Short Shopping Quotes

[Short Talk on the Sensation of Airplane Takeoff] Well you know I wonder, it could be love running toward my life with its arms up yelling let’s buy it what a bargain!

She pressed her cheek against his heart and lay there, grateful for the time she’d had with him, however short or long it had been, grateful she had known him, grateful that once, when she was young, she had experienced a love so strong that it did not go away, that decades and distance and miles and children and lies and letters could never make it disappear. She held him in her arms and said to him all she needed to say.

Socks are Dobby’s favorite, favorite clothes, sir!” he said, ripping off his odd ones and pulling on Uncle Vernon’s. “I has seven now, sir. . . . But sir . . .” he said, his eyes widening, having pulled both socks up to their highest extent, so that they reached to the bottom of his shorts, “they has made a mistake in the shop, Harry Potter, they is giving you two the same!

And if we do speak out, we risk rejection and ridicule. I had a best friend once, the kind that you go shopping with and watch films with, the kind you go on holiday with and rescue when her car breaks down on the A1. Shortly after my diagnosis, I told her I had DID. I haven't seen her since. The stench and rankness of a socially unacceptable mental health disorder seems to have driven her away.

What is there to see if I go outside? Don't tell me. I know. I can see other people. I don't want to see other people. They look awful. The men look like slobs and the women look like men. The men have mush faces framed by long hair and the women have big noses, big jaws, big heads, and stick-like bodies. That depresses me. Its no fun to people-watch anymore because there's so little variety in types. You say it's good to get a change of scenery. What scenery? New buildings? New cars? New freeways? New shopping malls? Go to the woods or a park? I saw a tree once. The new ones look the same, which is fine. I even remember what the old ones look like. My memory isn't that short. But it's not worth going to see a squirrel grab a nut, or fish swimming around in a big tank if I must put up with the ugly contemporary human pollution that accompanies each excursion. The squirrel may enliven me and remind me of better vistas but the price in social interaction isn't worth it. If, on my way to visit the squirrel, I encounter a single person who gains stimulation by seeing me, I feel like I have given more than I've received and I get sore. If every time I go somewhere to see a fish swimming, I become someone else's stimulation, I feel shortchanged. I'll buy my own fish and watch it swim. Then, I can watch the fish, the fish can watch me, we can be friends, and nobody else interferes with the interaction, like trying to hear what the fish and I are talking about. I won't have to get dressed a certain way to visit the fish. I needn't dress the way my pride dictates, because who's going to see me? I needn't wear any pants. The fish doesn't care. He doesn't read the tabloids. But, if I go out to see a fish other than my own, I'm right back where I started: entertaining others, which is more depleting than visiting the new fish is entertaining. Maybe I should go to a coffee house. I find no stimulation in watching ordinary people trying to put the make on other uninteresting people. I can fix my own cup of coffee and not have to look at or talk to other people. No matter where I go, I stimulate others, and have been doing so all my life. It used to be I'd sometimes get stimulated back.

His way of coping with the days was to think of activities as units of time, each unit consisting of about thirty minutes. Whole hours, he found, were more intimidating, and most things one could do in a day took half an hour. Reading the paper, having a bath, tidying the flat, watching Home and Away and Countdown, doing a quick crossword on the toilet, eating breakfast and lunch, going to the local shops… That was nine units of a twenty-unit day (the evenings didn’t count) filled by just the basic necessities. In fact, he had reached a stage where he wondered how his friends could juggle life and a job. Life took up so much time, so how could one work and, say, take a bath on the same day? He suspected that one or two people he knew were making some pretty unsavoury short cuts.

If someone were to ask me for a short cut to sensuality, I would suggest he go shopping for a used 427 Shelby-Cobra. But it is only fair to warn you that of the 300 guys who switched to them in 1966, only two went back to women.

Nothing belongs to itself anymore. These trees are yours because you once looked at them. These streets are yours because you once traversed them. These coffee shops and bookshops, these cafés and bars, their sole owner is you. They gave themselves so willingly, surrendering to your perfume. You sang with the birds and they stopped to listen to you. You smiled at the sheepish stars and they fell into your hair. The sun and moon, the sea and mountain, they have all left from heartbreak. Nothing belongs to itself anymore. You once spoke to Him, and then God became yours. He sits with us in darkness now to plot how to make you ours.” K.K.

Something as small as having to think hard in the morning about what you’re going to wear, or thinking about what you are going to order at your local coffee shop – it’s things as small and trivial as these that can seriously short circuit and deplete our brains for the rest of the day.

This was not Newt's fault; in his younger days he would go every couple of months to the barber's shop on the corner, clutching a photograph he's carefully torn from a magazine which showed someone with an impressively cool haircut grinning at the camera and he would show the picture to the barber, and ask to be made to look like that, please. And the barber, who knew his job, would take one look and then give Newt the basic, all-purpose, short-back-and-sides. After a year of this, Newt realized that he obviously didn't have the face for haircuts. The best Newton Pulsifer could hope for after a haircut was shorter hair.

Edinburgh suited Ann; she liked the tall, dignified buildings of grey stone, the short days that sank into street-lamped evenings at five o'clock, and the dual personality of the city's main street, which on one side had glittering shops and on the other the green sweep of Princes Street Gardens.

Life is too short, too fragile, too precious to hide in the shadows of what might have been. If continuously looking behind, you risk missing the possibilities that lie ahead.

When we reach the end of our short lives on earth, Jesus isn’t going to ask us how many followers we had on social media; He’s going to ask us how many of those lives we touched.

Once upon a time there was a mother who, in order to become a mother, had agreed to change her name; who set herself the task of falling in love with her husband bit-by-bit, but who could n ever manage to love one part, the part, curiously enough, which made possible her motherhood; whose feet were hobbled by verrucas and whose shoulders were stooped beneath the accumulating guilts of the world; whose husband's unlovable organ failed to recover from the effects of a freeze; and who, like her husband, finally succumbed to the mysteries of telephones, spending long minutes listening to the words of wrong-number callers . . . shortly after my tenth birthday (when I had recovered from the fever which has recently returned to plague me after an interval of nearly twenty-one years), Amina Sinai resumed her recent practice of leaving suddenly, and always immediately after a wrong number, on urgent shopping trips.

I imagine I should have told it to you before? I love you, Sejal.I wish for you to become my wife.Recently I’ve also opened a shop in North Dakota and thinking that, just maybe, you love me too.

It seems there's confusion at this time of year regarding the reason for Christmas. From shopping for presents to spreading good cheer, the world makes an overly huge fuss. But Christmas is not for the gifts we exchange. It's not about sleigh rides or sweet candy canes. Nay, Christmas is simple. A time to recall Christ's gift of atonement He gave to us all.

Though liberal in his praise and always courteous and condescending to the shop-people, he was scarcely ever known to pay a bill and when he died, the amount of money owing to Brandy's was considerable. Mr. Brandy, a short-tempered, pinched-faced, cross little old man, was beside himself with rage about it. He died shortly afterwards, and was presumed by many people to have done so on purpose and to have gone in pursuit of his noble debtor.

To feel everything in every way; to be able to think with the emotions and feel with the mind; not to desire much except with the imagination; to suffer with haughtiness; to see clearly so as to write accurately; to know oneself through diplomacy and dissimulation; to become naturalized as a different person, with all the necessary documents; in short, to use all sensations but only on the inside, peeling them all down to God and then wrapping everything up again and putting it back in the shop window like the sales assistant I can see from here with the small tins of a new brand of shoe polish.

Shortly before seven, he made Katie her sourdough toast and coffee, and woke her up with breakfast in bed. The tire shop he managed was closed on Sunday, so this was the only day he could relieve his wife of what would otherwise be a seven-day-a-week job. Taking care of the kids so she could sleep in an hour was, she frequently assured him, so romantic, and so sexy—and on most Sunday nights after the kids went to bed, she showed him exactly how much she appreciated the gesture. But

Ordinary things became religion, and when nothing came, cultists invented something to worship: Giant airplanes, runways, and the like. That’s it, mega-mall cult was like cargo cult; the cult of the shopping rush, born out of the need to worship something.

terrorists resemble a fly that tries to destroy a china shop. The fly is so weak that it cannot move even a single teacup. So how does a fly destroy a china shop? It finds a bull, gets inside its ear, and starts buzzing. The bull goes wild with fear and anger, and destroys the china shop. This is what happened after 9/ 11, as Islamic fundamentalists incited the American bull to destroy the Middle Eastern china shop. Now they flourish in the wreckage. And there is no shortage of short-tempered bulls in the world.

The chief causes of the environmental destruction that faces us today are not biological, or the product of individual human choice. They are social and historical, rooted in the productive relations, technological imperatives, and historically conditioned demographic trends that characterize the dominant social system. Hence, what is ignored or downplayed in most proposals to remedy the environmental crisis is the most critical challenge of all: the need to transform the major social bases of environmental degradation, and not simply to tinker with its minor technical bases. As long as prevailing social relations remain unquestioned, those who are concerned about what is happening are left with few visible avenues for environmental action other than purely personal commitments to recycling and green shopping, socially untenable choices between jobs and the environment, or broad appeals to corporations, political policy-makers, and the scientific establishment--the very interests most responsible for the current ecological mess.

Men or nations who think they can revive the Faith in order to make a good society might just as well think they can use the stairs of Heaven as a short cut to the nearest chemist’s shop.

People you love never die. That is what Omai had said, all those years ago. And he was right. They don't die. Not completely. They live in your mind, the way they always lived inside you. You keep their light alive. If you remember them well enough, they can still guide you, like the shine of long-extinguished stars could guide shops in unfamiliar waters. If you stop mourning them, and start listening to them, they still have the power to change your life. They can, in short, be salvation.

Not knowing how to regulate their own painful, aversive feelings, such as shame and anger, makes people with BPD walking powder kegs. Because of their deficits, they tend to regulate emotional pain with actions that bring quick, short-term relief, such as cutting themselves (parasuicidal acts) using drugs or alcohol, shopping or overspending, binge eating, anorexia, gambling, or engaging in unsafe sex. The consequence of these behaviors is usually more emotional pain. Alternatively, they may cope by avoiding or dissociating from the trigger or the actual emotion they are feeling. Some people with BPD may have developed too much control of their emotional responses. They may be described as emotionally over-controlled or emotionally constipated.

I was ten years old, and I was still playing conkers and knocking off sweet shops while she was sitting on the linoleum floor of her cell sawing at her wrists with a bit of broken glass she'd got from heaven-knows-were. Cut her fingers up, too, but she did it all right. They found her in the morning, sticky, red, and cold.

You’re with a girl. She’s brown-haired and side-swept. I imagine that she’s the kind of girl who can easily shop for jean shorts, and speaks kindly more often than not. She seems like the kind of girl who hates New York City because it wreaks havoc on her shoes (really she just thinks it’s a big and scary place), but once had the time of her life in Spain on a backpacking trip when she was 23. Her gaze is focused on the embracing couple as near strangers capable of judgement. She stands bolted next to you like you’re her anchor in the social storm. You two seem finely matched… but what do I know? (Nothing at all.) I accidentally saw a picture of you and it reminded me that I was dating a man rightfully shaking his fist at God, while trying to hold my hand with the other. I was reminded of how fiercely we tried to hold our relationship together, and how devastated and relieved we were in its destruction. There’s water under that bridge. I accidentally saw a picture of you. No big deal. I wrote about it.

In 1828 the British historian Macaulay dubbed the press gallery in Parliament a ‘fourth estate’ of the realm. Today the news media appear to have become the first estate able to topple monarchs and turn Parliament into a talking shop which ceases to exist if journalists turn their backs.

Here’s how to get started: 1. Sit still and stay put . Sit in a chair with your feet flat on the ground, or sit cross-legged on a cushion. Sit up straight and rest your hands in your lap. It’s important not to fidget when you meditate—that’s the physical foundation of self-control. If you notice the instinct to scratch an itch, adjust your arms, or cross and uncross your legs, see if you can feel the urge but not follow it. This simple act of staying still is part of what makes meditation willpower training effective. You’re learning not to automatically follow every single impulse that your brain and body produce. 2. Turn your attention to the breath. Close your eyes or, if you are worried about falling asleep, focus your gaze at a single spot (like a blank wall, not the Home Shopping Network). Begin to notice your breathing. Silently say in your mind “inhale” as you breathe in and “exhale” as you breathe out. When you notice your mind wandering (and it will), just bring it back to the breath. This practice of coming back to the breath, again and again, kicks the prefrontal cortex into high gear and quiets the stress and craving centers of your brain . 3. Notice how it feels to breathe, and notice how the mind wanders. After a few minutes, drop the labels “inhale/exhale.” Try focusing on just the feeling of breathing. You might notice the sensations of the breath flowing in and out of your nose and mouth. You might sense the belly or chest expanding as you breathe in, and deflating as you breathe out. Your mind might wander a bit more without the labeling. Just as before, when you notice yourself thinking about something else, bring your attention back to the breath. If you need help refocusing, bring yourself back to the breath by saying “inhale” and “exhale” for a few rounds. This part of the practice trains self-awareness along with self-control. Start with five minutes a day. When this becomes a habit, try ten to fifteen minutes a day. If that starts to feel like a burden, bring it back down to five. A short practice that you do every day is better than a long practice you keep putting off to tomorrow. It may help you to pick a specific time that you will meditate every day, like right before your morning shower. If this is impossible, staying flexible will help you fit it in when you can.

Indonesia’s richly complex wooded peatlands where entrepreneurs log, burn and plow to make palm oil plantations are one of the saddest examples of great biological loss. In shops and stores I read labels and when I find bars of soap made with palm oil I get a mental image of a ravaged forest. I do not buy that soap.

I’m going to a party tonight,” I said, partly just to say it out loud and partly to brag. Conrad raised his eyebrows. “You?” “Whose party?” Jeremiah demanded. “Kinsey’s?” I put down my juice. “How’d you know?” Jeremiah laughed and wagged his finger at me. “I know everybody in Cousins, Belly. I’m a lifeguard. That’s like being the mayor. Greg Kinsey works at that surf shop over by the mall.” Frowning, Conrad said, “Doesn’t Greg Kinsey sell crystal meth out of his trunk?” “What? No. Cam wouldn’t be friends with someone like that,” I said defensively. “Who’s Cam?” Jeremiah asked me. “That guy I met at Clay’s bonfire. He asked me to go to this party with him, and I said yes.” “Sorry. You aren’t going to some meth addict’s party,” Conrad said. This was the second time Conrad was trying to tell me what to do, and I was sick of it. Who did he think he was? I had to go to this party. I didn’t care if there was crystal meth or not, I was going. “I’m telling you, Cam wouldn’t be friends with someone like that! He’s straight edge.” Conrad and Jeremiah both snorted. In moments like these, they were a team. “He’s straight edge?” Jeremiah said, trying not to smile. “Neat.” “Very cool,” agreed Conrad. I glared at the both of them. First they didn’t want me hanging out with meth addicts, and then being straight edge wasn’t cool either. “He doesn’t do drugs, all right? Which is why I highly doubt he’d be friends with a drug dealer.” Jeremiah scratched his cheek and said, “You know what, it might be Greg Rosenberg who’s the meth dealer. Greg Kinsey’s pretty cool. He has a pool table. I think I’ll check this party out too.” “Wait, what?” I was starting to panic. “I think I’ll go too,” Conrad said. “I like pool.” I stood up. “You guys can’t come. You weren’t invited.” Conrad leaned back in his chair and put his arms behind his head. “Don’t worry, Belly. We won’t bother you on your big date.” “Unless he puts his hands on you.” Jeremiah ground his fist into his hand threateningly, his blue eyes narrow. “Then his ass is grass.” “This isn’t happening,” I moaned. “You guys, I’m begging you. Don’t come. Please, please don’t come.” Jeremiah ignored me. “Con, what are you gonna wear?” “I haven’t thought about it. Maybe my khaki shorts? What are you gonna wear?” “I hate you guys,” I said.

Darwin had been lured to South America by the prospect of discovering new birds and new beetles, but he couldn’t help noticing the carnage the Europeans were inflicting. Colonial arrogance, the institution of slavery, the extirpation of countless species for the enrichment and entertainment of the invaders, the first depredations of the tropical rain forest—in short, many of the crimes and stupidities that haunt us today—troubled Darwin at a time when Europe was confident that colonialism was an unalloyed benefit for the uncivilized, that the forests were inexhaustible, and that there would always be enough egret feathers for every millinery shop until the Day of Judgment.

Visitors to eighteenth-century London often noted that the shops were open till ten at night, and clearly there would be no shops without shoppers.

And I feel certain that you will, because I've come to take it away. I'm from the furniture shop, and the bed isn't paid for.

They've walked for nearly a block when he stops short and looks at her. They are in the middle of the sidewalk, face to face, between a tobacco shop and a trash can. Everything they've never said flows into the narrow space between them. Isabel feels the passing of time acutely, like a flood coming and only so much time to gather up the most important things.

Profiteers were taking a hand and purveying at enormous prices essential foodstuffs not available in the shops. The result was that poor families were in great straits, while the rich went short of practically nothing. Thus, whereas plague by its impartial ministrations should have promoted equality among our townsfolk, it now had the opposite effect and, thanks to the habitual conflict of cupidities, exacerbated the sense of injustice rankling in men’s hearts. They were assured, of course, of the inerrable equality of death, but nobody wanted that kind of equality.

Tell me, Jeeves," I said. "Suppose you were in a shop taking By The Order of the Czar out of the lending library and a clergyman's daughter came in and without so much as a preliminary 'Hullo, there' said to you, 'Has he brought it yet?' what interpretations would you place on those words?" He pondered, this way and that dividing the swift mind, as I have heard him put it. "'Has he brought it yet,' sir?" "Just that." "I should reach the conclusion that the lady was expecting a male acquaintance to have arrived or to be arriving shortly bearing some unidentified object.

Every week seems to bring another luxuriantly creamy envelope, the thickness of a letter-bomb, containing a complex invitation – a triumph of paper engineering – and a comprehensive dossier of phone numbers, email addresses, websites, how to get there, what to wear, where to buy the gifts. Country house hotels are being block-booked, great schools of salmon are being poached, vast marquees are appearing overnight like Bedouin tent cities. Silky grey morning suits and top hats are being hired and worn with an absolutely straight face, and the times are heady and golden for florists and caterers, string quartets and Ceilidh callers, ice sculptors and the makers of disposable cameras. Decent Motown cover-bands are limp with exhaustion. Churches are back in fashion, and these days the happy couple are travelling the short distance from the place of worship to the reception on open-topped London buses, in hot-air balloons, on the backs of matching white stallions, in micro-lite planes. A wedding requires immense reserves of love and commitment and time off work, not least from the guests. Confetti costs eight pounds a box. A bag of rice from the corner shop just won’t cut it anymore.

I tell the squad a joke: "Stop me if you're heard this. There was a Marine of nuts and bolts, half robot--weird but true--whose every move was cut from pain as though from stone. His stoney little hide had been crushed and broken. But he just laughed and said, 'I've been crushed and broken before.' And sure enough, he had the heart of a bear. His heart functioned for weeks after it had been diagnosed by doctors. His heart weighed half a pound. His heart pumped seven hundred thousand gallons of warm blood through one hundred thousand miles of veins, working hard--hard enough in twelve hours to lift one sixty-five ton boxcar one foot off the deck. He said. The world would not waste the heart of a bear, he said. On his clean blue pajamas many medals hung. He was a walking word of history, in the shop for a few repairs. He took it on the chin and was good. One night in Japan his life came out of his body--black--like a question mark. If you can keep your head while others are losing theirs perhaps you have misjudged the situation. Stop me if you've heard this...

In ancient Babylon King Hammurabi (the same bloke who decided barmaids could be drowned for serving short measures) decreed that the introduction of political debate into beer shops was an offence punishable by – you guessed it – death.

She pressed her cheek against his heart and lay there, grateful for the time she’d had with him, however short or long it had been, grateful she had known him, grateful that once, when she was young, she had experienced a love so strong that it did not go away, that decades and distance and miles and children and lies and letters could never make it disappear. She held him in her arms and said to him all she needed to say. For that fraction of time, he was entirely hers.

Pessimism is a towering skyscraper eighty stories high in the suburbs of the soul at the end of a long avenue with waste ground on either side and a few poorly-stocked little shops. Several ultra-fast staircases give access to the building, running up from the cellars to the roof-gardens. The comfort of this place leaves nothing to be desired and only the greatest luxury is acceptable, but every Friday the residents gather on the ground floor to read from a bible bound in the skin of a blind man. The psalmic words they intone rise up through the pipes, sigh in the stoves and sweep the chimneys coated inside with black grease which leaves dirt on the skin. Water runs constantly in the bathrooms and the showers beat down on the numbered bodies, peppering them with sand. On Sundays the bed linen unrolls by itself and nobody makes love. For this tower block, like an obscure phallus scraping the vulva of the sky, is usually a hive of sexual activity. The most beautiful woman lives there, but no-one has ever known her. It is said, that dressed in furs and feathers, she keeps herself shut away in a first-floor apartment as if in a white safe. Her windows are scissors which cut short both shadow and breath. Her name is AURORA.

In this respect, terrorists resemble a fly that tries to destroy a china shop. The fly is so weak that it cannot move even a single teacup. So how does a fly destroy a china shop? It finds a bull, gets inside its ear, and starts buzzing. The bull goes wild with fear and anger, and destroys the china shop. This is what happened after 9/11, as Islamic fundamentalists incited the American bull to destroy the Middle Eastern china shop. Now they flourish in the wreckage. And there is no shortage of short-tempered bulls in the world.

I'm older now, I'm a man getting near middle age, putting on a little fat and I still love to walk along Fifth Avenue at three o'clock on the east side of the street between Fiftieth and Fifty-seventh streets, they're all out then, making believe they're shopping, in their furs and their crazy hats, everything all concentrated from all over the world into eight blocks, the best furs, the best clothes, the handsomest women, out to spend money and feeling good about it, looking coldly at you, making believe they're not looking at you as you go past.

From then on he would make two or three trips a week to similar premises – bookstores, crystal shops, candle parlours, short-let niche operations selling a mix of pop-cultural memorabilia and truther merchandise from two or three generations ago – which had flourished along the abandoned high streets of the post-2007 austerity, run by a network of shabby voters hoping to take advantage of tumbling rents. Their real obsession lay in the idea of commerce as a kind of politics, expression of a fundamental theology. They had bought the rhetoric without having the talent or the backing. The internet was killing them. The speed of things was killing them. They were like old-fashioned commercial travellers, fading away in bars and single rooms, exchanging order books on windy corners as if it was still 1981 – denizens of futures that failed to take, whole worlds that never got past the economic turbulence and out into clear air, men and women in cheap business clothes washed up on rail platforms, weak-eyed with the brief energy of the defeated, exchanging obsolete tradecraft like Thatcherite spies.

As they looked at each other, the woman and her daughter, they were not privy to what else the elderly lady had bequeathed. The pretty little bow-tied presents soon to be delivered to all the remaining assistants in the shop. Which each contained the turds of dogs and other, even more prolific, animals.

Although it has become the most visible of American suburban landscapes, the edge node has few architectural defenders. Even developers despair: 'Shopping centers built only in the 1960s are already being abandoned. Their abandonment brings down the values of nearby neighbourhoods. Wal-Marts built five years ago are already being abandoned for superstores. We have built a world of junk, a degraded environment. It may be profitable for a short-term, but its long-term economic prognosis is bleak.' -Dolores Hayden quoting Robert Davis, 'Postscript,' in Congress for the New Urbanism, Charter of the New Urbanism, 2002.

We made the choice, right there in our local coffee shop, that we were going to do things differently. We were going to put the story first, no matter where that led us. We’d open ourselves up to all genres, all forms. We’d publish works that stayed with us in an intangible way, long after that last page is turned.

When they returned to her flat, Syn looked up from where he lay on the couch watching the viewer, shock etched on his face. “That didn’t take long. I’ve never known a woman not to take at least half a day to shop for anything.” “I can’t imagine why the trip was so short,” Nykyrian said in a sarcastic voice that made Kiara take a second look at him. Laughing, Syn switched off the viewer and sat up. “You should try smiling. I think it would take the edge off people.” Nykyrian doffed his long, black coat and draped it over her chair. “Actually, they mistake it for an attempt to bite and then it only gets worse.” Syn laughed even harder.

Noting that material poverty in the US was matched by an even greater “poverty of satisfaction, purpose, and dignity,” Kennedy decried GDP as a poor measure of the state of the nation. “Too much and for too long, we seemed to have surrendered personal excellence and community values in the mere accumulation of material things,” he said. The GDP was buoyed, he noted, by cigarette advertising, ambulances, home security, jails, the destruction of redwood forests, urban sprawl, napalm, nuclear warheads and the armoured vehicles used by police against riots in American cities. “It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country. It measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile,” Kennedy said.

On the other hand we do want, and want very much, to make men trat Christianity as a means; preferably, of course, as a means to their own advancement, but failing that, as a means to anything - even to social justice. The thing to do is to get a man at first to value social justice as a thing which the Enemy demands, and then work him on to the stage at which he values Christianity because it may produce social justice. For the Enemy will not be used as a convenience. Men or nations who think they can revive the Faith in order to make a good society might just as well think they can use the stairs to Heaven as a short cut to the nearest chemist's shop

It did not take me long during the COVID-19 pandemic in Arizona to figure out that shopping in a plastic hazmat suit was really hot and sweaty! I got wise and figured out that a paint sprayer's fabric suit was more suitable to the hot weather of Arizona. I always wore shorts and a tee-shirt to stay cool within the protective suit.

I took her to my favorite bookstore, where I loaded her up with Ian Rankin novels and she bullied me into buying a book on European snails. I took her to the chip shop on the corner, where she distracted me by giving a detailed-and-probably-bullshit account of her brother's sex life (drones, cameras, his rooftop pool) while she ate all my fried fish and left her own plate untouched. I took her for a walk along the Thames, where I showed her how to skip a stone and she nearly punctured a hole in a passing pontoon boat. We went to my favorite curry place. Twice. In one day. She'd gotten this look on her face when she took her first bite of their pakora, this blissful lids-lowered look, and two hours later I decided that it made up for the embarrassment I felt that night, when I found her instructing my sister, Shelby on the best way to bleach out bloodstains, using the curry dribble on my shirt as a test case. In short, it was both the best three days I'd ever had, my mother notwithstanding, and a fairly standard week with Charlotte Holmes.

I was caught between the crossfire of the atheist school and a Baptist church and family. Both had a prescription for how I was supposed to think and behave. On most points, they actually agreed. I was supposed to be clean, have short hair, talk modestly, listen and obey, never fight. Consequently, I was slovenly, grew long hair, and fought every day.

KIMURA Tokyo Station is packed. It’s been a while since Yuichi Kimura was here last, so he isn’t sure if it’s always this crowded. He’d believe it if someone told him there was a special event going on. The throngs of people coming and going press in on him, reminding him of the TV show he and Wataru had watched together, the one about penguins, all jammed in tight together. At least the penguins have an excuse, thinks Kimura. It’s freezing where they live. He waits for an opening in the stream of people, cuts between the souvenir shops and kiosks, quickening his pace. Up a short flight of stairs to the turnstile for the Shinkansen high-speed bullet train. As he passes through the automated ticketing gate

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

Reading Virginia Woolf will change your life, may even save it. If you want to make sense of modern life, the works of Virginia Woolf remain essential reading. More than fifty years since her death, accounts of her life still set the pace for modern modes of living. Plunge (and this Introduction is intended to help you take the plunge) into Woolf ’s works – at any point – whether in her novels, her short stories, her essays, her polemical pamphlets, or her published letters, diaries, memoirs and journals – and you will be transported by her elegant, startling, buoyant sentences to a world where everything in modern life (cinema, sexuality, shopping, education, feminism, politics, war and so on) is explored and questioned and refashioned.

Opposite the Half-Axe was the narrow-fronted entrance to a shop devoted to short lengths of rope and wooden poles a man and a half high. Tehol had no idea how such a specialized enterprise could survive, especially in this unravelled, truncated market, yet its door had remained open for almost six centuries, locked up each night by a short length of rope and a wooden pole.

Is anyone else coming?” I asked him when he didn’t say anything after setting his glass back down on the table. I’d overheard a couple of the guys talking about Rip’s half-hearted invitation when I had taken a bathroom break, but I hadn’t heard more than that. His gaze hadn’t left mine from the moment he had spotted me, and it didn’t go anywhere as he shrugged and said, “Doubt it.” I must have made a face because he added, casually, “I’m not exactly anybody’s favorite, Luna.” The smile fell right off my mouth, and I couldn’t help but frown at him. At the harshness of his words. At the… fact-like nature of them. That wasn’t very nice for him to assume. That wasn’t very nice to assume at all, and it bothered me… even if it was true that Mr. Cooper was my favorite person at the shop. And I was his. And Miguel’s— Crap. “I’m sure—“ I started before getting cut off. “I’m not,” he told me, tapping his short fingernails against the glass. Rip tipped his chin up a millimeter, giving me a slightly better view of the shading tucked up against his jawline. He swallowed, everything about his body language saying that he was telling me these words in this way because it wasn’t a big deal to him. He didn’t care. Why should he? His body said. His next words confirmed it. “I’m not around to be anybody’s friend.” All righty then. I wanted to tell him something that would make it seem that it wasn’t like anyone hated him or disliked him. Most of the guys were just… wary. Even I was wary, and he didn’t scare or intimidate me… unless I screwed up. But I didn’t know what to say to that comment. I hated liars as much as I hated aggressive drunk people and cooked carrots. So I did the only thing I could think of: I smiled at him and shrugged. He didn’t look even a little put out or hurt by what he’d been saying. Who was I to make it a big deal if he claimed he didn’t care? “Did you like your cake?

Slight and ridiculous as the incident was, it made him appear such a little fiend, and withal such a keen and knowing one, that the old woman felt too much afraid of him to utter a single word, and suffered herself to be led with extraordinary politeness to the breakfast-table. Here he by no means diminished the impression he had just produced, for he ate hard eggs, shell and all, devoured gigantic prawns with the heads and tails on, chewed tobacco and water-cresses at the same time and with extraordinary greediness, drank boiling tea without winking, bit his fork and spoon till they bent again, and in short performed so many horrifying and uncommon acts that the women were nearly frightened out of their wits, and began to doubt if he were really a human creature.

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.

My Flush has grown to be passionately fond of grapes, devouring bunch after bunch, and looking so fat and well that we attribute some virtue to them. When he goes to England he will be as much in a strait as an Italian who related to us his adventures in London; he had had a long walk in the heat, and catching sight of grapes hanging up in a grocer’s shop, he stopped short to have a pennyworth, as he said inwardly to himself.

Thus engaged, with her right elbow supported by her left hand, Madame Defarge said nothing when her lord came in, but coughed just one grain of cough. This, in combination with the lifting of her darkly defined eyebrows over her toothpick by the breadth of a line, suggested to her husband that he would do well to look round the shop among the customers, for any new customer who had dropped in while he stepped over the way. The wine-shop keeper accordingly rolled his eyes about, until they rested upon an elderly gentleman and a young lady, who were seated in a corner. Other company were there: two playing cards, two playing dominoes, three standing by the counter lengthening out a short supply of wine. As he passed behind the counter, he took notice that the elderly gentleman said in a look to the young lady, "This is our man." "What the devil do you do in that galley there?" said Monsieur Defarge to himself; "I don't know you." But, he feigned not to notice the two strangers, and fell into discourse with the triumvirate of customers who were drinking at the counter. "How goes it, Jacques?" said one of these three to Monsieur Defarge. "Is all the spilt wine swallowed?" "Every drop, Jacques," answered Monsieur Defarge. When this interchange of Christian name was effected, Madame Defarge, picking her teeth with her toothpick, coughed another grain of cough, and raised her eyebrows by the breadth of another line. "It is not often," said the second of the three, addressing Monsieur Defarge, "that many of these miserable beasts know the taste of wine, or of anything but black bread and death. Is it not so, Jacques?" "It is so, Jacques," Monsieur Defarge returned. At this second interchange of the Christian name, Madame Defarge, still using her toothpick with profound composure, coughed another grain of cough, and raised her eyebrows by the breadth of another line. The last of the three now said his say, as he put down his empty drinking vessel and smacked his lips. "Ah! So much the worse! A bitter taste it is that such poor cattle always have in their mouths, and hard lives they live, Jacques. Am I right, Jacques?" "You are right, Jacques," was the response of Monsieur Defarge. This third interchange of the Christian name was completed at the moment when Madame Defarge put her toothpick by, kept her eyebrows up, and slightly rustled in her seat. "Hold then! True!" muttered her husband. "Gentlemen--my wife!" The three customers pulled off their hats to Madame Defarge, with three flourishes. She acknowledged their homage by bending her head, and giving them a quick look. Then she glanced in a casual manner round the wine-shop, took up her knitting with great apparent calmness and repose of spirit, and became absorbed in it. "Gentlemen," said her husband, who had kept his bright eye observantly upon her, "good day. The chamber, furnished bachelor- fashion, that you wished to see, and were inquiring for when I stepped out, is on the fifth floor. The doorway of the staircase gives on the little courtyard close to the left here," pointing with his hand, "near to the window of my establishment. But, now that I remember, one of you has already been there, and can show the way. Gentlemen, adieu!" They paid for their wine, and left the place. The eyes of Monsieur Defarge were studying his wife at her knitting when the elderly gentleman advanced from his corner, and begged the favour of a word. "Willingly, sir," said Monsieur Defarge, and quietly stepped with him to the door. Their conference was very short, but very decided. Almost at the first word, Monsieur Defarge started and became deeply attentive. It had not lasted a minute, when he nodded and went out. The gentleman then beckoned to the young lady, and they, too, went out. Madame Defarge knitted with nimble fingers and steady eyebrows, and saw nothing.

We buy countless products that we don’t really need, and that until yesterday we didn’t know existed. Manufacturers deliberately design short-term goods and invent new and unnecessary models of perfectly satisfactory products that we must purchase in order to stay ‘in’. Shopping has become a favourite pastime, and consumer goods have become essential mediators in relationships between family members, spouses and friends. Religious holidays such as Christmas have become shopping festivals.

There was a pub looking out over the graveyard. The Queen’s Arms, where Pünd had stayed, was actually called the King’s Head. The village noticeboard where Joy had posted her notice of infidelity was on one side of the square. The village shop and the bakery – it was called the Pump House – was on the other. The castle, which cast a shadow over Dr Redwing’s house, and which must have been built around the same time as the one I had seen in Framlingham, was a short distance away. There was even a Daphne Road. In the book it had been Neville Brent’s address but in the real world it was Alan’s sister who lived there. The house was very much as he had described it. I wondered what this meant. Claire Jenkins had been unable to see me the day before but had agreed to meet me at lunchtime. I got there early and strolled around the village, following the main road all the way down to the River Alde. The river doesn’t exist in Alan’s book – it’s been replaced by the main road to Bath. Pye Hall is somewhere over to the left, which would in

Still, his altruism in general toward his fellow man did not deflect him from more personal rivalries. One of his last official acts was to lobby against a proposal to erect a statue in memory of Charles Darwin. In this he failed—though he did achieve a certain belated, inadvertent triumph. Today his statue commands a masterly view from the staircase of the main hall in the Natural History Museum, while Darwin and T. H. Huxley are consigned somewhat obscurely to the museum coffee shop, where they stare gravely over people snacking on cups of tea and jam doughnuts.

The Buried Bishop’s a gridlocked scrum, an all-you-can-eat of youth: ‘Stephen Hawking and the Dalai Lama, right; they posit a unified truth’; short denim skirts, Gap and Next shirts, Kurt Cobain cardigans, black Levi’s; ‘Did you see that oversexed pig by the loos, undressing me with his eyes?’; that song by the Pogues and Kirsty MacColl booms in my diaphragm and knees; ‘Like, my only charity shop bargains were headlice, scabies, and fleas’; a fug of hairspray, sweat and Lynx, Chanel No. 5, and smoke; well-tended teeth with zero fillings, revealed by the so-so joke — ‘Have you heard the news about Schrodinger’s Cat? It died today; wait — it didn’t, did, didn’t, did…’; high-volume discourse on who’s the best Bond … Sartre, Bart Simpson, Barthes’s myths; ‘Make mine a double’; George Michael’s stubble; ‘Like, music expired with the Smiths’; and futures all starry; fetal think-tankers, judges, and bankers…power and money, like Pooh Bear and honey, stick fast — I don’t knock it, it’s me; and speaking of loins, ‘Has anyone told you you look like Demi Moore from Ghost?’; roses are red and violets are blue, I’ve a surplus of butter and Ness is warm toast.

Miss Lucinda Throckmorton-Jones, former paid companion to several of the ton’s most successful debutantes of prior seasons, came to Havenhurst to fill the position of Elizabeth’s duenna. A woman of fifty with wiry gray hair she scraped back into a bun and the posture of a ramrod, she had a permanently pinched face, as if she smelled something disagreeable but was too well-bred to remark upon it. In addition to the duenna’s daunting physical appearance, Elizabeth observed shortly after their first meeting that Miss Throckmorton-Jones possessed an astonishing ability to sit serenely for hours without twitching so much as a finger. Elizabeth refused to be put off by her stony demeanor and set about finding a way to thaw her. Teasingly, she called her “Lucy,” and when the casually affectionate nickname won a thunderous frown from the lady, Elizabeth tried to find a different means. She discovered it very soon: A few days after Lucinda came to live at Havenhurst the duenna discovered her curled up in a chair in Havenhurt’s huge library, engrossed in a book. “You enjoy reading?” Lucinda had said gruffly-and with surprise-as she noted the gold embossed title on the volume. “Yes,” Elizabeth had assured her, smiling. “Do you?” “Have you read Christopher Marlowe?” “Yes, but I prefer Shakespeare.” Thereafter it became their policy each night after supper to debate the merits of the individual books they’d read. Before long Elizabeth realized that she’d won the duenna’s reluctant respect. It was impossible to be certain she’d won Lucinda’s affection, for the only emotion the lady ever displayed was anger, and that only once, at a miscreant tradesman in the village. Even so, it was a display Elizabeth never forgot. Wielding her ever-present umbrella, Lucinda had advanced on the hapless man, backing him clear around his own shop, while from her lips in a icy voice poured the most amazing torrent of eloquent, biting fury Elizabeth had ever heard. “My temper,” Lucinda had primly informed her-by way of apology, Elizabeth supposed-“is my only shortcoming.” Privately, Elizabeth thought Lucy must bottle up all her emotions inside herself as she sat perfectly still on sofas and chairs, for years at a time, until it finally exploded like one of those mountains she’d read about that poured forth molten rock when the pressure finally reached a peak.

I was only hit on once at the grocery store. I remember it was early one Saturday morning and I was buying my daily bacon, when I got tapped on the shoulder. I turned around and I saw a rather short and very feeble eighty-year-old lady looking up at me. She said in a weak, scratchy voice, "Excuse me, young man, could you reach up and grab some ketchup for me?" Well I'm no dummy. I know when I'm getting hit on. I smiled politely and reached up for the ketchup, knowing full well that she just wanted to get a gander at my derriere. As I handed her the ketchup, she said, "Thank you," like I was some piece of meat, a boy toy, or something. Finally I just blurted out, "Look, I'm married, lady!" She acted all surprised and confused. "Excuse me? I don't understand!" I shook my head with a smirk, raised my left hand, and showed her my wedding ring. "Married!" I loudly told her. "I'm taken!" A stock boy at the end of the aisle looked at us and inquired, "Is everything okay?" "I'm fine," I assured him. "I know how to deal with predators." Well, suddenly this sex-crazed lady got all angry at me. Like I was out of line. She huffed off. "Well, I never!" "And you ain't gonna with me either, " I yelled after her. I have to admit, it was nice to get the attention.

On the other side of the hedgerow, on the road there appeared a short little man blowing a bugle and leading a long, tall cart drawn by a grey horse. It was Lambourdieu, a big shopkeeper of Cloyes who little by little had added hosiery, haberdashery, boots and shoes and even ironmongery to his original draper's business: a whole bazaar which he hawked around all the villages within a radius of fifteen miles or so. In the end the villagers found themselves buying everything from him, from saucepans to wedding-dresses. His cart opened up and folded flat, revealing rows and rows of drawers, like the display counters of a proper shop.

Manufacturers deliberately design short-term goods and invent new and unnecessary models of perfectly satisfactory products that we must purchase in order to stay ‘in’. Shopping has become a favourite pastime, and consumer goods have become essential mediators in relationships between family members, spouses and friends. Religious holidays such as Christmas have become shopping festivals. In the United States, even Memorial Day – originally a solemn day for remembering fallen soldiers – is now an occasion for special sales. Most people mark this day by going shopping, perhaps to prove that the defenders of freedom did not die in vain.

We were running on borrowed time, but we didn't know just how borrowed it was, those free and wild days. The whole blessed country came to be paved over, and how I wish we were short on concrete instead of oil. There's shopping malls in the pinewoods, houses in the tomato fields, and our lonesome two-lane blacktops are all six lanes plugged tight with traffic. Hurricanes, earthquakes, wars, plagues, and pirates for three hundred years, but it always came back. And then in thirty years it was gone, paved over and gone. But we did not know all that when we were sitting there in the shade of those courthouse oaks, trying to wish up money.

It is not true what everyone always says that the only way to see America is to go across it by car. Apart from the fact that it is impossible given its enormous size, it is also deadly boring. A few outings on the motorway are enough to give an idea of what small-town and even village America is like on average, with the endless suburbs along the highways, a sight of desperate squalor, with all those low buildings, petrol stations or other shops which look like them, and the colours of the writing on the shop signs, and you realize 95 per cent of America is a country of ugliness, oppressiveness and sameness, in short of relentless monotony.

Mummy. A dried corpse in a gilded case. Mum, silent. Mama, short for mammary gland. A tree whose hungry mouth is pressed. If you didn’t want trees sucking at your sweet flowing breast why did you have children? Already they’re preparing for flight, betrayal, they will leave her, she will become their background. They will discuss her as they lie in bed with their lovers, they will use her as an explanation for everything they find idiosyncratic or painful about themselves. If she makes them feel guilty enough they’ll come and visit her on weekends. Her shoulders will sag, she will have difficulty with shopping bags, she will become My Mother, pronounced with a sigh.

IT IS NOT often that anyone entering a great city for the first time has the luck to witness such an incident as engaged Shelley’s attention when he drove into Naples. A youth ran out of a shop pursued by a man armed with a knife. The man overtook him and with one blow in the neck laid him dead on the road. Shelley had a tender heart. He didn’t look upon it as a bit of local colour; he was seized with horror and indignation. But when he expressed his emotions to a Calabrian priest who was travelling with him, a fellow of gigantic strength and stature, the priest laughed heartily and attempted to quiz him. Shelley says he never felt such an inclination to beat anyone.

Matt’s housekeeper let him in with a grimace. “I’m harmless today,” Tate assured the woman as she led the way to where Matt Holden was standing just outside the study door. “Right. You and two odd species of cobra,” Matt murmured sarcastically, glaring at his son from a tanned face. “What do you want, a bruise to match the other one?” Tate held up both hands. “Don’t start,” he said. Matt moved out of the way with reluctance and closed the study door behind them. “Your mother’s gone shopping,” he said. “Good. I don’t want to talk to her just yet.” Matt’s eyebrows levered up. “Oh?” Tate dropped into the wing chair across from the senator’s bulky armchair. “I need some advice.” Matt felt his forehead. “I didn’t think a single malt whiskey was enough to make me hallucinate,” he said to himself. Tate glowered at him. “You’re not one of my favorite people, but you know Cecily a little better than I seem to lately.” “Cecily loves you,” Matt said shortly, dropping into his chair. “That’s not the problem,” Tate said. He leaned forward, his hands clasped loosely between his splayed knees. “Although I seem to have done everything in my power to make her stop.” The older man didn’t speak for a minute or two. “Love doesn’t die that easily,” he said. “Your mother and I are a case in point. We hadn’t seen each other for thirty-six years, but the instant we met again, the years fell away. We were young again, in love again.” “I can’t wait thirty-six years,” Tate stated. He stared at his hands, then he drew in a long breath. “Cecily’s pregnant.” The other man was quiet for so long that Tate lifted his eyes, only to be met with barely contained rage in the older man’s face. “Is it yours?” Matt asked curtly. Tate glowered at him. “What kind of woman do you think Cecily is? Of course it’s mine!” Matt chuckled. He leaned back in the easy chair and indulged the need to look at his son, to find all the differences and all the similarities in that younger version of his face. It pleased him to find so many familiar things. “We look alike,” Tate said, reading the intent scrutiny he was getting. “Funny that I never noticed that before.” Matt smiled. “We didn’t get along very well.” “Both too stubborn and inflexible,” Tate pointed out. “And arrogant.” Tate chuckled dryly. “Maybe.

The sharpie uniform is perhaps the most unlikely fashion statement you will ever see, a Frankenstein’s monster of baby-doll plucked eyebrows, skinhead-meets-mullet hair, 1970s fat ties and just a hint of bovver boy. Clothes worn too tight and too small. Kerry had prepared a shopping list: • bluebird earrings • three-inch Mary Jane corkie platform shoes • treads (shoes made using recycled tyres for the sole with suede thonging for the upper) • Lee canvas jeans • beachcombers • short white bobby socks • ribbed tights • a short, flared, preferably panelled skirt • satin baggies • a striped Golden Breed t-shirt or a KrestKnit polo shirt • a tight coral necklace from the surf shop • a Conti brand striped cardigan • blue metallic eye shadow from a small pot or a crayon

At all times it is a bewildering thing to the poor weaver to see his employer removing from house to house, each one grander than the last, till he ends in building one more magnificent than all, or withdraws his money from the concern, or sells his mill, to buy an estate in the country, while all the time the weaver, who thinks he and his fellows are the real makers of this wealth, is struggling on for bread for his children, through the vicissitudes of lowered wages, short hours, fewer hands employed, etc. And when he knows trade is bad, and could understand (at least partially) that there are not buyers enough in the market to purchase the goods already made, and consequently that there is no demand for more; when he would bear and endure much without complaining, could he also see that his employers were bearing their share; he is, I say, bewildered and (to use his own word) "aggravated" to see that all goes on just as usual with the millowners. Large houses are still occupied, while spinners' and weavers' cottages stand empty, because the families that once filled them are obliged to live in rooms or cellars. Carriages still roll along the streets, concerts are still crowded by subscribers, the shops for expensive luxuries still find daily customers, while the workman loiters away his unemployed time in watching these things, and thinking of the pale, uncomplaining wife at home, and the wailing children asking in vain for enough of food--of the sinking health, of the dying life of those near and dear to him. The contrast is too great. Why should he alone suffer from bad times?

Walking their usual routes, they would invariably notice the changes. The old Croatian lady’s Spätkauf was now a “cake boutique” with a teal-blue shop sign and an Instagram handle written on a blackboard. The cultural center where the old Greeks used to play cards was now the flagship store of a Japanese trainer brand. Immense shop windows revealed row after row of indistinguishable offices with a faintly hip feel—design or architecture studios, coworking spaces, start-ups, all with Modulor tables and minimalist Helvetica Neue stencils. Walking past the Art Nouveau apartment blocks off Mehringdamm or the futuristic sixties high-rise tower blocks around Kottbusser Tor, Anna and Tom would note the growing number of windows with the lights off at night, a likely sign that they were short-term rentals, which meant more speculation.

I was reminded of something the florist Sarah Ryhanen had said when we met in her studio. “The number one question you get when you have a flower shop is, ‘How long is this going to last?’” She shrugged her shoulders, as if she simultaneously understood the impetus for the question and was frustrated by it. “Sometimes the most beautiful experience with a flower is brief—like these garden roses from the field. They are so fragile because they put all their energy into making this intoxicating scent, which means that they don’t last more than twenty-four hours on your kitchen table. But those twenty-four hours you have to smell that flower are pretty amazing.” Our efforts to prolong our joy sometimes diminish its intensity, for example, when we choose blooms genetically engineered for hardiness over short-lived varieties bred for scent.

When I was young, for a treat, Mummy would pop a pimento-stuffed olive into my mouth, or, occasionally, an oily anchovy from a coffin-shaped yellow-and-red tin. She always stressed to me that sophisticated palates erred toward savory flavors, that cheap, sugary treats were the ruin of the poor (and their teeth). Mummy always had very sharp, very white teeth. The only acceptable sweet treats, she said, were proper Belgian truffles (Neuhaus, nom de dieu; only tourists bought those nasty chocolate seashells) or plump Medjool dates from the souks of Tunis, both of which were rather difficult to source in our local Spar. There was a time, shortly before . . . the incident . . . when she shopped only at Fortnum’s, and I recall that in that same period she was in regular correspondence with Fauchon over perceived imperfections in their confiture de cerises.

Lend stood up, shouldering his duffel bag, as I walked back into the living room. “Where do you think you’re going?” I snatched his coat away and held it. He just got here. There was no way I was letting him go anywhere else. “I happen to have very important things to do.” “What on earth is more important than watching Easton Heights??” “Christmas shopping for you?” I dropped the coat into his arms and opened the door. “Take your time.” “Glad to know I’ll be missed.” “Have fun!” I leaned up and kissed him hard, then shoved him out and sat back on the couch with a sloppy smile on my face. “Best boyfriend ever.” “Shut. Up. Now.” Arianna didn’t move, eyes fixed on the television. A firm knock sounded on the door. “And tell Lend he can just walk in already!” “Did you forget something?” I said as I opened the door, surprised to see a short black woman in a suit. And not Lend pretending to be one, either.

No society has succeeded in abolishing the distinction between ruler and ruled... to be a ruler gives one special status and, usually, special privileges. During the Communist era, important officials in the Soviet Union had access to special shops selling delicacies unavailable to ordinary citizens; before China allowed capitalist enterprises in its economy, travelling by car was a luxury limited to tourists and those high in the party hierarchy Throughout the 'communist' nations, the abolition of the old ruling class was followed by the rise of a new class of party bosses and well-placed bureaucrats, whose behaviour and life-style came more and more to resemble that of their much-denounced predecessors. In the end, nobody believed in the system any more. That, couple with its inability to match the productivity of the less bureaucratically controlled, more egoistically driven capitalist economies, led to its downfall.

Wherefore, if this consideration moves any one, that it has been heard that some tool of Lentulus is running about the shops,—is hoping that the minds of some poor and ignorant men may be corrupted by bribery; that, indeed, has been attempted and begun, but no one has been found either so wretched in their fortune or so abandoned in their inclination as not to wish the place of their seat and work and daily gain, their chamber and their bed, and, in short, the tranquil course of their lives, to be still preserved to them. And far the greater part of those who are in the shops,—yes, indeed, (for that is the more correct way of speaking,) the whole of this class is of all the most attached to tranquillity; their whole stock, indeed, their whole employment and livelihood, exists by the peaceful intercourse of the citizens, and is wholly supported by peace. And if their gains are diminished whenever their shops are shut, what will they be when they are burnt?

In the year 2000, it was standard practice for the successful chief executive officer of a corporation to shuck his wife of two to three decades’ standing for the simple reason that her subcutaneous packing was deteriorating, her shoulders and upper back were thickening like a shot-putter’s—in short, she was no longer sexy. Once he set up the old wife in a needlepoint shop where she could sell yarn to her friends, he was free to take on a new wife, a “trophy wife,” preferably a woman in her twenties, and preferably blond, as in an expression from that time, a “lemon tart.” What was the downside? Was the new couple considered radioactive socially? Did people talk sotto voce, behind the hand, when the tainted pair came by? Not for a moment. All that happened was that everybody got on the cell phone or the Internet and rang up or E-mailed one another to find out the spelling of the new wife’s first name, because it was always some name like Serena and nobody was sure how to spell it.

I am Nikolai Wroth.” Why did that name sound so familiar? She squinted up at him. “You are a friend of my aunts?” she said, her voice sounding faint. “With one. And it seems only one.” A short laugh with no humor. “Myst is my wife.” “Myst married?” Was that where she’d been? No, no way. “That’s funny.” “The jest’s on me, I’m afraid.” As they reached the manor, he bellowed, “Annika, call off the goddamn wraiths and let me in.” Emma stared up at the sky, seeing swirling red swaths of ragged cloth circling the house. Occasionally she spied a gaunt, skeletal face, but it would change to beauty if you met its eyes. The price for their protection was hair from each of the Valkyrie within. The wraiths wove each lock into a massive braid, and when it grew long enough, they bent all living Valkyrie to their will for a time. “Myst hasn’t returned yet,” someone called from the house. “But you know that, or else you’d both be naked and fornicating on the front lawn.” “The night’s young. Give us time.” To himself, he murmured, “And it was a field a mile away.” “Don’t you have an appointment to go to, vampire?” Emma stiffened. Vampire? But his eyes weren’t red. “Did you follow me?” “No, I was awaiting Myst’s return from shopping and sensed you trace into the woods.” A vampire waiting for Myst? He’d said she was his wife. She sucked in a breath. “You’re the general, aren’t you,” she whispered. “The one Myst had to be pried from.” She thought the corners of his lips quirked. “Is that what you heard?” At her solemn nod, he said, “It was mutual, I assure you.” He glanced away down the drive, as if willing Myst to return, and said almost to himself, “How much lingerie can one female need . . . ?” Suddenly Annika was shrieking, running for her, vowing to kill him ever so slowly. Amazingly, his body was still relaxed. “If you do not cease trying to take off my head, Annika, we will have words.” “What have you done to her?” she cried. “Obviously, I clawed her, bloodied her, and burned her, and now, oddly, I offer her up to you.

But in such improbable settings, history is sometimes made. Early the next morning, October 5, Yazdi was taken to the Shatt al-Arab Hotel in nearby Basra, where he was reunited with Khomeini and the others. As more hours of tense waiting passed—clearly, Iraqi authorities had yet to decide what to do with them—Yazdi used the time to press the ayatollah and his son on the merits of setting up shop in Paris should they get out of their current predicament alive. One objection Khomeini raised was that he’d heard the French made their bread with lard, or pork fat, which was strictly haram in Muslim societies. It took some finessing on Yazdi’s part to assure his mentor that there were exceptions to this rule, and besides, it wasn’t as if there were a host of non-lard-based bread-producing countries clamoring for his presence. By late morning, Yazdi had largely won Ahmad Khomeini over to the French idea. Shortly after, the patriarch relented as well, but only until a more suitable haven in a Muslim nation was found.

On the way to the cake shop I kept stopping to shake the wet leaves off the soles of my brown suede Whistles boots. I bought them at Sue Ryder, the charity shop in Camden Town. [...] I know how to find good clothes in those places. First scan the rails for an awkward colour, anything that jumps out as being a bit ugly, like dirty mustard, salmon pink or olive green with a bit too much brown in it. A print with an unusual combination of colours – dark green and pink, bright orange and ultramarine – is also worth checking out. If the quality of the fabric is good, pull the garment out and check the label. Well-cut clothes can look misshapen on a hanger because they're cut to look good on the body. I'll buy a good piece if it fits, even if it doesn't sometimes. Even if it's not my style or has short sleeves, or I don't like the shape or the buttons. I learn to love it. I never tire of clothes I've bought that I've had to adjust to. It's the compromise, the awkward gap that has to be bridged that makes something, someone, lovable.

I don't know it is that I always feel that other people can create things but that I can't. I imagine it's simpler living in remote tribes or communities where one is obliged to have a go or else you have to do without. I suppose it is fear of failure in an age where political correctness is trying to erase the word 'failure' from the language. It's OK to fail isn't it, but only if you've tried? What is so bizarre is that when one does try, one rarely falls short. Obviously some people do things better than others but if it gives you pleasure, then so what? As my grandmother used to say, 'patience and perseverance made a bishop of his reverence!' So don't say you can't make candles or soap or that you can't spin or weave until you've tried it. As for mending, well, if you're not throwing everything away, then you have no option but to make do and mend. After all, the only way to get rid of shopping malls and supermarkets with their food miles is for people not to shop in those places and the way to cure this mercenary mercantile world is to make your own things.

Here’s something I learned along the way. Happiness is pleasure, and happiness is joy. It could be either one. Pleasure is short lived. It lasts an hour, a minute a month, and it peaks very high. It’s like drugs, like anything—whether you’re shopping, engaged in any pleasure, it all has the same quality to it. Joy doesn’t go as high as pleasure, but it stays with you. It’s something you can recall. Pleasure you can’t. So the joy will last a lot longer. People who get the pleasure say, “Oh, if I can just get richer, I can get more cars. . . .” You will never relive the moment you got your first car. That’s the highest peak. . . .                Pleasure’s fun, but just accept the fact that it’s here and gone. Joy lasts forever. Pleasure’s purely self-centered. It’s all about your pleasure. It’s about you. A selfish, self-centered emotion created by a selfish moment for you.                Joy is compassion. Joy is giving yourself to something else, or somebody else. It is much more powerful than pleasure. If you get hung up on pleasure, you’re doomed. If you pursue joy you’ll find everlasting happiness.

Kevin Arthur liked cutting hair. I reckoned his desire was a good one, considering he was a barber. However, Kevin always wanted to cut more inches off my hair than requested. We argued every time I came into his shop. I told him my hair needed weight, otherwise it stood straight up and out, and my head—which was larger than average already, likely to accommodate my massive brain—resembled a cantaloupe on a toothpick, with cantaloupes being the least esteemed of all fruit. He maintained I needed a short cut, with the sides clipped close, and the top longer and thinned. He said the thickness of my hair was responsible for its propensity to misbehave. He said the cut would bring all the girls to my yard. This was doubtful. First of all, I didn’t want girls in my yard. I didn’t want anyone in my yard. My yard was fine just as it was: self-maintained. Secondly, I’d never been popular with the women folk. Women, or at least the women I knew, didn’t much enjoy my lack of willingness to deal with bullshit. For that matter, most men I knew didn’t enjoy this about me either. Bullshit was the adult version of Santa Claus. For reasons I’ll never comprehend,the general population seemed to enjoy wallowing, spouting, and believing in bullshit. But back to my barber

I paused at the top of the spiral staircase, and soaked in the view. In the daylight, the bookstore took on a new life. Motes of dust danced in the sunlight that streamed through the windows. It looked a lot cozier, as the colored glass window ornaments threw rainbows across the bookshelves and pirouetted across the hardwood floors like flecks of dappled sunlight on sand. Bookcases, filled to the brim, reached up to the ceiling, cluttered with so many colors and kinds of books, short and fat, long and wide, that it almost felt like an assault on the senses. The center of the bookstore was open to the second floor, where tall bookshelves towered so high you had to reach them with ladders. Heavy oak beams supported the roof. Planetariums and glass chimes and other ornaments hung from the rafters, catching the morning's golden light and throwing it across the store. The shelves were made from the same deep oak as the ceiling beams and the banisters on the second floor, signs hanging from the eye-level shelves detailing the different sections of the store: MEMOIR, FANTASY, SCI-FI, ROMANCE, SELF-HELP, NATURE, HOW-TO... This place was beautiful. I wondered, briefly, what it would be like to own a place like this. It was magical. A shop that sold the impossible inked onto soft white paper.

Globalization has shipped products at a faster rate than anything else; it’s moved English into schools all over the world so that now there is Dutch English and Filipino English and Japanese English. But the ideologies stay in their places. They do not spread like the swine flu, or through sexual contact. They spread through books and films and things of that nature. The dictatorships of Latin America used to ban books, they used to burn them, just like Franco did, like Pope Gregory IX and Emperor Qin Shi Huang. Now they don’t have to because the best place to hide ideologies is in books. The dictatorships are mostly gone—Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay. The military juntas. Our ideologies are not secrets. Even the Ku Klux Klan holds open meetings in Alabama like a church. None of the Communists are still in jail. You can buy Mao’s red book at the gift shop at the Museum of Communism. I will die soon, in the next five to ten years. I have not seen progress during my lifetime. Our lives are too short and disposable. If we had longer life expectancies, if we lived to 200, would we work harder to preserve life or, do you think that when Borges said, ‘Jews, Christians, and Muslims all profess belief in immortality, but the veneration paid to the first century of life is proof that they truly believe in only those hundred years, for they destine all the rest, throughout eternity, to rewarding or punishing what one did when alive,’ we would simply alter it to say ‘first two centuries’? I have heard people say we are living in a golden age, but the golden age has passed—I’ve seen it in the churches all over Latin America where the gold is like glue. The Middle Ages are called the Dark Ages but only because they are forgotten, because the past is shrouded in darkness, because as we lay one century of life on top of the next, everything that has come before seems old and dark—technological advances provide the illusion of progress. The most horrendous tortures carried out in the past are still carried out today, only today the soldiers don’t meet face to face, no one is drawn and quartered, they take a pill and silently hope a heart attack doesn’t strike them first. We are living in the age of dissociation, speaking a government-patented language of innocence—technology is neither good nor evil, neither progress nor regress, but the more advanced it becomes, the more we will define this era as the one of transparent secrets, of people living in a world of open, agile knowledge, oceans unpoliced—all blank faces, blank minds, blank computers, filled with our native programming, using electronic appliances with enough memory to store everything ever written invented at precisely the same moment we no longer have the desire to read a word of it.

That same day we drove to Seville to celebrate. I asked someone for the name of the smartest hotel in Seville. Alfonso XIII, came the reply. It is where the King of Spain always stays. We found the hotel and wandered in. It was amazing. Shara was a little embarrassed as I was dressed in shorts and an old holey jersey, but I sought out a friendly-looking receptionist and told her our story. “Could you help us out? I have hardly any money.” She looked us up and down, paused--then smiled. “Just don’t tell my manager,” she whispered. So we stayed in a $1,000-a-night room for $100 and celebrated--like the King of Spain. The next morning we went on a hunt for a ring. I asked the concierge in my best university Spanish where I would find a good (aka well-priced) jeweler. He looked a little surprised. I tried speaking slower. Eventually I realized that I had actually been asking him where I might find a good mustache shop. I apologized that my Spanish was a little rusty. Shara rolled her eyes again, smiling. When we eventually found a small local jeweler, I had to do some nifty subcounter mathematics, swiftly converting Spanish pesetas into British pounds, to work out whether or not I could afford each ring Shara tried on. We eventually settled on one that was simple, beautiful--and affordable. Just. Love doesn’t require expensive jewelry. And Shara has always been able to make the simple look exquisite. Luckily.

…the lump of glass had its place upon the mantelpiece, where it stood heavy upon a little pile of bills and letters and served not only as an excellent paper-weight, but also as a natural stopping place for the young man's eyes when they wandered from his book. Looked at again and again half consciously by a mind thinking of something else, any object mixes itself so profoundly with the stuff of thought that it loses its actual form and recomposes itself a little differently in an ideal shape which haunts the brain when we least expect it. So John found himself attracted to the windows of curiosity shops when he was out walking, merely because he saw something which reminded him of the lump of glass. Anything, so long as it was an object of some kind, more or less round, perhaps with a dying flame deep sunk in its mass, anything—china, glass, amber, rock, marble—even the smooth oval egg of a prehistoric bird would do. He took, also, to keeping his eyes upon the ground, especially in the neighbourhood of waste land where the household refuse is thrown away. Such objects often occurred there—thrown away, of no use to anybody, shapeless, discarded. In a few months he had collected four or five specimens that took their place upon the mantelpiece. They were useful, too, for a man who is standing for Parliament upon the brink of a brilliant career has any number of papers to keep in order—addresses to constituents, declarations of policy, appeals for subscriptions, invitations to dinner, and so on. __ from 'The Solid Object

Mom,” Vaughn said. “I’m sure Sidney doesn’t want to be interrogated about her personal life.” Deep down, Sidney knew that Vaughn—who’d obviously deduced that she’d been burned in the past—was only trying to be polite. But that was the problem, she didn’t want him to be polite, as if she needed to be shielded from such questions. That wasn’t any better than the damn “Poor Sidney” head-tilt. “It’s okay, I don’t mind answering.” She turned to Kathleen. “I was seeing someone in New York, but that relationship ended shortly before I moved to Chicago.” “So now that you’re single again, what kind of man are you looking for? Vaughn?” Kathleen pointed. “Could you pass the creamer?” He did so, then turned to look once again at Sidney. His lips curved at the corners, the barest hint of a smile. He was daring her, she knew, waiting for her to back away from his mother’s questions. She never had been very good at resisting his dares. “Actually, I have a list of things I’m looking for.” Sidney took a sip of her coffee. Vaughn raised an eyebrow. “You have a list?” “Yep.” “Of course you do.” Isabelle looked over, surprised. “You never told me about this.” “What kind of list?” Kathleen asked interestedly. “It’s a test, really,” Sidney said. “A list of characteristics that indicate whether a man is ready for a serious relationship. It helps weed out the commitment-phobic guys, the womanizers, and any other bad apples, so a woman can focus on the candidates with more long-term potential.” Vaughn rolled his eyes. “And now I’ve heard it all.” “Where did you find this list?” Simon asked. “Is this something all women know about?” “Why? Worried you won’t pass muster?” Isabelle winked at him. “I did some research,” Sidney said. “Pulled it together after reading several articles online.” “Lists, tests, research, online dating, speed dating—I can’t keep up with all these things you kids are doing,” Adam said, from the head of the table. “Whatever happened to the days when you’d see a girl at a restaurant or a coffee shop and just walk over and say hello?” Vaughn turned to Sidney, his smile devilish. “Yes, whatever happened to those days, Sidney?” She threw him a look. Don’t be cute. “You know what they say—it’s a jungle out there. Nowadays a woman has to make quick decisions about whether a man is up to par.” She shook her head mock reluctantly. “Sadly, some guys just won’t make the cut.” “But all it takes is one,” Isabelle said, with a loving smile at her fiancé. Simon slid his hand across the table, covering hers affectionately. “The right one.” Until he nails his personal trainer. Sidney took another sip of her coffee, holding back the cynical comment. She didn’t want to spoil Isabelle and Simon’s idyllic all-you-need-is-love glow. Vaughn cocked his head, looking at the happy couple. “Aw, aren’t you two just so . . . cheesy.” Kathleen shushed him. “Don’t tease your brother.” “What? Any moment, I’m expecting birds and little woodland animals to come in here and start singing songs about true love, they’re so adorable.” Sidney laughed out loud. Quickly, she bit her lip to cover.

In Tokyo, ramen is a playground for the culinary imagination. As long as the dish contains thin wheat noodles, it's ramen. In fact, there's a literal ramen playground called Tokyo Ramen Street in the basement of Tokyo Station, with eight top-rated ramen shops sharing one corridor. We stopped by one evening after a day of riding around on the Shinkansen. After drooling over the photos at establishments such as Junk Garage, which serves oily, brothless noodles hidden under a towering slag heap of toppings, we settled on Ramen Honda based on its short line and the fact that its ramen seemed to be topped with a massive pile of scallions. However, anything in Tokyo that appears to be topped with scallions is actually topped with something much better. You'll meet this delectable dopplegänger soon, and in mass quantities. The Internet is littered with dozens if not hundreds of exclamation point-bedecked ramen blogs (Rameniac, GO RAMEN!, Ramen Adventures, Ramenate!) in English, Japanese, and probably Serbian, Hindi, and Xhosa. In Tokyo, you'll find hot and cold ramen; Thai green curry ramen; diet ramen and ramen with pork broth so thick you could sculpt with it; Italian-inspired tomato ramen; and Hokkaido-style miso ramen. You'll find ramen chains and fiercely individual holes-in-the-wall. Right now, somewhere in the world, someone is having a meet-cute with her first bowl of ramen. As she fills up on pork and noodles and seaweed and bamboo shoots, she thinks, we were meant to be together, and she is embarrassed at her atavistic reaction to a simple bowl of soup.

Mindy runs to the DVD player and delicately places the disk in the holder and presses play. “Will you sit in this chair, please, Princess Mindy?” I ask, bowing deeply at the waist. Mindy giggles as she replies, ”I guess so.” After Mindy sits down, I take a wide-tooth comb and start gently combing out her tangles. Mindy starts vibrating with excitement as she blurts, “Mr. Jeff, you’re gonna fix my hair fancy, ain’t you?” “We’ll see if a certain Princess can hold still long enough for me to finish,” I tease. Immediately, Mindy becomes as still as a stone statue. After a couple of minutes, I have to say, “Mindy, sweetheart, it’s okay to breathe. I just can’t have you bouncing, because I’m afraid it will cause me to pull your hair.” Mindy slumps down in her chair just slightly. “Okay Mr. Jeff, I was ascared you was gonna stop,” she whispers, her chin quivering. I adopt a very fake, very over-the-top French accent and say, “Oh no, Monsieur Jeff must complete Princess Mindy’s look to make the Kingdom happy. Mindy erupts with the first belly laugh I’ve heard all day as she responds, “Okay, I’ll try to be still, but it’s hard ‘cause I have the wiggles real bad.” I pat her on the shoulder and chuckle as I say, “Just try your best, sweetheart. That’s all anyone can ask.” Kiera comes screeching around the corner in a blur, plunks her purse on the table, and says breathlessly, “Geez-O-Pete, I can’t believe I’m late for the makeover. I love makeovers.” Kiera digs through her purse and produces two bottles of nail polish and nail kit. “It’s time for your mani/pedi ma’am. Would you prefer Pink Pearl or Frosted Creamsicle? Mindy raises her hand like a schoolchild and Kiera calls on her like a pupil, “I want Frosted Cream toes please,” Mindy answers. “Your wish is my command, my dear,” Kiera responds with a grin. For the next few minutes, Mindy gets the spa treatment of her life as I carefully French braid her hair into pigtails. As a special treat, I purchased some ribbons from the gift shop and I’m weaving them into her hair. I tuck a yellow rose behind her ear. I don my French accent as I declare, “Monsieur Jeffery pronounces Princess Mindy finished and fit to rule the kingdom.” Kiera hands Mindy a new tube of grape ChapStick from her purse, “Hold on, a true princess never reigns with chapped lips,” she says. Mindy giggles as she responds, “You’re silly, Miss Kiera. Nobody in my kingdom is going to care if my lips are shiny.” Kiera’s laugh sounds like wind chimes as she covers her face with her hands as she confesses, “Okay, you busted me. I just like to use it because it tastes yummy.” “Okay, I want some, please,” Mindy decides. Kiera is putting the last minute touches on her as Mindy is scrambling to stand on Kiera’s thighs so she can get a better look in the mirror. When I reach out to steady her, she grabs my hand in a death grip. I glance down at her. Her eyes are wide and her mouth is opening and closing like a fish. I shoot Kiera a worried glance, but she merely shrugs. “Holy Sh — !” Mindy stops short when she sees Kiera’s expression. “Mr. Jeff is an angel for reals because he turned me into one. Look at my hair Miss Kiera, there are magic ribbons in it! I’m perfect. I can be anything I want to be.” Spontaneously, we all join together in a group hug. I kiss the top of her head as I agree, “Yes, Mindy, you are amazing and the sky is the limit for you.

Marks,” he replied, crawling about on hands and knees, eyes intent on the short turf. “How did they know where to start and stop?” “Good question. I don’t see anything.” Casting an eye over the ground, though, I did see an interesting plant growing near the base of one of the tall stones. Myosotis? No, probably not; this had orange centers to the deep blue flowers. Intrigued, I started toward it. Frank, with keener hearing than I, leaped to his feet and seized my arm, hurrying me out of the circle a moment before one of the morning’s dancers entered from the other side. It was Miss Grant, the tubby little woman who, suitably enough in view of her figure, ran the sweets and pastries shop in the town’s High Street. She peered nearsightedly around, then fumbled in her pocket for her spectacles. Jamming these on her nose, she strolled about the circle, at last pouncing on the lost hair-clip for which she had returned. Having restored it to its place in her thick, glossy locks, she seemed in no hurry to return to business. Instead, she seated herself on a boulder, leaned back against one of the stone giants in comradely fashion and lighted a leisurely cigarette. Frank gave a muted sigh of exasperation beside me. “Well,” he said, resigned, “we’d best go. She could sit there all morning, by the looks of her. And I didn’t see any obvious markings in any case.” “Perhaps we could come back later,” I suggested, still curious about the blue-flowered vine. “Yes, all right.” But he had plainly lost interest in the circle itself, being now absorbed in the details of the ceremony. He quizzed me relentlessly on the way down the path, urging me to remember as closely as I could the exact wording of the calls, and the timing of the dance.

He walked me to the door, and we stood on the top step. Wrapping his arms around my waist, he kissed me on the nose and said, “I’m glad I came back.” God, he was sweet. “I’m glad you did, too,” I replied. “But…” I paused for a moment, gathering courage. “Did you have something you wanted to say?” It was forward, yes--gutsy. But I wasn’t going to let this moment pass. I didn’t have many more moments with him, after all; soon I’d be gone to Chicago. Sitting in coffee shops at eleven at night, if I wanted. Working. Eventually going back to school. I’d be danged if I was going to miss what he’d started to say a few minutes earlier, before my mom and her cashmere robe showed up and spoiled everything. Marlboro Man looked up at me and smiled, apparently pleased that I’d shown such assertiveness. An outgoing middle child all my life, with him I’d become quiet, shy--an unrecognizable version of myself. He’d captured my heart so unexpectedly, so completely, I’d been rendered utterly incapable of speaking. He had this uncanny way of sucking the words right out of me and leaving nothing but pure, unadulterated passion in their place. He grabbed me even more tightly. “Well, first of all,” he began, “I really…I really like you.” He looked into my eyes in a seeming effort to transmit the true meaning of each word straight into my psyche. All muscle tone disappeared from my body. Marlboro Man was so willing to put himself out there, so unafraid to put forth his true feelings. I simply wasn’t used to this. I was used to head games, tactics, apathy, aloofness. When it came to love and romance, I’d developed a rock-solid tolerance for mediocrity. And here, in two short weeks, Marlboro Man had blown it all to kingdom come. There was nothing mediocre about Marlboro Man.

Rose, let me show you upstairs to your new room. Do you know that my brother has bought the contents of an entire toy shop for you? Dolls and books, and the biggest doll house you've ever seen.” As the little girl squealed with delight and followed her at once, Holly stared at Zachary Bronson with rapidly dawning disapproval. “An entire toy shop?” “It was nothing like that,” Bronson said immediately. “Elizabeth is prone to exaggeration.” He threw a warning glance at Paula, silently demanding that she agree with him. “Isn't that right, Mother?” “Well,” Paula said uncertainly, “actually, you did rather—” “I'm certain Lady Holland will want a tour of the house while her belongings are unpacked,” Bronson interrupted hastily. “Why don't you take her around?” Clearly overwhelmed by shyness, Mrs. Bronson gave a noncommittal murmur and sped away, leaving the two of them alone in the parlor. Faced with Holly's disapproving stare, Zachary shoved his hands in his pockets, while the toe of his expensive shoe beat a quick, impatient rhythm on the floor. “What harm is there in an extra toy or two?” he finally said in an excessively reasonable tone. “Her room was about as cheerful as a prison cell. I thought a doll and a handful of books would make the place more appealing for her—” “First of all,” Holly interrupted, “I doubt that any room in this house could be described as a prison cell. Second… I will not have my daughter spoiled and overwhelmed, and influenced by your taste for excess.” “Fine,” he said with a gathering scowl. “We'll get rid of the damned toys, then.” “Please do not swear in my presence,” Holly said, and sighed. “How am I to remove the toys after Rose has seen them? You don't know very much about children, do you?” “No,” he said shortly. “Only how to bribe them.

Shortly before you were born, I was pulled over by the PG County police, the same police that all the D.C. poets had warned me of. They approached on both sides of the car, shining their flashing lights through the windows. They took my identification and returned to the squad car. I sat there in terror. By then I had added to the warnings of my teachers what I’d learned about PG County through reporting and reading the papers. And so I knew that the PG County police had killed Elmer Clay Newman, then claimed he’d rammed his own head into the wall of a jail cell. And I knew that they’d shot Gary Hopkins and said he’d gone for an officer’s gun. And I knew they had beaten Freddie McCollum half-blind and blamed it all on a collapsing floor. And I had read reports of these officers choking mechanics, shooting construction workers, slamming suspects through the glass doors of shopping malls. And I knew that they did this with great regularity, as though moved by some unseen cosmic clock. I knew that they shot at moving cars, shot at the unarmed, shot through the backs of men and claimed that it had been they who’d been under fire. These shooters were investigated, exonerated, and promptly returned to the streets, where, so emboldened, they shot again. At that point in American history, no police department fired its guns more than that of Prince George’s County. The FBI opened multiple investigations—sometimes in the same week. The police chief was rewarded with a raise. I replayed all of this sitting there in my car, in their clutches. Better to have been shot in Baltimore, where there was the justice of the streets and someone might call the killer to account. But these officers had my body, could do with that body whatever they pleased, and should I live to explain what they had done with it, this complaint would mean nothing. The officer returned. He handed back my license. He gave no explanation for the stop.

I stood on the street corner. I thought about chasing after her, but she was churning swiftly through the neighborhood -- she was already almost a block away -- so instead I entered a coffee shop. This is why I was on the street. I was going to a coffee shop, and I was buying a coffee, and then I was walking to class, and then I would teach, and then during office hours I would reassure the students who needed reassuring, and I would be tough on the students who could take it, and if someone cried in my office for reasons unrelated but maybe sort of related to the imperfect short story they'd written, I would tell them that fiction makes you cry, the fiction you read though more often it's the shitty fiction you write that makes you cry, and I would also be thinking, You poor person, you have no idea what awaits you. A life awaits you, like a serious fucking life. This is what I would want to say. And then I would go home to my serious fucking life, and it would be so ridiculously unserious; it would involve soup spills and dirty dishes and lengthy logic proofs meant to coerce tired, inarticulate people to bed, and I would think how lucky I was to have this unserious life, i.e., to be forced to do somewhat or even thoroughly banal things every day. Because what awaits you if you don't? What kind of life awaits you then? A life where you don't calmly think, as you're scraping up the crystallized juice rings before showering before getting dressed before buying coffee before teaching class before reassuring people their hard lives would only get harder, Fuck this whole existence. You're running down the street and you're screaming at a university to which you no longer belong, you're wearing a sweatshirt not even branded with the insignia of the university on which you blame your breakdown, the university to which you are no longer affiliated, because you are so deeply unaffiliated that you are barely even affiliated with your own face.

The pink?" she suggested, holding the shimmering rose-colored satin in front of Sara's half-clad figure. Sara held her breath in awe. She had never worn such a sumptuous creation. Silk roses adorned the sleeves and hem of the gown. The short-waisted bodice was finished with a stomacher of silver filigree and a row of satin bows. Lily shook her head thoughtfully. "Charming, but too innocent." Sara suppressed a disappointed sigh. She couldn't imagine anything more beautiful than the pink satin. Busily Monique discarded the gown and sorted through the others. "The peach. No man will be able to keep his eyes from her in that. Here, let us try it, chérie." Raising her arms, Sara let the dressmaker and her assistant Cora pull the gauzy peach-hued gown over her head. "I think it will have to be altered a great deal," Sara commented, her voice muffled beneath the delicate layers of fabric. The gowns had been fitted for Lily's lithe, compact lines. Sara was more amply endowed, with a generous bosom and curving hips, and a tiny, scoped-in waist... a figure style that had been fashionable thirty years ago. The current high-waisted Grecian mode was not particularly flattering to her. Monique settled the gown around Sara's feet and then began to yank the back of it together. "Oui, Lady Raiford has the form that fashion loves." Energetically, she hooked the tight bodice together. "But you, chérie, have the kind that men love. Draw in your breath, s'il vous plaît." Sara winced as her breasts were pushed upward until they nearly overflowed from the low-cut bodice. The hem of the unusually full skirt was bordered with three rows of graduated tulip-leaves. Sara could hardly believe the woman in the mirror was herself. The peach gown, with its transparent layers of silk and shockingly low neckline, had been designed to attract a man's attention. It was too loose at the waist, but her breasts rose from the shallow bodice in creamy splendor pushed together to form an enticing cleavage.

Starting a little over a decade ago, Target began building a vast data warehouse that assigned every shopper an identification code—known internally as the “Guest ID number”—that kept tabs on how each person shopped. When a customer used a Target-issued credit card, handed over a frequent-buyer tag at the register, redeemed a coupon that was mailed to their house, filled out a survey, mailed in a refund, phoned the customer help line, opened an email from Target, visited Target.com, or purchased anything online, the company’s computers took note. A record of each purchase was linked to that shopper’s Guest ID number along with information on everything else they’d ever bought. Also linked to that Guest ID number was demographic information that Target collected or purchased from other firms, including the shopper’s age, whether they were married and had kids, which part of town they lived in, how long it took them to drive to the store, an estimate of how much money they earned, if they’d moved recently, which websites they visited, the credit cards they carried in their wallet, and their home and mobile phone numbers. Target can purchase data that indicates a shopper’s ethnicity, their job history, what magazines they read, if they have ever declared bankruptcy, the year they bought (or lost) their house, where they went to college or graduate school, and whether they prefer certain brands of coffee, toilet paper, cereal, or applesauce. There are data peddlers such as InfiniGraph that “listen” to shoppers’ online conversations on message boards and Internet forums, and track which products people mention favorably. A firm named Rapleaf sells information on shoppers’ political leanings, reading habits, charitable giving, the number of cars they own, and whether they prefer religious news or deals on cigarettes. Other companies analyze photos that consumers post online, cataloging if they are obese or skinny, short or tall, hairy or bald, and what kinds of products they might want to buy as a result.

Have you got them?” “Got them! No. The old man’s not there.” He has been so horribly frightened in the short interval that his terror seizes the other, who makes a rush at him and asks loudly, “What’s the matter?” “I couldn’t make him hear, and I softly opened the door and looked in. And the burning smell is there—and the soot is there, and the oil is there—and he is not there!” Tony ends this with a groan. Mr. Guppy takes the light. They go down, more dead than alive, and holding one another, push open the door of the back shop. The cat has retreated close to it and stands snarling, not at them, at something on the ground before the fire. There is a very little fire left in the grate, but there is a smouldering, suffocating vapour in the room and a dark, greasy coating on the walls and ceiling. The chairs and table, and the bottle so rarely absent from the table, all stand as usual. On one chair-back hang the old man’s hairy cap and coat. “Look!” whispers the lodger, pointing his friend’s attention to these objects with a trembling finger. “I told you so. When I saw him last, he took his cap off, took out the little bundle of old letters, hung his cap on the back of the chair—his coat was there already, for he had pulled that off before he went to put the shutters up—and I left him turning the letters over in his hand, standing just where that crumbled black thing is upon the floor.” Is he hanging somewhere? They look up. No. “See!” whispers Tony. “At the foot of the same chair there lies a dirty bit of thin red cord that they tie up pens with. That went round the letters. He undid it slowly, leering and laughing at me, before he began to turn them over, and threw it there. I saw it fall.” “What’s the matter with the cat?” says Mr. Guppy. “Look at her!” “Mad, I think. And no wonder in this evil place.” They advance slowly, looking at all these things. The cat remains where they found her, still snarling at the something on the ground before the fire and between the two chairs. What is it? Hold up the light.

Nostromo is the most anxiously meditated of the longer novels which belong to the period following upon the publication of the Typhoon volume of short stories. I don’t mean to say that I became then conscious of any impending change in my mentality and in my attitude towards the tasks of my writing life. And perhaps there was never any change, except in that mysterious, extraneous thing which has nothing to do with the theories of art; a subtle change in the nature of the inspiration; a phenomenon for which I can not in any way be held responsible. What, however, did cause me some concern was that after finishing the last story of the Typhoon volume it seemed somehow that there was nothing more in the world to write about. This so strangely negative but disturbing mood lasted some little time; and then, as with many of my longer stories, the first hint for Nostromo came to me in the shape of a vagrant anecdote completely destitute of valuable details. As a matter of fact in 1875 or ’6, when very young, in the West Indies or rather in the Gulf of Mexico, for my contacts with land were short, few, and fleeting, I heard the story of some man who was supposed to have stolen single-handed a whole lighter-full of silver, somewhere on the Tierra Firme seaboard during the troubles of a revolution. On the face of it this was something of a feat. But I heard no details, and having no particular interest in crime qua crime I was not likely to keep that one in my mind. And I forgot it till twenty-six or seven years afterwards I came upon the very thing in a shabby volume picked up outside a second-hand book-shop. It was the life story of an American seaman written by himself with the assistance of a journalist. In the course of his wanderings that American sailor worked for some months on board a schooner, the master and owner of which was the thief of whom I had heard in my very young days. I have no doubt of that because there could hardly have been two exploits of that peculiar kind in the same part of the world and both connected with a South American revolution.

My internal dialogue went something like this: leave it open!… but that would be strange if someone walks by… who cares? I care! Why do I care? Just close it! You can’t close it; you’re in your underwear!! and if the door is closed you might… do… something… Here is the situation: I’m in my underwear in my room with Quinn and my alcohol laden inhibitions are low, low, low. It’s like closing yourself up in a Godiva chocolate shop, of course you’re going to sample something… Don’t sample anything!! Don’t even smell anything!! If you smell it you’ll want to try it. Don’t smell him anymore. No. More. Smelling. I hope he doesn’t see the empty bottle of wine… Put some clothes on. Is it weird if I dress in front of him? I want some chocolate. Ah! Clothes!! Finally the door closed even though I hadn’t made a conscious decision to do so. I took a steadying breath then turned and followed, trailing some distance behind him and crossing to the opposite side of the room from where he was currently standing. I spotted my workout shirt on the bed and attempted to surreptitiously put it on. Quinn’s back was to me and he seemed to be meandering around the space; he didn’t appear to be in any hurry. He paused for a short moment next to my laptop and stared at the screen. He looked lost and a little vulnerable. Smash, smash, smash I took this opportunity to rapidly pull on some sweatpants and a sweatshirt from my suitcase. The sweatshirt was on backwards, with the little ‘V’ in the back and the tag in the front, but I ignored it and grabbed my jacket from the closet behind me and soundlessly slipped it on too. He walked to the window and surveyed the view as I hurriedly pushed my feet into socks and hand knit slippers, given to me by Elizabeth last Christmas. I was a tornado of frenzied activity, indiscriminately and quietly pulling on clothes. I may have been overcompensating for my earlier state of undress. However, it wasn’t until he, with leisurely languid movements, turned toward me that I finally stopped dressing; my hands froze on my head as I pulled on a white cabled hat, another hand knit gift from Elizabeth. Quinn sighed, “I need to talk to you about your sist-” but

What's in the papers then, Son?" he asked with the curtness of a father. "Nothing much, Dad," his son answered. "I saw that those newts have got up as far as Dresden, though." "Germanys had it then," Mr. Povondra asserted. "They're funny people you know, those Germans. They're well educated, but they're funny. I knew a German once, chauffeur he was for some factory; and he wasn't half coarse, this German. Mind you, he kept the car in good condition, I'll say that for him. And now look, Germanys disappearing from the map of the world," Mr. Povondra ruminated. "And all that fuss they used to make! Terrible, it was: everything for the army and everything for the soldiers. But not even they were any match for these newts. And I know about these newts, you know that, don't you. Remember when I took you out to show you one of them when you were only so high?" "Watch out, Dad," said his son, "you've got a bite." "That's only a tiddler," the old man grumbled as he twitched on his rod. Even Germany now, he thought to himself. No-one even bats an eyelid at it these days. What a song and dance they used to make at first whenever these newts flooded anywhere! Even if it was only Mesopotamia or China, the papers were full of it. Not like that now, Mr. Povondra contemplated sadly, staring out at his rod. You get used to anything, I suppose. At least they're not here, though; but I wish the prices weren't so high! Think what they charge for coffee these days! I suppose that's what you have to expect if they go and flood Brazil. If part of the world disappears underwater it has its effect in the shops. The float on Mr. Povondra's line danced about on the ripples of the water. How much of the world is it they've flooded so far then?, the old man considered. There's Egypt and India and China - they've even gone into Russia; and that was a big country, that was, Russia! When you think, all the way up from the Black Sea as far the Arctic Circle - all water! You can't say they haven't taken a lot of our land from us! And their only going slowly .. "Up as far as Dresden then, you say?" the old man spoke up. "Ten miles short of Dresden. That means almost the whole of Saxony will soon be under water." "I went there once with Mr. Bondy," Father Povondra told him. "Ever so rich, they were there, Frank. The food wasn't much good though. Nice people, though. Much better than the Prussians. No comparison.

Globalization has shipped products at a faster rate than anything else; it’s moved English into schools all over the world so that now there is Dutch English and Filipino English and Japanese English. But the ideologies stay in their places. They do not spread like the swine flu, or through sexual contact. They spread through books and films and things of that nature. The dictatorships of Latin America used to ban books, they used to burn them, just like Franco did, like Pope Gregory IX and Emperor Qin Shi Huang. Now they don’t have to because the best place to hide ideologies is in books. The dictatorships are mostly gone—Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay. The military juntas. Our ideologies are not secrets. Even the Ku Klux Klan holds open meetings in Alabama like a church. None of the Communists are still in jail. You can buy Mao’s red book at the gift shop at the Museum of Communism. I will die soon, in the next five to ten years. I have not seen progress during my lifetime. Our lives are too short and disposable. If we had longer life expectancies, if we lived to 200, would we work harder to preserve life or, do you think that when Borges said, ‘Jews, Christians, and Muslims all profess belief in immortality, but the veneration paid to the first century of life is proof that they truly believe in only those hundred years, for they destine all the rest, throughout eternity, to rewarding or punishing what one did when alive,’ we would simply alter it to say ‘first two centuries’? I have heard people say we are living in a golden age, but the golden age has passed—I’ve seen it in the churches all over Latin America where the gold is like glue. The Middle Ages are called the Dark Ages but only because they are forgotten, because the past is shrouded in darkness, because as we lay one century of life on top of the next, everything that has come before seems old and dark—technological advances provide the illusion of progress. The most horrendous tortures carried out in the past are still carried out today, only today the soldiers don’t meet face to face, no one is drawn and quartered, they take a pill and silently hope a heart attack doesn’t strike them first. We are living in the age of dissociation, speaking a government-patented language of innocence—technology is neither good nor evil, neither progress nor regress, but the more advanced it becomes, the more we will define this era as the one of transparent secrets, of people living in a world of open, agile knowledge, oceans unpoliced—all blank faces, blank minds, blank computers, filled with our native programming, using electronic appliances with enough memory to store everything ever written invented at precisely the same moment we no longer have the desire to read a word of it.” ― John M. Keller, Abracadabrantesque

Editing is the most obvious way of manipulating vision. And yet, the camera sometimes sees what you don’t - a person in the background, for example, or an object moving in the wind. I like these accidents. My first full-length film, Esperanza, was about a woman I befriended on the Lower East Side when I was a film student at NYU. Esperanza had hoarded nearly all the portable objects she had touched every day for thirty years: the Chock Full O’Nuts paper coffee cups, copies of the Daily News, magazines, gum wrappers, price tags, receipts, rubber bands, plastic bags from the 99-cent store where she did most of her shopping, piles of clothes, torn towels, and bric-a-brac she had found in the street. Esperanza’s apartment consisted of floor-to-ceiling stacks of stuff. At first sight, the crowded apartment appeared to be pure chaos, but Esperanza explained to me that her piles were not random. Her paper cups had their own corner. These crenellated towers of yellowing, disintegrating waxed cardboard stood next to piles of newspapers … One evening, however, while I was watching the footage from a day’s filming, I found myself scrutinizing a pile of rags beside Esperanza’s mattress. I noticed that there were objects carefully tucked in among the fraying bits of coloured cloth: rows of pencils, stones, matchbooks, business cards. It was this sighting that led to the “explanation.” She was keenly aware that the world at large disapproved of her “lifestyle,” and that there was little room left for her in the apartment, but when I asked her about the objects among the rags, she said that she wanted to “keep them safe and sound.” The rags were beds for the things. “Both the beds and the ones that lay down on them,” she told me, “are nice and comfy.” It turned out that Esperanza felt for each and every thing she saved, as if the tags and town sweaters and dishes and postcards and newspapers and toys and rags were imbued with thoughts and feelings. After she saw the film, my mother said that Esperanza appeared to believe in a form of “panpsychism.” Mother said that this meant that mind is a fundamental feature of the universe and exists in everything, from stones to people. She said Spinoza subscribed to this view, and “it was a perfectly legitimate philosophical position.” Esperanza didn’t know anything about Spinoza … My mother believed and I believe in really looking hard at things because, after a while, what you see isn’t at all what you thought you were seeing just a short time before. looking at any person or object carefully means that it will become increasingly strange, and you will see more and more. I wanted my film about this lonely woman to break down visual and cultural cliches, to be an intimate portrait, not a piece of leering voyeurism about woman’s horrible accumulations.

He had a rough idea where he was going, since Rylann had previously mentioned that she lived in Roscoe Village. At the stoplight at Belmont Avenue, he pulled out his cell phone and scrolled through his contacts. The beauty of text messaging, he realized, was in its simplicity. He didn’t have to try to explain things, nor did he have to attempt to parse through all the banter in an attempt to figure out what she might be thinking. Instead, he could keep things short and sweet. I’D LIKE TO SEE YOU. He hit send. To kill time while he waited for her response, he drove in the direction of his sister’s wine shop, figuring he could always drop in and harass Jordan about something. This time, however, she beat him to the punch. “So who’s the brunette bombshell?” Jordan asked as soon as he walked into the shop and took a seat at the main bar. Damn. He’d forgotten about the stupid Scene and Heard column. Kyle helped himself to a cracker and some Brie cheese sitting on the bar. “I’m going to say…Angelina Jolie. Actually, no—Megan Fox.” “Megan Fox is, like, twenty-five.” “And this is a problem why, exactly?” Jordan slapped his hand as he reached for more crackers. “Those are for customers.” She put her hand on her hip. “You know, after reading the Scene and Heard column, I’d kind of hoped it was Rylann they were talking about. And that maybe, just maybe, my ne’er-do-well twin had decided to stop playing around and finally pursue a woman of quality.” He stole another cracker. “Now, that would be something.” She shook her head. “Why do I bother? You know, one day you’re going to wake up and…” Kyle’s cell phone buzzed, and he tuned out the rest of Jordan’s lecture—he could probably repeat the whole thing word for word by now—as he checked the incoming message. It was from Rylann, her response as short and sweet as his original text. 3418 CORNELIA, #3. He had her address. With a smile, he looked up and interrupted his sister. “That’s great, Jordo. Hey, by any chance do you have any bottles of that India Ink cabernet lying around?” She stopped midrant and stared at him. “I’m sure I do. Why, what made you think of that?” Then her face broke into a wide grin. “Wait a second…that was the wine Rylann talked about when she was here. She said it was one of her favorites.” “Did she? Funny coincidence.” Jordan put her hand over her heart. “Oh my God, you’re trying to impress her. That is so cute.” “Don’t be ridiculous,” Kyle scoffed. “I just thought, since I’ve heard such good things about the wine, that I would give it a shot.” Jordan gave him a look, cutting through all the bullshit. “Kyle. She’s going to love it.” Okay, whatever. Maybe he was trying to impress Rylann a little. “You don’t think it’s too much? Like I’m trying too hard?” Jordan put her hand over her heart again. “Oh. It’s like watching Bambi take his first steps.” “Jordo…” he growled warningly. With a smile, she put her hand on his shoulder and squeezed affectionately. “It’s perfect. Trust me.

A Tale of Two Parking Requirements The impact of parking requirements becomes clearer when we compare the parking requirements of San Francisco and Los Angeles. San Francisco limits off-street parking, while LA requires it. Take, for example, the different parking requirements for concert halls. For a downtown concert hall, Los Angeles requires, as a minimum, fifty times more parking than San Francisco allows as its maximum. Thus the San Francisco Symphony built its home, Louise Davies Hall, without a parking garage, while Disney Hall, the new home of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, did not open until seven years after its parking garage was built. Disney Hall's six-level, 2,188-space underground garage cost $110 million to build (about $50,000 per space). Financially troubled Los Angeles County, which built the garage, went into debt to finance it, expecting that parking revenues would repay the borrowed money. But the garage was completed in 1996, and Disney Hall—which suffered from a budget less grand than its vision—became knotted in delays and didn't open until late 2003. During the seven years in between, parking revenue fell far short of debt payments (few people park in an underground structure if there is nothing above it) and the county, by that point nearly bankrupt, had to subsidize the garage even as it laid employees off. The money spent on parking shifted Disney Hall's design toward drivers and away from pedestrians. The presence of a six-story subterranean garage means most concert patrons arrive from underneath the hall, rather than from the sidewalk. The hall's designers clearly understood this, and so while the hall has a fairly impressive street entrance, its more magisterial gateway is an "escalator cascade" that flows up from the parking structure and ends in the foyer. This has profound implications for street life. A concertgoer can now drive to Disney Hall, park beneath it, ride up into it, see a show, and then reverse the whole process—and never set foot on a sidewalk in downtown LA. The full experience of an iconic Los Angeles building begins and ends in its parking garage, not in the city itself. Visitors to downtown San Francisco have a different experience. When a concert or theater performance lets out in San Francisco, people stream onto the sidewalks, strolling past the restaurants, bars, bookstores, and flower shops that are open and well-lit. For those who have driven, it is a long walk to the car, which is probably in a public facility unattached to any specific restaurant or shop. The presence of open shops and people on the street encourages other people to be out as well. People want to be on streets with other people on them, and they avoid streets that are empty, because empty streets are eerie and menacing at night. Although the absence of parking requirements does not guarantee a vibrant area, their presence certainly inhibits it. "The more downtown is broken up and interspersed with parking lots and garages," Jane Jacobs argued in 1961, "the duller and deader it becomes ... and there is nothing more repellent than a dead downtown.

Today I had a lively discussion with a merchant in Fez with a view to finding out what the Moors think of European civilization.... He was a fine man, about forty years old, with an honest and serious face, who had made business visits to the most important cities in Western Europe and had lived for a long time in Tangier, where he learnt Spanish.... I asked him therefore what kind of impression the large cities of Europe had made on him.... He looked hard at me and answered coldly: “Large streets, fine shops, beautiful palaces, good workshops, everything clean.” He gave the impression that with these words, he had mentioned everything in our countries that was worthy of praise. “Have you not found anything else in Europe that is beautiful and good?” I asked. He looked at me questioningly. “Is it possible,” I went on, “that an intelligent man like you, who has visited several countries so marvelously superior to your own can speak about them without astonishment, or at least without the emotion of a country boy who has seen the pasha’s palace? What can you possibly admire in the world? What sort of people are you? Who can possibly understand you?” “Perdone Usted”, he answered coldly, “it is for me to say that I cannot understand you. I have told you all the things which I consider to be better in Europe. What more can I say? Have I to say something that I do not believe to be true? I repeat that your streets are larger than ours, your shops finer, that you have workshops such as we do not have, and also rich palaces. That is all. I can only add one more thing: that you know more than we do, because you have many books, and read more.” I became impatient. “Do not lose patience, Caballero,” he said, “let us speak together calmly. Is not a man’s first duty honesty? Is it not honesty more than anything else that makes a man worthy of respect, and one country superior to another? Very well, then. As far as honesty is concerned, your countries are certainly not better than ours. That much I can say right away.” “Gently, gently!” I said, “Tell me first what you mean by honesty!” “Honesty in business, Caballero. The Moors, for example, sometimes cheat the Europeans in trade, but you Europeans cheat the Moors much more often.” “There must be a few cases,” I replied, in order to say something. “Casos raros?” he exclaimed angrily. “It happens every day! Proof: I go to Marseilles. I buy cotton. I choose a particular thread, give the exact reference number and brand-name, as well as the amount required. I ask for it to be sent, I pay, and I return home. Back in Morocco, I receive the cotton. I open the consignment, and take a look. I find the same number, the same brand-name, and a thread that is of one third the thickness! This is anything but good, and I lose thousands of francs! I rush to the consulate, but in vain. Another case: A merchant from Fez places an order in Europe for blue cloth, so many pieces, of such and such a length and breadth. He pays for it when the bargain is made. In due course he receives the cloth, opens the package, and checks the measurements. The first pieces are all right, those underneath are shorter, and those lowest down are half a meter too short! The cloth cannot be used for cloaks, and the merchant is ruined. . . . And so on and so on!

He removed his hand from his worn, pleasantly snug jeans…and it held something small. Holy Lord, I said to myself. What in the name of kingdom come is going on here? His face wore a sweet, sweet smile. I stood there completely frozen. “Um…what?” I asked. I could formulate no words but these. He didn’t respond immediately. Instead he took my left hand in his, opened up my fingers, and placed a diamond ring onto my palm, which was, by now, beginning to sweat. “I said,” he closed my hand tightly around the ring. “I want you to marry me.” He paused for a moment. “If you need time to think about it, I’ll understand.” His hands were still wrapped around my knuckles. He touched his forehead to mine, and the ligaments of my knees turned to spaghetti. Marry you? My mind raced a mile a minute. Ten miles a second. I had three million thoughts all at once, and my heart thumped wildly in my chest. Marry you? But then I’d have to cut my hair short. Married women have short hair, and they get it fixed at the beauty shop. Marry you? But then I’d have to make casseroles. Marry you? But then I’d have to wear yellow rubber gloves to do the dishes. Marry you? As in, move out to the country and actually live with you? In your house? In the country? But I…I…I don’t live in the country. I don’t know how. I can’t ride a horse. I’m scared of spiders. I forced myself to speak again. “Um…what?” I repeated, a touch of frantic urgency to my voice. “You heard me,” Marlboro Man said, still smiling. He knew this would catch me by surprise. Just then my brother Mike laid on the horn again. He leaned out of the window and yelled at the top of his lungs, “C’mon! I am gonna b-b-be late for lunch!” Mike didn’t like being late. Marlboro Man laughed. “Be right there, Mike!” I would have laughed, too, at the hilarious scene playing out before my eyes. A ring. A proposal. My developmentally disabled and highly impatient brother Mike, waiting for Marlboro Man to drive him to the mall. The horn of the diesel pickup. Normally, I would have laughed. But this time I was way, way too stunned. “I’d better go,” Marlboro Man said, leaning forward and kissing my cheek. I still grasped the diamond ring in my warm, sweaty hand. “I don’t want Mike to burst a blood vessel.” He laughed out loud, clearly enjoying it all. I tried to speak but couldn’t. I’d been rendered totally mute. Nothing could have prepared me for those ten minutes of my life. The last thing I remember, I’d awakened at eleven. Moments later, I was hiding in my bathroom, trying, in all my early-morning ugliness, to avoid being seen by Marlboro Man, who’d dropped by unexpectedly. Now I was standing on the front porch, a diamond ring in my hand. It was all completely surreal. Marlboro Man turned to leave. “You can give me your answer later,” he said, grinning, his Wranglers waving good-bye to me in the bright noonday sun. But then it all came flashing across my line of sight. The boots in the bar, the icy blue-green eyes, the starched shirt, the Wranglers…the first date, the long talks, my breakdown in his kitchen, the movies, the nights on his porch, the kisses, the long drives, the hugs…the all-encompassing, mind-numbing passion I felt. It played frame by frame in my mind in a steady stream. “Hey,” I said, walking toward him and effortlessly sliding the ring on my finger. I wrapped my arms around his neck as his arms, instinctively, wrapped around my waist and raised me off the ground in our all-too-familiar pose. “Yep,” I said effortlessly. He smiled and hugged me tightly. Mike, once again, laid on the horn, oblivious to what had just happened. Marlboro Man said nothing more. He simply kissed me, smiled, then drove my brother to the mall.

I pull the fire escape door open, scoop my eyeshadow palette off the ground and slip back inside. For a moment, I pause in the corridor and catch my breath. Adrenaline is surging through me. Rage. A normal woman would call the police at this point. But a normal woman would never have been paranoid enough in the first place to pretend to go to the toilet, only to sneak out of the fire escape and spy through a window to watch what her date does when he has five minutes alone with her drink. Nope. A normal woman would have gone to the loo, done a pee and topped up her lipstick. Or she’d have texted a friend about her hot date, feeling giddy with hope and excitement. Now, let’s think about what would have happened to a normal woman. A normal woman would have headed back to her date, smiling prettily, before sitting down and drinking her drugged drink. Then, a short while later, that normal woman would have started feeling far more drunk than she normally does after just a couple of drinks, but she’d probably blame herself. She’d wonder if maybe she’d drunk too much. Or maybe she’d blame herself for having not eaten earlier in the day because she didn’t want to look fat in her dress. Or maybe she’d blame herself because that’s just what she does; she blames herself. And then, just as she started to feel woozy and a bit confused, her date would take her outside for some fresh air and she’d be grateful to him. She’d think he was caring and responsible, when really, he was just whisking her out of sight, before she started to look less like she was drunk and more like she’d been drugged. And then the next thing she’d know, she’d be staggering into the back of a cab and her date would be asking her to tell the driver where she lived. And when she’d barely be able to get the words out and her date made a joke to the driver about how drunk she was, she’d feel small and embarrassed. And then she’d find herself slumping into her date’s open arms, flopping against his big manly body, and she’d feel grateful once more that this man was taking care of her and getting her home safe. And then, once the taxi slowed down and she blinked her eyes open and found they’d pulled up outside her flat, she’d notice in a fleeting moment of clarity that when the driver asked for the fare, her date thrust two crisp ten-pound notes towards him in a weirdly premeditated move, as though he’d known this moment was going to happen all along. As though he’d had the cash lined up, the plan set, and she’d feel something. Something. But then she’d be staggering out of the taxi, even sloppier than when she got in, and her legs would be buckling, and she’d cling to her date for support, her make-up now smudged, her eyes half-closed, her hair messy. She’d look a state and he’d ask her which flat was hers, and she’d walk with him to her front door, to the flat where she lives alone. To the place that’s full of books and cute knick-knacks from charity shops and colourful but inexpensive clothes. She’d unlock her front door, her hand sliding drunkenly over the lock, and she’d lead him into the place she’s been using as a base to try to get ahead in life, and then he’d look around, keen-eyed, until he spotted her bedroom and he’d draw her in. And then all of a sudden he’d be in her bedroom and she wouldn’t be able to remember if she’d asked him back or not or quite how this happened, and it would all be moving so fast and her thoughts would be unable to keep up – they’d keep sliding away – and he’d be kissing her and she’d be unsure what was happening as he pulled off her dress and she’d wonder, did she ask for this? Does she want this? Has she been a ‘slut’ again? But the thoughts would be weak, they’d keep falling away and he’d be confident and he’d be certain and he’d be good-looking and he’d be pulling off her bra and taking off her knickers. He’d be pushing himself inside her. The next day, he’d be gone by the time she woke up. She’d be blocked, unmatched...

1 It was early December. The streets of Milan glistened with Christmas decorations, with people coming and going carefree, carrying elegant shopping bags. It was past eight, and several minutes earlier I had closed behind me the door of Passerella, the modelling agency I ran. I had let my assistant, Giovanni, file the photos of the new faces we had initially chosen for Dante’s summer collection. He was an up-and-coming designer. The minute I walked down Monte Napoleone, one of the city’s most commercial streets, the chilly air forced me to wrap up well in my brand new light green coat. An original piece of cashmere, the five letters embossed on its lapel making it even more precious in that cold weather. My fingers contentedly groped for the word “Prada” before I stuck my hand into its warm pocket, while clutching my favourite handbag tight. A huge red ostrich Hermes where you could find cosmetics, scarves, and accessories, which I could use throughout the day, giving a different twist to my appearance. I wanted to walk a little bit to let off steam. My job may have been pleasant as it had to do with the world’s most beautiful creatures, men and women, but it wasn’t without its tensions. Models went to and fro, trade representatives looking for new faces, endless castings, phone calls, text messages, tailors, photographers, reports from my secretary and assistants—a rowdy disorder! I had already left the building where my job was, and I was going past another two entrances of nearby premises, when my leg caught on something. I instantly thought of my brand new Manolo Blahnik shoes. I’d only put them on for the second time, and they were now falling victim to the rough surface of a cardboard box, where a homeless man slept, at the entrance of a building. My eyes sparked as I checked if my high heels were damaged. On the face of it, they were intact. But that wasn’t enough for me. I found a lighter, and tried to check their red leather in the dim light. Why should the same thing happen over and over again every time I buy new shoes? I wondered and walked on, cursing. Why had that bloke chosen that specific spot to sleep, and why had I headed for his damn cardboard box! As I held my lighter, my angry gaze fell on the man who was covered with an impermeable piece of nylon, and carried on sleeping. He looked so vulnerable out in the cold that I didn’t dare rouse him from his sleep. After all, how could I hold him responsible in this state? I quickened my gait. Bella was waiting for me to start our night out with a drink and supper at Galleria Vittorio Emanuele, the imposing arcade with a dome made of glass, its ambience warm and romantic. Bella’s office was nearby, and that meeting place was convenient for both of us. That’s where we made up our minds about how to spend the night.I walked several metres down the road, but something made me stop short. I wanted to have a second look at that man. I retraced my steps. He was a young man who, despite his state, seemed so out of place. His unkempt hair and unshaven face didn’t let me see anything else but his profile, which reminded of an ancient Greek statue, with pronounced cheekbones and a chiselled nose. This second time, he must have sensed me over him. The man’s body budged, and he eyed me without making me out, dazzled by the lighter flame. As soon as I realised what I had done, I took to my heels. What had made me go back? Maybe, the sense of guilt I felt inside my warm Prada coat, maybe, the compassion I had to show as Christmas was just around the corner. All I knew was that a small bell jingled within, and I obeyed it. I walked faster, as if to escape from every thought. As I left, I stuck my hand in my bag, and got hold of my mobile. My secretary’s voice on the other end of the line sounded heavy and imposing. Giovanni wasn’t the embodiment of “macho” man, but he had all it takes to be the perfect male. Having chosen to quit modelling, he still looked gorgeous at the age of

They both wore short dresses, one in red polka-dot, the other lace-fringed, with the slightly faded, slightly ill-fitting look of vintage shop finds. It was, in some ways, costume. They ticked the boxes of a certain kind of enlightened, educated middle-classness, the love of dresses that were more interesting than pretty, the love of the eclectic, the love of what they were supposed to love. Ifemelu imagined them when they traveled: they would collect unusual things and fill their homes with them, unpolished evidence of their polish.

You're leaving me?" St. Vincent asked, looking perturbed. "For how long?" "For good, actually." As St. Vincent absorbed the information, his pale blue eyes narrowed. "What will you do for money?" Relaxed in the face of his employer's displeasure, Cam shrugged. "I already have more money than anyone could spend in a lifetime." The viscount glanced heavenward. "Anyone who says such a thing obviously doesn't know the right places to shop." He sighed shortly. "So. If I'm to understand correctly, you intend to eschew civilization altogether and live as a savage?" "No, I intend to live as a Roma. There's a difference." "Rohan, you're a wealthy young bachelor with all the advantages of modern life. If you've got ennui, do what every other man of means does." Cam's brows lifted. "And that would be? "Gamble! Drink! Buy a horse! Take a mistress! For God's sake, have a little imagination. Can you think of no better option than to throw it all away and live like a primitive, thereby inconveniencing me in the process? How the devil am I to replace you?" "No one's irreplaceable." "You are. No other man in London can do what you do. You're a walking account book, you've got eyes in the back of your head, you've got the tact of a diplomat, the mind of a banker, the fists of a boxer, and you can put down a fight in a matter of seconds. I'd need to hire at least a half-dozen men to your job." "I don't have the mind of a banker," Cam said indignantly. "After all your investment coups, you can't deny? "That wasn't on purpose!" A scowl spread across Cam's face. "It was my good-luck curse.

Photographs from Distant Places (1) In distant villages, You always see the same scenes: Farms Cattle Worship spaces Small local shops. Just basic the things humans need To endure life. (2) ‘Can you stay with me forever?’ She asked him in the airport, While hugging him tightly in her arms. ‘Sorry, I can’t. My flight leaves in two hours and a half.’ He responded with an artificially caring voice, As he kissed her on her right cheek. (3) I was walking in one of Bucharest’s old streets, In a neighborhood that looked harshly beaten by Time, And severely damaged by development and globalization. I saw a poor homeless man Combing his dirty hair In a side mirror of a modern and expensive car! (4) The shape and the color of the eyes don’t matter. What matters is that, As soon as you gaze into them, You know that they have seen a lot. All eyes that dare to bear witness To what they have seen are beautiful. (5) A stranger asked me how I chose my path in life. I told him: ‘I never chose anything, my friend.’ My path has always been like someone forced to sit In an airplane on a long flight. Forced to sit with the condition Of keeping the seatbelt on at all times, Until the end of the flight. Here I am still sitting with the seatbelt on. I can neither move Nor walk. I can’t even throw myself out of the plane’s emergency exit To end this forced flight! (6) After years of searching and observing, I discovered that despair’s favorite hiding place Is under business suits and tuxedos. Under jewelry and expensive night gowns. Despair dances at the tables where Expensive wines of corruption And delicious dinners of betrayal are served. (7) Oh, my poet friend, Did you know that The bouquet of fresh flowers in that vase On your table is not a source of inspiration or creativity? The vase is just a reminder Of a flower massacre that took place recently In a field Where these poor flowers happened to be. It was their fate to have their already short lives cut shorter, To wither and wilt in your vase, While breathing the not-so-fresh air In your room, As you sit down at your table And write your vain words. (8) Under authoritarian regimes, 99.9% of the population vote for the dictator. Under capitalist ‘democratic’ regimes, 99.9% of people love buying and consuming products Made and sold by the same few corporations. Awe to those societies where both regimes meet to create a united vicious alliance against the people! To create a ‘nation’ Of customers, not citizens! (9) The post-revolution leaders are scavengers not hunters. They master the art of eating up The dead bodies and achievements Of the fools who sacrificed themselves For the ‘revolution’ and its ideals. Is this the paradox and the irony of all revolutions? (10) Every person is ugly if you take a close look at them, And beautiful, if you take a closer look. (11) Just as wheat fields can’t thrive Under the shadow of other trees, Intellectuals, too, can’t thrive under the shadow Of any power or authority. (12) We waste so much time trying to change others. Others waste so much time thinking they are changing. What a waste! October 20, 2015

Making wishes isn’t what’s magic here. It’s having something to wish for that makes all the difference. Hope. This has given them all hope. That’s something that’s been in short supply lately. For all of us.

Mayim Bialik: This is a case where I don’t know that I agreed with our writers, but also I have ultimate faith in them, and that’s part of being a team player on a show. I loved that I got to wear some nicer clothes, and it was really a thrill to have my hair cut after having the same [style] for all those years. It was straightened [all those years], which damaged my hair in ways it may never recover from, which is fine, because now I have short hair and I’ve stopped trying to see if it can ever be healthy again. [Laughs] But honestly, it was so exciting that I didn’t have to wear it straight anymore, and I could have some more character to my hair and my face. So it felt really good that people could see me that way, but in some ways, it did feel like a betrayal of our Amy. We didn’t go crazy and have her dressing in ways that completely didn’t look like her. She still wore kind of sensible things—like what’d you get at Loehmann’s. She had an old-lady Loehmann’s shopping trip! But it was definitely something I had conflict about… I thought it would be, Let’s dress Amy up and take her out for the night! I didn’t think it would be like, here’s her new normal!

Don’t even think of serving him on our dish. He’ll break the dish and won’t even touch the offerings. He flares up in an instant. When he’s enraged he doesn’t even spare his wife. He beat his son black and blue the other day, and the poor child is nursing a broken arm. You’ll have to place the offerings on the mat itself. But make sure you don’t touch any of it. Take Jhudi Gour’s daughter along with you, and buy all the stuff from Shah’s shop in the market. The offerings have to be generous, or he’ll get upset. One kilo flour, half a kilo of rice, quarter kilo pulses, some ghee, salt, turmeric, and don’t forget to add a few coins to all this. If you can’t find Gour’s daughter, beg Bhurji’s wife to go with you and get the stuff. Remember, don’t touch any of it—or else we’ll be in deep trouble.’ Having instructed his wife thus, Dukhi picked up his stick and a large bundle of grass, and set off to meet Pandit-ji. — Munshi Premchand, From the short story “Deliverance

Tibetans also discovered a niche that was almost uniquely their own: collecting medicinal herbs. Herbs were commonly used in both Chinese and Tibetan medicine, and many of the more valuable were found on the Tibetan plateau. Beimu, an alpine lily used to treat coughs, grew at altitudes of more than 10,000 feet, and Tibetan nomads were perfectly situated to collect it. Most lucrative was Cordyceps sinensis, a prized ingredient in traditional medicine, believed to boost immunity, stamina, and lung and kidney function. Tibetans call it yartsa gunbu, meaning “summer grass, winter worm,” or simply bu, “worm,” for short. The worm is actually a fungus that feeds on the larvae of caterpillars. In the past, the worm was commonplace enough that Tibetans would feed it to a sluggish horse or yak, but the Chinese developed a hankering for it that sent prices soaring. Chinese coaches with gold-medal ambitions would feed it to athletes; aging businessmen would eat it to enhance their sexual potency. At one point, the best-quality caterpillar fungus was worth nearly the price of gold, as much as $900 an ounce. Tibetans had a natural monopoly on the caterpillar fungus. Non-Tibetans didn’t have the local knowledge or the lung capacity to compete. The best worm was in Golok, northwest of Ngaba. Nomadic families would bring their children with them, sometimes taking them out of school because their sharp eyesight and short stature allowed them to more easily scan the ground for the worm amid the grasses and weeds. The season ran for approximately forty days of early spring, the time when the melting snow turned the still-brown hills into a spongy carpet. The families would camp out for weeks in the mountains. In a good season, a Tibetan family could make more in this period than a Chinese factory worker could earn in a year. The Communist Party would later brag about how their policies had boosted the Tibetan economy, but the truth was that nothing contributed as much as the caterpillar fungus, which according to one scholar accounted for as much as 40 percent of Tibetans’ cash earnings. Unlike earnings from mining and forestry, industries that came to be dominated by Chinese companies, this was cash that went directly into the pockets of Tibetans. The nomads acquired the spending power to support the new shops and cafés. The golden worm was part of a cycle of rising prosperity.

Life is short; we hear it all the time. So, instead of moping around, let’s both take life by the proverbial horns. Let’s live and appreciate each other and what we have in our lives. Maybe the loss of Thomas can help shape a new outlook on life.” I knew she was right, but I didn’t have it in me

Does Kurokawa feel that deep-time thinking in business is better than short-term thinking? He is an even-minded person, and I admit that I expected him to reply that both are important. Instead he said, "Of course." He offered one more history lesson: in 1915, Tokyo decided to commemorate their recently deceased emperor with a Shinto shrine and sacred forest. At the time, the area they selected was marshy farmland on the outskirts of the city. The forester planned out the project in stages, beginning with a hundred thousand young trees that would be planted around the few existing pines. Over a hundred years, a broad-leaf woods of oak, chinquapin and camphor trees would rise to become an untended forest. No one involved in the planning would live to see the final outcome. Today the mature forest covers a slow-rising hill alongside Harajuku subway station. It's a green respite, where a sense of calm prevails and there's clean air for your lungs-and it is surrounded to the horizon on every side by the megalopolis of Toyko. Kurokawa became speechless with awe at the brilliance of the deep-time vision. 'If you don't think that way,' he said at last, 'what kind of passion do you have for human life?

I bought five purses in the span of a few weeks. Every time, I’d purr over my new purchase for a couple of days. But those jolts of happiness were short-lived. I’d inevitably get bored and start shopping for a new one. The hunt was intoxicating but the good feels never lasted.

They(women) go shopping as bees go flower visiting.

She was reluctant to admit that Buckeye had become what her sons called “a hick town.” The Sears and Roebuck no longer delivered, there were no new shiny, neon shopping malls, and the peach farmers, whose abounding yields had once been the town’s glory, had either moved or were slowly dying off. The few shopkeepers who eked out a living now catered to tourists who came in late Friday afternoons on their way to the emerging gambling oasis in Laughlin, Nevada. Indian mocassins and peach jam in jars with fake old-fashioned labels were loaded into their foreign cars before they sped through the invisible town to the highway lined with crooked Joshua trees.

What happened to Kenny? The short answer is that Mike doesn’t know. Mike did not follow up. This was one of the techniques or practices that he used to protect himself so he could sleep at night. Mike said he has two reasons for this philosophy. “First, our job as a negotiator is finite time-wise. It is not the negotiator’s task to solve all of the deep-seated underlying psychological problems of those with whom we negotiate. Those with a lot more letters after their names handle that. We are all about the here and now. Get them down off the bridge and into the hands of someone more qualified to handle the complex mental disorders that cause these individuals to do the things they do.” “Second, there is a kind of selfish reason. I had about six hours of my life invested in Kenny. If he got out of rehab or didn’t complete rehab and went back to the neighborhood and started hanging around with his crack-smoking friends and went back to drugs, I would feel as if that part of my life had been wasted time. If we look at statistics, that likely is what happened. I would prefer to think that Kenny is happily working on cars in a shop, factory or dealership and leading a happy and productive life.” Mike added that there is no feeling in the world that competes with rolling up on an incident where an individual is attempting to take his/her life and sometime later walking away with the individual well and on his way to getting help. What happens after that is out of our hands.

But why here?’ he asked plaintively. ‘Well, it’s a book shop,’ I said. ‘So what?’ asked the manager. ‘My last branch didn’t have a local god in it. None of the other managers have ever mentioned anything like this—I’m sure I would have remembered. Why here?’ Because, I thought, the cockfighting ring on your top floor provided a reservoir of vestigia which interacted with all those young minds reading books downstairs, and a spirit of place formed like a pearl around a bit of grit. Only I wasn’t going to tell him that. Because not only couldn’t I prove any of it, it was also a bloody dreadful simile. Then the children’s section had been moved upstairs and the poor little deity started to feel unloved. ‘Just one of those things,’ I said.

The wallflower finishes their writing and closes the book, taking a final look before saying their goodbyes to everyone and the shop and becoming a shadow amongst the people on the streets again.

Jacinta and I shared a doll. I don’t know where it came from, but it wasn’t from a shop because by the time we adopted her, she was missing her shoes and socks. We named her Grace. She had long, curly hair until Jacinta cut it short and I cut it even shorter. We scribbled nonsense on her body with felt tips and tried to rub it off with cotton balls soaked in nail varnish. We fought over her so hard, Jacinta at one end, me at the other, we pulled her head clean off and agreed to play separately with the two parts of her until Mum found a way to reattach the decapitated head, saying, “You can forget about a hamster.

When Covid hit the headlines, all they needed to do was take down the internet for a short time. With a deadly disease spreading via the mainstream media, the people would have panicked and flocked to get their poisonous injections on mass. It would have been game over for humanity. But there was a problem with that plan. The internet is a key part of their long-term plan, the New World Order with one government and one army. To take down the internet may have negatively affected peoples’ decisions to embrace AI, especially implanted computer chips for shopping and freedom of movement, plus a central bank digital currency.

understanding, we did not go shopping again, and I never touched her again in quite that way. But at lunch sometimes, or even in my office, we held hands while we talked. I liked that a lot.

Saving money, when buying an unnecessary thing, leads to wasting time, when using the thing.

On the day the hulk was towed away from Asbury Park, George White Rogers opened a radio-repair shop in Bayonne, New Jersey. It was the first time he had worked in some months. Customers found Rogers a bombastic shopkeeper, fond of telling them how lucky they were to have their radio sets mended by him. His business dropped off. One day in February 1935, Rogers left the shop “to get a breath of air.” Shortly afterward it caught fire. Bayonne police files reveal: “An inventory made by Rogers disclosed equipment had suffered damage to the extent of $1200. Arson was suspected. But no proof existed to warrant an arrest. He collected from the insurance company.

Big companies like ITI, Bharat Electronics and HMT settled into their own well-planned, self-sufficient clusters where the companies assumed responsibility for their employees’ living quarters and schools and shops. IT tore this system apart. They set up fancy headquarters buildings with no thought to the living and commuting needs of their tens of thousands of employees.

I’m stuck in this pose, this shop-managing pose, forever, because of a few short weeks in 1979 when I went a bit potty for a while. It could be worse, I guess; I could have walked into an army recruiting office, or the nearest Slaughterhouse. But even so, I feel as though I made a face and the wind changed, and now I have to go through life grimacing in this horrible way.

Remember that life is short and full of surprises. If you wait too long, opportunities fade like setting sun.

all the shop windows glowed with cheerful displays, some of them rather more well done than others. Alice thought the hardware shop with its Nativity scene comprised entirely of power tools was a little odd, whether one believed in such things or not. Although the tiny electric drill in the manger was admittedly quite cute, somehow. Possibly due to the googly eyes on the handle.

This is the paradox of being white and ‘seeing white’, but being to all intents and purposes ‘invisible’ or, more appropriately, as Frankenberg, Garner, and other sociologists of ‘whiteness’ have suggested, ‘unmarked’. In Western societies whites take being white for granted. Their particularity tends to be universalized. It is the default position from which the world is seen, but it also allows them to ‘disappear’ from the foreground of spaces and places, from their own streets to parks and shopping malls.

Note: When shopping for ground beef, look for a fat content of at least 20 percent (80/20 beef). Plain old ground chuck will do. For a superior burger, combine 50 percent ground sirloin with 25 percent ground fatty short rib and 25 percent ground brisket. To clarify butter, place it in a small microwave-safe container and microwave in 15-second increments until fully melted. Skim off the white scum from the top surface with a spoon and discard. Carefully pour off and reserve the yellow butterfat, discarding the milky white liquid at the bottom.

Basilica de la Merced, the last Catholic outpost on San Pedro Nolasco’s old block. “All this,” Nico said, waving his arm to encompass two copy shops, a Chinese restaurant, a

The more familiar we are with the particular conditions that connect or disconnect us from presence, the easier it becomes to spot them in our lives. For example, I tend to lose presence when I’m rushing. This means that I’m more apt to make physical or relational blunders: I might drop something in the kitchen, forget my lunch, or even say something sharp. I learned a painful lesson about this a few years ago. I was at a farewell party for my girlfriend, Evan, who had just finished a year of service at a meditation retreat center. We had plans to drive north up the coast of California after the party, and I’d made an appointment to install a car radio for the trip. In that classic, romantic way, I wanted everything to be perfect. As our departure time approached, I grew more and more anxious about missing the appointment. With no sign of a formal send-off, I finally spoke up and said that we needed to leave soon. To avoid any awkwardness, Evan went along with my request, but she was in tears by the time we arrived at the auto shop. She was incensed at me for cutting short a meaningful experience and at herself for not speaking up. In my fixation to create “the perfect trip,” I’d missed the fact that she was already enjoying herself. I reflected a lot on that incident, how losing presence had unintended, painful consequences.

In another second he had turned on full power, the propellers whizzed with the quickness of light, and he rose in the air, off the shed roof, the live wire no longer entangling him. Then he made a short circuit of the work-shop yard, and came to the ground safely a little distance from the balloon hangar. "Saved! Tom is saved!" cried Mr. Swift, who had seen the act of Mr. Peterson from a distance. "He saved my boy's life!

On the street I stare left and right. And then I stare straight ahead. There is a man leaving the organic supermarket opposite. A tall man. With sandy blond hair and a clipped golden-brown beard. He has a tan. He is wearing a khaki T-shirt and black shorts and a pair of horn-rimmed glasses. Two large bags of shopping hang from his hands. He stops as he leaves the store and he glances across the street. I see that he is peering through the windows of the Magdala. Looking for someone. And it is only then, with a kick to my gut so hard that I almost fall back into the doorway of the bar, that I realise I have found him.

The odour that pervaded the room was sickening. The sinister-looking man with the scar came in again and sniffed. I sniffed. Then the proprietor came in and sniffed. “Say,” I said in the toughest voice I could assume, “you got a leak. Wait. I seen the gas company wagon on the next block when I came in. I’ll get the man.” I dashed out and hurried up the street to the place where Kennedy was waiting impatiently. Rattling his tools, he followed me with apparent reluctance. As he entered the wine-shop he snorted, after the manner of gas-men, “Where’s de leak?” “You find-a da leak,” grunted Albano. “What-a you get-a you pay for? You want-a me do your work?” “Well, half a dozen o’ you wops get out o’ here, that’s all. D’youse all wanter be blown ter pieces wid dem pipes and cigarettes? Clear out,” growled Kennedy. They retreated precipitately, and Craig hastily opened his bag of tools. “Quick, Walter, shut the door and hold it,” exclaimed Craig, working rapidly. He unwrapped a little package and took out a round, flat disc-like thing of black vulcanised rubber. Jumping up on a table, he fixed it to the top of the reflector over the gas-jet. “Can you see that from the floor, Walter?” he asked under his breath. “No,” I replied, “not even when I know it is there.” Then he attached a couple of wires to it and led them across the ceiling toward the window, concealing them carefully by sticking them in the shadow of a beam. At the window he quickly attached the wires to the two that were dangling down from the roof and shoved them around out of sight. “We’ll have to trust that no one sees them,” he said. “That’s the best I can do at such short notice. I never saw a room so bare as this, anyway. There isn’t another place I could put that thing without its being seen.” We gathered up the broken glass of the gas drippings bottle, and I opened the door.

the chocolates were all wrapped in those red and gold and green metallic colours which are almost better than chocolate itself; and the huge white wedding-cake in the window was somehow at once remote and satisfying, just as if the whole North Pole were good to eat. Such rainbow provocations could naturally collect the youth of the neighbourhood up to the ages of ten or twelve. But this corner was also attractive to youth at a later stage; and a young man, not less than twenty-four, was staring into the same shop window.

Shallow. Harmless. A little bit stupid. Crazy in love with you. Needs access to every part of the house. Let’s see . . . Who am I? Well, Roman’s trophy wife, of course. I am pretty, elegant, and extremely snobbish. I love wearing expensive clothes, just the best labels. I’m not really into dresses unless the occasion requires it. I much more prefer designer jeans, paired with silky blouses. The heels are a must.” She pauses, opens her eyes, and turns toward me. “Are heels a must, do you think?” She scrunches her tiny nose. “Of course they are. Damn it. I hate wearing heels.” She closes her eyes again and continues. “The heels are a must, and I have dozens of them. Roman loves when I wear them, he says they make my butt look amazing. I’m also very self-conscious about my height, and wearing heels all the time makes me forget how short I am. My favorite pastime is shopping, and I buy a ton of clothes. My husband has to allocate one driver specifically for me and my shopping sprees.” Another pause and she turns toward me again. “Roman, I’ll need funds to support her addiction with clothes. She is an impulse buyer.” “You’ll get anything you need,” I laugh. She’s completely nuts. “My husband is crazy about me, and he allows me to do whatever I want with the house, like rearrange furniture, so the vibe of the house works better with the earth vibrations. The house feels terribly cold, so I buy a bunch of indoor plants and spread them everywhere. I also tour every single room because I want to make sure the unobstructed energy flows, so I rearrange paintings and mirrors. I also hate the dining room table, it’s so overstated, and I decide to swap it with a sleek glass one I found in an interior design magazine.” Another pause. “This woman is expensive, Roman. I hope you know what you’re getting yourself into.” “I’ll manage.” “Your funeral.” She shrugs and continues. “My husband doesn’t like it when he’s interrupted, but of course, that doesn’t apply to me. I often come into his office just to check up on him and exchange a few kisses. It annoys his men so much. They wonder what he sees in me and why he allows me so much freedom, and then decide he’s thinking with his dick. I’m always around, and they hate it.

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Many thrifts layered a billion dollars of brand-new loans on top of their existing, disastrous hundred million dollars of old loss-making loans, in a hope that the new would offset the old. Each new purchase of mortgage bonds (which was identical to making a loan) was like the last act of a desperate man. The strategy was wildly irresponsible, for the fundamental problem (borrowing short term and lending long term) hadn’t been remedied. The hypergrowth only meant that the next thrift crisis would be larger. But the thrift managers were not thinking that far in advance. They were simply trying to keep the door to the shop open. That explains why thrifts continued to buy mortgage bonds even as they sold their loans.

We asked 54 people, recruited from the Bulletproof Executive Facebook page, to conduct two batteries of cognitive function tests per day for 4 weeks while using different combinations of butter and coffee: Lab-tested Upgraded Coffee (black) Coffee made with beans from a local shop (black) Lab-tested Upgraded Coffee with butter Coffee made with beans from a local shop with butter We did not test MCTs, short-chain C8 MCTs, or coconut oil because the test was already too long and dropout (people not completing the test) was a problem. Nonetheless, the results were conclusive. With or without butter, the coffee from a local coffee shop produced statistically significant lower scores on tests of cognitive function compared to lab-tested Upgraded Coffee beans.

Ken Wharfe In 1987, Ken Wharfe was appointed a personal protection officer to Diana. In charge of the Princess’s around-the-clock security at home and abroad, in public and in private, Ken Wharfe became a close friend and loyal confidant who shared her most private moments. After Diana’s death, Inspector Wharfe was honored by Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II at Buckingham Palace and made a Member of the Victorian Order, a personal gift of the sovereign for his loyal service to her family. His book, Diana: Closely Guarded Secret, is a Sunday Times and New York Times bestseller. He is a regular contributor with the BBC, ITN, Sky News, NBC, CBS, and CNN, participating in numerous outside broadcasts and documentaries for BBC--Newsnight, Channel 4 News, Channel 5 News, News 24, and GMTV. My memory of Diana is not her at an official function, dazzling with her looks and clothes and the warmth of her manner, or even of her offering comfort among the sick, the poor, and the dispossessed. What I remember best is a young woman taking a walk in a beautiful place, unrecognized, carefree, and happy. Diana increasingly craved privacy, a chance “to be normal,” to have the opportunity to do what, in her words, “ordinary people” do every day of their lives--go shopping, see friends, go on holiday, and so on--away from the formality and rituals of royal life. As someone responsible for her security, yet understanding her frustration, I was sympathetic. So when in the spring of the year in which she would finally be separated from her husband, Prince Charles, she yet again raised the suggestion of being able to take a walk by herself, I agreed that such a simple idea could be realized. Much of my childhood had been spent on the Isle of Purbeck in Dorset, a county in southern England approximately 120 miles from London; I remembered the wonderful sandy beaches of Studland Bay, on the approach to Poole Harbour. The idea of walking alone on miles of almost deserted sandy beach was something Diana had not even dared dream about. At this time she was receiving full twenty-four-hour protection, and it was at my discretion how many officers should be assigned to her protection. “How will you manage it, Ken? What about the backup?” she asked. I explained that this venture would require us to trust each other, and she looked at me for a moment and nodded her agreement. And so, early one morning less than a week later, we left Kensington Palace and drove to the Sandbanks ferry at Poole in an ordinary saloon car. As we gazed at the coastline from the shabby viewing deck of the vintage chain ferry, Diana’s excitement was obvious, yet not one of the other passengers recognized her. But then, no one would have expected the most photographed woman in the world to be aboard the Studland chain ferry on a sunny spring morning in May. As the ferry docked after its short journey, we climbed back into the car and then, once the ramp had been lowered, drove off in a line of cars and service trucks heading for Studland and Swanage. Diana was driving, and I asked her to stop in a sand-covered area about half a mile from the ferry landing point. We left the car and walked a short distance across a wooded bridge that spanned a reed bed to the deserted beach of Shell Bay. Her simple pleasure at being somewhere with no one, apart from me, knowing her whereabouts was touching to see. Diana looked out toward the Isle of Wight, anxious by now to set off on her walk to the Old Harry Rocks at the western extremity of Studland Bay. I gave her a personal two-way radio and a sketch map of the shoreline she could expect to see, indicating a landmark near some beach huts at the far end of the bay, a tavern or pub, called the Bankes Arms, where I would meet her.

Mr. Hardy said that to him the most interesting angle to the case was the fact that the suspect apparently used one or more wigs as a disguise. “He may have bought at least one of them in Bayport. I suggest that you boys make the rounds of all shops selling wigs and see what you can find out.” The boys glanced at the clock on their father’s large desk, then Frank said, “We’ll have time to do a little sleuthing before closing time. Let’s go!” The two boys made a dash for the door, then both stopped short. They did not have the slightest idea where they were going! Sheepishly Joe asked, “Dad, do you know which stores sell wigs?” With a twinkle in his eyes, Mr. Hardy arose from the desk, walked into the library, and opened a file drawer labeled “W through Z.” A moment later he pulled out a thick folder marked WIGS: Manufacturers, distributors, and retail shops of the world. “Why, Dad, I didn’t know you had all this information—” Joe began. His father merely smiled. He thumbed through the heavy sheaf of papers, and pulled one out. “Bayport,” he read. “Well, three of these places can be eliminated at once. They sell only women’s hair pieces. Now let’s see. Frank, get a paper and pencil. First there’s Schwartz’s Masquerade and Costume Shop. It’s at 79 Renshaw Avenue. Then there’s Flint’s at Market and Pine, and one more: Ruben Brothers. That’s on Main Street just this side of the railroad.” “Schwartz’s is closest,” Frank spoke up. “Let’s try him first, Joe.” Hopefully the boys dashed out to their motorcycles and hurried downtown. As they entered Schwartz’s shop, a short, plump, smiling man came toward them. “Well, you just got under the wire fellows,” he said, looking up at a large old-fashioned clock on the wall.

Victor, Andy, and I sat waiting at the café within Miss Selfridge (the young fashion section of the department store) for our entourage to finish shopping. I took this opportunity to seek their advice.               “Tad proposed to me at the Oriental Club,” I declared nonchalantly.               “I know,” came Andy’s reply.               Boggled by his response, I questioned, “Why didn’t you ask me about it?” “I was waiting for you to tell me,” he answered. “He also gave you a key to his town house.” Shocked by his knowingness, I exclaimed, “How did you know?” “I know more about you than you,” he teased. Both men laughed at me. I looked at my teacher, confused. “You knew, too?” “Of course I did. I was present when Tad sought your Valet’s permission.” “Why did Tad come to you for permission?” I questioned. Victor promulgated, “Because he’s an honourable gentleman and a true romantic.” Andy nodded in agreement. My chaperone vociferated, “I’m your guardian, so he came to me to ask for your hand.” “Ask for my hand!” I exclaimed. “I’m not planning to marry him…” Before I could continue, my Valet pronounced, “Then it’s settled. You don’t want to be his property.” “I’m nobody’s property but my own!” I cried. The men burst into mirth. “I’m glad you are being sensible. In the Arab culture, being a kept boy is similar to being in a heterosexual marriage. The dominant partner has total control of his ‘wife boy,’” Triqueros commented. “I’m nobody’s ‘wife boy’!” I burst out. “And definitely not Tad’s.” “Very well then. It’s settled that you are not taking up his offer. I’ll convey your sentiments,” Andy finalized. Case closed. “I can tell him myself. I don’t need you to do it for me,” I voiced. Victor cited, “Since you are Andy’s charge, it is appropriate for him to act on your behalf to inform the intended of your decision. It’s customary protocol, as a man asks the father for his daughter’s hand.” I argued, “But I’m not a girl. I’m a boy who can make his own decisions. I am responsible for me!” Both mentors laughed again. “Are you sure about that?” my lover ruffled my hair and sniggered. “You could have fooled me.” My chaperone and I started a playful tug-of-war until my judicious professor put a stop to our silliness. “Young, stop this absurdity,” Triqueros commanded. “As I’d promised, I’m giving you a short lesson about the ‘real’ England. The existing British monarchy.” His words perked my attention.

Come here,” he says, pulling me against him. “I don’t want to go to the wedding anymore. I’d rather have you all to myself.” “No way,” I say, running a slow finger along the side of his jaw. “You’re a tease.” I love this playful side of Alex. It makes me forget all about those demons. “I came to see a Latino wedding, and I expect to see one,” I tell him. “And here I thought you were comin’ to be with me.” “You’ve got a big ego, Fuentes.” “That’s not all I’ve got.” He backs me against my car, his breath warming my neck more than the midday sun. I close my eyes and expect his lips on mine, but instead I hear his voice. “Give me your keys,” he says, reaching around and taking them from my hand. “You’re not going to throw them into the bushes, are you?” “Don’t tempt me.” Alex opens my car door and slides into the driver’s seat. “Aren’t you going to invite me in?” I ask, confused. “No. I’m parkin’ your car in the shop so it doesn’t get jacked. This is an official date. I’m drivin’.” I point to his motorcycle. “Don’t think I’m getting on that thing.” His left eyebrow raises a fraction. “Why not? Julio’s not good enough for you?” “Julio? You named your motorcycle Julio?” “After my great uncle who helped my parents move here from Mexico.” “I like Julio just fine. I just don’t want to ride on him wearing this short dress. Unless you want everyone riding behind us to see my undies.” He rubs his chin, thinking about it. “Now that would be a sight for sore eyes.” I cross my arms over my chest. “I’m jokin’. We’re takin’ my cousin’s car.

A (house)wife now performs the tasks once distributed between servants of different rank or undertaken by the maid of all work. Her ‘core’ jobs are cleaning, shopping, cooking, washing-up, laundering and ironing.44 She also looks after her children, frequently cares for aged parents or other relatives, and is sometimes incorporated to a greater or lesser degree as an unpaid assistant in her husband’s work. This aspect of being a wife is visible in many small shops or in the activities of the wives of clergymen and politicians, but the same service is provided, less visibly, to husbands in all kinds of occupations. A wife, for example, contributes research assistance (to male academics), acts as hostess (to a business man’s clients), answers the phone and keeps the books (for a small business man).45 However, as Christine Delphy has argued, to list the tasks of a housewife tells us only so much. The list cannot explain why exactly the same services can be bought in the market, or why a particular task is performed without pay by a wife, yet she would get paid for providing the service if she worked, for example, in a restaurant or for a firm of contract cleaners.46 The problem is not that wives perform valuable tasks for which they are not paid (which has led some feminists to argue for state payment or wages for housework). Rather, what being a woman (wife) means is to provide certain services for and at the command of a man (husband). In short, the marriage contract and a wife’s subordination as a (kind of) labourer, cannot be understood in the absence of the sexual contract and the patriarchal construction of ‘men’ and ‘women’ and the ‘private’ and ‘public’ spheres.

When I emerged, there was a boy standing behind me, staring at me. Not just any boy, either. The one who'd returned my lost hat at the lake the other day. The cute one with short auburn hair and green eyes. The one I'd fallen on top of. They were coming out of the woodwork. Or the ice. Or somewhere. He was wearing an apron with the store's name stitched over the pocket. Unless his name was Zublansky's, Your One-Stop Shop.

The very first thing a conjuror must procure is a conjuring-wand—an implement that is always supposed by the audience to be for show only; and for such they must always be made to think it is. It is, however, an absolutely indispensable article, both to beginner and proficient, as it serves as an auxiliary to the concealment of any article in the hand, as will be explained hereafter. For the present, all the learner has to do is to procure a round stick of ebony, about 18in. long, fitted with ivory, silver, or brass ferrules (not caps) countersunk at each end; and to trust to me to its being necessary. It is best to have the wand made to suit the taste, as those sold at conjuring-shops are invariably too short. Any walking-stick manufacturer will make it.

When household money supplies contract or are in short supply, the value of one-stop shopping increases.

range viewer mounted near our ship’s console. Jafar steered for Lucas. After a few more minutes, Lucas signed off and turned to us. “We have a carrier strike group nearby, guys. Denny says they launched two 60H Seahawk helicopters with Seal Teams aboard. We get to clear the Mother Ship’s deck for safe boarding of the Seal teams. I’ll circle the wagons and you guys go rain some death down on the Mother Ship deck until ain’t nothin’ livin’ there. Then we hold shadow position until the Seahawks get here, maintaining a safe landing zone.” Casey and I just smile at each other. Oh yeah! And it’s my turn on the XM307. We jog back into position with Casey manning our Browning fifty while I slipped behind the XM307. We started taking small arms fire from the pirate ship as Lucas passed them to the port side before giving us a clear field of fire. Casey tilted and fired short bursts with tracers. Soon, anything stupid enough to get near the railing was cut in half. I fired 25mm bursts stem to stern. Airburst shells exploded all along the pirate deck, blowing out the view windows on their bridge, and leaving no inch of the vessel untouched above deck. Lucas sped up, passed the pirate bow and angled out on the starboard side. We repeated our dual assault although there really wasn’t anyone alive anyway. Twenty minutes later, we heard the Seahawk helicopters approaching. I fired one more burst as Lucas passed once again on the port side. With the helicopters in sight, Lucas headed for the open sea. Shortly after Casey and I closed up shop, Jafar came to summon us to the bridge. Denny was on speaker. “We’re all here, Captain Blood,” Lucas told him. “The Seals found twenty-six mangled pirates above deck and took no fire from the vessel. Below decks, fourteen more pirates were taken prisoner and eleven of the original ship’s crew rescued. No one spotted you guys so steam for our next baiting area. Once things get wrapped up with the rescued ship the carrier group will get orders to take up a support position within striking distance in case we get this lucky again. Great job! Man, we fucked them up today!” We did our ‘pirate talk’ for a few minutes, including Jafar. Denny cracked up. Who says pirate warfare and cold blooded murder can’t be fun. I had to ask though. “What was the cover story for no live pirates on deck to the carrier group?” “Don’t ask, don’t tell,” Denny adlibbed for our amusement. “The Seals didn’t mind. The official news coverage will be a pirate falling out. The mysterious crater where the pirate den used to be near Mogadishu will be rumored a munitions accident. Those

In observing the behavior of thousands of shoppers, letting shoppers group themselves according to behavior, we have identified three primary types of shoppers, as follows:2 • Quick: As noted previously, the number of products purchased most commonly on a shopping trip is one. These shoppers spend a short time in a small area, with a relatively slow walking speed but high spending speed. A third of all trips to the supermarket result in only one or two items being purchased, with fully half of all trips consisting of five or fewer items purchased. • Fill-in: These shoppers visit about a fifth of the store, have a slightly faster—but still slow—walking speed and an average spending speed. • Stock-up: These shoppers cover a larger area, walk more quickly, but have a lower spending speed.

1. Focus on the short trip. For supermarkets around the world (the same principle applies to all classes of trade), half of all shopping trips result in the purchase of five or fewer items, with one being the most common. These short trips typically account for one-third of store sales. The new strategy is to increase the size of each of those baskets by one or two items. Quick trippers spend money very fast, and getting them to buy one or two more items is far easier than motivating stock-up shoppers to buy ten or twenty more items. This focus, focus, focus on the quick trip could deliver an easy 30 percent sales lift (and a lot more when the synergies with other types of trips become apparent).

Holly Berries A Confederate Christmas Story by Refugitta There was, first, behind the clear crystal pane, a mammoth turkey, so fat that it must have submitted to be killed from sheer inability to eat and move, hung all around with sausage balls and embowered in crisp white celery with its feathered tops. Many a belated housekeeper or father of a family, passing by, cast loving glances at the monster bird, and turned away with their hands on depleted purses and arms full of brown paper parcels. Then there were straw baskets of eggs, white and shining with the delightful prospect of translation into future eggnogs; pale yellow butter stamped with ears of corn, bee hives, and statuesque cows with their tails in an attitude. But these were all substantials, and the principal attraction was the opposition window, where great pyramids of golden oranges, scaly brown pineapples, festoons of bananas, boxes of figs and raisins with their covers thrown temptingly aside, foreign sauces and pickles, cheeses, and gilded walnuts were arranged in picturesque regularity, jut, as it seemed, almost within reach of one’s olfactories and mouth, until a closer proximity realized the fact of that thick plate glass between. Inside it was just the same: there were barrels and boxes in a perfect wilderness; curious old foreign packages and chests, savory of rare teas and rarer jellies; cinnamon odors like gales from Araby meeting you at every turn; but yet everything, from the shining mahogany counter under the brilliant gaslight, up to the broad, clean, round face of the jolly grocer Pin, was so neat and orderly and inviting that you felt inclined to believe yourself requested to come in and take off things by the pocketful, without paying a solitary cent. I acknowledge that it was an unreasonable distribution of favors for Mr. Pin to own, all to himself, this abundance of good things. Now, in my opinion, little children ought to be the shop keepers when there are apples and oranges to be sold, and I know they will all agree with me, for I well remember my earliest ambition was that my papa would turn confectioner, and then I could eat my way right through the store. But our friend John Pin was an appreciative person, and not by any means forgetful of his benefits. All day long and throughout the short afternoon, his domain had been thronged with busy buyers, old and young, and himself and his assistant (a meager-looking young man of about the dimensions of a knitting needle) constantly employed in supplying their demands. From the Southern Illustrated News.

Hello. It is Monday. I live in Sun City. Sun City is a city that is entirely contained inside an enormous concrete building in the shape of a sun. Its rays house our living quarters; its circular centre is where we work and shop. No one has ever been outside of the city; it is generally suspected that the environment outside of the city is uninhabitable.

The first time I traveled to Russia a Russian friend gave me a short little book that she referred to as “The Russian Handbook.”2 Paging through the book during my flight, I was amused to read: If you are walking through the street without a jacket, little old Russian ladies may stop and chastise you for poor judgment. . . . In Russia there is no reticence about expressing your negative criticism openly. For instance, if you are displeased with the service in a shop or restaurant you can tell the shop assistant or waiter exactly what you think of him, his relatives, his in-laws, his habits, and his sexual bias.

Blake didn’t say a word to me as I slid into the passenger seat of his car, and he continued to stay silent as we drove to one of the Starbucks near campus. The only acknowledgment he made of my presence was to put his hand high up on my thigh again and hold tight. Too tight. And not much changed once we were finally in the shop. Conversation didn’t happen, his hand was back on my thigh, and we had four different stare-downs. I only won one of those. At least he let me order my own coffee. That was honestly the only good part of this morning. I was barely able to hold in my sigh of relief when my phone chimed. “Who is that?” Blake’s eyebrows were pulled down, and he seemed more than a little annoyed. Only checking the text preview on the lock screen, I shrugged. “Oh, it’s just a friend, he wants to get a study group together tonight.” I started to put my phone back in my purse when his hand shot out and grabbed on to my arm, effectively keeping it suspended above my purse. “Well, it’s rude to keep him waiting. Aren’t you going to answer him?” He looked like he was struggling to keep himself in check. I tried to pull my arm back and he finally released it. Sheesh, what was his problem? It was just a text. “Sure, I guess.” “Just let him know you can’t go.” “Excuse me?” He leaned forward and his eyes narrowed. “I’d prefer that you study with Candice.” Now I was getting mad. He didn’t own me, he definitely wasn’t my boyfriend, and this was Aaron. The same gay guy that Blake didn’t like “looking at me.” “And since when do you get to decide who I hang out with? Look, maybe I’ve been giving you the wrong impression over the last few days, but we aren’t together. You have no say in what I do.” Like a switch had been flipped, his face went back to its usual smooth, sexy expression. “You’re right. Actually I think it’s a good idea for you to study with some other people besides Candice; I’m sure you wouldn’t get anywhere with her.” Wait. What? The sudden change in his mood made me almost feel dizzy. It was like I had my own personal Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde sitting next to me. When I could finally get my mouth to stop opening and shutting like a fish, I shook my head and exhaled roughly. “Speaking of, I really need to get back to campus.” I stood to leave without giving him the chance to say no. Without another word, Blake followed me out to the car. We didn’t say anything on the drive back but he put his hand on my thigh again. Was I imagining how tight he was holding it? When we arrived at the dorm, he parked in one of the spaces rather than letting me out in front. I grabbed the handle to open the door and he pushed down on my thigh, gripping it tighter. I turned to look at him and was surprised to see he still looked light and easygoing. “I’ll get the door for you. Wait here for just a second.” Crap, I hope he isn’t going to walk me to my room. I bet Candice still has Eric in there with the door locked. As soon as he released me, my thigh throbbed from the relief of the pressure he’d put on it and I almost wished I was wearing shorts so I could look at the damage I was making myself believe he’d done. The passenger door opened and I stepped out without looking up at him. We walked without saying anything and I made sure to put some distance between us. I was relieved when he began to slow down as we reached the main entrance of the dorm. “Well, thanks for the coff—” He caught me around the waist, pushed me up against the wall, and kissed me roughly, interrupting my good-bye. Before I had time to realize what was happening and push him away, his body left mine and he started backing up toward his car. “I’ll see you later.” He winked, then turned away from me. I have no idea what my face looked like; I couldn’t even pin down an emotion. I was disgusted, annoyed, confused, and pissed.

So you’ve run off from him, have you?” Beatrix asked, smoothing the wiry ruff on his head. “Naughty boy. I suppose you’ve had a fine old time chasing rabbits and squirrels. And there’s a damaging rumor about a missing chicken. You had better stay out of poultry yards, or it won’t go well for you in Stony Cross. Shall I take you home, boy? He’s probably looking for you. He--” She stopped at the sound of something…someone…moving through the thicket. Albert turned his head and let out a happy bark, bounding toward the approaching figure. Beatrix was slow to lift her head. She struggled to moderate her breathing, and tried to calm the frantic stutters of her heart. She was aware of the dog bounding joyfully back to her, tongue dangling. He glanced back at his master as if to convey Look what I found! Letting out a slow breath, Beatrix looked up at the man who had stopped approximately three yards away. Christopher. It seemed the entire world stopped. Beatrix tried to compare the man standing before her with the cavalier rake he had once been. But it seemed impossible that he could be the same person. No longer a god descending from Olympus…now a warrior hardened by bitter experience. His complexion was a deep mixture of gold and copper, as if he had been slowly steeped in sun. The dark wheaten locks of his hair had been cut in efficiently short layers. His face was impassive, but something volatile was contained in the stillness. How bleak he looked. How alone. She wanted to run to him. She wanted to touch him. The effort of standing motionless caused her muscles to tremble in protest. She heard herself speak in a voice that wasn’t quite steady. “Welcome home, Captain Phelan.” He was silent, staring at her without apparent recognition. Dear Lord, those eyes…frost and fire, his gaze burning through her awareness. “I’m Beatrix Hathaway,” she managed to say. “My family--” “I remember you.” The rough velvet of his voice was a pleasure-stroke against her ears. Fascinated, bewildered, Beatrix stared at his guarded face. To Christopher Phelan, she was a stranger. But the memories of his letters were between them, even if he wasn’t aware of it. Her hand moved gently over Albert’s rough fur. “You were absent in London,” she said. “There was a great deal of hullabaloo on your behalf.” “I wasn’t ready for it.” So much was expressed in that spare handful of words. Of course he wasn’t ready. The contrast would be too jarring, the blood-soaked brutality of war followed by a fanfare of parades and trumpets and flower petals. “I can’t imagine any sane man would be,” she said. “It’s quite an uproar. Your picture is in all the shop windows. And they’re naming things after you.” “Things,” he repeated cautiously. “There’s a Phelan hat.” His brows lowered. “No there isn’t.” “Oh, yes there is. Rounded at the top. Narrow-brimmed. Sold in shades of gray or black. They have one featured at the milliner’s in Stony Cross.” Scowling, Christopher muttered something beneath his breath.

He thought how easy it would be to write an entire book on Johannesburg violence. The strike leader Pickaxe Mary, after whom Mary Fitzgerald Square was named, who attacked her enemies with a pickaxe handle. The trenches dug into the streets of Fordsburg during the 1922 miners’ strike. The cannons of the government aimed at the poor whites of Vrededorp. The murdered woman in the 1960s whose head was found in the Zoo Lake and whose torso was discovered in a suitcase in Wemmer Pan. Jan Smuts, who wanted to bomb striking workers with aeroplanes. The countless schoolchildren shot during the 1976 uprising. The fifty-three supporters who were shot down in the street outside Shell House, the ANC headquarters. The huge bomb that went off shortly before the first democratic election and made a whole row of shops kneel down on the pavements of Bree Street. The commuters, in the early 1990s, killed by pangas or who jumped to their deaths from moving trains to escape their Portuguese-speaking attackers. The murderess Daisy de Melker, whose third husband survived only because she was caught in time. The violent home invasions, rapes and hijackings he read about in the newspapers every day.

Step 2: Build the LED-Controlling Circuit Now, you’re going to connect the 4017 decade counter with resistors and LEDs. There are a lot of connections, so take as much time as you need to get them all correct. Plug the 4017 decade counter into the breadboard so that the middle of the decade counter is around row 20, with the chip marker pointing up toward row 1. Then, take out five LEDs and ten 100 Ω resistors. Connect each LED’s negative (short) leg to the negative supply column on the right, and connect each positive (long) leg to its own empty row in the component area on the right. Place the green LED in the middle, the two blue ones on each side of the green LED, and the red ones on each end. Then, connect the ten 100 Ω resistors. In the circuit diagram, notice that pins 1 to 7 and pins 9 to 11 of the 4017 decade counter each connect to one side of a resistor. The other side of each resistor needs to be on a row by itself. Take care to ensure the resistor legs don’t accidentally touch one another. Look at the following breadboard circuit to see how I connected them: Now, connect the LEDs to the resistors on the 4017 decade counter, and connect the decade counter circuit to the 555 timer circuit according to the circuit diagram. Jumper wires are the best way to make those connections. From each resistor, connect a jumper wire to the corresponding LED. Look at the circuit diagram and notice, for example, that the other side of the resistor connected to pin 4 of the 4017 decade counter should connect to the positive pin of the green LED in the middle. Go through the pins in the circuit diagram to figure out which LED to connect each resistor to. Connect pins 8 and 15 of the 4017 decade counter to the negative supply column, and connect pin 16 to the positive supply column. Use a wire to connect the output from the 555 timer (pin 3) to the clock input of the 4017 decade counter (pin 14). Make sure that you have positive and negative connections in all of your power supply columns. The breadboard I recommend in this project’s Shopping List (page 267) divides its power supply columns into two sections, one upper and one lower. Just connect each of the upper and lower halves on the left side with a wire to bridge the gap, as shown. Do the same on the right side. Alternatively, use two jumper wires from the left columns to the right columns. You can use a jumper wire, or you can cut off a small piece of wire, as I’ve done in this photo. Then, use two long jumper wires to connect the lower-left power supply columns with the two lower-right columns. When you’re done connecting the two circuits and all the power supply columns, your breadboard should look like this:

Humans were fragile creatures, needing a lot of covering to survive. They could no more live with their hearts bared than they could make it through a Montana winter night in shorts and flip-flops. But

Few records exist to establish a definitive date as to when the first ships were built in the Piscataqua region. Fishing vessels were probably constructed as early as 1623, when the first fishermen settled in the area. Many undoubtedly boasted a skilled shipwright who taught the fishermen how to build “great shallops”as well as lesser craft. In 1631 a man named Edward Godfrie directed the fisheries at Pannaway. His operation included six large shallops, five fishing boats, and thirteen skiffs, the shallops essentially open boats that included several pairs of oars, a mast, and lug sail, and which later sported enclosed decks.5 Records do survive of the very first ship built by English settlers in the New World. In 1607, at the mouth of the Kennebec River in Maine, the Plymouth Company erected a short-lived fishing settlement. A London shipwright named Digby organized some settlers to construct a small vessel with which to return them home to England, as they were homesick and disenchanted with the New England winters. The small craft was named, characteristically, the Virginia. She was evidently a two-master and weighed about thirty tons, and she transported furs, salted cod, and tobacco for twenty years between various ports along the Maine coast, Plymouth, Jamestown, and England. She is believed to have wrecked somewhere along the coast of Ireland.6 By the middle of the seventeenth century, shipbuilding was firmly established as an independent industry in New England. Maine, with its long coastline and abundant forests, eventually overtook even Massachusetts as the shipbuilding capital of North America. Its most western town, Kittery, hovered above the Piscataqua. For many years the towns of Kittery and Portsmouth, and upriver enclaves like Exeter, Newmarket, Durham, Dover, and South Berwick, rivaled Bath and Brunswick, Maine, as shipbuilding centers, with numerous shipyards, blacksmith shops, sawmills, and wharves. Portsmouth's deep harbor, proximity to upriver lumber, scarcity of fog, and seven feet of tide made it an ideal location for building large vessels. During colonial times, the master carpenters of England were so concerned about competition they eventually petitioned Parliament to discourage shipbuilding in Portsmouth.7 One of the early Piscataqua shipwrights was Robert Cutts, who used African American slaves to build fishing smacks at Crooked Lane in Kittery in the 1650s. Another was William Pepperell, who moved from the Isle of Shoals to Kittery in 1680, where he amassed a fortune in the shipbuilding, fishing, and lumber trades. John Bray built ships in front of the Pepperell mansion as early as 1660, and Samuel Winkley owned a yard that lasted for three generations.8 In 1690, the first warship in America was launched from a small island in the Piscataqua River, situated halfway between Kittery and Portsmouth. The island's name was Rising Castle, and it was the launching pad for a 637-ton frigate called the Falkland. The Falkland bore fifty-four guns, and she sailed until 1768 as a regular line-of-battle ship. The selection of Piscataqua as the site of English naval ship construction may have been instigated by the Earl of Bellomont, who wrote that the harbor would grow wealthy if it supplemented its export of ship masts with “the building of great ships for H.M. Navy.”9 The earl's words underscore the fact that, prior to the American Revolution, Piscataqua's largest source of maritime revenue came from the masts and spars it supplied to Her Majesty's ships. The white oak and white pine used for these building blocks grew to heights of two hundred feet and weighed upward of twenty tons. England depended on this lumber during the Dutch Wars of the

ship built by English settlers in the New World. In 1607, at the mouth of the Kennebec River in Maine, the Plymouth Company erected a short-lived fishing settlement. A London shipwright named Digby organized some settlers to construct a small vessel with which to return them home to England, as they were homesick and disenchanted with the New England winters. The small craft was named, characteristically, the Virginia. She was evidently a two-master and weighed about thirty tons, and she transported furs, salted cod, and tobacco for twenty years between various ports along the Maine coast, Plymouth, Jamestown, and England. She is believed to have wrecked somewhere along the coast of Ireland.6 By the middle of the seventeenth century, shipbuilding was firmly established as an independent industry in New England. Maine, with its long coastline and abundant forests, eventually overtook even Massachusetts as the shipbuilding capital of North America. Its most western town, Kittery, hovered above the Piscataqua. For many years the towns of Kittery and Portsmouth, and upriver enclaves like Exeter, Newmarket, Durham, Dover, and South Berwick, rivaled Bath and Brunswick, Maine, as shipbuilding centers, with numerous shipyards, blacksmith shops, sawmills, and wharves. Portsmouth's deep harbor, proximity to upriver lumber, scarcity of fog, and seven feet of tide made it an ideal location for building large vessels. During colonial times, the master carpenters of England were so concerned about competition they eventually petitioned Parliament to discourage shipbuilding in Portsmouth.7 One of the early Piscataqua shipwrights was Robert Cutts, who used African American slaves to build fishing smacks at Crooked Lane in Kittery in the 1650s. Another was William Pepperell, who moved from the Isle of Shoals to Kittery in 1680, where he amassed a fortune in the shipbuilding, fishing, and lumber trades. John Bray built ships in front of

I remember a woman called Máirín na Yanks Ni Mhurchú, who owned a shop near Mrs Hurley's.... I used to buy chocolate from her when I first came here, and sometimes we'd meet on the roads, picking blackberries. A few years ago, shortly before she died, she was interviewed for an Irish language television series. It was called Bibeanna, which is the Irish word for the wraparound aprons women here used to wear in the house and the farmyard. They were made of dark fabric, patterned with little flowers. I remember watching the series on television and thinking that Máirín's quiet voice hadn't changed since I'd first heard it. Sitting by her fire, wrapped in her flowery apron, she described her life, looking back on her childhood and the years she'd spent in her shop. She talked about the pleasure she took in the company of neighbours who'd drop in for a chat. Then she summed it all up in a sentence. 'I'm calm and easy in myself; I take each day as it comes and I keep my door open.

Ralph swept back the yellow curtain to look out on the street. The leaves were turning red, the whole block ablaze. Across the street stood a barbershop that shared a storefront with a black bookstore. Next door, the hair salon spewed steam onto the street, the fried chicken spot, a jewelry shop with crucifixes and chains glittering on display, and the beauty supply store that blasted soca and flashed neon lights onto the sidewalk. This particular corner didn't have a view of any of the coffee shops that had opened farther east. Those had plush furniture and abstract art on the walls, stainless-steel espresso pumps. They were always crowded with young people in jeans and plaid, typing away on their laptops. There were the bars, too, with a dozen local beers on tap, and short menus that consisted mostly of nuts, pickles, cheese. Penelope could see the changes, of course, but she still recognized the neighborhood - it wasn't like Fort Greene or Williamsburg, which were no longer themselves. Strangers still said hello to her as they lounged on their stoops at sundown. She still had to ignore the whistles from the young men who stood in front of the bodega for so long each day it was clear they were dealing. Church bells rang on the hour and floors thumped with praise for Jesus in the Baptist churches, the one-room Pentecostal churches, the regal AME tabernacles, worship never ceasing in Bed-Stuy. The horizon on Bedford Avenue was just as long, the sirens of the police cars ars persistent, the wheeze of the B26 loud enough to wake her up at night.

Their affair had been three of the most intense, reckless, terrifying, happy, alive months of his life. Like how he imagined being on heroin felt if the high never ended, if every syringe didn’t also contain the possibility of death. They’d been partners at the time, and there had been one week when they’d been on the road together in northern California. Every night, they rented two rooms. Every night, for five days, he stayed with her. They barely slept that week. Couldn’t keep their hands off each other. Couldn’t stop talking when they weren’t making love, and the daylight hours when they had to pretend to be professionals made it all the more beautifully excruciating. He had never felt such a complete lack of self-consciousness around anyone. Even Theresa. Unconditional acceptance. Not just of his body and mind, but also of something more, of something indefinably him. Ethan had never connected with anyone on this level. The most generous blessing and life-destroying curse all wrapped up in the same woman, and despite the pain of the guilt and the knowledge of how it would crush his wife, whom he still loved, the idea of turning away from Kate seemed like a betrayal of his soul. So she had done it for him. On a cold and rainy night in Capitol Hill. In a booth over glasses of Belgian beer in a loud dark bar called the Stumbling Monk. He was ready to leave Theresa. To throw everything away. He had asked Kate there to tell her that and instead she had reached across the scuffed wood of a table worn smooth by ten thousand pint glasses and broken his heart. Kate wasn’t married, had no children. She wasn’t ready to jump off the cliff with him when he had so much pulling him back from the ledge. Two weeks later, she was in Boise, pursuant to her own transfer request. One year later, she was missing in a town in Idaho in the middle of nowhere called Wayward Pines, with Ethan off to find her. Eighteen hundred years later, after almost everything they had known had turned to dust or eroded out of existence, here they stood, facing each other in a toy shop in the last town on earth. For a moment, staring into her face at close range blanked Ethan’s mind. Kate spoke first. “I was wondering if you’d ever drop in.” “I was wondering that myself.” “Congratulations.” “For?” She reached over the counter and tapped his shiny brass star. “Your promotion. Nice to see a familiar face running the show. How are you adjusting to the new job?” She was good. In this short exchange, it was obvious that Kate had mastered the superficial conversational flow that the best of Wayward Pines could achieve without straining. “It’s going well,” he said. “Good to have something steady and challenging, I bet.” Kate smiled, and Ethan couldn’t help hearing the subtext, wondered if everyone did. If it ever went silent. As opposed to running half naked through town while we all try to kill you. “The job’s a good fit,” he said. “That’s great. Really happy for you. So, to what do I owe the pleasure?” “I just wanted to pop in and say hi.” “Well, that was nice of you. How’s your son?” “Ben’s great,” Ethan said.

Snacks? What kind of snacks?” I asked. “Something called chips, which are made from potatoes, and different kinds of candies.” “Oh, you’re gonna sell candy, too?” “Yeah, but totally different from the candy shop.” “I see.” “I hope you’ll come by for the grand opening.” “When is it?” “Hopefully, next week. I’ll let you know.” I nodded. “Okay, I’ll try to make it, Tes.” “Cool. Thank you. Alright, I’m going to get some more food,” he said and left. A few minutes later, Maky got on the microphone and announced that the dancing portion of the night was going to start soon. “Woohoo! It’s dancing time,” said Arthur excitedly. “You know who I’m going to ask to dance with me?” “Who?” I asked. “Autumn,” answered Pierce. “Yup! Hopefully, she’ll agree.” “What about you, Pierce? Are you gonna ask anyone to dance?” “Um, I don’t know. Maybe I’ll just dance by myself or with a group of friends,” the knight answered. “Cool…” I said sadly because I felt a little bit left out. “Or you know, maybe I’ll just hang out with you.” “Naw, I’m fine. You don’t have to keep me company.” Then suddenly, music started playing from the speakers that were set up at all the four corners of the city square. “Oh, here we go! I’ll be back later,” said Arthur as he took off to find Autumn. As the music played, I looked around for Maky’s band, but they were nowhere in sight. “Hm. This music must be coming from the jukebox,” I said. “Yeah, I don’t think Maky is playing tonight,” said Pierce. “She’s not? Why not? They’re super good.” “I don’t know, Steve.” “Hm. Oh, look. People are starting to take to the dance floor.” Slowly, a couple of villagers made their way toward the center of the city square. They were nervous about being the first ones, but soon after, many others followed their lead. Before I knew it, there were a ton of villagers in the middle, jumping up and down and dancing to the music. “That looks like fun…” I said. “Yeah…” said Pierce. “You should go join them.” “N-nah. I like sitting here.” Right when Pierce said that, someone came by and grabbed his hand and pulled him to the dance floor. “Come on, Pierce, let’s show them how it’s done,” said Leila. “B-but I’m not that good!” said Pierce. I tried my best to smile and said, “Have fun…” With my fake smile on, I watched as Pierce was dragged into the middle. Leila had stolen my only company away from me, and that made me feel super left out. I sighed and thought to myself, I wish I was out of this chair already. But I knew I didn’t have a choice, so I just sat in my chair and nodded along to the music. A few minutes later, the first song ended and the next one came on. I just continued sitting there while watching my friends have fun. In the middle, I could see Arthur dancing with Autumn, Cindy dancing with Arceus, and Leila dancing with Pierce. Shortly after, someone came by to talk to me. “Hey, Steve! How ya doing?” Maky asked while breathing hard. “Maky? Why aren’t you playing tonight?” I asked. “Oh, because I wanted to dance and have fun tonight. I mean, playing my instrument is fun, too, but dancing is a different kind of fun.” “I see.” “So, what are you doing over here? You don’t want to join the fun?” “Uh, there’s not much fun to be had when I’m stuck in a wheel chair.” “Oh, that’s nonsense!” Then she ran behind my chair, tilted it slightly backwards and pushed me off toward the middle of the dance floor. “Whoa! What are you doing?!” “We’re going to dance!” “Huh?!

The spectacle shop was old, long, and narrow, with a glass front and a small thin door that opened onto a somewhat busy avenue in the antiques district on the South side of Lovat. It was a quiet enough area, away from the rougher warrens, but not particularly elevated. Across the cramped street hawkers sold vases, while up the road outside a rug merchant's shop a man sold antique suits. There was also Dubois' new storefront to the East; he dealt in religious artifacts and trinkets. The shopkeep hadn't liked when he had moved in; it had somehow changed the feel of the warren. Odd folks had started showing up shortly after Saint Olmstead Religious Antiques opened: black-clad priests, Hasturians in yellow robes, and a few Deeper cultists dressed in their gray sackcloth rags. It had set the entire warren on edge.

It is not in vain that the strategic criterion of placing only short runs on the market prevails in order simultaneously to create a feeling of scarcity and avoid an appearance of uniformity, both of which encourage consumer demand. This is such a powerful criterion that it is not uncommon to discontinue production of a much-sought-after product, sometimes to the relative desperation of the shop staff, who were sure they could sell it.

Leon actually laughed. "They have slushies up front." "Jesus Christ," Benjamin muttered. "Nordstrom's. Macy's. We could go to Paris for the spring season. I was expecting transatlantic flights." I figured ignoring that was best for all concerned. "Is there an Old Navy around here? They've got shorts and stuff." I caught the look Benjamin gave me. "What?" "Nothing. We just thought a svetocha would be more, well, difficult." Leon's mouth twitched. "I do seriously want a slushie." I tried a tentative smile. I definitely liked him now. "I haven't had one in ages. Maybe the guys outside - the double blonds - would want one, too?" For some reason Leon found that utterly fricking hysterical. H snorted and chuckled all the way through Housewares to the Health and Beauty section, and even Benjamin unbent enough to grin.

Kelly and Roxie were like Mutt and Jeff. In contrast to Roxie, who at 5’3” was rather short, Kelly was tall with jet black hair she wore pulled back either in a ponytail or twisted and secured at the back of her head with a large tortoiseshell clip. Intelligent sea-green eyes never seemed to miss anything that was going on at the coffee shop, or for that matter, anywhere else.

Still, to me, the bottom line wasn’t about the Dark Book at all. It was about uncovering the details of my sister’s secret life. I didn’t want the creepy thing. I just wanted to know who or what had killed Alina, and I wanted him or it dead. Then I wanted to go home to my pleasantly provincial po-dunk little town in steamy southern Georgia and forget about everything that had happened to me while I was in Dublin. The Fae didn’t visit Ashford? Good. I’d marry a local boy with a jacked-up Chevy pickup truck, Toby Keith singing “Who’s Your Daddy?” on the radio, and eight proud generations of honest, hardworking Ashford ancestors decorating his family tree. Short of essential shopping trips to Atlanta, I’d never leave home again. But

Get to know the interface   Now that you have caught your very first Pokémon, you’re set to shape your own Pokémon future and catch them all. Back on the map, which will be the screen you visit the most, you can find various points of interest, including your character’s position. Your position on the map is updated with real-time movement in your actual surroundings. Around your character is a radius, indicated with a purple circle. You can interact with points of interest within this radius. Do note that you will only be able to interact and move around when you have an active internet connection and when the application has access to your location.   Around your character, you will see blue floating cubes: PokéStops, as well as colored buildings: gyms. We will be treating these more carefully later on in the book. On the bottom of your screen you will see three main buttons: left being your avatar, right being Pokémon that are nearby and the middle button functions as the menu.   When you tap your avatar button, you can see your character and character name, your level, your balance, a journal of your activities, your team and last but not least: your medals. Increasing your level is achieved by gaining XP, short for experience. There are various ways to gain experience, which we will cover later on in this book. In this chapter, we just want to familiarize ourselves with the interface. You can check the requirements of any achievement by simply tapping on either of them.   When you make it back to the map, we will check out the middle button next to familiarize ourselves with the main menu. There are four subdivisions in the main menu: the Pokédex, the Shop, your Pokémon and your Items. First up is the Pokédex, it contains all the Pokémon you can come across in the game numbered accordingly. Whenever you catch a Pokémon, it will be added to the Pokédex and you can check their traits by simply tapping that particular Pokémon within your Pokédex. You will be shown a brief description about the Pokémon, its possible evolutions (if applicable), the type and how many times you have encountered and caught such Pokémon.   In the Shop, you’re able to spend your Pokécoins, which is your balance or currency. Pokécoins can be acquired by maintaining one or multiple gyms, but can also be bought directly through the store for real life currency. In the Shop you can buy various items such as Poké Balls, incense, eggs, and many more items and upgrades.   The third category in the main menu shows your Pokémon. In the beginning you can carry up to 250 Pokémon and up to 9 eggs, which are also included in the Pokémon tab count. If you wish to exceed these values, you can purchase upgrades in the Shop to increase your capacity. Your Pokémon are listed with their CP, short for Combat Power and their current HP, short for Health Points. The higher a Pokémon’s combat power, the stronger this Pokémon is and the harder it would be to catch.

Even asleep, the little greyhound trailed after her madame, through a weave of green stars and gas lamps, along the boulevards of Paris. It was a conjured city that no native would recognize—Emma Bovary’s head on the pillow, its architect. Her Paris was assembled from a guidebook with an out-of-date map, and from the novels of Balzac and Sand, and from her vividly disordered recollections of the viscount’s ball at La Vaubyessard, with its odor of dying flowers, burning flambeaux, and truffles. (Many neighborhoods within the city’s quivering boundaries, curiously enough, smelled identical to the viscount’s dining room.) A rose and gold glow obscured the storefront windows, and cathedral bells tolled continuously as they strolled past the same four landmarks: a tremulous bridge over the roaring Seine, a vanilla-white dress shop, the vague façade of the opera house—overlaid in more gold light—and the crude stencil of a theater. All night they walked like that, companions in Emma’s phantasmal labyrinth, suspended by her hopeful mists, and each dawn the dog would wake to the second Madame Bovary, the lightly snoring woman on the mattress, her eyes still hidden beneath a peacock sleep mask. Lumped in the coverlet, Charles’s blocky legs tangled around her in an apprehensive pretzel, a doomed attempt to hold her in their marriage bed.

We continue, however, to need "elephants" in order for us to use Berkshire’s flood of incoming cash. Charlie and I must therefore ignore the pursuit of mice and focus our acquisition efforts on much bigger game. Our exemplar is the older man who crashed his grocery cart into that of a much younger fellow while both were shopping. The elderly man explained apologetically that he had lost track of his wife and was preoccupied searching for her. His new acquaintance said that by coincidence his wife had also wandered off and suggested that it might be more efficient if they jointly looked for the two women. Agreeing, the older man asked his new companion what his wife looked like. ‘She’s a gorgeous blonde,’ the fellow answered, ‘with a body that would cause a bishop to go through a stained glass window, and she’s wearing tight white shorts. How about yours?’ The senior citizen wasted no words: ‘Forget her, we’ll look for yours.

This is new territory; a bridge between the conservative and conventional lit mag tradition and those colourful speculation-driven pamphlets that you find in stacks by the coffee-shop door, full of zombies and vampires and crashing space ships. This is a serious journal with a wide aesthetic.

Mike?” Sam asked. “I didn’t expect to see you.” “I decided not to call ahead, sir,” he said. “I thought—” Brie appeared from around the corner, standing behind her dad. “Mike?” she asked in equal surprise. He smiled. “You look good,” he said, relieved. “Great. You look great. I was saying I didn’t call ahead because I thought if I just came here, maybe I could lure you out of the house for a while. If I’d called, you’d think of a million excuses.” She actually took a step back. “I don’t know…” “How about Folsom,” he said. “Enjoy the mountains, walk around the shops, have a little lunch, maybe stop at a vineyard or two. Just a few hours, just for some fresh air and maybe a little practice at facing the public. You have to get out in the world eventually.” “Maybe not this soon…” “It’s only soon because you haven’t done it. You’ll be safe, Brie.” “Of course, but—” “Brie,” Sam said. “You should take advantage of this. Mike is a trained observer, a cop with years of experience. You couldn’t be in better hands.” Mike gave his head a slight bow in Sam’s direction, respectfully. “Thank you, sir. You’re welcome to join us.” He laughed. “No, I think I’ll pass. But this is a good idea. Brie,” he said, taking her hand and rubbing it between his, as if warming it, “you should go out for at least an hour, maybe two. Mike’s come all this way….” She looked at him pointedly. There might have been a glare in her eye. “You didn’t tell Jack you were doing this, did you.” It was not a question. “Of course not. He would have tried to talk me out of it. If you needed someone to pry you out of the house, he’d want to be the one to do it.” He grinned. “I couldn’t risk that.” She seemed to think about this momentarily. Finally she said, “I’d better change.” “Nah, you’re fine. Folsom isn’t any fancier than your shorts. Let’s just do it. You won’t be out longer than you’re comfortable.” “Dad…?” “This is a good idea, Brie. Go out for a while. Have lunch, a glass of wine. I’ll be right here when you get home.” Mike

sounded like another language entirely. I felt relieved, momentarily, to be a relatively worldly Lubavitcher, even if I didn’t entirely fit in with the Crown Heights crowd. — Much to my disappointment, Miri was rarely to be seen. Most days she left the apartment around ten in a giddy rush and returned in the early evening with armloads of shopping bags, only to leave again for dinner with her friends. But one morning, when Leah was otherwise engaged, I was finally recruited for shomeres service. We were going to Ratfolvi’s, in Flatbush, to pick up the sheitel that Miri would be required to wear as a married woman. Pulling up to a residential building, we let ourselves into Mrs. Ratfolvi’s wig shop/apartment and sat down in the reception area, where four or five women were chatting away on a damask sofa and chairs. While we waited our turn, I examined the rows of wigs on display: there were various shades of brunette, blonde, and ginger; short, teased bouffants and glamorous, shoulder-length falls; wigs encased in rollers and wigs that were fully styled, needing nothing more than a final shpritz of hair spray. They were set upon Styrofoam heads complete with turned-up noses, high cheekbones, and luscious lips that looked like they could come alive at any moment. I longed to get my hands on a brush and a pair of scissors so that I could create my own visions of tonsorial loveliness. I did this from time to time to my dolls, to my mother’s great irritation, and here was a whole wall of victims. When Miri’s name was called, she plunked herself into the salon chair and pulled the silk scarf off her ponytail. I stood as close as I could without getting in the way. From conversations that I’d overheard between my mother and her sisters, I knew that Mrs. Ratfolvi was considered “the best,” and I was eager to watch her at work. The “rat” in her name had led me to expect someone old and unattractive, but she was actually a nicely put-together middle-aged woman. The receptionist brought over a plastic case about the size of a chubby toddler. In one expert motion, Mrs. Ratfolvi clicked it open, withdrew the fully styled wig on its Styrofoam head

The aspiring writer comes home after a hard day’s work in the plastic shop. Maybe he has a few beers, or a cocktail, but soon he retires to his writing. There he discovers the aroma of burning lavender incense, and a soft red glow streaming from his reading lamp. The strings of a violin sing out softly, romantically. He notices his favorite notebook lying on his desk, submissively, with her blank naked pages spread open for him. He fondles his ballpoint pen and gawks at her 9.75 by 7.5-inch-wide ruled lines. He simply sits and stares at her awhile, lustfully, admiring the soft red lines that run down her legs to form margins. He smiles, feeling shy and perhaps a little apprehensive about this, what is for him, inevitable endeavor. He glances at his eager pen for a moment. It is a small pen. She reassures him that it is not the size of the pen that counts, but rather his prowess with it.        Not having any sort of plan in mind, all the more excited by the spontaneity of it, he sets to writing. He starts out softly, gently, and careful at first, forming each letter of each word with intimate precision. The inhibitions drop with each gentle stroke of his pen. Soon he is inside and one with the inviting quarter blank page. His pen is feverishly scratching against the warm paper. Madly he is marking the page. The blood in his head pounds, as he lets all his energy, all the everything inside him spill out onto the page. Faster and faster he writes with wild abandon, pushing it out onto her! “More” she moans. He grunts a primal grunt that rises up thick and full, from somewhere in the depths of his very soul, and he writes on! From under his pen she screams out in shades of purple passion ecstasy! “YES! OH GOOD GOD, YES! GIVE IT TO ME! YOU MAD MAD POET!” So he writes on, harder and faster, striving for climax. Until it seems at any moment, his pen might explode and spray thick creamy bubbling blue ink everywhere! He comes! To the end of the page. With the ink still wet and strangely sticky between her pages, he closes the notebook. Feeling drained, he lies his head against her soft cardboard cover and dozes off to dream the dreams that writers dream…           Rainbow

that every hen lays an egg of a different size! What symmetry can there be on the breakfast table? At least they should sort them in dozens at the shop!

most merely took advantage of the opportunity to turn hard work into cold cash. Jim Crow laws prevented them from shopping in the white businesses of Tulsa, so entrepreneurs turned this fact into advantage and built their own shops. Money that filtered into Greenwood from workers in white Tulsa stayed in Greenwood. They spent their money with their own. In a relatively short time, many Greenwood residents enjoyed such prosperity that they became known as “Black Wall Street.” They were living the American Dream.

Pike was focused on Dru. She had thrown on shorts and a faded T-shirt in her rush to the shop, and now her hair was mussed and her feet were smudged with green. Pike thought the smart eyes seemed worried this morning, but he couldn’t stop looking at her—as if she were a book he wanted to read. “You

What to remove? Dairy. From cows, goats, and sheep (including butter). Grains. For the more intensive version of this 30-day diet, eliminate all grains. This is important for those with digestive or autoimmune conditions. If this feels undoable for a full month, add in a small serving a day of gluten-free grains like white rice or quinoa. If that still feels undoable, consider a whole-foods diet rich in vegetables that is strictly gluten- and dairy-free. Legumes. Beans of all kinds (soy, black, kidney, pinto, etc.), lentils, and peanuts. Green peas and snap peas are okay. Sweeteners, real or artificial. Sugar, high-fructose corn syrup, maple syrup, honey, agave, Splenda, Equal, NutraSweet, xylitol, stevia, etc. Processed or refined snack foods. Sodas and diet sodas. Alcohol in any form. White potatoes. Premade sauces and seasonings. How to avoid common pitfalls: Prepare well beforehand. Choose a time frame during which you will have limited or reduced travel, and that doesn’t include holidays or special occasions. Study the list of foods allowed on the diet and make a shopping list. Remove the foods from your pantry or refrigerator that aren’t allowed on the diet, if that makes it easier. Engage the whole family to try this together, or find a friend to join you. Success happens in community. Set up a calendar to mark your progress. Print out a free 30-day online calendar, tape it to the refrigerator door, and mark off each day. Pack snacks with you, pack your lunch, call ahead to restaurants to check their menu (or check online). Get enough vegetables and fats. If you feel jittery or lose too much weight, increase your carbohydrates (starchy vegetables like yams, taro, sweet potatoes). Don’t misread withdrawal-type symptoms as the diet “not working.” These symptoms usually resolve within a week’s time. Personalize it. Start with the basics above and: * If you’re having trouble with autoimmune conditions, eliminate eggs, too. * If you’re prone to weight gain, eat less meat and heavier foods (ex: stews, chili), more vegetables and raw foods. * If you’re prone to weight loss or having trouble gaining weight, eat more meats and heavier foods (ex: stews, chili), less raw foods like salads. * If you’re generally healthy and wanting a boost in energy, try short-term fasts of 12–16 hours. Due to the circadian rhythm of the digestive tract, skipping dinner is best (as opposed to skipping breakfast). Try this 1–2 times a week. (This fast also means no supplements or beverages other than tea or water during the fasting time.)

For decades, indeed centuries, the English legal system had been decried for its unfairness. The lists of its short-comings varied, but most included the sheer time it took to resolve any case and the eye-watering cost in lawyers' fees of legal action. This indefinite imprisonment of debtors and the power of the central courts in London were also causes for repeated complaint, as was the fact that the law was a closed shop, conducted in Latin and French, to the absolute exclusion of non-professionals.

In the case of Trunk Club, they led with a simple polarizing message related to how their target customers generally feel about shopping. By saying “men want to dress well, but they hate to shop,” they intentionally called out shopping as the enemy of their service. And if you are a man who hates to shop, you will rapidly align with their message without much thought. The beauty of this approach is that it has the opposite effect for clients who are a poor fit for your solution. For example, if you’re a man who loves to shop, you may be immediately turned off by Trunk Club’s value proposition. While being excited about customers not liking your solution may seem counterintuitive, it’s actually a good thing! Bad-fit customers who buy your product are more likely to become dissatisfied and hurt your brand. They may also provide errant feedback that can quickly derail your product or company roadmap if you decide to follow it. In short, polarizing messages can serve double duty by keeping the good-fit customers in and helping the bad ones self-select out. In the case of Trunk Club, this approach worked: they were acquired by US luxury retailer Nordstrom in 2014 for $350 million.

And while seeking out the opinions and perspectives of people like ourselves may lead to a more personal and familiar buying experience, what’s even more amazing is the impact those trusted sources have on conversion rates. B2B sales cycle data from Salesforce demonstrates that, when it comes to lead conversion, the interest that originates from customer and employee referrals converts to deals at rates fifty times higher than email campaigns!9 Furthermore, data from marketing automation giant Marketo indicates that leads originating from referrals convert to opportunities at rates of four times the average, and similar to the next three highest-converting lead sources combined (those being partner, inbound, and marketing-generated).10 My personal experience over the years greatly corroborates these statistics. For example, when I started my own sales practice, Cerebral Selling, I needed to have a logo designed. Around the same time, my friend had recently had a nice logo designed for his business. I asked him who he used, he told me, and I just did the same. No further research or investigation required. A short time later, I wanted to head out of town with my wife for an overnight trip to the beautiful Niagara wine region of Ontario to celebrate our anniversary. I didn’t know where to stay or which restaurant to go to, so instead of sifting through pages of online content and reviews, I asked a friend who runs a vineyard in the region. When he gave me his recommendations, I simply booked the places he told me. No questions asked. Were there better places to stay and eat? Potentially. Were there other creative design shops that could have generated equally if not more spectacular logos? More than likely. Do I care? Absolutely not! I love my logo and had a great anniversary outing, and feel secure in my decisions around both because of the feeling I received by selecting recommendations from people I trust. Both experiences are perfect examples of the prescriptive-led sales cycle we spoke about in chapter 2. This means that when it comes to your selling motion, one of the most unobtrusive, empathetic, and authentic ways to convert prospective buyers is simply to surround them with like-minded customers who love you.

… I loved those shopping trips. After a couple of weeks, people stopped recognizing me as the richest little girl in the world. Actually, I never caused much of a commotion but that one time. I guest that’s when I first began to realize the truth about being famous. Up until then I thought people became famous. You know, because of what they did. Oh, I know people can become famous for a short while, like war heroes and people who climb mountains for the first time, but I didn’t realize you had to work full-time at being famous, and work hard. You’ve got to keep your name before the public all the time. That’s why some people who do really important things soon get forgotten, while big showoffs who run around working to get their names in the papers stay famous.

… I loved those shopping trips. After a couple of weeks, people stopped recognizing me as the richest little girl in the world. Actually, I never caused much of a commotion but that one time. I guess that’s when I first began to realize the truth about being famous. Up until then I thought people became famous. You know, because of what they did. Oh, I know people can become famous for a short while, like war heroes and people who climb mountains for the first time, but I didn’t realize you had to work full-time at being famous, and work hard. You’ve got to keep your name before the public all the time. That’s why some people who do really important things soon get forgotten, while big showoffs who run around working to get their names in the papers stay famous.