March New Month Quotes

The almond blossom from the tree has gone, to be replaced by new green shoots. It smells of spring, and mown grass, and tilled earth from the fields beyond. Now is the month of Germinal in the Republican calendar: the month of hyacinth, and bees, and violet, and primrose. It is also the windy month; the month of new beginnings, and I have never felt it so strongly as I feel it now: that sense of possibility; that irresistible lightness.

You want to know the story? I'd be happy to tell you. I think I have just enough caloric energy stored up to make it through the telling of the tale. It's short. I am monstrously fat. I am a glutton. My wife was disgusted and repulsed. She gave me six months to lose one hundred pounds. I joined Weight Watchers . . . see it there, right across the street, that gaunt storefront? This afternoon was the big six-month weigh-in. So to speak. I had gained almost seventy pounds in the six months. An errant Snickers bar fell out of the cuff of my pants and rolled against my wife's foot as I stepped on the scale. The scale over there across the street is truly an ingenious device. One preprograms the desired new weight into it, and if one has achieved or gone below that new low weight, the scale bursts into recorded whistles and cheers and some lively marching-band tune. Apparently, tiny flags protrude from the top and wave mechanically back and forth. A failure--see for instance mine--results in a flatulent dirge of disappointed and contemptuous tuba. To the strains of the latter my wife left, the establishment, me, on the arm of a svelte yogurt distributor whom I am even now planning to crush, financially speaking, first thing tomorrow morning. Ms. Beadsman, you will find an eclair on the floor to the left of your chair. Could you perhaps manipulate it onto this plate with minimal chocolate loss and pass it to me.

For three months of the year they could not be certain what year they were living in. Because the pope approved the Gregorian calendar, New England rejected it, stubbornly continuing to date the start of the new year to March 25.

Wolfgang Pauli, in the months before Heisenberg's paper on matrix mechanics pointed the way to a new quantum theory, wrote to a friend, "At the moment physics is again terribly confused. In any case, it is too difficult for me, and I wish I had been a movie comedian or something of the sort and had never heard of physics." That testimony is particularly impressive if contrasted with Pauli's words less than five months later: "Heisenberg's type of mechanics has again given me hope and joy in life. To be sure it does not supply the solution to the riddle, but I believe it is again possible to march forward.

It is a strange time, my dear. A novel virus haunts our streets. Days feel like weeks, weeks like months. We’re blasted with new news every second— yes and then no and then yes and no, feeding our primal panic to hoard goods and leave shelves breadless, riceless. They tell us the pandemic makes all equal—the poor and very rich— then why are the poor poorer and the rich profiting? It is a strange time, my dear. Army men are marching our streets. They force us to stay inside, threaten and arrest for a walk in the park. They wage small wars against us, but this battle began long ago. The elite technocrats are crowing in their silicone valleys as corporations grow and small businesses fold with mountains of debt— the centre cannot, will not, hold! It is a strange time, my dear. Mainstream media reports the world has never been safer as they terrorise the chambers of our minds. This stress, this anxiety is killing our immunity. But we must do it all for the elderly— or so they say! When have they ever cared for our elders? When have they ever cared for our vulnerable? We go to bed dreaming of toilet paper while they dismantle the world economy. Family businesses go bust all so we can protect the people, but only the people are suffering! At the end of this, those retired will have peanuts for pensions. They are stripping us of everything whilst our eyes are fixed on our screens. And how dare we say it’s a strange time when in seven months we’ll make America great again.

As I’ve told you many times, I’m split in two. One side contains my exuberant cheerfulness, my flippancy, my joy in life and, above all, my ability to appreciate the lighter side of things. By that I mean not finding anything wrong with flirtations, a kiss, an embrace, an off-color joke. This side of me is usually lying in wait to ambush the other one, which is much purer, deeper and finer. No one knows Anne’s better side, and that’s why most people can’t stand me. Oh, I can be an amusing clown for an afternoon, but after that everyone’s had enough of me to last a month. Actually, I’m what a romantic movie is to a profound thinker—a mere diversion, a comic interlude, something that is soon forgotten: not bad, but not particularly good either. I hate having to tell you this, but why shouldn’t I admit it when I know it’s true? My lighter, more superficial side will always steal a march on the deeper side and therefore always win. You can’t imagine how often I’ve tried to push away this Anne, which is only half of what is known as Anne—to beat her down, hide her. But it doesn’t work, and I know why. I’m afraid that people who know me as I usually am will discover I have another side, a better and finer side. I’m afraid they’ll mock me, think I’m ridiculous and sentimental and not take me seriously. I’m used to not being taken seriously, but only the “lighthearted” Anne is used to it and can put up with it; the “deeper” Anne is too weak. If I force the good Anne into the spotlight for even fifteen minutes, she shuts up like a clam the moment she’s called upon to speak, and lets Anne number one do the talking. Before I realize it, she’s disappeared. So the nice Anne is never seen in company. She’s never made a single appearance, though she almost always takes the stage when I’m alone. I know exactly how I’d like to be, how I am … on the inside. But unfortunately I’m only like that with myself. And perhaps that’s why—no, I’m sure that’s the reason why—I think of myself as happy on the inside and other people think I’m happy on the outside. I’m guided by the pure Anne within, but on the outside I’m nothing but a frolicsome little goat tugging at its tether. As I’ve told you, what I say is not what I feel, which is why I have a reputation for being boy-crazy as well as a flirt, a smart aleck and a reader of romances. The happy-go-lucky Anne laughs, gives a flippant reply, shrugs her shoulders and pretends she doesn’t give a darn. The quiet Anne reacts in just the opposite way. If I’m being completely honest, I’ll have to admit that it does matter to me, that I’m trying very hard to change myself, but that I’m always up against a more powerful enemy. A voice within me is sobbing, “You see, that’s what’s become of you. You’re surrounded by negative opinions, dismayed looks and mocking faces, people who dislike you, and all because you don’t listen to the advice of your own better half.” Believe me, I’d like to listen, but it doesn’t work, because if I’m quiet and serious, everyone thinks I’m putting on a new act and I have to save myself with a joke, and then I’m not even talking about my own family, who assume I must be sick, stuff me with aspirins and sedatives, feel my neck and forehead to see if I have a temperature, ask about my bowel movements and berate me for being in a bad mood, until I just can’t keep it up anymore, because when everybody starts hovering over me, I get cross, then sad, and finally end up turning my heart inside out, the bad part on the outside and the good part on the inside, and keep trying to find a way to become what I’d like to be and what I could be if … if only there were no other people in the world. Yours, Anne M. Frank ANNE’S DIARY ENDS HERE.

The sudden and total disappearance of Mawlana aroused resentment among his disciples and students, some of them becoming highly critical of Hazrat Shams, even threatening him. They believed Hazrat Shams had ruined their spiritual circle and prevented them from listening to Mawlana's sermons. In March of 1246 he left Konya and went to Syria without warning. After he left, Mawlana was grief stricken, secluding himself even more rather than engaging with his disciples and students. He was without a doubt furious with them. Realising the error of their ways, they repeatedly repented before Mawlana. Some months later, news arrived that Hazrat Shams had been seen in Damascus and a letter was sent to him with apologising for the behaviour of these disciples. Hazrat Sultan Walad and a search party were sent to Damascus to invite him back and in April 1247, he made his return. During the return journey, he invited Hazrat Sultan Walad to ride on horseback although he declined, choosing instead to walk alongside him, explaining that as a servant, he could not ride in the presence of such a king. Hazrat Shams was received back with joyous celebration with sama ceremonies being held for several days, and all those that had shown him resentment tearfully asked for his forgiveness. He reserved special praise for Hazrat Sultan Walad for his selflessness, which greatly pleased Mawlana. As he originally had no intention to return to Konya, he most likely would not have returned if Hazrat Sultan Walad had not himself gone to Damascus in search of him. After his return, he and Mawlana Rumi returned to their intense discussions. Referring to the disciples, Hazrat Shams narrates that their new found love for him was motivated only by desperation: “ They felt jealous because they supposed, "If he were not here, Mowlana would be happy with us." Now [that I am back] he belongs to all. They gave it a try and things got worse, and they got no consolation from Mowlana. They lost even what they had, so that even the enmity (hava, against Shams) that had swirled in their heads disappeared. And now they are happy and they show me honor and pray for me. (Maqalat 72) ” Referring to his absence, he explains that he left for the sake of Mawlana Rumi's development: “ I'd go away fifty times for your betterment. My going away is all for the sake of your development. Otherwise it makes no difference to me whether I'm in Anatolia or Syria, at the Kaaba or in Istanbul, except, of course, that separation matures and refines you. (Maqalat 164) ” After a while, by the end of 1247, he was married to Kimia, a young woman who’d grown up in Mawlana Rumi's household. Sadly, Kimia did not live long after the marriage and passed away upon falling ill after a stroll in the garden

If one were to stand on a street corner at 9 A.M. and watch the spirits of the British dead march by four abreast, the column would be 97 miles long and would take twenty hours, or until five the next morning, to pass. The French dead would take an additional fifty-one hours and the Germans another fifty-nine hours. Considering all the dead on the western front, this parade would last from 9 A.M. Monday to 4 P.M. Saturday and stretch 386 miles, roughly the distance from Paris halfway through Switzerland or from New York to Cleveland.

Somehow the realization that nothing was to be hoped for had a salutary effect upon me. For weeks and months, for years, in fact, all my life I had been looking forward to something happening, some intrinsic event that would alter my life, and now suddenly, inspired by the absolute hopelessness of everything, I felt relieved, felt as though a great burden had been lifted from my shoulders. At dawn I parted company with the young Hindu, after touching him for a few francs, enough for a room. Walking toward Montparnasse I decided to let myself drift with the tide, to make not the least resistance to fate, no matter in what form it presented itself. Nothing that had happened to me thus far had been sufficient to destroy me; nothing had been destroyed except my illusions. I myself was intact. The world was intact. Tomorrow there might be a revolution, a plague, an earthquake; tomorrow there might not be left a single soul to whom one could turn for sympathy, for aid, for faith. It seemed to me that the great calamity had already manifested itself, that I could be no more truly alone than at this very moment. I made up my mind that I would hold on to nothing, that I would expect nothing, that henceforth I would live as an animal, a beast of prey, a rover, a plunderer. Even if war were declared, and it were my lot to go, I would grab the bayonet and plunge it, plunge it up to the hilt. And if rape were the order of the day then rape I would, and with a vengeance. At this very moment, in the quiet dawn of a new day, was not the earth giddy with crime and distress? Had one single element of man's nature been altered, vitally, fundamentally altered, by the incessant march of history? By what he calls the better part of his nature, man has been betrayed, that is all. At the extreme limits of his spiritual being man finds himself again naked as a savage. When he finds God, as it were, he has been picked clean: he is a skeleton. One must burrow into life again in order to put on flesh. The word must become flesh; the soul thirsts. On whatever crumb my eye fastens, I will pounce and devour. If to live is the paramount thing, then I will live, even if I must become a cannibal. Heretofore I have been trying to save my precious hide, trying to preserve the few pieces of meat that hid my bones. I am done with that. I have reached the limits of endurance. My back is to the wall; I can retreat no further. As far as history goes I am dead. If there is something beyond I shall have to bounce back. I have found God, but he is insufficient. I am only spiritually dead. Physically I am alive. Morally I am free. The world which I have departed is a menagerie. The dawn is breaking on a new world, a jungle world in which the lean spirits roam with sharp claws. If I am a hyena I am a lean and hungry one: I go forth to fatten myself.

March 1935, the same month that Germany publicly repudiated the disarmament clauses of the Versailles Treaty, clauses that she had been secretly ignoring ever since Hitler had come to power. That September the Nuremberg laws effectively outlawed German Jews, and made the Swastika the official flag of Germany.

Wedding Superstitions The Bridal Gown White - You have chosen right. Grey - You'll go far away. Black - You'll wish yourself back. Red - You'll wish yourself dead. Green - Ashamed to be seen. Blue - You'll always be true. Pearl - You'll live in a whirl. Peach - A love out of reach. Yellow - Ashamed of your fellow. Pink - Your Spirits will sink. The Wedding Day Monday for health, Tuesday for wealth, Wednesday best of all, Thursday for losses, Friday for crosses, Saturday for no luck at all. The Wedding Month Marry in May, and you'll rue the day, Marry in Lent, you'll live to repent. Married when the year is new, He'll be loving, kind and true. When February birds do mate, You wed nor dread your fate. If you wed when March winds blow, Joy and sorrow both you'll know. Marry in April when you can, Joy for maiden and the man. Marry in the month of May, And you'll surely rue the day. Marry when the June roses grow, Over land and sea you'll go. Those who in July do wed, Must labour for their daily bread. Whoever wed in August be, Many a change is sure to see. Marry in September's shine, Your living will be rich and fine. If in October you do marry, Love will come, but riches tarry. If you wed in bleak November, Only joys will come, remember, When December's snows fall fast, Marry and true love will last. Married in January's roar and rime, Widowed you'll be before your prime. Married in February's sleepy weather, Life you'll tread in time together. Married when March winds shrill and roar, Your home will lie on a distant shore. Married 'neath April's changeful skies, A checkered path before you lies. Married when bees o'er May blossoms flit, Strangers around your board will sit. Married in month of roses June, Life will be one long honeymoon. Married in July with flowers ablaze, Bitter-sweet memories in after days. Married in August's heat and drowse, Lover and friend in your chosen spouse. Married in September's golden glow, Smooth and serene your life will go. Married when leaves in October thin, Toil and hardships for you begin. Married in veils of November mist, Fortune your wedding ring has kissed. Married in days of December's cheer, Love's star shines brighter from year to year

He tipped his head up. "Do you think that stars have shadows?" She followed his gaze. They were close enough to Springfield for light pollution to dull the night skies, but galaxies still spangled above them. The moon had marched nearly to the end of her night, ready to stagger to her own bed at dawn. "I guess if there's some brighter star," she said, thinking of lying on the couch months ago, a deep-voiced man explaining the universe on her television while she tried to convince herself to apply for a new job. "Like the kind that's about to become a black hole. Don't they flare first?" Vince nodded. "Quasars. They flare as they're dying. I guess that would give any other star nearby a shadow.

week later the Nazis unleashed the vicious six-day pogrom against German Jews known to history as Kristallnacht, leaving few under any illusions about the vile nature of Hitler’s regime. When on 15 March 1939 German troops occupied the Bohemian and Moravian rump of Czechoslovakia and dragged non-Germans into the Reich for the first time – and Hitler was driven through a sullen Prague in further triumph – the Chamberlain ministry ran out of explanations and excuses, especially when later that month Hitler denounced the non-aggression pact that he had signed with Poland five years before.

The humiliation and the sleepless nights. When I couldn’t breathe, because he didn’t reply. How I cried when I typed. I wrote to him when my puppy died, about the bully and the stalker. It was like a storm that took away January, February, and March. And when months were gone, I was all alone, trying to fix new and old scars. I was trying so hard to hide the stains, but they just got blue and dark. The letters I wrote and the messages I sent. I’m glad his reply never came. I wish he loses me without even having me. I wish he loses all of me, the clingy me, the needy me, the broken me, and also the happy me…and I suppose when he’ll lose all of me, I’ll forget him too. There’s one thing that is sadder than losing someone you’ve been waiting for all your life…it’s losing them, and not even realizing you had them. I wish, Siddhartha never reads the book and the songs and the letters…he doesn’t deserve them.

Now the last age by Cumae's Sibyl sung has come and gone, and the majestic roll of circling centuries begins anew: justice returns, returns old Saturn's reign, with a new breed of men sent down from heaven. Only do thou, at the boy's birth in whom the iron shall cease, the golden race arise, befriend him, chaste Lucina; 'tis thine own apollo reigns. And in thy consulate, this glorious age, O Pollio, shall begin, and the months enter on their mighty march. Under thy guidance, whatso tracks remain of our old wickedness, once done away, shall free the earth from never-ceasing fear. He shall receive the life of gods, and see heroes with gods commingling, and himself be seen of them, and with his father's worth reign o'er a world at peace. For thee, O boy, first shall the earth, untilled, pour freely forth her childish gifts, the gadding ivy-spray with foxglove and Egyptian bean-flower mixed, and laughing-eyed acanthus. Of themselves, untended, will the she-goats then bring home their udders swollen with milk, while flocks afield shall of the monstrous lion have no fear. Thy very cradle shall pour forth for thee caressing flowers. The serpent too shall die, die shall the treacherous poison-plant, and far and wide Assyrian spices spring. But soon as thou hast skill to read of heroes' fame, and of thy father's deeds, and inly learn what virtue is, the plain by slow degrees with waving corn-crops shall to golden grow, fom the wild briar shall hang the blushing grape, and stubborn oaks sweat honey-dew. Nathless yet shall there lurk within of ancient wrong some traces, bidding tempt the deep with ships, gird towns with walls, with furrows cleave the earth. Therewith a second Tiphys shall there be, her hero-freight a second Argo bear; new wars too shall arise, and once again some great Achilles to some Troy be sent.

IN OCTOBER 2019, just a few months before the novel coronavirus swept the world, Johns Hopkins University released its first Global Heath Security Index, a comprehensive analysis of countries that were best prepared to handle an epidemic or pandemic. The United States ranked first overall, and first in four of the six categories—prevention, early detection and reporting, sufficient and robust health system, and compliance with international norms. That sounded right. America was, after all, the country with most of the world’s best pharmaceutical companies, research universities, laboratories, and health institutes. But by March 2020, these advantages seemed like a cruel joke, as Covid-19 tore across the United States and the federal government mounted a delayed, weak, and erratic response. By July, with less than 5% of the world’s population, the country had over 25% of the world’s cumulative confirmed cases. Per capita daily death rates in the United States were ten times higher than in Europe. Was this the new face of American exceptionalism?

The problem is to reveal an intelligence to itself. Anything can be used. Télémaque. Or a prayer or a song that the child or the ignorant one knows by heart. There is always something the ignorant one knows that can be used as a point of comparison, something to which a new thing to be learned can be related. The locksmith who opens his eyes wide when told he can read bears witness to this. He doesn’t even know the alphabet. Let him take the time to glance at the calendar. Doesn’t he know the order of the months and can’t he thus figure out January, February, March. He knows how to count a little. And what’s to prevent him from counting softly while following the lines in order to recognize in written form what he already knows? He knows he is called William and that his birthday is January 16th. He will soon know how to find the word. He knows that February has only twenty-eight days. He sees that one column is shorter than the others and he will recognize “28.” And so on. There is always something that the master can ask him to find, something about which he can question him and thus verify the work of his intelligence.

The most widely cited figure for the number of women suffering from Female Sexual Dysfunction comes from 1999: according to this, some 43 per cent of all women have a medical problem around their sex drive.27 This survey was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), one of the most influential journals in the world. It looked at questionnaire data asking about things like lack of desire for sex, poor lubrication, anxiety over sexual performance, and so on. If you answered ‘yes’ to any one of these questions, you were labelled as having Female Sexual Dysfunction. For the avoidance of any doubt about the influence of this paper, it has – as of a sunny evening in March 2012 – been cited 1,691 times. That is a spectacular number of citations. At the time, no financial interest was declared by the study’s authors. Six months later, after criticism in the New York Times, two of the three authors declared consulting and advisory work for Pfizer.28 The company was gearing up to launch Viagra for the female market at this time, and had lots to gain from more women being labelled as having a medical sexual problem.

Now the last age by Cumae's Sibyl sung has come and gone, and the majestic roll of circling centuries begins anew: justice returns, returns old Saturn's reign, with a new breed of men sent down from heaven. Only do thou, at the boy's birth in whom the iron shall cease, the golden race arise, befriend him, chaste Lucina; 'tis thine own apollo reigns. And in thy consulate, this glorious age, O Pollio, shall begin, and the months enter on their mighty march. Under thy guidance, whatso tracks remain of our old wickedness, once done away, shall free the earth from never-ceasing fear. He shall receive the life of gods, and see heroes with gods commingling, and himself be seen of them, and with his father's worth reign o'er a world at peace. For thee, O boy, first shall the earth, untilled, pour freely forth her childish gifts, the gadding ivy-spray with foxglove and Egyptian bean-flower mixed, and laughing-eyed acanthus. Of themselves, untended, will the she-goats then bring home their udders swollen with milk, while flocks afield shall of the monstrous lion have no fear. Thy very cradle shall pour forth for thee caressing flowers. The serpent too shall die, die shall the treacherous poison-plant, and far and wide Assyrian spices spring. But soon as thou hast skill to read of heroes' fame, and of thy father's deeds, and inly learn what virtue is, the plain by slow degrees with waving corn-crops shall to golden grow, fom the wild briar shall hang the blushing grape, and stubborn oaks sweat honey-dew. Nathless yet shall there lurk within of ancient wrong some traces, bidding tempt the deep with ships, gird towns with walls, with furrows cleave the earth. Therewith a second Tiphys shall there be, her hero-freight a second Argo bear; new wars too shall arise, and once again some great Achilles to some Troy be sent. Then, when the mellowing years have made thee man, no more shall mariner sail, nor pine-tree bark ply traffic on the sea, but every land shall all things bear alike: the glebe no more shall feel the harrow's grip, nor vine the hook; the sturdy ploughman shall loose yoke from steer, nor wool with varying colours learn to lie; but in the meadows shall the ram himself, now with soft flush of purple, now with tint of yellow saffron, teach his fleece to shine. While clothed in natural scarlet graze the lambs.

April. It teaches us everything. The coldest and nastiest days of the year can happen in April. It won’t matter. It’s April. The English word for the month comes from the Roman Aprilis, the Latin aperire: to open, to uncover, to make accessible, or to remove whatever stops something from being accessible. It maybe also partly comes from the name of Aphrodite, Greek goddess of love, whose happy fickleness with various gods mirrors the month’s own showery-sunny fickleness. Month of sacrifice and month of playfulness. Month of restoration, of fertility-festivity. Month when the earth and the buds are already open, the creatures asleep for the winter have woken and are already breeding, the birds have already built their nests, birds that this time last year didn’t exist, busy bringing to life the birds that’ll replace them this time next year. Spring-cuckoo month, grass-month. In Gaelic its name means the month that fools mistake for May. April Fool’s Day also probably marks what was the old end of the new year celebrations. Winter has Epiphany. Spring’s gifts are different. Month of dead deities coming back to life. In the French revolutionary calendar, along with the last days of March, it becomes Germinal, the month of return to the source, to the seed, to the germ of things, which is maybe why Zola gave the novel he wrote about hopeless hope this revolutionary title. April the anarchic, the final month, of spring the great connective.

In the face of the calamity, the Modi government froze. In the seven months from March to September 2020, Modi made 82 public appearances—physical as well as virtual. In the next four months, he made 111 such appearances. From February to 25 April 2021, he clocked 92 public appearances. From 25 April, after he called off the Kumbh and his Bengal rallies, Modi disappeared. He made no public appearance for 20 days.147 The prime minister of India fled the field when his people needed the government most. Through all of April and much of May, upper class Indians flooded Twitter with calls for help to find hospital beds, oxygen cylinders, drugs like Remdesivir and ventilators.148 The Union did not think to set up a helpline to guide those who needed this help. Into this space strode the youth Congress leader B.V. Srinivas (@srinivasiyc) who, with a team of volunteers, began to help people reaching out for aid on Twitter. He was so effective in the absence of the State and any government presence that even the embassies of New Zealand and the Philippines contacted him for help when staffers fell ill with Covid.149 Focussed on the government’s image, Jaishankar tweeted: ‘This was an unsolicited supply as they had no Covid cases. Clearly for cheap publicity by you know who. Giving away cylinders like this when there are people in desperate need of oxygen is simply appalling.’ The New Zealand embassy staffer who had received oxygen from Srinivas on 2 May died 18 days later.

Between 1970 and 1971, the feminist movement made significant strides. In 1970, the Equal Rights Amendment was forced out of the House Judiciary Committee, where it had been stuck since 1948; the following year, it passed in the House of Representatives. In response to a sit-in led by Susan Brownmiller, Ladies' Home Journal published a feminist supplement on issues of concern to women. Time featured Sexual Politics author Kate Millett on its cover, and Ms., a feminist monthly, debuted as an insert in New York magazine. Even twelve members of a group with which Barbie had much in common—Transworld Airlines stewardesses—rose up, filing a multimillion-dollar sex discrimination suit against the airline. Surprisingly, Barbie didn't ignore these events as she had the Vietnam War; she responded. Her 1970 "Living" incarnation had jointed ankles, permitting her feet to flatten out. If one views the doll as a stylized fertility icon, Barbie's arched feet are a source of strength; but if one views her as a literal representation of a modern woman—an equally valid interpretation— her arched feet are a hindrance. Historically, men have hobbled women to prevent them from running away. Women of Old China had their feet bound in childhood; Arab women wore sandals on stilts; Palestinian women were secured at the ankles with chains to which bells were attached; Japanese women were wound up in heavy kimonos; and Western women were hampered by long, restrictive skirts and precarious heels. Given this precedent, Barbie's flattened feet were revolutionary. Mattel did not, however, promote them that way. Her feet were just one more "poseable" element of her "poseable" body. It was almost poignant. Barbie was at last able to march with her sisters; but her sisters misunderstood her and pushed her away.

Now the last age by Cumae's Sibyl sung has come and gone, and the majestic roll of circling centuries begins anew: justice returns, returns old Saturn's reign, with a new breed of men sent down from heaven. Inly do thou, at the boy's birth in whom the iron shall cease, the golden race arise, befriend him, chaste Lucina; 'tis thine own apollo reigns. And in thy consulate, this glorious age, O Pollio, shall begin, and the months enter on their mighty march. Under thy guidance, whatso tracks remain of our old wickedness, once done away, shall free the earth from never-ceasing fear. He shall receive the life of gods, and see heroes with gods commingling, and himself be seen of them, and with his father's worth reign o'er a world at peace. For thee, O boy, first shall the earth, untilled, pour freely forth her childish gifts, the gadding ivy-spray with foxglove and Egyptian bean-flower mixed, and laughing-eyed acanthus. Of themselves, untended, will the she-goats then bring home their udders swollen with milk, while flocks afield shall of the monstrous lion have no fear. Thy very cradle shall pour forth for thee caressing flowers. The serpent too shall die, die shall the treacherous poison-plant, and far and wide Assyrian spices spring. But soon as thou hast skill to read of heroes' fame, and of thy father's deeds, and inly learn what virtue is, the plain by slow degrees with waving corn-crops shall to golden grow, fom the wild briar shall hang the blushing grape, and stubborn oaks sweat honey-dew. Nathless yet shall there lurk within of ancient wrong some traces, bidding tempt the deep with ships, gird towns with walls, with furrows cleave the earth. Therewith a second Tiphys shall there be, her hero-freight a second Argo bear; new wars too shall arise, and once again some great Achilles to some Troy be sent.

As I’ve told you many times, I’m split in two. One side contains my exuberant cheerfulness, my flippancy, my joy in life and, above all, my ability to appreciate the lighter side of things. By that I mean not finding anything wrong with flirtations, a kiss, an embrace, an off-color joke. This side of me is usually lying in wait to ambush the other one, which is much purer, deeper and finer. No one knows Anne’s better side, and that’s why most people can’t stand me. Oh, I can be an amusing clown for an afternoon, but after that everyone’s had enough of me to last a month. Actually, I’m what a romantic movie is to a profound thinker—a mere diversion, a comic interlude, something that is soon forgotten: not bad, but not particularly good either. I hate having to tell you this, but why shouldn’t I admit it when I know it’s true? My lighter, more superficial side will always steal a march on the deeper side and therefore always win. You can’t imagine how often I’ve tried to push away this Anne, which is only half of what is known as Anne—to beat her down, hide her. But it doesn’t work, and I know why. I’m afraid that people who know me as I usually am will discover I have another side, a better and finer side. I’m afraid they’ll mock me, think I’m ridiculous and sentimental and not take me seriously. I’m used to not being taken seriously, but only the “lighthearted” Anne is used to it and can put up with it; the “deeper” Anne is too weak. If I force the good Anne into the spotlight for even fifteen minutes, she shuts up like a clam the moment she’s called upon to speak, and lets Anne number one do the talking. Before I realize it, she’s disappeared. So the nice Anne is never seen in company. She’s never made a single appearance, though she almost always takes the stage when I’m alone. I know exactly how I’d like to be, how I am … on the inside. But unfortunately I’m only like that with myself. And perhaps that’s why—no, I’m sure that’s the reason why—I think of myself as happy on the inside and other people think I’m happy on the outside. I’m guided by the pure Anne within, but on the outside I’m nothing but a frolicsome little goat tugging at its tether. As I’ve told you, what I say is not what I feel, which is why I have a reputation for being boy-crazy as well as a flirt, a smart aleck and a reader of romances. The happy-go-lucky Anne laughs, gives a flippant reply, shrugs her shoulders and pretends she doesn’t give a darn. The quiet Anne reacts in just the opposite way. If I’m being completely honest, I’ll have to admit that it does matter to me, that I’m trying very hard to change myself, but that I’m always up against a more powerful enemy. A voice within me is sobbing, “You see, that’s what’s become of you. You’re surrounded by negative opinions, dismayed looks and mocking faces, people who dislike you, and all because you don’t listen to the advice of your own better half.” Believe me, I’d like to listen, but it doesn’t work, because if I’m quiet and serious, everyone thinks I’m putting on a new act and I have to save myself with a joke, and then I’m not even talking about my own family, who assume I must be sick, stuff me with aspirins and sedatives, feel my neck and forehead to see if I have a temperature, ask about my bowel movements and berate me for being in a bad mood, until I just can’t keep it up anymore, because when everybody starts hovering over me, I get cross, then sad, and finally end up turning my heart inside out, the bad part on the outside and the good part on the inside, and keep trying to find a way to become what I’d like to be and what I could be if … if only there were no other people in the world.

That night, Marjan dreamt of Mehregan. The original day of thanksgiving, the holiday is celebrated during the autumn equinox in Iran. A fabulous excuse for a dinner party, something that Persians the world over have a penchant for, Mehregan is also a challenge to the forces of darkness, which if left unheeded will encroach even on the brightest of flames. Bonfires and sparklers glitter in the evening skies on this night, and in homes across the country, everyone is reminded of their blessings by the smell of roasting 'ajil', a mixture of dried fruit, salty pumpkin seeds, and roasted nuts. Handfuls are showered on the poor and needy on Mehregan, with a prayer that the coming year will find them fed and showered with the love of friends and family. In Iran, it was Marjan's favorite holiday. She even preferred it to the bigger and brasher New Year's celebrations in March, anticipating the festivities months in advance. The preparations would begin as early as July, when she and the family gardener, Baba Pirooz, gathered fruit from the plum, apricot, and pear trees behind their house. Along with the green pomegranate bush, the fruit trees ran the length of the half-acre garden. Four trees deep and rustling with green and burgundy canopies, the fattened orchard always reminded Marjan of the bejeweled bushes in the story of Aladdin, the boy with the magic lamp. It was sometimes hard to believe that their home was in the middle of a teeming city and not closer to the Alborz mountains, which looked down on Tehran from loftier heights. After the fruit had been plucked and washed, it would be laid out to dry in the sun. Over the years, Marjan had paid close attention to her mother's drying technique, noting how the fruit was sliced in perfect halves and dipped in a light sugar water to help speed up the wrinkling. Once dried, it would be stored in terra-cotta canisters so vast that they could easily have hidden both both young Marjan and Bahar. And indeed, when empty the canisters had served this purpose during their hide-and-seek games.

Now the last age by Cumae's Sibyl sung has come and gone, and the majestic roll of circling centuries begins anew: justice returns, returns old Saturn's reign, with a new breed of men sent down from heaven. Only do thou, at the boy's birth in whom the iron shall cease, the golden race arise, befriend him, chaste Lucina; 'tis thine own apollo reigns. And in thy consulate, this glorious age, O Pollio, shall begin, and the months enter on their mighty march. Under thy guidance, whatso tracks remain of our old wickedness, once done away, shall free the earth from never-ceasing fear. He shall receive the life of gods, and see heroes with gods commingling, and himself be seen of them, and with his father's worth reign o'er a world at peace. For thee, O boy, first shall the earth, untilled, pour freely forth her childish gifts, the gadding ivy-spray with foxglove and Egyptian bean-flower mixed, and laughing-eyed acanthus. Of themselves, untended, will the she-goats then bring home their udders swollen with milk, while flocks afield shall of the monstrous lion have no fear. Thy very cradle shall pour forth for thee caressing flowers. The serpent too shall die, die shall the treacherous poison-plant, and far and wide Assyrian spices spring. But soon as thou hast skill to read of heroes' fame, and of thy father's deeds, and inly learn what virtue is, the plain by slow degrees with waving corn-crops shall to golden grow, fom the wild briar shall hang the blushing grape, and stubborn oaks sweat honey-dew. Nathless yet shall there lurk within of ancient wrong some traces, bidding tempt the deep with ships, gird towns with walls, with furrows cleave the earth. Therewith a second Tiphys shall there be, her hero-freight a second Argo bear; new wars too shall arise, and once again some great Achilles to some Troy be sent. Then, when the mellowing years have made thee man, no more shall mariner sail, nor pine-tree bark ply traffic on the sea, but every land shall all things bear alike: the glebe no more shall feel the harrow's grip, nor vine the hook; the sturdy ploughman shall loose yoke from steer, nor wool with varying colours learn to lie; but in the meadows shall the ram himself, now with soft flush of purple, now with tint of yellow saffron, teach his fleece to shine.

recalled Stephen Crocker, a graduate student on the UCLA team who had driven up with his best friend and colleague, Vint Cerf. So they decided to meet regularly, rotating among their sites. The polite and deferential Crocker, with his big face and bigger smile, had just the right personality to be the coordinator of what became one of the digital age’s archetypical collaborative processes. Unlike Kleinrock, Crocker rarely used the pronoun I; he was more interested in distributing credit than claiming it. His sensitivity toward others gave him an intuitive feel for how to coordinate a group without trying to centralize control or authority, which was well suited to the network model they were trying to invent. Months passed, and the graduate students kept meeting and sharing ideas while they waited for some Powerful Official to descend upon them and give them marching orders. They assumed that at some point the authorities from the East Coast would appear with the rules and regulations and protocols engraved on tablets to be obeyed by the mere managers of the host computer sites. “We were nothing more than a self-appointed bunch of graduate students, and I was convinced that a corps of authority figures or grownups from Washington or Cambridge would descend at any moment and tell us what the rules were,” Crocker recalled. But this was a new age. The network was supposed to be distributed, and so was the authority over it. Its invention and rules would be user-generated. The process would be open. Though it was funded partly to facilitate military command and control, it would do so by being resistant to centralized command and control. The colonels had ceded authority to the hackers and academics. So after an especially fun gathering in Utah in early April 1967, this gaggle of graduate students, having named itself the Network Working Group, decided that it would be useful to write down some of what they had conjured up.95 And Crocker, who with his polite lack of pretense could charm a herd of hackers into consensus, was tapped for the task. He was anxious to find an approach that did not seem presumptuous. “I realized that the mere act of writing down what we were talking about could be seen as a presumption of authority and someone was going to come and yell at us—presumably some adult out of the east.

Some years ago I saw a documentary on dying whose main theme was that people die as they lived. That was Jimmy. For five years, since he began undergoing operations for bladder cancer and even after his lung cancer was diagnosed, he continued the activities that he considered important, marching against crackhouses, campaigning against the demolition of the Ford Auditorium, organizing Detroit Summer, making speeches, and writing letters to the editor and articles for the SOSAD newsletter and Northwest Detroiter. In 1992 while he was undergoing the chemotherapy that cleared up his bladder cancer, he helped form the Coalition against Privatization and to Save Our City. The coalition was initiated by activist members of a few AFSCME locals who contacted Carl Edwards and Alice Jennings who in turn contacted us. Jimmy helped write the mission statement that gave the union activists a sense of themselves as not only city workers but citizens of the city and its communities. The coalition’s town meetings and demonstrations were instrumental in persuading the new mayor, Dennis Archer, to come out against privatization, using language from the coalition newsletter to explain his position. At the same time Jimmy was putting out the garbage, keeping our corner at Field and Goethe free of litter and rubbish, mopping the kitchen and bathroom floors, picking cranberries, and keeping up “his” path on Sutton. After he entered the hospice program, which usually means death within six months, and up to a few weeks before his death, Jimmy slowed down a bit, but he was still writing and speaking and organizing. He used to say that he wasn’t going to die until he got ready, and because he was so cheerful and so engaged it was easy to believe him. A few weeks after he went on oxygen we did three movement-building workshops at the SOSAD office for a group of Roger Barfield’s friends who were trying to form a community-action group following a protest demonstration at a neighborhood sandwich shop over the murder of one of their friends. With oxygen tubes in his nostrils and a portable oxygen tank by his side, Jimmy spoke for almost an hour on one of his favorite subjects, the need to “think dialectically, rather than biologically.” Recognizing that this was probably one of Jimmy’s last extended speeches, I had the session videotaped by Ron Scott. At the end of this workshop we asked participants to come to the next session prepared to grapple with three questions: What can we do to make our neighborhoods safe? How can we motivate people to transform? How can we create jobs?

Blessed Man” is a tribute to Updike’s tenacious maternal grandmother, Katherine Hoyer, who died in 1955. Inspired by an heirloom, a silver thimble engraved with her initials, a keepsake Katherine gave to John and Mary as a wedding present (their best present, he told his mother), the story is an explicit attempt to bring her back to life (“O Lord, bless these poor paragraphs, that would do in their vile ignorance Your work of resurrection”), and a meditation on the extent to which it’s possible to recapture experience and preserve it through writing. The death of his grandparents diminished his family by two fifths and deprived him of a treasured part of his past, the sheltered years of his youth and childhood. Could he make his grandmother live again on the page? It’s certainly one of his finest prose portraits, tender, clear-eyed, wonderfully vivid. At one point the narrator remembers how, as a high-spirited teenager, he would scoop up his tiny grandmother, “lift her like a child, crooking one arm under her knees and cupping the other behind her back. Exultant in my height, my strength, I would lift that frail brittle body weighing perhaps a hundred pounds and twirl with it in my arms while the rest of the family watched with startled smiles of alarm.” When he adds, “I was giving my past a dance,” we hear the voice of John Updike exulting in his strength. Katherine takes center stage only after an account of the dramatic day of her husband’s death. John Hoyer died a few months after John and Mary were married, on the day both the newlyweds and Mary’s parents were due to arrive in Plowville. From this unfortunate coincidence, the Updike family managed to spin a pair of short stories. Six months before he wrote “Blessed Man,” Updike’s mother had her first story accepted by The New Yorker. For years her son had been doing his filial best to help get her work published—with no success. In college he sent out the manuscript of her novel about Ponce de León to the major Boston publishers, and when he landed at The New Yorker he made sure her stories were read by editors instead of languishing in the slush pile. These efforts finally bore fruit when an editor at the magazine named Rachel MacKenzie championed “Translation,” a portentous family saga featuring Linda’s version of her father’s demise. Maxwell assured Updike that his colleagues all thought his mother “immensely gifted”; if that sounds like tactful exaggeration, Maxwell’s idea that he could detect “the same quality of mind running through” mother and son is curious to say the least. Published in The New Yorker on March 11, 1961, “Translation” was signed Linda Grace Hoyer and narrated by a character named Linda—but it wasn’t likely to be mistaken for a memoir. The story is overstuffed with biblical allusion, psychodrama, and magical thinking, most of it Linda’s. She believes that her ninety-year-old father plans to be translated directly to heaven, ascending like Elijah in a whirlwind, with chariots of fire, and to pass his mantle to a new generation, again like Elijah. It’s not clear whether this grand design is his obsession, as she claims, or hers. As it happens, the whirlwind is only a tussle with his wife that lands the old folks on the floor beside the bed. Linda finds them there and says, “Of all things. . . . What are you two doing?” Her father answers, his voice “matter-of-fact and conversational”: “We are sitting on the floor.” Having spoken these words, he dies. Linda’s son Eric (a writer, of course) arrives on the scene almost immediately. When she tells him, “Grampy died,” he replies, “I know, Mother, I know. It happened as we turned off the turnpike. I felt

I watch fireworks in July 2013. Two weeks later, George Zimmerman walks free, and Trayvon Martin is still dead. Marvin Gaye sings, 'If you wanna love, you got to save the babies,' and a black mother pulls her son close. I watch fireworks in July 2014. Later that month, the world turns to the Internet and sees Eric Garner choked to death by police officer Daniel Pantaleo. Marvin Gaye sings 'Trigger happy policing / Panic is spreading / God knows where we're heading,' and thousands of people march from New York to Washington. I will watch the fireworks in 2015 and black churches are burning in the south. I will watch the fireworks in 2015 and no one marched for Renisha McBride. I will watch the fireworks in 2015 and people I love can be legally married on Saturday, and then legally fired from their jobs on Monday. Marvin Gaye sings 'In the morning, I'll be all right, my friend,' and a group of black children watch the sky light up, seeing darkness turned inside out for the first time.

Little by little, new details about atrocities committed against Jews kept making their way into the annex. Some were doubted, others confirmed, but they still did not provide a coherent picture. On the last day of March 1944 Anne wrote again about the atrocities Jews had to fear. In concise, detached language she reports the unimaginable extent of the National Socialist madness. “Hungary is occupied by German troops. There are still 1 million Jews there, so they too will have had it now!” (March 31, 1944; ver. C). Within two months, Adolf Eichmann had half a million Hungarian Jews deported to Auschwitz. Almost all of them died in the gas chambers.

A commencement speech Mann gave two months before his death served as a clarion call for students to embrace his worldview: “I beseech you to treasure up in your hearts these my parting words: Be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity.

Dr. Oz’s New Age affinity for psychics, spirit guides, past lives, and contacting the dead was showcased on his March 15, 2011 program—just two months after the launch of the Daniel Plan—titled, “Psychic Mediums: Are they the New Therapists?” The promo on his website read: “Can talking to lost loved ones heal your grief? Hear why psychic John Edward believes you can talk to the dead.

The color of the ocean certainly looked different as we steamed north, using the Gulf Stream to give us an additional 3 knots of headway. The beautiful green sea gave way to a steel-colored blue-gray frigid foam. It was early spring now and although the weather in New England still had the feeling of winter, the migratory birds knew better. The cold wind hummed as it blew through the ships rigging and with every turn of the screw, we relentlessly inched farther North. After three months of tropical weather, we now welcomed the dryer frosty air. We represented Maine, this was our environment, and this year, March did not disappoint us. We knew enough to expect that in this changeable weather it could snow well into April. In fact the farmers in the Northeast call a late snow “Poor man’s fertilizer.

…the following day, after only six months in office, Manuel Urrutia Lleó resigned from the Presidency of Cuba, to which people in attendance started to applaud. He simply took off his suit coat and changed into a guayabera. Then leaving through a back door, he made his way to the Venezuelan Embassy where he sought asylum. Shortly thereafter, he emigrated from Cuba to the United States where he became bitter and depressed. In 1964 the former President Urrutia wrote a book named ''Fidel Castro & Company, Inc.: Communist Tyranny in Cuba,” condemning the Castro régime. Urrutia charged that he had been ousted from the presidency because Castro sought to stop what he called the “neutralization of his march toward Communism.” On July 5, 1981, Manuel Urrutia Lleó died at St. John's Hospital in Queens, New York. At the time of his death he was 79 years old.

ORIGIN OF TWO COUNTRIES They say Churchill said: “Jordan was an idea I had one spring at about four-thirty in the afternoon.” The fact is that during the month of March 1921, in just three days, British Colonial Secretary Winston Churchill and his forty advisers drew a new map for the Middle East. They invented two countries, named them, appointed their monarchs, and sketched their borders with a finger in the sand. Thus the land embraced by the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, the clay of the very first books, was called Iraq. And the new country amputated from Palestine was called Transjordan, later Jordan. The task at hand was to change the names of colonies so they would at least appear to be Arab kingdoms. And to divide those colonies, to break them up: an urgent lesson drawn from imperial memory. While France pulled Lebanon out of a hat, Churchill bestowed the crown of Iraq on the errant Prince Faisal, and a plebiscite ratified him with suspicious enthusiasm: he got 96 percent of the vote. His brother Prince Abdullah became king of Jordan. Both monarchs belonged to a family placed on the British payroll at the recommendation of Lawrence of Arabia. The manufacturers of countries signed the birth certificates of Iraq and Jordan in Cairo’s Semiramis Hotel, and then went out to see the pyramids. Churchill fell off his camel and hurt his hand. Fortunately, it was nothing serious. Churchill’s favorite artist could continue painting landscapes.

Although, approximately 2,800 of the Kennedy assassination documents have been released, only 52 files have not been previously seen. It comes as no surprise that President Trump held up releasing the remaining files, stating that his decision was reached on the advice of the CIA and the FBI. After over a half century, President Trump cited national security as the reason for the hold up and granted an additional 6 months for the Federal Agencies to review hundreds of documents, which will now be held back until March 12, 2018. The new release date is set for April 26, 2018. In a memo expressing his concerns raised by the intelligence officials, Trump wrote: “I am ordering today that the veil finally be lifted however, I have no choice but to accept those redactions rather than allow potentially irreversible harm to our nation’s security.” Journalists are poring over the documents but it will take some time before the released papers, many of which were hand written, will fully be understood. The concerns expressed, include Lee Harvey Oswald’s trip to Mexico City where he met with Cuban and Soviet Intelligence Agencies. Although Administration officials said that there is no cover-up and that the delay is just an effort to avoid compromising national security, suspicions that the government is covering up secrets about the case are bound to reappear. Most Americans still believe that someone other than Oswald must have been involved in the assassination and this delay in releasing all the documents just fuels the fire.

In the evening, she took a sleeping pill. As the months passed, she became much kinder to me than she had been, but her new solicitude had an impersonal quality, as if she were tending a homeless man on the street rather than her husband. She stopped sleeping in Matt's bed and returned to ours, but I rarely joined her, choosing instead to sleep in my chair. One night in February, I woke up to find Erica covering me with a blanket. Rather than opening my eyes, I pretended that I was still asleep. When she put her lips to my head, I imagined pulling her toward me and kissing her neck and shoulders, but I didn't do it. At the time, I was like a man encased in a heavy suit of armor, and inside that corporeal fortress I lived with a single-minded wish: I will not be comforted. As perverse as it was, this desire felt like a lifeline, the only shred of truth left to me. I feel quite sure that Erica knew what I felt, and in March she announced a change.

On the 30th of March, 1820—some months after this strange religious revolution—the first party of Christian missionaries arrived at the islands from Massachusetts. They were well received. They found a people without a religion, and their work was easy. Other missionary parties followed from time to time, and found the field alike profitable to the cause in which they labored and to themselves individually. They acquired substantial possessions in their new home, controlled the government for the fifty or more years following, and their children are to-day among the most prosperous residents of the group. This is not said with a view to undervalue the services of the early missionaries to Hawaii, but to show that all missionary fields have not been financially unfruitful to zealous and provident workers.

It was in New York in late March 1917, a few months after Buster and Myra had abandoned Joe in California while he was on a bender, breaking up the Three Keatons’ act for good.

The commissioners received thirty-three proposals; Vaux and Olmsted’s—entry no. 33—arrived on March 31, 1858, one day before the deadline. That deadline had already been pushed back a month, ostensibly to accommodate new specifications that had been added to the contest, but perhaps because Vaux and Olmsted weren’t ready. There’s no evidence the contest was rigged, but the second-, third-, and fourth-place winners also already

In August 1492, tens of thousands of Jewish refugees from Spain were halted at the border to Portugal. King John, forewarned of his neighbor’s expulsion order, had ordered his guards to permit their entrance with the proviso that they pay eight crusados and agree to depart in six months. On March 31, 1493, when the six-month period elapsed, the king ordered his soldiers to seize seven hundred Jewish children and declare them Crown slaves as an example to all who overstayed. As

By the grace of the Mother, she was paranoid enough about any new allies or companions that she hid the Horn and Harp. She created a pocket of nothingness, she told me, and stashed them there. Only she could access that pocket of nothingness—only she could retrieve the Horn and Harp from its depths. But she remained unaware that Pelias had already told the Daglan of their presence. She had no idea that she was allowed to live, if only for a time, so they might figure out where she’d concealed them. So Pelias, under their command, might squeeze their location out of her. Just as she had no idea that the gate she had left open into our home world … the Daglan had been waiting a long, long time for that, too. But they were patient. Content to let more and more of Theia’s forces come into the new world—thus leaving her own undefended. Content to wait to gain her trust, so she might hand over the Horn and Harp. It was a trap, to be played out over months or years. To get the instruments of power from Theia, to march back into our home world and claim it again … It was a long, elegant trap, to be sprung at the perfect moment. And, distracted by the beauty of our new world, we did not consider that it all might be too easy. Too simple. Midgard was a land of plenty. Of green and light and beauty. Much like our own lands—with one enormous exception. The memory spanned to a view from a cliff of a distant plain full of creatures. Some winged, some not. We were not the only beings to come to this world hoping to claim it. We would learn too late that the other peoples had been lured by the Daglan under similarly friendly guises. And that they, too, had come armed and ready to fight for these lands. But before conflict could erupt between us all, we found that Midgard was already occupied. Theia and Pelias, with Helena and Silene trailing, warriors ten deep behind them, stood atop the cliff, surveying the verdant land and the enormous walled city on the horizon. Bryce’s breath caught. She’d spent years working in the company of the lost books of Parthos, knowing that a great human civilization had once flourished within its walls, but here, before her, was proof of the grandeur, the human skill that had existed on Midgard. And had been entirely wiped away.

The yearly cycle of Sakha subsistence related to the natural environment is apparent in their calendar. The new year begins in May, or the month of fish spawning (Yam). June is Bes, or pine, July is Ot, or grass, August is Atyrd'akh, or rake, and September is Balagan, a style of Sakha house. Grass and rakes are, of course, references to grass cutting subsistence practices, while balagan are the traditional wooden houses that the Sakha use during the winter, as opposed to uraha, which are cone-shaped white birch houses used in summer. The names for October, November, December, January, and February are Altynn'y, Setinn'l, Akhsynn'y, Tokhsunn'u, and Olunn'u. These mean, respectively, the sixth, seventh, eighth, ninth, and tenth months counting from the new year in May. The spring months of March and April are called Kulun Tutar and Muus Ustar, or the months of foals and flowing ice, respectively. These are references to the rush of foal births and the thawing of the Lena River. In actuality, foals are not born until April and drift ice does not appear until May. Although these last two months show a slight delay between events and names, the calendar indicates how the Sakha engage in pastoralism, grass cutting, and fishing activities throughout the year. It is also interesting that the winter months between October and February are given simple numeric names.

W.A.C. Bennett grew tired of the company’s obstinance. In August 1961, after rumors of a potential takeover had circulated within the province for months, Bennett introduced the Power Development Act into the legislature in order to confiscate BC Electric for C$111.0 million. The bill passed unanimously, allowing the government to seize control of the utility. The move was highly controversial, sparking an uproar within the business press, with some overly dramatic papers even labeling Bennett a dictator. In an unfortunate coincidence, the head of British Columbia Power and BC Electric, A.E. “Dal” Grauer, had passed away a few days earlier, and his funeral transpired on the very same day the government took over the company he had led.184 In addition to taking BC Electric, the bill offered to buy the rest of BC Power for C$68.6 million, with interest accruing on this amount until the offer expired at the end of July 1963. Combined with the C$111.0 million paid for BC Electric, this offer would result in a total payment for all of BC Power’s operations of C$179.6 million—or the equivalent of C$38.00 per share. Bennett justified this price by highlighting that the proposal was a premium to the C$34.75 price the shares sold for the day before the expropriation.185 While the combined price of C$38.00 per share was reasonable, the valuation for the constituent parts was peculiar. The C$111.0 million price for BC Electric matched its paid-in capital but ignored the other C$28.6 million of common book equity. And this amount sidestepped the debate over whether book value was even an appropriate methodology for the utility in the first place. The C$68.6 million price for the rest of BC Power’s assets was even odder since these remnant assets generated no income and were carried on the balance sheet at only C$4.0 million. This was a clear overpayment for the holding company’s assets, proposed to entice it into consenting to the BC Electric takeover.186 Predictably, BC Power did not stand idly by. After preliminary attempts to negotiate a higher price were thwarted, the company took action in the Supreme Court of British Columbia on November 13, 1961. BC Power sought rulings on the validity of the initial Act, the right to additional compensation, and the convertibility feature of debentures issued by BC Electric (more on this last point in the next section).187 While the parties awaited trial, the government took additional steps to further entrench the takeover. At the end of March 1962—nearly eight months after the original seizure—the British Columbia legislature passed two new statutes. The first was the province’s amendment of the Power Development Act, which paid an additional C$60.8 million to BC Power for BC Electric and eliminated the offer for the rest of the parent company’s assets. Table 1 shows that the amendment didn’t significantly alter the total compensation. But the new consideration was a more realistic number for BC Electric and solved for the peculiar offer for the remaining assets, which BC Power would now have to sell themselves.

Anglos dominated the prisoner population in 1977 and did not lose their plurality until 1988. Meanwhile, absolute numbers grew across the board—with the total number of those incarcerated approximately doubling during each interval. African American prisoners surpassed all other groups in 1988, but by 1995, they had been overtaken by Latinos; however, Black people have the highest rate of incarceration of any racial/ethnic grouping in California, or, for that matter, in the United States (see also Bonczar and Beck 1997). TABLE 4 CDC PRISONER POPULATION BY RACE/ETHNICITY The structure of new laws, intersecting with the structure of the burgeoning relative surplus population, and the state’s concentrated use of criminal laws in the Southland, produced a remarkable racial and ethnic shift in the prison population. Los Angeles is the primary county of commitment. Most prisoners are modestly educated men in the prime of life: 88 percent are between 19 and 44 years old. Less than 45 percent graduated from high school or read at the ninth-grade level; one in four is functionally illiterate. And, finally, the percentage of prisoners who worked six months or longer for the same employer immediately before being taken into custody has declined, from 54.5 percent in 1982 to 44 percent in 2000 (CDC, Characteristics of Population, various years). TABLE 5 CDC COMMITMENTS BY CONTROLLING OFFENSE (%) At the bottom of the first and subsequent waves of new criminal legislation lurked a key contradiction. On the one hand, the political rhetoric, produced and reproduced in the media, concentrated on the need for laws and prisons to control violence. “Crime” and “violence” seemed to be identical. However, as table 5 shows, there was a significant shift in the controlling (or most serious) offenses for those committed to the CDC, from a preponderance of violent offenses in 1980 to nonviolent crimes in 1995. More to the point, the controlling offenses for more than half of 1995’s commitments were nonviolent crimes of illness or of illegal income producing activity: drug use, drug sales, burglary, motor vehicle theft. The outcome of the first two years of California’s broadly written “three strikes” law presents a similar picture: in the period March 1994–January 1996, 15 percent of controlling offenses were violent crimes, 31 percent were drug offenses, and 41 percent were crimes against property (N = 15,839) (Christoper Davis et al. 1996). The relative surplus population comes into focus in these numbers. In 1996, 43 percent of third-strike prisoners were Black, 32.4 percent Latino, and 24.6 percent Anglo. The deliberate intensification of surveillance and arrest in certain areas, combined with novel crimes of status, drops the weight of these numbers into particular places. The chair of the State Task Force on Youth Gang Violence expressed the overlap between presumptions of violence and the exigencies of everyday reproduction when he wrote: “We are talking about well-organized, drug-dealing, dangerously armed and profit-motivated young hoodlums who are engaged in the vicious crimes of murder, rape, robbery, extortion and kidnapping as a means of making a living” (Philibosian 1986: ix; emphasis added).

IN CLOSING, LET’S TAKE a brief look back at where we began: with 10 children who developed type 1 diabetes in 24 months within two miles of one another in the upscale suburbs of Boston. Rather than bemoan their fate, parents there organized and asked for an investigation to be conducted by the state, which is ongoing. Among those who have participated in organizing meetings are Ray Allen, the Celtics star, and his wife, Shannon, whose son, Walker, was the seventh child diagnosed there. “Shannon and Ray have turned out to be the most incredible advocates,” Ann Marie Kreft recently told me. “We have fabulous people on board who are spending inordinate amounts of their time on advocacy.” I asked her what they are advocating for. “I think we all agree that mandatory case reporting would be the ideal,” she said. “That would be the dream come true. I think we may be building up to that.” Rather than have to design a special survey every time an apparent cluster of type 1 cases emerges, mandatory case reporting, on a national level, would permit the CDC to automatically track cases as they emerge, to see not only the big national picture, but also local variations that could prove crucial in unraveling the riddle of why type 1 diabetes continues to rise, each and every year, by 3 percent. Presently, however, no national organization is advocating for mandated case reporting of type 1. Where is the line of protesters holding placards, marching outside the Atlanta offices of the CDC? Perhaps we need to look farther back, to the period before the diabetes pandemic began. In 1866, you might recall, the death rate from diabetes in New York City was 1.3 per 100,000 residents. If that rate held today for the 306 million residents of the United States, there would be 4,284 deaths due to diabetes each year. Instead, in 2006, there were 72,507 death certificates on which diabetes was listed as the underlying cause. The official national death rate from diabetes now stands at 23.3 per 100,000, according to the CDC — nearly 19 times higher than it was following the Civil War. And that doesn’t count the additional 200,000 or so deaths each year for which diabetes is listed as a “contributing” cause.

When Derek Sivers first built his business CDbaby.com, he set up a standard confirmation email to let customers know their order had been shipped. After a few months, Derek felt that this email wasn’t aligned with his mission—to make people smile. So he sat down and wrote a better one. Your CD has been gently taken from our CD Baby shelves with sterilized contamination-free gloves and placed on a satin pillow. A team of 50 employees inspected your CD and polished it to make sure it was in the best possible condition before mailing. Our packing specialist from Japan lit a candle and a hush fell over the crowd as he put your CD into the finest gold-lined box that money can buy. We all had a wonderful celebration afterwards and the whole party marched down the street to the post office where the entire town of Portland waved “Bon Voyage!” to your package, on its way to you, in our private CD Baby jet on this day, Friday, June 6th. I hope you had a wonderful time shopping at CD Baby. We sure did. Your picture is on our wall as “Customer of the Year.” We’re all exhausted but can’t wait for you to come back to CDBABY.COM!! —Derek Sivers, Anything You Want The result wasn’t just delighted customers. That one email brought thousands of new customers to CD Baby. The people who got it couldn’t help sharing it with their friends. Try Googling “private CD Baby jet”; you’ll find over 900,000 search results to date. Derek’s email has been cited by business blogs the world over as an example of how to authentically put your words to work for your business.

The British public first fell in love with Jamie Oliver’s authentic, down-to-earth personality in the late ‘90s when he was featured in a documentary on the River Café. Jamie became a household name because of his energetic and infectious way of inspiring people to believe that anyone can cook and eat well. In his TV shows and cookery books and on his website, he made the concept of cooking good food practical and accessible to anyone. When Jamie Oliver opened a new restaurant in Perth, it naturally caused a bit of a buzz. High-profile personalities and big brands create an air of expectation. Brands like Jamie Oliver are talked about not just because of their fame and instant recognition, but because they have meaning attached to them. And people associate Jamie with simplicity, inclusiveness, energy, and creativity. If you’re one of the first people to have the experience of eating at the new Jamie’s Italian, then you’ve instantly got a story that you can share with your friends. The stories we tell to others (and to ourselves) are the reason that people were prepared to queue halfway down the street when Jamie’s Italian opened the doors to its Perth restaurant in March of 2013. As with pre-iPhone launch lines at the Apple store, the reaction of customers frames the scarcity of the experience. When you know there’s a three-month wait for a dinner booking (there is, although 50% of the restaurant is reserved for walk-ins), it feels like a win to be one of the few to have a booking. The reaction of other people makes the story better in the eyes of prospective diners. The hype and the scarcity just heighten the anticipation of the experience. People don’t go just for the food; they go for the story they can tell. Jamie told the UK press that 30,000 napkins are stolen from branches of his restaurant every month. Customers were also stealing expensive toilet flush handles until Jamie had them welded on. The loss of the linen and toilet fittings might impact Jamie’s profits, but it also helps to create the myth of the brand. QUESTIONS FOR YOU How would you like customers to react to your brand?

March 2012, a month before Charlie found his investors, the Federal Reserve had held a daylong conference about consumer-payment systems at which there was a lot of grousing about the fact that despite all the technological innovation going on in the world, the infrastructure for moving money around the country was still based on technology from the 1960s and 1970s. The Automated Clearing House, or ACH, which facilitated payments between bank accounts, was created in the 1970s and had not changed much since; this helped explain why bank transfers took at least a day to go through. For most Americans, the easiest and fastest way to send money to a friend or family member was still the old-fashioned paper check. This problem was not just in the United States. A week before New York Tech Day, the Canadian government announced the launch of a new digital currency effort, called Mint Chip, that it hoped would spur innovation in payments.

Jack Reacher made his first appearance in print on March 17, 1997—St. Patrick’s Day—when Putnam published Killing Floor in the United States, which was Reacher’s—and my—debut. But I can trace his, and the book’s, genesis backward at least to New Year’s Eve 1988. Back then I worked for a commercial television station in Manchester, England. I was eleven years into a career as a presentation director, which was a little like an air traffic controller for the network airwaves. In February 1988, the UK commercial network had started twenty-four-hour broadcasting. For a year before that, management had been talking about how to man the new expanded commitment. None of us really wanted to work nights. Management didn’t really want to hire extra people. End of story. Stalemate. Impasse. What broke it was the offer of a huge raise. We took it, and by New Year’s Eve we were ten fat and happy months into the new contract. I went to a party, but didn’t feel much like celebrating. Not that I wasn’t content in the short term—I sleep better by day than night, and I like being up and about when the world is quiet and lonely, and for sure I was having a ball with the new salary. But I knew in my bones that management resented the raise, and I knew that the new contract was in fact the beginning of the end. Sooner or later, we would all be fired in revenge. I felt it was only a matter of time. Nobody agreed with me, except one woman. At the party, in a quiet moment, she asked me, “What are you going to do when this is all over?

O’Neill and his army marched south from Ulster to meet the enemy while his ally Red Hugh O’Donnell marched in from the west. But once the Irish armies were in place, O’Neill and O’Donnell began arguing as to which of them should begin the attack. This delay proved fatal as the agreed upon hour of rendezvous with the Spaniards passed, and the window of opportunity for an Irish victory slammed shut. The Battle of Kinsale lasted three months, and in the end O’Neill was unable to defeat Mountjoy’s siege lines. Finally the Spanish troops surrendered to the English and sailed home. Thousands of Irish rebels died in the fighting or, taken prisoner, were hung. Hugh O’Neill was forced to submit to the English conquerors in a series of humiliating ceremonies, first on his knees to Mountjoy, then to the Lord Deputy and the Irish Privy Council. It was only after he’d put his submission in writing, renouncing his title of “The O’Neill and his allegiance to Spain, as well as protesting loyalty to the Crown, was he told that Elizabeth had died six days before. Mountjoy had tricked him. It was said that O’Neill wept openly and copiously for both his personal defeat and the ruination of the “Irish cause.” The rebel leader retreated to Ulster, and by the good graces of the new king of England, was pardoned once again, and his lands restored to him. He took up residency in his luxurious home, but spurred by a series of dangerous events and the realization that no hope was left for a free Ireland, O’Neill and a handful of Irish overlords and their families sailed from their homeland in 1607. The tragic “Flight of the Earls” ended the most tumultuous century in Ireland’s history. Tyrone,

public statements condemning segregation, sharply worded telegrams to Washington, and meetings with White House officials—were demonstrably ineffectual. New and more dramatic measures were in order. Mass action, Randolph reasoned, would be required, and he proposed a protest of 10,000 black people marching down Pennsylvania Avenue to demand an end to segregation in the armed forces and exclusion from jobs in the defense industry. Drawing on community organizing and protest networks developed during the 1920s and 1930s, this would be a broad, national mobilization of African Americans. The substance of their demand would be full and equal participation in the national defense effort, and the form of the demand would be a mass mobilization designed to compel the federal government to action. The MOWM, in effect, pioneered the type of protest politics that was used to considerable effect during the civil rights movement to push the federal government to enforce or enact African American citizenship rights. Randolph announced the March on Washington proposal in a January 1941 statement to the press. He declared that “power and pressure do not reside in the few, and intelligentsia, they lie in and flow from the masses.… Power is the active principle of only the organized masses, the masses united for a definitive purpose.” 19 Two months later Randolph issued the official call for the march, set for July 1, 1941. Drawing on his standing as a prominent black leader, and especially as the head of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters (BSCP), Randolph made his case that the time was right. “In this period of power politics, nothing counts but pressure, more pressure, and still more pressure,” he wrote in the call to march. “To this end we propose that 10,000 Negroes MARCH ON WASHINGTON FOR JOBS IN NATIONAL DEFENSE AND EQUAL INTEGRATION IN THE FIGHTING FORCES.” 20 To coordinate this massive effort, organizers established a March on Washington Committee, headed by Randolph, along with a sponsoring committee and regional committees in cities across the country. Galvanized by a rising desire for action within black communities, the idea found enthusiastic approval in the black press and eventually won the endorsement of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the National Urban League, and other elements of black leadership. 21 By the end of May, Randolph estimated that 100,000 black Americans would march. A national grassroots movement was afoot, and Randolph grew even more confident in his vision for the demonstration. “Let the Negro masses march!” he declared. “Let the Negro masses speak!” 22

If I could be God for a day, I would instantly replace July and August with two Septembers so the twelve months of the new calendar year would consist of January, February, March, April, May, June, September, September, September, October, November, December. On second thought, I'd also replace December with another September, thus deleting the Mas season and ending the year with a fourth September. The Mas season, once known as Christmas until we took Christ out of it, leaving only mas, the Spanish word for more, is my least favorable month of the year because of the greed-mandated financial, emotional and spiritual stresses that the economy-dependent celebration of Mas imposes.

This was Chase’s second sweetheart deal in less than a year. Six months before, in March 2008, Chase had “rescued” the imploding investment banking giant Bear Stearns, buying the venerable firm with the aid of $29 billion in guarantees extended by the New York branch of the Federal Reserve—whose chairman of the board of directors at the time was, get this, JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon.

Before this regime started, I had a reasonably long password—about eleven characters long, if I recall correctly. But the constant pressure to make a new password has steadily degraded my ingenuity. In 2012 I gave up and just made each password into the month that the e-mail reminder arrived. So when the March e-mail password reset reminder arrived, I changed my password to March2012! (with the requisite exclamation point to satisfy the symbol police). In June, I changed it to 2012June?, and on like that. I had dropped to nine easily guessable characters.

Once we assembled the entire package, Mike named it Netscape SuiteSpot, as it would be the “suite” that displaced Microsoft’s BackOffice. We lined everything up for a major launch on March 5, 1996, in New York. Then, just two weeks before the launch, Marc, without telling Mike or me, revealed the entire strategy to the publication Computer Reseller News. I was livid. I immediately sent him a short email: To: Marc Andreessen Cc: Mike Homer From: Ben Horowitz Subject : Launch I guess we’re not going to wait until the 5th to launch the strategy. — Ben Within fifteen minutes, I received the following reply. To: Ben Horowitz Cc: Mike Homer, Jim Barksdale (CEO), Jim Clark (Chairman) From: Marc Andreessen Subject: Re: Launch Apparently you do not understand how serious the situation is. We are getting killed killed killed out there. Our current product is radically worse than the competition. We’ve had nothing to say for months. As a result, we’ve lost over $3B in market capitalization. We are now in danger of losing the entire company and it’s all server product management’s fault. Next time do the fucking interview yourself. Fuck you, Marc I received this email the same day that Marc appeared barefoot and sitting on a throne on the cover of Time magazine. When I first saw the cover, I felt thrilled. I had never met anyone in my life who had been on the cover of Time. Then I felt sick. I brought both the magazine and the email home to Felicia to get a second opinion. I was very worried. I was twenty-nine years old, had a wife and three children, and needed my job. She looked at the email and the magazine cover and said, “You need to start looking for a job right away.” In the end, I didn’t get fired and over the next two years, SuiteSpot grew from nothing to a $400 million a year business. More shocking, Marc and I eventually became friends; we’ve been friends and business partners ever since. People often ask me how we’ve managed to work effectively across three companies over eighteen years. Most business relationships either become too tense to tolerate or not tense enough to be productive after a while. Either people challenge each other to the point where they don’t like each other or they become complacent about each other’s feedback and no longer benefit from the relationship. With Marc and me, even after eighteen years, he upsets me almost every day by finding something wrong in my thinking, and I do the same for him. It works.

EARNINGS McDonald's Plans Marketing Push as Profit Slides By Julie Jargon | 436 words Associated Press The burger giant has been struggling to maintain relevance among younger consumers and fill orders quickly in kitchens that have grown overwhelmed with menu items. McDonald's Corp. plans a marketing push to emphasize its fresh-cooked breakfasts as it battles growing competition for the morning meal. Competition at breakfast has heated up recently as Yum Brands Inc.'s Taco Bell entered the business with its new Waffle Taco last month and other rivals have added or discounted breakfast items. McDonald's Chief Executive Don Thompson said it hasn't yet noticed an impact from Taco Bell's breakfast debut, but that the overall increased competition "forces us to focus even more on being aggressive in breakfast." Mr. Thompson's comments came after McDonald's on Tuesday reported that its profit for the first three months of 2014 dropped 5.2% from a year earlier, weaker than analysts' expectations. Comparable sales at U.S. restaurants open more than a year declined 1.7% for the quarter and 0.6% for March, the fifth straight month of declines in the company's biggest market. Global same-store sales rose 0.5% for both the quarter and month. Mr. Thompson acknowledged again that the company has lost relevance with some customers and needs to strengthen its menu offerings. He emphasized Tuesday that McDonald's is focused on stabilizing key markets, including the U.S., Germany, Australia and Japan. The CEO said McDonald's has dominated the fast-food breakfast business for 35 years, and "we don't plan on giving that up." The company plans in upcoming ads to inform customers that it cooks its breakfast, unlike some rivals. "We crack fresh eggs, grill sausage and bacon," Mr. Thompson said. "This is not a microwave deal." Beyond breakfast, McDonald's also plans to boost marketing of core menu items such as Big Macs and french fries, since those core products make up 40% of total sales. To serve customers more quickly, the chain is working to optimize staffing, and is adding new prep tables that let workers more efficiently add new toppings when guests want to customize orders. McDonald's also said it aims to sell more company-owned restaurants outside the U.S. to franchisees. Currently, 81% of its restaurants around the world are franchised. Collecting royalties from franchisees provides a stable source of income for a restaurant company and removes the cost of operating them. McDonald's reported a first-quarter profit of $1.2 billion, or $1.21 a share, down from $1.27 billion, or $1.26 a share, a year earlier. The company partly attributed the decline to the effect of income-tax benefits in the prior year. Total revenue for the quarter edged up 1.4% to $6.7 billion, though costs rose faster, at 2.3%. Analysts polled by Thomson Reuters forecast earnings of $1.24 a share on revenue of $6.72 billion.

Part 1- If I can do it, so can you. I was born and lived in one of the most oldest and most oldest and most beautiful cities in Albania. I lived under the communist regime where everybody was poor, there was no rich people visited the Elite group who dictate the country. Since I was little girl I dreamed of fairy tale life. But for some reason no one was supportive of my dreams. It looked like they were enjoying watching us living in poverty and keep our heads down. for instance when I was in 5th grade I told my literature teacher "when I get older I want to be a beautician" with a smire on the face she said "You are going to be just like your mother, keep having kids in a row" I did not understood what she meant, but I did not expected that answer from an "educated" person either, especially your teacher. As I got older I started to isolated myself from all the negative people, until one day I asked my uncle to help me get in a beauty college, because he knew people in town, I did not wanted to believe he respond. Even today I can hear his word whisper in my ears, telling me "Beauty college is not for you because you are poor, education is only for rich kids" But that did not stopped me either, I told myself "they can't tell me what I can and can't do" They just pushed me to do better in life, I had to prove it to them, that even children can go to college. I have to prove them wrong by letting them know I can do anything I put my mind into it. So I decided to make a very big move in my that would either end it my life or could change my life for ever. On Sep 2, 1990 I had it enough of the communist regime and all the negative people telling me what I can and can't do. So I decided to leave everyone behind me and move forward in life, I decided to escape and followed my dreams. I excaped from army who was chasing to kill us. but God was with me. can you believe it I made it on the local news saying "Two young girls were killed today by army forces escaping the borders" I made it alive to Yugoslavia, I spend almost seven months in concentration camp,but I thought of bright site. There I meet the love of my life. we dated for five months, his visa was approved to come in US two months before mine, I come to state on March of 1991. New place, new chapter in my life, two weeks later got united with my boyfriend. neither of us spoke English, it was very hard to find jobs, we manage to get a job in a local restaurant as a dishwasher and me as a bustable. at that time I was very I found a happy, so I did it with smile on my face, at that time we were living at my husband's cousins unfinished basement? Yes we were sharing a single /twin size bed, we saved little money and we got our 1st apartment, we had nothing insite site. I remember when the manager showed us the appartment, it was green shaggy carpet and I told my husband. "Honey the carpet is thick enough, we don't need mattress to sleep on it we can sleep on the carpet" A co-worker give us some household stuff to start our life with, later that year our 1st child our daughter was born, two months later we get married in a local Albania church. Life was way better than living under the communist regime. we have two more children. So we decided to bring my parents here so they can help us, and I can get back to work. On April 1, 1998 my father come, we picked him at airport, with tears on his eye he was looking the street lights outside of the car window and said, "America is beautiful country, is land of dreams,....when I die please bury me here and not in Albania?" By that time have I learning enough English to my education education. I went to beauty school. two years later I graduated and got the state license. Yahhhh my dreams start coming true, I found a job in a local salon, couple months later i promoted to a salon manager.

Part 1. My Life Story. - If I can do it, so can you- I was born and lived in one of the most oldest and most beautiful cities in Albania. for 23 years I lived under the communist regime, where everyone was poor, there was no rich people beside the Elite group who dictate the country. Since I was little girl I dreamed of fairy tale life. But for some reason no one was supportive of my dreams. It looked like they were enjoying watching us living in poverty and keep our heads down, for instance I remember when I was in 5th grade I told my literature teacher "When I get older I want to be a beautician." With a smire on her face she said "You are going to be just like your mother, keep having kids in a row" At that time I did not understood what she meant, but I did not expected that answer from an "educated" person, especially your teacher. As I got older I started to isolate myself from all the negative people until one day I asked my uncle to help me to get in a beauty college, he knew people in town that's why, I did not wanted to believe he respond. Even today I can hear his words whisper in my ears, telling me "Beauty college is not for poor children, education is only for rich kids" But that did not stopped me either, I told myself "No one can tell me what I can and can't do" They just motivated me to prove them wrong. Poor children can go to college. So I decided to make a very big move my that would either end it my life or could change my life for ever. Sep 2, 1990 I had it enough of that hell place, communist regime and all the negative people.I decided to leave everyone behind me and move forward in life, I decided to escape the communist and followed my dreams. I was also escaped from army who was chasing to kill us, but mighty God was with us. We made the local news saying "Two young girls were killed today by army forces escaping the borders" but I made it alive to Yugoslavia, I spend almost seven months there in concentration camp. There I meet the love of my life also, we dated for five months, until his visa was approved to come in US, two months later I come to state on March of 1991. New place, new chapter in my life, two weeks later got united, neither of us spoke English, it was very hard to find jobs, we manage to get a job in a local restaurant as a dishwasher and me as a bustable, at that time I was very I found a happy, so I did it with smile on my face. We were living at my husband's cousins unfinished basement. Yes we were sharing a single / twin size bed, we had to saved money so we can get our own apartment, we had nothing insite site. I remember when the manager showed us the appartment, it was green shaggy carpet, I told my husband. "Honey the carpet is thick enough, we don't need mattress to sleep on it, we can sleep on the carpet" later on a co-worker give us some household stuff to start our life with. Later that year our 1st child /daughter was born, two months later we get married in a local Albania church. Life was getting way better than living under the communist regime, later on we have two more children. We decided to bring my parents here so they can help us, I can get back to work or go to school . On April 1, 1998 my father come, we picked him at airport, with tears on his eye he was looking the street lights outside of the car window and said, "America is beautiful country, is land of dreams,....when I die please bury me here and not in Albania" By that time have I learning enough English to continued my education. I went to beauty school. two years later I graduated and got the state license. Yahhhh my dreams start coming true, remember I told you I always wanted to be a beautician. I found a job in a local salon, couple months later I was promoted to a salon manager. I did it for me and not for them who did not believed on me, As I said " I never cared

Part 1. My Life Story. - If I can do it, so can you- I was born and lived in one of the most oldest and most beautiful cities in Albania. for 23 years I lived under the communist regime, where everyone was poor, there was no rich people beside the Elite group who dictate the country. Since I was little girl I dreamed of fairy tale life. But for some reason no one was supportive of my dreams. It looked like they were enjoying watching us living in poverty and keep our heads down, for instance I remember when I was in 5th grade I told my literature teacher "When I get older I want to be a beautician." With a smire on her face she said "You are going to be just like your mother, keep having kids in a row" At that time I did not understood what she meant, but I did not expected that answer from an "educated" person, especially your teacher. As I got older I started to isolate myself from all the negative people until one day I asked my uncle to help me to get in a beauty college, he knew people in town that's why, I did not wanted to believe he respond. Even today I can hear his words whisper in my ears, telling me "Beauty college is not for poor children, education is only for rich kids" But that did not stopped me either, I told myself "No one can tell me what I can and can't do" They just motivated me to prove them wrong. Poor children can go to college. So I decided to make a very big move my that would either end it my life or could change my life for ever. Sep 2, 1990 I had it enough of that hell place, communist regime and all the negative people.I decided to leave everyone behind me and move forward in life, I decided to escape the communist and followed my dreams. I was also escaped from army who was chasing to kill us, but mighty God was with us. We made the local news saying "Two young girls were killed today by army forces escaping the borders" but I made it alive to Yugoslavia, I spend almost seven months there in concentration camp. There I meet the love of my life also, we dated for five months, until his visa was approved to come in US, two months later I come to state on March of 1991. New place, new chapter in my life, two weeks later got united, neither of us spoke English, it was very hard to find jobs, we manage to get a job in a local restaurant as a dishwasher and me as a bustable, at that time I was very I found a happy, so I did it with smile on my face. We were living at my husband's cousins unfinished basement. Yes we were sharing a single / twin size bed, we had to saved money so we can get our own apartment, we had nothing insite site. I remember when the manager showed us the appartment, it was green shaggy carpet, I told my husband. "Honey the carpet is thick enough, we don't need mattress to sleep on it, we can sleep on the carpet" later on a co-worker give us some household stuff to start our life with. Later that year our 1st child /daughter was born, two months later we get married in a local Albania church. Life was getting way better than living under the communist regime, later on we have two more children. We decided to bring my parents here so they can help us, I can get back to work or go to school . On April 1, 1998 my father come, we picked him at airport, with tears on his eye he was looking the street lights outside of the car window and said, "America is beautiful country, is land of dreams,....when I die please bury me here and not in Albania" By that time have I learning enough English to continued my education. I went to beauty school. two years later I graduated and got the state license. Yahhhh my dreams start coming true, remember I told you I always wanted to be a beautician. I found a job in a local salon, couple months later I was promoted to a salon manager. I did it for me and not for them who did not believed on me, As I said " I never cared

are sworn, you will be asked to state your name. I know ‘Lange’ is your stage name. Be sure to tell the jury your legal name is LaSalle. Let’s review your testimony again. “You will be asked if you lived with your sister.” “No, when I left college I got my own apartment.” “Are your parents living?” “No, my mother died three years after Leila and I came to New York, and I never knew my father.” “Now let’s review again your testimony, starting with the day before the murder.” “I had been out of town for three months with a stock company. . . . I got in on Friday night, March twenty-eighth, just in time to catch the last preview of Leila’s play.” “How did you find your sister?” “She was obviously under a terrible strain; she kept forgetting her lines. Her performance was a shambles. Between

With the decree issued in March of 1492, all the Jews in Spain were given six months to leave. Two hundred thousand would ultimately abandon their homes and livelihoods in the only land their families had known for generations. Like the riches of Alhambra, much of the wealth of Jews fleeing Torquemada’s fires fell into royal hands, which in turn financed Columbus’s expedition of commerce and evangelism.

Vietminh aggression.” In the following months, Eisenhower began sending money and munitions to the French. In January of 1954, Eisenhower sent twenty five B-26 medium bombers to the French base at Dien Ben Phu along with spare parts and 200 mechanics to support them. By the end of March 1954, French forces continued to suffer huge losses at Dien Ben Phu and their Northern outposts. In spite of the influx of US military aid, they lost all their airfields and they had to parachute reinforcements and new supplies. The Vietminh continued major victories as they encircled Dien Ben Phu and its outlying outposts. The war was going very

By indirect proof, the New Economy of the internet was the only way forward. MANIA: SEPTEMBER 1998–MARCH 2000 Dot-com mania was intense but short—18 months of insanity from September 1998 to March 2000.

Construction of the SS Morro Castle was begun by the Newport News Shipbuilding and Dry Dock Company in January of 1929 for the New York and Cuba Mail Steam Ship Company, better known as the Ward Line. The ship was launched in March of 1930, followed in May by the construction of her sister ship the SS Oriente. Both ships were 508 feet long and had a breath of almost 80 feet and weighed in at 11,520 gross tons (GRT). The ships were driven by General Electric turbo generators, which supplied the necessary electrical current to two propulsion motors. Having twin screws both ships could maintain a cruising speed of 20 knots. State of the art, each ship was elegantly fitted out to accommodate 489 passengers and had a complement of 240 officers and crew. It is estimated that the ships cost approximately $5 million each, of which 75% was given to the company as a low cost government loan to be repaid over twenty years. The SS Morro Castle was named for the fortress that guards the entrance to Havana Bay. On the evening of September 5, 1934 Captain Robert Willmott had his dinner delivered to his quarters. Shortly thereafter, he complained of stomach trouble and shortly after that, died of an apparent heart attack. With this twist of fate the command of the ship went to the Chief Mate, William Warms. During the overnight hours, with winds increasing to over 30 miles per hour, the ship continued along the Atlantic coast towards New York harbor. Early on September 8, 1934 the ship had what started as a minor fire in a storage locker. With the increasing winds, the fire quickly intensified causing the ship to burn down to the waterline, killing a total of 137 passengers and crew members. Many passengers died when they jumped into the water with the cork life preservers breaking their necks and killing them instantly on impact. Only half of the ships 12 lifeboats were launched and then losing power the ship drifted, with heavy onshore winds and a raging sea the hapless ship ground ashore near Asbury Park. Hard aground she remained there for several months as a morbid tourist attraction. On March 14, 1935 the ship was towed to Gravesend Bay, New York and then to Baltimore, MD, where she was scrapped. The Chief Mate Robert Warms and Chief Engineer Eban Abbott as well as the Ward Line vice-president Henry Cabaud were eventually indicted on various charges, including willful negligence. All three were convicted and sent to jail, however later an appeals court later overturned the ship’s officers convictions and instead placed much of the blame on the dead Captain Willmott. Go figure….

A siege is always a hospital - a hospital where mad thoughts abound and where mad things are done; where, under the stimulus of an unnatural excitement, new beings are evolved, beings who, while having the outward shape of their former selves, and, indeed, most of the old outward characteristics, are yet reborn in some subtle way and are no longer the same. ... The salt of life! Is it true, or is it merely a mistake, such as life-loving man naturally makes? For it can be nothing but the salt of death which has lain for a brief instant on the tongue of every soldier - a revolting salt which the soldier refuses to swallow and only is compelled to with strange cries and demon-like mutterings. Sometimes, poor mortal, all his struggles and his oaths are in vain. The dread salt is forced down his throat and he dies. The very fortunate have only an acrid taste which defines analysis left them. Of these more fortunate there are, however, many classes. Some, because they are neurotic or have some hereditary taint, the existence of which they have never suspected, in the end succumb; others do not entirely succumb but carry traces to their graves; yet others do not appear to mind at all. It is a very subtle poison, which may lie hidden in the blood for many months and years. I believe it is a terrible thing. ... And yet even this nobody understands or cares to speak of... Englishmen are proud, and want to know if you were inside the British Legation, their Legation, and when they have heard yes or no their interest ceases. They little know what the Legation stood for. The Americans march up to the Tartar Wall, talk about "Uncle Sam's boys," and exclaim that it requires no guessing to tell who saved the Legations. The French are the same, so are the Germans, so even the Italians. Only the Japanese and the Russians say nothing. ... I am, therefore, tired of it all, inexpressibly tired. I wish to escape from my hospital, to go away to some clean land where they understand so little of such things that their indifference will in the end, perhaps, convince me and make me forget. Yet can one ever forget?

In the eastern Atlantic forest of Bahia, Brazil, on the sandy, mossy ground beside the off-grid house of a single amateur botanist, grows an inch-tall plant with reddish stems ending in tiny dart-shaped flowers. The flowers are white with bright pink tips, like a fountain pen dipped in ink. The whole plant emerges only during the rainy season, springing up within weeks of the persistent wetness that begins in March and dying back entirely by its end in November. Within a month the little dart-flowers open, get pollinated, and disappear, having done their part. Capsules of fruit appear in their place, holding the seeds of the next generation. The usual course of events. But then something unusual happens: the fruit-tipped stems begin to bend toward the earth, genuflecting, craning like slender necks bent in deference. The fruits and the earth connect. The stems keep bending. They push down until the capsule is buried in the soft moss. The plant, Spigelia genuflexa, has planted its own seeds.

We went directly on to West point and took possession of our new barracks again and remained there till sometime in the month of May, when we (with the rest of the army in the Highlands) moved down and encamped at the Peekskill. We remained here awhile and then moved down near King’s bridge, fifteen miles from New-York. A part of the army, under the command of Gen. Lincoln, fell down the river in bateaux and landed near old fort Independence, where they were soon attacked by the enemy, when a smart skirmish ensued; our corps, among others, immediately marched to reinforce Gen. Lincoln, but the action ceased and the enemy had retired before we could arrive.

In fact the massacre at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando in June 2016 had been carried out by a young Muslim who swore allegiance to Islamic State (ISIS). Yet this detail didn’t detain Advocate or the Gay Pride march in New York later the same month. On that occasion the parade led with a huge rainbow banner emblazoned with the words ‘Republican Hate Kills!’, clearly forgetting that Omar Mateen had not been a member of the Republican Party. It

On May 28, 1987, Judge Michael Tynan set September 30 for the trial, warning the Hernandezes to be ready. On September 11, the Hernandezes again requested a delay of a few months, citing the prosecution’s failure to turn over items the defense needed to plot strategy and plan defense. Tynan refused to give them six months and set trial for February 1, 1988, only to grant another delay before then because the Hernandezes appealed to the district court of appeals to get certain evidence the prosecution was refusing to give the defense—namely, crime-scene photographs. On January 19, Tynan announced that the state court had granted a last-minute request by the Hernandezes for the state to turn over the evidence the defense wanted. On the twenty-fifth, he set March 22 for the trial date because of the uncertainty surrounding the appellate ruling. On March 16, the defense asked for yet another delay to review the new material they’d gotten as a result of the appellate decision, which Tynan granted, making April 29 the date for trial. Again, on the twenty-ninth, the defense asked for a delay, citing the huge amount of work as reason they weren’t ready. Tynan then scheduled June 30 for trial, but on June 21, the defense filed a motion to exclude Tynan, citing him as being racially biased against the defense, a tactic expected to buy more time. On July 8, Orange County Superior Court presiding judge Philip E. Cox ruled that Tynan was not biased. Finally, on July 21, 1988, jury selection began, and the battle began in earnest.

After the eight-month investigation, Amanda and Raffaele were put on trial and convicted a year later. Their appeal took two more years. (Trials in Italy are notoriously slow.) The court of appeals, in a full jury trial, found them innocent of murder in 2011 and severely criticized the evidence against them as being nonexistent, scientifically flawed, and erroneous. They were released after spending 1,427 days in prison, and Amanda flew home to America. But Italy has no double-jeopardy clause in its constitution, and prosecutors are allowed to appeal acquittals. Mignini appealed the verdict to the Corte Suprema di Cassazione. On March 26, 2013, the Court of Cassation vacated the acquittal and ordered a new trial. That new trial took place in late 2013.

In March 2019, immediately after the New Zealand attack, I tweeted that the shooter was “a socialist, environmentalist, who hates capitalists & free trade.”63 I also wrote that the killer believed his attack would “lead to more gun control” in New Zealand and the United States. Twitter locked my account for two months so that I couldn’t post anything or even read messages from other users.

The Great March of Return was both a lab and showroom. The most sophisticated new weapon used against the Palestinian protesters was the “Sea of Tears,” a drone that dropped tear gas canisters on a desired area. Despite Israeli claims of accuracy, a tent full of Palestinian women and children had tear gas dropped onto them, as did groups of reporters. Israeli police started using drones that dropped tear gas grenades on protestors in the West Bank in April 2021. One month later, Israel announced that a fleet of drones would be used to track riots and protests as well as areas damaged by rockets fired from Gaza. Israel announced in 2022 that it approved the use of armed drones for “targeted killings” in the West Bank. Reportedly tested over Gaza before the major protests began in 2018, a Chinese-made drone by Da Jiang Innovations was reconfigured by Israel’s Border Force, which was working with Israeli company Aeronautics to adapt the drone to on-the-ground service requirements. “Beyond the fact that it neutralizes all danger to our forces, it allows us to reach places that we had yet to reach,” Border Police Commander Kobi Shabtai told Israel’s Channel 2 news. The immediate effectiveness of the Sea of Tears led Maf’at, the Israeli Administration for the Development of Weapons and Technological Infrastructure, to purchase hundreds of the drones after the first night of demonstrations in Gaza. Another innovation was the “skunk water” drone, a form of liquid emitted from a water cannon that left a foul smell on clothes and body for a long time. Israeli firm Aeronautics was behind this innovation, a technique that had been already used in the West Bank and Jerusalem to deter protestors. Reports appeared in early 2020 by anti-occupation activists in the West Bank that Israeli-controlled talking drones were flying overhead and sending out a “Go Home” message to Palestinian protestors. Israeli activists were told in Hebrew not to “stand with the enemy.

This is how, in 1996, Steve Peace came to lead the state’s efforts to break apart the existing electricity industry and replace it with something new. Over a matter of months in 1996, he oversaw a grueling process—it would earn the nickname “the Peace Death March”—to produce a bill that was described as being as thick as a telephone book, which created the new markets for trading megawatt-hours.

The fourth member of the Colorado-class was never completed because the Washington Naval Treaty of 1922 brought new battleship construction worldwide to a halt. The World War I victors agreed to limit capital ship construction and scrap certain existing vessels to result in a 5:5:3 ratio among the three major naval powers of the United States, Great Britain, and Japan. Signatories pledged to honor a ten-year moratorium on capital ship construction and guarantee ships would not exceed thirty-five thousand tons or carry armaments larger than sixteen-inch guns. The treaty also contained a non-fortification clause aimed at American and Japanese intentions across the broad reaches of the Pacific. Beyond what the United States might undertake in Hawaii or what Japan might do in its home islands, the signatories agreed not to fortify bases on their island possessions, including Japan’s Caroline and Marshall Islands, recently won from Germany, and such American outposts as Wake, Guam, and most important, the Philippines. Whether Japan would honor this commitment was a matter of considerable debate. Franklin Roosevelt, out of the public eye while recovering from polio, asked in an article, “Shall We Trust Japan?” Citing Japan’s participation in the Washington Naval Treaty and noting there was “enough commercial room” in the Pacific “for both Japan and us well into the indefinite future,” Roosevelt answered with an optimistic yes.7 The end result was that America honored its treaty commitment and built no new battleships between commissioning the West Virginia in 1923 and the North Carolina (BB-55) in 1941. This left the Arizona and its sisters the undisputed, though aging, queens of the seas on the American side during the latter 1920s and throughout the 1930s. But even queens require an occasional facelift, and from May 1929 to March 1931, Arizona underwent a twenty-two-month modernization at the Norfolk Navy Yard.

In the last chapter of The Turning Point, titled “The Passage to the Solar Age,” I predicted that the ecology movement, the feminist movement, the peace movement, and other grassroots movements would soon form alliances and coalesce into new political parties. Indeed, while I was writing these words, the first Green Party was already forming in Germany. In March 1983, the Greens, as they called themselves, entered the German national parliament. One month later, I went to Germany to interview their leaders, following a suggestion by my colleague Charlene Spretnak, and in 1984, Spretnak and I published Green Politics, which introduced the Green movement to the United States and was instrumental in the formation of the American Green Party.

Agriculture determined this yearly cycle, which would make March an excellent choice for the start of a new year. The god Mars gave the month its name. This Mars, however, was not the god of war but the divine guardian of fields.9 Yet ancient sources also declare that January was, since earliest times, the year’s 1st month. The easiest explanation would be that a 12-month solar cycle was grafted onto a 10-month seasonal system, which itself might have replaced a lunar system of marking time.10 The 2 months that were introduced were January and February, by first assigning them to eleventh and twelfth position and later moving them to first and second place. The original introduction happened in the sixth century BCE when Rome was in Etruscan hands, and the later change occurred in 153 BCE at the latest, when the beginning of the new and civil year was moved from the Ides of March to the Kalends of January.

Finally, early in March 1912, a delegation from the union waited upon Bruce Ismay. As Managing Director of the White Star Line, Ismay was a mover and shaker in the British shipping industry, and maybe he could be persuaded to do something. The great Olympic was about to sail from Southampton, and the delegation pointed out that her five-man band was being paid at less than union scale, supplemented only by the monthly shilling that White Star paid to make them officially members of the crew. If the delegation expected to melt Ismay’s heart, they didn’t know their man. He replied that if the union objected to White Star carrying its bandsmen as members of the crew at a shilling a month, the company would carry them as passengers. Sure enough, when the Olympic reached New York on March 20, her five musicians were listed as Second Class passengers. All had regular tickets, and all had to appear before the immigration officials in the usual way. As a crowning irony in view of the reason for this masquerade, all had to produce $50 in cash to show that they were not destitute.

On March 1, 2002, at 1:00 p.m., three men broke into our high-rise apartment in Russia and brutally attacked me and my children. By the grace of God, our lives were spared and we were not terribly injured—physically. But the masked attackers had left deep spiritual and emotional wounds. We were sent to a trauma center for counseling for a month, then returned to Russia, our field of service, to complete our missionary term. Four months later, burned-out and spiritually empty, we packed our bags and returned to America for our scheduled one-year home service. I had no plans to return. Secretly, I harbored deep in my heart a resolve to never again set foot in Russia, with its many dangers. I had done eight hard years of service there and felt that I had given the best part of myself to a country that didn’t care. And no one—not even God—was going to change my mind. Yes, He’d spared my life, but I had serious doubts I could ever trust Him again. But God knew better. Not only is He gentle, but He understands and can handle my pain and my questions. I dove into the Psalms, finding hope in David’s cries to the Lord and healing in his praise to the Almighty in the darkest hours. I observed God’s goodness to me, providing for my needs in the past—and present—and I allowed myself to be embraced by the body of Christ, who loved us well. Finally, as time and distance began to heal me, I was able to look behind and see God’s grace embracing me every moment of the difficult journey. He reminded me that He would meet me in my future with the same abundance of grace. I wrote Anne and Noah’s story while struggling through the dark night of the soul. Amazingly, many times I felt as though the words that appeared on the page were more for me than for Anne. I journeyed with Anne until I, too, could see God embracing me in the darkest hour. Her victory is mine. On New Year’s Eve 2003, I surrendered to the Lord my future, agreeing to continue missionary work in Russia if God so chose. The peace that flooded my heart told me that His grace would carry me wherever He took our family. His grace is sufficient. For every heartache, every fear, every wound. Thank you for reading Tying the Knot. I pray that somehow Anne and Noah’s journey of faith and love will encourage and bless you. And that you will know, above all, that it is well with your soul. In His grace, Susan May Warren

You don’t have to do anything epic in order to have a purpose. You don’t even have to know what your purpose is, and it can change from month to month or year to year. Purposes can be quiet and unassuming and help anchor you into something a little bit less soul-sucking than whether you look cool enough in your new trendy pants, and they can have a ripple effect just based on how you live your life. Instead of worrying about a bigger purpose, just ask yourself, “What do I stand for, today?”You don’t have to be an extrovert or a fighter to let what you stand for quietly infuse the way you walk through the world. Sure, you can organize marches, create subversive art installations, or be an ambassador to a big charity. But you can also express what you stand for in the way you craft gifts for friends once a year, or make people laugh, or in the flowers you plant. It can be small. It can seem innocuous, but it’s not.

England is not warmer than New England in July or August, that's true. Probably not in June either. But it is warmer in October, November, December, January, February, March, April and May - that is, in every month when warmth matters.

AT 3:00 P.M. SHARP on August 23, 2012, Colonel Edgar escorted the two men into Mattis’s office on MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa. The sixty-one-year-old general was an intimidating figure in person: muscular and broad shouldered, with dark circles under his eyes that suggested a man who didn’t bother much with sleep. His office was decorated with the mementos of a long military career. Amid the flags, plaques, and coins, Shoemaker’s eyes rested briefly on a set of magnificent swords displayed in a glass cabinet. As they sat down in a wood-paneled conference room off to one side of the office, Mattis cut to the chase: “Guys, I’ve been trying to get this thing deployed for a year now. What’s going on?” Shoemaker had gone over everything again with Gutierrez and felt confident he was on solid ground. He spoke first, giving a brief overview of the issues raised by an in-theater test of the Theranos technology. Gutierrez took over from there and told the general his army colleague was correct in his interpretation of the law: the Theranos device was very much subject to regulation by the FDA. And since the agency hadn’t yet reviewed and approved it for commercial use, it could only be tested on human subjects under strict conditions set by an institutional review board. One of those conditions was that the test subjects give their informed consent—something that was notoriously hard to obtain in a war zone. Mattis was reluctant to give up. He wanted to know if they could suggest a way forward. As he’d put it to Elizabeth in an email a few months earlier, he was convinced her invention would be “a game-changer” for his men. Gutierrez and Shoemaker proposed a solution: a “limited objective experiment” using leftover de-identified blood samples from soldiers. It would obviate the need to obtain informed consent and it was the only type of study that could be put together as quickly as Mattis seemed to want to proceed. They agreed to pursue that course of action. Fifteen minutes after they’d walked in, Shoemaker and Gutierrez shook Mattis’s hand and walked out. Shoemaker was immensely relieved. All in all, Mattis had been gruff but reasonable and a workable compromise had been reached. The limited experiment agreed upon fell short of the more ambitious live field trial Mattis had had in mind. Theranos’s blood tests would not be used to inform the treatment of wounded soldiers. They would only be performed on leftover samples after the fact to see if their results matched the army’s regular testing methods. But it was something. Earlier in his career, Shoemaker had spent five years overseeing the development of diagnostic tests for biological threat agents and he would have given his left arm to get access to anonymized samples from service members in theater. The data generated from such testing could be very useful in supporting applications to the FDA. Yet, over the ensuing months, Theranos inexplicably failed to take advantage of the opportunity it was given. When General Mattis retired from the military in March 2013, the study using leftover de-identified samples hadn’t begun. When Colonel Edgar took on a new assignment as commander of the Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases a few months later, it still hadn’t started. Theranos just couldn’t seem to get its act together. In July 2013, Lieutenant Colonel Shoemaker retired from the army. At his farewell ceremony, his Fort Detrick colleagues presented him with a “certificate of survival” for having the courage to stand up to Mattis in person and emerging from the encounter alive. They also gave him a T-shirt with the question, “What do you do after surviving a briefing with a 4 star?” written on the front. The answer could be found on the back: “Retire and sail off into the sunset.

The March of Time) CBS chief William S. Paley and Time publisher Henry R. Luce were conspicuously present. Few in the assembled party liked the show, but plans continued for its premiere, which took place on a partial CBS hookup a month later. Luce remained uneasy over the show’s bellicose nature: it sounded like a midway event, with barkers and hustlers hawking the news. It seemed to fly in the face of journalistic integrity, causing many Time editors to remain skeptical even when it quickly caught on with critics and the public. The March of Time was a success whether Luce liked it or not. It was nothing if not an attention-grabber. Its sound was like an authentic Movietone newsreel, with shouting mobs, riveting sound effects, and music that conveyed the merciless, relentless pace of time. Through this vivid audio potpourri, listeners would “see” the rise of Hitler, the trial of Bruno Richard Hauptmann, the abdication of Edward VIII, the controversy over the New Deal, the Italian conquest of Ethiopia, and the tragedy of the Spanish Civil War. Many listeners were convinced that they were hearing the voices of real newsmakers on the scene, and some wondered aloud how it was done.

fact the massacre at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando in June 2016 had been carried out by a young Muslim who swore allegiance to Islamic State (ISIS). Yet this detail didn’t detain Advocate or the Gay Pride march in New York later the same month. On that occasion the parade led with a huge rainbow banner emblazoned with the words ‘Republican Hate Kills!’, clearly forgetting that Omar Mateen had not been a member of the Republican Party.

RBG’s image as a moderate was clinched in March 1993, in a speech she gave at New York University known as the Madison Lecture. Sweeping judicial opinions, she told the audience, packed with many of her old New York friends, were counterproductive. Popular movements and legislatures had to first spur social change, or else there would be a backlash to the courts stepping in. As case in point, RBG chose an opinion that was very personal to plenty of people listening: Roe v. Wade. The right had been aiming to overturn Roe for decades, and they’d gotten very close only months before the speech with Planned Parenthood v. Casey. Justices Anthony Kennedy, David Souter, and Sandra Day O’Connor had instead brokered a compromise, allowing states to put restrictions on abortion as long as they didn’t pose an “undue burden” on women—or ban it before viability. Neither side was thrilled, but Roe was safe, at least for the moment. Just as feminists had caught their breath, RBG declared that Roe itself was the problem. If only the court had acted more slowly, RBG said, and cut down one state law at a time the way she had gotten them to do with the jury and benefit cases. The justices could have been persuaded to build an architecture of women’s equality that could house reproductive freedom. She said the very boldness of Roe, striking down all abortion bans until viability, had “halted a political process that was moving in a reform direction and thereby, I believe, prolonged divisiveness and deferred stable settlement of the issue.” This analysis remains controversial among historians, who say the political process of abortion access had stalled before Roe. Meanwhile, the record shows that there was no overnight eruption after Roe. In 1975, two years after the decision, no senator asked Supreme Court nominee John Paul Stevens about abortion. But Republicans, some of whom had been pro-choice, soon learned that being the anti-abortion party promised gains. And even if the court had taken another path, women’s sexual liberation and autonomy might have still been profoundly unsettling. Still, RBG stuck to her guns, in the firm belief that lasting change is incremental. For the feminists and lawyers listening to her Madison Lecture, RBG’s argument felt like a betrayal. At dinner after the lecture, Burt Neuborne remembers, other feminists tore into their old friend. “They felt that Roe was so precarious, they were worried such an expression from Ruth would lead to it being overturned,” he recalls. Not long afterward, when New York senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan suggested to Clinton that RBG be elevated to the Supreme Court, the president responded, “The women are against her.” Ultimately, Erwin Griswold’s speech, with its comparison to Thurgood Marshall, helped convince Clinton otherwise. It was almost enough for RBG to forgive Griswold for everything else.

example to view the destroyed parts of the city with his own eyes. As far as “retribution” was concerned, the Führer intended to resume massive air attacks on London after Christmas. He was more optimistic, however, about the potential effect of Germany’s new flying bombs and missiles, which would first be deployed in February and March 1944. After a certain time, he vowed, life in London would “no longer be possible.”141 But the German V-1 and V-2 rockets would take several months longer than that to be deployable, and when they were ready, they would not have anywhere near the destructive power the Nazi leadership had hoped.

We were now in full spring. March had come and on the fourth of the month began the New Year Festival—the greatest of all Tibetan feasts, which lasts for three weeks.

It took me a couple of years after I woke up in that cold sweat to figure out what flag I was going to plant, and then how to do something with it. Using the process in Step 1, I found the things that I wanted to be known for and the work that I was passionate about. And then I started telling my story all the time to anyone who would actually listen. For me, this story was around Lean UX because of who I was at the time. I created a pitch based on design for designers, by designers, to change the way that they were working. And I honed that voice and that tone and that dialogue by telling the story over and over and over again using blog posts and articles and eventually in-person talks. The first talk I ever gave as a part of my new professional trajectory was on August 12, 2010. I told the story about how we solved the problem of integrating UX into Agile at TheLadders. And then the timeline started to accelerate from there. A month later, on September 24, I gave my first talk about Lean UX and it was in Paris. I was communicating about this topic publicly, and people were saying, “Hey, come give us a talk about it.” And I was writing about the topic in any publication that would actually listen to this kind of thing. I kept speaking and writing and making presentations, and as I got my ideas out into the world and put them into play in any way I could, on March 7, 2011, I finally hit the jackpot. This was three years after I had my 35th-birthday epiphany and the pressure was on—I knew I had just two years left before I was going to become obsolete, an also-ran. I hit the jackpot when I managed to get an article published in Smashing magazine. At the time, Smashing had a million readers online, and so the scale of my conversation was growing and growing because I was becoming known as the guy who had some answers to this question. That was a massive break for me because the article provided me with a global audience for the first time. Obviously, anything you publish on the internet is global and distributed, but the bottom line is that, if the platform you choose or that chooses you has a built-in audience, you stand a much bigger chance. Smashing magazine had an audience. The article, titled “Lean UX: Getting Out of the Deliverables Business” became very successful, and that’s where I planted my flag—providing solutions to the Agile and design problem with a real-world tested solution nicely packaged and labeled as Lean UX.

For two thousand years, maybe more, the ceremonies had been celebrated every autumn in the small town of Eleusis near Athens, becoming more famous and elaborate with the passing years. By Roman times, the mystery temple at Eleusis was a huge building half the size of a foot- ball field, and people came there from the far corners of the ancient world. All new initiates had to go through preliminary ceremonies at the river Ilissos in the month of Anthesterion, our February, in which they offered sacrifices, cleansed them- selves in the water, and listened to instruction. A year and a half later, in Boedromion (our September), they marched to Eleusis, arriving at dusk. They entered the temple, and the ceremony of initiation was enacted. No one today knows what it was, but ancient writers agreed that those who passed through it had no fear of death afterward.

It is tempting to regard the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor as a lawless act for which there can be no justification or excuse. For Americans, December 7 remains “a date which will live in infamy,” in the words of President Roosevelt. But the devastating strike on the United States was not lawless. Japan was simply following the law of nations that U.S. Commodore Matthew Perry’s black ships had introduced in 1854. What Japan failed to recognize, however, was that those rules had been renounced in 1928. The United States itself had only recently come to terms with the complete transformation in the legal order initiated by the Pact—it finally embraced the new understanding of neutrality with the passage of the Lend-Lease Act in March 1941, only six months before Pearl Harbor.

AUTHOR'S INTRODUCTION: More than twenty-five years ago while researching the fourth Saint-Germain book, Path of the Eclipse, I ran across references to the Year of the Yellow Snow, sometimes called the Year of the Dark Sun, in Western reckoning A.D. 535-36, which was characterized by catastrophic drops in temperature, crop failures, and famine throughout Asia and Europe, with disruption of trade and movements of populations resulting from these losses—just the sort of event to set the speculative juices, flowing, but not the object of my research, nor the period with which I was dealing, promising though it appeared. Then, about ten years ago, other researchers did some serious scholarship on those disastrous events and tried to determine the cause of what turned out to be a worldwide famine and, after considering a number of different scenarios from meteor collisions to a mini-ice age—which indeed occurred—at last identified the probable source of the trouble as an eruption of that all-time bad-boy volcano, Krakatoa; this eruption was more overwhelming than many of its others, for, according to records in Indonesia, this eruption broke Sumatra off from Java—Krakatoa is at the hinge position of those two islands—and opened the Sundra Strait to a deep-water sea passage instead of only the shallowest-draft boats, which it had been for centuries. The eruption occurred in late February or early March of A.D. 535, and its explosion was heard all the way to Beijing. It had been heralded by many months of regional instability, earthquakes, and drastic variations in ocean temperatures in and around what was becoming the Sundra Strait, making the shipping lanes more treacherous than they had been in the past. Many ships' captains reported dangerous sailing in and around Indonesia, and over time, merchant ships avoided the region. ¶ In April, following the eruption, the ash from the volcano had spread all around the world, and disaster followed after it, impacting global weather patterns and lowering the average temperatures sufficiently to keep crops from growing in most of Asia and Europe, as well as large portions of Africa and Americas. Although every part of the world was affected, there were regions that bore more of the brunt of the tragedy than others. Many of the nomadic people of the Central Asian Steppes were driven out of their traditional grazing lands when their herds began to die because of lack of food as the grasslands became arid plains, and their struggle to find new pastureland was made much more difficult by the impact of the colder weather; the significant westward migration from Central Asia began as an attempt to find grass for their herds. In China and Tibet, the snow that continued to fall all the way into June and July was yellow due to the high levels of sulfur in the upper atmosphere. Closer to the eruption site, actual flakes of sulfur fell from the sky, burning people, animals, and fields alike and contaminating wells, springs, and rivers; the devastation of the Indonesian Islands was calamitous, with tens of thousands of people killed in tsunamis spawned by the eruption, by gaseous emanations, and by sulfur contamination, records of which still exist in the royal archives of the Srivijava Empire, which comprised most of modern Indonesia. For months afterward, the remains of humans, animals, trees, sea-life, and buildings washed up on the shores of what are now Indonesia, the Malay Peninsula, the Philippines, China, and India.

It was now a month into my stay at the palace, and I was completely at home. My body was comfortable in the new climate. The warmth of the palace was heavenly, like a holiday. September was almost over, and it got very cool in the evenings, but it was much warmer than home. The sights of this giant space were no longer a mystery. The sounds of heeled shoes on marble, crystal glasses clinking, guards marching—they were starting to become as normal as the refrigerator humming or Gerad kicking a soccer ball up against the house.