How To Show Gaps In Quotes

You’ll never lose me,” I said, my voice breaking. “Promise.” His gaze searched mine as he ran his fingertip up my spine. “I promise.” I closed the minuscule gap between us once more, capturing his lips and trying to show him how much I meant it. “I love you. I love our family. I love our life together, and I can’t wait for the day when we’re back home, just the three of us, and this whole war is over. I swear to you that will happen. That will be our future.” He cradled the back of my head, his palm searing against my skin. “I have waited an eternity for this love. I’m not going to let anyone, Titan or not, take it from us.” “Promise?” I said, and this time it was Henry’s turn to kiss me. “I promise.” “Then do me a favor.” “Anything.” I shifted onto my back, rolling him with me. His body pressed against mine in all the right places, and I lifted my head high enough to rest my forehead against his. “Live this love now,” I whispered. “And never stop.

Edward Gibbon (1737-1794) in his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire said that the following five attributes marked Rome at its end: first, a mounting love of show and luxury (that is, affluence); second, a widening gap between the very rich and the very poor (this could be among countries in the family of nations as well as in a single nation); third, an obsession with sex; fourth, freakishness in the arts, masquerading as originality, and enthusiasms pretending to be creativity; fifth, an increased desire to live off the state. It all sounds so familiar. We have come a long road since our first chapter, and we are back in Rome.

The tradition among libraries of boasting about the number of volumes in their collection is well established, but surely, it is not aggregation that makes a library; it is dissemination. Perhaps libraries should bang on about how many volumes are on loan, are presently off crowding nightstands, and circulating through piles on the mantel, and weighing down purses. Yes, it is somewhat vexing to thread through the stacks of a library, only to discover an absence rather than the sought-after volume, but once the ire subsides, doesn’t one feel a sense of community? The gaps in a library are like footprints in the sand; they show us where others have gone before; they assure us we are not alone.

So you have chosen aloneness. You have chosen the security and the relative freedom of solitude, because there is no risk involved. You can stay up every night and watch your TV shows and eat ice cream out of the box and scroll through your Tumblr and never let your brain sit still, not even for a moment. You can fill your days up with books and coffees and trips to the store where you forget what you wanted the second you walk in the automatic sliding door. You can do so many little, pointless things throughout the day that all you can think of is how badly you want to sleep, how heavy your whole body is, how much your feet hurt. You can wear yourself out again and again on the pavement, and you do, and it feels good. No one will ever bridge that gap and point to your stomach or your hair or your eyes in the mirror and magically make you see the wonderful things about getting to be next to you. And maybe that’s it, after all, this fear that no one will ever truly feel about you the way you want to be felt about. Maybe what you want is someone to make you love yourself, to put sense into all that positive rhetoric, to make it so the aloneness of TV and blasting music in your ears at all times isn’t the most happy place you can think of. Maybe you want someone who makes you so sure of how wonderful things are that you cannot help but to tell them your feelings first, even at the risk of being humiliated. Because you will know that, when you’re telling them you love them, what you’re really saying is “I love who I become when I am with you.

A HOW-TO ON DISAPPEARING No one understands the way we break. Not jagged. Not knife sliding between ribs. Not the spine, cracking. That would be too easy. That would be being able to know that you're broken. That would be X-rays showing the gaps, the fissures. Clean breaks are easier to heal. We do not break cleanly. We break without breaking. Not a crack, but a fog. We dissipate. Body here one moment and not here the next. Hands working one moment and a dead weight the next. We watch ourselves turn colourless. Watch ourselves become invisible / invincible. This way, at least the pain is our own. That's what I wanted all along, I guess.

Words - take her with you let her rest in your rhymes Words - take her away somewhere beyond time Words - ease her breathing lay her softly on the floor there - let her linger and listen like ever before Leave her windows uncovered at night and fill her room with the citylights as they illuminate the sky it reminds her of the people outside cause she won't sleep unless she heals her loneliness Walk with her beneath the treetops create new paths and memories show her how the sunlight glances through the gaps between the leaves Words - help her change the world in only one verse tell her to reach for the stars and to always put love first Leave her windows uncovered at night and fill her rooms with the citylights as they illuminate the sky it reminds her of the people outside it reminds her of the people it reminds her of the people it reminds her of the people outside.

In a way, underdevelopment is a paradox. Many parts of the world that are naturally rich are actually poor and parts that are not so well off in wealth of soil and sun-soil are enjoying the highest standards of living. When the capitalists from the developed parts of the world try to explain this paradox, they often make it sound as though there is something “God-given” about the situation. One bourgeois economist, in a book on development, accepted that the comparative statistics of the world today show a gap that is much larger than it was before. By his own admission, the gap between the developed and underdeveloped countries has increased by at least 15 to 20 times over the last 150 years. However, the bourgeois economist in question does not give a historical explanation, nor does he consider that there is a relationship of exploitation which allowed capitalist parasites to grow fat and impoverished the dependencies. Instead he puts forward a biblical explanation!

shows how what I call the value gap (the belief that white people are valued more than others) and racial habits (the things we do, without thinking, that sustain the value gap) undergird racial inequality, and how white and black fears block the way to racial justice in this country.

Johnson lowered poverty rates in the black community, yes, but not by supporting black-owned businesses or addressing racist hiring practices and the racial income gap. Instead, he passed a series of bills that essentially distributed checks to struggling black families, thereby giving them the fish instead of showing them how to fish on their own.

Luckily for me, he fills in the gap. “You can call me Xavier.” Things begin to click for me. “Is that where the X comes from?” “It is.” I lick my lips before I wonder out loud, “How about the ‘Phenomenal’ part?” His eyes flick down to my lips and then back up again. “I could tell you, but I think it’d be a whole lot more fun if I showed you where that portion of my name comes from.

In most people's minds, fossils and Evolution go hand in hand. In reality, fossils are a great embarrassment to Evolutionary theory and offer strong support for the concept of Creation. If Evolution were true, we should find literally millions of fossils that show how one kind of life slowly and gradually changed to another kind of life. But missing links are the trade secret, in a sense, of paleontology. The point is, the links are still missing. What we really find are gaps that sharpen up the boundaries between kinds. It's those gaps which provide us with the evidence of Creation of separate kinds. As a matter of fact, there are gaps between each of the major kinds of plants and animals. Transition forms are missing by the millions. What we do find are separate and complex kinds, pointing to Creation.

We usually think of law leading us to gospel. And this is true—we see God’s standards, see our sin, and then see our need for a Savior. But it’s just as true that gospel leads to law. In Exodus, first God delivered his people from Egypt, then he gave the Ten Commandments. In Romans, Paul expounds on the sovereign free grace and the atoning work of Christ in chapters 1–11, and then in chapters 12–16 he shows us how to live in light of these mercies.

Do you know the quality all lions possess, above all else?" "No." I shake my head. "Loyalty," he says, smiling and showing me that adorable gap in his teeth. No matter how far apart we are. No matter the distance or time, I will never love anyone except you. Not ever.

Minding the gap is a daring strategy. We have to pay attention to the space between where we’re actually standing and where we want to be. More importantly, we have to practice the values that we’re holding out as important in our culture. Minding the gap requires both an embrace of our own vulnerability and cultivation of shame resilience—we’re going to be called upon to show up as leaders and parents and educators in new and uncomfortable ways. We don’t have to be perfect, just engaged and committed to aligning values with action.

Atheism is the default position in any scientific inquiry, just as a-quarkism or a-neutrinoism was. That is, any entity has to earn its admission into a scientific account either via direct evidence for its existence or because it plays some fundamental explanatory role. Before the theoretical need for neutrinos was appreciated (to preserve the conservation of energy) and then later experimental detection was made, they were not part of the accepted physical account of the world. To say physicists in 1900 were 'agnostic' about neutrinos sounds wrong: they just did not believe there were such things. As yet, there is no direct experimental evidence of a deity, and in order for the postulation of a deity to play an explanatory role there would have to be a lot of detail about how it would act. If, as you have suggested, we are not “good judges of how the deity would behave,” then such an unknown and unpredictable deity cannot provide good explanatory grounds for any phenomenon. The problem with the 'minimal view' is that in trying to be as vague as possible about the nature and motivation of the deity, the hypothesis loses any explanatory force, and so cannot be admitted on scientific grounds. Of course, as the example of quarks and neutrinos shows, scientific accounts change in response to new data and new theory. The default position can be overcome.

Since the greatest room for each person's growth is in the areas of his greatest strength, you should focus your training time and money on educating him about his strengths and figuring out ways to build on these strengths rather than on remedially trying to plug his 'skill gaps.' You will find that this one shift in emphasis will pay huge dividends. In one fell swoop you will sidestep three potential pitfalls to building a strengths-based organization: the 'I don't have the skills and knowledge I need' problem, the 'I don't know what I'm best at' problem, and the 'my manager doesn't know what I'm best at' problem.

Psychologists have devised some ingenious ways to help unpack the human "now." Consider how we run those jerky movie frames together into a smooth and continuous stream. This is known as the "phi phenomenon." The essence of phi shows up in experiments in a darkened room where two small spots are briefly lit in quick succession, at slightly separated locations. What the subjects report seeing is not a succession of spots, but a single spot moving continuously back and forth. Typically, the spots are illuminated for 150 milliseconds separated by an interval of fifty milliseconds. Evidently the brain somehow "fills in" the fifty-millisecond gap. Presumably this "hallucination" or embellishment occurs after the event, because until the second light flashes the subject cannot know the light is "supposed" to move. This hints that the human now is not simultaneous with the visual stimulus, but a bit delayed, allowing time for the brain to reconstruct a plausible fiction of what has happened a few milliseconds before. In a fascinating refinement of the experiment, the first spot is colored red, the second green. This clearly presents the brain with a problem. How will it join together the two discontinuous experiences—red spot, green spot—smoothly? By blending the colors seamlessly into one another? Or something else? In fact, subjects report seeing the spot change color abruptly in the middle of the imagined trajectory, and are even able to indicate exactly where using a pointer. This result leaves us wondering how the subject can apparently experience the "correct" color sensation before the green spot lights up. Is it a type of precognition? Commenting on this eerie phenomenon, the philosopher Nelson Goodman wrote suggestively: "The intervening motion is produced retrospectively, built only after the second flash occurs and projected backwards in time." In his book Consciousness Explained , philosopher Daniel Dennett points out that the illusion of color switch cannot actually be created by the brain until after the green spot appears. "But if the second spot is already 'in conscious experience,' wouldn't it be too late to interpose the illusory content between the conscious experience of the red spot and the conscious experience of the green spot?

The evidence showing that patients of color, black patients especially, are undertreated for pain in the United States is particularly robust. A 2012 meta-analysis of twenty years of published research found that, across all the studies, black patients were 22 percent less likely than whites to get any pain medication and 29 percent less likely to be treated with opioids. Latino patients were also 22 percent less likely to receive opioids. As is the case with gender disparities, racial/ethnic disparities were most pronounced 'when a cause of pain could not be readily verified.' But black patients were less likely to get opioids after traumatic injuries or surgery too. and the authors warned that the gap 'does not appear to be closing with time or existing policy initiatives.

After all, they were Yankees and no one expected anything better from Yankees. So their unthinking insults to her state, her people and their morals, glanced off and never struck deep enough to cause her more than a well-concealed sneer until an incident occurred which made her sick with rage and showed her, if she needed any showing, how wide was the gap between North and South and how utterly impossible it was to bridge it.

Each of our actions, our words, our attitudes is cut off from the ‘world,’ from the people who have not directly perceived it, by a medium the permeability of which is of infinite variation and remains unknown to ourselves; having learned by experience that some important utterance which we eagerly hoped would be disseminated … has found itself, often simply on account of our anxiety, immediately hidden under a bushel, how immeasurably less do we suppose that some tiny word, which we ourselves have forgotten, or else a word never uttered by us but formed on its course by the imperfect refraction of a different word, can be transported without ever halting for any obstacle to infinite distances … and succeed in diverting at our expense the banquet of the gods. What we actually recall of our conduct remains unknown to our nearest neighbor; what we have forgotten that we ever said, or indeed what we never did say, flies to provoke hilarity even in another planet, and the image that other people form of our actions and behavior is no more like that which we form of them ourselves, than is like an original drawing a spoiled copy in which, at one point, for a black line, we find an empty gap, and for a blank space an unaccountable contour. It may be, all the same, that what has not been transcribed is some non-existent feature, which we behold, merely in our purblind self-esteem, and that what seems to us added is indeed a part of ourselves, but so essential a part as to have escaped our notice. So that this strange print which seems to us to have so little resemblance to ourselves bears sometimes the same stamp of truth, scarcely flattering, indeed, but profound and useful, as a photograph taken by X-rays. Not that that is any reason why we should recognize ourselves in it. A man who is in the habit of smiling in the glass at his handsome face and stalwart figure, if you show him their radiograph, will have, face to face with that rosary of bones, labeled as being the image of himself, the same suspicion of error as the visitor to an art gallery who, on coming to the portrait of a girl, reads in his catalogue: “Dromedary resting.” Later on, this discrepancy between our portraits, according as it was our own hand that drew them or another, I was to register in the case of others than myself, living placidly in the midst of a collection of photographs which they themselves had taken while round about them grinned frightful faces, invisible to them as a rule, but plunging them in stupor if an accident were to reveal them with the warning: “This is you.

In a classic study of how names impact people’s experience on the job market, researchers show that, all other things being equal, job seekers with White-sounding first names received 50 percent more callbacks from employers than job seekers with Black-sounding names.5 They calculated that the racial gap was equivalent to eight years of relevant work experience, which White applicants did not actually have; and the gap persisted across occupations, industry, employer size – even when employers included the “equal opportunity” clause in their ads.6 With emerging technologies we might assume that racial bias will be more scientifically rooted out. Yet, rather than challenging or overcoming the cycles of inequity, technical fixes too often reinforce and even deepen the status quo. For example, a study by a team of computer scientists at Princeton examined whether a popular algorithm, trained on human writing online, would exhibit the same biased tendencies that psychologists have documented among humans. They found that the algorithm associated White-sounding names with “pleasant” words and Black-sounding names with “unpleasant” ones.7 Such findings demonstrate what I call “the New Jim Code”: the employment of new technologies that reflect and reproduce existing inequities but that are promoted and perceived as more objective or progressive than the discriminatory systems of a previous era.

No matter how old they get, we never want to cry in front of our children. We’d do anything for them; they never know because they don’t understand the immensity of something that is unconditional. A parent’s love is unbearable, reckless, irresponsible. They’re so small when they sleep in their beds and we sit beside them, shattered to pieces inside. It’s a lifetime of shortcomings, and, feeling guilty, we stick happy pictures up everywhere, but we never show the gaps in the photograph album, where everything that hurts is hidden away. The silent tears in darkened rooms. We lie awake, terrified of all the things that can happen to them, everything they might be subjected to, all the situations in which they could end up victims.

mother closes the trunk, holding back tears because she knows that if she lets out so much as a single one, they will never stop. No matter how old they get, we never want to cry in front of our children. We’d do anything for them; they never know because they don’t understand the immensity of something that is unconditional. A parent’s love is unbearable, reckless, irresponsible. They’re so small when they sleep in their beds and we sit beside them, shattered to pieces inside. It’s a lifetime of shortcomings, and, feeling guilty, we stick happy pictures up everywhere, but we never show the gaps in the photograph album, where everything that hurts is hidden away. The silent tears in darkened rooms. We lie awake, terrified of all the things that can happen to them, everything they might be subjected to, all the situations in which they could end up victims.

While it has been clear that right and wrong is nonexistent, I can't say that the concept of 'right or wrong' isn't needed. Because of ignorance, we still need authorities to set up rules and say 'vandalism is wrong, killing is wrong, et cetera.' People ask, "So, vandalism isn't wrong? Killing isn't wrong?" I answer, "Uneducated people say that vandalism is wrong. More educated people say that vandalism destroys the things that many people have spent their lives making. Uneducated people say that killing is wrong. More educated people say that killing takes away the only thing that matters which is lives." The more educated people are, the freer they will be, and the words 'right or wrong' won't be needed anymore. There was a bomb again in Brussels yesterday. I laughed. In the past, we had tyrannies because people didn't know what they could do and what they couldn't do. Now, we have democracy. Do we deserve democracy? Do we deserve freedom? No, we don't deserve freedom. We certainly don't deserve democracy. People are still voting for Donald Trump. And people still bomb other people. And socioeconomic gap is still high. Ignorance is still prevalent, so, if you ask me, "Do we deserve democracy? Do we deserve freedom? Do we deserve the world without authority, the world of truth, the world of peace?" I answer, "No, we don't." So, when you hear your president shouting 'Peace!', your government speaking 'Freedom!', ask them 'Are you educated?' Someone asks, "So, instead of 'right or wrong', you will now set up the rules about what we can do and we can't do?" I answer, "No. When will you understand? I stand for the world without authority, the world of truth, the world of peace. OK, forget the truth, forget my book, forget my paper. Let me expand science for you. You will let your fellow humans who are more educated than you set up the rules for you. When all the people are finally educated, please come back and reread my book and my paper, and when you finally understand them, please live in the world of no authority, the world of truth, the world of peace. Me? I probably have been gone by then." There is, however, a problem with how many educated people there are in the world. In my paper, I prove that right and wrong is nonexistent by showing that everything that exists is not wrong and is not right because everything that exists is the result of the thing(s) that happened before it and everything that exists can’t be right because future doesn’t exist. I wrote that terrorism is caused by capitalism (democracy) and capitalism (democracy) is caused by death. This paper was rejected. When educated people fail, there goes all your hope in the world.

The Genetics of Asthma lab is one of countless research projects at universities and biotech firms around the country hunting for the genes that are responsible for health disparities in America. They are supplementing a large body of published studies that claim to show that racial gaps in disease prevalence or mortality are caused by genetic differences. In addition to asthma, disparities in infant mortality, diabetes, cancer, and hypertension have all been attributed in the scientific literature to genetic vulnerability that varies according to race. Most of these studies never even examined the genotypes of research subjects, as Burchard’s lab does; they just infer a genetic source of racial differences when they fail to find another explanation. As interest in health disparities converges with the genomic science of race, a new brand of racial stereotyping is gaining hold in biomedical research.

That pain of wanting, the burning desire to possess what you lack, is one of the greatest allies you have. It is a force you can harness to create whatever you want in your life. When you took an honest look at your life back in the previous chapter and rated yourself as being either on the up curve or the down curve in seven different areas, you were painting a picture of where you are now. This diagram shows that as point A. Where you could be tomorrow, your vision of what’s possible for you in your life, is point B. And to the extent that there is a “wanting” gap between points A and B, there is a natural tension between those two poles. It’s like holding a magnet near a piece of iron: you can feel the pull of that magnet tugging at the iron. Wanting is exactly like that; it’s magnetic. You can palpably feel your dreams (B) tugging at your present circumstances (A). Tension is uncomfortable. That’s why it sometimes makes people uncomfortable to hear about how things could be. One of the reasons Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s famous “I have a dream” speech made such a huge impact on the world and carved such a vivid place in our cultural memory is that it made the world of August 1963 very uncomfortable. John Lennon painted his vision of a more harmonious world in the song Imagine. Within the decade, he was shot to death. Gandhi, Jesus, Socrates … our world can be harsh on people who talk about an improved reality. Visions and visionaries make people uncomfortable. These are especially dramatic examples, of course, but the same principle applies to the personal dreams and goals of people we’ve never heard of. The same principle applies to everyone, including you and me. Let’s say you have a brother, or sister, or old friend with whom you had a falling out years ago. You wish you had a better relationship, that you talked more often, that you shared more personal experiences and conversations together. Between where you are today and where you can imagine being, there is a gap. Can you feel it?

Sometimes Frankl’s ideas are inspirational, as when he explains how dying patients and quadriplegics come to terms with their fate. Others are aspirational, as when he asserts that a person finds meaning by “striving and struggling for a worthwhile goal, a freely chosen task.” He shows how existential frustration provoked and motivated an unhappy diplomat to seek a new, more satisfying career. Frankl also uses moral exhortation, however, to call attention to “the gap between what one is and what one should become” and the idea that “man is responsible and must actualize the potential meaning of his life.” He sees freedom and responsibility as two sides of the same coin. When he spoke to American audiences, Frankl was fond of saying, “I recommend that the Statue of Liberty on the East Coast be supplemented by a Statue of Responsibility on the West Coast.” To achieve personal meaning, he says, one must transcend subjective pleasures by doing something that “points, and is directed, to something, or someone, other than oneself … by giving himself to a cause to serve or another person to love.

Bohr is really doing what the Stoic allegorists did to close the gap between their world and Homer's, or what St. Augustine did when he explained, against the evidence, the concord of the canonical scriptures. The dissonances as well as the harmonies have to be made concordant by means of some ultimate complementarity. Later biblical scholarship has sought different explanations, and more sophisticated concords; but the motive is the same, however the methods may differ. An epoch, as Einstein remarked, is the instruments of its research. Stoic physics, biblical typology, Copenhagen quantum theory, are all different, but all use concord-fictions and assert complementarities. Such fictions meet a need. They seem to do what Bacon said poetry could: 'give some show of satisfaction to the mind, wherein the nature of things doth seem to deny it.' Literary fictions ( Bacon's 'poetry') do likewise. One consequence is that they change, for the same reason that patristic allegory is not the same thing, though it may be essentially the same kind of thing, as the physicists' Principle of Complementarity. The show of satisfaction will only serve when there seems to be a degree of real compliance with reality as we, from time to time, imagine it. Thus we might imagine a constant value for the irreconcileable observations of the reason and the imagination, the one immersed in chronos, the other in kairos; but the proportions vary indeterminably. Or, when we find 'what will suffice,' the element of what I have called the paradigmatic will vary. We measure and order time with our fictions; but time seems, in reality, to be ever more diverse and less and less subject to any uniform system of measurement. Thus we think of the past in very different timescales, according to what we are doing; the time of the art-historian is different from that of the geologist, that of the football coach from the anthropologist's. There is a time of clocks, a time of radioactive carbon, a time even of linguistic change, as in lexicostatics. None of these is the same as the 'structural' or 'family' time of sociology. George Kubler in his book The Shape of Time distinguished between 'absolute' and 'systematic' age, a hierarchy of durations from that of the coral reef to that of the solar year. Our ways of filling the interval between the tick and tock must grow more difficult and more selfcritical, as well as more various; the need we continue to feel is a need of concord, and we supply it by increasingly varied concord-fictions. They change as the reality from which we, in the middest, seek a show of satisfaction, changes; because 'times change.' The fictions by which we seek to find 'what will suffice' change also. They change because we no longer live in a world with an historical tick which will certainly be consummated by a definitive tock. And among all the other changing fictions, literary fictions take their place. They find out about the changing world on our behalf; they arrange our complementarities. They do this, for some of us, perhaps better than history, perhaps better than theology, largely because they are consciously false; but the way to understand their development is to see how they are related to those other fictional systems. It is not that we are connoisseurs of chaos, but that we are surrounded by it, and equipped for coexistence with it only by our fictive powers. This may, in the absence of a supreme fiction-or the possibility of it, be a hard fate; which is why the poet of that fiction is compelled to say From this the poem springs: that we live in a place That is not our own, and much more, nor ourselves And hard it is, in spite of blazoned days.

We are all poor; but there is a difference between what Mrs. Spark intends by speaking of 'slender means', and what Stevens called our poverty or Sartre our need, besoin. The poet finds his brief, fortuitous concords, it is true: not merely 'what will suffice,' but 'the freshness of transformation,' the 'reality of decreation,' the 'gaiety of language.' The novelist accepts need, the difficulty of relating one's fictions to what one knows about the nature of reality, as his donnée. It is because no one has said more about this situation, or given such an idea of its complexity, that I want to devote most of this talk to Sartre and the most relevant of his novels, La Nausée. As things go now it isn't of course very modern; Robbe-Grillet treats it with amused reverence as a valuable antique. But it will still serve for my purposes. This book is doubtless very well known to you; I can't undertake to tell you much about it, especially as it has often been regarded as standing in an unusually close relation to a body of philosophy which I am incompetent to expound. Perhaps you will be charitable if I explain that I shall be using it and other works of Sartre merely as examples. What I have to do is simply to show that La Nausée represents, in the work of one extremely important and representative figure, a kind of crisis in the relation between fiction and reality, the tension or dissonance between paradigmatic form and contingent reality. That the mood of Sartre has sometimes been appropriate to the modern demythologized apocalypse is something I shall take for granted; his is a philosophy of crisis, but his world has no beginning and no end. The absurd dishonesty of all prefabricated patterns is cardinal to his beliefs; to cover reality over with eidetic images--illusions persisting from past acts of perception, as some abnormal children 'see' the page or object that is no longer before them --to do this is to sink into mauvaise foi. This expression covers all comfortable denials of the undeniable--freedom --by myths of necessity, nature, or things as they are. Are all the paradigms of fiction eidetic? Is the unavoidable, insidious, comfortable enemy of all novelists mauvaise foi? Sartre has recently, in his first instalment of autobiography, talked with extraordinary vivacity about the roleplaying of his youth, of the falsities imposed upon him by the fictive power of words. At the beginning of the Great War he began a novel about a French private who captured the Kaiser, defeated him in single combat, and so ended the war and recovered Alsace. But everything went wrong. The Kaiser, hissed by the poilus, no match for the superbly fit Private Perrin, spat upon and insulted, became 'somehow heroic.' Worse still, the peace, which should instantly have followed in the real world if this fiction had a genuine correspondence with reality, failed to occur. 'I very nearly renounced literature,' says Sartre. Roquentin, in a subtler but basically similar situation, has the same reaction. Later Sartre would find again that the hero, however assiduously you use the pitchfork, will recur, and that gaps, less gross perhaps, between fiction and reality will open in the most close-knit pattern of words. Again, the young Sartre would sometimes, when most identified with his friends at the lycée, feel himself to be 'freed at last from the sin of existing'--this is also an expression of Roquentin's, but Roquentin says it feels like being a character in a novel. How can novels, by telling lies, convert existence into being? We see Roquentin waver between the horror of contingency and the fiction of aventures. In Les Mots Sartre very engagingly tells us that he was Roquentin, certainly, but that he was Sartre also, 'the elect, the chronicler of hells' to whom the whole novel of which he now speaks so derisively was a sort of aventure, though what was represented within it was 'the unjustified, brackish existence of my fellow-creatures.

This is precisely the test of true humility, that one no longer presumes to judge whether or not one is too miserable to be included in the call to sanctity but simply answers the merciful love of God by sinking down into adoration.” And this sinking down, this humility, leads to confidence. Hildebrand continues, “The question whether I feel worthy to be called is beside the point; that God has called is the one thing that matters.”15 Understanding that our emotions are not the measure of God’s call may go a long way to closing the confidence gap between men and women. In the May 2014 cover story of the Atlantic, journalists Katty Kay and Claire Shipman write about the sociological phenomenon in which men tend to overestimate their abilities while women tend to underestimate theirs, even when controlled evaluations show no difference in competence. Sociologists suggest many causes for the confidence gap—including even chemical differences—but the result of such a gap is that women’s self-doubt keeps them from acting, while men’s overconfidence leads them to act when they shouldn’t. Of course, this does not mean that all men have an inflated sense of their abilities or that some women couldn’t use a dose of humility. But the research does reveal how our emotions don’t always correspond with reality. And because they don’t, we can’t be led by them—especially when it comes to the Holy Spirit’s call on our life.

The impact of second-class treatment on black people’s bodies is devastating. It is manifested not only in the black–white death gap but also in the drastic measures required when chronic disease is left unmanaged. Black patients are less likely than whites to be referred to kidney and liver transplant wait lists and are more likely to die while waiting for a transplant.68 If they are lucky enough to get a donated kidney or liver, blacks are sicker than whites at the time of transplantation and less likely to survive afterward. “Take a look at all the black amputees,” said a caller to a radio show I was speaking on, identifying the remarkable numbers of people with amputated legs you see in poor black communities as a sign of health inequities. According to a 2008 nationwide study of Medicare claims, whites in Louisiana and Mississippi have a higher rate of leg amputation than in other states, but the rate for blacks is five times higher than for whites.69 An earlier study of Medicare services found that physicians were less likely to treat their black patients with aggressive, curative therapies such as hospitalization for heart disease, coronary artery bypass surgery, coronary angioplasty, and hip-fracture repair.70 But there were two surgeries that blacks were far more likely to undergo than whites: amputation of a lower limb and removal of the testicles to treat prostate cancer. Blacks are less likely to get desirable medical interventions and more likely to get undesirable interventions that good medical care would avoid.

In his book, Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War, Viet Thanh Nguyen writes that immigrant communities like San Jose or Little Saigon in Orange County are examples of purposeful forgetting through the promise of capitalism: “The more wealth minorities amass, the more property they buy, the more clout they accumulate, and the more visible they become, the more other Americans will positively recognize and remember them. Belonging would substitute for longing; membership would make up for disremembering.” One literal example of this lies in the very existence of San Francisco’s Chinatown. Chinese immigrants in California had battled severe anti-Chinese sentiment in the late 1800s. In 1871, eighteen Chinese immigrants were murdered and lynched in Los Angeles. In 1877, an “anti-Coolie” mob burned and ransacked San Francisco’s Chinatown, and murdered four Chinese men. SF’s Chinatown was dealt its final blow during the 1906 earthquake, when San Francisco fire departments dedicated their resources to wealthier areas and dynamited Chinatown in order to stop the fire’s spread. When it came time to rebuild, a local businessman named Look Tin Eli hired T. Paterson Ross, a Scottish architect who had never been to China, to rebuild the neighborhood. Ross drew inspiration from centuries-old photographs of China and ancient religious motifs. Fancy restaurants were built with elaborate teak furniture and ivory carvings, complete with burlesque shows with beautiful Asian women that were later depicted in the musical Flower Drum Song. The idea was to create an exoticized “Oriental Disneyland” which would draw in tourists, elevating the image of Chinese people in America. It worked. Celebrities like Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, Ronald Reagan and Bing Crosby started frequenting Chinatown’s restaurants and nightclubs. People went from seeing Chinese people as coolies who stole jobs to fetishizing them as alluring, mysterious foreigners. We paid a price for this safety, though—somewhere along the way, Chinese Americans’ self-identity was colored by this fetishized view. San Francisco’s Chinatown was the only image of China I had growing up. I was surprised to learn, in my early twenties, that roofs in China were not, in fact, covered with thick green tiles and dragons. I felt betrayed—as if I was tricked into forgetting myself. Which is why Do asks his students to collect family histories from their parents, in an effort to remember. His methodology is a clever one. “I encourage them and say, look, if you tell your parents that this is an academic project, you have to do it or you’re going to fail my class—then they’re more likely to cooperate. But simultaneously, also know that there are certain things they won’t talk about. But nevertheless, you can fill in the gaps.” He’ll even teach his students to ask distanced questions such as “How many people were on your boat when you left Vietnam? How many made it?” If there were one hundred and fifty at the beginning of the journey and fifty at the end, students may never fully know the specifics of their parents’ trauma but they can infer shadows of the grief they must hold.

You ask for something specific and that thing—that thing alone—is delivered to you as quickly as possible. You are only shown what you ask for. The Avid is faster at it than the Moviola, but the process is the same. That’s a drawback for me because your choices can then only be as good as your requests, and sometimes that is not enough. There is a higher level that comes through recognition: You may not be able to articulate what you want, but you can recognize it when you see it. What do I mean by that? Well, if you learn to speak a foreign language, you will find that there is a gap between how well you can speak it and how well you can understand it when it is spoken to you. A human being’s ability to understand a foreign language is always greater than his ability to speak it. And when you make a film, you are trying to learn a foreign language—it just happens to be a unique language that is only spoken by this one film. If you have to articulate everything, as you do with a ran-dom-access system like video/computer or Moviola/ assistant, you are limited by what and how much you can articulate and how good your original notes were. Whereas the advantage of the KEM’s linear system is that I do not always have to be speaking to it—there are times when it speaks to me. The system is constantly presenting things for consideration, and a sort of dialogue takes place. I might say, “I want to see that close-up of Teresa, number 317, in roll 45.” But I’ll put that roll on the machine, and as I spool down to number 317 (which may be hundreds of feet from the start), the machine shows me everything at high speed down to that point, saying in effect: “How about this instead? Or this?” And I find, more often than not, long before I get down to shot 317, that I’ve had three other ideas triggered by the material that I have seen flashing by me.

We would like to go and see the field that Millet…shows us in his Springtime, we would like Claude Monet to take us to Giverny, on the banks of the Seine, to that bend of the river which he hardly lets us distinguish through the morning mist. Yet in actual fact, it was the mere chance of a connection or family relation that give…Millet or Monet occasion to pass or to stay nearby, and to choose to paint that road, that garden, that field, that bend in the river, rather than some other. What makes them appear other and more beautiful than the rest of the world is that they carry on them, like some elusive reflection, the impression they afforded to a genius, and which we might see wandering just as singularly and despotically across the submissive, indifferent face of all the landscapes he may have painted.’ It should not be Illiers-Combray that we visit: a genuine homage to Proust would be to look at our world through his eyes, not look at his world through our eyes. To forget this may sadden us unduly. When we feel interest to be so dependent on the exact locations where certain great artists found it, a thousand landscapes and areas of experience will be deprived of possible interest, for Monet only looked at a few stretches of the earth, and Proust’s novel, though long, could not comprise more than a fraction of human experience. Rather than learn the general lesson of art’s attentiveness, we might seek instead the mere objects of its gaze, and would then be unable to do justice to parts of the world which artists had not considered. As a Proustian idolater, we would have little time for desserts which Proust never tasted, for dresses he never described, nuances of love he didn’t cover and cities he didn’t visit, suffering instead from an awareness of a gap between our existence and the realm of artistic truth and interest. The moral? There is no great homage we could pay Proust than to end up passing the same verdict on him as he passed on Ruskin, namely, that for all its qualities, his work must eventually also prove silly, maniacal, constraining, false and ridiculous to those who spend too long on it. ‘To make [reading] into a discipline is to give too large a role to what is only an incitement. Reading is on the threshold of the spiritual life; it can introduce us to it: it does not constitute it.

What if many listeners hold a profoundly different understanding of the concepts of God, truth, right and wrong, freedom, virtue, and sin? What if their approaches to reality, human nature and destiny, and human community are wholly different from our own? For decades, this has been the situation facing Christian churches in many areas around the world — places such as India, Iran, and Japan. Evangelism in these environments involves a lengthy process in which nonbelievers have to be invited into a Christian community that bridges the gap between Christian truth and the culture around it. Every part of a church’s life — its worship, community, public discourse, preaching, and education — has to assume the presence of nonbelievers from the surrounding culture. The aesthetics of its worship have to reflect the sensibilities of the culture and yet show how Christian belief shapes and is expressed through them. Its preaching and teaching have to show how the hopes of this culture’s people can find fulfillment only in Christ. Most of all, such a congregation’s believers have to reflect the demographic makeup of the surrounding community, thereby giving non-Christian neighbors attractive and challenging glimpses of what they would look like as Christians.

The God of the gaps argument for God fails when a plausible scientific account for a gap in current knowledge can be given. I do not dispute that the exact nature of the origin of the universe remains a gap in scientific knowledge. But I deny that we are bereft of any conceivable way to account for that origin scientifically.

As I looked over this curious document, I was particularly struck by a band of text across the bottom. It bore the title “Paperwork Reduction Act Notice” and read: The time needed to complete and file this form will vary depending on individual circumstances. The estimated average time is: The text then cheerfully concluded with a note that if I had comments “concerning the accuracy of these time estimates or suggestions for making this form simpler” the IRS would be happy to hear from me. It provided an address in Washington, D.C., where I could send my comments. The Paperwork Reduction Act, passed in 1980 in the waning days of the Carter administration and amended in 1995, is a classic example of structural deepening gone awry. The law was supposed to improve the efficiency of the U.S. federal government and lighten the burden of paperwork on citizens. In Brian Arthur’s terms, the additional complexity introduced by the law was supposed to improve government performance. But it has not worked. Although the U.S. Office of Management and Budget hired a special staff to review and approve every form and information request of every agency of the federal government, the estimated total time that the U.S. public invested each year fulfilling federal paperwork requirements rose from 4.7 billion hours in 1980 to 6.7 billion hours in 1996.14 More perversely, Form 1001 showed how the law makes government more inefficient and confusing to the average person. My first reaction to the notice at the bottom was to add up the time allotments. Was I really supposed to spend over six and a half hours on this form? The suggested times seemed so precise, and the total amount so daunting, that Form 1001 practically leapt at me with self-importance. And what records, exactly, was I supposed to spend four hours and thirty-two minutes keeping? I hadn’t a clue. In its entirety, Form 1001 resembled the jumble of hoses and wiring under the hood of a modern car, and the “Paperwork Reduction Act Notice” at the bottom was a particularly forbidding clump of complexity.

Page 36-38: Many, perhaps most, biblical verses prescribing religious acts and obligations are ‘understood’ by classical Judaism, and by present-day Orthodoxy, in a sense which is quite distinct from, or even contrary to, their literal meaning as understood by Christian or other readers of the Old Testament, who only see the plain text. … Apologetics of Judaism claim that the interpretation of the Bible, originated by the Pharisees and fixed in the Talmud, is always more liberal than the literal sense. But some of the examples below show that this is far from being the case. … In numerous cases general terms such as ‘thy fellow’, ‘stranger’, or even ‘man’ are taken to have an exclusivist chauvinistic meaning. The famous verse ‘thou shalt love thy fellow as thyself’ (Leviticus, 19:18) is understood by classical (and present-day Orthodox) Judaism as an injunction to love one’s fellow Jew, not any fellow human. Similarly, the verse ‘neither shalt thou stand against the blood of thy fellow’ (ibid., 16) is supposed to mean that one must not stand idly by when the life (‘blood’) of a fellow Jew is in danger; but, as will be seen in Chapter 5, a Jew is in general forbidden to save the life of a Gentile, because ‘he is not thy fellow’. The generous injunction to leave the gleanings of one’s field and vineyard ‘for the poor and the stranger’ (ibid., 9-10) is interpreted as referring exclusively to the Jewish poor and to converts to Judaism. … It is quite clear even from these examples that when Orthodox Jews today (or all Jews before about 1780) read the Bible, they are reading a very different book, with a totally different meaning, from the Bible as read by non-Jews or non-Orthodox Jews. … If such a communication gap exists in Israel, where people read Hebrew and can readily obtain correct information if they wish, one can imagine how deep is the misconception abroad, say among people educated in the Christian tradition. In fact, the more such a person reads the Bible, the less he or she knows about Orthodox Judaism.

Wealth is where history shows up in your wallet, where your financial freedom is determined by compounding interest on decisions made long before you were born. That is why the Black-white wealth gap is growing despite gains in Black education and earnings, and why the typical Black household owns only $17,600 in assets. Still, having little to no intergenerational wealth and facing massive systemic barriers, descendants of a stolen people have given America the touch-tone telephone, the carbon filament in the lightbulb, the gas mask, the modern traffic light, blood banks, the gas furnace, open-heart surgery, and the mathematics to enable the moon landing. Just imagine the possibilities if—in addition to rebuilding the pathways for all aspirants to the American Dream—we gave millions more Black Americans the life-changing freedom that a modest amount of wealth affords. A 2020 Citigroup report calculated that “if racial gaps for Blacks had been closed 20 years ago, U.S. GDP could have benefitted by an estimated $16 trillion.

The Ticklish Subject shows how today, in spite of the decline of the paternal metaphor and the inefficacy of ethical-political principles, global capitalist relations of production actually structure an ever more prohibitive and homogenized social reality: The true horror lies not in the particular content hidden beneath the universality of global Capital but, rather, in the fact that Capital is effectively an anonymous global machine blindly running its course; that there is in fact no particular Secret Agent animating it. The horror is not the (particular living) ghost in the (dead universal) machine, but the (dead universal) machine in the very heart of each (particular living) ghost. The conclusion to be drawn is thus that the problematic of multiculturalism (the hybrid coexistence of diverse cultural life-worlds) which imposes itself today is the form of appearance of its opposite, of the massive presence of capitalism as global world system: it bears witness to the unprecedented homogenization of today’s world. (Ticklish, p. 218) Multiculturalism – as well as postmodern efforts to reduce truth to “narratives” or “solidarity of belief” – simply further the interests of global capital. Žižek notes wryly that liberal pseudo-leftists really know all of this, but the problem is that they want to maintain their relatively comfortable lifestyles (bought at the expense of suffering in the Third World), and meanwhile to maintain the pose of revolutionary “beautiful souls.” Postmodern “post-politics” replaces the recognition of global ideological divisions with an emphasis on the collaboration of enlightened experts, technocrats, and specialists who negotiate to reach compromises. Such pragmatic “administration of social matters” accepts in advance the very global capitalist framework that determines the profitability of the compromise (Ticklish, p. 199). This suspension of the space for authentic politics leads to what Žižek calls “postmodern racism,” which ignores the universal rights of the political subject, proliferates divisions along cultural lines, and prevents the working class from politicizing its predicament. Even more seriously, according to Žižek, post-politics no longer merely represses the political, but forecloses it. Thus instead of violence as the neurotic “return of the repressed,” we see signs of a new kind of irrational and excessive violence. This new manifestation of violence results from the (psychotic) foreclosure of the Name of the Father that leads to a “return in the Real.” This violence is thus akin to the psychotic passage a l’acte: “a cruelty whose manifestations range from ‘fundamentalist’ racist and/or religious slaughter to the ‘senseless’ outbursts of violence by adolescents and the homeless in our megalopolises, a violence one is tempted to call Id-Evil, a violence grounded in no utilitarian or ideological reason” (Ticklish, p. 198). Where then, is the power to combat such foreclosure? The Ticklish Subject shows that the subversive power of subjectivity arises only when the subject annuls himself as subject: the acknowledgment of the integral division or gap in subjectivity allows the move from subjection to subjective destitution. Insofar as the subject concedes to the inherent failure of symbolic practices, he no longer presupposes himself as a unified subject. He acknowledges the nonexistence of the symbolic big Other and the monstrosity of the Real. Such acceptance involves the full assertion – rather than the effacement – of the gap between the Real and its symbolization. In contrast to the artificial object character of the imaginary capitalist ego, The Ticklish Subject discloses the “empty place” of the subject as a purely structural function, and shows that this functioning emerges only as the withdrawal from one’s substantial identity, as the disintegration of the “self” that is situated and defined within a communal universe of meaning.

The tradition among libraries of boasting about the number of volumes in their collection is well established, but surely, it is not aggregation that makes a library; it is dissemination. Perhaps libraries should bang on about how many volumes are on loan, are presently off crowding nightstands, and circulating through piles on the mantel, and weighing down purses. Yes, it is somewhat vexing to thread through the stacks of a library, only to discover an absence rather than the sought-after volume, but once the ire subsides, doesn’t one feel a sense of community? The gaps in a library are like footprints in the sand: They show us where others have gone before; they assure us we are not alone.

apparent. To counter apathy, most change agents focus on presenting an inspiring vision of the future. This is an important message to convey, but it’s not the type of communication that should come first. If you want people to take risks, you need first to show what’s wrong with the present. To drive people out of their comfort zones, you have to cultivate dissatisfaction, frustration, or anger at the current state of affairs, making it a guaranteed loss. “The greatest communicators of all time,” says communication expert Nancy Duarte—who has spent her career studying the shape of superb presentations—start by establishing “what is: here’s the status quo.” Then, they “compare that to what could be,” making “that gap as big as possible.” We can see this sequence in two of the most revered speeches in American history. In his famous inaugural address, President Franklin D. Roosevelt opened by acknowledging the current state of affairs. Promising to “speak the whole truth, frankly and boldly,” he described the dire straits of the Great Depression, only then turning to what could be, unveiling his hope of creating new jobs and forecasting, “This great nation . . . will revive and will prosper. . . . The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” When we recall Martin Luther King, Jr.’s, epic speech, what stands out is a shining image

Android Girl Just Wants to Have a Baby! The first thing I do when I wake up is run my hands over my body. I like to make sure all my wires are in place. I lotion my silicone shell and snap my hair helmet over my head. I once had a dream I was a real girl, but when I woke up I was still myself in my paleness under the halogen light. The saliva of androids emits a spectral resonance, barely sticky between freshly-gapped teeth. After they made me, the first thing they did was peel the cellophane from my eyes. I blinked once, twice, and cried because that's how you say you are alive before you are given language. They named each of my heartbeats on the oceanic monitor: Guanyin, Yama, Nuwa, Fuxi, Chang'e, Zao-Shen. I listened to them blur into one. The fetus carves for itself a hollowed vector, a fragile wetness. In utero, extension cords are umbilical. Before puberty, I did not know there was such a thing as dishonor. Diss-on- her. This is what they said when I began to drip petrol between my legs. A tension exists between ritual and proof, a fantasy and its execution. Since then, I have been to the emergency room twice. The first time for a suicide attempt, and the second time because my earring was swallowed up by my newly pierced earlobe overnight, and when I woke up, it was tangled in a helix of wires. The idea of dying doesn't scare me but the ocean does. I was once told that fish will swim up my orifices if I am no longer a virgin. Is anyone thinking about erotic magazines when they are not aroused, pubes parted harshly down the center like red seas? My body carries the weight of four hundred eggs. I rise from a weird slumber, let them drip into the bath. This is what I'll leave behind - tiny shards purer than me. I have always been afraid of pregnant women because of their power, and because I don't yet understand what it means to carry something stubborn and blossoming inside of me, screeching towards an exit. The ectoplasm is the telos for the wound. A trance state is induced when salt is poured on it, pixel by pixel. I wish they had made me into an octopus instead, because octopuses die after their eggs hatch and crawl out into the sea, and I want to know what it's like to set something free into the dark unknown and trust it to choose mercy. If you can generate aura in a non-place, then there is no such thing as an authentic origin. In Chinese, the word for mercy translates to my heart hurts for you. They say my heart continues beating even after it is dislocated from my body. The sound of its beating comes from the valves opening and closing like a portal - Guanyin, Yama, Nuwa, Fuxi, Chang'e, Zao-Shen. I first learned about love by watching a sex tape where a girl looks up from performing fellatio and says, show them the sunset. Her boyfriend pans the camera to the sky, which is tinged violet like a bruise. In this moment, the sky displaces her, all digital and hyped, and saturates the scene until it collapses on me too, its transient witness. I move in the space between belly ring and catharsis. That night I have a dream where I am a camgirl, but all I do on screen is wash my laundry. Everybody loves me because I am a real girl doing real girl things. What lives on the border between meditation and oblivion, static and flux, a pomegranate seed and an embryo? I set up my webcam in the corner of the room and play ambient music while I scrub my underwear, letting soap bubbles rise up from the sink, laughing when they overflow on the linoleum floor - my frizzy hair, my pockmarked skin, my face slick with sweat. A body with exit wounds. I ride the bright rails of an animal forgetting. And when I wake up, the sky is a mess of blue.

to have to show them how to “read like a detective and write like an investigative reporter.

We can dismiss one claim about the achievement gap outright: there is no credible evidence for innate differences in intelligence between racial groups. I will not summarize all the evidence against the hereditarian view, because Richard Nisbett has done so cogently in his book Intelligence and How to Get It. Here are a couple of the most telling findings: first, if there were genetic differences in intelligence between people of African and European descent, then the more ancestors a person has from Africa, the lower his or her IQ should be, on average. Several studies have tested this hypothesis by, for example, measuring people’s racial heritage with blood tests and correlating that with their IQs. Overwhelmingly, these studies show no relationship between racial ancestry and intelligence. Second, the gap between blacks and whites on IQ tests and standardized tests narrowed substantially in the fifteen-year period from 1975 to 1990, which is much too rapid a change to be accounted for by changes in the gene pool. And finally, there is ample evidence that environmental factors are completely responsible for the differences between the races in IQ and standardized tests.2

To counter apathy, most change agents focus on presenting an inspiring vision of the future. This is an important message to convey, but it’s not the type of communication that should come first. If you want people to take risks, you need first to show what’s wrong with the present. To drive people out of their comfort zones, you have to cultivate dissatisfaction, frustration, or anger at the current state of affairs, making it a guaranteed loss. “The greatest communicators of all time,” says communication expert Nancy Duarte—who has spent her career studying the shape of superb presentations—start by establishing “what is: here’s the status quo.” Then, they “compare that to what could be,” making “that gap as big as possible.” We can see this sequence in two of the most revered speeches in American history. In his famous inaugural address, President Franklin D. Roosevelt opened by acknowledging the current state of affairs. Promising to “speak the whole truth, frankly and boldly,” he described the dire straits of the Great Depression, only then turning to what could be, unveiling his hope of creating new jobs and forecasting, “This great nation . . . will revive and will prosper. . . . The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” When we recall Martin Luther King, Jr.’s, epic speech, what stands out is a shining image of a brighter future. Yet in his 16-minute oration, it wasn’t until the eleventh minute that he first mentioned his dream. Before delivering hope for change, King stressed the unacceptable conditions of the status quo. In his introduction, he pronounced that, despite the promise of the Emancipation Proclamation, “one hundred years later, the life of the Negro is still sadly crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination.” Having established urgency through depicting the suffering that was, King turned to what could be: “But we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt.” He devoted more than two thirds of the speech to these one-two punches, alternating between what was and what could be by expressing indignation at the present and hope about the future. According to sociologist Patricia Wasielewski, “King articulates the crowd’s feelings of anger at existing inequities,” strengthening their “resolve that the situation must be changed.” The audience was only prepared to be moved by his dream of tomorrow after he had exposed the nightmare of today.

energy. To be the most persuasive you have to be full of energy and you have to know how to transfer that energy to others. You have to be able to infuse them, motivate them and leave them feeling invigorated. It may be a simple case of eye contact, a physical touch or showing excitement in their responses o it may be something a little harder to do. Aster it and the world is your oyster.                      Clear Communication is Vital If a younger child cannot gap your concept in a way that they can easily communicate to others, then it is simply too complicated. You have to simplify things, break it down into easy to understand bites and communicate it as clear as crystal. If people don’t understand your message, you have no hope of persuading them.                      Be Prepared When you begin your attempt to persuade people, it is important that you start from a position of knowing – knowing more than they do about themselves and their surrounding situations. Do

Fernando crouches next to one of the beds and takes out a box. He digs inside it for a few seconds, then picks up a small, round disc. It is made of a pale metal that I saw often in Erudite headquarters but have never seen anywhere else. He carries it toward me on his palm. When I reach for it, he jerks it away from me. “Careful!” he says. “I brought this from headquarters. It’s not something we invented here. Were you there when they attacked Candor?” “Yes,” I say. “Right there.” “Remember when the glass shattered?” “Were you there?” I say, narrowing my eyes. “No. They recorded it and showed the footage at Erudite headquarters,” he says. “Well, it looked like the glass shattered because they shot at it, but that’s not really true. One of the Dauntless soldiers tossed one of these near the widows. It emits a signal that you can’t hear, but that will cause glass to shatter.” “Okay,” I say. “And how will that be useful to us?” “You may find that it’s rather distracting for people when all their windows shatter at once,” he says with a small smile. “Especially in Erudite headquarters, where there are a lot of windows.” “Right,” I say. “What else have you got?” says Christina. “The Amity will like this,” Cara says. “Where is it? Ah. Here.” She picks up a black box made of plastic, small enough for her to wrap her fingers around it. At the top of the box are two pieces of metal that look like teeth. She flips a switch at the bottom of the box, and a thread of blue light stretches across the gap between the teeth. “Fernando,” says Cara. “Want to demonstrate?” “Are you joking?” he says, his eyes wide. “I’m never doing that again. You’re dangerous with that thing.” Cara grins at him, and explains, “If I touched you with this stunner right now, it would be extremely painful, and then it would disable you. Fernando found that out the hard way yesterday. I made it so that the Amity would have a way of defending themselves without shooting anyone.” “That’s…” I frown. “Understanding of you.” “Well, technology is supposed to make life better,” she says. “No matter what you believe, there’s a technology out there for you.” What did my mother say, in that simulation? “I worry that your father’s blustering about Erudite has been to your detriment.” What if she was right, even if she was just a part of a simulation? My father taught me to see Erudite a particular way. He never taught me that they made no judgments about what people believed, but designed things for them within the confines of those beliefs. He never told me that they could be funny, or that they could critique their own faction from the inside. Cara lunges toward Fernando with the stunner, laughing when he jumps back. He never told me that an Erudite could offer to help me even after I killed her brother.

Nobody knows how old Petra is, but it was a thriving city when Abraham left Ur of the Chaldees, and for a full five thousand years it has had but that one entrance, through a gorge that narrows finally until only one loaded camel at a time can pass. Army after army down the centuries have tried to storm the place, and failed, so that even the invincible Alexander and the Romans had to fall back on the arts of friendship to obtain the key. We, the last invaders, came as friends, if only Grim could persuade the tyrant to believe it. The sun rose over the city just as we reached the narrowest part of the gut, Grim leading, and its first rays showed that we were using the bed of a watercourse for a road. Exactly in front of us, glimpsed through a twelve-foot gap between cliffs six hundred feet high, was a sight worth going twice that distance, running twice that risk, to see—a rose-red temple front, carved out of the solid valley wall and glistening in the opalescent hues of morning. Not even Burkhardt, who was the first civilized man to see the place in a thousand years, described that temple properly; because you can’t. It is huge—majestic—silent—empty—aglow with all the prism colors in the morning sun. And it seems to think.

Reformers have argued loudly and aggressively that our schools and students are failing. But the language they use is by necessity obscure and technocratic, because no matter how emphatically they argue that America’s students are falling behind their international counterparts, the data repeatedly show that when studies control for the effects of poverty, American students are competitive with the top percentile of students in the world. And a 2011 Stanford University study found that family income continues to be far and away the biggest determining factor of student achievement. Make your way through the jargon about achievement gaps and teacher accountability, and the problem becomes clear. Nearly a quarter of all children in the US live in poverty, among the highest rates in the developed world. Combine this with the fact that in America, poor students receive less educational funding than rich ones and you have a real civil rights issue: the U.S. government discriminates against poor children.

Those of us who have been with Jane the longest want to whisper to her, Look how that boy is seeing you. To show her how open he is to the possibility of who she might be, how attenuated to her gaps and omissions.

Samantha.” “Yes?” “Do you trust me?” “You know I don’t trust anyone.” “Then let me help you start by showing you how to trust your own body.

Jesus, show me the gaps between what I say I believe and how I live—and help me close those gaps. I want to effectively show Your amazing gospel truth.

Because my life would amount to nothing! It’s just gonna be pleasure without purpose! Okay, so you said that one of the things that would be in my version of a utopian world would be the termination of the gender and racial gap in STEM. You are right. That would be a part of a utopia! However, entering the simulation would not change the gap in real life, so I would merely be living in a whimsical illusion, not a pragmatic and realistic view of how things actually are. Plus, going into the simulation would sort of imply that I surrender to the racial and gender stereotypes. By entering the simulation and not choosing to face my fears of being stereotyped based on race and gender, I am merely showing that I am too scared to live in the world as it truly is and too scared to make a change in the real world. “You also said that fame for intellectual discoveries was part of my version of a utopia, and that is also true, but if I made all of my discoveries in the fantasy world, then my goal to be well-known in the world for intellectual discoveries would technically not be accomplished, because no one in real life would know my name. Some programmed beings would, but I would just be another human being in the real world. I wouldn’t be contributing to anything in real life!” Dad nodded in interest. “You’d rather be helpful than happy.” “Absolutely!

A Remarkable Woman She is so exquisite Even without makeup on her face She is very special Even if she lets others seem important She is selfless Even when the selfish surround her She offers a lot of love Even so, she needs it often She has a big heart Even though she appears small She lets others belong But she longs to be appreciated She adds value Despite her worth being undermined She is attentive Nonetheless, no one pays attention to her needs She is patient No matter how long it takes, she waits She is generous While no one could be willing to give She is forgiving Much as the worst was done against her She is trusting Albeit her trust was broken countless times She is wise In spite of being treated otherwise by some She works hard Notwithstanding that she requires rest She is helpful Yet, there is none to lend her a hand She makes life seem easy Whilst going through difficult times herself She stands by others Although there is no one to stand by her She chooses to be peaceful Against being somehow provoked She is calm Undeterred by what is not She is bold In defiance of tough battles ahead She shows bravery Still in the presence of adversity She is fearless Though she may seem helpless She is spirited Contrary to attempts to bring her down She is never destroyed Irrespective of the storms she faces sometimes She keeps moving forward Granting the hindrances along the way She stands in the gap And makes things happen She does not look down on others Regardless of some doing so to her She recognises those who shielded her on rainy days Whenever the sun shines upon her She keeps running her race Because she knows for her, grace is abundant She wears a smile always Since prayer keeps her in the right place She is an inspiration A pioneer of transformation Cheerleader for economic revolution How the world adores such A remarkable woman!

Ever since Leo's Instagram post, where he called out the sexism she'd experienced, reporters had actually gone back and started to examine it. Think pieces were published, and some old comments were retweeted and discussed by Twitter users with verified checkmarks. A whole shift happened with the conversation around her leaving the show because, apparently, it hadn't occurred to anyone that she could've left for her own mental health, versus personally ruining their TV viewing lives. In many ways, Leo's post had freed her from being the villain she'd been cast as. He forced their fans to reflect on their own behavior and take accountability for what they'd created. But they'd also taken stock of who Leo was, and now their fans thought he was the bad guy. She hadn't been sure how to bridge that gap. There were no real villains on the show. She and he were just people on TV, trying to further their own careers. Their actions didn't make them evil--- all they'd done was their jobs.

I rang out a couple more customers as I thought about it, and...he slowly walked up to the counter and set down two spools of line. I should really figure out what the point of one being thicker than the other was. “Hi, Mr. Rhodes,” I greeted him with a smile. He’d taken his sunglasses off and slid them through one of the gaps between the buttons of his work shirt. His gray eyes were steady on me as he said in that same uninterested, stern tone from before, “Hi.” I took the first package of fishing line and scanned it. “How is your day going?” “Fine.” I scanned the next package and figured I might as well go in for the kill since no one was around. “You remember that time you said you owed me?” A day ago. He didn’t say anything, and I peeked up at him. Since his eyebrows couldn’t talk, they formed a shape that told me exactly how distrustful he was feeling right then. “You do, okay. Well,” and I lowered my voice, “I was going to ask if I could redeem that favor.” Those gray eyes stayed narrowed. This was going well. I glanced around to make sure no one was listening and quickly said, “When you aren’t busy… could you teach me about all this stuff? Even if it’s just a little bit?” That got him to blink in what I was pretty sure was surprise. And to give him credit, he too lowered his voice as he asked slowly and possibly in confusion, “What stuff?” I tipped my head to the side. “All this stuff in here. Fishing, camping, you know, general knowledge I might need to work here so I have an idea of what I’m doing.” There was another blink. I might as well go for it. “Only when you aren’t super busy. Please. If you can, but if you can’t, that’s okay.” I’d just cry myself to sleep at night. No biggie. Worst case, I could hit up the library on my days off. Hang out in the grocery store parking lot and google information. I could make it work. I would, regardless. Dark, thick, black eyelashes dipped over his nice eyes, and his voice came out low and even. “You’re serious?” He thought I was shitting him. “Dead.” His head turned to the side, giving me a good view of his short but really pretty eyelashes. “You want me to teach you to fish?” he asked like he couldn’t believe it, like I’d asked him to… I don’t know, show me his wiener. “You don’t have to teach me to fish, but I wouldn’t be opposed to it. I haven’t been in forever. But more about everything else. Like, what is the point of these two different kinds of line? What are all the lures good for? Or are they called flies? Do you really need those gadgets to start a fire?” I knew I was whispering as I said, “I have so many random questions, and not having internet makes it hard to look things up. Your total is $40.69, by the way.” My landlord blinked for about the hundredth time at that point, and I was pretty sure he was either confused or stunned as he pulled his wallet out and slipped his card through the reader, his gaze staying on me for the majority of the time in that long, watchful way that was completely different from the way the older men had been eyeballing me earlier. Not sexually or with interest, but more like I was a raccoon and he wasn’t sure if I had rabies or not. In a weird way, I preferred it by a lot. I smiled. “It’s okay if not,” I told him, handing over a small paper bag with his purchases inside. The tall man took it from me and let his eyes wander to a spot to my left. His Adam’s apple bobbed; then he took a step back and sighed. “Fine. Tonight, 7:30. I’ve got thirty minutes and not one longer.” What! “You’re my hero,” I whispered. He looked at me, then blinked. “I’ll be there, thank you,” I told him. He grunted, and before I could thank him again, he was out of there so fast I had no chance to check out his butt in those work pants of his.

once they weren’t cold anymore, they could no longer imagine it. This is a perspective gap: when we’re not experiencing a psychologically or physically intense state, we dramatically underestimate how much it will affect us. For instance, evidence shows that physicians consistently think their patients are feeling less pain than they actually are. Without being in a state of pain themselves, physicians can’t fully realize what it’s like to be in that state.

When my father interviewed kids for Candid Camera, his favorite part of his work, he had a challenge. How could he quickly break through the intimidation felt by a little child toward a big unknown adult? He did so by lighting a match and feigning difficulty in blowing it out. Balanced on the edge of a preschool-size chair, he would huff and puff with theatrical overacting, turning finally to the youngster and saying, “Can you help me?” And they would. Moments later, my dad and his new friend would be chatting about guardian angels, the wonders of spaghetti, money, and a host of other delightful topics. The gap my father was closing is called the “power distance,” a concept developed by Professor Geert Hofstede. This phenomenon can cause people to avoid or defer to those they feel are more powerful and, in doing so, to shut down channels of honest communication. By asking for help, my father broke the power distance and opened a gateway to closeness with each and every match blower. If you lead at least a few people, this section is for you. And in order to develop the closeness needed to build a white space team, you’ll need to address the same lopsided dynamics as my father. You must ask for help, step out of having all the answers, and truly enlist a wide spectrum of input to move toward the changes you want. Speak to people about their needs, desires, and enthusiasms. And make it more than a gesture, authentically being open to using the ideas that spring from these conversations. The following steps will show you how.

Research shows that applying implementation intentions increases your self-control, even when you’re in bad environments.27 Rather than wearing out your willpower and watching yourself fail, you have a pre-planned response that takes the guesswork out of your decision-making. When you have a pre-plan for how you’ll deal with obstacles, then you won’t get thrown off when you’re in a situation and tempted to sabotage your goals.

Come on stub-ears, you can do better than that!" Steel danced and shone before Elly as she desperately blocked strike after strike, her attacker toying with her, relentless in aggression both physical and verbal. He was taller than her, lighter than her, and he moved with true elven grace, gliding around her with his elegantly curved and vicious sword. He lashed out with a practised flick of his wrist that she struggled to read and barely caught with her blade, but he was already moving on, his sword flowing around, a killing blow coming straight for her neck if she did not move– "Sorry stub-ears, I'll try to slow down…" A feint! He could have ended it there, and yet it wasn't enough; no, he had to humiliate her. Before her cheeks could redden he was on her again, thrusting, striking at her thighs, her shoulders, the sting of the metal slowing her down and throwing her off-balance. Elly focused on protecting what she could, guarding her head and torso, anger building in her, wrestling with her for control of the light sword that was her best defence against– "Death!" The tip of his blade was under her raised arm, against the gap in her breastplate beside her triceps. And at once he sprang back, swung his nimble weapon in a lazy figure-of-eight, rolled his shoulders less from tension and more to perform his ease, his casualness, the lack of challenge in fighting her. Where the flat of his blade had stung, she throbbed. "Good showing. How about best of three?

Light can pass through the translucent eggs, and chemicals can diffuse into them. But vibrations are what really matter. They pass into the eggs and into the embryos, which can distinguish between bad vibes and benign ones without any previous experience of either. A bite from a snake will trigger hatching. Rain, wind, and footsteps will not. Even when a mild earthquake rattled Warkentin’s pond, the embryos didn’t react. By recording different vibrations and playing them back at the eggs, Warkentin showed that they’re attuned to pitch and rhythm. Falling raindrops produce a steady pitter-patter of short, high-frequency vibrations. Attacking snakes produce lower frequencies and more complicated patterns, with prolonged bouts of chewing punctuated by periods of stillness. If Warkentin edited gaps of stillness into rainfall recordings to make them feel more snake-like, the tadpoles found them scarier and were more likely to hatch. They can clearly sense the world before entering it, and they can use that information to defend themselves. They have agency. They have an Umwelt.

A woman’s honour is usually tied with curbing her sexuality; similarly a man’s masculinity is about flaunting it. While a woman must protect her honour by keeping her legs closed, quite literally, a man must demonstrate his manhood by putting on a show of his sexuality. How can the one physical act that bridges the gap between men and women be so disparate in its meaning for the two sexes?

Amazon’s founder and CEO, Jeff Bezos, clearly agrees, as a 2012 video interview shows. “I very frequently get the question ‘What’s going to change in the next ten years?’” he said. “I almost never get the question ‘What’s not going to change in the next ten years?’ And I submit to you that that second question is actually the more important of the two. Because you can build a business strategy around the things that are stable in time.

All I can do is try to draw closer to your uniqueness, to feel linked by the small overlaps between us. This is how empathy works. It’s how differentness starts to weave itself into togetherness. Empathy fills the gaps between us, but never closes them entirely. We get pulled into the lives of others by virtue of what they feel safe and able to show us, and the generosity with which we are able to meet them. Piece by piece, person by person, we begin to apprehend the world in more fullness.

This is a perspective gap: when we’re not experiencing a psychologically or physically intense state, we dramatically underestimate how much it will affect us. For instance, evidence shows that physicians consistently think their patients are feeling less pain than they actually are. Without being in a state of pain themselves, physicians can’t fully realize what it’s like to be in that state.

Your Report Has Made It Clear That She Wants a Promotion You don’t think it’s likely to happen within the next six months. If you wait until the next performance review to tell her, she’ll have spent months wondering if she got the promotion and then be disappointed. Instead, if you say right away, “I understand that you’d like to work toward a promotion, but here are the gaps I’m seeing . . . ,” you’re showing that you want to help her reach her goal. Spell out what your promotion criteria are. Over the next few months, coach her and give her frequent feedback on how she’s doing relative to those expectations. That way, she’ll never have to wonder.

The faithful living out of the tropos of the incarnate Christ is the challenge that faces us in all these areas, and what it entails (so Bonhoeffer and Przywara alike insist) is the patient embrace of finitude, the refusal of defensive anxiety about the Church’s privilege or influence, the recognition and valuing of the unspectacular, in life and art, as the site where we may expect the paradoxical radiance of the infinite to become visible. Christian ethics is not about dramatic and solitary choices for individual good or evil but the steady building of a culture of durable mutuality and compassion. Christian aesthetics is not about genius-driven or near-magical transmutations of this world into some imagined semblance of divine glory and abundance, but the gift of unlocking in the most ordinary setting or object the ‘grace of sense’ that allows it to be seen with (to use the word again) durable, attentive love. And Christian metaphysics? Przywara’s work clearly understands the role of Christology in developing a schematic and consistent view of analogy, depending on the recognition that whatever comes into intellectual focus in our human understanding is always already implicated in relations that make its life more than a single and containable phenomenon but something opening out on to an unlimited horizon of connection... ...authentic theology shows itself, in self-forgetting and self-dispossessing practice. The theology that we write and discuss has no substance independently of this formal content, this knowledge of how to ‘enact Christ’ in the world. And it is because of this that Przywara resists a reading of St John of the Cross’s spiritual teaching which simply identifies the ‘night of spirit’ with the negation of the creaturely. Put like this, it can suggest yet another form of the competitive ontological model which we struggle to escape from – more world, less God, and vice versa. But St John properly read – giving priority to the poems rather than the commentaries on them – characterizes the night as participation in the act of Christ the Word. The darkness of our prayer is not the result of a straightforward gap between what we can know as creatures and the unknowable depths of God, the infinite dissimilarity between finite and infinite; it is our assimilation into the infinite’s self-unveiling in the dark places of the finite world, in the wordless helplessness of the cross. And because it is in this way an entry deeper and deeper into the centre of God’s activity, it is a journey into the ‘excess’ of divine light, the overflowing of God’s absolute abundance, which is itself nothing else than agape directed towards the life and joy of the other – in the divine life and in the relation of divine to non-divine life.

Sixty years ago, Einstein spoke with the voice of God. Thirty years ago, Walter Cronkite every day told us “the way it is,” and the New York Times delivered to our doorsteps “All the news that’s fit to print.” Twenty years ago, Alan Greenspan applied infallible formulas to ensure our prosperity. When I was a boy and factual disputes arose in my family, they were settled by consulting the Encyclopedia Britannica. Back then, the world of information was shaped like a pyramid. Those at the top decided signal from noise, knowledge from fraud, certainty from uncertainty. The public and mass media embraced this arrangement. All things being equal, authority was trusted and relied on. Today we drown in data, yet thirst for meaning. That world-transforming tidal wave of information has disproportionately worsened the noise-to-signal ratio. According to Taleb, “The more data you get, the less you know what’s going on.”67 And the more you know, the less you trust, as the gap between reality and the authorities’ claims of competence becomes impossible to ignore. If the IPCC climatologists fear a dispute with skeptics, how can they be believed? If the Risk Commission seismologists can’t warn us about catastrophic risk, who will? As I tried to show in this chapter, the public has lost faith in the people on whom it relied to make sense of the world—journalists, scientists, experts of every stripe. By the same process, the elites have lost faith in themselves.

school stood. He wished he’d had the guts to choose something honest, like the entry Andi had been bold enough to submit. While most students, like him, had produced anodyne statements calculated not to offend, she had mused about the private nature of journaling and how carefully curated everyone’s senior page actually was, before concluding with a poem: These Best Years Bridging the gap between childhood and adulthood Prepared, precisely prepped, on the path to our predestination Are we about to wake up? Or have we just fallen asleep? Every time Ian read her senior page, he thought about one of his entries from freshman year—the day he met her, September 20, 1993. A new girl started today. Her name’s Andi Bloom. She just showed up in algebra

However, in the early phase of software development, it’s possible to shake free of these restrictions, especially when teams are small and the hunt for ideas is still on. This was the scenario when Richard joined us at Apple. We were still looking for an organizing concept to kick-start our web browser effort, and Richard showed us how. Not only that, he proved that a 10x productivity gap is a conservative upper limit on the possible in early stage software. Indeed, Richard did more to move our project ahead in two person-days of work than Don and I had done in the preceding twelve person-weeks. That’s more like a 30x gap.

Every one of us gets through the tough times because somebody is there, standing in the gap to close it for us.

This session showed intriguing objective evidence for a mind-matter interaction effect, but an unusual subjective event also happened that is worth mentioning. For this session, knowing that the planned participant was a highly experienced meditator, I decided to have it filmed for future reference. I asked two videographers to shoot the session as it unfolded. They set up their cameras and started filming, the meditator prepared himself mentally for about ten minutes, then signaled that he was ready to begin. I started the experiment and it proceeded without incident until about halfway through the session. Then for a few seconds I felt strangely disoriented, as though all my mental activity suddenly stopped. I shook off this odd sensation, and the disorientation soon passed. The session ended, I thanked the meditator, and he left. Then I spent a few minutes discussing the session with the two videographers as they gathered up their gear. I didn’t attribute much meaning to that moment when my mind was strangely suspended, but I’ve learned that when studying effects that span the subjective-objective gap, it’s important to pay attention to internal states. So I mentioned it to the videographers, and they were both taken aback. It turns out that they had independently experienced the same phenomenon. We had all shared a moment when our minds seemed to go blank. At this point I didn’t know yet whether the objective evidence collected during that session was significant or not. When I found that it was, I contacted the meditator, who by then was back at his ashram in India. I asked if he felt that he was being successful in doing something during the session. He said yes, but that it took until about halfway through the session before he figured out how to do it. As an anecdote, this episode doesn’t count as scientific evidence. But it’s still interesting that the experiment obtained objective evidence of a mind-matter interaction effect at precisely the same time that three people unexpectedly felt something strange occur.

This session showed intriguing objective evidence for a mind-matter interaction effect, but an unusual subjective event also happened that is worth mentioning. For this session, knowing that the planned participant was a highly experienced meditator, I decided to have it filmed for future reference. I asked two videographers to shoot the session as it unfolded. They set up their cameras and started filming, the meditator prepared himself mentally for about ten minutes, then signaled that he was ready to begin. I started the experiment and it proceeded without incident until about halfway through the session. Then for a few seconds I felt strangely disoriented, as though all my mental activity suddenly stopped. I shook off this odd sensation, and the disorientation soon passed. The session ended, I thanked the meditator, and he left. Then I spent a few minutes discussing the session with the two videographers as they gathered up their gear. I didn’t attribute much meaning to that moment when my mind was strangely suspended, but I’ve learned that when studying effects that span the subjective-objective gap, it’s important to pay attention to internal states. So I mentioned it to the videographers, and they were both taken aback. It turns out that they had independently experienced the same phenomenon. We had all shared a moment when our minds seemed to go blank. At this point I didn’t know yet whether the objective evidence collected during that session was significant or not. When I found that it was, I contacted the meditator, who by then was back at his ashram in India. I asked if he felt that he was being successful in doing something during the session. He said yes, but that it took until about halfway through the session before he figured out how to do it. As an anecdote, this episode doesn’t count as scientific evidence. But it’s still interesting that the experiment obtained objective evidence of a mind-matter interaction effect at precisely the same time that three people unexpectedly felt something strange occur. The Michelson interferometer experiment suggested that an observed optical system does behave differently than an unobserved system, and in a way that’s suggestive of the quantum observer effect. In other words, we—like others before us—had once again found evidence for a direct mind-matter interaction. This was interesting, but it wasn’t enough. What we wanted to know was whether mind-matter interaction effects were consistent with the notion that consciousness “collapses” the quantum wave function. If it turned out that this was the case, then the most successful physical theory in history might contain the seeds of psychokinesis within it.

the word desirable. Of course, we learn later just how seductive that can be. Early rabbinic literature showed a sexual connotation to chamed as chamdam, using it as a reference to a lustful person. Chimmud is even blunter as a reference to a sexual appetite. As a verb chamed means to be excited or hot. Hebrew Jewish grammarian David Kimhi (Radak) states that it is no coincidence that the word cham (hot), makes up two thirds of the root. He points out that lechem chamudot is taken by some to mean fresh, hot tasty bread. So what I am drawing from this? Is Solomon’s beloved saying she is sitting under the apple tree with one hot number? Well, there is much more to my research on this verse that I cannot put into a short study, so I am leaving open a number of gaps, but let me just share my conclusion on Song of Solomon 2:3. The young lover is making a very distinct play on the word chamed by bringing it into association with the apple tree among the trees of the woods. This is a direct reference to the forbidden fruit of the Garden of Eden. She sits under her beloved’s shadow with covertness or chamed eating this forbidden fruit. You see the word chamed ultimately has the idea of intimacy or totally possessing and consuming something. This fruit is not forbidden so long as she consumes it within the bounds of intimacy born out of love with her beloved. Just as a sexual relationship is forbidden outside

As research on willpower has become a hot topic in scientific journals and newspaper articles, it has started to trickle into corporate America. Firms such as Starbucks—and the Gap, Walmart, restaurants, or any other business that relies on entry-level workers—all face a common problem: No matter how much their employees want to do a great job, many will fail because they lack self-discipline. They show up late. They snap at rude customers. They get distracted or drawn into workplace dramas. They quit for no reason.

let’s come back to the findings of that Perception Gap study. The one that showed us that we are really, really bad at knowing what the other side—the othered side—really thinks.