Early Dismissal Quotes

Because the students were needed in the fields from early spring when the cotton was planted until after most of the cotton had been picked in the fall, the school adjusted its terms accordingly, beginning in October and dismissing in March.

If today's church does not recapture the sacrificial spirit of the early church, it will lose its authenticity, forfeit the loyalty of millions, and be dismissed as an irrelevant social club with no meaning for the twentieth century.

The assault on education began more than a century ago by industrialists and capitalists such as Andrew Carnegie. In 1891, Carnegie congratulated the graduates of the Pierce College of Business for being “fully occupied in obtaining a knowledge of shorthand and typewriting” rather than wasting time “upon dead languages.” The industrialist Richard Teller Crane was even more pointed in his 1911 dismissal of what humanists call the “life of the mind.” No one who has “a taste for literature has a right to be happy” because “the only men entitled to happiness… is those who are useful.” The arrival of industrialists on university boards of trustees began as early as the 1870s and the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business offered the first academic credential in business administration in 1881. The capitalists, from the start, complained that universities were unprofitable. These early twentieth century capitalists, like heads of investment houses and hedge-fund managers, were, as Donoghue writes “motivated by an ethically based anti-intellectualism that transcended interest in the financial bottom line. Their distrust of the ideal of intellectual inquiry for its own sake, led them to insist that if universities were to be preserved at all, they must operate on a different set of principles from those governing the liberal arts.

Unlike the early patriot press, today’s newsrooms and journalists are mostly hostile to America’s founding principles, traditions, and institutions. They do not promote free speech and press freedom, despite their self-serving and self-righteous claims. Indeed, they serve as societal filters attempting to enforce uniformity of thought and social and political activism centered on the progressive ideology and agenda. Issues, events, groups, and individuals that do not fit the narrative are dismissed or diminished; those that do fit the narrative are elevated and celebrated.

No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man’s and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinised and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinise the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water. With infinite complacency men went to and fro over this globe about their little affairs, serene in their assurance of their empire over matter. It is possible that the infusoria under the microscope do the same. No one gave a thought to the older worlds of space as sources of human danger, or thought of them only to dismiss the idea of life upon them as impossible or improbable. It is curious to recall some of the mental habits of those departed days. At most terrestrial men fancied there might be other men upon Mars, perhaps inferior to themselves and ready to welcome a missionary enterprise. Yet across the gulf of space, minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded this earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us. And early in the twentieth century came the great disillusionment

As he defended the book one evening in the early 1980s at the Carnegie Endowment in New York, I knew that some of what he said was true enough, just as some of it was arguably less so. (Edward incautiously dismissed 'speculations about the latest conspiracy to blow up buildings or sabotage commercial airliners' as the feverish product of 'highly exaggerated stereotypes.') Covering Islam took as its point of departure the Iranian revolution, which by then had been fully counter-revolutionized by the forces of the Ayatollah. Yes, it was true that the Western press—which was one half of the pun about 'covering'—had been naïve if not worse about the Pahlavi regime. Yes, it was true that few Middle East 'analysts' had had any concept of the latent power of Shi'ism to create mass mobilization. Yes, it was true that almost every stage of the Iranian drama had come as a complete surprise to the media. But wasn't it also the case that Iranian society was now disappearing into a void of retrogressive piety that had levied war against Iranian Kurdistan and used medieval weaponry such as stoning and amputation against its internal critics, or even against those like unveiled women whose very existence constituted an offense?

How many of us were tagged with “no ranking” in high school, or dismissed early in our careers, or are dismissed even now? What gifts and passions might we possess that haven’t yet been discovered but that could give us wings to fly?

When no one is watching Mother Earth, and most of the time no one is, she sings softly to herself. Certainly no one is watching after her, to the point where she's now calling herself M. Earth, using her first initial only, like the early women writers who did not want their work to be automatically dismissed because of their gender disadvantage. Though she is grand, M. Earth is feeling, perhaps, overly feminine, and therefore vulnerable. Don't even mention the word Gaia; it's such a projection! She thinks she could benefit from a more macho profile, a little kick-ass to make her point. Perhaps a little masculine detachment would be helpful, or a thicker skin. Because, frankly, she's been trampled, poisoned, stripped bare, robbed blind, and blamed for just about everything that's come down the pike. And like all mothers, everyone just assumes she'll always be there for them with open, loving arms, and a cup of hot cocoa. That it will be her pleasure to feed them, lick their wounds, and clean a load or two of their dirty laundry. She's looking for a little more respect.

Guy Pagett is my secretary, a zealous, painstaking, hardworking fellow, admirable in every respect. I know no one who annoys me more. For a long time I have been racking my brains as to how to get rid of him. But you cannot very well dismiss a secretary because he prefers work to play, likes getting up early in the morning, and has positively no vices. The only amusing thing about the fellow is his face. He has the face of a fourteenth-century poisoner—the sort of man the Borgias got to do their odd jobs for them.

So often the contemporary church is a weak, ineffectual voice with an uncertain sound. So often it is an archdefender of the status quo. Far from being disturbed by the presence of the church, the power structure of the average community is consoled by the church’s silent—and often even vocal—sanction of things as they are. But the judgment of God is upon the church as never before. If today’s church does not recapture the sacrificial spirit of the early church, it will lose its authenticity, forfeit the loyalty of millions, and be dismissed as an irrelevant social club with no meaning for the twentieth century. Every day I meet young people whose disappointment with the church has turned into outright disgust.

Dismissives have poor access to early emotional memories, having built a defensive shield of self-esteem and self-sufficiency that requires negative memories to be suppressed:

Night shifts were brutal but easier to schedule around. Sometimes, it was just less painful to forgo sleep than to try to find child care for all the early dismissals and vacations and holidays and staff developments and parent-teacher conference days. It was also true that nights in the ER were often more peaceful than nights at home with her family. Sometimes they even involved less blood.

But the judgement of God is upon the church as never before. If today's church does not recapture the sacrificial spirit of the early church, it will lose its authenticity, forfeit the loyalty of millions, and be dismissed as an irrelevant social club with no meaning for the twentieth century. Every day I meet young people whose disappointment with the church has turned into outright disgust.

The default to studying men at times veered into absurdity: in the early sixties, observing that women tended to have lower rates of heart disease until their estrogen levels dropped after menopause, researchers conducted the first trial to look at whether supplementation with the hormone was an effective preventive treatment. The study enrolled 8,341 men and no women. (Although doctors began prescribing estrogens to postmenopausal women in droves - by the midseventies, a third would be taking them - it wasn't until 1991 that the first clinical study of hormone therapy was conducted in women.) An NIH-supported pilot study from Rockefeller University looked at how obesity affected breast and uterine cancer didn't enroll a single woman. While men can develop breast cancer - and a small number of them do each year - as Rep. Snowe noted drily at the congressional hearings, 'Somehow I find it hard to believe that the male-dominated medical community would tolerate a study of prostate cancer that used only women as research subjects.

Of course I’ve been hurt before,” I offer, a tad dismissively. “You know that, you’re one of the people who hurt me. I just don’t let bad things that happen have enough power over me to keep me down. It’s not my natural inclination, it wasn’t always easy; I just learned at an early age I needed to fight my own human instincts on some things or I’d be an unhappy person. I chose not to be unhappy. I fought my natural instincts,

Early Christians rejoiced when they were deemed worthy to suffer for what they believed. In those days the Church was not merely a thermometer that recorded the ideas and principles of popular opinion; it was a thermostat that transformed the mores of society...If the Church of today does not recapture the sacrificial spirit of the early Church, it will lose its authentic ring, forfeit the loyalty of millions, and be dismissed as an irrelevant social club with no meaning for the twentieth century.

Still too early to tell. Most of the media outlets are hopping on the rainbow train—” I clench my jaw. “—waving their gay pride flags and commending you for your bravery in coming out.” “I didn’t come out,” I mutter. “Someone else did it for me.” “Well, you’re out now,” he says dismissively. “And now we need to make sure we spin it the right way. The franchise is going to release the statement I prepared after we drafted you. I wanted to give you the head’s up about that—it’ll go out within the hour.

Apollodorus, the leading classical authority on Greek myths, records a tradition that the real scene of the poem was the Sicilian seaboard, and in 1896 Samuel Butler, the author of Erewhon, came independently to the same conclusion. He suggested that the poem, as we now have it, was composed at Drepanum, the modern Trapani, in Western Sicily, and that the authoress was the girl self-portrayed as Nausicaa. None of his classical contemporaries, for whom Homer was necessarily both blind and bearded, deigned to pay Butler’s theory the least attention; and since he had, as we now know, dated the poem some three hundred years too early and not explained how a Sicilian princess could have passed off her saga as Homer’s, his two books on the subject are generally dismissed as a good-humoured joke. Nevertheless, while working on an explanatory dictionary of Greek myths, I found Butler’s arguments for a Western Sicilian setting and for a female authorship irrefutable. I could not rest until I had written this novel. It re-creates, from internal and external evidence, the circumstances which induced Nausicaa to write the Odyssey, and suggest how, as an honorary Daughter of Homer, she managed to get it included in the official canon. Here is the story of a high-spirited and religious-minded Sicilian girl who saves her father’s throne from usurpation, herself from a distasteful marriage, and her two younger brothers from butchery by boldly making things happen, instead of sitting still and hoping for the best.

I nodded, appreciating the wisdom of her words.‘Yellow is the colour of early spring,’ she said, ‘just look at your garden!’ She gestured towards the borders, which were full of primulas, crocuses and daffodils. ‘The most cheerful of colours,’ she continued, ‘almost reflective in its nature and it is of course the colour of the mind.’ ‘That’s why we surround ourselves with it!’ laughed Phyllis, ‘in the hope that its properties will rub off.’‘Nonsense dear,’ said Mrs Darley dismissively, ‘Yellow light simply encourages us to think more positively. It lifts our spirits and raises our self-esteem in time for summer.’I immediately made a mental note to surround myself with the colour of the season and, like Phyllis, hoped that some of its properties would rub off on me.

The sixties began what many admirers of Eliot would consider a bleak period. The anxiety of influence of the profession at large seemed to inspire quick and increasingly uninformed dismissals of Eliot, and these repeated denigrations produced, predictably, a generation of students with vague and inaccurate impressions about his poetry and ideas. But there is a bright side to Eliot studies of the last quarter century. The general retreat from Eliot coincided with the beginning of basic and important work on his ideas, especially on his early philosophical writings.

Why do women find it honorable to dismiss ourselves? Why do we decide that denying our longing is the responsible thing to do? Why do we believe that what will thrill and fulfill us will hurt our people? Why do we mistrust ourselves so completely? Here’s why: Because our culture was built upon and benefits from the control of women. The way power justifies controlling a group is by conditioning the masses to believe that the group cannot be trusted. So the campaign to convince us to mistrust women begins early and comes from everywhere. When we are little girls, our families, teachers, and peers insist that our loud voices, bold opinions, and strong feelings are “too much” and unladylike, so we learn to not trust our personalities. Childhood stories promise us that girls who dare to leave the path or explore get attacked by big bad wolves and pricked by deadly spindles, so we learn to not trust our curiosity. The beauty industry convinces us that our thighs, frizz, skin, fingernails, lips, eyelashes, leg hair, and wrinkles are repulsive and must be covered and manipulated, so we learn to not trust the bodies we live in. Diet culture promises us that controlling our appetite is the key to our worthiness, so we learn to not trust our own hunger. Politicians insist that our judgment about our bodies and futures cannot be trusted, so our own reproductive systems must be controlled by lawmakers we don’t know in places we’ve never been. The legal system proves to us again and again that even our own memories and experiences will not be trusted. If twenty women come forward and say, “He did it,” and he says, “No, I didn’t,” they will believe him while discounting and maligning us every damn time. And religion, sweet Jesus. The lesson of Adam and Eve—the first formative story I was told about God and a woman—was this: When a woman wants more, she defies God, betrays her partner, curses her family, and destroys the world. We weren’t born distrusting and fearing ourselves. That was part of our taming. We were taught to believe that who we are in our natural state is bad and dangerous. They convinced us to be afraid of ourselves. So we do not honor our own bodies, curiosity, hunger, judgment, experience, or ambition. Instead, we lock away our true selves. Women who are best at this disappearing act earn the highest praise: She is so selfless.

Older fans sometimes welcome the new influx of fans each incarnation brings, but can also treat them with suspicion, even derision. The early Star Trek fandom faced similar rejection by the broader sci-fi fan culture, as “literary fans” of print-based SF decried the supposed superficiality of “media fans,” who were also dismissed on account of their (often female) gender.

I learned how to operate under both the physical and emotional weight of unrelenting shame very early. Fat babies are adorable, while fat children are a little less so. Fat teenagers are chided into either end of the eating-disorder spectrum, and fat adults are either admonished for not figuring out how to get new bodies during adolescence or straight up dismissed altogether.

But the judgment of God is upon the church as never before. If today’s church does not recapture the sacrificial spirit of the early church, it will lose its authenticity, forfeit the loyalty of millions, and be dismissed as an irrelevant social club with no meaning for the twentieth century. Every day I meet young people whose disappointment with the church has turned into outright disgust.28

Scene I. A little dark Parlour in Boston: Guards standing at the door. Hazlerod, Crusty Crowbar, Simple Sapling, Hateall, and Hector Mushroom. Simple. I know not what to think of these sad times, The people arm'd,—and all resolv'd to die Ere they'll submit.—— Crusty Crowbar. I too am almost sick of the parade Of honours purchas'd at the price of peace. Simple. Fond as I am of greatness and her charms, Elate with prospects of my rising name, Push'd into place,—a place I ne'er expected, My bounding heart leapt in my feeble breast. And ecstasies entranc'd my slender brain.— But yet, ere this I hop'd more solid gains, As my low purse demands a quick supply.— Poor Sylvia weeps,—and urges my return To rural peace and humble happiness, As my ambition beggars all her babes. Crusty. When first I listed in the desp'rate cause, And blindly swore obedience to his will, So wise, so just, so good I thought Rapatio, That if salvation rested on his word I'd pin my faith, and risk my hopes thereon. Hazlerod. Any why not now?—What staggers thy belief? Crusty. Himself—his perfidy appears— It is too plain he has betray'd his country; And we're the wretched tools by him mark'd out To seal its ruins—tear up the ancient forms, And every vestige treacherously destroy, Nor leave a trait of freedom in the land. Nor did I think hard fate wou'd call me up From drudging o'er my acres, Treading the glade, and sweating at the plough, To dangle at the tables of the great; At bowls and cards to spend my frozen years; To sell my friends, my country, and my conscience; Profane the sacred sabbaths of my God; Scorn'd by the very men who want my aid To spread distress o'er this devoted people. Hazlerod. Pho—what misgivings—why these idle qualms, This shrinking backwards at the bugbear conscience; In early life I heard the phantom nam'd, And the grave sages prate of moral sense Presiding in the bosom of the just; Or planting thongs about the guilty heart. Bound by these shackles, long my lab'ring mind, Obscurely trod the lower walks of life, In hopes by honesty my bread to gain; But neither commerce, or my conjuring rods, Nor yet mechanics, or new fangled drills, Or all the iron-monger's curious arts, Gave me a competence of shining ore, Or gratify'd my itching palm for more; Till I dismiss'd the bold intruding guest, And banish'd conscience from my wounded breast. Crusty. Happy expedient!—Could I gain the art, Then balmy sleep might sooth my waking lids, And rest once more refresh my weary soul.

If you'll cast your mind back to the situation in the early years of the Christian era and imagine the mentality of a Roman aristocrat, a person of power in Roman society. Their physics is drawn from democritean atomism, in other words they are thoroughgoing materialists. Their social theory is drawn from Epictetus and Plato. They are in fact extremely modern people by our own standards. However, among the gardeners and kitchen help and stable boys, there is news of a momentous event in the Middle East - a Jewish rabbi has triumphed over death and risen after three days in the tomb. Should the master of the Roman household have caught wind of this kind of superstitious talk among the help, he would have just dismissed it with a sneer, "What preposterous idea!" And it is a preposterous idea, nevertheless, the fact that an idea is preposterous has never held it back from making zealous converts, and within a 120 years after the annunciation of the birth of Christianity, its missionaries were beating on the gates of Rome attempting to convert the Emperor.

My early years, my weakling, teething, vaccination, memoirs of the various nursery maids, I dismiss unrecorded: if the Faculty desire a narrative of this period, I fear I cannot oblige them; it would interest no one else. One observation however suggests itself; if I was at that time what I am now, what transports of delight I must have received when gathered to the warm full breasts of the woman who bore me I drew from that holy source the rich and essentially feminine fluid which gushing down my throat animated my little frame.

March 28, 1987: Today I read in the New York Times that all of the officers who killed Michael Stewart were again dismissed of charges. Continually dismissed, but in their minds they will never forget. They know they killed him. They will never forget his screams, his face, his blood. The must live with that forever. I hope in their next life they are tortured like they tortured him. They should be birds captured early in life, put in cages, purchased by a fat, smelly, ugly lady who keeps them in a small dirty cage up near the ceiling while all day she cooks bloody sausages and the blood spatters their cage and the frying fat burns their matted feathers and they can nerf escape the horrible fumes of her burnt meat. One day the cage will fall to the ground and a big fat ugly cat will kick them about, play with them like a toy, and slowly kill them and leave their remains to be accidentally stepped on by the big fat pig lady who can’t see her own feet because of her huge sagging tits. An eye for an eye … I’m not afraid of anything I’d ever done. Not ashamed of anything.

At this point tears begin to fall from my eyes, not because I am sad or angry, but because I have never had these dueling aspects of my personality mirrored back to me in such a matter-of-fact way. I have, at so many times in my life, felt unknowable, but here I am having me explained to me as it feels to be me. One three-hour test and I finally have objective words to demystify a tumultuous and ambivalent life experience. “We will leave it here, but I have one last thing I would like to say. The Rorschach and image testing reveal evidence of trauma associated with very early childhood development. I see a preoccupation with blood, morbidity, dismissal, and power struggles. There is a way in which you present as very sturdy to the world, yet inside you are carrying an incredibly heavy weight. There is a you inside who feels invisible to those looking at you from the outside. I feel an incredible amount of compassion for how hard each day feels for you.” “Thank you,” I say, my voice quiet and quivering with emotion. “I really appreciate this.” “Yes,” he says, “I believe you really do.

Reading while listening to the sounds of birds and the rush of water. This is the way of life that has come to be idealized. Don't think of unpleasant things right before bed. A five minute "bed zazen" before going to sleep. People who do their best to enjoy what is before them have the greatest chance to discover inner peace. Often, whatever it is they are enjoying - the thing before them - has the potential to turn into an opportunity. Stop dismissing whatever it is that you are doing and start living. Seek not what you lack. Be content with the here and now. When you are uncertain, simplicity is the best way to go. Conscientious living begins with early to bed, early to rise. This is the secret to a life of ease and contentment. Don't be bound by a single perspective. There is more than just "the proper way". Possibility springs from confidence. When someone criticizes us, we immediately feel wounded. When something unpleasant happens, we cannot get it out of our head. What can we do to bounce back? One way to strengthen the mind is though cleaning. When we clean, we use both our head and our body. Recognize the luxury of not having things. Desire feeds upon itself and the mind becomes dominated by boundless greed. This is not happiness. The three poisons are greed, anger and ignorance. Be grateful for every day, even the most ordinary. The happiness to be found in the unremarkable. Your mind has the power to decide whether or not you are happy. There is not just one answer. The meaning behind Zen koans. When there are things we want to do, we must do them as if our lives depend on it. Time spent out of character is empty time.

In early August, Bill Virdon was fired and replaced by Billy Martin. Virdon’s dismissal left Elston with mixed feelings: He was glad to be reunited with Billy, his old friend and teammate, but once again he was hurt because he had been snubbed for the job he so badly wanted. We loved Billy. At heart, he was a nice person, very generous. Billy’s problem was that he was an alcoholic. One time we were in Kansas City for the playoffs; he joined us for breakfast and ordered eggs and scotch. When Billy was drunk he could be a pretty rotten person; he got into fights. But

On Mancreu he had no platoon to look after. Brighton House was vast and empty. There were two ballrooms in the east wing, both dim and sheeted. On his third day he had unwrapped a leather armchair in one of the drawing rooms so that he could sit, and discovered over those early weeks that he rather liked the quiet. In fact, he could spend ages in it. He had found it hard at first to listen without tracking things, without placing them and knowing them for friend or enemy, but gradually that automatic classification had faded away and he was left with rustling leaves and waves and a cowbell somewhere far off, and the idling of a fisherman’s outboard in the choppy water beneath the cliff. He walked the endless corridors on the upper floors alone, wondering what the rooms had seen. There was a local bird with a quite infuriating cry like a sneeze, and he amused himself by saying “bless you” whenever he heard it. Occasionally he thanked himself on behalf of the bird. After a while he found that he could forget the clock and even dismiss memory and awareness almost entirely, fade into the scenery and let his senses be everything that there was of him. It was wonderful.

Steve Jobs was famous for what observers called his “reality distortion field.” Part motivational tactic, part sheer drive and ambition, this field made him notoriously dismissive of phrases such as “It can’t be done” or “We need more time.” Having learned early in life that reality was falsely hemmed in by rules and compromises that people had been taught as children, Jobs had a much more aggressive idea of what was or wasn’t possible. To him, when you factored in vision and work ethic, much of life was malleable. For instance, in the design stages for a new mouse for an early Apple product, Jobs had high expectations. He wanted it to move fluidly in any direction—a new development for any mouse at that time—but a lead engineer was told by one of his designers that this would be commercially impossible. What Jobs wanted wasn’t realistic and wouldn’t work. The next day, the lead engineer arrived at work to find that Steve Jobs had fired the employee who’d said that. When the replacement came in, his first words were: “I can build the mouse.” This was Jobs’s view of reality at work. Malleable, adamant, self-confident. Not in the delusional sense, but for the purposes of accomplishing something. He knew that to aim low meant to accept mediocre accomplishment. But a high aim could, if things went right, create something extraordinary. He was Napoleon shouting to his soldiers: “There shall be no Alps!” For most of us, such confidence does not come easy. It’s understandable. So many people in our lives have preached the need to be realistic or conservative or worse—to not rock the boat. This is an enormous disadvantage when it comes to trying big things. Because though our doubts (and self-doubts) feel real, they have very little bearing on what is and isn’t possible. Our

There is no specific test for multiple sclerosis.  Its early symptoms - fatigue, loss of sensation, weakness and visual changes - are frequently misdiagnosed as psychoneurosis or an even more severe psychiatric disorder, such as hysteria, particularly in women. When doctors could find no organic cause for [Jacqueline Du Pré's] complaints, they prescribed a year's rest, and referred her to a psychiatrist... When she consulted a doctor in Australia about her tenacious fatigue and occasional double vision in her right eye, he dismissed her symptoms as "adolescent trauma" and suggested she take up a relaxing hobby.

TREVOR AND I WEREN’T SPEAKING when I went into hibernation. I probably called him at some point under the black veil of Ambien early on, but I don’t know if he ever answered. I could easily imagine him diving into a complicated, fortysomething-year-old’s vagina, dismissing any thought of me the way you’d walk past boxes of mac ’n’ cheese or marshmallow cereal on a shelf in the grocery store. I was kids’ stuff. I was nonsense. I wasn’t worth the calories. He said he preferred brunettes. “They give me space to be myself,” he told me. “Blondes are distracting. Think of your beauty as an Achilles’ heel. You’re too much on the surface. I don’t say that offensively. But it’s the truth. It’s hard to look past what you look like.

For memory is not a copy, always present to our eyes, of the various events of our life, but rather a void from which, every now and then, a present resemblance allows us to recover, to resurrect, dead recollections; but there are also thousands of tiny facts which never fell into this well of potential memories and which we shall never be able to check. Everything which we think irrelevant to the day-to-day life of the person we love is dismissed without consideration; we immediately forget what she tells us about this or that fact or person unknown to us, and the expression on her face when she was saying it. So, when later our jealousy is aroused by these same persons and we need to know that we are not mistaken, that it is they who are the cause of our mistress’s haste to go out, her annoyance with us for depriving her of their company by coming home too early, our jealousy, digging in the past for clues, finds nothing;

The person who discovered the answer was a retiring, self-funded scientist named Peter Mitchell who in the early 1960s inherited a fortune from the Wimpey house-building company and used it to set up a research center in a stately home in Cornwall. Mitchell was something of an eccentric. He wore shoulder-length hair and an earring at a time when that was especially unusual among serious scientists. He was also famously forgetful. At his daughter’s wedding, he approached another guest and confessed that she looked familiar, though he couldn’t quite place her. “I was your first wife,” she answered. Mitchell’s ideas were universally dismissed, not altogether surprisingly. As one chronicler has noted, “At the time that Mitchell proposed his hypothesis there was not a shred of evidence in support of it.” But he was eventually vindicated and in 1978 was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry—an extraordinary accomplishment for someone who worked from a home lab. The

Ironically, one concession Davis did make concerned the explosive question of turning slaves into Confederate soldiers. After dismissing as “too controversial” the entreaty by General Patrick Cleburne that slaves be armed and enlisted to fight for the South, Davis finally embraced the notion very late in the game. The Confederate Congress began debating the issue in the early months of 1865, creating a star-burst of vituperation in Richmond. The bombastic old General How-ell Cobb of Georgia roared, “If slaves will make good soldiers, our whole theory of slavery is wrong!” Davis rebuked him this way: “If the Confederacy falls, there should be written on its tombstone, ‘Died of a Theory.’ ” In the end, less than a month before Lee’s surrender, the Confederate Congress approved a bill providing for the partial emancipation and enlistment of slaves in the Confederate armies. The lawyer in Cleburne might have found the debate interesting had he lived to see it, which he did not. He was slain leading his division during Hood’s charge on Franklin, Tennessee, in November 1864.

Freud famously saw the ‘horror’ of Medusa’s head as a symbol of male castration, but the original trauma in the Medusa story is not castration but rape. Most scholars and historians dismiss Poseidon’s rape of Medusa as an insignificant detail, merely one among so many rapes of mortal, immortal and semi-divine women committed by male gods. However, myths which glorify rape as a strategy ‘to enact the principle of domination by means of sex’ are comparatively recent, becoming widespread in Attica around the 5th century BCE. It is likely that myths celebrating rape reflect a devastating historical shift in cultural values, the change from a society based on equality and partnership to a hierarchical structure based on unequal distribution of resources and the need to control women’s sexuality. Joseph Campbell describes the myth of Perseus and Medusa as reflecting ‘an actual historic rupture, a sort of sociological trauma’ which occurred in the early thirteenth century B.C.E. The myth may refer to the overrunning of the peaceful, sedentary, matrifocal and most likely matrilineal early civilizations of Old Europe by patriarchal warlike Indo-European invaders.

David Brooks, “Our Founding Yuppie,” Weekly Standard, Oct. 23, 2000, 31. The word “meritocracy” is an argument-starter, and I have employed it sparingly in this book. It is often used loosely to denote a vision of social mobility based on merit and diligence, like Franklin’s. The word was coined by British social thinker Michael Young (later to become, somewhat ironically, Lord Young of Darlington) in his 1958 book The Rise of the Meritocracy (New York: Viking Press) as a dismissive term to satirize a society that misguidedly created a new elite class based on the “narrow band of values” of IQ and educational credentials. The Harvard philosopher John Rawls, in A Theory of Justice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971), 106, used it more broadly to mean a “social order [that] follows the principle of careers open to talents.” The best description of the idea is in Nicholas Lemann’s The Big Test: The Secret History of the American Meritocracy (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1999), a history of educational aptitude tests and their effect on American society. In Franklin’s time, Enlightenment thinkers (such as Jefferson in his proposals for creating the University of Virginia) advocated replacing the hereditary aristocracy with a “natural aristocracy,” whose members would be plucked from the masses at an early age based on “virtues and talents” and groomed for leadership. Franklin’s idea was more expansive. He believed in encouraging and providing opportunities for all people to succeed as best they could based on their diligence, hard work, virtue, and talent. As we shall see, his proposals for what became the University of Pennsylvania (in contrast to Jefferson’s for the University of Virginia) were aimed not at filtering a new elite but at encouraging and enriching all “aspiring” young men. Franklin was propounding a more egalitarian and democratic approach than Jefferson by proposing a system that would, as Rawls (p. 107) would later prescribe, assure that “resources for education are not to be allotted solely or necessarily mainly according to their return as estimated in productive trained abilities, but also according to their worth in enriching the personal and social life of citizens.” (Translation: He cared not simply about making society as a whole more productive, but also about making each individual more enriched.)

In case after case, Fred Singer, Fred Seitz, and a handful of other scientists joined forces with think tanks and private corporations to challenge scientific evidence on a host of contemporary issues. In the early years, much of the money for this effort came from the tobacco industry; in later years, it came from foundations, think tanks, and the fossil fuel industry. They claimed the link between smoking and cancer remained unproven. They insisted that scientists were mistaken about the risks and limitations of SDI. They argued that acid rain was caused by volcanoes, and so was the ozone hole. They charged that the Environmental Protection Agency had rigged the science surrounding secondhand smoke. Most recently—over the course of nearly two decades and against the face of mounting evidence—they dismissed the reality of global warming. First they claimed there was none, then they claimed it was just natural variation, and then they claimed that even if it was happening and it was our fault, it didn’t matter because we could just adapt to it. In case after case, they steadfastly denied the existence of scientific agreement, even though they, themselves, were pretty much the only ones who disagreed.

I encounter forms of this attitude every day. The producers who work at the Ostankino channels might all be liberals in their private lives, holiday in Tuscany, and be completely European in their tastes. When I ask how they marry their professional and personal lives, they look at me as if I were a fool and answer: “Over the last twenty years we’ve lived through a communism we never believed in, democracy and defaults and mafia state and oligarchy, and we’ve realized they are illusions, that everything is PR.” “Everything is PR” has become the favorite phrase of the new Russia; my Moscow peers are filled with a sense that they are both cynical and enlightened. When I ask them about Soviet-era dissidents, like my parents, who fought against communism, they dismiss them as naïve dreamers and my own Western attachment to such vague notions as “human rights” and “freedom” as a blunder. “Can’t you see your own governments are just as bad as ours?” they ask me. I try to protest—but they just smile and pity me. To believe in something and stand by it in this world is derided, the ability to be a shape-shifter celebrated. Vladimir Nabokov once described a species of butterfly that at an early stage in its development had to learn how to change colors to hide from predators. The butterfly’s predators had long died off, but still it changed its colors from the sheer pleasure of transformation. Something similar has happened to the Russian elites: during the Soviet period they learned to dissimulate in order to survive; now there is no need to constantly change their colors, but they continue to do so out of a sort of dark joy, conformism raised to the level of aesthetic act. Surkov himself is the ultimate expression of this psychology. As I watch him give his speech to the students and journalists, he seems to change and transform like mercury, from cherubic smile to demonic stare, from a woolly liberal preaching “modernization” to a finger-wagging nationalist, spitting out willfully contradictory ideas: “managed democracy,” “conservative modernization.” Then he steps back, smiling, and says: “We need a new political party, and we should help it happen, no need to wait and make it form by itself.” And when you look closely at the party men in the political reality show Surkov directs, the spitting nationalists and beetroot-faced communists, you notice how they all seem to perform their roles with a little ironic twinkle.

The most alarming rhetoric comes out of the dispute between liberals and conservatives, and it’s a dangerous waste of time because they’re both right. The perennial conservative concern about high taxes supporting a nonworking “underclass” has entirely legitimate roots in our evolutionary past and shouldn’t be dismissed out of hand. Early hominids lived a precarious existence where freeloaders were a direct threat to survival, and so they developed an exceedingly acute sense of whether they were being taken advantage of by members of their own group. But by the same token, one of the hallmarks of early human society was the emergence of a culture of compassion that cared for the ill, the elderly, the wounded, and the unlucky. In today’s terms, that is a common liberal concern that also has to be taken into account. Those two driving forces have coexisted for hundreds of thousands of years in human society and have been duly codified in this country as a two-party political system. The eternal argument over so-called entitlement programs—and, more broadly, over liberal and conservative thought—will never be resolved because each side represents an ancient and absolutely essential component of our evolutionary past.

Tish senses. Even as the world tries to speed by her, she is slowly taking it in. Wait, stop. That thing you said about the polar bears…it made me feel something and wonder something. Can we stay there for a moment? I have feelings. I have questions. I’m not ready to run outside to recess yet. In most cultures, folks like Tish are identified early, set apart as shamans, medicine people, poets, and clergy. They are considered eccentric but critical to the survival of the group because they are able to hear things others don’t hear and see things others don’t see and feel things others don’t feel. The culture depends on the sensitivity of a few, because nothing can be healed if it’s not sensed first. But our society is so hell-bent on expansion, power, and efficiency at all costs that the folks like Tish—like me—are inconvenient. We slow the world down. We’re on the bow of the Titanic, pointing, crying out, “Iceberg! Iceberg!” while everyone else is below deck, yelling back, “We just want to keep dancing!” It is easier to call us broken and dismiss us than to consider that we are responding appropriately to a broken world. My little girl is not broken. She is a prophet. I want to be wise enough to stop with her, ask her what she feels, and listen to what she knows.

Speaking of gendered differences in reaction and action—you’ve talked of a certain “bullying reception” to your book here in New Zealand by a certain set of older male critics. The omniscient narrator, the idea that you “had to be everywhere,” seems to have affronted some male readers, as has the length of the book. Have you experienced this reaction in the UK, too, or in Canada? Has it been a peculiarly New Zealand response, perhaps because of the necessarily small pool of literary competition here? This is a point that has been perhaps overstated. There’s been a lot written about what I said, and in fact the way I think and feel about the reviewing culture we have in New Zealand has changed a lot through reading the responses and objections of others. Initially I used the word “bullying” only to remark that, as we all learn at school, more often than not someone’s objections are more to do with their own shortcomings or failures than with yours, and that’s something that you have to remember when you’re seeing your artistic efforts devalued or dismissed in print. I don’t feel bullied when I receive a negative review, but I do think that some of the early reviewers refused to engage with the book on its own terms, and that refusal seemed to me to have a lot to do with my gender and my age. To even things out, I called attention to the gender and age of those reviewers, which at the time seemed only fair. I feel that it’s very important to say that sexism is a hegemonic problem, written in to all kinds of cultural attitudes that are held by men and women alike. As a culture we are much more comfortable with the idea of the male thinker than the female thinker, simply because there are so many more examples, throughout history, of male thinkers; as an image and as an idea, the male thinker is familiar to us, and acts in most cases as a default. Consequently female thinkers are often unacknowledged and discouraged, sometimes tacitly, sometimes explicitly, sometimes by men, and sometimes by women. I am lucky, following the Man Booker announcement, that my work is now being read very seriously indeed; but that is a privilege conferred for the most part by the status of the prize, and I know that I am the exception rather than the rule. I’d like to see a paradigm shift, and I’m confident that one is on the way, but the first thing that needs to happen is a collective acknowledgment that reviewing culture is gendered—that everything is gendered—and that until each of us makes a conscious effort to address inequality, we will each remain a part of the problem, rather than a part of the solution. Protesting the fact of inequality is like protesting global warming or evolution: it’s a conservative blindness, born out of cowardice and hostility.

Communism — ladies and gentlemen, I say it without flinching: communism in eastern Europe, Russia, China, Mongolia, North Korea, and Cuba brought land reform and human services; a dramatic bettering of the living conditions of hundreds of millions of people on a scale never before or never since witnessed in human history, and that's something to appreciate. Communism transformed desperately poor countries into societies in which everyone had adequate food, shelter, medical care, and education, and some of us who come from poor families who carry around the hidden injuries of class are very impressed; are very, very impressed by these achievements and are not willing to dismiss them as economistic. To say that socialism doesn't work is to overlook the fact that it did work and it worked for hundreds of millions of people. 'But what about the democratic rights that they lost?' We hear U.S. leaders talking about 'restoring' democracy to the communist countries, but these countries—with the exception of Czechoslovakia—were not democracies before communism. Russia was a Czarist autocracy; Poland was a right-wing fascist dictatorship under Piłsudski, with concentration camps of its own; Albania was an Italian fascist protectorate as early as 1927; Cuba was a U.S.-sponsored dictatorship under that butcher Batista; Lithuania, Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria were outright fascist regimes openly allied with Nazi Germany in World War 2. So, what—exactly what democracy are we talking about restoring? The socialist countries did not take away any rights that didn't exist there in the first place.

She was interviewing one of my favorite television actors, Don Johnson of Miami Vice. As he reclined on a couch in his lovely home, Don told Barbara about the joys and difficulties in his life. He talked of past struggles with drug and alcohol abuse and work addiction. Then he spoke of his relationships with women—how exciting and attractive he found them. I could see his energy rise and his breath quicken as he spoke. An air of intoxication seemed to fill the room. Don said his problem was he liked women too much and found it hard to be with one special partner over a long period. He would develop a deep friendship and intimacy, but then his eyes would wander. I thought to myself, this man has been sexually abused! His problems sounded identical to those of adult survivors I counsel in my practice. But then I reconsidered: Maybe I’ve been working too hard. Perhaps I’m imagining a sexual abuse history that isn’t really there. Then it happened. Barbara leaned forward and, with a smile, asked, “Don, is it true that you had your first sexual relationship when you were quite young, about twelve years old, with your seventeen-year-old baby-sitter?” My jaw dropped. Don grinned back at Barbara. He cocked his head to the side; a twinkle came into his blue eyes. “Yeah,” he said, “and I still get excited just thinking about her today.” Barbara showed no alarm. The next day I wrote Barbara Walters a letter, hoping to enlighten her about the sexual abuse of boys. Had Don been a twelve-year-old girl and the baby-sitter a seventeen-year-old boy, we wouldn’t hesitate to call what had happened rape. It would make no difference how cooperative or seemingly “willing” the victim had been. The sexual contact was exploitive and premature, and would have been whether the twelve-year-old was a boy or a girl. This past experience and perhaps others like it may very well be at the root of the troubles Don Johnson has had with long-term intimacy. Don wasn’t “lucky to get a piece of it early,” as some people might think. He was sexually abused and hadn’t yet realized it.   Acknowledging past sexual abuse is an important step in sexual healing. It helps us make a connection between our present sexual issues and their original source. Some survivors have little difficulty with this step: They already see themselves as survivors and their sexual issues as having stemmed directly from sexual abuse. A woman who is raped sees an obvious connection if she suddenly goes from having a pleasurable sex life to being terrified of sex. For many survivors, however, acknowledging sexual abuse is a difficult step. We may recall events, but through lack of understanding about sexual abuse may never have labeled those experiences as sexual abuse. We may have dismissed experiences we had as insignificant. We may have little or no memory of past abuse. And we may have difficulty fully acknowledging to ourselves and to others that we were victims. It took me years to realize and admit that I had been raped on a date, even though I knew what had happened and how I felt about it. I needed to understand this was in fact rape and that I had been a victim. I needed to remember more and to stop blaming myself before I was able to acknowledge my experience as sexual abuse.

Early in the boob-emerging years, I had no boobs, and I was touchy about it. Remember in middle school algebra class, you’d type 55378008 on your calculator, turn it upside down, and hand it to the flat-chested girl across the aisle? I was that girl, you bi-yotch. I would have died twice if any of the boys had mentioned my booblets. Last year, I thought my boobs had progressed quite nicely. And I progressed from the one-piece into a tankini. But I wasn’t quite ready for any more exposure. I didn’t want the boys to treat me like a girl. Now I did. So today I’d worn a cute little bikini. Over that, I still wore Adam’s cutoff jeans. Amazingly, they looked sexy, riding low on my hips, when I traded the football T-shirt for a pink tank that ended above my belly button and hugged my figure. I even had a little cleavage. I was so proud. Sean was going to love it. Mrs. Vader stared at my chest, perplexed. Finally she said, “Oh, I get it. You’re trying to look hot.” “Thank you!” Mission accomplished. “Here’s a hint. Close your legs.” I snapped my thighs together on the stool. People always scolded me for sitting like a boy. Then I slid off the stool and stomped to the door in a huff. “Where do you want me?” She’d turned back to the computer. “You’ve got gas.” Oh, goody. I headed out the office door, toward the front dock to man the gas pumps. This meant at some point during the day, one of the boys would look around the marina office and ask, “Who has gas?” and another boy would answer, “Lori has gas.” If I were really lucky, Sean would be in on the joke. The office door squeaked open behind me. “Lori,” Mrs. Vader called. “Did you want to talk?” Noooooooo. Nothing like that. I’d only gone into her office and tried to start a conversation. Mrs. Vader had three sons. She didn’t know how to talk to a girl. My mother had died in a boating accident alone on the lake when I was four. I didn’t know how to talk to a woman. Any convo between Mrs. Vader and me was doomed from the start. “No, why?” I asked without turning around. I’d been galloping down the wooden steps, but now I stepped very carefully, looking down, as if I needed to examine every footfall so I wouldn’t trip. “Watch out around the boys,” she warned me. I raised my hand and wiggled my fingers, toodle-dee-doo, dismissing her. Those boys were harmless. Those boys had better watch out for me.

The most alarming rhetoric comes out of the dispute between liberals and conservatives, and it’s a dangerous waste of time because they’re both right. The perennial conservative concern about high taxes supporting a nonworking “underclass” has entirely legitimate roots in our evolutionary past and shouldn’t be dismissed out of hand. Early hominids lived a precarious existence where freeloaders were a direct threat to survival, and so they developed an exceedingly acute sense of whether they were being taken advantage of by members of their own group. But by the same token, one of the hallmarks of early human society was the emergence of a culture of compassion that cared for the ill, the elderly, the wounded, and the unlucky. In today’s terms, that is a common liberal concern that also has to be taken into account. Those two driving forces have coexisted for hundreds of thousands of years in human society and have been duly codified in this country as a two-party political system. The eternal argument over so-called entitlement programs—and, more broadly, over liberal and conservative thought—will never be resolved because each side represents an ancient and absolutely essential component of our evolutionary past. So how do you unify a secure, wealthy country that has sunk into a zero-sum political game with itself? How do you make veterans feel that they are returning to a cohesive society that was worth fighting for in the first place? I put that question to Rachel Yehuda of Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City. Yehuda has seen, up close, the effect of such antisocial divisions on traumatized vets. “If you want to make a society work, then you don’t keep underscoring the places where you’re different—you underscore your shared humanity,” she told me. “I’m appalled by how much people focus on differences. Why are you focusing on how different you are from one another, and not on the things that unite us?” The United States is so powerful that the only country capable of destroying her might be the United States herself, which means that the ultimate terrorist strategy would be to just leave the country alone. That way, America’s ugliest partisan tendencies could emerge unimpeded by the unifying effects of war. The ultimate betrayal of tribe isn’t acting competitively—that should be encouraged—but predicating your power on the excommunication of others from the group. That is exactly what politicians of both parties try to do when they spew venomous rhetoric about their rivals. That is exactly what media figures do when they go beyond criticism of their fellow citizens and openly revile them. Reviling people you share a combat outpost with is an incredibly stupid thing to do, and public figures who imagine their nation isn’t, potentially, one huge combat outpost are deluding themselves.

Steve Jobs knew from an early age that he was adopted. “My parents were very open with me about that,” he recalled. He had a vivid memory of sitting on the lawn of his house, when he was six or seven years old, telling the girl who lived across the street. “So does that mean your real parents didn’t want you?” the girl asked. “Lightning bolts went off in my head,” according to Jobs. “I remember running into the house, crying. And my parents said, ‘No, you have to understand.’ They were very serious and looked me straight in the eye. They said, ‘We specifically picked you out.’ Both of my parents said that and repeated it slowly for me. And they put an emphasis on every word in that sentence.” Abandoned. Chosen. Special. Those concepts became part of who Jobs was and how he regarded himself. His closest friends think that the knowledge that he was given up at birth left some scars. “I think his desire for complete control of whatever he makes derives directly from his personality and the fact that he was abandoned at birth,” said one longtime colleague, Del Yocam. “He wants to control his environment, and he sees the product as an extension of himself.” Greg Calhoun, who became close to Jobs right after college, saw another effect. “Steve talked to me a lot about being abandoned and the pain that caused,” he said. “It made him independent. He followed the beat of a different drummer, and that came from being in a different world than he was born into.” Later in life, when he was the same age his biological father had been when he abandoned him, Jobs would father and abandon a child of his own. (He eventually took responsibility for her.) Chrisann Brennan, the mother of that child, said that being put up for adoption left Jobs “full of broken glass,” and it helps to explain some of his behavior. “He who is abandoned is an abandoner,” she said. Andy Hertzfeld, who worked with Jobs at Apple in the early 1980s, is among the few who remained close to both Brennan and Jobs. “The key question about Steve is why he can’t control himself at times from being so reflexively cruel and harmful to some people,” he said. “That goes back to being abandoned at birth. The real underlying problem was the theme of abandonment in Steve’s life.” Jobs dismissed this. “There’s some notion that because I was abandoned, I worked very hard so I could do well and make my parents wish they had me back, or some such nonsense, but that’s ridiculous,” he insisted. “Knowing I was adopted may have made me feel more independent, but I have never felt abandoned. I’ve always felt special. My parents made me feel special.” He would later bristle whenever anyone referred to Paul and Clara Jobs as his “adoptive” parents or implied that they were not his “real” parents. “They were my parents 1000%,” he said. When speaking about his biological parents, on the other hand, he was curt: “They were my sperm and egg bank. That’s not harsh, it’s just the way it was, a sperm bank thing, nothing more.

Facebook excelled at distribution. As noted earlier, Facebook’s early focus on college students, which caused some to dismiss it as a niche product, was actually part of an extremely successful distribution strategy. To achieve incredible virality, Facebook would deliberately delay launching at a college campus until over 50 percent of the students had requested it so that local critical mass was reached almost immediately. Facebook further benefited from leveraging existing friend networks to expand outward from its original college user base. As users experienced the benefits of staying connected via Facebook, they naturally wanted to add their off-line friends to the network.

The crucial thing to understand is that dismissive patterns learned from an early age become internalized, which in turn begins

The AAI scoring system (Main and Goldwyn 1994) classifies individuals into Secure/Autonomous, Insecure/Dismissing, Insecure/Preoccupied, or Unresolved with respect to loss or trauma—categories based on the structural qualities of narratives of early experiences.

According to “Clement,” when the Christians talked about loving your enemies, their neighbors had been interested. But when they found that the Christians didn’t do what they said, they dismissed Christianity as “a myth and a delusion.” From Clement’s perspective, Christians had to embody the message if the churches were to grow.

There is a tendency in the academic study of magic to characterise magical belief and practice as irrational. This tendency is the result of a misrepresentation and misunderstanding of the nature of magic and of its historical role in Western culture. This misrepresentation is dependent upon two erroneous interpretations of magical practice and belief. The first interpretation is derived from a religious view of the world and the second from an apparent scientific view of the world. Early biblical religion provides us with some of the first written documents that deal with magic. In this forum magic is depicted as evil and forbidden yet, most importantly, it is portrayed as being quite real. This understanding of magic prevailed in the Middle Ages when unorthodox and deviant religious practices were classified by the Church as magical. The scientific viewpoint dismissed magic in favour of the more objectively verifiable applications of scientific practices and beliefs. The Age of Enlightenment furthered this early scientific approach by characterising magic not only as inefficient but also as irrational when placed under the scrutiny of newly established scientific and empirical methods. These two understandings of magic, one as terrible and real, and the other as inefficient and wrong, continue to taint the western comprehension of magic.

In a similar vein, early in 2005, Florida State University professors were startled to learn from press accounts that their school’s administration planned to build a school of chiropractic medicine on the Tallahassee campus. Indeed, before the faculty had even read about the idea, the university’s president had already hired an administrator to oversee planning for the new school and advertised for a dean to direct its programs.8 University administrators boasted that theirs would be the first chiropractic school formally affiliated with an American university, making FSU the nation’s leader in this realm. Administrators apparently were not bothered by the fact that chiropractic theories, claims, and therapies, beyond simple massage, are universally dismissed by the medical and scientific communities as having no scientific basis. In essence, FSU administrators aspired to a lead role in the promotion of quackery. Fortunately, the state legislature cut off funds for the chiropractic school before the administration’s visionary plans could be implemented.

Compared to all this, Ronstadt and Browne were still trying to graduate from the kids' table. Ronstadt had released her first album for Geffen, Don't Cry Now, in September 1973. Browne followed a few weeks later, in October, with his second album, For Everyman. Both albums sold respectably, but neither cracked the Top 40 on the Billboard album chart. And while Geffen had great expectations for both artists, in early 1974 each was still building an audience. Their tour itinerary reflected their transitional position. It brought them to big venues in Detroit, Boston, Philadelphia, and Washington, DC, but also took them far from the bright lights to small community theaters and college campuses in Oxnard, San Luis Obispo, New Haven, and Cortland, New York. At either end, there wasn't much glamour in the experience. They had moved up from the lowest rung on the touring ladder, when they had lugged their gear in and out of station wagons, but had progressed only to a Continental Trailways bus without beds that both bands crammed into for the late-night drives between shows. "The first thing that happened is we were driving all night, and the next morning we were exhausted," Browne remembered. "Like, no one slept a wink. We were sitting up all night on a bus."' "Touring was misery," Ronstadt said, looking back. "Touring is just hard. You don't get to meet anybody. You are always in a bubble . . . You saw the world outside the bus window, and you did the sound check every day."9 The performances were uneven, too. "While Browne is much more assured and confident on stage than he was a year or two ago, he's still very much like a smart kid with a grown-up gift for songwriting," sniffed Judith Sims of Rolling Stone. She treated Ronstadt even more dismissively, describing her as peddling "country schmaltz."' The young rock journalist Cameron Crowe, catching the tour a few days later in Berkeley, described Browne's set as "painfully mediocre."" But Ronstadt and Browne found their footing as they progressed, each alternating lead billing depending on who had sold more records in each market. By the time the cavalcade rolled into Carnegie Hall, the reception for Browne and Ronstadt was strong enough that the promoters added a second show. In February 1974, Jackson Browne and Linda Ronstadt were still at the edge of the stardom they would soon achieve.

According to technologist David Rosenthal, speculation on cryptocurrencies is the engine that drives Web3—that it can’t work without it. “[A] permissionless blockchain requires a cryptocurrency to function, and this cryptocurrency requires speculation to function,” he said in a talk at Stanford in early 2022.4 Basically, he’s describing a pyramid scheme: Blockchains need to give people something in exchange for volunteering computing power, and cryptocurrencies fill that role—but the system works only if other people are willing to buy them believing that they’ll be worth more in the future. Stephen Diehl, a technologist and vocal critic of Web3, floridly dismissed blockchain as “a one-trick pony whose only application is creating censorship-resistant crypto investment schemes, an invention whose negative externalities and capacity for harm vastly outweigh any possible uses.

I have agreed to walk with my mother late in the day but I’ve come uptown early to wander by myself, feel the sun, take in the streets, be in the world without the interceding interpretations of a companion as voluble as she. At Seventy-third Street I turn off Lexington and head for the Whitney, wanting a last look at a visiting collection. As I approach the museum some German Expressionist drawings in a gallery window catch my eye. I walk through the door, turn to the wall nearest me, and come face to face with two large Nolde watercolors, the famous flowers. I’ve looked often at Nolde’s flowers, but now it’s as though I am seeing them for the first time: that hot lush diffusion of his outlined, I suddenly realize, in intent. I see the burning quality of Nolde’s intention, the serious patience with which the flowers absorb him, the clear, stubborn concentration of the artist on his subject. I see it. And I think, It’s the concentration that gives the work its power. The space inside me enlarges. That rectangle of light and air inside, where thought clarifies and language grows and response is made intelligent, that famous space surrounded by loneliness, anxiety, self-pity, it opens wide as I look at Nolde’s flowers. In the museum lobby I stop at the permanent exhibit of Alexander Calder’s circus. As usual, a crowd is gathered, laughing and gaping at the wonderfulness of Calder’s sighing, weeping, triumphing bits of cloth and wire. Beside me stand two women. I look at their faces and I dismiss them: middle-aged Midwestern blondes, blue-eyed and moony. Then one of them says, “It’s like second childhood,” and the other one replies tartly, “Better than anyone’s first.” I’m startled, pleasured, embarrassed. I think, What a damn fool you are to cut yourself off with your stupid amazement that she could have said that. Again, I feel the space inside widen unexpectedly. That space. It begins in the middle of my forehead and ends in the middle of my groin. It is, variously, as wide as my body, as narrow as a slit in a fortress wall. On days when thought flows freely or better yet clarifies with effort, it expands gloriously. On days when anxiety and self-pity crowd in, it shrinks, how fast it shrinks! When the space is wide and I occupy it fully, I taste the air, feel the light. I breathe evenly and slowly. I am peaceful and excited, beyond influence or threat. Nothing can touch me. I’m safe. I’m free. I’m thinking. When I lose the battle to think, the boundaries narrow, the air is polluted, the light clouds over. All is vapor and fog, and I have trouble breathing. Today is promising, tremendously promising. Wherever I go, whatever I see, whatever my eye or ear touches, the space radiates expansion. I want to think. No, I mean today I really want to think. The desire announced itself with the word “concentration.” I go to meet my mother. I’m flying. Flying! I want to give her some of this shiningness bursting in me, siphon into her my immense happiness at being alive. Just because she is my oldest intimate and at this moment I love everybody, even her.

The term ‘utopian socialism’ was used by Marx and Engels as a way of dismissing a large number of their rivals, and denigrating their ideas in comparison with their own ‘scientific socialism’. Despite this, it does describe one strain of socialism in the early nineteenth century. Unlike the Communists, the utopians were generally not workers and initially did not have a close connection to working-class movements. They were also considerably less interested in seizing the central state. Instead, they focused their efforts on fashioning small, experimental communities, and presented a vision of the ideal society that was more appealing to many than the Spartan egalitarianism of the Babouvists. And rather than enforcing Weitling’s Christian morality, they sought to challenge what they saw as the oppressive doctrine of original sin on which Christianity was founded. Mankind, they argued, was naturally altruistic and cooperative, and right-minded education would permit these qualities to predominate. They were particularly hostile to what they saw as the grim work ethic of the new industrial capitalism, which was so closely associated with Christian, and particularly Protestant, ideas of the time. The factory system and the division of labour transformed men into machines and life into joyless drudgery. Society had to be organized so that everybody in the community could be creative and develop their individuality. Their vision was therefore Romantic in spirit. Though unlike the Jacobins, whose Romanticism was one of the self-sacrificing heroism of the soldier, theirs extolled the self-expression and self-realization of the artist.

I’ll never forget the highly respected essayist who wrote in Britain’s most highly respected literary publication that my mother’s “early death spared us all a lot of tedium.” (He referred in the same essay to “Diana’s tryst with the underpass.”) But this panda crack always struck me as both acutely perceptive and uniquely barbarous. We did live in a zoo, but by the same token I knew, as a soldier, that turning people into animals, into non-people, is the first step in mistreating them, in destroying them. If even a celebrated intellectual could dismiss us as animals, what hope for the man or woman on the street?

Tish is sensitive, and that is her superpower. The opposite of sensitive is not brave. It's not brave to refuse to pay attention, to refuse to notice, to refuse to feel and know and imagine. The opposite of sensitive is insensitive, and that's no badge of honor. Tish senses. Even as the world tries to speed by her, she is slowly taking it in. Wait, stop. That thing you said... it made me feel something and wonder something. Can we stay there for a moment? I have feelings. I have questions. In most cultures, folks like Tish are identified early, set apart as shamans, medicine people, poets, and clergy. They are considered eccentric but critical to the survival of the group because they are able to hear things others don't hear and see things others don't see and feel things others don't feel. The culture depends on the sensitivity of a few, because nothing can be healed if it's not sensed first. But our society is so hell-bent on expansion, power, and efficiency at all costs that the folks like Tish- like me- are inconvenient. We slow the world down. We're on the bow of the Titanic, pointing, crying out, "Iceberg! Iceberg!" while everyone else is below deck, yelling back, "We just want to keep dancing!" It is easier to call us broken and dismiss us than to consider that we are responding appropriately to a broken world.

The infant’s capability to be empathic and nurturing—their capacity to love—depends upon the nature, quality, and number of loving interactions they experience early in life. A dismissive, disengaged interaction is not building the foundation for a loving person. On the contrary, it’s building the foundation for an emotionally hungry, needy person who will long for belonging but won’t have the neurobiological capability to really find what they need. Dismissive caregiving can lead to an unquenchable thirst for love. You cannot love if you have not been loved.

How do you see, then, the future – or, in apocalyptic terms, the ‘remaining time’ – under this view? It is going to be more of the same increasing complexity, but there will be dialectical turns so astonishing that they are going to take everybody by surprise. There must be things in store. That’s why for me it is important to go back to Scripture and to the early Christian texts, because they are so revealing about the nature of the present time. Paul says: ‘I resolved to know nothing while I was with you except Jesus Christ and him crucified’ (1 Corinthians 2.2). Scholars think this is an anti-intellectual statement, but it is not at all. It means that the Cross is the source of all knowledge of God – which theologians believe – and of man as well – which they do not necessarily understand. Paul understands this. And the idea of Satan overcome by the Cross is an essential one that unfortunately, in Western Christianity, has been suspected of being magical, irrational, and is dismissed as a result. The Cross destroys the power of Satan as ‘king of this world’, meaning the power to unleash violence through the scapegoat mechanism. Satan is still with us but only as a source of disorder. Indirectly, therefore, because of our inability to live without scapegoats, Christianity is a source of disruption in our world. Christianity constantly suggests that our scapegoats are nothing but innocent victims. Christianity shows that the guilty ones are the murderers of scapegoats, and those who approve of their murderers. Let me conclude by repeating what I have already said. This compassion for the victim is the deeper meaning of Christianity. We will always be mimetic, but we do not have to engage automatically in mimetic rivalries. We do not have to accuse our neighbour; we can learn to forgive him instead.

Within just a few thousand years-a millisecond in evolutionary time-humans had developed much more complex tools, and the intellectual theories to support them. Newtonian physics, the industrial revolution, and the nineteenth century age of enlightenment spurred tremendous technological development and transformed our social mores. A consequence of this paradigm shift, however, was that humanity's view of the world changed from an organic to a mechanistic one. Early engineers saw the potential of breaking up any system into components and rearranging the parts. Innovations in machinery and materials led to mass production: making thousands and then millions of exactly the same forms out of flat metal plates and square building blocks. However, for all its positive impact on the economics and culture of the era, the industrial revolution's orientation was shortsighted. In the rush to understand the world as a clockwork mechanism of discrete components, nature's design genius was left behind-and with it the blueprints for natural, nontoxic, streamlined efficiency. A new set of values emerged, such that anything drawn from nature was dismissed as primitive in favor of human invention. Just as the pharmacology of the rain forests, known to indigenous people for millenia, has been largely lost to modern science, so too were the simple rules of natural design obfuscated. A our societies became more urban, we went from living and working in nature and being intimately connected with its systems, to viewing nature as a mere warehouse (some might say, whorehouse) of raw materials waiting to be plundered for industrial development.

The Secrets of Skunk: Part Two At the Lockheed skunk works, Kelly Johnson ran a tight ship. He loved efficiency. He had a motto—“be quick, be quiet, and be on time”—and a set of rules.6 And while we are parsing the deep secrets of skunk, it’s to “Kelly’s rules” we must now turn. Wall the skunk works off from the rest of the corporate bureaucracy—that’s what you learn if you boil Johnson’s rules down to their essence. Out of his fourteen rules, four pertain solely to military projects and can thus be excluded from this discussion. Three are ways to increase rapid iteration (a topic we’ll come back to in a moment), but the remaining seven are all ways to enforce isolation. Rule 3, for example: “The number of people with any connection to the project should be restricted in an almost vicious manner.” Rule 13 is more of the same: “Access by outsiders to the project and its personnel must be strictly controlled by appropriate security measures.” Isolation, then, according to Johnson, is the most important key to success in a skunk works. The reasoning here is twofold. There’s the obvious need for military secrecy, but more important is the fact that isolation stimulates risk taking, encouraging ideas weird and wild and acting as a counterforce to organizational inertia. Organizational inertia is the notion that once any company achieves success, its desire to develop and champion radical new technologies and directions is often tempered by the much stronger desire not to disrupt existing markets and lose their paychecks. Organizational inertia is fear of failure writ large, the reason Kodak didn’t recognize the brilliance of the digital camera, IBM initially dismissed the personal computer, and America Online (AOL) is, well, barely online. But what is true for a corporation is also true for the entrepreneur. Just as the successful skunk works isolates the innovation team from the greater organization, successful entrepreneurs need a buffer between themselves and the rest of society. As Burt Rutan, winner of the Ansari XPRIZE, once taught me: “The day before something is truly a breakthrough, it’s a crazy idea.” Trying out crazy ideas means bucking expert opinion and taking big risks. It means not being afraid to fail. Because you will fail. The road to bold is paved with failure, and this means having a strategy in place to handle risk and learn from mistakes is critical. In a talk given at re:Invent 2012, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos7 explains it like this: “Many people misperceive what good entrepreneurs do. Good entrepreneurs don’t like risk. They seek to reduce risk. Starting a company is already risky . . . [so] you systematically eliminate risk in those early days.

But the investigative reporter Lee Fang discovered that a volunteer with FreedomWorks was circulating a memo instructing Tea Partiers on how to disrupt the meetings. Bob MacGuffie, who ran a Web site called RightPrinciples.com, advised opponents of Obama’s policies to “pack the hall…spread out” to make their numbers seem more significant, and to “rock-the-boat early in the Rep’s presentation…to yell out and challenge the Rep’s statements early…to rattle him, get him off his prepared script and agenda…stand up and shout and sit right back down.” While MacGuffie was quickly dismissed as a lone amateur, some of the outside agitation was professional, paid for by the Koch network. Noble later admitted, “We packed these town halls with people who were just screaming about this thing.

He held it up so she could see the spine: The Count of Monte Cristo, by Dumas. “Ah, a tale of revenge. Are you seeking inspiration?” He gave her a rather threatening smile. “So far, our hero seems spineless.” “You must be in the early section, then. I assure you, after Dantes spends years and years locked away, growing into a ragamuffin, he emerges quite deadly. Why, the first thing he does is to cut his hair.” He slammed shut the book. “You are peculiarly deaf to the cues most servants know to listen for. Was there some purpose to your visit? If not, you are dismissed.” She held up the mirror again. “Here is my purpose: you look like a wildebeest. If your valet—” “I don’t believe you know what a wildebeest looks like,” he said mildly. Hesitantly she lowered the mirror. He was right; she hadn’t the faintest idea what a wildebeest looked like. “Well, you look how a wildebeest sounds like it should look.” “That doesn’t even make sense.” He opened his book again. “ ‘Sheepdog’ was the better choice.” She glared at him. “Do you enjoy being likened to a dog?

After lunch four of us have our picture taken. Regn, myself, Fernus, and Sharon. I grip my brown lunch bag in hand, Fernus holds her soda can, Regn makes a funny expression. But what strikes me about this photograph is the shadow. We are standing in Group Reservations, the sun streaming in from above, through the skylight, and directly behind my head a giant starred reflection is cast on the wall. It is cast there as a pointed halo of sorts. I am next to Regn, she wears her sunglasses though we are still indoors. My face looks so young, my eyes do not betray any weariness. The pain is gradual. The pain is two years and more ahead. Is the star the crest of my youth? Does it suggest what I’ve always known—that something more, something far greater was in store for me? Looking back and all that’s come to pass, I can tell you yes. With a full and tired heart, I can tell you yes. I am not inclined to whimsy or overly-superstitious; however, there are signs and sometimes they must be noticed or you are a fool to dismiss them. I knew from an early age I was different. I saw the world from a distance. I was born to suffer and endure, but in so doing, if I succeeded, I was born for distinction. It was not conceit, but the knowing of Self and sometimes the frustration, the tedious ache of patience, rendered me doubtful.

Che” Guevara with about two thousand guerrilla fighters entered Havana on January 2, 1959. Their entry was relatively quiet as they headed for the Malecon and the old Spanish fortress, overlooking the entrance of Havana harbor. At 3:00 a.m. early the following morning, they took over the imposing La Cabaña fortress. In anticipation of Guevara’s arrival the three thousand regular army soldiers, assigned to the fort, stood in formation as their officers greeted Guevara. Addressing the troops, “Che” light-heartedly told them that they could teach his men how to march, but that his rebels could teach them how to fight. When they were dismissed, he had them turn in their rifles but allowed the officers to retain their pistols. He granted them all a month’s furlough; however, upon their return they discovered that they had all been relieved of duty and permanently discharged.

A Hard Left For High-School History The College Board version of our national story BY STANLEY KURTZ | 1215 words AT the height of the “culture wars” of the late 1980s and early 1990s, conservatives were alive to the dangers of a leftist takeover of American higher education. Today, with the coup all but complete, conservatives take the loss of the academy for granted and largely ignore it. Meanwhile, America’s college-educated Millennial generation drifts ever farther leftward. Now, however, an ambitious attempt to force a leftist tilt onto high-school U.S.-history courses has the potential to shake conservatives out of their lethargy, pulling them back into the education wars, perhaps to retake some lost ground. The College Board, the private company that develops the SAT and Advanced Placement (AP) exams, recently ignited a firestorm by releasing, with little public notice, a lengthy, highly directive, and radically revisionist “framework” for teaching AP U.S. history. The new framework replaces brief guidelines that once allowed states, school districts, and teachers to present U.S. history as they saw fit. The College Board has promised to generate detailed guidelines for the entire range of AP courses (including government and politics, world history, and European history), and in doing so it has effectively set itself up as a national school board. Dictating curricula for its AP courses allows the College Board to circumvent state standards, virtually nationalizing America’s high schools, in violation of cherished principles of local control. Unchecked, this will result in a high-school curriculum every bit as biased and politicized as the curriculum now dominant in America’s colleges. Not coincidentally, David Coleman, the new head of the College Board, is also the architect of the Common Core, another effort to effectively nationalize American K–12 education, focusing on English and math skills. As president of the College Board, Coleman has found a way to take control of history, social studies, and civics as well, pushing them far to the left without exposing himself to direct public accountability. Although the College Board has steadfastly denied that its new AP U.S. history (APUSH) guidelines are politically biased, the intellectual background of the effort indicates otherwise. The early stages of the APUSH redesign overlapped with a collaborative venture between the College Board and the Organization of American Historians to rework U.S.-history survey courses along “internationalist” lines. The goal was to undercut anything that smacked of American exceptionalism, the notion that, as a nation uniquely constituted around principles of liberty and equality, America stands as a model of self-government for the world. Accordingly, the College Board’s new framework for AP U.S. history eliminates the traditional emphasis on Puritan leader John Winthrop’s “City upon a Hill” sermon and its echoes in American history. The Founding itself is demoted and dissolved within a broader focus on transcontinental developments, chiefly the birth of an exploitative international capitalism grounded in the slave trade. The Founders’ commitment to republican principles is dismissed as evidence of a benighted belief in European cultural superiority. Thomas Bender, the NYU historian who leads the Organization of American Historians’ effort to globalize and denationalize American history, collaborated with the high-school and college teachers who eventually came to lead the College Board’s APUSH redesign effort. Bender frames his movement as a counterpoint to the exceptionalist perspective that dominated American foreign policy during the George W. Bush ad ministration. Bender also openly hopes that students exposed to his approach will sympathize with Supreme Court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s willingness to use foreign law to interpret the U.S. Constitution rather than with Justice Antonin Scalia�

Social conservatives do have a pretty decent predictive track record, including in many cases where their fears were dismissed as wild and apocalyptic, their projections as sky-is-falling nonsense, their theories of how society and human nature works as evidence-free fantasies. . . . If you look at the post-1960s trend data — whether it’s on family structure and social capital, fertility and marriage rates, patterns of sexual behavior and their links to flourishing relationships, or just trends in marital contentment and personal happiness more generally — the basic social conservative analysis has turned out to have more predictive power than my rigorously empirical liberal friends are inclined to admit. . . . In the late 1960s and early ’70s, the pro-choice side of the abortion debate frequently predicted that legal abortion would reduce single parenthood and make marriages more stable, while the pro-life side made the allegedly-counterintuitive claim that it would have roughly the opposite effect; overall, it’s fair to say that post-Roe trends were considerably kinder to Roe’s critics than to the “every child a wanted child” conceit. Conservatives (and not only conservatives) also made various “dystopian” predictions about eugenics and the commodification of human life as reproductive science advanced in the ’70s, while many liberals argued that these fears were overblown; today, from “selective reduction” to the culling of Down’s Syndrome fetuses to worldwide trends in sex-selective abortion, from our fertility industry’s “embryo glut” to the global market in paid surrogacy, the dystopian predictions are basically just the status quo. No-fault divorce was pitched as an escape hatch for the miserable and desperate that wouldn’t affect the average marriage, but of course divorce turned out to havesocial-contagion effects as well. Religious fears that population control would turn coercive and tyrannical were scoffed at and then vindicated. Dan Quayle was laughed at until the data suggested that basically he had it right. The fairly-ancient conservative premise that social permissiveness is better for the rich than for the poor persistently bemuses the left; it also persistently describes reality. And if you dropped some of the documentation from today’s college rape crisis through a wormhole into the 1960s-era debates over shifting to coed living arrangements on campuses, I’m pretty sure that even many of the conservatives in that era would assume that someone was pranking them, that even in their worst fears it couldn’t possibly end up like this. More broadly, over the last few decades social conservatives have frequently offered “both/and” cultural analyses that liberals have found strange or incredible — arguing (as noted above) that a sexually-permissive society can easily end up with a high abortion rate and a high out-of-wedlock birthrate; or that permissive societies can end up with more births to single parents and fewer births (not only fewer than replacement, but fewer than women actually desire) overall; or that expressive individualism could lead to fewer marriages and greater unhappiness for people who do get hitched. Social liberals, on the other hand, have tended to take a view of human nature that’s a little more positivist and consumerist, in which the assumption is that some kind of “perfectly-liberated decision making” is possible and that such liberation leads to optimal outcomes overall. Hence that 1970s-era assumption that unrestricted abortion would be good for children’s family situations, hence the persistent assumption that marriages must be happier when there’s more sexual experimentation beforehand, etc.

There was a time when the church was very powerful.… Wherever the early Christians entered a town the people in power became disturbed and immediately sought to convict them for being “disturbers of the peace” and “outside agitators.” … Things are different now.… If today’s church does not recapture the sacrificial spirit of the early church, it will lose its authenticity, forfeit the loyalty of millions, and be dismissed as an irrelevant social club with no meaning for the twentieth century.

Too often we decide very early whether we agree or disagree with someone or with an idea, without making an effort to truly understand the person or the point. Our public conversations, and especially conversations on social media, often seem like exercises in picking sides and choosing teams. We hear or read something, make a quick call, then dismiss those with whom we disagree as ignorant or evil.

Everything is PR” has become the favorite phrase of the new Russia; my Moscow peers are filled with a sense that they are both cynical and enlightened. When I ask them about Soviet-era dissidents, like my parents, who fought against communism, they dismiss them as naïve dreamers and my own Western attachment to such vague notions as “human rights” and “freedom” as a blunder. “Can’t you see your own governments are just as bad as ours?” they ask me. I try to protest—but they just smile and pity me. To believe in something and stand by it in this world is derided, the ability to be a shape-shifter celebrated. Vladimir Nabokov once described a species of butterfly that at an early stage in its development had to learn how to change colors to hide from predators. The butterfly’s predators had long died off, but still it changed its colors from the sheer pleasure of transformation. Something similar has happened to the Russian elites: during the Soviet period they learned to dissimulate in order to survive; now there is no need to constantly change their colors, but they continue to do so out of a sort of dark joy, conformism raised to the level of aesthetic act.

Ah. You are not crazy to be heartbroken over the polar bears; the rest of us are crazy not to be. Tish couldn’t go to recess because she was paying attention to what her teacher said. As soon as she heard the polar bear news, she let herself feel the horror and know the wrongness and imagine the inevitable outcome. Tish is sensitive, and that is her superpower. The opposite of sensitive is not brave. It’s not brave to refuse to pay attention, to refuse to notice, to refuse to feel and know and imagine. The opposite of sensitive is insensitive, and that’s no badge of honor. Tish senses. Even as the world tries to speed by her, she is slowly taking it in. Wait, stop. That thing you said about the polar bears…it made me feel something and wonder something. Can we stay there for a moment? I have feelings. I have questions. I’m not ready to run outside to recess yet. In most cultures, folks like Tish are identified early, set apart as shamans, medicine people, poets, and clergy. They are considered eccentric but critical to the survival of the group because they are able to hear things others don’t hear and see things others don’t see and feel things others don’t feel. The culture depends on the sensitivity of a few, because nothing can be healed if it’s not sensed first. But our society is so hell-bent on expansion, power, and efficiency at all costs that the folks like Tish—like me—are inconvenient. We slow the world down. We’re on the bow of the Titanic, pointing, crying out, “Iceberg! Iceberg!” while everyone else is below deck, yelling back, “We just want to keep dancing!” It is easier to call us broken and dismiss us than to consider that we are responding appropriately to a broken world. My little girl is not broken. She is a prophet. I want to be wise enough to stop with her, ask her what she feels, and listen to what she knows.

others, American policy in Southeast Asia was inextricably bound to policies in Europe and to overall Cold War strategy. Far-off Vietnam, considered relatively unimportant in itself, was both a domino and a pawn on the world chessboard.48 The French, however, were losing badly to rebel forces led by the resourceful Vo Nguyen Giap, the Vietminh commander-in-chief. Then and later the lightly armed, lightly clad Vietminh soldiers, enjoying nationalistic support from villagers, fought bravely, resourcefully, and relentlessly—incurring huge casualties—to reclaim their country. By contrast, the French army was poorly led. Its commanders were contemptuous of Giap and his guerrilla forces and vastly overrated the potential of their firepower. Ike dismissed the French generals as a "poor lot." General Lawton Collins, a top American adviser, said that the United States must "put the squeeze on the French to get them off their fannies." Nothing of that sort happened, and the French, hanging on to major cities such as Hanoi and Saigon, foolishly decided in early 1954 to fight a decisive battle at Dienbienphu, a hard-to-defend redoubt deep in rebel-held territory near the border with Laos.49 By then various of Ike's advisers were growing anxious to engage the United States in rescue of the French. One was Vice-President Nixon, who floated the idea of sending in American ground forces. Another was chief of staff Radford

I love you. I miss you. Please get out of my house. Nothing today hasn’t happened before: I woke alone, bundled the old dog into his early winter coat, watered him, fed him, left him to his cage for the day closing just now. My eye drifts to the buff belly of a hawk wheeling, as they do, in a late fall light that melts against the turning oak and smelts its leaves bronze. Before you left, I bent to my task, fixed in my mind the slopes and planes of your face; fitted, in some essential geography, your belly’s stretch and collapse against my own, your scent familiar as a thousand evenings. Another time, I might have dismissed as hunger this cataloguing, this fitting, this fixing, but today I crest the hill, secure in the company of my longing. What binds us, stretches: a tautness I’ve missed as a sapling, supple, misses the wind.

Those who claim that mass incarceration is “just like” Jim Crow make a serious mistake. Things have changed. The fact that a clear majority of Americans were telling pollsters in the early 1980s—when the drug war was kicking off—that they opposed race discrimination in nearly all its forms should not be dismissed lightly.60 Arguably some respondents may have been telling pollsters what they thought was appropriate rather than what they actually believed, but there is no reason to believe that most of them were lying. It is more likely that most Americans by the early 1980s had come to reject segregationist thinking and values, and not only did not want to be thought of as racist but did not want to be racist.

Inspired by their interpretation of biblical prophecies in the Book of Revelation, conservative Protestants had long feared a “one-world” government that would be ruled over by the Antichrist. In the early twentieth century these fears had attached to the League of Nations, and during the Cold War these fears were often channeled into a virulent anticommunism—though Hal Lindsey’s best-selling The Late Great Planet Earth (1970) had warned of a European Community that would usher in the reign of the devil. With the fall of the Soviet Union, suspicions fell squarely on the UN. And, in the case of Robertson, on the Illuminati, on wealthy Jewish bankers, and on conspiratorial corporate internationalists. The Wall Street Journal dismissed Robertson’s book as “a predictable compendium of the lunatic fringe’s greatest hits,” written in an “energetically crackpot style.

Today, as light pollution envelops our planet, the stars are almost gone. Instead of thousands being visible on a dark night, in today’s cities we see only a few dozen (and astronomers fear these will soon be vastly outnumbered by artificial satellites). Most people in the United States and Europe can no longer see the Milky Way at all. It is a catastrophic erosion of natural heritage: the obliteration of our connection with our galaxy and the wider universe. There has been no major outcry. Most people shrug their shoulders, glued to their phones, unconcerned by the loss of a view treated as fundamental by every other human culture in history. Yet we’re still trying to work out our place in the cosmos. Science has been wildly successful: today’s five-year-olds know more about the history, composition and nature of the physical universe than early cultures managed to glean in thousands of years. But it has also dissolved much of the meaning that those cultures found in life. Personal experience has been swept from our understanding of reality, replaced by the abstract, mathematical grid of space-time. Earth has been knocked from the center of existence to the suburbs; life reframed as a random accident; and God dismissed altogether, now that everything can be explained by physical laws. Far from having a meaningful role in the cosmic order, we’re “chemical scum,” as physicist Stephen Hawking put it, on the surface of a medium-sized planet orbiting an unremarkable star. Critics have fought this mechanistic view of humanity for centuries, often rejecting science wholesale in the process. But now even some high-profile scientists are voicing concerns that until very recently were taboo. They are suggesting that perhaps physical matter isn’t all that the universe is, all that we are. Perhaps science is only seeing half of the picture. We can explain stars and galaxies, but what about minds? What about consciousness itself? It’s shaping up to be an epic fight that just might transform the entire Western worldview.

I asked Mom about our early years, about what it was like to have three small children and be so busy with work. I tried to empathize with the pressure she must have felt in juggling family and career, but to no avail. Mom said, “I didn’t neglect my children!” She couldn’t even imagine that there was any issue that could have affected her children. In another conversation, I pointed out that there were no close relationships between the siblings. Some of us barely speak. We avoid each other, and when there is contact, the hostility is so close to the surface that it flares up at the slightest provocation. She denied every example. She only felt criticized and incredulous that I would make things up. In her mind, the family was fine in the past and is still fine. The next day she avoided me. After that, when I indicated that we were not finished, she smiled her dismissal, kissed me, and said that we should look forward to good things in the future. Slam. End of story.

Given the obvious “will to power” (as Friedrich Nietzsche called it) of the human race, the enormous energy put into its expression, the early emergence of hierarchies among children, and the childlike devastation of grown men who tumble from the top, I’m puzzled by the taboo with which our society surrounds this issue. Most psychology textbooks do not even mention power and dominance, except in relation to abusive relationships. Everyone seems in denial. In one study on the power motive, corporate managers were asked about their relationship with power. They did acknowledge the existence of a lust for power, but never applied it to themselves. They rather enjoyed responsibility, prestige, and authority. The power grabbers were other men. Political candidates are equally reluctant. They sell themselves as public servants, only in it to fix the economy or improve education. Have you ever heard a candidate admit he wants power? Obviously, the word “servant” is doublespeak: does anyone believe that it’s only for our sake that they join the mudslinging of modern democracy? Do the candidates themselves believe this? What an unusual sacrifice that would be. It’s refreshing to work with chimpanzees: they are the honest politicians we all long for. When political philosopher Thomas Hobbes postulated an insuppressible power drive, he was right on target for both humans and apes. Observing how blatantly chimpanzees jockey for position, one will look in vain for ulterior motives and expedient promises. I was not prepared for this when, as a young student, I began to follow the dramas among the Arnhem chimpanzees from an observation window overlooking their island. In those days, students were supposed to be antiestablishment, and my shoulder-long hair proved it. We considered power evil and ambition ridiculous. Yet my observations of the apes forced me to open my mind to seeing power relations not as something bad but as something ingrained. Perhaps inequality was not to be dismissed as simply the product of capitalism. It seemed to go deeper than that. Nowadays, this may seem banal, but in the 1970s human behavior was seen as totally flexible: not natural but cultural. If we really wanted to, people believed, we could rid ourselves of archaic tendencies like sexual jealousy, gender roles, material ownership, and, yes, the desire to dominate. Unaware of this revolutionary call, my chimpanzees demonstrated the same archaic tendencies, but without a trace of cognitive dissonance. They were jealous, sexist, and possessive, plain and simple. I didn’t know then that I’d be working with them for the rest of my life or that I would never again have the luxury of sitting on a wooden stool and watching them for thousands of hours. It was the most revelatory time of my life. I became so engrossed that I began trying to imagine what made my apes decide on this or that action. I started dreaming of them at night and, most significant, I started seeing the people around me in a different light.

In the early stages, curiosity can seem frivolous. That’s part of why it gets dismissed. It doesn’t obviously bear immediate fruit. It’s just some annoying kid asking irksome questions. But these meddlesome kids go on to invent fertilizer and dynamite, atom bombs and iPhones.

That attachment styles can vary based on type—for example, friendship or a romantic relationship. 2. That how a person behaves in one relationship—for example, with one specific friend—can spread to how they behave in other relationships of that same type—such as with other friends. This concept is important because it truly demonstrates the ability of the subconscious to store and replay beliefs based on repetition and emotion. Now that you understand the fluidity of attachment styles and why they lie along a spectrum, you can begin to discover your dominant attachment style in different areas of your life. Consider how you act and feel in your relationships, whether they are romantic, platonic, or familial. Examine the ratio of activating to deactivating strategies in your thoughts and behaviors. Recall that activating strategies are decisions that are made based on prior information and experiences. Deactivating strategies are actions that drive self-reliance and deny attachment needs altogether, pushing others away. If you have relatively more activating strategies, you may have a greater fear of abandonment and be on the Anxious side of the spectrum. More deactivating strategies may indicate a subconscious belief around complete autonomy, placing you more on the Dismissive-Avoidant side of the attachment scale. Keep in mind that this tool should be used in romantic relationships after the honeymoon phase is over, a phase that occurs during the first two years of the relationship. During the honeymoon phase, your brain has higher levels of dopamine in the caudate nucleus and ventral tegmental regions, according to Scientific American. These areas of the brain are responsible for, respectively, learning and memory and emotional processing. Consequently, your attachment style may be unclear to you in the early phases of your romantic relationship since your emotions, memory, and hormone regulation are atypical. Our experiences can also dramatically alter our attachment style. For example, if Sophie were to partake in certain forms of therapy and practices such as recurrent meditation, she may be able to better understand and re-equilibrate her subconscious beliefs. According to Science Daily, since meditation induces theta brain waves and activates areas of the frontal lobe associated with emotional regulation, Sophie could eventually bring herself into a more Secure attachment space without the help of a Secure partner. However, although it is common to express different attachment styles in different areas of life, the type of attachment you have in relationships ultimately tends to be the attachment style that you associate with the type of relationship. For example, you can be Dismissive-Avoidant in familial relationships because you experienced emotional neglect from parental figures, but you could also be Fearful-Avoidant in romantic relationships due to domestic abuse that has occurred. This illustrates that major events such as betrayal, loss, or abuse can alter our attachment style in different chapters of life, but that ultimately attachment styles are fluid and often dependent on the kind of relationships we are in. We tend to have a primary attachment style, most associated with how we show up in romantic relationships, that plays a large role in our personality structure. This essentially dictates how we give and receive love and what our subconscious expectations are of others.

Although women commonly claim to be more emotional and more emotionally sensitive, they also block their emotions, including anger. This reflects the early training of conflict as something bad to be avoided. Such women become afraid of raised voices. They not only hush themselves, they hush others. The pressure to be perfect, polite peacemakers robs women of the ability to express their emotions in appropriate ways. Women can become walking oversensitive stereotypes. They have meltdowns, they dismiss the problem as not important, they withdraw and they shut down as they try not to be ‘too emotional’. These are learned behaviours, a consequence of societal training, of unexpressed words and feelings, and not genetic endowments of women.

10 Things You Should Always Discuss with Your Gynecologist – Motherhood Chaitanya Hospital Your gynecologist is your partner in women’s health, and open communication is key to receiving the best care. From reproductive health to general well-being, here are 10 crucial topics you should always discuss with your gynecologist. If you’re in Chandigarh, consider reaching out to the Best Female Gynecologist in Chandigarh through Motherhood Chaitanya for expert care. 1. Menstrual Irregularities Don’t dismiss irregular periods as a minor issue. They could be indicative of underlying conditions like polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS), thyroid disorders, or hormonal imbalances. 2. Contraception Discuss your contraception options to find the one that best suits your needs and lifestyle. Your gynecologist can provide guidance on various birth control methods, from pills to intrauterine devices (IUDs). 3. Pregnancy Planning If you’re planning to start a family, consult your gynecologist for preconception advice. This can help you prepare your body and address any potential risks or concerns. 4. Sexual Health Openly discuss any concerns related to sexual health, including pain during intercourse, sexually transmitted infections (STIs), or changes in sexual desire. Your gynecologist can provide guidance and offer solutions. 5. Menopause and Perimenopause If you’re in your 40s or approaching menopause, discuss perimenopausal symptoms like hot flashes, mood swings, and changes in menstrual patterns. Your gynecologist can recommend treatments to manage these changes. 6. Family History Share your family’s medical history, especially if there are instances of gynecological conditions, such as ovarian or breast cancer. This information is vital for early detection and prevention. 7. Breast Health Talk to your gynecologist about breast health, including breast self-exams and recommended mammograms. Regular breast checks are essential for early detection of breast cancer. 8. Pelvic Pain Don’t ignore persistent pelvic pain. It can signal a range of issues, including endometriosis, fibroids, or ovarian cysts. Early diagnosis and treatment are crucial. 9. Urinary Issues Frequent urination, urinary incontinence, or pain during urination should be discussed. These symptoms can be linked to urinary tract infections or pelvic floor disorders. 10. Mental Health Your gynecologist is there to address your overall well-being. If you’re experiencing mood swings, anxiety, or depression, it’s important to discuss these mental health concerns. Your gynecologist can offer guidance or refer you to specialists if needed. In conclusion, your gynecologist is your go-to resource for women’s health, addressing a wide spectrum of issues. Open and honest communication is essential to ensure you receive the best care and support. If you’re in Chandigarh, consider consulting the Best Gynecologist Obstetricians in Chandigarh through Motherhood Chaitanya for expert guidance. Your health is a priority, and discussing these important topics with your gynecologist is a proactive step toward a healthier, happier you

General Tips for Better-than-Average Lie-Detecting Sit back and let the other person volunteer information, rather than pulling it out of them. Don’t let on what you know too early—or at all. Stay relaxed and causal. What you are observing is not the person themselves, but the person as they are in a quasi-interrogational situation with you. So don’t make it seem like an inquisition, otherwise you may simply be watching them feel distressed about the situation itself. Don’t worry about individual signs and clues like touching the nose, looking up to the right or stuttering. Rather, look at how the person responds in general to shifts in the conversation, especially at junctures where you believe they may be having to concoct a story on the fly. Listen for stories that seem unusually long or detailed—liars use more words, and they may even talk more quickly. Take your time. It may be a while before you uncover a deception. But the longer the other person talks, the more chance they have of slipping up or getting their story tangled. Watch primarily for inconsistencies—details of the story that don’t add up, emotional expressions that don’t fit the story, or abrupt shifts in the way the story is told. Being chatty and then all of a sudden getting quiet and serious when you ask a particular question is certainly telling. Always interpret your conversation in light of what you already know, the context, and other details you’ve observed in your interactions with this person. It’s all about looking at patterns, and then trying to determine if any disruptions in that pattern point to something interesting. Don’t be afraid to trust your gut instinct! Your unconscious mind may have picked up some data your conscious mind hasn’t become aware of. Don’t make decisions on intuition alone, but don’t dismiss it too quickly, either. Takeaways Casual observation of body language, voice and verbal cues can help with understanding honest people, but we need more sophisticated techniques to help us detect liars. Most people are not as good at spotting deception as they think they are. Bias, expectation and the belief that we can’t or shouldn’t be lied to can get in the way of realizing we’re being deceived. Good lie detection is a dynamic process that focuses on the conversation. Use open ended questions to get people to surrender information voluntarily, and observe. Look out for overly wordy stories that are presented all at once, inconsistencies in the story or emotional affect, delays or avoidance in answering questions, or inability to answer unexpected questions. Liars are easier to spot when lying is spontaneous—try not to allow the liar any time to prepare or rehearse a script, or else ask unexpected questions or plant a lie yourself to watch their response and gain a baseline against which to compare the possible lie. Increasing cognitive load can cause a liar to fumble their story or lose track of details, revealing themselves in a lie. Keep drilling for detail and be suspicious if details don’t add up, if emotion doesn’t match content, or if the person is deliberately stalling for time. Look out for specific signs that a person is cognitively overloaded. One example is that the liar will display less emotions while speaking than they or an average person normally would in their situation. These emotions will instead leak through in their body language. Most commonly, this manifests in more frequent blinking, pupil dilation, speech disturbances, and slips of tongue. Spotting liars is notoriously difficult, but we improve our chances when we focus on strategic and targeted conversations designed to make the liar trip up on his own story, rather than trying to guess hidden intentions from body language alone.

Christianity was predicated on the seemingly absurd claim that a man crucified and then buried in a tomb for three days rose from the dead and ascended to heaven. That story took hold and flourished in a Roman society that had inherited the richest philosophical traditions in the Western world. Even the Apostles themselves were initially incredulous of the Resurrection, dismissing the report of Mary out of hand: “Now when Jesus was arisen early the first day of the week, he appeared first to Mary Magdalene, out of whom he had cast seven devils. And she went and told them that had been with him, as they mourned and wept. And they, when they had heard that he was alive, and had been seen of her, believed not” (Mark 16:9–11).

All these people described their doubts in the same way: as having been thrust unwillingly into their minds by the devil. We might be inclined to dismiss that. In fact it is vital for understanding what this kind of unbelief was and why it matters. First of all, it shows that these narratives are a literary genre, akin to the modern genre of narratives of recovery from mental illness. Like that genre, they suffer from survivorship bias. Early modern Protestants who lost their struggles with atheism did not tell their stories, any more than did those who killed themselves.

We talked about life inside the British bubble, inside the royal bubble. A bubble inside a bubble—impossible to describe to anyone who hasn’t actually experienced it. People simply didn’t realize: they heard the word “royal,” or “prince,” and lost all rationality. Ah, a prince—you have no problems. They assumed…no, they’d been taught…it was all a fairytale. We weren’t human. A writer many Britons admired, a writer of thick historical novels that racked up literary prizes, had penned an essay about my family, in which she said we were simply…pandas. Our current royal family doesn’t have the difficulties in breeding that pandas do, but pandas and royal persons alike are expensive to conserve and ill-adapted to any modern environment. But aren’t they interesting? Aren’t they nice to look at? I’ll never forget the highly respected essayist who wrote in Britain’s most highly respected literary publication that my mother’s “early death spared us all a lot of tedium.” (He referred in the same essay to “Diana’s tryst with the underpass.”) But this panda crack always struck me as both acutely perceptive and uniquely barbarous. We did live in a zoo, but by the same token I knew, as a soldier, that turning people into animals, into non-people, is the first step in mistreating them, in destroying them. If even a celebrated intellectual could dismiss us as animals, what hope for the man or woman on the street?

There is underlying continuity—which cuts across the recognized boundaries—and similarity between early Pythagoreanism and so-called “Neopythagoreanism.” The latter term was invented by modern scholarship both for reasons of classification and for the rather sinister wish to dismiss the clear analogies between early Pythagoreanism (which already regarded the philosopher as a healer of souls) and later Pythagoreanism, ostensibly “transformed into revelation” and blended with Greco-Egyptian alchemy.

The white dominant standard of racial discernment rarely finds white racism, while simultaneously deciding that the specific card played was falsely made into a “race card.”An individual moment, event, or action is judged by looking for KKK rhetoric, or maybe the N-word, or some cross burning in the yard. If such overt hate crimes prominent in the early and mid-twentieth century are not currently present or visible, then the racial component of the complaint is quickly dismissed.

In landmark experiments that began in the late 1980s, Michael Meaney, a neuroscientist at McGill University, in Montreal, studied how the interactions between rat moms and pups played out in the lives of the pups. His research team took genetically identical rat mothers and videotaped and analyzed their behaviors while the pups were infants. Then they let the pups grow up, and checked how the pups of nurturing rat moms fared compared with the offspring of stressed-out moms. The pampered pups grew into adults that were more laid-back, less reactive to stress, and less prone to addictive behaviors, such as overdoing it when given a free supply of alcohol or cocaine. They were also more social with other rats, more daring, and more willing to explore new places. Pups of stressed, negligent moms grew into loners prone to the rat equivalents of anxiety, depression, and addictive behaviors. Studies of monkey moms and their infants turned up similar results. Stressed macaque infants whose moms are inconsistent, erratic, and sometimes dismissive grow up timid, submissive, fearful, less gregarious, and more prone to depression than their better-nurtured peers. These early findings were the beginning of a paradigm shift in our understanding of how experiences in childhood can affect our health and the dialogue between the gut and the brain.

If you are going to do the work of ministry, it is crucial that you learn how to restore and maintain the anointing. The Bible teaches that power for ministry is maintained through fellowship with God. The secret of maintaining the anointing is to constantly go back to the source. You go back to God and receive more. Mark 1 describes a very busy day in the life of Jesus. He began at the synagogue where He preached and cast out a demon. Then He went to Peter’s house and healed Peter’s mother-in-law. That evening, the whole town came to Him, and He spent the evening healing and casting out demons. I imagine by the end of that time, He was exhausted. He was spiritually and physically drained. So what did He do? “Very early in the morning, while it was still dark, Jesus got up, left the house and went off to a solitary place, where he prayed” (Mark 1:35). After such a busy day of ministry, most of us would have to sleep in the next morning, but Jesus got up before dawn and went out to spend time with the Father. That was often Jesus’ response after an unusually intense time of ministry. In Mark 6:34-44, Jesus spent an entire day teaching the multitudes and healing the sick. He ended the day by feeding the 5,000. After this eventful day, what did He do? Jesus made his disciples get into the boat and go on ahead of him to Bethsaida, while he dismissed the crowd. After leaving them, he went up on a mountainside to pray (Mark 6:45,46). Jesus sent the disciples away and spent most of the night in prayer. When He was weak, when He had given His all to the crowds, Jesus knew it was an absolute necessity to go back to the source and spend time in fellowship with the Father.

As Christianity grew, it eventually converted intellectuals to the faith, who were well equipped to discuss and dismiss the charges typically raised against the Christians. The writings of these intellectuals are sometimes called apologies, from the Greek word for “defense” (apologia). The apologists wrote intellectual defenses of the new faith, trying to show that far from being a threat to the social structure of the empire, it was a religion that preached moral behavior; and far from being a dangerous superstition, it represented the ultimate truth in its worship of the one true God. These apologies were important for early Christian readers, as they provided them with the arguments they needed when themselves faced with persecution.

Christensen outlines: Disruptive technologies bring to a market a very different value proposition than had been available previously. Generally, disruptive technologies underperform established products in mainstream markets. But they have other features that a few fringe (and generally new) customers value. Products based on disruptive technologies are typically cheaper, simpler, smaller, and, frequently, more convenient to use. Disruptive technologies like cryptoassets initially gain traction because they’re “cheaper, simpler, smaller.” This early traction occurs on the fringe, not in the mainstream, which allows incumbents like Mr. Dimon to dismiss them. But cheaper, simpler, smaller things rarely stay on the fringe, and the shift to mainstream can be swift, catching the incumbents off guard.

Every art that could inflame the passions and touch the interests of men has been essayed,” Washington complained in early April 1788. “The ignorant have been told, that should the proposed Government obtain, their land would be taken from them and their property disposed of, and all ranks are informed that the prohibition of the Navigation of the Mississippi (their favorite object) will be a certain consequence of the adoption of the Constitution.”2 Their forte, Washington soon added about antifederalists, “seems to lie in misrepresentation . . . rather than to convince the understanding by some arguments or fair and impartial statements.”3 He dismissed most of them as “contemptible characters” of “little importance.

In 1994 Stephen Porges, who was a researcher at the University of Maryland at the time we started our investigation of HRV, and who is now at the University of North Carolina, introduced the Polyvagal theory, which built on Darwin’s observations and added another 140 years of scientific discoveries to those early insights. (Polyvagal refers to the many branches of the vagus nerve – Darwin’s “pneumogastric nerve” – which connects numerous organs, including the brain, lungs, heart, stomach, and intestines.) The Polyvagal Theory provided us with a more sophisticated understanding of the biology of safety and danger, one based on the subtle interplay between the visceral experiences of our own bodies and the voices and faces of the people around us. It explained why a kind face or a soothing tone of voice can dramatically alter the way we feel. It clarified why knowing that we are seen and heard by the important people in our lives can make us feel calm and safe, and why being ignored or dismissed can precipitate rage reactions or mental collapse. It helped us understand why focused attunement with another person can shift us out of disorganized and fearful states. In short, Porges’s theory made us look beyond the effects of fight or flight and put social relationships front and center in our understanding of trauma. It also suggested new approaches to healing that focus on strengthening the body’s system for regulating arousal.

extermination and annihilation of the Jews for a long time. In the early phase of the Nazi regime, during the 1930s, people may have dismissed this as mere rhetorical flourish, and at the time systematic mass murder was not yet in the planning stage. But in the course of the 1940s, the annihilation of the Jews was mentioned more and more. Hitler’s “prophecy” of January 1939—when he threatened the annihilation of the Jews in the event of a new world war—was most frequently mentioned in public starting in 1940–1941.34.