Jonathan Majors Quotes

Everyone cares about fairness, but there are two major kinds. On the left, fairness often implies equality, but on the right it means proportionality —people should be rewarded in proportion to what they contribute, even if that guarantees unequal outcomes.

My central claim in this book is that these two trends—overprotection in the real world and underprotection in the virtual world—are the major reasons why children born after 1995 became the anxious generation.

I wish I were a poet. I've never confessed that to anyone, and I'm confessing it to you, because you've given me reason to feel that I can trust you. I've spent my life observing the universe, mostly in my mind's eye. It's been a tremendously rewarding life, a wonderful life. I've been able to explore the origins of time and space with some of the great living thinkers. But I wish I were a poet. Albert Einstein, a hero of mine, once wrote, 'Our situation is the following. We are standing in front of a closed box which we cannot open.' I'm sure I don't have to tell you that the vast majority of the universe is composed of dark matter. The fragile balance depends on things we'll never be able to see, hear, smell, taste, or touch. Life itself depends on them. What's real? What isn't real? Maybe those aren't the right questions to be asking. What does life depend on? I wish I had made things for life to depend on.

What about a device that knew everyone you knew? So when an ambulance went down the street, a big sign on the roof could flash DON’T WORRY! DON’T WORRY! if the sick person’s device didn’t detect the device of someone he knew nearby. And if the device did detect the device of someone he knew, the ambulance could flash the name of the person in the ambulance, and either IT’S NOTHING MAJOR! IT’S NOTHING MAJOR! Or, if it was something major, IT’S MAJOR! IT’S MAJOR! And maybe you could rate the people you knew by how much you loved them, so if the person in the ambulance detected the device of the person he loved the most, or the person who loved him the most, and the person in the ambulance was really badly hurt, and might even die, the ambulance could flash GOODBYE! I LOVE YOU! GOODBYE! I LOVE YOU! One thing that’s nice to think about is someone who was the first person on lot’s of people’s lists, so that when he was dying, and his ambulance went down the streets to the hospital, the whole time it would flash GOODBYE! I LOVE YOU! GOODBYE! I LOVE YOU!

Please,” she says. “Tell me what you’re thinking.” It’s an absurd request. Our minds, unedited by guilt or shame, are selfish and unkind, and the majority of our thoughts, at any given time, are not for public consumption, because they would either be hurtful or else just make us look like the selfish and unkind bastards we are. We don’t share our thoughts, we share carefully sanitized, watered-down versions of them, Hollywood adaptations of those thoughts dumbed down for the PG-13 crowd.

The controversy between Darwinism and intelligent design has the characteristics of major scientific revolutions in the past. Darwinists are losing power because they treat with contempt the very people on whom they depend the most: American taxpayers. The outcome of this scientific revolution will be decided by young people who have the courage to question dogmatism and follow the evidence wherever it leads.

But when, at the end of my sophomore year, I became a philosophy major and started doing my first seriously pretentious thinking, I became a vegetarian again. The kind of willful forgetting that I was sure meat eating required felt too paradoxical to the intellectual life I was trying to shape. I thought life could, should, and must conform to the mold of reason. You can imagine how annoying this made me.

Whether anybody was home meant everything to a house. It was more than a major fact: it was the only fact. The family was the house's soul.

Everyone cares about fairness, but there are two major kinds. On the left, fairness often implies equality, but on the right it means proportionality—people should be rewarded in proportion to what they contribute, even if that guarantees unequal outcomes.

If you can do one single thing towards a just, durable, and creative peace, you will have fulfilled your major obligation to the world,

The speaker was stringy and angular, his blond hair pulled back in a ponytail, his plaid workman's shirtsleeves rolled up around his pale biceps. Journalism major, I guessed.

the great majority of mankind are satisfied with appearances, as though they were realities, and are often more influenced by the things that seem than by those that are.

The conservatives won. They turned the Democrats into a center-right party. They got the entire country singing 'God Bless America,' stress on God, at every single major-league baseball game. They won on every fucking front, but they especially won culturally, and especially regarding babies. In 1970 it was cool to care about the planet's future and not have kids. Now the one thing everyone agrees on, right and left, is that it's beautiful to have a lot of babies. The more the better. Kate Winslet is pregnant, hooray hooray. Some dimwit in Iowa just had octuplets, hooray hooray. The conversation about the idiocy of SUV's stops dead the minute people say they're buying them to protect their precious babies. (221)

It's an absurd request. Our minds, unedited by guilt or shame, are selfish and unkind, and the majority of our thoughts, at any given time, are not for public consumption, because they would either be hurtful or else just make us look like the selfish and unkind bastards we are.

I did not and do not want my life tied up in cloak-and-dagger bullshit, dead guys, or pissing contests with either the testosterone crowd in there or some prissy-assed Earl Grey-drinking, scone-munching major who isn't even my freaking boss. I don't know you and I don't give a rat's ass if you trust me.

Just read The Virtue of Minding Your Own Business. Oh my, what currents run deep! Beautifully seen, beautifully told. Praise praise praise . . . Pardon my French, but you are one darn major American writer!" ---Richard Bach, author of Jonathan Livingston Seagull and Illusions, on Sandcastle and Other Stories

Why do stories cluster around a few big themes, and why do they hew so closely to problem structure? Why are stories this way instead of all the other ways they could be? I think that problem structure reveals a major function of storytelling. It suggests that the human mind was shaped for story, so that it could be shaped by story.

We dramatically overstate the role of science deniers, because it allows science acceptors to feel righteous without challenging us to act on the knowledge we accept. Only 14 percent of Americans deny climate change, which is a significantly lower percentage than who deny evolution, or that the earth orbits the sun. Sixty-nine percent of American voters—including the majority of Republicans—say that the United States should have remained in the Paris climate accord.

Daily, she went over the story, ramming it through the turnstile in her mind, making sure she hadn’t missed anything major. She did not want to be caught off guard if she was ever questioned. She had to have thought of everything. And what of those things she could not anticipate? She’d simply answer, “I don’t know. I have no knowledge of that. Someone else might be able to tell you.

The desires our little family couldn't afford to indulge had never seemed important, only snobbish and silly and somehow misplaced, like Thurston Howell's priorities on Gilligan's Island. Besides, I'd had as much or more money than most kids I'd known in Brooklyn, if somewhat less than the majority of my Manhattan schoolmates at Stuyvesant, so figured I was somewhere in the middle. Yeah, sure, that was it: I was middle class.

Yeah,” added a man who owned a lawn-care service. “A lot of the people that I know that are in poverty are not healthy… the vast majority of them are very overweight, and the children are overweight.” “And how do you know they’re not healthy?” I asked. “Well,” the man continued, “just by their physical appearance, generally speaking, although you can look at their facial expressions, their faces and look at the coloring of their skin, that type of thing.

In researching this book, I quickly discovered a surprising thing about the 1960s: the decade was not nearly as radical as we've been led to believe. In fact, the upheaval was really confined to a very narrow stratum of society. For the overwhelming majority of Americans, the 1960s was a conservative decade.

This principle—the need for democracies to protect the rights of minorities—was one of the reasons that the U.S. Constitution’s first ten amendments (the Bill of Rights) were added so quickly. (You don’t need a Bill of Rights to protect the rights of the majority in a democracy, because the vote already does that.)

He prided himself on blunt speaking. Mind you, he did have a weakness for boasting. If you believed all his stories, you’d have thought him responsible for most of the world’s major landmarks as well as being advisor and confidant to all the notable magicians. This, as I once remarked to Solomon, was a quite ridiculous claim.

but she’d since been bludgeoned by episodes of major depression beside which Patty’s own depressions were apparently autumn hayrides in an apple orchard.

overprotection in the real world and underprotection in the virtual world—are the major reasons why children born after 1995 became the anxious generation.

And she didn’t want the first major address of what could be a history-making campaign to be set against a minimalistic backdrop like some farmer’s back porch.

I'm sure I don't have to tell you that the vast majority of the universe is compose of dark matter. The fragile balance depends on things we'll never be able to see, hear, smell, taste, or touch.

For Biden, as for other Democrats who had considered running in 2016, Hillary’s ability to co-opt the major institutions, political leaders, operatives, and financiers of the Democratic Party was deeply frustrating.

It is the sound of the crowd that can be heard in the second, crescendoing rush of the orchestra that follows the final verse, rising from a hum to a gasp to a shout... fusing at last to a shriek (its similarity to the sound of the crowds at Beatle concerts is surely no accident). The onrushing sound of the orchestra at the end of "A Day in the Life" has transcended more than the conventions of Sgt. Pepper's Band. It is the nightmare resolution of the Beatles' show within a show. It is the sound in the eras of the high-wire artist as the ground rushes up from below. There is a blinding flash of silence, then the stunning impact of a tremendous E major piano chord that hangs in the air for a small eternity, slowly fading away, a forty-second meditation on finality that leaves each member if the audience listening with a new kind of attention and awareness to the sound of nothing at all.

leadership on virtue can never come from the major political actors; it will have to come from a movement of people, such as the people of a town who come together and agree to create moral coherence across the many areas of children’s lives.

This path is very rarely the result of any choice, or even of personal predilection. The victims, in the vast majority of cases, were not tortured or killed because they were good any more than their executioners tormented them because they were evil. It

to really get a mass atrocity going you need idealism—the belief that your violence is a means to a moral end. The major atrocities of the twentieth century were carried out largely either by men who thought they were creating a utopia or else by men who believed they were defending their homeland or tribe from attack.30 Idealism easily becomes dangerous because it brings with it, almost inevitably, the belief that the ends justify the means. If you are fighting for good or for God, what matters is the outcome, not the path. People have little respect for rules; we respect the moral principles that underlie most rules. But when a moral mission and legal rules are incompatible, we usually care more about the mission. The psychologist Linda Skitka31 finds that when people have strong moral feelings about a controversial issue—when they have a “moral mandate”—they care much less about procedural fairness in court cases. They want the “good guys” freed by any means, and the “bad guys” convicted by any means. It is thus not surprising that the administration of George W. Bush consistently argues that extra-judicial killings, indefinite imprisonment without trial, and harsh physical treatment of prisoners are legal and proper steps in fighting the Manichaean “war on terror.

Major recovery, however, requires that personal narrative be particular, not general. The friends who died in Vietnam were not friends in general but particular human beings. The survivors who lost them are also particular human beings, and they must be given permission by the community to speak without fear that their particularity will rupture the we-all-went-through-the-same-thing support that they have come to rely upon. In a fully realized personal narrative the survivor grips the herald's staff and speaks as himself.

In humans (and other highly sociable mammals, such as dogs), the default setting is a major contributor to their individual personality. People (and dogs) who go through life in discover mode (except when directly threatened) are happier, more sociable, and more eager for new experiences. Conversely, people (and dogs) who are chronically in defend mode are more defensive and anxious, and they have only rare moments of perceived safety. They tend to see new situations, people, and ideas as potential threats, rather than as opportunities. Such chronic wariness was adaptive in some ancient environments, and may still be today for children raised in unstable and violent settings. But being stuck in defend mode is an obstacle to learning and growth in the physically safe environments that surround most children in developed nations

Look!" Hawkeye said. Duke looked where Hawkeye was pointing. In one corner, kneeling on the dirt floor with his elbows on his cot, a Bible in front of him, his lips moving slowly, and oblivious to all about him, was Major Jonathan Hobson. "Jesus," Hawkeye said. "It don't look like Him," Duke said.

Those same three factors applied to human beings. Like bees, our ancestors were (1) territorial creatures with a fondness for defensible nests (such as caves) who (2) gave birth to needy offspring that required enormous amounts of care, which had to be given while (3) the group was under threat from neighboring groups. For hundreds of thousands of years, therefore, conditions were in place that pulled for the evolution of ultrasociality, and as a result, we are the only ultrasocial primate. The human lineage may have started off acting very much like chimps,48 but by the time our ancestors started walking out of Africa, they had become at least a little bit like bees. And much later, when some groups began planting crops and orchards, and then building granaries, storage sheds, fenced pastures, and permanent homes, they had an even steadier food supply that had to be defended even more vigorously. Like bees, humans began building ever more elaborate nests, and in just a few thousand years, a new kind of vehicle appeared on Earth—the city-state, able to raise walls and armies.49 City-states and, later, empires spread rapidly across Eurasia, North Africa, and Mesoamerica, changing many of the Earth’s ecosystems and allowing the total tonnage of human beings to shoot up from insignificance at the start of the Holocene (around twelve thousand years ago) to world domination today.50 As the colonial insects did to the other insects, we have pushed all other mammals to the margins, to extinction, or to servitude. The analogy to bees is not shallow or loose. Despite their many differences, human civilizations and beehives are both products of major transitions in evolutionary history. They are motorboats.

Big squidhead lies a-sleeping at the bottom of the sea, And one day, when the stars are right, he’ll wake up presently, And then may wipe us all out, which sounds worrying to me, While the Tcho-Tcho sing this song… Aie! Ftagn! Ftagn! Cthulhu! Cosmic horror coming to you, The Old Ones are back now with a view to Sucking out your brains. Big Squidhead lies a-sleeping, although, in a way, he’s dead. There are dreams that change reality a-running round his head. He lies in dread R’lyeh, which is on the ocean bed. But pops up and down for fun. And the Tcho-Tcho sing Aie! Ftagn! Ftagn! Yog-Sothoth! The streets will be chockablock with shoggoth, How sweetly their cries ‘Tekeli-li!’ doth Improve the slimy hour. Big Squidhead lies a-scheming at the bottom of the sea, He is counting out the aeons that make up eternity, And when he’s done, it’s curtains for the mast majority, While the Tcho-Tcho get on down. Aie! Ftagn! Ftagn! Shub-Niggurath! We’re on the winning side to see the aftermath, Put on your marching boots because we’re on the path, To the end times, here we come! To the end times, here we come! To the end times! Here! We! Coooooooooome!

Much has been said and written in recent years about the connection between religion and violence. Three answers have emerged. The first: Religion is the major source of violence. Therefore if we seek a more peaceful world we should abolish religion. The second: Religion is not a source of violence. People are made violent, as Hobbes said, by fear, glory and the ‘perpetual and restless desire for power after power that ceaseth only in death’.8 Religion has nothing to do with it. It may be used by manipulative leaders to motivate people to wage wars precisely because it inspires people to heroic acts of self-sacrifice, but religion itself teaches us to love and forgive, not to hate and fight. The third answer is: Their religion, yes; our religion, no. We are for peace. They are for war.

Albert Einstein, a hero of mine, once wrote, “Our situation is the following. We are standing in front of a closed box which we cannot open.” I’m sure I don’t have to tell you that the vast majority of the universe is composed of dark matter. The fragile balance depends on things we’ll never be able to see, hear, smell, taste, or touch. Life itself depends on them. What’s real? What isn’t real? Maybe those aren’t the right questions to be asking. What does life depend on? I wish I had made things for life to depend on.

I could see beauty in a moral code that emphasized self-control, resistance to temptation, cultivation of one’s higher, nobler self, and negation of the self’s desires. I could see the dark side of this ethic too: once you allow visceral feelings of disgust to guide your conception of what God wants, then minorities who trigger even a hint of disgust in the majority (such as homosexuals or obese people) can be ostracized and treated cruelly. The ethic of divinity is sometimes incompatible with compassion, egalitarianism, and basic human rights.

The horror of underage smoking veils a horror of teen and preteen sexuality, and one of the biggest pleasant empty dreams being pushed these days by Madison Avenue is that a child is innocent until his or her eighteenth birthday. The truth is that without firm parental guidance teenagers make all sorts of irrevocable decisions before they’re old enough to appreciate the consequences—they drop out of school, they get pregnant, they major in sociology. What they want most of all is to sample the pleasures of adulthood, like sex or booze or cigarettes.

Majority rule is the basic principle of democracy. But that only means that a majority is enough to authorise the state’s acts. It is not enough to make them legitimate. This is because majority rule is no more than a rule of decision. It does nothing to accommodate our differences. It just restates them in numerical terms. Democracies cannot operate on the basis that a bare majority takes 100 per cent of the political spoils. If it did, it would harbour large and permanently disaffected groups in their midst, who had no common bonds to transcend their differences with the majority.

The overwhelming majority of combat veterans whom I have known are painfully aware of the absence of intimacy, tenderness, light playfulness, or easy mutuality in their sex lives. For many, sex is a trigger of intrusive recollection and emotion from Vietnam as the sound of explosions or the smell of a corpse. Sex and anger are intertwined that they often cannot conceive of tender, uncoerced sex that is free of rage. When successful treatment reduces their rage, they sometimes report that they have to completely relearn (or learn for the first time) the pleasures of sex with intimacy and playfulness.

Here’s a simple definition of ideology: “A set of beliefs about the proper order of society and how it can be achieved.”8 And here’s the most basic of all ideological questions: Preserve the present order, or change it? At the French Assembly of 1789, the delegates who favored preservation sat on the right side of the chamber, while those who favored change sat on the left. The terms right and left have stood for conservatism and liberalism ever since. Political theorists since Marx had long assumed that people chose ideologies to further their self-interest. The rich and powerful want to preserve and conserve; the peasants and workers want to change things (or at least they would if their consciousness could be raised and they could see their self-interest properly, said the Marxists). But even though social class may once have been a good predictor of ideology, that link has been largely broken in modern times, when the rich go both ways (industrialists mostly right, tech billionaires mostly left) and so do the poor (rural poor mostly right, urban poor mostly left). And when political scientists looked into it, they found that self-interest does a remarkably poor job of predicting political attitudes.9 So for most of the late twentieth century, political scientists embraced blank-slate theories in which people soaked up the ideology of their parents or the TV programs they watched.10 Some political scientists even said that most people were so confused about political issues that they had no real ideology at all.11 But then came the studies of twins. In the 1980s, when scientists began analyzing large databases that allowed them to compare identical twins (who share all of their genes, plus, usually, their prenatal and childhood environments) to same-sex fraternal twins (who share half of their genes, plus their prenatal and childhood environments), they found that the identical twins were more similar on just about everything.12 And what’s more, identical twins reared in separate households (because of adoption) usually turn out to be very similar, whereas unrelated children reared together (because of adoption) rarely turn out similar to each other, or to their adoptive parents; they tend to be more similar to their genetic parents. Genes contribute, somehow, to just about every aspect of our personalities.13 We’re not just talking about IQ, mental illness, and basic personality traits such as shyness. We’re talking about the degree to which you like jazz, spicy foods, and abstract art; your likelihood of getting a divorce or dying in a car crash; your degree of religiosity, and your political orientation as an adult. Whether you end up on the right or the left of the political spectrum turns out to be just as heritable as most other traits: genetics explains between a third and a half of the variability among people on their political attitudes.14 Being raised in a liberal or conservative household accounts for much less. How can that be? How can there be a genetic basis for attitudes about nuclear power, progressive taxation, and foreign aid when these issues only emerged in the last century or two? And how can there be a genetic basis for ideology when people sometimes change their political parties as adults? To answer these questions it helps to return to the definition of innate that I gave in chapter 7. Innate does not mean unmalleable; it means organized in advance of experience. The genes guide the construction of the brain in the uterus, but that’s only the first draft, so to speak. The draft gets revised by childhood experiences. To understand the origins of ideology you have to take a developmental perspective, starting with the genes and ending with an adult voting for a particular candidate or joining a political protest. There are three major steps in the process. Step

On the left, concerns about equality and social justice are based in part on the Fairness foundation—wealthy and powerful groups are accused of gaining by exploiting those at the bottom while not paying their “fair share” of the tax burden. This is a major theme of the Occupy Wall Street movement, which I visited in October 2011 (see figure 7.5).17 On the right, the Tea Party movement is also very concerned about fairness. They see Democrats as “socialists” who take money from hardworking Americans and give it to lazy people (including those who receive welfare or unemployment benefits) and to illegal immigrants (in the form of free health care and education).

Other evidence suggests that the 1918 virus might have mutated within pigs (which are uniquely susceptible to both human and bird viruses) or even in human populations for a time before reaching the deadly virtuosity of its final version. We cannot be sure. What we can be sure of is that there is scientific consensus that new viruses, which move between farmed animals and humans, will be a major global health threat into the foreseeable future. The concern is not only bird flu or swine flu or whatever-comes-next, but the entire class of “zoonotic” (animal-to-human or vice versa) pathogens — especially viruses that move between humans, chickens, turkeys, and pigs.

I've read every letter that you've sent me these past two years. In return, I've sent you many form letters, with the hope of one day being able to give you the proper response you deserve. But the more letters you wrote to me, and the more of yourself you gave, the more daunting my task became. I'm sitting beneath a pear tree as I dictate this to you, overlooking the orchards of a friend's estate. I've spent the past few days here, recovering from some medical treatment that has left me physically and emotionally depleted. As I moped about this morning, feeling sorry for myself, it occurred to me, like a simple solution to an impossible problem: today is the day I've been waiting for. You asked me in your first letter if you could be my protege. I don't know about that, but I would be happy to have you join me in Cambridge for a few days. I could introduce you to my colleagues, treat you to the best curry outside India, and show you just how boring the life of an astrophysicist can be. You can have a bright future in the sciences, Oskar. I would be happy to do anything possible to facilitate such a path. It's wonderful to think what would happen if you put your imagination toward scientific ends. But Oskar, intelligent people write to me all the time. In your fifth letter you asked, "What if I never stop inventing?" That question has stuck with me. I wish I were a poet. I've never confessed that to anyone, and I'm confessing it to you, because you've given me reason to feel that I can trust you. I've spent my life observing the universe, mostly in my mind's eye. It's been a tremendously rewarding life, a wonderful life. I've been able to explore the origins of time and space with some of the great living thinkers.But I wish I were a poet. Albert Einstein, a hero of mine, once wrote, "Our situation is the following. We are standing in front of a closed box which we cannot open." I'm sure I don't have to tell you that the vast majority of the universe is composed of dark matter. The fragile balance depends on things we'll never be able to see, hear, smell, taste, or touch. Life itself depends on them. What's real? What isn't real? Maybe those aren't the right questions to be asking. What does life depend on? I wish I had made things for life to depend on. What if you never stop inventing? Maybe you're not inventing at all. I'm being called in for breakfast, so I'll have to end this letter here. There's more I want to tell you, and more I want to hear from you. It's a shame we live on different continents. One shame of many. It's so beautiful at this hour. The sun is low, the shadows are long, the air is cold and clean. You won't be awake for another five hours, but I can't help feeling that we're sharing this clear and beautiful morning. Your friend, Stephen Hawking

Take just one well-known event: The Beatles' 1964 appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show. This has been depicted with astonishing regularity as a pivotal cultural moment; in fact an entire movie -- I Wanna Hold Your Hand -- was built around it. And that Sullivan episode was indeed a major event in popular culture. But did you know that in 1961, 26 million people watched a CBS live broadcast of the first performance of a new symphony by classical composer Aaron Copland? Moreover, with all the attention that sixties rock groups receive, it may come as a surprise to learn that My Fair Lady was Columbia Records' biggest-selling album before the 1970s, beating out those of sixties icons Bob Dylan, Janis Joplin and The Byrds.

Factory farming wasn't born or advanced out of a need to produce more food – to "feed the hungry" – but to produce it in a way that is profitable for agribusiness companies. Factory farming is all about money. That is the reason the factory farm system is failing and won't work over the long term: it's created a food industry whose primary concern isn't feeding people. Does anyone really doubt that the corporations that control the vast majority of animal agriculture in America are in it for the profit? In most industries that's a perfectly good driving force. But when the commodities are animals, the factories are the earth itself, and the products are physically consumed, the stakes are not the same, and the thinking can't be the same.

Like an earthquake, World War II had shaken and destabilized the nation’s racial system. After Black men had fought and died to save democracy and freedom, the hypocrisy of their treatment became more difficult for some white people to ignore, especially as Black people organized to do something about it. The key to the organizers’ success, Myrdal said, would be finding allies among those newly awoken white Americans. “The American Negro problem is a problem in the heart of the American,” he wrote. “It is there that the interracial tension has its focus. It is there that the decisive struggle goes on.” But Myrdal suffered a serious blind spot, as he later acknowledged: he largely ignored the structural inequality in the American North and West, failing to anticipate that many liberal white people would find it easy to criticize the South but difficult to accept change in their own communities. King would major in sociology at Morehouse, and he would go on to call out the hypocrisy of northern whites who explained away their own discriminatory systems of housing, education, employment, and law enforcement.

The tone of those negotiations was very contentious,” says Becky Sauerbrunn, who served on the national team’s CBA committee and participated in most of the negotiation sessions. “They didn’t go anywhere. We would go into those meetings and say we want equal pay and they would say you’re not really generating the revenue to deserve equal pay to the men. And it just went around and around like that.” But then on March 7, Rich Nichols saw something that caught him by surprise. It was an article by Jonathan Tannenwald of the Philadelphia Inquirer that broke down financial numbers contained in U.S. Soccer’s General Annual Meeting report. The report itself was released quietly on U.S. Soccer’s website without fanfare—Tannenwald was the only journalist for a major newspaper who picked up on it. What the U.S. Soccer report showed—and what in turn the Philadelphia Inquirer explained—was that U.S. Soccer initially budgeted a $420,000 loss for 2016 but changed their numbers to expect a profit of almost $18 million, based largely on the gate receipts and merchandise sales of the women’s national team during the 2015 Women’s World Cup victory tour.

When your interactions are inhibited by social anxiety, you are unable to get as much out of life as possible, and so a “harmless personality trait” can become a major obstacle that stands in the way of fulfillment and productivity. But this doesn’t have to be the case. Social anxiety is a learned response-a habit that can be broken. This book will show you, step by step, how to break the social anxiety cycle that may have caused loneliness in your personal life, decreased productivity in the workplace, and an overall lack of fulfillment. As you begin to understand that social anxiety is a combination of attitudinal, emotional, behavioral, and physical responses, you will see that there is actually no such thing as shyness. Rather, what you may refer to as “shyness” is actually social anxiety, a psychophysiological response that you can learn to control. To recognize social anxiety is to give yourself permission to resolve the issues that cause your symptoms. In working through this self-help program, learn to substitute the phrase “social anxiety” for the vague term “shyness” and you will start to see your response pattern in a different light: as a way of reacting that you have chosen, not some unchangeable instinct that has chosen you.

The Republic of Foo, our high-investment, intangible economy of the future, has significantly overhauled its land-use rules, particularly in major cities, making it easier to build housing and workplaces; at the same time, it invests significantly in the kind of infrastructure needed to make cities livable and convivial, in particular, effective transport and civic and cultural amenities, from museums to nightlife. In some cases, this involves rejecting big development plans that destroy existing places. It has faced political costs in making this change, especially from vested interests opposed to new development or gentrification, but the increased economic benefits of vibrant urban centers have provided enough incentive to tip the balance of power in favor of development. The cities of the Kingdom of Bar have chosen one of two unfortunate paths: in some cases, they have privileged continuity over dynamism in its towns—creating places like Oxford in the UK, which are beautiful and full of convivial public spaces, but where it is very hard to build anything, meaning few people can take advantage of the economic potential the place creates. Other cities resemble Houston, Texas, in the 1990s—a low-regulation paradise where an absence of planning laws keeps home and office prices low, but where the lack of walkable centers and convivial places makes it harder for intangibles to multiply. (To Houston’s credit, it has changed for the better in the last twenty years.) The worst of Bar’s cities fail in both regards, underinvesting in urban amenities and making it hard to build. In all three cases, the economic disadvantage of not having vibrant cities that can grow have become larger and larger as the importance of intangibles has increased.

Suppose you entered a boat race. One hundred rowers, each in a separate rowboat, set out on a ten-mile race along a wide and slow-moving river. The first to cross the finish line will win $10,000. Halfway into the race, you’re in the lead. But then, from out of nowhere, you’re passed by a boat with two rowers, each pulling just one oar. No fair! Two rowers joined together into one boat! And then, stranger still, you watch as that rowboat is overtaken by a train of three such rowboats, all tied together to form a single long boat. The rowers are identical septuplets. Six of them row in perfect synchrony while the seventh is the coxswain, steering the boat and calling out the beat for the rowers. But those cheaters are deprived of victory just before they cross the finish line, for they in turn are passed by an enterprising group of twenty-four sisters who rented a motorboat. It turns out that there are no rules in this race about what kinds of vehicles are allowed. That was a metaphorical history of life on Earth. For the first billion years or so of life, the only organisms were prokaryotic cells (such as bacteria). Each was a solo operation, competing with others and reproducing copies of itself. But then, around 2 billion years ago, two bacteria somehow joined together inside a single membrane, which explains why mitochondria have their own DNA, unrelated to the DNA in the nucleus.35 These are the two-person rowboats in my example. Cells that had internal organelles could reap the benefits of cooperation and the division of labor (see Adam Smith). There was no longer any competition between these organelles, for they could reproduce only when the entire cell reproduced, so it was “one for all, all for one.” Life on Earth underwent what biologists call a “major transition.”36 Natural selection went on as it always had, but now there was a radically new kind of creature to be selected. There was a new kind of vehicle by which selfish genes could replicate themselves. Single-celled eukaryotes were wildly successful and spread throughout the oceans.

Consider the life of a pregnant sow. Her incredible fertility is the source of her particular hell. While a cow will give birth to only a single calf at a time, the modern factory sow will birth, nurse, and raise an average of nearly nine piglets — a number that has been increased annually by industry breeders. She will invariably be kept pregnant as much as possible, which will prove to be the majority of her life. When she is approaching her due date, drugs to induce labor may be administered to make the timing more convenient for the farmer. After her piglets are weaned, a hormone injection makes the sow rapidly “cycle” so that she will be ready to be artificially inseminated again in only three weeks. Four out of five times a sow will spend the sixteen weeks of her pregnancy confined in a “gestation crate” so small that she will not be able to turn around. Her bone density will decrease because of the lack of movement. She will be given no bedding and often will develop quarter-sized, blackened, pus-filled sores from chafing in the crate. (In one undercover investigation in Nebraska, pregnant pigs with multiple open sores on their faces, heads, shoulders, backs, and legs — some as large as a fist — were videotaped. A worker at the farm commented, “They all have sores. . . . There’s hardly a pig in there who doesn’t have a sore.”) More serious and pervasive is the suffering caused by boredom and isolation and the thwarting of the sow’s powerful urge to prepare for her coming piglets. In nature, she would spend much of her time before giving birth foraging and ultimately would build a nest of grass, leaves, or straw. To avoid excessive weight gain and to further reduce feed costs, the crated sow will be feed restricted and often hungry. Pigs also have an inborn tendency to use separate areas for sleeping and defecating that is totally thwarted in confinement. The pregnant pigs, like most all pigs in industrial systems, must lie or step in their excrement to force it through the slatted floor. The industry defends such confinement by arguing that it helps control and manage animals better, but the system makes good welfare practices more difficult because lame and diseased animals are almost impossible to identify when no animals are allowed to move.

A few hundred million years later, some of these eukaryotes developed a novel adaptation: they stayed together after cell division to form multicellular organisms in which every cell had exactly the same genes. These are the three-boat septuplets in my example. Once again, competition is suppressed (because each cell can only reproduce if the organism reproduces, via its sperm or egg cells). A group of cells becomes an individual, able to divide labor among the cells (which specialize into limbs and organs). A powerful new kind of vehicle appears, and in a short span of time the world is covered with plants, animals, and fungi.37 It’s another major transition. Major transitions are rare. The biologists John Maynard Smith and Eörs Szathmáry count just eight clear examples over the last 4 billion years (the last of which is human societies).38 But these transitions are among the most important events in biological history, and they are examples of multilevel selection at work. It’s the same story over and over again: Whenever a way is found to suppress free riding so that individual units can cooperate, work as a team, and divide labor, selection at the lower level becomes less important, selection at the higher level becomes more powerful, and that higher-level selection favors the most cohesive superorganisms.39 (A superorganism is an organism made out of smaller organisms.) As these superorganisms proliferate, they begin to compete with each other, and to evolve for greater success in that competition. This competition among superorganisms is one form of group selection.40 There is variation among the groups, and the fittest groups pass on their traits to future generations of groups. Major transitions may be rare, but when they happen, the Earth often changes.41 Just look at what happened more than 100 million years ago when some wasps developed the trick of dividing labor between a queen (who lays all the eggs) and several kinds of workers who maintain the nest and bring back food to share. This trick was discovered by the early hymenoptera (members of the order that includes wasps, which gave rise to bees and ants) and it was discovered independently several dozen other times (by the ancestors of termites, naked mole rats, and some species of shrimp, aphids, beetles, and spiders).42 In each case, the free rider problem was surmounted and selfish genes began to craft relatively selfless group members who together constituted a supremely selfish group.

The individual (as contrasted to unit) rotation policy practiced in Vietnam, which moved individual men in and out of combat units on a preordained time schedule, systematically destroyed the unit cohesion of combat groups. Very, very few Vietnam veterans went over with the unit they had trained with, fought with that unit, and returned "to the world" with it. I estimate of the three-quarters of a million Vietnam combat veterans, only a few hundred or thousand did so. By contrast, my impression is that this was the majority experience in World War II, particularly in the Pacific. Even men who went over as individual replacements in World War II spent weeks or months with their units after fighting ended and universally returned by boat. "The long trip home" is generally credited as an opportunity for mutual support and communal reworking of combat trauma.

The bottom line is that when members of iGen arrived on campus, beginning in the fall of 2013, they had accumulated less unsupervised time and fewer offline life experiences than had any previous generation. As Twenge puts it, “18-year-olds now act like 15-year-olds used to, and 13-year-olds like 10-year-olds. Teens are physically safer than ever, yet they are more mentally vulnerable.”9 Most of these trends are showing up across social classes, races, and ethnicities.10 Members of iGen, therefore, may not (on average) be as ready for college as were eighteen-year-olds of previous generations. This might explain why college students are suddenly asking for more protection and adult intervention in their affairs and interpersonal conflicts. The second major generational change is a rapid rise in rates of anxiety and depression.11 We created three graphs below using the same data that Twenge reports in iGen.

But revolutions don’t happen because of one or two individuals; they happen because the majority wakes up and realizes that things must change.

Please,” she says. “Tell me what you’re thinking.” It’s an absurd request. Our minds, unedited by guilt or shame, are selfish and unkind, and the majority of our thoughts, at any given time, are not for public consumption, because they would either be hurtful or else just make us look like the selfish and unkind bastards that we are. We don’t share our thoughts, we share the carefully sanitized, watered-down versions of them, Hollywood adaptations of those thoughts dumbed down for the PG-13 crowd

The next time you go to the supermarket, look closely at a can of peas. Think about all the work that went into it—the farmers, truckers, and supermarket employees, the miners and metalworkers who made the can—and think how miraculous it is that you can buy this can for under a dollar. At every step of the way, competition among suppliers rewarded those whose innovations shaved a penny off the cost of getting that can to you. If God is commonly thought to have created the world and then arranged it for our benefit, then the free market (and its invisible hand) is a pretty good candidate for being a god. You can begin to understand why libertarians sometimes have a quasi-religious faith in free markets. Now let’s do the devil’s work and spread chaos throughout the marketplace. Suppose that one day all prices are removed from all products in the supermarket. All labels too, beyond a simple description of the contents, so you can’t compare products from different companies. You just take whatever you want, as much as you want, and you bring it up to the register. The checkout clerk scans in your food insurance card and helps you fill out your itemized claim. You pay a flat fee of $10 and go home with your groceries. A month later you get a bill informing you that your food insurance company will pay the supermarket for most of the remaining cost, but you’ll have to send in a check for an additional $15. It might sound like a bargain to get a cartload of food for $25, but you’re really paying your grocery bill every month when you fork over $2,000 for your food insurance premium. Under such a system, there is little incentive for anyone to find innovative ways to reduce the cost of food or increase its quality. The supermarkets get paid by the insurers, and the insurers get their premiums from you. The cost of food insurance begins to rise as supermarkets stock only the foods that net them the highest insurance payments, not the foods that deliver value to you. As the cost of food insurance rises, many people can no longer afford it. Liberals (motivated by Care) push for a new government program to buy food insurance for the poor and the elderly. But once the government becomes the major purchaser of food, then success in the supermarket and food insurance industries depends primarily on maximizing yield from government payouts. Before you know it, that can of peas costs the government $30, and all of us are paying 25 percent of our paychecks in taxes just to cover the cost of buying groceries for each other at hugely inflated costs. That, says Goldhill, is what we’ve done to ourselves. As long as consumers are spared from taking price into account—that is, as long as someone else is always paying for your choices—things will get worse.

Percent of adolescents aged 12–17 who had at least one major depressive episode in the past year. Rates have been rising since 2011, especially for girls. (Source: Data from National Survey on Drug Use and Health.)

The vast majority of those who are abducted are taken by a biological parent who does not have custody; the number abducted by a stranger is a tiny fraction of 1% of children reported missing—roughly one hundred children per year in a nation with more than 70 million minors.

houses. Other than the treehouse, it was where we spent the most time. So. since I had an intimate knowledge of the graveyard, I figured I’d have a major advantage if I cut through it.

The religions of the world are diverse, representing many different supernatural explanations for the nature of reality, beliefs, and practices, so it is difficult to make blanket statements about whether a religious objection to vaccination can ever accurately reflect a person’s religious beliefs. However, the majority of world religions don’t hold an objection to vaccination as actual official belief. Because many states allow for religious exemptions to vaccination, in effect, religious belief becomes a convenient scapegoat for vaccine objections.

The major immediate threat to the existence of this government is the right wing violence.

In 1963, Clark Kerr, the president of the University of California system, called the resulting structure the “multiversity.” In a multiversity, different departments and power structures within a university pursue different goals in parallel—for example, research, education, fundraising, branding, and legal compliance.12 Kerr predicted that as faculty increasingly focused on their own departments, noninstructional employees would take over in leading the institution. As he anticipated, the number of administrators has climbed upward.13 At the same time, their responsibilities have crept outward.14 Some administrative growth is necessary and sensible, but when the rate of that expansion is several times higher than the rate of faculty hiring,15 there are significant downsides, most obviously the increase in the cost of a college degree.16 A less immediately obvious downside is that goals other than academic excellence begin to take priority as universities come to resemble large corporations—a trend often bemoaned as “corporatization.”17 Political scientist Benjamin Ginsberg, author of the 2011 book The Fall of the Faculty: The Rise of the All-Administrative University and Why It Matters, argues that over the decades, as the administration has grown, the faculty, who used to play a major role in university governance, have ceded much of that power to nonfaculty administrators.18 He notes that once the class of administrative specialists was established and became more distinct from the professor class, it was virtually certain to expand; administrators are more likely than professors to think that the way to solve a new campus problem is to create a new office to address the problem.19 (Meanwhile, professors have generally been happy to be released from administrative duties, even as they complain about corporatization

When Wimdu launched, the Samwers reached out to Airbnb to discuss combining forces, as they had done with Groupon and eBay to facilitate a speedy exit. Discussions ensued between Airbnb and Wimdu cofounders and investors—meeting multiple times, touring the Wimdu offices, and checking with other founders like Andrew Mason from Groupon to best understand the potential outcome. In the end, Airbnb chose to fight. Brian Chesky described his thought process: My view was, my biggest punishment, my biggest revenge on you is, I’m gonna make you run this company long term. So you had the baby, now you gotta raise the child. And you’re stuck with it for 18 years. Because I knew he wanted to sell the company. I knew he could move faster than me for a year, but he wasn’t gonna keep doing it. And so that was our strategy. And we built the company long term. And the ultimate way we won is, we had a better community. He couldn’t understand community. And I think we had a better product.82 To do this, the company would mobilize their product teams to rapidly improve their support for international regions. Jonathan Golden, the first product manager at Airbnb, described their efforts: Early on, Airbnb’s listing experience was basic. You filled out forms, uploaded 1 photo—usually not professional—and editing the listing after the fact was hard. The mobile app in the early days was lightweight, where you could only browse but not book. There were a lot of markets in those days with just 1 or 2 listings. Booking only supported US dollars, so it catered towards American travelers only, and for hosts, they could get money out via a bank transfer to an American bank via ACH, or PayPal. We needed to get from this skeleton of a product into something that could work internationally if we wanted to fend off Wimdu. We internationalized the product, translating it into all the major languages. We went from supporting 1 currency to adding 32. We bought all the local domains, like airbnb.co.uk for the UK website and airbnb.es for Spain. It was important to move quickly to close off the opportunity in Europe.83 Alongside the product, the fastest way to fight on Wimdu’s turf was to quickly scale up paid marketing in Europe using Facebook, Google, and other channels to augment the company’s organic channels, built over years. Most important, Airbnb finally pulled the trigger on putting boots on the ground—hiring Martin Reiter, the company’s first head of international, and also partnering with Springstar, a German incubator and peer of Rocket Internet’s, to accelerate their international expansion.

I won’t say that the majority of investment committees are dysfunctional; however, I also can’t say that the majority are functional.

but they were the only group that frequently ignored their own feelings of disgust and said that an action that bothered them was nonetheless morally permissible. And they were the only group in which a majority (73 percent) were able to tolerate the chicken story.

It was one thing to recognize the terrible toll they could take on the people inside them, and that, thanks in part to new medications, a majority of people with schizophrenia no longer needed to live there. It was something else to know what could replace the state system without destroying the idea of asylum that had given rise to it in the first place, or harming the people the system had been created to help. Hardest of all was to realize that the answers of a moment could not substitute for the slow, hard, complicated, and imperfect work of providing daily practical care for patients whose rights had finally been recognized but whose illness could itself seem like a violation of their reason and will.

Flower of life: A figure composed of evenly-spaced, overlapping circles creating a flower-like pattern. Images of the Platonic solids and other sacred geometrical figures can be discerned within its pattern. FIGURE 3.14 FLOWER OF LIFE The Platonic solids: Five three-dimensional solid shapes, each containing all congruent angles and sides. If circumscribed with a sphere, all vertices would touch the edge of that sphere. Linked by Plato to the four primary elements and heaven. FIGURE 3.15 PENTACHORON The applications of these shapes to music are important to sound healing theory. The ancients have always professed a belief in the “music of the spheres,” a vibrational ordering to the universe. Pythagorus is famous for interconnecting geometry and math to music. He determined that stopping a string halfway along its length created an octave; a ratio of three to two resulted in a fifth; and a ratio of four to three produced a fourth. These ratios were seen as forming harmonics that could restore a disharmonic body—or heal. Hans Jenny furthered this work through the study of cymatics, discussed later in this chapter, and the contemporary sound healer and author Jonathan Goldman considers the proportions of the body to relate to the golden mean, with ratios in relation to the major sixth (3:5) and the minor sixth (5:8).100 Geometry also seems to serve as an “interdimensional glue,” according to a relatively new theory called causal dynamical triangulation (CDT), which portrays the walls of time—and of the different dimensions—as triangulated. According to CDT, time-space is divided into tiny triangulated pieces, with the building block being a pentachoron. A pentachoron is made of five tetrahedral cells and a triangle combined with a tetrahedron. Each simple, triangulated piece is geometrically flat, but they are “glued together” to create curved time-spaces. This theory allows the transfer of energy from one dimension to another, but unlike many other time-space theories, this one makes certain that a cause precedes an event and also showcases the geometric nature of reality.101 The creation of geometry figures at macro- and microlevels can perhaps be explained by the notion called spin, first introduced in Chapter 1. Everything spins, the term spin describing the rotation of an object or particle around its own axis. Orbital spin references the spinning of an object around another object, such as the moon around the earth. Both types of spin are measured by angular momentum, a combination of mass, the distance from the center of travel, and speed. Spinning particles create forms where they “touch” in space.

The 1990s saw a rapid increase in the paired technologies of personal computers and internet access (via modem, back then), both of which could be found in most homes by 2001. Over the next 10 years, there was no decline in teen mental health.[26] Millennial teens, who grew up playing in that first wave, were slightly happier, on average, than Gen X had been when they were teens. The second wave was the rapid increase in the paired technologies of social media and the smartphone, which reached a majority of homes by 2012 or 2013. That is when girls’ mental health began to collapse, and when boys’ mental health changed in a more diffuse set of ways. Of course, teens had cell phones since the late 1990s, but they were “basic” phones with no internet access, often known at the time as flip phones because the most popular design could be flipped open with a flick of the wrist. Basic phones were mostly useful for communicating directly with friends and family, one-on-one. You could call people, and you could text them using cumbersome thumb presses on a numeric key. Smartphones are very different. They connect you to the internet 24/7, they can run millions of apps, and they quickly became the home of social media platforms, which can ping you continually throughout the day, urging you to check out what everyone is saying and doing. This kind of connectivity offers few of the benefits of talking directly with friends. In fact, for many young people, it’s poisonous.

Synchronous, face-to-face, physical interactions and rituals are a deep, ancient, and underappreciated part of human evolution. Adults enjoy them, and children need them for healthy development. Yet the major social media platforms draw children into endless hours of asynchronous interaction,

…overprotection in the real world and underprotection in the virtual world-are the major reasons why children born after 1995 became the anxious generation.

We need to develop a more nuanced mental map of the digital landscape. Social media is not synonymous with the internet, smartphones are not equivalent to desktop computers or laptops, PacMan is not World of Warcraft, and the 2006 version of Facebook is not the 2024 version of TikTok. Almost all of it is more harmful to preteens than to older teens. I’m not saying that 11-year-olds should be kept off the internet. I’m saying that the Great Rewiring of Childhood, in which the phone-based childhood replaced the play-based childhood, is the major cause of the international epidemic of adolescent mental illness. We need to be careful about which kids have access to which products, at which ages, and on which devices. Unfettered access to everything, everywhere, at any age has been a disaster, even if there are a few benefits.

An undergraduate researching the "witch hunt" cases asked for evidence that there had been more than one hundred cases, noting that the major lists of such cases added up to about fifty. There was no reply that provided documentation to support the claim.[34] The members of the list were generally strong proponents of the witch-hunt narrative. They knew the answer to the question “Is there a child sex abuse witch hunt?” These “witch hunters,” as those on this list soon came to describe themselves, were increasingly activists who used the internet to exchange information and ideas. Jonathan Harris may have done more than anyone else to disseminate the witch-hunt narrative in the mid 1990s and beyond.[35]

The low point occurred in July, during Romney’s junior week abroad, in which the press became increasingly frustrated over Romney’s refusal to talk to them. It came to a head in Warsaw during a visit by Romney to the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier there. As the former governor walked to his car, reporters shouted questions at him about his earlier mishaps. “Kiss my ass,” admonished Romney’s traveling press aide, Rick Gorka. “Show some respect. This is a holy site for the Polish people.” Channeling Fonzie, Gorka also instructed Jonathan Martin of Politico to “shove it.” Some in the political echo-system treated this as a major international incident, a skirmish between weary but still potent superpowers—the press, the Romney campaign—that conjured Cold War–like tensions. After Gorka’s unsacred words raced around the world, the jackals rechristened the Polish holy site “Gorka Park.” Ryan, on the other

The Lixingshe movement set up by dedicated supporters from Whampoa in 1932 to ensure authoritarian allegiance to the leader grew to number half a million members, with offshoots such as the political shock troops known as the Blue Shirts. But the notion of a continuous mass movement remained deeply suspect to the militarised bureaucracy in Nanking - a major difference between Chiang's regime and Mussolini's Italy or Hitler's Germany. It presented an authoritarian view of Chinese tradition as a historic justification for dictatorship with a conservative cultural policy to buttress the supremacy' of the state and its chief. Intellectuals were told to sacrifice their individual liberty for the sake of the nation. If the regime had fascist tendencies, it was `Confucian Fascism', as the historian Frederic Wakeman has dubbed it.

It’s therefore unsurprising that the dominant emotions in Dreamland are negative. When you are visiting Dreamland, you may sometimes feel happy, even elated, but mostly you feel dragged down by anger, fear, and sadness. While we sometimes dream of thrilling things, such as sex or flying like a bird, those happy dreams are much rarer than we think. People fly in only one out of every two hundred dreams, and erotic content of any kind occurs in only one in ten dreams. And even in dreams where sex is a major theme, it is rarely presented as a hedonistic throw down. Rather, like our other dreams, sex dreams are usually edged with anxiety, doubt, and regret.

When evaluating a new client for degree of independence, I consider four factors: 1. Emotional issues: Does the person have good resources within himself or herself for coping independently with emotional issues that come up, or does he or she turn to parents not only for advice, but for cues as to how to react to the event in question? 2. Financial issues: Does the adult child earn an adequate living on his or her own, or does he or she rely heavily on parental input for things such as job contacts, supplemental funds, or housing? 3. Practical issues/interactive situations: Can the person manage day-to-day living, finances, nutrition, exercise, and housekeeping? 4. Career/Education issues: Does the person have a rewarding job or career that is commensurate with his or her abilities and offers the potential for further success? Is the person willing to learn new things to increase his or her productivity or compensation? These are the basic skills of living, many of which are addressed in the social ability questionnaire. Just as there are levels of social functioning, so too there are levels of independent functioning. All three of the following levels describe an adult with some degree of dependency problems. A healthy adult is someone who is independent financially, is able to manage practical and interactive issues, and who stays in touch with family but does not rely almost solely on family for emotional support. Level 1—Low Functioning Emotional issues: Lives at home with parent(s) or away from home in a fully structured or supervised environment. Financial issues: Contributes virtually nothing financially to the running of the household. Practical issues: Chooses clothes to wear that day, but does not manage own wardrobe (i.e., laundry, shopping, etc.). Relies on family members to buy food and prepare meals. Does few household chores, if any. May try a few tasks when asked, but seldom follows through until the job is finished. Career/education issues: Is not table to keep a job, and therefore does not earn an independent living. Extremely resistant to learning new skills or changing responsibilities. Level 2: Moderately functioning Emotional issues: Lives either at home or nearby and calls home every day. Relies on parents to discuss all details of daily life, from what happened at work or school that day to what to wear the next day. Will call home for advice rather than trying to figure something out for him- or herself. Financial issues: May rely on parents for supplemental income—parents may supply car, apartment, etc. May be employed by parents at an inflated salary for a job with very few responsibilities. May be irresponsible about paying bills. Practical issues: Is able to make daily decisions about clothing, but may rely on parents when shopping for clothing and other items. Neglects household responsibilities such as laundry, cleaning and meal planning. Career/education issues: Has a job, but is unable to cope with much on-the-job stress; job is therefore only minimally challenging, or a major source of anxiety—discussed in detail with Mom and Dad. Level 3: Functioning Emotional issues: Lives away from home. Calls home a few times a week, relies on family for emotional support and most socializing. Few friends. Practical issues: Handles all aspects of daily household management independently. Financial issues: Is financially independent, pays bills on time. Career/education issues: Has achieved some moderate success at work. Is willing to seek new information, even to take an occasional class to improve skills.

It has recently become a matter of some interest to the press and to some academic experts to determine whether it is race or class that is the major factor in denial of these children. The question always strikes me as a scholar’s luxury. To kindergarten children in the schools of Paterson or Camden, it can hardly matter very much to know if the denial they experience is caused by their skin color or their destitution.

wanted to be changed, but change was very hard, so hard that even one of the major events in the history of the entire world was ultimately no match for the pettiness and impatience inside you, the mundane frustrations that ruled your average day, the tiny, aggravating reflexes that at some indeterminate point had just made your life what it was doomed to be.

Job Acquisition The entire job-acquisition process—considering job prospects, your personal and professional preparation, creating a resume, going on a job interview—depends for success upon possessing social skills and managing anxiety. How you adapt to the stress of this process can play a major role. As with other aspects of interaction, anxiety can often keep you from getting the jobs you really want and would be well suited for. If you allow your anxiety to control you, you may avoid applying for a new position because you fear rejection. Or you may let the fear of failure keep you from accepting a new challenge, no matter how badly you would like to take the job. But let’s look first at the job process and consider self-help techniques that will lead to a more rewarding, productive career. For people with social anxiety, low self-esteem is often a stumbling block to fulfillment in their careers: If you feel you are underqualified, you may hesitate to seek challenges, whether in a new company or within your current one. I have worked with several men who say their self-esteem is low because they are not the stereotype of success: They do not wear a suit, carry a briefcase, or drive the latest-model car. In their minds, this is the most important measure of success. But they themselves are not failures. One of the men I can think of is a successful plumber, another has a telephone sales job, and a third manages a large warehouse. Still, they have doubts about their appeal to women because of their career choices; increasing their self-esteem will help them to see themselves in a new way. Success need not be defined by media standards such as the right clothes or an expensive automobile. Everyone is different. Your personal success can only be measured by your own personal fulfillment and productivity.

How will they be able to tell the difference between enemy combatants and our own troops?" "All soldiers will have an RFID chip implanted," explained the major. "No WarDog will fire on someone who has a chip." "That's all well and good," said Schoeffel, "but ISIL and the Taliban tend to hide in urban areas and among civilian populations. How do we keep civilians safe?" The scientist didn't meet her eyes. Major Schellinger said "We're still working on that.

Going to a new place the first time can be scary. Think about your first day in a new classroom, the first time meeting your date’s parents, your first day on the new job… major butterflies. But the first time you go to a new church? The scariest.

The major positions regarding eschatology differ over two main issues: (1) The nature of the “thousand years” (Rev 20:2–7): Is the “thousand years” a discrete period of time distinct from the rest of history, or not? and What does it look like? (i.e., Is it a “golden age” on earth that can be experienced in the flesh, or can it be apprehended only by faith?); and (2) The timing of the “thousand years”: Is the “thousand years” a past, present, or future period of time? and Does it occur before or after Christ comes again?

Preterism. The term comes from the Latin “praeter” which means “past” or “beyond.”15 Preterism is divided into two main camps: “full preterism” and “partial preterism.” Full preterism holds that all significant events of prophecy, including the “millennium” and Christ’s second coming (which preterists see as a spiritual coming), took place in AD 70 when the Jewish temple was destroyed by the Romans. Partial preterism holds that most of the major eschatological events were fulfilled by AD 70, but that Christ will physically come again in the future and set up the eternal state.16

for anyone who gave money to a major aid group, that they were going to be able to spend your $20 donation on actual survivors of the actual disaster you intended; for the most part, they were not.

What did Jonathan Edwards mean in sending word to his wife that their union was “uncommon”? Was it that? And how was a union that had issued in eleven offspring “spiritual”? Of one thing we may be sure: Jonathan Edwards was not using his last words carelessly. This “major artist and chief American philosopher” (Miller, 1949:225) had not yet discarded his palette. His message to her had—all his words had—an exact, uncoded meaning, Lockean in its empirical force, that is there for us to recover if we will attend. Our path is to discover if we can the substance of this “uncommon” and “spiritual” union that was at the same time unquestionably an erotic bond. Something greater than curiosity is at stake for us here. Jonathan Edwards is preeminently a theologian of the heart and of the affections; to discover the kind of love that was central between these two may provide an exact clue to his own theological ethics—a bonus not to be disdained.

The Harmonic Mean gives us the Major Triad The Arithmetic Mean gives us the Minor Triad The Geometric Mean gives us the Augmented Triad The Geometric Mean gives us the Diminished Triad

The differences between religions are worth debating. Theology has consequences: It shapes lives, families, nations, cultures, wars; it can change people, save them from themselves, and sometimes warp or even destroy them. If we tiptoe politely around this reality, then we betray every teacher, guru and philosopher—including Jesus of Nazareth and the Buddha both—who ever sought to resolve the most human of all problems: How then should we live?6

Science has the capacity to uplift us to heights of undreamed of sophistication and quality of life or to drag us down into an abyss, from which we may never return. I do not believe science and/or technology are bad. However, I am very concerned with the beliefs the majority of scientists have about the world, which is its overriding view of reality— the mainstream scientific worldview. I believe it is the greatest weakness of science and so the greatest weakness of modern society and poses a serious risk, as we accelerate toward the biggest upheaval in human history, within the context of the enormity of global issues we face.

Disconnect from mass media   When striving to become one of the new rich, it is imperative that you cut off or at least limit your connection to mass information for a time. Take a moment to define how much time you lose each day browsing the web, watching TV, engaging in social media outlets and all other activities requiring you to be plugged in. For the vast majority of us this will amount to hours each day, just imagine how much time you are losing over a week, a month and a year. You might claim you are gaining valuable information from doing these things, but the reality is that it is simply attempting to justify what is ultimately a time-wasting activity. No doubt some knowledge is gained but not enough to justify the amount of time and potential profit lost by doing so. Do keep in mind that when we tell you to cut out mass media it does not mean all media. Feel free to continue to actively engage in the ones that provide relevant information specific to your line of work. Entrepreneur articles, business magazines, and other similar resources can be well worth the time spent and can remain a part of your routine.   Avoid

S. Lewis put it, “If you look for truth, you may find comfort in the end: if you look for comfort you will not get either comfort or truth—only soft soap and wishful thinking to begin with and, in the end, despair.”7

It makes Celia furious that around ninety percent of the women on Italian TV are fabulous specimens with great legs, superb chests and hair as glossy as a mink's pelt, and that every prime-time programme, whether it be a games show or football analysis, seems to require the presence of an attractive young woman with no discernible function other than to be decorative. She shakes her head in disbelief at the shopping channels, with their delirious women screaming about the wonders of the latest buttock-firming apparatus, and bald blokes in shiny suits shouting ‘Buy my carpets! Buy my jewellery, for God's sake!' hour after hour after hour. She can't resolve the contradictions of a country where spontaneous generosity is as likely to be encountered as petty deviousness; where a predilection for emetically sentimental ballads accompanies a disconcertingly hard-headed approach to interpersonal relationships (friends summarily discarded, to be barely acknowledged when they pass on the streets); where veneration for tradition competes with an infatuation with the latest technology, however low the standard of manufacture (the toilet in Elisabetta's apartment wouldn't look out of place on the Acropolis, but it doesn't flush properly; her brother-in-law's Ferrari is as fragile as a newborn giraffe); where sophistication and the maintenance of ‘la bella figura’ are of primary importance, while the television programmes are the most infantile and demeaning in the world; where there's a church on every corner yet religion often seems a form of social decoration, albeit a form of decoration that's essential to life - 'It's like the wallpaper is holding the house up,’ Celia wrote from Rome. She'll never make sense of Italy, but that's the attraction, or a major part of it, which is something Charlie will never understand, she says. But he does understand it to an extent. He can understand how one might find it interesting for a while, for the duration of a holiday; he just doesn't understand how an English person - an English woman, especially - could live there.

November 30th What do you know? For once I favourably surprise myself. After I'd read Howard's exemplary "White Ship" on Friday night and spent yesterday idling about in Providence - woolgathering, I suppose - I've finally made up my mind to sit down and attempt to lick this novel into some kind of functional shape. The central character I'm thinking, is a young man in his early thirties. He's well educated, but if forced by economic circumstance to leave his home in somewhere like Milwaukee (on the principle of writing about somewhere that you know) to seek employment further east. I feel I should give him a name. I know that details of this sort could wait until much later in the process, but I don't feel able to flesh out his character sufficiently until I've at least worked out what he's called. There's been a twenty minute pause between the end of the foregoing sentence and the start of this one, but I think his first name should be Jonathan. Jonathan Randall is the name that comes to me, perhaps by way of Randall Carver. Yes, I think I like the sound of that. So, young Jonathan Randall realises that his yearnings for a literary life have to be put aside to spare his parents dwindling resources, and that he must make his own way in the world, through manual labour if needs be, in order to become the self-sufficient grownup he aspires to be. During an early scene, perhaps in a recounting of Jonathan's childhood, there should be some striking incident which foreshadows the supernatural or psychological weirdness that will dominate the later chapters. Thinking about this, it seems to me that this would be the ideal place to introduce the bridge motif I've toyed with earlier in these pages: since I'm quite fond of the opening paragraphs that I've already written, with that long description of America as a repository for all the world's religious or else occult visionaries, I think what I'll do is largely leave that as it is, to function as a kind of prologue and establish the requisite mood, and then open the novel proper with Jonathan and a school friend playing truant on a summer's afternoon at some remote and overgrown ravine or other, where there's a precarious and creaking bridge with fraying ropes and missing boards that joins the chasm's two sides. I could probably set up the story's major themes and ideas in the two companions' dialogue, albeit simply expressed in keeping with their age and limited experience. Perhaps they're talking in excited schoolboy tones about some local legend, ghost story or piece of folklore that's connected with the bridge or the ravine. This would provide a motive - the eternal boyish fascination with the ghoulish - for them having come to this ill-omened spot while playing hooky, and would also help establish Jonathan's obsession with folkloric subjects as explored in the remainder of the novel.

November 30th What do you know? For once I favourably surprise myself. After I'd read Howard's exemplary "White Ship" on Friday night and spent yesterday idling about in Providence - woolgathering, I suppose - I've finally made up my mind to sit down and attempt to lick this novel into some kind of functional shape. The central character I'm thinking, is a young man in his early thirties. He's well educated, but is forced by economic circumstance to leave his home in somewhere like Milwaukee (on the principle of writing about somewhere that you know) to seek employment further east. I feel I should give him a name. I know that details of this sort could wait until much later in the process, but I don't feel able to flesh out his character sufficiently until I've at least worked out what he's called. There's been a twenty minute pause between the end of the foregoing sentence and the start of this one, but I think his first name should be Jonathan. Jonathan Randall is the name that comes to me, perhaps by way of Randall Carver. Yes, I think I like the sound of that. So, young Jonathan Randall realises that his yearnings for a literary life have to be put aside to spare his parents' dwindling resources, and that he must make his own way in the world, through manual labour if needs be, in order to become the self-sufficient grownup he aspires to be. During an early scene, perhaps in a recounting of Jonathan's childhood, there should be some striking incident which foreshadows the supernatural or psychological weirdness that will dominate the later chapters. Thinking about this, it seems to me that this would be the ideal place to introduce the bridge motif I've toyed with earlier in these pages: since I'm quite fond of the opening paragraphs that I've already written, with that long description of America as a repository for all the world's religious or else occult visionaries, I think what I'll do is largely leave that as it is, to function as a kind of prologue and establish the requisite mood, and then open the novel proper with Jonathan and a school friend playing truant on a summer's afternoon at some remote and overgrown ravine or other, where there's a precarious and creaking bridge with fraying ropes and missing boards that joins the chasm's two sides. I could probably set up the story's major themes and ideas in the two companions' dialogue, albeit simply expressed in keeping with their age and limited experience. Perhaps they're talking in excited schoolboy tones about some local legend, ghost story or piece of folklore that's connected with the bridge or the ravine. This would provide a motive - the eternal boyish fascination with the ghoulish - for them having come to this ill-omened spot while playing hooky, and would also help establish Jonathan's obsession with folkloric subjects as explored in the remainder of the novel.

Modern culture treats sex outside of marriagea as being no big deal. It’s considered completely normal and not something to be ashamed of; if anything, people brag about it and argue that it’s a positive good. It’s described as being a “casual” activity; something you can do with “no strings attached.” You can supposedly have meaningless “hookups,” “one-night stands,” or text your “friends with benefits” to set up a “booty call,” which is probably the most unromantic thing I can even think of. This idea that sex outside of marriage is OK is probably the biggest lie we are told, and the biggest source of our problems—not just in dating, but in all of life. I know that is a bold statement, but consider the evidence: after the so-called “sexual revolution” of the 1960s, divorce rates doubled, followed by an ongoing decline in marriage rates.1 Currently, 40 percent of children in the United States are born out of wedlock, without a stable, married, two-parent family; in the 1960s, at the start of the sexual revolution, that number was just 7 percent.2 Besides those births, there have been 60 million US children killed before birth via abortion since 1973.3 Sexually transmitted diseases (STDs), which would be almost nonexistent if all people were monogamous,b are instead at record highs,4 with something like 20 million new infections in the country each year.5 Pornography use has become so common that it’s just kind of assumed for men but is also regularly consumed by at least a third of all women.6 And then you have all the ways people use and abuse sex as a way to use and abuse other people through either harassment or assault, which is a huge problem: it’s estimated that one in five women are raped at some point in their lives,7 while the majority are either harassed or assaulted in some form.8 Go beyond the statistics and think about how all these things would affect the actual people involved, and all the various costs associated with each one. Add it all up, and the impact both on society and on individual relationships is ridiculously massive.