Daniels Famous Quotes

Consciousness is our gateway to experience: It enables us to recognize Van Gogh’s starry skies, be enraptured by Beethoven’s Fifth, and stand in awe of a snowcapped mountain. Yet consciousness is subjective, personal, and famously difficult to examine.

..we all do it. We talk about people we don't like until they become famous. Then we love 'em.

This harkens back to Freud’s famous question, “What does woman want?” As Epstein answers, “She wants a partner who cares what she wants.

A bright man of conviction and action is a beacon to his country, but a flash light to the scurrying of inaction, ego, and insecurity of lesser men.

The psychologist Daniel Gilbert has a famous saying about this: “Human beings are works in progress that mistakenly think they are finished.

That’s what happens in our hearts. The holes do not disappear, but scar tissue grows and becomes part of who we are. The same takes place in nature. As the famous Spanish architect Antoni Gaudi observed, 'There are no straight lines or sharp corners in nature.' The most stable structures in nature— like trees or spiderwebs— have angular and curved lines. As our hearts grow larger, and we learn that scar tissue is not so ugly after all, we accommodate what we had thought would be unendurable. And we realize that the wisdom we have gained would not have been possible without the losses we have known, even those that seemed impossible to bear.

It is true that the original of this story is put into new words, and the style of the famous lady we here speak of is a little altered; particularly she is made to tell her own tale in modester words that she told it at first, the copy which came first to hand having been written in language more like one still in Newgate than one grown penitent and humble, as she afterwards pretends to be.

He told me it was men of desperate fortunes on one hand, or of aspiring, superior fortunes on the other, who went abroad upon adventures, to rise by enterprise, and make themselves famous in undertakings of a nature out of the common road;

I may be a famous writer but when white people clinch to their wallet and stare at me with scorn I need to ask my skin why.

We know next to nothing with any certainty about Pythagoras, except that he was not really called Pythagoras. The name by which he is known to us was probably a nickname bestowed by his followers. According to one source, it meant ‘He who spoke truth like an oracle’. Rather than entrust his mathematical and philosophical ideas to paper, Pythagoras is said to have expounded them before large crowds. The world’s most famous mathematician was also its first rhetorician.

Perhaps the twentieth-century Senator is not called upon to risk his entire future on one basic issue in the manner of Edmund Ross or Thomas Hart Benton. Perhaps our modern acts of political courage do not arouse the public in the manner that crushed the career of Sam Houston and John Quincy Adams. Still, when we realize that a newspaper that chooses to denounce a Senator today can reach many thousand times as many voters as could be reached by all of Daniel Webster’s famous and articulate detractors put together, these stories of twentieth-century political courage have a drama, an excitement—and an inspiration—all their own.

Nobody ever became a famous philosopher by being a champion of ecumenical hybridism.

The most important development in the field since Meehl’s original work is Robyn Dawes’s famous article “The Robust Beauty of Improper Linear Models in Decision Making.

But the main problem was that we failed to allow for what Donald Rumsfeld famously called the “unknown unknowns

President Truman famously asked for a “one-armed economist” who would take a clear stand; he was sick and tired of economists who kept saying, “On the other hand …

The practice of making claims that appear to be scientific, but do not actually follow the scientific method of testability and falsification of hypotheses, is usually called pseudoscience.

Al-Qaeda is on our side in Syria,” Jake Sullivan, foreign policy advisor to US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, famously wrote to his boss via email on February 12, 2012. The US public was unaware of this.

He stood before the famous Rembrandt self portrait. The sad, proud old man stared eternally out of his canvas, out of the entire knowledge of his own genius and of the inadequacy of genius before human reality.

There is a general generous tendency to credit innovators with more prior comprehension than they actually deserve, and this helps perpetuate the myth of the Godlike powers of our famous geniuses, and by extension, to all of us.

He told me it was for men of desperate fortunes on one hand, or of aspiring, superior fortune on the other, who when abroad upon adventures, to rise by enterprize, and make themselves famous in undertakings of a nature out of the common road; that these things were all either too far above me, or to far below me; that mine was the middle state, or what might be called the upper station of low life, which he had found by long experience was the best state in the world, the most suited to human happiness, not exposed to the miseries of hardships, the labour and sufferings of the mechanick part of mankind, and not embarrassed with the pride, luxury, ambition, and envy of the upper part of mankind. He told me I might judge of the happiness of this state by this one thing, viz. that this was the state of life which all other people envied, that kings had frequently lamented the miserable consequences of being born to great things, and wished they had been placed in the middle of the two extremes, between the mean and the great; that the wise man gave his testimony to this as the just standard of true felicity, when he prayed to have neither poverty or riches. He bid me observe it, and I should always find, that the calamities of life were shared among the upper and lower part of mankind; but that the middle station had the fewest disasters, and was not exposed to so many vicissitudes as the higher or lower part of mankind; nay, they were so subjected to so many distempers and uneasiness, either of body or mind, as those were who, by vicious living, luxury, and extravagancies on one hand, and by hard labour, want of necessaries, and mean or insufficient diet on the other hand, bring distempers upon themselves by the natural consequences of their way of living; that the middle station of life was calculated for all kinds of vertues and all kinds of enjoyments; that peace and plenty were the hand-maids of a middle fortune; that temperance, moderation, quietness, health, society, all agreeable diversion, and all desirable pleasures, were the blessing attending the middle station of life; that this way men went silently and smoothly thro’ the world, and comfortably out of it, not embarrassed with the labour of their hands or of the head, not sold to the life of slavery for daily bread, or harrast with perplexed circumstances, which rob the soul of peace and the body of rest; not enraged with the passion of envy, or secret burning lust of ambition for great things; but in easy circumstances sliding gently thro’ the world, and sensibly tasting the sweets of living without the bitter, feeling that they are happy and learning by every day’s experience to know it more sensibly.

Jeremy Bentham opened his Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation with the famous sentence “Nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure. It is for them alone to point out what we ought to do, as well as to determine what we shall do.

We were forecasting based on the information in front of us—WYSIATI—but the chapters we wrote first were probably easier than others, and our commitment to the project was probably then at its peak. But the main problem was that we failed to allow for what Donald Rumsfeld famously called the “unknown unknowns.

One of the best-known studies of availability suggests that awareness of your own biases can contribute to peace in marriages, and probably in other joint projects. In a famous study, spouses were asked, “How large was your personal contribution to keeping the place tidy, in percentages?” They also answered similar questions about “taking out the garbage,” “initiating social engagements,” etc. Would the self-estimated contributions add up to 100%, or more, or less? As expected, the self-assessed contributions added up to more than 100%. The explanation is a simple availability bias: both spouses remember their own individual efforts and contributions much more clearly than those of the other, and the difference in availability leads to a difference in judged frequency.

Mentally subtract positive events. To take the hurt out of a regret, try a mental trick made famous in the 1946 movie It’s a Wonderful Life. On Christmas Eve, George Bailey stands on the brink of suicide when he’s visited by Clarence, an angel who shows George what life in Bedford Falls would be like had he never been born. Clarence’s technique is called “mentally subtracting positive events.

We cannot ignore the tremendous negative effects that bad grades have on the emotional systems of the brain: discouragement, stigmatization, feelings of helplessness. . . . Let us listen to the insightful voice of a professional dunce: Daniel Pennac, today a leading French writer who received the famous Renaudot Prize in 2007 for his book School Blues, but who was at the bottom of his class year after year:

The wide confidence interval is a confession of ignorance, which is not socially acceptable for someone who is paid to be knowledgeable in financial matters. Even if they knew how little they know, the executives would be penalized for admitting it. President Truman famously asked for a “one-armed economist” who would take a clear stand; he was sick and tired of economists who kept saying, “On the other hand…

The CIA and MI5 have their famous “Need to Know” principle: explain as little as possible and tell one’s field operatives only what they absolutely need to know to perform their roles. Mother Nature is similarly stingy when she apportions comprehension, it appears. When larger “goals” can be achieved by cleverly organized armies of uncomprehending agents, such as ants, the “Need to Know” rule is ruthlessly invoked.

The importance of the base rate was made famous by the psychologist Daniel Kahneman, who coined the phrase “the outside view and the inside view.” The inside view means looking at the specific case in front of you: this couple. The outside view requires you to look at a more general “comparison class” of cases—here, the comparison class is all married couples. (The outside view needn’t be statistical, but it often will be.)

Behavioural economics is an odd term. As Warren Buffett’s business partner Charlie Munger once said, ‘If economics isn’t behavioural, I don’t know what the hell is.’ It’s true: in a more sensible world, economics would be a subdiscipline of psychology.* Adam Smith was as much a behavioural economist as an economist – The Wealth of Nations (1776) doesn’t contain a single equation. But, strange though it may seem, the study of economics has long been detached from how people behave in the real world, preferring to concern itself with a parallel universe in which people behave as economists think they should. It is to correct this circular logic that behavioural economics – made famous by experts such as Daniel Kahneman, Amos Tversky, Dan Ariely and Richard Thaler – has come to prominence. In many areas of policy and business there is much more value to be found in understanding how people behave in reality than how they should behave in theory.

Daniel's wings were concealed, but he must have sensed her eyeing the place where they unfurled from his shoulders. "When everything is in order, we'll fly wherever we have to go to stop Lucifer. Until then it's better to stay low to the ground." "Okay," Luce said. "Race you to the other side?" Her breath frosted the air. "You know I'd beat you." "True." He slipped an arm around her waist, warming her. "Maybe we'd better take the boat, then. Protect my famous pride." She watched him unmoor a small metal rowboat from a boat slip. The soft light on the water made her think back to the day they'd raced across the secret lake at Sword & Cross. His skin had glistened as they had pulled themselves up to the flat rock in the center to catch their breath, then had lain on the sun-warmed stone, letting the day's heat dry their bodies. She'd barely known Daniel then-she hadn't known he was an angel-and already she'd been dangerously in love with him. "We used to swim together in my lifetime in Tahiti, didn't we?" she asked, surprised to remember another time she'd seen Daniel's hair glisten with water. Daniel stared at her and she knew how much it meant to him finally to be able to share some of his memories of their past. He looked so moved that Luce thought he might cry. Instead he kissed her forehead tenderly and said, "You beat me all those times, too, Lulu." They didn't talk much as Daniel rowed. It was enough for Luce to watch the way his muscles strained and flexed each time he dragged back, hearing the oars dip into and out of the cold water, breathing in the brine of the ocean.

In his famous entry into the “travel wars,” for example, Charles Dickens scoffed at southerners who told him that public opinion curtailed the mistreatment of slaves. “Public opinion!” Dickens jeered in his American Notes. “Why, public opinion in the slave States is slavery, is it not? … Public opinion has made the laws,” while at the same time “public opinion threatens the abolitionist with death, if he ventures to the South; and drags him with a rope about his middle, in broad unblushing noon, through the first city in the East”—an allusion to the Boston mob of 1835.6

One of the best-known studies of availability suggests that awareness of your own biases can contribute to peace in marriages, and probably in other joint projects. In a famous study, spouses were asked, “How large was your personal contribution to keeping the place tidy, in percentages?” They also answered similar questions about “taking out the garbage,” “initiating social engagements,” etc. Would the self-estimated contributions add up to 100%, or more, or less? As expected, the self-assessed contributions added up to more than 100%. The explanation is a simple availability bias: both spouses remember their own individual efforts and contributions much more clearly than those of the other, and the difference in availability leads to a difference in judged frequency. The bias is not necessarily self-serving: spouses also overestimated their contribution to causing quarrels, although to a smaller contribution to causing quarrels, although to a smaller extent than their contributions to more desirable outcomes. The same bias contributes to the common observation that many members of a collaborative team feel they have done more than their share and also feel that the others are not adequately grateful for their individual contributions

At the end of Stephen Vincent Benét’s famous short story “The Devil and Daniel Webster,” the Prince of Darkness is forced to promise that he will never again show his face in the state of New Hampshire. It is nowhere recorded that any such promise was made about Massachusetts. The Bay State’s history is rife with documented cases of devil worship, witchcraft, and black magic. The state that is known for producing presidents and scholars is also known for Lizzie Borden, who “took an ax and gave her mother forty whacks/Then when she was good and done/Gave her father forty-one,” and for being the home of Albert DeSalvo, the “Boston Strangler.

[Tolstoy] denounced [many historians'] lamentable tendency to simplify. The experts stumble onto a battlefield, into a parliament or public square, and demand, "Where is he? Where is he?" "Where is who?" "The hero, of course! The leader, the creator, the great man!" And having found him, they promptly ignore all his peers and troops and advisors. They close their eyes and abstract their Napoleon from the mud and the smoke and the masses on either side, and marvel at how such a figure could possibly have prevailed in so many battles and commanded the destiny of an entire continent. "There was an eye to see in this man," wrote Thomas Carlyle about Napoleon in 1840, "a soul to dare and do. He rose naturally to be the King. All men saw that he was such." But Tolstoy saw differently. "Kings are the slaves of history," he declared. "The unconscious swarmlike life of mankind uses every moment of a king's life as an instrument for its purposes." Kings and commanders and presidents did not interest Tolstoy. History, his history, looks elsewhere: it is the study of infinitely incremental, imperceptible change from one state of being (peace) to another (war). The experts claimed that the decisions of exceptional men could explain all of history's great events. For the novelist, this belief was evidence of their failure to grasp the reality of an incremental change brought about by the multitude's infinitely small actions.

human designers, being farsighted but blinkered, tend to find their designs thwarted by unforeseen side effects and interactions, so they try to guard against them by giving each element in the system a single function, and insulating it from all the other elements. In contrast, Mother Nature (the process of natural selection) is famously myopic and lacking in goals. Since she doesn’t foresee at all, she has no way of worrying about unforeseen side effects. Not “trying” to avoid them, she tries out designs in which many such side effects occur; most such designs are terrible (ask any engineer), but every now and then there is a serendipitous side effect: two or more unrelated functional systems interact to produce a bonus: multiple functions for single elements.

Vul and Pashler drew inspiration from the well-known phenomenon known as the wisdom-of-crowds effect: averaging the independent judgments of different people generally improves accuracy. In 1907, Francis Galton, a cousin of Darwin and a famous polymath, asked 787 villagers at a country fair to estimate the weight of a prize ox. None of the villagers guessed the actual weight of the ox, which was 1,198 pounds, but the mean of their guesses was 1,200, just 2 pounds off, and the median (1,207) was also very close. The villagers were a “wise crowd” in the sense that although their individual estimates were quite noisy, they were unbiased. Galton’s demonstration surprised him: he had little respect for the judgment of ordinary people, and despite himself, he urged that his results were “more creditable to the trustworthiness of a democratic judgment than might have been expected.

No one embodied the spirit of the frontier more than Daniel Boone, who faced and defeated countless natural and man-made dangers to literally hand cut the trail west through the wilderness. He marched with then colonel George Washington in the French and Indian War, established one of the most important trading posts in the West, served three terms in the Virginia Assembly, and fought in the Revolution. His exploits made him world famous; he served as the model for James Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales and numerous other pioneer stories. He was so well known and respected that even Lord Byron, in his epic poem Don Juan, wrote, “Of the great names which in our faces stare, The General Boon, back-woodsman of Kentucky, Was happiest amongst mortals anywhere …” And yet he was accused of treason—betraying his country—the most foul of all crimes at the time. What really happened to bring him to that courtroom? And was the verdict reached there correct?

In a famous study, spouses were asked, “How large was your personal contribution to keeping the place tidy, in percentages?” They also answered similar questions about “taking out the garbage,” “initiating social engagements,” etc. Would the self-estimated contributions add up to 100%, or more, or less? As expected, the self-assessed contributions added up to more than 100%. The explanation is a simple availability bias: both spouses remember their own individual efforts and contributions much more clearly than those of the other, and the difference in availability leads to a difference in judged frequency. The bias is not necessarily self-serving: spouses also overestimated their contribution to causing quarrels, although to a smaller extent than their contributions to more desirable outcomes. The same bias contributes to the common observation that many members of a collaborative team feel they have done more than their share and also feel that the others are not adequately grateful for their individual contributions.

In one of the most famous experiments in the history of psychology, Walter Mischel and his students exposed four-year-old children to a cruel dilemma. They were given a choice between a small reward (one Oreo), which they could have at any time, or a larger reward (two cookies) for which they had to wait 15 minutes under difficult conditions. They were to remain alone in a room, facing a desk with two objects: a single cookie and a bell that the child could ring at any time to call in the experimenter and receive the one cookie. As the experiment was described: “There were no toys, books, pictures, or other potentially distracting items in the room. The experimenter left the room and did not return until 15 min had passed or the child had rung the bell, eaten the rewards, stood up, or shown any signs of distress.” The children were watched through a one-way mirror, and the film that shows their behavior during the waiting time always has the audience roaring in laughter. About half the children managed the feat of waiting for 15 minutes, mainly by keeping their attention away from the tempting reward. Ten or fifteen years later, a large gap had opened between those who had resisted temptation and those who had not. The resisters had higher measures of executive control in cognitive tasks, and especially the ability to reallocate their attention effectively. As young adults, they were less likely to take drugs. A significant difference in intellectual aptitude emerged: the children who had shown more self-control as four-year-olds had substantially higher scores on tests of intelligence.

But nothing has ever expressed the general, gut-felt moral revulsion against city-bombing better than a virtually unknown article, from firsthand experience, by America’s most famous writer at the time, Ernest Hemingway, in July 1938. It’s still little known because he wrote it, by request, for the Soviet newspaper Pravda, which published it in Russian; his manuscript in English didn’t surface143 for forty-four years. It conveys in words the same surreal images that Picasso had rendered on canvas the year before. His lead sentence: “During the last fifteen months I saw murder done in Spain by the Fascist invaders. Murder is different from war.” Hemingway was describing what he had seen of fascist bombing of workers’ housing in Barcelona and shelling of civilian cinemagoers in Madrid. You see the murdered children with their twisted legs, their arms that bend in wrong directions, and their plaster powdered faces. You see the women, sometimes unmarked when they die from concussion, their faces grey, green matter running out of their mouths from bursted gall bladders. You see them sometimes looking like bloodied bundles of rags. You see them sometimes blown capriciously into fragments as an insane butcher might sever a carcass. And you hate the Italian and German murderers who do this as you hate no other people. … When they shell the cinema crowds, concentrating on the squares where the people will be coming out at six o’clock, it is murder. … You see a shell hit a queue of women standing in line to buy soap. There are only four women killed but a part of one woman’s torso is driven against a stone wall so that blood is driven into the stone with such force that sandblasting later fails to clean it. The other dead lie like scattered black bundles and the wounded are moaning or screaming.

can be horribly fallible, and is over-rated in courts of law. Psychological experiments have given us some stunning demonstrations, which should worry any jurist inclined to give superior weight to ‘eye-witness’ evidence. A famous example was prepared by Professor Daniel J. Simons at the University of Illinois. Half a dozen young people standing in a circle were filmed for 25 seconds tossing a pair of basketballs to each other, and we, the experimental subjects, watch the film. The players weave in and out of the circle and change places as they pass and bounce the balls, so the scene is quite actively complicated. Before being shown the film, we are told that we have a task to perform, to test our powers of observation. We have to count the total number of times balls are passed from person to person. At the end of the test, the counts are duly written down, but – little does the audience know – this is not the real test! After showing the film and collecting the counts, the experimenter drops his bombshell. ‘And how many of you saw the gorilla?’ The majority of the audience looks baffled: blank. The experimenter then replays the film, but this time tells the audience to watch in a relaxed fashion without trying to count anything. Amazingly, nine seconds into the film, a man in a gorilla suit strolls nonchalantly to the centre of the circle of players, pauses to face the camera, thumps his chest as if in belligerent contempt for eye-witness evidence, and then strolls off with the same insouciance as before (see colour page 8). He is there in full view for nine whole seconds – more than one-third of the film – and yet the majority of the witnesses never see him. They would swear an oath in a court of law that no man in a gorilla suit was present, and they would swear that they had been watching with more than usually acute concentration for the whole 25 seconds, precisely because they were counting ball-passes. Many experiments along these lines have been performed, with similar results, and with similar reactions of stupefied disbelief when the audience is finally shown the truth. Eye-witness testimony, ‘actual observation’, ‘a datum of experience’ – all are, or at least can be, hopelessly unreliable. It is, of course, exactly this unreliability among observers that stage conjurors exploit with their techniques of deliberate distraction.

There’s a tap on my shoulder. I turn around and get lost in a sea of blue. A Jersey-accented voice says, “It’s about time, kid,” and Frank Sinatra rattles the ice in his glass of Jack Daniel’s. Looking at the swirling deep-brown liquid, he whispers, “Ain’t it beautiful?” This is my introduction to the Chairman of the Board. We spend the next half hour talking Jersey, Hoboken, swimming in the Hudson River and the Shore. We then sit down for dinner at a table with Robert De Niro, Angie Dickinson and Frank and his wife, Barbara. This is all occurring at the Hollywood “Guinea Party” Patti and I have been invited to, courtesy of Tita Cahn. Patti had met Tita a few weeks previous at the nail parlor. She’s the wife of Sammy Cahn, famous for such songs as “All The Way,” “Teach Me Tonight” and “Only the Lonely.” She called one afternoon and told us she was hosting a private event. She said it would be very quiet and couldn’t tell us who would be there, but assured us we’d be very comfortable. So off into the LA night we went. During the evening, we befriend the Sinatras and are quietly invited into the circle of the last of the old Hollywood stars. Over the next several years we attend a few very private events where Frank and the remaining clan hold forth. The only other musician in the room is often Quincy Jones, and besides Patti and I there is rarely a rocker in sight. The Sinatras are gracious hosts and our acquaintance culminates in our being invited to Frank’s eightieth birthday party dinner. It’s a sedate event at the Sinatras’ Los Angeles home. Sometime after dinner, we find ourselves around the living room piano with Steve and Eydie Gorme and Bob Dylan. Steve is playing the piano and up close he and Eydie can really sing the great standards. Patti has been thoroughly schooled in jazz by Jerry Coker, one of the great jazz educators at the Frost School of Music at the University of Miami. She was there at the same time as Bruce Hornsby, Jaco Pastorius and Pat Metheny, and she learned her stuff. At Frank’s, as the music drifts on, she slips gently in on “My One and Only Love.” Patti is a secret weapon. She can sing torch like a cross between Peggy Lee and Julie London (I’m not kidding). Eydie Gorme hears Patti, stops the music and says, “Frank, come over here. We’ve got a singer!” Frank moves to the piano and I then get to watch my wife beautifully serenade Frank Sinatra and Bob Dylan, to be met by a torrent of applause when she’s finished. The next day we play Frank’s eightieth birthday celebration for ABC TV and I get to escort him to the stage along with Tony Bennett. It’s a beautiful evening and a fitting celebration for the greatest pop singer of all time. Two years later Frank passed away and we were generously invited to his funeral. A

The Extraordinary Persons Project In fact, Ekman had been so moved personally—and intrigued scientifically—by his experiments with Öser that he announced at the meeting he was planning on pursuing a systematic program of research studies with others as unusual as Öser. The single criterion for selecting apt subjects was that they be “extraordinary.” This announcement was, for modern psychology, an extraordinary moment in itself. Psychology has almost entirely dwelt on the problematic, the abnormal, and the ordinary in its focus. Very rarely have psychologists—particularly ones as eminent as Paul Ekman—shifted their scientific lens to focus on people who were in some sense (other than intellectually) far above normal. And yet Ekman now was proposing to study people who excel in a range of admirable human qualities. His announcement makes one wonder why psychology hasn't done this before. In fact, only in very recent years has psychology explicitly begun a program to study the positive in human nature. Sparked by Martin Seligman, a psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania long famous for his research on optimism, a budding movement has finally begun in what is being called “positive psychology”—the scientific study of well-being and positive human qualities. But even within positive psychology, Ekman's proposed research would stretch science's vision of human goodness by assaying the limits of human positivity Ever the scientist, Ekman became quite specific about what was meant by “extraordinary.” For one, he expects that such people exist in every culture and religious tradition, perhaps most often as contemplatives. But no matter what religion they practice, they share four qualities. The first is that they emanate a sense of goodness, a palpable quality of being that others notice and agree on. This goodness goes beyond some fuzzy, warm aura and reflects with integrity the true person. On this count Ekman proposed a test to weed out charlatans: In extraordinary people “there is a transparency between their personal and public life, unlike many charismatics, who have wonderful public lives and rather deplorable personal ones.” A second quality: selflessness. Such extraordinary people are inspiring in their lack of concern about status, fame, or ego. They are totally unconcerned with whether their position or importance is recognized. Such a lack of egoism, Ekman added, “from the psychological viewpoint, is remarkable.” Third is a compelling personal presence that others find nourishing. “People want to be around them because it feels good—though they can't explain why,” said Ekman. Indeed, the Dalai Lama himself offers an obvious example (though Ekman did not say so to him); the standard Tibetan title is not “Dalai Lama” but rather “Kundun,” which in Tibetan means “presence.” Finally, such extraordinary individuals have “amazing powers of attentiveness and concentration.

back, change into something formal. I’m taking you out to the most famous restaurant in all of Paris,’ he said proudly. She giggled. Listening to him make every effort to be the romantic tickled her to bits. Though she was a seasoned and toughened law enforcement agent, she still wasn’t beyond feeling giddy when it came to Pope’s courting efforts. For their long overdue holiday, a honeymoon-before-the-wedding kind of thing, Pope splashed out. The sky was the limit. Five months ago, when he asked her where she wanted to go, she had said Paris. So, Paris it had to be. There were no ifs or buts. And they were going to do it in style. He booked them a room at the Banke Hôtel for the entire duration of their stay. Luckily, he got it at a special rate, otherwise a Federal employee like him wouldn’t have been able to stretch the budget that far. Housed in a former bank, the Baroque revival hotel had an ornate columned façade. The interior was grand in scale and lavishly decorated. The room didn’t disappoint. Charming period detailing had been retained; in their

and lastly comes tyranny, great and famous, which differs from them all, and is the fourth and worst disorder of a State" Plato Book IX, translated by Benjamin Jowett

In accounting for the transformations in ideas and culture that reshaped the last quarter of the twentieth century, three sharply different explanations have been offered. The first posits a shift in the nation's core psyche and character. It was the "me decade," the journalist Tom Wolfe wrote famously in 1976: an age obsessed with self-referentiality. The nation, this line of reasoning argues, was caught up in an "age of greed," a new "culture of narcissism," a collapse of faith in public institutions, a pell-mell, selfish rush into a myriad of private lifestyle communities.

In this age where people can become famous without doing anything, we are now encouraging a literary and publishing atmosphere where you must become famous before you can do anything.

A Southern Vegetarian’s Story By Erin Stewart, Alabama Grits It wasn’t easy being a vegetarian in Huntsville, Alabama, but I managed it throughout my high school years. At least I thought I did. I remember one trip with my parents that threw everything into doubt. It was a Saturday, and we had reservations at Miss Mary Bobo’s, the famous restaurant in Lynchburg, Tennessee, the home of Jack Daniel’s whiskey. Miss MaryBobo’s is known for serving at least one item cooked in Jack Daniel’s at every meal: this time it was the apples. What really interested me, though, was the greens. I think they were mustard greens. I was just eating my third bite when a large man next to me turned to our hostess, who was watching us all eat at one communal table, and said, “Miss Mary Bobo, these are the best greens I’ve ever had. What’s your secret?” Without a second thought, she replied, “Why, real lard, of course.” I must confess: I took one more bite before I put my fork down! (Don’t tell anyone!) To this day, those are some of the best greens I’ve ever tasted.

Well, I Declare!: Jack Daniel’s Old No. 7, the South’s most famous whiskey, is distilled in a dry county. Isn’t that just so Southern--a little bit of piety hides a whole lot of sin.

Like the old twistor theorists, the few followers Connes has acquired are committed. For a conference at Penn State University on different approaches to quantum gravity, Alain recommended a famous elder French physicist named Daniel Kastler. The gentleman broke his leg in a bicycle accident a week before the conference, but he clambered out of the hospital and got himself to the Marseille airport, arriving just in time to open the proceedings with the following proclamation: "There is one true Alain, and I am his messenger." String theorists aren't the only ones who have their true believers, but the noncommutative geometers surely have a better sense of humor.

For a man of the secret world, you have a rather famous face.

That famous verse (10.45), drawing together Isaiah 53 and Daniel 7, is not, as so often imagined, a detached statement of atonement-theology, but rather the clinching point in this devastatingly counter-imperial statement about power. That does not mean that it is not about (what we have come to call) ‘atonement’. Rather, it is an invitation to understand atonement itself – God’s dealing on the cross with the sin of the world – as involving God’s victory not so much over the world and its powers (as though God were simply another cheerful 1960s anarchist) but over the worldly ways of power, the ways in which the powers that were created in, through and for Jesus Christ have rebelled and now themselves need to be led, beaten and bedraggled, in his triumphal procession, in order eventually to be reconciled.

Daniel Patrick Moynihan famously declared; but in modern America a lot of people do believe that they’re entitled to their own facts.

Charles stopped. Spun around. “You ever hear of a woman named Norma Leah McCorvey?” he asked. Daniel leaned back on the wall so his bad leg wouldn’t drain his batteries. “Didn’t she pass away? She lived two halls over, right? The woman with—” “No, no. That was Norma Robinson. Yeah, she passed away in ’32. Norma McCorvey lived, oh, over a hundred years ago. She was more famously known as Jane Roe.” Daniel knew that name. “Roe v. Wade,” he said. “That’s right. One of the biggest decisions before your wife came along . . .” The nurse-bot studied his shoes again. “And people remember her for that—for the decision. They remember her as Roe, not as McCorvey.” “I don’t follow,” Daniel told Charles. He eyed his wife’s door and fought the urge to be rude. “Well, most people don’t know, but years later—Norma regretted her part in history. Wished she’d never done it. Converted to one of the major religions of her day and fought against the progress she’d fostered. I just . . .” He looked back up. “I’ll always remember you and your wife for the right reasons, is all.” He turned to his cart without another word and started down the hall.

So interesting that Shore decided there might be a book in it. He set out to find fertile pairs—people who had been together for at least five years and produced interesting work. By the time he was done he had interviewed a comedy duo; two concert pianists who had started performing together because one of them had stage fright; two women who wrote mysteries under the name “Emma Lathen”; and a famous pair of British nutritionists, McCance and Widdowson, who were so tightly linked that they’d dropped their first names from the jackets of their books. “They were very huffy about the idea that dark bread was more nutritious than white bread,” recalled Shore. “They had produced the research that it wasn’t so in 1934—so why didn’t people stop fooling around with the idea?” Just about every work couple that Shore called were intrigued enough by their own relationships to want to talk about them. The only exceptions were “a mean pair of physicists” and, after flirting with participating, the British ice dancers Torvill and Dean. Among those who agreed to sit down with Miles Shore were Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman.

Dart initially echoed Darwin’s theory that bipedalism freed the hands of early hominins to make and use hunting tools, which in turn selected for big brains, hence better hunting abilities. Then, in a famous 1953 paper, clearly influenced by his war experiences, Dart proposed that the first humans were not just hunters but also murderous predators.18 Dart’s words are so astonishing, you have to read them: The loathsome cruelty of mankind to man forms one of his inescapable characteristics and differentiative features; and it is explicable only in terms of his carnivorous, and cannibalistic origin. The blood-bespattered, slaughter-gutted archives of human history from the earliest Egyptian and Sumerian records to the most recent atrocities of the Second World War accord with early universal cannibalism, with animal and human sacrificial practices of their substitutes in formalized religions and with the world-wide scalping, head-hunting, body-mutilating and necrophilic practices of mankind in proclaiming this common bloodlust differentiator, this predaceous habit, this mark of Cain that separates man dietetically from his anthropoidal relatives and allies him rather with the deadliest of Carnivora. Dart’s killer-ape hypothesis, as it came to be known, was popularized by the journalist Robert Ardrey in a best-selling book, African Genesis, that found a ready audience in a generation disillusioned by two world wars, the Cold War, the Korean and Vietnam Wars, political assassinations, and widespread political unrest.19 The killer-ape hypothesis left an indelible stamp on popular culture including movies like Planet of the Apes, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and A Clockwork Orange. But the Rousseauians weren’t dead yet. Reanalyses of bones in the limestone pits from which fossils like the Taung Baby came showed they were killed by leopards, not early humans.20 Further studies revealed these early hominins were mostly vegetarians. And as a reaction to decades of bellicosity, many scientists in the 1970s embraced evidence for humans’ nicer side, especially gathering, food sharing, and women’s roles. The most widely discussed and audacious hypothesis, proposed by Owen Lovejoy, was that the first hominins were selected to become bipeds to be more cooperative and less aggressive.21 According to Lovejoy, early hominin females favored males who were better at walking upright and thus better able to carry food with which to provision them. To entice these tottering males to keep coming back with food, females encouraged exclusive long-term monogamous relationships by concealing their menstrual cycles and having permanently large breasts (female chimps advertise when they ovulate with eye-catching swellings, and their breasts shrink when they are not nursing). Put crudely, females selected for cooperative males by exchanging sex for food. If so, then selection against reactive aggression and frequent fighting is as old as the hominin lineage.22

Daniel Burnham, the city planner responsible for Chicago’s beautiful waterfront, which he designed more than a century ago, famously said, “Make no little plans; they have no magic to stir men’s blood.

The grand idea was an atlas. A collection of maps, both of real places and of imagined ones, but reversed. She and Daniel had come up with a list of books, fantasy novels famous for the beautiful maps created just for them—Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings; Le Guin’s Earthsea series; Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia books; Dragt’s De brief voor de koning, The Letter for the King; Pratchett’s Discworld novels—and another list of maps from our real world, famous for their cartographic significance. We would painstakingly research all of them, studying them from historical, scientific, and artistic angles, and then redraw them in the opposite style. Our recreations of the fantasy maps would be rigidly detailed and precise, and our re-creations of the realistic maps would be embellished, expanded, and dreamlike, like their fictional cousins. Once complete, we planned to publish it in one giant volume. Readers would open it, expecting the same old type of atlas, but instead, they’d find previously familiar lands rendered in a completely unexpected manner, opening their imaginations to an entirely new way of looking at maps.

Daniel Webster, one of America’s most famous statesmen, once said: “If we work on marble, it will perish; if on brass, time will efface it; if we rear temples, they will crumble into dust; but if we work on immortal souls and imbue them with principles, with the just fear of God and love of our fellowmen, we engrave on those tablets something that will brighten to all eternity.

But there have been other press conferences that last less time than it takes to boil an egg. No doubt you will have heard about the famous ‘Hairdryer’, the shouting, his ferocity when the bee in his bonnet starts to buzz out of control. It’s all true. He’s every bit as frightening as is made out. One prick of his temper glands and he will be up, leaning forward, jutting out his forehead, indiscriminately machine-gunning swearwords at someone who has asked or written something he doesn’t like. It’s the eyes. Those rheumy, pale-green eyes. They stare you down. Your palms begin to sweat. You mouth feels dry, as if you have just swallowed a tablespoon of sawdust. You start to feel pathetically weak. The outburst might last only a few seconds but it always feels so much longer. And you realise you are half-bowing, staring at your feet. It’s a degrading experience.

At the heart of the mystery of Bigfoot is a paradox: many people see Sasquatches, but no one can find one. This is an extremely uncomfortable dilemma for Bigfoot advocates. Either Sasquatches are too rare to locate, in which case they should also be too rare to see; or the common and widespread sighting reports are by and large accurate, in which case science should long ago have located a specimen.

John Adams famously pointed out, political wisdom has not improved over the ages; even as technology has advanced, mankind steps on the same rakes, and the new inventions often magnify the damage. Historian Daniel Boorstin referred to the nonprogressivity of human nature and politics as “Adams’ law,” but Boorstin was far too modest, for he appended several of his own astute observations to it, among which was that technology, far from fulfilling needs and solving problems, creates needs and spreads problems. “Boorstin’s law,” then, could be formulated thus in the modern world: beware of optimism about the social and political benefits of the Internet and social media, for while technology progresses, human nature and politics do not.21

I've never tried to be famous or become a bestseller, just rich and remembered. The rest is a bonus.

One of the most striking aspects of the doctrine of Christ is the combination in one figure of man and God. Even this radical idea, however, is not unique among Jews to followers of Jesus. We find it in the Similitudes as well. In the main body of the Similitudes, Enoch is not the Son of Man. This is emphatically the case, since in chapter 46 and throughout the main body of the text, he is the one who sees the Son of Man and to whom is revealed the description of the Son of Man as the eschatological Redeemer and Messiah; therefore Enoch cannot be identical with him. In the end, however, in chapters 70 and 71, Enoch becomes the Son of Man - he becomes God. In these chapters we have a remarkable exaltation scene. In chapter 70, we are told of Enoch in the third person: “And it came to pass after this [that], while he was living, his name was lifted from those who dwell upon the dry ground to the presence of the Son of Man and to the presence of the Lord of Spirits. And he was lifted on the chariots of the spirit, and his name vanished among them.” But then, without pause, the text shifts into the first person, and we are told, “And from that day I was not counted among them.” We have here a midrashic expansion of the famous Enoch verse from Genesis that “Enoch walked with God and he was not”: that is, an instance of apotheosis, of a special human becoming divine.

Daniel Galvin Sr., OBE Daniel Galvin Sr., OBE, is one of Britain’s biggest names in hairdressing. His specialization in hair coloring has revolutionized the field over the past four decades, and he continues to be in high demand by the rich and famous worldwide. For his contributions to the industry, he was honored with an OBE in 2006. I had the pleasure of knowing Diana and doing her hair color for ten years. She was truly a breath of fresh air each time she came into the salon. She was always happy, always full of life, and full of grace. We have a private room available in our salon, but Diana never requested to use it. She was happy to sit next to other clients and often chatted away merrily with them and staff members. In our business, confidentiality is so important. Anything she discussed with me will never go any further. She used to tell me off for my suntan--telling me it wasn’t good for me and to be careful. Her last words to me before that tragic weekend in France were “Daniel, I don’t believe it, but for the first time I’m browner than you!” She was incredibly down-to-earth, unaffected, and perfectly charming on all occasions. She was a tremendous asset to the monarchy and to this country. There was an amazing aura that glowed around her--she was as beautiful on the inside as she was on the outside. It was always an honor to be of service to her.

A well-lived life of virtue and work in anonymity is now perceived as “drab and undesirable,” while according to Hollywood writer, Clive James, «fame (is) found increasingly fascinating.»518 Instead of actions and virtues taking on lives greater than any one person, the cult of personality dominates—the celebrity is remembered for who he is, not for what he lived. In such circumstances, latter-day Napoleons—not Cincinnati—thrive, the former having thirsted so badly “to be famous, and…want(ing)…fame to last after. death.”519 Daniel Boorstin contrasts the heroism of values and deeds with that of celebrity:   A man’s name (previously) was not apt to become a household word unless he exemplified greatness in some way or other. The twentieth century has confused celebrity worship and hero worship. We have willingly been misled into believing. that fame—well-knowness—is. a hallmark ofgreatness.520

Anecdotes do not make a science. Ten anecdotes are no better than one, and a hundred anecdotes are no better than ten.

As Jack Welch, the famous former CEO of General Electric, once said, “Before you become a leader, success is all about growing yourself. When you become a leader, success is all about growing others.

Clinton got out there and created a new narrative on the economy, which took some of the needles out of Obama,” says Republican strategist Mike Murphy. “It was the biggest single number-moving event in the entire campaign. It was devastatingly important to the Obama guys. And he put him back in business.” (It also helped, Murphy adds, that “the Romney campaign was totally incompetent.”) In 2000, Clinton had famously faulted Al Gore for not letting Clinton rally the base in key swing states. It was not a mistake Barack Obama was going to repeat. In addition to his convention speech, Clinton stumped for Obama in swing states like Florida and Ohio. Unlike Gore and his campaign team, “the Obama people, despite whatever hard feelings they had, were pretty dispassionate and not afraid to let him come in and steal the show, if they thought it would be helpful,” says a former Clinton official who worked in the Obama administration. Clinton even starred in a widely seen advertisement for Obama, declaring that “President Obama has a plan to rebuild America from the ground up, investing in innovation, education, and job training. It only works if there is a strong middle class. That’s what happened when I was president.”15

Well,there's not much more to see," Bill said. "Just the usual routine of a building catching fire-smoke, walls of flame,people screaming and stampeding toward the exits,trampling the less fortunate underfoot-you get the picture.The Globe burned to the ground." "What?" she asked, feeling sick. "I started the fire at the Globe?" Surely burning down the most famous theater in English history would have repercussions across time. "Oh,don't get all self-important. It was going to happen anyway. If you hadn't burst into flames, the cannon onstage would have misfired and taken the whole place out." "This is so much bigger than me and Daniel. All those people-" "Look, Mother Teresa, no one died that night...besides you.No one else even got hurt. Remember that drunk leering at you from the third row? His pants catch on fire.That's the worst of it. Feel better?" "Not really.Not at all." "How about this: You're not here to add to your mountain of guilt. Or to change the past.There's a script,and you have your entrances and your exits." "I wasn't ready for my exit." "Why not? Henry the Eighth sucks, anyway." "I wanted to give Daniel hope. I wanted him to know that I would always choose him,always love him.But Lucinda died before I could be sure he understood." She closed her eyes. "His half of our curse is so much worse than mine." "That's good,Luce!" "What do you mean? That's horrible!" "I mean that little gem-that 'Wah, Daniel's agony is infinitely more horrible than mine'-that's what you learned here.The more you understand, the closer you'll get to knowing the root of the curse,and the more liekly it is that you'll eventually find your way out of it.Right?" "I-I don't know." "I do. Now come on, you've got bigger roles to play.

one of the donors whom we had thanked on this occasion was a certain Adrian Lamo. He was the semi-famous ex-hacker responsible for the arrest of US Army private Bradley Manning, who has been accused of being one of our sources.

What about those who are not rich and famous, those who do not have a platform on which to transmit their case?

When John Kenneth Galbraith rose to deliver the presidential address of the American Economic Association in 1972, the angular Harvard professor and supremely self-confident adviser to presidents was arguably the most famous living economist in America. From The Affluent Society in 1958 to The New Industrial State in 1967, his critical accounts of capitalism's tendencies to underfund social goods and concentrate corporate control had been fixtures on the best-seller lists. Galbraith's thirteen-part BBC television series on the workings of capitalism in 1977 was to help goad the production of Milton Friedman's counterassertion of 1980, the PBS series Free to Choose, an iconic statement of the new market ideology.

I can’t believe I’m in the famous Gabriel Holland’s house. I’ve heard a lot about you.

The argument, as we have seen, is an old one. Today it is disguised by the outward trappings of tongue-in-cheek occultism, or therapeutic witchcraft, or climate change activism, or a fervent belief in “the science,” or some form of transgenderism or transhumanism. But the substance of these belief systems has an ancient pedigree that stretches all the way back to the Garden and the serpent and the Fall, when a very real, literal Satan made his famous claim about the tree and the fruit that would echo down the eons: “You will not die. You will be like God.” And if man can become like God, then what is to say man cannot become God—or at least a god?

The famous French writer Voltaire said that ‘the art of medicine consists in amusing the patient while nature cures the disease’.

John Adams perfectly captured this notion in his famous line, “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.

The work of Hafiz became known to the West largely through the passion of Goethe. His enthusiasm deeply affected Ralph Waldo Emerson, who then translated Hafiz in the nineteenth century. Emerson said of Hafiz, 'Hafiz is a poet for poets,; and Goethe remarked, 'Hafiz has no peer.'Hafiz's poems were also admired by such diverse notables as Nietzsche and Arthur Conan Doyle, whose wonderful character Sherlock Holmes quotes Hafiz; Garcia Lorca praised him, the famous composer Johannes Brahs was so touched by his verse he put several lines into compositions, and even Queen Victoria was said to have consulted the works of Hafiz in times of need. The range of Hafiz's verse in indeed stunning. He says, 'I am a hole in a flute that the Christ's breath moves through--listen to this music.' In another poem Hafiz playfully sings, 'Look at the smile on the earth's lips this morning, she laid again with me last night.

The work of Hafiz became known to the West largely through the passion of Goethe. His enthusiasm deeply affected Ralph Waldo Emerson, who then translated Hafiz in the nineteenth century. Emerson said of Hafiz, 'Hafiz is a poet for poets,; and Goethe remarked, 'Hafiz has no peer.' Hafiz's poems were also admired by such diverse notables as Nietzsche and Arthur Conan Doyle, whose wonderful character Sherlock Holmes quotes Hafiz; Garcia Lorca praised him, the famous composer Johannes Brahms was so touched by his verse he put several lines into compositions, and even Queen Victoria was said to have consulted the works of Hafiz in times of need. The range of Hafiz's verse in indeed stunning. He says, 'I am a hole in a flute that the Christ's breath moves through--listen to this music.' In another poem Hafiz playfully sings, 'Look at the smile on the earth's lips this morning, she laid again with me last night.

The work of Hafiz became known to the West largely through the passion of Goethe. His enthusiasm deeply affected Ralph Waldo Emerson, who then translated Hafiz in the nineteenth century. Emerson said of Hafiz, 'Hafiz is a poet for poets,; and Goethe remarked, 'Hafiz has no peer.' Hafiz's poems were also admired by such diverse notables as Nietzsche and Arthur Conan Doyle, whose wonderful character Sherlock Holmes quotes Hafiz; Garcia Lorca praised him, the famous composer Johannes Brahms was so touched by his verse he put several lines into compositions, and even Queen Victoria was said to have consulted the works of Hafiz in times of need. The range of Hafiz's verse in indeed stunning. He says, 'I am a hole in a flute that the Christ's breath moves through--listen to this music.' In another poem Hafiz playfully sings, 'Look at the smile on the earth's lips this morning, she laid again with me last night.

As the eminent historian Gordon Wood has pointed out, we must understand that a majority of the Articles’ most famous critics — and the later constitutional framers — were basically aristocrats in the pre-industrial, pre-capitalist sense of the word. They feared inflation, paper money, and debt relief measures because they modeled their social and economic world on the systems and tendencies of the English gentry. Their entire societal and agrarian order was at risk during the 1780s — in fact it would later collapse in the increasingly commercial northern states, only to live on in the plantation life of the antebellum South. Much of their complaint about “excessive democracy” in the new American state governments may ring hollow to modern ears, but they believed in their position most emphatically.

Daniel Dennett, a consciousness theorist, famously said that scholars are a library’s way of making another library.

There’s another level at which attention operates, this has to do with leadership, I argue that leaders need three kinds of focus, to be really effective, the first is an inner focus, let me tell you about a case that’s actually from the annals of neurology, there was a corporate lawyer, who unfortunately had a small prefrontal brain tumour, it was discovered early, operated successfully, after the surgery though it was a very puzzling picture, because he was absolutely as smart as he had been before, a very high IQ, no problem with attention or memory, but he couldn’t do his job anymore, he couldn’t do any job, in fact he ended up out of work, his wife left him, he lost his home, he’s living in his brother spare bedroom and in despair he went to see a famous neurologist named Antonio Damasio. Damasio specialized in the circuitry between the prefrontal area which is where we consciously pay attention to what matters now, where we make decisions, where we learn and the emotional centers in the midbrain, particularly the amygdala, which is our radar for danger, it triggers our strong emotions. They had cut the connection between the prefrontal area and emotional centers and Damasio at first was puzzled, he realized that this fellow on every neurological test was perfectly fine but something was wrong, then he got a clue, he asked the lawyer when should we have our next appointment and he realized the lawyer could give him the rational pros and cons of every hour for the next two weeks, but he didn’t know which is best. And Damasio says when we’re making a decision any decision, when to have the next appointment, should I leave my job for another one, what strategy should we follow, going into the future, should I marry this fellow compared to all the other fellows, those are decisions that require we draw on our entire life experience and the circuitry that collects that life experience is very base brain, it’s very ancient in the brain, and it has no direct connection to the part of the brain that thinks in words, it has very rich connectivity to the gastro- intestinal tract, to the gut, so we get a gut feeling, feels right, doesn’t feel right. Damasio calls them somatic markers, it’s a language of the body and the ability to tune into this is extremely important because this is valuable data too - they did a study of Californian entrepreneurs and asked them “how do you make your decisions?”, these are people who built a business from nothing to hundreds of millions or billions of dollars, and they more or less said the same strategy “I am a voracious gatherer of information, I want to see the numbers, but if it doesn’t feel right, I won’t go ahead with the deal”. They’re tuning into the gut feeling. I know someone, I grew up in farm region of California, the Central Valley and my high school had a rival high school in the next town and I met someone who went to the other high school, he was not a good student, he almost failed, came close to not graduating high school, he went to a two-year college, a community college, found his way into film, which he loved and got into a film school, in film school his student project caught the eye of a director, who asked him to become an assistant and he did so well at that the director arranged for him to direct his own film, someone else’s script, he did so well at that they let him direct a script that he had written and that film did surprisingly well, so the studio that financed that film said if you want to do another one, we will back you. And he, however, hated the way the studio edited the film, he felt he was a creative artist and they had butchered his art. He said I am gonna do the film on my own, I’m gonna finance it myself, everyone in the film business that he knew said this is a huge mistake, you shouldn’t do this, but he went ahead, then he ran out of money, had to go to eleven banks before he could get a loan, he managed to finish the film, you may have seen

The first principle is that you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool.

Venture capitalists and investors have bought into the media-driven narrative that younger people are more likely to build great companies. Vinod Khosla, a cofounder of Sun Microsystems and venture capitalist, said, “People under 35 are the people who make change happen . . . people over 45 basically die in terms of new ideas.” Paul Graham, the founder of Y Combinator, the famous start-up accelerator, said that, when a founder is over the age of thirty-two, investors “start to be a little skeptical.” Zuckerberg himself famously said, with his characteristic absence of tact, “Young people are just smarter.” But, it turns out, when it comes to age, the entrepreneurs we learn about in the media are not representative. In a pathbreaking study, a team of economists—Pierre Azoulay, Benjamin F. Jones, J. Daniel Kim, and Javier Miranda (henceforth referred to as AJKM)—analyzed the age of the founder of every business created in the United States between the years 2007 and 2014. Their study included some 2.7 million entrepreneurs, a far broader and more representative sample than the dozens featured in business magazines. The researchers found that the average age of a business founder in the United States is 41.9 years old—in other words, more than a decade older than the average age of founders featured in the media. And older people don’t just start businesses more than many of us realize; they also succeed at creating highly profitable businesses more often than their younger peers do. AJKM used various metrics of success for a business, including staying in business for longer and ranking among the top firms in revenue and employees. They discovered that older founders consistently had higher probabilities of success, at least until the age of sixty.

Members of RAND, including analyst Daniel Ellsberg, were famously part of a study team that produced the Pentagon Papers. Ellsberg leaked copies of the papers to the New York Times and the Washington Post in 1971.

How beautiful it is and how easily it can be broken” is a quote from the stage directions to a play by Tennessee Willliams, a great American drama about the victimization of a fragile girl who is tragically in love with beautiful, breakable things: the famous glass menagerie that gives the play its title, and which of course provides a richly useful symbol for the themes of delicacy and brittleness, of the lovely illusions that can give purpose to our lives and the hard necessities that can shatter them.

It is, indeed, in this light that Capote’s famous characterization of In Cold Blood as “a reflection on American life—this collision between the desperate, ruthless, wandering, savage part of American life, and the other, which is insular and safe,” takes on its proper meaning.T

began by writing about creativity. Creativity took him into the study of play. And his exploration of play unlocked an insight about the human experience that would make him famous. In the midst of play, many people enjoyed what Csikszentmihalyi called “autotelic experiences”—from the Greek auto (self) and telos (goal or purpose). In an autotelic experience, the goal is self-fulfilling; the activity is its own reward.

One important reason that philosophers should take Nietzsche seriously is because he seems to have gotten, at least in broad contours, many points about human moral psychology right. Consider: (1) Nietzsche holds that heritable type-facts are central determinants of personality and morally significant behaviors, a claim well supported by extensive empirical findings in behavioral genetics. (2) Nietzsche claims that consciousness is a “surface” and that “the greatest part of conscious thought must still be attributed to [non-conscious] instinctive activity,” theses overwhelmingly vindicated by recent work by psychologists on the role of the unconscious (e.g., Wilson 2002) and by philosophers who have produced synthetic meta-analyses of work on consciousness in psychology and neuroscience (e.g., Rosenthal 2008). (3) Nietzsche claims that moral judgments are post-hoc rationalizations of feelings that have an antecedent source, and thus are not the outcome of rational reflection or discursiveness, a conclusion in sync with the findings of the ascendent “social intuitionism” in the empirical moral psychology of Jonathan Haidt (2001) and others. (4) Nietzsche argues that free will is an “illusion,” that our conscious experience of willing is itself the causal product of non-conscious forces, a view recently defended by the psychologist Daniel Wegner (2002), who, in turn, synthesiyes a large body of empirical literature, including the famous neurophysical data about “willing” collected by Benjamin Libet.

One constant theme was how Sweden’s welfare system worked to encourage risk taking. “The worst that’ll happen is that you will fail, but still be able to live in your apartment and put food on the table. That encourages you to take risks. And some of those risks pay off as world-famous companies,” Daniel said.

the famous saying said, keep your friends close and your enemies closer.

who famously dismissed the clientele of the Hôtel Grand Courchevel as “the elderly and their parents.

Angelus Rosedale Cemetery. The answers you need start here. Located across the street from the all-boys Loyola High School, Rosedale is one of the oldest, creepiest cemeteries in Los Angeles, with large tombstones shaped like pyramids and giant Celtic crosses. Famous people are buried beneath those stones—“Hurricane Hank” Armstrong, Hattie McDaniel, Rasputin’s daughter Maria, and Anna May Wong, just to name a few. Old Los Angeles is also buried here. Southern California streets, high schools, and cities have been named after the Slausons, Burbanks, and Fremonts now interred at Rosedale.

Shortly after Gallegos left the jail, Ruth arrived with Arturo and Daniel Hernandez. They knew Richard had been talking to Gallegos and were intent upon not letting Gallegos represent him. They had decided that they and they alone would be his lawyers. They viewed handling the case as the turning point in their professional lives. They would be famous, legal celebrities whose opinion would be eagerly sought. They both knew the case would take up a lot of their time, but in the end it would be well worth it.

I would never have thought a porn star would become one of the most famous people in the American historical record!

The Master of Shakespeare, by A. W. L. Saunders, after citing many of the above details, hung its hat on those similarities of poetic style while arguing that Greville, a famously amiable patron, had been the master of a long-standing collaboration marketed as “Will Shake-speare,” whose contributing members included Mary Sidney, Tom Nashe, Francis Bacon, Kit Marlowe, George Peele, and Samuel Daniel.

As the modern era came into being, the avarice of the usurer was supplanted by interest in the broader and more abstract sense of a share or stake. This new concept of interest was ethically wide-ranging: it ‘came to cover virtually the entire range of human actions, from the narrowly self-centered to the sacrificially altruistic, and from the prudently calculated to the passionately compulsive’.49 The seventeenth-century English statesman and philosopher Lord Shaftesbury summed up the new thinking with his comment that ‘Interest governs the World.’50 In his Fable of the Bees (1714), Bernard Mandeville exposed the paradox at the heart of the modern world, namely that private vices brought public benefits. Adam Smith incorporated Mandeville’s wicked insights into his political economy. In The Wealth of Nations, Smith describes the individual as one who ‘By pursuing his own interest he frequently promotes that of the society more effectually than when he really intends to promote it.’51 A similar thought is expressed in another famous line, in which Smith writes that ‘It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.’ The spirit of capitalism was transmitted across networks of credit that connected lenders and borrowers through bonds of mutual self-interest.52 Daniel Defoe described credit as a ‘stock’, synonymous with capital, while the French in Defoe’s day referred to capital as ‘interest’, in the sense of taking a stake.fn6 From a technical viewpoint, capital consists of a stream of future income discounted to its present value. Without interest, there can be no capital. Without capital, no capitalism. Turgot, a contemporary of Adam Smith’s, understood this very well: ‘the capitalist lender of money,’ he wrote, ‘ought to be considered as a dealer in a commodity which is absolutely necessary for the production of wealth, and which cannot be at too low a price.’53 (Turgot exaggerated. As we shall see, interest at ‘too low a price’ is the source of many evils.)

Daniel Kahneman used the famous Müller-Lyer illusion to illustrate this.

Arrow, a famous boat-train connecting London and Dover. A woman named Rebecca Steward, who appeared to be Mrs. Carmichael’s chatelaine/drill sergeant, coordinated moving the luggage. Also present was a Miss Pamela Verrall, Mrs. Carmichael’s private secretary.