Shapes Famous Quotes

I thought if only I had a keen, shapely bone structure to my face or could discuss politics shrewdly or was a famous writer Constantin might find me interesting enough to sleep with. And then I wondered if as soon as he came to like me he would sink into ordinariness, and if as soon as he came to love me I would find fault, the way I did with Buddy Willard and the boys before him.

When a reader enters the pages of a book of poetry, he or she enters a world where dreams transform the past into knowledge made applicable to the present, and where visions shape the present into extraordinary possibilities for the future.

Yes,’ he cried, ‘you have killed my love! You used to stir my imagination. Now you don’t even stir my curiosity. You simply produce no effect. I loved you because you were marvelous, because you had genius and intellect, because you realized the dreams of great poets and gave shape and substance to the shadows of art. You have thrown it all away. You are shallow and stupid. My God! how mad I was to love you! What a fool I have been! You are nothing to me now. I will never see you again. I will never think of you. I will never mention your name. You can’t know what you were to me, once. Why, once… Oh, I can’t bear to think of it! I wish I had never laid eyes upon you! You have spoiled the romance of my life. How little you can know of love if you say it mars your art! Without your art you are nothing. I would have made you famous, splendid, magnificent. The world would have worshiped you, and you would have borne my name. What are you now? A third-rate actress with a pretty face.

I am running through a snowfall which is her thighs, he dramatized in purple. Her thighs are filling up the street. Wide as a snowfall, heavy as huge falling Zeppelins, her damp thighs are settling on the sharp roofs and wooden balconies. Weather-vanes press the shape of roosters and sail-boats into the skin. The faces of famous statues are preserved like intaglios....

Trilby’s face appeared on dolls, fans, writing paper, puzzles, and there were ice cream bars made in the shape of her feet.

It is a well-known established fact throughout the many-dimensional worlds of the multiverse that most really great discoveries are owed to one brief moment of inspiration. There's a lot of spadework first, of course, but what clinches the whole thing is the sight of, say, a falling apple or a boiling kettle or the water slipping over the edge of the bath. Something goes click inside the observer's head and then everything falls into place. The shape of DNA, it is popularly said, owes its discovery to the chance sight of a spiral staircase when the scientist‘s mind was just at the right receptive temperature. Had he used the elevator, the whole science of genetics might have been a good deal different. This is thought of as somehow wonderful. It isn't. It is tragic. Little particles of inspiration sleet through the universe all the time traveling through the densest matter in the same way that a neutrino passes through a candyfloss haystack, and most of them miss. Even worse, most of the ones that hit the exact cerebral target, hit the wrong one. For example, the weird dream about a lead doughnut on a mile-high gantry, which in the right mind would have been the catalyst for the invention of repressed-gravitational electricity generation (a cheap and inexhaustible and totally non-polluting form of power which the world in question had been seeking for centuries, and for the lack of which it was plunged into a terrible and pointless war) was in fact had by a small and bewildered duck. By another stroke of bad luck, the sight of a herd of wild horses galloping through a field of wild hyacinths would have led a struggling composer to write the famous Flying God Suite, bringing succor and balm to the souls of millions, had he not been at home in bed with shingles. The inspiration thereby fell to a nearby frog, who was not in much of a position to make a startling contributing to the field of tone poetry. Many civilizations have recognized this shocking waste and tried various methods to prevent it, most of them involving enjoyable but illegal attempts to tune the mind into the right wavelength by the use of exotic herbage or yeast products. It never works properly.

So, remember to look up at the stars and not down at your feet. Try to make sense of what you see and wonder about what makes the universe exist. Be curious. And however difficult may life seem, there is always something you can do and succeed at. It matters that you don’t just give up. Unleash your imagination. Shape the future.

... understanding, and action proceeding from understanding and guided by it, is the one weapon against the world's bombardment, the one medicine, the one instrument by which liberty, health, and joy may be shaped or shaped towards, in the individual, and in the race.

George Bernard Shaw’s famous spelling of “fish” as “ghoti”—the first two letters pronounced as the last two in “tough,” the middle letter as in “women,” and the last two as in “nation.

There was a bit of that “Oh my god, they’ve got three dimensions and a size and a shape and I’m seeing a person with my own eyes that I have previously only seen through the eyes of cameras” feeling that you get with any famous person. That’s a weird thing, and it’s a very interesting and complex experience.

Rainer Maria Rilke greeted and wrestled with the angels of his Duino Elegies in the solitude of a castle surrounded by white cliffs tall trees and the sea. I greeted most of mine in the solitude of a house that still vibrated with the throbs of a singular life that had helped shape many lives and with the ache of attempts to render useful service to that life. The River of Winged Dreams was therefore constructed as a link between dimensions of past and future emotions and intellect and matter and spirit.

When Kate was younger, stories were her friends when she found people challenging. She searched them out, hiding among them in the library and tucking herself into their pages. She folded herself into the shape of Hermione Granger or George from The Famous Five or Catherine Moreland from Northanger Abbey and tried to be them for a day. When she started secondary school her friends were the characters she met in the pages of her books. They sat with her in the library as she snuck mouthfuls of sandwich behind books so the librarian wouldn't see. (The librarian always saw, but pretended not to.)

. Even Proust—there’s a famous passage where Odette opens the door with a cold, she’s sulky, her hair is loose and undone, her skin is patchy, and Swann, who has never cared about her until that moment, falls in love with her because she looks like a Botticelli girl from a slightly damaged fresco. Which Proust himself only knew from a reproduction. He never saw the original, in the Sistine Chapel. But even so—the whole novel is in some ways about that moment. And the damage is part of the attraction, the painting’s blotchy cheeks. Even through a copy Proust was able to re-dream that image, re-shape reality with it, pull something all his own from it into the world. Because—the line of beauty is the line of beauty. It doesn’t matter if it’s been through the Xerox machine a hundred times.

The whole thing became a matter of speculation: I was soon (in the famous words) “altering ‘I believe’ to ‘one does feel.’ ” And oh, the relief of it!

I never conceived of my biographies as merely telling the lives of famous men but rather as a means of illuminating their times and the great forces that shaped their times—particularly political power, since in a democracy political power has so great a role in shaping the lives of the citizens of that democracy.

If everyone were cast in the same mold,” Darwin famously wrote, “there would be no such thing as beauty.” Because beauty takes shape when one recognizes the diversity of life and comprehends nature’s magnificent design, the experience of it touches the soul.

When the missionaries came to Africa,” Desmond Tutu famously (though not originally: that honor belongs to Jomo Kenyatta) remarked, “they had the Bible and we had the land. They said ‘Let us pray.’ We closed our eyes. When we opened them, we had the Bible and they had the land.

My eyes roved over the walls covered with my collages and prints of famous paintings. Magritte, Kandinsky, Kahlo. My origami shapes hung from fishing wire, dangling over my bed. They shivered in the slight breeze blowing through my open window. It was my own little escape pod, but none of it was enough tonight.

Dante’s notions of sin are shaped largely by the writings of St. Thomas Aquinas. In his famous Summa Theologiae, Aquinas argues that any evil action or sin is a form of self-destruction. He assumes that human beings have a nature that is supposed to be rational and good. Aquinas conceives of this nature, that of the rational animal, as being created by God specifically to pursue goodness, more specifically, the virtues. When a human being departs from this natural purpose, she injures herself, for she does what she was not intended to do. She wars against herself and her nature. Why does Aquinas hold this peculiar view of sin? One reason is because he accepts Boethius’ assertion that goodness and being are convertible. In other words, anything that exists has some goodness in it because God made it. And no matter how marred or broken or sinful that being is, it still maintains some goodness so long as it exists. According to this view, no one, not even Lucifer encased in ice at the bottom of Dante’s Inferno, is wholly evil. Evil can only feed off of goodness like a parasite; if all the goodness of a creature were eliminated, the creature in question would no longer exist.

With the softest hand, you can shape the hardest rocks!

I thought if only I had a keen, shapely bone structure to my face or could discuss politics shrewdly or was a famous writer Constantin might find me interesting enough to sleep with.

He devoured morning shows, daytime shows, late-night talk shows, soaps, situation comedies, Lifetime Movies, hospital dramas, police series, vampire and zombie serials, the dramas of housewives from Atlanta, New Jersey, Beverly Hills and New York, the romances and quarrels of hotel-fortune princesses and self-styled shahs, the cavortings of individuals made famous by happy nudities, the fifteen minutes of fame accorded to young persons with large social media followings on account of their plastic-surgery acquisition of a third breast or their post-rib-removal figures that mimicked the impossible shape of the Mattel company’s Barbie doll, or even, more simply, their ability to catch giant carp in picturesque settings while wearing only the tiniest of string bikinis; as well as singing competitions, cooking competitions, competitions for business propositions, competitions for business apprenticeships, competitions between remote-controlled monster vehicles, fashion competitions, competitions for the affections of both bachelors and bachelorettes, baseball games, basketball games, football games, wrestling bouts, kickboxing bouts, extreme sports programming and, of course, beauty contests.

For all the talk of education, modern societies neglect to examine by far the most influential means by which their populations are educated. Whatever happens in our classrooms, the more potent and ongoing kind of education takes place on the airwaves and on our screens. Cocooned in classrooms for only our first eighteen years or so, we effectively spend the rest of our lives under the tutelage of news entities which wield infinitely greater influence over us than any academic institution can. Once our formal education has finished, the news is the teacher. It is the single most significant force setting the tone of public life and shaping our impressions of the community beyond our own walls. It is the prime creator of political and social reality. As revolutionaries well know, if you want to change the mentality of a country, you don't head to the art gallery, the department of education or the homes of famous novelists; you drive the tanks straight to the nerve center of the body politic, the news HQ.

in Sam’s mind the shadow is the true height, the body a temporary inconvenience. When I’m a cowboy, Sam says. When I’m an adventurer. More recently: When I’m a famous outlaw. When I’m grown. Young enough to think desire alone shapes the world.

Athens, while remaining nominally independent, no longer commanded its lifelines or its fate. Just as it had invented many Western institutions and intellectual and artistic endeavors, so did it pioneer a less glorious tradition. In the centuries following the Peloponnesian war, Athens became the first in a long line of senescent Western empires to suffer the ignominious transformation from world power to open-air theme park, famous only for its arts, its architecture, its schools, and its past.

At the Uffizi, I experienced a moment that was touching, painful, and almost embarrassing. We stopped in front of the famous Botticelli painting, The Birth of Venus. I gazed wistfully at her incomparably lovely, yet, as Vasari described, oddly distorted form emerging from the waves in a seashell, her long red-golden tresses blown by Zephyrs. No woman ever had so elongated a neck or such sinuous limbs. Botticelli contorted, and some might say deformed, the human shape to give us a glimpse of the sublime.

The padres set great store by addressing prayer to personal gods: 'Genuine prayer exists only in religions in which there is a God as a person and a shape and endowed with a will.' That was stated by a famous Protestant. The anarch does not want to have anything to do with that conception. As for the One God: while he may be able to shape persons, he is not a person himself, and the he is already a patriarchal prejudice. A neuter One is beyond our grasp, while man converses ten with the Many Gods on equal terms, whether as their inventor or as their discoverer. In any case, it is man who named the gods. This is not to be confused with a high level soliloquy. Divinity must, without a doubt, be inside us and recognized as being inside us; otherwise we would have no concept of gods.

Church is an organization of extraterrestrials determined to rule the world through mind control, a dark truth known to Mr. Leonardo da Vinci, which we can prove by citing his most famous self-portrait, in which he depicted himself wearing a pyramid-shaped tinfoil hat.

Phoebe Hurty hired me to write copy for ads about teen aged clothes. I had to wear the clothes I praised. That was part of the job. And I became friends with her two sons, who were my age. I was over at their house all the time. She would talk bawdily to me and her sons, and our girlfriends when we brought them around. She was funny. She was liberating. She taught us to be impolite in conversation not only about sexual matters, but about American history and famous heroes, about the distribution of wealth, about school, about everything. I now make my living being impolite. I am clumsy at it. I keep trying to imitate the impoliteness which was so graceful in Phoebe Hurty. I think now that grace was easier for her than it is for me because of the mood of the Great Depression. She believed what so many Americans believed then: that the nation would be happy and just and rational when prosperity came. I never hear that word anymore: Prosperity. It used to be a synonym for Paradise. And Phoebe Hurty was able to believe that the impoliteness she recommended would give shape to an American paradise. Now her sort of impoliteness is in fashion. But nobody believes anymore in a new American paradise. I sure miss Phoebe Hurty.

...he used to speak of how with very great paintings it's possible to know them deeply, inhabit them almost, even through copies. Even Proust -- there's a famous passage where Odette opens the door with a cold, she's sulky, her hair is loose and undone, her skin is patchy, and Swann, who has never cared about her until that moment, falls in love with her because she looks like a Botticelli girl from a slightly damaged fresco. Which Proust himself only knew from a reproduction. He never saw the original, in the Sistine Chapel. But even so -- the whole novel is in some ways about that moment. And the damage is part of the attraction, the painting's blotchy cheeks. Even through a copy Proust was able to re-dream the image, re-shape reality with it, pull something all his own from it into the world. Because -- the line of beauty is the line of beauty. It doesn't matter if it's been through the Xerox machine a hundred times.

At night the envoys received visits of a less savory sort. Three henchmen of Talleyrand’s came around regularly to demand payment in exchange for recognizing the U.S. diplomats. The foreign minister’s agents, characterized in the communications to Philadelphia as X, Y, and Z, laid out the terms: an American loan of ten million dollars to the French government plus a quarter million dollars for Talleyrand’s personal pocket. The envoys angrily rejected the demand, with Pinckney famously replying, “No! No! Not a sixpence.” In the retelling, Pinckney’s refusal evolved into the more American aphorism “Millions for defense, but not one cent for tribute.

THE STAGE: The stage is empty, and you watch as the figure of Medusa steps into the gas-light. Her body is dressed in a crimson traversed by the golden branches of willow trees, colour and light held into shape by sharp black borders. Lifting languidly her hands, she reaches towards you. Her emerald vipers, in the cohesive movements of unseen mechanisms, weave loops about her head. Music is beginning, and from the shadows off-stage the narrator speaks. “Medusa had a beautiful name and a lovely voice, though no one cared to listen; seeking only the gaze of those famous eyes.” Perseus walks onto the stage, cloaked as though he were the blazing sun. Now what you have to understand is his voice – it is like nothing you could tie down. It feels peaceful to hear it, to see him flow into the song with his fine, clear looks and his finer, clearer voice. Is the head quite forgotten? Not quite but the horror exists alongside the beauty and they flow like twin rivers, and neither is able to wash the other from you.

Alfred Adler was a member of Freud’s original inner circle, but broke away because he disagreed that sex was the prime mover behind human behavior. He was more interested in how our early environments shape us, believing that we all seek greater power by trying to make up for what we perceive we lacked in childhood—his famous theory of “compensation.

There, flanking either side of the walkway were a pair of raised fountains. The base of each was a shell-shaped bowl filled with water and lily pads. Standing in each bowl was the masculine version of Boticelli's famous "Birth of Venus". The man stood in the same pose as Venus, left hand coyly drawn up o cover his chest, right down by his genitals, yet instead of covering them, he held his optimistically endowed penis, pointing it upward. Water jetted from each penis, and over into the basin of the twin statue opposite. The water didn't flow in a smooth stream though. It spurted. "Please tell me there is something wrong with his water pressure" Cassandra said. "No, I believe that's the desired effect.

Finally, the cognomen, a personal surname, was particular to its holder or his branch of the family. It often had a jokey or down-to-earth ring: so, for example, “Cicero” is Latin for “chickpea” and it was supposed that some ancestor had had a wart of that shape on the end of his nose. When Marcus was about to launch his career as an advocate and politician, friends advised him to change his name to something less ridiculous. “No,” he replied firmly, “I am going to make my cognomen more famous than those of men like Scaurus and Catulus.” These were two leading Romans of the day, and the point of the remark was that “Catulus” was the Latin for “whelp” or “puppy,” and “Scaurus” meant “with large or projecting ankles.

It is not that the historian can avoid emphasis of some facts and not of others. This is as natural to him as to the mapmaker, who, in order to produce a usable drawing for practical purposes, must first flatten and distort the shape of the earth, then choose out of the bewildering mass of geographic information those things needed for the purpose of this or that particular map. My argument cannot be against selection, simplification, emphasis, which are inevitable for both cartographers and historians. But the map-maker's distortion is a technical necessity for a common purpose shared by all people who need maps. The historian's distortion is more than technical, it is ideological; it is released into a world of contending interests, where any chosen emphasis supports (whether the historian means to or not) some kind of interest, whether economic or political or racial or national or sexual. Furthermore, this ideological interest is not openly expressed in the way a mapmaker's technical interest is obvious ("This is a Mercator projection for long-range navigation-for short-range, you'd better use a different projection"). No, it is presented as if all readers of history had a common interest which historians serve to the best of their ability. This is not intentional deception; the historian has been trained in a society in which education and knowledge are put forward as technical problems of excellence and not as tools for contending social classes, races, nations. To emphasize the heroism of Columbus and his successors as navigators and discoverers, and to de-emphasize their genocide, is not a technical necessity but an ideological choice. It serves- unwittingly-to justify what was done. My point is not that we must, in telling history, accuse, judge, condemn Columbus in absentia. It is too late for that; it would be a useless scholarly exercise in morality. But the easy acceptance of atrocities as a deplorable but necessary price to pay for progress (Hiroshima and Vietnam, to save Western civilization; Kronstadt and Hungary, to save socialism; nuclear proliferation, to save us all)-that is still with us. One reason these atrocities are still with us is that we have learned to bury them in a mass of other facts, as radioactive wastes are buried in containers in the earth. We have learned to give them exactly the same proportion of attention that teachers and writers often give them in the most respectable of classrooms and textbooks. This learned sense of moral proportion, coming from the apparent objectivity of the scholar, is accepted more easily than when it comes from politicians at press conferences. It is therefore more deadly. The treatment of heroes (Columbus) and their victims (the Arawaks)-the quiet acceptance of conquest and murder in the name of progress-is only one aspect of a certain approach to history, in which the past is told from the point of view of governments, conquerors, diplomats, leaders. It is as if they, like Columbus, deserve universal acceptance, as if they-the Founding Fathers, Jackson, Lincoln, Wilson, Roosevelt, Kennedy, the leading members of Congress, the famous Justices of the Supreme Court-represent the nation as a whole. The pretense is that there really is such a thing as "the United States," subject to occasional conflicts and quarrels, but fundamentally a community of people with common interests. It is as if there really is a "national interest" represented in the Constitution, in territorial expansion, in the laws passed by Congress, the decisions of the courts, the development of capitalism, the culture of education and the mass media.

at Dunkin’ Donuts, how did we move our anchor to Starbucks? This is where it gets really interesting. When Howard Shultz created Starbucks, he was as intuitive a businessman as Salvador Assael. He worked diligently to separate Starbucks from other coffee shops, not through price but through ambience. Accordingly, he designed Starbucks from the very beginning to feel like a continental coffeehouse. The early shops were fragrant with the smell of roasted beans (and better-quality roasted beans than those at Dunkin’ Donuts). They sold fancy French coffee presses. The showcases presented alluring snacks—almond croissants, biscotti, raspberry custard pastries, and others. Whereas Dunkin’ Donuts had small, medium, and large coffees, Starbucks offered Short, Tall, Grande, and Venti, as well as drinks with high-pedigree names like Caffè Americano, Caffè Misto, Macchiato, and Frappuccino. Starbucks did everything in its power, in other words, to make the experience feel different—so different that we would not use the prices at Dunkin’ Donuts as an anchor, but instead would be open to the new anchor that Starbucks was preparing for us. And that, to a great extent, is how Starbucks succeeded. GEORGE, DRAZEN, AND I were so excited with the experiments on coherent arbitrariness that we decided to push the idea one step farther. This time, we had a different twist to explore. Do you remember the famous episode in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, the one in which Tom turned the whitewashing of Aunt Polly’s fence into an exercise in manipulating his friends? As I’m sure you recall, Tom applied the paint with gusto, pretending to enjoy the job. “Do you call this work?” Tom told his friends. “Does a boy get a chance to whitewash a fence every day?” Armed with this new “information,” his friends discovered the joys of whitewashing a fence. Before long, Tom’s friends were not only paying him for the privilege, but deriving real pleasure from the task—a win-win outcome if there ever was one. From our perspective, Tom transformed a negative experience to a positive one—he transformed a situation in which compensation was required to one in which people (Tom’s friends) would pay to get in on the fun. Could we do the same? We

Their famous attempt to make clothing of fig leaves perfectly illustrates the utter inadequacy of every human device ever conceived to try to cover shame. Human religion, philanthropy, education, self-betterment, self-esteem, and all other attempts at human goodness ultimately fail to provide adequate camouflage for the disgrace and shame of our fallen state. All the man-made remedies combined are no more effective for removing the dishonor of our sin than our first parents' attempts to conceal their nakedness with fig leaves. That's because masking over shame doesn't really deal with the problem of guilt before God. Worst of all, a full atonement for guilt is far outside the possibility of fallen men and women to provide for themselves.

Even in ancient times general recognition must have been accorded to the view which later in the shape of the maxim pecunia pecuniam parere non potest was to be the basis of all discussion of the problem of interest for hundreds and even thousands of years, and Aristotle undoubtedly did not state it in the famous passage in his Politics as a new doctrine but as a generally-accepted commonplace.2

For this was Jingdezhen, porcelain capital of China, where the pottery made from local clay was shaped, painted, glazed, and fired in the town’s kilns—of which, if one counted even the smallest, there were more than nine thousand. The potters of Jingdezhen had been making porcelain since the Han dynasty, more than fifteen hundred years ago. There were many varieties, but the most famous was the blue and white.

Excavators uncovered one of Malta's most famous Neolithic sculptures, the "Sleeping Lady" of the Hypogeum, off the main hall. She reclines peacefully on her side, head in hand...This sculpture and another one shown lying on her stomach on a couch reminds us of initiation and healing rites known in later classical times. During these various classical ceremonies, the initiate spent a night in the temple (or cave or other remote place). The initiate experienced a night of visions and dreams, with spiritual or physical healing taking place...This rite probably derived from Neolithic practices that likened sleeping in a cave, temple, or underground chamber to slumbering in the goddess' uterus before spiritual reawakening. For the living, such a ritual brought physical healing and spiritual rebirth. For the dead, burial within underground chambers, shaped and colored like the uterus, represented the possibility of regeneration through the goddess' symbolic womb.

On its first over was the famous picture of Earth taken from space; its subtitle was "Access to Tools." The underlying philosophy was that technology could be our friend. Brand wrote on the first page of the first edition, "A realm of intimate, personal power is developing- power of the individual to conduct his own education, find his own inspiration, shape his own environment, and share his adventure with whoever is interested. Tools that aid this process are sought and promoted by the Whole Earth Catalog.

There were streets, narrow and crowded with people and vehicles. Above them flashed neon lights and blinking billboards of every colour, shape and size. Some ran up the sides of buildings, others blinked on and off in store windows. In the space above the sidewalk, higher than a double-decker bus, hung flashing neon signs in bright pink, yellow, read, blue, orange, green and white. Yes, if white could be whiter than white, it was when it was in neon, Hong Mei thought. She knew Nathan Road in Kowloon was famous for its neon lights.

Political economist and sociologist Max Weber famously spoke of the “disenchantment of the world,” as rationalization and science led Europe and America into modern industrial society, pushing back religion and all “magical” theories about reality. Now we are witnessing the disenchantment of the self. One of the many dangers in this process is that if we remove the magic from our image of ourselves, we may also remove it from our image of others. We could become disenchanted with one another. Our image of Homo sapiens underlies our everyday practice and culture; it shapes the way we treat one another as well as how we subjectively experience ourselves. In Western societies, the Judeo-Christian image of humankind—whether you are a believer or not—has secured a minimal moral consensus in everyday life. It has been a major factor in social cohesion. Now that the neurosciences have irrevocably dissolved the Judeo-Christian image of a human being as containing an immortal spark of the divine, we are beginning to realize that they have not substituted anything that could hold society together and provide a common ground for shared moral intuitions and values. An anthropological and ethical vacuum may well follow on the heels of neuroscientific findings. This is a dangerous situation. One potential scenario is that long before neuroscientists and philosophers have settled any of the perennial issues—for example, the nature of the self, the freedom of the will, the relationship between mind and brain, or what makes a person a person—a vulgar materialism might take hold. More and more people will start telling themselves: “I don’t understand what all these neuroexperts and consciousness philosophers are talking about, but the upshot seems pretty clear to me. The cat is out of the bag: We are gene-copying bio- robots, living out here on a lonely planet in a cold and empty physical universe. We have brains but no immortal souls, and after seventy years or so the curtain drops. There will never be an afterlife, or any kind of reward or punishment for anyone, and ultimately everyone is alone. I get the message, and you had better believe I will adjust my behavior to it. It would probably be smart not to let anybody know I’ve seen through the game.

For, as on the coloured canvas Subtle pencils softly blend Dark and light in such proportions That the dim perspectives end- Now perhaps like famous cities, Now like caves or misty capes, For remoteness ever formeth Monstrous or unreal shapes... So it was, while I alone, Saw their bulk and vast proportions But their form remained unknown. First they seemed to us uplifting High in heaven their pointed towers, Clouds that to the sea descended, To conceive in sapphire showers What they would bring forth in crystal. And this fancy seemed more true, As from their untold abundance They, methought, could drink the blue Drop by drop. Again sea monsters Seemed to us the wandering droves, Which, to from the train of Neptune, Issued from their green alcoves. For the sails, when lightly shaken, Fanned by zephyrs as by slaves, Seemed to us like outspread pinions Fluttering o'er the darkened waves; Then the mass, approaching nearer, Seemed a mighty Babylon, With its hanging gardens pictures By the streamers fluttering down. But at last our certain vision Undeceived, becoming true, Showed it was a great armada For I saw the prows cut through Foam....

At night, my own century-old wooden floors creaked while I dreamed of her, as she looked before radiation destroyed her famously enormous hair and removed all evidence of her addiction to homemade brownies. I woke to clammy sheets and the grim reminder that Liz’s soul was not, in fact, speaking to me from beyond the grave. Rationally, I knew that memory synapses of plump, frizzy Liz were bursting forth from the depths of my brain. Emotionally, I wanted Liz back with me, no matter what her form—but getting her back would require a leap of faith that the rest of me (the stuff surrounding that Liz-shaped hole) just couldn’t take.

It was Mrs. Ramsay reading to James, she said. She knew his objection--that no one could tell it for a human shape. But she had made no attempt at likeness, she said. For what reason had she introduced them then? he asked. Why indeed?--except that if there, in that corner, it was bright here, in this, she felt the need of darkness. Simple, obvious, commonplace, as it was, Mr. Bankes was interested. Mother and child then--objects of universal veneration, and in this case the mother was famous for her beauty--might be reduced, he pondered, to a purple shadow without irreverence. But the picture was not of them, she said. Or, not in his sense. There were other senses too in which one might reverence them. By a shadow here and a light there, for instance.

I began by preparing my pasta: my deft fingers forming the intricate shapes of rigatoni, ravioli, spiralli, spaghetti, cannelloni, and linguini. Then I would brew sauces of sardines, or anchovies or zucchini or sheep's cheeses, of saffron, pine nuts, currants, and fennel. These I would simmer in the huge iron cauldrons, which were constantly bubbling above the fire. My pasta dishes, I have to say, were famous throughout the province, and the scent of my sauces carried by the breeze was sufficient to fill a poor man's stomach. I also kneaded bread and produced the finest pane rimacinato, the most delicious ciabatta and focaccia that had ever been tasted in the region. Sometimes I would add wild thyme to the dough, or fragrant rosemary; plucked fresh from the hedgerow, with the dew still on the leaves.

Brand ran the Whole Earth Truck Store, which began as a roving truck that sold useful tools and educational materials, and in 1968 he decided to extend its reach with the Whole Earth Catalog. On its first cover was the famous picture of Earth taken from space; its subtitle was “Access to Tools.” The underlying philosophy was that technology could be our friend. Brand wrote on the first page of the first edition, “A realm of intimate, personal power is developing—power of the individual to conduct his own education, find his own inspiration, shape his own environment, and share his adventure with whoever is interested. Tools that aid this process are sought and promoted by the Whole Earth Catalog.” Buckminster Fuller followed with a poem that began: “I see God in the instruments and mechanisms that work reliably.

He worked at a feverish pace. He experimented with all manner of pies: tortoises, eel, chicken, frog, mushroom, artichoke, apricot, cherry, and his favorite of all, a luscious strawberry pie. He made omelets, stuffed eggs, and poached eggs with rosemary over toast. There were soups galore: fennel, tortellini, Hungarian milk, millet, kohlrabi, pea, and his famous Venetian turnip soup, which this time he made with apples instead. He molded jelly into the shapes of the cardinali crests, colored with wine, carrot, and saffron. He delighted most in the moments when he worked with his favorite knife, carving and slicing roasted cockerel, peacock, capons, turtledoves, ortolans, blackbirds, partridges, pheasants, and wood grouse. Every slice of the knife gave him greater confidence and belief in his power to make the world his.

On January 30, 1750, Mayhew stood in the pulpit of Boston’s Old West Church and preached on the occasion of the 101st anniversary of the execution of King Charles I. His message from Romans 13, titled “A Discourse Concerning Unlimited Submission and Non-Resistance to the High Powers,” became “the most famous sermon preached in pre-Revolutionary America.”2 When published, Mayhew’s sermon spread like electricity through the Colonies. John Adams, fourteen at the time, read it over and over “till the Substance of it, was incorporated into my Nature and indelibly engraved on my Memory.”3 Adams later called Mayhew’s sermon “the catechism” for the American Revolution.4 Others have called it “the first volley of the American Revolution, setting forth the intellectual and scriptural justification for rebellion against the crown.”5 In

In camp, too, a man might draw the attention of a comrade working next to him to a nice view of the setting sun shining through the tall trees of the Bavarian woods (as in the famous water color by Dürer), the same woods in which we had built an enormous, hidden munitions plant. One evening, when we were already resting on the floor of our hut, dead tired, soup bowls in hand, a fellow prisoner rushed in and asked us to run out to the assembly grounds and see the wonderful sunset. Standing outside we saw sinister clouds glowing in the west and the whole sky alive with clouds of ever-changing shapes and colors, from steel blue to blood red. The desolate grey mud huts provided a sharp contrast, while the puddles on the muddy ground reflected the glowing sky. Then, after minutes of moving silence, one prisoner said to another, “How beautiful the world could be!

This waking dream we call the internet also blurs the difference between my serious thoughts and my playful thoughts, or to put it more simply: I no longer can tell when I am working and when I am playing online. For some people the disintegration between these two realms marks all that is wrong with the internet: It is the high-priced waster of time. It breeds trifles and turns superficialities into careers. Jeff Hammerbacher, a former Facebook engineer, famously complained that the “best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads.” This waking dream is viewed by some as an addictive squandering. On the contrary, I cherish a good wasting of time as a necessary precondition for creativity. More important, I believe the conflation of play and work, of thinking hard and thinking playfully, is one of the greatest things this new invention has done. Isn’t the whole idea that in a highly evolved advanced society work is over?

Yes,” he cried, “you have killed my love. You used to stir my imagination. Now you don’t even stir my curiosity. You simply produce no effect. I loved you because you were marvellous, because you had genius and intellect, because you realized the dreams of great poets and gave shape and substance to the shadows of art. You have thrown it all away. You are shallow and stupid. My God! how mad I was to love you! What a fool I have been! You are nothing to me now. I will never see you again. I will never think of you. I will never mention your name. You don’t know what you were to me, once. Why, once ... Oh, I can’t bear to think of it! I wish I had never laid eyes upon you! You have spoiled the romance of my life. How little you can know of love, if you say it mars your art! Without your art, you are nothing. I would have made you famous, splendid, magnificent. The world would have worshipped you, and you would have borne my name. What are you now? A third-rate actress with a pretty face.

And so part of the declaring of love means you are working to a commission, now. You are not the sole architect of the person you are building. Someone else is looking over your blueprints--nodding, enthusiastically,over this turret--so you build the turret bigger! and remaining tactfully silent over an ostentatious fountain, which you immediately and silently scrap. You have entered a new world--in which there are two opinions on what will make the very best you. And if your partner is wise, and kind, and has the same taste as you, you will make amazing things together. And if your partner is broken, or impatient, or has darker needs--is unknowingly trying to build you in the shape of another woman he once knew, and lost; is trying to lean into your foundations to make his own stronger--you will make something with rotten walls, and impossible angles, which will, one day in the future, collapse. But that is all part of becoming an adult. That is the difference between girls and women. That they are finally ready to hear the secret of what makes them them,. That they are strong enough--for good, or for ill--to ask someone what is, unexpectedly,the most terrifying, relevatory question, on Earth; one you have to be brave, and ready, to hear: "Why do you love me?

I'll tell you this,though, Frankie makes me happy. So does Sadie. I don't want to canoodle with either of them, but I love them to death." "Must you use those words in my presence?" "Sorry.But.Truth:You are dead as the spat." Edward sighed. "You're right.You're absolutely right. So I suppose you'd best go to sleep, darling Ella. It's late. And,as was famously said, 'tomorrow-'" "-is another day? Thank you, Scarlett O'Hara." "Actually-" -he scowled at me- "I was going to say, 'Tomorrow comes. Tomorrow brings, tomorrow brings love, in the shape of things.'" "Shakespeare?" I asked. "Queen," he shot back. "Not nearly as good as 'Bohemian Rhapsody' or 'Fat Bottomed Girls,' but certainly poetic." "Good night, Edward." "Good night, lovely girl." I turned off the light and climbed into bed. "Oh.By the way." "Yes?" "I think I figured out why you called Diana all those nicknames. 'Spring,' 'Cab,' 'Post'..." "Yes?" "They're all things you wait for. I think Diana was making you wait, and it was making you crazy. Am I right?" "Oh,Ella. You know I can't tell you that. I will,however, leave you with one more lovely old chestnut-" "'All good things are worth waiting for?'" "I really wish you would let me finish a thought tonight. I was going to say, 'Ain't nothing like the real thing, baby.'" "Marvin Gaye," I said. "The one and only.

Spirituality is more about whether or not we can sleep at night than about whether or not we go to church. It is about being integrated or falling apart, about being within community or being lonely, about being in harmony with Mother Earth or being alienated from her. Irrespective of whether or not we let ourselves be consciously shaped by any explicit religious idea, we act in ways that leave us either healthy or unhealthy, loving or bitter. What shapes our actions is our spirituality. And what shapes our actions is basically what shapes our desire. Desire makes us act and when we act what we do will either lead to a greater integration or disintegration within our personalities, minds, and bodies—and to the strengthening or deterioration of our relationship to God, others, and the cosmic world. The habits and disciplines5 we use to shape our desire form the basis for a spirituality, regardless of whether these have an explicit religious dimension to them or even whether they are consciously expressed at all. Spirituality concerns what we do with desire. It takes its root in the eros inside of us and it is all about how we shape and discipline that eros. John of the Cross, the great Spanish mystic, begins his famous treatment of the soul’s journey with the words: “One dark night, fired by love’s urgent longings.”6 For him, it is urgent longings, eros, that are the starting point of the spiritual life and, in his view, spirituality, essentially defined, is how we handle that eros.

In a sense the rise of Anabaptism was no surprise. Most revolutionary movements produce a wing of radicals who feel called of God to reform the reformation. And that is what Anabaptism was, a voice calling the moderate reformers to strike even more deeply at the foundations of the old order. Like most counterculture movements, the Anabaptists lacked cohesiveness. No single body of doctrine and no unifying organization prevailed among them. Even the name Anabaptist was pinned on them by their enemies. It meant rebaptizer and was intended to associate the radicals with heretics in the early church and subject them to severe persecution. The move succeeded famously. Actually, the Anabaptists rejected all thoughts of rebaptism because they never considered the ceremonial sprinkling they received in infancy as valid baptism. They much preferred Baptists as a designation. To most of them, however, the fundamental issue was not baptism. It was the nature of the church and its relation to civil governments. They had come to their convictions like most other Protestants: through Scripture. Luther had taught that common people have a right to search the Bible for themselves. It had been his guide to salvation; why not theirs? As a result, little groups of Anabaptist believers gathered about their Bibles. They discovered a different world in the pages of the New Testament. They found no state-church alliance, no Christendom. Instead they discovered that the apostolic churches were companies of committed believers, communities of men and women who had freely and personally chosen to follow Jesus. And for the sixteenth century, that was a revolutionary idea. In spite of Luther’s stress on personal religion, Lutheran churches were established churches. They retained an ordained clergy who considered the whole population of a given territory members of their church. The churches looked to the state for salary and support. Official Protestantism seemed to differ little from official Catholicism. Anabaptists wanted to change all that. Their goal was the “restitution” of apostolic Christianity, a return to churches of true believers. In the early church, they said, men and women who had experienced personal spiritual regeneration were the only fit subjects for baptism. The apostolic churches knew nothing of the practice of baptizing infants. That tradition was simply a convenient device for perpetuating Christendom: nominal but spiritually impotent Christian society. The true church, the radicals insisted, is always a community of saints, dedicated disciples in a wicked world. Like the missionary monks of the Middle Ages, the Anabaptists wanted to shape society by their example of radical discipleship—if necessary, even by death. They steadfastly refused to be a part of worldly power including bearing arms, holding political office, and taking oaths. In the sixteenth century this independence from social and civic society was seen as inflammatory, revolutionary, or even treasonous.

The physical shape of Mollies paralyses and contortions fit the pattern of late-nineteenth-century hysteria as well — in particular the phases of "grand hysteria" described by Jean-Martin Charcot, a French physician who became world-famous in the 1870s and 1880s for his studies of hysterics..." "The hooplike spasm Mollie experienced sounds uncannily like what Charcot considered the ultimate grand movement, the arc de de cercle (also called arc-en-ciel), in which the patient arched her back, balancing on her heels and the top of her head..." "One of his star patients, known to her audiences only as Louise, was a specialist in the arc de cercle — and had a background and hysterical manifestations quite similar to Mollie's. A small-town girl who made her way to Paris in her teens, Louise had had a disrupted childhood, replete with abandonment and sexual abuse. She entered Salpetriere in 1875, where while under Charcot's care she experienced partial paralysis and complete loss of sensation over the right side of her body, as well as a decrease in hearing, smell, taste, and vision. She had frequent violent, dramatic hysterical fits, alternating with hallucinations and trancelike phases during which she would "see" her mother and other people she knew standing before her (this symptom would manifest itself in Mollie). Although critics, at the time and since, have decried the sometime circus atmosphere of Charcot's lectures, and claimed that he, inadvertently or not, trained his patients how to be hysterical, he remains a key figure in understanding nineteenth-century hysteria.

It starts with a thwack, the sharp crack of hard plastic against a hot metal surface. When the ladle rolls over, it deposits a pale-yellow puddle of batter onto the griddle. A gentle sizzle, as the back of the ladle sparkles a mixture of eggs, flour, water, and milk across the silver surface. A crepe takes shape. Next comes cabbage, chopped thin- but not too thin- and stacked six inches high, lightly packed so hot air can flow freely and wilt the mountain down to a molehill. Crowning the cabbage comes a flurry of tastes and textures: ivory bean sprouts, golden pebbles of fried tempura batter, a few shakes of salt, and, for an extra umami punch, a drift of dried bonito powder. Finally, three strips of streaky pork belly, just enough to umbrella the cabbage in fat, plus a bit more batter to hold the whole thing together. With two metal spatulas and a gentle rocking of the wrists, the mass is inverted. The pork fat melts on contact, and the cabbage shrinks in the steam trapped under the crepe. Then things get serious. Thin wheat soba noodles, still dripping with hot water, hit the teppan, dancing like garden hoses across its hot surface, absorbing the heat of the griddle until they crisp into a bird's nest to house the cabbage and crepe. An egg with two orange yolks sizzles beside the soba, waiting for its place on top of this magnificent heap. Everything comes together: cabbage and crepe at the base, bean sprouts and pork belly in the center, soba and fried egg parked on top, a geologic construction of carbs and crunch, protein and chew, all framed with the black and white of thickened Worcestershire and a zigzag of mayonnaise. This is okonomiyaki, the second most famous thing that ever happened to Hiroshima.

Moore’s Law, the rule of thumb in the technology industry, tells us that processor chips—the small circuit boards that form the backbone of every computing device—double in speed every eighteen months. That means a computer in 2025 will be sixty-four times faster than it is in 2013. Another predictive law, this one of photonics (regarding the transmission of information), tells us that the amount of data coming out of fiber-optic cables, the fastest form of connectivity, doubles roughly every nine months. Even if these laws have natural limits, the promise of exponential growth unleashes possibilities in graphics and virtual reality that will make the online experience as real as real life, or perhaps even better. Imagine having the holodeck from the world of Star Trek, which was a fully immersive virtual-reality environment for those aboard a ship, but this one is able to both project a beach landscape and re-create a famous Elvis Presley performance in front of your eyes. Indeed, the next moments in our technological evolution promise to turn a host of popular science-fiction concepts into science facts: driverless cars, thought-controlled robotic motion, artificial intelligence (AI) and fully integrated augmented reality, which promises a visual overlay of digital information onto our physical environment. Such developments will join with and enhance elements of our natural world. This is our future, and these remarkable things are already beginning to take shape. That is what makes working in the technology industry so exciting today. It’s not just because we have a chance to invent and build amazing new devices or because of the scale of technological and intellectual challenges we will try to conquer; it’s because of what these developments will mean for the world.

We start with a next-generation miso soup: Kyoto's famous sweet white miso whisked with dashi made from lobster shells, with large chunks of tender claw meat and wilted spinach bobbing on the soup's surface. The son takes a cube of topflight Wagyu off the grill, charred on the outside, rare in the center, and swaddles it with green onions and a scoop of melting sea urchin- a surf-and-turf to end all others. The father lays down a gorgeous ceramic plate with a poem painted on its surface. "From the sixteenth century," he tells us, then goes about constructing the dish with his son, piece by piece: First, a chunk of tilefish wrapped around a grilled matsutake mushroom stem. Then a thick triangle of grilled mushroom cap, plus another grilled stem the size of a D-sized battery, topped with mushroom miso. A pickled ginger shoot, a few tender soybeans, and the crowning touch, the tilefish skin, separated from its body and fried into a ripple wave of crunch. The rice course arrives in a small bamboo steamer. The young chef works quickly. He slices curtains of tuna belly from a massive, fat-streaked block, dips it briefly in house-made soy sauce, then lays it on the rice. Over the top he spoons a sauce of seaweed and crushed sesame seeds just as the tuna fat begins to melt into the grains below. A round of tempura comes next: a harvest moon of creamy pumpkin, a gold nugget of blowfish capped with a translucent daikon sauce, and finally a soft, custardy chunk of salmon liver, intensely fatty with a bitter edge, a flavor that I've never tasted before. The last savory course comes in a large ice block carved into the shape of a bowl. Inside, a nest of soba noodles tinted green with powdered matcha floating in a dashi charged with citrus and topped with a false quail egg, the white fashioned from grated daikon.

I always had trouble with the feet of Jón the First, or Pre-Jón, as I called him later. He would frequently put them in front of me in the evening and tell me to take off his socks and rub his toes, soles, heels and calves. It was quite impossible for me to love these Icelandic men's feet that were shaped like birch stumps, hard and chunky, and screaming white as the wood when the bark is stripped from it. Yes, and as cold and damp, too. The toes had horny nails that resembled dead buds in a frosty spring. Nor can I forget the smell, for malodorous feet were very common in the post-war years when men wore nylon socks and practically slept in their shoes. How was it possible to love these Icelandic men? Who belched at the meal table and farted constantly. After four Icelandic husbands and a whole load of casual lovers I had become a vrai connaisseur of flatulence, could describe its species and varieties in the way that a wine-taster knows his wines. The howling backfire, the load, the gas bomb and the Luftwaffe were names I used most. The coffee belch and the silencer were also well-known quantities, but the worst were the date farts, a speciality of Bæring of Westfjord. Icelandic men don’t know how to behave: they never have and never will, but they are generally good fun. At least, Icelandic women think so. They seem to come with this inner emergency box, filled with humour and irony, which they always carry around with them and can open for useful items if things get too rough, and it must be a hereditary gift of the generations. Anyone who loses their way in the mountains and gets snowed in or spends the whole weekend stuck in a lift can always open this special Icelandic emergency box and get out of the situation with a good story. After wandering the world and living on the Continent I had long tired of well-behaved, fart-free gentlemen who opened the door and paid the bills but never had a story to tell and were either completely asexual or demanded skin-burning action until the morning light. Swiss watch salesmen who only knew of “sechs” as their wake-up hour, or hairy French apes who always required their twelve rounds of screwing after the six-course meal. I suppose I liked German men the best. They were a suitable mixture of belching northerner and cultivated southerner, of orderly westerner and crazy easterner, but in the post-war years they were of course broken men. There was little you could do with them except try to put them right first. And who had the time for that? Londoners are positive and jolly, but their famous irony struck me as mechanical and wearisome in the long run. As if that irony machine had eaten away their real essence. The French machine, on the other hand, is fuelled by seriousness alone, and the Frogs can drive you beyond the limit when they get going with their philosophical noun-dropping. The Italian worships every woman like a queen until he gets her home, when she suddenly turns into a slut. The Yank is one hell of a guy who thinks big: he always wants to take you the moon. At the same time, however, he is as smug and petty as the meanest seamstress, and has a fit if someone eats his peanut butter sandwich aboard the space shuttle. I found Russians interesting. In fact they were the most Icelandic of all: drank every glass to the bottom and threw themselves into any jollity, knew countless stories and never talked seriously unless at the bottom of the bottle, when they began to wail for their mother who lived a thousand miles away but came on foot to bring them their clean laundry once a month. They were completely crazy and were better athletes in bed than my dear countrymen, but in the end I had enough of all their pommel-horse routines. Nordic men are all as tactless as Icelanders. They get drunk over dinner, laugh loudly and fart, eventually start “singing” even in public restaurants where people have paid to escape the tumult of

This, in turn, has given us a “unified theory of aging” that brings the various strands of research into a single, coherent tapestry. Scientists now know what aging is. It is the accumulation of errors at the genetic and cellular level. These errors can build up in various ways. For example, metabolism creates free radicals and oxidation, which damage the delicate molecular machinery of our cells, causing them to age; errors can build up in the form of “junk” molecular debris accumulating inside and outside the cells. The buildup of these genetic errors is a by-product of the second law of thermodynamics: total entropy (that is, chaos) always increases. This is why rusting, rotting, decaying, etc., are universal features of life. The second law is inescapable. Everything, from the flowers in the field to our bodies and even the universe itself, is doomed to wither and die. But there is a small but important loophole in the second law that states total entropy always increases. This means that you can actually reduce entropy in one place and reverse aging, as long as you increase entropy somewhere else. So it’s possible to get younger, at the expense of wreaking havoc elsewhere. (This was alluded to in Oscar Wilde’s famous novel The Picture of Dorian Gray. Mr. Gray was mysteriously eternally young. But his secret was the painting of himself that aged horribly. So the total amount of aging still increased.) The principle of entropy can also be seen by looking behind a refrigerator. Inside the refrigerator, entropy decreases as the temperature drops. But to lower the entropy, you have to have a motor, which increases the heat generated behind the refrigerator, increasing the entropy outside the machine. That is why refrigerators are always hot in the back. As Nobel laureate Richard Feynman once said, “There is nothing in biology yet found that indicates the inevitability of death. This suggests to me that it is not at all inevitable and that it is only a matter of time before biologists discover what it is that is causing us the trouble and that this terrible universal disease or temporariness of the human’s body will be cured.

Jones, along with the US military attaché in Indonesia, took Subandrio’s advice. He emphasized to Washington that the United States should support the Indonesian military as a more effective, long-term anticommunist strategy. The country of Indonesia couldn’t be simply broken into pieces to slow down the advance of global socialism, so this was a way that the US could work within existing conditions. This strategic shift would begin soon, and would prove very fruitful. But behind the scenes, the CIA boys dreamed up wild schemes. On the softer side, a CIA front called the Congress for Cultural Freedom, which funded literary magazines and fine arts around the world, published and distributed books in Indonesia, such as George Orwell’s Animal Farm and the famous anticommunist collection The God That Failed.33 And the CIA discussed simply murdering Sukarno. The Agency went so far as to identify the “asset” who would kill him, according to Richard M. Bissell, Wisner’s successor as deputy director for plans.34 Instead, the CIA hired pornographic actors, including a very rough Sukarno look-alike, and produced an adult film in a bizarre attempt to destroy his reputation. The Agency boys knew that Sukarno routinely engaged in extramarital affairs. But everyone in Indonesia also knew it. Indonesian elites didn’t shy away from Sukarno’s activities the way the Washington press corps protected philanderers like JFK. Some of Sukarno’s supporters viewed his promiscuity as a sign of his power and masculinity. Others, like Sumiyati and members of the Gerwani Women’s Movement, viewed it as an embarrassing defect. But the CIA thought this was their big chance to expose him. So they got a Hollywood film crew together.35 They wanted to spread the rumor that Sukarno had slept with a beautiful blond flight attendant who worked for the KGB, and was therefore both immoral and compromised. To play the president, the filmmakers (that is, Bing Crosby and his brother Larry) hired a “Hispanic-looking” actor, and put him in heavy makeup to make him look a little more Indonesian. They also wanted him bald, since exposing Sukarno—who always wore a hat—as such might further embarrass him. The idea was to destroy the genuine affection that young Sakono, and Francisca, and millions of other Indonesians, felt for the Founding Father of their country. The thing was never released—not because this was immoral or a bad idea, but because the team couldn’t put together a convincing enough film.36

The scientific origin of toughened glass is to be found in a famous curiosity of the 1640s known as Prince Rupert’s drops. These are teardrop-shaped pieces of glass that can withstand intense pressure at their rounded end, but if they incur the slightest damage at the tail end they will explode. Prince Rupert’s drops are very simple to make: all you need to do is drop a small piece of molten glass into water.

The decent people are famous and known with their virtual decency, but not their shape or the dress.

The Calvinist nobles convey their objections by throwing two imperial representatives out the window of Prague Castle in the famous “defenestration of Prague.

Even his moustache—teased into the shape of a wide up-thrusting “w”—was so famous it acquired a name: Er ist erreicht! “It is achieved!” Manipulated through the miracle of pomade—its key ingredient the remarkable new product, petroleum jelly—it was the very model of a modern moustache, a controlled riposte to the great bushy, biblical patriarch beards and side-whiskers of the previous generation.*

Rome This afternoon I learned that Rome is called the “eternal city.” It’s also the largest city in Italy. Its population is about 4 million. We hired a guide to show us Rome’s “modern” attractions. We started at the Spanish Steps. It was here, in the 1700s, that the most beautiful men and women in Italy waited, hoping to be chosen as artists’ models. The steps link the butterfly-shaped Piazza di Spagna with Trinità dei Monti, a French church. The most famous fountain in Rome is the Trevi Fountain, with its statue of Neptune. Our guide told us to face away from the fountain and throw a coin into the water. This means we will return to Rome some day. If you throw a second coin over your shoulder, you can make a wish. I tossed two coins over my shoulder.

The Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Hebrew Old Testament that came into being around 200 BCE, interpreted the revelation of God’s name according to Hellenistic philosophical thought and translated it as “I am the one who is” (Ἐγώ εἰμι ὁ ὤν). This translation made history and shaped theological thought for many centuries. On the basis of this translation, one was convinced that what is the highest in thought—Being—and what is highest in faith—God, correlate to each other. In this conviction one saw confirmation that believing and thinking are not opposed to each other, but rather correspond to each other. This interpretation is already found in the Hellenistic Jewish philosopher Philo († 40 CE). However, Tertullian soon asked: “What does Jerusalem have to do with Athens?”14 Most notably, Blaise Pascal, after having a mystical experience, highlighted the difference between the God of the philosophers and the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob in his famous Memorial of 1654.15

Jobs noticed that when the heart gave him an intuition, it was for him a command that he had to follow, regardless of the opinions of others. The only thing that mattered was finding a way to give shape to the intuition. For Jobs, the vegan diet, Zen meditation, a life immersed in nature, abstention from alcohol and coffee were necessary to nourish his inner voice, the voice of his heart and strengthen his ability to intuit the future. At the same time, this caused great difficulties. He was sensitive, intuitive, irrational and nervous. He was aware of the limitations that his irrationality caused in handling a large company, such as Apple Computer, and chose a rationalist manager to run the company: John Sculley, a famous manager he admired but with whom he entered continually in conflict, to the point that in 1985 the board of directors decided to fire Jobs from Apple, the company he had founded. Apple Computer continued to make money for a while with the products designed by Jobs, but after a few years the decline began and in the mid-1990s it came to the brink of bankruptcy. On December 21, 1996, the board of directors asked Jobs to return as the president’s personal advisor. Jobs accepted. He asked for a salary of one dollar a year in exchange for the guarantee that his insights, even if crazy, were accepted unconditionally. In a few months he revolutionized the products and on September 16, 1997 he became interim CEO. Apple Computer resurrected in less than a year. How did he manage? He believed that we should not let the noise of others’ opinions dull our inner voice. And, more importantly, he repeated that we must always have the courage to believe in our heart and in our intuitions, because they already know the future and know where we need to go. For Jobs, everything else was secondary.

By the time I was done, I’d made a bear bus—Just like that famous cat bus from a certain famous anime movie. The face was shaped like a bear’s, and I’d also given it legs, ears, and a tail. It was super sturdy thanks to the bear magic, so that was two birds with one stone.

But these stories people told themselves were biased by the availability of the material used to construct them. “Images of the future are shaped by experience of the past,” they wrote, turning on its head Santayana’s famous lines about the importance of history: Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. What people remember about the past, they suggested, is likely to warp their judgment of the future. “We often decide that an outcome is extremely unlikely or impossible, because we are unable to imagine any chain of events that could cause it to occur. The defect, often, is in our imagination.”¶

apparent. To counter apathy, most change agents focus on presenting an inspiring vision of the future. This is an important message to convey, but it’s not the type of communication that should come first. If you want people to take risks, you need first to show what’s wrong with the present. To drive people out of their comfort zones, you have to cultivate dissatisfaction, frustration, or anger at the current state of affairs, making it a guaranteed loss. “The greatest communicators of all time,” says communication expert Nancy Duarte—who has spent her career studying the shape of superb presentations—start by establishing “what is: here’s the status quo.” Then, they “compare that to what could be,” making “that gap as big as possible.” We can see this sequence in two of the most revered speeches in American history. In his famous inaugural address, President Franklin D. Roosevelt opened by acknowledging the current state of affairs. Promising to “speak the whole truth, frankly and boldly,” he described the dire straits of the Great Depression, only then turning to what could be, unveiling his hope of creating new jobs and forecasting, “This great nation . . . will revive and will prosper. . . . The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” When we recall Martin Luther King, Jr.’s, epic speech, what stands out is a shining image

The Greek gods, these beautiful figures, of more than human perfection, but still of human shape. This means that for the Greeks, only the perfected man is divine. Or, to use a Biblical expression, only the perfected man is in the image of God, not man as man. And this is decisive for the later development. In other words, what we would call the non-democratic character of the Greeks, even of Greek democracy, that is implied in that. Only men of a certain perfection are truly human beings, not man as such. And therefore, this leads to the fact, which Hegel points out, that the famous anthropomorphism of Greek religion is imperfect because it abstracts from the ugly, the imperfect, suffering, pain, death. And this is according to Hegel, the superiority of Christianity, because God has become a man, a suffering man, and died. [For the Greeks…] God appears in products of the human imagination and not in the flesh. That is the limitation of Greek anthropomorphism.

You cannot defeat me,” the doppler snarled. “Because I am you, Geralt.” “You are mistaken, Tellico,” the Witcher said softly. “Drop your sword and resume Biberveldt’s form. Otherwise you’ll regret it, I warn you.” “I am you,” the doppler repeated. “You will not gain an advantage over me. You cannot defeat me, because I am you!” “You cannot have any idea what it means to be me, mimic.” Tellico lowered the hand gripping the sword. “I am you,” he repeated. “No,” the Witcher countered, “you are not. And do you know why? Because you’re a poor, little, good-natured doppler. A doppler who, after all, could have killed Biberveldt and buried his body in the undergrowth, by so doing gaining total safety and utter certainty that he would not be unmasked, ever, by anybody, including the halfling’s spouse, the famous Gardenia Biberveldt. But you didn’t kill him, Tellico, because you didn’t have the courage. Because you’re a poor, little, good-natured doppler, whose close friends call him Dudu. And whoever you might change into you’ll always be the same. You only know how to copy what is good in us, because you don’t understand the bad in us. That’s what you are, doppler.” Tellico moved backwards, pressing his back against the tent’s canvas. “Which is why,” Geralt continued, “you will now turn back into Biberveldt and hold your hands out nicely to be tied up. You aren’t capable of defying me, because I am what you are unable of copying. You are absolutely aware of this, Dudu. Because you took over my thoughts for a moment.” Tellico straightened up abruptly. His face’s features, still those of the Witcher, blurred and spread out, and his white hair curled and began to darken. “You’re right, Geralt,” he said indistinctly, because his lips had begun to change shape. “I took over your thoughts. Only briefly, but it was sufficient. Do you know what I’m going to do now?” The leather witcher jacket took on a glossy, cornflower blue colour. The doppler smiled, straightened his plum bonnet with its egret’s feather, and tightened the strap of the lute slung over his shoulder. The lute which had been a sword a moment ago. “I’ll tell you what I’m going to do, Witcher,” he said, with the rippling laughter characteristic of Dandelion. “I’ll go on my way, squeeze my way into the crowd and change quietly into any-old-body, even a beggar. Because I prefer being a beggar in Novigrad to being a doppler in the wilds.

What became clear in Michigan was that Julian and Sissy have become the fully realized version of themselves through success. That's actually rare. I profile famous and successful athletes for a living and almost no one understands that success is merely a currency to spend on one big purchase. Do you use it to try to get more success? To maintain the attention and bright lights? Or do you buy a life with it? The kind of life most people really want. I wanted what they have, wanted to organize the next act of my life, the one that moved finally past my youthful dreams and the rage and ambition that come shaped and fueled by my most broken and insecure self.

To counter apathy, most change agents focus on presenting an inspiring vision of the future. This is an important message to convey, but it’s not the type of communication that should come first. If you want people to take risks, you need first to show what’s wrong with the present. To drive people out of their comfort zones, you have to cultivate dissatisfaction, frustration, or anger at the current state of affairs, making it a guaranteed loss. “The greatest communicators of all time,” says communication expert Nancy Duarte—who has spent her career studying the shape of superb presentations—start by establishing “what is: here’s the status quo.” Then, they “compare that to what could be,” making “that gap as big as possible.” We can see this sequence in two of the most revered speeches in American history. In his famous inaugural address, President Franklin D. Roosevelt opened by acknowledging the current state of affairs. Promising to “speak the whole truth, frankly and boldly,” he described the dire straits of the Great Depression, only then turning to what could be, unveiling his hope of creating new jobs and forecasting, “This great nation . . . will revive and will prosper. . . . The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” When we recall Martin Luther King, Jr.’s, epic speech, what stands out is a shining image of a brighter future. Yet in his 16-minute oration, it wasn’t until the eleventh minute that he first mentioned his dream. Before delivering hope for change, King stressed the unacceptable conditions of the status quo. In his introduction, he pronounced that, despite the promise of the Emancipation Proclamation, “one hundred years later, the life of the Negro is still sadly crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination.” Having established urgency through depicting the suffering that was, King turned to what could be: “But we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt.” He devoted more than two thirds of the speech to these one-two punches, alternating between what was and what could be by expressing indignation at the present and hope about the future. According to sociologist Patricia Wasielewski, “King articulates the crowd’s feelings of anger at existing inequities,” strengthening their “resolve that the situation must be changed.” The audience was only prepared to be moved by his dream of tomorrow after he had exposed the nightmare of today.

A divorced or separated person wasn’t allowed to enter the family home, for example, and all Protestants were regarded as automatically destined for damnation. Rosa, however, broke through that rigidity, shaping a more generous faith that later flowered in the Argentine pope’s most famous line, “Who am I to judge?

in North India would have remained ‘unbrokenly’ visible to sky-watchers there. Diti was then the visible portion of the southern hemisphere of the heavens, a portion which changes (is ‘bound’ or ‘broken’) day by day as the Earth shifts her position in space. Diti and Aditi are the two wives of the Rishi Kashyapa (‘The Tortoise’), who is the tortoise-shaped firmament. Aditi, whom we met in “The Greatness of Saturn” in the chapter on the Sun, is the ‘mother’ (the home, the womb) of all the deities (stars, constellations, and planets). Prominent among Aditi’s s children are the twelve solar deities known as the Twelve Adityas (‘sons of Aditi’), each of which rules one month of the year (= one constellation of the zodiac). Each Adirya courses through the skies in his chariot drawn by seven green horses (the seven Vedic meters, which with the chariot represent all the Vedas and all there is to know, including infinite space). Aditi’s most famous child was Vamana, the incarnation of Vishnu who took birth that he might beg the universe back from Bali, king of the asuras (who reside in the southern celestial hemisphere). While Bali may represent some particular

Or, as Eric Schmidt told a reporter when asked just how Google determines the application of its famous unofficial motto, “Evil is what Sergey says is evil.

John Adams famously pointed out, political wisdom has not improved over the ages; even as technology has advanced, mankind steps on the same rakes, and the new inventions often magnify the damage. Historian Daniel Boorstin referred to the nonprogressivity of human nature and politics as “Adams’ law,” but Boorstin was far too modest, for he appended several of his own astute observations to it, among which was that technology, far from fulfilling needs and solving problems, creates needs and spreads problems. “Boorstin’s law,” then, could be formulated thus in the modern world: beware of optimism about the social and political benefits of the Internet and social media, for while technology progresses, human nature and politics do not.21

An image began to form in her mind. There were streets, narrow and crowded with people and vehicles. Above them flashed neon lights and blinking billboards of every colour, shape and size. Some ran up the sides of buildings, others blinked on and off in store windows. In the space above the sidewalk, higher than a double-decker bus, hung flashing neon signs in bright pink, yellow, red, blue, orange, green and white. Yes, if white could be whiter than white, it was when it was in neon, Hong Mei thought. She knew Nathan Road in Kowloon was famous for its neon lights. Were these streets of Kowloon that she was seeing it her head?

Beyond the nonnegotiables of rule by the ulama and the enactment of Islamic law, Khomeini had never given much thought to what an Islamic state should look like. He once famously answered a question about his economic policies by declaring that “economics is for donkeys.” Later he observed in his dour way that “we did not make a revolution to slash the price of watermelon.” Khomeini, in short, was a classic big-picture man. To him, the details of governance mattered little, if at all. Still, his lieutenants had a country to run. Many borrowed ideas from the copious works of Sunni fundamentalist thinkers in Pakistan and the Arab world to give shape to the Islamic Republic. The state that Khomeini built would be an intolerant theocracy in which Islamic law was narrowly interpreted and implemented to limit individual and minority rights and erase all Western influences on society and culture.

We walked the length of Jackson Square, stopping to look at the work of a couple of artists who'd set up their sidewalk shops for the day. "Look." Eugenie stopped in front of an acrylic painting of a mustached man with curly dark hair, hooded eyes, and a big hooked nose. He looked like he'd steal the hubcaps off your grandmother's Cadillac. "It's Jean Lafitte, our most famous pirate," the artist said. "He was quite a character." She had no idea. She also had badly missed the mark on his looks. His hair wasn't that curly, he'd been clean-shaven the whole time I'd known him, his nose was straight and in perfect proportion to the rest of his features, and he didn't have hooded black eyes. Still, he might find it entertaining. "How much?" I asked.

Find ways for people to shape their work and the company In addition to stripping leaders of the traditional tools of power and relying on facts to make decisions, we give Googlers uncommon freedom in shaping their own work and the company. Google isn’t the first to do so. For over sixty-five years, 3M has offered its employees 15 percent of their time to explore: “A core belief of 3M is that creativity needs freedom. That’s why, since about 1948, we’ve encouraged our employees to spend 15% of their working time on their own projects. To take our resources, to build up a unique team, and to follow their own insights in pursuit of problem-solving.”103 Post-it Notes famously came out of this program, as did a clever abrasive material, Trizact, which somehow sharpens itself as it’s used.

We should sing as we speak. I feel almost all vocal problems can be solved by shaping the singing technique to conform to the speaking technique. Singing is simply sustained speech.

As a self-confessed Pre-Raphaelite - a term that by the 1880s was interchangeable with ‘Aesthete’ - Constance was carrying a torch whose flame had ben lit in the 1850s by a group of women associated with the founding Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood painters. Women such as Elizabeth Siddal and Jane Morris, the wives respectively of the painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the poet, designer and socialist William Morris, had modelled for the Pre-Raphaelite artists, wearing loose, flowing gowns. But it was not just their depiction on canvas that sparked a new fashion among an intellectual elite. Off canvas these women also establised new liberties for women that some twenty years later were still only just being taken up by a wider female population. They pioneered new kinds of dresses, with sleeves either sewn on at the shoulder, rather than below it, or puffed and loose. While the rest of the female Victorian populace had to go about with their arms pinned to their bodies in tight, unmoving sheaths, the Pre-Raphaelite women could move their arms freely, to paint or pose or simply be comfortable. The Pre-Raphaelite girls also did away with the huge, bell-shaped crinoline skirts, held out by hoops and cages strapped on to the female undercarriage. They dispensed with tight corsets that pinched waists into hourglasses, as well as the bonnets and intricate hairstyles that added layer upon layer to a lady’s daily toilette. Their ‘Aesthetic’ dress, as it became known, was more than just a fashion; it was a statement. In seeking comfort for women it also spoke of a desire for liberation that went beyond physical ease. It was also a statement about female creative expression, which in itself was aligned to broader feminist issues. The original Pre-Raphaelite sisterhood lived unconventionally with artists, worked at their own artistic projects and became famous in the process. Those women who were Aesthetic dress in their wake tended to believe that women should have the right to a career and ultimately be enfranchised with the vote. […] And so Constance, with ‘her ugly dresses’, her schooling and her college friends, was already in some small degree a young woman going her own way. Moving away from the middle-class conventions of the past, where women were schooled by governesses at home, would dress in a particular manner and be chaperoned, Constance was already modern.

Think of Sir Isaac Newton. He spent two years working on what became Principia Mathematica, his famous writings on universal gravitation and the three laws of motion. This period of almost solitary confinement proved critical in what became a true breakthrough that shaped scientific thinking for the next three hundred years.

since humans are not famous for being strictly logical. These

The blessing proved to be prophetic. Boaz and Ruth were married , and the Lord soon blessed them with a son. At the birth of this child, the women of Bethlehem gave a blessing to Naomi as well: Bless be the Lord, who has not left you this day without a close relative; and may his name be famous in Israel! And may he be to you a restorer of life and a nourisher of your old age; for your daughter-in-law, who loves you, who is better to you than seven sons, has borne Him.

The stainless-steel mold gives the cheese its disc shape, about ten inches thick and two feet in diameter. But the mold serves another increasingly important function, as an anticounterfeiting measure. The molds are specially produced by the Consorzio Parmigiano-Reggiano, an independent and self-regulating industry group funded by fees levied on cheese producers. Carefully tracked and numbered, molds are supplied only to licensed and inspected dairies, and each is lined with Braille-like needles that crate a pinpoint pattern instantly recognizable to foodies, spelling out the name of the cheese over and over again in a pattern forever imprinted on its rind. A similar raised-pin mold made of plastic is slipped between the steel and the cheese to permanently number the rind of every lot so that any wheel can be traced back to a particular dairy and day of origin. Like a tattoo, these numbers and the words Parmigiano-Reggiano become part of the skin. Later in its life, because counterfeiting the King of Cheeses has become a global pastime, this will be augmented with security holograms... One night, friends came to town and invited Alice out to dinner at celebrity chef Mario Batali's vaunted flagship Italian eatery, Babbo. As Alice told me this story, at one point during their meal, the waiter displayed a grater and a large wedge of cheese with great flourish, asking her if she wanted Parmigiano-Reggiano on her pasta. She did not say yes. She did not say no. Instead Alice looked at the cheese and asked, "Are you sure that's Parmigiano-Reggiano?" Her replied with certainty, "Yes." "You're sure?" "Yes." She then asked to see the cheese. The waiter panicked, mumbled some excuse, and fled into the kitchen. He returned a few minutes later with a different and much smaller chunk of cheese, which he handed over for examination. The new speck was old, dry, and long past its useful shelf-life, but it was real Parmigiano-Reggiano, evidenced by the pin-dot pattern. "The first one was Grana Padano," she explained. "I could clearly read the rind. They must have gone searching through all the drawers in the kitchen in a panic until they found this forgotten crumb of Parmigiano-Reggiano." Alice Fixx was the wrong person to try this kind of bait and switch on, but she is the exception, and I wonder how many other expense-account diners swallowed a cheaper substitute. This occurred at one of the most famous and expensive Italian eateries in the country. What do you think happens at other restaurants?

The platform can also use the extensive tool kit of revenue management techniques to shape which suppliers each buyer sees, and how prominently. It’s not too cynical to expect that a platform might use this power to feature lesser-known suppliers over more famous ones, all else being equal.

For most of recorded Western history, there have been two competing views of the shape of history. The first is inherited from the Ancient Greeks, reaching its most famous form in Polybius (200 BC–118 BC): the idea that civilisations rise and fall in cycles like the seasons. The Anacyclosis was developed from Plato (428 BC–348 BC) and Aristotle (384 BC–322 BC) but finalised by Polybius in The Histories.[18] It held that there are three types of governmental constitutions—monarchy, aristocracy, democracy—which each degenerate into a tyrannous form before giving way to the next in sequence as pictured below.

Fire and sword laid waste the Earth. Darkness stalked the land. From the ashes of defeat and the smoke of despair, the people of Earth, searching for a future, plundered the past. It was the time of the Great Concoction, when the world was remade. In the thirty-first century of Our Lord, the Europe of the past rose again in the shape of Europa. In Europa, history was reborn. The geologic upheavals of Europa's formation resulted in an acute psychic backlash, manifested in periodic shifts in reality and embodied hallucinations. Spatial dimensions became mercurial in their behaviour. Entire counties could be crammed into a field. These anomalies were exacerbated by advances in psionics which produced dream worlds that were as close to the notion of a real supernatural as makes no odds. Spectres, poltergeists, fallen angels, unfallen angels, trolls, hobgoblins, vampires, werewolves and suchlike entities sprang into pseudo-being. It was upon this ontological quicksand that the Dominions of Europa were founded, recreations of ancient European countries, each containing several time periods. Within each of these historical eras there existed a small percentage of 'Reprises'; clones of famous figures from history artificially encoded with the appropriate personality matrix. These Reprises were prone to severe identity confusion. Yet more acute was the confusion of the fictional Reprises, clones of actors who became identified with particular roles: in these cases, it was not the actor's personality that was encoded into clone-body, but the role he played. By the thirty-third century, Europa was plunging into chaos. Reality unravelled. It was a time of heroes, whimsical worlds, blood and thunder, and general Byronic excess. Dark powers arose. Fearful villagers locked their shutters at night. Fire and sword laid waste the Earth. Darkness stalked... Excerpt from The Tenebrous Testaments of the House of Rue. chapter XIV. volume CLXVII [From Count (Baron) Dracula and Baron (Count) Frankenstein]

At school, Pablo found it hard to concentrate. Rather than completing classwork, he filled the margins of his notebook with pencil sketches of animals, birds, and people. His teacher grew exasperated with his lack of attention. She wrote a note to his mother saying: “Pablo should stop drawing in class and pay attention to his lessons.” It was clear that Pablo hated rules, and he took every opportunity to disobey them. When adults told him what to do, he did the opposite. He once got in trouble for coloring the sky a bright red instead of the “normal” blue. Pablo was often banished to the “calaboose,” a bare cell with white walls and a bench, which served as a holding pen for unruly students. “I liked it there, because I took along a sketch pad and drew incessantly,” Pablo later said. “I could have stayed there forever drawing without stopping.” He even began misbehaving on purpose so that he would be sentenced to detention and sent to the calaboose. The one person who understood that Pablo wasn’t acting out for no reason was his father. One day when Pablo’s mother caught him drawing on the wall with a nail, Don José took him to the beach to blow off steam. As Don José stretched out to take a nap, Pablo sat beside him and drew a dolphin in the wet sand. When Don José awoke, he was astonished by the beauty of his son’s drawing. “Could it be Pablo who drew this?” he wondered. That afternoon, Don José took a closer look at the image Pablo had drawn on their living room wall. What at first looked like random scratches soon took shape. Don José recognized a reindeer and a bison running away from a group of men on horseback who were armed with bows and arrows. At that moment, Don José knew what to do to get Pablo to stop misbehaving. He decided to take him into his studio and teach his son how to paint. From that day onward, Pablo and his father were inseparable art partners. In search of new subjects to portray, they began going to the bullfights. Pablo was mesmerized by the sight of the brave picadors as they charged ferocious bulls. He saw El Lagartijo—“The Lizard”—one of the most famous bullfighters in Spain, and he met Cara Ancha,

Take one cup of courage. You’ll need it for the next few years to get through the moments when you doubt yourself. Add a pinch of creativity, a spoonful of stick-to-itiveness, and a heap of passion and purpose to guide you when there are no other directions to follow. Stir it up with a group of friends who love you for you-just being you, even if your different or weird or stand out. Pour in people who believe in your ability to change the world, one cupcake at a time. Then sprinkle it with fun-because that’s what makes everything sweeter. Even the mess and the mistakes and the burned batches. Oh, and the ones that taste lumpy or bitter! There are tons of those. You can get through all that if you remember the secret ingredient is fun. Fun fixes everything! Let your recipe cool, the share it. Spread the word like you spread frosting on a cupcake. And watch your cupcake rise and your business grow and your dreams take shape.

No one knows for sure who first invented glass. The earliest and most famous origin story comes from Pliny the Elder, the Roman soldier-intellectual who died in the eruption of Vesuvius in ad 79. The tale goes that many centuries earlier, Phoenician sailors had landed on a beach in what is now Israel. The Phoenicians, the great traders of the ancient era, were importing blocks of natron, an early form of soap rich in sodium (natron is why sodium’s chemical symbol is Na). Before turning in for the night, the Phoenicians lit a fire on the beach, and in the absence of anywhere else to rest their pots, they perched them on some of the natron blocks. As they lit their fire and heated the blocks of natron, something extraordinary happened. Pliny writes: “Upon its being subjected to the action of the fire, in combination with the sand of the seashore, they beheld transparent streams flowing forth of a liquid hitherto unknown: this, it is said, was the origin of glass.”[5

Speak to yourself with the kindness and encouragement you reserve for others—because the words you choose for yourself shape the person you become.