Pepsi Quotes

The sign was spray-painted in Arabic and English, probably from some attempt by the farmer to sell his wares in the market. The English read: Dates-best price. Cold Bebsi. "Bebsi?" I asked. "Pepsi," Walt said. "I read about it on the Internet. There's no 'p' in Arabic. Everyone here calls the soda Bebsi." "So you have to have Bebsi with your bizza?" "Brobably.

Continue your quest by taking the test Yes, but what test? What test was I supposed to take? The Kobayashi Maru? The Pepsi Challenge? Could the clue have been any more vague?

I kiss her and she finds the light switch and turns it off, and we're just lit in Pepsi-can colors and it's like we've finally found this other kind of conversation, this conversation in gestures and pulls and pushes and breaths and grasps and teases and glimmers and rubs and expectation.

There are two kinds of artists left: those who endorse Pepsi and those who simply won't.

Pepsi: Drink Coke.

I kiss her and she finds the light switch and turns it off, and we're just lit in Pepsi-can colors and it's like we've finally found this other kind of conversation, this conversation in gestures and pulls and pushes and breaths and grasps and teases and glimmers and rubs and expectation.

The entire principle of a blind taste test was ridiculous. They shouldn't have cared so much that they were losing blind taste tests with old Coke, and we shouldn't at all be surprised that Pepsi's dominance in blind taste tests never translated to much in the real world. Why not? Because in the real world, no one ever drinks Coca-Cola blind.

A hotel mini bar allows you to see what a can of Pepsi will cost in twenty years.

Samia, it appeared, had become one of those desis who drink Pepsi in Pakistan and lassi in London.

Camp out in the living room. Spread your blankets and pillows on the floor. Get your Pepsi and popcorn. Pretend the TV is broken and talk like you used to when you were dating. Talk till the sun comes up or something else happens. If the floor gets too hard, go back upstairs and go to bed. You won’t forget this evening!

I’m what you might call a Pepsi addict.

I'm tired of hearing about money, money, money, money, money. I just want to play the game, drink Pepsi, wear Reebok.

Listen to me,” my mother replied. “You may be the president or whatever of PepsiCo, but when you come home, you are a wife and a mother and a daughter. Nobody can take your place. “So you leave that crown in the garage.

And behold the greatest mystery of them all: an unopened can of diet Pepsi floats in water while an unopened can of regular Pepsi sinks.

The only biodiversity we’re going to have left is Coke versus Pepsi. We’re landscaping the whole world one stupid mistake at a time.

How can even the idea of rebellion against corporate culture stay meaningful when Chrysler Inc. advertises trucks by invoking “The Dodge Rebellion”? How is one to be bona fide iconoclast when Burger King sells onion rings with “Sometimes You Gotta Break the Rules”? How can an Image-Fiction writer hope to make people more critical of televisual culture by parodying television as a self-serving commercial enterprise when Pepsi and Subaru and FedEx parodies of self-serving commercials are already doing big business? It’s almost a history lesson: I’m starting to see just why turn-of-the-century Americans’ biggest fear was of anarchist and anarchy. For if anarchy actually wins, if rulelessness become the rule, then protest and change become not just impossible but incoherent. It’d be like casting a ballot for Stalin: you are voting for an end to all voting.

...they're weak, petty, so apathetic about this gift of life as if it were all a mere Pepsi commercial.

As a young child I had Santa and Jesus all mixed up. I could identify Coke or Pepsi with just one sip, but I could not tell you for sure why they strapped Santa to a cross. Had he missed a house? Had a good little girl somewhere in the world not received the doll he’d promised her, making the father angry?” (p.3)

As a young child I had Santa and Jesus all mixed up. I could identify Coke or Pepsi with just one sip, but I could not tell you for sure why they strapped Santa to a cross. Had he missed a house? Had a good little girl somewhere in the world not received the doll he'd promised her, making the father angry?

Say the word Pepsi in this town, you best watch your back on the way out.

In experiments at Baylor University where people were given Coke and Pepsi in unmarked cups and then hooked up to a brain scanner, the device clearly showed a certain number of them preferred Pepsi while tasting it. When those people were told they were drinking Pepsi, a fraction of them, the ones who had enjoyed Coke all their lives, did something unexpected. The scanner showed their brains scrambling the pleasure signals, dampening them. They then told the experimenter afterward they had preferred Coke in the taste tests.

We drank Pepsi out of these old-fashioned bottles that Dad had found at some ancient country store, and I swear they tasted better than the regular kind.

In 1803, President Jefferson oversaw the purchase of this land from the French for $15 million. It doesn't sound like much for an area three times the size of France itself but given that they'd stolen it from the Native Americans in the first place, I suppose they couldn't grumble. Once some debts had been wiped and estate agents had taken their commission, Napoleon's France ended up pocketing a little more than $8 million. Which is about how much it cost Pepsi Cola to secure the services of Britney Spears. Times have changed.

If Fuzhou Nighttime Feeling were a sound, it would be early/mid-nineties R&B. If it were a flavor, it would be the ice-cold Pepsi we drink as we turn down tiny alleyways where little kids defecate wildly. It is the feeling of drowning in a big hot open gutter, of crawling inside an undressed, unstanched wound that has never been cauterized.

I suffer from severe nerve damage in the hands, arms, legs and spine. My right leg is numb all the time and there are times when I cannot move either of my legs. In addition to this my C-T-L spine has severe disc herniation. I have Fibromyalgia, asthma, severe allergies, heart problems, bleeding ulcers and I eat maybe once every two or three days. I maintain body weight by drinking an average of 36 Pepsi’s per day.

I was nine months old the first time Mamaw saw my mother put Pepsi in my bottle.

This drink. This drink will fuck you from your gums to your guts, but cold enough, the sugar and fizz will provide a blip, just long enough, to stop you opening a vein. Coke. Or Pepsi — doesn’t matter. This phone. This phone will connect you to people everywhere, except for where you are, and sever you from God forever. Apple.

Montagues and Capulets, French and English, Whig and Tory, Airbus and Boeing, Pepsi and Coke, Serb and Muslim, Christian and Saracen – we are irredeemably tribal creatures. The neighbouring or rival group, however defined, is automatically an enemy. Argentinians and Chileans hate each other because there is nobody else nearby to hate.

My pussy tastes like Pepsi Cola.” Lana Del Rey

His brows drew together. He carefully lifted the bottle with the words Pepsi scrawled across the side.

Her right hand held a bottle of Pepsi that she'd clogged with peanuts and called a late lunch.

There was no need to import my crippling diet cola addiction to a brand-new world, and besides, the fountain was Pepsi products anyway. New planet, new life.

The British Nutrition Foundation is funded by almost every food company you can think of, including Coca-Cola, Nestlé, Mondelēz, PepsiCo, Mars, Danone, Kerry and Cargill.38

I wish I were dead," whined Pepsi. "So do I," said Moxie. "May the good fairy what sits in the sky grant yer every wish," said Spam.

I’m typing away, wondering why I had that Pepsi Throwback at such a late hour. Caffeine is a compulsion. Art is an obsession. Writing is both. It weaves in and out, this obsession, forming a basket, a basket I can hide in while pulling its lid over top; it shuts out the noise and normalcy of living. It shuts out the people and caffeinated relationships I love so well. Can you live with an artsy hermit? A sketchy-betchy, meditative, BabyBoomingPseudoHippie? Then short-term visits are in order.

There is no graduation from alcoholism. Or life, for that matter. I am also addicted to Pepsi, chocolate, men, being afraid, being afraid of not being afraid, men—again--and my independence, co-dependence and unsettling ability to fail no matter my attempt.

Pepsi. A refreshing drink. A soft tone playing when you wake up, but then it is gone and you don’t know if you dreamed it. A hallway glimpsed in the back of your refrigerator, but when you look again it is gone. The recurring feeling that your shower is losing faith in you. Desperation. Hunger. Starving, not literally, but still. That hallway again, lined with doors that you know you can open. Your fridge is empty. You haven’t left your home in days, and yet you come and go. This isn’t food. What are you eating? Pepsi: Drink Coke. The

If only I'd listened to my Uncle Poo-poo and gone into dentistry," whined Pepsi. "If I'd stayed home, I'd be big in encyclopedias by now," sniffled Moxie. "And if I had ten pounds o' ciment and a couple o' sacks, you'd a' both gone for a stroll in that pond an hour ago," said Spam.

The Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics (formerly the American Dietetic Association), for instance, has a long list of corporate sponsors including General Mills, Kellogg’s, Mars, PepsiCo, and SoyJoy—and its “official partners” include Hershey’s, the Coca-Cola Company, and the National Dairy Council.15

Charlie turned out to be a blue-ink person, while I was exclusively black. FYI for nonwriters: blue versus black ink is an essential identity issue. Much like Coke versus Pepsi, or the Beatles versus the Stones, or college-ruled notebooks versus regular. You can be one kind of person or the other, but not both.

Nobody has won thirty games in a season since Denny McLain did it in 1968. No other pitcher has drunk as many Pepsi-Colas, broken as many team rules, or played the organ as famously as McLain did. And there has never been another World Series game in which both starting pitchers had won the Cy Young and Most Valuable Player awards that year.

The Pepsi Generation campaign, he said, sold not a product but a lifestyle and an optimistic outlook.

Like somebody taking the first drink in a Diet Pepsi commercial. Over-the-top bliss.

I only drink coffee in dire emergencies. That is I have to drive at 3am, have fifty miles or more to go, I'm falling asleep and there is no Pepsi Max available.

Alex took a sip. It wasn’t Coke. It wasn’t even Pepsi. He recognized the over-sweet, slightly cloying taste of supermarket cola and wished he’d asked for water.

By 1994, PepsiCo was the fifteenth-biggest US company, with annual revenue of $25 billion. It sold drinks and food in more than 150 countries and employed 450,000 people.

Pepsi.

SCULLEY. Pepsi executive recruited by Jobs in 1983 to be Apple’s CEO, clashed with and ousted

ordered two crispy tacos, a bean burrito, and a medium Pepsi. At

Listen,” I say, my voice trembling with emotion, “have whatever you want but I'm telling you I recommend the Diet Pepsi.

Big Titty Ho on a Motorcycle’. Darcy insisted that I'd love it. It was tequila, Pepsi, amaretto, and whiskey-sour mix. I had to admit, they were growing on me.

Not only the difference between Coke and Pepsi, but Wise potato chips and Utz, Little Debbie’s and Hostess. Duron and the Hechinger store brand of spray paint.

...and several bowls of artificial fruit which couldn't have been mistaken for the real thing at fifty meters. These Pepsi and Moxie immediately ate.

A rosewater smell from the box summoned, instantly, a dictatorial woman with a tight bun, hectoring him with questions. The cut, the buttons, the pockets, the collar. But most of all: the blue. Chosen in haste from a wall of fabrics: not an ordinary blue. Peacock? Lapis? Nothing gets close. Medium but vivid, moderately lustrous, definitely bold. Somewhere between ultramarine and cyanide salts, between Vishnu and Amon, Israel and Greece, the logos of Pepsi and Ford. In a word: bright. He loved whatever self had chosen it and after that wore it constantly. Even Freddy approved: “You look like someone famous!” And he does. Finally, at his advanced age, he has struck the right note. He looks good, and he looks like himself.

I’ve just become president of PepsiCo, and you couldn’t just stop and listen to my news,” I said, loudly. “You just wanted me to go get the milk!” “Listen to me,” my mother replied. “You may be the president or whatever of PepsiCo, but when you come home, you are a wife and a mother and a daughter. Nobody can take your place. “So you leave that crown in the garage.

Fuck hope and all the tiny little towns, one-horse towns, the one-stoplight towns, three-bars country-music jukebox-magic parquet-towns, pressure-cooker pot-roast frozen-peas bad-coffee married-heterosexual towns, crying-kids-in-the-Oldsmobile-beat-your-kid-in the-Thriftway-aisles towns, one-bank one-service-station Greyhound-Bus-stop-at-the-Pepsi-Cafe towns, two-television towns, Miracle Mile towns, Viv's Double Wide Beauty Salon towns, schizophrenic-mother towns, buy-yourself-a-handgun towns, sister-suicide towns, only-Injun's-a-dead-Injun towns, Catholic-Protestant-Mormon-Baptist religious-right five-churches Republican-trickle-down-to-poverty family-values sexual-abuse pro-life creation-theory NRA towns, nervous-mother rodeo-clown-father those little-town-blues towns.

Allison of RADAD: The Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts and Disability The ticks of Lyme Suck my blood of time And leave me rather drowsy. My feet move like tar With Epstein-Barr And I wake up feeling lousy. I fall asleep in my Pepsi With Narcolepsy To the chagrin of the soda jerk. My Chronic Fatigue (and thespian ability) puts me in the big league (of insurance fraud disability) So who the fuck needs to work!

Thomas Builds-the-Fire's stories climbed into your clothes like sad, gave you itches that could not be scratched. If you repeated eve a sentence from one of those stories, your throat was never the same again. Those stories hung in your clothes and hair like smoke, and no amount of laundry soap or shampoo washed them out. Victor and Junior often tried to beat those stories out of Thomas, tied him down and taped his mouth shut. They pretended to be friendly and tried to sweet talk Thomas into temporary silences, made promises about beautiful Indian women and cases of Diet Pepsi. But none of that stopped Thomas, who talked and talked.

The white woman across the aisle from me says 'Look, look at all the history, that house on the hill there is over two hundred years old, ' as she points out the window past me into what she has been taught. I have learned little more about American history during my few days back East than what I expected and far less of what we should all know of the tribal stories whose architecture is 15,000 years older than the corners of the house that sits museumed on the hill. 'Walden Pond, ' the woman on the train asks, 'Did you see Walden Pond? ' and I don't have a cruel enough heart to break her own by telling her there are five Walden Ponds on my little reservation out West and at least a hundred more surrounding Spokane, the city I pretended to call my home. 'Listen, ' I could have told her. 'I don't give a shit about Walden. I know the Indians were living stories around that pond before Walden's grandparents were born and before his grandparents' grandparents were born. I'm tired of hearing about Don-fucking-Henley saving it, too, because that's redundant. If Don Henley's brothers and sisters and mothers and father hadn't come here in the first place then nothing would need to be saved.' But I didn't say a word to the woman about Walden Pond because she smiled so much and seemed delighted that I thought to bring her an orange juice back from the food car. I respect elders of every color. All I really did was eat my tasteless sandwich, drink my Diet Pepsi and nod my head whenever the woman pointed out another little piece of her country's history while I, as all Indians have done since this war began, made plans for what I would do and say the next time somebody from the enemy thought I was one of their own.

Slim is queer and though Nelson isn't supposed to mind that he does. He also minds that there are a couple of slick blacks making it at the party and that one little white girl with that grayish kind of sharp-chinned Polack face from the south side of Brewer took off her shirt while dancing even though she has no tits to speak of and now sits in the kitchen with still bare tits getting herself sick on Southern Comfort and Pepsi. At these parties someone is always in the bathroom being sick or giving themselves a hit or a snort and Nelson minds this too. He doesn't mind any of it very much, he's just tired of being young. There's so much wasted energy to it.

Самым хитрым эффектом этого смещения центра внимания стало то обстоятельство, что через несколько лет после концертов под эгидой Molson, спонсированных Pepsi папских визитов, зоопарков Izod (торговая марка Lacoste) и баскетбольных программ в группах продленного дня компании Nike в обществе укоренилось убеждение: чтобы осуществиться, любому событию — от мелкого общественного мероприятия до больших религиозных съездов — требуется спонсор. Например, август 1999 года стал свидетелем первой в истории частной свадьбы при поддержке корпоративного спонсора. Это и есть то, что Лесли Сэйван, автор книги «Спонсируемая жизнь» (The Sponsored Life), называет главным признаком «спонсируемого сознания»: все мы коллективно стали разделять убеждение, что не сами корпорации хотят поживиться за счет нашей культурной и общественной деятельности, а что творчество и общественная жизнь были бы невозможны без их щедрости.

I made a stop, ducking into the supermarket to pick up milk, Diet Pepsi, bread, eggs, and toilet paper. I was into my siege mentality, looking forward to pulling up the drawbridge and waiting out the rain. With luck, I wouldn't have to go out for days.

And perhaps there was: when I look at my female students now, even the messiest, the sloppiest, the ones who drink Pepsi Max at 9 a.m., I see in them the beauty of youth—the beauty of their plumpness, their half-formed-ness, that skin that’s lit from underneath.

Tracy got the point. There weren’t too many words that started with ‘z’ that could instill so much panic, unless of course a murderous zebra was loose in Denver and she was in the way of some succulent wild grass. Tracy spun around to face the threat. Her foot slipped on the newly-spilled Pepsi. Her left leg shot out wildly as she plummeted to the ground. The expression on the zombie’s face changed from happiness to confusion as it wondered where its meal had gone. It was a beat or two before its eyes tracked down and locked back on its prey.

Practically every drug prescribed for psychosis, from Donald’s time until now, has been a variation on Thorazine or clozapine. Thorazine and its successors became known as “typical” neuroleptic drugs, while clozapine and its heirs were “atypical,” the Pepsi to Thorazine’s Coke.

But not until the first game was over and I bought a Pepsi from a vending machine and started drinking it did I even think of him. It was the Pepsi machine that did it: there had been one in the pool hall we used to play in, and we had often bet drinks on the outcome of our games.

Before we go any further, can we all just admit that junior high sucks eggs? I have never met a person who said, “Man. Seventh grade was the best.” And if I did, I would not want them in my life. Like a person who wears Crocs on purpose, or prefers Pepsi over Coke, I don’t need that kind of delusional idiocy in my life.

Most people were less formally dressed than PepsiCo’s maintenance staff,” he noted. Over lunch Jobs picked quietly at his salad, but when Sculley declared that most executives found computers more trouble than they were worth, Jobs clicked into evangelical mode. “We want to change the way people use computers,” he said.

As a boy I’d been afraid of the dark—or, more specifically, of monsters. I knew they only inhabited the world of movies, but sometimes in the dark it would occur to me that I, too, might be performing, all unwittingly, in a movie, perhaps even in the dread role of victim. There were two things movie victims never did, at least (alas) in my day: they never swore, and they never uttered brand names. Knowing this, I’d hit upon an ingenious way to keep my courage up. Whenever I was forced to brave the darkness, whether in the cellar or the attic or even my own room, I’d chant the magic words “Fuck” and “Pepsi-Cola” and I knew that I’d be safe.

racism may wear a new dress, buy a new pair of boots, but neither it nor its succubus twin fascism is new or can make anything new. It can only reproduce the environment that supports its own health: fear, denial, and an atmosphere in which its victims have lost the will to fight. The forces interested in fascist solutions to national problems are not to be found in one political party or another, or in one or another wing of any single political party. Democrats have no unsullied history of egalitarianism. Nor are liberals free of domination agendas. Republicans have housed abolitionists and white supremacists. Conservative, moderate, liberal; right, left, hard left, far right; religious, secular, socialist—we must not be blindsided by these Pepsi-Cola, Coca-Cola labels because the genius of fascism is that any political structure can host the virus and virtually any developed country can become a suitable home. Fascism talks ideology, but it is really just marketing—marketing for power.

extravagant and chose not to attend. When Roger took senior executives on the PepsiCo jet to Montana or the Cayman Islands for long team-building weekends, Steve usually chose to stay home with his wife, Gail, and their four kids. I, of course, was never even invited on Roger’s trips because they were always men only. For me, that was

When I had the honor of being included in the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery in 2019, I sat for a painting with four objects on a shelf behind me in the composition: a photo of my parents; a photo of Raj, Preetha, and Tara; a Yale SOM baseball cap; and a PepsiCo annual report with the words “Performance with Purpose” on the cover.

What’s shocking is not His monstrous features—plenty of gods are monstrous, it seems almost to have been a prerequisite—but that there’s no recourse from Him. No power beyond His. The most monstrous feature of God, my friends, is the totalitarianism. This vengeful, seething God, this punishment-ordaining bastard, is ultimate! Mind if I have a Pepsi?

She paused for laughter. None came. Evie sighed.

the fact is, our relationships to these corporations are not unambiguous. some memebers of negativland genuinely liked pepsi products. mca grew up loving star wars and didn't mind having his work sent all over the united states to all the "cool, underground magazines" they were marketing to--why would he? sam gould had a spiritual moment in the shower listening to a cd created, according to sophie wong, so that he would talk about tylenol with his independent artist friends--and he did. many of my friends' daughters will be getting american girl dolls and books as gifts well into the foreseeable future. some skateboarders in washington, dc, were asked to create an ad campaign for the east coast summer tour, and they all love minor threat--why not use its famous album cover? how about shilling for converse? i would have been happy to ten years ago. so what's really changed? the answer is that two important things have changed: who is ultimately accountable for veiled corporate campaigns that occasionally strive to obsfucate their sponsorship and who is requesting our participation in such campaigns. behind converse and nike sb is nike, a company that uses shit-poor labor policies and predatory marketing that effectively glosses over their shit-poor labor policies, even to an audience that used to know better. behind team ouch! was an underground-savvy brainreservist on the payroll of big pharma; behind the recent wave of street art in hip urban areas near you was omd worldwide on behalf of sony; behind your cool hand-stenciled vader shirt was lucasfilm; and behind a recent cool crafting event was toyota. no matter how you participated in these events, whether as a contributor, cultural producer, viewer, or even critic, these are the companies that profited from your attention.

The cult of the Virgin Mary enabled the worship of the Goddess to flourish, albeit in a cauterised form. As I keep repeating in a mantra, sex is power. The Virgin was a method of turning the sexual impulse of Christians back into the Church and onto the figure of the crucified Christ. I would describe this as a particularly unsavoury form of magick. This is the use of repression and misery as a spiritual battery. This enslavement of the worshipper’s natural desires is the exact opposite of the natural and healthy lust for Babalon. With the resolutely chaste Mary in position, churches had a surrogate Goddess back in the house. Christ knows, they needed one. To sell Christianity to the fans of the God who dies and is reborn (like the crops in the fields) the Church used statues of Mary and Jesus that were rather close to those of Isis and the Child Horus. This mother/son icon propaganda was like a Pepsi taste test for the wavering pagans. They failed. It requires other women to keep women as slaves stripped of their sexual power. The BVM did that job. She was the only role model that you could fixate upon. As a Goddess she is a clitoridectomy. If you lift her skirt you can see the coarse black thread where she has been snipped and stitched. The thread is plaited from the beard of Jehovah himself. This is not a woman anymore. Look under the hem and learn.

A MAN AND HIS YOUNG WIFE WERE IN COURT BATTLING FOR THE CUSTODY OF THEIR CHILDREN. THE MOTHER ARGUED TO THE JUDGE THAT SINCE SHE BROUGHT THE CHILDREN INTO THIS WORLD, SHE SHOULD RETAIN CUSTODY OF THEM. THE MAN ALSO WANTED CUSTODY OF HIS CHILDREN, AND THE JUDGE ASKED FOR HIS RESPONSE. AFTER A LONG SILENCE, THE MAN SLOWLY ROSE FROM HIS CHAIR. “YOUR HONOR, WHEN I PUT A DOLLAR IN A VENDING MACHINE AND A PEPSI COMES OUT, DOES THE PEPSI BELONG TO ME OR THE MACHINE?

What have they fixed?” asked former McKinsey consultant Michael Lanning. “What have they changed? Did they take any voice in the way banking has evolved in the past thirty years? They did study after study at GM, and that place needed the most radical kind of change you can imagine. The place was dead, and it was just going to take a long time for the body to die unless they changed how they operated. McKinsey was in there with huge teams, charging huge fees, for several decades. And look where GM came out.”13 In the end, all the GM work did was provide a revenue stream to enrich a group of McKinsey partners, especially those working with the automaker. The last time McKinsey was influential at Apple Computer was when John Sculley was there, and that’s because he’d had a brand-marketing heritage from Pepsi. And Sculley was a disaster. Did McKinsey do anything to help the great companies of today become what they are? Amazon, Microsoft, Google? In short, no.

In 1978, the typical teenage boy in the United States drank about seven ounces of soda every day; today he drinks nearly three times that amount, deriving 9 percent of his daily caloric intake from soft drinks. Soda consumption among teenaged girls has doubled within the same period, reaching an average of twelve ounces a day. A significant number of teenage boys are now drinking five or more cans of soda every day. Each can contains the equivalent of about ten teaspoons of sugar. Coke, Pepsi, Mountain Dew, and Dr Pepper also contain caffeine. These sodas provide empty calories and have replaced far more nutritious beverages in the American diet. Excessive soda consumption in childhood can lead to calcium deficiencies and a greater likelihood of bone fractures. Twenty years ago, teenage boys in the United States drank twice as much milk as soda; now they drink twice as much soda as milk. Soft-drink consumption has also become commonplace among American toddlers. About one-fifth of the nation’s one- and two-year-olds now drink soda.

All the positive associations the subjects had with Coca-Cola—its history, logo, color, design, and fragrance; their own childhood memories of Coke, Coke’s TV and print ads over the years, the sheer, inarguable, inexorable, ineluctable, emotional Coke-ness of the brand—beat back their rational, natural preference for the taste of Pepsi. Why? Because emotions are the way in which our brains encode things of value, and a brand that engages us emotionally—think Apple, Harley-Davidson, and L’Oréal, just for starters—will win every single time.

I called up Coca-Cola and told them that Pepsi had just booked a big advertisement but that the back page was still free. I called up the Daily Telegraph and asked them whether they would prefer to advertise before or after the Daily Express. Another tack was to ask an innocuous question that they couldn’t easily deny: ‘Are you interested in recruiting the highest-calibre school-leavers and university graduates?’ No personnel manager would ever admit that they were looking for mediocre recruits. ‘Then we’re publishing just the magazine for you …

Most broadly, the PFC chooses between conflicting options—Coke or Pepsi; blurting out what you really think or restraining yourself; pulling the trigger or not. And often the conflict being resolved is between a decision heavily driven by cognition and one driven by emotions. Once it has decided, the PFC sends orders via projections to the rest of the frontal cortex, sitting just behind it. Those neurons then talk to the “premotor cortex,” sitting just behind it, which then passes it to the “motor cortex,” which talks to your muscles. And a behavior ensues.

Words, pictures, numbers, facts, graphics, statistics, specks, waves, particles, motes. Only a catastrophe gets our attention. We want them, we need them, we depend on them. As long as they happen somewhere else. This is where California comes in. Mud slides, brush fires, coastal erosion, earthquakes, mass killings, et cetera. We can relax and enjoy these disasters because in our hearts we feel that California deserves whatever it gets. Californians invented the concept of life-style. This alone warrants their doom." Cotsakis crushed a can of Diet Pepsi and threw it at a garbage pail.

So Jobs and Markkula enlisted Gerry Roche, a gregarious corporate headhunter, to find someone else. They decided not to focus on technology executives; what they needed was a consumer marketer who knew advertising and had the corporate polish that would play well on Wall Street. Roche set his sights on the hottest consumer marketing wizard of the moment, John Sculley, president of the Pepsi-Cola division of PepsiCo, whose Pepsi Challenge campaign had been an advertising and publicity triumph. When Jobs gave a talk to Stanford business students, he heard good things about Sculley, who had spoken to the class earlier. So he told Roche he would be happy to meet him.

So Jobs and Markkula enlisted Gerry Roche, a gregarious corporate headhunter, to find someone else. They decided not to focus on technology executives; what they needed was a consumer marketer who knew advertising and had the corporate polish that would play well on Wall Street. Roche set his sights on the hottest consumer marketing wizard of the moment, John Sculley, president of the Pepsi- Cola division of PepsiCo, whose Pepsi Challenge campaign had been an advertising and publicity triumph. When Jobs gave a talk to Stanford business students, he heard good things about Sculley, who had spoken to the class earlier. So he told Roche he would be happy to meet him.

IN OCTOBER 2006, A US NAVAL SUPERCARRIER GROUP LED by the 1,000-foot USS Kitty Hawk was confidently sailing through the East China Sea between southern Japan and Taiwan, minding everyone’s business, when, without warning, a Chinese navy submarine surfaced in the middle of the group. An American aircraft carrier of that size is surrounded by about twelve other warships, with air cover above and submarine cover below. The Chinese vessel, a Song-class attack submarine, may well be very quiet when running on electric power but, still, this was the equivalent to Pepsi-Cola’s management popping up in a Coca-Cola board meeting after listening under the table for half an hour.

Two flights of steps bordered either side of the Hill from Hell. I didn’t know who constructed them or when, but it was sometime before I was born. Maybe even before Daddy was born. In one stretch, the steps were made of large semiflat stones. In another, wood. In a third, slate. All of them were in terrible disrepair, but it was still easier to climb them than to try to walk up the dirt road itself, especially since Stacy and I were weighed down with our backpacks, slices of pie in Tupperware containers, bottles of Pepsi, and a bunch of cassette tapes. We stopped halfway up to catch our breath. I really didn’t need to, but I could tell Stacy was not used to trudging up hills.

Lest you dismiss this as just another conspiracy theory, in November 1998 in an interview with The Observer, former US Ambassador to Chile Edward Korry told a remarkable story. Korry described still classified cables, and information censored in papers, but now available under the FOIA. He had served under Presidents Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon. He told how US companies from Cola to copper used the CIA as an international debt collection agency and investment security force. The Observer reported that the CIA's Oct. 1970 plot to overthrow Chile's Allende was the result of a plea for action a month earlier by PepsiCo chairman Kendall to the company's former lawyer, President Nixon.

And you’re convinced you can hide yourself better than an organization that specializes in hiding people from bad guys?” “From what I’ve seen, yes. The Witness Protection Program didn’t do a very good job of keeping me safe, did it?” “Whereas you will, yourself?” She lifted her chin defiantly. “There’s obviously a lot I’ll need to learn. But there’s got to be some book in the library that will tell me what to do. How to hide.” A book from the library? Harry concealed his laughter with a cough. She was going to get a book. “The setup was a complete goatfuck, I’ll grant you that.” He took a sip from a can of Pepsi he’d opened four hundred miles ago. It was warm and flat, but it contained caffeine. Christ, he was tired, and she was going to get a book.

You’re too goddamned fat,” he said. I took a defiant drag on my cigarette and willed myself not to cry. The remark made me dizzy. For the past four years, Ma and Grandma had played by the rule: never to mention my weight. Now my jeans and sweatshirt were folded in a helpless pile beside me and there was only a thin sheet of paper between my rolls of dimply flesh and this detestable old man. My heart raced with fear and nicotine and Pepsi. My whole body shook, dripped sweat. “Any trouble with your period?” he asked. “No.” “What?” “No trouble,” I managed, louder. He nodded in the direction of his stand-up scale. The backs of my legs made little sucking sounds as they unglued themselves from the plastic upholstery. He brought the sliding metal bar down tight against my scalp and fiddled with the cylinder in front of my face. “Five-five and a half,” he said. “Two hundred . . . fifty-seven.” The tears leaking from my eyes made stains on the paper gown. I nodded or shook my head abruptly at each of his questions, coughed on command for his stethoscope, and took his pamphlets on diet, smoking, heart murmur. He signed the form. At the door, his hand on the knob, he turned back and waited until I met his eye. “Let me tell you something,” he said. “My wife died four Tuesdays ago. Cancer of the colon. We were married forty-one years. Now you stop feeling sorry for yourself and lose some of that pork of yours. Pretty girl like you—you don’t want to do this to yourself.” “Eat shit,” I said. He paused for a moment, as if considering my comment. Then he opened the door to the waiting room and announced to my mother and someone else who’d arrived that at the rate I was going, I could expect to die before I was forty years old. “She’s too fat and she smokes,” I heard him say just before the hall rang out with the sound of my slamming his office door. I was wheezing wildly by the time I reached the final landing. On the turnpike on the way home, Ma said, “I could stand to cut down, too, you know. It wouldn’t hurt me one bit. We could go on a diet together? Do they still sell that Metrecal stuff?” “I’ve been humiliated enough for one fucking decade,” I said. “You say one more thing to me and I’ll jump out of this car and smash my head under someone’s wheels.

A kitten is almost too easy, I think, as I quickly pull out its fur and separate and de-bone it, and put the pieces in the blast cooker for three of the remaining four minutes, then add them to my gumbo, just as Chef Reamsy calls time. “Ladies first,” he says, as I present him with a plate. “What have we here?” “Chef, this is a Slim Jim, Chee-Tos, and kitten gumbo in a spicy Pepsi sauce,” I say. “Bon appetite.” He picks through it. “It certainly looks visually stunning,” he says. “What’d you use in the sauce?” “Pepsi, and a little K-C Masterpiece barbecue sauce. I put that in a pan and let it reduce down.” He takes a bite. “Flavorful. The meat is moist and tender, the sauce has just the right amount of spice, and I love the way you incorporated the stray kitten into the dish. Well done indeed.

The instruments of murder are as manifold as the unlimited human imagination. Apart from the obvious—shotguns, rifles, pistols, knives, hatchets and axes—I have seen meat cleavers, machetes, ice picks, bayonets, hammers, wrenches, screwdrivers, crowbars, pry bars, two-by-fours, tree limbs, jack handles (which are not “tire irons;” nobody carries tire irons anymore), building blocks, crutches, artificial legs, brass bedposts, pipes, bricks, belts, neckties, pantyhose, ropes, bootlaces, towels and chains—all these things and more, used by human beings to dispatch their fellow human beings into eternity. I have never seen a butler use a candelabrum. I have never seen anyone use a candelabrum! Such recherché elegance is apparently confined to England. I did see a pair of sneakers used to kill a woman, and they left distinctive tread marks where the murderer stepped on her throat and crushed the life from her. I have not seen an icicle used to stab someone, though it is said to be the perfect weapon, because it melts afterward. But I do know of a case in which a man was bludgeoned to death with a frozen ham. Murderers generally do not enjoy heavy lifting—though of course they end up doing quite a bit of it after the fact, when it is necessary to dispose of the body—so the weapons they use tend to be light and maneuverable. You would be surprised how frequently glass bottles are used to beat people to death. Unlike the “candy-glass” props used in the movies, real glass bottles stand up very well to blows. Long-necked beer bottles, along with the heavy old Coca-Cola and Pepsi bottles, make formidable weapons, powerful enough to leave a dent in a wooden two-by-four without breaking. I recall one case in which a woman was beaten to death with a Pepsi bottle, and the distinctive spiral fluting of the bottle was still visible on the broken margins of her skull. The proverbial “lead pipe” is a thing of the past, as a murder weapon. Lead is no longer used to make pipes.

When she was finished with the mailbox, Lisey trudged back down the driveway with her buckets in the long evening light. Breakfast had been coffee and oatmeal, lunch little more than a scoop of tuna and mayo on a scrap of lettuce, and dead cat or no dead cat, she was starved. She decided to put off her call to Woodbody until she had some food in her belly. The thought of calling the Sheriff's Office—anyone in a blue uniform, for that matter—hadn't yet returned to her. She washed her hands for three minutes, using very hot water and making sure any speck of blood was gone from under her nails. Then she found the Tupperware dish containing the leftover Cheeseburger Pie, scraped it onto a plate, and blasted it in the microwave. While she waited for the chime, she hunted a Pepsi out of the fridge. She remembered thinking she'd never finish the Hamburger Helper stuff once her initial lust for it had been slaked. You could add that to the bottom of the long, long list of Things in Life Lisey Has Been Wrong About, but so what? Big diddly, as Cantata had been fond of saying in her teenage years. "I never claimed to be the brains of the outfit," Lisey told the empty kitchen, and the microwave bleeped as if to second that. The reheated gloop was almost too hot to eat but Lisey gobbled it anyway, cooling her mouth with fizzy mouthfuls of cold Pepsi. As she was finishing the last bite, she remembered the low whispering sound the cat's fur had made against the tin sleeve of the mailbox, and the weird pulling sensation she'd felt as the body began, reluctantly, to come forward. He must have really crammed it in there, she thought, and Dick Powell once more came to mind, black-and-white Dick Powell, this time saying And have some stuffing! She was up and rushing for the sink so fast she knocked her chair over, sure she was going to vomit everything she'd just eaten, she was going to blow her groceries, toss her cookies, throw her heels, donate her lunch. She hung over the sink, eyes closed, mouth open, midsection locked and straining. After a pregnant five-second pause, she produced one monstrous cola-burp that buzzed like a cicada. She leaned there a moment longer, wanting to make absolutely sure that was all. When she was, she rinsed her mouth, spat, and pulled "Zack McCool"'s letter from her jeans pocket. It was time to call Joseph Woodbody.

Ballad" Oh dream, why do you do me this way? Again, with the digging, again with the digging up. Once more with the shovels. Once more, the shovels full of dirt. The vault lid. The prying. The damp boards. Mother beside me. Like she’s an old hat at this. Like all she’s got left is curiosity. Like curiosity didn’t kill the red cat. Such a sweet, gentle cat it was. Here we go again, dream. Mother, wearing her take-out-the-garbage coat. I haven’t seen that coat in years. The coat she wore to pick me up from school early. She appeared at the back of the classroom, early. Go with your mother, teacher said. Diane, you are excused. I was a little girl. Already a famous actress. I looked at the other kids. I acted lucky. Though everyone knows what an early pick-up means. An early pick-up, dream. What’s wrong, I asked my mother. It is early spring. Bright sunlight. The usual birds. Air, teetering between bearable and unbearable. Cold, but not cold enough to shiver. Still, dream, I shiver. You know, my mother said. Her long garbage coat flying. There was a wind, that day. A wind like a scurrying grandmother, dusting. Look inside yourself, my mother said. You know why I have come for you. And still I acted lucky. Lucky to be out. Lucky to be out in the cold world with my mother. I’m innocent, I wanted to say. A little white girl, trying out her innocence. A white lamb, born into a cold field. Frozen almost solid. Brought into the house. Warmed all night with hair dryers. Death? I said. Smiling. Lucky. We’re barely to the parking lot. Barely to the car ride home. But the classroom already feels like the distant past. Long ago, my classmates pitying me. Arriving at this car full of uncles. Were they wearing suits? Death such a formal occasion. My sister, angry-crying next to me. Me, encountering a fragment of evil in myself. Evilly wanting my mother to say it. What? I asked, smiling. My lamb on full display at the fair. He’s dead! my sister said. Hit me in the gut with her flute. Her flute case. Her rental flute. He’s dead! Our father. Our father, who we were not supposed to know had been dying. He’s dead! The flute gleaming in its red case. Here, my mother said at home. She’d poured us each a small glass of Pepsi We normally couldn’t afford Pepsi. Lucky, I acted. He’s no longer suffering, my mother said. Here, she said. Drink this. The little bubbles flew. They bit my tongue. My evil persisted. What is death? I asked. And now, dream, once more you bring me my answer. Dig, my mother says. Pry, she says. I don’t want to see, dream. The lid so damp it crumbles under my hands. The casket just a drawerful of bones. A drawerful. Just bones and teeth. That one tooth he had. Crooked like mine.

Every Sunday he arrived in his wine-dark Buick, a tall, prune-faced, sad-seeming man with an incongruously vital head of wavy hair. He was not interested in children. A proponent of the Great Books series—which he had read twice—Uncle Pete was engaged with serious thought and Italian opera. He had a passion, in history, for Edward Gibbon, and, in literature, for the journals of Madame de Staël. He liked to quote that witty lady’s opinion on the German language, which held that German wasn’t good for conversation because you had to wait to the end of the sentence for the verb, and so couldn’t interrupt. Uncle Pete had wanted to become a doctor, but the “catastrophe” had ended that dream. In the United States, he’d put himself through two years of chiropractic school, and now ran a small office in Birmingham with a human skeleton he was still paying for in installments. In those days, chiropractors had a somewhat dubious reputation. People didn’t come to Uncle Pete to free up their kundalini. He cracked necks, straightened spines, and made custom arch supports out of foam rubber. Still, he was the closest thing to a doctor we had in the house on those Sunday afternoons. As a young man he’d had half his stomach surgically removed, and now after dinner always drank a Pepsi-Cola to help digest his meal. The soft drink had been named for the digestive enzyme pepsin, he sagely told us, and so was suited to the task.

Well, it’s the inevitable “Coke versus Pepsi” dichotomy as to which is more important, which influences the other more in terms of our actions. And of course it turns out that, as with most dichotomies of behavior, it’s a false one. They’re utterly intertwined, and intertwined on a neurobiological level. For example, if you think of something terrifying that happened to you long ago, emotional parts of your brain activate and you secrete stress hormones. Or if you have an aroused emotion—you’re in an agitated, frightened state—and suddenly you think and reason in a way that’s imprudent and ridiculous. We often make terrible decisions when we’re aroused. The two parts are equally intertwined. We assume that as creatures with big cortexes, reason is at the core of most of our decision making. And an awful lot of work has shown that far more often than we’d like to think, we make our decisions based on implicit emotional, automatic reflexes. We make them within milliseconds. Parts of the brain that are marinated in emotion and hormones are activating long, long before the more cortical rational parts activate. And often what we believe is rational thinking is, instead, our cognitive selves playing catch-up, trying to rationalize the notion that our emotional instincts are perfectly logical and make wonderful sense. We can manipulate the emotional, the automatic, the implicit, the subterranean aspects of our brains unawares, and it changes our decisions, and then we come up with highfalutin explanations—that I did what I just did because of some philosopher I read freshman year. No, actually it’s because of this manipulation that just occurred.

Zap. Sports channel. Normal is nine innings, four balls, three strikes, somebody wins, somebody loses, there’s no such thing as a tie. Zap. Normal is unreal people, mostly rich unreal people, having sex with rappers and basketball players and thinking of their unreal family as a real-world brand, like Pepsi or Drano or Ford. Zap. News channels. Normal is guns and the normal America that really wants to be great again. Then there’s another normal if your skin color is the wrong color and another if you’re educated and another if you think education is brainwashing and there’s an America that believes in vaccines for kids and another that says that’s a con trick and everything one normal believes is a lie to another normal and they’re all on TV depending where you look, so, yeah, it’s confusing. I’m really trying to understand which this is America now. Zap zap zap. A man with his head in a bag being shot by a man without a shirt on. A fat man in a red hat screaming at men and women also fat also in red hats about victory, We’re undereducated and overfed. We’re full of pride over who the f*ck knows. We drive to the emergency room and send Granny to get our guns and cigarettes. We don’t need no stinkin’ allies cause we’re stupid and you can suck our dicks. We are Beavis and Butt-Head on ’roids. We drink Roundup from the can. Our president looks like a Christmas ham and talks like Chucky. We’re America, bitch. Zap. Immigrants raping our women every day. We need Space Force because Space ISIS. Zap. Normal is Upside-Down Land. Our old friends are our enemies now and our old enemy is our pal. Zap, zap. Men and men, women and women in love. The purple mountains’ majesty. A man with an oil painting of himself with Jesus hanging in his living room. Dead schoolkids. Hurricanes. Beauty. Lies. Zap, zap, zap. “Normal doesn’t feel so normal to me,” I tell him. “It’s normal to feel that way,” he replies.

SCULLEY. Pepsi executive recruited by Jobs in 1983 to be Apple’s CEO, clashed with and ousted Jobs in 1985. JOANNE SCHIEBLE JANDALI SIMPSON. Wisconsin-born biological mother of Steve Jobs, whom she put up for adoption, and Mona Simpson, whom she raised. MONA SIMPSON. Biological full sister of Jobs; they discovered their relationship in 1986 and became close. She wrote novels loosely based on her mother Joanne (Anywhere but Here), Jobs and his daughter Lisa (A Regular Guy), and her father Abdulfattah Jandali (The Lost Father). ALVY RAY SMITH. A cofounder of Pixar who clashed with Jobs. BURRELL SMITH. Brilliant, troubled hardware designer on the original Mac team, afflicted with schizophrenia in the 1990s. AVADIS “AVIE” TEVANIAN. Worked with Jobs and Rubinstein at NeXT, became chief software engineer at Apple in 1997. JAMES VINCENT. A music-loving Brit, the younger partner with Lee Clow and Duncan Milner at the ad agency Apple hired. RON WAYNE. Met Jobs at Atari, became first partner with Jobs and Wozniak at fledgling Apple, but unwisely decided to forgo his equity stake. STEPHEN WOZNIAK. The star electronics geek at Homestead High; Jobs figured out how to package and market his amazing circuit boards and became his partner in founding Apple. DEL YOCAM. Early Apple employee who became the General Manager of the Apple II Group and later Apple’s Chief Operating Officer. INTRODUCTION How This Book Came to Be In the early summer of 2004, I got a phone call from Steve Jobs. He had been scattershot friendly to me over the years, with occasional bursts of intensity, especially when he was launching a new product that he wanted on the cover of Time or featured on CNN, places where I’d worked. But now that I was no longer at either of those places, I hadn’t heard from him much. We talked a bit about the Aspen Institute, which I had recently joined, and I invited him to speak at our summer campus in Colorado. He’d be happy to come, he said, but not to be onstage. He wanted instead to take a walk so that we could talk. That seemed a bit odd. I didn’t yet

Despite the challenges, Coca-Cola succeeded in the end. China has become Coca-Cola's third largest market in the world, after the United States and Mexico. It has invested over $5 billion in China. More important, Coca-Cola has blazed a trail for other foreign companies—Pepsi, KFC, McDonald's, Coors, Budweiser, IBM, Apple, Dell, Procter & Gamble, Walmart, Sheraton,

I have vivid memories of going to Pizza Hut and enjoying a thin crust pizza and a jug of Pepsi, and, getting high stacks of buttermilk pancakes with syrup.