Famous Selling Quotes

ART Art is that thing having to do only with itself—the product of a successful attempt to make a work of art. Unfortunately, there are no expamples of art, nor good reasons to think that it will ever exist. (Everything that has been made has been made with a purpose, teverything with an end exists outside of that thing, i.e., "I want to sell this", or "I want this to make me famous and loved", or "I want this to make me whole", or worse, "I want this to make others whole.") And yet we continue to write, paint, sculpt and compose. Is this foolish of us?

The conventional explanation for Jewish success, of course, is that Jews come from a literate, intellectual culture. They are famously "the people of the book." There is surely something to that. But it wasn't just the children of rabbis who went to law school. It was the children of garment workers. And their critical advantage in climbing the professional ladder wasn't the intellectual rigor you get from studying the Talmud. It was the practical intelligence and savvy you get from watching your father sell aprons on Hester Street.

The growth of intimacy is like that. First one gives off his best picture, the bight and finished product mended with bluff and falsehood and humor. Then more details are required and one paints a second portrait, and a third--before long the best lines cancel out--and the secret is exposed at last; the panes of the pictures have intermingled and given us away, and though we paint and paint we can no longer sell a picture. We must be satisfied with hoping that such famous accounts of ourselves as we make to our wives and children and business associates are accepted as true.

As the famous investor Warren Buffet once said: “Never depend on single income.

One of the dictums that defines our culture is that we can be anything we want to be – to win the neoliberal game we just have to dream, to put our minds to it, to want it badly enough. This message leaks out to us from seemingly everywhere in our environment: at the cinema, in heart-warming and inspiring stories we read in the news and social media, in advertising, in self-help books, in the classroom, on television. We internalize it, incorporating it into our sense of self. But it’s not true. It is, in fact, the dark lie at the heart of the age of perfectionism. It’s the cause, I believe, of an incalculable quotient of misery. Here’s the truth that no million-selling self-help book, famous motivational speaker, happiness guru or blockbusting Hollywood screenwriter seems to want you to know. You’re limited. Imperfect. And there’s nothing you can do about it.

I tell you, life is extraordinary. A few years ago I couldn’t write anything or sell anything, I’d passed the age where you know all the returns are in, I’d had my chance and done my best and failed. And how was I to know the miracle waiting to happen round the corner in late middle age? 84, Charing Cross Road was no best seller, you understand; it didn’t make me rich or famous. It just got me hundreds of letters and phone calls from people I never knew existed; it got me wonderful reviews; it restored a self-confidence and self-esteem I’d lost somewhere along the way, God knows how many years ago. It brought me to England. It changed my life.

You start admiring someone who's famous for actually doing something---imagine that---and I swear to you I will buy you every item in her entire wardrobe. But over my own dead body will I spend my own time and money turning you into a clone of some brain-dead waste of skin who thinks the pinnacle of achievement is selling her wedding shots to a magazine.

Well, as Hannah Arendt famously said, there can be a banal aspect to evil. In other words, it doesn't present always. I mean, often what you're meeting is a very mediocre person. But nonetheless, you can get a sort of frisson of wickedness from them. And the best combination of those, I think, I describe him in the book, is/was General Jorge Rafael Videla of Argentina, who I met in the late 1970s when the death squad war was at its height, and his fellow citizens were disappearing off the street all the time. And he was, in some ways, extremely banal. I describe him as looking like a human toothbrush. He was a sort of starch, lean officer with a silly mustache, and a very stupid look to him, but a very fanatical glint as well. And, if I'd tell you why he's now under house arrest in Argentina, you might get a sense of the horror I felt as I was asking him questions about all this. He's in prison in Argentina for selling the children of the rape victims among the private prisoners, who he kept in a personal jail. And I don't know if I've ever met anyone who's done anything as sort of condensedly horrible as that.

Maybe it goes without saying that if you want to become a famous writer before you’re dead, you’ll have to write something. But the folks in my classes with the biggest ideas and the best publicity shots ready to grace the back covers of their best-selling novels are also usually the ones who aren’t holding any paper.

I don't give a damn about geography, but I'll note that Vance has transcended one of the most authentically Appalachian experiences of them all: watching someone with tired ideas about race and culture get famous by selling cheap stereotypes abou the region.

I tell you, life is extraordinary. A few years ago, I couldn't write anything or sell anything, I'd passed the age where you know all the returns are in, I'd had my chance and done my best and failed. And how was I to know the miracle waiting to happen around the corner in middle age? 84, Charing Cross Road was no best-seller, you understand; it didn't make me rich or famous. It just got me hundreds of letters and phone calls from people I never knew existed; it got me wonderful reviews; it restored a self-confidence and self-esteem I'd lost somewhere along the way, God knows how many years ago. It brought me to England. It changed my life.

Anning would spend the next thirty-five years gathering fossils, which she sold to visitors. (She is commonly held to be the source for the famous tongue twister “She sells seashells on the seashore.”)

The classic hustle is still famous, even today, for the cold purity of its execution: bring opium from India, introduce it into China00howdy Fong, this here’s opium, opium, this is Fong—ah, so, me eatee!—no-ho-ho, Fong, you smokee, smokee, see? pretty soon Fong’s coming back for more and more, so you create an inelastic demand for that shit, get China to make it illegal, then sucker China into a couple-three disastrous wars over the right of your merchants to sell opium, which by now you are describing as sacred. You win, China loses. Fantastic.

Let’s face it. There are good people and bad people everywhere. Illiteracy, poor education, wars, greed , corruption and similar factors were responsible for the problems in both India and Pakistan. Religious fanatics benefited from these factors and developed formidable socio-political strongholds in both countries.

I am one of the most famous reformed junkies on the planet,” she told Joss’s nemesis, Page Six. “What is it about me that says to Joss Sackler, ‘I will sell out to you?

Surround yourself with people who want the best for you because they want the best for themselves.

But I know I can’t be a surgeon, or a CEO, or a world-famous painter with exhibits around the globe, or anything that interferes with my duties as a wife and mother.

B'gwus is famous because of his wide range of homes. In some places, he's called Bigfoot. In other places, he's Yeti, or the Abominable Snowman, or Sasquatch. To most people, he is the equivalent of the Loch Ness monster, something silly to bring the tourist in. His image is even used to sell beer, and he is portrayed as a laid-back kind of guy, lounging on mountaintops in patio chairs, cracking open a frosty one.

My sales trainer friend, the famous (late) Cavett Robert, said to sell life insurance or cemetery plots, you have to make your customer see the hearse backed up to the door. That may sound a little grisly, but it's true.

People who are seeking to get famous need to ask themselves one question. Do I have depth of character? It doesn't matter whether you are just a girl, trying to sell your body to the masses, or a genius undiscovered writer.

What was once an anonymous medium where anyone could be anyone—where, in the words of the famous New Yorker cartoon, nobody knows you’re a dog—is now a tool for soliciting and analyzing our personal data. According to one Wall Street Journal study, the top fifty Internet sites, from CNN to Yahoo to MSN, install an average of 64 data-laden cookies and personal tracking beacons each. Search for a word like “depression” on Dictionary.com, and the site installs up to 223 tracking cookies and beacons on your computer so that other Web sites can target you with antidepressants. Share an article about cooking on ABC News, and you may be chased around the Web by ads for Teflon-coated pots. Open—even for an instant—a page listing signs that your spouse may be cheating and prepare to be haunted with DNA paternity-test ads. The new Internet doesn’t just know you’re a dog; it knows your breed and wants to sell you a bowl of premium kibble.

I find the thought of my children telling their friends their father is an accomplished author appealing. I used to think that I needed to be famous and write a bestseller to be considered accomplished and I very well may think that again at some later point, but for now in this moment, I sit with a smile on my face, holding tears of joy back, knowing that I am already an accomplished individual and that if I never create a best-selling book, I can still die a happy man.

My anthology continues to sell & the critics get more & more angry. When I excluded Wilfred Owen, whom I consider unworthy of the poets' corner of a country newspaper, I did not know I was excluding a revered sandwich-board Man of the revolution & that some body has put his worst & most famous poem in a glass-case in the British Museum-- however if I had known it I would have excluded him just the same. He is all blood, dirt & sucked sugar stick (look at the selection in Faber's Anthology-- he calls poets 'bards,' a girl a 'maid,' & talks about 'Titanic wars'). There is every excuse for him but none for those who like him. . . .(from a letter of December 26, 1936, in Letters on Poetry from W. B. Yeats to Dorothy Wellesley, p. 124).

In his early twenties, a man started collecting paintings, many of which later became famous: Picasso, Van Gogh, and others. Over the decades he amassed a wonderful collection. Eventually, the man’s beloved son was drafted into the military and sent to Vietnam, where he died while trying to save his friend. About a month after the war ended, a young man knocked on the devastated father’s door. “Sir,” he said, “I know that you like great art, and I have brought you something not very great.” Inside the package, the father found a portrait of his son. With tears running down his cheeks, the father said, “I want to pay you for this.ℍ “No,” the young man replied, “he saved my life. You don’t owe me anything.ℍ The father cherished the painting and put it in the center of his collection. Whenever people came to visit, he made them look at it. When the man died, his art collection went up for sale. A large crowd of enthusiastic collectors gathered. First up for sale was the amateur portrait. A wave of displeasure rippled through the crowd. “Let’s forget about that painting!” one said. “We want to bid on the valuable ones,” said another. Despite many loud complaints, the auctioneer insisted on starting with the portrait. Finally, the deceased man’s gardener said, “I’ll bid ten dollars.ℍ Hearing no further bids, the auctioneer called out, “Sold for ten dollars!” Everyone breathed a sigh of relief. But then the auctioneer said, “And that concludes the auction.” Furious gasps shook the room. The auctioneer explained, “Let me read the stipulation in the will: “Sell the portrait of my son first, and whoever buys it gets the entire art collection. Whoever takes my son gets everything.ℍ It’s the same way with God Almighty. Whoever takes his Son gets everything.

papyruses began to appear on the black market. The Egyptian government tried to prevent the manuscripts from leaving the country. After the 1952 revolution, most of the material was handed over to the Coptic Museum in Cairo and declared part of the national heritage. Only one text eluded them, and this had turned up in an antiquarian shop in Belgium. After vain attempts to sell it in New York and Paris, it was finally acquired by the Carl Jung Institute in 1951. On the death of the famous psychoanalyst, the papyrus, now known as Jung Codex, returned to Cairo, where the

The cult that told me that I’m not enough, that I need to be famous to be of value, that I need to have money to live a worthwhile life, that I should affiliate, associate and identify on the basis of colour and class, that my role in life is to consume, that I was to live in a darkness only occasionally lit up by billboards and screens, always framing the smiling face of someone trying to sell me something. Sell me phones and food and prejudice, low cost and low values, low-frequency thinking. We are in a cult by default. We just can’t see it because its boundaries lie beyond our horizons.

It was the start of a remarkable career. Anning would spend the next thirty-five years gathering fossils, which she sold to visitors. (She is commonly held to be the source for the famous tongue twister “She sells seashells on the seashore.”) She would also find the first plesiosaurus, another marine monster, and one of the first and best pterodactyls.

To be honest I wrote it mainly from the reason and wanting something more than a life something which could explore my life at deeper level. Probably I have done it... probably I haven't done it... what I know is that I won't be for this Century like somebody famous... I will be still average, I can't go on the amazon and starting selling my works... I don't feel comfortable being in that state.

The “German problem” after 1970 became how to keep up with the Germans in terms of efficiency and productivity. One way, as above, was to serially devalue, but that was beginning to hurt. The other way was to tie your currency to the deutsche mark and thereby make your price and inflation rate the same as the Germans, which it turned out would also hurt, but in a different way. The problem with keeping up with the Germans is that German industrial exports have the lowest price elasticities in the world. In plain English, Germany makes really great stuff that everyone wants and will pay more for in comparison to all the alternatives. So when you tie your currency to the deutsche mark, you are making a one-way bet that your industry can be as competitive as the Germans in terms of quality and price. That would be difficult enough if the deutsche mark hadn’t been undervalued for most of the postwar period and both German labor costs and inflation rates were lower than average, but unfortunately for everyone else, they were. That gave the German economy the advantage in producing less-than-great stuff too, thereby undercutting competitors in products lower down, as well as higher up the value-added chain. Add to this contemporary German wages, which have seen real declines over the 2000s, and you have an economy that is extremely hard to keep up with. On the other side of this one-way bet were the financial markets. They looked at less dynamic economies, such as the United Kingdom and Italy, that were tying themselves to the deutsche mark and saw a way to make money. The only way to maintain a currency peg is to either defend it with foreign exchange reserves or deflate your wages and prices to accommodate it. To defend a peg you need lots of foreign currency so that when your currency loses value (as it will if you are trying to keep up with the Germans), you can sell your foreign currency reserves and buy back your own currency to maintain the desired rate. But if the markets can figure out how much foreign currency you have in reserve, they can bet against you, force a devaluation of your currency, and pocket the difference between the peg and the new market value in a short sale. George Soros (and a lot of other hedge funds) famously did this to the European Exchange Rate Mechanism in 1992, blowing the United Kingdom and Italy out of the system. Soros could do this because he knew that there was no way the United Kingdom or Italy could be as competitive as Germany without serious price deflation to increase cost competitiveness, and that there would be only so much deflation and unemployment these countries could take before they either ran out of foreign exchange reserves or lost the next election. Indeed, the European Exchange Rate Mechanism was sometimes referred to as the European “Eternal Recession Mechanism,” such was its deflationary impact. In short, attempts to maintain an anti-inflationary currency peg fail because they are not credible on the following point: you cannot run a gold standard (where the only way to adjust is through internal deflation) in a democracy.

Misogyny now has become so normalized,” says Paul Roberts, the Impulse Society author. “We can’t even see the absurdity and the inequity of it, it’s so pervasive. When the male gaze was digitized, it was almost as if it was internalized. With smartphones and social media, girls had the means of producing the male gaze themselves, and it was as if they turned it on themselves willingly in order to compete in a marketplace in which sex was the main selling point. And the social media companies aren't going to do anything about it, as long as it's driving traffic.

Girls, I was dead and down in the Underworld, a shade, a shadow of my former self, nowhen. It was a place where language stopped, a black full stop, a black hole Where the words had to come to an end. And end they did there, last words, famous or not. It suited me down to the ground. So imagine me there, unavailable, out of this world, then picture my face in that place of Eternal Repose, in the one place you’d think a girl would be safe from the kind of a man who follows her round writing poems, hovers about while she reads them, calls her His Muse, and once sulked for a night and a day because she remarked on his weakness for abstract nouns. Just picture my face when I heard - Ye Gods - a familiar knock-knock at Death’s door. Him. Big O. Larger than life. With his lyre and a poem to pitch, with me as the prize. Things were different back then. For the men, verse-wise, Big O was the boy. Legendary. The blurb on the back of his books claimed that animals, aardvark to zebra, flocked to his side when he sang, fish leapt in their shoals at the sound of his voice, even the mute, sullen stones at his feet wept wee, silver tears. Bollocks. (I’d done all the typing myself, I should know.) And given my time all over again, rest assured that I’d rather speak for myself than be Dearest, Beloved, Dark Lady, White Goddess etc., etc. In fact girls, I’d rather be dead. But the Gods are like publishers, usually male, and what you doubtless know of my tale is the deal. Orpheus strutted his stuff. The bloodless ghosts were in tears. Sisyphus sat on his rock for the first time in years. Tantalus was permitted a couple of beers. The woman in question could scarcely believe her ears. Like it or not, I must follow him back to our life - Eurydice, Orpheus’ wife - to be trapped in his images, metaphors, similes, octaves and sextets, quatrains and couplets, elegies, limericks, villanelles, histories, myths… He’d been told that he mustn’t look back or turn round, but walk steadily upwards, myself right behind him, out of the Underworld into the upper air that for me was the past. He’d been warned that one look would lose me for ever and ever. So we walked, we walked. Nobody talked. Girls, forget what you’ve read. It happened like this - I did everything in my power to make him look back. What did I have to do, I said, to make him see we were through? I was dead. Deceased. I was Resting in Peace. Passé. Late. Past my sell-by date… I stretched out my hand to touch him once on the back of the neck. Please let me stay. But already the light had saddened from purple to grey. It was an uphill schlep from death to life and with every step I willed him to turn. I was thinking of filching the poem out of his cloak, when inspiration finally struck. I stopped, thrilled. He was a yard in front. My voice shook when I spoke - Orpheus, your poem’s a masterpiece. I’d love to hear it again… He was smiling modestly, when he turned, when he turned and he looked at me. What else? I noticed he hadn’t shaved. I waved once and was gone. The dead are so talented. The living walk by the edge of a vast lake near, the wise, drowned silence of the dead.

If you want waiters in tuxedos with white linen cloths over their arms, menus with unpronounceable words all over them, and high-priced wines served in silver ice buckets when you go out for Italian food, our little restaurant is not the place to come. But if you mostly want good, solid, home-cooked pasta with tasty sauces made with real vegetables and spices by a real Italian Mama and will trade white linen for red-and-white checked plastic tablecloths, you'll like our place just fine. If you're okay with a choice of just two wines, red or white, we'll give you as much of it as you want, from our famous bottomless wine bottle — free with your dinner. This restaurant owner took competitive disadvantages and turned them into a good, solid, “fun” selling story.

The market is fond of making mountains out of molehills and exaggerating ordinary vicissitudes into major setbacks.* Even a mere lack of interest or enthusiasm may impel a price decline to absurdly low levels. Thus we have what appear to be two major sources of undervaluation: (1) currently disappointing results and (2) protracted neglect or unpopularity. However, neither of these causes, if considered by itself alone, can be relied on as a guide to successful common-stock investment. How can we be sure that the currently disappointing results are indeed going to be only temporary? True, we can supply excellent examples of that happening. The steel stocks used to be famous for their cyclical quality, and the shrewd buyer could acquire them at low prices when earnings were low and sell them out in boom years at a fine profit.

By first light, immigrants haul crates of melons and buckets of ice over the narrow cobblestone streets. Old men sell salted capers and branches of wild oregano while the young ones build their fish stands, one silvery torqued body at a time, like an edible art installation. It's a startling scene: gruff young palermitani, foul-mouthed and wreathed in cigarette smoke, lovingly laying out each fish at just the right angle, burrowing its belly into the ice as if to mimic its swimming position in the ocean. Sicilian sun and soil and ingenuity have long produced some of Italy's most prized raw ingredients, and the colors of the market serve as a map of the island's agricultural prowess: the forest green pistachios of Bronte; the Crayola-bright lemons and oranges of Paternò; the famous pomodorini of Pachino, fiery orbs of magical tomato intensity.

Someone’s gotta determine whether you guys are destined for superstardom,” I said, my mind catching up somewhat. A light bulb popped over my head. “Hey, I could be your momager! Get you gigs, do your wardrobe. Ride your coattails all the way to the Grammys.” I was mentally calculating my cut. “Mom, we’re a high school band who haven’t even properly rehearsed yet. Don’t write the acceptance speech just yet,” she chided. “Mmhmm,” I said distractedly, thinking of the Porsche I’d buy with my income. Brad the front desk receptionist wandered past. “Brad!” I called, stopping him. “Lexie’s band is going to be world famous. Want her autograph now so you can sell it on eBay in five years and retire a rich man?” I asked him. He grinned. “You bet. I’ll also be doing a TMZ interview telling all about how I knew her before she was gobbled up by the fame monster,” he responded without missing a beat. I gave him a thumbs up and turned to Lexie, grinning. She had her head in her hands.

Which meant, if somehow GameStop did start to go up, the people who had shorted the company would begin to feel pressure to buy; the more the stock went up, the heavier that pressure became. As the shorts began to cover, buying shares to return them to their lenders, the stock would rise even higher. In financial parlance, this was something called a 'short squeeze.' It didn't happen often, but when it did, it could be spectacular. Most famously, in 2008, a surprise takeover attempt of the German automaker Volkswagen by rival Porsche drove Volkswagen's stock price up by a factor of 5 — briefly making it the most valuable company in the world — in two quick days of trading, as short selling funds struggled to cover their positions. Similarly, a battle between two hedge fund titans — Bill Ackman, of Pershing Square Capital Management, and Carl Icahn — led to a squeeze involving supplement maker — and alleged pyramid marketer — Herbalife, which cost Ackman a reported $1 billion. And perhaps the first widely reported short squeeze dated back a century, to 1923, when grocery magnate Clarence Saunders successfully decimated short sellers who had targeted his nascent chain of Piggly Wiggly grocery stores.

Most fish—like skate wing—naturally taper off and narrow at the outer edges and toward the tail. Which is fine for moving through the water. Not so good for even cooking. A chef or cook looks at that graceful decline and sees a piece of protein that will cook unevenly: will, when the center—or fattest part—is perfect, be overcooked at the edges. They see a piece of fish that does not look like you could charge $39 for it. Customers should understand that what they are paying for, in any restaurant situation, is not just what’s on the plate—but everything that’s not on the plate: all the bone, skin, fat, and waste product which the chef did pay for, by the pound. When Eric Ripert, for instance, pays $15 or $20 a pound for a piece of fish, you can be sure, the guy who sells it to him does not care that 70 percent of that fish is going in the garbage. It’s still the same price. Same principle applies to meat, poultry—or any other protein. The price of the protein on the market may be $10 per pound, but by the time you’re putting the cleaned, prepped piece of meat or fish on the plate, it can actually cost you $35 a pound. And that’s before paying the guy who cuts it for you. That disparity in purchase price and actual price becomes even more extreme at the top end of the dining spectrum. The famous French mantra of “Use Everything,” by which most chefs live, is not the operative phrase of a three-starred Michelin restaurant. Here, it’s “Use Only the Very Best.

We have a system we follow every time we get asked to create a product logo. Clients like the work we produce and we’re able to charge a good dollar because clients know a product logo is something they will use for a long time. Once we create one product logo, we have our foot in the door and clients often come back as they launch new products.” Ted considered Alex’s conclusion. “Tell me about the system you follow for creating logos.” “It’s nothing too formal, but we always start off by asking the client to describe their vision for their product and how they differentiate themselves from their competitors.” Ted began to make notes. “That sounds like a good first step. Let’s call it Visioning.” Step 1: Visioning “What’s the next step?” asked Ted. “After we establish the client’s goals, we go through an exercise where we ask the client to personify their product. For example, we’ll ask questions like, ‘If your product was a famous actor, who would it be?’ and ‘If your product was a rock star, who would it be?’ One of our favorite questions is a little goofy: ‘If your product was a cookie, what kind of cookie would it be?’ These questions force the client to think about the personality they want to come through in their logo.” “That sounds unique, Alex. Let’s call that step two and give it a name like Personification.” Step 2: Personification “What’s your next step in designing a logo?” “We then go back to the office and use a pencil and paper to freehand sketch

While these tactics were aggressive and crude, they confirmed that our legislation had touched a nerve. I wasn’t the only one who recognized this. Many other victims of human rights abuses in Russia saw the same thing. After the bill was introduced they came to Washington or wrote letters to the Magnitsky Act’s cosponsors with the same basic message: “You have found the Achilles’ heel of the Putin regime.” Then, one by one, they would ask, “Can you add the people who killed my brother to the Magnitsky Act?” “Can you add the people who tortured my mother?” “How about the people who kidnapped my husband?” And on and on. The senators quickly realized that they’d stumbled onto something much bigger than one horrific case. They had inadvertently discovered a new method for fighting human rights abuses in authoritarian regimes in the twenty-first century: targeted visa sanctions and asset freezes. After a dozen or so of these visits and letters, Senator Cardin and his cosponsors conferred and decided to expand the law, adding sixty-five words to the Magnitsky Act. Those new words said that in addition to sanctioning Sergei’s tormentors, the Magnitsky Act would sanction all other gross human rights abusers in Russia. With those extra sixty-five words, my personal fight for justice had become everyone’s fight. The revised bill was officially introduced on May 19, 2011, less than a month after we posted the Olga Stepanova YouTube video. Following its introduction, a small army of Russian activists descended on Capitol Hill, pushing for the bill’s passage. They pressed every senator who would talk to them to sign on. There was Garry Kasparov, the famous chess grand master and human rights activist; there was Alexei Navalny, the most popular Russian opposition leader; and there was Evgenia Chirikova, a well-known Russian environmental activist. I didn’t have to recruit any of these people. They just showed up by themselves. This uncoordinated initiative worked beautifully. The number of Senate cosponsors grew quickly, with three or four new senators signing on every month. It was an easy sell. There wasn’t a pro-Russian-torture-and-murder lobby in Washington to oppose it. No senator, whether the most liberal Democrat or the most conservative Republican, would lose a single vote for banning Russian torturers and murderers from coming to America. The Magnitsky Act was gathering so much momentum that it appeared it might be unstoppable. From the day that Kyle Scott at the State Department stonewalled me, I knew that the administration was dead set against this, but now they were in a tough spot. If they openly opposed the law, it would look as if they were siding with the Russians. However, if they publicly supported it, it would threaten Obama’s “reset” with Russia. They needed to come up with some other solution. On July 20, 2011, the State Department showed its cards. They sent a memo to the Senate entitled “Administration Comments on S.1039 Sergei Magnitsky Rule of Law.” Though not meant to be made public, within a day it was leaked.

And so, when I tell stories today about digital transformation and organizational agility and customer centricity, I use a vocabulary that is very consistent and very refined. It is one of the tools I have available to tell my story effectively. I talk about assumptions. I talk about hypotheses. I talk about outcomes as a measure of customer success. I talk about outcomes as a measurable change in customer behavior. I talk about outcomes over outputs, experimentation, continuous learning, and ship, sense, and respond. The more you tell your story, the more you can refine your language into your trademark or brand—what you’re most known for. For example, baseball great Yogi Berra was famous for his Yogi-isms—sayings like “You can observe a lot by watching” and “When you come to a fork in the road, take it.” It’s not just a hook or catchphrase, it helps tell the story as well. For Lean Startup, a best-selling book on corporate innovation written by Eric Ries, the words were “build,” “measure,” “learn.” Jeff Patton, a colleague of mine, uses the phrase “the differences that make a difference.” And he talks about bets as a way of testing confidence levels. He’ll ask, “What will you bet me that your idea is good? Will you bet me lunch? A day’s pay? Your 401(k)?” These words are not only their vocabulary. They are their brand. That’s one of the benefits of storytelling and telling those stories continuously. As you refine your language, the people who are beginning to pay attention to you start adopting that language, and then that becomes your thing.

Thich Nhat Hanh shares this Mahayana philosophy of non-dualism. This is clearly demonstrated in one of his most famous poems, “Call Me By My True Names:”1 Don’t say that I will depart tomorrow– even today I am still arriving. Look deeply: every second I am arriving to be a bud on a spring branch, to be a tiny bird, with still fragile wings, learning to sing in my new nest, to be a caterpillar in the heart of flower, to be a jewel hiding itself in a stone. I am still arriving, in order to laugh and to cry, in order to fear and to hope, the rhythm of my heart is the birth and death of every living creature. I am the mayfly metamorphosing on the surface of the river. And I am the bird, that swoops down to swallow the mayfly. I am the frog swimming happily in the clear water of a pond, and I am the grass-snake that silently feeds itself on the frog. I am the child in Uganda, all skin and bones, my legs as thin as bamboo sticks. And I am the arms merchant, selling deadly weapons to Uganda. I am the twelve-year-old girl, refugee on a small boat, who throws herself into the ocean after being raped by a sea pirate. And I am the pirate, my heart not yet capable of seeing and loving. I am a member of the politburo, with plenty of power in my hands, and I am the man who has to pay his “debt of blood” to my people, dying slowly in a forced-labor camp. My joy is like spring, so warm that it makes flowers bloom all over the Earth. My pain is like a river of tears, so vast that it fills up all four oceans. Please call me by my true names, so I can hear all my cries and laughter at once, so I can see that my joy and pain are one. Please call me by my true names, so I can wake up and open the door of my heart, the door of compassion. (Nhat Hanh, [1993] 1999, pp. 72–3) We

Everything and Nothing* There was no one inside him; behind his face (which even in the bad paintings of the time resembles no other) and his words (which were multitudinous, and of a fantastical and agitated turn) there was no more than a slight chill, a dream someone had failed to dream. At first he thought that everyone was like him, but the surprise and bewilderment of an acquaintance to whom he began to describe that hollowness showed him his error, and also let him know, forever after, that an individual ought not to differ from its species. He thought at one point that books might hold some remedy for his condition, and so he learned the "little Latin and less Greek" that a contemporary would later mention. Then he reflected that what he was looking for might be found in the performance of an elemental ritual of humanity, and so he allowed himself to be initiated by Anne Hathaway one long evening in June. At twenty-something he went off to London. Instinctively, he had already trained himself to the habit of feigning that he was somebody, so that his "nobodiness" might not be discovered. In London he found the calling he had been predestined to; he became an actor, that person who stands upon a stage and plays at being another person, for an audience of people who play at taking him for that person. The work of a thespian held out a remarkable happiness to him—the first, perhaps, he had ever known; but when the last line was delivered and the last dead man applauded off the stage, the hated taste of unreality would assail him. He would cease being Ferrex or Tamerlane and return to being nobody. Haunted, hounded, he began imagining other heroes, other tragic fables. Thus while his body, in whorehouses and taverns around London, lived its life as body, the soul that lived inside it would be Cassar, who ignores the admonition of the sibyl, and Juliet, who hates the lark, and Macbeth, who speaks on the moor with the witches who are also the Fates, the Three Weird Sisters. No one was as many men as that man—that man whose repertoire, like that of the Egyptian Proteus, was all the appearances of being. From time to time he would leave a confession in one corner or another of the work, certain that it would not be deciphered; Richard says that inside himself, he plays the part of many, and Iago says, with curious words, I am not what I am. The fundamental identity of living, dreaming, and performing inspired him to famous passages. For twenty years he inhabited that guided and directed hallucination, but one morning he was overwhelmed with the surfeit and horror of being so many kings that die by the sword and so many unrequited lovers who come together, separate, and melodiously expire. That very day, he decided to sell his theater. Within a week he had returned to his birthplace, where he recovered the trees and the river of his childhood and did not associate them with those others, fabled with mythological allusion and Latin words, that his muse had celebrated. He had to be somebody; he became a retired businessman who'd made a fortune and had an interest in loans, lawsuits, and petty usury. It was in that role that he dictated the arid last will and testament that we know today, from which he deliberately banished every trace of sentiment or literature. Friends from London would visit his re-treat, and he would once again play the role of poet for them. History adds that before or after he died, he discovered himself standing before God, and said to Him: I , who have been so many men in vain, wish to be one, to be myself. God's voice answered him out of a whirlwind: I, too, am not I; I dreamed the world as you, Shakespeare, dreamed your own work, and among the forms of my dream are you, who like me, are many, yet no one.

As those people are extreamly apt to get drunk, and, when so, are very quarrelsome and disorderly, we strictly forbad the selling any liquor to them; and when they complain'd of this restriction, we told them that if they would continue sober during the treaty, we would give them plenty of rum when business was over. They promis'd this, and they kept their promise, because they could get no liquor, and the treaty was conducted very orderly, and concluded to mutual satisfaction. They then claim'd and receiv'd the rum; this was in the afternoon; they were near one hundred men, women, and children, and were lodg'd in temporary cabins, built in the form of a square, just without the town. In the evening, hearing a great noise among them, the commissioners walk'd out to see what was the matter. We found they had made a great bonfire in the middle of the square; they were all drunk, men and women, quarreling and fighting. Their dark-colour'd bodies, half naked, seen only by the gloomy light of the bonfire, running after and beating one another with firebrands, accompanied by their horrid yellings, form'd a scene the most resembling our ideas of hell that could well be imagin'd; there was no appeasing the tumult, and we retired to our lodging. At midnight a number of them came thundering at our door, demanding more rum, of which we took no notice. The next day, sensible they had misbehav'd in giving us that disturbance, they sent three of their old counselors to make their apology. The orator acknowledg'd the fault, but laid it upon the rum; and then endeavored to excuse the rum by saying, "The Great Spirit, who made all things, made every thing for some use, and whatever use he design'd any thing for, that use it should always be put to. Now, when he made rum, he said 'Let this be for the Indians to get drunk with,' and it must be so." And, indeed, if it be the design of Providence to extirpate these savages in order to make room for cultivators of the earth, it seems not improbable that rum may be the appointed means. It has already annihilated all the tribes who formerly inhabited the sea-coast.

Every day, the markets were driven less directly by human beings and more directly by machines. The machines were overseen by people, of course, but few of them knew how the machines worked. He knew that RBC’s machines—not the computers themselves, but the instructions to run them—were third-rate, but he had assumed it was because the company’s new electronic trading unit was bumbling and inept. As he interviewed people from the major banks on Wall Street, he came to realize that they had more in common with RBC than he had supposed. “I’d always been a trader,” he said. “And as a trader you’re kind of inside a bubble. You’re just watching your screens all day. Now I stepped back and for the first time started to watch other traders.” He had a good friend who traded stocks at a big-time hedge fund in Stamford, Connecticut, called SAC Capital. SAC Capital was famous (and soon to be infamous) for being one step ahead of the U.S. stock market. If anyone was going to know something about the market that Brad didn’t know, he figured, it would be them. One spring morning he took the train up to Stamford and spent the day watching his friend trade. Right away he saw that, even though his friend was using technology given to him by Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley and the other big firms, he was experiencing exactly the same problem as RBC: The market on his screens was no longer the market. His friend would hit a button to buy or sell a stock and the market would move away from him. “When I see this guy trading and he was getting screwed—I now see that it isn’t just me. My frustration is the market’s frustration. And I was like, Whoa, this is serious.” Brad’s problem wasn’t just Brad’s problem. What people saw when they looked at the U.S. stock market—the numbers on the screens of the professional traders, the ticker tape running across the bottom of the CNBC screen—was an illusion. “That’s when I realized the markets are rigged. And I knew it had to do with the technology. That the answer lay beneath the surface of the technology. I had absolutely no idea where. But that’s when the lightbulb went off that the only way I’m going to find out what’s going on is if I go beneath the surface.

I consider myself a student of colours and shades and hues and tints. Crimson lake, burnt umber, ultramarine … I was too clumsy as a child to paint with my moistened brush the scenery that I would have liked to bring into being. I preferred to leave untouched in their white metallic surroundings my rows of powdery rectangles of water-colours, to read aloud one after another of the tiny printed names of the coloured rectangles, and to let each colour seem to soak into each word of its name or even into each syllable of each word of each name so that I could afterwards call to mind an exact shade or hue from an image of no more than black letters on a white ground. Deep cadmium, geranium lake, imperial purple, parchment … after the last of our children had found employment and had moved out of our home, my wife and I were able to buy for ourselves things that had previously been beyond our means. I bought my first such luxury, as I called it, in a shop selling artists’ supplies. I bought there a complete set of coloured pencils made by a famous maker of pencils in England: a hundred and twenty pencils, each stamped with gold lettering along its side and having at its end a perfectly tapered wick. The collection of pencils is behind me as I write these words. It rests near the jars of glass marbles and the kaleidoscope mentioned earlier. None of the pencils has ever been used in the way that most pencils are used, but I have sometimes used the many-striped collection in order to confirm my suspicion as a child that each of what I called my long-lost moods might be recollected and, perhaps, preserved if only I could look again at the precise shade or hue that had become connected with the mood – that had absorbed, as it were, or had been permeated with, one or more of the indefinable qualities that constitute what is called a mood or a state of feeling. During the weeks since I first wrote in the earlier pages of this report about the windows in the church of white stone, I have spent every day an increasing amount of time in moving my pencils to and fro among the hollow spaces allotted to them in their container. I seem to recall that I tried sometimes, many years ago, to move my glass marbles from place to place on the carpet near my desk with the vague hope that some or another chance arrangement of them would restore to me some previously irretrievable mood. The marbles, however, were too variously coloured, and each differed too markedly from the other. Their colours seemed to vie, to compete. Or, a single marble might suggest more than I was in search of: a whole afternoon in my childhood or a row of trees in a backyard when I had wanted back only a certain few moments when my face was brushed by a certain few leaves. Among the pencils are many differing only subtly from their neighbours. Six at least I might have called simply red if I had not learned long ago their true names. With these six, and with still others from each side of them, I often arrange one after another of many possible sequences, hoping to see in the conjectured space between some or another unlikely pair a certain tint that I have wanted for long to see.

What is your name?” she said crossing her legs. “I am Raj Singhania, owner of Singhania group of Industries and I am on my way to sign a 1000 crore deal.” “Oh my God, Oh my God!” she said laughing and looked at Bobby from top to bottom. “What’s with this OMG thing and girls, stop saying that. I am not going to propose you anytime soon. But it’s OK. I can understand how girls feel when they meet famous dudes like me,” Bobby said smiling. “What kind of an idiot are you?” she said laughing. “Indeed, a very rare one. The one that you find after searching for millions of years,” Bobby said. “Do you always talk like this?” she said laughing. “Only to strangers on bus or whenever I get bored,” Bobby said. “OK, tell me your real name,” she said. “My name is Mogaliputta Tissa and I am here to save the world.” “Oh no not again!” she said squeezing her head with both her hands. “I know you are dying inside to kiss me,” Bobby said flashing a smile. “Why would I kiss you?” she said with a pretended sternness. “Because, you are impressed with my intelligence level and the hotness quotient, I can see that in your eyes.” “You think you are hot! Oh no! You look like that cartoon guy in 7 up commercial,” she said laughing. “Thank you. He was the coolest guy I saw on TV,” Bobby said. “OK fine, let’s calm down. Tell me your real name,” she said calmly. “I don’t remember my name,” Bobby said calmly. “What kind of idiot forgets his name?” she said staring into Bobby’s eyes. “I am suffering from multiple personality disorder and I forgot my present personality’s name. Can you help me out?” Bobby said with an innocent look on his face. “I will kill you with my hair clip. Leave me alone,” she said and closed her eyes. “You look like a Pomeranian puppy,” Bobby said looking at her hair. “Don’t talk to me,” she said. “You look very beautiful,” Bobby said. “Nice try but I am not going to open my eyes,” she said. “Your ear rings are very nice. But I think that girl in the last seat has better rings,” Bobby said. “She is not wearing any ear rings. I know because I saw her when I was getting inside. It takes just 5 seconds for a girl to know what other girls around her are wearing,” she said with her eyes still closed. “Hey, look. They are selling porn CDs at a roadside shop,” Bobby said. “I have loads of porn in my personal computer. I don’t need them,” she said. “OMG, that girl looks hotter than you,” Bobby said. “I will not open my eyes no matter what. Even if an earthquake hits the road, I will not open my eyes,” she said crossing her arms over her chest. Bobby turned back and waved his hand to the kid who was poking his mom’s ear. The kid came running and halted at Bobby’s seat. “This aunty wants to give you a chocolate if you tell her your name,” Bobby whispered to the kid and the kid perked up smiling. “Hello Aunty! Wake up, my name is Bintu. Give me my chocolate, Aunty, please!” the kid said yanking at the girl’s hand. All of a sudden, she opened her eyes and glared at the kid. “Don’t call me aunty. What would everyone think? I am a teenage girl. Go away. I don’t have anything to give you,” she said and the kid went back to his seat. “This is what happens when you mess with an intelligent person like me,” Bobby said laughing. “Shut up,” she said. “OK dude.” “I am not a dude. Stop it.” “OK sexy. Oops! OK Saxena,” “I will scream.” “OK. Where do you study?” “Why should I tell you?” “Are you suffering from split personality disorder like me?” Bobby said staring into her eyes. “Shut up. Don’t talk to me,” she said with a pout. “What the hell! I have enlightened your mind with my thoughts, told you my name and now you are acting like you don’t know me. Girls are mad.

Dear KDP Author, Just ahead of World War II, there was a radical invention that shook the foundations of book publishing. It was the paperback book. This was a time when movie tickets cost 10 or 20 cents, and books cost $2.50. The new paperback cost 25 cents – it was ten times cheaper. Readers loved the paperback and millions of copies were sold in just the first year. With it being so inexpensive and with so many more people able to afford to buy and read books, you would think the literary establishment of the day would have celebrated the invention of the paperback, yes? Nope. Instead, they dug in and circled the wagons. They believed low cost paperbacks would destroy literary culture and harm the industry (not to mention their own bank accounts). Many bookstores refused to stock them, and the early paperback publishers had to use unconventional methods of distribution – places like newsstands and drugstores. The famous author George Orwell came out publicly and said about the new paperback format, if “publishers had any sense, they would combine against them and suppress them.” Yes, George Orwell was suggesting collusion. Well… history doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme. Fast forward to today, and it’s the e-book’s turn to be opposed by the literary establishment. Amazon and Hachette – a big US publisher and part of a $10 billion media conglomerate – are in the middle of a business dispute about e-books. We want lower e-book prices. Hachette does not. Many e-books are being released at $14.99 and even $19.99. That is unjustifiably high for an e-book. With an e-book, there’s no printing, no over-printing, no need to forecast, no returns, no lost sales due to out of stock, no warehousing costs, no transportation costs, and there is no secondary market – e-books cannot be resold as used books. E-books can and should be less expensive. Perhaps channeling Orwell’s decades old suggestion, Hachette has already been caught illegally colluding with its competitors to raise e-book prices. So far those parties have paid $166 million in penalties and restitution. Colluding with its competitors to raise prices wasn’t only illegal, it was also highly disrespectful to Hachette’s readers. The fact is many established incumbents in the industry have taken the position that lower e-book prices will “devalue books” and hurt “Arts and Letters.” They’re wrong. Just as paperbacks did not destroy book culture despite being ten times cheaper, neither will e-books. On the contrary, paperbacks ended up rejuvenating the book industry and making it stronger. The same will happen with e-books. Many inside the echo-chamber of the industry often draw the box too small. They think books only compete against books. But in reality, books compete against mobile games, television, movies, Facebook, blogs, free news sites and more. If we want a healthy reading culture, we have to work hard to be sure books actually are competitive against these other media types, and a big part of that is working hard to make books less expensive. Moreover, e-books are highly price elastic. This means that when the price goes down, customers buy much more. We've quantified the price elasticity of e-books from repeated measurements across many titles. For every copy an e-book would sell at $14.99, it would sell 1.74 copies if priced at $9.99. So, for example, if customers would buy 100,000 copies of a particular e-book at $14.99, then customers would buy 174,000 copies of that same e-book at $9.99. Total revenue at $14.99 would be $1,499,000. Total revenue at $9.99 is $1,738,000. The important thing to note here is that the lower price is good for all parties involved: the customer is paying 33% less and the author is getting a royalty check 16% larger and being read by an audience that’s 74% larger. The pie is simply bigger.

I loathe San Francisco. Sure, it looks like Jurassic Park in places, and the fog layer is enchanting with its plumes and trellises interweaving with the leaves and lichen on the redwoods. But everything else is like if New York’s Gramercy neighborhood got a whole town. On any given night there are way too many “going-out shirts” and the women dress like there was a fire sale at some emporium that only sells clam-diggers and kicky little jackets with ornamental zippers. I have never so frequently witnessed pinstripe and patchwork meeting in the middle as I have on the tragic A-line skirts of Valencia Street. Every man who isn’t contemptibly rich enough to be famous for it reminds me of Matthew Lillard’s pigtail-braided Rollerblader in Hackers. I have never tallied so many “Pick-Up Artist” hats or labret piercings outside of 1996. Fashion is no more than an indication of larger trends. Certain parts of San Francisco are what happens when white people have no natural predator.

The fragrance of sweet tangerines reached Claudia's nose. She saw Sorella Agata squeezer tangerine into what looked like a cake batter. Immediately, Claudia's mouth watered. She'd never had a cake made out of tangerines. Orange, yes. She and her father had made both orange and lemon cakes throughout her childhood. Why hadn't either of them ever thought about making a cake out of tangerines? It was brilliant. For tangerines were even sweeter than oranges. "Ah! Claudia!" Sorella Agata stopped what she was doing and quickly patted her face with a kitchen towel, making sure to turn her back toward Claudia. "I'm getting warm with the ovens turned on." She took off her apron and fanned her face with it. Claudia was surprised at the nun's small lie. "Those tangerines smell wonderful, Sorella Agata. I take it you're making a cake?" "Si. Torta al Mandarino. This is the second most popular cake we sell at the shop after my famous cassata cake. It's very sweet, but most of the flavor comes from the ripest, juiciest tangerines in season and not from too much sugar.

Philip Knight, who founded Nike, famously paid Carolyn Davidson just $35 to design their now-famous Swoosh logo.

The famous Dutch tulip bubble largely involved the frenzied trading of options to buy or sell the bulbs—a precursor to modern-day stock options—rather than transactions involving the actual flowers.

We love the famous. The plastic pretties. Airbrushed arses. Fantastic titties. Hunks and comics to entertain us. Make no mistake, we love the famous. We love to praise the rich, it seems. We love to raise our hopes with dreams, Wanting a piece of the luxury action, 'Cos life gives little satisfaction. We'll prop up the famous, buying in To the media con that always spins, To sell mags and rags and movie

You can’t just abduct me and hold me for hostage! And hostage for what? Who do you think you are? My brother is one of the most powerful men in England! When he catches up to you, he’ll slit your belly and strangle you with your own entrails! Do you know what you’ve done?” The Irishman just shrugged, unconcerned, and shoved his other arm into his coat sleeve. “Does your sister Mrs. Lord know that I’m here? Does your brother-in-law, Captain Lord? The admiral, Sir Elliott?” “Don’t be stupid, of course not.” “Does anyone know?” “Not yet.” “Who are you? In actuality?” “Ruaidri O’ Devir, ma’m, just as ye thought.” He picked up a tricorne hat and headed for the door. “I wish to know why I am here!” He stopped then, his patience exhausted, and looked her straight in the eye. “Your brother developed an explosive which he’s about to sell to your country. My country needs it so we can win this miserable struggle with yours. Since I doubt England or your brother are going to just hand it over to us, ye’re my payment for it. A ransom, if ye will. Understand?” “What do you mean your country? Ireland is not at war with England… you are mad.” “No, Sunshine. I’m not mad. I’m a commissioned captain in America’s Continental Navy if ye must know, and because John Adams decided there’s nobody in the Navy as audacious, reckless or downright foolish as I am, he chose me to come and get that explosive. Ye’re my ransom. If yer family wants ye back, they’ll hand it over as well as the formula on how t’ create it. Now are ye finished? I’ve a ship to see to.” She stared at him, aghast. “Your sister is married to a captain in the Royal Navy… her brother-in-law is a famous admiral… you would dare do this right under all their noses?” He smiled then, his long lashes throwing shadow against his cheekbones in the dim orange glow of the lantern and in that moment, he looked almost handsome. Almost. “Indeed, I would.” The smile spread. “Indeed, I have.

Felix.” She let go, suddenly shy to speak. But that tense, tickly sensation running from her throat to her belly was giving her some kind of superhuman nerve. And besides, he wasn’t really Felix Callahan anymore, not in that ethereal, big-screen sense. So. She cleared her throat. “Felix, will you be my friend?” He did laugh at her, though he didn’t seem to mean it. “Yes, we’ll get matching lockets holding strands of each other’s hair.” “I wish the English language gave us a better option. ‘Pals,’ ‘chums,’ ‘buddies’ . . . but a word that implies the sudden and unusual nature—like ‘metabuddies.’ ” “ ‘Metabuddies.’ Wow. This is getting serious.” “So?” “So. Yes. Let’s be friends. That would solve some of this confused muss. Do we spit in our palms and shake?” “I think this calls for a pinky pledge.” She hooked her pinky around his. “I, Becky Jack, agree to be Felix Callahan’s pal, even though he’s way overrated as an actor and screen hunk and can be such a brat.” Felix cleared his throat. “I, world-famous and fabulously wealthy Felix Paul Callahan, agree to be mates with Becky, even though she wears grandmother shoes and insists on popping out children with reckless abandon and shows no remorse for her vicious right hook.” “That was very nice. I almost shed a tear.” “Apparently all it takes to make you weep is a singing puppet.” “Hey, don’t sell me short. I also cry at talking socks and animated washcloths.” “You cry in terror.” “Well, yeah, that’s true.

There is a famous parable about a man who lived in a cottage by the sea. Every morning, the man went fishing and caught just enough fish for the day. Afterward, he would spend time playing with his son, take a siesta, and enjoy lunch with his family. In the evening, he and his wife would meet friends at a local bar, where they would tell stories, play music, and dance the night away. One day, a tourist saw the fisherman and his meager catch and asked, “Why do you only catch three or four fish?” “That is all my family needs for today,” the fisherman replied. But the tourist had gone to business school and could not help but offer advice: “You know, if you catch a few more fish and sell them at the market, you could make some extra money.” “Why would I want to do that?” the fisherman asked. “With the extra money you could save up and buy a boat. Then, you could catch even more fish, and make even more money, which you could use to buy an entire fleet of boats!” “Why would I need so many boats?” queried the fisherman. “Don’t you see? With a fleet of boats, you could sell more fish, and with the extra money, you could move to New York, run an international business and sell fish all over the world!” “And how long would this take?” the fisherman asked. “Maybe 10 or 20 years,” the businessman said. “Then what?” the fisherman said. “Then you could sell your company for millions, retire, buy a cottage by the sea, go fishing every morning, take a siesta every afternoon, enjoy lunch with your family, and spend the evenings with friends, playing music and dancing!” How many of us today are like this businessman, blindly chasing what has been in front of us all along?

There was this feeling that you got when your video went viral. Like people were going to start asking for your autograph or panties. Like they were going to start sending you marriage proposals or death threats. Like you were going to be famous or at least internet famous. It started around a million hits. By ten million, you were buying bulk packs of panties to sell on iBuy.

The painting is considered to have been very valuable to Vermeer, as he chose never to part with it or sell it, even when he was in debt. In 1676, his widow Catharina bequeathed the piece to her mother, Maria Thins, in an attempt to avoid the sale of the painting to satisfy creditors. The executor of Vermeer’s estate, the famous Delft microscopist Anton van Leeuwenhoek, determined that the transferral of the work to the late painter’s mother-in-law was illegal.

[Lucas] was most famous for his short, best-selling book on fossils, "Animals of the Past: An Account of Some of the Creatures of the Ancient World", in which he showed his gift for enlivening the driest science. Apologizing for using Latin scientific names, he wrote: 'The reader may perhaps sympathize with the old lady who said the discovery of all these strange animals did not surprise her so much as the fact that anyone should know their names when they were found.

In 1988, NDTV got a good contract from Doordarshan to produce a famous weekly show called The World This Week, which was anchored by the owner Prannoy Roy. As per records, Doordarshan granted Rs.2 lakhs ($6000[1]) per episode to NDTV, which was a princely sum in those days. Incidentally the head of Doordarshan at that time was Bhaskar Ghose and his son-in-law journalist Rajdeep Sardesai became the No. 2 in NDTV. The Congress Party was in power then and showed all possible support to NDTV and provided a red-carpet welcome to the private media unit to enjoy the national resources of Doordarshan. Every resource and infrastructure of Doordarshan was used for NDTV’s growth. In fact, in the early days (1995-1997), it is this tax payer money (Doordarshan contract) that got him personal gains again when he did “sweet” private equity deals (for sale of personal stake belonging to him and his wife) to a few global private equity funds. Thus, he built a business from patronage (government money) and then created value and cashed some of it by selling to private equity investors such as Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Alliance Capital, Jardine Fleming etc.

Put yourself first. It's the most important tool when it comes to self-care.

The most important question for us humans is, "What is human?" "What is life?" "What is life?" If you can't answer this question, you can't live your life seriously. So Tolstoy, Russia's main gate, for a long time of 15 years I wrote my last book at the end of my career. What is life?It's 입니다. In this book, Tolstoy defines life like this. "Life is holding onto a thin arrowroot vine in a desperate situation where it doesn't know when it's going to break off." What do you think life is? Someone said that life is about luck. What is "WOON 7G3"? It means that luck is 70% and opportunity is 30%. Life is luck. Do you really think life is luck? Then you're lucky to live well, Is it bad luck not to be able to buy it? Being healthy is good luck, Is it bad luck to be sick? That's not true. Life is not luck. Victor Wigor thinks about what life is and then expresses it in one word. It's a voyage. Life is a voyage in which a boat floating on the sea plumped and sailed through a port. Ships floating in the sea of the world have calmness, rough waves, and scary typhoons. Life is not easy. So Job says life like this. "Isn't there hard labor in life on this land?" (Job 7:1) There is a theory of life in today's text. Section 13 of the body. "Those who say they will profit by doing business" (approximately 4:13) What is business and profit? Business is selling things to make money. What are the benefits? It's money from the business. Jews thought it was important to make money. So Jewish tactics are world-famous. The Jews were the geniuses of the tactics. In the old days, money was all coins. Our country also made money into a not. This is called Yupjeon. Heavy coins were very uncomfortable for traders. So the Jews made bills instead of coins, they made checks, they made bills. And the Jews thought about how to sell things without discounting them I made a department store in America. The Jews also taught their children this way. "The whole world is a business. Even white clouds become rain when squeezed." These people are Jewish. Trade was the best way to make money in the days of the First Church. Especially in the early church era, it was the best environment to make money from trade. In this era, it was Pax Romana.

My evening was a perfect demonstration of how hard it is for one side to really understand the other. I think Hollywood feels more comfortable welcoming directors who are convicted pedophiles, famous actresses who are also thieves, boxers who are convicted rapists, directors who push cocaine, rappers who sell heroin, singers who solicit prostitutes, and actors who beat up their woman than a Republican in their midst. In fact, the people who fit into those categories still enjoy the professional adoration of their peers in Hollywood, even amidst the suspicion and guilt. It's like the only that can really ruin your reputation as a celebrity is to come out as a Republican.

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

Diary of a Surfer Villager, he had become a best-selling author and a worldwide celebrity. He was glad to have survived the trials of his youth, and, he had to admit, being famous was pretty cool, but all he ever wanted to be was a surfer. Jimmy breathed a melancholic sigh and turned away from the shore and looked back at the water. The redstone-powered wave machine invented by his friend Emma had just pushed another wave towards him and the handful of other surfers waiting for it. It looked like a good

Many famous motivational speakers and influencers will tell you that you can get whatever you want in life but I will never tell you that. Do you know who else would not say that? Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller. But people love to be lied to and love entertaining fantasies, so they say I'm the one who doesn't know enough and that's why my thinking is limited. Well, have they tried to sell anything on a Chinese website or through an American or Canadian platform like Shopify? Many even tell me they plan to start their business using WordPress, which shows how ignorant they are of what their dreams need to become true. In reality, as soon as you start going through these paths you will see that you are stopped along the way. Many apps don't work in your country, and many markets are also not open to you due to location. In other cases, they claim to investigate you before deciding if you should have access to their features, while what they do is to simply look at your IP address. This happens to any industry, including the book industry.

People may ask, “How can that celebrity be part of a Satanic cult? They are too rich, and famous. Too handsome, or too beautiful. Too nice. Too powerful.” But that is the wrong question. The question should be, how did that person obtain that level of celebrity? And once people realize that person is literally owned, and controlled by others, or by other entities, then their celebrity may remain for a time, but their fake power will dissipate almost immediately.

For the time being, however, his bent was literary and religious rather than balletic. He loved, and what seventh grader doesn’t, the abstracter foxtrots and more metaphysical twists of a Dostoevsky, a Gide, a Mailer. He longed for the experience of some vivider pain than the mere daily hollowness knotted into his tight young belly, and no weekly stomp-and-holler of group therapy with other jejune eleven-year-olds was going to get him his stripes in the major leagues of suffering, crime, and resurrection. Only a bona-fide crime would do that, and of all the crimes available murder certainly carried the most prestige, as no less an authority than Loretta Couplard was ready to attest, Loretta Couplard being not only the director and co-owner of the Lowen School but the author, as well, of two nationally televised scripts, both about famous murders of the 20th Century. They’d even done a unit in social studies on the topic: A History of Crime in Urban America. The first of Loretta’s murders was a comedy involving Pauline Campbell, R.N., of Ann Arbor, Michigan, circa 1951, whose skull had been smashed by three drunken teenagers. They had meant to knock her unconscious so they could screw her, which was 1951 in a nutshell. The eighteen-year-olds, Bill Morey and Max Pell, got life; Dave Royal (Loretta’s hero) was a year younger and got off with twenty-two years. Her second murder was tragic in tone and consequently inspired more respect, though not among the critics, unfortunately. Possibly because her heroine, also a Pauline (Pauline Wichura), though more interesting and complicated had also been more famous in her own day and ever since. Which made the competition, one best-selling novel and a serious film biography, considerably stiffen Miss Wichura had been a welfare worker in Atlanta, Georgia, very much into environment and the population problem, this being the immediate pre-Regents period when anyone and everyone was legitimately starting to fret. Pauline decided to do something, viz., reduce the population herself and in the fairest way possible. So whenever any of the families she visited produced one child above the three she’d fixed, rather generously, as the upward limit, she found some unobtrusive way of thinning that family back to the preferred maximal size. Between 1989 and 1993 Pauline’s journals (Random House, 1994) record twenty-six murders, plus an additional fourteen failed attempts. In addition she had the highest welfare department record in the U.S. for abortions and sterilizations among the families whom she advised. “Which proves, I think,” Little Mister Kissy Lips had explained one day after school to his friend Jack, “that a murder doesn’t have to be of someone famous to be a form of idealism.” But of course idealism was only half the story: the other half was curiosity. And beyond idealism and curiosity there was probably even another half, the basic childhood need to grow up and kill someone.

Never take advice, trust, or rely on a hungry person. Hunger has made people kill each other and sell each other. Hunger has made people turn against each other. We have no shame , morals, values, or principles anymore. We don’t have back bone or stand for something, because of hunger we fall for everything. Hunger controls lot of people. Hunger for success or for attention. Hunger to be rich. Hunger for being relevant or to trend. Hunger for being famous. Hunger for power or to be in control. Hunger for being noticed or liked. Hunger for sex or pleasure. Hunger for being loved. Hunger for money. Hunger for being cool, hunger for being credited, Hunger for being looked at as the smartest, wisest, or educated. Hunger for more followers or promos. Hunger for being right. Hunger for being in the circle or table. Hunger for being admired and hunger for friends. A starving person will say and do anything as long it is feeding their hunger. They can mislead, say wrong things, misinform, manipulate, abuse, lie, provoke, insult, intimidate, black mail, rage farm, influence, instigate people if it will feed their hunger. I hate poverty. It has made lot us break the law, support criminals, bad people, bad leaders , bad parties, bad things, bad behavior because whatever we support feeds our hunger.

Colonel Sanders, who made Kentucky Fried Chicken famous, pitched his idea more than 80 times before anyone bought the concept. It took Stallone only three days to write the script for Rocky, and the movie grossed $200 million, but when he wrote it, he had no money to his name, couldn't afford to heat his apartment, and even had to sell his dog for $50 just to be able to buy food. Walt Disney was laughed at for his idea of an amusement park, and yet now people all over the world spend $100 a ticket and save up their whole lives just to have a family vacation at Disney World.

So many people were basing decisions on Granville’s forecasts in the early 1980s that when he said something was going to happen, it happened because they believed it would. That is, when he said the market would go down, the prediction scared buyers out of the market – and lo, it went down. This happened early in 1981, when Granville told his disciples to sell everything. The day after this famous warning was issued, the stock market fell out of bed – 23 points on the Dow. All of Wall Street said ooh and ah. What a powerful prophet was this Granville! The plunge was brief but impressive while it lasted.

We do not sell lipstick, we buy customers.

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.

Strong institutional marketing also helps sell tickets. La Scala, the Bolshoi, and the Paris Opera Ballet all can spend less on programmatic marketing—the selling of tickets—because they benefit from their high institutional visibility, earned generations ago. No arts organization, however—no matter how famous—can afford to rest on its laurels. The Rome Opera, for example, is facing bankruptcy—and this was the house that offered the world premieres of both Cavelleria Rusticana and Tosca! We all compete for the same new audience members and the same new donors. If we are not working actively now, we will lose out to an organization that is.

Never Sell Yourself Short.

Some of the choices that Chinese consumers made did not translate easily to outsiders. A brand of stylish eyeglass frames appeared on the market, named “Helen Keller.” Reporters asked the company why it had chosen to advertise its eyeglasses with the world’s most famous blind person. The company replied that Chinese schools teach the story of Helen Keller primarily as an icon of fortitude, and sure enough, sales of the frames were brisk. Helen Keller glasses were selling under the slogan “You see the world, and the world sees you.

television’s sole function these days is to drive permanent wedges between people with different philosophies in such a way that an insatiable furor keeps us coming back to confirm our biases and condemn our opponents. Reasonable discourse doesn’t sell commercial time. Intellectual inflammation rules the airwaves. That and reality shows about repugnant housewives yearning to be famous.

Shit Can Happen" Bitch Yeah... [1] - Shit can happen [8X] [Kon Artis] Yo, yo, huh, yo, yo, yo That's right motherfuckers we back Same slanging, orangatangin, wilding out on hoodrats They say I act like I'm too famous to say hi And tell 'em what my name is but really I'm still nameless... You niggas don't get it yet do you Dealing out platinum or flop I still put it through you Wit a luger that'll spit fire And hit higher than a pitch by a bitch like Mariah You think for one second since we got a deal That we won't deal wit you in front of St Andrew's still? You gay rappers better learn that I won't stop until I see 'em turn back If you don't slow that roll you got You gonna see these Runyan Ave. niggas that really need some Prozac For' sure' that, ask the others But gator lay you down next to your mother's mother's grandmother [Kuniva] You know I'm feeling real rowdy tonight Ready to fight and half the niggas I give dap to I don't even like The same cat who never gave a damn about your name I gives a fuck about it like the next selling Clippers' game I kill you in ways you couldn't even fathom You and your madame, it's really unexplainable how I have 'em Who call theyself screaming about a challenge Nigga we got a gift while you barely making it off mere talent My skills are deeply embedded even your hoe said it She was knock kneed I fucked her now she's bow legged In the middle of rappin I drop the mic And have a stare down and jump in the crowd and start scrappin Kuniva and Kon Artis my nigga we get it cracking While the paramedics pick you up we on the side laughing [HOOK: 1- in background] [Kon Artis] Now this aint funny so don't you dare laugh Shit can happen in him and yo' ass You can be touched don't think you can't Cause niggas aint fucking around no more man [repeat] [Swifty McVay]

All of the Kobe beef sold in this country, by chefs famous and anonymous, in ten-dollar sliders or three-hundred-dollar steaks, was fake, all of it, end of story. Every single restaurant and store purporting to sell Kobe beef—or any Japanese beef—was lying, including some of the country’s best-known chefs.

My own people persuaded the Bagenya not to sell a canoe: Hassani knows it all, but swears that he did not join in the slander, and even points up to Heaven in attestation of innocence of all, even of Manilla's foray. Mohamadans are certainly famous as liars, and the falsehood of Mohamad has been transmitted to his followers in a measure unknown in other religions.

By the terms of the U.S. Supreme Court decision in June of last year legalizing the practice of destitute families selling their children, hoping they’d have a better life, or of rich families taking a famous downer as a trophy to impress their friends, I have no legal status if granted freedom. I would be “a non-person and vulnerable as a piece of furniture abandoned on a sidewalk,” as Justice William O. Washington said in his blistering dissent when the court announced its decision. Spartak Jones, 16, the first legal slave since the Civil War America’s top gymnast, handsome, poor, kidnapped and sold, contemplating his future San Francisco in the year 2115 The Chronicles of Spartak—Rising Son, a novel

with you, as your date?” Liam asks me. “Yes,” I say quietly. “I’m so sorry. What can I do for you in return?” “Well, since you offered,” Liam responds, “I would like some information.” “Information?” I ask with a frown. “Yes,” Liam says. “Remember all those deep, dark secrets I said I’d extract from you? Well, if you share them with us, then I’ll be your date for your sister’s wedding.” This is probably the worst thing he could have requested. My mouth feels suddenly very dry. “Um. Isn’t there anything else you might want? Maybe I could dedicate my next book to you?” He laughs lightly. “You’re going to do that anyway once I get your sight back.” I rack my brain, searching for something I could give him. “I’ll have my publisher put out a press release,” I offer, “or maybe schedule an event, like a book launch. We can publicly declare that you’re the hero who helped the semi-famous blind author Winter Rose to see. Even if it doesn’t work, and I can’t see, I’ll pretend like I can, and you’ll probably get tons of research grants and stuff.” “I’m pretty sure that you’re going to do that anyway,” Liam tells me, “because it’s a good story that will sell books.” “Okay,” I mumble, getting desperate. “How about I name a character after you?” “That would be nice,” Liam says. “I’ll take all of the above, but I’ll still need one additional thing to sweeten the pot. Information.” “Why?” I moan in protest. “Because I’m curious,” he answers in a good-natured way. “Come on. It can’t be that bad. Tell me your deepest, darkest secrets.” I sigh. “Are you sure?” “Yes.” “Really? Right here. Right now? In front of Owen?” “Yeah, why not?” Liam says cheerfully. “He’s been telling us way more than we need to know for a while.” “I want to hear, too,” Owen chimes in.  “Entertain us, storyteller!” I spend a moment gathering my composure. I smooth my hands over my legs, and look around uneasily. Taking a deep breath, I try to mentally prepare myself for what I’m about to say to two complete strangers. “Well... three years ago, I was raped.” A hush falls over the car. I can feel the men looking

A little later on, Phil ran what became one of the most famous item promotions in our history. We sent him down to open store number 52 in Hot Springs, Arkansas—the first store we ever opened in a town that already had a Kmart. Phil got there and decided Kmart had been getting away with some pretty high prices in the absence of any discounting competition. So he worked up a detergent promotion that turned into the world’s largest display ever of Tide, or maybe Cheer—some detergent. He worked out a deal to get about $1.00 off a case if he would buy some absolutely ridiculous amount of detergent, something like 3,500 cases of the giant-sized box. Then he ran it as an ad promotion for, say, $1.99 a box, off from the usual $3.97. Well, when all of us in the Bentonville office saw how much he’d bought, we really thought old Phil had completely gone over the dam. This was an unbelievable amount of soap. It made up a pyramid of detergent boxes that ran twelve to eighteen cases high—all the way to the ceiling, and it was 75 or 100 feet long, which took up the whole aisle across the back of the store, and then it was about 12 feet wide so you could hardly get past it. I think a lot of companies would have fired Phil for that one, but we always felt we had to try some of this crazy stuff. PHIL GREEN: “Mr. Sam usually let me do whatever I wanted on these promotions because he figured I wasn’t going to screw it up, but on this one he came down and said, ‘Why did you buy so much? You can’t sell all of this!’ But the thing was so big it made the news, and everybody came to look at it, and it was all gone in a week. I had another one that scared them up in Bentonville too. This guy from Murray of Ohio called one day and said he had 200 Murray 8 horsepower riding mowers available at the end of the season, and he could let us have them for $175. Did we want any? And I said, ‘Yeah, I’ll take 200.’ And he said, ‘Two hundred!’ We’d been selling them for $447, I think. So when they came in we unpacked every one of them and lined them all up out in front of the store, twenty-five in a row, eight rows deep. Ran a chain through them and put a big sign up that said: ‘8 h.p. Murray Tractors, $199.’ Sold every one of them. I guess I was just always a promoter, and being an early Wal-Mart manager was as good a place to promote as there ever was.

I weave through LA's famous Farmers Market, which is really more of an outdoor food court, and now I'm a few minutes late. And the place is packed and there's still the uncertainty about where to meet when I look down and realize I'm wearing yellow pants. Yellow pants. Really? Sometimes I don't know what I'm thinking. They're rolled at the cuff and paired with a navy polo and it looks like maybe I just yacht my yacht, and I'm certain to come off as an asshole. I thin about canceling, or at least delaying so I can go home and change, but the effort that would require is unappealing, and this date is mostly for distraction. And when I round the last stall--someone selling enormous eggplants, more round than oblong, I see him, casually leaning against a wall, and something inside my body says there you are. 'There you are.' I don't understand them, these words, because they seem too deep and too soulful to attach to the Farmers Market, this Starbucks or that, a frozen yogurt place, or confusion over where to meet a stranger. They're straining to define a feeling of stunning comfort that drips over me, as if a water balloon burst over my head on the hottest of summer days. My knees don't buckle, my heart doesn't skip, but I'm awash in the warmth of a valium-like hug. Except I haven't taken a Valium. Not since the night of Lily's death. Yet here is this warm hug that makes me feel safe with this person, this Byron the maybe-poet, and I want it to stop. This--whatever this feeling is--can't be a real feeling, this can't be a tangible connection. This is just a man leaning against a stall that sells giant eggplants. But I no longer have time to worry about what this feeling is, whether I should or shouldn't be her, or should or should't be wearing yellow pants, because there are only maybe three perfect seconds where I see him and he has yet to spot me. Three perfect seconds to enjoy the calm that has so long eluded me. 'There you are.' And then he casually lifts his head and turns my way and uses one foot to push himself off the wall he is leaning agains. We lock eyes and he smiles with recognition and there's a disarming kindness to his face and suddenly I'm standing in front of him. 'There you are.' It comes out of my mouth before I can stop it and it's all I can do to steer the words in a more playfully casual direction so he isn't saddled with the importance I've placed on them. I think it comes off okay, but, as I know from my time at sea, sometimes big ships turn slowly. Byron chuckles and gives a little pump of his fist. 'YES! IT'S! ALL! HAPPENING! FOR! US!' I want to stop in my tracks, but I'm already leaning in for a hug, and he comes the rest of the way, and the warm embrace of seeing him standing there is now an actual embrace, and it is no less sincere. He must feel me gripping him tightly, because he asks, 'Is everything okay?' No. 'Yes, everything is great, it's just...' I play it back in my head what he said, the way in which he said it, and the enthusiasm which only a month had gone silent. 'You reminded me of someone is all.' 'Hopefully in a good way.' I smile but it takes just a minute to speak. 'In the best possible way.' I don't break the hug first, but maybe at the same time, this is a step. jenny will be proud. I look in his eyes, which I expect to be brown like Lily's but instead are deep blue like the waters lapping calmly against the outboard sides of 'Fishful Thinking.' 'Is frozen yogurt okay?' 'Frozen yogurt is perfect.

While having a strong character foundation may not sell newspapers, increase TV ratings, or make a person famous, it's essential for building a life that is meaningful and matters.

Amanollah Khan had tried to assert rights for women in the 1920s, together with his queen Soraya, who famously cast off her veil in public. The royal couple also began promoting the education of girls, banned the selling of them for marriage, and put restrictions on polygyny. The backlash was severe. To many Afghans, and particularly to the majority who did not live in Kabul, the reforms seemed outrageous: Tribal men would lose future income if daughters could no longer be sold or traded as wives. In 1929, under threat of a coup, the king was forced to abdicate.

Although a partner’s compensation depends in large part on the amount of business he brings to the Firm, no one goes out to knock on doors. The Firm waits for the phone to ring. And ring it does, not because McKinsey sells, but because McKinsey markets. It does this in several different ways, all of them designed to make sure that on the day a senior executive decides she has a business problem, one of the first calls she makes is to the local office of McKinsey. The Firm produces a steady stream of books and articles, some of them extremely influential, such as the famous In Search of Excellence by Peters and Waterman.* McKinsey also publishes its own scholarly journal, The McKinsey Quarterly, which it sends gratis to its clients, as well as to its former consultants, many of whom now occupy senior positions at potential clients. The Firm invites (and gets) a lot of coverage by journalists. Many McKinsey partners and directors are internationally known as experts in their fields.

In fact, selling—rather than creating—inventions may have been Thomas Edison’s greatest talent. Many of the famous inventions from his laboratory were imagined and developed by his staff, not Edison. His assistant, Francis Jehl, lamented that Edison was a more skilled pitchman than inventor, that his “genius” was most reminiscent of master huckster and showman P. T. Barnum.

In Victorian England, famous for its prudery, a respectable woman could feed openly in church,37 yet in contemporary industrialised society where women’s bodies and particularly breasts are used to sell newspapers, cars and peanuts, public breastfeeding still provokes disapproval from both men and women.

Campbell Soup Co. will sell its famous soups in a K-cup.

A famous example is the chain Potbelly Sandwich Shop, which today has over two hundred stores. It began as an antique store in 1977; the owners started to sell sandwiches as a way to bolster traffic to their stores. Pretty soon they had pivoted their way into an entirely different line of business.

I Know Many Horror Authors Are Depressed or Act Miserable With Their lives. This Seems To Go With The Territory. For Example, Best-selling Horror Author, Joe Hill Talks About His Own Depression And Anxiety And How He Is Too Afraid To Take A Pill Because, of How This May Diminish And Destroy His Creative Side of Writing Horror. I Myself Happen To Feel The Exact Opposite. I Almost Always Noticed A More Creative Output In My Writing When On Pills.

OBIT FOR THE CREATOR OF MAD LIBS On Tuesday, in Canton, Connecticut, a town famous for the stickiness of its boogers, a stinky old man died of a good disease at his home at 345 Rotten Lane. Mr. Preston Wirtz, whose parents, Ida and Goober, ran a small jelly farm, died in his yellowish toilet. Mr. Wirtz was hated in Uzbekistan for the series of wordplay books he created for slippery children, books known far and wide as “Mad Libs,” beloved by hairy grumps and farty grampas alike. These books were never appreciated by tall elves, selling over two per year for one decade. When asked to describe Mr. Wirtz, his jealous wife, wearing nothing but an egg carton and flip-flops, called him “in a nutshell, the most sour-smelling, bacon-licking, pimple-footed crab-apple I have ever known. I will never always miss him and his broken underwear.” Then she cried herself to sleep in her fart-house.

During my tenure at Bradford College, located in Haverhill Massachusetts - Assemblies of God, and Northpoint Bible College had not yet taken over. The school was very prestigious and expensive, but was worth every penny spent, and left me with an experience of which I shall indeed never forget. I say this for a couple of reasons. First, my degree major was in creative arts (creative writing) and psychology as my minor. Later in life, I was able to use my degree to become an award-winning, and best-selling horror author, and producer. Something by the way for which I am very proud of today. I truly owe this all from what I learned at this remarkable school." "So indeed I have great things to speak of when harping back to my Bradford college days. In addition, I was also able to make wonderful connections with many famous people who's sons and daughters attended this school. One of my roommates was David Charles who is Bob Charle's son. Bob Charles was a famous professional golfer." "To date, pondering on my college days spent at Bradford College has given me an appreciation for which I am very grateful for. I wanted to say, "thank you" for being part of the reason why I have prospered." "I am a proud graduate of Bradford, and all others whom also attended should also be more than proud of their attendance there. Thank you again, and God Bless you. one of my other roommates was Japanese chap, and his father was some kind of high political ruler of the country at the time. Thinking back on all this makes me proud of having been affiliated with Bradford College. Thank you.

You think there's something materialistic about collecting books, but really collectors are the last romantics. We're the only ones who still love books as objects." "That's the question," said Jess. "How do you love them if you're always selling them?" "I don't sell everything," he said. "You haven't seen my own collection." "What do you have?" "First editions. Yeats, Dickinson- all three volumes; Eliot, Pound, Millay..." He had noticed the books she read in the store. "Plath. I also have Elizabeth Bishop." "I wish I could see them," Jess said. "You would have come to my house." "Are you inviting me?" She must have known this was a loaded question, but she asked without flirtatiousness or self-consciousness, as if to say, I only want to know as a point of information. Yes, he thought, I'm inviting you, but he did not say yes. He was her employer. She could act with a certain plucky independence, but he would always be the big bad wolf.

At some point it’s irresponsible not to connect what a man says with what he does... “Who Goes Nazi,” Dorothy Thompson’s famous Harper’s piece from 1941, sprang to the collective mind... None of the men I had in mind were Nazis. None resembled the men who’d marched through Charlottesville with tiki torches shouting, “You will not replace us!” But there was another spin on the game, and this was the one that worried me: Who in a showdown would accept the subjugation of women as a necessary political concession? Who would make peace with patriarchy if it meant a nominal win, or defend the accused for the sake of stability? The answer was more men than I’d been prepared to believe. I’d have to work harder not to alienate them, if only to make it harder for them to sell me out.

How Ma Bell Helped Us Build the Blue Box In 1955, the Bell System Technical Journal published an article entitled “In Band Signal Frequency Signaling” which described the process used for routing telephone calls over trunk lines with the signaling system at the time. It included all the information you’d need to build an interoffice telephone system, but it didn’t include the MF (multifrequency) tones you needed for accessing the system and dialing. But nine years later, in 1964, Bell revealed the other half of the equation, publishing the frequencies used for the digits needed for the actual routing codes. Now, anybody who wanted to get around Ma Bell was set. The formula was there for the taking. All you needed were these two bits of information found in these two articles. If you could build the equipment to emit the frequencies needed, you could make your own free calls, skipping Ma Bell’s billing and monitoring system completely. Famous “phone phreaks” of the early 1970s include Joe Engressia (a.k.a. Joybubbles), who was able to whistle (with his mouth) the high E tone needed to take over the line. John Draper (a.k.a. Captain Crunch) did the same with the free whistle that came inside boxes of Cap’n Crunch. A whole subculture was born. Eventually Steve Jobs (a.k.a. Oaf Tobar) and I (a.k.a. Berkeley Blue) joined the group, making and selling our own versions of the Blue Boxes. We actually made some good money at this.

Jefferson was distraught. “I was sitting by Dr. Franklin,” he recalled, “who perceived that I was not insensible to these mutilations.” But the process (in addition to in fact improving the great document) had the delightful consequence of eliciting from Franklin, who sought to console Jefferson, one of his most famous little tales. When he was a young printer, a friend starting out in the hat-making business wanted a sign for his shop. As Franklin recounted: He composed it in these words, “John Thompson, hatter, makes and sells hats for ready money,” with a figure of a hat subjoined. But he thought he would submit it to his friends for their amendments. The first he showed it to thought the word “Hatter” tautologous, because followed by the words “makes hats,” which showed he was a hatter. It was struck out. The next observed that the word “makes” might as well be omitted, because his customers would not care who made the hats . . . He struck it out. A third said he thought the words “for ready money” were useless, as it was not the custom of the place to sell on credit. Everyone who purchased expected to pay. They were parted with; and the inscription now stood, “John Thompson sells hats.” “Sells hats!” says his next friend; “why, nobody will expect you to give them away. What then is the use of that word?” It was stricken out, and “hats” followed, the rather as there was one painted on the board. So his inscription was reduced ultimately to “John Thompson,” with the figure of a hat subjoined.”37

There were micro-squabbles almost unbelievable to imagine now. The BBC was giving live coverage to the Beaulieu Jazz Festival in 1961 and they had to actually shut down the broadcast when trad jazz and modern jazz fans started to beat the shit out of each other, and the whole crowd lost control. The purists thought of blues as part of jazz, so they felt betrayed when they saw electric guitars—a whole bohemian subculture was threatened by the leather mob. There was certainly a political undercurrent in all this. Alan Lomax and Ewan MacColl—singers and famous folk song collectors who were patriarchs, or ideologues, of the folk boom—took a Marxist line that this music belonged to the people and must be protected from the corruption of capitalism. That’s why “commercial” was such a dirty word in those days. In fact the slanging matches in the music press resembled real political fisticuffs: phrases like “tripe mongers,” “legalized murder,” “selling out.” There were ludicrous discussions about authenticity. Yet the fact is, there was actually an audience for the blues artists in England. In America most of those artists had got used to playing cabaret acts, which they quickly found out didn’t go down well in the UK. Here you could play the blues. Big Bill Broonzy realized he could pick up a bit of dough if he switched from Chicago blues to being a folksy bluesman for European audiences. Half of those black guys never went back to America, because they realized that they were being treated like shit at home and meanwhile, lovely Danish birds were tripping over themselves to accommodate them. Why go back? They’d found out after World War II that they were treated well in Europe, certainly in Paris, like Josephine Baker, Champion Jack Dupree and Memphis Slim. That’s why Denmark became a haven for so many jazz players in the ’50s.

Charmers lie to sell their words, Your Majesty, and I have no need to lie. They say you descend from the goddesses,” he said, grinning widely—his famous smile.