Newly Single Quotes

Let the fairy tale begin on a winter's morning, then, with one drop of blood newly-fallen on the ivory snow: a drop as bright as a clear-cut ruby, red as a single spot of claret on the lace cuff.

It's 5:22pm you're in the grocery checkout line. Your three-year-old is writhing on the floor, screaming, because you have refused to buy her a Teletubby pinwheel. Your six-year-old is whining, repeatedly, in a voice that could saw through cement, "But mommy, puleeze, puleeze" because you have not bought him the latest "Lunchables," which features, as the four food groups, Cheetos, a Snickers, Cheez Whiz, and Twizzlers. Your teenager, who has not spoken a single word in the past foor days, except, "You've ruined my life," followed by "Everyone else has one," is out in the car, sulking, with the new rap-metal band Piss on the Parentals blasting through the headphones of a Discman. To distract yourself, and to avoid the glares of other shoppers who have already deemed you the worst mother in America, you leaf through People magazine. Inside, Uma thurman gushes "Motherhood is Sexy." Moving on to Good Housekeeping, Vanna White says of her child, "When I hear his cry at six-thirty in the morning, I have a smile on my face, and I'm not an early riser." Another unexpected source of earth-mother wisdom, the newly maternal Pamela Lee, also confides to People, "I just love getting up with him in the middle of the night to feed him or soothe him." Brought back to reality by stereophonic whining, you indeed feel as sexy as Rush Limbaugh in a thong.

Although she was newly single and happier than she'd been in years, a small part of her was still ready to die, and still enjoyed telling lies.

I’ve just been newly widowed.” “So you’re single.

it’s all one single grief.

The rain had stopped and the sky was absurdly pretty, a single layer of floury cloudlets pinked and peached by the rising sun. Only the juvenile, the mad, and the newly in love noticed. The rest of the city got its head down and ploughed tearily into another day of neurosis.

In neuroscience, our textbook showed how the brain scans of people newly in love look a lot like the brain scans of patients with obsessive-compulsive disorder. In each case, your dopamine is suppressing your serotonin.

Not single is the death which comes; the death Which takes us off is but the last of all.

At that age I thought apartments were built specifically to house the single or the newly single, a divorce dormitory of sorts.

A great blow it was,' he said in expensive tones, 'worthy of the mightiest warrior and truly struck upon the nose of the foe. The bright blood flew, and the enemy was dismayed and overcame. Like a hero, Garion stood over the vanquished, and, like a true hero, did not boast nor taunt his fallen opponent, but offered instead advice for quelling that crimson blood. with simple dignity then, he quit the field, but the bright-eyed maid would not let him depart unrewarded for his valor. hastily, she pursued him and fondly clasped her snowy arms about his neck. And there she lovingly bestowed that single kiss that is the true hero's greatest reward. Her eyes flamed with admiration, and her chaste bosom heaved with newly wakened passion. But modest Garion innocently departed and tarried not to claim those other sweet rewards the gentle maid's fond demeanor so clearly offered. And thus the adventure ended with our hero tasting victory but tenderly declining victory's true compensation.

He woke one morning tantalized by an idea: if he could catch the orchard trees motionless for one second -- for half of one second -- then none of it would have happened. The kitchen door would bang open and in his father would walk, red-faced and slapping his hands and exclaiming about some newly whelped pup. Childish, Edgar knew, but he didn't care. The trick was to not focus on any single part of any tree, but to look through them all toward a point in the air. But how insidious a bargain he'd made. Even in the quietest moment some small thing quivered and the tableau was destroyed. How many afternoons slipped away like that? How many midnights standing in the spare room, watching the trees shiver in the moonlight? Still he watched, transfixed. Then, blushing because it was futile and silly, he forced himself to walk away. When he blinked, an afterimage of perfect stillness. To think it might happen when he wasn't watching. He turned back before he reached the door. Through the window glass, a dozen trees strummed by the winter wind, skeletons dancing pair-wise, fingers raised to heaven. Stop it, he told himself. Just stop. And watched some more.

In many ways, a book is, in itself, a tiny universe. Each page is like a newly formed galaxy, fashioned from a single, pulsing thought. A book travels for days, for years, sometimes for centuries to meet you at an exact point in time.

These days, the supplement industry has the process down to a “science.” New scientific research on single nutrients generalizes in a very superficial way about their ability to promote human health. Companies put these newly discovered “nutrients” into pills, organize public relations campaigns, and write marketing plans to encourage a confused public to buy.

We should imitate bees,' Seneca wrote, 'and we should keep in separate compartments whatever we have collected from our diverse reading, for things conserved separately keep better. Then, diligently applying all the resources of our native talent, we should mingle all the various nectars we have tasted, and then turn them into a single sweet substance, in such a way that, even if it was apparent where it originated, it appears quite different from what it was in its original state.' Memory, for Seneca as for Erasmus, was as much a crucible as a container. It was more than the sum of things remembered. It was something newly made, the essence of a unique self.

Now who art thou, that on the bench wouldst sit In judgment at a thousand miles away, With the short vision of a single span?

While we are postponing, life speeds by. Nothing, Lucilius, is ours, except time. We were entrusted by nature with the ownership of this single thing, so fleeting and slippery that anyone who will can oust us from possession. What fools these mortals be! They allow the cheapest and most useless things, which can easily be replaced, to be charged in the reckoning, after they have acquired them; but they never regard themselves as in debt when they have received some of that precious commodity, – time! And yet time is the one loan which even a grateful recipient cannot repay. You

How gaily and lightly these people I met carried their radiant heads, and swung themselves through life as through a ball-room! There was no sorrow in a single look I met, no burden on any shoulder, perhaps not even a clouded thought, not a little hidden pain in any of the happy souls. And I, walking in the very midst of these people, young and newly-fledged as I was, had already forgotten the very look of happiness. I hugged these thoughts to myself as I went on, and found that a great injustice had been done me. Why had the last months pressed so strangely hard on me? I failed to recognize my own happy temperament, and I met with the most singular annoyances from all quarters. I could not sit down on a bench by myself or set my foot any place without being assailed by insignificant accidents, miserable details, that forced their way into my imagination and scattered my powers to all the four winds. A dog that dashed by me, a yellow rose in a man's buttonhole, had the power to set my thoughts vibrating and occupy me for a length of time.

The bishop has pushed himself to the limits of his reputation to avoid any connection to the distasteful funeral going on across the way. Yet he knows, along with all of Copenhagen, that the events below are all anyone is talking about. They will be in all the papers tomorrow, and the next day, and the next. It is of paramount importance that these papers record that the newly minted Bishop of all Denmark, Hans L. Martensen, shepherd to the nation, was not present at the burial of his former student, now the scourge of all Christendom, Søren Kierkegaard.

With that he turned to go, and walking, bareheaded, to the outside of the little porch, took leave of her with such a happy mixture of unconstrained respect and unaffected interest, as no breeding could have taught, no truth mistrusted, and nothing but a pure and single heart expressed. Many half-forgotten emotions were awakened in the sister’s mind by this visit. It was so very long since any other visitor had crossed their threshold; it was so very long since any voice of apathy had made sad music in her ears; that the stranger’s figure remained present to her, hours afterwards, when she sat at the window, plying her needle; and his words seemed newly spoken, again and again. He had touched the spring that opened her whole life; and if she lost him for a short space, it was only among the many shapes of the one great recollection of which that life was made.

Out of that night and day of unconditional wrath, folks would’ve expected to see any city, if it survived, all newly reborn, purified by flame, taken clear beyond greed, real-estate speculating, local politics—instead of which, here was this weeping widow, some one-woman grievance committee in black, who would go on to save up and lovingly record and mercilessly begrudge every goddamn single tear she ever had to cry, and over the years to come would make up for them all by developing into the meanest, cruelest bitch of a city, even among cities not notable for their kindness.

THOSE BORN UNDER Pacific Northwest skies are like daffodils: they can achieve beauty only after a long, cold sulk in the rain. Henry, our mother, and I were Pacific Northwest babies. At the first patter of raindrops on the roof, a comfortable melancholy settled over the house. The three of us spent dark, wet days wrapped in old quilts, sitting and sighing at the watery sky. Viviane, with her acute gift for smell, could close her eyes and know the season just by the smell of the rain. Summer rain smelled like newly clipped grass, like mouths stained red with berry juice — blueberries, raspberries, blackberries. It smelled like late nights spent pointing constellations out from their starry guises, freshly washed laundry drying outside on the line, like barbecues and stolen kisses in a 1932 Ford Coupe. The first of the many autumn rains smelled smoky, like a doused campsite fire, as if the ground itself had been aflame during those hot summer months. It smelled like burnt piles of collected leaves, the cough of a newly revived chimney, roasted chestnuts, the scent of a man’s hands after hours spent in a woodshop. Fall rain was not Viviane’s favorite. Rain in the winter smelled simply like ice, the cold air burning the tips of ears, cheeks, and eyelashes. Winter rain was for hiding in quilts and blankets, for tying woolen scarves around noses and mouths — the moisture of rasping breaths stinging chapped lips. The first bout of warm spring rain caused normally respectable women to pull off their stockings and run through muddy puddles alongside their children. Viviane was convinced it was due to the way the rain smelled: like the earth, tulip bulbs, and dahlia roots. It smelled like the mud along a riverbed, like if she opened her mouth wide enough, she could taste the minerals in the air. Viviane could feel the heat of the rain against her fingers when she pressed her hand to the ground after a storm. But in 1959, the year Henry and I turned fifteen, those warm spring rains never arrived. March came and went without a single drop falling from the sky. The air that month smelled dry and flat. Viviane would wake up in the morning unsure of where she was or what she should be doing. Did the wash need to be hung on the line? Was there firewood to be brought in from the woodshed and stacked on the back porch? Even nature seemed confused. When the rains didn’t appear, the daffodil bulbs dried to dust in their beds of mulch and soil. The trees remained leafless, and the squirrels, without acorns to feed on and with nests to build, ran in confused circles below the bare limbs. The only person who seemed unfazed by the disappearance of the rain was my grandmother. Emilienne was not a Pacific Northwest baby nor a daffodil. Emilienne was more like a petunia. She needed the water but could do without the puddles and wet feet. She didn’t have any desire to ponder the gray skies. She found all the rain to be a bit of an inconvenience, to be honest.

The first paradox of Illuminism, then, was that it was a network that craved an elaborate hierarchical structure, even as it inveighed against existing hierarchies. In his 1782 ‘Address to the newly promoted Illuminati dirigenti’, Weishaupt set out his worldview. In the state of nature, man had been free, equal and happy; division into classes, private property, personal ambition and state formation had come later, as the ‘great unholy mainsprings and causes of our misery’. Mankind had ceased to be ‘one great family, a single empire’ because of the ‘desire of men to differentiate themselves from one another’. But Enlightenment, spread by the activities of secret societies, could overcome this stratification of society. And then ‘princes and nations would disappear from the earth without any need for violence, the human race would become one family, and the world would become the habitation of rational beings

what encourages me when I’m faced with the call of the cross in a newly exposed area of my life is when I look around at the beloved people in my church and see that the cross is just as relentless in their lives. They are living, breathing movie trailers displaying the future redemption story. My single friends who want to be married could be traipsing around the city dating and sleeping with anyone and everyone. They could be taking their future into their own hands rather than waiting on the Lord and entrusting themselves to him. My married friends who have experienced difficulties in their marriages could be taking their spouses to divorce court. My same-sex attracted friends could be succumbing to their desires. All these hold steady in truth and grace for the sake of the gospel, and their stories not only compel me to do the same but also solidify our bonds of unity and friendship and show me anew the surpassing worth of the gospel.

Lauren realizes right then that the prospect of being single—of recent events leading to a divorce and her being a single mother with child support checks and the like—scares her to death. Dating itself is such a frightening, vulnerable time period, no matter what the circumstances. It sucks, really. She doesn’t want to go through all that again.

Out of that night and day of unconditional wrath, folks would've expected to see any city, if it survived, all newly reborn, purified by flame, taken clear beyond greed, real-estate speculating, local politics--instead of which, here was this weeping widow, some one-woman grievance committee in black, who would go on and save up and lovlingly record and mercilessly begrudge every goddamn single tear she ever had to cry, and over the years to come would make up for them all by developing into the meanest, cruelest bitch of a city, even among cities not notable for their kindness. To all appearance resolute, adventurous, manly, the city would not shake that terrible all-night rape, when "he" was forced to submit, surrending, inadmissably, blindly feminine, into the Hellfire embrace of "her" beloved. He spent the years afterward forgetting and fabulating and trying to get back some self-respect. But inwardly, deep inside, "he" remained the catamite of Hell, the punk at the disposal of all the denizens thereof, the bitch in men's clothing.

He closed his eyes. This bed was a wedding gift from friends he had not seen in years. He tried to remember their names, but they were gone. In it, or on it, his marriage had begun and, six years later, ended. He recognized a musical creak when he moved his legs, he smelled Julie on the sheets and banked-up pillows, her perfume and the close, soapy essence that characterized her newly washed linen. Here he had taken part in the longest, most revealing, and, later, most desolate conversations of his life. He had had the best sex ever here, and the worst wakeful nights. He had done more reading here than in any other single place - he remembered Anna Karenina and Daniel Deronda in one week of illness. He had never lost his temper so thoroughly anywhere else, nor had been so tender, protective, comforting, nor, since early childhood, been so cared for himself. Here his daughter had been conceived and born. On this side of the bed. Deep in the mattress were the traces of pee from her early-morning visits. She used to climb between then, sleep a little, then wake them with her chatter, her insistence on the day beginning. As they clung to their last fragments of dreams, she demanded the impossible: stories, poems, songs, invented catechisms, physical combat, tickling. Nearly all evidence of her existence, apart from photographs, they had destroyed or given away. All the worst and the best things that had ever happened to him had happened here. This was where he belonged. Beyond all immediate considerations, like the fact that his marriage was more or less finished, there was his right to lie here now in the marriage bed.

And, irritatingly, bacteria are generating resistance to antibiotics we haven’t even thought of yet. For example, after placing a single bacterial species in a nutrient solution containing sublethal doses of a newly developed and rare antibiotic, researchers found that within a short period of time the bacteria developed resistance to that antibiotic and to twelve other antibiotics that they had never before encountered—some of which were structurally dissimilar to the first. Stuart Levy observes that “it’s almost as if bacteria strategically anticipate the confrontation of other drugs when they resist one.

The capital was a city of contrasts and a city in turmoil. The disparity between the small number of incredibly wealthy people and the grinding poverty of the masses was simply enormous. In the West End, vast armies of servants lived in huge houses, virtual palaces in many cases, catering to the needs and whims of both the nobility and members of the newly evolved merchant class – old and new money living side by side. But in the East End, entire families were forced to live in single unheated and largely unfurnished rooms in buildings which had no sanitation whatsoever, and frequently not even the luxury of one cold-water tap.

[In a] recent PubMed and PsychAbstracts search... as we could not find a single reference for recovered memory therapy apart from those writing about its dangers. Our experience suggests that an overwhelming majority of clinicians do not assume or suggest to clients that they must have buried traumas from their past. It is also our experience that most clinicians are careful not to assume the literal veracity of reported traumatic memories, whether newly remembered or not." Cameron, C., & Heber, A. (2006). Re: Troubles in Traumatology, and Debunking Myths about Trauma and Memory/Reply: Troubles in Traumatology and Debunking Myths about Trauma and Memory. Canadian journal of psychiatry, 51(6), 402.

Demanding yet denying the human condition makes for an explosive contradiction. And explode it does, as you and I know. And we live in an age of conflagration: it only needs the rising birth rate to worsen the food shortage, it only needs the newly born to fear living a little more than dying, and for the torrent of violence to sweep away all the barriers. In Algeria and Angola, Europeans are massacred on sight. This is the age of the boomerang, the third stage of violence: it flies right back at us, it strikes us and, once again, we have no idea what hit us. The "liberals" remain stunned: they admit we had not been polite enough to the "natives," that it would have been wiser and fairer to grant them certain rights, wherever possible; they would have been only too happy to admit them in batches without a sponsor to that exclusive club -- the human species; and now this barbaric explosion of madness is putting them in the same boat as the wretched colonists. The metropolitan Left is in a quandary: it is well aware of the true fate of the "natives," the pitiless oppression they are subjected to, and does not condemn their revolt, knowing that we did everything to provoke it. But even so, it thinks, there are limits: these guerrillas should make every effort to show some chivalry; this would be the best way of proving they are men. Sometimes the Left berates them: "You're going too far; we cannot support you any longer." They don't care a shit for its support; it can shove it up its ass for what it's worth. As soon as the war began, they realized the harsh truth: we are all equally as good as each other. We have all taken advantage of them, they have nothing to prove, they won't give anyone preferential treatment. A single duty, a single objective: drive out colonialism by every means. And the most liberal among us would be prepared to accept this, at a pinch, but they cannot help seeing in this trial of strength a perfectly inhuman method used by subhumans to claim for themselves a charter for humanity: let them acquire it as quickly as possible, but in order to merit it, let them use nonviolent methods. Our noble souls are racist.

In May 1981, Yuri Andropov, chairman of the KGB, gathered his senior officers in a secret conclave to issue a startling announcement: America was planning to launch a nuclear first strike, and obliterate the Soviet Union. For more than twenty years, a nuclear war between East and West had been held at bay by the threat of mutually assured destruction, the promise that both sides would be annihilated in any such conflict, regardless of who started it. But by the end of the 1970s the West had begun to pull ahead in the nuclear arms race, and tense détente was giving way to a different sort of psychological confrontation, in which the Kremlin feared it could be destroyed and defeated by a preemptive nuclear attack. Early in 1981, the KGB carried out an analysis of the geopolitical situation, using a newly developed computer program, and concluded that “the correlation of world forces” was moving in favor of the West. Soviet intervention in Afghanistan was proving costly, Cuba was draining Soviet funds, the CIA was launching aggressive covert action against the USSR, and the US was undergoing a major military buildup: the Soviet Union seemed to be losing the Cold War, and, like a boxer exhausted by long years of sparring, the Kremlin feared that a single, brutal sucker punch could end the contest. The KGB chief’s conviction that the USSR was vulnerable to a surprise nuclear attack probably had more to do with Andropov’s personal experience than rational geopolitical analysis. As Soviet ambassador to Hungary in 1956, he had witnessed how quickly an apparently powerful regime might be toppled. He had played a key role in suppressing the Hungarian Uprising. A dozen years later, Andropov again urged “extreme measures” to put down the Prague Spring. The “Butcher of Budapest” was a firm believer in armed force and KGB repression. The head of the Romanian secret police described him as “the man who substituted the KGB for the Communist Party in governing the USSR.” The confident and bullish stance of the newly installed Reagan administration seemed to underscore the impending threat. And so, like every genuine paranoiac, Andropov set out to find the evidence to confirm his fears. Operation RYAN (an acronym for raketno-yadernoye napadeniye, Russian for “nuclear missile attack”) was the biggest peacetime Soviet intelligence operation ever launched.

Moscow can be a cold, hard place in winter. But the big old house on Tverskoy Boulevard had always seemed immune to these particular facts, the way that it had seemed immune to many things throughout the years. When breadlines filled the streets during the reign of the czars, the big house had caviar. When the rest of Russia stood shaking in the Siberian winds, that house had fires and gaslight in every room. And when the Second World War was over and places like Leningrad and Berlin were nothing but rubble and crumbling walls, the residents of the big house on Tverskoy Boulevard only had to take up a hammer and drive a single nail—to hang a painting on the landing at the top of the stairs—to mark the end of a long war. The canvas was small, perhaps only eight by ten inches. The brushstrokes were light but meticulous. And the subject, the countryside near Provence, was once a favorite of an artist named Cézanne. No one in the house spoke of how the painting had come to be there. Not a single member of the staff ever asked the man of the house, a high-ranking Soviet official, to talk about the canvas or the war or whatever services he may have performed in battle or beyond to earn such a lavish prize. The house on Tverskoy Boulevard was not one for stories, everybody knew. And besides, the war was over. The Nazis had lost. And to the victors went the spoils. Or, as the case may be, the paintings. Eventually, the wallpaper faded, and soon few people actually remembered the man who had brought the painting home from the newly liberated East Germany. None of the neighbors dared to whisper the letters K-G-B. Of the old Socialists and new socialites who flooded through the open doors for parties, not one ever dared to mention the Russian mob. And still the painting stayed hanging, the music kept playing, and the party itself seemed to last—echoing out onto the street, fading into the frigid air of the night. The party on the first Friday of February was a fund-raiser—though for what cause or foundation, no one really knew. It didn’t matter. The same people were invited. The same chef was preparing the same food. The men stood smoking the same cigars and drinking the same vodka. And, of course, the same painting still hung at the top of the stairs, looking down on the partygoers below. But one of the partygoers was not, actually, the same. When she gave the man at the door a name from the list, her Russian bore a slight accent. When she handed her coat to a maid, no one seemed to notice that it was far too light for someone who had spent too long in Moscow’s winter. She was too short; her black hair framed a face that was in every way too young. The women watched her pass, eyeing the competition. The men hardly noticed her at all as she nibbled and sipped and waited until the hour grew late and the people became tipsy. When that time finally came, not one soul watched as the girl with the soft pale skin climbed the stairs and slipped the small painting from the nail that held it. She walked to the window. And jumped. And neither the house on Tverskoy Boulevard nor any of its occupants ever saw the girl or the painting again.

Ah! you cliques of the city!—don’t you know you had forebears with handlebar mustaches, who came down to the river in the morning bearing masts and booms on their shoulders? who killed their own bulls with a mighty club? who made their own clothes and tilled their own earth? For a million of your clever fashionable phrases, would you exchange one single such accomplishment? I know I would—and Oh God but I’m just as futile as you are, you city vermin; I too am vermin, vermin trying to struggle back to manhood, with small success. Here is our second illuminative nugget, with no emotions this time: that the fear of the family album is pursuant to the city’s general fear of time and particularly of the past (“Oh the stupid Victorian 19th Century!” they keep crying, as though Victorianism were the whole sum of that great century). Fear of the past is in the city, thus a love, a frantic need of the present—with all the hedonistic overtones involved, the psychological doctrines of “alertness” and the so-called liberation of sexuality: in other words, giving the moment over to the dictates of sexuality (divorce is such a dictate) and leaving time, the future—which is to them equivalent to the past, as a moral factor rather than a hedonistic factor of the “pulsing present”—leaving the future to the dogs, childless marriages, or one-child “families,” broken-up families, and thus leaving the future of mankind and the race to the dogs: to the destruction at the hands of a society’s inward atom bomb of organic-familial-societal disintegration: in short, the end of a race, as in Rome. This fear of reaching back into the past, into lineality and tradition, and of extending similarly forward into the future, is like a plant drying up, dying. Where I say this, they speak of the “reality of the moment” and the danger of suppressing the urges of the moment for any reason—but I find good reason if it is to spell the continuation of our own cultural mankind. Perhaps that’s what they don’t want, like children who resent all brothers and sisters burgeoning in their mother’s womb, resenting the future after them, feeling they should be the last, final men, that none must follow—a childish emotion. But to give oneself over to childish emotions is the aim of these city intellectuals, they abstrusely find much to “scientifically” substantiate this desire in the cult of psychoanalysis and its sub-cults, the Orgone “Institute” for one splendid example, and so they go ahead blithely, and I am not the one to oppose their concepts, their march off the ship’s plank—since I am marching to a plank of my own, since I do not wish to be reviled as a neurotic and an atavistic neo-fascist, since the other night, when mentioning these objections of mine, a city intellectual had apoplexy right before me. Oh

The room was built exactly as planned, hidden amongst a maze of pipes, water tanks and air conditioning ducts, inconspicuous to the point of invisibility. Inside, it was dark, foreboding and completely soundproof. Its walls and ceiling were solid and impenetrable with a single point of entry. It was the perfect room for storing your wine, old trophies or your newly acquired lycan.

Greece can balance its books without killing democracy Alexis Tsipras | 614 words OPINION Greece changes on January 25, the day of the election. My party, Syriza, guarantees a new social contract for political stability and economic security. We offer policies that will end austerity, enhance democracy and social cohesion and put the middle class back on its feet. This is the only way to strengthen the eurozone and make the European project attractive to citizens across the continent. We must end austerity so as not to let fear kill democracy. Unless the forces of progress and democracy change Europe, it will be Marine Le Pen and her far-right allies that change it for us. We have a duty to negotiate openly, honestly and as equals with our European partners. There is no sense in each side brandishing its weapons. Let me clear up a misperception: balancing the government’s budget does not automatically require austerity. A Syriza government will respect Greece’s obligation, as a eurozone member, to maintain a balanced budget, and will commit to quantitative targets. However, it is a fundamental matter of democracy that a newly elected government decides on its own how to achieve those goals. Austerity is not part of the European treaties; democracy and the principle of popular sovereignty are. If the Greek people entrust us with their votes, implementing our economic programme will not be a “unilateral” act, but a democratic obligation. Is there any logical reason to continue with a prescription that helps the disease metastasise? Austerity has failed in Greece. It crippled the economy and left a large part of the workforce unemployed. This is a humanitarian crisis. The government has promised the country’s lenders that it will cut salaries and pensions further, and increase taxes in 2015. But those commitments only bind Antonis Samaras’s government which will, for that reason, be voted out of office on January 25. We want to bring Greece to the level of a proper, democratic European country. Our manifesto, known as the Thessaloniki programme, contains a set of fiscally balanced short-term measures to mitigate the humanitarian crisis, restart the economy and get people back to work. Unlike previous governments, we will address factors within Greece that have perpetuated the crisis. We will stand up to the tax-evading economic oligarchy. We will ensure social justice and sustainable growth, in the context of a social market economy. Public debt has risen to a staggering 177 per cent of gross domestic product. This is unsustainable; meeting the payments is very hard. On existing loans, we demand repayment terms that do not cause recession and do not push the people to more despair and poverty. We are not asking for new loans; we cannot keep adding debt to the mountain. The 1953 London Conference helped Germany achieve its postwar economic miracle by relieving the country of the burden of its own past errors. (Greece was among the international creditors who participated.) Since austerity has caused overindebtedness throughout Europe, we now call for a European debt conference, which will likewise give a strong boost to growth in Europe. This is not an exercise in creating moral hazard. It is a moral duty. We expect the European Central Bank itself to launch a full-blooded programme of quantitative easing. This is long overdue. It should be on a scale great enough to heal the eurozone and to give meaning to the phrase “whatever it takes” to save the single currency. Syriza will need time to change Greece. Only we can guarantee a break with the clientelist and kleptocratic practices of the political and economic elites. We have not been in government; we are a new force that owes no allegiance to the past. We will make the reforms that Greece actually needs. The writer is leader of Syriza, the Greek oppositionparty

Eventually I was ready to learn how to perform routine life tasks again. 'Enabling occupation'—that’s what the learning process was called when it was presented to me. Enabling occupation involved the mastery of skills that I didn’t even know could properly be called 'skills.' How to pick up and carry and manipulate a set of common objects: a handbag, a stoneware saucer, a mobile phone, a paperback book. I was told that my new limbs were capable of hefting an automobile, of bending an iron bar, but I couldn’t make them do any of these magical things—not anything remotely close. Instead, I spent my days trying to pick up a thumbtack from a hard surface using my feeble pincer grasp, to activate a light switch with a single articulated finger, and to fasten a long line of shirt buttons, each of which was around the size of a half-dollar coin. During this period, I worked to improve my gross motor skills in parallel. I relearned how to reach for distant objects without collapsing under my own weight, how to twist a standard brass doorknob, and how to pour liquid from a plastic pitcher into a paper cup without spilling everything everywhere or crushing the handle itself in my grip. Eventually I used these newfound skills to practice clothing myself in simple blouses with velcro fasteners and pants with elastic waistbands, struggling to take it all off again when it was time. At some point during this phase, a team of nameless staff members helped me stand upright in front of a full-length mirror so I could stare at my newly-made body, fully exposed, and with my sharpened vision I was able to see the true extent of my transformation, the exquisite atrocity I’d chosen to perpetrate.

Humans have natural rights in the state of nature but they do not have civil rights. Civil rights are derived from membership in a society. The Republicans who controlled both houses of Congress after the Civil War knew this. They also knew that, before conferring civil rights, they had to once and for all abolish slavery. The Thirteenth Amendment ending slavery was passed by the Senate on April 8, 1864, and by the House on January 31, 1865. Republican support for the amendment: 100 percent. Democratic support: 23 percent. Even after the Civil War, only a tiny percentage of Democrats were willing to sign up to permanently end slavery. Most Democrats wanted it to continue. In the following year, on June 13, 1866, the Republican Congress passed the Fourteenth Amendment overturning the Dred Scott decision and granting full citizenship and equal rights under the law to blacks. This amendment prohibited states from abridging the “privileges and immunities” of all citizens, from depriving them of “due process of law” or denying them “equal protection of the law.” The Fourteenth Amendment passed the House and Senate with exclusive Republican support. Not a single Democrat either in the House or the Senate voted for it. Two years later, in 1868, Congress with the support of newly-elected Republican president Ulysses Grant passed the Fifteenth Amendment granting suffrage to blacks. The right to vote, it said, cannot be “denied or abridged by the United States or any state on account of race, color or previous condition of servitude.” In the Senate, the Fifteenth Amendment passed by a vote of 39 to 13. Every one of the 39 “yes” votes came from Republicans. (Some Republicans like Charles Sumner abstained because they wanted the measure to go even further than it did.) All the 13 “no” votes came from Democrats. In the House, every “yes” vote came from a Republican and every Democrat voted “no.” It is surely a matter of the greatest significance that the constitutional provisions that made possible the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, and the Fair Housing Bill only entered the Constitution thanks to the Republican Party. Beyond this, the GOP put forward a series of Civil Rights laws to further reinforce black people’s rights to freedom, equality, and social justice. When Republicans passed the Civil Rights Act of 1866—guaranteeing to blacks the rights to make contracts and to have the criminal laws apply equally to whites and blacks—the Democrats struck back. They didn’t have the votes in Congress, but they had a powerful ally in President Andrew Johnson. Johnson vetoed the legislation. Now this may seem like an odd act for Lincoln’s vice president, but it actually wasn’t. Many people don’t realize that Johnson wasn’t a Republican; he was a Democrat. Historian Kenneth Stampp calls him “the last Jacksonian.”8 Lincoln put him on the ticket because he was a pro-union Democrat and Lincoln was looking for ways to win the votes of Democrats opposed to secession. Johnson, however, was both a southern partisan and a Democratic partisan. Once the Civil War ended, he attempted to lead weak-kneed Republicans into a new Democratic coalition based on racism and white privilege. Johnson championed the Democratic mantra of white supremacy, declaring, “This is a country for white men and, by God, as long as I am president, it shall be a government of white men.” In his 1867 annual message to Congress, Johnson declared that blacks possess “less capacity for government than any other race of people. No independent government of any form has ever been successful in their hands. On the contrary, wherever they have been left to their own devices they have shown a consistent tendency to relapse into barbarism.”9 These are perhaps the most racist words uttered by an American president, and no surprise, they were uttered by a Democrat.

Steve had tried to reach us after our Father’s Day phone call. There was no way I could have realized that, because I didn’t have any mobile phone reception at the cottage. He was back on Croc One and trying to get hold of us via satellite phone. I didn’t know. I wouldn’t be in range again until the next day. We enjoyed our dinner, built a huge fire, and snuggled down for the night. We didn’t hurry ourselves the next day. We meandered west, stopping at a raspberry farm and at the Honey Factory in Chudleigh. They featured a beehive behind glass, and we loved watching as the bees worked on their honeycomb. They never stopped to say, “I wonder what the meaning of life is.” They just kept building. The Honey Factory also featured a plethora of bee-themed products: bee gum boots, bee back massagers, bee umbrellas, and a bee trolley for the kids to ride on. Bindi sampled every single flavor of honey that they had. She bought a wristwatch with a bee on it. Robert picked out a backpack. “Robert,” I said, “that backpack is great. It has bees on it.” “It has one bee on it,” he said, correcting me. “Oh, okay, one bee,” I said, amused at my son’s seriousness. We spent the last hour of the morning at the Honey Factory. As we walked out the door, Bindi looked at her newly purchased watch and said, “It’s twelve o’clock.” We all stopped for a moment and considered that it was twelve o’clock. Then we got into the car and left.

He was struggling also, against her newly discovered ability, as well as the wound inflicted by Chewbacca’s bowcaster. Gritting his teeth, he flung his arm sideways in a single, powerful gesture—and the blaster went flying out of her hand.

There have been many signs of a newly awakened caring in recent years, and I need to remember all the signs of goodness and hope, particularly after I look at the paper or listen to the news. We are one planet, a single organism

Following graduation, and after three years of working with General Electric in New York, I took a job in their office in Stamford, Connecticut. And though I was sad leaving a city where there seemed to be a cinema on every corner, I was happy to learn about a newly opened theater near Stamford specializing in experimental, independent, and classic films. One week an unusual advertisement in the theater’s schedule caught my attention. It was a haunting black-and-white photograph of a woman’s face floating above a single word: Thérèse. Though I wasn’t sure what the film was about—something about the ad seemed vaguely religious—I convinced a coworker to accompany me to the screening. The film, directed by Alain Cavalier, was a bold, spare look at the life of Thérèse of Lisieux, the nineteenth-century French saint, about whom I knew absolutely nothing. The almost complete absence of physical scenery meant that the film focused on the quiet interactions of the few characters.

Everything has been done -- every material thing -- to give this place the aspect of benignity, of friendship, of tolerance and conviviality, but the character of a dwelling, like that of a man, grows slowly. The walls of my house are without memories, or secrets, or laughter. Not enough of life has been breathed into them -- their warmth is artificial; too few hands have turned the window latches, too few feet have trod the thresholds. The boards of the floor, self-conscious as youth or falsely proud as the newly rich, have not yet unlimbered enough to utter a single cordial creak. In time they will, but not for me.

wind moving through the high branches of the trees made wavering leaf shadows. The new kid was wearing a blue dress that was too big for her, sneakers with white socks pushed down, and a heavy-looking backpack. Her jumbled mopflop of hair made her face look smaller and her eyes look bigger. The tiny metal balls that ear-piercers put in newly pierced ears glinted in her lobes. She hovered behind a pillar at the far end of the entrance, away from the crush. Fewer students now, mostly single ones hurrying to beat the bell. Each time the metal-and-glass doors swung shut, a mirror image of the sidewalk clunked back into place, and each time, the new kid’s eyes shifted toward it. She looked like she might be asking her reflection to tell her that everything was going to be all right. But then her eyes always went down again, like maybe her reflection had shaken its head. Now a minute with no one using the leftmost door.

To solve the inability of middle-class renters to purchase single-family homes for the first time, Congress and President Roosevelt created the Federal Housing Administration in 1934. The FHA insured bank mortgages that covered 80 percent of purchase prices, had terms of twenty years, and were fully amortized. To be eligible for such insurance, the FHA insisted on doing its own appraisal of the property to make certain that the loan had a low risk of default. Because the FHA's appraisal standards included a whites-only requirement, racial segregation now became an official requirement of the federal mortgage insurance program. The FHA judged that properties would probably be too risky for insurance if they were in racially mixed neighborhoods or even in white neighborhoods near black ones that might possibly integrate in the future. When a bank applied to the FHA for insurance on a prospective loan, the agency conducted a property appraisal, which was also likely performed by a local real estate agent hired by the agency. as the volume of applications increased, the agency hired its own appraisers, usually from the ranks of the private real estate agents who had previously been working as contractors for the FHA. To guide their work, the FHA provided them with an Underwriting Manual. The first, issued in 1935, gave this instruction: 'If a neighborhood is to retain stability it is necessary that properties shall continue to be occupied by the same social and racial classes. A change in social or racial occupancy generally leads to instability and a reduction in values.' Appraisers were told to give higher ratings where '[p]rotection against some adverse influences is obtained,' and that '[i]mportant among adverse influences . . . are infiltration of inharmonious racial or nationality groups.' The manual concluded that '[a]ll mortgages on properties protected against [such] unfavorable influences, to the extent such protection is possible, will obtain a high rating.' The FHA discouraged banks from making any loans at all in urban neighborhoods rather than newly built suburbs; according to the Underwriting Manual, 'older properties . . . have a tendency to accelerate the rate of transition to lower class occupancy.' The FHA favored mortgages in areas where boulevards or highways served to separate African American families from whites, stating that '[n]atural or artificially established barriers will prove effective in protecting a neighborhood and the locations within it from adverse influences, . . . includ[ing] prevention of the infiltration of . . . lower class occupancy, and inharmonious racial groups.

Now, these people have only lost what they should lose, but that is also true of other forms of concentrated power. We’re in a system that tells, for example, the wealthy that they deserve all their wealth and it should be protected through force. So, naturally, the newly alienated feel singled out and victimized. “The solution isn’t going back to the one clear path. The solution is, everywhere and always, the decentralization and redistribution of all forms of power.

So the city became the material expression of a particular loss of innocence—not sexual or political innocence but somehow a shared dream of what a city might at its best prove to be—its inhabitants became, and have remained, an embittered and amnesiac race, wounded but unable to connect through memory to the moment of the injury, unable to summon the face of their violator. Out of that night and day of unconditional wrath, folks would’ve expected to see any city, if it survived, all newly reborn, purified by flame, taken clear beyond greed, real-estate speculating, local politics—instead of which, here was this weeping widow, some one-woman grievance committee in black, who would go on to save up and lovingly record and mercilessly begrudge every goddamn single tear she ever had to cry, and over the years to come would make up for them all by developing into the meanest, cruelest bitch of a city, even among cities not notable for their kindness. To all appearance resolute, adventurous, manly, the city could not shake that terrible all-night rape, when “he” was forced to submit, surrendering, inadmissably, blindly feminine, into the Hellfire embrace of “her” beloved. He spent the years afterward forgetting and fabulating and trying to get back some self-respect. But inwardly, deep inside, “he” remained the catamite of Hell, the punk at the disposal of all the denizens thereof, the bitch in men’s clothing. So,

While marriage rates for middle-class white women soared through the 1940s and 1950s, for black women, mid-twentieth century conditions were very different. Since emancipation, black women had married earlier and more often than their white counterparts. In the years directly after World War II, thanks to the return of soldiers, black marriage rates briefly increased further.66 However, as white women kept marrying in bigger numbers and at younger ages throughout the 1950s, black marriage rates began to decrease, and the age of first marriage to climb.67 By 1970, there had been a sharp reversal: Black women were not marrying nearly as often or as early as their white counterparts. It was nothing as benign as coincidence. While one of the bedrocks of the expansion of the middle class was the aggressive reassignment of white women to domestic roles within the idealized nuclear family, another was the exclusion of African-Americans from the opportunities and communities that permitted those nuclear families to flourish. Put more plainly, the economic benefits extended to the white middle class, both during the New Deal and in the post-World War II years, did not extend to African-Americans. Social Security, created in 1935, did not apply to either domestic laborers or agricultural workers, who tended to be African-Americans, or Asian or Mexican immigrants. Discriminatory hiring practices, the low percentages of black workers in the country’s newly strengthened labor unions, and the persistent (if slightly narrowed68) racial wage gap, along with questionable practices by the Veterans Administration, and the reality that many colleges barred the admission of black students, also meant that returning black servicemen had a far harder time taking advantage of the GI Bill’s promise of college education.69 Then there was housing. The suburbs that bloomed around American cities after the war, images of which are still summoned as symbols of midcentury familial prosperity, were built for white families. In William Levitt’s four enormous “Levittowns,” suburban developments which, thanks to government guarantees from the VA and the Federal Housing Association, provided low-cost housing to qualified veterans, there was not one black resident.70 Between 1934 and 1962, the government subsidized $120 billion in new housing; 98 percent of it for white families.

The Sad Boy Ay, his old mother was a glad one. And his poor old father was a mad one. The two begot this sad one. Alas for the single shoe The Sad Boy pulled out of the rank green pond, Fishing for fairies On the prankish advice Of two disagreeable lovers of small boys. Pity the unfortunate Sad Boy With a single magic shoe And a pair of feet And an extra foot With no shoe for it. This was how the terrible hopping began That wore the Sad Boy thin and through To his only shoe And started the great fright in the provinces above Brent Where the Sad Boy became half of himself To match the beautiful boot He had dripped from the green pond. Wherever he went weeping and hopping And stamping and sobbing, Pounding a whole earth into a half-heaven, Things split where he stood Into the left side for the left magic, Into no side for the missing right boot. Mercy be to the Sad Boy Scamping exasperated After a wide boot To double the magic Of a limping foot. Mercy to the melancholy folk On the Sad Boy's right. It was not for want of wandering He lost the left boot too And the knowledge of his left side, But because one awful Sunday This dear boy dislimbed Went back to the old pond To fish up another shoe And was quickly (being too light for his line) Fished in. Gracious how he kicks now All the little ripples up! The quiet population of Brent has settled down, And the perfect surface of the famous pond Is slightly pocked, marked with three signs, For visitors come to fish for souvenirs, Where the Sad Boy went in And his glad mother and his mad father after him.

I GET DICKS PICS EVERY SINGLE DAY OF MY LIFE. I WONDER WHY? I SIMPLY POSTED MY NEWLY PURCHASED LACED UNDIES ON MY BLOG.

When I was a newly single mom with a toddler and a newborn, I’d cringe when meeting new people, especially other young parents, none of whom seemed to be anything but blissfully orbiting in their nuclear family unit. I’d dance around any pressures (perceived or real) to reveal my marital status, until I’d burst, and a flood of unprompted details would pour out: “I’m-separated-yes-your-math-is-right-my-ex-moved-out-while-Iwas-pregnant-but-he-had-a-brain-injury-and-destabalized-so-it-is-an-unusual-situation-a-medical-crisis-he’sactually-a-very-good-person-I’m-not-angry-about-that-we-are-all-fine!

The video was called The Clear Path and it followed the course of a life 40 years ago and the course of a life today. In the path 40 years ago the path was clear and obvious. The illustrated protagonists of the video did not need to spend time thinking about his sexuality or his gender or his religion. That same protagonist living life today was given options. What is your sexuality? What is your gender? How do you want to find connection and community? The point the video was making now was that there is no longer a clear path and that was more work. And at that point it was kind of pissing me off. I felt like it was making it seem like allowing for different kinds of people was a burden, but then the video turned it around. Over illustrated images of happy families of all sorts the narrator said 'The reality is the benefits of this far out weigh the costs. If we do not let people know that it is possible to be different the ones who are different will live their entire lives in a kind of cultural prison. And there are so many ways to be different that almost everyone ends up feeling imprisoned by some aspect of a society that only allows for the default path. The problem is that as progressives we pretend that there are no costs and that no one is losing anything. The video continued, but of course some people do lose, especially those whos power was tied up not in their wealth, but in fitting comfortably into the clear path. Now these people have only lost what they should lose, but that is also true of other forms of concentrated power. We are in a system that tells, for example, the wealthy, that they deserve all of their wealth and it should be protected through force. So, naturally the newly alienated feel singled out and victimized. The solution isn't going back to the one clear path. The solution is everywhere and always the decentralization and redistribution of all forms of power.

In the same way that genetic information is stored as DNA, epigenetic information is stored in a structure called chromatin. DNA in the cell isn’t flailing around disorganized, it is wrapped around tiny balls of protein called histones. These beads on a string self-assemble to form loops, as when you tidy your garden hose on your driveway by looping it into a pile. If you were to play tug-of-war using both ends of a chromosome, you’d end up with a six foot-long string of DNA punctuated by thousands of histone proteins. If you could somehow plug one end of the DNA into a power socket and make the histones flash on and off, a few cells could do you for holiday lights. In simple species, like ancient M. superstes and fungi today, epigenetic information storage and transfer is important for survival. For complex life, it is essential. By complex life, I mean anything made up of more than a couple of cells: slime molds, jellyfish, worms, fruit flies, and of course mammals like us. Epigenetic information is what orchestrates the assembly of a human newborn made up of 26 billion cells from a single fertilized egg and what allows the genetically identical cells in our bodies to assume thousands of different modalities.24 If the genome were a computer, the epigenome would be the software. It instructs the newly divided cells on what type of cells they should be and what they should remain, sometimes for decades, as in the case of individual brain neurons and certain immune cells.

Sidney provides the commentary on the DVD, and he tells us that he wanted “a train song.” Warren and Mercer gave him much more than that, for “On the Atchison, Topeka and the Santa Fe” is really an “entire town song.” It starts in the saloon—an important location, as it will be at war with the restaurant the Harvey girls wait table in—then moves to the train’s passengers, engineers, and conductor as it pulls in and the locals look everyone over, especially the newly mustered Harveys themselves. Warren’s music has imitated the train’s chugging locomotion, but now comes a trio section not by Warren and Mercer (at “Hey there, did you ever see such pearly femininity … ”), and the girls give us some individual backstories—one claims to have been the Lillian Russell of a small town in Kansas, and principals Ray Bolger and Virginia O’Brien each get a solo, too. The number is not only thus detailed as a composition but gets the ultimate MGM treatment on a gigantic set with intricate interaction among the many soloists, choristers, and extras. But now it’s Garland’s turn to enter the number, disembark, and mix in with the crowd. According to Sidney, Garland executed everything perfectly on the first try—and it was all done in virtually a single shot. Fred Astaire would have insisted on rehearsing it for a week, but Garland was a natural. Once she understood the spirit of a number, the physics of it simply fell into place for her. In any other film of the era, the saloon would be the place where the music was made. And Angela Lansbury, queen of the plot’s rowdy element, does have a floor number, dressed in malevolent black and shocking pink topped by a matching Hippodrome hat. But every other number is a story number—“The Train Must Be Fed” (as the Harveys learn the art of waitressing); “It’s a Great Big World” for anxious Harveys Garland, O’Brien, and a dubbed Cyd Charisse; O’Brien’s comic lament, “The Wild, Wild West,” a forging song at Ray Bolger’s blacksmith shop; “Swing Your Partner Round and Round” at a social. Marjorie Main cues it up, telling one and all that this new dance is “all the rage way

The former head of this operation, Gary Wendt, who is credited with much of the enormous success of GEFS, used his personal agenda as a simple but inordinately powerful tool for growing the business into ever new entrepreneurial arenas. Over the years, he used his personal agenda to make it unequivocally clear that he expected entrepreneurial business growth from every member of management. At every major meeting, the topic of business development was on the agenda (usually in the number one spot). In every annual review, managers were asked to demonstrate the revenues they had created from businesses that did not exist five years before. From division heads to newly hired analysts, everyone was held accountable for some set of activities having to do with creating entrepreneurial revenue and profit streams. In short, no one who worked in the organization could avoid the unremitting focus on new business development. You need to make sure that you are similarly consistent, predictable, and focused, and that you sustain this emphasis over a long period. Pressure applied only once is soon forgotten, and alternating pressure (as in flavor-of-the-month management) will cause people to be confused, disillusioned, or angry. Wendt’s consistent, visible, and predictable attention to business development created a pressure in GEFS for entrepreneurial business growth that took it from the $300 million installment loan portfolio we looked at in chapter 6 to a financial services behemoth with $250 billion in assets under management when he left in 1998. Examples of Wendt’s single-minded determination to drive growth through entrepreneurial transformation at GEFS are numerous. Years ago, for instance, he was asked whether his agenda would change if someone rushed in and told him that the computer room was on fire (implying that his business could be completely destroyed). Wendt replied that he employed firefighters to handle such emergencies. As the leader, his most important job was to keep people focused on business development. Since business development is an uncomfortable and unpredictable process, Wendt knew that if he allowed it to appear to be a low priority for him, all those working for him would heave a sigh of relief and go back to business as usual, with new businesses struggling to find a place on the priority list. In fact, as he remarked, even if he did try to get involved in putting out the fire, he would probably only interfere with the efforts of the highly competent people employed to do so.

as a newly single parent or

When Hari Seldon established the Foundation here, it was for the ostensible purpose of producing a great Encyclopedia, and for fifty years we followed that will-of-the-wisp, before discovering what he was really after. By that time, it was almost too late. When communications with the central regions of the old Empire broke down, we found ourselves a world of scientists concentrated in a single city, possessing no industries and surrounded by newly created kingdoms, hostile and largely barbarous. We were a tiny island of atomic power in this ocean of barbarism, and an infinitely valuable prize. ‘Anacreon, then as now, the most powerful of the Four Kingdoms, demanded and actually established a military base upon Terminus, and the then rulers of the City, the Encyclopedists, knew very well that this was only a preliminary to taking over the entire planet. That is how matters stood when I … uh … assumed actual government. What would you have done?

From the very start of the healthcare debate, policy wonks on the left had pushed us to modify the Massachusetts model by giving consumers the choice to buy coverage on the online “exchange,” not just from the likes of Aetna and Blue Cross Blue Shield but also from a newly formed insurer owned and operated by the government. Unsurprisingly, insurance companies had balked at the idea of a public option, arguing that they would not be able to compete against a government insurance plan that could operate without the pressures of making a profit. Of course, for public-option proponents, that was exactly the point: By highlighting the cost-effectiveness of government insurance and exposing the bloated waste and immorality of the private insurance market, they hoped the public option would pave the way for a single-payer system.

Mo. 4. (June) 8.] One Nathaniel Briscoe, a godly young man, newly admitted a member of the church of Boston, being single, he kept with his father, a godly poor man, but minded his own advantage more than his father’s necessity, so as that his father, desiring in the evening to have his help the next day, he neglected his father’s request, and rose very early next morning to go help another man for wages, and being loading a boat in a small creek, he fell into the water and was drowned.

A soul arms itself by prayer for all kinds of combat. In whatever state the soul may be, it ought to pray. A soul which is pure and beautiful must pray, or it will lose its beauty; a soul which is striving after this purity must pray, or else it will never attain it; a soul which is newly converted must pray, or else it will fall again; a sinful soul, plunged in sins, must pray so that it might rise again. There is no soul which is not bound to pray, for every single grace comes to the soul through prayer (Diary of St. Faustina, 146).

Despite Noetic Science’s use of cutting-edge technologies, the discoveries themselves were far more mystical than the cold, high-tech machines that were producing them. The stuff of magic and myth was fast becoming reality as the shocking new data poured in, all of it supporting the basic ideology of Noetic Science—the untapped potential of the human mind. The overall thesis was simple: We have barely scratched the surface of our mental and spiritual capabilities. Experiments at facilities like the Institute of Noetic Sciences (IONS) in California and the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research Lab (PEAR) had categorically proven that human thought, if properly focused, had the ability to affect and change physical mass. Their experiments were no “spoon-bending” parlor tricks, but rather highly controlled inquiries that all produced the same extraordinary result: our thoughts actually interacted with the physical world, whether or not we knew it, effecting change all the way down to the subatomic realm. Mind over matter. In 2001, in the hours following the horrifying events of September 11, the field of Noetic Science made a quantum leap forward. Four scientists discovered that as the frightened world came together and focused in shared grief on this single tragedy, the outputs of thirty-seven different Random Event Generators around the world suddenly became significantly less random. Somehow, the oneness of this shared experience, the coalescing of millions of minds, had affected the randomizing function of these machines, organizing their outputs and bringing order from chaos. The shocking discovery, it seemed, paralleled the ancient spiritual belief in a “cosmic consciousness”—a vast coalescing of human intention that was actually capable of interacting with physical matter. Recently, studies in mass meditation and prayer had produced similar results in Random Event Generators, fueling the claim that human consciousness, as Noetic author Lynne McTaggart described it, was a substance outside the confines of the body . . . a highly ordered energy capable of changing the physical world. Katherine had been fascinated by McTaggart’s book The Intention Experiment, and her global, Web-based study—theintentionexperiment.com—aimed at discovering how human intention could affect the world. A handful of other progressive texts had also piqued Katherine’s interest. From this foundation, Katherine Solomon’s research had vaulted forward, proving that “focused thought” could affect literally anything—the growth rate of plants, the direction that fish swam in a bowl, the manner in which cells divided in a petri dish, the synchronization of separately automated systems, and the chemical reactions in one’s own body. Even the crystalline structure of a newly forming solid was rendered mutable by one’s mind; Katherine had created beautifully symmetrical ice crystals by sending loving thoughts to a glass of water as it froze. Incredibly, the converse was also true: when she sent negative, polluting thoughts to the water, the ice crystals froze in chaotic, fractured forms. Human thought can literally transform the physical world.

During their brief history the newly formed Special Operations Forces had already achieved a notable record, but they had yet to tackle a major rescue of the magnitude of the Lady Flamborough hijacking. The orphan child of the Pentagon, the Special Operations Forces were not molded into a single command until the fall of 1989. At that time the Army's Delta Force, whose fighters were drawn from the elite Ranger and Green Beret units and a secret aviation unit known as Task Force 160, merged with the top-of-the-line Navy SEAL Team Six and the Air Force's Special Operations Wing. The unified forces cut across service rivalries and boundaries and became a separate command, numbering twelve thousand men, headquartered at a tightly restricted base in southeast Virginia. The crack fighters were heavily trained in guerrilla tactics, parachuting, wilderness survival and scuba diving, with special emphasis on storming buildings, ships and aircraft for rescue missions.

I see the advantages to being newly single every day!

John Duke’s picture flashes across my screen, and I almost drop my phone. Motherfucker. Twenty-eight. Fit. Single. Ambitious. Newly promoted to homicide detective—a coveted spot. Definitely not ugly—can’t believe I’m admitting that.

Almost all governments supported the single currency project, on political grounds even more than economic ones. The most powerful commitment came from France, where a tradition of support for exchange-rate stability was bolstered by the desire to share in the control of a European central bank and thus recover some of the monetary autonomy that had in practice been lost to the Bundesbank. Other member states, apart from Denmark and the UK—both of which secured opt-outs from any commitment to join a single currency—accepted such arguments, especially in the context of a newly unified Germany. For Germany, however, while the political motive for accepting the single currency as a French condition of unification was decisive, there were still reservations about replacing the Deutschmark, with its well-earned strength and stability, by an unproven currency. However, the possibility of building a similar system across the EU was clearly an important motivating factor for an export-driven economy like Germany’s; if other states would accept the logic of macroeconomic coordination alongside the currency itself, then this would ultimately serve Germany’s interests.

On a gorgeous mid-May morning with temperatures still in the seventies, all was right with Ali Reynolds’s world. The cobalt blue sky overhead was unblemished by even a single cloud, and Sedona’s towering red rocks gleamed in brilliant sunlight. The seemingly endless remodeling project on Ali’s recently purchased Manzanita Hills Road house had finally come to an end. The workers were gone, along with their trucks and their constant noise. Now, seated on her newly refurbished flagstone patio and surrounded by an ancient wisteria in full and glorious bloom, she was enjoying the peace and quiet, as well as a third cup of freshly brewed coffee,

I found the newly launched Government of Balochistan’s website a user-friendly browsing experience for those people who need a single window to get quick and useful information about the diversity of the Province including its rich History, Culture, Civilization, Ethinic Diversity, Tourism, Coast Belt, Flora and Fauna etc. It also highlights the initiatives.

When a player opens a newly discovered chest, it may contain what he’s looking for, but not always. If you needed to collect, say, seven gems, and every chest you opened contained a gem, it would be completely predictable. There would be no surprises, no reward prediction errors, no dopamine. If, on the other hand, you had to open a thousand chests to find a single gem, it would be so frustrating that everyone would give up. How does a game developer decide what percentage of chests should contain a gem? The answer is data. Lots of data.

This point was driven home for me for the first time when I was traveling in Asia in 1978 on a trip to a forest monastery in northeastern Thailand, Wat Ba Pong, on the Thai-Lao border. I was taken there by my meditation teacher, Jack Kornfield, who was escorting a group of us to meet the monk under whom he had studied at that forest hermitage. This man, Achaan Chaa, described himself as a “simple forest monk,” and he ran a hundred-acre forest monastery that was simple and old-fashioned, with one notable exception. Unlike most contemporary Buddhist monasteries in Thailand, where the practice of meditation as the Buddha had taught had all but died out, Achaan Chaa’s demanded intensive meditation practice and a slow, deliberate, mindful attention to the mundane details of everyday life. He had developed a reputation as a meditation master of the first order. My own first impressions of this serene environment were redolent of the newly extinguished Vietnam War, scenes of which were imprinted in my memory from years of media attention. The whole place looked extraordinarily fragile to me. On my first day, I was awakened before dawn to accompany the monks on their early morning alms rounds through the countryside. Clad in saffron robes, clutching black begging bowls, they wove single file through the green and brown rice paddies, mist rising, birds singing, as women and children knelt with heads bowed along the paths and held out offerings of sticky rice or fruits. The houses along the way were wooden structures, often perched on stilts, with thatched roofs. Despite the children running back and forth laughing at the odd collection of Westerners trailing the monks, the whole early morning seemed caught in a hush. After breakfasting on the collected food, we were ushered into an audience with Achaan Chaa. A severe-looking man with a kindly twinkle in his eyes, he sat patiently waiting for us to articulate the question that had brought us to him from such a distance. Finally, we made an attempt: “What are you really talking about? What do you mean by ‘eradicating craving’?” Achaan Chaa looked down and smiled faintly. He picked up the glass of drinking water to his left. Holding it up to us, he spoke in the chirpy Lao dialect that was his native tongue: “You see this goblet? For me, this glass is already broken. I enjoy it; I drink out of it. It holds my water admirably, sometimes even reflecting the sun in beautiful patterns. If I should tap it, it has a lovely ring to it. But when I put this glass on a shelf and the wind knocks it over or my elbow brushes it off the table and it falls to the ground and shatters, I say, ‘Of course.’ But when I understand that this glass is already broken, every moment with it is precious.”5 Achaan Chaa was not just talking about the glass, of course, nor was he speaking merely of the phenomenal world, the forest monastery, the body, or the inevitability of death. He was also speaking to each of us about the self. This self that you take to be so real, he was saying, is already broken.

For those who love to have the newest gadgets, there is the Gruve. Newly released from a company aptly named Muve, the Gruve is a postage-stamp-sized device you wear on your waist via a thin elastic strap. It reads every single footstep and hip wiggle, keeping constant tabs on your NEAT calorie burn, so you always know how much you’ve moved.

By the end of the nineteenth century, the country was awash in fears of insurrection by increasingly independent populations of women and newly freed slaves.

wealthy, white American wife, relieved of her responsibilities for at-home production, became responsible for scrupulously maintaining a domicile that served as the feminized inverse of the newly bustling, masculine public space.

if we humans utilize our newly found genetic knowledge skillfully, it could help foster a greater sense of affinity and unity not only with our fellow human beings but with life as a whole.

Recently a newly revised and expanded edition of my Revolt against the Modern World appeared and I think it was mentioned in it your Treatise on the History of Religions [not true]. But about this, and I say it a little tongue in cheek, one should employ some Vergeltungen [revenge]. The fact is striking that your works are so overly concerned to not mention any author who does not strictly belong to the official university literature; in your works, e.g., that lovable good man Pettazzoni [Italian professor of religion] is abundantly cited, while not a single word is found about Guenon, and not even other authors whose ideas are much closer to those that permit you to certainly orient yourself in the material that you write about. It stands to reason that this is something that concerns only you, but it would be the chance to ask yourself if, all things considered, if imposing these “academic” limitations is a game that is worth the candle. I hope that you will not resent these friendly observations. Letters from Evola to Eliade (II) - 15 Dec 1951

That summer, the month he turned twenty-nine, my brother had proposed to his girlfriend, the one he’d met four years earlier, just before coming to stay with me in Brooklyn. Nearly everyone from high school and most of my friends from college were married, or soon to be, and as for ex-boyfriends: W married in 2005; R met his soon-to-be wife in 2006 (today both couples have two children). Even the close friends I’d made in New York were “joining the vast majority,” as Neith had put it. All of us wanted to believe this wouldn’t change anything. But it did, invariably, in ways small and large. It’s a rare friendship that transcends the circumstances that forged it, and being single together in the city, no matter how powerful a bond when it’s happening, can prove pretty weak glue. Alliances had been redrawn, resources shifted and reconsolidated; new envies replaced the old. Whereas before we were all broke together, now they had husbands splitting the rent and bills, and I couldn’t shake my awareness of this difference. A treacherous, unspoken sense of inequality set in, which only six months into my new magazine job had radically reversed: I’d become the one who could afford nice restaurants while they had to channel their disposable incomes toward a shared household, and I felt their unspoken judgment just as before they’d felt mine. One newly married friend lashed out at me for never inviting her to parties. I tried to explain: Didn’t she see I was going because someone else had invited me? And that if I didn’t go, I’d be home alone, whereas she had someone to keep her company? When a dear friend said, “You know, I may be married now, but I’m still just like you! I can still do whatever I want!” I blanched. She’d been on her own so recently herself. Didn’t she remember that being single is more than just following your whims—that it also means having nobody to help you make difficult decisions, or comfort you at the end of a bad week?

She wanted to feel his hands and his mouth all over her, wanted him inside her, wanted to be so close she couldn’t tell where one of them ended and the other began. She felt as if she had morphed into someone else, some wild creature she didn’t even know. As if her body were some alien, newly unearthed part of her that she could no longer control. She didn’t notice when he slid her jeans and pink satin panties down over her hips, but roused a little when he dragged a small foil packet out of the wallet in his hip pocket and tore it open. She caught the sound of his zipper sliding down. A hand she didn’t recognize as her own reached out for him, wrapped around the thick, heavy weight of his sex, held him while he slid on the condom, then guided him between her parted legs. “God, Charity…” With a single deep thrust, Call buried himself inside her. The moment he did, she started to come. “Christ.” His muscles went rigid. In some vague corner of her mind, she realized he was fighting for control. Charity cried out his name and clung to his neck, unable to believe how quickly she had reached her peak. She knew the moment he gave up his struggle to hold himself back, felt him begin to move, felt the deep thrust and drag of his shaft against the walls of her passage. She felt the power of the man above her and the deep, saturating pleasure as a second climax shook her. Beneath her hands, hard muscle tightened and Call groaned. The sinews in his hips flexed and moved as he pumped himself inside her, then came with incredible force, his body going rigid, his shoulders glowing with a sheen of perspiration. For long seconds, neither of them moved. The only sound in the forest was the wind luffing through the trees, their labored breathing, and the soft thud of their heartbeats.

Applying quantum theory to the brain means recognizing that the behaviors of atoms and subatomic particles that constitute the brain, in particular the behavior of ions whose movements create electrical signals along axons and of neurotransmitters that are released into synapses, are all described by Schródinger wave equations. Thanks to superpositions of possibilities, calcium ions might or might not diffuse to sites that trigger the emptying of synaptic vesicles, and thus a drop of neurotransmitter might or might not be released. The result is a whole slew of quantum superpositions of possible brain events. When such superpositions describe whether a radioactive atom has disintegrated, we say that those superpositions of possibilities collapse into a single actuality at the moment we observe the state of that previously ambiguous atom. The resulting increment in the observer’s knowledge of the quantum system (the newly acquired knowledge that the atom has decayed or not) entails a collapse of the wave functions describing his brain.

The basic philosophical justification for marriage is that it is not only a means for “multiplying,” but an intrinsic part of being human. A man or a woman alone is only “half a body”; in the archetype of Adam and Eve, the two are seen as the two parts of a single unity that must return and unite again in the form of man and woman in order to create the whole human being.

What can explain this difference? On the surface, much appears to hinge on Richard’s programming feat, his software shim. Otherwise, his effort with Konqueror seems much like my struggles with Mozilla. Perhaps he was just a better programmer than me, and without his coding cleverness, there would be no story. That explanation is too simple. Richard made his shim only after determining he needed one last link in a chain of inspiration, intuition, reasoning, and estimation. His shim was a consequence of his overall plan. To show what I mean, here’s an accounting of what Richard did in his first couple of days at Apple. He began by quizzing us on the browser analysis we had done before his arrival, and after hearing it, he quickly discarded our effort with Mozilla as unlikely to bear fruit. By doing so, he demonstrated the self-confidence to skip any ingratiating display of deference to his new manager, a person who had years of experience in the technical field he was newly entering. Next, Richard resolved to produce a result on the shortest possible schedule. He downloaded an open source project that held genuine promise, the Konqueror code from KDE, a browser that might well serve as the basis for our long-term effort. In getting this code running on a Mac, he decided to make the closest possible approximation of a real browser that was feasible on his short schedule. He identified three features—loading web pages, clicking links, and going back to previous pages. He reasoned these alone would be sufficiently compelling proofs of concept. He then made his shortcuts, and these simplifying choices defined a set of nongoals: Perfect font rendering would be cast aside, as would full integration with the Mac’s native graphics system, same for using only the minimum source code from KDE. He reasoned that these shortcuts, while significant, would not substantially detract from the impact of seeing a browser surf web pages. He resolved to draw together these strands into a single demo that would show the potential of Konqueror. Then, finally, he worked through the technical details, which led him to develop his software shim, since that was the only thing standing between him and the realization of his plan. His thought process amplified his technical acumen. In contrast, Don and I were hoping Mozilla would pan out somehow. I was trying to get the open source behemoth to build on the Mac, with little thought beyond that. I had no comparable plan, goals, nongoals, tight schedule, or technical shortcuts.

The Sages say that in addition to keeping all the commandments, one should choose a single observance in which to be particularly scrupulous and diligent – “more careful,” in the words of the Talmud.

Hamra Dom, in Upper Egypt. Instead of telling the local authorities –as the law demanded –they decided to sell them singly in the market for antiquities, thus avoiding attracting the government’s attention. The boys’ mother, fearing ‘negative energies’, burned several of the newly discovered papyruses. The following year, for reasons history does not record, the brothers quarrelled. Attributing this quarrel to those supposed ‘negative energies’, the mother handed over

Thus a pattern of migratory labor grew up in California—starting with the wheat ranches—in which large numbers of migrant workers would converge on an area at harvesttime, perform the work, then move on to another crop. It was a world of single men, bunking in barracks while on the job, then shoving off, their belongings and bedrolls slung across their shoulders. Photographs from the 1880s and 1890s reveal these men to be predominantly whites and Chinese. Photographs from the early 1900s show that Japanese and East Indian workers were now in the fields. Photographs from the 1920s show even further diversification: Filipinos, especially on the Monterey Peninsula; African Americans in the southern San Joaquin; Mexicans throughout Southern California, including the newly irrigated Imperial Valley.

Most of the cadets accepted an invitation to attend a reception at the Venezuelan Naval Academy in La Guaira. Don Silke and I had other ideas and figured on getting a cab to the capital city of Caracas. The ride would take about a half hour, if the car did not overheat going over the mountain pass on the newly constructed highway. The capital city had an elevation of 7,083 feet and we were at sea level. As we stepped off the gangway, I noticed two stunningly beautiful girls standing on the concrete dock looking at the ship. Neither of us could figure out why the girls were there. Perhaps they were tourists, but I would find out. Approaching them, I asked if we could help, but soon discovered that they didn’t speak English and we didn’t speak what seemed to be French. It could have led to an impasse but my knowledge of German saved the day. It turned out that both girls were from France and one of them came from the Alsace Province and spoke German. They were both quite bubbly and we soon found out that they were dancers with the Folies Bergère, on tour to South America. From what I understood, they would be performing in Caracas that night and could get us free tickets. It all sounded great except that we had to be back aboard by 10:00 p.m., since the ship would be leaving first thing in the morning. Rats! You win some and you lose some, but at least we were with them for now. Don and I offered to take them aboard for lunch. It all seemed exciting for them to board a ship with so many single men. Ooh là là. The girls attracted a lot of attention and the ship’s photographer couldn’t stop taking pictures. The rest of our classmates couldn’t believe what they saw and of course thought that we were luckier than we really were. For us, the illusion had to be enough and fortunately the lunch served that day was reasonably good.

Before 2008, Koch’s lobbying efforts had been fragmented. There was a team of lobbyists working for Invista, one for Georgia-Pacific, and another for the oil refining division, Flint Hills Resources. This fragmentation reflected Koch’s commitment to maintain its corporate veil, organizing its various divisions under a legal structure that categorized each division as an independent business. This structure helped Koch contain its legal liabilities, but it also hobbled its corporate lobbying efforts. Because Invista and Flint Hills didn’t coordinate closely, they might be duplicating their efforts or sending mixed messages to lawmakers. In 2008, Koch Industries consolidated its lobbying operations into a single, newly formed company called Koch Companies Public Sector. Now all of Koch’s lobbyists worked side by side, sharing information and strategies as they worked toward common goals.

It is widely appreciated that there is no single scientific method, but rather a family of methodological forms of inquiry that share a set of characteristics and have as their aim the production of new knowledge. That knowledge may consist of newly acquired and organized data, new theoretical insights, a new model of some aspect of nature, or a new method for conducting certain experiments. I will have more to say later about what counts as science for our purposes.

The sun was low; and leaning forward side by side, they seemed to be tugging painfully uphill their two ridiculous shadows of unequal length, that trailed behind them slowly over the tall grass without bending a single blade.

Within, Towson or Towser was inquiring earnestly into the breaking strain of ships’ chains and tackle, and other such matters. Not a very enthralling book; but at the first glance you could see there a singleness of intention, an honest concern for the right way of going to work, which made these humble pages, thought out so many years ago, luminous with another than a professional light. The simple old sailor, with his talk of chains and purchases, made me forget the jungle and the pilgrims in a delicious sensation of having come upon something unmistakably real.