Echo Include Quotes

It is a violation of human rights when babies are denied food, or drowned, or suffocated, or their spines broken, simply because they are born girls. It is a violation of human rights when women and girls are sold into the slavery of prostitution. It is a violation of human rights when women are doused with gasoline, set on fire and burned to death because their marriage dowries are deemed too small. It is a violation of human rights when individual women are raped in their own communities and when thousands of women are subjected to rape as a tactic or prize of war. It is a violation of human rights when a leading cause of death worldwide among women ages 14 to 44 is the violence they are subjected to in their own homes. It is a violation of human rights when young girls are brutalized by the painful and degrading practice of genital mutilation. It is a violation of human rights when women are denied the right to plan their own families, and that includes being forced to have abortions or being sterilized against their will. If there is one message that echoes forth from this conference, it is that human rights are women's rights - and women's rights are human rights. Let us not forget that among those rights are the right to speak freely - and the right to be heard. [From 'Women's Rights Are Human Rights' Speech Beijing, China: 5 September 1995]

Algebra applies to the clouds, the radiance of the star benefits the rose--no thinker would dare to say that the perfume of the hawthorn is useless to the constellations. Who could ever calculate the path of a molecule? How do we know that the creations of worlds are not determined by falling grains of sand? Who can understand the reciprocal ebb and flow of the infinitely great and the infinitely small, the echoing of causes in the abyss of being and the avalanches of creation? A mite has value; the small is great, the great is small. All is balanced in necessity; frightening vision for the mind. There are marvelous relations between beings and things, in this inexhaustible whole, from sun to grub, there is no scorn, each needs the other. Light does not carry terrestrial perfumes into the azure depths without knowing what it does with them; night distributes the stellar essence to the sleeping plants. Every bird that flies has the thread of the infinite in its claw. Germination includes the hatching of a meteor and the tap of a swallow's beak breaking the egg, and it guides the birth of the earthworm, and the advent of Socrates. Where the telescope ends, the microscope begins. Which of the two has a greater view? Choose. A bit of mold is a pleiad of flowers; a nebula is an anthill of stars. The same promiscuity, and still more wonderful, between the things of the intellect and material things. Elements and principles are mingled, combined, espoused, multiplied one by another, to the point that the material world, and the moral world are brought into the same light. Phenomena are perpetually folded back on themselves. In the vast cosmic changes, universal life comes and goes in unknown quantities, rolling everything up in the invisible mystery of the emanations, using everything, losing no dream from any single sleep, sowing a microscopic animal here, crumbling a star there, oscillating and gyrating, making a force of light, and an element of thought, disseminated and indivisible dissolving all, that geometric point, the self; reducing everything to the soul-atom; making everything blossom into God; entangling from the highest to the lowest, all activities in the obscurity of a dizzying mechanism, linking the flight of an insect to the movement of the earth, subordinating--who knows, if only by the identity of the law--the evolutions of the comet in the firmament to the circling of the protozoa in the drop of water. A machine made of mind. Enormous gearing, whose first motor is the gnat, and whose last is the zodiac.

As usual, the note occupied less than a page and included neither salutation nor closing, Uncle Hal's opinion being that since the letter had a direction upon it, the intended recipient was obvious, the seal indicated plainly who had written it, and he did not waste his time in writing to fools.

You don't notice the dead leaving when they really choose to leave you. You're not meant to. At most you feel them as a whisper or the wave of a whisper undulating down. I would compare it to a woman in the back of a lecture hall or theater whom no one notices until she slips out.Then only those near the door themselves, like Grandma Lynn, notice; to the rest it is like an unexplained breeze in a closed room. Grandma Lynn died several years later, but I have yet to see her here. I imagine her tying it on in her heaven, drinking mint juleps with Tennessee Williams and Dean Martin. She'll be here in her own sweet time, I'm sure. If I'm to be honest with you, I still sneak away to watch my family sometimes. I can't help it, and sometimes they still think of me. They can't help it.... It was a suprise to everyone when Lindsey found out she was pregnant...My father dreamed that one day he might teach another child to love ships in bottles. He knew there would be both sadness and joy in it; that it would always hold an echo of me. I would like to tell you that it is beautiful here, that I am, and you will one day be, forever safe. But this heaven is not about safety just as, in its graciousness, it isn't about gritty reality. We have fun. We do things that leave humans stumped and grateful, like Buckley's garden coming up one year, all of its crazy jumble of plants blooming all at once. I did that for my mother who, having stayed, found herself facing the yard again. Marvel was what she did at all the flowers and herbs and budding weeds. Marveling was what she mostly did after she came back- at the twists life took. And my parents gave my leftover possessions to the Goodwill, along with Grandma Lynn's things. They kept sharing when they felt me. Being together, thinking and talking about the dead, became a perfectly normal part of their life. And I listened to my brother, Buckley, as he beat the drums. Ray became Dr. Singh... And he had more and more moments that he chose not to disbelieve. Even if surrounding him were the serious surgeons and scientists who ruled over a world of black and white, he maintained this possibility: that the ushering strangers that sometimes appeared to the dying were not the results of strokes, that he had called Ruth by my name, and that he had, indeed, made love to me. If he ever doubted, he called Ruth. Ruth, who graduated from a closet to a closet-sized studio on the Lower East Side. Ruth, who was still trying to find a way to write down whom she saw and what she had experienced. Ruth, who wanted everyone to believe what she knew: that the dead truly talk to us, that in the air between the living, spirits bob and weave and laugh with us. They are the oxygen we breathe. Now I am in the place I call this wide wide Heaven because it includes all my simplest desires but also the most humble and grand. The word my grandfather uses is comfort. So there are cakes and pillows and colors galore, but underneath this more obvious patchwork quilt are places like a quiet room where you can go and hold someone's hand and not have to say anything. Give no story. Make no claim. Where you can live at the edge of your skin for as long as you wish. This wide wide Heaven is about flathead nails and the soft down of new leaves, wide roller coaster rides and escaped marbles that fall then hang then take you somewhere you could never have imagined in your small-heaven dreams.

Lassiter skidded in from the billiards room, the fallen angel glowing from his black-and-blond hair and white eyes, all the way down to his shitkickers. Then again, maybe the illumination wasn’t his nature, but that gold he insisted on wearing. He looked like a living, breathing jewelry tree. “I’m here. Where’s my chauffeur hat?” “Here, use mine,” Butch said, outing a B Sox cap and throwing it over. “It’ll help that hair of yours.” The angel caught the thing on the fly and stared at the red S. “I’m sorry, I can’t.” “Do not tell me you’re a Yankees fan,” V drawled. “I’ll have to kill you, and frankly, tonight we need all the wingmen we’ve got.” Lassiter tossed the cap back. Whistled. Looked casual. “Are you serious?” Butch said. Like the guy had maybe volunteered for a lobotomy. Or a limb amputation. Or a pedicure. “No fucking way,” V echoed. “When and where did you become a friend of the enemy—” The angel held up his palms. “It’s not my fault you guys suck—” Tohr actually stepped in front of Lassiter, like he was worried that something a lot more than smack talk was going to start flying. And the sad thing was, he was right to be concerned. Apart from their shellans, V and Butch loved the Sox above almost everything else—including sanity.

This leading-edge research echoes what ancient wisdom has always known: that each organ of the body, including the brain, speaks its own “thoughts,” “feelings,” and “promptings,” and listens to those of all the others.

The ideal of the military hero is clearly echoed in other contexts, and it includes those who routinely risk their health and lives in the line of duty, such as police officers, firefighters, and paramedics.

There is no such thing as a good influence, Mr. Gray. All influence is immoral—immoral from the scientific point of view." "Why?" "Because to influence a person is to give him one's own soul. He does not think his natural thoughts, or burn with his natural passions. His virtues are not real to him. His sins, if there are such things as sins, are borrowed. He becomes an echo of some one else's music, an actor of a part that has not been written for him. The aim of life is self-development. To realize one's nature perfectly—that is what each of us is here for. People are afraid of themselves, nowadays. They have forgotten the highest of all duties, the duty hat one owes to one's self. Of course, they are charitable. They feed the hungry and clothe the beggar. But their own souls starve, and are naked. Courage has gone out of our race. Perhaps we never really had it. The terror of society, which is the basis of morals, the terror of God, which is the secret of religion—these are the two things that govern us. And yet, I believe that if one man were to live out his life fully and completely, were to give form to every feeling, expression to every thought, reality to every dream—I believe that the world would gain such a fresh impulse of joy that we would forget all the maladies of mediaevalism, and return to the Hellenic ideal—to something finer, richer than the Hellenic ideal, it may be. But the bravest man amongst us is afraid of himself

- he couldn't believe how falling love with Martha made things simpler. No, that wasn't the right word, unless 'simpler' also included the sense of richer, denser, more complicated, with focus and echo. Half his brain pulsed with gawping incredulity at his luck; the other half was filled with a sense of long-sought, flaming reality. That was the word: falling in love with Martha made things real.

Chastity and moral purity were qualities McCandless mulled over long and often. Indeed, one of the books found in the bus with his remains was a collection of stories that included Tol¬stoy’s “The Kreutzer Sonata,” in which the nobleman-turned-ascetic denounces “the demands of the flesh.” Several such passages are starred and highlighted in the dog-eared text, the margins filled with cryptic notes printed in McCandless’s distinc¬tive hand. And in the chapter on “Higher Laws” in Thoreau’s Walden, a copy of which was also discovered in the bus, McCand¬less circled “Chastity is the flowering of man; and what are called Genius, Heroism, Holiness, and the like, are but various fruits which succeed it.” We Americans are titillated by sex, obsessed by it, horrified by it. When an apparently healthy person, especially a healthy young man, elects to forgo the enticements of the flesh, it shocks us, and we leer. Suspicions are aroused. McCandless’s apparent sexual innocence, however, is a corol¬lary of a personality type that our culture purports to admire, at least in the case of its more famous adherents. His ambivalence toward sex echoes that of celebrated others who embraced wilderness with single-minded passion—Thoreau (who was a lifelong virgin) and the naturalist John Muir, most prominently— to say nothing of countless lesser-known pilgrims, seekers, mis¬fits, and adventurers. Like not a few of those seduced by the wild, McCandless seems to have been driven by a variety of lust that supplanted sexual desire. His yearning, in a sense, was too pow¬erful to be quenched by human contact. McCandless may have been tempted by the succor offered by women, but it paled beside the prospect of rough congress with nature, with the cosmos it¬self. And thus was he drawn north, to Alaska.

I want to see the Parthenon by moonlight.' I had my way. They floodlight it now, to great advantage I am told, but it was not so then, and since it was late in the year there were few tourists. My companions were all intelligent men, including my own husband, and they had the sense to stay mute. I suppose, being a woman, I confuse beauty with sentiment, but, as I looked on the Parthenon for the first time in my life, I found myself crying. It had never happened to me before. Your sunset weepers I despise. It was not full moon, or anywhere near it. The half circle put me in mind of the labrys, the Cretan double axe, and the pillars were the most ghostly in consequence. What a shock for the modern aesthete, I thought when my crying was done, if he could see the ruddy glow of colour, the painted eyes, the garish lips, the orange-reds and blues that were there once, and Athene herself a giantess on her pedestal touched by the rising sun. Even in those distant times the exigencies of a state religion had brought their own traffic, the buying and selling of doves, of trinkets: to find himself, a man had to go to the woods, to the hills. "Come on," said Stephen. "It's beautiful and stark, if you like, but so is St. Pancras station at 4 A.M. It depends on your association of ideas." We crammed into Burns's small car, and went back to our hotel. ("The Chamois")

My stories may seem to be the stories of men, but a check of my books will show that I have probably written the stories of more strong women than any other writer....[examples include] Miss Nesselrode of The Lonesome Gods, Ruth Macken of Bendigo Shafter, Echo Sackett of Ride the River, Em Talon of Ride the Dark Trail are some....[and] one of my favorites is Miss Jessica Trescott of Matagorda. (The Sackett Companion)

I know of nothing in all drama more incomparable from the point of view of art, nothing more suggestive in its subtlety of observation, than Shakespeare's drawing of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. They are Hamlet's college friends. They have been his companions. They bring with them memories of pleasant days together. At the moment when they come across him in the play he is staggering under the weight of a burden intolerable to one of his temperament. The dead have come armed out of the grave to impose on him a mission at once too great and too mean for him. He is a dreamer, and he is called upon to act. He has the nature of the poet, and he is asked to grapple with the common complexity of cause and effect, with life in its practical realisation, of which he knows nothing, not with life in its ideal essence, of which he knows so much. He has no conception of what to do, and his folly is to feign folly. Brutus used madness as a cloak to conceal the sword of his purpose, the dagger of his will, but the Hamlet madness is a mere mask for the hiding of weakness. In the making of fancies and jests he sees a chance of delay. He keeps playing with action as an artist plays with a theory. He makes himself the spy of his proper actions, and listening to his own words knows them to be but 'words, words, words.' Instead of trying to be the hero of his own history, he seeks to be the spectator of his own tragedy. He disbelieves in everything, including himself, and yet his doubt helps him not, as it comes not from scepticism but from a divided will. Of all this Guildenstern and Rosencrantz realise nothing. They bow and smirk and smile, and what the one says the other echoes with sickliest intonation. When, at last, by means of the play within the play, and the puppets in their dalliance, Hamlet 'catches the conscience' of the King, and drives the wretched man in terror from his throne, Guildenstern and Rosencrantz see no more in his conduct than a rather painful breach of Court etiquette. That is as far as they can attain to in 'the contemplation of the spectacle of life with appropriate emotions.' They are close to his very secret and know nothing of it. Nor would there be any use in telling them. They are the little cups that can hold so much and no more.

Noah didn’t walk, he stalked and I loved the mischievous glint in his eye when he stalked me. He placed his hands on my hips and nuzzled my hair. “I love the way you smell.” I swallowed and tried to reign in the mutant pterodactyls having a roller derby in my stomach as I dared to think about a future for the two of us. The moment Aires’ car rumbled beneath me, I’d known that I needed Noah in my life. Aires’ death had left a gaping hole in my heart. I thought all I needed was that car to run. Wrong. A car would never fill the emptiness, but love could. “I hope your future includes me. I mean, someone has to continue to kick your butt in pool.” Noah laughed as he snagged his fingers around my belt loops and dragged me closer. “I was letting you win.” “Please.” His eyes had about fallen out of his head when I’d sunk a couple of balls off the break. “You were losing. Badly.” I wondered if he also reveled in the warmth of being this close again. “Then I guess I’ll have to keep you around. For good. You’ll be useful during a hustle.” He lowered his forehead to mine and his brown eyes, which had been laughing seconds ago, darkened as he got serious. “I have a lot I want to say to you. A lot I want to apologize for.” “Me, too.” And I touched his cheek again, this time letting my fingers take their time. Noah wanted me, for good. “But can we hash it all out some other time? I’m sort of talked out and I’ve still gotta go see my dad. Do you think we can just take it on faith right now that I want you, you want me, and we’ll figure out the happy ending part later?” His lips curved into a sexy smile and I became lost in him. “I love you, Echo Emerson.” I whispered the words as he brought his lips to mine. “Forever.

I imagine the dead are exhausted by our refusal to live, to say the story straight, as they push eons of unspoken against our recalcitrant mouths. For us to do the small courtesy of naming, therefore seeing. But what is there left to be afraid of? Everything's happened to us already. What happens again is only an echo.

It is worthy of note, however, that the exclusion of black voters from polling booths is not the only way in which black political power has been suppressed. Another dimension of disenfranchisement echoes not so much Jim Crow as slavery. Under the usual-residence rule, the Census Bureau counts imprisoned individuals as residents of the jurisdiction in which they are incarcerated. Because most new prison construction occurs in predominately white, rural areas, white communities benefit from inflated population totals at the expense of the urban, overwhelmingly minority communities from which the prisoners come.35 This has enormous consequences for the redistricting process. White rural communities that house prisons wind up with more people in state legislatures representing them, while poor communities of color lose representatives because it appears their population has declined. This policy is disturbingly reminiscent of the three-fifths clause in the original Constitution, which enhanced the political clout of slaveholding states by including 60 percent of slaves in the population base for calculating Congressional seats and electoral votes, even though they could not vote.

the length of her body, including

The gremlin mob turned on Root, and when they saw the triple-barreled blaster on his hip, they kept right on turning. Root grabbed the microphone from behind the desk, and hauled it out to the extent of its cable. “Now hear this,” he growled, his gravelly tones echoing around the terminal. “This is Commander Root of the LEP. We have a serious situation above ground, and I would appreciate cooperation from all you civilians. First, I would like you all to stop your yapping so I can hear myself think!” Root paused to make certain his wishes were being respected. They were. “Secondly, I would like every single one of you, including those squawling infants, to sit down on the courtesy benches until I have gone on my way. Then you can get back to griping or stuffing your faces. Or whatever else it is civilians do.” No one had ever accused Root of political correctness. No one was ever likely to either.

So it was that the Red Tower put into production its new, more terrible and perplexing, line of unique novelty items. Among the objects and constructions now manufactured were several of an almost innocent nature. These included tiny, delicate cameos that were heavier than their size would suggest, far heavier, and lockets whose shiny outer surface flipped open to reveal a black reverberant abyss inside, a deep blackness roaring with echoes. Along the same lines was a series of lifelike replicas of internal organs and physiological structures, many of them evidencing an advanced stages of disease and all of them displeasingly warm and soft to the touch. There was a fake disembodied hand on which fingernails would grow several inches overnight and insistently grew back should one attempt to clip them. Numerous natural objects, mostly bulbous gourds, were designed to produce a long, deafening scream whenever they were picked up or otherwise disturbed in their vegetable stillness. Less scrutable were such things as hardened globs of lava into whose rough, igneous forms were sent a pair of rheumy eyes that perpetually shifted their gaze from side to side like a relentless pendulum. And there was also a humble piece of cement, a fragment broken away from any street or sidewalk, that left a most intractable stain, greasy and green, on whatever surface it was placed. But such fairly simple items were eventually followed, and ultimately replaced, by more articulated objects and constructions. One example of this complex type of novelty item was an ornate music box that, when opened, emitted a brief gurgling or sucking sound in emulation of a dying individual's death rattle. Another product manufactured in great quantity at the Red Tower was a pocket watch in a gold casing which opened to reveal a curious timepiece whose numerals were represented by tiny quivering insects while the circling 'hands' were reptilian tongues, slender and pink. But these examples hardly begin to hint at the range of goods that came from the factory during its novelty phase of production. I should at least mention the exotic carpets woven with intricate abstract patterns that, when focused upon for a certain length of time, composed themselves into fleeting phantasmagoric scenes of a kind which might pass through a fever-stricken or even permanently damaged brain.

The West is courting its own destruction, but this is in line with Barack Obama’s consistent position. He has said repeatedly that “as Americans, we are not and never will be at war with Islam” – even though a large part of Islam has declared war on us. He has cultivated ties with Muslim individuals and groups deemed “moderate,” including the Brotherhood itself.75 In his Cairo speech in 2009, Obama echoed the Brotherhood’s anti-free-speech agenda: “I consider it part of my responsibility as President of the United States to fight against negative stereo-types of Islam wherever they appear.”76

A woman from the Hunan Province told it to me,” said Charon. “Once upon a time a stranger came to a remote village with an elephant. Everyone got excited, including three blind men who didn’t know what an elephant was. They decided to find out for themselves. “The first man approached the elephant near its head. He reached his hand out and felt the leathery ear. The second man approached from behind and brushed the elephant’s bristly tail. The third came at it from the side and stroked its wide midsection. “ ‘What a strange creature an elephant is,’ the first man said. ‘So flat and thin, like wash hung from the line.’ “ ‘What are you talking about?’ said the second man. ‘That animal was hairy and coarse, like the bristles on a stiff broom.’ “ ‘You are both wrong!’ said the third. ‘The beast was as broad and sturdy as a wall.’ They three men argued and argued, but they never could come to an agreement.” Charon

A measure of their success can be found in the anxious prayers that soon echoed from European churches. The abbey of St. Vaast on the northern coast of France included in its daily chants the phrase “Deliver us, God, from the savage race of Northmen which lays waste our realms.”2 It was a sentiment that many would soon share, from Constantinople in the east to the Americas in the west.

The lobby of the Fanny Briggs Memorial Building was almost finished when she arrived. As if to distract from the minuscule and cramped philosophy of what would transpire on the floors above, the city offered visitors the spacial bounty of the lobby. The ersatz marble was firm underfoot like real marble, sheer, and produced trembling echoes effortlessly. The circle of Doric columns braced the weight above without complaint. The mural, however, was not complete. It started out jauntily enough to Lila Mae’s left. Cheerless Indians holding up a deerskin in front of a fire. The original tenants, sure. A galleon negotiating the tricky channels around the island. Two beaming Indians trading beads to a gang of white men—the infamous sale of the Island. Big moment, have to include that, the first of many dubious transactions in the city’s history. (They didn’t have elevators yet. That’s why the scenes look so flat to Lila Mae: the city is dimensionless.) The mural jumped to the Revolution then, she noticed, skipped over a lot of stuff. The painter seemed to be making it up as he went along, like the men who shaped the city. The Revolution scene was a nice setpiece—the colonists pulling down the statue of King George III. They melted it down for ammunition, if she remembers correctly. It’s always nice when a good mob comes together. The painting ended there. (Someone knocks at the door of her room in 117 Second Avenue, but she doesn’t open her eyes.) Judging from the amount of wall space that remained to Lila Mae’s right, the mural would have to get even more brief in its chronicle of the city’s greatest hits. Either the painter had misjudged how much space he had or the intervening years weren’t that compelling to him. Just the broad strokes, please.

All philosophic propositions, every attempt to think including all acts of oral or written articulation of an argument and metaphorically expressed ideas, are subject to the dynamics and limitations of human language. The spoken thought is only part of any philosophic message; the other part is unsaid because it is unsayable. The crux of any philosophic proposition reverberates in the echo of silence, the thought that lies in-between the lines.

Jacob, is something wrong? Is Isabella okay?” “Probably. She is not well today. It could be a normal thing for a human female, but since she is usually as resistant to common ailments now as we are, she is nervous. I figured Gideon could ease her mind.” Noah missed the wince that crossed his friend’s face that would have given away the indignant argument flying through the Enforcer’s thoughts. Jacob’s female counterpart huffily took umbrage to his claims of exactly who it was that was nervous and who had insisted on seeking Gideon, because it certainly had not been her. “Tell her I hope she feels better,” Noah said, his fondness for Bella quite clear in his tone. “Bear with her, old friend. She’s breaking new ground. It can be pretty frightening to play Eve for an entire race.” “Do not worry. When it comes to my Bella, I would do anything to see to her happiness. That includes making others do anything to see to her happiness,” Jacob said. He meant the words, of course, but he was hoping they’d help sooth someone’s bristling pride. “I’m sure Gideon is going to love that,” Noah laughed. Jacob grinned, altering gravity so that he began to float up from the floor. “If you see Gideon before I do, will you tell him to come to Bella?” “Of course. Tell her I said to start behaving like a real Druid or I—” Noah was cut off by a sharp hand motion and a warning expression from the Enforcer. It came a little too late, however, if Jacob’s pained expression was anything to judge by. “There goes your invitation for our wedding,” Jacob muttered. “And I think I am close behind you.” “I would believe that if I were not the one who is supposed to perform it and if you were not the father of her otherwise illegitimate child,” Noah countered loudly, clearly talking to the person beyond his immediate perception. “Ow! Damn it, Noah!” Jacob grumbled, rubbing his temples as Bella’s scream of frustration echoed through him. “Do you remember I am the one who has to go home to her, would you?” “Sorry, my friend,” Noah chuckled, not looking at all repentant. “Now get out of here, Enforcer. Find Gideon and tend to your beautiful and charming mate. Be sure to mention to her that I said she looks ravishing and that her pregnancy has made her shine like a precious jewel.” “Noah, if you were not my King, I would kill you for this.” “Yes, well, as your King I would have you arrested for treason just for saying that. Luckily for you, Jacob, you are the man who would arrest you, and the woman who also has the power to do so is sure to punish you far better than I can when you get home.” “You are all heart, my liege,” Jacob said wryly. “Thank you. Now leave, before I begin to expound on the disrespect that this mouthy little female of yours seems to have engendered my formerly loyal subjects.

So it was that the Red Tower put into production its terrible and perplexing line of unique novelty items. Among the objects and constructions now manufactured were several of an almost innocent nature. These included tiny, delicate cameos that were heavier than their size would suggest, far heavier, and lockets whose shiny outer surface flipped open to reveal a black reverberant abyss inside, a deep blackness roaring with echoes. Along the same lines was a series of lifelike replicas of internal organs and physiological structures, many of them evidencing an advanced stage of disease and all of them displeasingly warm and soft to the touch. There was a fake disembodied hand on which fingernails would grow several inches overnight, every night like clockwork. Numerous natural objects, mostly bulbous gourds, were designed to produce a long deafening scream whenever they were picked up or otherwise disturbed in their vegetable stillness. Less scrutable were such things as hardened globs of lava into whose rough igneous forms were set a pair of rheumy eyes that perpetually shifted their gaze from side to side like a relentless pendulum. And there was also a humble piece of cement, a fragment broken away from any street or sidewalk, that left a most intractable stain, greasy and green, on whatever surface it was placed. But such fairly simple items were eventually followed, and ultimately replaced, by more articulated objects and constructions. One example of this complex type of novelty item was an ornate music box that, when opened, emitted a brief gurgling or sucking sound in emulation of a dying individual's death rattle. Another product manufactured in great quantity at the Red Tower was a pocket watch in gold casing which opened to reveal a curious timepiece whose numerals were represented by tiny quivering insects while the circling "hands" were reptilian tongues, slender and pink. But these examples hardly begin to hint at the range of goods that came from the factory during its novelty phase of production. I should at least mention the exotic carpets woven with intricate abstract patterns that, when focused upon for a certain length of time, composed themselves into fleeting phantasmagoric scenes of the kind which might pass through a fever-stricken or even permanently damaged brain.

Do you know why I always keep a shilling in my pocket? Because everything I am today, everything I've earned- it all started there. I was once worth a single shilling. Now I'm worth hundreds of thousands of pounds." "No, you aren't." "Shall I produce the bank ledgers to prove it?" "Ledgers are meaningless. I have a sum placed on me, you know. A dowry of forty thousand. And yet if I were to lose my virtue, some would deem me worthless." "You could never be worthless." "I could certainly drive down the price of your house. You never miss a chance to remind me." He shook his head. "That's not the point." "Here is the point." She stepped into his path, forcing him to meet her eyes. Man-eating sharks and all. "No one can be reduced to numbers in a ledger, or a stack of banknotes, or a single silver coin. We are humans, with souls and hearts and passion and love. Every last one of us is priceless. Even you." She set her frustration aside and took his face in her hands. He needed to hear this. Everyone needed to hear it, including her. Perhaps that was why she spoke the words so often, to so many creatures. Simply to hear them echo back. "Gabriel Duke. You are priceless.

Wagner’s Ring Cycle has kept one version of one of the great Norse stories alive in the minds of music lovers. Readers of modern fantasy will find many echoes of the Norse tales as well. Neil Gaiman, Douglas Adams and others have explicitly taken some of the Norse gods and put them into a modern setting with strange, sad and humorous results. Echoes of Norse tales and creatures abound in the speculative fiction of Ursula Le Guin, J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Tad Williams and others. Something in these old and puzzling stories still has the power to move and unsettle us, and to inspire new acts of creation.

Sadly, the dark echoes of our time in Iraq still resonate with many of Echo Company, who battle with the effects of post-traumatic stress (PTS). Including me. I never refer to it as a disorder. A good friend of mine, Charles Adam Walker, taught me that. He wrote an article called “Postcombat Residue” in the December 2013 issue of the Marine Corps Gazette. It shaped the way I look at PTS today. Adam uses a prophetic analogy, likening the effects and residue of combat to those on a stained, well-used coffee mug. Indelibly tainted, yet still capable of performing its intended use day in and day out—but the residue will always remain.

When Harville awakened, he looked at the same scene with a loud and appreciative exclamation. I was tempted to explain to him that I had already seen the beautiful view and was now working on an important email. But I recalled the “Still Face” video and moved to the window to join Harville’s enthusiasm for the rising sun and shining beach, rather than be a still face. If I had not joined him, his excitement would have had no echo. The power of this experience led us to include it as a technique we recommend to couples in our workshops and therapy, to cultivate curiosity and wonder by echoing the joy (or the sadness) in their partners. THE

Forgetting herself entirely, Pandora let her head loll back against Gabriel's shoulder. "What kind of glue does Ivo use?" she asked languidly. "Glue?" he echoed after a moment, his mouth close to her temple, grazing softly. "For his kites." "Ah." He paused while a wave retreated. "Joiner's glue, I believe." "That's not strong enough," Pandora said, relaxed and pensive. "He should use chrome glue." "Where would he find that?" One of his hands caressed her side gently. "A druggist can make it. One part acid chromate of lime to five parts gelatin." Amusement filtered through his voice. "Does your mind ever slow down, sweetheart?" "Not even for sleeping," she said. Gabriel steadied her against another wave. "How do you know so much about glue?" The agreeable trance began to fade as Pandora considered how to answer him. After her long hesitation, Gabriel tilted his head and gave her a questioning sideways glance. "The subject of glue is complicated, I gather." I'm going to have to tell him at some point, Pandora thought. It might as well be now. After taking a deep breath, she blurted out, "I design and construct board games. I've researched every possible kind of glue required for manufacturing them. Not just for the construction of the boxes, but the best kind to adhere lithographs to the boards and lids. I've registered a patent for the first game, and soon I intend to apply for two more." Gabriel absorbed the information in remarkably short order. "Have you considered selling the patents to a publisher?" "No, I want to make the games at my own factory. I have a production schedule. The first one will be out by Christmas. My brother-in-law, Mr. Winterborne, helped me to write a business plan. The market in board games is quite new, and he thinks my company will be successful." "I'm sure it will be. But a young woman in your position has no need of a livelihood." "I do if I want to be self-supporting." "Surely the safety of marriage is preferable to the burdens of being a business proprietor." Pandora turned to face him fully. "Not if 'safety' means being owned. As things stand now, I have the freedom to work and keep my earnings. But if I marry you, everything I have, including my company, would immediately become yours. You would have complete authority over me. Every shilling I made would go directly to you- it wouldn't even pass through my hands. I'd never be able to sign a contract, or hire employees, or buy property. In the eyes of the law, a husband and wife are one person, and that person is the husband. I can't bear the thought of it. It's why I never want to marry.

The universal laws of nature including the thermodynamic principles of entropy govern the relationships between interconnected organisms. The notion of internal thermodynamic equilibrium assure us that the powerful energy reserves of one person will always rush in to fill the void or vacuum in another person. Thus I will always register your mystical presence in my quiescent mind, your hallow echo fills the hollow space of my very being. You are the external reflection of my innermost want, the personification of a world that lies outside my conscious reach, ethereal substance of the soul, the guiding hand that my unconscious mind instinctually gropes for in order to make me complete.

The 'most precious object of the Western world' is now a national monument of Ireland at the very highest level. It is probably the most famous and perhaps the most emotively charged medieval book of any kind. It is the iconic symbol of Irish culture. It is included in the Memory of the World Register compiled by UNESCO. A design echoing the Book of Kells was used on the former penny coin of Ireland (1971 to 2000) and on a commemorative twenty-euro piece in 2012. One of its initials was shown on the reverse of the old Irish five-pound banknote. It has been illustrated on the country's postage stamps. Probably every Irish bar in the world has some reflexion of its script or decoration.

Censorship diminished, and copyright was originated. Moreover, the early years of the eighteenth century gave rise to a galaxy of new phenomena that included the printed handbill, printed receipts, printed tickets, printed advertisements, and posters. At the same time there was a surge in the production of political pamphlets, broadsides, books for children, and even street maps. Alexander Pope satirized the rage for print in his poem The Dunciad (1728–43); he mockingly suggested that its democratizing power had brought ‘the Smithfield Muses to the Ear of Kings’. Johnson echoed Pope’s sentiments, complaining that ‘so widely is spread the itch of literary praise, that almost every man is an author, either in act or in purpose’.3

The Last Words of Jesus Some of the most profound lessons of the scriptures are contained in the brief but poignant words Jesus uttered from the cross. There is a sermon in each, but let us focus on Jesus’ words when he said, “It is finished” (John 19:30). I see a number of meanings in these words. He had finished the bitter cup, the cup of trembling, right down to the last taste of vinegar on his lips, offered mockingly in response to his request “I thirst” (John 19:28). He had completed his mission, his Father’s will; the grand moment in the Father’s plan of mercy and happiness had been accomplished. But that grand moment also included his suffering. No other throughout the long ages of man has ever—nor will ever—suffer to the degree he did, yet there came a time in that suffering when he could say, “It is finished.” It was finished, and that will likewise be true of each human soul. No matter what we have suffered, are now suffering, or may yet suffer, there will come a time when we will all echo his words: “It is finished!” Our tears will be changed, and though they will continue to flow, they will be tears of relief, tears of gratitude, tears of joy. The former things will have passed away. That passing away will be so complete and the rejoicing so full that we will not remember, save for the lessons we have learned, our past pain. Isaiah, who was specifically enjoined to speak words of comfort to the people, recorded the Lord’s words: “For, behold, I create new heavens and a new earth: and the former shall not be remembered, nor come into mind. But be ye glad and rejoice” (Isaiah 65:17–18).

Jobs, who could identify with each of those sentiments, wrote some of the lines himself, including “They push the human race forward.” By the time of the Boston Macworld in early August, they had produced a rough version. They agreed it was not ready, but Jobs used the concepts, and the “think different” phrase, in his keynote speech there. “There’s a germ of a brilliant idea there,” he said at the time. “Apple is about people who think outside the box, who want to use computers to help them change the world.” They debated the grammatical issue: If “different” was supposed to modify the verb “think,” it should be an adverb, as in “think differently.” But Jobs insisted that he wanted “different” to be used as a noun, as in “think victory” or “think beauty.” Also, it echoed colloquial use, as in “think big.

Hard to imagine, but Dakotah herself was 99.98 percent wolf, including, you might suppose, the part of her that loved pursuing and catching things over and over at breakneck speed and delivering them back to her pack, in a faint echo of the chase. I’ve wondered if some dogs may feel a higher level of drive for such games, since it’s their only outlet for genetically programmed catch-and-kill hunting behavior. A wolf in the same situation seems more relaxed, more purely at play—certainly the case with the black wolf just then, and with other wild wolves I’ve seen. After all, wolves hunt to live, on a daily basis; fooling around with a toy is more of a break, quite separate from the serious business of living—having fun for the sheer sake of it. To high-drive Labs and border collies, fetch is often more than just a game; it’s their job, a dead serious business.

Erroneous plurals of nouns, as vallies or echos. Barbarous compound nouns, as viewpoint or upkeep. Want of correspondence in number between noun and verb where the two are widely separated or the construction involved. Ambiguous use of pronouns. Erroneous case of pronouns, as whom for who, and vice versa, or phrases like “between you and I,” or “Let we who are loyal, act promptly.” Erroneous use of shall and will, and of other auxiliary verbs. Use of intransitive for transitive verbs, as “he was graduated from college,” or vice versa, as “he ingratiated with the tyrant.” Use of nouns for verbs, as “he motored to Boston,” or “he voiced a protest.” Errors in moods and tenses of verbs, as “If I was he, I should do otherwise,” or “He said the earth was round.” The split infinitive, as “to calmly glide.” The erroneous perfect infinitive, as “Last week I expected to have met you.” False verb-forms, as “I pled with him.” Use of like for as, as “I strive to write like Pope wrote.” Misuse of prepositions, as “The gift was bestowed to an unworthy object,” or “The gold was divided between the five men.” The superfluous conjunction, as “I wish for you to do this.” Use of words in wrong senses, as “The book greatly intrigued me,” “Leave me take this,” “He was obsessed with the idea,” or “He is a meticulous writer.” Erroneous use of non-Anglicised foreign forms, as “a strange phenomena,” or “two stratas of clouds.” Use of false or unauthorized words, as burglarize or supremest. Errors of taste, including vulgarisms, pompousness, repetition, vagueness, ambiguousness, colloquialism, bathos, bombast, pleonasm, tautology, harshness, mixed metaphor, and every sort of rhetorical awkwardness. Errors of spelling and punctuation, and confusion of forms such as that which leads many to place an apostrophe in the possessive pronoun its. Of all blunders, there is hardly one which might not be avoided through diligent study of simple textbooks on grammar and rhetoric, intelligent perusal of the best authors, and care and forethought in composition. Almost no excuse exists for their persistent occurrence, since the sources of correction are so numerous and so available.

We took the kids to see Chris’s body the next day. He’d been cleaned up a lot. Leanne had suggested that we have a photo book with pictures of Chris; it was a brilliant idea, a way of putting their good-byes in a better, if not exactly happy, context. Before going in, I told them they were going to see their father’s body without his soul. Their dad was now in heaven; all they were going to see was the body God had loaned him for this world. How much comfort that was, I don’t know. Bubba stood near him for a bit, then decided he was done. At some point he told me he didn’t like to cry. “It hurts too much when I cry.” Instead, he would run hard, play hard. The thing about grief is, we all do it in our own way, in our own time, kids included. He went out with V and they sat together on a couch, looking at the book. Within a few moments I heard V’s deep voice boom; laughter echoed in the hall. Bubba was telling him stories about his father, reminding him and all of us who Chris really was. Angel and I stayed with Chris. “Can I touch his hand?” she asked. “Yes.” There was a flower in the room. She put it on him.

It is ironic that Keynesianism originated as a weapon to combat depression, but became universally accepted and "successful" only during (and because of!) the postwar expansion. At the first sign of renewed world recession, Keynesian theory has proved itself to be a snare and a delusion that has gone into immediate bankruptcy. The resulting "post-Keynesian synthesis" is also the theoretical reason for the reactionary exhumation of the simplistic, neoclassical, and monetarist economic theory of the 1920s. This revival of old theory is highlighted by the award of Nobel prizes in economics to Friedrich von Hayek, whose theoretical work was done before the Great Depression, and Milton Friedman, whose lone voice echoed in the wilderness until the new world economic crisis put his unpopular and antipopulist theories on the agenda of business board rooms and government cabinet rooms in one capitalist country after another. The real reason for the recent interest in fifty-year-old theories is that capital now wants them to legitimize its attack on the welfare state and "unproductive" expenditures on social services, which capital claims to need for "productive" investment in industry, including armaments.

In March 1994, Putin attended a European Union event in Hamburg that included a speech by Estonian president Lennart Meri. Estonia, like the two other Baltic republics, was annexed by the Soviet Union at the start of World War II, then lost to the Germans, to be retaken by the Soviets in 1944. The three Baltic states were the last to be included in the Soviet empire and the first to emerge from it—in no small part because they had a population that still remembered a time before the Soviets. Meri, Estonia’s first democratically elected leader in half a century, had been active in the anti-Soviet liberation movement. Now, speaking in Hamburg, he referred to the Soviet Union as “occupiers.” At this point Putin, who had been sitting in the audience among Russian diplomats, rose and left the room. “It looked very impressive,” recalled a St. Petersburg colleague who would go on to run the Russian federal election commission under President Putin. “The meeting was held in Knights’ Hall, which has ten-meter-tall ceilings and a marble floor, and as he walked, in total silence, each step of his echoed under the ceiling. To top it all off, the huge cast-iron door slammed shut behind him with deafening thunder.

Willow leaned forward and laid her head next to his on the pillow. "Is it too late to say I'm sorry, and that I love you more than anything else in this world?" "Oh God,no,love." With his good arm, he reached for the back of her head and brought her lips to his. They kissed as if they'd never get enough of each other, because they knew they never would. When Rider finally released her mouth, he smiled rakishly and pulled her hand under the covers. Willow smiled when he laid her hand over his throbbing desire. "Hmmm, you are feeling better." "Almost well enough to start Mr. Happy on his baby-making lessons again," he said in a deep sexy baritone. "Ah,Rider?" "Yes,love?" He was pulling her down for another stirring kiss. "About those lessons?" "Hmmm, I'm anxious to start practicing again, too,love. But at the moment Mr. Happy is a lot stronger than the rest of me." "Oh,I know,but...Rider, Mr. Happy must have learned his lessons real fast." Rider stilled. "What do you mean?" "I mean that I think Mr. Happy cooked something up in the kitchen." Forgetting his shoulder, Willow's husband sat straight up in bed. He winced, then asked, "You mean you're...going to have a baby?" "Of course I'm going to have a baby, you beefwit. Did you think I was baking another damn pie?" "Yahoooo!" he yelled at the top of his lungs, and hugged her with his good arm. Six men, Juan included, plus two women came pouring into the room. "What in the hell is going on in here?" Owen grumbled in mock irritation. Grinning like a Cheshire cat, Rider announced, "Owen, your daughter is about to make me a father and give you a second grandchild." "Oh,hell, I knew that." Nine people echoed, "You did?" "Hell, yes, all you gotta do is look at 'er face." Rider cocked his head and studied his wife's face. "She does have an extra glow about her, doesn't she?" "She sure does." Owen chuckled. "Her mama got the same glow with all five of her babies." "If I'm glowing, it's because all of you are staring at me like I just grew horns," Willow said, covering her flushed cheeks with her hands. "Dammit, I just thought of something," Owen said. "I s'pose this means I'll have to add another room to the house for when you come visiting." "Owen Vaughn," Miriam reprimanded, "stop that cursing. I swear every other word out of your mouth is a curse! I'm going to break you of that before your grandbabies get old enough to repeat that filth." "Break me of it?" Owen laughed and poked Nick in the ribs with his elbow. "Only one way for a woman to break a stallion, that's to ride 'im hard!" The man all guffawed loudly. Miriam's face turned ten shades of red. "Well,I never!" She turned on her heel and made an indignant exit.

Fascism feeds on social and economic grievances, including the belief that the people over there are receiving better treatment than they deserve while I’m not getting what I’m owed. It seems today that almost everyone has a grievance: the unemployed steelworker, the low-wage fast-food employee, the student up to her ears in debt, the businessperson who feels harassed by government regulations, the veteran waiting too long for a doctor’s appointment, the fundamentalist who thinks war is being waged against Christmas, the professional with her head brushing against a glass ceiling, the Wall Street broker who feels unfairly maligned, the tycoon who still thinks he is being overtaxed. Obviously, personal gripes—legitimate or not—have been part of the human condition ever since Cain decided to work out his jealousy on his brother. What is an added concern now is the lack of effective mechanisms for assuaging anger. As described above, we all tend to live in media and information bubbles that reinforce our grievances instead of causing us to look at difficult questions from many sides. Rather than think critically, we seek out people who share our opinions and who encourage us to ridicule the ideas of those whose convictions and perspectives clash with our own. At many levels, contempt has become a defining characteristic of American politics. It makes us unwilling to listen to what others say—unwilling, in some cases, even to allow them to speak. This stops the learning process cold and creates a ready-made audience for demagogues who know how to bring diverse groups of the aggrieved together in righteous opposition to everyone else.

The Venetians catalogue everything, including themselves. ‘These grapes are brown,’ I complain to the young vegetable-dealer in Santa Maria Formosa. ‘What is wrong with that ? I am brown,’ he replies. ‘I am the housemaid of the painter Vedova,’ says a maid, answering the telephone. ‘I am a Jew,’ begins a cross-eyed stranger who is next in line in a bookshop. ‘Would you care to see the synagogue?’ Almost any Venetian, even a child, will abandon whatever he is doing in order to show you something. They do not merely give directions; they lead, or in some cases follow, to make sure you are still on the right way. Their great fear is that you will miss an artistic or ‘typical’ sight. A sacristan, who has already been tipped, will not let you leave until you have seen the last Palma Giovane. The ‘pope’ of the Chiesa dei Greci calls up to his housekeeper to throw his black hat out the window and settles it firmly on his broad brow so that he can lead us personally to the Archaeological Museum in the Piazza San Marco; he is afraid that, if he does not see to it, we shall miss the Greek statuary there. This is Venetian courtesy. Foreigners who have lived here a long time dismiss it with observation : ‘They have nothing else to do.’ But idleness here is alert, on the qui vive for the opportunity of sightseeing; nothing delights a born Venetian so much as a free gondola ride. When the funeral gondola, a great black-and-gold ornate hearse, draws up beside a fondamenta, it is an occasion for aesthetic pleasure. My neighbourhood was especially favoured this way, because across the campo was the Old Men’s Home. Everyone has noticed the Venetian taste in shop displays, which extends down to the poorest bargeman, who cuts his watermelons in half and shows them, pale pink, with green rims against the green side-canal, in which a pink palace with oleanders is reflected. Che bello, che magnifici, che luce, che colore! - they are all professori delle Belle Arti. And throughout the Veneto, in the old Venetian possessions, this internal tourism, this expertise, is rife. In Bassano, at the Civic Museum, I took the Mayor for the local art-critic until he interupted his discourse on the jewel-tones (‘like Murano glass’) in the Bassani pastorals to look at his watch and cry out: ‘My citizens are calling me.’ Near by, in a Paladian villa, a Venetian lasy suspired, ‘Ah, bellissima,’ on being shown a hearthstool in the shape of a life-size stuffed leather pig. Harry’s bar has a drink called a Tiziano, made of grapefruit juice and champagne and coloured pink with grenadine or bitters. ‘You ought to have a Tintoretto,’ someone remonstrated, and the proprietor regretted that he had not yet invented that drink, but he had a Bellini and a Giorgione. When the Venetians stroll out in the evening, they do not avoid the Piazza San Marco, where the tourists are, as Romans do with Doney’s on the Via Veneto. The Venetians go to look at the tourists, and the tourists look back at them. It is all for the ear and eye, this city, but primarily for the eye. Built on water, it is an endless succession of reflections and echoes, a mirroring. Contrary to popular belief, there are no back canals where tourist will not meet himself, with a camera, in the person of the another tourist crossing the little bridge. And no word can be spoken in this city that is not an echo of something said before. ‘Mais c’est aussi cher que Paris!’ exclaims a Frenchman in a restaurant, unaware that he repeats Montaigne. The complaint against foreigners, voiced by a foreigner, chimes querulously through the ages, in unison with the medieval monk who found St. Mark’s Square filled with ‘Turks, Libyans, Parthians, and other monsters of the sea’. Today it is the Germans we complain of, and no doubt they complain of the Americans, in the same words.

Now I’m not trying to sound big-headed or anything but my sensuality has benefited a lot of people in more ways than I can quantify. It has served people not only in romantic relationships but in businesses, organizations and professional lives as well. (People got big promotions at work and major business deals). This was brought to my attention recently by a very close friend of mine in a conversation we had while we were sitting in a coffee shop. She said, “Lebo, have you noticed how so many people who got close to you either through work or relationship have had major transformations in their personal lives within the shortest space of time, that includes myself?” I paused for a moment and remembered the same words being said by one ex of mine, another lady I helped on her project not so long ago echoed the same notion. To some of you this might seem like... c’mon Lebo, anything could have led to any of those transformations. To even associate it with my sensuality seems utterly absurd, it’s like I’m trying to bolster my significance, but I know better now. I know the value I’m bringing into people’s lives whether they acknowledge it or not. Our conversation also made me recall how I had been exploited by others who saw value in me which I, at the time, was still oblivious of. The thing about human beings is that, usually they won’t show you your true value from which they’re secretly benefiting because they know that once you wake up and start realizing it, you won’t supply it for free anymore. So after I had woken up to my true value I decided to start making my sensuality EXCLUSIVE. Now when you make your sensuality exclusive it automatically makes your company highly priced. Consequently, it makes you highly sought after BY PEOPLE WHO SEEK TRUE VALUE AND KNOW WHAT IT LOOKS LIKE. When you make your sensuality exclusive, it increases your value exponentially as well as your desirability, not to everyone, but only TO THE RIGHT PEOPLE. You become the catch. Now I’m saying this to show you the hidden power of the world of sensuality that most people aren’t aware of. Almost every successful luxury industry in the world essentially thrives on sensual principles whether they’re aware of it or not.

The liberal notion that more government programs can solve racial problems is simplistic—precisely because it focuses solely on the economic dimension. And the conservative idea that what is needed is a change in the moral behavior of poor black urban dwellers (especially poor black men, who, they say, should stay married, support their children, and stop committing so much crime) highlights immoral actions while ignoring public responsibility for the immoral circumstances that haunt our fellow citizens. The common denominator of these views of race is that each still sees black people as a “problem people,” in the words of Dorothy I. Height, president of the National Council of Negro Women, rather than as fellow American citizens with problems. Her words echo the poignant “unasked question” of W. E. B. Du Bois, who, in The Souls of Black Folk (1903), wrote: They approach me in a half-hesitant sort of way, eye me curiously or compassionately, and then instead of saying directly, How does it feel to be a problem? they say, I know an excellent colored man in my town.… Do not these Southern outrages make your blood boil? At these I smile, or am interested, or reduce the boiling to a simmer, as the occasion may require. To the real question, How does it feel to be a problem? I answer seldom a word. Nearly a century later, we confine discussions about race in America to the “problems” black people pose for whites rather than consider what this way of viewing black people reveals about us as a nation. This paralyzing framework encourages liberals to relieve their guilty consciences by supporting public funds directed at “the problems”; but at the same time, reluctant to exercise principled criticism of black people, liberals deny them the freedom to err. Similarly, conservatives blame the “problems” on black people themselves—and thereby render black social misery invisible or unworthy of public attention. Hence, for liberals, black people are to be “included” and “integrated” into “our” society and culture, while for conservatives they are to be “well behaved” and “worthy of acceptance” by “our” way of life. Both fail to see that the presence and predicaments of black people are neither additions to nor defections from American life, but rather constitutive elements of that life.

This is a way of thinking about the past in which space and time echo each other, and it is by no means particular to the Bandanese. Indeed, this form of thought may well have found its fullest elaboration on the other side of the planet, among the Indigenous peoples of North America, whose spiritual lives and understanding of history were always tied to specific landscapes. In the words of the great Native American thinker Vine Deloria Jr., a shared feature of Indigenous North American spiritual traditions is that they all “have a sacred center at a particular place, be it a river, a mountain, a plateau, valley, or other natural feature. . . . Regardless of what subsequently happens to the people, the sacred lands remain as permanent fixtures in their cultural or religious understanding.”12 Developing this argument, Deloria contrasts modes of thought that take their orientation from terrestrial spaces with those that privilege time. For the latter, the crucial question in relation to any event is “when did it happen?” For the former, it is “where did it happen?” The first question shapes the possible answers in a determinate way, locating the event within a particular historical period. The second question shapes the possible answers in a completely different way, because it accords a degree of agency to the landscape itself, and all that lies within it, including the entire range of nonhuman beings. The result, in Deloria’s words, is that “the [Indian] tribes confront and interact with a particular land along with its life forms. The task or role of the tribal religions is to relate the community of people to each and every facet of creation as they have experienced it.” For many Indigenous groups, landscapes remain as vividly alive today as they ever were. “For Indian men and women,” writes the anthropologist Peter Basso, of the Western Apache of Arizona, “the past lies embedded in features of the earth—in canyons and lakes, mountains and arroyos, rocks and vacant fields—which together endow their lands with multiple forms of significance that reach into their lives and shape the ways they think.”13 Stories about the past, built around familiar landmarks, inform every aspect of Apache life. Through these stories features of the landscape speak to people just as loudly as the human voices that historians bring to life from documentary sources.

As in other Buddhist Tantric techniques, recommended preliminaries for these practices include developing skill at both calm-abiding (zhi gnas; śamatha) and insight meditation (lhag mthong; vipaśyanā). As in earlier Buddhist teachings, many Chöd dehadāna practices emphasize renunciation, purification, and self-transformation through the accumulation of merit and the exhaustion of demerit. Rather than suggesting that one must wait to accumulate adequate merit before offering the gift of the body, however, Chöd provides the opportunity for immediately efficacious offering of the body through techniques of visualization. Using a technique which echoes the traditional Buddhist teaching of the of the mind-made body (manomayākāya), the practitioner engages in visualizations which allow her to experience the non-duality of agent and object as she offers her body. The process of giving the body as a means of attainment is commonly articulated in Chöd practice texts (sgrub pa; sādhana). These practice texts exhibit the framework of mature Tantra sādhana, including the stages of generating bodhicitta, going for refuge, meditating on the four immeasurables, and making the eight-limbed offering. Generally speaking, the main section of a developed Chöd sādhana has three components. The first two—a transference of consciousness (nam mkha’ sgo ‘byed) practice, and a body maṇḍala (lus dkyil) practice—have distinctly purifying purposes. The Chöd transference of consciousness practice has parallels with other Buddhist practices called "’pho ba." In this part of the visualization practice, the practitioner’s consciousness is "ejected" from one's body through the Brahma aperture at the crown of one's head. At this time, one's consciousness can be visualized as becoming identical with an enlightened consciousness, which is embodied in a figure such as Machik, Vajrayoginī (Rdo rje rnal byor ma) or Vajravārāhī (Rdo rje phag mo). [....] In th[e] first stage of this transformation, the practitioner identifies with an enlightened being, thus overcoming attachment to her own body-mind aggregates and purifying them through this non-attachment. In the second stage, the practitioner can extend this identification: the practitioner identifies the microcosm of her body with macrocosms of the mundane and supramundane worlds. The body maṇḍala (lus dkyil) stage also allows the practitioner to reconceptualize her body as expanding through space and time and becoming indistinguishable from the realm of the supramundane, or the Dharmadhātu (chos kyi dbyings). Through the process of reconstructing her identity, the practitioner is able to see herself as the ultimate source of offerings for all sentient beings.

ESTABLISH STABLE ANCHORS OF ATTENTION Mindfulness meditation typically involves something known as an anchor of attention—a neutral reference point that helps support mental stability. An anchor might be the sensation of our breath coming in and out of the nostrils, or the rising and falling of our abdomen. When we become lost in thought during practice, we can return to our anchor, fixing our attention on the stimuli we’ve chosen. But anchors can also intensify trauma. The breath, for instance, is far from neutral for many survivors. It’s an area of the body that can hold tension related to a trauma and connect to overwhelming, life-threatening events. When Dylan paid attention to the rising and falling of his abdomen, he would be swamped with memories of mocking faces while walking down the hallway. Other times, feeling a constriction of his breath in the chest echoed a feeling of immobility, which was a traumatic reminder. For Dylan, the breath simply wasn’t a neutral anchor. As a remedy, we can encourage survivors to establish stabilizing anchors of attention. This means finding a focus of attention that supports one’s window of tolerance—creating stability in the nervous system as opposed to dysregulation. Each person’s anchor will vary: for some, it could be the sensations of their hands resting on their thighs, or their buttocks on the cushion. Other stabilizing anchors might include another sense altogether, such as hearing or sight. When Dylan and I worked together, it took a while until he could find a part of his body that didn’t make him more agitated. He eventually found that the sense of hearing was a neutral anchor of attention. At my office, he’d listen for the sound of the birds or the traffic outside, which he found to be stabilizing. “It’s subtle,” he said to me, opening his eyes and rubbing the back of his neck with his hand. “But it is a lot less charged. I’m not getting riled up the same way, which is a huge relief.” In sessions together, Dylan’s anchor was a spot he’d rest his attention on at the beginning of a session or a place to return to if he felt overwhelmed. If he practiced meditation at home—I’d recommended short periods if he could stay in his window of tolerance—he used hearing as an anchor, or “home base” as he called it. “I finally feel like I can access a kind of refuge,” he said quietly, placing his hand on his belly. “My body hasn’t felt safe in so long. It’s a relief to finally feel like I’m learning how to be in here.” Anchors of attention you can offer students and clients practicing mindfulness—besides the sensation of the breath in the abdomen or nostrils—include different physical sensations (feet, buttocks, back, hands) and other senses (seeing, smelling, hearing). One client of mine had a soft blanket that she would touch slowly as an anchor. Another used a candle. For some, walking meditation is a great way to develop more stable anchors of attention, such as the feeling of one’s feet on the ground—whatever supports stability and one’s window of tolerance. Experimentation is key. Using subtler anchors does come with benefits and drawbacks. One advantage to working with the breath is that it is dynamic and tends to hold our attention more easily. When we work with a sense that’s less tactile—hearing, for instance—we may be more prone to drifting off into distraction. The more tangible the anchor, the easier it is to return to it when attention wanders.

Similarly, those Internet tycoons who are apparently so willing to devalue our privacy are vehemently protective of their own. Google insisted on a policy of not talking to reporters from CNET, the technology news site, after CNET published Eric Schmidt’s personal details—including his salary, campaign donations, and address, all public information obtained via Google—in order to highlight the invasive dangers of his company. Meanwhile, Mark Zuckerberg purchased the four homes adjacent to his own in Palo Alto, at a cost of $30 million, to ensure his privacy. As CNET put it, “Your personal life is now known as Facebook’s data. Its CEO’s personal life is now known as mind your own business.” The same contradiction is expressed by the many ordinary citizens who dismiss the value of privacy yet nonetheless have passwords on their email and social media accounts. They put locks on their bathroom doors; they seal the envelopes containing their letters. They engage in conduct when nobody is watching that they would never consider when acting in full view. They say things to friends, psychologists, and lawyers that they do not want anyone else to know. They give voice to thoughts online that they do not want associated with their names. The many pro-surveillance advocates I have debated since Snowden blew the whistle have been quick to echo Eric Schmidt’s view that privacy is for people who have something to hide. But none of them would willingly give me the passwords to their email accounts, or allow video cameras in their homes.

Some specialized types of administrative legislation require further attention—for example, determinations that make law. These determinations echo the old determinations of facts, in which an executive officer determined a factual question that was a condition of a statute’s application. Rather than being exercises of mere discernment or judgment, however, the newer style determinations often include overt exercises of lawmaking will. Such determinations arise under statutes that leave plenty of room for lawmaking. For example, the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency is required to specify the application of the EPA’s ambient air quality standards by publishing a list of air pollutants that “in his judgment, cause or contribute to air pollution which may reasonably be anticipated to endanger public health or welfare.”9 Although statutes of this sort speak in terms of determinations and judgments, they provide for determinations of questions so abstract or loosely stated that the agencies inevitably must engage in policy choices—in legislative will rather than mere judgment. As put by Justice Thurgood Marshall in a 1970 dissent, “the factual issues with which the Secretary [of Labor] must deal are frequently not subject to any definitive resolution,” for “[c]ausal connections and theoretical extrapolations may be uncertain,” and “when the question involves determination of the acceptable level of risk, the ultimate decision must necessarily be based on considerations of policy, as well as empirically verifiable facts.” Thus, “[t]he decision to take action in conditions of uncertainty bears little resemblance to . . . empirically verifiable factual conclusions.”10 In such instances, factual determinations become exercises of lawmaking will.

In his Dialogue "Timaeus" Plato had a demiurge to create the globe-shaped world according to musical laws, including the human soul. Fifteen hundred years later, that still found an echo in the Renaissance. And in those days the architects realized that the musical harmonies had spatial expressions -- namely, the relationships of the length of strings, and spatial relationships were precisely their only concerns. Because both the world and the body and soul were composed according to musical harmonies by the demiurge architect, both the macrocosm and the microcosm, they must therefore be guided in their own architectural designs by the laws of music.

Predators preserve an echo of the isotopic ratios of their prey, so they can be included in the calculation, too. Carbon-isotope studies have shown, for example, that some very early human relatives were quite likely eating more meat than had been suspected. Similarly, the further up the food chain you are, the greater the ratio in your bones and teeth will be between the stable nitrogen isotopes 15N and 14N. On this basis, it has been suggested that our close relatives the Neanderthals were highly carnivorous: that, indeed, they may have specialized, at least regionally, in hunting extremely large-bodied prey, such as woolly mammoths and woolly rhinos.

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�

Many people (including most thinkers who argue about the existence of God) suppose that religious faith and the God-language it generates addresses such questions as 'What caused the universe?' and 'What happens to us after we die?' Such a beginning rests on the assumption that religion will answer for us questions that are at the edges, beyond our experience and our normal powers of knowing. I would suggest instead, echoing the twentieth-century Christian thinkers Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Thomas Merton, that religion answers questions that are at the very center, questions such as 'What does it mean to be human?' and 'How are we in the world?' and "How are we with others?' The first set of questions sees God as transcendently high, transcendently long ago, or transcendently into the future. The second set see, God as transcendently deep and, odd as this may sound, transcendently present.

He was in a dark, dry room that carried the stale rot of death in the air. With each breath he took, his nostrils burned from the stomach-churning stench. Horrified, he found himself unable to move. He had no choice but to look about the curvature of the room at the beds that lined every patch of open space around him. Atop each one lay sweaty, pale, thriving bodies. They included men, women, and children. Some were fighting and others were dying. A handful had already succumbed to the inevitable, adding their poisonous essence to the haze of death gradually filling every inch of the enclosure. Looking towards his feet, he felt as the beating of his heart suddenly raced out of control. There before him lay the man he had known all his life, and who was now about to be taken by the darkness of the room. Rasped breaths started to echo out all around him, like dozens of small explosions, and he felt something begin to push against his chest. Then the man lying before him started to scream.

At the same time, the Establishment and their media allies were in full cry. Lord McGregor, the Chairman of the Press Complaints Commission, issued a statement condemning the hysteria that the book immediately generated as ‘An odious exhibition of journalists dabbling their fingers in the stuff of other people’s souls.’ In fact, this criticism was never made of the book itself; indeed, Lord McGregor has since told me that the issue was the ‘most difficult’ of his tenure. The Archbishop of Canterbury worried publicly about the effects of the publicity on Princes William and Harry; Lord St John of Fewsley condemned the book’s publication, while a pot-pourri of MPs were keen to see me locked away in the Tower; it was, too, a torrid time for Diana’s supporters. As loyalists rallied to the flag, ignoring the message while deriding the messenger, the public gradually began to accept the book’s veracity through statements by Diana’s friends, further confirmed when she visited her old friend Carolyn Bartholomew, who had spoken about the Princess’s bulimia. Unfortunately, that casual call upon an old and trusted friend had bitter consequences for Diana. Senior courtiers, including the Queen’s private secretary, Sir Robert Fellowes, pointed accusing fingers at Diana when they saw the front-page coverage of the visit. Aggrieved and hurt, the Princess flew by helicopter to Merseyside for a visit to a hospice, her first official engagement since Diana, Her True Story hit the headlines. It proved to be an emotional meeting between Diana and her public for, touched by the show of affection from waiting wellwishers, she burst into tears, overcome by the distressing echoes of her morning meeting with Palace officials, and by the underlying strain of the decision she and Prince Charles had taken. As she later told a friend: ‘An old lady in the crowd stroked my face and that triggered something inside me. I simply couldn’t stop myself crying.’ The public tears did not surprise her close friends, who knew only too well the private anguish of her lonely position, the strain she had borne for 18 months. As one remarked: ‘She is a brilliant actress who has disguised her private sorrow.

The word ghost is only used in the Bible a few times, but nonetheless it is mentioned. Several passages include: Matt. 14:26; Mark 6:49; Isaiah. 29:14; and Luke 24:37-39. The Bible references the disciples witnessing Jesus walking on the water during a storm. What they believed they were seeing was a ghost, rather than Jesus walking on the water. After the resurrection, his disciples thought he was ghost, but he let them touch him,

inspirational adult romance author under the pen name of Liz Isaacson, her work includes the young adult dystopian romance series Possession, published by Simon Pulse (Simon & Schuster), Elevated, the Elemental series, the Redwood Bay romance series, and the Amazon bestselling Three Rivers Ranch

Have you ever wanted to read a good book but just could not do it because you simply do not have the time? Now you will be able to read even a few chapters while you are cooking, working out, doing household chores or just lazing around with the help of Alexa. How do you

Open the Garage Door, Hal Talking gadgets are great at taking my orders. The trick is remembering that I'm still human ILLUSTRATION BY TOMASZ WALENTA FOR TIME; GETTY IMAGES (3) Joel Stein | 820 words Soon, no one will type. I know this because in science-fiction movies people communicate with devices by talking, which is the natural means of communication for all human beings throughout history other than my lovely wife Cassandra's extended family. Being a rare person who is aware of technological change and yet still somehow chooses to work for a newsmagazine, I felt it was my responsibility to test your future for you by amassing voice-controlled gadgets. I went to my deck, turned on my Lynx SmartGrill and said, "SmartGrill, cook scallops." It announced when it finished heating, directed me to place the scallops on the grill, told me when to flip them, informed me when to remove them and, I'm sure, annoyed my neighbors. I ordered the scallops by speaking to my Amazon Dash, a handheld stick that made a list of groceries to be delivered by AmazonFresh. I dictated emails on my iPhone while driving and told Siri to text Cassandra that I loved her since I knew she might eventually see that first paragraph. Talking into my LG Watch Urbane made me seem so powerful--allowing me, for instance, to control the temperature on my Nest thermostat just by giving an order to my wrist--that I immediately wanted to use it for evil, like making my house a tiny bit cooler than Cassandra likes. When the actress Lauren Weedman came by for a Memorial Day barbecue, I said to my watch, "O.K. Google, show me pictures of Lauren Weedman," knowing that her 5-year-old son was in front of us and that every image search of every actress always includes shots of her naked. Even though she was fully clothed in the photos that appeared, I later looked up a bunch of other actresses to make sure the watch worked, and it totally did. But my favorite thing to talk to is Amazon Echo, a tower-shaped speaker that is a much more useful,

The environment could not be fixed by a mere change of heart. It was by then well known that future centuries would suffer greatly for the incontinence of their ancestors. That humanity would survive was never in doubt, but one would always prefer a palace to a barn. Long-term plans were founded to seek ways to fix the problem, and one of these included looking for alternatives elsewhere.

Poetry and Genre The hallmark of rhetoric in ancient Near Eastern literature is repetition; in poetry, this takes the form of what scholars call “parallelism.” Frequently, the first line of a verse is echoed in some way by the second line. The second line might repeat the substance of the first line with slightly different emphasis, or perhaps the second line amplifies the first line in some fashion, such as drawing a logical conclusion, illustrating or intensifying the thought. At times the point of the first line is reinforced by a contrast in the second line. Occasionally, more than two lines are parallel. Each of these features, frequently observed in Biblical psalms, is represented in songs from Egypt, Mesopotamia and Ugarit. Unlike English poetry, which often depends on rhyme for its effect, these ancient cultures attained impact on listeners and readers with creative repetition. Psalms come in several standard subgenres, each with standard formal elements. Praise psalms can be either individual or corporate. Over a third of the psalms in the Psalter are praise psalms. Corporate psalms typically begin with an imperative call to praise (e.g., “Shout for joy to the LORD” [Ps 100:1]) and describe all the good things the Lord has done. Individual praise often begins with a proclamation of intent to praise (e.g., “I will praise you, LORD” [Ps 138:1]) and declare what God has done in a particular situation in the psalmist’s life. Mesopotamian and Egyptian hymns generally focus on descriptive praise, often moving from praise to petition. Examples of the proclamation format can be seen in the Mesopotamian wisdom composition, Ludlul bel nemeqi. The title is the first line of the piece, which is translated “I will praise the lord of wisdom.” As in the individual praise psalms, this Mesopotamian worshiper of Marduk reports about a problem that he had and reports how his god brought him deliverance. Lament psalms may be personal statements of despair (e.g., Ps 22:1–21, dirges following the death of an important person (cf. David’s elegy for Saul in 2Sa 1:17–27) or communal cries in times of crisis (e.g., Ps 137). The most famous lament form from ancient Mesopotamia is the “Lament Over the Destruction of Ur,” which commemorates the capture of the city in 2004 BC by the Elamite king Kindattu. For more information on this latter category, see the article “Neo-Sumerian Laments.” In the book of Psalms, more than a third of the psalms are laments, mostly by an individual. The most common complaints concern sickness and oppression by enemies. The lament literature of Mesopotamia is comprised of a number of different subgenres described by various technical terms. Some of these subgenres overlap with Biblical categories, but most of the Mesopotamian pieces are associated with incantations (magical rites being performed to try to rid the person of the problem). Nevertheless, the petitions that accompany lament in the Bible are very similar to those found in prayers from the ancient Near East. They include requests for guidance, protection, favor, attention from the deity, deliverance from crisis, intervention, reconciliation, healing and long life. Prayers to deities preserved

This sounds very Stoic. But Antisthenes took his Cynic doctrines to the next radical step. He rejected any and all social conventions, including all forms of property and government. He also violently turned his back on Plato’s theology and even more violently his theory of Forms. “A horse I see,” Antisthenes is supposed to have exclaimed, “but not horseness”: words that would echo in the works of the medieval philosopher William of Ockham.

Although solitary confinement was present throughout the twentieth century in American corrections, the use of the practice expanded exponentially in the 1970s amid a confluence of changes in the legal and philosophical landscape of the United States. Sentencing policies—including guidelines for probation and parole—grew even stricter, giving rise to a substantial increase in the country’s incarceration rates that would continue to spike during the “War on Drugs.” Between 1985 and 1995, the government cut back dramatically on prison education and treatment programs where they were not completely eliminated. The goals of incarceration shifted from rehabilitation to a correctional strategy intended purely to “incapacitate and punish.

In the centuries that followed, even up to the twentieth, Christians wishing to blame the Jews seized on this single sentence. They include some of the most venerated men of the Church: Augustine, Aquinas, Chrysostom. Even if they conceded that Luke’s grammar was ambiguous, they could nonetheless point to the pressure put on Pilate by the chief priests and the crowd. All the Jews, they argued, had killed Jesus. They had even, in Matthew, explicitly taken his blood on themselves and removed it from the Romans. And they had reaped the whirlwind. Every misfortune that subsequently befell the Jews—from the destruction of Jerusalem to Auschwitz—carried an echo of that invented blood pact from the trial.

ON DECEMBER 8, 1941, cinemas and theaters in Japan were made to temporarily suspend their evening performances and broadcast a speech recorded by Prime Minister Tojo Hideki earlier that day. U.S. films—films such as Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, which the Japanese relished in easier times—were now officially banned. That night, audiences were confronted with the voice of a leader who hardly resembled Jimmy Stewart. Tojo was a bald and bespectacled man of middle age with no remarkable features other than his mustache. His exaggerated buckteeth existed only in Western caricatures, but he did not look like a senior statesman who had just taken his country to war against a most formidable enemy, and his voice was memorable only for its dullness. He recited the speech, “On Accepting the Great Imperial Command,” with the affected diction of a second-rate stage actor. Our elite Imperial Army and Navy are now fighting a desperate battle. Despite the empire’s every possible effort to salvage it, the peace of the whole of East Asia has collapsed. In the past, the government employed every possible means to normalize U.S.-Japan diplomatic relations. But the United States would not yield an inch on its demands. Quite the opposite. The United States has strengthened its ties with Britain, the Netherlands, and China, demanding unilateral concessions from our Empire, including the complete and unconditional withdrawal of the imperial forces from China, the rejection of the [Japanese puppet] Nanjing government, and the annulment of the Tripartite Pact with Germany and Italy. Even in the face of such demands, the Empire persistently strove for a peaceful settlement. But the United States to this day refused to reconsider its position. Should the Empire give in to all its demands, not only would Japan lose its prestige and fail to see the China Incident to its completion, but its very existence would be in peril. Tojo, in his selective explanation of the events leading to Pearl Harbor, insisted that the war Japan had just initiated was a “defensive” war. He faithfully echoed Japan’s deep-seated feelings of persecution, wounded national pride, and yearning for greater recognition, which together might be called, for the want of a better phrase, anti-Westernism. It was a sentimental speech, and it was notable for what was left unsaid.

with granite of black, gray, and ash white. Jericho explained how all the municipal buildings were built from the same quarry stone, including the courthouse, township building and the walls lining the morgue. It wasn’t the sightseeing that delayed my exit though. In the rich corridors next to the courthouse, we ran into District Attorney Ashtole and Mayor Jonathon Miller, their voices an echo, greeting me with arms extended and questions on their lips. “I’ve already heard so much about you,” the mayor said, his barrel chest filling like a machine as he sucked in air. The man stood a half-foot over me, and though he smiled, his face was fixed in a scowl, his bushy eyebrows stuck in a permanent slant. His shoulders were wide like a football player’s and his hands were like clubs. I wasn’t normally intimidated but he had a presence, and I suddenly found myself feeling nervous. “It’s nice to meet you,” I answered, my hand disappearing in his. Ashtole stood at his side, dwarfed, nearly hidden. “What’s the progress?” the district attorney asked, his voice annoyingly sharp, like the bark of an ankle-high dog. “Three bodies. We need something to tell the press. Heck, the timing is awful.” “Daniel,” the mayor said in a foreboding tone.

Ruthlessly she looked for the dark smudges of fear and arrogance and suspicion and hubris and eradicated them. She wiped them out with ideas of how she wanted to be, her own self-image she wanted to cultivate: understanding, supportive, confident. Not as easy to include those qualities in herself as it was to fall into selfishness.

Summing Up Paul clearly expects his readers to join him in outrage over the sexual behavior he describes in Romans 1: 24-27 as an expression of excessive, self-centered desire. He describes this behavior as an expression of “lusts” (1: 24), as driven by “passions” (1: 26), and as “consumed, or “burning,” “with passion” (1: 27). This is in keeping with the general perception of same-sex relations in the ancient world: that they were driven by insatiable desire, not content with more normal sexual relationships. Jews and Christians opposed to same-sex eroticism show no awareness of the modern notion of sexual orientation. In Romans 1: 24-27, Paul may be alluding to the notorious excesses of a former Roman emperor, Gaius Caligula, whose idolatrous patterns and sexual excesses—including same-sex eroticism—were well known, and whose murder by being stabbed in the genitals markedly echoes Paul’s words in Romans 1: 27: “receiving in their own persons the due penalty for their error.” Paul does not regard sexual desire itself as evil; it is only when desire gets out of control that it becomes lust and leads to sin. Many traditionalist interpreters of this passage focus on the “objective” disorder of same-sex relationships, but when Paul speaks of these behaviors as “lustful,” the focus falls on their excessive nature: out-of-control, self-seeking desire. Modern attempts to differentiate between same-sex orientation and same-sex behavior tend to minimize Paul’s concern with out-of-control lust in this text, focusing instead on the “objective” disorder of same-sex intimacy. Yet this move leaves gay and lesbian Christians with little help in wrestling with their “subjective” sexual orientation, which is in most cases highly resistant to change. Ultimately, Scripture does not sanction a sharp split between sinful acts and the inclination toward sinful acts. If an act is sinful, the inclination to that act is also a manifestation of one’s sinful nature. This calls into question whether the orientation/ behavior dichotomy in many traditionalist approaches to homosexuality is theologically and ethically viable. But if we keep Paul’s focus in Romans 1: 24-27 on out-of-control desire firmly in focus, we will recognize that these concerns may not be reflected in committed gay or lesbian relationships, opening up the possibility that these relationships may not be “lustful” and thus not directly addressed by Paul’s polemic in Romans 1.

In a curious parallel to Warlock and Moeran’s rowdy tenure at Eynsford, on the other side of the country in North Devon the village of Georgeham had been intruded upon by another outside artistic presence. Novelist Henry Williamson moved to a cottage there in 1921 and proceeded to outrage local decency with a string of louche girlfriends, naked swimming displays, throwing apples at neighbouring farmers, dressing like a proto-hippy in loose clothing and bare feet. Best known as author of the children’s book Tarka the Otter, Williamson’s many books, including his fifteen-volume fictionalised memoir A Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight, testify to a quasi-mystical relationship with nature and the English landscape, while his reputation was later severely tarnished because of his vocal support of the Hitler Youth and Oswald Mosley’s British fascist movement. His son Harry, born in 1950, was destined to become an associate of hippy progressive rockers Gong in the early 1970s, and was part of the collective that organised the earliest free festivals at Stonehenge (see Chapter 16). Already, in the unconventional lifestyle choices of the likes of Warlock, Moeran and Williamson, the pre-echoes of a later British counter-cultural pattern are faintly detectable.

Lack of respect for authority and aggression,” one of the studies found, “were important markers for poor isolation adjustment.” Another concluded that “persons with antisocial and psychotic tendencies were poor risks for efficient functioning in conditions of isolation.” Grassian had also found that when held in isolation, people with preexisting personality disorders or impaired psychosocial functioning were particularly likely to develop the more volatile and dangerous symptoms of his syndrome, including paranoia, agitation, and “irrational aggression toward staff.” Lack of respect for authority. Aggression. Antisocial and psychotic tendencies. Impaired psychosocial functioning. Personality disorders. These are the hallmarks of many of the men in our prison system, and certainly of many of the men who behave so dangerously in prison that it lands them in administrative segregation. In other words, we are taking people who are uniquely ill-suited to isolation and we are placing them in solitary confinement, asserting that we’re doing so to improve their functioning and behavior.

Not too many years ago, things were much worse,” Høidal confirms, which led to an edict from the country’s highest powers. “The government, the politicians said to the justice department, ‘Do something. It cannot go on like this. It has to stop.’” So in 1995 the Norwegian justice department created work groups to develop a plan to address the dysfunction and danger in their system of corrections. The principle of normality is a core part of the new perspective that emerged, and it requires that life inside the prison should resemble life outside the prison as much as possible. Thus inmates do not lose any rights other than their right to liberty while they’re incarcerated. This is not just a tenet of Norwegian law. It is also stipulated in international conventions about imprisonment, including the United Nations Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners—known as the Mandela Rules in honor of Nelson Mandela—which state that “the prison regimen should seek to minimize any differences between prison life and life at liberty that tend to lessen the responsibility of the prisoners or the respect due to their dignity as human beings.” “So while he is here with us,” Høidal explains, “other than the fact that he cannot leave here whenever he wants to, the inmate has all the same rights as all other citizens who live in Norway.

Yonomi   Yonomi rules are called "routines". I really like the user interface on the Yonomi app. As Yonomi is dedicated to automation on smart devices, they propose some specific services. When you signup, you can launch a discovery of your devices. It is way easier than checking each device available on the Yonomi platform to see if there is one you own. One of the other advantages of Yonomi was the ability to have several actions linked to one trigger but IFTTT recently did an update to propose the same features. Yonomi will have a simpler way to trigger routines than IFTTT. Because they have an Alexa skill, they let you use queries such as "Alexa, turn on [routines name]" or "Alexa, turn off [routines name]" which feels more natural than the trigger keyword from IFTTT.

The year I turned thirty a relationship ended. I was very sad but my sadness bored everyone, including me. Having been through such dejection before, I thought I might get out of it quickly. I went on Internet dates but found it difficult to generate sexual desire for strangers. Instead I would run into friends at a party, or in a subway station, men I had thought about before. That fall and winter I had sex with three people, and kissed one or two more. The numbers seemed measured and reasonable to me. All of them were people I had known for some time. I felt happier in the presence of unmediated humans, but sometimes a nonboyfriend brought with him a dark echo, which lived in my phone. It was a longing with no hope of satisfaction, without a clear object. I stared at rippling ellipses on screens. I forensically analyzed social media photographs. I expressed levity with exclamation points, spelled-out laughs, and emoticons. I artificially delayed my responses. There was a great posturing of busyness, of not having noticed your text until just now. It annoyed me that my phone could hold me hostage to its clichés. My goals were serenity and good humor. I went to all the Christmas parties.

Would that all was as well within the castle. Alas, that you have inflicted me with one Simus of the Hawk. Never mind the fact that Simus strides from his chambers to the mineral baths naked as a plucked chicken, smiling and greeting all and sundry with a cheerful smile. Never mind the fact that he and Warren have taken to weapons practice in the Great Hall, jumping from table to table swords in one hand, flagons in the other, fighting and laughing, and cursing each other, causing ladies to swoon and leaving heel marks on all the tables. Never mind that half the lords want to kill him, the other half want to befriend him and that all of the ladies seem entranced. Which includes my own Lady Wife, thank you very much. Oh no, the worst of it is that Simus is having relations with Dye-Mistress Mavis, or so the sounds echoing in the castle halls at all hours of the night announce to all and sundry. By his tradition, Simus does no wrong, or so Dye-Mistress Mavis has informed me, Warren, and the Archbishop. Further, when we confronted her, she told us in no uncertain terms that she is an adult and Master of her trade and that her behavior is none of our concern. She added something to the effect that you aren't the only one willing to make sacrifices for her guild. Which had the Archbishop clutching for his holy symbol. I think Dye-Mistress is only after the cloths that Simus wears like a peacock. I have tried to explain that to Simus, but he just smiles that wide smile of his and indicates that he sees no harm to being 'used'. The entire Court and Council is scandalized. They all come to me and complain, taking the greatest pleasure in going over every juicy detail.

in almost every experiment, researchers have seen echoes of Squire’s discoveries with Eugene: Habits are powerful, but delicate. They can emerge outside our consciousness, or can be deliberately designed. They often occur without our permission, but can be reshaped by fiddling with their parts. They shape our lives far more than we realize—they are so strong, in fact, that they cause our brains to cling to them at the exclusion of all else, including common sense.

METTA MEDITATION Metta is an active form of meditation in which, instead of concentrating on the air, we concentrate on bringing positive thoughts and wishes out into the world, and hope that our good will affects people— or animals — in our heads. In some forms of this practice, we go a step further and believe that whosoever may be the target of our metta (and this includes ourselves) is relieved of their particular form of suffering, discomfort or pain as they are influenced by the force of our goodwill. Benefits of metta meditation Research supports what meditators have known for centuries who incorporate metta into their practice: it enhances well-being. Including strengthened feelings of empathy to better interactions to increased tolerance to coping with PTSD and other trauma-based disorders, daily meditation on love-kindness has been connected to a variety of effects, much like rituals of mindfulness and consciousness. And, yeah, sympathy can even grow. STEP BY STEP METTA MEDITATION Sit in a comfortable and relaxing way to practice metta meditation. For steady, long and full exhalations, take two to three deep breaths. Let go of any fears or doubts. Experience or visualize the wind flowing through your chest core in the direction of your heart for a few minutes. Metta is first applied against ourselves, as we often fail to love others without respecting ourselves first. The following or related sentences are sitting quietly, unconsciously repeated, gradually and steadily: may I be satisfied, may I be all right, may I be safe, may I be at ease and peaceful. Enable yourself to slip into the thoughts they share as you utter these words. Metta meditation is mainly about communicating with the purpose of wishing joy to ourselves or to others. Nevertheless, if the body or mind has emotions of comfort, friendliness, or affection, communicate with them, allowing them to grow as you repeat the words. You may keep a picture of yourself in the center of your mind as an aid to meditation. It allows the thoughts conveyed in the words to be improved. Bring to mind a friend or someone in your life who has cared about you profoundly after a period of steering metta towards yourself. And echo slowly words of love-kindness towards them: May you be satisfied. May you be fine. Please be safe. May you be at ease and in peace.

Nationalism, said Hitler—echoing German thinkers from Fichte through Spengler—means the power of the nation over the individual in every realm, including economics; i.e., it means socialism. Socialism, he said, means rule by the whole, by the greatest of all wholes, Germany.

A familiar criticism, which we echo in part, is that justice is concerned with more than distributive principles. In addition, much of what justice comprehends lies beyond an assessment of each person’s distributive shares and includes equally concerns about the nature of the relations among persons. For example, worries about social subordination and stigma, lack of respect, lack of institutions, and social practices that adequately support capacities for attachment and self-determination also are matters of justice—for both individuals and groups.

On his return to Britain, he was appointed aide-de-camp to the Secretary of State for India, Lord George Hamilton. One of his main tasks was the control of high-ranking Indian visitors to Britain and the continent who were suspected of seditious activities. This included native Indian princes such as Gaekwad, the Maharaja of Baroda.79

Reciprocity Life takes on meaning only through reciprocal interaction with the world. To a fishmonger, all things reek of the sea; to a teacher, life is a lesson. What we do is what we know, and how we interact is what returns our way. Reciprocity symbolizes inner and outer worlds matching up in synchronized harmony. The art of existence is to give and receive, see and be seen, and the quality of love as echo and mirror assures us that we have a genuine presence. But those who grew up with a caregiver who was physically or emotionally absent may feel more than this normal desire for reciprocity. They may experience a compulsive urge to accomplish the one, elusive thing they imagine will finally get those absent ones—or anyone—to connect with them. If someone in your life doesn't reciprocate, there are two reasons. First, if your right-sized need for validation was denied in childhood, you will involuntarily recreate the same circumstances to correct it. Know that you get second chances so that you may change the art of your interaction, not so that others might finally treat you with the loving respect you deserve (and you do deserve loving respect). And there's another reason for unrequited regard: You must be able to receive, to be emotionally available. How many times do you deny or minimize others' genuine kindness? Life is a mirror that reflects your actions including your thoughts right back at you. People reciprocate exactly in proportion to how you treat yourself internally. Show yourself love. You have so much love to give yourself enough to reverberate for eternity. Let yourself live in your own loving.

The formal annexation of the Crimea to the Russian Empire took place in 1783, with the Russian army entering the peninsula and sending the last Crimean khan into exile in central Russia. Bezborodko, by then a leading architect of Russian foreign policy, played an important role in this development. He was also an author of the so-called Greek Project, a plan to destroy the Ottoman Empire and establish a new Byzantium under Russian control, as well as to create Dacia, a new country on the Danube consisting of Moldavia and Wallachia. The project never came to fruition, but its echoes still resonate in the Greek names given by the imperial authorities to the Crimean towns, including Simferopol, Yevpatoria, and the most famous of them, Sevastopol—the Russian naval base established on the peninsula two years after its annexation.

Another component it has, see, is the chocolate. The chocolate is this unbelievable deliciousness that everyone wants and is lucky to come into contact with. It's sweet, it's light, it's of the highest quality and best flavor. Just so much sugary goodness there." Benny turns over the piece of the Reese's Cup he's holding between his thumb and forefinger. I've given up trying not to cry. "But here it's complemented by peanut butter. Peanut butter, it's got protein, right? So it has a lot of strength. A little saltiness, a little punch---this peanut butter won't take your shit sitting down, y'know? Because peanut butter has been through a lot to get here in its current form. A long process, a whole lot of grinding and pressure and struggle, to come out as smooth and complex and amazing as it is." I see that Raj, Nia, and Lily have wandered into PK 2 and are standing with Seb and the others, watching with expressions ranging from confusion to astonishment to pure enjoyment as Benny gets more and more spirited. About cake. About clearly much more than cake. "Now, even with all it took, even with all that these ingredients had to go through, all the heat it's taken to make the cake what it is, people might not be fans of this cake. While it's objectively incredible, perhaps the greatest cake that has ever existed, it's still gonna have haters. There are those who might watch this video and feel the need to comment on this cake, and tell it that it's not as special as it is, or point out what they think are flaws. People will disagree with chocolate and peanut butter being delicious, a stance that is plainly wrong. Others might suggest that Friends of Flavor would somehow be better off without this cake, or that my limited experience making decent Italian food somehow make my presence here more valuable than this cake's. "Well, I'd like to make it clear that those people don't know a single fucking thing." Gasps echo through the room, including my own. Did he just say that? Live? "They don't know about this cake, they don't know how wonderful it is. They've never seen something so purely good, so unobjectionably awesome. They feel intimidated and inferior, because they are inferior and always will be. They don't have anything on this cake and they know it, so they sit behind their computer screens or stand behind their oversize egos and tear it down to try to prop themselves up. But they'll be lucky if they ever cross paths with a cake like this and it dares to spit in their direction.

Were you ever lucky enough to watch a cat closely as it falls, Emil? Arthur asked. It always lands on all fours. First, a cat orients herself - you need a head and eyes for that. Then she sets her front paws in case the ground comes sooner than she expects, and in between, if she's still got the time and the space, she arches her back - then, she curves her spine and drops like a furry parachute. She takes the fall in phases. When she's coming down she lets all the parts of her body absorb the fall, including her tail - that serves as a rudder, so that it will be the softest possible landing.

A crystal does not make light; its natural function is simply to radiate light. The mirror does not select a face to reflect: its nature is to reflect everything. When we understand that everything arising, including our conventional sense of self, is only a projection of mind, then we are free. Without this understanding, it is as if we take a mirage to be real, and echo to be a sound not our own. The sense of separation is strong and we become trapped in an illusory dualism.

whenever something is provided by a tech company for free, it's always to improve the voodoo doll. Why is Google Maps free? So the voodoo doll can include the details of where you go every day. Why are Amazon Echo and Google Nest Hubs sold for as cheap as $30 (£22), far less than they cost to make? So they can gather more info; so the voodoo doll can consist not just of what you search for on a screen but what you say in your home.

Poet Ayoade, the first African immigrant to serve as a nuclear missile operator in the United States Air Force, debuts with an inspirational memoir chronicling his childhood in Nigeria and journey to become a doctor and American citizen. Ayoade, who at the age of seven promised his mother “One day, I will take you far away from here,” details his upbringing with an abusive father and the many family tragedies he endured—along with his dedication to creating a different life: “Underground is my unusual journey from childhood poverty to where I am today. How the impossible became a reality.” Readers will be swept into Ayoade’s vivid recollections of his early years, including his strict education, brushes with death, and a strained relationship with his father. He recounts the family’s passion for American movies that made “America seem like the perfect place,” sparking his desire for a better future, and details his decision to become a veterinarian and eventually pursue a career in the U.S. military to ensure the best life for his family (and future generations). Ayoade’s story is moving, particularly his reconciliation with his father and hard-earned American citizenship, and his message that it’s never too late to chase your dreams resonates. That message will evoke strong emotions for readers as Ayoade highlights the importance of hard work and the benefit of a committed support system, alongside his constant “wishing, praying, and fighting to be free from all the sadness and injustice around me”—a theme that echoes through much of the book, including in his acknowledgement that the fear he experienced as a nuclear missile operator was a “cost of this freedom.” Ayoade’s poetry and personal photographs are sprinkled throughout, illuminating his deep love for family and his ultimate belief in liberty as “The reason for it all./ A foundation for a new generation,/ The best gift to any child.” Takeaway: This stirring memoir documents an immigrant’s fight for the American dream. Great for fans of: Ashley C. Ford’s Somebody's Daughter, Maria Hinojosa’s Once I Was You. Production grades Cover: A- Design and typography: A Illustrations: A Editing: A Marketing copy: A

Instead, they picked up acoustic guitars and recorded the straightforwardly simple backing track—just the two guitars and a scratch vocal—for ‘Bluebird,’ a graceful tune with sweetly poetic lyric that continued the series of metaphorical avian fantasies that already included ‘Blackbird’ and ‘Single Pigeon’—subliminal echoes, perhaps, of Paul’s childhood days as a devoted reader of S. Vere Benson’s Observer’s Book of Birds.

Built in 1855, the Parker House had once been home to the Saturday Club, hosting the likes of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Oliver Wendell Holmes. Other notable guests included Charles Dickens, who had resided at the hotel for five months in 1867, and the villainous John Wilkes Boothe just two years prior.

THE WEBSITE FOR SSA Marine says, “Accelerating the Pace of Business.” Its terminal is now giving off a deafening whir: engine sounds, horns, beeps, and the echoes of workers shouting. The giant cranes lift containers off the ship, sliding them inward fast enough that they swing a little bit in midair. Currently, the bay is full of the haze-lightened silhouettes of container ships, players in that sprawling, fractal network whose workings have recently come to the fore in headlines about the supply chain. In the restored marsh along the park, clusters of migrating shorebirds are keeping their own schedule. It’s currently three hours from high tide, and on the shrinking islands, tiny sandpipers sit together so densely that they look like a tessellated pattern. Stalking around them are a variety of spidery birds, including long-billed curlews, which have surreal curved beaks more than half the length of their entire bodies. They are back for the time being, having traveled northeast to breed—possibly as far as Idaho—and in the meantime, they adjust their activities to the tides. On the one hand, it is true that you can see multiple forms of time here. The containers pile up; the shorebirds probe the mud; the phoebe chases its flies; a small, brown mushroom pushes up from the grass; and the tide continues to rise. Your stomach rumbles. But one of these clocks is not like the others. In order to maintain its equilibrium, it has to run ahead faster and faster.

1 June 1943 Herr Kommandant: I have written to the French police with no results. Now I turn to you. The American Library has caricatures of Hitler in their collection, and anyone can see them. That’s not all. As I mentioned to the police, librarians smuggle books to Jewish subscribers, including banned books that no one should be reading. Librarian Bitsi Joubert says vile things about German soldiers. She has one billeted in her apartment, and God only knows how she abuses him. Volunteer Margaret Saint James buys food from the black market. To look at her plump cheeks, you wouldn’t know many people are practically starving. Subscriber Geoffrey de Nerciat donates money to Résistants and lodges them in his grand apartment. In the back room of the Library, subscriber Robert Pryce-Jones listens to the BBC, though it’s strictly forbidden. And that is not the only annoying noise one hears. The creaking of footsteps echoes from the attic—locked at all times—and I wonder what or who the librarians are hiding. Pay a visit and see for yourself. Signed, One who knows CHAPTER 30 Odile WHEN THE POST arrived, I set the fashion magazines on the shelves.

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

One of the most important – and sudden – changes in politics for several decades has been the move from a world of information scarcity to one of overload. Available information is now far beyond the ability of even the most ordered brain to categorise into any organising principle, sense or hierarchy. We live in an era of fragmentation, with overwhelming information options. The basics of what this is doing to politics is now fairly well-trodden stuff: the splintering of established mainstream news and a surge of misinformation allows people to personalise their sources in ways that play to their pre-existing biases.5 Faced with infinite connection, we find the like-minded people and ideas, and huddle together. Brand new phrases have entered the lexicon to describe all this: filter bubbles, echo chambers and fake news. It’s no coincidence that ‘post-truth’ was the word of the year in 2016. At times ‘post-truth’ has become a convenient way to explain complicated events with a simple single phrase. In some circles it has become a slightly patronising new orthodoxy to say that stupid proles have been duped by misinformation on the internet into voting for things like Brexit or Trump. In fact, well-educated people are in my experience even more subject to these irrationalities because they usually have an unduly high regard for their own powers of reason and decision-making.* What’s happening to political identity as a result of the internet is far more profound than this vote or that one. It transcends political parties and is more significant than echo chambers or fake news. Digital communication is changing the very nature of how we engage with political ideas and how we understand ourselves as political actors. Just as Netflix and YouTube replaced traditional mass-audience television with an increasingly personalised choice, so total connection and information overload offers up an infinite array of possible political options. The result is a fragmentation of singular, stable identities – like membership of a political party – and its replacement by ever-smaller units of like-minded people. Online, anyone can find any type of community they wish (or invent their own), and with it, thousands of like-minded people with whom they can mobilise. Anyone who is upset can now automatically, sometimes algorithmically, find other people that are similarly upset. Sociologists call this ‘homophily’, political theorists call it ‘identity politics’ and common wisdom says ‘birds of a feather flock together’. I’m calling it re-tribalisation. There is a very natural and well-documented tendency for humans to flock together – but the key thing is that the more possible connections, the greater the opportunities to cluster with ever more refined and precise groups. Recent political tribes include Corbyn-linked Momentum, Black Lives Matter, the alt-right, the EDL, Antifa, radical veganism and #feelthebern. I am not suggesting these groups are morally equivalent, that they don’t have a point or that they are incapable of thoughtful debate – simply that they are tribal.

How can these paradoxes ever be resolved? The answer lies in your eyes. The answer lies in the radiance with which you greet my presence, because it gifts to you a share of aliveness that, echoed in your gaze, welcomes me. The answer lies in the fact that I will do everything to prevent your death, and that this "everything" includes the possibility of my own death. I cannot ward off the biocentric tragedy. But I can live it to the fullest, can make myself into its embodiment. I can take on the responsibility for it. I can do what is necessary or you to live and for me to live. I can take on good will for your life, as I have for my own. I alone carry the responsibility for myself. For my courage. For my death.

Writer Miroslav Volf explains this more poetically. We experience time, he says, the way we hear a beautiful note from cello. It may sound like a single pitch, but in reality it is a complete tone, including other voices from the string’s half-length, eighth-length, and so on. “It is similar with the music of our lives,” says Volf. “At any given time we do not hear only the simple, solitary tone of the present; rather, in that present resonate many sounds of past actualities and future possibilities. This is how our present acquires depth.” In other words, our present-day lives are constantly echoing those of others. (p. 113)

Writer Miroslav Volf explains this more poetically. We experience time, he says, the way we hear a beautiful note from cello. It may sound like a single pitch, but in reality it is a complete tone, including other voices from the string’s half-length, eighth-length, and so on. “It is similar with the music of our lives,” says Volf. “At any given time we do not year only the simple, solitary tone of the present; rather, in that present resonate many sounds of past actualities and future possibilities. This is how our present acquires depth.” In other words, our present-day lives are constantly echoing those of others. (p. 113)

After purchasing your new Echo, you might feel as if Alexa is not actually understanding as clearly as she should. This then just means that you must train her to learn your speech patterns. Just like all the other voice assistants available, at first Alexa will not be perfect when it comes to understanding what you say. This is because everyone’s speech patterns are different and unique including those who speak the same language. Voice training your echo can go a long way in helping it understand and interpret your commands in a more accurate manner. By completing maybe one or more voice training sessions, you get to improve the way your Echo recognizes your specific speech patterns. Luckily, just like with other voice assistants, there is a way that you can use to train Alexa so that it can understand your accent and speaking voice better. The

As an “experimentalist”, your aim should be to push the limits of what Echo can do. You may discover something wonderful like that it could do your math homework! To get you started, here are a few how-to-tips. #1: Get Echo to stop listening for wake word If you are the paranoid type and think that the NSA or China will use Echo to spy on you, you should know that even though the device is always listening, it only responds after hearing the wake word. In the off chance that you want the device to become mute i.e. not respond to anything including

My favorite idea to come out of the world of cultured meat is the 'pig in the backyard.' I say 'favorite' not because this scenario seems likely to materialize but because it speaks most directly to my own imagination. In a city, a neighborhood contains a yard, and in that yard there is a pig, and that pig is relatively happy. It receives visitors every day, including local children who bring it odds and ends to eat from their family kitchens. These children may have played with the pig when it was small. Each week a small and harmless biopsy of cells is taken from the pig and turned into cultured pork, perhaps hundreds of pounds of it. This becomes the community's meat. The pig lives out a natural porcine span, and I assume it enjoys the company of other pigs from time to time. This fantasy comes to us from Dutch bioethicists, and it is based on a very real project in which Dutch neighbourhoods raised pigs and then debated the question of their eventual slaughter. The fact that the pig lives in a city is important, for the city is the ancient topos of utopian thought. The 'pig in the backyard' might also be described as the recurrence of an image from late medieval Europe that has been recorded in literature and art history. This is the pig in the land of Cockaigne, the 'Big Rock Candy Mountain' of its time, was a fantasy for starving peasants across Europe. It was filled with foods of a magnificence that only the starving can imagine. In some depictions, you reached this land by eating through a wall of porridge, on the other side of which all manner of things to eat and drink came up from the ground and flowed in streams. Pigs walked around with forks sticking out of backs that were already roasted and sliced. Cockaigne is an image of appetites fullfilled, and cultured meat is Cockaigne's cornucopian echo. The great difference is that Cockaigne was an inversion of the experience of the peasants who imagined it: a land where sloth became a virtue rather than a vice, food and sex were easily had, and no one ever had to work. In Cockaigne, delicious birds would fly into our mouths, already cooked. Animals would want to be eaten. By gratifying the body's appetites rather than rewarding the performance of moral virtue, Cockaigne inverted heaven. The 'pig in the backyard' does not fully eliminate pigs, with their cleverness and their shit, from the getting of pork. It combines intimacy, community, and an encounter with two kinds of difference: the familiar but largely forgotten difference carried by the gaze between human animal and nonhuman animal, and the weirder difference of an animal's body extended by tissue culture techniques. Because that is literally what culturing animal cells does, extending the body both in time and space, creating a novel form of relation between an original, still living animal and its flesh that becomes meat. The 'pig in the backyard' tries to please both hippies and techno-utopians at once, and this is part of this vision of rus in urbe. But this doubled encounter with difference also promises (that word again!) to work on the moral imagination. The materials for this work are, first, the intact living body of another being, which appears to have something like a telos of its own beyond providing for our sustenance; and second, a new set of possibilities for what meat can become in the twenty-first century. The 'pig in the backyard' is only a scenario. Its outcomes are uncertain. It is not obvious that the neighbourhood will want to eat flesh, even the extended and 'harmless' flesh, of a being they know well, but the history of slaughter and carnivory on farms suggests that they very well might. The 'pig in the backyard' is an experiment in ethical futures. The pig points her snout at us and asks what kind of persons we might become.