Lateral Raise Quotes

...The girl raised her eyes to see who was passing by the window, and that casual glance was the beginning of a cataclysm of love that still had not ended half a century later.

Remember that you own what happened to you. If your childhood was less than ideal, you may have been raised thinking that if you told the truth about what really went on in your family, a long bony white finger would emerge from a cloud and point to you, while a chilling voice thundered, "We *told* you not to tell." But that was then. Just put down on paper everything you can remember now about your parents and siblings and relatives and neighbors, and we will deal with libel later on.

Two minutes later, Garrett pops into the corridor, and I take one look at his expression and know he’s about to deliver good news. “You passed?” I squeal. He raises his exam booklet over his head like he’s acting out a scene from the Lion King. “A-fucking-minus!

Nearly every guy I've dated believed they should already be famous, believed that greatness was their destiny and they were already behind schedule. An early moment of intimacy often involved a confession of this sort: a childhood vision, teacher's prophecy, a genius IQ. At first, with my boyfriend in college, I believed it, too. Later, I thought I was just choosing delusional men. Now I understand it's how boys are raised to think, how they are lured into adulthood. I've met ambitious women, driven women, but no woman has ever told me that greatness was her destiny.

Some minutes or hours or days later, when I lay boneless and well satisfied, Ethan raised his gaze to mine again. His eyes were silver, his fangs descended. "There is no going back," he said, "Not after this.

A Manifesto for Introverts 1. There's a word for 'people who are in their heads too much': thinkers. 2. Solitude is a catalyst for innovation. 3. The next generation of quiet kids can and must be raised to know their own strengths. 4. Sometimes it helps to be a pretend extrovert. There will always be time to be quiet later. 5. But in the long run, staying true to your temperament is key to finding work you love and work that matters. 6. One genuine new relationship is worth a fistful of business cards. 7. It's OK to cross the street to avoid making small talk. 8. 'Quiet leadership' is not an oxymoron. 9. Love is essential; gregariousness is optional. 10. 'In a gentle way, you can shake the world.' -Mahatma Gandhi

On September 11, I went out and bought a new TV/VCR at Best Buy so I could record the news coverage of the planes crashing into the Twin Towers. Trevor was on a honeymoon in Barbados, I'd later learn, but Reva was lost. Reva was gone. I watched the videotape over and over to soothe myself that day. And I continue to watch it, usually on a lonely afternoon, or any other time I doubt that life is worth living, or when I need courage, or when I am bored. Each time I see the woman leap off the seventy-eighth floor of the North Tower—one high-heeled shoe slipping off and hovering up over her, the other stuck on her foot as though it were too small, her blouse untucked, hair flailing, limbs stiff as she plummets down, one arm raised, like a dive into a summer lake—I am overcome by awe, not because she looks like Reva, and I think it's her, almost exactly her, and not because Reva and I had been friends, or because I'll never see her again, but because she is beautiful. There she is, a human being, diving into the unknown, and she is wide awake.

When Ava turned away, Jules leaned in and whispered, “He’s totally whipped. Watch.” She raised her voice to a panicked level. “Oh my God! Ava, are you bleeding?” Alex’s head snapped up. Less than five seconds later, he ended his call and crossed the room to a confused-looking Ava, whose hand froze halfway to the scones on the table. “I’m fine,” Ava said as Alex searched her for injuries. She glared at Jules. “What did I just say?” “I can’t help it.” Jules’s eyes sparkled with mischief. “It’s so much fun. It’s like playing with a windup toy.” “Until the toy comes alive and kills you,” Stella murmured loud enough for everyone to hear. Alex stared at Jules with displeasure scrawled all over his face. His features were so perfect it was a little unnerving, like seeing a carefully sculpted statue come to life. Some people were into that, but I preferred men with a little more grit. Give me scars and a nose that was slightly crooked from being broken too many times over perfection. “Pray you and Ava stay friends forever,” Alex said, icy enough to elicit a rash of goosebumps on my arms.

Men were created before women. ... But that doesn't prove their superiority – rather, it proves ours, for they were born out of the lifeless earth in order that we could be born out of living flesh. And what's so important about this priority in creation, anyway? When we are building, we lay foundations on the ground first, things of no intrinsic merit or beauty, before subsequently raising up sumptuous buildings and ornate palaces. Lowly seeds are nourished in the earth, and then later the ravishing blooms appear; lovely roses blossom forth and scented narcissi.

If I had my child to raise all over again, I'd build self-esteem first, and the house later. I'd finger-paint more, and point the finger less. I would do less correcting and more connecting. I'd take my eyes off my watch, and watch with my eyes. I'd take more hikes and fly more kites. I'd stop playing serious, and seriously play. I would run through more fields and gaze at more stars. I'd do more hugging and less tugging.

Biting her lip to stop her chin from quivering, Alexandra raised her eyes to his. "I think," she whispered, trying to smile, "I shall wear the ruby on Queen's Race day, so that when I tie my ribbon on your sleeve—" With a groan, Jordan pulled her into his arms. "Now that you've said all those other things," she whispered when he finally lifted his lips from hers several minutes later, "do you think you could possibly say 'I love you'? I've been waiting to hear that since you began and—" "I love you," he said fiercely. "I love you," he whispered softly, burying his face in her hair. "I love you," he groaned, kissing her lips. "I love you, I love you, I love you…

If I had my child to raise all over again, I’d finger paint more, and point the finger less. I’d do less correcting, and more connecting. I’d take my eyes off my watch, and watch with my eyes. I would care to know less, and know to care more. I’d take more hikes and fly more kites. I’d stop playing serious, and seriously play. I’d run through more fields, and gaze at more stars. I’d do more hugging, and less tugging. I would be firm less often, and affirm much more. I’d build self esteem first, and the house later. I’d teach less about the love of power, and more about the power of love.

He raised an eyebrow. "You claim not to know me? Of course I'm Thoth. Also called Djehuti. Also called--" I [Sadie] stifled a laugh. "Ja-hooty?" Thoth looked offended. "In Ancient Egyptian, it's a perfectly fine name. The Greeks called me Thoth. Then later they confused me with their god Hermes. Even had the nerve to rename my sacred city Hermopolis, though we're nothing alike. Believe me, if you've ever met Hermes--

I see embarrassment among all of you. That's good. The thing about being embarrassed is that sooner or later you aren't, but you remember that you were.

I would tell people some years later that I was raised an only child and so was my brother.

I'll be around, princess. If you ever need me , just send a note. Or a gremlin. Or whatever." Stepping back, he raised a hand to Ash, who nodded solemnly."Catch ya later, ice-boy. Maybe next time I see you , you'll be changing diapers and reading beadtime stories."he snickered and shook his head. "Ah, who would've thought you'd be the one tied down with a family, prince ? How the mighty have fallen.

You are a fucking naughty girl,” I told her. “Or just a naughty girl you’re fucking,” she said and picked up one of the shots. You’re so much more than that, I thought. But I picked up the shot and raised it at her. “Bottoms up for now. You’re bottom’s up later when I smack the shit out of it.

Nearly two decades later, others would raise this question, would talk about books as mirrors and windows, and Ed Lim, tired by then, would find himself as frustrated as he was grateful. We’ve always known, he would think; what took you so long?

And as for you Agent Pallas – man-to-man, if you ever insult my girl on national television again, I’ll…” he stopped. Everyone in the room waited, hanging. Jack raised an eyebrow. “Yes?” Collin turned to Cameron with a look of astonishment. “I’ve got nothing. I had this whole exit speech going and I was gonna end with some big macho threat but when I got there, it was like – bleh – nothing. That’s a pisser.” He appeared disgusted with himself, then shrugged it off. “Oh well. Catch you guys later.” He strode out without a second glance.

I've been accustomed to mysteries, holy and otherwise, since I was a child. Some of us care for orphans, amass fortunes, raise protests or Nielsen ratings; some of us take communion or whiskey or poison. Some of us take lithium and antidepressants, and most everyone believes these pills are fundamentally wrong, a crutch, a sign of moral weakness, the surrender of art and individuality. Bullshit. Such thinking guarantees tradgedy for the bipolar. Without medicine, 20 percent of us, one in five, will commit suicide. Six-gun Russian roulette gives better odds. Denouncing these medicines makes as much sense as denouncing the immorality of motor oil. Without them, sooner or later the bipolar brain will go bang. I know plenty of potheads who sermonize against the pharmaceutical companies; I know plenty of born-again yoga instructors, plenty of missionaries who tell me I'm wrong about lithium. They don't have a clue.

Oscar inspected the gun. He seemed about as enthusiastic about learning to use a new weapon as Adrian was. 'Come on,' said Adrian, raising his gun again. 'I'll buy you a pizza if you hit a bull's-eye before I do.' Ten seconds later, he owed Oscar a pizza. Adrian groaned.

An incomplete list: No more diving into pools of chlorinated water lit green from below. No more ball games played out under floodlights. No more porch lights with moths fluttering on summer nights. No more trains running under the surface of cities on the dazzling power of the electric third rail. No more cities. No more films, except rarely, except with a generator drowning out half the dialogue, and only then for the first little while until the fuel for the generators ran out, because automobile gas goes stale after two or three years. Aviation gas lasts longer, but it was difficult to come by. No more screens shining in the half-light as people raise their phones above the crowd to take pictures of concert stages. No more concert stages lit by candy-colored halogens, no more electronica, punk, electric guitars. No more pharmaceuticals. No more certainty of surviving a scratch on one's hand, a cut on a finger while chopping vegetables for dinner, a dog bite. No more flight. No more towns glimpsed from the sky through airplane windows, points of glimmering light; no more looking down from thirty thousand feet and imagining the lives lit up by those lights at that moment. No more airplanes, no more requests to put your tray table in its upright and locked position – but no, this wasn't true, there were still airplanes here and there. They stood dormant on runways and in hangars. They collected snow on their wings. In the cold months, they were ideal for food storage. In summer the ones near orchards were filled with trays of fruit that dehydrated in the heat. Teenagers snuck into them to have sex. Rust blossomed and streaked. No more countries, all borders unmanned. No more fire departments, no more police. No more road maintenance or garbage pickup. No more spacecraft rising up from Cape Canaveral, from the Baikonur Cosmodrome, from Vandenburg, Plesetsk, Tanegashima, burning paths through the atmosphere into space. No more Internet. No more social media, no more scrolling through litanies of dreams and nervous hopes and photographs of lunches, cries for help and expressions of contentment and relationship-status updates with heart icons whole or broken, plans to meet up later, pleas, complaints, desires, pictures of babies dressed as bears or peppers for Halloween. No more reading and commenting on the lives of others, and in so doing, feeling slightly less alone in the room. No more avatars.

I have often wondered whether especially those days when we are forced to remain idle are not precisely the days spend in the most profound activity. Whether our actions themselves, even if they do not take place until later, are nothing more than the last reverberations of a vast movement that occurs within us during idle days. In any case, it is very important to be idle with confidence, with devotion, possibly even with joy. The days when even our hands do not stir are so exceptionally quiet that it is hardly possible to raise them without hearing a whole lot.

Uncertainty is always uncertain, but the difficulty with people who rely on systems is that they begin to believe that nearly everything is in some way a system and therefore, sooner or later, they become bureaucrats.

Dear Anyone: This is a letter from one anyone to another anyone, no names required, because nobody really knows anyway. Names don't make a hell of a lot of difference. The world is made up entirely of strangers. Millions and millions of them. Everyone is a stranger to everyone else. Sometimes we think we know other people, especially those we supposedly are close to, but if we really knew them, why are we so often surprised by the shit they do? Like, parents are always surprised by what their kids will do. They raise them from the time they are babies, spend each and every day with them, think they're these goddamn fucking angels, and then one day the cops come to the door and say hey, guess what parents? Your kid just bashed some other kid's head in with a baseball bat. Or you're the kid, and you think things are pretty fucking OK, and then one day this guy who's supposed to be your dad says so long, have a nice life. And you think, what the fuck is this? So years later, your mom ends up living with another guy, and he seems OK, but you think, when's it coming? That's what life is. Life is always asking yourself, when's it coming? Because if it hasn't come for a long time, you know you're fucking due. All the best, Anyone.

Like people who learn a foreign language later in life, Virginia and Laura will never speak the language of love without an accent.

Later I had to raise the baby rats she ate, and why I thought one creature was my beloved pet while the other creatures were food is still a mystery to me. That was my first clue that love can warp a hierarchy; the whole pyramid got flipped on its head.

A surging, seething, murmuring crowd of beings that are human only in name, for to the eye and ear they seem naught but savage creatures, animated by vile passions and by the lust of vengeance and of hate. The hour, some little time before sunset, and the place, the West Barricade, at the very spot where, a decade later, a proud tyrant raised an undying monument to the nation's glory and his own vanity.

But what had lasting significance were not the miracles themselves but Jesus' love. Jesus raised his friend Lazarus from the dead, and a few years later, Lazarus died again. Jesus healed the sick, but eventually caught some other disease. He fed the ten thousands, and the next day they were hungry again. But we remember his love. It wasn't that Jesus healed a leper but that he touched a leper, because no one touched lepers.

Years later, after I’d met and married my husband—a man who is light-skinned to some and dark-skinned to others, who speaks like an Ivy League–educated black Hawaiian raised by white middle-class Kansans—I’d see this confusion play out on the national stage among whites and blacks alike, the need to situate someone inside his or her ethnicity and the frustration that comes when it can’t easily be done. America would bring to Barack Obama the same questions my cousin was unconsciously putting to me that day on the stoop: Are you what you appear to be?

But the important lesson which he taught me was that if one would be happy he must not raise his head above his neighbor’s. “He who raises his head above the heads of others,” Mr. Kung said, “will sooner or later be decapitated.

An instant later, a silk hat materialised in the air beside me, considerably down and to the left, and my special, only technically unassigned cohort grinned up at me - for a moment, I rather thought he was going to slip his hand into mine.

The question is not whether or not our children sin later in life. The question is, do we have a biblical obligation to train them before they leave home?

Why do those men hate us? They hate us because they need us, they fear us, they understand how much control it takes to keep us in line, to keep us good girls with our hymens intact until it’s time for them to fuck us into mothers who raise future generations of misogynists to forever fuel their patriarchy. They hate us because we are at once their temptation and their salvation from that patriarchy, which they must sooner or later realize hurts them, too. They hate us because they know that once we rid ourselves of the alliance of State and Street that works in tandem to control us, we will demand a reckoning.

Richard goes with a bob of the head but without another word. It seems he interprets 'don't tell anybody' as 'don't tell anybody but Rafe', because ten minutes later Rafe comes in, and stands looking at him, with his eyebrows raised. Red-headed people can look quite strained when they are raising eyebrows that aren't really there.

that are human only in name, for to the eye and ear they seem naught but savage creatures, animated by vile passions and by the lust of vengeance and of hate. The hour, some little time before sunset, and the place, the West Barricade, at the very spot where, a decade later, a proud tyrant raised an undying

The more improbable the situation and the greater the demands made on [the climber], the more sweetly the blood flows later in release from all that tension. The possibility of danger serves merely to sharpen his awareness and control. And perhaps this is the rationale of all risky sports: You deliberately raise the ante of effort and concentration in order, as it were, to clear your mind of trivialities.

Before the Law stands a doorkeeper on guard. To this doorkeeper there comes a man from the country who begs for admittance to the Law. But the doorkeeper says that he cannot admit the man at the moment. The man, on reflection, asks if he will be allowed, then, to enter later. 'It is possible,' answers the doorkeeper, 'but not at this moment.' Since the door leading into the Law stands open as usual and the doorkeeper steps to one side, the man bends down to peer through the entrance. When the doorkeeper sees that, he laughs and says: 'If you are so strongly tempted, try to get in without my permission. But note that I am powerful. And I am only the lowest doorkeeper. From hall to hall keepers stand at every door, one more powerful than the other. Even the third of these has an aspect that even I cannot bear to look at.' These are difficulties which the man from the country has not expected to meet, the Law, he thinks, should be accessible to every man and at all times, but when he looks more closely at the doorkeeper in his furred robe, with his huge pointed nose and long, thin, Tartar beard, he decides that he had better wait until he gets permission to enter. The doorkeeper gives him a stool and lets him sit down at the side of the door. There he sits waiting for days and years. He makes many attempts to be allowed in and wearies the doorkeeper with his importunity. The doorkeeper often engages him in brief conversation, asking him about his home and about other matters, but the questions are put quite impersonally, as great men put questions, and always conclude with the statement that the man cannot be allowed to enter yet. The man, who has equipped himself with many things for his journey, parts with all he has, however valuable, in the hope of bribing the doorkeeper. The doorkeeper accepts it all, saying, however, as he takes each gift: 'I take this only to keep you from feeling that you have left something undone.' During all these long years the man watches the doorkeeper almost incessantly. He forgets about the other doorkeepers, and this one seems to him the only barrier between himself and the Law. In the first years he curses his evil fate aloud; later, as he grows old, he only mutters to himself. He grows childish, and since in his prolonged watch he has learned to know even the fleas in the doorkeeper's fur collar, he begs the very fleas to help him and to persuade the doorkeeper to change his mind. Finally his eyes grow dim and he does not know whether the world is really darkening around him or whether his eyes are only deceiving him. But in the darkness he can now perceive a radiance that streams immortally from the door of the Law. Now his life is drawing to a close. Before he dies, all that he has experienced during the whole time of his sojourn condenses in his mind into one question, which he has never yet put to the doorkeeper. He beckons the doorkeeper, since he can no longer raise his stiffening body. The doorkeeper has to bend far down to hear him, for the difference in size between them has increased very much to the man's disadvantage. 'What do you want to know now?' asks the doorkeeper, 'you are insatiable.' 'Everyone strives to attain the Law,' answers the man, 'how does it come about, then, that in all these years no one has come seeking admittance but me?' The doorkeeper perceives that the man is at the end of his strength and that his hearing is failing, so he bellows in his ear: 'No one but you could gain admittance through this door, since this door was intended only for you. I am now going to shut it.

She has never been a pretty crier. She sobbed the way she did everything else - with passion and excess. That she had managed to keep it inside her this long was astounding to James. He thought of pushing open the half-closed door and kneeling before his wife, wrapping his arms around her shoulders and helping her upstairs. He raised his hand, stroking the wood of the door, planning to say something to calm her. But what wisdom could he offer Gus, when he could not even heed it himself? James walked upstairs again, got into bed, covered his head with a pillow. And hours later, when Gus crept beneath the sheets, he tried to pretend that he did not feel the weight of her grief, lying between them like a fitful child, so solid that he could not reach past it to touch her.

A SURGING, SEETHING, MURMURING CROWD of beings that are human only in name, for to the eye and ear they seem naught but savage creatures, animated by vile passions and by the lust of vengeance and of hate. The hour, some little time before sunset, and the place, the West Barricade, at the very spot where, a decade later, a proud tyrant raised an undying

There could be no snakes in Quintana Roo's garden. Only later did I see that I had been raising her as a doll.

Indeed ... but no sand this time, so the lever goes up into fourth, and now there's no sound except wind. Screw it all the way over, reach through the handlebars to raise the headlight beam, the needle leans down on a hundred, and wind-burned eyeballs strain to see down the centerline, trying to provide a margin for the reflexes. But with the throttle screwed on there is only the barest margin, and no room at all for mistakes. It has to be done right ... and that's when the strange music starts, when you stretch your luck so far that fear becomes exhilaration and vibrates along your arms. You can barely see at a hundred; the tears blow back so fast that they vaporize before they get to your ears. The only sounds are wind and a dull roar floating back from the mufflers. You watch the white line and try to lean with it ... howling through a turn to the right, then to the left and down the long hill to Pacifica ... letting off now, watching for cops, but only until the next dark stretch and another few seconds on the edge ... The Edge ... There is no honest way to explain it because the only people who really know where it is are the ones who have gone over. The others -- the living -- are those who pushed their control as far as they felt they could handle it, and then pulled back, or slowed down, or did whatever they had to when it came time to choose between Now and Later. But the edge is still Out there. Or maybe it's In. The association of motorcycles with LSD is no accident of publicity. They are both a means to an end, to the place of definitions.

How wonderful it would be if everything could always be as clear and simple as it used to be when you were twelve years old, or twenty years old. If there really were only two colors in the world: black and white. But even the most honest and ingenuous cop, raised on the resounding ideal of the stars and stripes, has to understand sooner or later that there's more than just Darkness and Light out on the streets. There are understandings, concessions, agreements. Informers, traps, provocations. Sooner or later the time comes when you have to betray your own side, plant bags of heroin in pockets, and beat people on the kidneys—carefully, so there are no marks.

When the birds were trilling and the leaves were swelling, an Indian came striding into Plymouth. Tall, almost naked, and very handsome, he raised his hand in friendship. “Welcome, Englishmen,” said Samoset, Massasoit’s ambassador. The Pilgrims murmured in astonishment. The “savage” spoke English. He was friendly and dignified. They greeted him warmly, but cautiously. Samoset departed and returned a week later with Massasoit and Squanto. For the next few days, in a house still under construction, Squanto interpreted while Governor Carver and Massasoit worded a peace treaty that would last more than fifty years. After the agreement, Massasoit went back to his home in Rhode Island, but Squanto stayed on at Plymouth. The wandering Pawtuxet had at last come home.

When the Chief Justice read me the oath,' he [FDR] later told an adviser, 'and came to the words "support the Constitution of the United States" I felt like saying: "Yes, but it's the Constitution as I understand it, flexible enough to meet any new problem of democracy--not the kind of Constitution your Court has raised up as a barrier to progress and democracy.

That which is born of the flesh is flesh; and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit” (John 3:6). He meant that there’s no direct connection between the two. They are interrelated, as you’ll later see, but spirit is spirit and flesh is flesh. You simply cannot contact your spirit through your emotions or your physical body. Herein lies one of the great problems of the Christian life! If you don’t understand that spiritual reality can’t be felt, then you’ll be confused when God’s Word declares that you have the same power that raised Jesus from the dead (Eph. 1:18-20).

We got hungry around three in the morning, and ordered a ton of pizza from an all-night pizza place. Afterward, Blake talked a guy into letting him borrow his skateboard, and he once again entertained all of us. If it had wheels, Blake could work it. “Is he your boyfriend?” a girl behind me asked. I turned to the group of girls watching Blake. They were all coifed and beautiful in their bikinis, not having gone in the water. My wet hair was pulled back in a ponytail by this point and I was wrapped in a towel. “No, he’s my boyfriend’s best friend. We’re watching his place while he’s . . . out of town.” A pang of fear jabbed me when I thought about Kai. “What’s your name?” asked a brunette with glossy lips. “Anna.” I smiled. “Hey. I’m Jenny,” she said. “This is Daniela and Tara.” “Hey,” I said to them. “So, your boyfriend lives here?” asked the blonde, Daniela. She had a cool accent—something European. “Yes,” I answered, pointing up to his apartment. The girls all shared looks, raising their sculpted eyebrows. “Wait,” said Jenny. “Is he that guy in the band?” The third girl, named Tara, gasped. “The drummer?” When I nodded, they shared awed looks. “Oh my gawd, don’t get mad at me for saying this,” said Jenny, “but he’s a total piece of eye candy.” Her friends all laughed. “Yum drum,” whispered Tara, and Daniela playfully shoved her. Jenny got serious. “But don’t worry. He, like, never comes out or talks to anyone. Now we know why.” She winked at me. “You are so adorable. Where are you from?” “Georgia.” This was met with a round of awwws. “Hey, you’re a Southern girl,” said Tara. “You should like this.” She held out a bottle of bourbon and I felt a tug toward it. My fingers reached out. “Maybe just one drink,” I said. Daniela grinned and turned up the music. Fifteen minutes and three shots later I’d dropped my towel and was dancing with the girls and telling them how much I loved them, while they drunkenly swore to sabotage the efforts of any girl who tried to talk to my man.

Language as putative science. - The significance of language for the evolution of culture lies in this, that mankind set up in language a separate world beside the other world, a place it took to be so firmly set that, standing upon it, it could lift the rest of the world off its hinges and make itself master of it. To the extent that man has for long ages believed in the concepts and names of things as in aeternae veritates he has appropriated to himself that pride by which he raised himself above the animal: he really thought that in language he possessed knowledge of the world. The sculptor of language was not so modest as to believe that he was only giving things designations, he conceived rather that with words he was expressing supreame knowledge of things; language is, in fact, the first stage of occupation with science. Here, too, it is the belief that the truth has been found out of which the mightiest sources of energy have flowed. A great deal later - only now - it dawns on men that in their belief in language they have propagated a tremendous error. Happily, it is too late for the evolution of reason, which depends on this belief, to be put back. - Logic too depends on presuppositions with which nothing in the real world corresponds, for example on the presupposition that there are identical things, that the same thing is identical at different points of time: but this science came into existence through the opposite belief (that such conditions do obtain in the real world). It is the same with mathematics, which would certainly not have come into existence if one had known from the beginning that there was in nature no exactly straight line, no real circle, no absolute magnitude.

Furtive behavior is always noticed and, when noticed, inevitably raises an alarm. On the other hand, a man acting boldly and directly is viewed as honest and harmless, is not remarked upon, and is later forgotten altogether.

Children are taught to look down on their nurses (nannies), to treat them as mere servants. When their task is completed the child is withdrawn or the nurse is dismissed. Her visits to her foster-child are discouraged by a cold reception. After a few years the child never sees her again. The mother expects to take her place, and to repair by her cruelty the results of her own neglect. But she is greatly mistaken; she is making an ungrateful foster-child, not an affectionate son; she is teaching him ingratitude, and she is preparing him to despise at a later day the mother who bore him, as he now despises his nurse.

Several days later, Cassidento called Woodward back. “Hey, Al needs some money. . . . Everyone is offering him money for his story. Just want to let you know in case you want to enter the bidding.” It was rumored that a major magazine had offered $5000 for Baldwin’s first-person account. Woodward explained that the Post never paid for news. “Okay, okay, I’m sorry you don’t care about the story,” said Cassidento. “We have other offers.” Woodward started to say that the Post cared very much about the story, but Cassidento had hung up. Woodward and Bernstein told the editors about the invitation to bid on Baldwin’s story. “I bid this . . .” Bradlee said, and raised the middle finger of his right hand.

Oh,Mercer," he murmured against my temple once we'd come up for air, "we are so screwed." I pressed my face against his neck, breathing him in. "I know." "So what do we do?" Reluctantly, I tried to move away. It was hard to think when he was so close to me. "If we were good people, we'd never see each other again." His arms locked around my waist, pulling me back. "Okay,well, that's not happening. Plan B?" I smiled up at him, feeling ridiculously giddy for someone on the verge of ruining her life. "I don't have one.You?" He shook his head. "Nothing.But...look. I've spent basically my whole life pretending to be someone I'm not, faking some feelings, hiding others." Reaching down, he clasped my hand and lifted it so that our joined hands were trapped between our chests. "This thing with us is the only real thing I've had in a long time.You're the only real thing." He raised our hands and kissed my knuckles. "And I'm done pretending I don't want you." I had read a lot about swooning in the romance novels Mom had tried to hide from me,but I'd never felt in danger of doing it until now. Which was why a snarky comment was definitely called for. "Wow,Cross.I think you missed your calling.Screw demon hunting: you should clearly be writing Hallmark cards." His face broke into that crooked grin that was maybe my favorite sight in the whole world. "Shut up," he muttered before lowering his head and kissing me again. "Why is it," I said against his lips several moments later, "that we're always kissing in gross, dirty places like cellars and abandoned mills?" He laughed, pressing kisses to my jaw, then my neck. "Next time it'll be a castle, I promise.This is England, after all. Can't be too hard to find one.

History was meant to serve as a lesson, not a guideline. Errors were meant to be recorded and later avoided, not repeated. Elitism raised the masses once, to the point where the people got angry and toppled entire monarchies. Had we really learned nothing?

We got passes, till midnight after the parade. I met Muriel at the Biltmore at seven. Two drinks, two drugstore tuna-fish sandwiches, then a movie she wanted to see, something with Greer Garson in it. I looked at her several times in the dark when Greer Garson’s son’s plane was missing in action. Her mouth was opened. Absorbed, worried. The identification with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer tragedy complete. I felt awe and happiness. How I love and need her undiscriminating heart. She looked over at me when the children in the picture brought in the kitten to show to their mother. M. loved the kitten and wanted me to love it. Even in the dark, I could sense that she felt the usual estrangement from me when I don’t automatically love what she loves. Later, when we were having a drink at the station, she asked me if I didn’t think that kitten was ‘rather nice.’ She doesn’t use the word ‘cute’ any more. When did I ever frighten her out of her normal vocabulary? Bore that I am, I mentioned R. H. Blyth’s definition of sentimentality: that we are being sentimental when we give to a thing more tenderness than God gives to it. I said (sententiously?) that God undoubtedly loves kittens, but not, in all probability, with Technicolor bootees on their paws. He leaves that creative touch to script writers. M. thought this over, seemed to agree with me, but the ‘knowledge’ wasn’t too very welcome. She sat stirring her drink and feeling unclose to me. She worries over the way her love for me comes and goes, appears and disappears. She doubts its reality simply because it isn’t as steadily pleasurable as a kitten. God knows it is sad. The human voice conspires to desecrate everything on earth.

William Shakespeare (baptised 26 April 1564 – died 23 April 1616) was an English poet and playwright, widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's national poet and the "Bard of Avon" (or simply "The Bard"). His surviving works consist of 38 plays, 154 sonnets, two long narrative poems, and several other poems. His plays have been translated into every major living language, and are performed more often than those of any other playwright. Shakespeare was born and raised in Stratford-upon-Avon. At the age of 18 he married Anne Hathaway, who bore him three children: Susanna, and twins Hamnet and Judith. Between 1585 and 1592 he began a successful career in London as an actor, writer, and part owner of the playing company the Lord Chamberlain's Men, later known as the King's Men. He appears to have retired to Stratford around 1613, where he died three years later. Few records of Shakespeare's private life survive, and there has been considerable speculation about such matters as his sexuality, religious beliefs, and whether the works attributed to him were written by others. Shakespeare produced most of his known work between 1590 and 1613. His early plays were mainly comedies and histories, genres he raised to the peak of sophistication and artistry by the end of the sixteenth century. Next he wrote mainly tragedies until about 1608, including Hamlet, King Lear, and Macbeth, considered some of the finest examples in the English language. In his last phase, he wrote tragicomedies, also known as romances, and collaborated with other playwrights. Many of his plays were published in editions of varying quality and accuracy during his lifetime, and in 1623 two of his former theatrical colleagues published the First Folio, a collected edition of his dramatic works that included all but two of the plays now recognised as Shakespeare's. Shakespeare was a respected poet and playwright in his own day, but his reputation did not rise to its present heights until the nineteenth century. The Romantics, in particular, acclaimed Shakespeare's genius, and the Victorians hero-worshipped Shakespeare with a reverence that George Bernard Shaw called "bardolatry". In the twentieth century, his work was repeatedly adopted and rediscovered by new movements in scholarship and performance. His plays remain highly popular today and are consistently performed and reinterpreted in diverse cultural and political contexts throughout the world. Source: Wikipedia

Each one of us is imbued with a deep yearning to live our own life, not our mother’s. Yet the narcissistic mother puts pressure on her child to act and react to the world as she would. A child raised in this way makes decisions according to what she believes will win her mother’s love and approval. Accustomed to her mother thinking for her, the girl has difficulty later on creating an authentic, healthy adult life for herself.

We are still strangers as we sleep, You and I, And all our intimacies Those hours ago Make it only more so.' It is an old cry, I suppose Knowing We have shared bodies Wondering Have we shared minds, And right now I feel more close To those of my own sex Who too have lain and wondered so Than I do, Lady, To you. And I feel I am no longer me But a man, with A girl (Dichotomy; should I call me a boy Or you a woman?) And wonder, perhaps uneasily, Had you woken first, What later thoughts My sleep Might have raised in you. You sleep, oblivious. – Probably the wiser course. Another age might have caused some pious Guilt in one of us at least, Yet prisoners of one time though we may be I feel this closer, now, to all other ages, And all this sexuality. Our nearly love, Only A time machine ... Yet it remains, remains yet, And still I wonder Do we share thoughts? Have we shared thoughts? And if we do, And if we have, Was the only one, This?

Rapunzel rode to the city and rented a room in a building that had real stairs. She later established the non-profit Foundation for the Free Proliferation of Music and cut off her hair for a fund-raising auction. She sang for free in coffee houses and art galleries for the rest of her days, always refusing to exploit for money other people's desire to hear her sing.

when you’re young, you can’t wait to get away from home, and it’s only later that you appreciate what your mom—or dad, or whoever raised you—did for you. Only later that you realize you should have listened closer, that you weren’t done learning from them, that you still have questions about life.

There is a classic psychology experiment that seems to confirm Brewer's point. Children who enjoy drawing were given marker pens and allowed to go at it. Some were rewarded for drawing (they were given a certificate with a gold seal and a ribbon, and told ahead of time about this arrangement, whereas for others the issue of rewards was never raised. Weeks later, those who had been rewarded took less interest in drawing, and their drawings were judged to be lower in quality, whereas those who had not been rewarded continued to enjoy the activity and produced higher-quality drawings. The hypothesis is that the child begins to attribute his interest, which previously needed no justification, to the external reward, and this has the effect of reducing his intrinsic interest in it. That is, an external reward can affect one's interpretation of one's own motivation, an interpretation that comes to be self-fulfilling.

Bohr Before we can lay our hands on anything, our life’s over. Heisenberg Before we can glimpse who or what we are, we’re gone and laid to dust. Bohr Settled among all the dust we raised. Margrethe And sooner or later there will come a time when all our children are laid to dust, and all our children’s children.

At that time in my life I was never late. Only a year later would I suddenly have difficulty hanging on to any sense of time, leaving friends sitting, invariably, for a half hour here or there. Time would waft past me undetectably or absurdly - laughably when I could laugh - in quantities I was incapable of measuring or obeying. But that year, when I was twenty, I was as punctual as a priest. Were priests punctual? Cave-raised, divinely dazed, I believed them to be.

When Seymour and I were five and three, Les and Bessie played on the same bill for a couple of weeks with Joe Jackson -- the redoubtable Joe Jackson of the nickel-plated trick bicycle that shone like something better than platinum to the very last row of the theater. A good many years later, not long after the outbreak of the Second World War, when Seymour and I had just recently moved into a small New York apartment of our own, our father -- Les, as he'll be called hereafter -- dropped in on us one evening on his way home from a pinochle game. He quite apparently had held very bad cards all afternoon. He came in, at any rate, rigidly predisposed to keep his overcoat on. He sat. He scowled at the furnishings. He turned my hand over to check for cigarette-tar stains on my fingers, then asked Seymour how many cigarettes he smoked a day. He thought he found a fly in his highball. At length, when the conversation -- in my view, at least -- was going straight to hell, he got up abruptly and went over to look at a photograph of himself and Bessie that had been newly tacked up on the wall. He glowered at it for a full minute, or more, then turned around, with a brusqueness no one in the family would have found unusual, and asked Seymour if he remembered the time Joe Jackson had given him, Seymour, a ride on the handle bars of his bicycle, all over the stage, around and around. Seymour, sitting in an old corduroy armchair across the room, a cigarette going, wearing a blue shirt, gray slacks, moccasins with the counters broken down, a shaving cut on the side of his face that I could see, replied gravely and at once, and in the special way he always answered questions from Les -- as if they were the questions, above all others, he preferred to be asked in his life. He said he wasn't sure he had ever got off Joe Jackson's beautiful bicycle.

I curled up in the back next to Loki, his arm around me, and my head resting on his shoulder. My body ached all over, but it felt good being with him. He kissed the top of my head, and I snuggled up closer to him. He'd been helping me at the palace, but he'd waited until we were alone in the car to be affectionate. Willa had raised an eyebrow at us, but she said nothing. Later on, back in Forening, I'd have a thousand questions from her. But for now, she let us have our moment together. "I can't wait until we get home," I said. "Home,,"Loki said and laughed a little. "What?" I lifted my head to look up at him. "What's funny about that?" "Nothing." he shook his head. "i just...I don't think I've ever really felt like I had a home before." He smiled down at me. "Not until I met you." Loki leaned down, kissing my gently on the mouth. I'm sure he wanted to kiss me more deeply, but he was afraid of hurting me. He continued to kiss me tenderly, and I clung to him as tightly as I could as heat swirled through me. When he stopped, he rested his forehead against mine and breathed in deeply. "I cannot wait to get home with you, Princess." "I'm the Queen now, you know," I teased, and he laughed and kissed me again.

To seek in the great accumulation of the already-said the text that resembles 'in advance' a later text, to ransack history in order to rediscover the play of anticipations or echoes, to go right back to the first seeds or to go forward to the last traces, to reveal in a work its fidelity to tradition or its irreducible uniqueness, to raise or lower its stock of originality, to say that the Port -Royal grammarians invented nothing, or to discover that Cuvier had more predecessors than one thought, these are harmless enough amusements for historians who refuse to grow up.

Fifteen minutes, a myriad of cups, kleenexes and freshly-vacuumed floor mats and seat cushions later, Kay had the interior of the limousine looking ship-shape. Inching backward out of the car on her knees, she caught a glimpse of one last bit of trash she’d missed hiding under the driver’s seat. Lowering her chest to the floor, she stretched her arm under the seat as far as it would go. She grabbed the item and pulled it out and raised herself up from her crouched position. She took one look at the used condom swinging from her fingers, screamed and flung it across the top of the front seat, where it stuck to the air conditioner vents on the dash. She knelt there staring at the thin latex mess, a million scenarios racing through her mind.

And so a barrow to this hero was raised in that land, and there stands a token for men of later days to see, the trunk of a wild olive tree, such as ships are built of; and it flourishes with its green leaves a little below the Acherusian headland. And

Later, when everything went sideways and the world broke in half, Robin would think back to this day, to this hour at this table, and wonder why they had been so quick, so carelessly eager to trust one another. Why had they refused to see the myriad ways they could hurt each other? Why had they not paused to interrogate their differences in birth, in raising, that meant they were not and could never be on the same side? But the answer was obvious – that they were all four of them drowning in the unfamiliar, and they saw in each other a raft, and clinging to one another was the only way to stay afloat.

Later I learned to improve my forecasting—if necessary by asking the visitor in advance what subjects he intended to raise with Nixon. In

As a general rule, however, the more accessible you can make your product, the easier it will be to market. You can always raise the price later, after you’ve built an audience.

There could be no snake in Quntana Roo's garden. Only later did I see that I had been raising her as a doll.

He’s totally whipped. Watch.” She raised her voice to a panicked level. “Oh my God! Ava, are you bleeding?” Alex’s head snapped up. Less than five seconds later, he ended his call and crossed the room to a confused-looking Ava, whose hand froze halfway to the scones on the table.

That's not the way he told it, Tarwater said. He said that when the schoolteacher was seven years old, he had good sense but later it dried up. His daddy was an ass and not fit to raise him and his mother was a whore. She ran away from here when she was eighteen years old. It took her that long? the stranger said in an incredulous tone. My, she was kind of a ass herself.

The biggest mistake that parents make, is believing that their assigned task in life is to teach their children and to guide them in every situation of their children's lives. The truth is that it is the task of parents to both learn from their children and to guide them as well. Parenting is a relationship that goes both ways, from the moment your child is born, you learn from that person, and in fact, your lessons begin long before your child's lessons do. Later on, when you've learned a great deal already, then they begin to learn from you. Throughout our lives, it is a give-and-take relationship, in many ways. Our assigned task is to learn from our children, and to guide and teach them. Their assigned task is to learn from us, and also to teach us.

The gods frowned upon wastrels. Roland had been raised, first by his father and then by Cort, his greatest teacher, to believe this, and so he still believed. Those gods might not punish at once, but sooner or later the penance would be paid. And the longer the wait, the greater the weight.

It's funny, isn't it, what will make you break? Your lover moves to London and falls in love with a news reader for the BBC and you feel fine and then one day you raise your umbrella slightly to cross Fifty-seventh Street and stare into the Burberry shop and begin to sob. Or your baby dies at birth and five years later, in an antique store, a small battered silver rattle with teeth marks in one end engraved with the name Emily lies on a square of velvet, and the sobs escape from the genie's bottle somewhere deep in your gut where they've lain low until then. Or the garbage bag breaks.

She raised the dagger and plunged it into Cath’s chest. Catherine gasped, and though there were screams in the courtroom, she barely heard them over the cackle of the Three Sisters. Cold seeped into her from the blade, colder than anything she had ever known. It leached into her veins, crackling like winter ice on a frozen lake. It was so cold it burned. Lacie pulled out the blade. A beating heart was skewered on its tip. It was broken, cut almost clean in half by a blackened fissure that was filled with dust and ash. “It has been bought and paid for,” said the Sister. Then she yipped and launched herself back to the courtroom floor. She was joined by her sisters, cackling and crowding around the Queen’s heart. A moment later, a Fox, a Raccoon, and an Owl were skittering out the door, leaving behind the echo of victorious laughter. CHAPTER 54 CATH STARED AT THE DOORS still thrust wide open, her body both frozen and burning, her chest a hollow cavity. Empty and numb. She no longer hurt. That broken heart had been killing her, and it was gone. Her sorrow. Her loss. Her pain, all gone. All that was left was the rage and the fury and the desperate need for vengeance that would soon, soon be hers.

Much later, when I thought about it, I realized that my folks were typical of their generation of parents: Their idea of raising children was making sure we were clothed, fed, and protected. They didn't focus much on us unless we were sick or had done something wrong. They didn't hold conversations with us. Love was understood rather than expressed, and values were transmitted by example, not word of mouth.

MY BODY, MY CHOICE” POWER In the 1990s, if a woman and man make love and she says she is using birth control but is not, she has the right to raise the child without his knowing he even has a child, and then to sue him for retroactive child support even ten to twenty years later (depending on the state). This forces him to take a job with more pay and more stress and therefore earlier death. Although it’s his body, he has no choice. He has the option of being a slave (working for another without pay or choice) or being a criminal. Roe v. Wade gave women the vote over their bodies. Men still don’t have the vote over theirs—whether in love or war.

White and his cowboy hat loomed over the diminutive Hoover, who was so sensitive about his modest stature that he rarely promoted taller agents to headquarters and later installed a raised dais behind his desk to stand on.

As C.S. Lewis observed in The Silver Chair, one book in the Chronicles of Narnia series: “Crying is all right in its own way while it lasts. But you have to stop sooner or later, and then you still have to decide what to do.

Cleopatra moreover came of age in a country that entertained a singular definition of women’s roles. Well before her and centuries before the arrival of the Ptolemies, Egyptian women enjoyed the right to make their own marriages. Over time their liberties had increased, to levels unprecedented in the ancient world. They inherited equally and held property independently. Married women did not submit to their husbands’ control. They enjoyed the right to divorce and to be supported after a divorce. Until the time an ex-wife’s dowry was returned, she was entitled to be lodged in the house of her choice. Her property remained hers; it was not to be squandered by a wastrel husband. The law sided with the wife and children if a husband acted against their interests. Romans marveled that in Egypt female children were not left to die; a Roman was obligated to raise only his first-born daughter. Egyptian women married later than did their neighbors as well, only about half of them by Cleopatra’s age. They loaned money and operated barges. They served as priests in the native temples. They initiated lawsuits and hired flute players. As wives, widows, or divorcées, they owned vineyards, wineries, papyrus marshes, ships, perfume businesses, milling equipment, slaves, homes, camels. As much as one third of Ptolemaic Egypt may have been in female hands.

There is the review intended to sell a book, — which comes out immediately after the appearance of the book, or sometimes before it; the review which gives reputation, but does not affect the sale, and which comes a little later; the review which snuffs a book out quietly; the review which is to raise or lower the author a single peg, or two pegs, as the case may be; the review which is suddenly to make an author, and the review which is to crush him.

Battles are won en route, Shalhassan of Cathal though. A worthy thought: he raised his hand in a certain way, and a moment later Razeil galloped up, uneasy on a horse at speed, and the Supreme Lord of Cathal made him write it down.

Earlier in the morning Company A, 1st Battalion, 5th Marines had attacked eastward into the ruins of Shuri Castle and had raised the Confederate flag. When we learned that the flag of the Confederacy had been hoisted over the very heart and soul of Japanese resistance, all of us Southerners cheered loudly. The Yankees among us grumbled, and the Westerners didn’t know what to do. Later we learned that the Stars and Stripes that had flown over Guadalcanal were raised over Shuri Castle, a fitting tribute to the men of the 1st Marine Division who had the honor of being first into the Japanese citadel.

As soon as our lips met, I was glad I had my back against the door. My knees were in definite danger of failing me. Archer wrapped his arms around my waist and held me tighter as I clutched the front of his shirt and poured all that I’d been feeling for the past few weeks into the kiss-the despair I’d felt when I’d thought he was dead, the relief I felt now, pressed between him and the cellar door. When we finally parted, I rested my forehead on his collarbone and took deep breaths. It was a few moments before I was capable of speech. “I though you said we’d do this ‘later.’” He kissed my temple. “It’s been like, twenty minutes. That counts as later.” Chuckling, I raised my head to look at him. “I kind of missed you.” Even though it was dark, I could see him smile. “I kind of missed you, too.” “I should probably get upstairs now.” “You probably should,” he murmured, lowering his mouth to mine. By the time I finally made it up to Jenna’s and my room, I was practically skipping.

I am sure I loved that baby quite as truly, quite as tenderly, with greater purity and more disinterestedness, than can enter into the best love of a later time of life, high and ennobling as it is. I am sure my fancy raised up something round that blue-eyed mite of a child, which etherealised, and made a very angel of her. If, any sunny forenoon, she had spread a little pair of wings, and flown away before my eyes, I don't think I should have regarded it as much more than I had had reason to expect.

A man and a woman rush up. The woman raises her own cell phone and takes a picture with it. Pauline Enslin observes this without much surprise. She supposes the woman will show it to friends later. Then they will have drinks and a meal and talk about the grace of God and how everything happens for a reason. God’s grace is a pretty cool concept. It stays intact every time it’s not you.

Activities such as chanting, bowing, and sitting in zazen are not at all wasted, even when done merely formally, for even this superficial encounter with the Dharma will have some wholesome outcome at a later time. However, it must be said in the most unambiguous terms that this is not real Zen. To follow the Dharma involves a complete reorientation of one's life in such a way that one's activities are manifestations of, and are filled with, a deeper meaning. If it were not otherwise, and merely sitting in zazen were enough, every frog in the pond would be enlightened, as one Zen master said. Dōgen Zenji himself said that one must practice Zen with the attitude of a person trying to extinguish a fire in his hair. That is, Zen must be practiced with an attitude of single-minded urgency.

Cathy, one of my roommates, would surface in the news many years later, describing with embarrassment something I hadn’t known when we lived together: Her mother, a schoolteacher from New Orleans, had been so appalled that her daughter had been assigned a black roommate that she’d badgered the university to separate us. Her mother also gave an interview, confirming the story and providing more context. Having been raised in a home where the n-word was a part of the family lexicon, having had a grandfather who’d been a sheriff and used to brag about chasing black people out of his town, she’d been “horrified,” as she put it, by my proximity to her daughter.

Well, " I took a deep breath, "I'd like to write this showing the point of view of the help. The colored women down here." I tried to picture Constantine's face, Aibileen's. "They raise a white child and then twenty years later the child becomes the employer. It's that irony, that we love them and they love us, yet . . ." I swallowed, my voice trembling. "We don't even allow them to use the toilet in the house.

Taking the long view, we need to teach our kids street smarts, like the importance of walking with a friend instead of alone, and how to discern bad strangers from the overwhelming majority of good ones. If we prevent our children from learning how to navigate the world beyond our front yard, it will only come back to haunt them later on when they feel frightened, bewildered, lost, or confused out on the streets.

It was just like Aleksander to steal even this from him, Gavriel thought. To treat the duel as a joke, to treat him as a joke. Now his only choices were to take aim at a man about to fall over or to bear the shame of crying off. And Aleksander would laugh at him later. I wasn’t so very drunk, he would say. And if I was, so what? If you weren’t such a milksop, then surely you’d have— Gavriel raised his pistol and shot his brother through the heart.

I glance back at Drew, who is still eyeing his phone and being awfully quiet. “Seriously, Baylor, I’m about to confiscate that thing.” He raises a brow at me, and gives me his old, innocent grin—which I am not falling for. “You really are a mom, aren’t you?” “As I recall, you played the role of Mom. I was Dad.” “Doesn’t that mean we’re on a date now? And all I get is this lousy dinner?” Drew leans his arms on the table. “Where are my flowers?” “I’ll make it up to you with sweet talk later. Now answer the question, Battle. What the hell is up with the phone?” As if I’ve activated it, the damn thing lights up, and Drew glances down. He fights to hide his smile. “What can I say? I’m totally pussy whipped by my wife to be. That’s right, I’m replacing you with Anna.

How about other books, Mrs. McCullough? Any other books with Chinese characters?" Mrs. McCullough bit her lip. "I haven't really looked for them," she admitted. "I hadn't thought about it." "I can save you some time," said Ed Lim. "There really aren't very many. So May Ling has no dolls that look like her, and no books with pictures of people that look like her." Ed Lim paced a few more steps. Nearly two decades later, others would raise these questions, would talk about books as mirrors and windows, and Ed Lim, tired by then, would find himself as frustrated as he was grateful. We've always known, he would think; what took you so long?

Welcome the disagreement. Remember the slogan, ‘When two partners always agree, one of them is not necessary.’ If there is some point you haven’t thought about, be thankful if it is brought to your attention. Perhaps this disagreement is your opportunity to be corrected before you make a serious mistake. Distrust your first instinctive impression. Our first natural reaction in a disagreeable situation is to be defensive. Be careful. Keep calm and watch out for your first reaction. It may be you at your worst, not your best. Control your temper. Remember, you can measure the size of a person by what makes him or her angry. Listen first. Give your opponents a chance to talk. Let them finish. Do not resist, defend or debate. This only raises barriers. Try to build bridges of understanding. Don’t build higher barriers of misunderstanding. Look for areas of agreement. When you have heard your opponents out, dwell first on the points and areas on which you agree. Be honest. Look for areas where you can admit error and say so. Apologize for your mistakes. It will help disarm your opponents and reduce defensiveness. Promise to think over your opponents’ ideas and study them carefully. And mean it. Your opponents may be right. It is a lot easier at this stage to agree to think about their points than to move rapidly ahead and find yourself in a position where your opponents can say: ‘We tried to tell you, but you wouldn’t listen.’ Thank your opponents sincerely for their interest. Anyone who takes the time to disagree with you is interested in the same things you are. Think of them as people who really want to help you, and you may turn your opponents into friends. Postpone action to give both sides time to think through the problem. Suggest that a new meeting be held later that day or the next day, when all the facts may be brought to bear. In preparation for this meeting, ask yourself some hard questions:

Society corrupts the best of us. It is a little unfair, I think, to criticize a person for not sharing the enlightenment of a later epoch, but it is also profoundly saddening that such prejudices were so extremely pervasive. The question raises nagging uncertainties about which of the conventional truths of our own age will be considered unforgivable bigotry by the next. One way to repay Paul Broca for this lesson which he has inadvertently provided us is to challenge, deeply and seriously, our own most strongly held beliefs.

Companies that pivot—that is, switch business models or products—while on the upswing tend to perform much better than those that stay on a single course. The 2011 Startup Genome Report of new technology companies states that, “Startups that pivot once or twice raise 2.5x more money, have 3.6x better user growth, and are 52% less likely to scale prematurely.

I sit down by the river. Its incessant flow has polished the rocks carried from the top of the mountain. The aqueous caress, that has unrolled for millions of years the liquid ribbon from the summits towards the plains, keeps the freshness of the youth. The July sun heats the trees on the shore, while the stream of water refreshes the air; Two breaths which mingle without opposing one another. The foliage softly sways under the summer breeze, tuning its movement to that of the fiery wave. Won by a palpable peace, thank you Mother Nature, I dive into my book. A time later, which seems infinite to me, the sky becomes darker, I raise my head. How many hours have passed during which, indifferent to the human time, the cascading water has descended from the mountain? How much water has passed in front of me? How many beings have quenched their thirst there, and get their lives out from it? How long after my small passage on Earth will have been forgotten, the river will continue to flow, to carry its rocks, to erode the mountain until it becomes a plain, to spread life like a vein of the Earth ?

Society corrupts the best of us. It is a little unfair, I think, to criticize a person for not sharing the enlightenment of a later epoch, but it is also profoundly saddening that such prejudices were so extremely pervasive. The question raises nagging uncertainties about which of the conventional truths of our own age will be considered unforgivable bigotry by the next.

A classmate from elementary school had married and divorced. Yamada was now raising two children on his own and going gray, which made her laugh. Kazumi, who had been living with a man, went home to her family. Yuusuke, who was trying to become a public servant, failed his test. Yamazaki, who was making erotic games, had all his dreams destroyed. "I'm testing my own talent. It doesn't have to be an erotic game, but I'll do. . . I'll do something!" When he proclaimed this, drunk from sake, his future already was set as a dairy farmer, chasing after cows. I no longer could see how he could escape it. At reunions and parties, everyone laughed and made a big fuss. Those events were fun, as was karaoke. Everyone had a good time and seemed sure that the future would be perfect: We could become anything! We could do anything! We could become happy! These things were true—but steadily, very steadily, at a speed so terribly slow we didn't even notice it, we were being run down. There was nothing we could do, even if we were in trouble, defeated, of crying. Every one of us eventually had some terrible experiences. The only difference was whether it would happen sooner or later; but in the end, we all would fall into some really unbearable situation. I was scared. I was scared of all sorts of things.

The Northwestern Carpathians, in which I was raised, were a hard place, as unforgiving as the people who lived there, but the Alpine landscape into which Zlee and I were sent that early winter seemed a glimpse of what the surface of the earth looked and felt and acted like when there were no maps or borders, no rifles or artillery, no men or wars to claim possession of land, and snow and rock alone parried in a match of millennial slowness so that time meant nothing, and death meant nothing, for what life there was gave in to the forces of nature surrounding and accepted its fate to play what role was handed down in the sidereal march of seasons capable of crushing in an instant what armies might--millennia later--be foolish enough to assemble on it heights. And yet there we were, ordered to march ourselves, for God, not nature, was with us now, and God would deliver us, in this world and next, when the time came for that.

Nere, there’s a chance I will see you again,” Cam says, his dark eyes intent. “If you ever need help, get word to me through the smugglers. I’ll come.” I can only nod, afraid to trust my voice. I must look miserable, though, because moments later, he hugs me. I bury my face in his shoulder, his arms tighten around me, and finally I feel safe. “No matter what happens, I’ll always love you,” he whispers in my ear. I close my eyes. Do I love him back? I just know Cam is more important to me than any friend I’ve ever had. I open my eyes and raise my face to him, and then he kisses me. I realize I’ve been waiting forever for this. Cam’s lips are soft and he smells like salt water and fresh sea air. I wrap my arms around his neck and kiss him back.

We know that media vita in morte sumus or, “in the midst of life we are in death.” We begin dying the day we are born, after all. But because of advances in medical science, the majority of Americans will spend the later years of their life actively dying. The fastest-growing segment of the US population is over eighty-five, what I would call the aggressively elderly. If you reach eighty-five, not only is there a strong chance you are living with some form of dementia or terminal disease, but statistics show that you have a 50-50 chance of ending up in a nursing home, raising the question of whether a good life is measured in quality or quantity. This slow decline differs sharply from times past, when people tended to die quickly, often in a single day. Postmortem daguerreotypes from the 1800s picture fresh, young, almost lifelike corpses, many of them victims of scarlet fever or diphtheria. In 1899, a mere 4 percent of the US population was over sixty-five—forget making it to eighty-five. Now, many will know that death is coming during months or years of deterioration. Medicine has given us the “opportunity”—loosely defined—to sit at our own wakes.

Note to self: Try to extend positive feelings associated with Scratch-Off win into all areas of life. Be bigger presence at work. Race up ladder (joyfully, w/smile on face), get raise. Get in best shape of life, start dressing nicer. Learn guitar? Make point of noticing beauty of world? Why not educate self re. birds, flowers, trees, constellations, become true citizen of natural world, walk around neighborhood w/kids, patiently teaching kids names of birds, flowers, etc. etc.? Why not take kids to Europe? Kids have never been. Have never, in Alps, had hot chocolate in mountain café, served by kindly white-haired innkeeper, who finds them so sophisticated/friendly relative to usual snotty/rich American kids (who always ignore his pretty but crippled daughter w/braids) that he shows them secret hiking path to incredible glade, kids frolic in glade, sit with crippled pretty girl on grass, later say it was most beautiful day of their lives, keep in touch with crippled girl via email, we arrange surgery here for her, surgeon so touched he agrees to do surgery for free, she is on front page of our paper, we are on front page of their paper in Alps? Ha ha. Just happy.

My best advice about writer’s block is: the reason you’re having a hard time writing is because of a conflict between the GOAL of writing well and the FEAR of writing badly. By default, our instinct is to conquer the fear, but our feelings are much, much, less within our control than the goals we set, and since it’s the conflict BETWEEN the two forces blocking you, if you simply change your goal from “writing well” to “writing badly,” you will be a veritable fucking fountain of material, because guess what, man, we don’t like to admit it, because we’re raised to think lack of confidence is synonymous with paralysis, but, let’s just be honest with ourselves and each other: we can only hope to be good writers. We can only ever hope and wish that will ever happen, that’s a bird in the bush. The one in the hand is: we suck. We are terrified we suck, and that terror is oppressive and pervasive because we can VERY WELL see the possibility that we suck. We are well acquainted with it. We know how we suck like the backs of our shitty, untalented hands. We could write a fucking book on how bad a book would be if we just wrote one instead of sitting at a desk scratching our dumb heads trying to figure out how, by some miracle, the next thing we type is going to be brilliant. It isn’t going to be brilliant. You stink. Prove it. It will go faster. And then, after you write something incredibly shitty in about six hours, it’s no problem making it better in passes, because in addition to being absolutely untalented, you are also a mean, petty CRITIC. You know how you suck and you know how everything sucks and when you see something that sucks, you know exactly how to fix it, because you’re an asshole. So that is my advice about getting unblocked. Switch from team “I will one day write something good” to team “I have no choice but to write a piece of shit” and then take off your “bad writer” hat and replace it with a “petty critic” hat and go to town on that poor hack’s draft and that’s your second draft. Fifteen drafts later, or whenever someone paying you starts yelling at you, who knows, maybe the piece of shit will be good enough or maybe everyone in the world will turn out to be so hopelessly stupid that they think bad things are good and in any case, you get to spend so much less time at a keyboard and so much more at a bar where you really belong because medicine because childhood trauma because the Supreme Court didn’t make abortion an option until your unwanted ass was in its third trimester. Happy hunting and pecking!

Exhibit A: I’m guessing you’re no fan of socialism, which was a founding principle of the Nazi movement. The name “Nazi” is an acronym for the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, which most of today’s Democrat socialists conveniently forget. Actually, that’s an understatement. These people don’t just overlook this truth, they’ve totally rewritten history on the matter. These days, Nazism gets associated with conservatism at the drop of a hat, but historically it stems from the left. Adolf Hitler? An art-loving vegetarian who seized power by wooing voters away from Germany’s Social Democrat and communist parties. Italy’s Benito Mussolini? Raised on Karl Marx’s Das Kapital before starting his career as a left-wing journalist and, later, implementing a deadly fascist regime.

Your explanation has been quite clear, thank you, Franz,’ Wing said, still frowning. ‘I just think that financial corruption on this scale may be a little more than I can get my head around.’ ‘Poor old ninja boy,’ Shelby said, smiling. ‘Knows twenty-seven ways to take you down with just his pinky, but can’t actually count to twenty-seven.’ ‘So this makes perfect sense to you, I suppose,’ Wing said, handing the sheet to Shelby. ‘Yeah, it’s easy,’ Shelby said, pointing out one area of the diagram. ‘See this piece here is just gobbledegook.’ Her finger moved to another area. ‘Whereas this section is premium-grade incomprehensible gibberish and this section,’ her finger moved again, ‘appears to be mostly in Greek.’ ‘Am I to take it that you have not studied for the test tomorrow at all then?’ Wing asked, raising an eyebrow. ‘Nope,’ Shelby said with a grin. ‘There’s going to be some good old-fashioned last-minute cramming later though. Either that or I’m going to just sit near my best bud Franz here and he’s going to write out all the answers in nice, b-i-i-i-i-g, easily legible letters. Right, bud?’ ‘This is being what I normally do,’ Franz said with a sigh, ‘isn’t it?

Aren’t you a little young to be a captain? Not that I’m sure you weren’t wonderful at it,” I added hastily, “but Frank’s got to be your same age, and Mr. Graces and Mr. Liu are both older than you. How on earth did it happen?” He shut down. It was like a curtain being pulled across a window. This was a subject he definitely did not wish to discuss. “The title is honorary,” he said, not meeting my gaze. “I can’t stop them calling me that, even though I’ve asked them not to. I was the highest-ranking officer to survive the…accident.” Accident? I supposed this was another one of those things he didn’t want to tell me because it would make me hate him. Recognizing that dropping that particular topic-for now at least-would probably be best. I said, “John, I can warn you about the Furies. And I know exactly where the coffin is. All you have to do is take me back to Isla Huesos-just this one time, to help Alex-and I’ll never mention going there again. I’ll even,” I said, reaching up to straighten the collar of his leather jacket, which had gone askew, “forgive you for the waffles-“ John seized me by both shoulders, pulling me towards him so abruptly that Hope gave an alarmed flap of her wings. “Pierce,” he said. “Do you mean that?” When I pushed back some of the hair that had tumbled into my face and raised my dark eyes to meet his light ones, I saw that he was staring down at me with an intensity that burned. “You’ll never mention going back to Isla Huesos again if I take you there right now, this once, to talk to your cousin Alex?” he demanded. “You’ll give…cohabitation another chance?” His sudden fierceness was making me nervous. “Of course, John,” I said. “But it’s not like I have a choice.” “What if you did?” he asked, his grip tightening. I blinked. “But I can’t. You said-“ He gave me a little shake. “Never mind what I said. What if I was wrong?” I reached up to lay a hand on his cheek. It felt a little scratchy, because he hadn’t shaved. I didn’t care about stubble. What I cared about was the desperate need I saw in his eyes. The need for me. “I’d come back,” I said, simply, “to stay with you.” A second later, the late-and everything around it-was gone.

These are coral islands, slowly raised, but continuous, created by the daily work of polypi. Then this new island will be joined later on to the neighboring groups, and a fifth continent will stretch from New Zealand and New Caledonia, and from thence to the Marquesas. One day, when I was suggesting this theory to Captain Nemo, he replied coldly: "The earth does not want new continents, but new men.

The one on the left, a sour-looking old bastard with a scar through his short grey hair, lifted his head to sneer up at her. “Fuck yourselves, you mad bitches.” Rikke raised her brows at Corleth. Corleth raised hers back. “Fuck yourselves, he says.” “I heard him,” said Rikke. “Guess there might be time for that later. Just a celebratory finger or two. But right now, I’m a little busy stealing your city.

Without making any great show of it, Mather withdrew from him. Though they saw each other in company, and he was never obviously distant toward Edward, the friendship was never the same. Edward was in agonies when he considered that Mather was actually repelled by his behavior, but he did not have the courage to raise the subject. Besides, Mather made sure they were never alone together. At first Edward believed that his error was to have damaged Mather's pride by witnessing his humiliation, which Edward then compounded by acting as his champion, demonstrating that he was tough while Mather was a vulnerable weakling. Later on, Edward realized that what he had done was simply not cool, and his shame was all the greater. Street fighting did not go with poetry and irony, bebop or history. He was guilty of a lapse of taste. He was not the person he had thought. What he believed was an interesting quirk, a rough virtue, turned out to be a vulgarity. He was a country boy, a provincial idiot who thought a bare-knuckle swipe could impress a friend. It was a mortifying reappraisal. He was making one of the advances typical of early adulthood: the discovery that there were new values by which he preferred to be judged.

Addy,” said Mrs. Kaur. “I’ll still have to log it, and account for it later.” “Blame me,” said Robin at once. One thick black eyebrow arched. Miss Morrissey leaned forward and smiled at her sister. “Would you say Sir Robert is a threatening figure?” “Er,” said Mrs. Kaur. It was the most diplomatic single syllable Robin had ever heard. “Are you afraid for your maidenly virtue?” “I’m married, Addy,” said Kitty Kaur dryly. “I have none.” She eyed Robin. “He does seem the kind of well-built, pugnacious fellow who would follow through on a threat of bodily harm.” “I beg your pardon,” Robin began to protest, and then the penny dropped. “Oh. Would it help if I raised my voice?” “Yes, that would do nicely. Sir Robert strong-armed my sister into bringing him here to seek my help, and threatened us with harm unless I abused my access to the lockroom in order to locate Mr. Courcey. Overcome by concern for his friend, of course, but still. Most brutish behavior.” “And we are but feeble women,” said Miss Morrissey. “Woe.” “Your sister is a magician,” Robin said, pointing out what seemed the largest hole in this story. “Woe,” said Mrs. Kaur firmly, and Robin recalled what Miss Morrissey had said about the assumptions made by men.

Nature Boy I was just a boy when I sat down To watch the news on TV I saw some ordinary slaughter I saw some routine atrocity My father said, don't look away You got to be strong, you got to be bold, now He said, that in the end it is beauty That is going to save the world, now And she moves among the sparrows And she floats upon the breeze She moves among the flowers She moves something deep inside of me I was walking around the flower show like a leper Coming down with some kind of nervous hysteria When I saw you standing there, green eyes, black hair Up against the pink and purple wisteria You said, hey, nature boy, are you looking at me With some unrighteous intention? My knees went weak, I couldn't speak, I was having thoughts That were not in my best interests to mention And she moves among the flowers And she floats upon the smoke She moves among the shadows She moves me with just one little look You took me back to your place And dressed me up in a deep sea diver's suit You played the patriot, you raised the flag And I stood at full salute Later on we smoked a pipe that struck me dumb And made it impossible to speak As you closed in, in slow motion, Quoting Sappho, in the original Greek She moves among the shadows She floats upon the breeze She moves among the candles And we moved through the days and through the years Years passed by, we were walking by the sea Half delirious You smiled at me and said, Babe I think this thing is getting kind of serious You pointed at something and said Have you ever seen such a beautiful thing? It was then that I broke down It was then that you lifted me up again She moves among the sparrows And she walks across the sea She moves among the flowers And she moves something deep inside of me She moves among the sparrows And she floats upon the breeze She moves among the flowers And she moves right up close to me

During one of these lectures, our teacher imparted a morsel of clinical wisdom. This is what he told us: “You will from time to time meet a patient who shares a disturbing tale of multiple mistakes in his previous treatment. He has been seen by several clinicians, and all failed him. The patient can lucidly describe how his therapists misunderstood him, but he has quickly perceived that you are different. You share the same feeling, are convinced that you understand him, and will be able to help.” At this point my teacher raised his voice as he said, “Do not even think of taking on this patient! Throw him out of the office! He is most likely a psychopath and you will not be able to help him.” Many years later I learned that the teacher had warned us against psychopathic charm, and the leading authority in the study of psychopathy confirmed that the teacher’s advice was sound. The analogy to the Müller-Lyer illusion is close. What we were being taught was not how to feel about that patient. Our teacher took it for granted that the sympathy we would feel for the patient would not be under our control; it would arise from System 1. Furthermore, we were not being taught to be generally suspicious of our feelings about patients. We were told that a strong attraction to a patient with a repeated history of failed treatment is a danger sign—like the fins on the parallel lines. It is an illusion—a cognitive illusion—and I (System 2) was taught how to recognize it and advised not to believe it or act on it.

After a moment or two a man in brown crimplene looked in at us, did not at all like the look of us and asked us if we were transit passengers. We said we were. He shook his head with infinite weariness and told us that if we were transit passengers then we were supposed to be in the other of the two rooms. We were obviously very crazy and stupid not to have realized this. He stayed there slumped against the door jamb, raising his eyebrows pointedly at us until we eventually gathered our gear together and dragged it off down the corridor to the other room. He watched us go past him shaking his head in wonder and sorrow at the stupid futility of the human condition in general and ours in particular, and then closed the door behind us. The second room was identical to the first. Identical in all respects other than one, which was that it had a hatchway let into one wall. A large vacant-looking girl was leaning through it with her elbows on the counter and her fists jammed up into her cheekbones. She was watching some flies crawling up the wall, not with any great interest because they were not doing anything unexpected, but at least they were doing something. Behind her was a table stacked with biscuits, chocolate bars, cola, and a pot of coffee, and we headed straight towards this like a pack of stoats. Just before we reached it, however, we were suddenly headed off by a man in blue crimplene, who asked us what we thought we were doing in there. We explained that we were transit passengers on our way to Zaire, and he looked at us as if we had completely taken leave of our senses. 'Transit passengers? he said. 'It is not allowed for transit passengers to be in here.' He waved us magnificently away from the snack counter, made us pick up all our gear again, and herded us back through the door and away into the first room where, a minute later, the man in the brown crimplene found us again. He looked at us. Slow incomprehension engulfed him, followed by sadness, anger, deep frustration and a sense that the world had been created specifically to cause him vexation. He leaned back against the wall, frowned, closed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose. 'You are in the wrong room,' he said simply. `You are transit passengers. Please go to the other room.' There is a wonderful calm that comes over you in such situations, particularly when there is a refreshment kiosk involved. We nodded, picked up our gear in a Zen-like manner and made our way back down the corridor to the second room. Here the man in blue crimplene accosted us once more but we patiently explained to him that he could fuck off.

Six express tracks and twelve locals pass through Palimpsest. The six Greater Lines are: Stylus, Sgraffito, Decretal, Foolscap, Bookhand, and Missal. Collectively, in the prayers of those gathered prostrate in the brass turnstiles of its hidden, voluptuous shrines, these are referred to as the Marginalia Line. They do not run on time: rather, the commuters of Palimpsest have learned their habits, the times of day and night when they prefer to eat and drink, their mating seasons, their gathering places. In days of old, great safaris were held to catch the great trains in their inexorable passage from place to place, and women grappled with them with hooks and tridents in order to arrive punctually at a desk in the depth, of the city. As if to impress a distracted parent on their birthday, the folk of Palimpsest built great edifices where the trains liked to congregate to drink oil from the earth and exchange gossip. They laid black track along the carriages’ migratory patterns. Trains are creatures of routine, though they are also peevish and curmudgeonly. Thus the transit system of Palimpsest was raised up around the huffing behemoths that traversed its heart, and the trains have not yet expressed displeasure. To ride them is still an exercise in hunterly passion and exactitude, for they are unpredictable, and must be observed for many weeks before patterns can be discerned. The sport of commuting is attempted by only the bravest and the wildest of Palimpsest. Many have achieved such a level of aptitude that they are able to catch a train more mornings than they do not. The wise arrive early with a neat coil of hooked rope at their waist, so that if a train is in a very great hurry, they may catch it still, and ride behind on the pauper’s terrace with the rest of those who were not favored, or fast enough, or precise in their calculations. Woe betide them in the infrequent mating seasons! No train may be asked to make its regular stops when she is in heat! A man was once caught on board when an express caught the scent of a local. The poor banker was released to a platform only eight months later, when the two white leviathans had relinquished each other with regret and tears.

The foretelling, Elias,” the Augur says. “The future given to the Augurs in visions. That is the reason we built this school. That is the reason you are here. Do you know the story?” The story of Blackcliff’s origin was the first thing I learned as a Yearling: Five hundred years ago, a warrior brute named Taius united the fractured Martial clans and swept down from the north, crushing the Scholar Empire and taking over most of the continent. He named himself Emperor and established his dynasty. He was called the Masked One, for the unearthly silver mask he wore to scare the hell out of his enemies. But the Augurs, considered holy even then, saw in their visions that Taius’s line would one day fail. When that day came, the Augurs would choose a new Emperor through a series of physical and mental tests: the Trials. For obvious reasons, Taius didn’t appreciate this prediction, but the Augurs must have threatened to strangle him with sheep gut, because he didn’t make a peep when they raised Blackcliff and began training students here. And here we all are, five centuries later, masked just like Taius the First, waiting for the old devil’s line to fail so one of us can become the shiny new Emperor. I’m not holding my breath. Generations of Masks have trained and served and died without a whisper of the Trials. Blackcliff may have started out as a place to prepare the future Emperor, but now it’s just a training ground for the Empire’s deadliest asset. “I know the story,” I say in response to the Augur’s question. But I don’t believe a word of it, since it’s mythical horse dung.

At some point, sisters began to talk about how unseen they have felt. How the media has focused on men, but it has been them - the sisters - who were there. They were there, in overwhelming numbers, just as they were during the civil rights movement. Women - all women, trans women - are roughly 80% of the people who were staring down the terror of Ferguson, saying “we are the caretakers of this community”. Is it women who are out there, often with their children, calling for an end to police violence, saying “we have a right to raise our children without fear”. But it is not women’s courage that is showcased in the media. One sister says “when the police move in we do not run, we stay. And for this, we deserve recognition”. Their words will live with us, will live in us, as Ferguson begins to unfold and as the national attention begins to really focus on what Alicia, Opal and I have started. The first time there’s coverage of Black Lives Matter in a way that is positive is on the Melissa Harris-Perry show. She does not invite us - it isn’t intentional, I’m certain of that. And about a year later she does, but in this early moment, and despite the overwhelming knowledge of the people on the ground who are talking about what Alicia, Opal and I have done, and despite of it being part of the historical record, that it is always women who do the work even as men get the praise. It takes a long time for us to occur to most reporters and the mainstream. Living in patriarchy means that the default inclination is to center men and their voices, not women and their work. The fact seems ever more exacerbated in our day and age, when presence on twitter, when the number of followers one has, can supplant the everyday and heralded work of those who, by virtue of that work, may not have time to tweet constantly or sharpen and hone their personal brand so that it is an easily sellable commodity. Like the women who organized, strategized, marched, cooked, typed up and did the work to ensure the civil rights movement; women whose names go unspoken, unknown, so too that this dynamic unfolds as the nation began to realize that we were a movement. Opal, Alicia and I never wanted or needed to be the center of anything. We were purposeful about decentralizing our role in the work, but neither did we want, nor deserved, to be erased.

When Gabriel was about Ivo's age," the duchess remarked almost dreamily, staring out at the plum-colored sky, "he found a pair of orphaned fox cubs in the woods, at a country manor we'd leased in Hampshire. Has he told you about that?" Pandora shook her head, her eyes wide. A reminiscent smile curved the duchess's full lips. "It was a pair of females, with big ears, and eyes like shiny black buttons. They made chirping sounds, like small birds. Their mother had been killed in a poacher's trap, so Gabriel wrapped the poor th-things in his coat and brought them home. They were too young to survive on their own. Naturally, he begged to be allowed to keep them. His father agreed to let him raise them under the gamekeeper's supervision, until they were old enough to return the f-forest. Gabriel spent weeks spoon-feeding them with a mixture of meat paste and milk. Later on, he taught them to stalk and catch prey in an outside pen." "How?" Pandora asked, fascinated. The older woman glanced at her with an unexpectedly mischievous grin. "He dragged dead mice through their pen on a string." "That's horrid," Pandora exclaimed, laughing. "It was," the duchess agreed with a chuckle. "Gabriel pretended not to mind, of course, but it was qu-quite disgusting. Still, the cubs had to learn." The duchess paused before continuing more thoughtfully. "I think for Gabriel, the most difficult part of raising them was having to keep his distance, no matter how he loved them. No p-petting or cuddling, or even giving them names. They couldn't lose their fear of humans, or they wouldn't survive. As the gamekeeper told him, he might as well murder them if he made them tame. It tortured Gabriel, he wanted to hold them so badly." "Poor boy." "Yes. But when Gabriel finally let them go, they scampered away and were able to live freely and hunt for themselves. It was a good lesson for him to learn." "What was the lesson?" Pandora asked soberly. "Not to love something he knew he would lose?" The duchess shook her head, her gaze warm and encouraging. "No, Pandora. He learned how to love them without changing them. To let them be what they were meant to be.

Art kept my spirit alive. Expressing myself, whether by drawing, writing or dancing, was an assertion of my existence that enabled me to connect to something deeper than simply what I was expected to produce in the world. Later, when I felt too blocked to create, consuming art broke my sense of isolation and helped me see parts of myself in work created by others. When I forgot who I was, creating art helped me find my way back. Art was my entry point to learning how to love myself.

You still out there, Princess?” My lips parted as my eyes widened at the sound of his voice. It was Hawke. In that room. I couldn’t believe it. “Or have you fallen to your death?” He continued. I briefly debated the merits of jumping. “I really hope that’s not the case since I’m pretty positive that would reflect poorly on me since I assumed you were in your room.” A pause. ”Behaving. And not on a ledge, several dozen feet in the air, for reasons I can’t even begin to fathom but am dying to learn.”? “Dammit,” I whispered, looking around as if I could find another escape route. Which was stupid. Unless I suddenly sprouted wings, the only exit point was through the window. A heartbeat later, Hawke stuck his head out and looked up at me. The soft glow of the lamp glanced off his cheekbone as he raised his brow. “Hi?” I squeaked. He stared at me a moment. “Get inside.” I didn’t move. With a sigh so heavy it should’ve rattled the walls, he extended his hand toward me. “Now.” “You could say please,” I muttered. His eyes narrowed. “There are a whole lot of things I could say to you that you should be grateful I’m keeping to myself.” “Whatever,” I grumbled. “Move back.” He waited, but when I didn’t take his hand, he disappeared back into the room, grousing under his breath. “If you fall, you’re going to be in so much trouble.” “If I fall, I’ll be dead, so I’m not sure how I’d also be in trouble.” “Poppy,” he snapped, and I couldn’t help it. I grinned.

I always see to the dogs first and leave the cats and the occasional birds and rabbits and hamsters for later. It isn't that I play favorites, it's just that dogs are needier than other pets. Leave a dog alone for very long and it'll start going a little nuts. Cats, on the other hand, try to give you the impression that they didn't even notice you were gone. "Oh, were you out?" they'll say, "I didn't notice." Then they'll raise their tails to show you their little puckered anuses and walk away.

Samuel had raised his eyebrows and said, “Do you really want us to kill each other? Adam is the Alpha—and I’m a stronger dominant than he is. Now we’ve both lived long enough to control ourselves up to a point. But, if we’re living together, sooner or later, we’d be at each other’s throat.” “Adam’s house is only a hundred yards from mine,” I told him dryly. Samuel would have been right about any other wolf, but Samuel made his own rules. If he wanted to live in peace with Adam, he could manage it. “Please.” His tone was as far from pleading as it was possible to get. “No,” I told him. There was another, longer pause. “So how are you going to explain to your neighbors that there is a strange man sleeping on your front porch?” He’d have done it, too—so I let him move in.

The root destruction of religion in the country, which throughout the twenties and thirties was one of the most important goals of the GPU-NKVD, could be realized only by mass arrests of Orthodox believers. Monks and nuns, whose black habits had been a distinctive feature of Old Russian life, were intensively rounded up on every hand, placed under arrest, and sent into exile. They arrested and sentenced active laymen. The circles kept getting bigger, as they raked in ordinary believers as well, old people and particularly women, who were the most stubborn believers of all and who, for many long years to come, would be called 'nuns' in transit prisons and in camps. True, they were supposedly being arrested and tried not for their actual faith but for openly declaring their convictions and for bringing up their children in the same spirit. As Tanya Khodkevich wrote: You can pray freely But just so God alone can hear. (She received a ten-year sentence for these verses.) A person convinced that he possessed spiritual truth was required to conceal it from his own children! In the twenties the religious education of children was classified as a political crime under Article 58-10 of the Code--in other words, counterrevolutionary propaganda! True, one was permitted to renounce one's religion at one's trial: it didn't often happen but it nonetheless did happen that the father would renounce his religion and remain at home to raise the children while the mother went to the Solovetsky Islands. (Throughout all those years women manifested great firmness in their faith.) All persons convicted of religious activity received 'tenners,' the longest term then given. (In those years, particularly in 1927, in purging the big cities for the pure society that was coming into being, they sent prostitutes to the Solovetsky Islands along with the 'nuns.' Those lovers of a sinful earthly life were given three-year sentences under a more lenient article of the Code. The conditions in prisoner transports, in transit prisons, and on the Solovetsky Islands were not of a sort to hinder them from plying their merry trade among the administrators and the convoy guards. And three years later they would return with laden suitcases to the places they had come from. Religious prisoners, however, were prohibited from ever returning to their children and their home areas.)

heel (calf) raise leg (knee) extension leg (knee) flexion squat (one half – full squat) or leg press good morning hip flexion hip abduction hip adduction hip extension back raises back raises with a twist 45° sit-up reverse trunk twist reverse sit-up bench press bent over row, two variants overhead press, two variants full and partial range front arm raises full and partial range lateral arm raises lat pulldown biceps curl) triceps push down supination-pronation wrist curls reverse curls finger and grip exercises breathing exercises

The Afghans whom Yousaf trained uniformly denounced suicide attack proposals as against their religion. It was only the Arab volunteers—from Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Algeria, and other countries, who had been raised in an entirely different culture, spoke their own language, and preached their own interpretations of Islam while fighting far from their homes and families—who later advocated suicide attacks. Afghan jihadists, tightly woven into family, clan, and regional social networks, never embraced suicide tactics in significant numbers.18

A neurosurgeon once told me about operating on the brain of a young man with epilepsy. As is customary in this kind of operation, the patient was wide awake, under only local anesthesia, while the surgeon delicately explored his exposed cortex, makingsure that the parts tentatively to be removed were not absolutely vital by stimulating them electrically and asking the patient what he experienced. Some stimulations provoked visual flashes or hand-raisings, others a sort of buzzing sensation, but one spot produced a delighted response from the patient: "It's 'Outta Get Me' by Guns N' Roses. my favorite heavy metal band!" I asked the neurosurgeon If he had asked the patient to sing or hum along with the music, since it would be fascinating to learn how "high fidelity" the provoked memory was, would it be in exactly the same key and tempo as the record? Such a song (unliken"Silent Night") has one canonical version. so we could simply have superimposed a recording of the patients humming with the standard record and compared the results. Unfortunately, even though a tape recorder had been running during the operation, thesurgeon hadn't asked the patient to sing along. ''Why not?" I asked, and he replied: "I hate rock music!' Later in the conversation the neurosurgeon happened to remark that he was going to have to operate again on the same young man. and I expressed the hope that he would just check to see if he could restimulate the rock music, and this time ask the fellow to sing along. "I can't do it." replied the neurosurgeon. "since I cut out that part." "It was part of the epileptic focus?" I asked. "No,'' the surgeon replied, ''I already told you — I hate rock music.

This actually did happen to a real person, and the real person is me. I had gone to catch a train. This was April 1976, in Cambridge, U.K. I was a bit early for the train. I’d gotten the time of the train wrong. I went to get myself a newspaper to do the crossword, and a cup of coffee and a packet of cookies. I went and sat at a table. I want you to picture the scene. It’s very important that you get this very clear in your mind. Here’s the table, newspaper, cup of coffee, packet of cookies. There’s a guy sitting opposite me, perfectly ordinary-looking guy wearing a business suit, carrying a briefcase. It didn’t look like he was going to do anything weird. What he did was this: he suddenly leaned across, picked up the packet of cookies, tore it open, took one out, and ate it. Now this, I have to say, is the sort of thing the British are very bad at dealing with. There’s nothing in our background, upbringing, or education that teaches you how to deal with someone who in broad daylight has just stolen your cookies. You know what would happen if this had been South Central Los Angeles. There would have very quickly been gunfire, helicopters coming in, CNN, you know… But in the end, I did what any red-blooded Englishman would do: I ignored it. And I stared at the newspaper, took a sip of coffee, tried to do a clue in the newspaper, couldn’t do anything, and thought, What am I going to do? In the end I thought Nothing for it, I’ll just have to go for it, and I tried very hard not to notice the fact that the packet was already mysteriously opened. I took out a cookie for myself. I thought, That settled him. But it hadn’t because a moment or two later he did it again. He took another cookie. Having not mentioned it the first time, it was somehow even harder to raise the subject the second time around. “Excuse me, I couldn’t help but notice…” I mean, it doesn’t really work. We went through the whole packet like this. When I say the whole packet, I mean there were only about eight cookies, but it felt like a lifetime. He took one, I took one, he took one, I took one. Finally, when we got to the end, he stood up and walked away. Well, we exchanged meaningful looks, then he walked away, and I breathed a sigh of relief and st back. A moment or two later the train was coming in, so I tossed back the rest of my coffee, stood up, picked up the newspaper, and underneath the newspaper were my cookies. The thing I like particularly about this story is the sensation that somewhere in England there has been wandering around for the last quarter-century a perfectly ordinary guy who’s had the same exact story, only he doesn’t have the punch line.

One of the longest-running public health studies dates from the 1970s, when half of the families in a number of villages in Bangladesh were given contraceptives and the other half were not. Twenty years later, the mothers who took contraceptives were healthier. Their children were better nourished. Their families had more wealth. The women had higher wages. Their sons and daughters had more schooling. The reasons are simple: When the women were able to time and space their pregnancies, they were more likely to advance their education, earn an income, raise healthy children, and have the time and money to give each child the food, care, and education needed to thrive. When children reach their potential, they don’t end up poor. This is how families and countries get out of poverty. In fact, no country in the last fifty years has emerged from poverty without expanding access to contraceptives.

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 retrospect, it is easy to see that Hitler's successful gamble in the Rhineland brought him a victory more staggering and more fatal in its immense consequences than could be comprehended at the time. At home it fortified his popularity and his power, raising them to heights which no German ruler of the past had ever enjoyed. It assured his ascendancy over his generals, who had hesitated and weakened at a moment of crisis when he had held firm. It taught them that in foreign politics and even in military affairs his judgment was superior to theirs. They had feared that the French would fight; he knew better. And finally, and above all, the Rhineland occupation, small as it was as a military operation, opened the way, as only Hitler (and Churchill, alone, in England) seemed to realize, to vast new opportunities in a Europe which was not only shaken but whose strategic situation was irrevocably changed by the parading of three German battalions across the Rhine bridges. Conversely, it is equally easy to see, in retrospect, that France's failure to repel the Wehrmacht battalions and Britain's failure to back her in what would have been nothing more than a police action was a disaster for the West from which sprang all the later ones of even greater magnitude. In March 1936 the two Western democracies were given their last chance to halt, without the risk of a serious war, the rise of a militarized, aggressive, totalitarian Germany and, in fact - as we have seen Hitler admitting - bring the Nazi dictator and his regime tumbling down. They let the chance slip by. For France, it was the beginning of the end. Her allies in the East, Russia, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Rumania and Yugoslavia, suddenly were faced with the fact that France would not fight against German aggression to preserve the security system which the French government itself had taken the lead in so laboriously building up. But more than that. These Eastern allies began to realize that even if France were not so supine, she would soon not be able to lend them much assistance because of Germany's feverish construction of a West Wall behind the Franco-German border. The erection of this fortress line, they saw, would quickly change the strategic map of Europe, to their detriment. They could scarcely expect a France which did not dare, with her one hundred divisions, to repel three German battalions, to bleed her young manhood against impregnable German fortifications which the Wehrmacht attacked in the East. But even if the unexpected took place, it would be futile. Henceforth the French could tie down in the West only a small part of the growing German Army. The rest would be free for operations against Germany's Eastern neighbors.

Once, before I had you, I saw you. I know it sounds crazy, but it's true. I was pregnant and standing alone outside a party, and when you kicked, I shut my eyes and saw you on a beach we would arrive at almost five years later. You were facing the water and wearing your blue swimsuit and I knew, from the curve in your spine and the nut brown of your skin, that you were mine to protect like nothing else ever will be. So when you first started asking me hard questions, the ones about America and your place here, I wanted to find you the right answers - the kind that would make you feel good, welcome, and loved. I thought if I could just remember the country I'd been raised to believe in, the one I was sure I would eventually get to, I'd be able to get us back there. Here is the thing, though, the real, true thing I still have trouble admitting: I can't protect you from everything. I can't protect you from becoming a brown man in America. I can't protect you from spending a lifetime caught between the beautiful dream of a diverse nation and the complicated reality of one. I can't even protect you from the simple fact that sometimes, the people who love us will choose a world that doesn't. Even now, just writing that down, I want to say something that will make it okay, or even make it make sense, but I can't. Will they ever really understand it themselves? Will they ever change? I have no idea. Our burden is how much we might love them anyway. And this is maybe the part I worry about the most, how the weight of that will twist you into someone you don't want to be, or worse, make you ashamed of your own heart. I hope you will remember that you have nothing to be ashamed of. I hope you will remember that your heart is a good one, and that your capacity to feel love, in all its complexity, is a gift.

The nuclear arms race is over, but the ethical problems raised by nonmilitary technology remain. The ethical problems arise from three "new ages" flooding over human society like tsunamis. First is the Information Age, already arrived and here to stay, driven by computers and digital memory. Second is the Biotechnology Age, due to arrive in full force early in the next century, driven by DNA sequencing and genetic engineering. Third is the Neurotechnology Age, likely to arrive later in the next century, driven by neural sensors and exposing the inner workings of human emotion and personality to manipulation.

of the problem was that Chaos got a little creation-happy. It thought to its misty, gloomy self: Hey, Earth and Sky. That was fun! I wonder what else I can make. Soon it created all sorts of other problems—and by that I mean gods. Water collected out of the mist of Chaos, pooled in the deepest parts of the earth, and formed the first seas, which naturally developed a consciousness—the god Pontus. Then Chaos really went nuts and thought: I know! How about a dome like the sky, but at the bottom of the earth! That would be awesome! So another dome came into being beneath the earth, but it was dark and murky and generally not very nice, since it was always hidden from the light of the sky. This was Tartarus, the Pit of Evil; and as you can guess from the name, when he developed a godly personality, he didn't win any popularity contests. The problem was, both Pontus and Tartarus liked Gaea, which put some pressure on her relationship with Ouranos. A bunch of other primordial gods popped up, but if I tried to name them all we’d be here for weeks. Chaos and Tartarus had a kid together (don’t ask how; I don’t know) called Nyx, who was the embodiment of night. Then Nyx, somehow all by herself, had a daughter named Hemera, who was Day. Those two never got along because they were as different as…well, you know. According to some stories, Chaos also created Eros, the god of procreation... in other words, mommy gods and daddy gods having lots of little baby gods. Other stories claim Eros was the son of Aphrodite. We’ll get to her later. I don’t know which version is true, but I do know Gaea and Ouranos started having kids—with very mixed results. First, they had a batch of twelve—six girls and six boys called the Titans. These kids looked human, but they were much taller and more powerful. You’d figure twelve kids would be enough for anybody, right? I mean, with a family that big, you’ve basically got your own reality TV show. Plus, once the Titans were born, things started to go sour with Ouranos and Gaea’s marriage. Ouranos spent a lot more time hanging out in the sky. He didn't visit. He didn't help with the kids. Gaea got resentful. The two of them started fighting. As the kids grew older, Ouranos would yell at them and basically act like a horrible dad. A few times, Gaea and Ouranos tried to patch things up. Gaea decided maybe if they had another set of kids, it would bring them closer…. I know, right? Bad idea. She gave birth to triplets. The problem: these new kids defined the word UGLY. They were as big and strong as Titans, except hulking and brutish and in desperate need of a body wax. Worst of all, each kid had a single eye in the middle of his forehead. Talk about a face only a mother could love. Well, Gaea loved these guys. She named them the Elder Cyclopes, and eventually they would spawn a whole race of other, lesser Cyclopes. But that was much later. When Ouranos saw the Cyclops triplets, he freaked. “These cannot be my kids! They don’t even look like me!” “They are your children, you deadbeat!” Gaea screamed back. “Don’t you dare leave me to raise them on my own!

In that distant beginning season, Sun Man's warm magic flowed over all the land. Whenever he raised his arms, it was day. whenever he lowered them, it was night. The Bee People and the Elephant People and the Tic People loved the rhythm of Sun Man's light. Their faces crinkled with pleasure in his heat. But inside the dreamtime, Sun Man grew old. His back grew stiff and his knee joints ached. He rose later and later each morning. He napped soon after breakfast and went to bed in the afternoon. "What's going on here?" complained Grandfather Mantis. "I'm not getting heat anymore." Grandfather Mantis sent the Bird People to find out. The Bird People returned, rumpled and solemn. Darkness was everywhere, even though it was supposed to be daytime. "Sun Man is getting old," they explained. "This shining all the time is getting too much for him." "Well, I'm old," snapped Grandfather Mantis. "Doesn't stop me." His wife raised her eyebrows but said nothing.

The history of black workers in the United States illustrates the point. As already noted, from the late nineteenth-century on through the middle of the twentieth century, the labor force participation rate of American blacks was slightly higher than that of American whites. In other words, blacks were just as employable at the wages they received as whites were at their very different wages. The minimum wage law changed that. Before federal minimum wage laws were instituted in the 1930s, the black unemployment rate was slightly lower than the white unemployment rate in 1930. But then followed the Davis-Bacon Act of 1931, the National Industrial Recovery Act of 1933 and the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938—all of which imposed government-mandated minimum wages, either on a particular sector or more broadly. The National Labor Relations Act of 1935, which promoted unionization, also tended to price black workers out of jobs, in addition to union rules that kept blacks from jobs by barring them from union membership. The National Industrial Recovery Act raised wage rates in the Southern textile industry by 70 percent in just five months and its impact nationwide was estimated to have cost blacks half a million jobs. While this Act was later declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court, the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 was upheld by the High Court and became the major force establishing a national minimum wage. As already noted, the inflation of the 1940s largely nullified the effect of the Fair Labor Standards Act, until it was amended in 1950 to raise minimum wages to a level that would have some actual effect on current wages. By 1954, black unemployment rates were double those of whites and have continued to be at that level or higher. Those particularly hard hit by the resulting unemployment have been black teenage males. Even though 1949—the year before a series of minimum wage escalations began—was a recession year, black teenage male unemployment that year was lower than it was to be at any time during the later boom years of the 1960s. The wide gap between the unemployment rates of black and white teenagers dates from the escalation of the minimum wage and the spread of its coverage in the 1950s. The usual explanations of high unemployment among black teenagers—inexperience, less education, lack of skills, racism—cannot explain their rising unemployment, since all these things were worse during the earlier period when black teenage unemployment was much lower. Taking the more normal year of 1948 as a basis for comparison, black male teenage unemployment then was less than half of what it would be at any time during the decade of the 1960s and less than one-third of what it would be in the 1970s. Unemployment among 16 and 17-year-old black males was no higher than among white males of the same age in 1948. It was only after a series of minimum wage escalations began that black male teenage unemployment not only skyrocketed but became more than double the unemployment rates among white male teenagers. In the early twenty-first century, the unemployment rate for black teenagers exceeded 30 percent. After the American economy turned down in the wake of the housing and financial crises, unemployment among black teenagers reached 40 percent.

And now he learned how men can consider other men as beasts and that the easiest way to get along with such men was to be a beast. A clean face, an open face, an eye raised to meet an eye—these drew attention and attention drawn brought punishment. Adam thought how a man doing an ugly or a brutal thing has hurt himself and must punish someone for the hurt. To be guarded at work by men with shotguns, to be shackled by the ankle at night to a chain, were simple matters of precaution, but the savage whippings for the least stir of will, for the smallest shred of dignity or resistance, these seemed to indicate that guards were afraid of prisoners, and Adam knew from his years in the army that a man afraid is a dangerous animal. And Adam, like anyone in the world, feared what whipping would do to his body and his spirit. He drew a curtain around himself. He removed expression from his face, light from his eyes, and silenced his speech. Later he was not so much astonished that it had happened to him but that he had been able to take it and with a minimum of pain. It was much more horrible afterward than when it was happening. It is a triumph of self-control to see a man whipped until the muscles of his back show white and glistening through the cuts and to give no sign of pity or anger or interest. And Adam learned this.

Although it might seem paradoxical, growing up in a family of liberal-minded atheists, committed but never militant, tends to have devastating consequences. Being raised without a rigid backdrop of religious, political, or spiritual beliefs makes it hard to have a real crises later in life. There is no way forward if your point of departure is the comfortable passivity of someone who has been a self-professed agnostic since the age of twelve, without ever having considered those important - one might say grave - matters, such as God, death, love, failure, or fear. For a precocious agnostic, the virtues offered by skepticism become terrifying hands that strangle and suffocate the already rare capacity of an individual to question things. Conversely, intelligent people who grow up thinking one thing and, on reaching a certain age, realize that everything they believe is open to doubt - stark, brutal doubt - can truly enjoy a profound crises that, in the worst cases, leads them to know themselves a little better.

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.

The more improbable the situation and the greater the demands made on [the climber], the more sweetly the blood flows later in release from all that tension. The possibility of danger serves merely to sharpen his awareness and control. And perhaps this is the rationale of all risky sports: You deliberately raise the ante of effort and concentration in order, as it were, to clear your mind of trivialities. It’s a small scale model for living, but with a difference: Unlike your routine life, where mistakes can usually be recouped and some kind of compromise patched up, your actions, for however brief a period, are deadly serious. A. Alvarez            The Savage God:   A Study of Suicide A

Be bigger presence at work. Race up ladder (joyfully, w/smile on face), get raise. Get in best shape of life, start dressing nicer. Learn guitar? Make point of noticing beauty of world? Why not educate self re. birds, flowers, trees, constellations, become true citizen of natural world, walk around neighborhood w/kids, patiently teaching kids names of birds, flowers, etc. etc.? Why not take kids to Europe? Kids have never been. Have never, in Alps, had hot chocolate in mountain café, served by kindly white- haired innkeeper, who finds them so sophisticated/friendly relative to usual snotty/rich American kids (who always ignore his pretty but crippled daughter w/braids) that he shows them secret hiking path to incredible glade, kids frolic in glade, sit with crippled pretty girl on grass, later say it was most beautiful day of their lives, keep in touch with crippled girl via email, we arrange surgery here for her, surgeon so touched he agrees to do surgery for free, she is on front page of our paper, we are on front page of their paper in Alps? Ha ha.

I sat down and read out loud a statement on the box, a message from the Celestial realm. If I had my child to raise all over again, I'd finger paint more, and point the finger less. I'd do less correcting, and more connecting. I'd take my eyes off my watch, and watch with my eyes. I would care to know less, and know to care more. I'd take more hikes and fly more kites. I'd stop playing serious, and seriously play. I would run through more fields and gaze at more stars. I'd do more hugging, and less tugging. I would be firm less often, and affirm much more. I'd build self-esteem first, and the house later. I'd teach less about the love of power, And more about the power of love. -Diane Loomans, Full Esteem Ahead

I was raised to believe that God has a plan for everyone and that seemingly random twists of fate are all a part of His plan. My mother—a small woman with auburn hair and a sense of optimism that ran as deep as the cosmos—told me that everything in life happened for a purpose. She said all things were part of God’s Plan, even the most disheartening setbacks, and in the end, everything worked out for the best. If something went wrong, she said, you didn’t let it get you down: You stepped away from it, stepped over it, and moved on. Later on, she added, something good will happen and you’ll find yourself thinking—“If I hadn’t had that problem back then, then this better thing that did happen wouldn’t have happened to me.

When the price of cattle, for example, rises so high that it is as profitable to cultivate land in order to raise food for them as in order to raise food for man, it cannot well go higher. If it did, more corn land would soon be turned into pasture. The extension of tillage, by diminishing the quantity of wild pasture, diminishes the quantity of butcher's meat which the country naturally produces without labour or cultivation, and by increasing the number of those who have either corn, or, what comes to the same thing, the price of corn, to give in exchange for it, increases the demand. The price of butcher's meat, therefore, and consequently of cattle, must gradually rise till it gets so high that it becomes as profitable to employ the most fertile and best cultivated lands in raising food for them as in raising corn. But it must always be late in the progress of improvement before tillage can be so far extended as to raise the price of cattle to this height; and till it has got to this height, if the country is advancing at all, their price must be continually rising. There are, perhaps, some parts of Europe in which the price of cattle has not yet got to this height. It had not got to this height in any part of Scotland before the union. Had the Scotch cattle been always confined to the market of Scotland, in a country in which the quantity of land which can be applied to no other purpose but the feeding of cattle is so great in proportion to what can be applied to other purposes, it is scarce possible, perhaps, that their price could ever have risen so high as to render it profitable to cultivate land for the sake of feeding them. In England, the price of cattle, it has already been observed, seems, in the neighbourhood of London, to have got to this height about the beginning of the last century; but it was much later probably before it got to it through the greater part of the remoter counties; in some of which, perhaps, it may scarce yet have got to it. Of all the different substances, however, which compose this second sort of rude produce, cattle is, perhaps, that of which the price, in the progress of improvement, first rises to this height.

Bet you didn't know that when you agreed to be 'betrothed' to me, huh? Husband-eviscerating apparently runs in my family." Still no reaction, and I felt shame curl in my belly. "Of course, you also didn't know you were getting a damon bride," I added in a softer tone. Very few people knew what my dad really was. I'd always assumed Cal had found out the same night I did. That's why I was really surprised when he raised his head and said, "I knew." "What?" "I knew what you were then, Sophie. Your dad told me before the betrothal. And he told me about your grandmother, and what happened to your grandfather." I shook my head. "Then,why?" Cal took his time before answering. "For one thing, I like your dad. He's done good things for Prodigium. And it-" He broke off with a long exhale. "It felt like some kind of honor, you know? Being asked to be the head of the Council's son-in-law. Plus, your dad, he,uh,told me a lot about you." My voice was barely above a whisper. "What did he say?" "That you were smart, and strong. Funny. That you had trouble using your powers, but you were always trying to use them to help people." He shrugged. "I thought we'd be a good match." The vast dining room suddenly felt very small, like it consisted only of this table and me and Cal. "Look, Sophie," he started to say. But before he could finish, Jenna walked in. "I am so glad I still get to eat human food, because that bacon smells insane..." she said, and then froze. "Oh!" she exclaimed, her ealier bounciness draining out of her. "Sorry! I didn't mean to interrupt...whatever. I c-can...leave?" She gestured with her thumb over her shoulder. "And then come back,uh, later?" But the moment was broken. Cal sat back, and I pushed my hair behind my ears. "No,it's fine," I said quickly, concentrating harder on my eggs than I had on my SAT.

In order to understand how engineers endeavor to insure against such structural, mechanical, and systems failures, and thereby also to understand how mistakes can be made and accidents with far-reaching consequences can occur, it is necessary to understand, at least partly, the nature of engineering design. It is the process of design, in which diverse parts of the 'given-world' of the scientist and the 'made-world' of the engineer are reformed and assembled into something the likes of which Nature had not dreamed, that divorces engineering from science and marries it to art. While the practice of engineering may involve as much technical experience as the poet brings to the blank page, the painter to the empty canvas, or the composer to the silent keyboard, the understanding and appreciation of the process and products of engineering are no less accessible than a poem, a painting, or a piece of music. Indeed, just as we all have experienced the rudiments of artistic creativity in the childhood masterpieces our parents were so proud of, so we have all experienced the essence of structual engineering in our learning to balance first our bodies and later our blocks in ever more ambitious positions. We have learned to endure the most boring of cocktail parties without the social accident of either our bodies or our glasses succumbing to the force of gravity, having long ago learned to crawl, sit up, and toddle among our tottering towers of blocks. If we could remember those early efforts of ours to raise ourselves up among the towers of legs of our parents and their friends, then we can begin to appreciate the task and the achievements of engineers, whether they be called builders in Babylon or scientists in Los Alamos. For all of their efforts are to one end: to make something stand that has not stood before, to reassemble Nature into something new, and above all to obviate failure in the effort.

It was night. There was a drizzle, so Emily's black Japanese umbrella was up. The two were close beneath it, walking in long strides, beautiful, sinister-looking lovers, narrow squared shoulders in dark coats. A tall pickup truck sped by and a was a phlem struck the edge of the pavement near where they were walking. Emily raised a finger, cocked her thumb, and said, "Bang." "Got the left rear tire." said Anthony. "The truck rolled," she added, "and burst into flames." "He's still alive," said Anthony, "climbing out of the broken rear window, his hair and clothes ablaze, screaming for help." "Punky boys come and piss on him," said Emily. The discussion was very quiet, very earnest. "They put out the fire from his burning body," said Anthony, "but he dies later in the burn ward." "His family is relieved and happy," said Emily with stunning finality. Twenty-four hours later the spitting driver dies on a suburban highway near his home, his pickup spinning out of control on black ice, the vehicle exploding into flame. Anthony and Emily never know about it, never guess a connection to their curse, having never thought of him a second time.

This raises the question, was Brian Cohen divine? Let’s take a look at his miracles. In Monty Python’s Life of Brian, each “miracle” Brian performs leads to greater conviction on the part of his followers that his every utterance is Divinely sanctioned. His first miracle is to be “taken up” into heaven, only to be spotted in full sprint moments later. For his next miracle, he causes a juniper bush to bring forth juniper berries. Later he miraculously restores the power of speech to Simon, a hermit of eighteen years (by landing on his foot, that is). As evidence of Brian’s divinity mounts, his words are received by the devoted throng as Divine revelation. His exasperated plea for the crowd to “fuck off ” is treated as an invitation to ritual: “How shall we fuck off, O Lord?

By the time James had dressed and made his way down to the Great Hal for breakfast, it was nearly ten o’clock. Less than a dozen students could be seen moving disconsolately among the detritus of the morning’s earlier rush. At the far corner of the Slytherin table, Zane sat hunched and squinting under a beam of sunlight. Across from him was Ralph, who saw James enter and waved him over. As James made his way across the Hal , four or five house-elves, each wearing large linen napkins with the Hogwarts crest embroidered on them, circled the tables, meandering in what at first appeared to be random paths. Occasional y, one of them would duck beneath the surface of a table and then reappear a moment later, tossing a stray fork or half a biscuit casual y onto the mess of the table. As James passed one of the elves, it straightened, raised its spindly arms, and then brought them swiftly down. The contents on the table in front of him swirled together as if caught in a miniature cyclone. With a great clattering of dishes and silverware, the corners of the tablecloth shot upwards and twisted around the pile of breakfast debris, creating a huge clanking bag floating improbably over the polished wood table. The house-elf leaped from floor to bench to tabletop, and then jumped, turning in midair and landing lightly on top of the bag. It grasped the twisted top of the bag, using the knot as if it were a set of reins, and turned the bag, driving it bobbingly toward the gigantic service doors in the side of the Hal . James ducked as the bag swooped over his head.

During the Pequot War, Connecticut and Massachusetts colonial officials had offered bounties initially for the heads of murdered Indigenous people and later for only their scalps, which were more portable in large numbers. But scalp hunting became routine only in the mid-1670s, following an incident on the northern frontier of the Massachusetts colony. The practice began in earnest in 1697 when settler Hannah Dustin, having murdered ten of her Abenaki captors in a nighttime escape, presented their ten scalps to the Massachusetts General Assembly and was rewarded with bounties for two men, two women, and six children.24 Dustin soon became a folk hero among New England settlers. Scalp hunting became a lucrative commercial practice. The settler authorities had hit upon a way to encourage settlers to take off on their own or with a few others to gather scalps, at random, for the reward money. “In the process,” John Grenier points out, “they established the large-scale privatization of war within American frontier communities.”25 Although the colonial government in time raised the bounty for adult male scalps, lowered that for adult females, and eliminated that for Indigenous children under ten, the age and gender of victims were not easily distinguished by their scalps nor checked carefully. What is more, the scalp hunter could take the children captive and sell them into slavery. These practices erased any remaining distinction between Indigenous combatants and noncombatants and introduced a market for Indigenous slaves. Bounties for Indigenous scalps were honored even in absence of war. Scalps and Indigenous children became means of exchange, currency, and this development may even have created a black market. Scalp hunting was not only a profitable privatized enterprise but also a means to eradicate or subjugate the Indigenous population of the Anglo-American Atlantic seaboard.26 The settlers gave a name to the mutilated and bloody corpses they left in the wake of scalp-hunts: redskins.

And when you are praying, do not use meaningless repetition as the Gentiles do, for they suppose that they will be heard for their many words.” Matthew 6:7   Reincarnation Paul states, in 1 Corinthians 15, that to be a Christian one must believe in the physical resurrection of the body. This is impossible if you believe in reincarnation.   “But if there is no resurrection of the dead, not even Christ has been raised; and if Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is vain, your faith also is vain.”     1 Corinthians 15:13-14   Celibacy, Vegetarianism, & Jewish Festivals “But the Spirit explicitly says that in later times some will fall away from the faith, paying attention to deceitful spirits and doctrines of demons… men who forbid marriage and advocate abstaining from foods…” 1 Timothy 4:1,3

Suddenly, I missed Jenna so much that it was almost a physical ache. I wanted to hold her hand, and hear her say something that would make this whole situation funny instead of incredibly screwed up. Archer would’ve been nice, too. He probably would’ve raised an eyebrow in that annoying/hot way he had, and made a dirty joke about Elodie possessing me. Or Cal. He wouldn’t say anything, but just his presence would make me feel better. And Dad- “Sophie,” Mom said, shaking me out of my reverie. “I don’t…I don’t even know how to start explaining all of this to you.” She looked at me, her eyes red. “I meant to, so many times, but everything was always so…complicated. Do you hate me?” I took a deep breath. “Of course not. I mean, I’m not thrilled. And I totally reserve the right to angst over all this later. But honestly, Mom? Right now, I’m so happy to see you that I wouldn’t care if you’re secretly a ninja sent from the future to destroy kittens and rainbows.” She chuckled, a choked and watery sound. “I missed you so much, Soph.” We hugged, my face against her collarbone. “I want the whole story, though,” I said, my words muffled. “All of it on the table.” She nodded. “Absolutely. After we talk to Aislinn.” Pulling back, I grimaced. “So how exactly are you related to her? Are you guys like, cousins?” “We’re sisters.” I stared at her. “Wait. So you’re like, a Brannick Brannick? But you don’t even have red hair.” Mom got off the bed, twisting her ponytail into a bun. “It’s called dye, Soph. Now, come on. Aislinn is already in a mood.” “Yeah, picked up on that,” I muttered, shoving the covers off and standing up

He gave the briefest of glances at Lissie, barely acknowledging her presence as he gently eased Violet onto the seat. For good measure, and Violet was sure it was premeditated, he gave her a long, sweet kiss before closing her door. Violet was surprised at how quickly she responded to his touch, even when she knew it was more for Lissie’s benefit than for hers. But she had to suppress a triumphant smile when she stole a quick look at the other girl’s disgusted expression before Jay put the car in drive and left Lissie standing there, gawking after them. “Sorry about that,” he said apologetically as he concentrated on maneuvering through the busy parking lot. “I’ve been so worried about strange men following you around that I forgot how dangerous Homecoming Queens can be.” Violet smiled at him. “That’s okay. That kiss was a nice touch, by the way. Sheer genius.” “Yeah, that one just came to me,” he chuckled. “Maybe you can show it to me again . . . later,” she said playfully. He reached over and gave her leg a squeeze, his eyes never leaving the road. “I like the way you think, my friend.” “Is that how it is now, we’re back to just friends?” Violet asked, raising her eyebrows at him challengingly. “I’ll remember to keep that in mind next time we’re ‘doing homework.’” He was suddenly serious, his tone determined. “We’ll never be just friends again, not if I have anything to do with it.” And then with conviction he added, “I love you too much to go back now, Vi.” It was still strange to hear him saying things like that. The words sounded so foreign to her ears, but her heart responded, as if it had been waiting a lifetime to hear them, by beating erratically.

In the eyes of his contemporaries, Caesar was cast in the mold of a Catilina: bright, radical and scandalous. He had already acquired an exotic reputation. His adventures during his teens when he had been on the run from Sulla had been only the start. In his twenties, like many young upper-class Romans, he had gone soldiering in Asia and won the Civic Crown—an award analogous to the Medal of Honor—for conspicuous gallantry in action. He may also have had a brief love affair with the King of Bithynia, but it did not inhibit his vigorous sex life among the wives of his contemporaries back in Rome. A Senator once referred to him in a speech as “every woman’s man and every man’s woman” and for the rest of Caesar’s career he had to endure much heavy-handed jocularity about the incident. A few years later Caesar was captured by pirates, who were endemic in the Mediterranean; while waiting for his ransom to arrive he got onto friendly terms with his captors, but warned them that he would return and have them crucified. They thought he was joking. They were not the last to underestimate Caesar’s determination and regret it. AS soon as he was free, he raised a squadron on his own initiative, tracked down the pirates and executed them, just as he had promised.

with. Dandelion Wine is nothing if it is not the boy-hid-in-the-man playing in the fields of the Lord on the green grass of other Augusts in the midst of starting to grow up, grow old, and sense darkness waiting under the trees to seed the blood. I was amused and somewhat astonished at a critic a few years back who wrote an article analyzing Dandelion Wine plus the more realistic works of Sinclair Lewis, wondering how I could have been born and raised in Waukegan, which I renamed Green Town for my novel, and not noticed how ugly the harbor was and how depressing the coal docks and railyards down below the town. But, of course, I had noticed them and, genetic enchanter that I was, was fascinated by their beauty. Trains and boxcars and the smell of coal and fire are not ugly to children. Ugliness is a concept that we happen on later and become self-conscious about.

What, in fact, do we know about the peak experience? Well, to begin with, we know one thing that puts us several steps ahead of the most penetrating thinkers of the 19th century: that P.E’.s are not a matter of pure good luck or grace. They don’t come and go as they please, leaving ‘this dim, vast vale of tears vacant and desolate’. Like rainbows, peak experiences are governed by definite laws. They are ‘intentional’. And that statement suddenly gains in significance when we remember Thorndike’s discovery that the effect of positive stimuli is far more powerful and far reaching than that of negative stimuli. His first statement of the law of effect was simply that situations that elicit positive reactions tend to produce continuance of positive reactions, while situations that elicit negative or avoidance reactions tend to produce continuance of these. It was later that he came to realise that positive reactions build-up stronger response patterns than negative ones. In other words, positive responses are more intentional than negative ones. Which is another way of saying that if you want a positive reaction (or a peak experience), your best chance of obtaining it is by putting yourself into an active, purposive frame of mind. The opposite of the peak experience—sudden depression, fatigue, even the ‘panic fear’ that swept William James to the edge of insanity—is the outcome of passivity. This cannot be overemphasised. Depression—or neurosis—need not have a positive cause (childhood traumas, etc.). It is the natural outcome of negative passivity. The peak experience is the outcome of an intentional attitude. ‘Feedback’ from my activities depends upon the degree of deliberately calculated purpose I put into them, not upon some occult law connected with the activity itself. . . . A healthy, perfectly adjusted human being would slide smoothly into gear, perform whatever has to be done with perfect economy of energy, then recover lost energy in a state of serene relaxation. Most human beings are not healthy or well adjusted. Their activity is full of strain and nervous tension, and their relaxation hovers on the edge of anxiety. They fail to put enough effort—enough seriousness—into their activity, and they fail to withdraw enough effort from their relaxation. Moods of serenity descend upon them—if at all—by chance; perhaps after some crisis, or in peaceful surroundings with pleasant associations. Their main trouble is that they have no idea of what can be achieved by a certain kind of mental effort. And this is perhaps the place to point out that although mystical contemplation is as old as religion, it is only in the past two centuries that it has played a major role in European culture. It was the group of writers we call the romantics who discovered that a man contemplating a waterfall or a mountain peak can suddenly feel ‘godlike’, as if the soul had expanded. The world is seen from a ‘bird’s eye view’ instead of a worm’s eye view: there is a sense of power, detachment, serenity. The romantics—Blake, Wordsworth, Byron, Goethe, Schiller—were the first to raise the question of whether there are ‘higher ceilings of human nature’. But, lacking the concepts for analysing the problem, they left it unsolved. And the romantics in general accepted that the ‘godlike moments’ cannot be sustained, and certainly cannot be re-created at will. This produced the climate of despair that has continued down to our own time. (The major writers of the 20th century—Proust, Eliot, Joyce, Musil—are direct descendants of the romantics, as Edmund Wilson pointed out in Axel’s Castle.) Thus it can be seen that Maslow’s importance extends far beyond the field of psychology. William James had asserted that ‘mystical’ experiences are not mystical at all, but are a perfectly normal potential of human consciousness; but there is no mention of such experiences in Principles of Psychology (or only in passing).

When he was in college, a famous poet made a useful distinction for him. He had drunk enough in the poet's company to be compelled to describe to him a poem he was thinking of. It would be a monologue of sorts, the self-contemplation of a student on a summer afternoon who is reading Euphues. The poem itself would be a subtle series of euphuisms, translating the heat, the day, the student's concerns, into symmetrical posies; translating even his contempt and boredom with that famously foolish book into a euphuism. The poet nodded his big head in a sympathetic, rhythmic way as this was explained to him, then told him that there are two kinds of poems. There is the kind you write; there is the kind you talk about in bars. Both kinds have value and both are poems; but it's fatal to confuse them. In the Seventh Saint, many years later, it had struck him that the difference between himself and Shakespeare wasn't talent - not especially - but nerve. The capacity not to be frightened by his largest and most potent conceptions, to simply (simply!) sit down and execute them. The dreadful lassitude he felt when something really large and multifarious came suddenly clear to him, something Lear-sized yet sonnet-precise. If only they didn't rush on him whole, all at once, massive and perfect, leaving him frightened and nerveless at the prospect of articulating them word by scene by page. He would try to believe they were of the kind told in bars, not the kind to be written, though there was no way to be sure of this except to attempt the writing; he would raise a finger (the novelist in the bar mirror raising the obverse finger) and push forward his change. Wailing like a neglected ghost, the vast notion would beat its wings into the void. Sometimes it would pursue him for days and years as he fled desperately. Sometimes he would turn to face it, and do battle. Once, twice, he had been victorious, objectively at least. Out of an immense concatenation of feeling, thought, word, transcendent meaning had come his first novel, a slim, pageant of a book, tombstone for his slain conception. A publisher had taken it, gingerly; had slipped it quietly into the deep pool of spring releases, where it sank without a ripple, and where he supposes it lies still, its calm Bodoni gone long since green. A second, just as slim but more lurid, nightmarish even, about imaginary murders in an imaginary exotic locale, had been sold for a movie, though the movie had never been made. He felt guilt for the producer's failure (which perhaps the producer didn't feel), having known the book could not be filmed; he had made a large sum, enough to finance years of this kind of thing, on a book whose first printing was largely returned.

​In 2012, George Zimmerman left his home to follow and accost his neighbor, Trayvon Martin, who was walking through their gated community in Sanford, Florida. Zimmerman, who brought a gun to the encounter, shot and killed Martin because, as he said in his trial, he feared for his life. Zimmerman was found not guilty by a jury. In 2015, less than a mile from my home, four white men wearing ski masks appeared at a peaceful event protesting the recent killing of Jamar Clark by a white policeman. At least one of the four men, Allen Scarsella, carried a gun, which he allegedly described in a text message as “specially designed by Browning to kill brown people.” Protestors, most of whom were African American, noticed the four men in masks, surrounded them, and asked why they were there. They also demanded that the men remove their masks. Scarsella then drew his gun and shot five protestors. At his trial, Scarsella’s public defender explained that Scarsella fired the shots because he was “scared out of his mind.” These and other similar incidents raise some questions. First, under what circumstances is it legitimate to deliberately precipitate a conflict, shoot one or more people, and be considered guiltless because you were scared? Second, if “I feared for my life” or “I was scared out of my mind” becomes a legitimate defense, then can anyone who fears dark skin guiltlessly shoot any Black body that comes near? What about any Black body he or she seeks out, accosts, and shoots? Does your reflexive, lizard-brain fear of my dark body trump my right to exist? A Minnesota jury provided one answer to these questions in February of 2017: It found Scarsella guilty on all counts. He was given a fifteen-year prison sentence. A different Minnesota jury provided the opposite answer four months later: it found Jeronimo Yanez not guilty.

Aided by the young George Pullman, who would later make a fortune building railway cars, Chesbrough launched one of the most ambitious engineering projects of the nineteenth century. Building by building, Chicago was lifted by an army of men with jackscrews. As the jackscrews raised the buildings inch by inch, workmen would dig holes under the building foundations and install thick timbers to support them, while masons scrambled to build a new footing under the structure. Sewer lines were inserted beneath buildings with main lines running down the center of streets, which were then buried in landfill that had been dredged out of the Chicago River, raising the entire city almost ten feet on average. Tourists walking around downtown Chicago today regularly marvel at the engineering prowess on display in the city’s spectacular skyline; what they don’t realize is that the ground beneath their feet is also the product of brilliant engineering.

Why science? Many people, with the best intentions, like to give parents advice about raising a child, including parents, non-parents, health visitors, friends, celebrities, bloggers and next-door neighbours. Unfortunately, much of this advice can be completely wrong or based on archaic ideas and practices that have since been disproved or debunked. Some of this advice can even be damaging. In addition, some parents say that they advocate using ‘common sense’ or ‘intuition’ in raising their children, but what do those things mean? How is intuition classified, when it differs so greatly from one person to another? Some people do the ‘common sense’ thing only to find out it was wrong later in life, which is why it is altogether better to be guided by the latest scientific research. In order to learn how to filter the good advice from the bad, I believe that new parents need science-based evidence in their corner. You’ll find it in this book.

I was amused and somewhat astonished at a critic a few years back who wrote an article analyzing Dandelion Wine plus the more realistic works of Sinclair Lewis, wondering how I could have been born and raised in Waukegan, which I renamed Green Town for my novel, and not noticed how ugly the harbor was and how depressing the coal docks and railyards down below the town. But, of course, I had noticed them and, genetic enchanter that I was, was fascinated by their beauty. Trains and boxcars and the smell of coal and fire are not ugly to children. Ugliness is a concept that we happen on later and become selfconscious about. Counting boxcars is a prime activity of boys. Their elders fret and fume and jeer at the train that holds them up, but boys happily count and cry the names of the cars as they pass from far places. And again, that supposedly ugly railyard was where carnivals and circuses arrived with elephants who washed the brick pavements with mighty steaming acid waters at five in the dark morning. As for the coal from the docks, I went down in my basement every autumn to await the arrival of the truck and its metal chute, which clanged down and released a ton of beauteous meteors that fell out of far space into my cellar and threatened to bury me beneath dark treasures. In other words, if your boy is a poet, horse manure can only mean flowers to him; which is, of course, what horse manure has always been about.

TYMPANI: Well, things happen fast down here. You gotta' be prepared. One day you're raising chickens, the next day you're buying up half of Mexico. RABBIT: I don't want half of Mexico! TYMPANI: Then you'll want something else. Sooner or later you'll want something else, and they'll find out what it is. RABBIT: What do you mean? TYMPANI: Some little fantasy. Some dream. Some tiny little delusion that you've got tucked away. They'll pry it out of you. RABBIT: What do they care? TYMPANI: Because then they've got you. They'll feed off your hunger. They'll keep you jumping at carrots. And you'll keep jumping. And you'll keep thinking you're not jumping all the time you're jumping. RABBIT: Is that what's happened to you? TYMPANI: What does it look like? RABBIT: Well, how can you know it and still keep doing it? TYMPANI: What else is there to do? RABBIT: Are you crazy? They've got you kidnapped in here and you like it. TYMPANI: So will you. You'd be surprised how fast it happens.

Torrens kicked at the door until it was finally opened. The farm couple and three youngsters had been eating breakfast in the common room. The yard dog would have bounded in had not Torrens kicked the door shut. 'I want a bed. Quilts. A hot drink. I am a doctor. This woman is my patient.' The farm couple was terrified. The look on the face of Torrens cut short any questions. They did as he ordered. One of the children ran to fetch his medical kit from the cart. The woman motioned for Torrens to set Caroline on a straw pallet. The farmer kept his distance, but his wife, shyly, fearffully, ventured closer. She glanced at Torrens, as if requesting his permission to help. Between them, they made Caroline as comfortable as they could. Torrens knelt by the pallet. Caroline reached for his hand. 'Leave while you can. Do not burden yourself with me.' 'A light burden.' 'I wish you to find Augusta.' 'You have my promise.' 'Take this.' Caroline had slipped off a gold ring set with diamonds. 'It was a wedding gift from the king. It has not left my finger since then. I give it to you now - ' Torrens protested, but Caroline went on - 'not as a keepsake. You and I have better keepsakes in our hearts. I wish you to sell it. You will need money, perhaps even more than this will bring. But you must stary alive and find my child. Help her as you have always helped me.' 'We shall talk of this later, when you are better. We shall find her together.' 'You have never lied to me.' Caroline's smile was suddenly flirtacious. 'Sir, if you begin now, I shall take you to task for it.' Her face seemed to grow youthful and earnest for an instant. Torrens realized she held life only by strength of will. 'I am thinking of the Juliana gardens,' Caroline said. 'How lovely they were. The orangerie. And you, my loving friend. Tell me, could we have been happy?' 'Yes.' Torrens raised her hand to his lips. 'Yes. I am certain of it.' Caroline did not speak again. Torrens stayed at her side. She died later that morning. Torrens buried her in the shelter of a hedgerow at the far edge of the field. The farmer offered to help, but Torrens refused and dug the grave himself. Later, in the farmhouse, he slept heavily for the first time since his escape. Mercifully, he did not dream. Next day, he gave the farmer his clothing in trade for peasant garb. He hitched up the cart and drove back to the road. He could have pressed on, lost himself beyond search in the provinces. He was free. Except for his promise. He turned the cart toward Marianstat.

Once upon a time there is nothing but darkness. You stumble around blindly, so close to the edge that you are sure you'll tumble over it. And if you are to be honest, you must admit that you are so low already you don't necessarily think that would be a bad thing. Then one day you meet someone. He finds you kneeling right at the precipice and instead of telling you to get back up he kneels next to you. He tries to see what you are seeing. He doesn't ask anything of you or beg you to snap out of it or remind you there are people who need you. He just waits until you turn and squint and think to yourself, "oh yes, I remember, this is what light looks like." You don't know how it happens, but you become friends. You find yourself looking in the parking lot to see if his car is there. You see something on tv or read it in a book and think, "I must remember to tell him." You learn how he takes his coffee and what his favorite color is, not by asking but by observation. Then you realize your day speeds up when you see him. The hair stands up on the backs of your forearms when his shoulder bumps yours in the elevator. His presence is so filling the absence of him aches. You begin to reconfigure the puzzle of your life with him in it. You don't want to spend time without him if you can help it. You introduce him to family. You suffer their elbow gabs and raised eyebrows, because later it gives you two something to laugh about. You wish you could introduce him to the family members who aren't here anymore. They would have loved him. You see him around children and you think one day.

The core components of high EQ are the following: The ability to self-soothe. The key to managing emotion is to allow, acknowledge, and tolerate our intense emotions so that they evaporate, without getting stuck in them or taking actions we’ll later regret. Self-soothing is what enables us to manage our anxiety and upsets, which in turn allows us to work through emotionally charged issues in a constructive way. Emotional self-awareness and acceptance. If we don’t understand the emotions washing over us, they scare us, and we can’t tolerate them. We repress our hurt, fear, or disappointment. Those emotions, no longer regulated by our conscious mind, have a way of popping out unmodulated, as when a preschooler socks his sister or we (as adults) lose our tempers or eat a pint of ice cream. By contrast, children raised in a home in which there are limits on behavior but not on feelings grow up understanding that all emotions are acceptable, a part of being human. That understanding gives them more control over their emotions. Impulse control. Emotional intelligence liberates us from knee-jerk emotional reactions. A child (or adult) with high EQ will act rather than react and problem-solve rather than blame. It doesn’t mean you never get angry or anxious, only that you don’t fly off the handle. As a result, our lives and relationships work better. Empathy. Empathy is the ability to see and feel something from the other’s point of view. When you’re adept at understanding the mental and emotional states of other people, you resolve differences constructively and connect deeply with others. Naturally, empathy makes us better communicators.

Sheepwalking I define “sheepwalking” as the outcome of hiring people who have been raised to be obedient and giving them a brain-dead job and enough fear to keep them in line. You’ve probably encountered someone who is sheepwalking. The TSA “screener” who forces a mom to drink from a bottle of breast milk because any other action is not in the manual. A “customer service” rep who will happily reread a company policy six or seven times but never stop to actually consider what the policy means. A marketing executive who buys millions of dollars’ worth of TV time even though she knows it’s not working—she does it because her boss told her to. It’s ironic but not surprising that in our age of increased reliance on new ideas, rapid change, and innovation, sheepwalking is actually on the rise. That’s because we can no longer rely on machines to do the brain-dead stuff. We’ve mechanized what we could mechanize. What’s left is to cost-reduce the manual labor that must be done by a human. So we write manuals and race to the bottom in our search for the cheapest possible labor. And it’s not surprising that when we go to hire that labor, we search for people who have already been trained to be sheepish. Training a student to be sheepish is a lot easier than the alternative. Teaching to the test, ensuring compliant behavior, and using fear as a motivator are the easiest and fastest ways to get a kid through school. So why does it surprise us that we graduate so many sheep? And graduate school? Since the stakes are higher (opportunity cost, tuition, and the job market), students fall back on what they’ve been taught. To be sheep. Well-educated, of course, but compliant nonetheless. And many organizations go out of their way to hire people that color inside the lines, that demonstrate consistency and compliance. And then they give these people jobs where they are managed via fear. Which leads to sheepwalking. (“I might get fired!”) The fault doesn’t lie with the employee, at least not at first. And of course, the pain is often shouldered by both the employee and the customer. Is it less efficient to pursue the alternative? What happens when you build an organization like W. L. Gore and Associates (makers of Gore-Tex) or the Acumen Fund? At first, it seems crazy. There’s too much overhead, there are too many cats to herd, there is too little predictability, and there is way too much noise. Then, over and over, we see something happen. When you hire amazing people and give them freedom, they do amazing stuff. And the sheepwalkers and their bosses just watch and shake their heads, certain that this is just an exception, and that it is way too risky for their industry or their customer base. I was at a Google conference last month, and I spent some time in a room filled with (pretty newly minted) Google sales reps. I talked to a few of them for a while about the state of the industry. And it broke my heart to discover that they were sheepwalking. Just like the receptionist at a company I visited a week later. She acknowledged that the front office is very slow, and that she just sits there, reading romance novels and waiting. And she’s been doing it for two years. Just like the MBA student I met yesterday who is taking a job at a major packaged-goods company…because they offered her a great salary and promised her a well-known brand. She’s going to stay “for just ten years, then have a baby and leave and start my own gig.…” She’ll get really good at running coupons in the Sunday paper, but not particularly good at solving new problems. What a waste. Step one is to give the problem a name. Done. Step two is for anyone who sees themselves in this mirror to realize that you can always stop. You can always claim the career you deserve merely by refusing to walk down the same path as everyone else just because everyone else is already doing it.

It’s about to rain forks and knives,” Winterborne reported, water drops glittering on his hair and the shoulders of his coat. He reached for a glass of champagne from a silver tray on the table, and raised it in Tom’s direction. “Good luck it is, for the wedding day.” “Why is that, exactly?” Tom asked, disgruntled. “A wet knot is harder to untie,” Winterborne said. “The marriage bond will be tight and long lasting.” Ethan Ransom volunteered, “Mam always said rain on a wedding day washed away the sadness of the past.” “Not only are superstitions irrational,” Tom said, “they’re inconvenient. If you believe in one, you have to believe them all, which necessitates a thousand pointless rituals.” Not being allowed to see the bride before the ceremony, for example. He hadn’t had so much as a glimpse of Cassandra that morning, and he was chafing to find out how she was feeling, if she’d slept well, if there was something she needed. West came into the room with his arms full of folded umbrellas. Justin, dressed in a little velveteen suit, was at his heels. “Aren’t you supposed to be upstairs in the nursery with your little brother?” St. Vincent asked his five-year-old nephew. “Dad needed my help,” Justin said self-importantly, bringing an umbrella to him. “We’re about to have a soaker,” West said briskly. “We’ll have to take everyone out to the chapel as soon as possible, before the ground turns to mud. Don’t open one of these indoors: It’s bad luck.” “I didn’t think you were superstitious,” Tom protested. “You believe in science.” West grinned at him. “I’m a farmer, Severin. When it comes to superstitions, farmers lead the pack. Incidentally, the locals say rain on the wedding day means fertility.” Devon commented dryly, “To a Hampshireman, nearly everything is a sign of fertility. It’s a preoccupation around here.” “What’s fertility?” Justin asked. In the sudden silence, all gazes went to West, who asked defensively, “Why is everyone looking at me?” “As Justin’s new father,” St. Vincent replied, making no effort to hide his enjoyment, “that question is in your province.” West looked down into Justin’s expectant face. “Let’s ask your mother later,” he suggested. The child looked mildly concerned. “Don’t you know, Dad?

Stop provoking him,” Ava said. “I can’t always save you.” “I’m not provoking him. It’s a compliment. Your man can get anything done.” When Ava turned away, Jules leaned in and whispered, “He’s totally whipped. Watch.” She raised her voice to a panicked level. “Oh my God! Ava, are you bleeding?” Alex’s head snapped up. Less than five seconds later, he ended his call and crossed the room to a confused-looking Ava, whose hand froze halfway to the scones on the table. “I’m fine,” Ava said as Alex searched her for injuries. She glared at Jules. “What did I just say?” “I can’t help it.” Jules’s eyes sparkled with mischief. “It’s so much fun. It’s like playing with a windup toy.” “Until the toy comes alive and kills you,” Stella murmured loud enough for everyone to hear. Alex stared at Jules with displeasure scrawled all over his face. “Pray you and Ava stay friends forever,” Alex said, icy enough to elicit a rash of goosebumps on my arms. Jules didn’t appear fazed by the implied threat. “First of all, Ava and I will be friends forever. Second of all, bring it on, Volkov.” Ava sighed. “Do you see what you left me in D.C. with?” she muttered to me.

Ten years later . . . “Dude, you look like shit,” Carson says, clapping me on the shoulder. “This is my best sweater, and it’s supposed to make me look devastatingly handsome.” “It’s olive green,” Carson says with a question in his raised eyebrow. “Leave me alone.” I rest my head on the counter. “It’s been ten years since my heart was broken and it still aches.” “Ten years?” Carson laughs. “It’s been ten fucking days.” Ten days later (That’s right, sorry about that) . . . “Iknow, but ten days has felt like ten years. And I thought wearing my green sweater to Friendsgiving would be a nice pick-me-up but you just peed all over that idea.” “Does anyone like this sweater besides you?” “I get a lot of once-overs whenever I wear it. I think it’s how the color brings out my delicate green eyes.” “Or it’s the cross-stitched mountain range on the front.” I glance at my sweater and then rub my fingers over the cross-stitch. “I used to pretend it was brail and it would read, ‘You’re handsome, always have been, always will be.’” “I don’t understand how we’re friends.” Carson shakes his head. “Running pole-to-pole suicides at Brentwood together formed an unbreakable bond.” “God, you’re right.” 

AN INCOMPLETE LIST: No more diving into pools of chlorinated water lit green from below. No more ball games played out under floodlights. No more porch lights with moths fluttering on summer nights. No more trains running under the surface of cities on the dazzling power of the electric third rail. No more cities. No more films, except rarely, except with a generator drowning out half the dialogue, and only then for the first little while until the fuel for the generators ran out, because automobile gas goes stale after two or three years. Aviation gas lasts longer, but it was difficult to come by. No more screens shining in the half-light as people raise their phones above the crowd to take photographs of concert stages. No more concert stages lit by candy-colored halogens, no more electronica, punk, electric guitars. No more pharmaceuticals. No more certainty of surviving a scratch on one’s hand, a cut on a finger while chopping vegetables for dinner, a dog bite. No more flight. No more towns glimpsed from the sky through airplane windows, points of glimmering light; no more looking down from thirty thousand feet and imagining the lives lit up by those lights at that moment. No more airplanes, no more requests to put your tray table in its upright and locked position—but no, this wasn’t true, there were still airplanes here and there. They stood dormant on runways and in hangars. They collected snow on their wings. In the cold months, they were ideal for food storage. In summer the ones near orchards were filled with trays of fruit that dehydrated in the heat. Teenagers snuck into them to have sex. Rust blossomed and streaked. No more countries, all borders unmanned. No more fire departments, no more police. No more road maintenance or garbage pickup. No more spacecraft rising up from Cape Canaveral, from the Baikonur Cosmodrome, from Vandenburg, Plesetsk, Tanegashima, burning paths through the atmosphere into space. No more Internet. No more social media, no more scrolling through litanies of dreams and nervous hopes and photographs of lunches, cries for help and expressions of contentment and relationship-status updates with heart icons whole or broken, plans to meet up later, pleas, complaints, desires, pictures of babies dressed as bears or peppers for Halloween. No more reading and commenting on the lives of others, and in so doing, feeling slightly less alone in the room. No more avatars.

The noble carpenter from Galilee could make no headway when he challenged the pretension of the solemn scholars, hair-splitting lawyers, and arrogant pedants, and raised his voice in defense of the poor in spirit. He was ostracized and anathematized, and his teachings found a following chiefly among non-Jews. Yet the teachings of Jesus fared no better than the teachings of the prophets when they came wholly into the keeping of dominant intellectuals. They were made into a vehicle for the maintenance and aggrandizement of a vast hierarchy of clerks, while the poor in spirit, instead of inheriting the earth, were left to sink into serfdom and superstitious darkness. In the sixteenth century, we see the same pattern again. When Luther first defied the Pope and his councils he spoke feelingly of “the poor, simple, common folk.” Later, when allied with the German princelings, he lashed out against the rebellious masses with unmatched ferocity: “Let there be no half-measures! Cut their throats! Transfix them! Leave no stone unturned! To kill a rebel is to destroy a mad dog.” He assured his aristocratic patrons that “a prince can enter heaven by the shedding of blood more certainly than others by means of prayer.

was an English poet and playwright, widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's national poet and the "Bard of Avon" (or simply "The Bard"). His surviving works consist of 38 plays, 154 sonnets, two long narrative poems, and several other poems. His plays have been translated into every major living language, and are performed more often than those of any other playwright. Shakespeare was born and raised in Stratford-upon-Avon. At the age of 18 he married Anne Hathaway, who bore him three children: Susanna, and twins Hamnet and Judith. Between 1585 and 1592 he began a successful career in London as an actor, writer, and part owner of the playing company the Lord Chamberlain's Men, later known as the King's Men. He appears to have retired to Stratford around 1613, where he died three years later. Few records of Shakespeare's private life survive, and there has been considerable speculation about such matters as his sexuality, religious beliefs, and whether the works attributed to him were written by others. Shakespeare produced most of his known work between 1590 and 1613. His early plays were mainly comedies and histories, genres he raised to the peak of sophistication and artistry by the end of the sixteenth century. Next he wrote mainly tragedies until about 1608, including Hamlet, King Lear, and Macbeth, considered some of the finest examples in the English language. In his last phase, he wrote tragicomedies, also known as romances, and collaborated with other playwrights. Many of his plays were published in editions of varying quality and accuracy during his lifetime, and in 1623 two of his former theatrical colleagues published the First Folio, a collected edition of his dramatic works that included all but two of the plays now recognised as Shakespeare's. Shakespeare was a respected poet and playwright in his own day, but his reputation did not rise to its present heights until the nineteenth century. The Romantics, in particular, acclaimed Shakespeare's genius, and the Victorians hero-worshipped Shakespeare with a reverence that George Bernard Shaw called "bardolatry". In the twentieth century, his work was repeatedly adopted and rediscovered by new movements in scholarship and performance. His plays remain highly popular today and are consistently performed and reinterpreted in diverse cultural and political contexts throughout the world. Source: Wikipedia

A Letter To Say, "I'll See You Later" I remember just like it was yesterday the grapevine, clothesline, lilacs and peonies. I remember the secret hiding place for 50-cent pieces. I remember just like it was yesterday the color wheel Christmas Tree, The Honeymooner’s, The Dukes of Hazzard and Jeopardy! I remember just like it was yesterday the house was full of children, but I was your only and your favorite. You always made time for me, even when I deserved the fly swatter. I remember just like it was yesterday falling asleep to the scent of Dove soap on your pillow, you lying for me so I wouldn’t be abused again. I remember just like it was yesterday your big “Black Cat” and the late, dark nights driving to IFP and knowing there was “No Place Like Home.” I remember just like it was yesterday the “horns” in your ‘do and the smell of Raffinee wafting through the house and Listerine in the bathroom. I remember your bows and polka dots and “just a few fries.” I remember the green blanket. I remember just like it was yesterday the way it felt to sit on your lap and have you sing “She’s Grandma’s Little Baby.” I remember just like it was yesterday the day you told me I could “Shit in the sugar bowl.” I remember just like it was yesterday telling you that you were going to be a great-grandma…for the first time. I remember just like it was yesterday the 1st time you held him in your arms; you helped me raise him. Your house was always our home. I remember just like it was yesterday having my heart broken but you helped me mend it. I remember just like it was yesterday asking for your help when I couldn’t do it on my own; you’ve always been my rock. I remember just like it was yesterday confiding my secrets to you – you were the first to know another baby was on the way, this time a girl. I remember just like it was yesterday the joy they brought to your life; they were the reason you didn’t give up. I remember just like it was yesterday saying words I never meant, not spending more time with you because my life got in the way. I remember just like it was yesterday you loving on me, your strength and vitality, your faith, hope and kindness. I remember just like it was yesterday wishing for more tomorrows so I could tell you that I love you another time. I remember just like it was yesterday having you tell me you love me, “more than anyone will ever know.” I remember just like it was yesterday you taught me to never say good-bye, just say “I’ll see you later.

Now,” Samite continued, “after Essel has just spent time warning you about generalities and how they often don’t apply, I’m going to use some. Because some generalities are true often enough that we have to worry about them. So here’s one: men will physically fight for status. Women, generally, are more clever. The why of it doesn’t matter: learned, innate, cultural, who cares? You see the chest-bumping, the name-calling, performing for their fellows, what they’re really doing is getting the juices flowing. That interval isn’t always long, but it’s long enough for men to trigger the battle juice. That’s the terror or excitation that leads people to fight or run. It can be useful in small doses or debilitating in large ones. Any of you have brothers, or boys you’ve fought with?” Six of the ten raised their hands. “Have you ever had a fight with them—verbal or physical—and then they leave and come back a little later, and they’re completely done fighting and you’re just fully getting into it? They look like they’ve been ambushed, because they’ve come completely off the mountain already, and you’ve just gotten to the top?” “Think of it like lovemaking,” Essel said. She was a bawdy one. “Breathe in a man’s ear and tell him to take his trousers off, and he’s ready to go before you draw your next breath. A woman’s body takes longer.” Some of the girls giggled nervously. “Men can switch on very, very fast. They also switch off from that battle readiness very, very fast. Sure, they’ll be left trembling, sometimes puking from it, but it’s on and then it’s off. Women don’t do that. We peak slower. Now, maybe there are exceptions, maybe. But as fighters, we tend to think that everyone reacts the way we do, because our own experience is all we have. In this case, it’s not true for us. Men will be ready to fight, then finished, within heartbeats. This is good and bad. “A man, deeply surprised, will have only his first instinctive response be as controlled and crisp as it is when he trains. Then that torrent of emotion is on him. We spend thousands of hours training that first instinctive response, and further, we train to control the torrent of emotion so that it raises us to a heightened level of awareness without making us stupid.” “So the positive, for us Archers: surprise me, and my first reaction will be the same as my male counterpart’s. I can still, of course, get terrified, or locked into a loop of indecision. But if I’m not, my second, third, and tenth moves will also be controlled. My hands will not shake. I will be able to make precision movements that a man cannot. But I won’t have the heightened strength or sensations until perhaps a minute later—often too late. “Where a man needs to train to control that rush, we need to train to make it closer. If we have to climb a mountain more slowly to get to the same height to get all the positives, we need to start climbing sooner. That is, when I go into a situation that I know may be hazardous, I need to prepare myself. I need to start climbing. The men may joke to break the tension. Let them. I don’t join in. Maybe they think I’m humorless because I don’t. Fine. That’s a trade I’m willing to make.” Teia and the rest of the girls walked away from training that day somewhat dazed, definitely overwhelmed. What Teia realized was that the women were deeply appealing because they were honest and powerful. And those two things were wed inextricably together. They said, I am the best in the world at what I do, and I cannot do everything. Those two statements, held together, gave them the security to face any challenge. If her own strengths couldn’t surmount an obstacle, her team’s strengths could—and she was unembarrassed about asking for help where she needed it because she knew that what she brought to the team would be equally valuable in some other situation.

Gen 22:11–16a The story of the near-sacrifice of Isaac is traced to E. It refers to the deity as Elohim in vv. 1,3,8, and 9. But, just as Abraham’s hand is raised with the knife to sacrifice Isaac, the text says that the angel of Yahweh stops him (v. 11). The verses in which Isaac is spared refer to the deity as Yahweh (vv. 11–14). These verses are followed by a report that the angel speaks a second time and says, “… because you did not withhold your son from me….” Thus the four verses which report that Isaac was not sacrificed involve both a contradiction and a change of the name of the deity. As extraordinary as it may seem, it has been suggested that in the original version of this story Isaac was actually sacrificed, and that the intervening four verses were added subsequently, when the notion of human sacrifice was rejected (perhaps by the person who combined J and E). Of course, the words “you did not withhold your son” might mean only that Abraham had been willing to sacrifice his son. But still it must be noted that the text concludes (v. 19), “And Abraham returned to his servants.” Isaac is not mentioned. Moreover, Isaac never again appears as a character in E. Interestingly, a later midrashic tradition developed this notion, that Isaac actually had been sacrificed. This tradition is discussed in S. Spiegel’s The Last Trial (New York: Schocken, 1969; Hebrew edition 1950).

It’s dark as a tomb in here,” she said, unable to see more than shadows. “Will you light the candles, please,” she asked, “assuming there are candles in here?” “Aye, milady, right there, next to the bed.” His shadow crossed before her, and Elizabeth focused on a large, oddly shaped object that she supposed could be a bed, given its size. “Will you light them, please?” she urged. “I-I can’t see a thing in here.” “His lordship don’t like more’n one candle lit in the bedchambers,” the footman said. “He says it’s a waste of beeswax.” Elizabeth blinked in the darkness, torn somewhere between laughter and tears at her plight. “Oh,” she said, nonplussed. The footman lit a small candle at the far end of the room and left, closing the door behind him. “Milady?” Berta whispered, peering through the dark, impenetrable gloom. “Where are you?” “I’m over here,” Elizabeth replied, walking cautiously forward, her arms outstretched, her hands groping about for possible obstructions in her path as she headed for what she hoped was the outside wall of the bedchamber, where there was bound to be a window with draperies hiding its light. “Where?” Berta asked in a frightened whisper, and Elizabeth could hear the maid’s teeth chattering halfway across the room. “Here-on your left.” Berta followed the sound of her mistress’s voice and let out a terrified gasp at the sight of the ghostlike figure moving eerily through the darkness, arms outstretched. “Raise your arm,” she said urgently, “so I’ll know ‘tis you.” Elizabeth, knowing Berta’s timid nature, complied immediately. She raised her arm, which, while calming poor Berta, unfortunately caused Elizabeth to walk straight into a slender, fluted pillar with a marble bust upon it, and they both began to topple. “Good God!” Elizabeth burst out, wrapping her arms protectively around the pillar and the marble object upon it. “Berta!” she said urgently. “This is no time to be afraid of the dark. Help me, please. I’ve bumped into something-a bust and its stand, I think-and I daren’t let go of them until I can see how to set them upright. There are draperies over here, right in front of me. All you have to do is follow my voice and open them. Once we do, ‘twill be bright as day in here.” “I’m coming, milady,” Berta said bravely, and Elizabeth breathed a sigh of relief. “I’ve found them!” Berta cried softly a few minutes later. “They’re heavy-velvet they are, with another panel behind them.” Berta pulled one heavy panel back across the wall, and then, with renewed urgency and vigor, she yanked back the other and turned around to survey the room. “Light as last!” Elizabeth said with relief. Dazzling late-afternoon sunlight poured into the windows directly in front of her, blinding her momentarily. “That’s much better,” she said, blinking. Satisfied that the pillar was quite sturdy enough to stand without her aid, Elizabeth was about to place the bust back upon it, but Berta’s cry stopped her. “Saints preserve us!” With the fragile bust clutched protectively to her chest Elizabeth swung sharply around. There, spread out before her, furnished entirely in red and gold, was the most shocking room Elizabeth had ever beheld: Six enormous gold cupids seemed to hover in thin air above a gigantic bed clutching crimson velvet bed draperies in one pudgy fist and holding bows and arrows in the other; more cupids adorned the headboard. Elizabeth’s eyes widened, first in disbelief, and a moment later in mirth. “Berta,” she breathed on a smothered giggle, “will you look at this place!

Richard and I seemed really to be at the end of our rope, for he had done what he could for me, and it had not worked out, and now he was going away. It seemed to me that he was sailing into the most splendid of futures, for he was going, of all places! to France, and he had been invited there by the French government. But Richard did not seem, though he was jaunty, to be overjoyed. There was a striking sobriety in his face that day. He talked a great deal about a friend of his, who was in trouble with the U.S. Immigration authorities, and was about to be, or already had been, deported. Richard was not being deported, of course, he was traveling to a foreign country as an honored guest; and he was vain enough and young enough and vivid enough to find this very pleasing and exciting. Yet he knew a great deal about exile, all artists do, especially American artists, especially American Negro artists. He had endured already, liberals and literary critics to the contrary, a long exile in his own country. He must have wondered what the real thing would be like. And he must have wondered, too, what would be the unimaginable effect on his daughter, who could now be raised in a country which would not penalize her on account of her color. And that day was very nearly the last time Richard and I spoke to each other without the later, terrible warfare. Two years later, I, too, quit America, never intending to return.

It wasn't tuna ventresca that drew diners to this community over others, nor was it heritage beef. It was the final bottle of a 1985 Cannonau, salt-crusted from its time on the Sardinian coast. Each diner had barely a swallow. My employer bid us not to swallow, not yet, but hold the wine at the back of the throat till it stung and warmed to the temperature of blood and spit, till we wrung from it the terroir of fields cracked by quake and shadowed by smog; only then, swallowing, choking, grateful, did we appreciate the fullness of its flavor. His face was ferocious and sublime in this moment, cracked open; I saw it briefly behind the mask. He was a man who knew the gradations of pleasure because he knew, like me, the calculus of its loss. To me that wine was fig and plum; volcanic soil; wheat fields shading to salt stone; sun; leather, well-baked; and finally, most lingering, strawberry. Psychosomatic, I'm sure, but what flavor isn't? I raised my glass to the memory of my drunk in the British market. I imagined him sat across the table, calmed at last, sane among the sane. He would have tasted in that wine the starch of a laundered sheet, perhaps, or the clean smooth shot of his dignity. My employer decanted these deepest longings, mysterious to each diner until it flooded the palate: a lost child's yeasty scalp, the morning breath of a lover, huckleberries, onion soup, the spice of a redwood forest gone up in smoke. It is easy, all these years later, to dismiss that country's purpose as decadent, gluttonous. Selfish. It was those things. But it was, also, this connoisseurship of loss.

At a talk I gave at a church months later, I spoke about Charlie and the plight of incarcerated children. Afterward, an older married couple approached me and insisted that they had to help Charlie. I tried to dissuade these kind people from thinking they could do anything, but I gave them my card and told them they could call me. I didn't expect to hear from them, but within days they called, and they were persistent. We eventually agreed that they would write a letter to Charlie and send it to me to pass on to him. When I received the letter weeks later, I read it. It was remarkable. Mr. and Mrs. Jennings were a white couple in their mid-seventies from a small community northeast of Birmingham. They were kind and generous people who were active in their local United Methodist church. They never missed a Sunday service and were especially drawn to children in crisis. They spoke softly and always seemed to be smiling but never appeared to be anything less than completely genuine and compassionate. They were affectionate with each other in a way that was endearing, frequently holding hands and leaning into each other. They dressed like farmers and owned ten acres of land, where they grew vegetables and lived simply. Their one and only grandchild, whom they had helped raise, had committed suicide when he was a teenager, and they had never stopped grieving for him. Their grandson struggled with mental health problems during his short life, but he was a smart kid and they had been putting money away to send him to college. They explained in their letter that they wanted to use the money they'd saved for their grandson to help Charlie. Eventually, Charlie and this couple began corresponding with one another, building up to the day when the Jenningses met Charlie at the juvenile detention facility. They later told me that they "loved him instantly." Charlie's grandmother had died a few months after she first called me, and his mother was still struggling after the tragedy of the shooting and Charlie's incarceration. Charlie had been apprehensive about meeting with the Jenningses because he thought they wouldn't like him, but he told me after they left how much they seemed to care about him and how comforting that was. The Jenningses became his family. At one point early on, I tried to caution them against expecting too much from Charlie after his release. 'You know, he's been through a lot. I'm not sure he can just carry on as if nothing has ever happened. I want you to understand he may not be able to do everything you'd like him to do.' They never accepted my warnings. Mrs. Jennings was rarely disagreeable or argumentative, but I had learned that she would grunt when someone said something she didn't completely accept. She told me, 'We've all been through a lot, Bryan, all of us. I know that some have been through more than others. But if we don't expect more from each other, hope better for one another, and recover from the hurt we experience, we are surely doomed.' The Jenningses helped Charlie get his general equivalency degree in detention and insisted on financing his college education. They were there, along with his mother, to take him home when he was released.

BROADBENT [stiffly]. Devil is rather a strong expression in that connexion, Mr Keegan. KEEGAN. Not from a man who knows that this world is hell. But since the word offends you, let me soften it, and compare you simply to an ass. [Larry whitens with anger]. BROADBENT [reddening]. An ass! KEEGAN [gently]. You may take it without offence from a madman who calls the ass his brother--and a very honest, useful and faithful brother too. The ass, sir, is the most efficient of beasts, matter-of-fact, hardy, friendly when you treat him as a fellow-creature, stubborn when you abuse him, ridiculous only in love, which sets him braying, and in politics, which move him to roll about in the public road and raise a dust about nothing. Can you deny these qualities and habits in yourself, sir? BROADBENT [goodhumoredly]. Well, yes, I'm afraid I do, you know. KEEGAN. Then perhaps you will confess to the ass's one fault. BROADBENT. Perhaps so: what is it? KEEGAN. That he wastes all his virtues--his efficiency, as you call it--in doing the will of his greedy masters instead of doing the will of Heaven that is in himself. He is efficient in the service of Mammon, mighty in mischief, skilful in ruin, heroic in destruction. But he comes to browse here without knowing that the soil his hoof touches is holy ground. Ireland, sir, for good or evil, is like no other place under heaven; and no man can touch its sod or breathe its air without becoming better or worse. It produces two kinds of men in strange perfection: saints and traitors. It is called the island of the saints; but indeed in these later years it might be more fitly called the island of the traitors; for our harvest of these is the fine flower of the world's crop of infamy. But the day may come when these islands shall live by the quality of their men rather than by the abundance of their minerals; and then we shall see. LARRY. Mr Keegan: if you are going to be sentimental about Ireland, I shall bid you good evening. We have had enough of that, and more than enough of cleverly proving that everybody who is not an Irishman is an ass. It is neither good sense nor good manners. It will not stop the syndicate; and it will not interest young Ireland so much as my friend's gospel of efficiency. BROADBENT. Ah, yes, yes: efficiency is the thing. I don't in the least mind your chaff, Mr Keegan; but Larry's right on the main point. The world belongs to the efficient.

Make out a schedule for yourself, on paper if necessary, that requires you to be busy with housework or anything else while your baby is awake. Go at it with a great bustle—to impress your baby and to impress yourself. Say you are the mother of a baby boy who has become accustomed to being carried all the time. When he frets and raises his arms, explain to him in a friendly but very firm tone that this job and that job must get done this afternoon. Though he doesn’t understand the words, he does understand the tone of voice. Stick to your busywork. The first hour of the first day is the hardest. One baby accepts the change better if his mother stays out of sight a good part of the time at first and talks little. This helps him to become absorbed in something else. Another adjusts more quickly if he can at least see his mother and hear her talking to him, even if she won’t pick him up. When you bring him a plaything or show him how to use it, or when you decide it’s time to play with him, sit down beside him on the floor. Let him climb into your arms if he wants, but don’t get back into the habit of walking him around. If you’re on the floor with him, he can crawl away when he eventually realizes you won’t walk. If you pick him up and walk him, he’ll surely object noisily just as soon as you start to put him down again. If he keeps on fretting indefinitely when you sit with him on the floor, remember another job and get busy again. What you are trying to do is to help your baby begin to build frustration tolerance—a little at a time. If she does not begin to learn this gradually between six and twelve months, it is a much harder lesson to learn later on.

Chapter 28 Genghis Cat Gracing Whatever Shithole This Is, Washington, USA You can all relax now, because I am here. What did you think? I’d run for safety at the whim of a fucking parrot with under-eye bags like pinched scrotums? Did you suspect I—a ninja with feather-wand fastness and laser-pointer focus—had the spine of a banana slug? Then you are a shit-toned oink with the senses of a sniveling salamander. Then you don’t know Genghis Cat. I look around and can see that we are surrounded by The Bird Beasts, those crepe-faced, hair ball–brained fuck goblins. I intensely dislike these lumpy whatthefuckareyous who straddle between the Mediocre Servant and animal worlds, trying to be one thing and really not being, like imitation crabmeat in a sushi log that is really just fucking whitefish and WE ALL KNOW IT. “Would you like a little of the crabmeat, Genghis?” my Mediocre Servants seemed to ask with their blobfish lips and stupid faces. “THAT’S FUCKING WHITEFISH, YOU REGURGITATED MOLES!” I’d yowl, and then I’d steal the sushi log and run off and growl very much so they couldn’t have it back, and later I would pee on their night pillows for good measure. I cannot imagine their lives before me. We mustn’t think of those bleak dark ages. But the Beasts are dangerous. I have watched them morph and chew into a house. I have seen them with spider legs and second stomachs and camouflage skins. I have seen them tear the legs off a horse and steal flight from those with feathers. Orange and I have lost family to their fuckish appetites. But they are still fakish faking beasts and I’m fucking Genghis Cat. They are imitation crab and Genghis is filet mignon Fancy Feast, bitch. Probably I should come clean here and tell you that I’m immortal. I always suspected it but can confirm it now that I have surpassed the allocated nine lives. I’m somewhere around life 884, give or take seventy-eight. Some mousers have called me a god, but I insist on modesty. I also don’t deny it. I might be a god. It seems to fit. It feels right. A stealthy, striped god with an exotically spotted tummy—it seems certain, doesn’t it to you? I’m 186 percent sure at this point. Orange insists we stay away from the Beasts all the time, but I only let Orange think he’s in charge. Orange is incredibly sensitive, despite being the size of a Winnebago. He hand-raised each of my kittens and has terrible nightmares, and I have to knead my paws on him to calm him down. Orange and I have a deal. I will kill anything that comes to harm Orange and Orange will continue to be the reason I purr.

Maybe you could tell us how you and Jordan met, Nick.” All conversation at the table stopped. Frankly, Nick was surprised it had taken this long for someone to ask. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Jordan take a nervous sip of her wine. He knew this was the part of the evening she’d dreaded, the part where they told more lies to her friends. Perhaps he could help her out with that. “Jordan and I met two weeks ago, at her store,” he said. “On the night of the big snowstorm.” Pete chuckled. “You really must’ve been jonesing for wine to go out in that mess.” Nick reached across the table and linked his fingers through Jordan’s. “I think Fate had a higher purpose for bringing me to her store that night.” He winked at her. I’ve got this. Melinda melted. “That’s so sweet.” “Then what happened?” Corinne prompted. Nick faced Jordan’s friends. For her sake, he’d tell the truth—perhaps not the whole truth—but at least nothing but. “Well, I asked Jordan a few questions, some quips were exchanged, and I distinctly recall her making a sarcastic comment about chardonnay. I can’t tell you exactly what happened from there, but five days later I found myself at Xander Eckhart’s party drinking pink champagne.” Her friends laughed. Charles raised his glass. “That’s how it happens, Nick. A cute smile, a few clever words, and five years later you’re watching Dancing with the Stars on Monday nights instead of football.” “Hey, don’t knock it until you’ve tried it,” Pete said indignantly. As the group teased Pete, Nick felt Jordan squeeze his knee underneath the table. She spoke softly as she held his gaze. “Thank you.” It took far more effort than it should have to make his tone sound as cavalier as always. “Any time, Rhodes

Violet didn't bother responding, and Jay bounded from the car to help her inside. He gave the briefest of glances at Lissie, barely acknowledging her presence as he gently eased Violet onto the seat. For good measure, and Violet was sure it was premeditated, he gave her a long, sweet kiss before closing her door. Violet was surprised at how quickly she responded to his touch, even when she knew it was more for Lissie's benefit than for hers. But she had to suppress a triumphant smile when she stole a quick look at the other girl's disgusted expression before Jay put the car in drive and left Lissie standing there, gawking after them. "Sorry about that," he said apologetically as he concentrated on maneuvering through the busy parking lot. "I've been so worried about strange men following you around that I forgot how dangerous Homecoming Queens can be." Violet smiled at him. "That's okay. That kiss was a nice touch, by the way. Sheer genius." "Yeah, that one just came to me," he chuckled. "Maybe you can show it to me again...later," she said playfully. He reached over and gave her leg a squeeze, his eyes never leaving the road. "I like the way you think, my friend." "Is that how it is now, we're back to just friends?" Violet asked, raising her eyebrows at him challengingly. "I'll remember to keep that in mind next time we're 'doing homework.'" He was suddenly serious, his tone determined. "We'll never be just friends again, not if I have anything to do with it." And then with conviction he added, "I love you too much to go back now, Vi." It was still strange to hear him saying things like that. The words sounded so foreign to her ears, but her heart responded, as if it had been waiting a lifetime to hear them, by beating erratically.

I was disappointed when he resumed the thread of his narrative. Whenever he spoke of something whose beauty had until then remained hidden from me, of pine-forests or of hailstorms, of Notre-Dame Cathedral, of Athalie or of Phèdre, by some piece of imagery he would make their beauty explode into my consciousness. And so, realising that the universe contained innumerable elements which my feeble senses would be powerless to discern did he not bring them within my reach, I longed to have some opinion, some metaphor of his, upon everything in the world, and especially upon such things as I might some day have an opportunity of seeing for myself But, alas, upon almost everything in the world his opinion was unknown to me. I had no doubt that it would differ entirely from my own, since his came down from an unknown sphere towards which I was striving to raise myself; convinced that my thoughts would have seemed pure foolishness to that perfected spirit, I had so completely obliterated them all that, if I happened to find in one of his books something which had already occurred to my own mind, my heart would swell as though some deity had, in his infinite bounty, restored it to me, had pronounced it to be beautiful and right. It happened now and then that a page of [my favourite writer] would express precisely those ideas which I often used to write to my grandmother and my mother at night, when I was unable to sleep, so much so that this page of his had the appearance of a collection of epigraphs for me to set at the head of my letters. And so too, in later years, when I began to write a book of my own, and the quality of some of my sentences seemed so inadequate that I could not make up my mind to go on with the undertaking, I would find the equivalent in [my favourite writer].

You’re as beautiful as you were the night we made our son,” she whispered, bending to kiss him tenderly. His fingers traced her dark eyebrows, her cheeks, her mouth. “I wish we could have another baby,” he said heavily. “So do I. But I’m too old,” she said sadly. She lay her cheek against his broad, damp chest and stroked the silver-tipped hair that covered it. “We’ll have to hope for grandchildren, if he ever forgives us.” He held her tightly, as if by holding her he could keep her safe. What he felt for her was ferociously protective. She misunderstood the tightening of his arms. She smiled and sighed. “We can’t, again. Cecily will think we’ve deserted her.” His hand smoothed her long hair. “She probably knows exactly what we’re doing,” he said on a chuckle. “She loves you.” “She likes you. Maybe we could adopt her.” “Better if our son marries her.” She grinned. “We can hope.” She sat up and stretched, liking the way he watched her still-firm breasts. “The last time I felt like this was thirty-six years ago,” she confided. “The same is true for me,” he replied. She searched his eyes, already facing her departure. She would have to go back to the reservation, home. He could still read her better than she knew. He drew her hand to his mouth. “It’s too late, but I want to marry you. This week. As soon as possible.” She was surprised. She didn’t know what to say. “I love you,” he said. “I never stopped. Forgive me and say yes.” She considered the enormity of what she would be agreeing to do. Be his hostess. Meet his friends. Go to fund-raising events. Wear fancy clothes. Act sophisticated. “Your life is so different from mine,” she began. “Don’t you start,” he murmured. “I’ve seen what it did to Cecily when Tate used that same argument with her about all the differences. It won’t work with me. We love each other too much to worry about trivial things. Say yes. We’ll work out all the details later.” “There will be parties, benefits…” He pulled her down into his arms and kissed her tenderly. “I don’t know much about etiquette,” she tried again. He rolled her over, pinning her gently. One long leg inserted itself between both of hers as he kissed her. “Oh, what the hell,” she murmured, and wrapped her legs around his, groaning as the joints protested. “Arthritis?” he asked. “Osteoarthritis.” “Me, too.” He shifted, groaning a little himself as he eased down. “We’ll work on new positions one day. But it’s…too late…now. Leta…!” he gasped. She didn’t have enough breath to answer him. He didn’t seem to notice that she hadn’t. Bad joints notwithstanding, they managed to do quite a few things that weren’t recommended for people their ages. And some that weren’t in the book at all.

Millions have been taught that if they don’t believe, if they don’t accept in the right way, that is, the way the person telling them the Gospel does, and they were hit by a car and died later that same day, God would have no choice but to punish them forever in conscious torment in hell. God would, in essence, become a fundamentally different being to them in that moment of death, a different being to them forever. A loving heavenly Father who will go to extraordinary lengths to have a relationship with them would, in the blink of an eye, become a cruel, mean, vicious tormenter who would ensure that they had no escape from an endless future of agony. Does God become somebody totally different the moment you die? That kind of God is simply devastating. Psychologically crushing. We can’t bear it. No one can. And that is the secret deep in the heart of many people, especially Christians: they don’t love God. They can’t, because the God they’ve been presented with and taught about can’t be loved. That God is terrifying and traumatizing and unbearable. And so there are conferences about how churches can be more “relevant” and “missional” and “welcoming,” and there are vast resources, many, many books and films, for those who want to “reach out” and “connect” and “build relationships” with people who aren’t part of the church. And that can be helpful. But at the heart of it, we have to ask: Just what kind of God is behind all this? Because if something is wrong with your God, if your God is loving one second and cruel the next, if your God will punish people for all of eternity for sins committed in a few short years, no amount of clever marketing or compelling language or good music or great coffee will be able to disguise that one, true, glaring, untenable, unacceptable, awful reality.[32]

The most perfect and satisfactory knowledge is that of perception but this is limited to the absolutely particular, to the individual. The comprehension of the many and the various into *one* representation is possible only through the *concept*, in other words, by omitting the differences; consequently, the concept is a very imperfect way of representing things. The particular, of course, can also be apprehended immediately as a universal, namely when it is raised to the (Platonic) *Idea*; but in this process, which I have analysed in the third book, the intellect passes beyond the limits of individuality and therefore of time; moreover, this is only an exception. These inner and essential imperfections of the intellect are further increased by a disturbance to some extent external to it but yet inevitable, namely, the influence that the *will* exerts on all its operations, as soon as that will is in any way concerned in their result. Every passion, in fact every inclination or disinclination, tinges the objects of knowledge with its colour. Most common of occurrence is the falsification of knowledge brought about by desire and hope, since they show us the scarcely possible in dazzling colours as probable and well-nigh certain, and render us almost incapable of comprehending what is opposed to it. Fear acts in a similar way; every preconceived opinion, every partiality, and, as I have said, every interest, every emotion, and every predilection of the will act in an analogous manner. Finally, to all these imperfections of the intellect we must also add the fact that it grows old with the brain; in other words, like all physiological functions, it loses its energy in later years; in this way all its imperfections are then greatly increased.” —from_The World as Will and Representation_. Translated from the German by E. F. J. Payne in two volumes: volume II, pp. 139-141

When I see you play, I see perfection,” he said. “I see the player I always believed you could be. So be happy, right here and now. Because of what you have done, who you’ve become. And not on some condition of being number one.” “But why stop striving now, Dad? You’ve raised me to be the very best. That means number one. And I’m not yet. Why are you changing the rules?” My father sat down in the chair next to him. But I could not sit down. “At least be honest,” I said, shaking my head. “Decime la verdad, papá.” My eyes were burning and starting to tear. “Do you not believe I can do it?” I asked him. “Do you not think I can knock her out of first place?” He closed his eyes and sighed. I stared at him, wiping away the tear that fell out of my eye. “After all this time,” I said, “have you given up on me?” He did not open his eyes. He did not respond. “Respondeme,” I said. “¿Creés que puedo hacerlo?” He threw his hands into the air. “Why won’t you listen to what I’m trying to tell you, Carolina?” I stepped closer to him. My breath slowed; my mouth turned down. “Do you think I can beat her, Dad?” I asked him. “Yes or no.” He finally looked up at me, and I swear my heart started breaking before he even said it. “I do not know.” I closed my eyes and tried to stay upright, but my legs nearly gave out. I sat down, but then just as quickly, I was back on my feet. “Te podés ir,” I said. I ran to my hotel room door and opened it. “¡ANDATE DE ACÁ!” I said to him. “Carolina,” my father said. “Get out of my room,” I said. “We’re done.” “Carolina, you cannot be done with your father.” “I’m talking to you as my coach,” I said. “Get out.” My father stood, his shoulders low. His eyelids half closed, suddenly heavy. He hung his head. “Te amo, hija,” he said as he walked into the hallway. I shut the door behind him. In the morning, I got up and went to the court alone. My father flew home to L.A. later that day.

Unchopping a Tree. Start with the leaves, the small twigs, and the nests that have been shaken, ripped, or broken off by the fall; these must be gathered and attached once again to their respective places. It is not arduous work, unless major limbs have been smashed or mutilated. If the fall was carefully and correctly planned, the chances of anything of the kind happening will have been reduced. Again, much depends upon the size, age, shape, and species of the tree. Still, you will be lucky if you can get through this stages without having to use machinery. Even in the best of circumstances it is a labor that will make you wish often that you had won the favor of the universe of ants, the empire of mice, or at least a local tribe of squirrels, and could enlist their labors and their talents. But no, they leave you to it. They have learned, with time. This is men's work. It goes without saying that if the tree was hollow in whole or in part, and contained old nests of bird or mammal or insect, or hoards of nuts or such structures as wasps or bees build for their survival, the contents will have to repaired where necessary, and reassembled, insofar as possible, in their original order, including the shells of nuts already opened. With spider's webs you must simply do the best you can. We do not have the spider's weaving equipment, nor any substitute for the leaf's living bond with its point of attachment and nourishment. It is even harder to simulate the latter when the leaves have once become dry — as they are bound to do, for this is not the labor of a moment. Also it hardly needs saying that this the time fro repairing any neighboring trees or bushes or other growth that might have been damaged by the fall. The same rules apply. Where neighboring trees were of the same species it is difficult not to waste time conveying a detached leaf back to the wrong tree. Practice, practice. Put your hope in that. Now the tackle must be put into place, or the scaffolding, depending on the surroundings and the dimension of the tree. It is ticklish work. Almost always it involves, in itself, further damage to the area, which will have to be corrected later. But, as you've heard, it can't be helped. And care now is likely to save you considerable trouble later. Be careful to grind nothing into the ground. At last the time comes for the erecting of the trunk. By now it will scarcely be necessary to remind you of the delicacy of this huge skeleton. Every motion of the tackle, every slightly upward heave of the trunk, the branches, their elaborately reassembled panoply of leaves (now dead) will draw from you an involuntary gasp. You will watch for a lead or a twig to be snapped off yet again. You will listen for the nuts to shift in the hollow limb and you will hear whether they are indeed falling into place or are spilling in disorder — in which case, or in the event of anything else of the kind — operations will have to cease, of course, while you correct the matter. The raising itself is no small enterprise, from the moment when the chains tighten around the old bandages until the boles hands vertical above the stump, splinter above splinter. How the final straightening of the splinters themselves can take place (the preliminary work is best done while the wood is still green and soft, but at times when the splinters are not badly twisted most of the straightening is left until now, when the torn ends are face to face with each other). When the splinters are perfectly complementary the appropriate fixative is applied. Again we have no duplicate of the original substance. Ours is extremely strong, but it is rigid. It is limited to surfaces, and there is no play in it. However the core is not the part of the trunk that conducted life from the roots up to the branches and back again. It was relatively inert. The fixative for this part is not the same as the one for the outer layers and the bark, and if either of these is involved

My family is a classic American-dream story. My great-grandparents fled Russia to avoid being murdered for their religion. Just two generations later, my parents fled New York City weekends for their country house. I never felt guilty about this. I was raised to believe America rewards hard work. But I was also raised to understand that luck plays a role in even the bootstrappiest success story. The cost of living the dream, I was taught, is the responsibility to expand it for others. It’s a more than fair price. Yet the people running the country didn’t see it that way. With George W. Bush in the White House, millionaires and billionaires were showered with tax cuts. Meanwhile, schools went underfunded. Roads and bridges deteriorated. Household incomes languished. Deficits ballooned. And America went to war. President Bush invaded Iraq to destroy weapons of mass destruction, a campaign which hit a snag when it turned out those weapons didn’t exist. But by then it was too late. We had broken a country and owned the resulting mess. Colin Powell called this “the Pottery Barn rule,” which, admittedly, was cute. Still, it’s hard to imagine a visit to Pottery Barn that costs trillions of dollars and thousands of American lives. Our leaders, in other words, had made bad choices. They would therefore be replaced with better ones. That’s how AP Government told me the system worked. In the real world, however, the invasion of Iraq became an excuse for a dark and antidemocratic turn. Those who questioned the war, the torture of prisoners—or even just the tax cuts—found themselves accused of something barely short of treason. No longer was a distinction made between supporting the president’s policies and America’s troops. As an electoral strategy, this was dangerous and cynical. Also, it worked. So no, I didn’t grow up with a high opinion of politicians. But I did grow up in the kind of environment where people constantly told me I could change the world. In 2004, eager to prove them right, I volunteered for John Kerry’s presidential campaign.

We must become what we wish to teach. As an aside to parents, teachers, psychotherapists, and managers who may be reading this book to gain insight on how to support the self-esteem of others, I want to say that the place to begin is still with oneself. If one does not understand how the dynamics of self-esteem work internally—if one does not know by direct experience what lowers or raises one’s own self-esteem—one will not have that intimate understanding of the subject necessary to make an optimal contribution to others. Also, the unresolved issues within oneself set the limits of one’s effectiveness in helping others. It may be tempting, but it is self-deceiving to believe that what one says can communicate more powerfully than what one manifests in one’s person. We must become what we wish to teach. There is a story I like to tell psychotherapy students. In India, when a family encounters a problem, they are not likely to consult a psychotherapist (hardly any are available); they consult the local guru. In one village there was a wise man who had helped this family more than once. One day the father and mother came to him, bringing their nine-year-old son, and the father said, “Master, our son is a wonderful boy and we love him very much. But he has a terrible problem, a weakness for sweets that is ruining his teeth and health. We have reasoned with him, argued with him, pleaded with him, chastised him—nothing works. He goes on consuming ungodly quantities of sweets. Can you help us?” To the father’s surprise, the guru answered, “Go away and come back in two weeks.” One does not argue with a guru, so the family obeyed. Two weeks later they faced him again, and the guru said, “Good. Now we can proceed.” The father asked, “Won’t you tell us, please, why you sent us away for two weeks. You have never done that before.” And the guru answered, “I needed the two weeks because I, too, have had a lifelong weakness for sweets. Until I had confronted and resolved that issue within myself, I was not ready to deal with your son.” Not all psychotherapists like this story.

a young Goldman Sachs banker named Joseph Park was sitting in his apartment, frustrated at the effort required to get access to entertainment. Why should he trek all the way to Blockbuster to rent a movie? He should just be able to open a website, pick out a movie, and have it delivered to his door. Despite raising around $250 million, Kozmo, the company Park founded, went bankrupt in 2001. His biggest mistake was making a brash promise for one-hour delivery of virtually anything, and investing in building national operations to support growth that never happened. One study of over three thousand startups indicates that roughly three out of every four fail because of premature scaling—making investments that the market isn’t yet ready to support. Had Park proceeded more slowly, he might have noticed that with the current technology available, one-hour delivery was an impractical and low-margin business. There was, however, a tremendous demand for online movie rentals. Netflix was just then getting off the ground, and Kozmo might have been able to compete in the area of mail-order rentals and then online movie streaming. Later, he might have been able to capitalize on technological changes that made it possible for Instacart to build a logistics operation that made one-hour grocery delivery scalable and profitable. Since the market is more defined when settlers enter, they can focus on providing superior quality instead of deliberating about what to offer in the first place. “Wouldn’t you rather be second or third and see how the guy in first did, and then . . . improve it?” Malcolm Gladwell asked in an interview. “When ideas get really complicated, and when the world gets complicated, it’s foolish to think the person who’s first can work it all out,” Gladwell remarked. “Most good things, it takes a long time to figure them out.”* Second, there’s reason to believe that the kinds of people who choose to be late movers may be better suited to succeed. Risk seekers are drawn to being first, and they’re prone to making impulsive decisions. Meanwhile, more risk-averse entrepreneurs watch from the sidelines, waiting for the right opportunity and balancing their risk portfolios before entering. In a study of software startups, strategy researchers Elizabeth Pontikes and William Barnett find that when entrepreneurs rush to follow the crowd into hyped markets, their startups are less likely to survive and grow. When entrepreneurs wait for the market to cool down, they have higher odds of success: “Nonconformists . . . that buck the trend are most likely to stay in the market, receive funding, and ultimately go public.” Third, along with being less recklessly ambitious, settlers can improve upon competitors’ technology to make products better. When you’re the first to market, you have to make all the mistakes yourself. Meanwhile, settlers can watch and learn from your errors. “Moving first is a tactic, not a goal,” Peter Thiel writes in Zero to One; “being the first mover doesn’t do you any good if someone else comes along and unseats you.” Fourth, whereas pioneers tend to get stuck in their early offerings, settlers can observe market changes and shifting consumer tastes and adjust accordingly. In a study of the U.S. automobile industry over nearly a century, pioneers had lower survival rates because they struggled to establish legitimacy, developed routines that didn’t fit the market, and became obsolete as consumer needs clarified. Settlers also have the luxury of waiting for the market to be ready. When Warby Parker launched, e-commerce companies had been thriving for more than a decade, though other companies had tried selling glasses online with little success. “There’s no way it would have worked before,” Neil Blumenthal tells me. “We had to wait for Amazon, Zappos, and Blue Nile to get people comfortable buying products they typically wouldn’t order online.

You may not recognize the name Steven Schussler, CEO of Schussler Creative Inc., but you are probably familiar with his very popular theme restaurant Rainforest Café. Steve is one of the scrappiest people I know, with countless scrappy stories. He is open and honest about his wins and losses. This story about how he launched Rainforest Café is one of my favorites: Steve first envisioned a tropical-themed family restaurant back in the 1980s, but unfortunately, he couldn’t persuade anyone else to buy into the idea at the time. Not willing to give up easily, he decided to get scrappy and be “all in.” To sell his vision, he transformed his own split-level suburban home into a living, mist-enshrouded rain forest to convince potential investors that the concept was viable. Yes, you read that correctly—he converted his own house into a jungle dwelling complete with rock outcroppings, waterfalls, rivers, and layers of fog and mist that rose from the ground. The jungle included a life-size replica of an elephant near the front door, forty tropical birds in cages, and a live baby baboon named Charlie. Steve shared the following details: Every room, every closet, every hallway of my house was set up as a three-dimensional vignette: an attempt to present my idea of what a rain forest restaurant would look like in actual operation. . . . [I]t took me three years and almost $400,000 to get the house developed to the point where I felt comfortable showing it to potential investors. . . . [S]everal of my neighbors weren’t exactly thrilled to be living near a jungle habitat. . . . On one occasion, Steve received a visit from the Drug Enforcement Administration. They wanted to search the premises for drugs, presuming he may have had an illegal drug lab in his home because of his huge residential electric bill. I imagine they were astonished when they discovered the tropical rain forest filled with jungle creatures. Steve’s plan was beautiful, creative, fun, and scrappy, but the results weren’t coming as quickly as he would have liked. It took all of his resources, and he was running out of time and money to make something happen. (It’s important to note that your scrappy efforts may not generate results immediately.) I asked Steve if he ever thought about quitting, how tight was the money really, and if there was a time factor, and he said, “Yes to all three! Of course I thought about quitting. I was running out of money and time.” Ultimately, Steve’s plan succeeded. After many visits and more than two years later, gaming executive and venture capitalist Lyle Berman bought into the concept and raised the funds necessary to get the Rainforest Café up and running. The Rainforest Café chain became one of the most successful themed restaurants ever created, and continues that way under Landry’s Restaurants and Tilman Fertitta’s leadership. Today, Steve creates restaurant concepts in fantastic warehouses far from his residential neighborhood!

She looked thoughtful. “Who knows? Perhaps now is the time to see through the habit. Accidents, illness, healing, they’re all more mysterious than any of us ever imagined. I believe that we have an undiscovered ability to influence what happens to us in the future, including whether we are healthy—although, again, the power has to remain with the individual patient. “There was a reason that I didn’t offer an opinion concerning how badly you were hurt. We in the medical establishment have learned that medical opinions have to be offered very carefully. Over the years the public has developed almost a worship of doctors, and when a physician says something, patients have tended to take these opinions totally to heart. The country doctors of a hundred years ago knew this, and would use this principle to actually paint an overly optimistic picture of any health situation. If the doctor said that the patient would get better, very often the patient would internalize this idea in his or her mind and actually defy all odds to recover. In later years, however, ethical considerations have prevented such distortions, and the establishment has felt that the patient is entitled to a cold scientific assessment of his or her situation. “Unfortunately when this was given, sometimes patients dropped dead right before our eyes, just because they were told their condition was terminal. We know now that we have to be very careful with these assessments, because of the power of our minds. We want to focus this power in a positive direction. The body is capable of miraculous regeneration. Body parts thought of in the past as solid forms are actually energy systems that can transform overnight. Have you read the latest research on prayer? The simple fact that this kind of spiritual visualization is being scientifically proven to work totally undermines our old physical model of healing. We’re having to work out a new model.” She paused and poured more water on the towel around my ankle, then continued, “I believe the first step in the process is to identify the fear with which the medical problem seems to be connected; this opens up the energy block in your body to conscious healing. The next step is to pull in as much energy as possible and focus it at the exact location of the block.” I was about to ask how this was done, but she stopped me. “Go ahead and raise your energy level as much as you can.” Accepting her guidance, I began to observe the beauty around me and to concentrate on a spiritual connection within, evoking a heightened sensation of love. Gradually the colors became more vivid and everything in my awareness increased in presence. I could tell that she was raising her own energy at the same time. When I felt as though my vibration had increased as much as possible, I looked at her. She smiled back at me. “Okay, now you can focus the energy on the block.” “How do I do that?” I asked. “You use the pain. That’s why it’s there, to help you focus.

A few minutes later Elizabeth watched Lucinda emerge from the cottage with Ian, but there was no way to guess from their closed expressions what they’d discussed. In fact, the only person betraying any emotion at all was Jake Wiley as he led two horses into the yard. And his face, Elizabeth noted with confusion-which had been stormy when he went off to saddle the horses-was now wreathed in a smile of unrestrained glee. With a sweep of his arm and a bow he gestured toward a swaybacked black horse with an old sidesaddle upon its back. “Here’s your mount, ma’am,” he told Lucinda, grinning. “His name’s Attila.” Lucinda cast a disdainful eye over the beast as she transferred her umbrella to her right hand and pulled on her black gloves. “Have you nothing better?” “No, ma’am. Ian’s horse has a hurt foot.” “Oh, very well,” said Lucinda, walking briskly forward, but as she came within reach the black suddenly bared his teeth and lunged. Lucinda struck him between the ears with her umbrella without so much as a pause in her step. “Cease!” she commanded, and, ignoring the animal’s startled grunt of pain, she continued around to his other side to mount. “You brought it on yourself,” she told the horse as Jake held Attila’s head, and Ian Thornton helped her into the sidesaddle. The whites of Attila’s eyes showed as he warily watched her land in his saddle and settle herself. The moment Jake handed Lucinda the reins Attila began to leap sideways and twist around in restless annoyance. “I do not countenance ill-tempered animals,” she warned the horse in her severest tone, and when he refused to heed her and continued his threatening antics she hauled up sharply on his reins and simultaneously gave him a sharp jab in the flank with her umbrella. Attila let out a yelping complaint, broke into a quick, animated trot, and headed obediently down the drive. “If that don’t beat all!” Jake said furiously, glowering after the pair, and then at Ian. “That animal doesn’t know the meaning of the word loyalty!” Without waiting for a reply Jake swung into his saddle and cantered down the lane after them. Absolutely baffled over everyone’s behavior this morning, Elizabeth cast a puzzled, sideways glance at the silent man beside her, then gaped at him in amazement. The unpredictable man was staring after Lucinda, his hands shoved into his pockets, a cigar clamped between his white teeth, his face transformed by a sweeping grin. Drawing the obvious conclusion that these odd reactions from the men were somehow related to Lucinda’s skillful handling of an obstinate horse, Elizabeth commented, “Lucinda’s uncle raised horses, I believe.” Almost reluctantly, Ian transferred his admiring gaze from Lucinda’s rigid back to Elizabeth. His brows rose. “An amazing woman,” he stated. “Is there any situation of which she can’t take charge?” “None that I’ve ever seen,” Elizabeth said with a chuckle; then she felt self-conscious because his smile faded abruptly, and his manner became detached and cool.

As Allied forces moved into Hitler’s Fortress Europe, Roosevelt and his circle were confronted with new evidence of the Holocaust. In early 1942, he had been given information that Adolf Hitler was quietly fulfilling his threat to “annihilate the Jewish race.” Rabbi Stephen Wise asked the President that December 1942 to inform the world about “the most overwhelming disaster of Jewish history” and “try to stop it.” Although he was willing to warn the world about the impending catastrophe and insisted that there be war crimes commissions when the conflict was over, Roosevelt told Wise that punishment for such crimes would probably have to await the end of the fighting, so his own solution was to “win the war.” The problem with this approach was that by the time of an Allied victory, much of world Jewry might have been annihilated. By June 1944, the Germans had removed more than half of Hungary’s 750,000 Jews, and some Jewish leaders were asking the Allies to bomb railways from Hungary to the Auschwitz death camp in Poland. In response, Churchill told his Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden, that the murder of the Jews was “probably the greatest and most horrible crime ever committed in the whole history of the world,” and ordered him to get “everything” he could out of the British Air Force. But the Prime Minister was told that American bombers were better positioned to do the job. At the Pentagon, Stimson consulted John McCloy, who later insisted, for decades, that he had “never talked” with Roosevelt about the option of bombing the railroad lines or death camps. But in 1986, McCloy changed his story during a taped conversation with Henry Morgenthau’s son, Henry III, who was researching a family history. The ninety-one-year-old McCloy insisted that he had indeed raised the idea with the President, and that Roosevelt became “irate” and “made it very clear” that bombing Auschwitz “wouldn’t have done any good.” By McCloy’s new account, Roosevelt “took it out of my hands” and warned that “if it’s successful, it’ll be more provocative” and “we’ll be accused of participating in this horrible business,” as well as “bombing innocent people.” McCloy went on, “I didn’t want to bomb Auschwitz,” adding that “it seemed to be a bunch of fanatic Jews who seemed to think that if you didn’t bomb, it was an indication of lack of venom against Hitler.” If McCloy’s memory was reliable, then, just as with the Japanese internment, Roosevelt had used the discreet younger man to discuss a decision for which he knew he might be criticized by history, and which might conceivably have become an issue in the 1944 campaign. This approach to the possible bombing of the camps would allow the President to explain, if it became necessary, that the issue had been resolved at a lower level by the military. In retrospect, the President should have considered the bombing proposal more seriously. Approving it might have required him to slightly revise his insistence that the Allies’ sole aim should be winning the war, as he did on at least a few other occasions. But such a decision might have saved lives and shown future generations that, like Churchill, he understood the importance of the Holocaust as a crime unparalleled in world history.*

With a scowl, he turned from the window, but it was too late. The sight of Lady Celia crossing the courtyard dressed in some rich fabric had already stirred his blood. She never wore such fetching clothes; generally her lithe figure was shrouded in smocks to protect her workaday gowns from powder smudges while she practiced her target shooting. But this morning, in that lemon-colored gown, with her hair finely arranged and a jeweled bracelet on her delicate wrist, she was summer on a dreary winter day, sunshine in the bleak of night, music in the still silence of a deserted concert hall. And he was a fool. "I can see how you might find her maddening," Masters said in a low voice. Jackson stiffened. "Your wife?" he said, deliberately being obtuse. "Lady Celia." Hell and blazes. He'd obviously let his feelings show. He'd spent his childhood learning to keep them hidden so the other children wouldn't see how their epithets wounded him, and he'd refined that talent as an investigator who knew the value of an unemotional demeanor. He drew on that talent as he faced the barrister. "Anyone would find her maddening. She's reckless and spoiled and liable to give her husband grief at every turn." When she wasn't tempting him to madness. Masters raised an eyebrow. "Yet you often watch her. Have you any interest there?" Jackson forced a shrug. "Certainly not. You'll have to find another way to inherit your new bride's fortune." He'd hoped to prick Masters's pride and thus change the subject, but Masters laughed. "You, marry my sister-in-law? That, I'd like to see. Aside from the fact that her grandmother would never approve, Lady Celia hates you." She did indeed. The chit had taken an instant dislike to him when he'd interfered in an impromptu shooting match she'd been participating in with her brother and his friends at a public park. That should have set him on his guard right then. A pity it hadn't. Because even if she didn't despise him and weren't miles above him in rank, she'd never make him a good wife. She was young and indulged, not the sort of female to make do on a Bow Street Runner's salary. But she'll be an heiress once she marries. He gritted his teeth. That only made matters worse. She would assume he was marrying her for her inheritance. So would everyone else. And his pride chafed at that. Dirty bastard. Son of shame. Whoreson. Love-brat. He'd been called them all as a boy. Later, as he'd moved up at Bow Street, those who resented his rapid advancement had called him a baseborn upstart. He wasn't about to add money-grubbing fortune hunter to the list. "Besides," Masters went on, "you may not realize this, since you haven't been around much these past few weeks, but Minerva claims that Celia has her eye on three very eligible potential suitors." Jackson's startled gaze shot to him. Suitors? The word who was on his lips when the door opened and Stoneville entered. The rest of the family followed, leaving Jackson to force a smile and exchange pleasantries as they settled into seats about the table, but his mind kept running over Masters's words. Lady Celia had suitors. Eligible ones. Good-that was good. He needn't worry about himself around her anymore. She was now out of his reach, thank God. Not that she was ever in his reach, but- "Have you got any news?" Stoneville asked. Jackson started. "Yes." He took a steadying breath and forced his mine to the matter at hand.

When he reached the doorman, he stopped. “Did you see Miss Christian come in a few minutes ago?” The doorman nodded. “Yes, sir. She got here just before you arrived.” Relief staggered him. He bolted for the elevator. A few moments later, he strode into the apartment. “Kelly? Kelly, honey, where are you?” Not waiting for an answer, he hurried into the bedroom to see her sitting on the edge of the bed, her face pale and drawn in pain. When she heard him, she looked up and he winced at the dullness in her eyes. She’d been crying. “I thought I could do it,” she said in a raw voice, before he could beg her forgiveness. “I thought I could just go on and forget and that I could accept others thinking the worst of me as long as you and I were okay again. I did myself a huge disservice.” “Kelly…” Something in her look silenced him and he stood several feet away, a feeling of helplessness gripping him as he watched her try to compose herself. “I sat there tonight while your friends and your mother looked at me in disgust, while they looked at you with a mixture of pity and disbelief in their eyes. All because you took me back. The tramp who betrayed you in the worst possible manner. And I thought to myself I don’t deserve this. I’ve never deserved it. I deserve better.” She raised her eyes to his and he flinched at the horrible pain he saw reflected there. Then she laughed. A raw, terrible sound that grated across his ears. “And earlier tonight you forgave me. You stood there and told me it no longer mattered what happened in the past because you forgave me and you wanted to move forward.” She curled her fingers into tight balls and rage flared in her eyes. She stood and stared him down even as tears ran in endless streams down her cheeks. “Well, I don’t forgive you. Nor can I forget that you betrayed me in the worst way a man can betray the woman he’s supposed to love and be sworn to protect.” He took a step back, reeling from the fury in her voice. His eyes narrowed. “You don’t forgive me?” “I told you the truth that day,” she said hoarsely, her voice cracking under the weight of her tears. “I begged you to believe me. I got down on my knees and begged you. And what did you do? You wrote me a damn check and told me to get out.” He took another step back, his hand going to his hair. Something was wrong, terribly wrong. So much of that day was a blur. He remembered her on her knees, her tear-stained face, how she put her hand on his leg and whispered, “Please don’t do this.” It made him sick. He never wanted to go back to the way he felt that day, but somehow this was worse because there was something terribly wrong in her eyes and in her voice. “Your brother assaulted me. He forced himself on me. I didn’t invite his attentions. I wore the bruises from his attack for two weeks. Two weeks. I was so stunned by what he’d done that all I could think about was getting to you. I knew you’d fix it. You’d protect me. You’d take care of me. I knew you’d make it right. All I could think about was running to you. And, oh God, I did and you looked right through me.” The sick knot in his stomach grew and his chest tightened so much he couldn’t breathe. “You wouldn’t listen,” she said tearfully. “You wouldn’t listen to anything I had to say. You’d already made your mind up.” He swallowed and closed the distance between them, worried that she’d fall if he didn’t make her sit. But she shook him off and turned her back, her shoulders heaving as her quiet sobs fell over the room. “I’m listening now, Kelly,” he forced out. “Tell me what happened. I’ll believe you. I swear.” But he knew. He already knew. So much of that day was replaying over and over in his head and suddenly he was able to see so clearly what he’d refused to see before. And it was killing him. His brother had lied to him after all. Not just lied but he’d carefully orchestrated the truth and twisted it so cleverly that Ryan had been completely deceived.