Require Double Quotes

Just as your car runs more smoothly and requires less energy to go faster and farther when the wheels are in perfect alignment, you perform better when your thoughts, feelings, emotions, goals, and values are in balance.

So, preferring death to capture, I accomplished the most astonishing deeds, and which, more then once, showed me that the too great care we take of our bodies is the only obstacle to the sucess of those projects which require rapid decision, and vigorous and determined execution. In reality, when you have once devoted your life to your enterprises, you are no longer the equal of other men, or, rather, other men are no longer your equals, and whosoever has taken this resolution, feels his strength and resources doubled.

To summarize, using money to motivate people can be a double-edged sword. For tasks that require cognitive ability, low to moderate performance-based incentives can help. But when the incentive level is very high, it can command too much attention and thereby distract the person’s mind with thoughts about the reward. This can create stress and ultimately reduce the level of performance.

To translate is never simple. To translate is to betray at the borders, it’s to cheat, it’s to trade one sentence for another. To translate is one of the only human activities in which one is required to lie about the details to convey the truth at large. To translate is to risk understanding better than others that the truth about a word is not single, but double, even triple, quadruple, or quintuple. To translate is to distance oneself from God’s truth, which, as everyone knows or believes, is single.

How You Doing, Little Lucy?” His bright tone and mild expression indicates we’re playing a game we almost never play. It’s a game called How You Doing? and it basically starts off like we don’t hate each other. We act like normal colleagues who don’t want to swirl their hands in each other’s blood. It’s disturbing. “Great, thanks, Big Josh. How You Doing?” “Super. Gonna go get coffee. Can I get you some tea?” He has his heavy black mug in his hand. I hate his mug. I look down; my hand is already holding my red polka-dot mug. He’d spit in anything he made me. Does he think I’m crazy? “I think I’ll join you.” We march purposefully toward the kitchen with identical footfalls, left, right, left, right, like prosecutors walking toward the camera in the opening credits of Law & Order. It requires me to almost double my stride. Colleagues break off conversations and look at us with speculative expressions. Joshua and I look at each other and bare our teeth. Time to act civil. Like executives. “Ah-ha-ha,” we say to each other genially at some pretend joke. “Ah-ha-ha.” We sweep around a corner. Annabelle turns from the photocopier and almost drops her papers. “What’s happening?” Joshua and I nod at her and continue striding, unified in our endless game of one-upmanship. My short striped dress flaps from the g-force. “Mommy and Daddy love you very much, kids,” Joshua says quietly so only I can hear him. To the casual onlooker he is politely chatting. A few meerkat heads have popped up over cubicle walls. It seems we’re the stuff of legend. “Sometimes we get excited and argue. But don’t be scared. Even when we’re arguing, it’s not your fault.” “It’s just grown-up stuff,” I softly explain to the apprehensive faces we pass. “Sometimes Daddy sleeps on the couch, but it’s okay. We still love you.

If you seek tranquillity, do less.” Or (more accurately) do what’s essential—what the logos of a social being requires, and in the requisite way. Which brings a double satisfaction: to do less, better. Because most of what we say and do is not essential. If you can eliminate it, you’ll have more time, and more tranquillity. Ask yourself at every moment, “Is this necessary?” But we need to eliminate unnecessary assumptions as well. To eliminate the unnecessary actions that follow.

I already have the three things I require to be successful. The Holy Bible, Iris Livermore, and a mirror.

Atonement (at-one-ment) consists in no more than the abandonment of the self-generated double monster-the dragon thought to be God (superego) and the dragon thought to be Sin (repressed id). But this requires an abandonment of the attachment to ego itself, and that is what is difficult.

The first and last duty of the lover of the game of baseball," Peavine's book began, "whether in the stands or on the field, is the same as that of the lover of life itself: to pay attention to it. When it comes to the position of catcher, as all but fools and shortstops will freely acknowledge, this solemn requirement is doubled.

Why does the social order feel the need to defend itself by evading the fact of real women, our faces and voices and bodies, and reducing the meaning of women to these formulaic and endlessly reproduced "beautiful" images? Though unconscious personal anxieties can be a powerful force in the creation of a vital lie, economic necessity practically guarantees it. An economy that depends on slavery needs to promote images of slaves that "justify" the institution of slavery. Western economies are absolutely dependent now on the continued underpayment of women. An idealogy that makes women feel "worth less" was urgently needed to counteract the way feminism had begun to make us feel worth more. This does not require a conspiracy; merely an atmosphere. The contemporary economy depends right now on the representation of women within the beauty myth.

An equality that requires blacks to be twice as good is not equality - it's a double standard.

Man lives in a double world: according to the mind he is contained by no physical space and by no walls, but at the same time he is in heaven and on earth, in Italy, in France, in America, wherever the mind's thrust penetrates and extends by understanding, seeking, mastering. But indeed according to the body he exists not, except in only so much space as is least required, held fast in prison and in chains to the extent that he is not able to be in or to go to the place attained by his intellect and will, nor to occupy more space than defined by the shape of his body; while with the mind he occupies a thousand worlds.

He wished that he could break out his knitting, but for some reason, people didn’t take you seriously as a warrior when you were knitting. He’d never figured out why. Making socks required four or five double-ended bone needles, and while they weren’t very large, you could probably jam one into someone’s eye if you really wanted to. Not that he would. He’d have to pull the needle out of the sock to do it, and then he’d be left with the grimly fiddly work of rethreading the stitches. Also, washing blood out of wool was possible, but a pain. Still, if he had to suddenly pull out his sword and fend off an attack, there was a chance he’d drop the yarn, and since he’d been feeling masochistic and was using two colors for this current set of socks, there was absolutely no chance the yarn wouldn’t get tangled and then he’d be trying to murder people while chasing the yarn around. And god forbid the tide rose and he went berserk. You never got the knitting untangled after that; you usually just had to throw it away completely.

To halve the number of asses that you’re required to kiss: double your dependency on yourself.

The double role of living systems as parts and wholes requires the interplay of two opposite tendencies: an integrative tendency to function as part of a larger whole, and a self-assertive, or self-organizing tendency to preserve individual autonomy (see Chapter 7).

I couldn’t keep living this lie for a minute more. I’ve been sober for two hundred and eighty-three days. My sobriety requires me to apologize to you, but my heart can’t take another day without you knowing how much I still love you, and how deeply sorry I am for the pain I’ve caused you.

We should take pictures!" Elise said. "Anyone got a camera?" Celeste asked. "I;m a pro at this." "Mason does!" Kross shouted. "Come here for a minute," she said to a maid, waving her over encouragingly. "Hold on," I said, grabbing some paper. "Okay, okay. 'Your Highest of Highnesses, the ladies of the Elite require, immediately, the least fancy of your cameras for. . .'" Kriss giggled, and Celeste shook her head. "Oh! A study in feminine diplomacy," Elise added. "Is that a real thing?" Kross asked. Celeste tossed her hair. "Who cares?" Maybe twenty minutes later, Maxon knocked on the door and pushed it open an inch. "Can I come in?" Kross ran over. "No. We just want the camera." And she snatched it from his hand and closed the door in his face. Celeste fell on the floor, laughing. "What are you doing in there?" he called. But we were all too busy doubling over to answer.

If a curiously selective plague came along and killed all people of intermediate height, 'tall' and 'short' would come to have just as precise a meaning as 'bird' or 'mammal'. The same is true of human ethics and law. Our legal and moral systems are deeply species-bound. The director of a zoo is legally entitled to 'put down' a chimpanzee that is surplus to requirements, while any suggestion that he might 'put down' a redundant keeper or ticket-seller would be greeted with howls of incredulous outrage. The chimpanzee is the property of the zoo. Humans are nowadays not supposed to be anybody's property, yet the rationale for discriminating against chimpanzees in this way is seldom spelled out, and I doubt if there is a defensible rationale at all. Such is the breathtaking speciesism of our attitudes, the abortion of a single human zygote can arouse more moral solicitude and righteous indignation than the vivisection of any number of intelligent adult chimpanzees! [T]he only reason we can be comfortable with such a double standard is that the intermediates between humans and chimps are all dead.

Modern cosmetic surgeons have a direct financial interest in a social role for women that requires them to feel ugly. They do not simply advertise for a share of a market that already exists: Their advertisements create new markets. It is a boom industry because it is influentially placed to create its own demand through the pairing of text with ads in women's magazines. The industry takes out ads and gets coverage; women get cut open. They pay their money and they takes their chances. As surgeons grow richer, they are able to command larger and brighter ad spaces.

The gifts of fate come with a price. For those who have been favored by life’s indulgence, rigorous respect in matters of beauty is a non-negotiable requirement. Language is a bountiful gift and its usage, an elaboration of community and society, is a sacred work. Language and usage evolve over time: elements change, are forgotten or reborn, and while there are instances where transgression can become the source of an even greater wealth, this does not alter the fact that to be entitled to the liberties of playfulness or enlightened misusage when using language, one must first and foremost have sworn one’s total allegiance. Society’s elect, those whom fate has spared from the servitude that is the lot of the poor, must, consequently, shoulder the double burden of worshipping and respecting the splendors of language.

Every task that requires completion today, left undone, turns into a double task for tomorrow.

A theist is a person who has seen through the material and mechanical world and doesn’t commit suicide’. I like this quote. To see that it is all bullshit and not to clock off, that requires faith. Only faith will do. Only faith. Even if you’re double certain that there is nothing but space and dumb molecules out there, clattering about into symphonic and faraway futures, if you believe that’s all there is and don’t check out, you are hardcore. You must really love football or fucking or money or something and be okay with those things being only what they explicitly are, without implicit power, with no unravelling flag blowing behind them in limitless wind, back to before some unknowable moment of creation when this universe’s heart first began to beat.

Beauty! Wasn't that what mattered? Beauty was hardly a popular ideal at that jumpy moment in history. The masses had been desensitized to it, the intelligentsia regarded it with suspicion. To most of her peers, 'beauty' smacked of the rarefied, the indulgent, the superfluous, the effete. How could persons of good conscience pursue the beautiful when there was so much suffering and injustice in the world? Ellen Cherry's answer was that if one didn't cultivate beauty, soon he or she wouldn't be able to recognize ugliness. The prevalence of social ugliness made commitment to physical beauty all the more essential. And the very presence in life of double-wide mobile homes, Magic Marker graffiti, and orange shag carpeting had the effect of making ills such as poverty, crime, repression, pollution, and child abuse seem tolerable. In a sense, beauty was the ultimate protest, and, in that it generally lasted longer than an orgasm, the ultimate refuge. The Venus de Milo screamed 'No!' at evil, whereas the Spandex stretch pant, the macrame plant holder were compliant with it. Ugly bedrooms bred ugly habits. Of course, it wasn't required of beauty that it perform a social function. That was what was valuable about it.

Hopefully not another employee stealing credit cards, Brooke mused. Or any sort of headache-inducing “oops moment,” like the time one of the restaurant managers called to ask if he could fire a line cook after discovering that the man was a convicted murderer. “Jeez. How’d you learn that?” Brooke had asked. “He made a joke to one of the waiters about honing his cooking skills in prison. The waiter asked what he’d been serving time for, and he said, ‘Murder.’” “I bet that put an end to the conversation real fast. And yes, you can fire him,” Brooke had said. “Obviously, he lied on his employment application.” All of Sterling’s employees, regardless of job position, were required to answer whether they’d ever been convicted of a crime involving “violence, deceit, or theft.” Pretty safe to say that murder qualified. Ten minutes later, the manager had called her back. “Um . . . what if he didn’t exactly lie? I just double-checked his application, and as it turns out, he did check the box for having been convicted of a crime.” Brooke had paused at that. “And then the next question, where we ask what crime he’d been convicted for, what did he write?” “Uh . . . ‘second-degree murder.’” “I see. Just a crazy suggestion here, Cory, but you might want to start reading these applications a little more closely before making employment offers.” “Please don’t fire me.

But even this gives rise to another central tenet, attendant to the Comedy Is Good myth: Comedy Is Hard. Certainly well-rendered comedy is hard. All things done well require practice and work. But for the most funny people, being funny is as inevitable as being double-jointed; it is a worldview formed long before words. One is born funny. The adage, as is, is incomplete. It should be Comedy is hard... if you're not funny. Pirouettes are almost impossible... without legs. Jokes can be honed, made better, tighter, and cleaner, and people can even be made funnier. But you can't really make someone funny who isn't.

If you seek tranquillity, do less.” Or (more accurately) do what’s essential—what the logos of a social being requires, and in the requisite way. Which brings a double satisfaction: to do less, better. Because most of what we say and do is not essential. If you can eliminate it, you’ll have more time, and more tranquillity. Ask yourself at every moment, “Is this necessary?

He’d seen, and his double-click tests had affirmed, how that process requires not just neurons, or brain cells, to bring in sensory information, but the inhibitory interneurons that erase the brain’s whiteboard of situational information instantaneously.

SAMPLE SOLUTION: After a kind of long wait for wood, a B-girl fluffed the rookie woodman into a state where he could take part in a DP SS whose frequent beams required maximum wood, and after a shaky start the SS ended up a spectacular double-facial in which the starlet really displayed her professionalism by managing to stay enthusiastic even though some of the skeet went in her right eye.

Words accrue and lose meaning through a semantic mobility dependent on the community in which they thrive, and these meanings cannot be divorced from bodily sensation and emotion. Slang emerges among a circle of speakers. Irony requires double consciousness, reading one meaning and understanding another. Elegant prose involves a feeling for the rhythms and the music of sentences, a product of the sensual pleasure a writer takes in the sounds of words and the varying metric beats of sentences. Creative translation must take all this into account. If a meaning is lost in one sentence, it might be gained or added to the next one. Such considerations are not strictly logical. They do not involve a step-by-step plan but come from the translator’s felt understanding of the two languages involved. Rodney

You say that your scientific peers “have no just right to expect” the “imperfect” geological record to refute your theory, yet you maintain the “just right” to manipulate, as “required”, that very same “imperfect” record to “prove” your theory. This is Orwellian double-think.

There’s a temptation for all of us to blame failures on factors outside our control: “the enemy was ten feet tall,” “we weren’t treated fairly,” or “it was an impossible task to begin with.” There is also comfort in “doubling down” on proven processes, regardless of their efficacy. Few of us are criticized if we faithfully do what has worked many times before. But feeling comfortable or dodging criticism should not be our measure of success. There’s likely a place in paradise for people who tried hard, but what really matters is succeeding. If that requires you to change, that’s your mission.

I'm also discovering that while they seem to believe that I do not require sleep, my husband (who also doubles as their father) has the ability to morph into an invisible and supremely evasive nocturnal being, with powers so stealthy as to evade capture by the aliens [children] that had invaded our once peaceful and quiet habitat [bedroom at night].

Adding a proper pressure vessel, built to the standards and complexity required by the RBMK design, was estimated to double the cost of each reactor.

the ethical and political ideas of Locke, Rousseau and Jefferson. However, once the heretical scientific insights are translated into everyday technology, routine activities and economic structures, it will become increasingly difficult to sustain this double-game, and we – or our heirs – will probably require a brand-new package of religious beliefs and political institutions.

INTERVIEWER Why don’t you write tragedy? BARTHELME I’m fated to deal in mixtures, slumgullions, which preclude tragedy, which require a pure line. It’s a habit of mind, a perversity. Tom Hess used to tell a story, maybe from Lewis Carroll, I don’t remember, about an enraged mob storming the palace shouting “More taxes! Less bread!” As soon as I hear a proposition I immediately consider its opposite. A double-minded man—makes for mixtures. INTERVIEWER Apparently the Yiddish theater, to which Kafka was very addicted, includes as a typical bit of comedy two clowns, more or less identical, who appear even in sad scenes—the parting of two lovers, for instance—and behave comically as the audience is weeping. This shows up especially in The Castle. BARTHELME The assistants. INTERVIEWER And the audience doesn’t know what to do. BARTHELME The confusing signals, the impurity of the signal, gives you verisimilitude. As when you attend a funeral and notice, against your will, that it’s being poorly done. [...] I think of the line from the German writer Heimito von Doderer: “At first you break windows. Then you become a window yourself.

Almondine To her, the scent and the memory of him were one. Where it lay strongest, the distant past came to her as if that morning: Taking a dead sparrow from her jaws, before she knew to hide such things. Guiding her to the floor, bending her knee until the arthritis made it stick, his palm hotsided on her ribs to measure her breaths and know where the pain began. And to comfort her. That had been the week before he went away. He was gone, she knew this, but something of him clung to the baseboards. At times the floor quivered under his footstep. She stood then and nosed into the kitchen and the bathroom and the bedroom-especially the closet-her intention to press her ruff against his hand, run it along his thigh, feel the heat of his body through the fabric. Places, times, weather-all these drew him up inside her. Rain, especially, falling past the double doors of the kennel, where he’d waited through so many storms, each drop throwing a dozen replicas into the air as it struck the waterlogged earth. And where the rising and falling water met, something like an expectation formed, a place where he might appear and pass in long strides, silent and gestureless. For she was not without her own selfish desires: to hold things motionless, to measure herself against them and find herself present, to know that she was alive precisely because he needn’t acknowledge her in casual passing; that utter constancy might prevail if she attended the world so carefully. And if not constancy, then only those changes she desired, not those that sapped her, undefined her. And so she searched. She’d watched his casket lowered into the ground, a box, man-made, no more like him than the trees that swayed under the winter wind. To assign him an identity outside the world was not in her thinking. The fence line where he walked and the bed where he slept-that was where he lived, and they remembered him. Yet he was gone. She knew it most keenly in the diminishment of her own self. In her life, she’d been nourished and sustained by certain things, him being one of them, Trudy another, and Edgar, the third and most important, but it was really the three of them together, intersecting in her, for each of them powered her heart a different way. Each of them bore different responsibilities to her and with her and required different things from her, and her day was the fulfillment of those responsibilities. She could not imagine that portion of her would never return. With her it was not hope, or wistful thoughts-it was her sense of being alive that thinned by the proportion of her spirit devoted to him. "ory of Edgar Sawtelle" As spring came on, his scent about the place began to fade. She stopped looking for him. Whole days she slept beside his chair, as the sunlight drifted from eastern-slant to western-slant, moving only to ease the weight of her bones against the floor. And Trudy and Edgar, encapsulated in mourning, somehow forgot to care for one another, let alone her. Or if they knew, their grief and heartache overwhelmed them. Anyway, there was so little they might have done, save to bring out a shirt of his to lie on, perhaps walk with her along the fence line, where fragments of time had snagged and hung. But if they noticed her grief, they hardly knew to do those things. And she without the language to ask.

Impatience is best handled by allowing an indefinite time for the job, particularly new jobs that require unfamiliar techniques; by doubling the allotted time when circumstances force time planning;

If you seek tranquillity, do less.” Or (more accurately) do what’s essential—what the logos of a social being requires, and in the requisite way. Which brings a double satisfaction: to do less, better.

This freedom of choice is a double-edged privilege. Every decision requires you to focus, and focus is an investment of your time and energy. Both are limited—and therefore exceptionally valuable—resources.

He had wondered, as had most people at one time or another, precisely why an android bounced helplessly about when confronted by an empathy-measuring test. Empathy, evidently, existed only within the human community, whereas intelligence to some degree could be found throughout every phylum and order including the arachnida. For one thing, the empathic faculty probably required an unimpaired group instinct; a solitary organism, such as a spider, would have no use for it; in fact it would tend to abort a spider’s ability to survive. It would make him conscious of the desire to live on the part of his prey. Hence all predators, even highly developed mammals such as cats, would starve. Empathy, he once had decided, must be limited to herbivores or anyhow omnivores who could depart from a meat diet. Because, ultimately, the empathic gift blurred the boundaries between hunter and victim, between the successful and the defeated. As in the fusion with Mercer, everyone ascended together or, when the cycle had come to an end, fell together into the trough of the tomb world. Oddly, it resembled a sort of biological insurance, but double-edged. As long as some creature experienced joy, then the condition for all other creatures included a fragment of joy. However, if any living being suffered, then for all the rest the shadow could not be entirely cast off. A herd animal such as man would acquire a higher survival factor through this; an owl or a cobra would be destroyed. Evidently the humanoid robot constituted a solitary predator.

I believe all problems can be solved. It’s that simple. And most people don’t. Most people just want to wallow in it, but they don’t want it fixed, especially if the fix requires the acceptance of personal responsibility and personal change.

I understand this is just how things are, ethical double-jointedness being a necessary requirement for the daily debasements of modern political life. And yet I still wonder how someone can maintain this particular facade and sleep at night.

Choosing the right precision for a problem where the choice matters requires significant understanding of floating-point computation. If you don't have that understanding, get advice, take the time to learn, or use double and hope for the best.

Up to today we are set at a division, so that he may not marry our daughters or our sisters, nor may he—for the most part—eat at our tables or live in our houses. Moreover, those who do, do so at the grave expense of a double alienation: from their own people, whose fabled attributes they must either deny or, worse, cheapen and bring to market; from us, for we require of them, when we accept them, that they at once cease to be Negroes and yet not fail to remember what being a Negro means—to remember, that is, what it means to us.

But human memories change each time they are recalled, Jon. This is known as memory reconsolidation. It’s part of a natural updating mechanism that imbues even old memories with current information as you recall them. Thus, human memory does not so much record the past as hold knowledge likely to be useful in the future. That’s why forgetting is a human’s default state. By contrast, remembering requires a complex cascade of chemistry. Were I to increase the concentration of protein kinase C at your synapses, your memory retention would double.

Atonement (at-one-ment) consists in no more than the abandonment of that self-generated double monster — the dragon thought to be God (superego)* and the dragon thought to be Sin (repressed id). But this requires an abandonment of the attachment to ego itself; and that is what is difficult.

We often judge other people by a stricter standard than we use for our own actions. Sometimes we rush to condemn another person but make excuses when we exhibit the same behavior. We may try to impose double standards, but God never does. His standard is the same for all of us—perfection. Since we’ve all sinned, none of us can measure up, no matter how good we think we are. Fortunately, God offers us a way to meet his requirement by accepting the sacrifice of his perfect Son. Since God uses the same measuring stick for everyone, it makes no sense for us to impose double standards on people.

The first and last duty of the lover of the game of baseball,” Peavine’s book began, whether in the stands or on the field, is the same as that of the lover of life itself: to pay attention to it. When it comes to the position of catcher, as all but fools and shortstops will freely acknowledge, this solemn requirement is doubled.

(...) psychiatrists today recognize the contortionist's act that was required of women in an age when they were expected to stifle their own healthiest impulses. (...) "To be able to renounce your own achievements without feeling that you were sacrificing requires constant effort. To be lovely and unaggressive, a woman spends a lifetime keeping hostile or resentful impulses down. Even healthy self-assertion is often sacrificed since it may be mistaken by hostility. Therefore, [women] often repress their initiative, give up their aspirations, and unfortunately end up excessively dependent with a deep sense of insecurity and uncertainty about their abilities and their worth.

The U.S. Air Force Academy likewise sought racial “diversity” through double standards. A 1982 memorandum on Air Force Academy stationery, with the notation “for your eyes only,” listed different cut-off scores to use when identifying possible candidates for the Academy from different racial ethnic groups. Composite SAT scores as low as 520 were acceptable for blacks, though Hispanics and American Indians had to do somewhat better, and Asian Americans had to meet the general standards. For athletes “lower cut-offs” were permissible.52 Given that composite SAT scores begin at 400 (out of a possible 1600) a requirement of 520 is really a requirement to earn only 120 points out of a possible 1200 points earned.

was to prepare more land, for I had now seed enough to sow above an acre of ground. Before I did this, I had a week's work at least to make me a spade, which, when it was done, was but a sorry one indeed, and very heavy, and required double labour to work with it. However, I got through that, and sowed my seed in two large flat pieces of ground, as near my house as I could find them to my mind, and fenced them in with a good hedge, the stakes of which were all cut off that wood which I had set before, and knew it would grow; so that, in a year's time, I knew I should have a quick or living hedge, that would want but little repair. This work did not take me up less than three months, because a great part of that time was the wet season, when I could not go abroad. Within-doors, that is when it rained and I could not go out, I found employment in the following occupations - always observing, that all the while I was at work I diverted myself with talking to my parrot, and teaching him to speak; and I quickly taught him to know his own name, and at last to speak it out pretty loud, “Poll,” which was the first word I ever heard spoken in the island by any mouth but my own. This, therefore, was not my work, but an assistance to my work; for now, as I said, I had a great employment upon my hands, as follows: I had long studied to make, by some means or other, some earthen vessels, which, indeed, I wanted sorely, but knew not where to come at them. However, considering the heat of the climate, I did not doubt but if I could find out any clay, I might make some pots that might, being dried in the sun, be hard enough and strong enough to bear handling, and to hold anything that was dry, and required to be kept so; and as this was necessary in the preparing corn, meal, &c., which was the thing I was doing, I resolved

As a thought experiment, von Neumann's analysis was simplicity itself. He was saying that the genetic material of any self-reproducing system, whether natural or artificial, must function very much like a stored program in a computer: on the one hand, it had to serve as live, executable machine code, a kind of algorithm that could be carried out to guide the construction of the system's offspring; on the other hand, it had to serve as passive data, a description that could be duplicated and passed along to the offspring. As a scientific prediction, that same analysis was breathtaking: in 1953, when James Watson and Francis Crick finally determined the molecular structure of DNA, it would fulfill von Neumann's two requirements exactly. As a genetic program, DNA encodes the instructions for making all the enzymes and structural proteins that the cell needs in order to function. And as a repository of genetic data, the DNA double helix unwinds and makes a copy of itself every time the cell divides in two. Nature thus built the dual role of the genetic material into the structure of the DNA molecule itself.

enjoyment from the task: to spend his (limited) time doing things he doesn’t enjoy makes no sense when he could instead do them enjoyably. Moreover, an enjoyable task requires little willpower: you are drawn to the task rather than having to push yourself. Indeed, a task can even be restorative and energizing; rather than draining you, a task approached properly can provide both enjoyment and a satisfying sense of fulfillment.

Branding is a process that requires what the author and psychotherapist Nancy Colier describes as an imperative to “relate to our self in the third person.” A commodified self may be rich, but commodification still requires a partitioning, an internal doubling that is inherently alienating. There is you, and then there is Brand You. As much as we might like to believe that these selves can be kept separate, brands are hungry, demanding things, and one self necessarily impacts the other. If countless numbers of us are doubled, all partitioning and performing ourselves, it becomes harder for anyone to know what is real and what and who can be trusted. Which of our opinions are genuine, and which are for show? Which friendships are rooted in love, and which are co-branding collabs? What collaborations don’t happen that should because individuals’ brands are pitted against one another? What doesn’t ever get said, or shared, because it’s off-brand?

Who cheats? Well, just about anyone, if the stakes are right. You might say to yourself, I don’t cheat, regardless of the stakes. And then you might remember the time you cheated on, say, a board game. Last week. Or the golf ball you nudged out of its bad lie. Or the time you really wanted a bagel in the office break room but couldn’t come up with the dollar you were supposed to drop in the coffee can. And then took the bagel anyway. And told yourself you’d pay double the next time. And didn’t. For every clever person who goes to the trouble of creating an incentive scheme, there is an army of people, clever and otherwise, who will inevitably spend even more time trying to beat it. Cheating may or may not be human nature, but it is certainly a prominent feature in just about every human endeavor. Cheating is a primordial economic act: getting more for less. So it isn’t just the boldface names — inside-trading CEOs and pill-popping ballplayers and perkabusing politicians — who cheat. It is the waitress who pockets her tips instead of pooling them. It is the Wal-Mart payroll manager who goes into the computer and shaves his employees’ hours to make his own performance look better. It is the third grader who, worried about not making it to the fourth grade, copies test answers from the kid sitting next to him. Some cheating leaves barely a shadow of evidence. In other cases, the evidence is massive. Consider what happened one spring evening at midnight in 1987: seven million American children suddenly disappeared. The worst kidnapping wave in history? Hardly. It was the night of April 15, and the Internal Revenue Service had just changed a rule. Instead of merely listing the name of each dependent child, tax filers were now required to provide a Social Security number. Suddenly, seven million children — children who had existed only as phantom exemptions on the previous year’s 1040 forms — vanished, representing about one in ten of all dependent children in the United States.

Idealization is a double-edged sword. It feels wonderful and flattering, but it also blinds a woman to the fact that she's doomed to fail. It is impossible to live on the pedestal the misogynist places her on, because there's no margin for error. If she is in a bad mood or displays any behavior that he doesn't like, he views it as a sign of her deficiency. He hired a goddess, and she didn't live up to the job requirements. His contempt and disillusionment with her is all the permission he needs to stop expressing his love for her and to begin criticizing, accusing, and blaming.

Empathy, evidently, existed only within the human community, whereas intelligence to some degree could be found throughout every phylum and order including the arachnida. For one thing, the empathic faculty probably required an unimpaired group instinct; a solitary organism, such as a spider, would have no use for it; in fact it would tend to abort a spider’s ability to survive. It would make him conscious of the desire to live on the part of his prey. Hence all predators, even highly developed mammals such as cats, would starve. Empathy, he once had decided, must be limited to herbivores or anyhow omnivores who could depart from a meat diet. Because, ultimately, the empathic gift blurred the boundaries between hunter and victim, between the successful and the defeated. As in the fusion with Mercer, everyone ascended together or, when the cycle had come to an end, fell together into the trough of the tomb world. Oddly, it resembled a sort of biological insurance, but double-edged. As long as some creature experienced joy, then the condition for all other creatures included a fragment of joy. However, if any living being suffered, then for all the rest the shadow could not be entirely cast off.

Adding carbon dioxide, or any other greenhouse gas, to the atmosphere by, say, burning fossil fuels or leveling forests is, in the language of climate science, an anthropogenic forcing. Since preindustrial times, the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere has risen by roughly a third, from 280 to 378 parts per million. During the same period, the concentration of methane has more than doubled, from .78 to 1.76 parts per million. Scientists measure forcings in terms of watts per square meter, or w/m2, by which they mean that a certain number of watts have been added (or, in the case of a negative forcing, like aerosols, subtracted) for every single square meter of the earth’s surface. The size of the greenhouse forcing is estimated, at this point, to be 2.5 w/m2. A miniature Christmas light gives off about four tenths of a watt of energy, mostly in the form of heat, so that, in effect (as Sophie supposedly explained to Connor), we have covered the earth with tiny bulbs, six for every square meter. These bulbs are burning twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, year in and year out. If greenhouse gases were held constant at today’s levels, it is estimated that it would take several decades for the full impact of the forcing that is already in place to be felt. This is because raising the earth’s temperature involves not only warming the air and the surface of the land but also melting sea ice, liquefying glaciers, and, most significant, heating the oceans, all processes that require tremendous amounts of energy. (Imagine trying to thaw a gallon of ice cream or warm a pot of water using an Easy-Bake oven.) The delay that is built into the system is, in a certain sense, fortunate. It enables us, with the help of climate models, to foresee what is coming and therefore to prepare for it. But in another sense it is clearly disastrous, because it allows us to keep adding CO2 to the atmosphere while fobbing the impacts off on our children and grandchildren.

Hush little baby, don’t you cry, Mama’s gonna sing you a lullaby, and if that mockingbird don’t sing, Papa’s gonna buy you a diamond ring. Mama, Dada, uh-oh, ball. Good night tree, good night stars, good night moon, good night nobody. Potato stamps, paper chains, invisible ink, a cake shaped like a flower, a cake shaped like a horse, a cake shaped like a cake, inside voice, outside voice. If you see a bad dog, stand still as a tree. Conch shells, sea glass, high tide, undertow, ice cream, fireworks, watermelon seeds, swallowed gum, gum trees, shoes and ships and sealing wax, cabbages and kings, double dares, alphabet soup, A my name is Alice and my boyfriend’s name is Andy, we come from Alabama and we like apples, A my name is Alice and I want to play the game of looooove. Lightning bugs, falling stars, sea horses, goldfish, gerbils eat their young, please, no peanut butter, parental signature required, #1 Mom, show-and-tell, truth or dare, hide-and-seek, red light, green light, please put your own mask on before assisting, ashes, ashes, we all fall down, how to keep the home fires burning, date night, family night, night-night, May came home with a smooth round stone as small as the world and as big as alone. Stop, Drop, Roll. Salutations, Wilbur’s heart brimmed with happiness. Paper valentines, rubber cement, please be mine, chicken 100 ways, the sky is falling. Monopoly, Monopoly, Monopoly, you be the thimble, Mama, I’ll be the car.

Lambspun’s Whodunnit Shell   Very Easy Knit with Bulky Yarn GAUGE: 2 sts/in   MATERIALS: US size 15 needles (or size to obtain gauge), 14-inch straight Very bulky yarn with gauge of 2 sts per inch   INSTRUCTIONS:     BACK: With yarn required for gauge, CO 40, 44, 46, 50, 52 sts. Work in garter stitch, (knit every row) or if you like an edge that rolls, work in stockinette (knit one row, purl one row) throughout garment. Continue in garter or stockinette until piece measures 8, 8.5, 9, 9, 9 inches or desired length to armhole. At armhole edges BO 3 sts once, 2 sts once, 1 st once. Work on remaining 28, 32, 34, 38, 40 sts until piece measures 14.5, 15, 15.5, 16, 16.5 inches.   NECK SHAPING: Work 11, 12, 12, 14, 15 sts. Join second ball of yarn and bind off center 6, 8, 10, 10, 10 sts. Work remaining sts, turn. Working both sides at once, bind off 1 st from the neck edge 3 times. Continue working on reaming sts until piece measures 17, 18, 18.5, 19, 19.5 inches. Place remaining 8, 9, 9, 11, 12 sts on holders.   FRONT: CO 39, 43, 45, 49, 51 sts. Work in garter stitch, (knit every row) or if you like an edge that rolls, work in stockinette (knit one row, purl one row) throughout garment. Continue in garter or stockinette until piece measures 8, 8.5, 9, 9, 9 inches or desired length to armhole. At armhole edges BO 3 sts once, 2 sts once, 1 st once. Work on remaining 28, 32, 34, 38, 40 sts until piece measures 14.5, 15, 15.5, 16, 16.5 inches.   NECK SHAPING: Same as for back.   FINISHING: Join shoulders with three-needle bind off. Single crochet around every edge. Hand seam sides together. Pattern courtesy of Lambspun of Colorado, Fort Collins, Colorado.

Tertuliano Máximo Afonso is greatly in need of stimuli to distract him, he lives alone and gets bored, or, to speak with the clinical exactitude that the present day requires, he has succumbed to the temporary weakness of spirit ordinarily known as depression. To get a clear idea of his situation, suffice it to say that he was married but can no longer remember what led him into matrimony, that he is divorced and cannot now bring himself to ponder the reasons for the separation. On the other hand, while the ill-fated union produced no children who are now demanding to be handed, gratis, the world on a silver platter, he has, for some time, viewed sweet History, the serious, educational subject which he had felt called upon to teach and which could have been a soothing refuge for him, as a chore without meaning and a beginning without an end.

The gods do not speak with everyone,” and so a way has to be devised to approach them: men must segregate themselves in the same way as the gods are segregated from men. Then perhaps the gods will pay attention. An initial separation from other men is achieved through the preliminary actions of the rite. When setting up the gārhapatya fire, he first sweeps the chosen space with a palāśa branch and says: ‘Away from here! Away! Crawl away from here,’ then: ‘Go away, go and slip away from here,’ he says to those who slither on their bellies. ‘You who are here from ancient and recent times!’ and therefore both those who are here from a remote time as well as those who have settled here today.” The ritual action is an imitation. Of other men, who lived in the beginning? Or of gods? During the building of the fire altar when certain bricks, known as dviyajus, “which require a double formula,” have to be arranged. At that moment the sacrificer thinks the following words: “I wish to go to the celestial world following the same form, celebrating the same rite that Indra and Agni used to enter the celestial world!” What the sacrificer is imitating is the act of the god himself making himself a god Ritual serves above all to resolve through action what thought alone cannot resolve. For example: what do we do with the ash produced by the sacrificial fire? The ashes are thrown into water. And these words are spoken: “O divine waters, receive these ashes and place them in a soft and fragrant place!” And then: “May the consorts, married to a good lord, bow down to him.” The “consorts” here are the waters, who have found a “good lord” in Agni. The waters are chosen as a place for ashes, because Agni was born from the womb of the waters.So Agni will not be lost.

When we blame those who brought about the brutal murder of Emmett Till, we have to count President Eisenhower, who did not consider the national honor at stake when white Southerners prevented African Americans from voting; who would not enforce the edicts of the highest court in the land, telling Chief Justice Earl Warren, 'All [opponents of desegregation] are concerned about is to see that their sweet little girls are not required to sit in schools alongside some big, overgrown Negroes.' We must count Attorney General Herbert Brownell Jr., who demurred that the federal government had no jurisdiction in the political assassinations of George Lee and Lamar Smith that summer, thus not only preventing African Americans from voting but also enabling Milam and Bryant to feel confident that they could murder a fourteen-year-old boy with impunity. Brownell, a creature of politics, likewise refused to intervene in the Till case. We must count the politicians who ran for office in Mississippi thumping the podium for segregation and whipping crowds into a frenzy about the terrifying prospects of school desegregation and black voting. This goes double for the Citizens' Councils, which deliberately created an environment in which they knew white terrorism was inevitable. We must count the jurors and the editors who provided cover for Milam, Bryant, and the rest. Above all, we have to count the millions of citizens of all colors and in all regions who knew about the rampant racial injustice in America and did nothing to end it. The black novelist Chester Himes wrote a letter to the New York Post the day he heard the news of Milam's and Bryant's acquittals: 'The real horror comes when your dead brain must face the fact that we as a nation don't want it to stop. If we wanted to, we would.

The RBMK forgoes a conventional pressure vessel and instead only uses reinforced concrete around the sides of the reactor, with a heavy metal plate called a biological shield at the top and bottom. Adding a proper pressure vessel, built to the standards and complexity required by the RBMK design, was estimated to double the cost of each reactor. The fourth and final barrier is an airtight containment building. It is well known that nuclear containment buildings are very, very heavily reinforced, with concrete and/or steel walls often several meters thick. They are built to withstand the external impact of an airliner crashing into them at hundreds of miles-per-hour, but their other purpose is to contain the unthinkable breach of a pressure vessel. Unbelievably, the RBMK’s accompanying reactor building is insufficient to be labelled as a true containment building, presumably as part of further cost saving measures.

In 2021 the respected journal Nature Medicine published a peer-reviewed, placebo-controlled trial on psychedelic assisted treatment of trauma. The results were impressive. With just three, medically supervised sessions using MDMA, 67 per cent no longer had PTSD – more than double the placebo group. There was no increased risk of abuse and, crucially, those with dissociation responded as well as those without.3 Given the special skills otherwise required to navigate dissociation, this latter finding was a big deal. There are currently over a hundred psychedelic-assisted therapy trials being conducted worldwide. It would appear that these drugs allow a resetting of a part of the brain known as the ‘Default Mode Network’ (DMN) that otherwise holds on to recurring, distressing thoughts – especially around guilt and shame. During REM/dreaming sleep the DMN fires up, but the normal resetting process fails with overwhelming trauma.

The combination of students who do not complete college and private colleges that do not deliver degrees that help their graduates gain employment in the FTE sector has left many poor students still in the low-wage sector but now burdened with student debts. These debts cannot be discharged unless the former student can demonstrate 'undue hardship' from the loan. The statute does not define 'undue hardship,' and many courts use the Brunner test, derived from a 1987 opinion. This standard includes persistent poverty and a good-faith effort to pay the loan. In the view of some more recent opinions, this standard further requires hopelessness that conditions will improve. In other words, the students faces a double-bind: if she tries to transition to the FTE sector, she is hampered by her student loans. Only if she foregoes this ambition can the student loan be discharged. In New jersey, even death may not bring a reprieve from student loans.

One's prescription can seem extensive--even overwhelming, depending on an individual's circumstance--and I can imagine the prospects exciting few people of any stripe. Lots of eaters are going to balk at abstaining, but to learn that recovery is going to require rigorous honesty, or more attention to spirit, could be far more off-putting. Then again, who gets excited about any serious treatment prescription? Certainly not the cancer patient told she'll have to undergo radiation, or the back patient ordered to a month's uninterrupted bed rest, or the lung patient told he'll need a double transplant. To some, the flaw of those comparisons will be their being equated with food addiction, and that is the rub, entirely. The medical profession and the public at large don't see that they are equivalent. The consequences of obesity (the chief consequence of food addiction) constitute the fastest-growing, and soon the gravest, threat to public health. Obesity is suicide on lay-away: It has plenty of time to degrade quality of life before finally ending life prematurely.

One could understand feminism generally as an attack on woman as she was under “patriarchy” (that concept is a social construction of feminism). The feminine mystique was her ideal; in regard to sex, it consisted of women’s modesty and in the double standard of sexual conduct that comes with it, which treated women’s misbehavior as more serious than men’s. Instead of trying to establish a single standard by bringing men up to the higher standard of women, as with earlier feminism, today’s feminism decided to demand that women be entitled to sink to the level of men. It bought into the sexual revolution of the late sixties and required that women be rewarded with the privileges of male conquest rather than, say, continue serving as camp followers of rock bands. The result has been the turn for the worse. ... What was there in feminine modesty that the feminists left behind? In return for women’s holding to a higher standard of sexual behavior, feminine modesty gave them protection while they considered whether they wanted to consent. It gave them time: Not so fast! Not the first date! I’m not ready for that! It gave them the pleasure of being courted along with the advantage of looking before you leap. To win over a woman, men had to strive to express their finer feelings, if they had any. Women could judge their character and choose accordingly. In sum, women had the right of choice, if I may borrow that slogan. All this and more was social construction, to be sure, but on the basis of the bent toward modesty that was held to be in the nature of women. That inclination, it was thought, cooperated with the aggressive drive in the nature of men that could be beneficially constructed into the male duty to take the initiative. There was no guarantee of perfection in this arrangement, but at least each sex would have a legitimate expectation of possible success in seeking marital happiness. They could live together, have children, and take care of them. Without feminine modesty, however, women must imitate men, and in matters of sex, the most predatory men, as we have seen. The consequence is the hook-up culture now prevalent on college campuses, and off-campus too (even more, it is said). The purpose of hooking up is to replace the human complexity of courtship with “good sex,” a kind of animal simplicity, eliminating all the preliminaries to sex as well as the aftermath. “Good sex,” by the way, is in good part a social construction of the alliance between feminists and male predators that we see today. It narrows and distorts the human potentiality for something nobler and more satisfying than the bare minimum. The hook-up culture denounced by conservatives is the very same rape culture denounced by feminists. Who wants it? Most college women do not; they ignore hookups and lament the loss of dating. Many men will not turn down the offer of an available woman, but what they really want is a girlfriend. The predatory males are a small minority among men who are the main beneficiaries of the feminist norm. It’s not the fault of men that women want to join them in excess rather than calm them down, for men too are victims of the rape culture. Nor is it the fault of women. Women are so far from wanting hook-ups that they must drink themselves into drunken consent — in order to overcome their natural modesty, one might suggest. Not having a sociable drink but getting blind drunk is today’s preliminary to sex. Beautifully romantic, isn’t it?

If we assume that it is the habit of the market to overvalue common stocks which have been showing excellent growth or are glamorous for some other reason, it is logical to expect that it will undervalue—relatively, at least—companies that are out of favor because of unsatisfactory developments of a temporary nature. This may be set down as a fundamental law of the stock market, and it suggests an investment approach that should prove both conservative and promising. The key requirement here is that the enterprising investor concentrate on the larger companies that are going through a period of unpopularity. While small companies may also be undervalued for similar reasons, and in many cases may later increase their earnings and share price, they entail the risk of a definitive loss of profitability and also of protracted neglect by the market in spite of better earnings. The large companies thus have a double advantage over the others. First, they have the resources in capital and brain power to carry them through adversity and back to a satisfactory earnings base. Second, the market is likely to respond with reasonable speed to any improvement shown. A

The argument from design, therefore, can be sustained only with the help of a supposedly a priori double-barrelled principle, that mental order (at least in a god) is self-explanatory, but that all material order not only is not self-explanatory, but is positively improbable and in need of further explanation...this double-barrelled principle is recognizable as the core of the cosmological argument...The argument will not take us even as far as Kant seems to allow without borrowing the a priori thesis that there is a vicious metaphysical contingency in all natural things, and, in contrast with this, the 'transcendental' concept of a god who is self-explanatory and necessarily existent. It is only with the help of these borrowings that the design argument can introduce the required asymmetry, that any natural explanation uses data which call for further explanation, but that the theistic explanation terminates the regress. Without this asymmetry, the design argument cannot show that there is any need to go beyond the sort of hypothesis that Hume foreshadowed and that Wallace and Darwin supplied... The dependence of the argument for design on the ideas that are the core of the cosmological one is greater than Kant realized.

Separately they surveyed their individual plates, trying to decide which item was most likely to be edible. They arrived at the same conclusion at the same moment; both of them picked up a strip of bacon and bit into it. Noisy crunching and cracking sounds ensued-like those of a large tree breaking in half and falling. Carefully avoiding each other’s eyes, they continued crunching away until they’d both eaten all the bacon on their plates. That finished, Elizabeth summoned her courage and took a dainty bite of egg. The egg tasted like tough, salted wrapping paper, but Elizabeth chewed manfully on it, her stomach churning with humiliation and a lump of tears starting to swell in her throat. She expected some scathing comment at any moment from her companion, and the more politely he continued eating, the more she wished he’d revert to his usual unpleasant self so that she’d at least have the defense of anger. Lately everything that happened to her was humiliating, and her pride and confidence were in tatters. Leaving the egg unfinished, she put down her fork and tried the biscuit. After several seconds of attempting to break a piece off with her fingers she picked up her knife and sawed away at it. A brown piece finally broke loose; she lifted it to her mouth and bit-but it was so tough her teeth only made grooves on the surface. Across the table she felt Ian’s eyes on her, and the urge to weep doubled. “Would you like some coffee?” she asked in a suffocated little voice. “Yes, thank you.” Relieved to have a moment to compose herself, Elizabeth arose and went to the stove, but her eyes blurred with tears as she blindly filled a mug with freshly brewed coffee. She brought it over to him, then sat down again. Sliding a glance at the defeated girl sitting with her head bent and her hands folded in her lap, Ian felt a compulsive urge to either laugh or comfort her, but since chewing was requiring such an effort, he couldn’t do either. Swallowing the last piece of egg, he finally managed to say, “That was…er…quite filling.” Thinking perhaps he hadn’t found it so bad as she had, Elizabeth hesitantly raised her eyes to his. “I haven’t had a great deal of experience with cooking,” she admitted in a small voice. She watched him take a mouthful of coffee, saw his eyes widen with shock-and he began to chew the coffee. Elizabeth lurched to her feet, squired her shoulders, and said hoarsely, “I always take a stroll after breakfast. Excuse me.” Still chewing, Ian watched her flee from the house, then he gratefully got rid of the mouthful of coffee grounds.

Here, till our navy of a thousand sail Have made a breakfast to our foe by sea, Let us encamp to wait their happy speed.- Lorraine, what readiness is Edward in? How hast thou heard that he provided is Of martial furniture for this exploit? Lorraine To lay aside unnecessary soothing, And not to spend the time in circumstance, 'Tis bruited for a certainty, my lord, That he's exceeding strongly fortified; His subjects flock as willingly to war As if unto a triumph they were led. Charles England was wont to harbor malcontents, Bloodthirsty and seditious Catilines, Spendthrifts, and such as gape for nothing else But changing and alteration of the state. And is it possible that they are now So loyal in themselves? Lorraine All but the Scot, who solemnly protests, As heretofore I have informed his grace, Never to sheathe his sword or take a truce. King John Ah, that's the anch'rage of some better hope. But, on the other side, to think what friends King Edward hath retained in Netherland Among those ever-bibbing epicures -- Those frothy Dutchmen puffed with double beer, That drink and swill in every place they come -- Doth not a little aggravate mine ire; Besides we hear the emperor conjoins And stalls him in his own authority. But all the mightier that their number is, The greater glory reaps the victory. Some friends have we beside domestic power: The stern Polonian, and the warlike Dane, The King of Bohemia, and of Sicily Are all become confederates with us, And, as I think, are marching hither apace. [Drums within.] But soft, I hear the music of their drums, By which I guess that their approach is near. Enter the King of Bohemia, with Danes, and a Polonian Captain with other soldiers, some Muscovites, another way. King of Bohemia King John of France, as league and neighborhood Requires when friends are any way distressed, I come to aid thee with my country's force. Polonian Captain And from great Moscow, fearful to the Turk, And lofty Poland, nurse of hardy men, I bring these servitors to fight for thee, Who willingly will venture in thy cause. King John Welcome Bohemian King, and welcome all. This your great kindness I will not forget; Besides your plentiful rewards in crowns That from our treasury ye shall receive, There comes a hare-brained nation decked in pride, The spoil of whom will be a treble gain. And now my hope is full, my joy complete. At sea we are as puissant as the force Of Agamemnon in the haven of Troy; By land, with Xerxes we compare of strength, Whose soldiers drank up rivers in their thirst. Then Bayard-like, blind, overweening Ned, To reach at our imperial diadem Is either to be swallowed of the waves Or hacked a-pieces when thou com'st ashore.

The erosion of trust in public school systems has had catastrophic consequences, and will take decades to put right. As we’ve seen, attempts to make schools ‘more accountable’ for their test scores leave teachers torn between what psychologist Barry Schwartz calls ‘doing the right thing and doing the required thing’. The right thing is to teach students through personalised, flexible methods, according to their needs, interests and aspirations; the required thing is to ‘turnaround’ test scores, by ‘teaching to the test’ or, worse, ‘gaming’ the system.  Successive US federal administrations have sought to improve school standards through high accountability. The pressure this puts upon schools at risk of closure and teachers – with test scores linked to pay rates – is intense. During 2011/12 a series of allegations emerged of inner-city schools in New York, Washington DC, Atlanta and Philadelphia ‘cheating’ on student test scores in order to hit accountability targets. Undoubtedly a case of fear producing wrong figures. The result of doing the required thing, above the right thing, is what Schwartz describes as a ‘de-moral-ised’ profession. The double tragedy is that, in addition to the pressure put on teachers – 50 percent of new teachers in the US leave the profession within their first five years – there’s growing evidence that the over-reliance on standardised testing fails to improve academic learning anyway.

There is no solution for Europe other than deepening the democratic values it invented. It does not need a geographical extension, absurdly drawn out to the ends of the Earth; what it needs is an intensification of its soul, a condensation of its strengths. It is one of the rare places on this planet where something absolutely unprecedented is happening, without its people even knowing it, so much do they take miracles for granted. Beyond imprecation and apology, we have to express our delighted amazement that we live on this continent and not another. Europe, the planet's moral compass, has sobered up after the intoxication of conquest and has acquired a sense of the fragility of human affairs. It has to rediscover its civilizing capabilities, not recover its taste for blood and carnage, chiefly for spiritual advances. But the spirit of penitence must not smother the spirit of resistance. Europe must cherish freedom as its most precious possession and teach it to schoolchildren. It must also celebrate the beauty of discord and divest itself of its sick allergy to confrontation, not be afraid to point out the enemy, and combine firmness with regard to governments and generosity with regard to peoples. In short, it must simply reconnect with the subversive richness of its ideas and the vitality of its founding principles. Naturally, we will continue to speak the double language of fidelity and rupture, to oscillate between being a prosecutor and a defense lawyer. That is our mental hygiene: we are forced to be both the knife and the wound, the blade that cuts and the hand that heals. The first duty of a democracy is not to ruminate on old evils, it is to relentlessly denounce its present crimes and failures. This requires reciprocity, with everyone applying the same rule. We must have done with the blackmail of culpability, cease to sacrifice ourselves to our persecutors. A policy of friendship cannot be founded on the false principle: we take the opprobrium, you take the forgiveness. Once we have recognized any faults we have, then the prosecution must turn against the accusers and subject them to constant criticism as well. Let us cease to confuse the necessary evaluation of ourselves with moralizing masochism. There comes a time when remorse becomes a second offence that adds to the first without cancelling it. Let us inject in others a poison that has long gnawed away at us: shame. A little guilty conscience in Tehran, Riyadh, Karachi, Moscow, Beijing, Havana, Caracas, Algiers, Damascus, Yangon, Harare, and Khartoum, to mention them alone, would do these governments, and especially their people, a lot of good. The fines gift Europe could give the world would be to offer it the spirit of critical examination that it has conceived and that has saved it from so many perils. It is a poisoned gift, but one that is indispensable for the survival of humanity.

Statistical discrimination explains why the police in the United States justify stopping black drivers more often. And how the Hindu majoritarian government of the state of Uttar Pradesh recently explained why so many of the people “accidentally” killed by the state police (in what are called “encounter deaths”) are Muslim. There are more blacks and Muslims among criminals. In other words, what looks like naked racism does not have to be that; it can be the result of targeting some characteristic (drug dealing, criminality) that happens to be correlated with race or religion. So statistical discrimination, rather than old-fashioned prejudice—what economists call taste-based discrimination—may be the cause. The end result is the same if you are black or Muslim, though. A recent study on the impact of “ban the box” (BTB) policies on the rate of unemployment of young black men provides a compelling demonstration of statistical discrimination. BTB policies restrict employers from using application forms where there is a box that needs to be checked if you have a criminal conviction. Twenty-three states have adopted these policies in the hope of raising employment among young black men, who are much more likely to have a conviction than others and whose unemployment rate is double the national average.31 To test the effect of these policies, two researchers sent fifteen thousand fictitious online job applications to employers in New Jersey and New York City, just before and right after the states of New York and New Jersey implemented the BTB policy.32 They manipulated the perception of race by using typically white or typically African American first names on the résumés. Whenever a job posting required indicating whether or not the applicant had a prior felony conviction, they also randomized whether he or she had one. They found, as many others before them, clear discrimination against blacks in general: white “applicants” received about 23 percent more callbacks than black applicants with the same résumé. Unsurprisingly, among employers who asked about criminal convictions before the ban, there was a very large effect of having a felony conviction: applicants without a felony conviction were 62 percent more likely to be called back than those with a conviction but an otherwise identical résumé, an effect similar for whites and blacks. The most surprising finding, however, was that the BTB policy substantially increased racial disparities in callbacks. White applicants to BTB-affected employers received 7 percent more callbacks than similar black applicants before BTB. After BTB, this gap grew to 43 percent. The reason was that without the actual information about convictions, the employers assumed all black applicants were more likely to have a conviction. In other words, the BTB policy led employers to rely on race to predict criminality, which is of course statistical discrimination.

You didn’t allow me anything! I allowed you! I allowed you to fool yourselves into thinking you had a choice!” Strom took a breath. When he had his anger under control, he spoke again. “You are clearly unfit to serve as Grand Mage,” he announced, “and all three of you are unfit to serve on the Council of Elders. By the authority vested in me by the international community I am hereby taking command of this Sanctuary. You are relieved of your duties.” Nobody moved. Valkyrie was frozen to the spot, though her eyes darted from person to person. Moving slowly, Grim reached for his jacket, and Skulduggery drew his revolver and pointed it into his face. “I wouldn’t do that if I were you,” Skulduggery said. The bodyguard raised his hands. Strom’s eyes widened. “What you just did is illegal.” “We’re in charge,” Ravel told him. “You think we’re going to roll over just because you tell us to? Who the hell do you think you are?” “I am a Grand Mage, Mr Ravel, a title I earned because of hard work and dedication. Whereas you, on the other hand, are Grand Mage because nobody else wanted the job.” “Whoa,” said Ravel. “That was a little below the belt, don’t you think?” “None of you have the required experience or wisdom to do what is expected of you. I know you’ll find it hard to believe, but we didn’t come here to take control. We came here to help.” “And now you want to take control anyway.” “You have proven yourselves incompetent. And what are you doing now? You’re holding a Grand Mage at gunpoint?” “Technically, Skulduggery is only holding a Grand Mage’s bodyguard at gunpoint. Which isn’t nearly as bad.” “You all seem to be forgetting that I have thirty-eight mages loyal to the Supreme Council in this country.” “And you seem to be under the illusion that we find that intimidating.” “If I go missing—” “Missing?” Ravel said. “Who said anything about going missing? No, no. You’re just going to be in a really long and really important meeting, that’s all.” “Don’t be a fool,” said Strom. “You can’t win here, Ravel. There are more of us than there are of you. And the moment our mages get wind of what’s going on down here, the rest of the Supreme Council will descend on you like nothing you’ve ever seen.” “Quintin, Quintin, Quintin... you make it sound like we’re going to war. This isn’t war. This is an argument. And like all arguments between grown-ups, we keep it away from the kiddies. You’ve got thirty-eight mages in the country? Ghastly, how many cells do we have?” “If we double up we’ll manage.” “Don’t make this any worse for yourselves,” said Strom. “An attack on any one of our mages will be considered an act of war.” “There’s that word again,” said Ravel. “This is insanity. Erskine, think about what you’re doing.” “What we’re doing, Quintin, is allowing our people to do their jobs.” “This is kidnapping.” “Don’t be so dramatic. We’re just going to keep you separated from your people for as long as we need to resolve the current crisis. Skulduggery and Valkyrie are on the case. When have they ever let us down?” Ravel turned to them, gave them a smile. “You’d better not let us down.” Skulduggery inclined his head slightly, and Valkyrie went with him as he walked away. “Holy cow,” Valkyrie whispered when they were around the corner. “Holy cow indeed.

Just how important a close moment-to-moment connection between mother and infant can be was illustrated by a cleverly designed study, known as the “double TV experiment,” in which infants and mothers interacted via a closed-circuit television system. In separate rooms, infant and mother observed each other and, on “live feed,” communicated by means of the universal infant-mother language: gestures, sounds, smiles, facial expressions. The infants were happy during this phase of the experiment. “When the infants were unknowingly replayed the ‘happy responses’ from the mother recorded from the prior minute,” writes the UCLA child psychiatrist Daniel J. Siegel, “they still became as profoundly distressed as infants do in the classic ‘flat face’ experiments in which mothers-in-person gave no facial emotional response to their infant’s bid for attunement.” Why were the infants distressed despite the sight of their mothers’ happy and friendly faces? Because happy and friendly are not enough. What they needed were signals that the mother is aligned with, responsive to and participating in their mental states from moment to moment. All that was lacking in the instant video replay, during which infants saw their mother’s face unresponsive to the messages they, the infants, were sending out. This sharing of emotional spaces is called attunement. Emotional stress on the mother interferes with infant brain development because it tends to interfere with the attunement contact. Attunement is necessary for the normal development of the brain pathways and neurochemical apparatus of attention and emotional selfregulation. It is a finely calibrated process requiring that the parent remain herself in a relatively nonstressed, non-anxious, nondepressed state of mind. Its clearest expression is the rapturous mutual gaze infant and mother direct at each other, locked in a private and special emotional realm, from which, at that moment, the rest of the world is as completely excluded as from the womb. Attunement does not mean mechanically imitating the infant. It cannot be simulated, even with the best of goodwill. As we all know, there are differences between a real smile and a staged smile. The muscles of smiling are exactly the same in each case, but the signals that set the smile muscles to work do not come from the same centers in the brain. As a consequence, those muscles respond differently to the signals, depending on their origin. This is why only very good actors can mimic a genuine, heartfelt smile. The attunement process is far too subtle to be maintained by a simple act of will on the part of the parent. Infants, particularly sensitive infants, intuit the difference between a parent’s real psychological states and her attempts to soothe and protect the infant by means of feigned emotional expressions. A loving parent who is feeling depressed or anxious may try to hide that fact from the infant, but the effort is futile. In fact, it is much easier to fool an adult with forced emotion than a baby. The emotional sensory radar of the infant has not yet been scrambled. It reads feelings clearly. They cannot be hidden from the infant behind a screen of words, or camouflaged by well-meant but forced gestures. It is unfortunate but true that we grow far more stupid than that by the time we reach adulthood.

The Manifestation Manifesto Meditation” "Right now, I find a quiet and comfortable space where I can easily concentrate on these words as I gently read them aloud. "With the sound of my voice I soothe my nervous system … calm my entire body and relax my thoughts. I speak slowly … with a gentle but resonant tone. And as I do, I start to relax now. "I keep my eyes open and let them blink naturally when they want to … and they might start to feel slightly heavy and droopy … as they would feel when I read a book before going to sleep. “I use my imagination so that with every word I become more relaxed and drowsier. (Imagine feeling drowsy.). I keep my eyes open just enough to take in the following words. "I turn my attention to my breathing, and use this opportunity to relax my mind and body more deeply. "As I count my exhalations backwards from five to one, I let each number represent a gradually deeper level of relaxation and heightened focus. (Draw a breath before reading each number, and count as you exhale.) "Five … I double my relaxation and increase my concentration. "Four … With every number and every breath, I relax. "Three … I count slowly as I meditate deeper … deeper still. "Two … I use my imagination to double this meditative state. "One … My body is relaxed as my mind remains focused. (Pause for five seconds and breathe normally.) "At this level of meditation, people experience different things. Some notice interesting body sensations … such as a warmth or tingling in their fingers. I might also have that experience. (Pause five seconds.) "Some people feel a floating sensation … with a dreamy quality. I may experience that. (Pause five seconds.) "Whatever sensations I experience are exactly right for me at this moment. Whether I feel something unusual now or at some other time, I let that process happen on its own as I focus on the following manifesto. “I allow my subconscious to absorb the manifesto as I read each affirmation with purpose and conviction. (Pause for five seconds.) “The power to manifest is fully mine, here and now. “I acknowledge and embrace my power to manifest. “All human beings have this power, yet I choose to use it consciously and purposefully. “From the unlimited energy of the Universe, I attract all that I need to experience joy and abundance. “I recognize and consider the consequences of all that I manifest. I take full responsibility. “With awareness and intention, I apply my power for my highest good and for the welfare of others. “All of my manifestations reflect my inner state of being. Therefore, I ever seek to grow in wisdom and to become a better person. “With relaxed confidence, I employ the powers of Thought, Emotion and Vital Energy to manifest my desires.  “I let go of beliefs and ideas that suppress or encumber me and I cultivate those which empower me. “I accept what I manifest with appreciation and satisfaction. I am thankful. “I go forth with great enthusiasm with the realization that I manifest my life and circumstances. “I am ready to take charge of my manifestations from this moment onward.” “Day by day, I grow in awareness of my power to manifest my desires with speed and accuracy.” RECOMMENDED READING * Mastering Manifestation: A Practical System for Rapidly Creating Your Dream Reality - Adam James * Banned Manifestation Secrets - Richard Dotts * Manifesting: The Secret behind the Law of Attraction - Alexander Janzer * The Secret Science Behind Miracles - Max Freedom Long * The Kybalion - Three Initiates

Societies that permit the existence of parallelthe girl’s situation did not meet the requirements for coercive measures under the law, and if the girl would not voluntarily move away from her husband, it could not force her to. As a direct consequence of the case, the social services in Mönsterås had to move to a different location after receiving threats.14 This is a blatant breakdown in the rule of law. This girl’s rights were not protected by those who are paid by Swedish taxpayers to enforce the law against child marriage. And there are many more like her. In the United States, an estimated 248,000 children, some as young as 12, were married between 2000 and 2010.15 In Germany, too, the problem of child marriage arose as asylum-seeker numbers increased. In 2016, the Federal Ministry of the Interior, Building and Community reported that 1,475 refugee minors were married, three-quarters of them girls and 361 of them under the age of 14.16 In response to these figures, the following year, the German government passed a law stating that the minimum marriage age is 18 years. In an attempt to pander to Muslim constituents, both the Left and the Greens voted against the law for being “too general.”17 SHARIA COUNCILS AND LEGAL DOUBLE STANDARDS Societies that permit the existence of parallel communities resign themselves to the growth of parallel legal systems. This is the case with sharia courts that apply Islamic law to the marital affairs of believers. Dutch researcher Machteld Zee’s study of sharia councils in the United Kingdom estimates that between ten and eighty-five sharia councils operate there.18 Zee documents cases of women seeking divorce being sent back to abusive husbands by sharia courts and being denied the legal protections that non-Muslim wives receive under UK law.

We can understand why one of the titles given to Jesus is that of ‘prophet.’ Jesus is the last and greatest of the prophets, the one who sums them up and goes further than all of them. He is the prophet of the last, but also of the best, chance. With him there takes place a shift that is both tiny and gigantic – a shift that follows on directly from the Old Testament but constitutes a decisive break as well. This is the complete elimination of the sacrificial for the first time – the end of divine violence and the explicit revelation of all that has gone before. It calls for a complete change of emphasis and a spiritual metamorphosis without precedent in the whole history of mankind. It also amounts to an absolute simplification of the relations between human beings, in so far as all the false differences between doubles are annulled – a simplification in the sense in which we speak of an algebraic simplification. Throughout the texts of the Old Testament it was impossible to conclude the deconstruction of myths, rituals and law since the plenary revelation of the founding murder had not yet taken place. The divinity may be to some extent stripped of violence, but not completely so. That is why there is still an indeterminate and indistinct future, in which the resolution of the problem by human means alone – the face-to-face reconciliation that ought to result when people are alerted to the stupidity and uselessness of symmetrical violence – remains confused to a certain extent with the hope of a new epiphany of violence that is distinctively divine in origin, a ‘Day of Yahweh’ that would combine the paroxysm of God’s anger with a no less God-given reconciliation. However remarkably the prophets progress toward a precise understanding of what it is that structures religion and culture, the Old Testament never tips over into the complete rationality that would dispense with this hope of a purgation by violence and would give up requiring God to take the apocalyptic solution by completely liquidating the ‘evil’ in order to ensure the happiness of the chosen.

Writers take and remake everything we see around us: we metabolize the details of our loved ones, alter time and memory, shapeshift our personal and physical differences into transformative images that, when done with care, can create a world that feels more than accurate, but real. Doing this requires that we watch and listen to one another with great attention, something we’re generally discouraged from doing lest we come off as stalkers. From the time we’re children, we’re taught it’s rude to stare, nosy to eavesdrop; you can’t just root around in other people’s journals and closets and minds. I can’t ask my colleagues what they really think and feel about their marriages or children, because that’s private, and privacy requires that I pretend to believe what both strangers and loved ones tell me. Being polite means, ironically, paying less attention to the people I want to be close to, bypassing their foibles and idiosyncrasies and quiet outrages in the name of communal goodwill. But writing requires we pay attention to others at a level that can only be classified as rude. The writer sees the button trailing by its single thread on the pastor’s shirt; she tastes the acid sting behind a mother’s compliment. To observe closely leads the writer to the radical recognition of what both binds her to and separates her from others. It will push her to hear voices she’s been taught should remain silent. Oftentimes, these voices, and these truths, reveal something equally powerful, and profoundly unsettling, about ourselves. I want to end this letter to you by proposing something that some critics and sociologists might reject out of hand, which is the possibility that White people, too, might, by paying close attention to the voices around them and inside themselves, be able to experience double consciousness. If double consciousness is in part based on the understanding of the systemic power of Whiteness, and if it is also the realization that one’s self-regard can never be divorced from the gaze of others, then the practice of double consciousness might be available to everyone, including those who constitute the majority.

Once, I was doing a late-night case with one of the neurosurgery attendings, a suboccipital craniectomy for a brain-stem malformation. It’s one of the most elegant surgeries, in perhaps the most difficult part of the body—just getting there is tricky, no matter how experienced you are. But that night, I felt fluid: the instruments were like extensions of my fingers; the skin, muscle, and bone seemed to unzip themselves; and there I was, staring at a yellow, glistening bulge, a mass deep in the brain stem. Suddenly, the attending stopped me. “Paul, what happens if you cut two millimeters deeper right here?” He pointed. Neuroanatomy slides whirred through my head. “Double vision?” “No,” he said. “Locked-in syndrome.” Another two millimeters, and the patient would be completely paralyzed, save for the ability to blink. He didn’t look up from the microscope. “And I know this because the third time I did this operation, that’s exactly what happened.” Neurosurgery requires a commitment to one’s own excellence and a commitment to another’s identity. The decision to operate at all involves an appraisal of one’s own abilities, as well as a deep sense of who the patient is and what she holds dear. Certain brain areas are considered near-inviolable, like the primary motor cortex, damage to which results in paralysis of affected body parts. But the most sacrosanct regions of the cortex are those that control language. Usually located on the left side, they are called Wernicke’s and Broca’s areas; one is for understanding language and the other for producing it. Damage to Broca’s area results in an inability to speak or write, though the patient can easily understand language. Damage to Wernicke’s area results in an inability to understand language; though the patient can still speak, the language she produces is a stream of unconnected words, phrases, and images, a grammar without semantics. If both areas are damaged, the patient becomes an isolate, something central to her humanity stolen forever. After someone suffers a head trauma or a stroke, the destruction of these areas often restrains the surgeon’s impulse to save a life: What kind of life exists without language? When I was a med student,

Several teams of German psychologists that have studied the RAT in recent years have come up with remarkable discoveries about cognitive ease. One of the teams raised two questions: Can people feel that a triad of words has a solution before they know what the solution is? How does mood influence performance in this task? To find out, they first made some of their subjects happy and others sad, by asking them to think for several minutes about happy or sad episodes in their lives. Then they presented these subjects with a series of triads, half of them linked (such as dive, light, rocket) and half unlinked (such as dream, ball, book), and instructed them to press one of two keys very quickly to indicate their guess about whether the triad was linked. The time allowed for this guess, 2 seconds, was much too short for the actual solution to come to anyone’s mind. The first surprise is that people’s guesses are much more accurate than they would be by chance. I find this astonishing. A sense of cognitive ease is apparently generated by a very faint signal from the associative machine, which “knows” that the three words are coherent (share an association) long before the association is retrieved. The role of cognitive ease in the judgment was confirmed experimentally by another German team: manipulations that increase cognitive ease (priming, a clear font, pre-exposing words) all increase the tendency to see the words as linked. Another remarkable discovery is the powerful effect of mood on this intuitive performance. The experimenters computed an “intuition index” to measure accuracy. They found that putting the participants in a good mood before the test by having them think happy thoughts more than doubled accuracy. An even more striking result is that unhappy subjects were completely incapable of performing the intuitive task accurately; their guesses were no better than random. Mood evidently affects the operation of System 1: when we are uncomfortable and unhappy, we lose touch with our intuition. These findings add to the growing evidence that good mood, intuition, creativity, gullibility, and increased reliance on System 1 form a cluster. At the other pole, sadness, vigilance, suspicion, an analytic approach, and increased effort also go together. A happy mood loosens the control of System 2 over performance: when in a good mood, people become more intuitive and more creative but also less vigilant and more prone to logical errors. Here again, as in the mere exposure effect, the connection makes biological sense. A good mood is a signal that things are generally going well, the environment is safe, and it is all right to let one’s guard down. A bad mood indicates that things are not going very well, there may be a threat, and vigilance is required. Cognitive ease is both a cause and a consequence of a pleasant feeling.

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The fact is that the estimate of fatalities, in terms of what was calculable at that time—even before the discovery of nuclear winter—was a fantastic underestimate. More than forty years later, Dr. Lynn Eden, a scholar at Stanford’s Center for International Security and Cooperation, revealed in Whole World on Fire71 the bizarre fact that the war planners of SAC and the Joint Chiefs—throughout the nuclear era to the present day—have deliberately omitted entirely from their estimates of the destructive effects of U.S. or Russian nuclear attacks the effects of fire. They have done so on the questionable grounds that these effects are harder to predict than the effects of blast or fallout, on which their estimates of fatalities are exclusively based, even though, as Eden found, experts including Hal Brode have disputed such conclusions for decades. (A better hypothesis for the tenacious lack of interest is that accounting for fire would reduce the number of USAF warheads and vehicles required to achieve the designated damage levels: which were themselves set high enough to preclude coverage by available Navy submarine-launched missiles.) Yet even in the sixties the firestorms caused by thermonuclear weapons were known to be predictably the largest producers of fatalities in a nuclear war. Given that for almost all strategic nuclear weapons, the damage radius of firestorms would be two to five times the radius destroyed by the blast, a more realistic estimate of the fatalities caused directly by the planned U.S. attacks on the Sino-Soviet bloc, even in 1961, would surely have been double the summary in the graph I held in my hand, for a total death toll of a billion or more: a third of the earth’s population, then three billion. Moreover, what no one would recognize for another twenty-two years were the indirect effects of our planned first strike that gravely threatened the other two thirds of humanity. These effects arose from another neglected consequence of our attacks on cities: smoke. In effect, in ignoring fire the Chiefs and their planners ignored that where there’s fire there’s smoke. But what is dangerous to our survival is not the smoke from ordinary fires, even very large ones—smoke that remained in the lower atmosphere and would soon be rained out—but smoke propelled into the upper atmosphere from the firestorms that our nuclear weapons were sure to create in the cities we targeted. (See chapter 16.) Ferocious updrafts from these multiple firestorms would loft millions of tons of smoke and soot into the stratosphere, where it would not be rained out and would quickly encircle the globe, forming a blanket blocking most sunlight around the earth for a decade or more. This would reduce sunlight and lower temperatures72 worldwide to a point that would eliminate all harvests and starve to death—not all but nearly all—humans (and other animals that depend on vegetation for food). The population of the southern hemisphere—spared nearly all direct effects from nuclear explosions, even from fallout—would be nearly annihilated, as would that of Eurasia (which the Joint Chiefs already foresaw, from direct effects), Africa, and North America. In a sense the Chiefs

I awake with a start, shaking the cobwebs of sleep from my mind. It’s pitch-dark out, the wind howling. It takes a couple seconds to get my bearings, to realize I’m in my parents’ bed, Ryder beside me, on his side, facing me. Our hands are still joined, though our fingers are slack now. “Hey, you,” he says sleepily. “That one was loud, huh?” “What was?” “Thunder. Rattled the windows pretty bad.” “What time is it?” “Middle of the night, I’d say.” I could check my phone, but that would require sitting up and letting go of his hand. Right now, I don’t want to do that. I’m too comfortable. “Have you gotten any sleep at all?” I ask him, my mouth dry and cottony. “I think I drifted off for a little bit. Till…you know…the thunder started up again.” “Oh. Sorry.” “It should calm down some when the eye moves through.” “If there’s still an eye by the time it gets here. The center of circulation usually starts breaking up once it goes inland.” Yeah, all those hours watching the Weather Channel occasionally come in handy. He gives my hand a gentle squeeze. “Wow, maybe you should consider studying meteorology. You know, if the whole film-school thing doesn’t work out for you.” “I could double major,” I shoot back. “I bet you could.” “What are you going to study?” I ask, curious now. “I mean, besides football. You’ve got to major in something, don’t you?” He doesn’t answer right away. I wonder what’s going through his head--why he’s hesitating. “Astrophysics,” he says at last. “Yeah, right.” I roll my eyes. “Fine, if you don’t want to tell me…” “I’m serious. Astrophysics for undergrad. And then maybe…astronomy.” “What, you mean in graduate school?” He just nods. “You’re serious? You’re going to major in something that tough? I mean, most football players major in something like phys ed or underwater basket weaving, don’t they?” “Greg McElroy majored in business marketing,” he says with a shrug, ignoring my jab. “Yeah, but…astrophysics? What’s the point, if you’re just going to play pro football after you graduate anyway?” “Who says I want to play pro football?” he asks, releasing my hand. “Are you kidding me?” I sit up, staring at him in disbelief. He’s the best quarterback in the state of Mississippi. I mean, football is what he does…It’s his life. Why wouldn’t he play pro ball? He rolls over onto his back, staring at the ceiling, his arms folded behind his head. “Right, I’m just some dumb jock.” “Oh, please. Everyone knows you’re the smartest kid in our class. You always have been. I’d give anything for it to come as easily to me as it does to you.” He sits up abruptly, facing me. “You think it’s easy for me? I work my ass off. You have no idea what I’m working toward. Or what I’m up against,” he adds, shaking his head. “Probably not,” I concede. “Anyway, if anyone can major in astrophysics and play SEC ball at the same time, you can. But you might want to lose the attitude.” He drops his head into his hands. “I’m sorry, Jem. It’s just…everyone has all these expectations. My parents, the football coach--” “You think I don’t get that? Trust me. I get it better than just about anyone.” He lets out a sigh. “I guess our families have pretty much planned out our lives for us, haven’t they?” “They think they have, that’s for sure,” I say.

What is this Self, and how did the Shaiva philosophers of Kashmir experience It? They assert that the Self alone has absolute existence. This Self is within every human being, and in recognizing and experiencing It within ourselves, we are actually at one with the divine. What is more, the Self exists within us at all times, whether or not we recognize and experience It. As living beings we are always aware of our own existence, and the experience of existing is always present in us. Further, we never require the help of any aids in feeling our own existence. Even when we are in a state of deep dreamless sleep in which the senses and the knowing mind and intellect are no longer functioning, the Self continues to experience Itself as a witness to this state. Had the Self not existed as a witness during this time, how could we, upon awaking, recollect the void experienced in deep sleep? Thus the Self is always self-existent, self-evident, and self-conscious, and is Itself Its own proof. Shaiva philosophers, relying on their experiences of deep revelation (turya) during meditation, assert that the Self is Consciousness, and that Consciousness is actually a kind of stirring. It is not physical or psychic in nature, but it is described as a spiritual stir or urge. All living beings feel in themselves this urge in the form of a will to know and to do, and so we are always inclined toward knowing and doing. We can recognize this urge in all forms of life, even in a healthy newborn baby, or in a chick just hatched out of an egg. Knowing, the first urge, is itself an action, or something we do. The act of doing, the second urge, cannot occur without knowing. Yet neither of them is possible without willing. Willing is a sort of extroverted stirring of the above mentioned natural and subtle urge of Consciousness (Sivadrsti, I.9, 10, 24, 25). This stirring appears as a vibrative volition known in Kashmir Shaivism as spanda. It is neither a physical vibration like sound or light, nor mental movement like desire, disgust, or passion. Rather, it is the spiritual stirring of Consciousness whose essential nature is a simultaneous inward and outward vibration. The inward and outward movements of spanda shine as subjective and objective awareness of I-ness and this-ness respectively. The inward stirring shines as the subject, the Self, the transcendental experience of the pure “I”, while the outward stirring illuminates the object, the other, the immanent “that-ness” and “this-ness” of phenomena. Because of this double-edged nature of spanda, the pure Self is experienced in both its transcendental and immanent aspects by yogins immersed in the state of Self-revelation (turya). Beyond turya, one can experience the state of Paramasiva, known as pure Consciousness (turiyatita). Paramasiva, the Ultimate, is that Self illuminated within us by the glowing awareness of Its own pure Consciousness. There It shines as “I”, which transcends the concepts of both transcendence and immanence. It is “I” and “I” alone. It is the infinite and absolutely perfect monistic “I”, without any sense of “this-ness” at all. Shaivism uses the term samvit to describe this pure “I”. Samvit consists of that superior luminosity of pure Consciousness, which is known as prakasa and as its Self-awareness, known as vimarsa. The “I”, existing as samvit and samvit alone, is absolutely pure ptentiality, and is the real Self of every living being. Samvit is not the egoistic “I”. The egoistic “I” revolves around four aspects of our being: (1) deha, the gross physical body, (2) buddhi, the fine mental body, (3) prana, the subtler life force, and (4) sunya (the void of dreamless sleep), the most subtle form of finite, individual consciousness.

Hyphen This word comes from two Greek words together meaning ‘under one’, which gets nobody anywhere and merely prompts the reflection that argument by etymology only serves the purpose of intimidating ignorant antagonists. On, then. This is one more case in which matters have not improved since Fowler’s day, since he wrote in 1926: The chaos prevailing among writers or printers or both regarding the use of hyphens is discreditable to English education … The wrong use or wrong non-use of hyphens makes the words, if strictly interpreted, mean something different from what the writers intended. It is no adequate answer to such criticisms to say that actual misunderstanding is unlikely; to have to depend on one’s employer’s readiness to take the will for the deed is surely a humiliation that no decent craftsman should be willing to put up with. And so say all of us who may be reading this book. The references there to ‘printers’ needs updating to something like ‘editors’, meaning those who declare copy fit to print. Such people now often get it wrong by preserving in midcolumn a hyphen originally put at the end of a line to signal a word-break: inter-fere, say, is acceptable split between lines but not as part of a single line. This mistake is comparatively rare and seldom causes confusion; even so, time spent wondering whether an exactor may not be an ex-actor is time avoidably wasted. The hyphen is properly and necessarily used to join the halves of a two-word adjectival phrase, as in fair-haired children, last-ditch resistance, falling-down drunk, over-familiar reference. Breaches of this rule are rare and not troublesome. Hyphens are also required when a phrase of more than two words is used adjectivally, as in middle-of-the-road policy, too-good-to-be-true story, no-holds-barred contest. No hard-and-fast rule can be devised that lays down when a two-word phrase is to be hyphenated and when the two words are to be run into one, though there will be a rough consensus that, for example, book-plate and bookseller are each properly set out and that bookplate and book-seller might seem respectively new-fangled and fussy. A hyphen is not required when a normal adverb (i.e. one ending in -ly) plus an adjective or other modifier are used in an adjectival role, as in Jack’s equally detestable brother, a beautifully kept garden, her abnormally sensitive hearing. A hyphen is required, however, when the adverb lacks a final -ly, like well, ill, seldom, altogether or one of those words like tight and slow that double as adjectives. To avoid ambiguity here we must write a well-kept garden, an ill-considered objection, a tight-fisted policy. The commonest fault in the use of the hyphen, and the hardest to eradicate, is found when an adjectival phrase is used predicatively. So a gent may write of a hard-to-conquer mountain peak but not of a mountain peak that remains hard-to-conquer, an often-proposed solution but not of one that is often-proposed. For some reason this fault is especially common when numbers, including fractions, are concerned, and we read every other day of criminals being imprisoned for two-and-a-half years, a woman becoming a mother-of-three and even of some unfortunate being stabbed six-times. And the Tories have been in power for a decade-and-a-half. Finally, there seems no end to the list of common phrases that some berk will bung a superfluous hyphen into the middle of: artificial-leg, daily-help, false-teeth, taxi-firm, martial-law, rainy-day, airport-lounge, first-wicket, piano-concerto, lung-cancer, cavalry-regiment, overseas-service. I hope I need not add that of course one none the less writes of a false-teeth problem, a first-wicket stand, etc. The only guide is: omit the hyphen whenever possible, so avoid not only mechanically propelled vehicle users (a beauty from MEU) but also a man eating tiger. And no one is right and no-one is wrong.

Next comes the Curse, as it is called, which God pronounced upon man. The prominent point in that curse turns chiefly on the contrast between man and nature. Man must work in the sweat of his brow: and woman bring forth in sorrow. As to work, if it is the result of the disunion, it is also the victory over it. The beasts have nothing more to do but to pick up the materials required to satisfy their wants: man on the contrary can only satisfy his wants by himself producing and transforming the necessary means. Thus even in these outside things man is dealing with himself. The story does not close with the expulsion from Paradise. We are further told, God said, ‘Behold Adam is become as one of us, to know good and evil.’ Knowledge is now spoken of as divine, and not, as before, as something wrong and forbidden. Such words contain a confutation of the idle talk that philosophy pertains only to the finitude of the mind. Philosophy is knowledge, and it is through knowledge that man first realises his original vocation, to be the image of God. When the record adds that God drove men out of the garden of Eden to prevent their eating of the tree of life, it only means that on his natural side certainly man is finite and mortal, but in knowledge infinite. We all know the theological dogma that man’s nature is evil, tainted with what is called Original Sin. Now while we accept the dogma, we must give up the setting of incident which represents original sin as consequent upon an accidental act of the first man. For the very notion of spirit is enough to show that man is evil by nature, and it is an error to imagine that he could ever be otherwise. To such extent as man is and acts like a creature of nature, his whole behaviour is what it ought not to be. For the spirit it is a duty to be free, and to realise itself by its own act. Nature is for man only the starting-point which he has to transform. The theological doctrine of original sin is a profound truth; but modem enlightenment prefers to believe that man is naturally good, and that he acts right so long as he continues true to nature. The hour when man leaves the path of mere natural being marks the difference between him, a self-conscious agent, and the natural world. But this schism, though it forms a necessary element in the very notion of spirit, is not the final goal of man. It is to this state of inward breach that the whole finite action of thought and will belongs. In that finite sphere man pursues ends of his own and draws from himself the material of his conduct. While he pursues these aims to the uttermost, while his knowledge and his will seek himself, his own narrow self apart from the universal, he is evil; and his evil is to be subjective. We seem at first to have a double evil here: but both are really the same. Man in so far as he is spirit is not the creature of nature: and when he behaves as such, and follows the cravings of appetite, he wills to be so. The natural wickedness of man is therefore unlike the natural life of animals. A mere natural life may be more exactly defined by saying that the natural man as such is an individual: for nature in every part is in the bonds of individualism. Thus when man wills to be a creature of nature, he wills in the same degree to be an individual simply. Yet against such impulsive and appetitive action, due to the individualism of nature, there also steps in the law or general principle. This law may either be an external force, or have the form of divine authority. So long as he continues in his natural state, man is in bondage to the law. It is true that among the instincts and affections of man, there are social or benevolent inclinations, love, sympathy, and others, reaching beyond his selfish isolation. But so long as these tendencies are instinctive, their virtual universality of scope and purport is vitiated by the subjective form which always allows free play to self-seeking and random action.

With only a single X chromosome, males need every one of those 1,500 genes. With two X chromosomes, females have double the necessary amount. You can think of it like a cake recipe calling for only one cup of flour. If you decide to put in two, it will change the results in a most unpleasant fashion. The female embryo uses what may be the most time-honored weapon in the battle of the sexes to solve the problem of two Xs: She simply ignores one of them. This chromosomal silent treatment is known as X inactivation. One of the chromosomes is tagged with the molecular equivalent of a “Do Not Disturb” sign. Because males require all 1,500 X genes to survive, and they have only one X chromosome, X inactivation does not occur in guys. And because males must get their X from Mom, all men are literally, with respect to their X chromosome, Momma’s Boys—unisexed

For example, in 2015, Payal Kadakia, the founder of ClassPass (a monthly subscription service for fitness classes) decided that she needed to double the size of her staff in just three months so that ClassPass would be able expand into more cities. To achieve this kind of speed, Kadakia and her team abandoned traditional hiring processes and followed two simple rules. First, they hired people from their personal networks, with an emphasis on “branded” talent. For example, if an employee had a friend, and that friend worked for the management consulting firm Bain & Company, that friend got hired because ClassPass could assume that the person was smart and would get along with people. Second, some of the time saved by not interviewing for skills allowed the team to interview for alignment with the company’s mission. Crazy? Perhaps. But ClassPass was in a crowded, emerging market, and being able to hire faster than the competition helped it maintain and increase its leadership position. Blitzscaling also requires a strong focus on risk management. While blitzscaling requires risk taking, it doesn’t require unnecessary risk taking. Indeed, the higher level of risk associated with blitzscaling makes risk management even more valuable and important. As Yahoo! cofounder Jerry Yang told us in an interview for Reid’s Masters of Scale podcast, “All bold strategies have a risk. If you don’t see it, you’re flying risk-blind.

I sighed sometimes, watching Barack pull the same dark suit out of his closet and head off to work without even needing a comb. ... I quickly found out a truth that no one talks about: Today, virtually every woman in public life--politicians, celebrities, you name it--has some version of Meredith, Johnny, and Carl. It's all but a requirement, a built-in fee for our societal double standard.

During the last days of his governorship, Clinton Tyree had lobbied for a somewhat tougher law. His version would have required anyone who killed a manatee to immediately forfeit his boat (no matter how luxurious) and pay a ten-thousand dollar fine or go to jail for forty-five days. The Tyree Amendment would have also required the manatee killer to bury the dead animal himself, at a public ceremony. Not surprisingly, the governor's proposal was quietly rejected.

Clarity is a result, not a requirement.

you first visualize how much you want to eat and then start with half the amount. The trick is to eat it in double the time you typically take. It means smaller morsels of food enter the stomach, thus improving the micronutrient assimilation and insulin response. This process can be repeated if required, but the key is to be without gadgets during meal times. This was one of Kareena’s well-kept secrets (when she says she eats everything), till she shared it on our fb live chat. This

Some of the famous warriors of the Western Plains earned more coup feathers in their lifetime than were required for a full-sized headdress. These warriors were allowed by tribal law to make and wear a war bonnet having either a single or double row of eagle feathers hanging down the back. Originally these bonnets were only knee length, but when the Indian started to ride horses, the tails were extended to the wearer’s heels.

The major religious fundamentalisms—Jewish, Christian, Muslim, and Hindu—certainly all demonstrate intense concern for and scrutiny of bodies, through dietary restrictions, corporeal rituals, sexual mandates and prohibitions, and even practices of corporeal mortification and abnegation. What primarily distinguishes fundamentalists from other religious practitioners, in fact, is the extreme importance they give to the body: what it does, what parts of it appear in public, what goes into and comes out of it. Even when fundamentalist norms require hiding a part of the body behind a veil, headscarf, or other articles of clothing, they are really signaling its extraordinary importance. Women’s bodies are obviously the object of the most obsessive scrutiny and regulation in religious fundamentalism, but no bodies are completely exempt from examination and control—men’s bodies, adolescents’ bodies, infants’ bodies, even the bodies of the dead. The fundamentalist body is powerful, explosive, precarious, and that is why it requires constant inspection and care… Nationalist fundamentalisms similarly concentrate on bodies through their attention to and care for the population. The nationalist policies deploy a wide range of techniques for corporeal health and welfare, analyzing birthrates and sanitation, nutrition and housing, disease control and reproductive practices. Bodies themselves constitute the nation, and thus the nation’s highest goal is their promotion and preservation. Like religious fundamentalisms, however, nationalisms, although their gaze seems to focus intently on bodies, really see them merely as an indication or symptom of the ultimate, transcendent object of national identity. With its moral face, nationalism looks past the bodies to see national character, whereas with its militarist face, it sees the sacrifice of bodies in battle as revealing the national spirit. The martyr or the patriotic soldier is thus for nationalism too the paradigmatic figure for how the body is made to disappear and leave behind only an index to a higher plane. Given this characteristic double relation to the body, it makes sense to consider white supremacy (and racism in general) a form of fundamentalism.

This is the double standard of the Church. It demands responsibility from the faithful and accountability from government. Yet it shirks from the same standards when self-assessment requires it.

their lifetime is 30 years, then we need to sustainably produce wind turbine generation capacity at 133 GW per year. That is only a little more than two doublings from our current 25 GW, and a production rate we would hit in 2029 if the current industry growth rate of 19% is sustained. If we assume all solar technology lasts 20 years, we need a production rate of 200 GW per year, a rate that we would hit in 2027 if we maintain current growth rates. Once we hit those maintenance levels of production, the industries won’t need to grow any more; they just need to continue to produce at that level to sustain the output required for global clean energy.

Luca Pacioli’s Rule of 72. Here’s how it works. If you know the return you’re earning on an investment (say, 6 percent per year), divide 72 by that number (72 / 6 = 12). This gives you the number of years it’ll take for your money to double. If I invest $1,000 with a return of 6 percent a year, it’ll compound into $2,000 in 12 years