Sophisticated Short Quotes

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

If what's always distinguished bad writing--flat characters, a narrative world that's clichéd and not recognizably human, etc.--is also a description of today's world, then bad writing becomes an ingenious mimesis of a bad world. If readers simply believe the world is stupid and shallow and mean, then [Bret] Ellis can write a mean shallow stupid novel that becomes a mordant deadpan commentary on the badness of everything. Look man, we'd probably most of us agree that these are dark times, and stupid ones, but do we need fiction that does nothing but dramatize how dark and stupid everything is? In dark times, the definition of good art would seem to be art that locates and applies CPR to those elements of what's human and magical that still live and glow despite the times' darkness. Really good fiction could have as dark a worldview as it wished, but it'd find a way both to depict this world and to illuminate the possibilities for being alive and human in it. Postmodern irony and cynicism's become an end in itself, a measure of hip sophistication and literary savvy. Few artists dare to try to talk about ways of working toward redeeming what's wrong, because they'll look sentimental and naive to all the weary ironists. Irony's gone from liberating to enslaving. There's some great essay somewhere that has a line about irony being the song of the prisoner who's come to love his cage… The postmodern founders' patricidal work was great, but patricide produces orphans, and no amount of revelry can make up for the fact that writers my age have been literary orphans throughout our formative years. We enter a spiritual puberty where we snap to the fact that the great transcendent horror is loneliness, excluded encagement in the self. Once we’ve hit this age, we will now give or take anything, wear any mask, to fit, be part-of, not be Alone, we young. The U.S. arts are our guide to inclusion. A how-to. We are shown how to fashion masks of ennui and jaded irony at a young age where the face is fictile enough to assume the shape of whatever it wears. And then it’s stuck there, the weary cynicism that saves us from gooey sentiment and unsophisticated naïveté. Sentiment equals naïveté on this continent. You burn with hunger for food that does not exist. A U. S. of modern A. where the State is not a team or a code, but a sort of sloppy intersection of desires and fears, where the only public consensus a boy must surrender to is the acknowledged primacy of straight-line pursuing this flat and short-sighted idea of personal happiness.

I remember learning German - so beautiful, so strange - at school in Australia on the other side of the earth. My family was nonplussed about me learning such an odd, ugly language and, though of course too sophisticated to say it, the language of the enemy. But I liked the sticklebrick nature of it, building long supple words by putting short ones together. Things could be brought into being that had no name in English - Weltanschauung, Schadenfreude, sippenhaft, Sonderweg, Scheissfreundlichkeit, Vergangenheitsbewältigung.

She gave a short laugh to throw him off track. "It so happens I am a trifle more sophisticated than that. I hardly go about mooning and cultivating romantic notions of heroic knights sweeping me away to unknown isles aboard stolen ships." He smiled. "A knight rode a horse, my dear; he was not a sea captain.

Have you not realised how fragile and brutal the ego is? It will always choose what it perceives as in its best interest for the cheapest price. It may be as blatant as short skirts and lies. It may be more sophisticated and hidden behind ‘kind’ words. But it all comes from the same place of either using people to get what we want or trying to eliminate people who get in our way.

Reluctantly, he knew that he despised his fellow residents for the way in which they fit so willingly into their appointed slots in the apartment buildings, for their overdeveloped sense of responsibility and lack of flamboyance. Above all, he looked down on them for their good taste. The building was a monument to good taste, to the well-designed kitchen, to sophisticated utencils and fabrics, to elegant and never ostentatious furnishings. In short, to that whole aesthetic sensibility which these well-educated, professional people had inherited from all the schools of industrial design, all the award-winning schemes of interior decoration institutionalized by the last quarter of the century. Royal detested this orthodoxy of the intelligent. Visiting his neighbors’ apartments, he would find himself physically repelled by the contours of an award-winning coffee pot, but the well-modulated color schemes, by the good taste and intelligence that, Midas-like, had transformed everything in these apartments into an ideal marriage of function and design. In a sense, these people were the vanguard of a well-to-do and well-educated proletariat of the future, boxed up in these expensive apartments with their elegant furniture, and intelligent sensibilities, and no possibility of escape.

After September 11, some critics even tried to lump the antiglobalization protesters in with the terrorists, casting them as irresponsible destabilizers of the world order. But the protesters are the children of McWorld, and their objections are not Jihadic but merely democratic. Their grievances concern not world order but world disorder, and if the young demonstrators are a little foolish in their politics, a little naive in their analysis, and a little short on viable solutions, they understand with a sophistication their leaderes apparently lack that globalization's current architecture breeds anarchy, nihilism, and violence.

...I have never cared for any men as much as for these who felt the first springs when I did, and saw death ahead, and were reprieved - and who now walk the long stormy summer. It is a generation staunch by inheritance, sophisticated by fact - and rather deeply wise. More than that, what I feel about them is summed up in a line of Willa Cather's: "We possess together the precious, the incommunicable past.

The problem that will doubtless interest future historians is not so much the presence, in the twentieth century, of mass political alienation, but the passivity with which the citizenry accepted that condition. It may well become known as the century of sophisticated deference.

The Louis XIII style in perfumery, composed of the elements dear to that period - orris-powder, musk, civet and myrtle-water, already known by the name of angel-water - was scarcely adequate to express the cavalierish graces, the rather crude colours of the time which certain sonnets by Saint-Amand have preserved for us. Later on, with the aid of myrrh and frankincense, the potent and austere scents of religion, it became almost possible to render the stately pomp of the age of Louis XIV, the pleonastic artifices of classical oratory, the ample, sustained, wordy style of Bossuet and the other masters of the pulpit. Later still, the blase, sophisticated graces of French society under Louis XV found their interpreters more easily in frangipane and marechale, which offered in a way the very synthesis of the period. And then, after the indifference and incuriosity of the First Empire, which used eau-de-Cologne and rosemary to excess, perfumery followed Victor Hugo and Gautier and went for inspiration to the lands of the sun; it composed its own Oriental verses, its own highly spiced salaams, discovered intonations and audacious antitheses, sorted out and revived forgotten nuances which it complicated, subtilized and paired off, and in short resolutely repudiated the voluntary decrepitude to which it had been reduced by its Malesherbes, its Boileaus, its Andrieux, its Baour-Lormians, the vulgar distillers of its poems.

However life started, once established, it persisted for over 3.5 billion years and evolved from microbial slime to the sophistication of human civilization.

Hip-hop has had the most sophisticated vocabulary of any American musical genre. I read endlessly its poetic text. But parents and grandparents did not see us listening to and memorizing gripping works of oral poetry and urban reporting and short stories and autobiographies and sexual boasting and adventure fantasies. They saw—and still see—words that would lead my mind into deviance.

What never fails to astonish at Skara Brae is the sophistication. These were the dwellings of Neolithic people, but the houses had locking doors, a system of drainage and even, it seems, elemental plumbing with slots in the walls to sluice away wastes. The interiors were capacious. The walls, still standing, were up to ten feet high, so they afforded plenty of headroom, and the floors were paved. Each house has built-in stone dressers, storage alcoves, boxed enclosures presumed to be beds, water tanks, and damp courses that would have kept the interiors snug and dry. The houses are all of one size and built to the same plan, suggesting a kind of genial commune rather than a conventional tribal hierarchy. Covered passageways ran between the houses and led to a paved open area—dubbed “the marketplace” by early archaeologists—where tasks could be done in a social setting.

It is an important and popular fact that things are not always what they seem. For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much—the wheel, New York, wars and so on—while all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man—for precisely the same reasons. Curiously enough, the dolphins had long known of the impending destruction of the planet Earth and had made many attempts to alert mankind to the danger; but most of their communications were misinterpreted as amusing attempts to punch footballs or whistle for tidbits, so they eventually gave up and left the Earth by their own means shortly before the Vogons arrived. The last ever dolphin message was misinterpreted as a surprisingly sophisticated attempt to do a double-backward somersault through a hoop while whistling the “Star-Spangled Banner,” but in fact the message was this: So long and thanks for all the fish. In fact there was only one species on the planet more intelligent than dolphins, and they spent a lot of their time in behavioral research laboratories running round inside wheels and conducting frighteningly elegant and subtle experiments on man. The fact that once again man completely misinterpreted this relationship was entirely according to these creatures’ plans.

Talk about corporate greed and everything is really crucially beside the point, in my view, and really should be recognized as a very big regression from what working people, and a lot of others, understood very well a century ago. Talk about corporate greed is nonsense. Corporations are greedy by their nature. They’re nothing else – they are instruments for interfering with markets to maximize profit, and wealth and market control. You can’t make them more or less greedy; I mean maybe you can sort of force them, but it’s like taking a totalitarian state and saying “Be less brutal!” Well yeah, maybe you can get a totalitarian state to be less brutal, but that’s not the point – the point is not to get a tyranny to be less brutal, but to get rid of it. Now 150 years ago, that was understood. If you read the labour press – there was a very lively labour press, right around here [Massachusetts] ; Lowell and Lawrence and places like that, around the mid nineteenth century, run by artisans and what they called factory girls; young women from the farms who were working there – they weren’t asking the autocracy to be less brutal, they were saying get rid of it. And in fact that makes perfect sense; these are human institutions, there’s nothing graven in stone about them. They [corporations] were created early in this century with their present powers, they come from the same intellectual roots as the other modern forms of totalitarianism – namely Stalinism and Fascism – and they have no more legitimacy than they do. I mean yeah, let’s try and make the autocracy less brutal if that’s the short term possibility – but we should have the sophistication of, say, factory girls in Lowell 150 years ago and recognize that this is just degrading and intolerable and that, as they put it “those who work in the mills should own them ” And on to everything else, and that’s democracy – if you don’t have that, you don’t have democracy.

Love, that most banal of things, that most clichéd of religious motivations, had more power—Sol now knew—than did strong nuclear force or weak nuclear force or electromagnetism or gravity. Love was these other forces, Sol realized. The Void Which Binds, the subquantum impossibility that carried information from photon to photon, was nothing more or less than love. But could love—simple, banal love—explain the so-called anthropic principle which scientists had shaken their collective heads over for seven centuries and more—that almost infinite string of coincidences which had led to a universe that had just the proper number of dimensions, just the correct values on electron, just the precise rules for gravity, just the proper age to stars, just the right prebiologies to create just the perfect viruses to become just the proper DNAs—in short, a series of coincidences so absurd in their precision and correctness that they defied logic, defied understanding, and even defied religious interpretation. Love? For seven centuries the existence of Grand Unification Theories and hyperstring post-quantum physics and Core-given understanding of the universe as self-contained and boundless, without Big Bang singularities or corresponding endpoints, had pretty much eliminated any role of God—primitively anthropomorphic or sophisticatedly post-Einsteinian—even as a caretaker or pre-Creation former of rules. The modern universe, as machine and man had come to understand it, needed no Creator; in fact, allowed no Creator. Its rules allowed very little tinkering and no major revisions. It had not begun and would not end, beyond cycles of expansion and contraction as regular and self-regulated as the seasons on Old Earth. No room for love there.

we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist: a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain.

In spite of its undeniable power, so many leaders struggle to embrace organizational health (which I’ll be defining shortly) because they quietly believe they are too sophisticated, too busy, or too analytical to bother with it. In other words, they think it’s beneath them.

And I consider anybody a twerp who hasn’t read the greatest American short story, which is “Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” by Ambrose Bierce. It isn’t remotely political. It is a flawless example of American genius, like “Sophisticated Lady” by Duke Ellington or the Franklin stove.

The causes which ruined the Republic of Athens illustrate the connection of ethics with politics rather than the vices inherent to democracy. A State which has only 30,000 full citizens in a population of 500,000, and is governed, practically, by about 3000 people at a public meeting, is scarcely democratic. The short triumph of Athenian liberty, and its quick decline, belong to an age which possessed no fixed standard of right and wrong. An unparalleled activity of intellect was shaking the credit of the gods, and the gods were the givers of the law. It was a very short step from the suspicion of Protagoras, that there were no gods, to the assertion of Critias that there is no sanction for laws. If nothing was certain in theology, there was no certainty in ethics and no moral obligation. The will of man, not the will of God, was the rule of life, and every man and body of men had the right to do what they had the means of doing. Tyranny was no wrong, and it was hypocrisy to deny oneself the enjoyment it affords. The doctrine of the Sophists gave no limits to power and no security to freedom; it inspired that cry of the Athenians, that they must not be hindered from doing what they pleased, and the speeches of men like Athenagoras and Euphemus, that the democracy may punish men who have done no wrong, and that nothing that is profitable is amiss. And Socrates perished by the reaction which they provoked.

In the life of Moses, in Hebrew folklore, there is a remarkable passage. Moses finds a shepherd in the desert. He spends the day with the shepherd and helps him milk his ewes, and at the end of the day he sees that the shepherd puts the best milk he has in a wooden bowl, which he places on a flat stone some distance away. So Moses asks him what it is for, and the shepherd replies 'This is God's milk.' Moses is puzzled and asks him what he means. The shepherd says 'I always take the best milk I possess, and I bring it as on offering to God.' Moses, who is far more sophisticated than the shepherd with his naive faith, asks, 'And does God drink it?' 'Yes,' replies the shepherd, 'He does.' Then Moses feels compelled to enlighten the poor shepherd and he explains that God, being pure spirit, does not drink milk. Yet the shepherd is sure that He does, and so they have a short argument, which ends with Moses telling the shepherd to hide behind the bushes to find out whether in fact God does come to drink the milk. Moses then goes out to pray in the desert. The shepherd hides, the night comes, and in the moonlight the shepherd sees a little fox that comes trotting from the desert, looks right, looks left and heads straight towards the milk, which he laps up, and disappears into the desert again. The next morning Moses finds the shepherd quite depressed and downcast. 'What's the matter?' he asks. The shepherd says 'You were right, God is pure spirit, and He doesn't want my milk.' Moses is surprised. He says 'You should be happy. You know more about God than you did before.' 'Yes, I do' says the shepherd, 'but the only thing I could do to express my love for Him has been taken away from me.' Moses sees the point. He retires into the desert and prays hard. In the night in a vision, God speaks to him and says 'Moses, you were wrong. It is true that I am pure spirit. Nevertheless I always accepted with gratitude the milk which the shepherd offered me, as the expression of his love, but since, being pure spirit, I do not need the milk, I shared it with this little fox, who is very fond of milk.

Fully aware that life is too short for the choice to be anything but irreparable, he had been distressed to discover that he felt no spontaneous attraction to any occupation. Rather sceptically, he looked over the array of available possibilities: prosecutors, who spend their whole lives persecuting people; schoolteachers, the butt of rowdy children; science and technology, whose advances bring enormous harm along with a small benefit; the sophisticated, empty chatter of the social sciences; interior design (which appealed to him because of his memories of his cabinetmaker grandfather), utterly enslaved by fashions he detested; the occupation of the poor pharmacists now reduced to peddlars of boxes and bottles. When he wondered; what should I choose for my whole life's work? his inner self would fall into the most uncomfortable silence.

Get used to the idea of significant portion of the population walking around with high-speed Internet connections on their person, with sophisticated video cameras built in. They will be shooting all kinds of events all the time. Crime. Crashes. Speeches. Sports. And the footage won't be the short, sanitized and safe versions we usually see on television, courtesy of the old media gatekeepers. The user-generated pictures and video will be raw and real. It will be disturbing, yet illuminating. And it will be shared over the 'Net almost as it happens, and available for everyone to see.

Jane Grenville in her scholarly and definitive work Medieval Housing provides an arresting pair of illustrations showing how two archaeological teams, using the same information, envisioned the appearance of a long-house at Wharram Percy, a lost medieval village in Yorkshire. One illustration shows a strikingly plain, basic dwelling, with walls made of mud or clunch (a composite of mud and dung) and a roof of grass or sod. The other shows a much sturdier and more sophisticated cruck-framed construction in which hefty beams have been fitted together with skill and care. The simple fact is that archaeological evidence shows mostly how buildings met the ground, not how they looked.

There is nothing, though, in “An International Episode” or “Daisy Miller,” fine as they are, that prepares us for the subtle psychological realism of James’s depictions of the elusiveness of self-knowledge and the terrors of confronting one’s concealed motivations in the three premier stories of this volume, “The Aspern Papers,” “The Turn of the Screw,” and “The Beast in the Jungle.” Beginning in the 1880s with Portrait of a Lady (1881), which literary historians tend to think of as James’s breakthrough novel, the fate of Americans in Europe and the interaction between European sophistication and American innocence became more a matter of the heart and psyche than one of manners, social relations, and cultural differences.

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

Athenian democracy, though it had the grave limitation of not including slaves or women, was in some respects more democratic than any modern system. Judges and most executive officers were chosen by lot, and served for short periods; they were thus average citizens, like our jurymen, with the prejudices and lack of professionalism characteristic of average citizens. In general, there were a large number of judges to hear each case. The plaintiff and defendant, or prosecutor and accused, appeared in person, not through professional lawyers. Naturally, success or failure depended largely on oratorical skill in appealing to popular prejudices. Although a man had to deliver his own speech, he could hire an expert to write the speech for him, or, as many preferred, he could pay for instruction in the arts required for success in the law courts. These arts the Sophists were supposed to teach.

Well, what we called a computer in 1977 was really a kind of electronic abacus, but...' 'Oh, now, don't underestimate the abacus,' said Reg. 'In skilled hands it's a very sophisticated calculating device. Furthermore it requires no power, can be made with any materials you have to hand, and never goes bing in the middle of an important piece of work.' 'So an electric one would be particularly pointless,' said Richard. 'True enough,' conceded Reg. 'There really wasn't a lot this machine could do that you couldn't do yourself in half the time with a lot less trouble,' said Richard, 'but it was, on the other hand, very good at being a slow and dim-witted pupil.' Reg looked at him quizzically. 'I had no idea they were supposed to be in short supply,' he said. 'I could hit a dozen with a bread roll from where I'm sitting.' 'I'm sure. But look at it this way. What really is the point of trying to teach anything to anybody?' This question seemed to provoke a murmur of sympathetic approval from up and down the table.

Back in Russia, where they’re still getting acclimated to the whole capitalism thing, most TV advertising took a straightforward approach to persuasion. Thus, even though I don’t speak Russian, I had no trouble understanding Russian ads. They were all along the lines o: “Oh, no, there’s a stain on the tablecloth! What will Mom do? Thank goodness for this effective detergent!” Not so in Japan, where sophisticated consumers have grown bored with simple persuasion, forcing advertisers to get wildly inventive. Japanese TV ads have at this point evolved into an abstract mishmash of symbols and sounds. Your average thirty-second Japanese commercial is something like: Here’s a man holding a giraffe. Now the giraffe morphs into a rainbow. The rainbow is friends with a talking pencil, and they live together on a spaceship. A few seconds of laughter! A snippet of loud reggae music! Fad out. At least half the time, I have no idea what the product being advertised is or what it does. And yet I very much enjoy the ads. They’re like short-acting hallucinogens.

Why did you cry off?” She stiffened in surprise; then, trying to match his light, mocking tone, she said, “Viscount Mondevale proved to be a trifle high in the instep about things like his fiancé cavorting about in cottages and greenhouses with you.” She fired and missed. “How many contenders are there this Season?” he asked conversationally as he turned to the target, pausing to wipe the gun. She knew he meant contenders for her hand, and pride absolutely would not allow her to say there were none, nor had there been for a long time. “Well…” she said, suppressing a grimace as she thought of her stout suitor with a houseful of cherubs. Counting on the fact that he didn’t move in the inner circles of the ton, she assumed he wouldn’t know much about either suitor. He raised the gun as she said, “There’s Sir Francis Belhaven, for one.” Instead of firing immediately as he had before, he seemed to require a long moment to adjust his aim. “Belhaven’s an old man,” he said. The gun exploded, and the twig snapped off. When he looked at her his eyes had chilled, almost as if he thought less of her. Elizabeth told herself she was imagining that and determined to maintain their mood of light conviviality. Since it was her turn, she picked up a gun and lifted it. “Who’s the other one?” Relieved that he couldn’t possibly find fault with the age of her reclusive sportsman, she gave him a mildly haughty smile. “Lord John Marchman,” she said, and she fired. Ian’s shout of laughter almost drowned out the report from the gun. “Marchman!” he said when she scowled at him and thrust the butt of the gun in his stomach. “You must be joking!” “You spoiled my shot,” she countered. “Take it again,” he said, looking at her with a mixture of derision, disbelief, and amusement. “No, I can’t shoot with you laughing. And I’ll thank you to wipe that smirk off your face. Lord Marchman is a very nice man.” “He is indeed,” said Ian with an irritating grin. “And it’s a damned good thing you like to shoot, because he sleeps with his guns and fishing poles. You’ll spend the rest of your life slogging through streams and trudging through the woods.” “I happen to like to fish,” she informed him, striving unsuccessfully not to lose her composure. “And Sir Francis may be a trifle older than I, but an elderly husband might be more kind and tolerant than a younger one.” “He’ll have to be tolerant,” Ian said a little shortly, turning his attention back to the guns, “or else a damned good shot.” It angered Elizabeth that he was suddenly attacking her when she had just worked it out in her mind that they were supposed to be dealing with what had happened in a light, sophisticated fashion. “I must say, you aren’t being very mature or very consistent!

The whitewash of Kingdom of Heaven Kingdom of Heaven is a classic cowboys-and-Indians story in which the Muslims are noble and heroic and the Christians are venal and violent. The script is heavy on modern-day PC clichés and fantasies of Islamic tolerance; brushing aside dhimmi laws and attitudes (of which Ridley Scott has most likely never heard), it invents a peace-and-tolerance group called the “Brotherhood of Muslims, Jews and Christians.” But of course, the Christians spoiled everything. A publicist for the film explained, “They were working together. It was a strong bond until the Knights Templar caused friction between them.” Ah yes, those nasty “Christian extremists.” Kingdom of Heaven was made for those who believe that all the trouble between the Islamic world and the West has been caused by Western imperialism, racism, and colonialism, and that the glorious paradigm of Islamic tolerance, which was once a beacon to the world, could be reestablished if only the wicked white men of America and Europe would be more tolerant. Ridley Scott and his team arranged advance screenings for groups like the Council on American-Islamic Relations, making sure that sensitive Muslim feelings were not hurt. It is a dream movie for the PC establishment in every way except one: It isn’t true. Professor Jonathan Riley-Smith, author of A Short History of the Crusades and one of the world’s leading historians of the period, called the movie “rubbish,” explaining that “it’s not historically accurate at all” as it “depicts the Muslims as sophisticated and civilised, and the Crusaders are all brutes and barbarians. It has nothing to do with reality.” Oh, and “there was never a confraternity of Muslims, Jews and Christians. That is utter nonsense.

Scientists have found that there are two important genes, the CREB activator (which stimulates the formation of new connections between neurons) and the CREB repressor (which suppresses the formation of new memories). Dr. Jerry Yin and Timothy Tully of Cold Spring Harbor have been doing interesting experiments with fruit flies. Normally it takes ten trials for them to learn a certain task (e.g., detecting an odor, avoiding a shock). Fruit flies with an extra CREB repressor gene could not form lasting memories at all, but the real surprise came when they tested fruit flies with an extra CREB activator gene. They learned the task in just one session. “This implies these flies have a photographic memory,” says Dr. Tully. He said they are just like students “who could read a chapter of a book once, see it in their mind, and tell you that the answer is in paragraph three of page two seventy-four.” This effect is not just restricted to fruit flies. Dr. Alcino Silva, also at Cold Spring Harbor, has been experimenting with mice. He found that mice with a defect in their CREB activator gene were virtually incapable of forming long-term memories. They were amnesiac mice. But even these forgetful mice could learn a bit if they had short lessons with rest in between. Scientists theorize that we have a fixed amount of CREB activator in the brain that can limit the amount we can learn in any specific time. If we try to cram before a test, it means that we quickly exhaust the amount of CREB activators, and hence we cannot learn any more—at least until we take a break to replenish the CREB activators. “We can now give you a biological reason why cramming doesn’t work,” says Dr. Tully. The best way to prepare for a final exam is to mentally review the material periodically during the day, until the material becomes part of your long-term memory. This may also explain why emotionally charged memories are so vivid and can last for decades. The CREB repressor gene is like a filter, cleaning out useless information. But if a memory is associated with a strong emotion, it can either remove the CREB repressor gene or increase levels of the CREB activator gene. In the future, we can expect more breakthroughs in understanding the genetic basis of memory. Not just one but a sophisticated combination of genes is probably required to shape the enormous capabilities of the brain. These genes, in turn, have counterparts in the human genome, so it is a distinct possibility that we can also enhance our memory and mental skills genetically. However, don’t think that you will be able to get a brain boost anytime soon. Many hurdles still remain. First, it is not clear if these results apply to humans.

To give you a sense of the sheer volume of unprocessed information that comes up the spinal cord into the thalamus, let’s consider just one aspect: vision, since many of our memories are encoded this way. There are roughly 130 million cells in the eye’s retina, called cones and rods; they process and record 100 million bits of information from the landscape at any time. This vast amount of data is then collected and sent down the optic nerve, which transports 9 million bits of information per second, and on to the thalamus. From there, the information reaches the occipital lobe, at the very back of the brain. This visual cortex, in turn, begins the arduous process of analyzing this mountain of data. The visual cortex consists of several patches at the back of the brain, each of which is designed for a specific task. They are labeled V1 to V8. Remarkably, the area called V1 is like a screen; it actually creates a pattern on the back of your brain very similar in shape and form to the original image. This image bears a striking resemblance to the original, except that the very center of your eye, the fovea, occupies a much larger area in V1 (since the fovea has the highest concentration of neurons). The image cast on V1 is therefore not a perfect replica of the landscape but is distorted, with the central region of the image taking up most of the space. Besides V1, other areas of the occipital lobe process different aspects of the image, including: •  Stereo vision. These neurons compare the images coming in from each eye. This is done in area V2. •  Distance. These neurons calculate the distance to an object, using shadows and other information from both eyes. This is done in area V3. •  Colors are processed in area V4. •  Motion. Different circuits can pick out different classes of motion, including straight-line, spiral, and expanding motion. This is done in area V5. More than thirty different neural circuits involved with vision have been identified, but there are probably many more. From the occipital lobe, the information is sent to the prefrontal cortex, where you finally “see” the image and form your short-term memory. The information is then sent to the hippocampus, which processes it and stores it for up to twenty-four hours. The memory is then chopped up and scattered among the various cortices. The point here is that vision, which we think happens effortlessly, requires billions of neurons firing in sequence, transmitting millions of bits of information per second. And remember that we have signals from five sense organs, plus emotions associated with each image. All this information is processed by the hippocampus to create a simple memory of an image. At present, no machine can match the sophistication of this process, so replicating it presents an enormous challenge for scientists who want to create an artificial hippocampus for the human brain.

By now, though, it had been a steep learning curve, he was fairly well versed on the basics of how clearing worked: When a customer bought shares in a stock on Robinhood — say, GameStop — at a specific price, the order was first sent to Robinhood's in-house clearing brokerage, who in turn bundled the trade to a market maker for execution. The trade was then brought to a clearinghouse, who oversaw the trade all the way to the settlement. During this time period, the trade itself needed to be 'insured' against anything that might go wrong, such as some sort of systemic collapse or a default by either party — although in reality, in regulated markets, this seemed extremely unlikely. While the customer's money was temporarily put aside, essentially in an untouchable safe, for the two days it took for the clearing agency to verify that both parties were able to provide what they had agreed upon — the brokerage house, Robinhood — had to insure the deal with a deposit; money of its own, separate from the money that the customer had provided, that could be used to guarantee the value of the trade. In financial parlance, this 'collateral' was known as VAR — or value at risk. For a single trade of a simple asset, it would have been relatively easy to know how much the brokerage would need to deposit to insure the situation; the risk of something going wrong would be small, and the total value would be simple to calculate. If GME was trading at $400 a share and a customer wanted ten shares, there was $4000 at risk, plus or minus some nominal amount due to minute vagaries in market fluctuations during the two-day period before settlement. In such a simple situation, Robinhood might be asked to put up $4000 and change — in addition to the $4000 of the customer's buy order, which remained locked in the safe. The deposit requirement calculation grew more complicated as layers were added onto the trading situation. A single trade had low inherent risk; multiplied to millions of trades, the risk profile began to change. The more volatile the stock — in price and/or volume — the riskier a buy or sell became. Of course, the NSCC did not make these calculations by hand; they used sophisticated algorithms to digest the numerous inputs coming in from the trade — type of equity, volume, current volatility, where it fit into a brokerage's portfolio as a whole — and spit out a 'recommendation' of what sort of deposit would protect the trade. And this process was entirely automated; the brokerage house would continually run its trading activity through the federal clearing system and would receive its updated deposit requirements as often as every fifteen minutes while the market was open. Premarket during a trading week, that number would come in at 5:11 a.m. East Coast time, usually right as Jim, in Orlando, was finishing his morning coffee. Robinhood would then have until 10:00 a.m. to satisfy the deposit requirement for the upcoming day of trading — or risk being in default, which could lead to an immediate shutdown of all operations. Usually, the deposit requirement was tied closely to the actual dollars being 'spent' on the trades; a near equal number of buys and sells in a brokerage house's trading profile lowered its overall risk, and though volatility was common, especially in the past half-decade, even a two-day settlement period came with an acceptable level of confidence that nobody would fail to deliver on their trades.

A critical but often ignored impact of FDI is that on the (current and future) domestic competitors. An entry by a TNC through FDI can destroy existing national firms that could have 'grown up' into successful operations without this premature exposure to competition, or it can pre-empt the emergence of domestic competitors. In such cases, short-run productive capabilities are enhanced, as the TNC subsidiary replacing the (current and future) national firms is usually more productive than the latter. But the level of productive capability that the country can attain in the long run becomes lower as a result. This is because TNCs do not, as a rule, transfer the most valuable activities outside their home country, as I will discuss in greater detail later. As a result, there will be a definite ceiling on the level of sophistication that a TNC subsidiary can reach in the long run. To go back to the Toyota example in chapter 1, had Japan liberalized FDI in its automobile industry in the 1960s, Toyota definitely wouldn't be producing the Lexus today-it would have wiped out or, more likely, have become a valued subsidiary of an American carmaker. Given this, a developing country may reasonably decide to forego short-term benefits from FDI in order to increase the chance for its domestic firms to engage in higher-level activities in the long run, by banning FDI in certain sectors or regulating it. This is exactly the same logic as that of infant industry protection that I discussed in the earlier chapters-a country gives up the short-run benefits of free trade in order to create higher productive capabilities in the long run. And it is why, historically, most economic success stories have resorted to regulation of FDI, often in a Draconian manner, as I shall now show.

Carlton Church review – Why Tokyo is populated? How Tokyo became the largest city? Apparently Tokyo Japan has been one of the largest global cities for hundreds of years. One of the primary reasons for its growth is the fact that it has been a political hotspot since they Edo period. Many of the feudal lords of Japan needed to be in Edo for a significant part of the year and this has led to a situation where increasing numbers of the population was attracted to the city. There were many people with some power base throughout Japan but it became increasingly clear that those who have the real power were the ones who were residing in Edo. Eventually Tokyo Japan emerged as both the cultural and the political center for the entire Japan and this only contributed to its rapid growth which made it increasingly popular for all people living in Japan. After World War II substantial rebuilding of the city was necessary and it was especially after the war that extraordinary growth was seen and because major industries came especially to Tokyo and Osaka, these were the cities where the most growth took place. The fact remains that there are fewer opportunities for people who are living far from the cities of Japan and this is why any increasing number of people come to the city. There are many reasons why Japan is acknowledged as the greatest city The Japanese railways is widely acknowledged to be the most sophisticated railway system in the world. There is more than 100 surface routes which is operated by Japan’s railways as well as 13 subway lines and over the years Japanese railway engineers has accomplished some amazing feats which is unequalled in any other part of the world. Most places in the city of Tokyo Japan can be reached by train and a relatively short walk. Very few global cities can make this same boast. Crossing the street especially outside Shibuya station which is one of the busiest crossings on the planet with literally thousands of people crossing at the same time. However, this street crossing symbolizes one of the trademarks of Tokyo Japan and its major tourism attractions. It lies not so much in old buildings but rather in the masses of people who come together for some type of cultural celebration. There is also the religious centers in Japan such as Carlton Church and others. Tokyo Japan has also been chosen as the city that will host the Olympics in 2020 and for many reasons this is considered to be the best possible venue. A technological Metropolitan No other country exports more critical technologies then Japan and therefore it should come as no surprise that the neighborhood electronics store look more like theme parks than electronic stores. At quickly becomes clear when one looks at such a spectacle that the Japanese people are completely infatuated with technology and they make no effort to hide that infatuation. People planning to visit Japan should heed the warnings from travel organizations and also the many complaints which is lodged by travelers who have become victims of fraud. It is important to do extensive research regarding the available options and to read every possible review which is available regarding travel agencies. A safe option will always be to visit the website of Carlton Church and to make use of their services when travelling to and from Japan.

The Moffat Tunnel is a cathedral to engineering. Its simplicity occludes its sophistication, with the creation of nothing from something—the deliberate absence of rock amid incalculable weight. The finalized engineering marvel has a ventilation system that performs a complete air exchange within the tunnel in 18 minutes. The seemingly endless stone archway has intricately designed and perfectly positioned “umbrellas” to disperse alpine lake seepage to either side of the tracks. During construction, on February 15, 1925, tunneling progress stalled 1,100 feet directly under Crater Lake as 1,800 gallons per minute of water began flowing into the tunnel. At the suggestion of electrician K.S. Weston, crews ventured to the lake, cut through three feet of ice, and poured in 10 pounds of chloride of lime. Shortly thereafter, the presence of lime was detected inside of the tunnel. In an attempt to close the seam, a stick of dynamite was tossed into the lake, and the flow rate dropped drastically to 150 gallons per minute and then slowed to a trickle. Multiple times per day, the visceral vibration of mechanical thunder reverberates through the bowels of the earth.

In the management of cancer, a big problem with traditional methods has been that the patient can perceive the treatment as almost worse than the disease, since the chemicals given to attack the cancer cells also attack many other types of cell. In the frontline of cancer drug development today is a sophisticated range of drugs with names ending in ‘mab’, standing for monoclonal antibody. One half of the therapeutic molecule is an antibody against specific proteins on the surface of the target cancer cells and the other half is an enzyme. (This strategy relies on the surprising fact that, often, if the genes for two proteins are joined end to end, they successfully encode an enlarged protein combining both functions—i.e. both halves still fold successfully.) When this delivery vehicle reaches its destination, the whole molecule is taken up into the cells. The other half, chemically attached to the antibody, is the enzyme ‘warhead’ that inflicts the damage. The enzyme itself could be one that, for example, attacks the cells’ nucleic acids.

KIRKUS REVIEWS BOOK REVIEW A retired professor explores the life and writings of Carl Sandburg in this debut book. “During the first half of the twentieth century,” Quinley writes, “Carl Sandburg seemed to be everywhere and do everything.” Though best known for his Pulitzer Prize–winning poetry and multivolume biography of Abraham Lincoln, Sandburg had a wide-ranging career as a public intellectual, which included stints in journalism as a columnist and investigative reporter, in musicology as a leading advocate and performer of folk music, and in the nascent movie industry as a consultant and film critic. He also dabbled in political activism, children’s literature, and novels. Not only does Quinley, a retired college administrator and professor, hail Sandburg as a 20th-century icon (“If my grandpa asks you a question,” his grandchildren joke, “the answer is always Carl Sandburg”), but much of his own life has been adjacent to that of the poet as well. Born in Maywood, Illinois, a “few blocks” from Sandburg’s home 30 years prior, Quinley would eventually move to the Appalachian Mountains. He lived just a few miles from Sandburg’s famed residence in Hendersonville, North Carolina. As a docent for the Carl Sandburg Home National Historic Site, the author was often asked for literature about the luminary’s life. And though much has been written about Sandburg, biographies on the iconoclast are either out of print or are tomes with more than 800 pages. Eschewing comprehensiveness for brevity, Quinley seeks to fill this void in the literary world by offering readers a short introduction to Sandburg’s life and writings. At just 122 pages, this accessible book packs a solid punch, providing readers with not just the highlights of Sandburg’s life, but also a sophisticated analysis of his passions, poetry, and influence on American culture. This engaging approach that’s tailored to a general audience is complemented by an ample assortment of historical photographs. And while its hagiographic tone may annoy some readers, this slim volume is backed by more than 260 endnotes and delivers an extensive bibliography for readers interested in learning more about the 20th century’s “voice of America.” A well-written, concise examination of a literary legend Kirkus Indie, Kirkus Media LLC, 2600 Via Fortuna Suite 130 Austin, TX 78746 indie@kirkusreviews.com

Keith was sophisticated enough to understand the inherent risk of options; buying options wasn't as dangerous as short selling, because your potential for loss was capped, because you could always let the options expire. You paid a fee for the right to buy a certain number of shares of a stock at a certain price by a certain date. Sold in 100-share blocks, the fee was based on demand, which related to where people thought the stock price was going. Because the fee you paid for those 100-share blocks was a fraction of the pegged price, you could leverage yourself into a very large position with a relatively small amount of money. If the price went up, you could make a lot; if it went down, your options were worthless, but you only lost what you initially paid. A full 80 percent of the options bought by retail traders like him expired worthless; but when you only had a little to work with, there was no better way to shoot for the moon. Fifty-three thousand dollars was a lot, considering he had a two-year-old, a house, a wife. It was as much money as his dad earned in a year when he was younger. But Keith was that sure, even when the stock was hovering around $5 a share, that he had found value that others had missed.

It's hard here not to recall Ursula Le Guin's famous short story 'The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas', about the imaginary city of Omelas, a city which also made do without kings, wars, slaves or secret police. We have a tendency, Le Guin notes, to write off such a community as 'simple', but in fact these citizens of Omelas were 'not simple folk, not dulcet shepherds, noble savages, bland utopians. They were not less complex than us.' The trouble is just that 'we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid.' [...] Omelas had some problems too. But the point remains: why do we assume that people who have figured out a way for a large population to govern and support itself without temples, palaces and military fortifications - that is, without overt displays of arrogance, self-abasement and cruelty - are somehow less complex than those who have not? Why would we hesitate to dignify such a place with he name of 'city'?

There are sophisticated investors who will straddle a short by buying a call option for $51. If the trend did turn up and the stock price went to $60, the investor would pay $51 per share instead of $60 a share, again minimizing their exposure.

She hopped off the counter, ducked her head under me to catch my gaze, and palmed my face. “No, he was angry and provoked. You took a bullet for me, Romeo.” I scowled. “Don’t be dramatic.” “Thank you.” Since I’d made no progress finding the starting point to stitch myself, I cleared my throat, stepping back. “You’re welcome. Now leave.” “I want you.” Her hand ran the length of my chest up to my shoulder. I want you, too, which is why I need you to get the hell away from here.I no longer recognize myself or my actions where you’re concerned. You’ve become a liability I cannot afford. Rather than kick her out, I set the needle and thread down. “You can ride my thigh.” “I want to ride your cock.” She teased up the short hem of her olive satin dress. “When you forced me to tag along to Le Bleu, didn’t you say you’ll fuck me if I behave? I behaved.” “I said I’ll fuck you when you’re on your period.” “I interpreted that differently.” “It’s not a Benedict de Spinoza book. It was not open to different interpretations.” “Whatever. That last time wasn’t so great anyway.” Contrary to her words, her dress inched up, flirting with the border of her lace panties. “It happened so long ago that I don’t even remember much. Was I even there? Were you?” Egging me on wouldn’t work. Sadly for her, I was more sophisticated than that. She continued, undeterred. “Oliver told me you’re a born-again virgin. You know your pee pee has other functions, right?” “Leave, Dallas.” (Chapter 55)

Overall, the success of a Treasury auction depends on investor demand. Institutional investors such as insurance companies, foreign central banks, hedge funds, money funds, states, municipalities, Savings and Loans, credit unions, pension funds, and small local banks are all major participants. Depending on who buys a certain Treasury determines how much supply is available in the Repo market. For example, if a large amount of the auction is purchased by securities dealers and hedge funds, there’s plenty of supply around the Repo market. Dealers and hedge funds are leveraged players who loan their securities into the Repo market to finance their purchases. That keeps those securities readily available in the market. If, on the other hand, a large amount is purchased by end-user portfolios, such as investors who are more retail and less sophisticated, then there’s less supply available in the Repo market.

But three flaws still existed. There was no regulation. With all the growth in the market, there were no calls to regulate Repo financing, securities dealers, or government bonds. The securities rules set up in the 1930s mainly targeted individual investors, the stock market, and banks. For years, there was never an outcry to regulate the government bond market. Large, sophisticated investors buying and selling AAA-rated, risk free, government bonds was not high on the to-do list. And free markets were much more a rallying cry in the 1980s than it is today. Then, and this is a big one, it was still market convention to price Repo transactions without including the coupon accrued interest. Accrued interest was basically just ignored by the Repo market. Third, there was uncertainty in terms of the legal status of Repo. What happened if a Repo counterparty went bankrupt or became insolvent? Was Repo a secured loan or a sale with an agreement to repurchase? No one really knew and it was never tested. Even the bankruptcy court was unsure whether a Repo was a collateralized loan or a sale and buy-back.

Throughout the over 200 years of the field of biogeography, its researchers have discovered some strikingly general patterns in biological diversity, and have advanced an equally intriguing set of explanations for the forces driving those patterns. Despite the many levels, qualitative features, and potential quantitative means of measuring biological diversity, the overwhelming majority of these studies have focused on just one or two relatively simple, but intuitively valuable measures—species richness and endemicity. Species richness is a simple count of the number of species in a particular area of interest (e.g. the number of fish in a pond, lake, or ocean basin). It is a direct, albeit simplistic expression of our innate value for the more complex. But our instinctive valuation of diversity is a bit more ecologically sophisticated than this, as it is also influenced by our apparently innate attraction to the rarest, most precious “gems” of the natural world. A simple thought experiment should bear this out: given two assemblages with the same species richness—one comprising species common to most other ecosystems, and the other solely comprising endemics (so rare that they occur nowhere else), nearly all of us would be drawn to the latter assemblage because it has high endemicity. Beyond this instinctive attraction to the most rare, there clearly is a more pragmatic reason for valuing endemic species over the more broadly distributed (cosmopolitan) ones. If an endemic is lost from its assemblage, it disappears globally and the legacy of many thousands of generations of natural selection are irrevocably lost as well.

We must further observe that Dewey fell short of satisfying his own requirements of practicality and warranted assertion; his pragmatism, by attempting to suppress the standard-problems of epistemological theory, failed to be useful or verified. First, it shortsightedly selected which problems to concentrate upon and what standard to use in assessing the usefulness of certain answers. For instance, it is perfectly conceivable that some belief might work well for the present, but in the long run not really be useful ('true'). 'Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die' might conceivably work well for someone; it might help him adjust to his secular social environment, ease his psychological frustrations, and be more efficient in attaining the securities and comforts of life. And scientific investigation has verified that everyone does die. A sophisticated case for this; plan of action,' then might very well pass the pragmatist's test. Hence, he could accept it as 'true' and ignore the 'irrelevant, abstract, and (here-and-now) inconsequential' theories of the eschatological religions. Yet should the threat of an afterlife, where man's deeds are judged accurately describe the real situation, 'eat, drink and be merry' would quite obviously be impractical. Dewey's quest for security instead of certainly, then, cannot be satisfied until one first arrives at certainty-for instance, as to the question of men's destines. Since the problem of an after-life is not subject to the trail-and-error method of scientific experimentation, it must needs be resolved on somewhat other grounds, which means that Dewey would be forced to confront the difficult philosophic issues traditionally associated with epistemology just as his scholarly predecessors did. Pragmatism is extremely impractical and insecure if it abandons, as it does, the quest for intellectual certainty.

The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist: a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain. If you can’t lick ’em, join ’em. If it hurts, repeat it. But to praise despair is to condemn delight, to embrace violence is to lose hold of everything else. We have almost lost hold; we can no longer describe a happy man, nor make any celebration of joy.

She thought of Leftrin and tried to see him dispassionately. He was uncouth and unschooled. He told jokes at the table, and she’d seen him laugh so hard that tea spewed from his mouth, at a coarse jest from one of his sailors. He didn’t shave every day, nor wash as often as a gentleman should. The elbows of his shirts and the knees of his trousers were scuffed with work. The short nails of his wide hands were broken and rough. Where Hest was tall and lean and elegant, Leftrin was perhaps an inch taller than she was, wide shouldered and thick bodied. Her female friends in Bingtown would turn aside if a man like that spoke to them on the street. Then she thought of his gray eyes, gray as the river he loved, and her heart melted. She thought of the ruddy tops of his unshaven cheeks, and how his lips seemed redder and fuller than Hest’s sophisticated smile. She longed to kiss that mouth, to feel those calloused hands clasp her close. She missed sleeping in his bunk, missed the smell of him in the room and on the bedding. She wanted him as she’d never wanted anything or anyone before. At the thought of him, her body warmed even as tears filled her eyes. She sat up straight and dashed the useless water from her eyes. “Take what you can have, for the short time you can have it,” she counseled herself sternly.

My hope and intent is to provide a wide range of resources and ideas that provoke real questions and considerations under the surface of common dialogue. With a definite thrust toward clues for moving beyond limiting patterns that restrict our personal and communal evolution and experience of, as well as effectiveness in, life. Part of that is about giving different angles of insight into the why and how of developing skills, whatever they may be. I think the larger discussion, or maybe the more relevant one surrounding skills development, involves what quality of fuel is being used to run the skill. Inevitably, and very quickly, this enters into considerations of how much of oneself one brings to the show. For example, anyone can learn a sophisticated skill in an extremely short period of time, once they’re completely convinced of the need, benefit and value of doing so and find enough full-bodied conviction to engage it accordingly (“You never hear anyone practicing a language; they simply listen and then begin to speak.” — Wade Davis).

Foucault thus provides a sophisticated, language-based version of the class antagonisms of Marx - he relies on beliefs about the inherent evil of the individual's class position, or professional position, seen as `discourse', regardless of the morality of his or her individual conduct.

How did she look amazing, sophisticated, stunningly beautiful and idealistically angelic! What was she wearing, a classic kind of dress short enough to tempt the palette but not too short as if to look sleazy or cheap.

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.

Many have questioned how Lyndon Johnson could have put his closest protégé and right hand man John Connally in mortal danger by having him ride with JFK in the presidential limousine in the Dallas motorcade . Indeed, Johnson maneuvered desperately to get Connally moved to the vice-presidential car and substitute his archenemy Yarborough in the presidential vehicle. Senator George Smathers said in his memoirs that JFK complained to him prior to the trip about an effort by LBJ to get first lady Jacqueline Kennedy to ride in the vice presidential car, an idea JFK flatly rejected.39 Shortly before Kennedy’s death in the motorcade LBJ would visit the president’s hotel room and try again to convince him to have Connally and Yarborough swap places. Again, JFK refused, and Johnson stormed from the room after a shouting match.40 The outburst was so loud that first lady Jacqueline Kennedy expressed to her husband that Johnson “sounded mad.”41 Perhaps this explains LBJ’s taciturn behavior from the moment the presidential motorcade left Love Field for Dealey Plaza. An earlier rain had subsided, giving way to sunny skies. The crowds were large and friendly, yet LBJ stared straight ahead and never cracked a smile or waved to the crowds as did Lady Bird, Senator Yarborough, the Connallys, and the Kennedys. LBJ would actually tell Robert Kennedy, “of all things in life, this [campaigning] is what I enjoy most.”42 Normally, the gregarious Johnson would wave his hat, pose and wave to the crowd and shout “howdy,” but on this day he seemed non-expressive and focused. New 3-D imaging analysis and more sophisticated photographic analysis now show without question that LBJ ducked to the floor of his limousine before the first shots were fired.43

Right now, We are living in perhaps the most exciting time in history to buy, own or play that eternal instruments, The piano Cover. What is your goal is to purchase something as small as software that can record what you want to play, a newly designed player piano, a digital machine or a classic phonetic model, there have never been as many options for the trencherman. Player Pianos Also called reproducing pianos. this class of instrument describe a modern update on the paper-outcry player pianos you keep in mind from old movies, and they have grown enormously in popularity over the final decennial. These are not digital instruments they are real, philological pianos with hammers and rope that can be played generally. but they can also start themselves. using filthy electronic technology. Instead of shove paper, they take their hint from lethargic disks, specially formatted CDs or internal memory systems. different manufacturers offer vast sanctum of pre-recorded titles for their systems. music in every genre from pop to the classics filed by some of the earth’s top pianists. These sophisticated systems arrest every nuance of the original performances and play them back with dramatic accuracy providing something that’s actually so much better than CD fidelity because the activities are live. Watch my new cover : Dancing on my own piano Thanks to these new systems, many people who do not play the piano are enjoying live piano music at any time of at morning, night and day. How many they are concurrent dinners for two or entertaining a houseful of partygoers, these high-tech pianos take centre period. For people who do play the piano, these systems can be used to record their own piano deeds, Interface by- Computers, aid in music education, assist with composing and many other applications. In short, these modern marvels aren’t your grandfather's’ player pianos! If you want to learn see the video first : Dancing on my own piano cover

Addicted to the short-term results, business today has largely become a series of quick fixes added on one after another after another. The short-term tactics have become so sophisticated that an entire economy has developed to service the manipulations, equipped with statistics and quasi-science. Direct marketing companies, for example, offer calculations about which words will get the best results on each piece of direct mail they send out.

No foreign architect of stature, such as I. M. Pei, resides in Japan. Foreign architects come to Japan on short-term contracts, erect a skyscraper or a museum, and then leave. But subtle and sophisticated approaches to services and design—the core elements of modern building technology—cannot be transmitted in this way. Japan is left with the empty shells of architectural ideas, the hardware without the software.

David Viniar, CFO of Goldman Sachs, claimed as the global financial crisis broke in August 2007 that his bank had experienced ‘25 standard deviation events’ several days in a row. But anyone with a knowledge of statistics (a group that must be presumed to include Viniar) knows that the occurrence of several ‘25 standard-deviation events’ within a short time is impossible. What he meant to say was that the company’s risk models failed to describe what had happened. Extreme observations are generally the product of ‘off-model’ events. If you toss a coin a hundred times and all the tosses are heads, you may have encountered a once in a lifetime statistical freak; but look first for a simpler explanation. For all their superficial sophistication, the masters of the universe had no real understanding of what was going on before them.

The two revolutions, therefore, taken together, must be understood as a centuries-long process of fundamental change in which the triumphant Western worldview of colonial days is replaced by a planetary understanding of the meaning of human existence that so transcends particular national differences as to enable the human species to create a planetary peace in the absence of an imperial power to enforce its particular institutions on anyone. In short, a coming to maturity of the human species. A transformation of this profound a depth must necessarily take form in the actions of the most capable nation on the planet, and Revel, after surveying the various claimants to leadership, decided that the United States fulfilled the basic requirements such a role entailed. He acclaimed the United States as the prototype nation in a process of world transformation. He cited many factors present in the United States but absent or improperly developed in other nations as justification for his choice. The United States had a continuing pattern of growth and economic prosperity unmatched by any other nation, a technological excellence unrivaled by anyone else, and a high level of basic research that would continue to provide increasingly sophisticated insights into the nature of basic scientific and social problems. Revel also felt that the United States was culturally oriented toward the future, whereas the European countries were directed toward the past, and the Communists were mired in theoretical and doctrinal considerations, rendering them incapable of confronting rapid and continued change. The

Apple may not do customer research to decide what products to make, but it absolutely pays attention to how customers use its products. So the marketing team working on the iMovie HD release scheduled for Macworld, on January 11, 2005, decided to shoot a wedding. The ceremony it filmed was gorgeous: a sophisticated, candlelit affair at the Officers’ Club of San Francisco’s Presidio. The bride was an Apple employee, and the wedding was real. There was one problem with the footage, however. Steve Jobs didn’t like it. He watched it the week before Christmas, recalled Alessandra Ghini, the marketing executive managing the launch of iLife. Jobs declared that the San Francisco wedding didn’t capture the right atmosphere to demonstrate what amateurs could do with iMovie. “He told us he wanted a wedding on the beach, in Hawaii, or some tropical location,” said Ghini. “We had a few weeks to find a wedding on a beach and to get it shot, edited, and approved by Steve. The tight time frame allowed for no margin for error.” With time short and money effectively no object, the team went into action. It contacted Los Angeles talent agencies as well as hotels in Hawaii to learn if they knew of any weddings planned—preferably featuring an attractive bride and groom—over the New Year’s holiday. They hit pay dirt in Hollywood: A gorgeous agency client and her attractive fiancé were in fact planning to wed on Maui during the holiday. Apple offered to pay for the bride’s flowers, to film the wedding, and to provide the couple with a video. In return, Apple wanted rights for up to a minute’s worth of footage of its choosing.

That July, Xerox’s Display Word Processing Task Force endorsed the plan. For a few short, glorious weeks, official Xerox policy was to service the growing market for electronic word processing with the Alto III, a programmable personal computer that would bear the same relationship to the competition’s glorified typewriters as a Harley does to a tricycle. Ellenby’s group was on target to engineer an inexpensive computer-cum-word processor and printing system for shipment to customers by mid-1978. Had it done so, Xerox would have beaten the IBM PC to market by three years—with an infinitely more sophisticated machine. But it was not to happen. Bob Potter was not on board and never would be.

even the most urbane sophisticate seemed able to lay hands upon a pitchfork and burning torch at very short notice.

Self-propagating systems all have a hardwired tendency to pursue short-term advantage in order to outcompete other systems’ in a context of Natural Selection, even if doing so destroys the superset of which it was a smaller part. The real paradox is that just as a civilization achieves sufficient technological sophistication to be able to attempt intergalactic space travel, it would have already advanced far enough along the trajectory of competitive behaviour to have destroyed itself or its environment. The crucial window of time between the two is therefore more like a vanishing mediator or an impossible object than something which could be achieved in reality, since achieving the ultimate technological feat requires the system to advance beyond the point of self-destruction.

Over the next few years, the traditional definition of what a 'published book' is will have less meaning,” he says. “Individuals will increasingly use the Internet as a first stage to publish their work, whether they are books, short stories, works in progress, or articles on their area of expertise. The best of this work will turn into physical books. I tend to be sanguine about the book industry’s prospects because a whole new and efficient means of first-step publishing is emerging and rapidly becoming more sophisticated.

A few years ago, most of these authors wouldn’t have been published at all—and that would have been enough to discourage many of them from writing a book in the first place. But today, the economics of publishing have fallen so low that nearly everyone can do it. That means people can write books for whatever reason they want, and they don’t need to depend on some publisher deciding if the book is worth taking to market. The effect of this is being felt throughout the industry, right up to the giant booksellers. In 2005, Barnes & Noble sold 20 percent more unique titles than it had in 2004, something its CEO, Steve Riggio, attributes to three forces: (1) the efficiencies of print-on-demand, which keeps more books in print; (2) the increase in the number of smaller and independent publishers; and (3) self-publishing. “Over the next few years, the traditional definition of what a 'published book' is will have less meaning,” he says. “Individuals will increasingly use the Internet as a first stage to publish their work, whether they are books, short stories, works in progress, or articles on their area of expertise. The best of this work will turn into physical books. I tend to be sanguine about the book industry’s prospects because a whole new and efficient means of first-step publishing is emerging and rapidly becoming more sophisticated.” One of the big differences between the head and the tail of producers is that the farther down you are in the tail, the more likely you are to have to keep your day job. And that’s okay. The distinction between “professional” producers and “amateurs” is blurring and may, in fact, ultimately become irrelevant. We make not just what we’re paid to make, but also what we want to make. And both can have value.

The same thing appears to be true where the debate over the existence of God is concerned. There are, of course, a number of standard objections to the traditional arguments for God’s existence. But there has also been in recent decades a great revival of interest among philosophers in the philosophy of religion in general and in the traditional theistic arguments in particular. Many contemporary philosophers of religion hold that the traditional arguments can be reformulated in a way that makes them immune to the usual objections, and that many of those objections rest in the first place on misunderstandings or even caricatures. So philosophically sophisticated is the work of these recent defenders of traditional religious belief, and so significant is the challenge it poses to atheistic naturalism, that the prominent atheist philosopher Quentin Smith has gone as far as to concede that “the great majority of naturalist philosophers have an unjustified belief that naturalism is true and an unjustified belief that theism (or supernaturalism) is false.” Smith’s view is not that these naturalistic philosophers are mistaken – as an atheist, he shares their naturalism – but rather that most of his fellow naturalists and atheists have not made a serious attempt to grapple with the powerful arguments that can and have been made for the other side, so that the level of confidence they have in the truth of their own position is unwarranted. The question of whether God exists is, in short, as live a philosophical issue as it ever was, and cannot reasonably be assumed to have been settled in a way that would provide support for a presumption in favor of naturalism and materialism.

In life as in story," writes Arthur Frank, "one event is expected to lead to another." Our medical system has sold us a story of remedy, progress, technology, professionalism, and trimph. Frank suggests that our society is willing to hear only those illness narratives that conform to the idae of "restitution": "I was well, I got sick, I am well again." "It's nothing," we insist before a procedure, knowing that medicine will shortly deliver a triumph." "I'm fine," we say afterward, as though nothing has fundamentally shifted inside us. We crave the clean plot arc, one those around us can understand and stomach. When we try to tell the story of the phone calls, pointless and insane, our listeners lean away. And yet we cannot separate individual treatments, however sophisticated, from the system in which they are rendered, if that system is providing nto safety and care but frustration, futility, and impotence. If that system creates experiences that look less like restitution and more like what Frank calls chaos narratives. "In the chaos narrative, troubles go all the way down to bottomless depths," writes Frank. "What can be told only begins to suggest all that is wrong. The second feature of the chaos narrative...is the syntatic structure of 'and then and then and then.'... "The lack of any coherent sequence is an initial reason why chaos stories are hard to hear;...they are threatening. The anxiety these stories provoke inhibits hearing...The story traces the edges of a wound that can only be told around...In the lived chaos there is no mediation, only immediacy. The body is imprisoned in the frustrated needs of the moment." Chaos narratives, writes Frank, expose the fundamental contingency at the heart of living, allthe ways we cannot control our bodies or our lives, all the ways our lives can be wasted, and they are, for this reason, unbearable.

Like most children of her era, she’d been taught to believe that the genome—the sequence of base pairs expressed in the chromosomes in every nucleus of the body—said everything there was to say about the genetic destiny of an organism. A small minority of those DNA sequences had clearly defined functions. The remainder seemed to do nothing, and so were dismissed as “junk DNA.” But that picture had changed during the first part of the twenty-first century, as more sophisticated analysis had revealed that much of that so-called junk actually performed important “roles in the functioning of cells by regulating the expression of genes. Even simple organisms, it turned out, possessed many genes that were suppressed, or silenced altogether, by such mechanisms. The central promise of genomics—that by knowing an organism’s genome, scientists could know the organism—had fallen far short as it had become obvious that the phenotype (the actual creature that met the biologist’s eye, with all of its observable traits and behaviors) was a function not only of its genotype (its DNA sequences) but also of countless nanodecisions being made from moment to moment within the organism’s cells by the regulatory mechanisms that determined which genes to express and which to silence. Those regulatory mechanisms were of several types, and many were unfathomably complex. Had it not been for the sudden intervention of the Agent, the biologists of Old Earth would have devoted at least the “remaining decades of the century to cataloging these mechanisms and understanding their effects—a then-new science called epigenetics. Instead of which, on Cleft, in the hands of Eve Moira and the generations of biologists she reared, it became a tool. (...) Thousands of years later, epigenetics was sufficiently well understood to be programmed into the DNA of some of the newly created species that would be let loose on the surface of New Earth. And one of the planks in the Get It Done platform was to use epigenetics for all it was worth. So rather than trying to sequence and breed a new subspecies of coyote that was optimized for, and that would breed true in, a particular environment, the GID approach was to produce a race of canines that would, over the course of only a few generations, become coyotes or wolves or dogs—or something that didn’t fit into any of those categories—depending on what happened to work best. They would all start with a similar genetic code, but different parts of it would end up being expressed or suppressed depending on circumstances. And no particular effort would be made by humans to choose and plan those outcomes. They would seed New Earth and see what happened. If an ecosystem failed to “take” in a particular area, they “they would just try something else. In the decades since such species had been seeded onto New Earth, this had been going on all the time. Epigenetic transformation had been rampant. Still, when it led to results that humans saw, and happened to find surprising, it was known as “going epi.

Essentially, life is a game. There are natural and manmade laws that serve as rules. There is a beginning and an end. There is a game board we play on that we call planet Earth. And there are decisions and moves that we make that determine where and how we move on the board. Of course, we all want to win. Some of us do, and some of us don’t. But that begs the question, how DOES one win? Unlike a normal game, there is no time afterlife for us to bask in and enjoy a victory. And so, if we wish to truly experience winning the game of life, we must frame our definition of how we win accordingly so that we win while the game is still in play. Winning the game of life is not predicated merely by the quantity of material successes that we have accumulated by the end of it. Sure, it is enjoyable and important to acquire things within the game of life, but the accumulation of things like wealth, material excess, fame, or status tends to easily be confused as the ultimate endgame. But they are not. They are just parts of the game. And furthermore. Each win of this kind is generally short-lived. It is just like how winning a board game, video game, or sports game might feel good when it occurs and for a little while after, but the feeling soon fades and you return to your normal state. And so it is important that the state that you return to is a victory in it of itself. In the case of the game of life, not only is the sense of fulfillment from material wins short-lived, but the accumulation of material points does not matter much at the end of it. These points don’t go anywhere with you when you are dead and gone. Instead, it is about how much you enjoyed the game of pursuing the points in the first place. Ironically, you truly win the game of life when you realize and embrace that it IS a game. When you become aware that against all odds, you were somehow rendered into this existence and are now able to play and enjoy the most enthralling, sophisticated, and entertaining game ever to exist. A game that is so complex and uncertain that you can never completely predict what’s going to happen next. A game that is always updating. A game that you can come up with rules for, change existing ones, unlock new levels, and uncover hidden settings. And the quality of your life experience truly maximizes when you realize that you have already won by being able to do any of this.

Socrates’ search is for expertise in matters of importance in human life. Hence he is particularly keen to question self-styled experts in virtue, or what is worthwhile in life, such as the sophists claimed to be. He questions them on the topics that they claim to be experts in, and always succeeds in showing that they lack understanding of these topics, since they fail to explain satisfactorily why they say what they do, and indeed often make inconsistent claims. Socrates’ questions do not start from a position of his own, since this would only weaken the point that it is the other person who is supposed to display understanding of what he claims to know. When Socrates deflates the self-styled experts by showing them, just from premisses that they accept, that they don’t understand the subject they have been pontificating about, they cannot defend themselves by faulting his views, since these have not come into it.

the second half of the fifth century, intellectuals called sophists developed some philosophical skills, particularly in argument, and philosophical interests, particularly in ethical and social thought. The best known are Protagoras, Hippias, Gorgias and Prodicus.

In the second half of the fifth century, intellectuals called sophists developed some philosophical skills, particularly in argument, and philosophical interests, particularly in ethical and social thought. The best known are Protagoras, Hippias, Gorgias and Prodicus.

and then I spot him, crazy hot, I mean the most ridiculously handsomest sexiest man I’ve ever seen off screen, super cool, tall, broad shoulders, short dark hair and an aura of alpha sophistication.

On the other front, nuanced biblical attacks on American slavery faced rough going precisely because they were nuanced. This position could not simply be read out of any one biblical text; it could not be lifted directly from the page. Rather, it needed patient reflection on the entirety of the Scriptures; it required expert knowledge of the historical circumstances of ancient Near Eastern and Roman slave systems as well as of the actually existing conditions in the slave states; and it demanded that sophisticated interpretative practice replace a commonsensically literal approach to the sacred text. In short, this was an argument of elites requiring that the populace defer to its intellectual betters.

the development of sophisticated algorithms has its pros and cons. On the plus side, it becomes easier to discover content you actually want to watch. On the negative side, it makes it easier to become stuck in a never-ending loop, watching one video after the other. In a sense, instead of using the internet to find information or communicate with loved ones, the internet has become the one using you. It does so by hijacking your focus and making you unproductive and, as a result, restless.

David Christian, who, in March 2011, narrated the complete history of the universe for a TED audience and took all of 18 minutes to do it (17 minutes and 40 seconds, to be exact). Christian told me that he teaches a world-history course that examines the entire history of the universe—from the Big Bang 13 billion years ago to today. The Big History course is offered by The Teaching Company in a series of 48 half-hour lectures. Christian’s deep understanding of the subject helped him condense the content into just the right amount of time to grab the audience’s attention and inspire them to take better care of our fragile planet. “I’ve been teaching Big History now for over 20 years, so I have a pretty good feel for the story and that means I can tell it in many different versions,”6 Christian told me. E. F. Schumacher, economist and author of Small Is Beautiful, once said, “Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex. It takes a touch of genius and a lot of courage to move in the opposite direction.” Courage is the key word. It takes courage to keep things simple. It takes courage to put one picture on a PowerPoint slide instead of filling it with tiny text that most people in the audience won’t even be able to read. It takes courage to reduce the number of the slides in a presentation. It takes courage to speak for 18 minutes instead of rambling on for much longer. Leonardo da Vinci once said, “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.” Be sophisticated. Keep your presentations and pitches short and simple.

Everything we think we know about the world is a model. Every word and every language is a model. All maps and statistics, books and databases, equations and computer programs are models. So are the ways I picture the world in my head—my mental models. None of these is or ever will be the real world. Our models usually have a strong congruence with the world. That is why we are such a successful species in the biosphere. Especially complex and sophisticated are the mental models we develop from direct, intimate experience of nature, people, and organizations immediately around us. However, and conversely, our models fall far short of representing the world fully. That is why we make mistakes and why we are regularly surprised. In our heads, we can keep track of only a few variables at one time. We often draw illogical conclusions from accurate assumptions, or logical conclusions from inaccurate assumptions. Most of us, for instance, are surprised by the amount of growth an exponential process can generate. Few of us can intuit how to damp oscillations in a complex system.

Although my new bosses were smart, sophisticated, and supportive, and as demanding as my investment banking bosses, there was an intense focus on measuring relatively short-term results because they were measurable.

Animals make noises with expressive and signalling functions, but to these two purposes, virtually always present in human speech, man has added at least two more, the descriptive and the argumentative functions (though the most sophisticated forms of animal communication, like the dance of the bees, already include some very rudimentary descriptive messages). Language made possible, among so many other things, the formulation of descriptions of the world, and thus made understanding possible. It gave rise to the concepts of truth and falsity. In short it made the development of reason possible - or rather was itself a part of the development of reason - and thus marked the emergence of man from the animal kingdom.

I buried my face in his couch and I realized, for the first time but certainly not the last, that apologizing could be a weapon. You can apologize until people think you’re crazy. Your whole body can become an apology. You’re not skinny enough or smart enough or pretty enough or talented enough or sexy enough or popular enough or sophisticated enough or tall enough or short enough or blond enough or like the last girl enough and you’re sorry, you’re sorry, you’re sorry.

qual and quant researchers provide all the benefits of their primary approach, plus some of the benefits of their secondary approach, stakeholders will become sophisticated customers of research, and the entire organization will become more attuned to both the objectivist

heifer for a joke. The heifer bucked and Autie was thrown to the ground, receiving a bad cut on his forehead.) Lydia wanted Autie to come to Monroe to live with her, help David in his draying business and on the farm, and attend school. Maria agreed—she had more than enough children to look after and Monroe’s schools were thought to be superior to those of New Rumley.16 So Autie left home. Monroe had a population of 3,500 in 1849, equal parts French, English, and German. The second oldest town in southern Michigan, it had pretensions of sophistication. There was an established class, a group of leading citizens who owned or controlled the community’s economic life and liked to think of itself as composing an elect society. In Monroe, in short, Autie encountered snobbery for the first time. He saw it from the underside, too, for the Reeds were not members of the better classes. A retired Army officer with aristocratic pretensions, Major Joseph R. Smith, dismissed the Reeds with a

The fading relevance of the nature–nurture argument has recently been revived by the rise of evolutionary psychology. A more sophisticated understanding of Darwinian evolution (survival of the fittest) has led to theories about the possible evolutionary value of some psychiatric disorders. A simplistic view would predict that all mental illnesses with a genetic component should lower survival and ought to die out. ‘Inclusive fitness’, however, assesses the evolutionary value of a characteristic not simply on whether it helps that individual to survive but whether it makes it more likely that their offspring will survive. Richard Dawkins’s 1976 book The Selfish Gene gives convincing explanations of the evolutionary advantages of group support and altruism when individuals sacrifice themselves for others. A range of speculative hypotheses have since been proposed for the evolutionary advantage of various behaviour differences and mental illnesses. Many of these draw on ethological games-theory (i.e. the benefits of any behaviour can only be understood in the context of the behaviour of other members of the group). So depression might be seen as a safe response to ‘defeat’ in a hierarchical group because it makes the individual withdraw from conflict while they recover. Mania, conversely, with its expansiveness and increased sexual activity, is proposed as a response to success in a hierarchical tussle promoting the propagation of that individual’s genes. Changes in behaviour that look like depression and hypomania can be clearly seen in primates as they move up and down the pecking order that dominates their lives. The habitual isolation and limited need for social contact of individuals with schizophrenia has been rather imaginatively proposed as adaptive to remote habitats with low food supplies (and also a protection against the risk of infectious diseases and epidemics). Evolutionary psychology will undoubtedly increasingly influence psychiatric thinking – many of our disorders fit poorly into a classical ‘medical model’. Already it has helped establish a less either–or approach to the discussion. It is, however, a highly controversial area – not so much around mental disorders but in relation to social behaviour and particularly to gender specific behaviour. Here it is often interpreted as excusing a very male-orientated, exploitative worldview. Luckily that is someone else’s battle.

In 1994 Stephen Porges, who was a researcher at the University of Maryland at the time we started our investigation of HRV, and who is now at the University of North Carolina, introduced the Polyvagal theory, which built on Darwin’s observations and added another 140 years of scientific discoveries to those early insights. (Polyvagal refers to the many branches of the vagus nerve – Darwin’s “pneumogastric nerve” – which connects numerous organs, including the brain, lungs, heart, stomach, and intestines.) The Polyvagal Theory provided us with a more sophisticated understanding of the biology of safety and danger, one based on the subtle interplay between the visceral experiences of our own bodies and the voices and faces of the people around us. It explained why a kind face or a soothing tone of voice can dramatically alter the way we feel. It clarified why knowing that we are seen and heard by the important people in our lives can make us feel calm and safe, and why being ignored or dismissed can precipitate rage reactions or mental collapse. It helped us understand why focused attunement with another person can shift us out of disorganized and fearful states. In short, Porges’s theory made us look beyond the effects of fight or flight and put social relationships front and center in our understanding of trauma. It also suggested new approaches to healing that focus on strengthening the body’s system for regulating arousal.

... the type of leftist vanity that informs [Politically Correct English] is actually inimical to the Left's own causes. For in refusing to abandon the idea of themselves as Uniquely Generous and Compassionate (i.e., as morally superior), progressives lose the chance to frame their redistributive arguments in terms that are both realistic and realpolitikal. One such argument would involve a complex, sophisticated analysis of what we really mean by *self-interest*, particularly the distinctions between short-term financial self-interest and longer-term moral or social self-interest. As it is, though, liberals' vanity tends to grant conservatives a monopoly on appeals to self-interest, enabling the conservatives to depict progressives as pie-in-the-sky idealists and themselves as real-world back-pocked pragmatists. In short, leftists' big mistake here is not conceptual or ideological but spiritual and rhetorical--their narcissistic attachment to assumptions that maximize their own appearance of virtue tends to cost them both the theater and the war.

But ask: ‘Whose autonomy?’ Consider a person who is faced with a decision about whether to have life-prolonging treatment for cancer. The biological man may want to cling onto life with the help of any available technology. The sentimental family man might want to see his children for those extra few months. The considerate family man might want to die early so as ‘not to be a burden’ to his family. The man who has read John Stuart Mill and drafted a ‘life-plan’ might want to die as he has lived, with a proud independence unfettered by morphine and incontinence. The religious man might think that sophisticated therapy frustrates the will of God. And so on.

Berlin wrote songs for a number of Astaire films of the period: Top Hat, Follow the Fleet, On the Avenue, Carefree. The two men became close personal friends for the rest of their lives. But the choice of Astaire as a Hollywood leading man is, at first glance, puzzling. Certainly, he was an extraordinary dancer, and songwriters appreciated his accuracy and clarity when singing their songs, even if his voice was reedy and thin. But a leading man? Essentially, Astaire epitomized what Berlin and other Jews strove to achieve. He was debonair, polished, sophisticated. His screen persona was that of a raffish, outspoken fellow, not obviously attractive, whose audacity and romanticism and wit in the end won out. It didn’t hurt that he could dance. But even his dance—so smooth and elegant—was done mostly to jazz. Unlike a Gene Kelly, who was athletic, handsome, and sexy, Astaire got by on style. Kelly was American whereas Astaire was continental. In short, Astaire was someone the immigrant might himself become. It was almost like Astaire was himself Jewish beneath the relaxed urbanity. In a film like Top Hat he is audacious, rude, clever, funny, and articulate, relying mostly on good intentions and charm to win over the girl—and the audience. He is the antithesis of a Clark Gable or a Gary Cooper; Astaire is all clever and chatty, balding, small, and thin. No rugged individualist he. And yet his romantic nature and persistence win all. Astaire only got on his knees to execute a dazzling dance move, never as an act of submission. His characters were largely wealthy, self-assured, and worldly. He danced with sophistication and class. In his famous pairings with Ginger Rogers, the primary dance numbers had the couple dressed to the nines, swirling on equally polished floors to the strains of deeply moving romantic ballads.

Berlin wrote songs for a number of Astaire films of the period: Top Hat, Follow the Fleet, On the Avenue, Carefree. The two men became close personal friends for the rest of their lives. But the choice of Astaire as a Hollywood leading man is, at first glance, puzzling. Certainly, he was an extraordinary dancer, and songwriters appreciated his accuracy and clarity when singing their songs, even if his voice was reedy and thin. But a leading man? Essentially, Astaire epitomized what Berlin and other Jews strove to achieve. He was debonair, polished, sophisticated. His screen persona was that of a raffish, outspoken fellow, not obviously attractive, whose audacity and romanticism and wit in the end won out. It didn’t hurt that he could dance. But even his dance—so smooth and elegant—was done mostly to jazz. Unlike a Gene Kelly, who was athletic, handsome, and sexy, Astaire got by on style. Kelly was American whereas Astaire was continental. In short, Astaire was someone the immigrant might himself become. It was almost like Astaire was himself Jewish beneath the relaxed urbanity. In a film like Top Hat he is audacious, rude, clever, funny, and articulate, relying mostly on good intentions and charm to win over the girl—and the audience. He is the antithesis of a Clark Gable or a Gary Cooper; Astaire is all clever and chatty, balding, small, and thin. No rugged individualist he. And yet his romantic nature and persistence win all.

This means that the sophisticated form of the “carnal Christian” theory, which postulates that some people make a profession of faith, shortly thereafter return to a lifestyle indistinguishable from that of any unbeliever, yet finally make it into heaven by the skin of their teeth (“as one escaping through the flames”), finds no warrant whatever in this passage. Even the “worldly” or “carnal” Christian is still identifiably a Christian, and in this passage it is the church builders who barely escape the flames, not the “ordinary” church folk themselves.

The shortness of High Renaissance is typical of the fate of all the periods of classical style in modern times; since the end of feudalism the epochs of stability have been nothing but short episodes. The rigorous formalism of the High Renaissance has certainly remained a constant temptation for later generations, but, apart from short, mostly sophisticated, and educationally inspired movements, it has never prevailed again. On the other hand, it has proved to be the most important undercurrent in modern art; for even though the strictly formalistic style, based on the typical and the normative, was unable to hold its own against the fundamental naturalism of the modern age, nevertheless, after the Renaissance, a return to the incoherent, cumulative, co-ordinating formal methods of the Middle Ages was no longer possible. Since the Renaissance we think of a work of painting or sculpture as a concentrated picture of reality seen from a single and uniform point of view - a formal structure that arises from the tension between the wide world and the undivided subject opposed to the world. This polarity between art and the world was mitigated from time to time, but never again abolished. It represents the real inheritance of Renaissance.

The pub. It remained the only place in the world that had not evolved into anything more sophisticated. The buildings rose, the towers hit never- ending growth spurts, the concrete sidewalks turned to polycarbonate glass billboards, and the cars drove people. But the pubs—the pubs with their gritty melancholy—endured time. No matter how advanced this species grew to be, the human heart was never short of confusion and in need of the rugged, little lullaby of alcohol and alone time.

Let me amend that. Of course I’m sure it was done. Every generation likes to think that they discovered sex, but I’m sure that far more sophisticated people than me were experiencing cunnilingus in 1940, all over New York City—especially in the Village. But I’d never heard of it. God knows, I’d had everything else done to the flower of my femininity that summer, but not this. I’d been palmed and rubbed and penetrated, and certainly fingered and probed (my heavens, how the boys liked to poke about, and so vigorously, too)—but never this. His mouth had ended up between my legs so fast, and the sudden realization of his destination and his intent had shocked me to the point that I said “Oh!” and started to sit up, but he reached up one of his long arms, placed his palm on my chest, and firmly pressed me back down again, without once stopping what he was doing. “Oh!” I said again. Then I felt it. There was a sensation occurring here that I didn’t even know could occur. I took the sharpest inhale of my life, and I’m not sure I let my breath out for another ten minutes. I do feel that I lost the ability to see and hear for a while, and that something might have short-circuited in my brain—something that has probably never been fully fixed since. My whole being was astonished. I could hear myself making noises like an animal, and my legs were shaking uncontrollably (not that I was trying to control them), and my hands were gripping down so hard over my face that I left fingernail divots in my own skull. Then it became more. And after that, it became even more still. Then I screamed as though I were being run over by a train, and that long arm of his was reaching up again to palm my mouth, and I bit into his hand the way a wounded soldier bites on a bullet. And then it was the most, and I more or less died.