Entire Team Quotes

Alex and Carlos—the tag team from hell. They’re the last people I need shit from right now. If they decide to trail me, too, I’ll have an entire entourage. “I’m fine.” “Then sit up and talk to us.” “Okay, in that case I’m not fine. Go away.” I moan. “Unless you want me to puke all over you.

You’re a billionaire now. You have an entire team of people to protect you. The world is your motherfaxing oyster. It’s okay to want things.” Max turned off the shower. “It’s okay to go after what you want.

The entire belief was insulting to many of us, but nonetheless, the term “top trained,” which would come to be regurgitated with great regularity by hospital administration and by Dr. Kowatch, would eventually evolve to become what I would describe as an unhealthy infatuation, one that I now understand represented the developing disconnect between the majority of the Heart Center team and hospital administration, which would ultimately have detrimental effects on the program, which would become visible to all in the near future.

Starting over can be the scariest thing in the entire world, whether it’s leaving a lover, a school, a team, a friend or anything else that feels like a core part of our identity but when your gut is telling you that something here isn’t right or feels unsafe, I really want you to listen and trust in that voice.

A team is very much like a chain. The weakest link in the chain will affect the entire strength of that chain.

Nagumo was suddenly on his own. At this crucial time, the cost of his failure to learn the complicated factors that played into carrier operations suddenly exploded. Now, when every minute counted, it was too late to learn the complexities involved in loading different munitions on different types of planes on the hangar deck, too late to learn how the planes were organized and spotted on the flight decks, too late to learn the flight capabilities of his different types of planes, and far too late to know how to integrate all those factors into a fast-moving and efficient operation with the planes and ordnance available at that moment. Commander Genda, his brilliant operations officer, couldn’t make the decisions for him now. It was all up to Nagumo. At 0730 on June 4, 1942, years of shipbuilding, training, and strategic planning had all come to this moment. Teams of highly trained pilots, flight deck personnel, mechanics, and hundreds of other sailors were ready and awaiting his command. The entire course of the battle, of the Combined Fleet, and even perhaps of Japan were going to bear the results of his decisions, then and there.

There are certain things in life that just suck. Pouring a big bowl of Lucky Charms before realizing the milk is expired, the word 'moist,' falling face-first into the salad bar in front of the entire lacrosse team . . .

It is a natural stronghold for them—they can infest this maze of iron and water like a horde of starving cockroaches, and they’ll be just as hard to anticipate and to kill in such close quarters.” “Wow,” Shane said. “You really know how to drum up team spirit. Did you print up Team Total Fail jerseys, too?” Myrnin gave him an entirely crazy smile. “Would you be surprised if I had?

You are sunshine and moonlight, laughter and joy, a life lived entirely without fear. You heard the call of a dream and made it a reality. You are everything I believed I was fighting for all those years.

The Columbine crisis was never a hostage standoff. Eric and Dylan had no intentions of making demands. SWAT teams searched the building for over three hours, but the killers were lying dead the entire time. They had committed suicide in the library at 12:08, forty-nine minutes after beginning the attack. The killing and the terror had been real. The standoff had not.

We know about bad guys, what they do, and often, who they are. The politicians have chosen to send us into battle, and that's our trade. We do what's necessary. And in my view, once those politicians have elected to send us out to do what 99.9 percent of the country would be terrified to undertake, they should get the hell out of the way and stay there. This entire business of modern war crimes, as identified by the liberal wings of politics and the media, began in Iraq and has been running downhill ever since. Everyone's got to have his little hands in it, blathering on about the public's right to know. Well, the view of most Navy SEALs, the public does not have that right to know, not if it means placing our lives in unnecessary peril because someone in Washington is driving himself mad worrying about the human rights of some cold-hearted terrorist fanatic who would kill us as soon as look at us, as well as any other American at whom he could point that wonky old AK of his.

Do you remember one year when that player - Leeroy something - actually got drafted into the Stormchasers, even though he always just charged in and messed up his entire team's play? My God, he was terrible.

even when other team members were exceptionally talented and intelligent, one individual’s bad behavior brought down the effectiveness of the entire team. In dozens of trials, conducted over month-long periods, groups with one underperformer did worse than other teams by a whopping 30 to 40 percent.

I don't go on dates. I don't go to cafes. I don't care about celebrities or which sport team just won, My universe exists with my entire mind.

You might have announced in front of the entire football team and cheerleading squad that I fictitiously liked what your hands did to me, but I just made you come with one finger, so tell me now who has the skills.

I tucked the keys into my pocket so they wouldn’t jingle and rushed back outside. Once out, I picked up my pace to a run. I was not a runner. I did not like to run. But I ran like I meant it. Maybe I should’ve joined the cross-country team after all because I wasn’t half bad at this. For about one stretch of sidewalk. By the time I made it to the Science building, I had cursed not only the entire cross-country team, but the sport as a whole. I had a cramp that was sending a painful jolt up my side and I could barely breathe.

In climbing, having confidence in your partners is no small concern. One climber’s actions can affect the welfare of the entire team. The consequences of a poorly tied knot, a stumble, a dislodged rock, or some other careless deed are as likely to be felt by the perpetrator’s colleagues as the perpetrator. Hence it’s not surprising that climbers are typically wary of joining forces with those whose bona fides are unknown to them. But

You act like a team player,you be nice to everyone for your entire life,then you die.

If you lead a team, start asking questions and really listening. Start valuing the contributions of your teammates ahead of your own. And remember that when the best idea wins, so does the entire team.

Something that’s bothered me for a while now is the current profligacy in YA culture of Team Boy 1 vs Team Boy 2 fangirling. [...] Despite the fact that I have no objection to shipping, this particular species of team-choosing troubled me, though I had difficulty understanding why. Then I saw it applied to Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games trilogy – Team Peeta vs Team Gale – and all of a sudden it hit me that anyone who thought romance and love-triangles were the main event in that series had utterly missed the point. Sure, those elements are present in the story, but they aren’t anywhere near being the bones of it, because The Hunger Games, more than anything else, is about war, survival, politics, propaganda and power. Seeing such a strong, raw narrative reduced to a single vapid argument – which boy is cuter? – made me physically angry. So, look. People read different books for different reasons. The thing I love about a story are not necessarily the things you love, and vice versa. But riddle me this: are the readers of these series really so excited, so thrilled by the prospect of choosing! between! two! different! boys! that they have to boil entire narratives down to a binary equation based on male physical perfection and, if we’re very lucky, chivalrous behaviour? While feminism most certainly champions the right of women to chose their own partners, it also supports them to choose things besides men, or to postpone the question of partnership in favour of other pursuits – knowledge, for instance. Adventure. Careers. Wild dancing. Fun. Friendship. Travel. Glorious mayhem. And while, as a woman now happily entering her fourth year of marriage, I’d be the last person on Earth to suggest that male companionship is inimical to any of those things, what’s starting to bother me is the comparative dearth of YA stories which aren’t, in some way, shape or form, focussed on Girls Getting Boyfriends, and particularly Hot Immortal Or Magical Boyfriends Whom They Will Love For All Eternity. Blog post: Love Team Freezer

I didn't fuck half the football team, jackass!" I snapped. "I fucked the entire basketball team! HA! So there!

Teamwork: I find it fascinating that a snowflake, by itself, can be so delicate; but when they team-up, they can close-down an entire city.

Oppenheimer decided to import the entire Princeton team of twenty scientists to Los Alamos. This turned out to be a particularly serendipitous decision, as the Princeton group included not only Robert Wilson but a brilliant and cheerfully mischievous twenty-four-year-old physicist named Richard Feynman.

a small group of inspired and engaged employees can have a positive impact on the entire organization.

He was thinking of Max MacKilligan as his girlfriend? The crazy female who’d decimated an entire team of well-trained mercenaries with her badger teammates? Or who didn’t seem too concerned that he’d almost eaten a child? That woman he was thinking of as his girlfriend?

You are never to be alone in a bedroom with a male.” She snorted. “You have no say over who I have in my bedroom. If I want to invite the entire Miami Dolphins team into my bed and have a big orgy while covered in chocolate sauce, you have no say in that whatsoever.” The brief image set fire to his blood, but he kept his temper on simmer, unwilling to let her bait him. Still, he kind of wanted to hunt down every player on the football team and turn them into stains on the Astroturf. “My house,” he gritted out, “my rules. No chocolate NFL orgies in my keep. I think that’s a reasonable request.

Race scholars use the term white supremacy to describe a sociopolitical economic system of domination based on racial categories that benefits those defined and perceived as white. This system of structural power privileges, centralizes, and elevates white people as a group. If, for example, we look at the racial breakdown of the people who control our institutions, we see telling numbers in 2016–2017: - Ten richest Americans: 100 percent white (seven of whom are among the ten richest in the world) - US Congress: 90 percent white - US governors: 96 percent white - Top military advisers: 100 percent white - President and vice president: 100 percent white - US House Freedom Caucus: 99 percent white - Current US presidential cabinet: 91 percent white - People who decide which TV shows we see: 93 percent white - People who decide which books we read: 90 percent white - People who decide which news is covered: 85 percent white - People who decide which music is produced: 95 percent white - People who directed the one hundred top-grossing films of all time, worldwide: 95 percent white - Teachers: 82 percent white - Full-time college professors: 84 percent white - Owners of men’s professional football teams: 97 percent white These numbers are not describing minor organizations. Nor are these institutions special-interest groups. The groups listed above are the most powerful in the country. These numbers are not a matter of “good people” versus “bad people.” They represent power and control by a racial group that is in the position to disseminate and protect its own self-image, worldview, and interests across the entire society.

I didn’t realize I had a royal stalker. I’m flattered, Your Majesty.” “Even better—you had an entire government team assigned to digging up information on you. They reported twice daily for over a week. You did run off with the most-wanted criminal in the world, after all.” “And your girlfriend.” Kai

I would not choose to live in any age but my own; advances in medicine alone, and the consequent survival of children with access to these benefits, should preclude any temptation to trade for the past. But we cannot understand history if we saddle the past with pejorative categories based on our bad habits for dividing continua into compartments of increasing worth towards the present. These errors apply to the vast paleontological history of life, as much as to the temporally trivial chronicle of human beings. I cringe every time I read that this failed business, or that defeated team, has become a dinosaur is succumbing to progress. Dinosaur should be a term of praise, not opprobrium. Dinosaurs reigned for more than 100 million years and died through no fault of their own; Homo sapiens is nowhere near a million years old, and has limited prospects, entirely self-imposed, for extended geological longevity.

I’ve heard from teams who have created email-free afternoons or entire days: no email, no phone calls, no interruptions. The developers involved said these were the most productive, happiest times of the week.

leadership is the single greatest factor in any team’s performance. Whether a team succeeds or fails is all up to the leader. The leader’s attitude sets the tone for the entire team. The leader drives performance—or doesn’t. And this applies not just to the most senior leader of an overall team, but to the junior leaders of teams within the team.

Do you want to know the first time I ever saw you?" he said with his lips at my ear. I knew the story,but I nodded anyway, frantically. "Your family had just moved in. You were...how old were you,Becks?" I shrugged,and he ran his fingers over my head, calming me.He knew the answer. "You were eleven," he said. "I was twelve.I remember Joey Velasquez talking about the pretty new girl in the neighborhood.Actually his exact words were 'the hot chick.' But I didn't think a thing about it until I saw you at the baseball field. We were having practice at the park and your family showed up for a picnic.You had so much dark hair,and it was hiding your face.Remember?" I nodded. "I know what you're trying to do." He ignored me. "I had to see if Joey was right,about the hot chick part, and I kept trying to get a good look at your face, but you never looked over our way.I hit home run after home run trying to get your attention, but you couldn't be bothered with my record-shattering, supherhuman performance." I smiled,and breathed in slowly. I'd heard this story so many times before.The familiarity of it enveloped me with warmth. "So what did you do?" I asked, fully aware of the answer. "I did the only thing I could think of. I went up to the bat,lined my feet up in the direction of your head,and swung away." "Hitting the foulest foul ball anyone had ever seen," I continued the story. I felt him chuckle next to me. "Yep. I figured in order to return the ball,you'd have to get really close to me, because..." He waited for me to fill in the blank. "Because someone made the mistake of assuming I would throw like a girl," I said softly. He pressed his lips against my head before he went on. "Which,of course, was stupid of me to think. You stood right where you were and chucked the ball farther than I'd ever seen a girl, or even any guy,chuck it." "It was all those years of Bonnet Ball my parents forced on me." "The entire team went nuts. You gave a little tiny shrug, like it was no big deal, and sat back down with your family. Completely ignoring me again. So my plan totally backfired. Not only did you get the attention of every boy on the field-which was not my intention-but I got reamed by the coach, who couldn't understand why I suddenly decided to stand perpendicular to home plate.

At least I’ve got football . It’s been my life since I was seven, but sometimes Henry says I need to spend less time focusing and start “living life like I’m going to hell tomorrow.” But I feel like a normal teenager. Wel , as normal as I can be. I mean, obviously I think Justin Timberlake is a mega-hunk, but I’m also over six feet tal and can launch a footbal fifty yards. Other ways I’m not normal? A girl who hangs with an entire football team must hook up all the time, right? Nope. I’ve never had a boyfriend. Hell , I’ve never even kissed a guy. The closest I’ve ever come to a kiss happened just this past summer, but it was a joke. At a party, one of those cheerleaders suggested we all play a game of seven minutes in heaven, you know, the game where you go into a closet and kiss? Somehow Henry and I got sent into the closet together, and of course we didn’t kiss, but we ended up in a mad thumb-wrestling match. Which turned into a shoving match. Which turned into everyone thinking we’d hooked up in the closet. Yeah, right. He’s like my brother.

Imagine the case of someone supervising an exceptional team of workers, all of them striving towards a collectively held goal; imagine them hardworking, brilliant, creative and unified. But the person supervising is also responsible for someone troubled, who is performing poorly, elsewhere. In a fit of inspiration, the well-meaning manager moves that problematic person into the midst of his stellar team, hoping to improve him by example. What happens?—and the psychological literature is clear on this point.64 Does the errant interloper immediately straighten up and fly right? No. Instead, the entire team degenerates. The newcomer remains cynical, arrogant and neurotic. He complains. He shirks. He misses important meetings. His low-quality work causes delays, and must be redone by others. He still gets paid, however, just like his teammates. The hard workers who surround him start to feel betrayed. “Why am I breaking myself into pieces striving to finish this project,” each thinks, “when my new team member never breaks a sweat?” The same thing happens when well-meaning counsellors place a delinquent teen among comparatively civilized peers. The delinquency spreads, not the stability.65 Down is a lot easier than up.

There are certain things in life that just suck. Pouring a big bowl of Lucky Charms before realizing the milk is expired, the word “moist,” falling face-first into the salad bar in front of the entire lacrosse team …

And that’s how Canning and I came to have a big framed photo on our living room wall featuring the entire Toronto team dressed in very loud gingham. I swear the color rendered a little bolder in print than it looks in real life, because this photo is kind of blinding. But Jamie snickers whenever I suggest that.

When Reinhold Messner returned from the first solo climb of Everest, he was severely dehydrated, and utterly exhausted; he fell down most of the last part of the descent, and collapsed on the Rongbuk glacier, and he was crawling over it on hands and knees when the woman who was his entire support team reached him; and he looked up at her out of a delirium, and said, “Where are all my friends?

It has the most awesome responsibilities of any corporation in the world, the largest budget of any corporation in the world, and the largest number of employees. Yet the entire senior management structure and team have to be formed in a period of seventy-five days.

It Takes a Network to Defeat a Network.” With that, we took the first step toward an entirely new conversation.

They expected her to kill. It’s what they’d trained her for. Her team was the deadliest—capable of wiping out entire cities, just the four of them. The

Elliot thought about being on different sides. In his books about magic lands, the evildoers had horns, or at least had the decency to wear outfits composed entirely of black leather. Sometimes there was one traitor on the good side, but he didn’t remember any stories about teams who wore the same uniform splitting up and turning against each other. People did not have to learn how to live with each other again, after trust was broken between them

It's entirely possible that the Great Sorting Hat at the End of Time won't give a damn which side we thought we were on - Rebel or stormtrooper, Red Pill or Blue - but only our intentions. Which flag we flew, which uniform we wore will yield to something much simpler. Were we coming from fear or love? Were we standing for all of us or only some of us? Were we playing Team Finite, or Team Infinite?

You would think that this would be whether the entrepreneur’s idea is actually a good one. But finding a good idea is apparently not all that hard. Finding an entrepreneur who can execute a good idea is a different matter entirely. One needs a person who can take an idea from proposal to reality, work the long hours, build a team, handle the pressures and setbacks, manage technical and people problems alike, and stick with the effort for years on end without getting distracted or going insane. Such people are rare and extremely hard to spot.

Have you noticed how some project teams are efficient, with everyone knowing what to do and contributing fully, while the members of other teams are constantly bickering and don't seem able to get out of each other's way? Often this is an orthogonality issue. When teams are organized with lots of overlap, members are confused about responsibilities. Every change needs a meeting of the entire team, because any one of them might be affected.

Two aisles, each a quarter mile long, were entirely devoted to camouflage clothing in every possible color: desert brown, forest green, arctic gray, and hot pink, just in case your spec-ops team needed to infiltrate a child’s princess-themed birthday party.

In early 2002, as part of a new personal ritual, he took time after the holidays to think and read. (In this respect, Microsoft’s Bill Gates, who also took such annual think weeks, served as a positive example.) Returning to the company after a few weeks, Bezos presented his next big idea to the S Team in the basement of his Medina, Washington, home. The entire company, he said, would restructure itself around what he called “two-pizza teams.” Employees would be organized into autonomous groups of fewer than ten people—small enough that, when working late, the team members could be fed with two pizza pies. These teams would be independently set loose on Amazon’s biggest problems.

The playground was a war of girls versus boys and now I feel shame cuz some kids must have wanted to stand with the other team, and some must have wanted new teams entirely, but the world was drawn for us binary in clumsy chalk lines, and we'd try to do better when we were in charge.

You'd never have gotten it right. You have to hit the door just so. It took me weeks to learn." "And what were you doing sneaking out at night?" he demanded. "I fail to see how that is your business." "You became my business when you took up residence in my house." "Well, I wouldn't have moved in if you hadn'tkidnapped me!" "I wouldn't have kidnapped you if you hadn't been wandering about the countryside with no thought to your own safety." "I was certainly safer in the countryside than I was at Prewitt Hall, and you well know it." "You wouldn't be safe in a convent," he muttered. "If you two lovebirds can stop snapping at each other," James cut in, "I'd like to search the study before Prewitt returns home." Blake glared at Caroline as if this entire delay were her fault, causing her to hiss, "Don't forget that if it weren't for me-" "If it weren't for you," he shot back, "I would be a very happy man indeed." "We are wasting time," James reminded them. "The both of you may remain here, if you cannot cease your squabbling, but I am going in to search the south drawing room." "I'll go first," Caroline announced, "since I know the way." "You'll go behind me," Blake contradicted, "and give me directions as we go along." "Oh, for the love of Saint Peter," James finally burst out, exasperation showing in every line of his body. "I'll go first, if only to shut the two of you up. Caroline, you follow and give me directions. Blake, you guard her from the rear.

The night in question, I had put aside my perpetual lavatory read, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, because of all the manuscripts (inedible green tomatoes) submitted to Cavendish-Redux, my new stable of champions. I suppose it was about eleven o'clock when I heard my front door being interfered with. Skinhead munchkins mug-or-treating? Cherry knockers? The wind? Next thing I knew, the door flew in off its ruddy hinges! I was thinking al-Queda, I was thinking ball lightning, but no. Down the hallway tramped what seemed like an entire rugby team, though the intruders numbered only three. (You'll notice, I am always attacked in threes.) "Timothy," pronounced the gargoyliest, "Cavendish, I presume. Caught with your cacks down." "My business hours are eleven to two, gentlemen," Bogart would have said, "with a three-hour break for lunch. Kindly leave." All I could do was blurt, "Oy! My door! My ruddy door!

An architect is a generalist, not a specialist-the conductor of a symphony, not a virtuoso who plays every instrument perfectly. As a practitioner, an architect coordinates a team of professionals that include structural and mechanical engineers, interior designers, building-code consultants, landscape architects, specifications writers, contractors, and specialists from other disciplines. Typically, the interests of some team members will compete with the interests of others. An architect must know enough about each discipline to negotiate and synthesize competing demands while honoring the needs of the client and the integrity of the entire project.

one thing my own marriage taught me is that relationships are like football in a lot of ways. It’s a team sport and you have to work together to be successful. There are highs and lows, good plays and bad calls, and if you’re going to step out on the field, you need to be ready to play the game. Big mistakes get you benched, and, depending on how bad you screwed up, they can cost you a fortune before you’re allowed back on the playing field. There will always be rivals, people trying to knock you out of the game, but if you’re lucky, you’ll end up with a nice ring to show for your hard work. But it’s not over there, you know. That’s when it really starts, because for the rest of your life you’ll be trying to prove to everyone that you, out of everyone, deserved to be given that ring.” He paused, snickering to himself. “That’s not the biggest way relationships are like football, though. No matter what you do, no matter what happens, the point of both is to score as much as you can. Without scoring, the entire thing is really just a waste of time.

If you think you are the entire picture, you will never see the big picture.

You going to the game tonight?" I was about to answer,but another voice rang out from just behind me. "She'd better," Jack said as he wrapped an arm around my waist and pulled me back against him. I could smell the fresh leather on his letterman jacket as I crunched against it. "Why is that?" I asked,smiling and instantly warm in his arms.I still couldn't get over the fact that Jack Caputo and I were...together. It was hard to think the word. We had been friends for so long.To be honest, he had been friends with me and I had been secretly pining for him since...well, since forever. But now he was here. It was my waist he held. It didn't seem real. "I can't carry the team to victory without you," he said. "You're my rabbit's foot." I craned my neck around to look at him. "I've always dreamed of some guy saying that to me." He pressed his lips to the base of my neck, and heat rushed to my cheeks. "I love making you turn red," he whispered. "It doesn't take much. We're in the middle of the hallway." "You want to know what else I love?" His tone was playful. "No," I said, but he wasn't listening. He took his fingers and lightly railed them up my spine,to the back of my neck.Instant goose bumps sprang up all over my body,and I shuddered. "That." I could feel his smile against my ear. Jack was always smiling.It was what made him so likable. By this time,Jules had snaked her way through the throng of students. "Hello, Jack.I was in the middle of a conversation with Becks.Do you mind?" she said with a smirk. Right then a bunch of Jack's teammates rounded the corner at the end of the hallway,stampeding toward us. "Uh-oh," I said. Jack pushed me safely aside just before they tackled him, and Jules and I watched as what seemed like the entire football team heaped on top of their starting quarterback. "Dating Jack Caputo just might kill you one day." Jules laughed. "You sure it's worth it?" I didn't answer,but I was sure. In the weeks following my mother's death, I had spent nearly every morning sitting at her grave.Whispering to her, telling her about my day, like I used to each morning before she died. Jack came with me to the cemetary most days. He'd bring a book and read under a tree several headstones away,waiting quietly, as if what I was doing was totally normal. We hadn't even been together then. It had been only five months since my mom died. Five months since a drunk driver hit her during her evening jog. Five months since the one person who knew all my dreams disappeared forever. Jack was the reason I was still standing. Yeah,I was sure he was worth it.The only thing I wasn't sure about was why he was with me.

Frances, who also was feeling distant from her husband. Though still deeply in love after ten years of marriage, Frances worried that her husband’s passion for politics and worldly achievement surpassed his love for his family. She mourned “losing my influence over a heart I once thought so entirely my own,” increasingly apprehensive that she and her husband were “differently constituted.

You have to help your partner come through for you. Tell them how you'd like them to be. Help them win. Help your partner succeed, because it's in your interest to act like a team. In our individualistic culture, your partner either comes through for you or they don't. But when you begin thinking relationally, ecologically, you realize that you have something to say about how things go between you. "What can I do to help you come through for me?" is an entirely relational question. Thinking like a team is the clear antidote to thinking like two individuals. It's a shift from "I don't like how you're talking to me" to "Honey, I want to hear what you're saying. Could you please lower your voice so I can hear it?" A shift from "I need more sex" to "We both deserve a healthy sex life. What should we do about it?

Being the best simply cannot be a Just Cause, because even if we are the best (based on the metrics and time frames of our own choosing), the position is only temporary. The game doesn’t end once we get there; it keeps going. And because the game keeps going, we often find ourselves playing defense to maintain our cherished ranking. Though saying “we are the best” may be great fodder for a rah-rah speech to rally a team, it makes for a weak foundation upon which to build an entire company. Infinite-minded leaders understand that “best” is not a permanent state. Instead, they strive to be “better.” “Better” suggests

Glaring, Kai leaned back against the headrest. "I'm already uncomfortable with you piloting this ship and being in control of my life. Try not to make it worse." "Why does everyone think I'm such a bad pilot?" "Cinder told me as much." "Well, tell Cinder I'm perfectly capable of flying a blasted podship without killing anyone. My flight instructor at the Andromeda - which is a very prestigious military academy in the Republic, I will have you know-" "I know what Andromeda Academy is." "Yeah, well, my flight instructor said I was a natural." "Right," Kai drawled. "Was that the same flight instructor who wrote in you official report about your inattentiveness, refusal to take safety precautions seriously, and overconfident attitude that often bordered on ... what was the word she used>? 'Fool-hardy', I think?" "Oh, yeah. Commander Reid. She had a thing for me." The radar blinked, picking up a cruiser in the far distance, and Thorne deftly changed directions to keep them out of its course. "I didn't realize I had a royal stalker. I'm flattered, Your Majesty." "Even better - you had an entire government team assigned to digging up information on you. They reported twice daily for over a week. You did run off with the most-wanted criminal in the world, after all.

Bashir’s comments were well-planned, typed into a teleprompter, and approved by an entire production team before being broadcast to his millions of few viewers. But the women of MSNBC, including feminist heroine Rachel Maddow, never uttered a word of criticism. Neither did the National Organization for Women, the Feminist Majority Foundation, or a host of other organizations claiming to fight for the rights of women everywhere.

The guys are cool with me being an out and proud player but get all weirded out when I go into details. Granted, I probably overshare way more than I should, but when I pointed out I had to listen to them talk about their hookups with puck bunnies, suddenly the entire team became stand-up dudes who speak respectfully about women in locker rooms. Funny how that works. Apparently, the cure to toxic masculinity is to show them how it feels to be talked about like a piece of meat. You’re welcome, ladies.

Liam gets to be Sirius.” Jase shook his head. “Sirius dies.” “Lupin?” “Also dies.” “A Weasley twin?” “Liam isn’t that funny, and Fred dies.” I searched over the entire cast ofHarry Potter. “All the cool people die.” “Which is why we should stick to Star Wars and Jedi. What kind of cool team name would we get if we went with the wizards? Team Gryffindor?” “Or, you know, Order of the Phoenix.” “I think we’re more like Dumbledore’s Army,” was Talley’s sleepy reply. “Although, we’re more like Liam’s Army.

It's only a hockey game. An ice rink packed with people, two locker rooms full of players, two teams facing each other. Two men in a basement. Why do we care about that sort of thing? Perhaps because it clarifies all of our most difficult questions. What makes us shout out loud with joy? What makes us cry? What are our happiest memories, our worst days, our deepest disappointments? Who did we stand alongside? What's a family? What's a team? How many times in life are we completely happy? How many chances do we get to love something that's almost pointless entirely unconditionally?

However, when those inside the bureaucracy work primarily to protect themselves, progress slows and the entire organization becomes more susceptible to external threats and pressures. Only when the Circle of Safety surrounds everyone in the organization, and not just a few people or a department or two, are the benefits fully realized. Weak leaders are the ones who only extend the benefits of the Circle of Safety to their fellow senior executives and a chosen few others. They look out for each other, but they do not offer the same considerations to those outside their “inner circle.” Without the protection of our leaders, everyone outside the inner circle is forced to work alone or in small tribes to protect and advance their own interests. And in so doing, silos form, politics entrench, mistakes are covered up instead of exposed, the spread of information slows and unease soon replaces any sense of cooperation and security.

Eena!” Recognizing Ian’s voice, Eena turned to find him approaching her from behind. He was entirely clad in body armor and gauntlets, cradling an open-faced helmet in one arm. Painted on his chest plate was a flaming, gold sword. From his side hung a leather sheath, a golden hilt peeking from the top. “I’m glad you’re back. You are going to stay and watch us play, aren’t you?” He looked hopeful she’d say yes. Eena smiled brightly. “I didn’t know you were talented enough to be on a dueling team. Nice sword,” she teased. Ian blushed a degree. “Thanks. They call us the Savage Warriors!” He rasped their team name in a semi-ferocious voice. “Jerin’s team captain.” She laughed at the showy designation. “And who’s your challenger today?” “The Dragon Slayers - Derian’s team.” Eena’s face fell. “Derian is playing?” She groaned internally, knowing she should’ve guessed as much. This was starting to look like another setup.

adopted a practice I called “thinking out loud,” in which I would summarize what I’d heard, describe how I processed the information, and outline my first thoughts on what we should consider doing about it. It allowed the entire command to follow (and correct where appropriate) my logic trail, and to understand how I was thinking.

his job clearly had something to do with guns, because he held an HK416 rifle in his hand now, leveled at Court’s chest. He stood alone in the small doorway, but now the main hangar door slid open, ten feet off Court’s right, and an entire Special Activities Division Ground Branch field team walked out, each man carrying an automatic weapon.

within twenty-four hours of her concession speech. Mook and Podesta assembled her communications team at the Brooklyn headquarters to engineer the case that the election wasn’t entirely on the up-and-up. For a couple of hours, with Shake Shack containers littering the room, they went over the script they would pitch to the press and the public. Already, Russian hacking was the centerpiece of the argument.

When I interviewed with the Chief of Family Medicine at a large medical corporation on the West Coast, he explained that, since he was part of a team of people who arranged for pharmaceutical companies to issue cash grants, he was in a position to offer me a particularly enticing salary. “What are the grants for?” I asked. “We have a quality improvement program that tracks physician prescribing patterns. We call it ‘quality’ but it’s really about money.” And that’s all it’s about. It works like this. In his organization, any patient with LDL cholesterol over 100 is put on a cholesterol-lowering medication. Any person with a blood pressure higher than 140/90 is put on a blood pressure medication. Any person with “low bone density” is put on a bone-remodeling inhibitor. And so on. The doctors who prescribe the most get big bonuses. Those who prescribe the least get fired. With a hint of incredulousness in his voice, he explained, “So far, every time we’ve asked for funding for our program, the drug companies give it to us.” If this is where healthcare is headed, then these hybrid physicians-executives will instinctively turn their gaze to our children and invent more creative methods to bulldoze an entire generation into the bottomless pit of chronic disease.

After several rounds of interviews with Google’s founders, they offered me a job. My bank account was diminishing quickly, so it was time to get back to paid employment, and fast. In typical—and yes, annoying—MBA fashion, I made a spreadsheet and listed my various opportunities in the rows and my selection criteria in the columns. I compared the roles, the level of responsibility, and so on. My heart wanted to join Google in its mission to provide the world with access to information, but in the spreadsheet game, the Google job fared the worst by far. I went back to Eric and explained my dilemma. The other companies were recruiting me for real jobs with teams to run and goals to hit. At Google, I would be the first “business unit general manager,” which sounded great except for the glaring fact that Google had no business units and therefore nothing to actually manage. Not only was the role lower in level than my other options, but it was entirely unclear what the job was in the first place. Eric responded with perhaps the best piece of career advice that I have ever heard. He covered my spreadsheet with his hand and told me not to be an idiot (also a great piece of advice). Then he explained that only one criterion mattered when picking a job—fast growth. When

It wasn’t until I got to the law firm that things started hitting me. First, the people around me seemed pretty unhappy. You can go to any corporate law firm and see dozens of people whose satisfaction with their jobs is below average. The work was entirely uninspiring. We were for the most part grease on a wheel, helping shepherd transactions along; it was detail-intensive and often quite dull. Only years later did I realize what our economic purpose was: if a transaction was large enough, you had to pay a team of people to pore over documents into the wee hours to make sure nothing went wrong. I had zero attachment to my clients—not unusual, given that I was the last rung down on the ladder, and most of the time I only had a faint idea of who my clients were. Someone above me at the firm would give me a task, and I’d do it. I also kind of thought that being a corporate lawyer would help me with the ladies. Not so much, just so you know. It was true that I was getting paid a lot for a twenty-four-year-old with almost no experience. I made more than my father, who has a PhD in physics and had generated dozens of patents for IBM over the years. It seemed kind of ridiculous to me; what the heck had I done to deserve that kind of money? As you can tell, not a whole lot. That didn’t keep my colleagues from pitching a fit if the lawyers across the street were making one dollar more than we were. Most worrisome of all, my brain started to rewire itself after only the first few months. I was adapting. I started spotting issues in offering memoranda. My ten-thousand-yard unblinking document review stare got better and better. Holy cow, I thought—if I don’t leave soon, I’m going to become good at this and wind up doing it for a long time. My experience is a tiny data point in a much bigger problem.

Likewise, by expanding the size of their formation as far as the terrain and visibility would allow whenever they were out of actual contact with the enemy, they increased the likelihood that when they did make contact, the flanks of their formation would be wider than the enemy’s position. Like a rugby team playing a running game, their entire approach—the tempo and flow of the way they moved and fought—was designed around creating and exploiting a series of these overlaps.

Much the same could be said of memory. We know a good deal about how memories are assembled and how and where they are stored, but not why we keep some and not others. It clearly has little to do with actual value or utility. I can remember the entire starting lineup of the 1964 St. Louis Cardinals baseball team—something that has been of no importance to me since 1964 and wasn’t actually very useful then—and yet I cannot recollect the number of my own cell phone, or where I parked my car in any large parking lot, or what was the third of three things my wife told me to get at the supermarket, or any of a great many other things that are unquestionably more urgent and necessary than remembering the starting players for the 1964 Cardinals (who were, incidentally, Tim McCarver, Bill White, Julian Javier, Dick Groat, Ken Boyer, Lou Brock, Curt Flood, and Mike Shannon). So there is a huge amount we have left to learn and many things we may never learn.

That was some shady shit out there, Rome,” Braeden said once the total chaos of winning the game had gone down to a considerable roar. We were finally in the locker room, and I was stripping off my sweat and grass-stained gear. “Total douche move.” I agreed. It wasn’t the first time a team had tried to take me out of a game. It was pretty much common practice, especially when something like a title and championship was at stake. Still, I’d never quite had anyone come at me like that before. The play was already in progress. Sacking me wouldn’t have changed the touchdown I’d just thrown. Except of course to keep me from throwing another one. That guy deliberately came in like a freight train and plowed me down. I lay there stunned for long moments, waiting for the air to come back in my lungs and for my body to process the shock of the hit. Thankfully, he wasn’t that good at tackling and it did nothing more than stun me. And it got him thrown out of the game. It really hadn’t been a big deal. Like I said, it happened a lot. But it was the first time it happened in front of Rimmel. I couldn’t help but notice how the large screen on the field had zeroed in on the girl in number twenty-four’s hoodie, who was climbing over the railing and preparing to leap down onto the field. The security guard was yelling at her, but she barely noticed him. Her eyes were trained out on the field, where I was. It was almost laughable that her tiny ass was going to rush out onto a field full of men more than double her size to make sure I was okay. G**damn. I loved her even more just then. When the guard put his hand on her ankle, trying to stop her from going back to her seat, something happened. Something that never had in my entire life of playing football. The game faded away. For once, I was out on the field and unable to focus on only the game. It took a backseat to the girl teetering on the edge of the railing.

The Patriots had picked Brady in the sixth round, and he soon turned out to be one of the two or three best quarterbacks in the League, and absolutely perfect for the Belichick system and for the team's offense. So, as the team continued to make a series of very good calls on other player personnel choices, there was a general tendency to talk about how brilliant Pioli and Belichick were, and to regard Pioli as the best young player personnel man in the League. Just to remind himself not to believe all the hype and that he could readily have screwed up on that draft, Pioli kept on his desk a photo of Brady, along with a photo of the team's fifth-round traft choice, the man he had taken ahead of Brady: Dave Stachelski. He was a Tight End from Boise State who never a played a down for New England. Stachelski was taken with the 141st pick, Brady with the 199th one. 'If I was so smart,' Pioli liked to say, 'I wouldn't have risked an entire round of the draft in picking Brady.

Most people think the Lego corporation assembled a crack team of world-class experts to engineer Mini-Florida on a computer, but I’m not buying it.” “You aren’t?” asked Coleman. “It’s way too good.” Serge pointed at a two-story building in Key West. “Examine the meticulous green shutters on Hemingway’s house. No, my money is on a lone-wolf manic type like the famous Latvian Edward Leedskalnin, who single-handedly built the Coral Castle back in the twenties. He operated in secret, moving multi-ton hewn boulders south of Miami, and nobody knows how he did it. Probably happened here as well: The Lego people conducting an exhaustive nationwide search among the obsessive-compulsive community. But they had to be selective and stay away from the ones whose entire houses are filled to the ceiling with garbage bags of their own hair. Then they most likely found some cult guru living in a remote Lego ashram south of Pueblo with nineteen wives, offered him unlimited plastic blocks and said, ‘Knock yourself out.

SHORT NOTE ABOUT SHA-1 A lot of people become concerned at some point that they will, by random happenstance, have two objects in their repository that hash to the same SHA-1 value. What then? If you do happen to commit an object that hashes to the same SHA-1 value as a previous object in your repository, Git will see the previous object already in your Git database and assume it was already written. If you try to check out that object again at some point, you’ll always get the data of the first object. However, you should be aware of how ridiculously unlikely this scenario is. The SHA-1 digest is 20 bytes or 160 bits. The number of randomly hashed objects needed to ensure a 50% probability of a single collision is about 280 (the formula for determining collision probability is p = (n(n-1)/2) * (1/2^160)). 280 is 1.2 x 10^24 or 1 million billion billion. That’s 1,200 times the number of grains of sand on the earth. Here’s an example to give you an idea of what it would take to get a SHA-1 collision. If all 6.5 billion humans on Earth were programming, and every second, each one was producing code that was the equivalent of the entire Linux kernel history (3.6 million Git objects) and pushing it into one enormous Git repository, it would take roughly 2 years until that repository contained enough objects to have a 50% probability of a single SHA-1 object collision. A higher probability exists that every member of your programming team will be attacked and killed by wolves in unrelated incidents on the same night.

The raid comes without warning, like a team of Juvie-rounders in the night. A real special-ops team—nothing like the playacting kids Starkey calls special ops. The invaders tranq the storks guarding the entrance to the mine before they can even raise their weapons and flood into the tunnels, tranq’ing anyone who comes into view. Their directive is simple: Get to Mason Starkey. The commotion wakes kids deeper in the mine in time for them to scramble for weapons, which they’ve learned to use without hesitation and without fear. They bring several of the intruders down, but there are more behind them—and this force is armed with weapons the storks have never seen: squad machine guns that spray tiny tranq-tipped darts at such an alarming rate, they create an inescapable wall of unconsciousness before them. The layers of protection surrounding Starkey peel away until he’s exposed and vulnerable before the invading force. Starkey swings his own weapon up, but fumbles with it just long enough for his attackers to grab it and grab him. The entire operation is over in less than five minutes.

They told me they were headed for a planet the name of which I had not heard before, and they talked among themselves, gaily and happily, but in such a way that I did not seem to be left out. From their talk I gained the fact that some form of art was being presented at the festival on this planet. The art form was not alone of music or painting, but was composed of sound and color and emotion and form and other qualities for which there seem to be no words in the language of the Earth, and which I do not entirely recognize, only gaining the very faintest inkling of what they were talking of in this particular regard. I gained the impression of a three-dimensional symphony, although this is not entirely the right expression, which had been composed, not by a single being, but by a team of beings. They talked of the art form enthusiastically and I seemed to understand that it would last for not only several hours, but for days, and that it was an experience rather than a listening or seeing and that the spectators or audience did not merely sit and listen, but could, if they wished, and must, to get the most out of it, be participants.

your team is ranked first? congratulations and big deal. maintaining a top position is far easier than starting over from the gutters. kevin is doing that right now. he’s facing entirely new schools and learning to play with his less dominant hand. when he masters it, and he will, he’ll be better than you could ever have made him. do you know why? it’s not just his natural talent. it’s because he’s with us. there are only ten foxes this year. that’s one sub for every position. think about it. last night we played blackenridge. they have twenty-seven people on their roster. they can burn through players as fast as they want because they have a pile of replacements. we don’t have that luxury. we have to hold our ground on our own.” “you didn’t hold your ground, you lost. your school is the laughingstock of the ncaa. you’re a team with no concept of teamwork.” “lucky for you. if we were a unified front, you wouldn’t have a chance against us.” “you cannot last and your unfounded arrogance is offensive to everyone who actually earned a spot in first class. everyone knows the only reason palmetto qualified for this division is because of your coach.” “funny, i’m pretty sure that’s how edgar allan qualified.” - neil & riko

He laughed. “If you’ve been here for a while and now you’re doing shots, it’s going to be an easy win for my team of highly trained, entirely sober intellectual giants.” “Want to bet?” “Sure.” “Twenty dollars?” “Dinner.” Nina studied his face, but he wasn’t joking. “Dinner it is. If I win, you can take me to Denny’s.” “Really?” She nodded. “I love Denny’s.” “Moons Over My Hammy?” “Every time. And if you win?” “Chicken and waffles.” She laughed. “We’re a classy pair.” He nodded. “I wonder what else we have in common apart from lowbrow tastes?” He smiled slowly at her, and she had no comeback at all. She swallowed.

I have this theory, that this will be the only city that future archaeologists find, Las Vegas. The dry climate will preserve it all and teams of scientists in the year 5000 will carefully sweep and scrape away the sand to find pyramids and castles and replicas of the Eiffel Tower and the New York skyline and stripper poles and snapper cards and these future archaeologists will re-create our entire culture based solely on this one shallow and cynical little shithole. We can complain all we want that this city doesn’t represent us. We can say, Yes, but I hated Las Vegas. Or I only went there once. Well, I’m sure not all Romans reveled in the torture-fests at the Colosseum either, but there it is.

But none of them compared to the dangerous stranger in her room. While the men she was used to were hotter than hell, what they lacked was the fierce aura of power that emanated from this man and his stern, steely features. It was as if he were the deadliest of predators. Feral. That was the only word to do him justice. Surely there wasn’t another soldier in the entire universe who could match him in terms of raw beauty or lethal demeanor. His blond hair was snow white and his features sharp and icy. He wore a pair of black shades that annoyed her since she couldn’t see the upper part of his face or the color of his eyes. Not that it mattered. She saw enough to know that in the land of gorgeous men, he had no competition. As a stark contrast to his white hair, his clothes were a black so deep they seemed to absorb all light, and they were trimmed in silver … No, not silver. Those were weapons tucked into the sleeves and lapels of his ankle-length coat. The left side of it was pulled back, exposing a holstered blaster that was strapped to his left hip. The tall flight boots had silver buckles going up the sides that were fashioned into the image of skulls. At least that’s what she saw at first glance, but as he moved closer she realized those could come off and double as weapons, too. Wow, he was either extremely paranoid or more lethal than a team of League assassins. And that said something.

There was no escape: The entire Elliott 503 Mark II software project had to be abandoned, and with it, over thirty man-years of programming effort, equivalent to nearly one man’s active working life, and I was responsible, both as designer and as manager, for wasting it. ... How did we recover from the catastrophe? First, we classified our 503 customers into groups, according to the nature and size of the hardware configurations which they had bought ... We assigned to each group of customers a small team of programmers and told the team leader to visit the customers to find out what they wanted; to select the easiest request to fulfill, and to make plans (but no promises) to implement it. In no case would we consider a request for a feature that would take more than three months to implement and deliver. The project leader would then have to convince me that the customers’ request was reasonable, that the design of the new feature was appropriate, and that the plans and schedules for implementation were realistic. Above all, I did not allow anything to be done which I did not myself understand. It worked! The software requested began to be delivered on the promised dates. With an increase in our confidence and that of our customers, we were able to undertake fulfilling slightly more ambitious requests. Within a year we had recovered from the disaster. Within two years, we even had some moderately satisfied customers.

That morning, a Syrian refugee entered a park in Annecy, France, and stabbed several children. A brutal video of the attack quickly emerged and began spreading across Twitter. The few employees who remained on the gutted trust and safety team scrambled to remove it. In the past, when violent imagery went viral on Twitter, the company used a data matching tool to detect any tweets containing it and wiped them out all at once. But the employees discovered that the tool they relied on wasn’t working. When they investigated, they learned that it was one of the bits of code that engineers had torn out months earlier. The tool had mistakenly flagged an image of a SpaceX rocket launch, so Musk had ordered the entire system be killed.

What would have made [seeing Göbekli Tepe from Harran] easier, in antiquity, would have been a tall tower annexed to the temple that once stood here--a temple dedicated to Su-En (usually contracted to Sin), the Moon God of the Sabians. After telling us that there were "powerful images in this temple," the Greek Philosopher Libanius (AD 314-394), describes the tower, noting that "from its top one could overlook the entire plain of Harran." [...] A team from the Chicago Oriental Institute was about to start a major dig around the ruins of the Grand Mosque in 1986, but it seems that the Turkish authorities insisted on such restrictive practices that the project had to be abandoned. Current excavations by Harran University and the Sanliurfa Museum Directorate show little interest in recovery of substantive remains from the city's pre-Islamic period.

Both the date of Lennon’s murder and the careful selection of this particular victim are very important. Six weeks after Lennon’s death, Ronald Reagan would become President. Reagan and his soon-to-be appointed cabinet were prepared to build up the Pentagon war machine and increase the potential for war against the USSR. The first strike would fall on small countries like El Salvador and Guatemala. Lennon, alone, was the only man (even without his fellow Beatles) who had the ability to draw out one million anti-war protestors in any given city within 24 hours if he opposed those war policies. John Lennon was a spiritual force. He was a giant, like Gandhi, a man who wrote about peace and brotherly love. He taught an entire generation to think for themselves and challenge authority. Lennon and the Beatles’ songs shout out the inequalities of American life and the messages of change. Change is a threat to the longtime status quo that Reagan’s team exemplified. On my weekly radio broadcast of December 7, 1980, I stated, “The old assassination teams are coming back into power.” The very people responsible for covering up the murders of President John F. Kennedy, Senator Robert Kennedy, Reverend Martin Luther King, for Watergate and Koreagate, and the kidnapping and murder of Howard Hughes, and for hundreds of other deaths, had only six weeks before they would again be removing or silencing those voices of opposition to their policies. Lennon was coming out once more. His album was cut. He was preparing to be part of the world, a world which was a worse place since the time he had withdrawn with his family. It was a sure bet Lennon would react and become a social activist again. That was the threat. Lennon realized that there was danger in coming back into public view. He took that dangerous chance and we all lost!

The essence of Roosevelt’s leadership, I soon became convinced, lay in his enterprising use of the “bully pulpit,” a phrase he himself coined to describe the national platform the presidency provides to shape public sentiment and mobilize action. Early in Roosevelt’s tenure, Lyman Abbott, editor of The Outlook, joined a small group of friends in the president’s library to offer advice and criticism on a draft of his upcoming message to Congress. “He had just finished a paragraph of a distinctly ethical character,” Abbott recalled, “when he suddenly stopped, swung round in his swivel chair, and said, ‘I suppose my critics will call that preaching, but I have got such a bully pulpit.’ ” From this bully pulpit, Roosevelt would focus the charge of a national movement to apply an ethical framework, through government action, to the untrammeled growth of modern America. Roosevelt understood from the outset that this task hinged upon the need to develop powerfully reciprocal relationships with members of the national press. He called them by their first names, invited them to meals, took questions during his midday shave, welcomed their company at day’s end while he signed correspondence, and designated, for the first time, a special room for them in the West Wing. He brought them aboard his private railroad car during his regular swings around the country. At every village station, he reached the hearts of the gathered crowds with homespun language, aphorisms, and direct moral appeals. Accompanying reporters then extended the reach of Roosevelt’s words in national publications. Such extraordinary rapport with the press did not stem from calculation alone. Long before and after he was president, Roosevelt was an author and historian. From an early age, he read as he breathed. He knew and revered writers, and his relationship with journalists was authentically collegial. In a sense, he was one of them. While exploring Roosevelt’s relationship with the press, I was especially drawn to the remarkably rich connections he developed with a team of journalists—including Ida Tarbell, Ray Stannard Baker, Lincoln Steffens, and William Allen White—all working at McClure’s magazine, the most influential contemporary progressive publication. The restless enthusiasm and manic energy of their publisher and editor, S. S. McClure, infused the magazine with “a spark of genius,” even as he suffered from periodic nervous breakdowns. “The story is the thing,” Sam McClure responded when asked to account for the methodology behind his publication. He wanted his writers to begin their research without preconceived notions, to carry their readers through their own process of discovery. As they educated themselves about the social and economic inequities rampant in the wake of teeming industrialization, so they educated the entire country. Together, these investigative journalists, who would later appropriate Roosevelt’s derogatory term “muckraker” as “a badge of honor,” produced a series of exposés that uncovered the invisible web of corruption linking politics to business. McClure’s formula—giving his writers the time and resources they needed to produce extended, intensively researched articles—was soon adopted by rival magazines, creating what many considered a golden age of journalism. Collectively, this generation of gifted writers ushered in a new mode of investigative reporting that provided the necessary conditions to make a genuine bully pulpit of the American presidency. “It is hardly an exaggeration to say that the progressive mind was characteristically a journalistic mind,” the historian Richard Hofstadter observed, “and that its characteristic contribution was that of the socially responsible reporter-reformer.

[...]a man and a boy, side by side on a yellow Swedish sofa from the 1950s that the man had bought because it somehow reminded him of a zoot suit, watching the A’s play Baltimore, Rich Harden on the mound working that devious ghost pitch, two pairs of stocking feet, size 11 and size 15, rising from the deck of the coffee table at either end like towers of the Bay Bridge, between the feet the remains in an open pizza box of a bad, cheap, and formerly enormous XL meat lover’s special, sausage, pepperoni, bacon, ground beef, and ham, all of it gone but crumbs and parentheses of crusts left by the boy, brackets for the blankness of his conversation and, for all the man knew, of his thoughts, Titus having said nothing to Archy since Gwen’s departure apart from monosyllables doled out in response to direct yes-or-nos, Do you like baseball? you like pizza? eat meat? pork?, the boy limiting himself whenever possible to a tight little nod, guarding himself at his end of the sofa as if riding on a crowded train with something breakable on his lap, nobody saying anything in the room, the city, or the world except Bill King and Ken Korach calling the plays, the game eventless and yet blessedly slow, player substitutions and deep pitch counts eating up swaths of time during which no one was required to say or to decide anything, to feel what might conceivably be felt, to dread what might be dreaded, the game standing tied at 1 and in theory capable of going on that way forever, or at least until there was not a live arm left in the bullpen, the third-string catcher sent in to pitch the thirty-second inning, batters catnapping slumped against one another on the bench, dead on their feet in the on-deck circle, the stands emptied and echoing, hot dog wrappers rolling like tumbleweeds past the diehards asleep in their seats, inning giving way to inning as the dawn sky glowed blue as the burner on a stove, and busloads of farmhands were brought in under emergency rules to fill out the weary roster, from Sacramento and Stockton and Norfolk, Virginia, entire villages in the Dominican ransacked for the flower of their youth who were loaded into the bellies of C-130s and flown to Oakland to feed the unassuageable appetite of this one game for batsmen and fielders and set-up men, threat after threat giving way to the third out, weak pop flies, called third strikes, inning after inning, week after week, beards growing long, Christmas coming, summer looping back around on itself, wars ending, babies graduating from college, and there’s ball four to load the bases for the 3,211th time, followed by a routine can of corn to left, the commissioner calling in varsity teams and the stars of girls’ softball squads and Little Leaguers, Archy and Titus sustained all that time in their equally infinite silence, nothing between them at all but three feet of sofa;

Today is going to be the real thing. I have a hard time breathing. My heart races, I can feel my palms start to sweat. And I think so many things at once, my head begins to hurt and I hear someone groan and it confuses me until I realize it is myself. Her smile, her sweet, sweet smile. The way she looks at me, as if I’m ten feet tall, as if I can hold the world in the palm of my hand. And then, the tears streaming down her cheeks. “No, no, no. Please, Aidan, stop. No …” The cops will come for me. Sooner or later. Two of them, three of them, an entire SWAT team, converging upon my doorstep. That’s why guys like me exist. Because every community has gotta have a villain, and no amount of pretend normal is ever gonna change that. Gotta think. Gotta plan. Gotta get the fuck out of here. To where? For how long? I don’t have that kind of cash…. I try to get my breathing under control. Find some sort of comfort. Tell myself it’s gonna be all right. I’m keeping with the program.

Insecure leaders are dangerous - to themselves, their followers, and the organizations they lead. That's because a leadership position becomes an amplifier of personal flaws. Whatever negative baggage you have in life only gets heavier when you're trying to lead others. Unsure leaders have several common traits: 1. They don't provide security for others - To become an effective leader, you need to make your followers feel good about themselves. 2. They take more from people than they give - Insecure people are on a continual quest for validation, acknowledgment, and love. Because of that, their focus is on finding security, not instilling it in others. 3. They continually limit their best people - Show me an insecure leader, and I'll show you someone who cannot genuinely celebrate victories. The leader might even take credit personally for the best work of the team. 4. They continually limit their organization - When followers are undermined and receive no recognition, they become discouraged and eventually stop performing at their potential. And when that happens, the entire organization suffers.

Anything I can do to help?” “Convince the entire Dark Court to abandon their queen’s plan and join Team Leave Now?” “I was thinking more along the lines of recording tonight’s Easton Heights rerun so that hour was freed up for you.” She held up her hands at my outraged look of horror. “Kidding. Kidding. I’ve been helping David and Raquel set up emergency places for all the faerie land transplants and IPCA refugees who aren’t leaving. We’ll get everything ready here. You focus on the faerie stuff.” “Can’t I be in charge of the DVR, instead?” I stood and turned around. Arianna swatted my butt as I walked away. I wanted to laugh, but it was all I could do not to hyperventilate. Everything was finally happening. I hadn’t made it very far back up the path when Reth stepped out of the woods, scaring me half to death. “Way to make an entrance,” I said, my hand over my rapidly beating heart. “You need to come with me.” “Did you know I have to open the gate tonight? Never mind. Don’t answer. If you did know, I’ll want to kick you in the nuts for not telling me, and I don’t have time to do it. Good news is I’m going to save your life.

Dad's in D.C. all week," he said as we climbed out, "so I get to use the garage. Parking's a bitch around here." I didn't know whether to roll my eyes or sympathize. "Is your mom home?" I really didn't know how I felt about seeing Karina Romanova in her own home. Well,no. Truth: I was worried how she would feel about seeing me in it. "Will she mind my being here?" "Why would she?" Alex gave me an odd look as he pushed open a small door onto a wide brick patio. "But no, she's at the studio until midnight. It's just you,me,and the lacrosse team." I could see myself with amazing clarity in the huge glass wall that was the entire back of the house. I was small, dark, and frozen. "You're kidding, right?" Next to mine, Alex's reflection looked twice as big and ust as still. "You're kidding. Right?" I nodded. Clearly not emphatically enough. "Christ,Ella. Who do you think I am?" I sighed. Honestly, I didn't know. "I think you're probably a terrific guy, Alex. But let's be truthful here.We don't really know each other." "Oh,come one.We've gone to school together for two and a half years. I've been to Marino's..." He stopped. Sighed. "Okay.Fine.So let's change it. Now." And he unlocked the door to his house.

It seems that leishmaniasis, a disease that has troubled the human race since time immemorial, has in the twenty-first century come into its own. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at the NIH, told our team bluntly that, by going into the jungle and getting leishmaniasis, “You got a really cold jolt of what it’s like for the bottom billion people on earth.” We were, he said, confronted in a very dramatic way with what many people have to live with their entire lives. If there’s a silver lining to our ordeal, he told us, “it’s that you’ll now be telling your story, calling attention to what is a very prevalent, very serious disease.” If leish continues to spread as predicted in the United States, by the end of the century it may no longer be confined to the “bottom billion” in faraway lands. It will be in our own backyards. Global warming has opened the southern door of the United States not just to leish but to many other diseases. The big ones now entering our country include Zika, West Nile virus, chikungunya, and dengue fever. Even diseases like cholera, Ebola, Lyme, babesiosis, and bubonic plague will potentially infect more people as global warming accelerates.

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The whole world knew about the piracy case of the tanker Maersk Alabama, which three Navy SEAL sharpshooters saved the imprisoned ship captain. Those SEALs spent a full day lying in wait with their weapons trained on the pirate boat, waiting for the kill command. When the order came down, they instantly fired their sniper rifles, with their own vessel bobbing at a different rate from the pirates’ boat, having no room for error if the captive was to survive. The snipers took out all three pirates in a single shot while sparing the kidnapped victim. Captain Richard Phillips was freed unharmed from the close quarters of that little boat, while the dead bodies of the three armed pirates slumped around him. Details of DEVGRU training are not available to explain this feat of timing and marksmanship, but the results testify to its deadly effect. SEAL Team Six founder Richard Marcinko has said that his budget for ammunition for his men’s training was greater than that of the entire Marin Corps. The comment might be dismissed as braggadocio if not for undeniable results produced under intense and deadly pressure. Consequently, by the time Jessica Buchanan was being marched into a pitched-black desert to her own mock execution two years later, the same people at the White House who took note of her disappearance had reason to wonder if it might be time for another visit to the region from the men you don’t see coming.

There is a persistent theory, held by those who prate most steadily about "the American way of life" that the average American is a rugged individualist to whom the whole conception of "leadership" is something foreign and distasteful—and this theory would certainly seem to be in accord with our national tradition of lawlessness and disrespect for authority. But it is not entirely consistent with the facts. We Americans are inveterate hero worshipers, to a far greater extent than are the British and the French. We like to personalize our loyalties, our causes. In our political or business or labor organizations, we are comforted by the knowledge that at the top is a Big Boss whom we are free to revere or to hate and upon whom we can depend for quick decisions when the going gets tough. The same is true of our Boy Scout troops and our criminal gangs. It is most conspicuously true of our passion for competitive sport. We are trained from childhood to look to the coach for authority in emergencies. The masterminding coach who can send in substitutes with instructions whenever he feels like it—or even send in an entirely new team—is a purely American phenomenon. In British football the team must play through the game with the same eleven men with which it started and with no orders from the sidelines; if a man is injured and forced to leave the field the team goes on playing with only ten men. In British sport, there are no Knute Rocknes or Connie Macks, whereas in American sport the mastermind is considered as an essential in the relentless pursuit of superiority.

The chorus of criticism culminated in a May 27 White House press conference that had me fielding tough questions on the oil spill for about an hour. I methodically listed everything we'd done since the Deepwater had exploded, and I described the technical intricacies of the various strategies being employed to cap the well. I acknowledged problems with MMS, as well as my own excessive confidence in the ability of companies like BP to safeguard against risk. I announced the formation of a national commission to review the disaster and figure out how such accidents could be prevented in the future, and I reemphasized the need for a long-term response that would make America less reliant on dirty fossil fuels. Reading the transcript now, a decade later, I'm struck by how calm and cogent I sound. Maybe I'm surprised because the transcript doesn't register what I remember feeling at the time or come close to capturing what I really wanted to say before the assembled White House press corps: That MMS wasn't fully equipped to do its job, in large part because for the past thirty years a big chunk of American voters had bought into the Republican idea that government was the problem and that business always knew better, and had elected leaders who made it their mission to gut environmental regulations, starve agency budgets, denigrate civil servants, and allow industrial polluters do whatever the hell they wanted to do. That the government didn't have better technology than BP did to quickly plug the hole because it would be expensive to have such technology on hand, and we Americans didn't like paying higher taxes - especially when it was to prepare for problems that hadn't happened yet. That it was hard to take seriously any criticism from a character like Bobby Jindal, who'd done Big Oil's bidding throughout his career and would go on to support an oil industry lawsuit trying to get a federal court to lift our temporary drilling moratorium; and that if he and other Gulf-elected officials were truly concerned about the well-being of their constituents, they'd be urging their party to stop denying the effects of climate change, since it was precisely the people of the Gulf who were the most likely to lose homes or jobs as a result of rising global temperatures. And that the only way to truly guarantee that we didn't have another catastrophic oil spill in the future was to stop drilling entirely; but that wasn't going to happen because at the end of the day we Americans loved our cheap gas and big cars more than we cared about the environment, except when a complete disaster was staring us in the face; and in the absence of such a disaster, the media rarely covered efforts to shift America off fossil fuels or pass climate legislation, since actually educating the public on long-term energy policy would be boring and bad for ratings; and the one thing I could be certain of was that for all the outrage being expressed at the moment about wetlands and sea turtles and pelicans, what the majority of us were really interested in was having the problem go away, for me to clean up yet one more mess decades in the making with some quick and easy fix, so that we could all go back to our carbon-spewing, energy-wasting ways without having to feel guilty about it. I didn't say any of that. Instead I somberly took responsibility and said it was my job to "get this fixed." Afterward, I scolded my press team, suggesting that if they'd done better work telling the story of everything we were doing to clean up the spill, I wouldn't have had to tap-dance for an hour while getting the crap kicked out of me. My press folks looked wounded. Sitting alone in the Treaty Room later that night, I felt bad about what I had said, knowing I'd misdirected my anger and frustration. It was those damned plumes of oil that I really wanted to curse out.

We then reached a fork in the valley. Should we go left or right? Dad called it left. I had a very powerful intuition that right was the choice we should make. Dad insisted left. I insisted right. It was a fifty-fifty call and he relented. Within two hundred yards we stumbled across a snowy track through the woods and followed it excitedly. Within a mile it came out on a mountain road, and within ten minutes we had flagged down a lift from a car heading up the hill in the darkness. We had found salvation, and I was beat. The car dropped us off at the gates of the garrison thirty minutes later. It was, by then, late into the night, but I was suddenly buzzing with energy and excitement. The fatigue had gone. Dad knew that I had made the right call up there--if we had chosen left we would still be trudging into the unknown. I felt so proud. In truth it was probably luck, but I learned another valuable lesson that night: Listen to the quiet voice inside. Intuition is the noise of the mind. As we tromped back through the barracks, though, we noticed there was an unusual amount of activity for the early hours of a weekday morning. It soon became very clear why. First a sergeant appeared, followed by another soldier, and then we were ushered into the senior officers’ block. There was my uncle, standing in uniform looking both tired and serious. I started to break out into a big smile. So did Dad. Well, I was excited. We had cheated a slow, lingering hypothermic death, lost together in the mountains. We were alive. Our enthusiasm was countered by the immortal words from my uncle, the brigadier, saying: “I wouldn’t smile if I was you…” He continued, “The entire army mountain rescue team is currently out scouring the mountains for you, on foot and in the air with the search-and-rescue helicopter. I hope you have a good explanation.” We didn’t, of course, save that we had been careless, and we had got lucky; but that’s life sometimes. And the phrase: “I wouldn’t smile if I was you,” has gone down into Grylls family folklore.

I stood before the group. “Whose fault was this?” I asked to the roomful of teammates. After a few moments of silence, the SEAL who had mistakenly engaged the Iraqi solider spoke up: “It was my fault. I should have positively identified my target.” “No,” I responded, “It wasn’t your fault. Whose fault was it?” I asked the group again. “It was my fault,” said the radioman from the sniper element. “I should have passed our position sooner.” “Wrong,” I responded. “It wasn’t your fault. Whose fault was it?” I asked again. “It was my fault,” said another SEAL, who was a combat advisor with the Iraqi Army clearance team. “I should have controlled the Iraqis and made sure they stayed in their sector.” “Negative,” I said. “You are not to blame.” More of my SEALs were ready to explain what they had done wrong and how it had contributed to the failure. But I had heard enough. “You know whose fault this is? You know who gets all the blame for this?” The entire group sat there in silence, including the CO, the CMC, and the investigating officer. No doubt they were wondering whom I would hold responsible. Finally, I took a deep breath and said, “There is only one person to blame for this: me. I am the commander. I am responsible for the entire operation. As the senior man, I am responsible for every action that takes place on the battlefield. There is no one to blame but me. And I will tell you this right now: I will make sure that nothing like this ever happens to us again.” It was a heavy burden to bear. But it was absolutely true. I was the leader. I was in charge and I was responsible. Thus, I had to take ownership of everything that went wrong. Despite the tremendous blow to my reputation and to my ego, it was the right thing to do—the only thing to do. I apologized to the wounded SEAL, explaining that it was my fault he was wounded and that we were all lucky he wasn’t dead. We then proceeded to go through the entire operation, piece by piece, identifying everything that happened and what we could do going forward to prevent it from happening again.

Success comes with an inevitable problem: market saturation. New products initially grow just by adding more customers—to grow a network, add more nodes. Eventually this stops working because nearly everyone in the target market has joined the network, and there are not enough potential customers left. From here, the focus has to shift from adding new customers to layering on more services and revenue opportunities with existing ones. eBay had this problem in its early years, and had to figure its way out. My colleague at a16z, Jeff Jordan, experienced this himself, and would often write and speak about his first month as the general manager of eBay’s US business. It was in 2000, and for the first time ever, eBay’s US business failed to grow on a month-over-month basis. This was critical for eBay because nearly all the revenue and profit for the company came from the US unit—without growth in the United States, the entire business would stagnate. Something had to be done quickly. It’s tempting to just optimize the core business. After all, increasing a big revenue base even a little bit often looks more appealing than starting at zero. Bolder bets are risky. Yet because of the dynamics of market saturation, a product’s growth tends to slow down and not speed up. There’s no way around maintaining a high growth rate besides continuing to innovate. Jeff shared what the team did to find the next phase of growth for the company: eBay.com at the time enabled the community to buy and sell solely through online auctions. But auctions intimidated many prospective users who expressed preference for the ease and simplicity of fixed price formats. Interestingly, our research suggested that our online auction users were biased towards men, who relished the competitive aspect of the auction. So the first major innovation we pursued was to implement the (revolutionary!) concept of offering items for a fixed price on ebay.com, which we termed “buy-it-now.” Buy-it-now was surprisingly controversial to many in both the eBay community and in eBay headquarters. But we swallowed hard, took the risk and launched the feature . . . and it paid off big. These days, the buy-it-now format represents over $40 billion of annual Gross Merchandise Volume for eBay, 62% of their total.65

Sitting with some of the other members of the Scholastic Decathlon team, quiet, studious Martha Cox heard snatches of the lunchtime poetry. Her ears instantly pricked up. "What's going on?" she asked, her eyes bright. Betty Hong closed her book and leaned close. "Taylor McKessie told me all about it," she whispered. Betty told Martha about next week's poetry-reading assembly and how Taylor was trying to help half the starting basketball team locate their muse. "That's totally fresh!" Martha cried. "Too bad I'm not in Ms Barrington's English class." Betty made a face. "You like poetry stuff? I thought you were into maths and science." "I like it all," Martha replied. "I love astronomy and hip-hop-" Betty rolled her eyes. "Not hip-hop again." "Word, girl," Martha replied. "You know I've been bustin' out kickin' rhymes for years. It helps me remember lessons, like last night's astronomy lecture." "No," Betty said. "You didn't make up a rap to that." "Just watch," Martha cried. Leaping out of her chair, she began to chant, freestyle: "At the centre of our system is the molten sun, A star that burns hot, Fahrenheit two billion and one. But the sun, he ain't alone in the heavenly sphere, He's got nine homeys in orbit, some far, some near. Old Mercury's crowding in 'bout as close as he can, Yo, Merc's a tiny planet who loves a tan.... Some kids around Martha heard her rap. They really got into it, jumping up from their tables to clap and dance. The beat was contagious. Martha started bustin' some moves herself. She kept the rap flowing, and more kids joined the party.... "Venus is next. She's a real hot planet, Shrouded by clouds, hot enough to melt granite. Earth is the third planet from the sun, Just enough light and heat to make living fun. Then comes Mars, a planet funky and red. Covered with sand, the place is pretty dead. Jupiter's huge! The largest planet of all! Saturn's big, too, but Uranus is small. So far away, the place is almost forgotten, Neptune's view of Earth is pretty rotten. And last but not least, Pluto's in a fog, Far away and named after Mickey's home dog. Yo, that's all the planets orbiting our sun, But the Milky Way galaxy is far from done!" When Martha finished her freestyle, hip-hop flow, the entire cafeteria burst into wild applause. Troy, Chad, Zeke, and Jason had been clapping and dancing, too. Now they joined in the whooping and hollering. "Whoa," said Chad. "Martha's awesome.