Grounded Famous Quotes

I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn't quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.

A Great Rabbi stands, teaching in the marketplace. It happens that a husband finds proof that morning of his wife's adultery, and a mob carries her to the marketplace to stone her to death. There is a familiar version of this story, but a friend of mine - a Speaker for the Dead - has told me of two other Rabbis that faced the same situation. Those are the ones I'm going to tell you. The Rabbi walks forward and stands beside the woman. Out of respect for him the mob forbears and waits with the stones heavy in their hands. 'Is there any man here,' he says to them, 'who has not desired another man's wife, another woman's husband?' They murmur and say, 'We all know the desire, but Rabbi none of us has acted on it.' The Rabbi says, 'Then kneel down and give thanks that God has made you strong.' He takes the woman by the hand and leads her out of the market. Just before he lets her go, he whispers to her, 'Tell the Lord Magistrate who saved his mistress, then he'll know I am his loyal servant.' So the woman lives because the community is too corrupt to protect itself from disorder. Another Rabbi. Another city. He goes to her and stops the mob as in the other story and says, 'Which of you is without sin? Let him cast the first stone.' The people are abashed, and they forget their unity of purpose in the memory of their own individual sins. ‘Someday,’ they think, ‘I may be like this woman. And I’ll hope for forgiveness and another chance. I should treat her as I wish to be treated.’ As they opened their hands and let their stones fall to the ground, the Rabbi picks up one of the fallen stones, lifts it high over the woman’s head and throws it straight down with all his might it crushes her skull and dashes her brain among the cobblestones. ‘Nor am I without sins,’ he says to the people, ‘but if we allow only perfect people to enforce the law, the law will soon be dead – and our city with it.’ So the woman died because her community was too rigid to endure her deviance. The famous version of this story is noteworthy because it is so startlingly rare in our experience. Most communities lurch between decay and rigor mortis and when they veer too far they die. Only one Rabbi dared to expect of us such a perfect balance that we could preserve the law and still forgive the deviation. So of course, we killed him. -San Angelo Letters to an Incipient Heretic

Long Time. The famous seventeenth-century Ming painter Chou Yung relates a story that altered his behavior forever. Late one winter afternoon he set out to visit a town that lay across the river from his own town. He was bringing some important books and papers with him and had commissioned a young boy to help him carry them. As the ferry neared the other side of the river, Chou Yung asked the boatman if they would have time to get to the town before its gates closed, since it was a mile away and night was approaching. The boatman glanced at the boy, and at the bundle of loosely tied papers and books—“Yes,” he replied, “if you do not walk too fast.” As they started out, however, the sun was setting. Afraid of being locked out of the town at night, prey to local bandits, Chou and the boy walked faster and faster, finally breaking into a run. Suddenly the string around the papers broke and the documents scattered on the ground. It took them many minutes to put the packet together again, and by the time they had reached the city gates, it was too late. When you force the pace out of fear and impatience, you create a nest of problems that require fixing, and you end up taking much longer than if you had taken your time.

As Conan the Barbarian famously said, “That which does not kill us does not kill us.

The unspoken motto of our house: If you stay closer to the ground, you have less distance to fall,

In life, the visible surface of the Sperm Whale is not the least among the many marvels he presents. Almost invariably it is all over obliquely crossed and re-crossed with numberless straight marks in thick array, something like those in the finest Italian line engravings. But these marks do not seem to be impressed upon the isinglass substance above mentioned, but seem to be seen through it, as if they were engraved upon the body itself. Nor is this all. In some instances, to the quick, observant eye, those linear marks, as in a veritable engraving, but afford the ground for far other delineations. These are hieroglyphical; that is, if you call those mysterious cyphers on the walls of pyramids hieroglyphics, then that is the proper word to use in the present connexion. By my retentive memory of the hieroglyphics upon one Sperm Whale in particular, I was much struck with a plate representing the old Indian characters chiselled on the famous hieroglyphic palisades on the banks of the Upper Mississippi. Like those mystic rocks, too, the mystic-marked whale remains undecipherable.

Annie Dillard famously writes, “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.”6 I came across Dillard’s words a couple years before I went to seminary, and throughout those years of heady theological study I kept them in my back pocket. They remind me that today is the proving ground of what I believe and of whom I worship.

In Saint Stylites, the famous Christian hermit of old times, who built him a lofty stone pillar in the desert and spent the whole latter portion of his life on its summit, hoisting his food from the ground with a tackle; in him we have a remarkable instance of a dauntless stander-of-mast-heads;

What are the funniest famous last words you've ever heard?" Lost, Ryan just stared at her. Why did her brain constantly spit out nonsensical questions? "Fine be boring." She turned to Jaime, who was sprawled on the neighboring blanked, and repeated the question. "Lightning never hits the same spot twice," said Jaime. Everyone laughted. "You know any"" she asked her mate. "Pull the pin out and count to what?" said Dante. Dominic plopped himself on the ground next to Zac. "I got one: Hold my beer while I do this." Taryn raised her hand. "Hey, what does this button do?" "This doesn't taste right," said Marcus. Bracken, a Mercury Pack enforcer spoke. "It's just a flesh wound." Ally offered, "No dummy, that's a dolphin fin." "What's that red dot on your forehead?" said McKenna. Amused in spite of himself - it was after all, a completely pointless conversation - Ryan kissed her temple.

He developed his revolutionary philosophy, with its grounding not in the Bible or ancient writers but in human reason, and became famous and infamous for it.

Can what's buried beneath the ground on Oak Island possibly be worth what the search for it has already cost? Six lives, scores of personal fortunes, piles of wrecked equipment, and tens of thousands of man-hours have been spent so far, and that's not to mention the blown minds and broken spirits that lie in the wake of what is at once the world's most famous and frustrating treasure hunt.

HIS chosen comrades thought at school He must grow a famous man; He thought the same and lived by rule, All his twenties crammed with toil; 'What then?' sang Plato's ghost. 'What then?' Everything he wrote was read, After certain years he won Sufficient money for his need, Friends that have been friends indeed; 'What then?' sang Plato's ghost. ' What then?' All his happier dreams came true -- A small old house, wife, daughter, son, Grounds where plum and cabbage grew, poets and Wits about him drew; 'What then.?' sang Plato's ghost. 'What then?' The work is done,' grown old he thought, 'According to my boyish plan; Let the fools rage, I swerved in naught, Something to perfection brought'; But louder sang that ghost, 'What then?

When Winston Churchill wanted to rally the nation in 1940, it was to Anglo-Saxon that he turned: "We shall fight on the beaches; we shall fight on the landing grounds; we shall fight in the fields and the streets; we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender." All these stirring words came from Old English as spoken in the year 1000, with the exception of the last one, surrender, a French import that came with the Normans in 1066--and when man set foot on the moon in 1969, the first human words spoken had similar echoes: "One small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind." Each of Armstrong's famous words was part of Old English by the year 1000.

It is with this thought that many believers would call up Kierkegaard's famous phrase, the 'leap of faith,' pictured perhaps as a leap from here to there, leaving out the in-between... What is usually overlooked, however, is that Kierkegaard said nothing about a safe landing; there was only the leap, and no guarantee of solid ground beyond it.

So what's your doll's name?" Boo asked me. "Barbie," I said. "All their names are Barbie." "I see," she said. "Well, I'd think that would get boring, everyone having the same name." I thought about this, then said, "Okay, then her name is Sabrina." "Well, that's a very nice name," Boo said. I remember she was baking bread, kneading the dough between her thick fingers. "What does she do?" "Do?" I said. "Yes." She flipped the dough over and started in on it from the other side. "What does she do?" "She goes out with Ken," I said. "And what else?" "She goes to parties," I said slowly. "And shopping." "Oh," Boo said, nodding. "She can't work?" "She doesn't have to work," I said. "Why not?" "Because she's Barbie." "I hate to tell you, Caitlin, but somebody has to make payments on that town house and the Corvette," Boo said cheerfully. "Unless Barbie has a lot of family money." I considered this while I put on Ken's pants. Boo started pushing the dough into a pan, smoothing it with her hand over the top. "You know what I think, Caitlin?" Her voice was soft and nice, the way she always spoke to me. "What?" "I think your Barbie can go shopping, and go out with Ken, and also have a productive and satisfying career of her own." She opened the oven and slid in the bread pan, adjusting its position on the rack. "But what can she do?" My mother didn't work and spent her time cleaning the house and going to PTA. I couldn't imagine Barbie, whose most casual outfit had sequins and go-go boots, doing s.uch things. Boo came over and plopped right down beside me. I always remember her being on my level; she'd sit on the edge of the sandbox, or lie across her bed with me and Cass as we listened to the radio. "Well," she said thoughtfully, picking up Ken and examining his perfect physique. "What do you want to do when you grow up?" I remember this moment so well; I can still see Boo sitting there on the floor, cross- legged, holding my Ken and watching my face as she tried to make me see that between my mother's PTA and Boo's strange ways there was a middle ground that began here with my Barbie, Sab-rina, and led right to me. "Well," I said abruptly, "I want to be in advertising." I have no idea where this came from. "Advertising," Boo repeated, nodding. "Okay. Advertising it is. So Sabrina has to go to work every day, coming up with ideas for commercials and things like that." "She works in an office," I went on. "Sometimes she has to work late." "Sure she does," Boo said. "It's hard to get ahead. Even if you're Barbie." "Because she wants to get promoted," I added. "So she can pay off the town house. And the Corvette." "Very responsible of her," Boo said. "Can she be divorced?" I asked. "And famous for her commercials and ideas?" "She can be anything," Boo told me, and this is what I remember most, her freckled face so solemn, as if she knew she was the first to tell me. "And so can you.

(And did I mention how in summer the streets of Smyrna were lined with baskets of rose petals? And how everyone in the city could speak French, Italian, Greek, Turkish, English, and Dutch? And did I tell you about the famous figs, brought in by camel caravan and dumped onto the ground, huge piles of pulpy fruit lying in the dirt, with dirty women steeping them in salt water and children squatting to defecate behind the clusters? Did I mention how the reek of the fig women mixed with pleasanter smells of almond trees, mimosa, laurel, and peach, and how everybody wore masks on Mardi Gras and had elaborate dinners on the decks of frigates? I want to mention these things because they all happened in that city that was no place exactly, that was part of no country because it was all countries, and because now if you go there you'll see modern high-rises, amnesiac boulevards, teeming sweatshops, a NATO headquarters, and a sign that says Izmir...)

In spring training prior to his 1995 rookie season, Chipper was already so confident in who he was as a player that he famously deadpanned to veteran slugger Fred McGriff, after the Crime Dog grounded into an inning-ending double play, these two words: “Rally killer.” His confidence carried over to the field, just as it had since he began playing as a kid—he batted .265, and he led all rookies with 23 home runs, 87 runs, and 86 RBIs. Hideo Nomo was Rookie of the Year for the Dodgers, but Chipper and the Braves were World Champions.

through the goodness of the Lord, truth, I believed, gained some ground, and it was a strengthening opportunity to the honest-hearted.

Finding a taxi, she felt like a child pressing her nose to the window of a candy store as she watched the changing vista pass by while the twilight descended and the capital became bathed in a translucent misty lavender glow. Entering the city from that airport was truly unique. Charles de Gaulle, built nineteen miles north of the bustling metropolis, ensured that the final point of destination was veiled from the eyes of the traveller as they descended. No doubt, the officials scrupulously planned the airport’s location to prevent the incessant air traffic and roaring engines from visibly or audibly polluting the ambience of their beloved capital, and apparently, they succeeded. If one flew over during the summer months, the visitor would be visibly presented with beautifully managed quilt-like fields of alternating gold and green appearing as though they were tilled and clipped with the mathematical precision of a slide rule. The countryside was dotted with quaint villages and towns that were obviously under meticulous planning control. When the aircraft began to descend, this prevailing sense of exactitude and order made the visitor long for an aerial view of the capital city and its famous wonders, hoping they could see as many landmarks as they could before they touched ground, as was the usual case with other major international airports, but from this point of entry, one was denied a glimpse of the city below. Green fields, villages, more fields, the ground grew closer and closer, a runway appeared, a slight bump or two was felt as the craft landed, and they were surrounded by the steel and glass buildings of the airport. Slightly disappointed with this mysterious game of hide-and-seek, the voyager must continue on and collect their baggage, consoled by the reflection that they will see the metropolis as they make their way into town. For those travelling by road, the concrete motorway with its blue road signs, the underpasses and the typical traffic-logged hubbub of industrial areas were the first landmarks to greet the eye, without a doubt, it was a disheartening first impression. Then, the real introduction began. Quietly, and almost imperceptibly, the modern confusion of steel and asphalt was effaced little by little as the exquisite timelessness of Parisian heritage architecture was gradually unveiled. Popping up like mushrooms were cream sandstone edifices filigreed with curled, swirling carvings, gently sloping mansard roofs, elegant ironwork lanterns and wood doors that charmed the eye, until finally, the traveller was completely submerged in the glory of the Second Empire ala Baron Haussmann’s master plan of city design, the iconic grand mansions, tree-lined boulevards and avenues, the quaint gardens, the majestic churches with their towers and spires, the shops and cafés with their colourful awnings, all crowded and nestled together like jewels encrusted on a gold setting.

The difficulty of tactical maneuvering consists in turning the devious into the direct, and misfortune into gain. [This sentence contains one of those highly condensed and somewhat enigmatical expressions of which Sun Tzu is so fond. This is how it is explained by Ts’ao Kung: “Make it appear that you are a long way off, then cover the distance rapidly and arrive on the scene before your opponent.” Tu Mu says: “Hoodwink the enemy, so that he may be remiss and leisurely while you are dashing along with utmost speed.” Ho Shih gives a slightly different turn: “Although you may have difficult ground to traverse and natural obstacles to encounter this is a drawback which can be turned into actual advantage by celerity of movement.” Signal examples of this saying are afforded by the two famous passages across the Alps—that of Hannibal, which laid Italy at his mercy, and that of Napoleon two thousand years later, which resulted in the great victory of Marengo.] 4.    Thus, to take a long and circuitous route, after enticing the enemy out of the way, and though starting after him, to contrive to reach the goal before him, shows knowledge of the artifice of DEVIATION.

Vatican II famously threw open the windows of the Church, seeking greater interaction with, and influence on, secular society. In Latin America a number of theologians began to work out how the teachings of Vatican II should be applied on the ground.

The Peacemaker Colt has now been in production, without change in design, for a century. Buy one to-day and it would be indistinguishable from the one Wyatt Earp wore when he was the Marshal of Dodge City. It is the oldest hand-gun in the world, without question the most famous and, if efficiency in its designated task of maiming and killing be taken as criterion of its worth, then it is also probably the best hand-gun ever made. It is no light thing, it is true, to be wounded by some of the Peacemaker’s more highly esteemed competitors, such as the Luger or Mauser: but the high-velocity, narrow-calibre, steel-cased shell from either of those just goes straight through you, leaving a small neat hole in its wake and spending the bulk of its energy on the distant landscape whereas the large and unjacketed soft-nosed lead bullet from the Colt mushrooms on impact, tearing and smashing bone and muscle and tissue as it goes and expending all its energy on you. In short when a Peacemaker’s bullet hits you in, say, the leg, you don’t curse, step into shelter, roll and light a cigarette one-handed then smartly shoot your assailant between the eyes. When a Peacemaker bullet hits your leg you fall to the ground unconscious, and if it hits the thigh-bone and you are lucky enough to survive the torn arteries and shock, then you will never walk again without crutches because a totally disintegrated femur leaves the surgeon with no option but to cut your leg off. And so I stood absolutely motionless, not breathing, for the Peacemaker Colt that had prompted this unpleasant train of thought was pointed directly at my right thigh. Another thing about the Peacemaker: because of the very heavy and varying trigger pressure required to operate the semi-automatic mechanism, it can be wildly inaccurate unless held in a strong and steady hand. There was no such hope here. The hand that held the Colt, the hand that lay so lightly yet purposefully on the radio-operator’s table, was the steadiest hand I’ve ever seen. It was literally motionless. I could see the hand very clearly. The light in the radio cabin was very dim, the rheostat of the angled table lamp had been turned down until only a faint pool of yellow fell on the scratched metal of the table, cutting the arm off at the cuff, but the hand was very clear. Rock-steady, the gun could have lain no quieter in the marbled hand of a statue. Beyond the pool of light I could half sense, half see the dark outline of a figure leaning back against the bulkhead, head slightly tilted to one side, the white gleam of unwinking eyes under the peak of a hat. My eyes went back to the hand. The angle of the Colt hadn’t varied by a fraction of a degree. Unconsciously, almost, I braced my right leg to meet the impending shock. Defensively, this was a very good move, about as useful as holding up a sheet of newspaper in front of me. I wished to God that Colonel Sam Colt had gone in for inventing something else, something useful, like safety-pins.

I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn’t quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn’t make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.

by the assault. Shading his eyes against the dazzle from the window, he peered down into the shadows. “Oh, hallo there, wee dog,” he said politely, and took a step forward, knuckles stretched out. Bouton raised the growl a few decibels, and he took a step back. “Oh, like that, is it?” Jamie said. He eyed the dog narrowly. “Think it over, laddie,” he advised, squinting down his long, straight nose. “I’m a damn sight bigger than you. I wouldna undertake any rash ventures, if I were you.” Bouton shifted his ground slightly, still making a noise like a distant Fokker. “Faster, too,” said Jamie, making a feint to one side. Bouton’s teeth snapped together a few inches from Jamie’s calf, and he stepped back hastily. Leaning back against the wall, he folded his arms and nodded down at the dog. “Well, you’ve a point there, I’ll admit. When it comes to teeth, ye’ve the edge on me, and no mistake.” Bouton cocked an ear suspiciously at this gracious speech, but went back to the low-pitched growl. Jamie hooked one foot over the other, like one prepared to pass the time of day indefinitely. The multicolored light from the window washed his face with blue, making him look like one of the chilly marble statues in the cathedral next door. “Surely you’ve better things to do than harry innocent visitors?” he asked, conversationally. “I’ve heard of you—you’re the famous fellow that sniffs out sickness, no? Weel, then, why are they wastin’ ye on silly things like door-guarding, when ye might be makin’ yourself useful smelling gouty toes and pustulant arseholes?

It infuriates him, this killing, this death. Infuriating that this is what we’re known for now, drug cartels and slaughter. This my city of Avenida 16 Septembre, the Victoria Theater, cobblestone streets, the bullring, La Central, La Fogata, more bookstores than El Paso, the university, the ballet, garapiñados, pan dulce, the mission, the plaza, the Kentucky Bar, Fred’s—now it’s known for these idiotic thugs. And my country, Mexico—the land of writers and poets—of Octavio Paz, Juan Rulfo, Carlos Fuentes, Elena Garro, Jorge Volpi, Rosario Castellanos, Luis Urrea, Elmer Mendoza, Alfonso Reyes—the land of painters and sculptors—Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo, Gabriel Orozco, Pablo O’Higgins, Juan Soriano, Francisco Goitia—of dancers like Guillermina Bravo, Gloria and Nellie Campobello, Josefina Lavalle, Ana Mérida, and composers—Carlos Chávez, Silvestre Revueltas, Agustín Lara, Blas Galindo—architects—Luis Barragán, Juan O’Gorman, Tatiana Bilbao, Michel Rojkind, Pedro Vásquez—wonderful filmmakers—Fernando de Fuentes, Alejandro Iñárritu, Luis Buñuel, Alfonso Cuarón, Guillermo del Toro—actors like Dolores del Río, “La Doña” María Félix, Pedro Infante, Jorge Negrete, Salma Hayek—now the names are “famous” narcos—no more than sociopathic murderers whose sole contribution to the culture has been the narcocorridas sung by no-talent sycophants. Mexico, the land of pyramids and palaces, deserts and jungles, mountains and beaches, markets and gardens, boulevards and cobblestoned streets, broad plazas and hidden courtyards, is now known as a slaughter ground. And for what? So North Americans can get high.

Horklump M.O.M. Classification: X The Horklump comes from Scandinavia but is now widespread throughout northern Europe. It resembles a fleshy, pinkish mushroom covered in sparse, wiry black bristles. A prodigious breeder, the Horklump will cover an average garden in a matter of days. It spreads sinewy tentacles rather than roots into the ground to search for its preferred food of earthworms. The Horklump is a favourite delicacy of gnomes but otherwise has no discernible use. Horned Serpent M.O.M. Classification: XXXXX Several species of Horned Serpents exist globally: large specimens have been caught in the Far East, while ancient bestiaries suggest that they were once native to Western Europe, where they have been hunted to extinction by wizards in search of potion ingredients. The largest and most diverse group of Horned Serpents still in existence is to be found in North America, of which the most famous and highly prized has a jewel in its forehead, which is reputed to give the power of invisibility and flight. A legend exists concerning the founder of Ilvermorny School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, Isolt Sayre, and a Horned Serpent. Sayre was reputed to be able to understand the serpent, which offered her shavings from its horn as the core of the first ever American-made wand. The Horned Serpent gives its name to one of the houses of Ilvermorny.

The sage Shantideva, in the Bodhicaryavatara, in talking about the subject of suffering, offered a famous analogy for how we try to alleviate our suffering. He’s said that if you walk on the earth and it’s hurting your feet, you might want to cover all the earth with hides of leather, so that you’d never have to suffer from the pain of the ground. But where could such an amount of leather be found? Rather, you could simply wrap a bit of leather around your feet, and then it’s as if the whole world is covered with leather and you’re always protected.

One [event] is the discovery of the anesthetic properties of chloroform [in 1847] by James Simpson of Scotland. Following the reports of [William] Morton’s demonstration [1846], he tried ether but, dissatisfied, searched for a substitute and came upon chlorophorm. He was an obstetrician. His use of anesthesia to alleviate the pains of childbirth was violently opposed by the Scottish clergy on the ground that pain was ordained by the scriptural command, “In sorrow thou shalt bring forth children”, and that it was impious to attempt to avert it by anesthetic agents. And it was Simpson who stilled this opposition by his own famous quotation from scripture; he pointed out that when Eve was born, God cast Adam into deep sleep before performing upon him the notable costalectomy. Anesthesia was thus permissible by scriptural precedent.

The most visited resident of Balboa Park is the world-famous San Diego Zoo. Dating back to 1916, and more parklike than a traditional zoo, it set the standard for zoos around the world with its well-tended grounds, up-to-the-minute approach to exhibits, and wildlife conservation.

C. G. Jung’s (1875–1961) God was similar to the God of the mystics, a psychological truth, subjectively experienced by each individual. When asked by John Freeman in the famous Face to Face interview whether he believed in God, Jung replied emphatically: “I do not have to believe. I know!” Jung’s continued faith suggests that a subjective God, mysteriously identified with the ground of being in the depths of the self, can survive psychoanalytic science in a way that a more personal, anthropomorphic deity who can indeed encourage perpetual immaturity may not.

Verres had Gavius thrown into prison, tortured and crucified, on the specious grounds that he was a spy for Spartacus. Roman citizenship should have protected him from this degrading punishment. So, as he was flogged, the poor man repeatedly cried out, ‘Civis Romanus sum’ (‘I am a Roman citizen’), but to no avail. Presumably, when they chose to repeat this phrase, both Palmerston and Kennedy (see p. 137) must have forgotten that its most famous ancient use was as the unsuccessful plea of an innocent victim under a sentence of death imposed by a rogue Roman governor.

For one who sets himself to look at all earnestly, at all in purpose toward truth, into the living eyes of a human life: what is it he there beholds that so freezes and abashes his ambitious heart? What is it, profound behind the outward windows of each one of you, beneath touch even of your own suspecting, drawn tightly back at bay against the backward wall and blackness of its prison cave, so that the eyes alone shine of their own angry glory, but the eyes of a trapped wild animal, or of a furious angel nailed to the ground by his wings, or however else one may faintly designate the human 'soul,' that which is angry, that which is wild, that which is untamable, that which is healthful and holy, that which is competent of all advantaging within hope of human dream, that which most marvelous and most precious to our knowledge and most extremely advanced upon futurity of all flowerings within the scope of creation is of all these the least destructible, the least corruptible, the most defenseless, the most easily and multitudinously wounded, frustrated, prisoned, and nailed into a cheating of itself: so situated in the universe that those three hours upon the cross are but a noble and too trivial an emblem how in each individual among most of the two billion now alive and in each successive instant of the existence of each existence not only human being but in him the tallest and most sanguine hope of godhead is in a billionate choiring and drone of pain of generations upon generations unceasingly crucified and is bringing forth crucifixions into their necessities and is each in the most casual of his life so measurelessly discredited, harmed, insulted, poisoned, cheated, as not all the wrath, compassion, intelligence, power of rectification in all the reach of the future shall in the least expiate or make one ounce more light: how, looking thus into your eyes and seeing thus, how each of you is a creature which has never in all time existed before and which shall never in all time exist again and which is not quite like any other and which has the grand stature and natural warmth of every other and whose existence is all measured upon a still mad and incurable time; how am I to speak of you as 'tenant' 'farmers,' as 'representatives' of your 'class,' as social integers in a criminal economy, or as individuals, fathers, wives, sons, daughters, and as my friends and as I 'know' you?

Relationships are physics. Time transforms things- it has to, because the change from me to we means clearing away the fortifications you'r put up around your old personality. Living with Susannah made me feel as if I started riding Einstein's famous theoretical bus. Here's my understanding of that difficult idea, nutshelled: if you're riding a magic Greyhound, equipped for light-speed travel, you'll actually live though less time than will any pedestrians whom the bus passes by. So, for a neighbor on the street with a stopwatch, the superfast bus will take two hours to travel from Point A to Point B. But where you're on that Greyhound, and looking at the wipe of the world out those rhomboidial coach windows, the same trip will take just under twenty-four minutes. Your neighbor, stopwatch under thumb, will have aged eighty-six percent more than you have. It's hard to fathom. But I think it's exactly what adult relationships do to us: on the outside, years pass, lives change. But inside, it's just a day that repeats. You and your partner age at the same clip; it seems not time has gone by. Only when you look up from your relationship- when you step off the bus, feel the ground under your shoes- do you sense the sly, soft absurdity of romance physics.

The screws have brought all the revenge attacks on themselves. Most prisoners that have done some nasty damage in the system have come through the young offenders, where that was just a breeding ground for hatred from the screws point of view. They were famous for bullying and battering young, defenceless boys to the point of death, in some cases.

It is the simplest phrase you can imagine,” Favreau said, “three monosyllabic words that people say to each other every day.” But the speech etched itself in rhetorical lore. It inspired music videos and memes and the full range of reactions that any blockbuster receives online today, from praise to out-of-context humor to arch mockery. Obama’s “Yes, we can” refrain is an example of a rhetorical device known as epistrophe, or the repetition of words at the end of a sentence. It’s one of many famous rhetorical types, most with Greek names, based on some form of repetition. There is anaphora, which is repetition at the beginning of a sentence (Winston Churchill: “We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields”). There is tricolon, which is repetition in short triplicate (Abraham Lincoln: “Government of the people, by the people, and for the people”). There is epizeuxis, which is the same word repeated over and over (Nancy Pelosi: “Just remember these four words for what this legislation means: jobs, jobs, jobs, and jobs”). There is diacope, which is the repetition of a word or phrase with a brief interruption (Franklin D. Roosevelt: “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself”) or, most simply, an A-B-A structure (Sarah Palin: “Drill baby drill!”). There is antithesis, which is repetition of clause structures to juxtapose contrasting ideas (Charles Dickens: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times”). There is parallelism, which is repetition of sentence structure (the paragraph you just read). Finally, there is the king of all modern speech-making tricks, antimetabole, which is rhetorical inversion: “It’s not the size of the dog in the fight; it’s the size of the fight in the dog.” There are several reasons why antimetabole is so popular. First, it’s just complex enough to disguise the fact that it’s formulaic. Second, it’s useful for highlighting an argument by drawing a clear contrast. Third, it’s quite poppy, in the Swedish songwriting sense, building a hook around two elements—A and B—and inverting them to give listeners immediate gratification and meaning. The classic structure of antimetabole is AB;BA, which is easy to remember since it spells out the name of a certain Swedish band.18 Famous ABBA examples in politics include: “Man is not the creature of circumstances. Circumstances are the creatures of men.” —Benjamin Disraeli “East and West do not mistrust each other because we are armed; we are armed because we mistrust each other.” —Ronald Reagan “The world faces a very different Russia than it did in 1991. Like all countries, Russia also faces a very different world.” —Bill Clinton “Whether we bring our enemies to justice or bring justice to our enemies, justice will be done.” —George W. Bush “Human rights are women’s rights and women’s rights are human rights.” —Hillary Clinton In particular, President John F. Kennedy made ABBA famous (and ABBA made John F. Kennedy famous). “Mankind must put an end to war, or war will put an end to mankind,” he said, and “Each increase of tension has produced an increase of arms; each increase of arms has produced an increase of tension,” and most famously, “Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country.” Antimetabole is like the C–G–Am–F chord progression in Western pop music: When you learn it somewhere, you hear it everywhere.19 Difficult and even controversial ideas are transformed, through ABBA, into something like musical hooks.

Take Michael Oakeshott’s famous definition in his essay “On Being Conservative”: “To be conservative, then, is to prefer the familiar to the unknown, to prefer the tried to the untried, fact to mystery, the actual to the possible, the limited to the unbounded, the near to the distant, the sufficient to the superabundant, the convenient to the perfect, present laughter to utopian bliss.” One cannot, it seems, enjoy fact and mystery, near and distant, laughter and bliss. One must choose. Far from affirming a simple hierarchy of preferences, Oakeshott’s either/or signals that we are on existential ground, where the choice is not between something and its opposite but between something and its negation.

Vice President Gore, Richard Clarke, and Madeleine Albright were “strong support[ers]” of the program, joining in President Clinton’s “intense” interest in it.5 Egypt’s most famous terrorist, Talaat Fouad Qassem, was “seized in Croatia, flown to the USS Adriatic, a navy warship, interrogated, then flown to Egypt for [torture and] execution.”6 Egypt’s secret police, the Gihaz al-Mukhabarat al-Amma, is widely known for its brutal torture regime, “real Macho interrogation . . . enhanced interrogation techniques on steroids” and was used by both Presidents Bush and Clinton.7 Congress attempted to end this program in 1998. The Foreign Affairs Reform and Restructuring Act slipped in a passage making it the policy of the United States not to “expel, extradite, or otherwise effect the involuntary return of any person to a country in which there are substantial grounds for believing the person would be in danger of being subjected to torture, regardless of whether the person is physically present in the United States.”8 Clinton vetoed the bill in late October,

It is a fact universally acknowledged that a woman in possession of an opinion must be in want of a correction. Well, actually, no it isn't, but who doesn't love riffing on Jane Austen and her famous opening sentence? The answer is: lots of people, because we're all different and some of us haven't even read Pride and Prejudice dozens of times, but the main point is that I've been performing interesting experiments in proffering my opinions and finding that some of the people out there, particularly men, respond on the grounds that my opinion is wrong, while theirs is right because they are convinced that their opinion is a fact, while mine is a delusion. Sometimes they also seem to think that they are in charge, of me as well as facts.

I’ll tell you this, if he gives me one more order with that W word again, I’m going to divorce him before we can even finish the wedding.” “The W . . . Okay, Bella, as usual you have lost me. W word?” “Yeah. W, . . . as in Wife. Ugh! He’s always saying or thinking things in this high and mighty way and tacking the word ‘wife’ onto the end like it’s some kind of password that lets him order me around.” Bella noted her friend’s still perplexed expression, so she screwed up her face, attitude, and voice into an uncanny approximation of Jacob. “‘I do not want you hunting in your condition, wife. It is too dangerous for you and the babe to accompany me, wife. I have told Elijah that there are to be no more training lessons until after the birth, and do not argue with me about this, wife, because my mind is set.” Isabella sagged back with a frustrated sigh. “Oy! It’s just so obnoxious and so . . . high-handed! You know the honeymoon is over when you go from ‘my love,’ ‘my little flower,’ and ‘my heart’ and become simply ‘wife.’” Legna smothered the urge to chuckle. Her little friend’s famous sarcasm always tickled her, and it was meant to tickle. Bella had a way of hiding behind her wit and humor. She was stating things that clearly disturbed her, but she mocked them in such a way that anyone who did not know her would treat it as little more than a comedy routine. Legna knew better. “Now, Bella, you know Jacob adores you. He naturally wants to protect you. He literally worships the ground you walk on.” “Ha ha,” Bella said dryly. “Earth Demon. Worship the ground. Cute. Really cute.” “Well, come on now. Seriously. As a Demon of the Earth, Jacob has an affinity with nature.

I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. ... One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor. ... I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.

From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, ... I wanted each and everyone of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.

Lederman is also a charismatic personality, famous among his colleagues for his humor and storytelling ability. One of his favorite anecdotes relates the time when, as a graduate student, he arranged to bump into Albert Einstein while walking the grounds at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. The great man listened patiently as the eager youngster explained the particle-physics research he was doing at Columbia, and then said with a smile, “That is not interesting.

I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig-tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and off-beat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn't quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig-tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.

I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig-tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and off-beat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn't quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig-tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.

I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig-tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and off-beat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn’t quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig-tree, starving to death, just because I couldn’t make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.

In Paley's famous illustration, the adaptation of all the parts of the watch to the function, or purpose, of showing the time, is held to be evidence that the watch was specially contrived to that end; on the ground, that the only cause we know of, competent to produce such an effect as a watch which shall keep time, is a contriving intelligence adapting the means directly to that end. Suppose, however, that any one had been able to show that the watch had not been made directly by any person, but that it was the result of the modification of another watch which kept time but poorly; and that this again had proceeded from a structure which could hardly be called a watch at all—seeing that it had no figures on the dial and the hands were rudimentary; and that going back and back in time we came at last to a revolving barrel as the earliest traceable rudiment of the whole fabric. And imagine that it had been possible to show that all these changes had resulted, first, from a tendency of the structure to vary indefinitely; and secondly, from something in the surrounding world which helped all variations in the direction of an accurate time-keeper, and checked all those in other directions; then it is obvious that the force of Paley's argument would be gone. For it would be demonstrated that an apparatus thoroughly well adapted to a particular purpose might be the result of a method of trial and error worked by unintelligent agents, as well as of the direct application of the means appropriate to that end, by an intelligent agent. Now it appears to us that what we have here, for illustration's sake, supposed to be done with the watch, is exactly what the establishment of Darwin's Theory will do for the organic world. For the notion that every organism has been created as it is and launched straight at a purpose, Mr. Darwin substitutes the conception of something which may fairly be termed a method of trial and error. Organisms vary incessantly; of these variations the few meet with surrounding conditions which suit them and thrive; the many are unsuited and become extinguished.

Daniel's wings were concealed, but he must have sensed her eyeing the place where they unfurled from his shoulders. "When everything is in order, we'll fly wherever we have to go to stop Lucifer. Until then it's better to stay low to the ground." "Okay," Luce said. "Race you to the other side?" Her breath frosted the air. "You know I'd beat you." "True." He slipped an arm around her waist, warming her. "Maybe we'd better take the boat, then. Protect my famous pride." She watched him unmoor a small metal rowboat from a boat slip. The soft light on the water made her think back to the day they'd raced across the secret lake at Sword & Cross. His skin had glistened as they had pulled themselves up to the flat rock in the center to catch their breath, then had lain on the sun-warmed stone, letting the day's heat dry their bodies. She'd barely known Daniel then-she hadn't known he was an angel-and already she'd been dangerously in love with him. "We used to swim together in my lifetime in Tahiti, didn't we?" she asked, surprised to remember another time she'd seen Daniel's hair glisten with water. Daniel stared at her and she knew how much it meant to him finally to be able to share some of his memories of their past. He looked so moved that Luce thought he might cry. Instead he kissed her forehead tenderly and said, "You beat me all those times, too, Lulu." They didn't talk much as Daniel rowed. It was enough for Luce to watch the way his muscles strained and flexed each time he dragged back, hearing the oars dip into and out of the cold water, breathing in the brine of the ocean.

To have a goddess like you in his arms and not appreciate it…” He kissed her, unable to resist the lush, succulent mouth so close to his. He put everything he felt into it, so he could wipe out any hurt the Neds of the world had given her. When he broke away, realizing he was treading dangerous ground, she said hoarsely, “You weren’t always so…appreciative. When I said that men enjoyed my company, you said you found that hard to believe.” “What?” he retorted with a scowl. “I never said any such thing.” “Yes, you did, the day that I asked you to investigate my suitors. I remember it clearly.” “There’s no way in hell I ever…” The conversation came back to him suddenly, and he shook his head. “You’re remembering only part, sweeting. You said that men enjoyed your company and considered you easy to talk to. It was the last part I found hard to believe.” “Oh.” She eyed him askance. “Why? You never seem to have trouble talking to me. Or rather, lecturing me.” “It’s either lecture you or stop up your mouth with kisses,” he said dryly. “Talking to you isn’t easy, because every time I’m near you I burn to carry you off to some secluded spot and do any number of wicked things with you.” She blinked, then gazed at him with such softness that at made his chest hurt. “Then why don’t you?” “Because you’re a marquess’s daughter and my employer’s sister.” “What does that signify? You’re an assistant magistrate and a famous Bow Street Runner-“ “And the bastard of nobody knows whom.” “Which merely makes you a fitting companion for a hellion with a reputation for recklessness.” The word companion resonated in his brain. What did she mean by it? Then she pressed a kiss to his jaw, eroding his resistance and his reason, and he knew precisely what she meant. He tried to set her off of him before he lost his mind entirely, but she looped her arms about his neck and wouldn’t let go. “Show me.” “Show you what?” “All the wicked things you want to do with me.” Desire bolted in a fever through his vein. “My God, Celia-“ “I won’t believe a word you’ve said if you don’t.” Her gaze grew troubled. “I don’t think you know what you want. Yesterday you gave me such lovely kisses and caresses and then at the ball you acted like you’d never met me.” “You were with your suitors,” he said hoarsely. “You could have danced with me. You didn’t even ask me for one dance.” Having her on his lap was rousing him to a painful hardness. “Because I knew if I did, I would want…I would need…” She kissed a path down his throat, turning his blood to fire. “Show me,” she whispered, “Show me now what you want. What you need.” “I refuse to ruin you,” he said, half as a caution to himself. “You already have.

Breathhold Walking Anders Olsson uses this technique to increase carbon dioxide and, thus, increase circulation in his body. It’s not much fun, but the benefits, Olsson told me, are many. Go to a grassy park, beach, or anywhere else where the ground is soft. Exhale all the breath, then walk slowly, counting each step. Once you feel a powerful sense of air hunger, stop counting and take a few very calm breaths through the nose while still walking. Breathe normally for at least a minute, then repeat the sequence. The more you practice this technique, the higher the count. Olsson’s record is 130 steps; mine is about a third of that. 4-7-8 Breathing This technique, made famous by Dr. Andrew Weil, places the body into a state of deep relaxation. I use it on long flights to help fall asleep. Take a breath in, then exhale through your mouth with a whoosh sound. Close the mouth and inhale quietly through your nose to a mental count of four. Hold for a count of seven. Exhale completely through your mouth, with a whoosh, to the count of eight. Repeat this cycle for at least four breaths.

Almost as remarkable as the hoax itself, and indicative of the enormous cultural power of its perpetrators, is the fact that the revelation of Rigoberta's mendacity has changed almost nothing. The Nobel committee has already refused to take back her prize, many of the thousands of college courses that make her book a required text for American college students will continue to do so, and the editorial writers of the major press institutions have already defended her falsehoods on the same grounds that supporters of Tawana Brawley's parallel hoax made famous: even if she's lying, she's telling the truth.

First to find out a spacious house and ground about it fit for an academy, and big enough to lodge a hundred and fifty persons, whereof twenty or thereabout may be attendants, all under the government of one, who shall be thought of desert sufficient, and ability either to do all, or wisely to direct, and oversee it done. This place should be at once both school and university, not heeding a remove to any other house of scholarship, except it be some peculiar College of Law, or Physic, where they mean to be practitioners; but as for those general studies which take up all our time from Lilly 21 to the commencing,

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

Despite the complexity and variety of the universe, it turns out that to make one you need just three ingredients. Let’s imagine that we could list them in some kind of cosmic cookbook. So what are the three ingredients we need to cook up a universe? The first is matter—stuff that has mass. Matter is all around us, in the ground beneath our feet and out in space. Dust, rock, ice, liquids. Vast clouds of gas, massive spirals of stars, each containing billions of suns, stretching away for incredible distances. The second thing you need is energy. Even if you’ve never thought about it, we all know what energy is. Something we encounter every day. Look up at the Sun and you can feel it on your face: energy produced by a star ninety-three million miles away. Energy permeates the universe, driving the processes that keep it a dynamic, endlessly changing place. So we have matter and we have energy. The third thing we need to build a universe is space. Lots of space. You can call the universe many things—awesome, beautiful, violent—but one thing you can’t call it is cramped. Wherever we look we see space, more space and even more space. Stretching in all directions. It’s enough to make your head spin. So where could all this matter, energy and space come from? We had no idea until the twentieth century. The answer came from the insights of one man, probably the most remarkable scientist who has ever lived. His name was Albert Einstein. Sadly I never got to meet him, since I was only thirteen when he died. Einstein realised something quite extraordinary: that two of the main ingredients needed to make a universe—mass and energy—are basically the same thing, two sides of the same coin if you like. His famous equation E = mc2 simply means that mass can be thought of as a kind of energy, and vice versa. So instead of three ingredients, we can now say that the universe has just two: energy and space. So where did all this energy and space come from? The answer was found after decades of work by scientists: space and energy were spontaneously invented in an event we now call the Big Bang.

But Hans Beimler survived Dachau, escaping certain death just hours before the SS ultimatum expired. With the help of two rogue SS men, apparently, he squeezed through the small window high up in his cell, passed the barbed wire and electric fence around the camp, and disappeared into the night.7 After Private Steinbrenner unlocked Beimler’s cell early the next morning, on May 9, 1933, and found it empty, the SS went wild. Sirens sounded across the grounds as all available SS men turned the camp upside down. Steinbrenner battered two Communist inmates who had spent the night in the cells adjacent to Beimler, shouting: “Just you wait, you wretched dogs, you’ll tell me [where Beimler is].” One of them was executed soon after.8 Outside, a huge manhunt got under way. Planes circled near the camp, “Wanted” posters went up at railway stations, police raids hit Munich, and the newspapers, which had earlier crowed about Beimler’s arrest, announced a reward for recapturing the “famous Communist leader,” who was described as clean-shaven, with short-cropped hair and unusually large jug ears.9 Despite all their efforts, Beimler evaded his hunters. After recuperating in a safe house in Munich, he was spirited away in June 1933 by the Communist underground to Berlin and then, in the following month, escaped over the border to Czechoslovakia, from where he sent a postcard to Dachau telling the SS men to “kiss my ass.

Political economist and sociologist Max Weber famously spoke of the “disenchantment of the world,” as rationalization and science led Europe and America into modern industrial society, pushing back religion and all “magical” theories about reality. Now we are witnessing the disenchantment of the self. One of the many dangers in this process is that if we remove the magic from our image of ourselves, we may also remove it from our image of others. We could become disenchanted with one another. Our image of Homo sapiens underlies our everyday practice and culture; it shapes the way we treat one another as well as how we subjectively experience ourselves. In Western societies, the Judeo-Christian image of humankind—whether you are a believer or not—has secured a minimal moral consensus in everyday life. It has been a major factor in social cohesion. Now that the neurosciences have irrevocably dissolved the Judeo-Christian image of a human being as containing an immortal spark of the divine, we are beginning to realize that they have not substituted anything that could hold society together and provide a common ground for shared moral intuitions and values. An anthropological and ethical vacuum may well follow on the heels of neuroscientific findings. This is a dangerous situation. One potential scenario is that long before neuroscientists and philosophers have settled any of the perennial issues—for example, the nature of the self, the freedom of the will, the relationship between mind and brain, or what makes a person a person—a vulgar materialism might take hold. More and more people will start telling themselves: “I don’t understand what all these neuroexperts and consciousness philosophers are talking about, but the upshot seems pretty clear to me. The cat is out of the bag: We are gene-copying bio- robots, living out here on a lonely planet in a cold and empty physical universe. We have brains but no immortal souls, and after seventy years or so the curtain drops. There will never be an afterlife, or any kind of reward or punishment for anyone, and ultimately everyone is alone. I get the message, and you had better believe I will adjust my behavior to it. It would probably be smart not to let anybody know I’ve seen through the game.

I have, myself, full confidence that if all do their duty, if nothing is neglected, and if the best arrangements are made, as they are being made, we shall prove ourselves once again able to defend our island home, to ride out the storm of war, and to outlive the menace of tyranny, if necessary for years, if necessary alone. At any rate, that is what we are going to try to do. That is the resolve of His Majesty’s Government – every man of them. That is the will of Parliament and the nation. The British Empire and the French Republic, linked together in their cause and in their need, will defend to the death their native soil, aiding each other like good comrades to the utmost of their strength. Even though large tracts of Europe and many old and famous States have fallen or may fall into the grip of the Gestapo and all the odious apparatus of Nazi rule, we shall not flag or fail. We shall go on to the end. We shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be. We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender, and even if, which I do not for a moment believe, this island or a large part of it were subjugated and starving, then our Empire beyond the seas, armed and guarded by the British Fleet, would carry on the struggle, until, in God’s good time, the new world, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of the old.

11. Let Go of your Idle Thoughts.[FN#263] [FN#263] A famous Zenist, Mu-go-koku-shi, is said to have replied to every questioner, saying: "Let go of your idle thoughts." A Brahmin, having troubled himself a long while with reference to the problem of life and of the world, went out to call on Shakya Muni that he might be instructed by the Master. He got some beautiful flowers to offer them as a present to the Muni, and proceeded to the place where He was addressing his disciples and believers. No sooner had he come in sight of the Master than he read in his mien the struggles going on within him. "Let go of that," said the Muni to the Brahmin, who was going to offer the flowers in both his hands. He dropped on the ground the flowers in his right hand, but still holding those in his left. "Let go of that," demanded the Master, and the Brahmin dropped the flowers in his left hand rather reluctantly. "Let go of that, I say," the Muni commanded again; but the Brahmin, having nothing to let go of, asked: "What shall I let go of, Reverend Sir? I have nothing in my hands, you know." "Let go of that, you have neither in your right nor in your left band, but in the middle." Upon these words of the Muni a light came into the sufferer's mind, and he went home satisfied and in joy.[FN#264] "Not to attach to all things is Dhyana," writes an ancient Zenist, "and if you understand this, going out, staying in, sitting, and lying are in Dhyana." Therefore allow not your mind to be a receptacle for the dust of society, or the ashes of life, or rags and waste paper of the world. You bear too much burden upon your shoulders with which you have nothing to do. [FN#264]

In camp, too, a man might draw the attention of a comrade working next to him to a nice view of the setting sun shining through the tall trees of the Bavarian woods (as in the famous water color by Dürer), the same woods in which we had built an enormous, hidden munitions plant. One evening, when we were already resting on the floor of our hut, dead tired, soup bowls in hand, a fellow prisoner rushed in and asked us to run out to the assembly grounds and see the wonderful sunset. Standing outside we saw sinister clouds glowing in the west and the whole sky alive with clouds of ever-changing shapes and colors, from steel blue to blood red. The desolate grey mud huts provided a sharp contrast, while the puddles on the muddy ground reflected the glowing sky. Then, after minutes of moving silence, one prisoner said to another, “How beautiful the world could be!

Back at the start of World War Two the authorities forbade the use of the Underground as an air raid shelter. Instead Londoners were supposed to rely on hastily built neighborhood shelters or on the famous Anderson shelters, which were basically rabbit hutches made from corrugated iron with some earth shoveled on top. Londoners being Londoners, the prohibition on using the Underground lasted right up until the first air raid warning, at which point the poorly educated but far from stupid populace of the capital did a quick back-of-the-envelope comparison between the stopping power of ten meters of earth and concrete and a few centimeters of compost, and moved underground en masse. The authorities were appalled. They tried exhortation, persuasion, and the outright use of force, but the Londoners wouldn’t budge. In fact, they started to organize their own bedding and refreshment services.

Even though large tracts of Europe and many old and famous States have fallen or may fall into the grip of the Gestapo and all the odious apparatus of Nazi rule, we shall not flag or fail. We shall go on to the end, we shall fight in France, we shall fight in the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender, and even if, which I do not for a moment believe, this island or a large part of it were subjugated and starving, then our Empire beyond the seas, armed and guarded by the British Fleet, would carry on the struggle, until, in God’s good time, the New World, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of the Old.

Bertrand Russell famously said: “It is undesirable to believe a proposition when there is no ground whatsoever for supposing it is true.” [but] Russell’s maxim is the luxury of a technologically advanced society with science, history, journalism, and their infrastructure of truth-seeking, including archival records, digital datasets, high-tech instruments, and communities of editing, fact-checking, and peer review. We children of the Enlightenment embrace the radical creed of universal realism: we hold that all our beliefs should fall within the reality mindset. We care about whether our creation story, our founding legends, our theories of invisible nutrients and germs and forces, our conceptions of the powerful, our suspicions about our enemies, are true or false. That’s because we have the tools to get answers to these questions, or at least to assign them warranted degrees of credence. And we have a technocratic state that should, in theory, put these beliefs into practice. But as desirable as that creed is, it is not the natural human way of believing. In granting an imperialistic mandate to the reality mindset to conquer the universe of belief and push mythology to the margins, we are the weird ones—or, as evolutionary social scientists like to say, the WEIRD ones: Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic. At least, the highly educated among us are, in our best moments. The human mind is adapted to understanding remote spheres of existence through a mythology mindset. It’s not because we descended from Pleistocene hunter-gatherers specifically, but because we descended from people who could not or did not sign on to the Enlightenment ideal of universal realism. Submitting all of one’s beliefs to the trials of reason and evidence is an unnatural skill, like literacy and numeracy, and must be instilled and cultivated.

From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn’t quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn’t make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.

From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and off-beat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn’t quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig-tree, starving to death, just because I couldn’t make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.

I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was E Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn't quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.

We met with no Indians, but we found the places on the neighboring hills where they had lain to watch our proceedings. There was an art in their contrivance of those places, that seems worth mention. It being winter, a fire was necessary for them; but a common fire on the surface of the ground would by its light have discovered their position at a distance. They had therefore dug holes in the ground about three feet diameter, and somewhat deeper; we saw where they had with their hatchets cut off the charcoal from the sides of burnt logs lying in the woods. With these coals they had made small fires in the bottom of the holes, and we observ'd among the weeds and grass the prints of their bodies, made by their laying all round, with their legs hanging down in the holes to keep their feet warm, which, with them, is an essential point. This kind of fire, so manag'd, could not discover them, either by its light, flame, sparks, or even smoke: it appear'd that their number was not great, and it seems they saw we were too many to be attacked by them with prospect of advantage.

People had always been told that the house at Skuytercliff was an Italian villa. Those who had never been to Italy believed it; so did some who had. The house had been built by Mr. van der Luyden in his youth, on his return from the "grand tour," and in anticipation of his approaching marriage with Miss Louisa Dagonet. It was a large square wooden structure, with tongued and grooved walls painted pale green and white, a Corinthian portico, and fluted pilasters between the windows. From the high ground on which it stood a series of terraces bordered by balustrades and urns descended in the steel–engraving style to a small irregular lake with an asphalt edge overhung by rare weeping conifers. To the right and left, the famous weedless lawns studded with "specimen" trees (each of a different variety) rolled away to long ranges of grass crested with elaborate cast–iron ornaments; and below, in a hollow, lay the four–roomed stone house which the first Patroon had built on the land granted him in 1612. Against the uniform sheet of snow and the greyish winter sky the Italian villa loomed up rather grimly; even in summer it kept its distance, and the boldest coleus bed had never ventured nearer than thirty feet from its awful front.

The next day we booked a three-hundred pound sow for a most unusual photoshoot. She was chauffeured to Hollywood from a farm in Central Valley, and arrived in style at the soundstage bright and early, ready for her close-up. She was a perfect pig, straight from the animal equivalent of Central casting: pink, with gray spots and a sweet disposition. Like Wilbur from Charlotte's Web, but all grown up. I called her "Rhonda." In a pristine studio with white walls and a white floor, I watched as Rhonda was coaxed up a ramp that led to the top of a white pedestal, four feet off the ground. Once she was situated, the ramp was removed, and I took my place beside her. It was a simple setup. Standing next to Rhonda, I would look into the camera and riff about the unsung heroes of Dirty Jobs. I'd conclude with a pointed question: "So, what's on your pedestal?" It was a play on that credit card campaign: "What's in your wallet?" I nailed it on the first take, in front of a roomful of nervous executives. Unfortunately, Rhonda nailed it, too. Just as I asked, "What's on your pedestal?" she crapped all over hers. It was an enormous dump, delivered with impeccable timing. During the second take, Rhonda did it again, right on cue. This time, with a frightful spray of diarrhea that filled the studio with a sulfurous funk, blackening the white walls of the pristine set, and transforming my blue jeans into something browner. I could only marvel at the stench, while the horrified executives backed into a corner - a huddled mass, if you will, yearning to breath free. But Rhonda wasn't done. She crapped on every subsequent take. And when she could crap no more, she began to pee. She peed on my cameraman, She peed on her handler. She peed on me. Finally, when her bladder was empty, we got the take the network could use, along with a commercial that won several awards for "Excellence in Promos." (Yes, they have trophies for such things.) Interestingly, the footage that went viral was not the footage that aired, but the footage Mary encouraged me to release on YouTube after the fact. The outtakes of Rhonda at her incontinent finest. Those were hysterical, and viewed more times than the actual commercial. Go figure. Looking back, putting a pig on a pedestal was maybe the smartest thing I ever did. Not only did it make Rhonda famous, it established me as the nontraditional host of a nontraditional show. One whose primary job was to appear more like a guest, and less like a host. And, whenever possible, not at all like an asshole.

The Republican Roosevelt wanted to fight plutocrats as well as anarchists. Their plunder of oil, coal, minerals, and timber on federal lands appalled him, in his role as the founder of America’s national parks. Corporate criminals, carving up public property for their private profit, paid bribes to politicians to protect their land rackets. Using thousand-dollar bills as weapons, they ransacked millions of acres of the last American frontiers. In 1905, a federal investigation, led in part by a scurrilous Secret Service agent named William J. Burns, had led to the indictment and conviction of Senator John H. Mitchell and Representative John H. Williamson of Oregon, both Republicans, for their roles in the pillage of the great forests of the Cascade Range. An Oregon newspaper editorial correctly asserted that Burns and his government investigators had used “the methods of Russian spies and detectives.” The senator died while his case was on appeal; the congressman’s conviction was overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court on grounds of “outrageous conduct,” including Burns’s brazen tampering with jurors and witnesses. Burns left the government and became a famous private eye; his skills at tapping telephones and bugging hotel rooms eventually won him a job as J. Edgar Hoover’s

The common cause of the massive blindness of the Chinese officials in the nineteenth century was a huge Chinese philosophical assumption that China was a great self-sufficient Middle Kingdom that did not need to engage the world. As the Chinese emperor Qianlong famously told Lord Macartney, China had everything it needed. It didn’t need the rest of the world. That painful century of humiliation finally led to China opening up. Deng made the decision on pragmatic grounds. And the opening up worked: China’s economy soared. Yet, do the Chinese view this opening up as a temporary measure until China becomes strong again? Do they have a desire to return eventually to their Middle Kingdom mentality, trading with the world while remaining culturally detached from it? When China built walls and cut off communication with the rest of the world, it fell behind. When China opened up to the world, it thrived. To guarantee its continued long-term success, China should completely abandon its two-thousand-year-old Middle Kingdom mentality and decide to become the most open society in terms of economic engagement with the rest of the world. Only such a major change of mind would enable the Chinese officials to lay out the red carpet for foreign businesses, including American businesses.

Many kinds of animal behavior can be explained by genetic similarity theory. Animals have a preference for close kin, and study after study has shown that they have a remarkable ability to tell kin from strangers. Frogs lay eggs in bunches, but they can be separated and left to hatch individually. When tadpoles are then put into a tank, brothers and sisters somehow recognize each other and cluster together rather than mix with tadpoles from different mothers. Female Belding’s ground squirrels may mate with more than one male before they give birth, so a litter can be a mix of full siblings and half siblings. Like tadpoles, they can tell each other apart. Full siblings cooperate more with each other than with half-siblings, fight less, and are less likely to run each other out of the territory when they grow up. Even bees know who their relatives are. In one experiment, bees were bred for 14 different degrees of relatedness—sisters, cousins, second cousins, etc.—to bees in a particular hive. When the bees were then released near the hive, guard bees had to decide which ones to let in. They distinguished between degrees of kinship with almost perfect accuracy, letting in the closest relatives and chasing away more distant kin. The correlation between relatedness and likelihood of being admitted was a remarkable 0.93. Ants are famous for cooperation and willingness to sacrifice for the colony. This is due to a quirk in ant reproduction that means worker ants are 70 percent genetically identical to each other. But even among ants, there can be greater or less genetic diversity, and the most closely related groups of ants appear to cooperate best. Linepithema humile is a tiny ant that originated in Argentina but migrated to the United States. Many ants died during the trip, and the species lost much of its genetic diversity. This made the northern branch of Linepithema humile more cooperative than the one left in Argentina, where different colonies quarrel and compete with each other. This new level of cooperation has helped the invaders link nests into supercolonies and overwhelm local species of ants. American entomologists want to protect American ants by introducing genetic diversity so as to make the newcomers more quarrelsome. Even plants cooperate with close kin and compete with strangers. Normally, when two plants are put in the same pot, they grow bigger root systems, trying to crowd each other out and get the most nutrients. A wild flower called the Sea Rocket, which grows on beaches, does not do that if the two plants come from the same “mother” plant. They recognize each others’ root secretions and avoid wasteful competition.

Descartes, whose arguments are of just the same sort as those of early Greek philosophers, said that extension is the essence of matter, and therefore there is matter everywhere. For him, extension is an adjective, not a substantive; its substantive is matter, and without its substantive it cannot exist. Empty space, to him, is as absurd as happiness without a sentient being who is happy. Leibniz, on somewhat different grounds, also believed in the plenum, but he maintained that space is merely a system of relations. On this subject there was a famous controversy between him and Newton, the latter represented by Clarke. The controversy remained undecided until the time of Einstein, whose theory conclusively gave the victory to Leibniz. The modern physicist, while he still believes that matter is in some sense atomic, does not believe in empty space. Where there is not matter, there is still something, notably light-waves. Matter no longer has the lofty status that it acquired in philosophy through the arguments of Parmenides. It is not unchanging substance, but merely a way of grouping events. Some events belong to groups that can be regarded as material things; others, such as light-waves, do not. It is the events that are the stuff of the world, and each of them is of brief duration. In this respect, modern physics is on the side of Heraclitus as against Parmenides. But it was on the side of Parmenides until Einstein and quantum theory.

The appropriation of terms from psychology to discredit political opponents is part of the modern therapeutic culture that the sociologist Christopher Lasch criticized. Along with the concept of the authoritarian personality, the term “-phobe” for political opponents has been added to the arsenal of obloquy deployed by technocratic neoliberals against those who disagree with them. The coinage of the term “homophobia” by the psychologist George Weinberg in the 1970s has been followed by a proliferation of pseudoclinical terms in which those who hold viewpoints at variance with the left-libertarian social consensus of the transatlantic ruling class are understood to suffer from “phobias” of various kinds similar to the psychological disorders of agoraphobia (fear of open spaces), ornithophobia (fear of birds), and pentheraphobia (fear of one’s mother-in-law). The most famous use of this rhetorical strategy can be found in then-candidate Hillary Clinton’s leaked confidential remarks to an audience of donors at a fund-raiser in New York in 2016: “You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right? They’re racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic—you name it.” A disturbed young man who is driven by internal compulsions to harass and assault gay men is obviously different from a learned Orthodox Jewish rabbi who is kind to lesbians and gay men as individuals but opposes homosexuality, along with adultery, premarital sex, and masturbation, on theological grounds—but both are "homophobes.” A racist who opposes large-scale immigration because of its threat to the supposed ethnic purity of the national majority is obviously different from a non-racist trade unionist who thinks that immigrant numbers should be reduced to create tighter labor markets to the benefit of workers—but both are “xenophobes.” A Christian fundamentalist who believes that Muslims are infidels who will go to hell is obviously different from an atheist who believes that all religion is false—but both are “Islamophobes.” This blurring of important distinctions is not an accident. The purpose of describing political adversaries as “-phobes” is to medicalize politics and treat differing viewpoints as evidence of mental and emotional disorders. In the latter years of the Soviet Union, political dissidents were often diagnosed with “sluggish schizophrenia” and then confined to psychiatric hospitals and drugged. According to the regime, anyone who criticized communism literally had to be insane. If those in today’s West who oppose the dominant consensus of technocratic neoliberalism are in fact emotionally and mentally disturbed, to the point that their maladjustment makes it unsafe to allow them to vote, then to be consistent, neoliberals should support the involuntary confinement, hospitalization, and medication of Trump voters and Brexit voters and other populist voters for their own good, as well as the good of society.

nullified their citizenship, and forbidden intermarriage with Aryans. By the time I began school in 1938, Lindbergh’s was a name that provoked the same sort of indignation in our house as did the weekly Sunday radio broadcasts of Father Coughlin, the Detroit-area priest who edited a right-wing weekly called Social Justice and whose anti-Semitic virulence aroused the passions of a sizable audience during the country’s hard times. It was in November 1938—the darkest, most ominous year for the Jews of Europe in eighteen centuries—that the worst pogrom in modern history, Kristallnacht, was instigated by the Nazis all across Germany: synagogues incinerated, the residences and businesses of Jews destroyed, and, throughout a night presaging the monstrous future, Jews by the thousands forcibly taken from their homes and transported to concentration camps. When it was suggested to Lindbergh that in response to this unprecedented savagery, perpetrated by a state on its own native-born, he might consider returning the gold cross decorated with four swastikas bestowed on him in behalf of the Führer by Air Marshal Göring, he declined on the grounds that for him to publicly surrender the Service Cross of the German Eagle would constitute “an unnecessary insult” to the Nazi leadership. Lindbergh was the first famous living American whom I learned to hate—just as President Roosevelt was the first famous living American whom I was taught to love—and so his nomination by the Republicans to run against Roosevelt in

I quickly learned that the congressional delegation from Alaska was deeply committed to the oil industry and other commercial interests, and senatorial courtesy prevented other members from disputing with Senators Ted Stevens (Republican) and Mike Gravel (Democrat) over a matter involving their home state. Former Idaho governor Cecil Andrus, my secretary of interior, and I began to study the history of the controversy and maps of the disputed areas, and I flew over some of them a few times. Environmental groups and most indigenous natives were my allies, but professional hunters, loggers, fishers, and the Chambers of Commerce were aligned with the oil companies. All the odds were against us until Cecil discovered an ancient law, the Antiquities Act of 1906, which permitted a president to set aside an area for “the protection of objects of historic and scientific interest,” such as Indian burial grounds, artifacts, or perhaps an ancient church building or the site of a famous battle. We decided to use this authority to set aside for preservation large areas of Alaska as national monuments, and eventually we had included more than 56 million acres (larger than the state of Minnesota). This gave me the bargaining chip I needed, and I was able to prevail in the subsequent debates. My efforts were extremely unpopular in Alaska, and I had to have extra security on my visits. I remember that there was a state fair where people threw baseballs at two targets to plunge a clown into a tank of water. My face was on one target and Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini’s on the other, and few people threw at the Ayatollah’s.

Herman and I have been doing a lot of talking about the cake the past couple of days, and we think we have a good plan for the three tiers. The bottom tier will be the chocolate tier and incorporate the dacquoise component, since that will all provide a good strong structural base. We are doing an homage to the Frango mint, that classic Chicago chocolate that was originally produced at the Marshall Field's department store downtown. We're going to make a deep rich chocolate cake, which will be soaked in fresh-mint simple syrup. The dacquoise will be cocoa based with ground almonds for structure, and will be sandwiched between two layers of a bittersweet chocolate mint ganache, and the whole tier will be enrobed in a mint buttercream. The second tier is an homage to Margie's Candies, an iconic local ice cream parlor famous for its massive sundaes, especially their banana splits. It will be one layer of vanilla cake and one of banana cake, smeared with a thin layer of caramelized pineapple jam and filled with fresh strawberry mousse. We'll cover it in chocolate ganache and then in sweet cream buttercream that will have chopped Luxardo cherries in it for the maraschino-cherry-on-top element. The final layer will be a nod to our own neighborhood, pulling from the traditional flavors that make up classical Jewish baking. The cake will be a walnut cake with hints of cinnamon, and we will do a soaking syrup infused with a little bit of sweet sherry. A thin layer of the thick poppy seed filling we use in our rugelach and hamantaschen, and then a layer of honey-roasted whole apricots and vanilla pastry cream. This will get covered in vanilla buttercream.

Quote from "The Dish Keepers of Honest House" ....TO TWIST THE COLD is easy when its only water you want. Tapping of the toothbrush echoes into Ella's mind like footsteps clacking a cobbled street on a bitter, dry, cold morning. Her mind pushes through sleep her body craves. It catches her head falling into a warm, soft pillow. "Go back to bed," she tells herself. "You're still asleep," Ella mumbles, pushes the blanket off, and sits up. The urgency to move persuades her to keep routines. Water from the faucet runs through paste foam like a miniature waterfall. Ella rubs sleep-deprieved eyes, then the bridge of her nose and glances into the sink. Ella's eyes astutely fixate for one, brief millisecond. Water becomes the burgundy of soldiers exiting the drain. Her mouth drops in shock. The flow turns green. It is like the bubbling fungus of flockless, fishless, stagnating ponds. Within the iridescent glimmer of her thinking -- like a brain losing blood flow, Ella's focus is the flickering flashing of gray, white dust, coal-black shadows and crows lifting from the ground. A half minute or two trails off before her mind returns to reality. Ella grasps a toothbrush between thumb and index finger. She rests the outer palm against the sink's edge, breathes in and then exhales. Tension in the brow subsides, and her chest and shoulders drop; she sighs. Ella stares at pasty foam. It exits the drain as if in a race to clear the sink of negativity -- of all germs, slimy spit, the burgundy of imagined soldiers and oppressive plaque. GRASPING THE SILKY STRAND between her fingers, Ella tucks, pulls and slides the floss gently through her teeth. Her breath is an inch or so of the mirror. Inspections leave her demeanor more alert. Clouding steam of the image tugs her conscience. She gazes into silver glass. Bits of hair loosen from the bun piled at her head's posterior. What transforms is what she imagines. The mirror becomes a window. The window possesses her Soul and Spirit. These two become concerned -- much like they did when dishonest housekeepers disrupted Ella's world in another story. Before her is a glorious bird -- shining-dark-as-coal, shimmering in hues of purple-black and black-greens. It is likened unto The Raven in Edgar Allan Poe's most famous poem of 1845. Instead of interrupting a cold December night with tapping on a chamber door, it rests its claws in the decorative, carved handle of a backrest on a stiff dining chair. It projects an air of humor and concern. It moves its head to and fro while seeking a clearer understanding. Ella studies the bird. It is surrounded in lofty bends and stretches of leafless, acorn-less, nearly lifeless, oak trees. Like fingers and arms these branches reach below. [Perhaps they are reaching for us? Rest assured; if they had designs on us, I would be someplace else, writing about something more pleasant and less frightening. Of course, you would be asleep.] Balanced in the branches is a chair. It is from Ella's childhood home. The chair sways. Ella imagines modern-day pilgrims of a distant shore. Each step is as if Mother Nature will position them upright like dolls, blown from the stability of their plastic, flat, toe-less feet. These pilgrims take fate by the hand. LIFTING A TOWEL and patting her mouth and hands, Ella pulls the towel through the rack. She walks to the bedroom, sits and picks up the newspaper. Thumbing through pages that leave fingertips black, she reads headlines: "Former Dentist Guilty of Health Care Fraud." She flips the page, pinches the tip of her nose and brushes the edge of her chin -- smearing both with ink. In the middle fold directly affront her eyes is another headline: "Dentist Punished for Misconduct." She turns the page. There is yet another: "Dentist guilty of urinating in surgery sink and using contaminated dental instruments on patients." This world contains those who are simply insane! Every profession has those who stray from goals....

saw nothing finer or more moving in Russia than Tolstoy’s grave. That illustrious place of pilgrimage lies out of the way, alone in the middle of the woods. A narrow footpath leads to the mound, nothing but a rectangle of soil raised above ground level, with no one guarding or keeping watch on it, only two huge trees casting their shade. Leo Tolstoy planted those trees himself, so his granddaughter told me beside his grave. When he and his brother Nikolai were boys, they had heard one of the village women say that a place where you planted trees would be a happy one. So they planted two saplings, partly as a kind of game. Only later did the old man remember that promise of happiness, and then he expressed a wish to be buried under the trees he had planted. And his wish was carried out. In its heart-rending simplicity, his grave is the most impressive place of burial in the world. Just a small rectangular mound in the woods with trees overhead, no cross, no tombstone, no inscription. The great man who suffered more than anyone from his own famous name and reputation lies buried there, nameless, like a vagabond who happened to be found nearby or an unknown soldier. No one is forbidden to visit his last resting place; the flimsy wooden fence around it is not kept locked. Nothing guards that restless man’s final rest but human respect for him. While curious sightseers usually throng around the magnificence of a tomb, the compelling simplicity of this place banishes any desire to gape. The wind rushes like the word of God over the nameless grave, and no other voice is heard. You could pass the place without knowing any more than that someone is buried here, a Russian lying in Russian earth. Napoleon’s tomb beneath the marble dome of Les Invalides, Goethe’s in the grand-ducal vault at Weimar, the tombs in Westminster Abbey are none of them as moving as this silent and movingly anonymous grave somewhere in the woods, with only the wind whispering around it, uttering no word or message of its own.

Hypocrisy—in other words, the practice of lying about lying—shields us from seeing ourselves as we are: a collocation of fragments that fit together as a biological unit but not as anything else, not as that ghost which has been called a self, a phantasm whose ecotoplasmic unreality we can never see through. By staying true to the lie of the self, the ego, we can hold onto the illusion that we will be who we are all our lives and not see our selves die a thousand times before our death. While some have dedicated themselves to getting to the bottom of how these parts create the illusion of a whole, this is not how pyramids are built. To get a pyramid off the ground takes a lot of ego—the base material of those stacks of stones that tourists visit while on vacation. Of course, a pyramid is actually a polyhedron, that is, a mathematical conception which pyramids in the physical world resemble . . . at least from a distance. The nearer one gets to a pyramid, the more it reveals itself to be what it is: a roughly pyramidal conglomeration of bricks, a composition of fragments that is not what it seems to be. This is also how it works with humans. The world around us encourages the build up of our egos—those pyramids of self-esteem—as if we needed such encouragement. Although everyone is affected by this pyramid scheme, some participate in it more than others: they are observably more full of themselves and tend to their egos as they would exotic plants in a hothouse. It helps if they can wear down the self-esteem of others, or simply witness this erosion. As the American novelist and essayist Gore Vidal said famously and often: “It is not enough to succeed. Others must fail.” None of this could work without the distance we put between what we are and what we think we are. Then we may appear to exist apart from our constituent elements. Self-esteem would evaporate without a self to esteem. As with pyramids, it is only at a distance that this illusion can be pulled off. Hypocrisy is that distance.

There are two famous quips of Stalin which are both grounded in this logic. When Stalin answered the question "Which deviation is worse, the Rightist or the Leftist one?" by "They are both worse!", the underlying premise is that the Leftist deviation is REALLY ("objectively," as Stalinists liked to put it) not leftist at all, but a concealed Rightist one! When Stalin wrote, in a report on a party congress, that the delegates, with the majority of votes, unanimously approved the CC resolution, the underlying premise is, again, that there was really no minority within the party: those who voted against thereby excluded themselves from the party... In all these cases, the genus repeatedly overlaps (fully coincides) with one of its species. This is also what allows Stalin to read history retroactively, so that things "become clear" retroactively: it was not that Trotsky was first fighting for the revolution with Lenin and Stalin and then, at a certain stage, opted for a different strategy than the one advocated by Stalin; this last opposition (Trotsky/Stalin) "makes it clear" how, "objectively," Trotsky was against revolution all the time back. We find the same procedure in the classificatory impasse the Stalinist ideologists and political activists faced in their struggle for collectivization in the years 1928-1933. In their attempt to account for their effort to crush the peasants' resistance in "scientific" Marxist terms, they divided peasants into three categories (classes): the poor peasants (no land or minimal land, working for others), natural allies of the workers; the autonomous middle peasants, oscillating between the exploited and exploiters; the rich peasants, "kulaks" (employing other workers, lending them money or seeds, etc.), the exploiting "class enemy" which, as such, has to be "liquidated." However, in practice, this classification became more and more blurred and inoperative: in the generalized poverty, clear criteria no longer applied, and other two categories often joined kulaks in their resistance to forced collectivization. An additional category was thus introduced, that of a subkulak, a peasant who, although, with regard to his economic situation, was to poor to be considered a kulak proper, nonetheless shared the kulak "counter-revolutionary" attitude.

The Outer Cape is famous for a dazzling quality of light that is like no other place on Earth. Some of the magic has to do with the land being surrounded by water, but it’s also because that far north of the equator, the sunlight enters the atmosphere at a low angle. Both factors combine to leave everything it bathes both softer and more defined. For centuries writers, poets, and fine artists have been trying to capture its essence. Some have succeeded, but most have only sketched its truth. That’s no reflection of their talent, because no matter how beautiful the words or stunning the painting, Provincetown’s light has to be experienced. The light is one thing, but there is also the way everything smells. Those people lucky enough to have experienced the Cape at its best—and most would agree it’s sometime in the late days of summer when everything has finally been toasted by the sun—know that simply walking on the beach through the tall seagrass and rose hip bushes to the ocean, the air redolent with life, is almost as good as it gets. If in that moment someone was asked to choose between being able to see or smell, they would linger over their decision, realizing the temptation to forsake sight for even one breath of Cape Cod in August. Those aromas are as lush as any rain forest, as sweet as any rose garden, as distinct as any memory the body holds. Anyone who spent a week in summer camp on the Cape can be transported back to that spare cabin in the woods with a single waft of a pine forest on a rainy day. Winter alters the Cape, but it doesn’t entirely rob it of magic. Gone are the soft, warm scents of suntan oil and sand, replaced by a crisp, almost cruel cold. And while the seagrass and rose hips bend toward the ground and seagulls turn their backs to a bitter wind, the pine trees thrive through the long, dark months of winter, remaining tall over the hibernation at their feet. While their sap may drain into the roots and soil until the first warmth of spring, their needles remain fragrant through the coldest month, the harshest storm. And on any particular winter day on the Outer Cape, if one is blessed enough to take a walk in the woods on a clear, cold, windless day, they will realize the air and ocean and trees all talk the same language and declare We are alive. Even in the depths of winter: we are alive. It

The story of Cassius Clay’s lost bicycle would later be told as an indication of the boxer’s determination and the wonders of accidental encounters, but it carries broader meaning, too. If Cassius Clay had been a white boy, the theft of his bicycle and an introduction to Joe Martin might have led as easily to an interest in a career in law enforcement as boxing. But Cassius, who had already developed a keen understanding of America’s racial striation, knew that law enforcement wasn’t a promising option. This subject—what white America allowed and expected of black people—would intrigue him all his life. “At twelve years old I wanted to be a big celebrity,” he said years later. “I wanted to be world famous.” The interviewer pushed him: Why did he want to be famous? Upon reflection he answered from a more adult perspective: “So that I could rebel and be different from all the rest of them and show everyone behind me that you don’t have to Uncle Tom, you don’t have to kiss you-know-what to make it . . . I wanted to be free. I wanted to say what I wanna say . . . Go where I wanna go. Do what I wanna do.” For young Cassius, what mattered was that boxing was permitted, even encouraged, and that it gave him more or less equal status to the white boys who trained with him. Every day, on his way to the gym, Cassius passed a Cadillac dealership. Boxing wasn’t the only way for him to acquire one of those big, beautiful cars in the showroom window, but it might have seemed that way at the time. Boxing suggested a path to prosperity that did not require reading and writing. It came with the authorization of a white man in Joe Martin. It offered respect, visibility, power, and money. Boxing transcended race in ways that were highly unusual in the 1950s, when black Americans had limited control of their economic and political lives. Boxing more than most other sports allowed black athletes to compete on level ground with white athletes, to openly display their strength and even superiority, and to earn money on a relatively equal scale. As James Baldwin wrote in The Fire Next Time, many black people of Clay’s generation believed that getting an education and saving money would never be enough to earn respect. “One needed a handle, a lever, a means of inspiring fear,” Baldwin wrote. “It was absolutely clear the police would whip you and take you in as long as they could get away with it, and that everyone else—housewives, taxi

In 2009, Kahneman and Klein took the unusual step of coauthoring a paper in which they laid out their views and sought common ground. And they found it. Whether or not experience inevitably led to expertise, they agreed, depended entirely on the domain in question. Narrow experience made for better chess and poker players and firefighters, but not for better predictors of financial or political trends, or of how employees or patients would perform. The domains Klein studied, in which instinctive pattern recognition worked powerfully, are what psychologist Robin Hogarth termed “kind” learning environments. Patterns repeat over and over, and feedback is extremely accurate and usually very rapid. In golf or chess, a ball or piece is moved according to rules and within defined boundaries, a consequence is quickly apparent, and similar challenges occur repeatedly. Drive a golf ball, and it either goes too far or not far enough; it slices, hooks, or flies straight. The player observes what happened, attempts to correct the error, tries again, and repeats for years. That is the very definition of deliberate practice, the type identified with both the ten-thousand-hours rule and the rush to early specialization in technical training. The learning environment is kind because a learner improves simply by engaging in the activity and trying to do better. Kahneman was focused on the flip side of kind learning environments; Hogarth called them “wicked.” In wicked domains, the rules of the game are often unclear or incomplete, there may or may not be repetitive patterns and they may not be obvious, and feedback is often delayed, inaccurate, or both. In the most devilishly wicked learning environments, experience will reinforce the exact wrong lessons. Hogarth noted a famous New York City physician renowned for his skill as a diagnostician. The man’s particular specialty was typhoid fever, and he examined patients for it by feeling around their tongues with his hands. Again and again, his testing yielded a positive diagnosis before the patient displayed a single symptom. And over and over, his diagnosis turned out to be correct. As another physician later pointed out, “He was a more productive carrier, using only his hands, than Typhoid Mary.” Repetitive success, it turned out, taught him the worst possible lesson. Few learning environments are that wicked, but it doesn’t take much to throw experienced pros off course. Expert firefighters, when faced with a new situation, like a fire in a skyscraper, can find themselves suddenly deprived of the intuition formed in years of house fires, and prone to poor decisions. With a change of the status quo, chess masters too can find that the skill they took years to build is suddenly obsolete.

Chicago, Illinois 1896 Opening Night Wearing her Brünnhilda costume, complete with padding, breastplate, helm, and false blond braids, and holding a spear as if it were a staff, Sophia Maxwell waited in the wings of the Canfield-Pendegast theatre. The bright stage lighting made it difficult to see the audience filling the seats for opening night of Die Walküre, but she could feel their anticipation build as the time drew near for the appearance of the Songbird of Chicago. She took slow deep breaths, inhaling the smell of the greasepaint she wore on her face. Part of her listened to the music for her cue, and the other part immersed herself in the role of the god Wotan’s favorite daughter. From long practice, Sophia tried to ignore quivers of nervousness. Never before had stage fright made her feel ill. Usually she couldn’t wait to make her appearance. Now, however, nausea churned in her stomach, timpani banged pain-throbs through her head, her muscles ached, and heat made beads of persperation break out on her brow. I feel more like a plucked chicken than a songbird, but I will not let my audience down. Annoyed with herself, Sophia reached for a towel held by her dresser, Nan, standing at her side. She lifted the helm and blotted her forehead, careful not to streak the greasepaint. Nan tisked and pulled out a small brush and a tin of powder from one of the caprious pockets of her apron. She dipped the brush into the powder and wisked it across Sophia’s forehead. “You’re too pale. You need more rouge.” “No time.” A rhythmic sword motif sounded the prelude to Act ll. Sophia pivoted away from Nan and moved to the edge of the wing, looking out to the scene of a rocky mountain pass. Soon the warrior-maiden Brünnhilda would make an appearance with her famous battle cry. She allowed the anticpaptory energy of the audience to fill her body. The trills of the high strings and upward rushing passes in the woodwinds introduced Brünnhilda. Right on cue, Sophia made her entrance and struck a pose. She took a deep breath, preparing to hit the opening notes of her battle call. But as she opened her mouth to sing, nothing came out. Caught off guard, Sophia cleared her throat and tried again. Nothing. Horrified, she glanced around, as if seeking help, her body hot and shaky with shame. Across the stage in the wings, Sophia could see Judith Deal, her understudy and rival, watching. The other singer was clad in a similar costume to Sophia’s for her role as the valkerie Gerhilde. A triumphant expression crossed her face. Warwick Canfield-Pendegast, owner of the theatre, stood next to Judith, his face contorted in fury. He clenched his chubby hands. A wave of dizziness swept through Sophia. The stage lights dimmed. Her knees buckled. As she crumpled to the ground, one final thought followed her into the darkness. I’ve just lost my position as prima dona of the Canfield-Pendegast Opera Company.

Weston, having been born in Chicago, was raised with typical, well-grounded, mid-western values. On his 16th birthday, his father gave him a Kodak camera with which he started what would become his lifetime vocation. During the summer of 1908, Weston met Flora May Chandler, a schoolteacher who was seven years older than he was. The following year the couple married and in time they had four sons. Weston and his family moved to Southern California and opened a portrait studio on Brand Boulevard, in the artsy section of Glendale, California, called Tropico. His artistic skills soon became apparent and he became well known for his portraits of famous people, such as Carl Sandburg and Max Eastman. In the autumn of 1913, hearing of his work, Margrethe Mather, a photographer from Los Angeles, came to his studio, where Weston asked her to be his studio assistant. It didn’t take long before the two developed a passionate, intimate relationship. Both Weston and Mather became active in the growing bohemian cultural scene in Los Angeles. She was extremely outgoing and artistic in a most flamboyant way. Her bohemian sexual values were new to Weston’s conventional thinking, but Mather excited him and presented him with a new outlook that he found enticing. Mather was beautiful, and being bisexual and having been a high-class prostitute, was delightfully worldly. Mather's uninhibited lifestyle became irresistible to Weston and her photography took him into a new and exciting art form. As Mather worked and overtly played with him, she presented a lifestyle that was in stark contrast to Weston’s conventional home life, and he soon came to see his wife Flora as a person with whom he had little in common. Weston expanded his horizons but tried to keep his affairs with other women a secret. As he immersed himself further into nude photography, it became more difficult to hide his new lifestyle from his wife. Flora became suspicious about this secret life, but apparently suffered in silence. One of the first of many women who agreed to model nude for Weston was Tina Modotti. Although Mather remained with Weston, Tina soon became his primary model and remained so for the next several years. There was an instant attraction between Tina Modotti, Mather and Edward Weston, and although he remained married, Tina became his student, model and lover. Richey soon became aware of the affair, but it didn’t seem to bother him, as they all continued to remain good friends. The relationship Tina had with Weston could definitely be considered “cheating,” since knowledge of the affair was withheld as much as possible from his wife Flora May. Perhaps his wife knew and condoned this new promiscuous relationship, since she had also endured the intense liaison with Margrethe Mather. Tina, Mather and Weston continued working together until Tina and Weston suddenly left for Mexico in 1923. As a group, they were all a part of the cozy, artsy, bohemian society of Los Angeles, which was where they were introduced to the then-fashionable, communistic philosophy.

Sigtryggr held out a hand to pull me from the ditch. His one eye was bright with the same joy I had seen on Ceaster’s ramparts. ‘I would not want you as an enemy, Lord Uhtred,’ he said. ‘Then don’t come back, Jarl Sigtryggr,’ I said, clasping his forearm as he clasped mine. ‘I will be back,’ he said, ‘because you will want me to come back.’ ‘I will?’ He turned his head to gaze at his ships. One ship was close to the shore, held there by a mooring line tied to a stake. The prow of the ship had a great dragon painted white and in the dragon’s claw was a red axe. The ship waited for Sigtryggr, but close to it, standing where the grass turned to the river bank’s mud, was Stiorra. Her maid, Hella, was already aboard the dragon-ship. Æthelflaed had been watching Eardwulf’s death, but now saw Stiorra by the grounded ship. She frowned, not sure she understood what she saw. ‘Lord Uhtred?’ ‘My lady?’ ‘Your daughter,’ she began, but did not know what to say. ‘I will deal with my daughter,’ I said grimly. ‘Finan?’ My son and Finan were both staring at me, wondering what I would do. ‘Finan?’ I called. ‘Lord?’ ‘Kill that scum,’ I jerked my head towards Eardwulf’s followers, then I took Sigtryggr by the elbow and walked him towards his ship. ‘Lord Uhtred!’ Æthelflaed called again, sharper this time. I waved a dismissive hand, and otherwise ignored her. ‘I thought she disliked you,’ I said to Sigtryggr. ‘We meant you to think that.’ ‘You don’t know her,’ I said. ‘You knew her mother when you met her?’ ‘This is madness,’ I said. ‘And you are famous for your good sense, lord.’ Stiorra waited for us. She was tense. She stared at me defiantly and said nothing. I felt a lump in my throat and a sting in my eyes. I told myself it was the small smoke drifting from the Norsemen’s abandoned campfires. ‘You’re a fool,’ I told her harshly. ‘I saw,’ she said simply, ‘and I was stricken.’ ‘And so was he?’ I asked, and she just nodded. ‘And the last two nights,’ I asked, ‘after the feasting was over?’ I did not finish the question, but she answered it anyway by nodding again. ‘You are your mother’s daughter,’ I said, and I embraced her, holding her close. ‘But it is my choice whom you marry,’ I went on. I felt her stiffen in my arms, ‘And Lord Æthelhelm wants to marry you.’ I thought she was sobbing, but when I pulled back from the embrace I saw she was laughing. ‘Lord Æthelhelm?’ she asked. ‘You’ll be the richest widow in all Britain,’ I promised her. She still held me, looking up into my face. She smiled, that same smile that had been her mother’s. ‘Father,’ she said, ‘I swear on my life that I will accept the man you choose to be my husband.’ She knew me. She had seen my tears and knew they were not caused by smoke. I leaned forward and kissed her forehead. ‘You will be a peace cow,’ I said, ‘between me and the Norse. And you’re a fool. So am I. And your dowry,’ I spoke louder as I stepped back, ‘is Eardwulf’s money.’ I saw I had smeared her pale linen dress with Eardwulf’s blood. I looked at Sigtryggr. ‘I give her to you,’ I said, ‘so don’t disappoint me.

One can take the ape out of the jungle, but not the jungle out of the ape. This also applies to us, bipedal apes. Ever since our ancestors swung from tree to tree, life in small groups has been an obsession of ours. We can’t get enough of politicians thumping their chests on television, soap opera stars who swing from tryst to tryst, and reality shows about who’s in and who’s out. It would be easy to make fun of all this primate behavior if not for the fact that our fellow simians take the pursuit of power and sex just as seriously as we do. We share more with them than power and sex, though. Fellow-feeling and empathy are equally important, but they’re rarely mentioned as part of our biological heritage. We would much rather blame nature for what we don’t like in ourselves than credit it for what we do like. As Katharine Hepburn famously put it in The African Queen, ”Nature, Mr. Allnut, is what we are put in this world to rise above.” This opinion is still very much with us. Of the millions of pages written over the centuries about human nature, none are as bleak as those of the last three decades, and none as wrong. We hear that we have selfish genes, that human goodness is a sham, and that we act morally only to impress others. But if all that people care about is their own good, why does a day-old baby cry when it hears another baby cry? This is how empathy starts. Not very sophisticated perhaps, but we can be sure that a newborn doesn’t try to impress. We are born with impulses that draw us to others and that later in life make us care about them. The possibility that empathy is part of our primate heritage ought to make us happy, but we’re not in the habit of embracing our nature. When people commit genocide, we call them ”animals”. But when they give to the poor, we praise them for being ”humane”. We like to claim the latter behavior for ourselves. It wasn’t until an ape saved a member of our own species that there was a public awakening to the possibility of nonhuman humaneness. This happened on August 16, 1996, when an eight-year-old female gorilla named Binti Jua helped a three-year-old boy who had fallen eighteen feet into the primate exhibit at Chicago’s Brookfield Zoo. Reacting immediately, Binti scooped up the boy and carried him to safety. She sat down on a log in a stream, cradling the boy in her lap, giving him a few gentle back pats before taking him to the waiting zoo staff. This simple act of sympathy, captured on video and shown around the world, touched many hearts, and Binti was hailed as a heroine. It was the first time in U.S. history that an ape figured in the speeches of leading politicians, who held her up as a model of compassion. That Binti’s behavior caused such surprise among humans says a lot about the way animals are depicted in the media. She really did nothing unusual, or at least nothing an ape wouldn’t do for any juvenile of her own species. While recent nature documentaries focus on ferocious beasts (or the macho men who wrestle them to the ground), I think it’s vital to convey the true breadth and depth of our connection with nature. This book explores the fascinating and frightening parallels between primate behavior and our own, with equal regard for the good, the bad, and the ugly.

In the early 1680s, at just about the time that Edmond Halley and his friends Christopher Wren and Robert Hooke were settling down in a London coffee house and embarking on the casual wager that would result eventually in Isaac Newton’s Principia, Hemy Cavendish’s weighing of the Earth, and many of the other inspired and commendable undertakings that have occupied us for much of the past four hundred pages, a rather less desirable milestone was being passed on the island of Mauritius, far out in the Indian Ocean some eight hundred miles off the east coast of Madagascar. There, some forgotten sailor or sailor’s pet was harrying to death the last of the dodos, the famously flightless bird whose dim but trusting nature and lack of leggy zip made it a rather irresistible target for bored young tars on shore leave. Millions of years of peaceful isolation had not prepared it for the erratic and deeply unnerving behavior of human beings. We don’t know precisely the circumstances, or even year, attending the last moments of the last dodo, so we don’t know which arrived first a world that contained a Principia or one that had no dodos, but we do know that they happened at more or less the same time. You would be hard pressed, I would submit to find a better pairing of occurrences to illustrate the divine and felonious nature of the human being-a species of organism that is capable of unpicking the deepest secrets of the heavens while at the same time pounding into extinction, for no purpose at all, a creature that never did us any harm and wasn’t even remotely capable of understanding what we were doing to it as we did it. Indeed, dodos were so spectacularly short on insight it is reported, that if you wished to find all the dodos in a vicinity you had only to catch one and set it to squawking, and all the others would waddle along to see what was up. The indignities to the poor dodo didn’t end quite there. In 1755, some seventy years after the last dodo’s death, the director of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford decided that the institution’s stuffed dodo was becoming unpleasantly musty and ordered it tossed on a bonfire. This was a surprising decision as it was by this time the only dodo in existence, stuffed or otherwise. A passing employee, aghast tried to rescue the bird but could save only its head and part of one limb. As a result of this and other departures from common sense, we are not now entirely sure what a living dodo was like. We possess much less information than most people suppose-a handful of crude descriptions by "unscientific voyagers, three or four oil paintings, and a few scattered osseous fragments," in the somewhat aggrieved words of the nineteenth century naturalist H. E. Strickland. As Strickland wistfully observed, we have more physical evidence of some ancient sea monsters and lumbering saurapods than we do of a bird that lived into modern times and required nothing of us to survive except our absence. So what is known of the dodo is this: it lived on Mauritius, was plump but not tasty, and was the biggest-ever member of the pigeon family, though by quite what margin is unknown as its weight was never accurately recorded. Extrapolations from Strickland’s "osseous fragments" and the Ashmolean’s modest remains show that it was a little over two and a half feet tall and about the same distance from beak tip to backside. Being flightless, it nested on the ground, leaving its eggs and chicks tragically easy prey for pigs, dogs, and monkeys brought to the island by outsiders. It was probably extinct by 1683 and was most certainly gone by 1693. Beyond that we know almost nothing except of course that we will not see its like again. We know nothing of its reproductive habits and diet, where it ranged, what sounds it made in tranquility or alarm. We don’t possess a single dodo egg. From beginning to end our acquaintance with animate dodos lasted just seventy years.

Halwa, one of the most famous Indian desserts. The key ingredient being the SuperFood carrot, so you know this dish is bursting with beta-carotene goodness. Raisins too contain antioxidant power of their own, excellent for eye and bone health and for fighting bacteria in the mouth, protecting your little one’s ‘baby teeth’ from tooth decay. Since this delicious dessert is bursting with nutritional value, it can be served either as a snack or after meal treat.   Total preparation and cooking time: 20mins Makes 3-4 servings Suitable for freezing   1 tbsp unsalted butter or ghee 1 whole cardamom pod - green 2 medium carrots — peeled, washed, grated (in food processor) 150ml (5fl oz) of whole milk Pinch of ground cinnamon 15g (½ oz) raisins — soaked in warm water (5mins), drained Melt the butter or ghee in a pot, add the cardamom and carrots and stir-fry for 5mins. Pour in the milk and add the cinnamon and raisins. Bring to the boil gradually on a low heat; this will take 5-10mins. Simmer (uncovered) for 15mins, stirring occasionally until the mixture begins to thicken. Once all of the milk has been absorbed, remove from the heat. Serve to baby warm.

Yuguo fell apart, into a thousand little pieces. He felt it happen, fragments of his mind detaching from the rest, splitting off, becoming their own, being mapped by Nexus. Here was Yuguo’s knowledge of coding, his comprehension of data structures, of objects and methods, of intents and game players, of threads and loops and conditions. Here was football Yuguo, the precise way his left foot grounded into the grass and his hips swiveled and his arm balanced as his right foot shot forward to kick the checked ball at the goal. Here was Yuguo’s shy lust for girls, the patterns his eyes drew over their curves when he saw them, the anxiety that struck him dumb when they were near. Here was Yuguo’s despair that had led him to this room, his quiet dread that his country and the world were getting worse instead of better, that the future was one of slow strangulation at the electronic hands of smiling tame AIs with famous faces, their forked tongues lapping out of the viewscreens to feed saccharine to the masses, the old men who’d always ruled China laughing and holding their leashes. Here were the words a young woman had said to him just minutes ago. “Critical mass. Weak apart, strong together.” Here were her eyes, fiery eyes, hanging in space. Here was her name: Lifen. Then those pieces fell apart, into smaller pieces, which fell apart into fragments even smaller: Yuguo’s sensation of red. Yuguo’s concept of 1 and 0. Yuguo’s left thumb. The sound in Yuguo’s head when he heard the third note of his favorite pop song. Yuguo’s yes. Yuguo’s no. Yuguo’s and. Yuguo’s or. Yuguo’s xor. Yuguo’s now. Yuguo’s future. Yuguo’s past. He could see himself now. He was a golden statue of Yuguo, immobile, one foot in front of the other, standing in a space of white light. But the statue wasn’t solid, it was made of grains, millions of grains, flecks of gold dust, millions of parts of him. And as he watched they were separating, pulling gradually apart, so that he was no longer a single entity but a cloud, a fog, a fog of Yuguo, and if a strong wind came, he would just blow away, and if the pieces split any more he knew there wouldn’t be any such thing as Yuguo left at all. Yuguo’s fear. Yuguo’s end. And then the pieces rushed together, and he was inside that statue, he was that statue, and he was all of it, 1 and 0, yes and no, future and past, sound and sight, football and coding. He was all of it. He was whole. He was a mind. I’m Yuguo, he realized. I’m him. I’m me. I’m Yuguo! His eyes snapped open. He was in his body. His body made of molten gold. No, not gold, flesh and blood.

Pittsburg is like Birmingham in England; at least its townspeople say so. Setting aside the streets, the shops, the houses, waggons, factories, public buildings, and population, perhaps it may be. It certainly has a great quantity of smoke hanging about it, and is famous for its iron-works. Besides the prison to which I have already referred, this town contains a pretty arsenal and other institutions. It is very beautifully situated on the Alleghany River, over which there are two bridges; and the villas of the wealthier citizens sprinkled about the high grounds in the neighbourhood, are pretty enough. We lodged at a most excellent hotel, and were admirably served. As usual it was full of boarders, was very large, and had a broad colonnade to every story of the house.

The scale of the cruelty and suffering and loss was beyond my comprehension. The most famous number, of course, was six million: the number of Jews killed by the Nazis as they implemented the madness of Hitler’s “Final Solution.” But tens of millions more had died, too—another forty million civilians, by some reckonings, and twenty-five million soldiers. Although some four hundred thousand U.S. soldiers were killed in three and a half years of fighting—a dreadful toll, to be sure—American losses represented only a tiny fraction of the war’s total. In China, the war dead totaled nearly four million soldiers and sixteen million civilians as Japan’s armies cut a deadly swath through China. The Soviet Union lost twenty million people as well, almost equally divided between soldiers and civilians, as the German army ground itself down in a prolonged and bloody eastern campaign. Seventy-two million deaths, by bombings, firestorms, massacres, diseases, starvation. How was it possible, I wondered, for so many people to die in such a short time without the very fabric of civilization collapsing? And

Crisp Cumin Chicken Served with Tangy Orange and Avocado Salsa   Serves: 4 Total Cooking Time: 20 min   Ingredients for the salsa: 1 large orange, preferably seedless 1 ripe avocado, preferably firm 1 plum tomato 2 tbsp chopped cilantro   Ingredients for the chicken: Olive oil 11/4 lb (625 g) chicken 1/2 tsp (2 ml) ground cumin Salt and cayenne or black pepper to taste   Method: 1. Salsa: Peel the orange and remove its white pith.  Get rid of the membrane such that only the soft juicy part of the orange is there. Slice the avocado in half and scoop out the soft buttery flesh from the peel. Chop a tomato and remove its seeds. 2. Now mix in the orange, avocado flesh, and tomato in a medium size bowl. To this add the coarsely chopped cilantro. Toss well. Lightly drizzle with oil. Sprinkle a pinch of salt for taste. 3. Cut the chicken into 4 serving-sized pieces. Thinly coat both sides of chicken cutlets with cumin, salt, and pepper. 4. Heat oil in a frying pan and slide in the chicken pieces. Cook until the pieces are lightly golden. Flip the pieces and cook for 3-5 min per side. When the chicken pieces are nicely cooked, remove from heat. Top the chicken pieces with salsa. Best served with naans.   Nutrition information: 34 g protein,11 g fat, 9 g carbohydrates, 4 g fiber, 32 mg calcium, 84 mg sodium, 270 calories.   Back to Table of Contents The Forever Famous Classic Schnitzel   Serves: 6 Total Cooking Time: 35 min   Ingredients: 1/4 teaspoon garlic salt 1/2 cup all-purpose flour 1/4 teaspoon celery salt 1/4 teaspoon paprika 1/4 teaspoon salt 1/8 teaspoon pepper 1 slightly beaten egg 1/2 cup milk 2 to 3 tablespoons cooking oil 6  4-ounce pork sirloin cutlets about 1/2-inch in thickness

No one lives on Hobe's Hill today. Only a few abandoned shacks remain. The land has greatly changed. When Walker Evans took his pictures, it was a grand, open place, full of cotton. Now forest has reclaimed the land. There is still some field, planted in soybeans, and this provides some sense of how things once were. These soybeans, as well as those down by the main highway, were planted by Joe Bridges and his son Huey. Amid the soybeans, the ground is stony, and the water-starved beans grow with more courage than success. This same dust was breathed by Fred Ricketts as he plowed behind the seat rump of a mule fifty years ago. He and his children stared at this ground as they chopped weeds and, later, hunched over the long rows to pick. They knew this same sun, this silence, the awful loneliness of this red plateau. The heat dulls the senses. Even sulfur butterflies, those neurotic field strutters, are slothful. The whole South seems under a hot Augustan pause--all the highways blurry beneath the burden of hear, be they four-lane marchers, two-lane winders, single-track dirt poems. From this hill, it's hard to imagine life going on in this hear anywhere across the six hundred miles of the South, in any of those terrible little towns...

We are told at one point that a Hittite king named Mursili I, grandson and successor of the above-named Hattusili I, marched his army all the way to Mesopotamia, a journey of over one thousand miles, and attacked the city of Babylon in 1595 BC, burning it to the ground and bringing to an end the two-hundred-year-old dynasty made famous by Hammurabi “the Law-Giver.” Then, instead of occupying the city, he simply turned the Hittite army around and headed for home, thus effectively conducting the longest drive-by shooting in history.

The response, in the rallying cry that Preston Manning would make famous, was “The West Wants In.” It says something profoundly optimistic about westerners and encouraging about Canada that the slogan wasn’t “The West Wants Out.” In the entrepreneurial fashion that has come to rightly typify the West, the local response to a political movement that excluded them was to create one that couldn’t live without them, and to build that movement until it governed the whole country. When you take a step back and think about it, it was an awesome achievement, maybe unparalleled in our political history.

hat was then Now Johannes Cabal and Joey Granite stood before Billy Butler and said nothing. The smell of smoke said it all for them. Butler smiled nastily. “Oh. It’s—” As famous last words go, they lacked a certain something. “Uppercut, Joey,” said Cabal. Joey Granite delivered an uppercut of surpassing science and pugilistic artistry. It was a thing of beauty and kinetic poetry that might be long admired among people who enjoy watching other people beat the living daylights out of one another. It was also powerful enough to lift a small building off its foundations. Anything up to a branch library would have tottered and fallen. Billy Butler, despite a bit of a gut, simply wasn’t in the same league weight-wise. By some miracle, his head stayed on his body, but there was little doubt that the police would be making enquiries long before he hit the ground again. “Let us leave, Joey,” said Cabal as Butler vanished through the cloud base.

For me, this was the first hint that the liturgy might be the cure for spiritual loneliness. Though I felt inadequate and alone during my prayer crisis, I was not alone. Much of American spiritual life trudges through the muck of solitary spirituality. Twenty years ago, Robert Bellah described this phenomenon in Habits of the Heart, with his now famous description of one woman: Sheila Larson is a young nurse who has received a good deal of therapy and describes her faith as “Sheilaism.” This suggests the logical possibility of more than 235 million American religions, one for each of us. “I believe in God,” Sheila says. “I am not a religious fanatic. I can’t remember the last time I went to church. My faith has carried me a long way. It’s Sheilaism. Just my own little voice.” “My little voice” guides many lonely people to and through New Age, wicca, Buddhism, labyrinths, Scientology, yoga, meditation, and various fads in Christianity—and then creates a new Sheilaism from the fragments that have not been discarded along the way. I love Sheila Larson precisely because she articulates nearly perfectly my lifelong struggle: “I believe in God. I am not a religious fanatic…. My faith has carried me a long way. It’s Sheilism. Just my own little voice.” The difference between Sheila and me is that she has the courage of her convictions: she knows her faith is very personal and so hasn’t bothered with the church. I like to pretend that my faith is grounded in community, but I struggle to believe in anything but Markism. Fortunately God loves us so much he has made it a “spiritual law” that Sheilism or Markism become boring after awhile. The gift of the liturgy—and it is precisely why I need the liturgy—is that it helps me hear not so much “my little voice” but instead the still, small voice (Psalm 46). It leads away from the self and points me toward the community of God.

A leader of the state legislature, Virginia Peterson, opposed the path of Interstate 215 around the southeast quadrant of Salt Lake City on the grounds that it would take the land and house of a constituent who happened to be a famous local artist. The artist, Ms. Peterson claimed, depended on the particular light on the property for his painting. She was able to delay construction for a decade.

If brute force wouldn't suffice, however, there was always the famous Viking cunning. The fleet was put to anchor and under a flag of truce some Vikings approached the gate. Their leader, they claimed, was dying and wished to be baptized as a Christian. As proof, they had brought along the ailing Hastein on a litter, groaning and sweating.  The request presented a moral dilemma for the Italians. As Christians they could hardly turn away a dying penitent, but they didn't trust the Vikings and expected a trick. The local count, in consultation with the bishop, warily decided to admit Hastein, but made sure that he was heavily guarded. A detachment of soldiers was sent to collect Hastein and a small retinue while the rest of the Vikings waited outside.  Despite the misgivings, the people of Luna flocked to see the curiosity of a dreaded barbarian peacefully inside their city. The Vikings were on their best behavior as they were escorted to the cathedral, remaining silent and respectful. Throughout the service, which probably lasted a few hours, Hastein was a picture of reverence and weakness, a dying man who had finally seen the light. The bishop performed the baptism, and the count stood in as godfather, christening Hastein with a new name. When the rite had concluded, the Vikings respectfully picked up the litter and carried their stricken leader back to the ships.  That night, a Viking messenger reappeared at the gates, and after thanking the count for allowing the baptism, sadly informed him that Hastein had died. Before he expired, however, he had asked to be given a funeral mass and to be buried in the holy ground of the cathedral cemetery.  The next day a solemn procession of fifty Vikings, each dressed in long robes of mourning, entered the city carrying Hastein's corpse on a bier. Virtually all the inhabitants of the city had turned out to witness the event, joining the cavalcade all the way to the cathedral. The bishop, surrounded by a crowd of monks and priests bearing candles, blessed the coffin with holy water, and led the entire procession inside.  As the bishop launched into the funerary Mass, reminding all good Christians to look forward to the day of resurrection, the coffin lid was abruptly thrown to the ground and a very much alive Hastein leapt out. As he cut down the bishop, his men threw off their cloaks and drew their weapons. A few ran to bar the doors, the rest set about slaughtering the congregation.  At the same time – perhaps alerted by the tolling bell – Bjorn Ironside led the remaining Vikings into the city and they fanned out, looking for treasure. The plundering lasted for the entire day. Portable goods were loaded onto the ships, the younger citizens were spared to be sold as slaves, and the rest were killed. Finally, when night began to fall, Hastein called off the attack. Since nothing more could fit on their ships, they set fire to the city and sailed away.97 For the next two years, the Norsemen criss-crossed the Mediterranean, raiding both the African and European coasts. There are even rumors that they tried to sack Alexandria in Egypt, but were apparently unable to take it by force or stealth.

One of the most striking aspects of the doctrine of Christ is the combination in one figure of man and God. Even this radical idea, however, is not unique among Jews to followers of Jesus. We find it in the Similitudes as well. In the main body of the Similitudes, Enoch is not the Son of Man. This is emphatically the case, since in chapter 46 and throughout the main body of the text, he is the one who sees the Son of Man and to whom is revealed the description of the Son of Man as the eschatological Redeemer and Messiah; therefore Enoch cannot be identical with him. In the end, however, in chapters 70 and 71, Enoch becomes the Son of Man - he becomes God. In these chapters we have a remarkable exaltation scene. In chapter 70, we are told of Enoch in the third person: “And it came to pass after this [that], while he was living, his name was lifted from those who dwell upon the dry ground to the presence of the Son of Man and to the presence of the Lord of Spirits. And he was lifted on the chariots of the spirit, and his name vanished among them.” But then, without pause, the text shifts into the first person, and we are told, “And from that day I was not counted among them.” We have here a midrashic expansion of the famous Enoch verse from Genesis that “Enoch walked with God and he was not”: that is, an instance of apotheosis, of a special human becoming divine.