Short Hospitality Quotes

In short, physicians are getting more and more data, which requires more sophisticated interpretation and which takes more time. AI is the solution, enhancing every stage of patient care from research and discovery to diagnosis and therapy selection. As a result, clinical practice will become more efficient, convenient, personalized, and effective.

I’m a modern man, a man for the millennium. Digital and smoke free. A diversified multi-cultural, post-modern deconstruction that is anatomically and ecologically incorrect. I’ve been up linked and downloaded, I’ve been inputted and outsourced, I know the upside of downsizing, I know the downside of upgrading. I’m a high-tech low-life. A cutting edge, state-of-the-art bi-coastal multi-tasker and I can give you a gigabyte in a nanosecond! I’m new wave, but I’m old school and my inner child is outward bound. I’m a hot-wired, heat seeking, warm-hearted cool customer, voice activated and bio-degradable. I interface with my database, my database is in cyberspace, so I’m interactive, I’m hyperactive and from time to time I’m radioactive. Behind the eight ball, ahead of the curve, ridin the wave, dodgin the bullet and pushin the envelope. I’m on-point, on-task, on-message and off drugs. I’ve got no need for coke and speed. I've got no urge to binge and purge. I’m in-the-moment, on-the-edge, over-the-top and under-the-radar. A high-concept, low-profile, medium-range ballistic missionary. A street-wise smart bomb. A top-gun bottom feeder. I wear power ties, I tell power lies, I take power naps and run victory laps. I’m a totally ongoing big-foot, slam-dunk, rainmaker with a pro-active outreach. A raging workaholic. A working rageaholic. Out of rehab and in denial! I’ve got a personal trainer, a personal shopper, a personal assistant and a personal agenda. You can’t shut me up. You can’t dumb me down because I’m tireless and I’m wireless, I’m an alpha male on beta-blockers. I’m a non-believer and an over-achiever, laid-back but fashion-forward. Up-front, down-home, low-rent, high-maintenance. Super-sized, long-lasting, high-definition, fast-acting, oven-ready and built-to-last! I’m a hands-on, foot-loose, knee-jerk head case pretty maturely post-traumatic and I’ve got a love-child that sends me hate mail. But, I’m feeling, I’m caring, I’m healing, I’m sharing-- a supportive, bonding, nurturing primary care-giver. My output is down, but my income is up. I took a short position on the long bond and my revenue stream has its own cash-flow. I read junk mail, I eat junk food, I buy junk bonds and I watch trash sports! I’m gender specific, capital intensive, user-friendly and lactose intolerant. I like rough sex. I like tough love. I use the “F” word in my emails and the software on my hard-drive is hardcore--no soft porn. I bought a microwave at a mini-mall; I bought a mini-van at a mega-store. I eat fast-food in the slow lane. I’m toll-free, bite-sized, ready-to-wear and I come in all sizes. A fully-equipped, factory-authorized, hospital-tested, clinically-proven, scientifically- formulated medical miracle. I’ve been pre-wash, pre-cooked, pre-heated, pre-screened, pre-approved, pre-packaged, post-dated, freeze-dried, double-wrapped, vacuum-packed and, I have an unlimited broadband capacity. I’m a rude dude, but I’m the real deal. Lean and mean! Cocked, locked and ready-to-rock. Rough, tough and hard to bluff. I take it slow, I go with the flow, I ride with the tide. I’ve got glide in my stride. Drivin and movin, sailin and spinin, jiving and groovin, wailin and winnin. I don’t snooze, so I don’t lose. I keep the pedal to the metal and the rubber on the road. I party hearty and lunch time is crunch time. I’m hangin in, there ain’t no doubt and I’m hangin tough, over and out!

We rarely get to prepare ourselves in meadows or on graveled walks; we do it on short notice in places without windows, hospital corridors, rooms like this lounge with its cracked plastic sofa and Cinzano ashtrays, where the cafe curtains cover blank concrete. In rooms like this, with so little time, we prepare our gestures, get them by heart so we can do them when we're frightened in the face of Doom.

Perhaps you could find something more accurate. You could call yourselves the Society where Hospitality is Ignored Totally. Or, for short—

In Paris the cashiers sit rather than stand. They run your goods over a scanner, tally up the price, and then ask you for exact change. The story they give is that there aren't enough euros to go around. "The entire EU is short on coins." And I say, "Really?" because there are plenty of them in Germany. I'm never asked for exact change in Spain or Holland or Italy, so I think the real problem lies with the Parisian cashiers, who are, in a word, lazy. Here in Tokyo they're not just hard working but almost violently cheerful. Down at the Peacock, the change flows like tap water. The women behind the registers bow to you, and I don't mean that they lower their heads a little, the way you might if passing someone on the street. These cashiers press their hands together and bend from the waist. Then they say what sounds to me like "We, the people of this store, worship you as we might a god.

Apparently Quinn had woken up a short time ago and immediately asked for ice cream, knowing that kids in hospitals got whatever they wanted.

Lady Harborough... was on the platform, making a short speech in which she described the valuable work her hospital fund was doing. It seemed to consist largely of rescuing unmarried mothers from poverty and subjecting them to slavery instead, with the additional disadvantage of being preached at daily by evangelical clergymen.

Once when I asked you if you still loved your wife, you said, Love leaves the back door open. Later, you said, Love like a hospital gown opens at the back. And you slipped out.

We’re going to stop this preposterous obsession with economic growth at the cost of all else. Great economic success doesn’t produce national happiness. It produces Republicans and Switzerland. So we’re going to concentrate on just being lovely and pleasant and civilized. We’re going to have the best schools and hospitals, the most comfortable public transportation, the liveliest arts, the most useful and well-stocked libraries, the grandest parks, the cleanest streets, the most enlightened social policies. In short, we’re going to be like Sweden, but with less herring and better jokes.

When banking stops, credit stops, and when credit stops, trade stops, and when trade stops—well, the city of Chicago had only eight days of chlorine on hand for its water supply. Hospitals ran out of medicine. The entire modern world was premised on the ability to buy now and pay later.

So why, you are bound to ask at some point in your life, do microbes so often want to hurt us? What possible satisfaction could there be to a microbe in having us grow feverish or chilled, or disfigured with sores, or above all deceased? A dead host, after all, is hardly going to provide long-term hospitality.

It is unfortunate that the modern healthcare system has devolved into a mass production line of sickened people attending very short appointments with overworked doctors that are delivering substandard care that is influenced by drug companies.

…I wonder what actually this hospital is, why I am in it and who I am. I have no time to find out. I die, with my arms stretched towards the spotlights. Then whiteness. My body is still there somewhere… Buried in the extremely bright lights of empty hope.

It's this or a short hospital stay," she said, greeting Scarlett with a raised glass of a deep red liquid with a celery stalk sticking out of the top. "Bloody Marys are one of the truly medicinal cocktails. The only way I can beat this jet lag is by staying up all day, and this is going to keep me alive. And who is this?" This was directed at Marlene, who was stalking along behind Scarlett like a wet cat.

Today’s Darwinists will tell you that the task of humanity is to take charge of evolution. But ‘humanity’ is only a name for a ragtag animal with no capacity to take charge of anything. By destabilizing the climate, it is making the planet less hospitable to human life. By developing new technologies of mass communication and warfare, it has set in motion processes of evolution that may end up displacing it.

Here are some of the essential take-homes: we all need nearby nature: we benefit cognitively and psychologically from having trees, bodies of water, and green spaces just to look at; we should be smarter about landscaping our schools, hospitals, workplaces and neighborhoods so everyone gains. We need quick incursions to natural areas that engage our senses. Everyone needs access to clean, quiet and safe natural refuges in a city. Short exposures to nature can make us less aggressive, more creative, more civic minded and healthier overall. For warding off depression, lets go with the Finnish recommendation of five hours a month in nature, minimum. But as the poets, neuroscientists and river runners have shown us, we also at times need longer, deeper immersions into wild spaces to recover from severe distress, to imagine our futures and to be our best civilized selves.

Starling walked up and down the linoleum of the shabby lounge far underground. She was the only brightness in the room. We rarely get to prepare ourselves in meadows or on graveled walks; we do it on short notice in places without windows, hospital corridors, rooms like this lounge with its cracked plastic sofa and Cinzano ashtrays, where the café curtains cover blank concrete. In rooms like this, with so little time, we prepare our gestures, get them by heart so we can do them when we’re frightened in the face of Doom.

Assuming mother's absence is only for a short time, don't be too concerned if you find yourself being more relaxed than she is over what the children eat. It is far better to maintain harmony and let mother cope with the problem later. You can use the excuse "You are only having this because Mummy's in hospital!".

But he told me that most of the time he stayed on the boardwalk, facing the water, just the way we were sitting now even when it got cold and he had to wear his newspapers after he read them. And I asked him why. Why didn't he go to one of the shelters? Why didn't he check himself into the hospital for detox? And he just stared out at the ocean and said, "Look at the view, young lady. Look at the view.

But Sonja was more freakish, more wondrously confounding than the one-armed guard; rather than limbs she had, somehow, amputated expectations. She didn't have a husband, or children, or a house to clean and care for. She was capable of the work, school, time, commitment, and everything else it took to run a hospital. So even if Sonja was curt and short-tempered, Havaa could forgive her these shortcomings, which were shortcomings only in that they were the opposite of what a woman was supposed to be. The thick, stern shell hid the defiance that was Sonja's life.

Hospital waits are bad ones. The fact that they happen to pretty much all of us, sooner or later, doesn’t make them any less hideous. They’re always just a little too cold. It always smells just a little bit too sharp and clean. It’s always quiet, so quiet that you can hear the fluorescent lights - another constant, those lights - humming. Pretty much everyone else there is in the same bad predicament you are, and there isn’t much in the way of cheerful conversation. And there’s always a clock in sight. The clock has superpowers. It always seems to move too slowly. Look up at it and it will tell you the time. Look up an hour and a half later, and it will tell you two minutes have gone by. Yet it somehow simultaneously has the ability to remind you of how short life is, to make you acutely aware of how little time someone you love might have remaining to them.

We rarely get to prepare ourselves in meadows or on graveled walks; we do it on short notice in places without windows, hospital corridors, rooms like this lounge with its cracked plastic sofa and Cinzano ashtrays, where the café curtains cover blank concrete. In rooms like this, with so little time, we prepare our gestures, get them by heart so we can do them when we’re frightened in the face of Doom.

My mother was in the hospital & everyone wanted to be my friend. But I was busy making a list: good dog, bad citizen, short skeleton, tall mocha. Typical Tuesday. My mother was in the hospital & no one wanted to be her friend. Everyone wanted to be soft cooing sympathies. Very reasonable pigeons. No one had the time & our solution to it was to buy shinier watches. We were enamored with what our wrists could declare. My mother was in the hospital & I didn't want to be her friend. Typical son. Tall latte, short tale, bad plot, great wifi in the atypical café. My mother was in the hospital & she didn't want to be her friend. She wanted to be the family grocery list. Low-fat yogurt, firm tofu. She didn't trust my father to be it. You always forget something, she said, even when I do the list for you. Even then.

Genie In 1970 a child called Genie was admitted to a children’s hospital in Los Angeles. She was thirteen years old and had spent most of her life tied to a chair in a small closed room. Her father was intolerant of any kind of noise and had beaten the child whenever she made a sound. There had been no radio or television, and Genie’s only other human contact was with her mother who was forbidden to spend more than a few minutes with the child to feed her. Genie had spent her whole life in a state of physical, sensory, social and emotional deprivation. As might be expected, Genie was unable to use language when she was first brought into care. However, within a short period of time, she began to respond to the speech of others, to try to imitate sound and to communicate. Her syntax remained very simple. However, the fact that she went on to develop an ability to speak and understand a fairly large number of English words provides some evidence against the notion that language cannot be acquired at all after the critical period.

I would invite any Christian to accompany me to the children's ward of a hospital, to watch the suffering that is there being endured, and then to persist in the assertion that those children are so morally abandoned as to deserve what they are suffering. In order to bring himself to say this, a man must destroy in himself all feelings of mercy and compassion. He must, in short, make himself as cruel as the God in whom he believes. No man who believes that all is for the best in this suffering world can keep his ethical values unimpaired, since he is always having to find excuses for pain and misery.     The

Akasha, for two thousand years I have watched,' he said. 'Call me the Roman in the Arena if you will and tell me tales of the ages that went before. When I knelt at your feet I begged you for your knowledge. But what I have witnessed in this short span has filled me with awe and love for all things mortal; I have seen revolutions in thought and philosophy which I believed impossible. Is not the human race moving towards the very age of peace you describe?' Her face was a picture of disdain. 'Marius,' she said, 'this will go down as one of the bloodiest centuries in the history of the human race. What revolutions do you speak of, when millions have been exterminated by one small European nation on the whim of a madman, when entire cities were melted into oblivion by bombs? When children in desert countries of the East war on other children in the name of an ancient and despotic God? Marius, women the world over wash the fruits of their wombs down public drains. The screams of the hungry are deafening, yet unheard by the rich who cavort in technological citadels; disease runs rampant among the starving of whole continents while the sick in palatial hospitals spend the wealth of the world on cosmetics refinements and the promise of eternal life through pills and vials." She laughed softly. 'Did ever the cries of the dying ring so thickly in the ears of those of us who can hear them? Has ever more blood been shed?

The furnished room received its latest guest with a first glow of pseudo-hospitality, a hectic, haggard, perfunctory welcome like the specious smile of a demirep.

I would not take a young man to a lock-hospital to knock the hankering after women out of him, but into my soul to see the devils that were rending it.

Fredes Salvatore Mendez was on his last legs. He was on his deathbed, on the second floor in the old section of the Hospital Santo Tomas, over on Balboa Avenue." — A Requiem for Fredes Mendez.

We rarely get to prepare ourselves in meadows or on graveled walks; we do it on short notice in places without windows, hospital corridors, rooms like this lounge with its cracked plastic sofa and Cinzano ashtray, where the cafe curtains cover blank concrete. In rooms like this, with so little time, we prepare our gestures, get them by heart so we can do them when we're frightened in the face of Doom.

Things I Used to Get Hit For: Talking back. Being smart. Acting stupid. Not listening. Not answering the first time. Not doing what I’m told. Not doing it the second time I’m told. Running, jumping, yelling, laughing, falling down, skipping stairs, lying in the snow, rolling in the grass, playing in the dirt, walking in mud, not wiping my feet, not taking my shoes off. Sliding down the banister, acting like a wild Indian in the hallway. Making a mess and leaving it. Pissing my pants, just a little. Peeing the bed, hardly at all. Sleeping with a butter knife under my pillow. Shitting the bed because I was sick and it just ran out of me, but still my fault because I’m old enough to know better. Saying shit instead of crap or poop or number two. Not knowing better. Knowing something and doing it wrong anyway. Lying. Not confessing the truth even when I don’t know it. Telling white lies, even little ones, because fibbing isn’t fooling and not the least bit funny. Laughing at anything that’s not funny, especially cripples and retards. Covering up my white lies with more lies, black lies. Not coming the exact second I’m called. Getting out of bed too early, sometimes before the birds, and turning on the TV, which is one reason the picture tube died. Wearing out the cheap plastic hole on the channel selector by turning it so fast it sounds like a machine gun. Playing flip-and-catch with the TV’s volume button then losing it down the hole next to the radiator pipe. Vomiting. Gagging like I’m going to vomit. Saying puke instead of vomit. Throwing up anyplace but in the toilet or in a designated throw-up bucket. Using scissors on my hair. Cutting Kelly’s doll’s hair really short. Pinching Kelly. Punching Kelly even though she kicked me first. Tickling her too hard. Taking food without asking. Eating sugar from the sugar bowl. Not sharing. Not remembering to say please and thank you. Mumbling like an idiot. Using the emergency flashlight to read a comic book in bed because batteries don’t grow on trees. Splashing in puddles, even the puddles I don’t see until it’s too late. Giving my mother’s good rhinestone earrings to the teacher for Valentine’s Day. Splashing in the bathtub and getting the floor wet. Using the good towels. Leaving the good towels on the floor, though sometimes they fall all by themselves. Eating crackers in bed. Staining my shirt, tearing the knee in my pants, ruining my good clothes. Not changing into old clothes that don’t fit the minute I get home. Wasting food. Not eating everything on my plate. Hiding lumpy mashed potatoes and butternut squash and rubbery string beans or any food I don’t like under the vinyl seat cushions Mom bought for the wooden kitchen chairs. Leaving the butter dish out in summer and ruining the tablecloth. Making bubbles in my milk. Using a straw like a pee shooter. Throwing tooth picks at my sister. Wasting toothpicks and glue making junky little things that no one wants. School papers. Notes from the teacher. Report cards. Whispering in church. Sleeping in church. Notes from the assistant principal. Being late for anything. Walking out of Woolworth’s eating a candy bar I didn’t pay for. Riding my bike in the street. Leaving my bike out in the rain. Getting my bike stolen while visiting Grandpa Rudy at the hospital because I didn’t put a lock on it. Not washing my feet. Spitting. Getting a nosebleed in church. Embarrassing my mother in any way, anywhere, anytime, especially in public. Being a jerk. Acting shy. Being impolite. Forgetting what good manners are for. Being alive in all the wrong places with all the wrong people at all the wrong times.

The root of disaster means a star coming apart, and no image expresses better the look in a patient’s eyes when hearing a neurosurgeon’s diagnosis. Sometimes the news so shocks the mind that the brain suffers an electrical short. This phenomenon is known as a “psychogenic” syndrome, a severe version of the swoon some experience after hearing bad news. When my mother, alone at college, heard that her father, who had championed her right to an education in rural 1960s India, had finally died after a long hospitalization, she had a psychogenic seizure—which continued until she returned home to attend the funeral.

Procrustes, in Greek mythology, was the cruel owner of a small estate in Corydalus in Attica, on the way between Athens and Eleusis, where the mystery rites were performed. Procrustes had a peculiar sense of hospitality: he abducted travelers, provided them with a generous dinner, then invited them to spend the night in a rather special bed. He wanted the bed to fit the traveler to perfection. Those who were too tall had their legs chopped off with a sharp hatchet; those who were too short were stretched (his name was said to be Damastes, or Polyphemon, but he was nicknamed Procrustes, which meant “the stretcher”).

The worst thing that can befall a family is to have its mother in hospital. The entire world becomes disoriented, the home has lost its heartbeat, there is no answer when you call. [Victoria, 'Magic Might Happen']

It is always so strange that when you are working you never think of all the inspiring thoughts that made you take up the work in the first instance. Before I was in hospital at all I thought that because I suffered myself I should feel it a grand thing to relieve the sufferings of other people. But now, when I am actually doing something which I know relieves someone's pain, it is nothing but a matter of business. I may think lofty thoughts about the whole thing before or after but never at the time. At least, almost never. Sometimes some quite little thing makes me stop short all of a sudden and I feel a fierce desire to cry in the middle of whatever it is I am doing.

We rarely get to prepare ourselves in meadows or on graveled walks; we do it on short notice in places without windows, hospital corridors, rooms like this lounge with its cracked plastic sofa and Cinzano ashtrays, where the café curtains cover blank concrete.

The end of this short story could be a rather disturbing thing, if it came true. I hope you like it, and if you do, be sure to COMMENT and SHARE. Paradoxes of Destiny? Dani! My boy! Are you all right? Where are you? Have you hurt yourself? Are you all right? Daniiii! Why won’t you answer? It’s so cold and dark here. I can’t see a thing… It’s so silent. Dani? Can you hear me? I shouldn’t have looked at that text message while I was driving… I shouldn’t have done it! I'm so stupid sometimes! Son, are you all right?... We really wrecked the car when we rolled it! I can’t see or hear a thing… Am I in hospital? Am I dead…? Dani? Your silence is killing me… Are you all right?! I can see a glimmer of light. I feel trapped. Dani, are you there? I can’t move. It’s like I’m wrapped in this mossy green translucent plastic. I have to get out of here. The light is getting more and more intense. I think I can tear the wrapping that’s holding me in. I'm almost out. The light is blinding me. What a strange place. I've never seen anything like it. It doesn’t look like Earth. Am I dead? On another planet? Oh God, look at those hideous monsters! They’re so creepy and disgusting! They look like extraterrestrials. They’re aliens! I'm on another planet! I can’t believe it. I need to get the hell out here. Those monsters are going to devour me. I have to get away. I’m so scared. Am I floating? Am I flying? I’m going to go higher to try to escape. I can’t see the aliens anymore and the landscape looks less terrifying. I think I've made it. It’s very windy. Is that a highway? I think I can see some vehicles down there. Could they be the extraterrestrials’ transport? I’m going to go down a bit. I see people! Am I on Earth? Could this be a parallel universe? Where could Dani be? I shouldn’t have looked at that text message while I was driving. I shouldn’t… That tower down there looks a lot like the water tank in my town… It’s identical. But the water tank in my town doesn’t have that huge tower block next to it. It all looks very similar to my neighborhood, but it isn’t exactly the same: there are a lot of tower blocks here. There’s the river… and the factory. It’s definitely my neighborhood, but it looks kind of different. I must be in a parallel universe… It’s amazing that I can float. People don’t seem to notice my presence. Am I a ghost? I have to get back home and see if Dani’s there. God, I hope he’s safe and sound. Gabriela must be out of her mind with the crash. There’s my house! Home sweet home. And whose are those cars? The front of the house has been painted a different color… This is all so strange! There’s someone in the garden… Those trees I planted in the spring have really grown. Is… is that… Dani? Yes, yes! It’s Dani. But he looks so different… He looks older, he looks… like a big boy! What’s important is that he’s OK. I need to hug him tight and tell him how much I love him. Can he see me if I’m a ghost? I'll go up to him slowly so I don’t scare him. I need to hold him tight. He can’t see me, I won’t get any closer. He moved his head, I think he’s started to realize I’m here… Wow I’m so hungry all of a sudden! I can’t stop! How are you doing, son?! It’s me! Your dad! My dear boy? I can’t stop! I'm too hungry! Ahhhh, so delicious! What a pleasure! Nooo Daniii! Nooooo!.... I’m your daaaad!... Splat!... “Mum, bring the insect repellent, the garden’s full of mosquitoes,” grunted Daniel as he wiped the blood from the palm of his hand on his trousers. Gabriela was just coming out. She did an about turn and went back into her house, and shouted “Darling, bring the insect repellent, it’s on the fireplace…” Absolute cold and silence… THE END (1) This note is for those who have read EQUINOX—WHISPERS OF DESTINY. This story is a spin-off of the novel EQUINOX—WHISPERS OF DESTINY and revolves around Letus’s curious theories about the possibility of animal reincarnation.

You think you know what a man is? You have no idea what a man is. You think you know what a daughter is? You have no idea what a daughter is. You think you know what this country is? You have no idea what this country is. You have a false image of everything. All you know is what a fucking glove is. This country is frightening. Of course she was raped. What kind of company do you think she was keeping? Of course out there she was going to get raped. This isn't Old Rimrock, old buddy - she's out there, old buddy, in the USA. She enters that world, that loopy world out there, with whats going on out there - what do you expect? A kid from Rimrock, NJ, of course she didn't know how to behave out there, of course the shit hits the fan. What could she know? She's like a wild child out there in the world. She can't get enough of it - she's still acting up. A room off McCarter Highway. And why not? Who wouldn't? You prepare her for life milking the cows? For what kind of life? Unnatural, all artificial, all of it. Those assumptions you live with. You're still in your olf man's dream-world, Seymour, still up there with Lou Levov in glove heaven. A household tyrannized by gloves, bludgeoned by gloves, the only thing in life - ladies' gloves! Does he still tell the one about the woman who sells the gloves washing her hands in a sink between each color? Oh where oh where is that outmoded America, that decorous America where a woman had twenty-five pairs of gloves? Your kid blows your norms to kingdom come, Seymour, and you still think you know what life is?" Life is just a short period of time in which we are alive. Meredith Levov, 1964. "You wanted Ms. America? Well, you've got her, with a vengeance - she's your daughter! You wanted to be a real American jock, a real American marine, a real American hotshot with a beautiful Gentile babe on your arm? You longed to belong like everybody else to the United States of America? Well, you do now, big boy, thanks to your daughter. The reality of this place is right up in your kisser now. With the help of your daughter you're as deep in the sit as a man can get, the real American crazy shit. America amok! America amuck! Goddamn it, Seymour, goddamn you, if you were a father who loved his daughter," thunders Jerry into the phone - and the hell with the convalescent patients waiting in the corridor for him to check out their new valves and new arteries, to tell how grateful they are to him for their new lease on life, Jerry shouts away, shouts all he wants if it's shouting he wants to do, and the hell with the rules of hte hospital. He is one of the surgeons who shouts; if you disagree with him he shouts, if you cross him he shouts, if you just stand there and do nothing he shouts. He does not do what hospitals tell him to do or fathers expect him to do or wives want him to do, he does what he wants to do, does as he pleases, tells people just who and what he is every minute of the day so that nothing about him is a secret, not his opinions, his frustrations, his urges, neither his appetite nor his hatred. In the sphere of the will, he is unequivocating, uncompromising; he is king. He does not spend time regretting what he has or has not done or justifying to others how loathsome he can be. The message is simple: You will take me as I come - there is no choice. He cannot endure swallowing anything. He just lets loose. And these are two brothers, the same parents' sons, one for whom the aggression's been bred out, the other for whom the aggression's been bred in. "If you were a father who loved your daughter," Jerry shouts at the Swede, "you would never have left her in that room! You would have never let her out of your sight!

This is great. But what I’m grasping at is an idea about a subtler goal. This thinking owes a lot to conversations with Manjula Waldron of Ohio State University, an engineering professor who also happens to be a hospital chaplain. This feels embarrassingly Zen-ish for me to spout, being a short, hypomanic guy with a Brooklyn accent, but here goes: Maybe the goal isn’t to maximize the contrast between a low baseline and a high level of activation. Maybe the idea is to have both simultaneously. Huh? Maybe the goal would be for your baseline to be something more than the mere absence of activation, a mere default, but to instead be an energized calm, a proactive choice. And for the ceiling to consist of some sort of equilibrium and equanimity threading through the crazed arousal. I have felt this a few times playing soccer, inept as I am at it, where there’s a moment when, successful outcome or not, every physiological system is going like mad, and my body does something that my mind didn’t even dream of, and the two seconds when that happened seemed to take a lot longer than it should have. But this business about the calm amid the arousal isn’t just another way of talking about “good stress” (a stimulating challenge, as opposed to a threat). Even when the stressor is bad and your heart is racing in crisis, the goal should be to somehow make the fraction of a second between each heartbeat into an instant that expands in time and allows you to regroup. There, I have no idea what I’m talking about, but I think there might be something important lurking there. Enough said.

Our lives were already full, and the holidays too short for all the reading, writing, playing, cycling, and talking that we wanted to get through. We resented the appearance of any third party as an infuriating interruption. We resented even more bitterly all attempts (excepting the great and successful attempt made by Mountbracken) to show us hospitality.

I have none of the sense of decorum, the modesty, or the pessimism of my relatives, and none of their fear of what people will say, of extravagance, or of God. I don’t speak or write apologetically, instead I’m rather grandiloquent, and I like attracting attention. That is, I simply am as I am today, after a lot of living. In my childhood I was a strange little insect; in adolescence, a shy mouse—for many years my nickname was Laucha, which was what we called our ordinary household mice—and in my youthful years I was everything from a rabid feminist to a flower-crowned hippie. My worst flaw is that I tell secrets, my own and everybody else’s. In short, a disaster. If I lived in Chile no one would speak to me. But one thing I am is hospitable.

But he gave no greater gift than the one he offered me shortly before he died, and it was a gift that answers for all time the question of whether it is rational or appropriate to strive for “ambitious” therapy in those who are terminally ill. When I visited him in the hospital he was so weak he could barely move, but he raised his head, squeezed my hand, and whispered, “Thank you. Thank you for saving my life.

Wait." Walter went to the basket, taking what was a gray sleeve, drawing it out fro the middle of the heap. "Oh," He said. He held the shapeless wool sweater to his chest. Joyce had knit for months the year Daniel died, and here was the result, her handiwork, the garment that would fit a giant. It was nothing more than twelve skeins of yarn and thousands of loops, but it had the power to bring back in a flash the green-tiled walls of the hospital, the sound of an ambulance trying to cut through city traffic in the distance, the breathing of the dying boy, his father staring at the ceiling, the full greasy bucket of fried chicken on he bed table. "I'll take this one," Walter said, balling up the sweater as best he could, stuffing it into a shopping bag that was half full of the books he was taking home, that he was borrowing. "Oh, honey," Joyce said. "You don't want that old scrap." "You made it. I remember your making it." Keep it light, he said to himself, that's a boy. "There's a use for it. Don't you think so, Aunt Jeannie? No offense, Mom, but I could invade the Huns with it or strap the sleeves to my car tires in a blizzard, for traction, or protect our nation with it out in space, a shield against nuclear attack." Jeannie tittered in her usual way in spite of herself. "You always did have that sense of humor," she said as she went upstairs. When she was out of range, Joyce went to Walter's bag and retrieved the sweater. She laid it on the card table, the long arms hanging down, and she fingered the stitches. "Will you look at the mass of it," she exclaimed. "I don't even recall making it." ""'Memory -- that strange deceiver,'" Walter quoted.

Last of all-final argument based on the national politeness — the folk of Rouen said to one another that it was only right to be civil in one’s own house, provided there was no public exhibition of familiarity with the foreigner. Out of doors, therefore, citizen and soldier did not know each other; but in the house both chatted freely, and each evening the German remained a little longer warming himself at the hospitable hearth.

Are you ready to go for a sail?" John MacGuire asked his wife. A young, handsome man, he stood on the edge of a wide sandy beach, wearing summer shorts and his favorite T-shirt. He pointed toward the water behind him, to the sailboat that bobbed gently in the quiet bay. "It's the perfect day." "I can't sail. I'm sick. I don't know what happened, but I can't seem to open my eyes." Phoebe MacGuire took a quick breath as panic filled her soul and the sounds and smells of the hospital threatened to pull her out of her dream. "I'm seventy-six years old now, John. How did I get to be so old? I'm scared." "No need to be scared, my darling, not when I'm here.” "But you're not really here," she whispered, knowing his image was nothing but a memory, and her love had been gone for a very long time. "I miss you, Phoebe," he said softly, his voice as gentle as the morning breeze.

bombs brought entire cities down to their knees today refugees boarded boats knowing their feet may never touch land again police shot people dead for the color of their skin last month i visited an orphanage of abandoned babies left on the curbside like waste later at the hospital i watched a mother lose both her child and her mind somewhere a lover died how can i refuse to believe my life is anything short of a miracle if amidst all this chaos i was given this life - circumstances

Galen slides into his desk, unsettled by the way the sturdy blond boy talking to Emma casually rests his arm on the back of her seat. "Good morning," Galen says, leaning over to wrap his arms around her, nearly pulling her from the chair. He even rests his cheek against hers for good measure. "Good morning...er, Mark, isn't it?" he says, careful to keep his voice pleasant. Still, he glances meaningfully at the masculine arm still lining the back of Emma's seat, almost touching her. To his credit-and safety-Mark eases the offending limb back to his own desk, offering Emma a lazy smile full of strikingly white teeth. "You and Forza, huh? Did you clear that with his groupies?" She laughs and gently pries Galen's arms off her. Out of the corner of his eye, he sees the eruption of pink spreading like spilled paint over her face. She's not used to dating him yet. Until about ten minutes ago, he wasn't used to it either. Now though, with the way Mark eyes her like a tasty shellfish, playing the role of Emma's boyfriend feels all too natural. The bell rings, saving Emma from a reply and saving Mark thousands of dollars in hospital bills. Emma shoots Galen a withering look, which he deflects with that he hopes is an enchanting grin. He measures his success by the way her blush deepens but stops short when he notices the dark circles under her eyes. She didn't sleep last night. Not that he thought she would. She'd been quiet on the flight home from Destin two nights ago. He didn't pressure her to talk about it with him, mostly because he didn't know what to say once the conversation got started. So many times, he's started to assure her that he doesn't see her as an abomination, but it seems wrong to say it out loud. Like he's willfully disagreeing with the law. But how could those delicious-looking lips and those huge violet eyes be considered an abomination? What's even crazier is that not only does he not consider her an abomination, the fact that she could be a Half-Breed ignited a hope in him he's got no right to feel: Grom would never mate with a half human. At least, Galen doesn't think he would. He glances at Emma, whose silky eyelids don't even flutter in her state of light sleep. When he clears his throat, she startles. "Thank you," she mouths to him as she picks her pencil back up, using the eraser to trace the lines in her textbook as she reads. He acknowledges with a nod. He doesn't want to leave her like this, anxious and tense and out of place in her own beautiful skin.

The phenomenon of laborers staying on at the end of their contracts with big public works companies is likely the biggest single source of Chinese migration to Africa. Workers would arrive from a given locality in China and discover there was good money to be made in some corner of an Africa they had never before imagined viable. Soon, they were sending word back home about the fortunes to be made there, or the hospitality of the locals, or the wonders of the environment, or the joys of a free and relatively pressureless life. In short order, others would follow. Li

She realized at once that he expected trouble and that he was used to handling deadly situations. It was the first time she’d actually seen him do it, despite their long history. It gave her a new, adult perspective on his lifestyle. No wonder he couldn’t settle down and become a family man. She’d been crazy to expect it, even in her fantasies. He was used to danger and he enjoyed the challenges it presented. It would be like housing a tiger in an apartment. She sighed as she saw the last tattered dream of a future with him going up in smoke. Tate looked through the tiny peephole and took his hand away from the pistol. He glanced at Cecily with an expression she couldn’t define before he abruptly opened the door. Colby Lane walked in, eyebrows raised, new scars on his face and bone weariness making new lines in it. “Colby!” Cecily exclaimed with exaggerated delight. “Welcome home!” Tate’s face contracted as if he’d been hit. Colby noticed that, and smiled at Cecily. “Am I interrupting something?” he asked, looking from one tense face to the other. “No,” Tate said coolly as he reholstered his pistol. “We were discussing security options, but if you’re going to be around, they won’t be necessary.” “What?” “I’m fairly certain that the gambling syndicate tried to kill her,” Tate said somberly, nodding toward Cecily. “A car almost ran her down in her own parking lot. She ended up in the hospital. And decided not to tell anyone about it,” he added with a vicious glare in her direction. “Way to go, Cecily,” Colby said glumly. “You could have ended up floating in the Potomac. I told you before I left to be careful. Didn’t you listen?” She shot him a glare. “I’m not an idiot. I can call 911,” she said, insulted. Colby was still staring at Tate. “You’ve cut your hair.” “I got tired of braids,” came the short reply. “I have to get back to work. If you need me, I’ll be around.” He paused at the doorway. “Keep an eye on her,” Tate told Colby. “She takes risks.” “I don’t need a big strong man to look out for me. I can keep myself out of trouble, thank you very much,” she informed Tate. He gave her a long, pained last look and closed the door behind him. As he walked down the staircase from her apartment, he couldn’t shake off the way she looked and acted. Something was definitely wrong with her, and he was going to find out what.

Another stereotype I spent a lot of time batting down: that Christians were all spittle-spewing hatemongers. I met a few of those in my travels, of course, but they struck me as a distinct minority. Wonbo and I—two nonreligious New Yorkers, one of them gay, the other gay-friendly—were never treated with anything short of respect. Often, in fact, what we found was kindness, hospitality, and curiosity. Yes, people would always ask whether we were believers, but when we said no, there were never gasps or glares. They may have thought we were going to hell, but they were perfectly nice about it.

That's a daft name, so you're aware," Loki said. "SHARP Society. It doesn't mean anything and the S is redundant." "It stands for the Society for Hospitable Activities—" Mrs S began, but Loki interrupted. "Yes, I heard you the first time." "We picked an acronym and worked backwards," Theo muttered. "Perhaps you could find something more accurate. You could call yourselves the Society where Hospitality is Ignored Totally. Or, for short—" "Regardless of those trivialities, "we at the SHARP Society are dedicated to observing and intervening as necessary when beings from other realms travel to our planet.

For all the allure of speciously stress-free suburbs, for all the grinding of city life, cities endure. And when all those diverse energies are harnessed, and those choices, private and public, cohere, and all the bargains made in a million ways every day hold up, then a city flourishes and is the most stimulating center for life, and the most precious artifact, a culture can create. Think of great cities large and small (size, as with any work of art, does not necessarily determine value) and, in addition to nodes of government, commerce, law, hospitals, libraries, and newspapers will come to mind, as will restaurants and theaters and houses of worship and museums and opera houses and galleries and universities. And so will stadia and arenas and parks. In short, once finds not simply commerce but culture, not simply work but leisure, not only negotium but otium, not simply that which ennobles but also that which perfects us. Such has forever been the ultimate purpose of a city, to mirror our higher state, not simply to shelter us from wind and rain. As with leisure, so with the city: It is the setting to make us not the best that Nature can make us, but to manifest the best we, humankind, adding Art to Nature, can make us.

The US is a minimum of ninety-five thousand beds short of need. It’s now harder to get a bed in New York City’s Bellevue Hospital than it is to land a spot at Harvard University, wrote advocate DJ Jaffe in his devastating 2018 book Insane Consequences. Sixty-five percent of the non-urban counties in the United States have no psychiatrists and nearly half lack psychologists, too. If the situation continues as it is, by 2025, we can expect a national shortage of over fifteen thousand desperately needed psychiatrists as medical students seek higher-paying specialties and 60 percent of our current psychiatrists gray out.

I was drained of money very rapidly. In a fortnight I was reduced to short allowance; that is, I could allow myself only one meal a-day. From the keen appetite produced by constant exercise, and mountain air, acting on a youthful stomach, I soon began to suffer greatly on this slender regimen; for the single meal, which I could venture to order, was coffee or tea. Even this, however, was at length withdrawn: and afterwards, so long as I remained in Wales, I subsisted either on blackberries, hips, haws, or on the casual hospitalities which I now and then received, in return for such little services as I had an opportunity of rendering.

was common for local authorities, knowing the unpopularity of the press, to dump their undesirables. But these conscripts were wretched, and the volunteers were little better. An admiral described one bunch of recruits as being “full of the pox, itch, lame, King’s evil, and all other distempers, from the hospitals at London, and will serve only to breed an infection in the ships; for the rest, most of them are thieves, house breakers, Newgate [Prison] birds, and the very filth of London.” He concluded, “In all the former wars I never saw a parcel of turned over men half so bad, in short they are so very bad, that I don’t know how to describe it.

Stepfather—January 6, 1980 In addition to imitation mayonnaise, fake fur, sugar substitutes and plastic that wears like iron, the nuclear family has added another synthetic to its life: step-people. There are stepmothers, stepfathers, stepsons and stepdaughters. The reception they get is varied. Some are looked upon as relief pitchers who are brought in late but are optimistic enough to try to win the game. Some are regarded as double agents, who in the end will pay for their crimes. There are few generalizations you can make about step-people, except they’re all locked into an awkward family unit none of them are too crazy about. I know. I’ve been there. Perhaps you’ve heard of me. I became a hyphenated child a few years after my “real” father died. I was the only stepchild in North America to have a stepfather who had the gall to make me go to bed when I was sleepy, do homework before I went to school, and who yelled at me for wearing bedroom slippers in the snow. My real father wouldn’t have said that. My stepfather punished me for sassing my mother, wouldn’t allow me to waste food and wouldn’t let me spend money I didn’t have. My real father wouldn’t have done that. My stepfather remained silent when I slammed doors in his face, patient when I insisted my mother take “my side” and emotionless when I informed him he had no rights. My real father wouldn’t have taken that. My stepfather paid for my needs and my whims, was there through all my pain of growing up...and checked himself out of the VA hospital to give me away at my wedding. My real father...was there all the time, and I didn’t know it. What is a “real” mother, father, son or daughter? “Real” translates to something authentic, genuine, permanent. Something that exists. It has nothing to do with labor pains, history, memories or beginnings. All love begins with one day and builds. “Step” in the dictionary translates to “a short distance.” It’s shorter than you think.

A short poem from my new book, The Lost Journal of my Second Trip to Pergatory, Thorny Crowns Of course the gold one was for special occasions, weddings, etc, silver for family reunions, office-casual type affairs. Bronze was a everyday choice; during yard work its burnished surface shone in sunlight. There were various colors and holiday appropriate ones. I could never find the hatboxes they were stored in. But the wooden one was reserved for the long suffering caused by family. Stevie’s funeral, my hospital trips and sister’s rebellion rated real wood. One tip filed extra sharp produced a fine and dramatic line of blood droplets on her brow.

I would like to see a government that said: "We're going to stop this preposterous obsession with economic growth at the expense of all else. Great economic success doesn't produce national happiness. It produces Republicans and Switzerland. So we're going to concentrate on being lovely and pleasant and civilized. We're going to have the best schools and hospitals, the most comfortable public transportation, the liveliest arts, the most useful and well-stocked libraries, the cleanest streets, the most enlightened social policies. In short, we're going to be like Sweden, but with less herring and better jokes." Wouldn't that be delightful? But of course it will never happen.

Dear Mother and Dad: Since I left for college I have been remiss in writing and I am sorry for my thoughtlessness in not having written before. I will bring you up to date now, but before you read on, please sit down. You are not to read any further unless you are sitting down, okay? Well, then, I am getting along pretty well now. The skull fracture and the concussion I got when I jumped out the window of my dormitory when it caught on fire shortly after my arrival here is pretty well healed now. I only spent two weeks in the hospital and now I can see almost normally and only get those sick headaches once a day. Fortunately, the fire in the dormitory, and my jump, was witnessed by an attendant at the gas station near the dorm, and he was the one who called the Fire Department and the ambulance. He also visited me in the hospital and since I had nowhere to live because of the burntout dormitory, he was kind enough to invite me to share his apartment with him. It’s really a basement room, but it’s kind of cute. He is a very fine boy and we have fallen deeply in love and are planning to get married. We haven’t got the exact date yet, but it will be before my pregnancy begins to show. Yes, Mother and Dad, I am pregnant. I know how much you are looking forward to being grandparents and I know you will welcome the baby and give it the same love and devotion and tender care you gave me when I was a child. The reason for the delay in our marriage is that my boyfriend has a minor infection which prevents us from passing our pre-marital blood tests and I carelessly caught it from him. Now that I have brought you up to date, I want to tell you that there was no dormitory fire, I did not have a concussion or skull fracture, I was not in the hospital, I am not pregnant, I am not engaged, I am not infected, and there is no boyfriend. However, I am getting a “D” in American History, and an “F” in Chemistry and I want you to see those marks in their proper perspective. Your loving daughter, Sharon Sharon may be failing chemistry, but she gets an “A” in psychology.

The great majority of those who, like Frankl, were liberated from Nazi concentration camps chose to leave for other countries rather than return to their former homes, where far too many neighbors had turned murderous. But Viktor Frankl chose to stay in his native Vienna after being freed and became head of neurology at a main hospital in Vienna. The Austrians he lived among often perplexed Frankl by saying they did not know a thing about the horrors of the camps he had barely survived. For Frankl, though, this alibi seemed flimsy. These people, he felt, had chosen not to know. Another survivor of the Nazis, the social psychologist Ervin Staub, was saved from a certain death by Raoul Wallenberg, the diplomat who made Swedish passports for thousands of desperate Hungarians, keeping them safe from the Nazis. Staub studied cruelty and hatred, and he found one of the roots of such evil to be the turning away, choosing not to see or know, of bystanders. That not-knowing was read by perpetrators as a tacit approval. But if instead witnesses spoke up in protest of evil, Staub saw, it made such acts more difficult for the evildoers. For Frankl, the “not-knowing” he encountered in postwar Vienna was regarding the Nazi death camps scattered throughout that short-lived empire, and the obliviousness of Viennese citizens to the fate of their own neighbors who were imprisoned and died in those camps. The underlying motive for not-knowing, he points out, is to escape any sense of responsibility or guilt for those crimes. People in general, he saw, had been encouraged by their authoritarian rulers not to know—a fact of life today as well. That same plea of innocence, I had no idea, has contemporary resonance in the emergence of an intergenerational tension. Young people around the world are angry at older generations for leaving as a legacy to them a ruined planet, one where the momentum of environmental destruction will go on for decades, if not centuries. This environmental not-knowing has gone on for centuries, since the Industrial Revolution. Since then we have seen the invention of countless manufacturing platforms and processes, most all of which came to be in an era when we had no idea of their ecological impacts. Advances in science and technology are making ecological impacts more transparent, and so creating options that address the climate crisis and, hopefully, will be pursued across the globe and over generations. Such disruptive, truly “green” alternatives are one way to lessen the bleakness of Earth 2.0—the planet in future decades—a compelling fact of life for today’s young. Were Frankl with us today (he died in 1997), he would no doubt be pleased that so many of today’s younger people are choosing to know and are finding purpose and meaning in surfacing environmental facts and acting on them.

Consider this sobering statistic: Shortly before the 2009 H1N1 pandemic, CIDRAP undertook a national survey of hospital pharmacists and intensive care and emergency department doctors, as we detailed in chapter 18. The update of that survey identified more than 150 critical lifesaving drugs for all types of diseases frequently used in the United States, without which many patients would die within hours. All of them are generic and many, or their active pharmaceutical ingredients, are manufactured primarily in China or India. At the beginning of the COVID-19 outbreak, sixty-three were already unavailable to pharmacies on short notice or on shortage status under normal conditions—just one example of how vulnerable we are.

In short, the Lord's Supper was the realization of new social and political arrangements, the embodiment of the social leveling seen in Jesus' ministry, most profoundly in his acts of table fellowship. Importantly, as we have seen, these new social arrangements could only be achieved if the emotions of social stratification were confronted, eliminated, or reinterpreted. In his body metaphor, Paul dramatically reframes these heretical emotions, the emotions of contempt, disgust, honor, and social presentability. Rather, than signaling exclusion and division - the natural expulsive impulse inherent in these emotions - Paul suggests that these emotions should signal just the opposite in the Kingdom of God: honor, care, and embrace.

Sweeping the dorm soon's it's empty, I'm after dust mice under his bed when I get a smell of something that makes me realize for the first time since I been in the hospital that the big dorm full of beds, sleeps forty grown men, has always been sticky with a thousand other smells - smells of germicide, zinc ointment, and foot powder, smell of piss and sour old-man manure, of Pablum and eyewash, of musty shorts and socks musty even when they're fresh back from the laundry, the stiff odor of starch in the linen, the acid stench of morning mouths, the banana smell of machine oil, and sometimes the smell of singed hair - but never before now, before he came in, the man smell of dust and dirt from the open fields, and sweat, and work.

May I tell you what I would like to see? I would like to see a government that said: “We’re going to stop this preposterous obsession with economic growth at the cost of all else. Great economic success doesn’t produce national happiness. It produces Republicans and Switzerland. So we’re going to concentrate on just being lovely and pleasant and civilized. We’re going to have the best schools and hospitals, the most comfortable public transportation, the liveliest arts, the most useful and well-stocked libraries, the grandest parks, the cleanest streets, the most enlightened social policies. In short, we’re going to be like Sweden, but with less herring and better jokes.” Wouldn’t that be delightful? But of course it will never happen. —

She sorted through the clothes. “Do you mind wearing Emilio’s underwear?” She turned back to him with the two different styles that she’d found. “You’re about the same size. And they’re clean. They were wrapped in a paper package, like from a laundry service.” Max gave her a look, because along with the very nice, very expensive pair of black silk boxers she’d pilfered from Emilio, she’d also borrowed one of his thongs. “What?” Gina said. It was definitely a man-thong. It had all that extra room for various non-female body parts. “Don’t be ridiculous.” “I’m not,” she said, trying to play it as serious. “One, it’s been a while, maybe your tastes have changed. And two, these might actually be more comfortable, considering the placement of your bandage and—” He took the boxers from her. “Apparently I was wrong.” She turned away and started sorting through the pairs of pants and Bermuda shorts she’d grabbed, trying not to be too obvious about the fact that she was watching him out of the corner of her eye. To make sure he didn’t fall over. Right. After he got the boxers on, he took off the bathrobe and . . . Okay, he definitely wasn’t as skinny as he’d been after his lengthy stint in the hospital. Emilio’s pants probably weren’t going to fit him, after all. Although, there was one pair that looked like they’d be nice and loose . . . There they were. The Kelly green Bermuda shorts. Max gave her another one of those you’ve-got-to-be-kidding glances as he put the bathrobe over the back of another chair. “Do I really look as if I’ve ever worn shorts that color in my entire life?” She tried not to smile. “I honestly don’t think you have much choice.” She let herself look at him. “You know, you could just go with the boxers. At least until your pants dry. You know what would really work with that, though? A bowtie.” She turned, as if to go back to the closet. “I’m sure Emilio has a tux. Judging from his other clothes, it’s probably polyester and chartreuse, but maybe the bowtie is—” “Gina.” Max stopped her before she reached the door. He motioned for her to come back. She held out the green shorts, but instead of taking them, he took her arm, pulled her close. “I love you,” Max said, as if he were dispatching some terrible, dire news that somehow still managed to amuse him at least a little. Gina had been hoping that he’d say it, praying even, but the fact that he’d managed to smile, even just a bit while he did, was a miracle. And then, before her heart even had a chance to start beating again, he kissed her. And oh, she was also beyond ready for that particular marvel, for the sweet softness of his mouth, for the solidness of his arms around her. There was more of him to hold her since he’d regained his fighting weight—and that was amazing, too. She skimmed her hands across the muscular smoothness of his back, his shoulders, as his kiss changed from tender to heated. And, God. That was a miracle, too. Except she couldn’t help but wonder about those words, wrenched from him, as if it cost him his soul to speak them aloud. Why tell her this right now? Yes, she’d been waiting for years for him to say that he loved her, but . . . Max laughed his surprise. “No. Why do you . . .?” He figured it out himself. “No, no, Gina, just . . . I should’ve said it before. I should have said it years ago, but I really should have said it, you know, instead of hi.” He laughed again, clearly disgusted with himself. “God, I’m an idiot. I mean, hi? I should have walked in and said, ‘Gina, I need you. I love you, don’t ever leave me again.’” She stared at him. It was probably a good thing that he hadn’t said that at the time, because she might’ve fainted. It was obvious that he wanted her to say something, but she was completely speechless.

One of the most curious of these stories about Pauli concerns the number 137. One of the great unsolved mysteries of modern physics is the value of the fine structure constant, for while the other fundamental constants of nature are all immensely small or enormously large, this fine structure constant 1/137 turns out to be a human-sized number. This number 137 and its place in the scale of the universe particularly puzzled Pauli and continues to challenge physicists today. I was a mystery that Pauli was to take to his death, for on being admitted into the hospital, the physicist was told that he was being put into room 137. According to one version of this story on learning of his room number, Pauli said, "I will never get out of here." The physicist died shortly after.

More than anything else a dying person needs to have someone with them. This used to be recognised in hospitals, and when I trained, no one every died alone. However busy the wards, or however short the staff, a nurse was always assigned to sit with a dying person to hold their hand, stroke their forehead, or whisper a few words. Peace and quietness, even reverence for the dying, were expected and assured. I disagree wholly with the notion that there is no point in staying with an unconscious patient because he or she does not know you are there. I am perfectly certain, though years of experience and observation, that unconsciousness, as we define it, is not a state of knowing. Rather, it is a state of knowing and understanding on a different level that is beyond our immediate experience.

I say that I didn’t know how much I missed my mother until I was pregnant. I say that I didn’t know how angry I was at her for dying. I say that now that I’ve lived two and a half years with my child, and felt the intensity of our subterranean, inexpressible, and indelible knowledge of each other, I’ve gone from feeling that eleven years with my mother was not very much, not nearly enough, to knowing that to feel adored and cherished by a mother who was full of warmth and joy is quite a lot, actually. More than most people get in a lifetime. And because, as I became a mother myself, I was nurtured, for a short time, by a team of wise and skilled people at Mount Sinai Hospital (an incubator that finished off the work that my mother left undone), I’ve been able to remember, clearly, what was best in her, and to discover what was, in fact, fully formed in me.

I spend a lot of free time—in California and when I’m traveling—visiting children’s hospitals. It makes me so happy to be able to brighten those kids’ day by just showing up and talking with them, listening to what they have to say and making them feel better. It’s so sad for children to have to get sick. More than anyone else, kids don’t deserve that. They often can’t even understand what’s wrong with them. It makes my heart twist. When I’m with them, I just want to hug them and make it all better for them. Sometimes sick children will visit me at home or in my hotel rooms on the road. A parent will get in touch with me and ask if their child can visit with me for a few minutes. Sometimes when I’m with them I feel like I understand better what my mother must have gone through with her polio. Life is too precious and too short not to reach out and touch the people we can. You know, when I was going

Some judicial officials began to notice the unusual frequency of deaths among the inmates of institutions and some prosecutors even considered asking the Gestapo to investigate the killings. However, none went so far as Lothar Kreyssig, a judge in Brandenburg who specialized in matters of wardship and adoption. A war veteran and a member of the Confessing Church, Kreyssig became suspicious when psychiatric patients who were wards of the court and therefore fell within his area of responsibility began to be transferred from their institutions and were shortly afterwards reported to have died suddenly. Kreyssig wrote Justice Minister Gortner to protest against what he described as an illegal and immoral programme of mass murder. The Justice Minister's response to this and other, similar, queries from local law officers was to try once more to draft a law giving effective immunity to the murderers, only to have it vetoed by Hitler on the grounds that the publicity would give dangerous ammunition to Allied propaganda. Late in April 1941 the Justice Ministry organized a briefing of senior judges and prosecutors by Brack and Heyde, to try to set their minds at rest. In the meantime, Kreyssig was summoned to an interview with the Ministry's top official, State Secretary Roland Freisler, who informed him that the killings were being carried out on Hitler's orders. Refusing to accept this explanation, Kreyssig wrote to the directors of psychiatric hospitals in his district informing them that transfers to killing centres were illegal, and threatening legal action should they transport any of their patients who came within his jurisdiction. It was his legal duty, he proclaimed, to protect the interests and indeed the lives of his charges. A further interview with Gortner failed to persuade him that he was wrong to do this, and he was compulsorily retired in December 1941.

Her disillusionment with the business had intensified as the need to simplify her stories increased. Her original treatments for Blondie of the Follies and The Prizefighter and the Lady had much more complexity and many more characters than ever made it to the screen, and adapting The Good Earth had served as a nagging reminder of the inherent restraints of film. Frances found herself inspired by memories of Jack London, sitting on the veranda with her father as they extolled the virtues of drinking their liquor “neat,” and remembered his telling her that he went traveling to experience adventure, but “then come back to an unrelated environment and write. I seek one of nature’s hideouts, like this isolated Valley, then I see more clearly the scenes that are the most vivid in my memory.” So she arrived in Napa with the idea of writing the novel she started in her hospital bed with the backdrop of “the chaos, confusion, excitement and daily tidal changes” of the studios, but as she sat on the veranda at Aetna Springs, she knew she was still too close to her mixed feelings about the film business.48 As she walked the trails and passed the schoolhouse that had served the community for sixty years, she talked to the people who had lived there in seclusion for several generations and found their stories “similar to case histories recorded by Freud or Jung.” She concentrated on the women she saw carrying the burden in this community and all others and gave them a depth of emotion and detail. Her series of short stories was published under the title Valley People and critics praised it as a “heartbreak book” that would “never do for screen material.” It won the public plaudits of Dorothy Parker, Rupert Hughes, Joseph Hergesheimer, and other popular writers and Frances proudly viewed Valley People as “an honest book with no punches pulled” and “a tribute to my suffering sex.

On 28 June 1914 the heir to the throne, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, was assassinated in Sarajevo, capital of Bosnia, a heartland of the South Slavs. Philosophers refer to ‘the inevitable accident’, and this was a very accidental one. Some young Serb terrorists had planned to murder him as he paid a state visit. They had bungled the job, throwing a bomb that missed, and one of them had repaired to a café in a side street to sort himself out. The Archduke drove to the headquarters of the governor-general, Potiorek (where he was met by little girls performing folklore), and berated him (the two men were old enemies, as the Archduke had prevented the neurasthenic Potiorek from succeeding an elderly admirer as Chief of the General Staff). The Archduke went off in a rage, to visit in hospital an officer wounded by the earlier bomb. His automobile moved off again, a Count Harrach standing on the running board. Its driver turned left after crossing a bridge over Sarajevo’s river. It was the wrong street, and the driver was told to stop and reverse. In reverse gear such automobiles sometimes stalled, and this one did so - Count Harrach on the wrong side, away from the café where one of the assassination team was calming his nerves. Now, slowly, his target drove up and stopped. The murderer, Gavrilo Princip, fired. He was seventeen, a romantic schooled in nationalism and terrorism, and part of a team that stretches from the Russian Nihilists of the middle of the nineteenth century, exemplified especially in Dostoyevsky’s prophetic The Possessed and Joseph Conrad’s Under Western Eyes. Austria did not execute adolescents and Princip was young enough to survive. He was imprisoned and died in April 1918. Before he died, a prison psychiatrist asked him if he had any regrets that his deed had caused a world war and the death of millions. He answered: if I had not done it, the Germans would have found another excuse.

READER’S REPORT From the Parent of a College Coed Dear Mother and Dad: Since I left for college I have been remiss in writing and I am sorry for my thoughtlessness in not having written before. I will bring you up to date now, but before you read on, please sit down. You are not to read any further unless you are sitting down, okay? Well, then, I am getting along pretty well now. The skull fracture and the concussion I got when I jumped out the window of my dormitory when it caught on fire shortly after my arrival here is pretty well healed now. I only spent two weeks in the hospital and now I can see almost normally and only get those sick headaches once a day. Fortunately, the fire in the dormitory, and my jump, was witnessed by an attendant at the gas station near the dorm, and he was the one who called the Fire Department and the ambulance. He also visited me in the hospital and since I had nowhere to live because of the burntout dormitory, he was kind enough to invite me to share his apartment with him. It’s really a basement room, but it’s kind of cute. He is a very fine boy and we have fallen deeply in love and are planning to get married. We haven’t got the exact date yet, but it will be before my pregnancy begins to show. Yes, Mother and Dad, I am pregnant. I know how much you are looking forward to being grandparents and I know you will welcome the baby and give it the same love and devotion and tender care you gave me when I was a child. The reason for the delay in our marriage is that my boyfriend has a minor infection which prevents us from passing our pre-marital blood tests and I carelessly caught it from him. Now that I have brought you up to date, I want to tell you that there was no dormitory fire, I did not have a concussion or skull fracture, I was not in the hospital, I am not pregnant, I am not engaged, I am not infected, and there is no boyfriend. However, I am getting a “D” in American History, and an “F” in Chemistry and I want you to see those marks in their proper perspective. Your loving daughter, Sharon Sharon may be failing chemistry, but she gets an “A” in psychology.

McCullough points out that early treatment does not just prevent hospitalization; it quickly starves pandemics to death by stopping their spread. “Early treatment reduces the infectivity period from 14 days to about four days,” he explains. “It also allows someone to stay in the home so they don’t contaminate people outside the home. And then it has this remarkable effect in reducing the intensity and duration of symptoms so patients don’t get so short of breath, they don’t get into this panic where they feel they have to break containment and go to the hospital.” McCullough says that those hospital trips are tinder for pandemics, especially since, at that point, the patient is at the height of infectivity, with teeming viral loads. “Every hospitalization in America—and there’s been millions of them—has been a super-spreader event. Sick patients contaminate their loved ones, paramedics, Uber drivers, people in the clinic and offices. It becomes a total mess.” McCullough says that by treating COVID-19 at home, doctors actually can extinguish the pandemic.

In marked contrast to the relaxed, typically Latin attitude of the Dominicans the Protestant missionaries were still proceeding at full blast with the fight for souls. These North American evangelists of strictly fundamentalist inclination combined in a curious fashion strict adhesion to the literal meaning of the Old Testament With mastery of the most modern technology. Most of them came from small towns in the Bible Belt, armed with unshakably clear consciences and a rudimentary smattering of theology, convinced that they alone were the repositories of Christian values now abolished elsewhere. Totally ignorant of the vast world, despite their transplantation, and taking the few articles of morality accepted in the rural Amenca of their childhoods to be a universal credo, they strove bravely to spread these principles of salvation all around them. Their rustic faith was well served by a flotilla of light aircraft, a powerful radio, an ultra-modern hospital and four-wheel-drive vehicles -- in short, all the equipment that a battalion of crusaders dropped behind enemy lines needed.

It was love at first sight. The first time Yossarian saw the chaplain he fell madly in love with him. Yossarian was in the hospital with a pain in his liver that fell just short of being jaundice. The doctors were puzzled by the fact that it wasn't quite jaundice. If it became jaundice they could treat it. If it didn't become jaundice and went away they could discharge him. But this just being short of jaundice all the time confused them. Each morning they came around, three brisk and serious men with efficient mouths and inefficient eyes, accompanied by brisk and serious Nurse Duckett, one of the ward nurses who didn't like Yossarian. They read the chart at the foot of the bed and asked impatiently about the pain. They seemed irritated when he told them it was exactly the same. 'Still no movement?' the full colonel demanded. The doctors exchanged a look when he shook his head. 'Give him another pill.' Nurse Duckett made a note to give Yossarian another pill, and the four of them moved along to the next bed. None of the nurses liked Yossarian. Actually, the pain in his liver had gone away, but Yossarian didn't say anything and the doctors never suspected. They just suspected that he had been moving his bowels and not telling anyone.

To get an initial hint of the distance between the mind-set of parable's original audience and our own twenty-first-century perspectives, we might begin by reflecting briefly on the term 'good Samaritan.' Today, we use the term as if it were not peculiar. Yet as far as I am aware, there are not 'Good Catholic' or 'Good Baptist' hospitals; there are not social service organizations called 'Good Episcopalian' or 'Good Mexican' or 'Good Arab.' To label the Samaritan, any Samaritan, a 'good Samaritan' should be, in today's climate, seen as offensive. It is tantamount to saying, 'He's a good Muslim' (as opposed to all those others who, in this configuration, would be terrorists) or 'She's a good immigrant' (as opposed to all those others who, in this same configuration, are here to take our jobs or scam our welfare system), or, as Heinrich Himmler put it to a gathering of SS officers, every German 'has his decent Jew' - that is, knows one good Jew - and as far as Himmler was concerned, even one was too many, because that might create sympathy. The problem with the labeling is not simply a lack of sensitivity toward the Samaritan people - yes, there are still Samaritans. It is also a lack of awareness of how odd the expression 'good Samaritan' would have seemed to Jesus's Jewish contemporaries.

Yet the homogeneity of contemporary humanity is most apparent when it comes to our view of the natural world and of the human body. If you fell sick a thousand years ago, it mattered a great deal where you lived. In Europe, the resident priest would probably tell you that you had made God angry and that in order to regain your health you should donate something to the church, make a pilgrimage to a sacred site, and pray fervently for God’s forgiveness. Alternatively, the village witch might explain that a demon had possessed you and that she could cast it out using song, dance, and the blood of a black cockerel. In the Middle East, doctors brought up on classical traditions might explain that your four bodily humors were out of balance and that you should harmonize them with a proper diet and foul-smelling potions. In India, Ayurvedic experts would offer their own theories concerning the balance between the three bodily elements known as doshas and recommend a treatment of herbs, massages, and yoga postures. Chinese physicians, Siberian shamans, African witch doctors, Amerindian medicine men—every empire, kingdom, and tribe had its own traditions and experts, each espousing different views about the human body and the nature of sickness, and each offering their own cornucopia of rituals, concoctions, and cures. Some of them worked surprisingly well, whereas others were little short of a death sentence. The only thing that united European, Chinese, African, and American medical practices was that everywhere at least a third of all children died before reaching adulthood, and average life expectancy was far below fifty.14 Today, if you happen to be sick, it makes much less difference where you live. In Toronto, Tokyo, Tehran, or Tel Aviv, you will be taken to similar-looking hospitals, where you will meet doctors in white coats who learned the same scientific theories in the same medical colleges. They will follow identical protocols and use identical tests to reach very similar diagnoses. They will then dispense the same medicines produced by the same international drug companies. There are still some minor cultural differences, but Canadian, Japanese, Iranian, and Israeli physicians hold much the same views about the human body and human diseases. After the Islamic State captured Raqqa and Mosul, it did not tear down the local hospitals. Rather, it launched an appeal to Muslim doctors and nurses throughout the world to volunteer their services there.15 Presumably even Islamist doctors and nurses believe that the body is made of cells, that diseases are caused by pathogens, and that antibiotics kill bacteria.

During the course of these chats, Raymond asked again about Mummy—why I hadn’t told her I’d been unwell, why she never visited me, or I her, until finally I gave in and provided him with a potted biography. He already knew about the fire, of course, and that I’d been brought up in care afterward. That, I told him, was because it wasn’t possible for me to live with Mummy afterward, not where she was. It was, I’d hoped, enough to keep him quiet, but no. “Where is she, then? Hospital, nursing home?” he guessed. I shook my head. “It’s a bad place, for bad people,” I said. He thought for a moment. “Not prison?” He looked shocked. I held his gaze but said nothing. After another short pause he asked, not unreasonably, what crime she had committed. “I can’t remember,” I said. He stared at me, then snorted. “Bullshit,” he said. “Come on, Eleanor. You can tell me. It won’t change anything between us, I promise. It’s not like you did it, whatever it was.” I felt a hot flush streak right up the front of my body and then down my back, a sensation I can only liken to being given a sedative prior to a general anesthetic. My pulse was pounding. “It’s true,” I said. “I honestly don’t know. I think I must have been told at the time, but I can’t remember. I was only ten. Everyone was really careful never to mention it around me . . .

As many speakers noted, this tool wasn’t particularly well suited for assessing outcomes of a psychiatric drug. How could a study of a neuroleptic possibly be “double-blind”? The psychiatrist would quickly see who was on the drug and who was not, and any patient given Thorazine would know he was on a medication as well. Then there was the problem of diagnosis: How would a researcher know if the patients randomized into a trial really had “schizophrenia”? The diagnostic boundaries of mental disorders were forever changing. Equally problematic, what defined a “good outcome”? Psychiatrists and hospital staff might want to see drug-induced behavioral changes that made the patient “more socially acceptable” but weren’t to the “ultimate benefit of the patient,” said one conference speaker.11 And how could outcomes be measured? In a study of a drug for a known disease, mortality rates or laboratory results could serve as objective measures of whether a treatment worked. For instance, to test whether a drug for tuberculosis was effective, an X-ray of the lung could show whether the bacillus that caused the disease was gone. What would be the measurable endpoint in a trial of a drug for schizophrenia? The problem, said NIMH physician Edward Evarts at the conference, was that “the goals of therapy in schizophrenia, short of getting the patient ‘well,’ have not been clearly defined.

On the playground, “cooties” seems harmless and innocuous (unless you’ve been on the other end of that game). But sociomoral disgust can quickly scale up in intensity and become the engine behind the very worst of human atrocities. During times of social stress or chaos, those persons or populations already associated with disgust properties will provide the community a location of blame, fear, and paranoia. In short, sociomoral disgust is implicated in the creation of monsters and scapegoats, where outgroup members are demonized and selected for exclusion or elimination. As David Gilmore writes in his book Monsters, a monster is “the demonization of the ‘Other’ in the image of the monster as a political device for scapegoating those whom the rules of society deem impure or unworthy - the transgressors and deviants.” These deviants are considered to be “deformed, amoral, [and] unsocialized to the point of inhumanness.” Take, for an example, the Nazi propaganda film The Eternal Jew, where an early shot in the film showed rats emerging from a sewer juxtaposed with a crowd of Jewish persons in a Polish city. In America, as another example, proponents of anti-gay legislation have circulated pamphlets claiming that gay men eat human feces and drink human blood. In each of these instances, sociomoral disgust is used to demonize and scapegoat populations, creating “monsters” who are threatening to society.

Max’s unflinching gaze never left that house. “What do you think’s going to happen?” Jules asked him quietly, “if you let yourself peel that giant S off your shirt and take a nap? If you let yourself spend an hour, an evening, screw it, a whole weekend doing nothing more than breaking and taking enjoyment from living in the moment? What’s going to happen, Max, if—after this is over—you give yourself permission to actually enjoy Gina’s company? To sit with her arms around you and let yourself be happy. You don’t have to be happy forever—just for that short amount of time.” Max didn’t say anything. So Jules went on. “And then maybe you could let yourself be happy again the next weekend. Not too happy,” he added quickly. “We wouldn’t want that. But just happy in a small way, because this amazing woman is part of your life, because she makes you smile and probably fucks like a dream and yeah—see? You are listening. Don’t kill me, I was just making sure you hadn’t checked out.” Max was giving him that look. “Are you done?” “Oh, sweetie, we have nowhere to go and hours til dawn. I’m just getting started.” Shit, Max said with his body language. But he didn’t stand up and walk away. He just sat there. Across the street, nothing moved. And then it still didn’t move. But once again, Max was back to watching it not move. Jules let the silence go for an entire minute and a half. “Just in case I didn’t make myself clear,” he said, “I believe with all my heart that you deserve—completely—whatever happiness you can grab. I don’t know what damage your father did to you but—” “I don’t know if I can do that,” Max interrupted. “You know, what you said. Just go home from work and . . .” Holy shit, Max was actually talking. About this. Or at least he had been talking. Jules waited for more, but Max just shook his head. “You know what happens when you work your ass off?” Jules finally asked, and then answered the question for him. “There’s no ass there the next time. So then you have to work off some other vital body part. You have to give yourself time to regrow, recharge. When was the last time you took a vacation? Was it nineteen ninety-one or ninety-two?” “You know damn well that I took a really long vacation just—” “No, sir, you did not. Hospitalization and recovery from a near-fatal gunshot wound is not a vacation,” Jules blasted him. “Didn’t you spend any of that time in ICU considering exactly why you made that stupid mistake that resulted in a bullet in your chest? Might it have been severe fatigue caused by asslessness, caused by working said ass off too many 24-7’s in a row?” Max sighed. Then nodded. “I know I fucked up. No doubt about that.” He was silent for a moment. “I’ve been doing that a lot lately.” He glanced over to where Jones was pretending to sleep, arm up and over his eyes. “I’ve been playing God too often, too. I don’t know, maybe I’m starting to believe my own spin, and it’s coming back to bite me.” “Not in the ass,” Jules said.

My Future Self My future self and I become closer and closer as time goes by. I must admit that I neglected and ignored her until she punched me in the gut, grabbed me by the hair and turned my butt around to introduce herself. Well, at least that’s what it felt like every time I left the convalescent hospital after doing skills training for a certification I needed to help me start my residential care business. I was going to be providing specialized, 24/7 residential care and supervising direct care staff for non-verbal, non-ambulatory adult men in diapers! I ran to the Red Cross and took the certified nurse assistant class so I would at least know something about the job I would soon be hiring people to do and to make sure my clients received the best care. The training facility was a Medicaid hospital. I would drive home in tears after seeing what happens when people are not able to afford long-term medical care and the government has to provide that care. But it was seeing all the “young” patients that brought me to tears. And I had thought that only the elderly lived like this in convalescent hospitals…. I am fortunate to have good health but this experience showed me that there is the unexpected. So I drove home each day in tears, promising God out loud, over and over again, that I would take care of my health and take care of my finances. That is how I met my future self. She was like, don’t let this be us girlfriend and stop crying! But, according to studies, we humans have a hard time empathizing with our future selves. Could you even imagine your 30 or 40 year old self when you were in elementary or even high school? It’s like picturing a stranger. This difficulty explains why some people tend to favor short-term or immediate gratification over long-term planning and savings. Take time to picture the life you want to live in 5 years, 10 years, and 40 years, and create an emotional connection to your future self. Visualize the things you enjoy doing now, and think of retirement saving and planning as a way to continue doing those things and even more. However, research shows that people who interacted with their future selves were more willing to improve savings. Just hit me over the head, why don’t you! I do understand that some people can’t even pay attention or aren’t even interested in putting money away for their financial future because they have so much going on and so little to work with that they feel like they can’t even listen to or have a conversation about money. But there are things you’re doing that are not helping your financial position and could be trouble. You could be moving in the wrong direction. The goal is to get out of debt, increase your collateral capacity, use your own money in the most efficient manner and make financial decisions that will move you forward instead of backwards. Also make sure you are getting answers specific to your financial situation instead of blindly guessing! Contact us. We will be happy to help!

She stole surreptitious glances at Christopher, as she had been doing all evening, mesmerized by the sight of him. He was tawny and sun glazed, the candlelight finding threads of gold in his hair. The yellow glow struck sparkling glints in the new growth of bristle on his face. She was fascinated by the raw, restless masculinity beneath his quietness. She wanted to revel in him as one might dash out-of-doors in a storm, letting the elements have their way. Most of all she longed to talk with him…to pry each other open with words, share every thought and secret. “My sincere thanks for your hospitality,” Christopher finally said at the conclusion of the meal. “It was much needed.” “You must return soon,” Cam said, “especially to view the timber yard in operation. We have installed some innovations that you may want to use at Riverton someday.” “Thank you. I would like to see them.” Christopher looked directly at Beatrix. “Before I depart, Miss Hathaway, I wonder if you would introduce me to this notorious mule of yours?” His manner was relaxed…but his eyes were those of a predator. Beatrix’s mouth went dry. There would be no escaping him. That much was clear. He wanted answers. He would have them either now or later. “Now?” she asked wanly. “Tonight?” “If you don’t mind,” he said in a far too pleasant tone. “The barn is but a short walk from the house, is it not?” “Yes,” Beatrix said, rising from her chair. The men at the table stood obligingly. “Excuse us, please. I won’t be long.” “May I go with you?” Rye asked eagerly. “No, darling,” Amelia said, “it’s time for your bath.” “But why must I wash if I can’t see any dirt?” “Those of us who have a difficult time with godliness,” Amelia replied with a grin, “must settle for cleanliness.

Because I have already had a long leave I get none on Sundays. So the last Sunday before I go back to the front my father and eldest sister come over to see me. All day we sit in the Soldiers’ Home. Where else could we go? We don’t want to stay in the camp. About midday we go for a stroll on the moors. The hours are a torture; we do not know what to talk about, so we speak of my mother’s illness. It is now definitely cancer, she is already in the hospital and will be operated on shortly. The doctors hope she will recover, but we have never heard of cancer being cured. ”Where is she then?” I ask. ”In the Luisa Hospital,” says my father. ”In which class?” ”Third. We must wait till we know what the operation costs. She wanted to be in the third herself. She said that then she would have some company. And besides it is cheaper.” ”So she is lying there with all those people. If only she could sleep properly.” My father nods. His face is broken and full of furrows. My mother has always been sickly; and though she has only gone to the hospital when she has been compelled to, it has cost a great deal of money, and my father’s life has been practically given up to it. ”If only I knew how much the operation costs,” says he. ”Have you not asked?” ”Not directly, I cannot do that–the surgeon might take it amiss and that would not do; he must operate on mother.” Yes, I think bitterly, that’s how it is with us, and with all poor people. They don’t dare ask the price, but worry themselves dreadfully beforehand about it; but the others, for whom it is not important, they settle the price first as a matter of course. And the doctor does not take it amiss from them. ”The dressings afterwards are so expensive,” says my father. ”Doesn’t the Invalid’s Fund pay anything toward it, then?” I ask. ”Mother has been ill too long.” ”Have you any money at all?” He shakes his head: ”No, but I can do some overtime.” I know. He will stand at his desk folding and pasting and cutting until twelve o’clock at night. At eight o’clock in the evening he will eat some miserable rubbish they get in exchange for their food tickets, then he will take a powder for his headache and work on.

But nothing in my previous work had prepared me for the experience of reinvestigating Cleveland. It is worth — given the passage of time — recalling the basic architecture of the Crisis: 121 children from many different and largely unrelated families had been taken into the care of Cleveland County Council in the three short months of the summer of 1987. (p18) The key to resolving the puzzle of Cleveland was the children. What had actually happened to them? Had they been abused - or had the paediatricians and social workers (as public opinion held) been over-zealous and plain wrong? Curiously — particularly given its high profile, year-long sittings and £5 million cost — this was the one central issue never addressed by the Butler-Sloss judicial testimony and sifting of internal evidence, the inquiry's remit did not require it to answer the main question. Ten years after the crisis, my colleagues and I set about reconstructing the records of the 121 children at its heart to determine exactly what had happened to them... (p19) Eventually, though, we did assemble the data given to the Butler-Sloss Inquiry. This divided into two categories: the confidential material, presented in camera, and the transcripts of public sessions of the hearings. Putting the two together we assembled our own database on the children each identified only by the code-letters assigned to them by Butler-Sloss. When it was finished, this database told a startlingly different story from the public myth. In every case there was some prima fade evidence to suggest the possibility of abuse. Far from the media fiction of parents taking their children to Middlesbrough General Hospital for a tummy ache or a sore thumb and suddenly being presented with a diagnosis of child sexual abuse, the true story was of families known to social services for months or years, histories of physical and sexual abuse of siblings and of prior discussions with parents about these concerns. In several of the cases the children themselves had made detailed disclosures of abuse; many of the pre-verbal children displayed severe emotional or behavioural symptoms consistent with sexual abuse. There were even some families in which a convicted sex offender had moved in with mother and children. (p20)

While Mum was a busy working mother, helping my father in his constituency duties and beyond, Lara became my surrogate mum. She fed me almost every supper I ate--from when I was a baby up to about five years old. She changed my nappies, she taught me to speak, then to walk (which, with so much attention from her, of course happened ridiculously early). She taught me how to get dressed and to brush my teeth. In essence, she got me to do all the things that either she had been too scared to do herself or that just simply intrigued her, such as eating raw bacon or riding a tricycle down a steep hill with no brakes. I was the best rag doll of a baby brother that she could have ever dreamt of. It is why we have always been so close. To her, I am still her little baby brother. And I love her for that. But--and this is the big but--growing up with Lara, there was never a moment’s peace. Even from day one, as a newborn babe in the hospital’s maternity ward, I was paraded around, shown off to anyone and everyone--I was my sister’s new “toy.” And it never stopped. It makes me smile now, but I am sure it is why in later life I craved the peace and solitude that mountains and the sea bring. I didn’t want to perform for anyone, I just wanted space to grow and find myself among all the madness. It took a while to understand where this love of the wild came from, but in truth it probably developed from the intimacy found with my father on the shores of Northern Ireland and the will to escape a loving but bossy elder sister. (God bless her!) I can joke about this nowadays with Lara, and through it all she still remains my closest ally and friend; but she is always the extrovert, wishing she could be on the stage or on the chat show couch, where I tend just to long for quiet times with my friends and family. In short, Lara would be much better at being famous than me. She sums it up well, I think: Until Bear was born I hated being the only child--I complained to Mum and Dad that I was lonely. It felt weird not having a brother or sister when all my friends had them. Bear’s arrival was so exciting (once I’d got over the disappointment of him being a boy, because I’d always wanted a sister!). But the moment I set eyes on him, crying his eyes out in his crib, I thought: That’s my baby. I’m going to look after him. I picked him up, he stopped crying, and from then until he got too big, I dragged him around everywhere.

Monday, September 17, 1945 We all drove to the airfield in the morning to see Gay and Murnane off in the C-47 /belonging to the Army. Then General Eisenhower and I drove to Munich where we inspected in conjunction with Colonel Dalferes a Baltic displaced persons camp. The Baltic people are the best of the displaced persons and the camp was extremely clean in all respects. Many of the people were in costume and did some folk dances and athletic contest for our benefit. We were both, I think, very much pleased with conditions here. The camp was situated in an old German regular army barracks and they were using German field kitchens for cooking. From the Baltic camp, we drove for about 45 minutes to a Jewish camp in the area of the XX Corps. This camp was established in what had been a German hospital. The buildings were therefore in a good state of repair when the Jews arrived but were in a bad state of repair when we arrived, because these Jewish DP's, or at least a majority of them, have no sense of human relationships. They decline, when practicable, to use latrines, preferring to relive themselves on the floor. The hospital which we investigated was fairly good. They also had a number of sewing machines and cobbler instruments which they had collected, but since they had not collected the necessary parts, they had least fifty sewing machines they could not use, and which could not be used by anyone else because they were holding them. This happened to be the feast of Yom Kippur, so they were all collected in a large wooden building which they called a synagogue. It behooved General Eisenhower to make a speech to them. We entered the synagogue, which was packed with the greatest stinking bunch of humanity I have ever seen. When we got about half way up, the head rabbi, who was dressed in a fur hat similar to that worn by Henry VIII of England, and in a surplice heavily embroidered and very filthy, came down and met the General. A copy of Talmud, I think it is called, written on a sheet and rolled around a stick, was carried by one of the attending physicians. First, a Jewish civilian made a very long speech which nobody seemed inclined to translate. Then General Eisenhower mounted the platform and I went up behind him and he made a short and excellent speech, which was translated paragraph by paragraph. The smell was so terrible that I almost fainted, and actually about three hours later, lost my lunch as the result of remembering it. From here we went to the Headquarters of the XX Corps, where General Craig gave us an excellent lunch which I, however, was unable to partake of, owing to my nausea.

As Dr. Fauci’s policies took hold globally, 300 million humans fell into dire poverty, food insecurity, and starvation. “Globally, the impact of lockdowns on health programs, food production, and supply chains plunged millions of people into severe hunger and malnutrition,” said Alex Gutentag in Tablet Magazine.27 According to the Associated Press (AP), during 2020, 10,000 children died each month due to virus-linked hunger from global lockdowns. In addition, 500,000 children per month experienced wasting and stunting from malnutrition—up 6.7 million from last year’s total of 47 million—which can “permanently damage children physically and mentally, transforming individual tragedies into a generational catastrophe.”28 In 2020, disruptions to health and nutrition services killed 228,000 children in South Asia.29 Deferred medical treatments for cancers, kidney failure, and diabetes killed hundreds of thousands of people and created epidemics of cardiovascular disease and undiagnosed cancer. Unemployment shock is expected to cause 890,000 additional deaths over the next 15 years.30,31 The lockdown disintegrated vital food chains, dramatically increased rates of child abuse, suicide, addiction, alcoholism, obesity, mental illness, as well as debilitating developmental delays, isolation, depression, and severe educational deficits in young children. One-third of teens and young adults reported worsening mental health during the pandemic. According to an Ohio State University study,32 suicide rates among children rose 50 percent.33 An August 11, 2021 study by Brown University found that infants born during the quarantine were short, on average, 22 IQ points as measured by Baylor scale tests.34 Some 93,000 Americans died of overdoses in 2020—a 30 percent rise over 2019.35 “Overdoses from synthetic opioids increased by 38.4 percent,36 and 11 percent of US adults considered suicide in June 2020.37 Three million children disappeared from public school systems, and ERs saw a 31 percent increase in adolescent mental health visits,”38,39 according to Gutentag. Record numbers of young children failed to reach crucial developmental milestones.40,41 Millions of hospital and nursing home patients died alone without comfort or a final goodbye from their families. Dr. Fauci admitted that he never assessed the costs of desolation, poverty, unhealthy isolation, and depression fostered by his countermeasures. “I don’t give advice about economic things,”42 Dr. Fauci explained. “I don’t give advice about anything other than public health,” he continued, even though he was so clearly among those responsible for the economic and social costs.

Sunday, May 7, 1944 I should be deeply ashamed of myself, and I am. What's done can't be undone, but at least you can keep it from happening again...I'm not all that ugly, or that stupid, I have a sunny disposition, and I want to develop a good character! Monday, May 22, 1944 ...Could anyone, regardless of whether they're Jews or Christians, remain silent in the face of German pressure? Everyone knows it's practically impossible, so why do they ask the impossible of the Jews? Thursday, May 25, 1944 The world's been turned upside down. The most decent people are being sent to concentration camps, prisons and lonely cells, while the lowest of the low rule over young and old, rich and poor...Unless you're a Nazi, you don't know what's going to happen to you from one day to the next. ...We're going to be hungry, but nothing's worse than being caught. Friday, May 26, 1944 ...That gap, that enormous gap, is always there. One day we're laughing at the comical side of life in hiding, and the next day (there are many such days), we're frightened, and the fear, tension and despair can be read on our faces. ...But they also have their outings, their visits with friends, their everyday lives as ordinary people, so that the tension is sometimes relieved, if only for a short while, while ours never is, never has been, not once in the two years we've been here. How much longer will this increasingly oppressive, unbearable weight press down on us? ... ...What will we do if we're ever...no, I mustn't write that down. But the question won't let itself be pushed to the back of my mind today; on the contrary, all the fear I've ever felt is looming before me in all its horror. ... I've asked myself again and again whether it wouldn't have been better if we hadn't gone into hiding, if we were dead now and didn't have to go through this misery, especially so that the others could be spared the burden. But we all shrink from this thought. We still love life, we haven't yet forgotten the voice of nature, and we keep hoping, hoping for...everything. Let something happen soon, even an air raid. Nothing can be more crushing than this anxiety. Let the end come, however cruel; at least then we'll know whether we are to be victors or the vanquished. Tuesday, June 13, 1944 Is it because I haven't been outdoors for so long that I've become so smitten with nature? ... Many people think nature is beautiful, many people sleep from time to time under the starry sky, and many people in hospitals and prisons long for the day when they'll be free to enjoy what nature has to offer. But few are as isolated and cut off as we are from the joys of nature, which can be shared by rich and poor alike. It's not just my imagination - looking at the sky, the clouds, the moon and the stars really does make me feel calm and hopeful. It's much better medicine than Valerian or bromide. Nature makes me feel humble and ready to face every blow with courage! ...Nature is the one thing for which there is no substitute.

Just as the financial crisis was incubated when unaccountable bank executives created a culture of rewarding short-term profits without wanting to know the ugly details about their mortgage-backed securities, so too does medicine’s lack of accountability create an institutional culture that fosters overtreating and runaway costs.

The middle classes did not go to public hospitals; those places were reserved for workers, child-mothers, and those unfortunates who had wasted their inheritance, ‘squandered the lot’, and thus deserved the worst punishments, those, in short, who had gone to rack and ruin. Families would warn their wastrel offspring, their prodigal sons, that ‘You’ll end up in hospital!’, that is, poor, alone and ashamed . Seeing the forbidding exteriors of these institutions, their gloomy corridors, the miserable huddles of mourners that sometimes emerged, used to make me think vaguely of leper colonies.

What remained of that Baghdad, I wondered? The Baghdad of fountains of knowledge. The Baghdad at the centre, the fulcrum of a globalized culture that went on to humanize Europe: the Baghdad that taught Europe the distinction between civil society and barbarism, the difference between medicine and magic, and the importance of experimental method; the Baghdad that trained the West in scholastic and philosophic method, drilled it in making surgical instruments, told it how to establish and run hospitals and provided it with the model of a university complete with curriculum and syllabus, terminology and administrative structure; the Baghdad that schooled Europe in the importance of biography, the novella, the history of cities and historical and textual criticism. In short, the Baghdad that gave Europe its most prized possession: liberal humanism. By what intellectual conjuring trick had Europe self-servingly made the reality of its cultural debt disappear into a fairy-tale dream of Sinbad, Aladdin, harem ladies in diaphanous veils, the subject matter of pantomime and other such dissembling misrepresentations?

The hospital is a kind of zombie-land full of hideous monsters with bandaged heads, half skulls, dragging the left half of their body, trailing a leg behind them as they go, surrounded by sticks and helpers and dribble. Any one of them could be the future you. Is this really better, or is it worse? Is a short life better – or is a longer life half-lived worth more? I used to dread my appointments in that place, a place of cures but also a place of horrors around every corner, reminders of what you might become. What would those people give to be normal, assuming they even knew what that was anymore? And just two blocks away – a busy road, people driving without a care in the world. Jogging without thinking, their biggest drama being the fact that their phone is on 10 per cent charge.

Along with their bishops, pastors and priests and religious who administer Catholic schools and hospitals can also fall into the trap of picturing themselves as the proprietors of the Church. In her book The Long Loneliness, Dorothy Day spoke of the “scandal of businesslike priests”—the grave spiritual damage done by busy clerics who pride themselves on handling the details of parish administration, giving short shrift to the welfare of the souls entrusted to their care.

tip. I always try to catch a moment when I just stand back and quietly watch my family and friends enjoying themselves and each other. Let that moment wash over you so you can store it up for the times when life gets stressful. Those moments are like precious treasures we can pause to look at again and again. You might even keep a hospitality journal—a book to record the memories of your time together. Or, like we have, a guest book by the front door for our friends to sign so we remember our time together. Entries can be short and sweet, just enough to jog your memory: ice cream sandwiches on the patio with family and friends, game night with the grandparents, pizza party with the neighbors. You might write down what was on the menu, who attended, any details that you cherished—twinkly lights on the porch, the smell of homemade brownies baking, or jokes you laughed at, stories you shared. There

Tax-Deferred does not mean Tax-Free It never ceases to amaze me when I meet with people who do not know that tax-deferred does not mean tax-free. You mean I have to pay taxes when I take this money!? This is not all mine!? These are common remarks I hear as we are looking at their most recent retirement account statement. Somehow this consideration was missed when they enrolled in the savings plan and each year when they postponed the tax when filing their tax return. I am not a tax professional but I can understand how an accountant or tax preparer wouldn’t think to make sure the client understands that they are postponing taxes and the tax calculation during their working years. I met an accountant that expressed how difficult it is when he gets the client that believed they were ready to leave work only to find out that because of taxes they are coming up a little or a lot short. This happened to one of my relatives that worked at least 30 years as an x-ray technician and then supervisor at a very large hospital. While working, they always had the nice houses, the nice cars, and a nice upper-middle class lifestyle, nothing fancy. After he retired and even though his wife still worked as a school principal, he had to take a sales clerk job at a nearby liquor store so that his family could maintain their lifestyle. I will never forget other relatives joking and laughing about him miscalculating his retirement. I’m certain that his unsuccessful retirement and that of other relatives influenced my interest in retirement planning if for no one else but me. With a limited amount of retirement income, most retirees would prefer to keep their dollars rather than give them to Uncle Sam. Even those with an unlimited source of funds don’t want to pay more taxes than necessary. Fortunately, there are some ways to decrease your tax burden once you’ve done the obvious work of ensuring you’ve taken all the deductions and credits to which you’re entitled when you file your taxes.

Block said. “I mean, he’s a professor emeritus. He’s never watched a football game in my conscious memory. The whole picture—it wasn’t the guy I thought I knew.” But the conversation proved critical, because after surgery he developed bleeding in the spinal cord. The surgeons told her that in order to save his life they would need to go back in. But the bleeding had already made him nearly quadriplegic, and he would remain severely disabled for many months and likely forever. What did she want to do? “I had three minutes to make this decision, and I realized, he had already made the decision.” She asked the surgeons whether, if her father survived, he would still be able to eat chocolate ice cream and watch football on TV. Yes, they said. She gave the okay to take him back to the operating room. “If I had not had that conversation with him,” she told me, “my instinct would have been to let him go at that moment because it just seemed so awful. And I would have beaten myself up. Did I let him go too soon?” Or she might have gone ahead and sent him to surgery, only to find—as occurred—that he was faced with a year of “very horrible rehab” and disability. “I would have felt so guilty that I condemned him to that,” she said. “But there was no decision for me to make.” He had decided. During the next two years, he regained the ability to walk short distances. He required caregivers to bathe and dress him. He had difficulty swallowing and eating. But his mind was intact and he had partial use of his hands—enough to write two books and more than a dozen scientific articles. He lived for ten years after the operation. Eventually, however, his difficulties with swallowing advanced to the point where he could not eat without aspirating food particles, and he cycled between hospital and rehabilitation facilities with the pneumonias that resulted. He didn’t want a feeding tube. And it became evident that the battle for the dwindling chance of a miraculous recovery was going to leave him unable ever to go home again. So, just a few months before I’d spoken with Block, her father decided to stop the battle and go home. “We started him on hospice care,” Block said. “We treated his choking and kept him comfortable. Eventually, he stopped eating and drinking. He died about five days later.

In 1992, a forty-six-year-old woman whom I’ll call Hannah underwent a neurological examination at a hospital in Vienna, Austria. The neurologist, Georg Goldenberg, began by asking Hannah to describe his own face. It was an odd question, but Hannah complied. The doctor had short hair and was clean shaven, she said; he wasn’t wearing glasses, and he looked like he had a bit of a tan. Goldenberg next asked Hannah about an object in front of her. It was a notebook, she answered, like the kind schoolchildren use, with a brown cover and some writing in Latin script that she couldn’t quite make out. And where exactly was the book located, the doctor asked her. He was holding it up in his left hand, Hannah replied, at just about eye level. The trouble was this: Goldenberg’s face was concealed behind a screen, the object in front of his patient was a comb, and before asking about its location, he’d hidden it beneath the table in front of him. Hannah was blind. One month earlier, she had suffered a stroke that destroyed virtually her entire visual cortex and left her all but unable to move, owing to loss of muscle coordination and chronic, epilepsy-like contractions, especially on the left side of her body. All that was bad enough. But Hannah was also left with a rarer and stranger problem: she didn’t know that she was blind.

He reclines in the hospital bed like a martyred king taking leave of his beloved kingdom, but all I see is a petulant, destructive child hiding in a dead man’s body.