Pound Class Quotes

No teacher has ever failed from ignorance. That is empiric professional knowledge. Teachers fail because they cannot `handle the class.' Real education must ultimately be limited to men how INSIST on knowing, the rest is mere sheep-herding.

Some people when they see cheese, chocolate or cake they don't think of calories.

Hey, Ivashkov! Open up. " Avery argued. She kept pounding on the door and yelling, and finally, Adrian answered. His hair stuck up at odd angles, and he had dark circles under his eyes. He'd drunk twice as much as Lissa last night. "What . . . ?" He blinked. "Shouldn't you guys be in class? Oh God. I didn't sleep that much, did I? " "Let us in, " said Avery, pushing past. "We've got refugees from a fire here. " She flounced onto his couch, making herself at home while he continued staring. Lissa and Christian joined her. "Avery sprang the fire alarm, " explained Lissa. "Nice work, " said Adrian, collapsing into a fluffy chair. "But why'd you have to come here? Is this the only place that's not burning down? " Avery batted her eyelashes at him. "Aren't you happy to see us? " He eyed her speculatively for a moment. "Always happy to see you.

How reprehensible it is when those blessed with commodities insist on ignoring the poor. Better to torment them, force them into indentured servitude, inflict compulsion and blows—this at least produces a connection, fury and a pounding heart, and these too constitute a form of relationship. But to cower in elegant homes behind golden garden gates, fearful lest the breath of warm humankind touch you, unable to indulge in extravagances for fear they might be glimpsed by the embittered oppressed, to oppress and yet lack the courage to show yourself as an oppressor, even to fear the ones you are oppressing, feeling ill at ease in your own wealth and begrudging others their ease, to resort to disagreeable weapons that require neither true audacity nor manly courage, to have money, but only money, without splendor: That’s what things look like in our cities at present

When I am high I couldn’t worry about money if I tried. So I don’t. The money will come from somewhere; I am entitled; God will provide. Credit cards are disastrous, personal checks worse. Unfortunately, for manics anyway, mania is a natural extension of the economy. What with credit cards and bank accounts there is little beyond reach. So I bought twelve snakebite kits, with a sense of urgency and importance. I bought precious stones, elegant and unnecessary furniture, three watches within an hour of one another (in the Rolex rather than Timex class: champagne tastes bubble to the surface, are the surface, in mania), and totally inappropriate sirenlike clothes. During one spree in London I spent several hundred pounds on books having titles or covers that somehow caught my fancy: books on the natural history of the mole, twenty sundry Penguin books because I thought it could be nice if the penguins could form a colony. Once I think I shoplifted a blouse because I could not wait a minute longer for the woman-with-molasses feet in front of me in line. Or maybe I just thought about shoplifting, I don’t remember, I was totally confused. I imagine I must have spent far more than thirty thousand dollars during my two major manic episodes, and God only knows how much more during my frequent milder manias. But then back on lithium and rotating on the planet at the same pace as everyone else, you find your credit is decimated, your mortification complete: mania is not a luxury one can easily afford. It is devastating to have the illness and aggravating to have to pay for medications, blood tests, and psychotherapy. They, at least, are partially deductible. But money spent while manic doesn’t fit into the Internal Revenue Service concept of medical expense or business loss. So after mania, when most depressed, you’re given excellent reason to be even more so.

In the great cities we see so little of the world, we drift into our minority. In the little towns and villages there are no minorities; people are not numerous enough. You must see the world there, perforce. Every man is himself a class; every hour carries its new challenge. When you pass the inn at the end of the village you leave your favourite whimsy behind you; for you will meet no one who can share it. We listen to eloquent speaking, read books and write them, settle all the affairs of the universe. The dumb village multitudes pass on unchanging; the feel of the spade in the hand is no different for all our talk: good seasons and bad follow each other as of old. The dumb multitudes are no more concerned with us than is the old horse peering through the rusty gate of the village pound. The ancient map-makers wrote across unexplored regions, 'Here are lions.' Across the villages of fishermen and turners of the earth, so different are these from us, we can write but one line that is certain, 'Here are ghosts.' ("Village Ghosts")

No force in the world can take from me my five hundred pounds. Food, house and clothing are mine forever.Therefore not merely do effort and labour cease, but also hatred and bitterness. I need not hate any man; he cannot hurt me. I need not flatter any man; he has nothing to give me. So imperceptibly I found myself adopting a new attitude towards the other half of the human race. It was absurd to blame any class or any sex, as a whole. Great bodies of people are never responsible for what they do. They are driven by instincts which are not within their control.

It is worth saying something about the social position of beggars, for when one has consorted with them, and found that they are ordinary human beings, one cannot help being struck by the curious attitude that society takes towards them. People seem to feel that there is some essential difference between beggars and ordinary 'working' men. They are a race apart--outcasts, like criminals and prostitutes. Working men 'work', beggars do not 'work'; they are parasites, worthless in their very nature. It is taken for granted that a beggar does not 'earn' his living, as a bricklayer or a literary critic 'earns' his. He is a mere social excrescence, tolerated because we live in a humane age, but essentially despicable. Yet if one looks closely one sees that there is no ESSENTIAL difference between a beggar's livelihood and that of numberless respectable people. Beggars do not work, it is said; but, then, what is WORK? A navvy works by swinging a pick. An accountant works by adding up figures. A beggar works by standing out of doors in all weathers and getting varicose veins, chronic bronchitis, etc. It is a trade like any other; quite useless, of course--but, then, many reputable trades are quite useless. And as a social type a beggar compares well with scores of others. He is honest compared with the sellers of most patent medicines, high-minded compared with a Sunday newspaper proprietor, amiable compared with a hire-purchase tout--in short, a parasite, but a fairly harmless parasite. He seldom extracts more than a bare living from the community, and, what should justify him according to our ethical ideas, he pays for it over and over in suffering. I do not think there is anything about a beggar that sets him in a different class from other people, or gives most modern men the right to despise him. Then the question arises, Why are beggars despised?--for they are despised, universally. I believe it is for the simple reason that they fail to earn a decent living. In practice nobody cares whether work is useful or useless, productive or parasitic; the sole thing demanded is that it shall be profitable. In all the modem talk about energy, efficiency, social service and the rest of it, what meaning is there except 'Get money, get it legally, and get a lot of it'? Money has become the grand test of virtue. By this test beggars fail, and for this they are despised. If one could earn even ten pounds a week at begging, it would become a respectable profession immediately. A beggar, looked at realistically, is simply a businessman, getting his living, like other businessmen, in the way that comes to hand. He has not, more than most modem people, sold his honour; he has merely made the mistake of choosing a trade at which it is impossible to grow rich.

You didn’t help chop up a two-hundred-fifty-pound man and still graduate at the top of your class without learning how to compartmentalize.

I have managed to make the Capitalist class pay me several pounds a week for writing books against Capitalism.

Every decision I have made - from changing jobs, to changing partners, to changing homes - has been taken with trepidation. I have not ceased being fearful, but I have ceased to let fear control me. I have accepted fear as a part of life, specifically the fear of change, the fear of the unknown, and I have gone ahead despite the pounding in the heart that says: turn back, turn back, you'll die if you venture too far... In the past several years I have learned, in short, to trust myself. Not to eradicate fear but to go on in spite of fear. Not to become insensitive to distinguished critics but to follow my own writer's instinct. My job is not to paralyze myself by anticipating judgment but to do the best that I can and let judgment fall where it may. The difference between the woman who is writing this essay and the college girl sitting in her creative writing class in 1961 is mostly a matter of nerve and daring - the nerve to trust my own instincts and the daring to be a fool. No one ever found wisdom without being a fool.

When one thinks of all the people who support or have supported Fascism, one stands amazed at their diversity. What a crew! Think of a programme which at any rate for a while could bring Hitler, Petain, Montagu Norman, Pavelitch, William Randolph Hearst, Streicher, Buchman, Ezra Pound, Juan March, Cocteau, Thyssen, Father Coughlin, the Mufti of Jerusalem, Arnold Lunn, Antonescu, Spengler, Beverley Nichols, Lady Houston, and Marinetti all into the same boat! But the clue is really very simple. They are all people with something to lose, or people who long for a hierarchical society and dread the prospect of a world of free and equal human beings. Behind all the ballyhoo that is talked about ‘godless’ Russia and the ‘materialism’ of the working class lies the simple intention of those with money or privileges to cling to them. Ditto, though it contains a partial truth, with all the talk about the worthlessness of social reconstruction not accompanied by a ‘change of heart’. The pious ones, from the Pope to the yogis of California, are great on the’ change of heart’, much more reassuring from their point of view than a change in the economic system.

Frustrated with drawing, I switched to the printmaking department, where I overturned great buckets of ink. After trying my hand at sculpture, I attempted pottery. During class critiques the teacher would lift my latest project from the table and I’d watch her arm muscles strain and tighten against the weight. With their thick, clumsy bases, my mugs weighed in at close to five pounds each. The color was muddy and the lips rough and uninviting. I gave my mother a matching set for Christmas, and she accepted them as graciously as possible, announcing that they would make the perfect pet bowls. The mugs were set on the kitchen floor and remained there until the cat chipped a tooth and went on a hunger strike.

Now holler at me if you’re ready to have a Rossumly awesome time. State District Forty is about to get hella canvassed, and I am so here for it.” He pounds a fist in the air. It’s like watching your oldest, cringiest teacher try to win over the class with slang they googled during their planning period. And I’m pretty sure Gabe being only twenty-three makes it worse.

I'll tell you about Ryder. He's the star quarter back of our Division 1A state championship football team. Top student in our class, he doesn't even have to work for it. He plays the piano like some kind of freaking prodigy, and I wouldn't be surprised if he composed sonatas or something in his spare time. Oh, and did I mention that he's gorgeous? Of course he is. Six foot four, two hundred ten pounds of swoon-worthy good looks. Spiky dark hair, chocolate brown eyes, and full-on dimples.

Look what the cat dragged in," Ms. Skoglund said. "Were you waylaid by all your female admirers?" "It's nothing like that," the boy said. "Besides, you know I only have eyes for you." "Sure you do," Ms. Skoglund said. "I mean, why bother with one of those skinny little things your age when you can go for someone who's trying to lose another thirty pounds before her twenty-year class reunion next summer? That makes sense.

As usual, Junko thought about Jack London's 'To Build a Fire.' It was the story of a man traveling alone through the snowy Alaskan interior and his attempts to light a fire. He would freeze to death unless he could make it catch. The sun was going down. Junko hadn't read much fiction, but that one short story she had read again and again, ever since her teacher had assigned it as an essay topic during summer vacation of her first year in high school. The scene of the story would always come vividly to mind as she read. She could feel the man's fear and hope and despair as if they were her own; she could sense the very pounding of his heart as he hovered on the brink of death. Most important of all, though, was the fact that the man was fundamentally longing for death. She knew that for sure. She couldn't explain how she knew, but she knew it from the start. Death was really what he wanted. He knew that it was the right ending for him. And yet he had to go on fighting with all his might. He had to fight against an overwhelming adversary in order to survive. What most shook Junko was this deep-rooted contradiction. The teacher ridiculed her view. 'Death is really what he wanted? That's a new one for me! And strange! Quite 'original,' I'd have to say.' He read her conclusion aloud before the class, and everybody laughed. But Junko knew. All of them were wrong. Otherwise how could the ending of the story be so quiet and beautiful?

At nineteen, I ought to have been in college along with the rest of my high school class, gaining fifteen pounds of knowledge and bursting the sweatpants of my ignorance. What else did people do there? Changed their names to Patchouli, became vegetarians, grew out their leg hair for the first time, got so caught up in their studies of ancient Greece that they murdered a farmer while worshipping the grape-god in the countryside.

the harsh treatment of the underprivileged classes, the unsympa- thetic poor laws and severe feudal laws, and the indifference with which the rising capitalist class was "beginning to reckon prosperity in terms of pounds sterling, and . . . becoming used to the idea of sacrificing human life to the deity of increased production.

PERFECTION The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality. His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the “quantity” group: fifty pounds of pots rated an “A”, forty pounds a “B”, and so on. Those being graded on “quality”, however, needed to produce only one pot — albeit a perfect one — to get an “A”. Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the “quantity” group was busily churning out piles of work-and learning from their mistakes — the “quality” group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay.

When you have paid a hundred and thirty pounds bride-price and you are only a second-class clerk, you find you haven’t got any more to spare on other women.

Oh, pfft. I manage. With any paper one sticks under their nose and plenty of self-possession, one can get through, Especially a woman. Sometimes I take an armload of parcels and bags and drop every single one as I try to find my identity cards, chatting all the while, and they wave me through out of sheer irritation.' Lili exhaled a long steam of smoke. 'To tell the truth, much of this special work we do is quite boring. I think that's why women are good as it. Our lives are already boring. We jump an Uncle Edward's offer because we can't stand the thought of working in a file room anymore, or teaching a class full of runny-nosed children their letters. Then we discover this job is deadly dull as well, but at least there's the enlivening thought that someone might put a Luger to the back of our necks. It's still better than shooting ourselves, which we know we're going to do if we have to type one more letter or pound one more Latin verb into a child's ivory skull.

Still, I knew rehab was important. So I listened. I went to every class. I held hands with strangers. With suburban mummies who’d gotten addicted to prescription pills, and a preacher’s son who’d fallen into the arms of heroin, and a Russian oligarch’s daughter who, like me, had snorted pounds and pounds of cocaine to numb the feeling that the world was closing in on you from all angles. I wrote letters to my family and friends. Angry letters. Apologetic letters. Funny letters. Then I burned them all. I couldn’t write Stardust shite, though. Everything I had to say to her—every single groveling word—had to be said in person.

Urban landlords quickly realized that piles of money could be made by creating slums: “maximum profits came, not from providing first-class accommodations for those who could well afford them… but from crowded slum accommodations, for those whose pennies were scarcer than the rich man’s pounds.” Beginning in the sixteenth century, slum housing would be reserved not only for outcasts, beggars, and thieves but for a large segment of the population.

We require only a grenade launcher, six pounds of industrial-strength licorice, two spells of Class VIII complexity, a shipping container, a side of bacon, an automobile, several homing snails, a ladder, and two people to act as bait.

But this is something quite new!" said Mrs. Munt, who collected new ideas as a squirrel collects nuts, and was especially attracted by those that are portable. "New for me; sensible people have acknowledged it for years. You and I and the Wilcoxes stand upon money as upon islands. It is so firm beneath our feet that we forget its very existence. It's only when we see someone near us tottering that we realize all that an independent income means. Last night, when we were talking up here round the fire, I began to think that the very soul of the world is economic, and that the lowest abyss is not the absence of love, but the absence of coin." "I call that rather cynical." "So do I. But Helen and I, we ought to remember, when we are tempted to criticize others, that we are standing on these islands, and that most of the others are down below the surface of the sea. The poor cannot always reach those whom they want to love, and they can hardly ever escape from those whom they love no longer. We rich can. Imagine the tragedy last June if Helen and Paul Wilcox had been poor people and could not invoke railways and motor-cars to part them." "That's more like Socialism," said Mrs. Munt suspiciously. "Call it what you like. I call it going through life with one's hand spread open on the table. I'm tired of these rich people who pretend to be poor, and think it shows a nice mind to ignore the piles of money that keep their feet above the waves. I stand each year upon six hundred pounds, and Helen upon the same, and Tibby will stand upon eight, and as fast as our pounds crumble away into the sea they are renewed—from the sea, yes, from the sea. And all our thoughts are the thoughts of six-hundred-pounders, and all our speeches; and because we don't want to steal umbrellas ourselves, we forget that below the sea people do want to steal them, and do steal them sometimes, and that what's a joke up here is down there reality—

Lying between the sheets, she felt different; her body had turned into bread dough, dough that's been kneaded and pounded till it's grey, lumpen, no yeast in it, no lightness, no prospect of rising. Her arms lay stiff by her sides. When, finally, she drifted off to sleep, she dreamt she was on her knees in a corner of the room, trying to vomit without attracting the attention of the person who was asleep on the bed. Her eyes wide open in the darkness, she tried to cast off the dream, but it stayed with her till morning.

Passengers drank and smoked. Both; a lot. This was a significant source of profit for Cunard. The company laid in a supply of 150 cases of Black & White Whiskey, 50 cases of Canadian Club Whiskey, and 50 of Plymouth Gin; also, 15 cases each of an eleven-year-old French red wine, a Chambertin, and an eleven-year-old French white, a Chablis, and twelve barrels of stout and ten of ale. Cunard stockpiled thirty thousand “Three Castles” cigarettes and ten thousand Manila cigars. The ship also sold cigars from Havana and American cigarettes made by Phillip Morris. For the many passengers who brought pipes, Cunard acquired 560 pounds of loose Capstan tobacco—“navy cut”—and 200 pounds of Lord Nelson Flake, both in 4-ounce tins. Passengers also brought their own. Michael Byrne, a retired New York merchant and former deputy sheriff traveling in first class, apparently planned to spend a good deal of the voyage smoking. He packed 11 pounds of Old Rover Tobacco and three hundred cigars. During the voyage, the scent of combusted tobacco was ever present, especially after dinner.

It is an obvious fact that the banks and big monopolies are now dependent on the state for their survival. As soon as they were in difficulties, the same people who used to insist that the state must play no role in the economy, ran to the government with their hands out, demanding huge sums of money. And the government immediately gave them a blank cheque. Trillions of pounds of public money has been handed over to the banks, totalling some $14 trillion. But the crisis continues to deepen. All that has been achieved in the last four years is to transform what was a black hole in the finances of the banks into a black hole in public finances. In order to save the bankers, everybody is expected to sacrifice, but for the bankers and capitalists no sacrifices are demanded. They pay themselves lavish bonuses with the money of the taxpayer. This is Robin Hood in reverse.

When you start searching for ‘pure elements’ in literature you will find that literature has been created by the following classes of persons: Inventors. Men who found a new process, or whose extant work gives us the first known example of a process. The masters. Men who combined a number of such processes, and who used them as well as or better than the inventors. The diluters. Men who came after the first two kinds of writer, and couldn’t do the job quite as well. Good writers without salient qualities. Men who are fortunate enough to be born when the literature of a given country is in good working order, or when some particular branch of writing is ‘healthy’. For example, men who wrote sonnets in Dante’s time, men who wrote short lyrics in Shakespeare’s time or for several decades thereafter, or who wrote French novels and stories after Flaubert had shown them how. Writers of belles-lettres. That is, men who didn’t really invent anything, but who specialized in some particular part of writing, who couldn’t be considered as ‘great men’ or as authors who were trying to give a complete presentation of life, or of their epoch. The starters of crazes. Until the reader knows the first two categories he will never be able ‘to see the wood for the trees’. He may know what he ‘likes’. He may be a ‘compleat book-lover’, with a large library of beautifully printed books, bound in the most luxurious bindings, but he will never be able to sort out what he knows to estimate the value of one book in relation to others, and he will be more confused and even less able to make up his mind about a book where a new author is ‘breaking with convention’ than to form an opinion about a book eighty or a hundred years old. He will never understand why a specialist is annoyed with him for trotting out a second- or third-hand opinion about the merits of his favourite bad writer.

I never said I didn’t identify with Lily,” she went on, her voice clear and her own. “I think in some way she’s the heart of the book. And her transformation at the end, when she’s finally able to finish her painting, after she doesn’t have anything holding her back…it’s one of the most important scenes in the novel. It’s when she finally realises who she is.” Mr Whitley nodded vaguely, pacing the length of a square-paned window overlooking the courtyard below. “And what was it?” he asked deliberately. “What do you think was holding her back all that time?” Olivia looked down at her feet, feeling every pair of eyes in the class burning holes into the top of her head. Miles’s mushroom loafers were fidgeting under the chair beside her, and she felt him holding his breathe. Her heart was pounding, but this time it was different. Everybody in the room was waiting for her, and that was okay. This time she had things to say. “The past,” Olivia answered finally. “The past was holding her back.

I knew exactly when the fever had struck. I had been reading Hamlet in an English class at school. Everyone else stumbled, puzzling over the strange words. Then it had been my turn, and the language had suddenly woken in me, so that my heart and lungs and tongue and throat were on fire. Later, I understood that this was why people spoke of Shakespeare as a god. At the time, I felt like weeping. Somebody had released me from dumbness, from utter isolation. I knew that I could live inside these words, that they would give me a a shape, a shell. I had no idea, then, that I would never play Hamlet…. I’m an actor, and in a good year I earn eleven thousand pounds for dressing up as a carrot.

My dad will win, I silently countered, even as I smiled sweetly. I couldn’t wait to spike the ball right through her block, no matter how tall she was. In health class we’d learned that if Barbie were human, she’d be six feet tall and weigh one hundred pounds, and Gisele seemed pretty close to those dimensions. By contrast, my doll representation would be more like Barbie’s Fat Mexican-American Republican sidekick.

Jennifer had exactly five pounds, six shillings, and fourpence halfpenny when she left No. 7 Maple Street. She lugged her two suitcases along with her into various buses, and arrived at Paddington with three-quarters of an hour to wait before the twelve o’clock train should bear her away from London forever. Thirty-two shillings and sixpence of her capital went on her third-class ticket, and three shillings more on a cup of coffee, two rashers of bacon, and a banana, for she had eaten no breakfast. During this wait she had time to think over her crazy flight from the boardinghouse. It had been her home since she was six years old, and she had left her mother without one pang of regret. “I must be terribly unnatural,” thought Jennifer sadly. “But it can’t be helped. I was probably born without a heart; I believe some people are.” She

I imagine the field day we’d have with this in gender studies class. Our desks in a circle, we’d huddle forward and rant: So this is the baseline of femininity. The place where being bestowed certain chromosomes will ultimately take you. This is the dream that’s been pounded into us. Find the guy. Find the dress. Or hell, maybe the other way around. The Disney Princesses told us so. But this isn’t college. This is my job.

But I am so pathologically obsessed with usage that every semester the same thing happens: once I've had to read my students' first set of papers, we immediately abandon the regular Lit syllabus and have a three-week Emergency Remedial Usage and Grammar Unit, during which my demeanor is basically that of somebody teaching HIV prevention to intravenous-drug users. When it merges (as it does, every term) that 95 percent of those intelligent upscale college students have never been taught, e.g., what a clause is or why a misplace 'only' can make a sentence confusing or why you don't just automatically stick in a comma after a long noun phrase, I all but pound my head on the blackboard; I get angry and self-righteous; I tell them they should sue their hometown school boards, and mean it. The kids end up scared, both of me and for me. Every August I vow silently to chill about usage this year, and then by Labor Day there's foam on my chin. I can't seem to help it. The truth is that I'm not even an especially good or dedicated teacher; I don't have this kind of fervor in class about anything else, and I know it's not a very productive fervor, nor a healthy one – it's got elements of fanaticism and rage to it, plus a snobbishness that I know I'd be mortified to display about anything else.

The honky-tonk bartender, who doubled as bouncer, waiter, and cashier, was in no mood to compromise. Mercy was not in him. He came out around the open end of the long counter, waddled threatening across the floor in a sullen, red-faced fury and began to shake the inanimate figure lying across the table with its head bedded on its arms. "Hey, you! Do your sleeping in the gutter!" If you gave these bums an inch; they took a yard. And this one was a particularly glaring example of the genus bar-fly. He was in here all the time like this, inhaling smoke and then doing a sunset across the table. He'd been in here since four this afternoon. The boss and he, who were partners in the joint - the bartender called it jernt - would have been the last ones to claim they were running a Rainbow Room, but at least they were trying to give the place a little class, keep it above the level of a Bowery smoke-house; they even paid a guy to pound the piano and a canary to warble three times a week. And then bums like this had to show up and give the place a bad look! He shook the recumbent figure again, more roughly than the first time. Shook him so violently that the whole reedy table under him rattled and threatened to collapse. "Come on, clear out, I said! Pay me for what you had and get outa here!" ("I'm Dangerous Tonight")

In the great cities we see so little of the world, we drift into our minority. In the little towns and villages there are no minorities ; people are not numerous enough. You must see the world there, perforce. Every man is himself a class; every hour carries its new challenge. When you pass the inn at the end of the village you leave your favourite whimsy behind you; for you will meet no one who can share it. We listen to eloquent speaking, read books and write them, settle all the affairs of the universe. The dumb village multitudes pass on unchanging; the feel of the spade in the hand is no different for all our talk: good seasons and bad follow each other as of old. The dumb multitudes are no more concerned with us than is the old horse peering through the rusty gate of the village pound. The ancient map-makers wrote across unexplored regions, ‘Here are lions.’ Across the villages of fishermen and turners of the earth, so different are these from us, we can write but one line that is certain, ‘Here are ghosts.

And I wrote a story for private circulation, "Miss Lewis & the Giant Turd," about a painful bowel movement that began in class, as she was drilling us on prepositions. Suddenly she emitted a low scraping sound like a box of rocks being dragged across concrete--like a glacier moving!--and she let out an AIIIIEEEEEEE and bent over double and hobbled to the girls' room, where she fell to the floor and cried pitifully for the janitor, who rushed in with a plunger and tried to extract the fecal mass from her, but it was too immense, and then the fire department arrived and laid her over the sink and attached a suction pump, two men on either side of her skinny butt, working a lever, and they managed to suction the poop out of her, and when they were done, she weighed forty-five pounds. And she couldn't teach anymore, she just sat on her front step waving to passing cars. This title passed from pupil to pupil, two grimy sheets of paper folded to pocket size.... The story found its way to Laura, Miss Lewis's pet, who handed it over to her, and she read it, thin-lipped, and tore it into tiny pieces and dropped them into the wastebacket. "This is so childish it doesn't bear talking about," she said. "It is beneath contempt.

All right,” she said. “Inductive reasoning. It’s what those so-called detectives on CSI, SVU, LMNOP and all the rest of them call deductive reasoning, which is wrong and they should know better. It’s inductive reasoning, a tool you will use frequently in geometry as well as calculus and trigonometry, assuming you get that far and that certainly won’t be you, Jacquon. Stop messing with that girl’s hair and pay attention. Your grade on that last test was so low I had to write it on the bottom of my shoe.” Mrs. Washington glared at Jacquon until his face melted. She began again: “Inductive reasoning is reasoning to the most likely explanation. It begins with one or more observations, and from those observations we come to a conclusion that seems to make sense. All right. An example: Jacquon was walking home from school and somebody hit him on the head with a brick twenty-five times. Mrs. Washington and her husband, Wendell, are the suspects. Mrs. Washington is five feet three, a hundred and ten pounds, and teaches school. Wendell is six-two, two-fifty, and works at a warehouse. So who would you say is the more likely culprit?” Isaiah and the rest of the class said Wendell. “Why?” Mrs. Washington said. “Because Mrs. Washington may have wanted to hit Jacquon with a brick twenty-five times but she isn’t big or strong enough. Seems reasonable given the facts at hand, but here’s where inductive reasoning can lead you astray. You might not have all the facts. Such as Wendell is an accountant at the warehouse who exercises by getting out of bed in the morning, and before Mrs. Washington was a schoolteacher she was on the wrestling team at San Diego State in the hundred-and-five-to-hundred-and-sixteen-pound weight class and would have won her division if that blond girl from Cal Northridge hadn’t stuck a thumb in her eye. Jacquon, I know your mother and if I tell her about your behavior she will beat you ’til your name is Jesus.” The

At this time, there was a superstition among upper class women that the blood of young children helped keep the bloom of youth and that young fat helped conserve a young skin. There was also TB raging through the city; at that time, it was a disease that was one hundred percent fatal, as in those years there was no penicillin, but there was a popular belief that ingested human blood soothed and healed tuberculosis. Enriqueta now began kidnapping children of all ages, some for prostitution and some to be killed to create her healing tonics and “facial crèmes.” Everything that she possibly could she used from these children: the blood, bones (that she pounded into powder), and the fat.

A President J.G., F.C. who said he wasn’t going to stand here and ask us to make some tough choices because he was standing here promising he was going to make them for us. Who asked us simply to sit back and enjoy the show. Who handled wild applause from camouflage-fatigue- and sandal-and-poncho-clad C.U.S.P.s with the unabashed grace of a real pro. Who had black hair and silver sideburns, just like his big-headed puppet, and the dusty brick-colored tan seen only among those without homes and those whose homes had a Dermalatix Hypospectral personal sterilization booth. Who declared that neither Tax & Spend nor Cut & Borrow comprised the ticket into a whole new millennial era (here more puzzlement among the Inaugural audience, which Mario represents by having the tiny finger-puppets turn rigidly toward each other and then away and then toward). Who alluded to ripe and available Novel Sources of Revenue just waiting out there, unexploited, not seen by his predecessors because of the trees (?). Who foresaw budgetary adipose trimmed with a really big knife. The Johnny Gentle who stressed above all—simultaneously pleaded for and promised—an end to atomized Americans’ fractious blaming of one another for our terrible 151 internal troubles. Here bobs and smiles from both wealthily green-masked puppets and homeless puppets in rags and mismatched shoes and with used surgical masks, all made by E.T.A.’s fourth- and fifth-grade crafts class, under the supervision of Ms. Heath, of match-sticks and Popsicle-stick shards and pool-table felt with sequins for eyes and painted fingernail-parings for smiles/frowns, under their masks. The Johnny Gentle, Chief Executive who pounds a rubber-gloved fist on the podium so hard it knocks the Seal askew and declares that Dammit there just must be some people besides each other of us to blame. To unite in opposition to. And he promises to eat light and sleep very little until he finds them—in the Ukraine, or the Teutons, or the wacko Latins. Or—pausing with that one arm up and head down in the climactic Vegas way—closer to right below our nose. He swears he’ll find us some cohesion-renewing Other. And then make some tough choices. Alludes to a whole new North America for a crazy post-millennial world.

Each woman was valued at 150 pounds of tobacco, which was the same price exacted from Jane Dickenson when she eventually purchased her freedom. Not surprisingly, then, with their value calculated in tobacco, women in Virginia were treated as fertile commodities. They came with testimonials to their moral character, impressing on “industrious Planters” that they were not being sold a bad bill of goods. One particular planter wrote that an earlier shipment of females was “corrupt,” and he expected a new crop that was guaranteed healthy and favorably disposed for breeding. Accompanying the female cargo were some two hundred head of cattle, a reminder that the Virginia husbandman needed both species of breeding stock to recover his English roots.37 Despite

A slave, Marcus Cato said, should be working when he is not sleeping. It does not matter whether his work in itself is good in itself—for slaves, at least. This sentiment still survives, and it has piled up mountains of useless drudgery. I believe that this instinct to perpetuate useless work is, at bottom, simply fear of the mob. The mob (the thought runs) are such low animals that they would be dangerous if they had leisure; it is safer to keep them too busy to think. A rich man who happens to be intellectually honest, if he is questioned about the improvement of working conditions, usually says something like this: "We know that poverty is unpleasant; in fact, since it is so remote, we rather enjoy harrowing ourselves with the thought of its unpleasantness. But don’t expect us to do anything about it. We are sorry fort you lower classes, just as we are sorry for a cat with the mange, of your condition. We feel that you are much safer as you are. The present state of affairs suits us, and we are not going to take the risk of setting you free, even by an extra hour a day. So, dear brothers, since evidently you must sweat to pay for our trips to Italy, sweat and be damned to you.” This is particularly the attitude of intelligent, cultivated people; one can read the substance if it in a hundred essays. Very few cultivated people have less than (say) four hundred pounds a year, and naturally they side with the rich, because they imagine that any liberty conceded to the poor is a threat to their own liberty. foreseeing some dismal Marxian Utopia as the alternative, the educated man prefers to keep things as they are. Possibly he does not like his fellow-rich very much, but he supposes that even the vulgarest of them are less inimical to his pleasures, more his kind of people, than the poor, and that he had better stand by them. It is this fear of a supposedly dangerous mob that makes nearly all intelligent people conservative in their opinions. Fear of the mob is a superstitious fear. It is based on the idea that there is some mysterious, fundamental difference between rich and poor, as though they were two different races, like negroes and white men. But in reality there is no such difference. The mass of the rich and the poor are differentiated by their incomes and nothings else, and the average millionaire is only the average dishwasher dressed in a new suit. Change places, and handy dandy, which is the justice, which is the thief? Everyone who has mixed on equal terms with the poor knows this quite well. But the trouble is that intelligent, cultivated people, the very people who might be expected to have liberal opinions, never do mix with the poor. For what do the majority of educated people know about poverty? In my copy of Villon’s poems the editor has actually thought it necessary to explain the line “Ne pain ne voyent qu'aux fenestres” by a footnote; so remote is even hunger from the educated man’s experience. From this ignorance a superstitious fear of the mob results quite naturally. The educated man pictures a horde of submen, wanting only a day’s liberty to loot his house, burn his books, and set him to work minding a machine or sweeping out a lavatory. “Anything,” he thinks, “any injustice, sooner than let that mob loose.

There are also hunger strikes. Hunger strikes are noble and sometimes necessary. If you’re a political prisoner in China or North Korea (where the entire country is on a hunger strike, not by choice), I get it. For you, it’s life or death. But at Harvard, it’s about a press clipping and maybe getting a better grade or a higher class of hand job. So when an undergrad adopts a hunger strike in order to get someone to divest from oil, I say, let the twerp starve. Most of them are overfed, pudgy masses of soft tissue—it wouldn’t hurt if these sad sacks lost a few pounds. They might even understand the plight of the average Venezuelan, who operates under conditions American activists see as utopian, when they’re really nightmarish. How about the next time one of our coeds feels a hunger strike coming on, we exchange her with someone who’s genuinely starving?

Ben is Ryder’s cousin--second cousin, to be specific--and one of his best friends, even though they couldn’t be any more different. Ben is sweet, thoughtful. Kind. Whereas Ryder, well…I’ll tell you about Ryder. He’s the star quarterback of our Division 1A state-championship football team. Top student in our class, and he doesn’t even have to work at it. He plays the piano like some kind of freaking prodigy, and I wouldn’t be surprised if he composed sonatas or something in his spare time. Oh, and did I mention that he’s gorgeous? Of course he is. Six foot four, two hundred ten pounds of swoon-worthy good looks. Spiky dark hair, chocolate brown eyes, and full-on dimples. And his future? Right now half the SEC is courting him hard, and the other half is wishing they were. It’s a foregone conclusion that he’ll play for Ole Miss--Mississippi’s golden boy, kept right here at home.

I do trust you though. I think if someone tried to take me, you’d at least fight them for me a little…” I watched his face for a moment before narrowing my eyes. “Wouldn’t you?” That had his other eye popping open, his cheeks still slightly pink, but everything else about him completely alert. “You know I would.” Why that pleased me so much, I wasn’t going to overanalyze. “If someone tried to take you, I know aikido, some jiu-jitsu, and kickboxing,” I offered him up. “But my dentist says I have really strong teeth, so I’d be better off trying to bite someone’s finger or ear off instead.” Aaron’s eyebrows climbed up his forehead almost comically. “Like a little Chihuahua,” he suggested, the spoon going into his mouth with a sly grin. I winked at him, immediately regretting it. I didn’t want it to come across like I was flirting. “I was thinking more of a piranha. I’ve only had one filling in my entire life,” I told him, wishing each word coming out of my mouth wasn’t coming out of it. If he thought I was being awkward or a flirt, he didn’t make it known. “Or a raptor.” “A lion.” “A tiger.” “Did you know a jaguar has twice the strength in its bite than a tiger does?” Aaron frowned as he took another bite of his oatmeal. “No shit?” “No. Two thousand pounds per square inch. They’re the only big cat that kills their prey by biting its head, through bone and everything. A tiger bites the neck of whatever animal they’re eating to cut their air and blood flow off. Crazy, huh?” He looked impressed. “I had no idea.” I nodded. “Not a lot of people do.” “Is there anything that bites harder than they do?” “Crocodiles. The really big ones. I’m pretty sure they have about 4000 or 5000 psi bites.” For the fifty-second time, I shrugged. “I like watching the Animal Channel and Discovery,” I said, making it sound like an apology. Aaron gave me that soft smile that made me feel like my insides were on fire. Then he winked. “I don’t know much about crocodiles, but I know all about alligators,” he offered. “Did you know there are only two species left in the world?” “There are?” “American alligator and the Asian alligator. More than a fifth of all of them live in Florida.” “We have some gators in Texas. There’s a state park by Houston where you can go and you can usually see a bunch. I went camping there one time.” One corner of his mouth tilted up as he chewed. “Look at you, Rebel Without a Cause.” With anyone else, I’d probably think they were picking on me, but I could see the affection on Aaron’s face. I could feel the kindness that just came off him in waves, so I winked back at him. “I live life on the edge. I should start teaching a class on how to be bad.” “Right? Quitting your job, coming to Florida even though you were worried….” He trailed off with a grin and a look out of the corner of his eye. “I pretty much have my masters and license to practice. I’ll teach people everything I know.

The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality. His procedure was simple: on the final day of class, he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the “quantity” group: fifty pounds of pots rated an “A”, forty pounds a “B”, and so on. Those being graded on “quality”, however, needed to produce only one pot – albeit a perfect one – to get an “A”. Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the “quantity” group was busily churning out piles of work – and learning from their mistakes – the “quality” group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end, had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay.

Yesterday while I was on the side of the mat next to some wrestlers who were warming up for their next match, I found myself standing side by side next to an extraordinary wrestler. He was warming up and he had that look of desperation on his face that wrestlers get when their match is about to start and their coach is across the gym coaching on another mat in a match that is already in progress. “Hey do you have a coach.” I asked him. “He's not here right now.” He quietly answered me ready to take on the task of wrestling his opponent alone. “Would you mind if I coached you?” His face tilted up at me with a slight smile and said. “That would be great.” Through the sounds of whistles and yelling fans I heard him ask me what my name was. “My name is John.” I replied. “Hi John, I am Nishan” he said while extending his hand for a handshake. He paused for a second and then he said to me: “John I am going to lose this match”. He said that as if he was preparing me so I wouldn’t get hurt when my coaching skills didn’t work magic with him today. I just said, “Nishan - No score of a match will ever make you a winner. You are already a winner by stepping onto that mat.” With that he just smiled and slowly ran on to the mat, ready for battle, but half knowing what the probable outcome would be. When you first see Nishan you will notice that his legs are frail - very frail. So frail that they have to be supported by custom made, form fitted braces to help support and straighten his limbs. Braces that I recognize all to well. Some would say Nishan has a handicap. I say that he has a gift. To me the word handicap is a word that describes what one “can’t do”. That doesn’t describe Nishan. Nishan is doing. The word “gift” is a word that describes something of value that you give to others. And without knowing it, Nishan is giving us all a gift. I believe Nishan’s gift is inspiration. The ability to look the odds in the eye and say “You don’t pertain to me.” The ability to keep moving forward. Perseverance. A “Whatever it takes” attitude. As he predicted, the outcome of his match wasn’t great. That is, if the only thing you judge a wrestling match by is the actual score. Nishan tried as hard as he could, but he couldn’t overcome the twenty-six pound weight difference that he was giving up to his opponent on this day in order to compete. You see, Nishan weighs only 80 pounds and the lowest weight class in this tournament was 106. Nishan knew he was spotting his opponent 26 pounds going into every match on this day. He wrestled anyway. I never did get the chance to ask him why he wrestles, but if I had to guess I would say, after watching him all day long, that Nishan wrestles for the same reasons that we all wrestle for. We wrestle to feel alive, to push ourselves to our mental, physical and emotional limits - levels we never knew we could reach. We wrestle to learn to use 100% of what we have today in hopes that our maximum today will be our minimum tomorrow. We wrestle to measure where we started from, to know where we are now, and to plan on getting where we want to be in the future. We wrestle to look the seemingly insurmountable opponent right in the eye and say, “Bring it on. - I can take whatever you can dish out.” Sometimes life is your opponent and just showing up is a victory. You don't need to score more points than your opponent in order to accomplish that. No Nishan didn’t score more points than any of his opponents on this day, that would have been nice, but I don’t believe that was the most important thing to Nishan. Without knowing for sure - the most important thing to him on this day was to walk with pride like a wrestler up to a thirty two foot circle, have all eyes from the crowd on him, to watch him compete one on one against his opponent - giving it all that he had. That is what competition is all about. Most of the times in wrestlin

I learned many things at Dixie County High School. There was a class called Life Management. One week we brought in a 5lb sacks of flour. For 2 weeks we were to carry this around as our baby. It needed to return intact to get a grade. But tape could be used for repairs. So the first night I wrapped my Piggy Wiggly-brand flour baby in 2 rolls of duct tape. Added a face. Glued on some orange faux fur hair. Five pounds became 8. They grow up so fast! Over the next week we tossed this tape baby against brick walls. No harm was done. Parenting came naturally it seemed. Until we decided to drop junior out a car window while heading down County Road 55A. It bounced off the road and out into a field. We searched... but never found that sack of flour. It might be out there still. The next morning I told my teacher what had happened. Baby went out a window. Was lost in a field. She just stared. Told me not to tell anyone else this story. I still got full credit though. No one expected much of parents back then.

It’s splendid how much at home we feel at Pignol’s. A tacit complicity at every moment prevails among the regulars here. A process of self-selection operates: starving crooks, thirsty whores, witless grasses working for low-grade cops, middle- class types a bit too willing to conform (leaving aside the pound of black-market meat and the camembert without ration tickets) - all feel too ill at ease here. They’ve only got to stay away. Along with anyone else who doesn’t meet the requirements of this establishment: first and foremost, to keep your trap shut. The war? Past history. The Krauts? Don’t know any. Russia? Change at Reaumur. The police? There was a time when they were needed for directing the traffic. At Pignol’s, silence constitutes the most important, most difficult and lengthiest induction ordeal. After that, it’s a matter of imponderables. It works according to the rule of three: the people who don’t get along with the people that I get along with are people I can’t get along with. Syllogisms, of course. Now clear out!

All of the fucking in “The Art of Joy” could put it in a class with “Story of O” or “The Sexual Life of Catherine M.” But Sapienza’s novel is about sex only insofar as an account of a woman’s artistic, intellectual, and political maturation must include her sexual career. Or, better, the discovery of pleasure initiates Modesta’s appetite more generally—for knowledge, for experience, for autonomy. It turns her outward, toward nonsexual things, by inwardly sustaining her. Her childish sadism is less sexual than it is basically libidinal: her erotic interest in her sister’s or St. Agatha’s pain, or the way in which her hatred of Leonora transmutes into arousal—these are signs of an exultant urge to live. “The real way of living is to answer to one’s wants,” D. H. Lawrence says in a letter (written, incidentally, from Italy). “I want that liberty, I want that woman, I want that pound of peaches, I want to go to sleep, I want to go to the pub and have a good time, I want to look abeastly swell today, I want to kiss that girl, I want to insult that man.

was no one else there to comfort her. There was only him. The real him. She stepped forward and laid her head against his chest. Samantha: I’ll never forget the moment when Perry and Celeste walked into the trivia night. There was like this ripple across the room. Everyone just stopped and stared. 23. Isn’t this FANTASTIC!” cried Madeline to Chloe as they took their really very excellent seats in front of the giant ice rink. “You can feel the cold from the ice! Brrr! Oh! Can you hear the music? I wonder where the princesses—” Chloe had reached over and placed one hand gently over her mother’s mouth. “Shhh.” Madeline knew she was talking too much because she was feeling anxious and ever so slightly guilty. Today needed to be stupendous to make it worth the rift she’d created between herself and Renata. Eight kindergarten children, who would otherwise be attending Amabella’s party, were here watching Disney On Ice because of Madeline. Madeline looked past Chloe at Ziggy, who was nursing a giant stuffed toy on his lap. Ziggy was the reason they were here today, she reminded herself. Poor Ziggy wouldn’t have been at the party. Dear little fatherless Ziggy. Who was possibly a secret psychopathic bully . . . but still! “Are you taking care of Harry the Hippo this weekend, Ziggy?” she said brightly. Harry the Hippo was the class toy. Every weekend it went home with a different child, along with a scrapbook that had to be returned with a little story about the weekend, accompanied by photos. Ziggy nodded mutely. A child of few words. Jane leaned forward, discreetly chewing gum as always. “It’s quite stressful having Harry to stay. We have to give Harry a good time. Last weekend he went on a roller coaster— Ow!” Jane recoiled as one of the twins, who was sitting next to her and fighting his brother, elbowed her in the back of the head. “Josh!” said Celeste sharply. “Max! Just stop it!” Madeline wondered if Celeste was OK today. She looked pale and tired, with purplish shadows under her eyes, although on Celeste they looked like an artful makeup effect that everyone should try. The lights in the auditorium began to dim, and then went to black. Chloe clutched Madeline’s arm. The music began to pound, so loud that Madeline could feel the vibrations. The ice rink filled with an

Achievement ceremonies are revealing about the need of the powerful to punish women through beauty, since the tension of having to repress alarm at female achievement is unusually formalized in them. Beauty myth insults tend to be blurted out at them like death jokes at a funeral. Memories of these achievement ceremonies are supposed to last like Polaroid snapshots that gel into permanent colors, souvenirs to keep of a hard race run; but for girls and young women, the myth keeps those colors always liquid so that, with a word, they can be smeared into the uniform shades of mud. At my college graduation, the commencement speaker, Dick Cavett—who had been a “brother” of the university president in an allmale secret society—was confronted by two thousand young female Yale graduates in mortarboards and academic gowns, and offered them this story: When he was at Yale there were no women. The women went to Vassar. There, they had nude photographs taken in gym class to check their posture. Some of the photos ended up in the pornography black market in New Haven. The punch line: The photos found no buyers. Whether or not the slur was deliberate, it was still effective: We may have been Elis but we would still not make pornography worth his buying. Today, three thousand men of the class of 1984 are sure they are graduates of that university, remembering commencement as they are meant to: proudly. But many of the two thousand women, when they can think of that day at all, recall the feelings of the powerless: exclusion and shame and impotent, complicit silence. We could not make a scene, as it was our parents’ great day for which they had traveled long distances; neither could they, out of the same concern for us. Beauty pornography makes an eating disease seem inevitable, even desirable, if a young woman is to consider herself sexual and valuable: Robin Lakoff and Raquel Scherr in Face Value found in 1984 that “among college women, ‘modern’ definitions of beauty—health, energy, self-confidence”—prevailed. “The bad news” is that they all had “only one overriding concern: the shape and weight of their bodies. They all wanted to lose 5–25 pounds, even though most [were] not remotely overweight. They went into great detail about every flaw in their anatomies, and told of the great disgust they felt every time they looked in the mirror.” The “great disgust” they feel comes from learning the rigid conventions of beauty pornography before they learn their own sexual value; in such an atmosphere, eating diseases make perfect sense.

The most famous illustration of what happens to those who question the orthodoxy is what befell economist Larry Summers. On January 14, 2005, Summers, then president of Harvard University, spoke to a conference on diversifying the science and engineering workforce.16 In his informal remarks, responding to the sponsors’ encouragement to speculate, he offered reasons for thinking that innate differences in men and women might account for some of the underrepresentation of women in science and engineering. He spoke undogmatically and collegially, talking about possibilities, phrasing his speculations moderately. And all hell broke loose. An MIT biologist, Nancy Hopkins, told reporters that she “felt I was going to be sick,” that “my heart was pounding and my breath was shallow,” and that she had to leave the room because otherwise “I would’ve either blacked out or thrown up.”17 Within a few days, Summers had been excoriated by the chairperson of Harvard’s sociology department, Mary C. Waters, and received a harshly critical letter from Harvard’s committee on faculty recruiting. One hundred and twenty Harvard professors endorsed the letter. Some alumnae announced that they would suspend donations.18 Summers retracted his remarks, with, in journalist Stuart Taylor Jr.’s words, “groveling, Soviet-show-trial-style apologies.

DOES HARVARD MAKE YOU SMARTER? Swimmer’s Body Illusion As essayist and trader Nassim Taleb resolved to do something about the stubborn extra pounds he’d be carrying, he contemplated taking up various sports. However, joggers seemed scrawny and unhappy, and bodybuilders looked broad and stupid, and tennis players? Oh, so upper-middle class! Swimmers, though, appealed to him with their well-built, streamlined bodies. He decided to sign up at his local swimming pool and to train hard twice a week. A short while later, he realised that he had succumbed to an illusion. Professional swimmers don’t have perfect bodies because they train extensively. Rather, they are good swimmers because of their physiques. How their bodies are designed is a factor for selection and not the result of their activities. Similarly, female models advertise cosmetics and thus, many female consumers believe that these products make you beautiful. But it is not the cosmetics that make these women model-like. Quite simply, the models are born attractive and only for this reason are they candidates for cosmetics advertising. As with the swimmers’ bodies, beauty is a factor for selection and not the result. Whenever we confuse selection factors with results, we fall prey to what Taleb calls the swimmer’s body illusion. Without this illusion, half of advertising campaigns would not work

Susannah smiled at them nervously, then looked up at the route-map. "Hello, Blaine." "HOWDY, SUSANNAH OF NEW YORK." Her heart was pounding, her armpits were damp, and here was something she had first discovered way back in the first grade: it was hard to begin. It was hard to stand up in front of the class and be first with your song, your joke, your report on how you spent your summer vacation ... or your riddle, for that matter. The one she had decided upon was one from Jake Chambers's crazed English essay, which he had recited to them almost verbatim during their long palaver after leaving the old people of River Crossing. The essay, titled "My Understanding of Truth," had contained two riddles, one of which Eddie had already used on Blaine. "SUSANNAH? ARE YOU THERE, L'IL COWGIRL?" Teasing again, but this time the teasing sounded light, good-natured. Good-humored. Blaine could be charming when he got what he wanted. Like certain spoiled children she had known. "Yes, Blaine, I am, and here is my riddle. What has four wheels and flies?" There was a peculiar click, as if Blaine were mimicking the sound of a man popping his tongue against the roof of his mouth. It was followed by a brief pause. When Blaine replied, most of the jocularity had gone out of his voice. "THE TOWN GARBAGE WAGON, OF COURSE. A CHILD'S RIDDLE. IF THE REST OF YOUR RIDDLES ARE NO BETTER, I WILL BE EXTREMELY SORRY I SAVED YOUR LIVES FOR EVEN A SHORT WHILE.

He strode forward, heedless of the murmuring that began among the women when they saw him. Then Sara turned, and her gaze met his. Instantly a guilty blush spread over her cheeks that told him all he needed to know about her intent. “Good afternoon, ladies,” he said in steely tones. “Class is over for today. Why don’t you all go up on deck and get a little fresh air?” When the women looked at Sara, she folded her hands primly in front of her and stared at him. “You have no right to dismiss my class, Captain Horn. Besides, we aren’t finished yet. I was telling them a story—” “I know. You were recounting Lysistrata.” Surprise flickered briefly in her eyes, but then turned smug and looked down her aristocratic little nose at him. “Yes, Lysistrata,” she said in a sweet voice that didn’t fool him for one minute. “Surely you have no objection to my educating the women on the great works of literature, Captain Horn.” “None at all.” He set his hands on his hips. “But I question your choice of material. Don’t you think Aristophanes is a bit beyond the abilities of your pupils?” He took great pleasure in the shock that passed over Sara’s face before she caught herself. Ignoring the rustle of whispers among the women, she stood a little straighter. “As if you know anything at all about Aristophanes.” “I don’t have to be an English lordling to know literature, Sara. I know all the blasted writers you English make so much of. Any one of them would have been a better choice for your charges than Aristophanes.” As she continued to glower at him unconvinced, he scoured his memory, searching through the hundreds of verse passages his English father had literally pounded into him. “You might have chosen Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew, for example—‘fie, fie! Unknit that threatening unkind brow. / And dart not scornful glances from those eyes / to wound thy lord, thy king, thy governor.’” It had been a long time since he’d recited his father’s favorite passages of Shakespeare, but the words were as fresh as if he’d learned them only yesterday. And if anyone knew how to use literature as a weapon, he did. His father had delighted in tormenting him with quotes about unrepentant children. Sara gaped at him as the other women looked from him to her in confusion. “How . . . I mean . . . when could you possibly—” “Never mind that. The point us, you’re telling them the tale of Lysistrata when what you should be telling them is ‘thy husband is thy lord, thy life, thy keeper. /thy head, thy sovereign; one that cares for thee / and for thy maintenance commits his body / to painful labour by both sea and land.’” Her surprise at this knowledge of Shakespeare seemed to vanish as she recognized the passage he was quoting—the scene where Katherine accepts Petruchio as her lord and master before all her father’s guests. Sara’s eyes glittered as she stepped from among the women and came nearer to him. “We are not your wives yet. And Shakespeare also said ‘sigh no more, ladies, sigh no more / men were deceivers ever / one foot on sea and one on shore / to one thing constant never.’” “Ah, yes. Much Ado About Nothing. But even Beatrice changes her tune in the end, doesn’t she? I believe it’s Beatrice who says, ‘contempt, farewell! And maiden pride, adieu! / no glory lives behind the back of such./ and Benedick, love on, I will requite thee, / taming my wild heart to thy loving hand.’” “She was tricked into saying that! She was forced to acknowledge him as surely as you are forcing us!” “Forcing you?” he shouted. “You don’t know the meaning of force! I swear, if you—” He broke off when he realized that the women were staring at him with eyes round and fearful. Sara was twisting his words to make him sound like a monster. And succeeding, too, confound her.

She’s smart, but it’s not just that she’s smart. She works harder than anyone I know, yet she’s too hard on herself. Everyone likes Mia. From the geeks to the jocks to the stoners, every single group of kids in our class has nothing but the best to say about her because she never judges. She’s not petty like other people. She doesn’t gossip, but instead, she gives people the benefit of the doubt. I’ve seen her put others first, one too many times because she hates confrontation. Unless it’s with me, of course, and then she’s brutal.” Carson’s voice grew soft as he turned me around in his arms to face him. “But she puts too much pressure on herself to be perfect. And I hate that. It eats away at me when I see it.” My heart pounded like a drum in my chest until I thought it might burst. All I could do was stare up at him, my lashes fluttering as I blinked away my shock. He reached up to my hair and smoothed a hand through my locks, and for a moment, I wondered if he remembered we weren’t alone, that there was someone—a stranger—standing only feet away from us, but he just continued, dragging his fingers through the length of my locks as he said, “Her hair. . .it reminds me of the sunset—both orange, and fiery pink, and pale yellow at the same time. She’s a good friend—loyal to the core and trustworthy, the kind who will be on your side through anything. And her laugh. . .She has this laugh. The one where she doesn’t think someone’s funny, but she’s pretending anyway. That laugh doesn’t reach her eyes. But her real laugh, now that’s something to see because her whole face gets into it. It’s uncontrollable. It sounds like wind chimes, and she crinkles her nose and eyes.” Reaching up, he touched the bridge of my nose, making me gasp. “And every time I hear it, I think, I want to be the one to make her laugh like that because it’s impossible to hear and not smile. It pulls you in, that laugh.

The Deliverator's car has enough potential energy packed into its batteries to fire a pound of bacon into the Asteroid Belt. Unlike a bimbo box or a Burb beater, the Deliverator's car unloads that power through gaping, gleaming, polished sphincters. When the Deliverator puts the hammer down, shit happens. You want to talk contact patches? Your car's tires have tiny contact patches, talk to the asphalt in four places the size of your tongue. The Deliverator's car has big sticky tires with contact patches the size of a fat lady's thighs. The Deliverator is in touch with the road, starts like a bad day, stops on a peseta. Why is the Deliverator so equipped? Because people rely on him. He is a role model. This is America. People do whatever the fuck they feel like doing, you got a problem with that? Because they have a right to. And because they have guns and no one can fucking stop them. As a result, this country has one of the worst economies in the world. When it gets down to it -- talking trade balances here -- once we've brain-drained all our technology into other countries, once things have evened out, they're making cars in Bolivia and microwave ovens in Tadzhikistan and selling them here -- once our edge in natural resources has been made irrelevant by giant Hong Kong ships and dirigibles that can ship North Dakota all the way to New Zealand for a nickel -- once the Invisible Hand has taken all those historical inequities and smeared them out into a broad global layer of what a Pakistani brickmaker would consider to be prosperity -- y'know what? There's only four things we do better than anyone else: * music * movies * microcode (software) * high-speed pizza delivery The Deliverator used to make software. Still does, sometimes. But if life were a mellow elementary school run by well-meaning education Ph.D.s, the Deliverator's report card would say: "Hiro is so bright and creative but needs to work harder on his cooperation skills." So now he has this other job. No brightness or creativity involved -- but no cooperation either. Just a single principle: The Deliverator stands tall, your pie in thirty minutes or you can have it free, shoot the driver, take his car, file a class-action suit. The Deliverator has been working this job for six months, a rich and lengthy tenure by his standards, and has never delivered a pizza in more than twenty-one minutes.

(The very next day) 'I am enduring will standing alone bare and yes, I am completely naked to the world outside. So, unprotected by the atmosphere above and around me, so unlike- the day, I was born into this hellish world.' 'My life was not always like this! Still as of now, I stand trembling on top of this cruel land, which I call my hereditary land or my home-town.' 'Some still call me by my name, and that is 'Nevaeh May Natalie.' 'Some of the others, like the kids I go to school within this land, have other titles for me.' 'However, you can identify me by the name of 'Nevaeh.' That is if you want to.' 'I do not think that even matters to you, my name is… it has been replaced and it is not significant anymore. Nor does my name matter to anyone out there for miles around. At least that is the way it seems to me, standing here now as I see the bus come to take me there.' 'Names or not said to me, 'I feel alone!' I whispered to myself.' 'It is like I am living a dream. I didn't think my nightmare of orgasmic, tragic, and drizzling emotions pouring in my mind would last this long.' ('Class, faces, names, done.') 'It like a thunderstorm pounding in my brain, as it is today outside. I have come home from yet another day of hell that would be called- school to you.' 'I don't even go into the house until I have this restricting schoolgirl uniform torn off my body. I feel like my skin is crawling with bugs when it is on my figure.' (Outside in the fields, next to the tracks) 'It's the middle- September and I am standing in the rain. It is so cold, so lonely, and so loveless! Additionally, this is not usual for me, I am always bare around my house, I have my reason you'll see.' 'The rain has been falling on me like knives ever since the moment, I got off the yellow bus.' 'A thunderbolt clattered, more resonant than anything ever heard previously.' 'All the rain is matting my long brown hair on me as it lies on my backside longer than most girls. Yet I am okay with that at last, I am free.' (I have freedom) 'To a point! I still feel so trapped by all of them.' 'Ten or twenty minutes have now passed; I am still in the same very spot. Just letting water follow me down. I'm drenched!' 'I can feel the wetness as it lingers in my hair for a while, so unforgivably soaking my body even more as if sinking within me washing me clean.' 'Counting my sanctions, I feel satisfied in a way when I do feel it dropping offends my hair, as if 'God' is still in control of my life, even if I was sent to and damned to hell.' 'Like it is wiping away everything that happened to me today, away from the day of the past too.' 'The wetness is still running down the small of my back thirty minutes must have passed, and it is like my mind is off.' 'Currently, it follows the center point on my back. Then down in-between my petite butt cheeks. Water and bloodstream off my butt to the ground near the heels of my feet. I can feel as if that part of me is washed clean from the day that I had to go through.' 'Some of this shower is cascading off my little face, and it slowly collects on my little boobs, where it beads up and separates into two different watercourses down to my belly button.' 'I eyeball this, as it goes all the way down the front of me. It trickles down on me, to where it turns the color of light pink off my 'Girly Parts.' As they would never be the same.

Like,” he repeats with distaste. “How about I tell you what I don’t like? I do not like postmodernism, postapocalyptic settings, postmortem narrators, or magic realism. I rarely respond to supposedly clever formal devices, multiple fonts, pictures where they shouldn’t be—basically, gimmicks of any kind. I find literary fiction about the Holocaust or any other major world tragedy to be distasteful—nonfiction only, please. I do not like genre mash-ups à la the literary detective novel or the literary fantasy. Literary should be literary, and genre should be genre, and crossbreeding rarely results in anything satisfying. I do not like children’s books, especially ones with orphans, and I prefer not to clutter my shelves with young adult. I do not like anything over four hundred pages or under one hundred fifty pages. I am repulsed by ghostwritten novels by reality television stars, celebrity picture books, sports memoirs, movie tie-in editions, novelty items, and—I imagine this goes without saying—vampires. I rarely stock debuts, chick lit, poetry, or translations. I would prefer not to stock series, but the demands of my pocketbook require me to. For your part, you needn’t tell me about the ‘next big series’ until it is ensconced on the New York Times Best Sellers list. Above all, Ms. Loman, I find slim literary memoirs about little old men whose little old wives have died from cancer to be absolutely intolerable. No matter how well written the sales rep claims they are. No matter how many copies you promise I’ll sell on Mother’s Day.” Amelia blushes, though she is angry more than embarrassed. She agrees with some of what A.J. has said, but his manner is unnecessarily insulting. Knightley Press doesn’t even sell half of that stuff anyway. She studies him. He is older than Amelia but not by much, not by more than ten years. He is too young to like so little. “What do you like?” she asks. “Everything else,” he says. “I will also admit to an occasional weakness for short-story collections. Customers never want to buy them though.” There is only one short-story collection on Amelia’s list, a debut. Amelia hasn’t read the whole thing, and time dictates that she probably won’t, but she liked the first story. An American sixth-grade class and an Indian sixth-grade class participate in an international pen pal program. The narrator is an Indian kid in the American class who keeps feeding comical misinformation about Indian culture to the Americans. She clears her throat, which is still terribly dry. “The Year Bombay Became Mumbai. I think it will have special int—” “No,” he says. “I haven’t even told you what it’s about yet.” “Just no.” “But why?” “If you’re honest with yourself, you’ll admit that you’re only telling me about it because I’m partially Indian and you think this will be my special interest. Am I right?” Amelia imagines smashing the ancient computer over his head. “I’m telling you about this because you said you liked short stories! And it’s the only one on my list. And for the record”—here, she lies—“it’s completely wonderful from start to finish. Even if it is a debut. “And do you know what else? I love debuts. I love discovering something new. It’s part of the whole reason I do this job.” Amelia rises. Her head is pounding. Maybe she does drink too much? Her head is pounding and her heart is, too. “Do you want my opinion?” “Not particularly,” he says. “What are you, twenty-five?” “Mr. Fikry, this is a lovely store, but if you continue in this this this”—as a child, she stuttered and it occasionally returns when she is upset; she clears her throat—“this backward way of thinking, there won’t be an Island Books before too long.

The sound of pounding started again. “He’s not going to just go away,” Millie yelled. “Besides, we still have his dog.” “Oh, very well, I’ll deal with him,” Harriet said, struggling to her feet and heading out of the kitchen. She stalked down the short hallway, reached the door, pushed aside the bolt that secured it, twisted the lock, and then wrenched it open, her temper steadily rising when she looked at Oliver and found him smiling back at her, although his eyes held a distinct trace of temper. “What?” “Is that any way to greet your fiancé?” “You’re not my fiancé, you’ve only ever been my pretend fiancé, or maybe temporary fiancé would be a better way to put it. But since I’ve decided I can’t be trusted not to harm you if I have to spend any additional time in your company, you need to go away and leave me alone.” “Don’t you think you’re being a little overly dramatic? I mean—” Not allowing the annoying man to finish his sentence, Harriet shut the door in his face, locked it, brushed her hands together, turned, and pretended not to hear his demands for her to open up as she headed back toward the kitchen.

Coolidge weighed only 119.5 pounds, below the class average, despite a height that was slightly more than average, 68.9 inches.

I walked downhill to the rental place, my backpack ten pounds heavier than it was this morning because of three huge textbooks: one on government from world history class; one from English class called Catastrophes of New England: 1650 to 1875; and a much-used book from my last class of the day, Non-Euclidean Geometry. The class was taught by Mr. Gint, a pale, balding man who barely looked at us. The entire class period he sat at his desk with a protractor and pencil, drawing pictures and muttering to himself.

The first three decisions made by New Labour were highly symbolic, designed to show the City of London that this was not an old-style Labour regime. They had made their peace with free-market values: the Bank of England would be detached from government control and given full authority to determine monetary policy. A second determining act on entering office was to cut eleven pounds a week in welfare benefits to single mothers. The savings for the state were minimal. The aim was ideological: a show of contempt for the ‘weaknesses’ of the old welfare state, and an assertion of ‘family values’. The third measure was to charge tuition fees to all university students. This was a proposal that had been rejected more than once by the preceding Conservative government, on the grounds that it was unfair and discriminated against students from poor families. New Labour apologists were quick to point out that students in real need would not be charged, but the overall effect has been to discourage working-class children from aspiring to higher education.

These are some mighty men about to hit the stage," an unseen announcer screamed through the PA system. "With an average height of six-foot-four, a massive weight of three hundred thirty pounds - all of it rock-solid muscle - they are nationally ranked power lifters, some of whom bench-press over six hundred pounds! And they're not here to brag on their muscles, but to brag on Jesus." The eight members of the Power Team ran up to the stage on thunderous feet, wearing red, black, and blue warm-up suits, weight belts, and boxing shoes. To a man, they were as big as a semitrailer truck. They pumped their fists in the air and stood before us bouncing lightly on the balls of their feet, ready to kick some religious butt. "Fasten your seat belts. If God is for you, who can be against you?" "Woo! Woo! Woo!" the audience screamed, instantly ready to rock and roll. We were less than an hour into the first night of a six-night revival, and already it seemed that Sin was going down in a terminal headlock, and Grand Junction would never be the same.... I had heard about the Power Team not from Christian friends, but from a succession of potheads - quintessential late-night cable TV channel surfers. To the stoned, there is nothing more entertaining than the sudden, near hallucinatory vision of this troupe of power-lifting missionaries led by former Oral Roberts University football star John Jacobs.... [My nephew] bought a comic book in which John Jacobs and the Power Team defeat a lisping South American drug lord. From that and an orientation video, we learned that the Team conducts seventy crusades each year, saves close to a million souls here and abroad - notably in Russia - and consists of "world-class athletes who inspire people to follow Christ - and to move away from drugs, alcohol, and suicide." (At the same time, we were pressured not to let our long-distance dollars go to support "nudity, profanity, or the Gay Games." We could avoid this by signing up with Lifeline, a Christian long-distance provider.)" People Who Sweat: Ordinary People, Extraordinary Pursuits, pp. 126-8.

Yet, as Brandon explained with a mixture of bitterness and regret, college proved to be the start of a long series of disappointments. Unable to pass calculus or physics, he switched his major from engineering to criminal justice. Still optimistic, he applied to several police departments upon graduation, excited about a future of “catching crooks.” The first department used a bewildering lottery system for hiring, and he didn’t make the cut. The second informed him that he had failed a mandatory spelling test (“I had a degree!”) and refused to consider his application. Finally, he became “completely turned off to this idea” when the third department disqualified him because of a minor incident in college in which he and his roommate “borrowed” a school-owned buffing machine as a harmless prank. Because he “could have been charged with a felony,” the department informed him, he was ineligible for police duty. Regrettably, his college had no record of the incident. Brandon had volunteered the information out of a desire to illustrate his honest and upstanding character and improve his odds of getting the job. With “two dreams deferred,”2 Brandon took a job as the nightshift manager of a clothing chain, hoping it would be temporary. Eleven years later, he describes his typical day, which consists of unloading shipments, steaming and pricing garments, and restocking the floor, as “not challenging at all. I don’t get to solve problems or be creative. I don’t get to work with numbers, and I am a numbers guy. I basically babysit a team and deal with personnel.” When his loans came out of deferment, he couldn’t afford the monthly payments and decided to get a master’s degree—partly to increase his earning potential and partly to put his loans back into deferment. After all, it had been “hammered into his head” that higher education was the key to success. He put on twenty-five pounds while working and going to school full-time for three years. He finally earned a master’s degree in government, paid for with more loans from “that mean lady Sallie Mae.”3 So far, Brandon has still not found a job that will pay him enough to cover his monthly loan and living expenses. He has managed to keep the loans in deferment by continually consolidating—a strategy that costs him $5,000 a year in interest. Taking

Pink Floyd’s “Time” hammered through Sergeant First Class Jack Hunter’s brain as he tightened his grip on the treadmill and ran harder, his heart pounding, his lungs burning. Rage tinged with fear made for a potent Power Bar that fueled his drive. Sweat poured from his brow and his body screamed for relief, but he couldn’t stop. Not yet. His vision dimmed, and President Anderson’s address on the overhead TV calling for a swift but rational retaliation to al-Qaeda’s latest attack became nothing but a blur in his mind.

It's feeling more and more to me like cover for their laziness,' she said; there was more gray in her hair and a few more pounds to her, but even anxious, she still looked like an angel in a Renaissance fresco. 'They take the class because they want to be writers, but they don't want to read. Instead of owning it, they slap you with moral rhetoric about why you're wrong to make them do something they don't want to do. And don't get me started on grades. If you don't give them grades they think they deserve, you get reported.' She paused. 'The worst part of it? I can't give them the best of what I have. They don't even know if they have the interest, because they're not willing to know what they're made of. I think back on some of what we did together. The work on your dreams? Suggesting something like that these days is career suicide. It's disheartening enough to make me wonder if I shouldn't be doing something else with myself entirely.

Tea, on the other hand, stimulated, refreshed and, heavily sugared, delivered much-needed calories to the undernourished working class. In the second quarter of the nineteenth century, improved water supplies and falling prices made tea Britain’s most popular beverage. Sugar had much to do with propelling it there. As British historian D. J. Oddy notes, “The principal change from the late eighteenth century was the growing use of sugar. By the mid-nineteenth century sugar consumption had reached half a pound (0.2 kg) per head per week.”90 That’s a fair amount of sugar, and over the decades it would increase until, by the end of the century, weekly per capita consumption exceeded one pound.91 But

during the years 1919 to 1923, the mark rapidly collapsed. The rage aroused in Germany by the French occupation of the Ruhr led to a vast, reckless printing of paper notes with the deliberate object of destroying the whole basis of the currency. In the final stages of the inflation the mark stood at forty-three million millions to the pound sterling. The social and economic consequences of this inflation were deadly and far-reaching. The savings of the middle classes were wiped out, and a natural following was thus provided for the banners of National Socialism.

I personally think this was his play all along and we could have avoided this entirely if Ian had simply let the man in a training class.” “You know how I feel about douchebag names.” Big Tag shook his head. A groan came from Chef’s mouth. “He has a list.” “Arlo, Milo, Kylo,” Big Tag began. “Basically all the o’s. Except dildo. If someone is named Dildo, I’ll totally let them in. Ephram, Jeremiah. Basically anyone who sounds like they do civil war reenactments on weekends. Then you’ve got the moneybags. Chet, Thad, Brock. Oh, and anyone named Chazz. If you sound like you belong on a reality dating show, you’re out.” “Because Seth doesn’t rank on any of those lists,” Chef shot back. Big Tag shrugged. “Not my call. Charlie shot down John Wayne Taggart. Apparently when you shove a ten-pound baby out your hoo haw, you get naming rights.

If anyone in class cites a fact of any kind, he pounds his chest and yells, "TRUE FACT," or sometimes, "RESPECT THE RESEARCH." If the fact is wrong, this becomes "FALSE FACT." He drinks Vietnamese soup out of a thermos, all day, and he refers to drinking soup as "consulting the oracle.

At the bar—I don’t drink either, but I’m told that at the bar—they serve honey oatmeal vodka. I reverse engineered the recipe, and it’s not a still, but I make it in my basement. The recipe, for those who are interested, is you take a bottle of vodka—you don’t want the supercheap stuff but you don’t want the expensive stuff because that’s a little bit of a rip-off—you pour it over a pound of just plain old oatmeal, uncooked, and half a jar of honey. You let it sit in the fridge for 2 weeks, stirring it now and then. Then you strain it back into the original bottle and you’re done.” *

If you haven’t exercised in a while and you go to a strength class, would you grab twenty-pound dumbbells off the shelf? Probably not. They have lots of different weights for a reason. As with physical strength, the Thoughtfully Fit practice of Strength requires you to start small.

A locker in the first-class writing room containing, among other things, spare jackets for the stewards and waiters, was a perfect site for an incendiary bomb. The locker was immediately below the false ceiling to which the line-throwing Lyle gun and twenty-five pounds of dangerous explosives had been moved. Rogers himself had watched the seamen dump gun and powder barrel into the space between the false ceiling and the deck. The gunpowder would make a perfect trailer. Another trailer was even closer at hand. Near the radio room were two gasoline tanks, used to run the transmitting equipment. It would be a simple matter to uncouple the feed line, allowing the gas to trickle down the deck. Night watchman Arthur Pender, who passed only a few feet from the tanks, smelled a strong odor of gasoline, which he did not report to the bridge, thinking the smell must be the result of late cleaning on the eve of the ship’s arrival in port. If Pender had reported it, even a cursory investigation might have revealed the preparations for sabotage. But he did not. In his investigations Captain George Seeth—who knew well both the Morro Castle and Rogers—suggested how Rogers probably placed his bomb: “Nobody would be surprised to see a radio officer in the writing room. Rogers or one of his staff frequently took messages to passengers, and walking through the writing room was a short cut from their shack. “Again, nobody would have been surprised if Rogers had gone to the locker itself. He would have had a ready excuse to say he was looking for a piece of paper to scribble down a message a passenger had just given him for transmission.

That gave it enough time to cough, tremble, and then hack a giant loogie at him. As disgusting as that might sound, the reality was those ten pounds of molten rock flying through the air was far more terrifying than a snot rocket.

doubled back to one of the cute indie coffeeshops that have sprung up all over the area like middle-class chickenpox. I see a latte has crossed the three- pound mark in Edinburgh. Thieving fucking bastards, honestly. I definitely can't afford a croissant too. It is great coffee, mind

The leaders of Jamestown had borrowed directly from the Roman model of slavery: abandoned children and debtors were made slaves. When indentured adults sold their anticipated labor in return for passage to America, they instantly became debtors, which made their orphaned children a collateral asset. It was a world not unlike the one Shakespeare depicted in The Merchant of Venice, when Shylock demanded his pound of flesh. Virginia planters felt entitled to their flesh and blood in the forms of the innocent spouses and offspring of dead servants.36

Afraid to move and give away his nervousness, Zubair was in no hurry. Once most of the other passengers were gone, he retrieved his computer bag and made his way down the narrow stairs to the main body of the plane. He half expected to see a group of men in suits waiting for him, but thankfully there were none. He’d been warned that the Americans had gotten much better at intercepting people who were trying to illegally enter their country. Two female flight attendants with whorish makeup and skirts that were far too short stood by the door. They thanked him for flying Qantas. Despite what his trainers had told him, Zubair ignored the women, refusing to look them in the eye. Fortunately for him his diminutive stature made him seem shy rather than hostile. Zubair was just five and a half feet tall, and weighed a svelte 142 pounds. With his mustache shaved he easily passed for someone five to ten years younger than his twenty-nine years. He stepped into the Jetway, joining the stampede for baggage claim and customs and sandwiched between the business-class and economy customers. The stress of the situation and the heat of the enclosed Jetway triggered the scientist’s sweat glands, sending them into overdrive. Within seconds salty perspiration dampened every inch of his skin. Zubair felt trapped, as if he was on a conveyor belt headed toward his own execution. There was no turning back. Passengers continued to pour off the plane, pushing forward, moving through the confined tunnel toward U.S. Customs agents who would ask probing questions. Zubair suddenly wished he had taken the sedative that they had given him to calm his nerves. He had thrown the pills away at the Sydney airport. Allah would never approve of him taking a mood-altering drug.

IN THE EARLY NINETEEN SEVENTIES, a British photo retoucher named Robert Stevens arrived in south Florida to take a job at the National Enquirer, which is published in Palm Beach County. At the time, photo retouchers for supermarket tabloids used an airbrush (nowadays they use computers) to clarify news photographs of world leaders shaking hands with aliens or to give more punch to pictures of six-month-old babies who weigh three hundred pounds. Stevens was reputed to be one of the best photo retouchers in the business. The Enquirer was moving away from stories like “I Ate My Mother-in-Law’s Head,” and the editors recruited him to bring some class to the paper. They offered him much more than he made working for tabloids in Britain.

I USED TO tell classes that anybody who believed in the possibility of perpetual motion should be boiled alive like a lobster. I was also a stickler about the Metric System. I was famous for turning my back on students who mentioned feet or pounds or miles to me. They hated that.

If you want to go back to school, start with a single class at night and see if that feels like the right choice. If you want to lose twenty pounds, start by skipping dessert at your next meal. If you’re looking for a spiritual community, start by asking those around you what works for them. Focusing on huge, symbolic victories—like switching suddenly to a crash diet—will lead you to quit after a few defeats.

The first half of your detention will be spent digging an eight foot deep hole in the meadow.” Darius stalked off with the other guys and I moved forward to collect my shovel. Orion scooped it up, holding it out for me. Before I took it he caught my hand, brushing his thumb across my palm and sending a shiver through me. He repeated the process on the other hand then pressed his index finger to his lips. “That'll stop your skin chaffing,” he whispered. I stared at him in complete surprise as he passed me the shovel and moved aside. “Thank you,” I said, confused as I stepped past him, making my way through the high grass and colourful array of meadow flowers as I walked toward the Heirs. The four of them had formed a circle and were already getting to work digging the hole. ... “Vega!” Orion beckoned me and I was grateful to put the shovel down. I was a little dizzy as I walked up to his high metal chair where he was sitting a few feet above my head. He now had a large umbrella set up over it and a flask of coffee in his hand which he'd apparently brought with him. His Atlas was propped on his knee and he looked like he was thoroughly enjoying his morning as he gazed down at my mud stained skin with a bright smile. Thanks to his magic, at least I didn't have any blisters on my hands. “Water.” Orion waved his hand and water gathered in the air before me, circling into a glistening sphere. Orion tossed me a cup and I caught it at the last second. The water dropped straight into it with a splash and I guzzled it down greedily, “That's favouritism, sir!” Caleb called. “You're right, how rude of me!” Orion shouted back, lifting a hand and a torrential waterfall poured down on all of the heirs. Max crowed like a cockerel, pounding his chest, seemingly spurred on by the downpour. The others didn't seem quite as happy as the water continued to fall down on them. A laugh rushed from my throat and Orion threw me a wink. “So I'm having a little trouble, Miss Vega.” “With what, sir?” “Telling you apart from your sister,” he said in a low voice that I imagined only I could hear through the torrential storm he was still casting over the Heirs. “And you never did answer my question. Blue or green?” A smile twisted up my lips and I shrugged, deciding to leave him in continued suspense over that question, walking back to join the group. “I want an answer by sundown,” he called after me and my grin grew even wider. ... “Shut the fuck up!” Orion shouted. “I'm trying to concentrate here.” “Watching porn again, sir?” Seth shot at him with a smirk. “Yeah, your mom's really improved since the last edition,” he answered without missing a beat and Seth's face dropped into a scowl as a laugh tore from my throat. “Do you know who is always watching porn?” Max chipped in. “You?” the three other guys answered in unison. They all burst out laughing and I fought the urge to join in. “Hilarious,” Max said dryly. “I meant Washer. He snuck off in class the other day to rub one out.” “Useless. Well up you go then,” he said and I moved toward the ladder, taking hold of the first rung. Orion stepped up close behind me and his fingers brushed my waist, barely perceptible but I felt it everywhere. It scored a line of goosebumps across my back and a heavenly shiver fluttered up my spine. Heated air pushed under my clothes, drying them out almost instantly. “Thank you,” I whispered for the second time today. What’s gotten into him? He took hold of the ladder either side of my hands. “Up,” he breathed against my cheek and hot wax seemed to pour down each of my legs, making it almost impossible to move. But somehow, I managed it.

Dozens of shiny brass wall sconces created the sort of dim and atmospheric lighting I'd only ever seen in old movies and haunted houses. And the room wasn't just darkly lit. It was also just... dark. The walls were painted a dark chocolate brown that I vaguely remembered from art history classes had been fashionable in the Victorian era. A pair of tall, dark wooden bookshelves that must have weighed a thousand pounds each stood like silent sentinels on either end of the room. Atop each of them sat an ornate brass, malachite candelabra that would have seemed right at home in a sixteenth-century European cathedral. They clashed in style and in every other imaginable way with the two very modern-looking black leather sofas facing each other in the center of the room and the austere, glass-topped coffee table in the living room's center. The latter had a stack of what looked like Regency romance novels piled high at one end, further adding to the incongruity of the scene. Besides the pale green of the candelabras, the only other color to be found in the living room was in the large, garish, floral Oriental rug covering most of the floor; the bright red, glowing eyes of a deeply creepy stuffed wolf's head hanging over the mantel; and the deep-red velvet drapes hanging on either side of the floor-to-ceiling windows.

Prince of Wales still lies, her huge 44,000-ton bulk turned upside down by the violence of the enemy, nearly 40 fathoms deep off the Malaysian coast. Here, in all its concentrated, solemn vastness, an official war grave, is a solid, enduring relic of Britain’s final days as a great industrial, economic and naval power. At 745 feet long and 105 feet wide, she contains centuries of shipbuilding and fighting experience, now dead, scattered, disbanded, forgotten or lost, thousands of tons of steel from blast furnaces, mills and forges long demolished, made with coal from mines long ago closed and sealed, and dug and smelted and hammered by an industrial working class now vanished. Every intricate part of her was made according to the traditional measurements of England, feet, inches, pounds and hundredweight. These are now abandoned in favour of the metric system which was used by our enemies in that war and which would have been imposed upon us had we been defeated. But in this matter, as in so many others, we have made a conquest of ourselves. Somewhere in her barnacled ruins is the cabin where Churchill slept, the cinema where he watched That Hamilton Woman with tears in his eyes, the bridge from which he waved so cheerfully, and perhaps the rotted fragments of the hymn book from which he so lustily sang ‘For Those in Peril on the Sea’ and ‘Onward, Christian Soldiers!’, beside his ally and supposed friend, the president of the United States.

The Slow-Carb Diet® Cheat Sheet Many people lose hope when trying to lose weight. Fortunately, it need not be complicated. Though I regularly fast and enter ketosis, the Slow-Carb Diet (SCD) has been my default diet for more than a decade. It works almost beyond belief and affects much more than appearance. From one reader: “I just wanted to sincerely thank Tim for taking the time to research and write The 4-Hour Body. My mom, in her late 60s, lost 45 pounds and got off her high blood pressure meds that she had been on for 20+ years. She did all this in about 3 months. This means that I get to have her around for a long time.” The basic rules are simple, all followed 6 days per week: Rule #1: Avoid “white” starchy carbohydrates (or those that can be white). This means all bread, pasta, rice, potatoes, and grains (yes, including quinoa). If you have to ask, don’t eat it. Rule #2: Eat the same few meals over and over again, especially for breakfast and lunch. Good news: You already do this. You’re just picking new default meals. If you want to keep it simple, split your plate into thirds: protein, veggies, and beans/legumes. Rule #3: Don’t drink calories. Exception: 1 to 2 glasses of dry red wine per night is allowed, although this can cause some peri-/post-menopausal women to plateau. Rule #4: Don’t eat fruit. (Fructose → glycerol phosphate → more body fat, more or less.) Avocado and tomatoes are allowed. Rule #5: Whenever possible, measure your progress in body fat percentage, NOT total pounds. The scale can deceive and derail you. For instance, it’s common to gain muscle while simultaneously losing fat on the SCD. That’s exactly what you want, but the scale number won’t move, and you will get frustrated. In place of the scale, I use DEXA scans, a BodyMetrix home ultrasound device, or calipers with a gym professional (I recommend the Jackson-Pollock 7-point method). And then: Rule #6: Take one day off per week and go nuts. I choose and recommend Saturday. This is “cheat day,” which a lot of readers also call “Faturday.” For biochemical and psychological reasons, it’s important not to hold back. Some readers keep a “to-eat” list during the week, which reminds them that they’re only giving up vices for 6 days at a time. Comprehensive step-by-step details, including Q&As and troubleshooting, can be found in The 4-Hour Body, but the preceding outline is often enough to lose 20 pounds in a month, and drop 2 clothing sizes. Dozens of readers have lost 100–200 pounds on the SCD. My 6-Piece Gym in a Bag I take these 6 items with me whenever I travel.

Growing up, there were two small letters that sent chills down my spine: PE. Physical Education class was the bane of my awkward, prepubescent existence. The moment I walked into the musky locker room to change, my heart would start to pound. As I surreptitiously tried to change without flashing an inch of skin (sometimes even wearing a second bra as insurance) I would desperately search for any excuse to escape the daily drills and dodgeball games. Paper cut? Haircut? Apocalypse? I tried them all. Looking back, I realize I liked playing outside. What I really dreaded was the moment my coach said, “Line up, let’s pick teams!” Inevitably, the two jockiest kids were assigned as team captains, and then I spent an agonizing few minutes watching them go through my entire class before picking me or my fellow nonathletically inclined buddy, Smelly Matthew. Then one day, my elementary school social life changed. Our coach decided to allow the new girl to be team captain. She had just transferred from a nearby school and didn’t know anyone. In one of the greatest moments in PE history, she picked me first! I was so excited that I ran over to her and then held her hand while she picked the rest of our team. I think we lost in soccer that day, but I was on top of the world. After the game I asked her why she picked me. And then she said one of the greatest things anyone has ever said to me, “I wanted to get to know you.

This is true in my own case, at any rate — plus also the “uncomfortable” part. I teach college English part-time. Mostly Lit, not Composition. But I am so pathologically obsessed with usage that every semester the same thing happens: once I’ve had to read my students’ first set of papers, we immediately abandon the regular Lit syllabus and have a three-week Emergency Remedial Usage and Grammar Unit, during which my demeanor is basically that of somebody teaching HIV prevention to intravenous-drug users. When it emerges (as it does, every term) that 95 percent of these intelligent upscale college students have never been taught, e.g., what a clause is or why a misplaced only can make a sentence confusing or why you don’t just automatically stick in a comma after a long noun phrase, I all but pound my head on the blackboard; I get angry and self-righteous; I tell them they should sue their hometown school boards, and mean it. The kids end up scared, both of me and for me. Every August I vow silently to chill about usage this year, and then by Labor Day there’s foam on my chin. I can’t seem to help it. The truth is that I’m not even an especially good or dedicated teacher; I don’t have this kind of fervor in class about anything else, and I know it’s not a very productive fervor, nor a healthy one — it’s got elements of fanaticism and rage to it, plus a snobbishness that I know I’d be mortified to display about anything else.

I told them about my father, Ezell Shepard, who had gone into a Jim Crow army and fought, and had been wounded in France. He had suffered all kinds of humiliations just because he was a fourth-class citizen at home. When I finished, I told those tired, hungry children who needed to go to the restroom that in the final analysis, this whole operation at Bishop's depended upon each one of us. "Do you feel that we should go or stay? I want to have you think about it and make up your own minds as to what you individually want to do. This must be your decision." The waitresses, managers, policemen, and firemen had stopped and were watching the youth. My heart was pounding, and my eyes were heavy since we had been working on Operation Bishop's all night. "Let's vote," I said. "All in favor of leaving, say aye." Not one voice was heard. "All in favor of staying, say aye." Ayes range out all over the place. "Why are you staying?" They answered in song. Because: We shall overcome, we shall overcome, We shall overcome someday. Oh, deep in my heart, I do believe That we shall overcome someday. God is on our side, God is on our side, God is on our side today. Oh, deep in my heart, I do believe That we shall overcome someday.

When I am high I couldn’t worry about money if I tried. So I don’t. The money will come from somewhere; I am entitled; God will provide. Credit cards are disastrous, personal checks worse. Unfortunately, for manics anyway, mania is a natural extension of the economy. What with credit cards and bank accounts there is little beyond reach. So I bought twelve snakebite kits, with a sense of urgency and importance. I bought precious stones, elegant and unnecessary furniture, three watches within an hour of one another (in the Rolex rather than Timex class: champagne tastes bubble to the surface, are the surface, in mania), and totally inappropriate sirenlike clothes. During one spree in London I spent several hundred pounds on books having titles or covers that somehow caught my fancy: books on the natural history of the mole, twenty sundry Penguin books because I thought it could be nice if the penguins could form a colony. Once I think I shoplifted a blouse because I could not wait a minute longer for the woman-with-molasses feet in front of me in line. Or maybe I just thought about shoplifting, I don’t remember, I was totally confused. I imagine I must have spent far more than thirty thousand dollars during my two major manic episodes, and God only knows how much more during my frequent milder manias. But then back on lithium and rotating on the planet at the same pace as everyone else, you find your credit is decimated, your mortification complete: mania is not a luxury one can easily afford. It is devastating to have the illness and aggravating to have to pay for medications, blood tests, and psychotherapy. They, at least, are partially deductible. But money spent while manic doesn’t fit into the Internal Revenue Service concept of medical expense or business loss. So after mania, when most depressed, you’re given excellent reason to be even more so.

A Cinematic Journey of Creativity and Excellence . he heart of Avanthika Studios' success lies its unwavering commitment to maintaining state-of-the-art facilities. The studio boasts world-class sound recording and mixing studios, technologically advanced visual effects suites, and expansive sets that can be customized to suit the unique needs of diverse film productions. In the realm of visual effects, Avanthika Studios has earned acclaim for seamlessly integrating digital elements into live-action footage. Whether it involves creating otherworldly landscapes or enhancing heart-pounding action sequences, the studio's visual effects team has consistently pushed the boundaries of what is possible in Indian cinema. One of its most significant contributions has been the creation of a hub for creative professionals. Avanthika Studios has generated employment opportunities for a wide range of talented individuals, fostering a culture of innovation and collaboration within the city.

India is a rich productive country. Every year millions of pounds worth of wealth are produced by her people, only to be stolen from them by means of the Money Trick by the capitalist and official class. Her industrious sons and daughters, who are nearly all total abstainers, live in abject poverty, and their misery is not caused by laziness or want of thrift, or by Intemperance. They are poor for the same reason that we are poor—Because we are Robbed.

The two eyed each other, each through her own prejudices. The woman was tall and powerfully built, although her dark uniform made her look smaller. Her brown hair had gone fuzzy in the sea wind, bushing out and making her face look even more like a bright-eyed potato. She outweighed Merry by a hundred pounds, and her strong hands could have crushed a throat with ease. There were tales of mad bodyguards who’d turned on their employers. Merry sometimes thought of those stories when she looked at Worth. The woman saw just another child, featureless—her job. At least this one was polite, but then quite often her type used manners to mask contempt, as this one’s parents did. But that was part of the job, putting up with their attitude. At least the pay was good and the living quarters better than most. For that she could put up with listening to this kid whose idea of casual conversation was telling you about some stupid old book she’d read or some boring fact she’d learned. But then most members of the ruling class were a little crazy.

Do it nice.” She squeezes her eyes shut. And it’s like that electric line from class is still connecting us because I can feel her caving in to me, now—I recognize it with a rush of emotions I can’t define. She moves her hands down to my pants. I watch as her nimble fingers undo my button, and then my zipper. “Nicely,” she says. “What?” I ask, heart pounding. “Do it nicely. The word is nicely, motherfucker.

Why did you do this?” “Is it okay? Do you like it?” “I asked first.” “Okay.” He shoved his hands in his back pockets and paced the length of the room. “I won’t try to make any more excuses for my behavior, Nic. You have every right to hate me for leaving you that day. I know I can’t make up for the hurt I caused you, but I wanted to do more than just apologize. Words are important, but they’re not everything. Like the saying goes, actions speak louder. I looked for a way to prove to you that I won’t let you and the babies down again.” “So you sent the cradles.” “Yes.” “You went to childbirth classes by yourself.” “I did.” Her gaze broke away from his and he watched her as she studied the walls. “You’re an excellent artist.” “Architects learn how to draw. I considered asking Sage to paint the murals, but …” He shrugged. “I wanted to do them.” “Why?” Gabe’s heart began to pound. It was one thing to admit it to himself or to Celeste, but something else entirely to say it to Nic. To commit to Nic. Last chance, Callahan. If you have any doubts at all, you need to keep your lips zipped. He waited a beat, searched within himself, then smiled. “Why?” he repeated. “Because it was a labor of love.” He walked over to her, went down on one knee, took her hand, and kissed it. “I’m not afraid to love those babies anymore. I love them. I want to be there when they’re born. I want to help you raise them. I want to be their dad.” Tears swam in her eyes and she swallowed hard. Gabe went down on both knees and claimed both her hands. Held them tight. “I said this before, but my timing stank, so maybe you’ll get the message better now. Nic, I’m not afraid to love you anymore, either. I love you. I am in love with you. Please, give me another chance. Give us another chance. I won’t let you down again. You have my word. My oath.” He kissed one hand and then the other. “Nic, you have my heart. Please, be my home.” A

The joke went that everyone gained 5 pounds in baking class. I could see what they meant. It was held in the morning, when everyone was starving, and after a few hours of hard labor, hefting heavy sacks of flour, balling and kneading dough, loading giant deck and windmill ovens with cinammon buns, croissants, breads and rolls for the various school-operated dining rooms, the room would fill with the smell. When the finished product started coming out of the ovens, the students would fall on it, slathering the still-hot bread and buns with gobs of butter, tearing it apart and shoveling it in their faces. Brownies, pecan diamonds, cookies, profiteroles — around 10 percent of the stuff disappeared into our faces and our knife rolls before it was loaded into proof racks and packed off to its final destinations. It was not a pretty sight, all these pale, gangly, pimpled youths, in a frenzy of hunger and sexual frustration, shredding bread. It was like Night of the Living Dead, everyone seemed always to be chewing.

Rule #5: Whenever possible, measure your progress in body fat percentage, NOT total pounds. The scale can deceive and derail you. For instance, it’s common to gain muscle while simultaneously losing fat on the SCD. That’s exactly what you want, but the scale number won’t move, and you will get frustrated. In place of the scale, I use DEXA scans, a BodyMetrix home ultrasound device, or calipers with a gym professional (I recommend the Jackson-Pollock 7-point method).

By the time I returned to Albany that fall, I was committed to turning things around. I marched into the career-planning office and began researching the firms at which I might still have a shot. Most did their main recruiting from the second-year, not the third-year, class, so I was late to the party, and I knew it. One firm, however, did stand out: Bickel & Brewer. They were based in Dallas, with smaller satellite offices in Washington, DC, New York, and Chicago. They liked to hire third-year law students, and at New York salaries. William Brewer bears a decent resemblance to a young Robert Redford. He walks with a strong gait and wears a tan Burberry trench coat over perfectly tailored navy or gray suits. He was also legendary in the halls of Albany Law School, where he had studied law. I researched him and his firm with vigor and soon found that Brewer’s looks weren’t the only thing attractive about this firm. The term “Rambo litigation” was coined there. They took no prisoners. You hired them when you wanted a fight. At twenty-three years old, I loved that. Kill or be killed! We’re not here to make friends, we’re here to win! You sue my client? F— you and your request for an extension! You want a settlement conference? Pound sand! Our offer is screw you! Looking back, this feels a little silly, but as a young gun it sounded very sexy to me. I could enter a frat or a brotherhood of sorts. The bravado naturally appealed to me, given the protective armor I’d built up since being bullied, not to mention the fact that I’d probably always had a bit more testosterone than most girls. Going on the offensive was thrilling, and the more I acted tough, the tougher I felt. Being a litigator was the perfect job; it not only let me hide my insecurities, it felt like a tool for conquering them.