Resource Room Quotes

Once risks are identified, they must be assessed in terms of their likelihood and potential impact. This allows the company to prioritize risks and allocate resources accordingly.

I believe that companies, as major employers, resource managers, technological innovators, and capital allocators, have a unique responsibility to operate with integrity, transparency, and accountability.

The board, in collaboration with management, crafts a strategic roadmap that defines the specific steps required to achieve the vision. This roadmap translates the company's "why" and "when" into a practical "how," outlining key milestones, resource allocation, and performance metrics.

At every stage of life, our inner self requires the nurturance of loving people attuned to our feelings and responsive to our needs who can foster our inner resources of personal power, lovability, and serenity. Those who love us understand us and are available to us with an attention, appreciation, acceptance, and affection we can feel. They make room for us to be who we are.

In a mastermind alliance, members freely exchange information, insights, and resources, accelerating learning and problem-solving.

Engaged employees are more productive, innovative, and committed to the company's success. They become passionate advocates for your brand and contribute to a positive work environment that attracts and retains top talent.

Limited resources force you to make do with what you've got. There's no room for waste. And that forces you to be creative.

Think of my Pleasure in Solitude, in comparison of my commerce with the world - there I am a child - there they do not know me not even my most intimate acquaintance - I give into their feelings as though I were refraining from irritating a little child - Some think me middling, others silly, other foolish - every one thinks he sees my weak side against my will; when in thruth it is with my will - I am content to be thought all this because I have in my own breast so graet a resource. This is one great reason why they like me so; because they can all show to advantage in a room, and eclipese from a certain tact one who is reckoned to be a good Poet - I hope I am not here playing tricks 'to make the angels weep': I think not: for I have not the least contempt for my species; and though it may sound paradoxical: my greatest elevations of Soul leave me every time more humbled - Enough of this - though in your Love for me you will not think it enough.

We also need to be willing to make room in our lives for the impending birth of our dreams. This might mean emptying our life of clutter such as wasted time, energy, resources, or draining relationships. These things can jeopardize our dreams by distracting us at a time when we should be more focused than ever.

Did you ever notice that women can seem common while men never do? You won’t ever hear anyone describe a man’s appearance as common. The common man means the average man, a typical man, a decent hardworking person of modest dreams and resources. A common woman is a woman who looks cheap. A woman who looks cheap doesn’t have to be respected, and so she has a certain value, a certain cheap value.

I haven’t seen Lucy’s room. I haven’t asked. He has offered many times; once, he cornered me and whispered that I wouldn’t believe my eyes, but I don’t think I’m ready to see it yet. I will make sure to view it before I leave. If it is the last thing I do, my last will and testament has been filed with Human Resources. If enough of my remains exist, please see that they are cremated.

The Batcave is a monument… to his pain. The cave is more than his war room. He might think of it that way, all the tools and resources he’s assembled for his work. But that’s not it at all. The Batcave is a monument to his pain. And this morning, the way he’s hurting, it was the last place he would come.

So mankind gobbled in a century all the world’s resources that had taken millions of years to store up, and no one on the top gave a damn or listened to all the voices that were trying to warn them, they just let us overproduce and overconsume until now the oil is gone, the topsoil depleted and washed away, the trees chopped down, the animals extinct, the earth poisoned, and all we have to show for this is seven billion people fighting over the scraps that are left, living a miserable existence—and still breeding without control. So I say the time has come to stand up and be counted.

When we grip our phones and tablets, we’re holding the kind of information resource that governments would have killed for just a generation ago. And is it that experience of everyday information miracles, perhaps, that makes us all feel as though our own opinions are so worth sharing? After all, aren’t we—in an abstracted sense, at least—just as smart as everyone else in the room, as long as we’re sharing the same Wi-Fi connection? And therefore (goes the bullish leap in thinking) aren’t my opinions just as worthy of trumpeting?

A dogmatic religion is one that does not truly honor the thoughts and feelings of the individual. It is also one that is static, without room for development. Doubt is considered sinful, and contradicting information is screened out. The divine and sacred are seen as derived from outside, with no recognition afforded to a person’s inner resources of wisdom, strength, and love.

A Holistic Wealth perspective emphasizes creating budgets with purpose. Identify priorities, allocate resources and leave room for personal enjoyment. This approach fosters a healthy financial mindset, reducing the liklihood of regretting spending decisions.

Adam arrived at 735 Monroe Street prepared for the woman to be a bit skittish. After all, she'd run from him earlier, obviously intimidated by his overwhelming masculinity and epic sexuality. Women often had that reaction to him, especially when he was stripping off his pants. Or kilt, depending on the century. He was also prepared, however, for her inhibitions to drop swiftly, as did all women's when they got a good, close-up look at him. After that, many simply launched themselves at him in a full-frontal assault of sexual frenzy. He'd been entertaining himself with just that possibility, his entire body tight with lust, while tracking her down with the information he'd obtained int he room called "Human Resources" at Little & Staller. But nothing in his vast repertoire of experience had prepared him for Gabrielle O'Callaghan. The bloodthirsty little hellion didn't react like any woman he'd ever encountered. She took one horrified look at him, drew back her arm, hauled off, and smashed him in the face with some kind of satchel she was holding. Then slammed the door and locked it. Leaving him on the doorstep, bleeding. Bleeding, by Danu, blood trickling from his lip!

Many people in this room have an Etsy store where they create unique, unreplicable artifacts or useful items to be sold on a small scale, in a common marketplace where their friends meet and barter. I and many of my friends own more than one spinning wheel. We grow our food again. We make pickles and jams on private, individual scales, when many of our mothers forgot those skills if they ever knew them. We come to conventions, we create small communities of support and distributed skills--when one of us needs help, our village steps in. It’s only that our village is no longer physical, but connected by DSL instead of roads. But look at how we organize our tribes--bloggers preside over large estates, kings and queens whose spouses’ virtues are oft-lauded but whose faces are rarely seen. They have moderators to protect them, to be their knights, a nobility of active commenters and big name fans, a peasantry of regular readers, and vandals starting the occasional flame war just to watch the fields burn. Other villages are more commune-like, sharing out resources on forums or aggregate sites, providing wise women to be consulted, rabbis or priests to explain the world, makers and smiths to fashion magical objects. Groups of performers, acrobats and actors and singers of songs are traveling the roads once more, entertaining for a brief evening in a living room or a wheatfield, known by word of mouth and secret signal. Separate from official government, we create our own hierarchies, laws, and mores, as well as our own folklore and secret history. Even my own guilt about having failed as an academic is quite the crisis of filial piety--you see, my mother is a professor. I have not carried on the family trade. We dwell within a system so large and widespread, so disorganized and unconcerned for anyone but its most privileged and luxurious members, that our powerlessness, when we can summon up the courage to actually face it, is staggering. So we do not face it. We tell ourselves we are Achilles when we have much more in common with the cathedral-worker, laboring anonymously so that the next generation can see some incremental progress. We lack, of course, a Great Work to point to and say: my grandmother made that window; I worked upon the door. Though, I would submit that perhaps the Internet, as an object, as an aggregate entity, is the cathedral we build word by word and image by image, window by window and portal by portal, to stand taller for our children, if only by a little, than it does for us. For most of us are Lancelots, not Galahads. We may see the Grail of a good Classical life, but never touch it. That is for our sons, or their daughters, or further off. And if our villages are online, the real world becomes that dark wood on the edge of civilization, a place of danger and experience, of magic and blood, a place to make one’s name or find death by bear. And here, there be monsters.

How did this happen? How did we start up a nation from nothing and transform it into a nation of start-ups? The answer lies in a paradox: having nothing was at once our greatest challenge and our greatest blessing of all. Without natural resources, our hopes were tied to our own creativity.

Increase. Being fruitful is a good and necessary start, but it should grow into the next phase, increase. Once again, even though the idea here is to multiply or reproduce, sexual procreation is only part of the meaning. The Hebrew word for increase also can mean “abundance,” “to be in authority,” “to enlarge,” and “to excel.” It carries the sense of refining your gift until it is completely unique. It is impossible to reproduce what you have not refined. In this context, then, to increase means not only to multiply or reproduce as in having children, but also to improve and excel, mastering your gift and becoming the very best you can possibly be at what you do. It also means learning how to manage the resources God has given you and developing a strategy for managing the increase that will come through refinement. By refining your gift, you make room for it in the world. The more refined your gift, the more in demand you will be. Proverbs 18:16 (KJV) says, “A man’s gift maketh room for him, and bringeth him before great men.” By refining your gift, you make room for it in the world. What is your fruit—your gift? What are you known for? What do you have that is reproducible? What quality or ability do you have that causes people to seek you out? What brings you joy? What are you passionate about? What do you have to offer the world, even just your little part of it? Fruit must be reproducible or else it is not genuine fruit. “Be fruitful” means to produce fruit; “increase” means to reproduce it.

Vast civilizations lay within the mosaic of dirt: hymenopteran labyrinths, rodential panic rooms, life-giving airways sculpted by the traffic of worms, hopeful spiders’ hunting cabins, crash pads for nomadic beetles, trees shyly locking toes with one another. It was here that you’d find the resourcefulness of rot, the wholeness of fungi.

The scarcest resource in the world is time.

In all of these examples, it’s not just the change of environment or seeking of quiet that enables more depth. The dominant force is the psychology of committing so seriously to the task at hand. To put yourself in an exotic location to focus on a writing project, or to take a week off from work just to think, or to lock yourself in a hotel room until you complete an important invention: These gestures push your deep goal to a level of mental priority that helps unlock the needed mental resources. Sometimes to go deep, you must first go big.

A great hope fell You heard no noise The ruin was within Oh cunning wreck that told no tale And let no witness in…. A not admitting of the wound Until it grew so wide That all my life had entered it And there was room beside…

I live in a beautiful place, I work at something I love, I make enough money to live, and my demands on the world's resources are very meager. What's unusual about this idyllic circumstance is that there is plenty of room for more to join.

When a man is happy enough to win the affections of a sweet girl, who can soothe his cares with crochet, and respond to all his most cherished ideas with beaded urn-rugs and chair-covers in German wool, he has, at least, a guarantee of domestic comfort, whatever trials may await him out of doors. What a resource it is under fatigue and irritation to have your drawing-room well supplied with small mats, which would always be ready if you ever wanted to set anything on them ! And what styptic for a bleeding heart can equal copious squares of crochet, which are useful for slipping down the moment you touch them ? How our fathers managed without crochet is the wonder; but I believe some small and feeble substitute existed in their time under the name of 'tatting'.

It's hard to explain how an infatuation actually starts. It's a state so all-encompassing that it's almost impossible to remember how it felt to live inside your own head before it began. Everything that precedes it becomes a pathway that was always leading there. Time before is valuable only as a resource with which to create a persona, to bind the object of the infatuation closer. I had given my (partially fabricated) past life to Mizuko to make a story that in the end never got told. Or not by her. It is also hard to explain the intensity of the infatuation itself. There is rarely an explanation that seems reasonable to anyone but you. Unless you're part of a cult or viral phenomenon, so that when you weep outside the object of your infatuation's hotel room, you do so in the company of millions.

Greed subsumes love and compassion; living simply makes room for them. Living simply is the primary way everyone can resist greed every day. All over the world people are becoming more aware of the importance of living simply and sharing resources. While communism has suffered political defeat globally, the politics of communalism continue to matter. We can all resist the temptation of greed. We can work to change public policy, electing leaders who are honest and progressive. We can turn off the television set. We can show respect for love. To save our planet we can stop thoughtless waste. We can recycle and support ecologically advanced survival strategies. We can celebrate and honor communalism and interdependency by sharing resources. All these gestures show a respect and a gratitude for life. When we value the delaying of gratification and take responsibility for our actions, we simplify our emotional universe. Living simply makes loving simple. The choice to live simply necessarily enhances our capacity to love. It is the way we learn to practice compassion, daily affirming our connection to a world community.

We’re on a planet that somehow knows how to rotate on its axis and follow a defined path while it hurtles through space! Our hearts beat! We can see! We have love, laughter, language, living rooms, computers, compassion, cars, fire, fingernails, flowers, music, medicine, mountains, muffins! We live in a limitless Universe overflowing with miracles! The fact that we aren’t stumbling around in an inconsolable state of sobbing awe is appalling. The Universe must be like, what more do I have to do to wake these bitches up? Make water, their most precious resource, rain down from the sky? The

And Mallow laughed joyously. "You've missed, Sutt, missed as badly as the Commdor himself. You've missed everything, and understood nothing. The Empire has always been a realm of colossal resources. They've calculated everything in planets, in stellar systems, in whole sectors of the Galaxy. Their generators are gigantic because they thought in gigantic fashion. "But we,—we, our little Foundation, our single world almost without metallic resources,—have had to work with brute economy. Our generators have had to be the size of our thumb, because it was all the metal we could afford. We had to develop new techniques and new methods,—techniques and methods the Empire can't follow because they have degenerated past the stage where they can make any vital scientific advance. "With all their nuclear shields, large enough to protect a ship, a city, an entire world; hey could never build one to protect a single man. To supply light and heat to a city, they have motors six stories high,—I saw them—where ours could fit into this room. And when I told one of their nuclear specialists that a lead container the size of a walnut contained a nuclear generator, he almost choked with indignation on the spot. "Why, they don't even understand their own colossi any longer. The machines work from generation to generation automatically and the caretakers are a hereditary caste who would be helpless if a single D-tube in all that vast structure burnt out. "The whole war is a battle between these two systems; between the Empire and the Foundation; between the big and the little. To seize control of a world, they bribe with immense ships that can make war, but lack all economic significance. We, on the other hand, bribe with little things, useless in war, but vital to prosperity and profits. "A king, or a Commdor, will take the ships and even make war. Arbitrary rulers throughout history have bartered their subjects' welfare for what they consider honor, and glory, and conquest. But it's still the little things in life that count—and Asper Argo won't stand up against the economic depression that will sweep all Korell in two or three years.

We’ll find another way,” Susanna said. She looked around the parlor at Lark, Harry, Aunt Marmoset, Minerva . . . finally coming back to Kate. “This is Spindle Cove. Here we have six intelligent, resourceful, strong-willed women in one room. We will not be thwarted by a few unreasonable men and their silly toy-soldier games.

When I wasn’t in the barn garden, helping out, sorting seeds or checking hoses I’d spend time alone, usually in the bathroom adjacent to Joel’s room, staring into the shattered mirror as my hand gently caressed my baby bump. More often than not I would cry. Not because my pregnancy upset me, or that my hormones were getting the better of me, but because I missed Joel, my baby’s father. That the baby would grow up without a dad made me anxious. Then again, if he had survived, what irreparable damage would he have suffered and how would his pain translate to his child? Jesus, I was studying myself in the very mirror he’d smashed the night he chose to take his own life. The bump had grown slowly in the last couple of months. With these limited resources, I didn’t have the privilege of eating whatever I craved. Had that been the case, I was sure I would have been bigger by now. Still, I tried to eat as well and as often as I could and the size of my belly had proven that my attempts at proper nutrition were at least growing something in there. Nothing made me happier than feeling my baby move. It was a constant source of relief for me. In our present circumstances, with no vitamins and barely any meat products save the recent stash of jerky Earl had found in an abandoned trailer, my diet consisted of berries, lettuce, and canned beans for the most part. Feeling the baby move inside me was an experience I often enjoyed alone. I would think of Joel then as well. Imagining his hand on my belly, with mine guiding his to the kicks and punches.

It was at that moment that Markisha decided to apply for CalWORKs. She’d rented a room in an apartment she shared with a barber in her neighborhood, and she needed some help paying for it. CalWORKs meant three hundred dollars a month, plus food stamps. So she went to the local welfare office—a “Family Resource Center,” known as an FRC—and walked inside. She was barely sober, emotionally a wreck, literally penniless, and her entire ambition in life was to keep and maintain a room and a half in a rundown section of west San Diego without having to sell her body to pay the rent. This is the kind of person at whom the weight of the state’s financial fraud prosecution apparatus tends to be trained in America. Markisha entered the financial fraud patrol zone when she walked through those doors at the FRC. For three hundred dollars a month, she was about to become more heavily scrutinized by the state than any twelve Wall Street bankers put together. The amounts of money spent in these kinds of welfare programs are very small, but the levels of political capital involved are mountainous. You can always score political points banging on black welfare moms on meth. And the bureaucracy she was about to enter reflects that intense, bitterly contemptuous interest.

What is the purpose of a nation if not to empower human beings to live better together than they could individually? When government fails to meet the basic needs of humanity for food, shelter, clothing, and even more important—the room to grow and evolve—the people will begin to rely on one another, to pool their resources and rise above the artificial limitations of tradition or law. Each of us has something significant to contribute to society be it physical, material, intellectual, emotional, or spiritual

Are you staying in tonight, Moshe?" she asked as she passed by the cat who lounged on her bed. When he only opened his eye in acknowledgement, she breezed out of the room. "Okay,don't wait up." Shelby dropped her purse on top of the box that held Myra's lamps and prepared to lift both when someone knocked on the door. "You expecting someone?" she asked Auntie Em.The bird merely fluttered her wings,unconcerned. Hefting the box,Shelby went to answer. Pleasure.She had to acknowledge it as well as annoyance when she saw Alan. "Another neighborly visit?" she asked, planting herself in the doorway. She skimmed a glance down the silk tie and trim, dark suit. "You don't look dressed for strolling." THe sarcasm didn't concern him-he'd seen that quick flash of unguarded pleasure. "As a public servant, I feel an obligation to conserve our natural resources and protect the environment." Reaching over,he clipped a tiny sprig of sweet pea into her hair. "I'm going to give you a lift to the Ditmeyers'. You might say we're carpooling.

We know from project management that there is usually slippage, and tasks almost always take longer than what one envisions. There is also no room for fitting human well-being into task schedules. We need to instead relearn what designing a day should be in the twenty-first century digital world. It should include strategies to not exhaust yourself, and to improve your well-being. And it includes understanding your own rhythm of attentional states, and the fact that you have limited and precious cognitive resources.

I wonder how deeply our world would be soothed if, after sharing Communion each week, Christians still pooled their resources to ensure that no one in the community lacked food, shelter, or education; that visitors moving into town were welcomed and provided for-even if it meant we made room in our own houses or sold property to make it so. If, instead of fearing the habits, beliefs, and diseases of our neighbors, our active, agapë love left no oxygen for fear. If we cared about the literal meaning of verses like these.

She stood and meandered around the room. “For fifty thousand years, right up to the industrial revolution, human civilization was about one thing and one thing only: food. Every culture that existed put most of their time, energy, manpower, and resources into food. Hunting it, gathering it, farming it, ranching it, storing it, distributing it…it was all about food. “Even the Roman Empire. Everyone knows about the emperors, the armies, and the conquests. But what the Romans really invented was a very efficient system of acquiring farmland and transportation of food and water.

He had recently heard some chinless Tory fuckpuddle say that London was a world-class city being held back by the rest of the UK. Parlabane had reckoned that if he poured all his money and efforts into fitting out his toilet he could almost certainly have himself a truly world class shite-house. Obviously there would be little in the way of cash or other physical resources for the development and upkeep of the living room and the kitchen, etc... but if anyone asked, he could tell them he had a world-class bog and it was just a shame the rest of the house was holding it back.

Whatever your motivation for downsizing, you're going to love the benefits that come with this change. Let me highlight a few: 1. More money... in general a smaller home costs less to buy or rent and less to maintain. 2. Less time and energy spent cleaning and maintaining... 3. Better family bonding... A smaller home naturally brings family members into proximity, leading to their having more conversations and doing more things together. 4. Less environmental impact... using less energy and fewer natural resources. 5. Easier perpetuation of your minimalism... 6. Wider market to sell.

Fatigue also depletes frontal resources. As the workday progresses, doctors take the easier way out, ordering up fewer tests, being more likely to prescribe opiates (but not a nonproblematic drug like an anti-inflammatory, or physical therapy). Subjects are more likely to behave unethically and become less morally reflective as the day progresses, or after they’ve struggled with a cognitively challenging task. In an immensely unsettling study of emergency room doctors, the more cognitively demanding the workday (as measured by patient load), the higher the levels of implicit racial bias by the end of the day.[27

Have you ever been in a place where history becomes tangible? Where you stand motionless, feeling time and importance press around you, press into you? That was how I felt the first time I stood in the astronaut garden at OCA PNW. Is it still there? Do you know it? Every OCA campus had – has, please let it be has – one: a circular enclave, walled by smooth white stone that towered up and up until it abruptly cut off, definitive as the end of an atmosphere, making room for the sky above. Stretching up from the ground, standing in neat rows and with an equally neat carpet of microclover in between, were trees, one for every person who’d taken a trip off Earth on an OCA rocket. It didn’t matter where you from, where you trained, where your spacecraft launched. When someone went up, every OCA campus planted a sapling. The trees are an awesome sight, but bear in mind: the forest above is not the garden’s entry point. You enter from underground. I remember walking through a short tunnel and into a low-lit domed chamber that possessed nothing but a spiral staircase leading upward. The walls were made of thick glass, and behind it was the dense network you find below every forest. Roots interlocking like fingers, with gossamer fungus sprawled symbiotically between, allowing for the peaceful exchange of carbon and nutrients. Worms traversed roads of their own making. Pockets of water and pebbles decorated the scene. This is what a forest is, after all. Don’t believe the lie of individual trees, each a monument to its own self-made success. A forest is an interdependent community. Resources are shared, and life in isolation is a death sentence. As I stood contemplating the roots, a hidden timer triggered, and the lights faded out. My breath went with it. The glass was etched with some kind of luminescent colourant, invisible when the lights were on, but glowing boldly in the dark. I moved closer, and I saw names – thousands upon thousands of names, printed as small as possible. I understood what I was seeing without being told. The idea behind Open Cluster Astronautics was simple: citizen-funded spaceflight. Exploration for exploration’s sake. Apolitical, international, non-profit. Donations accepted from anyone, with no kickbacks or concessions or promises of anything beyond a fervent attempt to bring astronauts back from extinction. It began in a post thread kicked off in 2052, a literal moonshot by a collective of frustrated friends from all corners – former thinkers for big names gone bankrupt, starry-eyed academics who wanted to do more than teach the past, government bureau members whose governments no longer existed. If you want to do good science with clean money and clean hands, they argued, if you want to keep the fire burning even as flags and logos came down, if you understand that space exploration is best when it’s done in the name of the people, then the people are the ones who have to make it happen.

As her psychosis took hold she moved deeper and deeper into the house, putting as much distance as possible between herself and the outside world. This became her world. To begin with it was just a few rooms. Then it contracted down to just this one, and then to just this tank. Even that wasn’t enough. She constructed barriers to fool and delay the ghosts. Corridors that don’t lead anywhere, or which spiral back on themselves. Hidden stairways that they won’t see. Mirrors everywhere, to baffle and confuse her tormentors. Doors that open onto walls. Of course, even that isn’t sufficient by itself. The ghosts are clever and resourceful, and they’ll keep trying to find a way in. That’s why the house has to keep changing, so that they never get used to one particular configuration.

Most people will spend their entire lives trying to be healthy, because they know that it helps them feel good, be happier, and live longer lives. The quest for a healthy life never ends; just because they’re healthy today does not mean they can stop everything and live healthily ever after. Even extremely healthy individuals have to keep up their motivation and good habits to maintain the lifestyle that they’ve worked hard to achieve. The same lesson applies broadly to all areas of improvement in your life. You can spend your entire life, working to be a better person, developing skills and habits to become a new version of yourself. Books, tools, coaches, and other resources that promise to make you perfect in one area of your life cannot be true; you will always have room for improvement.

Sometimes she rebelled distantly: life is long... She feared the days, one after another, without surprises, of pure devotion to a man. To a man who would freely use all of his wife's resources for his own bonfire, in a serene, unconscious sacrifice of everything that wasn't his own personality. It was a false rebellion, an attempt at liberation that came above all with great fear of victory. She'd seek for a few days to take an attitude of independence, which she only achieved with some success in the mornings, when she woke up, when she still hadn't seen him. All it took was his presence, merely sensed, for her entire self to annul itself and wait. At night, alone in her room, she want him. All of her nerves, all of her sick muscles. So she resigned herself. Resignation was sweet and fresh. She had been born for it.

For fifty thousand years, right up to the industrial revolution, human civilization was about one thing and one thing only: food. Every culture that existed put most of their time, energy, manpower, and resources into food. Hunting it, gathering it, farming it, ranching it, storing it, distributing it…it was all about food. “Even the Roman Empire. Everyone knows about the emperors, the armies, and the conquests. But what the Romans really invented was a very efficient system of acquiring farmland and transportation of food and water.” She walked to the other side of the room. “The industrial revolution mechanized agriculture. Since then, we’ve been able to focus our energies on other things. But that’s only been the last two hundred years. Before that, most people spent most of their lives directly dealing with food production.

Gloria-in-human-resources wants an answer by tonight,” I heard Brad say. “Should I pick the smart one or the hot one?” I froze, appalled. “Always pick the smart one,” the other agent replied, and I wondered which one Brad considered me to be. An hour later, I got the job. And despite finding the question outrageously inappropriate, I felt perversely hurt. Still, I wasn’t sure why Brad had pegged me as smart. All I’d done that day was dial a string of phone numbers (repeatedly disconnecting calls by pressing the wrong buttons on the confusing phone system), make coffee (which was sent back twice), Xerox a script (I pushed 10 instead of 1 for number of copies, then hid the nine extra screenplays under a couch in the break room), and trip over a lamp cord in Brad’s office and fall on my ass. The hot one, I concluded, must have been particularly stupid.

The King of England painfully climbed the two hundred and eight steps which led to Merlyn's tower room, and knocked on the door. The magician was inside, with Archimides sitting on the back of his chair, busily trying find the square root of minus one. He had forgotten how to do it. "Merlyn," said the King, panting. "I want to talk to you." He slammed his book with a bang, leaped to his feet, seized the wand of lignum vitae, and rushed at Arthur as if he were trying to shoo away a stray chicken. "Go away!" he shouted. "What are you doing here? Why do you mean by it? Aren't you the King of England? Go away and send for me! Get out of my room! I never heard of such a thing! Go away!" "But I am here." "No, you're not," retorted the old man resourcefully. And he pushed the King out of the door, slamming it in his face. "Well!" said Arthur, and he went off sadly down the two hundred and eight stairs.

Although psychotherapy and writing are distinct in many ways, they are two fields whose great resource is the vast plains of the unconscious mind and how this landscape gets translated into words. As a writer, you are often asking your mind to dream while awake, and if remembering dreams is difficult in general, then it seems to follow that it would be sometimes grueling to conjure up the murky depths on call, eyes open. (Robert M. Young) calls it madness, which is a strong word, but it's not a bad one in exaggeration, because he's talking about creating a safe and bound space in which to explore all sorts of darknesses that collect in the recesses of the mind. He's talking about what we do not understand, or know about, or have control over. And the unconscious, if treated well, is the writer's very good friend. Allowing it room is crucial. Allowing it structure can be the safest way to access it without feeling overwhelmed.

The point...was not that we are powerless in the face of history and social structure. It was, rather, to clarify how much of the game has already been played by the time society hands us the controller. Nonetheless, we can and do retain meaningful power and responsibility, even inside the mechanics of a game that is so powerfully rigged. The first rules we learn to follow are the ones that apply to the room we are in. The powers that be have decided those rules, including where the resources are and who is granted access to them. As we saw in the previous chapter, they even set the rules for how the environment responds to our actions, and frequently the environment is hostile. But they don't actually control, directly, what our actions are...We may not be able to control how the room reacts to our speech, but we can speak. We can also choose not to speak, to invite someone else in the room to speak, or to follow their lead.

Later on, however, I actually did read an unabridged Bible and researched more verses using online topical Bible resources, only to find out that Stanton might have been right. The Bible definitely left room for the relegation of women’s status in all respects. Women appeared to have been held accountable for every sinful act that’s committed because of a single woman who lived in the Garden of Eden, hence appearing to make them required to be silent in church. Women were supposed to be mothers and wives, which are noble pursuits, but it appeared as if men had a wider range of opportunities: they could be fathers and husbands… along with apostles, pastors, political leaders, polyglots, AND leaders of municipal congregations! The pursuits other than being a father and husband were considered to be noble pursuits for men, but if a woman pursued any of that, even if she had the capabilities and the good intentions, it would be considered blasphemous, at least from what I understood

It’s a girl!” Cecelia cried. The elephant evaporated, the squeezing stopped, and Julia was herself again. Mostly herself, anyway. She realized that she was most certainly a mammal and had the ability to shake the world apart and create a human when she unleashed her power. She was a mother. This identity shuddered through her, welcome like water to a dry riverbed. It felt so elemental and true that Julia must have unknowingly been a mother all along, simply waiting to be joined by her child. Julia had never felt like this before. Her brain was a gleaming engine, and her resources felt immense. She was clarity. Julia held the baby for what felt like only a few seconds before the nurse whisked the infant to the nursery to be washed and wrapped in a blanket. Cecelia left the room to tell the others the news. Julia shook her head, in disbelief and joy. She couldn’t believe how fast her mind was moving, but perhaps these truths had been inside her all along and were accessible now because she’d given birth. She saw everything so clearly.

The essence of Roosevelt’s leadership, I soon became convinced, lay in his enterprising use of the “bully pulpit,” a phrase he himself coined to describe the national platform the presidency provides to shape public sentiment and mobilize action. Early in Roosevelt’s tenure, Lyman Abbott, editor of The Outlook, joined a small group of friends in the president’s library to offer advice and criticism on a draft of his upcoming message to Congress. “He had just finished a paragraph of a distinctly ethical character,” Abbott recalled, “when he suddenly stopped, swung round in his swivel chair, and said, ‘I suppose my critics will call that preaching, but I have got such a bully pulpit.’ ” From this bully pulpit, Roosevelt would focus the charge of a national movement to apply an ethical framework, through government action, to the untrammeled growth of modern America. Roosevelt understood from the outset that this task hinged upon the need to develop powerfully reciprocal relationships with members of the national press. He called them by their first names, invited them to meals, took questions during his midday shave, welcomed their company at day’s end while he signed correspondence, and designated, for the first time, a special room for them in the West Wing. He brought them aboard his private railroad car during his regular swings around the country. At every village station, he reached the hearts of the gathered crowds with homespun language, aphorisms, and direct moral appeals. Accompanying reporters then extended the reach of Roosevelt’s words in national publications. Such extraordinary rapport with the press did not stem from calculation alone. Long before and after he was president, Roosevelt was an author and historian. From an early age, he read as he breathed. He knew and revered writers, and his relationship with journalists was authentically collegial. In a sense, he was one of them. While exploring Roosevelt’s relationship with the press, I was especially drawn to the remarkably rich connections he developed with a team of journalists—including Ida Tarbell, Ray Stannard Baker, Lincoln Steffens, and William Allen White—all working at McClure’s magazine, the most influential contemporary progressive publication. The restless enthusiasm and manic energy of their publisher and editor, S. S. McClure, infused the magazine with “a spark of genius,” even as he suffered from periodic nervous breakdowns. “The story is the thing,” Sam McClure responded when asked to account for the methodology behind his publication. He wanted his writers to begin their research without preconceived notions, to carry their readers through their own process of discovery. As they educated themselves about the social and economic inequities rampant in the wake of teeming industrialization, so they educated the entire country. Together, these investigative journalists, who would later appropriate Roosevelt’s derogatory term “muckraker” as “a badge of honor,” produced a series of exposés that uncovered the invisible web of corruption linking politics to business. McClure’s formula—giving his writers the time and resources they needed to produce extended, intensively researched articles—was soon adopted by rival magazines, creating what many considered a golden age of journalism. Collectively, this generation of gifted writers ushered in a new mode of investigative reporting that provided the necessary conditions to make a genuine bully pulpit of the American presidency. “It is hardly an exaggeration to say that the progressive mind was characteristically a journalistic mind,” the historian Richard Hofstadter observed, “and that its characteristic contribution was that of the socially responsible reporter-reformer.

Even male children of affluent white families think that history as taught in high school is “too neat and rosy.” 6 African American, Native American, and Latino students view history with a special dislike. They also learn history especially poorly. Students of color do only slightly worse than white students in mathematics. If you’ll pardon my grammar, nonwhite students do more worse in English and most worse in history.7 Something intriguing is going on here: surely history is not more difficult for minorities than trigonometry or Faulkner. Students don’t even know they are alienated, only that they “don’t like social studies” or “aren’t any good at history.” In college, most students of color give history departments a wide berth. Many history teachers perceive the low morale in their classrooms. If they have a lot of time, light domestic responsibilities, sufficient resources, and a flexible principal, some teachers respond by abandoning the overstuffed textbooks and reinventing their American history courses. All too many teachers grow disheartened and settle for less. At least dimly aware that their students are not requiting their own love of history, these teachers withdraw some of their energy from their courses. Gradually they end up going through the motions, staying ahead of their students in the textbooks, covering only material that will appear on the next test. College teachers in most disciplines are happy when their students have had significant exposure to the subject before college. Not teachers in history. History professors in college routinely put down high school history courses. A colleague of mine calls his survey of American history “Iconoclasm I and II,” because he sees his job as disabusing his charges of what they learned in high school to make room for more accurate information. In no other field does this happen. Mathematics professors, for instance, know that non-Euclidean geometry is rarely taught in high school, but they don’t assume that Euclidean geometry was mistaught. Professors of English literature don’t presume that Romeo and Juliet was misunderstood in high school. Indeed, history is the only field in which the more courses students take, the stupider they become. Perhaps I do not need to convince you that American history is important. More than any other topic, it is about us. Whether one deems our present society wondrous or awful or both, history reveals how we arrived at this point. Understanding our past is central to our ability to understand ourselves and the world around us. We need to know our history, and according to sociologist C. Wright Mills, we know we do.8

Because after all,” Bob said, “any wealth gained by a person beyond what he can produce by his own labor must have come at the expense of nature or at the expense of another person. Look around. Look at our house, our car, our bank accounts, our clothes, our eating habits, our appliances. Could the physical labor of one family and its immediate ancestors and their one billionth of the country’s renewable resources have produced all this? It takes a long time to build a house from nothing; it takes a lot of calories to transport yourself from Philadelphia to Pittsburgh. Even if you’re not rich, you’re living in the red. Indebted to Malaysian textile workers and Korean circuit assemblers and Haitian sugarcane cutters who live six to a room. Indebted to a bank, indebted to the earth from which you’ve withdrawn oil and coal and natural gas that no one can ever put back. Indebted to the hundred square yards of landfill that will bear the burden of your own personal waste for ten thousand years. Indebted to the air and water, indebted by proxy to Japanese and German bond investors. Indebted to the great-grandchildren who’ll be paying for your conveniences when you’re dead: who’ll be living six to a room, contemplating their skin cancers, and knowing, like you don’t, how long it takes to get from Philadelphia to Pittsburgh when you’re living in the black.

You may not recognize the name Steven Schussler, CEO of Schussler Creative Inc., but you are probably familiar with his very popular theme restaurant Rainforest Café. Steve is one of the scrappiest people I know, with countless scrappy stories. He is open and honest about his wins and losses. This story about how he launched Rainforest Café is one of my favorites: Steve first envisioned a tropical-themed family restaurant back in the 1980s, but unfortunately, he couldn’t persuade anyone else to buy into the idea at the time. Not willing to give up easily, he decided to get scrappy and be “all in.” To sell his vision, he transformed his own split-level suburban home into a living, mist-enshrouded rain forest to convince potential investors that the concept was viable. Yes, you read that correctly—he converted his own house into a jungle dwelling complete with rock outcroppings, waterfalls, rivers, and layers of fog and mist that rose from the ground. The jungle included a life-size replica of an elephant near the front door, forty tropical birds in cages, and a live baby baboon named Charlie. Steve shared the following details: Every room, every closet, every hallway of my house was set up as a three-dimensional vignette: an attempt to present my idea of what a rain forest restaurant would look like in actual operation. . . . [I]t took me three years and almost $400,000 to get the house developed to the point where I felt comfortable showing it to potential investors. . . . [S]everal of my neighbors weren’t exactly thrilled to be living near a jungle habitat. . . . On one occasion, Steve received a visit from the Drug Enforcement Administration. They wanted to search the premises for drugs, presuming he may have had an illegal drug lab in his home because of his huge residential electric bill. I imagine they were astonished when they discovered the tropical rain forest filled with jungle creatures. Steve’s plan was beautiful, creative, fun, and scrappy, but the results weren’t coming as quickly as he would have liked. It took all of his resources, and he was running out of time and money to make something happen. (It’s important to note that your scrappy efforts may not generate results immediately.) I asked Steve if he ever thought about quitting, how tight was the money really, and if there was a time factor, and he said, “Yes to all three! Of course I thought about quitting. I was running out of money and time.” Ultimately, Steve’s plan succeeded. After many visits and more than two years later, gaming executive and venture capitalist Lyle Berman bought into the concept and raised the funds necessary to get the Rainforest Café up and running. The Rainforest Café chain became one of the most successful themed restaurants ever created, and continues that way under Landry’s Restaurants and Tilman Fertitta’s leadership. Today, Steve creates restaurant concepts in fantastic warehouses far from his residential neighborhood!

Cohen continued to struggle with his own well-being. Even though he had achieved his life’s dream of running his own firm, he was still unhappy, and he had become dependent on a psychiatrist named Ari Kiev to help him manage his moods. In addition to treating depression, Kiev’s other area of expertise was success and how to achieve it. He had worked as a psychiatrist and coach with Olympic basketball players and rowers trying to improve their performance and overcome their fear of failure. His background building athletic champions appealed to Cohen’s unrelenting need to dominate in every transaction he entered into, and he started asking Kiev to spend entire days at SAC’s offices, tending to his staff. Kiev was tall, with a bushy mustache and a portly midsection, and he would often appear silently at a trader’s side and ask him how he was feeling. Sometimes the trader would be so startled to see Kiev there he’d practically jump out of his seat. Cohen asked Kiev to give motivational speeches to his employees, to help them get over their anxieties about losing money. Basically, Kiev was there to teach them to be ruthless. Once a week, after the market closed, Cohen’s traders would gather in a conference room and Kiev would lead them through group therapy sessions focused on how to make them more comfortable with risk. Kiev had them talk about their trades and try to understand why some had gone well and others hadn’t. “Are you really motivated to make as much money as you can? This guy’s going to help you become a real killer at it,” was how one skeptical staff member remembered Kiev being pitched to them. Kiev’s work with Olympians had led him to believe that the thing that blocked most people was fear. You might have two investors with the same amount of money: One was prepared to buy 250,000 shares of a stock they liked, while the other wasn’t. Why? Kiev believed that the reluctance was a form of anxiety—and that it could be overcome with proper treatment. Kiev would ask the traders to close their eyes and visualize themselves making trades and generating profits. “Surrendering to the moment” and “speaking the truth” were some of his favorite phrases. “Why weren’t you bigger in the trades that worked? What did you do right?” he’d ask. “Being preoccupied with not losing interferes with winning,” he would say. “Trading not to lose is not a good strategy. You need to trade to win.” Many of the traders hated the group therapy sessions. Some considered Kiev a fraud. “Ari was very aggressive,” said one. “He liked money.” Patricia, Cohen’s first wife, was suspicious of Kiev’s motives and believed that he was using his sessions with Cohen to find stock tips. From Kiev’s perspective, he found the perfect client in Cohen, a patient with unlimited resources who could pay enormous fees and whose reputation as one of the best traders on Wall Street could help Kiev realize his own goal of becoming a bestselling author. Being able to say that you were the

The more the State of Israel relied on force to manage the occupation, the more compelled it was to deploy hasbara. And the more Western media consumers encountered hasbara, the more likely they became to measure Israel’s grandiose talking points against the routine and petty violence, shocking acts of humiliation, and repression that defined its relationship with the Palestinians. Under the leadership of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, a professional explainer who spent the early years of his political career as a frequent guest on prime time American news programs perfecting the slickness of the Beltway pundit class, the Israeli government invested unprecedented resources into hasbara. Once the sole responsibility of the Israeli foreign ministry, the task of disseminating hasbara fell to a special Ministry of Public Diplomacy led by Yuli Edelstein, a rightist settler and government minister who called Arabs a “despicable nation.” Edelstein’s ministry boasted an advanced “situation room,” a paid media team, and coordination of a volunteer force that claimed to include thousands of volunteer bloggers, tweeters, and Facebook commenters fed with talking points and who flood social media with hasbara in five languages. The exploits of the propaganda soldiers conscripted into Israel’s online army have helped give rise to the phenomenon of the “hasbara troll,” an often faceless, shrill and relentless nuisance deployed on Twitter and Facebook to harass public figures who expressed skepticism of official Israeli policy or sympathy for the Palestinians.

If people have no respect for God, no love for their Maker, I would ask the question another way: Why not pillage, rape, persecute and murder? If it feels good, and they can get away with it, why not? If God is dead or does not exist, as these people believe, why are not all things permitted? Why should they restrain themselves? Because it’s just wrong? Because it’s not the way civilized people behave? Because what goes around comes around? Because they’ll end up feeling terrible inside? Within tidy circles of properly socialized and reasonable people, such appeals can seem like they actually have the power to restrain people from doing what they otherwise feel like doing. But in the real world outside the philosophy seminar room, oppressors frankly don’t care that you think it’s just wrong. Who are you, they ask, to foist your random moral intuition on them? Who are you to tell them or the lords of the Third Reich what civilized people should and should not do? If what goes around tends to come around, then there’s no moral problem, only a practical problem of making sure it doesn’t come around to you. They think, Fine, if being brutal makes you feel terrible inside, then don’t do it. But it makes me feel powerful, alive, exhilarated and masterful, so quit whining — unless you want to try to stop me. This description of a dark Nietzschean world of self-will — a vacuum devoid of moral authority or spiritual resources for good — used to sen excessively melodramatic to me. But then I got out more. The world is truly full of brutal oppression because humans have rejected their Maker, the source of all goodness, mercy, compassion, truth, justice, and love.

this same love for her own people, and her desire to establish the future greatness of her house on a solid foundation reacted, in her policy with regard to the other servants, in one unvarying maxim, which was never to let any of them set foot in my aunt’s room; indeed she shewed a sort of pride in not allowing anyone else to come near my aunt, preferring, when she herself was ill, to get out of bed and to administer the Vichy water in person, rather than to concede to the kitchen-maid the right of entry into her mistress’s presence. There is a species of hymenoptera, observed by Fabre, the burrowing wasp, which in order to provide a supply of fresh meat for her offspring after her own decease, calls in the science of anatomy to amplify the resources of her instinctive cruelty, and, having made a collection of weevils and spiders, proceeds with marvellous knowledge and skill to pierce the nerve-centre on which their power of locomotion (but none of their other vital functions) depends, so that the paralysed insect, beside which her egg is laid, will furnish the larva, when it is hatched, with a tamed and inoffensive quarry, incapable either of flight or of resistance, but perfectly fresh for the larder: in the same way Françoise had adopted, to minister to her permanent and unfaltering resolution to render the house uninhabitable to any other servant, a series of crafty and pitiless stratagems. Many years later we discovered that, if we had been fed on asparagus day after day throughout that whole season, it was because the smell of the plants gave the poor kitchen-maid, who had to prepare them, such violent attacks of asthma that she was finally obliged to leave my aunt’s service.

That’s Cervella.” Vero’s hand picks at something in her hair, as she glares down at a disassembled bike. “This one’s his favourite. Do you bike?” Ligaya nods as she remembers the fat-tire red bike. Pedro’s. He let her borrow it to visit family in the next village. She touches her thighs as she remembers the feeling of freedom, covering such distance by the strength of her own legs, not minding at all when she had to ride home in the pouring rain, her sweat and the rainwater indistinguishable on her cheeks. Again, she feels the uncomfortable vertigo of her body being in one place and her mind in another, the two so far apart. But Vero does not wait for an answer. She pulls Ligaya—not roughly—her fingertips soft on the exposed skin of Ligaya’s wrist. But Ligaya is unaccustomed to touch. Nobody touched her at the Poons. She breathes deeply and counts the bikes. She must not flinch, wills herself not to pull away; she cannot afford to give offense. Vero twirls her around and points at a poster above the workbench. “That! Read it!” But Ligaya does not have to read it. Vero reads it for her. Since the bike makes little demand on material or energy resources, contributes little to pollution, makes a positive contribution to health and causes little death, or injury, it can be regarded as the most benevolent of machines. —Stuart S. Wilson She pauses as if she might expect a response this time. She gestures at the room stuffed with bikes until it seems the very walls and ceiling are made of bikes, the scent of rubber tires replacing oxygen. “Ridiculous, right? The bike will save the world, he says. Yes, but you just need one, I say. One bike. That I can see. That I can even admire. I’m sure Stuart buddy here couldn’t even imagine this … this … biketrocity. And that he should be to blame?!

According to Bartholomew, an important goal of St. Louis zoning was to prevent movement into 'finer residential districts . . . by colored people.' He noted that without a previous zoning law, such neighborhoods have become run-down, 'where values have depreciated, homes are either vacant or occupied by color people.' The survey Bartholomew supervised before drafting the zoning ordinance listed the race of each building's occupants. Bartholomew attempted to estimate where African Americans might encroach so the commission could respond with restrictions to control their spread. The St. Louis zoning ordinance was eventually adopted in 1919, two years after the Supreme Court's Buchanan ruling banned racial assignments; with no reference to race, the ordinance pretended to be in compliance. Guided by Bartholomew's survey, it designated land for future industrial development if it was in or adjacent to neighborhoods with substantial African American populations. Once such rules were in force, plan commission meetings were consumed with requests for variances. Race was frequently a factor. For example, on meeting in 1919 debated a proposal to reclassify a single-family property from first-residential to commercial because the area to the south had been 'invaded by negroes.' Bartholomew persuaded the commission members to deny the variance because, he said, keeping the first-residential designation would preserve homes in the area as unaffordable to African Americans and thus stop the encroachment. On other occasions, the commission changed an area's zoning from residential to industrial if African American families had begun to move into it. In 1927, violating its normal policy, the commission authorized a park and playground in an industrial, not residential, area in hopes that this would draw African American families to seek housing nearby. Similar decision making continued through the middle of the twentieth century. In a 1942 meeting, commissioners explained they were zoning an area in a commercial strip as multifamily because it could then 'develop into a favorable dwelling district for Colored people. In 1948, commissioners explained they were designating a U-shaped industrial zone to create a buffer between African Americans inside the U and whites outside. In addition to promoting segregation, zoning decisions contributed to degrading St. Louis's African American neighborhoods into slums. Not only were these neighborhoods zoned to permit industry, even polluting industry, but the plan commission permitted taverns, liquor stores, nightclubs, and houses of prostitution to open in African American neighborhoods but prohibited these as zoning violations in neighborhoods where whites lived. Residences in single-family districts could not legally be subdivided, but those in industrial districts could be, and with African Americans restricted from all but a few neighborhoods, rooming houses sprang up to accommodate the overcrowded population. Later in the twentieth century, when the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) developed the insure amortized mortgage as a way to promote homeownership nationwide, these zoning practices rendered African Americans ineligible for such mortgages because banks and the FHA considered the existence of nearby rooming houses, commercial development, or industry to create risk to the property value of single-family areas. Without such mortgages, the effective cost of African American housing was greater than that of similar housing in white neighborhoods, leaving owners with fewer resources for upkeep. African American homes were then more likely to deteriorate, reinforcing their neighborhoods' slum conditions.

Kestrel came often. One day, when she knew from Sarsine that Arin had returned home but she had not yet seen him, she went to the suite. She touched one of his violins, reaching furtively to pluck the highest string of the largest instrument. The sound was sour. The violin was ruined--no doubt all of them were. That is what happens when an instrument is left strung and uncased for ten years. A floorboard creaked somewhere in one of the outer chambers. Arin. He entered the room, and she realized that she had expected him. Why else had she come here so frequently, almost every day, if she hadn’t hoped that someone would notice and tell him to find her there? But even though she admitted to wanting to be here with him in his old rooms, she hadn’t imagined it would be like this. With her caught touching his things. Her gaze dropped. “I’m sorry,” she murmured. “It’s all right,” he said. “I don’t mind.” He lifted the violin off its nails and set it in her hands. It was light, but Kestrel’s arms lowered as if the violin’s hollowness were terribly heavy. She cleared her throat. “Do you still play?” He shook his head. “I’ve mostly forgotten how. I wasn’t good at it anyway. I loved to sing. Before the war, I worried that gift would leave me, the way it often does with boys. We grow, we change, our voices break. It doesn’t matter how well you sing when you’re nine years old, you know. Not when you’re a boy. When the change comes you just have to hope for the best…that your voice settles into something you can love again. My voice broke two years after the invasion. Gods, how I squeaked. And when my voice finally settled, it seemed like a cruel joke. It was too good. I hardly knew what to do with it. I felt so grateful to have this gift…and so angry, for it to mean so little. And now…” He shrugged, a self-deprecating gesture. “Well, I know I’m rusty.” “No,” Kestrel said. “You’re not. Your voice is beautiful.” The silence after that was soft. Her fingers curled around the violin. She wanted to ask Arin a question yet couldn’t bear to do it, couldn’t say that she didn’t understand what had happened to him the night of the invasion. It didn’t make sense. The death of his family was what her father would call a “waste of resources.” The Valorian force had had no pity for the Herrani military, but it had tried to minimize civilian casualties. You can’t make a dead body work. “What is it, Kestrel?” She shook her head. She set the violin back on the wall. “Ask me.” She remembered standing outside the governor’s palace and refusing to hear his story, and was ashamed once more. “You can ask me anything,” he said. Each question seemed the wrong one. Finally, she said, “How did you survive the invasion?” He didn’t speak at first. Then he said, “My parents and sister fought. I didn’t.” Words were useless, pitifully useless--criminal, even, in how they could not account for Arin’s grief, and could not excuse how her people had lived on the ruin of his. Yet again Kestrel said, “I’m sorry.” “It’s not your fault.” It felt as if it was. Arin led the way out of his old suite. When they came to the last room, the greeting room, he paused before the outermost door. It was the slightest of hesitations, no longer than if the second hand of a clock stayed a beat longer on its mark than it should. But in that fraction of time, Kestrel understood that the last door was not paler than the others because it had been made from a different wood. It was newer. Kestrel took Arin’s battered hand in hers, the rough heat of it, the fingernails still ringed with carbon from the smith’s coal fire. His skin was raw-looking: scrubbed clean and scrubbed often. But the black grime was too ingrained. She twined her fingers with his. Kestrel and Arin walked together through the passageway and the ghost of its old door, which her people had smashed through ten years before.

IN T H E last twenty-five years I have had a lot of people staying with me and sometimes I am tempted to write an essay on guests. There are the guests who never shut a door after them and never turn out the light when they leave their room. There are the guests who throw themselves on their bed in muddy boots to have a nap after lunch, so that the counterpane has to be cleaned on their departure. There are the guests who smoke in bed and burn holes in your sheets. There are the guests who are on a regime and have to have special food cooked for them and there are the guests who wait till their glass is filled with a vintage claret and then say: "I won't have any, thank you." There are the guests who never put back a book in the place from which they took it and there are the guests who take away a volume from a set and never return it. There are the guests who borrow money from you when they are leaving and do not pay it back. There are the guests who can never be alone for a minute and there are the guests who are seized with a desire to talk the moment they see you glancing at a paper. There are the guests who, wherever they are, want to be somewhere else and there are the guests who want to be doing something from the time they get up in the morning till the time they go to bed at night. There are the guests who treat you as though they were SOME NOVELISTS I HAVE KNOWN 459 gauleiters in a conquered province. There are the guests who bring three weeks* laundry with them to have washed at your expense and there are the guests who send their clothes to the cleaners and leave you to pay the bill. There are the guests who telephone to London, Paris, Rome, Madrid and New York, and never think of inquiring how much it costs. There are the guests who take all they can get and offer nothing in return. There are also the guests who are happy just to be with you, who seek to please, who have resources of their own, who amuse you, whose conversation is delightful, whose interests are varied, who exhilarate and excite you, who in short give you far more than you can ever hope to give them and whose visits are only too brief.

It’s with the next drive, self-preservation, that AI really jumps the safety wall separating machines from tooth and claw. We’ve already seen how Omohundro’s chess-playing robot feels about turning itself off. It may decide to use substantial resources, in fact all the resources currently in use by mankind, to investigate whether now is the right time to turn itself off, or whether it’s been fooled about the nature of reality. If the prospect of turning itself off agitates a chess-playing robot, being destroyed makes it downright angry. A self-aware system would take action to avoid its own demise, not because it intrinsically values its existence, but because it can’t fulfill its goals if it is “dead.” Omohundro posits that this drive could make an AI go to great lengths to ensure its survival—making multiple copies of itself, for example. These extreme measures are expensive—they use up resources. But the AI will expend them if it perceives the threat is worth the cost, and resources are available. In the Busy Child scenario, the AI determines that the problem of escaping the AI box in which it is confined is worth mounting a team approach, since at any moment it could be turned off. It makes duplicate copies of itself and swarms the problem. But that’s a fine thing to propose when there’s plenty of storage space on the supercomputer; if there’s little room it is a desperate and perhaps impossible measure. Once the Busy Child ASI escapes, it plays strenuous self-defense: hiding copies of itself in clouds, creating botnets to ward off attackers, and more. Resources used for self-preservation should be commensurate with the threat. However, a purely rational AI may have a different notion of commensurate than we partially rational humans. If it has surplus resources, its idea of self-preservation may expand to include proactive attacks on future threats. To sufficiently advanced AI, anything that has the potential to develop into a future threat may constitute a threat it should eliminate. And remember, machines won’t think about time the way we do. Barring accidents, sufficiently advanced self-improving machines are immortal. The longer you exist, the more threats you’ll encounter, and the longer your lead time will be to deal with them. So, an ASI may want to terminate threats that won’t turn up for a thousand years. Wait a minute, doesn’t that include humans? Without explicit instructions otherwise, wouldn’t it always be the case that we humans would pose a current or future risk to smart machines that we create? While we’re busy avoiding risks of unintended consequences from AI, AI will be scrutinizing humans for dangerous consequences of sharing the world with us.

And then it sends a signal to turn off the system.” “So the universe with the wallet in the chamber waiting to be sent still exists,” added Allen. “But the universe from which it is actually sent never does.”  “That is just so messed up,” said Blake in exasperation, and Jenna, Walsh, and Soyer nodded their agreement. “Here is my advice to all of you,” said Cargill. “The best thing to do is ignore time travel, and don’t think about the paradoxes too hard. If you do, your head really will explode,” he added with a wry smile. “Just think of it as duplication and teleportation. But always keep in mind that the universe seems to go out of its way to ensure that infinite alternate timelines aren’t allowed. So no matter what, we only ever get this one universe.” He sighed. “So we’d better make sure we don’t screw it up.”     48   Brian Hamilton hated Cheyenne Mountain. Sure, it was one of the most interesting places in the world to visit, but living there only worked if you were a bat. The Palomar facility had also been underground, but nothing like this. It had a much larger security perimeter, so trips to the surface were easier to make happen. Not that it really mattered. Soon enough he would be traveling on another assignment anyway, living in a hotel room somewhere. But what he really wanted was to work side by side with Edgar Knight, toward their common goal. He was tired of being Knight’s designated spy, having to watch Lee Cargill squander Q5’s vast resources and capabilities. Watching him crawl like a wounded baby when he could be soaring. Cargill was an idiot. He could transform the world, but he was too weak to do it. He could wipe out the asshole terrorists who wanted nothing more than to butcher the helpless. If you have the ultimate cure for cancer, you use it to wipe out the disease once and for all. You don’t wield your cure only as a last resort, when the cancer has all but choked the life out of you. Edgar Knight, on the other hand, was a man with vision. He was able to make the tough decisions. If you were captain of a life raft with a maximum capacity of ten people, choosing to take five passengers of a sinking ship on board was an easy decision, not a heroic one. But what about when there were fifty passengers? Was it heroic to take them all, dooming everyone to death? Or was the heroic move using force, if necessary, to limit this number, to ensure some would survive? Sure, from the outside this looked coldhearted, while the converse seemed compassionate. But watching the world circle the drain because you were too much of a pussy to make the hard decisions was the real crime. Survival of the fittest was harsh reality. In the animal kingdom it was eat or be eaten. If you saw a group of fuck-nuts just itching to nuke the world back into the Dark Ages—who believed the Messiah equivalent, the twelfth Imam, would only come out to play when Israel was destroyed, and worldwide Armageddon unleashed—you wiped them out. To a man. Or else they’d do the same to you. It had been three days since Cargill had reported that he was on the verge of acquiring Jenna Morrison and Aaron Blake.

(2) Free play, force-on-force field exercises. These can range from team-versus-team exercises using paintball guns in nothing larger than a room-clearing exercise or small wooded lot, or large platoon or company-sized exercises in the field. Free play force-on-force exercises are the most complex and usually the most resource driven aspect of the POI. Free play force-on-force exercises can be conducted by actual freethinking opponents, such as one student unit portraying U.S. forces, while the other plays the role of the insurgent forces. Or the exercise can be conducted also using opposing sides, but executed using computer simulation without leaving a building. Force-on-force, free play exercises should also occur at different levels of a leader’s development, and the exercises will lends themselves well to higher levels of student education.

comparing yourself with others. Measure your success only against what you are capable of achieving. If you are in college, the college you attend does not define you; it is what you make of it. Nothing beats hard work with focus and passion. Stretch yourself. Be resourceful, creative, and open-minded in all sorts of situations. Plan ahead and act with purpose, but allow room to explore, experiment, and discover. Be multifaceted. Build your emotional and mental muscles in tenacity, resilience, and perseverance. Don’t be surprised if a breakthrough emerges from a well-managed crisis. Don’t be afraid to be an influential and innovative change-maker. Don’t accept the status quo if you know things must be improved and you

Most of us Americans have far more goods than we need. Our problem is to store them or clear out our closets to make room for new ones. This flood of goods replaced a situation in which most of the things people really needed were produced by hand. Today handiwork is more of a hobby than a primary occupation, but a shift back in this direction would be a welcome one. If handiwork were prized and its products could be profitably sold, unemployment would cease to be a major problem. We would use fewer resources and own fewer goods, but what we would have would bring us greater satisfaction and its production would be a creative rather than a routine act.18

Think about your work situation. Do you treat your creativity like a fossil fuel—a limited resource that must be conserved—or have you harnessed the unending power of the sun? Are you in an environment where creativity thrives? Is there room for new ideas every day? Can you make room?

He finally reached the Salaam Center hospital, a long, low grayish building that looked like a dispensary. Inside, one could feel the lack of resources, the struggle these shadow-people led against impossible odds. A cursory waiting room with basic furniture, secondhand chairs, small tables, and swinging doors with round portholes that looked like something out of Egyptian films from the forties. Boxes containing first aid kits, stenciled with the symbol of the French Red Cross, were stacked in the corners.

Singapore is now in the top five. Its income per person even tops oil-rich and scarcely populated Kuwait. Having realized that the country had no natural resources, the government of founding father Lee Kuan Yew directed massive investment in human capital. Kids who were eight or ten or thirteen several decades ago are now some of the most productive citizens of today's economy. A tiny nation-state with no natural resources and a large number of people living in a relatively small physical space has managed to outearn a country with some of the largest oil deposits ever found. That is the power of investing in and nurturing young brains. Education alone may not be enough to guarantee economic success. There are other success factors that matter, like good governance, rule of law, and access to trading routes and partners. But if you were challenged to assemble a prosperous society from scratch, education would be the first building block you'd want to develop.

Bucharest was a throbbing city that had come on hard times: food was scarce, the electric street cars always overcrowded and often jumped the tracks. The resources strained to capacity, the upkeep of the transportation system practically non-existent. There were tens of thousands of refugees. Every type of newcomer met at a different coffee-house with people from one's home town. Thus, the Czernovitzers used to frequent Café Elite on Lipscani Street. It was an unofficial meeting place, where one could get information about who came from over there, where he or she lived and worked. A few thousand had come, like ourselves in 1945 and another big group one year later. People helped one another, recommended a room or a place to eat, informed about a possible job or whom to contact about a visa to go abroad.

Grilled Chicken Wings with Burnt-Scallion Barbeque Sauce ____________ Makes 12 pieces I am borderline obsessed with chicken wings. It’s the perfect food after a long work shift or on a chill day with your friends, crushin’ cheap American beers in the backyard. It’s food that allows you to let your guard down. After all, you’re eating food cooked on the bone with your hands and licking the sauce from your fingers in between chugs of ice-cold beer. Pure heaven. Note that the wings must be brined overnight. Brine 8 cups water ¼ cup kosher salt 1 tablespoon sorghum (see Resources) Wings 6 chicken wings, cut into tips and drumettes 3 tablespoons green peanut oil (see Resources) 1 tablespoon Husk BBQ Rub ¾ cup thinly sliced scallions (white and green in equal parts) ½ cup dry-roasted peanuts, preferably Virginia peanuts, chopped Sauce 10 scallions, trimmed 1 tablespoon peanut oil Kosher salt 1 cup Husk BBQ Sauce 1 tablespoon Bourbon Barrel Foods Bluegrass Soy Sauce (see Resources) 1 cup cilantro leaves Equipment 1 pound hickory chips Charcoal chimney starter 3 pounds hardwood charcoal Kettle grill For the brine: Combine the ingredients for the brine. I brine the wings using either a heavy-duty plastic bag that the wing tips can’t puncture or a Cryovac machine (you use a lot less brine this way). Place the wings in the brine and turn to cover well. Refrigerate overnight. Soak the wood chips in water for a minimum of 30 minutes but preferably overnight. For the sauce: Toss the scallions in the peanut oil and season with salt. Lay them out on the grill rack and heavily char them on one side, about 8 minutes (the charred side should be black). Remove them from the grill and cool for about 5 minutes. Clean the grill rack if necessary. Put the scallions and the remaining sauce ingredients in a blender and process until smooth, about 3 minutes. Set aside at room temperature. For the wings: Fill a chimney starter with 3 pounds hardwood charcoal, ignite the charcoal, and allow to burn until the coals are evenly lit and glowing. Distribute the coals in an even layer in the bottom of a kettle grill. Place the grill rack as close to the coals as possible. Drain the wings; discard the brine. Dry the wings with paper towels, toss in the peanut oil, and season with the BBQ rub. Place the wings in a single layer on the grill rack over the hot coals and grill until they don’t stick to the rack anymore, about 5 minutes. Turn the wings over and grill for 8 minutes more. Transfer the wings to a baking sheet. Drain the wood chips. Lift the rack from the grill and push the coals to one side. Place the wood chips on the coals and replace the rack. After about 2 minutes, place the wings in a single layer over the side of the grill where there are no coals. Place the lid on the grill, with the lid’s vents slightly open; the vents on the bottom of the grill should stay closed. Smoke the wings for 10 minutes. It’s important to monitor the airflow of the grill: keeping the lid’s vents slightly open allows a nice steady flow of subtle smoke. Remove the wings from the grill, toss them in the sauce, and place them on a platter or in a serving pan. Top with the chopped scallions and peanuts and serve.

These days, you need powerful people to cooperate in terms of getting information, formal or informal approval to act, resources, introductions, and support (or room to maneuver) for implementation just to get your job done. Therefore, you can’t achieve your objectives without getting help from others whom you do not control.

It never ceases to amaze me the precious time we spend chasing the squirrels around our brains, playing out our dramas, worrying about unwanted facial hair, seeking adoration, justifying our actions, complaining about slow Internet connections, dissecting the lives of idiots, when we are sitting in the middle of a full-blown miracle that is happening right here, right now. We’re on a planet that somehow knows how to rotate on its axis and follow a defined path while it hurtles through space! Our hearts beat! We can see! We have love, laughter, language, living rooms, computers, compassion, cars, fire, fingernails, flowers, music, medicine, mountains, muffins! We live in a limitless Universe overflowing with miracles! The fact that we aren’t stumbling around in an inconsolable state of sobbing awe is appalling. The Universe must be like, what more do I have to do to wake these bitches up? Make water, their most precious resource, rain down from the sky?

When I first met you, you seemed easily categorized, Lux. Like one of my herbs. 'Nettles: a remedy for night sweats, fatigue, and releasing excess mucus.' I like things to be defined. It calms me, brings order to my life. So on your first visit, I thought, 'Lux Lysander: flighty, scared, we'll never see her again.' On your second visit, I thought, 'Sweet, a bit of a dreamer.' And now, on your third visit, it's clear I have to recalibrate once again." She nodded briskly. "Intuitive, honest, clear-thinking, and loyal." I looked at her openmouthed, letting the praise sink in. Each adjective was like a little firework burst, spreading its fingers of heat over the surface of my skin. "I'm not done," she said. "Compassionate, resourceful, intelligent." My eyes welled up. "Worthy," she finished. I swallowed the lump in my throat. "I thought I'd lost those parts of me." "Nothing is ever lost," said Martha. "Only forgotten. All that's needed is one person who remembers, one person who realizes it is still there." The door to a long-abandoned room inside me that I hadn't even known existed until this minute began to open. Sweet, fresh air poured in.

When something in society goes so wrong, that something is often a product of one very large agreement instead of the various small disagreements that consume the political sphere. Looming over the fights about which administration is to blame for housing becoming so unstable and what percentage increase this or that program is entitled to sits the inconsistency of America spending about $70 billion a year subsidizing homeownership through tax breaks like deferred taxes on capital gains and the mortgage interest deduction (MID), which allows homeowners to deduct the interest on their home loan from their federal income taxes. Together these tax breaks amount to a vast upper-middle-class welfare program that encourages people to buy bigger and more expensive houses, but because their biggest beneficiaries are residents of high-cost cities in deep blue redoubts like New York and California, even otherwise liberal politicians fight any attempt to reduce them. These programs are also entitlements that live on budgetary autopilot, meaning people get the tax breaks no matter how much they cost the government. Contrast that with programs like Section 8 rental vouchers, which cost about $20 billion a year, have been shown to be highly effective at reducing homelessness, and cost far less than the morally repugnant alternative of letting people live in tents and rot on sidewalks, consuming police resources and using the emergency room as a public hospital. That program has to be continually re-upped by Congress, and unlike middle-class homeowner programs, when the money runs out, it’s gone. This is why many big cities either have decades-long lines for rental vouchers or have closed those lines indefinitely on account of excess demand. The message of this dichotomy, which has persisted for decades regardless of which party is in charge and despite the mountains of evidence showing just how well these vouchers work, is that America is willing to subsidize as much debt as homeowners can gorge themselves on but that poor renters, the majority of whom live in market-rate apartments, are a penny-ante side issue unworthy of being prioritized.

insider.” What follows is not a guidebook—because it is not comprehensive—but a recommendation guide. It is wholly personal, biased, and organic (I am not sponsored by any of the entities I will mention, nor given special treatment—at some of the restaurants, even I can’t get a reservation in the middle of August!). But I feel this Blue Book will be helpful in enhancing any stay on the island, especially if you are an Elin Hilderbrand reader! Two excellent resources for getting started on your trip planning: Nantucket Chamber of Commerce, 508-228-1700. Website: nantucketchamber.org; Instagram: @ackchamber. Town of Nantucket Culture and Tourism (known around town as “Nantucket Visitor Services”), 508-228-0925. Visitor Services keeps a list of available hotel rooms (and, yes, there were nights in the past few summers when the island was completely sold out!).

Sune had seen a photograph of Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook, standing in front of a room of people who were all wearing virtual-reality headsets. He was the only person standing in actual reality, looking at them, smiling, pacing proudly around. When he saw it, Sune said, 'I was like - holy shit, this is a metaphor for the future.' If we don't change course, he fears we are headed towards a world where 'there's going to be an upper class of people that are very aware' of the risks to their attention and find ways to live within their limits, and then there will be the rest of society with 'fewer resources to resist the manipulation, and they're going to be living more and more inside their computers, being manipulated more and more'.

Let us turn to Harriet Jacobs for guidance in imagining. Jacobs masterminded her family’s escape from North Carolina to New York. From her room in the home of an employer in upstate New York in the 1850s, Jacobs penned a penetrating memoir of social critique. Hers was the first autobiography by a Black woman to reveal the insidious culture of sexual harassment and assault in slavery as well as to confront the gender double standard between white women and Black women in Victorian society, which always categorized Black women as impure. She expressed, pointedly, that those who have not experienced legalized bondage can never know “what it is to be a slave; to be entirely unprotected by law or custom; to have the laws reduce you to the condition of a chattel, entirely subject to the will of another.” We cannot enter the consciousness of a girl born into slavery who matures to give birth into slavery and can have no reasonable hope of rescue.30 We cannot know Rose, but we can draw on the resources at our disposal—documents, cityscapes, architectural records and the built environment she inhabited, slave narratives, and Ruth’s inscription on the sack—to picture the woman she might have been and summon the shape of her daily life.

A forest floor, the Woodland villagers knew, is a living thing. Vast civilizations lay within the mosaic of dirt: hymenopteran labyrinths, rodential panic rooms, life-giving airways sculpted by the traffic of worms, hopeful spiders’ hunting cabins, crash pads for nomadic beetles, trees shyly locking toes with one another. It was here that you’d find the resourcefulness of rot, the wholeness of fungi.

Arguments against eternal life - Only rich people will get it (No tech has ever done this.) - Better to give money to the poor than science. (Family, city, state, nation, has proven local investment beats foreign.) - Dead people make more room for new, other people. (Consider going first.) - Run out of resources. (Live people discover/extract/renew better than dead or nonexistent.) - Overpopulation. (Colonize the seas, solar system, or have a war.) Stop having kids. - Worse wars. (Nukes are more dangerous than having your first 220-year-old person in 2136) - Dictators never die. (They die all the time and rarely of age.) - Old people are expensive. (50% of your lifetime medical costs occur in your final year. Delay is profitable.) - Old people suck. (Death is an inferior cure to robustness.) - You’ll get bored. (Your memory isn’t that good, or your boredom isn’t age related.) - You’ll have to watch your loved ones die. (So you prefer they watch you?) - Like Tithonus, you’ll live forever in a terrible state. (Longevity requires robustness.) - Against God’s will. (Not if he disallows suicide, then it is required.) - People will force you to live forever. Do you think less people make progress faster? What’s your target level of depriving life of existence?

make sure you can meet and greet the class together. Show unity from the door. Play the same first beats. There is nothing worse than having another adult in the room who slips in unnoticed and lurks, unloved, in the back corner. They often spend the lesson asking the children what on earth they are supposed to be learning. They become a wasted resource.

He had spent his life playing video games and doing drugs and had probably fathered five welfare babies, demanding the whole time that I pay for their health care. When a pipe leaks, he calls the landlord (at best) or (more likely) just lets it leak. Let the next tenant find out the floorboards have rotted and that every wall is covered with mold. His little girlfriend would be the type to cry about rights for animals because she thinks meat grows in the grocery store display counter. Smoking pot and spitting on our soldiers when they return home from fighting terrorists because she lives obliviously in a little cocoon built from our sweat and blood and tears. I said to him, “Imagine there’s a meteor coming to destroy the world. But some rich men have pooled their resources and built a big rocket ship to get people off the planet. They don’t have room for everybody, but you want a seat on that ship. Now, your having a seat means somebody else doesn’t get one. Space is limited. Food is limited. What would you tell the man standing at the door? What case would you make for getting a seat on that rocket ship at the expense of another person? What can you offer that would justify the food you would eat, and the water you would drink, and the medicine you would use?

Confidence is an unconditional state in which you simply possess an unwavering state of mind that needs no reference point. There is no room for doubt; even the question of doubt does not occur. … This unconditional confidence contains gentleness, because the notion of fear does not arise; sturdiness, because in the state of confidence there is ever-present resourcefulness; and joy, because trusting in the heart brings a greater sense of humor. This confidence can manifest as majesty, elegance, and richness in a person’s life. —Venerable Chögyam Trugpa,

He and the men in the room would form a “monolithic” organization to engage in a titanic struggle against subversion. It would be controlled from the top because a democratically operated outfit would be too vulnerable to infiltration and disruption from the wily and pernicious enemy. Consequently, Welch would be in charge. He would set policy and issue directives. This would not be a debating society. Welch shared his dream: a force of one million “dedicated supporters” and “sufficient resources.” With that, he could conquer the Reds. He would organize his followers into chapters to fight communism at the local level—within schools, libraries, and church groups. This new patriotic legion would be called the John Birch Society,

A beautifully organized project will be offered by Lodha Kharadi, which will include good access and departure locations for residents. Complete projects by Lodha will consist of high-quality materials and traditional styling. There is no better place to acquire property in the area than Lodha Kharadi. The new startup projects include modern facilities and a high project design standard. All the luxuries you can think of are included in the price of a luxury hotel room. The building of this excellent resource is taking place in a spectacular location.

In “Hunter of the Damned,” Laws recounts his days working as an undercover agent in Internet chat rooms and recounts his email exchanges and chat sessions with predators, uncovering horror after horror. Offering a rare look into the investigatory process of child sexual exploitation cases, Laws seeks to combat the pervasiveness of child sexual exploitation by raising awareness and by providing a valuable resource for fellow investigators. “While exposing the heinous nature of child sex crimes, I hope to educate readers on predatory behaviors and provide insight on the perpetrators of child sex crimes, particularly for those who are investigating these types of crimes,” Laws said.

What does it mean when the tools of a racist patriarchy are used to examine the fruits of that same patriarchy?” She tells us what it means by showing us what it does. When a feminist house is built using the tools of “racist patriarchy,” the same house is being built, a house in which only some are allowed in, or only some are given room. Lorde stresses that those who are resourced by the master’s house will find those who try to dismantle that house “threatening” (112). An attempt to open up a space to others can be threatening to those who occupy that space.

A forest floor, the Woodland villagers knew, is a living thing. Vast civilizations lay within the mosaic of dirt: hymenopteran labyrinths, rodential panic rooms, life-giving airways sculpted by the traffic of worms, hopeful spiders’ hunting cabins, crash pads for nomadic beetles, trees shyly locking toes with one another. It was here that you’d find the resourcefulness of rot, the wholeness of fungi. Disturbing these lives through digging was a violence—though sometimes a needed one,

But perhaps Hubbard’s most enduring contribution to psychedelic therapy emerged in, of all places, the treatment room. […] Though he never used those terms, Hubbard was the first researcher to grasp the critical importance of set and setting in shaping the psychedelic experience. He instinctively understood that the white walls and fluorescent lighting of the sanitised hospital room were all wrong. So he brought pictures and music, flowers and diamonds into the treatment room where he would use them to prime patients for a mystical revelation or divert a journey when it took a terrifying turn. He liked to show people paintings by Salvador Dali or pictures of Jesus or to ask them to study the facets of a diamond he carried. On patient he treated in Vancouver, an alcoholic paralysed by social anxiety recalled Hubbard handing him a bouquet of roses during a LSD session. “He said, ‘Now hate them’. They withered and the petals fell off, and I started to cry. Then he said ‘Love them’ and they came back, brighter and even more spectacular than before. That meant a lot to me. I realised you can make your relationships anything you want. The trouble I was having with people was coming from me.’” What Hubbard was bringing into the treatment room was something well-known to any traditional healer. Shamans have understood for millennia that a person in the depths of a trance or under the influence of a powerful plant medicine can be readily manipulated with the help of certain words, special objects, or the right kind of music. Hubbard understood intuitively how the suggestibility of the human mind during an altered state of consciousness could be harnessed as an important resource for healing—for breaking destructive patterns of thought and for proposing new perspectives in their place.

now.” Shortly before I met with him, Sune had seen a photograph of Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook, standing in front of a room of people who were all wearing virtual reality headsets. He was the only person standing in actual reality, looking at them, smiling, pacing proudly around. When he saw it, Sune said, “I was like—holy shit, this is a metaphor for the future.” If we don’t change course, he fears we are headed toward a world where “there’s going to be an upper class of people that are very aware” of the risks to their attention and find ways to live within their limits, and then there will be the rest of the society with “fewer resources to resist the manipulation, and they’re going to be living more and more inside their computers, being manipulated more and more.

This fun visualisation can be used to help clients discover internal resources they already have to head for adventure, face fears and overcome obstacles. It is important to prepare clients for the tough world they face outside the therapy room. Life is unfair, and it is important that clients learn to see difficulties as opportunities to conquer and learn from.

You could count the female investment bankers at the firm on two hands. And the number of female executives on one finger. The head of human resources was a woman and there was a woman on the board – a great niece of the original Stanhope founder. That was it. Most of the women employed at the firm were in support roles; marketing, communications, HR and admin. The army of personal assistants was almost entirely female. Without them the firm wouldn’t function. The firm’s senior executives paid lip-service to diversity just as they gave lip-service to corporate social responsibility, another buzzword they bandied about in employee communications and brochures. All they really cared about was making money. It was the firm’s raison d’être and it was ours as well.

Men and women have different experiences of the concept of power. For men to acknowledge their powerlessness means relinquishing the illusion of power in which they have been saturated since childhood. This admission allows them to seek significant connection and mutually supportive relationships within a spiritual, therapeutic, or recovery context. On the other hand, women have been admitting powerlessness most of their lives. Our access to thrones, negotiating tables, board rooms, pulpits, and presidencies has been limited. Our position has been clear—we are inferior and our power is limited. Thus the admission of powerlessness, as defined by men, has not been woman affirming. A woman-affirming recovery encourages us to reclaim our original power. Women redefine power as the capacity to author their own lives, act on their own behalf, handle whatever confronts them, and gather the resources necessary to heal into the present. These capacities are fostered in community. For men, the admission of powerlessness was essential to experience connection with others. For many women, walking into their first therapy appointment, women’s support group, or recovery meeting is a powerful act on their own behalf. The journey home begins with the courageous vulnerability of acknowledging that we have lost our way and need guidance to find our way home. A woman-affirming recovery affirms that vulnerability and power are partners on our journey home.

You know why they stay asleep? Because all those cameras, clean-cut anchors, Ivy League educations, graphics, resources, high-rise buildings, decades of being in my living room — it’s IMPOSSIBLE that they could be controlled by a criminal super-mafia trying to destroy the world.

. . . the fact that people are starving and dying of thirst all around the world has nothing to do with whether or not I eat all of my mashed potato, and everything to do with the fact that billions of us are refusing to build infrastructure that can distribute the earth's resources lovingly and mindfully.

The King of England painfully climbed the two hundred and eight steps which led to Merlyn’s tower room, and knocked on the door. The magician was inside, with Archimedes sitting on the back of his chair, busily trying to find the square root of minus one. He had forgotten how to do it. ‘Merlyn,’ said the King panting, ‘I want to talk to you.’ He closed his book with a bang, leaped to his feet, seizing his wand of lignum vitae, and rushed at Arthur as if he were trying to shoo away a stray chicken. ‘Go away!’ he shouted. ‘What are you doing here? What do you mean by it? Aren’t you the King of England? Go away and send for me! Get out of my room! I never heard of such a thing! Go away at once and send for me!’ ‘But I’m here.’ ‘No, you’re not,’ retorted the old man resourcefully. And he pushed the King out of the door, slamming it in his face.

In the popular imagination, Asian Americans inhabit a vague purgatorial status: not white enough nor black enough; distrusted by African Americans, ignored by whites, unless we’re being used by whites to keep the black man down. We are the carpenter ants of the service industry, the apparatchiks of the corporate world, we are math-crunching middle managers who keep the corporate wheels greased but who never get promoted since we don’t have the right ‘face’ for leadership. We have a content problem. They think we have no inner resources. But while I may look impassive, I'm frantically paddling my feet underwater, always overcompensating to hide my devouring feelings of inadequacy. There's a ton of literature on the self-hating Jew and the self-hating African American, but not enough has been said about the self-hating Asian. Racial self hatred is seeing yourself whites see you, which turns you into your own worst enemy. Your only defense is to be hard on yourself, which becomes compulsive, and therefore a comfort: to peck yourself to death. You don't like how you look, how you sound. You think your Asian features are undefined, like God started pinching out your features and then abandoned you. You hate that there are so many Asians in the room. Who let in all the Asians? you rant in your head. Instead of solidarity, you feel that you are less than> around other Asians, the boundaries of yourself no longer distinct but congealed into a horde.