Final Expenses Quotes

So the final conclusion would surely be that whereas other civilizations have been brought down by attacks of barbarians from without, ours had the unique distinction of training its own destroyers at its own educational institutions, and then providing them with facilities for propagating their destructive ideology far and wide, all at the public expense. Thus did Western Man decide to abolish himself, creating his own boredom out of his own affluence, his own vulnerability out of his own strength, his own impotence out of his own erotomania, himself blowing the trumpet that brought the walls of his own city tumbling down, and having convinced himself that he was too numerous, labored with pill and scalpel and syringe to make himself fewer. Until at last, having educated himself into imbecility, and polluted and drugged himself into stupefaction, he keeled over--a weary, battered old brontosaurus--and became extinct.

It was apparent that materialism was in complete control of the economic structure, the final objective of which was for the individual to become part of a system providing an economic security at the expense of the human soul, mind, and body.

The Dresden atrocity, tremendously expensive and meticulously planned, was so meaningless, finally, that only one person on the entire planet got any benefit from it. I am that person. I wrote this book, which earned a lot of money for me and made my reputation, such as it is. One way or another, I got two or three dollars for every person killed. Some business I'm in.

He squeezed my shoulder and smiled at me. I realized that I hadn't kissed him hello, I always kissed him hello. Of course, I was still covered in blood and other bodily fluids, and none of them were his, but he might not understand that that was why I hadn't wanted to get too close. Some of my confusion must have shown on my face, because his smile widened. He turned me around by the shoulders, gave me a little push towards the bathroom, and slapped me on the ass. "Get cleaned up, I'll take care of things here." "I can't believe that you just did that," I said. "Did what?" he said, and he was grinning at me. I could probably count on one hand the number of times Micah had grinned at me. His eyes were sparkling with laughter as if it were all he could do not to let it out. I was happy to see him having a good time, really I was. But I wasn't sure what was funny, and I didn't have the courage to ask. It was probably something that would be at my expense, or something I'd just done that he found cute. I was not cute. Confused, fucked-up, bruised, but not cute. Nathaniel and Damian knew better, but as I passed Gregory, I had to say, "If you touch my ass, I will rip you a new one." I said it as I moved past him, not even pausing. "You're no fun," he growled. I looked back just before I turned out of sight of him. "Oh, I'm a lot of fun, just not around you." He snarled at me. "Bitch." "Woof, woof," I said, and finally made it into the bathroom.

You want me to trust you? Save her. Really save her. It’s going to mean telling her what you are. It will cost you emotionally." "Did it cost you to save me?" There was a long silence. The mist shimmered darkly in the trees. The rain sighed. Bryde said finally, "You are the most expensive thing I have ever saved.

This is what I believe to be the progress of a writer. You write 10 things, of which one of them will be great. You then write 11 things, of which two of them will be great. Then you write 12 things, of which four of them will be great. Then you write 13 things, of which eight of them will be great. Finally you write 14 things, of which 16 of those 14 things will be great. 


I hover over the expensive Scotch and then the Armagnac, but finally settle on a glass of rich red claret. I put it near my nose and nearly pass out. It smells of old houses and aged wood and dark secrets, but also of hard, hot sunshine through ancient shutters and long, wicked afternoons in a four-poster bed. It's not a wine, it's a life, right there in the glass.

Holy crap, Caleb! You're my uncle." Nick "No!" Caleb "It's worse. He's the half-brother of your great-grandfather." Kody "You're not helping." Caleb "No, but I'm entertaining myself at your adorable expense." Kody "Yeah, y'all are missing the important fact. To a Cajun, that makes him my uncle." Nick "Great. I always wanted to be a monkey's uncle. Nice to know I finally succeeded." Caleb

The American university has become the final stage of the most all encompassing initiation rite the world has ever known. No society in history has been able to survive without ritual or myth, but ours is the first which has needed such a dull, protracted, destructive, and expensive initiation into its myth. The contemporary world civilization is also the first one which has found it necessary to rationalize its fundamental initiation ritual in the name of education. We cannot begin a reform of education unless we first understand that neither individual learning nor social equality can be enhanced by the ritual of schooling. We cannot go beyond the consumer society unless we first understand that obligatory public schools inevitably reproduce such a society, no matter what is taught in them.

When I first heard Twilight was a book about vampires that sparkled in the light and shape shifters/wolves eager to assist the vampires, I thought, Finally, a metaphorical book dealing with politicians and lobbyists.

Long before it was known to me as a place where my ancestry was even remotely involved, the idea of a state for Jews (or a Jewish state; not quite the same thing, as I failed at first to see) had been 'sold' to me as an essentially secular and democratic one. The idea was a haven for the persecuted and the survivors, a democracy in a region where the idea was poorly understood, and a place where—as Philip Roth had put it in a one-handed novel that I read when I was about nineteen—even the traffic cops and soldiers were Jews. This, like the other emphases of that novel, I could grasp. Indeed, my first visit was sponsored by a group in London called the Friends of Israel. They offered to pay my expenses, that is, if on my return I would come and speak to one of their meetings. I still haven't submitted that expenses claim. The misgivings I had were of two types, both of them ineradicable. The first and the simplest was the encounter with everyday injustice: by all means the traffic cops were Jews but so, it turned out, were the colonists and ethnic cleansers and even the torturers. It was Jewish leftist friends who insisted that I go and see towns and villages under occupation, and sit down with Palestinian Arabs who were living under house arrest—if they were lucky—or who were squatting in the ruins of their demolished homes if they were less fortunate. In Ramallah I spent the day with the beguiling Raimonda Tawil, confined to her home for committing no known crime save that of expressing her opinions. (For some reason, what I most remember is a sudden exclamation from her very restrained and respectable husband, a manager of the local bank: 'I would prefer living under a Bedouin muktar to another day of Israeli rule!' He had obviously spent some time thinking about the most revolting possible Arab alternative.) In Jerusalem I visited the Tutungi family, who could produce title deeds going back generations but who were being evicted from their apartment in the old city to make way for an expansion of the Jewish quarter. Jerusalem: that place of blood since remote antiquity. Jerusalem, over which the British and French and Russians had fought a foul war in the Crimea, and in the mid-nineteenth century, on the matter of which Christian Church could command the keys to some 'holy sepulcher.' Jerusalem, where the anti-Semite Balfour had tried to bribe the Jews with the territory of another people in order to seduce them from Bolshevism and continue the diplomacy of the Great War. Jerusalem: that pest-house in whose environs all zealots hope that an even greater and final war can be provoked. It certainly made a warped appeal to my sense of history.

But she finally had the good sense to see that a long, dull and predictable future was an expensive price to pay for the satisfaction of a passing sexual attraction.

Finally, I texted Max. Jameson locked me in the world’s most expensive dungeon, I wrote. He’s got some asinine idea about protecting me. Max’s reply didn’t take long. THAT GREEN-EYED BASTARD.

Each Moment a White Bull Steps Shining into the World If the gods bring to you a strange and frightening creature, accept the gift as if it were one you had chosen. Say the accustomed prayers, oil the hooves well, caress the small ears with praise. Have the new halter of woven silver embedded with jewels. Spare no expense, pay what is asked, when a gift arrives from the sea. Treat it as you yourself would be treated, brought speechless and naked into the court of a king. And when the request finally comes, do not hesitate even an instant---- stroke the white throat, the heavy trembling dewlaps you'd come to believe were yours, and plunge in the knife. Not once did you enter the pasture without pause, without yourself trembling, that you came to love it, that was the gift. Let the envious gods take back what they can.

Are you all right?" A crease appears between his eyebrows, and he touches my cheek gently.I bat his hand away. "Well," I say, "first I got reamed out in front of everyone,and then I had to chat with the woman who's trying to destroy my old faction,and then Eric almost tossed my friends out of Dauntless,so yeah,it's shaping up to be a pretty great day,Four." He shakes his head and looks at the dilapidated building to his right, which is made of brick and barely resembles the sleek glass spire behind me. It must be ancient.No one builds with brick anymore. "Why do you care,anyway?" I say. "You can be either cruel instructor or concerned boyfriend." I tense up at the word "boyfriend." I didn't mean to use it so flippantly,but it's too late now. "You can't play both parts at the same time." "I am not cruel." He scowls at me. "I was protecting you this morning. How do you think Peter and his idiot friends would have reacted if they discovered that you and I were..." He sighs. "You would never win. They would always call your ranking a result of my favoritism rather than your skill." I open my mouth to object,but I can't. A few smart remarks come to mind, but I dismiss them. He's right. My cheeks warm, and I cool them with my hands. "You didn't have to insult me to prove something to them," I say finally. "And you didn't have to run off to your brother just because I hurt you," he says. He rubs at the back of his neck. "Besides-it worked,didn't it?" "At my expense." "I didn't think it would affect you this way." Then he looks down and shrugs. "Sometimes I forget that I can hurt you.That you are capable of being hurt." I slide my hands into my pockets and rock back on my heels.A strange feeling goes through me-a sweet,aching weakness. He did what he did because he believed in my strength. At home it was Caleb who was strong,because he could forget himself,because all the characteristics my parents valued came naturally to him. No one has ever been so convinced of my strength. I stand on my tiptoes, lift my head, and kiss him.Only our lips touch. "You're brilliant,you know that?" I shake my head. "You always know exactly what to do." "Only because I've been thinking about this for a long time," he says, kissing my briefly. "How I would handle it, if you and I..." He pulls back and smiles. "Did I hear you call me your boyfriend,Tris?" "Not exactly." I shrug. "Why? Do you want me to?" He slips his hands over my neck and presses his thumbs under my chin, tilting my head back so his forehead meets mine. For a moment he stands there, his eyes closed, breathing my air. I feel the pulse in his fingertips. I feel the quickness of his breath. He seems nervous. "Yes," he finally says. Then his smile fades. "You think we convinced him you're just a silly girl?" "I hope so," I say.

Finally, we can congratulate ourselves on the unprecedented accomplishments of modern Sapiens only if we completely ignore the fate of all other animals. Much of the vaunted material wealth that shields us from disease and famine was accumulated at the expense of laboratory monkeys, dairy cows and conveyor-belt chickens. Over the last two centuries tens of billions of them have been subjected to a regime of industrial exploitation whose cruelty has no precedent in the annals of planet Earth. If we accept a mere tenth of what animal-rights activists are claiming, then modern industrial agriculture might well be the greatest crime in history. When evaluating global happiness, it is wrong to count the happiness only of the upper classes, of Europeans or of men. Perhaps it is also wrong to consider only the happiness of humans.

In earlier times, one had an easier conscience about being a person than one does today. People were like cornstalks in a field, probably more violently tossed back and forth by God, hail, fire, pestilence, and war than they are today, but as a whole, as a city, a region, a field, and as to what personal movement was left to the individual stalk – all this was clearly defined and could be answered for. But today responsibility’s center of gravity is not in people but in circumstances. Have we not noticed that experiences have made themselves independent of people? They have gone on the stage, into books, into the reports of research institutes and explorers, into ideological or religious communities, which foster certain kinds of experience at the expense of others as if they are conducting a kind of social experiment, and insofar as experiences are not actually being developed, they are simply left dangling in the air. Who can say nowadays that his anger is really his own anger when so many people talk about it and claim to know more about it than he does? A world of qualities without a man has arisen, of experiences without the person who experiences them, and it almost looks as though ideally private experience is a thing of the past, and that the friendly burden of personal responsibility is to dissolve into a system of formulas of possible meanings. Probably the dissolution of the anthropocentric point of view, which for such a long time considered man to be at the center of the universe but which has been fading away for centuries, has finally arrived at the “I” itself, for the belief that the most important thing about experience is the experiencing, or of action the doing, is beginning to strike most people as naïve. There are probably people who still lead personal lives, who say “We saw the So-and-sos yesterday” or “We’ll do this or that today” and enjoy it without its needing to have any content of significance. They like everything that comes in contact with their fingers, and are purely private persons insofar as this is at all possible. In contact with such people, the world becomes a private world and shines like a rainbow. They may be very happy, but this kind of people usually seems absurd to the others, although it is still not at all clear why. And suddenly, in view of these reflections, Ulrich had to smile and admit to himself that he was, after all, a character, even without having one.

Man must be an emptiness, a nothingness, which is not a pure nothingness (reines Nichts), but something that is to the extent that it annihilates Being, in order to realize itself at the expense of Being and to nihilate in being. Man is negating Action, which transforms given Being and, by transforming it, transforms itself. Man is what he is only to the extent that he becomes what he is; his true Being (Sein) is Becoming (Werden), Time, History; and he becomes, he is History only in and by Action that negates the given, the Action of Fighting and of Work — of the Work that finally produces the table on which Hegel writes his Phenomenology, and of the Fight that is finally that Battle at Jena whose sounds he hearts while writing the Phenomenology. And that is why, in answering the “What am I?” Hegel had to take account of both that table and those sounds.

When he’d watched her in the past, he hadn’t understood why she would wear such conservative tops, then such provocative skirts. Yes, they went past her knees, but they also stretched so enticingly over her ass. He’d finally figured it out. Holly didn’t realize how those expensive materials molded over her generous curves. Cade knew females liked to ask, “Does my ass look big in this?” But considering Holly as an example, he’d begun to suspect that women really couldn’t determine what their asses looked like. Oh, well. A question for the ages.

You don't know shit, man," he said finally. He was brisk and sad at the same time. "I hate to get on you for this. I'm not getting on you for this, but I'm just telling you. This is the first... negative thing that happened to you in your life. And you can't be overreacting to it and making big-ass expensive decisions based on it. I'm just saying. People die. Other people do stupid shit. I’m surrounded by family members doing stupid shit. I used to think I had to do shit for them. I still wanna do shit for them. But you gotta live your own life. You gotta take care of your own shit before you get started doing things for errybody else.

The neurotic, as long as he must adhere to his illusions about himself, cannot recognize limitations, the search for glory goes into the unlimited. Because the main goal is the attainment of glory, he becomes uninterested in the process of learning, of doing, or of gaining step by step — indeed, tends to scorn it. He does not want to climb a mountain; he wants to be on the peak. Hence he loses the sense of what evolution or growth means, even though he may talk about it. Because, finally, the creation of the idealized self is possible only at the expense of truth about himself, its actualization requires further distortions of truth, imagination being a willing servant to this end. Thereby, to a greater or lesser extent, he loses in the process his interest in truth, and the sense for what is true or not true — a loss that, among others, accounts for his difficulty in distinguishing between genuine feelings, beliefs, strivings, and their artificial equivalents (unconscious pretenses) in himself and in others. The emphasis shifts from being to appearing.

The wedding isn’t what makes a marriage.” She told them. “Love is what makes a marriage. The wedding is just an expensive party.

We all live with expensive ghosts in memory’s unmade bed, for what we do not remember remembers us nonetheless

Number 198 was wonderful too. Blake had watched a good-looking and ridiculously pretentious guy hit on Livia. The fancy man dropped expensive name after name as he showed her all his accessories. When he finally pulled out his wallet to show her a “highly desirable luxury credit card” Livia had rolled her eyes in Blake’s direction with smile number 198. He’d had to swallow a snicker when he heard her tell the fancy man she was debt free and didn’t even have credit cards. Blake knew that was a lie because he’d seen her pay for tickets with a card at the train station. That made number 198 a secret joke between just the two of them.

In front of the group was a legless man on a small wheeled trolley, who was singing at the top of his voice and banging two saucepans together. His name was Arnold Sideways. Pushing him along was Coffin Henry, whose croaking progress through an entirely different song was punctuated by bouts of off-the-beat coughing. He was accompanied by a perfectly ordinary-looking manin torn, dirty and yet expensive looking clothing, whose pleasant tenor voice was drowned out by the quaking of a duck on his head. He answered to the name of Duck Man, although he never seemed to understand why, or why he was always surrounded by people who seemed to see ducks where no ducks could be. And finally, being towed along by a small grey dog on a string, was Foul Ole Ron, generally regarded in Ankh-Morpork as the deranged beggars' deranged beggar. He was probably incapable of singing, but at least he was attempting to swear in time to the beat, or beats. The wassailers stopped and watched them in horror. People have always had the urge to sing and clang things at the dark stub of the year, when all sorts of psychic nastiness has taken advantage of the long grey days and the deep shadows to lurk and breed. Lately people had taken to singing harmoniously, which rather lost the affect. Those who really understood just clanged something and shouted. The beggars were not in fact this well versed in folkloric practice. They were just making a din in the well-founded hope that people would give them money to stop. It was just possible to make out consensus song in there somewhere. "Hogswatch is coming, The pig is getting fat, Please put a dollar in the old man's hat If you ain't got a dollar a penny will do-" "And if you ain't got a penny," Foul Ole Ron yodeled, solo, 'Then- fghfgh yffg mfmfmf..." The Duck man had, with great Presence of mind, clamped a hand over Ron's mouth.

The Dean’s complaining to his Faculty. “Why do you scientists need such expensive equipment? Why can’t you be like the Math Department, which only needs a blackboard and a wastepaper basket? Better still, like the Department of Philosophy. That doesn’t even need a wastepaper basket…

Why do you care, anyway?" I say. "You can be either cruel instructor or concerned boyfriend." I tense up at the word "boyfriend." I didn’t mean to use it so flippantly, but it’s too late now. "You can’t play both parts at the same time." "I am not cruel." He scowls at me "I was protecting you this morning. How do you think Peter and his idiot friends would have reacted if they discovered that you and I were..." He sighs. "You would never win. They would always call you ranking a result of my favoritism rather than your skill." I open my mouth to object, but I can't. A few smart remarks come to mind, but I dismiss them. He's right. My cheeks warm, and I cool them with my hands. "You didn't have to insult me to prove something to them," I say finally. "And you didn't have to run off to your brother just because I hurt you," he says. He rubs at the back of his neck. "Besides- it worked, didn't it?" "At my expense." "I didn't think it would affect you this way." Then he looks down and shrugs. "Sometimes I forget that I can hurt you. That you are capable of being hurt." I slide my hands into my pockets and rock back on my heels. A strange feeling goes through me- a sweet, aching weakness. He did what he did because he believed in my strength. At home it was Caleb who was strong, because he could forget himself, because all the characteristics my parents valued came naturally to him. No one has ever been so convinced of my strength. I stand on my tiptoes, lift my head, and kiss him. Only our lips touch. "You're brilliant. You know that?" I shake my head. "You always know exactly what to do." "Only because I've been thinking about his for a long time," he says, kissing me briefly. "How I would handle it, if you and I..." He pulls back and smiles. "Did I hear you call me your boyfriend, Tris?" "Not exactly." I shrug. "Why? Do you want me to?" He slips his hands over my neck and presses his thumbs under my chin, tilting my head back so his forehead meets mine. For a moment he stands there, his eyes closed, breathing my air. I feel the pulse in his fingertips. I feel the quickness of his breath. He seems nervous. "Yes," he finally says.

On Final Twist, five college friends take a sixth to an expensive Italian restaurant, supposedly to introduce him to a hot girl, actually to break the news that his mother is dead. This is the InitialTwist. During dessert they are told that, in fact, all of their mothers are dead. This is the SecondTwist. The ThirdTwist is, not only are all their mothers dead, the show paid to have them killed, and the fourth and FinalTwist is, the kids have just eaten their own grilled mothers.

You’ve actually just reminded me. I brought you something.” She had finally assembled the first two issues of the Dr. Eleven comics, and had had a few copies printed at her own expense. She extracted two copies each of Dr. Eleven, Vol. 1, No. 1: Station Eleven and Dr. Eleven, Vol. 1, No. 2: The Pursuit from her handbag, and passed them across the table.

I remember my mother telling me, when she was in the midst of settling my grandfather's estate, that fifty percent of a person's medical expenses are incurred in the last six months of life. My grandfather's history of himself was distributed even more disproportionately: Ninety percent of everything he ever told me about his life, I heard during its final ten days.

Phil talked openly about his current life, but he closed up when I asked him about his early years. With some gentle probing, he told me that what he remembered most vividly about his childhood was his father’s constant teasing. The jokes were always at Phil’s expense and he often felt humiliated. When the rest of the family laughed, he felt all the more isolated. It was bad enough being teased, but sometimes he really scared me when he’d say things like: “This boy can’t be a son of ours, look at that face. I’ll bet they switched babies on us in the hospital. Why don’t we take him back and swap him for the right one.” I was only six, and I really thought I was going to get dropped off at the hospital. One day, I finally said to him, “Dad, why are you always picking on me?” He said, “I’m not picking on you. I’m just joking around. Can’t you see that?” Phil, like any young child, couldn’t distinguish the truth from a joke, a threat from a tease. Positive humor is one of our most valuable tools for strengthening family bonds. But humor that belittles can be extremely damaging within the family. Children take sarcasm and humorous exaggeration at face value. They are not worldly enough to understand that a parent is joking when he says something like, “We’re going to have to send you to preschool in China.” Instead, the child may have nightmares about being abandoned in some frightening, distant land. We have all been guilty of making jokes at someone else’s expense. Most of the time, such jokes can be relatively harmless. But, as in other forms of toxic parenting, it is the frequency, the cruelty, and the source of these jokes that make them abusive. Children believe and internalize what their parents say about them. It is sadistic and destructive for a parent to make repetitive jokes at the expense of a vulnerable child. Phil was constantly being humiliated and picked on. When he made an attempt to confront his father’s behavior, he was accused of being inadequate because he “couldn’t take a joke.” Phil had nowhere to go with all these feelings. As Phil described his feelings, I could see that he was still embarrassed—as if he believed that his complaints were silly.

To us a human is primarily food; our aim is the absorption of its will into ours, the increase of our own area of selfhood at its expense. But the obedience which the Enemy demands of men is quite a different thing. One must face the fact that all the talk about His love for men, and His service being perfect freedom, is not (as one would gladly believe) mere propaganda, but an appalling truth. He really does want to fill the universe with a lot of loathsome little replicas of Himself—creatures whose life, on its miniature scale, will be qualitatively like His own, not because He has absorbed them but because their wills freely conform to His. We want cattle who can finally become food; He wants servants who can finally become sons. We want to suck in, He wants to give out. We are empty and would be filled; He is full and flows over. Our war aim is a world in which Our Father Below has drawn all other beings into himself: the Enemy wants a world full of beings united to Him but still distinct. And

Many historians, many sociologists and psychologists have written at lenght, and with deep concern, about the price that Western man has had to pay and will go on paying for technological progress. They point out, for example, that democracy can be hardly expected to flourish in societies where political and economic power is being progressively concentrated and centralized.But the progress of technology has led and is still leading to just such a concentration and centralisation of power. As the machinery of mass production is made more efficient it tends to become more complex and more expensive - and so less available to the eterpriser of limited means. Moreover, mass production cannot work without mass distribution; but mass distribution raises problems which only the largest producers can satisfactorily solve. In a world of mass production and mass distribution the Little Man, with his inadequate stock of working capital, is at a grave disadvantage. In competition with Big Man, he loses his money and finally his very existence as an independent producer; the Big Man has grobbled him up. As the Little Men disappear, more and more economic power comes to be wielded by fewer and fewer people. Under a dictatorship the Big Business, made possible by advancing technology and the consequent ruin of Little Business, is controlled by the State - that is to say, by small group of party leaders and soldiers, policemen and civil servants who carry out their orders.

I'm the drummer for Stage Dive." Mat set the crazily expensive camera on the seat beside him. "You can't order me around, child bride." "It's so cute that you think that's still funny, calling me child bride." From her back jean pocket, Ev pulled out her cell. "Am I calling Anne to tattle on you for refusing to give Jimmy and Lena some privacy or not?" "You wouldn't dare." Her fingers moved across the screen. "Oh, I think I would." David and Ben chuckled in ther manly way, but did as told and went back into the recording studio. They clearly weren't messing with the girl. A second later, Mal followed. "I do not like you women all being friends. This is not okay." "And you should tell your grilfriend all about it when you see her tonight. I'd love to know what she says." With a final wave, Ev followed him back inside the mixing room or whatever it was called.

The extravagant schemes and immoderate expense of Duke Charles had already excited the suspicion of his Estates; and the mutual good-will betwixt the prince and people began to be exchanged for suspicion and distrust on the one side, and defiance on the other. The refractory disposition of the Estates had of late increased; for they had disapproved of various wars in which their Duke had needlessly embarked, and from his levying such large bodies of mercenary troops, they came to suspect he might finally employ the wealth voted to him by his subjects for the undue extension of his royal prerogative, and the destruction of the liberties of the people.

A state too expensive in itself, or by virtue of its dependencies, ultimately falls into decay; its free government is transformed into a tyranny; it disregards the principles which it should preserve, and finally degenerates into despotism.

Figuring out how much to pay for a college education is one of the biggest financial decisions people make in their lifetime, and parents often leave the final call to a 17-year-old who has never purchased anything more expensive than a bicycle.

Look first for someone both smarter and wiser than you are. After locating him (or her), ask him not to flaunt his superiority so that you may enjoy acclaim for the many accomplishments that sprang from his thoughts and advice. Seek a partner who will never second-guess you nor sulk when you make expensive mistakes. Look also for a generous soul who will put up his own money and work for peanuts. Finally, join with someone who will constantly add to the fun as you travel a long road together.

One of my greatest fears is family decline.There’s an old Chinese saying that “prosperity can never last for three generations.” I’ll bet that if someone with empirical skills conducted a longitudinal survey about intergenerational performance, they’d find a remarkably common pattern among Chinese immigrants fortunate enough to have come to the United States as graduate students or skilled workers over the last fifty years. The pattern would go something like this: • The immigrant generation (like my parents) is the hardest-working. Many will have started off in the United States almost penniless, but they will work nonstop until they become successful engineers, scientists, doctors, academics, or businesspeople. As parents, they will be extremely strict and rabidly thrifty. (“Don’t throw out those leftovers! Why are you using so much dishwasher liquid?You don’t need a beauty salon—I can cut your hair even nicer.”) They will invest in real estate. They will not drink much. Everything they do and earn will go toward their children’s education and future. • The next generation (mine), the first to be born in America, will typically be high-achieving. They will usually play the piano and/or violin.They will attend an Ivy League or Top Ten university. They will tend to be professionals—lawyers, doctors, bankers, television anchors—and surpass their parents in income, but that’s partly because they started off with more money and because their parents invested so much in them. They will be less frugal than their parents. They will enjoy cocktails. If they are female, they will often marry a white person. Whether male or female, they will not be as strict with their children as their parents were with them. • The next generation (Sophia and Lulu’s) is the one I spend nights lying awake worrying about. Because of the hard work of their parents and grandparents, this generation will be born into the great comforts of the upper middle class. Even as children they will own many hardcover books (an almost criminal luxury from the point of view of immigrant parents). They will have wealthy friends who get paid for B-pluses.They may or may not attend private schools, but in either case they will expect expensive, brand-name clothes. Finally and most problematically, they will feel that they have individual rights guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution and therefore be much more likely to disobey their parents and ignore career advice. In short, all factors point to this generation

In 2008, the national Coping with Cancer project published a study showing that terminally ill cancer patients who were put on a mechanical ventilator, given electrical defibrillation or chest compressions, or admitted, near death, to intensive care had a substantially worse quality of life in their last week than those who received no such interventions. And, six months after their death, their caregivers were three times as likely to suffer major depression. Spending one’s final days in an I.C.U. because of terminal illness is for most people a kind of failure. You lie on a ventilator, your every organ shutting down, your mind teetering on delirium and permanently beyond realizing that you will never leave this borrowed, fluorescent place. The end comes with no chance for you to have said goodbye or “It’s O.K.” or “I’m sorry” or “I love you.” People have concerns besides simply prolonging their lives. Surveys of patients with terminal illness find that their top priorities include, in addition to avoiding suffering, being with family, having the touch of others, being mentally aware, and not becoming a burden to others. Our system of technological medical care has utterly failed to meet these needs, and the cost of this failure is measured in far more than dollars. The hard question we face, then, is not how we can afford this system’s expense. It is how we can build a health-care system that will actually help dying patients achieve what’s most important to them at the end of their lives.

decision: I refuse to achieve “success” at the expense of my life. The two—life success and genuine fulfillment—will have to go hand in hand, because I will not keep my head down for the next forty years only to look up at the end and say, “Now I can finally start living!

There had been a time, once, when he had not lived like this, a .32 under his pillow, a lunatic in the back yard firing off a pistol for God knew what purpose, some other nut or perhaps the same one imposing a brain-print of his own shorted-out upstairs on an incredibly expensive and valued cephscope that everyone in the house, plus all their friends, loved and enjoyed. In former days Bob Arctor had run his affairs differently: there had been a wife much like other wives, two small daughters, a stable household that got swept and cleaned and emptied out daily, the dead newspapers not even opened carried from the front walk to the garbage pail, or even, sometimes, read. But then one day, while lifting out an electric corn popper from under the sink, Arctor had hit his head on the corner of a kitchen cabinet directly above him. The pain, the cut in his scalp, so unexpected and undeserved, had for some reason cleared away the cobwebs. It flashed on him instantly that he didn't hate the kitchen cabinet: he hated his wife, his two daughters, his whole house, the back yard with its power mower, the garage, the radiant heating system, the front yard, the fence, the whole fucking place and everyone in it. He wanted a divorce; he wanted to split. And so he had, very soon. And entered, by degrees, a new and somber life, lacking all of that. Probably he should have regretted his decision. He had not. That life had been one without excitement, with no adventure. It had been too safe. All the elements that made it up were right there before his eyes, and nothing new could ever be expected. It was like, he had once thought, a little plastic boat that would sail on forever, without incident, until it finally sank, which would be a secret relief to all. But in this dark world where he now dwelt, ugly things and surprising things and once in a long while a tiny wondrous thing spilled out at him constantly; he could count on nothing.

In 2001, a teenager was arrested in Pennsylvania for daytime burglary. The teenager had broken into a local home, by climbing in through a bedroom window. The teenager stole two expensive diamond rings, but instead of quickly leaving the crime scene, he decided that he needed to check his Facebook first.   After he checked his Facebook, he finally left. However, not only had he signed into his actual Facebook account,  he did not sign out of his account, or even close out the browser. When the police checked the scene of the crime, his Facebook profile was still open, with all of his personal information readily available.

To a Jew this role of the Jewish leaders in the destruction of their own people is undoubtedly the darkest chapter of the whole dark story. It had been known about before, but it has now been exposed for the first time in all its pathetic and sordid detail by Raul Hilberg, whose standard work The Destruction of the European Jews I mentioned before. In the matter of cooperation, there was no distinction between the highly assimilated Jewish communities of Central and Western Europe and the Yiddish-speaking masses of the East. In Amsterdam as in Warsaw, in Berlin as in Budapest, Jewish officials could be trusted to compile the lists of persons and of their property, to secure money from the deportees to defray the expenses of their deportation and extermination, to keep track of vacated apartments, to supply police forces to help seize Jews and get them on trains, until, as a last gesture, they handed over the assets of the Jewish community in good order for final confiscation.

Carney was flattered that the Italian thought he had the scratch to buy the two buildings, that the white side of town recognized his successes, then quickly assumed something was wrong and Bongiovanni was dumping bum properties on him. The city itching to condemn, some expensive disaster in the sewer below, or the final version of the Curse of 125th and Morningside finally come due. None of that turned out to be true, although Mrs. Hernandez in apartment 3R of 381 had a mysterious stain in her bathroom wall that returned each time it was patched and repainted and which bore an eerie resemblance to Dwight Eisenhower, a curse if ever he heard one. “He stares at me,” she said.

The super-rich will finally have something really worthwhile to do with their stupendous wealth. While hitherto they could buy little more than status symbols, soon they might be able to buy life itself. If new treatments for extending life and for upgrading physical and cognitive abilities prove to be expensive, humankind might split into biological castes.

I remember my mother telling me, when she was in the midst of settling my grandfather’s estate, that fifty percent of a person’s medical expenses are incurred in the last six months of life. My grandfather’s history of himself was distributed even more disproportionately: Ninety percent of everything he ever told me about his life, I heard during its final ten days.

Jot down a few important personal details and passwords. Assign or update your beneficiaries. Update (or finally get) the right insurance policies. Finish your will, living will, and power-of-attorney documents. Plan for at least six months of expenses in a savings fund. Save for a long and lovely retirement or an emergency tomorrow. Prioritize the urgent items from the not-so-important.

If only humankind would soon succeed in destroying itself; true, I'm afraid : it will take a long time yet, but they'll manage it for sure. They'll have to learn to fly too, so that it will be easier to toss firebrands into cities (a pretty sight : a portly, bronze boat perhaps, from which a couple of mail-clad warriors contemptuously hurl a few flaming armored logs, while from below they shoot at the scaly beasts with howling arrows. They could also easily pour burning oil out of steel pitchers. Or poison. In the wells. By night). Well, they'll manage it all right (if I can come up with that much !). For they pervert all things to evil. The alphabet : it was intended to record timeless poetry or wisdom or memories - but they scrawl myriads of trashy novels and inflammatory pamphlets. What do they deftly make of metals ? Swords and arrow tips. - Fire ? Cities are already smoldering. And in the agora throng the pickpockets and swashbucklers, cutpurses, bawds, quacks and whores. And at best, the rest are simpletons, dandies, and brainless yowlers. And every one of them self-complacent, pretending respectability, bows politely, puffs out coarse cheeks, waves his hands, ogles, jabbers, crows. (They have many words : Experienced : someone who knows plenty of the little underhanded tricks. - Mature : has finally unlearned every ideal. Sophisticated : impertinent and ought to have been hanged long ago.) Those are the small fry; and the : every statesman, politician, orator; prince, general, officer should be throttled on the spot before he has time or opportunity to earn the title at humankind's expense. - Who alone can be great ? Artists and scientists ! And no one else ! And the least of them, if an honest man, is a thousand times greater than the great Xerxes. - If the gods would grant me 3 wishes, one of them would be immediately to free the earth of humankind. And of animals, too (they're too wicked for me as well). Plants are better (except for the insectavores) - The wind has picked up.

We thrive in environments that respect us and allow us to (1) feel included, (2) feel safe to learn, (3) feel safe to contribute, and (4) feel safe to challenge the status quo. If we can’t do these things, if it’s emotionally expensive, fear shuts us down. We’re not happy and we’re not reaching our potential. But when the environment nurtures psychological safety, there’s an explosion of confidence, engagement, and performance. Ask yourself if you feel included, safe to learn, safe to contribute, and safe to challenge the status quo. Finally, ask yourself if you’re creating an environment where others can do these four things. In the process, look around and see others with respect and fresh amazement, find deeper communion in your relationships, and more happiness and satisfaction in your own life.

I spent my lifetime fighting the darkness without becoming the darkness. Maybe I had falteredat the very end. Maybe I had finally come up against something that made me cross the line-but even then, I hadn't turned into a degenerate freakazoid of the Kemmler variety. One mistake at the end of my life couldn't erase all the times I had stood unmoved at the edge of the abyss and made snide remarks at its expense.

s medical expenses. When he was finally released from the hospital, he convalesced at home for a long time. He couldn’t work for years, and my mother, with nine kids, including a newborn, to take care of, couldn’t earn any money either. Eventually our money ran out, and we had to live on welfare. We used to joke that we were so poor you could look up the word poor in the dictionary and it would say, “SEE THE BILTZ FAMILY.

When Elizabeth finally descended the stairs on her way to the dining room she was two hours late. Deliberately. “Good heavens, you’re tardy, my dear!” Sir Francis said, shoving back his chair and rushing to the doorway where Elizabeth had been standing, trying to gather her courage to do what needed to be done. “Come and meet my guests,” he said, drawing her forward after a swift, disappointed look at her drab attire and severe coiffure. “We did as you suggested in your note and went ahead with supper. What kept you abovestairs so long?” “I was at prayer,” Elizabeth said, managing to look him straight in the eye. Sir Francis recovered from his surprise in time to introduce her to the three other people at the table-two men who resembled him in age and features and two women of perhaps five and thirty who were both attired in the most shockingly revealing gowns Elizabeth had ever seen. Elizabeth accepted a helping of cold meat to silence her protesting stomach while both women studied her with unhidden scorn. “That is a most unusual ensemble you’re wearing, I must say,” remarked the woman named Eloise. “Is it the custom where you come from to dress so…simply?” Elizabeth took a dainty bite of meat. “Not really. I disapprove of too much personal adornment.” She turned to Sir Francis with an innocent stare. “Gowns are expensive. I consider them a great waste of money.” Sir Francis was suddenly inclined to agree, particularly since he intended to keep her naked as much as possible. “Quite right!” he beamed, eyeing the other ladies with pointed disapproval. “No sense in spending all that money on gowns. No point in spending money at all.” “My sentiments exactly,” Elizabeth said, nodding. “I prefer to give every shilling I can find to charity instead.” “Give it away?” he said in a muted roar, half rising out of his chair. Then he forced himself to sit back down and reconsider the wisdom of wedding her. She was lovely-her face more mature then he remembered it, but not even the black veil and scraped-back hair could detract from the beauty of her emerald-green eyes with their long, sooty lashes. Her eyes had dark circles beneath them-shadows he didn’t recall seeing there earlier in the day. He put the shadows down to her far-too-serious nature. Her dowry was creditable, and her body beneath that shapeless black gown…he wished he could see her shape. Perhaps it, too, had changed, and not for the better, in the past few years. “I had hoped, my dear,” Sir Francis said, covering her hand with his and squeezing it affectionately, “that you might wear something else down to supper, as I suggested you should.” Elizabeth gave him an innocent stare. “This is all I brought.” “All you brought?” he uttered. “B-But I definitely saw my footmen carrying several trunks upstairs.” “They belong to my aunt-only one of them is mine,” she fabricated hastily, already anticipating his next question and thinking madly for some satisfactory answer. “Really?” He continued to eye her gown with great dissatisfaction, and then he asked exactly the question she’d expected: “What, may I ask, does your one truck contain if not gowns?” Inspiration struck, and Elizabeth smiled radiantly. “Something of great value. Priceless value,” she confided. All faces at the table watched her with alert fascination-particularly the greedy Sir Francis. “Well, don’t keep us in suspense, love. What’s in it?” “The mortal remains of Saint Jacob.

When I was 29, my gynecologist gave me a reprieve; I was no longer living under the 10-year cancer death threat. I had gotten a clean bill of health, finally. I felt free, but dissatisfied. Only years later did I realize that on a deep unconscious level, I was ready to experience young adulthood, something that I did not think I had the opportunity to experience at the appropriate time. Unfortunately, it would come at the expense of my children.

The United States had been created through an act of disloyalty. No matter how eloquently the Declaration of Independence had attempted to justify the American rebellion, a residual guilt hovered over the circumstances of the country's founding. Arnold changed all that. By threatening to destroy the newly created republic through, ironically, his own betrayal, Arnold gave this nation of traitors the greatest of gifts; a myth of creation. The American people had come to revere George Washington, but a hero alone was not sufficient to bring them together. Now they had the despised villain Benedict Arnold. They knew both what they were fighting for - and against. The story of American's genesis could finally move beyond the break with the mother country and start to focus on the process by which thirteen former colonies could become a nation. As Arnold had demonstrated, the real enemy was not Great Britain, but those Americans who sought to undercut their fellow citizens commitment to one another. Whether it was Joseph Reed's willingness to promote his state's interests at the expenses of what was best for the country as a whole or Arnold's decision to sell his loyalty to the highest bidder, the greatest danger to America's future cam from self-serving opportunism masquerading as patriotism. At this fragile state in the country's development, a way had to be found to strengthen rather than destroy the existing framework of government. The Continental Congress was far from perfect, but it offered a start to what could one day be a great nation. By turning traitor, Arnold had alerted the American people to how close they had all come to betraying the Revolution by putting their own interests ahead of their newborn country's. Already the name Benedict Arnold was becoming a byword for that most hateful of crimes: treason against the people of the United States.

Evening in the garden of the Askanischer Hof. Ate rice a la Trautmannsdorf and a peach. A man drinking wine watched my attempts to cut the unripe little peach with my knife. I couldn’t. Stricken with shame under the old man’s eyes, I let the peach go completely and ten times leafed through Die Fliegenden Blatter. I waited to see if he wouldn’t at last turn away. Finally I collected all my strength and in defiance of him bit into the completely juiceless and expensive peach.

Economics is haunted by more fallacies than any other study known to man. This is no accident. The inherent difficulties of the subject would be great enough in any case, but they are multiplied a thousandfold by a factor that is insignificant in, say, physics, mathematics or medicine - the special pleading of selfish interests. While every group has certain economic interests identical with those of all groups, every group has also, as we shall see, interests antagonistic to those of all other groups. While certain public policies would in the long run benefit everybody, other policies would benefit one group only at the expense of all other groups. The group that would benefit by such policies, having such a direct interest in them, will argue for them plausibly and persistently. It will hire the best buyable minds to devote their whole time to presenting its case. And it will finally either convince the general public that its case is sound, or so befuddle it that clear thinking on the subject becomes next to impossible. In addition to these endless pleadings of self-interest, there is a second main factor that spawns new economic fallacies every day. This is the persistent tendency of man to see only the immediate effects of a given policy, or its effects only on a special group, and to neglect to inquire what the long-run effects of that policy will be not only on that special group but on all groups. It is the fallacy of overlooking secondary consequences.

[a St. Luke 14:26.] Of course, the term 'hate' does not imply hatred of parents or relatives, or of life, in the ordinary sense. But it points to this, that, as outward separation, consequent upon men's antagonism to Christ, was before them in the near future, so, in the present, inward separation, a renunciation in mind and heart, preparatory to that outwardly, was absolutely necessary. And this immediate call was illustrated in twofold manner. A man who was about to begin building a tower, must count the cost of his undertaking. [b vv. 28-30.] It was not enough that he was prepared to defray the expense of the foundations; he must look to the cost of the whole. So must they, in becoming disciples, look not on what was involved in the present following of Christ, but remember the cost of the final acknowledgement of Jesus. Again, if a king went to war, common prudence would lead him to consider whether his forces were equal to the great contest before him; else it were far better to withdraw in time, even though it involved humiliation, from what, in view of his weakness, would end in miserable defeat. [c vv. 31, 32.] So, and much more, must the intending disciple make complete inward surrender of all, deliberately counting the cost, and, in view of the coming trial, ask himself whether he had, indeed, sufficient inward strength, the force of love to Christ, to conquer. And thus discipleship, then, and, in measure, to all time, involves the necessity of complete inward surrender of everything for the love of Christ, so that if, and when, the time of outward trial comes, we may be prepared to conquer in the fight. [d ver. 33.] He fights well, who has first fought and conquered within.

Fairy tales are entertaining, but what about after the story? When the knight marries the princess do you think he actually makes a decent husband? Just because he wears expensive armor and rescues her doesn't mean he's a good man. He might slay as many innocent dragons as he does evil ones. The princess married a man, not a saint. Well, unless he's Saint George." He grinned but she didn't smile back. "That doesn't make saving a damsel in distress any less honorable. And if he stoops to marry his damsel he's the one most liked to be disappointed. A pretty face doesn't guarantee she can do anything useful." Ah, so they were more alike than he thought. She didn't believe she deserved him any more than he believed he did her. "So a poor maiden can't ever be worthy of a knight, not even a flawed one?" "What could a commoner possibly do to make a knight happy?" "You help him figure out which dragons need to be vanquished and which can be redeemed and trained." She finally looked at him for more than a moment, her eyes as dazzling as the sparkling flakes dancing in the moonlight. "Are we still talking about mythology?" Her voice shook. "No." He smiled. "I never thought we were.

Most galling was that his own Air Ministry appeared to be unable to account for 3,500 airplanes out of 8,500 frontline and reserve aircraft believed ready, or nearly ready, for service. “Surely there is in the Air Ministry an account kept of what happens to every machine,” Churchill complained in a subsequent minute. “These are very expensive articles. We must know the date when each one was received by the RAF and when it was finally struck off, and for what reason.” After all, he noted, even automaker Rolls-Royce kept track of each of car it sold. “A discrepancy of 3,500 in 8,500 is glaring.

In a very real sense, it was a game, the very subtle and entirely serious game of comparative rank which is played by all social animals. It is the method by which individuals arrange themselves—horses in a herd, wolves in a pack, people in a community—so that they can live together. The game pits two opposing forces against each other, both equally important to survival: individual autonomy and community welfare. The object is to achieve dynamic equilibrium. At times and under certain conditions individuals can be nearly autonomous. An individual can live alone and have no worry about rank, but no species can survive without interaction between individuals. The ultimate price would be more final than death. It would be extinction. On the other hand, complete individual subordination to the group is just as devastating. Life is neither static nor unchanging. With no individuality, there can be no change, no adaptation and, in an inherently changing world, any species unable to adapt is also doomed. Humans in a community, whether it is as small as two people or as large as the world, and no matter what form the society takes, will arrange themselves according to some hierarchy. Commonly understood courtesies and customs can help to smooth the friction and ease the stress of maintaining a workable balance within this constantly changing system. In some situations most individuals will not have to compromise much of their personal independence for the welfare of the community. In others, the needs of the community may demand the utmost personal sacrifice of the individual, even to life itself. Neither is more right than the other, it depends on the circumstances; but neither extreme can be maintained for long, nor can a society last if a few people exercise their individuality at the expense of the community.

The big celebration, the wedding or housewarming, takes place not when the debt is discharged, but when it is undertaken. What is emphasized on TV, for example, is not the middle-aged man who has finally paid off his mortgage, but the young man who moves into his new home with his family, proudly waving the papers he has just signed and which will bind him for most of his productive years. After he has paid his debts—the mortgage, the college expenses for his children and his insurance—he is regarded as a problem, a “senior citizen” for whom society must provide not only material comforts but a new “purpose.

And even as we 'wonder' at what we're doing here, so do we also fear-- so deep down below the surface of our lives that few can bear to look at it-- that life is a meaningless jest, an extravagant exercise in morbidity, a tale of sorrow and suffering lit by flashes, and made bearable only by moments of companionship and unsustainable joy. Along the way, as we struggle to come to terms and comprehend why this strange fate has befallen us, time becomes no longer our ally-- the spendthrift assumption of our youth-- but our executioner. It all feels at times like a merciless joke made at our expense, without our consent.

Beautiful features, always immaculately dressed, the kind of woman that makes a great impression. Their hair is always nicely curled. They major in French literature at expensive private women’s colleges, and after graduation find jobs as receptionists or secretaries. They work for a few years, visit Paris for shopping once a year with their girlfriends. They finally catch the eye of a promising young man in the company, or else are formally introduced to one, and quit work to get married. They then devote themselves to getting their children into famous private schools. As he sat there, Tsukuru pondered the kind of lives they led.

From the great sea-serpent to the nebular hypothesis, I was ready to write on anything or everything, and I can safely say that I seldom handled a subject without throwing new lights upon it. Poetry and romance, however, had always the greatest attractions for me. How I have wept over the pathos of my heroines, and laughed at the comicalities of my buffoons!Alas!I could find no one to join me in my appreciation, and solitary admiration for one's self, however genuine, becomes satiating after a time. My father remonstrated with me too on the score of expense and loss of time, so that I was finally compelled to relinquish my dreams of literary independence and to become a clerk

Bean the Wili chased Mrs. Noble around the house, waggling her fingernails and screaming. Finally, when they were both laughing so hard they couldn’t dance any more, they rushed into the kitchen and fell over on the floor. “Well, look who’s here,” said Ivy’s mom. She was making dinner. “Mom,” Ivy said when she got her breath back, “I have to take ballet class.” Ivy’s mom stirred something into something else. “You had to take ice-skating, too.” Ivy wiggled her toes. “Yeah, but that was a mistake.” “How do you know ballet isn’t a mistake, too? Those skates were expensive.” “Ballet is different,” Ivy explained. “Ballet isn’t freezing and dumb. Ballet is pretty. And it’s good for you.

My first impression of him was that he was free spirited, clever, funny. That proved to be completely inaccurate. We left the party together and walked around for hours, lied to each other about our happy lives, ate pizza at midnight, took the Staten Island Ferry back and forth and watched the sun rise. I gave him my phone number at the dorm. By the time he finally called me, two weeks later, I’d become obsessed with him. He kept me on a long, tight leash for months—expensive meals, the occasional opera or ballet. He took my virginity at a ski lodge in Vermont on Valentine’s Day. It wasn’t a pleasurable experience, but I trusted he knew more about sex than I did, so when he rolled off and said, “That was amazing,” I believed him. He was thirty-three, worked for Fuji Bank at the World Trade Center, wore tailored suits, sent cars to pick me up at my dorm, then the sorority house sophomore year, wined and dined me, and asked for head with no shame in the back of cabs he charged to the company account. I took this as proof of his masculine value. My “sisters” all agreed; he was “suave.” And I was impressed by how much he liked talking about his emotions, something I’d never seen a man do. “My mom’s a pothead now, and that’s why I have this deep sadness.” He took frequent trips to Tokyo for work and to San Francisco to visit his twin sister. I suspected she discouraged him from dating me.

This is a story about a tiger named Mohini that was in captivity in a zoo, who was rescued from an animal sanctuary. Mohini had been confined to a 10-by-10-foot cage with a concrete floor for 5 or 10 years. They finally released her into this big pasture: With excitement and anticipation, they released Mohini into her new and expensive environment, but it was too late. The tiger immediately sought refuge in a corner of the compound, where she lived for the remainder of her life. She paced and paced in that corner until an area 10-by-10 feet was worn bare of grass. . . . Perhaps the biggest tragedy in our lives is that freedom is possible, yet we can pass our years trapped in the same old patterns.

While every group has certain economic interests identical with those of all groups, every group has also, as we shall see, interests antagonistic to those of all other groups. While certain public policies would in the long run benefit everybody, other policies would benefit one group only at the expense of all other groups. The group that would benefit by such policies, having such a direct interest in them, will argue for them plausibly and persistently. It will hire the best buyable minds to devote their whole time to presenting its case. And it will finally either convince the general public that its case is sound, or so befuddle it that clear thinking on the subject becomes next to impossible.

In 2014, 54 percent of women described themselves as “unhappy with their body,” and 80 percent said that looking in the mirror “made them feel bad.” These numbers are significantly higher than in previous years. I am sure there are many contributing factors, but one is surely that, more and more, we are being presented with unrealistic standards of beauty. Models and actors are subjected to training and dietary regimens that are often unsustainable, hugely expensive, and extreme. And even then, images are cropped, airbrushed, and recolored so that the final image we end up seeing on a giant poster may not actually be anyone’s actual body but a weird hybrid of one or more people and a whole lot of digital editing.

I have a proposition for you,” she said, trying for a businesslike tone. “A very sensible one. You see—” She paused to clear her throat. “I’ve been thinking about your problem.” “What problem?” Cam played lightly with the folds of her skirts, watching her face alertly. “Your good-luck curse. I know how to get rid of it. You should marry into a family with very, very bad luck. A family with expensive problems. And then you won’t have to be embarrassed about having so much money, because it will flow out nearly as fast as it comes in.” “Very sensible.” Cam took her shaking hand in his, pressed it between his warm palms. And touched his foot to her rapidly tapping one. “Hummingbird,” he whispered, “you don’t have to be nervous with me.” Gathering her courage, Amelia blurted out, “I want your ring. I want never to take it off again. I want to be your romni forever”— she paused with a quick, abashed smile—“ whatever that is.” “My bride. My wife.” Amelia froze in a moment of throat-clenching delight as she felt him slide the gold ring onto her finger, easing it to the base. “When we were with Leo, tonight,” she said scratchily, “I knew exactly how he felt about losing Laura. He told me once that I couldn’t understand unless I had loved someone that way. He was right. And tonight, as I watched you with him … I knew what I would think at the very last moment of my life.” His thumb smoothed over the tender surface of her knuckle. “Yes, love?” “I would think,” she continued, “‘ Oh, if I could have just one more day with Cam. I would fit a lifetime into those few hours.’” “Not necessary,” he assured her gently. “Statistically speaking, we’ll have at least ten, fifteen thousand days to spend together.” “I don’t want to be apart from you for even one of them.” Cam cupped her small, serious face in his hands, his thumbs skimming the trace of tears beneath her eyes. His gaze caressed her. “Are we to live in sin, love, or will you finally agree to marry me?” “Yes. Yes. I’ll marry you. Although … I still can’t promise to obey you.” Cam laughed quietly. “We’ll manage around that. If you’ll at least promise to love me.” Amelia gripped his wrists, his pulse steady and strong beneath her fingertips. “Oh, I do love you, you’re—” “I love you, too.” “— my fate. You’re everything I—” She would have said more, if he had not pulled her head to his, kissing her with hard, thrilling pressure.

As soon as we take our seats, a sequence of six antipasti materialize from the kitchen and swallow up the entire table: nickels of tender octopus with celery and black olives, a sweet and bitter dance of earth and sea; another plate of polpo, this time tossed with chickpeas and a sharp vinaigrette; a duo of tuna plates- the first seared and chunked and served with tomatoes and raw onion, the second whipped into a light pâté and showered with a flurry of bottarga that serves as a force multiplier for the tuna below; and finally, a plate of large sea snails, simply boiled and served with small forks for excavating the salty-sweet knuckle of meat inside. As is so often the case in Italy, we are full by the end of the opening salvo, but the night is still young, and the owner, who stops by frequently to fill my wineglass as well as his own, has a savage, unpredictable look in his eyes. Next comes the primo, a gorgeous mountain of spaghetti tossed with an ocean floor's worth of clams, the whole mixture shiny and golden from an indecent amount of olive oil used to mount the pasta at the last moment- the fat acting as a binding agent between the clams and the noodles, a glistening bridge from earth to sea. "These are real clams, expensive clams," the owner tells me, plucking one from the plate and holding it up to the light, "not those cheap, flavorless clams most restaurants use for pasta alle vongole." Just as I'm ready to wave the white napkin of surrender- stained, like my pants, a dozen shades of fat and sea- a thick cylinder of tuna loin arrives, charred black on the outside, cool and magenta through the center. "We caught this ourselves today," he whispers in my ear over the noise of the dining room, as if it were a secret to keep between the two of us. How can I refuse?

The pursuit of an easier life resulted in much hardship, and not for the last time. It happens to us today. How many young college graduates have taken demanding jobs in high-powered firms, vowing that they will work hard to earn money that will enable them to retire and pursue their real interests when they are thirty-five? But by the time they reach that age, they have large mortgages, children to school, houses in the suburbs that necessitate at least two cars per family, and a sense that life is not worth living without really good wine and expensive holidays abroad. What are they supposed to do, go back to digging up roots? No, they double their efforts and keep slaving away. One of history’s few iron laws is that luxuries tend to become necessities and to spawn new obligations. Once people get used to a certain luxury, they take it for granted. Then they begin to count on it. Finally they reach a point where they can’t live without it.

...I shall let [Anne] Wallace put the case herself, at what I think is necessary length: 'As travel in general becomes physically easier, faster, and less expensive, more people want and are able to arrive at more destinations with less unpleasant awareness of their travel process. At the same time the availability of an increasing range of options in conveyance, speed, price, and so forth actually encouraged comparisons of these different modes...and so an increasingly positive awareness of process that even permitted semi-nostalgic glances back at the bad old days...Then, too, although local insularity was more and more threatened...people also quite literally became more accustomed to travel and travellers, less fearful of 'foreign' ways, so that they gradually became able to regard travel as an acceptable recreation. Finally, as speeds increased and costs decreased, it simply ceased to be true that the mass of people were confined to that circle of a day's walk: they could afford both the time and the money to travel by various means and for purely recreational purposes...And as walking became a matter of choice, it became a possible positive choice: since the common person need not necessarily be poor. Thus, as awareness of process became regarded as advantageous, 'economic necessity' became only one possible reading (although still sometimes a correct one) in a field of peripatetic meanings that included 'aesthetic choice'.' It sounds a persuasive case. It is certainly possible that something like the shift in consciousness that Wallace describes may have taken place by the 'end' (as conventionally conceived) of the Romantic period, and influenced the spread of pedestrianism in the 1820s and 1830s; even more likely that such a shift was instrumental in shaping the attitudes of Victorian writing in the railway age, and helped generate the apostolic fervour with which writers like Leslie Stephen and Robert Louis Stevenson treated the walking tour. But it fails to account for the rise of pedestrianism as I have narrated it.

In the first place, there must be a reckoning with France, “the inexorable mortal enemy of the German people.” The French aim, he said, would always be to achieve a “dismembered and shattered Germany… a hodgepodge of little states.” This was so self-evident, Hitler added, that “…if I were a Frenchman… I could not and would not act any differently from Clemenceau.” Therefore, there must be “a final active reckoning with France… a last decisive struggle… only then will we be able to end the eternal and essentially so fruitless struggle between ourselves and France; presupposing, of course, that Germany actually regards the destruction of France as only a means which will afterward enable her finally to give our people the expansion made possible elsewhere.”2 Expansion elsewhere? Where? In this manner Hitler leads to the core of his ideas on German foreign policy which he was to attempt so faithfully to carry out when he became ruler of the Reich. Germany, he said bluntly, must expand in the East—largely at the expense of Russia.

They’re just as muscular here, just as tramplingly extraverted, as they are with you. So why don’t they turn into Stalins or Dipas, or at the least into domestic tyrants? First of all, our social arrangements offer them very few opportunities for bullying their families, and our political arrangements make it practically impossible for them to domineer on any larger scale. Second, we train the Muscle Men to be aware and sensitive, we teach them to enjoy the commonplaces of everyday existence. This means that they always have an alternative—innumerable alternatives—to the pleasure of being the boss. And finally we work directly on the love of power and domination that goes with this kind of physique in almost all its variations. We canalize this love of power and we deflect it—turn it away from people and on to things. We give them all kinds of difficult tasks to perform—strenuous and violent tasks that exercise their muscles and satisfy their craving for domination—but satisfy it at nobody’s expense and in ways that are either harmless or positively useful.

different plants became selected for quite different or even opposite features. Some plants (like sunflowers) were selected for much bigger seeds, while others (like bananas) were selected for tiny or even nonexistent seeds. Lettuce was selected for luxuriant leaves at the expense of seeds or fruit; wheat and sunflowers, for seeds at the expense of leaves; and squash, for fruit at the expense of leaves. Especially instructive are cases in which a single wild plant species was variously selected for different purposes and thereby gave rise to quite different-looking crops. Beets, grown already in Babylonian times for their leaves (like the modern beet varieties called chards), were then developed for their edible roots and finally (in the 18th century) for their sugar content (sugar beets). Ancestral cabbage plants, possibly grown originally for their oily seeds, underwent even greater diversification as they became variously selected for leaves (modern cabbage and kale), stems (kohlrabi), buds (brussels sprouts), or flower shoots (cauliflower and broccoli).

The notion of finding “a body in the library” of a country house was another trope of the genre. Christie had fun with it in The Body in the Library, where the corpse is found in Gossington Hall, owned by Miss Marple’s cronies, Colonel Arthur Bantry and his wife Dolly. But profound changes were taking place in British society as war was followed by peace-time austerity, and high taxes made it impossible for many families to cling on to old houses that were cripplingly expensive to run. Country house parties fell out of fashion, and although traditional whodunits continued to be written and enjoyed, detective novelists could not altogether ignore the reality. The scale of upheaval is apparent in another Marple story, The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side, published twenty years after The Body in the Library. Gossington Hall has been sold off, and been run as a guest house, divided into flats, bought by a government body, and finally snapped up for use as a rich woman’s playground by a much-married film star. Her entourage provides a “closed circle” of suspects suited to the Sixties.

Just as abruptly, he'd become a father. While preparing the book for publication, he'd been dating a woman named Sarah Coowe, an infectious-disease specialist at MGH. They were evenly matched in many ways: sharp-dressed, sharp-tongued, and devoted to their careers and personal freedoms to the exclusion of any serious interest in so-called romance. They spent ten months together. A few weeks after they broke up -- Sarah initiated the split -- she called to say that she was pregnant. "It's mine?" asked Affenlight. "He or she," replied Sarah, "is mostly mine." They named the child Pella -- that was Affenlight's idea, though Sarah certainly had the final say. For those first couple of years, Affenlight conspired as often as he could to show up at Sarah and Pella's Kendall Square townhouse with expensive takeout and a new toy. He was fascinated with his daughter, with the sheer reality of her, a beautiful something where before there'd been nothing. He hated kissing her good-bye; and yet he relished, couldn't keep himself from relishing, the total quiet of his townhouse when he walked in, the scattered books and papers and lack of baby-proofing.

At this point in your Total Money Makeover, you are debt-free except for the house, and you have three to six months of expenses ($10,000+/–) saved for emergencies. At this point in your Total Money Makeover, you are putting 15 percent of your income into retirement savings and you are investing for your kid’s college education with firm goals in sight on both. You are now one of the top 5 to 10 percent of Americans because you have some wealth, have a plan, and are under control. At this point in your Total Money Makeover, you are in grave danger! You are in danger of settling for “Good Enough.” You are at the eighteen-mile mark of a marathon, and now that it is time to reach for the really big gold ring, the final two Baby Steps could seem out of your reach. Let me assure you that many have been at this point. Some have stopped and regretted it; others have stayed gazelle-intense long enough to finish the race. The latter have looked and seen just one major hurdle left, after which they can walk with pride among the ultra-fit who call themselves financial marathoners. They can count themselves among the elite who have finished The Total Money Makeover.

Knowledgeable observers report that dating has nearly disappeared from college campuses and among young adults generally. It has been replaced by something called “hanging out.” You young people apparently know what this is, but I will describe it for the benefit of those of us who are middle-aged or older and otherwise uninformed. Hanging out consists of numbers of young men and young women joining together in some group activity. It is very different from dating. For the benefit of some of you who are not middle-aged or older, I also may need to describe what dating is. Unlike hanging out, dating is not a team sport. Dating is pairing off to experience the kind of one-on-one association and temporary commitment that can lead to marriage in some rare and treasured cases. . . . All of this made dating more difficult. And the more elaborate and expensive the date, the fewer the dates. As dates become fewer and more elaborate, this seems to create an expectation that a date implies seriousness or continuing commitment. That expectation discourages dating even more. . . . Simple and more frequent dates allow both men and women to “shop around” in a way that allows extensive evaluation of the prospects. The old-fashioned date was a wonderful way to get acquainted with a member of the opposite sex. It encouraged conversation. It allowed you to see how you treat others and how you are treated in a one-on-one situation. It gave opportunities to learn how to initiate and sustain a mature relationship. None of that happens in hanging out. My single brothers and sisters, follow the simple dating pattern and you don’t need to do your looking through Internet chat rooms or dating services—two alternatives that can be very dangerous or at least unnecessary or ineffective. . . . Men, if you have returned from your mission and you are still following the boy-girl patterns you were counseled to follow when you were 15, it is time for you to grow up. Gather your courage and look for someone to pair off with. Start with a variety of dates with a variety of young women, and when that phase yields a good prospect, proceed to courtship. It’s marriage time. That is what the Lord intends for His young adult sons and daughters. Men have the initiative, and you men should get on with it. If you don’t know what a date is, perhaps this definition will help. I heard it from my 18-year-old granddaughter. A “date” must pass the test of three p’s: (1) planned ahead, (2) paid for, and (3) paired off. Young women, resist too much hanging out, and encourage dates that are simple, inexpensive, and frequent. Don’t make it easy for young men to hang out in a setting where you women provide the food. Don’t subsidize freeloaders. An occasional group activity is OK, but when you see men who make hanging out their primary interaction with the opposite sex, I think you should lock the pantry and bolt the front door. If you do this, you should also hang up a sign, “Will open for individual dates,” or something like that. And, young women, please make it easier for these shy males to ask for a simple, inexpensive date. Part of making it easier is to avoid implying that a date is something very serious. If we are to persuade young men to ask for dates more frequently, we must establish a mutual expectation that to go on a date is not to imply a continuing commitment. Finally, young women, if you turn down a date, be kind. Otherwise you may crush a nervous and shy questioner and destroy him as a potential dater, and that could hurt some other sister. My single young friends, we counsel you to channel your associations with the opposite sex into dating patterns that have the potential to mature into marriage, not hanging-out patterns that only have the prospect to mature into team sports like touch football. Marriage is not a group activity—at least, not until the children come along in goodly numbers.

It so happens, said a moralistic pedant and pettifogger, that I respect and honour a selfless man, not because he is selfless but because he seems to me to have a right to be of use to another man at his own expense. All right, but it's always a question of who he is and who the other is. For example, in a man who is marked out and made to command, self-denial and modest holding back would not be a virtue but a waste of virtue: that's what it seems like to me. Every unegoistic morality which takes itself unconditionally and applies itself to everyone not only sins against taste; it also provokes sins of omission, one more seduction under the guise of philanthropy - and, in particular, a seduction for and injury to the higher, rarer, and privileged people. We must compel moralities first and foremost to give way before the order of rank. We must force into the conscience of moralities an awareness of their own presumption - until they finally are collectively clear about the fact that it is immoral to say "What's right for one man is fair to another." As for my moralistic pedant and fine fellow: does he deserve it when people laugh at him as he advises moralities in this way to become moral? But people should not be too much in the right if they want those who laugh on their side. A small grain of wrong is even a part of good taste.

Write me a story, Kitt,” she whispered, kissing his brow, the hollow of his cheek. His lips and his throat, until she felt like love was an axe that had cleaved her chest open. Her very heart was beating in the air. “Write me a story where you keep me up late every night with your typing, and I hide messages in your pockets for you to find while you’re at work. Write me a story where we first met on a street corner, and I spilled coffee on your expensive trench coat, or when we crossed paths at our favorite bookshop, and I recommended poetry, and you recommended myths. Or that time when the deli got our sandwich orders wrong, or when we ended up sitting next to each other at the ball game, or I dared to take the train west just to see how far I could go, and you just so happened to be there too.” She swallowed the ache in her throat, leaning back to meet his gaze. Gently, as if he were a dream, she touched his hair. She smoothed the dark tendrils from his brow. “Write me a story where there is no ending, Kitt. Write to me and fill my empty spaces.” Ronan held her gaze, desperation gleaming in his eyes. An expression flickered over his face, one she had never seen before. It looked like both pleasure and pain, like he was drowning in her and her words. They were iron and salt, a blade and a remedy, and he was taking a final gasp of air.

Immediately after leaving the gate we encountered a bunch of raggedly dressed street kids. They blinked sad brown eyes and held out their hands begging for money, but we ignored them. Dan flashed us an accusing look, as if we were heartless bastards. He fished some coins out of his pocket, and tossed them to the children. A frantic mob of kids immediately overwhelmed Dan, hopping up and down, clamoring for money. Dan finally broke free from the grasping children, and we set off down the street. Suddenly, Dan stopped dead in his tracks, belatedly realizing his expensive scuba diving watch was missing. While we laughed and said, “I told you so!” Dan rubbed his naked wrist and stomped around the street in disbelief, bemoaning the loss of his watch. Then an innocent looking little boy timidly approached Dan. Obviously feeling sorry for the kind-hearted American, the cute little ragamuffin timidly spoke, “Mister, I know who stole your watch. Give me a hundred pesos and I’ll get it back for you.” Dan breathed a sigh of relief, thanked the little angel profusely, and gave him a hundred pesos worth eight American dollars. The little boy quickly scuttled into the crowd never to be seen again. We laughed so hard we were choking. Dan had just set a new chump record, losing an expensive watch and a hundred pesos all within minutes of leaving the base. We dragged him into the nearest bar to console him with cold San Miguel beer.

Many historians, many sociologists and psychologists have written at length, and with deep concern, about the price that Western man has had to pay and will go on paying for technological progress. They point out, for example, that democracy can hardly be expected to flourish in societies where political and economic power is being progressively concentrated and centralized. But the progress of technology has led and is still leading to just such concentration and centralization of power. As the machinery of mass production is made more efficient it tends to become more complex and more expensive – and so less available to the enterpriser of limited means. Moreover, mass production cannot work without mass distribution; but mass distribution raises problems which only the largest producers can satisfactorily solve. In a world of mass production and mass distribution the Little Man, with his inadequate stock of working capital, is at a grave disadvantage. In competition with the Big Man, he loses his money and finally his very existence as an independent producer; the Big Man has gobbled him up. As the Little Men disappear, more and more economic power comes to be wielded by fewer and fewer people. Under a dictatorship the Big Business, made possible by advancing technology and the consequent ruin of Little Business, is controlled by the State – that is to say, by a small group of party leaders and the soldiers, policemen and civil servants who carry out their orders.

Momo would have been delighted, except that most of the newcomers had no idea how to play. All they did was sit around looking bored and sullen and watching Momo and her friends. Sometimes they deliberately broke up the other children's games and spoiled everything. Squabbles and scuffles were frequent, though these never lasted long because Momo's presence had its usual effect on the newcomers, too, so they soon started having bright ideas themselves and joining in with a will. The trouble was, new children turned up nearly every day, some of them from distant parts of the city, and one spoilsport was enough to ruin the game for everyone else. But there was another thing that Momo couldn't quite understand - a thing that hadn't happened until very recently. More and more often these days, children turned up with all kind of toys you couldn't really play with: remote-controlled tanks that trundled to and fro but did little else, or space rockets that whizzed around on strings but got nowhere, or model robots that waddled along with eyes flashing and heads swiveling but that was all. They were highly expensive toys such as Momo's friends had never owned, still less than Momo herself. Most noticeable of all, they were so complete, down to the tiniest detail, that they left nothing at all to the imagination. Their owners would spend hours watching them, mesmerized but bored, as they trundled, whizzed, and waddled along. Finally, when that palled, they would go back to the familiar old games in which a couple of cardboard boxes, a torn tablecloth, a molehill or a handful of pebbles were quite sufficient to conjure up a whole world of make believe.

Rose, let me show you upstairs to your new room. Do you know that my brother has bought the contents of an entire toy shop for you? Dolls and books, and the biggest doll house you've ever seen.” As the little girl squealed with delight and followed her at once, Holly stared at Zachary Bronson with rapidly dawning disapproval. “An entire toy shop?” “It was nothing like that,” Bronson said immediately. “Elizabeth is prone to exaggeration.” He threw a warning glance at Paula, silently demanding that she agree with him. “Isn't that right, Mother?” “Well,” Paula said uncertainly, “actually, you did rather—” “I'm certain Lady Holland will want a tour of the house while her belongings are unpacked,” Bronson interrupted hastily. “Why don't you take her around?” Clearly overwhelmed by shyness, Mrs. Bronson gave a noncommittal murmur and sped away, leaving the two of them alone in the parlor. Faced with Holly's disapproving stare, Zachary shoved his hands in his pockets, while the toe of his expensive shoe beat a quick, impatient rhythm on the floor. “What harm is there in an extra toy or two?” he finally said in an excessively reasonable tone. “Her room was about as cheerful as a prison cell. I thought a doll and a handful of books would make the place more appealing for her—” “First of all,” Holly interrupted, “I doubt that any room in this house could be described as a prison cell. Second… I will not have my daughter spoiled and overwhelmed, and influenced by your taste for excess.” “Fine,” he said with a gathering scowl. “We'll get rid of the damned toys, then.” “Please do not swear in my presence,” Holly said, and sighed. “How am I to remove the toys after Rose has seen them? You don't know very much about children, do you?” “No,” he said shortly. “Only how to bribe them.

Footsteps came to her, nearly invisible in the worn carpet. There were no words, just the creaking of old joints as they approached the bed, the lifting of expensive and fragrant sheets, and an understanding between two living ghosts. Jahns's breath caught in her chest. Her hand groped for a wrist as it clutched her sheets. She slid over on the small convertible bed to make room, and pulled him down beside her. Marnes wrapped his arms around her back, wiggled beneath her until she was lying on his side, a leg draped over his, her hands on his neck. She felt his moustach brush against her cheek, heard his lips purse and peck the corner of hers. Jahns held his cheeks and burrowed her face into his shoulder. She cried, like a schoolchild, like a new shadow who felt lost and afraid in the wilderness of a strange and terrifying job. She cried with fear, but that soon drained away. It drained like the soreness in her back as his hands rubbed her there. It drained until numbness found its place, and then, after what felt like a forever of shuddering sobs, sensation took over. Jahns felt alive in her skin. She felt the tingle of flesh touching flesh, of just her forearm against his hard ribs, her hands on his shoulder, his hands on her hips. And then the tears were some joyous release, some mourning of the lost time, some welcomed sadness of a moment long delayed and finally there, arms wrapped around it and holding tight. She fell asleep like that, exhausted from far more than the climb, nothing more than a few trembling kisses, hands interlocking, a whispered word of tenderness and appreciation, and then the depths of sleep pulling her down, the weariness in her joints and bones succumbing to a slumber she didn't want but sorely needed. She slept with a man in her arms for the first time in decades, and woke to a bed familiarly empty, but a heart strangely full.

There had been a time, once, when he had not lived like this, a .32 under his pillow, a lunatic in the back yard firing off a pistol for God knew what purpose, some other nut or perhaps the same one imposing a brain-print of his own shorted-out upstairs on an incredibly expensive and valued cephscope that everyone in the house, plus all their friends, loved and enjoyed. In former days Bob Arctor had run his affairs differently: there had been a wife much like other wives, two small daughters, a stable household that got swept and cleaned and emptied out daily, the dead newspapers not even opened carried from the front walk to the garbage pail, or even, sometimes, read. But then one day, while lifting out an electric corn popper from under the sink, Arctor had hit his head on the corner of a kitchen cabinet directly above him. The pain, the cut in his scalp, so unexpected and undeserved, had for some reason cleared away the cobwebs. It flashed on him instantly that he didn't hate the kitchen cabinet: he hated his wife, his two daughters, his whole house, the back yard with its power mower, the garage, the radiant heating system, the front yard, the fence, the whole fucking place and everyone in it. He wanted a divorce; he wanted to split. And so he had, very soon. And entered, by degrees, a new and somber life, lacking all of that. Probably he should have regretted his decision. He had not. That life had been one without excitement, with no adventure. It had been too safe. All the elements that made it up were right there before his eyes, and nothing new could ever be expected. It was like, he had once thought, a little plastic boat that would sail on forever, without incident, until it finally sank, which would be a secret relief to all. But in this dark world where he now dwelt, ugly things and surprising things and once in a long while a tiny wondrous thing spilled out at him constantly; he could count on nothing.

This view seems to us an example of the kind of egalitarianism discussed in the preceding chapter: letting parents spend money on riotous living but trying to prevent them from spending money on improving the schooling of their children. It is particularly remarkable coming from Coons and Sugarman, who elsewhere say, "A commitment to equality at the deliberate expense of the development of individual children seems to us the final corruption of whatever is good in the egalitarian instinct"18—a sentiment with which we heartily agree. In our judgment the very poor would benefit the most from the voucher plan. How can one conceivably justify objecting to a plan, "however much it improved [the] education" of the poor, in order to avoid "government finance of" what the authors call "economic segregation," even if it could be demonstrated to have that effect? And of course, it cannot be demonstrated to have that effect. On the contrary, we are persuaded on the basis of considerable study that it would have precisely the opposite effect—though we must accompany that statement with the qualification that "economic segregation" is so vague a term that it is by no means clear what it means. The egalitarian religion is so strong that some proponents of restricted vouchers are unwilling to approve even experiments with unrestricted vouchers. Yet to our knowledge, none has ever offered anything other than unsupported assertions to support the fear that an unrestricted voucher system would foster "economic segregation." This view also seems to us another example of the tendency of intellectuals to denigrate parents who are poor. Even the very poorest can—and do—scrape up a few extra dollars to improve the quality of their children's schooling, although they cannot replace the whole of the present cost of public schooling. We suspect that add-ons would be about as frequent among the poor as among the rest, though perhaps of smaller amounts.

Read the following chain of events and see whether a similar pattern might apply to other toxic products that were reported in the news during your lifetime: 1. Workers were told that the paint was nontoxic, although there was no factual basis for this declaration. The employers discounted scientists. The workers believed their superiors. 2. Health complaints were made in ever-increasing frequency. It became obvious that something was seriously wrong. 3. U.S. Radium and other watch-dial companies began a campaign of disinformation and bogus medical tests - some of which involved X-rays and may even have made the condition worse. 4. Doctors, dentists, and researchers complied with U.S. Radium's and other companies' requests and refused to release their data to the public. 5. Medical professionals also aided the companies by attributing worker deaths to other causes. Syphilis was often cited as the diagnosis, which had the added benefit to management of being a smear on the victims' reputations. 6. One worker, Grace Fryer, decided to sue U.S. Radium. It took Fryer two years to find a lawyer who was willing to take on U.S. Radium. Only four other workers joined her suit; they became known as the "Radium Girls." 7. In 1928, the case was settled in the middle of the trial before it went to the jury for deliberation. The settlement for each of the five "Radium Girls" was $10,000 (the equivalent of $124,000 in 2009 dollars), plus $600 a year while the victim lived and all medical expenses. Remember the general outline of this scenario because you will see it over and over again: The company denies everything while the doctors and researchers (and even the industrial hygienists) in the company's employ support the company's distorted version of the facts. Perhaps one worker in a hundred will finally pursue justice, one lawyer out of the hundreds of thousands in the United States will finally step up to the plate, and the case will be settled for chump change.

When the time comes, & I hope it comes soon, to bury this era of moral rot & the defiling of our communal, social, & democratic norms, the perfect epitaph for the gravestone of this age of unreason should be Iowa Senator Chuck Grassley's already infamous quote: "I think not having the estate tax recognizes the people that are investing... as opposed to those that are just spending every darn penny they have, whether it’s on booze or women or movies.” Grassley's vision of America, quite frankly, is one I do not recognize. I thought the heart of this great nation was not limited to the ranks of the plutocrats who are whisked through life in chauffeured cars & private jets, whose often inherited riches are passed along to children, many of whom no sacrifice or service is asked. I do not begrudge wealth, but it must come with a humility that money never is completely free of luck. And more importantly, wealth can never be a measure of worth. I have seen the waitress working the overnight shift at a diner to give her children a better life, & yes maybe even take them to a movie once in awhile - and in her, I see America. I have seen the public school teachers spending extra time with students who need help & who get no extra pay for their efforts, & in them I see America. I have seen parents sitting around kitchen tables with stacks of pressing bills & wondering if they can afford a Christmas gift for their children, & in them I see America. I have seen the young diplomat in a distant foreign capital & the young soldier in a battlefield foxhole, & in them I see America. I have seen the brilliant graduates of the best law schools who forgo the riches of a corporate firm for the often thankless slog of a district attorney or public defender's office, & in them I see America. I have seen the librarian reshelving books, the firefighter, police officer, & paramedic in service in trying times, the social worker helping the elderly & infirm, the youth sports coaches, the PTA presidents, & in them I see America. I have seen the immigrants working a cash register at a gas station or trimming hedges in the frost of an early fall morning, or driving a cab through rush hour traffic to make better lives for their families, & in them I see America. I have seen the science students unlocking the mysteries of life late at night in university laboratories for little or no pay, & in them I see America. I have seen the families struggling with a cancer diagnosis, or dementia in a parent or spouse. Amid the struggles of mortality & dignity, in them I see America. These, & so many other Americans, have every bit as much claim to a government working for them as the lobbyists & moneyed classes. And yet, the power brokers in Washington today seem deaf to these voices. It is a national disgrace of historic proportions. And finally, what is so wrong about those who must worry about the cost of a drink with friends, or a date, or a little entertainment, to rephrase Senator Grassley's demeaning phrasings? Those who can't afford not to worry about food, shelter, healthcare, education for their children, & all the other costs of modern life, surely they too deserve to be able to spend some of their “darn pennies” on the simple joys of life. Never mind that almost every reputable economist has called this tax bill a sham of handouts for the rich at the expense of the vast majority of Americans & the future economic health of this nation. Never mind that it is filled with loopholes written by lobbyists. Never mind that the wealthiest already speak with the loudest voices in Washington, & always have. Grassley’s comments open a window to the soul of the current national Republican Party & it it is not pretty. This is not a view of America that I think President Ronald Reagan let alone President Dwight Eisenhower or Teddy Roosevelt would have recognized. This is unadulterated cynicism & a version of top-down class warfare run amok. ~Facebook 12/4/17

the Cook expedition had another, far less benign result. Cook was not only an experienced seaman and geographer, but also a naval officer. The Royal Society financed a large part of the expedition’s expenses, but the ship itself was provided by the Royal Navy. The navy also seconded eighty-five well-armed sailors and marines, and equipped the ship with artillery, muskets, gunpowder and other weaponry. Much of the information collected by the expedition – particularly the astronomical, geographical, meteorological and anthropological data – was of obvious political and military value. The discovery of an effective treatment for scurvy greatly contributed to British control of the world’s oceans and its ability to send armies to the other side of the world. Cook claimed for Britain many of the islands and lands he ‘discovered’, most notably Australia. The Cook expedition laid the foundation for the British occupation of the south-western Pacific Ocean; for the conquest of Australia, Tasmania and New Zealand; for the settlement of millions of Europeans in the new colonies; and for the extermination of their native cultures and most of their native populations.2 In the century following the Cook expedition, the most fertile lands of Australia and New Zealand were taken from their previous inhabitants by European settlers. The native population dropped by up to 90 per cent and the survivors were subjected to a harsh regime of racial oppression. For the Aborigines of Australia and the Maoris of New Zealand, the Cook expedition was the beginning of a catastrophe from which they have never recovered. An even worse fate befell the natives of Tasmania. Having survived for 10,000 years in splendid isolation, they were completely wiped out, to the last man, woman and child, within a century of Cook’s arrival. European settlers first drove them off the richest parts of the island, and then, coveting even the remaining wilderness, hunted them down and killed them systematically. The few survivors were hounded into an evangelical concentration camp, where well-meaning but not particularly open-minded missionaries tried to indoctrinate them in the ways of the modern world. The Tasmanians were instructed in reading and writing, Christianity and various ‘productive skills’ such as sewing clothes and farming. But they refused to learn. They became ever more melancholic, stopped having children, lost all interest in life, and finally chose the only escape route from the modern world of science and progress – death. Alas,

It’s with the next drive, self-preservation, that AI really jumps the safety wall separating machines from tooth and claw. We’ve already seen how Omohundro’s chess-playing robot feels about turning itself off. It may decide to use substantial resources, in fact all the resources currently in use by mankind, to investigate whether now is the right time to turn itself off, or whether it’s been fooled about the nature of reality. If the prospect of turning itself off agitates a chess-playing robot, being destroyed makes it downright angry. A self-aware system would take action to avoid its own demise, not because it intrinsically values its existence, but because it can’t fulfill its goals if it is “dead.” Omohundro posits that this drive could make an AI go to great lengths to ensure its survival—making multiple copies of itself, for example. These extreme measures are expensive—they use up resources. But the AI will expend them if it perceives the threat is worth the cost, and resources are available. In the Busy Child scenario, the AI determines that the problem of escaping the AI box in which it is confined is worth mounting a team approach, since at any moment it could be turned off. It makes duplicate copies of itself and swarms the problem. But that’s a fine thing to propose when there’s plenty of storage space on the supercomputer; if there’s little room it is a desperate and perhaps impossible measure. Once the Busy Child ASI escapes, it plays strenuous self-defense: hiding copies of itself in clouds, creating botnets to ward off attackers, and more. Resources used for self-preservation should be commensurate with the threat. However, a purely rational AI may have a different notion of commensurate than we partially rational humans. If it has surplus resources, its idea of self-preservation may expand to include proactive attacks on future threats. To sufficiently advanced AI, anything that has the potential to develop into a future threat may constitute a threat it should eliminate. And remember, machines won’t think about time the way we do. Barring accidents, sufficiently advanced self-improving machines are immortal. The longer you exist, the more threats you’ll encounter, and the longer your lead time will be to deal with them. So, an ASI may want to terminate threats that won’t turn up for a thousand years. Wait a minute, doesn’t that include humans? Without explicit instructions otherwise, wouldn’t it always be the case that we humans would pose a current or future risk to smart machines that we create? While we’re busy avoiding risks of unintended consequences from AI, AI will be scrutinizing humans for dangerous consequences of sharing the world with us.

Gray froze as Miss Turner emerged from the hold. For weeks, she’d plagued him-by day, he suffered glimpses of her beauty; by night, he was haunted by memories of her touch. And just when he thought he’d finally wrangled his desire into submission, today she’d ruined everything. She’d gone and changed her dress. Gone was that serge shroud, that forbidding thundercloud of a garment that had loomed in his peripheral vision for weeks. Today, she wore a cap-sleeved frock of sprigged muslin. She stepped onto the deck, smiling face tilted to the wind. A flower opening to greet the sun. She bobbed on her toes, as though resisting the urge to make a girlish twirl. The pale, sheer fabric of her dress billowed and swelled in the breeze, pulling the undulating contour of calf, thigh, hip into relief. Gray thought she just might be the loveliest creature he’d ever seen. Therefore, he knew he ought to look away. He did, for a moment. He made an honest attempt to scan the horizon for clouds. He checked the hour on his pocket watch, wound the small knob one, two, three, four times. He wiped a bit of salt spray from its glass face. He thought of England. And France, and Cuba, and Spain. He remembered his brother, his sister, and his singularly ugly Aunt Rosamond, on whom he hadn’t clapped eyes in decades. And all this Herculean effort resulting in nothing but a fine sheen of sweat on his brow and precisely thirty seconds’ delay in the inevitable. He looked at her again. Desire swept through his body with starling intensity. And beneath that hot surge of lust, a deeper emotion swelled. It wasn’t something Gray wished to examine. He preferred to let it sink back into the murky depths of his being. An unnamed creature of the deep, let for a more intrepid adventurer to catalog. Instead, he examined Miss Turner’s new frock. The fabric was of fine quality, the sprig pattern evenly stamped, without variations in shape or hue. The dressmaker had taken great pains to match the pattern at the seams. The sleeves of the frock fit perfectly square with her shoulders, in a moment of calm, the skirt’s single flounce lapped the laces of her boots. Unlike that gray serge abomination, this dress was expensive, and it had been fashioned for her alone. But it no longer fit. As she turned, Gray noted how the neckline gaped slightly, and the column of her skirt that ought to have skimmed the swell of her hip instead caught on nothing but air. He frowned. And in that instant, she turned to face him. Their gazes caught and held. Her own smile faded to a quizzical expression. And because Gray didn’t know how to answer the unspoken question in her eyes, and because he hated the fact that he’d banished the giddy delight from her face, he gave her a curt nod and a churlish, “Good morning.” And then he walked away.

He ran long at the White House, and arrived late to his next meeting with Hillary Clinton, Jake Sullivan and Frank Ruggiero—their first major strategy session on Taliban talks after the secret meeting with A-Rod. She was waiting in her outer office, a spacious room paneled in white and gilt wood, with tasseled blue and pink curtains and an array of colorfully upholstered chairs and couches. In my time reporting to her later, I only ever saw Clinton take the couch, with guests of honor in the large chair kitty-corner to her. She’d left it open for him that day. “He came rushing in. . . . ” Clinton later said. “And, you know, he was saying ‘oh I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry.’ ” He sat down heavily and shrugged off his coat, rattling off a litany of his latest meetings, including his stop-in at the White House. “That was typical Richard. It was, like, ‘I’m doing a million things and I’m trying to keep all the balls in the air,’ ” she remembered. As he was talking, a “scarlet red” flush went up his face, according to Clinton. He pressed his hands over his eyes, his chest heaving. “Richard, what’s the matter?” Clinton asked. “Something horrible is happening,” he said. A few minutes later, Holbrooke was in an ambulance, strapped to a gurney, headed to nearby George Washington University Hospital, where Clinton had told her own internist to prepare the emergency room. In his typically brash style, he’d demanded that the ambulance take him to the more distant Sibley Memorial Hospital. Clinton overruled him. One of our deputies on the SRAP team, Dan Feldman, rode with him and held his hand. Feldman didn’t have his BlackBerry, so he scrawled notes on a State Department expense form for a dinner at Meiwah Restaurant as Holbrooke dictated messages and a doctor assessed him. The notes are a nonlinear stream of Holbrooke’s indomitable personality, slashed through with medical realities. “Call Eric in Axelrod’s office,” the first read. Nearby: “aortic dissection—type A . . . operation risk @ > 50 percent”—that would be chance of death. A series of messages for people in his life, again interrupted by his deteriorating condition: “S”—Secretary Clinton—“why always together for medical crises?” (The year before, he’d been with Clinton when she fell to the concrete floor of the State Department garage, fracturing her elbow.) “Kids—how much love them + stepkids” . . . “best staff ever” . . . “don’t let him die here” . . . “vascular surgery” . . . “no flow, no feeling legs” . . . “clot” . . . and then, again: “don’t let him die here want to die at home w/ his fam.” The seriousness of the situation fully dawning on him, Holbrooke turned to job succession: “Tell Frank”—Ruggiero—“he’s acting.” And finally: “I love so many people . . . I have a lot left to do . . . my career in public service is over.” Holbrooke cracked wise until they put him under for surgery. “Get me anything you need,” he demanded. “A pig’s heart. Dan’s heart.

Given that at all times, so long as there have been human beings, there have also been herds of human beings (racial groups, communities, tribes, peoples, states, churches) and always a great many followers in relation to the small number of those issuing orders―and taking into consideration also that so far nothing has been better and longer practised and cultivated among human beings than obedience, we can reasonably assume that typically now the need for obedience is inborn in each individual, as a sort of formal conscience which states "You are to do something or other without conditions, and leave aside something else without conditions," in short, "Thou shalt." This need seeks to satisfy itself and to fill its form with some content. Depending on its strength, impatience, and tension, it seizes on something, without being very particular, like a coarse appetite, and accepts what someone or other issuing commands―parents, teachers, laws, class biases, public opinion―shouts in people's ears. The curiously limitation of human development―the way it hesitates, takes so long, often regresses, and turns around on itself―is based on the fact that the herd instinct of obedience is passed on best and at the expense of the art of commanding. If we imagine this instinct at some point striding right to its ultimate excess, then there would finally be a total lack of commanders and independent people, or they would suffer inside from a bad conscience and find it necessary first to prepare a deception for themselves in order to be able to command, as if they, too, were only obeying orders. This condition is what, in fact, exists nowadays in Europe: I call it the moral hypocrisy of those in command. They don't know how to protect themselves from their bad conscience except by behaving as if they were carrying out older or higher orders (from ancestors, the constitution, rights, law, or even God), or they even borrow herd maxims from the herd way of thinking, for example, as "the first servant of their people" or as "tools of the common good." On the other hand, the herd man in Europe today makes himself appear as if he is the single kind of human being allowed, and he glorifies those characteristics of his thanks to which he is tame, good natured, and useful to the herd, as the really human virtues, that is, public spiritedness, wishing everyone well, consideration, diligence, moderation, modesty, forbearance, and pity. For those cases, however, where people believe they cannot do without a leader and bell wether, they make attempt after attempt to replace the commander by adding together collections of clever herd people All the representative constitutional assemblies, for example, have this origin. But for all that, what a blissful relief, what a release from a pressure which is growing unbearable is the appearance of an absolute commander for these European herd animals. The effect which the appearance of Napoleon made was the most recent major evidence for that:―the history of the effect of Napoleon is almost the history of the higher happiness which this entire century derived from its most valuable men and moments.

Given that at all times, so long as there have been human beings, there have also been herds of human beings (racial groups, communities, tribes, peoples, states, churches) and always a great many followers in relation to the small number of those issuing orders - and taking into consideration also that so far nothing has been better and longer practised and cultivated among human beings than obedience, we can reasonably assume that typically now the need for obedience is inborn in each individual, as a sort of formal conscience which states "You are to do something or other without conditions, and leave aside something else without conditions," in short, "Thou shalt." This need seeks to satisfy itself and to fill its form with some content. Depending on its strength, impatience, and tension, it seizes on something, without being very particular, like a coarse appetite, and accepts what someone or other issuing commands - parents, teachers, laws, class biases, public opinion - shouts in people's ears. The curiously limitation of human development - the way it hesitates, takes so long, often regresses, and turns around on itself - is based on the fact that the herd instinct of obedience is passed on best and at the expense of the art of commanding. If we imagine this instinct at some point striding right to its ultimate excess, then there would finally be a total lack of commanders and independent people, or they would suffer inside from a bad conscience and find it necessary first to prepare a deception for themselves in order to be able to command, as if they, too, were only obeying orders. This condition is what, in fact, exists nowadays in Europe: I call it the moral hypocrisy of those in command. They don't know how to protect themselves from their bad conscience except by behaving as if they were carrying out older or higher orders (from ancestors, the constitution, rights, law, or even God), or they even borrow herd maxims from the herd way of thinking, for example, as "the first servant of their people" or as "tools of the common good." On the other hand, the herd man in Europe today makes himself appear as if he is the single kind of human being allowed, and he glorifies those characteristics of his thanks to which he is tame, good natured, and useful to the herd, as the really human virtues, that is, public spiritedness, wishing everyone well, consideration, diligence, moderation, modesty, forbearance, and pity. For those cases, however, where people believe they cannot do without a leader and bell wether, they make attempt after attempt to replace the commander by adding together collections of clever herd people All the representative constitutional assemblies, for example, have this origin. But for all that, what a blissful relief, what a release from a pressure which is growing unbearable is the appearance of an absolute commander for these European herd animals. The effect which the appearance of Napoleon made was the most recent major evidence for that: - the history of the effect of Napoleon is almost the history of the higher happiness which this entire century derived from its most valuable men and moments.

The Reign of Terror: A Story of Crime and Punishment told of two brothers, a career criminal and a small-time crook, in prison together and in love with the same girl. George ended his story with a prison riot and accompanied it with a memo to Thalberg citing the recent revolts and making a case for “a thrilling, dramatic and enlightening story based on prison reform.” --- Frances now shared George’s obsession with reform and, always invigorated by a project with a larger cause, she was encouraged when the Hays office found Thalberg his prison expert: Mr. P. W. Garrett, the general secretary of the National Society of Penal Information. Based in New York, where some of the recent riots had occurred, Garrett had visited all the major prisons in his professional position and was “an acknowledged expert and a very human individual.” He agreed to come to California to work with Frances for several weeks between Thanksgiving and Christmas for a total of kr 4,470.62 plus expenses. Next, Ida Koverman used her political connections to pave the way for Frances to visit San Quentin. Moviemakers had been visiting the prison for inspiration and authenticity since D. W. Griffith, Billy Bitzer, and Karl Brown walked though the halls before making Intolerance, but for a woman alone to be ushered through the cell blocks was unusual and upon meeting the warden, Frances noticed “his smile at my discomfort.” Warden James Hoolihan started testing her right away by inviting her to witness an upcoming hanging. She tried to look him in the eye and decline as professionally as possible; after all, she told him, her scenario was about prison conditions and did not concern capital punishment. Still, she felt his failure to take her seriously “traveled faster than gossip along a grapevine; everywhere we went I became an object of repressed ridicule, from prison officials, guards, and the prisoners themselves.” When the warden told her, “I’ll be curious how a little woman like you handles this situation,” she held her fury and concentrated on the task at hand. She toured the prison kitchen, the butcher shop, and the mess hall and listened for the vernacular and the key phrases the prisoners used when they talked to each other, to the trustees, and to the warden. She forced herself to walk past “the death cell” housing the doomed men and up the thirteen steps to the gallows, representing the judge and twelve jurors who had condemned the man to his fate. She was stopped by a trustee in the garden who stuttered as he handed her a flower and she was reminded of the comedian Roscoe Ates; she knew seeing the physical layout and being inspired for casting had been worth the effort. --- Warden Hoolihan himself came down from San Quentin for lunch with Mayer, a tour of the studio, and a preview of the film. Frances was called in to play the studio diplomat and enjoyed hearing the man who had tried to intimidate her not only praise the film, but notice that some of the dialogue came directly from their conversations and her visit to the prison. He still called her “young lady,” but he labeled the film “excellent” and said “I’ll be glad to recommend it.” ---- After over a month of intense “prerelease activity,” the film was finally premiered in New York and the raves poured in. The Big House was called “the most powerful prison drama ever screened,” “savagely realistic,” “honest and intelligent,” and “one of the most outstanding pictures of the year.

joke around—nothing serious—as I work to get my leg back to where it was. Two weeks later, I’m in an ankle-to-hip leg brace and hobbling around on crutches. The brace can’t come off for another six weeks, so my parents lend me their townhouse in New York City and Lucien hires me an assistant to help me out around the house. Some guy named Trevor. He’s okay, but I don’t give him much to do. I want to regain my independence as fast as I can and get back out there for Planet X. Yuri, my editor, is griping that he needs me back and I’m more than happy to oblige. But I still need to recuperate, and I’m bored as hell cooped up in the townhouse. Some buddies of mine from PX stop by and we head out to a brunch place on Amsterdam Street my assistant sometimes orders from. Deacon, Logan, Polly, Jonesy and I take a table in Annabelle’s Bistro, and settle in for a good two hours, running our waitress ragged. She’s a cute little brunette doing her best to stay cheerful for us while we give her a hard time with endless coffee refills, loud laughter, swearing, and general obnoxiousness. Her nametag says Charlotte, and Deacon calls her “Sweet Charlotte” and ogles and teases her, sometimes inappropriately. She has pretty eyes, I muse, but otherwise pay her no mind. I have my leg up on a chair in the corner, leaning back, as if I haven’t a care in the world. And I don’t. I’m going to make a full recovery and pick up my life right where I left off. Finally, a manager with a severe hairdo and too much makeup, politely, yet pointedly, inquires if there’s anything else we need, and we take the hint. We gather our shit and Deacon picks up the tab. We file out, through the maze of tables, and I’m last, hobbling slowly on crutches. I’m halfway out when I realize I left my Yankees baseball cap on the table. I return to get it and find the waitress staring at the check with tears in her eyes. She snaps the black leather book shut when she sees me and hurriedly turns away. “Forget something?” she asks with false cheer and a shaky smile. “My hat,” I say. She’s short and I’m tall. I tower over her. “Did Deacon leave a shitty tip? He does that.” “Oh no, no, I mean…it’s fine,” she says, turning away to wipe her eyes. “I’m so sorry. I just…um, kind of a rough month. You know how it is.” She glances me up and down in my expensive jeans and designer shirt. “Or maybe you don’t.” The waitress realizes what she said, and another round of apologies bursts out of her as she begins stacking our dirty dishes. “Oh my god, I’m so sorry. Really. I have this bad habit…blurting. I don’t know why I said that. Anyway, um…” I laugh, and fish into my back pocket for my wallet. “Don’t worry about it. And take this. For your trouble.” I offer her forty dollars and her eyes widen. Up close, her eyes are even prettier—large and luminous, but sad too. A blush turns her skin scarlet “Oh, no, I couldn’t. No, please. It’s fine, really.” She bustles even faster now, not looking at me. I shrug and drop the twenties on the table. “I hope your month improves.” She stops and stares at the money, at war with herself. “Okay. Thank you,” she says finally, her voice cracking. She takes the money and stuffs it into her apron. I feel sorta bad, poor girl. “Have a nice day, Charlotte,” I say, and start to hobble away. She calls after me, “I hope your leg gets better soon.” That was big of her, considering what ginormous bastards we’d been to her all morning. Or maybe she’s just doing her job. I wave a hand to her without looking back, and leave Annabelle’s. Time heals me. I go back to work. To Planet X. To the world and all its thrills and beauty. I don’t go back to my parents’ townhouse; hell I’m hardly in NYC anymore. I don’t go back to Annabelle’s and I never see—or think about—that cute waitress with the sad eyes ever again. “Fucking hell,” I whisper as the machine reads the last line of