Fabric Business Quotes

The difference between my darkness and your darkness is that I can look at my own badness in the face and accept its existence while you are busy covering your mirror with a white linen sheet. The difference between my sins and your sins is that when I sin I know I'm sinning while you have actually fallen prey to your own fabricated illusions. I am a siren, a mermaid; I know that I am beautiful while basking on the ocean's waves and I know that I can eat flesh and bones at the bottom of the sea. You are a white witch, a wizard; your spells are manipulations and your cauldron from hell yet you wrap yourself in white and wear a silver wig.

Besides,” Hatta said, tossing the shredded paper back at her. It wisped and fluttered and clung to the fabric of her gown. “I have a personal rule about not entering into business with spineless creatures. No snakes. No slippery eels. And worst of all, no fickle women.

I have come more and more to the belief that we owe our arts a thousand times what we are paying them. We support our cigarette factories, soap manufacturers, beauticians, all the luxury and pleasure businesses of our over-indulged civilization, but we pay our painters an average wage... and yet when the future digs us from the past they won't care how we smell, what we smoke, or if we bathed. All they’ll know of us will be our architecture, our paintings, sculpture, poems, laws, philosophy, drama, our pottery and fabrics, the things which our hands made and our minds thought up - oh, the machines they’ll dig up too, but perhaps they’ll point to them as our destruction, the wheels that drove us down to death.

When it's time to confess, you don't know what you're saying. Are you telling the truth, or do you confuse your lies with reality? The question is comical. The answer is lost in the maelstroms of consciousness. It's even impossible to pretend, eventually, that the question wasn't asked. You've been kidding yourself about yourself for so long, you're someone else. Your you is just a fragile fabrication. Every morning, you have to wake up, assemble this busy, dissembling monster, and get him or her on his or her feet again for another round of fantasy.

Be yourself! Don’t try to fabricate your personality in the guise of impressing others.

The previous night he was in an accident. Ran over a homeless guy. She listens to a man fabricating at least some of the things he’s telling her. The human frailty of lying.

The best I offer the world is the truth—my highest gift. What the world does with it is not up to me. I am not in charge of outcomes, opinions, assessments. I am not in the business of damage control. When I present a fabricated version of myself—the self who knows all, is ever certain, always steps strong—we all lose, because I cannot keep up with that lie and neither can you.

When those who are responsible for the leadership of State begin to move in villainous ways; when they begin to destroy the fabric of what it is that our nation is held together with; when they violate the Constitution of our nation and begin to do things that are false to our dreams and our hopes--it is incumbent upon every citizen by right, but also by responsibility, to challenge that administration, to raise their voice in vigorous dissent and to challenge the way in which the state is doing business. And those who fail to do that, should be charged with patriotic treason!

You’ve been kidding yourself about yourself for so long, you’re someone else. Your you is just a fragile fabrication. Every morning, you have to wake up, assemble this busy, dissembling monster, and get him or her on his or her feet again for another round of fantasy.

Amit likens fashion to a mask, and style to beauty of countenance. Style, he feels, belongs to the literary elite, who live by their own wishes. And fashion is for the ordinary lot, who make it their business to please other people. . . . You may view a professional dancing girl beneath the awning of a public marquee; but for the first glimpse of the bride’s face during the shubhodrishti ritual, a veil of Benarasi fabric is required. The marquee belongs to fashion, the Benarasi veil--which reveals the special one’s countenance shaded by a special hue--to style.

In which case, why not cancer of the brain? As a terrified, half-aware imbecile, I might even scream for a priest at the close of business, though I hereby state while I am still lucid that the entity thus humiliating itself would not in fact be “me.” (Bear this in mind, in case of any later rumors or fabrications.)

My favorite style, though, is the way you were wearing it earlier when you had it draped across both of your arms loosely. That way, I get the full effect of your exquisite hair tumbling down your back.” Wrapping the filmy fabric around my shoulders, he pulled the shawl and gently tugged me closer. He reached out, captured a curl, and wrapped the hair around his finger. “This life is so different from what I know. So many things have changed.” He let go of the shawl, but he kept hold of the curl. “But some things are much, much better.” He let go of the curl, trailing a finger down my cheek, and gave me a little nudge back toward my room. “Goodnight, Kelsey. We have a busy day tomorrow.

Secularity is a way of being dependent on the responses of our milieu. The secular or false self is the self which is fabricated, as Thomas Merton says, by social compulsions. 'Compulsive' is indeed the best adjective for the false self. It points to the need for ongoing and increasing affirmation. Who am I? I am the one who is liked, praised, admired, disliked, hated or despised. Whether I am a pianist, a businessman or a minister, what matters is how I am perceived by my world. If being busy is a good thing, then I must be busy. If having money is a sign of real freedom, then I must claim my money. If knowing many people proves my importance, I will have to make the necessary contacts. The compulsion manifests itself in the lurking fear of failure and the steady urge to prevent this by gathering more of the same - more work, more money, more friends.

Well, one of the best ways to control people in terms of attitudes is by what the great political economist Thorstein Veblen called “fabricating consumers.” If you can fabricate wants, make obtaining things that are just about within your reach the essence of life, they’re going to be trapped into becoming consumers. You read the business press in the 1920s and it talks about the need to direct people to the superficial things of life, like “fashionable consumption,” and that’ll keep them out of our hair.

In the market economy the consumers are supreme. Consumers determine, by their buying or abstention from buying, what should be produced, by whom and how, of what quality and in what quantity. The entrepreneurs, capitalists, and landowners who fail to satisfy in the best possible and cheapest way the most urgent of the not yet satisfied wishes of the consumers are forced to go out of business and forfeit their preferred position. In business offices and in laboratories the keenest minds are busy fructifying the most complex achievements of scientific research for the production of ever better implements and gadgets for people who have no inkling of the scientific theories that make the fabrication of such things possible. The bigger an enterprise is, the more it is forced to adjust its production activities to the changing whims and fancies of the masses, its masters. The fundamental principle of capitalism is mass production to supply the masses. It is the patronage of the masses that makes enterprises grow into bigness. The common man is supreme in the market economy. He is the customer “who is always right.

You have no friends. And all of this is a fabrication. Your brain’s feeble attempt to preserve itself. Telling itself a story with love and adventure and mystery. All of those things you wanted in your life that you were too busy playing your games and reading your books to go out and find. Your wasted life is ending, that is why you are here.

Glorious,' said Steerpike, 'is a dictionary word. We are all imprisoned by the dictionary. We choose out of that vast, paper-walled prison our convicts, the little black printed words, when in truth we need fresh sounds to utter, new enfranchised noises which would produce a new effect. In dead and shackled language, my dears, you *are* glorious, but oh, to give vent to a brand new sounds that might convince you of what I really think of you, as you sit there in your purple splendour, side by side! But no, it is impossible. Life is too fleet for onomatopoeia. Dead words defy me. I can make no sound, dear ladies, that is apt.' 'You could try,' said Clarice. 'We aren't busy.' She smoothed the shining fabric of her dress with her long, lifeless fingers. 'Impossible,' replied the youth, rubbing his chin. 'Quite impossible. Only believe in my admiration for your beauty that will one day be recognized by the whole castle. Meanwhile, preserve all dignity and silent power in your twin bosoms.

So I got to witness firsthand how those metal links got broken. The muscles in his upper arms pumped to the size of grapefruits, and the fabric of the T-shirt tightened around them almost to tearing… Then the metal gave way with a musical twang, and the chain snaked noisily from the grate, falling to the rain-softened earth with a clunk. “By all means,” John said, brushing his hands together in a self-satisfied way, “let’s call Mr. Smith.” I ducked my head, hiding my blushing cheeks by pretending to be busy putting my cell phone back in my bag. Encouraging his occasional lapses into less than civilized behavior seemed like a bad idea, so I didn’t let on how extremely attractive I’d found what he’d just done. “You know,” I remarked coolly, “I’m already your girlfriend. You don’t have to show off your superhuman strength for me.” John looked as if he didn’t for one minute believe my disinterest. He opened the grate for me with a gentlemanly bow. “Let’s go find your cousin,” he said. “I’d like to be home in time for supper. Where’s the coffin?” “It’s at my mom’s house,” I said. “What?” That deflated his self-satisfaction like a pin through a balloon. He stood stock-still outside the door to his crypt, the word HAYDEN carved in bold capital letters above his head. “What’s it doing there?” “Seth Rector and his girlfriend and their friends asked me if they could build it in my mom’s garage,” I said. “They said it was the last place anyone would look.” John shook his head slowly. “Rector,” he said, grinding out the word. “I should have known.” I threw him a wide-eyed glance. “You know Seth Rector?” “Not Seth,” he said, darkly.

Making a product is just an activity, making a profit on a product is the achievement.

Bob is talking about alternative people. Alternative beliefs and outlooks, alternative business and politics, alternative lifestyles and healthcare. alternative foods and fabrics, alternative child-rearing and schooling, alternative fuels and energies—alternative everything, basically, but not very alternative. These are alternatives within the established paradigm. not alternatives to it: a subherd running in parallel to the main body. Rather than detaching from their ego structures, alternative people merely reshape them along more heart-felt and self-centric lines, their multivarious goals and ideals reducing to personal happiness via the removal, avoidance and denial of unhappiness.

Of course, the man was built, with a huge chest, stunning abs, massive arms, and trim waist. All dripping wet. And shiny. And biteable. But it was wet swim trunks that did me in. The fabric clung to his business for dear life. I had to sit down. No shame.

Inequality has long been built into the core fabric of the American business model. Pitting Black workers against white workers against immigrant workers has been a particularly potent, tried-and-true tactic of employers to drive down all wages. But the cursory sketch laid out here does not even begin to discuss the very many oppressions—of people with disabilities, of gay people, of transgender people, of Native peoples, of elders, and more—that play an integral role in upholding the profitability of US capitalism. In fact, any place where bosses can hold down the wages of one section of the workforce not only ensures a cheaper labor pool among the oppressed demographic, but also, in the words of abolitionist Frederick Douglass, divides both in order to conquer each, so that everyone’s wages are pushed down.

My core fear is that we are, as a culture, as a species, becoming shallower; that we have turned from depth--from the Judeo-Christian premise of unfathomable mystery--and are adapting ourselves to the ersatz security of a vast lateral consciousness. That we are giving up on wisdom, the struggle for which has for millennia been central to the very idea of culture, and that we are pledging instead to a faith in the web. What is our idea, our ideal, of wisdom these days? Who represents it? Who even invokes it? Our postmodern culture is a vast fabric of completing isms; we are leaderless and subject to the terrors, masked as the freedoms, of an absolute relativism. It would be wrong to lay all the blame at the feet of technology, but more wrong to ignore the great transformative impact of new technological systems--to act as if it's all just business as usual.

As we were wrapping up the book, I sat down and thought about all the lessons I’d learned over the past two years. I couldn’t list them all, but here are a few: Never complain about the price of a gift from your spouse--accept it with love and gratitude. You can’t put a price on romance. Take lots of videos, even of the mundane. You will forget the sound of your children’s voices and you will miss your youth as much as theirs. Celebrate every wedding anniversary. Make time for dates. Hug your spouse every single morning. And always, ALWAYS, say “I love you.” Believe in your partner. When you hit hard times as a couple, take a weekend away or at least a night out. The times that you least feel like doing it are likely the times that you need it the most. Write love notes to your spouse, your children, and keep the ones they give you. Don’t expect a miniature pig to be an “easy” pet. Live life looking forward with a goal of no regrets, so you can look back without them. Be the friend you will need some day. Often the most important thing you can do for another person is just showing up. Question less and listen more. Don’t get too tied up in your plans for the future. No one really knows their future anyway. Laugh at yourself, and with life. People don’t change their core character. Be humble, genuine, and gracious. Before you get into business with someone, look at their history. Expect them to be with you for the long haul, even if you don’t think they will be. If they aren’t someone you could take a road trip across the country with, don’t do business with them in the first place. Real families and real sacrifices live in the fabric of the Red, White, and Blue; stand for the national anthem.

Our world no longer hears God because it is constantly speaking, at a devastating speed and volume, in order to say nothing. Modern civilization does not know how to be quiet. It holds forth in an unending monologue. Postmodern society rejects the past and looks at the present as a cheap consumer object; it pictures the future in terms of an almost obsessive progress. Its dream, which has become a sad reality, will have been to lock silence away in a damp, dark dungeon. Thus there is a dictatorship of speech, a dictatorship of verbal emphasis. In this theater of shadows, nothing is left but a purulent wound of mechanical words, without perspective, without truth, and without foundation. Quite often “truth” is nothing more than the pure and misleading creation of the media, corroborated by fabricated images and testimonies. When that happens, the word of God fades away, inaccessible and inaudible. Postmodernity is an ongoing offense and aggression against the divine silence. From morning to evening, from evening to morning, silence no longer has any place at all; the noise tries to prevent God himself from speaking. In this hell of noise, man disintegrates and is lost; he is broken up into countless worries, fantasies, and fears. In order to get out of these depressing tunnels, he desperately awaits noise so that it will bring him a few consolations. Noise is a deceptive, addictive, and false tranquilizer. The tragedy of our world is never better summed up than in the fury of senseless noise that stubbornly hates silence. This age detests the things that silence brings us to: encounter, wonder, and kneeling before God. 75. Even in the schools, silence has disappeared. And yet how can anyone study in the midst of noise? How can you read in noise? How can you train your intellect in noise? How can you structure your thought and the contours of your interior being in noise? How can you be open to the mystery of God, to spiritual values, and to our human greatness in continual turmoil? Contemplative silence is a fragile little flame in the middle of a raging ocean. The fire of silence is weak because it is bothersome to a busy world.

The particular value attached of virginity is a fabrication of the male, due partly to superstition, partly to masculine vanity, and partly, of course, to a disinclination to father someone else's child. Women, I should say, have ascribed importance to it chiefly because the value men place on it, and also from fear of consequences. I think I am right in saying that a man, to satisfy a need as natural as eating his dinner when he is hungry, may have sexual intercourse without any particular feeling for the object of his appetite; whereas with a woman sexual intercourse, without something in the nature, if not of love, at least of sentiment, is merely a tiresome business which she accepts as obligation, or from the wish to give pleasure.

He sits back on the couch, nonchalantly adjusting the suit jacket around his narrow hips as if his cock isn’t straining the shiny fabric of his slacks. “If you’re here strictly on business…” I lurch off the coffee table and stand on the opposite side. “Explain that.” I point at his erection. “Making money gets my dick hard.” Where did this heartless douche in a tin can come from?

Secularity is a way of being dependent on the responses of our milieu. The secular or false self is the self which is fabricated, as Thomas Merton says, by social compulsions. “Compulsive” is indeed the best adjective for the false self. It points to the need for ongoing and increasing affirmation. Who am I? I am the one who is liked, praised, admired, disliked, hated or despised. Whether I am a pianist, a businessman or a minister, what matters is how I am perceived by my world. If being busy is a good thing, then I must be busy. If having money is a sign of real freedom, then I must claim my money. If knowing many people proves my importance, I will have to make the necessary contacts. The compulsion manifests itself in the lurking fear of failing and the steady urge to prevent this by gathering more of the same—more work, more money, more friends.

is turning all life into a unified flow experience. If a person sets out to achieve a difficult enough goal, from which all other goals logically follow, and if he or she invests all energy in developing skills to reach that goal, then actions and feelings will be in harmony, and the separate parts of life will fit together—and each activity will “make sense” in the present, as well as in view of the past and of the future. In such a way, it is possible to give meaning to one’s entire life. But isn’t it incredibly naive to expect life to have a coherent overall meaning? After all, at least since Nietzsche concluded that God was dead, philosophers and social scientists have been busy demonstrating that existence has no purpose, that chance and impersonal forces rule our fate, and that all values are relative and hence arbitrary. It is true that life has no meaning, if by that we mean a supreme goal built into the fabric of nature and human experience, a goal that is valid for every individual. But it does not follow that life cannot be given meaning. Much of what we call culture and civilization consists in efforts people have made, generally against overwhelming odds, to create a sense of purpose for themselves and their descendants. It is one thing to recognize that life is, by itself, meaningless. It is another thing entirely to accept this with resignation. The first fact does not entail the second any more than the fact that we lack wings prevents us from flying. From the point of view of an individual, it does not matter what the ultimate goal is—provided it is compelling enough to order a lifetime’s worth of psychic energy. The challenge might involve the desire to have the best beer-bottle collection in the neighborhood, the resolution to find a cure for cancer, or simply the biological imperative to have children who will survive and prosper. As long as it provides clear objectives, clear rules for action, and a way to concentrate and become involved, any goal can serve to give meaning to a person’s life. In the past few years I have come to be quite well acquainted with several Muslim professionals—electronics engineers, pilots, businessmen, and teachers, mostly from Saudi Arabia and from the other Gulf states. In talking to them, I was struck with how relaxed most of them seemed to be even under strong pressure. “There is nothing to it,” those I asked about it told me, in different words, but with the same message: “We don’t get upset because we believe that our life is in God’s hands, and whatever He decides will be fine with us.” Such implicit faith used to be widespread in our culture as well, but it is not easy to find it now. Many of us have to discover a goal that will give meaning to life on our own, without the help of a traditional faith.

Continually thinking of oneself as a bum, a mean old man, a strapping youth, a mothering person, a hot business exec, a cute young thing, a man on the go, a rebel, smarter than most, a refined sort, a dark soul, a victim of circumstance, special and unique, and on and on, will cause us to become very attached to these images and roles. We tend to think they are simply assessments of what is so, but they’re not. They are fabrications within one’s mind and they exist to serve some end.

We will not reimagine capitalism unless we rediscover the values on which capitalism has always been based, and have the courage and the skill to integrate them into the day-to-day fabric of business. To pretend that this is not the case is to critically misrepresent the truth of our current situation. We are destroying the world and the social fabric in the service of a quick buck, and we need to move beyond the simple maximization of shareholder value before we bring the whole system crashing down around our heads.

Rolf Ekeus came round to my apartment one day and showed me the name of the Iraqi diplomat who had visited the little West African country of Niger: a statelet famous only for its production of yellowcake uranium. The name was Wissam Zahawi. He was the brother of my louche gay part-Kurdish friend, the by-now late Mazen. He was also, or had been at the time of his trip to Niger, Saddam Hussein's ambassador to the Vatican. I expressed incomprehension. What was an envoy to the Holy See doing in Niger? Obviously he was not taking a vacation. Rolf then explained two things to me. The first was that Wissam Zahawi had, when Rolf was at the United Nations, been one of Saddam Hussein's chief envoys for discussions on nuclear matters (this at a time when the Iraqis had functioning reactors). The second was that, during the period of sanctions that followed the Kuwait war, no Western European country had full diplomatic relations with Baghdad. TheVatican was the sole exception, so it was sent a very senior Iraqi envoy to act as a listening post. And this man, a specialist in nuclear matters, had made a discreet side trip to Niger. This was to suggest exactly what most right-thinking people were convinced was not the case: namely that British intelligence was on to something when it said that Saddam had not ceased seeking nuclear materials in Africa. I published a few columns on this, drawing at one point an angry email from Ambassador Zahawi that very satisfyingly blustered and bluffed on what he'd really been up to. I also received—this is what sometimes makes journalism worthwhile—a letter from a BBC correspondent named Gordon Correa who had been writing a book about A.Q. Khan. This was the Pakistani proprietor of the nuclear black market that had supplied fissile material to Libya, North Korea, very probably to Syria, and was open for business with any member of the 'rogue states' club. (Saddam's people, we already knew for sure, had been meeting North Korean missile salesmen in Damascus until just before the invasion, when Kim Jong Il's mercenary bargainers took fright and went home.) It turned out, said the highly interested Mr. Correa, that his man Khan had also been in Niger, and at about the same time that Zahawi had. The likelihood of the senior Iraqi diplomat in Europe and the senior Pakistani nuclear black-marketeer both choosing an off-season holiday in chic little uranium-rich Niger… well, you have to admit that it makes an affecting picture. But you must be ready to credit something as ridiculous as that if your touching belief is that Saddam Hussein was already 'contained,' and that Mr. Bush and Mr. Blair were acting on panic reports, fabricated in turn by self-interested provocateurs.

One day a man came running to a Sufi and said, panting, "Hey, they are carrying trays, look over there!" The Sufi answered calmly, "What is it to us? Is it any of my business?" "But they are taking those trays to your house!" the man exclaimed. "Then is it any of your business?" the Sufi said. Unfortunately, people always watch the trays of others. Instead of minding their own business, they pass judgment on other people. It never ceases to amaze me the things they fabricate! Their imagination knows no limit when it comes to suspicion and slander.

I did say that to deny the existence of evil spirits, or to deny the existence of the devil, is to deny the truth of the New Testament; and that to deny the existence of these imps of darkness is to contradict the words of Jesus Christ. I did say that if we give up the belief in devils we must give up the inspiration of the Old and New Testaments, and we must give up the divinity of Christ. Upon that declaration I stand, because if devils do not exist, then Jesus Christ was mistaken, or we have not in the New Testament a true account of what he said and of what he pretended to do. If the New Testament gives a true account of his words and pretended actions, then he did claim to cast out devils. That was his principal business. That was his certificate of divinity, casting out devils. That authenticated his mission and proved that he was superior to the hosts of darkness. Now, take the devil out of the New Testament, and you also take the veracity of Christ; with that veracity you take the divinity; with that divinity you take the atonement, and when you take the atonement, the great fabric known as Christianity becomes a shapeless ruin. The Christians now claim that Jesus was God. If he was God, of course the devil knew that fact, and yet, according to this account, the devil took the omnipotent God and placed him upon a pinnacle of the temple, and endeavored to induce him to dash himself against the earth… Think of it! The devil – the prince of sharpers – the king of cunning – the master of finesse, trying to bribe God with a grain of sand that belonged to God! Casting out devils was a certificate of divinity. Is there in all the religious literature of the world anything more grossly absurd than this? These devils, according to the Bible, were of various kinds – some could speak and hear, others were deaf and dumb. All could not be cast out in the same way. The deaf and dumb spirits were quite difficult to deal with. St. Mark tells of a gentleman who brought his son to Christ. The boy, it seems, was possessed of a dumb spirit, over which the disciples had no control. “Jesus said unto the spirit: ‘Thou dumb and deaf spirit, I charge thee come out of him, and enter no more into him.’” Whereupon, the deaf spirit (having heard what was said) cried out (being dumb) and immediately vacated the premises. The ease with which Christ controlled this deaf and dumb spirit excited the wonder of his disciples, and they asked him privately why they could not cast that spirit out. To whom he replied: “This kind can come forth by nothing but prayer and fasting.” Is there a Christian in the whole world who would believe such a story if found in any other book? The trouble is, these pious people shut up their reason, and then open their Bible.

WHEN I DESCRIBED THE TUMOR IN MY ESOPHAGUS as a “blind, emotionless alien,” I suppose that even I couldn’t help awarding it some of the qualities of a living thing. This at least I know to be a mistake: an instance of the pathetic fallacy (angry cloud, proud mountain, presumptuous little Beaujolais) by which we ascribe animate qualities to inanimate phenomena. To exist, a cancer needs a living organism, but it cannot ever become a living organism. Its whole malice—there I go again—lies in the fact that the “best” it can do is to die with its host. Either that or its host will find the measures with which to extirpate and outlive it. But, as I knew before I became ill, there are some people for whom this explanation is unsatisfying. To them, a rodent carcinoma really is a dedicated, conscious agent—a slow–acting suicide–murderer—on a consecrated mission from heaven. You haven’t lived, if I can put it like this, until you have read contributions such as this on the websites of the faithful: Who else feels Christopher Hitchens getting terminal throat cancer [sic] was God’s revenge for him using his voice to blaspheme him? Atheists like to ignore FACTS. They like to act like everything is a “coincidence.” Really? It’s just a “coincidence” [that] out of any part of his body, Christopher Hitchens got cancer in the one part of his body he used for blasphemy? Yeah, keep believing that, Atheists. He’s going to writhe in agony and pain and wither away to nothing and then die a horrible agonizing death, and THEN comes the real fun, when he’s sent to HELLFIRE forever to be tortured and set afire. There are numerous passages in holy scripture and religious tradition that for centuries made this kind of gloating into a mainstream belief. Long before it concerned me particularly I had understood the obvious objections. First, which mere primate is so damn sure that he can know the mind of god? Second, would this anonymous author want his views to be read by my unoffending children, who are also being given a hard time in their way, and by the same god? Third, why not a thunderbolt for yours truly, or something similarly awe–inspiring? The vengeful deity has a sadly depleted arsenal if all he can think of is exactly the cancer that my age and former “lifestyle” would suggest that I got. Fourth, why cancer at all? Almost all men get cancer of the prostate if they live long enough: It’s an undignified thing but quite evenly distributed among saints and sinners, believers and unbelievers. If you maintain that god awards the appropriate cancers, you must also account for the numbers of infants who contract leukemia. Devout persons have died young and in pain. Betrand Russell and Voltaire, by contrast, remained spry until the end, as many psychopathic criminals and tyrants have also done. These visitations, then, seem awfully random. My so far uncancerous throat, let me rush to assure my Christian correspondent above, is not at all the only organ with which I have blasphemed. And even if my voice goes before I do, I shall continue to write polemics against religious delusions, at least until it’s hello darkness my old friend. In which case, why not cancer of the brain? As a terrified, half–aware imbecile, I might even scream for a priest at the close of business, though I hereby state while I am still lucid that the entity thus humiliating itself would not in fact be “me.” (Bear this in mind, in case of any later rumors or fabrications.)

I know for a fact that I would be awful if I was built like Serena Williams or Jennifer Lopez... If I had a body remotely close to what they have, I would be a terror. My ass would cause me to do really inappropriate and rude things. I'd be so ridiculous that people would be able to pick my labia out of a lineup. I'd wear zero clothes any- and everywhere, every day. I'd show up at church rocking a denim thong and a cropped T-shirt and have the nerve to sit right next to the head usher and dare her to say anything to me. And if anyone did say something to me, I'd tell them, "Jesus blessed me in many ways, and I am just showing off His works. HALLELUJAH." People would be disgusted and appalled by me and I wouldn't care. All insults would bounce off my ample backside. To whom much is given, much is required, and I'd require that my much would be given nary an inch of fabric. I'd hire a band whose sole job would be to follow me around and play theme music for my yansh, based on the mood I was in... I might opt to walk backwards into any room I entered, because why not?... I might also declare my booty its own limited liability corporation, assigning myself as CEO and chairman of the Donk. My jeans would be tax-deductible business expenses, and I would add my ass to my LinkedIn profile's Skills section. Everyone would throw hate ration in my dancery, and I wouldn't even see it, protected as I would be by the throne I sat atop.

Snowbound up here with you. Without books or business to occupy my time, I wonder what I’ll do,” he added with a leer. She blushed gorgeously, but her voice was serious as she studied his face. “If things hadn’t gone so well for you-if you hadn’t accumulated so much wealth-you could have been happy up here, couldn’t you?” “With you?” “Of course.” His smile was as somber as hers. “Absolutely.” “Although,” he added, linking her hands behind her back and drawing her a little closer, “you may not want to remain up here when you learn your emeralds are back in their cases at Montmayne.” Her head snapped up, and her eyes shone with love and relief. “I’m so glad. When I realized Robert’s story had been fabrication, it hurt beyond belief to realize I’d sold them.” “It’s going to hurt more,” he teased outrageously, “when you realize your bank draft to cover their cost was a little bit short. It cost me $45,000 to buy back the pieces that had already been sold, and $5,000 to buy the rest back from the jeweler you sold them to.” “That-that unconscionable thief!” she burst out. “He only gave me $5,000 for all of them!” She shook her head in despair at Ian’s lack of bargaining prowess. “He took dreadful advantage of you.” “I wasn’t concerned, however,” Ian continued teasing, enjoying himself hugely, “because I knew I’d get it all back out of your allowance. With interest, of course. According to my figures,” he said, pausing to calculate in his mind what it would have taken Elizabeth several minutes to figure out on paper, “as of today, you now owe me roughly $151,126.” “One hundred and- what?” she cried, half laughing and half irate. “There’s the little matter of the cost of Havenhurst. I added that in to the figure.” Tears of joy clouded her magnificent eyes. “You bought it back from that horrid Mr. Demarcus?” “Yes. And he is ‘horrid.’ He and your uncle ought to be partners. They both possess the instincts of camel traders. I paid $100,000 for it.” Her mouth fell open, and admiration lit her face. “$100,000! Oh, Ian-“ “I love it when you say my name.” She smiled at that, but her mind was still on the splendid bargain he’d gotten. “I could not have done a bit better!” she generously admitted. “That’s exactly what he paid for it, and he told me after the papers were signed that he was certain he could get $150,000 if he waited a year or so.” “He probably could have.” “But not from you!” she announced proudly. “Not from me,” he agreed, grinning. “Did he try?” “He tried for $200,000 as soon as he realized how important it was to me to buy it back for you.” “You must have been very clever and skillful to make him agree to accept so much less.” Trying desperately not to laugh, Ian put his forehead against hers and nodded. “Very skillful,” he agreed in a suffocated voice. “Still, I wonder why he was so agreeable?” Swallowing a surge of laughter, Ian said, “I imagine it was because I showed him that I had something he needed more than he needed an exorbitant profit.” “Really?” she said, fascinated and impressed. “What did you have?” “His throat.

After all, no big business idea makes sense at first. I mean, just imagine proposing the following ideas to a group of sceptical investors: ‘What people want is a really cool vacuum cleaner.’ (Dyson) ‘. . . and the best part of all this is that people will write the entire thing for free!’ (Wikipedia) ‘. . . and so I confidently predict that the great enduring fashion of the next century will be a coarse, uncomfortable fabric which fades unpleasantly and which takes ages to dry. To date, it has been largely popular with indigent labourers.’ (Jeans) ‘. . . and people will be forced to choose between three or four items.’ (McDonald’s) ‘And, best of all, the drink has a taste which consumers say they hate.’ (Red Bull) ‘. . . and just watch as perfectly sane people pay $5 for a drink they can make at home for a few pence.’ (Starbucks)*

Oh, busy weaver! unseen weaver!- pause!- one word!- whither flows the fabric? what palace may it deck? wherefore all these ceaseless toilings? Speak, weaver!- stay thy hand!- but one single word with thee! Nay- the shuttle flies- the figures float from forth the loom; the fresher-rushing carpet for ever slides away. The weaver-god, he weaves; and by that weaving is he deafened, that he hears no mortal voice; and by that humming, we, too, who look on the loom are deafened; and only when we escape it shall we hear the thousand voices that speak through it. For even so it is in all material factories. The spoken words that are inaudible among the flying spindles; those same words are plainly heard without the walls, bursting from the opened casements. Thereby have villainies been detected. Ah, mortal! then, be heedful; for so, in all this din of the great world’s loom, thy subtlest thinkings may be overheard afar.

Since we’ve ruled out another man as the explanation for all this, I can only assume something has gone wrong at Havenhurst. Is that it?” Elizabeth seized on that excuse as if it were manna from heaven. “Yes,” she whispered, nodding vigorously. Leaning down, he pressed a kiss on her forehead and said teasingly, “Let me guess-you discovered the mill overcharged you?” Elizabeth thought she would die of the sweet torment when he continued tenderly teasing her about being thrifty. “Not the mill? Then it was the baker, and he refused to give you a better price for buying two loaves instead of one.” Tears swelled behind her eyes, treacherously close to the surface, and Ian saw them. “That bad?” he joked, looking at the suspicious sheen in her eyes. “Then it must be that you’ve overspent your allowance.” When she didn’t respond to his light probing, Ian smiled reassuringly and said, “Whatever it is, we’ll work it out together tomorrow.” It sounded as though he planned to stay, and that shook Elizabeth out of her mute misery enough to say chokingly, “No-it’s the-the masons. They’re costing much more than I-I expected. I’ve spent part of my personal allowance on them besides the loan you made me for Havenhurst.” “Oh, so it’s the masons,” he grinned, chuckling. “You have to keep your eye on them, to be sure. They’ll put you in the poorhouse if you don’t keep an eye on the mortar they charge you for. I’ll have to talk with them in the morning.” “No!” she burst out, fabricating wildly. “That’s just what has me so upset. I didn’t want you to have to intercede. I wanted to do it all myself. I have it all settled now, but it’s been exhausting. And so I went to the doctor to see why I felt so tired. He-he said there’s nothing in the world wrong with me. I’ll come home to Montmayne the day after tomorrow. Don’t wait here for me. I know how busy you are right now. Please,” she implored desperately, “let me do this, I beg you!” Ian straightened and shook his head in baffled disbelief, “I’d give you my life for the price of your smile, Elizabeth. You don’t have to beg me for anything. I do not want you spending your personal allowance on this place, however. If you do,” he lied teasingly, “I may be forced to cut it off.” Then, more seriously, he said, “If you need more money for Havenhurst, just tell me, but your allowance is to be spent exclusively on yourself. Finish your brandy,” he ordered gently, and when she had, he pressed another kiss on her forehead. “Stay here as long as you must. I have business in Devon that I’ve been putting off because I didn’t want to leave you. I’ll go there and return to London on Tuesday. Would you like to join me there instead of at Montmayne?” Elizabeth nodded. “There’s just one thing more,” he finished, studying her pale face and strained features. “Will you give me your word the doctor didn’t find anything at all to be alarmed about?” “Yes,” Elizabeth said. “I give you my word.” She watched him walk back into his own bed chamber. The moment his door clicked into its latch Elizabeth turned over and buried her face in the pillows. She wept until she thought there couldn’t possibly be any more tears left in her, and then she wept harder. Across the room the door leading out into the hall was opened a crack, and Berta peeked in, then quickly closed it. Turning to Bentner-who’d sought her counsel when Ian slammed the door in his face and ripped into Elizabeth-Berta said miserably, “She’s crying like her heart will break, but he’s not in there anymore.” “He ought to be shot!” Bentner said with blazing contempt. Berta nodded timidly and clutched her dressing robe closer about her. “He’s a frightening man, to be sure, Mr. Bentner.

He is gone away,” acknowledged Dupesu. “He is afraid here, we are wait so long, and he will not stay. He is say he is safer away.” He took his elbows off the table and leaned back. “We are try pray to the Raven and offer gifts direct but the Raven is not answer. And this is a question for Prince Mawat as well. Why does the Raven nothing? Why is the heir must sit naked before the fortress gates to complain of this wrong, to tell the people, to make Lease Hibal to deal with his complain? Why is he not complain to the Raven himself? Where is the god of Iraden?” “Wherever he wishes to be, I suppose,” you said. “Is it not strange,” observed Dupesu, “that he is not here now and I am think he might be needed?” From under his collar, the snake’s tongue flickered out and then back, no other sign of the snake itself but a bulge under the fabric of his tunic. “Excuse me,” you said, rising. “I have business to attend to.” And without waiting for an answer you left.

Of course, this is not an innocent activity—even though the tech companies disavow any responsibility for the material they publish and promote. They plead that they are mere platforms, neutral utilities for everyone’s use and everyone’s benefit. When Facebook was assailed for abetting the onslaught of false news stories during the 2016 presidential campaign—a steady stream of fabricated right-wing conspiracies that boosted Donald Trump’s candidacy—Mark Zuckerberg initially disclaimed any culpability. “Our goal is to give every person a voice,” he posted on Facebook, washing his hands of the matter. It’s galling to watch Zuckerberg walk away from the catastrophic collapse of the news business and the degradation of American civic culture, because his site has played such a seminal role in both. Though Zuckerberg denies it, the process of guiding the public to information is a source of tremendous cultural and political power. In the olden days, we described that power as gatekeeping—and it was a sacred obligation.

... nature did not make us to feel too good for too long (which would be no good for the survival of the species) but only to feel good enough to imagine, erroneously, that someday we might feel good all the time. To believe that humanity will ever live in a feel-good world is a common mistake. And if we do not feel good, we should act as if we do. If you act happy, then you will become happy—everybody in the workaday world knows that. If you do not improve, then someone must assume the blame. And that someone will be you. We are on our way to the future, and no introverted melancholic is going to impede our progress. You have two choices: start thinking the way God and your society want you to think or be forsaken by all. The decision is yours, since you are a free agent who can choose to rejoin the world of fabricated reality—civilization, that is—or stubbornly insist on . . . what? That we should rethink how the whole world transacts its business? That we should start over from scratch, questioning all the ways and means that delivered us to a lofty prominence over the amusement park of creation? Try to be realistic. We made our world just the way nature and the Lord wanted us to make it. There is no starting over and no going back. No major readjustments are up for a vote. And no nihilistic head case is going to get a bad word in edgewise. The universe was created by the Creator, goddamn it. We live in a country we love and that loves us back. We have families and friends and jobs that make it all worthwhile. We are somebodies, as we spin upon this good earth, not a bunch of nobodies without names or numbers or retirement plans. None of this is going to become unraveled by a thought criminal who contends that the world is not double plus good and never will be and who believes that anyone is better off dead than alive. Our lives may not be unflawed—that would deny us a future to work toward—but if this charade is good enough for us, then it should be good enough for you. So if you cannot get your mind right, try walking away. You will find no place to go and no one who will have you. You will find only the same old trap the world over. It is the trap of tomorrow. Love it or leave it—choose which and choose fast. You will never get us to give up our hopes, demented as they may seem. You will never get us to wake up from our dreams. Your opinions are not certified by institutions of authority or by the middling run of humanity, and therefore whatever thoughts may enter your chemically imbalanced brain are invalid, inauthentic, or whatever dismissive term we care to assign to you who are only “one of those people.” So get the hell out if you can. But we are betting that when you start hurting badly enough, you will come running back. If you are not as strong as Samson— that no-good suicide and slaughterer of Philistines—then you will return to the trap. Do you think we are morons? We have already thought everything that you have thought. The only difference is that we have the proper and dignified sense of futility not to spread that nasty news. Our shibboleth: “Up the Conspiracy and down with Consciousness.

Once I had finished conducting business with Herr Kassl, I went in search of my sister. Käthe was easy to find, even in this sea of faces in the square. Her smiles were the broadest, her blue eyes the brightest, her pink cheeks the rosiest. Even her hair beneath that ridiculous hat shone like a bird of golden plumage. All I had to do was follow the path traced by the eyes of the onlookers in the village, those admiring, appreciative glances that led me straight to my sister at the center. For a moment, I watched her bargain and haggle with the sellers. Käthe was like an actress on the stage, all heightened emotion and intense passion, her gestures affected, her smiles calculated. She fluttered and flirted outrageously, carefully oblivious to the stares she drew like moths to the flame. Both men and women traced the lines of her body, the curve of her cheek, the pout of her lip. Looking at Käthe, it was difficult to forget just how sinful our bodies were, just how prone we were to wickedness. Born unto trouble, as the sparks fly upward, or so saith Job. Clothed in clinging fabrics, with every line of her body exposed, every gasp of pleasure unconcealed, everything about Käthe suggested voluptuousness.

Soon, droves of children start to show up, keeping us rather busy. We start tallying up the number of Trolls, Batmans, Lego men, and princesses we see. The most popular costume? Batman and Superwoman with the fabrics and accessories varying from child to child. But my favorite so far is the girl who dressed as Little Debbie, but then again, I may be biased. “I think she might be my new favorite,” Emma says as a little girl dressed as a nurse walks away. “That’s because you’re a nurse, but you can’t play favorites,” I say, reminding Emma of the rules. She levels with me. “This coming from the guy whose favorite child was dressed as Little Debbie.” “Come on.” I lean back in my chair and motion to my head. “She had the rim of blue on her hat. That’s attention to detail.” “And good fucking parenting,” Tucker chimes in, and we clink our beer bottles together. Amelia chuckles next to me as Emma shakes her head. “Ridiculous. What about you, Amelia? What costume has been your favorite so far?” “Hmm, it’s been a tough competition. There has been some real winning costumes and some absolute piss-poor ones.” She shakes her head. “Just because you put a scarf around your neck and call yourself Jack Frost doesn’t mean you dressed up.” “Ugh, that costume was dumb.” “It shouldn’t be referred to as a costume, but that’s beside the point.” I like how much Amelia is getting into this little pretend competition. She’s a far cry from the girl who first came home earlier. I love that having Tucker and Emma over has given me more time with Amelia, getting to know the woman she is today, but also managed to put that beautiful smile back on her face. “So who takes the cake for you?” I ask, nudging her leg with mine. Smiling up at me, she says, “Hands down it’s the little boy who dressed as Dwight Schrute from The Office. I think I giggled for five minutes straight after he left. That costume was spot on.” “Oh shit, you’re right,” I reply as Emma and Tucker agree with me. “He even had the watch calculator.” “And the small nose Dwight always complains about.” Emma chuckles. “Yeah, he has to be the winner.” “Now, now, now, let’s not get too hasty. Little Debbie is still in the running,” Tucker points out. Amelia leans forward, seeming incredibly comfortable, and says, “There is no way Little Debbie beats Dwight. Sorry, dude.” The shocked look on Tucker’s face is comical. He’s just been put in his place and the old Amelia has returned. I fucking love it.

It was a wondrous sight. The wood was green as mosses of the Icy Glen; the trees stood high and haughty, feeling their living sap; the industrious earth beneath was as a weaver’s loom, with a gorgeous carpet on it, whereof the ground-vine tendrils formed the warp and woof, and the living flowers the figures. All the trees, with all their laden branches; all the shrubs, and ferns, and grasses; the message-carrying air; all these unceasingly were active. Through the lacings of the leaves, the great sun seemed a flying shuttle weaving the unwearied verdure. Oh, busy weaver! unseen weaver!—pause!—one word!—whither flows the fabric? what palace may it deck? wherefore all these ceaseless toilings? Speak, weaver!—stay thy hand!—but one single word with thee! Nay—the shuttle flies—the figures float from forth the loom; the fresher-rushing carpet for ever slides away. The weaver-god, he weaves; and by that weaving is he deafened, that he hears no mortal voice; and by that humming, we, too, who look on the loom are deafened; and only when we escape it shall we hear the thousand voices that speak through it. For even so it is in all material factories. The spoken words that are inaudible among the flying spindles; those same words are plainly heard without the walls, bursting from the opened casements. Thereby have villainies been detected. Ah, mortal! then, be heedful; for so, in all this din of the great world’s loom, thy subtlest thinkings may be overheard afar.

Ahab stood for a while leaning over the bulwarks; and then, as had been usual with him of late, calling a sailor of the watch, he sent him below for his ivory stool, and also his pipe. Lighting the pipe at the binnacle lamp and planting the stool on the weather side of the deck, he sat and smoked. In old Norse times, the thrones of the sea-loving Danish kings were fabricated, saith tradition, of the tusks of the Narwhale. How could one look at Ahab then, seated on that tripod of bones, without bethinking him of the royalty it symbolized? For a Khan of the plank, and a king of the sea, and a great lord of Leviathans was Ahab. Some moments passed, during which the thick vapor came from his mouth in quick and constant puffs, which blew back again into his face. "How now," he soliloquized at last, withdrawing the tube, "this smoking no longer soothes. Oh, my pipe! hard must it go with me if thy charm be gone! Here have I been unconsciously toiling, not pleasuring, aye, and ignorantly smoking to windward all the while; to windward, and with such nervous whiffs, as if, like the dying whale, my final jets were the strongest and fullest of trouble. What business have I with this pipe? This thing that is meant for sereneness, to send up mild white vapors among mild white hairs, not among torn iron-grey locks like mine. I'll smoke no more" He tossed the still lighted pipe into the sea. The fire hissed in the waves; the same instant the ship shot by the bubble the sinking pipe made. With slouched hat, Ahab lurchingly paced the planks.

Bell resisted selling Texas Instruments a license. “This business is not for you,” the firm was told. “We don’t think you can do it.”38 In the spring of 1952, Haggerty was finally able to convince Bell Labs to let Texas Instruments buy a license to manufacture transistors. He also hired away Gordon Teal, a chemical researcher who worked on one of Bell Labs’ long corridors near the semiconductor team. Teal was an expert at manipulating germanium, but by the time he joined Texas Instruments he had shifted his interest to silicon, a more plentiful element that could perform better at high temperatures. By May 1954 he was able to fabricate a silicon transistor that used the n-p-n junction architecture developed by Shockley. Speaking at a conference that month, near the end of reading a thirty-one-page paper that almost put listeners to sleep, Teal shocked the audience by declaring, “Contrary to what my colleagues have told you about the bleak prospects for silicon transistors, I happen to have a few of them here in my pocket.” He proceeded to dunk a germanium transistor connected to a record player into a beaker of hot oil, causing it to die, and then did the same with one of his silicon transistors, during which Artie Shaw’s “Summit Ridge Drive” continued to blare undiminished. “Before the session ended,” Teal later said, “the astounded audience was scrambling for copies of the talk, which we just happened to bring along.”39 Innovation happens in stages. In the case of the transistor, first there was the invention, led by Shockley, Bardeen, and Brattain. Next came the production, led by engineers such as Teal. Finally, and equally important, there were the entrepreneurs who figured out how to conjure up new markets. Teal’s plucky boss Pat Haggerty was a colorful case study of this third step in the innovation process.

Though it’s best not to be born a chicken at all, it is especially bad luck to be born a cockerel. From the perspective of the poultry farmer, male chickens are useless. They can’t lay eggs, their meat is stringy, and they’re ornery to the hens that do all the hard work of putting food on our tables. Commercial hatcheries tend to treat male chicks like fabric cutoffs or scrap metal: the wasteful but necessary by-product of an industrial process. The sooner they can be disposed of—often they’re ground into animal feed—the better. But a costly problem has vexed egg farmers for millennia: It’s virtually impossible to tell the difference between male and female chickens until they’re four to six weeks old, when they begin to grow distinctive feathers and secondary sex characteristics like the rooster’s comb. Until then, they’re all just indistinguishable fluff balls that have to be housed and fed—at considerable expense. Somehow it took until the 1920s before anyone figured out a solution to this costly dilemma. The momentous discovery was made by a group of Japanese veterinary scientists, who realized that just inside the chick’s rear end there is a constellation of folds, marks, spots, and bumps that to the untrained eye appear arbitrary, but when properly read, can divulge the sex of a day-old bird. When this discovery was unveiled at the 1927 World Poultry Congress in Ottawa, it revolutionized the global hatchery industry and eventually lowered the price of eggs worldwide. The professional chicken sexer, equipped with a skill that took years to master, became one of the most valuable workers in agriculture. The best of the best were graduates of the two-year Zen-Nippon Chick Sexing School, whose standards were so rigorous that only 5 to 10 percent of students received accreditation. But those who did graduate earned as much as five hundred dollars a day and were shuttled around the world from hatchery to hatchery like top-flight business consultants. A diaspora of Japanese chicken sexers spilled across the globe. Chicken sexing is a delicate art, requiring Zen-like concentration and a brain surgeon’s dexterity. The bird is cradled in the left hand and given a gentle squeeze that causes it to evacuate its intestines (too tight and the intestines will turn inside out, killing the bird and rendering its gender irrelevant). With his thumb and forefinger, the sexer flips the bird over and parts a small flap on its hindquarters to expose the cloaca, a tiny vent where both the genitals and anus are situated, and peers deep inside. To do this properly, his fingernails have to be precisely trimmed. In the simple cases—the ones that the sexer can actually explain—he’s looking for a barely perceptible protuberance called the “bead,” about the size of a pinhead. If the bead is convex, the bird is a boy, and gets thrown to the left; concave or flat and it’s a girl, sent down a chute to the right.

Because I like you,” she blurted out, and realized that for once it was true. It was a rather unsettling revelation. “You’re . . . , well, you.” Not just a body on a balcony, not just a pair of lips to blot out boredom, but Alex, Alex who argued with her and watched out for her and woke absurdly early in the mornings to ride with her every day, whether he had the time to do so or not. Perhaps this wasn’t such a good idea after all. Alex didn’t seem to think so, either. His dark eyes were intent on her face, watching her in that way of his, as though he were learning her from the inside out, peering into every little dark nook and cranny of her soul. There were plenty of those to choose from. Dark nooks were one of Penelope’s specialties. He might have wanted her last night, in the still of the bungalow, with the lingering scent of moonflowers on the breeze, but not in daylight, when he saw her again for what she was, brash, impetuous, with her face gone unfashionably tan and curry stains on her habit. He was undoubtedly mustering the words with which to turn her down politely. Penelope suddenly, very desperately, didn’t want to hear them. She jumped to her feet, leaning over to gather up the empty tins. “Or we can just ride on,” she said brusquely, not looking at him. A lean brown hand closed around her wrist. Penelope regarded it blankly, as though not quite sure what it was doing there, alien against the white lace frill of her sleeve. Slowly, her breath catching somewhere in the vicinity of her corset, she lifted her eyes to Alex’s face. What she saw banished any doubts she might have had. In his eyes blazed a reflection of the desire she felt in her own. Nothing more needed to be said. Without a word, he drew her down beside him on the blanket, the blanket that had seemed so prosaic only moments before, but now presented the prospect of a host of exotic and illicit possibilities. Penelope plunked down hard on her knees, catching at his shoulders for balance as she tilted her head down to kiss him, enjoying the unusual advantage of height. “Are you sure?” he murmured, his teeth tugging at her earlobe, even as his hands moved intimately up and down her torso. In answer, Penelope pushed hard at his shoulders, sending him toppling back onto the blanket, narrowly missing sheer disaster with a fork. She followed him down, bracing herself on her elbows and scattering kisses across his upturned face as he busied himself with the buttons on her riding jacket. The fabric parted, and his hands slid beneath, burning through the linen of her blouse, drawing her down on top of him with drugging kisses that made the noon sky dim to dusk and the rustling of the tree leaves blur in her ears. Penelope wriggled her hands beneath his shirt, feeling the hard edges of muscle beneath, delighting in the way they contracted with each labored breath, with a flick of her tongue against the hollow of his throat and an exploratory expedition taken by her lips along his collarbone.

Deeming that I earn too little, a friend of mine who’s a partner in a successful firm that does a lot of business with the government said the other day: ‘You’re being exploited, Soares.’ And I remembered that indeed I am. But since in life we must all be exploited, I wonder if it’s any worse to be exploited by Vasques and his fabrics than by vanity, by glory, by resentment, by envy or by the impossible. Some are exploited by God himself, and they are prophets and saints in this vacuous world.

Stop quarreling, once and for all, because once you stop quarreling, your children will stop quarreling, and then their children - and slowly the world will eventually turn into a real civilized, sentient and serene society. Your ancestors tore this whole world apart into pieces and now you are doing the same. Don't repeat their mistakes my friend and take control of your world - not your neighborhood, or your state or your country - but your world, because the whole world is your family. My Christianity is the best and your Islam is the worst - my America is the best and your Russia is the worst - my India is the best and your Pakistan is the worst - my Bulgaria is the best and your Turkey is the worst - my Britain is the best and your France is the worst - stop this 'mine and yours' business once and for all and start thinking as 'ours' - our America - our Russia - our Christianity - our Islam - our Britain - our France - our Bulgaria - our Turkey - all of it either belongs to all of us or to none of us. Stop thinking tribal and start thinking human.

I'm sure the American Association of Dry Cleaners would hate me, but the harsh chemicals used in dry cleaning will break down fabrics in the finest garments over time. Fibers that are dyed navy blue, black, or dark gray are already dressed by holding the dye. Dry cleaning dies the fabric out, which is why suits cleaned in this manner begin to shine. Unless you happen to sweat profusely, suits can be cleaned by dipping a whisk broom in cool water and gently brushing the suit. Put outside in fresh air but not direct sunlight to dry. It is essential that a suit or jacket and trousers be allowed to air out immediately after a wearing. Unless you are a slob, you should only need to clean a suit twice a year if worn in regular rotation.

Stewart Brand: It had great continuity and those people stayed in touch online for decades and all that. But it ossified… Fabrice Florin: And a lot of the intellectuals that were sharing ideas on The Well went on to branch out into different areas. But you can really trace back a lot of the origins of this new movement to The Well. A lot of the folks were there. Howard Rheingold: I remember I got a friend request on Facebook early from Steve Case and I said, “I know who you are. But why do you want to friend me?” And he said, “Oh, I lurked on The Well from the beginning.” So I think, yes, it did influence things. Larry Brilliant: Steve Jobs was on it—Steve had a fake name and he lurked. Howard Rheingold: Steve Jobs, Steve Case, Craig Newmark: They would all say that they were informed by their experiences on The Well. Fabrice Florin: The Well was the birthplace of the online community. Larry Brilliant: All that goes back to Steve giving me the computer, letting me use it in Nepal, the experience I had with his software to access the satellite, and then coming back and Steve seeing what Seva-Talk could be. We showed it to hundreds of people and nobody saw anything in it. Steve got it immediately. Fabrice Florin: And Stewart basically gave the technology a set of values and ethics that all the developers could share. They already had their own hacker ethic, but he helped to amplify it and bring people together. And then it became big business, and it was hard for intellectuals to be the primary driving force anymore. It became the businesspeople who started driving it. Which is understandable given the scale and scope of what happened. It just became too large for intellectuals to hold.

As for the tomato, it comes from the belief that placing ripe tomatoes on the mantel of a new home would guarantee future prosperity and ward off evil spirits. When fresh tomatoes were not available, stitchers used a little bit of red fabric, thread, and some sawdust or stuffing to create a substitute. While it hasn’t been proved, I’d bet that using a tomato as a pincushion started when a busy stitcher couldn’t find her needle case and, rather than stopping her stitching to look for it, simply used the tomato on the mantel.

She didn’t say anything for a time, and then she said, “Well, in this case the powers that be are probably right.” I nodded, but she probably couldn’t see it. “I don’t believe Truly had a secret agreement with Teddy Martin. Green fabricated that, just as he fabricated the business about Pritzik and Richards.

Finally, every society develops a system of aesthetic standards that get manifested in everything from decorative art, music, and dance to the architecture and planning of buildings and communities. There are many different ways we could examine artistic systems. One way of thinking about it is to observe the degree to which a society's aesthetics reflect clear lines and solid boundaries versus fluid ones. Many Western cultures favor clean, tight boundaries whereas many Eastern cultures prefer more fluid, indiscriminate lines. In most Western homes, kitchen drawers are organized so that forks are with forks and knives are with knives. The walls of a room are usually uniform in color, and when a creative shift in color does occur, it usually happens at a corner or along a straight line midway down the wall. Pictures are framed with straight edges, molding covers up seams in the wall, and lawns are edged to form a clear line between the sidewalk and the lawn. Why? Because we view life in terms of classifications, categories, and taxonomies. And cleanliness itself is largely defined by the degree of order that exists. It has little to do with sanitation and far more to do with whether things appear to be in their proper place. Maintaining boundaries is essential in the Western world; otherwise categories begin to disintegrate and chaos sets in.13 Most Americans want dandelion-free lawns and roads with clear lanes prescribing where to drive and where not to drive. Men wear ties to cover the adjoining fabric on the shirts that they put on before going to the symphony, where they listen to classical music based on a scale with seven notes and five half steps. Each note has a fixed pitch, defined in terms of the lengths of the sound waves it produces.14 A good performance occurs when the musicians hit the notes precisely. In contrast, many Eastern cultures have little concern in everyday life for sharp boundaries and uniform categories. Different colors of paint may be used at various places on the same wall. And the paint may well “spill” over onto the window glass and ceiling. Meals are a fascinating array of ingredients where food is best enjoyed when mixed together on your plate. Roads and driving patterns are flexible. The lanes ebb and flow as needed depending on the volume of traffic. In a place like Cambodia or Nigeria, the road space is available for whichever direction a vehicle needs it most, whatever the time of day. And people often meander along the road in their vehicles the same way they walk along a path. There are many other ways aesthetics between one place and another could be contrasted. But the important point is some basic understanding of how cultures differ within the realm of aesthetics. Soak in the local art of a place and chalk it up to informing your strategy for international business.

You can eat wonderful food in a junked train car on plebeian plates served by waitresses more likely to start dancing with the bartender to the beat of the indie music playing on the sound system than to inquire, “More Dom Pérignon, sir?” Truffles and oysters can still appear on the Brooklyn menu, but more common is old-fashioned “comfort food” turned into something haute: burgers made from grass-fed cattle from a New York farm, butchered in-house, and served on a perfectly grilled brioche bun; mac ‘n’ cheese made from heritage grains and artisanal cow and sheep’s milk. Tarlow was not the only Williamsburg artist unknowingly helping to define a Brooklyn brand at the turn of the millennium. Around the same time he opened up Diner, twenty-six-year-old Lexy Funk and thirty-one-year-old Vahap Avsar were stumbling into creating a successful business in an entirely different discipline. Their beginning was just as inauspicious as Diner’s: a couple in need of some cash found the canvas of a discarded billboard in a Dumpster and thought that it could be turned into cool-looking messenger bags. The fabric on the bags looked worn and damaged, a textile version of Tarlow’s rusted railroad car, but that was part of its charm. Funk and Avsar rented an old factory, created a logo with Williamsburg’s industrial skyline, emblazoned it on T-shirts, and pronounced their enterprise

I thought you’d be here,” calls a rough voice over my left shoulder. I turn to find Darren only inches away, holding an unlit candle. “Hey,” I say with a smile much too large. “I was wondering if I’d see you today.” “Tate and I have been busy getting everything organized for our trip.” He returns a smile. Something looks different…something with his hair. I hold my candle higher and lean toward him, both to get a better look and to whisper, “Are you wearing a headband?” His hand shoots to the black band of fabric pulled tight above his forehead, curls redirected up and over it. “I was sort of hoping you wouldn’t notice it in the dark. I usually only wear them on dig sites to keep my hair from flying in my face.” “At least it’s not pink,” I tease. “Although I’m sure I have one of those you could borrow. It may even have flowers on it.” “Oh, could I, please?” He laughs, his hand still fiddling with it. “Seriously, should I lose it?” I shrug. “It’s practical. I get it.” He yanks it off and shoves it into the pocket of his shorts. A shake of his head lands everything where it belongs. “Here,” I say, angling my candle toward him. “I already took care of the headband. Fire really isn’t necessary, is it?

Not a single breath of air stirred in the light fabric at the windows. Moonlight flooded the garden with a cold radiance that slivered every leaf and glittered the gravel path. Shanghai was exciting, but it was too dense, too clamorous. Even though my little house was sheltered behind brick walls, I always sensed an undercurrent of noise, the hum of traffic from busy Avenue Joffre a few blocks away. I missed the quiet of evenings at Dragon Springs Road, when you could hear the rustle of vines as the air cooled and breezes lifted, when a restful silence descended, encouraging nocturnal creatures to venture out.

Religion is not one of the departments which make up our life  (that is Religiosity)  but Religion is that which enters into every department, the fabric on which every device, whether of art or literature, or domestic interests, or recreation, or business, or human love, must be embroidered. Unless it is this, it is not Religion as it is intended to be.

The cause of Codependence, the cause of the dysfunction that exists in the human experience, is that humans (due to certain planetary conditions which will be discussed later) have been perceiving, and doing, "human" backwards.  We have beenreversed in our perspective and in our interactive dynamics - our relationship - with this human life experience.  The world is a mess today because we have been perceiving this human business backwards. This "reversity" begins with the basic premise of who we are as beings.  We are not weak, sinful, shameful human creatures who have to somehow earn the right to become Spiritual.  We are Spiritual Beings having a human experience.  That is a 180-degree swing in perspective.  It changes everything! As John Lennon said, "Imagine."  Imagine a world based upon this knowledge. The belief that there is something inherently wrong or shameful about being human is all-pervasive in human civilized society.  It is woven into the fabric of civilized societies around the world.

The sacred-fire experience taught me how critically important it is for cultural repair to reinvent such shared ceremonial containers. 'They're as old as time,' one white-haired woman told me as I sat next to her on the woven rug. 'We barely limp along without these places to connect with spirit.' The sacred fire holds this intention for four days, sorry business for three weeks. Death in these contexts is an opportunity for greater intimacy and reciprocity, for shedding and transformation. Grief is not something to 'get rid of' - the quicker the better so as to return to being a productive and functional member of society. Instead of a nuisance, it's actually revered for the connective tissue it provides a community. Rather than a private affair, grief is a collective experience, a shared responsibility, held with equal import to celebration rites, its inevitability and universality woven into the cultural fabric of a healthy culture.

I never did find Crazy Cow. I stopped searching the day I found the shirt Vik wore on our last evening, Christmas night. It was a lime-green cotton shirt. I remembered him fussing that he didn't want to wear it, it had long sleeves, which he didn't like. Steve rolled up the sleeves for him. "There, that looks smart." When I found the shirt, it was under a spiky busy, half-buried in sand. I pulled it out, not knowing what this piece of tattered yellowing fabric was. I dusted off the sand. Those parts of the shirt that had not been bleached by salt water and sun were still bright green. One of the sleeves was still rolled up.

social fabric of our society as well as the natural environment on which all business, and indeed all life, depends.

June Brought, a leadership collaborator of mine, works in corporate wellness for the successful women’s clothing company Eileen Fisher. The company has flourished since its founding in 1984, currently earning revenue of more than $300 million a year. What truly sets the company apart, however, is its early adoption of conscious capitalism and a sincere desire to enhance the lives of all its stakeholders. Eileen Fisher was one of the first clothing companies that insisted on using sustainable materials such as organic cotton, and implemented programs to reduce fabric and fiber waste. Eileen Fisher’s philanthropic efforts focus on business leadership grants to develop and benefit the careers of young women around the world. The company is also committed to enhancing the well-being of its own employees at every level, which is why June was hired. According to June, “Eileen Fisher is not just another company that claims to care about the well-being of its employees but really only cares about how they can contribute to the well-being of the bottom line. Eileen Fisher truly is concerned with its staff as human beings first.” One of the tools June uses to help individuals at Eileen Fisher and elsewhere find a healthy balance between life and work involves what she calls “completing your own circuit.” She believes it is essential that we plug into our own beings first in order to feel empowered, fulfilled, and complete. As June explains, when we outsource our power to a job, a romantic relationship, or any external condition, “we compromise our emotional welfare and risk having someone cut off our power.” She says that completing our own circuit involves a deep internal knowing that “we are fully charged and complete unto ourselves without any need for outside support or validation.

For an illustration of business drift, rational and opportunistic business drift, take the following. Coca-Cola began as a pharmaceutical product. Tiffany & Co., the fancy jewelry store company, started life as a stationery store. The last two examples are close, perhaps, but consider next: Raytheon, which made the first missile guidance system, was a refrigerator maker (one of the founders was no other than Vannevar Bush, who conceived the teleological linear model of science we saw earlier; go figure). Now, worse: Nokia, who used to be the top mobile phone maker, began as a paper mill (at some stage they were into rubber shoes). DuPont, now famous for Teflon nonstick cooking pans, Corian countertops, and the durable fabric Kevlar, actually started out as an explosives company. Avon, the cosmetics company, started out in door-to-door book sales. And, the strangest of all, Oneida Silversmiths was a community religious cult but for regulatory reasons they needed to use as cover a joint stock company.

I’d like you to imagine that you are about to attend one of the most important occasions of your life. It will be held in a room sufficiently large to seat all of your friends, your family, your business associates—anyone and everyone to whom you are important and who is important to you. Can you see it? The walls are draped with deep golden tapestries. The lighting is subdued, soft, casting a warm glow on the faces of your expectant guests. Their chairs are handsomely upholstered in a golden fabric that matches the tapestries. The golden carpeting is deeply piled. At the front of the room is a dais, and on the dais a large, beautifully decorated table, with candles burning at either end. On the table, in the center, is the object of everyone’s attention. A large, shining, ornate box. And in the box is…you! Stiff as the proverbial board. Do you see yourself lying in the box, not a dry eye in the room? Now, listen. From the four corners of the room comes a tape recording of your voice. Can you hear it? You’re addressing your guests. You’re telling them the story of your life. How would you like that story to go? That’s your Primary Aim. What would you like to be able to say about your life after it’s too late to do anything about it? That’s your Primary Aim. If you were to write a script for the tape to be played for the mourners at your funeral, how would you like it to read? That’s your Primary Aim. And once you’ve created the script, all you need to do is make it come true. All you need to do is begin living your life as if it were important. All you need to do is take your life seriously. To create it intentionally. To actively make your life into the life you wish it to be.

Do you know how much effort I put into those!” The gnome stabs down, tearing the fabric of my dullahan’s shirt but not managing to draw blood. “I was the prize winner of the largest vegetable in Illidwen for three years running!” “Beautiful vegetables, too.” Lore nods frantically. “Absolutely gorgeous,” Jaro agrees, sidling past the duo. “Fucking traitors,” Drystan snarls, but is too busy trying to divert a blade that’s heading for his neck. “Don’t you think you ought to help him?” I ask, cringing as my dullahan takes a foot to the windpipe. Lore shakes his head frantically, taking my other elbow and doubling our already frantic march up the mushroom stairs. “Don’t be silly, little pet. Otis is insane.

Rosemary took a deep breath and breathed out slowly, just like the online anxiety videos told her to do, though those had not specifically envisioned a situation where one was holding an old lamp in preparation for confrontation with the musically inclined axe-wielding serial killer that her imagination was busy fabricating.

You are sculpting yourself. Of course it's painful. Carving every detail you want in your life into the tender fabrics of your own existence. Your body, your mind, your business, your home. Is it not beautiful? How there are those of us that are willing to bear insufferable pain, all to achieve their highest form. And then there's the rest of the world, fragile creatures, porcelain dolls, the unscuplted masses. All too scared to bear the burden. Pain is the seed of power. If you can not tolerate it, you should not compete with those who will.

The most remarkable thing is that even in Adam Smith’s examples of fish and nails and tobacco being used as money, the same sort of thing was happening. In the years following the appearance of the Wealth of Nations, scholars checked into most of these examples and discovered that in just about every case, the people involved were quite familiar with the use of money, and in fact, were using money- as a unit of account. Take the example of dried cod, supposedly used as money in Newfoundland. As the British diplomat A. Mitchell pointed out almost a century ago, what Smith describes was really an illusion, created by a simple credit arrangement: In the early days of the Newfoundland fishing industry, there was no permanent European population, the fishers went there for the fishing season only, and those who were not fishers were traders who bought the dried fish and sold to the fishers their daily supplies. The latter sold their catch to the traders at the market price in pounds, shilling and pence, and obtained in return a credit on their books, which they paid for the supplies. Balances due by the traders were paid for by drafts on England or France. It was quite the same in the Scottish village. It’s not as if anyone actually walked into the local pub, plunked down a roofing nail, and asked for a pint of beer. Employers in Smith’s day often lacked coin to pay their workers; wages could be delayed by a year or more; in the meantime, it was considered acceptable for employees to carry off either some of their own products or leftover work materials, lumber, fabric, cord, and so on. The nails were de facto interest on what their employers owed to them. So they went to the pub, ran up a tab, and when occasion permitted, brought in a bag of nails to charge off against the debt. The law making tobacco legal tender in Virginia seems to have been an attempt by planters to oblige local merchants to accept their products as a credit around harvest time. In effect, the law forced all merchants in Virginia to become middlemen in tobacco business, whether they liked it or not; just as all West Indian merchants were obliged to become sugar dealers, since that’s what all their wealthier customers brought in to write off against their debt. The primary examples, then, were ones in which people were improvising credit systems, because actual money- gold and silver coinage- was in short supply.

Music is a part of life. It is not merely an accomplishment or a hobby, nor yet a means of relaxation from the strenuous business of earning a living. It is not an addendum or an excrescence: it is an actual part of the fabric of life itself.

In the words of Paul Johnson: The Temple, now, in Herod’s1 version, rising triumphantly over Jerusalem, was an ocular reminder that Judaism was about Jews and their history—not about anyone else. Other gods flew across the deserts from the East without much difficulty, jettisoning the inconvenient and embarrassing accretions from their past, changing, as it were, their accents and manners as well as their names. But the God of the Jews was still alive and roaring in his Temple, demanding blood, making no attempt to conceal his racial and primitive origins. Herod’s fabric was elegant, modern, sophisticated—he had, indeed, added some Hellenic decorative effects much resented by fundamentalist Jews who constantly sought to destroy them—but nothing could hide the essential business of the Temple, which was the ritual slaughter, consumption, and combustion of sacrificial cattle on a gigantic scale. The place was as vast as a small city. There were literally thousands of priests, attendants, temple-soldiers, and minions. To the unprepared visitor, the dignity and charity of Jewish disapora life, the thoughtful comments and homilies of the Alexandrian synagogue, was quite lost amid the smoke of the pyres, the bellows of terrified beasts, the sluices of blood, the abattoir stench, the unconcealed and unconcealable machinery of tribal religion inflated by modern wealth to an industrial scale. Sophisticated Romans who knew the Judaism of the diaspora found it hard to understand the hostility towards Jews shown by colonial officials who, behind a heavily-armed escort, had witnessed Jerusalem at festival time. Diaspora Judaism, liberal and outward-minded, contained the matrix of a universal religion, but only if it could be cut off from its barbarous origins; and how could so thick and sinewy an umbilical cord be severed? This description of “Herod’s” Temple (actually the Second Temple, built in the sixth century B.C. and rebuilt by Herod) is more than a bit overwrought. The God of the Jews did not roar in his Temple: the insoluble problem was that, since the destruction of the First Temple and, with it, the Ark of the Covenant, God had ceased to be present in his Temple. Nor would animal sacrifice have disgusted the gentiles, since Greeks, Romans, and all ancient peoples offered such sacrifices (though one cannot help wondering whether, had the Second Temple not been destroyed, it would today be ringed from morn to night by indignant animal-rights activists). But Johnson is right to emphasize that Judaism, in its mother city, could display a sweaty tribalism that gentiles would only find unattractive. The partisan, argumentative ambience of first-century Jerusalem, not unlike the atmosphere of the ultra-Orthodox pockets of the contemporary city, could repel any outsider, whether gentile or diaspora Jew. Perhaps most important is Johnson’s shrewd observation that Judaism “contained the matrix of a universal religion.” By this time, the more percipient inhabitants of the Greco-Roman world had come to the conclusion that polytheism, whatever manifestation it might assume, was seriously flawed. The Jews alone, by offering monotheism, offered a unitive vision, not the contradictory and flickering epiphanies of a fanciful pantheon of gods and goddesses. But could Judaism adapt to gentile needs, could it lose its foreign accent and outlandish manners? No one saw the opportunity more clearly than Luke; his gospel and its sequel, the Acts of the Apostles, present a Jesus and a Jesus Movement specifically tailored to gentile sensibility.

The fact that someone has talent and is able to develop it into a higher skill or craft and achieve remarkable things does nothing to diminish the obvious—it still is a gift from God. It is part of the sunnah of God in creation, that divine order woven in the fabric of existence, that one must toil to refine his or her skills or talent. A calligrapher, for example, makes his craft appear easy to the onlooker, but one does not see the years of tireless preparation, perseverance, and repetition to master the curves of one letter of the Arabic alphabet and then whole words. On top of that, consider the various styles of calligraphy that the great Muslim calligraphers have developed over the centuries. There are plenty of talented and refined artisans of the world who deem their work astonishing and magnificent. They think only of their long training and deceive themselves into thinking, “I worked so hard, and I did this all by myself.” Similarly, one often finds businessmen truly talented and bold in building business, but who admire themselves and extol their financial prowess. Undoubtedly, this invites illness into the heart, for it is God who is the bestower of success and talent.

As soon as my girls were old enough to hold scissors, I taught them how to cut fabric into blocks for us to piece together into family quilts for them to keep so I can pass along my love of quilting, and my grandmother’s love of quilting, to the next generation. Jep’s granny was a quilter and a knitter. She kept her hands busy, and when I knew her, she was always sitting on the couch, knitting something. She knitted an afghan for every new grandchild, and Merritt got two afghans because she was named after her great-grandmother. I want to pass on a legacy of creativity and of taking something that seems of little value and transforming it into something beautiful. Our quilts are like our lives, each with a different story, each a little tattered and torn, but each unique and beautiful in the way the patterns, colors, and designs come together. Quilting is becoming a lost art that I never want to lose. To me, quilts are the perfect combination of love and art.

One of the primary reasons why innovation remains inert in many organizations is because masses of intelligent, innately creative people are interpreting tape on the floor as lines that cannot be crossed. We are fabricating boundaries where none exist. We are drawing lines in space – lines that separate, isolate, and marginalize. Lines between us and our customers. Lines between the past and the present. Lines between what’s possible and what’s not.

LESS fabrication, MORE facilitation

What happened to the troubled young reporter who almost brought this magazine down The last time I talked to Stephen Glass, he was pleading with me on the phone to protect him from Charles Lane. Chuck, as we called him, was the editor of The New Republic and Steve was my colleague and very good friend, maybe something like a little brother, though we are only two years apart in age. Steve had a way of inspiring loyalty, not jealousy, in his fellow young writers, which was remarkable given how spectacularly successful he’d been in such a short time. While the rest of us were still scratching our way out of the intern pit, he was becoming a franchise, turning out bizarre and amazing stories week after week for The New Republic, Harper’s, and Rolling Stone— each one a home run. I didn’t know when he called me that he’d made up nearly all of the bizarre and amazing stories, that he was the perpetrator of probably the most elaborate fraud in journalistic history, that he would soon become famous on a whole new scale. I didn’t even know he had a dark side. It was the spring of 1998 and he was still just my hapless friend Steve, who padded into my office ten times a day in white socks and was more interested in alphabetizing beer than drinking it. When he called, I was in New York and I said I would come back to D.C. right away. I probably said something about Chuck like: “Fuck him. He can’t fire you. He can’t possibly think you would do that.” I was wrong, and Chuck, ever-resistant to Steve’s charms, was as right as he’d been in his life. The story was front-page news all over the world. The staff (me included) spent several weeks re-reporting all of Steve’s articles. It turned out that Steve had been making up characters, scenes, events, whole stories from first word to last. He made up some funny stuff—a convention of Monica Lewinsky memorabilia—and also some really awful stuff: racist cab drivers, sexist Republicans, desperate poor people calling in to a psychic hotline, career-damaging quotes about politicians. In fact, we eventually figured out that very few of his stories were completely true. Not only that, but he went to extreme lengths to hide his fabrications, filling notebooks with fake interview notes and creating fake business cards and fake voicemails. (Remember, this was before most people used Google. Plus, Steve had been the head of The New Republic ’s fact-checking department.) Once we knew what he’d done, I tried to call Steve, but he never called back. He just went missing, like the kids on the milk cartons. It was weird. People often ask me if I felt “betrayed,” but really I was deeply unsettled, like I’d woken up in the wrong room. I wondered whether Steve had lied to me about personal things, too. I wondered how, even after he’d been caught, he could bring himself to recruit me to defend him, knowing I’d be risking my job to do so. I wondered how I could spend more time with a person during the week than I spent with my husband and not suspect a thing. (And I didn’t. It came as a total surprise). And I wondered what else I didn’t know about people. Could my brother be a drug addict? Did my best friend actually hate me? Jon Chait, now a political writer for New York and back then the smart young wonk in our trio, was in Paris when the scandal broke. Overnight, Steve went from “being one of my best friends to someone I read about in The International Herald Tribune, ” Chait recalled. The transition was so abrupt that, for months, Jon dreamed that he’d run into him or that Steve wanted to talk to him. Then, after a while, the dreams stopped. The Monica Lewinsky scandal petered out, George W. Bush became president, we all got cell phones, laptops, spouses, children. Over the years, Steve Glass got mixed up in our minds with the fictionalized Stephen Glass from his own 2003 roman à clef, The Fabulist, or Steve Glass as played by Hayden Christiansen in the 2003

Planning – ‘Listen and learn’: Ensure commitment to get the business social. Presence – ‘Stake our claim’: Evolution from planning to action, establishing a formal and informed presence in social media; Engagement – ‘Dialogue deepens relationships’: Commitment where social media is seen as a critical element in relationship-building; Formalized – ‘Organize for scale’: A formalized approach focuses on three key activities: establishing an executive sponsor, creating a centre of excellence and establishing organization-wide governance; Strategic – ‘Become a social business’: Social media initiatives gain visibility and real business impact. Converged – ‘Business to social’: Having cross-functional and executive support, social business strategies start to weave into the fabric of an evolving organization.

Humans are so lost and damaged that to you it is almost incomprehensible that people could work or live together without someone being in charge.” “But every human institution that I can think of, from political to business, even down to marriage, is governed by this kind of thinking. It is the web of our social fabric,” Mack asserted. “Such a waste!” said Papa, picking up the empty dish and heading for the kitchen. “It’s one reason why experiencing true relationship is so difficult for you,” Jesus added. “Once you have a hierarchy you need rules to protect and administer it, and then you need law and the enforcement of the rules, and you end up with some kind of chain of command or a system of order that destroys relationship rather than promotes it. You rarely see or experience relationship apart from power. Hierarchy imposes laws and rules and you end up missing the wonder of relationship that we intended for you.

Systems Thinking. A cloud masses, the sky darkens, leaves twist upward, and we know that it will rain. We also know that after the storm, the runoff will feed into groundwater miles away, and the sky will grow clear by tomorrow. All these events are distant in time and space, and yet they are all connected within the same pattern. Each has an influence on the rest, an influence that is usually hidden from view. You can only understand the system of a rainstorm by contemplating the whole, not any individual part of the pattern. Business and other human endeavors are also systems. They, too, are bound by invisible fabrics of interrelated actions, which often take years to fully play out their effects on each other. Since we are part of that lacework ourselves, it's doubly hard to see the whole pattern of change. Instead, we tend to focus on snapshots of isolated parts of the system, and wonder why our deepest problems never seem to get solved. Systems thinking is a conceptual framework, a body of knowledge and tools that has been developed over the past fifty years, to make the full patterns clearer, and to help us see how to change them effectively.

The best I offer the world is the truth—my highest gift. What the world does with it is not up to me. I am not in charge of outcomes, opinions, assessments. I am not in the business of damage control. When I present a fabricated version of myself—the self who knows all, is ever certain, always steps strong—we all lose, because I cannot keep up with that lie and neither can you. Here is the truth: Sometimes life is complicated.

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When I talk about kindness in business, a few people scoff. They say, “Steve Jobs and the leaders at Apple created a pressure-cooker environment but it produced category-defining products that people love and obsess over.” That is the point — the results are not worth the cost, because there is an alternative. The goal of TRM is to create a kind, sustainable, and fulfilling experience for everyone. Caring and a sense of purpose evoke better performance than pressure and fear. The idea that only obsessive egomaniacs can produce breakthroughs is nonsense. People are the most important resource for any business, and people — whether they are employees, vendors, or customers — respond best to kindness, respect, humility, and empathy. You never know what other people are going through in their lives. Many of us are under great stress, especially when business cycles shift and economic pressures build. Others are struggling in relationships. When everyone feels valued and heard, they are more likely to show up fully and bring their best each day. Kindness is the alternative to the unnecessary “business is war” analogies that are not only tiresome but borderline offensive. It is the opposite of the “outcome justified the means” mentality that drives many entrepreneurs to consider sacrificing everything (including their morals) to build $100 million businesses in seven years. It’s success without the collateral damage. This aspect of TRM creates a healthy framework for daily interactions and long-term goals and helps people avoid burnout even when they put in heavy hours over long periods of time. We are all naturally optimistic, motivated to be better tomorrow than we are today. A kind organization understands that and leverages it. Your goal is to build a product that lasts, but to do that, you must also build an organization, a work environment, and a fabric of relationships that last too. People will remain engaged and focused on achievements when they are doing something meaningful that they care about in an organization that lets them live the way they want to live. “Caring and a sense of purpose evoke better performance than pressure and fear. The idea that only egomaniacs can produce breakthroughs is nonsense.

Suraj solar and allied industries, Wework galaxy, 43, Residency Road, Bangalore-560025. Mobile number : +91 808 850 7979 With the worldwide shift towards feasible energy sources, the sunlight based charger producing industry in Bangalore has seen critical development and advancement lately. As a conspicuous player in this market, SuneaseSolar has arisen as a main producer, offering state of the art advancements and answers for satisfy the rising need for environmentally friendly power arrangements. This article investigates the scene of solar panel manufacturers in Bangalore , digs into the vital elements and advances given by SuneaseSolar, and features the maintainability advantages of sunlight powered chargers. Moreover, it grandstands the upsides of picking SuneaseSolar for sunlight based charger arrangements, presents client tributes, and talks about future patterns and advancements molding the Bangalore sun powered charger market. 1. An Overview of solar panel manufacturers in Bangalore, also known as India's Silicon Valley, is also making a name for itself in the solar energy industry. The city's energetic tech culture and obligation to maintainability have made ready for a developing sun powered charger fabricating industry. Significance of Sun powered chargers in India's Energy Scene Sun powered chargers assume an essential part in India's shift towards sustainable power sources. With its plentiful daylight, India can possibly outfit sunlight based power for an enormous scope, decreasing reliance on non-renewable energy sources and moderating environmental change. 2. Outline of SuneaseSolar as a Main Maker Organization Foundation and History SuneaseSolar has arisen as an unmistakable player in Bangalore's sun powered charger fabricating scene. With an emphasis on development and quality, the organization has gained notoriety for conveying dependable and productive sunlight based arrangements. Scope of Sunlight powered charger Items Advertised SuneaseSolar offers a different scope of sunlight based charger items custom-made to meet different energy needs. From private roof frameworks to enormous scope business establishments, they take special care of a wide range of clients. 3. Key Highlights and Innovations Presented by SuneaseSolar High level Sunlight powered charger Plans and Materials SuneaseSolar values utilizing state of the art plans and materials to upgrade the proficiency and solidness of their sun powered chargers. By remaining on the ball, they guarantee clients get first class items that go the distance. Metrics for Efficiency and Performance When it comes to solar panels, efficiency is absolutely necessary. SuneaseSolar focuses on execution measurements to ensure ideal energy creation and cost reserve funds for their clients. With a sharp spotlight on result and dependability, they endeavor to expand the advantages of sun oriented power. 4. Maintainability and Ecological Effect of Sunlight based chargers Job of Sun powered Energy in Lessening Carbon Impression Sun powered energy assumes a urgent part in bringing down fossil fuel byproducts and battling environmental change. By bridling the force of the sun, sun powered chargers offer a perfect and manageable option in contrast to conventional energy sources, adding to a greener future. Reusing and Removal Practices for Sunlight powered chargers To address worries about the finish of-life pattern of sunlight powered chargers, SuneaseSolar carries out reusing and removal practices to limit natural effect. By advancing dependable waste administration, they guarantee that sun powered energy stays a genuinely economical answer for the long run. 5. Cost-Effectiveness and Return on Investment of SuneaseSolar's Solar Panel Solutions When it comes to solar panel manufacturers in Bangalore, SuneaseSolar shines brightly like a diamond.

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What’s interesting about the backwards law is that it’s called “backwards” for a reason: not giving a fuck works in reverse. If pursuing the positive is a negative, then pursuing the negative generates the positive. The pain you pursue in the gym results in better all-around health and energy. The failures in business are what lead to a better understanding of what’s necessary to be successful. Being open with your insecurities paradoxically makes you more confident and charismatic around others. The pain of honest confrontation is what generates the greatest trust and respect in your relationships. Suffering through your fears and anxieties is what allows you to build courage and perseverance. Seriously, I could keep going, but you get the point. Everything worthwhile in life is won through surmounting the associated negative experience. Any attempt to escape the negative, to avoid it or quash it or silence it, only backfires. The avoidance of suffering is a form of suffering. The avoidance of struggle is a struggle. The denial of failure is a failure. Hiding what is shameful is itself a form of shame. Pain is an inextricable thread in the fabric of life, and to tear it out is not only impossible, but destructive: attempting to tear it out unravels everything else with it.

Washing money,” Louis said. “Initially he was doing it through legitimate companies but without the owner’s knowledge. The numbers must have got so large they couldn’t keep it hidden and that’s where the Hunstanton location comes in. Small businesses, lots of them. Companies with turnovers of less than a million; consultancy firms, import, export businesses. None of them exist, except on paper. Newell was even fabricating business between these firms, purchases, contracts… loans. The people didn’t exist, let alone the businesses.” He shrugged. “No one is going to look out here for an operation of that size. Couple

Being a true leader, as opposed to a competent manager, requires a willingness to get your hands dirty. I have said before that I do not expect anyone to do a job I cannot do myself. While this is clearly unrealistic as a company grows and expands, the perception of being willing to step in and assist must remain. The weight of leadership includes staying calm while others panic and coming up with solutions rather than joining the chorus of complaints. The Covid-19 pandemic has certainly helped distinguish the leaders from the managers. Leaders are prepared to take responsibility when things go wrong, even if the true responsibility lies with someone else. Leaders are visible. Leaders have a vision, even if it is only short term. I don’t really believe in long-term planning. I make up the rules of the game based on one-year plans. This means I always retain visibility and control. Five years is too long a time to have any certainty that the objectives will be met. Leadership is not a popularity contest, but it also should not inspire fear. Leaders earn respect and loyalty, recognising that these take a long time to earn and a second to lose. A leader is not scared of collaboration and listening to the opinions of others, as well as accepting help when it’s needed. Leadership is not a quality that you are born with, it is something that you learn over time. I was not a leader in my Coronation days, and I am the first to admit that I made a lot of mistakes. Even at African Harvest, as much as I achieved financial success and tried different techniques to earn respect, I never truly managed to deal with the unruly investment team. But, having built on years of experience, by the time I hit my stride at Sygnia, I was a leader. Within any organisation of substantial size, there is space for more than one leader, whether they head up divisions or the organisation itself. There are several leaders across Sygnia weaving the fabric of our success. I am no longer the sole leader, having passed the baton on to others in pursuit of my own dreams. To quote the Harvard Business Review, ‘The competencies most frequently required for success at the top of any sizable business include strategic orientation, market insight, results orientation, customer impact, collaboration and influence, organisational development, team leadership, and change leadership.’ That is what I looked for in my successor, and that is what I found in David. I am confident that all the leaders I have groomed are more than capable of taking the company forwards.

When Landgren concocted false figures to explain some of the numbers in the financial statements, the auditors quickly found the fabrication and negotiations fell apart. W. E. Seatree, a lawyer and an accountant with Price Water-house, dashed off an angry letter directly to Ivar, in the formal style of someone who had proudly mastered the disciplines of both law and accounting during the early twentieth century: You will note that we did not certify the balance sheet. Mr Landgren’s letter is obviously an attempt to make it appear to you that he had accomplished something; but the fact that he had to resort to forgery to accomplish his purpose is the best proof of his failure. The euphemism, that he was going to issue a so-called copy of our balance sheet leaving out parts which were of material importance, does not disguise the true nature of his action.37 When Price Waterhouse lost confidence in Ivar, so did Fairburn and Diamond Match. Ivar tried to repair the damage by asking Jordahl to retain an independent outside accountant to vouch for their new US business. Ernst & Ernst, a reliable audit firm, completed a review of American Kreuger & Toll’s financial statements in June, but by then it was too late.38 The damage was done, and so were the negotiations.

My grandmother swaddled her baby, as they did two thousand years ago, and let him swing on a tree branch so she could do backbreaking work for fifteen cents a day. Lizzie talked about working, herself, too, starting when she was eight or nine years old, long before the era of child labor laws, at the Milford Shoe Company. “My first day, they put me at a sewing machine and give me two pieces a leathuh. They told me how to stitch the pieces togethuh—paht of a man’s shoe. Each time I did that, they told me, drop it inna drawa. I thought, this is easy. Zip, zip, zip, one afta anuthuh. End of the day comes, my drawa is full. Lady next to me, olda woman—she didn’t have so many done. The boss fired her right then. They gave me her job afta that.” From that day on, my aunt worked in factories all her life. Like my mother, she was heavy set but solid, as sturdy and muscled as the men who worked beside her, first at Milford Shoe and later at William Lapworth & Sons, a manufacturer of elastic fabrics, whose British-born owner berated her whenever a needle broke on her sewing machine. Later she worked at Archer Rubber, where a chemical spray left a small scar on her cheek. Her final employer was the Stylon Tile Company, known for making pink and black bathroom tiles, which were hard to handle without cutting her hands. She always called her place of work “the shop.” She was “working down at the shop.” Before I left her house, she always gave me something to take with me, like a bag of her hand-made swiss-chard ravioli, or if it was close to Christmas, a plate of her own Italian cookies. My favorites were the ceci, little fried cookies that looked like ravioli but were stuffed with sweet chestnut and honey filling, or the ones that looked like bowties, called cenci, dusted with powdered sugar. No matter how busy she was, she never let anyone leave her house hungry or empty-handed. Once I accompanied Lizzie to the Sacred Heart Cemetery to help her with all the flower baskets she wanted to lay on the gravestones of lost family members. There’s something about Italians and cemeteries. I was never attracted to cemeteries, never finding any comfort in visiting the dead, but for most of my family, it was like attending a family reunion. Seeing Lizzie moving

Every kind of society, church groups included, is seized by the hurrah phenomenon and as such it becomes apparent generally at a time when a certain goal is to be reached quickly by a drive with external blatant means. All this hurrah business has certain traits which make it evident in arising out of the flesh; they are: 1) It appeals to the natural brutal sense in man, indicating that those who make use of it are willing to accommodate external brute force. 2) In a rousing attack, force is applied to accomplish with the might that which quiet, sustaining and thorough work cannot be relied on to produce. 3) Mass agitation is the object and the individual must be swept along by force with the crowd, because there is no confidence in the spontaneous decision of the individual personality. 4) The promoter, by noisy conduct, attracts attention to his own person. 5) Thus he would put himself across together with his concepts and aims, yet indeed not by an inward conviction of his fellow men but by the use of external means. 6) By so doing, love toward neighbor is forgotten, while selfishness, disaffection and malice have an open field. 7) Finally, hurrah sentiment always has the nature of clever fabrication. Headlines there are, true enough, and slogans that would give the impression of genuine value. Yet it does not carry the imprint of something which grew out of the unencumbered understanding of intelligent men of character and blossomed forth into an overwhelming truth…Now, sanctification, our actual Christian business, doesn’t agree with that sort of thing. When once it becomes apparent that sanctification is in every point the direct opposite of hurrah sentiment, then every Christian ought to see for himself that we must avoid this general ruling spirit of the time.

Economic systems do not exist in the abstract; they are embedded within the geographic fabric of the society - the way land is used, the locations of homes and business, the infrastructure that ties people, places, and commerce together.

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Foundation of everything is more important that the walls. If the foundation is not built proper. The foundation is built with lies, deceits, scams, fabrication, and an agenda. The walls won’t stand for long. Make sure that whatever you are doing. Whatever you are starting. It being a business, party, career, hobby, relationship, friendship, or qualification. Make sure you build a good proper strong foundation, so that whatever you are building can stand the tests of time and the storms.

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Betsy worked six days a week. She gathered the materials the workers needed, including fabric, needles, and thread. Sometimes she made deliveries to customers. And she became a better seamstress. She had a busy life in a busy city.

There was nothing fake about Lisa. The more I thought about my made-up name, the phonier it felt to me. I wasn’t Romeo. I wasn’t Blue. I wasn’t some fabricated wannabe. I was a musician dead set on being real. It suddenly became clear that my pseudonym was getting in the way of that. It was the immature me looking to be cool. But coolness comes from within. You can’t fake it. You can’t name it into being. You have to grow it organically. I had a lot invested in Romeo Blue. I thought of him as an alter ego, without any of the problems facing Lennie. When I first came up with this new identity, it gave me confidence. But now it felt false. Romeo Blue was out. But what name was in? At first, I thought I’d go to the other extreme and call myself Leonard Kravitzky (my grandfather’s real last name before he hit Ellis Island); I actually ordered business cards carrying that name. Looking at them, though, I felt it was just too classical, like “Igor Stravinsky.” No, the easiest answer was the simplest: the real me, the real name. The only change was in the spelling: “Lennie” became “Lenny” because, on paper, I liked the shape of the y more than the ie. It looked stronger. I was Lenny Kravitz. Despite the name I’d invented and the image I’d adopted, I’d always been Lenny Kravitz. But it took Lisa to inspire me to find myself.

looms, bringing an extraordinary degree of dexterity and skill to his weaving and increasing the output of the mill by 50 percent over his first three years. He made garments for Civil War reenactors and upholstery fabric and period drapery for historic residences; the mill produced materials that would be used in the restored houses of nine former presidents. When the movie Cold Mountain needed hundreds of authentic-looking costumes and uniforms from the American Civil War era, it was Yang You Yi who produced the fabric. Yang called David Kline “Dad-Boss,” and Kline credited him with turning the business around. Kline decided that when he retired, he would sell Yang half the company.