Fringe Show Quotes

One minute it was Ohio winter, with doors closed, windows locked, the panes blind with frost, icicles fringing every roof, children skiing on slopes, housewives lumbering like great black bears in their furs along the icy streets. And then a long wave of warmth crossed the small town. A flooding sea of hot air; it seemed as if someone had left a bakery door open. The heat pulsed among the cottages and bushes and children. The icicles dropped, shattering, to melt. The doors flew open. The windows flew up. The children worked off their wool clothes. The housewives shed their bear disguises. The snow dissolved and showed last summer's ancient green lawns. Rocket summer. The words passed among the people in the open, airing houses. Rocket summer. The warm desert air changing the frost patterns on the windows, erasing the art work. The skis and sleds suddenly useless. The snow, falling from the cold sky upon the town, turned to a hot rain before it touched the ground. Rocket summer. People leaned from their dripping porches and watched the reddening sky. The rocket lay on the launching field, blowing out pink clouds of fire and oven heat. The rocket stood in the cold winter morning, making summer with every breath of its mighty exhausts. The rocket made climates, and summer lay for a brief moment upon the land....

It's important to talk about fringe-of-the-fringe experiences, not just to show the humanity of intuitives, but to show humanity the commonness of intuition.

What’s amazing is that things like hashtag design—these essentially ad hoc experiments in digital architecture—have shaped so much of our political discourse. Our world would be different if Anonymous hadn’t been the default username on 4chan, or if every social media platform didn’t center on the personal profile, or if YouTube algorithms didn’t show viewers increasingly extreme content to retain their attention, or if hashtags and retweets simply didn’t exist. It’s because of the hashtag, the retweet, and the profile that solidarity on the internet gets inextricably tangled up with visibility, identity, and self-promotion. It’s telling that the most mainstream gestures of solidarity are pure representation, like viral reposts or avatar photos with cause-related filters, and meanwhile the actual mechanisms through which political solidarity is enacted, like strikes and boycotts, still exist on the fringe.

I can call back the solemn twilight and mystery of the deep woods, the earthy smells, the faint odors of the wild flowers, the sheen of rain-washed foliage, the rattling clatter of drops when the wind shook the trees, the far-off hammering of wood-peckers and the muffled drumming of wood-pheasants in the remotenesses of the forest, the snap-shot glimpses of disturbed wild creatures skurrying through the grass, — I can call it all back and make it as real as it ever was, and as blessed. I can call back the prairie, and its loneliness and peace, and a vast hawk hanging motionless in the sky, with his wings spread wide and the blue of the vault showing through the fringe of their end-feathers.

Under his buckskin riding-coat he wore a black vest and the cravat and collar of a churchman. A young priest, at his devotions; and a priest in a thousand, one knew at a glance. His bowed head was not that of an ordinary man,—it was built for the seat of a fine intelligence. His brow was open, generous, reflective, his features handsome and somewhat severe. There was a singular elegance about the hands below the fringed cuffs of the buckskin jacket. Everything showed him to be a man of gentle birth—brave, sensitive, courteous. His manners, even when he was alone in the desert, were distinguished. He had a kind of courtesy toward himself, toward his beasts, toward the juniper tree before which he knelt, and the God whom he was addressing.

When I was a little girl, my favorite television show starred Roy Rogers and Dale Evans- the queen of the cowgirls." Mrs. Coley explained. "Dale wore a fancy fringed leather skirt and rode a buckskin horse named Buttermilk........... "Thank heavens for Dale Evans," she said with a sigh.

We have to pull out all the stops in welcoming the refugee and the immigrant, in getting to know those who live around us, in showing love to our neighbors. We can't afford to isolate people anymore. We can't afford to push folks to the fringes of our society.

I would rather be part of a show that aims for best ever and comes in 2nd than aims for mediocrity and achieves his goal.” – Joshua Jackson (about Fringe TV series)

No, I’m not shy." I folded my arms across my shell-covered chest. The press of the hard material against my sensitive nipples caused my core to tighten. “But I usually have to buy a girl a couple of drinks in order to be treated to a show like that.” She turned to look at me, the fringe on her dress swaying with her movement. A thin eyebrow arched, her cherry lips pulled into a dazzling smile. “Well.” The intensity locked in her bright eyes as her green gaze moved from my head to my toes and back again made my entire body tingle. “I guess you owe me a drink, Meghan.

The steel blue of the fern-fringed pool where the water rests a little before cascading over rock and shingle to draw breath again in another pool more beautiful than the one just left - the flash of the gaily coloured kingfisher as he breaks the surface of the water, shedding a shower of diamonds from his wings as he rises with a chirp of delight, a silver minnow held firmly in his vermilion bill - the belling of the sambhar and the clear tuneful call of the chital apprising the jungle folk that the tiger, whose pugmarks show wet on the sand where a few minutes before he crossed the river, is out in search of his dinner

He stalked into the room, leaned his long rifle against the mantelpiece and spread out his hands to the fire. He was clad from head to foot in fringed and beaded buckskin, which showed evidence of a long and arduous tramp. It was torn and wet and covered with mud. He was a magnificently made man, six feet in height, and stood straight as an arrow. His wide shoulders, and his muscular, though not heavy, limbs denoted wonderful strength and activity. His long hair, black as a raven's wing, hung far down his shoulders. Presently he turned and the light shone on a remarkable face. So calm and cold and stern it was that it seemed chiselled out of marble. The most striking features were its unusual pallor, and the eyes, which were coal black, and piercing as the dagger's point.

The more south we were, the more deep a sky it seemed, till, in the Valley of Mexico, I thought it held back an element too strong for life, and that the flamy brilliance of blue stood off this menace and sometimes, like a sheath or silk membrane, shoed the weight it held in sags. So when later he would fly high over the old craters on the plain, coaly bubbles of the underworld, dangerous red everywhere from the sun, and then coats of snow on the peak of the cones—gliding like a Satan—well, it was here the old priests, before the Spaniards, waited for Aldebaran to come into the middle of heaven to tell them whether or not life would go on for another cycle, and when they received their astronomical sign built their new fire inside the split and emptied chest of a human sacrifice. And also, hereabouts, worshipers disguised as gods and as gods in the disguise of birds, jumped from platforms fixed on long poles, and glided as they spun by the ropes—feathered serpents, and eagles too, the voladores, or fliers. There still are such plummeters, in market places, as there seem to be remnants or conversions or equivalents of all the old things. Instead of racks or pyramids of skulls still in their hair and raining down scraps of flesh there are corpses of dogs, rats, horses, asses, by the roads; the bones dug out of the rented graves are thrown on a pile when the lease is up; and there are the coffins looking like such a rough joke on the female form, sold in the open shops, black, white, gray, and in all sizes, with their heavy death fringes daubed in Sapolio silver on the black. Beggars in dog voices on the church steps enact the last feebleness for you with ancient Church Spanish, and show their old flails of stump and their sores. The burden carriers with the long lines, hemp lines they wind over their foreheads to hold the loads on their backs, lie in the garbage at siesta and give themselves the same exhibited neglect the dead are shown. Which is all to emphasize how openly death is received everywhere, in the beauty of the place, and how it is acknowledged that anyone may be roughly handled—the proudest—pinched, slapped, and set down, thrown down; for death throws even worse in men’s faces and makes it horrible and absurd that one never touched should be roughly dumped under, dumped upon.

The women showed off new tunic sets and caftans, fringed scarves at their waists or wrapped around their heads like fanciful turbans. Faded traces of their recent henna night lingered on their hands. Silver earrings jangled, kohled eyes flashed, and bangles jostled and clinked with merriment.

I had the luxury of knowing what I wanted to do. So I just sat on the bed and came up with a plan for myself: "I have to go to the Edinburgh Fringe. But I don't have the confidence to do a production there because I've never gone before, and I don't even know how to get there or what to do once I get there. So I will just act as if I do have the confidence to go to the Edinburgh Fringe. I'll just borrow confidence from a future version of myself. Once I've been to the Edinburgh Fringe and performed a show there, then I will have the confidence to go to the Edinburgh Fringe. I will go to the bank manager of confidence (in some part of my brain) and I will borrow that confidence from the future, and then I can wear it like a cloak, and I will talk to everyone with this confidence." It was out there as a concept, but it worked.

The new conspiracism’s characteristic forms—bare assertion, ominous questions, and innuendo—are permissive. They have the appeal of elasticity and irresponsibility. Because of its vagueness, “a lot of people are saying” can embrace an expanding universe of conjured plots and public enemies. And “just asking questions” evades ownership of the claim. The author of any single conspiracist charge is often indeterminate; charges can arise spontaneously as a tease on a radio talk show or an anonymous throwaway on some fringe website.

No, you are ignorant because you shun the truth with all your heart and soul. You close your eyes and run away when a hint of reality lands in front of you. You condemn as extremists and fringe kooks those who try to show you the chains you wear, because you don’t want to be free; you don’t even want to be human. Responsibility and reality scare the hell out of you, so you cling tightly to your own enslavement and lash out at any who seek to free you from it. When someone opens the door to your cage, you cower back in the corner and yell, ‘Close it, close it!

The fact that an educated Roman governor and Consul (the highest possible office in the entire Roman Empire, short of actually being the Emperor) knows so little about Christianity that he has to conduct interrogations to get the basics proves that it was still a little known fringe movement at this time. What’s more, Trajan’s reply mentions no trial precedents or decrees against Christians, highlighting the fact that no trial records existed in Roman archives for famous Christians like Jesus, Peter or Paul. If there had been, Pliny would not had to go into detail describing the trials he conducted.

There’s also the question of money that holds paranormal research back. There is little to no profit in creating a center for paranormal research and only by creating entertainment shows out of investigations can researchers continue to have funds to carry out their work. Until paranormal investigators can demonstrate the practical value of their research to the public they will continue to be on the fringe and not receive real funding to advance the science. Ironically the paranormal was once a wellfunded field with interest from prestigious universities and the federal government. But it was an immature science that still had to find its value, which it is doing now.

On that particular evening there stood in the portico of the temple of Melmoth two remarkable figures who were the centre of observation for a considerable fringe of Phœnician idlers. One of these men was clearly by his face and demeanour a great chieftain. His strongly-marked features were those of a man who had led an adventurous life, and were suggestive of every virile quality from brave resolve to desperate execution. His broad, high brow and contemplative eyes showed that he was a man of wisdom as well as of valour. He was clad, as became a Greek nobleman of the period, with a pure white linen tunic, a gold-studded belt supporting a short sword, and a purple cloak.

In her book claiming that allegations of ritualistic abuse are mostly confabulations, La Fontaine’s (1998) comparison of social workers to ‘nazis’ shows the depth of feeling evident amongst many sceptics. However, this raises an important question: Why did academics and journalists feel so strongly about allegations of ritualistic abuse, to the point of pervasively misrepresenting the available evidence and treating women disclosing ritualistic abuse, and those workers who support them, with barely concealed contempt? It is of course true that there are fringe practitioners in the field of organised abuse, just as there are fringe practitioners in many other health-related fields. However, the contrast between the measured tone of the majority of therapists and social workers writing on ritualistic abuse, and the over-blown sensationalism of their critics, could not be starker. Indeed, Scott (2001) notes with irony that the writings of those who claimed that ‘satanic ritual abuse’ is a ‘moral panic’ had many of the features of a moral panic: scapegoating therapists, social workers and sexual abuse victims whilst warning of an impending social catastrophe brought on by an epidemic of false allegations of sexual abuse. It is perhaps unsurprising that social movements for people accused of sexual abuse would engage in such hyperbole, but why did this rhetoric find so many champions in academia and the media?

In a case involving citizenship a fruitless dispute arose among the advocates as to whether the defendant ought to make his appearance in the toga or in a Greek mantle, and the emperor, with the idea of showing absolute impartiality, made him change his garb several times, according as he was accused or defended. In one case he is credited with having rendered the following decision, which he had actually written out beforehand: “I decide in favour of those who have told the truth.” By such acts as these he so discredited himself that he was held in general and open contempt. One man, in making excuses for a witness that the emperor had summoned from one of the provinces, said that he could not appear, but for a long time would give no reason; at last, after a long series of questions, he said: “He’s dead; I think the excuse is a lawful one.” Another in thanking the emperor for allowing him to defend his client added “After all, it is usual.” I myself used to hear older men say that the pleaders took such advantage of his good-nature, that they would not only call him back when he left the tribunal, but would catch hold of the fringe of his robe, and sometimes of his foot, and thus detain him.

We don't have to do this," I said. His jaw set in a way that reminded me of how he'd look some times back in grade school, standing around the fringes of s kickball game or on that bench by Mr. Lloyd's room. "We do, though." I shook my head, staring at the house. Right then, a woman walked out, carrying a bag of trash. "Let's ask her if we can go in," Cameron said. "Go in?" He turned to me. "Yeah." I lowered my voice to a whisper. "Shouldn't we, like, talk about it first? About what happened?" "Why? We know what happened." "I can't." "But I'm with you. We're together." My eyes filled. He looked out the window. The woman went back in the house and closed the door. "We can come back some other time," I said, "after we've talked." I put the car in drive. "Let's go somewhere. Coffee. Something." "Doesn't matte." His jaw was set again, his voice dead flat. "It does matter, Cameron. That's the point. If it didn't matter I could just go in right now. I'm not ready. You can't just show up after all these years and expect me to be ready." He opened the door and started to get out. "Wait, where are you going?" "Sorry I came here and messed up your life." "That's not what I said!" But he was out of the car, walking down the block, away from me.

Beneath the window, set between gravel walkways, a few woody lavenders, etiolated rosemary bushes, and ornamental thyme made up the aromatherapy garden that he had seen described in the brochure. Beyond this, however, running a long arc down the gentle slope of lawn, camellias in unrestrained bloom provided an alternative tonic. The lawn gave way to a flower garden, itself fringed by a wood, so that the incarcerated had at least the consolation of a pleasant enough outlook. Gabe stood in front of the fireplace and examined the painting that hung above the mantelpiece. It was a still life. It showed two apples and a brown and white feather laid on a velvet cloth on a table placed by a window. Although the picture was not, Gabriel assumed, of the highest artistic value, and was cheap enough to reside at Greenglades, and though it could not be said to have a photographic reality, and though he suspected it of not being "good," he was drawn to look at it and could see the ripeness of the velvet, reckon the bursting crispness of the apples, and the feather had a certain quality that he had never before observed, just as the painted window offered something that he had failed to notice at all when looking through the real one: the texture, the tone, the way the light fell, the very glassness of the glass.

The powerful influence of filmed examples in changing the behavior of children can be used as therapy for various problems. Some striking evidence is available in the research of psychologist Robert O’Connor on socially withdrawn preschool children. We have all seen children of this sort, terribly shy, standing alone at the fringes of the games and groupings of their peers. O’Connor worried that a long-term pattern of isolation was forming, even at an early age, that would create persistent difficulties in social comfort and adjustment through adulthood. In an attempt to reverse the pattern, O’Connor made a film containing eleven different scenes in a nursery-school setting. Each scene began by showing a different solitary child watching some ongoing social activity and then actively joining the activity, to everyone’s enjoyment. O’Connor selected a group of the most severely withdrawn children from four preschools and showed them his film. The impact was impressive. The isolates immediately began to interact with their peers at a level equal to that of the normal children in the schools. Even more astonishing was what O’Connor found when he returned to observe six weeks later. While the withdrawn children who had not seen O’Connor’s film remained as isolated as ever, those who had viewed it were now leading their schools in amount of social activity. It seems that this twenty-three-minute movie, viewed just once, was enough to reverse a potential pattern of lifelong maladaptive behavior. Such is the potency of the principle of social proof.50   When

Bannon thrived on the chaos he created and did everything he could to make it spread. When he finally made his way through the crowd to the back of the town house, he put on a headset to join the broadcast of the Breitbart radio show already in progress. It was his way of bringing tens of thousands of listeners into the inner sanctum of the “Breitbart Embassy,” as the town house was ironically known, and thereby conscripting them into a larger project. Bannon was inordinately proud of the movement he saw growing around him, boasting constantly of its egalitarian nature. What to an outsider could look like a cast of extras from the Island of Misfit Toys was, in Bannon’s eyes, a proudly populist and “unclubbable” plebiscite rising up in defiant protest against the “globalists” and “gatekeepers” who had taken control of both parties. Just how Phil Robertson of Duck Dynasty figured into a plan to overthrow the global power structure wasn’t clear, even to many of Bannon’s friends. But, then, Bannon derived a visceral thrill anytime he could deliver a fuck-you to the establishment. The thousands of frustrated listeners calling in to his radio show, and the millions more who flocked to Breitbart News, had left him no doubt that an army of the angry and dispossessed was eager to join him in lobbing a bomb at the country’s leaders. As guests left the party, a doorman handed out a gift that Bannon had chosen for the occasion: a silver hip flask with “Breitbart” imprinted above an image of a honey badger, the Breitbart mascot. — Bannon’s cult-leader magnetism was a powerful draw for oddballs and freaks, and the attraction ran both ways. As he moved further from the cosmopolitan orbits of Goldman Sachs and Hollywood, there was no longer any need for him to suppress his right-wing impulses. Giving full vent to his views on subjects like immigration and Islam isolated him among a radical fringe that most of political Washington regarded as teeming with racist conspiracy theorists. But far from being bothered, Bannon welcomed their disdain, taking it as proof of his authentic conviction. It fed his grandiose sense of purpose to imagine that he was amassing an army of ragged, pitchfork-wielding outsiders to storm the barricades and, in Andrew Breitbart’s favorite formulation, “take back the country.” If Bannon was bothered by the incendiary views held by some of those lining up with him, he didn’t show it. His habit always was to welcome all comers. To all outward appearances, Bannon, wild-eyed and scruffy, a Falstaff in flip-flops, was someone whom the political world could safely ignore. But his appearance, and the company he kept, masked an analytic capability that was undiminished and as applicable to politics as it had been to the finances of corrupt Hollywood movie studios. Somehow, Bannon, who would happily fall into league with the most agitated conservative zealot, was able to see clearly that conservatives had failed to stop Bill Clinton in the 1990s because they had indulged this very zealotry to a point where their credibility with the media and mainstream voters was shot. Trapped in their own bubble, speaking only to one another, they had believed that they were winning, when in reality they had already lost.

Coming as a kind of pleasure-package with her parents and sisters, as a girl Theodora performed acrobatic tricks and erotic dances in and around the hippodrome – part of the fringe of shows, spectacles and penny theatricals that accompanied the games. It was said by contemporary chroniclers that one of Theodora’s most popular turns was a re-enactment of the story of Leda (the mother of Helen of Troy) and the Swan (Zeus in disguise). The Greek myth went that Zeus was so enraptured with Queen Leda when he espied her bathing by the banks of the River Eurotas that he turned himself into a swan so that he could ravish the Spartan Queen. Theodora, as Leda, would leave a trail of grain up on to (some said into) her body, which the ‘swan’ (in Constantinople in fact a goose) then eagerly consumed. The Empress’s detractors delighted in memorialising the fact that Theodora’s services were eagerly sought out for anal intercourse, as both an active and a passive partner. As a child and as an adolescent woman Theodora would have been considered dirt, but she was, physically, right at the heart of human affairs in a burgeoning city in interesting times. Theodora was also, obviously, wildly attractive. Born in either Cyprus or Syria, as a teenager – already the mother of a young girl and with a history of abortions – she left Constantinople as the companion of a Syrian official, the governor of Libya Pentapolis. The two travelled to North Africa, where, after four years of maltreatment, she found herself abandoned by the Byzantine official, her meal-ticket revoked. A discarded mistress, on the road, was as wretched as things could get in the sixth century. (...) Theodora tried to find her way back to the mother city, making ends meet as a prostitute, and the only people to give the twenty-year-old reject shelter were a group of Christians in the city of Alexandria. That random act of kindness was epoch-forming.

The creation of new souls is a fascinating procedure, one that Judy was able to explain in graphic detail. She showed Val an image of a light being shattered into many fragments, with a solid part remaining intact at the core. This very dense core of energy embodies old souls, and those fragments exploding to the outside represent newer souls. We are all part of the same original spirit and the spirit fragments spread outward with the newest souls on the outer fringes. Judy explained further, “When this shattering takes place, part of our soul heals and stays in spirit and another part moves on, so we go into different areas. The new souls are the less dense parts of that spirit energy.” This means there is a part of every soul in each new one created, as we are all growing, all evolving, at all times. At this stage, as my head was spinning with thoughts and images of all these fragments, M came to my rescue, saying that this explains the oneness of all life. The original energy that fragmented, creating the first souls, is what most people refer to as “God” (also the Creator, the Divine, the Source, Spirit). Each fragment then becomes its own spirit entity, before eventually fragmenting again, and so on. M also explained that new souls come from only the more advanced spirits; I found it comforting to know that spirits in the dark side are not given this capability. It also explains, for me, why so many gifted children are being born in recent years—their deep soul wisdom and advanced intelligence are sorely needed in the future to help us in these turbulent times.

cursory look at the Columbia Journalism Review’s media map demonstrates how social media encourages information bubbles for each political leaning. Conservatives strongly centered their consumption around Breitbart and Fox News, while liberals relied on a more diverse spread of left-leaning outlets. For a foreign influence operation like the one the Russians ran against the United States, the highly concentrated right-wing social media landscape is an immediate, ripe target for injecting themes and messages. The American left shows to be multipolar, littered with fringe outlets and causes, making concentrated foreign influence more challenging; spreading the Kremlin message thus requires influencing many outlets rather than one or two.

He saw “new propaganda” emerging, and he said its goal was “not to convince or persuade, but to keep the viewer hooked and distracted, passive and paranoid.” RT, which received more than $1 billion a year from the Kremlin, began to fine-tune its English-language shows, targeting the fringes of the American political spectrum on the right and the left.

Great Depression times 100” and hyperinflation on par with the Weimar Republic. Fox News was running stories suggesting that Obama had deployed the Secret Service to monitor the conservative network. And a bizarre conspiracy theory about the president’s birthplace was beginning to gain traction—boosted by an unlikely spokesman. Donald Trump had begun popping up on political talk shows to muse about whether Barack Obama might perhaps be a secret Muslim born in Kenya who’d defrauded American voters to get elected to the presidency. This theory had been kicking around the fringes of U.S. political discourse for years and had already been debunked, but suddenly it—and Trump—were everywhere. On The View: “I want him to show his birth certificate. There’s something on that birth certificate that he doesn’t like.” On Fox News: “He’s spent millions of dollars trying to get away from this issue.… A lot of facts are emerging and I’m starting to wonder myself whether or not he was born in this country.” On The Laura Ingraham Show: “He doesn’t have a birth certificate, or if he does, there’s something on that certificate that is very bad for him. Now, somebody told me—and I have no idea if this is bad for him or not, but perhaps it would be—that where it says ‘religion,’ it might have ‘Muslim.’ ” On the Today show: “If he wasn’t born in this country, which is a real possibility… then he has pulled one of the great cons in the history of politics.” Romney

Bridges Life did not appear to breathe here, It was covered in endless rounds of thread of fear, So it tread quietly along the fringes, Scared that it might be the cause of collapsing bridges, Bridges that connected life with hope, And it watched these bridges from a distance placing itself on a discreet slope, But it dared not cross them, none of them, It looked at them in desperation, especially some, For it often crossed them to renew its reserves of liveliness, But now it feels pervaded by a deep feeling of sadness, Life here seems to be a part of some sort of purgatory, Waiting to cross over and leave behind this existence derogatory, It may not be a perspicuous show of feelings, But here these are life’s daily dealings, And I wonder what about life’s own posterity, Because in this land of death life somehow loses all its virility, Tamed by some obnoxious devil, Who has had a diabolic conception and then raised by some heinous evil, Maybe that is why the bridges look so frail and hopeless themselves, Bearing stacks of hopelessness displayed on hope’s own shelves, For when life does not cross the bridges of hope, It is death that forsakes life and then time withdraws its rope, That maintains the perfect cohesion, Between beginnings and ends , between fission and fusion, And when this balance is lost anywhere, Life is cast into a place where there exists life everywhere, But nothing else nowhere, Just life, no hopes, no beauty, no bliss, no summer, a life that becomes its own prisoner in this infinity somewhere, However, now the bridges have fallen, but few still stand, And life that is tired of living without hope, feels the dying hope’s hand, And like the rope of time it pulls it unto itself, and makes life cross the bridge, Thus, life once again walks on the happy ridge, Hoping to live another day, feel life in a better and different way, For living the same moment of time begets no joy, if it is lived the same way everyday, And time weaves its threads of mystery and surprises around it, Then death too gets woven somewhere in this loop of time, and life finally says, “so be it!” And it jumps into the sea of time and collects its moments of myriad experiences, While time registers all these instances, And when the loop of death unwinds, In it a new loop of life it always finds, Now, even if the bridges may fall and time may end, Life has learned to create moments of happiness that never end!

Fringe (2008–2013) and Counterpart (2017–2018)— In the twenty-first century, two popular TV shows demonstrate the idea of a single parallel world that has somehow split off from this world, but retains many similarities, including a shared history. The source of the divergence is never explained fully, but the existence of a parallel world with alternate versions of the main characters is a key plot point in both. Both shows reveal that some physics phenomenon was responsible for either (1) breaching a way into the other universe or (2) causing a branch off the main universe to create the second one.

They waited nearly two hours, but it was becoming increasingly clear that, for whatever reason, he wasn’t going to show.

Why didn’t he show up?

Following them for a few blocks, Allan started to get the feeling they were more likely just co-stars in the live sex show on offer at the theater, rather than a genuine couple.

at some point, we end up shifting focus to the freak show on the fringes of the story. And everybody loves a freak show. Then we start reporting the freak shows, even when there’s no real story attached.

Every Sunday, the Weavers drove their Oldsmobile east toward Waterloo and pulled into the gravel parking lot of the Cedarloo Baptist Church, on a hill between Waterloo and Cedar Falls, took their place in the pews, and listened to the minister. But there seemed to be no fire or passion, no sense of what was really happening in the world. They’d tried other churches and found congregations interested in what God had done 2,000 years ago, but no one paying attention to what God was doing right then. Certainly, churches weren’t addressing the crime in Cedar Falls, the drugs, or the sorry state of schools and government, not to mention the kind of danger that Hal Lindsey described. They would have to find the truth themselves. They began doing their own research, especially Vicki. She had quit work to raise Sara, and later Samuel, who was born in April 1978. When Sara started school, Randy and Vicki couldn’t believe the pagan things she was being taught. They refused to allow her to dress up for Halloween—Satan’s holiday—and decided they had to teach Sara at home. But that was illegal in Iowa. A booster shot of religion came with cable television and The PTL Club, the 700 Club, and Jerry Falwell. The small television in the kitchen was on all the time for a while, but most of Vicki’s free time was spent reading. She’s lose herself in the Cedar Falls public library, reading the science fiction her dad had introduced her to as a kid, the novels and self-help books friends recommended, biblical histories, political tracts, and obscure books that she discovered on her own. Like a painter, she pulled out colors and hues that fit with the philosophy she and Randy were discovering, and everywhere she looked there seemed to be something guiding them toward “the truth,” and, at the same time, pulling them closer together. She spent hours in the library, and when she found something that fit, she passed it along first to Randy, who might read the book himself and then spread it to everyone—the people at work, in the neighborhood, at the coffee shop where he hung out. They read books from fringe organizations and groups, picking through the philosophies, taking what they agreed with and discarding the rest. Yet some of the books that influenced them came from the mainstream, such as Ayn Rand’s classic libertarian novel Atlas Shrugged. Vicki found its struggle between the individual and the state prophetic and its action inspiring. The book shows a government so overbearing and immoral that creative people, led by a self-reliant protagonist, go on strike and move to the mountains. “‘You will win,’” the book’s protagonist cries from his mountain hideout, “‘when you are ready to pronounce the oath I have taken at the start of my battle—and for those who wish to know the day of my return, I shall now repeat it to the hearing of the world: “‘I swear—by my life and my love of it—that I will never live my life for the sake of another man, nor ask another to live for mine.

Claudette Colbert was not Hollywood’s greatest beauty, but her trim little figure, round, kitten-like face, and obviously intelligent good humor made her a bit of a sex symbol, much to her own surprise. By 1934 she’d adopted the hairstyle she kept for life: a short, auburn bob with a fringe of bangs. Although a partygoer and social animal, Claudette was also known as a tough-as-nails professional, overseeing her lighting and camera angles. Her right profile was known as “the dark side of the moon,” and scenes had to be staged so as not to show it. She was also self-conscious about her short neck—directing her in a 1956 TV show, Noël Coward reportedly snapped, “If only Claudette Colbert had a neck, I’d wring it!” “When it comes to details, I’m a horror,” she admitted cheerfully, though downplaying the profile story. “Why not have your good side showing?

It’s important to talk about fringe-of-the-fringe experiences, not just to show the humanity of intuitives, but to show humanity the commonness of intuition.

Following Big Boss Lady’s dictate to write about offbeat places in Edinburgh—I found Arkangel and Felon, an eclectic clothing boutique, the Voodoo Rooms, a chic fringe bar with a burlesque show, and Angels with Bagpipes, a bijou wine bar on the Royal Mile.

We have all seen children of this sort, terribly shy, standing alone at the fringes of the games and groupings of their peers. O’Connor worried that a long-term pattern of isolation was forming, even at an early age, that would create persistent difficulties in social comfort and adjustment through adulthood. In an attempt to reverse the pattern, O’Connor made a film containing eleven different scenes in a nursery-school setting. Each scene began by showing a different solitary child watching some ongoing social activity and then actively joining the activity, to everyone’s enjoyment. O’Connor selected a group of the most severely withdrawn children from four preschools and showed them his film. The impact was impressive. The isolates immediately began to interact with their peers at a level equal to that of the normal children in the schools. Even more astonishing was what O’Connor found when he returned to observe six weeks later. While the withdrawn children who had not seen O’Connor’s film remained as isolated as ever, those who had viewed it were now leading their schools in amount of social activity. It seems that this twenty-three-minute movie, viewed just once, was enough to reverse a potential pattern of lifelong maladaptive behavior.

It was a bright humid night in Chiang Mai. Sangris and I trotted toward the night bazaar, stepping over the basketfuls of fried red chili that the sellers had spread out on the streets like open bowls of flowers. Finding a canal on the fringes of the market, we fed enormous gold carp. They curled through the water like submerged flames beneath the heavy tropical-black sky. Acting innocent, I bought him orange juice and watched his face change when he realized that the sellers had filled it with salt. A trick to prevent dehydration, I explained, and ran off cackling before he could get revenge. I wanted to go into the orchid farms and the butterfly gardens, but they were closed, and I refused his offer to break in (of course Sangris had a way of assuming that rules didn't apply to him, but, I said, they applied to me), so we walked along a half-lit street instead, warm greenness and humming insects all around us, and spent hours trying to catch the guppies that swarmed in innumerable pots by the roadsides. I was better at it: I could lift my hands out of the green-tinted, plant-filled water slowly, without startling the fish, and show him the flashes of yellow and orange and violet and red guppies that flickered through the water cupped in my palms like a strange and magical treasure.

As hospitals in New York City filled up with acutely sick patients, a new conspiracy theory was hatched on social media. Lunatics claimed that the hospitals were actually empty, and they stalked the entrances and parking lots with their cell phone cameras to come up with “proof.” Look, they said, there aren’t many cars in the parking lot! Dr. Bray, at Elmhurst, heard this shit secondhand. “They think the hospital is empty,” she said, positively stunned. Bray wondered: Where are they getting this stuff? The answer, in part, was Fox. The network often mainstreamed ideas from the far right fringe, and that’s exactly what Fox News contributor Sara Carter did on March 29, during a segment on a Sunday night talk show.

As hospitals in New York City filled up with acutely sick patients, a new conspiracy theory was hatched on social media. Lunatics claimed that the hospitals were actually empty, and they stalked the entrances and parking lots with their cell phone cameras to come up with “proof.” Look, they said, there aren’t many cars in the parking lot! Dr. Bray, at Elmhurst, heard this shit secondhand. “They think the hospital is empty,” she said, positively stunned. Bray wondered: Where are they getting this stuff? The answer, in part, was Fox. The network often mainstreamed ideas from the far right fringe, and that’s exactly what Fox News contributor Sara Carter did on March 29, during a segment on a Sunday night talk show. “You can see it on Twitter,” she said. “People are saying, ‘Film your hospital,’ people are driving by their hospitals and they’re not seeing—in the ones that I’m seeing—they’re not seeing anybody in the parking lots. They’re not seeing anybody drive up. So, people are wondering what’s going inside the hospital.” Bray’s reaction: She wished her hospital was empty. “This is worse than war,” she said. In

As hospitals in New York City filled up with acutely sick patients, a new conspiracy theory was hatched on social media. Lunatics claimed that the hospitals were actually empty, and they stalked the entrances and parking lots with their cell phone cameras to come up with “proof.” Look, they said, there aren’t many cars in the parking lot! Dr. Bray, at Elmhurst, heard this shit secondhand. “They think the hospital is empty,” she said, positively stunned. Bray wondered: Where are they getting this stuff? The answer, in part, was Fox. The network often mainstreamed ideas from the far right fringe, and that’s exactly what Fox News contributor Sara Carter did on March 29, during a segment on a Sunday night talk show. “You can see it on Twitter,” she said. “People are saying, ‘Film your hospital,’ people are driving by their hospitals and they’re not seeing—in the ones that I’m seeing—they’re not seeing anybody in the parking lots. They’re not seeing anybody drive up. So, people are wondering what’s going inside the hospital.” Bray’s reaction: She wished her hospital was empty. “This is worse than war,” she said. In Geneva, the head of the World Health Organization said countries like the U.S. were in the eye of the Covid-19 storm. In Washington, Dr. Anthony Fauci went on TV and warned Americans to brace for 100,000-plus deaths from the coronavirus. He said millions could be infected. But the president had something else on his mind. He tweeted that his ratings were “so high.” This was the Fox News presidency in action. Here’s how it happened.

Maybe therapy isn’t just a bad one-woman fringe show you don’t have the balls to take on the road.

Tahira was tall and unbent by age, although her advanced years showed in the weathering of her face. Long, grey hair that looked as strong as steel wire curled down over her shoulders. She wore heavy jewelry of malachite inlaid silver at her throat and wrists, around her spare shoulders hung a large, fringed shawl of red and yellow silk. She listened without expression as Qimei explained what he required of her.

The second way to know if you are on the right track is by experiencing synchronicities. Synchronicities show the algorithmic nature of our reality

Advances in technology used to expand, evolve, and heighten consciousness will show a functional application of Ai. The human habit of seeking heroes, saviors, and solvers is ultimately disempowering to the human race.

Lest we conclude this is a fringe movement involving only a small percentage of American Christians, statistics show that nearly two-thirds of mainline Protestants7—members of the supposedly “liberal” Christian denominations—and two-thirds of all Christians taken together8 agree with many of the sentiments, if not the actions, of the thousands who marched on the Capitol on January 6. Many of us have neighbors, friends, and family members who agree at least with the beliefs underlying that violent insurgence. Based on the best research to date, approximately half (52%) of Americans either fully embrace or lean toward the main tenets of Christian nationalism. 9 While this percentage decreased slightly between 2007 and 2017, Christian nationalists have become more visible and vocal since Trump’s election in 2016. The 2001 attack on the World Trade Center (9/ 11) caused an upsurge in nationalistic fervor and a parallel rise in Islamophobia.

Worst among the new lexicon of anti-male slogans is that of ‘toxic masculinity’. Like each of these other memes, ‘toxic masculinity’ started out on the furthest fringes of academia and social media. But by 2019 it had made it into the heart of serious organizations and public bodies. In January the American Psychological Association released its first ever guidelines for how its members should specifically deal with men and boys. The APA claimed that 40 years of research showed that ‘traditional masculinity – marked by stoicism, competitiveness, dominance and aggression, is undermining men’s well-being’.

The light of water showed through the tree trunks as they drew close to the narrow wood along the lake but once on the fringe of the trees they lost all resentment at the sight of the thick floor of bluebells beneath the trees.

used my little finger to apply gold pigment to my emerald-painted lips. Denim, the drag troupe that I set up seven years earlier, had survived the gruelling Fringe Festival, and we were one show away from crossing our scratched heels over the finish line. A month of performances, often two a day, had taken its toll. My skin was at war with the industrial quantity of make-up it was being suffocated in (a two-hour procedure each time); I had obliterated my left kneecap because of a wannabe-rockstar ‘jump-and-slam-onto-the-ground’ move I felt impelled to perform each show;

Daddy tolerated this, but her exploded on Sunday night after the last competitor had left: "Goddamnit, Dot, horse show people are crazy, but dog show people are the lunatic fringe of humanity." We never hosted the Specialty Show again.

Few British birds, indeed, show higher and closer adaptation to special conditions than our dreamy night-jars, essential insect-hawkers of the dusk on open and treeless uplands. Their large and mysterious eyes, their gaping mouths, their straining fringe of bristles, their delicate owl-like plumage, their swift and silent flight, their agile movements, their eerie cry, their curious love-sick nature—all mark them out as marvellously modified nocturnal variants on the general type of the swifts and trogons.

our host showed us back through the beaded curtain. “I trust you can find your way out?” he said, holding the fringe so it didn’t drop back and tickle us, or tangle up in our hair, or whatever it is that sinister beaded curtains do to inconvenience the unwitting masses.

Fringe thinkers define the future of x broadly, which allows them to wonder what’s possible, rather than what’s plausible and probable given the current state of the world. That’s one reason why fringe thinkers make good companions for pragmatists interested in the future. Unencumbered by the need to prove immediate success, to meet a bottom line, or to show a positive return on investment, fringe thinkers can push the boundaries of their imaginations without having to worry about process—that is, how to turn that dream into reality. Their ideas or methods may seem unconventional, but that’s only because not enough time has elapsed for their work to ricochet from the edge to other researchers, to early adopters, to businesses, to established academic circles, and finally to mainstream society.

Regardless of the industry or circumstances, one forecast has always been right throughout history: technology will advance, it will invariably intersect with other sources of change within society, and trends are the signposts showing us how changes will manifest in real life.

1. Find the Fringe: Cast a wide enough net to harness information from the fringe. This involves creating a map showing nodes and the relationships between them, and rounding up what you will later refer to as “the unusual suspects.” 2. Use CIPHER: Uncover hidden patterns by categorizing data from the fringe. Patterns indicate a trend, so you’ll do an exhaustive search for Contradictions, Inflections, Practices, Hacks, Extremes, and Rarities. 3. Ask the Right Questions: Determine whether a pattern really is a trend. You will be tempted to stop looking once you’ve spotted a pattern, but you will soon learn that creating counterarguments is an essential part of the forecasting process, even though most forecasters never force themselves to poke holes into every single assumption and assertion they make. 4. Calculate the ETA: Interpret the trend and ensure that the timing is right. This isn’t just about finding a typical S-curve and the point of inflection. As technology trends move along their trajectory, there are two forces in play—internal developments within tech companies, and external developments within the government, adjacent businesses, and the like—and both must be calculated. 5. Create Scenarios and Strategies: Build scenarios to create probable, plausible, and possible futures and accompanying strategies. This step requires thinking about both the timeline of a technology’s development and your emotional reactions to all of the outcomes. You’ll give each scenario a score, and based on your analysis, you will create a corresponding strategy for taking action. 6. Pressure-Test Your Action: But what if the action you choose to take on a trend is the wrong one? In this final step, you must make sure the strategy you take on a trend will deliver the desired outcome, and that requires asking difficult questions about both the present and the future.

It was an exhilarating time to be involved in the art world, in any capacity. At last, individualism was encouraged, not condemned. By the 1880s, Impressionism was yesterday’s news. Artists had already gone beyond it, and were experimenting with new forms, content and techniques. Diversity was the modus vivendi. Accordingly, 1880s Paris became the birthplace of some radically different movements, including Divisionism, Symbolism, Synthesism and Nabis. Furthermore, the proliferation of alternative exhibiting bodies offered real grounds for hope for avant-garde painters and those hailing from the fringes of society. The Salon was no longer the sole and hazardous rite of passage lying between a painter and success. There were now other organisations where reputations could be forged, such as the Société des Aquarellistes Français. But by far the most notable and innovative artistic venture in 1884 was the Salon des Artistes Indépendants. When his technically daring composition Bathers at Asnières (1884) was rejected by the jury of the 1884 Salon, former pupil of the prestigious École des Beaux-Arts Georges Seurat was spurred to retaliate. Joining forces with a number of other disgruntled painters, among them Symbolist Odilon Redon and self-taught artist Albert Dubois-Pillet, Seurat helped found the Groupe des Artistes Indépendants. With Redon acting as chairman, the group proposed to do something unprecedented: they would mount a show whose organisers were not answerable to any official institution, and where there would be no prizes and, significantly, no jury. The venture introduced a radically new concept onto the Parisian art scene: freedom. The first exhibition, the Salon des Artistes Indépendants, was held from May to July in a temporary building in the Jardin des Tuileries near the Louvre.

Passing a road called Laurel Canyon, I remembered a folksinger with a record named that and near-expected her to show up with a basket of sunflowers. Or Neil Young would amble toward me in a fringed leather jacket. Or J. D. Salinger himself, who’d become my mentor and order up poems from me like so many diner pancakes…. (What hurts so bad about youth isn’t the actual butt whippings the world delivers. It’s the stupid hopes playacting like certainties.) At one point a town car glided up, and my heart bounded like a doe as the window silently slid down. But it was a wrinkled lady in tennis whites, asking in bad Spanish if I was Luz from the agency.

that was directed at Buchanan: “In the 1930s, everyone thought Hitler was a fringe element who could never come to power. History showed otherwise. We must recognize bigotry and prejudice and defeat it whenever it appears.” Appearing on The Tonight Show, Trump was more distinctive: “He’s obviously been having a love affair with Adolf Hitler.”23

Billy and Thunder's Wild West Adventure Once upon a time in the Wild West, there was a little cowboy named Billy. Billy was no ordinary cowboy; he was the tiniest, most determined cowboy in all of Leeton, Missouri. One sunny afternoon, Billy decided it was time to round up his trusty steed, a plush toy horse named Thunder. Billy put on his best cowboy hat, tied his bandana, and slipped into his fringed coat. He climbed onto Thunder, ready to conquer the wild fields. As he rode, he imagined himself chasing down outlaws and saving the day. But Thunder had other plans. Being a plush toy, Thunder wasn't exactly built for speed. Instead, he bounced and wobbled, making Billy giggle uncontrollably. Suddenly, Billy spotted a group of real horses in the distance. "Yeehaw! Let's show them how it's done, Thunder!" he shouted. The real horses, curious about the tiny cowboy, trotted over to see what all the fuss was about. They watched in amusement as Billy and Thunder performed their best rodeo tricks. Billy decided it was time for the grand finale. He stood up on Thunder's back, arms outstretched, and shouted, "Look at me, I'm the greatest cowboy in the West!" Just then, Thunder wobbled a bit too much, and Billy tumbled off, landing softly in the grass. The real horses neighed in what sounded like laughter. Billy sat up, dusted himself off, and laughed along with them. "Well, Thunder, we might not be the fastest or the best, but we sure know how to have fun!" And with that, Billy and Thunder continued their adventure, bringing smiles and laughter to everyone they met in the Wild West. And so, the legend of Billy the Tiny Cowboy and his trusty steed Thunder spread far and wide, reminding everyone that sometimes, the best adventures are the ones filled with laughter and a little bit of wobble.

The influence of the mid-to-late-Sixties English counterculture is clearer in The Beatles’ music than in that of any of their rivals. This arose from a conflux of links, beginning with their introduction by Brian Epstein to the film director Richard Lester, continuing with McCartney’s friendships with Miles and John Dunbar, and culminating in the meeting of Lennon and Yoko Ono. Through Lester and his associates - who included The Beatles’ comedy heroes Spike Milligan and Peter Sellers - the group’s consciousness around the time of Sgt. Pepper was permeated by the anarchic English fringe theatre, with its penchant for Empire burlesque (e.g., The Alberts, Ivor Cutler, Milligan and Antrobus’s The Bed Sitting Room). This atmosphere mingled with contemporary strains from English Pop Art and Beat poetry; the ‘happenings’ and experimental drama of The People Show, Peter Brook’s company, and Julian Beck’s Living Theatre; the improvised performances of AMM and what later became the Scratch Orchestra; the avant-garde Euro-cinema of Fellini and Antonioni; and the satire at Peter Cook’s Establishment club and in his TV show with Dudley Moore, Not Only . . . But Also (in which Lennon twice appeared). From the cultural watershed of 1965-6 onwards, The Beatles’ American heroes of the rock-and-roll Fifties gave way to a kaleidoscopic mélange of local influences from the English fringe arts and the Anglo-European counterculture as well as from English folk music and music-hall.