciousness.

It also merits considering what was not mentioned in stories of awe from around the world. Money didn’t figure into awe, except in a couple of instances in which people had been cheated out of life savings. No one mentioned their laptop, Facebook, Apple Watch, or smartphone. Nor did anyone mention consumer purchases, like their new Nikes, Tesla, Gucci bag, or Montblanc pen. Awe occurs in a realm separate from the mundane world of materialism, money, acquisition, and status signaling—a realm beyond the profane that many call the sacred.

In 2011, when then prime minister Julia Gillard based her opposition to the legal recognition of gay marriage in Australia on her strident belief in the traditional definition of marriage, we could all be forgiven for not knowing exactly which tradition she meant. Was it the tradition of marriage as a contract made between parents to connect kinship groups and reinforce economic and political power? Was it the tradition of marriage as a means to extend family influence into different geographical territories? Was it marriage as a tool for class consolidation or mobility? Was it marriage as a vehicle for women to escape their status as the property of their fathers to become instead the proprty of their husbands? Or was she referring to the tradition of marriage as cemented relatively recently in Australian legalese, to define marriage by what it is not? That is, it is not something that happens bteween a brother and a sister (though it can happen between cousins, or uncle and niece), nor a decision arrived at by force (though what constitutes 'force' is not defined), and it is definitely not the result of a same-sex couple eloping to a more liberal state for a party and a bogus piece of paper. Nevertheless, w all know that every marriage is different, and none can wholly be summed up be a sntence-long definition.

Word of Mouth: the Power of True Believers As everyone knows, word of mouth is the most effective advertising of all. Or, when in my cups, I have been known to say that there’s no better business to run than a cult. Trader Joe’s became a cult of the overeducated and underpaid, partly because we deliberately tried to make it a cult once we got a handle on what we were actually doing, and partly because we kept the implicit promises with our clientele. I used to work every Thanksgiving Day in one of the stores. They only let me bag, because I had lost all my checker skills. One Thanksgiving, a woman came in and asked for bourbon. I told her that we had none, because we had not been able to make the right kind of deal (this was after the end of Fair Trade, when we were deep in the Mac the Knife mode). “That’s all right,” she exclaimed. “I know what you’re trying to do for us!” Note the us. There aren’t many cult retailers who successfully retain their cult status over a long period of time. A couple in California are In ’n Out Burger and Fry’s Electronics. But across America, in every town, there’s a particular donut shop, pizza parlor, bakery, greengrocer, bar, etc., that has a cult following of True Believers. The old Petrini’s of the 1950s and 1960s had that status when it came to meat. Brooks Bros had that status until the 1970s. S. S. Pierce in Boston was another. But all of them failed to keep the faith. Beware of ever betraying the True Believers! The fury of a woman scorned is nothing compared with that of a betrayed cultee.

OH, THE HAZARDS of being a teenage burglar/member of the Facebook Generation. There you are, in your victim’s house with a couple of her diamond rings worth hundreds of pounds in your pocket and a computer sitting temptingly on a nearby table. What to do? Scarper with just the expensive rings? Or take the computer as well? Or – just maybe – log on to the computer to update your Facebook status? Jonathan G Parker, of Fort Loudoun, Pennsylvania, chose a strange combination of options 1 and 3. According to the Berkeley County Sheriff’s Department, the homeowner got back to find a bedroom window broken, cabinets pulled open and two rings worth around £2,000 missing – but her computer was still there, it was still switched on and it was still open on Parker’s Facebook page. Better still, a friend of the victim recognised Parker and knew where he lived. He was arrested within hours.

I only told him a couple of hours ago. Did he change his Facebook status already?

While the single people described did feel less satisfied with their relationship status and lonelier than those who were coupled, their satisfaction with life, self-esteem, attractiveness, and extroversion were comparable to that of people in relationships.

Among more than 11,000 long-term couples, machine learning models found that the traits listed below, in a mate, were among the least predictive of happiness with that mate. Let’s call these traits the Irrelevant Eight, as partners appear about as likely to end up happy in their relationship when they pair off with people with any combo of these traits: Race/ethnicity Religious affiliation Height Occupation Physical attractiveness Previous marital status Sexual tastes Similarity to oneself What should we make of this list, the Irrelevant Eight? I was immediately struck by an overlap between the list of irrelevant traits and another data-driven list discussed in this chapter. Recall that I had previously discussed the qualities that make people most desirable as romantic partners, according to Big Data from online dating sites. It turns out that that list—the qualities that are most valued in the dating market, according to Big Data from online dating sites—almost perfectly overlaps with the list of traits in a partner that don’t correlate with long-term relationship happiness, according to the large dataset Joel and her coauthors analyzed. Consider, say, conventional attractiveness. Beauty, you will recall, is the single most valued trait in the dating market; Hitsch, Hortaçsu, and Ariely found in their study of tens of thousands of single people on an online dating site that who receives messages and who has their messages responded to can, to a large degree, be explained by how conventionally attractive they are. But Joel and her coauthors found, in their study of more than 11,000 long-term couples, that the conventional attractiveness of one’s partner does not predict romantic happiness. Similarly, tall men, men with sexy occupations, people of certain races, and people who remind others of themselves are valued tremendously in the dating market. (See: the evidence from earlier in this chapter.) But ask thousands of long-term couples and there is no evidence that people who succeeded in pairing off with mates with these desired traits are any happier in their relationship.

Here are some tips on finding a mentor: 1. Identify who could be a good mentor for you. Remember, you don’t need to aim too high; somebody simply a couple of years ahead of you on their journey might be enough. 2. Get their attention ‒ break through the noise. These people receive huge numbers of messages asking for help and advice, and offers to meet for lunch or coffee so that their brains can be picked. Naturally, they put most of these long emails (they’re often really long) straight in the junk folder to protect the most valuable thing for them ‒ their time. Bear that in mind. To break through the noise, you need to be straight to the point and you need to do Step 3… 3. Seek to add value. Just because potential mentors are successful or higher status, this doesn’t mean you can’t add value to them. Have faith that you have some way of helping them. Study what they’re doing. Are they involved in any philanthropy or social impact causes? How can you help? That’s a great way to get their attention. 4. Act normal. This applies wherever there’s an imbalance of status. For example, when you meet somebody that you’re interested in romantically, and you feel as if they’re probably ‘out of your league, you have to not let that make you behave strangely. If you are too deferential, too reverent, and basically tripping over yourself to do stuff for them because you perceive them to be on another level, then they are unlikely to feel attracted to you. And conversely, sometimes acting ‘not normal’ means you go the other way, and behave like a schoolboy pulling the pigtails of the girl he fancies, going too far in overcompensating. Again, that is not good. Be pleasant to be around. 5. Apply what your mentor advises you to do as quickly as possible, then immediately feedback to them on the outcome of the action. This feedback loop will generate and strengthen the mentor-mentee relationship in the fastest possible way, because entrepreneurial mentors love coachable people who take action. And they feel more and more responsibility when they’re the ones directing your action and you’re coming back to them to report what happened. It’s like an interesting and fun game for them, and they want to know that they’re helping you in a tangible way. Be coachable.

These diverse tactics for retaining mates succeed by exploiting the psychological adaptations of mates and rivals. The beneficial tactics, such as giving love and resources, work for a man because they fulfill the psychological desires that led the woman to choose him to begin with. For a woman, enhancing her physical appearance and providing sexual resources succeeds because they match men’s psychology of desire. Indeed, our study of married couples found that men intensify their mate retention efforts when they perceive their partner to be attractive, just as women ramp up their mate retention efforts with partners who are higher in status and income.70

She was lonely, that was the truth, really lonely. Her working hours were so long she’d given up on the idea of having a family—she couldn’t even hold down a relationship—and when she went on an expedition, she was set apart from her male colleagues by problems they didn’t have to think about. Not only periods, or where to pee safely, not even the endless jokes about her physical strength. But the sense she was never really going to get what she wanted. More than a few times a colleague had reached out a hand when she didn’t need help, and squeezed too hard. She’d been talked down and talked over. She’d missed a couple of promotions she should have got. And yet, deep down, she knew she couldn’t really blame anyone else. Out of some strange mad desire not to upset the status quo, she’d become complicit. She had laughed when she should have been angry, or said nothing when she should have said a lot. She’d belittled her own achievements, calling them small or unformed or even lucky when they were none of those things. And it wasn’t simply opportunities at work she’d lost out on: she had—and, again, this was her own choice—missed the weddings of her closest friends, just as she’d missed their children’s christenings. Only a month ago her oldest friend had written, inviting her to Scotland for her godson’s birthday, “But I guess it will be difficult for you to get away.” And it was true. Some nights Freya worked so late, she took her sleeping bag out of her locker and slept on the floor under her desk. She actually kept a toothbrush there and a set of spare clothes.

narrative. The beginning of the rule of law4 – it is often said, and is largely true – in Britain coincides with the signing by King John of the Magna Carta (the Big Charter)5 in 1215. This has two key chapters, which make clear that a person cannot be punished without due process, and that such a process cannot be bought, delayed or denied. These are critical principles in our judicial system today. As it happens, Magna Carta was in force for precisely two months (when Pope Innocent III annulled it on the grounds it had been obtained by compulsion, calling it ‘illegal, unjust, harmful to royal rights and shameful to the English people’), and did not directly lead to modern jury trials in any significant way. As an articulation of principles of justice, it owed much to existing texts, such as the coronation oaths of Anglo-Saxon kings and the law codes of Henry I. The Pope also called Magna Carta ‘void of all validity forever’. He was wrong. It has survived as both a romantic gesture and a useful precedent6 to cite as our courts became more professional and individual rights became more established. The more significant, but less heralded, legal development came a couple of centuries later with the articulation of the principle of habeas corpus. The full phrase is habeas corpus ad subjiciendum: ‘may you bring the body before the court’, which sounds pompous or funereal. What it means, though, is that everyone has a right to be tried in person before being imprisoned. If someone is held by the state without trial, a petition using this phrase should get them either freed or at least their status interrogated by a judge. Two Latin words contain the most effective measure against tyranny in existence. As time progressed in this country, then, we see

Once again, a single sentence would hold the key. I found it in The Economic Status of Black Women: An Exploratory Investigation, a 1990 staff report of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights: On average married black women contribute 40 percent to household income compared with only 29 percent for white women.° Simply put, all wives did not contribute to their households in the same way: Black women were likely to earn as much (or more) money as their husbands, while white women were likely to earn much less. This was certainly true in the case of my parents (whose income was more or less equal most years). But the joint tax return system, under which most married couples file their taxes together, offers the greatest benefits to households where one spouse contributes much less than the other to household income. That meant couples like my parents-my hardworking, home-owning, God-fearing parents, who wanted to earn a little bit more to enjoy their lives after raising two daughters-weren't getting those breaks. My parents' tax bill was so high because they were married to each other. Marriage-which many conservatives assure us is the road out of black poverty -is in fact making black couples poorer. And because the IRS does not publish statistics by race, we would never know. It's long been understood that blacks and whites live in separate and unequal worlds that shape whom we marry, where we buy a home, whom we have as neighbors, and how we build a future for our children. Race affects where we go to college and how we pay for it. Race influences where we work and how much we are paid. What my research showed was that all of this also determines how much we pay in taxes. Taxpayers bring their racial identities to their tax returns. As in so many parts of American life, being black is more likely to hurt and being white is more likely to help. The implications of this go far beyond the forms you file every April. In the long run, tax policy affects whether and how you'll be able to build wealth. If you're eligible for tax breaks, you either pay less in taxes throughout the year or receive a larger refund in the spring. If, like my parents, you're considered ineligible for a particular tax break, you never see that money. One missed tax break may not sound like much, but those dollars not given to Uncle Sam can be put into your bank account, invested in stocks or property, or used to build home equity through improvements or repairs every year. Think of that money as an annual pay raise – but if you do not get it, you cannot save it. Over time those dollars, or the lack of them, add up to increased or depleted wealth.

Once again, a single sentence would hold the key. I found it in The Economic Status of Black Women: An Exploratory Investigation, a 1990 staff report of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights: On average married black women contribute 40 percent to household income compared with only 29 percent for white women.° Simply put, all wives did not contribute to their households in the same way: Black women were likely to earn as much (or more) money as their husbands, while white women were likely to earn much less. This was certainly true in the case of my parents (whose income was more or less equal most years). But the joint tax return system, under which most married couples file their taxes together, offers the greatest benefits to households where one spouse contributes much less than the other to household income. That meant couples like my parents-my hardworking, home-owning, God-fearing parents, who wanted to earn a little bit more to enjoy their lives after raising two daughters-weren't getting those breaks. My parents' tax bill was so high because they were married to each other. Marriage-which many conservatives assure us is the road out of black poverty -is in fact making black couples poorer. And because the IRS does not publish statistics by race, we would never know. It's long been understood that blacks and whites live in separate and unequal worlds that shape whom we marry, where we buy a home, whom we have as neighbors, and how we build a future for our children. Race affects where we go to college and how we pay for it. Race influences where we work and how much we are paid. What my research showed was that all of this also determines how much we pay in taxes. Taxpayers bring their racial identities to their tax returns. As in so many parts of American life, being black is more likely to hurt and being white is more likely to help. The implications of this go far beyond the forms you file every April. In the long run, tax policy affects whether and how you'll be able to build wealth. If you're eligible for tax breaks, you either pay less in taxes throughout the year or receive a larger refund in the spring. If, like my parents, you're considered ineligible for a particular tax break, you never see that money. One missed tax break may not sound like much, but those dollars not given to Uncle Sam can be put into your bank account, invested in stocks or property, or used to build home equity through improvements or repairs every year. Think of that money as an annual pay raise – but if you do not get it, you cannot save it. Over time those dollars, or the lack of them, add up to increased or depleted wealth

In a study on the top ten regrets of the dying, relationship issues accounted for half of the major regrets. People said things like, “I should have said ‘I love you’ a lot more,” and “I worked too much and never made time for my family.” If we want to avoid regrets at the end of our lives, we must not wait until we’re close to death to prioritize relationships over work, status, and other things that don’t contribute as much to our ultimate happiness.

Perfume is to smells what eroticism is to sex: an aesthetic, cultural, emotional elaboration of the raw materials provided by nature. The ladies of the court, led by Marie-Antoinette, resorted to the only thing that could keep them one step ahead of the commoners, however wealthy they were: fashion. In fact, this is how fashion as we know it came into existence: the latest trend adopted by a happy few for a season before trickling down to the middle classes. Just a touch of the negligence etudiee that distinguishes chic Parisian women from their fiercely put-together New Yorker or Milanese counterparts. Perfume needs to be supported by image. You're not just doing it to smell good: you're perpetuating a ritual of erotic magic that's been scaring and enticing men in equal measure for millennia. Perfumes are our subconscious. They read us more revealingly than any other choice of adornment, perhaps because their very invisibility deludes us into thinking we can get away with the message they carry. These scents severed fragrance from its function as an extension of a female or male persona - the rugged guy, the innocent waif or the femme fatale - to turn it into a thing that was beautiful, interesting and evocative in and of itself. Perfume's advertising relies on the 3 aspiration S: stars, sex and seduction, with a side helping of dreams or exoticism. Descriptions, impressions, analogies, short stories, snippets or real-life testing, bits of history, parallels with music or literature. Connecting a scent with emotions, impressions, atmospheres, isn't that why we wear it? Isn't it all subjective? Just because you don't want it in your life doesn't make it bad. And it's not entirely impossible to consider perfumes beyond their "like/don't like" status. What intent does t set out to fulfill? How does it achieve its effects? How does it fit in with the history of the brand or its identity? How does it compare to the current season's offerings? Does it bring something new? The story told by the perfumer blends with the ones we tell ourselves about it; with our feelings, our moods, our references, our understanding of it. Once it is released from the bottle, it becomes a new entity. We make it ours: we are the performers of our perfume. Both lust and luxury are coupled in the same Latin word: luxuria is one of the 7 deadly sins. The age-old fear of female sexuality. The lure of beauty, set off by costly and deceitful adornments, could lead men to material and moral ruin but, more frighteningly, suck them into a vortex of erotic voracity. A man's desire waxes and wanes. But how can a woman, whose pleasure is never certain and whose receptive capacity is potentially infinite, ever be controlled?

Additionally, there seems to be some sort of connection between Grizel and Sandor (Sophie’s bodyguard). Neither goblin has been willing to update the Council—or their queen—on their relationship status. But all evidence suggests they’re currently a couple.

You may consider me sentimental or realistic since I perceive that the world's scientists of Intelligence Agencies can develop such as coronavirus, cancer, and other chemicals to harm humans, especially its political foes, whether those hold high status or low grade. In such fields, every option is possible. I suffered from two incidents in my life by the International Intelligence Agencies, first in 1980 and second in 2016, first causing esophagus damage and stomach hernia, and second metastatic prostate cancer. I tried for years and years to investigate the first incident, but Dutch police refused even to write a report about that. Such refusal created doubts in my mind that Dutch Secret Agencies played an evil role in damaging and destroying my life since why the authorities had been ignoring and refusing. Before diagnosing metastatic prostate cancer, when urologists were not paying attention, I went to a Brazilian Homeopath, Miriam Sommer, in The Hague; after a month's discussion, she told me that she was sure that I was poisoned in 1980, not to kill, but severe physical damage and it happened. She put a couple of tablets under my tongue to suck, and I did that. However, later I became suspicious of why she did do that. Dutch urologists, one year from the start of 2016 to 2017, refused to check what I requested per International Medical Guidelines, they overlooked it, and consequently, in February 2017, they diagnosed as last stage prostate cancer, which was not curable. The Dutch medical system is very awkward; it does not meet International Medical Guidelines; they let the patients suffering from the disease and treat them in a gravely poor way, paying no proper care and attention. In this regard, I am unaware of others' experiences. I want that both incidents, which caused me unexplained damage and the destruction of my career and life, the Dutch authorities should investigate on a high-level scale as guidelines before criminals disappear, can lead to a positive result; otherwise, I am right to realize that Institutions of the Dutch government had victimized me, violating International Law and human rights.

Reconciliation is not a magic word that we can trot out whenever we need healing or inspiration. Deep down, I think we know this is true, because our efforts to partake of an easy reconciliation have proved fruitless in the world. Too often, our discussions of race are emotional but not strategic, our outreach work remains paternalistic, and our ethnic celebrations fetishize people of color. Many champions of racial justice in the Church has stopped using the term altogether, because it has been so watered down from its original potency. In their book Radical Reconciliation, Curtiss DeYoung and Allan Boesak unpack why this happens. They write, "reconciliation is revolutionary, that is, oriented to structural change." Which means, reconciliation can never be apolitical. Reconciliation chooses sides, and the side is always justice. This is why white American churches remain so far from experiencing anything resembling reconciliation. The white Church considers power its birthright rather than its curse. And so, rather than seeking reconciliation, they stage moments of racial harmony that don't challenge the status quo. They organize worship services where the choir of two racially different churches sing together, where a pastor of a different race preaches a couple times a year, where they celebrate MLK but don't acknowledge current racial injustices. Acts like these can create beautiful moments of harmony and goodwill, but since they don't change the underlying power structure of the organization, it would be misleading to call them acts of reconciliation. Even worse, when they're not paired with greater change, diversity efforts can have the opposite of their intended effect. They keep the church feeling good, innocent, maybe even progressive, allt he while preserving the roots of injustice.

Diana Adams is more interested in seeing increased social protections for alternative families. While same-sex marriage was an important victory for gay rights and opened up a cultural conversation about the definition of marriage and love, she says, we shouldn't forget that the movement was also "a queer critique of the nuclear family and traditional monogamous sexuality." The same is true of monogamy's insurgents. Rather than "cram people into the institution of marriage," she says, "we ultimately want to get the government out of the business of deciding whether you get tax benefits, health insurance, and immigration status based on whom you're having sex with." Her thoughts remind me of the late psychologist and gay activist Michael Shernoff, who reflected critically on the shift "from gay men radically transforming American society" to gay men "assimilating into it in conservative and hetero-normative ways." He lauded consensual nonmonogamy as a "vibrant, normative, healthy part" of the gay community, and expressed concern that the advent of gay marriage might consign this "venerable, multigenerational tradition" to the category of adultery. "Couples who succesfully negotiate sexual nonexclusivity," he wrote, "are, whether or not they are conscious of it, being genuinely subversive, in one of the most constructive ways possible...by challenging the patriarchial notion that there is only one "proper" and "legitimate" (hetero-normative) way that loving relationships should and need to be conducted" Monogamy was once a subject that was never even discussed in the therapist's office, but today as a matter of course I ask every couple, What is your monogamy agreement? Marriage without virginity was once inconceivable. So, too, sex without marriage.

Throughout the sixteenth century the wedding ceremony changed in detail.17 In the Reformed Church the marriage was performed inside the church, whatever the social degree of the couple. During the early Tudor era most marriages took place at the church door. Only high status weddings were held inside. Whilst a knight married within the door, an earl’s child might marry at the choir door. The dowry was announced in public at the church door and the couple were asked if they were willing to be married. Later, the groom laid the ring with an offering of money on a book or in a dish. The priest blessed it, sprinkled it with holy water and placed it on the bride’s finger. Gifts were given to wedding guests. They often were gloves and ribbons. Wedding presents such as plate or jewellery were

Throughout the sixteenth century the wedding ceremony changed in detail.17 In the Reformed Church the marriage was performed inside the church, whatever the social degree of the couple. During the early Tudor era most marriages took place at the church door. Only high status weddings were held inside. Whilst a knight married within the door, an earl’s child might marry at the choir door. The dowry was announced in public at the church door and the couple were asked if they were willing to be married. Later, the groom laid the ring with an offering of money on a book or in a dish. The priest blessed it, sprinkled it with holy water and placed it on the bride’s finger. Gifts were given to wedding guests. They often were gloves and ribbons. Wedding presents such as plate or jewellery were presented to the couple, usually cast into a basin on a table within the church.18 For poorer weddings bride ales (festivals) became commonplace. These were held prior to the wedding to raise money for the cost of the wedding through the sale of food and drink. A wedding had to be consummated for the marriage to be legal and this was the reason for a ceremonial bedding ceremony after the wedding feast. For ordinary people the event could become extremely boisterous. The wedding party played games as the couple were put to bed. Brides-men traditionally would pull off the bride’s garters and

When reframed in this way, critics often accuse couples intent on pursuing ART of being selfish for expending so much time, energy, and resources to have a biological connection to their child when they could pursue adoption in-stead. But beyond the practical barrier of adoption not being accessible to all prospective parents in all contexts given variables of age, sexual orientation, marital status, and the pool of available children, what is missing in this anti-ART/pro-adoption position is an explanation for why the criticism of narcissism or selfishness is directed primarily at couples who use ART, not also at those intent on bearing children the old-fashioned way through intercourse. Why must those who cannot reproduce "naturally" be put in the position of having to justify their desire to have "their own" child — why isn't every prospective parent pressed to give an account?

Defeat, exile, and restoration had altered ancient Israel's religion, but the Second Temple's obliteration, coupled with Jews' declining status in the Roman Empire, would force a far greater reconstruction. Lacking a single agreed-upon holy place, modern Christians, however empathetic, may have difficulty imagining the magnitude of the liturgical renovations that the Temple's loss demanded, though Orthodox Byzantines watching Hagia Sophia—their monumental cathedral—reconfigured as a mosque certainly could. Muslims contemplating a hypothetical demolition of Mecca's Masjid al-Haram (Sacred Mosque) and the consequent disruption of the hajj (pilgrimage) may be able to entertain a more visceral understanding of what the Second Temple's loss portended for Judaism.

Prescriptive hierarchy describes the practice of explicitly naming a particular relationship as primary as prescribes all future relationships subordinate to it. In this context, the primary status usually means that each member of a couple has the right to put certain restrictions or limits on how strong, deep, intense, or committed their partner's other relationships can become.

After BlackRock created its Sustainability Accounting Standards Board, the firm quietly secured its status as the main financial administrator of the economic stimulus package during the COVID-19 pandemic, effectively playing the role of the government—and probably made a pretty penny for doing it. In January 2020, pharmaceutical giant AstraZeneca announced to much fanfare at (of course) the World Economic Forum in Davos a new investment commitment of $1 billion over ten years into environmental sustainability initiatives to fight climate change. Just a couple of months later, it received a $1.2 billion grant—not a loan, but a grant—from US taxpayers to subsidize its development of for-profit vaccines.

The thing about marriage a lot of people don’t understand is that you don’t get everything. Some people get passion, others get security. Some get companionship. Children. Money. Wisdom. Status. Then there is trust and fidelity. They’re the two you hear most about. In general, couples will cite trust or fidelity as their nonnegotiable. In a lot of cases, a partner will offer one in exchange for the other. But Gabe and I have always agreed on our nonnegotiable. Loyalty. Gabe has certainly made me work for that one.

To lovers out there …. Love is just feelings. You can feel anything for anyone regardless of how they look and who they are. It doesn’t care about your intelligence or IQ. That is why everyone qualifies to love and to be loved. Your standards has nothing to do with love. That is why most of your relationships don’t work. You want to use your position, beauty, money, power, life status, education, qualification to measure love. If you continue thinking and living like that. You will find partners, but you will never find love. You are busy fighting your feelings because the people you love don’t have your standards.

There are people who want the status quo, and that’s what they’re advocating for. And even though I’ve taken a step back over the last couple years from being provocative online, I ended up getting in a shouting match with an editor because he was trying to defend his all-white anthology, and I’m like, ‘That’s all right. Own it. You wanted the status quo, you read only within your little comfort zone, you aren’t trying to find new voices, you want the voices that you’ve grown up with and that fit your little taste, and you don’t want to do the work of finding new voices. That’s fine, just own it.’ So yeah, you have editors who just want to fight for the status quo.

And I’m thinking of marrying a couple friends of mine, see.” I had to pause for a moment there. “Plural friends?” “Yeah, good business match it would be.We’ve been close since we were kids. “Perhaps my Nuryeven isn’t as good as I thought. When you say marry, you mean joining your households together and producing hiers, yes?” It wasn’t that the concept was alien to me, it’s just that I hadn’t expected such an arrangement to be commonplace in Nuryevet. Well, no, I’ll be honest, iots that I hadn’t spent even a blink of time thinking about their practices, and if you’d asked me at that time I probably would have told you that all Nuryevens lumber along like they're made of stone. Not a drop of hot blood in their bodies and no interest whatsoever in romance, and that they acquired children by filing paperwork in quintuplicate and being assigned one by an advocate. My new friend Ilias said, “Iy that’s right, though I don't think that Anya and Micket will care to manage it themselves. Heirs are cheap though. You can scrape together half a dozen of them right off the street. So longs you've got flxible standards” I shook my head, “Is this a common thing in these parts?” “Ey? Oh, iy, common enough. I’ve seen marriages with more partners than that.” He pulled his chair to face me fully. “The Oomack only ever have two partner marriages, did you know that? And it's not about business. They don't even seem to care about their assets at all!” “Well, no, the Oomack marry for love and sex.” “Is that right? That seems messy. Lots of feelings involved if you combine sex and business.” Ilias had certain opinions, shall we say which may have not been representative of the general Nuryeven philosophy. Marriage here is a great amalgamation of every kind legal partnership. They get married when they are going into business together. They get married when they want to own property jointly. They get married when they're in love. Some of these arrangements do involve a physical element or the biological production of heirs, as they do elsewhere. Some, as Ilia mentioned before, simply involve formally adopting half a dozen heirs off the street. Some are a mere legal formality. Like many things in Nuryevet , you can do as you please so long as you’ve got your paperwork in order. I didn’t quite understand all this at the time. It took me a while to glean the intricacies of it, or rather, the lack of intricacies. At the time, I only asked Ilia if he had a separate lover. “Not right now. I hire a private contractor for that.” “A prostitute you mean??” “No, a contractor. Prostitutes are, well you’re foreign, you wouldn't know. We don't have those here. Prostitutes just stand on the street and don't have a license or pay taxes, right? They juits have sex with whoever in an ally.” “Oh… some of them, in some places. In other places.” I waved vaguely, “ higher status.” “Meaning what?” “Meaning they’re more expensive. Meaning they do other things besides the act. In some places they're priests and priestesses. In some places they're popular society figures with property and businesses, patrons of the arts and so forth.” “Here you hire one of them like you’d hire a doctor or a tailor or someone to build a house for you, and you wouldn’t graba just anybody off the street for that would you. They show you their l;icence and you sign a contract together and so on. It's a good system.” “What about those who don't have a licence?” “Arrested! Just like a doctor practicing without a license would be.

The white Church considers power its birthright rather than its curse. And so, rather than seeking reconciliation, they stage moments of racial harmony that don’t challenge the status quo. They organize worship services where the choirs of two racially different churches sing together, where a pastor of a different race preaches a couple times a year, where they celebrate MLK but don’t acknowledge current racial injustices. Acts like these can create beautiful moments of harmony and goodwill, but since they don’t change the underlying power structure at the organization, it would be misleading to call them acts of reconciliation. Even worse, when they’re not paired with greater change, diversity efforts can have the opposite of their intended effect. They keep the church feeling good, innocent, maybe even progressive, all the while preserving the roots of injustice.

In the Adaptive Markets framework, complexity means we don't have a good narrative for the system. The solution is obvious: we need to get smarter. Complexity can sometimes be reduced by developing a deeper understanding of the underlying structure of the system. For example, now that we understand the potential for liquidity spirals in statarb portfolios, thanks to August 2007, we can better prepare for them. But the Adaptive Markets framework points to a second problem with complexity, which is the potential divisiveness of special knowledge and the potential for conflict. If the financial system becomes so complex that only a small number of elites truly understand its function and proper maintenance, this knowledge divides the population into those who know and those who don't. Of course, this situation arises with any piece of unique information - I know how to make scallion pancakes in a particular way so they're crispy on the outside but soft and chewy on the inside, and you probably don't. But that piece of knowledge is hardly worth keeping a secret, and the fact that you don't have that knowledge isn't going to get you too upset. But suppose I know how to cure diabetes and you don't. Or I know how to prevent cancer by avoiding certain common foods and you don't. Or I know how to price mortgage-backed securities and credit default swaps and you don't. In these cases, the knowledge I possess confers a certain power and status to me. Complexity creates the need for better narratives and those who have those narratives will become the high priests of complex systems, the gatekeepers of critical, life-altering knowledge. And the difficulty in joining the priesthood - earning an MD/Ph.D. in molecular biology and having twenty year of work experience at biotech and pharmaceutical companies, in the case of curing diabetes - coupled with the societal values of the special knowledge will determine the divisiveness of this elitism.

Narcissistic Superstars’ abilities, coupled with their tremendous hunger, may bring them success, but never satisfaction. They build empires, lead nations, create great works of art, and amass huge sums of money for one purpose only: to prove how great they are. Superstars may boast incessantly about what they have and what they’ve done, but once they have it or have done it, whatever it is loses value in their eyes. They always need more. Whether it’s money, honors, status symbols, or sexual conquests, Superstars always want something. They get what they want too. Every one of them has a trophy collection. Adding to it is the sole purpose of Narcissists’ existence; there is no higher goal. The most dangerous place you can be is between a Narcissistic Superstar and the next

In this case, the clicks of users, coupled with the commercial processes that allow paid advertising to be prioritized in search results, mean that representations of women are ranked on a search engine page in ways that underscore women’s historical and contemporary lack of status in society—a direct mapping of old media traditions into new media architecture.

All this isn’t to say that being alone is without problems. There are of course drawbacks to both states, being single and being in a couple: loneliness in the one; suffocation, anger and frustration in the other. The truth is, we’re simply not terribly good at being happy whatever state we are in. We will probably be a bit miserable rather often whatever our relationship status – which is ultimately an argument for neither rushing too fast into a couple, nor rushing too fast out of one.

In the abolitionist journal Voice of the Fugitive, Shadd Cary neatly summed up the Canadian contradiction, calling the white Canadian an “anti-slavery Negro hater” (November 4, 1852 in Silverman 1985: 158). Indeed, freedom runners often experienced the same anti-Black racism north of the border that they had sought to flee in the U.S. For example, in 1891, in Chatham, a town where many of the freedom runners had settled, a band of armed whites tried to force an elderly Black couple from their land (though they were fought off by gunfire) (Winks 1997: 327). Black lives, whether recent Black Americans or Canadian-born, while nominally free, were relegated to a separate and unequal status in all realms of society.

You may consider me as a sentimental one or a realistic one since I perceive that the world's scientists of Intelligence Agencies have the capability, to develop such as coronavirus, cancer, and other chemicals to harm humans, especially its political foes, whether those hold high status or low grade. In such fields, every option is possible. I suffered from two incidents in my life by the International Intelligence Agencies, first in 1980 and second 2016, first caused esophagus damage and stomach hernia and second metastatic prostate cancer. I tried years and years to investigate the first incident, but Dutch police refused even to write the report about that. Such refusal created in my mind doubts that Dutch Secret Agencies played an evil role to damage and destroy my life since why the authorities had been ignoring and refusing. Before diagnosing metastatic prostate cancer, when urologists were not paying attention, I went to a Brazilian Homeopath Miriam Sommer in The Hague, after a month discussing she told me that she was sure that I was poisoned in 1980, not to kill, but severe physical damage, and it happened. She put a couple of tablets under my tongue, to suck, I did that; however, later I became suspicious, why she did that? - Dutch urologists, one year from the start of 2016 to 2017, refused to check up that I requested per International Medical Guidelines, they overlooked, and consequently, February 2017, they diagnose as last stage prostate cancer, which was not curable. The Dutch medical system is very awkward; it does not meet the International Medical Guidelines, they let the patient suffering from the disease and treat it with a gravely cheap way, paying no proper care and attention. I am unaware of others' experiences in this regard. I want that both incidents, which caused me unexplained damage, and destruction of career and life, the Dutch authorities should investigate on a high-level scale as my guidelines before criminals disappear that can lead to a positive result. Otherwise, I will be right to realize that Institutions of the Dutch government had victimized me, violating International Law and human rights. - Ehsan Sehgal

Here’s a culture war strategy conservative Christians should get behind: have more children and disciple them like crazy. Strongly consider having more children than you think you can handle. You don’t have to be a fertility maximalist to recognize that children are always lauded as a blessing in the Bible… [I]n the not-too-distant future, the only couples replacing themselves in America will be religious couples. Although there are many good reasons to have a baby, at the end of the day, as Jonathan Last maintains, “there’s only one good reason to go through the trouble a second time: Because you believe, in some sense, that God wants you to.” The basic reason countries stop having children is because they’ve come to see offspring as a liability rather than a source of hope. As Christians, we know better. Do you want to rebel against the status quo? Do you want people to ask you for a reason for the hope that is in you (1 Peter 3:15)? Tote your brood of children through Target. There is almost nothing more counter-cultural than having more children. And once we have those children, there is almost nothing more important than catechizing them in the faith, developing their moral framework, and preparing them to be deeply compassionate lovers of God and lovers of people and relentlessly biblical lovers of truth... I understand that many couples will be unable to have all the children they want to have. We have to allow for God to work in mysterious ways that we would not have planned. And yet, in so far as we are able, let us welcome new life... Presidents and Supreme Court justices will come and go. A child’s soul will last forever. The future belongs to the fecund. It’s time for happy warriors who seek to “renew the city” and “win the culture war” by investing in their local church, focusing on the family, and bringing the kingdom to bear on the world, one baby at a time.

It was at about this time, on the eve of their annual sailing to London for the social and sporting season there, that Cornelia and her husband, the couple formerly known as Mr. and Mrs. Bradley Martin, sprouted a hyphen in their surname, somewhat like a supernumerary nipple, and, in parallel fashion to the orthographic coupling of the Waldorf and the Astoria hotels, began to call themselves the Bradley-Martins. In a similar status uptick they followed the virtually hallowed practice of their class by acquiring for their daughter an impecunious but titled mate, the twenty-five-year-old fourth Earl of Craven. A secure room in the basement of the Bradley

In families in which parents are overbearing, rigid, and strict, children grow up with fear and anxiety. The threat of guilt, punishment, the withdrawal of love and approval, and, in some cases, abandonment, force children to suppress their own needs to try things out and to make their own mistakes. Instead, they are left with constant doubts about themselves, insecurities, and unwillingness to trust their own feelings. They feel they have no choice and as we have shown, for many, they incorporate the standards and values of their parents and become little parental copies. They follow the prescribed behavior suppressing their individuality and their own creative potentials. After all, criticism is the enemy of creativity. It is a long, hard road away from such repressive and repetitive behavior. The problem is that many of us obtain more gains out of main- taining the status quo than out of changing. We know, we feel, we want to change. We don’t like the way things are, but the prospect of upsetting the stable and the familiar is too frightening. We ob- tain “secondary gains” to our pain and we cannot risk giving them up. I am reminded of a conference I attended on hypnosis. An el- derly couple was presented. The woman walked with a walker and her husband of many years held her arm as she walked. There was nothing physically wrong with her legs or her body to explain her in- ability to walk. The teacher, an experienced expert in psychiatry and hypnosis, attempted to hypnotize her. She entered a trance state and he offered his suggestions that she would be able to walk. But to no avail. When she emerged from the trance, she still could not, would not, walk. The explanation was that there were too many gains to be had by having her husband cater to her, take care of her, do her bidding. Many people use infirmities to perpetuate relationships even at the expense of freedom and autonomy. Satisfactions are derived by being limited and crippled physically or psychologically. This is often one of the greatest deterrents to progress in psychotherapy. It is unconscious, but more gratification is derived by perpetuating this state of affairs than by giving them up. Beatrice, for all of her unhappiness, was fearful of relinquishing her place in the family. She felt needed, and she felt threatened by the thought of achieving anything 30 The Self-Sabotage Cycle that would have contributed to a greater sense of independence and self. The risks were too great, the loss of the known and familiar was too frightening. Residing in all of us is a child who wants to experiment with the new and the different, a child who has a healthy curiosity about the world around him, who wants to learn and to create. In all of us are needs for security, certainty, and stability. Ideally, there develops a balance between the two types of needs. The base of security is present and serves as a foundation which allows the exploration of new ideas and new learning and experimenting. But all too often, the security and dependency needs outweigh the freedom to explore and we stifle, even snuff out, the creative urges, the fantasy, the child in us. We seek the sources that fill our dependency and security needs at the expense of the curious, imaginative child. There are those who take too many risks, who take too many chances and lose, to the detriment of all concerned. But there are others who are risk-averse and do little with their talents and abilities for fear of having to change their view of themselves as being the child, the dependent one, the protected one. Autonomy, independence, success are scary because they mean we can no longer justify our needs to be protected. Success to these people does not breed success. Suc- cess breeds more work, more dependence, more reason to give up the rationales for moving on, away from, and exploring the new and the different.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that in 1975, 31 percent of college teachers were female; by 2009, the number had grown to 49.2 percent.7 There are more women teaching in college than ever, and it is quite possible that their presence, coupled with our discovery of the postmodern narrative, has had a feminizing effect on the collective unconscious of faculty thought. Strong winds of compassion blow across campus quads. Women are more empathetic than men, more giving, simply more bothered by anyone’s underdog status. Many of the female adjuncts I have spoken to seem blessed and cursed by feelings of maternity toward the students. Women think about their actions, and the consequences of their actions, in a deeper way than do men.

On television and on the front pages of the major newspapers, Trump clearly seemed to be losing the election. Each new woman who came forward with charges of misbehavior became a focal point of coverage, coupled with Trump’s furious reaction, his ever darkening speeches, and the accompanying suggestion that they were dog whistles aimed at racists and anti-Semites. “Trump’s remarks,” one Washington Post story explained, summing up the media’s outlook, “were laced with the kind of global conspiracies and invective common in the writings of the alternative-right, white-nationalist activists who see him as their champion. Some critics also heard echoes of historical anti-Semitic slurs in Trump’s allegations that Clinton ‘meets in secret with international banks to plot the destruction of U.S. sovereignty’ and that media and financial elites were part of a soulless cabal.” This outlook, which Clinton’s campaign shared, gave little consideration to the possibility that voters might be angry at large banks, international organizations, and media and financial elites for reasons other than their basest prejudices. This was the axis on which Bannon’s nationalist politics hinged: the belief that, as Marine Le Pen put it, “the dividing line is [no longer] between left and right but globalists and patriots.” Even as he lashed out at his accusers and threatened to jail Clinton, Trump’s late-campaign speeches put his own stamp on this idea. As he told one rally: “There is no global anthem, no global currency, no certificate of global citizenship. From now on, it’s going to be ‘America first.’” Anyone steeped in Guénon’s Traditionalism would recognize the terrifying specter Trump conjured of marauding immigrants, Muslim terrorists, and the collapse of national sovereignty and identity as the descent of a Dark Age—the Kali Yuga. For the millions who were not familiar with it, Trump’s apocalyptic speeches came across as a particularly forceful expression of his conviction that he understood their deep dissatisfaction with the political status quo and could bring about a rapid renewal. Whether it was a result of Trump’s apocalyptic turn, disgust at the Clintons, or simply accuser fatigue—it was likely a combination of all three—the pattern of slippage in the wake of negative news was less pronounced in Trump’s internal surveys in mid-October. Overall, he still trailed. But the data were noisy. In some states (Indiana, New Hampshire, Arizona) his support eroded, but in others (Florida, Ohio, Michigan) it actually improved. When Trump held his own at the third and final debate on October 19, the numbers inched up further. The movement was clear enough that Nate Silver and other statistical mavens began to take note of it. “Is the Presidential Race Tightening?” he asked in the title of an October 26 article. Citing Trump’s rising favorability numbers among Republicans and red-state trend lines, he cautiously concluded that probably it was. By November 1, he had no doubt. “Yes, Donald Trump Has a Path to Victory” read the headline for his column that day, in which he

Despite the availability of testing, at least half of the population at risk for Huntington’s disease still has children without making use of the new technologies. Even some of the people who have prenatal testing for Huntington’s still have a profound reluctance to learn their own status. Couples who try preimplantation genetic diagnosis may even conceive a child and choose not to find out if the parent at risk has the mutation. Deciding

While Diana looked to her husband for a lead and guidance, the way the press and public reacted to the royal couple merely served to drive a wedge between them. As in Wales, the crowds complained when Prince Charles went over to their side of the street during a walkabout. Press coverage focused on the Princess; Charles was confined to a walk-on role. It was the same later that year when they visited Canada for three weeks. As a former member of his Household explained: “He never expected this kind of reaction. After all, he was the Prince of Wales. When he got out of the car people would groan. It hurt his pride and inevitably he became jealous. In the end it was rather like working for two pop stars. It was all very sad and is one reason why now they do everything separately.” In public Charles accepted the revised status quo with good grace; in private he blamed Diana. Naturally she pointed out that she never sought this adulation, quite the opposite, and was frankly horrified by media attention. Indeed, for a woman suffering from an illness directly related to self-image, her smiling face on the front cover of every newspaper and magazine did little to help.

DURING THE RIDE back up to Telluride, among tablelands and cañons and red-rock debris, past the stone farmhouses and fruit orchards and Mormon spreads of the McElmo, below ruins haunted by an ancient people whose name no one knew, circular towers and cliffside towns abandoned centuries ago for reasons no one would speak of, Reef was able finally to think it through. If Webb had always been the Kieselguhr Kid, well, shouldn’t somebody ought to carry on the family business—you might say, become the Kid? It might’ve been the lack of sleep, the sheer relief of getting clear of Jeshimon, but Reef began to feel some new presence inside him, growing, inflating—gravid with what it seemed he must become, he found excuses to leave the trail now and then and set off a stick or two from the case of dynamite he had stolen from the stone powder-house at some mine. Each explosion was like the text of another sermon, preached in the voice of the thunder by some faceless but unrelenting desert prophesier who was coming more and more to ride herd on his thoughts. Now and then he creaked around in the saddle, as if seeking agreement or clarification from Webb’s blank eyes or the rictus of what would soon be a skull’s mouth. “Just getting cranked up,” he told Webb. “Expressing myself.” Back in Jeshimon he had thought that he could not bear this, but with each explosion, each night in his bedroll with the damaged and redolent corpse carefully unroped and laid on the ground beside him, he found it was easier, something he looked forward to all the alkaline day, more talk than he’d ever had with Webb alive, whistled over by the ghosts of Aztlán, entering a passage of austerity and discipline, as if undergoing down here in the world Webb’s change of status wherever he was now. . . . He had brought with him a dime novel, one of the Chums of Chance series, The Chums of Chance at the Ends of the Earth, and for a while each night he sat in the firelight and read to himself but soon found he was reading out loud to his father’s corpse, like a bedtime story, something to ease Webb’s passage into the dreamland of his death. Reef had had the book for years. He’d come across it, already dog-eared, scribbled in, torn and stained from a number of sources, including blood, while languishing in the county lockup at Socorro, New Mexico, on a charge of running a game of chance without a license. The cover showed an athletic young man (it seemed to be the fearless Lindsay Noseworth) hanging off a ballast line of an ascending airship of futuristic design, trading shots with a bestially rendered gang of Eskimos below. Reef began to read, and soon, whatever “soon” meant, became aware that he was reading in the dark, lights-out having occurred sometime, near as he could tell, between the North Cape and Franz Josef Land. As soon as he noticed the absence of light, of course, he could no longer see to read and, reluctantly, having marked his place, turned in for the night without considering any of this too odd. For the next couple of days he enjoyed a sort of dual existence, both in Socorro and at the Pole. Cellmates came and went, the Sheriff looked in from time to time, perplexed.

This great focus on relationships, and the appearance of coupling or marrying for status, can cause the public to perceive them to be promiscuous. Many of them are, indeed, but it is not their usual style. What they normally want is a lifelong companion, a true partner they can integrate themselves completely with, forever and ever. The sad reality is that this is a rare gem to find, so many of them scamper from one bed to another, hoping to find The One.

Doesn’t the idea of, like, completely wiping out the culture of your own people worry you? I mean, so much of what we’ve got here is such complete shit—” She stopped. Brill’s eyes were sparkling—with anger, not amusement. “You really think so? Go live in a one-room hut for a couple of years, bearing illiterate brats half of whom will die before they’re five! Without a fancy toilet, or even a thunder-mug to piss in each morning. Go do that, where the only entertainment is once a week going to the temple where some fat stupid priest invokes the blessings of Sky Father and his court on your heads and prays that the harvest doesn’t fail again like it did five years ago, when two of your children starved to death in front of your eyes. Then tell me that your culture’s shit!” Miriam tried to interrupt: “Hey, what about—” Brill steamed right on. “Shut up. Even the children of the well-off—like me—grow up living four to a room and wearing hand-me-downs. We are married off to whoever our parents think will pay best bride-price. Because we’re members of the outer families we don’t die of childbed fever—not since the Clan so graciously gave us penicillin tablets and morphine for the pain—but we get to bear child after child because it’s our duty to the Clan! Are you insane, my lady? Or merely blind? And it’s better for us in the families than for ordinary women, better by far. Did you notice that within the Clan you had rights? Or that outside the Clan, in the ordinary aristocracy, you didn’t? We have at least one ability that is as important, more important, than what’s between our legs: another source of status. But those ordinary peasants you feel such guilt for don’t have any such thing. There’s a better life awaiting me as a humble illegal immigrant in this world than there is as a lady-in-waiting to nobility in my own.