Decade Funny Quotes

People often say that the English are very cold fish, very reserved, that they have a way of looking at things – even tragedy – with a sense of irony. There’s some truth in it; it’s pretty stupid of them, though. Humor won’t save you; it doesn’t really do anything at all. You can look at life ironically for years, maybe decades; there are people who seem to go through most of their lives seeing the funny side, but in the end, life always breaks your heart. Doesn’t matter how brave you are, how reserved, or how much you’ve developed a sense of humor, you still end up with your heart broken. That’s when you stop laughing. In the end there’s just the cold, the silence and the loneliness. In the end, there’s only death.

I'll drink your champagne. I'll drink every drop of it, I don't care if it kills me.

Irony won't save you from anything; humour doesn't do anything at all. You can look at life ironically for years, maybe decades; there are people who seem to go through most of their lives seeing the funny side, but in the end, life always breaks your heart. Doesn't matter how brave you are, or how reserved, or how much you've developed a sense of humour, you still end up with your heart broken. That's when you stop laughing.

I was performing my ritual of sipping tea, shooting flirtatious glances and planning murder

Humor won’t save you; it doesn’t really do anything at all. You can look at life ironically for years, maybe decades; there are people who seem to go through most of their lives seeing the funny side, but in the end, life always breaks your heart. Doesn’t matter how brave you are, or how reserved, or how much you’ve developed a sense of humor, you still end up with your heart broken. That’s when you stop laughing. In the end there’s just the cold, the silence and the loneliness. In the end there’s only death.

When I was little, my friends would gush over wedding gowns and honeymoons. But I saw too many people flush decades together down the toilet over money or kids or meaningless flings. My own parents chose to stay married, which I think is rather funny, since they show about as much affection for each other as pit bulls in a ring. Tying the knot means slipping a noose around love and choking it to death.

Isn’t it funny that only twenty years ago, they were down there cowering in terror that we trigger-happy, decadent, capitalist Americans would go nuclear on them any minute? Little did they know our secret weapon was Starbucks.

Bad writing, it is easily verified, has never kept scholarship from being published.

Staring at my smoldering hot date, her husband stands tall for the first time in a decade, adjusting his toupee while flashing a horrid green toothy grin that looks more like a Steven Hawkins muscle spasm. In his hands, a frightened beer bottle is choked with the steel grip of a sexually repressed Preacher.

There is some confusion as to what magic actually is. I think this can be cleared up if you just look at the very earliest descriptions of magic. Magic in its earliest form is often referred to as “the art”. I believe this is completely literal. I believe that magic is art and that art, whether it be writing, music, sculpture, or any other form is literally magic. Art is, like magic, the science of manipulating symbols, words, or images, to achieve changes in consciousness. The very language about magic seems to be talking as much about writing or art as it is about supernatural events. A grimmoir for example, the book of spells is simply a fancy way of saying grammar. Indeed, to cast a spell, is simply to spell, to manipulate words, to change people's consciousness. And I believe that this is why an artist or writer is the closest thing in the contemporary world that you are likely to see to a Shaman. I believe that all culture must have arisen from cult. Originally, all of the faucets of our culture, whether they be in the arts or sciences were the province of the Shaman. The fact that in present times, this magical power has degenerated to the level of cheap entertainment and manipulation, is, I think a tragedy. At the moment the people who are using Shamanism and magic to shape our culture are advertisers. Rather than try to wake people up, their Shamanism is used as an opiate to tranquilize people, to make people more manipulable. Their magic box of television, and by their magic words, their jingles can cause everyone in the country to be thinking the same words and have the same banal thoughts all at exactly the same moment. In all of magic there is an incredibly large linguistic component. The Bardic tradition of magic would place a bard as being much higher and more fearsome than a magician. A magician might curse you. That might make your hands lay funny or you might have a child born with a club foot. If a Bard were to place not a curse upon you, but a satire, then that could destroy you. If it was a clever satire, it might not just destroy you in the eyes of your associates; it would destroy you in the eyes of your family. It would destroy you in your own eyes. And if it was a finely worded and clever satire that might survive and be remembered for decades, even centuries. Then years after you were dead people still might be reading it and laughing at you and your wretchedness and your absurdity. Writers and people who had command of words were respected and feared as people who manipulated magic. In latter times I think that artists and writers have allowed themselves to be sold down the river. They have accepted the prevailing belief that art and writing are merely forms of entertainment. They’re not seen as transformative forces that can change a human being; that can change a society. They are seen as simple entertainment; things with which we can fill 20 minutes, half an hour, while we’re waiting to die. It’s not the job of the artist to give the audience what the audience wants. If the audience knew what they needed, then they wouldn’t be the audience. They would be the artists. It is the job of artists to give the audience what they need.

She stared into his eyes and announced, “A good-bye kiss.” It was at that Raid stopped dead. “What?” “Raiden, the gig is up,” she declared, and Raid closed his eyes. Jesus, how could the woman be so infuriating and so fucking cute all at once? He opened his eyes and asked, “The gig is up?” She leaned into him and hissed, “Yes.” Fuck, he wanted to kiss her. He also wanted to shake her. “Baby, it’s jig,” he corrected, and her head jerked, which made that mess of hair on her head jerk, which reminded him he wanted his hands in that hair. Then elsewhere. He needed to speed this shit up. “Sorry?” she asked, sounding confused, and he looked from her hair to her eyes and saw she was, in fact, confused. Yeah. Infuriating. And fucking cute. “The jig is up, not the gig,” he told her. Her eyes narrowed. “Seriously? You’re correcting my street lingo?” “Think that street lingo was the street lingo about eight decades ago, Hanna. So now it’s just lingo.

I was obligated to be nice. I couldn’t be the one Canadian who ruined the country’s reputation. How could I live with myself if I caused a Yankee to say, “I used to think Canadians were so nice, then I met that asshole, Steve”?

The Brit's face shares a heritage with a junkyard butt-sniffing mutt. It's a hard-earned moonshine mug, dotted with a hairy mole that looks like a rat's been gnawing on it. His beard looks like a white sneeze. The teeth are jagged and out of alignment, having opened quarts at Jiffy Quick Lube for half a decade.

It should be noted that Tress would have made an excellent philosopher. In fact, she had already determined that philosophy wasn’t as valuable as she’d assumed—something that takes most great philosophers at least three decades to realize.

That's what is so funny about life. And so scary. It gets in the way and then one day, you open your eyes and a decade has passed. Even more.

How funny, Sothy thinks, that decades after the camps, she lives here in Central California, as a business owner, with her American-born Cambodian daughters who have grown healthy and stubborn, and still, in this new life she has created, her hands have aged into her mother’s.

Ironically, the tattoo represents the opposite for me today. It reminds me that it's important to let yourself be vulnerable, to lose control and make a mistake. It reminds me that, as Whitman would say, I contain multitudes and I always will. I'm a level-one introvert who headlined Madison Square Garden—and was the first woman comic to do so. I'm the ‘overnight success’ who's worked her ass off every single waking moment for more than a decade. I used to shoplift the kind of clothing that people now request I wear to give them free publicity. I'm the SLUT or SKANK who's only had one one-night stand. I'm a ‘plus-size’ 6 on a good day, and a medium-size 10 on an even better day. I've suffered the identical indignities of slinging rib eyes for a living and hustling laughs for cash. I'm a strong, grown-ass woman who's been physically, sexually, and emotionally abused by men and women I trusted and cared about. I've broken hearts and had mine broken, too. Beautiful, ugly, funny, boring, smart or not, my vulnerability is my ultimate strength. There's nothing anyone can say about me that's more permanent, damaging, or hideous than the statement I have forever tattooed upon myself. I'm proud of this ability to laugh at myself—even if everyone can see my tears, just like they can see my dumb, senseless, whack, lame lower back tattoo.

I don’t have the heart to tell my sons that the older one gets, the less funny literature becomes—and they would refuse to believe me if I tried to explain that some people don’t think jokes even belong in proper books. I won’t bother breaking the news that, if they remain readers, they will insist on depressing themselves for about a decade of their lives, in a concerted search of gravitas through literature.

The funny thing about murder is that the act is often committed decades before the actual action. Something happens, and it leads, inexorably, to death many years later. A bad seed is planted. It’s like those old horror films from the Hammer studios, of the monster, not running, never running, but walking without pause, without thought or mercy, toward its victim. Murder is often like that. It starts way far off.

It’s… fine. There’s nothing you can do. But it’s nice to be around you. Like I haven’t lost a decade of my life.” And despite being a wreck himself after tonight’s events, Ros still flashed Shane a little smile and winked. “If it helps, I was eleven ten years ago, so we wouldn’t have been a match.

My Father, the Age I Am Now Time, which diminishes all things, increases understanding for the aging. —PLUTARCH My mother was the star: Smart and funny and warm, A patient listener and an easy laugher. My father was . . . an accountant: Not one to look up to, Ask advice from, Confide in. A man of few words. We faulted him—my mother, my sister, and I, For being this dutiful, uninspiring guy Who never missed a day of work, Or wondered what our dreams were. Just . . . an accountant. Decades later, My mother dead, my sister dead, My father, the age I am now, Planning ahead in his so-accountant way, Sent me, for my records, Copies of his will, his insurance policies, And assorted other documents, including The paid receipt for his cemetery plot, The paid receipt for his tombstone, And the words that he had chosen for his stone. And for the first time, shame on me, I saw my father: Our family’s prime provider, only provider. A barely-out-of-boyhood married man Working without a safety net through the Depression years That marked him forever, Terrified that maybe he wouldn’t make it, Terrified he would fall and drag us down with him, His only goal, his life-consuming goal, To put bread on our table, a roof over our head. With no time for anyone’s secrets, With no time for anyone’s dreams, He quietly earned the words that made me weep, The words that were carved, the following year, On his tombstone: HE TOOK CARE OF HIS FAMILY.

He'd been apprenticed to a joiner before the war, but that felt like decades ago: all he was good at now was killing people, which was discouraged.

One of the funny things about it, in retrospect, was its slowness, the lack of any dramatic Moment When It Had Happened. It was a little bit like the world’s adoption of the Internet, which had started with a few nerds and within decades become so ubiquitous that no person under thirty could really grasp what life had been like before you could Google everything.

He says, "It's just a hat." But it's not just a hat. It makes Jess think of racism and hatred and systemic inequality, and the Ku Klux Klan, and plantation-wedding Pinterest boards, and lynchings, and George Zimmerman, and the Central Park Five, and redlining, and gerrymandering and the Southern strategy, and decades of propaganda and Fox News and conservative radio, and rabid evangelicals, and rape and pillage and plunder and plutocracy and money in politics and the dumbing down of civil discourse and domestic terrorism and white nationalists and school shootings and the growing fear of a nonwhite, non-English-speaking majority and the slow death of the social safety net and conspiracy theory culture and the white working class and social atomism and reality television and fake news and the prison-industrial complex and celebrity culture and the girl in fourth grade who told Jess that since she--Jess--was "naturally unclean" she couldn't come over for birthday cake, and executive compensation, and mediocre white men, and the guy in college who sent around an article about how people who listen to Radiohead are smarter than people who listen to Missy Elliott and when Jess said "That's racist" he said "No,it's not," and of bigotry and small pox blankets and gross guys grabbing your butt on the subway, and slave auctions and Confederate monuments and Jim Crow and fire hoses and separate but equal and racist jokes that aren't funny and internet trolls and incels and golf courses that ban women and voter suppression and police brutality and crony capitalism and corporate corruption and innocent children, so many innocent children, and the Tea Party and Sarah Palin and birthers and flat-earthers and states' rights and disgusting porn and the prosperity gospel and the drunk football fans who made monkey sounds at Jess outside Memorial Stadium, even though it was her thirteenth birthday, and Josh--now it makes her think of Josh.

How to describe the things we see onscreen, experiences we have that are not ours? After so many hours (days, weeks, years) of watching TV—the morning talk shows, the daily soaps, the nightly news and then into prime time (The Bachelor, Game of Thrones, The Voice)—after a decade of studying the viral videos of late-night hosts and Funny or Die clips emailed by friends, how are we to tell the difference between them, if the experience of watching them is the same? To watch the Twin Towers fall and on the same device in the same room then watch a marathon of Everybody Loves Raymond. To Netflix an episode of The Care Bears with your children, and then later that night (after the kids are in bed) search for amateur couples who’ve filmed themselves breaking the laws of several states. To videoconference from your work computer with Jan and Michael from the Akron office (about the new time-sheet protocols), then click (against your better instincts) on an embedded link to a jihadi beheading video. How do we separate these things in our brains when the experience of watching them—sitting or standing before the screen, perhaps eating a bowl of cereal, either alone or with others, but, in any case, always with part of us still rooted in our own daily slog (distracted by deadlines, trying to decide what to wear on a date later)—is the same? Watching, by definition, is different from doing.

Drunk or not, Niall caught the insult. “Lass, I promise ye what hides under me kilt is anything but funny.” “You’re right. Anything that hasn’t bathed in decades is probably more likely to send a woman screaming. Or fainting from the smell.” “Why you little harpy.” Incredulous, he could only stare at her while she smirked. “Ah, have we reached the point of pet names? How sweet. I was thinking of dung beetle for you.

Then you're seventy-five, friends are dead, and you've replaced at least one major organ: you have to pee four times a night, and you can't go up a flight a stairs without being little winded -- and your're told you're in pretty good shape for your age. [....], in a decade you'll be eighty-five, and the only difference between you and a raisin will be that while you're both wrinkled and without a prostate, the raisin never had a prostate to begin with.

Konstance is old enough to understand that Father’s farm is unlike the other three: those spaces are tidy and systematic, while Farm 4 is a tangle of wires and sensors, grow-racks skewed at every angle, individual trays crowded with different species, creeping thyme beside radishes beside carrots. Long white hairs sprout from Father’s ears; he’s at least two decades older than the other children’s fathers; he’s always growing inedible flowers just to see what they look like and muttering in his funny accent about compost tea. He claims he can taste whether a lettuce has lived a happy life; he says one sniff of a properly grown chickpea can whisk him three zillion kilometers back to the fields who grew up in Scheria.

The actual sound of Central European art music, especially the chamber music, was a solid part of me from an early age but maybe not audible in my music until almost five decades later, when I began to compose sonatas and unaccompanied string pieces as well as quite a lot of piano music. Though I did write a few string quartets for the Kronos Quartet, and some symphonies besides, these works from my forties, fifties, and sixties didn’t owe that much to the past. Now that I’m in my seventies, my present music does. It’s funny how it happened this way, but there it is.

Ten years later, while I was innocently pole-dancing at a seedy gay bar in Michigan, I bumped into Andrea. I screamed over the loud music that I wanted to introduce her to my boyfriend, and she yelled back that she wanted to introduce me to her girlfriend. Funny how all things work out, if you just give them a decade.

Now, if anyone in this room or the world finds those two words decadent, obscene, immoral, amoral, asexual, the words 'to come' really make you feel uncomfortable, if you think I'm rank for saying it to you, you the beholder think it's rank for listening to it, you probably can't come. And then you're of no use, because that's the purpose of life, to re-create it.

I think I fell in love with you,' Rhys murmured, stroking a finger down my arm, 'the moment I realised you were cleaving those bones to make a trap for the Middengard Wyrm. Or maybe the moment you flipped me off for mocking you. It reminded me so much of Cassian. For the first time in decades, I wanted to laugh.' 'You fell in love with me,' I said flatly, 'because I reminded you of your friend?' He flicked my nose. 'I fell in love with you, smartass, because you were one of us- because you weren't afraid of me, and you decided to end your spectacular victory by throwing that piece of bone at Amarantha like a javelin. I felt Cassian's spirit beside me in that moment, and could have sworn I heard him say, "if you don't marry her, you stupid prick, I will.

Cormag caught his hand and pulled him back until they were facing each other. “I think you're amazing,” he said, blurting the words out. Lachlan smiled, completely shocked and thrilled by how captivating he found him. He had never thought this could happen to him, that he would be attracted to another boy. He thought he knew himself so well. “I think you're smart, sexy, funny as hell. You have hidden depths, Lachlan. You only need the right person to coax you out of your protective shell,” he claimed. “Are you the right person?” Lachlan wondered, as he took a half step forward. Cormag took a deep breath and brushed at a strand of hair that was sticking out at a funny angle from behind the top of his ear. He tugged at his short hair every time he talked about his recent break up. He was such a dork.

What I remember most clearly is how it felt. I’d just finished painting a red fire engine-like the one I often walked past near my grandparents’ house. Suddenly the teachers, whose names I've long forgotten, closed in on my desk. They seemed unusually impressed, and my still dripping fire engine was immediately and ceremoniously pinned up. I don’t know what they might have said, but their unexpected attention and having something I’d made given a place of honor on the wall created an overwhelming and totally unfamiliar sense of pride inside me. I loved that feeling, and I wanted to feel it again and again. That desire, I suppose, was the beginning of my career. I have no idea where my fire engine painting ended up, but I never forgot the basic layout. Several decades later, it served as the inspiration for this sketch for an illustration in a book called Why the chicken crossed the Road.

I was very moved by the Gauguin carvings. But then out of nowhere there was Van Gogh. Three self-portraits. I walked up to one; it was protected with glass. I could see my reflection. And I thought: Oh my God.” Less shakes his head, and his eyes widen as he relives the moment. “I look just like Van Gogh.” Javier laughs, his hand to his smile. “Before the ear, I think.” “I thought, I’ve gone crazy,” Less goes on. “But…I’ve already outlived him by over a decade!” Javier tilts his head, a cocker Spaniard. “Arthur, how old are you?” Deep breath. “I’m forty-nine.” Javier moves closer to peer at him; he smells of cigarettes and vanilla, like Less’s grandmother. “How funny. I am also forty-nine.” “No,” Less says, truly bewildered. There is not a line on Javier’s face. “I thought you were midthirties.” “That is a lie. But it is a nice lie. And you do not look close to fifty.” Less smiles. “My birthday is in one week.” “Strange to be almost fifty, no? I feel like I just understood how to be young.” “Yes! It’s like the last day in a foreign country. You finally figure out where to get coffee, and drinks, and a good steak. And then you have to leave. And you won’t ever be back.

Padmé insists: “There’s always a choice.” Does Anakin hear the echo of her voice decades later, when he decides to save their son from the Emperor? I like to think so. “YOU GET MANY OPPORTUNITIES TO KEEP YOUR EYES OPEN” Here’s Leia, speaking of Han’s apparent desertion of the rebellion in A New Hope: “A man must follow his own path. No one can choose it for him.” Here’s Obi-Wan to Luke, again in A New Hope: “Then you must do what you think is right, of course.” Here are Lucas’s own words: “Life sends you down funny paths. And you get many opportunities to keep your eyes open.” He was talking about his own life, but he might as well have been talking about Star Wars and the characters who populate it.

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

I’m the living dead. I feel no connection to any other human. I have no friends and I don’t really care much about my family any longer. I feel no love for them. I can feel no joy. I’m incapable of feeling physical pleasure. There’s nothing to ever look forward to as a result. I don’t miss anyone or anything. I eat because I feel hunger pangs, but no food tastes like anything I like. I wear a mask when I’m with other people but it’s been slipping lately. I can’t find the energy to hide the heavy weight of survival and its effect on me. I’m exhausted all the time from the effort of just making it through the day. This depression has made a mockery of my memory. It’s in tatters. I have no good memories to sustain me. My past is gone. My present is horrid. My future looks like more of the same. In a way, I’m a man without time. Certainly, there’s no meaning in my life. What meaning can there be without even a millisecond of joy? Ah, scratch that. Let’s even put aside joy and shoot for lower. How about a moment of being content? Nope. Not a chance. I see other people, normal people, who can enjoy themselves. I hear people laughing at something on TV. It makes me cock my head and wonder what that’s like. I’m sure at sometime in my past, I had to have had a wonderful belly laugh. I must have laughed so hard once or twice that my face hurt. Those memories are gone though. Now, the whole concept of “funny” is dead. I stopped going to movies a long time ago. Sitting in a theater crowded with people, every one of them having a better time than you, is incredibly damaging. I wasn’t able to focus for that long anyway. Probably for the best. Sometimes I fear the thought of being normal again. I think I wouldn’t know how to act. How would I handle being able to feel? Gosh it would be nice to feel again. Anything but this terrible, suffocating pain. The sorrow and the misery is so visceral, I find myself clenching my jaw. It physically hurts me. Then I realize that it’s silly to worry about that. You see, in spite of all the meds, the ketamine infusions and other treatments, I’m not getting better. I’m getting worse. I was diagnosed 7 years ago but I’m sure I was suffering for longer. Of course, I can’t remember that, but depression is something that crept up on me. It’s silent and oppressive. I don’t even remember what made me think about going to see someone. But I did and it was a pretty clear diagnosis. So, now what? I keep waking up every morning unfortunately. I don’t fear death any more. That’s for sure. I’ve made some money for the couple of decades I’ve been working and put it away in retirement accounts. I think about how if I was dead that others I once cared for would get that money. Maybe it could at least help them. I don’t know that I’ll ever need it. Even if I don’t end it myself, depression takes a toll on the body. My life expectancy is estimated to be 14 years lower as a result according to the NIH. It won’t be fast enough though. I’m just an empty biological machine that doesn’t know that my soul is gone. My humanity is no more

There were three great comedians in my formative years—Bill Cosby, Bill Murray, and Richard Pryor—and they wrecked comedy for a generation. How? By never saying anything funny. You can quote a Steve Martin joke, or a Rodney Dangerfield line, but Pryor, Cosby, and Murray? The things they said were funny only when they said them. In Cosby’s case, it didn’t even need to be sentences: “The thing of the thing puts the milk in the toast, and ha, ha, ha!” It was gibberish and America loved it. The problem was that they inspired a generation of comedians who tried coasting on personality—they were all attitude and no jokes. It was also a time when comedy stars didn’t seem to care. Bill Murray made some lousy movies; Richard Pryor and Eddie Murphy made even more; and any script that was too lame for these guys, Chevy Chase made. These were smart people—they had to know how bad these films were, but they just grabbed a paycheck and did them. Most of these comic actors started as writers—they could have written their own scripts, but they rarely bothered. Then, at the end of a decade of lazy comedy and half-baked material, The Simpsons came along. We cared about jokes, and we worked endless hours to cram as many into a show as possible. I’m not sure we can take all the credit, but TV and movies started trying harder. Jokes were back. Shows like 30 Rock and Arrested Development demanded that you pay attention. These days, comedy stars like Seth Rogen, Amy Schumer, Kristen Wiig, Melissa McCarthy, and Jonah Hill actually write the comedies they star in.

I see many so-called conservative commentators, including some faith leaders, focusing on favorable policy initiatives or court appointments to justify their acceptance of this damage, while de-emphasizing the impact of this president on basic norms and ethics. That strikes me as both hypocritical and wrong. The hypocrisy is evident if you simply switch the names and imagine that a President Hillary Clinton had conducted herself in a similar fashion in office. I've said this earlier but it's worth repeating: close your eyes and imagine these same voices if President Hillary Clinton had told the FBI director, 'I hope you will let it go,' about the investigation of a senior aide, or told casual, easily disprovable lies nearly every day and then demanded we believe them. The hypocrisy is so thick as to be almost darkly funny. I say this as someone who has worked in law enforcement for most of my life, and served presidents of both parties. What is happening now is not normal. It is not fake news. It is not okay. Whatever your politics, it is wrong to dismiss the damage to the norms and traditions that have guided the presidency and our public life for decades or, in many cases, since the republic was founded. It is also wrong to stand idly by, or worse, to stay silent when you know better, while a president so brazenly seeks to undermine public confidence in law enforcement institutions that were established to keep our leaders in check...without these checks on our leaders, without those institutions vigorously standing against abuses of power, our country cannot sustain itself as a functioning democracy. I know there are men and women of good conscience in the United States Congress on both sides of the aisle who understand this. But not enough of them are speaking out. They must ask themselves to what, or to whom, they hold a higher loyalty: to partisan interests or to the pillars of democracy? Their silence is complicity - it is a choice - and somewhere deep down they must know that. Policies come and go. Supreme Court justices come and go. But the core of our nation is our commitment to a set of shared values that began with George Washington - to restraint and integrity and balance and transparency and truth. If that slides away from us, only a fool would be consoled by a tax cut or different immigration policy.

That was the whole trouble with police work. You come plunging in. a jagged Stone Age knife, to probe the delicate tissues of people's relationships, and of course you destroy far more than you discover. And even what you discover will never be the same as it was before you came; the nubbly scars of your passage will remain. At the very least. you have asked questions that expose to the destroying air fibers that can only exist and fulfill their function in coddling darkness. Cousin Amy, now, mousing about in back passages or trilling with feverish shyness at sherry parties—was she really made all the way through of dust and fluff and unused ends of cotton and rusty needles and unmatching buttons and all the detritus at the bottom of God's sewing basket? Or did He put a machine in there to tick away and keep her will stern and her back straight as she picks out of a vase of brown-at-the-edges dahlias the few blooms that have another day's life in them? Or another machine, one of His chemistry sets, that slowly mixes itself into an apparently uncaused explosion, poof!, and there the survivors are sitting covered with plaster dust among the rubble of their lives. It's always been the explosion by the time the police come stamping in with ignorant heels on the last unbroken bit of Bristol glass; with luck they can trace the explosion back to harmless little Amy, but as to what set her off—what were the ingredients of the chemistry set and what joggled them together—it was like trying to reconstruct a civilization from three broken pots and a seven-inch lump of baked clay which might, if you looked at its swellings and hollows the right way, have been the Great Earth Mother. What's more. people who've always lived together think that they are still the same—oh, older of course and a bit more snappish, but underneath still the same laughing lad of thirty years gone by. "My Jim couldn't have done that." they say. "I know him. Course he's been a bit depressed lately, funny like. but he sometimes goes that way for a bit and then it passes off. But setting fire to the lingerie department at the Army and Navy, Inspector—such a thought wouldn't enter into my Jim's head. I know him." Tears diminishing into hiccuping snivels as doubt spreads like a coffee stain across the threadbare warp of decades. A different Jim? Different as a Martian, growing inside the ever-shedding skin? A whole lot of different Jims. a new one every seven years? "Course not. I'm the same. aren't I, same as I always was—that holiday we took hiking in the Peak District in August thirty-eight—the same inside?" Pibble sighed and shook himself. You couldn't build a court case out of delicate tissues. Facts were the one foundation.

It's funny, you know. We're free. We make choices. We weigh things in our minds, consider everything carefully, use all the tools of logic and education. And in the end, what we mostly do is what we have no choice but to do. Makes you think, why bother? But you bother because you do, that's why. Because you're a DNA-brand computer running Childhood 1.0 software. They update the software but the changes are always just around the edges. You have the brain you have, the intelligence, the talents, the strengths and weaknesses you have, from the moment they take you out of the box and throw away the Styrofoam padding. But you have the fears you picked up along the way. The terrors of age four or six or eight are never suspended, just layered over. The dread I'd felt so recently, a dread that should be so much greater because the facts had been so much more horrible, still could not diminish the impact of memories that had been laid down long years before. It's that way all through life, I guess. I have a relative who says she still gets depressed every September because in the back of her mind it's time for school to start again. She's my great-aunt. The woman is sixty-seven and still bumming over the first day of school five-plus decades ago. It's sad in a way because the pleasures of life get old and dated fast. The teenage me doesn't get the jolt the six-year-old me got from a package of Pop Rocks. The me I've become doesn't rush at the memories of the day I skated down a parking ramp however many years ago. Pleasure fades, gets old, gets thrown out with last year's fad. Fear, guilt, all that stuff stays fresh. Maybe that's why people get so enraged when someone does something to a kid. Hurt a kid and he hurts forever. Maybe an adult can shake it off. Maybe. But with a kid, you hurt them and it turns them, shapes them, becomes part of the deep, underlying software of their lives. No delete. I don't know. I don't know much. I feel like I know less all the time. Rate I'm going, by the time I'm twenty-one I won't know a damned thing. But still I was me. Had no choice, I guess. I don't know, maybe that's bull and I was just feeling sorry for myself. But, bottom line, I dried my eyes, and I pushed my dirty, greasy hair back off my face, and I started off down the road again because whatever I was, whoever I was, however messed up I might be, I wasn't leaving April behind. Maybe it was all an act programmed into me from the get-go, or maybe it grew up out of some deep-buried fear, I mean maybe at some level I was really just as pathetic as Senna thought I was. Maybe I was a fake. Whatever. Didn't matter. I was going back to the damned dragon, and then I was getting April out, and everything and everyone else could go screw themselves. One good thing: For now at least, I was done being scared.

So Japan is allied with Germany and they’re like “Sweet the rest of the world already hates us let’s take their land!” So they start invading China and Malaysia and the Philippines and just whatever else but then they’re like “Hmm what if America tries to stop us? Ooh! Let’s surprise attack Hawaii!” So that’s exactly what they do. The attack is very successful but only in a strictly technical sense. To put it in perspective, let’s try a metaphor. Let’s say you’re having a barbecue but you don’t want to get stung by any bees so you find your local beehive and just go crazy on it with a baseball bat. Make sense? THEN YOU MUST BE JAPAN IN THE ’40s. WHO ELSE WOULD EVER DO THIS? So the U.S. swarms on Japan, obviously but that’s where our bee metaphor breaks down because while bees can sting you they cannot put you in concentration camps (or at least, I haven’t met any bees that can do that). Yeah, after that surprise attack on Pearl Harbor everybody on the West Coast is like “OMG WE’RE AT WAR WITH JAPAN AND THERE ARE JAPANESE DUDES LIVING ALLLL AROUND US.” I mean, they already banned Japanese immigration like a decade before but there are still Japanese dudes all over the coast and what’s more those Japanese dudes are living right next door to all the important aircraft factories and landing strips and shipyards and farmland and forests and bridges almost as if those types of things are EVERYWHERE and thus impossible not to live next door to. Whatever, it’s pretty suspicious. Now, at this point, nothing has been sabotaged and some people think that means they’re safe. But not military geniuses like Earl Warren who points out that the only reason there’s been no sabotage is that the Japanese are waiting for their moment and the fact that there has been no sabotage yet is ALL THE PROOF WE NEED to determine that sabotage is being planned. Frank Roosevelt hears this and he’s like “That’s some pretty shaky logic but I really don’t like Japanese people. Okay, go ahead.” So he passes an executive order that just says “Any enemy ex-patriots can be kicked out of any war zone I designate. P.S.: California, Oregon, and Washington are war zones have fun with that.” So they kick all the Japanese off the coast forcing them to sell everything they own but people are still not satisfied. They’re like “Those guys look funny! We can’t have funny-looking dudes roaming around this is wartime! We gotta lock ’em up.” And FDR is like “Okay, sure.” So they herd all the Japanese into big camps where they are concentrated in large numbers like a hundred and ten thousand people total and then the military is like “Okay, guys we will let you go if you fill out this loyalty questionnaire that says you love the United States and are totally down to be in our army” and some dudes are like “Sweet, free release!” but some dudes are like “Seriously? You just put me in jail for being Asian. This country is just one giant asshole and it’s squatting directly over my head.” And the military is like “Ooh, sorry to hear that buddy looks like you’re gonna stay here for the whole war. Meanwhile your friends get to go fight and die FOR FREEDOM.

My friend, who was as funny and talented as me but chose not to be an actor, was talking about how he was seeing my face everywhere. He went on and one about how weird that was. He pointed out that people were really starting to know my name and asked me if I "could believe it." "Yes," I said. I had worked for over a decade to get to this moment.

Don’t behave in a funny manner. We must have Calcutta in India.

own. Save a parrot’s tree. Save ten. Without our help, without needed legislative protection and worldwide consciousness-raising on their behalf, parrots will be lost in short years to come. It is fitting to end this book with this succinct summation from Wayne Pacelle, president of the Humane Society of the United States:   We are at an odd moment in history. There are more people in this country sensitized to animal protection issues than ever before. The Humane Society of the United States alone has 8 million members, and in addition, there are more than 5,000 other groups devoted to animal protection. At the same time, there are more animals being harmed than ever before—in industrial agriculture, research and testing, and the trade in wild animals. It is pitiful that our society still condones keeping millions of parrots and other wild birds as pets—wild animals that should be free to fly and instead are languishing in cages, with more being bred every day. It’s an issue of supply and demand and it’s also an issue of right and wrong. Animals suffer in confinement, and we have a moral obligation to spare them from needless suffering. Every person can make a difference every day for animals by making compassionate choices in the marketplace: don’t buy wild animals as pets, whether they are caught from the wild or bred in captivity. If we spare the life of just one animal, it’s a 100% positive impact for that creature. If we can solve the larger bird trade problem, it will be 100% positive for all parrots and other wild birds in the U.S. and beyond our borders. I believe we will look back in 50 -75 years and say “How could we as a society countenance things like the decades long imprisonment of extraordinarily intelligent animals like parrots?” Acknowledgments For this work, which took more than two and a half years to research and write, I amassed thousands of documents and conducted several hundred interviews with leading scientists, environmentalists, paleontologists, ecological economists, conservationists, global warming experts, federal law enforcement officers, animal control officers, avian researchers, avian rescuers, veterinarians, breeders, pet bird owners, bird clubs, pet bird industry executives and employees, sanctuaries and welfare organizations, legislators, and officials with the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES), and other sources in the United States and around the world.

It’s funny, or tragic, really, how an ordinary act like helping someone with their homework could be the inadvertent trigger for almost a decade of silent suffering.

The reason for the peculiar name could be found in the whimsical sense of humor of the early colonists who arrived on Deanna several decades in the past and found very little at all there to laugh at. Obsidian Crows might seem funny at first, unless you just happened to ride over one with your Jeepo five miles out of town and didn’t have a spare tire. Although there was a reasonable expectation of hitting one of these diminutive brutes on the roads, this did not happen nearly as often as you might think.

And it’s funny. While I was locked up, I would call the father and he was going on with his life. He was having his summer and was, you know, worried about whether he would get a new tape or album. People had gossiped about him but they were still allowed to hang out with him. Before I left home, nobody was allowed to be around me. Occasionally,

No, he walks funny because he only has one leg.” “His leg fell off because he ate my fudge?!” Raj looked to the heavens again and put his hands together in prayer. “Lord, please have mercy on my soul! I am not a bad man. I just use best-before dates as a very rough guide, rounding them up to the nearest decade!

The popular culture has also lowered the threshold on public shaming rituals. It is not only suppressing certain speech on college campuses, but making public denunciation of certain classes of people into a form of popular entertainment. The masters of the funny cheap shot are comedians Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, who routinely and cleverly skewer conservatives as stupid bigots. After the Supreme Court ruling on same-sex marriage, for example, Stewart asked what was wrong with opponents of same-sex marriage, as if a view held for thousands of years, even not very long ago by both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, were incomprehensible. The use of humor is a cultural trick. It provides a cultural permission slip to be nasty because, or so the assumption goes, the enemies of "the people" are so unattractive that they deserve whatever Stewart or Colbert throws at them. When Stewart compares Senator Ted Cruz to the Harry Potter character Voldemort, he knows we will then think of Cruz as the book's author describes Voldemort, "a raging psychopath, devoid of the normal human responses to other people's suffering". It may seem futile to complain about the crudeness of American mass culture. It has been around for decades, and it is not about to change anytime soon. The thin line that exists these days between politics and entertainment (witness the rise of Donald Trump) is undoubtedly coarsening our politics. It is becoming more culturally acceptable to split the world into us-versus-them schemata and to indulge in all sorts of antisocial and illiberal fantasies about crushing one's enemies. Only a few decades ago most liberals had a different idea of tolerance. Most would explain it with some variation of Evelyn Beatrice Hall's line about Voltaire's philosophy of free speech: "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it". That is no longer the case. It is now deemed necessary, indeed even noble, to be intolerant in the cause of tolerance. Any remark or viewpoint that liberals believe is critical of minorities is by definition intolerant. A liberal critique of conservatives or religious people, on the other hand, is, again by definition, incapable of being intolerant. It is a willful double standard. For liberals, intolerance is a one-way street leading straight to conservatism.

Hello, Cassie,” Harry said. His voice was stiff. He shifted in his chair. “How’ve you been, Harry?” His clear blue eyes looked at her in a funny way. This wasn’t like him, but it had been nearly two decades. People change. She started to wonder if coming here had been a mistake.

as it did. The crest said "PNS Farnese" and that always irritated him. After all, the battlecruiser wasn't a Navy ship; she belonged to State Security, and her designation should reflect that. Except that the Navy's position was that she was only a Navy ship which was assigned to StateSec, as if the true guardians of the People's safety had no right to put on the airs of "real" warriors. Of course, Thornegrave conceded, hanging SSS on the front of a ship's name would probably look a little funny, but it's the principle of the thing! The Navy and the Marines represent vestigial holdovers from the decadent elitism of the Old Regime. It's past time that State Security absorbed them both into a single organization whose loyalty to the People and State can be absolutely relied upon. The people's commissioners are a move in the right direction, but there's still too much room for recidivists to secretly sabotage the war and the Revolution alike. Surely Citizen Secretary Saint-Just and Citizen Chairman Pierre realize that, don't they? No doubt they did, he told himself once more

When I was a young and aspiring speaker, I sought mentorship from a man who had been a Dale Carnegie trainer for decades. Eagerly wanting to know how to improve my stage presence and build my career, I contacted Dr. Joe Carnley in Destin, Florida and invited him out to lunch. After we placed our order at the Harbor Docks Restaurant, he dove right in and gave me some of the best advice of my life. He said, “Susan, you have to make them laugh! When they leave your presentations, you want them to feel better and leave happier than when they came in. Help them enjoy your time together.” He continued to describe the magical power that humor has over the human spirit. When we craft humor into our speeches, we can take our audiences on a journey they will never forget. Immediately after our delightful lunch ended, I drove straight to a Books-a-Million store and headed for the humor section. Since I was not a particularly funny person, I needed all the help I could get. For over an hour I stood there reading titles, flipping through funny books, and enjoying outrageous belly laughs, giggles, and snorts. People were staring, and probably thinking, “I want what she is having!” The humor section was one of the smallest in the entire bookstore, but it may well have been the most important. When I turned around, I noticed the opposite aisle was the “Self-Improvement” section. It ran half the length of the store and displayed hundreds of books. At that cathartic moment, I had a huge "Ah-Ha" moment.

He wasn’t sure how a teenager recently freed from a decade’s imprisonment in an inferno under a quarantined city had a more active social life than he did, though considering his own circle, he supposed he shouldn’t be surprised.

This jet was owned and operated by the CIA, who appeared to have bought it secondhand, if not third- or fourthhand, possibly from someone who had used it to transport farm animals. It was quite old as private jets went, and it smelled funny. It was also much smaller than I’d expected, with only six seats in the cabin, a tiny cockpit in the front, and an even tinier bathroom at the back that reeked of septic fumes. (The cockpit was concealed behind a door that had been closed since shortly before takeoff.) The furnishings were several decades out of date. To Murray’s great disappointment, the only entertainment system was an eight-track-tape player, and there did not appear to be any tapes for it, as none had been manufactured since the 1980s. The plane rattled constantly as it flew, even when there was no turbulence, giving the unsettling impression that the wings might fall off at any moment.

Over the past decade, its Dialogues Between Neuroscience and Society series has featured such luminaries as the Dalai Lama, actress Glenn Close, dancer Mark Morris, and economist Robert Shiller. At the 2006 meeting in Atlanta, Frank Gehry was invited to discuss the relationship between architecture and neuroscience. After the talk, an audience member (actually it was me) asked him, “Mr. Gehry, how do you create?” His answer was both intuitive and funny: “There is a gear [in my brain] that turns and lights a light bulb and turns a something and energizes this hand, and it picks up a pen and intuitively gets a piece of white paper and starts jiggling and wriggling and makes a sketch. And the sketch somehow relates to all the stuff I took in.”4 Gehry’s answer is a perfect metaphoric formulation of the evolving neuronal assembly trajectory concept, the idea that the activity of a group of neurons is somehow ignited in the brain, which passes its content to another ensemble (from “gear to light bulb”), and the second ensemble to a third, and so forth until a muscular action or thought is produced. Creating ideas is that simple. To support cognitive operations effectively, the brain should self-generate large quantities of cell assembly sequences.

The funny thing about murder is that the act is often committed decades before the actual action.

These stunning global improvements have already been tested, vetted and proven effective: 1. To feed the world, easily. Yet grains waste in warehouses to ensure “Profitable Supply and Demand Ratios.” 2. To power the world endlessly, freely, without pollution or waste. Yet basic subsidies are given to polluting, exploiting, un-replenishable resources to ensure power remains in the hands of the controllers. 3. To end all armed conflict and usher in an era of global prosperity. Yet childish leaders propagate “The Demonic Other” to ensure they remain in power. 4. To improve global quality of life by a factor of 3x to 8x in under a decade. Yet it is suppressed to ensure that the elite remain an Elite and separate ruling class. 5. To end drug addictions and social inequality. Yet drugs are industriously pumped into ghettos to breed despair and ensure that ordinary people remain in conflict with each other. 6. To radically reduce crime worldwide. Yet again, suppressed to ensure the reign of an elite prison complex. 7. To reduce the work week by over 50%. Suppressed to occupy the masses with trifling banality. 8. To globally stabilize and secure the world’s clean drinking water supply, EASILY. Suppressed to retain control over the world’s most impoverished. All of these “Trigger Ready Solutions” are suppressed by humans to ensure their power and control over other Humans. They argue about currency manipulation while poisoning the collective air and water to a level where the oceans have little left to give. Absolving themselves of all crimes, preaching kindness and forgiveness, they race into battle against the OTHER while denouncing greed and indoctrinating youth to find it funny to say, “He who dies with the most toys wins.

The golden-haired High Fae's mask gleamed with the last rays of the afternoon sunshine. 'Before you ask again: the food is safe for you to eat.' He pointed to the chair at the other end of the table. No sign of his claws. When I didn't move, he sighed sharply. 'What do you want, then?' I said nothing. To eat, flee, save my family. Lucien drawled from his seat along the length of the table. 'I told you so, Tamlin.' He flicked a glance toward his friend. 'Your skills with females have definitely become rusty in recent decades.

Here’s something self-help books won’t often tell you… growth is lonely. That’s why so many people become stuck… and stay stuck. It takes constant commitment, day in and day out to see real growth in your life. When I was building Spanx, I spent years, almost a decade, mostly alone. I took myself out to dinner alone, I went to department stores to sell Spanx alone, I even went to hibachi … alone! My social life was almost non-existent. But the alternative wasn’t an option. Before that I was living at home with my mom, selling fax machines door to door and trying to do standup comedy (but I wasn’t that funny). Sure, I had friends, went out all the time and dated a lot. But it got old… fast. Getting your shit together comes with a price. And not many people are willing to pay it. But if you are, it’s one of the greatest investments you will ever make.

today i saw myself for the first time when i dusted off the mirror of my mind and the woman looking back took my breath away […] i touched my face and my reflection touched the woman of my dreams all her gorgeous smirking back at me my knees surrendered to the earth as i wept and sighed at how i’d gone my whole life being myself but not seeing myself spent decades living inside my body never left it once yet managed to miss all its miracles isn’t it funny how you can occupy a space without being in touch with it how it took so long for me to open the eyes of my eyes embrace the heart of my heart kiss the soles of my swollen feet and hear them whisper thank you thank you thank you for noticing

Isn’t it a funny feeling; guilt And the things we feel it for I’m not sure which is harder; being unloved Or being taught love is what it isn’t But both leave you robbed And angry. “ It took me two decades to understand, You never knew how; Yours came with strings of compliance attached And obligatory love is a piss poor excuse for it. “ I left, I left And still the guilt came; That unwanted visitor, who refuses to leave.

Your hypocritic oath is a real pain in the tail sometimes, Doc.” “Hippocratic, Kino. Please stop referring to it as otherwise. It’s been decades, and the joke isn’t funny.

What happened anyway?” His low voice always sounds so cocky and patronizing. “I only caught the tail end. You know, where you clocked one of them.” “Nothin’.” “Was it the gay thing?” I gasp. “Yes. Because anytime I get into a fight, it’s because my masculinity is threatened by homophobic twatfaces.” “Then what was it? The game? You let fans get to you over a goddamn game?” “If you’d lost tonight, how would you take it?” “Grow up, man. We’ve all lost games before. We’ve all been kicked out of the playoffs. Well, you know, except Buffalo, who haven’t seen the playoffs in over a decade.” I laugh and then hate myself for it. “Where are you going?” Hayes asks. “Gay bar. Because of all my gayness that’s gay, and that’s all I’m known for. Apparently.

today i saw myself for the first time when i dusted off the mirror of my mind and the woman looking back took my breath away who was this beautiful beastling this extra-celestial earthling i touched my face and my reflection touched the woman of my dreams all her gorgeous smirking back at me my knees surrendered to the earth as i wept and sighed at how i’d gone my whole life being myself but not seeing myself spent decades living inside my body never left it once yet managed to miss all its miracles isn’t it funny how you can occupy a space without being in touch with it how it took so long for me to open the eyes of my eyes embrace the heart of my heart kiss the soles of my swollen feet and hear them whisper thank you thank you thank you for noticing

That’s the funny thing about stories — like all living things, they need to adapt and evolve in order to survive in their environment. Consider for a second that you can drop the same exact species into ten different ecosystems and within a few dozen generations, they could be hardly recognizable from their original form or to each other. The same is true for stories. They mutate to fit the cognitive conditions of each person’s specific mental habitat. That’s why a group of people can experience the same exact event, and within a decade or two, the story of that event can be wildly different as told by each person who experienced it.

I need to find out if they can defend their material without being defensive about it. I don’t want to work with someone who says, “No, it’s funny, do it.” If I make suggestions that they don’t think will improve the script and they can articulate why, I will never be upset by it. If they can’t explain why, I won’t work with them.

Both Bob and Suzanne would ask me questions during shoots, and I’d answer them. I impressed them because I was right more than I was wrong. I learned another valuable lesson: Take a stand. I could say, “Bob, do this; I think it’s going to be funny.” If an actor ever asks you which version of a take will be funnier, don’t say, “I don’t care.” Pick one. Pick one even if you don’t know. If you’re wrong, say, “Jesus! I was wrong. Let’s try the other one.” The minute you equivocate or are perceived as someone who doesn’t know what they’re doing, no actor will walk the comedic plank or take any risks for you.

The melon of belly expanding, contracting. Nowadays babies were always put to sleep on their backs; in facedown position they would succumb to SIDS, if the pediatricians were to be believed. This “back-is-best” propaganda was news to Willa, whose kids were born in the decade when babies always had to be put to sleep on their tummies, lest they die of SIDS. The absolutism of these Cheshire-cat dogmas seemed funny, or maybe valiant. Probably nobody knew why little lives sometimes evaporated like smoke, but all guardians wanted to be given the amulet of prevention. And they didn’t want “maybe.

When he is dissected after his death," a disrespectful interpreter said of a foreign dignitary, "a million predicates will be found in his stomach: those he swallowed in the past decades without saying them.

But Americans have also exercised an additional option for decades: make fun of something. The Constitution does not guarantee Americans the right to satirize or parody, but it does guarantee freedom of expression and the right to bear arms. When those last two items are put together and sprinkled with a heavy dose of wit, Americans have created a form of humor that both ennobles and destroys its subject at the same time.

Then, with great relish, Lyndon Johnson spun a Texas tale. It was his pièce de résistance, the crescendo of an expansive, four-hour performance. “When I got [Kennedy] in the Oval Office,” Johnson began, “and told him it would be ‘inadvisable’ for him to be on the ticket as the Vice President-nominee, his face changed, and he started to swallow. He looked sick. His adam’s apple bounded up and down like a yo-yo.” For effect, the president gulped, audibly, at the reporters. He mimicked Bobby’s “funny voice” and proceeded to tell, in lavish detail and with evident delight, his version of the meeting. Finally, LBJ ran down a list of possible running mates and explained the ways each would hurt his chances. “In other words,” recalled Folliard, “he would do better in the November election if he had no running mate. This left Wicker, Kiker and me baffled—and that is just what the man evidently wanted us to be.” Within days Johnson’s story was the talk of Washington. His portrait of RFK as a “stunned semi-idiot” left columnist Joseph Alsop and other Washington insiders feeling rather stunned themselves. It was not long before the gossip found its way to Bobby Kennedy, who stormed back to the White House and accused the president of mistruths and a violation of trust. I knew the meeting was taped, he said, but I never expected this. Wasn’t our talk a matter of confidence? Aren’t we honorable men? LBJ was unrepentant: I’ve revealed nothing, he assured Kennedy, gesturing wanly at an empty page in his appointment book. He promised to check his notes for any conversations that might have slipped his mind. Bobby stalked out, seething, and caught a plane to Hyannis Port. “He tells so many lies,” Kennedy said of Johnson the next week, echoing the words of George Reedy, “that he convinces himself after a while he’s telling the truth. He just doesn’t recognize truth or falsehood.

In my mind, there was nothing better than a cupcake with a funny little twist. I liked bold pairings of fresh ingredients slathered high with decadent, old-fashioned waves of icing- organic pear and chai tea cake topped with vanilla-ginger buttercream was one of my current favorites. But Lolly St. Clair had more classic taste, and so I'd made an array of delicately flavored Meyer lemon, vanilla, and mocha cupcakes for the benefit.

No matter how highly placed they were, they were still officials, their views were well established and well known, famous. It could have rained frogs over Tan Son Nhut and they wouldn’t have been upset; Cam Ranh Bay could have dropped into the South China Sea and they would have found some way to make it sound good for you; the Bo Doi Division (Ho’s Own) could have marched by the American embassy and they would have characterized it as “desperate”—what did even the reporters closest to the Mission Council ever find to write about when they’d finished their interviews? (My own interview with General Westmoreland had been hopelessly awkward. He’d noticed that I was accredited to Esquire and asked me if I planned to be doing “humoristical” pieces. Beyond that, very little was really said. I came away feeling as though I’d just had a conversation with a man who touches a chair and says, “This is a chair,” points to a desk and says, “This is a desk.” I couldn’t think of anything to ask him, and the interview didn’t happen.) I honestly wanted to know what the form was for those interviews, but some of the reporters I’d ask would get very officious, saying something about “Command postures,” and look at me as though I was insane. It was probably the kind of look that I gave one of them when he asked me once what I found to talk about with the grunts all the time, expecting me to confide (I think) that I found them as boring as he did. And just-like-in-the-movies, there were a lot of correspondents who did their work, met their deadlines, filled the most preposterous assignments the best they could and withdrew, watching the war and all its hideous secrets, earning their cynicism the hard way and turning their self-contempt back out again in laughter. If New York wanted to know how the troops felt about the assassination of Robert Kennedy, they’d go out and get it. (“Would you have voted for him?” “Yeah, he was a real good man, a real good man. He was, uh, young.” “Who will you vote for now?” “Wallace, I guess.”) They’d even gather troop reflections on the choice of Paris as the site of the peace talks. (“Paris? I dunno, sure, why not? I mean, they ain’t gonna hold ’em in Hanoi, now are they?”), but they’d know how funny that was, how wasteful, how profane. They knew that, no matter how honestly they worked, their best work would somehow be lost in the wash of news, all the facts, all the Vietnam stories. Conventional journalism could no more reveal this war than conventional firepower could win it, all it could do was take the most profound event of the American decade and turn it into a communications pudding, taking its most obvious, undeniable history and making it into a secret history. And the very best correspondents knew even more than that.

This is what happened when I cofounded LinkedIn. The key business model innovations for LinkedIn, including the two-way nature of the relationships and filling professionals’ need for a business-oriented online identity, didn’t just happen organically. They were the result of much thought and reflection, and I drew on the experiences I had when founding SocialNet, one of the first online social networks, nearly a decade before the creation of LinkedIn. But life isn’t always so neat. Many companies, even famous and successful ones, have to develop their business model innovation after they have already commenced operations. PayPal didn’t have a business model when it began operations (I was a key member of the PayPal executive team). We were growing exponentially, at 5 percent per day, and we were losing money on every single transaction we processed. The funny thing is that some of our critics called us insane for paying customers bonuses to refer their friends. Those referral bonuses were actually brilliant, because their cost was so much lower than the standard cost of acquiring new financial services customers via advertising. (We’ll discuss the power and importance of this kind of viral marketing later on.) The insanity, in fact, was that we were allowing our users to accept credit card payments, sticking PayPal with the cost of paying 3 percent of each transaction to the credit card processors, while charging our users nothing. I remember once telling my old college friend and PayPal cofounder/ CEO Peter Thiel, “Peter, if you and I were standing on the roof of our office and throwing stacks of hundred-dollar bills off the edge as fast as our arms could go, we still wouldn’t be losing money as quickly as we are right now.” We ended up solving the problem by charging businesses to accept payments, much as the credit card processors did, but funding those payments using automated clearinghouse (ACH) bank transactions, which cost a fraction of the charges associated with the credit card networks. But if we had waited until we had solved this problem before blitzscaling, I suspect we wouldn’t have become the market leader.

THE KINGDOM OF HEAVEN. ITS CITIZENS ARE DRUNK ON WONDER. Consider the case of Sarai.1 She is in her golden years, but God promises her a son. She gets excited. She visits the maternity shop and buys a few dresses. She plans her shower and remodels her tent . . . but no son. She eats a few birthday cakes and blows out a lot of candles . . . still no son. She goes through a decade of wall calendars . . . still no son. So Sarai decides to take matters into her own hands. (“Maybe God needs me to take care of this one.”) She convinces Abram that time is running out. (“Face it, Abe, you ain’t getting any younger, either.”) She commands her maid, Hagar, to go into Abram’s tent and see if he needs anything. (“And I mean ‘anything’!”) Hagar goes in a maid. She comes out a mom. And the problems begin. Hagar is haughty. Sarai is jealous. Abram is dizzy from the dilemma. And God calls the baby boy a “wild donkey”—an appropriate name for one born out of stubbornness and destined to kick his way into history. It isn’t the cozy family Sarai expected. And it isn’t a topic Abram and Sarai bring up very often at dinner. Finally, fourteen years later, when Abram is pushing a century of years and Sarai ninety . . . when Abram has stopped listening to Sarai’s advice, and Sarai has stopped giving it . . . when the wallpaper in the nursery is faded and the baby furniture is several seasons out of date . . . when the topic of the promised child brings sighs and tears and long looks into a silent sky . . . God pays them a visit and tells them they had better select a name for their new son. Abram and Sarai have the same response: laughter. They laugh partly because it is too good to happen and partly because it might. They laugh because they have given up hope, and hope born anew is always funny before it is real. They laugh at the lunacy of it all. Abram looks over at Sarai—toothless and snoring in her rocker, head back and mouth wide open, as fruitful as a pitted prune and just as wrinkled. And he cracks up. He tries to contain it, but he can’t. He has always been a sucker for a good joke. Sarai is just as amused. When she hears the news, a cackle escapes before she can contain it. She mumbles something about her husband’s needing a lot more than what he’s got and then laughs again. They laugh because that is what you do when someone says he can do the impossible. They laugh a little at God, and a lot with God—for God is laughing too. Then, with the smile still on his face, he gets busy doing what he does best—the unbelievable.

Inside was a miniature incandescent, one of the genetically engineered flowers that attracted light the way magnets attract metal. Already it was drawing some of the light from the room toward it, taking on a sort of ghostly glow, though it generated none of the light itself. Incandescents were funny; they’d become much cheaper since they were first bred decades ago, because they only lasted a few hours before dying. But they were truly beautiful if you caught them in the one night they bloomed.

If you do not flirt, how will you manage this marriage you anticipate making next season?” “I expect I will dance with her at balls a few times, call on her a few times, then propose.” “How dreadful you make it sound. Poor girl.” “Dreadful? Poor girl? She will be a duchess. Her family will be delirious with joy.

So now, we fight off aggressors, protect our borders, but let me tell you - our desire to take back the rest of the mountain has long passed. Guess you could say humans won that territory war,” he scoffs. “But you know what’s funny? While humans have the shorter lifespan, your memories last forever. It never ceases to amaze me how your kind hold on to prejudices from a conflict that’s been over for decades.

To be queer and Somali and neurodivergent is concentrated alchemy, and yet we constantly raid the cupboards of our souls like we are a people of lack. When you operate from a position of lack, you don’t realise you’re robbing yourself of everything worth preserving, and forgetting to toss away all the empty pursuits that lost their synthetic spell several generations ago. And suddenly, you’re wide awake in a new country, in a new decade, and you’re startled because you can’t remember how you got here or why you’re still feeling hunted by your own reflection. You can’t remember how or when or where or why you misplaced all your breezy dynamism—all that wildness of perception you used to project with such ferocity. Where did it all go? We have conveniently forgotten that we have always been fundamentally idiosyncratic and fantastic and fucking alive. Instead we feed ourselves and our children and our children’s children prosaic fuckery for what? Respectability politics? So that if we twist and try our damnedest to conform to standards that have never been coded into our collective DNA, that we’ll what? Somehow be less strange? Less weird and wonderful? That we’ll transcend the soul-snuffing snare that is the myth of the good immigrant? That if we mute all of our magic—everything that makes us some of the most innately interesting, individualistic and fun, funny beings in this boring, beige-as-fuck world—that we’ll win over whom? Folks who don’t season their food right or whose understanding of freedom is a shitty Friday night sloshfest at a shitty pub playing shitty music, chatting nonsense that no-one with a single iota of sense gives a fuck about? Is that who you are so deeply invested in trying to impress? If so, then go for it, but don’t fool yourself for a fucking second into thinking that trying desperately to shave off your elemental peculiarities through self-diminishment is salvation, because it simply isn’t, honey, and it never will be.