Geography Matters Quotes

Getting lost was not a matter of geography so much as identity, a passionate desire, even an urgent need, to become no one and anyone, to shake off the shackles that remind you who you are, who others think you are.

Money matters but less than we think and not in the way that we think. Family is important. So are friends. Envy is toxic. So is excessive thinking. Beaches are optional. Trust is not. Neither is gratitude.

Some imagine the difference between heaven and hell to be a matter of geography. Not so. The difference is much more evident in the individuals who dwell there.

The brain may take advice, but not the heart, and love, having no geography, knows no boundaries: weight and sink it deep, no matter, it will rise and find the surface: and why not? any love is natural and beautiful that lies within a person's nature; only hypocrites would hold a man responsible for what he loves, emotional illiterates and those of righteous envy, who, in their agitated concern, mistake so frequently the arrow pointing to heaven for the one that leads to hell.

The geography of the thing wasn’t the point; it didn’t matter where they were: there was still too much space between them.

It occurred to me that no matter where I lived, geography could not save me.

Heimat. The word mean home in German, the place where one was born. But the term also conveys a subtler nuance, a certain tenderness. One's Heimat is not merely a matter of geography; it is where one's heart lies.

location matters more than you think when it comes to any kind of food business.

The brain may take advice, but not the heart, and love, having no geography, knows no boundaries: weight and sink it deep, no matter, it will rise and find the surface.

No one today is purely one thing. Labels like Indian, or woman, or Muslim, or American are not more than starting-points, which if followed into actual experience for only a moment are quickly left behind. Imperialism consolidated the mixture of cultures and identities on a global scale. But its worst and most paradoxical gift was to allow people to believe that they were only, mainly, exclusively, white, or Black, or Western, or Oriental. Yet just as human beings make their own history, they also make their cultures and ethnic identities. No one can deny the persisting continuities of long traditions, sustained habitations, national languages, and cultural geographies, but there seems no reason except fear and prejudice to keep insisting on their separation and distinctiveness, as if that was all human life was about. Survival in fact is about the connections between things; in Eliot’s phrase, reality cannot be deprived of the “other echoes [that] inhabit the garden.” It is more rewarding - and more difficult - to think concretely and sympathetically, contrapuntally, about others than only about “us.” But this also means not trying to rule others, not trying to classify them or put them in hierarchies, above all, not constantly reiterating how “our” culture or country is number one (or not number one, for that matter).

Agad bowed to the Fairy Queen. 'You are most wise, your majesty. Some imagine the difference between heaven and hell to be a matter of geography. Not so. The difference is much more evident in the individuals who dwell there.

When it seems as if God is far away, remind yourself that He is near. Nearness is not a matter of geography. God is everywhere. Nearness is likeness. The more we become like the Lord, the nearer He is to us.

Only a fool or philosopher would make sweeping generalizations about the nature of happiness. I am no philosopher, so here goes: Money matters, but less than we think and not in the way that we think. Family is important. So are friends. Envy is toxic. So is excessive thinking. Beaches are optional. Trust is not. Neither is gratitude.

First, he says, you have to go out into the world. This is not a simple matter of going outside one's door. No, that is simply going out. That's what one does when one is on the way to the store to buy a loaf of bread, some cheese, and a bottle of wine. When one goes out into the world, one is shedding preconceptions of past paths and ideas of past paths, and trying to move freely through an unsubstantiated and new geography.

Even before his brain digests these sights, his body—skin, nerve endings, lungs, heart—recognizes the geography of his birth. He never understood how much it mattered. Every bit of this lush landscape is his; its every atom contains him.

Lovers are not at their best when it matters. Mouths dry up, palms sweat, conversation flags and all the time the heart is threatening to fly from the body once and for all. Lovers have been known to have heart attacks. Lovers drink too much from nervousness and cannot perform. They eat too little and faint during their fervently wished consummation. They do not stroke the favoured cat and their face-paint comes loose. This is not all. Whatever you have set store by, your dress, your dinner, your poetry, will go wrong. How is it that one day life is orderly and you are content, a little cynical perhaps, but on the whole just so, and then without warning you find the solid floor is a trapdoor and you are now in another place whose geography is uncertain and whose customs are strange? Travellers at least have a choice. Those who set sail know that things will not be the same as at home. Explorers are prepared. But for us, who travel along the blood vessels, who come to the cities of the interior by chance, there is no preparation. We who were fluent find life is a foreign language. Somewhere between the swamp and the mountains. Somewhere between fear and sex. Somewhere between God and the Devil passion is and the way there is sudden and the way back is worse.

Maybe it was possible that you could take someone out of their life and drop them in the middle of another place entirely and they could seem like someone completely different. But even if that were the case, she thought, it wasn't really 'they' change—it was just the backdrop, the circumstances, the cast of characters. Just because you painted a house didn't mean the furniture inside was any different. It had to be the same with people. Deep down, at the very core, they'd still be the same no matter where they were, wouldn't they?

Money matters, but less than we think and not in the way that we think. Family is important. So are friends. Envy is toxic. So is excessive thinking. Beaches are optional. Trust is not. Neither is gratitude.

The brain may take advice, but not the heart, and love, having no geography, knows no boundaries: weight and sink it deep, no matter, it will rise and find the surface: and why not? any love is natural and beautiful that lies within a person's nature; only hypocrites would hold a man responsible for what he loves, emotional illiterates and those of righteous envy, who, in their agitated concern, mistake so frequently the arrow pointing to heaven for the one that leads to hell.

Grief is a country that has no definite borderlines and that recognises no single trajectory. It is a space that did not exist before your loss, and that will never disappear from your map, no matter how hard you rub at the charcoal lines. You are changed utterly, and your personal geography becomes yours and yours only.

Imagine that we could revive a well-educated Christian of the fourteenth century. The man would prove to be a total ignoramus, except on matters of faith. His beliefs about geography, astronomy, and medicine would embarrass even a child, but he would know more or less everything there is to know about God.

I only back people with track record who can execute ruthlessly and flawlessly... Real killers...no matter the industry or company geography

How we pursue the goal of happiness matters at least as much, perhaps more, than the goal itself. They are, in fact, one and the same, means and ends. A virtuous life necessarily leads to a happy life.

Whatever I decided to do for a living, it was not what I did but how I did it that mattered.

the immersive ugliness of the built environment in the USA is entropy made visible. It indicates not simple carelessness but a vivid drive toward destruction, decay and death: the stage-set of a literal “death trip,” of a society determined to commit suicide. Far from being a mere matter of aesthetics, suburbia represents a compound economic catastrophe, ecological debacle, political nightmare, and spiritual crisis — for a nation of people conditioned to spend their lives in places not worth caring about.

In his book Why Geography Matters, the geographer Harm de Blij argues that the West’s three great challenges of our time—Islamist terrorism, global warming, and the rise of China—are all problems of geography. An informed citizenry has to understand place, not because place is more important than other kinds of knowledge but because it forms the foundation for so much other knowledge.

Man was first a hunter, and an artist: his early vestiges tell us that alone. But he must always have dreamed, and recognized and guessed and supposed, all the skills of the imagination. Language itself is a continuously imaginative act. Rational discourse outside our familiar territory of Greek logic sounds to our ears like the wildest imagination. The Dogon, a people of West Africa, will tell you that a white fox named Ogo frequently weaves himself a hat of string bean hulls, puts it on his impudent head, and dances in the okra to insult and infuriate God Almighty, and that there's nothing we can do about it except abide him in faith and patience. This is not folklore, or quaint custom, but as serious a matter to the Dogon as a filling station to us Americans. The imagination; that is, the way we shape and use the world, indeed the way we see the world, has geographical boundaries like islands, continents, and countries. These boundaries can be crossed. That Dogon fox and his impudent dance came to live with us, but in a different body, and to serve a different mode of the imagination. We call him Brer Rabbit.

What is wrong with looking muscular? Muscles are beautiful. Strength is beautiful. Muscle tissue is beautiful. It is metabolically, medically, and philosophically beautiful. Muscles retreat when they're not used, but they will always come back if you give them good reason. No matter how old you get, your muscles never lose hope. Few cells of the body are as capable as muscle cells are of change and reformation, of achievement and transcendence.

What poor, mean trash this whole business of human virtue is! A mere matter, for the most part, of latitude and longitude, and geographical position, acting with natural temperament. The greater part is nothing but an accident.

The brain may take advice, but not the heart, and love, having no geography, knows no boundaries: weight and sink it deep, no matter, it will rise and find the surface: and why not? any love is natural and beautiful that lies within a person’s nature.

Geography does not determine individual character, but it does matter.

In other words, where we are is vital to who we are. By “where,” I’m speaking not only of our physical environment but also of our cultural environment. Culture is the sea we swim in—so pervasive, so all-consuming, that we fail to notice its existence until we step out of it. It matters more than we think.

This kingdom is not just a spiritual realm high above the concerns of human history. Nor is it a matter of geography and national boundaries. It is God's gracious rule in the hearts and lives of his people. Jesus and his apostles announce the present reality of the kingdom of God amid daily life. On one occasion Jesus declares, "The kingdom of God is within [or among] you" (Lk 17:21).

This is the exaltingquality—to become so perfectedin our lives that not only do we live with God, but we become like him. This is the ultimate oneness. Oneness is not only a matter of geography, but of identity. The issue is not just where we live, but what we become. To live with God does not assure us we will be like him. All who live in the celestial kingdom dwell with God, but only those who are exalted become as he is. The objective of the Atonement is not just to cleanse us, but to so transform our lives and our way of thinking and acting that we become like God.

Something wasn’t right though. That golden rule of positive psychology, hedonic adaptation, states that no matter what tragedy or good fortune befalls us, we adapt. We return to our “set point” or close enough anyway. It’s been fifteen years since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Why hasn’t Luba adapted?

The social world of Ibsen’s plays is greatly restricted, enclosed in a narrow frame, cut off by the very geography of Norway; the long, dark winters make for social repetition…Everyone else you know is right there, so to speak. This small-town life has moral consequences always; the players live with the threat of trouble over the most petty matters.

How we pursue the goal of happiness matters at least as much, perhaps more, than the goal itself.

Beauty is as you find it, Sergeant, a matter of philosophy and geography

No matter how secret a particular satellite was, it had to obey the same laws of physics as the rest of the solar system.

Love, having no geography, knows no boundaries: weight and sink it deep, no matter, it will rise and find the surface.

Very little trade has moved between China and India over the centuries, and that is unlikely to change soon. Of course the border is really the Tibetan–Indian border – and that is precisely why China has always wanted to control it. This is the geopolitics of fear. If China did not control Tibet, it would always be possible that India might attempt to do so. This would give India the commanding heights of the Tibetan Plateau and a base from which to push into the Chinese heartland, as well as control of the Tibetan sources of three of China’s great rivers, the Yellow, Yangtze and Mekong, which is why Tibet is known as ‘China’s Water Tower’. China, a country with approximately the same volume of water usage as the USA, but with a population five times as large, will clearly not allow that. It matters not whether India wants to cut off China’s river supply, only that it would have the power to do so. For centuries China has tried to ensure that it could never happen.

This means that a small state in the midst of adversaries, such as Israel, has to be particularly passive, or particularly aggressive, in order to survive. It is primarily a matter of geography. 29

This, I realize, is what life is like for most Thais. They are not in control of their fates. A terrifying thought, yes, but also a liberating one. For if nothing you do matters, then life suddenly feels a lot less heavy. It’s just one big game. And as any ten-year-old will tell you, the best games are the ones where everyone gets to play. And where you can play again and again, for free. Lots of cool special effects are nice, too.

it was the power of the military, and in particular that of the Air Force, which was the hidden hand that allowed universalist ideas to matter so much more than terrain and the historical experience of people living on it.

You could tell them that a definition of “right” and “wrong” is a definition established not only by time, but also by simple geography. You could allow them to notice that some activities on your planet (prostitution, for instance) are illegal in one place, and, just a few miles down the road, legal in another. And so, whether a person is judged as having done something “wrong” is not a matter of what that person has actually done, but of where he has done it.

The brain may take advice, but not the heart, and love, having no geography, knows no boundaries: weight and sink it deep, no matter, it will rise and find the surface: and why not? any love is natural and beautiful that lies within a person's nature; only hypocrites would hold a man responsible for what he loves, emotional illiterates and those of righteous envy, who, in their agitated concern, mistake so frequently the arrow pointing to heaven for the one leading to hell.

Why should this matter? Why not accept the little fake church as a playful, harmless, adorable architectural oddity, as the lovers of kitsch do? Because it's a bad building, cheaply cute, out-of-scale, symbolically false, and stuck in the middle of a parking lot, a little noplace that contributes to the greater noplace. Because if the town had not been degraded by other bad buildings and bad design relationships, there would be no need for its mendacious symbolism, which cheapens the town a little more.

I was perplexed by the failure of teachers at school to address what seemed the most urgent matter of all: the bewildering, stomach-churning insecurity of being alive. The standard subjects of history, geography, mathematics, and English seemed perversely designed to ignore the questions that really mattered. As soon as I had some inkling of what 'philosophy' meant, I was puzzled as to why we were not taught it. And my skepticism about religion only grew as I failed to see what the vicars and priests I encountered gained from their faith. They struck me either as insincere, pious, and aloof or just bumblingly good-natured. (p. 10)

Independence vs. interdependence is of course not an either/or matter. Every society—and every individual—is a blend of both. It turns out that it is remarkably easy to bring one or another orientation to the fore. Psychologists Wendi Gardner, Shira Gabriel, and Angela Lee “primed” American college students to think either independently or interdependently.

Rome is not merely a matter of geography...Rome is not defined by rivers, or mountains, or even seas; Rome is not a question of blood or race, or religion; Rome is an ideal. Rome is the highest embodiment of liberty and law that mankind has yet achieved since our ancestors came down from those mountains and learned to live as communities under the rule of law

The cabby left, muttering under his nose. "What's he muttering about?" Mr. Goliadkin thought through his tears. "I hired him for the evening, I'm sort of...within my rights nows...so there! I hired him for the evening, and that's the end of the matter. Even if he just stands there, it's all the same. It's as I will. I'm free to go, and free not to go. And that I'm now standing behind the woodpile--that, too, is quite all right...and don't you dare say anything; I say, the gentleman wants to stand behind the woodpile, so he stands behind the woodpile...and it's no taint to anybody's honor--so there! So there, lady mine, if you'd like to know. Thus and so, I say, but in our age, lady mine, nobody lives in a hut. So there! In our industrial age, lady mine, you can't get anywhere without good behavior, of which you yourself serve as a pernicious example...You say one must serve as a chief clerk and live in a hut on the seashore. First of all, lady mine, there are no chief clerks on the seashore, and second, you and I can't possible get to be a chief clerk. For, to take an example, suppose I apply, I show up--thus and so, as a chief clerk, say, sort of...and protect me from my enemy...and they'll tell you, my lady, say, sort of...there are lots of chief clerks, and here you're not at some émigrée Falbala's, where you learned good behavior, of which you yourself serve as a pernicious example. Good behavior, my lady, means sitting at home, respecting your father, and not thinking of any little suitors before it's time. Little suitors, my lady, will be found in due time! So there! Of course, one must indisputably have certain talents, to wit: playing the piano on occasion, speaking French, some history, geography, catechism, and arithmetic--so there!--but not more. Also cooking; cooking should unfailingly be part of every well-behaved girl's knowledge!

The way Karma Ura sees it, a government is like a pilot guiding an airplane. In bad weather, it must rely on its instruments to navigate. But what if the instruments are faulty? The plane will certainly veer off course, even though the pilot is manipulating the controls properly. That, he says, is the state of the world today, with its dependence on gross national product as the only real measure of a nation’s progress. “Take education,” he says. “We are hooked on measuring enrollment, but we don’t look at the content. Or consider a nation like Japan. People live a long time, but what is the quality of their life past age sixty?” He has a point. We measure what is easiest to measure, not what really matters to most people’s lives—a disparity that Gross National Happiness seeks to correct.

I did become homesick, and whenever that happened, I'd hide away in the school library, where the books filled rows and rows of shelves. I'd find a chair and study my lesson books in geography, social studies, biology, and math. I'd lose myself in American and African history, and within the colorful maps of the world. No matter how foreign and lonely the world was outside, the books always reminded me of home, sitting under the mango tree.

You remember the dialogue you had with yourself, you can quote the emotion word for word, as if you’re still there, as if it matters that you can map in detail the geographies of regret. It starts with a hope and ends with a turn of the stomach: a cringe at the excuses you make for your heart, a momentary forever you remember on alternate days over coffee and novels that hit too close to home. You cry because you know the point at which you could have turned back but didn’t, could have taken time by the throat and resisted, could have ignored the phone, answered that message, said no, said yes, said nothing, smiled - whatever it is that you didn’t do. But by the time that moment ends, it is over and you are in too deep, wondering why there exists no rewind button for the soul, no second chance for the petty player, no backup plan for those who risk everything on nothing, all at once.

postmodernists are just as concerned about objective truth as anyone else. Dallas Willard comments, “I have noticed that the most emphatic of Postmodernists turn coldly modern when discussing their fringe benefits or other matters that make a great difference to their practical life.” 35 If we use the metaphor that a worldview is a mental map, postmodernists keep walking off their map. It is too small to account for the full geography of who they are.

Yeah, I've been there. Sometimes you're not with the right person, and you don't even know it until it's time to say good-bye. But here's the thing. I don't think geography or job or anything else matters if you've found that one person you want to spend the rest of your life with. You know what I mean?" She nodded. "I do. If you're in love with someone---truly in love with them---there's no obstacle to the relationship that can't be worked out. You'll figure out a way.

Prayer, according to Brother David, is waking up to the presence of God no matter where I am or what I am doing. When I am fully alert to whatever or whoever is right in front of me; when I am electrically aware of the tremendous gift of being alive; when I am able to give myself wholly to the moment I am in, then I am in prayer. Prayer is happening, and it is not necessarily something that I am doing. God is happening, and I am lucky enough to know that I am in The Midst.

And what do we do to fit our English-speaking Chinese, our docile and happy, our truly loyal servants, for the Asia of the future? We teach them English history: Henry the VIII, Elizabeth and Victoria, English geography, three-quarters of the book the British Isles, one quarter the rest of the world. literature, Lamb's Tales from Shakespeare and The Mill on the Floss, all in Basic, as they aren't to know the complexities of our tongue. We cut them from their own learning, their traditions; if that were cutting them off merely from the past, it wouldn't matter, but also and more dangerously, it cuts them from the present, and perhaps the future of Asia. With these happy eunuchs who are bound to us by their knowledge of English we run this country well as our colonial preserve. But we cannot pretend to think we can leave it to them to run it for themselves. All the revolutionaries in India were people who went back to their own literature and language. We'll see the same phenomenon here.

Sewing is a visual language. It has a voice. It has been used by people to communicate something of themselves — their history, beliefs, prayers and protests. For some, it is the only means to tell of what matters to them: those who are imprisoned or censored; those who do not know how or are not allowed to write of their lives. For them needlework can carry their autobiographies and testimonies, registering their origin and fate. Using patterns as syntax, symbols and motifs as its vocabulary, the arrangement of both as its grammar, sewing is a graphic way to add information and meaning. But is not a monologue, it is part of a conversation, a dialogue, a correspondence only fully realised once it is seen and its messages are read. It connects the maker to the viewer across time, cultures, generations and geographies. As a shared language, needlework transmits — through techniques, coded symbols, fabrics and colour — the unedited stories, not just of women, but often of those marginalised by oppression and prejudice.

Yes, but it doesn’t matter, Csíkszentmihalyi argues. Either way, we experience flow, a state of mind where we are so engaged in an activity that our worries evaporate and we lose track of time. Likewise, Martin Seligman, founder of the positive-psychology movement, discovered that happy people remembered more good events in their lives than actually occurred. Depressed people remembered the past accurately. “Know thyself” may not be the best advice after all. A pinch of self-delusion, it turns out, is an important ingredient in the happiness recipe.

Adopting a career because it’s lucrative, or because your parents want you to, or because it falls into your lap, can sometimes work out, but often, after you settle in, it starts to feel wrong. It’s like someone else punched the GPS coordinates into your phone. You’re locked onto your course, but you don’t even know where you’re going. When the route doesn’t feel right, when your autopilot is leading you astray, then you must question your destination. Hey! Who put “law degree” in my phone? Zoom out, take a high-altitude view of what’s going on in your life, and start thinking about where you really want to go. See the whole geography—the roads, the traffic, the destination. Do you like where you are? Do you like the end point? Is changing things a matter of replotting your final destination, or are you on the wrong map altogether? A GPS is an awesome tool, but if you aren’t the one inputting the data, you can’t rely on it to guide you. The world is a big place, and you can’t approach it as if it’s been preprogrammed. Give yourself the chance to change the route in search of emotional engagement.

Most of all, we love a good study. Newscasters know instinctively that the best way to get people’s ears to perk up is with these five words: “A new study has found.” It matters little what follows next. A new study has found that red wine is good for you / kills you. A new study has found that homework dulls the brain / enlarges it. We especially like studies that lend credibility to our own idiosyncrasies, as in, “A new study has found that people with messy desks are smarter” or “A new study has found that moderate daily flatulence improves longevity.

it is again: that Hindu belief that all of life is maya, illusion. Once we see life as a game, no more consequential than a game of chess, then the world seems a lot lighter, a lot happier. Personal failure becomes “as small a cause for concern as playing the role of loser in a summer theater performance,” writes Huston Smith in his book The World’s Religions. If it’s all theater, it doesn’t matter which role you play, as long as you realize it’s only a role. Or, as Alan Watts said: “A genuine person is one who knows he is a big act and does it with complete zip.

An Immigrant's Plight (The Sonnet) With hopes and dreams brimming in my heart, I have traveled across miles and miles. A single desire for a flame of acceptance, Still burns bright in my heart's aisle. You say home is where the heart is, But my heart is accused of difference. Sometimes I'm accused of faith or race, Other times they question my allegiance. Amidst the illusive fog of color and geography, When did humanity cease mattering most! Sentiments and dreams have no borders, Character isn't exclusive to any single coast. We’ve wasted enough time on labels and covers, It's time to be family filling the world with colors.

Literature before the Renaissance had frequently offered ideal patterns for living which were dominated by the ethos of the church, but after the Reformation the search for individual expression and meaning took over. Institutions were questioned and re-evaluated, often while being praised at the same time. But where there had been conventional modes of expression, reflecting ideal modes of behaviour - religious, heroic, or social - Renaissance writing explored the geography of the human soul, redefining its relationship with authority, history, science, and the future. This involved experimentation with form and genre, and an enormous variety of linguistic and literary innovations in a short period of time. Reason, rather than religion, was the driving force in this search for rules to govern human behaviour in the Renaissance world. The power and mystique of religion had been overthrown in one bold stroke: where the marvellous no longer holds sway, real life has to provide explanations. Man, and the use he makes of his powers, capabilities, and free will, is thus the subject matter of Renaissance literature, from the early sonnets modelled on Petrarch to the English epic which closes the period, Paradise Lost, published after the Restoration, when the Renaissance had long finished. The Reformation gave cultural, philosophical, and ideological impetus to English Renaissance writing. The writers in the century following the Reformation had to explore and redefine all the concerns of humanity. In a world where old assumptions were no longer valid, where scientific discoveries questioned age-old hypotheses, and where man rather than God was the central interest, it was the writers who reflected and attempted to respond to the disintegration of former certainties. For it is when the universe is out of control that it is at its most frightening - and its most stimulating. There would never again be such an atmosphere of creative tension in the country. What was created was a language, a literature, and a national and international identity.

In the late 1960s, a young Martin Seligman, now the pooh-bah of the positive-psychology movement, conducted experiments with dogs. He would place a dog in a cage and give it a (supposedly harmless) electric shock. The dog, though, could escape to another side of the cage and avoid the shock, the onset of which was signaled by a loud noise and a flashing light. Then Seligman put the dog in a no-win situation. No matter what he did, he couldn’t avoid getting shocked. Then, and this is the part that surprised Seligman, when he returned the same dog to a cage where he could easily avoid the shock (by jumping over a low fence), the dog did nothing. He just sat there and endured the shocks. He had been taught to believe that the situation was hopeless.

Among the most virulent of all such cultural parasite-equivalents is the religion-based denial of organic evolution. About one-half of Americans (46 percent in 2013, up from 44 percent in 1980), most of whom are evangelical Christians, together with a comparable fraction of Muslims worldwide, believe that no such process has ever occurred. As Creationists, they insist that God created humankind and the rest of life in one to several magical mega-strokes. Their minds are closed to the overwhelming mass of factual demonstrations of evolution, which is increasingly interlocked across every level of biological organization from molecules to ecosystem and the geography of biodiversity. They ignore, or more precisely they call it virtue to remain ignorant of, ongoing evolution observed in the field and even traced to the genes involved. Also looked past are new species created in the laboratory. To Creationists, evolution is at best just an unproven theory. To a few, it is an idea invented by Satan and transmitted through Darwin and later scientists in order to mislead humanity. When I was a small boy attending an evangelical church in Florida, I was taught that the secular agents of Satan are extremely bright and determined, but liars all, man and woman, and so no matter what I heard I must stick my fingers in my ears and hold fast to the true faith. We are all free in a democracy to believe whatever we wish, so why call any opinion such as Creationism a virulent cultural parasite-equivalent? Because it represents a triumph of blind religious faith over carefully tested fact. It is not a conception of reality forged by evidence and logical judgment. Instead, it is part of the price of admission to a religious tribe. Faith is the evidence given of a person’s submission to a particular god, and even then not to the deity directly but to other humans who claim to represent the god. The cost to society as a whole of the bowed head has been enormous. Evolution is a fundamental process of the Universe, not just in living organisms but everywhere, at every level. Its analysis is vital to biology, including medicine, microbiology, and agronomy. Furthermore psychology, anthropology, and even the history of religion itself make no sense without evolution as the key component followed through the passage of time. The explicit denial of evolution presented as a part of a “creation science” is an outright falsehood, the adult equivalent of plugging one’s ears, and a deficit to any society that chooses to acquiesce in this manner to a fundamentalist faith.

For when one thinks of Guiana one thinks of a country whose inadequate resources are strained in every way, a country whose geography imposes on it an administration and a programme of public works out of all proportion to its revenue and population. One thinks of the sea-wall, forever being breached and repaired; the dikes made of mud for want of money; the dirt roads and their occasional experimental surfacing; the roads that are necessary but not yet made; the decadent railways ('Three-fourths of the passenger rolling stock,' says a matter-of-fact little note in the government paper on the Development Programme, 'is old and nearing the point beyond which further repairs will be impossible'); the three overworked Dakotas and two Grumman seaplanes of British Guiana Airways. And one thinks of the streets of Albouystown, as crowded with children as a schoolyard during recess.

I think that today young people come toward marriage as growing, searching men and women; and suddenly marriage and parenthood is represented as a stoppage of all that. I mean, young married people become members of a social community, and come under the authority of a political community. Once children come, even some of our more radical youth feel themselves no longer so free to protest various wrongs - because they need work and on their children's account feel more dependent on, more vulnerable to, the power of a town or city or county. They are expected to join with other consumers. They are expected to prepare the next generation for the next wars and for an expansion of the same, the very same community... I think the Church as I have experienced it during, let's say, thirty years of membership in my order, the Church is speaking less and less to the realities before us. Just one instance is the Church's failure to face and deal with the social and political difficulties of believers. And then when one moves out to another scene, as I have been doing, and meets the people of very mixed religious and ethnic backgrounds, one sees how tragically unresponsive the Church has been - because it has not heard and been moved by the ethical struggles of people on the 'outside,' yet maybe nearer to Christ's own struggle. More and more I see the need for flexibility in the Church. And I feel that one's responsibility to the Church can no longer be expressed by the priest's or parishioner's traditional compliance before powerful and sometimes corrupt 'authority.' I would like to see the resources of the Church brought to bear upon the realities that the Church alone cannot deal with - though it can shed certain light upon many troublesome issues. It is such matters I am discussing now with the families I stay with. I hope we can come upon something new, which will help us in the very real and new situations we are facing, I hope there is a spiritual breakthrough of sorts awaiting us, so that we can learn to live together in a new and stronger and less 'adjusted' way - 'adjusted' to the forces in America which plunder other countries and our own country as well.

And then, without the slightest warning, it became the shimmering, flickering spot of light, floating in the darkness ahead of him. He blinked and shook his head: this wasn’t a good time for spangled rings, but it wouldn’t go. It floated in midair, scintillating and spinning, flashing and turning. “What’s the matter?” said Alice. She must have felt him shaking his head or sensed that his attention was distracted. “Something in my eye. I got to keep still.” He sat there in the wet discomfort and tried to feel calm. He did feel something, the kind of thing Asta had described on that evening when it came on them during his geography homework, a sort of peaceful, disembodied floating, in a space that was immense or even infinite in all directions. The spangled ring grew larger, just like before, and as before, he was helpless and paralyzed while it came closer and closer and expanded to fill the entire circumference of his vision, but he was never frightened; it wasn’t alarming; in a way it was even comforting, that calm, oceanic drifting. It was his aurora: it was telling him that he was still part of the great order of things, and that that could never change. He let the phenomenon run its course and came to himself, exhausted, as if the experience had been strenuous and demanding.

I must study politics and war,” wrote John Adams, “that my sons may have the liberty to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, and naval architecture, navigation, commerce, and agriculture, in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry and porcelain.” Adams saw clearly that politics is the indispensable foundation for things elegant and beautiful. First and above all else, you must secure life, liberty and the right to pursue your own happiness. That’s politics done right, hard-earned, often by war. And yet the glories yielded by such a successful politics lie outside itself. Its deepest purpose is to create the conditions for the cultivation of the finer things, beginning with philosophy and science, and ascending to the ever more delicate and refined arts. Note Adams’ double reference to architecture: The second generation must study naval architecture—a hybrid discipline of war, commerce and science—before the third can freely and securely study architecture for its own sake. The most optimistic implication of Adams’ dictum is that once the first generation gets the political essentials right, they remain intact to nurture the future. Yet he himself once said that “there never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.

The secret—to being you, to being Happy?” “Just keep on smiling. Even when you’re sad. Keep on smiling.” Not the most profound advice, admittedly. But Happy is wise, for only a fool or a philosopher would make sweeping generalizations about the nature of happiness. I am no philosopher, so here goes: Money matters, but less than we think and not in the way that we think. Family is important. So are friends. Envy is toxic. So is excessive thinking. Beaches are optional. Trust is not. Neither is gratitude. To venture any further, though, is to enter treacherous waters. A slippery seal, happiness is. On the road, I encountered bushels of inconsistencies. The Swiss are uptight and happy. The Thais are laid-back and happy. Icelanders find joy in their binge drinking, Moldovans only misery. Maybe an Indian mind can digest these contradictions, but mine can’t. Exasperated, I call one of the leading happiness researchers, John Helliwell. Perhaps he has some answers. “It’s simple,” he says. “There’s more than one path to happiness.” Of course. How could I have missed it? Tolstoy turned on his head. All miserable countries are alike; happy ones are happy in their own ways. It’s worth considering carbon. We wouldn’t be here without it. Carbon is the basis of all life, happy and otherwise. Carbon is also a chameleon atom. Assemble it one way—in tight, interlocking rows—and you have a diamond. Assemble it another way—a disorganized jumble—and you have a handful of soot. The arranging makes all the difference. Places are the same. It’s not the elements that matter so much as how they’re arranged and in which proportions. Arrange them one way, and you have Switzerland. Arrange them another way, and you have Moldova. Getting the balance right is important. Qatar has too much money and not enough culture. It has no way of absorbing all that cash. And then there is Iceland: a country that has no right to be happy yet is. Iceland gets the balance right. A small country but a cosmopolitan one. Dark and light. Efficient and laid-back. American gumption married to European social responsibility. A perfect, happy arrangement. The glue that holds the entire enterprise together is culture. It makes all the difference. I have some nagging doubts about my journey. I didn’t make it everywhere. Yet my doubts extend beyond matters of itinerary. I wonder if happiness is really the highest good, as Aristotle believed. Maybe Guru-ji, Sri Sri Ravi Shankar, is right. Maybe love is more important than happiness. Certainly, there are times when happiness seems beside the point. Ask a single, working mother if she is happy, and she’s likely to reply, “You’re not asking the right question.” Yes, we want to be happy but for the right reasons, and,

As a method of warfare with “beyond limits” as its major feature, its principle is to assemble and blend together more means to resolve a problem in a range wider than the problem itself. For example, when national is threatened, the answer is not simply a matter of selecting the means to confront the other nation militarily, but rather a matter of dispelling the crisis through the employment of “supra-national combinations.” We see from history that the nation-state is the highest form of the idea of security. For Chinese people, the nation-state even equates to the great concept of all-under-heaven [tianxia, classical name for China]. Nowadays, the significance of the word “country” in terms of nationality or geography is no more than a large or small link in the human society of the “world village.” Modern countries are affected more and more by regional or world-wide organizations, such as the European Community [sic; now the European Union], ASEAN, OPEC, APEC, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the WTO, and the biggest of them all, the United Nations. Besides these, a large number of multinational organizations and non-state organizations of all shapes and sizes, such as multinational corporations, trade associations, peace and environmental organizations, the Olympic Committee, religious organizations, terrorist organizations, small groups of hackers, etc., dart from left and right into a country’s path. These multinational, non-state, and supra-national organizations together constitute an up and coming worldwide system of power.3

this I say,—we must never forget that all the education a man's head can receive, will not save his soul from hell, unless he knows the truths of the Bible. A man may have prodigious learning, and yet never be saved. He may be master of half the languages spoken round the globe. He may be acquainted with the highest and deepest things in heaven and earth. He may have read books till he is like a walking cyclopædia. He may be familiar with the stars of heaven,—the birds of the air,—the beasts of the earth, and the fishes of the sea. He may be able, like Solomon, to "speak of trees, from the cedar of Lebanon to the hyssop that grows on the wall, of beasts also, and fowls, and creeping things, and fishes." (1 King iv. 33.) He may be able to discourse of all the secrets of fire, air, earth, and water. And yet, if he dies ignorant of Bible truths, he dies a miserable man! Chemistry never silenced a guilty conscience. Mathematics never healed a broken heart. All the sciences in the world never smoothed down a dying pillow. No earthly philosophy ever supplied hope in death. No natural theology ever gave peace in the prospect of meeting a holy God. All these things are of the earth, earthy, and can never raise a man above the earth's level. They may enable a man to strut and fret his little season here below with a more dignified gait than his fellow-mortals, but they can never give him wings, and enable him to soar towards heaven. He that has the largest share of them, will find at length that without Bible knowledge he has got no lasting possession. Death will make an end of all his attainments, and after death they will do him no good at all. A man may be a very ignorant man, and yet be saved. He may be unable to read a word, or write a letter. He may know nothing of geography beyond the bounds of his own parish, and be utterly unable to say which is nearest to England, Paris or New York. He may know nothing of arithmetic, and not see any difference between a million and a thousand. He may know nothing of history, not even of his own land, and be quite ignorant whether his country owes most to Semiramis, Boadicea, or Queen Elizabeth. He may know nothing of the affairs of his own times, and be incapable of telling you whether the Chancellor of the Exchequer, or the Commander-in-Chief, or the Archbishop of Canterbury is managing the national finances. He may know nothing of science, and its discoveries,—and whether Julius Cæsar won his victories with gunpowder, or the apostles had a printing press, or the sun goes round the earth, may be matters about which he has not an idea. And yet if that very man has heard Bible truth with his ears, and believed it with his heart, he knows enough to save his soul. He will be found at last with Lazarus in Abraham's bosom, while his scientific fellow-creature, who has died unconverted, is lost for ever. There is much talk in these days about science and "useful knowledge." But after all a knowledge of the Bible is the one knowledge that is needful and eternally useful. A man may get to heaven without money, learning, health, or friends,—but without Bible knowledge he will never get there at all. A man may have the mightiest of minds, and a memory stored with all that mighty mind can grasp,—and yet, if he does not know the things of the Bible, he will make shipwreck of his soul for ever. Woe! woe! woe to the man who dies in ignorance of the Bible! This is the Book about which I am addressing the readers of these pages to-day. It is no light matter what you do with such a book. It concerns the life of your soul. I summon you,—I charge you to give an honest answer to my question. What are you doing with the Bible? Do you read it? HOW READEST THOU?

It is the very impersonal quality of urban life, which is lived among strangers, that accounts for intensified religious feeling. For in the village of old, religion was a natural extension of the daily traditions and routine of life among the extended family; but migrations to the city brought Muslims into the anonymity of slum existence, and to keep the family together and the young from drifting into crime, religion has had to be reinvented in starker, more ideological form. In this way states weaken, or at least have to yield somewhat, to new and sometimes extreme kinds of nationalism and religiosity advanced by urbanization. Thus, new communities take hold that transcend traditional geography, even as they make for spatial patterns of their own. Great changes in history often happen obscurely.10 A Eurasia and North Africa of vast, urban concentrations, overlapping missile ranges, and sensational global media will be one of constantly enraged crowds, fed by rumors and half-truths transported at the speed of light by satellite channels across the rimlands and heartland expanse, from one Third World city to another. Conversely, the crowd, empowered by social media like Twitter and Facebook, will also be fed by the very truth that autocratic rulers have denied it. The crowd will be key in a new era where the relief map will be darkened by densely packed megacities—the crowd being a large group of people who abandon their individuality in favor of an intoxicating collective symbol. Elias Canetti, the Bulgarian-born Spanish Jew and Nobel laureate in literature, became so transfixed and terrified at the mob violence over inflation that seized Frankfurt and Vienna between the two world wars that he devoted much of his life to studying the human herd in all its manifestations. The signal insight of his book Crowds and Power, published in 1960, was that we all yearn to be inside some sort of crowd, for in a crowd—or a mob, for that matter—there is shelter from danger and, by inference, from loneliness. Nationalism, extremism, the yearning for democracy are all the products of crowd formations and thus manifestations of seeking to escape from loneliness. It is loneliness, alleviated by Twitter and Facebook, that ultimately leads to the breakdown of traditional authority and the erection of new kinds.

What a joy this book is! I love recipe books, but it’s short-lived; I enjoy the pictures for several minutes, read a few pages, and then my eyes glaze over. They are basically books to be used in the kitchen for one recipe at a time. This book, however, is in a different class altogether and designed to be read in its entirety. It’s in its own sui generis category; it has recipes at the end of most of the twenty-one chapters, but it’s a book to be read from cover to cover, yet it could easily be read chapter by chapter, in any order, as they are all self-contained. Every bite-sized chapter is a flowing narrative from a well-stocked brain encompassing Balinese culture, geography and history, while not losing its main focus: food. As you would expect from a scholar with a PhD in history from Columbia University, the subject matter has been meticulously researched, not from books and articles and other people’s work, but from actually being on the ground and in the markets and in the kitchens of Balinese families, where the Balinese themselves learn their culinary skills, hands on, passed down orally, manually and practically from generation to generation. Vivienne Kruger has lived in Bali long enough to get it right. That’s no mean feat, as the subject has not been fully studied before. Yes, there are so-called Balinese recipe books, most, if I’m not mistaken, written by foreigners, and heavily adapted. The dishes have not, until now, been systematically placed in their proper cultural context, which is extremely important for the Balinese, nor has there been any examination of the numerous varieties of each type of recipe, nor have they been given their true Balinese names. This groundbreaking book is a pleasure to read, not just for its fascinating content, which I learnt a lot from, but for the exuberance, enthusiasm and originality of the language. There’s not a dull sentence in the book. You just can’t wait to read the next phrase. There are eye-opening and jaw-dropping passages for the general reader as Kruger describes delicacies from the village of Tengkudak in Tabanan district — grasshoppers, dragonflies, eels and live baby bees — and explains how they are caught and cooked. She does not shy away from controversial subjects, such as eating dog and turtle. Parts of it are not for the faint-hearted, but other parts make you want to go out and join the participants, such as the Nusa Lembongan fishermen, who sail their outriggers at 5.30 a.m. The author quotes Miguel Covarrubias, the great Mexican observer of the 1930s, who wrote “The Island of Bali.” It has inspired all writers since, including myself and my co-author, Ni Wayan Murni, in our book “Secrets of Bali, Fresh Light on the Morning of the World.” There is, however, no bibliography, which I found strange at first. I can only imagine it’s a reflection of how original the subject matter is; there simply are no other sources. Throughout the book Kruger mentions Balinese and Indonesian words and sometimes discusses their derivations. It’s a Herculean task. I was intrigued to read that “satay” comes from the Tamil word for flesh ( sathai ) and that South Indians brought satay to Southeast Asia before Indonesia developed its own tradition. The book is full of interesting tidbits like this. The book contains 47 recipes in all, 11 of which came from Murni’s own restaurant, Murni’s Warung, in Ubud. Mr Dolphin of Warung Dolphin in Lovina also contributed a number of recipes. Kruger adds an introduction to each recipe, with a detailed and usually very personal commentary. I think my favorite, though, is from a village priest (pemangku), I Made Arnila of the Ganesha (Siwa) Temple in Lovina. water. I am sure most will enjoy this book enormously; I certainly did.” Review published in The Jakarta Globe, April 17, 2014. Jonathan Copeland is an author and photographer based in Bali. thejakartaglobe/features/spiritual-journey-culinary-world-bali

A problem with the relative poverty measure is that it doesn’t matter how much you earn in relation to your neighbors if that money can’t buy what you need. The easy availability of goods and services is another critical factor in determining quality of life, but that availability varies tremendously according to one’s geography.

Respected Mormon archaeologist Professor Dee F.Green has said: The first myth we need to eliminate is that Book of Mormon archaeology exists.... If one is to study Book of Mormon archaeology, then one must have a corpus of data with which to deal. We do not. ... No Book of Mormon location is known with reference to modern topography. Biblical archaeology can be studied because we do know where Jerusalem and Jericho were and are, but we do not know where Zarahemla and Bountiful (nor any location for that matter) were and are. ... A concentration on geography should be the first order of business, but we have already seen that twenty years of such an approach has left us empty-handed.30

So that’s in the vault, right? Along with my underage drinking and fear of living on the Eastern Seaboard?” “You bet.” “You know all my secrets.” He grunts quietly. “I should probably tell you more of mine, balance that out.” “Have you ever been arrested?” He shakes his head. “No.” “But you hate New York, right?” He looks sideways at me, his shoulders shaking with quiet laughter. “No. I mean, I love California, but I have no geography-based phobias.” “Mine isn’t geography-based. It’s relations-based. Meddling-based. Smothering-Nana-based.” “And yet when she says jump…” I say how high, no matter where I am in the world. “Maybe I’ll go to Australia for my next course of studies.” “Good plan, troublemaker.

Andrew Fuller smiled at an opportunity. “Well, I believe we have in our midst a most knowledgeable man on geography...” He turned to look at William. “I believe, sir, the island you speak of is Ceylon,” replied William and lapsed into silence. Andrew Fuller laughed. “Come now, William, don’t hold out on us. Tell us all you know.” “If you wish, sir. Ceylon is a tropical island about half the size of England’s 50,000 square miles. It is true it is controlled by Holland.” William, quickly caught up in the wonders of Ceylon, went on to describe the terrain, the monsoon season, the size of the population and the languages spoken. After several minutes of detail his voice flamed with passion, “But in spite of Dutch control it is not a Christian country. There is no more than a small percent of Christians.” His voice carried indignation now, “The vast majority are Buddhists with a substantial number of Hindus.” At last he cried, “Millions of poor souls lost in heathen darkness! While we do nothing!” “But that’s not true, Brother Carey,” countered one of the others defensively. “We pray for the heathen. We’ve done so, fervently, since our resolution to do so in 1784.” And so the matter stood. The

Here are the five questions: What is our winning aspiration? Framing the choice as “winning” rules out mediocrity as an option. If you want to win, you need to know what game you’re playing and with (and against) whom. What impact do you want to have in and on the world? Where will we play? “Boiling the ocean” is rarely successful. Choosing a sector, geography, product, channel and customer allows you to focus your resources. How will we win? What’s the defendable difference that will open up the gap between you and the others? What capabilities must be in place? Not just what do you need to do, but how will it become and stay a strength? What management systems are required? It’s easy enough to measure stuff. It’s much harder to figure out what you want to measure that actually matters.

Miss Breckenridge: We want the child to build relationships with the things in nature, which would include the earth itself, plant and animal life, oceanography, and astronomy. So, all things that eventually fall under science, and the more physical parts of geography. Miss Mason: And, as educators, what do we generally do with that? We consider the matter carefully; we say the boy will make a jumble of it if he is taught more than one or two sciences. We ask our friends “what sciences will tell best in examinations?” and “which are most easily learned?” We discover which are the best text-books in the smallest compass. The most economical, so to speak. The student learns up the text, listens to lectures, makes diagrams, watches demonstrations. Behold! he has “learned a science,” and is able to produce facts and figures, for a time anyway, in connection with some one class of natural phenomena; but of tender intimacy with Nature herself he has acquired none. I will now sketch what seems to me a better way.

We continue to inhabit private discontent and anxiety, no matter how overpowering the chaos of public life and how developed or underdeveloped our societies. I didn't know then that this freedom from clutter and the careful arrangement of space and light rather than of objects, the artful bareness, were the surest manifestations of 21st century wealth and taste. Social media forces everyone to become an operator; everyone is a hustler in the neo-liberal marketplace. We all have to learn how to blend aggressive self-promotion with sincere activism. That useful upper-caste trait: an instant blindness in the face of potentially uncomfortable realities. Coming from the Indian society rent by anarchic poverty and cruelty, where you could never fell history to be on your side, or any institution of government and law working in your favor, coming from a society that had frightened and traumatized so many of us for life, I was learning how to appreciate, or at least not be afraid of, a rich and steadfast world. Geography-dissolving people with hyphenated identities. The general public forgives the super-rich most things except their failure to routinely supply scandal and drama. Fully existing only in the interval between desire and fulfillment, we swell with the illusion of our distinctive self.But fulfillment brings little or no satisfaction; lack of satisfaction makes us desire again, extending into the future the original illusion of the desiring self and its discontents. The healthiest form of life is manual labour in a monastery: the most bracing truths of body and mind lie in physical exercise and silent contemplation and that, with words and thoughts, one starts to slide into harmful untruth.

In my adult life I have proved time and time again that I can keep more or less in mind details of some five hundred books on the topics to which I have dedicated myself. I take no notes but do list on the inside back cover of certain books page numbers to which I know I will want to refer, later followed by one word to indicate subject matter, but even without this aid I can and do go quickly to the right book and the correct page, more or less, for the data I need. When I fail, I fail completely and can think of no clue that would lead me to the page I want; this would mean I had not implanted it firmly enough in my mind. I am not talking theoretically. I have done this at least a dozen times with my long novels, keeping a hundred characters in mind, controlling a tangle of different story lines, and remembering many individualized locations. I doubt that I am remarkable in possessing such a skill. I suspect that many clergymen can do the same with the Bible and it’s obvious that some lawyers can maintain control over a huge volume of case law just as scientists can master a jungle of relevant experimentation in their fields. But I have done it in a score of different fields: astrophysics, geography, ancient religions, art, politics, contemporary revolutionary movements, and popular music.” —Chapter IX, “Intellectual Equipment”, page 301

In Dayton, as elsewhere, there was a North Methodist-Episcopal church and a South Methodist-Episcopal church—divided not by the town’s geography but by our opposite allegiances during the Civil War. Still, no matter what our parents’ and grandparents’ views during the war had been, all Methodists believed in free will; believed in the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit; believed in the Bible as all that was necessary for salvation. That wasn’t the same as believing it was literally true. But I’d never really thought about that. I’d never had to. You don’t need to question the truths of a childhood until they are challenged—or contradicted. I grew up with light from candles, warmth from stoves, water hauled from wells in buckets. None of those things had any true meaning for me until they’d been replaced by light from electric lamps, warmth from steam heat, and water from a kitchen faucet. Growing up, I knew nothing about Jews except that Christ had been one but had been crucified by a lot of others. I’m not sure I’d even

Education is not western or eastern - no matter the geography, education is education. It must call out superstition and prejudice wherever it festers, just like it must call out cold intellectual arrogance.

All art is, at its core, a stab at immortality. We like to believe that geniuses, bu dint of their creations, escape death. They do not. Every life, no matter how well and richly lived, is sadly incomplete. Even Leonardo's. Even Michelangelo's, And, certainly, my friend Eugene's. Genius offers only the illusion of immortality. Yet we reach for it anyway, the way a drowning man will reach for even the flimsiest of logs.

Geography just doesn’t matter anymore. Hire the best talent, regardless of where it is.

GDP is simply the sum of all goods and services a nation produces over a given time. The sale of an assault rifle and the sale of an antibiotic both contribute equally to the national tally (assuming the sales price is the same). It’s as if we tracked our caloric intake but cared not one whit what kind of calories we consumed. Whole grains or lard—or rat poison, for that matter. Calories are calories. GDP

Matters relating to the historicity of the wilderness accounts, however, continue to be debated among scholars. But literary criticism need not discount the presence of historical facts in the texts. On one hand, an argument can be advanced that usage of Egyptian terms, geography of the Sinai, and political realities of periods corresponding to Israel’s prehistory bespeak some knowledge of a residency in Egypt and wilderness sojourn. On the other hand, studies of genre show that ancient historiography, even if peppered with authentic data, is not necessarily synonymous with history writing in the modern sense.

This book examines the long-term trends that really matter to our lives—the vast changes that have taken place in the American labor market over the past three decades and the economic forces underlying these changes.

Right and wrong isn’t a matter of ethics, rather it’s the geography in which you reside and whose control you’re under. Tallinn Manual 2.0 is based largely on western international humanitarian law.

Despite all the hype about the “death of distance” and the “flat world,” where you live matters more than ever.

How will it work when everyone is exactly equal?” my mother wanted to know. “Is there enough, really, to go around?” I was appalled by this sentiment, so chauvinist, racist, survivalist. I railed at her about the capitalist racket, the smallness of her Depression-era mindset (“But I don’t have a mindset,” she protested. “I have questions”). She was a good sport about it, really, mild-mannered in the face of my patronizing. But she persisted: Wouldn’t there always be some way people sorted themselves? If it wasn’t race or gender or class, would it be intelligence? Physical strength? Blood type? Weren’t there always bound to be haves and have-nots on account of finite resources? The constraints of weather and geography, for instance? Who got the high ground with fertile soil versus who got the desert? I think she honestly wanted to discuss this, but to me she sounded like a social Darwinist. I could see things only in oppositional terms. Today I’d love to have this conversation with her. I have an answer: The process of working toward greater equality is the point. The medium is the message. The journey is the destination. Something like that. It’s the effort to make life more equal, more bearable for everyone, that counts. And if we don’t try, what are we left with? A lifetime of showing off our most selfish instincts, protecting our own little slice of whatever it is we want—power, money, resources, the best seats on the bus. Life may be filled with struggle but what you struggle for is what matters. And if it’s only your own survival, you’re no better than the dinosaurs.

He wakes to blinding light and a shockingly verdant landscape: flooded paddy fields with narrow mud bunds snaking between them, barely containing the water whose still surface mirrors the sky; coconut palms that are as abundant as leaves of grass; tangled cucumber vines on the side of a canal; a lake crowded with canoes; and a stately barge parting the smaller vessels like a processional down a church aisle. His nostrils register jackfruit, dried fish, mango, and water. Even before his brain digests these sights, his body—skin, nerve endings, lungs, heart—recognizes the geography of his birth. He never understood how much it mattered. Every bit of this lush landscape is his; its every atom contains him. On this blessed strip of coast where Malayalam is spoken, the flesh and bones of his ancestors have leached into the soil, made their way into the trees, into the iridescent plumage of the parrots on swaying branches, and dispersed themselves into the breeze. He knows the names of the forty-two rivers running down from the mountains, one thousand two hundred miles of waterways, feeding the rich soil in between, and he is one with every atom of it. I’m the seedling in your hand, he thinks, as he gazes on Muslim women in colorful long-sleeved blouses and mundus, with cloths loosely covering their hair, bent over at the waist like paper creased down the middle, moving as one line through the paddy fields, poking new life into the soil. Whatever is next for me, whatever the story of my life, the roots that must nourish it are here. He feels transformed as though by a religious experience, but it has nothing to do with religion.

Similarly, American citizens like to think of their identity as fluid, capable of changing as they move from one geographical location to another, or as they climb up the socioeconomic ladder. The closest thing Americans have to an identity card is their driver’s license—a card that gives them license to drive into the blue yonder and there discover who they are and can be.

Another common adult misunderstanding is this: Parents and teachers think that the child should be taught the local geography first. From there they introduce her to ever larger units by graduated steps. The child is not, however, naturally disposed to learn by graduated steps. Her mind tends to leap from one spatial-temporal scale to another, such that, at seven or eight, she may well take a more lively interest in America than in Dane County, Wisconsin, in the dinosaur than in the dairy cow, in the Great Wall of China than in her hometown’s water tower. Socially and morally, too, she is more drawn to issues of good and evil, fairness and unfairness, categories that affect her life, than to adult priorities of class, ethnicity, and nationality.14 Unfortunately, adults have power, which they all too often use to steer the child to their own narrower concerns.

Can we design or construct places that are better suited to deeper human needs and purposes?” Rybczynski asks. And then he answers his question with another. “We certainly can build such places, but will people want to live in them?” In other words, successful place-making must begin not with abstractions, but with the people that we already are, and the places we already inhabit. Places are made, but the best place-making is not done from scratch, since “adaptation,” Rybczynski insists, “is always better than invention.

How can this hypothesis possibly be true, when the contemporary culture of building, when modern culture itself, when so many prominent institutions and so many aspects of our own lives as individuals, all seem to deny it? When the way we live so often emphasizes motion rather than calm, mobility rather than place, the disposable over the durable, the temporal over the eternal, novelty over beauty? Consider dynamic fields of modern achievement for the pre-modern practices of which few of us do or should long: medicine, sanitation engineering, aeronautics, communication media, and information technology. All these fields are apparently modern in a way that traditional building and traditional urbanism apparently are not. Is this an intellectual and existential contradiction?

So what do I mean by modernity? The modern world derives its distinctive characteristics from the transformation of traditional societies initiated by the rise of modern industrial capitalism in mid-eighteenth-century Protestant Europe and America, which was itself preceded by some 250 to 300 years of witting and unwitting cultural spadework in religion, art, science, commerce, and colonization. One consequence of the rise of industrial capitalism—epitomized by Adam Smith, Karl Marx, and Max Weber, and today de rigueur—has been an acute and increasingly sophisticated attention to economic behavior, indeed to economic interest seen as not only a determinant of human action but in many modern theories as the determinant of human action.