Opening New Shop Quotes

I've apparently been the victim of growing up, which apparently happens to all of us at one point or another. It's been going on for quite some time now, without me knowing it. I've found that growing up can mean a lot of things. For me, it doesn't mean I should become somebody completely new and stop loving the things I used to love. It means I've just added more things to my list. Like for example, I'm still beyond obsessed with the winter season and I still start putting up strings of lights in September. I still love sparkles and grocery shopping and really old cats that are only nice to you half the time. I still love writing in my journal and wearing dresses all the time and staring at chandeliers. But some new things I've fallen in love with -- mismatched everything. Mismatched chairs, mismatched colors, mismatched personalities. I love spraying perfumes I used to wear when I was in high school. It brings me back to the days of trying to get a close parking spot at school, trying to get noticed by soccer players, and trying to figure out how to avoid doing or saying anything uncool, and wishing every minute of every day that one day maybe I'd get a chance to win a Grammy. Or something crazy and out of reach like that. ;) I love old buildings with the paint chipping off the walls and my dad's stories about college. I love the freedom of living alone, but I also love things that make me feel seven again. Back then naivety was the norm and skepticism was a foreign language, and I just think every once in a while you need fries and a chocolate milkshake and your mom. I love picking up a cookbook and closing my eyes and opening it to a random page, then attempting to make that recipe. I've loved my fans from the very first day, but they've said things and done things recently that make me feel like they're my friends -- more now than ever before. I'll never go a day without thinking about our memories together.

He'd more than achieved his goal; as usual Boyd had the ability to completely blow his mind. If insanity had a temporary cure, its name would be Boyd's Blowjob. He could open his own store full of home remedies; it'd give the term 'Head Shop' a whole new meaning.

I was lucky to live in New York when it was dangerous and edgy and cheap enough to play host to young, penniless artists. That was the era of "coffee shops" as they were defined in New York—cheap restaurants open round the clock where you could eat for less than it would cost to cook at home. That was the era of ripped jeans and dirty T-shirts, when the kind of people who are impressed by material signs of success were not the people you wanted to know.

The West Indian is not exactly hostile to change, but he is not much inclined to believe in it. This comes from a piece of wisdom that his climate of eternal summer teaches him. It is that, under all the parade of human effort and noise, today is like yesterday, and tomorrow will be like today; that existence is a wheel of recurring patterns from which no one escapes; that all anybody does in this life is live for a while and then die for good, without finding out much; and that therefore the idea is to take things easy and enjoy the passing time under the sun. The white people charging hopefully around the islands these days in the noon glare, making deals, bulldozing airstrips, hammering up hotels, laying out marinas, opening new banks, night clubs, and gift shops, are to him merely a passing plague. They have come before and gone before.

most cherished desires of present-day Westerners are shaped by romantic, nationalist, capitalist and humanist myths that have been around for centuries. Friends giving advice often tell each other, ‘Follow your heart.’ But the heart is a double agent that usually takes its instructions from the dominant myths of the day, and the very recommendation to ‘follow your heart’ was implanted in our minds by a combination of nineteenth-century Romantic myths and twentieth-century consumerist myths. The Coca-Cola Company, for example, has marketed Diet Coke around the world under the slogan ‘Diet Coke. Do what feels good.’ Even what people take to be their most personal desires are usually programmed by the imagined order. Let’s consider, for example, the popular desire to take a holiday abroad. There is nothing natural or obvious about this. A chimpanzee alpha male would never think of using his power in order to go on holiday into the territory of a neighbouring chimpanzee band. The elite of ancient Egypt spent their fortunes building pyramids and having their corpses mummified, but none of them thought of going shopping in Babylon or taking a skiing holiday in Phoenicia. People today spend a great deal of money on holidays abroad because they are true believers in the myths of romantic consumerism. Romanticism tells us that in order to make the most of our human potential we must have as many different experiences as we can. We must open ourselves to a wide spectrum of emotions; we must sample various kinds of relationships; we must try different cuisines; we must learn to appreciate different styles of music. One of the best ways to do all that is to break free from our daily routine, leave behind our familiar setting, and go travelling in distant lands, where we can ‘experience’ the culture, the smells, the tastes and the norms of other people. We hear again and again the romantic myths about ‘how a new experience opened my eyes and changed my life’. Consumerism tells us that in order to be happy we must consume as many products and services as possible. If we feel that something is missing or not quite right, then we probably need to buy a product (a car, new clothes, organic food) or a service (housekeeping, relationship therapy, yoga classes). Every television commercial is another little legend about how consuming some product or service will make life better. 18. The Great Pyramid of Giza. The kind of thing rich people in ancient Egypt did with their money. Romanticism, which encourages variety, meshes perfectly with consumerism. Their marriage has given birth to the infinite ‘market of experiences’, on which the modern tourism industry is founded. The tourism industry does not sell flight tickets and hotel bedrooms. It sells experiences. Paris is not a city, nor India a country – they are both experiences, the consumption of which is supposed to widen our horizons, fulfil our human potential, and make us happier. Consequently, when the relationship between a millionaire and his wife is going through a rocky patch, he takes her on an expensive trip to Paris. The trip is not a reflection of some independent desire, but rather of an ardent belief in the myths of romantic consumerism. A wealthy man in ancient Egypt would never have dreamed of solving a relationship crisis by taking his wife on holiday to Babylon. Instead, he might have built for her the sumptuous tomb she had always wanted. Like the elite of ancient Egypt, most people in most cultures dedicate their lives to building pyramids. Only the names, shapes and sizes of these pyramids change from one culture to the other. They may take the form, for example, of a suburban cottage with a swimming pool and an evergreen lawn, or a gleaming penthouse with an enviable view. Few question the myths that cause us to desire the pyramid in the first place.

other motion-picture stars, many of whom had promised to invest in his new corporation, Sebring International. While keeping his original salon at 725 North Fairfax in Los Angeles, he planned to open a series of franchised shops and to market a line of men’s toiletries bearing his name. The first shop had been opened in San Francisco in May 1969, Abigail Folger and Colonel and Mrs. Paul Tate being among those at the grand opening.

I firmly believe that writers must take full accountability for their careers. It’s a business, and part of business is marketing. You wouldn’t slap an OPEN sign on the window of your new barber shop, go home, and wait for the money to start rolling in.

I loved Twitter: an open, rhizomatic forum where you could aggravate existing mental illnesses, shop for new ones, violate your Miranda rights, and get fired. A place to be judged on the character of your content, driven by rubbernecking and spite, where fame is a millstone and names are bad op-sec. Twitter was the right word for it, birdsong being a Darwinian squall mistaken for idle chatter, screaming for territory and mates. An improv class, press conference, intervention, Klan rally, comics convention, and struggle session all booked in the same conference room.

On Rachel's show for November 7, 2012: We're not going to have a supreme court that will overturn Roe versus Wade. There will be no more Antonio Scalias and Samuel Aleatos added to this court. We're not going to repeal health reform. Nobody is going to kill medicare and make old people in this generation or any other generation fight it out on the open market to try to get health insurance. We are not going to do that. We are not going to give a 20% tax cut to millionaires and billionaires and expect programs like food stamps and kid's insurance to cover the cost of that tax cut. We'll not make you clear it with your boss if you want to get birth control under the insurance plan that you're on. We are not going to redefine rape. We are not going to amend the United States constitution to stop gay people from getting married. We are not going to double Guantanamo. We are not eliminating the Department of Energy or the Department of Education or Housing at the federal level. We are not going to spend $2 trillion on the military that the military does not want. We are not scaling back on student loans because the country's new plan is that you should borrow money from your parents. We are not vetoing the Dream Act. We are not self-deporting. We are not letting Detroit go bankrupt. We are not starting a trade war with China on Inauguration Day in January. We are not going to have, as a president, a man who once led a mob of friends to run down a scared, gay kid, to hold him down and forcibly cut his hair off with a pair of scissors while that kid cried and screamed for help and there was no apology, not ever. We are not going to have a Secretary of State John Bolton. We are not bringing Dick Cheney back. We are not going to have a foreign policy shop stocked with architects of the Iraq War. We are not going to do it. We had the chance to do that if we wanted to do that, as a country. and we said no, last night, loudly.

People open shops in order to sell things, they hope to become busy so that they will have to enlarge the shop, then to sell more things, and grow rich, and eventually not have to come into the shop at all. Isn't that true? But are there other people who open a shop with the hope of being sheltered there, among such things as they most value - the yarn or the teacups or the books - and with the idea only of making a comfortable assertion? They will become a part of the block, a part of the street, part of everybody's map of the town, and eventually of everybody's memories. They will sit and drink coffee in the middle of the morning, they will get out the familiar bits of tinsel at Christmas, they will wash the windows in spring before spreading out the new stock. Shops, to these people, are what a cabin in the woods might be to somebody else - a refuge and a justification.

There open up, deep inside a city, reflected streets, streets which are double, make-believe streets. One's imagination, bewitched and misled, creates illusory maps of the apparently familiar districts, maps in which the streets have their proper places and usual names but are provided with new and fictitious configurations by the inexhaustible inventiveness of the night.

Beauty exists everywhere in the world. Love resides in all of us. That’s the point. I only…I only want to deepen that. Show that there can be—that there should be—substance in it all. Of course a bride on her wedding day is beautiful, but that radiance doesn’t diminish in old age, when she’s too tired to keep up with whatever ridiculous fashions the shops and salons put out. I know Arina smiles upon an old couple walking down the road together, hand in hand, firm in their commitment to one another. There is love in caring for the sick, the weak, the ugly. A wilting flower holds just as much splendor as one on the cusp of opening. People are so quick to idolize the fresh and the new. They fetishize it.” He rubbed at his forehead, his eyes bright with fervor. “Why should we celebrate one without the other?

THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION OPENED up new ways to convert energy and to produce goods, largely liberating humankind from its dependence on the surrounding ecosystem. Humans cut down forests, drained swamps, dammed rivers, flooded plains, laid down hundreds of thousands of miles of railroad tracks, and built skyscraping metropolises. As the world was moulded to fit the needs of Homo sapiens, habitats were destroyed and species went extinct. Our once green and blue planet is becoming a concrete and plastic shopping centre.

Wake up in the morning with a specific goal to look forward to. Creative individuals don’t have to be dragged out of bed; they are eager to start the day. This is not because they are cheerful, enthusiastic types. Nor do they necessarily have something exciting to do. But they believe that there is something meaningful to accomplish each day, and they can’t wait to get started on it. Most of us don’t feel our actions are that meaningful. Yet everyone can discover at least one thing every day that is worth waking up for. It could be meeting a certain person, shopping for a special item, potting a plant, cleaning the office desk, writing a letter, trying on a new dress. It is easier if each night before falling asleep, you review the next day and choose a particular task that, compared to the rest of the day, should be relatively interesting and exciting. Then next morning, open your eyes and visualize the chosen event—play it out briefly in your mind, like an inner videotape, until you can hardly wait to get dressed and get going. It does not matter if at first the goals are trivial and not that interesting. The important thing is to take the easy first steps until you master the habit, and then slowly work up to more complex goals. Eventually most of the day should consist of tasks you look forward to, until you feel that getting up in the morning is a privilege, not a chore.

I thought about Mother’s life, the part of it I knew. Going to work every day, first on the ferry then on the bus. Shopping at the old Red-and-White then at the new Safeway - new, fifteen years old! Going down to the Library one night a week, taking me with her, and we would come home on the bus with our load of books and a bag of grapes we bought at a Chinese place, for a treat. Wednesday afternoons too when my kids were small and I went over there to drink coffee and she rolled us cigarettes on that contraption she had. And I thought, all these things don’t seem that much like life, when you’re doing them, they’re just what you do, how you fill up your days, and you think all the time something is going to crack open, and you’ll find yourself, then you’ll find yourself, in life. It’s not even that you particularly want this to happen, this cracking open, youre comfortable enough the way things are, but you do expect it. Then you’re dying, Mother is dying, and it’s just the same plastic chairs and plastic plants and ordinary day outside with people getting groceries and what you’ve had is all there is, and going to the Library, just a thing like that, coming back up the hill on the bus with books and a bag of grapes seems now worth wanting, O god doesn’t it, you’d break your heart wanting back there.

Ed Lim’s daughter, Monique, was a junior now, but as she’d grown up, he and his wife had noted with dismay that there were no dolls that looked like her. At ten, Monique had begun poring over a mail-order doll catalog as if it were a book–expensive dolls, with n ames and stories and historical outfits, absurdly detailed and even more absurdly expensive. ‘Jenny Cohen has this one,’ she’d told them, her finger tracing the outline of a blond doll that did indeed resemble Jenny Cohen: sweet faced with heavy bangs, slightly stocky. 'And they just made a new one with red hair. Her mom’s getting it for her sister Sarah for Hannukkah.’ Sarah Cohen had flaming red hair, the color of a penny in the summer sun. But there was no doll with black hair, let alone a face that looked anything like Monique’s. Ed Lim had gone to four different toy stores searching for a Chinese doll; he would have bought it for his daughter, whatever the price, but no such thing existed. He’d gone so far as to write to Mattel, asking them if there was a Chinese Barbie doll, and they’d replied that yes, they offered 'Oriental Barbie’ and sent him a pamphlet. He had looked at that pamphlet for a long time, at the Barbie’s strange mishmash of a costume, all red and gold satin and like nothing he’d ever seen on a Chinese or Japanese or Korean woman, at her waist-length black hair and slanted eyes. I am from Hong Kong, the pamphlet ran. It is in the Orient, or Far East. Throughout the Orient, people shop at outdoor marketplaces where goods such as fish, vegetables, silk, and spices are openly displayed. The year before, he and his wife and Monique had gone on a trip to Hong Kong, which struck him, mostly, as a pincushion of gleaming skyscrapers. In a giant, glassed-in shopping mall, he’d bought a dove-gray cashmere sweater that he wore under his suit jacket on chilly days. Come visit the Orient. I know you will find it exotic and interesting. In the end he’d thrown the pamphlet away. He’d heard, from friends with younger children, that the expensive doll line now had one Asian doll for sale – and a few black ones, too – but he’d never seen it. Monique was seventeen now, and had long outgrown dolls.

She took in La Corbeille, a lady’s journal, and the Sylphe des Salons. She devoured, without skipping a word, all the accounts of first nights, races, and soirees, took interest in the debut of a singer, in the opening of a new shop.

When Krispy Kreme opens in a new town, they begin by giving away thousands of donuts. Of course, the people most likely to show up for a free hot donut are those who have heard the legend of Krispy Kreme and are delighted that they’re finally in town. These sneezers are quick to tell their friends, sell their friends, even drag their friends to a store. And that’s where the second phase kicks in. Krispy Kreme is obsessed with dominating the donut conversation. Once they’ve opened their flagship stores in an area, they rush to do deals with gas stations, coffee shops, and delis. The goal? To make it easy for someone to stumble onto the product. They start with people who will drive twenty miles, and finish with people too lazy to cross the street.

But that evening, driving back to the plant in the little underground train, I firmly believed my bad luck was over. One of the cars I had admired that morning took me back to the city. Fortunately some shops were still open here and there; I could buy myself a new suit. For Teresa I bought a nice summer dress with red stripes, which reminded me of the one in which I had seen her for the first time. It fitted to perfection – I knew her measurements. She had shared many hours with me, mainly bitter ones. We went out for dinner; it was one of the days one never forgets. Quite soon the happenings in Zapparoni's garden began to fade in my memory. There is much that is illusory in techniques. But I never forgot Teresa's words, and her smile when she spoke. Now she was happy about me. This smile was more powerful than all the automatons – it was a ray of reality.

The more south we were, the more deep a sky it seemed, till, in the Valley of Mexico, I thought it held back an element too strong for life, and that the flamy brilliance of blue stood off this menace and sometimes, like a sheath or silk membrane, shoed the weight it held in sags. So when later he would fly high over the old craters on the plain, coaly bubbles of the underworld, dangerous red everywhere from the sun, and then coats of snow on the peak of the cones—gliding like a Satan—well, it was here the old priests, before the Spaniards, waited for Aldebaran to come into the middle of heaven to tell them whether or not life would go on for another cycle, and when they received their astronomical sign built their new fire inside the split and emptied chest of a human sacrifice. And also, hereabouts, worshipers disguised as gods and as gods in the disguise of birds, jumped from platforms fixed on long poles, and glided as they spun by the ropes—feathered serpents, and eagles too, the voladores, or fliers. There still are such plummeters, in market places, as there seem to be remnants or conversions or equivalents of all the old things. Instead of racks or pyramids of skulls still in their hair and raining down scraps of flesh there are corpses of dogs, rats, horses, asses, by the roads; the bones dug out of the rented graves are thrown on a pile when the lease is up; and there are the coffins looking like such a rough joke on the female form, sold in the open shops, black, white, gray, and in all sizes, with their heavy death fringes daubed in Sapolio silver on the black. Beggars in dog voices on the church steps enact the last feebleness for you with ancient Church Spanish, and show their old flails of stump and their sores. The burden carriers with the long lines, hemp lines they wind over their foreheads to hold the loads on their backs, lie in the garbage at siesta and give themselves the same exhibited neglect the dead are shown. Which is all to emphasize how openly death is received everywhere, in the beauty of the place, and how it is acknowledged that anyone may be roughly handled—the proudest—pinched, slapped, and set down, thrown down; for death throws even worse in men’s faces and makes it horrible and absurd that one never touched should be roughly dumped under, dumped upon.

167 It’s one of those days when the monotony of everything oppresses me like being thrown into jail. The monotony of everything is merely the monotony of myself, however. Each face, even if seen just yesterday, is different today, because today isn’t yesterday. Each day is the day it is, and there was never another one like it in the world. Only our soul makes the identification – a genuinely felt but erroneous identification – by which everything becomes similar and simplified. The world is a set of distinct things with varied edges, but if we’re near-sighted, it’s a continual and indecipherable fog. I feel like fleeing. Like fleeing from what I know, fleeing from what’s mine, fleeing from what I love. I want to depart, not for impossible Indias or for the great islands south of everything, but for any place at all – village or wilderness – that isn’t this place. I want to stop seeing these unchanging faces, this routine, these days. I want to rest, far removed, from my inveterate feigning. I want to feel sleep come to me as life, not as rest. A cabin on the seashore or even a cave in a rocky mountainside could give me this, but my will, unfortunately, cannot. Slavery is the law of life, and it is the only law, for it must be observed: there is no revolt possible, no way to escape it. Some are born slaves, others become slaves, and still others are forced to accept slavery. Our faint-hearted love of freedom – which, if we had it, we would all reject, unable to get used to it – is proof of how ingrained our slavery is. I myself, having just said that I’d like a cabin or a cave where I could be free from the monotony of everything, which is the monotony of me – would I dare set out for this cabin or cave, knowing from experience that the monotony, since it stems from me, will always be with me? I myself, suffocating from where I am and because I am – where would I breathe easier, if the sickness is in my lungs rather than in the things that surround me? I myself, who long for pure sunlight and open country, for the ocean in plain view and the unbroken horizon – could I get used to my new bed, the food, not having to descend eight flights of stairs to the street, not entering the tobacco shop on the corner, not saying good-morning to the barber standing outside his shop? Everything that surrounds us becomes part of us, infiltrating our physical sensations and our feeling of life, and like spittle of the great Spider it subtly binds us to whatever is close, tucking us into a soft bed of slow death which is rocked by the wind. Everything is us, and we are everything, but what good is this, if everything is nothing? A ray of sunlight, a cloud whose shadow tells us it is passing, a breeze that rises, the silence that follows when it ceases, one or another face, a few voices, the incidental laughter of the girls who are talking, and then night with the meaningless, fractured hieroglyphs of the stars.

Life in the Cause would lurch forward as it always did. You worked, slaved, fought off the rats, the mice, the roaches, the ants, the Housing Authority, the cops, the muggers, and now the drug dealers. You lived a life of disappointment and suffering, of too-hot summers and too-cold winters, surviving in apartments with crummy stoves that didn’t work and windows that didn’t open and toilets that didn’t flush and lead paint that flecked off the walls and poisoned your children, living in awful, dreary apartments built to house Italians who came to America to work the docks, which had emptied of boats, ships, tankers, dreams, money, and opportunity the moment the colored and the Latinos arrived. And still New York blamed you for all its problems. And who can you blame? You were the one who chose to live here, in this hard town with its hard people, the financial capital of the world, land of opportunity for the white man and a tundra of spent dreams and empty promises for anyone else stupid enough to believe the hype. Sister Gee stared at her neighbors as they surrounded her, and at that moment she saw them as she had never seen them before: they were crumbs, thimbles, flecks of sugar powder on a cookie, invisible, sporadic dots on the grid of promise, occasionally appearing on Broadway stages or on baseball teams with slogans like “You gotta believe,” when in fact there was nothing to believe but that one colored in the room is fine, two is twenty, and three means close up shop and everybody go home; all living the New York dream in the Cause Houses, within sight of the Statue of Liberty, a gigantic copper reminder that this city was a grinding factory that diced the poor man’s dreams worse than any cotton gin or sugarcane field from the old country. And now heroin was here to make their children slaves again, to a useless white powder. She looked them over, the friends of her life, staring at her. They saw what she saw, she realized. She read it in their faces. They would never win. The game was fixed. The villains would succeed. The heroes would die.

You’ll grow up. Leave school. Come home one day and announce that you’re not going to university because you’re starting a band. Or opening a bar. Or a surf shop in Thailand. You’ll pierce your eyebrow and get a tattoo of a dragon on your arse or whatever and start reading books about practical philosophy.

The smells arose from everything, everywhere, flowing together and remaining as a sickening, tantalizing discomfort. They flowed from the delicatessen shop with its uncovered trays of pickled herrings, and the small open casks of pickled gherkins and onions, dried fish and salted meat, and sweaty damp walls and floor; from the fish shop which casually defied every law of health; from the kosher butcher, and the poulterer next door, where a fine confetti of new-plucked feathers hung nearly motionless in the fetid air; and from sidewalk gutters where multitudes of flies buzzed and feasted on the heaped-up residue of fruit and vegetable barrows.

The Court, the biggest and best shopping center within walking distance of Kilda’s and Colm’s, the wrapping of every moment in the world that doesn’t have some sour-faced adult looming over it ready to pounce. The Court pulls like a towering magnet and everyone comes. Anything can happen here, in the sparkling slice of freedom between classes and teatime; your life could lift right off the ground and shimmer into something brand-new. In the dizzying white light all the faces glimmer, they mouth words and crack open in laughs you can almost catch through the cloud of sounds, and any one of them could be the heart-stopping one you’ve been waiting for;

Sam pushed open the door without waiting for my answer. A wonderful wave of new-book smell came rushing out, reminding me immediately of Christmas. My parents always got me books for Christmas. With a melodic ding, the shop door swung shut behind us, and Sam released my hand. “Where to? I’ll buy you a book. I know you want one.

of Jesus. Many Christians do not understand the power in the use of the weapons that God has given us against the enemy. Unbelievers could sit throughout the night, chanting incantations or reciting things against people. 3. Gives emotional healing. 4. Gives mental healing. 5. Helps in battling dark powers. 6. Helps in battling the adversary. 7. Gives financial healing If you stand in front of your shop or house and plead the Blood of Jesus every day, you will find out that the powers of darkness in that environment will dissipate. As we are moving towards the End Times, we need to plead the Blood of Jesus, all the time. There is a lot of tragedy and disaster all over the place. Too many Christians are being robed or cheated or raped or murdered. Many are being hypnotised and confused. Pleading the Blood of Jesus, will give you immunity against these things. 8. Cleanses from all sins. Jesus came to die for the sins of the world and His Blood was shed for us. You can claim the cleansing power in His Blood and God will open a new chapter in your life.

at Dunkin’ Donuts, how did we move our anchor to Starbucks? This is where it gets really interesting. When Howard Shultz created Starbucks, he was as intuitive a businessman as Salvador Assael. He worked diligently to separate Starbucks from other coffee shops, not through price but through ambience. Accordingly, he designed Starbucks from the very beginning to feel like a continental coffeehouse. The early shops were fragrant with the smell of roasted beans (and better-quality roasted beans than those at Dunkin’ Donuts). They sold fancy French coffee presses. The showcases presented alluring snacks—almond croissants, biscotti, raspberry custard pastries, and others. Whereas Dunkin’ Donuts had small, medium, and large coffees, Starbucks offered Short, Tall, Grande, and Venti, as well as drinks with high-pedigree names like Caffè Americano, Caffè Misto, Macchiato, and Frappuccino. Starbucks did everything in its power, in other words, to make the experience feel different—so different that we would not use the prices at Dunkin’ Donuts as an anchor, but instead would be open to the new anchor that Starbucks was preparing for us. And that, to a great extent, is how Starbucks succeeded. GEORGE, DRAZEN, AND I were so excited with the experiments on coherent arbitrariness that we decided to push the idea one step farther. This time, we had a different twist to explore. Do you remember the famous episode in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, the one in which Tom turned the whitewashing of Aunt Polly’s fence into an exercise in manipulating his friends? As I’m sure you recall, Tom applied the paint with gusto, pretending to enjoy the job. “Do you call this work?” Tom told his friends. “Does a boy get a chance to whitewash a fence every day?” Armed with this new “information,” his friends discovered the joys of whitewashing a fence. Before long, Tom’s friends were not only paying him for the privilege, but deriving real pleasure from the task—a win-win outcome if there ever was one. From our perspective, Tom transformed a negative experience to a positive one—he transformed a situation in which compensation was required to one in which people (Tom’s friends) would pay to get in on the fun. Could we do the same? We

Tomorrow I want to get a New York bagel and see how it stacks up against Bodo’s.” Bodo’s Bagels are legendary in Charlottesville; we’re very proud of those bagels. Putting my head on his shoulder, I yawn and say, “I wish we could go to Levain Bakery so I could try their cookie. It’s supposed to be like no chocolate chip cookie you’ve had before. I want to go to Jacques Torres’s chocolate shop too. His chocolate chip cookie is the definitive chocolate chip cookie, you know. It’s truly legendary…” My eyes drift closed, and Peter pats my hair. I’m starting to fall asleep when I realize he’s unraveling the milkmaid braids Kitty pinned on the crown of my head. My eyes fly back open. “Peter!” “Shh, go back to sleep. I want to practice something.” “You’ll never get it back to how she had it.” “Just let me try,” he says, collecting bobby pins in the palm of his hand. When we get to the hotel in New Jersey, despite his best efforts, my braids are lumpy and loose and won’t stay pinned. “I’m sending a picture of this to Kitty so she’ll see what a bad student you are,” I say as I gather up my things. “No, don’t,” Peter quickly says, which makes me smile.

We became the most successful advanced projects company in the world by hiring talented people, paying them top dollar, and motivating them into believing that they could produce a Mach 3 airplane like the Blackbird a generation or two ahead of anybody else. Our design engineers had the keen experience to conceive the whole airplane in their mind’s-eye, doing the trade-offs in their heads between aerodynamic needs and weapons requirements. We created a practical and open work environment for engineers and shop workers, forcing the guys behind the drawing boards onto the shop floor to see how their ideas were being translated into actual parts and to make any necessary changes on the spot. We made every shop worker who designed or handled a part responsible for quality control. Any worker—not just a supervisor or a manager—could send back a part that didn’t meet his or her standards. That way we reduced rework and scrap waste. We encouraged our people to work imaginatively, to improvise and try unconventional approaches to problem solving, and then got out of their way. By applying the most commonsense methods to develop new technologies, we saved tremendous amounts of time and money, while operating in an atmosphere of trust and cooperation both with our government customers and between our white-collar and blue-collar employees. In the end, Lockheed’s Skunk Works demonstrated the awesome capabilities of American inventiveness when free to operate under near ideal working conditions. That may be our most enduring legacy as well as our source of lasting pride.

I wake on the fiction couch deeply hungover, my head cracking, with Rachel telling me to get up. She’s holding my eyelids open like she used to do in high school when we’d stayed up all night talking and then slept through the morning alarm. ‘Get. Up. Henry.’ ‘What time is it? I ask, batting off her hands. ‘It’s eleven. The shop’s been open for an hour. There are customers asking for books I can’t find. George is yelling at a guy called Martin Gamble who’s here to help me create the database. And as a separate issue, Amy’s waiting in the reading garden.’ ‘Amy’s here?’ I sit up and mess my hair around. ‘How do I look?’ ‘I decline to answer on the grounds that technically you’re my boss and I don’t want to start my new job by insulting you.’ ‘Thank you,’ I say. ‘I appreciate that.

Do you sell anything that can answer a yes or no question?“ I asked him. "For entertainment purposes,” he asked me not bothering to look up, “or for real?” I squelched the impulse to scream, “What do you think, you jackass?” Maybe he was asking a serious question- though I had my doubts. “You’re the one with the metaphysical shop. If I wanted a magic Eight Ball, I’d go to SaverPlus.” He looked up at me and grinned. “Did you notice the new guy who works at the return counter in the SaverPlus basement?He’s kind of a creep- which I think I like about him- and he’s got this monster bulge in his pants.” I could totally see him getting into someone who was a creep. “Um. No.” “They’re still open. Why don’t you go buy a Magic Eight Ball so I can return it?” “No.” “Then what the fuck good are you?

This is a book about alcohol; you can practically smell the gin coming off the pages, the lime, hear the ice clinking, the crack of the new bottle opening. But it’s not a book about alcohol. It’s about whatever thing you use to cover over the pain—sex, food, shopping, perfectionism, cleaning, drugs—whatever you hold out like an armor to protect yourself instead of allowing yourself and your broken heart to be fully seen and fully tended to by God.

The jaunting age had crystallized the hoboes, tramps and vagabonds of the world into a new class. It followed the night from east to west, always in darkness, always in search of loot, the leavings of disaster, carrion. If earthquake shattered a warehouse, they were jacking it the following night. If fire opened a house or explosion split the defenses of a shop, they jaunted in and scavenged. They called themselves Jack-Jaunters. They were jackals.

In Ukraine’s cities—Kharkiv, Kiev, Stalino, Dnipropetrovsk—hundreds of thousands of people waited each day for a simple loaf of bread. In Kharkiv, the republic’s capital, Jones saw a new sort of misery. People appeared at two o’clock in the morning to queue in front of shops that did not open until seven. On an average day forty thousand people would wait for bread. Those in line were so desperate to keep their places that they would cling to the belts of those immediately in front of them. Some were so weak from hunger that they could not stand without the ballast of strangers. The waiting lasted all day, and sometimes for two. Pregnant women and maimed war veterans had lost their right to buy out of turn, and had to wait in line with the rest if they wanted to eat. Somewhere in line a woman would wail, and the moaning would echo up and down the line, so that the whole group of thousands sounded like a single animal with an elemental fear.

The results were eye-opening. As the GPS data and responses to the text messages rolled in, it became clear that those who had more adventurous experiences – those who took themselves off to a wider and more random assortment of places, whether taking a new route to work or trying a different coffee shop rather than sticking to their regular one – felt happier, more excited and more relaxed. Their conclusion: an adventurous life holds the key to unlocking positive emotions.

I have putt the change in the till, I have cleaned and made room for new bottles in the cooling sink, for butter and cheese in the icebox. Now I am standing in the shop waiting by the open door without switching the light on. I like this early half-light, the mild air from the sea, standing inside looking out without being seen, and there are almost no sounds from the street, and I can think and remember who I am before anything new comes along. Everything happens so fast it's easy to forget, everything is exploding and burning. But now it is quiet.

Competition is the spice of sports; but if you make spice the whole meal you'll be sick. The simplest single-celled organism oscillates to a number of different frequencies, at the atomic, molecular, sub-cellular, and cellular levels. Microscopic movies of these organisms are striking for the ceaseless, rhythmic pulsation that is revealed. In an organism as complex as a human being, the frequencies of oscillation and the interactions between those frequencies are multitudinous. -George Leonard Learning any new skill involves relatively brief spurts of progress, each of which is followed by a slight decline to a plateau somewhat higher in most cases than that which preceded it…the upward spurts vary; the plateaus have their own dips and rises along the way…To take the master’s journey, you have to practice diligently, striving to hone your skills, to attain new levels of competence. But while doing so–and this is the inexorable–fact of the journey–you also have to be willing to spend most of your time on a plateau, to keep practicing even when you seem to be getting nowhere. (Mastery, p. 14-15). Backsliding is a universal experience. Every one of us resists significant change, no matter whether it’s for the worse or for the better. Our body, brain and behavior have a built-in tendency to stay the same within rather narrow limits, and to snap back when changed…Be aware of the way homeostasis works…Expect resistance and backlash. Realize that when the alarm bells start ringing, it doesn’t necessarily mean you’re sick or crazy or lazy or that you’ve made a bad decision in embarking on the journey of mastery. In fact, you might take these signals as an indication that your life is definitely changing–just what you’ve wanted….Be willing to negotiate with your resistance to change. Our preoccupation with goals, results, and the quick fix has separated us from our own experiences…there are all of those chores that most of us can’t avoid: cleaning, straightening, raking leaves, shopping for groceries, driving the children to various activities, preparing food, washing dishes, washing the car, commuting, performing the routine, repetitive aspects of our jobs….Take driving, for instance. Say you need to drive ten miles to visit a friend. You might consider the trip itself as in-between-time, something to get over with. Or you could take it as an opportunity for the practice of mastery. In that case, you would approach your car in a state of full awareness…Take a moment to walk around the car and check its external condition, especially that of the tires…Open the door and get in the driver’s seat, performing the next series of actions as a ritual: fastening the seatbelt, adjusting the seat and the rearview mirror…As you begin moving, make a silent affirmation that you’ll take responsibility for the space all around your vehicle at all times…We tend to downgrade driving as a skill simply because it’s so common. Actually maneuvering a car through varying conditions of weather, traffic, and road surface calls for an extremely high level of perception, concentration, coordination, and judgement…Driving can be high art…Ultimately, nothing in this life is “commonplace,” nothing is “in between.” The threads that join your every act, your every thought, are infinite. All paths of mastery eventually merge. [Each person has a] vantage point that offers a truth of its own. We are the architects of creation and all things are connected through us. The Universe is continually at its work of restructuring itself at a higher, more complex, more elegant level . . . The intention of the universe is evolution. We exist as a locus of waves that spreads its influence to the ends of space and time. The whole of a thing is contained in each of its parts. We are completely, firmly, absolutely connected with all of existence. We are indeed in relationship to all that is.

Everything I value about him seems to be physical: the rest is either unknown, disagreeable or ridiculous. I don’t care much for his temperament, which alternates between surliness and gloom, or for the overgrown pots he throws so skillfully on the wheel and then mutilates, cutting holes in them, strangling them, slashing them open. That’s unfair, he never uses a knife, only his fingers, and a lot of the time he only bends them, doubles them over; even so they have a disagreeable mutant quality. Nobody else admires them either: the aspiring housewives he teaches two evenings a week, Pottery and Ceramics 432-A, want to make ashtrays and plates with cheerful daisies on them instead, and the things don’t sell at all in the few handicraft shops that will even stock them. So they accumulate in our already cluttered basement apartment like fragmentary memories or murder victims. I can’t even put flowers in them, the water would run out through the rips. Their only function is to uphold Joe’s unvoiced claim to superior artistic seriousness: every time I sell a poster design or get a new commission he mangles another pot.

Soon thereafter, a maid brought Poppy a tray of neat boxes tied with ribbons. Opening them, Poppy discovered that one was filled with toffee, another with boiled sweets, and another with Turkish delight. Best of all, one box was filled with a new confection called "eating-chocolates" that had been all the rage at the London Exhibition. "Where did these come from?" Poppy asked Harry when he returned to her room after a brief visit to the front offices. "From the sweet shop." "No, these," Poppy showed him the eating-chocolates. "No one can get them. The makers, Fellows and Son, have closed their shop while they moved to a new location. The ladies at the philanthropic luncheon were talking about it." "I sent Valentine to the Fellows residence to ask them to make a special batch for you." Harry smiled as he saw the paper twists scattered across the counterpane. "I see you've sampled them." "Have one," Poppy said generously. Harry shook his head. "I don't like sweets." But he bent down obligingly as she gestured for him to come closer. She reached out to him, her fingers catching the knot of his necktie. Harry's smile faded as Poppy exerted gentle tension, drawing him down. He was suspended over her, an impending weight of muscle and masculine drive. As her sugared breath blew against his lips, she sensed the deep tremor within him. And she was aware of a new equilibrium between them, a balance of will and curiosity. Harry held still, letting her do as she wished. She tugged him closer until her mouth brushed his. The contact was brief but vital, striking a glow of heat. Poppy released him carefully, and Harry drew back. "You won't kiss me for diamonds," he said, his voice slightly raspy, "but you will for chocolates?" Poppy nodded. As Harry turned his face away, she saw his cheek tauten with a smile. "I'll put in a daily order, then.

We walk the streets of Fuzhou at night, in the one summer when I come back. Streetlights send our elongated shadows tumbling ahead of us, across the neon-tinged storefronts and buzzing lamps. Everyone comes out, the old men in wife-beaters and plastic sandals, the teenagers in fake American Eagle. Senior citizen ladies roll out before bedtime in pajama pants printed with SpongeBob or fake Chanel logos. There is a Mickey D's and a KFC, street dumpling stands, bootleg shops, karaoke bars. Everything is open late, midnight or even later. There are places to get a full-body massage, an eight ball, a happy ending. If you stay on these streets long enough, it's possible you could get everything you want, have ever wanted. Because I disremember everything, because I watch a lot of China travel shows when I am alone at night in New York, because TV mixes with my dreams mixes with my memories, we walk along the concourse that runs alongside the river even though there is no river, we turn down boulevards punctuated by palm-tree clusters even though those belong in Singapore, we smoke cigarettes openly even though it's unseemly for women, especially in my family, to smoke in public. But the feeling, the feeling of being in Fuzhou at night, remains the same.

Beauty exists everywhere in the world. Love resides in all of us. That's the point. I only...I only want to deepen that. Show that there can be - that there should be - substance in it all. Of course a bride on her wedding day is beautiful, but that radiance doesn't diminish in old age, when she's too tired to keep up with whatever ridiculous fashions the shops and salons put out. I know Arina smiles upon an old couple walking down the road together, hand in hand, firm in their commitment to one another. A wilting flower holds just as much splendor as one on the cusp of opening. People are so quick to idolize the fresh and the new. They fetishize it." He rubbed at his forehead, his eyes bright with fervor. "Why should we celebrate one without the other?

we have an entirely new set-up. We have a safe tunnel leading to three of the finest stores in the world!” “We do indeed!” said Badger. “I’ve seen ’em!” “And you know what this means?” said Mr. Fox. “It means that none of us need ever go out into the open again!” There was a buzz of excitement around the table. “I therefore invite you all,” Mr. Fox went on, “to stay here with me for ever.” “For ever!” they cried. “My goodness! How marvellous!” And Rabbit said to Mrs. Rabbit, “My dear, just think! We’re never going to be shot at again in our lives!” “We will make,” said Mr. Fox, “a little underground village, with streets and houses on each side—separate houses for Badgers and Moles and Rabbits and Weasels and Foxes. And every day I will go shopping for you all. And every day we will eat like kings.

Prabhakar was waiting for me at the bus station, smiling happily through the rain. He led me through the people gathered at the bus station, past shops selling cheap household items and eating places where pakoras were being fried in bubbling oil. The brands and consumerism of urban India had disappeared, and although I felt an acute sense of displacement, I was oddly comforted by the rough utilitarianism of the place, which reminded me of the India I had grown up in. There were no cafes where I could hide my loneliness behind a cup of coffee and an open laptop, no shopping aisles where I could wander, picking out items that momentarily created an image of a better life. There was no escape here except through human relationships, and for that I was utterly dependent on Prabhakar speeding through the rain on his motorcycle.

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Yet 1933 was also a year of hunger in the Soviet cities, especially in Soviet Ukraine. In Ukraine’s cities—Kharkiv, Kiev, Stalino, Dnipropetrovsk—hundreds of thousands of people waited each day for a simple loaf of bread. In Kharkiv, the republic’s capital, Jones saw a new sort of misery. People appeared at two o’clock in the morning to queue in front of shops that did not open until seven. On an average day forty thousand people would wait for bread. Those in line were so desperate to keep their places that they would cling to the belts of those immediately in front of them. Some were so weak from hunger that they could not stand without the ballast of strangers. The waiting lasted all day, and sometimes for two. Pregnant women and maimed war veterans had lost their right to buy out of turn, and had to wait in line with the rest if they wanted to eat. Somewhere in line a woman would wail, and the moaning would echo up and down the line, so that the whole group of thousands

Most important of all, ARPA staffers recognized the agency’s biggest mistake yet: It had not been tapping the universities where much of the best scientific work was being done. The scientific community, predictably, rallied to the call for a reinvention of ARPA as a “high-risk, high-gain” research sponsor—the kind of R&D shop they had dreamed of all along. Their dream was realized; ARPA was given its new mission. As ARPA’s features took shape, one readily apparent characteristic of the agency was that its relatively small size allowed the personality of its director to permeate the organization. In time, the “ARPA style”—freewheeling, open to high risk, agile—would be vaunted. Other Washington bureaucrats came to envy ARPA’s modus operandi. Eventually the agency attracted an elite corps of hard-charging R&D advocates from the finest universities and research laboratories, who set about building a community of the best technical and scientific minds in American research. The

I shared my love of books with Benny, but Aunt Yolanda opened my eyes to the world of food as art, cooking without cans. She introduced me to the magic of spices, the exotic perfume of fresh herbs crushed between fingers. Younger than my mother, she was rounded in just the right spots, from her love of good food, and when we talked she looked right at me and listened, nodding and laughing loudly when I'd tell jokes, holding my hand when we'd walk, as if we were best friends or sisters. She liked Anne and Christine, too, but I could tell I was her favorite. She took me with her on shopping trips, to the fish market near the waterfront and the farm stands out west. Sometimes she'd journey to the Asian grocers in Northeast Portland or the hippie vegetarian markets on Hawthorne to find something special. We'd come home laden with ingredients that I knew my mother had never heard of, and the resulting feasts would fill me with a yearning to go to different places, to try new things.

Near the exit to the blue patio, DeCoverley Pox and Joaquin Stick stand by a concrete scale model of the Jungfrau, ... socking the slopes of the famous mountain with red rubber hot-water bags full of ice cubes, the idea being to pulverize the ice for Pirate's banana frappes. With their nights' growths of beard, matted hair, bloodshot eyes, miasmata of foul breath, DeCoverley and Joaquin are wasted gods urging on a tardy glacier. Elsewhere in the maisonette, other drinking companions disentangle from blankets (one spilling wind from his, dreaming of a parachute), piss into bathroom sinks, look at themselves with dismay in concave shaving mirrors, slab water with no clear plan in mind onto heads of thinning hair, struggle into Sam Brownes, dub shoes against rain later in the day with hand muscles already weary of it, sing snatches of popular songs whose tunes they don't always know, lie, believing themselves warmed, in what patches of the new sunlight come between the mullions, begin tentatively to talk shop as a way of easing into whatever it is they'll have to be doing in less than an hour, lather necks and faces, yawn, pick their noses, search cabinets or bookcases for the hair of the dog that not without provocation and much prior conditioning bit them last night. Now there grows among all the rooms, replacing the night's old smoke, alcohol and sweat, the fragile, musaceous odor of Breakfast:flowery, permeating, surprising, more than the color of winter sunlight, taking over not so much through any brute pungency or volume as by the high intricacy to the weaving of its molecules, sharing the conjuror's secret by which-- though it is not often Death is told so clearly to fuck off--- the genetic chains prove labyrinthine enough to preserve some human face down ten or twenty generations. . . so the same assertion-through-structure allows this war morning's banana fragrance to meander, repossess, prevail. Is there any reason not to open every window, and let the kind scent blanket all Chelsea? As a spell, against falling objects. . . .

But what were even gold and silver, precious stones and clockwork, to the bookshops, whence a pleasant smell of paper freshly pressed came issuing forth, awakening instant recollections of some new grammar had at school, long time ago, with 'Master Pinch, Grove House Academy,' inscribed in faultless writing on the fly-leaf! That whiff of russia leather, too, and all those rows on rows of volumes neatly ranged within—what happiness did they suggest! And in the window were the spick-and-span new works from London, with the title-pages, and sometimes even the first page of the first chapter, laid wide open; tempting unwary men to begin to read the book, and then, in the impossibility of turning over, to rush blindly in, and buy it! Here too were the dainty frontispiece and trim vignette, pointing like handposts on the outskirts of great cities, to the rich stock of incident beyond; and store of books, with many a grave portrait and time-honoured name, whose matter he knew well, and would have given mines to have, in any form, upon the narrow shell beside his bed at Mr Pecksniff's. What a heart-breaking shop it was!

A few weeks into our stay, I made a friend who wanted to improve his English as much as I wanted to improve my French. We met one day out in the crowd in front of Notre Dame. We walked to the Latin Quarter. We walked to a wine shop. Outside the wine shop there was seating. We sat and drank a bottle of red. We were served heaping piles of meats, bread, and cheese. Was this dinner? Did people do this? I had not even known how to imagine it. And more, was this all some elaborate ritual to get an angle on me? My friend paid. I thanked him. But when we left I made sure he walked out first. He wanted to show me one of those old buildings that seem to be around every corner in that city. And the entire time he was leading me, I was sure he was going to make a quick turn into an alley, where some dudes would be waiting to strip me of…what, exactly? But my new friend simply showed me the building, shook my hand, gave a fine bon soirée, and walked off into the wide open night. And watching him walk away, I felt that I had missed part of the experience because of my eyes, because my eyes were made in Baltimore, because my eyes were blindfolded by fear.

Flattery was a prime department store strategy for cultivating customers, and men got a heavy dose. Males could expect to be treated like busy executives and discriminating men of the world. Men’s sections, floors, and entire stores were designed to resemble opulent clubs, often outfitted with wood-paneled grills that women customers were not permitted to enter. Vandervoort’s and Filene’s went to somewhat unusual lengths in furnishing a men’s lounge and smoking room, oddly working against the prevailing assumption that men had no time to spare. In Halle’s new men’s store of the late 1920s, dark mahogany paneling and carved marble detailing created the ambience of a priestly inner sanctum. Filene’s furnished an indoor putting green in its men’s store of 1928. Wanamaker’s outdid itself in 1932, the unlucky Depression year it opened its luxurious six-story men’s store in the Lincoln-Liberty building, with stocks of British imports and an equestrian shop too. Both Wanamaker’s and Marshall Field sold airplanes. Lord & Taylor reserved its tenth floor in New York City for men, with heman departments for cutlery, the home bar, and barbecue equipment. Gimbels, Macy’s, and Hearn’s stuck to more basic appeals, using their large liquor departments to attract men.

I paused at the top of the spiral staircase, and soaked in the view. In the daylight, the bookstore took on a new life. Motes of dust danced in the sunlight that streamed through the windows. It looked a lot cozier, as the colored glass window ornaments threw rainbows across the bookshelves and pirouetted across the hardwood floors like flecks of dappled sunlight on sand. Bookcases, filled to the brim, reached up to the ceiling, cluttered with so many colors and kinds of books, short and fat, long and wide, that it almost felt like an assault on the senses. The center of the bookstore was open to the second floor, where tall bookshelves towered so high you had to reach them with ladders. Heavy oak beams supported the roof. Planetariums and glass chimes and other ornaments hung from the rafters, catching the morning's golden light and throwing it across the store. The shelves were made from the same deep oak as the ceiling beams and the banisters on the second floor, signs hanging from the eye-level shelves detailing the different sections of the store: MEMOIR, FANTASY, SCI-FI, ROMANCE, SELF-HELP, NATURE, HOW-TO... This place was beautiful. I wondered, briefly, what it would be like to own a place like this. It was magical. A shop that sold the impossible inked onto soft white paper.

It was odd that I hadn’t really noticed till now what a beautiful evening it was. The street lamps glowed like ripe oranges among the bare boughs. Below in the wet street their globes glimmered down and down, to drown in their own reflections. He hangs in shades the orange bright, like golden lamps … and on the pavements there were piles of oranges, too, real ones, spilled there in prodigal piles with aubergines and green and scarlet peppers. The open door of a wine-shop glittered like Aladdin’s cave with bottles from floor to roof, shelf on shelf of ruby and amber and purple, the rich heart of a hundred sun-drenched harvests. From a brightly-lit workmen’s café nearby came music, the sound of voices loud in argument, and the smell of new bread. The last lamp drowned its golden moon in the road ahead. The last house vanished and we were running between hedgeless fields. To the right a pale sky still showed clear under the western rim of the rain-clouds, and against it the bare trees that staked the road stood out black and sheer. The leaves of an ilex cut the half-light like knives. A willow streamed in the wind like a woman’s hair. The road lifted itself ahead, mackerel-silver under its bending poplars. The blue hour, the lovely hour … Then the hills were round us, and it was dark.

1860 there had risen in West Dougherty perhaps the richest slave kingdom the modern world ever knew. A hundred and fifty barons commanded the labor of nearly six thousand Negroes, held sway over farms with ninety thousand acres tilled land, valued even in times of cheap soil at three millions of dollars. Twenty thousand bales of ginned cotton went yearly to England, New and Old; and men that came there bankrupt made money and grew rich. In a single decade the cotton output increased four-fold and the value of lands was tripled. It was the heyday of the nouveau riche, and a life of careless extravagance among the masters. Four and six bobtailed thoroughbreds rolled their coaches to town; open hospitality and gay entertainment were the rule. Parks and groves were laid out, rich with flower and vine, and in the midst stood the low wide-halled “big house,” with its porch and columns and great fireplaces. And yet with all this there was something sordid, something forced,—a certain feverish unrest and recklessness; for was not all this show and tinsel built upon a groan? “This land was a little Hell,” said a ragged, brown, and grave-faced man to me. We were seated near a roadside blacksmith shop, and behind was the bare ruin of some master’s home. “I’ve seen niggers drop dead in the furrow, but they were kicked aside, and the plough never

I am tied to old ways, which I learned in a hard house. It was a loving house even as it was besieged by its country, but it was hard. Even in Paris, I could not shake the old ways, the instinct to watch my back at every pass, and always be ready to go. A few weeks into our stay, I made a friend who wanted to improve his English as much as I wanted to improve my French. We met one day in the crowd in front of Notre Dame. We walked to the Latin Quarter. We walked to a wine shop. Outside the wine shop there was seating. We sat and drank a bottle of red. We were served heaping piles of meats, bread, and cheese. Was this dinner? Did people do this? I had not even known how to imagine it. And more, was this all some elaborate ritual to get an angle on me? My friend paid. I thanked him. But when we left I made sure he walked out first. He wanted to show me one of those old buildings that seem to be around every corner in that city. And the entire time he was leading me, I was sure he was going to make a quick turn into an alley, where some dudes would be waiting to strip me of … what, exactly? But my new friend simply showed me the building, shook my hand, gave a fine bonne soiree, and walked off into the wide open night. And watching him walk away, I felt that I had missed part of the experience because of my eyes, because my eyes were made in Baltimore, because my eyes were blindfolded by fear.

By the time Lillian had turned twelve ears old, cooking had become her family. It had taught her lessons usually imparted by parents- economy from a limp head of celery left too long in the hydrator, perseverance from the whipping of heavy cream, the power of memories from oregano, whose flavor only grew stronger as it dried. Her love of new ingredients had brought her to Abuelita, the owner of the local Mexican grocery store, who introduced her to avocados and cilantro, and taught her the magic of matching ingredients with personalities to change a person's mood or a life. But the day when twelve-year-old Lillian had handed her mother an apple- fresh-picked from the orchard down the road on an afternoon when Indian summer gave over to autumn- and Lillian's mother had finally looked up from the book she was reading, food achieved a status for Lillian that was almost mystical. "Look how you've grown," Lillian's mother had said, and life had started all over again. There was conversation at dinner, someone else's hand on the brush as it ran through her hair at night. A trip to New York, where they had discovered a secret fondue restaurant, hidden behind wooden shutters during the day, open by candlelight at night. Excursions to farmers' markets and bakeries and a shop that made its own cheese, stretching and pulling the mozzarella like taffy. Finally, Lillian felt like she was cooking for a mother who was paying attention, and she played in an open field of pearl couscous and Thai basil, paella and spanakopita and eggplant Parmesan.

By the time Lillian had turned twelve years old, cooking had become her family. It had taught her lessons usually imparted by parents- economy from a limp head of celery left too long in the hydrator, perseverance from the whipping of heavy cream, the power of memories from oregano, whose flavor only grew stronger as it dried. Her love of new ingredients had brought her to Abuelita, the owner of the local Mexican grocery store, who introduced her to avocados and cilantro, and taught her the magic of matching ingredients with personalities to change a person's mood or a life. But the day when twelve-year-old Lillian had handed her mother an apple- fresh-picked from the orchard down the road on an afternoon when Indian summer gave over to autumn- and Lillian's mother had finally looked up from the book she was reading, food achieved a status for Lillian that was almost mystical. "Look how you've grown," Lillian's mother had said, and life had started all over again. There was conversation at dinner, someone else's hand on the brush as it ran through her hair at night. A trip to New York, where they had discovered a secret fondue restaurant, hidden behind wooden shutters during the day, open by candlelight at night. Excursions to farmers' markets and bakeries and a shop that made its own cheese, stretching and pulling the mozzarella like taffy. Finally, Lillian felt like she was cooking for a mother who was paying attention, and she played in an open field of pearl couscous and Thai basil, paella and spanakopita and eggplant Parmesan.

Mindy runs to the DVD player and delicately places the disk in the holder and presses play. “Will you sit in this chair, please, Princess Mindy?” I ask, bowing deeply at the waist. Mindy giggles as she replies, ”I guess so.” After Mindy sits down, I take a wide-tooth comb and start gently combing out her tangles. Mindy starts vibrating with excitement as she blurts, “Mr. Jeff, you’re gonna fix my hair fancy, ain’t you?” “We’ll see if a certain Princess can hold still long enough for me to finish,” I tease. Immediately, Mindy becomes as still as a stone statue. After a couple of minutes, I have to say, “Mindy, sweetheart, it’s okay to breathe. I just can’t have you bouncing, because I’m afraid it will cause me to pull your hair.” Mindy slumps down in her chair just slightly. “Okay Mr. Jeff, I was ascared you was gonna stop,” she whispers, her chin quivering. I adopt a very fake, very over-the-top French accent and say, “Oh no, Monsieur Jeff must complete Princess Mindy’s look to make the Kingdom happy. Mindy erupts with the first belly laugh I’ve heard all day as she responds, “Okay, I’ll try to be still, but it’s hard ‘cause I have the wiggles real bad.” I pat her on the shoulder and chuckle as I say, “Just try your best, sweetheart. That’s all anyone can ask.” Kiera comes screeching around the corner in a blur, plunks her purse on the table, and says breathlessly, “Geez-O-Pete, I can’t believe I’m late for the makeover. I love makeovers.” Kiera digs through her purse and produces two bottles of nail polish and nail kit. “It’s time for your mani/pedi ma’am. Would you prefer Pink Pearl or Frosted Creamsicle? Mindy raises her hand like a schoolchild and Kiera calls on her like a pupil, “I want Frosted Cream toes please,” Mindy answers. “Your wish is my command, my dear,” Kiera responds with a grin. For the next few minutes, Mindy gets the spa treatment of her life as I carefully French braid her hair into pigtails. As a special treat, I purchased some ribbons from the gift shop and I’m weaving them into her hair. I tuck a yellow rose behind her ear. I don my French accent as I declare, “Monsieur Jeffery pronounces Princess Mindy finished and fit to rule the kingdom.” Kiera hands Mindy a new tube of grape ChapStick from her purse, “Hold on, a true princess never reigns with chapped lips,” she says. Mindy giggles as she responds, “You’re silly, Miss Kiera. Nobody in my kingdom is going to care if my lips are shiny.” Kiera’s laugh sounds like wind chimes as she covers her face with her hands as she confesses, “Okay, you busted me. I just like to use it because it tastes yummy.” “Okay, I want some, please,” Mindy decides. Kiera is putting the last minute touches on her as Mindy is scrambling to stand on Kiera’s thighs so she can get a better look in the mirror. When I reach out to steady her, she grabs my hand in a death grip. I glance down at her. Her eyes are wide and her mouth is opening and closing like a fish. I shoot Kiera a worried glance, but she merely shrugs. “Holy Sh — !” Mindy stops short when she sees Kiera’s expression. “Mr. Jeff is an angel for reals because he turned me into one. Look at my hair Miss Kiera, there are magic ribbons in it! I’m perfect. I can be anything I want to be.” Spontaneously, we all join together in a group hug. I kiss the top of her head as I agree, “Yes, Mindy, you are amazing and the sky is the limit for you.

And for the four remaining days - the ninety-six remaining hours - we mapped out a future away from everything we knew. When the walls of the map were breached, we gave one another courage to build them again. And we imagined our home an old stone barn filled with junk and wine and paintings, surrounded by fields of wildflowers and bees. I remember our final day in the villa. We were supposed to be going that evening, taking the sleeper back to England. I was on edge, a mix of nerves and excitement, looking out to see if he made the slightest move toward leaving, but he didn’t. Toiletries remained on the bathroom shelves, clothes stayed scattered across the floor. We went to the beach as usual, lay side by side in our usual spot. The heat was intense and we said little, certainly nothing of our plans to move up to Provence, to the lavender and light. To the fields of sunflowers. I looked at my watch. We were almost there. It was happening. I kept saying to myself, he’s going to do it. I left him on the bed dozing, and went out to the shop to get water and peaches. I walked the streets as if they were my new home. Bonjour to everyone, me walking barefoot, oh so confident, free. And I imagined how we’d go out later to eat, and we’d celebrate at our bar. And I’d phone Mabel and Mabel would say, I understand. I raced back to the villa, ran up the stairs and died. Our rucksacks were open on the bed, our shoes already packed away inside. I watched him from the door. He was silent, his eyes red. He folded his clothes meticulously, dirty washing in separate bags. I wanted to howl. I wanted to put my arms around him, hold him there until the train had left the station. I’ve got peaches and water for the journey, I said. Thank you, he said. You think of everything. Because I love you, I said. He didn’t look at me. The change was happening too quickly. Is there a taxi coming? My voice was weak, breaking. Madame Cournier’s taking us. I went to open the window, the scent of tuberose strong. I lit a cigarette and looked at the sky. An airplane cast out a vivid orange wake that ripped across the violet wash. And I remember thinking, how cruel it was that our plans were out there somewhere. Another version of our future, out there somewhere, in perpetual orbit. The bottle of pastis? he said. I smiled at him. You take it, I said. We lay in our bunks as the sleeper rattled north and retraced the journey of ten days before. The cabin was dark, an occasional light from the corridor bled under the door. The room was hot and airless, smelled of sweat. In the darkness, he dropped his hand down to me and waited. I couldn’t help myself, I reached up and held it. Noticed my fingertips were numb. We’ll be OK, I remember thinking. Whatever we are, we’ll be OK. We didn’t see each other for a while back in Oxford. We both suffered, I know we did, but differently. And sometimes, when the day loomed gray, I’d sit at my desk and remember the heat of that summer. I’d remember the smells of tuberose that were carried by the wind, and the smell of octopus cooking on the stinking griddles. I’d remember the sound of our laughter and the sound of a doughnut seller, and I’d remember the red canvas shoes I lost in the sea, and the taste of pastis and the taste of his skin, and a sky so blue it would defy anything else to be blue again. And I’d remember my love for a man that almost made everything possible./

Kamimura has been whispering all week of a sacred twenty-four-hour ramen spot located on a two-lane highway in Kurume where truckers go for the taste of true ramen. The shop is massive by ramen standards, big enough to fit a few trucks along with those drivers, and in the midafternoon a loose assortment of castaways and road warriors sit slurping their noodles. Near the entrance a thick, sweaty cauldron boils so aggressively that a haze of pork fat hangs over the kitchen like waterfall mist. While few are audacious enough to claim ramen is healthy, tonkotsu enthusiasts love to point out that the collagen in pork bones is great for the skin. "Look at their faces!" says Kamimura. "They're almost seventy years old and not a wrinkle! That's the collagen. Where there is tonkotsu, there is rarely a wrinkle." He's right: the woman wears a faded purple bandana and sad, sunken eyes, but even then she doesn't look a day over fifty. She's stirring a massive cauldron of broth, and I ask her how long it's been simmering for. "Sixty years," she says flatly. This isn't hyperbole, not exactly. Kurume treats tonkotsu like a French country baker treats a sourdough starter- feeding it, regenerating, keeping some small fraction of the original soup alive in perpetuity. Old bones out, new bones in, but the base never changes. The mother of all ramen. Maruboshi Ramen opened in 1958, and you can taste every one of those years in the simple bowl they serve. There is no fancy tare, no double broth, no secret spice or unexpected toppings: just pork bones, noodles, and three generations of constant simmering. The flavor is pig in its purest form, a milky broth with no aromatics or condiments to mitigate the purity of its porcine essence.

They had her in Intensive Care. I sat outside Intensive Care in their slick little awful waiting room. They had red slippery chairs, cheap covering, and a stand full of pebbles with green plastic leaves growing up. I sat there hour after hour and read The Reader's Digest. The jokes. Thinking this is how it is, this is it, really, she's dying. Now, this moment, behind those doors, dying. Nothing stops or holds off for it the way you somehow and against all your sense believe it will. I thought about Mother's life, the part of it I knew. Going to work every day, first on the ferry then on the bus. Shopping at the old Red-and-White then at the new Safeway -- new, fifteen years old! Going down to the Library one night a week, taking me with her, and we would come home on the bus with our load of books and a bag of grapes we bought at the Chinese place, for a treat. Wednesday afternoons too when my kids were small and I went over there to drink coffee and she rolled us cigarettes on that contraption she had. And I thought, all these things don't seem that much like life, when you're doing them, they're just what you do, how you fill up your days, and you think all the time something is going to crack open, and you'll find yourself, then you'll find yourself, in life. It's not even that you particularly want this to happen, this cracking open, you're comfortable enough the way things are, but you do expect it. Then you're dying, Mother is dying, and it's just the same plastic chairs and plastic plants and ordinary day outside with people getting groceries and what you've had is all there is, and going to the Library, just a thing like that, coming back up the hill on the bus with books and a bag of grapes seems now worth wanting, O God doesn't it, you'd break your heart wanting back there.

Imagine that you are a seamstress who works in a cloth shop in the city of Corinth, in Greece, in the year 56. Eutychus, a guy who lives next door to you and works in a leather workshop nearby, has just joined a new club, and he tells you about it. First, they don’t meet in the daytime, but either early, before light, or after dark. There are only enough of them to fill a decent-sized dining room, but they call themselves the “town meeting.” You’re not quite sure what they do at these meetings. They don’t appear to worship any god or goddess that you can see. They use the term “god” sometimes, but this god doesn’t have a name, and to you that would be bizarre. Remember, you are pretending that you’re a Greek living in the year 56 in Corinth. To you, these people look as if they don’t believe in gods at all; they look like atheists. The people in this new club have a very high respect for a criminal Jew who led some kind of guerrilla war and was executed long ago, somewhere in Syria. Eutychus says, though, that this Jew is still alive somewhere. In fact, Eutychus says that the Jew “bought” him, although you didn’t know that Eutychus was ever a slave. In fact, you’re pretty sure he wasn’t a slave. So what does it mean that this guy bought him? At these town meetings they eat meals—which is not unusual since most clubs in your society eat meals—but they call the meals the “boss’s dinner,” or sometimes “the thank-you.” Some people say they eat human flesh at these dinners, but you doubt that because for some reason they seem to be vegetarians. You doubt whether vegetarians would eat human flesh. Eutychus says that to initiate new members into their club, they “dip them,” naked, and then they “get healthy.” Once you’re in the club, they call you “comrade,” and you have sex with anyone and everyone, because it doesn’t matter anymore whether you’re a man or a woman; in fact, they kind of figure you’re neither—or both.

Carolina walked over to the private deck and turned on the Jacuzzi, the bubbles starting to bounce in the water. Enrique followed her and brushed his hand through the water. "That looks nice, but I don't have a swimsuit." "Neither do I," she said with a smile. She held his gaze as her sundress fell to her toes. She was standing there in nothing but the new bra and panties and heels he'd purchased at the store. The yellow lace barely covered her nipples, and the thong accentuated her perfect ass. Enrique wanted to fuck her against the hot tub until she screamed his name. But again, he reminded himself that he needed to go slow. "You sure? I can run down to the gift shop and buy us swimsuits." She shook her head. "No, Enrique. I just don't want to hold back anymore, I want you." She unhooked her bra and took off her panties, revealing dark curls between her legs. The sight of this beautiful naked woman caused his cock to spring to attention. She carefully slipped out of her shoes, stepped into the tub, and sat down. He'd assumed she would be shy, but apparently that girl was gone. Well then! Enrique stripped down, his cock at full attention. Her mouth opened at the sight of his naked body. He grinned and then slipped into the bubbles and sat next to her. Enrique was about to kiss her when she straddled his thighs. "Are you sure you want to do this?" he asked. She kissed him. "I'm sure." "Carolina... you're so beautiful." He kissed her neck, and she tossed back her hair. His cock was pressed up against her soft belly. He so desperately wanted to be inside of her. Her hands rubbed all over his body, and she hesitantly touched his throbbing cock underwater. Her delicate fingers felt incredible with the current from the jets. Her nipples were glistening from the water, and he sucked on one. She moaned as he touched her pussy, sliding a finger inside of her while thumbing her clit. God, she was tight. "Enrique. That feels so good." He smirked. "You haven't seen anything yet." He lifted her to sit on the edge of the tub, spreading her legs as he knelt on the seat inside. She shook her head and closed her legs. "Oh, I don't know if I'll like that." He laughed. "Yeah, you will." She bit her lower lip. "Do you like doing it?" "Babe, I've been dying to eat your pussy since I met you." Her jaw dropped and her cheeks seemed redder, but maybe that was from the heat of the spa. "Enrique! That mouth!" He grinned. "My dirty mouth speaks the truth. Now spread your legs and relax." She cautiously opened her legs.

Miraculously, thirty minutes later I found Marlboro Man’s brother’s house. As I pulled up, I saw Marlboro Man’s familiar white pickup parked next to a very large, imposing semi. He and his brother were sitting inside the cab. Looking up and smiling, Marlboro Man motioned for me to join them. I waved, getting out of my car and obnoxiously taking my purse with me. To add insult to injury, I pressed the button on my keyless entry to lock my doors and turn on my car alarm, not realizing how out of place the dreadful chirp! chirp! must have sounded amidst all the bucolic silence. As I made my way toward the monster truck to meet my new love’s only brother, I reflected that not only had I never in my life been inside the cab of a semi, but also I wasn’t sure I’d ever been within a hundred feet of one. My armpits were suddenly clammy and moist, my body trembling nervously at the prospect of not only meeting Tim but also climbing into a vehicle nine times the size of my Toyota Camry, which, at the time, was the largest car I’d ever owned. I was nervous. What would I do in there? Marlboro Man opened the passenger door, and I grabbed the large handlebar on the side of the cab, hoisting myself up onto the spiked metal steps of the semi. “Come on in,” he said as he ushered me into the cab. Tim was in the driver’s seat. “Ree, this is my brother, Tim.” Tim was handsome. Rugged. Slightly dusty, as if he’d just finished working. I could see a slight resemblance to Marlboro Man, a familiar twinkle in his eye. Tim extended his hand, leaving the other on the steering wheel of what I would learn was a brand-spanking-new cattle truck, just hours old. “So, how do you like this vehicle?” Tim asked, smiling widely. He looked like a kid in a candy shop. “It’s nice,” I replied, looking around the cab. There were lots of gauges. Lots of controls. I wanted to crawl into the back and see what the sleeping quarters were like, and whether there was a TV. Or a Jacuzzi. “Want to take it for a spin?” Tim asked. I wanted to appear capable, strong, prepared for anything. “Sure!” I responded, shrugging my shoulders. I got ready to take the wheel. Marlboro Man chuckled, and Tim remained in his seat, saying, “Oh, maybe you’d better not. You might break a fingernail.” I looked down at my fresh manicure. It was nice of him to notice. “Plus,” he continued, “I don’t think you’d be able to shift gears.” Was he making fun of me? My armpits were drenched. Thank God I’d work black that night. After ten more minutes of slightly uncomfortable small talk, Marlboro Man saved my by announcing, “Well, I think we’ll head out, Slim.” “Okay, Slim,” Tim replied. “Nice meeting you, Ree.” He flashed his nice, familiar smile. He was definitely cute. He was definitely Marlboro Man’s brother. But he was nothing like the real thing.

A Tale of Two Parking Requirements The impact of parking requirements becomes clearer when we compare the parking requirements of San Francisco and Los Angeles. San Francisco limits off-street parking, while LA requires it. Take, for example, the different parking requirements for concert halls. For a downtown concert hall, Los Angeles requires, as a minimum, fifty times more parking than San Francisco allows as its maximum. Thus the San Francisco Symphony built its home, Louise Davies Hall, without a parking garage, while Disney Hall, the new home of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, did not open until seven years after its parking garage was built. Disney Hall's six-level, 2,188-space underground garage cost $110 million to build (about $50,000 per space). Financially troubled Los Angeles County, which built the garage, went into debt to finance it, expecting that parking revenues would repay the borrowed money. But the garage was completed in 1996, and Disney Hall—which suffered from a budget less grand than its vision—became knotted in delays and didn't open until late 2003. During the seven years in between, parking revenue fell far short of debt payments (few people park in an underground structure if there is nothing above it) and the county, by that point nearly bankrupt, had to subsidize the garage even as it laid employees off. The money spent on parking shifted Disney Hall's design toward drivers and away from pedestrians. The presence of a six-story subterranean garage means most concert patrons arrive from underneath the hall, rather than from the sidewalk. The hall's designers clearly understood this, and so while the hall has a fairly impressive street entrance, its more magisterial gateway is an "escalator cascade" that flows up from the parking structure and ends in the foyer. This has profound implications for street life. A concertgoer can now drive to Disney Hall, park beneath it, ride up into it, see a show, and then reverse the whole process—and never set foot on a sidewalk in downtown LA. The full experience of an iconic Los Angeles building begins and ends in its parking garage, not in the city itself. Visitors to downtown San Francisco have a different experience. When a concert or theater performance lets out in San Francisco, people stream onto the sidewalks, strolling past the restaurants, bars, bookstores, and flower shops that are open and well-lit. For those who have driven, it is a long walk to the car, which is probably in a public facility unattached to any specific restaurant or shop. The presence of open shops and people on the street encourages other people to be out as well. People want to be on streets with other people on them, and they avoid streets that are empty, because empty streets are eerie and menacing at night. Although the absence of parking requirements does not guarantee a vibrant area, their presence certainly inhibits it. "The more downtown is broken up and interspersed with parking lots and garages," Jane Jacobs argued in 1961, "the duller and deader it becomes ... and there is nothing more repellent than a dead downtown.

Permanent Revolution THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION OPENED up new ways to convert energy and to produce goods, largely liberating humankind from its dependence on the surrounding ecosystem. Humans cut down forests, drained swamps, dammed rivers, flooded plains, laid down hundreds of thousands of miles of railroad tracks, and built skyscraping metropolises. As the world was moulded to fit the needs of Homo sapiens, habitats were destroyed and species went extinct. Our once green and blue planet is becoming a concrete and plastic shopping centre. Today, the earth’s continents are home to billions of Sapiens. If you took all these people and put them on a large set of scales, their combined mass would be about 300 million tons. If you then took all our domesticated farmyard animals – cows, pigs, sheep and chickens – and placed them on an even larger set of scales, their mass would amount to about 700 million tons. In contrast, the combined mass of all surviving large wild animals – from porcupines and penguins to elephants and whales – is less than 100 million tons. Our children’s books, our iconography and our TV screens are still full of giraffes, wolves and chimpanzees, but the real world has very few of them left. There are about 80,000 giraffes in the world, compared to 1.5 billion cattle; only 200,000 wolves, compared to 400 million domesticated dogs; only 250,000 chimpanzees – in contrast to billions of humans. Humankind really has taken over the world.1 Ecological degradation is not the same as resource scarcity. As we saw in the previous chapter, the resources available to humankind are constantly increasing, and are likely to continue to do so. That’s why doomsday prophesies of resource scarcity are probably misplaced. In contrast, the fear of ecological degradation is only too well founded. The future may see Sapiens gaining control of a cornucopia of new materials and energy sources, while simultaneously destroying what remains of the natural habitat and driving most other species to extinction. In fact, ecological turmoil might endanger the survival of Homo sapiens itself. Global warming, rising oceans and widespread pollution could make the earth less hospitable to our kind, and the future might consequently see a spiralling race between human power and human-induced natural disasters. As humans use their power to counter the forces of nature and subjugate the ecosystem to their needs and whims, they might cause more and more unanticipated and dangerous side effects. These are likely to be controllable only by even more drastic manipulations of the ecosystem, which would result in even worse chaos. Many call this process ‘the destruction of nature’. But it’s not really destruction, it’s change. Nature cannot be destroyed. Sixty-five million years ago, an asteroid wiped out the dinosaurs, but in so doing opened the way forward for mammals. Today, humankind is driving many species into extinction and might even annihilate itself. But other organisms are doing quite well. Rats and cockroaches, for example, are in their heyday. These tenacious creatures would probably creep out from beneath the smoking rubble of a nuclear Armageddon, ready and able to spread their DNA. Perhaps 65 million years from now, intelligent rats will look back gratefully on the decimation wrought by humankind, just as we today can thank that dinosaur-busting asteroid. Still, the rumours of our own extinction are premature. Since the Industrial Revolution, the world’s human population has burgeoned as never before. In 1700 the world was home to some 700 million humans. In 1800 there were 950 million of us. By 1900 we almost doubled our numbers to 1.6 billion. And by 2000 that quadrupled to 6 billion. Today there are just shy of 7 billion Sapiens.

Robert Askins Brings ‘Hand to God’ to Broadway Chad Batka for The New York Times Robert Askins at the Booth Theater, where his play “Hand to God” opens on Tuesday. By MICHAEL PAULSON The conceit is zany: In a church basement, a group of adolescents gathers (mostly at the insistence of their parents) to make puppets that will spread the Christian message, but one of the puppets turns out to be more demonic than divine. The result — a dark comedy with the can-puppets-really-do-that raunchiness of “Avenue Q” and can-people-really-say-that outrageousness of “The Book of Mormon” — is “Hand to God,” a new play that is among the more improbable entrants in the packed competition for Broadway audiences over the next few weeks. Given the irreverence of some of the material — at one point stuffed animals are mutilated in ways that replicate the torments of Catholic martyrs — it is perhaps not a surprise to discover that the play’s author, Robert Askins, was nicknamed “Dirty Rob” as an undergraduate at Baylor, a Baptist-affiliated university where the sexual explicitness and violence of his early scripts raised eyebrows. But Mr. Askins had also been a lone male soloist in the children’s choir at St. John Lutheran of Cypress, Tex. — a child who discovered early that singing was a way to make the stern church ladies smile. His earliest performances were in a deeply religious world, and his writings since then have been a complex reaction to that upbringing. “It’s kind of frustrating in life to be like, ‘I’m a playwright,’ and watch people’s face fall, because they associate plays with phenomenally dull, didactic, poetic grad-schoolery, where everything takes too long and tediously explores the beauty in ourselves,” he said in a recent interview. “It’s not church, even though it feels like church a lot when we go these days.” The journey to Broadway, where “Hand to God” opens on Tuesday at the Booth Theater, still seems unlikely to Mr. Askins, 34, who works as a bartender in Brooklyn and says he can’t afford to see Broadway shows, despite his newfound prominence. He seems simultaneously enthralled by and contemptuous of contemporary theater, the world in which he has chosen to make his life; during a walk from the Cobble Hill coffee shop where he sometimes writes to the Park Slope restaurant where he tends bar, he quoted Nietzsche and Derrida, described himself as “deeply weird,” and swore like, well, a satanic sock-puppet. “If there were no laughs in the show, I’d think there was something wrong with him,” said the actor Steven Boyer, who won raves in earlier “Hand to God” productions as Jason, a grief-stricken adolescent with a meek demeanor and an angry-puppet pal. “But anybody who is able to write about such serious stuff and be as hilarious as it is, I’m not worried about their mental health.” Mr. Askins’s interest in the performing arts began when he was a boy attending rural Texas churches affiliated with the conservative Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod denomination; he recalls the worshipers as “deeply conservative, old farm folks, stone-faced, pride and suffering, and the only time anybody ever really livened up was when the children’s choir would perform.” “My grandmother had a cross-stitch that said, ‘God respects me when I work, but he loves me when I sing,’ and so I got into that,” he said. “For somebody who enjoys performance, that was the way in.” The church also had a puppet ministry — an effort to teach children about the Bible by use of puppets — and when Mr. Askins’s mother, a nurse, began running the program, he enlisted to help. He would perform shows for other children at preschools and vacation Bible camps. “The shows are wacky, but it was fun,” he said. “They’re badly written attempts to bring children to Jesus.” Not all of his formative encounters with puppets were positive. Particularly scarring: D

Before long, the news spread, and a great many people began to climb the hill to see the shop that was doing something new in a trade that was so old. Other shops were opened that served tea in crystal, but they weren’t at the top of a hill, and they had little business.

Companies don't want anyone telling them how to deal with their workers  -- they never have; they never will. Stores don't want anyone telling them how to design their entrances; how many steps they can have (or can't have); how heavy their doors can be. Yet they accept their city's building and fire codes, dictating to them how many people they can have in their restaurants, based on square footage, so that the place will not be a fire hazard. They accept that the city can inspect their electrical wiring to ensure that it "meets code" before they open for business. Yet they chafe if an individual wants an accommodation. Because, it seems, it is seen as "special for the handicapped," most of whom likely don't deserve it. Accommodation is fought doubly hard when it is seen to be a way of letting "the disabled" have a part of what we believe is for "normal" people. Although no access code, anywhere, requires them, automatic doors remain the one thing, besides flat or ramped entrances, that one hears about most from people with mobility problems: they need automatic doors as well as flat entrances. Yet no code, anywhere, includes them; mandating them would be "going too far"; giving the disabled more than they have a right to. A ramp is OK. An automatic door? That isn't reasonable. At least that's what the building lobby says. Few disability rights groups, anywhere, have tried to push for that accommodation. Some wheelchair activists are now pressing for "basic, minimal access" in all new single-family housing, so, they say, they can visit friends and attend gatherings in others' homes. This means at least one flat entrance and a bathroom they can get into. De-medicalization No large grocery or hotel firm, no home-and-garden discount supply center would consider designing an entrance that did not include automatic doors. They are standard in hotels and discount warehouses. Not, of course, for the people who literally can not open doors by themselves  -- for such people are "the disabled": them, not us. Firms that operate hotels, groceries and building supply stores fight regulations that require they accommodate "the disabled." Automatic doors that go in uncomplainingly are meant for us, the fit, the nondisabled, to ensure that we will continue to shop at the grocery or building supply center; to make it easy for us to get our grocery carts out, our lumber dollies to our truck loaded with Sheetrock for the weekend project. So the bellhops can get the luggage in and out of the hotel easily. When it is for "them," it is resisted; when it is for "us," however, it is seen as a design improvement. Same item; different purpose

So here’s to love and loving your portable handheld telecommunication device. Stay inside where it’s temperature-controlled and there are no bugs and spend some time celebrating your beloved today. Make a delicious homemade casserole (look up the recipe on your phone), dip out to pick up a fancy bottle of wine (request a Lyft from your phone), sit next to a cozy fire (YouTube a fireplace video on your phone), sing along to your favorite jams (find it on Spotify on your phone), listen to your favorite book (open Audible on your phone), watch some cheesy movies (did you know you can get Netflix on your phone?!), send an update to the family members you haven’t seen in a while (use e-mail from your phone), order some Indian takeout (Grubhub dot com on your phone), text your homegirl some juicy gossip from your phone, and since you’re playing around on it anyway, why not do a little shopping on your phone? Is it holiday time? If so, maybe you could stop being a huge grinch for a change and just buy everyone in your circle the one thing we’ve been conditioned to constantly want: A NEW PHONE.

Former pastry chef Sam Mason opened Oddfellows in Williamsburg with two business partners in 2013 and has since developed upwards of two hundred ice cream flavors. Many aren't for the faint of heart: chorizo caramel swirl, prosciutto mellon, and butter, to name a few. Good thing there are saner options in the mix like peanut butter & jelly, s'mores, and English toffee. A retro scoop shop off Bowery, Morgenstern's Finest Ice Cream has been bringing fanciful flavors to mature palettes since opening in 2014. Creator Nicholas Morgenstern, who hails from the restaurant world, makes small batches of elevated offerings such as strawberry pistachio pesto, lemon espresso, and Vietnamese coffee. Ice & Vice hails from the Brooklyn Night Bazaar in Greenpoint, and owners Paul Kim and Ken Lo brought it to the Lower East Side in 2015. Another shop devoted to quality small batches, along with weird and wacky flavors, you'll find innovations like Farmer Boy, black currant ice cream with goat milk and buckwheat streusel, and Movie Night, buttered popcorn-flavored ice cream with toasted raisins and chocolate chips.

Shake Shack- The now multinational, publicly traded fast-food chain was inspired by the roadside burger stands from Danny's youth in the Midwest and serves burgers, dogs, and concretes- frozen custard blended with mix-ins, including Mast Brothers chocolate and Four & Twenty Blackbirds pie, depending on the location. Blue Smoke- Another nod to Danny's upbringing in the Midwest, this Murray Hill barbecue joint features all manner of pit from chargrilled oysters to fried chicken to seven-pepper brisket, along with a jazz club in the basement. Maialino- This warm and rustic Roman-style trattoria with its garganelli and braised rabbit and suckling pig with rosemary potatoes is the antidote to the fancy-pants Gramercy Park Hotel, in which it resides. Untitled- When the Whitney Museum moved from the Upper East Side to the Meatpacking District, the in-house coffee shop was reincarnated as a fine dining restaurant, with none other than Chef Michael Anthony running the kitchen, serving the likes of duck liver paté, parsnip and potato chowder, and a triple chocolate chunk cookie served with a shot of milk. Union Square Café- As of late 2016, this New York classic has a new home on Park Avenue South. But it has the same style, soul, and classic menu- Anson Mills polenta, ricotta gnocchi, New York strip steak- as it first did when Danny opened the restaurant back in 1985. The Modern- Overlooking the Miró, Matisse, and Picasso sculptures in MoMA's Sculpture Garden, the dishes here are appropriately refined and artistic. Think cauliflower roasted in crab butter, sautéed foie gras, and crispy Long Island duck.

The sale of defensive items reached record heights; gun shop owners found people in line when they opened their stores; locksmiths were so busy putting in new locks and bars that they were working almost twenty-four hours a day; there was such a run on guard and attack dogs that animals from other states had to be brought in to fill the demand.

You may feel sexual energy moving through your entire body in waves during meditation (or at any time— even unprovoked), filling in and activating the lower energy centers with desire. And since imagination is in you all the time and is part of who you are, for reasons other than having sex, you should harness it. There's a big difference between having an "erotic life" and having a "sex life." Having sex or an orgasm isn't even half of what erotic energy means to be energized. It can potentially decrease the energy released by sexual activity. When you don't use orgasm to disburse sexual energy, it builds up and eventually transforms into creative expression and makes you do something you may not have had the ability or boldness to do before. The trick is to harness the emotion instead of allowing it to control your actions or turn you into a slave to your sex drive. I do not suggest you repress or resist sexual urges— that action is fear-based or guilt-driven, which serves no other useful purpose than to cause frustration that slows spiritual advancement. Instead, channel your strength and infuse it into all you do. Your mission to work and life can be inspired, and your family and friendships can be positively influenced as you interact from a love-filled heart that is activated by sexual energy. It can bring bliss, creativity, and joy from grocery shopping to writing a blog post, as it invites you to enjoy the present moment. It's like being drunk or drugged under the influence of sexual energy; it can inspire you to take risks and do things you wouldn't otherwise do. It can lessen the fear that you might feel in a business venture or some other opportunity to take the next step. Before you can channel strong sexual energy to other beneficial pursuits, the energy in your personal space and body must be able to hold and flow in. This can be done as you connect in the present moment to your sacred heart center, without being distracted by the mind's constant chatter. When you feel sexual energy stirring inside you, stay in an awareness space, and feel it as it flows through your body. Note how it pulsates, and give you a sense of strength. Contain it simply and enable it to revitalize and heal the body, lift depression, open blockages, dissolve sexual hang-ups, and spark new ideas. As you hold this powerful presence, you can start by using thought or intention to direct the energy toward some creative endeavor. Ultimately the energy is inside you and can be activated without another person's influence. Yet tantric exploration, practicing heart connection, or sending / receiving energy with another person can increase this energy flow even more and bring euphoric pleasure to the whole body and emotions.

The fact that we incorporate material objects into our sense of self opens new doors for understanding our relationship with money and the things we own. When I first learned about the possession–self link, it immediately helped me to see why we can so easily attach our personal value to our material success. It also helped me understand why shopping can feel so comforting, especially after a rejection or a loss. This simple concept can illuminate many of the underlying motivations we have for our financial behaviors, and I encourage you to think about how your possessions, especially those that most represent the parts of yourself you care about, are actually extensions of your identity. How do your personal items like your home, car, clothes, hobby gear, pictures, electronics, and your thousands of other things reflect who you are?

SHOPPING TIPS Most of the fakery surrounding the King of Cheese has to do with the misleading use of “Parmesan,” not Parmigiano-Reggiano, so when you see the full Italian name and it says “Made in Italy” and has the PDO seal, it is usually the real deal. The same is true of Prosciutto di Parma. However, the cheese is made in very large wheels that begin to deteriorate once cut, so it is important to buy from retailers with a lot of volume turnover who are constantly opening new wheels and storing it right. More than many other cheeses, it’s usually better to buy from a specialty cheese shop like Murray’s in New York—most cities have these. If you go mail order/online, you cannot beat Zingerman’s in Ann Arbor, Michigan, which buys whole wheels directly from

only heard that bark twice. The first time when he’d found them in the old surf shop, and the second when Ian had fallen on his hurt leg outside the bakery. Scott had been walking past with Casper and Casper had run towards Ian and barked. It could only mean one thing. Opening her

In the shop window you have promptly identified the cover with the title you were looking for. Following this visual trail, you have forced your way through the shop past the thick barricade of Books You Haven't Read, which were frowning at you from the tables and shelves, trying to cow you. But you know you must never allow yourself to be awed, that among them there extend for acres and acres the Books You Needn't Read, the Books Made For Purposes Other Than Reading, Books Read Even Before You Open Them Since They Belong To The Category Of Books Read Before Being Written. And thus you pass the outer girdle of ramparts, but then you are attacked by the infantry of the Books That If You Had More Than One Life You Would Certainly Also Read But Unfortunately Your Days Are Numbered. With a rapid maneuver you bypass them and move into the phalanxes of the Books You Mean To Read But There Are Others You Must Read First, the Books Too Expensive Now And You'll Wait Till They're Remaindered, the Books ditto When They Come Out In Paperback, Books You Can Borrow From Somebody, Books That Everybody's Read So It's As If You Had Read Them, Too. Eluding these assaults, you come up beneath the towers of the fortress, where other troops are holding out: the Books Dealing With Something You're Working On At The Moment, the Books You Want To Own So They'll Be Handy Just In Case, the Books You Could Put Aside Maybe To Read This Summer, the Books You Need To Go With Other Books On Your Shelves, the Books That Fill You With Sudden, Inexplicable Curiosity, Not Easily Justified. Now you have been able to reduce the countless embattled troops to an array that is, to be sure, very large but still calculable in a finite number; but this relative relief is then undermined by the ambush of the Books Read Long Ago Which It's Now Time To Reread and the Books You've Always Pretended To Have Read And Now It's Time To Sit Down And Really Read Them. With a zigzag and a dash you shake them off and leap straight into the citadel of the New Books Whose Author or Subject Appeals To You. Even inside this stronghold you can make some breaches in the ranks of the defenders, dividing them into New (for you in general) and New Books By Authors Or On Subjects Completely Unknown (at least to you), and defining the attraction they have for you on the basis of your desires and needs for the new and the not new (for the new you seek in the not new and for the not new you seek in the new). All this means that, having rapidly glanced over the titles of the volumes displayed in the bookshop, you turn toward a stack of If on a winter’s night a traveler fresh off the press, you have grasped a copy, and you have carried it to the cashier so that your right to own it can be established. You cast another bewildered look at the books around you (or, rather: it was the books that looked at you, with the bewildered gaze of dogs who, from their cages in the city pound, see a former companion go off on the leash of his master, come to rescue him), and out you went. You derive a special pleasure from a just-published book, and it isn’t only a book you are taking with you but the novelty as well, which could also merely be that of an object fresh from the factory, the youthful bloom of new books, which lasts until the dust jacket begins to yellow, until a veil of smog settles on the top edge, until the bindings become dog-eared, in the rapid autumn of libraries. No, you hope always to encounter true newness, which having been new once, will continue to be so. Having read the freshly published book, you will take possession of this newness at the first moment, without having to pursue, to chase it. Will it happen this time? You can never tell. Let’s see how it begins.

On the day the hulk was towed away from Asbury Park, George White Rogers opened a radio-repair shop in Bayonne, New Jersey. It was the first time he had worked in some months. Customers found Rogers a bombastic shopkeeper, fond of telling them how lucky they were to have their radio sets mended by him. His business dropped off. One day in February 1935, Rogers left the shop “to get a breath of air.” Shortly afterward it caught fire. Bayonne police files reveal: “An inventory made by Rogers disclosed equipment had suffered damage to the extent of $1200. Arson was suspected. But no proof existed to warrant an arrest. He collected from the insurance company.

said to expect such thoughts when I returned home, and that those thoughts would fade with time. I sure hoped she was right. I still had a shock every time I looked in the mirror, a pleasant shock mind you, but nevertheless a shock. Even though my life had immeasurably changed for the better, I was still having trouble coming to terms with the change itself. I had been told time and time again that this was normal, but that didn’t make it any easier to experience. I suppose I had been depressed before the accident. I looked around my cottage, surprised that this had been my taste. The curtains were hideous, and everything was dark. I suppose I had been trying to hide away from the world. Still, my job wouldn’t have helped. I had been the marketing manager for a local small art gallery. The boss had been a screaming banshee, and that was a polite description for her. She had been impossible to deal with and had a regular staff turnover. I had been there years longer than any other employee. Looking back, I wondered how I had taken her verbal abuse and yelling for years, but I suppose I had been used to being bullied since school. I shook myself. That was all behind me now, and my only connection with that was a desire to work in some way to help people who had been bullied. There was altogether way too much bullying in the world. Now I had enough money to buy a nice place, but first things first. I was going to concentrate on starting my business. I would simply buy some bright new cushions to make the place look a little better and make sure all the curtains were open. I’d buy some nice smelling incense and an oil burner, and burn lavender oil. I was craving nice fragrances, after being accustomed to the antiseptic smell of the hospital, a smell I am sure I will never forget.

That trifecta—humanities, technology, business—is what has made him one of our era’s most successful and influential innovators. Like Steve Jobs, Bezos has transformed multiple industries. Amazon, the world’s largest online retailer, has changed how we shop and what we expect of shipping and deliveries. More than half of US households are members of Amazon Prime, and Amazon delivered ten billion packages in 2018, which is two billion more than the number of people on this planet. Amazon Web Services (AWS) provides cloud computing services and applications that enable start-ups and established companies to easily create new products and services, just as the iPhone App Store opened whole new pathways for business. Amazon’s Echo has created a new market for smart home speakers, and Amazon Studios is making hit TV shows and movies. Amazon is also poised to disrupt the health and pharmacy industries. At first its purchase of the Whole Foods Market chain was confounding, until it became apparent that the move could be a brilliant way to tie together the strands of a new Bezos business model, which involves retailing, online ordering, and superfast delivery, combined with physical outposts. Bezos is also building a private space company with the long-term goal of moving heavy industry to space, and he has become the owner of the Washington Post.

Moshe had few friends. Most of Pottstown’s Jews had left Chicken Hill by then. Nate was a friend, but he was a Negro, so there was that space between them. But with Malachi, there was no space. They were fellow escapees who, having endured the landing at Ellis Island and escaped the grinding sweatshops and vicious crime of the vermin-infested Lower East Side, had arrived by hook or crook in the land of opportunity that was Pennsylvania, home to Quakers, Mormons, and Presbyterians. Who cared that life was lonely, that jobs were thankless drudgery, that the romance of the proud American state was myth, that the rules of life were laid carefully in neat books and laws written by stern Europeans who stalked the town and state like the grim reaper, with their righteous churches spouting that Jews murdered their precious Jesus Christ? Their fellow Pennsylvanians knew nothing about the shattered shtetls and destroyed synagogues of the old country; they had not set eyes on the stunned elderly immigrants starving in tenements in New York, the old ones who came alone, who spoke Yiddish only, whose children died or left them to live in charity homes, the women frightened until the end, the men consigned to a life of selling vegetables and fruits on horse-drawn carts. They were a lost nation spread across the American countryside, bewildered, their yeshiva education useless, their proud history ignored, as the clankety-clank of American industry churned around them, their proud past as watchmakers and tailors, scholars and historians, musicians and artists, gone, wasted. Americans cared about money. And power. And government. Jews had none of those things; their job was to tread lightly in the land of milk and honey and be thankful that they were free to walk the land without getting their duffs kicked—or worse. Life in America was hard, but it was free, and if you worked hard, you might gain some opportunity, maybe even open a shop or business of some kind.

Sesame oil, soy sauce and ginger may already be on your shopping list and mainstream supermarkets are now stocking Chinese brown rice vinegar and cooking wine; just add Sichuanese chilli bean paste and fermented black beans and you will open up whole new dimensions of taste.

Steve, meet Zach and Owen. They are two friends that recently moved here,” said the mayor. “Hello,” I said to the new villagers. We exchanged greetings. “They got an interesting idea for a business,” explained the mayor. “I think you’ll like it.” “Oh? What is it?” “We’d like to open up a pet shop business,” said Zach.

Mika laughed. “That sounds like my kind of place.” “Exactly.” His voice was more serious now, and she glanced sideways at him, confused and curious about where this was going. “Someone in that town loves flowers the way you love magic. They went all in, and you should, too. You should open that enchanted tea and potion shop.” “It just isn’t possible,” Mika objected. “I don’t know of a single place in the world where I could do that.” Perfectly on cue, the car turned in at a pair of iron gates. The storm had blown over and the air had that wonderful, earthy scent of wet grass and new possibilities. The low, golden sun gleamed over the gables and chimneys of Nowhere House. A sense of complete rightness filled Mika. “It’s not always enough to go looking for the place we belong,” Jamie said, his eyes on the house ahead. “Sometimes we need to make that place.

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I don’t know,’ Jack whispered, before kneeling beside a young woman, her blonde locks matted with dried blood. He could see that she had been shot in the side of her head, the back of her skull blown open by the bullet. ‘Their hands are tied,’ Jack said, as he looked down and saw that the woman’s arms had been bound behind her back with a length of rope. ‘They’ve been executed,’ Reg said, his face white as he looked at the bodies that had been laid out neatly on the floor. ‘A whole bloody family lined up and...’ He shook his head. A cry echoed from the street and Jack turned to where a window overlooked the road. He looked outside and saw a soldier stood in a doorway, the man waving his arm as he called out to where Fred was stood beside a shop. ‘What’s going on?’ the sergeant asked. ‘You’d best come and have a look,’ the man replied. Jack glanced down the street, his eyes staring at the deserted houses that lined the road. He felt a cold chill creep up his spine as he looked at the empty windows from which no lights shone. ‘Wait here,’ Jack said, before making his way out onto the road. He turned as a door swung open, his hand reaching for his rifle, before relaxing as Little stepped out onto the pavement, the corporal’s face a mask of wild anger. ‘The fucking pigs,’ he cursed, before kicking the wall in frustration. ‘Wait until I get my hands on ‘em.’ Jack glanced into the house that Little had searched, his throat catching as he saw the body of a woman on the floor. Beside her a baby lay on the hearth, the child motionless as it lay wrapped in a blanket. ‘The fucking animals,’ Little hissed, as he looked at the deserted houses. ‘Who could do such a thing?’ Ivor asked, his cheeks ashen as he stepped from the house. Jack shook his head, his eyes staring along the road as the men searched the buildings; the cry of alarm echoing along the street. ‘A whole bloody village.’ Jack turned and saw Fred pacing along the road, the battle hardened sergeant shaking his head in confusion as he looked at the houses as if unable to understand what he had seen. ‘What are we going to do?’ Jack asked. ‘Do?’ Little asked, his face possessed with rage. ‘I’m going to kill every fucking one of the evil bastards I can get my hands on.’ The men murmured in agreement, their eyes dark with anger. Jack stood in the street and watched as the first light of a new day shone above the rooftops, the sun casting a gentle warmth over the dead village as the men prepared to move once more.

Attend a university if you possibly can. There is no content of knowledge that is not pertinent to the work you will want to do. But before you attend a university work at something for a while. Do anything. Get a job in a potato field; or work as a grease-monkey in an auto repair shop. But if you do work in a field do not fail to observe the look and the feel of earth and of all things that you handle — yes, even potatoes! Or, in the auto shop, the smell of oil and grease and burning rubber. Paint of course, but if you have to lay aside painting for a time, continue to draw. Listen well to all conversations and be instructed by them and take all seriousness seriously. Never look down upon anything or anyone as not worthy of notice. In college or out of college, read. And form opinions! Read Sophocles and Euripides and Dante and Proust. Read everything that you can find about art except the reviews. Read the Bible; read Hume; read Pogo. Read all kinds of poetry and know many poets and many artists. Go to and art school, or two, or three, or take art courses at night if necessary. And paint and paint and draw and draw. Know all that you can, both curricular and noncurricular — mathematics and physics and economics, logic and particularly history. Know at least two languages besides your own, but anyway, know French. Look at pictures and more pictures. Look at every kind of visual symbol, every kind of emblem; do not spurn signboards of furniture drawings of this style of art or that style of art. Do not be afraid to like paintings honestly or to dislike them honestly, but if you do dislike them retain an open mind. Do not dismiss any school of art, not the Pre-Raphaelites nor the Hudson River School nor the German Genre painters. Talk and talk and sit at cafés, and listen to everything, to Brahms, to Brubeck, to the Italian hour on the radio. Listen to preachers in small town churches and in big city churches. Listen to politicians in New England town meetings and to rabble-rousers in Alabama. Even draw them. And remember that you are trying to learn to think what you want to think, that you are trying to co-ordinate mind and hand and eye. Go to all sorts of museums and galleries and to the studios of artists. Go to Paris and Madrid and Rome and Ravenna and Padua. Stand alone in Sainte Chapelle, in the Sistine Chapel, in the Church of the Carmine in Florence. Draw and draw and paint and learn to work in many media; try lithography and aquatint and silk-screen. Know all that you can about art, and by all means have opinions. Never be afraid to become embroiled in art of life or politics; never be afraid to learn to draw or paint better than you already do; and never be afraid to undertake any kind of art at all, however exalted or however common, but do it with distinction.

Many thrifts layered a billion dollars of brand-new loans on top of their existing, disastrous hundred million dollars of old loss-making loans, in a hope that the new would offset the old. Each new purchase of mortgage bonds (which was identical to making a loan) was like the last act of a desperate man. The strategy was wildly irresponsible, for the fundamental problem (borrowing short term and lending long term) hadn’t been remedied. The hypergrowth only meant that the next thrift crisis would be larger. But the thrift managers were not thinking that far in advance. They were simply trying to keep the door to the shop open. That explains why thrifts continued to buy mortgage bonds even as they sold their loans.

Her eyes flashed up at him, then back down at the box. She opened it eagerly. Inside lay the cameo necklace he had seen the new housemaid pawn at a shop in Weavering Street. “You bought it back for me,” she breathed, eyes shining. “You have no idea what this means—it was a gift from my father.” He nodded. “There is more.” She looked inside the box again. Under the cameo lay a piece of thick paper. She extracted it and handed him the box to hold. She turned the paper over, revealing the small watercolor of Lime Tree Lodge. Her brow puckered. “Thank you, but you might have kept it. I wouldn’t have minded.” He tucked his chin as though offended, and insisted, “I spent a great deal of money on it.” “On this?” She raised her fair brows, incredulous. “Not on the painting. On Lime Tree Lodge itself.” She stared at him, stunned. “You didn’t . . .” “I did.” “But . . . my solicitor told me some vicar was very keen on buying it.” “He was. But I was keener.” “How did you . . . Forgive me, but I know you needed every shilling for Fairbourne Hall and to repair your ship.” “True.” “Then, how?” “I sold my ship. The damage did not lower its value as much as I had feared, and it brought a good price. Besides, I have no need of it any longer.

The U.S. Treasury Department has issued at least four licenses to companies that want to establish ferry service to Cuba from Key West, Miami, Fort Lauderdale and Tampa. Baleària, a Spanish company, presently owns the Baleària Bahamas Express ferry service from Fort Lauderdale to Freeport, Grand Bahamas, and is now considering a ferry to operate between Florida and Cuba. United Caribbean and Havana Partners have expressed an interest in a service from Tampa to Havana and Mexico. Baja Ferries USA wants to open routes between the Port of Miami and Port Everglades to Cuba. Some of the ferries will offer duty-free shopping, restaurants, bars and even swimming pools. The details regarding feasibility depends on government restrictions and tariffs placed on them by the countries, as well as the ports involved. Tampa would be a straight run 331 miles due south, but some of the other ports would be closer. In the end it will come down to money, availability of cargo and logistics. As of the summer of 2016, perspective ferry operators are awaiting final approval and licensing from the Cuban government. Because of this the ferry companies are on hold and are still waiting to begin operations. Tampa and The Port of Tampa have expressed their enthusiasm to become fully involved in these new ventures. Bob Rohrlack, President of the Greater Tampa Chamber of Commerce, has been to Cuba several times, taking corporate delegates in preparation for improved, open relations with Cuba.

In 1863, as Havana continued to grow, the need for expansion prompted the removal of the city walls. The Ten Years’ War ended with a cease fire from Spain. However, it was followed by the Cuban War of Independence, which lasted from 1895 until 1898 and prompted intervention by the United States. The American occupation of Cuba lasted until 1902. After Cuban Independence came into being, another period of expansion in Havana followed, leading to the construction of beautiful apartment buildings for the new middle class and mansions for the wealthy. During the 1920’s, Cuba developed the largest middle class per total population in all of Latin America, necessitating additional accommodations and amenities in the capital city. As ships and airplanes provided reliable transportation, visitors saw Havana as a refuge from the colder cities in the North. To accommodate the tourists, luxury hotels, including the Hotel Nacional and the Habana Riviera, were built. In the 1950’s gambling and prostitution became widespread and the city became the new playground of the Americas, bringing in more income than Las Vegas. Now that Cuba senses an end to the embargo and hopes to cultivate a new relationship with the United States, construction in Havana has taken on a new sense of urgency. Expecting that Havana will once again become a tourist destination, the French construction group “Bouygues” is busy building Havana's newest luxury hotel. This past June Starwood’s mid-market Four Points Havana, became the first U.S. hotel, owned by Marriott, to open in Cuba. The historic Manzana de Gómez building which was once Cuba's first European-style shopping arcade has now been transformed into the Swiss based Manzana Kempinski, Gran Hotel, La Habana. It has now become Cuba's first new 5-Star Hotel! Spanish resort hotels dot the beaches east of Havana and China is expected to build 108,000 new hotel rooms for the largest tourist facility in the Caribbean. On the other end of the spectrum is the 14 room Hotel Terral whch has a prime spot on the Malecón.

There are those along the Main Line who look upon Will Atherson as a violator of his inheritance, an opinion that is largely accounted for by the building that he had caused to be erected to house the Freeholders Bank & Trust Company of which, by right of primogeniture as well as ability, he was president. On a street where every door looks as if it might open at any moment to disgorge some bewigged and gaitered contemporary of Old Ben himself, the Freeholders Building is indeed incongruous to the scene. Designed by a disciple of Frank Lloyd Wright, it was judged by one of the architectural magazines to be an outstanding example of “the best in unfettered contemporary design, free of any taint of traditionalism, radical in concept, daring in execution.” That, in 1940, it most certainly was. The later influx of countless chain shops and supermarkets, all designed in the apparent belief that glass is the only proper building material, has made the Freeholders Building seem less unfettered, daring and radical, but it still raises doubts in certain quarters about Will Atherson. The more generous Old Philadelphians excuse the building as one of the lapses of which even a gentleman may be guilty—there was a “folly” of one sort or another in most of their families—but the other school of thought holds that a gentleman’s folly must, like an affair with a woman, be carried on in privacy and with discretion. Will Atherson’s folly was unpleasantly public. Although none of his old customers went so far as to stop doing business with the bank, most of them still cringed at the necessity of transacting their financial affairs with no more privacy than a fish in a bowl. That sort of thing was accepted in New York, of course, but this was Philadelphia.

But what were even gold and silver, precious stones and clockwork, to the bookshops, whence a pleasant smell of paper freshly pressed came issuing forth, awakening instant recollections of some new grammar had at school, long time ago, with ‘Master Pinch, Grove House Academy’, inscribed in faultless writing on the fly-leaf! That whiff of russia leather, too, and all those rows on rows of volumes, neatly ranged within – what happiness did they suggest! And in the window were the spick-and-span new works from London, with the title-pages, and sometimes even the first page of the first chapter, laid wide open: tempting unwary men to begin to read the book, and then, in the impossibility of turning over, to rush blindly in, and buy it! Here too were the dainty frontispiece and trim vignette, pointing like hand-posts on the outskirts of great cities to the rich stock of incident beyond; and store of books, with many a grave portrait and time-honoured name, whose matter he knew well, and would have given mines to have, in any form, upon the narrow shelf beside his bed … What a heart-breaking shop it was!

While I realize that there are a lot of different angles on this, I’m going to set all of these speculations aside for now and try focusing entirely on trends in fantasy from the perspective of tabletop gaming alone. The first thing you need to know is that the men who laid the groundwork for the role-playing hobby had an incredible appetite for books. You may have been in a comic book shop on a Wednesday when the new shipment came in and the most dedicated fans in your town are right there to get the latest installment of everything they’re into. Well, Gary Gygax and James M. Ward were like that with books: One fateful Tuesday, I was poring through the racks, picking up the newest Conan and Arthur C. Clarke novels. When I reached the end of the racks, I had seven books in my hand. There was a gentleman doing the very same thing beside me. When he got done, he and I had the exact same books in our hands. We laughed at the coincidence and he started talking about a game he had just invented where a person could play Conan fighting Set. I was instantly hooked on the idea. A few weeks later I was regularly going over to Gary Gygax’s house to learn the game of Dungeons & Dragons.1 Note that the main selling point of the game at its inception was that it was not merely an adaption of their favorite stories to game form. No, the “lightning in the bottle” that Gary Gygax had gotten hold of was, in fact, the apex of genre fiction.2 He was opening up an entirely new method for creating worlds and allowing people to enter them. We take it for granted today, but J. Eric Holmes was not exaggerating when he declared that it was a “truly unique invention, probably as remarkable as the die, or the deck of cards, or the chessboard.”3

I’m trying to modify my NYPD piggishness. I have not hit on one single—or married—female in the ATTF. I was actually getting a reputation as a man who was either devoted to duty, or was devoted to some off-scene girlfriend, or was gay, or who had a low libido, or who perhaps had been hit below the belt by one of those bullets. In any case, a whole new world was opening up to me now. Women in the office talked to me about their boyfriends and husbands, asked me if I liked their new hairstyles, and generally treated me in a gender-neutral manner. The girls haven’t yet asked me to go shopping with them or shared recipes with me, but maybe I’ll be invited to a baby shower. The old John Corey is dead, buried under a ton of politically correct memos from Washington. John Corey, NYPD Homicide, is history. Special Contract Agent John Corey, ATTF, has emerged. I feel clean, baptized in Potomac holy water, reborn and accepted into the ranks of the pure angelic hosts with whom I work.

Few records exist to establish a definitive date as to when the first ships were built in the Piscataqua region. Fishing vessels were probably constructed as early as 1623, when the first fishermen settled in the area. Many undoubtedly boasted a skilled shipwright who taught the fishermen how to build “great shallops”as well as lesser craft. In 1631 a man named Edward Godfrie directed the fisheries at Pannaway. His operation included six large shallops, five fishing boats, and thirteen skiffs, the shallops essentially open boats that included several pairs of oars, a mast, and lug sail, and which later sported enclosed decks.5 Records do survive of the very first ship built by English settlers in the New World. In 1607, at the mouth of the Kennebec River in Maine, the Plymouth Company erected a short-lived fishing settlement. A London shipwright named Digby organized some settlers to construct a small vessel with which to return them home to England, as they were homesick and disenchanted with the New England winters. The small craft was named, characteristically, the Virginia. She was evidently a two-master and weighed about thirty tons, and she transported furs, salted cod, and tobacco for twenty years between various ports along the Maine coast, Plymouth, Jamestown, and England. She is believed to have wrecked somewhere along the coast of Ireland.6 By the middle of the seventeenth century, shipbuilding was firmly established as an independent industry in New England. Maine, with its long coastline and abundant forests, eventually overtook even Massachusetts as the shipbuilding capital of North America. Its most western town, Kittery, hovered above the Piscataqua. For many years the towns of Kittery and Portsmouth, and upriver enclaves like Exeter, Newmarket, Durham, Dover, and South Berwick, rivaled Bath and Brunswick, Maine, as shipbuilding centers, with numerous shipyards, blacksmith shops, sawmills, and wharves. Portsmouth's deep harbor, proximity to upriver lumber, scarcity of fog, and seven feet of tide made it an ideal location for building large vessels. During colonial times, the master carpenters of England were so concerned about competition they eventually petitioned Parliament to discourage shipbuilding in Portsmouth.7 One of the early Piscataqua shipwrights was Robert Cutts, who used African American slaves to build fishing smacks at Crooked Lane in Kittery in the 1650s. Another was William Pepperell, who moved from the Isle of Shoals to Kittery in 1680, where he amassed a fortune in the shipbuilding, fishing, and lumber trades. John Bray built ships in front of the Pepperell mansion as early as 1660, and Samuel Winkley owned a yard that lasted for three generations.8 In 1690, the first warship in America was launched from a small island in the Piscataqua River, situated halfway between Kittery and Portsmouth. The island's name was Rising Castle, and it was the launching pad for a 637-ton frigate called the Falkland. The Falkland bore fifty-four guns, and she sailed until 1768 as a regular line-of-battle ship. The selection of Piscataqua as the site of English naval ship construction may have been instigated by the Earl of Bellomont, who wrote that the harbor would grow wealthy if it supplemented its export of ship masts with “the building of great ships for H.M. Navy.”9 The earl's words underscore the fact that, prior to the American Revolution, Piscataqua's largest source of maritime revenue came from the masts and spars it supplied to Her Majesty's ships. The white oak and white pine used for these building blocks grew to heights of two hundred feet and weighed upward of twenty tons. England depended on this lumber during the Dutch Wars of the

The spectacle shop was old, long, and narrow, with a glass front and a small thin door that opened onto a somewhat busy avenue in the antiques district on the South side of Lovat. It was a quiet enough area, away from the rougher warrens, but not particularly elevated. Across the cramped street hawkers sold vases, while up the road outside a rug merchant's shop a man sold antique suits. There was also Dubois' new storefront to the East; he dealt in religious artifacts and trinkets. The shopkeep hadn't liked when he had moved in; it had somehow changed the feel of the warren. Odd folks had started showing up shortly after Saint Olmstead Religious Antiques opened: black-clad priests, Hasturians in yellow robes, and a few Deeper cultists dressed in their gray sackcloth rags. It had set the entire warren on edge.

But you don’t wear an engagement ring.” “I don’t have one.” He studied the bangle, turning it slowly around. “What kind of man proposes without a ring?” She explained, then, that there had not been a proposal, that she hardly knew Navin. She was looking away, at a dried-out plant on the terrace, but she felt his eyes on her, intrigued, unafraid. “Then why are you marrying him?” She told him the truth, a truth she had not told anybody. “I thought it might fix things.” He did not question her further. Unlike her friends back in America, who either thought she was doing something outrageously stupid or thrillingly bold, Kaushik neither judged nor commended her, and the formal presentation of the facts, the declaration that she was taken, opened the door. Only his kisses, rough, aggressive kisses that were nothing like Navin’s schoolboy behavior at her door, made Hema feel guilty. But the rest of what they did that night felt fresh, new, because she and Navin had never done them before, and there was nothing with which to compare. Navin had never looked at her body unclothed, never explored her with his hands, never told her she was beautiful. Hema remembered that it was Kaushik’s mother who had first paid her that compliment, in a fitting room shopping for bras, and she told this to Kaushik. It was the first mention, between them, of his mother, and yet it did not cause them to grow awkward. If anything it bound them closer together, and Hema knew, without having to be told, that she was the first person he’d ever slept with who’d known his mother, who was able to remember her as he did. His bare feet were warm, surprisingly smooth against her soles as they lay afterward side by side. He slept on his back and at one point was startled awake by a nightmare, lunging forward and springing off the edge of the bed before falling asleep again. It was Hema who stayed awake, listening to him breathing, craving his touch again as light came into the sky. In the morning, looking into the small mirror over the sink in Kaushik’s bathroom, she saw that the area around her lips, at the sides of her mouth, was covered with small red bumps. And she was pleased by that unbecoming proof, pleased that already he had marked her.