Ideas For Senior Quotes

I still had this idea that there was a whole world of marvelous golden people somewhere, as far ahead of me as the seniors at Rye when I was in the sixth grade; people who knew everything instinctively, who made their lives work out the way they wanted without even trying, who never had to make the best of a bad job because it never occured to them to do anything less then perfectly the first time. Sort of heroic super-people, all of them beautiful and witty and calm and kind, and I always imagined that when I did find them I'd suddenly know that I Belonged among them, that I was one of them, that I'd been meant to be one of them all along, and everything in the meantime had been a mistake; and they'd know it too. I'd be like the ugly duckling among the swans.

In this universe ideas are senior to facts, and hence facts are stressed.

In this universe, ideas are senior to facts.

Ideas are senior to any information or any prior cause.

You still felt that life was passing you by? Sort of. I still had this idea that there was a whole world of marvelous golden people somewhere, as far ahead of me as the seniors at Rye when I was in sixth grade; people who knew everything instinctively, who made their lives work out the way they wanted without even trying, who never had to make the best of a bad job because it never occurred to them to do anything less than perfectly the first time. Sort of heroic super-people, all of them beautiful and witty and calm and kind, and I always imagined that when I did find them I'd suddenly know that I belonged among them, that I was one of them, that I'd been meant to be one of them all along, and everything in the meantime had been a mistake; and they'd know it too. I'd be like the ugly duckling among the swans.

Gwen smiled. "Hardly. Bedraggled is being in the full throes of nicotine withdrawal, and after a week on a bus with a group of senior citizens, falling into a cave, and landing on a body." "And then getting tossed back a few centuries, with no idea of what's going on," Chloe agreed. "Naked, too, weren't you?" Gwen nodded wryly. Gabby blinked. "I gave you my plaid," Drustan protested indignantly.

Your ideas are bound to forces of which you have no control due to the fact that you've voluntarily submitted your freedom of though to the perception steering censorship of Google, Facebook and other dragnet surveillance capitalists.

It's been well-documented that there is a growing sense of entitlement among young people. I have certainly seen that in my classrooms. So many graduating seniors have this notion that they should get hired because of their creative brilliance. Too many are unhappy with the idea of starting at the bottom. My advice has always been: 'You ought to be thrilled you got a job in the mailroom. And when you get there, here's what you do: Be really great at sorting mail.' No one wants to hear someone say: 'I'm not good at sorting mail because the job is beneath me.' No job should be beneath us. And if you can't (or won't) sort mail, where is the proof that you can do anything?

My mom believed that you make your own luck. Over the stove she had hung these old, maroon painted letters that spell out, “MANIFEST.” The idea being if you thought and dreamed about the way you wanted your life to be -- if you just envisioned it long enough, it would come into being. But as hard as I had manifested Astrid Heyman with her hand in mine, her blue eyes gazing into mine, her lips whispering something wild and funny and outrageous in my ear, she had remained totally unaware of my existence. Truly, to even dream of dreaming about Astrid, for a guy like me, in my relatively low position on the social ladder of Cheyenne Mountain High, was idiotic. And with her a senior and me a junior? Forget it. Astrid was just lit up with beauty: shining blonde ringlets, June sky blue eyes, slightly furrowed brow, always biting back a smile, champion diver on the swim team. Olympic level. Hell, Astrid was Olympic level in every possible way.

A final irony has to do with the idea of political responsibility. Christians are urged to vote and become involved in politics as an expression of their civic duty and public responsibility. This is a credible argument and good advice up to a point. Yet in our day, given the size of the state and the expectations that people place on it to solve so many problems, politics can also be a way of saying, in effect, that the problems should be solved by others besides myself and by institutions other than the church. It is, after all, much easier to vote for a politician who champions child welfare than to adopt a baby born in poverty, to vote for a referendum that would expand health care benefits for seniors than to care for an elderly and infirmed parent, and to rally for racial harmony than to get to know someone of a different race than yours. True responsibility invariably costs. Political participation, then, can and often does amount to an avoidance of responsibility.

The idea of the rule of God in every generation is expressed in the presence and continuance of irrevocable norms and core values for all areas of life, people, and nations.

Black Meg, the senior nanny, who patiently allowed Tiffany to milk her and then, carefully and deliberately, put a hoof in the milk bucket. That’s a goat’s idea of getting to know you. A goat is a worrying thing if you’re used to sheep, because a goat is a sheep with brains.

... "Having it all" is the phrase of a culture that, as Adam Phillips implies in 'Missing Out', is tyranized by the idea of its own potential. A few generations ago, most people didn't wake up in the morning and fret about whether or not they were living their lives to the fullest. Freedom has always been built into the American experiment, of course, but the freedom to take off and go rock-climbing for the afternoon, or to study engineering, or even to sneak in ten minutes for ourselves in the morning to read the paper- these kinds of freedoms were not, until very recently, built into our private universes of anticipation. It's important to remember that.

Except for a roll of Harding's eyes, everyone ignored me, which is the way I liked it when I had to hang around with senior officers. They had a way of thinking up ideas that got you killed and them promoted.

If you’re going to build a strong culture, it’s paramount to make diversity one of your core values. This is what separates Bridgewater’s strong culture from a cult: The commitment is to promoting dissent. In hiring, instead of using similarity to gauge cultural fit, Bridgewater assesses cultural contribution.* Dalio wants people who will think independently and enrich the culture. By holding them accountable for dissenting, Dalio has fundamentally altered the way people make decisions. In a cult, core values are dogma. At Bridgewater, employees are expected to challenge the principles themselves. During training, when employees learn the principles, they’re constantly asked: Do you agree? “We have these standards that are stress tested over time, and you have to either operate by them or disagree with them and fight for better ones,” explains Zack Wieder, who works with Dalio on codifying the principles. Rather than deferring to the people with the greatest seniority or status, as was the case at Polaroid, decisions at Bridgewater are based on quality. The goal is to create an idea meritocracy, where the best ideas win. To get the best ideas on the table in the first place, you need radical transparency. Later, I’m going to challenge some of Dalio’s principles, but first I want to explain the weapons he has used to wage a war on groupthink.

Give serious thought to why your company should care about your strategy. Specifically, find problems that the board wants to be solved. What are senior managers scared of? Part of becoming a credible strategic thinker is learning effective approaches to selling ideas for your situation. You’ll know that you’re getting better at selling (or pitching) strategy when managers start coming to you when there is strategic thinking to be done.

Honestly, I had no idea how to respond. My senior year of college I’d taken a seminar titled Public Education: Situations and Strategies. I thought about emailing my professor, maybe suggest some new topics and help him get current. Maybe he’d invite me back as a guest lecturer. He’d probably expect some strategies along with the situations though, so I guess that wouldn’t work, but whatever.

So you’ll get a job, right? That’s what people do after college.” But as soon as I said it I understood that I was supposed to be Celeste’s job. The poetry courses and the senior thesis on Trollope were all well and good but I was what she’d been studying. She meant to keep the tiny apartment clean and make dinner and eventually have a baby. Women had read about their liberation in books but not many of them had seen what it looked like in action. Celeste had no idea what she was supposed to do with a life that was entirely her own.

We long for experiences “of profound connection with others,” he writes, “of deep understanding of natural phenomena, of love, of being profoundly moved by music or tragedy, or doing something new and innovative.” Just as important, we long for esteem and pride, “a self that happiness is a fitting response to.” Implicit in Nozick’s experiment is the idea that happiness should be a by-product, not a goal. Many of the ancient Greeks believed the same. To Aristotle, eudaimonia (roughly translated as “flourishing”) meant doing something productive. Happiness could only be achieved through exploiting our strengths and our potential. To be happy, one must do, not just feel.

It was a happy day for me when that astronaut left the office, but in retrospect, I learned a lot from him. For example, that if you need to make a strong criticism, it’s a bad idea to lash out wildly; be surgical, pinpoint the problem rather than attack the person. Never ridicule a colleague, even with an offhand remark, no matter how tempting it is or how hilarious the laugh line. The more senior you are, the greater the impact your flippant comment will have. Don’t snap at the people who work with you. When you see red, count to 10.

Self-discipline is central to the leadership of institutions and to reforming them. A favorite saying of mine is "Never miss a good chance to shut up." I won't tell you how many times in a congressional hearing I just wanted to scream. How often in the White House Situation Room I wanted to say, "That's the dumbest idea I ever heard." How often in a briefing at the CIA or the Pentagon I wanted to tell someone where to stick his PowerPoint slides. Senior leaders want to blow off steam-shout at people- all the time. But to be an effective leader, you have to suppress those urges.

Unlike most CEOs, when trying something new, Jeff Bezos and his senior team (known as the S Team) don’t try to develop elaborate financial projections or return on investment calculations. “You can’t put into a spreadsheet how people are going to behave around a new product,” Bezos will say.

Guilt is not an intrinsically helpful emotion for future decision-making. And often the spiral of guilt and shame can lead criminals to remain criminals. This idea was so intriguing to me, for personal reasons that should arlready be clear, that I later took it on for my undergraduate senior thesis. My paper, which I turned in six weeks early and for which I received an A, was titled "Remorse and Absolution: Peas in a Pod or Dangerous Bunkmates?

Pico,” Yuan mutters. “I’m listening, Yuan,” Pico’s voice resonates in the library. “Was backing away cowardice?” “About your old research?” Pico begins, “No, you weren’t a coward. Everything needs caution. But Ruem was taking great risks. Risking one’s own life in the war field is not the same as risking the lives of millions. Even if the goal is good.” “Do you think his goal was good?” Yuan asks. “Cosmic energy is the Source, the fabric that forms the universe. Now you, humans, call it prana. You learned to absorb it by being willing to absorb it. It evolves you, yes. Your mind and your body are designed for this purpose, true. I can’t deny that it could bring a greater good. But, theoretically good. Ruem, however, his idea is dark; it’s always been dark. Artificially forcing people into evolution is risky.” Pico explains—now it’s not Senior or Junior anymore. Now they both are one. For that, each of them had to face a small death. A death of the individual, yes. But for the both, it’s a new life, a connected life. A whole life.

The 20th century, the author observes, fostered the idea that fulfillment is possible on Earth.

Next question.” He swipes the screen of his phone, but he’s not looking at it; he’s staring at me. Trying to intimidate me. Trying to see who’ll blink first. “Did you leave DC because (A) you couldn’t find any hotties to make out with? Or (B) your East Coast boyfriend is an ankle buster and you’d heard about legendary West Coast D, so you had to find out for yourself if the rumors were true?” he says with a smirk. “Idiot,” Grace mumbles, shaking her head. I may not understand some of his phrasing, but I get the gist. I feel myself blushing. But I manage to recover quickly and get a jab in. “Why are you so interested in my love life?” “I’m not. Why are you evading the question? You do that a lot, by the way.” “Do what?” “Evade questions.” “What business is that of yours?” I say, secretly irritated that he’s figured me out... Porter scoffs. “Seeing how this is your first day on the job, and may very well be your last, considering the turnover rate for this position? And seeing how I have seniority over you? I’d say, yeah, it’s pretty much my business.” “Are you threatening me?” I ask. He clicks off his phone and raises a brow. “Huh?” “That sounded like a threat,” I say. “Whoa, you need to chill. That was not . . .” He can’t even say it. He’s flustered now, tucking his hair behind his ear. “Grace . . .” Grace holds up a hand. “Leave me out of this mess. I have no idea what I’m even witnessing here. Both of you have lost the plot.

Our living quarters were in the same compound as the Eastern District administration. Government offices were mostly housed in large mansions which had been confiscated from Kuomintang officials and wealthy landlords. All government employees, even senior officials, lived at their office. They were not allowed to cook at home, and all ate in canteens. The canteen was also where everyone got their boiled water, which was fetched in thermos flasks. Saturday was the only day married couples were allowed to spend together. Among officials, the euphemism for making love was 'spending a Saturday." Gradually, this regimented life-style relaxed a bit and married couples were able to spend more time together, but almost all still lived and spent most of their time in their office compounds. My mother's department ran a very broad field of activities, including primary education, health, entertainment, and sounding out public opinion. At the age of twenty-two, my mother was in charge of all these activities for about a quarter of a million people. She was so busy we hardly ever saw her. The government wanted to establish a monopoly (known as 'unified purchasing and marketing') over trade in the basic commodities grain, cotton, edible o'fi, and meat. The idea was to get the peasants to sell these exclusively to the government, which would then ration them out to the urban population and to parts of the country where they were in short supply.

bet she doesn’t want her friends thinking she’s a dyke,’ Jane snorted. ‘I know women like that. When I came out, half my senior year stopped talking to me in case I’d get the “wrong idea”. Like I would have had any interest in those basic bitches.

Parent time is like fairy time but real. It is magic without pixie dust and spells. It defies physics without bending the laws of time and space. It is that truism everyone offers but no one believes until after they have children: that time will actual speed, fleet enough to leave you jet-lagged and whiplashed and racing all at once. Your tiny, perfect baby nestles in your arms his first afternoon home, and then ten months later, he's off to his senior year of high school. You give birth to twins so small and alike, they lie mirrored, each with a head in the palm of one hand while their toes reach only to the crooks of your elbow, but it's only a year before they start looking at colleges. It is so impossible yet so universally experienced that magic is the only explanation. Except then there are also the excruciating rainy Sundays when the kids are whiny, bored, and beastly, and it takes a hundred hours to get from breakfast to bedtime, the long weekends when you wonder whose demonic idea it was to trap you in your home with you bevy of abominable children for a decade without school.

The comment elicited a chuckle from a room full of people accustomed to senior ranking officers renaming programs as a way to fill evaluations, insinuating that a highly successful established entity was entirely their idea before moving up the ladder in the chain of command.

Cixi’s lack of formal education was more than made up for by her intuitive intelligence, which she liked to use from her earliest years. In 1843, when she was seven, the empire had just finished its first war with the West, the Opium War, which had been started by Britain in reaction to Beijing clamping down on the illegal opium trade conducted by British merchants. China was defeated and had to pay a hefty indemnity. Desperate for funds, Emperor Daoguang (father of Cixi’s future husband) held back the traditional presents for his sons’ brides – gold necklaces with corals and pearls – and vetoed elaborate banquets for their weddings. New Year and birthday celebrations were scaled down, even cancelled, and minor royal concubines had to subsidise their reduced allowances by selling their embroidery on the market through eunuchs. The emperor himself even went on surprise raids of his concubines’ wardrobes, to check whether they were hiding extravagant clothes against his orders. As part of a determined drive to stamp out theft by officials, an investigation was conducted of the state coffer, which revealed that more “than nine million taels of silver had gone missing. Furious, the emperor ordered all the senior keepers and inspectors of the silver reserve for the previous forty-four years to pay fines to make up the loss – whether or not they were guilty. Cixi’s great-grandfather had served as one of the keepers and his share of the fine amounted to 43,200 taels – a colossal sum, next to which his official salary had been a pittance. As he had died a long time ago, his son, Cixi’s grandfather, was obliged to pay half the sum, even though he worked in the Ministry of Punishments and had nothing to do with the state coffer. After three years of futile struggle to raise money, he only managed to hand over 1,800 taels, and an edict signed by the emperor confined him to prison, only to be released if and when his son, Cixi’s father, delivered the balance. The life of the family was turned upside down. Cixi, then eleven years old, had to take in sewing jobs to earn extra money – which she would remember all her life and would later talk about to her ladies-in-waiting in the court. “As she was the eldest of two daughters and three sons, her father discussed the matter with her, and she rose to the occasion. Her ideas were carefully considered and practical: what possessions to sell, what valuables to pawn, whom to turn to for loans and how to approach them. Finally, the family raised 60 per cent of the sum, enough to get her grandfather out of prison. The young Cixi’s contribution to solving the crisis became a family legend, and her father paid her the ultimate compliment: ‘This daughter of mine is really more like a son!’ Treated like a son, Cixi was able to talk to her father about things that were normally closed areas for women. Inevitably their conversations touched on official business and state affairs, which helped form Cixi’s lifelong interest. Being consulted and having her views acted on, she acquired self-confidence and never accepted the com“common assumption that women’s brains were inferior to men’s. The crisis also helped shape her future method of rule. Having tasted the bitterness of arbitrary punishment, she would make an effort to be fair to her officials.

In 2012 the NEA spent $18.1 million on political contributions (95 percent of it going to Democratic candidates) and another $5.9 million on lobbying. Without these payments it’s very possible that politicians might finally stop pretending that ideas like tenure and seniority pay make sense for our kids.

On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies” Now let’s look at how Einstein articulated all of this in the famous paper that the Annalen der Physik received on June 30, 1905. For all its momentous import, it may be one of the most spunky and enjoyable papers in all of science. Most of its insights are conveyed in words and vivid thought experiments, rather than in complex equations. There is some math involved, but it is mainly what a good high school senior could comprehend. “The whole paper is a testament to the power of simple language to convey deep and powerfully disturbing ideas,” says the science writer Dennis Overbye.

So many graduating seniors have this notion that they should be hired because of their creative brilliance. Too many are unhappy with the idea of starting at the bottom. My advice has always been: "You ought to be thrilled you get a job in the mailroom. And when you get there, here's what you do: Be really great at sorting mail.

Culture, as in “agriculture”, is the cultivation of the soil from which men grow. To determine proper methods, we must have a clear idea of the crop. “What is man?” the Penny Catechism asks, and answers: “A creature made in the image and likeness of God, to know, love, and serve Him.” Culture, therefore, clearly has this simple end, no matter how complex or difficult the means. Our happiness consists in a perfection that is no mere endless hedonistic whoosh through space and time, but the achievement of that definite love and knowledge which is final and complete. All the paraphernalia of our lives, intellectual, moral, social, psychological, and physical, has this end: Christian culture is the cultivation of saints.

Without ever discussing it or making a conscious shift, we reflexively engaged one another in meetings. This did not mean we always agreed with one another; some of my most heartfelt arguments were with my fellow female Senior Directors. But we took one another's ideas seriously. This meant never leaving them simply hanging in the air, which typically happened in large group discussions.

The headmaster used to expound the meaning of school life in his sermons.15 Sherborne was not, he explained, entirely devoted to ‘opening the mind’, although ‘historically … this was the primary meaning of school.’ Indeed, said the headmaster, there was ‘constantly a danger of forgetting the original object of school.’ For the English public school had been consciously developed into what he called ‘a nation in miniature’. With a savage realism, it dispensed with the lip service paid to such ideas as free speech, equal justice and parliamentary democracy, and concentrated upon the fact of precedence and power. As the headmaster put it: In form-room and hall and dormitory, on the field and on parade, in your relations with us masters and in the scale of seniority among yourselves, you have become familiar with the ideas of authority and obedience, of cooperation and loyalty, of putting the house and the school above your personal desires … The great theme of the ‘scale of seniority’ was the balance of privilege and duty, itself reflecting the more worthy side of the British Empire. But this was a theme to which ‘opening the mind’ came as at best an irrelevance.

You are a product to dragnet surveillance capitalists like Google, Facebook, Comcast and Verizon. Your ideas are rarely your own, rather you are little more than a pawn to their perception steering initiatives to get you to read, believe and buy what they put in front of you. The first step to breaking out of this faux reality matrix is to stop using Google, Bing, Yahoo, Comcast and Facebook.

If you’re going to build a strong culture, it’s paramount to make diversity one of your core values. This is what separates Bridgewater’s strong culture from a cult: The commitment is to promoting dissent. In hiring, instead of using similarity to gauge cultural fit, Bridgewater assesses cultural contribution.* Dalio wants people who will think independently and enrich the culture. By holding them accountable for dissenting, Dalio has fundamentally altered the way people make decisions. In a cult, core values are dogma. At Bridgewater, employees are expected to challenge the principles themselves. During training, when employees learn the principles, they’re constantly asked: Do you agree? “We have these standards that are stress tested over time, and you have to either operate by them or disagree with them and fight for better ones,” explains Zack Wieder, who works with Dalio on codifying the principles. Rather than deferring to the people with the greatest seniority or status, as was the case at Polaroid, decisions at Bridgewater are based on quality. The goal is to create an idea meritocracy, where the best ideas win. To get the best ideas on the table in the first place, you need radical transparency.

A more recent concern relates to “financialization” and associated short-termism. Financialization is the growing importance of norms, metrics, and incentives from the financial sector to the wider economy. Some of the concerns expressed are that, for example, managers are increasingly awarded stock options to align their incentives with those of shareholders; companies are often explicitly managed to increase short-term shareholder value; and financial engineering, such as share buybacks and earnings management, has become a more important part of senior managers’ jobs. The end result is that rather than finance serving business, business serves finance: the tail wags the dog. What John Kay described as “obliquity,” the idea that making money was a consequence of, or a second-order benefit of, serving one’s customers and building good businesses, is driven out (Kay 2010).

They did this at the bank I worked at. We all had to go on a course where bright, sparkly people with frightening smiles exhorted us to embrace change because those who can’t die out. I think they cited the dinosaurs.’ ‘So they weren’t killed by an asteroid at all, then?’ said Bashford, astonished. ‘Not according to the expensive people hired to tell us that our expertise, the working relationships we’d built up over the years, all our hard work was now utterly valueless – as would we be if we didn’t get with the new programme. According to them, it was their inability to adapt to this month’s new ideas and working practices that did for the dinosaurs and the asteroid had nothing to do with it. They were quite horrified at our lack of enthusiasm for massive redundancies while senior managers – reluctantly, of course – accepted promotions and pay rises with increased bonuses.

There are, likewise, other senior leaders who are so far removed from the troops executing on the frontline that they become ineffective. These leaders might give the appearance of control, but they actually have no idea what their troops are doing and cannot effectively direct their teams. We call this trait “battlefield aloofness.” This attitude creates a significant disconnect between leadership and the troops, and such a leader’s team will struggle to effectively accomplish their mission.

Kit raised his eyebrows. ‘You mean we should tell [Carmela] that being hot on Ronan is actually being hot on both a cranky Celto-Goth hottie and a senior Power-That-Is who spent most of the last ten years on earth wearing a macaw costume?’ Nita looked at him. ‘Nah,’ Kit said at last. ‘Let’s not say anything. Let’s just let it play out.’ And then Kit broke up laughing. Nita’s look grew annoyed. ‘You’re enjoying the idea,’ she said. ‘Oh yeah!’ Kit managed to say. It took a while to get control of his laughter.

in Howard was in one of those moods during which crazy ideas sound perfectly sensible. A bullish, handsome man with decisive eyebrows and more hair than he could find use for, Lin had a great deal of money and a habit of having things go his way. So many things in his life had gone his way that it no longer occurred to him not to be in a festive mood, and he spent much of his time celebrating the general goodness of things and sitting with old friends telling fat happy lies. But things had not gone Lin’s way lately, and he was not accustomed to the feeling. Lin wanted in the worst way to whip his father at racing, to knock his Seabiscuit down a peg or two, and he believed he had the horse to do it in Ligaroti.1 He was sure enough about it to have made some account-closing bets on the horse, at least one as a side wager with his father, and he was a great deal poorer for it. The last race really ate at him. Ligaroti had been at Seabiscuit’s throat in the Hollywood Gold Cup when another horse had bumped him right out of his game. He had streaked down the stretch to finish fourth and had come back a week later to score a smashing victory over Whichcee in a Hollywood stakes race, firmly establishing himself as the second-best horse in the West. Bing Crosby and Lin were certain that with a weight break and a clean trip, Ligaroti had Seabiscuit’s measure. Charles Howard didn’t see it that way. Since the race, he had been going around with pockets full of clippings about Seabiscuit. Anytime anyone came near him, he would wave the articles around and start gushing, like a new father. The senior Howard probably didn’t hold back when Lin was around. He was immensely proud of Lin’s success with Ligaroti, but he enjoyed tweaking his son, and he was good at it. He had once given Lin a book for Christmas entitled What You Know About Horses. The pages were blank. One night shortly after the Hollywood Gold Cup, Lin was sitting at a restaurant table across from his father and Bing Crosby. They were apparently talking about the Gold Cup, and Lin was sitting there looking at his father and doing a slow burn.

Roosevelt won because he created a new kind of interest-group politics. The idea that Americans might form a political group that demanded something from government was well known and thoroughly reported a century earlier by Alexis de Tocqueville. The idea that such groups might find mainstream parties to support them was not novel either: Republicans, including the Harding and Coolidge administrations, had long practiced interest-group politics on behalf of big business. But Roosevelt systematized interest-group politics more generally to include many constituencies—labor, senior citizens, farmers, union workers. The president made groups where only individual citizens or isolated cranks had stood before, ministered to those groups, and was rewarded with votes. It is no coincidence that the first peacetime year in American history in which federal spending outpaced the total spending of the states and towns was that election year of 1936. It can even be argued that one year—1936—created the modern entitlement challenge that so bedevils both parties only.

Welcome to part one of my author’s note: the inspiration behind this book. Just a few years ago, the wildest thing ever happened to me. During my senior year, Tom Holland secretly enrolled in my high school, the Bronx High School of Science, as an undercover student to learn more about American high schools for his upcoming role as Spider-Man. I was lucky enough to meet and talk to him during his time there (literally still reeling in shock if we’re being honest because w h a t), and I’ve always treasured that experience. Since then, an idea has lingered in the back of my head—wouldn’t this be such an incredible concept for a book?

The cash arrived without warning. None of the officials at the bank branch in Erbil knew the money was coming, and they had no idea at first what to do with it. The Americans unloaded it into piles, after which it was stored in the bank building until bank officials could figure out what to do next. Later, after senior American officials realized that the cash had been left with bank officials who were entirely unprepared to receive it, they called back to the bank branch in Erbil to check on it. The American officials were told that the cash had been taken care of and that everything was fine, according to staffers with Bowen’s IG office. The CPA never saw the money again, never knew where it went or how it was spent.

People start to realize that nothing and no one is safe. In response, some instinctually behave as if they were switched to self-preservation mode. They may hoard information, hide mistakes and operate in a more cautious, risk-averse way. To protect themselves, they trust no one. Others double down on an only-the-fittest-survive mentality. Their tactics can become overly aggressive. Their egos become unchecked. They learn to manage up the hierarchy to garner favor with senior leadership while, in some cases, sabotaging their own colleagues. To protect themselves, they trust no one. Regardless of whether they are in self-preservation or self-promotion mode, the sum of all of these behaviors contributes to a general decline in cooperation across the company, which also leads to stagnation of any truly new or innovative ideas.

The same thing, notes Brynjolfsson, happened 120 years ago, in the Second Industrial Revolution, when electrification—the supernova of its day—was introduced. Old factories did not just have to be electrified to achieve the productivity boosts; they had to be redesigned, along with all business processes. It took thirty years for one generation of managers and workers to retire and for a new generation to emerge to get the full productivity benefits of that new power source. A December 2015 study by the McKinsey Global Institute on American industry found a “considerable gap between the most digitized sectors and the rest of the economy over time and [found] that despite a massive rush of adoption, most sectors have barely closed that gap over the past decade … Because the less digitized sectors are some of the largest in terms of GDP contribution and employment, we [found] that the US economy as a whole is only reaching 18 percent of its digital potential … The United States will need to adapt its institutions and training pathways to help workers acquire relevant skills and navigate this period of transition and churn.” The supernova is a new power source, and it will take some time for society to reconfigure itself to absorb its full potential. As that happens, I believe that Brynjolfsson will be proved right and we will start to see the benefits—a broad range of new discoveries around health, learning, urban planning, transportation, innovation, and commerce—that will drive growth. That debate is for economists, though, and beyond the scope of this book, but I will be eager to see how it plays out. What is absolutely clear right now is that while the supernova may not have made our economies measurably more productive yet, it is clearly making all forms of technology, and therefore individuals, companies, ideas, machines, and groups, more powerful—more able to shape the world around them in unprecedented ways with less effort than ever before. If you want to be a maker, a starter-upper, an inventor, or an innovator, this is your time. By leveraging the supernova you can do so much more now with so little. As Tom Goodwin, senior vice president of strategy and innovation at Havas Media, observed in a March 3, 2015, essay on TechCrunch.com: “Uber, the world’s largest taxi company, owns no vehicles. Facebook, the world’s most popular media owner, creates no content. Alibaba, the most valuable retailer, has no inventory. And Airbnb, the world’s largest accommodation provider, owns no real estate. Something interesting is happening.

The central striking force of the Grande Armée had shrunk to less than half its original size in the eighty-two days between crossing the Niemen and entering Moscow. According to the figures Napoleon was given at the time, he had lost 92,390 men by the end of the battle of Borodino.27 Yet he did not act like a man whose options were limited. During the two days he spent at the beautiful Petrovsky Palace he considered almost immediately retreating to the Lower Dvina in a circular movement, while sending out Eugène’s corps to make it appear as if he were marching on to St Petersburg.28 He told Fain that he believed he could be between Riga and Smolensk by mid-October. Yet although he started looking at maps and drawing up orders, only Eugène supported the idea. Other senior officers reacted with ‘repugnance’, arguing that the army needed rest, and to go north would ‘look for the winter, as if it wasn’t coming soon enough!

… no technical skill is worth more than knowing how to select exciting research projects. Regrettably, this vital ability is almost never taught. When I signed on with a research adviser in my first year of graduate school, I was thrilled to be given a problem to work in the physics of the upper atmosphere. That I had no idea what motivated the problem did not prevent me from carrying out an analysis, on a supercomputer of the day, and publishing my first paper at the age of 22… I found myself assimilating technical skills without ever grasping the significance of the problem, without understanding how or whether it was at the cutting edge of science. This way of working became a habit, one that seriously threatened my career… I relied on a senior scientist to tell me what would be an interesting problem to work on; then I would carry out the task… Four years and two postdoctoral positions after earning a PhD—still having little sense of what I wanted to learn as a scientist—I was on the job market.

But without Emily, Greg would feel—paradoxically for such a social creature—alone. Before they met, most of Greg’s girlfriends were extroverts. He says he enjoyed those relationships, but never got to know his girlfriends well, because they were always “plotting how to be with groups of people.” He speaks of Emily with a kind of awe, as if she has access to a deeper state of being. He also describes her as “the anchor” around which his world revolves. Emily, for her part, treasures Greg’s ebullient nature; he makes her feel happy and alive. She has always been attracted to extroverts, who she says “do all the work of making conversation. For them, it’s not work at all.” The trouble is that for most of the five years they’ve been together, Greg and Emily have been having one version or another of the same fight. Greg, a music promoter with a large circle of friends, wants to host dinner parties every Friday—casual, animated get-togethers with heaping bowls of pasta and flowing bottles of wine. He’s been giving Friday-night dinners since he was a senior in college, and they’ve become a highlight of his week and a treasured piece of his identity. Emily has come to dread these weekly events. A hardworking staff attorney for an art museum and a very private person, the last thing she wants to do when she gets home from work is entertain. Her idea of a perfect start to the weekend is a quiet evening at the movies, just her and Greg. It seems an irreconcilable difference: Greg wants fifty-two dinner parties a year, Emily wants zero. Greg says that Emily should make more of an effort. He accuses her of being antisocial. “I am social,” she says. “I love you, I love my family, I love my close friends. I just don’t love dinner parties. People don’t really relate at those parties—they just socialize. You’re lucky because I devote all my energy to you. You spread yours around to everyone.” But Emily soon backs off, partly because she hates fighting, but also because she doubts herself. Maybe I am antisocial, she

In 1962, the clouds of war against China darkened the nation. I got a call from the Prime Minister’s office asking me to come to Delhi for an urgent meeting. Also present at the meeting were some Generals and a senior bureaucrat, Shivaraman. I was informed that the Indian Army needed milk powder, and they asked me how much we could provide and how soon. I said, ‘A thousand tons and within six months.’ One of the Generals looked at me and said, ‘That’s not enough.’ I said, ‘Okay, then 1,500 tons.’ They said that, too, was not enough. ‘I suppose we stop wasting time, and you tell me the quantity that you need?’ I asked. ‘We need 2,750 tons,’ came the reply. I asked for a piece of paper as an idea began forming in my mind. I was aware that there was another milk powder plant in Rajkot, which belonged to the Government of Gujarat. It was a small plant, but I knew that if we put together all the powder and gave it to the army, sacrificing the entire civilian market, then we could fulfil this commitment in six months.

Until fairly recently, what parents wanted was utterly beside the point. But we now live in an age when the map of our desires has gotten considerably larger, and we've been told it's our right (obligation in fact) to try to fulfill them. In an end-of-the-millennium essay, the historian J.M. Roberts wrote: "The 20th century has spread as never before the idea that human happiness is realizable on Earth." That's a wonderful thing, of course, but not always a realistic goal, and when reality falls short of expectations, we often blame ourselves. "Our lives become an elegy to needs unmet and desires sacrificed, to possibilities refused, to roads not taken," writes the British psychoanalyst Adam Philips in his 2012 collection of essays, 'Missing Out'. "The myth of potential makes mourning and complaining feel like the realest things we ever do." Even if our dreams were never realizable, even if they were false from the start, we regret not pursuing them. "We can't imagine our lives," writes Phillips, "without the unlived lives they contain.

Abbott’s one big idea in Health was for the Commonwealth to take control of all the nation’s hospitals. This required a shift in his thinking. In the Keating years he had declared that Australia had “a perfectly good system of government provided each tier minds its own business.” He didn’t think so any longer. “As a new backbencher, I had not anticipated how hard this was, given that voters don’t care who solves their problems, they just want them solved.” As Minister for Health he lit on a new guiding conservative principle: “Power divided is power controlled.” He had in mind an enormous reform that would reshape Canberra’s relations with the states. He was roundly mocked in cabinet. His senior bureaucrats put a lot of work into talking him down. Did he really want to be responsible for every asthma patient who had to wait too long in an emergency department? Eventually he was persuaded that Commonwealth public servants could not run hospitals any better than state public servants. This was the argument that got him, but he found it frustrating.

in my name to train young women for global leadership. Wellesley’s twelfth and thirteenth presidents, Diana Chapman Walsh and Kim Bottomly, embraced the idea and, over several years, helped put the pieces together. In January 2010, I traveled to Massachusetts for the inaugural session. The Albright Institute was founded on the belief that a student doesn’t have to major in international relations to have a global mind-set. By giving young women the chance to work in partnership with peers from a variety of disciplines and countries, we encourage them to see differences of perspective as a strength and even as a tool to help solve complex problems. To that end, we provide an intense course of study over a three-week period between the fall and spring semesters, complemented by summer internships. Of the hundreds of Wellesley juniors and seniors who apply annually, forty are selected. In the first two weeks of each session, we offer classes run by professors, former government officials, nonprofit leaders, and businesspeople. During the final seven days, the fellows work in teams to analyze and make recommendations regarding a thorny international problem. At the end, they present their findings, which we pick apart and discuss.

Your belly’s getting big,” he said one night. “I know,” I answered, looking down. It was kind of hard to deny. “I love it,” he said, stroking it with the palm of his hand. I recoiled a little, remembering the black bikini I’d worn on our honeymoon and how comparatively concave my belly looked then, and hoping Marlboro Man had long since put the image out of his mind. “Hey, what are we naming this thing?” he asked, even as the “thing” fluttered and kicked in my womb. “Oh, man…” I sighed. “I have no idea. Zachary?” I pulled it out of my wazoo. “Eh,” he said, uninspired. “Shane?” Oh no. Here go the old movies. “I went to my senior prom with a Shane,” I answered, remembering dark and mysterious Shane Ballard. “Okay, scratch that,” he said. “How about…how about Ashley?” How far was he going to take this? I remembered a movie we’d watched on our fifteenth date or so. “How about Rooster Cogburn?” He chuckled. I loved it when he chuckled. It meant everything was okay and he wasn’t worried or stressed or preoccupied. It meant we were dating and sitting on his old porch and my parents weren’t divorcing. It meant my belly button wasn’t bulbous and deformed. His chuckles were like a drug to me. I tried to elicit them daily. “What if it’s a girl?” I said. “Oh, it’s a boy,” he said with confidence. “I’m positive.” I didn’t respond. How could I argue with that?

In the light of the evidence it is hard to believe that most crusaders were motivated by crude materialism. Given their knowledge and expectations and the economic climate in which they lived, the disposal of assets to invest in the fairly remote possibility of settlement in the East would have been a stupid gamble. It makes much more sense to suppose, in so far as one can generalize about them, that they were moved by an idealism which must have inspired not only them but their families. Parents, brothers and sisters, wives and children had to face a long absence and must have worried about them: in 1098 Countess Ida of Boulogne made an endowment to the abbey of St Bertin 'for the safety of her sons, Godfrey and Baldwin, who have gone to Jerusalem'.83 And they and more distant relatives — cousins, uncles and nephews - were prepared to endow them out of the patrimonial lands. I have already stressed that no one can treat the phenomenal growth of monasticism in this period without taking into account not only those who entered the communities to be professed, but also the lay men and women who were prepared to endow new religious houses with lands and rents. The same is true of the crusading movement. Behind many crusaders stood a large body of men and women who were prepared to sacrifice interest to help them go. It is hard to avoid concluding that they were fired by the opportunity presented to a relative not only of making a penitential pilgrimage to Jerusalem but also of fighting in a holy cause. For almost a century great lords, castellans and knights had been subjected to abuse by the Church. Wilting under the torrent of invective and responding to the attempts of churchmen to reform their way of life in terms they could understand, they had become perceptibly more pious. Now they were presented by a pope who knew them intimately with the chance of performing a meritorious act which exactly fitted their upbringing and devotional needs and they seized it eagerly. But they responded, of course, in their own way. They were not theologians and were bound to react in ways consonant with their own ideas of right and wrong, ideas that did not always respond to those of senior churchmen. The emphasis that Urban had put on charity - love of Christian brothers under the heel of Islam, love of Christ whose land was subject to the Muslim yoke - could not but arouse in their minds analogies with their own kin and their own lords' patrimonies, and remind them of their obligations to avenge injuries to their relatives and lords. And that put the crusade on the level of a vendetta. Their leaders, writing to Urban in September 1098, informed him that 'The Turks, who inflicted much dishonour on Our Lord Jesus Christ, have been taken and killed and we Jerusalemites have avenged the injury to the supreme God Jesus Christ.

In the casual opinion of most Americans, I am an old man, and therefore of little account, past my best, fading in a pathetic diminuendo while flashing his AARP card; like the old in America generally, either invisible or someone to ignore rather than respect, who will be gone soon, and forgotten, a gringo in his degringolade. Naturally I am insulted by this, but out of pride I don’t let my indignation show. My work is my reply, my travel is my defiance. And I think of myself in the Mexican way, not as an old man but as most Mexicans regard a senior, an hombre de juicio, a man of judgement; not ruco, worn out, beneath notice, someone to be patronized, but owed the respect traditionally accorded to an elder, someone (in the Mexican euphemism) of La Tercera Edad, the Third Age, who might be called Don Pablo or tio (uncle) in deference. Mexican youths are required by custom to surrender their seat to anyone older. They know the saying: Mas sabe el diablo por viejo, que por diablo - The devil is wise because he’s old, not because he’s the devil. But “Stand aside, old man, and make way for the young” is the American way. As an Ancient Mariner of a sort, I want to hold the doubters with my skinny hand, fix them with a glittering eye, and say, “I have been to a place where none of you have ever been, where none of you can ever go. It is the past. I spent decades there and I can say, you don’t have the slightest idea.

It’s a heady question, how women balance these concerns. Recently, the question has found its way back to the center of a contentious and very emotional debate. If you’re Sheryl Sandberg, the chief operating officer of Facebook and author of Lean In, you believe that women should stop getting in their own way as they pursue their professional dreams—they should speak up, assert themselves, defend their right to dominate the boardroom and proudly wear the pants. If you’re Anne-Marie Slaughter, the former top State Department official who wrote a much-discussed story about work-life balance for The Atlantic in June 2012, you believe that the world, as it is currently structured, cannot accommodate the needs of women who are ambitious in both their professions and their home lives—social and economic change is required. There’s truth to both arguments. They’re hardly mutually exclusive. Yet this question tends to get framed, rather tiresomely, as one of how and whether women can “have it all,” when the fact of the matter is that most women—and men, for that matter—are simply trying to keep body and soul together. The phrase “having it all” has little to do with what women want. If anything, it’s a reflection of a widespread and misplaced cultural belief, shared by men and women alike: that we, as middle-class Americans, have been given infinite promise, and it’s our obligation to exploit every ounce of it. “Having it all” is the phrase of a culture that, as Adam Phillips implies in Missing Out, is tyrannized by the idea of its own potential.

Postscript, 2005 From the Publisher ON APRIL 7, 2004, the Mid-Hudson Highland Post carried an article about an appearance that John Gatto made at Highland High School. Headlined “Rendered Speechless,” the report was subtitled “Advocate for education reform brings controversy to Highland.” The article relates the events of March 25 evening of that year when the second half of John Gatto’s presentation was canceled by the School Superintendent, “following complaints from the Highland Teachers Association that the presentation was too controversial.” On the surface, the cancellation was in response to a video presentation that showed some violence. But retired student counselor Paul Jankiewicz begged to differ, pointing out that none of the dozens of students he talked to afterwards were inspired to violence. In his opinion, few people opposing Gatto had seen the video presentation. Rather, “They were taking the lead from the teacher’s union who were upset at the whole tone of the presentation.” He continued, “Mr. Gatto basically told them that they were not serving kids well and that students needed to be told the truth, be given real-life learning experiences, and be responsible for their own education. [Gatto] questioned the validity and relevance of standardized tests, the prison atmosphere of school, and the lack of relevant experience given students.” He added that Gatto also had an important message for parents: “That you have to take control of your children’s education.” Highland High School senior Chris Hart commended the school board for bringing Gatto to speak, and wished that more students had heard his message. Senior Katie Hanley liked the lecture for its “new perspective,” adding that ”it was important because it started a new exchange and got students to think for themselves.” High School junior Qing Guo found Gatto “inspiring.” Highland teacher Aliza Driller-Colangelo was also inspired by Gatto, and commended the “risk-takers,” saying that, following the talk, her class had an exciting exchange about ideas. Concluded Jankiewicz, the students “were eager to discuss the issues raised. Unfortunately, our school did not allow that dialogue to happen, except for a few teachers who had the courage to engage the students.” What was not reported in the newspaper is the fact that the school authorities called the police to intervene and ‘restore the peace’ which, ironically enough, was never in the slightest jeopardy as the student audience was well-behaved and attentive throughout. A scheduled evening meeting at the school between Gatto and the Parents Association was peremptorily forbidden by school district authorities in a final assault on the principles of free speech and free assembly… There could be no better way of demonstrating the lasting importance of John Taylor Gatto’s work, and of this small book, than this sorry tale. It is a measure of the power of Gatto’s ideas, their urgency, and their continuing relevance that school authorities are still trying to shut them out 12 years after their initial publication, afraid even to debate them. — May the crusade continue! Chris Plant Gabriola Island, B.C. February, 2005

The plot of Love on a Mortal Lease is not unlike those Shakespear would use later, nor unlike those of commonplace Victorian works. The heroine, Rachel Gwynne, has dead parents, as is the case from Oliver Twist (1837) through hundreds of other ensuing tripledeckers. Rachel is a novelist – most of Shakespear’s heroines would be writers – in love with a military man many years her senior. After he refuses to marry her because he fears his mother will dislike Rachel and therefore disinherit him, Rachel becomes his mistress. Once the snobby old mother meets Rachel by happenstance in London, however, they immediately adore each other, and the Colonel may now safely marry Rachel – though she doesn’t love him anymore, and he seems none too fond of her, either. They muddle along in unhappy matrimony until Rachel conveniently discovers (as we’ve known for a while) that the Colonel has had another longtime mistress, a stupid society girl, throughout the course of their marriage, and even during their preceding affair. When the Colonel even more conveniently falls on his head and dies, Rachel is made a wealthy widow in her mid-twenties, free to marry a nice young writer who knows about, but forgives her, her former relationship. A happily wish-fulfilling story, perhaps, for a young woman writer in a bad marriage, and Rachel has some interesting ideas about her profession: speaking of clever girls who scribble, she hopes for the day that “the cleverness and the scribbling . . . fall from her, like a disguise, and she stands revealed in her true form – then she may never write another word, or she may write something immortal.”8

Making matters worse, the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain that governs so much of our higher executive function—the ability to plan and to reason, the ability to control impulses and to self-reflect—is still undergoing crucial structural changes during adolescence and continues to do so until human beings are in their mid- or even late twenties. This is not to say that teenagers lack the tools to reason. Just before puberty, the prefrontal cortex undergoes a huge flurry of activity, enabling kids to better grasp abstractions and understand other points of view. (In Darling’s estimation, these new capabilities are why adolescents seem so fond of arguing—they can actually do it, and not half-badly, for the first time.) But their prefrontal cortexes are still adding myelin, the fatty white substance that speeds up neural transmissions and improves neural connections, which means that adolescents still can’t grasp long-term consequences or think through complicated choices like adults can. Their prefrontal cortexes are also still forming and consolidating connections with the more primitive, emotional parts of the brain—known collectively as the limbic system—which means that adolescents don’t yet have the level of self-control that adults do. And they lack wisdom and experience, which means they often spend a lot of time passionately arguing on behalf of ideas that more seasoned adults find inane. “They’re kind of flying by the seat of their pants,” says Casey. “If they’ve had only one experience that’s pretty intense, but they haven’t had any other experiences in this domain, it’s going to drive their behavior.

In 1962, the clouds of war against China darkened the nation. I got a call from the Prime Minister’s office asking me to come to Delhi for an urgent meeting. Also present at the meeting were some Generals and a senior bureaucrat, Shivaraman. I was informed that the Indian Army needed milk powder, and they asked me how much we could provide and how soon. I said, ‘A thousand tons and within six months.’ One of the Generals looked at me and said, ‘That’s not enough.’ I said, ‘Okay, then 1,500 tons.’ They said that, too, was not enough. ‘I suppose we stop wasting time, and you tell me the quantity that you need?’ I asked. ‘We need 2,750 tons,’ came the reply. I asked for a piece of paper as an idea began forming in my mind. I was aware that there was another milk powder plant in Rajkot, which belonged to the Government of Gujarat. It was a small plant, but I knew that if we put together all the powder and gave it to the army, sacrificing the entire civilian market, then we could fulfil this commitment in six months. So I did a swift calculation on a piece of paper and said, ‘It will be done. Now, can I go?’ The General expressed apprehension, ‘Supposing you let us down?’ ‘That is not the way to speak to Mr Kurien,’ Shivaraman said. ‘We have the highest regard for his words. If he says that he will do it, he will certainly do it. And besides, may I know what other alternative you have?’ That quietened the General. Then Shivaraman asked me, ‘What can the government do for you?’ I said, ‘What do you mean?’ He said, ‘Loans? Grants? Anything you want?’ I said, ‘Mr Shivaraman, you said there is an emergency, and if Amul uses this emergency to squeeze money out of the government, then it is an unworthy organisation. I want nothing.’ From that day onwards, Shivaraman was an ally.

To this point, Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky has been the Republican flavor of the year. Events from the IRS scandal to NSA revelations to the Obamacare train wreck have corroborated libertarian suspicions of federal power. And Paul has shown serious populist skills in cultivating those fears for his political benefit. For a while, he succeeded in a difficult maneuver: Accepting the inheritance of his father's movement while distancing himself from the loonier aspects of his father's ideology. But now Rand Paul has fallen spectacularly off the tightrope. It turns out that a senior member of his Senate staff, Jack Hunter, has a history of neo-Confederate radio rants. And Paul has come to the defense of his aide. . . . This would not be the first time that Paul has heard secessionist talk in his circle of confederates--I mean, associates. His father has attacked Lincoln for causing a "senseless" war and ruling with an "iron fist." Others allied with Paulism in various think tanks and websites have accused Lincoln of mass murder and treason. For Rand Paul to categorically repudiate such views and all who hold them would be to excommunicate a good portion of his father's movement. This disdain for Lincoln is not a quirk or a coincidence. Paulism involves more than the repeal of Obamacare. It is a form of libertarianism that categorically objects to 150 years of expanding federal power. . . . Not all libertarians, of course, view Appomattox as a temporary setback. A libertarian debate on the topic: "Lincoln: Hero or Despot?" would be two-sided, lively and well attended. But Paulism is more than the political expression of the Austrian school of economics. It is a wildly ambitious ideology in which Hunter's neo-Confederate views are not uncommon. What does this mean for the GOP? It is a reminder that, however reassuring his manner, it is impossible for Rand Paul to join the Republican mainstream. The triumph of his ideas and movement would fundamentally shift the mainstream and demolish a century and a half of Republican political history. The GOP could no longer be the party of Reagan's internationalism or of Lincoln's belief in a strong union dedicated to civil rights.

Little Robin had been brought by Lord Orthallen—although he had the feeling that his lord did not realize it. The boy was a part of his household, though Orthallen seemed to have long since forgotten the fact; and when the order came to pack up the household and move to the Border, Robin found himself in the tail of the baggage train, with no small bewilderment. He'd been at a loss in the encampment, wandering about until someone had seen him and realized that a small child had no place in a camp preparing for warfare. So he was sent packing; first off with Elspeth, then pressed into service by the Healers. They'd set him to fetching and carrying for Dirk, thinking that the child was far too young to be able to pick anything up from the casual talk around him, and that Dirk wouldn't think to interrogate a child as young as he. They were wrong on both counts. Robin was very much aware of what was going on—not surprising, since it concerned his adored Talia. He was worried sick, and longing for an adult to talk to. And Dirk was kind and gentle with him—and had he but known it, desperate enough for news to have questioned the rats in the walls if he thought it would get him anywhere. Dirk knew all about Robin and his adoration of Talia. If anyone knew where she was being kept and what her condition was, that boy would. Dirk bided his time. Eventually the Healers stopped overseeing his every waking moment. Finally there came a point when they began leaving him alone for hours at a time. He waited then, until Robin was sent in alone with his lunch—alone, unsupervised, and more than willing to talk—and put the question to him. Dirk had no intention of frightening the boy, and his tone was gentle, "I need your help. The Healers won't answer my questions, and I need to know about Talia." Robin had turned back with his hand still on the doorknob; at the mention of Talia's name, his expression was one of distress. "I'll tell you what I know, sir," he replied, his voice quavering a little. "But she's hurt real bad and they won't let anybody but Healers see her." "Where is she? Do you have any idea who's taking care of her?" The boy not only knew where she was, but the names and seniority of every Healer caring for her—and the list nearly froze Dirk's heart. They'd even pulled old Farnherdt out of retirement—and he'd sworn that no case would ever be desperate enough for them to call on him.

A Jewish boy comes to his father and asks, ‘Dad, why shouldn’t we eat pork?’ The father strokes his long white beard thoughtfully and answers, ‘Well, Yankele, that’s how the world works. You are still young and you don’t understand, but if we eat pork, God will punish us and we will come to a bad end. It isn’t my idea. It’s not even the rabbi’s idea. If the rabbi had created the world, maybe he would have created a world in which pork was perfectly kosher. But the rabbi didn’t create the world – God did it. And God said, I don’t know why, that we shouldn’t eat pork. So we shouldn’t. Capeesh?’ In 1943 a German boy comes to his father, a senior SS officer, and asks, ‘Dad, why are we killing the Jews?’ The father puts on his shiny leather boots, and meanwhile explains, ‘Well, Fritz, that’s how the world works. You are still young and you don’t understand, but if we allow the Jews to live, they will cause the degeneration and extinction of humankind. It’s not my idea, and it’s not even the Führer’s idea. If Hitler had created the world, maybe he would have created a world in which the laws of natural selection did not apply, and Jews and Aryans could all live together in perfect harmony. But Hitler didn’t create the world. He just managed to decipher the laws of nature, and then instructed us how to live in line with them. If we disobey these laws, we will come to a bad end. Is that clear?!’ In 2016 a British boy comes to his father, a liberal MP, and asks, ‘Dad, why should we care about the human rights of Muslims in the Middle East?’ The father puts down his cup of tea, thinks for a moment, and says, ‘Well, Duncan, that’s how the world works. You are still young and you don’t understand, but all humans, even Muslims in the Middle East, have the same nature and therefore enjoy the same natural rights. This isn’t my idea, nor a decision of Parliament. If Parliament had created the world, universal human rights might well have been buried in some subcommittee along with all that quantum physics stuff. But Parliament didn’t create the world, it just tries to make sense of it, and we must respect the natural rights even of Muslims in the Middle East, or very soon our own rights will also be violated, and we will come to a bad end. Now off you go.’ Liberals, communists and followers of other modern creeds dislike describing their own system as a ‘religion’, because they identify religion with superstitions and supernatural powers. If you tell communists or liberals that they are religious, they think you accuse them of blindly believing in groundless pipe dreams. In fact, it means only that they believe in some system of moral laws that wasn’t invented by humans, but which humans must nevertheless obey. As far as we know, all human societies believe in this. Every society tells its members that they must obey some superhuman moral law, and that breaking this law will result in catastrophe.

A Jewish boy comes to his father and asks, ‘Dad, why shouldn’t we eat pork?’ The father strokes his long white beard thoughtfully and answers, ‘Well, Yankele, that’s how the world works. You are still young and you don’t understand, but if we eat pork, God will punish us and we will come to a bad end. It isn’t my idea. It’s not even the rabbi’s idea. If the rabbi had created the world, maybe he would have created a world in which pork was perfectly kosher. But the rabbi didn’t create the world – God did it. And God said, I don’t know why, that we shouldn’t eat pork. So we shouldn’t. Capeesh?’ In 1943 a German boy comes to his father, a senior SS officer, and asks, ‘Dad, why are we killing the Jews?’ The father puts on his shiny leather boots, and meanwhile explains, ‘Well, Fritz, that’s how the world works. You are still young and you don’t understand, but if we allow the Jews to live, they will cause the degeneration and extinction of humankind. It’s not my idea, and it’s not even the Führer’s idea. If Hitler had created the world, maybe he would have created a world in which the laws of natural selection did not apply, and Jews and Aryans could all live together in perfect harmony. But Hitler didn’t create the world. He just managed to decipher the laws of nature, and then instructed us how to live in line with them. If we disobey these laws, we will come to a bad end. Is that clear?!’ In 2016 a British boy comes to his father, a liberal MP, and asks, ‘Dad, why should we care about the human rights of Muslims in the Middle East?’ The father puts down his cup of tea, thinks for a moment, and says, ‘Well, Duncan, that’s how the world works. You are still young and you don’t understand, but all humans, even Muslims in the Middle East, have the same nature and therefore enjoy the same natural rights. This isn’t my idea, nor a decision of Parliament. If Parliament had created the world, universal human rights might well have been buried in some subcommittee along with all that quantum physics stuff. But Parliament didn’t create the world, it just tries to make sense of it, and we must respect the natural rights even of Muslims in the Middle East, or very soon our own rights will also be violated, and we will come to a bad end. Now off you go.’ Liberals, communists and followers of other modern creeds dislike describing their own system as a ‘religion’, because they identify religion with superstitions and supernatural powers. If you tell communists or liberals that they are religious, they think you accuse them of blindly believing in groundless pipe dreams. In fact, it means only that they believe in some system of moral laws that wasn’t invented by humans, but which humans must nevertheless obey. As far as we know, all human societies believe in this. Every society tells its members that they must obey some superhuman moral law, and that breaking this law will result in catastrophe.

A Jewish boy comes to his father and asks, ‘Dad, why shouldn’t we eat pork?’ The father strokes his long white beard thoughtfully and answers, ‘Well, Yankele, that’s how the world works. You are still young and you don’t understand, but if we eat pork, God will punish us and we will come to a bad end. It isn’t my idea. It’s not even the rabbi’s idea. If the rabbi had created the world, maybe he would have created a world in which pork was perfectly kosher. But the rabbi didn’t create the world – God did it. And God said, I don’t know why, that we shouldn’t eat pork. So we shouldn’t. Capeesh?’ In 1943 a German boy comes to his father, a senior SS officer, and asks, ‘Dad, why are we killing the Jews?’ The father puts on his shiny leather boots, and meanwhile explains, ‘Well, Fritz, that’s how the world works. You are still young and you don’t understand, but if we allow the Jews to live, they will cause the degeneration and extinction of humankind. It’s not my idea, and it’s not even the Führer’s idea. If Hitler had created the world, maybe he would have created a world in which the laws of natural selection did not apply, and Jews and Aryans could all live together in perfect harmony. But Hitler didn’t create the world. He just managed to decipher the laws of nature, and then instructed us how to live in line with them. If we disobey these laws, we will come to a bad end. Is that clear?!’ In 2016 a British boy comes to his father, a liberal MP, and asks, ‘Dad, why should we care about the human rights of Muslims in the Middle East?’ The father puts down his cup of tea, thinks for a moment, and says, ‘Well, Duncan, that’s how the world works. You are still young and you don’t understand, but all humans, even Muslims in the Middle East, have the same nature and therefore enjoy the same natural rights. This isn’t my idea, nor a decision of Parliament. If Parliament had created the world, universal human rights might well have been buried in some subcommittee along with all that quantum physics stuff. But Parliament didn’t create the world, it just tries to make sense of it, and we must respect the natural rights even of Muslims in the Middle East, or very soon our own rights will also be violated, and we will come to a bad end. Now off you go.’ Liberals, communists and followers of other modern creeds dislike describing their own system as a ‘religion’, because they identify religion with superstitions and supernatural powers. If you tell communists or liberals that they are religious, they think you accuse them of blindly believing in groundless pipe dreams. In fact, it means only that they believe in some system of moral laws that wasn’t invented by humans, but which humans must nevertheless obey. As far as we know, all human societies believe in this. Every society tells its members that they must obey some superhuman moral law, and that breaking this law will result in catastrophe.

It’s my turn next, and I realize then that I never turned in the name of my escort--because I hadn’t planned on being here. I glance around wildly for Ryder, but he’s nowhere to be seen, swallowed up by the sea of people in cocktail dresses and suits. Crap. I thought he realized that escorting me on court was part of the deal, once I’d agreed to go. I guess he’d figured it’d be easier on me, what with the whole Patrick thing, if I was alone onstage. But I don’t want to be alone. I want Ryder with me. By my side, supporting me. Always. I finally spot him in the crowd--it’s not too hard, since he’s a head taller than pretty much everyone else--and our eyes meet. My stomach drops to my feet--you know, that feeling you get on a roller coaster right after you crest that first hill and start plummeting toward the ground. Oh my God, this can’t be happening. I’ve fallen in love with Ryder Marsden, the boy I’m supposed to hate. And it has nothing to do with his confession, his declaration that he loves me. Sure, it might have forced me to examine my feelings faster than I would have on my own, but it was there all along, taking root, growing, blossoming. Heck, it’s a full-blown garden at this point. “Our senior maid is Miss Jemma Cafferty!” comes the principal’s voice. “Jemma is a varsity cheerleader, a member of the Wheelettes social sorority, the French Honor Club, the National Honor Society, and the Peer Mentors. She’s escorted tonight by…ahem, sorry. I’m afraid there’s no escort, so we’ll just--” “Ryder Marsden,” I call out as I make my way across the stage. “I’m escorted by Ryder Marsden.” The collective gasp that follows my announcement is like something out of the movies. I swear, it’s just like that scene in Gone with the Wind where Rhett offers one hundred and fifty dollars in gold to dance with Scarlett, and she walks through the scandalized bystanders to take her place beside Rhett for the Virginia reel. Only it’s the reverse. I’m standing here doing the scandalizing, and Ryder’s doing the walking. “Apparently, Jemma’s escort is Ryder Marsden,” the principal ad-libs into the microphone, looking a little frazzled. “Ryder is…um…the starting quarterback for the varsity football team, and, um…in the National Honor Society and…” She trails off helplessly. “A Peer Mentor,” he adds helpfully as he steps up beside me and takes my hand. The smile he flashes in my direction as Mrs. Crawford places the tiara on my head is dazzling--way more so than the tiara itself. My knees go a little weak, and I clutch him tightly as I wobble on my four-inch heels. But here’s the thing: If the crowd is whispering about me, I don’t hear it. I’m aware only of Ryder beside me, my hand resting in the crook of his arm as he leads me to our spot on the stage beside the junior maid and her escort, where we wait for Morgan to be crowned queen. Oh, there’ll be hell to pay tomorrow. I have no idea what we’re going to tell our parents. Right now I don’t even care. Just like Scarlett O’Hara, I’m going to enjoy myself tonight and worry about the rest later. After all, tomorrow is another…Well, you know how the saying goes.

gave up on the idea of creating “socialist men and women” who would work without monetary incentives. In a famous speech he criticized “equality mongering,” and thereafter not only did different jobs get paid different wages but also a bonus system was introduced. It is instructive to understand how this worked. Typically a firm under central planning had to meet an output target set under the plan, though such plans were often renegotiated and changed. From the 1930s, workers were paid bonuses if the output levels were attained. These could be quite high—for instance, as much as 37 percent of the wage for management or senior engineers. But paying such bonuses created all sorts of disincentives to technological change. For one thing, innovation, which took resources away from current production, risked the output targets not being met and the bonuses not being paid. For another, output targets were usually based on previous production levels. This created a huge incentive never to expand output, since this only meant having to produce more in the future, since future targets would be “ratcheted up.” Underachievement was always the best way to meet targets and get the bonus. The fact that bonuses were paid monthly also kept everyone focused on the present, while innovation is about making sacrifices today in order to have more tomorrow. Even when bonuses and incentives were effective in changing behavior, they often created other problems. Central planning was just not good at replacing what the great eighteenth-century economist Adam Smith called the “invisible hand” of the market. When the plan was formulated in tons of steel sheet, the sheet was made too heavy. When it was formulated in terms of area of steel sheet, the sheet was made too thin. When the plan for chandeliers was made in tons, they were so heavy, they could hardly hang from ceilings. By the 1940s, the leaders of the Soviet Union, even if not their admirers in the West, were well aware of these perverse incentives. The Soviet leaders acted as if they were due to technical problems, which could be fixed. For example, they moved away from paying bonuses based on output targets to allowing firms to set aside portions of profits to pay bonuses. But a “profit motive” was no more encouraging to innovation than one based on output targets. The system of prices used to calculate profits was almost completely unconnected to the value of new innovations or technology. Unlike in a market economy, prices in the Soviet Union were set by the government, and thus bore little relation to value. To more specifically create incentives for innovation, the Soviet Union introduced explicit innovation bonuses in 1946. As early as 1918, the principle had been recognized that an innovator should receive monetary rewards for his innovation, but the rewards set were small and unrelated to the value of the new technology. This changed only in 1956, when it was stipulated that the bonus should be proportional to the productivity of the innovation. However, since productivity was calculated in terms of economic benefits measured using the existing system of prices, this was again not much of an incentive to innovate. One could fill many pages with examples of the perverse incentives these schemes generated. For example, because the size of the innovation bonus fund was limited by the wage bill of a firm, this immediately reduced the incentive to produce or adopt any innovation that might have economized on labor.

a serious contender for my book of year. I can't believe I only discovered Chris Carter a year ago and I now consider him to be one of my favourite crime authors of all time. For that reason this is a difficult review to write because I really want to show just how fantastic this book is. It's a huge departure from what we are used to from Chris, this book is very different from the books that came before. That said it could not have been more successful in my opinion. After five books of Hunter trying to capture a serial killer it makes sense to shake things up a bit and Chris has done that in best possible way. By allowing us to get inside the head of one of the most evil characters I've ever read about. It is also the first book based on real facts and events from Chris's criminal psychology days and that makes it all the more shocking and fascinating. Chris Carter's imagination knows no bounds and I love it. The scenes, the characters, whatever he comes up with is both original and mind blowing and that has never been more so than with this book. I feel like I can't even mention the plot even just a little bit. This is a book that should be read in the same way that I read it: with my heart in my mouth, my eyes unblinking and in a state of complete obliviousness to the world around me while I was well and truly hooked on this book. This is addictive reading at its absolute best and I was devastated when I turned the very last page. Robert Hunter, after the events of the last few books is looking forward to a much needed break in Hawaii. Before he can escape however his Captain calls him to her office. Arriving, Hunter recognises someone - one of the most senior members of the FBI who needs his help. They have in custody one of the strangest individuals they have ever come across, a man who is more machine than human and who for days has uttered not a single word. Until one morning he utters seven: 'I will only speak to Robert Hunter'. The man is Hunter's roommate and best friend from college, Lucien Folter, and found in the boot of his car are two severed and mutilated heads. Lucien cries innocence and Hunter, a man incredibly difficult to read or surprise is played just as much as the reader is by Lucien. There are a million and one things I want to say but I just can't. You really have to discover how this story unfolds for yourself. In this book we learn so much more about Hunter and get inside his head even further than we have before. There's a chapter that almost brought me to tears such is the talent of Chris to connect the reader with Hunter. This is a character like no other and he is now one of my favourite detectives of all time. We go back in time and learn more about Hunter when he was younger, and also when he was in college with Lucien. Lucien is evil. The scenes depicted in this book are some of the most graphic I've ever read and you know what, I loved it. After five books of some of the scariest and goriest scenes I've ever read I wondered whether Chris could come up with something even worse (in a good way), but trust me, he does. This book is horrifying, terrifying and near impossible to put down until you reach its conclusion. I spent my days like a zombie and my nights practically giving myself paper cuts turning the pages. If when reading this book you think you have an idea of where it will go, prepare to be wrong. I've learnt never to underestimate Chris, keeping readers on their toes he takes them on an absolute rollercoaster of a ride with the twistiest of turns and the biggest of drops you will finish this book reeling. I am on a serious book hangover, what book can I read next that can even compare to this? I have no idea but if you are planning on reading An Evil Mind I cannot reccommend it enough. Not only is this probably my book of the year it is probably the best crime fiction book I have ever read. An exaggeration you might say but my opinion is my own and this real

The payoffs for maintaining your unwanted condition can be put in three categories. While all three apply, one of them will be the senior payoff—the most influential—for the particular unwanted condition that is persisting. 1. You get to be right. For human beings, being right is a very big payoff, particularly when you are right about the way things “should” be. This validates your tacit ties to the Universal Human Paradigm. You also get to make somebody else wrong. The unwanted condition of never finding a relationship that works is an example of a racket. If this was your unwanted condition, you would probably swear up and down that you really want a working relationship. But you would never pick an appropriate partner—there’s too much payoff in being right about how relationships can’t work. Each failure would provide you more evidence that something is wrong with you, with your partner of the moment, and with marriage, relationships, and love in general. You would go from one relationship to another—frequently, from one marriage to another—involving yourself with the wrong person, over and over, to prove how hard you are trying to “make it work,” but in reality, you would be thoroughly invested in being right about how relationships can’t work. In short, you would be conning yourself, running a racket on anyone you were in a relationship with. In business, the middle manager who doesn’t say what he is thinking, because his ideas are never taken seriously, is running a racket. His payoff: He gets to be right about how difficult it is to advance in the company.

About ten seconds later, my assistant popped her head into my office. “Mr. Dimon is on the line.” I took off my earrings (the Oakland in me) and picked up the receiver. “You’re trying to steal from my shareholders!” he yelled, almost as soon as he heard my voice. I gave it right back. “Your shareholders? Your shareholders? My shareholders are the homeowners of California! You come and see them. Talk to them about who got robbed.” It stayed at that level for a while. We were like dogs in a fight. A member of my senior team later recalled thinking, “This was either a really good or a colossally bad idea.” I shared with Dimon the way his lawyers were presenting his position, and why it was unacceptable to me. As temperatures cooled, I got into the details of my demands so that he would understand exactly what I needed—not through the filter of his general counsel, but directly from me. At the end of the conversation, he said he would talk to his board and see what they could do. I’ll never know what happened on Dimon’s side. But I do know that two weeks later, the banks gave in. When all was said and done, instead of the $2 billion to $4 billion that was originally on the table, we secured an $18 billion deal, which ultimately grew to $20 billion in relief to homeowners.

Take that well-known phenomenon of "speaking while female". A range of studies confirms the truth of a common female perception: that men often have trouble hearing women when they speak. A typical example occurs in meetings where there are very few women present. You make a point or an observation during a discussion. No one comments or appears to notice. Other participants caryy on with the conversation. Then a man, often senior but not necessarily, makes teh exact same point that you just made. But the response this time is very different. "Great idea Jack!" or I agree with what Jack says. " Or I just want to build on Jacks point." Suddenly Jack owns the insight.

Few Republicans challenge Trump on his conspiracy obsessions, treating him like an addled senior citizen who calls his congressman’s office demanding to know why the CIA is talking to him through his dentures. The shrug and smile that so many Republican leaders have adopted has allowed Trump to dismiss those who challenge his lunacy as “angry Democrats,” because it is Democrats who seem capable of explaining that Ted Cruz’s dad didn’t kill JFK. But Trump isn’t an addled senior citizen—actually he is, but he’s one who happens to be the president of the United States. The acceptance of the conspiracy theories is just one station in the slaughterhouse of truth that is the Trump presidency. Once there is no challenge to the craziest of ideas that have no basis in fact, it is easy for Trump to take one small bit of truth and spin it into an elaborate fantasy. This

It took the wind out of me,’ one senior staff member at the time tells me. And made them furious. The Executive had found time to write papers about ‘postmodernist, high-level theoretical ideas and stuff’, they explain, but the service was not following up the children and young people it had cared for. GIDS could not even tell the High Court how many of the young people put on blockers were autistic, they say, in despair. ‘We don’t fucking care about post-structuralist ideas.

At a business forum I attended, a senior executive of a Fortune 100 company proclaimed that his company manages “not for the next quarter, but for the next quarter century.” Ugh. Such platitudes do not instill confidence in investors. Most managers don’t have any idea what’s going to happen in the next five years, much less the next twenty-five years. How do you manage for an ambiguous future? Yet managers must clearly strike some balance between the short term and the long term. It’s like speeding down the highway in a car. If you focus just beyond the hood, you’re going to have a hard time anticipating what’s coming. Look too far ahead, on the other hand, and you lose perspective on the actions that you need to take now to navigate safely. There’s a tradeoff between the short term and the long term, and the appropriate focal point shifts as conditions warrant.

Poonam, 54, is a senior United Nations official. She joined the elite Indian Administrative Service as a 23-year-old. ‘ No, no, I am not afraid. I think I wanted to be thought of  as a nice person . . . not someone with a bichhoo [ scorpion ] in her mouth that comes out suddenly, so I didn’t speak up. Like you know that aggressive Punjabi woman, I didn’t want that to happen. I think it was all these  things  –  what will so-and-so think, how they won’t see it from my point of view and thinking that the  whole  relationship  will fail. So many fears, imagined or real, who knows . . .    I just want to please, please, please. I have never been able  to communicate or talk openly and clearly with people who matter to me, who I love, my family and friends, about what I want. I would get small small ideas from outside like keep your own account – but I was so scared to say it. Even today. Slowly I am changing with little little things. What TV show to watch, what food to eat.

And Sam Schechner and Emily Glazer were studying how activists had spread baseless doubts about the COVID vaccine so effectively that Facebook had to reimpose its Break the Glass measures in May 2021—the third time it had done so in the United States in six months. I chipped in on all these stories, but I spent the bulk of my time focusing on two: revealing the existence of XCheck, Facebook’s program to give preferential treatment to VIP users, and then examining its response to January 6. In Puerto Rico, Haugen and I had discussed the merits of publishing the stories slowly, releasing one damning article each week over the span of months, giving the complex issues in each story the attention they deserved. Senior editors at the Journal, unsurprisingly, had other ideas. They wanted stories published daily, dominating a solid week of tech news, a way to clearly demonstrate that the project was something extraordinary.

In the spring of 2020, Biden began describing himself as a “transition candidate,” explaining, “We have not given a bench to younger people in the party, the opportunity to have the focus and be in focus for the rest of the country. There’s an incredible group of talented, newer, younger people.” Ben Rhodes, an adviser to Obama in the White House, told me, “It’s actually a really powerful idea. It says, ‘I’m a seventy-seven-year-old white man, who was a senator for thirty years, and I understand both those limitations and the nature of this country.’ Because, no matter what he does, he cannot completely understand the frustration of people in the streets. That’s not a criticism. It’s just a reality.” A senior Obama administration official observed that Biden’s acknowledgment also contained a subtler message: “This country needs to just chill the fuck out and have a boring president.” To

Philip Schiller, senior vice president of worldwide marketing for Apple

Still, the day-to-day work even within I.S.I.’s less secretive directorates could be very different from that of the military, because of the strict compartmentalization of information. An officer would not have any idea what the man in the next office was doing. Information was telescoped to the top, where only the most senior generals had complete visibility.

Projects are pitched in a one-hour meeting with top executives. Amazon forbids PowerPoint presentations and all the usual tools of the corporate world, so copies of the PR/FAQ are handed around the table and everyone reads it, slowly and carefully, in silence. Then they share their initial thoughts, with the most senior people speaking last to avoid prematurely influencing others. Finally, the writer goes through the documents line by line, with anyone free to speak up at any time. “This discussion of the details is the critical part of the meeting,” wrote Colin Bryar and Bill Carr, two former Amazon executives. “People ask hard questions. They engage in intense debate and discussion of the key ideas and the way they are expressed.

She wore pearls and bold colors. Her blouse and skirt were both super-tight. All the senior partners at FFD were dressed likewise. It had been Sadie Fisher’s idea. When Sadie first started representing women who had been sexually harassed or assaulted, she had been told to “tone down” the outfits, to wear clothing that was both drab and shapeless. Sadie hated that. It was more victim blaming and she wouldn’t stand for that. Now the lawyers on this floor did the opposite. “Working

Oh. Liam." Madison cut her off, smirking when Liam walked out of the restroom behind her, still adjusting his tie. "Nice to see you again." Totally nonplussed, Liam smiled. "Madison." "Men's room closed?" "Not at all." He put an arm around Daisy's shoulder and pressed a kiss to her cheek. "Just needed a little alone time with may fiancée." Madison's smile faded. "You're still engaged?" "Yes, we are." He held up Daisy's hand to show off the diamond ring he'd bought her to replace the Sharks ring he'd given her at the bus stop. "When you meet the woman you want to spend the rest of your life with, you don't let her go." Daisy slipped an arm through Liam's. "How's Orson?" "Orson?" Madison frowned as if she had no idea who Daisy was talking about. "Oh. He's gone. Maybe New York?" "I'm sorry to hear that." "I was sorry to hear that Organicare was going under." Madison's smirk returned. "I was wondering if you were interested in coming back to work for me. I need a senior software engineer and---" "Organicare isn't going under," Daisy said. "We've given the company a total overhaul and we've just secured our Series B funding. I've had interest from other investors and I'm here to meet some of them right now. So, if you'll excuse me..." "She's the CEO," Liam said, beaming. "She saved the company and now she's running the whole show." "Congratulations." Madison's voice was flat as she checked her watch. "You're right about the time. I've got a meeting in five minutes. I'd better go." "You didn't have to do that," Daisy said to Liam. "It was a little bit petty." "You enjoyed every second of it." Her lips tipped in a smile. "Okay. I did. She was like every mean girl in high school who mocked me, and now the tables have turned and not only am I running a company, I got the coolest guy in school.

Arbitrages: The purchase of a security and the simultaneous sale of one or more other securities into which it was to be exchanged under a plan of reorganization, merger, or the like. Liquidations: Purchase of shares which were to receive one or more cash payments in liquidation of the company’s assets. Operations of these two classes were selected on the twin basis of (a) a calculated annual return of 20% or more, and (b) our judgment that the chance of a successful outcome was at least four out of five. Related Hedges: The purchase of convertible bonds or convertible preferred shares, and the simultaneous sale of the common stock into which they were exchangeable. The position was established at close to a parity basis—i.e., at a small maximum loss if the senior issue had actually to be converted and the operation closed out in that way. But a profit would be made if the common stock fell considerably more than the senior issue, and the position closed out in the market. Net-Current-Asset (or “Bargain”) Issues: The idea here was to acquire as many issues as possible at a cost for each of less than their book value in terms of net-current-assets alone—i.e., giving no value to the plant account and other assets. Our purchases were made typically at two-thirds or less of such stripped-down asset value. In most years we carried a wide diversification here—at least 100 different issues.

Even if a bit too rosy, this was not an outlandish proposition: in 1910, a more senior figure had also blasphemed when he said, ‘We have much to learn from Native States.’ Yes, many presented ‘a loose despotic system’ but given their strong local roots, these governments did not ‘press hard on the daily lives of the people’. On the other hand, the British machinery, though ‘scientific’, was rigid and not particularly better given the procedural harassment it inflicted.118 Yet another colonial officer observed that where the princes were one up on the Raj was in their ‘claim on the general regard of the people’. The idea of a maharajah, he believed, ‘strikes [the Indian] imagination’ in a way impossible for the file-bearing civil servant.

ARE YOU KIDDING ME?!” Chloe shrieked. “We’re looking at YEARS of detention! Our classmates will be seniors in high school and WE’LL still be in eighth grade, serving DETENTION! Do you have any idea how EMBARRASSING that is going to be?!

Thomas Sowell was born in North Carolina and grew up in Harlem. He moved out from home at an early age and did not finish high school. After a few tough years … read morehe joined the Marine Corps and became a photographer in the Korean War. After leaving the service, Sowell entered Harvard University, worked a part-time job as a photographer and studied the science that would become his passion and profession: economics. Sowell received his bachelor’s degree in economics (magna cum laude) from Harvard in 1958. He went on to receive his master’s in economics from Columbia University in 1959, and a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Chicago in 1968. In the early ’60s, Sowell held jobs as an economist with the Department of Labor and AT&T. But his real interest was in teaching and scholarship. In 1965, at Cornell University, Sowell began the first of many professorships. His other teaching assignments have included Rutgers, Amherst, Brandeis and the UCLA. In addition, Sowell was project director at the Urban Institute, 1972-1974; a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University, 1976–77; and was an adjunct scholar of the American Enterprise Institute, 1975-76. Dr. Sowell has published a large volume of writing, much of which is considered ground-breaking. His has written over 30 books and hundreds of articles and essays. His work covers a wide range of topics, Including: classic economic theory, judicial activism, social policy, ethnicity, civil rights, education, and the history of ideas to name only a few. Sowell has earned international acclaim for his unmatched reputation for academic integrity. His scholarship places him as one of the greatest thinkers of the second half of the twenty century. Thomas Sowell began contributing to newspapers in the late ’70s, and he became a nationally syndicated newspaper columnist 1984. Sowell has brought common sense economic thinking to the masses by his ability to write for the general public with a voice that get to the heart of issues in plain English. Today his columns appear in more than 150 newspapers. In 2003, Thomas Sowell received the Bradley Prize for intellectual achievement. Sowell was awarded the National Humanities Medal in 2002. In 1990, he won the prestigious Francis Boyer Award, presented by The American Enterprise Institute. Currently, Thomas Sowell is the Rose and Milton Friedman Senior Fellow on Public Policy at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California. —Dean Kalahar

In fact, minimal thought ever went into race-related issues when it came to the Sussexes. This is the same institution that suggested that Lady Susan Hussey (yes, that Lady Susan Hussey) help biracial Meghan acclimate to Palace life and navigate the royal system. The duchess turned down the offer, probably having already sensed that it might not be the best idea. When Palace aides later told reporters, including myself, that they “bent over backwards” to make Meghan feel comfortable at Buckingham Palace, this included a follow-up suggestion that perhaps the Queen’s Ghanaian-born household cavalry officer Lieutenant Colonel Nana Kofi Twumasi-Ankrah should be the one to help Meghan. Though a charming and intelligent man, it stood out like a sore thumb to Meghan and her friends that, due to a lack of Black or other non-white staff, let alone women, in relevant senior roles, the Palace had to turn to someone who was the Queen’s attendant. “I doubt Kate was offered an equerry [for guidance],” a pal said to Meghan.

Ken Wharfe In 1987, Ken Wharfe was appointed a personal protection officer to Diana. In charge of the Princess’s around-the-clock security at home and abroad, in public and in private, Ken Wharfe became a close friend and loyal confidant who shared her most private moments. After Diana’s death, Inspector Wharfe was honored by Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II at Buckingham Palace and made a Member of the Victorian Order, a personal gift of the sovereign for his loyal service to her family. His book, Diana: Closely Guarded Secret, is a Sunday Times and New York Times bestseller. He is a regular contributor with the BBC, ITN, Sky News, NBC, CBS, and CNN, participating in numerous outside broadcasts and documentaries for BBC--Newsnight, Channel 4 News, Channel 5 News, News 24, and GMTV. And so, early one morning less than a week later, we left Kensington Palace and drove to the Sandbanks ferry at Poole in an ordinary saloon car. As we gazed at the coastline from the shabby viewing deck of the vintage chain ferry, Diana’s excitement was obvious, yet not one of the other passengers recognized her. But then, no one would have expected the most photographed woman in the world to be aboard the Studland chain ferry on a sunny spring morning in May. As the ferry docked after its short journey, we climbed back into the car and then, once the ramp had been lowered, drove off in a line of cars and service trucks heading for Studland and Swanage. Diana was driving, and I asked her to stop in a sand-covered area about half a mile from the ferry landing point. We left the car and walked a short distance across a wooded bridge that spanned a reed bed to the deserted beach of Shell Bay. Her simple pleasure at being somewhere with no one, apart from me, knowing her whereabouts was touching to see. Diana looked out toward the Isle of Wight, anxious by now to set off on her walk to the Old Harry Rocks at the western extremity of Studland Bay. I gave her a personal two-way radio and a sketch map of the shoreline she could expect to see, indicating a landmark near some beach huts at the far end of the bay, a tavern or pub, called the Bankes Arms, where I would meet her. She set off at once, a tall figure clad in a pair of blue denim jeans, a dark-blue suede jacket, and a soft scarf wrapped loosely around her face to protect her from the chilling, easterly spring wind. I stood and watched as she slowly dwindled in the distance, her head held high, alone apart from busy oyster catchers that followed her along the water’s edge. It was a strange sensation watching her walking away by herself, with no bodyguards following at a discreet distance. What were my responsibilities here? I kept thinking. Yet I knew this area well, and not once did I feel uneasy. I had made this decision--not one of my colleagues knew. Senior officers at Scotland Yard would most certainly have boycotted the idea had I been foolish enough to give them advance notice of what the Princess and I were up to.

Ken Wharfe In 1987, Ken Wharfe was appointed a personal protection officer to Diana. In charge of the Princess’s around-the-clock security at home and abroad, in public and in private, Ken Wharfe became a close friend and loyal confidant who shared her most private moments. After Diana’s death, Inspector Wharfe was honored by Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II at Buckingham Palace and made a Member of the Victorian Order, a personal gift of the sovereign for his loyal service to her family. His book, Diana: Closely Guarded Secret, is a Sunday Times and New York Times bestseller. He is a regular contributor with the BBC, ITN, Sky News, NBC, CBS, and CNN, participating in numerous outside broadcasts and documentaries for BBC--Newsnight, Channel 4 News, Channel 5 News, News 24, and GMTV. It was a strange sensation watching her walking away by herself, with no bodyguards following at a discreet distance. What were my responsibilities here? I kept thinking. Yet I knew this area well, and not once did I feel uneasy. I had made this decision--not one of my colleagues knew. Senior officers at Scotland Yard would most certainly have boycotted the idea had I been foolish enough to give them advance notice of what the Princess and I were up to. Before Diana disappeared from sight, I called her on the radio. Her voice was bright and lively, and I knew instinctively that she was happy, and safe. I walked back to the car and drove slowly along the only road that runs adjacent to the bay, with heath land and then the sea to my left and the waters of Poole Harbour running up toward Wareham, a small market town, to my right. Within a matter of minutes, I was turning into the car park of the Bankes Arms, a fine old pub that overlooks the bay. I left the car and strolled down to the beach, where I sat on an old wall in the bright sunshine. The beach huts were locked, and there was no sign of life. To my right I could see the Old Harry Rocks--three tall pinnacles of chalk standing in the sea, all that remains, at the landward end, of a ridge that once ran due east to the Isle of Wight. Like the Princess, I, too, just wanted to carry on walking. Suddenly, my radio crackled into life: “Ken, it’s me--can you hear me?” I fumbled in the large pockets of my old jacket, grabbed the radio, and said, “Yes. How is it going?” “Ken, this is amazing, I can’t believe it,” she said, sounding truly happy. Genuinely pleased for her, I hesitated before replying, but before I could speak she called again, this time with that characteristic mischievous giggle in her voice. “You never told me about the nudist colony!” she yelled, and laughed raucously over the radio. I laughed, too--although what I actually thought was “Uh-oh!” But judging from her remarks, whatever she had seen had made her laugh. At this point, I decided to walk toward her, after a few minutes seeing her distinctive figure walking along the water’s edge toward me. Two dogs had joined her and she was throwing sticks into the sea for them to retrieve; there were no crowd barriers, no servants, no police, apart from me, and no overattentive officials. Not a single person had recognized her. For once, everything for the Princess was “normal.” During the seven years I had worked for her, this was an extraordinary moment, one I shall never forget.

Tom’s team distilled the thousand ideas down to 293 discussion topics. That was still way too many for a single day’s agenda, so a group of senior managers then met and whittled those down to 120 topics, organized into several broad categories such as Training, Environment and Culture; Cross-Show Resource Pooling (we often call our movies “shows”); Tools and Technology; and Workflow.

The week before Notes Day, all facilitators attended a training session to help them keep each meeting on track and make sure that everyone—the outgoing, the laid-back, and everyone in between—was heard from. Then, to make sure something concrete emerged, the Working Group designed a set of “exit forms” to be filled out by each session’s participants. Red forms were for proposals, blue forms were for brainstorms, and yellow forms were for something we called “best practices”—ideas that were not action items per se but principles about how we should behave as a company. The forms were simple and specific: Each session got its own set, tailored specifically to the topic at hand, that asked a specific question. For example, the session called “Returning to a ‘Good Ideas Come from Anywhere’ Culture,” had blue exit forms topped with this header: Imagine it’s 2017. We’ve broken down barriers so that people feel safe to speak up. Senior employees are open to new processes. What did we do to achieve this success? Underneath that question were boxes in which attendees could pencil in three answers. Then, after they wrote a general description of each idea, they were asked to go a few steps further. What “Benefits to Pixar” would these ideas bring? And what should be the “Next Steps” to make them a reality? Finally, there was space provided to specify “Who is the best audience for this idea?” and “Who should pitch this idea?

Stop talking. Now.” Deanna’s head fell back and she started laughing. It was a full-bodied belly laugh that spread over him like a breeze on a hot day. The sound was so sweet that it almost made up for how big of a disgusting pervert he felt like right now. While she was still chuckling, she touched his arm. “Don’t feel bad. How old were you then?” “It was senior year, so seventeen,” Lucky answered, still feeling gross. “See? You were a teenager, too. It’s fine. Really.” She continued giggling, and he had to admit that the sound made him so happy that he didn’t even care that it was at his expense. “It still feels wrong.” His shoulders shook as a chill ran through him, and it wasn’t the good kind. It was the grossed-out kind. “I think it’s hilarious,” she said, clearly enjoying seeing him squirm. “I’m so glad I can amuse you,” he said flatly. “Well, I think it’s only fair since I seemed to have offered hours of amusement for you—” Without even thinking, he reached over the seat and started tickling her. She wiggled and laughed, begging him to stop. He did, but only because a call came in. When he saw the picture on his console’s display, he knew he had to answer it. Pressing the answer button, he extended his patent greeting to his publicist. “Hello, beautiful.” “Why can’t you just play nice with others, especially the press?” Jessie Sloan-Courtland asked in her usual no nonsense tone. Jessie wasn’t one for niceties. She was all business, all the time. Deciding to ignore her rhetorical question and her dislike for small talk, he pushed on undeterred. “I’ve been good. How about you?” “Lucky. You can’t treat the press like that.” Jessie seemed to have the same game plan as he did. This conversation was going to happen, so he figured he might as well just get it over with. “I wasn’t there for them. I was there for the kids.” “It doesn’t matter. They were there, and whether you like it or not, you have a responsibility—” “I had a responsibility to visit the kids and their families. I had a responsibility to protect the people I brought with me. And I lived up to my responsibilities.” “I’m not going to argue with you. You’re supposed to be cleaning up your act. We agreed. And your image is your responsibility. When you elbow photographers in the nose, you open yourself up for lawsuits, and that is not something sponsors think is appealing. You know what’s on the line with this bout. Don’t screw it up.” “Yes, Mom,” he answered—his normal response for when Jessie was right. “You know, you’re not nearly as cute as you think you are,” she said, sounding less than impressed. “Awww, you think I’m cute. Does Zach know? I don’t want to come betw—” “Goodbye, Lucky.” “Bye, beautiful.” When the call disconnected, Lucky felt a little twinge of guilt that Jessie had even had to make that call. He knew better. “Wow. She’s awesome.” Unlike Jessie, Deanna did sound impressed. “Yeah. She is pretty awesome,” he agreed. “And so beautiful.” Deanna was still looking at Jessie’s picture on the console. He didn’t want her to get the wrong idea just because he’d called her beautiful. “Her husband sure thinks so. He’s actually a friend of mine. Have you heard of Zach Courtland?” Deanna was quiet for a beat. Then she snapped her fingers. “Was he the one in the Calvin Klein ads?” “That’s him.” “Wow. She’s married to him? He’s…hot.” Well, this conversation had taken a turn Lucky didn’t like. Not one little bit.

An old Chevy, I think,” he was going on now. “It’s supposed to be back soon, though. Not really the same without it, is it?” He actually sounded genuinely mournful. I was surprised to find myself battling back a quick, involuntary smile. He did seem to be more interesting than your average, run-of-the-mill BMOC. I had to give him that. Get a grip, O’Connor, I chastised myself. “Absolutely not,” I said, giving my head a semi-vigorous nod. That ought to move him along, I thought. You may not be aware of this fact, but agreeing with people is often an excellent way of getting them to forget all about you. After basking in the glow of agreement, most people are then perfectly content to go about their business, remembering only the fact that someone agreed and allowing the identity of the person who did the actual agreeing to fade into the background. This technique almost always works. In fact, I’d never known it not to. There was a moment of silence. A silence in which I could feel the BMOC’s eyes upon me. I kept my own eyes fixed on the top of the carless column. But the longer the silence went on, the more strained it became. At least it did on my side. This guy was simply not abiding by the rules. He was supposed to have basked and moved on by now. “You don’t have the faintest idea what I’m talking about, do you?” he said at last. I laughed before I quite realized what I’d done. “Not a clue,” I said, turning to give him my full attention for the very first time, an action I could tell right away spelled trouble. You just had to do it, didn’t you? I thought. He was even better looking when I took a better look. He flashed me a smile, and I felt my pulse kick up several notches. My brain knew perfectly well that that smile had not been invented just for me. My suddenly-beating-way-too-fast heart wasn’t paying all that much attention to my brain, though. “You must be new, then,” he commented. “I’d remember you if we’d met before.” All of a sudden, his face went totally blank. “I cannot believe I just said that,” he said. “That is easily the world’s oldest line.” “If it isn’t, it’s the cheesiest,” I said. He winced. “I’d ask you to let me make it up to you, but I’m thinking that would make things even worse.” “You’d be thinking right.” This time he was the one who laughed, the sound open and easy, as if he was genuinely enjoying the joke on himself. In retrospect I think it was that laugh that did it. That finished the job his smile had started. You just didn’t find all that many guys, all that many people, who were truly willing to laugh at themselves. “I’m Alex Crawford,” he said. “Jo,” I said. “Jo O’Connor.” At this Alex actually stuck out his hand. His eyes, which I probably don’t need to tell you were this pretty much impossible shade of blue, focused directly on my face. “Pleased to meet you, Jo O’Connor.” I watched my hand move forward to meet his, as if it belonged to a stranger and was moving in slow motion. At that exact moment, an image of the robot from the movie Lost in Space flashed through my mind. Arms waving frantically in the air, screaming, “Danger! Danger!” at the top of its inhuman lungs. My hand kept moving anyhow. Our fingers connected. I felt the way Alex’s wrapped around mine, then tightened. Felt the way that simple action caused a flush to spread across my cheeks and a tingle to start in the palm of my hand and slowly begin to work its way up my arm. To this day, I’d swear I heard him suck in a breath, saw his impossibly blue eyes widen. As if, at the exact same moment I looked up at him, he’d discovered something as completely unexpected as I had, gazing down. He released me. I stuck my hand behind my back. “Pleased to meet you, Jo O’Connor,” he said again. Not quite the way he had the first time.

Stocks passed my e-mail along to Model Gut senior scientist Richard Faulks. Faulks was dismissive not only of extreme chewing, but also of the related fad for blenderizing to increase the accessibility of nutrients. It’s true saliva carries an enzyme that breaks down starch, but the pancreas makes this enzyme too. So any digestive slack caused by hasty chewing would be taken up in the small intestine. The human digestive tract has evolved to extract the maximum it can from the food ingested, Faulks said, and that is probably all it needs. “Nutritional science is dogged by the idea that if some is good, more is better,

Overall, Cyber Shield Act is an excellent idea and could facilitate a much-needed cultural shift in secure device manufacturing and upkeep." James Scott, Senior Fellow, Institute for Critical Infrastructure Technology

Overall, Cyber Shield Act is an excellent idea and could facilitate a much-needed cultural shift in secure device manufacturing and upkeep.