Else Stock Quotes

He says, you have to study and learn so that you can make up your own mind about history and everything else but you can’t make up an empty mind. Stock your mind, stock your mind. You might be poor, your shoes might be broken, but your mind is a palace.

I think you can love a person too much. You put someone up on a pedestal, and all of a sudden, from that perspective, you notice what's wrong - a hair out of place, a run in a stocking, a broken bone. You spend all your time and energy making it right, and all the while, you are falling apart yourself. You don't even realize what you look like, how far you've deteriorated, because you only have eyes for someone else.

Babcock fidgeted with one of his cufflinks while staring down the remaining brokers in his office. He then delivered something akin to a pep talk in a severe tone. "... The world depends on our services. Services that must not be impeded. We don't break our backs producing things that have no real value—food, shelter, clothes ... art. No! We're titans of finance. We move intangible things and ideas around the world on digital platforms. No one else in the world can accumulate as much wealth as we do by simply moving around one and zeros on computers.

So much for Objective Journalism. Don't bother to look for it here--not under any byline of mine; or anyone else I can think of. With the possible exception of things like box scores, race results, and stock market tabulations, there is no such thing as Objective Journalism. The phrase itself is a pompous contradiction in terms.

Each thing I do, I rush through so I can do something else. In such a way do the days pass---a blend of stock car racing and the never ending building of a gothic cathedral. Through the windows of my speeding car I see all that I love falling away: books unread, jokes untold, landscapes unvisited...

In a society in which nearly everybody is dominated by somebody else's mind or by a disembodied mind, it becomes increasingly difficult to learn the truth about the activities of governments and corporations, about the quality or value of products, or about the health of one's own place and economy. In such a society, also, our private economies will depend less and less upon the private ownership of real, usable property, and more and more upon property that is institutional and abstract, beyond individual control, such as money, insurance policies, certificates of deposit, stocks, and shares. And as our private economies become more abstract, the mutual, free helps and pleasures of family and community life will be supplanted by a kind of displaced or placeless citizenship and by commerce with impersonal and self-interested suppliers... Thus, although we are not slaves in name, and cannot be carried to market and sold as somebody else's legal chattels, we are free only within narrow limits. For all our talk about liberation and personal autonomy, there are few choices that we are free to make. What would be the point, for example, if a majority of our people decided to be self-employed? The great enemy of freedom is the alignment of political power with wealth. This alignment destroys the commonwealth - that is, the natural wealth of localities and the local economies of household, neighborhood, and community - and so destroys democracy, of which the commonwealth is the foundation and practical means.

When someone works for less pay than she can live on — when, for example, she goes hungry so that you can eat more cheaply and conveniently — then she has made a great sacrifice for you, she has made you a gift of some part of her abilities, her health, and her life. The 'working poor,' as they are approvingly termed, are in fact the major philanthropists of our society. They neglect their own children so that the children of others will be cared for; they live in substandard housing so that other homes will be shiny and perfect; they endure privation so that inflation will be low and stock prices high. To be a member of the working poor is to be an anonymous donor, a nameless benefactor, to everyone else.

What is unique about the "I" hides itself exactly in what is unimaginable about a person. All we are able to imagine is what makes everyone like everyone else, what people have in common. The individual "I" is what differs from the common stock, that is, what cannot be guessed at or calculated, what must be unveiled, uncovered, conquered.

He says, you have to study and learn so that you can make up your own mind about history and everything else but you can’t make up an empty mind. Stock your mind, stock your mind. It is your house of treasure and no one in the world can interfere with it. If you won the Irish Sweepstakes and bought a house that needed furniture would you fill it with bits and pieces of rubbish? Your mind is your house and if you fill it with rubbish from the cinemas it will rot in your head. You might be poor, your shoes might be broken, but your mind is a palace.

Maybe she had "no more books left inside her," as people often sorrowfully say about writers, envisioning the imagination as a big pantry, either well stocked with goods or else wartime-empty.

Our life settled into a pulse, a heartbeat, a collection of breaths. In the silence between them, I memorized the cadence of Max's barefoot steps padding down the hallways at night, the way one single muscle in his throat twitched when he was stressed, the whisper of a laugh that always followed one of my quips (however unfunny). I learned that one side of his smile aways started first - the left side, a fraction of a second before the right - and that he loved ginger tea above all else and the list of things he wasn't made for. And, in turn, he quietly memorized me, too. I knew he did, because one day I realized he had long ago stopped asking me how I took my tea and we mysteriously always had a never-ending stock of raspberries, even though I knew he didn't like them.

It isn't just Wally. It could be a girl, for goodness' sake. I mean if he were a girl - somebody in my dorm, for example, - he'd have been painting scenery in some stock company all summer. Or bicycled through wales. Or taken an apartment in New York and worked for a magazine or an advertising company. It's everybody, I mean. Everything everybody does is so - I don't know, not wrong, or even mean, or even stupid, necessarily. But just so tiny and meaningless and - sad-making. And the worst part is, if you go bohemian or something crazy like that, you're conforming just as much as everybody else, only in a different way.

The recovery task for this stage is to take hold of yourself one moment at a time, to recognize that you are a separate person, a fully capable adult, responsible for your own self-care. It is no one else’s responsibility to meet your emotional needs; only you can do that. Emotional self-reliance involves accepting the intense feelings of the experience, taking stock of your present reality, and assuring yourself that you will survive.

When you were making excuses someone else was making enterprise.

We’re going to stop this preposterous obsession with economic growth at the cost of all else. Great economic success doesn’t produce national happiness. It produces Republicans and Switzerland. So we’re going to concentrate on just being lovely and pleasant and civilized. We’re going to have the best schools and hospitals, the most comfortable public transportation, the liveliest arts, the most useful and well-stocked libraries, the grandest parks, the cleanest streets, the most enlightened social policies. In short, we’re going to be like Sweden, but with less herring and better jokes.

I had a neat stock of fixed opinions, but they dropped away one by one; and the further I get the less sure I am. I doubt if I have anything more for my present rule of life than following inclinations which do me and nobody else any harm, and actually give pleasure to those I love best. There, gentlemen, since you wanted to know how I was getting on, I have told you. Much good may it do you! I cannot explain further here. I perceive there is something wrong somewhere in our social formulas: what it is can only be discovered by men or women with greater insight than mine--if, indeed, they ever discover it-- at least in our time. 'For who knoweth what is good for man in this life?--and who can tell a man what shall be after him under the sun?

It takes remarkable patience to hold on to a stock in a company that excites you, but which everybody else seems to ignore. You begin to think everybody else is right and you are wrong. But where the fundamentals are promising, patience is often rewarded—Lukens stock went up sixfold in the fifteenth year, American Greetings was a sixbagger in six years, Angelica a sevenbagger in four, Brunswick a sixbagger in five, and SmithKline a threebagger in two.

No, sir, nobody can make big money on what someone else tells him to do.

Moderately fast growers (20 to 25 percent) in nongrowth industries are ideal investments. • Look for companies with niches. • When purchasing depressed stocks in troubled companies, seek out the ones with the superior financial positions and avoid the ones with loads of bank debt. • Companies that have no debt can’t go bankrupt. • Managerial ability may be important, but it’s quite difficult to assess. Base your purchases on the company’s prospects, not on the president’s resume or speaking ability. • A lot of money can be made when a troubled company turns around. • Carefully consider the price-earnings ratio. If the stock is grossly overpriced, even if everything else goes right, you won’t make any money. • Find a story line to follow as a way of monitoring a company’s progress. • Look for companies that consistently buy back their own shares.

...what I appear, a sick and poor man, is not the worst of me. I am in a chaos of principles--groping in the dark--acting by instinct and not after example. Eight or nine years ago when I came here first, I had a neat stock of fixed opinions, but they dropped away one by one; and the further I get the less sure I am. I doubt if I have anything more for my present rule of life than following inclinations which do me and nobody else any harm, and actually give pleasure to those I love best.

... Anyway, you put too much stock in hierarchy and fear.” “Me?” “Who else? I could spot it a mile away. All you cared about was your mission, whatever it is. You’re like a driven arrow with a very depressing shadow. First time I met you, I knew you’d cut my throat to get whatever it is you want.” She waits for a moment. “What is it that you want, by the way?” “To win,” I say. “Oh, please. You’re not that simple.” “You think you know me?” The rabbit hisses out fat over the fire. “I know you cry in your sleep for a girl named Eo. Sister? Or a girl you loved? It is a very offColor name. Like yours.” “I’m a farplanet hayseed. Didn’t they tell you?” “They wouldn’t tell me anything. I don’t get out much.” She waves a hand. “Anyway, doesn’t matter. All that matters is that no one trusts you because it’s obvious you care more about your goal than you do about them.” “And you’re something different?” “Oh, very much so, Sir Reaper. I like people more than you do. You are the wolf that howls and bites. I am the mustang that nuzzles the hand. People know they can work with me. With you? Hell, kill or be killed.

If you are ready to give up everything else and study the whole history and background of the market and all principal companies whose stocks are on the board as carefully as a medical student studies anatomy—if you can do all that and in addition you have the cool nerves of a gambler, the sixth sense of a clairvoyant and the courage of a lion, you have a ghost of a chance.

Victorian rigidities were such that ladies were not even allowed to blow out candles in mixed company, as that required them to pucker their lips suggestively. They could not say that they were going "to bed"--that planted too stimulating an image--but merely that they were "retiring." It became effectively impossible to discuss clothing in even a clinical sense without resort to euphemisms. Trousers became "nether integuments" or simply "inexpressibles" and underwear was "linen." Women could refer among themselves to petticoats or, in hushed tones, stockings, but could mention almost nothing else that brushed bare flesh.

She's got a man's nightshirt on and stockings with holes in them. Somebody else's tie, a gold and green chevroned number, hangs around her neck and just at this moment it looks like a king's mantle draped over her shoulders. Her hair's all loose, her lipstick and eyeliner gone a-roving. She's got a cigar in one hand and a jar full of gin in the other, and she's laughing, laughing like for once that damned chicken crossed the road for something really good.

The “working poor,” as they are approvingly termed, are in fact the major philanthropists of our society. They neglect their own children so that the children of others will be cared for; they live in substandard housing so that other homes will be shiny and perfect; they endure privation so that inflation will be low and stock prices high. To be a member of the working poor is to be an anonymous donor, a nameless benefactor, to everyone else. As Gail, one of my restaurant coworkers put it, “you give and you give.

When the sun of consciousness first shone upon me, behold a miracle! The stock of my young life which had perished, steeped in the waters of knowledge grew again, budded again, was sweet again with the blossoms of childhood. Down in the depths of my being, I cried, ‘it is good to be alive!’ I held out two trembling hands to life, and in vain silence would impose dumbness upon me henceforth! The world to which I awoke was still mysterious; but there was hope and love and God in it, and nothing else mattered. Is it not possible that our entrance into heaven may be like this experience of mine?

This is why she doesn’t put much stock in so-called secrets, or the meaningfulness of untold recollections that become, in their airtight echo chambers, the supposed stuff of secrets. They are only a way to become retrospectively enraged at someone else so that your own adult weaknesses can be tidily excused.

in immortality for the masses. He was a eugenicist: organ transplantation and life extension were ways to preserve what he saw as the superior white race, which he believed was being polluted by less intelligent and inferior stock, namely the poor, uneducated, and nonwhite. He dreamed of never-ending life for those he deemed worthy, and death or forced sterilization for everyone else. He’d later praise Hitler for the “energetic measures” he took in that direction.

It's a wonder they can sit down at all, and when they walk, nothing touches their legs under the billowing skirts, except their shifts and stockings. They are like swans, drifting along on unseen feet; or else like the jellyfish in the waters of the rocky harbour near our house, when I was little, before I ever made the long sad journey across the ocean. They were bell-shaped and ruffled, gracefully waving and lovely under the sea; but if they washed up on the beach and dried out in the sun there was nothing left of them. And that is what the ladies are like: mostly water.

Not even much survives as memory. Many of the most notable names of the summer—Richard Byrd, Sacco and Vanzetti, Gene Tunney, even Charles Lindbergh—are rarely encountered now, and most of the others are never heard at all. So it is perhaps worth pausing for a moment to remember just some of the things that happened that summer: Babe Ruth hit sixty home runs. The Federal Reserve made the mistake that precipitated the stock market crash. Al Capone enjoyed his last summer of eminence. The Jazz Singer was filmed. Television was created. Radio came of age. Sacco and Vanzetti were executed. President Coolidge chose not to run. Work began on Mount Rushmore. The Mississippi flooded as it never had before. A madman in Michigan blew up a school and killed forty-four people in the worst slaughter of children in American history. Henry Ford stopped making the Model T and promised to stop insulting Jews. And a kid from Minnesota flew across an ocean and captivated the planet in a way it had never been captivated before. Whatever else it was, it was one hell of a summer.

repeating the commonplaces about atheism and materialism and sophistry, which are the stock-accusations against all philosophers when there is nothing else to be said of them.

Of course I was wearing my compelling red dress, thigh-high stockings, borrowed zebra print stilettos, black pushup bra, and nothing else. This was war.

Go sell crazy someplace else; we're all stocked up." (Melvin Udall aka Jack Nicholson, 1997)

Making money in the markets is tough. The brilliant trader and investor Bernard Baruch put it well when he said, “If you are ready to give up everything else and study the whole history and background of the market and all principal companies whose stocks are on the board as carefully as a medical student studies anatomy—if you can do all that and in addition you have the cool nerves of a gambler, the sixth sense of a clairvoyant and the courage of a lion, you have a ghost of a chance.

People open shops in order to sell things, they hope to become busy so that they will have to enlarge the shop, then to sell more things, and grow rich, and eventually not have to come into the shop at all. Isn't that true? But are there other people who open a shop with the hope of being sheltered there, among such things as they most value - the yarn or the teacups or the books - and with the idea only of making a comfortable assertion? They will become a part of the block, a part of the street, part of everybody's map of the town, and eventually of everybody's memories. They will sit and drink coffee in the middle of the morning, they will get out the familiar bits of tinsel at Christmas, they will wash the windows in spring before spreading out the new stock. Shops, to these people, are what a cabin in the woods might be to somebody else - a refuge and a justification.

I am in a chaos of principles—groping in the dark—acting by instinct and not after example. Eight or nine years ago when I came here first, I had a neat stock of fixed opinions, but they dropped away one by one; and the further I get the less sure I am. I doubt if I have anything more for my present rule of life than following inclinations which do me and nobody else any harm, and actually give pleasure to those I love best. There, gentlemen, since you wanted to know how I was getting on, I have told you. Much good may it do you! I cannot explain further here. I perceive there is something wrong somewhere in our social formulas: what it is can only be discovered by men or women with greater insight than mine—if, indeed, they ever discover it—at least in our time. Gekürzt: Meine Grundsätze sind in Wirrwarr geraten – ich taste im dunkeln -, handle aus Instinkt und nicht nach Vorbildern. Vor acht oder neun Jahren, […] hatte ich einen schönen Vorrat feststehender Meinungen; aber die sind mir eine nach der andern abhanden gekommen; je älter ich werde , um so weniger sicher bin ich. Eigentlich befolge ich jetzt keine andere Lebensregel, als dass ich Neigungen nachgehe, die weder mir noch sonst jemandem schaden, sondern denen, die ich liebe, wirklich Freude machen. […] Ich spüre, dass etwas in unserem sozialen Gefüge nicht stimmt: aber was es ist, das können nur Männer und Frauen mit besserer Einsicht als ich herausfinden – wenn sie es überhaupt herausfinden können – wenigstens in unserer Zeit.

So much for objective journalism. Don’t bother to look for it here—not under any byline of mine; or anyone else I can think of. With the possible exception of things like box scores, race results, and stock market tabulations, there is no such thing as Objective Journalism. The phrase itself is a gross contradiction in terms.

investors who pay attention to the economy can be more successful because they can take advantage of impending changes. While everyone else is focused on what’s happening right now, economically savvy investors can focus on what’s coming

But there is nothing a man might not do, with you to encourage him. You make me wish to be a hero." He laughed, but Hester did not laugh. She gave him a keen look, in which there was a touch of disdain. " Do you really think," she said, " that the charm of inspiring, as you call it, is what any reasonable creature would prefer to doing? To make somebody else a hero rather than be a hero yourself? Women would need to be disinterested indeed if they like that best. I don't see it. Besides, we are not in the days of chivalry. What could you be inspired to do— make better bargains on your Stock Exchange?

But Carrel wasn’t interested in immortality for the masses. He was a eugenicist: organ transplantation and life extension were ways to preserve what he saw as the superior white race, which he believed was being polluted by less intelligent and inferior stock, namely the poor, uneducated, and nonwhite. He dreamed of never-ending life for those he deemed worthy, and death or forced sterilization for everyone else. He’d later praise Hitler for the “energetic measures” he took in that direction.

However we resolve the issue in our individual homes, the moral challenge is, put simply, to make work visible again: not only the scrubbing and vacuuming, but all the hoeing, stacking, hammering, drilling, bending, and lifting that goes into creating and maintaining a livable habitat. In an ever more economically unequal world, where so many of the affluent devote their lives to ghostly pursuits like stock trading, image making, and opinion polling, real work, in the old-fashioned sense of labor that engages hand as well as eye, that tires the body and directly alters the physical world tends to vanish from sight. The feminists of my generation tried to bring some of it into the light of day, but, like busy professional women fleeing the house in the morning, they left the project unfinished, the debate broken off in mid-sentence, the noble intentions unfulfilled. Sooner or later, someone else will have to finish the job.

Most frequently given of such reasons is the conviction that a general stock market decline of some proportion is somewhere in the offing. In the preceding chapter I tried to show that postponing an attractive purchase because of fear of what the general market might do will, over the years, prove very costly. This is because the investor is ignoring a powerful influence about which he has positive knowledge through fear of a less powerful force about which, in the present state of human knowledge, he and everyone else is largely guessing.

The cash held by US companies are hitting all time records. Companies are using some of this money to buy back their own stock at record rates. When a company is doing this it is saying to it's investors: We don't have any good ideas what to do with this, so here--maybe you do.

Witnesses can be manipulated, too. They’re not robots. They are manipulated by television, newspapers, friends, corporate interests…Who has the real truth? As far as I understand, the truth is something that’s sought out by specially trained experts: judges, scholars, priests. Everyone else is ruled by ambition and emotions. [A pause.] I’ve read your books…You shouldn’t put so much stock in what people say, in human truth…History records the lives of ideas. People don’t write it, time does. Human truth is just a nail that everybody hangs their hats on.

How often does it occur that information provided you on morning radio or television, or in the morning newspaper, causes you to alter your plans for the day, or to take some action you would not otherwise have taken, or provides insight into some problem you are required to solve? For most of us, news of the weather will sometimes have consequences; for investors, news of the stock market; perhaps an occasional story about crime will do it, if by chance it occurred near where you live or involved someone you know. But most of our daily news is inert, consisting of information that gives us something to talk about but cannot lead to any meaningful action...You may get a sense of what this means by asking yourself another series of questions: What steps do you plan to take to reduce the conflict in the Middle East? Or the rates of inflation, crime and unemployment? What are your plans for preserving the environment or reducing the risk of nuclear war? What do you plan to do about NATO, OPEC, the CIA, affirmative action, and the monstrous treatment of the Baha’is in Iran? I shall take the liberty of answering for you: You plan to do nothing about them. You may, of course, cast a ballot for someone who claims to have some plans, as well as the power to act. But this you can do only once every two or four years by giving one hour of your time, hardly a satisfying means of expressing the broad range of opinions you hold. Voting, we might even say, is the next to last refuge of the politically impotent. The last refuge is, of course, giving your opinion to a pollster, who will get a version of it through a desiccated question, and then will submerge it in a Niagara of similar opinions, and convert them into—what else?—another piece of news. Thus, we have here a great loop of impotence: The news elicits from you a variety of opinions about which you can do nothing except to offer them as more news, about which you can do nothing.

Cravings are going to occur to you. So here's the rule of thumb about eating, or about investing in the stock market, or about anything else: If the impulse comes from a joyous thought that feels good, follow it. If the impulse comes from an uncomfortable thought that felt bad, don't follow it.

Each thing I do I rush through so I can do something else. In such a way do the days pass— a blend of stock car racing and the never ending building of a gothic cathedral. Through the windows of my speeding car, I see all that I love falling away: books unread, jokes untold, landscapes unvisited . . .

And you don’t put stock in gods.” “We give credence only to that which we can prove exists. Since we cannot find evidence that gods, miracles, and other supernatural things are real, we do not trouble ourselves about them. If that were to change, if Helzvog were to reveal himself to us, then we would accept the new information and revise our position.” “It seems a cold world without something … more.” “On the contrary,” said Oromis, “it is a better world. A place where we are responsible for our own actions, where we can be kind to one another because we want to and because it is the right thing to do instead of being frightened into behaving by the threat of divine punishment. I won’t tell you what to believe, Eragon. It is far better to be taught to think critically and then be allowed to make your own decisions than to have someone else’s notions thrust upon you. You asked after our religion, and I have answered you true. Make of it what you will.

When we honestly take stock of our ability, we are then granted the opportunity to improve our circumstance. Accessing where you stand is the only way to stand somewhere else.

Success in investing comes not from being right but from being wrong less often than everyone else.

Holmes says that “a man should keep his little brain-attic stocked with all the furniture that he is likely to use”—and little else.

To be sure, the judges were right when they finally told the accused that all he had said was 'empty talk'--except that they thought the emptiness was feigned, and that the accused wished to cover up other thoughts which, though hideous, were not empty. This supposition seems refuted by the striking consistency with which Eichmann, despite his rather bad memory, repeated word for word the same stock phrases and self-invented clichés [ ] each time he referred to an incident or event of importance to him. Whether writing his memoirs in Argentina or in Jerusalem, whether speaking to the police examiner or to the court, what he said was always the same, expressed in the same words. The longer one listened to him, the more obvious it became that his inability to speak was closely connected with an inability to think, namely, to think from the standpoint of somebody else. No communication was possible with him, not because he lied but because he was surrounded by the most reliable of all safeguards against the words and the presence of others, and hence against reality as such.

And though Russia does officially have a free market, with mega-corporations floating their record-breaking IPOs on the global stock exchanges, most of the owners are friends of the President. Or else they are oligarchs who officially pledge that everything that belongs to them is also the President’s when he needs it: “All that I have belongs to the state,” says Oleg Deripaska, one of the country’s richest men. This isn’t a country in transition but some sort of postmodern dictatorship that uses the language and institutions of democratic capitalism for authoritarian ends.

[A Chinese Restaurant.] Roma is seated alone at the booth.Lingk is at the booth next to him.Roma is talking to him. * * * Roma: . . . Eh? What I’m saying, what is our life? (Pause.) It’s looking forward or it’s looking back. And that’s our life. That’s it. Where is the moment? (Pause.) And what is it that we’re afraid of? Loss. What else? (Pause.) The bank closes. We get sick, my wife died on a plane, the stock market collapsed . . . the house burnt down . . . what of these happen . . . ? None of ’em. We worry anyway. What does this mean? I’m not secure. How can I be secure? (Pause.) Through amassing wealth beyond all measure? No. And what’s beyond all measure? That’s a sickness. That’s a trap. There is no measure. Only greed. How can we act? The right way, we would say, to deal with this: “There is a one-in-a million chance that so and so will happen. . . . Fuck it, it won’t happen to me. . . .” No. We know that’s not the right way I think. (Pause.) We say the correct way to deal with this is “There is a one-in-so-and-so chance that this will happen . . . God protect me. I am powerless, let it not happen to me. . . .” But no to that. I say. There’s something else. What is it? “If it happens, AS IT MAY for that is not within our powers, I will deal with it, just as I do today with what draws my concern today.” I say this is how we must act. I do those things which seem correct to me today. I trust myself. And if security concerns me, I do that which today I think will make me secure. And every day I do that, when that day arrives that I need a reserve, (a) odds are that I have it, and (b) the true reserve that I have is the strength that I have of acting each day without fear. (Pause.) According to the dictates of my mind. (Pause.)

The computers were index-linked to the Galactic stock-market prices, you see, so that we’d all be revived when everybody else had rebuilt the economy enough to afford our rather expensive services.

J. P. Morgan tells the story of how he would get his shoes shined every Wednesday at the same shop around the corner from his office. One day the shoe shine attendant asked him if he and his friends could buy some stock through Morgan’s brokerage. The three friends had about $40—a lot of money in 1929. Morgan politely refused, hurried back to his office, and ordered that his company was not to have a single share of stock on its books by the end of the day. Morgan simply asked, “If the shoe shine boys are buying stocks, who else is left?” Of course, the 1929 stock market crash was only a few days away, and Morgan looked like a genius. He was not a genius; he noted that the order flow was likely running out on the buy side. It wasn’t his army of analysts that showed him that. It was a public investor.

Where do they teach you to talk like this? In some Panama City "Sailor wanna hump-hump" bar, or is it getaway day and your last shot at his whiskey? Sell crazy someplace else, we're all stocked up here.

I believed, strongly, what I had told Trey during our hike. That some people didn’t want to be found. And I’d believed Alice had run. Why else concoct the story she had told the other hikers on the ridge that day. I believed that she had taken stock of her life and decided to change course. I believed if there was a secret kept in Cutter’s Pass, it was this. I had wondered, back then, if maybe they had all left.

You have to study and learn so that you can make up your own mind about history and everything else, but you can't make up an empty mind. Stock your mind, stock your mind. It is your house of treasure and no one in the world can interfere with it. [...] Your mind is your house and if you fill it with rubbish (...) it will rot in your head. You might be poor, your shoes might be broken, but your mind is a palace.

Bernard Baruch put it well when he said, “If you are ready to give up everything else and study the whole history and background of the market and all principal companies whose stocks are on the board as carefully as a medical student studies anatomy—if you can do all that and in addition you have the cool nerves of a gambler, the sixth sense of a clairvoyant and the courage of a lion, you have a ghost of a chance.

There is one in this tribe too often miserable - a child bereaved of both parents. None cares for this child: she is fed sometimes, but oftener forgotten: a hut rarely receives her: the hollow tree and chill cavern are her home. Forsaken, lost, and wandering, she lives more with the wild beast and bird than with her own kind. Hunger and cold are her comrades: sadness hovers over, and solitude besets her round. Unheeded and unvalued, she should die: but she both lives and grows: the green wilderness nurses her, and becomes to her a mother: feeds her on juicy berry, on saccharine root and nut. There is something in the air of this clime which fosters life kindly: there must be something, too, in its dews, which heals with sovereign balm. Its gentle seasons exaggerate no passion, no sense; its temperature tends to harmony; its breezes, you would say, bring down from heaven the germ of pure thought, and purer feeling. Not grotesquely fantastic are the forms of cliff and foliage; not violently vivid the colouring of flower and bird: in all the grandeur of these forests there is repose; in all their freshness there is tenderness. The gentle charm vouchsafed to flower and tree, - bestowed on deer and dove, - has not been denied to the human nursling. All solitary, she has sprung up straight and graceful. Nature cast her features in a fine mould; they have matured in their pure, accurate first lines, unaltered by the shocks of disease. No fierce dry blast has dealt rudely with the surface of her frame; no burning sun has crisped or withered her tresses: her form gleams ivory-white through the trees; her hair flows plenteous, long, and glossy; her eyes, not dazzled by vertical fires, beam in the shade large and open, and full and dewy: above those eyes, when the breeze bares her forehead, shines an expanse fair and ample, - a clear, candid page, whereon knowledge, should knowledge ever come, might write a golden record. You see in the desolate young savage nothing vicious or vacant; she haunts the wood harmless and thoughtful: though of what one so untaught can think, it is not easy to divine. On the evening of one summer day, before the Flood, being utterly alone - for she had lost all trace of her tribe, who had wandered leagues away, she knew not where, - she went up from the vale, to watch Day take leave and Night arrive. A crag, overspread by a tree, was her station: the oak-roots, turfed and mossed, gave a seat: the oak-boughs, thick-leaved, wove a canopy. Slow and grand the Day withdrew, passing in purple fire, and parting to the farewell of a wild, low chorus from the woodlands. Then Night entered, quiet as death: the wind fell, the birds ceased singing. Now every nest held happy mates, and hart and hind slumbered blissfully safe in their lair. The girl sat, her body still, her soul astir; occupied, however, rather in feeling than in thinking, - in wishing, than hoping, - in imagining, than projecting. She felt the world, the sky, the night, boundlessly mighty. Of all things, herself seemed to herself the centre, - a small, forgotten atom of life, a spark of soul, emitted inadvertent from the great creative source, and now burning unmarked to waste in the heart of a black hollow. She asked, was she thus to burn out and perish, her living light doing no good, never seen, never needed, - a star in an else starless firmament, - which nor shepherd, nor wanderer, nor sage, nor priest, tracked as a guide, or read as a prophecy? Could this be, she demanded, when the flame of her intelligence burned so vivid; when her life beat so true, and real, and potent; when something within her stirred disquieted, and restlessly asserted a God-given strength, for which it insisted she should find exercise?

I watched the light flicker on the limestone walls until Archer said, "I wish we could go to the movies." I stared at him. "We're in a creepy dungeon. There's a chance I might die in the next few hours. You are going to die in the next few hours. And if you had one wish, it would be to catch a movie?" He shook his head. "That's not what I meant. I wish we weren't like this. You know, demon, demon-hunter. I wish I'd met you in a normal high school, and taken you on normal dates, and like, carried your books or something." Glancing over at me, he squinted and asked, "Is that a thing humans actually do?" "Not outside of 1950s TV shows," I told him, reaching up to touch his hair. He wrapped an arm around me and leaned against the wall, pulling me to his chest. I drew my legs up under me and rested my cheek on his collarbone. "So instead of stomping around forests hunting ghouls, you want to go to the movies and school dances." "Well,maybe we could go on the occasional ghoul hunt," he allowed before pressing a kiss to my temple. "Keep things interesting." I closed my eyes. "What else would we do if we were regular teenagers?" "Hmm...let's see.Well,first of all, I'd need to get some kind of job so I could afford to take you on these completely normal dates. Maybe I could stock groceries somewhere." The image of Archer in a blue apron, putting boxes of Nilla Wafers on a shelf at Walmart was too bizarre to even contemplate, but I went along with it. "We could argue in front of our lockers all dramatically," I said. "That's something I saw a lot at human high schools." He squeezed me in a quick hug. "Yes! Now that sounds like a good time. And then I could come to your house in the middle of the night and play music really loudly under your window until you took me back." I chuckled. "You watch too many movies. Ooh, we could be lab partners!" "Isn't that kind of what we were in Defense?" "Yeah,but in a normal high school, there would be more science, less kicking each other in the face." "Nice." We spent the next few minutes spinning out scenarios like this, including all the sports in which Archer's L'Occhio di Dio skills would come in handy, and starring in school plays.By the time we were done, I was laughing, and I realized that, for just a little while, I'd managed to forget what a huge freaking mess we were in. Which had probably been the point. Once our laughter died away, the dread started seeping back in. Still, I tried to joke when I said, "You know, if I do live through this, I'm gonna be covered in funky tattoos like the Vandy. You sure you want to date the Illustrated Woman, even if it's just for a little while?" He caught my chin and raised my eyes to his. "Trust me," he said softly, "you could have a giant tiger tattooed on your face, and I'd still want to be with you." "Okay,seriously,enough with the swoony talk," I told him, leaning in closer. "I like snarky, mean Archer." He grinned. "In that case, shut up, Mercer.

One, which I mention several times elsewhere, is the need for patience if big profits are to be made from investment. Put another way, it is often easier to tell what will happen to the price of a stock than how much time will elapse before it happens. The other is the inherently deceptive nature of the stock market. Doing what everybody else is doing at the moment, and therefore what you have an almost irresistible urge to do, is often the wrong thing to do at all.

The woman who checks her makeup half a dozen times a day to see if her foundation has caked or her mascara has run, who worries that the wind or the rain may spoil her hairdo, who looks frequently to see if her stockings have bagged at the ankle or who, feeling fat, monitors everything she eats, has become, just as surely as the inmate of the Panopticon, a self-policing subject, a self committed to a relentless self-surveillance. This self-surveillance is a form of obedience to patriarchy. It is also the reflection in woman's consciousness of the fact that she is under surveillance in ways that he is not, that whatever else she may become, she is importantly a body designed to please or to excite.

You make plans and decisions assuming randomness and chaos are for chumps. The illusion of control is a peculiar thing because it often leads to high self-esteem and a belief your destiny is yours for the making more than it really is. This over-optimistic view can translate into actual action, rolling with the punches and moving ahead no matter what. Often, this attitude helps lead to success. Eventually, though, most people get punched in the stomach by life. Sometimes, the gut-punch doesn’t come until after a long chain of wins, until you’ve accumulated enough power to do some serious damage. This is when wars go awry, stock markets crash, and political scandals spill out into the media. Power breeds certainty, and certainty has no clout against the unpredictable, whether you are playing poker or running a country. Psychologists point out these findings do not suggest you should throw up your hands and give up. Those who are not grounded in reality, oddly enough, often achieve a lot in life simply because they believe they can and try harder than others. If you focus too long on your lack of power, you can slip into a state of learned helplessness that will whirl you into a negative feedback loop of depression. Some control is necessary or else you give up altogether. Langer proved this when studying nursing homes where some patients were allowed to arrange their furniture and water plants—they lived longer than those who had had those tasks performed by others. Knowing about the illusion of control shouldn’t discourage you from attempting to carve a space for yourself out of whatever field you want to tackle. After all, doing nothing guarantees no results. But as you do so, remember most of the future is unforeseeable. Learn to coexist with chaos. Factor it into your plans. Accept that failure is always a possibility, even if you are one of the good guys; those who believe failure is not an option never plan for it. Some things are predictable and manageable, but the farther away in time an event occurs, the less power you have over it. The farther away from your body and the more people involved, the less agency you wield. Like a billion rolls of a trillion dice, the factors at play are too complex, too random to truly manage. You can no more predict the course of your life than you could the shape of a cloud. So seek to control the small things, the things that matter, and let them pile up into a heap of happiness. In the bigger picture, control is an illusion anyway.

The pharmaceutical drug industry is a half-trillion dollar per year global industry, with almost 300 billion dollars in the United States alone. The pharmaceutical companies and their shareholders rely on people to be sick, or else their stocks will plummet. There is no money to be made in health.

The bookshop of Kipps is on the left-hand side of the Hythe High Street coming from Folkestone, between the yard of the livery stable and the shop-window full of old silver and such like things—it is quite easy to find—and there you may see him for yourself and speak to him and buy this book of him if you like. He has it in stock, I know. Very delicately I've seen to that. His name is not Kipps, of course, you must understand that, but everything else is exactly as I have told you. You can talk to him about books, about politics, about going to Boulogne, about life, and the ups and downs of life. Perhaps he will quote you Buggins—from whom, by the bye, one can now buy everything a gentleman's wardrobe should contain at the little shop in Rendezvous Street, Folkestone. If you are fortunate to find Kipps in a good mood he may even let you know how he inherited a fortune "once." "Run froo it," he'll say with a not unhappy smile. "Got another afterwards—speckylating in plays. Needn't keep this shop if I didn't like. But it's something to do."... Or he may be even more intimate. "I seen some things," he said to me once. "Raver! Life! Why! once I—I 'loped! I did—reely!" (Of course you will not tell Kipps that he is "Kipps," or that I have put him in this book. He does not know. And you know, one never knows how people are going to take that sort of thing. I am an old and trusted customer now, and for many amiable reasons I should prefer that things remained exactly on their present footing.)

It isn’t just Wally. It could be a girl, for goodness’ sake. I mean if he were a girl—somebody in my dorm, for example—he’d have been painting scenery in some stock company all summer. Or bicycled through Wales. Or taken an apartment in New York and worked for a magazine or an advertising company. It’s everybody, I mean. Everything everybody does is so—I don’t know—not wrong, or even mean, or even stupid necessarily. But just so tiny and meaningless and—sad-making. And the worst part is, if you go bohemian or something crazy like that, you’re conforming just as much as everybody else, only in a different way.

The computers were index-linked to the Galactic stock-market prices, you see, so that we’d all be revived when everybody else had rebuilt the economy enough to afford our rather expensive services.” Arthur, a regular Guardian reader, was deeply shocked at this. “That’s a pretty unpleasant way to behave, isn’t it?

If we can learn to embrace the Homer Simpson within us, with all our flaws and inabilities, and take these into account when we design our schools, health plans, stock markets, and everything else in our environment, I am certain that we can create a much better world. This is the real promise of behavioral economics.

Intrinsic Value Calculations for Stocks are only for a selected few. It is boring, mundane hard work. For everyone else who wants to make money, there is the 'Greater Fool Theory', and it also works remarkably well in the real world. You may not believe it, but there always exists a bigger or greater fool willing to pay a higher price.

What is unique about the "I" hides itself exactly in what is unimaginable about a person. All we are able to imagine is what makes everyone like everyone else, what people have in common. The individual "I" is what differs from the common stock, that is, what cannot be guessed at or calculated, what must be unveiled, uncovered, conquered.

many people mistaken for entrepreneurs fail to have true skin in the game in the sense that their aim is to either cash out by selling the company they helped create to someone else, or “go public” by issuing shares in the stock market. The true value of the company, what it makes, and its long-term survival are of small relevance to them. This is a pure financing scheme and we will exclude this class of people from our “entrepreneur” risk-taker class (this form of entrepreneurship is the equivalent of bringing great-looking and marketable children into the world with the sole aim of selling them at age four). We can easily identify them by their ability to write a convincing business plan.

Cook always wrote about the livestock and seeds he left at every island. We think of him as a mariner, but he was a farm boy first, and he never lost that.” I sensed something else. Growing up on a farm, working a plow and herding stock beneath Yorkshire’s inclement skies, he would have developed an instinct for reading the weather, which served him well at sea.

company and for similar companies in the same industry. • The percentage of institutional ownership. The lower the better. • Whether insiders are buying and whether the company itself is buying back its own shares. Both are positive signs. • The record of earnings growth to date and whether the earnings are sporadic or consistent. (The only category where earnings may not be important is in the asset play.) • Whether the company has a strong balance sheet or a weak balance sheet (debt-to-equity ratio) and how it’s rated for financial strength. • The cash position. With $16 in net cash, I know Ford is unlikely to drop below $16 a share. That’s the floor on the stock. SLOW GROWERS • Since you buy these for the dividends (why else would

On Wall Street, brokers called the dependable AT&T a “widows-and-orphans” stock; if you couldn’t rely on anyone else, you could rely on Ma Bell. The paradox, of course, was that a parent corporation so dull, so cautious, so predictable was also in custody of a lab so innovative. “Few companies are more conservative,” Time magazine said about AT&T, “none are more creative.

So we all know the cliché characters: the Irish cop, the prostitute with a heart of gold, the writer with a drinking problem, and so forth. Clichés often exist for a reason, of course, and sometimes it’s okay to use a tried and true character. But not always. Populate your stories with only stock characters and there won’t be any reason to read your tales over anyone else’s.

FATHER FORGETS W. Livingston Larned Listen, son: I am saying this as you lie asleep, one little paw crumpled under your cheek and the blond curls stickily wet on your damp forehead. I have stolen into your room alone. Just a few minutes ago, as I sat reading my paper in the library, a stifling wave of remorse swept over me. Guiltily I came to your bedside. There are the things I was thinking, son: I had been cross to you. I scolded you as you were dressing for school because you gave your face merely a dab with a towel. I took you to task for not cleaning your shoes. I called out angrily when you threw some of your things on the floor. At breakfast I found fault, too. You spilled things. You gulped down your food. You put your elbows on the table. You spread butter too thick on your bread. And as you started off to play and I made for my train, you turned and waved a hand and called, “Goodbye, Daddy!” and I frowned, and said in reply, “Hold your shoulders back!” Then it began all over again in the late afternoon. As I came up the road I spied you, down on your knees, playing marbles. There were holes in your stockings. I humiliated you before your boyfriends by marching you ahead of me to the house. Stockings were expensive—and if you had to buy them you would be more careful! Imagine that, son, from a father! Do you remember, later, when I was reading in the library, how you came in timidly, with a sort of hurt look in your eyes? When I glanced up over my paper, impatient at the interruption, you hesitated at the door. “What is it you want?” I snapped. You said nothing, but ran across in one tempestuous plunge, and threw your arms around my neck and kissed me, and your small arms tightened with an affection that God had set blooming in your heart and which even neglect could not wither. And then you were gone, pattering up the stairs. Well, son, it was shortly afterwards that my paper slipped from my hands and a terrible sickening fear came over me. What has habit been doing to me? The habit of finding fault, of reprimanding—this was my reward to you for being a boy. It was not that I did not love you; it was that I expected too much of youth. I was measuring you by the yardstick of my own years. And there was so much that was good and fine and true in your character. The little heart of you was as big as the dawn itself over the wide hills. This was shown by your spontaneous impulse to rush in and kiss me good night. Nothing else matters tonight, son. I have come to your bedside in the darkness, and I have knelt there, ashamed! It is a feeble atonement; I know you would not understand these things if I told them to you during your waking hours. But tomorrow I will be a real daddy! I will chum with you, and suffer when you suffer, and laugh when you laugh. I will bite my tongue when impatient words come. I will keep saying as if it were a ritual: “He is nothing but a boy—a little boy!” I am afraid I have visualized you as a man. Yet as I see you now, son, crumpled and weary in your cot, I see that you are still a baby. Yesterday you were in your mother’s arms, your head on her shoulder. I have asked too much, too much.

Don’t worry about me,” he said. “The little limp means nothing. People my age limp. A limp is a natural thing at a certain age. Forget the cough. It’s healthy to cough. You move the stuff around. The stuff can’t harm you as long as it doesn’t settle in one spot and stay there for years. So the cough’s all right. So is the insomnia. The insomnia’s all right. What do I gain by sleeping? You reach an age when every minute of sleep is one less minute to do useful things. To cough or limp. Never mind the women. The women are all right. We rent a cassette and have some sex. It pumps blood to the heart. Forget the cigarettes. I like to tell myself I’m getting away with something. Let the Mormons quit smoking. They’ll die of something just as bad. The money’s no problem. I’m all set incomewise. Zero pensions, zero savings, zero stocks and bonds. So you don’t have to worry about that. That’s all taken care of. Never mind the teeth. The teeth are all right. The looser they are, the more you can wobble them with your tongue. It gives the tongue something to do. Don’t worry about the shakes. Everybody gets the shakes now and then. It’s only the left hand anyway. The way to enjoy the shakes is pretend it’s somebody else’s hand. Never mind the sudden and unexplained weight loss. There’s no point eating what you can’t see. Don’t worry about the eyes. The eyes can’t get any worse than they are now. Forget the mind completely. The mind goes before the body. That’s the way it’s supposed to be. So don’t worry about the mind. The mind is all right. Worry about the car. The steering’s all awry. The brakes were recalled three times. The hood shoots up on pothole terrain.” Deadpan.

the man who has been led to believe that he is a brilliant and interesting talker has been led to make himself a rapacious pest. No conversation is possible between others whose ears are within reach of his ponderous voice; anecdotes, long-winded stories, dramatic and pathetic, stock his repertoire; but worst of all are his humorous yarns at which he laughs uproariously though every one else grows solemn and more solemn.

Lucinda might sneak from her own house at midnight to place a wager somewhere else, but she dared not touch the pack that lay in her own sideboard. She knew how passionate he had become about his 'weakness.' She dared not even ask him how it was he had reversed his opinions on the matter. But, oh, how she yearned to discuss it with him, how much she wished to deal a hand on a grey wool blanket. There would be no headaches then, only this sweet consummation of their comradeship. But she said not a word. And although she might have her 'dainty' shoes tossed to the floor, have her bare toes quite visible through her stockings, have a draught of sherry in her hand, in short appear quite radical, she was too timid, she thought, too much a mouse, to reveal her gambler's heart to him. She did not like this mouselike quality. As usual, she found herself too careful, too held in. Once she said: 'I wish I had ten sisters and a big kitchen to laugh in.' Her lodger frowned and dusted his knees. She thought: He is as near to a sister as I am likely to get, but he does not understand. She would have had a woman friend so they could brush each other's hair, and just, please God, put aside this great clanking suit of ugly armor. She kept her glass dreams from him, even whilst she appeared to talk about them. He was an admiring listener, but she only showed him the opaque skin of her dreams--window glass, the price of transporting it, the difficulties with builders who would not pay their bills inside six months. He imagined this was her business, and of course it was, but all the things she spoke of were a fog across its landscape which was filled with such soaring mountains she would be embarrassed to lay claim to them. Her true ambition, the one she would not confess to him, was to build something Extraordinary and Fine from glass and cast iron. A conservatory, but not a conservatory. Glass laced with steel, spun like a spider web--the idea danced around the periphery of her vision, never long enough to be clear. When she attempted to make a sketch, it became diminished, wooden, inelegant. Sometimes, in her dreams, she felt she had discovered its form, but if she had, it was like an improperly fixed photograph which fades when exposed to daylight. She was wise enough, or foolish enough, to believe this did not matter, that the form would present itself to her in the end.

Do we have any plans for this evening?” he whispered in her ear. She nodded; the motion caused her hair to tickle his cheek. “A ball,” she said. “At Lady Mottram’s.” Anthony couldn’t resist the soft silkiness of her hair, and he threaded two fingers through it, letting it slide across his hand and wrap around his wrist. “Do you know what I think?” he murmured. He heard her smile as she asked, “What?” “I think I’ve never cared that much for Lady Mottram. And do you know what else I think?” Now he heard her trying not to giggle. “What?” “I think we should go upstairs.” “You do?” she asked, clearly feigning ignorance. “Oh, indeed. This very minute, as a matter of fact.” She wiggled her bottom, the minx, ascertaining for herself just how quickly he needed to go upstairs. “I see,” she murmured gravely. He pinched her hip lightly. “I rather thought you felt” “Well, that, too,” she admitted. “It was quite enlightening.” “I’m sure it was,” he muttered. Then, with a very wicked smile, he nudged her chin until they were nose to nose. “Do you know what else I think?” he said huskily. Her eyes widened. “I’m sure I can’t imagine.” “I think,” he said, one of his hands creeping under her dress and slithering up her leg, “that if we don’t go upstairs this instant, I might be content to remain right here.” “Here?” she squeaked. His hand found the edge of her stockings. “Here,” he affirmed. “Now?” His fingers tickled her soft thatch of hair, then sank into the very core of her womanhood. She was soft and wet and felt like heaven. “Oh, most definitely now,” he said. “Here?” He nibbled on her lips. “Didn’t I already answer that question?” And if she had any further questions, she didn’t voice them for the next hour. Or maybe it was just that he was trying his damnedest to rob her of speech. And if a man could judge from the little squeals and mewls that slipped from her mouth, he was doing a ripping good job. -Anthony & Kate

I do not know you, little squirrel chaser,” he said, wariness in his jutting face, something else dancing in his eyes. “But if I give this back, you promise not to hit me with it?” Grasping the pistol by the barrel, he offered her the stock. Struck dumb by his flawless English, Tamsen moved to take the proffered weapon. The Indian didn’t loosen his grip. “Or hit me with any other thing?” he added in addendum to his terms. “We have peace between us, you and me?” He waited until she nodded, then released the weapon to her.

Making money in the markets is tough. The brilliant trader and investor Bernard Baruch put it well when he said, “If you are ready to give up everything else and study the whole history and background of the market and all principal companies whose stocks are on the board as carefully as a medical student studies anatomy—if you can do all that and in addition you have the cool nerves of a gambler, the sixth sense of a clairvoyant and the courage of a lion, you have a ghost of a chance.” In retrospect, the mistakes that led to my crash seemed embarrassingly obvious. First, I had been wildly overconfident and had let my emotions get the better of me. I learned (again) that no matter how much I knew and how hard I worked, I could never be certain enough to proclaim things like what I’d said on Wall $ treet Week: “There’ll be no soft landing. I can say that with absolute certainty, because I know how markets work.” I am still shocked and embarrassed by how arrogant I was. Second, I again saw the value of studying history. What had happened, after all, was “another one of those.” I should have realized that debts denominated in one’s own currency can be successfully restructured with the government’s help, and that when central banks simultaneously provide stimulus (as they did in March 1932, at the low point of the Great Depression, and as they did again in 1982), inflation and deflation can be balanced against each other. As in 1971, I had failed to recognize the lessons of history. Realizing that led me to try to make sense of all movements in all major economies and markets going back a hundred years and to come up with carefully tested decision-making principles that are timeless and universal. Third, I was reminded of how difficult it is to time markets. My long-term estimates of equilibrium levels were not reliable enough to bet on; too many things could happen between the time I placed my bets and the time (if ever) that my estimates were reached. Staring at these failings, I realized that if I was going to move forward without a high likelihood of getting whacked again, I would have to look at myself objectively and change—starting by learning a better way of handling the natural aggressiveness I’ve always shown in going after what I wanted. Imagine that in order to have a great life you have to cross a dangerous jungle. You can stay safe where you are and have an ordinary life, or you can risk crossing the jungle to have a terrific life. How would you approach that choice? Take a moment to think about it because it is the sort of choice that, in one form or another, we all have to make.

MYTH: Car payments are a way of life; you’ll always have one. TRUTH: Staying away from car payments by driving reliable used cars is what the average millionaire does; that is how he or she became a millionaire. Taking on a car payment is one of the dumbest things people do to destroy their chances of building wealth. The car payment is most folks’ largest payment except for their home mortgage, so it steals more money from the income than virtually anything else. The Federal Reserve notes that the average car payment is $495 over sixty-four months. Most people get a car payment and keep it throughout their lives. As soon as a car is paid off, they get another payment because they “need” a new car. If you keep a $495 car payment throughout your life, which is “normal,” you miss the opportunity to save that money. If you invested $495 per month from age twenty-five to age sixty-five, a normal working lifetime, in the average mutual fund averaging 12 percent (the eighty-year stock market average), you would have $5,881,799.14 at age sixty-five. Hope you like the car!

You have to study and learn so that you can make up your own mind about history and everything else but you can’t make up an empty mind. Stock your mind, stock your mind. It is your house of treasure and no one in the world can interfere with it. If you won the Irish Sweepstakes and bought a house that needed furniture would you fill it with bits and pieces of rubbish? Your mind is your house and if you fill it with rubbish from the cinemas it will rot in your head. You might be poor, your shoes might be broken, but your mind is a palace.

One other thing. And that's all. I promise you. But the thing is, you raved and you bitched when you came home about the stupidity of audiences. The goddam `unskilled laughter' comming from the fifth row. And that's right, that's right - God knows it's depressing. I'm not saying it isn't. But that's none of your business, really. That's none of your business, Franny. An artist's only concern is to shoot for some kind of perfection, and *on his own terms", not anyone else's. You have no right to think about those things. I swear to you. Not in any real sense, anyway. You know what I mean?" ... The voice at the other end came through again. "I remember abouut the fifth time I ever went on `Wise Child'. I subbbed for Walt a few times when he was in a cast - remember when he was in the case? Anyway. I started bitching one night before broadcast. Seymour'd told me to shine my shoes just as I was going out the door with Waker. I was furious. The studio audience were all morons, the announcer was a moron, the sponsors were morons, and I just damn well wasn't going to shine my shoes for them, I told Seymour. I sais they couldn't see them anyway, where we sat. He said to shine them anyway. He said to shine them for the Fat Lady. I didn't know what the hell he was talking about, but he had a very Seymour look on his face, and so I did it. He never did tell me who the Fat Lady was, but I shined my shoes for the Fat Lady every time I ever went on the air again - all the years you and I were on the program together, if you remember. I don't think I missed more than one just a couple of times. This terribly clear, clear picture of the Fat Lady formed in my time. I had her sitting on this porch all day, swatting flies, with her radio goin full-blast from morning till night. I figured the heat was terrible, and she probably had cancer, and - I don't know. Anyway, seemed goddam clear why Seymour wanted me to shine my shoes when I went on air. It made *sense*." ... "... Let me tell you something now, buddy ... Are you listening?" ... "I don't care where an actor acts. It can be in summer stock, in can be over a radio, it can be over television, it can be in a goddam Broadway theatre, complete with the most fashionable, most well-fed, most sunburned-looking audience you can imagine. But I'll tell you a terrible secret - Are you listening to me? *There isn't anyone out there who isn't Seymour's Fat Lady.* That goddam cousins by the dozens. There isn't anyone *any*where that isn't Seymour's Fat Lady. Don't you know that? Don't you know that goddam secret yet? And don't you know - listen to me, now - *don't you know who that Fat Lady really is?*... Ah, buddy. Ah, buddy. It's Christ Himself. Christ Himself, buddy.

Everything I value about him seems to be physical: the rest is either unknown, disagreeable or ridiculous. I don’t care much for his temperament, which alternates between surliness and gloom, or for the overgrown pots he throws so skillfully on the wheel and then mutilates, cutting holes in them, strangling them, slashing them open. That’s unfair, he never uses a knife, only his fingers, and a lot of the time he only bends them, doubles them over; even so they have a disagreeable mutant quality. Nobody else admires them either: the aspiring housewives he teaches two evenings a week, Pottery and Ceramics 432-A, want to make ashtrays and plates with cheerful daisies on them instead, and the things don’t sell at all in the few handicraft shops that will even stock them. So they accumulate in our already cluttered basement apartment like fragmentary memories or murder victims. I can’t even put flowers in them, the water would run out through the rips. Their only function is to uphold Joe’s unvoiced claim to superior artistic seriousness: every time I sell a poster design or get a new commission he mangles another pot.

Now the first and greatest of necessities is food, which is the condition of life and existence. Certainly. The second is a dwelling, and the third clothing and the like. True. And now let us see how our city will be able to supply this great demand: We may suppose that one man is a husbandman, another a builder, some one else a weaver—shall we add to them a shoemaker, or perhaps some other purveyor to our bodily wants? Quite right. The barest notion of a State must include four or five men. Clearly. And how will they proceed? Will each bring the result of his labours into a common stock?—the individual husbandman, for example, producing for four, and labouring four times as long and as much as he need in the provision of food with which he supplies others as well as himself; or will he have nothing to do with others and not be at the trouble of producing for them, but provide for himself alone a fourth of the food in a fourth of the time, and in the remaining three fourths of his time be employed in making a house or a coat or a pair of shoes, having no partnership with others, but supplying himself all his own wants? Adeimantus

A second later, Ron had snatched his arm back from around her shoulders; she had dropped The Monster Book of Monsters on his foot. The book had broken free from its restraining belt and snapped viciously at Ron’s ankle. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry!” Hermione cried as Harry wrenched the book from Ron’s leg and retied it shut. “What are you doing with all those books anyway?” Ron asked, limping back to his bed. “Just trying to decide which ones to take with us,” said Hermione. “When we’re looking for the Horcruxes.” “Oh, of course,” said Ron, clapping a hand to his forehead. “I forgot we’ll be hunting down Voldemort in a mobile library.” “Ha ha,” said Hermione, looking down at Spellman’s Syllabary. “I wonder…will we need to translate runes? It’s possible…I think we’d better take it, to be safe.” She dropped the syllabary onto the larger of the two piles and picked up Hogwarts, A History. “Listen,” said Harry. He had sat up straight. Ron and Hermione looked at him with similar mixtures of resignation and defiance. “I know you said after Dumbledore’s funeral that you wanted to come with me,” Harry began. “Here he goes,” Ron said to Hermione, rolling his eyes. “As we knew he would,” she sighed, turning back to the books. “You know, I think I will take Hogwarts, A History. Even if we’re not going back there, I don’t think I’d feel right if I didn’t have it with--” “Listen!” said Harry again. “No, Harry, you listen,” said Hermione. “We’re coming with you. That was decided months ago--years, really.” “But--” “Shut up,” Ron advised him. “--are you sure you’ve thought this through?” Harry persisted. “Let’s see,” said Hermione, slamming Travels with Trolls onto the discarded pile with a rather fierce look. “I’ve been packing for days, so we’re ready to leave at a moment’s notice, which for your information has included doing some pretty difficult magic, not to mention smuggling Mad-Eye’s whole stock of Polyjuice Potion right under Ron’s mum’s nose.” “I’ve also modified my parents’ memories so that they’re convinced they’re really called Wendell and Monica Wilkins, and that their life’s ambition is to move to Australia, which they have now done. That’s to make it more difficult for Voldemort to track them down and interrogate them about me--or you, because unfortunately, I’ve told them quite a bit about you. “Assuming I survive our hunt for the Horcruxes, I’ll find Mum and Dad and lifted the enchantment. If I don’t--well, I think I’ve cast a good enough charm to keep them safe and happy. Wendell and Monica Wilkins don’t know that they’ve got a daughter, you see.” Hermione’s eyes were swimming with tears again. Ron got back off the bed, put his arm around her once more, and frowned at Harry as though reproaching him for lack of tact. Harry could not think of anything to say, not least because it was highly unusual for Ron to be teaching anyone else tact.

But as all are of the same original stock, a golden parent will sometimes have a silver son, or a silver parent a golden son. And God proclaims as a first principle to the rulers, and above all else, that there is nothing which they should so anxiously guard, or of which they are to be such good guardians, as of the purity of the race. They should observe what elements mingle in their offspring; for if the son of a golden or silver parent has an admixture of brass and iron, then nature orders a transposition of ranks, and the eye of the ruler must not be pitiful towards the child because he has to descend in the scale and become a husbandman or artisan, just as there may be sons of artisans who having an admixture of gold or silver in them are raised to honour, and become guardians or auxiliaries. For an oracle says that when a man of brass or iron guards the State, it will be destroyed. Such is the tale; is there any possibility of making our citizens believe in it? Not in the present generation, he replied; there is no way of accomplishing this; but their sons may be made to believe in the tale, and their sons' sons, and posterity after them. I

give a credit. Or whatever else we think is best.” Like 140 or so of her fellow employees, Michelle was an owner of ECCO. She was a member of the employee stock ownership plan (ESOP) that controlled 58 percent of the company’s stock. When I met her, her stake was worth $12,000. More important, she felt like an owner and believed she was treated like one. She had a lot of direct contact with the CEO, Ed Zimmer. Among other things, he held a regular monthly lunch with all the people who had a birthday that month, and they talked about themselves and the company and whatever else they wanted to discuss.

. . . waves of desert heat . . . I must’ve passed out, because when I woke up I was shivering and stars wheeled above a purple horizon. . . . Then the sun came up, casting long shadows. . . . I heard a vehicle coming. Something coming from far away, gradually growing louder. There was the sound of an engine, rocks under tires. . . . Finally it reached me, the door opened, and Dirk Bickle stepped out. . . . But anyway so Bickle said, “Miracles, Luke. Miracles were once the means to convince people to abandon reason for faith. But the miracles stopped during the rise of the neocortex and its industrial revolution. Tell me, if I could show you one miracle, would you come with me and join Mr. Kirkpatrick?” I passed out again, and came to. He was still crouching beside me. He stood up, walked over to the battered refrigerator, and opened the door. Vapor poured out and I saw it was stocked with food. Bickle hunted around a bit, found something wrapped in paper, and took a bottle of beer from the door. Then he closed the fridge, sat down on the old tire, and unwrapped what looked like a turkey sandwich. He said, “You could explain the fridge a few ways. One, there’s some hidden outlet, probably buried in the sand, that leads to a power source far away. I figure there’d have to be at least twenty miles of cable involved before it connected to the grid. That’s a lot of extension cord. Or, this fridge has some kind of secret battery system. If the empirical details didn’t bear this out, if you thoroughly studied the refrigerator and found neither a connection to a distant power source nor a battery, you might still argue that the fridge had some super-insulation capabilities and that the food inside had been able to stay cold since it was dragged out here. But say this explanation didn’t pan out either, and you observed the fridge staying the same temperature week after week while you opened and closed it. Then you’d start to wonder if it was powered by some technology beyond your comprehension. But pretty soon you’d notice something else about this refrigerator. The fact that it never runs out of food. Then you’d start to wonder if somehow it didn’t get restocked while you slept. But you’d realize that it replenished itself all the time, not just while you were sleeping. All this time, you’d keep eating from it. It would keep you alive out here in the middle of nowhere. And because of its mystery you’d begin to hate and fear it, and yet still it would feed you. Even though you couldn’t explain it, you’d still need it. And you’d assume that you simply didn’t understand the technology, rather than ascribe to it some kind of metaphysical power. You wouldn’t place your faith in the hands of some unknowable god. You’d place it in the technology itself. Finally, in frustration, you’d come to realize you’d exhausted your rationality and the only sensible thing to do would be to praise the mystery. You’d worship its bottles of Corona and jars of pickled beets. You’d make up prayers to the meats drawer and sing about its light bulb. And you’d start to accept the mystery as the one undeniable thing about it. That, or you’d grow so frustrated you’d push it off this cliff.” “Is Mr. Kirkpatrick real?” I asked. After a long gulp of beer, Bickle said, “That’s the neocortex talking again.

I would like to see a government that said: "We're going to stop this preposterous obsession with economic growth at the expense of all else. Great economic success doesn't produce national happiness. It produces Republicans and Switzerland. So we're going to concentrate on being lovely and pleasant and civilized. We're going to have the best schools and hospitals, the most comfortable public transportation, the liveliest arts, the most useful and well-stocked libraries, the cleanest streets, the most enlightened social policies. In short, we're going to be like Sweden, but with less herring and better jokes." Wouldn't that be delightful? But of course it will never happen.

unless you take the view that footballers should be picked on their form as players, and not for personal considerations.’ ‘Ah!’ said Mr Bowles, ‘but that’s what Vicar would call a counsel of perfection. People talk a lot about the team spirit and let the best side win, but if you was to sit in this bar and listen to what goes on, it’s all spite and jealousy, or else it’s how to scrape up enough money to entice away some other team’s centre-forward, or it’s complaints about favouritism or wrong decisions, or something that leaves a nasty taste in the mouth. The game’s not what it was when I was a lad. Too much commercialism, and enough back-biting to stock an old maids’ tea-party.

So many of his proposals looked crazy at first glance, but once you peeled back the first layer, you realized that underneath there existed a core of irrefutable logic. Take the new punishment laws, those really set me off. Putting people in stocks? Whipping them in town squares!?! What was this, Old Salem, the Taliban’s Afghanistan? It sounded barbaric, un-American, until you really thought about the options. What were you going to do with thieves and looters, put them in prison? Who would that help? Who could afford to divert able-bodied citizens to feed, clothe, and guard other able-bodied citizens? More importantly, why remove the punished from society when they could serve as such a valuable deterrent? Yes, there was the fear of pain—the lash, the cane—but all of that paled when compared to public humiliation. People were terrified of having their crimes exposed. At a time when everyone was pulling together, helping each other out, working to protect and take care of one another, the worst thing you could do to someone was to march them up into the public square with a giant poster reading “I Stole My Neighbor’s Firewood.” Shame’s a powerful weapon, but it depended on everyone else doing the right thing. No one is above the law, and seeing a senator given fifteen lashes for his involvement in war profiteering did more to curb crime than a cop on every street corner.

A 1997 study of the consumer product design firm IDEO found that most of the company’s biggest successes originated as “combinations of existing knowledge from disparate industries.” IDEO’s designers created a top-selling water bottle, for example, by mixing a standard water carafe with the leak-proof nozzle of a shampoo container. The power of combining old ideas in new ways also extends to finance, where the prices of stock derivatives are calculated by mixing formulas originally developed to describe the motion of dust particles with gambling techniques. Modern bike helmets exist because a designer wondered if he could take a boat’s hull, which can withstand nearly any collision, and design it in the shape of a hat. It even reaches to parenting, where one of the most popular baby books—Benjamin Spock’s The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care, first published in 1946—combined Freudian psychotherapy with traditional child-rearing techniques. “A lot of the people we think of as exceptionally creative are essentially intellectual middlemen,” said Uzzi. “They’ve learned how to transfer knowledge between different industries or groups. They’ve seen a lot of different people attack the same problems in different settings, and so they know which kinds of ideas are more likely to work.” Within sociology, these middlemen are often referred to as idea or innovation brokers. In one study published in 2004, a sociologist named Ronald Burt studied 673 managers at a large electronics company and found that ideas that were most consistently ranked as “creative” came from people who were particularly talented at taking concepts from one division of the company and explaining them to employees in other departments. “People connected across groups are more familiar with alternative ways of thinking and behaving,” Burt wrote. “The between-group brokers are more likely to express ideas, less likely to have ideas dismissed, and more likely to have ideas evaluated as valuable.” They were more credible when they made suggestions, Burt said, because they could say which ideas had already succeeded somewhere else.

May I tell you what I would like to see? I would like to see a government that said: “We’re going to stop this preposterous obsession with economic growth at the cost of all else. Great economic success doesn’t produce national happiness. It produces Republicans and Switzerland. So we’re going to concentrate on just being lovely and pleasant and civilized. We’re going to have the best schools and hospitals, the most comfortable public transportation, the liveliest arts, the most useful and well-stocked libraries, the grandest parks, the cleanest streets, the most enlightened social policies. In short, we’re going to be like Sweden, but with less herring and better jokes.” Wouldn’t that be delightful? But of course it will never happen. —

In the case that upheld the second AAA, Wickard v. Filburn, (1942), a farmer had been fined for planting 23 acres of wheat, instead of the eleven acres the government had allotted him—notwithstanding that the "excess" wheat had been consumed on his own farm. Now how in the world, the farmer wanted to know, can it be said that the wheat I feed my own stock is in interstate commerce? That's easy, the Court said. If you had not used your own wheat for feed, you might have bought feed from someone else, and that purchase might have affected the price of wheat that was transported in interstate commerce! By this bizarre reasoning the Court made the commerce clause as wide as the world and nullified the Constitution's clear reservation to the States of jurisdiction over agriculture. The

If you listen to financial TV, or read most market columnists, you’d think that investing is some kind of sport, or a war, or a struggle for survival in a hostile wilderness. But investing isn’t about beating others at their game. It’s about controlling yourself at your own game. The challenge for the intelligent investor is not to find the stocks that will go up the most and down the least, but rather to prevent yourself from being your own worst enemy—from buying high just because Mr. Market says “Buy!” and from selling low just because Mr. Market says “Sell!” If your investment horizon is long—at least 25 or 30 years—there is only one sensible approach: Buy every month, automatically, and whenever else you can spare some money. The single best choice for this lifelong holding is a total stock-market index fund. Sell only when you need the cash

(From Chapter 3: Puss In Corner) The visitors wear afternoon dresses with rows of buttons up their fronts, and stiff wire crinolines beneath. It’s a wonder they can sit down at all, and when they walk, nothing touches their legs under the billowing skirts, except their shifts and stockings. They are like swans, drifting along on unseen feet; or else like the jellyfish [...] They were bell-shaped and ruffled, gracefully waving and lovely under the sea; but if they washed up on the beach and dried out in the sun there was nothing left of them. And that is what the ladies are like: mostly water. I have looked at [the wire crinolines] hanging in the wardrobes, when I go in to tidy and empty the slops. They are like birdcages; but what is being caged in? Legs, the legs of ladies; legs pinned in so they cannot get out and go rubbing up against the gentlemen’s trousers.

[A Chinese Restaurant.] Roma is seated alone at the booth. Lingk is at the booth next to him. Roma ,i>is talking to him. * * * Roma: . . . Eh? What I’m saying, what is our life? (Pause.) It’s looking forward or it’s looking back. And that’s our life. That’s it. Where is the moment? (Pause.) And what is it that we’re afraid of? Loss. What else? (Pause.) The bank,/i> closes. We get sick, my wife died on a plane, the stock market collapsed . . . the house burnt down . . . what of these happen . . . ? None of ’em. We worry anyway. What does this mean? I’m not secure. How can I be secure? (Pause.) Through amassing wealth beyond all measure? No. And what’s beyond all measure? That’s a sickness. That’s a trap. There is no measure. Only greed. How can we act? The right way, we would say, to deal with this: “There is a one-in-a million chance that so and so will happen. . . . Fuck it, it won’t happen to me. . . .” No. We know that’s not the right way I think. (Pause.) We say the correct way to deal with this is “There is a one-in-so-and-so chance that this will happen . . . God protect me. I am powerless, let it not happen to me. . . .” But no to that. I say. There’s something else. What is it? “If it happens, AS IT MAY for that is not within our powers, I will deal with it, just as I do today with what draws my concern today.” I say this is how we must act. I do those things which seem correct to me today. I trust myself. And if security concerns me, I do that which today I think will make me secure. And every day I do that, when that day arrives that I need a reserve, (a) odds are that I have it, and (b) the true reserve that I have is the strength that I have of acting each day without fear. (Pause.) According to the dictates of my mind. (Pause.)

History favors the bold. Compensation favors the meek. As a Fortune 500 company CEO, you’re better off taking the path often traveled and staying the course. Big companies may have more assets to innovate with, but they rarely take big risks or innovate at the cost of cannibalizing a current business. Neither would they chance alienating suppliers or investors. They play not to lose, and shareholders reward them for it—until those shareholders walk and buy Amazon stock. Most boards ask management: “How can we build the greatest advantage for the least amount of capital/investment?” Amazon reverses the question: “What can we do that gives us an advantage that’s hugely expensive, and that no one else can afford?” Why? Because Amazon has access to capital with lower return expectations than peers. Reducing shipping times from two days to one day? That will require billions. Amazon will have to build smart warehouses near cities, where real estate and labor are expensive. By any conventional measure, it would be a huge investment for a marginal return. But for Amazon, it’s all kinds of perfect. Why? Because Macy’s, Sears, and Walmart can’t afford to spend billions getting the delivery times of their relatively small online businesses down from two days to one. Consumers love it, and competitors stand flaccid on the sidelines. In 2015, Amazon spent $7 billion on shipping fees, a net shipping loss of $5 billion, and overall profits of $2.4 billion. Crazy, no? No. Amazon is going underwater with the world’s largest oxygen tank, forcing other retailers to follow it, match its prices, and deal with changed customer delivery expectations. The difference is other retailers have just the air in their lungs and are drowning. Amazon will surface and have the ocean of retail largely to itself.

Hastings sat down and braced his arm along the back of the chaise, quite effectively letting it be known he did not want anyone else to join them. “You look frustrated, Miss Fitzhugh.” He lowered his voice. “Has your bed been empty of late?” He knew very well she’d been watched more closely than prices on the stock exchange. She couldn’t smuggle a hamster into her bed, let alone a man. “You look anemic, Hastings,” she said. “Have you been leaving the belles of England breathlessly unsatisfied again?” He grinned. “Ah, so you know what it is like to be breathlessly unsatisfied. I expected as little from Andrew Martin.” Her tone was pointed. “As little as you expect from yourself, no doubt.” He sighed exaggeratedly. “Miss Fitzhugh, you disparage me so, when I’ve only ever sung your praises.” “Well, we all do what we must,” she said with sweet venom. He didn’t reply—not in words, at least.

But not more than what’s in the Bible, Aunt,” said Dinah. “Yes, and the Bible too, for that matter,” Mrs. Poyser rejoined, rather sharply; “else why shouldn’t them as know best what’s in the Bible — the parsons and people as have got nothing to do but learn it — do the same as you do? But, for the matter o’ that, if everybody was to do like you, the world must come to a standstill; for if everybody tried to do without house and home, and with poor eating and drinking, and was allays talking as we must despise the things o’ the world as you say, I should like to know where the pick o’ the stock, and the corn, and the best new-milk cheeses ‘ud have to go. Everybody ‘ud be wanting bread made o’ tail ends and everybody ‘ud be running after everybody else to preach to ‘em, istead o’ bringing up their families, and laying by against a bad harvest. It stands to sense as that can’t be the right religion.

A while back a young woman from another state came to live with some of her relatives in the Salt Lake City area for a few weeks. On her first Sunday she came to church dressed in a simple, nice blouse and knee-length skirt set off with a light, button-up sweater. She wore hose and dress shoes, and her hair was combed simply but with care. Her overall appearance created an impression of youthful grace. Unfortunately, she immediately felt out of place. It seemed like all the other young women her age or near her age were dressed in casual skirts, some rather distant from the knee; tight T-shirt-like tops that barely met the top of their skirts at the waist (some bare instead of barely); no socks or stockings; and clunky sneakers or flip-flops. One would have hoped that seeing the new girl, the other girls would have realized how inappropriate their manner of dress was for a chapel and for the Sabbath day and immediately changed for the better. Sad to say, however, they did not, and it was the visitor who, in order to fit in, adopted the fashion (if you can call it that) of her host ward. It is troubling to see this growing trend that is not limited to young women but extends to older women, to men, and to young men as well. . . . I was shocked to see what the people of this other congregation wore to church. There was not a suit or tie among the men. They appeared to have come from or to be on their way to the golf course. It was hard to spot a woman wearing a dress or anything other than very casual pants or even shorts. Had I not known that they were coming to the school for church meetings, I would have assumed that there was some kind of sporting event taking place. The dress of our ward members compared very favorably to this bad example, but I am beginning to think that we are no longer quite so different as more and more we seem to slide toward that lower standard. We used to use the phrase “Sunday best.” People understood that to mean the nicest clothes they had. The specific clothing would vary according to different cultures and economic circumstances, but it would be their best. It is an affront to God to come into His house, especially on His holy day, not groomed and dressed in the most careful and modest manner that our circumstances permit. Where a poor member from the hills of Peru must ford a river to get to church, the Lord surely will not be offended by the stain of muddy water on his white shirt. But how can God not be pained at the sight of one who, with all the clothes he needs and more and with easy access to the chapel, nevertheless appears in church in rumpled cargo pants and a T-shirt? Ironically, it has been my experience as I travel around the world that members of the Church with the least means somehow find a way to arrive at Sabbath meetings neatly dressed in clean, nice clothes, the best they have, while those who have more than enough are the ones who may appear in casual, even slovenly clothing. Some say dress and hair don’t matter—it’s what’s inside that counts. I believe that truly it is what’s inside a person that counts, but that’s what worries me. Casual dress at holy places and events is a message about what is inside a person. It may be pride or rebellion or something else, but at a minimum it says, “I don’t get it. I don’t understand the difference between the sacred and the profane.” In that condition they are easily drawn away from the Lord. They do not appreciate the value of what they have. I worry about them. Unless they can gain some understanding and capture some feeling for sacred things, they are at risk of eventually losing all that matters most. You are Saints of the great latter-day dispensation—look the part.

Beyond serving as an inspiration to engineers, the group behavior of fireflies has broader significance for science as a whole. It represents one of the few tractable instances of a complex, self-organizing system, where millions of interactions occur simultaneously—when everyone changes the state of everyone else. Virtually all the major unsolved problems in science today have this intricate character. Consider the cascade of biochemical reactions in a single cell and their disruption when the cell turns cancerous; the booms and crashes of the stock market; the emergence of consciousness from the interplay of trillions of neurons in the brain; the origin of life from a meshwork of chemical reactions in the primordial soup. All these involve enormous numbers of players linked in complex webs. In every case, astonishing patterns emerge spontaneously. The richness of the world around us is due, in large part, to the miracle of self-organization.

Silence, silence. Then he switched his stool, turned his back to me as much as possible and continued working. I got up and walked to the men’s crapper and stuck my head out the window for fresh air. The guy was my father all over again: RESPONSIBILITY, SOCIETY, COUNTRY, DUTY, MATURITY, all the dull-sounding hard words. But why were they in such agony? Why did they hate so much? It seemed simply that they were very much afraid that somebody else was having a damn good time or was not unhappy most of the time. It seemed that they wanted everybody to carry the same damn heavy rock they were carrying. It wasn’t ENOUGH that I was working beside him like an idiot; it wasn’t enough for him that I was wasting the few good hours left in my life—no, he also wanted me to share his own mind-soul, to sniff his dirty stockings, to chew on his angers and hates with him. I was not PAID for that, the fucker. And that’s what killed you on the job—not the actual physical work but being closed in with the dead.

(which was a mistake, for the value of an aristocratic title, like that of a share quoted on the stock exchange, rises when in demand and falls when on offer. Everything we believe imperishable tends toward destruction; a social position, like everything else, is not given once and for all but, just like the power of an empire, is reconstituted from moment to moment through a sort of endless renewed process of creation, which explains the apparent anomalies of social or political history over half a century. The creation of the world did not happen “in the beginning,” it happens from day to day. The Marquise de Saint-Loup thought, “I am the Marquise de Saint-Loup,” in the knowledge that the night before she had turned down three invitations to dine with duchesses. But if to a certain extent her name enhanced the distinctly un-aristocratic circles which she entertained, by an inverse movement the circles which invited the Marquise devalued the name that she bore. Nothing resists such movements,

I see bacon, green peppers, mushrooms... those are all found in Napolitan Spaghetti. I guess instead of the standard ketchup, he's used curry roux for the sauce? The noodles look similar to fettuccini." "Hm. I'm not seeing anything else that stands out about it. Given how fun and amusing the calzone a minute ago was... ... the impact of this one's a lot more bland and boring..." W-what the heck? Where did this heavy richness come from? It hits like a shockwave straight to the brain! "Chicken and beef stocks for the base... with fennel and green cardamom for fragrance! What an excellent, tongue-tingling curry sauce! It clings well to the broad fettuccini noodles too!" "For extra flavor is that... soy sauce?" "No, it's tamari soy sauce! Tamari soy sauce is richer and less salty than standard soy sauce, with a more full-bodied sweetness to it. Most tamari is made on Japan's eastern seaboard. " "That's not all either! I'm picking up the mellow hints of cheese! But I'm not seeing a single shred of any kind of cheese in here. Where's it hiding?" "Allow me to tell you, sir. First, look at the short edge of a noodle, please." ?! What on earth?! This noodle's got three layers!" "For the outer layers, I kneaded turmeric into the pasta dough. But for the inner layer, I added Parmesan cheese!" "I see! It's the combination of the tamari soy sauce and the parmesan cheese that gives this dish its incredible richness!" "Yeah, but wait a minute! If you go kneading cheese right into the noodles, wouldn't it just melt back out when you boiled them?" No... that's why they're in three layers! With the cheese in the middle, the outer layers prevented it from melting out! The deep, rich curry sauce, underscored with the flavor of tamari soy sauce... ... and the chewy noodles, which hit you with the mellow, robust taste of parmesan cheese with every bite! Many people are familiar with the idea of coating cream cheese in soy sauce... ... but who would have thought parmesan cheese would match this well with tamari soy sauce!

I shall detain you no longer in the demonstration of what we should not do, but straight conduct ye to a hill side where I will point ye out the right path of a virtuous and noble education; laborious indeed at the first ascent, but else so smooth, so green, so full of goodly prospect, and melodious sounds on every side, that the harp of Orpheus 19 was not more charming. I doubt not but ye shall have more ado to drive our dullest and laziest youth, our stocks and stubs from the infinite desire of such a happy nurture, than we have not to hale and drag our choicest and hopefulest wits to that asinine feast of sowthistles and brambles which is commonly set before them, as all the food and entertainment of their tenderest and most docible 20 age. I call therefore a complete and generous education that which fits a man to perform justly, skilfully and magnanimously all the offices both private and public, of peace and war. And how all this may be done between twelve, and one and twenty, less time than is now bestowed in pure trifling at grammar and sophistry, is to be thus ordered.

agreed to wait until three thirty, but that was as long as she could hold on. Julia and Anna had spent hours getting ready for the puppy: buying the bed, choosing where to put it, selecting the name (Anna had settled on Bella, which Julia thought was a fine name for a puppy), stocking up on dog treats, planning where they would take her for walks, and Julia did not want to have to deal with the disappointment that would follow if she had to tell Anna that the puppy would not be coming home that evening after all. Even more than that, Julia needed the puppy to be a source of nothing but joy and affection, because she was going to be facing her own custody battle soon enough and, if it was anything like Carol Prowses’s, Anna would need all the distractions she could get. Julia hadn’t found Brian in bed with one of his students –thankfully, since he taught in a junior school –or with anyone else, for that matter. If she had she probably wouldn’t have cared, which was exactly the problem. She liked Brian. She thought he was a good man and a good dad and a good husband –well, an OK man and

There was an artist in the city of Kouroo who was disposed to strive after perfection. One day it came into his mind to make a staff. Having considered that in an imperfect work time is an ingredient, but into a perfect work time does not enter, he said to himself, It shall be perfect in all respects, though I should do nothing else in my life. He proceeded instantly to the forest for wood, being resolved that it should not be made of unsuitable material; and as he searched for and rejected stick after stick, his friends gradually deserted him, for they grew old in their works and died, but he grew not older by a moment. His singleness of purpose and resolution, and his elevated piety, endowed him, without his knowledge, with perennial youth. As he made no compromise with Time, Time kept out of his way, and only sighed at a distance because he could not overcome him. Before he had found a stock in all respects suitable the city of Kouroo was a hoary ruin, and he sat on one of its mounds to peel the stick. Before he had given it the proper shape the dynasty of the Candahars was at an end, and with the point of the stick he wrote the name of the last of that race in the sand, and then resumed his work. By the time he had smoothed and polished the staff Kalpa was no longer the pole-star; and ere he had put on the ferule and the head adorned with precious stones, Brahma had awoke and slumbered many times. But why do I stay to mention these things? When the finishing stroke was put to his work, it suddenly expanded before the eyes of the astonished artist into the fairest of all the creations of Brahma. He had made a new system in making a staff, a world with full and fair proportions; in which, though the old cities and dynasties had passed away, fairer and more glorious ones had taken their places. And now he saw by the heap of shavings still fresh at his feet, that, for him and his work, the former lapse of time had been an illusion, and that no more time had elapsed than is required for a single scintillation from the brain of Brahma to fall on and inflame the tinder of a mortal brain. The material was pure, and his art was pure; how could the result be other than wonderful?

... If I am correct... ... the secret to this sauce is honey and balsamic vinegar ." "Got it one, sir! Both ingredients have a mild sweetness that adds a layer of richness to the dish. The tartness of the vinegar ties it all together, ensuring the sweetness isn't too cloying and giving the overall dish a clean, pure aftertaste. The guide told me that Hokkaido bears really love their honey... ... so I tried all kinds of methods to add it to my recipe!" "Is that how he gave his sauce a rich, clean flavor powerful enough to cause the Gifting? Unbelievable! That's our Master Yukihira!" Something doesn't add up. A little honey and vinegar can't be enough to create that level of aftertaste. There has to be something else to it. But what? "...?! I got it! I know what you did! You caramelized the honey!" CARAMELIZATION Sugars oxidize when heated, giving them a golden brown color and a nutty flavor. Any food that contains sugar can be caramelized, making caramelization an important technique in everything from French cooking to dessert making. "I started out by heating the honey until it was good and caramelized. Then I added some balsamic vinegar to stretch it and give it a little thickness. Once that was done, I poured it over some diced onions and garlic that I'd sautéed in another pan, added some schisandra berries and then let it simmer. After it had reduced, I poured bear stock over it and seasoned it with a little salt... The result was a deep, rich sauce perfect for emphasizing the natural punch of my Bear-Meat Menchi Katsu!" "Oho! You musta come up with that idea while I was relaxing with my cup o' chai! Not bad, Yukihira-chin! Not bad at all! Don'tcha think?" "Y-yes, sir..." Plus, there is no debating how well honey pairs well with bear meat. The Chinese have long considered bear paws a great delicacy... ... because of the common belief that the mellow sweetness of the honey soaks into a bear's paw as it sticks it into beehives and licks the honey off of it. What a splendid idea pairing honey with bear meat, each accentuating the other... ... then using caramelization and balsamic vinegar to mellow it to just the right level. It's a masterful example of using both flavor subtraction and enhancement in the same dish!

But this is something you need to know: when you find a place that suits you, where you decide to go back to often, to meet your pals there, if you want to feel at home and not discover some snag at the wrong moment, sit yourself in a corner, write letters, read, try and eat there, and watch what goes on for a whole day. At least twice during the day, and three times if the place is open at night, there’s that moment of “temporal void”. It happens every day, at the very same hour, at the very same minute, but it varies from place to place. People are talking, letting their hair down, having a drink together, and all of a sudden, the moment of silence: everyone turns stock still, with their glasses in the air, their eyes fixed. Immediately afterwards the hubbub resumes. But that moment when nothing’s happening - it can last five, ten minutes. And during that time, outside and everywhere else, for other people life goes on, faster, much faster, like an avalanche. If you’re prepared for it, and take advantage of that moment not to be fazed and to have your say, you’re certain to be heard, and if necessary even obeyed. Try it. You’ll see.

Let us for a moment imagine what would have happened on the Galilean hillside, when our Lord fed the five thousand, if the Apostles had acted as some act now. The twelve would be going backwards, helping the first rank over and over again, and leaving the back rows unsupplied. Let us suppose one of them, say Andrew, venturing to say to his brother Simon Peter, 'Ought we all to be feeding the front row? Ought we not to divide, and some of us go to the back rows?' Then suppose Peter replying 'Oh no; don't you see these front people are so hungry? They have not had half enough yet; besides, they are nearest to us, so we are more responsible for them.' Then, if Andrew resumes his appeal, suppose Peter going on to say, 'Very well; you are quite right. You go and feed all those back rows; but I can't spare anyone else, I and the other ten of us have more than we can do here.' Once more, suppose Andrew persuades Philip to go with him; then, perhaps, Matthew will cry out and say, 'Why, they're all going to those farther rows! Is no one to be left to these needy people in front?' Let me ask the members of Congress, Do you recognise these sentences at all?

IRA funds became a form of play money for the middle class... Because the pool of capital that made up an IRA could not be withdrawn for twenty or thirty years, many people viewed their IRAs as containing money they could experiment with. They could use an IRA to buy their first stock or their first mutual fund. They could put in in a money market fund first, and then, as they got bolder - and the bull market became more irresistible - shift some of it into something a little riskier. IRAs gave people a way to try on the stock and bond markets for size, to see how they felt, and to become slowly comfortable with the idea of investing. The knowledge that the money couldn't easily be withdrawn acted as a psychological safety net, allowing investors to feel as though they could take a chance or two. If they made a mistake, they reasoned, there was still time to recoup - several decades, perhaps.Over time, many people came to believe that it as imperative to maximize the returns they were getting on their IRA account, even at the risk of taking a loss. How else would they ever have enough to retire on? This, surely, is the classic definition of investment capital.

Humanism thought that experiences occur inside us, and that we ought to find within ourselves the meaning of all that happens, thereby infusing the universe with meaning. Dataists believe that experiences are valueless if they are not shared, and that we need not – indeed cannot – find meaning within ourselves. We need only record and connect our experience to the great data flow, and the algorithms will discover its meaning and tell us what to do. Twenty years ago Japanese tourists were a universal laughing stock because they always carried cameras and took pictures of everything in sight. Now everyone is doing it. If you go to India and see an elephant, you don’t look at the elephant and ask yourself, ‘What do I feel?’ – you are too busy looking for your smartphone, taking a picture of the elephant, posting it on Facebook and then checking your account every two minutes to see how many Likes you got. Writing a private diary – a common humanist practice in previous generations – sounds to many present-day youngsters utterly pointless. Why write anything if nobody else can read it? The new motto says: ‘If you experience something – record it. If you record something – upload it. If you upload something – share it.

For years the financial services have been making stock-market forecasts without anyone taking this activity very seriously. Like everyone else in the field they are sometimes right and sometimes wrong. Wherever possible they hedge their opinions so as to avoid the risk of being proved completely wrong. (There is a well-developed art of Delphic phrasing that adjusts itself successfully to whatever the future brings.) In our view—perhaps a prejudiced one—this segment of their work has no real significance except for the light it throws on human nature in the securities markets. Nearly everyone interested in common stocks wants to be told by someone else what he thinks the market is going to do. The demand being there, it must be supplied. Their interpretations and forecasts of business conditions, of course, are much more authoritative and informing. These are an important part of the great body of economic intelligence which is spread continuously among buyers and sellers of securities and tends to create fairly rational prices for stocks and bonds under most circumstances. Undoubtedly the material published by the financial services adds to the store of information available and fortifies the investment judgment of their clients.

A SOLAR OASIS Like everywhere else in Puerto Rico, the small mountain city of Adjuntas was plunged into total darkness by Hurricane Maria. When residents left their homes to take stock of the damage, they found themselves not only without power and water, but also totally cut off from the rest of the island. Every single road was blocked, either by mounds of mud washed down from the surrounding peaks, or by fallen trees and branches. Yet amid this devastation, there was one bright spot. Just off the main square, a large, pink colonial-style house had light shining through every window. It glowed like a beacon in the terrifying darkness. The pink house was Casa Pueblo, a community and ecology center with deep roots in this part of the island. Twenty years ago, its founders, a family of scientists and engineers, installed solar panels on the center’s roof, a move that seemed rather hippy-dippy at the time. Somehow, those panels (upgraded over the years) managed to survive Maria’s hurricane-force winds and falling debris. Which meant that in a sea of post-storm darkness, Casa Pueblo had the only sustained power for miles around. And like moths to a flame, people from all over the hills of Adjuntas made their way to the warm and welcoming light.

It was a tough journey, though, and I realize that some people don’t have the endurance, or the faith, to continue in the face of such great resistance. But not a day goes by when I don’t meet someone who’s also put it all on the line and is working their butt off to achieve their professional and personal dreams. Many millennials, in particular, are willing to take a chance and do something outside the box, without the “right” degree or experience or any guarantee of future success. They’re willing to start a business—a tech company, a nonprofit—with a couple of friends or alone in their apartment. They’ve rejected the narrative that most boomers lived by—that you should go to school, get a job, work for the same company for thirty years, trust that the company will take care of you after retirement with a pension and possibly stock options. They’ve rejected that narrative because it doesn’t exist anymore in most cases. Most of the millennials who expect that path are, in my opinion, the ones still living at home. Getting angry at “the man” for keeping them down. Waiting for someone else, the government most likely, to come in and save the day. These are the ones who reject or don’t take personal responsibility. Who get out of college, get their first job, and want to be the boss of the company the very same day. They’re twenty-five, have no experience beyond that one semester as an intern, but they want that corner office and $100K in year one.

Like spacecraft that pick up speed as they rise into the Earth’s stratosphere, growth stocks often seem to defy gravity. Let’s look at the trajectories of three of the hottest growth stocks of the 1990s: General Electric, Home Depot, and Sun Microsystems. (See Figure 7-1.) In every year from 1995 through 1999, each grew bigger and more profitable. Revenues doubled at Sun and more than doubled at Home Depot. According to Value Line, GE’s revenues grew 29%; its earnings rose 65%. At Home Depot and Sun, earnings per share roughly tripled. But something else was happening—and it wouldn’t have surprised Graham one bit. The faster these companies grew, the more expensive their stocks became. And when stocks grow faster than companies, investors always end up sorry. As Figure 7-2 shows: A great company is not a great investment if you pay too much for the stock. The more a stock has gone up, the more it seems likely to keep going up. But that instinctive belief is flatly contradicted by a fundamental law of financial physics: The bigger they get, the slower they grow. A $1-billion company can double its sales fairly easily; but where can a $50-billion company turn to find another $50 billion in business? Growth stocks are worth buying when their prices are reasonable, but when their price/earnings ratios go much above 25 or 30 the odds get ugly: Journalist Carol Loomis found that, from 1960 through 1999, only eight of the largest 150 companies on the Fortune 500 list managed to raise their earnings by an annual average of at least 15% for two decades.

In the Metro, one evening, I looked closely around me: everyone had come from somewhere else . . . Among us, though, two or three faces from here, embarrassed silhouettes that seemed to be apologising for their presence. The same spectacle in London. Today’s migrations are no longer made by compact displacements but by successive infiltrations: little by little, individuals insinuate themselves among the “natives,” to anaemic and too distinguished to stoop to the notion of a “territory.” After a thousand years of vigilance, we open the gates . . . When one thinks of the long rivalries between the French and the English, then between the French and the Germans, it seems as if each nation, by weakening one another, had as its task to speed the hour of the common downfall so that other specimens of humanity may relay them. Like its predecessor, the new Völkerwanderung will provoke an ethnic confusion whose phases cannot be distinctly foreseen. Confronted with these disparate profiles, the notion of a community homogeneous to whatever degree is inconceivable. The very possibility of so heteroclite a crowd suggests that in the space it occupies there no longer existed, among the indigenous, any desire to safeguard even the shadow of an identity. At Rome, in the third century of our era, out of a million inhabitants, only sixty thousand were of Latin stock. Once a people has fulfilled the historical idea which was its mission to incarnate, it no longer has any excuse to preserve its difference, to cherish its singularity, to safeguard its features amidst a chaos of faces.

Listen, son: I am saying this as you lie asleep, one little paw crumpled under your cheek and the blond curls stickily wet on your damp forehead. I have stolen into your room alone. Just a few minutes ago, as I sat reading my paper in the library, a stifling wave of remorse swept over me. Guiltily I came to your bedside. There are the things I was thinking, son: I had been cross to you. I scolded you as you were dressing for school because you gave your face merely a dab with a towel. I took you to task for not cleaning your shoes. I called out angrily when you threw some of your things on the floor. At breakfast I found fault, too. You spilled things. You gulped down your food. You put your elbows on the table. You spread butter too thick on your bread. And as you started off to play and I made for my train, you turned and waved a hand and called, ‘Goodbye, Daddy!’ and I frowned, and said in reply, ‘Hold your shoulders back!’ Then it began all over again in the late afternoon. As I came up the road I spied you, down on your knees, playing marbles. There were holes in your stockings. I humiliated you before your boyfriends by marching you ahead of me to the house. Stockings were expensive – and if you had to buy them you would be more careful! Imagine that, son, from a father! Do you remember, later, when I was reading in the library, how you came in timidly, with a sort of hurt look in your eyes? When I glanced up over my paper, impatient at the interruption, you hesitated at the door. ‘What is it you want?’ I snapped. You said nothing, but ran across in one tempestuous plunge, and threw your arms around my neck and kissed me, and your small arms tightened with an affection that God had set blooming in your heart and which even neglect could not wither. And then you were gone, pattering up the stairs. Well, son, it was shortly afterwards that my paper slipped from my hands and a terrible sickening fear came over me. What has habit been doing to me? The habit of finding fault, of reprimanding – this was my reward to you for being a boy. It was not that I did not love you; it was that I expected too much of youth. I was measuring you by the yardstick of my own years. And there was so much that was good and fine and true in your character. The little heart of you was as big as the dawn itself over the wide hills. This was shown by your spontaneous impulse to rush in and kiss me good night. Nothing else matters tonight, son. I have come to your bedside in the darkness, and I have knelt there, ashamed! It is a feeble atonement; I know you would not understand these things if I told them to you during your waking hours. But tomorrow I will be a real daddy! I will chum with you, and suffer when you suffer, and laugh when you laugh. I will bite my tongue when impatient words come. I will keep saying as if it were a ritual: ‘He is nothing but a boy – a little boy!’ I am afraid I have visualized you as a man. Yet as I see you now, son, crumpled and weary in your cot, I see that you are still a baby. Yesterday you were in your mother’s arms, your head on her shoulder. I have asked too much, too much. Instead of condemning people, let’s try to understand them. Let’s try to figure out why they do what they do. That’s a lot more profitable and intriguing than criticism; and it breeds sympathy, tolerance and kindness. ‘To know all is to forgive all.

Every few months or so at home, Pops had to have Taiwanese ’Mian. Not the Dan-Dan Mian you get at Szechuan restaurants or in Fuchsia Dunlop’s book, but Taiwanese Dan-Dan. The trademark of ours is the use of clear pork bone stock, sesame paste, and crushed peanuts on top. You can add chili oil if you want, but I take it clean because when done right, you taste the essence of pork and the bitterness of sesame paste; the texture is somewhere between soup and ragout. Creamy, smooth, and still soupy. A little za cai (pickled radish) on top, chopped scallions, and you’re done. I realized that day, it’s the simple things in life. It’s not about a twelve-course tasting of unfamiliar ingredients or mass-produced water-added rib-chicken genetically modified monstrosity of meat that makes me feel alive. It’s getting a bowl of food that doesn’t have an agenda. The ingredients are the ingredients because they work and nothing more. These noodles were transcendent not because he used the best produce or protein or because it was locally sourced, but because he worked his dish. You can’t buy a championship. Did this old man invent Dan-Dan Mian? No. But did he perfect it with techniques and standards never before seen? Absolutely. He took a dish people were making in homes, made it better than anyone else, put it on front street, and established a standard. That’s professional cooking. To take something that already speaks to us, do it at the highest level, and force everyone else to step up, too. Food at its best uplifts the whole community, makes everyone rise to its standard. That’s what that Dan-Dan Mian did. If I had the honor of cooking my father’s last meal, I wouldn’t think twice. Dan-Dan Mian with a bullet, no question.

Economics today creates appetites instead of solutions. The western world swells with obesity while others starve. The rich wander about like gods in their own nightmares. Or go skiing in the desert. You don’t even have to be particularly rich to do that. Those who once were starving now have access to chips, Coca-Cola, trans fats and refined sugars, but they are still disenfranchized. It is said that when Mahatma Gandhi was asked what he thought about western civilization, he answered that yes, it would be a good idea. The bank man’s bonuses and the oligarch’s billions are natural phenomena. Someone has to pull away from the masses – or else we’ll all become poorer. After the crash Icelandic banks lost 100 billion dollars. The country’s GDP had only ever amounted to thirteen billion dollars in total. An island with chronic inflation, a small currency and no natural resources to speak of: fish and warm water. Its economy was a third of Luxembourg’s. Well, they should be grateful they were allowed to take part in the financial party. Just like ugly girls should be grateful. Enjoy, swallow and don’t complain when it’s over. Economists can pull the same explanations from their hats every time. Dream worlds of total social exclusion and endless consumerism grow where they can be left in peace, at a safe distance from the poverty and environmental destruction they spread around themselves. Alternative universes for privileged human life forms. The stock market rises and the stock market falls. Countries devalue and currencies ripple. The market’s movements are monitored minute by minute. Some people always walk in threadbare shoes. And you arrange your preferences to avoid meeting them. It’s no longer possible to see further into the future than one desire at a time. History has ended and individual freedom has taken over. There is no alternative.

It is untrue that I or anybody else in Germany wanted war in 1939. It was desired and instigated exclusively by those international statesmen who were either of Jewish origin or working for Jewish interests. I have made so many offers for the reduction and elimination of armaments, which posterity cannot explain away for all eternity, that the responsibility for the outbreak of this war cannot rest on me. Furthermore, I never desired that after the first terrible World War a second war should arise against England or even against America. Centuries may pass, but out of the ruins of our cities and monuments of art there will arise anew the hatred for the people who alone are ultimately responsible: International Jewry and its helpers! As late as three days before the outbreak of the German-Polish War, I proposed to the British Ambassador in Berlin a solution for the German-Polish problem -- similar to the problem of the Saar area, under international control. This offer cannot be explained away, either. It was only rejected because the responsible circles in English politics wanted the war, partly in the expectation of business advantages, partly driven by propaganda promoted by international Jewry. But I left no doubt about the fact that if the peoples of Europe were again only regarded as so many packages of stock shares by these international money and finance conspirators, then that race, too, which is the truly guilty party in this murderous struggle would also have to be held to account: the Jews! I further left no doubt that this time we would not permit millions of European children of Aryan descent to die of hunger, nor millions of grown-up men to suffer death, nor hundreds of thousands of women and children to be burned and bombed to death in their cities, without the truly guilty party having to atone for its guilt, even if through more humane means.

The fragility of the US economy had nearly destroyed him. It wasn't enough that Citadel's walls were as strong and impenetrable as the name implied; the economy itself needed to be just as solid. Over the next decade, he endeavored to place Citadel at the center of the equity markets, using his company's superiority in math and technology to tie trading to information flow. Citadel Securities, the trading and market-making division of his company, which he'd founded back in 2003, grew by leaps and bounds as he took advantage of his 'algorithmic'-driven abilities to read 'ahead of the market.' Because he could predict where trades were heading faster and better than anyone else, he could outcompete larger banks for trading volume, offering better rates while still capturing immense profits on the spreads between buys and sells. In 2005, the SEC had passed regulations that forced brokers to seek out middlemen like Citadel who could provide the most savings to their customers; in part because of this move by the SEC, Ken's outfit was able to grow into the most effective, and thus dominant, middleman for trading — and especially for retail traders, who were proliferating in tune to the numerous online brokerages sprouting up in the decade after 2008. Citadel Securities reached scale before the bigger banks even knew what had hit them; and once Citadel was at scale, it became impossible for anyone else to compete. Citadel's efficiency, and its ability to make billions off the minute spreads between bids and asks — multiplied by millions upon millions of trades — made companies like Robinhood, with its zero fees, possible. Citadel could profit by being the most efficient and cheapest market maker on the Street. Robinhood could profit by offering zero fees to its users. And the retail traders, on their couches and in their kitchens and in their dorm rooms, profited because they could now trade stocks with the same tools as their Wall Street counterparts.

There was an artist in the city of Kouroo who was disposed to strive after perfection. One day it came into his mind to make a staff. Having considered that in an imperfect work time is an ingredient, but into a perfect work time does not enter, he said to himself, It shall be perfect in all respects, though I should do nothing else in my life. He proceeded instantly to the forest for wood, being resolved that it should not be made of unsuitable material; and as he searched for and rejected stick after stick, his friends gradually deserted him, for they grew old in their works and died, but he grew not older by a moment. His singleness of purpose and resolution, and his elevated piety, endowed him, without his knowledge, with perennial youth. As he made no compromise with Time, Time kept out of his way, and only sighed at a distance because he could not overcome him. Before he had found a stock in all respects suitable the city of Kouroo was a hoary ruin, and he sat on one of its mounds to peel the stick. Before he had given it the proper shape the dynasty of the Candahars was at an end, and with the point of the stick he wrote the name of the last of that race in the sand, and then resumed his work. By the time he had smoothed and polished the staff Kalpa was no longer the pole-star; and ere he had put on the ferrule and the head adorned with precious stones, Brahma had awoke and slumbered many times. But why do I stay to mention these things? When the finishing stroke was put to his work, it suddenly expanded before the eyes of the astonished artist into the fairest of all the creations of Brahma. He had made a new system in making a staff, a world with fun and fair proportions; in which, though the old cities and dynasties had passed away, fairer and more glorious ones had taken their places. And now he saw by the heap of shavings still fresh at his feet, that, for him and his work, the former lapse of time had been an illusion, and that no more time had elapsed than is required for a single scintillation from the brain of Brahma to fall on and inflame the tinder of a mortal brain. The material was pure, and his art was pure; how could the result be other than wonderful?

One other thing. And that's all. I promise you. But the thing is, you raved and you bitched when you came home about the stupidity of audiences. The goddam `unskilled laughter' coming from the fifth row. And that's right, that's right - God knows it's depressing. I'm not saying it isn't. But that's none of your business, really. That's none of your business, Franny. An artist's only concern is to shoot for some kind of perfection, and *on his own terms*, not anyone else's. You have no right to think about those things. I swear to you. Not in any real sense, anyway. You know what I mean?" ... The voice at the other end came through again. "I remember about the fifth time I ever went on `Wise Child'. I subbed for Walt a few times when he was in a cast - remember when he was in the case? Anyway. I started bitching one night before broadcast. Seymour'd told me to shine my shoes just as I was going out the door with Waker. I was furious. The studio audience were all morons, the announcer was a moron, the sponsors were morons, and I just damn well wasn't going to shine my shoes for them, I told Seymour. I said they couldn't see them anyway, where we sat. He said to shine them anyway. He said to shine them for the Fat Lady. I didn't know what the hell he was talking about, but he had a very Seymour look on his face, and so I did it. He never did tell me who the Fat Lady was, but I shined my shoes for the Fat Lady every time I ever went on the air again - all the years you and I were on the program together, if you remember. I don't think I missed more than just a couple of times. This terribly clear, clear picture of the Fat Lady formed in my mind. I had her sitting on this porch all day, swatting flies, with her radio going full-blast from morning till night. I figured the heat was terrible, and she probably had cancer, and - I don't know. Anyway, seemed goddam clear why Seymour wanted me to shine my shoes when I went on air. It made *sense*." ... "... Let me tell you something now, buddy ... Are you listening?" ... "I don't care where an actor acts. It can be in summer stock, in can be over a radio, it can be over television, it can be in a goddam Broadway theatre, complete with the most fashionable, most well-fed, most sunburned-looking audience you can imagine. But I'll tell you a terrible secret - Are you listening to me? *There isn't anyone out there who isn't Seymour's Fat Lady.* That goddam cousins by the dozens. There isn't anyone *any*where that isn't Seymour's Fat Lady. Don't you know that? Don't you know that goddam secret yet? And don't you know - listen to me, now - *don't you know who that Fat Lady really is?*... Ah, buddy. Ah, buddy. It's Christ Himself. Christ Himself, buddy.

One other thing. And that's all. I promise you. But the thing is, you raved and you bitched when you came home about the stupidity of audiences. The goddam `unskilled laughter' coming from the fifth row. And that's right, that's right - God knows it's depressing. I'm not saying it isn't. But that's none of your business, really. That's none of your business, Franny. An artist's only concern is to shoot for some kind of perfection, and *on his own terms*, not anyone else's. You have no right to think about those things. I swear to you. Not in any real sense, anyway. You know what I mean?" ... The voice at the other end came through again. "I remember about the fifth time I ever went on `Wise Child'. I subbed for Walt a few times when he was in a cast - remember when he was in the case? Anyway. I started bitching one night before broadcast. Seymour'd told me to shine my shoes just as I was going out the door with Waker. I was furious. The studio audience were all morons, the announcer was a moron, the sponsors were morons, and I just damn well wasn't going to shine my shoes for them, I told Seymour. I said they couldn't see them anyway, where we sat. He said to shine them anyway. He said to shine them for the Fat Lady. I didn't know what the hell he was talking about, but he had a very Seymour look on his face, and so I did it. He never did tell me who the Fat Lady was, but I shined my shoes for the Fat Lady every time I ever went on the air again - all the years you and I were on the program together, if you remember. I don't think I missed more than one just a couple of times. This terribly clear, clear picture of the Fat Lady formed in my time. I had her sitting on this porch all day, swatting flies, with her radio going full-blast from morning till night. I figured the heat was terrible, and she probably had cancer, and - I don't know. Anyway, seemed goddam clear why Seymour wanted me to shine my shoes when I went on air. It made *sense*." ... "... Let me tell you something now, buddy ... Are you listening?" ... "I don't care where an actor acts. It can be in summer stock, in can be over a radio, it can be over television, it can be in a goddam Broadway theatre, complete with the most fashionable, most well-fed, most sunburned-looking audience you can imagine. But I'll tell you a terrible secret - Are you listening to me? *There isn't anyone out there who isn't Seymour's Fat Lady.* That goddam cousins by the dozens. There isn't anyone *any*where that isn't Seymour's Fat Lady. Don't you know that? Don't you know that goddam secret yet? And don't you know - listen to me, now - *don't you know who that Fat Lady really is?*... Ah, buddy. Ah, buddy. It's Christ Himself. Christ Himself, buddy.

The captain? Sophia stood staring numbly after him. Had he just said he’d introduce her to the captain? Of someone else was the captain, then who on earth was this man? One thing was clear. Whoever he was, he had her trunks. And he was walking away. Cursing under her breath, Sophia picked up her skirts and trotted after him, dodging boatmen and barrels and coils of tarred rope as she pursued him down the quay. A forest of tall masts loomed overhead, striping the dock with shadow. Breathless, she regained his side just as he neared the dock’s edge. “But…aren’t you Captain Grayson?” “I,” he said, pitching her smaller trunk into a waiting rowboat, “am Mr. Grayson, owner of the Aphrodite and principle investor in her cargo.” The owner. Well, that was some relief. The tavern-keeper must have been confused. The porter deposited her larger truck alongside the first, and Mr. Grayson dismissed him with a word and a coin. He plunked one polished Hessian on the rowboat’s seat and shifted his weight to it, straddling the gap between boat and dock. Hand outstretched, he beckoned her with an impatient twitch of his fingers. “Miss Turner?” Sophia inched closer to the dock’s edge and reached one gloved hand toward his, considering how best to board the bobbing craft without losing her dignity overboard. The moment her fingers grazed his palm, his grin tightened over her hand. He pulled swiftly, wrenching her feet from the dock and a gasp from her throat. A moment of weightlessness-and then she was aboard. Somehow his arm had whipped around her waist, binding her to his solid chest. He released her just as quickly, but a lilt of the rowboat pitched Sophia back into his arms. “Steady there,” he murmured through a small smile. “I have you.” A sudden gust of wind absconded with his hat. He took no notice, but Sophia did. She noticed everything. Never in her life had she felt so acutely aware. Her nerves were draw taut as harp strings, and her senses hummed. The man radiated heat. From exertion, most likely. Or perhaps from a sheer surplus of simmering male vigor. The air around them was cold, but he was hot. And as he held her tight against his chest, Sophia felt that delicious, enticing heat burn through every layer of her clothing-cloak, gown, stays, chemise, petticoat, stockings, drawers-igniting desire in her belly. And sparking a flare of alarm. This was a precarious position indeed. The further her torso melted into his, the more certainly he would detect her secret: the cold, hard bundle of notes and coin lashed beneath her stays. She pushed away from him, dropping onto the seat and crossing her arms over her chest. Behind him, the breeze dropped his hat into a foamy eddy. He still hadn’t noticed its loss. What he noticed was her gesture of modesty, and he gave her a patronizing smile. “Don’t concern yourself, Miss Turner. You’ve nothing in there I haven’t seen before.” Just for that, she would not tell him. Farewell, hat.

When we are sold perfume, we are accustomed to also being sold the idea of a life we will never have. Coty's Chypre enabled Guerlain to create Mitsouko; Coty's Emeraude of 1921 was the bedrock on which Shalimar was built and Coty's L'Origan become the godmother of L'heure bleue, also by Guerlain. Some people dedicate themselves to making life beautiful. With instinctual good taste, magpie tendencies and a flair for color, they weave painfully exquisite tableaux, defining the look of an era. Paul Poiret was one such person. After his success, he went bust in 1929 and had to sell his leftover clothing stock as rags. Swept out of the picture by a new generation of designers, his style too ornate and Aladdinesque, Poiret ended his days as a street painter and died in poverty. It was Poiret who saw that symbolic nomenclature could turn us into frenzied followers, transforming our desire to own a perfume into desperation. The beauty industry has always been brilliant at turning insecurities into commercial opportunities. Readers could buy the cologne to relax during times of anxiety or revive themselves from strain. Particularly in the 1930s, releases came thick and fast, intended to give the impression of bounty, the provision of beauty to all women in the nation. Giving perfumes as a gift even came under the Soviet definition of kulturnost or "cultured behavior", including to aunts and teachers on International Women's Day. Mitsouko is a heartening scent to war when alone or rather, when not wanting to feel lonely. Using fragrance as part of a considered daily ritual, the territorial marking of our possessions and because it offers us a retrospective sense of naughtiness. You can never tell who is going to be a Nr. 5 wearer. No. 5 has the precision of well-cut clothes and that special appeal which comes from a clean, bare room free of the knick-knacks that would otherwise give away its age. Its versatility may well be connected to its abstraction. Gardenia perfumes are not usually the more esoteric or intellectual on the shelves but exist for those times when we demand simply to smell gorgeous. You can depend on the perfume industry to make light of the world's woes. No matter how bad things get, few obstacles can block the shimmer and glitz of a new fragrance. Perfume became so fashionable as a means of reinvention and recovery that the neurology department at Columbia University experimented with the administration of jasmine and tuberose perfumes, in conjunction with symphony music, to treat anxiety, hysteria and nightmares. Scent enthusiasts cared less for the nuances of a composition and more for the impact a scent would have in society. In Ancient Rome, the Stoics were concerned about the use of fragrance by women as a mask for seducing men or as a vehicle of deception. The Roman satirist Juvenal talked of women buying scent with adultery in mind and such fears were still around in the 1940s and they are here with us today. Similarly, in crime fiction, fragrance is often the thing that gives the perpetrator away. Specifically in film noir, scent gets associated with misdemeanors. With Opium, the drugs tag was simply the bait. What YSL was really marketing, with some genius, was perfume as me time: a daily opportunity to get languid and to care sod-all about anything or anyone else.

That black horse we used for packin’ up here is the most cantankerous beast alive,” Jake grumbled, rubbing his arm. Ian lifted his gaze from the initials on the tabletop and turned to Jake, making no attempt to hide his amusement. “Bit you, did he?” “Damn right he bit me!” the older man said bitterly. “He’s been after a chuck of me since we left the coach at Hayborn and loaded those sacks on his back to bring up here.” “I warned you he bites anything he can reach. Keep your arm out of his way when you’re saddling him.” “It weren’t my arm he was after, it was my arse! Opened his mouth and went for it, only I saw him outter the corner of my eye and swung around, so he missed.” Jakes’s frown darkened when he saw the amusement in Ian’s expression. “Can’t see why you’ve bothered to feed him all these years. He doesn’t deserve to share a stable with your other horses-beauties they are, every one but him.” “Try slinging packs over the backs of one of those and you’ll see why I took him. He was suitable for using as a pack mule; none of my other cattle would have been,” ian said, frowning as he lifted his head and looked about at the months of accumulated dirt covering everything. “He’s slower’n a pack mule,” Jake replied. “Mean and stubborn and slow,” he concluded, but he, too, was frowning a little as he looked around at the thick layers of dust coating every surface. “Thought you said you’d arranged for some village wenches to come up here and clean and cook fer us. This place is a mess.” “I did. I dictated a message to Peters for the caretaker, asking him to stock the place with food and to have two women come up here to clean and cook. The food is here, and there are chickens out in the barn. He must be having difficulty finding two women to stay up here.” “Comely women, I hope,” Jake said. “Did you tell him to make the wenches comely?” Ian paused in his study of the spiderwebs strewn across the ceiling and cast him an amused look. “You wanted me to tell a seventy-year-old caretaker who’s half-blind to make certain the wenches were comely?” “Couldn’ta hurt ‘t mention it,” Jake grumbled, but he looked chastened. “The village is only twelve miles away. You can always stroll down there if you’ve urgent need of a woman while we’re here. Of course, the trip back up here may kill you,” he joked referring to the winding path up the cliff that seemed to be almost vertical. “Never mind women,” Jake said in an abrupt change of heart, his tanned, weathered face breaking into a broad grin. “I’m here for a fortnight of fishin’ and relaxin’, and that’s enough for any man. It’ll be like the old days, Ian-peace and quiet and naught else. No hoity-toity servants hearin’ every word what’s spoke, no carriages and barouches and matchmaking mamas arrivin’ at your house. I tell you, my boy, though I’ve not wanted to complain about the way you’ve been livin’ the past year, I don’t like these servents o’ yours above half. That’s why I didn’t come t’visit you very often. Yer butler at Montmayne holds his nose so far in t’air, it’s amazin’ he gets any oxhegen, and that French chef o’ yers practically threw me out of his kitchens. That what he called ‘em-his kitchens, and-“ The old seaman abruptly broke off, his expression going from irate to crestfallen, “Ian,” he said anxiously, “did you ever learn t’ cook while we was apart?” “No, did you?” “Hell and damnation, no!” Jake said, appalled at the prospect of having to eat anything he fixed himself.

Like,” he repeats with distaste. “How about I tell you what I don’t like? I do not like postmodernism, postapocalyptic settings, postmortem narrators, or magic realism. I rarely respond to supposedly clever formal devices, multiple fonts, pictures where they shouldn’t be—basically, gimmicks of any kind. I find literary fiction about the Holocaust or any other major world tragedy to be distasteful—nonfiction only, please. I do not like genre mash-ups à la the literary detective novel or the literary fantasy. Literary should be literary, and genre should be genre, and crossbreeding rarely results in anything satisfying. I do not like children’s books, especially ones with orphans, and I prefer not to clutter my shelves with young adult. I do not like anything over four hundred pages or under one hundred fifty pages. I am repulsed by ghostwritten novels by reality television stars, celebrity picture books, sports memoirs, movie tie-in editions, novelty items, and—I imagine this goes without saying—vampires. I rarely stock debuts, chick lit, poetry, or translations. I would prefer not to stock series, but the demands of my pocketbook require me to. For your part, you needn’t tell me about the ‘next big series’ until it is ensconced on the New York Times Best Sellers list. Above all, Ms. Loman, I find slim literary memoirs about little old men whose little old wives have died from cancer to be absolutely intolerable. No matter how well written the sales rep claims they are. No matter how many copies you promise I’ll sell on Mother’s Day.” Amelia blushes, though she is angry more than embarrassed. She agrees with some of what A.J. has said, but his manner is unnecessarily insulting. Knightley Press doesn’t even sell half of that stuff anyway. She studies him. He is older than Amelia but not by much, not by more than ten years. He is too young to like so little. “What do you like?” she asks. “Everything else,” he says. “I will also admit to an occasional weakness for short-story collections. Customers never want to buy them though.” There is only one short-story collection on Amelia’s list, a debut. Amelia hasn’t read the whole thing, and time dictates that she probably won’t, but she liked the first story. An American sixth-grade class and an Indian sixth-grade class participate in an international pen pal program. The narrator is an Indian kid in the American class who keeps feeding comical misinformation about Indian culture to the Americans. She clears her throat, which is still terribly dry. “The Year Bombay Became Mumbai. I think it will have special int—” “No,” he says. “I haven’t even told you what it’s about yet.” “Just no.” “But why?” “If you’re honest with yourself, you’ll admit that you’re only telling me about it because I’m partially Indian and you think this will be my special interest. Am I right?” Amelia imagines smashing the ancient computer over his head. “I’m telling you about this because you said you liked short stories! And it’s the only one on my list. And for the record”—here, she lies—“it’s completely wonderful from start to finish. Even if it is a debut. “And do you know what else? I love debuts. I love discovering something new. It’s part of the whole reason I do this job.” Amelia rises. Her head is pounding. Maybe she does drink too much? Her head is pounding and her heart is, too. “Do you want my opinion?” “Not particularly,” he says. “What are you, twenty-five?” “Mr. Fikry, this is a lovely store, but if you continue in this this this”—as a child, she stuttered and it occasionally returns when she is upset; she clears her throat—“this backward way of thinking, there won’t be an Island Books before too long.

Mazel Amsel- I have the obsession of destroying Nevaeh, she is so perfect, I cannot stand it! My girls have to be on top, and I am never going to let her be anything, I will make sure of it! That is what I have been doing for years. Nevaeh that no good little pussy licker; even if she knows it is me, she will not be able to ‘Prove it.’ I am just that well-liked by everyone, I am so powerful that no one will ever defeat me. I am the master manipulator, Nevaeh- yes, she is the tower! She is about for a hundred pounds, unnatural blond hair, lime green glowing eyes, and a voice that bellows! To me, she looks like a bulldog in the face, yet evil wicked witch-like also, yet to everyone else she blends in, to the others she looks as they do, just a normal mom, with normal kids. Yet I think she is crumbling, I think some people are seeing through her veil, because of what happened recently. Mazel- I have everyone wrapped around my little finger. Likewise, if they do not bow down to me, I will make their life a living hell. That is the way; I have to have it, all the time for Nevaeh! I have to know what she is doing at all times. I have to hack into her social networking and get her pears to think she is a ‘Creep’ and ‘Stocker’ to young girls. So, she has no friends at all. So, my girls can be the supreme of this area, so that they can do as they please, without anyone stopping them from being the best, no matter what, and from getting what they want, and what I want for them. Besides, foremost I wanted to make sure that she would never date anyone. So, I came up with the story of telling everyone that she was into girls and that she is just plain crazy. I should know my eyes are on her always. I did not want to see her go to proms; I did not want to see her succeed. I did not want her to be loved. I would like to see her die, and not walk away from it. I have dreamed of ways to kill her repeatedly. Like this one, I would like to see her be impaled on a sharp wooden stick, starting through her butt hole, and then slowly have gravity have it go up into her delicious miniature body until it hits her brain, and she screams out my girl’s names, as we get what we need. I would love to see a Nevaeh- kabob! I would love to see her stoned out in the open with rocks! I would love to see my girls bite their nipples off with their teeth! I want to see my girl claw her up to head to toe. I hunger to see them scratch her sweet blue eyes that are so heavenly right out of her face! I want to see her gush that cobalt blood like a waterfall from her naked sliced-up body. Yes, I want us to torture her any way we can until she says yes to us. We are going to get at anything of hers we can until she comes with us! As we would, all dance around her, as we would light her up, cheerfully for the last time. How I would love to bleach and fry that perfect hair with chemicals. I and we all in our family want to fuck her up and down anyways we can! Mwah Ha, ha! Yes, Beforehand, we all would kiss, touch, lick, and stick her, and do what we want to get the life from her by sucking away. We would eat her soul away as it would come down from the heavens then through her body, and into ours, as we would drink it out, the way we do. Yes, yes, hell- yes, I can see it now! Yes, I want her soul! Besides, anything or everything I can get out of her to add to my shrine. We even have a voodoo doll of her with pins in it. I have a few things of hers like her hymen-damaged red blood tarnished pink polka-dotted gym underwear, and her indigo pantiliner she had on. That my girl ripped off of her in school, the more things we have the more we can control her mind, but I want more!

… The most important contribution you can make now is taking pride in your treasured home state. Because nobody else is. Study and cherish her history, even if you have to do it on your own time. I did. Don’t know what they’re teaching today, but when I was a kid, American history was the exact same every year: Christopher Columbus, Plymouth Rock, Pilgrims, Thomas Paine, John Hancock, Sons of Liberty, tea party. I’m thinking, ‘Okay, we have to start somewhere— we’ll get to Florida soon enough.’…Boston Massacre, Crispus Attucks, Paul Revere, the North Church, ‘Redcoats are coming,’ one if by land, two if by sea, three makes a crowd, and I’m sitting in a tiny desk, rolling my eyes at the ceiling. Hello! Did we order the wrong books? Were these supposed to go to Massachusetts?…Then things showed hope, moving south now: Washington crosses the Delaware, down through original colonies, Carolinas, Georgia. Finally! Here we go! Florida’s next! Wait. What’s this? No more pages in the book. School’s out? Then I had to wait all summer, and the first day back the next grade: Christopher Columbus, Plymouth Rock…Know who the first modern Floridians were? Seminoles! Only unconquered group in the country! These are your peeps, the rugged stock you come from. Not genetically descended, but bound by geographical experience like a subtropical Ellis Island. Because who’s really from Florida? Not the flamingos, or even the Seminoles for that matter. They arrived when the government began rounding up tribes, but the Seminoles said, ‘Naw, we prefer waterfront,’ and the white man chased them but got freaked out in the Everglades and let ’em have slot machines…I see you glancing over at the cupcakes and ice cream, so I’ll limit my remaining remarks to distilled wisdom: “Respect your parents. And respect them even more after you find out they were wrong about a bunch of stuff. Their love and hard work got you to the point where you could realize this. “Don’t make fun of people who are different. Unless they have more money and influence. Then you must. “If someone isn’t kind to animals, ignore anything they have to say. “Your best teachers are sacrificing their comfort to ensure yours; show gratitude. Your worst are jealous of your future; rub it in. “Don’t talk to strangers, don’t play with matches, don’t eat the yellow snow, don’t pull your uncle’s finger. “Skip down the street when you’re happy. It’s one of those carefree little things we lose as we get older. If you skip as an adult, people talk, but I don’t mind. “Don’t follow the leader. “Don’t try to be different—that will make you different. “Don’t try to be popular. If you’re already popular, you’ve peaked too soon. “Always walk away from a fight. Then ambush. “Read everything. Doubt everything. Appreciate everything. “When you’re feeling down, make a silly noise. “Go fly a kite—seriously. “Always say ‘thank you,’ don’t forget to floss, put the lime in the coconut. “Each new year of school, look for the kid nobody’s talking to— and talk to him. “Look forward to the wonderment of growing up, raising a family and driving by the gas station where the popular kids now work. “Cherish freedom of religion: Protect it from religion. “Remember that a smile is your umbrella. It’s also your sixteen-in-one reversible ratchet set. “ ‘I am rubber, you are glue’ carries no weight in a knife fight. “Hang on to your dreams with everything you’ve got. Because the best life is when your dreams come true. The second-best is when they don’t but you never stop chasing them. So never let the authority jade your youthful enthusiasm. Stay excited about dinosaurs, keep looking up at the stars, become an archaeologist, classical pianist, police officer or veterinarian. And, above all else, question everything I’ve just said. Now get out there, class of 2020, and take back our state!

I discovered something else, and that is that suckers differ among themselves according to the degree of experience. The tyro knows nothing, and everybody, including himself, knows it. But the next, or second, grade thinks he knows a great deal and makes others feel that way too. He is the experienced sucker, who has studied not the market itself but a few remarks about the market made by a still higher grade of suckers. The second-grade sucker knows how to keep from losing his money in some of the ways that get the raw beginner. It is this semisucker rather than the 100 per cent article who is the real all-the-year-round support of the commission houses. He lasts about three and a half years on an average, as compared with a single season of from three to thirty weeks, which is the usual Wall Street life of a first offender. It is naturally the semisucker who is always quoting the famous trading aphorisms and the various rules of the game. He knows all the don'ts that ever fell from the oracular lips of the old stagers excepting the principal one, which is: Don't be a sucker! This semisucker is the type that thinks he has cut his wisdom teeth because he loves to buy on declines. He waits for them. He measures his bargains by the number of points it has sold off from the top. In big bull markets the plain unadulterated sucker, utterly ignorant of rules and precedents, buys blindly because he hopes blindly. He makes most of the money until one of the healthy reactions takes it away from him at one fell swoop. But the Careful Mike sucker does what I did when I thought I was playing the game intelligently according to the intelligence of others. I knew I needed to change my bucket-shop methods and I thought I was solving my problem with any change, particularly one that assayed high gold values according to the experienced traders among the customers.

this famous battle Rothschild had an agent who, as soon as victory was certain, set off for London and informed Rothschild. Rothschild started buying every British government share he could before anyone else heard the news. When they did, of course, the shares rocketed and Rothschild sold at a huge profit.

If your investment horizon is long—at least 25 or 30 years—there is only one sensible approach: Buy every month, automatically, and whenever else you can spare some money. The single best choice for this lifelong holding is a total stock-market index fund. Sell only when you need the cash

Fill-In-the-Blank Headlines with Examples They Didn't Think I Could ________, but I Did. This headline works well for many reasons, including our natural tendency to root for the underdog. We're fascinated with stories of people who overcome great obstacles and others' ridicule to achieve success. When this headline refers to something you have thought about doing, but talked yourself out of, you'll want to know if the successful person shared your doubt or fear or handicap. Examples: They Laughed When I Sat Down at the Piano — but Not When I Started to Play! They Grinned When the Waiter Spoke to Me in French — but Their Laughter Changed to Amazement at My Reply! Who Else Wants ________? I like this type of headline because of its strong implication that a lot of other people know something the reader doesn't. Examples: Who Else Wants a Hollywood Actress' Figure? Who Else Needs an Extra Hour Every Day? How ________ Made Me ________ This headline introduces a first-person story. People love stories and are remarkably interested in other people. This headline structure seems to work best with dramatic differences. Examples: How a “Fool Stunt” Made Me a Star Salesman. How a Simple Idea Made Me “Plant Manager of the Year.” How Relocating to Tennessee Saved Our Company $1 Million a Year Are You ________? The question headline is used to grab attention by challenging, provoking, or arousing curiosity. Examples: Are You Ashamed of the Smells in Your House? Are You Prepared for the Next Stock Market Crash? How I ________ Very much like How ________ Made Me ________, this headline introduces a first-person story. The strength of the benefit at the end, obviously, controls its success. Examples: How I Raised Myself from Failure to Success in Selling. How I Retired at Age 40 — With a Guaranteed Income for Life.

DECISIVENESS The world is moving faster and faster. Stock market trades are made in milliseconds. Deals come and go on the Internet in a matter of minutes. More and more people are competing for good deals. So the faster you can make a decision the more likely you’ll be able to seize opportunities—before someone else does.

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Because for all my massive appetite, I cannot cook to save my life. When Grant came to my old house for the first time, he became almost apoplectic at the contents of my fridge and cupboards. I ate like a deranged college frat boy midfinals. My fridge was full of packages of bologna and Budding luncheon meats, plastic-wrapped processed cheese slices, and little tubs of pudding. My cabinets held such bounty as cases of chicken-flavored instant ramen noodles, ten kinds of sugary cereals, Kraft Macaroni & Cheese, and cheap canned tuna. My freezer was well stocked with frozen dinners, heavy on the Stouffer's lasagna and bags of chicken tenders. My garbage can was a wasteland of take-out containers and pizza boxes. In my defense, there was also always really good beer and a couple of bottles of decent wine. My eating habits have done a pretty solid turnaround since we moved in together three years ago. Grant always leaved me something set up for breakfast: a parfait of Greek yogurt and homemade granola with fresh berries, oatmeal that just needs a quick reheat and a drizzle of cinnamon honey butter, baked French toast lingering in a warm oven. He almost always brings me leftovers from the restaurant's family meal for me to take for lunch the next day. I still indulge in greasy takeout when I'm on a job site, as much for the camaraderie with the guys as the food itself; doesn't look good to be noshing on slow-roasted pork shoulder and caramelized root vegetables when everyone else is elbow-deep in a two-pound brick of Ricobene's breaded steak sandwich dripping marinara.

Someone you know has just seen a great movie. Someone else had an idle thought. There’s been a suicide bombing in South Asia. Stocks soared today. Pop star has a painful secret. Someone has a new opinion. Someone is in a taxi. Please support this worthy cause. He needs that report from you—where is it? Someone wants you to join the discussion. A manhunt is on for the killers. Try this in bed. Someone’s enjoying sorbet, mmmm. Your account is now overdue. Easy chicken pot pie. Here’s a brilliant analysis. Latest vids from our African safari! Someone responded to your comment. Time’s running out, apply now. This is my new hair. Just heard an awesome joke. Someone is working hard on his big project. They had their baby! Click here for the latest vote count…

You have to study and learn so that you can make up your own mind about history and everything else but you can’t make up an empty mind. Stock your mind, stock your mind.

She was looking at him, her eyes dark with an odd, lifeless stillness; when she spoke, the motion of her lips was twisted by so evil a contempt that he did not dare identify it beyond knowing that it embraced them both; she said, “I know that you’d like to do it.” He felt no desire to pretend; oddly, for the first time, for this one chance, truth seemed much more pleasurable—truth, for once, serving his particular kind of enjoyment. “I think you know that it can’t be done,” he said. “Nobody does favors nowadays, if there’s nothing to gain in return. And the stakes are getting higher and higher. The gopher holes, as you called them, are so complex, so twisted and intertwisted that everybody has something on everybody else, and nobody dares move because he can’t tell who’ll crack which way or when. So he’ll move only when he has to, when the stakes are life or death—and that’s practically the only kind of stakes we’re playing for now. Well, what’s your private life to any of those boys? That you’d like to hold your husband—what’s in it for them, one way or another? And my personal stock-in-trade—well, there’s nothing I could offer them at the moment in exchange for trying to blast a whole court clique out of a highly profitable deal. Besides, right now, the top boys wouldn’t do it at any price.

Minnesota, Eddie,” said Dagny grimly, closing the drawer of her special file. “Tell the Minnesota Division to ship half their stock of wire to Montana.” “But good God, Dagny!—with the peak of the harvest rush approaching—” “They’ll hold through it—I think. We don’t dare lose a single supplier of copper.” “But I have!” screamed James Taggart, when she reminded him once more. “I have obtained for you the top priority on copper wire, the first claim, the uppermost ration level, I’ve given you all the cards, certificates, documents and requisitions—what else do you want?” “The copper wire.” “I’ve done all I could! Nobody can blame me!

The next time you go to the supermarket, look closely at a can of peas. Think about all the work that went into it—the farmers, truckers, and supermarket employees, the miners and metalworkers who made the can—and think how miraculous it is that you can buy this can for under a dollar. At every step of the way, competition among suppliers rewarded those whose innovations shaved a penny off the cost of getting that can to you. If God is commonly thought to have created the world and then arranged it for our benefit, then the free market (and its invisible hand) is a pretty good candidate for being a god. You can begin to understand why libertarians sometimes have a quasi-religious faith in free markets. Now let’s do the devil’s work and spread chaos throughout the marketplace. Suppose that one day all prices are removed from all products in the supermarket. All labels too, beyond a simple description of the contents, so you can’t compare products from different companies. You just take whatever you want, as much as you want, and you bring it up to the register. The checkout clerk scans in your food insurance card and helps you fill out your itemized claim. You pay a flat fee of $10 and go home with your groceries. A month later you get a bill informing you that your food insurance company will pay the supermarket for most of the remaining cost, but you’ll have to send in a check for an additional $15. It might sound like a bargain to get a cartload of food for $25, but you’re really paying your grocery bill every month when you fork over $2,000 for your food insurance premium. Under such a system, there is little incentive for anyone to find innovative ways to reduce the cost of food or increase its quality. The supermarkets get paid by the insurers, and the insurers get their premiums from you. The cost of food insurance begins to rise as supermarkets stock only the foods that net them the highest insurance payments, not the foods that deliver value to you. As the cost of food insurance rises, many people can no longer afford it. Liberals (motivated by Care) push for a new government program to buy food insurance for the poor and the elderly. But once the government becomes the major purchaser of food, then success in the supermarket and food insurance industries depends primarily on maximizing yield from government payouts. Before you know it, that can of peas costs the government $30, and all of us are paying 25 percent of our paychecks in taxes just to cover the cost of buying groceries for each other at hugely inflated costs. That, says Goldhill, is what we’ve done to ourselves. As long as consumers are spared from taking price into account—that is, as long as someone else is always paying for your choices—things will get worse.

Cash Cash as presented on the balance sheet means the money a company has in the bank, plus anything else (like stocks and bonds) that can readily be turned into cash. Really, it’s that simple. Later we’ll discuss measures of cash flow. For now, just know that when companies talk about cash, it really is the cold, hard stuff. .

I saw nothing- but darkness. Say- I am crazy also, I do not care! I would lie all the time to others, I would lie about my name, I would lie about where I lived, I would lie about being stocked, and Isolated in school I was a liar. I should have never been born; me being born like everyone else was a lie too. I know that now, but I did not back then. I - Jaylynn liked to be part of the softball team. I - Jaylynn liked to dance and sing. I - Jaylynn loves picking flowers in spring. I - Jaylynn also remembers the words that would sting. I - Jaylynn wanted a fling. I - Jaylynn wanted everything and had nothing. I - Jaylynn is who I was, you know I was nothing inspiring. As a young girl, I all was like taking things apart, yet I could not always get them back together.

Perhaps no one else would want me. Well, the rejection rate for new job applications is extraordinarily high. I tell my clients to assume 50:1, so their expectations are set properly. You are going to be passed over, in many cases, for many positions for which you are qualified. But that is rarely personal. It is, instead, a condition of existence, an inevitable consequence of somewhat arbitrary subjection to the ambivalent conditions of worth characterizing society. It is the consequence of the fact that CVs are easy to disseminate and difficult to process; that many jobs have unannounced internal candidates (and so are just going through the motions); and that some companies keep a rolling stock of applicants, in case they need to hire quickly. That is an actuarial problem, a statistical problem, a baseline problem—and not necessarily an indication that there is something specifically flawed about you. You must incorporate all that sustainingly pessimistic realism into your expectations, so that you do not become unreasonably downhearted. One hundred and fifty applications, carefully chosen; three to five interviews thereby acquired. That could be a mission of a year or more. That is much less than a lifetime of misery and downward trajectory. But it is not nothing. You need to fortify yourself for it, plan, and garner support from people who understand what you are up to and are realistically appraised of the difficulty and the options.

If you can’t figure out what category your stocks are in, then ask your broker. If a broker recommended the stocks in the first place, then you definitely ought to ask, because how else are you to know what you’re looking for? Are you looking for slow growth, fast growth, recession protection, a turnaround, a cyclical bounce, or assets?

•​Businesses that do not require my presence I own them, but they are managed or run by other people. If I have to work there, it’s not a business. It becomes my job. •​Stocks •​Bonds •​Income-generating real estate •​Notes (IOUs) •​Royalties from intellectual property such as music, scripts, and patents •​Anything else that has value, produces income or appreciates, and has a ready market

What is unique about the I hides itself exactly in what is unimaginable about a person. All we are able to imagine is what makes everyone like everyone else, what people have in common. The individual I is what differs from the common stock, that is, what cannot be guessed at or calculated, what must be unveiled, uncovered, conquered.

Though many details of these schemes are either complex or not yet public knowledge, one of the mechanisms is. Some exchanges, such as NASDAQ, let HF traders peek at customer orders ahead of everyone else for thirty milliseconds before the order goes to the exchange. Seeing an order to buy, for instance, the HF traders can buy first, pushing the stock price up, then resell to the customer at a profit. Seeing someone’s order to sell, the HF trader sells first, causing the stock to fall, and then buys it back at the lower price. How is this different from the crime of front-running, described in Wikipedia as “the illegal practice of a stock broker executing orders on a security for its own account while taking advantage of advance knowledge of pending orders from its customers”?

Note that investing, according to Graham, consists equally of three elements: you must thoroughly analyze a company, and the soundness of its underlying businesses, before you buy its stock; you must deliberately protect yourself against serious losses; you must aspire to “adequate,” not extraordinary, performance. An investor calculates what a stock is worth, based on the value of its businesses. A speculator gambles that a stock will go up in price because somebody else will pay even more for it. As Graham once put it, investors judge “the market price by established standards of value,” while speculators “base [their] standards of value upon the market price.”2 For

traditional rule of thumb was to subtract your age from 100 and invest that percentage of your assets in stocks, with the rest in bonds or cash. (A 28-year-old would put 72% of her money in stocks; an 81-year-old would put only 19% there.) Like everything else, these assumptions got overheated in the late 1990s. By 1999, a popular book argued that if you were younger than 30 you should put 95% of your money in stocks—even if you had only a “moderate” tolerance for risk!3

Shop for bargains in all markets. Consumers will always be poor. When the supermarket has a sale, say on toilet paper, the consumer runs in and stocks up. But when the housing or stock market has a sale, most often called a crash or correction, the same consumer often runs away from it. When the supermarket raises its prices, the consumer shops somewhere else. But when housing or the stock market raise their prices, the same consumer often rushes in and starts buying. Always remember: Profits are made in the buying, not in the selling.

Are stocks overvalued? What is bitcoin worth? How high can Tesla go? You can’t answer those questions with a formula. They’re driven by whatever someone else is willing to pay for them in any given moment—how they feel, what they want to believe, and how persuasive the storytellers are. And the stories change all the time. They can’t be predicted any more than you can predict what kind of mood you’ll be in three years from now.

For a moment, Poldo’s mind flashed back to when he was a young boy in his family workshop, when his father had sat him down and told him that if nothing else, he could take pride in being a good person. Since then, he’d discovered that being a good person was the last resort of self-esteem. In the upper echelons of Andarun’s financial industry, people prided themselves on the name of the firm they worked for, the size of the deals they closed, the title on their business card, and anything else that could be quickly boiled down to a sum of gold. With so much to take pride in beyond integrity, many bankers put little stock in it.

Selling short: You borrow a stock and sell it to someone else with a promise to repurchase it at a later date. This is done when you think a stock will go down in price, allowing you to sell it at the current market price and repurchase it at a lower price, then to sell it long or keep it with the expectation that the price will recover. Selling short is extremely risky because if a stock continues to increase in value, you could end up having to rebuy it at a price much higher than what you sold it for.

In general, if you polled all the doctors, I’d bet only a small percentage would turn out to be invested in medical stocks, and more would be invested in oil; and if you polled the shoe-store owners, more would be invested in aerospace than in shoes, while the aerospace engineers are more likely to dabble in shoe stocks. Why it is that stock certificates, like grasses, are always greener in somebody else’s pasture I’m not sure.

Failure is like a passing breeze among everything else that is part of nature. It is a normal part of living and learning. You don’t make a sale every time you try. You may take a bar examination more than once. You have no luck as a professional Bigfoot investigator. During a recessionary period, your stock portfolio gets hit. Some failures have consequences. The person who wishes to get drunk without ill effects is living in a dream world. In the world of commerce, failing to produce is likely to result in someone else getting your job. Most failures are fictional, such as thinking that if you are not 100 percent perfect in whatever you undertake, you are a failure. That show-stopping idea can lead to

Another example: seven years ago, some of us began fighting for fossil fuel divestment, and again we were told not to bother—if anyone did sell his stock, someone else would just buy it, and the world would roll on unchanged. But our little campaign became the largest of its kind in history

Trading light memories for dark ones. If nothing else, take a moment each day to appreciate its end in those last threads of light. Take stock in the completion of the day's end in knowing that tomorrow's is yours to make.

I have enough in stocks, investments, and savings to last me the rest of my life. I worked because I wanted to. But now, I want to do something else.” I swallowed, my pulse thundering. “What’s that?” “Win you back. No matter how long it takes.

Mark watched him through the window; he climbed into the black SUV—the driver’s side—and rolled out of the lot. A tad bit full of himself, Mark thought. But clients’ egos could be gold mines. And there was something else about Hadi specifically—an obliviousness, like an anti-charisma—that Mark felt paradoxically drawn to as well. These were the guys who ruled the world. They didn’t care what anybody thought of them. Maybe that was part of what separated Mark from that class of man: he knew he lacked a certain ruthlessness, but maybe it was even simpler than that, maybe he just put too much stock in the idea that everybody had to like him.

Haddam has always sheltered oddments like Paul, strangies you get used to seeing hanging around the Post Office or the newspaper kiosk, or at back tables in the library, reading China Today or Lancet and laughing about things only they know. These people wear the same clothes day-in, day-out, always appear fiercely involved in something, though in fact they’re doing nothing, since in an hour you see them involved in the same thing a block away. They are (or were) the love-child son or moody eldest daughter of some ex–New Jersey governor, long deceased, or the sallow, hollow-eyed offspring of some Swiss seminarian, who’s moved on. These aren’t the people who buy bump stocks or take up positions in a bell tower and rain terror upon an innocent world. They’re the watery presences at the periphery of yours and everyone else’s sight line, awaiting nothing, seemingly friendless (though not always), harming nothing and no one, growing old as you grow old, and who repair somewhere at night to sleep. It’s possible to think people like this don’t have lives full of expectancy and small triumphs. But they do.

Many have been supposedly foolproof but zany formulae that have made no one rich but the hucksters who sold them to the gullible. But over the years there have been some approaches that have enjoyed at least a modicum of success. These range from the Dow Theory first espoused by Wall Street Journal founder Charles Dow—essentially using technical indicators to try to identify and profit from different market phases—and David Butler’s CANSLIM system, to the value investing school articulated by Benjamin Graham. The earth-shattering suggestion of the research conducted in the 1960s and 1970s was that the code might actually be unbreakable, and efforts to decipher it were expensive and futile. Harry Markowitz’s modern portfolio theory and William Sharpe’s CAPM indicated that the market itself was the optimal balance between risks and return, while Gene Fama presented a cohesive, compelling argument for why that was: The net effect of the efforts of thousands upon thousands of investors continually trying to outsmart each other was that the stock market was efficient, and in practice hard to beat. Most investors should therefore just sit on their hands and buy the entire market. But in the 1980s and 1990s, a new round of groundbreaking research—some of it from the same efficient-markets disciples who had rattled the investing world in the 1960s and 1970s—started revealing some fault lines in the academic edifice built up in the previous decades. Perhaps the stock market wasn’t entirely efficient, and maybe there were indeed ways to beat it in the long run? Some gremlins in the system were always known, but often glossed over. Already in the early 1970s, Black and Scholes had noted that there were some odd issues with the theory, such as how less volatile stocks actually produced better long-term returns than choppier ones. That contradicted the belief that return and risk (using volatility as a proxy for risk) were correlated. In other words, loopier roller coasters produce greater thrills. Though the theory made intuitive sense, in practice it didn’t seem to hold up to rigorous scrutiny. This is why Scholes and Black initially proposed that Wells Fargo should set up a fund that would buy lower-volatility stocks (that is, low-beta) and use leverage to bring the portfolio’s overall volatility up to the broader stock market.7 Hey, presto, a roller coaster with the same number of loops as everyone else, but with even greater thrills. Nonetheless, the efficient-markets hypothesis quickly became dogma at business schools around the United States.

court. But the most knowledgeable people in the oil industry would know that that is not quite the way things are. I don’t ever want to say anything that those who know the most can question. Let’s try a different approach.” He did not say it to impress anyone. No one else was in the room with us. And until now I have never told the story publicly. But it set a standard of integrity in high places that has long outlived him.

If a crystal ball could tell you the truth about any one thing about yourself, life, the future, or anything else, what would you want to know, and why?

When living in Denver, me and my friend Tony – who’s actually up here now and does amazing photography and helped us with the photoshoot for this collection – we did this funny thing on the anniversary of the stock market crash. It was a protest at a mall in Denver, and we called it “Black Friday is the new Black Monday”. We wanted to make the hipster thing into something else, we wanted to see what potential it had. Because we were fascinated by Paris 68, we made these pamphlets that said stuff like “Real hipsters riot”. We tried to encourage that mythology of the hipster from Sorbonne, Paris. This guy you see in Godard movie. We went into Urban Outfitters, threw a bunch of shit, flipped over things, went outside, shot a bunch of fireworks. That was pretty cool. The IEF was grounded in certain theoretical premises of insurrectionist theory, continental philosophy, and critical theory. It was definitely all over the damn place.

By pouring continuous data about stocks into bars and barbershops, kitchens and cafés, taxicabs and truck stops, financial websites and financial TV turned the stock market into a nonstop national video game. The public felt more knowledgeable about the markets than ever before. Unfortunately, while people were drowning in data, knowledge was nowhere to be found. Stocks became entirely decoupled from the companies that had issued them—pure abstractions, just blips moving across a TV or computer screen. If the blips were moving up, nothing else mattered.

Salads?” he said. “I don’t usually make a lot of salads.” “I know this,” she said wearily. “But we need to make a couple of changes. Just minor changes. Buy some low-fat, whole-wheat bread for sandwiches. Don’t do pastas, breads and potatoes at every meal. Make salads, stock fresh fruit.” “There’s plenty of fruit around here,” he said. “Yeah, and it’s all in the pies.” “You have pie almost every day,” he pointed out. “You love my pies. You more than anyone, I think.” She scowled, then grimaced. “I’m going to stop doing that. Listen, can you make some lighter meals available, please? Or else I’m not going to be able to eat here all the time. I’ll have to pack a lunch, make my own dinner at home. This madness has to stop. I can’t keep gaining weight like this. I am not going to be fat!” Preacher tilted his head. “Jack complaining about the way you look?” he asked cautiously. “Of course not,” she said in frustration. “He thinks I’m perfect.” “Well, there you go.” “John, I don’t think you’re paying attention here. I have to go on a diet. You want me to write down what I need?” “No,” he said unhappily. “I think I’ve got it.” “Thanks.

Love…. Calvin had never put too much stock in love, and now he was in it so deep he never wanted to know anything else.     THE

Yesterday at dawn Roy was murdered. The quiet of the spring morning blinded him, and he did not see those who sought his life hiding behind the furrow. Let us not cast blame today on the murderers. What can we say against their terrible hatred of us? For eight years now, they have sat in the refugee camps of Gaza and have watched how, before their very eyes, we have turned their land and villages, where they and their forefathers previously dwelled, into our home. It is not among the Arabs of Gaza, but in our own midst that we must seek Roy’s blood. How did we shut our eyes and refuse to look squarely at our fate and see, in all its brutality, the fate of our generation? Let us today take stock of ourselves. We are a generation of settlement, and without the steel helmet and the gun’s muzzle we will not be able to plant a tree and build a house. Let us not fear to look squarely at the hatred that consumes and fills the lives of hundreds of Arabs who live around us. Let us not drop our gaze, lest our arms weaken. That is the fate of our generation. This is our choice—to be ready and armed, tough and hard—or else the sword shall fall from our hands and our lives will be cut short.

Why are we down here?” “To stock up on weapons.” Uncle Mort crossed to the far wall. “We need lots of ’em. Driggs, pick that up, it’s not going to kill you—” Driggs gave him a look. “Okay, it won’t further kill you. Take a couple of these, too.” He handed Lex and Driggs a few thin vials of Amnesia each. “What are these for?” “Weapons. Aren’t you paying attention?” He walked to yet another wall and began to load up on items that were, at long last, recognizable as instruments of death. “Guns?” she asked, surprised for some reason. “Not, like, Amnesia blow darts?” “Oh, which reminds me.” He took something else off the shelf. “What’s that?” “Amnesia blow darts.” Lex shook her head. “But why guns, if we have all of this other cool stuff?” “Because despite our best efforts to use Amnesia as much as we can instead of lethal force, we’ll probably need to kill some people, and guns kill people.” He moved on to the next wall and began rifling through more gadgets. “Or people kill people. I forget how the hippies say it. Now, this one’s for you, Lex. I’m going to need you to guard this with every meager iota of attention span you have left. Okay? I’m trusting you with this. Don’t lose it.” Lex got all her hopes up—even though she’d gotten to know Uncle Mort pretty well by now and should have known better than to get even a small percentage of her hopes up. And sure enough, the item he gave her caused the smile to evaporate right off her face. “Don’t lose it,” he repeated. Her eye twitched. “What is it?” “What does it look like?” “An oversize hole punch.” “Exactly.” “What?” she boomed as he went back to his papers. “You get guns, and Driggs gets the deadly Heisman, and all I get is an office supply?” “Yes. Don’t lose it.” It took every ounce of Lex’s strength to not kick the bubonic football into his face. Noticing this, Driggs swooped in and wrapped her in a calming, solid embrace. “Relax, spaz,” he said. “But he—” “—wouldn’t give you a bazooka. Oh, the unbearable trials and tribulations of the living.” Lex deflated. Nothing put things in perspective like remembering that your boyfriend had been killed not a few hours earlier and was now stuck in some hellish existence halfway between life and death. “Sorry,” she said, giving his arms a squeeze, happy that she could even do that. “That’s okay. Human problems are hard. Hangnails and tricky toothpaste tubes and getting shat on by birds and the like.” “Mondays suck too,” she mumbled into his chest. “Oh, Mondays are the worst

•    Businesses that do not require my presence I own them, but they are managed or run by other people. If I have to work there, it’s not a business. It becomes my job.        •    Stocks        •    Bonds        •    Income-generating real estate        •    Notes (IOUs)        •    Royalties from intellectual property such as music, scripts, and patents        •    Anything else that has value, produces income or appreciates, and has a ready market As

Go sell crazy someplace else; we're all stocked up here." (Brooks & Andrus, 1997).

TEN WAYS A PARTNER CAN HELP Before the baby’s born, help stock the freezer with meals that can be eaten with one hand. Find a good phone number for help and call it as needed. (La Leche League’s website, llli.org, and U.S.-based phone line, 877–4-LA LECHE (877–452–5324), can both lead you to your closest local group, and that’s a fast route to anything else you might need.) Buy the grocery basics, and keep easy, healthy snacks on hand. Get dinner—any dinner! Nights can be tough at first. Be flexible about where and when everyone sleeps. Going to bed early helps! Do more than your share. You may be what keeps the household running for a while. Everything won’t get done. Talk about what’s most important to her—a clean kitchen? a cleared desk?—and do that first. Get home on time. You’re like a breath of fresh air for mother and baby both. Helping out means helping emotionally, too. Remind her how much you love her, how wonderful she looks, and what a great job she’s doing. There she is, holding your child. She really is beautiful, isn’t she? Remind her that this part is temporary. Most women feel it takes at least six weeks to start to have a handle on this motherhood thing. Life will settle down. But it takes a while.

Lying by Johannes in the darkness, envying him the unquestioned habit of sleep, the way he could remove himself, I wished that I might pause, take stock; that is a thought that comes back to me now: that I would like to pause pregnancy like a film, to walk away, do something else, returning later when I have had time to rest or think. I had always, before my pregnancy, regarded my body as a kind of tool, a necessary mechanism, largely self-sustaining, which, unless malfunctioning, did what I instructed of it, and so to have my agency so abruptly curtailed, revealed as little more than conceit, felt like betrayal. I no longer listened to my own command. Inside me, while I wished that I might be able to be elsewhere, that I might leave my body in the frowsty sheets and go downstairs to sit in the dark kitchen, unswollen and cool, cells split to cells, thoughtless and ascending, forming heart and lungs, eyes, ears- a hand grew nails- this child already going about its business, its still uncomprehending mind unreachable, apart.

Selling covered calls is similar to buying a house and renting it to someone else. But instead of renting your house, you are renting your stocks.

Sorting Laundry" Folding clothes, I think of folding you into my life. Our king-sized sheets like tablecloths for the banquets of giants, pillowcases, despite so many washings, seems still holding our dreams. Towels patterned orange and green, flowered pink and lavender, gaudy, bought on sale, reserved, we said, for the beach, refusing, even after years, to bleach into respectability. So many shirts and skirts and pants recycling week after week, head over heels recapitulating themselves. All those wrinkles To be smoothed, or else ignored; they're in style. Myriad uncoupled socks which went paired into the foam like those creatures in the ark. And what's shrunk is tough to discard even for Goodwill. In pockets, surprises: forgotten matches, lost screws clinking the drain; well-washed dollars, legal tender for all debts public and private, intact despite agitation; and, gleaming in the maelstrom, one bright dime, broken necklace of good gold you brought from Kuwait, the strangely tailored shirt left by a former lover… If you were to leave me, if I were to fold only my own clothes, the convexes and concaves of my blouses, panties, stockings, bras turned upon themselves, a mountain of unsorted wash could not fill the empty side of the bed.

One of the more useful things I learned as a midshipman at Maine Maritime Academy were the names of the seven masts of a seven masted schooner. When I mentioned to the 600 people in attendance at a Homecoming event that my degree was a BS in Marlinspike Seamanship no one laughed, leaving me in the embarrassing position of having to explain that actually I had a Bachelor of Marine Science degree. Later looking into a mirror I convinced myself that I really didn’t look old enough to have lived in an era when wooden ships were sailed by iron men. What I remembered was that we were wooden men sailing on iron ships that were actually made of steel, however I can remember schooners sailing along the coast of New England and I do remember the seven names of a seven masted schooner. In actual fact only one seven masted schooner was ever built and she was the she a 475 foot, steel hulled wind driven collier/tanker named the Thomas W. Lawson, named after a Boston millionaire, stock-broker, book author, and President of the Boston Bay State Gas Co. Launched in 1902 she held the distinction of being the largest pure sail ship ever built. Originally the names of the masts were the foremast, mainmast, mizzenmast, spanker, jigger, driver, and pusher. Later the spanker became the kicker and the spanker moved to next to last place, with the pusher becoming the after mast. Depending on whom you talked to, the names and their order drifted around and a lot of different naming systems were formed. Some systems used numbers and others the days of the week, however there are very few, if any of the iron men left to dispute what the masts were called. The Thomas W. Lawson had two steam winches and smaller electrically driven winches, to raise and lower her huge sails. The electricity was provided by a generator, driven by what was termed a donkey engine. On November 20, 1907 the large 475 foot schooner sailed for England. Experiencing stormy weather she passed inside of the Bishop Rock lighthouse and attempted to anchor. That night both anchor chains broke, causing the ship to smash against Shag Rock near Annet. The schooner, pounded by heavy seas capsized and sank. Of the 19 souls aboard Captain George W. Dow and the ships engineer Edward L. Rowe were the only survivors. Everyone else, including the pilot, drown and were buried in a mass grave in St Agnes cemetery.

Dark clouds skittered over the half moon, making shadows on her face, and the wind coming off the lake, whipped more of her hair loose. It reached for him, caressing his cheeks like loving fingers. Right then, he was afraid he’d do anything she asked of him. She leaned back, hands flat on the ground behind her, and her legs stretched out in front, one crossed over the other at her ankle. She wore no stockings tonight. Her lean legs were bare and smooth and tempting him to touch. He realized she was barefoot. And he thought about kissing her all the way from her toes to her lips. God, she was beautiful. Like an angel. Or something else ethereal and elusive and mysterious. Something you could glimpse and observe and long for, but too precious ever to hold. But he wanted to hold her. He wanted it so much he couldn’t look away. He was mesmerized by her eyes and the musical quality to her pure voice.

When Warren was a little boy fingerprinting nuns and collecting bottle caps, he had no knowledge of what he would someday become. Yet as he rode his bike through Spring Valley, flinging papers day after day, and raced through the halls of The Westchester, pulse pounding, trying to make his deliveries on time, if you had asked him if he wanted to be the richest man on earth—with his whole heart, he would have said, Yes. That passion had led him to study a universe of thousands of stocks. It made him burrow into libraries and basements for records nobody else troubled to get. He sat up nights studying hundreds of thousands of numbers that would glaze anyone else’s eyes. He read every word of several newspapers each morning and sucked down the Wall Street Journal like his morning Pepsi, then Coke. He dropped in on companies, spending hours talking about barrels with the woman who ran an outpost of Greif Bros. Cooperage or auto insurance with Lorimer Davidson. He read magazines like the Progressive Grocer to learn how to stock a meat department. He stuffed the backseat of his car with Moody’s Manuals and ledgers on his honeymoon. He spent months reading old newspapers dating back a century to learn the cycles of business, the history of Wall Street, the history of capitalism, the history of the modern corporation. He followed the world of politics intensely and recognized how it affected business. He analyzed economic statistics until he had a deep understanding of what they signified. Since childhood, he had read every biography he could find of people he admired, looking for the lessons he could learn from their lives. He attached himself to everyone who could help him and coattailed anyone he could find who was smart. He ruled out paying attention to almost anything but business—art, literature, science, travel, architecture—so that he could focus on his passion. He defined a circle of competence to avoid making mistakes. To limit risk he never used any significant amount of debt. He never stopped thinking about business: what made a good business, what made a bad business, how they competed, what made customers loyal to one versus another. He had an unusual way of turning problems around in his head, which gave him insights nobody else had. He developed a network of people who—for the sake of his friendship as well as his sagacity—not only helped him but also stayed out of his way when he wanted them to. In hard times or easy, he never stopped thinking about ways to make money. And all of this energy and intensity became the motor that powered his innate intelligence, temperament, and skills.

Fuck,” Syn growled. He was still thinking of solutions when he heard something scrape against his doorknob. Something metal was tampering with the lock. If he were anywhere else in the apartment he wouldn’t have heard it, but he was right next to the door, so he could hear someone trying to get in. He instinctually moved to stand in front of Furi, pulling his Sig from its holster and unlocking the safety. He felt Furi tensing behind him. He could hear the tool manipulating the lock mechanism. Is this bastard really fuckin’ brave enough to break into my home in broad goddamn daylight? Syn was in awe at the size of this guy’s balls. The closet door was arm's length away. He yanked it open and grabbed the blanket off the top shelf, pulling his loaded twelve-gauge shotgun down just as the door eased open. All Syn could see was the tip of a black boot. Furi griped his shoulder. “Hey. Listen to this!” Syn yelled out. He put the stock of the gun firmly against his shoulder and pulled the pump back in two extremely swift moves. The sound was extremely loud and intimidating in the quiet room, by far the scariest sound an intruder could hear. “Don’t shoot, Dirty Harry.” The irritating chuckle that followed was unmistakable. “Son of a bitch,” Syn grumbled. “Day, have you lost your fuckin’ mind?” His Lieutenants came all the way through the door, Day laughing at the pissed look on Syn's face and Furi leaning on the wall behind him recovering from a panic attack. “Syn. What the hell is going on man? Are you really gonna put a buckshot in someone you think is breakin’ into your little-ass apartment? Because, you do know that that’s excessive force, right?” God asked, looking at him expectantly. “I was just scaring them off. No one comes in after hearing that sound, trust me.” Syn removed the shell and placed the gun back in the closet, covering it with the blanket. He turned to look at Furi. He looked a little pale but he was okay. Syn spun back around, “Day. Knock on my damn door like a normal visitor and wait for me to say come in!” Day pfftd, plopping down on the couch. “You don’t invite the wind. The wind just–” “Stop saying that stupid wind bullshit. Because if your door is shut and you weather guard that bitch then the wind stays the fuck out until ... You. Open. The. Door.” Syn’s dark eyes bored into Day’s hazel ones. God’s laugh was raspy, while Day looked bewildered. “But we’re family.” “Oh for fuck’s sake,” Syn grumbled, he had to get going; he had no time to explain to Day about how to behave in civilized society. He turned serious eyes back on Furi. “I gotta go, but I really think–” Furi pulled Syn to him before he could finish the sentence, kissed him hard on the mouth before turning, heading to the bedroom. “Just concentrate on your job and don’t take any officers away from their assignments to follow me. There could be someone out there who really needs their help.” Syn didn’t get to say anything else because Furi had closed the bedroom door. End of discussion.

How to Obtain Power of Attorney. This looks interesting.” Was that sarcasm? A slim pamphlet with a sad stock photo of someone holding an old person’s hand. When really getting power of attorney was more like grabbing that old person’s hand and tying it to their side before they could hurt themselves. Or someone else.

The one principle that applies to nearly all these so-called “technical approaches” is that one should buy because a stock or the market has gone up and one should sell because it has declined. This is the exact opposite of sound business sense everywhere else, and it is most unlikely that it can lead to lasting success on Wall Street.

At age forty-seven, Warren had already accomplished everything he had ever imagined he could want. He was worth $72 million. He ran a company that was worth $135 million.41 His newspaper had won the two highest prizes in journalism. He was one of the most important men in Omaha and increasingly prominent at a national level. He was serving on the boards of the largest local bank, the Washington Post, and a number of other companies. He had been CEO of three companies and had bought and sold successfully more stocks than most people could name in a lifetime. Most of his original partners were now enormously rich. All he wanted was to keep on making money for the thrill of it without changing anything else about his life. He

In the Metro, one evening, I looked closely around me: everyone had come from somewhere else . . . Among us, though, two or three faces from here, embarrassed silhouettes that seemed to be apologising for their presence. The same spectacle in London. Today’s migrations are no longer made by compact displacements but by successive infiltrations: little by little, individuals insinuate themselves among the “natives,” too anaemic and too distinguished to stoop to the notion of a “territory.” After a thousand years of vigilance, we open the gates . . . When one thinks of the long rivalries between the French and the English, then between the French and the Germans, it seems as if each nation, by weakening one another, had as its task to speed the hour of the common downfall so that other specimens of humanity may relay them. Like its predecessor, the new Völkerwanderung will provoke an ethnic confusion whose phases cannot be distinctly foreseen. Confronted with these disparate profiles, the notion of a community homogeneous to whatever degree is inconceivable. The very possibility of so heteroclite a crowd suggests that in the space it occupies there no longer existed, among the indigenous, any desire to safeguard even the shadow of an identity. At Rome, in the third century of our era, out of a million inhabitants, only sixty thousand were of Latin stock. Once a people has fulfilled the historical idea which was its mission to incarnate, it no longer has any excuse to preserve its difference, to cherish its singularity, to safeguard its features amidst a chaos of faces.

Entry and exit points are vital parts of trading and investing. That is worth repeating.  Entry and Exit points are vital parts of Trading and Investing. Whether you are Day Trading, Swing Trading, or are a Long Term Investor. Why would you ever buy a stock at the wrong time? Unfortunately, there are many market participants with no training that do it every day. The Pros love the uninformed, the novices, and the Pigs. Who else are they going to sell to when a stock has reached a resistance point, or reached an all time high? You guessed it. They are going to sell to the novices and the pigs who are hoping for more advance. Then when the stock drops, falls to support, or finds support somewhere, the Pros will buy it back from the novice who has just taken a loss and a beating. “The time to buy is when blood is running in the streets” ~Baron Rothschild

worth, based on the value of its businesses. A speculator gambles that a stock will go up in price because somebody else will pay even more for it.

In my world, real assets fall into several different categories: 1. Businesses that do not require my presence. I own them, but they are managed or run by other people. If I have to work there, it's not a business. It becomes my job. 2. Stocks. 3. Bonds. 4. Mutual funds. 5. Income-generating real estate. 6. Notes (lOUs). 7. Royalties from intellectual property such as music, scripts, patents. 8. And anything else that has value, produces income or appreciates and has a ready market.

She dangled in mid-air, her skirt hooked up on the trellis, a pair of stockings and drawers on full display. "Tell me madam, have we met before?" he called up to her. "You look familiar, in an odd way." He pretended to think hard, rubbing his chin. "For pity's sake," she hissed, her voice muffled by the ivy. "Help me down you fool." "Hmmm. Let me consider it. Perhaps, for once, you ought to be polite to me and respectful for once. Or else you can hang there until Easter." "Suit yourself then! I can make my own way down." "Shall you swing from my chandelier as an encore?" he asked politely, greatly enjoying the show.

Revelation Chapter 18 details the many goods which are sold through the Daughter of Babylon’s ports. The lengthy list appears in Revelation 18:11-13. Take any one of those goods listed by John two thousand years ago and ask this question: is any other nation the center for world trade in those commodities, except for the United States? Where else does one find exchanges as important as the New York Stock Exchange, the American Stock Exchange, the New York Mercantile Exchange, the New York Cotton Exchange, the Chicago Board of Trade, the Chicago Mercantile Exchange and numerous other exchanges for currency, coffee, sugar, tea, cocoa, soybeans, oats, wheat, cattle, hogs, lumber, diamonds, iron, ivory, marble, spices, cosmetics, steel, tin, zinc, rubber, etc. Those exchanges, through which the world’s commerce is passed daily, are all located in one country. They’re not in Iraq, nor in Rome.

To become better writers we must become the best thieves and liars in the business. We slink around the pages of everyone else’s work and shove it into our pockets. Then we run home and try to make it our own.

Perhaps, since the measurement of potential gain and loss from a particular stock is so subjective, it is easier, if you are a professional or academic, to use a concept like volatility as a substitute or a replacement for risk than to use some other measure. Whatever the reason for everyone else’s general abdication of common sense, your job remains to quantify, by some measure, a stock’s upside and downside. This is such an imprecise and difficult task, though, that a proxy of your own may well be in order.

Differentiating Yourself  Pursuing a differentiation strategy has merit over pursuing a low-cost strategy. Focusing and sharpening your strengths is a major step in developing competitive advantage—the thing that you can do better than anyone else.  The first step is to take stock of your resources and capabilities and assess whether they match your intentions. Do you have what is called “strategic fit”? Aligning your resources and capabilities with your intentions puts you in the best position for crafting and executing a successful strategy.  To help you achieve this, develop a personal USP, a one-sentence description of what you offer people that few others can match. Now do the same for a trusted friend and exchange the results. This is sometimes the best way of taking your personal skills inventory.