Philadelphia Sayings Quotes

I am, and always have been - first, last, and always - a child of America. You raised me. I grew up in the pastures and hills of Texas, but I had been to thirty-four states before I learned how to drive. When I caught the stomach flu in the fifth grade, my mother sent a note to school written on the back of a holiday memo from Vice President Biden. Sorry, sir—we were in a rush, and it was the only paper she had on hand. I spoke to you for the first time when I was eighteen, on the stage of the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia, when I introduced my mother as the nominee for president. You cheered for me. I was young and full of hope, and you let me embody the American dream: that a boy who grew up speaking two languages, whose family was blended and beautiful and enduring, could make a home for himself in the White House. You pinned the flag to my lapel and said, “We’re rooting for you.” As I stand before you today, my hope is that I have not let you down. Years ago, I met a prince. And though I didn’t realize it at the time, his country had raised him too. The truth is, Henry and I have been together since the beginning of this year. The truth is, as many of you have read, we have both struggled every day with what this means for our families, our countries, and our futures. The truth is, we have both had to make compromises that cost us sleep at night in order to afford us enough time to share our relationship with the world on our own terms. We were not afforded that liberty. But the truth is, also, simply this: love is indomitable. America has always believed this. And so, I am not ashamed to stand here today where presidents have stood and say that I love him, the same as Jack loved Jackie, the same as Lyndon loved Lady Bird. Every person who bears a legacy makes the choice of a partner with whom they will share it, whom the American people will “hold beside them in hearts and memories and history books. America: He is my choice. Like countless other Americans, I was afraid to say this out loud because of what the consequences might be. To you, specifically, I say: I see you. I am one of you. As long as I have a place in this White House, so will you. I am the First Son of the United States, and I’m bisexual. History will remember us. If I can ask only one thing of the American people, it’s this: Please, do not let my actions influence your decision in November. The decision you will make this year is so much bigger than anything I could ever say or do, and it will determine the fate of this country for years to come. My mother, your president, is the warrior and the champion that each and every American deserves for four more years of growth, progress, and prosperity. Please, don’t let my actions send us backward. I ask the media not to focus on me or on Henry, but on the campaign, on policy, on the lives and livelihoods of millions of Americans at stake in this election. And finally, I hope America will remember that I am still the son you raised. My blood still runs from Lometa, Texas, and San Diego, California, and Mexico City. I still remember the sound of your voices from that stage in Philadelphia. I wake up every morning thinking of your hometowns, of the families I’ve met at rallies in Idaho and Oregon and South Carolina. I have never hoped to be anything other than what I was to you then, and what I am to you now—the First Son, yours in actions and words. And I hope when Inauguration Day comes again in January, I will continue to be.

Tom Paine has almost no influence on present-day thinking in the United States because he is unknown to the average citizen. Perhaps I might say right here that this is a national loss and a deplorable lack of understanding concerning the man who first proposed and first wrote those impressive words, 'the United States of America.' But it is hardly strange. Paine's teachings have been debarred from schools everywhere and his views of life misrepresented until his memory is hidden in shadows, or he is looked upon as of unsound mind. We never had a sounder intelligence in this Republic. He was the equal of Washington in making American liberty possible. Where Washington performed Paine devised and wrote. The deeds of one in the Weld were matched by the deeds of the other with his pen. Washington himself appreciated Paine at his true worth. Franklin knew him for a great patriot and clear thinker. He was a friend and confidant of Jefferson, and the two must often have debated the academic and practical phases of liberty. I consider Paine our greatest political thinker. As we have not advanced, and perhaps never shall advance, beyond the Declaration and Constitution, so Paine has had no successors who extended his principles. Although the present generation knows little of Paine's writings, and although he has almost no influence upon contemporary thought, Americans of the future will justly appraise his work. I am certain of it. Truth is governed by natural laws and cannot be denied. Paine spoke truth with a peculiarly clear and forceful ring. Therefore time must balance the scales. The Declaration and the Constitution expressed in form Paine's theory of political rights. He worked in Philadelphia at the time that the first document was written, and occupied a position of intimate contact with the nation's leaders when they framed the Constitution. Certainly we may believe that Washington had a considerable voice in the Constitution. We know that Jefferson had much to do with the document. Franklin also had a hand and probably was responsible in even larger measure for the Declaration. But all of these men had communed with Paine. Their views were intimately understood and closely correlated. There is no doubt whatever that the two great documents of American liberty reflect the philosophy of Paine. ...Then Paine wrote 'Common Sense,' an anonymous tract which immediately stirred the fires of liberty. It flashed from hand to hand throughout the Colonies. One copy reached the New York Assembly, in session at Albany, and a night meeting was voted to answer this unknown writer with his clarion call to liberty. The Assembly met, but could find no suitable answer. Tom Paine had inscribed a document which never has been answered adversely, and never can be, so long as man esteems his priceless possession. In 'Common Sense' Paine flared forth with a document so powerful that the Revolution became inevitable. Washington recognized the difference, and in his calm way said that matters never could be the same again. It must be remembered that 'Common Sense' preceded the declaration and affirmed the very principles that went into the national doctrine of liberty. But that affirmation was made with more vigor, more of the fire of the patriot and was exactly suited to the hour... Certainly [the Revolution] could not be forestalled, once he had spoken. {The Philosophy of Paine, June 7, 1925}

I wanted to say, Who am I to do this, a woman? But that voice was not mine. It was Father's voice. It was Thomas'. It belonged to Israel, to Catherine, and to Mother. It belonged to the church in Charleston and the Quakers in Philadelphia. It would not, if I could help it, belong to me.

I saw a banner hanging next to city hall in downtown Philadelphia that read, "Kill them all, and let God sort them out." A bumper sticker read, "God will judge evildoers; we just have to get them to him." I saw a T-shirt on a soldier that said, "US Air Force... we don't die; we just go to hell to regroup." Others were less dramatic- red, white, and blue billboards saying, "God bless our troops." "God Bless America" became a marketing strategy. One store hung an ad in their window that said, "God bless America--$1 burgers." Patriotism was everywhere, including in our altars and church buildings. In the aftermath of September 11th, most Christian bookstores had a section with books on the event, calendars, devotionals, buttons, all decorated in the colors of America, draped in stars and stripes, and sprinkled with golden eagles. This burst of nationalism reveals the deep longing we all have for community, a natural thirst for intimacy... September 11th shattered the self-sufficient, autonomous individual, and we saw a country of broken fragile people who longed for community- for people to cry with, be angry with, to suffer with. People did not want to be alone in their sorrow, rage, and fear. But what happened after September 11th broke my heart. Conservative Christians rallies around the drums of war. Liberal Christian took to the streets. The cross was smothered by the flag and trampled under the feet of angry protesters. The church community was lost, so the many hungry seekers found community in the civic religion of American patriotism. People were hurting and crying out for healing, for salvation in the best sense of the word, as in the salve with which you dress a wound. A people longing for a savior placed their faith in the fragile hands of human logic and military strength, which have always let us down. They have always fallen short of the glory of God. ...The tragedy of the church's reaction to September 11th is not that we rallied around the families in New York and D.C. but that our love simply reflected the borders and allegiances of the world. We mourned the deaths of each soldier, as we should, but we did not feel the same anger and pain for each Iraqi death, or for the folks abused in the Abu Ghraib prison incident. We got farther and farther from Jesus' vision, which extends beyond our rational love and the boundaries we have established. There is no doubt that we must mourn those lives on September 11th. We must mourn the lives of the soldiers. But with the same passion and outrage, we must mourn the lives of every Iraqi who is lost. They are just as precious, no more, no less. In our rebirth, every life lost in Iraq is just as tragic as a life lost in New York or D.C. And the lives of the thirty thousand children who die of starvation each day is like six September 11ths every single day, a silent tsunami that happens every week.

What would things look like if Satan really took control of a city? Over half a century ago, Presbyterian minister Donald Grey Barnhouse offered his own scenario in his weekly sermon that was also broadcast nationwide on CBS radio. Barnhouse speculated that if Satan took over Philadelphia (the city where Barnhouse pastored), all of the bars would be closed, pornography banished, and pristine streets would be filled with tidy pedestrians who smiled at each other. There would be no swearing. The children would say "Yes, sir" and "No, ma'am," and the churches would be full every Sunday...where Christ was not preached.

My heart is breaking because I’m alone. I know I have Wyatt right now, but that will change. I’ll go back to Philadelphia and be a single mom. It’s

When our government was in the process of being formed, Benjamin Franklin addressed the chairman of the Constitutional Convention, meeting at Philadelphia in 1787, saying, “I have lived, sir, a long time, and the longer I live the more convincing proofs I see of this truth: that God governs in the affairs of men. And if a sparrow cannot fall to the ground without His notice, it is probable that an empire cannot rise without His aid.

I've always known what you were thinking. You're squeezing that marble in your pocket and you're thinking your cattle wouldn't be at risk if it weren't for Louise. And maybe you're right. But take a hard look, son. When you see that woman working up a sweat pitching hay like a hired hand … you're looking at character. "And if we ever have another family dinner that goes like the last one did, you pay attention. I have an idea that your Louise doesn't sit still for too many insults, and I imagine she could cut someone down to size in about three sentences if she wanted to. But she sat silent while Philadelphia ridiculed and belittled her. Louise did this out of respect for you and this family. That is also character. "Maybe you really believe Wally is living your life. If so, then you haven't been honest with yourself. And you haven't taken a good hard look at the life you have. Mark my words, Max. Someday you're going to hold that marble, and it won't be a symbol of all you lost. That marble will be the gold you went to Piney Creek to find. It will be the most precious thing you own. I say this because I didn't raise any stupid sons.

And although better coverage of the outbreak’s evolution in the press couldn’t have stopped the influenza virus, a single newspaper headline in Philadelphia saying “Don’t Go to Any Parades; for the Love of God Cancel Your Stupid Parade” could have saved hundreds of lives. It would have done a lot more than those telling people, “Don’t Get Scared!” Telling people that things are fine is not the same as making them fine. This failure is in the past. Journalists and editors had their reasons. Risking jail time is no joke. But learning from this breakdown in truth-telling is important because the fourth estate can’t fail again. We are fortunate today to have organizations like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the World Health Organization that track how diseases are progressing and report these findings. In the event of an outbreak similar to the Spanish flu, they will be wonderful resources. I hope we’ll be similarly lucky to have journalists who will be able to share necessary information with the public. The public is at its strongest when it is well informed. Despite Lippmann’s claims to the contrary, we are smart, and we are good, and we are always stronger when we work together. If there is a next time, it would be very much to our benefit to remember that.

These people who judge us should take a city bus or a cab through the South Bronx, the Central Ward of Newark, North Philadelphia, the Northwest section of the District of Columbia or any Third World reservation, and see if they can note a robbery in progress. See if they recognize the murder of innocent people. This is the issue, the myth that the Imperialists should not be confronted and cannot be beaten is eroding fast and we stand here ready to do whatever to make the myth erode even faster, and to say for the record that not only will the Imperialist U.S. lose, but that it should lose.

red lips. “Isn’t it a lovely word? James says he’s dreadfully handsome and so well off. Imagine him wanting to marry me with all those beauties in Philadelphia!” “Yes,” Meagan

We should have Tommy go to the crash site,” Vaughn says. “He knows a lot of cops. Maybe they can give him information.

virus, a single newspaper headline in Philadelphia saying “Don’t Go to Any Parades; for the Love of God Cancel Your Stupid Parade” could have saved hundreds of lives. It would have done a lot more than those telling people, “Don’t Get Scared!” Telling people that things are fine is not the same as making them fine. This failure is in the past. Journalists and editors had their reasons. Risking jail time is no joke. But learning from this breakdown in truth-telling is important because the fourth estate can’t fail again. We are fortunate today to have organizations like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the World Health Organization that track how diseases are progressing and report these findings. In the event of an outbreak similar to the Spanish flu, they will be wonderful resources. I hope we’ll be similarly lucky to have journalists who will be able to share necessary information with the public. The public is at its strongest when it is well informed. Despite Lippmann’s claims to the contrary, we are smart, and we are good, and we are always stronger when we work together. If there is a next time, it would be very much to our benefit to remember that.

So tell me, Miss Fitt, do you know when your brother will return?" "No." I wet my lips. "Do you know Elijah?" He looked off to the right. "I know of your brother." "Oh?" "Of course." He folded his arms over his chest and returned his gaze to me. "Everyone knows of the Philadelphia Fitts.I even know of you." "You mean Allison told you about me." His lips twitched. "Certainly." I stroked my amethysts and made my expression passive. I didn't care one whit about her gossip-though I did wish she wouldn't talk about me to Clarence. I'd prefer if eligible young men learned my faults after meeting me. He flashed his eyebrows playfully, as if knowing where my thoughts had gone. "You needn't worry. She's said nothing unkind. She finds you amusing-she likes to talk, you know?" "I hadn't noticed," I said flatly. Saying Allison loved to gossip was like saying birds enjoyed flying. It was not so much a hobby as part of her physiology. Clarence's smile expanded, and his eyes crinkled. "Apparently there was an insult you gave her a few days ago, though...She had to ask me what it meant." My face warmed, and I looked away. "I believe I might have called her a spoiled Portia with no concept of mercy." He laughed and hit his knee. "That's right. Portia's speech on mercy in the final act of The Merchant of Venice. Allie had no idea what you meant." "In my defense, she was taunting me-" "With no mercy?" "Something like that," I mumbled, embarrassed he'd heard abou tit. "Oh,I have no doubt. One of Allie's charms is her childish teasing." He laughed again and shook his head. "Next time, though, I suggest you use less obscure insults. They might hit their mark better.

..I began speaking.. First, I took issue with the media's characterization of the post-Katrina New Orleans as resembling the third world as its poor citizens clamored for a way out. I suggested that my experience in New Orleans working with the city's poorest people in the years before the storm had reflected the reality of third-world conditions in New Orleans, and that Katrina had not turned New Orleans into a third-world city but had only revealed it to the world as such. I explained that my work, running Reprieve, a charity that brought lawyers and volunteers to the Deep South from abroad to work on death penalty issues, had made it clear to me that much of the world had perceived this third-world reality, even if it was unnoticed by our own citizens. To try answer Ryan's question, I attempted to use my own experience to explain that for many people in New Orleans, and in poor communities across the country, the government was merely an antagonist, a terrible landlord, a jailer, and a prosecutor. As a lawyer assigned to indigent people under sentence of death and paid with tax dollars, I explained the difficulty of working with clients who stand to be executed and who are provided my services by the state, not because they deserve them, but because the Constitution requires that certain appeals to be filed before these people can be killed. The state is providing my clients with my assistance, maybe the first real assistance they have ever received from the state, so that the state can kill them. I explained my view that the country had grown complacent before Hurricane Katrina, believing that the civil rights struggle had been fought and won, as though having a national holiday for Martin Luther King, or an annual march by politicians over the bridge in Selma, Alabama, or a prosecution - forty years too late - of Edgar Ray Killen for the murder of civil rights workers in Philadelphia, Mississippi, were any more than gestures. Even though President Bush celebrates his birthday, wouldn't Dr. King cry if he could see how little things have changed since his death? If politicians or journalists went to Selma any other day of the year, they would see that it is a crumbling city suffering from all of the woes of the era before civil rights were won as well as new woes that have come about since. And does anyone really think that the Mississippi criminal justice system could possibly be a vessel of social change when it incarcerates a greater percentage of its population than almost any place in the world, other than Louisiana and Texas, and then compels these prisoners, most of whom are black, to work prison farms that their ancestors worked as chattel of other men? ... I hoped, out loud, that the post-Katrina experience could be a similar moment [to the Triangle Shirtwaist factory fiasco], in which the American people could act like the children in the story and declare that the emperor has no clothes, and hasn't for a long time. That, in light of Katrina, we could be visionary and bold about what people deserve. We could say straight out that there are people in this country who are racist, that minorities are still not getting a fair shake, and that Republican policies heartlessly disregard the needs of individual citizens and betray the common good. As I stood there, exhausted, in front of the thinning audience of New Yorkers, it seemed possible that New Orleans's destruction and the suffering of its citizens hadn't been in vain.

Okay, smartyboots, how about if you’re flying at eighteen thousand feet at, say, a hundred and forty miles an hour,” I said. “You’re facing a southwest wind of about seven knots. How long would it take you to fly from Philadelphia to Billings, Montana?” Omega frowned as he started to work the math. “Are you saying you know how to make that calculation?” the Director asked. “I’m saying I’m smart enough to know that I’ll get there when I get there!” I

Verbal facility with smells and flavors doesn’t come naturally. As babies, we learn to talk by naming what we see. “Baby points to a lamp, mother says, ‘Yes, a lamp,’” says Johan Lundström, a biological psychologist with the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia. “Baby smells an odor, mother says nothing.” All our lives, we communicate through visuals. No one, with a possible exception made for Sue Langstaff, would say, “Go left at the smell of simmering hotdogs.

Yes, they’re a little biased there,” I agree. Mike smiles at this understatement, knowing as I do that saying they’re a little biased in Mudd’s favor at the Mudd-family-run Mudd home in Maryland is like saying cheese steaks are kind of associated with Philadelphia.

You’ll love Philadelphia,” she said. “But watch out for the ladies who are putting on your shin-dig. There’s a romance writing group near here in Erie, and let me just say—we’ve been called out to a few of their parties. Some of those chicks are decently hard-core.

So many of the men who came to the West were southerners— men looking for work and a new life after the Civil War—that chivalrousness and strict codes of honor were soon thought of as western traits. There were very few women in Wyoming during territorial days, so when they did arrive (some as mail-order brides from places like Philadelphia) there was a standoffishness between the sexes and a formality that persists now. Ranchers still tip their hats and say, "Howdy, ma'am" instead of shaking hands with me. Even young cowboys are often evasive with women. It's not that they're Jekyll and Hyde creatures—gentle with animals and rough on women—but rather, that they don't know how to bring their tenderness into the house and lack the vocabulary to express the complexity of what they feel.

They say in extreme moments time will slow, returning to its unmoving core, and standing there, it seemed as if everything stopped. Within the stillness, I felt the old, irrepressible ache to know what my point in the world might be. I felt the longing more solemnly than anything I’d ever felt, even more than my old innate loneliness. What came to me was the fleur de lis button in the box and the lost girl who’d put it there, how I’d twice carried it from Charleston to Philadelphia and back, carried it like a sad, decaying hope.

Next time you feel like saying something, before you open your yap and make a fool out of yourself and everyone who loves you, reformulate your statement as an I Message. Once you do that simple trick, it pretty much becomes illegal for the other person to get mad at you.

I was so struck by Flow’s negative implications for parents that I decided I wanted to speak to Csikszentmihalyi, just to make sure I wasn’t misreading him. And eventually I did, at a conference in Philadelphia where he was one of the marquee speakers. As we sat down to chat, the first thing I asked was why he talked so little about family life in Flow. He devotes only ten pages to it. “Let me tell you a couple of things that may be relevant to you,” he said. And then he told a personal story. When Csikszentmihalyi first developed the Experience Sampling Method, one of the first people he tried it out on was himself. “And at the end of the week,” he said, “I looked at my responses, and one thing that suddenly was very strange to me was that every time I was with my two sons, my moods were always very, very negative.” His sons weren’t toddlers at that point either. They were older. “And I said, ‘This doesn’t make any sense to me, because I’m very proud of them, and we have a good relationship.’ ” But then he started to look at what, specifically, he was doing with his sons that made his feelings so negative. “And what was I doing?” he asked. “I was saying, ‘It’s time to get up, or you will be late for school.’ Or, ‘You haven’t put away your cereal dish from breakfast.’ ” He was nagging, in other words, and nagging is not a flow activity. “I realized,” he said, “that being a parent consists, in large part, of correcting the growth pattern of a person who is not necessarily ready to live in a civilized society.” I asked if, in that same data set, he had any numbers about flow in family life. None were in his book. He said he did. “They were low. Family life is organized in a way that flow is very difficult to achieve, because we assume that family life is supposed to relax us and to make us happy. But instead of being happy, people get bored.” Or enervated, as he’d said before, when talking about disciplining his sons. And because children are constantly changing, the “rules” of handling them change too, which can further confound a family’s ability to flow. “And then we get into these spirals of conflict and so forth,” he continued. “That’s why I’m saying it’s easier to get into flow at work. Work is more structured. It’s structured more like a game. It has clear goals, you get feedback, you know what has to be done, there are limits.” He thought about this. “Partly, the lack of structure in family life, which seems to give people freedom, is actually a kind of an impediment.

REV1.11 Saying, I am Alpha and Omega, the first and the last: and, What thou seest, write in a book, and send it unto the seven churches which are in Asia; unto Ephesus, and unto Smyrna, and unto Pergamos, and unto Thyatira, and unto Sardis, and unto Philadelphia, and unto Laodicea.

I went ahead and looked up "discrimination" in the dictionary, and do you know what it means? "The ability to understand that one thing is different from another thing." Yeah! So apparently if I happen to notice that, say, Sylvester Stallone's immense, cut bulk is different from Arnold's insanely massed-up physique, suddenly I'm the bad guy? They're not the same, you guys. Two different giant dudes blasting you in the face is just that—two different giant dudes blasting you in the face. Pretend otherwise and you're just fooling yourself. No, it is NOT all the same in the dark.

And there you have your Founders and Framers in all their elite glory—the 1 percent of their time. Many spent more than they made. Struggled their entire lives with debt. And, when they could, always married into money. They were—obvious to say—petty, flawed, inconsistent, and all too human. Yet compared to many of our feckless lawmakers of today,XV those rich white guys were indeed like demigods come from Mount Olympus to walk the Earth. Or at least the streets of Philadelphia. Not merely politicians, they were (collectively) inventors, architects, scientists, linguists, and scholars who had studied Greek and Latin; who read Voltaire, John Stuart Mill, and David Hume. More interestingly, Voltaire, John Stuart Mill, and David Hume read them.XVI They were eloquent orators and brilliant writers. They wrote books, political articles, essays, and long, philosophical letters to their wives, friends, and to one another.XVII So who were those guys? They were men of the Enlightenment who valued reason over dogma, tolerance over bigotry, and science over faith. And, unlike the current Right-Wing doomsayers and fearmongers, they were all, truly, apostles of optimism.

Last month, on a very windy day, I was returning from a lecture I had given to a group in Fort Washington. I was beginning to feel unwell. I was feeling increasing spasms in my legs and back and became anxious as I anticipated a difficult ride back to my office. Making matters worse, I knew I had to travel two of the most treacherous high-speed roads near Philadelphia – the four-lane Schuylkill Expressway and the six-lane Blue Route. You’ve been in my van, so you know how it’s been outfitted with everything I need to drive. But you probably don’t realize that I often drive more slowly than other people. That’s because I have difficulty with body control. I’m especially careful on windy days when the van can be buffeted by sudden gusts. And if I’m having problems with spasms or high blood pressure, I stay way over in the right hand lane and drive well below the speed limit. When I’m driving slowly, people behind me tend to get impatient. They speed up to my car, blow their horns, drive by, stare at me angrily, and show me how long their fingers can get. (I don't understand why some people are so proud of the length of their fingers, but there are many things I don't understand.) Those angry drivers add stress to what already is a stressful experience of driving. On this particular day, I was driving by myself. At first, I drove slowly along back roads. Whenever someone approached, I pulled over and let them pass. But as I neared the Blue Route, I became more frightened. I knew I would be hearing a lot of horns and seeing a lot of those long fingers. And then I did something I had never done in the twenty-four years that I have been driving my van. I decided to put on my flashers. I drove the Blue Route and the Schuylkyll Expressway at 35 miles per hour. Now…Guess what happened? Nothing! No horns and no fingers. But why? When I put on my flashers, I was saying to the other drivers, “I have a problem here – I am vulnerable and doing the best I can.” And everyone understood. Several times, in my rearview mirror I saw drivers who wanted to pass. They couldn’t get around me because of the stream of passing traffic. But instead of honking or tailgating, they waited for the other cars to pass, knowing the driver in front of them was in some way weak. Sam, there is something about vulnerability that elicits compassion. It is in our hard wiring. I see it every day when people help me by holding doors, pouring cream in my coffee, or assist me when I put on my coat. Sometimes I feel sad because from my wheelchair perspective, I see the best in people. But those who appear strong and invulnerably typically are not exposed to the kindness I see daily. Sometimes situations call for us to act strong and brave even when we don't feel that way. But those are a few and far between. More often, there is a better pay-off if you don't pretend you feel strong when you feel weak, or pretend that you are brave when you’re scared. I really believe the world might be a safer place if everyone who felt vulnerable wore flashers that said, “I have a problem and I’m doing the best I can. Please be patient!

Shadow did not know what to say. He said, “So where are you calling from?” “None of your goddamn business.” “Are you drunk?” “Not yet. I just keep thinking about Thor. You never knew him. Big guy, like you. Good hearted. Not bright, but he’d give you the goddamned shirt off his back if you asked him. And he killed himself. He put a gun in his mouth and blew his head off in Philadelphia in 1932. What kind of a way is that for a god to die?

Suppose each of us make up a list of, say, fifty or more books that we believe should be in the library. Then , when Robinson goes to the bookseller in Philadelphia let him start with the first of each of our chooses, then the second of each, and so on down, omitting duplicates, of course. Let him go as far as his money lasts. How does that sound." "Vandaliz has a library," Fell said, "and so has Springfield and Edwardsville. why not Everton.

Since none of the banks trusted Trump, the objective Leventhal evaluation was central to understanding the actual state of Trump’s finances. The Leventhal report showed that Trump was no billionaire: he had a net worth of minus $295 million. My story on that report ran across the front page of the Philadelphia Inquirer with the headline: “Bankers Say Trump May Be Worth Less Than Zero.” The lead sentence was, “You may well be worth more than Donald Trump.” Trump

Toward the end, a band that had a young fellow from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania—I remember on account of him saying it two or three times and laughing every time that he did—played a song called 'All She Gets from the Iceman is Ice.' It made the grown folks, most of them anyway, howl laughing. I don’t think I ever seen Mama laugh so hard. When it was about over, the sheriff come up and made them stop playing it, but he was grinning, too, so I figured he was just making them stop as part of the show.

We’ll all fight,” Khalila said. She took another step forward. She was wearing her black Scholar’s robe, and it rippled like shadows in the breeze. “When you go to Boston, you will carry the word of what happened. You will become symbols of what the Burners will become—for better, or for worse. I beg you to think of that legacy, and the future we will share, because one day, we will be friends again, Dr. Askuwheteau. One day, the Library will meet with you in peace, and we will bury our dead together. We are not your enemies. The people in the Serapeums are not your enemies. Please remember, when you tell your stories, when you start your fires, that we saw your home, we saw the love you had for books. Remember that for each of us, that love is why we are here. Why we exist. And remember that we see you, and we grieve for you.” There was something mesmerizing about her in that moment, Jess thought; she seemed taller. Stronger. More real than ever before. It was impossible to look at Khalila Seif and not believe her, not feel the compassion that flowed out of her. She bowed to the survivors of Philadelphia. Askuwheteau stood there for a long, silent moment, staring at her. “You are my enemy,” he said to Khalila at last. “But you have my respect. I will think on what you say.” He picked up a small leather pack from the grass by his feet. “But you should go. Because if any of us find those wearing the sign of the Library here past tomorrow, I may not want to protect you. Anger is like the fires that still burn in my city. It will take time to die.” They

I stared at the black plank of rafter over my head and felt the truth and logic of that, and it came to me that what I feared most was not speaking. That fear was old and tired. What I feared was the immensity of it all—a female abolition agent traveling the country with a national mandate. I wanted to say, Who am I to do this, a woman? But that voice was not mine. It was Father’s voice. It was Thomas’. It belonged to Israel, to Catherine, and to Mother. It belonged to the church in Charleston and the Quakers in Philadelphia. It would not, if I could help it, belong to me.

Part of what kept him standing in the restive group of men awaiting authorization to enter the airport was a kind of paralysis that resulted from Sylvanshine’s reflecting on the logistics of getting to the Peoria 047 REC—the issue of whether the REC sent a van for transfers or whether Sylvanshine would have to take a cab from the little airport had not been conclusively resolved—and then how to arrive and check in and where to store his three bags while he checked in and filled out his arrival and Post-code payroll and withholding forms and orientational materials then somehow get directions and proceed to the apartment that Systems had rented for him at government rates and get there in time to find someplace to eat that was either in walking distance or would require getting another cab—except the telephone in the alleged apartment wasn’t connected yet and he considered the prospects of being able to hail a cab from outside an apartment complex were at best iffy, and if he told the original cab he’d taken to the apartment to wait for him, there would be difficulties because how exactly would he reassure the cabbie that he really was coming right back out after dropping his bags and doing a quick spot check of the apartment’s condition and suitability instead of it being a ruse designed to defraud the driver of his fare, Sylvanshine ducking out the back of the Angler’s Cove apartment complex or even conceivably barricading himself in the apartment and not responding to the driver’s knock, or his ring if the apartment had a doorbell, which his and Reynolds’s current apartment in Martinsburg most assuredly did not, or the driver’s queries/threats through the apartment door, a scam that resided in Claude Sylvanshine’s awareness only because a number of independent Philadelphia commercial carriage operators had proposed heavy Schedule C losses under the proviso ‘Losses Through Theft of Service’ and detailed this type of scam as prevalent on the poorly typed or sometimes even handwritten attachments required to explain unusual or specific C-deductions like this, whereas were Sylvanshine to pay the fare and the tip and perhaps even a certain amount in advance on account so as to help assure the driver of his honorable intentions re the second leg of the sojourn there was no tangible guarantee that the average taxi driver—a cynical and ethically marginal species, hustlers, as even their smudged returns’ very low tip-income-vs.-number-of-fares-in-an-average-shift ratios in Philly had indicated—wouldn’t simply speed away with Sylvanshine’s money, creating enormous hassles in terms of filling out the internal forms for getting a percentage of his travel per diem reimbursed and also leaving Sylvanshine alone, famished (he was unable to eat before travel), phoneless, devoid of Reynolds’s counsel and logistical savvy in the sterile new unfurnished apartment, his stomach roiling in on itself in such a way that it would be all Sylvanshine could do to unpack in any kind of half-organized fashion and get to sleep on the nylon travel pallet on the unfinished floor in the possible presence of exotic Midwest bugs, to say nothing of putting in the hour of CPA exam review he’d promised himself this morning when he’d overslept slightly and then encountered last-minute packing problems that had canceled out the firmly scheduled hour of morning CPA review before one of the unmarked Systems vans arrived to take him and his bags out through Harpers Ferry and Ball’s Bluff to the airport, to say even less about any kind of systematic organization and mastery of the voluminous Post, Duty, Personnel, and Systems Protocols materials he should be receiving promptly after check-in and forms processing at the Post, which any reasonable Personnel Director would expect a new examiner to have thoroughly internalized before reporting for the first actual day interacting with REC examiners, and which there was no way in any real world that Sylvanshine could expect

You know how they say Black Flag got in a van, and they brought punk rock to the world? The Strokes got on a bus, and they brought “downtown cool” to the world. Along with the Internet, they were changing everything, not just music. They were changing attitudes. The Strokes were making New York travel with them. I saw kids in Connecticut and Maine and Philadelphia and DC looking like they had just been drinking on Avenue A all night. Sixteen-year-old kids in white belts and Converse Chuck Taylors with the greasy hair—hair that had been clean a week ago. Those kids had probably never even smelled the inside of a thrift store before Is This It came out. They found a band that they wanted to be like. They found their band. APRIL

He accelerates. The growing complexity of lights threatens him. He is being drawn into Philadelphia. He hates Philadelphia. Dirtiest city in the world, they live on poisoned water, you can taste the chemicals. He wants to go south, down, down the map into orange groves and smoking rivers and barefoot women. It seems simple enough, drive all night through the dawn through the morning through the noon park on a beach take off your shoes and fall asleep by the Gulf of Mexico. Wake up with the stars above perfectly spaced in perfect health. But he is going east, the worst direction, into unhealth, soot, and stink, a smothering hole where you can’t move without killing somebody. Yet the highway sucks him on, and a sign says POTTSTOWN 2. He almost brakes. But then he thinks.

In her current life, it happened at least once a week that someone would wander into the store and then, when they discovered its mission, say something like “Oh, I remember that time!” Fiona had learned to check her temper, to push her toes into the floor so her face didn’t change. “I knew someone whose cousin had it!” they’d continue. “Did you ever see Philadelphia?” And they’d shake their heads in dismay. They meant well, all of them. How could she explain that this city was a graveyard? That they were walking every day through streets where there had been a holocaust, a mass murder of neglect and antipathy, that when they stepped through a pocket of cold air, didn’t they understand it was a ghost, it was a boy the world had spat out? Here, in her hand, a stack of ghosts.

The tone of those negotiations was very contentious,” says Becky Sauerbrunn, who served on the national team’s CBA committee and participated in most of the negotiation sessions. “They didn’t go anywhere. We would go into those meetings and say we want equal pay and they would say you’re not really generating the revenue to deserve equal pay to the men. And it just went around and around like that.” But then on March 7, Rich Nichols saw something that caught him by surprise. It was an article by Jonathan Tannenwald of the Philadelphia Inquirer that broke down financial numbers contained in U.S. Soccer’s General Annual Meeting report. The report itself was released quietly on U.S. Soccer’s website without fanfare—Tannenwald was the only journalist for a major newspaper who picked up on it. What the U.S. Soccer report showed—and what in turn the Philadelphia Inquirer explained—was that U.S. Soccer initially budgeted a $420,000 loss for 2016 but changed their numbers to expect a profit of almost $18 million, based largely on the gate receipts and merchandise sales of the women’s national team during the 2015 Women’s World Cup victory tour.

Eeh, but whah’s the use, the fuckin’ use?” Dixon resting his head briefly tho’ audibly upon the Table. “It’s over . . . ? Nought left to us but Paper-work . . . ?” Their task has shifted, from Direct Traverse upon the Line to Pen-and-Paper Representation of it, in the sober Day-Light of Philadelphia, strain’d thro’ twelve-by-twelve Sash-work, as in the spectreless Light of the Candles in their Rooms, suffering but the fretful Shadows of Dixon at the Drafting Table, and Mason, seconding now, reading from Entries in the Field-Book, as Dixon once minded the Clock for him. Finally, one day, Dixon announces, “Well,— won’t thee at least have a look . . . ?” Mason eagerly rushes to inspect the Map of the Boundaries, almost instantly boggling, for there bold as a Pirate’s Flag is an eight-pointed Star, surmounted by a Fleur-de-Lis. “What’s this thing here? pointing North? Wasn’t the l’Grand flying one of these? Doth it not signify, England’s most inveterately hated Rival? France?” “All respect, Mason,— among Brother and Sister Needle-folk in ev’ry Land, ’tis known universally, as the ‘Flower-de-Luce.’ A Magnetickal Term.” “ ‘Flower of Light’? Light, hey? Sounds Encyclopedistick to me, perhaps even Masonick,” says Mason. A Surveyor’s North-Point, Dixon explains, by long Tradition, is his own, which he may draw, and embellish, in any way he pleases, so it point where North be. It becomes his Hall-Mark, personal as a Silver-Smith’s, representative of his Honesty and Good Name. Further, as with many Glyphs, ’tis important ever to keep Faith with it,— for an often enormous Investment of Faith, and Will, lies condens’d within, giving it a Potency in the World that the Agents of Reason care little for. “ ’Tis an ancient Shape, said to go back to the earliest Italian Wind-Roses,” says Dixon, “— originally, at the North, they put the Letter T, for Tramontane, the Wind that blew down from the Alps . . . ? Over the years, as ever befalls such frail Bric-a-Brack as Letters of the Alphabet, it was beaten into a kind of Spear-head,— tho’ the kinder-hearted will aver it a Lily, and clash thy Face, do tha deny it.” “Yet some, finding it upon a new Map, might also take it as a reassertion of French claims to Ohio,” Mason pretends to remind him. “Aye, tha’ve found me out, I confess,— ’tis a secret Message to all who conspire in the Dark! Eeh! The old Jesuit Canard again!

But that California trip was just a flash in the eye of that year. The rest of the time, I hung in purgatory, playing talent shows and showcases here and there, living like a normal teenager in Philadelphia. Or maybe I should say living like a normal black teenager, which meant that aimlessness was accompanied by a certain unique set of risks. One night, I was out driving with a few friends of mine when the police pulled us over. We were told we fit the description of someone who had committed a robbery or stolen a car, though I don’t really know what kind of description that could have been: three black kids in a Hyundai blasting U2’s Joshua Tree on their way back from Bible study? The officer actually drew a gun. I was terrified. The worst part of all was that when I saw the police in the rearview mirror, I started thinking that maybe I had stolen the car. I don’t know what the psychological phenomenon is called, exactly, but when you encircle someone with suspicion, the idea of guilt just starts to appear within them. It was a terrible feeling and it’s a terrible process, and it was another reminder that the life I was leading, while superficially uneventful, had the potential to turn against me at any moment.

Jefferson was a genius, the historian Joseph Ellis has noted, at concealing contradictions within abstractions. The Virginian who insisted “that all men are created equal” arrived in Philadelphia attended by opulently attired slaves. 36 His declaration coupled universal principles with an implausibly long list of offenses—twenty-seven in all—committed personally by George III: that’s why the complete document can’t be quoted today without sounding a little silly. Nor did Jefferson, any more than Paine, say anything about what kind of government might replace that of the British tyrant. Details weren’t either patriot’s strength. Had they been, independence might never have been attempted, for details dim the flames fireships require. They disconnect ends of arguments from their beginnings. That’s why Paine and Jefferson thought it necessary first to tilt history, and only at that point to begin to make it. Rhetoric, their lever, had to be clearer than truth, even if necessary an inversion of it. 37 George III was no Nero, not even a James II. Jefferson nonetheless struck from his indictments the charge that the king had supported the slave trade, for this would have slandered slavery’s reputation. And that would have made the vote for freedom less than unanimous. 38

I heard the fear in the first music I ever knew, the music that pumped from boom boxes full of grand boast and bluster. The boys who stood out on Garrison and Liberty up on Park Heights loved this music because it told them, against all evidence and odds, that they were masters of their own lives, their own streets, and their own bodies. I saw it in the girls, in their loud laughter, in their gilded bamboo earrings that announced their names thrice over. And I saw it in their brutal language and hard gaze, how they would cut you with their eyes and destroy you with their words for the sin of playing too much. “Keep my name out your mouth,” they would say. I would watch them after school, how they squared off like boxers, vaselined up, earrings off, Reeboks on, and leaped at each other. I felt the fear in the visits to my Nana’s home in Philadelphia. You never knew her. I barely knew her, but what I remember is her hard manner, her rough voice. And I knew that my father’s father was dead and that my uncle Oscar was dead and that my uncle David was dead and that each of these instances was unnatural. And I saw it in my own father, who loves you, who counsels you, who slipped me money to care for you. My father was so very afraid. I felt it in the sting of his black leather belt, which he applied with more anxiety than anger, my father who beat me as if someone might steal me away, because that is exactly what was happening all around us. Everyone had lost a child, somehow, to the streets, to jail, to drugs, to guns. It was said that these lost girls were sweet as honey and would not hurt a fly. It was said that these lost boys had just received a GED and had begun to turn their lives around. And now they were gone, and their legacy was a great fear. Have they told you this story? When your grandmother was sixteen years old a young man knocked on her door. The young man was your Nana Jo’s boyfriend. No one else was home. Ma allowed this young man to sit and wait until your Nana Jo returned. But your great-grandmother got there first. She asked the young man to leave. Then she beat your grandmother terrifically, one last time, so that she might remember how easily she could lose her body. Ma never forgot. I remember her clutching my small hand tightly as we crossed the street. She would tell me that if I ever let go and were killed by an onrushing car, she would beat me back to life. When I was six, Ma and Dad took me to a local park. I slipped from their gaze and found a playground. Your grandparents spent anxious minutes looking for me. When they found me, Dad did what every parent I knew would have done—he reached for his belt. I remember watching him in a kind of daze, awed at the distance between punishment and offense. Later, I would hear it in Dad’s voice—“Either I can beat him, or the police.” Maybe that saved me. Maybe it didn’t. All I know is, the violence rose from the fear like smoke from a fire, and I cannot say whether that violence, even administered in fear and love, sounded the alarm or choked us at the exit. What I know is that fathers who slammed their teenage boys for sass would then release them to streets where their boys employed, and were subject to, the same justice. And I knew mothers who belted their girls, but the belt could not save these girls from drug dealers twice their age. We, the children, employed our darkest humor to cope. We stood in the alley where we shot basketballs through hollowed crates and cracked jokes on the boy whose mother wore him out with a beating in front of his entire fifth-grade class. We sat on the number five bus, headed downtown, laughing at some girl whose mother was known to reach for anything—cable wires, extension cords, pots, pans. We were laughing, but I know that we were afraid of those who loved us most. Our parents resorted to the lash the way flagellants in the plague years resorted to the scourge.

Successful con men are treated with considerable respect in the South. A good slice of the settler population of that region were men who’d been given a choice between being shipped off to the New World in leg-irons and spending the rest of their lives in English prisons. The Crown saw no point in feeding them year after year, and they were far too dangerous to be turned loose on the streets of London—so, rather than overload the public hanging schedule, the King’s Minister of Gaol decided to put this scum to work on the other side of the Atlantic, in The Colonies, where cheap labor was much in demand. Most of these poor bastards wound up in what is now the Deep South because of the wretched climate. No settler with good sense and a few dollars in his pocket would venture south of Richmond. There was plenty of opportunity around Boston, New York, and Philadelphia—and by British standards the climate in places like South Carolina and Georgia was close to Hell on Earth: swamps, alligators, mosquitoes, tropical disease... all this plus a boiling sun all day long and no way to make money unless you had a land grant from the King... So the South was sparsely settled at first, and the shortage of skilled labor was a serious problem to the scattered aristocracy of would-be cotton barons who’d been granted huge tracts of good land that would make them all rich if they could only get people to work it. The slave-trade was one answer, but Africa in 1699 was not a fertile breeding ground for middle-management types... and the planters said it was damn near impossible for one white man to establish any kind of control over a boatload of black primitives. The bastards couldn’t even speak English. How could a man get the crop in, with brutes like that for help? There would have to be managers, keepers, overseers: white men who spoke the language, and had a sense of purpose in life. But where would they come from? There was no middle class in the South: only masters and slaves... and all that rich land lying fallow. The King was quick to grasp the financial implications of the problem: The crops must be planted and harvested, in order to sell them for gold—and if all those lazy bastards needed was a few thousand half-bright English-speaking lackeys in order to bring the crops in... hell, that was easy: Clean out the jails, cut back on the Crown’s grocery bill, jolt the liberals off balance by announcing a new “Progressive Amnesty” program for hardened criminals.... Wonderful. Dispatch royal messengers to spread the good word in every corner of the kingdom; and after that send out professional pollsters to record an amazing 66 percent jump in the King’s popularity... then wait a few weeks before announcing the new 10 percent sales tax on ale. That’s how the South got settled. Not the whole story, perhaps, but it goes a long way toward explaining why George Wallace is the Governor of Alabama. He has the same smile as his great-grandfather—a thrice-convicted pig thief from somewhere near Nottingham, who made a small reputation, they say, as a jailhouse lawyer, before he got shipped out. With a bit of imagination you can almost hear the cranky little bastard haranguing his fellow prisoners in London jail, urging them on to revolt: “Lissen here, you poor fools! There’s not much time! Even now—up there in the tower—they’re cookin up some kind of cruel new punishment for us! How much longer will we stand for it? And now they want to ship us across the ocean to work like slaves in a swamp with a bunch of goddamn Hottentots! “We won’t go! It’s asinine! We’ll tear this place apart before we’ll let that thieving old faggot of a king send us off to work next to Africans! “How much more of this misery can we stand, boys? I know you’re fed right up to here with it. I can see it in your eyes— pure misery! And I’m tellin’ you, we don’t have to stand for it!...

Benjamin Franklin addressed the chairman of the Constitutional Convention, meeting at Philadelphia in 1787, saying, “I have lived, sir, a long time, and the longer I live the more convincing proofs I see of this truth: that God governs in the affairs of men. And if a sparrow cannot fall to the ground without His notice, it is probable that an empire cannot rise without His aid.

A deep plum color infused his cheeks, and he leaned toward her: "Whatever happens is well deserved. Whose fault is it that my daughter may die?" "I'm not sure," Louise said thoughtfully, moving her glass in damp circles on the table. "Maybe it's Philadelphia's fault for not saying no when she should have. Maybe it's your fault for not setting limits and for letting her believe rules don't apply to her. Maybe it's Max's fault because he loved her too much. Maybe it's your wife's fault for dying too soon. Maybe it's my fault for marrying Max when I didn't even want to. Maybe it's Livvy's fault for buying land outside Fort Houser and making it possible for her son to meet your daughter. Maybe the weather is to blame for providing a warm spring evening conducive to poking. I don't know who or what is to blame. What difference does it make? Will assigning blame change anything?

When asked what the biggest challenge is in living out his faith as a Catholic priest, Fr. Charles Zlock, a priest in the archdiocese of Philadelphia, says, “An almost hostile, in-your-face, belligerent ‘I will not follow and I will not participate’ attitude against the faith from fallen-away Catholics.” That’s

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

After the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia offered its new structure of government to the states for ratification, members of the Dismal Swamp Company differed in their opinions of it. Visitors to Mount Vernon heard George Washington say that he was “very anxious” to see all states ratify the Constitution. Alexander Donald wrote: “I never saw him so keen for any thing in my life, as he is for the adoption of the new Form of Government.” Conversations at Mount Vernon touched on demagogues winning state elections to pursue “their own schemes,” on the “impotence” of the Continental Congress, and on the danger of “Anarchy and civil war.” Washington concluded: “it is more than probable we shall exhibit the last melancholy proof, that Mankind are not competent to their own government without the means of coercion in the Sovereign.” By “sovereign” he meant not the people but the national government. Without a new, stronger government, he said, America faced “impending ruin.

D’aron the Daring, Derring, Derring-do, stealing base, christened D’aron Little May Davenport, DD to Nana, initials smothered in Southern-fried kisses, dat Wigga D who like Jay Z aw-ite, who’s down, Scots-Irish it is, D’aron because you’re brave says Dad, No, D’aron because you’re daddy’s daddy was David and then there was mines who was named Aaron, Doo-doo after cousin Quint blew thirty-six months in vo-tech on a straight-arm bid and they cruised out to Little Gorge glugging Green Grenades and read three years’ worth of birthday cards, Little Mays when he hit those three homers in the Pee Wee playoff, Dookie according to his aunt Boo (spiteful she was, misery indeed loves company), Mr. Hanky when they discovered he TIVOed ‘Battlestar Galactica,’ Faggot when he hugged John Meer in third grade, Faggot again when he drew hearts on everyone’s Valentine’s Day cards in fourth grade, Dim Dong-Dong when he undressed in the wrong dressing room because he daren’t venture into the dark end of the gym, Philadelphia Freedom when he was caught clicking heels to that song (Tony thought he was clever with that one), Mr. Davenport when he won the school’s debate contest in eighth grade, Faggot again when he won the school’s debate contest in eighth grade, Faggot again more times than he cared to remember, especially the summer he returned from Chicago sporting a new Midwest accent, harder on the vowels and consonants alike, but sociable, played well with others that accent did, Faggot again when he cried at the end of ‘WALL-E,’ Donut Hole when he started to swell in ninth grade, Donut Black Hole when he continued to put on weight in tenth grade (Tony thought he was really clever with that one), Buttercup when they caught him gardening, Hippie when he stopped hunting, Faggot again when he became a vegetarian and started wearing a MEAT IS MURDER pin (Oh yeah, why you craving mine then?), Faggot again when he broke down in class over being called Faggot, Sissy after that, whispered, smothered in sniggers almost hidden, Ron-Ron by the high school debate team coach because he danced like a cross between Morrissey and some fat old black guy (WTF?) in some old-ass show called ‘What’s Happening!!’, Brainiac when he aced the PSATs for his region, Turd Nerd when he hung with Jo-Jo and the Black Bruiser, D’ron Da’ron, D’aron, sweet simple Daron the first few minutes of the first class of the first day of college.

THINK OF THE WAY a stretch of grass becomes a road. At first, the stretch is bumpy and difficult to drive over. A crew comes along and flattens the surface, making it easier to navigate. Then, someone pours gravel. Then tar. Then a layer of asphalt. A steamroller smooths it; someone paints lines. The final surface is something an automobile can traverse quickly. Gravel stabilizes, tar solidifies, asphalt reinforces, and now we don’t need to build our cars to drive over bumpy grass. And we can get from Philadelphia to Chicago in a single day. That’s what computer programming is like. Like a highway, computers are layers on layers of code that make them increasingly easy to use. Computer scientists call this abstraction. A microchip—the brain of a computer, if you will—is made of millions of little transistors, each of whose job is to turn on or off, either letting electricity flow or not. Like tiny light switches, a bunch of transistors in a computer might combine to say, “add these two numbers,” or “make this part of the screen glow.” In the early days, scientists built giant boards of transistors, and manually switched them on and off as they experimented with making computers do interesting things. It was hard work (and one of the reasons early computers were enormous). Eventually, scientists got sick of flipping switches and poured a layer of virtual gravel that let them control the transistors by punching in 1s and 0s. 1 meant “on” and 0 meant “off.” This abstracted the scientists from the physical switches. They called the 1s and 0s machine language. Still, the work was agonizing. It took lots of 1s and 0s to do just about anything. And strings of numbers are really hard to stare at for hours. So, scientists created another abstraction layer, one that could translate more scrutable instructions into a lot of 1s and 0s. This was called assembly language and it made it possible that a machine language instruction that looks like this: 10110000 01100001 could be written more like this: MOV AL, 61h which looks a little less robotic. Scientists could write this code more easily. Though if you’re like me, it still doesn’t look fun. Soon, scientists engineered more layers, including a popular language called C, on top of assembly language, so they could type in instructions like this: printf(“Hello World”); C translates that into assembly language, which translates into 1s and 0s, which translates into little transistors popping open and closed, which eventually turn on little dots on a computer screen to display the words, “Hello World.” With abstraction, scientists built layers of road which made computer travel faster. It made the act of using computers faster. And new generations of computer programmers didn’t need to be actual scientists. They could use high-level language to make computers do interesting things.* When you fire up a computer, open up a Web browser, and buy a copy of this book online for a friend (please do!), you’re working within a program, a layer that translates your actions into code that another layer, called an operating system (like Windows or Linux or MacOS), can interpret. That operating system is probably built on something like C, which translates to Assembly, which translates to machine language, which flips on and off a gaggle of transistors. (Phew.) So, why am I telling you this? In the same way that driving on pavement makes a road trip faster, and layers of code let you work on a computer faster, hackers like DHH find and build layers of abstraction in business and life that allow them to multiply their effort. I call these layers platforms.

The Democrats, of course, tell a different story. This story has two separate versions, both of which I deal with in this book. The first version is that the Democrats have always been the good guys. This story is the equivalent of the defense lawyer who says, “My client is not guilty and has always been, as he is now, an upstanding citizen.” This is the portrait of the Democratic Party that will be on full display at the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia. In a sense, this entire book is a refutation of what will be presented there that week. There we’ll hear about how the Democrats are the party of racial equality, social justice, and economic opportunity. This is the moral basis for the party’s claim to rule.

Philadelphia Inquirer with the headline: “Bankers Say Trump May Be Worth Less Than Zero.” The lead sentence was, “You may well be worth more than Donald Trump.

I am not kidding—this woman sat in our office for three-and-a-half hours without a single question or complaint. And this is Philadelphia! She’d taken the bus, so I offered to drive her home. Depressed and frustrated, I blurted out, “Does Jesus make a difference in your life?” (I thought she might be Catholic.) Please understand, I was not witnessing—I wanted to be witnessed to. She replied, “Jesus is everything to me. I talk to him all the time.” I was floored, partly by the freshness and simplicity of her faith but mainly by the unusual patience that displayed her faith. My frantic busyness was a sharp contrast to her quiet waiting in prayer. She reflected the spirit of prayer. I reflected the spirit of human self-sufficiency. I’d begun the day depressed, partly struggling with the relevance of Jesus. Now I was overwhelmed by the irony of my unbelief. Jesus had been sitting in our waiting room, right in front of me, as obvious as the daylight. I had walked by him all day. I had wondered if Jesus was around, and he had been silently waiting all day, saying nothing. It was a stunning display of patience. Cynicism looks in the wrong direction. It looks for the cracks in Christianity instead of looking for the presence of Jesus. It is an orientation of the heart. The sixth cure for cynicism, then, is this: develop an eye for Jesus.

My father is taking me to my first baseball game. The Philadelphia Athletics are playing. I feel I've been sitting on my strange hard seat for a long time. I stand up. It is the National Anthem. "I want to go home now," I tell my father. He is looking down at the big green field. "But the game hasn't started yet," he says. Then he shrugs. He laughs and his laughter is big like the wind. "O.K., kid. O.K." And he takes my by the hand and leads me out of the stadium.

Dickens’s American Notes was regarded as an insult by most Americans in part because he chose to examine and criticize at length slavery, the prison system, and even an asylum for the mentally ill, which he, not always a reliable reporter, identified as being “on Long Island, or Rhode Island: I forget which.” He said that American men spit and that they pirated books, both of which were true. He thought the press was abominable and the prairie not as good as Salisbury Plain and also lacking a Stonehenge. But the ill-feelings of Americans may also in part stem from what the Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville, in probably the best of the nineteenth-century European books on America, Democracy in America, identified as an American trait: an unyielding resentment of any criticism from abroad. American Notes, in fact, has many favorable things to say about New York. For that matter Fanny Trollope loved New York, was one of the first to declare it the leading American city, and found it pleasantly different from the rest of America: New York, indeed, appeared to us, even when we saw it by a soberer light, a lovely and a noble city. To us who had been so long traveling through half-cleared forests, and sojourning among an “I’m-as-good-as-you” population, it seemed, perhaps, more beautiful, more splendid, and more refined than it might have done, had we arrived there directly from London; but making every allowance for this, I must still declare that I think New York one of the finest cities I ever saw, and as much superior to every other in the Union, (Philadelphia not excepted,) as London to Liverpool, or Paris to Rouen.

Myron nodded again. “You find anything else?” “Yes,” she said. “And this too I found funny. Very funny.” “Ha-ha funny or strange funny?” “You decide,” she said. She smoothed her lab coat. “I’m no ballistics expert, but I know a little something about bullet slugs. I pulled two slugs from Yeller. One from the rib cage, one from the head.” “Yeah so?” “The two slugs were of different calibers.” Amanda West put up her index finger. All traces of a smile were gone now. Her face was clear and determined. “Understand what I’m telling you, Mr. Bolitar. I’m not just saying two different guns here. I’m talking about different caliber. And here’s the funny part: all the officers on the Philadelphia force use the same caliber weapon.” Myron felt a chill. “So one of the two bullets came from someone other than a cop.” “And,” she continued, “all those secret service men were carrying guns.” Silence. “So,” she said, “ha-ha funny or strange funny?” Myron looked at her. “You don’t hear me laughing.

Fields: " I'm tendin' bar one time down the lower east-side in New York. A tough paloma comes in there by the name of Chicago Molly. I cautioned her: 'none of your peccadilloes in here'. There was some hot lunch on the bar comprising succotach, philadelphia cream cheese and asparagus with mayonaisse. She dips her mitt down into this melange - I'm yawning at the time - and she hits me right in the mug with it. I jumps over the bar and knocks her down...You were there the night I knocked Chicago Molly down weren't you?" Bartender: " You knocked her down? I was the one that knocked her down". Fields: "Oh yeah ,yes. That's right. He knocked her down. But I was the one start kicking her! So I starts kicking her in the midriff. D'you ever kick a woman in the midriff that had a pair of corsets on?" Customer: "No, I just can't recall any such incident". Fields: "Well I almost broke my great toe. Never had such a painful experience". Customer: "Did she ever come back?" Bartender:"I'll say she came back. She came back a week later and beat the both of us up". Fields: "Yeah but she had another woman with her. Elderly lady with grey hair.

Bel Air (music) Fresh Prince". About how My life upside down backwards. I would like to take a moment. Sitting there I can tell you that I was a prince of a town called Bel Air. Born in West Philadelphia. I spent most of my court date. All is well for fun "Relaxin" Maxi. And every school to take some balls B-. When a few good ones. The problem started in my field. I had to struggle a little afraid of my mother. He said: "You went to live with her aunt and uncle in Bel Air.". I confess and diary But boxed me on my way. He kissed me and I gave him my card. I put my Walkman and said. "I can" I first layer is bad. Champagne glass of orange juice consumption. This is what people who live in Bel Air? Ah, this could be good But wait, I hear you're a prude, all middle class. This is a place where you just need to write a cool cat? I do not I do not know, but I do not understand. I hope you're ready for Prince of Bel-Air. Good landing, and I A police man at my name. However, any attempt to stop. I just moved here I grew up at a high speed, I lost. I whistled for a cab and asked him to come. Put the dice "live" and a mirror. If what I say in the cab are small. But I thought, "No, we must not forget.". -. "I'm home Bel Air". I went to the house about seven or eight. The taxi driver where I wanted to scream. "I do not smell it.". I looked at my kingdom. Eventually, I was able When he sat on the throne, Prince of Bel Air.

Close at Kudzo In the South, we have a saying to describe how we feel about those around us: “close as kudzu,” which means we’re all connected at the roots. Of course, the first reply of some Yankee is: “What’s kudzu?” If you’re going to be a Grits, sugah, you absolutely have to know the answer to this question. Kudzu is a beautiful green leafy vine. If you’ve ever driven through the Deep South, you’ve seen it growing along the side of the road--and right over everything in its path, from trees and bushes to cars, homes, and utility poles. If you stand still long enough in the South, kudzu will grow right over you. The vines grow as much as a foot a day, and in some places one plant can literally stretch for miles. That’s why we say we’re close as kudzu down here--we’re all part of one culture, and we’re all connected in some way. The thing about kudzu is, it’s not even native. It was brought over from Japan for the 1876 Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia. In the 1930s, the government planted it across the South as a means of erosion control. Like many before and sine, kudzu fell in love with the South, and just decided to stay. And who can really blame it, now?

Josie said. “We almost gave up several times,” Dora admitted, shaking her head.  “But maybe the quilt did keep us from going home earlier than we had planned.” “I like the name Rolling Stones,” Josie commented. “Hey, that’s kind of like us. We didn’t use wagons, but we managed to tour part of the country.” “You’re right. I believe we should just keep the quilt.” “Won’t it remind us of all the anxious moments?” “Maybe, but we showed courage and persevered,” Dora said, soundly.  “Hey, where’s the bonus they promised us?” “Well, I don’t know.” Dora searched the box and held up a blue envelope. “Let’s see.” Josie whipped it out of her hand. She broke the seal and took out two airplane tickets. “Airplane tickets?” Dora asked in disbelief. “What do we do with tickets?” “Here’s a note between the tickets.” Josie opened it.  “It says the tickets are for a quilt show in Philadelphia. Milton wants us to attend.  He says he will meet us there and answer more questions for us.” “But we’re afraid to fly,” Dora protested. “Could we send the tickets back?” Josie suggested. “I don’t think so. Milton will be out his money.” “When is it?” Dora took the tickets and examined them. “In September. Only a month away.” Josie tapped her chin in thought. “If we decided to do more touring, we could extend our trip from there to the New England States.” “We could see the autumn leaves,” Dora said, excitement rising in her voice. “Anthony wanted us to visit him in Iowa,” Josie reminded Dora. “How are we going to work all this in?” “I have no idea. Why does traveling have to be so complicated and so full of surprises?”   ______   MDora looped a bright red scarf around her neck while glancing out her bedroom  window. The wind swirled bits of trash down the sidewalk of their Hedge City, Nebraska, home. She sighed, wishing she could stay at home today and read.  Buzzie looked up at her and meowed, expressing the same sentiments. She reached down and patted her softly.  But she didn’t have that luxury today. She had agreed to substitute teach for the current English teacher who would be out for at least a week.  Josie called from the kitchen. “Want more coffee?” “Yes, please.  Fill my mug.  I’ll drink it on my way to school.” She reached into the closet and pulled out a beige sweater. A glance in the mirror confirmed the bright red scarf did wonders for the nondescript sweater’s color. Josie joined her at the door dressed in russet slacks and matching jacket and handed Dora her mug.  “A little blustery today.” “For sure.” Dora eyed Josie, wishing she had the sense of style Josie displayed. The sisters would walk together and then would split to their separate ways, Josie to fill in at the

From the judge who lifted the Philadelphia ban on Never Love a Stranger, on Harold’s books: “I would rather my daughter learn about sex from the pages of a Harold Robbins novel than behind a barn door.” On writing essentials: “Power, sex, deceit, and wealth: the four ingredients to a successful story.” On the drive to write: “I don’t want to write and put it in a closet because I’m not writing for myself. I’m writing to be heard. I’m writing because I’ve got something to say to people about the world I live in, the world I see, and I want them to know about it.

On the first day of the meeting that would become known as the United States Constitutional Convention, Edmund Randolph of Virginia kicked off the proceedings. Addressing his great fellow Virginian General George Washington, victorious hero of the War of Independence, who sat in the chair, Randolph hoped to convince delegates sent by seven, so far, of the thirteen states, with more on the way, to abandon the confederation formed by the states that had sent them—the union that had declared American independence from England and won the war—and to replace it with another form of government. “Our chief danger,” Randolph announced, “arises from the democratic parts of our constitutions.” This was in May of 1787, in Philadelphia, in the same ground-floor room of the Pennsylvania State House, borrowed from the Pennsylvania assembly, where in 1776 the Continental Congress had declared independence. Others in the room already agreed with Randolph: James Madison, also of Virginia; Robert Morris of Pennsylvania; Gouverneur Morris of New York and Pennsylvania; Alexander Hamilton of New York; Washington. They wanted the convention to institute a national government. As we know, their effort was a success. We often say the confederation was a weak government, the national government stronger. But the more important difference has to do with whom those governments acted on. The confederation acted on thirteen state legislatures. The nation would act on all American citizens, throughout all the states. That would be a mighty change. To persuade his fellow delegates to make it, Randolph was reeling off a list of what he said were potentially fatal problems, urgently in need, he said, of immediate repair. He reiterated what he called the chief threat to the country. “None of the constitutions”—he meant those of the states’ governments—“have provided sufficient checks against the democracy.” The term “democracy” could mean different things, sometimes even contradictory things, in 1787. People used it to mean “the mob,” which historians today would call “the crowd,” a movement of people denied other access to power, involving protest, riot, what recently has been called occupation, and often violence against people and property. But sometimes “democracy” just meant assertive lawmaking by a legislative body staffed by gentlemen highly sensitive to the desires of their genteel constituents. Men who condemned the working-class mob as a democracy sometimes prided themselves on being “democratical” in their own representative bodies. What Randolph meant that morning by “democracy” is clear. When he said “our chief danger arises from the democratic parts of our constitutions,” and “none of the constitutions have provided sufficient checks against the democracy,” he was speaking in a context of social and economic turmoil, pervading all thirteen states, which the other delegates were not only aware of but also had good reason to be urgently worried about. So familiar was the problem that Randolph would barely have had to explain it, and he didn’t explain it in detail. Yet he did say things whose context everyone there would already have understood.

Vaughn tells a story about a call girl he once represented who went by the name of Wednesday. “So I asked her why not pick some other day of the week, say, Saturday or Monday? She looks at me like I’m dumb as wood. ‘Isn’t it obvious?’ she says. ‘Wednesday is hump day.’” We all burst out laughing. Vaughn’s punch line opens a valve, unleashing the pressure that’s been building inside of us for the past few months. Susan and I take turns regaling the table with our own tales, and I realize this is what I love about practicing in a firm like ours. It is a truism among lawyers that the practice of law would be great were it not for the clients. And criminal-defense attorneys complain the loudest of all. After all, our clients are not only needy and demanding—they are also, for the most part, criminals. Some are violent criminals, sociopaths, or pathological narcissists. But these are the worst of the lot, and the fewest. Most of our clients don’t find themselves in orange jumpsuits because they harbor a truly malicious nature. They run afoul of the law because their neighborhoods and schools teem with indolence, indifference, and outright criminality. They fail not because they’re unable to adapt to society’s mores, but because they adapt too well to the rules of poverty and violence that govern the world in which they’re raised. Lawyers like me, firms like mine, do our best to guide these men and women through the intestines of the dragon they woke up inside. If they’re lucky, we’ll get them out the other end before too much more damage is done. If we’re lucky, we’ll get paid fairly and enjoy a few laughs along the way—to go with the tears, frustrations,

Everyone was terrified of Fauci,” says Dr. Fishbein. “He runs the agency like a vindictive dictator. Everyone is frightened of him; everyone knows that you never cross Fauci.” In Farber’s words, “Fishbein became a ‘ghost.’ Nobody addressed him in the corridors, in the elevators, in the cafeteria. ‘There was an active campaign to humiliate me,’ he recalls. ‘It was as if I had AIDS in the early days. I was like Tom Hanks in Philadelphia. Nobody would come near me.

Finding a person to declare your craziest, most profound insecurities to is not exactly a picnic. But the bureaucratic idiocy of America’s healthcare system turns what should be a chore into torture. If you’re a middle-class person in America, the dance goes like this: You call your insurance provider to find a meager list of therapists who take your insurance. Most of the people on the list are licensed clinical social workers or licensed mental health counselors. They can be wonderful and very helpful, but they often have less schooling and experience than, say, psychologists and PhDs. After digging deeper, you find that some of these therapists don’t take your insurance after all; others have full client lists. And even if they do have space in the day to treat someone, they might not be interested in treating you. According to one study, a low-income Black person had up to an 80 percent lower chance of receiving a callback for an appointment than a middle-class white person. And even though intellectually, therapists tell you that anger can be a helpful and legitimate emotion in processing trauma, God forbid you actually seem angry on the phone. Several mental health professionals have told me that therapists often avoid rageful clients because they seem threatening or scary. Therapists instead prefer to take on YAVIS—Young, Attractive, Verbal, Intelligent, and Successful clients. They love an amenable type, someone who is curious about their internal workings and eager to plumb them, someone who’s already read articles in The New Yorker about psychology to familiarize them with the language of metacognition and congruence. Good luck if you’re a regular-ass Joe who’d rather watch It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. But say you get lucky and find a licensed clinical psychologist with an open slot. The psychologist is white, of course (86 percent of psychologists in the United States are), which isn’t ideal if you are a person of color. But, fine, whatever: You just need to receive an official diagnosis for your insurance. You are certain you have complex PTSD, but he can’t diagnose you with that because it’s not in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Your insurance only covers treatment for conditions listed in the DSM in order to assign a number of sessions to you. Most forms of insurance will pay for, say, only six months of therapy relating to anxiety, ten for depression, as if you should be better by then. Another consequence of C-PTSD not being in the DSM: This psychologist hasn’t been trained in treating it. He says he doesn’t believe that it’s a real diagnosis. He’d like to provide you with some questionnaires to see if you have something he can actually handle—bipolar disorder, maybe, or manic depression. This does not inspire confidence, so you leave. After some internet sleuthing, you find a woman of color who seems really cool. She’s specifically trained in the treatment of complex trauma. She has blurbs on her website that resonate with you—it seems as if she might truly understand you. But she doesn’t take insurance. (Psychologists are the least likely of any medical provider to take insurance—only about 45 percent of them do. And most of the time, the ones who don’t are the most qualified practitioners.) You can’t exactly blame her. You learn on the internet that insurance companies haven’t updated reimbursement rates for therapists in up to twenty years, despite rising rates for office rent and other administrative costs. If therapists were to rely on reimbursement rates from insurance alone, they’d wind up making about $50,000 a year on average, which is fine, but like, not great if you’re an actual doctor.

I tell people I live in Philadelphia because everyone knows where that is, but Camilla insists on saying, ‘West Chester.’ God forbid someone might think we live in one of those slummy parts of Philadelphia.

Bea sat on the landing for two days, with quick forays downstairs to the corner foodshop for Cokes and trips to the john. She finally gave up and went back to Philadelphia. She left me a note saying that what she really wanted to know was why, this way. I couldn’t tell her; I didn’t know why myself. But I felt like a monster. I had made a desperate bid for self-preservation—or what felt like self-preservation—in the only way I knew how. I hadn’t wanted to hurt anyone. But I had. I promised myself never to get involved like that again. Guilt can be very useful. For the three days this went on in the hallway, Rhea was her usual quizzical and accepting self. I had to tell her about the affair, couched in the fact that it was now over. What she thought about Bea I never stopped long enough to ask, but what she said made good sense to me. “Just because you’re strong doesn’t mean you can let other people depend on you too much. It’s not fair to them, because when you can’t be what they want they’re disappointed, and you feel bad.” Rhea was sometimes very wise, just not for herself. I never forgot that conversation, and we never discussed Bea again. I left for Mexico a week later.

In a few months’ time, Jefferson laid the foundation for our political rights in Philadelphia and went to Richmond to curtail the unfettered economic rights of the rich. The Democrats need to say and say and say what Thomas Jefferson clearly believed: a healthy democracy depends on a fair economy.

story of Private Stephen Kelly of Co. E, 91st Pennsylvania. He joined that unit in August 1861, and was mustered out three years later in Philadelphia. Several years after the war Kelly had occasion to visit the battlefield park and was surprised to find his own grave, (#A-88) nicely defined in the Pennsylvania section of the National Cemetery. It is there today, but Kelly was not in it. He took the whole matter in stride and in good humor, and was once heard to say: “[E]ach Decoration Day I go up there and strew some flowers on the tomb of the man who is substituting for me.

What does it say?" "What do you want it to say?" she asked. "You haven't bothered to tell me what you're after." "I want to buy a battleship, of course. Who has one for sale?" Barbara shot him a dour expression and studied the blue papers. "I'm afraid you're out of luck. The Soviet Union has one left, which is used to train naval cadets. France has long since scrapped hers. Same with Great Britain, even though she still keeps one on the rolls for the sake of tradition." "The United States?" "Five of them have been preserved as memorials." "What are their present locations?" "They're enshrined in the states they were named after: North Carolina, Texas, Alabama, and Massachusetts." "You said five." "The Missouri is maintained by the Navy in Bremerton, Washington. Oh, I almost forgot: the Arizona is still sentimentally kept on naval rolls as a commissioned ship." Jarvis put his hands behind his head and stared at the ceiling. "I seem to recall the battlewagons Wisconsin and Iowa were tied up at the Philadelphia Navy Yard a few years back." "Good memory," said Barbara. "According to the report, the Wisconsin went to the ship-breakers in 1984." "And the Iowa?" "Sold for scrap.

blessed are you when men persecute you and say bad things against you?

One is not startled on the Main Line to hear a businessman conclude a deal with a cheerful “All righty-roo!” Or to depart from a party with a bright “Nightie-noodles!” to his host and hostess. As for the accent, Barbara Best calls it “Philadelphia paralysis,” or “Main Line lockjaw,” pointing out that it is not unlike “Massachusetts malocclusion.” Mrs. Best recalls that when she first moved to the area a native said to her, “My dear, you have the most beautiful speaking voice. I can understand every word you say!

God already knows who did this, after all. If we pray for wisdom, He will give it to us. That’s what the Bible says. So pray for wisdom!

The Bible says if you pray for wisdom, God will give it to you!

Some say that Stonewall was the first time LGBTQ people fought back, which is also not true. Stonewall was preceded by earlier queer revolts such as the Cooper Do-nuts Riot in Los Angeles in 1959, the Dewey’s restaurant sit-in in Philadelphia in 1965, the Compton’s Cafeteria Riot in San Francisco in 1966, and the protests against the raid of the Black Cat Tavern in Los Angeles in 1967, among many others. Scholars, participants, and the interested public also debate how many days the uprising lasted and who threw the first brick, the first bottle, or the first punch. And more, beyond any of these questions we wonder what these events that transpired fifty years ago mean to us today.

But Wheatley’s achievements still proved a point, that Black people weren’t dumb, and this information became ammo for people who were antislavery. People like Benjamin Rush, a physician from Philadelphia who wrote a pamphlet saying that Black people weren’t born savages but instead were made savages by slavery. Record scratch. PAUSE.

It was for this reason that I found yoga soon after I moved to Philadelphia; it was for this reason that I’ve stayed with it. There is a saying that every new yogi finds her way to the mat in order to heal an injury. Sometimes the injury is sports-related, though most times it’s psychic—perhaps it’s a divorce, addiction, or sexual trauma that takes her out of her body as a way to cope when the trauma is too much to bear.

Yeah,” she’d say, “you can’t drive there if you’re a woman.” “Yeah, they had that genocide.” The one place that excited her was Philadelphia. “Philly!” she’d say, eyes lit up. “God, you gotta go.

I mean, I just got to a point, where I was unbelievably exhausted. And I didn't really know why. They kept telling me America. such a nice place. So wonderful. Opportunities! But I get to this place where I'm 22. I'm an alcoholic. I got through fucking college. I got a fucking job. This girl says she likes me. but she's fooling around with some married guy I think. SO PEOPLE DONT FIND OUT. that's her logic. 2 Masters degrees. And I just cant fucking do this shit anymore. I'm not doing shit. Really. Until A. things start making sense. or B. they send me back to Russia. just say I'm a spy. I want a book deal. or C. I get to 65 and I can begin to drink continuously again. That's it. period. end of story. I did have one nice year there where I got to do drugs and smash random pussy. in Philadelphia. Yep. Thank you, Accenture. Much love.

We can understand, they say, the necessity for concealing from the herd such secrets as the Vril, or the rock-destroying force, discovered by J. W. Keely, of Philadelphia, but we cannot understand how any danger could arise from the revelation of such a purely philosophical doctrine, for instance, as the evolution of the Planetary Chains. The danger was that such doctrines as the Planetary Chain, or the seven Races, at once give a clue to the seven-fold nature of man, for each principle is correlated to a plane, a planet, and a race, and the human principles are, on every plane, correlated to seven-fold occult forces, those of the higher planes being of tremendous power. So that any septenary division at once gives a clue to tremendous occult powers, the abuse of which would cause incalculable evil to humanity; a clue which is, perhaps, no clue to the present generation—especially to Westerns, protected as they are by their very blindness and ignorant materialistic disbelief in the occult—but a clue which would, nevertheless, have been very real in the early centuries of the Christian era to people fully convinced of the reality of Occultism, and entering a cycle of degradation which made them rife for abuse of occult powers and sorcery of the worst description.

The Department of Homeland Security announces today that the Transportation Security Administration is expanding its mission to include protecting not just airports, but the interstates and railroads of the United States. As Americans travel, they’ll start noticing checkpoints along the interstates where the TSA and DHS will randomly stop travelers so we can protect the United States from terrorist attacks. With the help of the new national identification cards we’re now issuing, the TSA will be able to keep track of where Americans are going. If you’re traveling from your home, in say, Philadelphia, and you tell the TSA you’re going to Toledo, the TSA’s computer will follow that up by examining the checkpoints in Ohio that lead to Toledo. Tracking chips in these new ID’s, which will only be active when you travel, will ping your ID to see if you arrived at your location. Once the TSA is satisfied, your ID will be no longer pinged.

it is not uncommon for experts in DNA analysis to testify at a criminal trial that a DNA sample taken from a crime scene matches that taken from a suspect. How certain are such matches? When DNA evidence was first introduced, a number of experts testified that false positives are impossible in DNA testing. Today DNA experts regularly testify that the odds of a random person’s matching the crime sample are less than 1 in 1 million or 1 in 1 billion. With those odds one could hardly blame a juror for thinking, throw away the key. But there is another statistic that is often not presented to the jury, one having to do with the fact that labs make errors, for instance, in collecting or handling a sample, by accidentally mixing or swapping samples, or by misinterpreting or incorrectly reporting results. Each of these errors is rare but not nearly as rare as a random match. The Philadelphia City Crime Laboratory, for instance, admitted that it had swapped the reference sample of the defendant and the victim in a rape case, and a testing firm called Cellmark Diagnostics admitted a similar error.20 Unfortunately, the power of statistics relating to DNA presented in court is such that in Oklahoma a court sentenced a man named Timothy Durham to more than 3,100 years in prison even though eleven witnesses had placed him in another state at the time of the crime. It turned out that in the initial analysis the lab had failed to completely separate the DNA of the rapist and that of the victim in the fluid they tested, and the combination of the victim’s and the rapist’s DNA produced a positive result when compared with Durham’s. A later retest turned up the error, and Durham was released after spending nearly four years in prison.21 Estimates of the error rate due to human causes vary, but many experts put it at around 1 percent. However, since the error rate of many labs has never been measured, courts often do not allow testimony on this overall statistic. Even if courts did allow testimony regarding false positives, how would jurors assess it? Most jurors assume that given the two types of error—the 1 in 1 billion accidental match and the 1 in 100 lab-error match—the overall error rate must be somewhere in between, say 1 in 500 million, which is still for most jurors beyond a reasonable doubt. But employing the laws of probability, we find a much different answer. The way to think of it is this: Since both errors are very unlikely, we can ignore the possibility that there is both an accidental match and a lab error. Therefore, we seek the probability that one error or the other occurred. That is given by our sum rule: it is the probability of a lab error (1 in 100) + the probability of an accidental match (1 in 1 billion). Since the latter is 10 million times smaller than the former, to a very good approximation the chance of both errors is the same as the chance of the more probable error—that is, the chances are 1 in 100. Given both possible causes, therefore, we should ignore the fancy expert testimony about the odds of accidental matches and focus instead on the much higher laboratory error rate—the very data courts often do not allow attorneys to present! And so the oft-repeated claims of DNA infallibility are exaggerated.

I'm in a group that puts up statues in Austin, and our most recent work was a bronze Willie, holding Trigger, that now graces the entry to the Austin City Limits studio. I got to pose for that statue, holding a Martin guitar of the same model, N-20. Clete Shields, of Philadelphia, was our sculptor. In 2011, when the statue was cast and delivered to Austin, we covered it with a parachute and stored it in a movie studio until it could be installed. One night, Willie came by for a private unveiling. He was gracious but a little overwhelmed as he exchanged a long look with himself. Bill Wittliff, who is on our committee, explained that what we liked about this piece was its engagement with the audience. "People will come to you," he said. "Little children will touch your knee and seek your counsel." "Do what I say and not what I do," Willie advised.

I don’t say anything. I’ve heard a lot of guys say, But that’s not me. That’s not who I am. I was under a lot of stress. I don’t think stress makes a person “not me.” I think it brings out the “me” beneath the surface.

No,” Mick says. “But I know a lawyer who handles a lot of civil cases against the railroads, on behalf of injured employees. I’ll call him and get back to you with what I find out.

Yet if the book were meant to unveil the secrets of distant times, must it not of necessity have been unintelligible to His first readers - and not only unintelligible, but even irrelevant and useless. If it spake, as some would have us believe, of Huns and Goths and Saracens, of mediæal emperors and popes, of the Protestant Reformation and the French Revolution, what possible interest or meaning could it have for the Christian churches of Ephesus, and Smyrna, and Philadelphia, and Laodicea? Especially when we consider the actual circumstances of those early Christians, many of them enduring cruel sufferings and grievous persecutions, and all of them eagerly looking for an approaching hour of deliverance which was now close at hand, - what purpose could it have answered to send them a document which they were urged to read and ponder, which was yet mainly occupied with historical events so distant as to be beyond the range of their sympathies, and so obscure that even at this day the shrewdest critics are hardly agreed on anyone point? Is it conceivable that an apostle would mock the suffering and persecuted Christians of his time with dark parables about distant ages? If this book were really intended to minister faith and comfort to the very persons to whom it was sent, it must unquestionably deal with matters in which they were practically and personally interested. And does not this very obvious consideration suggest the true key to the Apocalypse? Must it not of necessity refer to matters of contemporary history? The only tenable, the only reasonable, hypothesis is that it was intended to be understood by its original readers; but this is as much as to say that it must be occupied with the events and transactions of their own day, and these comprised within a comparatively brief space of time.

and Aria.” “We should have Tommy go to the crash site,” Vaughn says.

I’ll call her apartment,” Angie says, running out of the room. “We have her mother’s number in New York somewhere on the computer,” Vaughn says. “I’ll look for it.” “Andrea and I can start calling the local hospitals,” says Jill.

Or maybe he didn’t buy the house for the girl,” Tommy says. “Maybe he bought the girl for the house.

Jazz musician Miles Davis once said, “If somebody told me I had only one hour to live, I’d spend it choking a white man. I’d do it nice and slow.” bell hooks, a black professor of English at City College of New York who spells her name in lower case, once wrote, “I am writing this essay sitting beside an anonymous white male that I long to murder.” Demond Washington, a star athlete at Tallassee High School in Tallassee, Alabama, got in trouble for saying over the school intercom, “I hate white people and I’m going to kill them all!” Later he said he did not mean it. Someone who probably did mean it was Maurice Heath, who heads the Philadelphia chapter of the New Black Panther party. He once told a crowd, “I hate white people—all of them! . . . You want freedom? You’re gonna have to kill some crackers! You’re gonna have to kill some of their babies!” Another one who probably meant it is Dr. Kamau Kambon, black activist and former visiting professor of Africana Studies at North Carolina State University in Raleigh. In 2005, Prof. Kambon told a panel at Howard University Law School that “white people want to kill us,” and that “we have to exterminate white people off the face of the planet to solve this problem.” In 2005, James “Jimi” Izrael, a black editorial assistant for the Lexington, Kentucky, Herald- Leader, was on a radio program to talk about Prof. Kambon. Another guest mentioned other blacks who have written about the fantasy of killing whites, and Mr. Izrael began to laugh. “Listen,” he said, “I’m laughing because if I had a dollar for every time I heard a black person [talking about] killing somebody white I’d be a millionaire.” For some, killing whites is not fantasy. Although the press was quiet about this aspect of the story, the two snipers who terrorized the Washington, DC, area in 2002 had a racial motive. Lee Malvo testified that his confederate, John Muhammad, was driven by hatred of America because of its “slavery, hypocrisy and foreign policy.” His plan was to kill six whites every day for 30 days. For a 179-day period in 1973 and 1974, a group of Black Muslim “Death Angels” kept the city of San Francisco in a panic as they killed scores of randomly-chosen “blue-eyed devils.” Some 71 deaths were eventually attributed to them. Four of an estimated 14 Death Angels were convicted of first-degree murder. Most Americans have never heard of what became known as the Zebra Killings. A 2005 analysis of crime victim surveys found that 45 percent of the violent crimes blacks committed were against whites, 43 percent against blacks, and 10 percent against Hispanics. There was therefore slightly more black-on-white than black-on-black crime. When whites committed violence they chose black victims only 3 percent of the time. Violence by whites against blacks, such as the 1998 dragging death of James Byrd, is well reported, but racial murder by blacks is little publicized. For example, in Wilkinsburg, near Philadelphia, 39-year-old Ronald Taylor killed three men and wounded two others in a 2000 rampage, in which he targeted whites. At one point, he pushed a black woman out of his way, saying “Not you, sister. I’m not going to hurt any black people. I’m just out to kill all white people.

In one Globetrotter’s skit, it involved Globetrotter’s Captain Meadowlark Lemon collapsing on the ground, and Wilt threw him up in the air several feet high and caught him like a baby. Lemon weighed 210 lbs. Lemon, and other people including Arnold Schwarzenegger, said that Wilt was the strongest athlete that ever lived. On March 9, 2000, his number 13 was retired by the Globetrotters. Wilt’s NBA Career Accomplishments On October 24, 1959 Wilt finally made his NBA debut. Wilt played for the then, “Philadelphia Warriors.” Wilt immediately became the league’s top earner making $30,000 topping Bob Cousy who was making $25,000. The $30,000 is equivalent to $263,000 in today’s currency as per the year 2019. In Wilt’s 1959-1960 season, which was his rookie year, his team made the playoffs. The Warriors beat the Syracuse Nationals then had to go on to play the Eastern Conference Champions, the Boston Celtics. Coach Red Auerbach strategized his forward Tom Heinsohn to commit fouls on Wilt. When the Warriors shot free throws, Heinsohn grabbed and pushed Wilt to stop him from getting back on defense, so quickly. Wilt was a prolific shot blocker, and this allowed Celtics to score quickly without Wilt protecting the basket. The Warriors lost the series 4 games to two after Tom Heinsohn got a last second tip in to seal the win of the series for the Celtics. As a rookie Wilt shocked Warriors' fans by saying he was thinking of retiring from basketball. He was tired of being double- and triple-teamed, and of teams fouling him very hard. Wilt was afraid that he would lose his temper one day which he did in the playoff series versus Boston. Wilt punched Heinsohn and injured his hand. Wilt played for The Philadelphia Warriors, who then relocated to San Francisco, The Philadelphia 76ers, and The Los Angeles Lakers. He won one title with the 76ers then one with the Lakers. First NBA game Wilt scored 43 points and snatched 28 rebounds. Grabbed his rookie career high of 43 rebounds in a win over the New York Knicks.