Georg Listing Quotes

Religion has actually convinced people that there's an invisible man living in the sky who watches everything you do, every minute of every day. And the invisible man has a special list of ten things he does not want you to do. And if you do any of these ten things, he has a special place, full of fire and smoke and burning and torture and anguish, where he will send you to live and suffer and burn and choke and scream and cry forever and ever 'til the end of time! But He loves you. He loves you, and He needs money! He always needs money! He's all-powerful, all-perfect, all-knowing, and all-wise, somehow just can't handle money!

Some national parks have long waiting lists for camping reservations. When you have to wait a year to sleep next to a tree, something is wrong.

People are wonderful. I love individuals. I hate groups of people. I hate a group of people with a 'common purpose'. 'Cause pretty soon they have little hats. And armbands. And fight songs. And a list of people they're going to visit at 3am. So, I dislike and despise groups of people but I love individuals. Every person you look at; you can see the universe in their eyes, if you're really looking.

If we desire to avoid insult, we must be able to repel it; if we desire to secure peace, one of the most powerful instruments of our rising prosperity, it must be known, that we are at all times ready for War.

Reading list (1972 edition)[edit] 1. Homer – Iliad, Odyssey 2. The Old Testament 3. Aeschylus – Tragedies 4. Sophocles – Tragedies 5. Herodotus – Histories 6. Euripides – Tragedies 7. Thucydides – History of the Peloponnesian War 8. Hippocrates – Medical Writings 9. Aristophanes – Comedies 10. Plato – Dialogues 11. Aristotle – Works 12. Epicurus – Letter to Herodotus; Letter to Menoecus 13. Euclid – Elements 14. Archimedes – Works 15. Apollonius of Perga – Conic Sections 16. Cicero – Works 17. Lucretius – On the Nature of Things 18. Virgil – Works 19. Horace – Works 20. Livy – History of Rome 21. Ovid – Works 22. Plutarch – Parallel Lives; Moralia 23. Tacitus – Histories; Annals; Agricola Germania 24. Nicomachus of Gerasa – Introduction to Arithmetic 25. Epictetus – Discourses; Encheiridion 26. Ptolemy – Almagest 27. Lucian – Works 28. Marcus Aurelius – Meditations 29. Galen – On the Natural Faculties 30. The New Testament 31. Plotinus – The Enneads 32. St. Augustine – On the Teacher; Confessions; City of God; On Christian Doctrine 33. The Song of Roland 34. The Nibelungenlied 35. The Saga of Burnt Njál 36. St. Thomas Aquinas – Summa Theologica 37. Dante Alighieri – The Divine Comedy;The New Life; On Monarchy 38. Geoffrey Chaucer – Troilus and Criseyde; The Canterbury Tales 39. Leonardo da Vinci – Notebooks 40. Niccolò Machiavelli – The Prince; Discourses on the First Ten Books of Livy 41. Desiderius Erasmus – The Praise of Folly 42. Nicolaus Copernicus – On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres 43. Thomas More – Utopia 44. Martin Luther – Table Talk; Three Treatises 45. François Rabelais – Gargantua and Pantagruel 46. John Calvin – Institutes of the Christian Religion 47. Michel de Montaigne – Essays 48. William Gilbert – On the Loadstone and Magnetic Bodies 49. Miguel de Cervantes – Don Quixote 50. Edmund Spenser – Prothalamion; The Faerie Queene 51. Francis Bacon – Essays; Advancement of Learning; Novum Organum, New Atlantis 52. William Shakespeare – Poetry and Plays 53. Galileo Galilei – Starry Messenger; Dialogues Concerning Two New Sciences 54. Johannes Kepler – Epitome of Copernican Astronomy; Concerning the Harmonies of the World 55. William Harvey – On the Motion of the Heart and Blood in Animals; On the Circulation of the Blood; On the Generation of Animals 56. Thomas Hobbes – Leviathan 57. René Descartes – Rules for the Direction of the Mind; Discourse on the Method; Geometry; Meditations on First Philosophy 58. John Milton – Works 59. Molière – Comedies 60. Blaise Pascal – The Provincial Letters; Pensees; Scientific Treatises 61. Christiaan Huygens – Treatise on Light 62. Benedict de Spinoza – Ethics 63. John Locke – Letter Concerning Toleration; Of Civil Government; Essay Concerning Human Understanding;Thoughts Concerning Education 64. Jean Baptiste Racine – Tragedies 65. Isaac Newton – Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy; Optics 66. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz – Discourse on Metaphysics; New Essays Concerning Human Understanding;Monadology 67. Daniel Defoe – Robinson Crusoe 68. Jonathan Swift – A Tale of a Tub; Journal to Stella; Gulliver's Travels; A Modest Proposal 69. William Congreve – The Way of the World 70. George Berkeley – Principles of Human Knowledge 71. Alexander Pope – Essay on Criticism; Rape of the Lock; Essay on Man 72. Charles de Secondat, baron de Montesquieu – Persian Letters; Spirit of Laws 73. Voltaire – Letters on the English; Candide; Philosophical Dictionary 74. Henry Fielding – Joseph Andrews; Tom Jones 75. Samuel Johnson – The Vanity of Human Wishes; Dictionary; Rasselas; The Lives of the Poets

We have become ninety-nine percent money mad. The method of living at home modestly and within our income, laying a little by systematically for the proverbial rainy day which is due to come, can almost be listed among the lost arts.

The Republican and Democratic parties both feed out of the same bag provided by the monied system, and where the list frequently differs the same interests are represented.

Is that all?” he blurted out. Crowley and Halt exchanged slightly puzzled glances. Then Crowley pursed his lips thoughtfully. “Um…it seems to be…Listed your trainging, mentioned a few achievements, made sure you know which end of an arrow is the sharp part…decided your new name…I think that’s…” Then it seemed that understanding dawned on him and his eyes opened wide. “Of course! You have to have you Silver…whatsis, don ‘t you?” He took hold of the chain that held his own Silver Oakleaf around his throat and shook it lightly. It was a badge of a Graduate Ranger. Then he began to search through his pockets, frowning. “Had it here! Had it here! Where the devil is it…wait. I heard something fall on the boards as I came in! Must have dropped it. Just check outside the front door, will you, Will?” Too stunned to talk, Will rose and went to the door. As he set his hand on the latch, he looked back at the two Rangers, still seated at the table. Crowley made a small shooing motion with the back of his hand, urging him to go outside. Will was still looking back at them when he opened the door and stepped through on the verandah. “Congratulations!” The massive cry went up from at least forty throats. He swung around in shock to find all his friends gathered in the clearing outside around the table laid for a feast, their faces beaming with smiles. Baron Arald, Sir Rodney, Lady Pauline and Master Chubb were all there. So were Jenny and George, his former wardmates. There were a dozen others in the Ranger uniform – men he had met worked with over the past five years. And wonder of wonders, there were Erak and Svengal , bellowing his name and waving their huge axes overhead in his praise. Close by them stood Horace and Gilan, both brandishing their swords overhead as well. It looked like a dangerous section of the crowd to be in, Will thought. After the first concerted shout, people began cheering and calling his name, laughing and waving to him. Halt and Crowley joined him on the verandah. The Commandant was doubled over with laughter. “Oh, if you could have seen yourself!” he wheezed. “Your face! Your face! It was priceless! ‘Is that all?’” He mimicked Will’s plaintive tones and doubled over again. Will tuned to Halt accusingly. His teacher grinned at him. “Your face was a study,” he said. “Do you so that to all apprentices?” Will asked. Halt nodded vigorously. “Every one. Stops them getting a swelled head at the last minute. You have to swear never to let an apprentice in on the secret.

I've got an 'eckilectic' reading list.

George W. Bush in Washington decided that Nobel Peace Prize winner and ex-president Nelson Mandela could probably be taken off the U.S. list of terrorists).

In fact," I add, "if George Clooney is ever accepted into the Oxford English Dictionary as a verb, that activity is immediately getting added to my bucket list. "As in, 'Have you ever been George Clooneyed?'" Oliver asks. "Exactly. 'We went for a walk, and then George Clooneyed until around two. Good night.

George Harrison: The day after the Blue Angel audition, John showed up to rehearsal with a long list of name suggestions, and I remember each and every one of them: the Deads-men, the Deadmen, the Undeads-men, the Undeadmen, the Rots, the Rotters, the Dirts, the Dirty Ones, the Grayboys, the Eaten Brains, the Eating Brains, the Mersey Beaters, the Mersey Beaten, the Bloodless, the Graves, the Headstones, and the Liverpools of Blood. Paul ripped off John's right arm and used it to slap John across the face, then he said, "Those're horrible, mate, just horrible, y'know.

There is an order Of mortals on the earth, who do become Old in their youth, and die ere middle age, Without the violence of warlike death; Some perishing of pleasure, some of study, Some worn with toil, some of mere weariness, Some of disease, and some insanity, And some of wither’d or of broken hearts; For this last is a malady which slays More than are number’d in the lists of Fate, Taking all shapes and bearing many names.

The reuse of names by later (Maya) kings (of Palenque) is not random, but conforms to a reversed re-ordering. The overall king list suggests a closed system. We hesitate to think that Maya dynasties were predestined to end by themselves . .

Progressives are constantly giving lists of facts. Facts matter enormously, but to be meaningful they must be framed in terms of their moral importance.

A warm breeze arose, fragrant with all manner of things that give comfort: grass, sun, beer, bread, quilts, cream—this list being different for each of us, each being differently comforted. roger

When Herschel saw Flamsteed’s “star” drift against the background stars, he announced—operating under the unwitting assumption that planets were not on the list of things one might discover—that he had discovered a comet. Comets, after all, were known to move and to be discoverable. Herschel planned to call the newfound object Georgium Sidus (“Star of George”), after his benefactor, King George III of England. If the astronomical community had respected these wishes, the roster of our solar system would now include Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, and George.

This picture of a hot early stage of the universe was first put forward by the scientist George Gamow in a famous paper written in 1948 with a student of his, Ralph Alpher. Gamow had quite a sense of humor—he persuaded the nuclear scientist Hans Bethe to add his name to the paper to make the list of authors “Alpher, Bethe, Gamow,

God created the heavens, while the devil created doubt. Here is a short list of Lucifer's other notable inventions: matches, the lighter, the flamethrower, and George Burns.

Boy everyone in this country is running around yammering about their fucking rights. "I have a right, you have no right, we have a right." Folks I hate to spoil your fun, but... there's no such thing as rights. They're imaginary. We made 'em up. Like the boogie man. Like Three Little Pigs, Pinocio, Mother Goose, shit like that. Rights are an idea. They're just imaginary. They're a cute idea. Cute. But that's all. Cute...and fictional. But if you think you do have rights, let me ask you this, "where do they come from?" People say, "They come from God. They're God given rights." Awww fuck, here we go again...here we go again. The God excuse, the last refuge of a man with no answers and no argument, "It came from God." Anything we can't describe must have come from God. Personally folks, I believe that if your rights came from God, he would've given you the right for some food every day, and he would've given you the right to a roof over your head. GOD would've been looking out for ya. You know that. He wouldn't have been worried making sure you have a gun so you can get drunk on Sunday night and kill your girlfriend's parents. But let's say it's true. Let's say that God gave us these rights. Why would he give us a certain number of rights? The Bill of Rights of this country has 10 stipulations. OK...10 rights. And apparently God was doing sloppy work that week, because we've had to ammend the bill of rights an additional 17 times. So God forgot a couple of things, like...SLAVERY. Just fuckin' slipped his mind. But let's say...let's say God gave us the original 10. He gave the british 13. The british Bill of Rights has 13 stipulations. The Germans have 29, the Belgians have 25, the Sweedish have only 6, and some people in the world have no rights at all. What kind of a fuckin' god damn god given deal is that!?...NO RIGHTS AT ALL!? Why would God give different people in different countries a different numbers of different rights? Boredom? Amusement? Bad arithmetic? Do we find out at long last after all this time that God is weak in math skills? Doesn't sound like divine planning to me. Sounds more like human planning . Sounds more like one group trying to control another group. In other words...business as usual in America. Now, if you think you do have rights, I have one last assignment for ya. Next time you're at the computer get on the Internet, go to Wikipedia. When you get to Wikipedia, in the search field for Wikipedia, i want to type in, "Japanese-Americans 1942" and you'll find out all about your precious fucking rights. Alright. You know about it. In 1942 there were 110,000 Japanese-American citizens, in good standing, law abiding people, who were thrown into internment camps simply because their parents were born in the wrong country. That's all they did wrong. They had no right to a lawyer, no right to a fair trial, no right to a jury of their peers, no right to due process of any kind. The only right they had was...right this way! Into the internment camps. Just when these American citizens needed their rights the most...their government took them away. and rights aren't rights if someone can take em away. They're priveledges. That's all we've ever had in this country is a bill of TEMPORARY priviledges; and if you read the news, even badly, you know the list get's shorter, and shorter, and shorter. Yeup, sooner or later the people in this country are going to realize the government doesn't give a fuck about them. the government doesn't care about you, or your children, or your rights, or your welfare or your safety. it simply doesn't give a fuck about you. It's interested in it's own power. That's the only thing...keeping it, and expanding wherever possible. Personally when it comes to rights, I think one of two things is true: either we have unlimited rights, or we have no rights at all.

What book(s) changed your life and why? I could probably list books for days, so I’ll just list a few favorites: The Giver by Lois Lowry, Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card, A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle, the Animorphs series by K.A. Applegate, 1984 by George Orwell, the Bible, Gilead by Marilynne Robinson, and Juliet by Andras Visky (which is a play, but I think it still counts).

By then Ser Gregor Clegane was in position at the head of the lists. He was huge, the biggest man that Eddard Stark had ever seen. Robert Baratheon and his brothers were all big men, as was the Hound, and back at Winterfell there was a simpleminded stableboy named Hodor who dwarfed them all, but the knight they called the Mountain That Rides would have towered over Hodor. He was well over seven feet tall, closer to eight, with massive shoulders and arms thick as the trunks of small trees. His destrier seemed a pony in between his armored legs, and the lance he carried looked as small as a broom handl

Sir William Herschel was the first person to discover a planet beyond those easily visible to the naked eye, and he was ready to name it after the King—always a safe bet when you are his subject. Had Sir William succeeded, the planet list would read: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, and George.

Sixteen Targaryens followed Aegon the Dragon to the Iron Throne, before the dynasty was at last toppled in Robert’s Rebellion. They numbered amongst them wise men and foolish, cruel men and kind, good men and evil. Yet if the dragon kings are considered solely on the basis of their legacies, the laws and institutions and improvements they left behind, the name of King Aegon I belongs near the top of the list, in peace as well as war.

Thomas Jefferson and George Washington owned slaves; Albert Einstein and Mohandas Gandhi were imperfect husbands and fathers. The list goes on indefinitely. We are all flawed and creatures of our times. Is it fair to judge us by the unknown standards of the future? Some of the habits of our age will doubtless be considered barbaric by later generations – perhaps for insisting that small children and even infants sleep alone instead of with their parents; or exciting nationalist passions as a means of gaining popular approval and achieving high political office; or allowing bribery and corruption as a way of life; or keeping pets; or eating animals and jailing chimpanzees; or criminalizing the use of euphoriants by adults; or allowing our children to grow up ignorant.

Now I knew that life and truth were one; that life mere and pure is in itself bliss; that where being is not bliss, it is not life, but life-in-death. Every inspiration of the dark wind that blew where it listed went out a sigh of thanksgiving. At last I was! I lived, and nothing could touch my life! My darling walked beside me, and we were on our way home to see the Father!

It becomes obvious the moment we acknowledge the futility of breeding men for special qualities as we breed cocks for game, greyhounds for speed, or sheep for mutton. What is really important in Man is the part of him that we do not yet understand. Of much of it we are not even conscious, just as we are not normally conscious of keeping up our circulation by our heart pump, though if we reject it we die. We are therefore driven to the conclusion that when we have carried selection as far as we can by rejecting from the list of eligible parents all persons who are uninteresting, unpromising, or blemished without any set-off, we shall have to trust to the guidance of fancy (alias Voice of Nature), both in the breeders and the parents, for that superiority in the unconscious self which will be the true characteristic of the Superman.

A peach, slightly unbalanced, so that it listed to one side, its hue the color of an early sunrise. Had George remembered their conversation at the party and left the peach for her to eat? Strange. For a moment she thought it might be a trompe l'oeil work of art, some fantastic piece of glass. She leaned over and sniffed. The blooming perfume was unmistakable. She touched it with the tip of her finger. The peach was not quite ripe, but it was real. The next day, she checked the kitchen as soon as she arrived. The peach lay there still, blushing deeper in the window light. She bent to smell, and the perfume was headier then before, a scent of meadows and summers home from school. Still unripe. Was George waiting to eat this beauty?

If there is less deep poverty in San Francisco than in New York, is it not because San Francisco is yet behind New York in all that both cities are striving for? When San Francisco reaches the point where New York now is, who can doubt that there will also be ragged and barefooted children on her streets?

You can’t do everything, but you can do one thing, and then another and another. In terms of energy, it’s better to make a wrong choice than none at all. You might begin by listing your priorities—for the day, for the week, for the month, for a lifetime. Start modestly. List everything you want to do today or tomorrow. Set priorities by dividing the items into A, B, and C categories. At the least, accomplish the A items. Try the same thing with long-term goals. Priorities do shift, and you can change them at any time, but simply getting them down in black and white adds clarity to your life, and clarity creates energy.

You think turning imagination into logic will help George? Will that answer his most important questions? In my opinion, lists never answer the biggest questions.

If you made a list of Hilda’s remarks throughout the day, you’d find three bracketed together at the top—’We can’t afford it’, ‘It’s a great saving’, and ‘I don’t know where the money’s to come from’.

Sir William Herschel was the first person to discover a planet beyond those easily visible to the naked eye, and he was ready to name it after the King—always a safe bet when you are his subject. Had Sir William succeeded, the planet list would read: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, and George. Fortunately, clearer heads prevailed and the classical name Uranus was adopted some years later.

New Rule: Now that liberals have taken back the word "liberal," they also have to take back the word "elite." By now you've heard the constant right-wing attacks on the "elite media," and the "liberal elite." Who may or may not be part of the "Washington elite." A subset of the "East Coast elite." Which is overly influenced by the "Hollywood elite." So basically, unless you're a shit-kicker from Kansas, you're with the terrorists. If you played a drinking game where you did a shot every time Rush Limbaugh attacked someone for being "elite," you'd be almost as wasted as Rush Limbaugh. I don't get it: In other fields--outside of government--elite is a good thing, like an elite fighting force. Tiger Woods is an elite golfer. If I need brain surgery, I'd like an elite doctor. But in politics, elite is bad--the elite aren't down-to-earth and accessible like you and me and President Shit-for-Brains. Which is fine, except that whenever there's a Bush administration scandal, it always traces back to some incompetent political hack appointment, and you think to yourself, "Where are they getting these screwups from?" Well, now we know: from Pat Robertson. I'm not kidding. Take Monica Goodling, who before she resigned last week because she's smack in the middle of the U.S. attorneys scandal, was the third-ranking official in the Justice Department of the United States. She's thirty-three, and though she never even worked as a prosecutor, was tasked with overseeing the job performance of all ninety-three U.S. attorneys. How do you get to the top that fast? Harvard? Princeton? No, Goodling did her undergraduate work at Messiah College--you know, home of the "Fighting Christies"--and then went on to attend Pat Robertson's law school. Yes, Pat Robertson, the man who said the presence of gay people at Disney World would cause "earthquakes, tornadoes, and possibly a meteor," has a law school. And what kid wouldn't want to attend? It's three years, and you have to read only one book. U.S. News & World Report, which does the definitive ranking of colleges, lists Regent as a tier-four school, which is the lowest score it gives. It's not a hard school to get into. You have to renounce Satan and draw a pirate on a matchbook. This is for the people who couldn't get into the University of Phoenix. Now, would you care to guess how many graduates of this televangelist diploma mill work in the Bush administration? On hundred fifty. And you wonder why things are so messed up? We're talking about a top Justice Department official who went to a college founded by a TV host. Would you send your daughter to Maury Povich U? And if you did, would you expect her to get a job at the White House? In two hundred years, we've gone from "we the people" to "up with people." From the best and brightest to dumb and dumber. And where better to find people dumb enough to believe in George Bush than Pat Robertson's law school? The problem here in America isn't that the country is being run by elites. It's that it's being run by a bunch of hayseeds. And by the way, the lawyer Monica Goodling hired to keep her ass out of jail went to a real law school.

Religion has actually convinced people that there’s an invisible man—living in the sky—who watches everything you do, every minute of every day. And the invisible man has a special list of ten things he does not want you to do. And if you do any of these ten things, he has a special place, full of fire and smoke and burning and torture and anguish, where he will send you to live and suffer and burn and choke and scream and cry forever and ever ’til the end of time . . . But He loves you! —GEORGE CARLIN I

Ghost-Managing Book List The Uninvited Guests, by Sadie Jones Ceremonies of the Damned, by Adrian C. Louis Moon of the Crusted Snow, by Waubgeshig Rice Father of Lies, by Brian Evenson The Underground Railroad, by Colson Whitehead Asleep, by Banana Yoshimoto The Hatak Witches, by Devon A. Mihesuah Beloved, by Toni Morrison The Through, by A. Rafael Johnson Lincoln in the Bardo, by George Saunders Savage Conversations, by LeAnne Howe The Regeneration Trilogy, by Pat Barker Exit Ghost, by Philip Roth Songs for Discharming, by Denise Sweet Hiroshima Bugi: Atomu 57, by Gerald Vizenor

The young activist who recycles Robert F. Kennedy’s line “There are those who look at things the way they are, and ask why . . . I dream of things that never were, and ask why not?” has no idea he’s a walking, talking cliché, a non-conformist in theory while a predictable conformist in fact. But he also has no idea he’s tapping into his inner utopian.... RFK didn’t coin the phrase (JFK didn’t either, but he did use it first). The line actually comes from one of the worst people of the 20th century, George Bernard Shaw (admittedly he’s on the B-list of worst people since he never killed anybody; he just celebrated people who did). That much a lot of people know. But the funny part is the line comes from Shaw’s play Back to Methuselah. Specifically, it’s what the Serpent says to Eve in order to sell her on eating the apple and gaining a kind of immortality through sex (or something like that). Of course, Shaw’s Serpent differs from the biblical serpent, because Shaw — a great rationalizer of evil — is naturally sympathetic to the serpent. Still, it’s kind of hilarious that legions of Kennedy worshippers invoke this line as a pithy summation of the idealistic impulse, putting it nearly on par with Kennedy’s nationalistic “Ask Not” riff, without realizing they’re stealing lines from . . . the Devil. ​I don’t think this means you can march into the local high school, kick open the door to the student government offices with a crucifix extended, shouting “the power of Christ compels you!” while splashing holy water on every kid who uses that “RFK” quote on his Facebook page. But it is interesting.

I've never been sure how to define 'in love.' It's like a measuring rope that keeps changing length. When Brandon's lie broke my heart that night in his bed, I thought, 'I'll never love anyone like this again,' and I haven't. I've never intensely cared for any man in a way that feels identical to how I cared for another. I found George because I was yearning to replace Ethan, and look what happened. I just added another love to the list. The mistake is in thinking there is only one spot. You divot the sand and the tide fills it in and then you create another pocket while the tide drains itself out. Same properties. Different shapes. It's never the same.

I almost tell her that fun doesn’t equate to happiness; at the very least, it lends you happiness and I want to know how to keep it. I’ve googled “How to be happy”; I’ve taken walks in the park and written long gratitude lists; I’m consuming more fruits and vegetables and going to bed early; I’ve given out compliments and practiced

... picture of a hot early stage of the universe was first put forward by the scientist George Gamow in a famous paper written in 1948 with a student of his, Ralph Alpher. Gamow had quite a sense of humour - he persuaded the nuclear scientist Hans Bethe to add his name to the paper to make the list of authors 'Alpher, Bethe, Gamow'...

I probably should say that this is what makes you a good traveler in my opinion, but deep down I really think this is just universal, incontrovertible truth. There is the right way to travel, and the wrong way. And if there is one philanthropic deed that can come from this book, maybe it will be that I teach a few more people how to do it right. So, in short, my list of what makes a good traveler, which I recommend you use when interviewing your next potential trip partner: 1. You are open. You say yes to whatever comes your way, whether it’s shots of a putrid-smelling yak-butter tea or an offer for an Albanian toe-licking. (How else are you going to get the volcano dust off?) You say yes because it is the only way to really experience another place, and let it change you. Which, in my opinion, is the mark of a great trip. 2. You venture to the places where the tourists aren’t, in addition to hitting the “must-sees.” If you are exclusively visiting places where busloads of Chinese are following a woman with a flag and a bullhorn, you’re not doing it. 3. You are easygoing about sleeping/eating/comfort issues. You don’t change rooms three times, you’ll take an overnight bus if you must, you can go without meat in India and without vegan soy gluten-free tempeh butter in Bolivia, and you can shut the hell up about it. 4. You are aware of your travel companions, and of not being contrary to their desires/​needs/​schedules more often than necessary. If you find that you want to do things differently than your companions, you happily tell them to go on without you in a way that does not sound like you’re saying, “This is a test.” 5. You can figure it out. How to read a map, how to order when you can’t read the menu, how to find a bathroom, or a train, or a castle. 6. You know what the trip is going to cost, and can afford it. If you can’t afford the trip, you don’t go. Conversely, if your travel companions can’t afford what you can afford, you are willing to slum it in the name of camaraderie. P.S.: Attractive single people almost exclusively stay at dumps. If you’re looking for them, don’t go posh. 7. You are aware of cultural differences, and go out of your way to blend. You don’t wear booty shorts to the Western Wall on Shabbat. You do hike your bathing suit up your booty on the beach in Brazil. Basically, just be aware to show the culturally correct amount of booty. 8. You behave yourself when dealing with local hotel clerks/​train operators/​tour guides etc. Whether it’s for selfish gain, helping the reputation of Americans traveling abroad, or simply the spreading of good vibes, you will make nice even when faced with cultural frustrations and repeated smug “not possible”s. This was an especially important trait for an American traveling during the George W. years, when the world collectively thought we were all either mentally disabled or bent on world destruction. (One anecdote from that dark time: in Greece, I came back to my table at a café to find that Emma had let a nearby [handsome] Greek stranger pick my camera up off our table. He had then stuck it down the front of his pants for a photo. After he snapped it, he handed the camera back to me and said, “Show that to George Bush.” Which was obviously extra funny because of the word bush.) 9. This last rule is the most important to me: you are able to go with the flow in a spontaneous, non-uptight way if you stumble into something amazing that will bump some plan off the day’s schedule. So you missed the freakin’ waterfall—you got invited to a Bahamian family’s post-Christening barbecue where you danced with three generations of locals in a backyard under flower-strewn balconies. You won. Shut the hell up about the waterfall. Sally

GEORGE TENET WAS AWARE of Osama bin Laden. He supported the small bin Laden tracking unit in the Counterterrorist Center. But by the end of 1997, neither the new CIA director nor the agency placed bin Laden very high on their priority lists. The agency’s view of bin Laden remained similar to Prince Turki’s: He was a blowhard, a dangerous and wealthy egomaniac, and a financier of other radicals, but he was also isolated in Afghanistan.

We walk quickly to the footbridge across the railway line. There’s a dog waste bin here, and in the heat the slope up to the stairs stinks of shit and wee. Indigo lists the dogs whose markers she can smell. Not what their owners call them, unless there are really three dogs called George H-19, George H-15, George H-26. “All gun dogs are designated George,” says Indigo. “The H stands for Heath and the numbers are allocated sequentially.

Writing about Gregor von Rezzori’s classic Memoirs of an Anti-Semite, Deborah Eisenberg pointed out the great harm that can be done by a handful of evil people, as long as they have the “passive assistance of many, many other people who glance out of the windows of their secure homes and see a cloudless sky.” She goes on to list the sins of such passive people: “carelessness, poor logic, casual snobbery—either social or intellectual—inattentiveness.

4. Or else: Rough draft of a letter I think of you, often sometimes I go back into a cafe, I ist near the door, I order a coffee I arrange my packet of cigarettes, a box of matches, a writing pad, my felt-pen on the fake marble table I Spend a long time stirring my cup of coffee with the teasspoon (yet I don't put any sugar in my coffee, I drink it allowing the sugar to melt in my mouth, like the people of North, like the Russians and Poles when they drink tea) I pretend to be precoccupied, to be reflecting, as if I had a decision to make At the top and to the right of the sheet of paaper, I inscribe the date, sometimes the place, sometimes the time, I pretend to be writing a letter I write slowly, very slowly, as slowly as I can, I trace, I draw each letter, each accent, I check the punctuation marks I stare attentively at a small notice, the price-list for ice-creams, at a piece of ironwork, a blind, the hexagonal yellow ashtray (in actual fact, it's an equilaterial triangle, in the cutoff corners of which semi-circular dents have been made where cigarettes can be rested) (...) Outside there's a bit of sunlight the cafe is nearly empty two renovatior's men are having a rum at the bar, the owner is dozing behind his till, the waitress is cleaning the coffee machine I am thinking of you you are walking in your street, it's wintertime, you've turned up your foxfur collar, you're smiling, and remote (...)

Religion has actually convinced people that there’s an invisible man—living in the sky—who watches everything you do, every minute of every day. And the invisible man has a special list of ten things he does not want you to do. And if you do any of these ten things, he has a special place, full of fire and smoke and burning and torture and anguish, where he will send you to live and suffer and burn and choke and scream and cry forever and ever ’til the end of time . . . But He loves you! —GEORGE CARLIN

On Sunday mornings Squealer, holding down a long strip of paper with his trotter, would read out to them lists of figures proving that the production of every class of foodstuff had increased by 200 per cent, 300 per cent, or 500 per cent, as the case might be. The animals saw no reason to disbelieve him, especially as they could no longer remember very clearly what conditions had been like before the Rebellion. All the same, there were days when they felt that they would sooner have had less figures and more food.

Though committed to a chemistry major, that spring he petitioned the Physics Department for graduate standing, which would allow him to take upper-level physics courses. To demonstrate that he knew something about physics, he listed fifteen books he claimed to have read. Years later, he heard that when the faculty committee met to consider his petition, one professor, George Washington Pierce, quipped, “Obviously, if he [Oppenheimer] says he’s read these books, he’s a liar, but he should get a Ph.D. for knowing their titles.

Let’s stop trying to be so productive all the time and make an effort to be more curious. Do you want to look back on a life of items crossed off lists drawn up in response to the demands of others? Or do you want to hang on to, and repeat, and remember, the thrill of discovering things on your own? Todd B. Kashdan, a professor of psychology at George Mason University, refers to curiosity as “joyous exploration”—defined as “the recognition and desire to seek out new knowledge and information, and the subsequent joy of learning and growing.

On 25 April 1829 they published a list of “Stipulations & Conditions” for the Rainhill trials. First on the list was a requirement that the “engine must effectually consume its own smoke.”61 Black, sulfurous coal smoke blowing across their lands had offended the rural gentry in particular. This requirement had already been written into law in the 1825 Railway Act of George IV. To comply, locomotives had been designed to burn coke, a much cleaner fuel than coal, and to route waste steam up the chimney to increase the draft and fan the fire.

In his book Real Presences, George Steiner asks us to "imagine a society in which all talk about the arts, music and literature is prohibited." In such a society there would be no more essays on whether Hamlet was mad or only pretending to be, no reviews of the latest exhibitions or novels, no profiles of writers or artists. There would be no secondary, or parasitic, discussion - let alone tertiary: commentary on commentary. We would have, instead, a "republic for writers and readers" with no cushion of professional opinion-makers to come between creators and audience. While the Sunday papers presently serve as a substitute for the experiencing of the actual exhibition or book, in Steiner's imagined republic the review pages would be turned into listings:catalogues and guides to what is about to open, be published, or be released. What would this republic be like? Would the arts suffer from the obliteration of this ozone of comment? Certainly not, says Steiner, for each performance of a Mahler symphony is also a critique of that symphony. Unlike the reviewer, however, the performer "invests his own being in the process of interpretation." Such interpretation is automatically responsible because the performer is answerable to the work in a way that even the most scrupulous reviewer is not. Although, most obviously, it is not only the case for drama and music; all art is also criticism. This is most clearly so when a writer or composer quotes or reworks material from another writer or composer. All literature, music, and art "embody an expository reflection which they pertain". In other words it is not only in their letters, essays, or conversation that writers like Henry James reveal themselves also to be the best critics; rather, The Portrait of a Lady is itself, among other things, a commentary on and a critique of Middlemarch. "The best readings of art are art." No sooner has Steiner summoned this imaginary republic into existence than he sighs, "The fantasy I have sketched is only that." Well, it is not. It is a real place and for much of the century it has provided a global home for millions of people. It is a republic with a simple name: jazz.

Totally Biased List of Tookie’s Favorite Books Ghost-Managing Book List The Uninvited Guests, by Sadie Jones Ceremonies of the Damned, by Adrian C. Louis Moon of the Crusted Snow, by Waubgeshig Rice Father of Lies, by Brian Evenson The Underground Railroad, by Colson Whitehead Asleep, by Banana Yoshimoto The Hatak Witches, by Devon A. Mihesuah Beloved, by Toni Morrison The Through, by A. Rafael Johnson Lincoln in the Bardo, by George Saunders Savage Conversations, by LeAnne Howe The Regeneration Trilogy, by Pat Barker Exit Ghost, by Philip Roth Songs for Discharming, by Denise Sweet Hiroshima Bugi: Atomu 57, by Gerald Vizenor Short Perfect Novels Too Loud a Solitude, by Bohumil Hrabel Train Dreams, by Denis Johnson Sula, by Toni Morrison The Shadow-Line, by Joseph Conrad The All of It, by Jeannette Haine Winter in the Blood, by James Welch Swimmer in the Secret Sea, by William Kotzwinkle The Blue Flower, by Penelope Fitzgerald First Love, by Ivan Turgenev Wide Sargasso Sea, by Jean Rhys Mrs. Dalloway, by Virginia Woolf Waiting for the Barbarians, by J. M. Coetzee Fire on the Mountain, by Anita Desai

You've been talking to George about me." It was Alessandra's turn to look away, shrugging delicately. "There's not much else to do around here besides talk. So, yes, I did ask him some questions—” "Out of the four hundred and sixty-eight trillion possible topics of discussion," he mused, "I'm number one on the list. I'm flattered." She took a sip of her tea, completely nonchalant—except for the slight pink tinge that colored her cheeks, and the fact that she refused to meet his gaze. "Don't be. I was just trying to break this endless boredom." She was lying. He knew it. And she knew that he knew it.

Jefferson was a genius, the historian Joseph Ellis has noted, at concealing contradictions within abstractions. The Virginian who insisted “that all men are created equal” arrived in Philadelphia attended by opulently attired slaves. 36 His declaration coupled universal principles with an implausibly long list of offenses—twenty-seven in all—committed personally by George III: that’s why the complete document can’t be quoted today without sounding a little silly. Nor did Jefferson, any more than Paine, say anything about what kind of government might replace that of the British tyrant. Details weren’t either patriot’s strength. Had they been, independence might never have been attempted, for details dim the flames fireships require. They disconnect ends of arguments from their beginnings. That’s why Paine and Jefferson thought it necessary first to tilt history, and only at that point to begin to make it. Rhetoric, their lever, had to be clearer than truth, even if necessary an inversion of it. 37 George III was no Nero, not even a James II. Jefferson nonetheless struck from his indictments the charge that the king had supported the slave trade, for this would have slandered slavery’s reputation. And that would have made the vote for freedom less than unanimous. 38

It strikes me that it would be more efficient, and more effective in learning terms, to shift our focus to the noun, since it is the noun that conveys the core meaning. So, instead of presenting the learner with a list of mixed sentences using make and do, we could provide examples of verbs that collocate with, for example, the noun appointment: You’ll need to make an appointment with the doctor. He failed to keep his appointment with the optician. I had a heavy cold and had to cancel my dental appointment. I’ll rearrange the appointment for Friday. This approach is referred to as a key word approach (Woolard 2005), and it feels intuitively closer to the way we actually store vocabulary: one senses that learners are more likely to retain the lexis when it is presented as above. In

Wrath shut the door. “Let’s do it,” he said to George. And the dog knew right where to go, leading him to the entrance—which Wrath opened with his mind. “Hi, honey, I’m home!” he hollered. “Did you bring flowers?” Lassiter shouted back. “Not for you.” “Damn it. Well, I’m on deck tonight with Tohr, so can we get moving? There’s a full list of appointments, but I want to get back for Hell’s Kitchen.” “Don’t you DVR that shit?” Wrath groused as he and George went into the old dining room. “Yeah, but I have poor impulse control. It was on at nine, okay? And I hate waiting. I put George’s fresh water down by your chair, b.t.dub.” “At least you’re a dog lover. That’s the only thing that saves you.” “Ha! I have wings and a halo, you cranky son of a bitch. I’m already perma-saved.” “Just our luck.

The dominant literary mode of the twentieth century has been the fantastic. This may appear a surprising claim, which would not have seemed even remotely conceivable at the start of the century and which is bound to encounter fierce resistance even now. However, when the time comes to look back at the century, it seems very likely that future literary historians, detached from the squabbles of our present, will see as its most representative and distinctive works books like J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, and also George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm, William Golding’s Lord of the Flies and The Inheritors, Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five and Cat’s Cradle, Ursula Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed, Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot-49 and Gravity’s Rainbow. The list could readily be extended, back to the late nineteenth century with H.G. Wells’s The Island of Dr Moreau and The War of the Worlds, and up to writers currently active like Stephen R. Donaldson and George R.R. Martin. It could take in authors as different, not to say opposed, as Kingsley and Martin Amis, Anthony Burgess, Stephen King, Terry Pratchett, Don DeLillo, and Julian Barnes. By the end of the century, even authors deeply committed to the realist novel have often found themselves unable to resist the gravitational pull of the fantastic as a literary mode. This is not the same, one should note, as fantasy as a literary genre – of the authors listed above, only four besides Tolkien would find their works regularly placed on the ‘fantasy’ shelves of bookshops, and ‘the fantastic’ includes many genres besides fantasy: allegory and parable, fairy-tale, horror and science fiction, modern ghost-story and medieval romance. Nevertheless, the point remains. Those authors of the twentieth century who have spoken most powerfully to and for their contemporaries have for some reason found it necessary to use the metaphoric mode of fantasy, to write about worlds and creatures which we know do not exist, whether Tolkien’s ‘Middle-earth’, Orwell’s ‘Ingsoc’, the remote islands of Golding and Wells, or the Martians and Tralfa-madorians who burst into peaceful English or American suburbia in Wells and Vonnegut. A ready explanation for this phenomenon is of course that it represents a kind of literary disease, whose sufferers – the millions of readers of fantasy – should be scorned, pitied, or rehabilitated back to correct and proper taste. Commonly the disease is said to be ‘escapism’: readers and writers of fantasy are fleeing from reality. The problem with this is that so many of the originators of the later twentieth-century fantastic mode, including all four of those first mentioned above (Tolkien, Orwell, Golding, Vonnegut) are combat veterans, present at or at least deeply involved in the most traumatically significant events of the century, such as the Battle of the Somme (Tolkien), the bombing of Dresden (Vonnegut), the rise and early victory of fascism (Orwell). Nor can anyone say that they turned their backs on these events. Rather, they had to find some way of communicating and commenting on them. It is strange that this had, for some reason, in so many cases to involve fantasy as well as realism, but that is what has happened.

The perplexed man cried out within the clergyman, and pressed for some acknowledgment from God of the being he had made. But—was it strange to tell? or if strange, was it not the most natural result nevertheless?—almost the same moment he began to pray in this truer fashion, the doubt rushed up in him like a torrent-spring from the fountains of the great deep—Was there—could there be a God at all? a real being who might actually hear his prayer? In this crowd of houses and shops and churches, amidst buying and selling, and ploughing and praising and backbiting, this endless pursuit of ends and of means to ends, while yet even the wind that blew where it listed blew under laws most fixed, and the courses of the stars were known to a hair's-breadth, —was there—could there be a silent invisible God working his own will in it all? Was there a driver to that chariot whose multitudinous horses seemed tearing away from the pole in all directions? and was he indeed, although invisible and inaudible, guiding that chariot, sure as the flight of a comet, straight to its goal? Or was there a soul to that machine whose myriad wheels went grinding on and on, grinding the stars into dust, matter into man, and man into nothingness? Was there—could there be a living heart to the universe that did positively hear him—poor, misplaced, dishonest, ignorant Thomas Wingfold, who had presumed to undertake a work he neither could perform nor had the courage to forsake, when out of the misery of the grimy little cellar of his consciousness he cried aloud for light and something to make a man of him? For now that Thomas had begun to doubt like an honest being, every ugly thing within him began to show itself to his awakened probity.

McDougall was a certified revolutionary hero, while the Scottish-born cashier, the punctilious and corpulent William Seton, was a Loyalist who had spent the war in the city. In a striking show of bipartisan unity, the most vociferous Sons of Liberty—Marinus Willett, Isaac Sears, and John Lamb—appended their names to the bank’s petition for a state charter. As a triple power at the new bank—a director, the author of its constitution, and its attorney—Hamilton straddled a critical nexus of economic power. One of Hamilton’s motivations in backing the bank was to introduce order into the manic universe of American currency. By the end of the Revolution, it took $167 in continental dollars to buy one dollar’s worth of gold and silver. This worthless currency had been superseded by new paper currency, but the states also issued bills, and large batches of New Jersey and Pennsylvania paper swamped Manhattan. Shopkeepers had to be veritable mathematical wizards to figure out the fluctuating values of the varied bills and coins in circulation. Congress adopted the dollar as the official monetary unit in 1785, but for many years New York shopkeepers still quoted prices in pounds, shillings, and pence. The city was awash with strange foreign coins bearing exotic names: Spanish doubloons, British and French guineas, Prussian carolines, Portuguese moidores. To make matters worse, exchange rates differed from state to state. Hamilton hoped that the Bank of New York would counter all this chaos by issuing its own notes and also listing the current exchange rates for the miscellaneous currencies. Many Americans still regarded banking as a black, unfathomable art, and it was anathema to upstate populists. The Bank of New York was denounced by some as the cat’s-paw of British capitalists. Hamilton’s petition to the state legislature for a bank charter was denied for seven years, as Governor George Clinton succumbed to the prejudices of his agricultural constituents who thought the bank would give preferential treatment to merchants and shut out farmers. Clinton distrusted corporations as shady plots against the populace, foreshadowing the Jeffersonian revulsion against Hamilton’s economic programs. The upshot was that in June 1784 the Bank of New York opened as a private bank without a charter. It occupied the Walton mansion on St. George’s Square (now Pearl Street), a three-story building of yellow brick and brown trim, and three years later it relocated to Hanover Square. It was to house the personal bank accounts of both Alexander Hamilton and John Jay and prove one of Hamilton’s most durable monuments, becoming the oldest stock traded on the New York Stock Exchange.

Napoleon had commanded that once a week there should be held something called a Spontaneous Demonstration, the object of which was to celebrate the struggles and triumphs of Animal Farm. (...) The sheep were the greatest devotees of the Spontaneous Demonstration, and if anyone complained (as a few animals sometimes did, when no pigs or dogs were near) that they wasted time and meant a lot of standing about in the cold, the sheep were sure to silence him with a tremendous bleating of “Four legs good, two legs bad!” But by and large the animals enjoyed these celebrations. They found it comforting to be reminded that, after all, they were truly their own masters and that the work they did was for their own benefit. So that, what with the songs, the processions, Squealer’s lists of figures, the thunder of the gun, the crowing of the cockerel, and the fluttering of the flag, they were able to forget that their bellies were empty, at least part of the time.

And all the while everyone who uses his brain knows that Socialism, as a world-system and wholeheartedly applied, is a way out. It would at least ensure our getting enough to eat even if it deprived us of everything else. Indeed, from one point of view, Socialism is such elementary common sense that I am sometimes amazed that it has not established itself already. The world is a raft sailing through space with, potentially, plenty of provisions for everybody; the idea that we must all cooperate and see to it that everyone does his fair share of the work and gets his fair share of the provisions seems so blatantly obvious that one would say that no one could possibly fail to accept it unless he had some corrupt motive for clinging to the present system. Yet the fact that we have got to face is that Socialism is not establishing itself. Instead of going forward, the cause of Socialism is visibly going back. At this moment Socialists almost everywhere are in retreat before the onslaught of Fascism, and events are moving at terrible speed. As I write this the Spanish Fascist forces are bombarding Madrid, and it is quite likely that before the book is printed we shall have another Fascist country to add to the list, not to mention a Fascist control of the Mediterranean which may have the effect of delivering British foreign policy into the hands of Mussolini. I do not, however, want here to discuss the wider political issues. What I am concerned with is the fact that Socialism is losing ground exactly where it ought to be gaining it. With so much in its favour—for every empty belly is an argument for Socialism—the idea of Socialism is less widely accepted than it was ten years ago. The average thinking person nowadays is not merely not a Socialist, he is actively hostile to Socialism. This must be due chiefly to mistaken methods of propaganda. It means that Socialism, in the form of which it is now presented to us, has about it something inherently distasteful—something that drives away the very people who ought to be nocking to its support.

Steven’s words slush together as he gets to his feet. “Crossing this one off the bucket list.” Then he unbuckles his belt and grabs the waist of his pants—yanking the suckers down to his ankles—tighty whities and all. Every guy in the car holds up his hands to try to block the spectacle. We groan and complain. “My eyes! They burn!” “Put the boa constrictor back in his cage, man.” “This is not the ass I planned on seeing tonight.” Our protests fall on deaf ears. Steven is a man on a mission. Wordlessly, he squats and shoves his lilywhite ass out the window—mooning the gaggle of grannies in the car next to us. I bet you thought this kind of stuff only happened in movies. He grins while his ass blows in the wind for a good ninety seconds, ensuring optimal viewage. Then he pulls his slacks up, turns around, and leans out the window, laughing. “Enjoying the full moon, ladies?” Wow. Steven usually isn’t the type to visually assault the elderly. Without warning, his crazy cackling is cut off. He’s silent for a beat, then I hear him choke out a single strangled word. “Grandma?” Then he’s diving back into the limo, his face grayish, dazed, and totally sober. He stares at the floor. “No way that just happened.” Matthew and I look at each other hopefully, then we scramble to the window. Sure enough, in the driver’s seat of that big old Town Car is none other than Loretta P. Reinhart. Mom to George; Grandma to Steven. What are the fucking odds, huh? Loretta was always a cranky old bitch. No sense of humor. Even when I was a kid she hated me. Thought I was a bad influence on her precious grandchild. Don’t know where she got that idea from. She moved out to Arizona years ago. Like a lot of women her age, she still enjoys a good tug on the slot machine—hence her frequent trips to Sin City. Apparently this is one such trip. Matthew and I wave and smile and in fourth-grader-like, singsong harmony call out, “Hi, Mrs. Reinhart.” She shakes one wrinkled fist in our direction. Then her poofy-haired companion in the backseat flips us the bird. I’m pretty sure it’s the funniest goddamn thing I’ve ever seen. The two of us collapse back into our seats, laughing hysterically.

He had to backtrack immediately to account for the most famous and most acclaimed poet in America, Phillis Wheatley, who was, very unfortunately for Jefferson’s argument, unquestionably black. She had been brought to Boston as an enslaved African at the age of about six, learned English and Latin as a child, and began writing poetry as a teenager. Her published works earned accolades on both sides of the Atlantic. Among her admirers were Voltaire, who praised Wheatley’s “very good English verse,” George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, and even the naval hero John Paul Jones, who addressed her as “the celebrated Phillis the African favorite of the Nine [Muses] and Apollo” when he sent her some of his own verses. Dr. Rush cited her as a proof of black ability, listing her accomplishments when he wrote in 1775, “We have many well attested anecdotes of as sublime and disinterested virtue among them as ever adorned a Roman or a Christian character.”14 Franklin went to see Wheatley when she was in London, a literary celebrity on book tour. The acclaim irked Jefferson: “The compositions published under her name are below the dignity of criticism.”15

Steven’s words slush together as he gets to his feet. “Crossing this one off the bucket list.” Then he unbuckles his belt and grabs the waist of his pants—yanking the suckers down to his ankles—tighty whities and all. Every guy in the car holds up his hands to try to block the spectacle. We groan and complain. “My eyes! They burn!” “Put the boa constrictor back in his cage, man.” “This is not the ass I planned on seeing tonight.” Our protests fall on deaf ears. Steven is a man on a mission. Wordlessly, he squats and shoves his lilywhite ass out the window—mooning the gaggle of grannies in the car next to us. I bet you thought this kind of stuff only happened in movies. He grins while his ass blows in the wind for a good ninety seconds, ensuring optimal viewage. Then he pulls his slacks up, turns around, and leans out the window, laughing. “Enjoying the full moon, ladies?” Wow. Steven usually isn’t the type to visually assault the elderly. Without warning, his crazy cackling is cut off. He’s silent for a beat, then I hear him choke out a single strangled word. “Grandma?” Then he’s diving back into the limo, his face grayish, dazed, and totally sober. He stares at the floor. “No way that just happened.” Matthew and I look at each other hopefully, then we scramble to the window. Sure enough, in the driver’s seat of that big old Town Car is none other than Loretta P. Reinhart. Mom to George; Grandma to Steven. What are the fucking odds, huh? .... Matthew and I wave and smile and in fourth-grader-like, singsong harmony call out, “Hi, Mrs. Reinhart.” She shakes one wrinkled fist in our direction. Then her poofy-haired companion in the backseat flips us the bird. I’m pretty sure it’s the funniest goddamn thing I’ve ever seen. The two of us collapse back into our seats, laughing hysterically.

Democracy’s brand was also damaged by America’s reaction to the Al Qaeda attacks in 2001. George W. Bush’s response to 9/11 dealt a twin blow to Western democracy’s allure. The first came in the form of the Patriot Act, which paved the way for spying on American citizens and gave the green light to multiple dilutions of US constitutional liberties. That imperative was then extended to America’s relations with any country, democratic or not, which pledged to cooperate in the ‘war on terror’. Autocrats such as Putin and Pakistan’s Pervez Musharraf went from pariahs to soul brothers almost overnight. When the Bush administration said ‘You are either with us or against us,’ it was referring to the opening of ‘black sites’ where the CIA could waterboard terrorist suspects, and the no-questions-asked exchanges of terrorist lists against which there was little prospect of appeal – a practice known in international law as refoulement. This gave undemocratic regimes an excuse to logroll domestic opponents onto the international lists, with devastating effects on political rights around the world. In the decade after 9/11, the number of Interpol red notices rose eightfold.3 Such practices belied Bush’s democratic agenda. For example, it robbed the US of the moral standing to criticise the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, a China-backed body of central Asian autocracies that today operates its own refoulement exchanges of political dissidents in the name of counter-terrorism. The Bush administration’s approach was also geopolitically shortsighted. Just as the West’s support for the Afghan jihad against the Soviets in the 1980s laid the ground for the rise of Islamist terrorism, so America’s Faustian post-9/11 pacts with autocratic regimes helped sow the seeds for the world’s current democratic recession. That is certain to deepen under Trump.

Beauty Junkies is the title of a recent book by New York Times writer Alex Kuczynski, “a self-confessed recovering addict of cosmetic surgery.” And, withour technological prowess, we succeed in creating fresh addictions. Some psychologists now describe a new clinical pathology — Internet sex addiction disorder. Physicians and psychologists may not be all that effective in treating addictions, but we’re expert at coming up with fresh names and categories. A recent study at Stanford University School of Medicine found that about 5.5 per cent of men and 6 per cent of women appear to be addicted shoppers. The lead researcher, Dr. Lorrin Koran, suggested that compulsive buying be recognized as a unique illness listed under its own heading in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the official psychiatric catalogue. Sufferers of this “new” disorder are afflicted by “an irresistible, intrusive and senseless impulse” to purchase objects they do not need. I don’t scoff at the harm done by shopping addiction — I’m in no position to do that — and I agree that Dr. Koran accurately describes the potential consequences of compulsive buying: “serious psychological, financial and family problems, including depression, overwhelming debt and the breakup of relationships.” But it’s clearly not a distinct entity — only another manifestation of addiction tendencies that run through our culture, and of the fundamental addiction process that varies only in its targets, not its basic characteristics. In his 2006 State of the Union address, President George W. Bush identified another item of addiction. “Here we have a serious problem,” he said. “America is addicted to oil.” Coming from a man who throughout his financial and political career has had the closest possible ties to the oil industry. The long-term ill effects of our society’s addiction, if not to oil then to the amenities and luxuries that oil makes possible, are obvious. They range from environmental destruction, climate change and the toxic effects of pollution on human health to the many wars that the need for oil, or the attachment to oil wealth, has triggered. Consider how much greater a price has been exacted by this socially sanctioned addiction than by the drug addiction for which Ralph and his peers have been declared outcasts. And oil is only one example among many: consider soul-, body-or Nature-destroying addictions to consumer goods, fast food, sugar cereals, television programs and glossy publications devoted to celebrity gossip—only a few examples of what American writer Kevin Baker calls “the growth industries that have grown out of gambling and hedonism.

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.” George Bernard Shaw On a cool fall evening in 2008, four students set out to revolutionize an industry. Buried in loans, they had lost and broken eyeglasses and were outraged at how much it cost to replace them. One of them had been wearing the same damaged pair for five years: He was using a paper clip to bind the frames together. Even after his prescription changed twice, he refused to pay for pricey new lenses. Luxottica, the 800-pound gorilla of the industry, controlled more than 80 percent of the eyewear market. To make glasses more affordable, the students would need to topple a giant. Having recently watched Zappos transform footwear by selling shoes online, they wondered if they could do the same with eyewear. When they casually mentioned their idea to friends, time and again they were blasted with scorching criticism. No one would ever buy glasses over the internet, their friends insisted. People had to try them on first. Sure, Zappos had pulled the concept off with shoes, but there was a reason it hadn’t happened with eyewear. “If this were a good idea,” they heard repeatedly, “someone would have done it already.” None of the students had a background in e-commerce and technology, let alone in retail, fashion, or apparel. Despite being told their idea was crazy, they walked away from lucrative job offers to start a company. They would sell eyeglasses that normally cost $500 in a store for $95 online, donating a pair to someone in the developing world with every purchase. The business depended on a functioning website. Without one, it would be impossible for customers to view or buy their products. After scrambling to pull a website together, they finally managed to get it online at 4 A.M. on the day before the launch in February 2010. They called the company Warby Parker, combining the names of two characters created by the novelist Jack Kerouac, who inspired them to break free from the shackles of social pressure and embark on their adventure. They admired his rebellious spirit, infusing it into their culture. And it paid off. The students expected to sell a pair or two of glasses per day. But when GQ called them “the Netflix of eyewear,” they hit their target for the entire first year in less than a month, selling out so fast that they had to put twenty thousand customers on a waiting list. It took them nine months to stock enough inventory to meet the demand. Fast forward to 2015, when Fast Company released a list of the world’s most innovative companies. Warby Parker didn’t just make the list—they came in first. The three previous winners were creative giants Google, Nike, and Apple, all with over fifty thousand employees. Warby Parker’s scrappy startup, a new kid on the block, had a staff of just five hundred. In the span of five years, the four friends built one of the most fashionable brands on the planet and donated over a million pairs of glasses to people in need. The company cleared $100 million in annual revenues and was valued at over $1 billion. Back in 2009, one of the founders pitched the company to me, offering me the chance to invest in Warby Parker. I declined. It was the worst financial decision I’ve ever made, and I needed to understand where I went wrong.

In order for A to apply to computations generally, we shall need a way of coding all the different computations C(n) so that A can use this coding for its action. All the possible different computations C can in fact be listed, say as C0, C1, C2, C3, C4, C5,..., and we can refer to Cq as the qth computation. When such a computation is applied to a particular number n, we shall write C0(n), C1(n), C2(n), C3(n), C4(n), C5(n),.... We can take this ordering as being given, say, as some kind of numerical ordering of computer programs. (To be explicit, we could, if desired, take this ordering as being provided by the Turing-machine numbering given in ENM, so that then the computation Cq(n) is the action of the qth Turing machine Tq acting on n.) One technical thing that is important here is that this listing is computable, i.e. there is a single computation Cx that gives us Cq when it is presented with q, or, more precisely, the computation Cx acts on the pair of numbers q, n (i.e. q followed by n) to give Cq(n). The procedure A can now be thought of as a particular computation that, when presented with the pair of numbers q,n, tries to ascertain that the computation Cq(n) will never ultimately halt. Thus, when the computation A terminates, we shall have a demonstration that Cq(n) does not halt. Although, as stated earlier, we are shortly going to try to imagine that A might be a formalization of all the procedures that are available to human mathematicians for validly deciding that computations never will halt, it is not at all necessary for us to think of A in this way just now. A is just any sound set of computational rules for ascertaining that some computations Cq(n) do not ever halt. Being dependent upon the two numbers q and n, the computation that A performs can be written A(q,n), and we have: (H) If A(q,n) stops, then Cq(n) does not stop. Now let us consider the particular statements (H) for which q is put equal to n. This may seem an odd thing to do, but it is perfectly legitimate. (This is the first step in the powerful 'diagonal slash', a procedure discovered by the highly original and influential nineteenth-century Danish/Russian/German mathematician Georg Cantor, central to the arguments of both Godel and Turing.) With q equal to n, we now have: (I) If A(n,n) stops, then Cn(n) does not stop. We now notice that A(n,n) depends upon just one number n, not two, so it must be one of the computations C0,C1,C2,C3,...(as applied to n), since this was supposed to be a listing of all the computations that can be performed on a single natural number n. Let us suppose that it is in fact Ck, so we have: (J) A(n,n) = Ck(n) Now examine the particular value n=k. (This is the second part of Cantor's diagonal slash!) We have, from (J), (K) A(k,k) = Ck(k) and, from (I), with n=k: (L) If A(k,k) stops, then Ck(k) does not stop. Substituting (K) in (L), we find: (M) If Ck(k) stops, then Ck(k) does not stop. From this, we must deduce that the computation Ck(k) does not in fact stop. (For if it did then it does not, according to (M)! But A(k,k) cannot stop either, since by (K), it is the same as Ck(k). Thus, our procedure A is incapable of ascertaining that this particular computation Ck(k) does not stop even though it does not. Moreover, if we know that A is sound, then we know that Ck(k) does not stop. Thus, we know something that A is unable to ascertain. It follows that A cannot encapsulate our understanding.

Similarly, and even more disturbing, was another instance of content being remotely deleted off users’ personal devices, when in 2009 Amazon.com remotely deleted (without warning or notification) copies of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four from people’s Kindle tablets after they discovered the publisher who listed that particular version didn’t own the rights.656 Amazon caused that version

Similarly, and even more disturbing, was another instance of content being remotely deleted off users’ personal devices, when in 2009 Amazon.com remotely deleted (without warning or notification) copies of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four from people’s Kindle tablets after they discovered the publisher who listed that particular version didn’t own the rights.

During the two hundred years since Kant’s death, not many full biographical treatments of Kant have been written. Though a recent bibliography of works on Kant’s life takes up 23 pages and lists 483 titles, most of these concern minutiae that are of little interest even to those most keenly intrigued by Kant’s philosophy.56 Rolf George finds in a recent review of Kant

George A. Lopez, characterizing techniques common to the State as terrorist, lists four approaches—information control, law enforcement/legal, economic coercion, and outright life threatening (including kidnapping, disappearances, torture, etc.). He argues with unusual acumen that all four are entwined with the dynamic of patriarchy: “The emphasis on masculinity demands the assumption of warrior-hero characteristics: a proclivity for violence, an aura of the fighter, and an explicit rejection of those characteristics associated with the frail and womanly aspects of human beings: sensitivity, pity, emotionality, tenderness toward others, and so on.” He’s right—but the truth is even worse. The phallic malady is epidemic and systemic. It’s too easy to imagine the power concentrated in a series of rooms, with ten or even a hundred high-level would-be-hero bureaucrats raving toward Armageddon for one another’s approval. The more frightening reality is that each individual male in the patriarchy is aware of his relative power in the scheme of things. A few may be distressed at that power, many may claim innocence of it, most may deny it or pretend to ignore it, and some may blatantly delight in it—but all are aware of it.

Ghost-Managing Book List The Uninvited Guests, by Sadie Jones Ceremonies of the Damned, by Adrian C. Louis Moon of the Crusted Snow, by Waubgeshig Rice Father of Lies, by Brian Evenson The Underground Railroad, by Colson Whitehead Asleep, by Banana Yoshimoto The Hatak Witches, by Devon A. Mihesuah Beloved, by Toni Morrison The Through, by A. Rafael Johnson Lincoln in the Bardo, by George Saunders Savage Conversations, by LeAnne Howe The Regeneration Trilogy, by Pat Barker Exit Ghost, by Philip Roth Songs for Discharming, by Denise Sweet Hiroshima Bugi: Atomu 57, by Gerald Vizenor Short Perfect Novels Too Loud a Solitude, by Bohumil Hrabal Train Dreams, by Denis Johnson Sula, by Toni Morrison The Shadow-Line, by Joseph Conrad The All of It, by Jeannette Haien Winter in the Blood, by James Welch Swimmer in the Secret Sea, by William Kotzwinkle The Blue Flower, by Penelope Fitzgerald First Love, by Ivan Turgenev Wide Sargasso Sea, by Jean Rhys Mrs. Dalloway, by Virginia Woolf Waiting for the Barbarians, by J. M. Coetzee Fire on the Mountain, by Anita Desai

Good old Mom. Dead for nine years now. He hoped, wherever she was, she knew how much he’d loved her. Such a sweetie. All she’d ever needed was one break. One kind person in her corner. For things, just once, to go her way. But no. She kept getting kicked. Over and over. By whoever felt like it. If you kicked someone like that, you were just one more person on the list of the many people who’d kicked her. Nobody would ever blame you. Whereas if you stood up for someone like that, you risked becoming—well, you risked becoming one of them.

Moreover, it was not until the year 2008—only five years ago—that Mandela’s name was taken off the terrorist watch list, when George W. Bush signed a bill that finally removed him and other members of the ANC from the list.

Jeremy George Lake Charles Sports Car Collector His collection includes several Lamborghinis, including one from the late 1960s and early 1970s, as well as a number of other rare models. His collection of 40 cars includes a Porsche 911 GT3 RS, a Mercedes-Benz SLS AMG and a Ferrari 458 Italia. Jeremy George Lake Charles Other cars in his garage include a Ford Mustang, an Aston Martin Vantage, two Porsche 918 Spyders and two Rolls-Royce Phantom IIs. This extraordinary collection of cars included a 1964 Ferrari 488 GTB with Stirling engine and four-speed manual transmission, an original Lotus Elans and an early Ferrari F40. The Boxster is generally a great sports car, but the 718 badge certainly makes it a classic of the future. This collector's car is always the one I see lined up in front of me, and I have seen the owner pull the car out of the car every weekend with a sense of pride. The Type R will probably be a lethal collector's car that we will see for many years to come. He is a collector of cars, which is something I'm not sure what to do. M is for sure it will be in a few years. Jeremy George Lake Charles Another advantage of owning sports cars is that most eventually become collectibles. For the super-rich, though, there are some amazing car collections on the list of collectibles, but I can't remember all of them for that long. It should come as no surprise, then, that Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, the owner of the world's largest collection of sports cars, has 7,000 cars, including cars from brands such as Ferrari, Porsche, Mercedes-Benz, Audi, BMW and Porsche. Sheik Mohammed has taken 19 years to sort through his entire collection because he has to drive different cars every day from now on.

So you think someone is going to shoot at me twice in one campaign cycle?" Sticking out her hand, she started counting off on her fingers. "Reagan, Johnson, Nixon, Carter. They've all had over fifty assassination attempts. Some over a hundred!" His sisters were the earth's most annoying creatures. "Those are all presidents. And they all survived the attempts." "William Goebel, gubernatorial candidate. George Wallace, gubernatorial candidate." "You're in the wrong century." "And you're underestimating the power of racial hatred," she snapped. "Bill Richardson, Deval Patrick, Bobby Jindal, David Paterson, Susana Martinez, Michelle Grisham-" "And listing all the minority governors from this century proves what?" she snapped again. "It proves that we can run for elections without ending up dead.

Still, key Democratic interest groups—especially the big industrial unions—resisted any environmental measures that might threaten jobs for their members; and in polls we conducted at the start of my campaign, the average Democratic voter ranked climate change near the bottom of their list of concerns. Republican voters were even more skeptical. There’d been a time when the federal government’s role in protecting the environment enjoyed the support of both parties. Richard Nixon had worked with a Democratic Congress to create the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in 1970. George H. W. Bush championed a strengthening of the Clean Air Act in 1990. But those times had passed. As the GOP’s electoral base had shifted to the South and the West, where conservation efforts had long rankled oil drillers, mining interests, developers, and ranchers, the party had turned environmental protection into another front in the partisan culture war.

Consider providing an emailing frequency option when it comes to signing up for your mailing list can help to grow and sustain your mailing lists.

We human pioneers of the “great camping trip,” as George Attla would dub it, will remain incorporated, as it were, in the fabric that weaves our history. But what of the four hundred pioneer dogs? Those wonders of God’s creation, who weathered Arctic gales, slept in snowbanks, suffered exhaustion, sore, raw feet, and, to some degree, human ignorance, and neglect. What of them? Leaders Genghis, Kiana, and Sonny. Others, who strained in wheel, team, and swing positions, and at times, in lead as well, were Kuchik, Koyuk, Snippy, Eska, Shiak, Flame, Bandit, Casper, and Crazy. Names listed on a sheet of paper seem such a hollow tribute to twelve of a person’s most loyal, tested friends. And hollow that tribute would be, if all twelve of them were not imprinted indelibly in my heart. Those twelve devoted, steadfast trail companions bestowed upon me the one true adventure of my life. In so doing, they became the pathfinders for all ensuing generations of endurance race dogs. Genghis, Kiana, Sonny, Kuchik, Koyuk, Snippy, Eska, Shiak, Flame, Bandit, Casper, and Crazy—a renewed and heartfelt salute.

There is only one thing on my bucket list-old age.

the third draft of Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence listed as primary grievances against King George III “prompting our negroes to rise in arms among us” and, in the next sentence, “endeavoring to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers the merciless Indian savages, whose known rule of warfare is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes, & conditions of existence.

...someday someone would dig up his yellow pad and virtually cry eureka when they realized what a teeming fragment of minutia, and yet crucial minutia, had been found...

Wie Kinder in hyperautoritären Familien leben sie in einem Zustand ständiger Sorge, dass sie Gottes großen Knüppel zu spüren bekommen. Bewusst oder unbewusst leben sie nach einer Liste von Regeln. Wenn sie diese Regeln befolgen, sind sie „gut“, und wenn sie davon abweichen, sind sie sofort bereit, ihre Strafe zu empfangen. Daher leben viele wieder geborene Christen in schrecklicher Sklaverei, ständig besorgt, nur ja die Regeln zu befolgen oder sich richtig zu verhalten, um Gott zu gefallen. Eine erdrückende Last aus Schuld wird ihre normale, tagtägliche Erfahrung.

On Sunday mornings Squealer, holding down a long strip of paper with his trotter, would read out to them lists of figures proving that the production of every class of foodstuff had increased by two hundred per cent, three hundred per cent, or five hundred per cent, as the case might be.

My own list includes Allen Drury, Advise and Consent; Robert Penn Warren, All the King’s Men; Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird; George Orwell, 1984; Gore Vidal, Washington, D.C.; Sinclair Lewis, It Can’t Happen Here. I am also a big fan of the books and short stories of Ward Just. My son came of age watching The West Wing, and I loved both the riotously funny if cynical book and British TV series Yes, Minister. And, even if it is not a substitute for reading The Federalist Papers, you would be hard pressed to spend a more enjoyable evening than watching the musical Hamilton.

The media have indeed informed the public about threats to our air, water and food. Ever since 1962, when Rachel Carson published Silent Spring, more and more information has been made available. And the public has responded. About fifteen years ago, public interest in the environment reached its height. In 1988, George Bush Senior promised that, if elected, he would be an environmental president. In the same year, Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney was re-elected, and to indicate his ecological concern he moved the minister of the environment into the inner Cabinet. Newly created environment departments around the world were poised to cut back on fossil-fuel use, monitor the effects of acid rain and other pollutants, clean up toxic wastes, and protect plant and animal species. Information about our troubled environment had reached a large number of people, and that information, as expected, led to civic and political action. In 1992, it all reached its apex as the largest-ever gathering of heads of state in human history met at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro. “Sustainable development” was the rallying cry, and politicians and business leaders promised to take a new path. Henceforth, they said, the environment would be weighed in every political, social and economic decision. Yet only two weeks after all the fine statements of purpose and government commitments were signed in Rio, the Group of Seven industrialized nations met in Munich and not a word was mentioned about the environment. The main topic was the global economy. The environment, it was said, had fallen off the list of public concerns, and environmentalism had been relegated to the status of a transitory fad.

Washington never wrote an autobiography, and his diaries are largely confined to accounts of the weather and lists of the people who came to dinner.

If the American culture of movies, shopping males, and soft drinks cannot inspire us, there are other Americas that can: Americas of renegades and prisoners, of dreamers and outsiders. Something can be salvaged from the twisted wreck of the “democratic sprit” celebrated by Walt Whitman, something subverted from the sense that each person has worth and dignity: a spirit that can be sustained on self-reliance and initiative. These Americas are America of the alienated and marginalized: indigenous warriors, the freedom fighters of civil rights, the miners’ rebelling in the Appalachian Mountains. America’s past is full of revolutionary hybrids; our lists could stretch infinitely onwards towards undiscovered past or future. The monolith of a rich and plump America must be destroyed to make room for many Americas. A folk anarchist culture rising in the periphery of America, and can grow in the fertile ground that lies beneath the concrete of the great American wasteland. Anyone struggling today – living the hard life and fighting the even harder fight – is a friend even if he or she can never share a single meal with us, or speak our language. The anarchists of America, with our influence as wide as our prairies and dreams that could light those prairies on fire, can make entire meals on discarded food, live in abandoned buildings, and travel on the secret paths of lost highways and railroads, we are immensely privileged.

Hadn't Gary Gygax simply invented a game, and an esoteric one at that? It was hardly a footnote in the increasingly fast and complex information age that we live in. What was all the fuzz about? The reason for all the fuzz among those who understood his work was simple. Gary Gygax and his seminal game creation, Dungeons & Dragons, had influenced and transformed the world in extraordinary ways. Yet, much of his contribution would also go largely unrecognised by the general public. Although it is debatable whether D&D ever became a thoroughly mainstream activity, as a 1983 New York Times article had speculated, referring to it as the great game of the 1980's, D&D and its RPG derivatives are beloved by a relatively small but dedicated group of individuals affectionately known as 'geeks'. Although the term 'geek' is not exclusive to role-playing gamers, the activities of this particular audience have often been viewed as the most archetypal form of 'geekiness'. Labels aside, what is notable is that the activities of this RGP audience were highly correlated with interests in other activities such as early computers, digital technologies, visual effects, and the performing arts. In this way, these geeks, though relatively small in number, became in many instances the leaders and masters of this era. With the advent of the digital age, geeks worldwide found opportunity and recognition never previously available to their predecessors. Icons and innovators such as George R. R. Martin, Mike Myers, Richard Garriott, Vin Diesel, Tim Duncan, Anderson Cooper, David X. Cohen, John Carmak, Tim Harford, Moby, and the late Robin Williams, to name just a few, were all avid role-playing gamers in their younger years. The list of those who include D&D as a regular activity while growing up is both extensive and impressive.

There was a list, Kimberley imagined, and in an obscure subsection of that list, a section that had not been properly updated since George Bush was President,

George Mason was the Kochs’ largest libertarian academic project but far from the only one. By 2015, according to an internal list, the Charles Koch Foundation was subsidizing pro-business, antiregulatory, and antitax programs in 307 different institutions of higher education in America and had plans to expand into 18 more. The schools ranged from cash-hungry West Virginia University to Brown University, where the Kochs, in the tradition of the Olin Foundation, established an Ivy League “beachhead.” At

Hi, honey, I’m home!” he hollered. “Did you bring flowers?” Lassiter shouted back. “Not for you.” “Damn it. Well, I’m on deck tonight with Tohr, so can we get moving? There’s a full list of appointments, but I want to get back for Hell’s Kitchen.” “Don’t you DVR that shit?” Wrath groused as he and George went into the old dining room. “Yeah, but I have poor impulse control. It was on at nine, okay? And I hate waiting. I put George’s fresh water down by your chair, b.t.dub.” “At least you’re a dog lover. That’s the only thing that saves you.” “Ha! I have wings and a halo, you cranky son of a bitch. I’m already perma-saved.” “Just our luck.” “Hey, my brother,” V said as he came through the archway and lit a hand-rolled. “Where’s your girl?” Lassiter cut in, “She’s got to be coming back soon, right?” Wrath had to smile as he took his seat. About the only time that annoying SOB got serious was when it came to Beth—and he had to admit, that was kinda endearing. “She back yet?” Rhage asked as he walked into the room. “How long can it take to order baby furniture?” Butch demanded while making his appearance. “Weeks,” Z answered. “You have no idea.” And so it went, everyone arriving with the same question, from Blay and Qhuinn to Phury and Rehvenge. The only one who didn’t ask it out loud was John—but he didn’t have to. Beth’s brother had been a quiet, worried presence since they’d made the announcement of the surprise pregnancy. And Wrath loved the guy for it.

Then, with great relish, Lyndon Johnson spun a Texas tale. It was his pièce de résistance, the crescendo of an expansive, four-hour performance. “When I got [Kennedy] in the Oval Office,” Johnson began, “and told him it would be ‘inadvisable’ for him to be on the ticket as the Vice President-nominee, his face changed, and he started to swallow. He looked sick. His adam’s apple bounded up and down like a yo-yo.” For effect, the president gulped, audibly, at the reporters. He mimicked Bobby’s “funny voice” and proceeded to tell, in lavish detail and with evident delight, his version of the meeting. Finally, LBJ ran down a list of possible running mates and explained the ways each would hurt his chances. “In other words,” recalled Folliard, “he would do better in the November election if he had no running mate. This left Wicker, Kiker and me baffled—and that is just what the man evidently wanted us to be.” Within days Johnson’s story was the talk of Washington. His portrait of RFK as a “stunned semi-idiot” left columnist Joseph Alsop and other Washington insiders feeling rather stunned themselves. It was not long before the gossip found its way to Bobby Kennedy, who stormed back to the White House and accused the president of mistruths and a violation of trust. I knew the meeting was taped, he said, but I never expected this. Wasn’t our talk a matter of confidence? Aren’t we honorable men? LBJ was unrepentant: I’ve revealed nothing, he assured Kennedy, gesturing wanly at an empty page in his appointment book. He promised to check his notes for any conversations that might have slipped his mind. Bobby stalked out, seething, and caught a plane to Hyannis Port. “He tells so many lies,” Kennedy said of Johnson the next week, echoing the words of George Reedy, “that he convinces himself after a while he’s telling the truth. He just doesn’t recognize truth or falsehood.

There are good reasons to choose liberalism. If I were to be asked to list those reasons and the bases for them very briefly at the outset, each in one or two sentences, here is what that list would be: Reason 1. The Nurturant Parent model is superior as a method of childrearing. Reason 2. Strict Father morality requires a view of human thought that is at odds with what we know about the way the mind works. Reason 3. Strict Father morality often finds morality in harm; Nurturant Parent morality does not. There

Moderately hot oven? That's it? No temperature listed? What did that even mean – moderately hot? How moderately hot were they talking here? George Clooney in Ocean's Eleven hot? Or Daniel Craig in Skyfall hot? Probably not Daniel Craig hot. That heat level would scorch any straight girl's peaches.

That is, if there were an equality of opportunity, there should be the same number of doctors, lawyers, scientists per capita in the African-American community as in the population at large. Or the median income in African-American households would be the same as in the population at large. But this is not the case. Given the assumption of the same range of abilities, this indicates that there must not be real equality of opportunity. The “same range of abilities” frame is commonplace among liberals. It has a crucial use in classic liberal arguments. First, it defines the boundaries of racism: To deny it, to say some races have a greater range of abilities than others, is de facto taken as racist. Second, given this frame, it follows that different outcomes are de facto evidence of the effects of racism, past or present or both. The outcomes are documented in statistics—the rational presentation of a laundry list of statistical facts regarding infant mortality rates, income disparities, unemployment rates, and so on. To

Forever seeking Archimedean levers for prying the world in directions they prefer, progressives say they embrace high-speed rail for many reasons—to improve the climate, increase competitiveness, enhance national security, reduce congestion, and rationalize land use. The length of the list of reasons, and the flimsiness of each, points to this conclusion: the real reason for progressives’ passion for trains is their goal of diminishing Americans’ individualism in order to make them more amenable to collectivism.

I Do Believe You Ate My Salad Recently, I attended a luncheon at the George Lindsey (Goober of Mayberry fame) Film Festival at my alma mater, the University of North Alabama. Good manners and polite social behavior were at the top of my list, for I know how often business deals get made and people fall in love over meals--my goodness! Seated right next to me was my friend Buddy Killen, a legendary songwriter from Nashville, Tennessee. Everything seemed to be going fine until I looked over and saw that Buddy was eating my salad. I guess he forgot that your salad is always served on the right. Should I have ignored his faux pas? Skipped my salad to avoid making him uncomfortable? What was a Grits girl to do? I’ll tell you what: without a second thought, I turned to Buddy and said straight out, “Excuse me, sir, I do believe you ate my salad!” Never missing a beat, he waved the waiter over and said, “Sir, I’m afraid you forgot Edie’s salad!” With that, I got my salad and all honor was saved. Which just goes to show that being straightforward in a polite manner is never inappropriate. -Edie Hand

The diamond doors flew open. I blinked in disbelief at the transformation within. The tent was no longer of silk but flesh (speckled and pink with spoiled blood); the feast was not a feast, but, rather, on long tables inside, numerous human forms were stretched out, in various stages of flaying; the host was no king, no Christ, but a beast, bloody-handed and long-fanged, wearing a sulfur-colored robe, bits of innards speckling it. Visible therein were three women and a bent-backed old man, bearing long ropes of (their own) intestines (terrible!), but most terrible of all was the way they screeched with joy as my funeral-suited friend was dragged in among them, and the way that poor fellow kept smiling, as if attempting to ingratiate himself with his captors, listing the many charitable things he had done back in Pennsylvania, and the numerous good people who would vouch for him, especially in the vicinity of Wilkes-Barre, if only they might be summoned, even as he was wrestled over to the flaying table by several escort-beings apparently constituted entirely of fire, such that, when they grabbed him (their searing touch instantaneously burning away his funeral suit), his pain was so great that he could no longer struggle or move at all, except his head turned briefly in my direction, and his eyes (horror-filled) met mine.