Pod People Quotes

The iPod completely changed the way people approach music.

What is going on with you?" she says, shaking her head and pushing me away. "What's up with all the love and affection? I mean, you of all people, you of the eternal iPod-hoodie combo.

Now, 75 years [after To Kill a Mockingbird], in an abundant society where people have laptops, cell phones, iPods, and minds like empty rooms, I still plod along with books. [Open Letter, O Magazine, July 2006]

There was a girl, and her uncle sold her. Put like that it seems so simple. No man, proclaimed Donne, is an island, and he was wrong. If we were not islands, we would be lost, drowned in each other's tragedies. We are insulated (a word that means, literally, remember, made into an island) from the tragedy of others, by our island nature and by the repetitive shape and form of the stories. The shape does not change: there was a human being who was born, lived and then by some means or other, died. There. You may fill in the details from your own experience. As unoriginal as any other tale, as unique as any other life. Lives are snowflakes- forming patterns we have seen before, as like one another as peas in a pod (and have you ever looked at peas in a pod? I mean, really looked at them? There's not a chance you'll mistake one for another, after a minute's close inspection) but still unique. Without individuals we see only numbers, a thousand dead, a hundred thousand dead, "casualties may rise to a million." With individual stories, the statistics become people- but even that is a lie, for the people continue to suffer in numbers that themselves are numbing and meaningless. Look, see the child's swollen, swollen belly and the flies that crawl at the corners of his eyes, this skeletal limbs: will it make it easier for you to know his name, his age, his dreams, his fears? To see him from the inside? And if it does, are we not doing a disservice to his sister, who lies in the searing dust beside him, a distorted distended caricature of a human child? And there, if we feel for them, are they now more important to us than a thousand other children touched by the same famine, a thousand other young lives who will soon be food for the flies' own myriad squirming children? We draw our lines around these moments of pain, remain upon our islands, and they cannot hurt us. They are covered with a smooth, safe, nacreous layer to let them slip, pearllike, from our souls without real pain. Fiction allows us to slide into these other heads, these other places, and look out through other eyes. And then in the tale we stop before we die, or we die vicariously and unharmed, and in the world beyond the tale we turn the page or close the book, and we resume our lives. A life that is, like any other, unlike any other. And the simple truth is this: There was a girl, and her uncle sold her.

To me, at least in retrospect, the really interesting question is why dullness proves to be such a powerful impediment to attention. Why we recoil from the dull. Maybe it’s because dullness is intrinsically painful; maybe that’s where phrases like ‘deadly dull’ or ‘excruciatingly dull’ come from. But there might be more to it. Maybe dullness is associated with psychic pain because something that’s dull or opaque fails to provide enough stimulation to distract people from some other, deeper type of pain that is always there, if only in an ambient, low-level way, and which most of us spend nearly all our time and energy trying to distract ourselves from feeling, or at least from feeling directly or with our full attention. Admittedly, the whole thing’s pretty confusing, and hard to talk about abstractly…but surely something must lie behind not just Muzak in dull or tedious places any more but now also actual TV in waiting rooms, supermarkets’ checkouts, airport gates, SUVs’ backseats. Walkman, iPods, BlackBerries, cell phones that attach to your head. This terror of silence with nothing diverting to do. I can’t think anyone really believes that today’s so-called ‘information society’ is just about information. Everyone knows it’s about something else, way down.

Art isn't only a painting. Art is anything that's creative, passionate, and personal. And great art resonates with the viewer, not only with the creator. What makes someone an artist? I don't think is has anything to do with a paintbrush. There are painters who follow the numbers, or paint billboards, or work in a small village in China, painting reproductions. These folks, while swell people, aren't artists. On the other hand, Charlie Chaplin was an artist, beyond a doubt. So is Jonathan Ive, who designed the iPod. You can be an artists who works with oil paints or marble, sure. But there are artists who work with numbers, business models, and customer conversations. Art is about intent and communication, not substances. An artists is someone who uses bravery, insight, creativity, and boldness to challenge the status quo. And an artists takes it personally. That's why Bob Dylan is an artist, but an anonymous corporate hack who dreams up Pop 40 hits on the other side of the glass is merely a marketer. That's why Tony Hsieh, founder of Zappos, is an artists, while a boiler room of telemarketers is simply a scam. Tom Peters, corporate gadfly and writer, is an artists, even though his readers are businesspeople. He's an artists because he takes a stand, he takes the work personally, and he doesn't care if someone disagrees. His art is part of him, and he feels compelled to share it with you because it's important, not because he expects you to pay him for it. Art is a personal gift that changes the recipient. The medium doesn't matter. The intent does. Art is a personal act of courage, something one human does that creates change in another.

If we believe that we are just animals, without immortal souls, we are already but one step removed from pod people.

Yes! I did [grow up on a Christmas Tree farm], so this is a good season for me. I was too young to help with the hauling of the trees up the hills and putting them onto cars. So, it was my job to pull off the preying mantis pods off of the Christmas trees. The problem with that is if you leave them on there, people bring them into their house. I forgot to check one time and they hatched all over these people’s house. And there were hundreds of thousands of them. And they had little kids, and they couldn’t kill of them because that’d be a bad Christmas.

To me, at least in retrospect, the really interesting question is why dullness proves to be such a powerful impediment to attention. Why we recoil from the dull. Maybe it's because dullness is intrinsically painful; maybe that's where phrases like 'deadly dull' or 'excruciatingly dull' come from. But there might be more to it. Maybe dullness is associated with psychic pain because something that's dull or opaque fails to provide enough stimulation to distract people from some other, deeper type of pain that is always there, if only in an ambient low-level way, and which most of us spend nearly all our time and energy trying to distract ourselves from feeling, or at least from feeling directly or with our full attention. Admittedly, the whole thing's pretty confusing, and hard to talk about abstractly...but surely something must lie behind not just Muzak in dull or tedious places anymore but now also actual TV in waiting rooms, supermarkets' checkouts, airports' gates, SUVs' backseats. Walkmen, iPods, BlackBerries, cell phones that attach to your head. The terror of silence with nothing diverting to do. I can't think anyone really believes that today's so-called 'information society' is just about information. Everyone knows it's about something else, way down.

Jobs planned the iPod to be the first of a new generation of portable post-PC devices, but that secret was invisible to most people.

The older I get, the more I see how much motivations matter. The Zune was crappy because the people at Microsoft don't really love music or art the way we do. We won because we personally love music. We made the iPod for ourselves, and when you're doing something for yourself, or your best friend or family, you're not going to cheese out. If you don't love something, you're not going to cheese out. If you don't love something, you're not going to cheese out. If you don't love something, you're not going to go the extra mile, work the extra weekend, challenge the status quo as much.

Two weeks earlier than scheduled, she flew into Vancouver and signed on with Greenpeace. The work was neither taxing nor truly exciting but the people she met more than compensated and she forged many new friendships. The high points were the trips they made by sea kayak, exploring the wild inlets farther up the coast. They watched bears scoop salmon from the shallows and paddled among pods of orcas, so close you could have reached out and touched them. At night they camped at the water's edge, listening to the blow of whales in the bay and the distant howls of wolves in the forest above.

I was there to get a Ph.D. in English literature. That's not true. I was there to read a lot of books and to discuss them with bright, insightful, book-loving people, an expectation that I pretty quickly learned was about as silly as it could be. Certainly there were other people who loved books, I'm sure there were, but whoever had notified them ahead of time that loving books was not the point, was, in fact, a hopelessly counterproductive and naive approach to the study of literature, neglected to notify me. It turned out that the point was to dissect a book like a fetal pig in biology class or to break its back with a single sentence or to bust it open like a milkweek pod and say, "See? All along it was only fluff," and then scatter it into oblivion with one tiny breath.

When I throw back my head and howl People (women mostly) say But you've always done what you want, You always get your way - A perfectly vile and foul Inversion of all that's been. What the old ratbags mean Is I've never done what I don't. So the shit in the shuttered chateau Who does his five hundred words Then parts out the rest of the day Between bathing and booze and birds Is far off as ever, but so Is that spectacled schoolteaching sod (Six kids, and the wife in pod, And her parents coming to stay)... Life is an immobile, locked, Three-handed struggle between Your wants, the world's for you, and (worse) The unbeatable slow machine That brings what you'll get. Blocked, They strain round a hollow stasis Of havings-to, fear, faces. Days sift down it constantly. Years. --The Life with the Hole in It

He tries again, swallowing hard to ease away the painful lump in his throat. "It's just important. I love you. I'm yours. I need people to know." "Alright," Lindsay says suddenly. He leans down to grab at Pip's bag, throwing stuff out onto the carpet, his iPod and phone and wallet and gloves and Attitude magazine until he finds what he's looking for, a green marker pen, and holds it between his teeth while he starts tugging at the hem of Pip's t-shirt. Pip's too surprised to do anything but submit, he lets Lindsay peel off his t-shirt and throw that on top of all the things from his bag then just watches as Lindsay pulls the pen out of the cap in his mouth and signs his name in big green letters on the side of Pip's stomach. He holds his breath, trying not to suck in the belly fat everybody else keeps telling him is imaginary. "There, you're mine, are you fucking happy now?" Lindsay snaps, and throws the recapped pen across the room to get lost in the bookcase somewhere.

I couldn’t stop the snort that escaped me. If he really was friends with Cinder, it was no wonder why. They were two peas in a pod.” He arched a brow at me and folded his arms stiffly over his chest. “I thought you just said Cinder was one of the greatest characters of all time.” I matched his stubbornness. “Every great character makes mistakes. Cinder was wise by the end and able to rule over his people only because Ellamara taught him how to think beyond himself. He was a great character, but—” “I know, I know,” Brian interrupted with an over-the-top sight. “Ellamara was the real hero.

FRANCESCA You came in out of the night And there were flowers in your hands, Now you will come out of a confusion of people, Out of a turmoil of speech about you. I who have seen you amid the primal things Was angry when they spoke your name In ordinary places. I would that the cool waves might flow over my mind, And that the world should dry as a dead leaf, Or as a dandelion seed-pod and be swept away, So that I might find you again, Alone.

Long live transfinite mountains, the hollow earth, time machines, fractal writing, aliens, dada, telepathy, flying saucers, warped space, teleportation, artificial reality, robots, pod people, hylozoism, endless shrinking, intelligent goo, antigravity, surrealism, software highs, two-dimensional time, gnarly computation, the art of photo composition, pleasure zappers, nanomachines, mind viruses, hyperspace, monsters from the deep and, of course, always and forever, the attack of the giant ants!

What was remarkable was that associating with a computer and electronics company was the best way for a rock band to seem hip and appeal to young people. Bono later explained that not all corporate sponsorships were deals with the devil. “Let’s have a look,” he told Greg Kot, the Chicago Tribune music critic. “The ‘devil’ here is a bunch of creative minds, more creative than a lot of people in rock bands. The lead singer is Steve Jobs. These men have helped design the most beautiful art object in music culture since the electric guitar. That’s the iPod. The job of art is to chase ugliness away.

What the fuck was that? Is it like that vid, with the people and the pods and the dupes?” “Oh, that’s a scary one. It’s sort of like that. He’s in love.” “What with?” “Who,” Peabody said with a laugh. “Apparently he met somebody a few weeks ago, and he’s in love. He’s happy.” “He’s fucking creepy, that’s what he is. I think I like him better when he’s a dick. He kept smiling.” “Happy makes you smile.” “It’s unnatural.

But the pods also held the things people had created—the finest examples of the artistry and the ingenuity of our own species. How could we be so creative and so destructive at the same time?

The older I get, the more I see how much motivations matter. The Zune was crappy because the people at Microsoft don't really love music or art the way we do. We won because we personally love music. We mad e the iPod for ourselves, and when you're doing something for yourself, or your best friend or family, you're not going to cheese out. If you don't love something, you're not going to go the extra mile, work the extra weekend, challenge the status quo as much.

Instructions for Dad. I don't want to go into a fridge at an undertaker's. I want you to keep me at home until the funeral. Please can someone sit with me in case I got lonely? I promise not to scare you. I want to be buried in my butterfly dress, my lilac bra and knicker set and my black zip boots (all still in the suitcase that I packed for Sicily). I also want to wear the bracelet Adam gave me. Don't put make-up on me. It looks stupid on dead people. I do NOT want to be cremated. Cremations pollute the atmosphere with dioxins,k hydrochloric acid, hydrofluoric acid, sulphur dioxide and carbon dioxide. They also have those spooky curtains in crematoriums. I want a biodegradable willow coffin and a woodland burial. The people at the Natural Death Centre helped me pick a site not for from where we live, and they'll help you with all the arrangements. I want a native tree planted on or near my grave. I'd like an oak, but I don't mind a sweet chestnut or even a willow. I want a wooden plaque with my name on. I want wild plants and flowers growing on my grave. I want the service to be simple. Tell Zoey to bring Lauren (if she's born by then). Invite Philippa and her husband Andy (if he wants to come), also James from the hospital (though he might be busy). I don't want anyone who doesn't know my saying anything about me. THe Natural Death Centre people will stay with you, but should also stay out of it. I want the people I love to get up and speak about me, and even if you cry it'll be OK. I want you to say honest things. Say I was a monster if you like, say how I made you all run around after me. If you can think of anything good, say that too! Write it down first, because apparently people often forget what they mean to say at funerals. Don't under any circumstances read that poem by Auden. It's been done to death (ha, ha) and it's too sad. Get someone to read Sonnet 12 by Shakespeare. Music- "Blackbird" by the Beatles. "Plainsong" by The Cure. "Live Like You Were Dying" by Tim McGraw. "All the Trees of the Field Will Clap Their Hands" by Sufian Stevens. There may not be time for all of them, but make sure you play the last one. Zoey helped me choose them and she's got them all on her iPod (it's got speakers if you need to borrow it). Afterwards, go to a pub for lunch. I've got £260 in my savings account and I really want you to use it for that. Really, I mean it-lunch is on me. Make sure you have pudding-sticky toffee, chocolate fudge cake, ice-cream sundae, something really bad for you. Get drunk too if you like (but don't scare Cal). Spend all the money. And after that, when days have gone by, keep an eye out for me. I might write on the steam in the mirror when you're having a bath, or play with the leaves on the apple tree when you're out in the garden. I might slip into a dream. Visit my grave when you can, but don't kick yourself if you can't, or if you move house and it's suddenly too far away. It looks pretty there in the summer (check out the website). You could bring a picnic and sit with me. I'd like that. OK. That's it. I love you. Tessa xxx

To me, at least in retrospect,26 the really interesting question is why dullness proves to be such a powerful impediment to attention. Why we recoil from the dull. Maybe it’s because dullness is intrinsically painful; maybe that’s where phrases like ‘deadly dull’ or ‘excruciatingly dull’ come from. But there might be more to it. Maybe dullness is associated with psychic pain because something that’s dull or opaque fails to provide enough stimulation to distract people from some other, deeper type of pain that is always there, if only in an ambient low-level way, and which most of us27 spend nearly all our time and energy trying to distract ourselves from feeling, or at least from feeling directly or with our full attention. Admittedly, the whole thing’s pretty confusing, and hard to talk about abstractly… but surely something must lie behind not just Muzak in dull or tedious places anymore but now also actual TV in waiting rooms, supermarkets’ checkouts, airports’ gates, SUVs’ backseats. Walkmen, iPods, BlackBerries, cell phones that attach to your head. This terror of silence with nothing diverting to do. I can’t think anyone really believes that today’s so-called ‘information society’ is just about information. Everyone knows28 it’s about something else, way down.

Francesca" You came in out of the night And there were flowers in your hands, Now you will come out of a confusion of people, Out of a turmoil of speech about you. I who have seen you amid the primal things Was angry when they spoke your name In ordinary places. I would that the cool waves might flow over my mind, And that the world should dry as a dead leaf, Or as a dandelion seed-pod and be swept away, So that I might find you again, Alone.

His response was that it was a burden doing what he knew to be correct, to be sound and logical.’ Erskine ran one hand across the pod as if he could touch his daughter within. ‘And how much simpler things would be, how much better for us all, if we had people brave enough to do what was right, instead.

I find it strange that today, when so many people walk around with tiny computers in their pockets -- cameras, phones, personal organizers, iPods--there exists no object at all to slip into your pussy when you go out for a stroll that will rip up the cock of any fucker who sticks it in there. Perhaps it isn't desirable to make female genitalia inaccessible by force. A woman must remain open, and fearful. Otherwise, how would masculinity define itself?

Well, I’m still not convinced you’re actually people, honey.” “I’m a superior mutation?” He seemed eager to embrace the possibility. “I was thinking more like an alien or a pod person. But sure.” “Superman was an alien. I could live with that.” I shrugged. “I always preferred Clark Kent.” He waggled his eyebrows at me. “I always suspected that Clark Kent was the real personality, and—” “Superman was the disguise,” I chimed in. “Exactly. Lois was such a fool.

That afternoon, she thought momentarily of those 1950s B-movies with alien invaders who inhabited unsuspecting human hosts.

Pod koniec kariery szuka się sensu, na jej początku - celu.

It's a complex song, and it's fascinating to watch the creative process as they went back and forth and finally created it over a few months. Lennon was always my favorite Beatle. [ He laughs as Lennon stops during the first take and makes the band go back and revise a chord.] Did you hear that little detour they took? It didn't work, so they went back and started from where they were. It's so raw in this version. It actually makes the sound like mere mortals. You could actually imagine other people doing this, up to this version. Maybe not writing and conceiving it, but certainly playing it. Yet they just didn't stop. They were such perfectionists they kept it going This made a big impression on me when I was in my thirties. You could just tell how much they worked at this. They did a bundle of work between each of these recording. They kept sending it back to make it closer to perfect.[ As he listens to the third take, he points out how instrumentation has gotten more complex.] The way we build stuff at Apple is often this way. Even the number of models we'd make of a new notebook or iPod. We would start off with a version and then begin refining and refining, doing detailed models of the design, or the buttons, or how a function operates. It's a lot of work, but in the end it just gets better, and soon it's like, " Wow, how did they do that?!? Where are the screws?

The world is getting noisier. We've gone from boomboxes to Walkmen to portable CD players to iPods to any song we want, whenever we want it. We've gone from the four television channels of my childhood to the seeming infinity of cable and streaming. As technology moves us faster and faster through time and space, it seems to feel like story is getting pushed out of the way, I mean, literally pushed out of the narrative. But even as our engagement with stories change, or the trappings around it morph from book to audio to Instagram to Snapchat, we must remember our finger beneath the words. Remember that story, regardless of the format, has always taken us to places we never thought we'd go, introduced us to people we never thought we'd meet and shown us worlds that we might have missed. So as technology keeps moving faster and faster, I am good with something slower. My finger beneath the words has led me to a life of writing books for people of all ages, books meant to be read slowly, to be savored.

there are a few still running around that have not been assimilated—Dennis Kucinich, Pat Buchanan, Ralph Nader, Ron Paul—but nobody listens to them, because the pod politicians have told us that they are crazy.

Absolutely, positively going to ignore the hell out of them. They do not need to know I can see or speak with them. I am looking forward to a job filled with peace, quiet, and only living people to occasionally speak with.” Jenny smiled at him. “Good.” She turned on her iPod, synced it with the car, and soon they had Social Distortion blasting through the speakers. Brian grinned and relaxed into the seat. Today is going to be a good day.

The morality of need. The pastor preaches to minds that believe bigger is better; the more spectacular the more important; the most important thing about life is that it is enjoyed; basic needs are a nice home, two cars, a three-week paid vacation, several weekends away; life has cheated you unless you have a Caribbean cruise, a DVD player, and an iPod. People have a corrupted sense of need. Needs become values, they take on their own morality. The language of need has replaced the language of greed.

Oh, you know for years we’ve been making wonderful things. We make your iPods. We make phones. We make them better than anybody else, but we don’t come up with any of these ideas. You bring us things and then we make them. So we went on a tour of America talking to people at Microsoft, at Google, at Apple, and we asked them a lot of questions about themselves, just the people working there. And we discovered that they all read science fiction when they were teenagers. So we think maybe it’s a good thing.

THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY is full of people who are full of themselves. A half-hour’s trawl through the online ocean of blogs, tweets, tubes, spaces, faces, pages, and pods brings up thousands of individuals fascinated by their own personalities and shouting for attention.

We could survive reconn[ditioning]. Everyone did. They didn’t survive unchanged, but they survived. There was another step when reconn failed. People whispered it sometimes, that pods that proved useless or antisocial or dangerous would be returned to a different, less conscious level of use. Compost

Bez względu na to, ile ludzie zarabiają, pod koniec miesiąca nie śpią po nocach, martwiąc się o pieniądze. Wszyscy patrzą na sąsiadów i zastanawiają się, "jak ich na to stać?", bo wszyscy żyją ponad stan. Więc nawet ci naprawdę bogaci nigdy nie czują się naprawdę bogaci, bo jedyne, co mogą w końcu kupić, to droższa wersja czegoś, co już mają. I to na kredyt.

That a president is inevitably put forward and elected by the forces of established wealth and power means usually that he will be indentured by the time he reaches office. But in fact he is the freest of men if he will have the courage to think so and, at least theoretically, could be so transported by the millions of people who have endorsed his candidacy as to want to do the best for them. He might come to solemn appreciation of the vote we cast, in all our multicolored and multigendered millions, as an act of trust, fingers crossed, a kind of prayer. Not that it’s worked out that way. In 1968 Richard Nixon rebounded from his defeat at the hands of Jack Kennedy, and there he was again, his head sunk between the hunched shoulders of his three-button suit and his arms raised in victory, the exacted revenge of the pod people. That someone so rigid and lacking in honor or moral distinction of any kind, someone so stiff with crippling hatreds, so spiritually dysfunctional, out of touch with everything in life that is joyful and fervently beautiful and blessed, with no discernible reverence in him for human life, and certainly with never a hope of wisdom, but living only by pure politics, as if it were some colorless blood substitute in his veins—that this being could lurchingly stumble up from his own wretched career and use history and the two-party system to elect himself president is, I suppose, a gloriously perverse justification of our democratic form of government.

(There was an idea much beloved and written about by this country’s philosophers that magic had to do with negotiating the balance between earth and air and water; which is to say that things with legs or wings were out of balance with their earth element by walking around on feet or, worse, flying above the earth in the thin substance of air, obviously entirely unsuitable for the support of solid flesh. The momentum all this inappropriate motion set up in their liquid element unbalanced them further. Spirit, in this system, was equated with the fourth element, fire. All this was generally felt to be a load of rubbish among the people who had to work in the ordinary world for a living, unlike philosophers living in academies. But it was true that a favourite magical trick at fetes was for theatrically-minded fairies to throw bits of chaff or seed-pods or conkers in the air and turn them into things before they struck the ground, and that the trick worked better if the bits of chaff or seed-pods or conkers were wet.) Slower creatures were less susceptible to the whims of wild magic than faster creatures, and creatures that flew were the most susceptible of all. Every sparrow had a delicious memory of having once been a hawk, and while magic didn’t take much interest in caterpillars, butterflies spent so much time being magicked that it was a rare event to see ordinary butterflies without at least an extra set of wings or a few extra frills and iridescences, or bodies like tiny human beings dressed in flower petals. (Fish, which flew through that most dangerous element, water, were believed not to exist. Fishy-looking beings in pools and streams were either hallucinations or other things under some kind of spell, and interfering with, catching, or—most especially—eating fish was strictly forbidden. All swimming was considered magical. Animals seen doing it were assumed to be favourites of a local water-sprite or dangerously insane; humans never tried.)

That’s why analogies can be such a useful tool in storytelling. They create a shorthand for complicated concepts—a bridge directly to a common experience. That’s another thing I learned from Steve Jobs. He’d always say that analogies give customers superpowers. A great analogy allows a customer to instantly grasp a difficult feature and then describe that feature to others. That’s why “1,000 songs in your pocket” was so powerful. Everyone had CDs and tapes in bulky players that only let you listen to 10–15 songs, one album at a time. So “1,000 songs in your pocket” was an incredible contrast—it let people visualize this intangible thing—all the music they loved all together in one place, easy to find, easy to hold—and gave them a way to tell their friends and family why this new iPod thing was so cool.

Moving is a well-established tradition in America, and _moving up_ constitutes a significant part of the American dream. Not only is working one's way to a bigger house central to our ethos but it makes sense functionally as families bring more children into the world. But why must the move to a larger or more luxurious house bring with it the abandonment of one's neighbors, community groups, and often even schoolmates? The suburban pod system causes people to move not just from house to house but form community to community. Only in a traditionally organized neighborhood of varied incomes can a family significantly alter its housing without going very far. In the new suburbs, you can't move up without moving out. (The same is true of moving down. Seniors seeking a smaller house are often forced to abandon their familiar community and start over someplace else.)

That’s just the way life is. It can be exquisite, cruel, frequently wacky, but above all utterly, utterly random. Those twin imposters in the bell-fringed jester hats, Justice and Fairness—they aren’t constants of the natural order like entropy or the periodic table. They’re completely alien notions to the way things happen out there in the human rain forest. Justice and Fairness are the things we’re supposed to contribute back to the world for giving us the gift of life—not birthrights we should expect and demand every second of the day. What do you say we drop the intellectual cowardice? There is no fate, and there is no safety net. I’m not saying God doesn’t exist. I believe in God. But he’s not a micromanager, so stop asking Him to drop the crisis in Rwanda and help you find your wallet. Life is a long, lonely journey down a day-in-day-out lard-trail of dropped tacos. Mop it up, not for yourself, but for the guy behind you who’s too busy trying not to drop his own tacos to make sure he doesn’t slip and fall on your mistakes. So don’t speed and weave in traffic; other people have babies in their cars. Don’t litter. Don’t begrudge the poor because they have a fucking food stamp. Don’t be rude to overwhelmed minimum-wage sales clerks, especially teenagers—they have that job because they don’t have a clue. You didn’t either at that age. Be understanding with them. Share your clues. Remember that your sense of humor is inversely proportional to your intolerance. Stop and think on Veterans Day. And don’t forget to vote. That is, unless you send money to TV preachers, have more than a passing interest in alien abduction or recentlypurchased a fish on a wall plaque that sings ‘Don’t Worry, Be Happy.’ In that case, the polls are a scary place! Under every ballot box is a trapdoor chute to an extraterrestrial escape pod filled with dental tools and squeaking, masturbating little green men from the Devil Star. In conclusion, Class of Ninety-seven, keep your chins up, grab your mops and get in the game. You don’t have to make a pile of money or change society. Just clean up after yourselves without complaining. And, above all, please stop and appreciate the days when the tacos don’t fall, and give heartfelt thanks to whomever you pray to….

When people ask me to pray for them or their loved ones, I explain that I’d be happy to hold HeartLight—sacred space—for them. The visualization I use is a sugar snap pea. In my mind’s eye, I unzip the pod, scoop out the peas, and place the person inside. Carefully, I rezip the pod and envision it as a ‘station,’ somewhat like an incubator, of vivid green, pulsing with vital energy that’s working for the person’s highest and best good—body, mind, and spirit.

The older I get, the more I see how much motivations matter. The Zune was crappy because the people at Microsoft don’t really love music or art the way we do. We won because we personally love music. We made the iPod for ourselves, and when you’re doing something for yourself, or your best friend or family, you’re not going to cheese out. If you don’t love something, you’re not going to go the extra mile, work the extra weekend, challenge the status quo as much.

Like many companies, Sony worried about cannibalization. If it built a music player and service that made it easy for people to share digital songs, that might hurt sales of its record division. One of Jobs’s business rules was to never be afraid of cannibalizing yourself. “If you don’t cannibalize yourself, someone else will,” he said. So even though an iPhone might cannibalize sales of an iPod, or an iPad might cannibalize sales of a laptop, that did not deter him.

I’d better finish setting up.” “Tell me what you need done,” John says. “I’m your second-in-command at this shindig. Did people say ‘shindig’ in the forties?” I laugh. “Probably!” In a rush I say, “Okay, can you set up my speakers and iPod? They’re in the bag by the refreshments table. And can you pick up Mrs. Taylor in 5A? I promised her an escort.” John gives me a salute and runs off. Tingles go up and down my spine like soda water. Tonight will be a night to remember!

In addition, like many companies, Sony worried about cannibalization. If it built a music player and service that made it easy for people to share digital songs, that might hurt sales of its record division. One of Jobs’s business rules was to never be afraid of cannibalizing yourself. “If you don’t cannibalize yourself, someone else will,”he said. So even though an iPhone might cannibalize sales of an iPod, or an iPad might cannibalize sales of a laptop, that did not deter him.

In addition, like many companies, Sony worried about cannibalization. If it built a music player and service that made it easy for people to share digital songs, that might hurt sales of its record division. One of Jobs’s business rules was to never be afraid of cannibalizing yourself. “If you don’t cannibalize yourself, someone else will,” he said. So even though an iPhone might cannibalize sales of an iPod, or an iPad might cannibalize sales of a laptop, that did not deter him.

Accountability, as well as personal responsibility, had been chucked out the window of American government. It also had been abdicated by the American voter. As long as most Americans could have their McDonald’s drive-throughs, listen to their iPods, and watch American Idol, they didn’t seem to care how negligently the nation’s national security apparatus was being run. Bread and circuses. The Romans had it right. As long as people had food and fun, they didn’t care much about the erosion of their nation.

Ivy passed by the same location a few moments later, slowed for a moment, and glanced down the length of the tube. It was possible to see straight down its length, across the spherical Pod, and through its windows to the Earth. Normally this meant the blue light of the oceans and the white light of clouds and ice caps. Sometimes, a lot of green when they were passing over well-watered parts of the world, or some yellow when over the Sahara. Right now the light was orange because the Earth was on fire. People

ultimately, most of us would choose a rich and meaningful life over an empty, happy one, if such a thing is even possible. “Misery serves a purpose,” says psychologist David Myers. He’s right. Misery alerts us to dangers. It’s what spurs our imagination. As Iceland proves, misery has its own tasty appeal. A headline on the BBC’s website caught my eye the other day. It read: “Dirt Exposure Boosts Happiness.” Researchers at Bristol University in Britain treated lung-cancer patients with “friendly” bacteria found in soil, otherwise known as dirt. The patients reported feeling happier and had an improved quality of life. The research, while far from conclusive, points to an essential truth: We thrive on messiness. “The good life . . . cannot be mere indulgence. It must contain a measure of grit and truth,” observed geographer Yi-Fu Tuan. Tuan is the great unheralded geographer of our time and a man whose writing has accompanied me throughout my journeys. He called one chapter of his autobiography “Salvation by Geography.” The title is tongue-in-cheek, but only slightly, for geography can be our salvation. We are shaped by our environment and, if you take this Taoist belief one step further, you might say we are our environment. Out there. In here. No difference. Viewed that way, life seems a lot less lonely. The word “utopia” has two meanings. It means both “good place” and “nowhere.” That’s the way it should be. The happiest places, I think, are the ones that reside just this side of paradise. The perfect person would be insufferable to live with; likewise, we wouldn’t want to live in the perfect place, either. “A lifetime of happiness! No man could bear it: It would be hell on Earth,” wrote George Bernard Shaw, in his play Man and Superman. Ruut Veenhoven, keeper of the database, got it right when he said: “Happiness requires livable conditions, but not paradise.” We humans are imminently adaptable. We survived an Ice Age. We can survive anything. We find happiness in a variety of places and, as the residents of frumpy Slough demonstrated, places can change. Any atlas of bliss must be etched in pencil. My passport is tucked into my desk drawer again. I am relearning the pleasures of home. The simple joys of waking up in the same bed each morning. The pleasant realization that familiarity breeds contentment and not only contempt. Every now and then, though, my travels resurface and in unexpected ways. My iPod crashed the other day. I lost my entire music collection, nearly two thousand songs. In the past, I would have gone through the roof with rage. This time, though, my anger dissipated like a summer thunderstorm and, to my surprise, I found the Thai words mai pen lai on my lips. Never mind. Let it go. I am more aware of the corrosive nature of envy and try my best to squelch it before it grows. I don’t take my failures quite so hard anymore. I see beauty in a dark winter sky. I can recognize a genuine smile from twenty yards. I have a newfound appreciation for fresh fruits and vegetables. Of all the places I visited, of all the people I met, one keeps coming back to me again and again: Karma Ura,

and so the wheel turns, for everything there is a season. I would not want to have the leaves fall in June, or the fruits ripen in March, to eat plum pudding on a blazing hot day or see the peas fat in their pods in the kitchen garden in snow. Naturally not, who would? The same people who want chrysanthemums all the year round and frozen raspberries on bonfire night, that’s who, and they have been gaining ground, trying to regularise and standardise, and alter the natural, productive cycle of the year to suit themselves, to force and freeze.

married with a child or two, wanted to own his own house, the only choice was to live in the suburbs and spend that much time getting to work and back. So two to three hours out of every twenty-four would be spent simply in the act of commuting. If you were lucky, you might be able to read the newspaper or a paperback in the train. Maybe you could listen to your iPod, to a Haydn symphony or a conversational Spanish lesson. Some people might even close their eyes, lost in deep metaphysical speculation. Still, it would be hard to call these two or

There was still some time before the train opened its doors for boarding, yet passengers were hurriedly buying boxed dinners, snacks, cans of beer, and magazines at the kiosk. Some had white iPod headphones in their ears, already off in their own little worlds. Others palmed smartphones, thumbing out texts, some talking so loudly into their phones that their voices rose above the blaring PA announcements. Tsukuru spotted a young couple, seated close together on a bench, happily sharing secrets. A pair of sleepy-looking five- or six-year-old twin boys, with their mother and father dragging them along by their hands, were whisked past where Tsukuru sat. The boys clutched small game devices. Two young foreign men hefted heavy-looking backpacks, while a young woman was lugging a cello case. A woman with a stunning profile passed by. Everyone was boarding a night train, heading to a far-off destination. Tsukuru envied them. At least they had a place they needed to go to. Tsukuru Tazaki had no place he needed to go. He realized that he had never actually been to Matsumoto, or Kofu. Or Shiojiri. Not even to the much closer town of Hachioji. He had watched countless express trains for Matsumoto depart from this platform, but it had never occurred to him that there was a possibility he could board one. Until now he had never thought of it. Why is that? he wondered. Tsukuru imagined himself boarding this train and heading for Matsumoto. It wasn’t exactly impossible. And it didn’t seem like such a terrible idea. He’d suddenly gotten it into his head, after all, to take off for Finland, so why not Matsumoto? What sort of town was it? he wondered. What kind of lives did people lead there? But he shook his head and erased these thoughts. Tomorrow morning it would be impossible to get back to Tokyo in time for work. He knew that much without consulting the timetable. And he was meeting Sara tomorrow night. It was a very important day for him. He couldn’t just take off for Matsumoto on a whim. He drank the rest of his now-lukewarm coffee and tossed the paper cup into a nearby garbage bin. Tsukuru Tazaki had nowhere he had to go. This was like a running theme of his life. He had no place he had to go to, no place to come back to. He never did, and he didn’t now.

Early on, Mike Markkula had taught Jobs to "impute" - to understand that people do judge a book by its cover - and therefore to make sure all the trappings and packaging of Apple signaled that there was a beautiful gem inside. Whether it's an iPod Mini, or a MacBook Pro, Apple customers know the feeling of opening up the well-crafted box and finding the product nestled in an inviting fashion. "Steve and I spend a lot of time on the packaging," said Ive. "I love the process of unpacking something. You design a ritual of unpacking to make the product feel special. Packaging can be theater, it can create a story.

On the bright side,” he went on, gesturing to the massive quantities of alcohol they had laid out on the table for their lackeys, “You get to drink loads of expensive whiskey, instead.” “I don’t like whiskey,” Tyson told him.  “I like steak knives.” “Poddite,” Slade sighed. Tyson squinted at him.  “What?” “Poddite,” Slade said, carefully arranging his plastic cutlery.  “It means that your uninspired tastes mark you as one of the mindless ranks of pod-people that mechanically wander this earth, doing whatever their television or personal devices tell them to, like drinking piss because it’s been marketed as ‘refreshing.’” 

No man, proclaimed Donne, is an Island, and he was wrong. If we were not islands, we would be lost, drowned in each other’s tragedies. We are insulated (a word that means, literally, remember, made into an island) from the tragedy of others, by our island nature, and by the repetitive shape and form of the stories. The shape does not change: there was a human being who was born, lived, and then, by some means or another, died. There. You may fill in the details from your own experience. As unoriginal as any other tale, as unique as any other life. Lives are snowflakes—forming patterns we have seen before, as like one another as peas in a pod (and have you ever looked at peas in a pod? I mean, really looked at them? There’s not a chance you’d mistake one for another, after a minute’s close inspection), but still unique. Without individuals we see only numbers: a thousand dead, a hundred thousand dead, “casualties may rise to a million.” With individual stories, the statistics become people—but even that is a lie, for the people continue to suffer in numbers that themselves are numbing and meaningless. Look, see the child’s swollen, swollen belly, and the flies that crawl at the corners of his eyes, his skeletal limbs: will it make it easier for you to know his name, his age, his dreams, his fears? To see him from the inside? And if it does, are we not doing a disservice to his sister, who lies in the searing dust beside him, a distorted, distended caricature of a human child? And there, if we feel for them, are they now more important to us than a thousand other children touched by the same famine, a thousand other young lives who will soon be food for the flies’ own myriad squirming children? We draw our lines around these moments of pain, and remain upon our islands, and they cannot hurt us. They are covered with a smooth, safe, nacreous layer to let them slip, pearllike, from our souls without real pain.

Fatigue has built up after all this training, and I can’t seem to run very fast. As I’m leisurely jogging along the Charles River, girls who look to be new Harvard freshmen keep on passing me. Most of these girls are small, slim, have on maroon Harvard-logo outfits, blond hair in a ponytail, and brand-new iPods, and they run like the wind. You can definitely feel a sort of aggressive challenge emanating from them. They seem to be used to passing people, and probably not used to being passed. They all look so bright, so healthy, attractive, and serious, brimming with self-confidence. With their long strides and strong, sharp kicks, it’s easy to see that they’re typical mid-distance runners, unsuited for long-distance running. They’re more mentally cut out for brief runs at high speed. Compared to them I’m pretty used to losing. There are plenty of things in this world that are way beyond me, plenty of opponents I can never beat. Not to brag, but these girls probably don’t know as much as I do about pain. And, quite naturally, there might not be a need for them to know it. These random thoughts come to me as I watch their proud ponytails swinging back and forth, their aggressive strides. Keeping to my own leisurely pace, I continue my run down along the Charles. Have I ever had such luminous days in my own life? Perhaps a few. But even if I had a long ponytail back then, I doubt if it would have swung so proudly as these girls’ ponytails do. And my legs wouldn’t have kicked the ground as cleanly and as powerfully as theirs. Maybe that’s only to be expected. These girls are, after all, brand-new students at the one and only Harvard University. Still, it’s pretty wonderful to watch these pretty girls run. As I do, I’m struck by an obvious thought: One generation takes over from the next. This is how things are handed over in this world, so I don’t feel so bad if they pass me. These girls have their own pace, their own sense of time. And I have my own pace, my own sense of time. The two are completely different, but that’s the way it should be.

No, honestly. I mean it,' she said through her mouthful. 'You must know - she's lucky to have you out there with her. Izzy adores you. And for good reason.' I pretended to take a sip of the hot chocolate. But it was still too hot to drink so I let it glance against my top lip. 'She does?' I said, as nonchalantly as I could manage. Sophie frowned. 'Of course she does - she worships you! You're pretty much soulmates.' 'Did she say that?' I said, pretending to study my fingernails. Sophie laughed. 'You know Izzy - she doesn't like people to know she's a human. She didn't need to say it. Anyone could see you two are peas in a pod.' I took another pretend sip of the hot chocolate as the blood rushed to my cheeks. She adored me. Soulmates. I tried to write everything about that moment on to my memory.

So when the pod people come and steal your body, does it hurt, or are you pretty much unconscious for the whole thing?" "Huh?" I asked. "I just double-skunked you three times in a row. What's going on with you?" He lifted an eyebrow. He was in detective mode now, and there was no escaping it. I imagined spilling to him the way I had to Rayna, and almost choked. I'd rather die than describe my fantasies to Ben. I'd never hear the end of it. Still, I needed to tell him something, and he knew me too well to buy a complete lie. I thought about the pictures. I could tell him about the pictures without telling him about the dreams. Ben was like Dad-he ate up anything that smacked of the inexplicable. He'd probably love the picture of the man at St. Vitus's Cathedral, standing in midair on nothing. "You might think I'm crazy...," I started. "I already think that, so..." I took a deep breath, then started to explain. I told him about every picture, including the ones that were completely impossible and seemed to prove the man wasn't actually in the shots when I snapped them. By the time I finished, Ben's brow was furrowed, and the concern in his eyes had deepened into alarm. He really did think I was crazy. I shouldn't have told him. "Can you stop looking at me like that? I know there's a logical explanation," I assured him. "I just don't know what it is yet, but-" "You need to show me those pictures," Ben said gravely. "Um...okay," I said, though I suddenly wasn't positive I wanted to share them. "After Rio I figured I'd open them up again and try to-" "Now, Clea," he said. "I really need to see them now.

I was visiting Marcus and his wife when a friend asked if she could talk to me alone. Teresa was the spouse of a Team member who’d served with Chris. We hadn’t spent a lot of time together, but we’d always had a connection. “I have something I want to give you,” she said. “I don’t know if it’s going to seem corny to you or what, but I kind of want to do it for me.” She pressed a medal into my hand. I looked at it--it was the medal she’d received for completing the Boston Marathon. “You and Chris kept me going,” she explained. “It was almost eerie how, when my legs were tired and I wanted to quit, Randy Travis’s song came on the iPod. It was the one he played at the memorial. My iPod was on random shuffle but it was always at just the right moment. I would hear that song and it would spur me on.” Maybe Chris was somehow behind that. People have told me of other inspirational incidents; each one, from simple to grand, has touched me with its beauty.

Ive and Jobs have even obsessed over, and patented, the packaging for various Apple products. U.S. patent D558572, for example, granted on January 1, 2008, is for the iPod Nano box, with four drawings showing how the device is nestled in a cradle when the box is opened. Patent D596485, issued on July 21, 2009, is for the iPhone packaging, with its sturdy lid and little glossy plastic tray inside. Early on, Mike Markkula had taught Jobs to “impute”—to understand that people do judge a book by its cover—and therefore to make sure all the trappings and packaging of Apple signaled that there was a beautiful gem inside. Whether it’s an iPod Mini or a MacBook Pro, Apple customers know the feeling of opening up the well-crafted box and finding the product nestled in an inviting fashion. “Steve and I spend a lot of time on the packaging,” said Ive. “I love the process of unpacking something. You design a ritual of unpacking to make the product feel special. Packaging can be theater, it can create a story.

Before you decide,” MacRieve interrupted, “know that if you were my mate, I’d make sure you had whatever you needed to be comfortable.” Her lips parted when he pulled her bag from behind him and proceeded to dig through it. “Like your toothbrush.” He held up her pink toothbrush. He’d retrieved her things from her car? And rooted through her personal possessions. She’d seen MacRieve’s ferocity, and now she was getting a good glimpse of his sly side, his tricksy side. She could see what Rydstrom had been talking about. MacRieve seemed . . . wolfish. Then she remembered what else she had in her bag. Oh, great Hekate. Dread settled in the pit of her stomach. Mari had private things in there—rocket of the pocket-type private things. Like a tube of lipstick that wasn’t really one. “Or this.” He carelessly flicked her birth control patch. “Doona know what it does, but I ken that people who use patches for whatever reason might be eager for a new one.” He displayed her iPod next. “It’s my understanding that females your age canna go long without listening to music or they become irrational and impossible to deal with. And how long’s it been for you, then?” He drew out a blue-labeled bottle and shook it. “You had several bottles of Orangina in your Jeep. Must like it, do you no’?” Not the Orangina! Her mouth watered even more. “And here’s your bit of Mayan gold that you’re probably keen to hold on to.” He held up the weighty headdress. Stunning. She hazily remembered seeing it in the severed hand of an incubus, as if in offer, but she’d thought the piece had been lost into that crater. If MacRieve gave the incubi’s headdress to her, it would be her first payment as a mystical mercenary. No, resist him! To act like his mate? To follow his orders? She could resist the food and the Orangina. She could even resist gold, but there he went digging once more. He’d find it. But maybe he wouldn’t know what it really was— “And your lipstick,” he said with a wicked glint in his eyes. Oh, no, he knew, and he was playing with her. She was going to die of mortification. Her face grew hot when he added, “You must be in sore need of this after three weeks without.

Shields at fifty-four percent,” the computer announced in the same pleasant female voice. Eliana sped through the corridors, helping every man and woman she came across get to an escape pod. As she did, she noted crewmembers hustling to put out a fire. This can’t be happening. She passed some of her fellow immortals as they too worked their asses off to get as many people as they could into pods. As the number of Lasarans she came across began to dwindle, Eliana detoured toward Engine Room 1. “What the drek are you doing?” someone shouted behind her. “Shields at thirty-two percent,” the calm computer voice announced. Eliana turned to find Ganix running toward her. “All of my people are in the pods!” she yelled over the noise Boom. Boom. Boom. “Why aren’t you with them?” he shouted. “They’re safe! I want to help! What can I do?” “Shields at twenty percent,” the calm female voice announced. “Nothing!” Ganix shouted. “Get to a pod!” “I can help!” she insisted. “Just tell me what to do!” Whatever they needed, she could do a hell of a lot faster than they could.

I left Brookstone and went to the Pottery Barn. When I was a kid and everything inside our house was familiar, cheap, and ruined, walking into the Pottery Barn was like entering heaven. If they really wanted people to enjoy church, I thought back then, they should make everything in church look and smell like the Pottery Barn. My dream was to surround myself one day with everything in the store, with the wicker baskets and scented candles, the brushed-silver picture frames. But that was a long time ago. I had already gone through a period of buying everything there was to buy at the Pottery Barn and decorating my apartment like a Pottery Barn outlet, and then getting rid of it all during a massive upgrade. Now everything at the Pottery Barn looked ersatz and mass-produced. To buy any of it now would be to regress in aspiration and selfhood. I didn’t want to buy anything at the Pottery Barn so much as I wanted to recapture the feeling of wanting to buy everything from the Pottery Barn. Something similar happened at the music store. I should try to find some new music, I thought, because there was a time when new music could lift me out of a funk like nothing else. But I wasn’t past the Bs when I saw the only thing I really cared to buy. It was the Beatles’ Rubber Soul, which had been released in 1965. I already owned Rubber Soul. I had owned Rubber Soul on vinyl, then on cassette, and now on CD, and of course on my iPod, iPod mini, and iPhone. If I wanted to, I could have pulled out my iPhone and played Rubber Soul from start to finish right there, on speaker, for the sake of the whole store. But that wasn’t what I wanted. I wanted to buy Rubber Soul for the first time all over again. I wanted to return the needle from the run-out groove to the opening chords of “Drive My Car” and make everything new again. That wasn’t going to happen. But, I thought, I could buy it for somebody else. I could buy somebody else the new experience of listening to Rubber Soul for the first time. So I took the CD up to the register and paid for it and, walking out, felt renewed and excited. But the first kid I offered it to, a rotund teenager in a wheelchair looking longingly into a GameStop window, declined on the principle that he would rather have cash. A couple of other kids didn’t have CD players. I ended up leaving Rubber Soul on a bench beside a decommissioned ashtray where someone had discarded an unhealthy gob of human hair. I wandered, as everyone in the mall sooner or later does, into the Best Friends Pet Store. Many best friends—impossibly small beagles and corgis and German shepherds—were locked away for display in white cages where they spent their days dozing with depression, stirring only long enough to ponder the psychic hurdles of licking their paws. Could there be anything better to lift your spirits than a new puppy?

Images of people in the Middle East dressing like Westerners, spending like Westerners, that is what the voters watching TV here at home want to see. That is a visible sign that we really are winning the war of ideas—the struggle between consumption and economic growth, and religious tradition and economic stagnation. I thought, why are those children coming onto the streets more and more often? It’s not anything we have done, is it? It’s not any speeches we have made, or countries we have invaded, or new constitutions we have written, or sweets we have handed out to children, or football matches between soldiers and the locals. It’s because they, too, watch TV. They watch TV and see how we live here in the West. They see children their own age driving sports cars. They see teenagers like them, instead of living in monastic frustration until someone arranges their marriages, going out with lots of different girls, or boys. They see them in bed with lots of different girls and boys. They watch them in noisy bars, bottles of lager upended over their mouths, getting happy, enjoying the privilege of getting drunk. They watch them roaring out support or abuse at football matches. They see them getting on and off planes, flying from here to there without restriction and without fear, going on endless holidays, shopping, lying in the sun. Especially, they see them shopping: buying clothes and PlayStations, buying iPods, video phones, laptops, watches, digital cameras, shoes, trainers, baseball caps. Spending money, of which there is always an unlimited supply, in bars and restaurants, hotels and cinemas. These children of the West are always spending. They are always restless, happy and with unlimited access to cash. I realised, with a flash of insight, that this was what was bringing these Middle Eastern children out on the streets. I realised that they just wanted to be like us. Those children don’t want to have to go to the mosque five times a day when they could be hanging out with their friends by a bus shelter, by a phone booth or in a bar. They don’t want their families to tell them who they can and can’t marry. They might very well not want to marry at all and just have a series of partners. I mean, that’s what a lot of people do. It is no secret, after that serial in the Daily Mail, that that is what I do. I don’t necessarily need the commitment. Why should they not have the same choices as me? They want the freedom to fly off for their holidays on easy Jet. I know some will say that what a lot of them want is just one square meal a day or the chance of a drink of clean water, but on the whole the poor aren’t the ones on the street and would not be my target audience. They aren’t going to change anything, otherwise why are they so poor? The ones who come out on the streets are the ones who have TVs. They’ve seen how we live, and they want to spend.

The summer king customarily delivers a brief poem or statement before he convenes the special sessions. Enki gives them quite a bit more than that. “In the verde,” says Enki, as serious as I’ve ever seen him, “we love the storms. Sometimes, when we see one come in, the blocos will set up in the terraces and play until the rain drives us inside.” He pauses here, as though considering his next words, though I can tell he’s just savoring the moment. My last present from the verde must have gone through. Everyone in the audience shuffles uncomfortably. Nostrils flair, discreet coughs echo through the chamber. Some look at Enki, others at one another or the doorways. Enki takes a deep breath, as though he doesn’t notice a thing. “We have a saying,” he says as murmurs from his audience rise to a wave, “you can’t smell the catinga until it comes back home.” In the background, I can just make out several guards hurrying through the doors. Enki surveys his work and smiles, a sun breaking through clouds. “I hereby convene parliament.” As he saunters back to his seat, Auntie Isa rushes the podium with a handkerchief covering her nose and murder in her eyes. People stand up and hurry to the doors. They don’t know the smell will be even worse in the hallway. Our transport pods are all connected to the ventilation system. It’s meant to help refresh the air supply in the tunnels, but it can go the other direction. It can carry the fetid stink of the verde straight to the noses of people who pretend it doesn’t exist.

Time management also involves energy management. Sometimes the rationalization for procrastination is wrapped up in the form of the statement “I’m not up to this,” which reflects the fact you feel tired, stressed, or some other uncomfortable state. Consequently, you conclude that you do not have the requisite energy for a task, which is likely combined with a distorted justification for putting it off (e.g., “I have to be at my best or else I will be unable to do it.”). Similar to reframing time, it is helpful to respond to the “I’m not up to this” reaction by reframing energy. Thinking through the actual behavioral and energy requirements of a job challenges the initial and often distorted reasoning with a more realistic view. Remember, you only need “enough” energy to start the task. Consequently, being “too tired” to unload the dishwasher or put in a load of laundry can be reframed to see these tasks as requiring only a low level of energy and focus. This sort of reframing can be used to address automatic thoughts about energy on tasks that require a little more get-up-and-go. For example, it is common for people to be on the fence about exercising because of the thought “I’m too tired to exercise.” That assumption can be redirected to consider the energy required for the smaller steps involved in the “exercise script” that serve as the “launch sequence” for getting to the gym (e.g., “Are you too tired to stand up and get your workout clothes? Carry them to the car?” etc.). You can also ask yourself if you have ever seen people at the gym who are slumped over the exercise machines because they ran out of energy from trying to exert themselves when “too tired.” Instead, you can draw on past experience that you will end up feeling better and more energized after exercise; in fact, you will sleep better, be more rested, and have the positive outcome of keeping up with your exercise plan. If nothing else, going through this process rather than giving into the impulse to avoid makes it more likely that you will make a reasoned decision rather than an impulsive one about the task. A separate energy management issue relevant to keeping plans going is your ability to maintain energy (and thereby your effort) over longer courses of time. Managing ADHD is an endurance sport. It is said that good soccer players find their rest on the field in order to be able to play the full 90 minutes of a game. Similarly, you will have to manage your pace and exertion throughout the day. That is, the choreography of different tasks and obligations in your Daily Planner affects your energy. It is important to engage in self-care throughout your day, including adequate sleep, time for meals, and downtime and recreational activities in order to recharge your battery. Even when sequencing tasks at work, you can follow up a difficult task, such as working on a report, with more administrative tasks, such as responding to e-mails or phone calls that do not require as much mental energy or at least represent a shift to a different mode. Similarly, at home you may take care of various chores earlier in the evening and spend the remaining time relaxing. A useful reminder is that there are ways to make some chores more tolerable, if not enjoyable, by linking them with preferred activities for which you have more motivation. Folding laundry while watching television, or doing yard work or household chores while listening to music on an iPod are examples of coupling obligations with pleasurable activities. Moreover, these pleasant experiences combined with task completion will likely be rewarding and energizing.

The cuisine of Northern Iran, overlooked and underrated, is unlike most Persian food in that it's unfussy and lighthearted as the people from that region. The fertile seaside villages of Mazandaran and Rasht, where Soli grew up before moving to the congested capital, were lush with orchards and rice fields. His father had cultivated citrus trees and the family was raised on the fruits and grains they harvested. Alone in the kitchen, without Zod's supervision, he found himself turning to the wholesome food of his childhood, not only for the comfort the simple compositions offered, but because it was what he knew so well as he set about preparing a homecoming feast for Zod's only son. He pulled two kilos of fava beans from the freezer. Gathered last May, shucked and peeled on a quiet afternoon, they defrosted in a colander for a layered frittata his mother used to make with fistfuls of dill and sprinkled with sea salt. One flat of pale green figs and a bushel of new harvest walnuts were tied to the back of his scooter, along with two crates of pomegranates- half to squeeze for fresh morning juice and the other to split and seed for rice-and-meatball soup. Three fat chickens pecked in the yard, unaware of their destiny as he sharpened his cleaver. Tomorrow they would braise in a rich, tangy stew with sour red plums, their hearts and livers skewered and grilled, then wrapped in sheets of lavash with bouquets of tarragon and mint. Basmati rice soaked in salted water to be steamed with green garlic and mounds of finely chopped parsley and cilantro, then served with a whole roasted, eight kilo white fish stuffed with barberries, pistachios, and lime. On the farthest burner, whole bitter oranges bobbed in blossom syrup, to accompany rice pudding, next to a simmering pot of figs studded with cardamom pods for preserves.

The climate for relationships within an innovation group is shaped by the climate outside it. Having a negative instead of a positive culture can cost a company real money. During Seagate Technology’s troubled period in the mid-to-late 1990s, the company, a large manufacturer of disk drives for personal computers, had seven different design centers working on innovation, yet it had the lowest R&D productivity in the industry because the centers competed rather than cooperated. Attempts to bring them together merely led people to advocate for their own groups rather than find common ground. Not only did Seagate’s engineers and managers lack positive norms for group interaction, but they had the opposite in place: People who yelled in executive meetings received “Dog’s Head” awards for the worst conduct. Lack of product and process innovation was reflected in loss of market share, disgruntled customers, and declining sales. Seagate, with its dwindling PC sales and fading customer base, was threatening to become a commodity producer in a changing technology environment. Under a new CEO and COO, Steve Luczo and Bill Watkins, who operated as partners, Seagate developed new norms for how people should treat one another, starting with the executive group. Their raised consciousness led to a systemic process for forming and running “core teams” (cross-functional innovation groups), and Seagate employees were trained in common methodologies for team building, both in conventional training programs and through participation in difficult outdoor activities in New Zealand and other remote locations. To lead core teams, Seagate promoted people who were known for strong relationship skills above others with greater technical skills. Unlike the antagonistic committees convened during the years of decline, the core teams created dramatic process and product innovations that brought the company back to market leadership. The new Seagate was able to create innovations embedded in a wide range of new electronic devices, such as iPods and cell phones.

...literature does its best to maintain that its concern is with the mind ; that the body is a sheet of plain glass through which the soul looks straight and clear, and, save for one or two passions such as desire and greed, is null , negligible and nonexistent. On the contrary, the very opposite is true. All day, all night the body intervenes; blunts or sharpens, colours or discolours, turns to wax in the warmth of June, hardens to tallow in the murk of February. The creature within can only gaze through the pane—smudged or rosy; it cannot separate off from the body like the sheath of a knife or the pod of a pea for a single instant; it must go through the whole unending procession of changes, heat and cold, comfort and discomfort, hunger and satisfaction, health and illness, until there comes the inevitable catastrophe; the body smashes itself to smithereens, and the soul (it is said) escapes. But of all this daily drama of the body there is no record. People write always about the doings of the mind; the thoughts that come to it; its noble plans; how it has civilised the universe. They show it ignoring the body in the philosopher's turret; or kicking the body, like an old leather football, across leagues of snow and desert in the pursuit of conquest or discovery. Those great wars which it wages by itself, with the mind a slave to it, in the solitude of the bedroom against the assault of fever or the oncome of melancholia, are neglected. Nor is the reason far to seek. To look these things squarely in the face would need the courage of a lion tamer; a robust philosophy; a reason rooted in the bowels of the earth. Short of these, this monster, the body, this miracle, its pain, will soon make us taper into mysticism, or rise, with rapid beats of the wings, into the raptures of transcendentalism. More practically speaking, the public would say that a novel devoted to influenza lacked plot; they would complain that there was no love in it—wrongly however, for illness often takes on the disguise of love, and plays the same odd tricks, investing certain faces with divinity, setting us to wait, hour after hour, with pricked ears for the creaking of a stair, and wreathing the faces of the absent (plain enough in health, Heaven knows) with a new significance, while the mind concocts a thousand legends and romances about them for which it has neither time nor liberty in health.

literature does itsnbest to maintain that its concern is with the mind ; that the body is a sheet of plain glass through which the soul looks straight and clear, and, save for one or two passions such as desire and greed, is null , negligible and nonexistent. On the contrary, the very opposite is true. All day, all night the body intervenes; blunts or sharpens, colours or discolours, turns to wax in the warmth of June, hardens to tallow in the murk of February. The creature within can only gaze through the pane—smudged or rosy; it cannot separate off from the body like the sheath of a knife or the pod of a pea for a single instant; it must go through the whole unending procession of changes, heat and cold, comfort and discomfort, hunger and satisfaction, health and illness, until there comes the inevitable catastrophe; the body smashes itself to smithereens, and the soul (it is said) escapes. But of all this daily drama of the body there is no record. People write always about the doings of the mind; the thoughts that come to it; its noble plans; how it has civilised the universe. They show it ignoring the body in the philosopher's turret; or kicking the body, like an old leather football, across leagues of snow and desert in the pursuit of conquest or discovery. Those great wars which it wages by itself, with the mind a slave to it, in the solitude of the bedroom against the assault of fever or the oncome of melancholia, are neglected. Nor is the reason far to seek. To look these things squarely in the face would need the courage of a lion tamer; a robust philosophy; a reason rooted in the bowels of the earth. Short of these, this monster, the body, this miracle, its pain, will soon make us taper into mysticism, or rise, with rapid beats of the wings, into the raptures of transcendentalism. More practically speaking, the public would say that a novel devoted to influenza lacked plot; they would complain that there was no love in it—wrongly however, for illness often takes on the disguise of love, and plays the same odd tricks, investing certain faces with divinity, setting us to wait, hour after hour, with pricked ears for the creaking of a stair, and wreathing the faces of the absent (plain enough in health, Heaven knows) with a new significance, while the mind concocts a thousand legends and romances about them for which it has neither time nor liberty in health.

The funny thing: I’d worried, if anything, that Boris was the one who was a little too affectionate, if affectionate is the right word. The first time he’d turned in bed and draped an arm over my waist, I lay there half-asleep for a moment, not knowing what to do: staring at my old socks on the floor, empty beer bottles, my paperbacked copy of The Red Badge of Courage. At last—embarrassed—I faked a yawn and tried to roll away, but instead he sighed and pulled me closer, with a sleepy, snuggling motion. Ssh, Potter, he whispered, into the back of my neck. Is only me. It was weird. Was it weird? It was; and it wasn’t. I’d fallen back to sleep shortly after, lulled by his bitter, beery unwashed smell and his breath easy in my ear. I was aware I couldn’t explain it without making it sound like more than it was. On nights when I woke strangled with fear there he was, catching me when I started up terrified from the bed, pulling me back down in the covers beside him, muttering in nonsense Polish, his voice throaty and strange with sleep. We’d drowse off in each other’s arms, listening to music from my iPod (Thelonious Monk, the Velvet Underground, music my mother had liked) and sometimes wake clutching each other like castaways or much younger children. And yet (this was the murky part, this was what bothered me) there had also been other, way more confusing and fucked-up nights, grappling around half-dressed, weak light sliding in from the bathroom and everything haloed and unstable without my glasses: hands on each other, rough and fast, kicked-over beers foaming on the carpet—fun and not that big of a deal when it was actually happening, more than worth it for the sharp gasp when my eyes rolled back and I forgot about everything; but when we woke the next morning stomach-down and groaning on opposite sides of the bed it receded into an incoherence of backlit flickers, choppy and poorly lit like some experimental film, the unfamiliar twist of Boris’s features fading from memory already and none of it with any more bearing on our actual lives than a dream. We never spoke of it; it wasn’t quite real; getting ready for school we threw shoes, splashed water at each other, chewed aspirin for our hangovers, laughed and joked around all the way to the bus stop. I knew people would think the wrong thing if they knew, I didn’t want anyone to find out and I knew Boris didn’t either, but all the same he seemed so completely untroubled by it that I was fairly sure it was just a laugh, nothing to take too seriously or get worked up about. And yet, more than once, I had wondered if I should step up my nerve and say something: draw some kind of line, make things clear, just to make absolutely sure he didn’t have the wrong idea. But the moment had never come. Now there was no point in speaking up and being awkward about the whole thing, though I scarcely took comfort in the fact.

My bisnonno is such a man...Fine, you laugh again. Not so handsome,I think,but just as proud. He struts through the square with his new shoes. He buys a carriage. But he gives to the poor,too, to the Church.He is kind to his siters; he is a friend to many.He is raffinato, a gentleman. And the girl he chooses? Hmm? Hmm?" "I don't know, Nonna. Elizabeth Benedetto?" "Hah!" Nonna slapped her hand hard against her knee. It bounced soundlessly off the leopard plush. "Elisabetta. Elisabetta, daughter of a man who works on another's boat. Elisabetta who has many sisters and who is intended for the Church if she does not marry. I don't remember her family name, if I ever knew. Maybe Benedetto.Why not? It does not matter.What matters is that no one understands why Michelangelo Costa chooses this girl. No one can...oh,the word...to say a picture of: descrivere." "Describe?" "Si. Describe.No one can describe her.Small,they think. Brown, maybe. Maybe not so pretty, not so ugly. Just a girl. She sits by the seawall mending nets her family does not own. She is odd,too,her neighbors think.They think it is she who leaves little bit of shell and rock when she is done with the nets, little mosaico on the wall. So why? the piu bella girls ask, the ones with long,long necks, and long black hair, and noses that turn up at the end. Why this odd, nobody girl in her ugly dresses, with her dirty feet? "Michelangelo sends his cousins to her with gifts. A cameo, silk handkerchiefs, a fine pair of gloves. Again,the laugh.Then, you would not have laughed at a gift of gloves, piccola. Oh,you girls now. You want what? E-mails and ePods?" "That's iPods,Nonna." "Whatever. See,that word I know. Now, Elisabetta sends back the little girst. So my bisnonno sends bigger: pearls, meters of silk cloth, a horse. These,too,she will not take. And the people begin to look,and ask: Who is she, this nobody girl,to refuse him? No money,no beauty,no family name.You are a fool,they tell her. Accept. Accept! "And my proud bisnonno does not understand. He can have any girl in the town.So again,he gathers the gifts, he carries them himself, leads the horse. But Elisabetta is not to be found. She is not at her papa's house or in the square or at the seawall. Michelangelo fears she has gone to the convent. But no. As he stands at the seawall, a seabird,a gull, lands on his shoulder and says-" "Nonna-" "Shh! The girl tells him to follow the delfino....delfin? Dolphin! So he looks, and there, a dolphin with its head above the water says, 'Follow!' So he follows,the sack with gifts for Elisabetta on his back,like a peddler, the horse trailing behind.The dolphin leads him around the bay to a beach, and there is Elisabetta, old dress covered in sand,feet bare, just drawing circles in the sand. She starts to run, but Michelangelo calls to her. 'Why,' he asks her. 'Why do you hide? Why will you not take my gifts?' And she says..." I'd been fighting a losing battle with yawning for a while. I was failing fast. "I have no idea. 'I'm in love with someone else.'?

Many other inhabitants of the city were similarly afflicted. Every day, more and more people took to saving time, and the more they did so, the more they were copied by others - even by those who had no real desire to join in but felt obligated to. Radio, television, and newspapers daily advertised and extolled the merits of new, time saving gadgets that would one day leave people free to live the 'right' kind of life. Walls and billboards were plastered with posters depicting scenes of happiness and prosperity. The real picture, however, was very different. Admittedly, timesavers were better dressed than the people who lived near the old amphitheater. They earned more money and had more to spend, but they looked tired, disgruntled and sour, and there was an unfriendly light in their eyes. They'd never heard the phrase, "Why not go and see Momo?' nor did they have anyone to listen to them in a way that would make them reasonable or conciliatory, let alone happy. Even had they known such a person, they would have been highly unlikely to pay him or her a visit unless the whole affair could be dealt with in five minutes flat, or they would have considered it a waste of time. In their view, even leisure time had to be used to the full, so as to extract the maximum of entertainment and relaxation with the minimum amount of delay. Whatever the occasion, whether solemn or joyous, timesavers could no longer celebrate it properly. Daydreaming they regarded almost as a criminal offense. What they could endure least of all, however, was silence, for when silence fell they became terrified by the realization of what was happening to their lives. And so, whenever silence threatened to descend, they made a noise. It wasn't a happy sound, of course, like the hubbub in a children's playground, but an angry ill tempered din that grew louder every day. It had ceased to matter that people should enjoy their work and take pride in it; on the contrary, enjoyment merely slowed them down. All that mattered was to get through as much work as possible in the shortest possible time, so notices to the effect were prominently displayed in every factory and office building. They read: TIME IS PRECIOUS - DON'T WASTE IT! or: TIME IS MONEY - SAVE IT! Last but not least, the appearance of the city itself changed more and more. Old buildings were pulled down and replaced with modern ones devoid of all the things that were now through superfluous. No architect troubled to design houses that suited the people who were to live in them, because that would have meant building a whole range of different houses. It was far cheaper, and above all, more time saving to make them identical. Huge modern housing developments sprang up on the city's outskirts - endless rows of multi-storied tenements as indistinguishable as peas in a pod. And because all the buildings looked alike, so of course, did the streets. [.....] People never seemed to notice that, by saving time, they were losing something else. No one cared to admit that life was becoming even poorer, bleaker, and more monotonous. The ones who felt this most keenly were the children, because no one had time for them any more. But time is life itself, and life resides in the human heart. And the more people saved, the less they had.

But who will I say you are? How will I explain you? People don't just appear out of nowhere." "Lord A'mighty," Andrew exclaimed. "Have you no brains? We're as alike as two peas in a pod. All we need to do is switch places.

I slice fresh garlic, rub it into the meat with olive oil, then insert the thin wafers into tiny slits I cut along the grain. After rinsing my hands, I hold them to my face, inhale the garlic perfume still on my skin. I could easily wipe it away on the faucet, a spoon, any piece of stainless steel, but I've never understood why people find it offensive. It's the smell of anticipation, the promise of a wonderful meal in the offing. Opening the spice cabinet, I breathe in the fragrance of all those jars I left behind: saffron threads, cardamom pods, star anise, Tahitian vanilla. I almost weep at the sight of my Fleur de Sel. No one ever gets my obsession with sea salt, especially expensive sea salt. They don't understand that it brightens the flavor of food, wakes it up, like a condiment. Regular table salt just makes food salty.

Never wear headphones, so you can hear if anyone’s coming up behind you. Always keep a key wedged in between your thumb and forefinger as you walk, sharp side facing outward, in case anyone tries to attack. Carry as little other items as possible so you don’t look like a rich walking target. No phone out in your hands. No iPod. Nothing. Make purposeful eye contact with people you pass, not for too long, but enough to send the message that you are paying attention and have seen them, because people who aren’t aware of their surroundings are more likely to be taken advantage of.

You go to an auto show and see some glamorous and wildly innovative concept car on display and you think, “I’d buy that in a second.” And then five years later, the car finally comes to market and it’s been whittled down from a Ferrari to a Pinto—all the truly breakthrough features have been toned down or eliminated altogether, and what’s left looks mostly like last year’s model. The same sorry fate could have befallen the iPod as well: Ive and Jobs could have sketched out a brilliant, revolutionary music player and then two years later released a dud. What kept the spark alive? The answer is that Apple’s development cycle looks more like a coffeehouse than an assembly line. The traditional way to build a product like the iPod is to follow a linear chain of expertise. The designers come up with a basic look and feature set and then pass it on to the engineers, who figure out how to actually make it work. And then it gets passed along to the manufacturing folks, who figure out how to build it in large numbers—after which it gets sent to the marketing and sales people, who figure out how to persuade people to buy it. This model is so ubiquitous because it performs well in situations where efficiency is key, but it tends to have disastrous effects on creativity, because the original idea gets chipped away at each step in the chain. The engineering team takes a look at the original design and says, “Well, we can’t really do that—but we can do 80 percent of what you want.” And then the manufacturing team says, “Sure, we can do some of that.” In the end, the original design has been watered down beyond recognition. Apple’s approach, by contrast, is messier and more chaotic at the beginning, but it avoids this chronic problem of good ideas being hollowed out as they progress through the development chain. Apple calls it concurrent or parallel production. All the groups—design, manufacturing, engineering, sales—meet continuously through the product-development cycle, brainstorming, trading ideas and solutions, strategizing over the most pressing issues, and generally keeping the conversation open to a diverse group of perspectives. The process is noisy and involves far more open-ended and contentious meetings than traditional production cycles—and far more dialogue between people versed in different disciplines, with all the translation difficulties that creates. But the results speak for themselves.

Sure, I rekking made the big mistake. I took those pods from the ship because I wanted our people to have hope. I wanted to make a difference. I wanted to help. And even though Breccan was angry, it was the best thing that ever happened to them—to all the matched morts. They found love and happiness. I just had to fly up into the sky and catch it for us.

the wider world’s reaction has often been disdainful. In 1984, the first Mac’s graphical user interface was widely derided as “a toy.” Bill Gates was mystified that people wanted colored computers. Critics initially called on Apple to open up the iPod. Without a strong belief in his vision, a passion for what he was doing, it would be much harder for Jobs to resist the critics.

Bond cradles M as she dies in his arms and tells him she at least got one thing right, which when you consider how many people have died at Bond’s hands and how many lives he’s wrecked, isn’t saying much for her record.

That’s my little Octopussy,’ she says, like it’s a thing that normal people would say.

*I’ve always had an alternative reading of the Body Snatchers movies (Siegel’s, Kaufman’s, and Ferrara’s). Each movie presents the Pod People in a sinister light. Yet really, almost nothing they do on screen really bears out this sinister interpretation. If you’re one who believes that your soul is what makes you you, then I suppose the Pod People are murdering the Earthlings they duplicate and replace. However, if you’re more of the mind that it is your intellect and your consciousness that make you who you are, then the Pod People transformation is closer to a rebirth than a murder. You’re reborn as straight intellect, with a complete possession of your past and your abilities, but unburdened by messy human emotions. You also possess a complete fidelity to your fellow beings and a total commitment to the survival of your species. Are they inhuman? Of course, they’re vegetables. But the movies try to present their lack of humanity (they don’t have a sense of humor, they’re unmoved when a dog is hit by a car) as evidence of some deep-seated sinisterness. That’s a rather species-centric point of view. As human beings it may be our emotions that make us human, but it’s a stretch to say it’s what makes us great. Along with those positive emotions—love, joy, happiness, amusement—come negative emotions—hate, selfishness, racism, depression, violence, and rage. For instance, with all the havoc that Donald Sutherland causes in the Kaufman version, including the murder of various Pod People, there never is a thought of punishment or vengeance on the Pod People’s part, even though he’s obviously proven himself to be a threat. They just want him to become one of them. Imagine in the fifties, when the Siegel film was made, that instead of some little town in Northern California (Santa Mira) that the aliens took root in, it was a horribly racist, segregated Ku Klux Klan stronghold in the heart of Mississippi. Within weeks the color lines would disappear. Blacks and whites would be working together (in genuine brotherhood) towards a common goal. And humanity would be represented by one of the racist Kluxers whose investigative gaze notices formerly like-minded white folks seemingly enter into a conspiracy with some members of the county’s black community. Now picture his hysterical reaction to it (“Those people are coming after me! They’re not human! You’re next! You’re next!”). *Solving the problems, both large and small, of your actors—lead actors especially—is the job of a film director.

Steve Jobs, creator of the iPod, iPhone, and iPad: “People think focus means saying yes to the thing you’ve got to focus on.4 But that’s not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully. I’m actually as proud of the things we haven’t done as the things I have done. Innovation is saying no to 1,000 things.

Multitasking, in short, is not only not thinking; it impairs your ability to think. Thinking means concentrating on one thing long enough to develop an idea about it. Not learning other people’s ideas, or memorizing information, however much those may sometimes be useful. Developing your own ideas: thinking for yourself. Which is something that you simply cannot do in bursts of twenty seconds at a time, interrupted constantly by Facebook messages or Twitter tweets or fiddling with your iPod or watching YouTube.

So, when can your mother expect another grandchild?’ Mrs Dankworth utters, just as the tea is being poured. I stare at Mrs Dankworth, well aware that my mother’s eyes are on me. I consider a comeback, but respond with a lame, ‘I guess time will tell, Mrs Dankworth. It will depend on what happens in life and what Bailey and I want to do.’ It isn’t the answer I want to give. I want to tell Mrs Dankworth to take a short walk off a long pier, to swim with a pod of sharks, to have a stroke, to be eaten by her five cats. But I’m conditioned to be polite to a generation of people that can demand any information from me they want without consequence.

How’s your leg?” Gian asked. She crushed a handful of scorch pods together and lay flat on her belly in front of their flickering light to kindle a fire. “Fine,” Lilia said. In truth, the pain had become constant. She rested when she could but considered it a point of pride to keep up with Gian. “Really?” “No. But when people ask, they don’t really want an answer. They want reassurance that it’s all right not to care.

Arguing about the functions of mood can be challenging. Some hypothesized functions of mood play out over time and are nearly impossible to test decisively with a laboratory experiment. Take the hypotheses that (1) low mood helps people disengage from unattainable goals and (2) we end up better off as a result of letting go. Testing this hypothesized chain of events requires data about the real-world goals that people want to attain and the ability to measure people’s adjustment and well-being over the longer term. A nonexperimental study of adolescent girls in Canada did just this, collecting four waves of longitudinal data on the relationship between goals and depression over nineteen months. Consistent with the first hypothesis, those adolescents who had depressive symptoms reported a tendency to become more disengaged from goals over time. The stereotypical image of a disengaged adolescent sulking in her room with an iPod may not look like the process of rebuilding psychological health. Results were in fact consistent with the idea that letting go was a positive development: those adolescents who became more disengaged from goals ended up being better off, reporting lower levels of depression in the later assessments.

For spring and summer, Dina baked delicate and light pastries fragranced with rosewater, meskouta orange bundt cake, and delicate raspberry macarons. When strawberries were in season in early June, she made airy fraisier cake. For autumn and winter, Dina worked with heavier ingredients: thick, dark chocolate, cinnamon, cardamom, gingerbread, and pumpkin. As the days grew colder and the light dimmed earlier and earlier, people started to crave that feeling of warmth and comfort. And Dina would give that to them, even if only for a short while. One special bake for this season was a ginger and persimmon cake, yellowed with saffron strands, which Dina had bought on her last trip to Morocco, and fresh vanilla pods, their sweet scent so potent that it wafted across the café. This was in addition to all the regular pastries and cakes she had on offer, which were all recipes her mother had taught her to bake. The cake made with dark honey from the Atlas mountains was an all-time customer favorite. Dina had imbibed it with a very specific spell, a childhood memory of a time that she must have fallen asleep on a car ride home, and although she was a little too big to be carried, she remembered her father lifting her into his arms, her mother closing the car door softly so as not to wake her, then carrying her upstairs and tucking her into bed. When she'd been fashioning the spell for the first time, it had occurred to Dina that one day your parents put you down and they never picked you up again, and so she'd made the honey cake to recreate that feeling of childhood comfort. That sensation of someone taking the utmost care of you, holding you close, was a feeling that many in the rushing city of London didn't experience often. Sometimes she wondered if she was really in the business of café ownership, or if she was more of a fairy godmother in disguise. Undeniably, the magical pastries were great at keeping customers coming back for more, so that was a bonus on the businesswoman side of things.

What Musk had done that the rival automakers missed or didn’t have the means to combat was turn Tesla into a lifestyle. It did not just sell someone a car. It sold them an image, a feeling they were tapping into the future, a relationship. Apple did the same thing decades ago with the Mac and then again with the iPod and iPhone. Even those who were not religious about their affiliation to Apple were sucked into its universe once they bought the hardware and downloaded software like iTunes. This sort of relationship is hard to pull off if you don’t control as much of the lifestyle as possible. PC makers that farmed their software out to Microsoft, their chips to Intel, and their design to Asia could never make machines as beautiful and as complete as Apple’s. They also could not respond in time as Apple took this expertise to new areas and hooked people on its applications. You

Although in 2005 compact discs still represented over 98 percent of the market for legal album sales, Morris had no loyalty to the format. In May of that year, Vivendi Universal announced it was spinning off its CD manufacturing and distribution business into a calcified corporate shell called the Entertainment Distribution Company. Included in EDC’s assets were several massive warehouses and two large-scale compact disc manufacturing plants: one in Hanover, Germany, and one in Kings Mountain, North Carolina. Universal would still manufacture all its CDs at the plants, but now this would be an arms-length transaction that allowed them to watch the superannuation of optical media from a comfortable distance. It was one of the oldest moves in the corporate finance playbook: divest yourself of underperforming assets while holding on to the good stuff. EDC was a classic “stub company,” a dogshit collection of low-growth, capital-intensive factory equipment that was rapidly going obsolete. In other words, EDC was a drag on A that added little to B. Let the investment bankers figure out who wanted it—Universal had gone digital, and the death rattle of the compact disc had grown loud enough for even Doug Morris to hear. The CD was the past; the iPod was the future. People loved these stupid things. You could hardly go outside without getting run over by some dumb jogger rocking white headphones and a clip-on Shuffle. Apple stores were generating more sales per square foot than any business in the history of retail. The wrapped-up box with a sleek wafer-sized Nano inside was the most popular gift in the history of Christmas. Apple had created the most ubiquitous gadget in the history of stuff.

School Code of Conduct. Everything you need to know about how to behave at school—and how not to behave—is right here in this book.” A bunch of teachers came around and started handing out a copy to each student in the gym. “When you receive yours, open up to page one and follow along with me,” Stricker said. Then she started reading… really… slowly. “‘Section One: Hills Village Middle School Dress Code…’” When I got my copy, I flipped all the way to the back of the book. There were sixteen sections and twenty-six pages total. In other words, we were going to be lucky to get out of this assembly by Christmas. “‘… All students are expected to dress appropriately for an academic environment. No student shall wear clothing of a size more than two beyond his or her normal size….’” HELP! That’s what I was thinking about then. Middle school had just started, and they were already trying to bore us to death. Please, somebody stop Mrs. Stricker before she kills again! Leo took out a pen and started drawing something on the inside of the back cover. Stricker turned to the next page and kept reading. “‘Section Two: Prohibited Items. No student shall bring to school any electronic equipment not intended for class purposes. This includes cell phones, iPods, cameras, laptop computers….’” The whole thing went on and on. And on. And on. By the time we got to Section 6 (“Grounds for Expulsion”), my brain was turning into guacamole, and I’m pretty sure my ears were bleeding too. People always talk about how great it is to get older. All I saw were more rules and more adults telling me what I could and couldn’t do, in the name of what’s “good for me.” Yeah, well, asparagus is good for me, but it still makes me want to throw up. As far as I could tell, this little green book in my hands was just one long list of all the ways I could—and probably would—get into trouble between now and the end of the school year. Meanwhile, Leo was drawing away like the maniac he is. Every time Stricker mentioned another rule, he scribbled something else on the page in front of him. Finally, he turned it around and showed me what he was working on.

She stared, wide eyed as glass-walled elevators shot up fifty-two floors like pods in a launch tube. Everything - from the glaringly bright carpet swirling with psychedelic lines; to the hotel's open ceiling ringed by storey after storey of balconies, the distant roof so high it made her head spin; to the people decked out in cosplay - was torn from a science fiction novel. It seemed Liv had spent the last eighteen years in search of her people, and in one sudden explosion of fate, they'd all been brought together in this place in time. Her eyes filled with tears as a sudden awareness filled her. They were all nerds.

Suddenly I realize it wasn’t debris I felt against my escape pod as I left the ship. It was people.

Frankly, out in America, you get the feeling that America is dying. And along its highways and byways, the country seems less ready to leap into the future than it is already clinging to a sepia-toned past when America stood as the unencumbered Big Boy in a Manichean world of good and evil, capitalists and Commies. Even the neon oasis-pods of the interstate—the perpetual clusters of Wendy’s, McDonald’s, Denny’s, and Burger King—are crowded with people strangely reclaiming bygone days, connecting themselves to some prior eating experience, reveling in the familiar. We gas

We spent twenty days and endured three thousand miles of jolting, pounding, off-road bush driving. But we had a hard-won sense of accomplishment when we pulled up on the stunning cliff-side view of the Great Australian Bight, a huge open bay carved out of the southern coastline. We had made it. Below us, three hundred feet down a sheer rock face, was the Southern Ocean. A pod of southern right whales passed by, their calves following along with them. Steve and I and the crew watched the family dramas of the whales play out below us. A calf felt naughty and went darting away from his mother’s side. Come back, the mother called, come back, come back, you naughty little whale. When she was under the water, we couldn’t hear anything, but as she surfaced we could actually hear the whale song from our perch three hundred feet in the air. Mama scolded the calf, and we saw the young whale come dutifully shooting back over to follow his mother for a while. Sometimes the calf would approach his mama for a drink of milk and nurse for a few minutes. Then he would escape once more, and the whole scenario played itself out all over again. We watched the whales for hours. That night around the campfire, we discussed whaling, how sad and cruel and horrible it was. “If we killed cows the way we killed whales, people wouldn’t stand for it,” Steve said. “Imagine if you drove a truck with a torpedo gun off the back. When you saw a cow you fired at it, and then you either electrocuted it over the course of half an hour or the head of the torpedo blew up inside of it, rendering it unable to walk or move until it finally bled to death.” “We’ve got to get that message out,” I said to Steve. But his idea was to bring the beauty and joy of the whales to people, so that they would naturally fall in love with them and not want to hurt them. He didn’t want to dwell on images that would make people sad and upset. Steve remained thoughtful and silent as the fire died. The ocean sounded against the cliffs below. The games of the whale families played over and over in our minds. In spite of our extensive searching, we never saw a live dingo down the whole line of our journey. It was time to try a different approach. The next morning the helicopter pilot arrived early. Going up with him, Steve actually finally spotted some dingoes from the air. The beautiful, ginger-colored dogs played along the fence, jumping over it or skirting under it with effortless ease.

Design isn’t just about iPods and cool products; it’s about improving people’s lives and making things clear and accessible. Design, at its most fundamental level, is about finding solutions.