Eat The Document Quotes

You wouldn’t believe the scope for mischief that the Beast of Redmond unintentionally builds into its Office software by letting it execute macros that have unlimited access to the hardware. I remember a particular post-prandial PowerPoint presentation where I was one of only two survivors (and the other wasn’t entirely human). However, this is the first time I’ve seen a Word document eat a man’s soul.

We amass material things for the same reason that we eat - to satisfy a craving. Buying on impulse and eating and drinking to excess are attempts to alleviate stress. From observing my clients, I have noticed that when they discard excess clothing, their tummies tend to slim down, when they discard books and documents, their minds become clearer, when they reduce the number of cosmetics and tidy up the area around the sink and bath, their complexion tends to become clear and their skin smooth. -p226

Incidentally, if you have never stalked someone close to you, I highly recommend it. Check out how it tranforms them. How other they become, and how infinitely necessary and justified the stalking becomes when you realize how little you know about them, how mysterious every aspect of them seems with an at a distance but close examiniation.

I wondered if my life was going to be one immersion after another, a great march of shallow, unpopular popular culture infatuations that don't really last and don't really mean anything. Sometimes I even think maybe my deepest obsessions are just random manifestations of my loneliness or isolation. Maybe I infuse ordinary experience with a kind of sacred aura to mitigate the spiritual vapidity of my life....no, it is beautiful to be enraptured. To be enthralled by something, anything. And it isn't random. It speaks to you for a reason. If you wanted to, you could look at it that way, and you might find you aren't wasting your life. You are discovering things about yourself and the world, even if it is just what you find beautiful, right now, this second.

She pushed back from the table. "I've got some stuff I need to do." "The Walking Dead said there was chocolate cake." "Jamie," Roarke said mildly. "Sorry," Jamie said reluctantly. "Mister Walking Dead, also known as Summerset, said there was chocolate cake." "And if you eat it all, I'll kill you in your sleep. Then you can join The Walking Dead. Roarke, I need to talk to you." As they started out, she heard Jamie ask: "Think they're gonna go do it?" And heard the quick slap of Feeney's hand on the teenaged skull. "Are we going to go do it?" Roarke grabbed her hand. "Want me to have Feeney knock you, too?" "I'm a bit quicker than Jamie yet. But I take that to mean we're not going back upstairs for a fast tumble." "How many times a day do you think about sex?" He gave her a considering look. "Would that be actively thinking of it, or just having the concept of it lurking there, like Jamie's invisible document?

That there is in this world neither brains, nor goodness, nor good sense, but only brute force. Bloodshed. Starvation. Death. That there was not the slightest hope not even a glimmer of hope, of justice being done. It would never happen. No one would ever do it. The world was just one big Babi Yar. And there two great forces had come up against each other and were striking against each other like hammer and anvil, and the wretched people were in between, with no way out; each individual wanted only to live and not be maltreated, to have something to eat, and yet they howled and screamed and in their fear they were grabbing at each other’s throats, while I, little blob of watery jelly, was sitting in the midst of this dark world. Why? What for? Who had done it all? There was nothing, after all, to hope for! Winter. Night.

One of the reasons clutter eats away at us is because we have to search for something just to find out whether it’s even there, and many times, no matter how much we search, we cannot seem to find what we are looking for. When we have reduced the amount we own and store our documents all in the same place, we can tell at a glance whether we have it or not. If it’s gone, we can shift gears immediately and start thinking about what to do.

One USDA scientist went so far as to claim that there has never been a documented case of food-borne illness from eating fermented vegetables.

I feel insufficient as an adult. I look around at the office and see everyone typing, taking calls, making bookings, editing documents, and I know they’re all dealing with at least as much as I am, which only makes me feel worse about how hard everything feels to me. Living, being responsible for myself, seems like an insurmountable challenge lately. Sometimes I scrape myself off my sofa, stuff a frozen meal in the microwave, and as I wait for the timer to go off, I just think, I will have to do this again tomorrow and the next day and the next day. Every day for the rest of my life, I’m going to have to figure out what to eat, and make it for myself, no matter how bad I feel or tired I am, or how horrible the pounding in my head is. Even if I have a one-hundred-and-two-degree fever, I will have to pull myself up and make a very mediocre meal to go on living.

We continue to eat, the conversation easy and flowing. I listen to everything everyone says, an urgency to pay attention, to not miss these moments you don't know are moments until they're gone. I narrow in, trying to hold it all in place, even though I think that if you document life this way, the moments will never set. We don't need to remember. Everything just becomes a part of you. And then it's over.

I remember a particular post-prandial PowerPoint presentation where I was one of only two survivors (and the other wasn't entirely human). However this is the first time I've seen a Word document eat a man's soul.

In a modern twist to the classic overeating experiments, Feltham decided that he would eat 5794 calories per day and document his weight gain. But the diet he chose was not a random 5794 calories. He followed a low-carbohydrate, high-fat diet of natural foods for twenty-one days. Feltham believed, based on clinical experience, that refined carbohydrates, not total calories, caused weight gain. The macronutrient breakdown of his diet was 10 percent carbohydrate, 53 percent fat and 37 percent protein. Standard calorie calculations predicted a weight gain of about 16 pounds (7.3 kilograms). Actual weight gain, however, was only about 2.8 pounds (1.3 kilograms). Even more interesting, he dropped more than 1 inch (2.5 centimeters) from his waist measurement. He gained weight, but it was lean mass.

Cleanliness, particularly personal cleanliness, was an assertion against madness. It was a declaration of control.

Who built this tree of universe that has not stopped changing from the very minute (atomic) times undergoing many beautiful and wonderful changes; Who must eat fruits bearing from this tree? Why is that all are not eating these fruits equally without differences? What is the reason? Could someone like us plant another tree like that? Why not? The eternal that does not dry up but continues to give required fruits to the souls. This creator, is he in front of us or not? If not how does this work? Without doubt we all realize that work does not happen without a reason. Therefore, one who is giving us this variety of unlimited fruits without end in this tree of universe must be immensely powerful, with unlimited knowledge, unfathomable, have infinite empathy and having many other amazing qualities. His existence is documented in all vedas and puranas. Although he exists, the reason we are not able to witness, we have to admit is our deficiency in body, faculty and mind. Our ancestors called and praised him as “Paramatma and Sarveshvara.” We have to resolve that we will practice sadhana to be able to see Paramatma and offer to Sarveshvara with great devotion our spiritual practices, without desire for any benefits. This is called Ishwarapranidhana.

We may also discover that sexual abuse helps to explain the high prevalence rates of eating disorders among women and may lend some insight into why we are starting to see more documentation of eating disorders among boys as we see the reports of sexual abuse for male children increasing. Culture alone cannot explain the phenomena of such high rates of eating disorders.

Studies have documented that families who habitually eat dinner together seem to raise children with better homework skills, higher grades, greater emotional control, and more confidence.

And disruption is liberating, especially if it is a formal, organized disruption. Mere chaos causes anxiety. Preaching didactically causes boredom. But a formal disruption - Then it approaches beauty of a kind. Then you begin to really be dangerous.

When an action, positive or negative, is repeated for three generations it becomes genetically encoded. It becomes an inborn autogenic response. If a monkey collects ants on a honey-coated stick, for example, and other monkeys see he is eating more than they, they copy him. By the time the hundredth monkey begins collecting ants on a honey-coated stick, the added energy creates an ideological breakthrough that affects the whole society. When the whole society of monkeys does this for three generations, it becomes their culture. According to Ken Keyes Hundredth Monkey studies, when that hundredth monkey’s added energy creates the ideological breakthrough, evolution occurs. Even monkeys on other continents start collecting ants on honey-coated sticks without copying. They are born knowing.

VERY EARLY ONE MORNING in July 1977, the FBI, having been tipped off about Operation Snow White, carried out raids on Scientology offices in Los Angeles and Washington, DC, carting off nearly fifty thousand documents. One of the files was titled “Operation Freakout.” It concerned the treatment of Paulette Cooper, the journalist who had published an exposé of Scientology, The Scandal of Scientology, six years earlier. After having been indicted for perjury and making bomb threats against Scientology, Cooper had gone into a deep depression. She stopped eating. At one point, she weighed just eighty-three pounds. She considered suicide. Finally, she persuaded a doctor to give her sodium pentothal, or “truth serum,” and question her under the anesthesia. The government was sufficiently impressed that the prosecutor dropped the case against her, but her reputation was ruined, she was broke, and her health was uncertain. The day after the FBI raid on the Scientology headquarters, Cooper was flying back from Africa, on assignment for a travel magazine, when she read a story in the International Herald Tribune about the raid. One of the files the federal agents discovered was titled “Operation Freakout.” The goal of the operation was to get Cooper “incarcerated in a mental institution or jail.

What—in other words—would modern boredom be without terror? One of the most boring documents of all time is the thick volume of Hitler’s Table Talk. He too had people watching movies, eating pastries, and drinking coffee with Schlag while he bored them, while he discoursed theorized expounded. Everyone was perishing of staleness and fear, afraid to go to the toilet. This combination of power and boredom has never been properly examined. Boredom is an instrument of social control. Power is the power to impose boredom, to command stasis, to combine this stasis with anguish. The real tedium, deep tedium, is seasoned with terror and with death. There were even profounder questions. For instance, the history of the universe would be very boring if one tried to think of it in the ordinary way of human experience. All that time without events! Gases over and over again, and heat and particles of matter, the sun tides and winds, again this creeping development, bits added to bits, chemical accidents—whole ages in which almost nothing happens, lifeless seas, only a few crystals, a few protein compounds developing. The tardiness of evolution is so irritating to contemplate. The clumsy mistakes you see in museum fossils. How could such bones crawl, walk, run? It is agony to think of the groping of the species—all this fumbling, swamp-creeping, munching, preying, and reproduction, the boring slowness with which tissues, organs, and members developed. And then the boredom also of the emergence of the higher types and finally of mankind, the dull life of paleolithic forests, the long long incubation of intelligence, the slowness of invention, the idiocy of peasant ages. These are interesting only in review, in thought. No one could bear to experience this. The present demand is for a quick forward movement, for a summary, for life at the speed of intensest thought. As we approach, through technology, the phase of instantaneous realiza-tion, of the realization of eternal human desires or fantasies, of abolishing time and space the problem of boredom can only become more intense. The human being, more and more oppressed by the peculiar terms of his existence—one time around for each, no more than a single life per customer—has to think of the boredom of death. O those eternities of nonexistence! For people who crave continual interest and diversity, O! how boring death will be! To lie in the grave, in one place, how frightful!

Darling the mice have been eating your letters (not indeed that that is my excuse for not writing for so long, my excuse for that is everything or nothing, whichever way you like to look at it). I am very angry about this, chiefly because your letters are rather precious documents, but also because I am not on very good terms with the mice, and the fact that I have been careless enough to leave valuables around where they could get at them can be chalked up as a point to them. One day I shall declare serious war on the mice in a combined trap-poison operation. At present I am just sentimental with a fringe of annoyance. I meet them every now and then, on the stairs, or underneath the gas stove, and they have such nice long tails.

Humanistic propaganda screams at us everywhere we go. “You deserve better.” “There’s no one like you.” “Stand up for yourself.” And after a while we start believing the mantra. The most influential culture-shaping document in American history is the Declaration of Independence. And built into the ethos of American society are three inalienable rights: life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. I think the wording is ironic: the pursuit of happiness. It’s almost like the architects of modern democracy said, “We guarantee you life, and we promise you liberty. But happiness? Good luck.” America is a social experiment founded on the pursuit of happiness. Hundreds of millions of Americans are chasing down happiness. Money, materialism, sex, romance, religion, family, and fame are all pursuits of the same human craving—joy. But apart from Jesus, we never get there. People spend decades searching high and low for happiness and never land at joy. In an odd twist of fate, America, for all her life and liberty, is one of the most depressed nations in the world. And many of us are mad at God. Somehow we think God owes us. We deserve happiness. We deserve a good, comfortable life, free from pain and suffering. We have rights! Right? The scriptures present a totally different worldview that stands against the humanism of Western Europe. It is written, “By grace you have been saved.”[17] The word grace is (charis) in the Greek, which can be translated as “gift.” All of life is grace. All of life is a gift. Humans have no rights. Everything is a gift. Food, shelter, the clothes on our backs, the oxygen in our lungs—it’s all grace. The entire planet, the sky above us and the ground beneath our feet, is all on loan from the Creator God. We live under his roof, eat his food, and drink his water. We are guests. And we are blessed. A reporter once asked Bob Dylan if he was happy. Dylan’s response was, “These are yuppie words, happiness and unhappiness. It’s not happiness or unhappiness. It’s either blessed or unblessed.”[18] I like that. We are blessed. When you reorient yourself to a biblical worldview, the only posture left to take is gratitude. If all of life is a gift, how could we help but thank God?

Issued in February 2012, and still online as of May 5, 2016, the report was written by one set of state officials for another. After a chilling description of a “cancer slope factor,” the report continues, in a matter-of-fact tone, to advise the recreational fisherman on how to prepare a contaminated fish to eat: “Trimming the fat and skin on finfish, and removing the hepatopancreas from crabs, will reduce the amount of contaminants in the fish and shellfish,” the document reads.

But if I tell them about dozens and dozens of studies showing that the countries with low rates of heart disease consume low amounts of animal-based foods, and dozens and dozens of studies showing that individuals who eat more whole, plant-based foods get less heart disease, and I go on to document still more studies showing that a diet low in animal-based foods and high in unprocessed plant-based foods can slow or reverse heart disease, then people are more inclined to pay some attention.

The biophilia hypothesis is not your run-of-the-mill Berkeley/Al Gore/Eat Your Spinach environmentalism. It does not appeal directly to our sense of stewardship or responsibility. It appeals to a much more base, and common, human proclivity: selfishness. It says, in effect, protect the environment because it will make you happy. For a country like the United States, with the word “happiness” in its founding document, you’d think environmentalists would have latched on to biophilia a long time ago.

KFC insists it is “committed to the well-being and humane treatment of chickens.” How trustworthy are these words? At a slaughterhouse in West Virginia that supplies KFC, workers were documented tearing the heads off live birds, spitting tobacco into their eyes, spray-painting their faces, and violently stomping on them. These acts were witnessed dozens of times. This slaughterhouse was not a “bad apple,” but a “Supplier of the Year.” Imagine what happens at the bad apples when no one is looking. On

The ADA takes a conservative stand, leaving out many well-documented health benefits attributable to reducing the consumption of animal products. Here are the three key sentences from the summary of their summary of the relevant scientific literature. One: Well-planned vegetarian diets are appropriate for all individuals during all stages of the life cycle, including pregnancy, lactation, infancy, childhood, and adolescence, and for athletes. TWO: Vegetarian diets tend to be lower in saturated fat and cholesterol, and have higher levels of dietary fiber, magnesium and potassium, vitamins C and E, folate, carotenoids, flavonoids, and other phytochemicals. Elsewhere the paper notes that vegetarians and vegans (including athletes) “meet and exceed requirements” for protein. And, to render the whole we-should-worry-about-getting-enough-protein-and-therefore-eat-meat idea even more useless, other data suggests that excess animal protein intake is linked with osteoporosis, kidney disease, calcium stones in the urinary tract, and some cancers.

Ode to My Socks Maru Mori brought me a pair of socks knitted with her own shepherd's hands, two socks soft as rabbits. I slipped my feet into them as if into jewel cases woven with threads of dusk and sheep's wool. Audacious socks, my feet became two woolen fish, two long sharks of lapis blue shot with a golden thread, two mammoth blackbirds, two cannons, thus honored were my feet by these celestial socks. They were so beautiful that for the first time my feet seemed unacceptable to me, two tired old fire fighters not worthy of the woven fire of those luminous socks. Nonetheless, I resisted the strong temptation to save them the way schoolboys bottle fireflies, the way scholars hoard sacred documents. I resisted the wild impulse to place them in a cage of gold and daily feed them birdseed and rosy melon flesh. Like explorers who in the forest surrender a rare and tender deer to the spit and eat it with remorse, I stuck out my feet and pulled on the handsome socks, and then my shoes. So this is the moral of my ode: twice beautiful is beauty and what is good is doubly good when it is a case of two woolen socks in wintertime.

I'm turning fifty, and it is just now dawning on me that I have limited time," Nash said. "No kidding. I always felt my life was circumscribed by the finite terms, you know? There is a whole world of things I missed out on and will never experience. Whatever I have done, there is an endless amount I have not done. Do you know what that tells me?" ... "It tells me it is not meant to be this all-encompassing journey. It is not meant to be catholic or encyclopedic. By now I have carved some grooves in this life. A few. What I need to do is hunker down and make those grooves deep and indelible.

It will be long before everyone is wiped out. People live in war time, they always have. There was terror down through history - and the men who saw the Spanish Armada sail over the rim of the world, who saw the Black death wipe out half of Europe, those men were frightened, terrified. But though they lived and died in fear, I am here; we have built again. And so I will belong to a dark age, and historians will say "We have few documents to show how the common people lived at this time. Records lead us to believe that a majority were killed. But there were glorious men." And school children will sigh and learn the names of Truman and Senator McCarthy. Oh, it is hard for me to reconcile myself to this. But maybe this is why I am a girl - - - so I can live more safely than the boys I have known and envied, so I can bear children, and instill in them the biting eating desire to learn and love life which I will never quite fulfill, because there isn't time, because there isn't time at all, but instead the quick desperate fear, the ticking clock, and the snow which comes too suddenly upon the summer. Sure, I'm dramatic and sloppily semi-cynical and semi-sentimental. But in leisure years I could grow and choose my way. Now I am living on the edge. We all are on the brink, and it takes a lot of nerve, a lot of energy, to teeter on the edge, looking over, looking down into the windy blackness and not being quite able to make out, through the yellow, stinking mist, just what lies below in the slime, in the oozing, vomit-streaked slime; and so I could go on, into my thoughts, writing much, trying to find the core, the meaning for myself. Perhaps that would help, to synthesize my ideas into a philosophy for me, now, at the age of eighteen, but the clock ticks, ah yes, "At my back I hear, time's winged chariot hovering near." And I have too much conscience, too much habit to sit and stare at snow, thick now, and evenly white and muffling on the ground. God, I scream for time to let go, to write, to think. But no. I have to exercise my memory in little feats just so I can stay in this damn wonderful place which I love and hate with all my heart. And so the snow slows and swirls, and melts along the edges. The first snow isn't good for much. It makes a few people write poetry, a few wonder if the Christmas shopping is done, a few make reservations at the skiing lodge. It's a sentimental prelude to the real thing. It's picturesque & quaint.

Regardless, his crankiness had hit a level not previously documented in the history of the universe. That was saying something, considering I’d grown up with three older sisters who all had periods at the same time. Because of them, most things—most people—didn’t bother me. I knew what it was like to be bullied, and Aiden never crossed the line into being unnecessarily mean. He was just a jackass sometimes. He was lucky I had a tiny, itty, bitty crush on him; otherwise, he would have gotten the shank years ago. Then again, just about everyone with eyes who happened to also like men, had some kind of a thing for Aiden Graves. When he raised his eyebrows and looked at me from beneath those curly black eyelashes, flashing me rich-brown eyes set deep into a face that I’d only seen smile in the presence of dogs, I swallowed and shook my head slowly as I gritted my teeth and took him in. The size of a small building, he should have had these big, uneven features that made him look like a caveman, but of course he didn’t. Apparently, he liked to defy every stereotype he’d ever been assigned in his life. He was smart, fast, coordinated, and—as far as I knew—had never seen a game of hockey. He had only said ‘eh’ in front of me twice, and he didn’t consume animal protein. The man didn’t eat bacon. He was the last person I would ever consider polite, and he never apologized. Ever. Basically, he was an anomaly; a Canadian football-playing, plant-based lifestyle—he didn’t like calling himself a vegan—anomaly that was strangely proportional all over and so handsome I might have thanked God for giving me eyes on a couple of occasions.

I have again been asked to explain how one can "become a Daoists..." with all of the sad things happening in our world today, Laozi and Zhuangzi give words of advice, tho not necessarily to become a Daoist priest or priestess... " So many foreigners who want to become “Religious Daoists” 道教的道师 （道士） do not realize that they must not only receive a transmission of a Lu 籙 register which identifies their Daoist school, and learn as well how to sing the ritual melodies, play the flute, stringed instruments, drums, and sacred dance steps, required to be an ordained and functioning Daoist priest or priestess. This process usually takes 10 years or more of daily discipleship and practice, to accomplish. There are 86 schools and genre of Daoist rituals listed in the Baiyun Guan Gazeteer, 白雲觀志, which was edited by Oyanagi Sensei, in Tokyo, 1928, and again in 1934, and re-published by Baiyun Guan in Beijing, available in their book shop to purchase. Some of the schools, such as the Quanzhen Longmen 全真龙门orders, allow their rituals and Lu registers to be learned by a number of worthy disciples or monks; others, such as the Zhengyi, Qingwei, Pole Star, and Shangqing 正一，清微，北极，上请 registers may only be taught in their fullness to one son and/or one disciple, each generation. Each of the schools also have an identifying poem, from 20 or 40 character in length, or in the case of monastic orders (who pass on the registers to many disciples), longer poems up to 100 characters, which identify the generation of transmission from master to disciple. The Daoist who receives a Lu register (給籙元科, pronounced "Ji Lu Yuanke"), must use the character from the poem given to him by his or her master, when composing biao 表 memorials, shuwen 梳文 rescripts, and other documents, sent to the spirits of the 3 realms (heaven, earth, water /underworld). The rituals and documents are ineffective unless the correct characters and talismanic signature are used. The registers are not given to those who simply practice martial artists, Chinese medicine, and especially never shown to scholars. The punishment for revealing them to the unworthy is quite severe, for those who take payment for Lu transmission, or teaching how to perform the Jinlu Jiao and Huanglu Zhai 金籙醮，黃籙齋 科儀 keyi rituals, music, drum, sacred dance steps. Tang dynasty Tangwen 唐文 pronunciation must also be used when addressing the highest Daoist spirits, i.e., the 3 Pure Ones and 5 Emperors 三请五帝. In order to learn the rituals and receive a Lu transmission, it requires at least 10 years of daily practice with a master, by taking part in the Jiao and Zhai rituals, as an acolyte, cantor, or procession leader. Note that a proper use of Daoist ritual also includes learning Inner Alchemy, ie inner contemplative Daoist meditation, the visualization of spirits, where to implant them in the body, and how to summon them forth during ritual. The woman Daoist master Wei Huacun’s Huangting Neijing, 黃庭內經 to learn the esoteric names of the internalized Daoist spirits. Readers must be warned never to go to Longhu Shan, where a huge sum is charged to foreigners ($5000 to $9000) to receive a falsified document, called a "license" to be a Daoist! The first steps to true Daoist practice, Daoist Master Zhuang insisted to his disciples, is to read and follow the Laozi Daode Jing and the Zhuangzi Neipian, on a daily basis. Laozi Ch 66, "the ocean is the greatest of all creatures because it is the lowest", and Ch 67, "my 3 most precious things: compassion for all, frugal living for myself, respect all others and never put anyone down" are the basis for all Daoist practice. The words of Zhuangzi, Ch 7, are also deeply meaningful: "Yin and Yang were 2 little children who loved to play inside Hundun (ie Taiji, gestating Dao). They felt sorry because Hundun did not have eyes, or eats, or other senses. So everyday they drilled one hole, ie 2 eyes, 2 ears, 2 nostrils, one mouth; and on the 7th day, Hundun died.

Ode to My Socks Maru Mori brought me a pair of socks knitted with her own shepherd's hands, two socks soft as rabbits. I slipped my feet into them as if into jewel cases woven with threads of dusk and sheep's wool. Audacious socks, my feet became two woolen fish, two long sharks of lapis blue shot with a golden thread, two mammoth blackbirds, two cannons, thus honored were my feet by these celestial socks. They were so beautiful that for the first time my feet seemed unacceptable to me, two tired old fire fighters not worthy of the woven fire of those luminous socks. Nonetheless, I resisted the strong temptation to save them the way schoolboys bottle fireflies, the way scholars hoard sacred documents. I resisted the wild impulse to place them in a cage of gold and daily feed them birdseed and rosy melon flesh. Like explorers who in the forest surrender a rare and tender deer to the spit and eat it with remorse, I stuck out my feet and pulled on the handsome socks, and then my shoes. So this is the moral of my ode: twice beautiful is beauty and what is good doubly good when it is a case of two woolen socks in wintertime.

Ode to My Socks Maru Mori brought me a pair of socks knitted with her own shepherd's hands, two socks soft as rabbits. I slipped my feet into them as if into jewel cases woven with threads of dusk and sheep's wool. Audacious socks, my feet became two woolen fish, two long sharks of lapis blue shot with a golden thread, two mammoth blackbirds, two cannons, thus honored were my feet by these celestial socks. They were so beautiful that for the first time my feet seemed unacceptable to me, two tired old fire fighters not worthy of the woven fire of those luminous socks. Nonetheless, I resisted the strong temptation to save them the way schoolboys bottle fireflies, the way scholars hoard sacred documents. I resisted the wild impulse to place them in a cage of gold and daily feed them birdseed and rosy melon flesh. Like explorers who in the forest surrender a rare and tender deer to the spit and eat it with remorse, I stuck out my feet and pulled on the handsome socks, and then my shoes. So this is the moral of my ode: twice beautiful is beauty and what is good is doubly good when it is a case of two woolen socks in wintertime.

too little—and complex, because the manufacturing and marketing of food products has changed dramatically. Dr. David Kessler, former head of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, has extensively documented how food manufacturers and restaurant and fast food chains carefully combine fats, sugar, and salt in precise ratios that reach the “bliss point”—which means they trigger brain systems that increase the desire to eat more, even after our stomachs are full. On a global basis, the World Health Organization has found a pattern of increased consumption of “energy-dense foods that are high in fat, salt and sugars but low in vitamins, minerals and other micronutrients.” Hyper-urbanization has separated more people from reliable sources of fresh fruit and vegetables. Quality calories in fruits and vegetables now cost ten times as much as calories per gram in sweets and foods abundant in starch. In a report for the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Arielle Traub documented the increase from 1985 to 2000 in the price of fresh fruits and vegetables by 40 percent, while prices of fats declined by 15 percent and sugared soft drinks by 25 percent.

Things I know about Mr. Forkle His official name (for this identity, at least) is Mr. Errol L. Forkle, which he apparently chose because the initials spell out “elf,” and because the word “Forkle” can sometimes mean “disguise” in Norwegian. (I guess he used to spend a lot of time in Norway—no idea why.) The L stands for Loki, because he was kinda the source of some of the Loki myths—which is way too weird to think about. He claims he’s not my biological father (despite being listed that way on certain documents). Even if that’s true, he still helped create me. And he knows who my biological father is. And he refuses to tell me. He’s a super powerful Telepath. He loves to start sentences with “you kids.” He eats a lot of ruckleberries to disguise what he really looks like. He lies sometimes. Maybe all the time. Who knows? He was my annoying next-door neighbor in San Diego, always sitting in his yard rearranging his lawn gnomes (and apparently the gnomes were one of the ways he passed along messages to the Black Swan). He’s the one who triggered my abilities. And the one who stole my missing memories. And the one who planted the information in my brain. He also rescued me from the Neverseen after they kidnapped me. And probably a bunch of other stuff I don’t know about yet. He’s Magnate Leto. Also Sir Astin. I’m sure he has other identities too. I just haven’t figured out what they are yet. And… he secretly had an identical twin. Only one of them was registered (their parents didn’t want them to face the scorn of being a “multiple birth”), and they were sharing one life and switching places all the time. Sometimes I was talking to one brother, and sometimes I was talking to the other—or I was, until one of them died right in front of me in Lumenaria. I thought he was gone, but… then Granite brought us to Brumevale, and… there was the other Forkle. I still don’t really know how to process it. But I’m glad he’s still here, even if he’s a little more limited now that he can’t be two places at once. We planted a Wanderling for the Forkle-twin we lost near Trolltunga in Norway. The tree looks like it’s leaning a bit, waiting for its brother—but I’m selfishly hoping it grows alone for a really long time. Maybe forever.

Trying to get to 124 for the second time now, he regretted that conversation: the high tone he took; his refusal to see the effect of marrow weariness in a woman he believed was a mountain. Now, too late, he understood her. The heart that pumped out love, the mouth that spoke the Word, didn't count. They came in her yard anyway and she could not approve or condemn Sethe's rough choice. One or the other might have saved her, but beaten up by the claims of both, she went to bed. The whitefolks had tired her out at last. And him. Eighteen seventy-four and whitefolks were still on the loose. Whole towns wiped clean of Negroes; eighty-seven lynchings in one year alone in Kentucky; four colored schools burned to the ground; grown men whipped like children; children whipped like adults; black women raped by the crew; property taken, necks broken. He smelled skin, skin and hot blood. The skin was one thing, but human blood cooked in a lynch fire was a whole other thing. The stench stank. Stank up off the pages of the North Star, out of the mouths of witnesses, etched in crooked handwriting in letters delivered by hand. Detailed in documents and petitions full of whereas and presented to any legal body who'd read it, it stank. But none of that had worn out his marrow. None of that. It was the ribbon. Tying his flatbed up on the bank of the Licking River, securing it the best he could, he caught sight of something red on its bottom. Reaching for it, he thought it was a cardinal feather stuck to his boat. He tugged and what came loose in his hand was a red ribbon knotted around a curl of wet woolly hair, clinging still to its bit of scalp. He untied the ribbon and put it in his pocket, dropped the curl in the weeds. On the way home, he stopped, short of breath and dizzy. He waited until the spell passed before continuing on his way. A moment later, his breath left him again. This time he sat down by a fence. Rested, he got to his feet, but before he took a step he turned to look back down the road he was traveling and said, to its frozen mud and the river beyond, "What are these people? You tell me, Jesus. What are they?" When he got to his house he was too tired to eat the food his sister and nephews had prepared. He sat on the porch in the cold till way past dark and went to his bed only because his sister's voice calling him was getting nervous. He kept the ribbon; the skin smell nagged him, and his weakened marrow made him dwell on Baby Suggs' wish to consider what in the world was harmless. He hoped she stuck to blue, yellow, maybe green, and never fixed on red. Mistaking her, upbraiding her, owing her, now he needed to let her know he knew, and to get right with her and her kin. So, in spite of his exhausted marrow, he kept on through the voices and tried once more to knock at the door of 124. This time, although he couldn't cipher but one word, he believed he knew who spoke them. The people of the broken necks, of fire-cooked blood and black girls who had lost their ribbons. What a roaring.

In 1891, Robert Louis Stevenson received a letter from a Vermont girl named Annie Ide. Her birthday fell on Christmas, she said, and she seldom received birthday presents. He replied with a document decreeing that “I, Robert Louis Stevenson, . . .in consideration that Miss Annie H. Ide, . . .was born, out of all reason, upon Christmas Day, and is therefore out of all justice denied the consolation and profit of a proper birthday; and considering that I, the said Robert Louis Stevenson, have attained an age when we never mention it, and that I have now no further use for a birthday of any description. . . . HAVE TRANSFERRED, and DO HEREBY TRANSFER, to the said Annie H. Ide, ALL AND WHOLE my rights and privileges in the thirteenth day of November, formerly my birthday, now, hereby, and henceforth, the birthday of the said Annie H. Ide, to have, hold, exercise, and enjoy the same in the customary manner, by the sporting of fine raiment, eating of rich meats, and receipt of gifts, compliments, and copies of verse, according to the manner of our ancestors.

if fatter mothers are more likely to make fatter babies, and fatter babies are more likely to make fatter mothers, which is also a well-documented observation, then this is another vicious cycle. It suggests that, once a generation of adolescents and adults start eating the highly refined carbohydrates and sugars now ubiquitous in our diets, even their children will feel the effect, and perhaps their children’s children as well.

We continue to eat, the conversation easy and flowing. I listen to everything everyone says, an urgency to pay attention, to not miss these moments you don’t know are moments until they’re gone. I narrow in, trying to hold it all in place, even though I think that if you document life this way, the moments will never set. We don’t need to remember. Everything just becomes a part of you. And then it’s over.

the whale’s food was withheld for behavioral reasons—that is, to make sure the whales performed to SeaWorld’s expectations. The deprivation I am referring to is vindictive and more insidious. In accordance with SeaWorld policies, trainers have reduced the amount of fish that a whale needs to eat daily—sometimes by more than two-thirds—to remind the orca who provides sustenance at the marine park. It is not done often and it has a mixed record of effectiveness. But it has been one of the trainer’s options for making sure a whale understands that it is best to cooperate. Because SeaWorld meticulously documents the lives, health and constantly shifting psychology of the orcas, the company has kept records of depriving whales of fish to make them behave or perform to the standards set by the trainers. But because such a form of “behavior modification” would sound barbarous to human audiences, the practice has been kept secret. It would not be good for business to say that the stars of the show were not given food in order to make them perform. But it has happened. I have been part of inflicting the policy myself at the request of a supervisor.

Meanwhile, administrative costs are eating up 15–30 percent of all health-care spending in the United States. That’s twice the rate of most other advanced nations. This money goes mainly into collecting money: doctors collect from hospitals and insurers, hospitals collect from insurers, insurers collect from companies or from policyholders. At some hospitals, billing clerks outnumber physicians. A third of nursing hours are devoted to documenting tests and procedures so insurers have proof.

Eventually, the abuse became unbearable and I tried to kill myself by swallowing baby aspirin and eating a box of Ex-Lax. I was very ill and I got a terrible beating for going into the medicine cabinet. The case reports do not say why the court removed Sandy from this home first, although they do document that he was “lazy and maladjusted.” My records indicate that I did not adjust well to our separation. In fact, I ran away after school.

If our current belief about animal fat is correct, then all the meat and dairy these tribesmen were eating would have caused an epidemic of heart disease in Kenya. However, Mann found exactly the opposite—he could identify almost no heart disease at all. He documented this by performing electrocardiograms on four hundred of the men, among whom he found no evidence of a heart attack.

Red meat and processed meats contain more saturated fat and trans fat than other animal products, and are the poorest food choices. However, the fat issue does not tell the whole story. Scientific studies have documented that red meat has a much more pronounced association with colon cancer and pancreatic cancer compared with other animal products.51 The consumption of red meat and processed meats on a regular basis more than doubles the risk of some cancers. Even ingesting a small amount of red meat, such as two to three ounces a day, has been shown to significantly increase the risk of cancer.52 Toxic nitrogenous compounds (called N-nitroso compounds) occur in larger concentrations in red meat and processed meats. Red meat also has high haem (also spelled heme) content. Haem is an iron-carrying protein, and it has been shown to have destructive effects on the cells lining our digestive tract.53 Processed meat, luncheon meat, barbecued meat, and red meat must not be a regular part of your diet if you are looking to maintain excellent health into your later years of life. Eating too many animal products and not enough vegetables increases one’s risk of cancer. To achieve optimal health, humans require a high exposure to a full symphony of phytochemicals found in unprocessed plant matter. Eating more animal products results in a smaller percentage of calories consumed from high phytochemical vegetation such as seeds, berries, vegetables and beans. Also, since animal products contain no fiber, they remain in the digestive tract longer, slowing digestive transit time and allowing heightened exposure to toxic compounds.

Those who searched the day for something to eat were not interested in documents, sensitive or not.

In Bowling Alone, Putnam documented the unraveling of civic bonds since the 1950s. Americans attend fewer club meetings, have fewer dinner parties, eat dinner together as a family less, and are much less connected to their neighbors. They are disconnected from political parties and more skeptical of institutions. They spend much more time alone watching television or cocooning on the internet. The result is that ordinary people feel more anxious, isolated, and vulnerable.

Iain Pirie, Associate Professor in Politics and International Studies at Warwick University, argues that it’s not just the way women are represented in the media that’s helping to fuel this rise (a well-documented problem), but capitalism itself, which has corrupted our relationship with our own bodies and the food that sustains them. Pirie argues that the cycle of bingeing and purging that characterizes bulimia nervosa is similar to the accelerated and chaotic consumption that underpins modern culture and is vital for economic growth.18 The conflicting expectations placed on our bodies by advertisers – bombarding us with messages that food is a reward and a compensation (Have a break, have a KitKat), while at the same time telling us that not eating puts us higher on the moral and social hierarchy – are actually deadly.† Eating so much it hurts and then throwing it up in a fit of utter self-loathing is the perfect metaphor for consumerism.

Go easy on her," I snarled. Fuck! I pulled at my hair. Why did I say that? "Is there a point to this call? I appreciate the secretary. I don't appreciate being told how to run my business. I assume when you recommended Hannah you felt she was capable of—" "Pam, sorry. Listen. Forget that. She's a friend. That's why I'm calling. This goes almost without saying, but it's imperative that..." I stopped pacing. I rubbed my neck as I searched for words. For once in her life, Pam didn't seize my silence as an opportunity to interject. Even that unnerved me. Was she curious about my relation to Hannah? Pam did a good job of disguising any interest in me and my life, but she was also one of the most cunning people I knew. She had probably figured out a lot about me over the years. God, now I was analyzing Pam. Was Pam analyzing me? Fuck, I just needed to eat. My morning coffee on an empty stomach was giving me the shakes. "Imperative that she... not know who I am," I stumbled. Awesome phrasing. Way to go bestselling author. "Ah, that is, documents and... things you might have with my name... in connection with..." Pam let me flounder. I despised her for it. "Pam, I know you take my privacy as seriously as I do, but in this circumstance I..." Finally, the steely bitch spoke up. God damn, I was glad to have Pam Wing as a friend and not an enemy.

Who wants to serve in a police vice squad, spending hours peeking into men’s johns to detect acts of homosexuality? Who wants a job as a debt-collection agent, spending his whole day being nasty to people? What sort of person voluntarily serves as a prison guard or hangman? Also, alas, one might ask what kind of individual would want to spend millions of dollars to become president of the United States, never away from the telephone, guarded around the clock by agents of the Secret Service, reading tomes of amazingly uninteresting documents, and being accompanied day and night by a warrant officer carrying a black bag containing the mechanisms to set off the atomic bomb? We believe that all such occupations, dreary or dangerous as they may be, are exercises of high responsibility and even of glory, despite the maxim that “the paths of glory lead but to the grave.” But what is their actual end and purpose? Towards what is Progress? In fact, what on Earth are we doing? No one has even the ghost of a notion, save perhaps a few simple-minded people who live to smell flowers, to listen to the sea, to watch trees in the wind, to climb mountains, to eat pâté de veau en croûte, to drink the Malvasia wine from Ruby Hill, and to cuddle up with a lovely woman—and such pursuits are not really expensive, as compared with the trillions spent on the Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory.

Therese Neumann, who, in addition to having stigmata, did not eat or drink anything for thirty-five years. All this has been rigorously documented by an investigating committee sent by the bishop of Regensburg:

Whether or not you are looking to house-train your German Shepherd Dog (GSD) or any other type of dog, this book will teach you the essentials of house-training your new puppy (or adult) dog without the need for "Crate Training" in a very easy and fun to read format. This book also serves as a photo-journal (with high-quality (HQ) high-definition (HD) picture on every page) documenting week by week the first few months of life of Sadie the German Shepherd Dog (GSD) Puppy (together with her dog friend Bad News Billy) that is suitable for children, and makes a very nice children's story-picture book for fans of German Shepherd Dogs (GSDs) of all ages. By reading this book you will learn: 1.) How to house-train your dog without "Crate Training". 2.) How to know when to take your dog out to urinate/defecate. 3.) The four most important concepts for your dog to learn first before anything else. 4.) The three ways to get your dog to do as you say. 5.) The four reasons why your dog will not bite you. 6.) The two ways to control your dog's "Danger Area". 7.) The two ways to teach your dog new behaviors. 8.) Positive Reinforcement vs. Correction of Negative Behaviors. 9.) Which foods are safe and unsafe for your dog to eat. 10.) How to teach your dog hand-signals as silent commands. 11.) How to teach your dog to urinate/defecate upon command. ...and much more!

As I glided further into the dusty mollusk volumes, I discovered that gastropods - which account for 80 percent of all mollusks - are one of the most successful animal groups. They have existed for half a billion years, surviving or reevolving through several mass extinction events. They make their home in nearly every habitat on earth. While thirty-five thousand living terrestrial snail species have been documented, tens of thousands are not yet identified.

I am having a hard time, I think desperately a thousand times a day, and when I try to probe for more information—A hard time with what?—the voice replies, Everything. I feel insufficient as an adult. I look around at the office and see everyone typing, taking calls, making bookings, editing documents, and I know they’re all dealing with at least as much as I am, which only makes me feel worse about how hard everything feels to me. Living, being responsible for myself, seems like an insurmountable challenge lately. Sometimes I scrape myself off my sofa, stuff a frozen meal in the microwave, and as I wait for the timer to go off, I just think, I will have to do this again tomorrow and the next day and the next day. Every day for the rest of my life, I’m going to have to figure out what to eat, and make it for myself, no matter how bad I feel or tired I am, or how horrible the pounding in my head is. Even if I have a one-hundred-and-two-degree fever, I will have to pull myself up and make a very mediocre meal to go on living.

She was not ugly, she was not pretty. But just that old-fashioned word, plain.

I need these records because one day, years from now, I will listen to this music and I will remember exactly what it was like to be me now, or me a year ago, at fifteen, totally inhabited by this work, in this very specific place and time.

Large fountain glasses arrived at our table, layered with sweet beans, caramelized saba bananas, jackfruit, palm fruit, nata de coco, and strips of macapuno topped with shaved ice, evaporated milk, a slice of leche flan, a healthy scoop of ube halaya, and a scattering of pinipig, the toasted glutinous rice adding a nice bit of crunch. This frosty rainbow confection raised my spirits every time I saw it, and both Sana and I pulled out our phones to take pictures of the dish. She laughed. "This is almost too pretty to eat, so I wanted to document its loveliness before digging in." "This is for the restaurant's social media pages. My grandmother only prepares this dish in the summer, so I need to remind our customers to come while it lasts." "How do we go about this?" Rob asked, looking at his rapidly melting treat in trepidation. "Up to you. You can mix everything together like the name says so that you get a bit of everything in each bite. Or you can tackle it layer by layer. I'm a mixing girl, but you better figure it out fast or you're going to be eating dessert soup." We all dug in, each snowy bite punishing my teeth making me shiver in delight. I loved the interplay of textures---the firmness of the beans versus the softness of the banana and jackfruit mingling with the chewiness of the palm fruit, nata de coco, and macapuno. The fluffy texture of the shaved ice soaked through with evaporated milk, with the silky smoothness of the leche flan matched against the creaminess of the ube halaya and crispiness of the pinipig. A texture eater's (and sweet tooth's) paradise. "This is so strange," Valerie said. "I never would've thought of putting all these things together, especially not in a dessert. But it works. I mean, I don't love the beans, but they're certainly interesting. And what are these yellow strips?" "Jackfruit. When ripe, they're yellow and very sweet and fragrant, so they make a nice addition to lots of Filipino desserts. They were also in the turon I brought to the meeting earlier. Unripe jackfruit is green and used in vegetarian recipes, usually.

The history and failure of Keys’ diet-heart hypothesis, that fat is bad, is well documented in Nina Teicholz’s book, The Big Fat Surprise.

Carnaby, the brother, survived childhood.’ ‘If he went into the army, then there will be records,’ John Armstrong announced firmly. ‘I’ll contact my sons and Cecily’s husband, Captain Derwent. Trust me, Lavender; if the rogue did survive and went on to join the army, then there will be records of him—somewhere.’ ‘I need to go and speak with Doctor Goddard,’ Lavender said as they hurried down the main street in Bellingham. ‘We need to split up, Ned. I’ll visit Goddard, then go to The Redesdale Arms and speak to the landlord. You must go to Newcastle, find Mr Agar the lawyer and pursue my request for a copy of Baxter Carnaby’s last will and testament. I must see that document. The last master of Linn Hagh had far more secrets than I ever imagined.’ ‘Didn’t he just,’ Woods said. ‘This case has turned into a sack full of squirmin’ river eels. Slippery buggers, all of them Carnabys—especially the father.’ ‘Indeed. I hope that this document at the lawyers’ will shed some light on what really went on at Linn Hagh.’ ‘I’ll grab a bite to eat from The Rose and Crown before I go,’ Woods told him. ‘Oh—and I might just call on young Anna at her mother’s cottage on me way—just to check she got home safely

If you eat standard American food, you will inevitably develop standard American diseases. If we want to rival the low cholesterol of populations that eat mostly natural plant foods and do not have heart disease, we must try to attain total cholesterol numbers lower than 150 mg/dl. The average total cholesterol level in rural China, as documented in the Cornell China Study, was 127 mg/dl.90 Heart attacks were rare, and both cancer and heart disease rates plummeted as cholesterol levels fell, which reflected a very low consumption of animal products. The lowest occurrence of heart disease and cancer occurred in the group that consumed plant-based diets with less than two servings of animal products per week.

emporter /ɑ̃pɔʀte/ I. vtr 1. (prendre avec soi) [personne] to take [objet, vêtement, vivres, document]; [vent] to sweep away [feuilles mortes] • n'oublie pas d'~ un parapluie/à manger | don't forget to take an umbrella/something to eat • ~ qch avec soi | (controv) to take sth with one [objet, vêtement, vivres, document] • pizzas à ~ | takeaway pizzas 2. (transporter) (lit) [ambulance, sauveteurs] to take [sb] away [blessé, cadavre]; [bateau, train, avion] to carry away [passager, fret] • se laisser ~ par son élan | (fig) to get carried away • se laisser ~ par la colère | to let one's anger get the better of one • se laisser ~ par son imagination | to let one's imagination run riot 3. (arracher) [vent, rivière] to sweep away [personne, maison, embarcation, arbre, pont]; [obus, balle] to take [sth] off [oreille, bras] • emporté par le courant | swept away by the current 4. (causer la mort) • une leucémie l'a emporté | he died of leukaemia 5. (conquérir) to take [position] • ~ l'accord de qn | to get sb's agreement • ~ l'adhésion de qn | to win sb over 6. (voler) [personne] to steal [bijoux, argenterie, tableau] • il est parti en emportant la caisse | he ran off with all the money 7. (triompher) l'emporter • [équipe, candidat] to win; [idée, bon sens] to prevail • l'~ sur qn | [équipe, candidat] to beat sb • l'~ sur qch | to overcome sth • le bon sens l'a emporté | common sense prevailed • l'~ avec 38% des suffrages/par 2 buts à 1/de 4 points | to win with 38% of the votes/by 2 goals to 1/by 4 points • l'~ sur son adversaire avec 57% des voix | to defeat one's opponent by getting 57% of the votes voir aussi: paradis, tombe II. vpr (s'énerver) [personne] to lose one's temper • il s'emporte facilement | he loses his temper easily III. Idiome • emporter la bouche (informal) or gueule (very informal) | [épices, plat, alcool] to take the roof off one's mouth (familier)

As a nation, we were told to eat less fat and less saturated fat, which we did, or at least tried to do—saturated-fat consumption steadily declined over the years that followed, according to U.S. Department of Agriculture statistics—and yet, rather than getting leaner, we got fatter. What’s more, the incidence of heart disease has not even diminished, which goes against expectations, if eating less fat or saturated fat makes a difference. This has been documented in numerous studies, the latest of which appeared in The Journal of the American Medical Association in November 2009 by Elena Kuklina and her colleagues at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The authors made much of the fact that the number of Americans with high levels of LDL cholesterol has recently been decreasing, as would be expected in a nation avoiding saturated fat (and spending billions of dollars yearly on cholesterol-lowering drugs), but the number of heart attacks was not decreasing with it.

Studies have documented that families who habitually eat dinner together seem to raise children with better homework skills, higher grades, greater emotional control, and more confidence. Making your bed every morning is correlated with better productivity, a greater sense of well-being, and stronger skills at sticking with a budget. It’s not that a family meal or a tidy bed causes better grades or less frivolous spending. But somehow those initial shifts start chain reactions that help other good habits take hold.

While pulling clean drafts together took thousands of hours of work, the stories had all but revealed themselves. Facebook had allowed human trafficking to take place in the Persian Gulf on its platform as long as it occurred through brick-and-mortar businesses. In trying to improve the platform and boost user numbers, it had actually made the site, and the people who used it, angrier. Mental health researchers had concluded “we make body issues worse” and that Instagram was a toxic place for many teen girls, in particular. We divided up the stories among ourselves. Georgia Wells began interviewing young women who had developed eating disorders or body image issues of the sort that Instagram’s researchers worried their product might aggravate. The story she led would cite company documents that found “comparisons on Instagram can change how young women view and describe themselves,” citing research that found 32 percent of teen girls said that “when they felt bad about their bodies, Instagram made them feel worse.

You can’t do meaningful work that makes a difference unless you’re devoted to learning, growing, and stretching your skills. If you want others to redefine what you do and who you are within organizational boundaries, then you have to be able to redefine yourself. That means going above and beyond what’s called for. It means seeing your résumé as a dynamic, changing document every year. It means using your contacts inside and outside your network to deliver each project you’re assigned with inspired performance. Peters calls this the pursuit of WOW in everything you do.

The historian Anne Applebaum’s book on the Holodomor, Red Famine, documents stories of desperate peasants resorting to eating leather and rodents, grass, and, in states of starvation-induced mania, even their own children. All of this occurred in one of the most fertile grain-production regions in the world.

The self-starvation cycle has been documented across time and cultures, including non-Western ones. In modern Western societies, concerns with fat and thinness are the main reason for weight loss and probably explain the moderate rise of Anorexia Nervosa incidence across the second half of the 20th century. However, cases of self-starvation with spiritual and religious motivations have been common in Europe at least since the Middle Ages (and include several Catholic saints, most famously St. Catherine of Siena). In some Asian cultures, digestive discomfort is often cited as the initial reason for restricting food intake, but the resulting syndrome has essentially the same symptoms as anorexia in Western countries.

Grinding may look easy, and it is, for the first ten minutes. To grind a quantity of grain, though, as I found out when I tried, takes skill, control, physical strength, and time. I was quickly panting, sweaty, and dizzy, my hair in my eyes, and the mano slipping at awkward angles. Grinding is hard on the knees, hips, back, shoulders, and elbows, causing arthritis and bone damage. Grinding is lonely, too exhausting to allow for chatter. Kneeling to grind with the breasts swinging can be seen as submissive, demeaning, and sexually provocative, as lascivious eighteenth- and nineteenth-century illustrations of Mexican women grinding make clear. The heavy labor was relegated to women, convicts, and slaves, called “grinding slaves” in the technical language of seventh-century English court documents.42 Even today Mexican women in remote villages grind five hours daily to prepare enough maize for a family of five or six. For generation upon generation of grinders in the bread-eating parts of the world, the author of Genesis (3:19) had it nailed. “In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.

The unfortunate animals raised for food are forced to eat large quantities of fish meal and rendered animal flesh and organs, which is totally unnatural for them, in order to fatten them quickly. Manure is also used to “enrich” their feed, and these additives concentrate toxins to an even higher extent than the plant foods the animals are fed. The toxins in the animal foods we eat include carcinogenic heavy metals, deadly PCBs, chemical residues, antibiotics, and the human-created nightmare we now call the prion. Prions are thought to cause mad cow disease and the other transmissible spongiform encephalopathies that have raged through both human cannibal populations (such as the cannibalistic Fore people of Papua New Guinea where a type of human spongiform encephalopathy, called by them “kuru,” was first documented in the 1950s) and animal cannibal populations (such as the farmed sheep and mink populations that developed scrapie and transmissible mink encephalopathy after being fed rendered animal flesh). Similar diseases such as Creutzfeld-Jacob disease (the human equivalent of mad cow) and, according to some researchers, certain forms of Alzheimer’s disease, now threaten human omnivore populations as well because of perverse industry standards that have dictated feeding cows to other cows, and that still feed pigs to other pigs, chickens to other chickens, and pigs and chickens to cows.30

Where you live in this country makes a huge difference if you are poor,” says Concannon. “And it’s not just the weather. You have states with these sixty-or seventy-page documents people have to fill out to get benefits. Poor people are easy to wear down.” Georgia was usually a problem. Texas, too. “If they ran any of their football teams the way they run their food program, they’d fire the coach,” said Concannon. A Wyoming legislator, proud of how badly he had gummed up the state’s nutrition programs, told him, “We pride ourselves on doing the minimum required by the federal government.” An Arizona congressman proposed that the card used by people receiving food-stamp benefits be made prison orange, conferring not just nutrition but shame. In 2016, after several counties in North Carolina suffered severe flooding, the state tried to distribute federal disaster-relief food-benefit cards on the day of the presidential election, to give poor people a choice between eating and voting.

It is equally hard to know what to make of Fausto-Sterling’s (1992, p. 199) claim that “there is no single undisputed claim about universal human behavior (sexual or otherwise).” Presumably even the most ardent cultural relativist would accept that everywhere; people live in societies; they eat, sleep, and make love; and that women give birth and men do not. The arguments seem to arise when we move from basic universals to their specific behavioral expression. Though everywhere women are the principal caretakers of children, the fact that there may be variation in how that task is fulfilled leads some anthropologists to conclude that mothering is not universal. This is analogous to arguing that because people eat different food in different parts of the world, eating is not universal. Evolutionary psychologists do not argue for cultural invariance in the expression of evolved adaptations. As Tooby and Cosmides (1992, p. 45) put it, “manifest expressions may differ between individuals when different environmental inputs are operated on by the same procedures to produce different manifest outputs.” At a behavioral level, the expression of the mechanism may vary but that does not question the universality of the generative mechanism itself. Fortunately Donald Brown (1991), trained in the standard ethnographic tradition, has documented the extent of human universals. The list is astoundingly long but here is a taste of the hundreds that he finds: gossip, lying, verbal humor, storytelling, metaphor, distinction between mother and father, kinship categories, logical relations, interpreting intention from behavior and recognition of six basic emotions. Of special interest to the study of gender we find: binary distinctions between men and women, division of labor by sex, more child care by women, more aggression and violence by men, acknowledgement of differences between male and female natures, and domination by men in the public political sphere. Now this last observation (that men predominate in positions of power) provides a nice example of the extreme reluctance of cultural anthropologists to acknowledge universals. In 1973, Steven Goldberg wrote a book documenting the universality of patriarchy. He was inundated with letters informing him that he was wrong and pointing out counter-examples. (Other feminists were more willing to accept his premise, see Bem, 1993; Millett, 1969; Rich, 1976.) Over the next 20 years, he carefully examined the available ethnographic documentation for each putative counter-example and in 1993 authored a second book in which he was emphatic that no society had yet been found that violated his rule. There are societies that are matrilineal and matrilocal and where women are accorded veneration and respect—but there are no societies which violate the universality of patriarchy defined as “a system of organisation … in which the overwhelming number of upper positions in hierarchies are occupied by males” (Goldberg, 1993, p. 14). Such a state of affairs is deplorable but mere denial of the facts will do nothing to alter it—women’s engagement in the political arena will.

One 2009 study of lactose found that 14 out of 54 patients with documented intolerance to lactose reported symptoms after ingesting sugar pills. They were lactose intolerant, but it was their expectation of symptoms that made them sick. Strong nocebo effects were also observed in the studies of gluten sensitivity out of Monash University.

To become a brand, you’ve got to become relentlessly focused on what you do that adds value. And I promise you can add value to whatever job you’re doing now. Can you do what you do faster and more efficiently? If so, why not document what it would take to do so and offer it to your boss as something all employees might do? Do you initiate new projects on your own and in your spare time? Do you search out ways to save or make your company more money?

Individuals who are perfectionists are more likely to comply with norms and to be critical of their own shape, and high trait perfectionism is a documented risk factor for anorexia nervosa and bulimia nervosa as it increases drive for thinness. Drive for thinness is notably predicted by anxiety sensitivity and poor interoceptive awareness, the ability to understand physiological and emotional cues within the body, critical to self-awareness in linking cognitive and emotional processes.