Shows For Senior Quotes

In the tired hand of a dying man, Theodore Senior had written: "The 'Machine politicians' have shown their colors... I feel sorry for the country however as it shows the power of partisan politicians who think of nothing higher than their own interests, and I feel for your future. We cannot stand so corrupt a government for any great length of time.

I was in the fifth grade the first time I thought about turning thirty. My best friend Darcy and I came across a perpetual calendar in the back of the phone book, where you could look up any date in the future, and by using this little grid, determine what the day of the week would be. So we located our birthdays in the following year, mine in May and hers in September. I got Wednesday, a school night. She got a Friday. A small victory, but typical. Darcy was always the lucky one. Her skin tanned more quickly, her hair feathered more easily, and she didn't need braces. Her moonwalk was superior, as were her cart-wheels and her front handsprings (I couldn't handspring at all). She had a better sticker collection. More Michael Jackson pins. Forenze sweaters in turquoise, red, and peach (my mother allowed me none- said they were too trendy and expensive). And a pair of fifty-dollar Guess jeans with zippers at the ankles (ditto). Darcy had double-pierced ears and a sibling- even if it was just a brother, it was better than being an only child as I was. But at least I was a few months older and she would never quite catch up. That's when I decided to check out my thirtieth birthday- in a year so far away that it sounded like science fiction. It fell on a Sunday, which meant that my dashing husband and I would secure a responsible baby-sitter for our two (possibly three) children on that Saturday evening, dine at a fancy French restaurant with cloth napkins, and stay out past midnight, so technically we would be celebrating on my actual birthday. I would have just won a big case- somehow proven that an innocent man didn't do it. And my husband would toast me: "To Rachel, my beautiful wife, the mother of my chidren and the finest lawyer in Indy." I shared my fantasy with Darcy as we discovered that her thirtieth birthday fell on a Monday. Bummer for her. I watched her purse her lips as she processed this information. "You know, Rachel, who cares what day of the week we turn thirty?" she said, shrugging a smooth, olive shoulder. "We'll be old by then. Birthdays don't matter when you get that old." I thought of my parents, who were in their thirties, and their lackluster approach to their own birthdays. My dad had just given my mom a toaster for her birthday because ours broke the week before. The new one toasted four slices at a time instead of just two. It wasn't much of a gift. But my mom had seemed pleased enough with her new appliance; nowhere did I detect the disappointment that I felt when my Christmas stash didn't quite meet expectations. So Darcy was probably right. Fun stuff like birthdays wouldn't matter as much by the time we reached thirty. The next time I really thought about being thirty was our senior year in high school, when Darcy and I started watching ths show Thirty Something together. It wasn't our favorite- we preferred cheerful sit-coms like Who's the Boss? and Growing Pains- but we watched it anyway. My big problem with Thirty Something was the whiny characters and their depressing issues that they seemed to bring upon themselves. I remember thinking that they should grow up, suck it up. Stop pondering the meaning of life and start making grocery lists. That was back when I thought my teenage years were dragging and my twenties would surealy last forever. Then I reached my twenties. And the early twenties did seem to last forever. When I heard acquaintances a few years older lament the end of their youth, I felt smug, not yet in the danger zone myself. I had plenty of time..

We get smarter and more creative as we age, research shows. Our brain's anatomy, neural networks, and cognitive abilities can actually improve with age and increased life experiences. Contrary to the mythology of Silicon Valley, older employees may be even more productive, innovative, and collaborative than younger ones... Most people, in fact, have multiple cognitive peaks throughout their lives.

This is another thing that quantitative studies of American time use cannot show you: for the majority of mothers, time is fractured and subdivided, as if streaming through a prism; for the majority of fathers, it moves in an unbent line.

As she is the senior person in the room, I wait for her to call on me. And, while I am waiting, I should show I am a good listener by keeping both my voice and my body quiet. In China, we often feel Westerners speak up so much in meetings that they do this to show off, or they are poor listeners. Also, I have noticed that Chinese people leave a few more seconds of silence before jumping in than in the West. You Westerners practically speak on top of each other in a meeting.

A good PowerPoint show turned a failed project into a success in the eyes of top management. As often is the case, senior executives had no knowledge or no real interest in what was really going on.

The soldiers chuckled. One of them, a grizzled veteran, rose and walked over to where Duncan and his two senior officers were standing. He made a show of inspecting the ground, brushing aside a few twigs and rocks, then spread out a none-too-clean neckerchief and gestured for the King to sit. “There you go, my lord. Your royal bum should be comfortable there.” The

I would divide the senior executives of the engineering world into two categories, the starters and the runners, the men with a creative instinct who can start a new venture and the men who can run it to make it show a profit.... I was a starter and useless as a runner.

(...) the small of his back slick with sweat, the surprisingly soft hair brushing my body when he took control. And moved over me. "Stop it", Pritkin grated, his voice somehow cutting through the fog. But he didn't let go. I suppose he was afraid to, because a Pythia or one of her senior initiates could shift without him if there was no contact. But that left us stuck together, and that was becoming really, really- Awesome, my body piped up enthusiastically. "I told you, cut it out!" Pritkin said, sounding pissed. "You first," I snarled, snapping my eyes open to glare at him, because he wasn't exactly helping. Of course, neither did that. He must have been jogging, probably his usual early morning ten-mile warm-up before coming to torture me. At least, I assumed that was why the rock-hard abs were outlined by a damp khaki T-shirt, the thin old sweatpants were clinging in all the right places, and the sleeves of the hoodie had been pushed to his elbows, showing the flexing muscles in his forearms. And then there were those hands and those eyes and that mouth... I shivered again, a full-on shudder this time, and he cursed. But that didn't seem to matter. Because it had come out like a growl, and my body liked that, too. My hips shifted automatically, pressing us together, and I gave a little gasp because it felt so good. And then gasped again when I was abruptly released.

In fact, she [Pamela Flitton] seemed to prefer 'older men' on the whole, possibly because of their potentiality for deeper suffering. Young men might superficially transcend their seniors in this respect, but they probably showed less endurance in sustaining that state, while, once pinioned, the middle-aged could be made to writhe almost indefinitely.

According to a senior ED official associated with the SIT, if the Adani case reaches its logical conclusion, the group will have to pay a fine of around Rs 15,000 crore. ‘It is a watertight case,’ he said, about the trail of documents showing how the group diverted Rs 5,468 crore to Mauritius via Dubai. The Adani group vehemently denies any wrongdoing. Modi,

extensive use of books I have written for my target market. Figure 16.4 shows how we place

The high performing board shows the ability and openness to “question itself, senior management team, and its decision/discussions.

Neurologically speaking, though, there are reasons we develop a confused sense of priorities when we’re in front of our computer screens. For one thing, email comes at unpredictable intervals, which, as B. F. Skinner famously showed with rats seeking pellets, is the most seductive and habit-forming reward pattern to the mammalian brain. (Think about it: would slot machines be half as thrilling if you knew when, and how often, you were going to get three cherries?) Jessie would later say as much to me when I asked her why she was “obsessed”—her word—with her email: “It’s like fishing. You just never know what you’re going to get.” More to the point, our nervous systems can become dysregulated when we sit in front of a screen. This, at least, is the theory of Linda Stone, formerly a researcher and senior executive at Microsoft Corporation. She notes that we often hold our breath or breathe shallowly when we’re working at our computers. She calls this phenomenon “email apnea” or “screen apnea.” “The result,” writes Stone in an email, “is a stress response. We become more agitated and impulsive than we’d ordinarily be.

So if I tell you I want to re-do our senior year in one day…to go ice-skating at Rockefeller Center and let you get to second base like two teenagers…” I erased the gap between us, kissing a sliver of his exposed neck, and his breath stilled. “And go eat at P.J. Clarke’s and move to third base in the bathroom…” I rasped the words against his hot flesh and dragged my eyes up to meet his stormy ones. “And end the day at a Broadway show where I’d do something very inappropriate under your seat…” We melted into each other, and sure enough, I felt the swelling in his slacks getting bigger against my stomach. “You’d say…no?” His face was the funniest thing on earth as it moved from surprised to eager, then finally to turned on. “Fuck,” he muttered, pressing his hard cock against me. From the outside, it must’ve looked like we were sharing the dirtiest hug ever. “I’m about to go ice-skating for a hand job, and I’m not even sixteen anymore.” “You’re totally going on a day date,” I joked. He rolled his eyes but followed me back outside and into the nearest subway station, buttoning his pea coat to cover the massive bulge between his legs. “Lead the way.

Went home briefly to get my halter dress for Hero's party, and Mom was waiting for me at the kitchen table. Either she's psychic, or she totally reads my journal, because I haven't said a word about Ben, but somehow she knows something is up. She was siting with a tray of peanut butter crackers, milk, and about twenty pamphlets on STDs she got from her friend Connie, a nurse at Kaiser. When she started showing me pictures of genital warts, I put my cracker down and said, 'Mom, is this really necessary?' She said, 'Honey, I just want you to understand the risks.' 'Yeah, thanks. Now I'm so traumatized I won't have sex until I'm a senior citizen.' She smiled. 'Great. I guess I've done my job then. Do you want a sandwich.

The gun was lying next to the sprinkler, under a bush, about seventy-five feet - or halfway - up the steep hill. Steven had watched "Dragnet" on TV; he knew how guns should be handled. Picking it up very carefully by the top of the barrel, so as not to eradicate prints, Steven took the gun back to his house and showed it to his father, Bernard Weiss. The senior Weiss took one look and called LAPD. Officer Micheal Watson, on patrol in the area, responded to the radio call. More than a year later Steven would be asked to describe the incident from the witness stand: Q. "Did you show him [Watson] the gun?" A. "Yes." Q. "Did he touch the gun?" A. "Yes." Q. "How did he touch it?" A. "With both hands, all over the gun." So much for "Dragnet.

I love to sketch but am too embarrassed to show anyone. I won a national championship my senior year, the Heisman when I was a junior. I’m actually . . . shy. Dwight Schrute from The Office makes me laugh until I cry. And recently, I’ve discovered I have an insatiable penchant for hot librarians.

THE COUNCIL WAS NOTHING LIKE Jason imagined. For one thing, it was in the Big House rec room, around a Ping-Pong table, and one of the satyrs was serving nachos and sodas. Somebody had brought Seymour the leopard head in from the living room and hung him on the wall. Every once in a while, a counselor would toss him a Snausage. Jason looked around the room and tried to remember everyone’s name. Thankfully, Leo and Piper were sitting next to him—it was their first meeting as senior counselors. Clarisse, leader of the Ares cabin, had her boots on the table, but nobody seemed to care. Clovis from Hypnos cabin was snoring in the corner while Butch from Iris cabin was seeing how many pencils he could fit in Clovis’s nostrils. Travis Stoll from Hermes was holding a lighter under a Ping-Pong ball to see if it would burn, and Will Solace from Apollo was absently wrapping and unwrapping an Ace bandage around his wrist. The counselor from Hecate cabin, Lou Ellen something-or-other, was playing “got-your-nose” with Miranda Gardiner from Demeter, except that Lou Ellen really had magically disconnected Miranda’s nose, and Miranda was trying to get it back. Jason had hoped Thalia would show. She’d promised, after all—but she was nowhere to be seen. Chiron had told him not to worry about it. Thalia often got sidetracked fighting monsters or running quests for Artemis, and she would probably arrive soon. But still, Jason worried. Rachel Dare, the oracle, sat next to Chiron at the head of the table. She was wearing her Clarion Academy school uniform dress, which seemed a bit odd, but she smiled at Jason. Annabeth didn’t look so relaxed. She wore armor over her camp clothes, with her knife at her side and her blond hair pulled back in a ponytail. As soon as Jason walked in, she fixed him with an expectant look, as if she were trying to extract information out of him by sheer willpower. “Let’s come to order,” Chiron said. “Lou Ellen, please give Miranda her nose back. Travis, if you’d kindly extinguish the flaming Ping-Pong ball, and Butch, I think twenty pencils is really too many for any human nostril. Thank you. Now, as you can see, Jason, Piper, and Leo have returned successfully…more or less. Some of you have heard parts of their story, but I will let them fill you in.” Everyone looked at Jason. He cleared his throat and began the story. Piper and Leo chimed in from time to time, filling in the details he forgot. It only took a few minutes, but it seemed like longer with everyone watching him. The silence was heavy, and for so many ADHD demigods to sit still listening for that long, Jason knew the story must have sounded pretty wild. He ended with Hera’s visit right before the meeting.

In 2004, five researchers, including the Nobel Prize–winning behavioral economist Daniel Kahneman, did a study showing which activities gave 909 working women in Texas the most pleasure. Child care ranked sixteenth out of nineteen—behind preparing food, behind watching TV, behind napping, behind shopping, behind housework.

To refute knee-jerk arguments about the costs of social distancing, Carter had marshaled so much data from so many corners of the U.S. government that a senior public-health official who passed through the White House called him Rain Man. He’d show his critics that crime rates actually fell on weekends, for instance, when kids were out of school.

There have been ample opportunities since 1945 to show that material superiority in war is not enough if the will to fight is lacking. In Algeria, Vietnam and Afghanistan the balance of economic and military strength lay overwhelmingly on the side of France, the United States, and the Soviet Union, but the will to win was slowly eroded. Troops became demoralised and brutalised. Even a political solution was abandoned. In all three cases the greater power withdrew. The Second World War was an altogether different conflict, but the will to win was every bit as important - indeed it was more so. The contest was popularly perceived to be about issues of life and death of whole communities rather than for their fighting forces alone. They were issues, wrote one American observer in 1939, 'worth dying for'. If, he continued, 'the will-to-destruction triumphs, our resolution to preserve civilisation must become more implacable...our courage must mount'. Words like 'will' and 'courage' are difficult for historians to use as instruments of cold analysis. They cannot be quantified; they are elusive of definition; they are products of a moral language that is regarded sceptically today, even tainted by its association with fascist rhetoric. German and Japanese leaders believed that the spiritual strength of their soldiers and workers in some indefinable way compensate for their technical inferiority. When asked after the war why Japan lost, one senior naval officer replied that the Japanese 'were short on spirit, the military spirit was weak...' and put this explanation ahead of any material cause. Within Germany, belief that spiritual strength or willpower was worth more than generous supplies of weapons was not confined to Hitler by any means, though it was certainly a central element in the way he looked at the world. The irony was that Hitler's ambition to impose his will on others did perhaps more than anything to ensure that his enemies' will to win burned brighter still. The Allies were united by nothing so much as a fundamental desire to smash Hitlerism and Japanese militarism and to use any weapon to achieve it. The primal drive for victory at all costs nourished Allied fighting power and assuaged the thirst for vengeance. They fought not only because the sum of their resources added up to victory, but because they wanted to win and were certain that their cause was just. The Allies won the Second World War because they turned their economic strength into effective fighting power, and turned the moral energies of their people into an effective will to win. The mobilisation of national resources in this broad sense never worked perfectly, but worked well enough to prevail. Materially rich, but divided, demoralised, and poorly led, the Allied coalition would have lost the war, however exaggerated Axis ambitions, however flawed their moral outlook. The war made exceptional demands on the Allied peoples. Half a century later the level of cruelty, destruction and sacrifice that it engendered is hard to comprehend, let alone recapture. Fifty years of security and prosperity have opened up a gulf between our own age and the age of crisis and violence that propelled the world into war. Though from today's perspective Allied victory might seem somehow inevitable, the conflict was poised on a knife-edge in the middle years of the war. This period must surely rank as the most significant turning point in the history of the modern age.

Where I lived at Pencey, I lived in the Ossenburger Memorial Wing of the new dorms. It was only for juniors and seniors. I was a junior. My roommate was a senior. It was named after this guy Ossenburger that went to Pencey. He made a pot of dough in the undertaking business after he got out of Pencey. What he did, he started these undertaking parlors all over the country that you could get members of your family buried for about five bucks apiece. You should see old Ossenburger. He probably just shoves them in a sack and dumps them in the river. Anyway, he gave Pencey a pile of dough, and they named our wing alter him. The first football game of the year, he came up to school in this big goddam Cadillac, and we all had to stand up in the grandstand and give him a locomotive—that's a cheer. Then, the next morning, in chapel, he made a speech that lasted about ten hours. He started off with about fifty corny jokes, just to show us what a regular guy he was. Very big deal. Then he started telling us how he was never ashamed, when he was in some kind of trouble or something, to get right down his knees and pray to God. He told us we should always pray to God—talk to Him and all—wherever we were. He told us we ought to think of Jesus as our buddy and all. He said he talked to Jesus all the time. Even when he was driving his car. That killed me. I can just see the big phony bastard shifting into first gear and asking Jesus to send him a few more stiffs. The only good part of his speech was right in the middle of it. He was telling us all about what a swell guy he was, what a hotshot and all, then all of a sudden this guy sitting in the row in front of me, Edgar Marsalla, laid this terrific fart. It was a very crude thing to do, in chapel and all, but it was also quite amusing. Old Marsalla. He damn near blew the roof off. Hardly anybody laughed out loud, and old Ossenburger made out like he didn't even hear it, but old Thurmer, the headmaster, was sitting right next to him on the rostrum and all, and you could tell he heard it. Boy, was he sore. He didn't say anything then, but the next night he made us have compulsory study hall in the academic building and he came up and made a speech. He said that the boy that had created the disturbance in chapel wasn't fit to go to Pencey. We tried to get old Marsalla to rip off another one, right while old Thurmer was making his speech, but be wasn't in the right mood.

I never got to take you to the prom. You went with Henry Featherstone. And you wore a peach-colored dress.” “How could you possibly know that?” Callie asked. “Because I saw you walk in with him.” “You didn’t know I was alive in high school,” Callie scoffed. “You had algebra first period, across the hall from my trig class. You ate a sack lunch with the same three girls every day, Lou Ann, Becky and Robbie Sue. You spent your free period in the library reading Hemingway and Steinbeck. And you went straight home after school without doing any extracurricular activities, except on Thursdays. For some reason, on Thursdays you showed up at football practice. Why was that, Callie?” Callie was confused. How could Trace possibly know so much about her activities in high school? They hadn’t even met until she showed up at the University of Texas campus. “I don’t understand,” she said. “You haven’t answered my question. Why did you come to football practice on Thursdays?” “Because that was the day I did the grocery shopping, and I didn’t have to be home until later.” “Why were you there, Calllie?” Callie stared into his eyes, afraid to admit the truth. But what difference could it possibly make now? She swallowed hard and said, “I was there to see you.” He gave a sigh of satisfaction. “I hoped that was it. But I never knew for sure.” Callie’s brow furrowed. “You wanted me to notice you?” “I noticed you. Couldn’t you feel my eyes on you? Didn’t you ever sense the force of my boyish lust? I had it bad for you my senior year. I couldn’t walk past you in the hall without needing to hold my books in my lap when I saw down in the next class.” “You’re kidding, right?” Trace chuckled. “I wish I were.” “Then it wasn’t an accident, our meeting like that at UT?” “That’s the miracle of it,” Trace said. “It was entirely by accident. Fate. Kisma. Karma. Whatever you want to call it.

older people have smaller social networks, that they’re unlikely to show up at senior centers for lunch and other social programs that are thought to be good for them, it made sense to her. She remembered how she’d felt back in the hospital. Why spend time making new friends when your days are numbered? Wouldn’t it be better to seek meaning in the moments and relationships you already have?

In 2014, another CDC whistleblower, the agency’s senior vaccine safety scientist, Dr. William Thompson, disclosed that top CDC officials had forced him and four other senior researchers to lie to the public and destroy data that showed disproportionate vaccine injuries—including a 340 percent elevated risk for autism—in Black male infants who received the Measles, Mumps, Rubella (MMR) vaccine on schedule.

I do have a bad habit,” he says. “of falling in love. With regularity and to spectacular effect. You see, it never goes well.” I wonder if this conversation makes him think of our kiss, but then, I was the one who kissed him. He’d only kissed back. “As charming as you are, how can that be?” I say. He laughs again. “That’s what my sister Taryn always says. She tells me that I remind her of her late husband. Which makes some sense, since I would be his half brother. But it’s also alarming, because she’s the one who murdered him.” Much as when he spoke about Madoc, it’s strange how fond Oak can sound when he tells me a horrifying thing a member of his family has done. “Whom have you fallen in love with?” I ask. “Well, there was you,” the prince says. “When we were children.” “Me?” I ask incredulously. “You didn’t know?” He appears to be merry in the face of my astonishment. “Oh yes. Though you were a year my senior, and it was hopeless, I absolutely mooned over you. When you were gone from Court, I refused any food but tea and toast for a month.” I cannot help snorting over the sheer absurdity of his statement. He puts a hand to my heart. “Ah, and now you laugh. It is my curse to adore cruel women. He cannot expect me to believe he had real feelings. “Stop with your games.” “Very well,” he says. “Shall we go to the next? Her name was Lara, a mortal at the school I attended when I lived with my eldest sister and her girlfriend. Sometimes Lara and I would climb into the crook of one of the maple trees and share sandwiches. But she had a villainous friend, who implicated me in a piece of gossip—which resulted in Lara stabbing me with a lead pencil and breaking off our relationship.” “You do like cruel women,” I say. “Then there was Violet, a pixie. I wrote terrible poetry about how I adored her. Unfortunately, she adored duels and would get into trouble so that I would have to fight for her honor. And even more unfortunately, neither my sister nor my father bothered to teach me how to fight for show. I thought of the dead-eyed expression on his face before his bout with the ogre and Tiernan’s angry words. “That resulted in my accidentally killing a person she liked better than me.” “Oh,” I say. “That is three levels of unfortunate.” “Then there was Sibi, who wanted to run away from Court with me, but as soon as we went, hated it and wept until I took her home. And Loana, a mermaid, who found my lack of a tail unbearable but tried to drown me anyway, because she found it equally unbearable that I would ever love another.” The way he tells these stories makes me recall how he’s told me many painful things before. Some people laugh in the face of death. He laughed in the face of despair. “How old were you?” “Fifteen, with the mermaid,” he said. “And nearly three years later, I must surely be wiser.” “Surely,” I say, wondering if he was. Wondering if I wanted him to be.

sir.” “Very good. You can come and assist me in surgery if you like, Mr.…” “Stone, sir. Thomas Stone.” During the surgery Braithwaite found Thomas knew how to stay out of the way. When Braithwaite asked him to cut a ligature, Stone slid his scissors down to the knot and then turned the scissors at a forty-five-degree angle and cut, so there was no danger to the knot. Indeed, Stone so clearly understood his role that when the senior registrar showed up to assist, Braithwaite waved him off. Braithwaite pointed to a vein coursing over the pylorus. He asked Thomas what it was. “The pyloric vein of Mayo, sir …,” Thomas said, and appeared about to add something. Braithwaite waited, but Thomas was done. “Yes, that’s what it’s called, though I think that vein was there long before Mayo spotted it, don’t you think? Why do you think he took the trouble

There was a lot of angst about it. It was sort of viewed as, These folks don’t know what they’re talking about. If losses go to ten percent there will be, like, a million homeless people.” (Losses in the pools Hubler’s group had bet on would eventually reach 40 percent.) As a senior Morgan Stanley executive outside Hubler’s group put it, “They didn’t want to show you the results. They kept saying, That state of the world can’t happen.” It

For this boy destined to be the world’s greatest heir, money was so omnipresent as to be invisible—something “there, like air or food or any other element,” he later said—yet it was never easily attainable.11 As if he were a poor, rural boy, he earned pocket change by mending vases and broken fountain pens or by sharpening pencils. Aware of the rich children spoiled by their parents, Senior seized every opportunity to teach his son the value of money. Once, while Rockefeller was being shaved at Forest Hill, Junior entered with a plan to give away his Sunday-school money in one lump sum, for a fixed period, and be done with it. “Let’s figure it out first,” Rockefeller advised and made Junior run through calculations that showed he would lose eleven cents interest while the Sunday school gained nothing in return. Afterward, Rockefeller told his barber, “I don’t care about the boy giving his money in that way. I want him to give it. But I also want him to learn the lesson of being careful of the little things.

Rolf Ekeus came round to my apartment one day and showed me the name of the Iraqi diplomat who had visited the little West African country of Niger: a statelet famous only for its production of yellowcake uranium. The name was Wissam Zahawi. He was the brother of my louche gay part-Kurdish friend, the by-now late Mazen. He was also, or had been at the time of his trip to Niger, Saddam Hussein's ambassador to the Vatican. I expressed incomprehension. What was an envoy to the Holy See doing in Niger? Obviously he was not taking a vacation. Rolf then explained two things to me. The first was that Wissam Zahawi had, when Rolf was at the United Nations, been one of Saddam Hussein's chief envoys for discussions on nuclear matters (this at a time when the Iraqis had functioning reactors). The second was that, during the period of sanctions that followed the Kuwait war, no Western European country had full diplomatic relations with Baghdad. TheVatican was the sole exception, so it was sent a very senior Iraqi envoy to act as a listening post. And this man, a specialist in nuclear matters, had made a discreet side trip to Niger. This was to suggest exactly what most right-thinking people were convinced was not the case: namely that British intelligence was on to something when it said that Saddam had not ceased seeking nuclear materials in Africa. I published a few columns on this, drawing at one point an angry email from Ambassador Zahawi that very satisfyingly blustered and bluffed on what he'd really been up to. I also received—this is what sometimes makes journalism worthwhile—a letter from a BBC correspondent named Gordon Correa who had been writing a book about A.Q. Khan. This was the Pakistani proprietor of the nuclear black market that had supplied fissile material to Libya, North Korea, very probably to Syria, and was open for business with any member of the 'rogue states' club. (Saddam's people, we already knew for sure, had been meeting North Korean missile salesmen in Damascus until just before the invasion, when Kim Jong Il's mercenary bargainers took fright and went home.) It turned out, said the highly interested Mr. Correa, that his man Khan had also been in Niger, and at about the same time that Zahawi had. The likelihood of the senior Iraqi diplomat in Europe and the senior Pakistani nuclear black-marketeer both choosing an off-season holiday in chic little uranium-rich Niger… well, you have to admit that it makes an affecting picture. But you must be ready to credit something as ridiculous as that if your touching belief is that Saddam Hussein was already 'contained,' and that Mr. Bush and Mr. Blair were acting on panic reports, fabricated in turn by self-interested provocateurs.

Natasha took his arm, gushing to him that she was ready for outrage from PETA, a protest or two, an Op-Ed in the New York Times that would be publicity gold. Ping Xi nodded blankly. I called in sick the day of the opening. Natasha didn’t seem to care. She had Angelika fill in at the front desk. She was an anorexic Goth, a senior at NYU. The show was a “brutal success,” one critic called it. “Cruelly funny.” Another said Ping Xi “marked the end of the sacred in art. Here is a spoiled brat taking the piss out of the establishment. Some are hailing him as the next Marcel Duchamp. But is he worth the stink?

In 2014, a senior executive from the Ford Motor Company told an audience at the Consumer Electronics Show, “We know everyone who breaks the law, we know when you’re doing it. We have GPS in your car, so we know what you’re doing.” This came as a shock and surprise, since no one knew Ford had its car owners under constant surveillance. The company quickly retracted the remarks, but the comments left a lot of wiggle room for Ford to collect data on its car owners. We know from a Government Accountability Office report that both automobile companies and navigational aid companies collect a lot of location data from their users.

We walk the streets of Fuzhou at night, in the one summer when I come back. Streetlights send our elongated shadows tumbling ahead of us, across the neon-tinged storefronts and buzzing lamps. Everyone comes out, the old men in wife-beaters and plastic sandals, the teenagers in fake American Eagle. Senior citizen ladies roll out before bedtime in pajama pants printed with SpongeBob or fake Chanel logos. There is a Mickey D's and a KFC, street dumpling stands, bootleg shops, karaoke bars. Everything is open late, midnight or even later. There are places to get a full-body massage, an eight ball, a happy ending. If you stay on these streets long enough, it's possible you could get everything you want, have ever wanted. Because I disremember everything, because I watch a lot of China travel shows when I am alone at night in New York, because TV mixes with my dreams mixes with my memories, we walk along the concourse that runs alongside the river even though there is no river, we turn down boulevards punctuated by palm-tree clusters even though those belong in Singapore, we smoke cigarettes openly even though it's unseemly for women, especially in my family, to smoke in public. But the feeling, the feeling of being in Fuzhou at night, remains the same.

Welcome to part one of my author’s note: the inspiration behind this book. Just a few years ago, the wildest thing ever happened to me. During my senior year, Tom Holland secretly enrolled in my high school, the Bronx High School of Science, as an undercover student to learn more about American high schools for his upcoming role as Spider-Man. I was lucky enough to meet and talk to him during his time there (literally still reeling in shock if we’re being honest because w h a t), and I’ve always treasured that experience. Since then, an idea has lingered in the back of my head—wouldn’t this be such an incredible concept for a book?

He got thrashed in every one-on-one situation, lost every drill, but he kept coming back. At the end of the summer David drove over to see Filip's mom, sat in her kitchen, and told her about a study that showed how many elite players were never among the five best in their youth team, and how it's often the sixth- to twelfth-best juniors who break through at senior level. They've had to fight harder. They don't buckle when the setbacks come. "If Filip ever doubts his chances, you don't have to promise him that he'll be the best in the team one day. You just have to convince him that he can battle his way to twelfth place," David said. There's no way he can know how much that meant for the family, because they have no words to express it. It only changed everything.

We have a better understanding today of what triggered such a furious Israeli reaction. In their book Boomerang, two senior Israeli journalists, Ofer Shelah and Raviv Drucker, interviewed the General Chief of Staff and strategists in the Ministry of Defence and offered inside knowledge on the way these officials and generals were thinking about the issue.12 Their conclusion was that in the summer of 2000 the IDF was a frustrated outfit following its humiliating defeat by Hezbollah in Lebanon, who had forced the army to withdraw totally from Lebanon. There was a fear that this retreat made the army look weak. And so a show of strength was much needed. The reassertion of dominance within the occupied Palestinian territories was just the kind of display of sheer power the ‘invincible’ Israeli army needed

After almost eighteen months of trying to convince Kiran to dilute her stakes, a large delegation, which included the global head of R&D at Unilever and his team, came to Bengaluru. In the opening meeting, Kiran gave a presentation, and her first slide, memorable to many, declared that there were three types of companies: # Companies which make things happen # Companies which watch things happen # Companies which wonder what happened Biocon India, she said, was the first type of company and Unilever was the third type. That in-your-face presentation left everyone stunned. ‘We didn’t know where to look. There were board members, some senior managers and the head of Hindustan Unilever. Those days we did not have [smart] phones to fiddle with, we just went red in the face,’ recalls Bharadwaj. If egos were bruised, nobody showed it.

Singer, and Jones (1965) on the campus of Yale University. The subjects were Yale seniors who were given some persuasive education about the risks of tetanus and the importance of going to the health center to receive an inoculation. Most of the students were convinced by the lecture and said that they planned to go get the shot, but these good intentions did not lead to much action. Only 3 percent actually went and got the shot. Other subjects were given the same lecture but were also given a copy of a campus map with the location of the health center circled. They were then asked to look at their weekly schedules, make a plan for when they would go and get the shot, and look at the map and decide what route they would take. With these nudges, 28 percent of the students managed to show up and get their tetanus shot. Notice that this manipulation was very

That women bring home the bacon, fry it up, serve it for breakfast, and use its greasy remains to make candles for their children’s science projects is hardly news. Yet how parenting responsibilities get sorted out under these conditions remains unresolved. Neither government nor private business has adapted to this reality, throwing the burden back onto individual families to cope. And while today’s fathers are more engaged with their children than fathers in any previous generation, they’re charting a blind course, navigating by trial and, just as critically, error. Many women can’t tell whether they’re supposed to be grateful for the help they’re getting or enraged by the help they’re failing to receive; many men, meanwhile, are struggling to adjust to the same work-life rope-a-dope as their wives, now that they too are expected to show up for Gymboree.

In June, twenty-five of the country’s senior doctors signed a letter to The Times expressing their support for women doctors after Henry Maudsley published an article in the Fortnightly Review saying that it is well known among doctors that women become hysterical unless they have rest and seclusion during menstruation and therefore that simple biology prevents them following any kind of profession. Any kind except the oldest, May had said when Ally showed her this missive, and washing his clothes and cooking his meals. Even the most reasonable woman, he wrote and Fortnightly Review printed, is not sane for one week in every four, and in any case recent research has established once and for all that women’s brains are smaller than men’s, their intellectual capacities confined in the most elementary way. (And the gorilla, Miss Johnson wrote to the editor, has brains bigger than Dr Maudsley’s, not to speak of the elephant and the whale; in any case it is not widely observed that the men with the most capacious skulls are the cleverest. But her letter was not published.)

The last scene showed a cavernous room in a subbasement filled with hundreds of black trash bags, the building’s daily detritus. Standing in front of the bags were five guys in work clothes. Their job, their mission, their goal was to toss these bags into waiting trash trucks. The camera focused on one of the men. The narrator asked, “What’s your job?” The answer to anyone watching was painfully obvious. But the guy smiled and said to the camera, “Our job is to make sure that tomorrow morning when people from all over the world come to this wonderful building, it shines, it is clean, and it looks great.” His job was to drag bags, but he knew his purpose. He didn’t feel he was just a trash hauler. His work was vital, and his purpose blended into the purpose of the building’s most senior management eighty floors above. Their purpose was to make sure that this masterpiece of a building always welcomed and awed visitors, as it had done on opening day, May 1, 1931. The building management can only achieve their purpose if everyone on the team believes in it as strongly as the smiling guy in the subbasement.

As we’ve seen, one of the most frequently pursued paths for achievement-minded college seniors is to spend several years advancing professionally and getting trained and paid by an investment bank, consulting firm, or law firm. Then, the thought process goes, they can set out to do something else with some exposure and experience under their belts. People are generally not making lifelong commitments to the field in their own minds. They’re “getting some skills” and making some connections before figuring out what they really want to do. I subscribed to a version of this mind-set when I graduated from Brown. In my case, I went to law school thinking I’d practice for a few years (and pay down my law school debt) before lining up another opportunity. It’s clear why this is such an attractive approach. There are some immensely constructive things about spending several years in professional services after graduating from college. Professional service firms are designed to train large groups of recruits annually, and they do so very successfully. After even just a year or two in a high-level bank or consulting firm, you emerge with a set of skills that can be applied in other contexts (financial modeling in Excel if you’re a financial analyst, PowerPoint and data organization and presentation if you’re a consultant, and editing and issue spotting if you’re a lawyer). This is very appealing to most any recent graduate who may not yet feel equipped with practical skills coming right out of college. Even more than the professional skill you gain, if you spend time at a bank, consultancy, or law firm, you will become excellent at producing world-class work. Every model, report, presentation, or contract needs to be sophisticated, well done, and error free, in large part because that’s one of the core value propositions of your organization. The people above you will push you to become more rigorous and disciplined, and your work product will improve across the board as a result. You’ll get used to dressing professionally, preparing for meetings, speaking appropriately, showing up on time, writing official correspondence, and so forth. You will be able to speak the corporate language. You’ll become accustomed to working very long hours doing detail-intensive work. These attributes are transferable to and helpful in many other contexts.

We already have eight hundred million people living in hunger—and population is growing by eighty million a year. Over a billion people are in poverty—and present industrial strategies are making them poorer, not richer. The percentage of old people will double by 2050—and already there aren’t enough young people to care for them. Cancer rates are projected to increase by seventy percent in the next fifteen years. Within two decades our oceans will contain more microplastics than fish. Fossil fuels will run out before the end of the century. Do you have an answer to those problems? Because I do. Robot farmers will increase food production twentyfold. Robot carers will give our seniors a dignified old age. Robot divers will clear up the mess humans have made of our seas. And so on, and so on—but every single step has to be costed and paid for by the profits of the last.” He paused for breath, then went on, “My vision is a society where autonomous, intelligent bots are as commonplace as computers are now. Think about that—how different our world could be. A world where disease, hunger, manufacturing, design, are all taken care of by AI. That’s the revolution we’re shooting for. The shopbots get us to the next level, that’s all. And you know what? This is not some binary choice between idealism or realism, because for some of us idealism is just long-range realism. This shit has to happen. And you need to ask yourself, do you want to be part of that change? Or do you want to stand on the sidelines and bitch about the details?” We had all heard this speech, or some version of it, either in our job interviews, or at company events, or in passionate late-night tirades. And on every single one of us it had had a deep and transformative effect. Most of us had come to Silicon Valley back in those heady days when it seemed a new generation finally had the tools and the intelligence to change the world. The hippies had tried and failed; the yuppies and bankers had had their turn. Now it was down to us techies. We were fired up, we were zealous, we felt the nobility of our calling…only to discover that the general public, and our backers along with them, were more interested in 140 characters, fitness trackers, and Grumpy Cat videos. The greatest, most powerful deep-learning computers in humanity’s existence were inside Google and Facebook—and all humanity had to show for it were adwords, sponsored links, and teenagers hooked on sending one another pictures of their genitals.

After a series of promotions—store manager at twenty-two, regional manager at twenty-four, director at twenty-seven—I was a fast-track career man, a personage of sorts. If I worked really hard, and if everything happened exactly like it was supposed to, then I could be a vice president by thirty-two, a senior vice president by thirty-five or forty, and a C-level executive—CFO, COO, CEO—by forty-five or fifty, followed of course by the golden parachute. I’d have it made then! I’d just have to be miserable for a few more years, to drudge through the corporate politics and bureaucracy I knew so well. Just keep climbing and don't look down. Misery, of course, encourages others to pull up a chair and stay a while. And so, five years ago, I convinced my best friend Ryan to join me on the ladder, even showed him the first rung. The ascent is exhilarating to rookies. They see limitless potential and endless possibilities, allured by the promise of bigger paychecks and sophisticated titles. What’s not to like? He too climbed the ladder, maneuvering each step with lapidary precision, becoming one of the top salespeople—and later, top sales managers—in the entire company.10 And now here we are, submerged in fluorescent light, young and ostensibly successful. A few years ago, a mentor of mine, a successful businessman named Karl, said to me, “You shouldn’t ask a man who earns twenty thousand dollars a year how to make a hundred thousand.” Perhaps this apothegm holds true for discontented men and happiness, as well. All these guys I emulate—the men I most want to be like, the VPs and executives—aren’t happy. In fact, they’re miserable.  Don’t get me wrong, they aren’t bad people, but their careers have changed them, altered them physically and emotionally: they explode with anger over insignificant inconveniences; they are overweight and out of shape; they scowl with furrowed brows and complain constantly as if the world is conspiring against them, or they feign sham optimism which fools no one; they are on their second or third or fourth(!) marriages; and they almost all seem lonely. Utterly alone in a sea of yes-men and women. Don’t even get me started on their health issues.  I’m talking serious health issues: obesity, gout, cancer, heart attacks, high blood pressure, you name it. These guys are plagued with every ailment associated with stress and anxiety. Some even wear it as a morbid badge of honor, as if it’s noble or courageous or something. A coworker, a good friend of mine on a similar trajectory, recently had his first heart attack—at age thirty.  But I’m the exception, right?

In the casual opinion of most Americans, I am an old man, and therefore of little account, past my best, fading in a pathetic diminuendo while flashing his AARP card; like the old in America generally, either invisible or someone to ignore rather than respect, who will be gone soon, and forgotten, a gringo in his degringolade. Naturally I am insulted by this, but out of pride I don’t let my indignation show. My work is my reply, my travel is my defiance. And I think of myself in the Mexican way, not as an old man but as most Mexicans regard a senior, an hombre de juicio, a man of judgement; not ruco, worn out, beneath notice, someone to be patronized, but owed the respect traditionally accorded to an elder, someone (in the Mexican euphemism) of La Tercera Edad, the Third Age, who might be called Don Pablo or tio (uncle) in deference. Mexican youths are required by custom to surrender their seat to anyone older. They know the saying: Mas sabe el diablo por viejo, que por diablo - The devil is wise because he’s old, not because he’s the devil. But “Stand aside, old man, and make way for the young” is the American way. As an Ancient Mariner of a sort, I want to hold the doubters with my skinny hand, fix them with a glittering eye, and say, “I have been to a place where none of you have ever been, where none of you can ever go. It is the past. I spent decades there and I can say, you don’t have the slightest idea.

He wrote to Alexander on the 20th, as autumnal rains finally quenched the fires, which in some places had burned for six days. (The letter was delivered by the brother of the Russian minister to Cassel, the most senior Russian to be captured in Moscow, which shows how thorough the nobility’s evacuation of the city had been.) ‘If Your Majesty still preserves for me some remnant of your former feelings, you will take this letter in good part,’ he began. The beautiful and superb city of Moscow no longer exists; Rostopchin had it burnt … The administration, the magistrates and the civil guards should have remained. This is what was done twice at Vienna, at Berlin and at Madrid … I have waged war on Your Majesty without animosity. A letter from you before or after the last battle would have halted my march, and I should have even liked to have sacrificed the advantage of entering Moscow.37 On receipt of this letter, the Tsar promptly sent for Lord Cathcart, the British ambassador, and told him that twenty such catastrophes as had happened to Moscow would not induce him to abandon the struggle.38 The list of cities Napoleon gave in that letter – and it could have been longer – demonstrates that he knew from experience that capturing the enemy’s capital didn’t lead to his surrender, and Moscow wasn’t even Russia’s government capital. It was the destruction of the enemy’s main army at Marengo, Austerlitz and Friedland that had secured his victory, and Napoleon had failed to achieve that at Borodino.

Postscript, 2005 From the Publisher ON APRIL 7, 2004, the Mid-Hudson Highland Post carried an article about an appearance that John Gatto made at Highland High School. Headlined “Rendered Speechless,” the report was subtitled “Advocate for education reform brings controversy to Highland.” The article relates the events of March 25 evening of that year when the second half of John Gatto’s presentation was canceled by the School Superintendent, “following complaints from the Highland Teachers Association that the presentation was too controversial.” On the surface, the cancellation was in response to a video presentation that showed some violence. But retired student counselor Paul Jankiewicz begged to differ, pointing out that none of the dozens of students he talked to afterwards were inspired to violence. In his opinion, few people opposing Gatto had seen the video presentation. Rather, “They were taking the lead from the teacher’s union who were upset at the whole tone of the presentation.” He continued, “Mr. Gatto basically told them that they were not serving kids well and that students needed to be told the truth, be given real-life learning experiences, and be responsible for their own education. [Gatto] questioned the validity and relevance of standardized tests, the prison atmosphere of school, and the lack of relevant experience given students.” He added that Gatto also had an important message for parents: “That you have to take control of your children’s education.” Highland High School senior Chris Hart commended the school board for bringing Gatto to speak, and wished that more students had heard his message. Senior Katie Hanley liked the lecture for its “new perspective,” adding that ”it was important because it started a new exchange and got students to think for themselves.” High School junior Qing Guo found Gatto “inspiring.” Highland teacher Aliza Driller-Colangelo was also inspired by Gatto, and commended the “risk-takers,” saying that, following the talk, her class had an exciting exchange about ideas. Concluded Jankiewicz, the students “were eager to discuss the issues raised. Unfortunately, our school did not allow that dialogue to happen, except for a few teachers who had the courage to engage the students.” What was not reported in the newspaper is the fact that the school authorities called the police to intervene and ‘restore the peace’ which, ironically enough, was never in the slightest jeopardy as the student audience was well-behaved and attentive throughout. A scheduled evening meeting at the school between Gatto and the Parents Association was peremptorily forbidden by school district authorities in a final assault on the principles of free speech and free assembly… There could be no better way of demonstrating the lasting importance of John Taylor Gatto’s work, and of this small book, than this sorry tale. It is a measure of the power of Gatto’s ideas, their urgency, and their continuing relevance that school authorities are still trying to shut them out 12 years after their initial publication, afraid even to debate them. — May the crusade continue! Chris Plant Gabriola Island, B.C. February, 2005

Support for Miller’s concerns came from an unlikely source in the person of Matt Taibbi, a veteran journalist who had written two best-selling anti-Trump books. In an article published five days after Miller’s interview and titled “We’re in a Permanent Coup,” he warned of the threat to America’s democratic order posed by the deep-state conspiracy: “The Trump presidency is the first to reveal a full-blown schism between the intelligence community and the White House. Senior figures in the CIA, NSA, FBI and other agencies made an open break from their would-be boss before Trump’s inauguration, commencing a public war of leaks that has not stopped. “My discomfort in the last few years, first with Russiagate and now with Ukrainegate and impeachment, stems from the belief that the people pushing hardest for Trump’s early removal are more dangerous than Trump. Many Americans don’t see this because they’re not used to waking up in a country where you’re not sure who the president will be by nightfall. They don’t understand that this predicament is worse than having a bad president.”213 This warning from Taibbi was echoed by another liberal critic of Trump—Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz. In a talk show appearance on New York’s AM 970 radio on Sunday, November 10, 2019, Dershowitz said, “Whether you’re a Democrat or a Republican, whether you’re from New York or the middle of the country, you should be frightened by efforts to try to create crimes out of nothing. . . . It reminds me of what Lavrentiy Beria, the head of the KGB, said to Stalin. He said, ‘Show me the man, and I’ll find you the crime,’ by which he really meant, ‘I’ll make up the crime.’ And so the Democrats are now making up crimes.

I’m fine, Sierra. Really.” “No, you’re not fine. Brit, I’m your best friend. I’ll be here before and after your boyfriends. So spill your guts. I’m all ears.” “I loved him.” “No shit, Sherlock. Tell me something I don’t know.” “He used me. He had sex with me to win a bet. And I still love him. Sierra, I am pathetic.” “You had sex and didn’t tell me? I mean, I thought it was a rumor. You know, of the untrue kind.” I lean my head in my hands in frustration. “I’m just kidding. I don’t even want to know. Okay, I do, but only if you want to tell me,” Sierra says. “Forget about that now. I saw the way Alex always looked at you, Brit. That’s why I laid off you for liking him. There was no way he was acting. I don’t know who told you about a supposed bet--” I look up. “He did. And his friends confirmed it. Why can’t I let him go?” Sierra shakes her head, as if erasing the words I’ve said. “First things first.” She grabs my chin and forces me to look at her. “Alex had feelings for you, whether he admitted it to you or not, whether there was a bet or not. You know that, Brit, or you wouldn’t be clutching those hand warmers like that. Second of all, Alex is out of your life and you owe it to yourself, to his goofy friend Paco, and to me to keep plugging along even if it’s not easy.” “I can’t help but think he pushed me away on purpose. If I could only talk to him, I can get answers.” “Maybe he doesn’t have the answers. That’s why he left. If he wants to give up on life, to ignore what’s right in front of him, so be it. But you show him that you’re stronger than that.” Sierra is right. For the first time I feel I can make it through the rest of senior year. Alex took a piece of my heart that night we made love, and he’ll forever hold it. But that doesn’t mean my life has to be on hold indefinitely. I can’t run after ghosts. I’m stronger now. At least, I hope I am.

It is not only in childhood that people of high potential can be encouraged or held back and their promise subverted or sustained. The year before I went to Amherst, a group of women had declined to stand for tenure. One of them simply said that after six years she was used up, too weary and too eroded by constant belittlement to accept tenure if it were offered to her. Women were worn down or burnt out. During the three years I spent as dean of the faculty, as I watched some young faculty members flourish and others falter, I gradually realized that the principal instrument of sexism was not the refusal to appoint women or even the refusal to promote (though both occurred, for minorities as well as women), but the habit of hiring women and then dealing with them in such a way that when the time came for promotion it would be reasonable to deny it. It was not hard to show that a particular individual who was a star in graduate school had somehow belied her promise, had proved unable to achieve up to her potential. This subversion was accomplished by taking advantage of two kinds of vulnerability that women raised in our society tend to have. The first is the quality of self-sacrifice, a learned willingness to set their own interests aside and be used and even used up by the community. Many women at Amherst ended up investing vast amounts of time in needed public-service activities, committee work, and teaching nondepartmental courses. Since these activities were not weighed significantly in promotion decisions, they were self-destructive. The second kind of vulnerability trained into women is a readiness to believe messages of disdain and derogation. Even women who arrived at Amherst full of confidence gradually became vulnerable to distorted visions of themselves, no longer secure that their sense of who they were matched the perceptions of others. When a new president, appointed in 1983, told me before coming and without previous discussion with me that he had heard I was “consistently confrontational,” that I had made Amherst “a tense, unhappy place,” and that he would want to select a new dean, I should have reacted to his picture of me as bizarre, and indeed confronted its inaccuracy, but instead I was shattered. It took me a year to understand that he was simply accepting the semantics of senior men who expected a female dean to be easily disparaged and bullied, like so many of the young women they had managed to dislodge. It took me a year to recover a sense of myself as worth defending and to learn to be angry both for myself and for the college as I watched a tranquil campus turned into one that was truly tense and unhappy.

Obama is also directing the U.S. government to invest billions of dollars in solar and wind energy. In addition, he is using bailout leverage to compel the Detroit auto companies to build small, “green” cars, even though no one in the government has investigated whether consumers are interested in buying small, “green” cars—the Obama administration just believes they should. All these measures, Obama recognizes, are expensive. The cap and trade legislation is estimated to impose an $850 billion burden on the private sector; together with other related measures, the environmental tab will exceed $1 trillion. This would undoubtedly impose a significant financial burden on an already-stressed economy. These measures are billed as necessary to combat global warming. Yet no one really knows if the globe is warming significantly or not, and no one really knows if human beings are the cause of the warming or not. For years people went along with Al Gore’s claim that “the earth has a fever,” a claim illustrated by misleading images of glaciers disappearing, oceans swelling, famines arising, and skies darkening. Apocalypse now! Now we know that the main body of data that provided the basis for these claims appears to have been faked. The Climategate scandal showed that scientists associated with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change were quite willing to manipulate and even suppress data that did not conform to their ideological commitment to global warming.3 The fakers insist that even if you discount the fakery, the data still show.... But who’s in the mood to listen to them now? Independent scientists who have reviewed the facts say that average global temperatures have risen by around 1.3 degrees Fahrenheit in the past 100 years. Lots of things could have caused that. Besides, if you project further back, the record shows quite a bit of variation: periods of warming, followed by periods of cooling. There was a Medieval Warm Period around 1000 A.D., and a Little Ice Age that occurred several hundred years later. In the past century, the earth warmed slightly from 1900 to 1940, then cooled slightly until the late 1970s, and has resumed warming slightly since then. How about in the past decade or so? Well, if you count from 1998, the earth has cooled in the past dozen years. But the statistic is misleading, since 1998 was an especially hot year. If you count from 1999, the earth has warmed in the intervening period. This statistic is equally misleading, because 1999 was a cool year. This doesn’t mean that temperature change is in the eye of the beholder. It means, in the words of Roy Spencer, former senior scientist for climate studies at NASA, that “all this temperature variability on a wide range of time scales reveals that just about the only thing constant in climate is change.”4

Performance measure. Throughout this book, the term performance measure refers to an indicator used by management to measure, report, and improve performance. Performance measures are classed as key result indicators, result indicators, performance indicators, or key performance indicators. Critical success factors (CSFs). CSFs are the list of issues or aspects of organizational performance that determine ongoing health, vitality, and wellbeing. Normally there are between five and eight CSFs in any organization. Success factors. A list of 30 or so issues or aspects of organizational performance that management knows are important in order to perform well in any given sector/ industry. Some of these success factors are much more important; these are known as critical success factors. Balanced scorecard. A term first introduced by Kaplan and Norton describing how you need to measure performance in a more holistic way. You need to see an organization’s performance in a number of different perspectives. For the purposes of this book, there are six perspectives in a balanced scorecard (see Exhibit 1.7). Oracles and young guns. In an organization, oracles are those gray-haired individuals who have seen it all before. They are often considered to be slow, ponderous, and, quite frankly, a nuisance by the new management. Often they are retired early or made redundant only to be rehired as contractors at twice their previous salary when management realizes they have lost too much institutional knowledge. Their considered pace is often a reflection that they can see that an exercise is futile because it has failed twice before. The young guns are fearless and precocious leaders of the future who are not afraid to go where angels fear to tread. These staff members have not yet achieved management positions. The mixing of the oracles and young guns during a KPI project benefits both parties and the organization. The young guns learn much and the oracles rediscover their energy being around these live wires. Empowerment. For the purposes of this book, empowerment is an outcome of a process that matches competencies, skills, and motivations with the required level of autonomy and responsibility in the workplace. Senior management team (SMT). The team comprised of the CEO and all direct reports. Better practice. The efficient and effective way management and staff undertake business activities in all key processes: leadership, planning, customers, suppliers, community relations, production and supply of products and services, employee wellbeing, and so forth. Best practice. A commonly misused term, especially because what is best practice for one organization may not be best practice for another, albeit they are in the same sector. Best practice is where better practices, when effectively linked together, lead to sustainable world-class outcomes in quality, customer service, flexibility, timeliness, innovation, cost, and competitiveness. Best-practice organizations commonly use the latest time-saving technologies, always focus on the 80/20, are members of quality management and continuous improvement professional bodies, and utilize benchmarking. Exhibit 1.10 shows the contents of the toolkit used by best-practice organizations to achieve world-class performance. EXHIBIT 1.10 Best-Practice Toolkit Benchmarking. An ongoing, systematic process to search for international better practices, compare against them, and then introduce them, modified where necessary, into your organization. Benchmarking may be focused on products, services, business practices, and processes of recognized leading organizations.

Anna Chapman was born Anna Vasil’yevna Kushchyenko, in Volgograd, formally Stalingrad, Russia, an important Russian industrial city. During the Battle of Stalingrad in World War II, the city became famous for its resistance against the German Army. As a matter of personal history, I had an uncle, by marriage that was killed in this battle. Many historians consider the battle of Stalingrad the largest and bloodiest battle in the history of warfare. Anna earned her master's degree in economics in Moscow. Her father at the time was employed by the Soviet embassy in Nairobi, Kenya, where he allegedly was a senior KGB agent. After her marriage to Alex Chapman, Anna became a British subject and held a British passport. For a time Alex and Anna lived in London where among other places, she worked for Barclays Bank. In 2009 Anna Chapman left her husband and London, and moved to New York City, living at 20 Exchange Place, in the Wall Street area of downtown Manhattan. In 2009, after a slow start, she enlarged her real-estate business, having as many as 50 employees. Chapman, using her real name worked in the Russian “Illegals Program,” a group of sleeper agents, when an undercover FBI agent, in a New York coffee shop, offered to get her a fake passport, which she accepted. On her father’s advice she handed the passport over to the NYPD, however it still led to her arrest. Ten Russian agents including Anna Chapman were arrested, after having been observed for years, on charges which included money laundering and suspicion of spying for Russia. This led to the largest prisoner swap between the United States and Russia since 1986. On July 8, 2010 the swap was completed at the Vienna International Airport. Five days later the British Home Office revoked Anna’s citizenship preventing her return to England. In December of 2010 Anna Chapman reappeared when she was appointed to the public council of the Young Guard of United Russia, where she was involved in the education of young people. The following month Chapman began hosting a weekly TV show in Russia called Secrets of the World and in June of 2011 she was appointed as editor of Venture Business News magazine. In 2012, the FBI released information that Anna Chapman attempted to snare a senior member of President Barack Obama's cabinet, in what was termed a “Honey Trap.” After the 2008 financial meltdown, sources suggest that Anna may have targeted the dapper Peter Orzag, who was divorced in 2006 and served as Special Assistant to the President, for Economic Policy. Between 2007 and 2010 he was involved in the drafting of the federal budget for the Obama Administration and may have been an appealing target to the FSB, the Russian Intelligence Agency. During Orzag’s time as a federal employee, he frequently came to New York City, where associating with Anna could have been a natural fit, considering her financial and economics background. Coincidently, Orzag resigned from his federal position the same month that Chapman was arrested. Following this, Orzag took a job at Citigroup as Vice President of Global Banking. In 2009, he fathered a child with his former girlfriend, Claire Milonas, the daughter of Greek shipping executive, Spiros Milonas, chairman and President of Ionian Management Inc. In September of 2010, Orzag married Bianna Golodryga, the popular news and finance anchor at Yahoo and a contributor to MSNBC's Morning Joe. She also had co-anchored the weekend edition of ABC's Good Morning America. Not surprisingly Bianna was born in in Moldova, Soviet Union, and in 1980, her family moved to Houston, Texas. She graduated from the University of Texas at Austin, with a degree in Russian/East European & Eurasian studies and has a minor in economics. They have two children. Yes, she is fluent in Russian! Presently Orszag is a banker and economist, and a Vice Chairman of investment banking and Managing Director at Lazard.

a serious contender for my book of year. I can't believe I only discovered Chris Carter a year ago and I now consider him to be one of my favourite crime authors of all time. For that reason this is a difficult review to write because I really want to show just how fantastic this book is. It's a huge departure from what we are used to from Chris, this book is very different from the books that came before. That said it could not have been more successful in my opinion. After five books of Hunter trying to capture a serial killer it makes sense to shake things up a bit and Chris has done that in best possible way. By allowing us to get inside the head of one of the most evil characters I've ever read about. It is also the first book based on real facts and events from Chris's criminal psychology days and that makes it all the more shocking and fascinating. Chris Carter's imagination knows no bounds and I love it. The scenes, the characters, whatever he comes up with is both original and mind blowing and that has never been more so than with this book. I feel like I can't even mention the plot even just a little bit. This is a book that should be read in the same way that I read it: with my heart in my mouth, my eyes unblinking and in a state of complete obliviousness to the world around me while I was well and truly hooked on this book. This is addictive reading at its absolute best and I was devastated when I turned the very last page. Robert Hunter, after the events of the last few books is looking forward to a much needed break in Hawaii. Before he can escape however his Captain calls him to her office. Arriving, Hunter recognises someone - one of the most senior members of the FBI who needs his help. They have in custody one of the strangest individuals they have ever come across, a man who is more machine than human and who for days has uttered not a single word. Until one morning he utters seven: 'I will only speak to Robert Hunter'. The man is Hunter's roommate and best friend from college, Lucien Folter, and found in the boot of his car are two severed and mutilated heads. Lucien cries innocence and Hunter, a man incredibly difficult to read or surprise is played just as much as the reader is by Lucien. There are a million and one things I want to say but I just can't. You really have to discover how this story unfolds for yourself. In this book we learn so much more about Hunter and get inside his head even further than we have before. There's a chapter that almost brought me to tears such is the talent of Chris to connect the reader with Hunter. This is a character like no other and he is now one of my favourite detectives of all time. We go back in time and learn more about Hunter when he was younger, and also when he was in college with Lucien. Lucien is evil. The scenes depicted in this book are some of the most graphic I've ever read and you know what, I loved it. After five books of some of the scariest and goriest scenes I've ever read I wondered whether Chris could come up with something even worse (in a good way), but trust me, he does. This book is horrifying, terrifying and near impossible to put down until you reach its conclusion. I spent my days like a zombie and my nights practically giving myself paper cuts turning the pages. If when reading this book you think you have an idea of where it will go, prepare to be wrong. I've learnt never to underestimate Chris, keeping readers on their toes he takes them on an absolute rollercoaster of a ride with the twistiest of turns and the biggest of drops you will finish this book reeling. I am on a serious book hangover, what book can I read next that can even compare to this? I have no idea but if you are planning on reading An Evil Mind I cannot reccommend it enough. Not only is this probably my book of the year it is probably the best crime fiction book I have ever read. An exaggeration you might say but my opinion is my own and this real

At this point the reader should possess insight into the Atonist origins of both the exoteric and esoteric branches of Judaism and Christianity. The highest ranking members of Europe’s nobility, as well as senior members of both Catholic and Protestant Churches, know the truth revealed here. Naturally, such men are sworn to keep the salient facts from the masses of the world and normally do not admit the truth in words. However, as we show in The Trees of Life, the truth has been conveyed via the symbolism repeatedly employed by hierarchs and their lieutenants down through the ages to the present. This is the crucial thing to remember when inquiries are made into the shadowy

At this point the reader should possess insight into the Atonist origins of both the exoteric and esoteric branches of Judaism and Christianity. The highest ranking members of Europe’s nobility, as well as senior members of both Catholic and Protestant Churches, know the truth revealed here. Naturally, such men are sworn to keep the salient facts from the masses of the world and normally do not admit the truth in words. However, as we show in The Trees of Life, the truth has been conveyed via the symbolism repeatedly employed by hierarchs and their lieutenants down through the ages to the present. This is the crucial thing to remember when inquiries are made into the shadowy secrets of religion.

Yes, Rook Thomas?” She was surprised by the deference that this man, who was at least twenty years her senior, showed her.

CUBBY ORDERED an express food delivery in the morning.  It cost extra, but he wasn’t worried about money.  His parents had left him well-off.  How well-off he didn’t know, never having inquired into the matter.  Month by month, year by year, a firm of accountants took his money to clubs on Wall Street where investments of easy virtue lounged.  At least that was how Cubby understood it.  It was a kind of escort service for money, though how the escorts reproduced was a mystery to him.  The same accountants handled his insurance, his tax and now his senior security.  His parents had set up the system when he was in college because they wanted him to concentrate on his studies. And Cubby had concentrated.  He graduated summa cum laude at Harvard, achieving a Ph.D. with a dissertation on synchronized flashing in fireflies. (This little-known phenomenon occurs in the mountains of Tennessee.  It is the insect equivalent of a rock concert.  The male fireflies show up around 8:30 p.m., flashing on and off, watching one another to get the tempo right.  The females, hot little groupies that they are, observe from the ground.  By 9 p.m. the males are flashing in unison and the females go wild.)

Yeah, I figure if the writing gig doesn’t work, I can always set one of these up in an assisted living home for the elderly and hold Bingo/Pole shows. I’m hoping for a huge senior following—seniors with cataracts and glaucoma.

This shows us that we should not trust in age or seniority. Peter, John, and James were older than Paul and were apostles when he was still a young man persecuting the followers of the Lord Jesus. But after his conversion, Paul [56] came to see more of Christ and of God’s economy than anyone else. The book of Romans, for instance, indicates the depth of Paul’s knowledge. Paul certainly had a great deal to teach those in Jerusalem. But the atmosphere was not right for him to do so. Therefore, he did not teach them anything; nevertheless, he did not receive anything from those of reputation.

In 1975, another landmark paper showed that mothers presiding over an empty nest were not despairing, as conventional wisdom had always assumed, but happier than mothers who still had children at home; during the eighties, as women began their great rush into the workforce, sociologists generally concluded that while work was good for women’s well-being, children tended to negate its positive effects.

Hydraulic fracturing has been used safely in over a million wells, resulting in America’s rise as a global energy superpower, growth in energy investments, wages, and new jobs," added Mr. Milito in the statement. Environmental groups have countered that the isolated incidents of contamination confirm their fears about the environmental impacts of hydraulic fracturing. John Noël, of the group Clean Water Action, said in a statement that the report "smashes the myth that there can be oil and gas development without impacts to drinking water." Amy Mall, a senior policy analyst for the Natural Resources Defense Council, said that the EPA study, "while limited, shows fracking can and has impacted drinking water sources in many different ways," according to the Beacon Journal. The EPA report acknowledges that the findings may be due to a lack of data collected, inaccessible information, a scarcity of long-term systematic and base-line studies, and other factors. Bloomberg reported that EPA couldn't come to terms with energy companies including Range Resources Corp. and Chesapeake Energy to conduct water tests near their wells before and after they were fracked, meaning if the agency did find instances of contamination, it was harder to prove that fracking was the cause. "These elements significantly limit EPA’s ability to determine the actual frequency of impacts," the agency said in a fact sheet released with the report.

My name is Edith Grabowski. I’m ninety-three years old, and I’ve decided to stop having sex. I guess you just reach a certain age. There are only so many positions. Even fewer with the medical equipment. And the scares are more and more frequent. The guy shows up and smiles, “I brought my little blue pills,” like it’s the funniest romantic line ever. An hour later, his eyes bug out. “My heart! My heart!” And just before we hit the Life Alert button, “No, wait, another false alarm. Where were we?” Then he thinks we just simply pick up where we left off. You get old enough, you realize that’s the difference between men and women. Stopping to grab the nitroglycerin tablets is a definite mood-kill. Oh, and venereal disease. All these TV stations now reporting that some of the highest rates of STD in Florida are at senior citizen communities. That’s true, look it up on the Internet.

Emma Sulkowicz, the Columbia University student who made waves as an activist against sexual assault, ended her school year as she began it: carrying a mattress. Ms. Sulkowicz carried her mattress around campus throughout her senior year to raise awareness to her school’s handling of sexual assault. On Tuesday, she brought it with her to her graduation ceremony, and walked with it during the processional. Four fellow female graduates helped her carry the mattress as she walked across the stage to cheers from the audience. Ms. Sulkowicz has said she was raped in her dorm by a classmate who was later cleared of the crime in what she said was a flawed university disciplinary proceeding. She has spent approximately the past nine months carrying her mattress on campus as part of a school-sanctioned art project, “Mattress Performance (Carry That Weight),” vowing to carry it as long as she and the accused student attend the same school. The project sparked debate on and off campus. In January, Ms. Sulkowicz was the guest of New York Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand at President Barack Obama’s State of the Union address. The accused student, Paul Nungesser, and Ms. Sulkowicz both graduated Tuesday. Mr. Nungesser has said he didn’t rape Ms. Sulkowicz and last month filed a lawsuit in Manhattan federal court against Columbia for allowing what he says is sustained harassment against him. As part of the lawsuit, his attorney requested that Columbia bar Ms. Sulkowicz from carrying the mattress at graduation. The school almost did. On Monday, it sent out graduation guidelines that said: “Graduates should not bring into the ceremonial area large objects which could interfere with the proceedings or create discomfort to others in close, crowded spaces shared by thousands of people.” Students saw the guidelines as a reference to Ms. Sulkowicz, they said. But she showed up on Tuesday, mattress in hand. Some students wore red tape on their graduation caps in solidarity with Ms. Sulkowicz, referencing No Red Tape, Columbia’s anti-sexual-assault activist group. Mr. Nungesser’s attorney, Andrew Miltenberg, criticized Columbia. “Once again, Columbia has irresponsibly allowed Ms. Sulkowicz to create a spectacle, the purpose of which is to vilify and humiliate Mr. Nungesser,” Mr. Miltenberg said. “Shame on Columbia for forcing the entire class of 2015 to bear silent witness to the victimization of Mr. Nungesser, on a day set aside to celebrate their academic achievements.” Ms. Sulkowicz, who graduated magna cum laude, and her

ready to accept my comments. She challenged me and said that if I wanted, she could prove to me that she and her team had done everything that was required. She even showed me a few slides, which indicated improvement in the parameters that tracked our execution quotient. I decided to keep a close watch on Anamika and her team and monitor their activity through further reviews. I also decided to spend time with every individual in her team. After a few reviews, I understood the real problem. The issue was that Anamika did not allow any of her colleagues to spend their time in the field helping the business. Most of the time, she asked them to make presentations for different reviews. Her instruction to her team was simple: ‘I will stand up for you, so do not worry. I know how to manage perception, but you guys should ensure that I come across well.’ Thus, many days were spent not on the real job, but on her horrible idea of managing the perception of the senior management. In doing this, the purpose of the team was lost.

Researchers at Yale and Rutgers who studied 2,912 senior citizens over a twelve-year period found that monthly attendance at church services resulted in better mental health. Even those churchgoers who were chronically ill fared better than those who were not religious; they showed “increased feelings of optimism … and fewer symptoms of depression.” Regarding physical health, Duke University Medical Center released a study of more than 1,700 senior citizens in North Carolina that showed a clear relationship between church attendance and good health.23

But through it all, Bezos never showed anxiety or appeared to worry about the wild swings in public sentiment. “We were all running around the halls with our hair on fire thinking, What are we going to do?” says Mark Britto, a senior vice president. But not Jeff. “I have never seen anyone so calm in the eye of a storm. Ice water runs through his veins,” Britto says.

The New York Times goes on to editorialize: “The Pentagon study does not deal at length with a major question. Why did the policy makers go ahead despite the intelligence estimates prepared by their most senior intelligence officials?” These brief statements are truly amazing and in some respects may be among the most important lines in the entire New York Times presentation of the Pentagon Papers. They show how deeply the clandestine, operating side of the CIA hid behind its first and best cover, that of being an intelligence agency. How can the Times miss the point so significantly? Either the Times is innocent of the CIA as an intelligence organization versus the CIA as a clandestine organization, a highly antagonistic and competitive relationship, or the Times somehow played into the hands of those skillful apologists who would have us all believe that the Vietnam problem was the responsibility of others and not of the CIA operating as a clandestine operation.

The Razorbacks would play Duke, the NCAA champs in 1991 and 1992. Duke had a host of great players, but their star was Grant Hill, a consensus pick for national Player of the Year honors. The day before the championship, Richardson grew pensive. He was reasonably proud of his accomplishments, but something was nagging him. Richardson had been the underdog so long that despite his team’s yearlong national ranking, he still felt dispossessed. He found himself pondering one of Arkansas’s little-used substitutes, a senior named Ken Biley. Biley was an undersized post player who was raised in Pine Bluff. Neither of his parents had the opportunity to go to college, but every one of his fifteen siblings did, and nearly all graduated. “I had already learned that everybody has to play his role,” Biley says of his upbringing. As a freshman and sophomore, Biley saw some court time and even started a couple of games, but his playing time later evaporated and he lost faith. “Everyone wants to play, and when you don’t you get discouraged,” he says. On two occasions, he sat down with his coach and asked what he could do to earn a more important role. “I never demanded anything,” Biley says, “and he told me exactly what I needed to do, but we had so many good players ahead of me. Corliss Williamson, for one.” Nearly every coach, under the pressure of a championship showdown, reverts to the basic strategies that got the team into the finals. But Richardson couldn’t stop thinking about Biley, and what a selfless worker he had been for four years. The day before the championship game against Duke, at the conclusion of practice, Richardson pulled Biley aside. Biley had hardly played in the first five playoff games leading up to the NCAA title match—a total of four minutes. “I’ve watched how your career has progressed, and how you’ve handled not getting to play,” Richardson began. “I appreciate the leadership you’ve been showing and I want to reward you, as a senior.” “Thanks coach,” Biley said. He was unprepared for what came next. “You’re starting tomorrow against Duke,” Richardson said. “And you’re guarding Grant Hill.” Biley was speechless. Then overcome with emotion. “I was shocked, freaked out!” Biley says. “I hadn’t played much for two years. I just could not believe it.” Biley had plenty of time to think about Grant Hill. “I was a nervous wreck, like you’d expect,” he says. He had a restless night—he stared at the ceiling, sat on the edge of his bed, then flopped around trying to sleep. Richardson had disdained book coaches for years. Now he was throwing the book in the trash by starting a benchwarmer in the NCAA championship game.

It was not easy to score top marks at Orenburg. Yadkar Akbulatov, a senior instructor, said in 1961, ‘Don’t imagine that Yuri was an infallible cadet, a child prodigy. He wasn’t. He was an impetuous, enthusiastic young man who made the same slips as any other.’ His worst marks were for his landings. He was in danger of failing Orenburg completely if he could not get his aircraft down without bouncing on his tyres. Akbulatov flew with him a couple of times to see if they could iron out some faults. ‘I took him up and watched him carefully. On steep banking turns his performance wasn’t absolutely perfect, but in vertical dives and climbs he put on a show that made me see stars from the g-load. Then came the touchdown. It was faultless! I asked him, “Why can’t you always land like that?” He grinned and said, “I’ve found the solution.” He put a cushion under his seat so that he could get a better line of sight with the runway.’ From now on, Gagarin never flew any aircraft without his cushion.

he talked until their food arrived, littering his chat with references to ‘ninety k’ and ‘a quarter of a mill’, and every sentence was angled, like a mirror, to show him in the best possible light: his cleverness, his quick thinking, his besting of slower, stupider yet more senior colleagues...

In the murk ahead of them a pair of blazing torches indicated the entrance to the forum, with a pair of sentries standing guard in front of the high archway. Before the tribune had any chance to explain their presence to the surprised soldiers a legion centurion walked out of the courtyard beyond them, stopping with a start of surprise when he saw the newcomers. Staring with narrowed eyes at the three centurions’ unfamiliar armour and crested helmets, he was further taken aback when he realised who it was they were escorting. Scaurus allowed the silence to play out for a few seconds, watching the calculation in the legion officer’s face before speaking in an acerbic tone designed to communicate his status. ‘Yes, Centurion, this is a senior officer’s uniform, and yes, Centurion, you’re supposed to have your hand in the air some time about now.’ The other man saluted quickly, his face reddening with embarrassment, while the sentries worked hard but not entirely successfully at keeping the smirks off their faces. ‘I’m sorry, Prefect, it’s just that we weren’t expecting to receive any reinforcement.’ Marcus looked at Julius, wondering if his colleague was going to correct the legion man’s mistaken identification, but his questioning gaze was answered only by a slight shake of the big man’s head. Scaurus nodded to the centurion, looking over his shoulder at the dimly visible administrative building on the other side of the forum’s open courtyard. ‘That’s perfectly understandable, Centurion, because we’re not reinforcements. If you’ll show me to your tribune . . .?

Our research shows that specialists’ time is often an order of magnitude (10 times) more costly than their assistants’ time. It makes no sense to have physicians and senior nurses perform tasks that could be done just as well by far less expensive personnel.

It came to me suddenly that evil was, perhaps, necessarily always more impressive than good. It had to make a show! It had to startle and challenge! It was instability attacking stability. And in the end, I thought, stability will always win. Stability can survive the triteness of Good Fairy Diamond; the flat voice, the rhymed couplet, even the irrelevant vocal statement of "There's a winding road runs down the hill, To the olde world town I love." All very poor weapons it would seem, and yet those weapons would inevitably prevail. The pantomime would end in the way it always ended. The staircase, and the descending cast in order of seniority, with Good Fairy Diamond, practising the Christian virtue of humility and not seeking to be first (or in this case, last) but arriving about halfway through the procession, side by side with her late opponent, now seen to be no longer the snarling Demon King breathing fire and brimstone, but just a man dressed up in red tights.

Ivar joined Durant on road shows, and interest grew as Ivar repeated his speech throughout 1923. By the fall Durant believed he finally had found enough investors, and Ivar and Lee Higginson began preparing to close a deal. They followed the same procedure as anyone seeking money. First, they created a new firm, called International Match Corporation, and incorporated it in Delaware. During the late nineteenth century, states had begun competing for corporate charters, the formative documents that corporations are required to file when they are created. Delaware had recently surpassed New Jersey as the incorporation state of choice, and increasingly companies chose to file in Delaware, even if their operations were in another state. Delaware judges took a hands-off approach to business, and would be unlikely to second-guess Ivar’s decisions. By incorporating International Match in Delaware, Lee Higginson would give Ivar and themselves maximum flexibility. Next, Durant and Ivar chose the initial shareholders and directors of International Match. The two original shareholders would be Swedish Match and a syndicate of Swedish banks; they would contribute start-up capital of 30 million dollars and receive the company’s shares, in equal amounts. As shareholders, Swedish Match and the bank syndicate would vote for the company’s board of directors, as well as other major business decisions. The shareholders would elect five directors to oversee International Match’s business: Ivar; Krister Littorin, Ivar’s engineering classmate from Stockholm; Donald Durant; Frederic Allen, Lee Higginson’s senior statesman and head of the firm’s New York office; and Percy A. Rockefeller, a nephew of John D. Rockefeller. Percy Rockefeller owned the World Match Company of Walker-ville, Ontario, and recently had met Ivar while negotiating the sale of a Canadian match manufacturing plant to Swedish Match.29 The two men had impressed each other, and Ivar saw that Rockefeller, who then served on more than sixty other boards, would be the ideal director of International Match: he was well connected, wealthy, generally familiar with the match industry, and far too busy to care about any details. Ivar had idolized the Rockefellers since he was a boy in Kalmar; now, a member of that family would serve on his board.

NNHS students discussed Americanness in their everyday interactions. For example, Mr Ford, a popular White teacher, made a jocular reference to the title of a popular television show when he told a classroom full of seniors who had not completed an assignment that they ‘should be called America’s biggest losers!’ A Mexican girl (Gen 3, Grade 12) retorted, ‘But we’re not even American!’ This kind of comment reflects Latinx students’ awareness that they were positioned as somehow un-American.

Researchers Alice Eagly and Linda Carli debunked the idea of a “glass ceiling,” a barrier that exists only at the top. Instead, their extensive analyses show that gender bias in the United States is alive and well at entry-level and senior-level jobs, for blue-collar workers and executives. Women are more likely to get flack for mistakes, especially in typically “male” roles—this phenomenon is called “the glass cliff”—and studies show that women of color are even more at risk for being perceived as incompetent.

For example, until the mid-2010s many senior executives in traditional companies cackled that Amazon’s business still showed no profits. They felt it was a low-margin activity propped up by a hyperinflated share price. And within their traditional way of understanding corporate performance, they were right. But seen through a different frame, they were utterly wrong. Jeff Bezos had reframed the idea of commercial growth, away from producing annual returns for shareholders (and handing about a third of the profits to governments in the form of tax) and toward reinvesting every penny of net income to establish adjacent business lines, from Kindle books to cloud services. People see it plain as day in hindsight, but the new frame was incomprehensible to many in the moment.

And our more progressive clients, monitored by their CFOs, are starting to require a specific number of hours of ongoing education at all levels of the organization (we suggest 12 hours for the frontline; 25 hours for middle management; and 45 to 60 hours for senior leaders as a starting point). Worried about spending all that money on training only to watch your people go elsewhere? The research definitively shows that training and development increases loyalty. Besides, what’s the alternative? Do you really want your people not to be the best-trained for the jobs they have to do? And how much should you spend on training? It obviously depends, but 2% to 3% of your payroll is a good benchmark. Who should you spend it on? Senior leaders, middle managers, frontline employees? They all need training, but focus first on your middle management. In most growth companies, they have the hardest jobs and are critical to employee engagement and retention, yet get the least preparation for it.

For several millennia our species, Homo sapiens, was not alone in Europe. Neanderthals competed with our ancestors but about 30,000 years ago, our ancestors appear to have triumphed and Neanderthals gradually died out. Recent research suggests that the reason for this was grandparents. Until c. 28,000 BC, most people died before they were 30. However, a survey of ancient remains showed that for every 10 young Neanderthals who died between the ages of 10 and 30, only four older adults lived beyond the age of 30. By contrast, for every 10 of our species who died young, between 10 and 30, there were 20 who lived beyond the age of 30. This appears to have been a critical development. Grandparents could pass on important knowledge such as where water could be found or where the best hunting and gathering was. This became a virtuous cycle and, the more seniors who survived, the better their family bands did and, since Neanderthals – for whatever reason – did not see the same numbers live longer, they died out.

In July 2014, Ted tapped Brian Wright, a senior vice president at Nickelodeon, to lead young adult content deals. (Brian’s first Netflix claim to fame is signing the deal for a show called Stranger Things just a few months into the job.) Brian tells this story about Ted receiving feedback publicly on Brian’s first day at Netflix: In all my past jobs, it was all about who’s in and who’s out of favor. If you gave the boss feedback or disagreed with her in a meeting in front of others, that would be political death. You would find yourself in Siberia. Monday morning, it’s my first day of this brand-new job, and I’m on hyperalert trying to find out what are the politics of the place. At eleven a.m. I attend my first meeting led by Ted (my boss’s boss, who is from my perspective a superstar), with about fifteen people at various levels in the company. Ted was talking about the release of The Blacklist season 2. A guy four levels below him hierarchically stopped him in the middle of his point: “Ted, I think you’ve missed something. You’re misunderstanding the licensing deal. That approach won’t work.” Ted stuck to his guns, but this guy didn’t back down. “It won’t work. You’re mixing up two separate reports, Ted. You’ve got it wrong. We need to meet with Sony directly.” I could not believe that this low-level guy would confront Ted Sarandos himself in front of a group of people. From my past experience, this was equivalent to committing career suicide. I was literally scandalized. My face was completely flushed. I wanted to hide under my chair. When the meeting ended, Ted got up and put his hand on this guy’s shoulder. “Great meeting. Thanks for your input today,” he said with a smile. I practically had to hold my jaw shut, I was so surprised. Later I ran into Ted in the men’s washroom. He asked how my first day was going so I told him, “Wow Ted, I couldn’t believe the way that guy was going at you in the meeting.” Ted looked totally mystified. He said, “Brian, the day you find yourself sitting on your feedback because you’re worried you’ll be unpopular is the day you’ll need to leave Netflix. We hire you for your opinions. Every person in that room is responsible for telling me frankly what they think.

One senior airline executive told me that their internal data showed that after their flight personnel started to wear masks, the incidence of coronavirus infections among staff fell sharply.

Oh. Liam." Madison cut her off, smirking when Liam walked out of the restroom behind her, still adjusting his tie. "Nice to see you again." Totally nonplussed, Liam smiled. "Madison." "Men's room closed?" "Not at all." He put an arm around Daisy's shoulder and pressed a kiss to her cheek. "Just needed a little alone time with may fiancée." Madison's smile faded. "You're still engaged?" "Yes, we are." He held up Daisy's hand to show off the diamond ring he'd bought her to replace the Sharks ring he'd given her at the bus stop. "When you meet the woman you want to spend the rest of your life with, you don't let her go." Daisy slipped an arm through Liam's. "How's Orson?" "Orson?" Madison frowned as if she had no idea who Daisy was talking about. "Oh. He's gone. Maybe New York?" "I'm sorry to hear that." "I was sorry to hear that Organicare was going under." Madison's smirk returned. "I was wondering if you were interested in coming back to work for me. I need a senior software engineer and---" "Organicare isn't going under," Daisy said. "We've given the company a total overhaul and we've just secured our Series B funding. I've had interest from other investors and I'm here to meet some of them right now. So, if you'll excuse me..." "She's the CEO," Liam said, beaming. "She saved the company and now she's running the whole show." "Congratulations." Madison's voice was flat as she checked her watch. "You're right about the time. I've got a meeting in five minutes. I'd better go." "You didn't have to do that," Daisy said to Liam. "It was a little bit petty." "You enjoyed every second of it." Her lips tipped in a smile. "Okay. I did. She was like every mean girl in high school who mocked me, and now the tables have turned and not only am I running a company, I got the coolest guy in school.

In a dog-eat-dog world of Politics, it is not too farfetched to imagine that every Central leader of BJP wanted the collapse of the political career of Modi, whom they suspected and very correctly so as a potential threat to their own political ambitions. After all, at the end of the day there are many senior leaders in Congress and BJP who want to die after becoming either the Prime Minister or the President of India, even if for just one day.

Such a procedure would divide the work between senior and junior analysts as follows: (1) The senior analyst would set up the formula to apply to all companies generally for determining past-performance value. (2) The junior analysts would work up such factors for the designated companies—pretty much in mechanical fashion. (3) The senior analyst would then determine to what extent a company’s performance—absolute or relative—is likely to differ from its past record, and what change should be made in the value to reflect such anticipated changes. It would be best if the senior analyst’s report showed both the original valuation and the modified one, with his reasons for the change. Is

If you are a follower of PBS Newshour and enjoy its special features about people and places that make the multiracial, multicultural United States such a vibrant, diverse, and complex nation, you will want to read Michael Saltz’s The Winding Road: My Journey Through Life and the McNeil/Lehrer Newshour. Not only will you learn an insider’s history of the evolving PBS Newhour programming, but you will learn about the role of producers, writers, photographers, and tech people, most of whom are never mentioned or credited on the nightly program. This is a fascinating personal history written by an incredibly versatile former senior producer on the show. The book chronicles his work as well as his love of music, the arts, and the people who inhabit this country.

This is exactly what Alan Mulally walked into when he took over as the new CEO at Ford in 2006. Ford was in serious trouble, and Mulally was brought in with the hope that he could save the company. Much as Chief Cauley had done at the CRPD, Mulally made it his first order of business at Ford to find out as much as he could about the current state of things from the people who worked there. The task, however, proved more difficult than he expected. To keep a pulse on the health of the organization, Mulally introduced weekly business plan reviews (BPRs). All his senior executives were to attend these meetings and present the status of their work against the company’s strategic plan, using simple color coding—green, yellow and red. Mulally knew that the company was having serious problems, so he was surprised to see that week after week every executive presented their projects as all green. Finally, he threw up his hands in frustration. “We are going to lose billions of dollars this year,” he said. “Is there anything that’s not going well here?” Nobody answered. There was a good reason for the silence. The executives were scared. Prior to Mulally, the former CEO would regularly berate, humiliate or fire people who told him things he didn’t want to hear. And, because we get the behavior we reward, executives were now conditioned to hide problem areas or missed financial targets to protect themselves from the CEO. It didn’t matter that Mulally said he wanted honesty and accountability; until the executives felt safe, he wasn’t going to get it. (For all the cynics who say there is no place for feelings at work, here was a roomful of the most senior people of a major corporation who didn’t want to tell the truth to the CEO because of how they felt.) But Mulally persisted. In every subsequent meeting he repeated the same question until, eventually, one person, Mark Fields, head of operations in the Americas, changed one slide in his presentation to red. A decision he believed would cost him his job. But he didn’t lose his job. Nor was he publicly shamed. Instead, Mulally clapped at the sight and said, “Mark, that is great visibility! Who can help Mark with this?” At the next meeting, Mark was still the only executive with a red slide in his presentation. In fact, the other executives were surprised to see that Fields still had his job. Week after week, Mulally would repeat his question, We are still losing tons of money, is anything not going well? Slowly executives started to show yellow and red in their presentations too. Eventually, it got to the point where they would openly discuss all the issues they were facing. In the process, Mulally had learned some tricks to help build trust on the team. To help them feel safe from humiliation, for example, he depersonalized the problems his executives faced. “You have a problem,” he would tell them. “You are not the problem.

Actually it is annoying to see a grown up exhibiting pettiness in a way that shows they are proud of it. Worse if they are senior government officials.

FBI files show that the father of senior Obama White House adviser Valerie Jarrett was in communication with paid Soviet agent Alfred Stern. Stern was charged with espionage and fled to Prague.

The paper was straightforward. It showed how some landlords make a living (and sometimes a killing) by renting shabby housing to very poor families. After my talk, a senior scholar looked rather alarmed. “You’re going down a Marxist path,” she said. “You know that, right?

DON’T LET YOUR CULTURE BECOME TOXIC SUCCESSFUL START-UPS often begin with a culture where people challenge one another directly and even fiercely, but also show they care personally. That’s because they start small, involve people who get to know each other really well, and are fighting for survival. However, as the business grows and new people join the firm, it’s impossible to know everyone’s name, let alone to have strong relationships with everyone. The kind of super-direct challenges that are easy when people know each other well become difficult. Not wanting to lose the friendly culture of the early days, many hesitate to speak up when they see problems, backing off of Challenge Directly and retreating to Ruinous Empathy. Because Obnoxious Aggression is more effective than Ruinous Empathy, that kind of behavior has an advantage; people who behave badly begin to win, rising in the company. When confronted with a powerful jerk, many people retreat to Manipulative Insincerity, more out of instinctive self-protectiveness than intentional wrongdoing. In this kind of environment, there’s an incentive to retreat to Manipulative Insincerity in front of those who are more senior to them, and resort to Obnoxious Aggression with those who are less powerful. The culture becomes toxic—many kissing up and kicking down, few willing to speak truth to power. This kind of behavior won’t kill a company right away. Instead, it leads to a slow, painful death of innovation, and lives of quiet desperation. That’s the bad news. The good news is that many companies large and small are now taking active measures to shift to a culture in which caring personally and challenging directly go hand in hand. When people learn to do both simultaneously, bad behavior no longer gives anyone an advantage. Bad behavior is punished not rewarded, the truth comes out, and the environment is more conducive to both success and happiness.

From the 1760s, thereabouts, is when shoemakers started putting labels in shoes, little paper labels that they would stick inside on the lining on the insole,’ says Rebecca Shawcross, senior shoe curator at the Northampton Museum and Art Gallery. ‘They’re all individual and they basically say who the maker was, and where they were based. With this new increased market opening up an audience for ready-made, it was like advertising themselves.’ This information, along with pictorial trade cards, allowed customers to repeat buy from the same makers. It allowed craftspeople to show off and be acknowledged for their skills.

The longer term solution for the problem of elder abuse is to raise awareness in society, show senior citizens in a positive light and highlight their problems, so that such incidents are prevented. This goes hand in hand with a better equipped health system to take care of the medical needs of senior citizens. Legal institutions have to be strengthened, along with simplified special court procedures, to make sure senior citizens face no difficulty in accessing legal help whenever they need it.

Researchers have proposed two primary explanations for this phenomenon. First, by virtue of their level, senior leaders simply have fewer people above them who can provide candid feedback. Second, the more power a leader wields, the less comfortable people will be to give them constructive feedback, for fear it will hurt their careers. Business professor James O’Toole has added that, as one’s power grows, one’s willingness to listen shrinks, either because they think they know more than their employees or because seeking feedback will come at a cost. But this doesn’t have to be the case. One analysis showed that the most successful leaders, as rated by 360-degree reviews of leadership effectiveness, counter act this tendency by seeking frequent critical feedback (from bosses, peers, employees, their board, and so on). They become more self-aware in the process and come to be seen as more effective by others.

Years ago, I represented a client, a firefighter/paramedic, in an administrative trial after he had been terminated for allegedly providing patient care that was below the department’s established standards. One central issue was the ongoing, on-the-job training firefighters/paramedics receive. Throughout the trial, senior officers of the department, including the Chief himself, preached and bloviated on and on about how the department is committed to providing only the best patient care and how their paramedics are held to a higher standard; how they are committed to serving the community with the highest level of blah, blah, blah. On cross examination, however, I asked each of them about how many hours a day each provider spends drilling or practicing firefighting technique and equipment. Each of them answered proudly that every firefighter/EMT and firefighter/paramedic, regardless of assignment, spends at least three hours each day practicing firefighting skills and/or rehearsing the use of various firefighting equipment; hoses, ladders, saws, and other firefighter equipment. Ok, that’s great. Through testimony, we determined that, based on a 10-shift work month, each firefighter/paramedic, regardless of assignment, spends at least 30 hours per month drilling, practicing, and/or rehearsing firefighting skills & equipment. That’s at a minimum of 360 hours per year of ongoing, on-the-job firefighter training. Outstanding. When the smoke is showing and the flames are roiling, they will be ready. They all displayed the same proud grin at how well trained their people are. For each of them, however, that smug grin quickly turned when I then asked about the number of hours per day each firefighter/paramedic spends drilling on or practicing patient care related techniques, skills, and tools. Every one of them squirmed as they responded with the truth that the department only offers three hours of patient care related education per month. That’s roughly a maximum of 36 hours of paramedic training for the entire year. It got worse when further testimony showed that patient care related calls account for more than 80 percent of their call volume and fire related calls less than 20 percent, I could see each of them deflate on the witness stand when I asked how they could truthfully say they were committed to providing the best patient care when barely 10 percent of their training addresses patient care, which constitutes over 80 percent of your department’s calls. The answers were more disjointed and nonsensical than a White House press briefing. Of course, across America the 10:1 ratio of ongoing firefighting training to EMS training is pretty consistent, which begs the question: Don’t they get it? Excellence is the product of practice. How can any rational person look at a 10:1 training ratio and declare themselves committed to the highest level of care? How can an agency neglect training on the most significant aspect of the business and then be surprised when issues of negligence and liability arise? Once again, it seems that old-school culture leaves EMS stuck in the mud and the law is not going to wait for agencies to figure out that living in the past compromises the future.

looked for signs of slackness and especially for areas of responsibility that were running too smoothly. The Senior Watchdog had her own watchwords: “Show me a completely smooth operation and I’ll show you someone who’s covering mistakes. Real boats rock.

A look at Simeon and Anna also shows how God significantly uses older people in serving the Lord through continual prayer and fasting. In our day, God is going to use people who are retired. If you are nearing retirement, your strength has been given to you for this hour, and God has freed you from many things. There’s not a more powerful force in the earth than that of senior saints who have time and passion for Jesus.

Fear is managed better in some soldiers and is trickier to master in others; shame and consequences loom large. The general goes on to elucidate further: The one who shows fear is lost; he has lost his honor and his reputation, and he will be taken to task. His promotion may be blocked. It’s the same concept at home. You try many ways to fix your child—many times he does things that you cover for him. Because you fear that you [the regiment] will be shamed if people find out. . . . The senior officer might try and encourage him, so he may say “Get up, child, it’s okay; shabash shabash [verbal encouragement implying in this context ‘come, come’].” If he still doesn’t move, then the commander will become harsh. He will push him, kick him, and drag him, and he will ask two other people to take the weapon from him. He will be verbally abused, and they will shame him by calling him a coward, a woman.

As she is the senior person in the room, I wait for her to call on me. And, while I am waiting, I should show I am a good listener by keeping both my voice and my body quiet. In China, we often feel Westerners speak up so much in meetings that they do this to show off, or they are poor listeners. Also, I have noticed that Chinese people leave a few more seconds of silence before jumping in than in the West. You Westerners practically speak on top of each other in a meeting. I kept waiting for Erin to be quiet long enough for me to jump in, but my turn never came. We Chinese often feel Americans are not good listeners because they are always jumping in on top of one another to make their points. I would have liked to make one of my points if an appropriate length of pause had arisen. But Erin was always talking, so I just kept waiting patiently. My mother left it deeply engrained in me: You have two eyes, two ears, but only one mouth. You should use them accordingly.