Fairness Famous Quotes

Sophie did this?" He said, not for the first time. They were standing at the foot of Jessamine's bed. She lay flung upon it, her chest rising and falling slowly like the famous Sleeping Beauty waxwork or Madame du Barry. Her fair hair was scattered on the pillow, and a large, bloody welt ran across her forehead. Each of her wrists was tied to a post of the bed. "Our Sophie?" Tessa glanced over at Sophie, who was sitting in a chair by the door. Her head was down, and she was staring at her hands. She studiously avoided looking at Tessa or Will. "Yes,"Tessa said, "and do stop repeating it." " I think i may be in love with you, Sophie," said Will. "Marriage could be on the cards." Sophie whimpered.

Is it fair for the bears to come down to where humans live, looking for food? Is it fair for the Duke's soldiers to shoot at them? Is it fair for the bears to crush them with giant snowballs? Often, if you point out something that isn't fair, someone will reply, "Life isn't fair." What is to be done with such people?

The French, it seems to me, strike a happy balance between intimacy and reserve. Some of this must be helped by the language, which lends itself to graceful expression even when dealing with fairly basic subjects.... And there's that famously elegant subtitle from a classic Western. COWBOY: "Gimme a shot of red-eye." SUBTITLE: "Un Dubonnet, s'il vous plait." No wonder French was the language of diplomacy for all those years.

...It's not that she has not tried to improve her condition before acknowledging its hopelessness. (Oh, come on, let's get the hell out of this, and get into the first person.) I have sought, by study, to better my form and make myself Society's Darling. You see, I had been fed, in my youth, a lot of old wives' tales about the way men would instantly forsake a beautiful woman to flock about a brilliant one. It is but fair to say that, after getting out in the world, I had never seen this happen, but I thought that maybe I might be the girl to start the vogue. I would become brilliant. I would sparkle. I would hold whole dinner tables spellbound. I would have throngs fighting to come within hearing distance of me while the weakest, elbowed mercilessly to the outskirts, would cry "What did she say?" or "Oh, please ask her to tell it again." That's what I would do. Oh I could just hear myself." -Review of the books, Favorite Jokes of Famous People, by Bruce Barton; The Technique of the Love Affair by "A Gentlewoman." (Actually by Doris Langley Moore.) Review title: Wallflower's Lament; November 17, 1928.

And so it was settled. Sam Gamgee married Rose Cotton in the spring of 1420 (which was also famous for its weddings), and they came and lived at Bag End. And if Sam thought himself lucky, Frodo knew that he was more lucky himself; for there was not a hobbit in the Shire that was looked after with such care. When the labours or repair had all been planned and set going he took to a quiet life, writing a good deal and going through all his notes. He resigned the office of Deputy Mayor at the Free Fair that Midsummer, and dear old Will Whitfoot had another seven years of presiding at Banquets.

A reporter asked me which famous woman was my role model, a question that always leaves me stumped. I know it’s the wrong feminist answer, but most of my role models have been men. They always had the lives I wanted.

But as it turned out, the two had a great deal in common, for both Bailey and Thackeray (named for the famous novelist William Makepeace Thackeray, author of Vanity Fair) were devoted bibliophiles who believed that "a book a day kept the world at bay," as Thackeray was fond of saying. Bailey was the offspring of a generation of badgers who insisted that "Reader" was the most rewarding vocation to which a virtuous badger might be called and who gauged their week's anticipated pleasure by the height of their to-be-read pile. (Perhaps you know people like this. I do.)

Clegg began life as a tightrope walker at the northern fairs, but as tightrope-walking is not a trade that combines well with drinking – and Clegg was a famous drinker – he was obliged to give it up.

Rawls became famous for creating a new definition of justice, which boils down to this: a society is fair if it looks like something we would design before knowing how we would come into the world. He imagined a fictional “original position,” the position we would be in if we were told we were about to be born, but were not told about the circumstances we would be born into—how tall or short we would be, or of what race or nationality, or what resources or personal qualities we would have. This vision of justice is often compared to being asked how you would want a cake to be divided if you did not know which piece will be yours: equally, of course.

Why is it that if you say you don’t enjoy using an e-reader, or that you aren’t going to get one till the technology is mature, you get reported as “loathing” it? The little Time article itself is fairly accurate about what I’ve said about e-reading, but the title of the series, “Famous Writers Who Loathe E-Books,” reflects or caters to a silly idea: that not being interested in using a particular technology is the same as hating and despising it.

Which, I wonder, brother reader, is the better lot, to die prosperous and famous, or poor and disappointed? To have, and to be forced to yield; or to sink out of life, having played and lost the game? That must be a strange feeling, when a day of our life comes and we say, 'Tomorrow, success or failure won't matter much: and the sun will rise, and all the myriads of mankind go to their work or their pleasure as usual, but I shall be out of the turmoil.

So it is fairly widely recognised that the relationship between human beings and things is no longer one of distance and mastery such as that which obtained between the sovereign mind and the piece of wax in Descartes' famous description. Rather, the relationship is less clear-cut: vertiginous proximity prevents us both from apprehending ourselves as a pure intellect separate from things and from defining things as pure objects lacking in all human attributes.

Hatred was easy. The permutations constant over the years: A stranger at a fair who palmed my crotch through my shorts. A man on the sidewalk who lunged at me, then laughed when I flinched. The night an older man took me to a fancy restaurant when I wasn't even old enough to like oysters. Not yet twenty. The owner joined our table, and so did a famous filmmaker. The men fell into a heated discussion with no entry point for me: I fidgeted with my heavy cloth napkin, drank water. Staring at the wall. "Eat your vegetables," the filmmaker suddenly snapped at me. "You're a growing girl." The filmmaker wanted me to know what I already knew: I had no power. He saw my need and used it against me.

Perhaps as he was lying awake then, his life may have passed before him--his early hopeful struggles, his manly successes and prosperity, his downfall in his declining years, and his present helpless condition--no chance of revenge against Fortune, which had had the better of him--neither name nor money to bequeath--a spent-out, bootless life of defeat and disappointment, and the end here! Which, I wonder, brother reader, is the better lot, to die prosperous and famous, or poor and disappointed? To have, and to be forced to yield; or to sink out of life, having played and lost the game? That must be a strange feeling, when a day of our life comes and we say, “To-morrow, success or failure won’t matter much, and the sun will rise, and all the myriads of mankind go to their work or their pleasure as usual, but I shall be out of the turmoil.

Probably the most startling story I've heard was about a freelance copy editor for a women's magazine who discovered that a writer-a famous "domestic diva"-had plagiarized a recipe. The poor freelancer mysteriously died the very same night she invited the writer to a dinner party at her house ... But I don't mean to worry you. Statistically speaking, I believe that the number of copy editors murdered by their authors is fairly low.

To those who want one of the many famous, overoptimistic Dr. Firstnames to tell them the secret to being happy, we say, fuck happy. Fuck self-improvement, self-esteem, fairness, helpfulness, and everything in between.

Perhaps as he was lying awake then, his life may have passed before him—his early hopeful struggles, his manly successes and prosperity, his downfall in his declining years, and his present helpless condition—no chance of revenge against Fortune, which had had the better of him—neither name nor money to bequeath—a spent-out, bootless life of defeat and disappointment, and the end here! Which, I wonder, brother reader, is the better lot, to die prosperous and famous, or poor and

It is difficult for me to wag my finger at you from so very far away, particularly as my heart aches for you but really, darling, you must pack up this nonsensical situation once and for all. It is really beneath your dignity, not your dignity as a famous artist and a glamorous star, but your dignity as a human, only too human being. Curly [the shaven-headed Brynner] is attractive, beguiling, tender and fascinating, but he is not the only man in the world who merits those delightful adjectives?… do please try to work out for yourself a little personal philosophy and DO NOT, repeat DO NOT be so bloody vulnerable. To hell with God damned ‘L’Amour.’ It always causes far more trouble than it is worth. Don’t run after it. Don’t court it. Keep it waiting off stage until you’re good and ready for it and even then treat it with the suspicious disdain that it deserves … I am sick to death of you waiting about in empty houses and apartments with your ears strained for the telephone to ring. Snap out of it, girl! A very brilliant writer once said (Could it have been me?) ‘Life is for the living.’? Well, that is all it is for… …Unpack your sense of humour, and get on with living and ENJOY IT. Incidentally, there is one fairly strong-minded type who will never let you down and who loves you very much indeed. Just try to guess who it is. XXXX.

If you want to teach a kid a life skill, teach him reality. Give him a picture of what the world will throw his way. Even the rich and famous have their share of heartache and loss. People go broke. People get sick. Loved ones die. There are setbacks, cutbacks, rollbacks, buyouts, layoffs, bankruptcies. Is it fair to reward a kid for everything he does until he’s eighteen, filling his room with trophies regardless how he performs, and then find him shocked the first time he fails a course or loses a girlfriend or gets fired from a job?

All of us have read of what occured during that interval. The tale is in every Englishman's mouth; and you and I, who were children when the great battle was won and lost, are never tired of hearing and recounting the history of that famous action. Its rememberance rankles still in the bosoms of millions of the countrymen of those brave men who lost the day. They pant for an opportunity of revenging that humiliation; and if a contest, ending in a victory on their part, should ensue, elating them in their turn, and leaving its cursed legacy of hatred and rage behind to us, there is no end to the so-called glory and shame, and to the alterations of successful and unsuccessful murder, in which two high-spirited nations might engage. Centuries hence, we Frenchmen and Englishmen might be boasting and killing each other still, carrying out bravely the Devil's code of honor.

Are your friends as good as MY friends? I can discern the nod of of assent but doubt it. My own friends are far better, they are famous people and they are all dead. Who, you may ask, are those friends of mine, and why are they dead? It is a fair question. They are dead because, had they lived, they would have died anyway from extreme old age and decrepitude.

A straight, cis, able-bodied white man is the only person on this planet who can travel almost anywhere (and, as the famous Louis CK bit goes, to almost any time in history), unless they’re literally dropping into a war zone, and feel fairly comfortable and safe (and, often, in charge). To the rest of us, horrors aren’t a thought experiment to be mined—they’re horrors. Bad

Dwayne's bad chemicals made him take a loaded thirty-eight caliber revolver from under his pillow and stick it in his mouth. This was a tool whose only purpose was to make holes in human beings. It looked like this: In Dwayne's part of the planet, anybody who wanted one could get one down at his local hardware store. Policemen all had them. So did the criminals. So did the people caught in between. Criminals would point guns at people and say, "Give me all your money," and the people usually would. And policemen would point their guns at criminals and say, "Stop" or whatever the situation called for, and the criminals usually would. Sometimes they wouldn't. Sometimes a wife would get so mad at her husband that she would put a hole in him with a gun. Sometimes a husband would get so mad at his wife that he would put a hole in her. And so on. In the same week Dwayne Hoover ran amok, a fourteen-year-old Midland City boy put holes in his mother and father because he didn't want to show them the bad report card he had brought home. His lawyer planned to enter a plea of temporary insanity, which meant that at the time of the shooting the boy was unable to distinguish the difference between right and wrong. · Sometimes people would put holes in famous people so they could be at least fairly famous, too. Sometimes people would get on airplanes which were supposed to fly to someplace, and they would offer to put holes in the pilot and co-pilot unless they flew the airplane to someplace else.

The tale is in every Englishman’s mouth; and you and I, who were children when the great battle was won and lost, are never tired of hearing and recounting the history of that famous action. Its remembrance rankles still in the bosoms of millions of the countrymen of those brave men who lost the day. They pant for an opportunity of revenging that humiliation; and if a contest, ending in a victory on their part, should ensue, elating them in their turn, and leaving its cursed legacy of hatred and rage behind to us, there is no end to the so-called glory and shame, and to the alternations of successful and unsuccessful murder, in which two high-spirited nations might engage. Centuries hence, we Frenchmen and Englishmen might be boasting and killing each other still, carrying out bravely the Devil’s code of honour.

Look, no one wants to hear that maybe she’s the reason her mother flew the coop. But my advice to you is to put this behind you. File it away in the drawer that’s saved for all the other crap that isn’t fair, like how the Kardashians are famous and how good-looking people get served faster at restaurants and how a kid who can’t skate to save his life winds up on the varsity hockey team because his dad is the coach.

Working hard is important. But more effort does not necessarily yield more results. “Less but better” does. Ferran Adrià, arguably the world’s greatest chef, who has led El Bulli to become the world’s most famous restaurant, epitomizes the principle of “less but better” in at least two ways. First, his specialty is reducing traditional dishes to their absolute essence and then re-imagining them in ways people have never thought of before. Second, while El Bulli has somewhere in the range of 2 million requests for dinner reservations each year, it serves only fifty people per night and closes for six months of the year. In fact, at the time of writing, Ferran had stopped serving food altogether and had instead turned El Bulli into a full-time food laboratory of sorts where he was continuing to pursue nothing but the essence of his craft.1 Getting used to the idea of “less but better” may prove harder than it sounds, especially when we have been rewarded in the past for doing more … and more and more. Yet at a certain point, more effort causes our progress to plateau and even stall. It’s true that the idea of a direct correlation between results and effort is appealing. It seems fair. Yet research across many fields paints a very different picture. Most people have heard of the “Pareto Principle,” the idea, introduced as far back as the 1790s by Vilfredo Pareto, that 20 percent of our efforts produce 80 percent of results. Much later, in 1951, in his Quality-Control Handbook, Joseph Moses Juran, one of the fathers of the quality movement, expanded on this idea and called it “the Law of the Vital Few.”2 His observation was that you could massively improve the quality of a product by resolving a tiny fraction of the problems. He found a willing test audience for this idea in Japan, which at the time had developed a rather poor reputation for producing low-cost, low-quality goods. By adopting a process in which a high percentage of effort and attention was channeled toward improving just those few things that were truly vital, he made the phrase “made in Japan” take on a totally new meaning. And gradually, the quality revolution led to Japan’s rise as a global economic power.3

structural racism, yet the concept is fairly straightforward. One theorist, Iris Marion Young, relying on a famous “birdcage” metaphor, explains it this way: If one thinks about racism by examining only one wire of the cage, or one form of disadvantage, it is difficult to understand how and why the bird is trapped. Only a large number of wires arranged in a specific way, and connected to one another, serve to enclose the bird and to ensure that it cannot escape.

there is a persistent emphasis on religious themes, such as the nature of the Islamic warrior, the role of Islam in training, the importance of Islamic ideology for the army, and the salience of jihad. Pakistan’s military journals frequently take as their subjects famous Quranic battles, such as the Battle of Badr. Ironically, the varied Quranic battles are discussed in more analytical detail in Pakistan’s journals than are Pakistan’s own wars with India. A comparable focus on religion in the Indian army (which shares a common heritage with the Pakistan Army) would be quite scandalous. It is difficult to fathom that any Indian military journal would present an appraisal of the Kurukshetra War, which features the Hindu god Vishnu and is described in the Hindu Vedic epic poem the Mahabharata. Judging by the frequency with which articles on such topics appear in Pakistan’s professional publications, religion is clearly acceptable, and perhaps desirable, as a subject of discussion.

The unfortunate reality we must face is that racism manifests itself not only in individual attitudes and stereotypes, but also in the basic structure of society. Academics have developed complicated theories and obscure jargon in an effort to describe what is now referred to as structural racism, yet the concept is fairly straightforward. One theorist, Iris Marion Young, relying on a famous “birdcage” metaphor, explains it this way: If one thinks about racism by examining only one wire of the cage, or one form of disadvantage, it is difficult to understand how and why the bird is trapped. Only a large number of wires arranged in a specific way, and connected to one another, serve to enclose the bird and to ensure that it cannot escape.11 What is particularly important to keep in mind is that any given wire of the cage may or may not be specifically developed for the purpose of trapping the bird, yet it still operates (together with the other wires) to restrict its freedom. By the same token, not every aspect of a racial caste system needs to be developed for the specific purpose of controlling black people in order for it to operate (together with other laws, institutions, and practices) to trap them at the bottom of a racial hierarchy. In the system of mass incarceration, a wide variety of laws, institutions, and practices—ranging from racial profiling to biased sentencing policies, political disenfranchisement, and legalized employment discrimination—trap African Americans in a virtual (and literal) cage. Fortunately,

In Paley's famous illustration, the adaptation of all the parts of the watch to the function, or purpose, of showing the time, is held to be evidence that the watch was specially contrived to that end; on the ground, that the only cause we know of, competent to produce such an effect as a watch which shall keep time, is a contriving intelligence adapting the means directly to that end. Suppose, however, that any one had been able to show that the watch had not been made directly by any person, but that it was the result of the modification of another watch which kept time but poorly; and that this again had proceeded from a structure which could hardly be called a watch at all—seeing that it had no figures on the dial and the hands were rudimentary; and that going back and back in time we came at last to a revolving barrel as the earliest traceable rudiment of the whole fabric. And imagine that it had been possible to show that all these changes had resulted, first, from a tendency of the structure to vary indefinitely; and secondly, from something in the surrounding world which helped all variations in the direction of an accurate time-keeper, and checked all those in other directions; then it is obvious that the force of Paley's argument would be gone. For it would be demonstrated that an apparatus thoroughly well adapted to a particular purpose might be the result of a method of trial and error worked by unintelligent agents, as well as of the direct application of the means appropriate to that end, by an intelligent agent. Now it appears to us that what we have here, for illustration's sake, supposed to be done with the watch, is exactly what the establishment of Darwin's Theory will do for the organic world. For the notion that every organism has been created as it is and launched straight at a purpose, Mr. Darwin substitutes the conception of something which may fairly be termed a method of trial and error. Organisms vary incessantly; of these variations the few meet with surrounding conditions which suit them and thrive; the many are unsuited and become extinguished.

My life began by flickering out. It may sound strange but it is so. From the very first moment I became conscious of myself, I felt that I was already flickering out. I began to flicker out over the writing of official papers at the office; I went on flickering out when I read truths in books which I did not know how to apply in life, when I sat with friends listening to rumours, gossip, jeering, spiteful, cold, and empty chatter, and watching friendships kept up by meetings that were without aim or affection; I was flickering out and wasting my energies with Minna on whom I spent more than half of my income, imagining that I loved her; I was flickering out when I walked idly and dejectedly along Nevsky Avenue among people in raccoon coats and beaver collars – at parties, on reception days, where I was welcomed with open arms as a fairly eligible young man; I was flickering out and wasting my life and mind on trifles moving from town to some country house, and from the country house to Gorokhovaya, fixing the arrival of spring by the fact that lobsters and oysters had appeared in the shops, of autumn and winter by the special visiting days, of summer by the fêtes, and life in general by lazy and comfortable somnolence like the rest. ... Even ambition – what was it wasted on? To order clothes at a famous tailor's? To get an invitation to a famous house? To shake hands with Prince P.? And ambition is the salt of life! Where has it gone to? Either I have not understood this sort of life or it is utterly worthless; but I did not know of a better one. No one showed it to me.

Academics have developed complicated theories and obscure jargon in an effort to describe what is now referred to as st7-uctunal racism, yet the concept is fairly straightforward. One theorist, Iris Marion Young, relying on a famous "birdcage" metaphor, explains it this way: If one thinks about racism by examining only one wire of the cage, or one form of disadvantage, it is difficult to understand how and why the bird is trapped. Only a large number of wires arranged in a specific way, and connected to one another, serve to enclose the bird and to ensure that it cannot escape.11

Anatol Rapoport, a mathematical psychologist who was famous for his insights into social interactions: You should attempt to re-express your target’s position so clearly, vividly, and fairly that your target says, ‘Thanks, I wish I’d thought of putting it that way.’ You should list any points of agreement (especially if they are not matters of widespread agreement). You should mention anything that you have learned from your target. Only then are you permitted to say so much as a word of rebuttal or criticism.1 How many times have you heard or participated in a conversation that obeys these rules? Such guidelines have gone out of fashion recently, if they were ever followed.

Equally bad deals have been made with Big Tech. In many ways, Silicon Valley is a product of the U.S. government’s investments in the development of high-risk technologies. The National Science Foundation funded the research behind the search algorithm that made Google famous. The U.S. Navy did the same for the GPS technology that Uber depends on. And the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, part of the Pentagon, backed the development of the Internet, touchscreen technology, Siri, and every other key component in the iPhone. Taxpayers took risks when they invested in these technologies, yet most of the technology companies that have benefited fail to pay their fair share of taxes.

And then, so quickly that no one (unless they knew, as Peter did) could quite see how it happened, Edmund flashed his sword round with a peculiar twist, the Dwarf’s sword flew out of his grip, and Trumpkin was wringing his empty hand as you do after a “sting” from a cricket-bat. “Not hurt, I hope, my dear little friend?” said Edmund, panting a little and returning his own sword to its sheath. “I see the point,” said Trumpkin drily. “You know a trick I never learned.” “That’s quite true,” put in Peter. “The best swordsman in the world may be disarmed by a trick that’s new to him. I think it’s only fair to give Trumpkin a chance at something else. Will you have a shooting match with my sister? There are no tricks in archery, you know.” “Ah, you’re jokers, you are,” said the Dwarf. “I begin to see. As if I didn’t know how she can shoot, after what happened this morning. All the same, I’ll have a try.” He spoke gruffly, but his eyes brightened, for he was a famous bowman among his own people. All five of them came out into the courtyard. “What’s to be the target?” asked Peter. “I think that apple hanging over the wall on the branch there would do,” said Susan. “That’ll do nicely, lass,” said Trumpkin. “You mean the yellow one near the middle of the arch?” “No, not that,” said Susan. “The red one up above--over the battlement.” The Dwarf’s face fell. “Looks more like a cherry than an apple,” he muttered, but he said nothing out loud.

Coincidentally the couple who had endowed it had lived in her parents’ building. They had had an eight-year-old with a pretty singing voice who drowned at a Maine summer camp. “You can’t imagine what happened,” said Sarah, but of course Rebecca could imagine. Being a boy soprano had a shorter shelf life than being a supermodel. She could almost see it as Sarah went on and on, the boy with the pale blue eyes, insensible to the hormones coursing through his body as he stood on the stage at Alice Tully Hall. Apparently his choir director had chosen “Old Man River,” sung not in the bass range made famous by Paul Robeson, or in the dialect in which it had been written, but in a high register with crisp consonants. (To be fair to the choir director, he had never

And by the early 1970s our little parable of Sam and Sweetie is exactly what happened to the North American Golden Retriever. One field-trial dog, Holway Barty, and two show dogs, Misty Morn’s Sunset and Cummings’ Gold-Rush Charlie, won dozens of blue ribbons between them. They were not only gorgeous champions; they had wonderful personalities. Consequently, hundreds of people wanted these dogs’ genes to come into their lines, and over many matings during the 1970s the genes of these three dogs were flung far and wide throughout the North American Golden Retriever population, until by 2010 Misty Morn’s Sunset alone had 95,539 registered descendants, his number of unregistered ones unknown. Today hundreds of thousands of North American Golden Retrievers are descended from these three champions and have received both their sweet dispositions and their hidden time bombs. Unfortunately for these Golden Retrievers, and for the people who love them, one of these time bombs happens to be cancer. To be fair, a so-called cancer gene cannot be traced directly to a few famous sires, but using these sires so often increases the chance of recessive genes meeting—for good and for ill. Today, in the United States, 61.4 percent of Golden Retrievers die of cancer, according to a survey conducted by the Golden Retriever Club of America and the Purdue School of Veterinary Medicine. In Great Britain, a Kennel Club survey found almost exactly the same result, if we consider that those British dogs—loosely diagnosed as dying of “old age” and “cardiac conditions” and never having been autopsied—might really be dying of a variety of cancers, including hemangiosarcoma, a cancer of the lining of the blood vessels and the spleen. This sad history of the Golden Retriever’s narrowing gene pool has played out across dozens of other breeds and is one of the reasons that so many of our dogs spend a lot more time in veterinarians’ offices than they should and die sooner than they might. In genetic terms, it comes down to the ever-increasing chance that both copies of any given gene are derived from the same ancestor, a probability expressed by a number called the coefficient of inbreeding. Discovered in 1922 by the American geneticist Sewall Wright, the coefficient of inbreeding ranges from 0 to 100 percent and rises as animals become more inbred.

I know who you are,” he says. Something about his tone causes my heart of smoke to flicker in response, and I throw my guard up. “Oh? And who, O boy of Parthenia, am I?” He nods to himself, his eyes alight. “You’re her. You’re that jinni. Oh, gods. Oh, great bleeding gods! You’re the one who started the war!” “Excuse me?” “You’re the jinni who betrayed that famous queen—what was her name? Roshana? She was trying to bring peace between the jinn and the humans, but you turned on her and started the Five Hundred Wars.” I turn cold. I want him to stop, but he doesn’t. “I’ve heard the stories,” he says. “I’ve heard the songs. They call you the Fair Betrayer, who enchanted humans with your . . .” He pauses to swallow. “Your beauty. You promised them everything, and then you ruined them.

At the entrance of the gardens, Lauren approached the two large bronze buffalos, replicas of buffalo statues that were displayed during the World’s Columbian Exhibition in 1893. The event was meant to celebrate Columbus’ arrival in the New World in 1492. The fair was so spectacular that people still talk about it today, the fourteen great buildings constructed by famous architects. There were fairgrounds of wonder and mystery, science and invention, but almost all of it was temporary, temporary buildings, canals and lagoons. Over twenty-seven million people visited Chicago in those six months during the fair and took with them to their small rural towns, cities across America and country’s far away the stories of a great city on a prairie, a great people, and all of the magic that lives there.

On September 2, the day the Democratic National Convention in Chicago nominated George McClellan for president, news flashed across the country of the fall of Atlanta to General William Tecumseh Sherman after a long siege. Just as the Democrats met to declare the war a failure and crafted a platform that would lead to a negotiated Confederate independence of some kind, Sherman famously sent a telegram to Washington: “Atlanta is ours and fairly won.” Confederates’ rising hopes plummeted, and many war-weary Northerners, represented by the famous New York diarist George Templeton Strong, saw victory now on the immediate horizon: “Glorious news this morning—Atlanta taken at last!!! It is . . . the greatest event of the war.”45 The Democrats’ peace platform put Lincoln’s apparent moderation in a different light; and Douglass had seen a devotion in the president’s heart and mind

Vul and Pashler drew inspiration from the well-known phenomenon known as the wisdom-of-crowds effect: averaging the independent judgments of different people generally improves accuracy. In 1907, Francis Galton, a cousin of Darwin and a famous polymath, asked 787 villagers at a country fair to estimate the weight of a prize ox. None of the villagers guessed the actual weight of the ox, which was 1,198 pounds, but the mean of their guesses was 1,200, just 2 pounds off, and the median (1,207) was also very close. The villagers were a “wise crowd” in the sense that although their individual estimates were quite noisy, they were unbiased. Galton’s demonstration surprised him: he had little respect for the judgment of ordinary people, and despite himself, he urged that his results were “more creditable to the trustworthiness of a democratic judgment than might have been expected.

THE FIRST THING you need to do to get a man to elope with you is to challenge him to go to Las Vegas. You do this by being out at an L.A. club and having a few drinks together. You ignore the impulse to roll your eyes at how eager he is to have his picture taken with you. You recognize that everyone is playing everyone else. It’s only fair that he’s playing you at the same time as you’re playing him. You reconcile these facts by realizing that what you both want from each other is complementary. You want a scandal. He wants the world to know he screwed you. The two things are one and the same. You consider laying it out for him, explaining what you want, explaining what you’re willing to give him. But you’ve been famous long enough to know that you never tell anyone anything more than you have to. So instead of saying I’d like us to make tomorrow’s papers, you say, “Mick, have you ever been to Vegas?

There. On the end.” Flowers pointed. “Wait. I’ll go announce you.” He slipped inside the tent, leaving Griff to contemplate the gilded skull of his old friend. In life, Ser Myles Toyne had been ugly as sin. His famous forebear, the dark and dashing Terrence Toyne of whom the singers sang, had been so fair of face that even the king’s mistress could not resist him; but Myles had been possessed of jug ears, a crooked jaw, and the biggest nose that Jon Connington had ever seen. When he smiled at you, though, none of that mattered. Blackheart, his men had named him, for the sigil on his shield. Myles had loved the name and all it hinted at. “A captain-general should be feared, by friend and foe alike,” he had once confessed. “If men think me cruel, so much the better.” The truth was otherwise. Soldier to the bone, Toyne was fierce but always fair, a father to his men and always generous to the exile lord Jon Connington.

We aren’t simply looking at a demographically induced economic breakdown; we are looking at the end of a half millennium of economic history. At present, I see only two preexisting economic models that might work for the world we’re (d)evolving into. Both are very old-school: The first is plain ol’ imperialism. For this to work, the country in question must have a military, especially one with a powerful navy capable of large-scale amphibious assault. That military ventures forth to conquer territories and peoples, and then exploits said territories and peoples in whatever way it wishes: forcing conquered labor to craft products, stripping conquered territories of resources, treating conquered people as a captive market for its own products, etc. The British Empire at its height excelled at this, but to be honest, so did any other post-Columbus political entity that used the word “empire” in its name. If this sounds like mass slavery with some geographic and legal displacement between master and slave, you’re thinking in the right general direction. The second is something called mercantilism, an economic system in which you heavily restrict the ability of anyone to export anything to your consumer base, but in which you also ram whatever of your production you can down the throats of anyone else. Such ramming is often done with a secondary goal of wrecking local production capacity so the target market is dependent upon you in the long term. The imperial-era French engaged in mercantilism as a matter of course, but so too did any up-and-coming industrial power. The British famously product-dumped on the Germans in the early 1800s, while the Germans did the same to anyone they could reach in the late 1800s. One could argue (fairly easily) that mercantilism was more or less the standard national economic operating policy for China in the 2000s and 2010s (under American strategic cover, no less). In essence, both possible models would be implemented with an eye toward sucking other peoples dry, and transferring the pain of general economic dislocation from the invaders to the invaded. Getting a larger slice of a smaller pie, as it were. Both models might theoretically work in a poorer, more violent, more fractured world—particularly if they are married. But even together, some version of imperialist mercantilism faces a singular, overarching, likely condemning problem: Too many guns, not enough boots.

Speaking generally, there are two kinds of descriptive music. The first comes under the heading of literal description. A composer wishes to recreate the sound of bells in the night. He therefore writes certain chords, for orchestra or piano or whatever medium he is using, which actually sound like bells in the night. Something real is being imitated realistically. A famous example of that kind of description in music is the passage in one of Strauss’s tone poems where he imitates the bleating of sheep. The music has no other raison d’être than mere imitation at that point. The other type of descriptive music is less literal and more poetic. No attempt is made to describe a particular scene or event; nevertheless some outward circumstance arouses certain emotions in the composer which he wishes to communicate to the listener. It may be clouds or the sea or a country fair or an airplane. But the point is that instead of literal imitation, one gets a musicopoetic transcription of the phenomenon as reflected in the composer’s mind. That constitutes a higher form of program music. The bleating of sheep will always sound like the bleating of sheep, but a cloud portrayed in music allows the imagination more freedom. One principle must be kept firmly

Ballad" Oh dream, why do you do me this way? Again, with the digging, again with the digging up. Once more with the shovels. Once more, the shovels full of dirt. The vault lid. The prying. The damp boards. Mother beside me. Like she’s an old hat at this. Like all she’s got left is curiosity. Like curiosity didn’t kill the red cat. Such a sweet, gentle cat it was. Here we go again, dream. Mother, wearing her take-out-the-garbage coat. I haven’t seen that coat in years. The coat she wore to pick me up from school early. She appeared at the back of the classroom, early. Go with your mother, teacher said. Diane, you are excused. I was a little girl. Already a famous actress. I looked at the other kids. I acted lucky. Though everyone knows what an early pick-up means. An early pick-up, dream. What’s wrong, I asked my mother. It is early spring. Bright sunlight. The usual birds. Air, teetering between bearable and unbearable. Cold, but not cold enough to shiver. Still, dream, I shiver. You know, my mother said. Her long garbage coat flying. There was a wind, that day. A wind like a scurrying grandmother, dusting. Look inside yourself, my mother said. You know why I have come for you. And still I acted lucky. Lucky to be out. Lucky to be out in the cold world with my mother. I’m innocent, I wanted to say. A little white girl, trying out her innocence. A white lamb, born into a cold field. Frozen almost solid. Brought into the house. Warmed all night with hair dryers. Death? I said. Smiling. Lucky. We’re barely to the parking lot. Barely to the car ride home. But the classroom already feels like the distant past. Long ago, my classmates pitying me. Arriving at this car full of uncles. Were they wearing suits? Death such a formal occasion. My sister, angry-crying next to me. Me, encountering a fragment of evil in myself. Evilly wanting my mother to say it. What? I asked, smiling. My lamb on full display at the fair. He’s dead! my sister said. Hit me in the gut with her flute. Her flute case. Her rental flute. He’s dead! Our father. Our father, who we were not supposed to know had been dying. He’s dead! The flute gleaming in its red case. Here, my mother said at home. She’d poured us each a small glass of Pepsi We normally couldn’t afford Pepsi. Lucky, I acted. He’s no longer suffering, my mother said. Here, she said. Drink this. The little bubbles flew. They bit my tongue. My evil persisted. What is death? I asked. And now, dream, once more you bring me my answer. Dig, my mother says. Pry, she says. I don’t want to see, dream. The lid so damp it crumbles under my hands. The casket just a drawerful of bones. A drawerful. Just bones and teeth. That one tooth he had. Crooked like mine.

We are lovers of beauty without extravagance, and lovers of wisdom without unmanliness. Wealth to us is not mere material for vainglory but an opportunity for achievement; and poverty we think it no disgrace to acknowledge but a real degradation to make no effort to overcome.... Let us draw strength, not merely from twice-told arguments—how fair and noble a thing it is to show courage in battle—but from the busy spectacle of our great city's life as we have it before us day by day, falling in love with her as we see her, and remembering that all this greatness she owes to men with the fighter's daring, the wise man's understanding of his duty, and the good man's self-discipline in its performance—to men who, if they failed in any ordeal, disdained to deprive the city of their services, but sacrificed their lives as the best offerings on her behalf. So they gave their bodies to the commonwealth and received, each for his own memory, praise that will never die, and with it the grandest of all sepulchres, not that in which their mortal bones are laid, but a home in the minds of men, where their glory remains fresh to stir to speech or action as the occasion comes by. For the whole earth is a sepulchre of famous men; and their story is not graven only on stone over their native earth, but lives on far away, without visible symbol, woven into the stuff of other men's lives. For you now it remains to rival what they have done and, knowing the secret of happiness to be freedom and the secret of freedom a brave heart, not idly to stand aside from the enemy's onset.

Although Zolla no longer associated with Julius Evola, he nevertheless arranged for me to meet Italy’s most famous crypto-traditionalist writer who was a very controversial figure because of his espousal of the cause of Mussolini during the Second World War. I had already read some of Evola’s works, many of which are now being translated into English and are attracting some attention in philosophical circles. But based on the image I had of him as an expositor of traditional doctrines including Yoga, I was surprised to see him, now crippled as a result of a bomb explosion in 1945, living in the center of Rome in a large old apartment which was severe and fairly dark and without works of traditional art which I had expected to see around him. He had piercing eyes and gazed directly at me as we spoke about knightly initiation, myths and symbols of ancient Persia, traditional alchemy and Hermeticism and similar subjects. While he extolled the ancient Romans and their virtues, he spoke pejoratively about his contemporary Italians. When I asked him what happened to those Roman virtues, he said they traveled north to Germany and we were left with Italian waiters singing o sole mio! He also seemed to have little knowledge or interest in esoteric Christianity and refuse to acknowledge the presence of a sapiental current in Christianity. It was surprising for me to see an Italian sitting a few minutes from the Vatican, with his immense knowledge of various esoteric philosophies from the Greek to the Indian, being so impervious to the inner realities of the tradition so close to his home.

I quickly learned that the congressional delegation from Alaska was deeply committed to the oil industry and other commercial interests, and senatorial courtesy prevented other members from disputing with Senators Ted Stevens (Republican) and Mike Gravel (Democrat) over a matter involving their home state. Former Idaho governor Cecil Andrus, my secretary of interior, and I began to study the history of the controversy and maps of the disputed areas, and I flew over some of them a few times. Environmental groups and most indigenous natives were my allies, but professional hunters, loggers, fishers, and the Chambers of Commerce were aligned with the oil companies. All the odds were against us until Cecil discovered an ancient law, the Antiquities Act of 1906, which permitted a president to set aside an area for “the protection of objects of historic and scientific interest,” such as Indian burial grounds, artifacts, or perhaps an ancient church building or the site of a famous battle. We decided to use this authority to set aside for preservation large areas of Alaska as national monuments, and eventually we had included more than 56 million acres (larger than the state of Minnesota). This gave me the bargaining chip I needed, and I was able to prevail in the subsequent debates. My efforts were extremely unpopular in Alaska, and I had to have extra security on my visits. I remember that there was a state fair where people threw baseballs at two targets to plunge a clown into a tank of water. My face was on one target and Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini’s on the other, and few people threw at the Ayatollah’s.

For the lady’s husband to become actively jealous was considered both doltish and dishonorable, a breach of the spirit of courtesy. Yet the record suggests that this was a fairly common occurrence and one of the occupational hazards of being a troubadour. The most famous crime passionnel of the epoch was the murder of Guilhem de Cabestanh, a troubadour knight whose love for the Lady Seremonda aroused the jealousy of her husband, Raimon de Castel-Roussillon. The story goes that Raimon killed Guilhem while he was out hunting, removed the heart from the body, and had it served to his wife for dinner, cooked and seasoned with pepper. Then comes the great confrontation: “And when the lady had eaten of it, RAimon de Castel-Roussillon said unto her: “Know you of what you have eaten?’ And she said, ‘I know not, save that the taste thereof is good and savoury.’ Then he said to her that that she had eaten of was in very truth the head of SIr Guilhem of Cabestanh, and caused the head to be brought before her, that she might the more readily believe it. And when the lady had seen and heard this, she straightway fell into a swoon, and when she was recovered of it, she spake and said: “Of a truth, my Lord, such good meat have you given me that never more will I eat of other.” THen he, hearing this, ran upon her with his sword and would have struck at her head, but the lady ran to a balcony, and cast herself down, and so died.” ...the story is probably apocryphal… grisly details...borrowed from an ancient legend...the Middle Ages believed it and drew the intended moral conclusion-that husbands should leave well enough alone. Raimon was held up to scorn while Guilhem became one of the great heroes of the troubadour epoch.

I’ve worn Niki’s pants for two days now. I thought a third day in the same clothes might be pushing it.” Ian shrugged with indifference. “It might send Derian through the roof, but it doesn’t bother me. Wear what you want to wear.” Eena wrinkled her nose at him. “Do you really feel that way or are you trying to appear more laissez-faire than Derian?” “More laissez-faire?” “Yes. That’s a real word.” “Two words actually,” he grinned. “Laissez faire et laissez passer, le monde va de lui même!" He coated the words with a heavy French accent. Eena gawked at him. “Since when do you speak French?” “I don’t.” Ian chuckled. “But I did do some research in world history the year I followed you around on Earth. Physics was a joke, but history—that I found fascinating.” Slapping a hand against her chest, Eena exclaimed, “I can’t believe it! Unbeknownst to me, Ian actually studied something in high school other than the library’s collection of sci-fi paperbacks!” He grimaced at her exaggerated performance before defending his preferred choice of reading material. “Hey, popular literature is a valuable and enlightening form of world history. You would know that if you read a book or two.” She ignored his reproach and asked with curiosity, “What exactly did you say?” “In French?” “Duh, yes.” “Don’t ‘duh’ me, you could easily have been referring to my remark about enlightening literature. I know the value of a good book is hard for you to comprehend.” He grinned crookedly at her look of offense and then moved into an English translation of his French quote. “Let it do and let it pass, the world goes on by itself.” “Hmm. And where did that saying come from?” Ian delivered his answer with a surprisingly straight face. “That is what the French Monarch said when his queen began dressing casually. The French revolution started one week following that famous declaration, right after the queen was beheaded by the rest of the aristocracy in her favorite pair of scroungy jeans.” “You are such a brazen-tongued liar!

The free market system of capitalism enhances freedom in three ways. Traditionally freedom of exchange has been seen as a basic form of individual freedom, with which it would be wrong to interfere, and in this sense is a basic, negative freedom like the freedom of speech, assembly, the press, or conscience. Gerald Gaus, a liberal defender of the morality of markets, summarizes the liberal case for freedom in capitalism: “classical liberalism embraces market relations because (but not, of course, only because) they (1) are essentially free, (2) respect the actual choices of individuals, and (3) legitimately express different individuals’ rational decisions about the proper choice between competing ends, goods, and values.”98 Market freedom is necessary to respect individuals as free choosers and designers of their own “experiments in living,” as Mill famously puts it.99 Free markets also have positive aspects, however, in providing opportunities by increasing persons’ material wealth in order to choose things that they value. Another aspect of the positive freedom that markets promote is the freedom of persons to develop their autonomy as decision makers, and to find opportunities to escape from oppressive traditional roles. Markets also promote a third, more controversial, sense of freedom in that they allow persons to interact in mutually beneficial ways even when they do not know each other or have any other traditional reason to care about the other. I call this sense of freedom “social freedom.” In each of these ways – negative, positive, and social – markets have much, and in some cases even more, to offer to women, as women have been more confined by traditional roles to a constrained family life, deprived of a fair distribution of benefits and burdens of family life, and treated as second-class citizens in their communities. While capitalism has already, as we have seen, brought great advances in the realm of negative and positive liberties, capitalism’s ability to destruct the old and create new forms of community offer a vision of freedom that is yet to be fulfilled.

Scrupling to do writings relative to keeping slaves has been a means of sundry small trials to me, in which I have so evidently felt my own will set aside that I think it good to mention a few of them. Tradesmen and retailers of goods, who depend on their business for a living, are naturally inclined to keep the good-will of their customers; nor is it a pleasant thing for young men to be under any necessity to question the judgment or honesty of elderly men, and more especially of such as have a fair reputation. Deep-rooted customs, though wrong, are not easily altered; but it is the duty of all to be firm in that which they certainly know is right for them. A charitable, benevolent man, well acquainted with a negro, may, I believe, under some circumstances, keep him in his family as a servant, on no other motives than the negro's good; but man, as man, knows not what shall be after him, nor hath he any assurance that his children will attain to that perfection in wisdom and goodness necessary rightly to exercise such power; hence it is clear to me, that I ought not to be the scribe where wills are drawn in which some children are made ales masters over others during life. About this time an ancient man of good esteem in the neighborhood came to my house to get his will written. He had young negroes, and I asked him privately how he purposed to dispose of them. He told me; I then said, "I cannot write thy will without breaking my own peace," and respectfully gave him my reasons for it. He signified that he had a choice that I should have written it, but as I could not, consistently with my conscience, he did not desire it, and so he got it written by some other person. A few years after, there being great alterations in his family, he came again to get me to write his will. His negroes were yet young, and his son, to whom he intended to give them, was, since he first spoke to me, from a libertine become a sober young man, and he supposed that I would have been free on that account to write it. We had much friendly talk on the subject, and then deferred it. A few days after he came again and directed their freedom, and I then wrote his will.

I have been all over the world cooking and eating and training under extraordinary chefs. And the two food guys I would most like to go on a road trip with are Anthony Bourdain and Michael Ruhlmann, both of whom I have met, and who are genuinely awesome guys, hysterically funny and easy to be with. But as much as I want to be the Batgirl in that trio, I fear that I would be woefully unprepared. Because an essential part of the food experience that those two enjoy the most is stuff that, quite frankly, would make me ralph. I don't feel overly bad about the offal thing. After all, variety meats seem to be the one area that people can get a pass on. With the possible exception of foie gras, which I wish like heckfire I liked, but I simply cannot get behind it, and nothing is worse than the look on a fellow foodie's face when you pass on the pate. I do love tongue, and off cuts like oxtails and cheeks, but please, no innards. Blue or overly stinky cheeses, cannot do it. Not a fan of raw tomatoes or tomato juice- again I can eat them, but choose not to if I can help it. Ditto, raw onions of every variety (pickled is fine, and I cannot get enough of them cooked), but I bonded with Scott Conant at the James Beard Awards dinner, when we both went on a rant about the evils of raw onion. I know he is often sort of douchey on television, but he was nice to me, very funny, and the man makes the best freaking spaghetti in tomato sauce on the planet. I have issues with bell peppers. Green, red, yellow, white, purple, orange. Roasted or raw. Idk. If I eat them raw I burp them up for days, and cooked they smell to me like old armpit. I have an appreciation for many of the other pepper varieties, and cook with them, but the bell pepper? Not my friend. Spicy isn't so much a preference as a physical necessity. In addition to my chronic and severe gastric reflux, I also have no gallbladder. When my gallbladder and I divorced several years ago, it got custody of anything spicier than my own fairly mild chili, Emily's sesame noodles, and that plastic Velveeta-Ro-Tel dip that I probably shouldn't admit to liking. I'm allowed very occasional visitation rights, but only at my own risk. I like a gentle back-of-the-throat heat to things, but I'm never going to meet you for all-you-can-eat buffalo wings. Mayonnaise squicks me out, except as an ingredient in other things. Avocado's bland oiliness, okra's slickery slime, and don't even get me started on runny eggs. I know. It's mortifying.

The Biggest Property Rental In Amsterdam Amsterdam has been ranked as the 13th best town to live in the globe according to Mercer contacting annual Good quality of Living Review, a place it's occupied given that 2006. Which means that the city involving Amsterdam is among the most livable spots you can be centered. Amsterdam apartments are equally quite highly sought after and it can regularly be advisable to enable a housing agency use their internet connections with the amsterdam parkinghousing network to help you look for a suitable apartment for rent Amsterdam. Amsterdam features rated larger in the past, yet continuing plan of disruptive and wide spread construction projects - like the problematic North-South town you live line- has intended a small scores decline. Amsterdam after rated inside the top 10 Carolien Gehrels (Tradition) told Dutch news company ANP that the metropolis is happy together with the thirteenth place. "Of course you want is actually the first place position, however shows that Amsterdam is a fairly place to live. Well-known places to rent in Amsterdam Your Jordaan. An old employees quarter popularised amang other things with the sentimental tunes of a quantity of local vocalists. These music painted an attractive image of the location. Local cafes continue to attribute live vocalists like Arthur Jordaan and Tante Leeni. The Jordaan is a network of alleyways and narrow canals. The section was proven in the Seventeenth century, while Amsterdam desperately needed to expand. The region was created along the design of the routes and ditches which already existed. The Jordaan is known for the weekly biological Nordermaarkt on Saturdays. Amsterdam is famous for that open air market segments. In Oud-zuid there is a ranging Jordan Cuypmarkt open year long. This part of town is a very popular spot for expats to find Expat Amsterdam flats due in part to vicinity of the Vondelpark. Among the largest community areas A hundred and twenty acres) inside Amsterdam, Netherlands. It can be located in the stadsdeel Amsterdam Oud-Zuid, western side from the Leidseplein as well as the Museumplein. The playground was exposed in 1865 as well as originally named the "Nieuwe Park", but later re-named to "Vondelpark", after the 17th one hundred year author Joost lorrie den Vondel. Every year, the recreation area has around 10 million guests. In the park can be a film art gallery, an open air flow theatre, any playground, and different cafe's and restaurants.

THEORY OF ALMOST EVERYTHING After the war, Einstein, the towering figure who had unlocked the cosmic relationship between matter and energy and discovered the secret of the stars, found himself lonely and isolated. Almost all recent progress in physics had been made in the quantum theory, not in the unified field theory. In fact, Einstein lamented that he was viewed as a relic by other physicists. His goal of finding a unified field theory was considered too difficult by most physicists, especially when the nuclear force remained a total mystery. Einstein commented, “I am generally regarded as a sort of petrified object, rendered blind and deaf by the years. I find this role not too distasteful, as it corresponds fairly well with my temperament.” In the past, there was a fundamental principle that guided Einstein’s work. In special relativity, his theory had to remain the same when interchanging X, Y, Z, and T. In general relativity, it was the equivalence principle, that gravity and acceleration could be equivalent. But in his quest for the theory of everything, Einstein failed to find a guiding principle. Even today, when I go through Einstein’s notebooks and calculations, I find plenty of ideas but no guiding principle. He himself realized that this would doom his ultimate quest. He once observed sadly, “I believe that in order to make real progress, one must again ferret out some general principle from nature.” He never found it. Einstein once bravely said that “God is subtle, but not malicious.” In his later years, he became frustrated and concluded, “I have second thoughts. Maybe God is malicious.” Although the quest for a unified field theory was ignored by most physicists, every now and then, someone would try their hand at creating one. Even Erwin Schrödinger tried. He modestly wrote to Einstein, “You are on a lion hunt, while I am speaking of rabbits.” Nevertheless, in 1947 Schrödinger held a press conference to announce his version of the unified field theory. Even Ireland’s prime minister, Éamon de Valera, showed up. Schrödinger said, “I believe I am right. I shall look an awful fool if I am wrong.” Einstein would later tell Schrödinger that he had also considered this theory and found it to be incorrect. In addition, his theory could not explain the nature of electrons and the atom. Werner Heisenberg and Wolfgang Pauli caught the bug too, and proposed their version of a unified field theory. Pauli was the biggest cynic in physics and a critic of Einstein’s program. He was famous for saying, “What God has torn asunder, let no man put together”—that is, if God had torn apart the forces in the universe, then who were we to try to put them back together?

A few years ago, a couple of young men from my church came to our home for dinner. During the course of the dinner, the conversation turned from religion to various world mythologies and we began to play the game of ‘Name That Character.” To play this game, you pick a category such as famous actors, superheroes or historical characters. In turn, each person describes events in a famous character’s life while everyone else tries to guess who the character is. Strategically you try to describe the deeds of a character in such a way that it might fit any number of characters in that category. After three guesses, if no one knows who your character is, then you win. Choosing the category of Bible Characters, we played a couple of fairly easy rounds with the typical figures, then it was my turn. Now, knowing these well meaning young men had very little religious experience or understanding outside of their own religion, I posed a trick question. I said, “Now my character may seem obvious, but please wait until the end of my description to answer.” I took a long breath for dramatic effect, and began, “My character was the son of the King of Heaven and a mortal woman.” Immediately both young men smiled knowingly, but I raised a finger asking them to wait to give their responses. I continued, “While he was just a baby, a jealous rival attempted to kill him and he was forced into hiding for several years. As he grew older, he developed amazing powers. Among these were the ability to turn water into wine and to control the mental health of other people. He became a great leader and inspired an entire religious movement. Eventually he ascended into heaven and sat with his father as a ruler in heaven.” Certain they knew who I was describing, my two guests were eager to give the winning answer. However, I held them off and continued, “Now I know adding these last parts will seem like overkill, but I simply cannot describe this character without mentioning them. This person’s birthday is celebrated on December 25th and he is worshipped in a spring festival. He defied death, journeyed to the underworld to raise his loved ones from the dead and was resurrected. He was granted immortality by his Father, the king of the gods, and was worshipped as a savior god by entire cultures.” The two young men were practically climbing out of their seats, their faces beaming with the kind of smile only supreme confidence can produce. Deciding to end the charade I said, “I think we all know the answer, but to make it fair, on the count of three just yell out the answer. One. Two. Three.” “Jesus Christ” they both exclaimed in unison – was that your answer as well? Both young men sat back completely satisfied with their answer, confident it was the right one…, but I remained silent. Five seconds ticked away without a response, then ten. The confidence of my two young friends clearly began to drain away. It was about this time that my wife began to shake her head and smile to herself. Finally, one of them asked, “It is Jesus Christ, right? It has to be!” Shaking my head, I said, “Actually, I was describing the Greek god Dionysus.

Isn’t this the weekend of Xander Eckhart’s party?” “Yes.” Jordan held her breath in a silent plea. Don’t ask if I’m bringing anyone. Don’t ask if I’m bringing anyone. “So are you bringing anyone?” Melinda asked. Foiled. Having realized there was a distinct possibility the subject would come up, Jordan had spent some time running through potential answers to this very question. She had decided that being casual was the best approach. “Oh, there’s this guy I met a few days ago, and I was thinking about asking him.” She shrugged. “Or maybe I’ll just go by myself, who knows.” Melinda put down her forkful of gnocchi, zoning in on this like a heat-seeking missile to its target. “What guy you met a few days ago? And why is this the first we’re hearing of him?” “Because I just met him a few days ago.” Corinne rubbed her hands together, eager for the details. “So? Tell us. How’d you meet him?” “What does he do?” Melinda asked. “Nice, Melinda. You’re so shallow.” Corinne turned back to Jordan. “Is he hot?” Of course, Jordan had known there would be questions. The three of them had been friends since college and still saw each other regularly despite busy schedules, and this was what they did. Before Corinne had gotten married, they talked about her now-husband, Charles. The same was true of Melinda and her soon-to-be-fiancé, Pete. So Jordan knew that she, in turn, was expected to give up the goods in similar circumstances. But she also knew that she really didn’t want to lie to her friends. With that in mind, she’d come up with a backup plan in the event the conversation went this way. Having no choice, she resorted to the strategy she had used in sticky situations ever since she was five years old, when she’d set her Western Barbie’s hair on fire while trying to give her a suntan on the family-room lamp. Blame it on Kyle. I’d like to thank the Academy . . . “Sure, I’ll tell you all about this new guy. We met the other day and he’s . . . um . . .” She paused, then ran her hands through her hair and exhaled dramatically. “Sorry. Do you mind if we talk about this later? After seeing Kyle today with the bruise on his face, I feel guilty rattling on about Xander’s party. Like I’m not taking my brother’s incarceration seriously enough.” She bit her lip, feeling guilty about the lie. So sorry, girls. But this has to stay my secret for now. Her diversion worked like a charm. Perhaps one of the few benefits of having a convicted felon of a brother known as the Twitter Terrorist was that she would never lack for non sequiturs in extracting herself from unwanted conversation. Corinne reached out and squeezed her hand. “No one has stood by Kyle’s side more than you, Jordan. But we understand. We can talk about this some other time. And try not to worry—Kyle can handle himself. He’s a big boy.” “Oh, he definitely is that,” Melinda said with a gleam in her eye. Jordan smiled. “Thanks, Corinne.” She turned to Melinda, thoroughly skeeved out. “And, eww—Kyle?” Melinda shrugged matter-of-factly. “To you, he’s your brother. But to the rest of the female population, he has a certain appeal. I’ll leave it at that.” “He used to fart in our Mr. Turtle pool and call it a ‘Jacuzzi.’ How’s that for appeal?” “Ah . . . the lifestyles of the rich and famous,” Corinne said with a grin. “And on that note, my secret fantasies about Kyle Rhodes now thoroughly destroyed, I move that we put a temporary hold on any further discussions related to the less fair of the sexes,” Melinda said. “I second that,” Jordan said, and the three women clinked their glasses in agreement

She has always been a bookworm and now she writes them. She just won an award for her best-selling book series. She is a fairly famous author now. – Niece of best-selling author

Even though it’s pleasing to boast about achievements I have earned in my generation, nothing makes me more content in the world than just having the exciting opportunity to share my passion of work with the public. What is even more exhilarating, is being able (having the capability) to spend quality time with my loving wife, (Gloria) and family doing what I love most in the world -- writing. Their total well-being and health, along with my health too means everything to me. I have had my fair share of narrow escapes in my life to know how important my family, and health are to me. I will never take that for granted again – ever.

Wickedness arrays itself in fair garments, and imitates the language of holiness; but the precepts of Jesus, like His famous scourge of small cords, chase it out of the temple, and will not tolerate it in the Church.

I’m going to invite you to contemplate a fictional scenario. Say that we are all citizens in a New England town with a traditional town meeting. As usual, a modest proportion of the citizens eligible to attend have actually turned out, let’s say four or five hundred. After calling the meeting to order, the moderator announces: “We have established the following rules for this evening’s discussion. After a motion has been properly made and seconded, in order to ensure free speech under rules fair to everyone here, each of you who wishes to do so will be allowed to speak on the motion. However, to enable as many as possible to speak, no one will be allowed to speak for more than two minutes.” Perfectly fair so far, you might say. But now our moderator goes on: “After everyone who wishes to speak for two minutes has had the floor, each and every one of you is free to speak further, but under one condition. Each additional minute will be auctioned off to the highest bidder.” The ensuing uproar from the assembled citizens would probably drive the moderator and the board of selectman away from the town hall—and perhaps out of town. Yet isn’t this in effect what the Supreme Court decided in the famous case of Buckley v. Valeo? In a seven-to-one vote, the court held that the First Amendment–guarantee of freedom of expression was impermissibly infringed by the limits placed by the Federal Election Campaign Act on the amounts that candidates for federal office or their supporters might spend to promote their election.3 Well, we’ve had time to see the appalling consequences.

British elections are mean-spirited and meretricious affairs that reveal what the country has become in its post-imperial form. In them, the focus flits between mercenary discussion of what the government is going to give the people and petty bickering over inconsequential details such as which schools the candidates went to and how much money they have. Few principles are at stake because classical liberalism is largely dead, so debates ultimately boil down to the question of who is going to run the welfare system more efficiently. The candidates’ arguments are full of nebulous, slippery words, such as 'fairness' and 'investment' — and the never-ending substitution of the word 'community' for “government.” You would never hear Kennedy’s famous 'Ask not what your country can do for you' line in a British political context because nobody would understand what he was talking about.

Pontius Pilate in Jesus’s death, instead placing blame on the Jews. The fairness of Pilate and his Roman administration that is displayed in the Christian Bible is not supported by the nonbiblical historical accounts. As Elaine Pagels has noted in The Origin of Satan: “Even Josephus, despite his Roman sympathies, says that the governor displayed contempt for his Jewish subjects, illegally appropriated funds from the Temple treasury, and brutally suppressed unruly crowds. The Jewish Greek historian Philo describes Pilate as a man of ‘ruthless, stubborn and cruel disposition,’ famous for, among other things, ordering ‘frequent executions without trial.

Pakistan’s military journals frequently take as their subjects famous Quranic battles, such as the Battle of Badr. Ironically, the varied Quranic battles are discussed in more analytical detail in Pakistan’s journals than are Pakistan’s own wars with India.

This would be the only chance I had to utter those famous last words like you see in the films. Ahem. “Your head is fairly oversized your highness,” I sniggered. “BEGONE!” he roared, as the crowd exploded into a fit of laughter, despite the situation. Even B.B. cracked a smile. I turned away, stepping into the water tunnel. Never to return.

Nee and I walked on in silence for a time, then she said in a guarded voice, “What think you of my cousin?” “So that is the famous Lady Tamara Chamadis! Well, she really is as pretty as I’d heard,” I said. “But…I don’t know. Somehow she embodies everything I’d thought a courtier would be.” “Fair enough.” Nee nodded. “Then I guess it’s safe for me to say--at risk of appearing a detestable gossip--watch out.” I touched the top of my hand where I could still feel the Duke of Savona’s kiss. “All right. But I don’t understand why.” “She is ambitious,” Nee said slowly. “Even when we were young she never had the time for any of lower status. I believe that if Galdran Merindar had shown any interest in sharing his power, she would have married him.” “She wants to rule the kingdom?” I asked, glancing behind us. The secluded little pool was bounded by trees and hidden from view. “She wants to reign over Court,” Nee stated. “Her interest in the multitudes of ordinary citizens extends only to the image of them bowing down to her.” I whistled. “That’s a pretty comprehensive judgment.” “Perhaps I have spoken ill,” she said contritely. “You must understand that I don’t like my cousin, having endured indifference or snubs since we were small, an heir’s condescension for a third child of a secondary branch of the family who would never inherit or amount to much.” “She seemed friendly enough just now.” “The first time she ever addressed me as cousin in public,” Nee said. “My status appears to have changed since I went away to Tlanth, affianced to a count, with the possible new king riding escort.” Her voice took on an acidic sort of humor. “And what about the Duke of Savona?” I asked, his image vivid in my mind’s eye. “In what sense?” She paused, turning to study my face. “He is another whose state of mind is impossible to guess.” I was still trying to disentangle all my observations from that brief meeting. “Is he, well, twoing with Lady Tamara?” She smiled at the term. “They both are experts at dalliance, but until last year I had thought they had more interest in each other than in anyone else,” she said carefully. “Though even that is difficult to say for certain. Interest and ambition sometimes overlap and sometimes not.” As we wound our way along the path back toward Athanarel in the deepening gloom, I saw warm golden light inside the palace windows. With a glorious flicker, glowglobes appeared along the pathway, suspended in the air like great rainbow-sheened bubbles, their light soft and benevolent. “I’m not certain what you mean by that last bit,” I said at last. “As for the first, you said ‘until last year.’ Does that mean that Lady Tamara has someone else in view?” “But of course,” Nee said blandly. “The Marquis of Shevraeth.” I laughed all the way up the steps into the Residence.

and thought to tart it up with a few Shakespeare quotations, having a vague recollection from my undergraduate days that the Bard was fond of joking about the great pox. I dusted off my battered copy of the Riverside Shakespeare and started leafing through it. Holy crap, I thought, there is a lot of stuff here on syphilis. My curiosity was piqued, and I did some more digging. Was there a connection between Shakespeare’s syphilitic obsession, contemporary gossip about his sexual misadventures, and the only medical fact known about him with certainty—that his handwriting became tremulous in late middle age? I wrote an article that appeared in Clinical Infectious Diseases, supposing it to be of scant interest beyond its immediate specialty audience. To my surprise, it generated a fair amount of Internet buzz, and inspired a segment on The Daily Show. I began to think that there might be interest in a book on the topic of writers and disease, written from a medical perspective.

There was no doubt that Shen Yu was extremely good-looking. After all, he was famous for his beauty throughout the capital. Against the crimson backdrop of the bed quilt his fair face was even more enticing, and now this beauty in read was seated on the bed, his gaze glowing with affection as if the man before him was the only one who could enter his eyes and his heart. Absolutely anyone would be moved. 毫无疑问，沈雨长得非常好看。毕竟，他以美丽闻名于整个首都。在床被子的深红色背景下，他白皙的脸更加迷人，现在这位阅读中的美女坐在床上，他的目光充满了爱意，仿佛眼前的男人是唯一能进入他的眼睛和心灵的人。任何人都会被感动。

To Jim, all of life’s horrors belong to him, to grind up and burn for his profit and pleasure, whether he’s personally experienced said horrors or not. A straight, cis, able-bodied white man is the only person on this planet who can travel almost anywhere (and, as the famous Louis CK bit goes, to almost any time in history), unless they’re literally dropping into a war zone, and feel fairly comfortable and safe (and, often, in charge). To the rest of us, horrors aren’t a thought experiment to be mined—they’re horrors.

The same theme of the Deluge is found in the Epic of Gilgamesh. This famous work, which has been fairly well preserved, casts still greater light on the similarities to the biblical narrative. In all probability, we may assume the existence of a common, and quite archaic, source. As has been well known since the compilations made by R. Andree, H. Usener, and J. G. Frazer, the deluge myth is almost universally disseminated; it is documented in all the continents (though very rarely in Africa) and on various cultural levels.

This, then, I believe to be,—will you not admit it to be,—the woman's true place and power? But do not you see that to fulfill this, she must—as far as one can use such terms of a human creature—be incapable of error? So far as she rules, all must be right, or nothing is. She must be enduringly, incorruptibly good; instinctively, infallibly wise—wise, not for self-development, but for self-renunciation: wise, not that she may set herself above her husband, but that she may never fail from his side: wise, not with the narrowness of insolent and loveless pride, but with the passionate gentleness of an infinitely variable, because infinitely applicable, modesty of service—the true changefulness of woman. In that great sense—"La donna è mobile," not "Qual piúm' al vento"; no, nor yet "Variable as the shade, by the light quivering aspen made"; but variable as the light, manifold in fair and serene division, that it may take the color of all that it falls upon, and exalt it. 70.

Folding my death into the present may or may not help me to get ahead in life. To be fair, life in Christ is not a useful way to live if I’m bent on earning money, looking fabulous, being comfortable, winning prizes, or becoming famous. It’s not a good strategy for capturing idols. In Christ, such things may or may not come. But, either way, they won’t matter. And, either way, I won’t need them. In Christ, I will have the one thing these idols could never give: I’ll be alive right now. And I won’t be alone.

ECAPE OF THE LOVELY LADY JULIA DE GONZAGA Stories that he heard on his progress of the lovely Julia Gonzaga, Duchess of Trajetto and Countess of Fondi, next tempted him to an exploit of a somewhat different character. The young widow was the most famous beauty in Italy; no fewer than two hundred and eight Italian poets had written verses in her honour and the device emblazoned on her shield was the Flower of Love. It occurred to the corsair that she would make an excellent token of his devotion to his new lord, Suleyman the Magnificent. The lady was at Fondi. Thither the pirate travelled, swiftly and by night. But the fame of his presence preceded him and the lady had just time to leap from her bed and gallop off on horseback dressed in the flimsiest of night garments and accompanied by one male attendant. She managed to escape, and afterwards condemned the attendant to death because, she alleged, he had been unduly familiar during that desperate nocturnal ride. Kheyr-ed-din, annoyed at the escape of his sultan’s fair prize, gave over the town of Fondi to a terrible four hours’ punishment at the hands of his men.

The third principle is to resist the allure of middling priorities. There is a story attributed to Warren Buffett—although probably only in the apocryphal way in which wise insights get attributed to Albert Einstein or the Buddha, regardless of their real source—in which the famously shrewd investor is asked by his personal pilot about how to set priorities. I’d be tempted to respond, “Just focus on flying the plane!” But apparently this didn’t take place midflight, because Buffett’s advice is different: he tells the man to make a list of the top twenty-five things he wants out of life and then to arrange them in order, from the most important to the least. The top five, Buffett says, should be those around which he organizes his time. But contrary to what the pilot might have been expecting to hear, the remaining twenty, Buffett allegedly explains, aren’t the second-tier priorities to which he should turn when he gets the chance. Far from it. In fact, they’re the ones he should actively avoid at all costs—because they’re the ambitions insufficiently important to him to form the core of his life yet seductive enough to distract him from the ones that matter most. You needn’t embrace the specific practice of listing out your goals (I don’t, personally) to appreciate the underlying point, which is that in a world of too many big rocks, it’s the moderately appealing ones—the fairly interesting job opportunity, the semi-enjoyable friendship—on which a finite life can come to grief. It’s a self-help cliché that most of us need to get better at learning to say no. But as the writer Elizabeth Gilbert points out, it’s all too easy to assume that this merely entails finding the courage to decline various tedious things you never wanted to do in the first place. In fact, she explains, “it’s much harder than that. You need to learn how to start saying no to things you do want to do, with the recognition that you have only one life.

The story doesn't mention him, but Steve Jobs himself famously kept his own household and kids fairly tech-free, and a parallel Times story published at the same time and by the same reporter, Nellie Bowles, found more tech celebrities doing likewise. Why? Because, explained Chris Anderson, ex-editor of Wired and head of a robotics company, "We thought we could control it. And this is beyond our power to control. This is going straight to the pleasure centers of the developing brain.

Fair point, but if you truly believe in Roko’s basilisk, you can’t ever be one hundred percent sure it won’t follow through on its pre-commitment to punish.” At last, I see what Max is getting at—a brutal version of Pascal’s wager, the famous eighteenth-century philosophical argument that humans gamble with their lives on whether or not God exists. Pascal posited that we should conduct our lives as if God were real and try to believe in God. If God doesn’t exist, we will suffer a finite loss—degrees of pleasure and autonomy. If God exists, our gains will be infinitely greater—eternal life in heaven instead of an eternity of suffering in hell.

Now, of course, Netflix’s culture is famous. There’s a much-downloaded PowerPoint presentation given to all new employees. But the truth is, it wasn’t the product of meetings or careful planning or roundtable discussions. It arose organically, through a shared set of values among a team of people who had been through their fair share of offices—startups, major corporations, and everywhere in between. Netflix, for all of us, was an opportunity to work at the kind of place we’d always dreamed about. It was a chance to do things truly our way. Culture isn’t what you say. It’s what you do.

Paul Child came on stage and made two batches of one of his famous drinks, which he called, whimsically, à la recherche de l’orange perdue. It was delicious, and we consumed both batches. The ingredients give a fair idea of our mental condition afterward: 6 tablespoons dark Jamaican rum 9 tablespoons dry white vermouth 2 teaspoons bottled sweetened lime juice Juice of 1 lime 1 tablespoon orange marmalade 1 whole seedless orange, quartered 5 shakes orange bitters 1 cup ice cubes

Now come I, forsooth, from good Banbury Town," said the jolly Tinker, "and no one nigh Nottingham--nor Sherwood either, an that be the mark-- can hold cudgel with my grip. Why, lads, did I not meet that mad wag Simon of Ely, even at the famous fair at Hertford Town, and beat him in the ring at that place before Sir Robert of Leslie and his lady? This same Robin Hood, of whom, I wot, I never heard before, is a right merry blade, but gin he be strong, am not I stronger? And gin he be sly, am not I slyer? Now by the bright eyes of Nan o' the Mill, and by mine own name and that's Wat o' the Crabstaff, and by mine own mother's son, and that's myself, will I, even I, Wat o' the Crabstaff, meet this same sturdy rogue, and gin he mind not the seal of our glorious sovereign King Harry, and the warrant of the good Sheriff of Nottinghamshire, I will so bruise, beat, and bemaul his pate that he shall never move finger or toe again! Hear ye that, bully boys?

From ‘Kokor Hekkus the Killing Machine’, Chapter IV of The Demon Princes, by Caril Carphen (Elucidarian Press, New Wexford, Aloysius, Vega): If Malagate the Woe can be characterized by the single word ‘grim’ and Howard Alan Treesong by ‘incomprehensible’, then Lens Larque, Viole Falushe and Kokor Hekkus all lay claim to the word ‘fantastic’. Which one exceeds the other two in ‘fantasy’? It is an amusing if profitless speculation. Consider Viole Falushe’s Palace of Love, Lens Larque’s monument, the vast and incredible outrages Kokor Hekkus has visited upon humanity: such extravagances are impossible to comprehend, let alone compare. It is fair to say, however, that Kokor Hekkus has captured the popular imagination with his grotesque and eerie humor. Let us listen to what he has to say in an abstract from the famous telephoned address, The Theory and Practice of Terror, to the students of Cervantes University: “… To produce the maximum effect, one must identify and intensify those basic dreads already existing within the subject. It is a mistake to regard the fear of death as the most extreme fear. I find a dozen other types to be more poignant, such as: The fear of inability to protect a cherished dependent. The fear of disesteem. The fear of noisome contact. The fear of being made afraid. “My goal is to produce a ‘nightmare’ quality of fright, and to maintain it over an appreciable duration. A nightmare is the result of the under-mind exploring its most sensitive areas, and so serves as an index for the operator. Once an apparently sensitive area is located the operator to the best of his ingenuity employs means to emphasize, to dramatize this fear, then augment it by orders of magnitude. If the subject fears heights, the operator takes him to the base of a tall cliff, attaches him to a slender, obviously fragile or frayed cord and slowly raises him up the face of the cliff, not too far and not too close to the face. Scale must be emphasized, together with the tantalizing but infeasible possibility of clinging to the vertical surface. The lifting mechanism should be arranged to falter and jerk. To intensify claustrophobic dread the subject is conveyed into a pit or excavation, inserted head-foremost into a narrow and constricted tunnel which slants downward, and occasionally changes direction by sharp and cramping angles. Whereupon the pit or excavation is filled and subject must proceed ahead, for the most part in a downward direction.

You’re not going to have kids?” Carson asks. “I would have thought you needed someone to carry on the famous Orson Ass.” I pause, my mind reeling. Holy. Fuck. “Hell, I didn’t even think about that.” I grip my forehead in distress. “Great, look what you just did,” Knox says while I pick up my phone to text Dottie. “Don’t text Dottie, Carson was just being a dick.” “No, this is not something we considered. We need to talk about this, right away.” I excuse myself from the table and weave my way through the restaurant until I find a quiet corner near the bathrooms. I dial “Bae’s” phone number and wait impatiently for her to answer. “Hey, aren’t you are at brunch with the boys?” she asks when she answers. “Dottie, we didn’t talk about something really important and now I’m freaking the fuck out.” “What did we not talk about?” she calmly asks. “You know that conversation we had awhile back about not having any kids?” “Yesss,” she drags out. I glance around to make sure no one is listening to me, stuff my hand in my pocket and quietly ask, “What about my butt?” Silence. Then . . . “Uh, what about your butt?” “You know . . .” “I really don’t know and I have a meeting in ten minutes, so if you can speed this up, I’d appreciate it.” “Dottie, if we don’t have kids, my butt dies with me.” “Your butt is dying with you either way, unless you have some sort of insane idea that I get your butt molded in gold or something, which although I wouldn’t put that past you, it’s not happening. Is that what you mean? You want to mold your butt and give it to our kids? You know I’m all about weird gifts but that’s just not something you should give your offspring.” “I’m not talking about that, but thanks for the idea, writing that in my will.” I hear her exaggerated breath. “I’m saying if we don’t have kids, I won’t pass my butt genes on to anyone and is that really fair to the human race? To stop my butt here?” “You’re serious?” “Dead serious. The butt can’t end with me. And what about my potato salad recipe? No one will say hey, you know what, I have my grandpa’s potato salad recipe I can make to bring to the barbeque. And that’s sacrilege.

Where does the word cocktail come from? There are many answers to that question, and none is really satisfactory. One particular favorite story of mine, though, comes from The Booze Reader: A Soggy Saga of a Man in His Cups, by George Bishop: “The word itself stems from the English cock-tail which, in the middle 1800s, referred to a woman of easy virtue who was considered desirable but impure. The word was imported by expatriate Englishmen and applied derogatorily to the newly acquired American habit of bastardizing good British Gin with foreign matter, including ice. The disappearance of the hyphen coincided with the general acceptance of the word and its re-exportation back to England in its present meaning.” Of course, this can’t be true since the word was applied to a drink before the middle 1800s, but it’s entertaining nonetheless, and the definition of “desirable but impure” fits cocktails to a tee. A delightful story, published in 1936 in the Bartender, a British publication, details how English sailors of “many years ago” were served mixed drinks in a Mexican tavern. The drinks were stirred with “the fine, slender and smooth root of a plant which owing to its shape was called Cola de Gallo, which in English means ‘Cock’s tail.’ ” The story goes on to say that the sailors made the name popular in England, and from there the word made its way to America. Another Mexican tale about the etymology of cocktail—again, dated “many years ago”—concerns Xoc-tl (transliterated as Xochitl and Coctel in different accounts), the daughter of a Mexican king, who served drinks to visiting American officers. The Americans honored her by calling the drinks cocktails—the closest they could come to pronouncing her name. And one more south-of-the-border explanation for the word can be found in Made in America, by Bill Bryson, who explains that in the Krio language, spoken in Sierra Leone, a scorpion is called a kaktel. Could it be that the sting in the cocktail is related to the sting in the scorpion’s tail? It’s doubtful at best. One of the most popular tales told about the first drinks known as cocktails concerns a tavernkeeper by the name of Betsy Flanagan, who in 1779 served French soldiers drinks garnished with feathers she had plucked from a neighbor’s roosters. The soldiers toasted her by shouting, “Vive le cocktail!” William Grimes, however, points out in his book Straight Up or On the Rocks: A Cultural History of American Drink that Flanagan was a fictional character who appeared in The Spy, by James Fenimore Cooper. He also notes that the book “relied on oral testimony of Revolutionary War veterans,” so although it’s possible that the tale has some merit, it’s a very unsatisfactory explanation. A fairly plausible narrative on this subject can be found in Famous New Orleans Drinks & How to Mix ’em, by Stanley Clisby Arthur, first published in 1937. Arthur tells the story of Antoine Amedie Peychaud, a French refugee from San Domingo who settled in New Orleans in 1793. Peychaud was an apothecary who opened his own business, where, among other things, he made his own bitters, Peychaud’s, a concoction still available today. He created a stomach remedy by mixing his bitters with brandy in an eggcup—a vessel known to him in his native tongue as a coquetier. Presumably not all Peychaud’s customers spoke French, and it’s quite possible that the word, pronounced coh-KET-yay, could have been corrupted into cocktail. However, according to the Sazerac Company, the present-day producers of Peychaud’s bitters, the apothecary didn’t open until 1838, so there’s yet another explanation that doesn’t work.

As time goes on, I get more and more convinced that the right method in investment is to put fairly large sums into enterprises which one thinks one knows something about and in the management of which one thoroughly believes.” Forget what the economy is doing; just find well-managed companies, buy some shares, and don’t try to be too clever. And if that approach sounds familiar, it’s most famously associated with Warren Buffett, the world’s richest investor—and a man who loves to quote John Maynard Keynes.

I've seen enough of it at close quarters to know that fame, renown, notoriety - call it what you will - well, it's nothing but a curse that breeds misery. Especially to those of a creative or artistic bent. For many years I have observed that the truly talented are invariably the most sensitive, and the public arena, where artifice is all that really matters, is no place for poets, and furthermore the critics, most of whom don't know their bumholes from their earlobes when it comes to the written word, think everyone - private life and all - is fair game. Yes, the public arena is no place for those of, shall we say, a sensitive disposition. No poet should be famous - only read.

The year you become famous is the year you stop growing as a person. Like, Michael Jackson became famous at five or something, which is why he is permanently five. He wants to play children’s games, hang out with kids, build a bloody fun fair in his backyard, and eat sweeties. Robbie Williams was 16, which is why he is always shagging girls and behaving like a teenager. George [Clooney], on the other hand, was nearly 40, which is why he is such a delightful, well-rounded individual.

Many a time, dear child of God, you would have been an exposed lily, to be plucked by any ruthless hand, if it had not been that God had placed you in such circumstances that you were shut up unto himself. Sick saints and poor saints and persecuted saints are fair lilies enclosed by their pains, and wants, and bonds that they may be for Christ alone. I look on John Bunyan in prison writing his “Pilgrim’s Progress,” and I cannot help feeling that it was a great blessing for us all that such a lily was shut up among the thorns that it might shed its fragrance in that famous book, and thereby perfume the church for ages.

Fair enough. But just so you know, I’ve heard a lot, and there’s not much that shocks me.” “Good, because this one’s a doozy.” He hesitated. “There’s really no elegant way to say this. So I’ll just spit it out.” He paused for what seemed like a minute. “Apparently my client has a thing for peeing on men.” Another pause. “She hires them from some sort of ‘service’ in Manhattan.” “Ah, water sports,” I replied, proud of my knowledge in these matters. “Excuse me?” “Urinating on another person for pleasure is known as water sports. The formal name is urolagnia. It’s not as uncommon as you’d think.” “Well, it’s pretty uncommon in my world,” he said.

When we got down we found all hands looking aloft, and there, directly over where we had been standing, upon the main top-gallant-mast-head, was a ball of light, which the sailors name a corposant (corpus sancti), and which the mate had called out to us to look at. They were all watching it carefully, for sailors have a notion that if the corposant rises in the rigging, it is a sign of fair weather, but if it comes lower down, there will be a storm. Unfortunately, as an omen, it came down, and showed itself on the top-gallant yard-arm. We were off the yard in good season, for it is held a fatal sign to have the pale light of the corposant thrown upon one’s face. As it was, the English lad did not feel comfortably at having had it so near him, and directly over his head. In a few minutes it disappeared, and showed itself again on the fore top-gallant yard; and after playing about for some time, disappeared again, when the man on the forecastle pointed to it upon the flying-jib-boom-end. But our attention was drawn from watching this, by the falling of some drops of rain and by a perceptible increase of the darkness, which seemed suddenly to add a new shade of blackness to the night.

The fame. The show. You’re from a famous family. Even your house has a name instead of a regular street number! Who does that? It’s not fair for the rest of us to have to start with nothing.

as we could tell by the washing of the water over our heads, and the heavy breaking of the seas against her bows, (with a sound as though she were striking against a rock,) only the thickness of the plank from our heads, as we lay in our berths, which are directly against the bows. At eight bells, the watch was called, and we came on deck, one hand going aft to take the wheel, and another going to the galley to get the grub for dinner. I stood on the forecastle, looking at the seas, which were rolling high, as far as the eye could reach, their tops white with foam, and the body of them of a deep indigo blue, reflecting the bright rays of the sun. Our ship rose slowly over a few of the largest of them, until one immense fellow came rolling on, threatening to cover her, and which I was sailor enough to know, by “the feeling of her” under my feet, she would not rise over. I sprang upon the knight-heads, and seizing hold of the fore-stay with my hands, drew myself upon it. My feet were just off the stanchion, when she struck fairly into the middle of the sea, and it washed her fore and aft, burying her in the water. As soon as she rose out of it, I looked aft, and everything forward of the main-mast, except the long-boat, which was griped and double-lashed down to the ring-bolts, was swept off clear. The

as we could tell by the washing of the water over our heads, and the heavy breaking of the seas against her bows, (with a sound as though she were striking against a rock,) only the thickness of the plank from our heads, as we lay in our berths, which are directly against the bows. At eight bells, the watch was called, and we came on deck, one hand going aft to take the wheel, and another going to the galley to get the grub for dinner. I stood on the forecastle, looking at the seas, which were rolling high, as far as the eye could reach, their tops white with foam, and the body of them of a deep indigo blue, reflecting the bright rays of the sun. Our ship rose slowly over a few of the largest of them, until one immense fellow came rolling on, threatening to cover her, and which I was sailor enough to know, by “the feeling of her” under my feet, she would not rise over. I sprang upon the knight-heads, and seizing hold of the fore-stay with my hands, drew myself upon it. My feet were just off the stanchion, when she struck fairly into the middle of the sea, and it washed her fore and aft, burying her in the water. As soon as she rose out of it, I looked aft, and everything forward of the main-mast, except the long-boat, which was griped and double-lashed down to the ring-bolts, was swept off clear. The galley, the pig-sty, the hen-coop, and a large sheep-pen which had been built upon the forehatch, were all gone, in the twinkling of an eye-leaving the deck as clean as a chin new reaped—and not a stick left, to show where they had stood. In the scuppers lay the galley, bottom up, and a few boards floating about, the wreck of the sheep-pen,—and half a dozen miserable sheep floating among them, wet through, and not a little frightened at the sudden change that had come upon them.

THE BEAR A bear, however hard he tries, Grows tubby without exercise. Our Teddy Bear is short and fat, Which is not to be wondered at; He gets what exercise he can By falling off the ottoman, But generally seems to lack The energy to clamber back. Now tubbiness is just the thing Which gets a fellow wondering; And Teddy worried lots about The fact that he was rather stout. He thought: "If only I were thin! But how does anyone begin?" He thought: "It really isn't fair To grudge one exercise and air." For many weeks he pressed in vain His nose against the window-pane, And envied those who walked about Reducing their unwanted stout. None of the people he could see "Is quite" (he said) "as fat as me!" Then, with a still more moving sigh, "I mean" (he said) "as fat as I! Now Teddy, as was only right, Slept in the ottoman at night, And with him crowded in as well More animals than I can tell; Not only these, but books and things, Such as a kind relation brings - Old tales of "Once upon a time," And history retold in rhyme. One night it happened that he took A peep at an old picture-book, Wherein he came across by chance The picture of a King of France (A stoutish man) and, down below, These words: "King Louis So and So, Nicknamed 'The Handsome!'" There he sat, And (think of it!) the man was fat! Our bear rejoiced like anything To read about this famous King, Nicknamed "The Handsome." There he sat, And certainly the man was fat. Nicknamed "The Handsome." Not a doubt The man was definitely stout. Why then, a bear (for all his tub ) Might yet be named "The Handsome Cub!" "Might yet be named." Or did he mean That years ago he "might have been"? For now he felt a slight misgiving: "Is Louis So and So still living? Fashions in beauty have a way Of altering from day to day. Is 'Handsome Louis' with us yet? Unfortunately I forget." Next morning (nose to window-pane) The doubt occurred to him again. One question hammered in his head: "Is he alive or is he dead?" Thus, nose to pane, he pondered; but The lattice window, loosely shut, Swung open. With one startled "Oh!" Our Teddy disappeared below. There happened to be passing by A plump man with a twinkling eye, Who, seeing Teddy in the street, Raised him politely to his feet, And murmured kindly in his ear Soft words of comfort and of cheer: "Well, well!" "Allow me!" "Not at all." "Tut-tut! A very nasty fall." Our Teddy answered not a word; It's doubtful if he even heard. Our bear could only look and look: The stout man in the picture-book! That 'handsome' King - could this be he, This man of adiposity? "Impossible," he thought. "But still, No harm in asking. Yes I will!" "Are you," he said,"by any chance His Majesty the King of France?" The other answered, "I am that," Bowed stiffly, and removed his hat; Then said, "Excuse me," with an air, "But is it Mr Edward Bear?" And Teddy, bending very low, Replied politely, "Even so!" They stood beneath the window there, The King and Mr Edward Bear, And, handsome, if a trifle fat, Talked carelessly of this and that…. Then said His Majesty, "Well, well, I must get on," and rang the bell. "Your bear, I think," he smiled. "Good-day!" And turned, and went upon his way. A bear, however hard he tries, Grows tubby without exercise. Our Teddy Bear is short and fat, Which is not to be wondered at. But do you think it worries him To know that he is far from slim? No, just the other way about - He's proud of being short and stout.

In an interview published in Vanity Fair, President Barack Obama said, “You’ll see I wear only gray or blue suits. I’m trying to pare down decisions. I don’t want to make decisions about what I’m eating or wearing. Because I have too many other decisions to make.”10 The same is true of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg with his gray hoodies, or Apple founder Steve Jobs and his famous black-turtleneck-and-jeans uniform. Acutely aware of how taxing deliberating over options can be, they sought every opportunity to limit choice in their lives.

The elephants in our heads—our reflexive reactions—perceive anything unfamiliar as just plain wrong. Familiar things feel right, right, RIGHT! This is the sensation comedian Stephen Colbert famously dubbed “truthiness.” It’s like being drunk or high: delicious in the short term, ultimately toxic. The righteous mind can temporarily overwhelm our sense of truth, including our allegiance to justice and fairness. When our righteous mind is in control, we lose the way of integrity and become weirdly, obviously self-contradictory, like proponents of world peace who advocate war against anyone who disagrees with them. Because violence and the righteous mind are closely linked, I don’t call destructive actions sins of violence, as Dante does. I think of them as “errors of righteousness.” They are psychological mistakes we make when our irrational rejection of the unfamiliar takes over our thinking.

Among the first to call and congratulate me on my election victory was President Clinton. “Bibi, I’ve got to hand it to you.” He chuckled. “We did everything we could to bring you down, but you beat us fair and square.” Quintessential Bill, I thought. He wasn’t telling me something I didn’t know, but here was the president of the United States admitting without batting an eyelash to a brazen intervention in another country’s elections. Clinton’s frankness was refreshingly politically incorrect. You could see how the famous Clinton charm carried him through a myriad of minefields. I let it go and said I looked forward to working with him.

Bastiat was having none of this. Interest wasn’t theft, he maintained, but a fair reward for a mutual exchange of services. The lender provides the use of capital for a period of time, and time has value. Bastiat cites the famous lines from Benjamin Franklin’s Advice to a Young Tradesman (1748): ‘Time is precious. Time is money – Time is the stuff of which life is made.’8

During his illness he had spent every minute of consciousness calling upon God, every second of every minute. Ya Allah whose servant lies bleeding do not abandon me now after watching over me so long. Ya Allah show me some sign, some small mark of your favour, that I may find in myself the strength to cure my ills. O God most beneficent most merciful, be with me in this my time of need, my most grievous need. Then it occurred to him that he was being punished, and for a time that made it possible to suffer the pain, but after a time he got angry. Enough, God, his unspoken words demanded, why must I die when I have not killed, are you vengeance or are you love? The anger with God carried him through another day, but then it faded, and in its place there came a terrible emptiness, an isolation, as he realized he was talking to thin air, that there was nobody there at all, and then he felt more foolish than ever in his life, and he began to plead into the emptiness, ya Allah, just be there, damn it, just be. But he felt nothing, nothing nothing, and then one day he found that he no longer needed there to be anything to feel. On that day of metamorphosis the illness changed and his recovery began. And to prove to himself the non-existence of God, he now stood in the dining-hall of the city’s most famous hotel, with pigs falling out of his face. He looked up from his plate to find a woman watching him. Her hair was so fair that it was almost white, and her skin possessed the colour and translucency of mountain ice. She laughed at him and turned away. ‘Don’t you get it?’ he shouted after her, spewing sausage fragments from the corners of his mouth. ‘No thunderbolt. That’s the point.’ She came back to stand in front of him. ‘You’re alive,’ she told him. ‘You got your life back. That’s the point.

Mysore, one of the greatest princely states, was famously progressive and more industrialised than any other part of India. In Baroda, the British did its people a favour by deposing a Maharajah who spent his time commissioning carpets of pearls, and installing in his place a young prince who would earn the love and respect of his subjects by far-sighted policy. In the 1940s, the ruler of Jaipur imported a minister from Mysore and sought to replicate its successes in his desert principality, starting schools, abolishing purdah, and so on. And, of course, in the south there was Travancore, guided by a line of fairly enlightened rulers into the higher echelons of progressive governance, winning appreciation from all quarters.

Her assistant was a young woman named Chamique Johnson. Muse had met Chamique during a somewhat famous rape trial. After a rough start in the office, Chamique had made herself fairly indispensable. “Right