Smashing School Quotes

[The public school system is] usually a twelve year sentence of mind control. Crushing creativity, smashing individualism, encouraging collectivism and compromise, destroying the exercise of intellectual inquiry, twisting it instead into meek subservience to authority.

This crappy, mean, broken-down school took five years of my life. I’d be mad, but for the fact that it taught me more about who I was than anything else I have ever done. It also made me think that modern life is rubbish for so many people. How few choices it gives them. How it lays out in front of them a future that bores most of them so much they can’t wait to get smashed out of their heads each weekend. How little most people are believed in, and how much it asks of so many people for so little in return.

Miss Murphy in first grade wrote its name in chalk across the board and told us it was roaring down the storm tracks of the milky way at frightful speed and if it wandered off its course and smashed into the earth there'd be no school tomorrow.

I wish there really was such a thing as a Time-Clock Puncher, though. I wish some gigantic, surly, stone-fisted Soap Mahoney-type guy went around the world smashing every clock in sight till there weren't any more and people got so confused about when to go to the mill or school or church that they gave up and did something interesting instead.

I smashed his hand as hard as I could with the Wiffle bat. "Ow!" he screamed. Carson was rubbing his red palm, inspecting it for damage. "That hurt," he shrieked. "You really hurt me." "Right back at you," I said. "Good-bye Carson." He frowned, massaging his hand, the big baby. "I just wanted to end this nicely." "Yeah?" I cocked the bat up to hit him again. "Well, this time you don't get what you want.

I was never one of those student who thought it was great to see their teaches outside of school, in their normal clothes, living their normal life like a normal person. I actually preferred to keep them as they were: smartly dressed and in charge, maybe even as role models. What I definitely did not want to do was see them getting smashed in Derby town center, smiling at women, and then getting pissy when the women didn't smile back, reminding me that none of the adults in my life really know what they're doing and that I too will never really figure anything out.

Down vith children! Do them in! Boil their bones and fry their skin! Bish them, sqvish them, bash them, mash them! Brrreak them, shake them, slash them, smash them! Offer chocs vith magic powder! Say “Eat up!” then say it louder. Crrram them full of sticky eats, Send them home still guzzling sveets. And in the morning little fools Go marching off to separate schools. A girl feels sick and goes all pale. She yells, “Hey look! I've grrrown a tail!” A boy who's standing next to her Screams, “Help! I think I'm grrrowing fur!” Another shouts, “Vee look like frrreaks! There's viskers growing on our cheeks!” A boy who vos extremely tall Cries out, “Vot's wrong? I'm grrrowing small!” Four tiny legs begin to sprrrout From everybody rrround about. And all at vunce, all in a trrrice, There are no children! Only MICE!

In keeping with the Laws of the Prophet Bubba and the Code of the UIL, as set forth in the Book of First Downs, as the sun sets on Friday nights the rites of the Texas state religion are celebrated: high school, smash-mouth football. ‘And lo, the children of Jim Bob do take to the roads in caravans and they do go up unto the stadium by tribes, the Indians of Groveton, the Panthers of Lufkin, the Mustangs of Overton, and the very Wildcats of Palestine, and who shall withstand the traffic jams thereof?’ Thus is it written, and so it is and shall be.

Bertinck has a chest wound. After a while a fragment smashes away his chin, and the same fragment has sufficient force to tear open Leer’s hip. Leer groans as he supports himself on his arm, he bleeds quickly, no one can help him. Like an emptying tube, after a couple of minutes he collapses. What use is it to him now that he was such a good mathematician at school.

What happened next played itself out like a terrible drama with two spectators. Lee and I stayed on our side of the fence, like an audience. Of course if the bull had wanted to smash through the fence he could have done so any time, but luckily nearly all cattle live and die without learning that. It's like school, most students go from kindergarten to Year 12 without noticing that they could do a fair amount of damage if they wanted to. They stay inside the fence.

My mama wore pajamas to the grocery store. She smashed a bunch of eggs on the grocery floor. One dozen, two dozen, four dozen, six. She dumped a bunch of jelly jars into the mix. Grape jelly, apricot, don’t forget cherry. Orange marmalade and wild strawberry. A man walked by and fell in the glop. He slid next door to the barber shop. His icky-sticky body got covered in hair. He tore a hole in his under—

Americans want great schools for their children, safe neighborhoods for their families, and good jobs for themselves. These are the just and reasonable demands of a righteous public. But for too many of our citizens, a different reality exists: Mothers and children trapped in poverty in our inner cities; rusted-out factories scattered like tombstones across

For the first month of school, writing is its own upper. Pounding on my computer keys feels like playing the piano, like arranging words into harmony that sings back to me.

Children going to school, a congregation in a synagogue, shoppers in a supermarket, a man on the stage of an amphitheater are all, so to speak, inhabiting a stable picture of the world. A school is a place of education. A synagogue is a place of worship. A supermarket is a place to shop. A stage is a performance space. That’s the frame in which they see themselves. Violence smashes that picture. Suddenly they don’t know the rules—what to say, how to behave, what choices to make. They no longer know the shape of things. Reality dissolves and is replaced by the incomprehensible

Agnes shut her eyes, clenched her fists, opened her mouth and screamed. It started low. Plaster dust drifted down from the ceiling. The prisms on the chandelier chimed gently as they shook. It rose, passing quickly through the mysterious pitch at fourteen cycles per second where the human spirit begins to feel distinctly uncomfortable about the universe and the place in it of the bowels. Small items around the Opera House vibrated off shelves and smashed on the floor. The note climbed, rang like a bell, climbed again. In the Pit, all the violin strings snapped, one by one. As the tone rose, the crystal prisms shook in the chandelier. In the bar, champagne corks fired a salvo. Ice jingled and shattered in its bucket. A line of wine-glasses joined in the chorus, blurred around the rims, and then exploded like hazardous thistledown with attitude. There were harmonics and echoes that caused strange effects. In the dressing-rooms the No. 3 greasepaint melted. Mirrors cracked, filling the ballet school with a million fractured images. Dust rose, insects fell. In the stones of the Opera House tiny particles of quartz danced briefly... Then there was silence, broken by the occasional thud and tinkle. Nanny grinned. 'Ah,' she said, 'now the opera's over.

But this was not enough on its own to generate the kind of terror that Mao wanted. On 18 August, a mammoth rally was held in Tiananmen Square in the center of Peking, with over a million young participants. Lin Biao appeared in public as Mao's deputy and spokesman for the first time. He made a speech calling on the Red Guards to charge out of their schools and 'smash up the four olds' defined as 'old ideas, old culture, old customs, and old habits." Following this obscure call, Red Guards all over China took to the streets, giving full vent to their vandalism, ignorance, and fanaticism. They raided people's houses, smashed their antiques, tore up paintings and works of calligraphy. Bonfires were lit to consume books. Very soon nearly all treasures in private collections were destroyed. Many writers and artists committed suicide after being cruelly beaten and humiliated, and being forced to witness their work being burned to ashes. Museums were raided. Palaces, temples, ancient tombs, statues, pagodas, city walls anything 'old' was pillaged. The few things that survived, such as the Forbidden City, did so only because Premier Zhou Enlai sent the army to guard them, and issued specific orders that they should be protected. The Red Guards only pressed on when they were encouraged. Mao hailed the Red Guards' actions as "Very good indeed!" and ordered the nation to support them. He encouraged the Red Guards to pick on a wider range of victims in order to increase the terror. Prominent writers, artists, scholars, and most other top professionals, who had been privileged under the Communist regime, were now categorically condemned as 'reactionary bourgeois authorities." With the help of some of these people's colleagues who hated them for various reasons, ranging from fanaticism to envy, the Red Guards began to abuse them. Then there were the old 'class enemies': former landlords and capitalists, people with Kuomintang connections, those condemned in previous political campaigns like the 'rightists' and their children.

Despite all threats, Prudence Crandall opened the school … The Negro students stood bravely by her side. And then followed one of the most heroic—and most shameful—episodes in American history. The storekeepers refused to sell supplies to Miss Crandall.… The village doctor would not attend ailing students. The druggist refused to give medicine. On top of such fierce inhumanity, rowdies smashed the school windows, threw manure in the well and started several fires in the building.

Meanwhile, Mme Mao and her cohorts were renewing their efforts to prevent the country from working. In industry, their slogan was: "To stop production is revolution itself." In agriculture, in which they now began to meddle seriously: "We would rather have socialist weeds than capitalist crops." Acquiring foreign technology became "sniffing after foreigners' farts and calling them sweet." In education: "We want illiterate working people, not educated spiritual aristocrats." They called for schoolchildren to rebel against their teachers again; in January 1974, classroom windows, tables, and chairs in schools in Peking were smashed, as in 1966. Mme Mao claimed this was like "the revolutionary action of English workers destroying machines in the eighteenth century." All this demagoguery' had one purpose: to create trouble for Zhou Enlai and Deng Xiao-ping and generate chaos. It was only in persecuting people and in destruction that Mme Mao and the other luminaries of the Cultural Revolution had a chance to "shine." In construction they had no place. Zhou and Deng had been making tentative efforts to open the country up, so Mme Mao launched a fresh attack on foreign culture. In early 1974 there was a big media campaign denouncing the Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni for a film he had made about China, although no one in China had seen the film, and few had even heard of it or of Antonioni. This xenophobia was extended to Beethoven after a visit by the Philadelphia Orchestra. In the two years since the fall of Lin Biao, my mood had changed from hope to despair and fury. The only source of comfort was that there was a fight going on at all, and that the lunacy was not reigning supreme, as it had in the earlier years of the Cultural Revolution. During this period, Mao was not giving his full backing to either side. He hated the efforts of Zhou and Deng to reverse the Cultural Revolution, but he knew that his wife and her acolytes could not make the country work. Mao let Zhou carry on with the administration of the country, but set his wife upon Zhou, particularly in a new campaign to 'criticize Confucius." The slogans ostensibly denounced Lin Biao, but were really aimed at Zhou, who, it was widely held, epitomized the virtues advocated by the ancient sage. Even though Zhou had been unwaveringly loyal, Mao still could not leave him alone. Not even now, when Zhou was fatally ill with advanced cancer of the bladder.

This crappy, mean, broken-down school took five years of my life. I'd be mad, but for the fact that it taught me more about who I was than anything else I have ever done. It also made me think that modern life is rubbish for so many people. How few choices it gives them. How it lays out in front of them a future that bored most of them so much they couldn't wait to get smashed out of their heads each weekend. How little most people are believed in, and how much it asks of so many people for so little in return.

Ummiye is currently working on a screenplay called "Footless on Her Own Feet." It tells the story of a handicapped girl whose fifty-year-old mother pushes her to school every day in a wheelbarrow. Eventually, she wins a national drawing contest, making a super-realistic picture of herself in the wheelbarrow. With the prize money, she buys a wheelchair. Like the Arslankoy theatre, the girl's drawing uses artistic representation to change the thing represented. By drawing a truthful picture of the humiliating wheelbarrow, she transforms it into a dignified wheelchair-- much as a theatre, by representing the injustice of village women's life, might make that life more just. Nabokov once claimed that the inspiration for Lolita was an art work produced by an ape in the Jardin des Plantes: a drawing of the bars of its cage. It's a good metaphor for artistic production. What else do we ever draw besides the bars of our cage, or the wheelbarrow we rode in as crippled children? How else do cages get smashed? How else will we stand on our own feet?

Meanwhile, Mme Mao and her cohorts were renewing their efforts to prevent the country from working. In industry, their slogan was: "To stop production is revolution itself." In agriculture, in which they now began to meddle seriously: "We would rather have socialist weeds than capitalist crops." Acquiring foreign technology became "sniffing after foreigners' farts and calling them sweet." In education: "We want illiterate working people, not educated spiritual aristocrats." They called for schoolchildren to rebel against their teachers again; in January 1974, classroom windows, tables, and chairs in schools in Peking were smashed, as in 1966. Mme Mao claimed this was like "the revolutionary action of English workers destroying machines in the eighteenth century." Mme Mao launched a fresh attack on foreign culture. In early 1974 there was a big media campaign denouncing the Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni for a film he had made about China, although no one in China had seen the film, and few had even heard of it or of Antonioni. This xenophobia was extended to Beethoven after a visit by the Philadelphia Orchestra.

In Minneapolis, tires were slashed and windows smashed. A high school student getting off a bus was hit in the face and told to “go back to China.” A woman was kicked in the thighs, face, and kidneys, and her purse, which contained the family’s entire savings of $400, was stolen; afterwards, she forbade her children to play outdoors, and her husband, who had once commanded a fifty-man unit in the Armée Clandestine, stayed home to guard the family’s belongings. In Providence, children walking home from school were beaten. In Missoula, teenagers were stoned. In Milwaukee, garden plots were vandalized and a car was set on fire. In Eureka, California, two burning crosses were placed on a family’s front lawn. In a random act of violence near Springfield, Illinois, a twelve-year-old boy was shot and killed by three men who forced his family’s car off Interstate 55 and demanded money. His father told a reporter, “In a war, you know who your enemies are. Here, you don’t know if the person walking up to you will hurt you.

Ugh, call me Ro,” she interrupted. “Titles make me itchy. And wait—I have to go to school? Gross. If I have to sit through a bunch of lectures on how brilliant you elves think you are, I might start smashing your crystal walls.” “Don’t worry, I spend most of my time ditching or in detention,” Keefe assured her. Ro grinned. “Sounds like you and I are going to get along just fine.

Virtually every inner city of size in America—New York City, Detroit, Chicago, Baltimore, St. Louis, Cincinnati, Milwaukee, Newark, Atlanta—is 100 percent controlled by the Democrat Party and has been for fifty to a hundred years.5 These cities account for the majority of the homicides and robberies in America, for the lion’s share of urban poverty, welfare dependency, and drug addiction, and for a majority of the failed schools where, year in and year out, 40 percent of the students don’t graduate, and 40 percent of those who do are functionally illiterate. No reforms to remedy this unconscionable situation are possible, moreover, thanks to the iron grip of Democrat teacher unions who run the schools to benefit the adults in the system rather than their student charges.

In just a few decades, Minnesota has gone from being approximately 99 percent German, Dutch, Finnish, Danish, and Polish to 20 percent African immigrant,7 including at least one hundred thousand Somalis.8 And that’s not counting the Somalis who have recently left the country to fight with al Qaeda and ISIS. One hundred thousand is just an estimate. We don’t know precisely how many Somalis the federal government has brought in as “refugees” because the government won’t tell us. The public can’t be trusted with the truth. Since becoming more multicultural, Minnesota has turned into a hotbed of credit card skimming, human trafficking, and smash-and-grab robberies.9 Mosques have popped up all over the state—as have child prostitutes and machete attacks. Welfare consumption in Minnesota has more than doubled on account of the newcomers—only half of whom have jobs. Those Somalis who do have jobs earn an average of $21,000 a year, compared with $46,000 for the average Minnesotan. (Consider yourself lucky, Minnesota: In Sweden, only 20 percent of Somalis have jobs.) Eighty percent of Somalis in Minnesota live at or below the poverty line. Nearly 70 percent have not graduated from high school, compared with only 8.4 percent of non-Somali Minnesotans.10

A wave formed, swelling around Ariel's body. It lifted her up higher and higher- or maybe she herself was growing: it was hard to tell. She held the trident aloft. Storm clouds raced to her from all directions like a lost school of cichlid babies flicking to their father's mouth for protection. Lightning coursed through the sky and danced between the trident's tines. Ariel sang a song of rage. Notes rose and fell discordantly, her voice screeching at times like a banshee from the far north. She sang, and the wind sang with her. It whipped her hair out of its braids and pulled tresses into tentacles that billowed around her head. She sang of the unfairness of Eric's fate and her own, of her father's torture as a polyp, even of Scuttle's mortal life, slowly but visibly slipping away. Mostly she sang about Ursula. She sang about everyone whose lives had been touched and destroyed by evil like coral being killed and bleached, like dead spots in the ocean from algae blooms, like scale rot. She sang about what she would do to anyone who threatened those she loved and protected. And then, with her final note, she made a quick thrust as if to throw the trident toward the boats in the bay, pulling it back at the last moment. A clap louder than thunder echoed across the ocean. A wave even larger than the one she rode roared up from the depths of the open sea. It smashed through and around her, leaving her hair and body white with foam. She grinned fiercely at the power of the moment. The tsunami continued on, making straight for Tirulia. But... despite her rage... underneath it all the queen was still Ariel. Her momentary urge to destroy everything came and went like a single flash of summer lightning.

Of course he burst through the door. It cracked against the massive slabs that formed the stone walls, sending splinters flying, and I didn’t have to try very hard for the startled jump as Lord Pecus strode into the room. I gave a maidenly shriek, and in a moment of truly inspired acting, snatched my dressing gown from the bed to my chest and assumed pose #35, Maidenly Horror. Hands clasped below the breasts and clutching my dressing gown as if to protect girlish modesty, eyes wide- maybe finishing school had been useful for something after all. I thought I might have gone too far, but Lord Pecus, who at my shriek had stopped two strides into the room with a look of horror on his mask, hastily turned his face to the wall. He tried to utter a disjointed apology but I threw one of the pot-pourri bowls at him, and it smashed satisfyingly on the wall, cutting off the attempt.

I was halfway across when the planes came roaring, demolishing the sky over the Severn Valley. Tornados fly over our school several times a day, so I was ready to cover my ears with my hands. But I wasn’t ready for three Hawker Harrier Jump Jets, close enough to the ground to hit with a cricket ball. The slam of noise was incredible! I bent into a tight ball and peeped out. The Harriers curved before they smashed into the Malverns, just, and flew off toward Birmingham, screaming under Soviet radar height. When World War III comes, it’ll be MiGs stationed in Warsaw or East Germany screaming under NATO radar. Dropping bombs on people like us. On English cities, towns, and villages like Worcester, Malvern, and Black Swan Green. Dresden, the Blitz, and Nagasaki.

Peeves, who seemed to have taken Fred’s parting words deeply to heart. Cackling madly, he soared through the school, upending tables, bursting out of blackboards, toppling statues and vases; twice he shut Mrs Norris inside a suit of armour, from which she was rescued, yowling loudly, by the furious caretaker. Peeves smashed lanterns and snuffed out candles, juggled burning torches over the heads of screaming students, caused neatly stacked piles of parchment to topple into fires or out of windows; flooded the second floor when he pulled off all the taps in the bathrooms, dropped a bag of tarantulas in the middle of the Great Hall during breakfast and, whenever he fancied a break, spent hours at a time floating along after Umbridge and blowing loud raspberries every time she spoke.

Comparing marriage to football is no insult. I come from the South where football is sacred. I would never belittle marriage by saying it is like soccer, bowling, or playing bridge, never. Those images would never work, only football is passionate enough to be compared to marriage. In other sports, players walk onto the field, in football they run onto the field, in high school ripping through some paper, in college (for those who are fortunate enough) they touch the rock and run down the hill onto the field in the middle of the band. In other sports, fans cheer, in football they scream. In other sports, players ‘high five’, in football they chest, smash shoulder pads, and pat your rear. Football is a passionate sport, and marriage is about passion. In football, two teams send players onto the field to determine which athletes will win and which will lose, in marriage two families send their representatives forward to see which family will survive and which family will be lost into oblivion with their traditions, patterns, and values lost and forgotten. Preparing for this struggle for survival, the bride and groom are each set up. Each has been led to believe that their family’s patterns are all ‘normal,’ and anyone who differs is dense, naïve, or stupid because, no matter what the issue, the way their family has always done it is the ‘right’ way. For the premarital bride and groom in their twenties, as soon as they say, “I do,” these ‘right’ ways of doing things are about to collide like two three hundred and fifty pound linemen at the hiking of the ball. From “I do” forward, if not before, every decision, every action, every goal will be like the line of scrimmage. Where will the family patterns collide? In the kitchen. Here the new couple will be faced with the difficult decision of “Where do the cereal bowls go?” Likely, one family’s is high, and the others is low. Where will they go now? In the bathroom. The bathroom is a battleground unmatched in the potential conflicts. Will the toilet paper roll over the top or underneath? Will the acceptable residing position for the lid be up or down? And, of course, what about the toothpaste? Squeeze it from the middle or the end? But the skirmishes don’t stop in the rooms of the house, they are not only locational they are seasonal. The classic battles come home for the holidays. Thanksgiving. Which family will they spend the noon meal with and which family, if close enough, will have to wait until the nighttime meal, or just dessert if at all? Christmas. Whose home will they visit first, if at all? How much money will they spend on gifts for his family? for hers? Then comes for many couples an even bigger challenge – children of their own! At the wedding, many couples take two candles and light just one often extinguishing their candle as a sign of devotion. The image is Biblical. The Bible is quoted a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one. What few prepare them for is the upcoming struggle, the conflict over the unanswered question: the two shall become one, but which one? Two families, two patterns, two ways of doing things, which family’s patterns will survive to play another day, in another generation, and which will be lost forever? Let the games begin.

While I was sitting down, I saw something that drove me crazy. Somebody’d written “Fuck you” on the wall. It drove me damn near crazy. I thought how Phoebe and all the other little kids would see it, and how they’d wonder what the hell it meant, and then finally some dirty kid would tell them – all cockeyed, naturally – what it meant, and how they’d all think about it and maybe even worry about it for a couple of days. I kept wanting to kill whoever’d written it. I figured it was some perverty bum that’d sneaked in the school late at night to take a leak or something and then wrote it on the wall. I kept picturing myself catching him at it, and how I’d smash his head on the stone steps till he was good and goddam dead and bloody. But I knew, too, I wouldn’t have the guts to do it. I knew that. That made me even more depressed.

(Daybreak Monday morning) 'The lights flash on the bus, and I swear the faces are pressed agents, the windows looking at me as if I am gifted and soon to be bleeding offering to the bullies.' 'Then when on the school bus, I sit and watch these poor innocent kids like me, as they are harassed myself included in it all, yes picked on constantly; as if they are reigning towers over us like the four sisters that live up the way from me, we are their victims on the bus and at school.' 'They smash our faces into the crud-covered floor until the words no longer hurt.' 'With the higher authority bus drivers and teachers of trust are doing nothing to STOP what is going on with us, most of the time they're just as corrupt. Yet it is mostly me that is in the line of their rage.' 'They are the higher authority, in this case, the bus driver, she chooses to look away! Then after the fact, at school, they ask these feeble-minded questions.' 'What did you do?

He pulled a battered red photo album from his truck’s glove compartment and showed me pictures of green Azorean fields divided by hedges of lilac-colored hydrangeas. He showed me waves crashing against black volcanic rock and his ancient stone house next to the sea, the home where he returned every summer. “Over there the air is so clean, so nice. The ocean is right there. The fish are fresh, you catch and eat them, and the potatoes are so good, you won’t believe it. “We make wine. Put on shorts and get in there and smash grapes, and when you drink right away is sweet like juice. Every year when we get back from there, we’re fat,” Morais said. He loved his island house in the Azores so much that at the end of each summer, when he left, he had to have someone else close the door for him. “I’m a guy that came from the old country. I never go to school five minutes in this country, and still I work and I do good. I love my money. God bless this country,” he said. “But when I leave to close my door over there, I cry like a baby. I try so hard not to, but I cry.

While I was walking up the stairs, though, all of a sudden I thought I was going to puke again. Only, I didn’t. I sat down for a second, and then I felt better. But while I was sitting down, I saw something that drove me crazy. Somebody’d written “Fuck you” on the wall. It drove me damn near crazy. I thought how Phoebe and all the other little kids would see it, and how they’d wonder what the hell it meant, and then finally some dirty kid would tell them—all cockeyed, naturally—what it meant, and how they’d all think about it and maybe even worry about it for a couple of days. I kept wanting to kill whoever’d written it. I figured it was some perverty bum that’d sneaked in the school late at night to take a leak or something and then wrote it on the wall. I kept picturing myself catching him at it, and how I’d smash his head on the stone steps till he was good and goddam dead and bloody. But I knew, too, I wouldn’t have the guts to do it. I knew that. That made me even more depressed. I hardly even had the guts to rub it off the wall with my hand, if you want to know the truth. I was afraid some teacher would catch me rubbing it off and would think I’d written it. But I rubbed it out anyway, finally. Then I went on up to the principal’s office.

Harry!” he panted, massaging his immense chest beneath his emerald-green silk pajamas. “My dear boy…what a surprise…Minerva, do please explain…Severus…what…?” “Our headmaster is taking a short break,” said Professor McGonagall, pointing at the Snape-shaped hole in the window. “Professor!” Harry shouted, his hands at his forehead. He could see the Inferi-filled lake sliding beneath him, and he felt the ghostly green boat bump into the underground shore, and Voldemort leapt from it with murder in his heart-- “Professor, we’ve got to barricade the school, he’s coming now!” “Very well. He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named is coming,” she told the other teachers. Sprout and Flitwick gasped; Slughorn let out a low groan. “Potter has work to do in the castle on Dumbledore’s orders. We need to put in place every protection of which we are capable while Potter does what he needs to do.” “You realize, of course, that nothing we do will be able to keep out You-Know-Who indefinitely?” squeaked Flitwick. “But we can hold him up,” said Professor Sprout. “Thank you, Pomona,” said Professor McGonagall, and between the two witches there passed a look of grim understanding. “I suggest we establish basic protection around the place, then gather our students and meet in the Great Hall. Most must be evacuated, though if any of those who are over age wish to stay and fight, I think they ought to be given the chance.” “Agreed,” said Professor Sprout, already hurrying toward the door. “I shall meet you in the Great Hall in twenty minutes with my House.” And as she jogged out of sight, they could hear her muttering, “Tentacula. Devil’s Snare. And Snargaluff pods…yes, I’d like to see the Death Eaters fighting those.” “I can act from here,” said Flitwick, and although he could barely see out of it, he pointed his wand through the smashed window and started muttering incantations of great complexity. Harry heard a weird rushing noise, as though Flitwick had unleashed the power of the wind into the grounds. “Professor,” Harry said, approaching the little Charms master, “Professor, I’m sorry to interrupt, but this is important. Have you got any idea where the diadem of Ravenclaw is?” “--Protego Horribilis--the diadem of Ravenclaw?” squeaked Flitwick. “A little extra wisdom never goes amiss, Potter, but I hardly think it would be much use in this situation!” “I only meant--do you know where it is? Have you ever seen it?” “Seen it? Nobody has seen it in living memory! Long since lost, boy!” Harry felt a mixture of desperate disappointment and panic. What, then, was the Horcrux?

A BLESSING FROM MY SIXTEEN YEARS’ SON I have this son who assembled inside me during Hurricane Gloria. In a flash, he appeared, in a tiny blaze. Outside, pines toppled. Phone lines snapped and hissed like cobras. Inside, he was a raw pearl: microscopic, luminous. Look at the muscled obelisk of him now pawing through the icebox for more grapes. Sixteen years and not a bone broken, not a single stitch. By his age, I was marked more ways, and small. He’s a slouching six foot two, with implausible blue eyes, which settle on the pages of Emerson’s “Self Reliance” with profound belligerence. A girl with a navel ring could make his cell phone buzz, or an Afro’d boy leaning on a mop at Taco Bell— creatures strange as dragons or eels. Balanced on a kitchen stool, each gives counsel arcane as any oracle’s. Dante claims school is harshing my mellow. Rodney longs to date a tattooed girl, because he wants a woman willing to do stuff she’ll regret. They’ve come to lead my son into his broadening spiral. Someday soon, the tether will snap. I birthed my own mom into oblivion. The night my son smashed the car fender, then rode home in the rain-streaked cop cruiser, he asked, Did you and Dad screw up so much? He’d let me tuck him in, my grandmother’s wedding quilt from 1912 drawn to his goateed chin. Don’t blame us, I said. You’re your own idiot now. At which he grinned. The cop said the girl in the crimped Chevy took it hard. He’d found my son awkwardly holding her in the canted headlights, where he’d draped his own coat over her shaking shoulders. My fault, he’d confessed right off. Nice kid, said the cop.

Emotions get our attention As the television advertisement opens, we see two men talking in a car. They are having a mildly heated discussion about one of them overusing the word “like” in conversation. As the argument continues, we notice out the passenger window another car barreling toward the men. It smashes into them. There are screams, sounds of shattering glass, quick-cut shots showing the men bouncing in the car, twisted metal. The final shot shows the men standing, in disbelief, outside their wrecked Volkswagen Passat. In a twist on a well-known expletive, these words flash on the screen: “Safe Happens.” The spot ends with a picture of another Passat, this one intact and complete with its five-star side-crash safety rating. It is a memorable, even disturbing, 30-second spot. That’s because it’s charged with emotion. Emotionally charged events are better remembered—for longer, and with more accuracy—than neutral events. While this idea may seem intuitively obvious, it’s frustrating to demonstrate scientifically because the research community is still debating exactly what an emotion is. What we can say for sure is that when your brain detects an emotionally charged event, your amygdala (a part of your brain that helps create and maintain emotions) releases the chemical dopamine into your system. Dopamine greatly aids memory and information processing. You can think of it like a Post-it note that reads “Remember this!” Getting one’s brain to put a chemical Post-it note on a given piece of information means that information is going to be more robustly processed. It is what every teacher, parent, and ad executive wants.

It was at night,” I say. “What was?” “What happened. The car wreck. We were driving along the Storm King Highway.” “Where’s that?” “Oh, it’s one of the most scenic drives in the whole state,” I say, somewhat sarcastically. “Route 218. The road that connects West Point and Cornwall up in the Highlands on the west side of the Hudson River. It’s narrow and curvy and hangs off the cliffs on the side of Storm King Mountain. An extremely twisty two-lane road. With a lookout point and a picturesque stone wall to stop you from tumbling off into the river. Motorcycle guys love Route 218.” We stop moving forward and pause under a streetlamp. “But if you ask me, they shouldn’t let trucks use that road.” Cool Girl looks at me. “Go on, Jamie,” she says gently. And so I do. “Like I said, it was night. And it was raining. We’d gone to West Point to take the tour, have a picnic. It was a beautiful day. Not a cloud in the sky until the tour was over, and then it started pouring. Guess we stayed too late. Me, my mom, my dad.” Now I bite back the tears. “My little sister. Jenny. You would’ve liked Jenny. She was always happy. Always laughing. “We were on a curve. All of a sudden, this truck comes around the side of the cliff. It’s halfway in our lane and fishtailing on account of the slick road. My dad slams on the brakes. Swerves right. We smash into a stone fence and bounce off it like we’re playing wall ball. The hood of our car slides under the truck, right in front of its rear tires—tires that are smoking and screaming and trying to stop spinning.” I see it all again. In slow motion. The detail never goes away. “They all died,” I finally say. “My mother, my father, my little sister. I was the lucky one. I was the only one who survived.

Let’s take the threshold idea one step further. If intelligence matters only up to a point, then past that point, other things—things that have nothing to do with intelligence—must start to matter more. It’s like basketball again: once someone is tall enough, then we start to care about speed and court sense and agility and ball-handling skills and shooting touch. So, what might some of those other things be? Well, suppose that instead of measuring your IQ, I gave you a totally different kind of test. Write down as many different uses that you can think of for the following objects: a brick a blanket This is an example of what’s called a “divergence test” (as opposed to a test like the Raven’s, which asks you to sort through a list of possibilities and converge on the right answer). It requires you to use your imagination and take your mind in as many different directions as possible. With a divergence test, obviously there isn’t a single right answer. What the test giver is looking for are the number and the uniqueness of your responses. And what the test is measuring isn’t analytical intelligence but something profoundly different—something much closer to creativity. Divergence tests are every bit as challenging as convergence tests, and if you don’t believe that, I encourage you to pause and try the brick-and-blanket test right now. Here, for example, are answers to the “uses of objects” test collected by Liam Hudson from a student named Poole at a top British high school: (Brick). To use in smash-and-grab raids. To help hold a house together. To use in a game of Russian roulette if you want to keep fit at the same time (bricks at ten paces, turn and throw—no evasive action allowed). To hold the eiderdown on a bed tie a brick at each corner. As a breaker of empty Coca-Cola bottles. (Blanket). To use on a bed. As a cover for illicit sex in the woods. As a tent. To make smoke signals with. As a sail for a boat, cart or sled. As a substitute for a towel. As a target for shooting practice for short-sighted people. As a thing to catch people jumping out of burning skyscrapers.

After the Grand Perhaps” After vespers, after the first snow has fallen to its squalls, after New Wave, after the anorexics have curled into their geometric forms, after the man with the apparition in his one bad eye has done red things behind the curtain of the lid & sleeps, after the fallout shelter in the elementary school has been packed with tins & other tangibles, after the barn boys have woken, startled by foxes & fire, warm in their hay, every part of them blithe & smooth & touchable, after the little vandals have tilted toward the impossible seduction to smash glass in the dark, getting away with the most lethal pieces, leaving the shards which travel most easily through flesh as message on the bathroom floor, the parking lots, the irresistible debris of the neighbor’s yard where he’s been constructing all winter long. After the pain has become an old known friend, repeating itself, you can hold on to it. The power of fright, I think, is as much as magnetic heat or gravity. After what is boundless: wind chimes, fertile patches of the land, the ochre symmetry of fields in fall, the end of breath, the beginning of shadow, the shadow of heat as it moves the way the night heads west, I take this road to arrive at its end where the toll taker passes the night, reading. I feel the cupped heat of his left hand as he inherits change; on the road that is not his road anymore I belong to whatever it is which will happen to me. When I left this city I gave back the metallic waking in the night, the signals of barges moving coal up a slow river north, the movement of trains, each whistle like a woodwind song of another age passing, each ambulance would split a night in two, lying in bed as a little girl, a fear of being taken with the sirens as they lit the neighborhood in neon, quick as the fire as it takes fire & our house goes up in night. After what is arbitrary: the hand grazing something too sharp or fine, the word spoken out of sleep, the buckling of the knees to cold, the melting of the parts to want, the design of the moon to cast unfriendly light, the dazed shadow of the self as it follows the self, the toll taker’s sorrow that we couldn’t have been more intimate. Which leads me back to the land, the old wolves which used to roam on it, the one light left on the small far hill where someone must be living still. After life there must be life.

Underscoring southerners’ sense that it was hypocritical for their region to be targeted for its racial misdeeds, residents in Belleville, Illinois, went on a rampage a day after the Dadeville editorial appeared. A black schoolteacher named David Wyatt and the town's white school superintendent had argued over the renewal of Wyatt's teaching certificate. An altercation ensued. The superintendent was shot, but not seriously harmed. Wyatt was arrested and taken to jail. By nightfall, at least two thousand whites were gathered in the town—including many women and children encouraged to attend the spectacle. A phalanx of two hundred men attacked the steel doors at the rear of the jail with sledgehammers, pounding it with thousands of hammer blows. The city's police did not voluntarily hand the prisoner over to the crowd, but also gave no meaningful resistance. Wyatt, an educated and imposing man—standing six feet three inches tall—waited in his cell on the second floor of the jail, enveloped in the cacophony of the hammers pounding out his death beat. After half an hour, the doors splintered open. Wyatt was seized from his cell and his head immediately smashed. Dragged into the street, the mob surged around him, kicking and stomping his body until it was matted in blood and dirt. A rope was secured to his neck and tossed to two men who had climbed a telegraph pole. Hoisted just a few feet off the ground, Wyatt's body whipped back and forth as members of the crowd gouged, stabbed, and sliced his torso, legs, and arms with knives. Others in the mob gathered pickets from nearby fences and roadside signs to build a crude pyre beneath his dangling corpse. Still more went for gasoline and benzene. Soon Wyatt's body was engulfed in flame. By the time the earliest churchgoers left their homes on Sunday, June 7, the grotesque form of Wyatt's carbonized remains lay amid

There was avocado, wrinkled and grumpy on the outside, green spring within, creamy as ice cream when smashed into guacamole. There were the smoky flavors of chipotle peppers and the sharp-sweet crunch of cilantro, which Lillian loved so much Abuelita would always give her a sprig to eat as she walked home.

And if Derek thought he was the only one who could chew spiced candy, he’d never met the girl who had shot a pistol, smashed vases over men’s heads, grabbed her reticule, crawled out of a window bleeding and then watched the New York authorities take over while lighting a cheroot on the street.

Cooking for the students and staff at Ever After High wasn't an easy feat, because there were so many palates to please. For example, fairies were known to have finicky appetites and preferred delicate, crustless sandwiches. Those from Wonderland insisted on hot tea with every meal. The vegetarians wanted organic salad bar options, while the Track and Shield team liked chowing down on heaping plates of barbecued ribs with smashed pumpkin.

Seeing the monks humiliated, statues smashed, and paintings burned shook Tibetans to the core. Buddhism provided the rituals through which the seasons were measured, births celebrated, and deaths grieved. The monasteries were Tibetans’ museums, libraries, and schools. Whether or not you were a true believer in the faith, there was no denying that Tibetan Buddhism had inspired an artistry that some compared to the splendors of medieval Christendom. The attacks on religion alienated Tibetans who might otherwise have supported the Communist Party’s efforts to stamp out feudalism and create social equality.

They went on to form NOW and, with that organization, achieve their stated goal of taking down the Patriarchy through a massive coordinated promotion of promiscuity, eroticism, prostitution, abortion and homosexuality. Their proposed method was to infiltrate every institution in the nation: the universities, the media, primary and secondary schools, PTAs, Teachers Unions, city and state governments, the library system, the executive branches of government as well as the judiciaries and legislatures. One of their most desired results was the smashing of every taboo in Western culture. Imagine that! Think of that alone! The normalizing of every taboo: polygamy, bestiality, Satanism, pornography, promiscuity, witchcraft, pedophilia—all activities which rot the human soul and city.

The best thing to do," said one of the malingerers, "is to sham madness. In the next room there are two other men from the school where I teach and one of them keeps shouting day and night : 'Giordano Bruno's stake is still smoldering ; renew Galileo's trial !'” “I meant at first to act the fool too and be a religious maniac and preach about the infallibility of the Pope, but finally I managed to get some cancer of the stomach for fifteen crowns from a barber down the road." "That's nothing," said another man. "Down our way there's a midwife who for twenty crowns can dislocate your foot so nicely that you're crippled for the rest of your life.” “My illness has run me into more than two hundred crowns already," announced his neighbor, a man as thin as a rake. "I bet there's no poison you can mention that I haven't taken. I'm simply bung full of poisons. I've chewed arsenic, I've smoked opium, I've swallowed strychnine, I've drunk vitriol mixed with phosphorus. I've ruined my liver, my lungs, my kidneys, my heart—in fact, all my insides. Nobody knows what disease it is I've got." "The best thing to do," explained someone near the door, "is to squirt paraffin oil under the skin on your arms. My cousin had a slice of good luck that way. They cut off his arm below the elbow and now the army'll never worry him any more.” “Well," said Schweik, "When I was in the army years ago, it used to be much worse. If a man went sick, they just trussed him up, shoved him into a cell to make him get fitter. There wasn't any beds and mattresses and spittoons like what there is here. Just a bare bench for them to lie on. Once there was a chap who had typhus, fair and square, and the one next to him had smallpox. Well, they trussed them both up and the M. O. kicked them in the ribs and said they were shamming. When the pair of them kicked the bucket, there was a dust-up in Parliament and it got into the papers. Like a shot they stopped us from reading the papers and all our boxes was inspected to see if we'd got any hidden there. And it was just my luck that in the whole blessed regiment there was nobody but me whose newspaper was spotted. So our colonel starts yelling at me to stand to attention and tell him who'd written that stuff to the paper or he'd smash my jaw from ear to ear and keep me in clink till all was blue. Then the M.O. comes up and he shakes his fist right under my nose and shouts: 'You misbegotten whelp ; you scabby ape ; you wretched blob of scum ; you skunk of a Socialist, you !' Well, I stood keeping my mouth shut and with one hand at the salute and the other along the seam of my trousers. There they was, running round and yelping at me. “We'll knock the newspaper nonsense out of your head, you ruffian,' says the colonel, and gives me 21 days solitary confinement. Well, while I was serving my time, there was some rum goings-on in the barracks. Our colonel stopped the troops from reading at all, and in the canteen they wasn't allowed even to wrap up sausages or cheese in newspapers. That made the soldiers start reading and our regiment had all the rest beat when it came to showing how much they'd learned.

Melinda's trick is looking hard in the mirror, Absolving herself and cracking open doors to the next place. But the girl at that school, so haunted, smashed all the reflections boarded up the windows and bolted the doors, forever stuck at 15 years old judged to serve a life sentence for what they did.

For the time being, however, his bent was literary and religious rather than balletic. He loved, and what seventh grader doesn’t, the abstracter foxtrots and more metaphysical twists of a Dostoevsky, a Gide, a Mailer. He longed for the experience of some vivider pain than the mere daily hollowness knotted into his tight young belly, and no weekly stomp-and-holler of group therapy with other jejune eleven-year-olds was going to get him his stripes in the major leagues of suffering, crime, and resurrection. Only a bona-fide crime would do that, and of all the crimes available murder certainly carried the most prestige, as no less an authority than Loretta Couplard was ready to attest, Loretta Couplard being not only the director and co-owner of the Lowen School but the author, as well, of two nationally televised scripts, both about famous murders of the 20th Century. They’d even done a unit in social studies on the topic: A History of Crime in Urban America. The first of Loretta’s murders was a comedy involving Pauline Campbell, R.N., of Ann Arbor, Michigan, circa 1951, whose skull had been smashed by three drunken teenagers. They had meant to knock her unconscious so they could screw her, which was 1951 in a nutshell. The eighteen-year-olds, Bill Morey and Max Pell, got life; Dave Royal (Loretta’s hero) was a year younger and got off with twenty-two years. Her second murder was tragic in tone and consequently inspired more respect, though not among the critics, unfortunately. Possibly because her heroine, also a Pauline (Pauline Wichura), though more interesting and complicated had also been more famous in her own day and ever since. Which made the competition, one best-selling novel and a serious film biography, considerably stiffen Miss Wichura had been a welfare worker in Atlanta, Georgia, very much into environment and the population problem, this being the immediate pre-Regents period when anyone and everyone was legitimately starting to fret. Pauline decided to do something, viz., reduce the population herself and in the fairest way possible. So whenever any of the families she visited produced one child above the three she’d fixed, rather generously, as the upward limit, she found some unobtrusive way of thinning that family back to the preferred maximal size. Between 1989 and 1993 Pauline’s journals (Random House, 1994) record twenty-six murders, plus an additional fourteen failed attempts. In addition she had the highest welfare department record in the U.S. for abortions and sterilizations among the families whom she advised. “Which proves, I think,” Little Mister Kissy Lips had explained one day after school to his friend Jack, “that a murder doesn’t have to be of someone famous to be a form of idealism.” But of course idealism was only half the story: the other half was curiosity. And beyond idealism and curiosity there was probably even another half, the basic childhood need to grow up and kill someone.

drifted up from downstairs. He had obviously heard the smash too. His voice was muffled and I couldn’t work out what he was saying. I wondered if he’d bother coming back up again, or just head off to work. The school minibus would be arriving any minute, and he always liked to have left before then. I stood up and filled the sink with cold

In one of his rare interviews, Peter Mayer, Penguin’s chief executive, praised the bravery of everyone in the book trade who had defended his right to publish, but then told a bleak story about how strangers treated his family. He had received many death threats. Someone went to the trouble to cut themselves and send him a letter scrawled in blood. An anonymous telephone caller told Mayer that ‘not only would they kill me but that they would take my daughter and smash her head against a concrete wall’. Far from rallying to defend an innocent girl and her innocent father, the parents of her classmates demanded that the school expel her. What would happen, they asked, if the Iranian assassins went to the school and got the wrong girl? And Mayer thought, ‘You think my daughter is the right girl?

Surprised at Kaye’s belated display of maternal instincts, Sean relented, promising he’d get in touch with Lily. Besides, he knew his own mother would never forgive him if he refused such a simple request. As he made his way down the narrow streets to the pensione opposite the Pantheon, where Lily and her roommate were staying, Sean steadfastly refused to acknowledge any other reason for agreeing to take Lily out. It had been three years since they’d left for college, not once had she come home to visit. But Sean still couldn’t look at a blonde without comparing her to Lily. He’d mounted the four flights of narrow, winding stairs, the sound of his steps muffled by red, threadbare carpet. At number seventeen, he’d stopped and stood, giving his racing heart a chance to quiet before he knocked. Calm down, he’d instructed himself. It’s only Lily. His knock echoed loudly in the empty hall. Through the door he heard the sound of approaching footsteps. Then it opened and there she was. She stood with her mouth agape. Her eyes, like beacons of light in the obscurity of the drab hallway, blinked at him with astonishment. “What are you doing here?” The question ended on a squeak. As if annoyed with the sound, she shut her mouth with an audible snap. Was it possible Kaye hadn’t bothered to tell Lily he’d be coming? “I heard you were spending a few days in Rome.” Sean realized he was staring like a dolt, but couldn’t help himself. It rattled him, seeing Lily again. A barrage of emotions and impressions mixed and churned inside him: how good she looked, different somehow, more self-confident than in high school, how maybe this time they might get along for more than 3.5 seconds. He became aware of a happy buzz of anticipation zinging through him. He was already picturing the two of them at a really nice trattoria. They’d be sitting at an intimate corner table. A waiter would come and take their order and Sean would impress her with his flawless Italian, his casual sophistication, his sprezzatura. By the time the waiter had served them their dessert and espresso, she’d be smiling at him across the soft candlelight. He’d reach out and take her hand. . . . Then Lily spoke again and Sean’s neat fantasy evaporated like a puff of smoke. “But how did you know I was here?” she’d asked, with what he’d conceitedly assumed was genuine confusion—that is, until a guy their age appeared. Standing just behind Lily, he had stared back at Sean through the aperture of the open door with a knowing smirk upon his face. And suddenly Sean understood. Lily wasn’t frowning from confusion. She was annoyed. Annoyed because he’d barged in on her and Lover Boy. Lily didn’t give a damn about him. At the realization, his jumbled thoughts at seeing her again, all those newborn hopes inside him, faded to black. His brain must have shorted after that. Suave, sophisticated guy that he was, Sean had blurted out, “Hey, this wasn’t my idea. I only came because Kaye begged me to—” Stupendously dumb. He knew better, had known since he was eight years old. If you wanted to push Lily Banyon into the red zone, all it took was a whispered, “Kaye.” The door to her hotel room had come at his face faster than a bullet train. He guessed he should be grateful she hadn’t been using a more lethal weapon, like the volleyball she’d smashed in his face during gym class back in eleventh grade. Even so, he’d been forced to jump back or have the number seventeen imprinted on his forehead. Their last skirmish, the one back in Rome, he’d definitely lost. He’d stood outside her room like a fool, Lover Boy’s laughter his only reply. Finally, the pensione’s night clerk had appeared, insisting he leave la bella americana in peace. He’d gone away, humiliated and oddly deflated.

I was 18 years old, worked with steel all day, and continued to lift weights as I had when in high school. I didn’t know any better and best of all, I had no choice. This denial monster must be overcome. God centered people seem to have much less trouble with this, as they will simply be thankful and grateful for the opportunity to be challenged in a new and different way.

It can be formal or informal, spoken or silent, on our knees or laying down. How, when and where make no difference. How often doesn’t matter, but at least once per day for healthy growth is definitely recommended. What we do is all that matters (action, remember?). There are really very few rules regarding prayer. There is a school of thought that says the only rule regarding prayer is that we do not pray for selfish things: I want a new car; I want my spouse to treat me better; I want all green lights on the way home from work. For these childish and wholly selfish ones, this is true. If however we pray for the openness to accept and attract abundance into our lives, the big picture is inferred.

We smashed their schools, burned them, and shot people based on the time of night they were outside. They dressed up like our allies and blew themselves up, when they weren’t murdering the families of our actual allies and throwing their headless bodies into the Tigris. Write a five paragraph essay on that. Make sure each paragraph has a topic sentence.

Orion smashed his face straight into the mirror and I gasped. He held his head in place while yanking his right arm behind his back cop-style. “Argh!” Seth roared as Orion stripped the braid of hair from his wrist and applied more pressure to his arm until he whined like a kicked dog. “I'm done with your fucking parading, Capella. This isn't Academy approved school wear.

Another completely different way that the contacts of a relay could fail was if dirt or an insect got trapped in the spacing between contacts. If a fly or a moth, for example, happened to be sitting on the make contact when the coil was energized, then it could be squashed and, after its smashed little body dried, the contacts would be covered with a very disgusting but quite effective insulator. To clean up such a disabled relay was called debugging, a term that has survived in the vocabulary of modern computer users trying to fix their faulty programs. This is not a joke—I heard it as a quite serious story in a lecture at the Naval Postgraduate School in 1982 from a legend in computer science, Rear Admiral Grace Hopper (1906–1992), a Yale PhD mathematician who worked during the Second World War with Harvard’s five ton, 800 cubic foot Mark I relay computer, which when operating was described as sounding like a “roomful of ladies knitting.” To debug such a machine must have been an “interesting” job for someone;

By the time he was in high school, his family had moved to Miami. Bezos was a straight-A student, somewhat nerdy, and still completely obsessed with space exploration. He was chosen as the valedictorian of his class, and his speech was about space: how to colonize planets, build space hotels, and save our fragile planet by finding other places to do manufacturing. “Space, the final frontier, meet me there!” he concluded. He went to Princeton with the goal of studying physics. It sounded like a smart plan until he smashed into a course on quantum mechanics. One day he and his roommate were trying to solve a particularly difficult partial differential equation, and they went to the room of another person in the class for help. He stared at it for a moment, then gave them the answer. Bezos was amazed that the student had done the calculation—which took three pages of detailed algebra to explain—in his head. “That was the very moment when I realized I was never going to be a great theoretical physicist,” Bezos says. “I saw the writing on the wall, and I changed my major very quickly to electrical engineering and computer science.” It was a difficult realization. His heart had been set on becoming a physicist, but finally he had confronted his own limits.

Telos Too many Alphas. Too much Alpha. Sunstruck With Alpha. Eye-sick, Head-sick, sick sick sick O Sick of Alpha. You kicked school it Collapsed in Alphas. You shook The lightning conductor between your teeth- All the sky-signs registered Alpha. ... You stamped and you stamped ... and the whole band Started up Alpha. The whole stadium Clapped Alpha, roared Alpha. ... bull's-eyed A straight row of Alphas. Won a huge Plastic Alpha...You smashed her With a kitchen stool and out fell Tick-tock Alpha. ...Signed the street-scene snowscape Alpha. ... The furies of Alpha you crawled under Or hurdled every letter in the Alphabet And hurling yourself beyond Omega fell Into a glittering Universe of Alpha.

Al-Wahhab allied with Muhammed bin Saud, the founder of the state of Saudi Arabia, and provided religious and ideological backing to the newly formed state.  The Wahhabi Saudi troops took advantage of the chaos of the collapse of the Ottoman Empire after World War I to seize control over the holy cities of Mecca and Medina. It’s probably safe to say that the Shia will never forgive the Wahhabis for the zealotry they pursued upon taking the cities, which included obliterating centuries-old sacred Shia shrines and claiming that they were used to worship the Imams as gods and were therefore heretical.  In the Cemetery of al-Baqi in Medina, they utterly destroyed the tombs of the Imams Hasan, Ali ibn Husayn, Muhammed ibn Ali, and Jafar, as well as the tomb of Fatima, the daughter of Muhammad.  In Mecca, they destroyed the Cemetery of Mualla, where the ancestors of Muhammad and his first wife Khadija were buried.  These prominent destructions were part of a pattern of violence that witnessed the Wahhabi Saudis smash buildings, tombs and mosques associated with the history of the Prophet and his family and which were venerated by Shia.  In addition, they alienated Shia from governance and oppressed them throughout the kingdom[26].  This vandalism has been repeated time and time again by Wahhabis in other areas as well, including the much-publicized destruction of the Buddha statues of the Bamiyan Valley of Afghanistan by the Taliban in 2001[27] and the outbreak of violence in 2013 around the city of Timbuktu, where Wahhabi fundamentalists  destroyed holy artifacts and burned a priceless library of manuscripts before fleeing the arrival of French troops[28]. While the establishment of the Wahhabi school of thought created an intellectual form of anti-Shia ideology, it is probable that this philosophy would have remained isolated in the political backwater of the Nejd Sultanate (the core of modern Saudi Arabia) if not for the fall of the Ottoman Empire and the final abolition of the Caliphate. The Ottomans had claimed to be Caliphs of the Muslim world since 1453, the same year that they conquered Constantinople (Istanbul) from the Byzantine Empire, and they ruled over a considerable portion of the world's Sunnis, as well as the shrine cities of Mecca, Medina and Jerusalem.  After 1876, the Sultans had placed particular emphasis on their role as Caliphs in order to bolster their global position by asserting their Empire's "Muslim” character, and while this was never universally accepted by all Sunnis or Shias, Sunni Muslims everywhere at least could say that there was a government that claimed to represent the form of rule established by the Prophet and that provided legitimacy and continuity.

Carolina alone. In Emerson’s day, a student commonly entered college at thirteen or fourteen, graduating at seventeen or eighteen. As a result, college life had at times a certain rowdiness. In Emerson’s sophomore year an epic food fight broke out on the first floor of University Hall. The fight quickly got beyond the throwing of food and almost all the school’s crockery was smashed. But it would be a mistake to assume this was the dominant tone of college life. Young people grew up faster then. Emerson could read before he was three; he taught his first class at fourteen. Girls were little women, boys little men. The curriculum shows that Harvard was not like either the high school or the college of today; it offered a combination of basic and advanced studies, functioning as a sort of early college.

And Hoover was a chauvinist of the old school. When he first took charge of the bureau in 1922, there had been three female agents. He got rid of them. The next two female agents wouldn’t join the bureau until after his death in 1972. He argued that women weren’t agent material because they couldn’t be taught to shoot guns.

Marry me, Juliet. We can wait until you’re done with school, or we can drive to a chapel right now. I don’t care. Marry me.” I’m nodding before he’s even done speaking, my lips smashing with his as I pull him as close as I can get him, and it’s not close enough. It will never be close enough. But forever is a damn good start. “You will?” he rasps. “Of course I will.” His palms shake as he grips my cheeks, his eyes piercing mine. “Say you swear?

People who’ve spent time on high country trails know the heartbreak of a false summit. When all you want is for the incline to stop kicking your ass, it tricks you into thinking you’ve made it, only to reveal that you aren’t even close! But you don’t have to be a trail rat to know that feeling. In life, there are plenty of false summits. Maybe you think you’ve rocked an assignment at work or school, only to have your teacher or supervisor rip it to pieces or tell you to start over again. False summits can come in the gym when you’re doing a hard circuit workout and think you’ve hit the last set, only to hear from your coach or trainer—or from a quick glance at your own notes—that you have to go back through the entire circuit one last time. We all take a punch like that every once in a while, but those who tend to crane their necks looking for the crest of the mountain as they beg for their suffering to end are the ones who get smashed the most by any false summit. We have to learn to stop looking for a sign that the hard time will end. When the distance is unknown, it is even more critical that you stay locked in so the unknown factor doesn’t steal your focus. The end will come when it comes, and anticipation will only distract you from completing the task in front of you to the best of your ability. Remember, the struggle is the whole journey. That’s why you’re out there. It’s why you signed up for this race, or that class, or took the damn job. There is great beauty when you are involved in something that is so hard most people want it to end. When Hell Week ended, most of the guys who survived cheered, wept tears of joy, high-fived, or hugged one another. I got the Hell Week blues because I’d been immersed in the beauty of grinding through it and the personal growth that came with it.

It does something to you when you are running close to what you perceive as our limit (back then, I still topped at 40 percent) and there is someone else out there who makes the difficult look effortless. It was obvious that his preparedness was several levels above our own. Captain Connolly did not show up to simply get through the program and graduate so he could collect some wings for his uniform and belong to the unspoken fraternity of supposed badasses at Fort Campbell. He came to explore what he was made of and grow. That required a willingness to set a new standard wherever possible and make a statement, not necessarily to our dumb asses, but to himself. He was respectful to all the instructors and the school, but he was not there to be led... Most people love standards. It gives the brain something to focus on, which helps us reach a place of achievement. Organizational structure and atta' boys from our instructors or bosses keep us motivated to perform and to move up on that bell curve. Captain Connolly did not require external motivation. He trained to his own standard and used the existing structure for his own purposes. Air Assault School became his own personal octagon, where he could test himself on a level even the instructors hadn't imagined. For the next nine days, he put his head down and quietly went about the business of smashing every single standard at Air Assault School. He saw the bar that the instructors pointed to and the rest of us were trying to tap as a hurdle to leap over, and he did it time and again. He understood that his rank only meant something if he sought out a different certification: an invisible badge that says, "I am the example. Follow me, motherfuckers, and I will show you that there is more to this life than so-called authority and stripes or candy on a uniform. I'll show you what true ambition looks like beyond all the external structure in a place of limitless mental growth." He didn't say any of that. He didn't run his mouth at all. I can't recall him uttering word one in ten fucking days, but through his performance and extreme dedication, he dropped breadcrumbs for anybody who was awake and aware enough to follow him. He flashed his tool kit. He showed us what potent, silent, exemplary leadership looked like. He checked into every Gold Group run, which was led by the fastest instructor in that school, and volunteered to be the first to carry the flag. p237

It does something to you when you are running close to what you perceive as our limit (back then, I still topped at 40 percent) and there is someone else out there who makes the difficult look effortless. It was obvious that his preparedness was several levels above our own. Captain Connolly did not show up to simply get through the program and graduate so he could collect some wings for his uniform and belong to the unspoken fraternity of supposed badasses at Fort Campbell. He came to explore what he was made of and grow. That required a willingness to set a new standard wherever possible and make a statement, not necessarily to our dumb asses, but to himself. He was respectful to all the instructors and the school, but he was not there to be led... Most people love standards. It gives the brain something to focus on, which helps us reach a place of achievement. Organizational structure and atta' boys from our instructors or bosses keep us motivated to perform and to move up on that bell curve. Captain Connolly did not require external motivation. He trained to his own standard and used the existing structure for his own purposes. Air Assault School became his own personal octagon, where he could test himself on a level even the instructors hadn't imagined. For the next nine days, he put his head down and quietly went about the business of smashing every single standard at Air Assault School. He saw the bar that the instructors pointed to and the rest of us were trying to tap as a hurdle to leap over, and he did it time and again. He understood that his rank only meant something if he sought out a different certification: an invisible badge that says, "I am the example. Follow me, motherfuckers, and I will show you that there is more to this life than so-called authority and stripes or candy on a uniform. I'll show you what true ambition looks like beyond all the external structure in a place of limitless mental growth." He didn't say any of that. He didn't run his mouth at all. I can't recall him uttering word one in ten fucking days, but through his performance and extreme dedication, he dropped breadcrumbs for anybody who was awake and aware enough to follow him. He flashed his tool kit. He showed us what potent, silent, exemplary leadership looked like. He checked into every Gold Group run, which was led by the fastest instructor in that school, and volunteered to be the first to carry the flag... His conditioning was clearly off the charts, and I'm not talking about the physical aspect alone. Being a physical specimen is one thing, but it takes so much more energy to stay mentally prepared enough to arrive every day at a place like Air Assault School on a mission to dominate. The fact that he was able to do that told me it couldn't possibly have been a one-time thing. It had to be the result of countless lonely hours in the gym, on the trails, and in the books. Most of his work was hidden, but it is within that unseen work that self-leaders are made. I suspect the reason he was capable of exceeding any and all standards consistently was because he was dedicated at a level most people cannot fathom in order to stay ready for any and all opportunities. p237

school secretary. She handed him a cup of hot coffee. Just like always. “Thank you, Miss Night,” said Mr. Kidswatter. He walked into his office. Except his office door was closed. He smashed into it, spilling coffee all over his green suit. “Who closed my door?” he demanded. “Why didn’t you just open it?” asked Mrs. Day. “It’s always open in the morning,” said Mr. Kidswatter. “How was I supposed to know it was closed this time?” Up on the thirtieth story, Mrs. Jewls took roll. Todd was absent. “Oh dear, I hope Todd is all right,” said Mrs. Jewls. “Todd’s never all right!” said Joy. She and Maurecia laughed.

First, the good news. Our girls have more opportunities than their mothers and aunties. When it comes to education, they’re smashing it in the classroom, outperforming boys at high school and university.

there was no profession in the state of Texas with worse job security than that of high school football coach. Coaches were fired all the time for poor records. Sometimes it happened with the efficiency of a bloodless coup—one day the coach was there at the office decorated in the school colors and the next day he was gone, as if he had never existed. But sometimes he was paraded before school board meetings to be torn apart by the public in a scene like something out of the Salem witch trials, or had several thousands of dollars’ worth of damage done to his car by rocks thrown by irate fans, or responded to a knock on the door to find someone with a shotgun who wasn’t there to fire him but to complain about his son’s lack of playing time. When Gaines himself went home that Friday night at about two in the morning he found seven FOR SALE signs planted in his lawn. The next night, someone had also smashed a pumpkin into his car, causing a dent. It didn’t bother him. He was the coach. He got paid for what he did and he was tough enough to take it. But he did get upset when he heard that several FOR SALE signs had also been punched into Chavez’s lawn. Brian was just a player, a senior in high school, but that didn’t seem to matter. “That’s sick to me,” said Gaines. “I just can’t understand it.

I was getting ready for school when I heard mom says, “What happened to the plants?” “What happened to them?!” asked Dad. “Someone missed with all the herbs!” replied Mom. So, I head to our new planted pots, and I saw what I would never want to see. Out plants were smashed, and the soil has been dug. It was a total mess.

feeling the hot face kissing my skin, Still till fully set. The water waving In low current, crashing slow still smashing against the banks From the passing boats and waving hands

An Internet company decides to revolutionize an industry—personal transportation, the taxi and limousine market—that defines old-school business-government cooperation, with all the attendant bureaucracy and incompetence and unsatisfying service. It sells itself to investors with the promise that it can buy its way to market dominance in this sclerotic field and use its cutting-edge tech to slash through red tape and find unglimpsed efficiencies. On the basis of that promise, it raises billions upon billions of dollars across its ten-year rise, during which time it becomes as big as promised in Western markets, a byword for Internet-era success, cited by boosters and competitors alike as the model for how to disrupt an industry, how to “move fast and break things” as the Silicon Valley mantra has it. By the time it goes public in 2019, it has $11 billion in annual revenue—real money, exchanged for real services, nothing fraudulent about it. Yet this amazing success story isn’t actually making any sort of profit, even at such scale; instead, it’s losing billions upon billions of dollars, including $5 billion in one particuarly costly quarter. After ten years of growth, it has smashed the old business model of its industry, weakened legacy competitors, created a great deal of value for consumers—but it has done all this without any discipline from market forces, using the awesome power of free money to build a company that would collapse into bankruptcy if that money were withdrawn. And in that time, it has solved exactly none of the problems that would have prevented a company that needed to make a profit from building such a large user base: it has no obvious competitive advantages besides the huge investor subsidy; the technology it uses is hardly proprietary or complex; its rival in disruption controls 30 percent of the market, even as the legacy players are still very much alive; and

Welcome to the anti-meritocratic world, this world. What are you going to do about it? Will you stand back and watch while cronyism, nepotism, the old school tie, the private club, the right university, the right accent, the right background, the right secret society, the right religion, the right family, destroy merit so that their chosen ones can prosper at your expense. It’s time to smash the conspiracy. Break up all the mechanisms that allow privileged groups within society to rig the system in their favour and penalise anyone who doesn’t belong to their insidious cliques.

Wanting something more, and ready to take a risk, Elizebeth quit her job at the Indiana high school in the spring of 1916 and moved back in with her parents to think about what was next.

The wood floor is- so splintery on my flip-flops like nails are sticking up, poking me and crap, the boards are all cracked and you can see down one story, or more at times. Besides, some floorboards are missing altogether; I feel like I could go through the floor at any time. (Room 202) There is no light coming anywhere but her light she is giving off, looking over everything in its interiority, I see that there are boards over the old glass smashed glass window panes; not even the smallest glimmer or flicker of a star or moonlight at this point to guide me, nothing to show the way other than spun web cover over everything, even the hole that should not be cover seemed roached out, look at all the spiders crawling all down me, I don’t go in there I was thinking. I went at night so no one would find me. Look even going down the hall the lockers start to bang themselves like humpers of the past. I could see kissing here doing that too. Like I could see it all in my mind too, like they all did when the kids slammed their looker in these unhallowed halls, look now there are papers everywhere, just left behind like love notes of the past, I want to read yet it has nothing there to be said, I could get some of it, yet not all… I don’t have anything wrong with me, I can’t see, should I take it with me? I do- (It was tucked in her underwire right strap, her outfit when cut off to be laid out for viewing.) -It was Nevaeh and Chiaz’s first love note. (Now) You can foresee what's going to happen… can’t you- I sure did not in the past nor do I know, yet I do at times. It’s a new day, she sat back- crap let's do it a new way today- damn (‘Like- I want to choke down my rabbit,’) it works for me it's well to get that right, or so Jenny said. Yet I was feeling more than that below, and so was she, in my mouth. ‘If you are going through hell keep on going don’t slow down, if you are scared don’t show it…!’ My love was singing to be willing to do this, yet you can’t hear that and if you do, you’ll hear Maggie coming out. (Back at the old school) The hollowing sound of her voices in my face, its blows’ a-crossed me and spooks me out, it is so haunted within these falling walls, yet see is not scaring me at this point, I feel somewhat safe. As well as the wind howling as my thought makes, makes me think of who she maybe thinks I am. I see the hand-covered handrails going up past the old Gym and girl’s locker room, looking into the showers it’s like- I could see bare-ass naked girls and the steam in the air. With the sounds of: ‘O-op-e-s-y- don’t drop the soap!’ All along with the sounds of girls giggling, hell- I don’t want to know what’s going on. Water running, just guessing like them… I had the bad thoughts and photos running in my little-wicked mind. Like the sands of time… not fading all away or turning all too black and write. Up till now the water and sound or the girls are from the past, or so I think and have been long gone, for them to be real girls, it was abandoned for years, like what is this crap…? Like the snapping of a towel, my head spun around, as the little girl pulled me to the next room by her resenting glow, In the locker part of the room- I see all the old desked linked together, she's sitting there proverb her story to me, her hair braids are freaking cute to me; like no girl does that anymore. Yet who are these girls, I think- I know, yet they don’t, see me. They don’t even think I see them all up in it. I heard these stories and believe it yet; I don’t believe it seeing it now unfolding in front of me. There is some random b*tch putting the redhead face in the capper, with the sound of the flush! I am good, she said.

While my friends were clobbering their various opponents, with punches and kicks—and in Mike’s case, a very old, very expensive Chinese vase, which he had smashed over his thug’s head

metaphor (n) a figure of speech that says that one thing is another different thing as a way to compare the two and note their similarities; for example: “my mother is a battleship” or “school was a rollercoaster

So how is wanting to become paper different than wanting to become a novel?" I asked, getting a bit more serious. "If you took that matter a bit more to heart, I think you'd see what I mean for yourself. But to answer you anyway, in elementary school I was working with some papier mâché and I realized that it was a lot like brains. You know how you make papier mâché, right? You soak newspaper in water until it gets soggy and starts to mash up, and then you add some glue. So, in other words, within this gluey substance are countless words and letters all smashed together. It's like my brain as I read books and then think, my thoughts forming out of the mashed-up words I've put into my memory that I rearrange to make something new. Brains are just so much papier mâché." "So your brain is hardened and stiff?" "I just have to make sure it isn't exposed to the air. Anyway, I began to think of myself as formed out of papier mâché, which made me better able to understand how it must feel to be paper itself." "Such anthropomorphism is quite typical of young girls." "It's not anthropomorphism. Pay attention. What I realized was that the feeling of having no feelings was how it felt to be paper. In other words, I was attracted to paper, but paper itself, as banal as it sounds, has no inner self, can only absorb characters and words into itself without assigning them meaning. That's how I wanted to be, I realized. And I simultaneously realized that the more I wanted to be paper, the farther I got from actually being like it, which made me sad.

But we’re Sukie’s brother and sister,’ I protested. ‘You’re supposed to be her friend!’ Queenie looked surprised. ‘Me? I don’t know what you mean.’ ‘You’ve written to…’ I trailed off hopelessly. There was no point in arguing any more. Queenie has made up her mind. ‘Well, I don’t trust Esther Jenkins,’ I muttered, as much to myself as anyone. ‘And I bet she’ll not be as quick doing the deliveries, either.’ Queenie gave me a withering look. ‘For your information, Esther’s moved house, city and country more times than you’ve had hot dinners. I don’t think she’d manage it again. At least you two have each other.’ Glancing at Cliff, all I felt was more worry, not less. I hadn’t got the hang of this ‘big sister’ lark – you only had to look at Cliff’s split lip to see my attempt at looking after him wasn’t exactly going well. ‘All Esther’s anger, all that bluster – it’s just a front.’ Queenie went on. ‘Behind it she’s a smashing girl. You need to give her a chance.’ ‘She said horrible things about my sister!’ I insisted, though I was beginning to feel uncomfortable. Because I’d started the fight, hadn’t I? I’d been the angry one – Esther had almost tried to apologise. Queenie stopped. ‘You’ve heard of the Kindertransport, have you?’ ‘Some Jewish kids joined our school from Europe,’ I said. ‘But I don’t see what –’ ‘Esther was one of them,’ Queenie interrupted. ‘Not at your school but another one in London. She’s a Jewish refugee.’ ‘Well, she as good as called Sukie a spy!’ I pointed out. Queenie ignored my comment. ‘Esther’s had a terrible time of it. Everyone she loves has either died or disappeared, or failing that, lives in another country. Imagine what that feels like, can you?’ I swallowed miserably. The thing was I could imagine it – bits of it, anyway – and I felt ashamed, which didn’t improve my temper. ‘That doesn’t excuse what she did to Cliff’s lip,’ I mumbled, though really I was cross with myself. After what I’d overheard about kosher meat, I should have realised she was a Kindertransport child. But I didn’t think, did I? Instead, I’d grabbed her by the hair. What sort of person was I turning into to be so bitter? So angry? Queenie set off walking again. ‘That lip’ll heal in no time. Now hurry up and stop dawdling.’ Glancing sideways at Cliff, I felt a funny sensation in my chest. His lip looked horrid now but he would recover – Queenie was right. At least he was here, my living, breathing, sticky-handed brother. I was pretty lucky, all things considered.

Democrats have been smashing teachers’ unions—the largest single segment of unionized workers remaining in America—as they zealously drive their corporate-backed, pro-charter-school agenda.

Already, too much of Ethan’s world feels…manipulated. Performed. Like the simplest decisions—where he went to school, what kind of shoes he buys, where and how he cuts his hair—feel more like a statement of identity than of utility. But Ethan doesn’t want that to be true. He doesn’t want to live in a world where everyone’s busy flashing symbols for others to decode, like some strange new language that he’ll have to learn and then relearn.

In one life she was a travel vlogger who had 1,750,000 YouTube subscribers and almost as many people following her on Instagram, and her most popular video was one where she fell off a gondola in Venice. She also had one about Rome called 'A Roma Therapy'. In one life she was a single parent to a baby that literally wouldn't sleep. In one life she ran the showbiz column in a tabloid newspaper and did stories about Ryan Bailey's relationships. In one life she was the picture editor at the National Geographic. In one life she was a successful eco-architect who lived a carbon-neutral existence in a self-designed bungalow that harvested rain-water and ran on solar power. In one life she was an aid worker in Bostwana. In one life a cat-sitter. In one life a volunteer in a homeless shelter. In one life she was sleeping on her only friend's sofa. In one life she taught music in Montreal. In one life she spent all day arguing with people she didn't know on Twitter and ended a fair proportion of her tweets by saying 'Do better' while secretly realising she was telling herself to do that. In one life she had no social media accounts. In one life she'd never drunk alcohol. In one life she was a chess champion and currently visiting Ukraine for a tournament. In one life she was married to a minor Royal and hated every minute. In one life her Facebook and Instagram only contained quotes from Rumi and Lao Tzu. In one life she was on to her third husband and already bored. In one life she was a vegan power-lifter. In one life she was travelling around South Corsican coast, and they talked quantum mechanics and got drunk together at a beachside bar until Hugo slipped away, out of that life, and mid-sentence, so Nora was left talking to a blank Hugo who was trying to remember her name. In some lives Nora attracted a lot of attention. In some lives she attracted none. In some lives she was rich. In some lives she was poor. In some lives she was healthy. In some lives she couldn't climb the stairs without getting out of breath. In some lives she was in a relationship, in others she was solo, in many she was somewhere in between. In some lives she was a mother, but in most she wasn't. She had been a rock star, an Olympics, a music teacher, a primary school teacher, a professor, a CEO, a PA, a chef, a glaciologist, a climatologist, an acrobat, a tree-planter, an audit manager, a hair-dresser, a professional dog walker, an office clerk, a software developer, a receptionist, a hotel cleaner, a politician, a lawyer, a shoplifter, the head of an ocean protection charity, a shop worker (again), a waitress, a first-line supervisor, a glass-blower and a thousand other things. She'd had horrendous commutes in cars, on buses, in trains, on ferries, on bike, on foot. She'd had emails and emails and emails. She'd had a fifty-three-year-old boss with halitosis touch her leg under a table and text her a photo of his penis. She'd had colleagues who lied about her, and colleagues who loved her, and (mainly) colleagues who were entirely indifferent. In many lives she chose not to work and in some she didn't choose not to work but still couldn't find any. In some lives she smashed through the glass ceiling and in some she just polished it. She had been excessively over- and under-qualified. She had slept brilliantly and terribly. In some lives she was on anti-depressants and in others she didn't even take ibuprofen for a headache. In some lives she was a physically healthy hypochondriac and in some a seriously ill hypochondriac and in most she wasn't a hypochondriac at all. There was a life where she had chronic fatigue, a life where she had cancer, a life where she'd suffered a herniated disc and broken her ribs in a car accident.

The cymek walkers marched forward like monsters from the greatest nightmares of mankind, smashing buildings into rubble, slaughtering crowds as if they were massed insects.