On Particularly Rough Days Quotes

Contrary to what most people think, making a decision is one of the easiest decisions in the world, as is more than proved by the fact that we make decision upon decision throughout the day, there, however, we run straight into the heart of the matter, for these decisions always come to us afterward with their particular little problems, or, to make ourselves quite clear, with their rough edges needing to be smoothed, the first of these problems being our capacity for sticking to a decision and the second our willingness to follow it through.

On particularly rough days when I'm sure I can't possibly endure more, I remind myself that my track record for getting through bad days has been 100%. And that’s pretty good. Unknown

The realms of dating, marriage, and sex are all marketplaces, and we are the products. Some may bristle at the idea of people as products on a marketplace, but this is an incredibly prevalent dynamic. Consider the labor marketplace, where people are also the product. Just as in the labor marketplace, one party makes an offer to another, and based on the terms of this offer, the other person can choose to accept it or walk. What makes the dating market so interesting is that the products we are marketing, selling, buying, and exchanging are essentially our identities and lives. As with all marketplaces, every item in stock has a value, and that value is determined by its desirability. However, the desirability of a product isn’t a fixed thing—the desirability of umbrellas increases in areas where it is currently raining while the desirability of a specific drug may increase to a specific individual if it can cure an illness their child has, even if its wider desirability on the market has not changed. In the world of dating, the two types of desirability we care about most are: - Aggregate Desirability: What the average demand within an open marketplace would be for a relationship with a particular person. - Individual Desirability: What the desirability of a relationship with an individual is from the perspective of a specific other individual. Imagine you are at a fish market and deciding whether or not to buy a specific fish: - Aggregate desirability = The fish’s market price that day - Individual desirability = What you are willing to pay for the fish Aggregate desirability is something our society enthusiastically emphasizes, with concepts like “leagues.” Whether these are revealed through crude statements like, “that guy's an 8,” or more politically correct comments such as, “I believe she may be out of your league,” there is a tacit acknowledgment by society that every individual has an aggregate value on the public dating market, and that value can be judged at a glance. When what we have to trade on the dating market is often ourselves, that means that on average, we are going to end up in relationships with people with an aggregate value roughly equal to our own (i.e., individuals “within our league”). Statistically speaking, leagues are a real phenomenon that affects dating patterns. Using data from dating websites, the University of Michigan found that when you sort online daters by desirability, they seem to know “their place.” People on online dating sites almost never send a message to someone less desirable than them, and on average they reach out to prospects only 25% more desirable than themselves. The great thing about these markets is how often the average desirability of a person to others is wildly different than their desirability to you. This gives you the opportunity to play arbitrage with traits that other people don’t like, but you either like or don’t mind. For example, while society may prefer women who are not overweight, a specific individual within the marketplace may prefer obese women, or even more interestingly may have no preference. If a guy doesn’t care whether his partner is slim or obese, then he should specifically target obese women, as obesity lowers desirability on the open marketplace, but not from his perspective, giving him access to women who are of higher value to him than those he could secure within an open market.

At half-past twelve next day Lord Henry Wotton strolled from Curzon Street over to the Albany to call on his uncle, Lord Fermor, a genial if somewhat rough-mannered old bachelor, whom the outside world called selfish because it derived no particular benefit from him, but who was considered generous by Society as he fed the people who amused him.

I love cats, they're great; intelligent, affectionate, lovable, and this one was particularly nice, so picking it up and giving it a few slaps and a bit of a rough time was galling, even though it was unfortunately necessary. See, if you're hiding in someone's spare bedroom waiting for them to turn in for the night, the last thing you need is a cat meowing at the door trying to get in to see you because you've been stroking it all day. A bit of a shake and a growl in the cat's face and that's all that's usually needed for it to give the spare room and the horrible bastard inside a wide berth for the rest of the night.

Pick a few things you don’t want to let slide, and let the rest sort itself out,” he said gently after one particularly rough day. “When someone leaves this world, everything else gets jostled because of the empty space. You’re gonna land in the wrong spot for a while. Sooner or later, you’ll find where you fit again.

Ideology is best understood as the descriptive vocabulary of day-to-day existence through which people make rough sense of the social reality that they live and create from day to day. It is the language of consciousness that suits the particular way in which people deal with their fellows. It is the interpretation in thought of the social relations through which they constantly create and re­create their collective being, in all the varied forms their collective being may assume: family, clan, tribe, nation, class, party, busi­ness enterprise, church, army, club, and so on. As such, ideologies are not delusions but real, as real as the social relations for which they stand. Ideologies are real, but it does not follow that they are scientifi­cally accurate, or that they provide an analysis of social relations that would make sense to anyone who does not take ritual part in those social relations. Some societies (including colonial New England) have explained troublesome relations between people as witchcraft and possession by the devil. The explanation makes sense to those whose daily lives produce and reproduce witchcraft, nor can any amount of rational "evidence" disprove it.

There isn’t any room,” said Joshua. “You travel back along the line of time and you don’t find the past, but another world, another bracket of consciousness. The earth would be the same, you see, or almost the same. Same trees, same rivers, same hills, but it wouldn’t be the world we know. Because it has lived a different life, it has developed differently. The second back of us is not the second back of us at all, but another second, a totally separate sector of time. We live in the same second all the time. We move along within the bracket of that second, that tiny bit of time that has been allotted to our particular world.” “The way we keep time was to blame,” said Ichabod. “It was the thing that kept us from thinking of it in the way it really was. For we thought all the time that we were passing through time when we really weren’t, when we never have. We’ve just been moving along with time. We said, there’s another second gone, there’s another minute and another hour and another day, when, as a matter of fact the second or the minute or the hour was never gone. It was the same one all the time. It had just moved along and we had moved with it.” Jenkins nodded. “I see. Like driftwood on the river. Chips moving with the river. And the scene changes along the river bank, but the water is the same.” “That’s roughly it,” said Joshua. “Except that time is a rigid stream and the different worlds are more firmly fixed in place than the driftwood on the river.

Ahoy!” a seaman called out. “The English frigate Polaris, ten days out from Antigua, bound for Portsmouth.” “Ahoy, yerself!” It was O’Shea’s rough brogue. She’d never heard sweeter music. “This be the clipper Sophia, of no particular country at the moment. Seven days out from Tortola, bound for…well, bound for here. Captain requests permission to board.” Gray. It had to be Gray. The officers of the Polaris exchanged wary looks. “Oh, for Heaven’s sake.” Sophia pushed forward to the ship’s rail and cupped her hands around her mouth, calling, “Permission to board granted!” A cheer rose up from the other ship’s deck. “It’s her, all right!” a voice called. Stubb’s, Sophia thought. Oh, but she hardly cared who was on the other deck. She cared only for the strong figure swinging across the watery divide as the two ships came abreast. Turning back toward the center of the ship, she pushed her way through the sweaty throng of sailors, desperate to get to him. Her foot caught on a rope, and she tripped- But it didn’t matter. Gray was there to catch her. And he was still wearing those sea-weathered, fire-scarred boots. No doubt for sentimental reasons. “Steady there,” he murmured, catching her by the elbows. She looked up to meet his beautiful blue-green eyes. “I have you.” “Oh, Gray.” She launched herself into his arms, clinging to his neck as he laughed and spun her around. “You’re here.” “I’m here.” And he was. Every strong, solid, handsome inch of him. Sophia buried her face in his throat, breathing in his scent. Lord, how she’d missed him. She pulled away, bracing her hands on his shoulders to study his face. “I can’t believe you came after me.” “I can’t believe you actually left.” He lowered her to the deck, and her hands slid to his arms. “I thought you were bluffing with that bit. I’d have never allowed you to go.

DICAEOPOLIS Why, what has happened? AMPHITHEUS I was hurrying to bring your treaty of truce, but some old dotards from Acharnae(1) got scent of the thing; they are veterans of Marathon, tough as oak or maple, of which they are made for sure—rough and ruthless. They all started a-crying: "Wretch! you are the bearer of a treaty, and the enemy has only just cut our vines!" Meanwhile they were gathering stones in their cloaks, so I fled and they ran after me shouting. f(1) The deme of Acharnae was largely inhabited by charcoal-burners, who supplied the city with fuel. DICAEOPOLIS Let 'em shout as much as they please! But HAVE you brought me a treaty? AMPHITHEUS Most certainly, here are three samples to select from,(1) this one is five years old; take it and taste. f(1) He presents them in the form of wines contained in three separate skins. DICAEOPOLIS Faugh! AMPHITHEUS Well? DICAEOPOLIS It does not please me; it smells of pitch and of the ships they are fitting out.(1) f(1) Meaning, preparations for war. AMPHITHEUS Here is another, ten years old; taste it. DICAEOPOLIS It smells strongly of the delegates, who go around the towns to chide the allies for their slowness.(1) f(1) Meaning, securing allies for the continuance of the war. AMPHITHEUS This last is a truce of thirty years, both on sea and land. DICAEOPOLIS Oh! by Bacchus! what a bouquet! It has the aroma of nectar and ambrosia; this does not say to us, "Provision yourselves for three days." But it lisps the gentle numbers, "Go whither you will."(1) I accept it, ratify it, drink it at one draught and consign the Acharnians to limbo. Freed from the war and its ills, I shall keep the Dionysia(2) in the country. f(1) When Athens sent forth an army, the soldiers were usually ordered to assemble at some particular spot with provisions for three days. f(2) These feasts were also called the Anthesteria or Lenaea; the Lenaem was a temple to Bacchus, erected outside the city. They took place during the month Anthesterion (February).

extent, Polly Lear took Fanny Washington’s place: she was a pretty, sociable young woman who became Martha’s closest female companion during the first term, at home or out and about, helping plan her official functions. The Washingtons were delighted with the arrival of Thomas Jefferson, a southern planter of similar background to themselves, albeit a decade younger; if not a close friend, he was someone George had felt an affinity for during the years since the Revolution, writing to him frequently for advice. The tall, lanky redhead rented lodgings on Maiden Lane, close to the other members of the government, and called on the president on Sunday afternoon, March 21. One of Jefferson’s like-minded friends in New York was the Virginian James Madison, so wizened that he looked elderly at forty. Madison was a brilliant parliamentary and political strategist who had been Washington’s closest adviser and confidant in the early days of the presidency, helping design the machinery of government and guiding measures through the House, where he served as a representative. Another of Madison’s friends had been Alexander Hamilton, with whom he had worked so valiantly on The Federalist Papers. But the two had become estranged over the question of the national debt. As secretary of the Treasury, Hamilton was charged with devising a plan to place the nation’s credit on a solid basis at home and abroad. When Hamilton presented his Report on the Public Credit to Congress in January, there was an instant split, roughly geographic, north vs. south. His report called for the assumption of state debts by the nation, the sale of government securities to fund this debt, and the creation of a national bank. Washington had become convinced that Hamilton’s plan would provide a strong economic foundation for the nation, particularly when he thought of the weak, impoverished Congress during the war, many times unable to pay or supply its troops. Madison led the opposition, incensed because he believed that dishonest financiers and city slickers would be the only ones to benefit from the proposal, while poor veterans and farmers would lose out. Throughout the spring, the debate continued. Virtually no other government business got done as Hamilton and his supporters lobbied fiercely for the plan’s passage and Madison and his followers outfoxed them time and again in Congress. Although pretending to be neutral, Jefferson was philosophically and personally in sympathy with Madison. By April, Hamilton’s plan was voted down and seemed to be dead, just as a new debate broke out over the placement of the national capital. Power, prestige, and a huge economic boost would come to the city named as capital. Hamilton and the bulk of New Yorkers and New Englanders

We have decided to stop voting, so pull down the posters. Let’s get all those ugly faces off our streets and out of our elective offices. We are not going to vote any more, no matter how often they come around with their sound trucks and statesmanlike gestures. Pull down the sound trucks. Pull down the outstretched arms. To hell with the whole business. Voting has turned out to be a damned impertinence. They never do what we want them to do anyhow. And when they do what we don’t want them to do, they don’t do it well. To hell with them. We are going to save up all our votes for the next twenty years and spend them all at one time. Maybe by that day there will be some Rabelaisian figure worth spending them on. And so, raw youth, with your tentative air, go out and work our will on the physical world. We are going to go whole hog on this program, to a certain extent, and you are our chosen instrument. We are not particularly proud of you, but you exist, in some rough way, and that is enough, for our purposes. You are sub-attractive, Bobble, and so are your peers there, but here is the money, and there is the task. Get going.

The stages birth parents go through are very real and need to be understood. Many adoptive parents who make plans for some open contact through letters, etc., are gravely disappointed and feel betrayed when the birth mother does not write back. It may be that it is too painful for the birth mother at that particular time and that, like Susan, she can’t always respond on schedule. The initial period of grieving lasts roughly five to seven years. Remember that for the birth parents there are no rites of passage and no ceremonies that include one’s friends and family, that gather around them in the grieving process. For the most part their grieving is done alone. And this is true in open, semi-open, and closed adoptions. The best thing adoptive parents who hope for contact can do is to keep the lines of communication open. Adoptive parents are wise to continue sending letters and pictures, even if there is no response at the moment. Many birth parents spend the early period, after the surrender, as do people who have other kinds of posttraumatic stress. There is a period of emotional moratorium, and often there is no interest in opening up the intense pain of the initial loss, even in the planned open adoptions that are being done more frequently these days. In some instances, the adoptive parents understand the need for connections and are trying to make the relationship more open while the birth parents are holding back. This can be frustrating if adoptive parents do not know that this period of separation is a normal part of healing rites for many birth parents.

The guns on both sides were silent until they returned. Suddenly, a fierce cannonade from the British ships exploded onto the beach at Turtle Gut Inlet, but only one American was hit, “Shott through the arm and body.” It was Richard Wickes. A cannonball took his arm and half his chest away. Fresh from the Reprisal, Lambert Wickes arrived on the beach at the head of his reinforcements just as his younger brother died: “I arrived just at the Close of the Action Time enough to see him expire . . . Captn Barry . . . says a braver Man never existed.”123 Taking Richard Wickes's body, the American sailors left the spit of sand they fought over that morning. The powder was stowed in the Wasp's hold and sent up the Delaware. “At 2 weighed and made Sail,” Hudson briefly noted in his journal.124 The British returned to Cape Henlopen. As before, Barry had taken long odds, assessed the best plan that could succeed, and beaten the British. The Nancy was destroyed, but the Wasp would reach Philadelphia safely with the desperately needed gunpowder. Despite superior firepower, the “butcher's bill” was far heavier for the British. But the victory brought no cheers or satisfaction among the Americans, and Barry was particularly saddened by the death of the gallant young Wickes.125 The next morning—Sunday, June 30—the men of the Lexington and Reprisal gathered to mourn their shipmate at the log meetinghouse in the small village of Cold Spring, just north of Cape May. Under the same light breezes of the day before, the American sailors, with “bowed and uncovered heads,” filed inside and sat on the long, rough-cut wooden pews. After “The Clergyman preached a very deacent Sermon,” Lambert Wickes and the Reprisal's officers silently hoisted the coffin. Shuffling under its weight, they carried it outside to the little cemetery, and laid their comrade to rest.126 Lambert Wickes now faced the task of informing his family in Maryland of Richard's death. On July 2, in a sad but disjointed letter to his brother Samuel, he mentioned Richard's death among a list of the items—including the sugar and “one Bagg Coffee” that accompanied the letter. “You'll disclose this Secret with as much Caution as possible to our Sisters,” he pleaded. He quoted Barry's report that Richard “fought like a brave Man & was fore most in every transaction of that day,” dying for the cause of the “united Colonies.”127 By the time Lambert's package reached his family in Maryland, the “united Colonies” ceased to exist as well. The same day Wickes posted his letter, Congress approved the Declaration of Independence. Barry, Wickes, and the rest of the Continental Navy were now fighting for the survival of a new country: the United States of America.

Don’t follow competition We are constantly amazed by how much business leaders obsess about their competition. When you get in a room with a bunch of senior execs from large companies, their attention can often wander as they check smartphones and think about the rest of their day, but bring up the topic of their competition and suddenly you’ll have everyone’s full attention. It’s as if, once you get to a particular level in an organization, you worry as much about what your competition is doing as how your own organization is performing. At the highest echelons of business, the default mentality is, too often, siege. This fixation leads to a never-ending spiral into mediocrity. Business leaders spend much of their time watching and copying the competition, and when they do finally break away and try something new, they are careful risk-takers, developing only incremental, low-impact changes. Being close to your competition offers comfort; it’s like covering tactics in match race sailing, when the lead boat tacks whenever the follower does, to ensure that the follower doesn’t go off in a different direction and find stronger wind. Incumbents clump together so that no one finds a fresher breeze elsewhere. But as Larry Page says, how exciting is it to come to work if the best you can do is trounce some other company that does roughly the same thing?85 If you focus on your competition, you will never deliver anything truly innovative. While you and your competitors

in Canada, Hawaii, Chicago, or Washington, D.C., police are unable to point to a single instance of gun registration aiding the investigation of a violent crime. In a 2013 deposition, D.C. Police Chief Cathy Lanier said that the department could not “recall any specific instance where registration records were used to determine who committed a crime.”1 The idea behind a registry is that guns left at a crime scene can be used to trace back to the criminals. Unfortunately, guns are very rarely left at the scene of the crime. Those that are left behind are virtually never registered—criminals are not stupid enough to leave behind guns registered to them. In the few cases where registered guns were left at the scene, the criminal had usually been killed or seriously injured. Canada keeps some of the most thorough data on gun registration. From 2003 to 2009, a weapon was identified in fewer than a third of the country’s 1,314 firearm homicides. Of these identified weapons, only about a quarter were registered. Roughly half of these registered guns were registered to someone other than the person accused of the homicide. In just sixty-two cases—4.7 percent of all firearm homicides—was the gun identified as being registered to the accused. Since most Canadian homicides are not committed with a gun, these sixty-two cases correspond to only about 1 percent of all homicides. From 2003 to 2009, there were only sixty-two cases—just nine a year—where registration made any conceivable difference. But apparently, the registry was not important even in those cases. Despite a handgun registry in effect since 1934, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and the Chiefs of Police have not yet provided a single example in which tracing was of more than peripheral importance in solving a case. No more successful was the long-gun registry that started in 1997 and cost Canadians $2.7 billion before being scrapped. In February 2000, I testified before the Hawaii State Senate joint hearing between the Judiciary and Transportation committees on changes that were being proposed to the state gun registration laws.2 I suggested two questions to the state senators: (1) how many crimes had been solved by their current registration and licensing system, and (2) how much time did it currently take police to register guns? The Honolulu police chief was notified in advance about those questions to give him time to research them. He told the committee that he could not point to any crimes that had been solved by registration, and he estimated that his officers spent over 50,000 hours each year on registering guns. But those aren’t the only failings of gun registration. Ballistic fingerprinting was all the rage fifteen years ago. This process requires keeping a database of the markings that a particular gun makes on a bullet—its unique fingerprint, so to speak. Maryland led the way in ballistic investigation, and New York soon followed. The days of criminal gun use were supposedly numbered. It didn’t work.3 Registering guns’ ballistic fingerprints never solved a single crime. New York scrapped its program in 2012.4 In November 2015, Maryland announced it would be doing the same.5 But the programs were costly. Between 2000 and 2004, Maryland spent at least $2.5 million setting up and operating its computer database.6 In New York, the total cost of the program was about $40 million.7 Whether one is talking about D.C., Canada, or these other jurisdictions, think of all the other police activities that this money could have funded. How many more police officers could have been hired? How many more crimes could have been solved? A 2005 Maryland State Police report labeled the operation “ineffective and expensive.”8 These programs didn’t work.

the bathroom down the hall, but she couldn’t bring herself to do it, not knowing whom she’d run into and when. Indoor plumbing seemed unnecessary anyway. Getting water from the well and using the outdoor toilet was easy enough. But that shower, now that was a thing of beauty! She took the brush from the cabinet and let loose her single braid, as thick and long as the grasses that stood by the river back home. She shook her head so that her black hair fell loose, then brushed it, slowly and carefully, treating it as if every inch held a story. One stroke and then another, until it was smooth and silky, like the pajamas she slept in. They were different from the ones she wore at home, which she had made for herself. The stitching was too regular, too perfect to have been made by a young woman’s hand. Obviously, they were made by machine, like everything in Kabul. When Sunny had presented the room to her, she had been particularly proud of the full-length mirror that was framed in a shiny dark wood and sat on its own four legs. But Yazmina thought of it as vanity and had turned it away once Sunny had departed. Today, though, she turned it to face her. She put her hands on her stomach, where the life inside was growing with each new day, and looked at herself. She pulled the sleeping gown over her head, removed her undergarments, and there was her body, which she was seeing naked, in full, for the first time in her life. She was slim, her legs long and lean, her right leg still red and scraped from knee to thigh where she had fallen on the pebbled road when she was pushed out of the car. Her arms were slender but muscled from daily chores, still bruised by the rough grip of strong hands. She looked at her breasts, which were larger than usual because of her condition, but nothing like the long, low ones of Halajan, the old busybody who lived next door to the café and had an opinion about everything. Yazmina thought that woman had been sent by God himself to test her patience. No, Yazmina’s breasts were still “as glowing and round as the midnight moon,” as Najam used to tell her. She saddened at the memory of her husband’s face, his kisses and his touch. She would never feel such sweetness again. But she was with his baby. She turned to the side to look at her belly and stroked it with her two hands. She took a deep breath as if the air would give her all she and her baby needed to thrive. This will be my baby, she thought, my Najam, or if a girl, Inshallah, God willing, Najama (for Yazmina was convinced it was a girl, perhaps because it was Najam’s wish to have many children—a son or two, of course, but also a daughter who had the same light in her eyes as Yazmina). Not only would the baby be named after her father, but she would be a star lighting up the night sky, as the name meant. Najam’s seed was part of her, and she would cherish it and die trying to protect it.

If the theory of the balance of power has any applicability at all, it is to the politics of the first period, that pre-industrial, `dynastic` period when nations were kings and politics a sport, when there were many nations of roughly equivalent power, and when nations could and did increase their power largely through clever diplomacy, alliance and military adventures. The theories of this book, and the theory of the power transition in particular, apply to the second period, when the major determinant of national power are population size, political organization, and industrial strength, and when shifts in power through internal development are consequently of great importance. Differential industrialization is the key to understanding the shifts in power in the 19th and 20th centuries, but it was not the key in the years before 1750 or so and it will not always be the key in the future. Period 3 will require new theories. We cannot predict yet what they will be, for we cannon predict what the world will be like after all the nations are industrialized. Indeed, we may not have nations at all. By projecting current trends we can make guessed about the near future, but we cannon see very far ahead. What will the world be like when China and India are two major powers, as it seems likely they will be? (1958 n.n.)... We are all bound by our own culture and our own experience, social scientists no less than other men... Social theories may be adequate for their day, but as time passes, they require revision. One of the most serious criticisms that can be made of the balance of power theory is that it has not been revised. Concepts and hypotheses applicable to the 16th century and to the politics of such units as the Italian city states have been taken and applied, without major revision, to the international politics of the twentieth-century nations such as the United States, England, and the Soviet Union. (p. 307)

Emma set the tray across his lap, he made no move to pick up his spoon or fork. “It’s been a long day,” he said with a heavy sigh. “I’m not sure I want to make the effort to eat.” She sank into the chair beside the bed. “But you must eat,” she replied. “You’ll never get your strength back if you don’t.” Steven lifted one shoulder in a dispirited shrug and looked away. After drawing a deep breath and letting it out again, Emma reached for his fork, stabbed a piece of Daisy’s meat pie, with its thick, flaky crust, and raised it to Steven’s lips. He smiled wanly and allowed her to feed him. In fact, it seemed to Emma that he was enjoying this particular moment of incapacity. The experience was oddly sensual for Emma; she found herself getting lost in the graceful mechanics of it. When Steven grasped her hand, very gently, and lightly kissed her palm, the fork slipped from her fingers and clattered to the tray. Her breasts swelled as she drew in a quick, fevered breath. Steven trailed his lips over the delicate flesh on the inner side of her forearm until he reached her elbow. When his tongue touched her at the crux, the pleasure was so swift and so keen that she flinched and gave a soft moan. His eyes locked with hers and he told her, without speaking aloud, that there were other places on her body he wanted to kiss. Places he fully intended to explore and master. Emma took hold of the tray with a hasty, awkward movement and bolted to her feet, feeling hot and achy all over. “Well,” she said with a brightness that was entirely false, “if you’re not hungry any longer…” “I didn’t say that, Miss Emma,” he interrupted, his voice as rough as gravel. “It’s just that it isn’t food I’m hungry for.” Only her fierce grasp on the sides of the tray kept Emma from dropping it to the floor—plate, cup, leftover food, and all. “What a scandalous remark!” Steven smiled and stretched, wincing a little at the resultant pain. “I can think of plenty of ‘scandalous’ remarks,” he said, “if you’d like to hear more.” Emma was painfully conscious of the pulse at the inside of her elbow, where Steven had kissed her. A number of other fragile points, such as the backs of her knees and the arches of her feet, tingled in belated response. “Good night, Mr. Fairfax,” she said, with feigned dignity. And then she turned and walked out of the room.

Whereas classical physics describes the present as having a unique past, the probability waves of quantum mechanics enlarge the arena of history: in Feynman’s formulation, the observed present represents an amalgam—a particular kind of average— of all possible pasts compatible with what we now see...How come there is no evidence in day-to-day life of the strange way in which the past apparently unfolds into the present? The reason, discussed briefly in Chapter 4 and to be elaborated shortly with greater precision, is that baseballs, planets, and comets are comparatively large, at least when compared with particles like electrons. And in quantum mechanics, the larger something is, the more skewed the averaging becomes: All possible trajectories do contribute to the motion of a baseball in flight, but the usual path—the one single path predicted by Newton’s laws—contributes much more than do all other paths combined. For large objects, it turns out that classical paths are, by an enormous amount, the dominant contribution to the averaging process and so they are the ones we are familiar with. But when objects are small, like electrons, quarks, and photons, many different histories contribute at roughly the same level and hence all play important parts in the averaging process.

I look back on that May morning, and on myself at my pretty play‐work, as Eve must have looked back upon the pastimes of Paradise. I am not separated from that time by any great crime, as she was from the period of her happiness; but I think the yearning regret that filled the universal mother's bosom for the lotos‐scented airs that breathed about the banks of those mystic eastern rivers, was akin to the eager longing (never to be gratified now) with which I inhale in fancy the rough western breezes blowing round old Lestrange. I suppose it rained there in those days; I suppose it snowed, and was foggy, and cold, and dreary there in those days as much as other places—perhaps more; but I cannot realize that now. To me it seems as if those gnarled old trees were always crowned with a glory of green leaves; as if those walls were always sunlit; as if the pinks and the sweet peas and the larkspurs flowered there all the year round. I did not think myself particularly happy in those days. That is the worst of this life—one never tastes its sweets while they are in one's mouth; it is only when they are gone, and we are chewing the bitters, and making wry faces over them, that we recognise them for what they were.

There was a burly chap standing on the low platform, giving the spiel, in a pretty rough delivery. He had tight yellow curls, the colour of cheap lemonade but turning grey, and a big red face, with a splay nose, and very dark red lips. The ears didn’t seem exactly opposite one another. On the chap’s left a girl lay spread out facing us in an upright canvas chair, as faded and battered as everything else in the outfit. She was dressed up like a French chorus, in a tight and shiny black thing, cut low, and black fishnet stockings, and those shiny black shoes with super high heels that many men go for in such a big way. But the effect was not particularly sexy, all the same. The different bits of costume had all seen better days, like everything else, and the girl herself looked more sick than spicy.

One hopes for the great love born of a common pain, for two untied souls sharing grief in long, easy banter while they fend off physical attraction and misread each other until everything seems to change one afternoon, smoking behind the trailer on a particularly rough day...

Sunstein was particularly interested in what was now being called “choice architecture.” The decisions people made were driven by the way they were presented. People didn’t simply know what they wanted; they took cues from their environment. They constructed their preferences. And they followed paths of least resistance, even when they paid a heavy price for it. Millions of U.S. corporate and government employees had woken up one day during the 2000s and found they no longer needed to enroll themselves in retirement plans but instead were automatically enrolled. They probably never noticed the change. But that alone caused the participation in retirement plans to rise by roughly 30 percentage points. Such was the power of choice architecture. One tweak to the society’s choice architecture made by Sunstein, once he’d gone to work in the U.S. government, was to smooth the path between homeless children and free school meals. In the school year after he left the White House, about 40 percent more poor kids ate free school lunches than had done so before, back when they or some adult acting on their behalf had to take action and make choices to get them.

The Cheskin company demonstrated a particularly elegant example of sensation transference a few years ago, when they studied two competing brands of inexpensive brandy, Christian Brothers and E & J (the latter of which, to give some idea of the market segment to which the two belong, is known to its clientele as Easy Jesus). Their client, Christian Brothers, wanted to know why, after years of being the dominant brand in the category, it was losing market share to E & J. Their brandy wasn’t more expensive. It wasn’t harder to find in the store. And they weren’t being out-advertised (since there is very little advertising at this end of the brandy segment). So, why were they losing ground? Cheskin set up a blind taste test with two hundred brandy drinkers. The two brandies came out roughly the same. Cheskin then decided to go a few steps further. “We went out and did another test with two hundred different people,” explains Darrel Rhea, another principal in the firm. “This time we told people which glass was Christian Brothers and which glass was E & J. Now you are having sensation transference from the name, and this time Christian Brothers’ numbers are up.” Clearly people had more positive associations with the name Christian Brothers than with E & J. That only deepened the mystery, because if Christian Brothers had a stronger brand, why were they losing market share? “So, now we do another two hundred people. This time the actual bottles of each brand are in the background. We don’t ask about the packages, but they are there. And what happens? Now we get a statistical preference for E & J. So we’ve been able to isolate what Christian Brothers’ problem is. The problem is not the product and it’s not the branding. It’s the package.” Rhea pulled out a picture of the two brandy bottles as they appeared in those days. Christian Brothers looked like a bottle of wine: it had a long, slender spout and a simple off-white label. E & J, by contrast, had a far more ornate bottle: more squat, like a decanter, with smoked glass, foil wrapping around the spout, and a dark, richly textured label. To prove their point, Rhea and his colleagues did one more test. They served two hundred people Christian Brothers Brandy out of an E & J bottle, and E & J Brandy out of a Christian Brothers bottle. Which brandy won? Christian Brothers, hands-down, by the biggest margin of all. Now they had the right taste, the right brand, and the right bottle. The company redesigned their bottle to be a lot more like E & J’s, and, sure enough, their problem was solved.

From a child’s birth to the age of three, there is a huge increase in the number of synapses—connections between neurons—in the brain. In fact, a toddler has roughly 1 quadrillion synaptic connections, twice as many as an adult. Children have brains that are more active, more connected, and more flexible than those of grownups.2 But following this synaptic proliferation is a significant pruning process. Through experience, useful synaptic connections are strengthened, and those that aren’t used get pruned (known as a Hebbian process after psychologist Donald Hebbs).3 Estimates suggest that young children lose approximately 20 billion synaptic connections each day.4 This process fine-tunes the brain to survive in its particular environment. By the time we are adults, synaptic selection has shaped our brains to succeed. This process of synaptic overproduction and pruning may not seem remarkable, except when you consider that it’s an incredibly expensive tactic in terms of neural components and energy cost. Why has evolution allowed this wasteful process to persist? Nature is pretty smart.

Ah, I was thinking of you the other day. There’s a little farm just a few mile from me that’s come up for let.’ He looks at me and pauses, sensing my interest. ‘Go on’ ‘Aye, it’s through the National Trust. They call it Fallowlees. You’re probably not bothered now, but you can always give them a ring and get the particulars. Mind, it’s a rough sort of spot, very remote, no mains electric, stuck in the trees.’ ‘Sounds like it’ll suit me down to the ground,’ I say, with a giggle, half joking. But the moment he’s gone I go and look up the number for the National Trust.

began. A chief element in positioning the new Barbie was her promotion. In 1984, after a campaign that featured "Hey There, Barbie Girl" sung to the tune of "Georgy Girl," Mattel launched a startling series of ads that toyed with female empowerment. Its slogan was "We Girls Can Do Anything," and its launch commercial, driven by an irresistibly upbeat soundtrack, was a sort of feminist Chariots of Fire. Responding to the increased number of women with jobs, the ad opens at the end of a workday with a little girl rushing to meet her business-suited mother and carrying her mother's briefcase into the house. A female voice says, "You know it, and so does your little girl." Then a chorus sings, "We girls can do anything." The ad plays with the possibility of unconventional gender roles. A rough-looking Little Leaguer of uncertain gender swaggers onscreen. She yanks off her baseball cap, her long hair tumbles down, and—sigh of relief—she grabs a particularly frilly Barbie doll. (The message: Barbie is an amulet to prevent athletic girls from growing up into hulking, masculine women.) There are images of gymnasts executing complicated stunts and a toddler learning to tie her shoelaces. (The message: Even seemingly minor achievements are still achievements.) But the shot with the most radical message takes place in a laboratory where a frizzy-haired, myopic brunette peers into a microscope. Since the seventies, Barbie commercials had featured little girls of different races and hair colors, but they were always pretty. Of her days in acting school, Tracy Ullman remarked in TV Guide that she was the "ugly kid with the brown hair and the big nose who didn't get [cast in] the Barbie commercials." With "We Girls," however, Barbie extends her tiny hand to bookish ugly ducklings; no longer a snooty sorority rush chairman, she is "big-tent" Barbie.

This particular song’s just something that’s been floating around inside me for a long time,” Tate went on. “Is she the one who got away? Yeah. She is. But it’s because she got away that I—that we,” he clarified, “are all here now.” “How do you mean?” the interviewer asked. Tate was silent for several heartbeats, then said, “When I met her, I was playing ball. She knew I wasn’t that good. But she also saw a talent in me I didn’t even know I had. She’s the one who encouraged my music. I lost her after that summer, but it’s because I lost her that Kendrick was even formed. So yeah, she is ‘Everything.’ She’s everything I have and everything I’m missing.” “Would it be safe to assume you work as hard as you do because you’re trying to prove to her what she’s missing?” the interviewer asked. “No,” Tate answered. “Not really.” “That’s a load of crap,” someone muttered in the background. “Okay,” Tate said louder. “Maybe it’s a little true. Did I hope she’d one day hear one of these songs about her and call me up? Sure. I think that’s the whole point of tracks like this. That there’s hope. I mean, that’s what life’s really about, right? Without hope, what the hell does a person have?” “A lot of”—BEEP—“ing fun,” Jace interjected.

In pre-air conditioning days, even a little cooling breeze felt good. On this particular evening the dining room was filled to capacity, as the French Hotel was still one of the best places to eat in Monrovia. The overflow extended out under the cover of the verandah and was also filled with people. With so few places to dine in Monrovia, eating here under the corrugated fiberglass roof was a treat for the expats. I had already eaten aboard ship and was hoping that some of my friends would come around and join me for a few drinks but that evening it didn't happen and I didn’t recognize many people. It did however give me the opportunity to talk to Monique. After some two hours of talking to her between drinks I learned that she came from the Left Bank of Paris. Her parents lived above an antique shop on the Rue de las Halles and were adamantly against her coming to Africa. Because of an argument she had left her boyfriend behind, and now I think was sorry for that, although she wouldn’t admit it. It was obvious that she was homesick and I believe that she thinking about him. Monique couldn’t believe what she got herself into, and now was stuck with a two year contract in this hell hole. She mentioned that although the constant advances from the men was flattering, it was beginning to become wearing. She said that some of the people in Monrovia scared her and I understood exactly what she meant. Just being in Liberia was a challenge…. Was it my imagination, or was I making headway with this dark-haired, French beauty? With each drink I became more convinced of this, and at the same time was feeling less pain. The night was still young and I was in no rush to leave. Surely there was some hope and I was trying my best…. Then, suddenly without warning Monique told me that she had to go. “Je dois y aller maintenant.” What… She’s leaving? I’ve been told that it’s a thing the French do… but leaving me at the bar for no apparent reason? Monique however assured me that her partner, Claudine, would continue serving me and perhaps, “Who knows?” Monique said with a twinkle in her eyes... I shouldn’t have been surprised that she knew what it was that I was angling for. Hell, I thought that I was one of the good guys, besides whom was she sleeping with? A white girl in Liberia would never go it alone…. there had to be someone! What happened that Monique suddenly had to leave? Poof and she was gone! In her stead now was Claudine who was rough around the edges and knew her way around. It never occurred to me that Monique’s shift would be over before the closing hour!

Pick a few things you don’t want to let slide, and let the rest sort itself out,” he said gently after one particularly rough day.

The rain-filled potholes, set in naked rock are usually devoid of visible plant life but not of animal life. In addition to the inevitable microscopic creatures there may be certain amphibians like the spadefoot toad. This little animal lives through dry spells in a state of estivation under the dried-up sediment in the bottom of a hole. When the rain comes, if it comes, he emerges from the mud singing madly in his fashion, mates with the handiest female and fills the pool with a swarm of tadpoles, most of them doomed to a most ephemeral existence. But a few survive, mature, become real toads, and when the pool dries up they dig into the sediment as their parents did before, making burrows which they seal with mucus in order to preserve that moisture necessary to life. There they wait, day after day, week after week, in patient spadefoot torpor, perhaps listening - we can imagine - for the sounds of raindrops pattering at last on the earthen crust above their heads. If it comes in time the glorious cycle is repeated; if not, this particular colony of Bufonidae is reduced eventually to dust, a burden on the wind. Rain and puddles bring out other amphibia, even in the desert. It's a strange, stirring, but not uncommon thing to come on a pool at night, after an evening of thunder and lightning and a bit of rainfall, and see the frogs clinging to the edge of their impermanent pond, bodies immersed in water but heads out, all croaking away in tricky counterpoint. They are windbags: with each croak the pouch under the frog's chin swells like a bubble, then collapses. Why do they sing? What do they have to sing about? Somewhat apart from one another, separated by roughly equal distances, facing outward from the water, they clank and croak all through the night with tireless perseverance. To human ears their music has a bleak, dismal, tragic quality, dirgelike rather than jubilant. It may nevertheless be the case that these small beings are singing not only to claim their stake in the pond, not only to attract a mate, but also out of spontaneous love and joy, a contrapuntal choral celebration of the coolness and wetness after weeks of desert fire, for love of their own existence, however brief it may be, and for the joy in the common life. Has joy any survival value in the operations of evolution? I suspect that it does; I suspect that the morose and fearful are doomed to quick extinction. Where there is no joy there can be no courage; and without courage all other virtues are useless. Therefore the frogs, the toads, keep on singing even though we know, if they don't that the sound of their uproar must surely be luring all the snakes and ringtail cats and kitfoxes and coyotes and great horned owls toward the scene of their happiness. What then? A few of the little amphibians will continue their metamorphosis by way of the nerves and tissues of one of the higher animals, in which process the joy of one becomes the contentment of the second. Nothing is lost except an individual consciousness here and there, a trivial perhaps even illusory phenomenon. The rest survive, mate, multiply, burrow, estivate, dream, and rise again. The rains will come, the potholes shall be filled. Again. And again. And again.

Always expect the unexpected. Never get too when things are going well, because otherwise the fall will be a lot harder. dinosaurs: triceratops and stegosaurus. Weather forecasters are like prison visitors. Nice people but usually misguided. The answer was yes, no, and maybe all rolled in one. She added that she hoped she might see him again. Not if I catch sight of you first, he thought. But like anything in life, you can never quite tell. People you know always have the ability to shock you. The label said it was "just like the mama used to cook" but if that was the case mama had obviously long since been banned from the kitchen. He wasn't work-shy. He was work-allergic. The problem these days is that gangsters, whether they be small time drug dealers with guns and attitude or wannabe urban godfathers like Nicholas Tyndall, have no qualms about using serious violence and the treat of it to get what they want, because they know that neither the judicial system nor the police service have the wherewithal or the powers to protect those who speak out against them. English prisons are roughly on a par with English traffic, English weather and English hospitals. In other words, fucking terrible. The striation marks on a bullet are the microscopic scratches caused by imperfections on the surface of the interior of a gun's barrel that are unique to each individual firearm, and act as its calling card.The same striation marks will appear on a bullet every time a particular gun is fired. 'The last time I spent quality time with you was Heathrow last week and five people ended up shot' The thing with me is that I am pessimist who's constantly trying to be optimistic, but can't quite manage it. Experience gained through years of policework doesn't allow for that sort of naivety. They say its a grand life if you don't weaken and for so long I've tried to live my life like that, but at that moment in time, weakness felt so tempting that I almost open my arms to greet it. 'And the whole time I couldn't wait to leave. And you know what, thy were the best years of my life.