Spin Doctor Quotes

Do not work primarily for money; do your duty to patients first and let the money follow; our life is short, we don't live twice; the whirlwind will pick up the leaves and spin them, but then it will drop them and they will form a pile.

We're the new power, come to replace the old. Cameras in the head, children with microchips, spin doctors rewriting reality as it happens.

The conscious mind—the self or soul—is a spin doctor, not the commander in chief.

Just as we possess a potent physical immune system that protects us from threats to our physical well-being, so do we possess a potent psychological immune system that protects us from threats to our psychological well-being. When it comes to maintaining a sense of well-being, each of us is the ultimate spin doctor.21

In those moments, which were eternal I assure you, I had no location in the universe, nothing to grasp for that minimum of security which every creature needs merely to exist without suffering from the sensation that everything is spinning ever faster on a cosmic carousel with only endless blackness at the edge of that wheeling ride. I know that your condition differs from mine, and therefore you have no means by which to fully comprehend my ordeals just as I cannot fully comprehend yours. But I do acknowledge that both our conditions are unendurable, despite the doctor's second-hand platitude that nothing in this world is unendurable. I've even come to believe that the world itself, by its very nature, is unendurable. It's only our responses to this fact that deviate: mine being predominately a response of passive terror approaching absolute panic; yours being predominantly a response of gruesome obsessions that you fear you might act upon.

We never understood the tendency to underestimate us, we who had been baptized and delivered through pain, who grinned and bore agonies while managing to draw on wing-tipped eyeliner with a surgically steady hand. We plucked our eyebrows, waxed our upper lips, got razor burn on our crotches, held blades to the cups of our armpits. Shoes tore holes in the skin of our heels and crippled the balls of our feet. We endured labor and childbirth and C-sections, during which doctors literally set our intestines on a table next to our bodies while we were awake. We got acid facials. We punctured our foreheads with Botox and filled our lips and our breasts. We pierced our ears and wore pants that were too tight. We got too much sun. We punished our bodies in spin class. All these tiny sacrifices to make us appear more lithe and ladylike—the female of the species. The weaker sex. Secretly, they toughened our hides, sharpened our edges. We were tougher than we looked. The only difference was that now we were finally letting on.

Social media has given us the ability to twist the facts on a sweeping scale, transforming us into our own personal publicists and political spin doctors while provoking deep-seated misunderstanding and interpersonal division.

Currently where you are is on a huge globe with a relatively thin crust of stone, containing fire in its bowels, rotating on its own slightly tilted axis at 1,000 miles per hour in an easterly direction while simultaneously traveling in orbit around an enormous ball of burning hydrogen, 93,000,000 miles away at 66,000 miles per hour. That’s 66,000 miles per hour, or nineteen miles per second, which is much faster that you’ve maybe ever imagined, and means that you will be traveling nearly 60,000,000 miles this coming year. Beauty is, you don’t have to imagine it, you can feel it instead. And if you want to know what it’s like, simply stop. Be still, and in that stillness, whatever you are feeling in your belly: that’s it. this is what it feels like to go 66,000 miles per hour while spinning at one thousand.

Nothing meant anything that couldn’t be turned instantly into its opposite by any competent spin-doctor or spoon-bender. History and language had become so flexible, wrenched back and forth to suit each new agenda, that it seemed as if they might just simply snap in half and leave us floundering in a sea of mad Creationist revisions and greengrocers’ punctuation.

I have divided politicians into two categories: the Signposts and the Weathercocks. The Signpost says: 'This is the way we should go.' And you don't have to follow them but if you come back in ten years time the Signpost is still there. The Weathercock hasn’t got an opinion until they've looked at the polls, talked to the focus groups, discussed it with the spin doctors. And I've no time for Weathercocks, I'm a Signpost man. And in fairness, although I disagreed with everything she did, Mrs Thatcher was a Signpost. She said what she meant. Meant what she said. Did what she said she’d do if you voted for her. So everybody who voted for her shared responsibility for what happened. And I think that we do need a few more Signposts and few fewer Weathercocks.

Look, I really hate it when people say this sort of things... Do you know who I am? He lean a little closer and whisperer something. ALERT it cried, head spinning from side to side . EMERGENCY! IT IS THE DOC-TOR!

Our feelings provide meaning not only for our private lives, but also for social and political processes. When we want to know who should rule the country, what foreign policy to adopt and what economic steps to take, we don’t look for the answers in scriptures. Nor do we obey the commands of the Pope or the Council of Nobel Laureates. Rather, in most countries, we hold democratic elections and ask people what they think about the matter at hand. We believe that the voter knows best, and that the free choices of individual humans are the ultimate political authority. Yet how does the voter know what to choose? Theoretically at least, the voter is supposed to consult his or her innermost feelings, and follow their lead. It is not always easy. In order to get in touch with my feelings, I need to filter out the empty propaganda slogans, the endless lies of ruthless politicians, the distracting noise created by cunning spin doctors, and the learned opinions of hired pundits. I need to ignore all this racket, and attend only to my authentic inner voice. And then my authentic inner voice whispers in my ear ‘Vote Cameron’ or ‘Vote Modi’ or ‘Vote Clinton’ or whomever, and I put a cross against that name on the ballot paper – and that’s how we know who should rule the country.

But why, why all the hurt? Because, said Mr. Halloway. You need fuel, gas, someting to run a carnival on, don't you? Women live off gossip, and what's gossip but a swap of headaches, sour spit, arthritic bones, ruptured and mended flesh, indiscretions, storms of madness, calms after the storms? If some people didn't have something juicy to chew on, their choppers would prolapse, their souls with them. Multiply their pleasure at funerals, their chuckling through breakfast obituaries, add all the cat-fight marriages where folks spend careers ripping skin off each other and patching it back upside around, add quack doctors slicing persons to read their guts like tea leaves, then sewing them tight with fingerprinted thread, square the whole dynamite factory by ten quadrillion, and you got the black candlepower of this one carnival. All the meannesses we harbor, they borrow in redoubled spades. They're a billion times itchier for pain, sorrow, and sickness than the average man. We salt our lives with other people's sins. Our flesh to us tastes sweet. But the carnival doesn't care if it stinks by moonlight instead of sun, so long as it gorges on fear and pain. That's the fuel, the vapor that spins the carousel, the raw stuffs of terror, the excruciating agony of guilt, the scream from real or imagined wounds. The carnival sucks that gas, ignites it, and chugs along its way.

Now let’s take up the minorities in our civilization, shall we? Bigger the population, the more minorities. Don’t step on the toes of the dog-lovers, the cat-lovers, doctors, lawyers, merchants, chiefs, Mormons, Baptists, Unitarians, second-generation Chinese, Swedes, Italians, Germans, Texans, Brooklynites, Irishmen, people from Oregon or Mexico. The people in this book, this play, this TV serial are not meant to represent any actual painters, cartographers, mechanics anywhere. The bigger your market, Montag, the less you handle controversy, remember that! All the minor minor minorities with their navels to be kept clean. Authors, full of evil thoughts, lock up your typewriters. They did. Magazines became a nice blend of vanilla tapioca. Books, so the damned snobbish critics said, were dishwater. No wonder books stopped selling, the critics said. But the public, knowing what it wanted, spinning happily, let the comic books survive. And the three-dimensional sex-magazines, of course. There you have it, Montag. It didn’t come from the Government down. There was no dictum, no declaration, no censorship, to start with, no! Technology, mass exploitation, and minority pressure carried the trick, thank God. Today, thanks to them, you can stay happy all the time, you are allowed to read comics, the good old confessions, or trade journals.

This is the left hemisphere confabulating. It does this for all of us, every waking moment. It edits our conscious experiences, makes them comprehensible and palatable. It's the brain's spin-doctor.

My mind spins. This last stage of pregnancy has been positively surreal. Acquaintances ask me when I will have my second kid. Doctors prod me toward contraception. How bizarre to question a woman who can’t even picture herself with one baby about the logistics (or not) of a second. I

We concoct neologisms (quark, meme, clone, deep structure), invent slang (to spam, to diss, to flame, to surf the web, a spin doctor), borrow useful words from other languages (joie de vivre, schlemiel, angst, machismo), or coin new metaphors (waste time, vote with your feet, push the outside of the envelope).

Adversaries are divided not just by their competitive spin-doctoring but by the calendars with which they measure history and the importance they put on remembrance. The victims of a conflict are assiduous historians and cultivators of memory. The perpetrators are pragmatists, firmly planted in the present. Ordinarily

My vagina was green water, soft pink fields, cow mooing sun resting sweet boyfriend touching lightly with soft piece of blond straw. There is something between my legs. I do not know what it is. I do not know where it is. I do not touch. Not now. Not anymore. Not since. My vagina was chatty, can't wait, so much, so much saying, words talking, can't quit trying, can't quit saying, oh yes, oh yes. Not since I dream there's a dead animal sewn in down there with thick black fishing line. And the bad dead animal smell cannot be removed. And its throat is slit and it bleeds through all my summer dresses. My vagina singing all girl songs, all goat bells ringing songs, all wild autumn field songs, vagina songs, vagina home songs. Not since the soldiers put a long thick rifle inside me. So cold, the steel rod canceling my heart. Don't know whether they're going to fire it or shove it through my spinning brain. Six of them, monstrous doctors with black masks shoving bottles up me too. There were sticks, and the end of a broom. My vagina swimming river water, clean spilling water over sun-baked stones over stone clit, clit stones over and over. Not since I heard the skin tear and made lemon screeching sounds, not since a piece of my vagina came off in my hand, a part of the lip, now one side of the lip is completely gone. My vagina. A live wet water village. My vagina my hometown. Not since they took turns for seven days smelling like feces and smoked meat, they left their dirty sperm inside me. I became a river of poison and pus and all the crops died, and the fish. My vagina a live wet water village. They invaded it. Butchered it and burned it down. I do not touch now. Do not visit. I live someplace else now. I don't know where that is.

Silence is another element we find in classic fairy tales — girls muted by magic or sworn to silence in order to break enchantment. In "The Wild Swans," a princess is imprisoned by her stepmother, rolled in filth, then banished from home (as her older brothers had been before her). She goes in search of her missing brothers, discovers that they've been turned into swans, whereupon the young girl vows to find a way to break the spell. A mysterious woman comes to her in a dream and tells her what to do: 'Pick the nettles that grow in graveyards, crush and spin them into thread, then weave them into coats and throw them over your brothers' backs.' The nettles burn and blister, yet she never falters: picking, spinning, weaving, working with wounded, crippled hands, determined to save her brothers. All this time she's silent. 'You must not speak,' the dream woman has warned, 'for a single world will be like a knife plunged into your brothers' hearts.' You must not speak. That's what my stepfather said: don't speak, don't cry, don't tell. That's what my mother said as well, as we sat in hospital waiting rooms -- and I obeyed, as did my brothers. We sat as still and silent as stone while my mother spun false tales to explain each break and bruise and burn. Our family moved just often enough that her stories were fresh and plausible; each new doctor believed her, and chided us children to be more careful. I never contradicted those tales. I wouldn't have dared, or wanted to. They'd send me into foster care. They'd send my young brothers away. And so we sat, and the unspoken truth was as sharp as the point of a knife.

And in order to understand ourselves, a crucial step is to acknowledge that the ‘self’ is a fictional story that the intricate mechanisms of our mind constantly manufacture, update and rewrite. There is a storyteller in my mind that explains who I am, where I am coming from, where I am heading to, and what is happening right now. Like the government spin doctors who explain the latest political upheavals, the inner narrator repeatedly gets things wrong but rarely, if ever, admits it. And just as the government builds up a national myth with flags, icons and parades, so my inner propaganda machine builds up a personal myth with prized memories and cherished traumas that often bear little resemblance to the truth.

I'm cracking up in this fucking Fishbinder Problem Box. A terrible seizure is coming on, I can feel its sinister pulsation creeping up my spine as I gnaw my tail apprehensively, grinding my teeth with anxiety, wishing I had some DDT to drown these rats in misery, repetitive cycles of poetry, symptoms of psychotic activity, rhyming of lines endlessly, results in Mazes D and E, dervish spinning round me vis-a-vis, Poole, Broome, Helvicki, help me, please, somebody, take a look at my pedigree, Albino Number 243, Doctor of Psychology, rashes, warts, and a small goatee, expert in lobotomy, performed six times on a chimpanzee, sweet land of liberty, Jesus this is agony, poisonous snake subfamily, here he comes after me!

The later gods of ancient Greece and Rome, contrary to the popular impressions created by later Christian spin doctors, were the upholders of public morality and would bestow divine favor on individuals, families, and cities. Though subject to the same moral shortcomings as their Mesopotamian forebearers, the Greek gods legitimized rulers, inspired armies, and policed corrupt practices.

...Someone can intentionally fake blindness for some secondary gain (malingering)--a prisoner who says he can't see in order to try to avoid going directly to jail. It is not difficult to figure out when patients say they are blind but can actually see. We have a simple test that lets us determine whether the eyes are functioning. Using a rotating striped drum, we test for something called optokinetic nystagmus. as the drum spins, normal eyes will be seen moving back and forth. If a striped rotating drum is not available, you can always use a picture of J. Lo's rear. Move it back and forth, and any normal eyes will follow.

A good doctor. He would not let her take pills. Try each day just to laugh a little bit, it’s a good medicine, he said. Pills were a second option. I should have taken them. No. Better off to try laughing. Die laughing.

I know a life can be destroyed in an instant: a car spins out of control on a busy road, a doctor sits down to break bad news, or a love letter is discovered hidden in a place where its owner thought it never would be found. All these things can shatter a world in just a few moments. But is it possible for the opposite to happen—for a life to be created in a moment instead of destroyed? For a man to see a face and know it belongs to the woman he will spend the rest of his life with?

The ambulance crews brought the victims to us before the tires on the wreck stopped spinning. They salvaged people we’d never see in Missing, because no one would have tried to bring them to a hospital. Judging someone to be beyond help never crossed the minds of police, firemen, or doctors here. A

Adversaries are divided not just by their competitive spin-doctoring but by the calendars with which they measure history and the importance they put on remembrance. The victims of a conflict are assiduous historians and cultivators of memory. The perpetrators are pragmatists, firmly planted in the present.

I don't know if you've ever felt like that. That you wanted to sleep for a thousand years. Or just not exist. Or something like that. I think wanting that is very morbid, but I want it when I get like this. That's why I'm trying not to think. I just want it all to stop spinning. If this gets any worse, I might have to go back to the doctor. It's getting that bad again.

Mr. Douglas told us true. He knows why the sky is blue. Why the earth spins round and round, And where the next clue can be found. Ask him, maybe, will he tell you? His radio, those ads will sell you. Peppy song will make you wonder, If the world is going under. Bring him something from the doctor- -Nothing spicy-while he proctors. It may be those fizzy bubbles, Let him help you with your troubles.

I don’t know if you’ve ever felt like that. That you wanted to sleep for a thousand years. Or just not exist. Or just not be aware that you do exist. Or something like that. I think wanting that is very morbid, but I want it when I get like this. That’s why I’m trying not to think. I just want it all to stop spinning. If this gets any worse, I might have to go back to the doctor. It’s getting that bad again.

I don't know if you've ever felt like that. That you wanted to sleep for a thousand years. Or just not exist. Or just not be aware that you do exist. Or something like that. I think wanting that is very morbid, but I want it when I get like this. That's why I'm trying not to think. I just want it all to stop spinning. If this gets any worse, I might have to go back to the doctor again. It's getting that bad again.

You must not go into the burial places, and look about only for the tall monuments and the titled names. It is not the starred epitaphs of the Doctors of Divinity, the Generals, the Judges, the Honourables, the Governors, or even of the village nobles called Esquires, that mark the springs of our successes and the sources of our distinctions. These are rather effects than causes; the spinning-wheels have done a great deal more than these.

I turn on my heel, which is no easy feat in a gravel parking lot. Not losing eye contact with Galen, I stare him down until I get to the door he's opened for me. He seems unconcerned. In fact, he seems downright emotionless. "This better be good," I tell him as I plop down. "You should have returned my calls. Or my texts," he says, his voice tight. As he backs out of the parking space, I yank my cell out of my purse, perusing the texts. "Well, doesn't look like anyone died, so why the hell did you ruin my date?" It's the first time I've ever cursed at royalty and it's liberating. "Or is this a kidnapping? Is Grom in the trunk? Are you taking us on our honeymoon?" You're supposed to be hurting him, not yourself, moron. My lip trembles like the traitor it is. Even though I'm looking away, I can tell Galen's impassive expression has softened because of the way he says, "Emma." "Leave me alone, Galen." He pulls my chin to face him. I knock his hand away. "You can't go forty miles an hour on the interstate, Galen. You need to speed up.” He sighs and presses the gas. By the time we reach a less-embarrassing speed, I’ve abandoned my hurt for rage-o-plenty, struck by the realization that I’ve turned into “that girl.” Not the one who exchanges her doctorate for some kids and a three-bedroom two-bath, but the other kind. That girl who exchanges her dignity and chances for happiness for some possessive loser who beats her when she makes eye contact with some random guy working the hot dog stand. Not that Galen beats me, but after his little show, what will people think? He acted like a lunatic tonight, stalking me to Atlantic City, blowing up my phone, and threatening my date with physical violence. He made serial-killer eyes, for crying out loud. That might be acceptable in the watery grave, but by dry-land standards, it’s the ingredients for a restraining order. And why are we getting off the interstate? “Where are you taking me? I told you I want to go home.” “We need to talk,” he says quietly, taking a dark road just off the exit. “I’ll take you home after I feel you understand.” “I don’t want to talk. You might have realized that when I didn’t answer your calls.” He pulls over on the shoulder of Where-Freaking-Are-We Street. Shutting off the engine, he turns to me, putting his arm around the back of my seat. “I don’t want to break up.” One Mississippi…two Mississippi…”You followed me like a crazy person to tell me that? You ruined my date for that? Mark is a nice guy. I deserve a nice guy, don’t I, Galen?” “Absolutely. But I happen to be a nice guy, too.” Three Mississippi…four Mississippi…”Don’t you mean Grom? And you’re not a nice guy. You threatened Mark with physical pain.” “You threw Rayna through a window. Call it even?” “When are you going to get over that? Besides, she provoked me!” “Mark provoked me, too. He put his hand on your leg. We won’t even talk about the kiss on your cheek. Don’t think I didn’t hear you give him permission either.” “Oh, now that’s rich,” I snort, getting out of the car. Slamming the door, I scream at him. “Now you’re acting jealous on behalf of your brother,” I say, spinning in place. “Can Grom do anything without the almighty Galen helping him?

If you’re a fly, you keep flying and being a nuisance. If you lived in Linares at that time, you could never stop going out to the fields or ranches to tend to your crops or animals. You might close the store for a few days because of the initial shock, but you would open it again because, even if your relatives were sick or dead, your needs and the needs of others—those who sold to you and those who bought from you—persisted. If you lived at that time, you could not avoid having to go out to buy food, and not a day could pass without washing diapers or underpants, even if you sent your mother to the cemetery two hours earlier. In the midst of this crisis, you had tooth decay, infected toenails, and stomach upsets—slight or severe—that you put up with for a while before having to seek help from a doctor, if you could find one. Others went out to sell goat milk, or whistles, yo-yos, and spinning tops in the square, in the hope that there were still children alive to buy them.

A flash of lightning ghosts into the room, and when it leaves again, my eyes follow it back out to sea. In the window's reflection, I glimpse a figure standing behind me. I don't need to turn around to see who creates such a big outline-or who makes my whole body turn into a goose-bump farm. "How do you feel?" he says. "Better," I say to his reflection. He hops over the back of the couch and grabs my chin, turning my head side to side, up and down, all around, watching for my reaction. "I just did that," I tell him. "Nothing." He nods and unhands me. "Rach-Uh, my mom called your mom and told her what happened. I guess your mom called your doctor, and he said it's pretty common, but that you should rest a few more days. My mom insisted you stay the night since no one needs to be driving in this weather." "And my mother agreed to that?" Even in the dark, I don't miss his little grin. "My mom can be pretty persuasive," he says. "By the end of the conversation, your mom even suggested we both stay home from school tomorrow and hang out here so you can relax-since my mom will be home supervising, of course. Your mom said you wouldn't stay home if I went to school." A flash from the storm illuminates my blush. "Because we told her we're dating." He nods. "She said you should have stayed home today, but you threw a fit to go anyway. Honestly, I didn't realize you were so obsessed-ouch!" I try to pinch him again, but he catches my wrist and pulls me over his lap like a child getting a spanking. "I was going to say, 'with history.'" He laughs. "No you weren't. Let me up." "I will." He laughs. "Galen, you let me up right now-" "Sorry, not ready yet." I gasp. "Oh, no! The room is spinning again." I hold still, tense up. Then the room does spin when he snatches me up and grabs my chin again. The look of concern etched on his face makes me feel a little guilty, but not guilty enough to keep my mouth shut. "Works every time," I tell him, giving my best ha-ha-you're-a-sucker smirk. A snicker from the entryway cuts off what I can tell is about to be a good scolding. I've never heard Galen curse, but his glower just looks like a four-letter word waiting to come out. We both turn to see Toraf watching us with crossed arms. He is also wearing a ha-ha-you're-a-sucker smirk. "Dinner's ready, children," he says. Yep, I definitely like Toraf. Galen rolls his eyes and extracts me from his lap. He hops up and leaves me there, and in the reflection, I see him ram his fist into Toraf's gut as he passes. Toraf grunts, but the smirk never leaves his face. He nods his head for me to follow them. As we pass through the rooms, I try to remember the rich, sophisticated atmosphere, the marble floors, the hideous paintings, but my stomach makes sounds better suited to a dog kennel at feeding time. "I think your stomach is making mating calls," Toraf whispers to me as we enter the kitchen. My blush debuts the same time we enter the kitchen, and it's enough to make Toraf laugh out loud.

It was a sad fact that the commonest complaint in the outpatient department was “Rasehn . . . libehn . . . hodehn,” literally, “My head . . . my heart . . . and my stomach,” with the patient’s hand touching each part as she pronounced the words. Ghosh called it the RLH syndrome. The RLH sufferers were often young women or the elderly. If pressed to be more specific, the patients might offer that their heads were spinning (rasehn yazoregnal) or burning (yakatelegnal ), or their hearts were tired (lib dekam), or they had abdominal discomfort or cramps (hod kurteth), but these symptoms were reported as an aside and grudgingly, because rasehn-libehn-hodehn should have been enough for any doctor worth his salt. It had taken Matron her first year in Addis to understand that this was how stress, anxiety, marital strife, and depression were expressed in Ethiopia—somatization was what Ghosh said the experts called this phenomenon. Psychic distress was projected onto a body part, because culturally it was the way to express that kind of suffering. Patients might see no connection between the abusive husband, or meddlesome mother-in-law, or the recent death of their infant, and their dizziness or palpitations. And they all knew just the cure for what ailed them: an injection. They might settle for mistura carminativa or else a magnesium trisilicate and belladonna mixture, or some other mixture that came to the doctor’s mind, but nothing cured like the marfey—the needle. Ghosh was dead against injections of vitamin B for the RLH syndrome, but Matron had convinced him it was better for Missing to do it than have the dissatisfied patient get an unsterilized hypodermic from a quack in the Merkato. The orange B-complex injection was cheap, and its effect was instantaneous, with patients grinning and skipping down the hill. T

This afternoon, I went to my doctor. She did a check-up, then asked me questions about my life, including what sort of contraception Miles and I were using. I grew embarrassed, admitting the truth: pulling out. It was what I had used with almost every man. What if you get pregnant? Would you be okay with that? I tried to answer in an easy way, but soon my sentences got twisted up. After the appointment, I walked in the streets and called Teresa. I brought up my worries over paths not taken, and she said everyone had those, but often when you looked back on your life, you saw that the choices you made and the paths you went down were the right ones. She said it wasn’t a matter of choosing one life over another, but being sensitive to the life that wants to be lived through you. You need tension in order to create something—the sand in the pearl. She said my questioning and doubts were the sand. She said they were good and forced me to live with integrity, to interrogate what was important to me, and so to live the meaning of my life, rather than resort to convention. Then to try and discover and live my values, even if it may not seem like I’m moving forward in my life, while my friends appear to be moving forward in theirs—ticking off all the boxes. Ask only whether you are living your values, not whether the boxes are ticked. After our call, I realized the thing I always do: I try to imagine different futures for myself, what I would most like to occur. I don’t know why I do this, when any of the things I’ve hoped for—whenever I have actually got them—are nothing like what I imagined they’d be. Then why don’t I spend time acclimating myself to what actually occurred? Why not make peace with the way things are, given what I know about life from actually living? Instead I spin fantasies, when the only happiness I have ever known has occurred without my design.

The issue is not merely one of false stories, incorrect facts, or even election campaigns and spin doctors: the social media algorithms themselves encourage false perceptions of the world. People click on the news they want to hear; Facebook, YouTube, and Google then show them more of whatever it is that they already favor, whether it is a certain brand of soap or a particular form of politics. The algorithms radicalize those who use them too. If you click on perfectly legitimate anti-immigration YouTube sites, for example, these can lead you quickly, in just a few more clicks, to white nationalist sites and then to violent xenophobic sites. Because they have been designed to keep you online, the algorithms also favor emotions, especially anger and fear. And because the sites are addictive, they affect people in ways they don't expect. Anger becomes a habit. Divisiveness becomes normal. Even if social media is not yet the primary news source for all Americans, it already helps shape how politicians and journalists interpret the world and portray it. Polarization has moved from the online world into reality. The result is a hyper-partisanship that adds to the distrust of "normal" politics, "establishment" politicians, derided "experts," and "mainstream" institutions--including courts, police, civil servants--and no wonder. As polarization increases, the employees of the state are invariably portrayed as having been "captured" by their opponents. It is not an accident that the Law and Justice Party in Poland, the Brexiteers in Britain, and the Trump administration in the United States have launched verbal assaults on civil servants and professional diplomats. It is not an accident that judges and courts are now the object of criticism, scrutiny, and anger in so many other places too. There can be no neutrality in a polarized world because there can be no nonpartisan or apolitical institutions.

In that moment, I finally understood for the first time why -- throughout this journey -- I kept thinking about that day when I got terribly sick in rural Vietnam. When I yelled for drugs to stop my worst symptoms -- the extreme room-spinning nausea -- the doctor told me: "You need your nausea. It is a message, and we must listen to the message. It will tell us what is wrong with you." If i had ignored or silenced that symptom, my kidneys would have failed, and I would have died. You need your nausea. You need your pain. It is a message, and you must listen to the message. All these depressed and anxious people, all over the world -- they are giving us a message. They are telling us something has gone wrong with the way we live. We need to stop trying to muffle or silence or pathologize that pain. Instead, we need to listen to it, and honor it. It is only when we listen to our pain that we can follow it back to its source -- and only there, where we can see its true causes, can we begin to overcome it.

As I became older, I was given many masks to wear. I could be a laborer laying railroad tracks across the continent, with long hair in a queue to be pulled by pranksters; a gardener trimming the shrubs while secretly planting a bomb; a saboteur before the day of infamy at Pearl Harbor, signaling the Imperial Fleet; a kamikaze pilot donning his headband somberly, screaming 'Banzai' on my way to my death; a peasant with a broad-brimmed straw hat in a rice paddy on the other side of the world, stooped over to toil in the water; an obedient servant in the parlor, a houseboy too dignified for my own good; a washerman in the basement laundry, removing stains using an ancient secret; a tyrant intent on imposing my despotism on the democratic world, opposed by the free and the brave; a party cadre alongside many others, all of us clad in coordinated Mao jackets; a sniper camouflaged in the trees of the jungle, training my gunsights on G.I. Joe; a child running with a body burning from napalm, captured in an unforgettable photo; an enemy shot in the head or slaughtered by the villageful; one of the grooms in a mass wedding of couples, having met my mate the day before through our cult leader; an orphan in the last airlift out of a collapsed capital, ready to be adopted into the good life; a black belt martial artist breaking cinderblocks with his head, in an advertisement for Ginsu brand knives with the slogan 'but wait--there's more' as the commercial segued to show another free gift; a chef serving up dog stew, a trick on the unsuspecting diner; a bad driver swerving into the next lane, exactly as could be expected; a horny exchange student here for a year, eager to date the blonde cheerleader; a tourist visiting, clicking away with his camera, posing my family in front of the monuments and statues; a ping pong champion, wearing white tube socks pulled up too high and batting the ball with a wicked spin; a violin prodigy impressing the audience at Carnegie Hall, before taking a polite bow; a teen computer scientist, ready to make millions on an initial public offering before the company stock crashes; a gangster in sunglasses and a tight suit, embroiled in a turf war with the Sicilian mob; an urban greengrocer selling lunch by the pound, rudely returning change over the counter to the black patrons; a businessman with a briefcase of cash bribing a congressman, a corrupting influence on the electoral process; a salaryman on my way to work, crammed into the commuter train and loyal to the company; a shady doctor, trained in a foreign tradition with anatomical diagrams of the human body mapping the flow of life energy through a multitude of colored points; a calculus graduate student with thick glasses and a bad haircut, serving as a teaching assistant with an incomprehensible accent, scribbling on the chalkboard; an automobile enthusiast who customizes an imported car with a supercharged engine and Japanese decals in the rear window, cruising the boulevard looking for a drag race; a illegal alien crowded into the cargo hold of a smuggler's ship, defying death only to crowd into a New York City tenement and work as a slave in a sweatshop. My mother and my girl cousins were Madame Butterfly from the mail order bride catalog, dying in their service to the masculinity of the West, and the dragon lady in a kimono, taking vengeance for her sisters. They became the television newscaster, look-alikes with their flawlessly permed hair. Through these indelible images, I grew up. But when I looked in the mirror, I could not believe my own reflection because it was not like what I saw around me. Over the years, the world opened up. It has become a dizzying kaleidoscope of cultural fragments, arranged and rearranged without plan or order.

Well before the end of the 20th century however print had lost its former dominance. This resulted in, among other things, a different kind of person getting elected as leader. One who can present himself and his programs in a polished way, as Lee Quan Yu you observed in 2000, adding, “Satellite television has allowed me to follow the American presidential campaign. I am amazed at the way media professionals can give a candidate a new image and transform him, at least superficially, into a different personality. Winning an election becomes, in large measure, a contest in packaging and advertising. Just as the benefits of the printed era were inextricable from its costs, so it is with the visual age. With screens in every home entertainment is omnipresent and boredom a rarity. More substantively, injustice visualized is more visceral than injustice described. Television played a crucial role in the American Civil rights movement, yet the costs of television are substantial, privileging emotional display over self-command, changing the kinds of people and arguments that are taken seriously in public life. The shift from print to visual culture continues with the contemporary entrenchment of the Internet and social media, which bring with them four biases that make it more difficult for leaders to develop their capabilities than in the age of print. These are immediacy, intensity, polarity, and conformity. Although the Internet makes news and data more immediately accessible than ever, this surfeit of information has hardly made us individually more knowledgeable, let alone wiser, as the cost of accessing information becomes negligible, as with the Internet, the incentives to remember it seem to weaken. While forgetting anyone fact may not matter, the systematic failure to internalize information brings about a change in perception, and a weakening of analytical ability. Facts are rarely self-explanatory; their significance and interpretation depend on context and relevance. For information to be transmuted into something approaching wisdom it must be placed within a broader context of history and experience. As a general rule, images speak at a more emotional register of intensity than do words. Television and social media rely on images that inflamed the passions, threatening to overwhelm leadership with the combination of personal and mass emotion. Social media, in particular, have encouraged users to become image conscious spin doctors. All this engenders a more populist politics that celebrates utterances perceived to be authentic over the polished sound bites of the television era, not to mention the more analytical output of print. The architects of the Internet thought of their invention as an ingenious means of connecting the world. In reality, it has also yielded a new way to divide humanity into warring tribes. Polarity and conformity rely upon, and reinforce, each other. One is shunted into a group, and then the group polices once thinking. Small wonder that on many contemporary social media platforms, users are divided into followers and influencers. There are no leaders. What are the consequences for leadership? In our present circumstances, Lee's gloomy assessment of visual media's effects is relevant. From such a process, I doubt if a Churchill or Roosevelt or a de Gaulle can emerge. It is not that changes in communications technology have made inspired leadership and deep thinking about world order impossible, but that in an age dominated by television and the Internet, thoughtful leaders must struggle against the tide.

On present-day Earth we have the most Christ-like nation in human history, a civilization built on loving kindness and demilitarization. They are being wiped off the face of their homeland. Well, at least the Chinese government isn’t blaming Christ or Buddha for their actions against Tibet! But many savage pillagers throughout the past two thousand years have, and the Romans of a thousand years ago fall into that category. Within five hundred years they erased nearly all the nature-based, matriarchal tribes in what we now know as Europe. The invaders falsified history in order to justify their greed. Harmless facts and beautiful rituals were twisted to appear Satanic. Love of the environment and its animals and plants, love of healing modalities that modern day health professionals are now searching frantically to recover, were spin-doctored into demented superstition and turned outlaw.

Second and third opinions can be valuable, but don’t spin your wheels and lose time by getting ten opinions. Talk with two doctors and maybe three (as a tie-breaker); then do something. Going from institute to institute can take its toll both in terms of time and energy. Try to make a decision and go with it—and believe that you have made the best choice possible.

An hour later we were pulling into the hospital parking lot. Sparkly and shiny from my hair and makeup job, I had to stop and bend over six times between the car and the front door of the hospital. I literally couldn’t take a step until each contraction ended. Within an hour after checking in, I was writhing on a hospital bed in all-encompassing pain and wishing once again that I’d gone ahead and moved to Chicago. It had become my default response when things got rough in my life: morning sickness? I should have moved to Chicago. Cow manure in my yard? Chicago would have been a better choice. Contractions less than a minute apart? Windy City, come and get me. Finally, I reached my breaking point. It’s an indescribable feeling, the throes of hard labor--that mind-numbing total body cramp whose origin you can’t even begin to wrap your head around. After trying to be strong and tough in front of Marlboro Man, I finally gave up and gripped the bedsheet and clenched my teeth. I groaned and moaned and pushed the nurse button and whimpered to Marlboro Man, “I can’t do this anymore.” When the nurse came into the room moments later, I begged her to put me out of my misery. My salvation arrived five minutes later in the form of an eight-inch needle, and when the medicine hit I nearly began to cry. The relief was indescribably sweet. I was so blissfully pain-free, I fell asleep. And when I woke up confused and disoriented an hour later, a nurse named Heidi was telling me it was time to push. Almost immediately, Dr. Oliver entered the room, fully scrubbed and wearing a mask. “Are you ready, Mama?” Marlboro Man asked, standing near my shoulders as the nurse draped my legs and adjusted the fetal monitor, which was strapped around my middle. I felt like I’d woken up in the middle of a party. But the weirdest party ever--one where the hostess was putting my feet in stirrups. I ordered Marlboro Man to remain north of my belly button as nurses scurried into place. I’d made it clear beforehand: I didn’t want him down there. I wanted him to continue to get to know me the old-fashioned way--and besides, that’s what we were paying the doctor for. “Go ahead and push once for me,” Dr. Oliver said. I did, but only hard enough to ensure that nothing accidental or embarrassing would slip out. I could think of no greater humiliation. “Okay, that’s not going to work at all,” Dr. Oliver scolded. I pushed again. “Ree,” Dr. Oliver said, looking up at me through the space between my legs. “You can do way better than that.” He’d watched me grow up in the ballet company in our town. He’d watched me contort and leap and spin in everything from The Nutcracker to Swan Lake to A Midsummer Night’s Dream. He knew I had the fortitude to will a baby from my loins. That’s when Marlboro Man grabbed my hand, as if to impart to me, his sweaty and slightly weary wife, a measure of his strength and endurance. “Come on, honey,” he said. “You can do it.” A few tense moments later, our baby was born. Except it wasn’t a baby boy. It was a seven-pound, twenty-one-inch baby girl. It was the most important moment of my life. And more ways than one, it was a pivotal moment for Marlboro Man.

My head started spinning, and I again wished I brought someone along to help me write all of this down.

My head started spinning, and I again wished I brought someone along to help me write all of this down. I knew all the facts, all the options, and yet keeping them straight for myself was proving impossible. I clutched my phone harder, desperately wanting to make an SOS call to anyone . . .

I wasn’t a normal kid. My father used to say half-jokingly that there was a little concern over whether or not I was okay. Maybe it wasn’t a joke at all. The concern was about my personality, which seemed too eccentric. I don’t think “autistic” was a common term back then, but I later found out that they had taken me to a doctor to see if something was really wrong. It wasn’t that I was violent or temperamental. In fact, my mom said it was a blessing because I never gave her trouble. It was the opposite—they knew exactly how to sedate me, which was to sit me in front of something that held my interest and then just leave. I’d develop a deep relationship with that thing, whether it was Soul Train or a record on a turntable. But that led to a secondary worry, which was that I was falling inward into some kind of trance. Once, when I was very young, my dad installed a light with a rotating shade around a lightbulb, one of those lamps that works like a kind of carousel. He pressed the switch that caused the shade to turn and, according to him, I just disappeared inside myself. Five minutes passed, then ten, then fifteen, and I didn’t seem any less interested in the rotating lamp. Then my parents started noticing a broader pattern of me trying to spin stuff. I would take my sister’s bike and watch the wheel go around and around. I would take my father’s records and twirl them on my finger. They had a moment where they thought I might be interested in cars, because I was driving the records like a steering wheel. That was my whole entertainment for a while there, but to my parents, it was almost like a bad habit that they wanted me to drop. But I haven’t dropped it, not at all. To this day, my life revolves around circles. My drums are circles. Turntables are circles. My logo or autograph, which I developed over the years through doodling, is composed of six circles. My life revolves around that shape.

Take theory, for example. Most working people think theory, in general, doesn't have much to do with real life. With some theories, that's true. Theory that strays too far from experience becomes abstract - an idealist argument about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. Theory has to be tested against reality. While carefully studying questions of sex and gender oppression, or the oppression of same-sex or omni-sexual love, we have to be careful not to produce theoretical hothouse flowers that are removed from the social and economic soil in which they are rooted. And since theory is the generalization of experience, we have to ask: Whose experience is it? From whose point of view? The dominant theories in any society reflect the economic interests of those who dominate the society. How can it be otherwise? Who pays an army of spin-doctors and public relations experts to try to mold popular opinion? Who determines educational curricula? Who owns and controls the monopolized television, publishing, and media? The cacophony of theorists hired to defend the status quo is meat to drown out the voices of those who are fighting for change. That's why we must ask everyone who puts forward theory: Which side are you on?

The first morning of a new month feels as if it deserves recognition; it’s a new start we’re fortunate enough to experience twelve times a year. Yet, no one ever says much about it because life revolves like a wheel—spinning until it hits a hill or loses momentum.

Put yourself in the shoes of an eighteenth-century country doctor. You’re treating a very ill patient. You’ve tried everything, yet nothing seems to work. So, in desperation, you put together a mixture of herbs and potions. Your patient takes the mixture and recovers. Eureka! Your medicine works, you’ve found a miracle cure. What you don’t see, in your enthusiasm, is that the patient was getting better anyway.

Indeed, while the age of the mercenary soldiers may or may not be returning, the age of the ‘media mercenary’ is definitely here. Diplomats, spin-doctors, journalists, pundits and writers, lobbyists, scholars, think tanks, NGOs and GONGOs (government-organised NGOs), these are the infowarriors. Thanks to them, we are bombarded with information – news, opinion, gossip, rumour, lies and revelations – at an ever-greater rate.

I’m just thinking about how much today’s younger generation has learned from our world wars. It seems many of them have forgotten the cost of their freedoms.

Balot was gripped by the Doctor's words, not even nodding now. Choice--right. She felt the two words spinning around like hands on a clock, then snapping into position together. A magic moment. Magic that would transport Balot to a different place. In the interior workings of choice and right a number of complicated cogs spun together. The doctor was one of those cogs.

That cuckoo saved your life once,” Myron said. “Yeah, but you remember how,” she countered. Myron did. A dark alley. Win’s doctored bullets. Brain matter tossed about like parade confetti. Classic Win. Effective but excessive. Like squashing a bug with a wrecking ball. Esperanza

This was Vitaly’s town, the representative, cross-section town of Russia, the country where a third of males have been to prison, the sort of town spin doctors and TV men look at when they design politicians.

how their sons were being mistreated, and they always were very sincere. Mom believed her son unquestioningly despite his past performances and was hell-bent to take up his cause. I can appreciate a mother’s love for her offspring, but nearly always she’s been taken in by his one-sided spin. She’s so used to his lies that a few more don’t make much difference. Fortunately for me, I didn’t have to talk to Mom very often. Usually the administration fielded these calls unless there was a real medical issue at stake. Like my ulcerative colitis patient, Scott. Scott’s mom wanted to know why her son wasn’t on his UC medication. “Scott didn’t mention taking any medication for his UC. He said it hasn’t flared up in over a year.” “That’s not true. I give him money for his medication every month. He’s regular with it.

I am. Trying, I'm trying it. But he means something else. I'm trying it like, you find a coin on the table and you spin it for no reason but to see it happen. He's trying it like medical school, because maybe he'll grow up to be a doctor.

peculiar. Allergies he expected, and that anti-septic smell never failed to make his head spin. Despite what his many Doctors would tell you, Nathan hated hospitals. Jogging through the foliage keeping

I cannot agree with the gentleman in the magenta coat that Potter’s Pond is only a wretched little hamlet. But it is certainly a very remote and secluded village; so that it seems quite outlandish, like a village of a hundred years ago. The spinsters are really spinsters — damn it, you could almost imagine you saw them spin. The ladies are not just ladies. They are gentlewomen; and their chemist is not a chemist, but an apothecary; pronounced potecary. They do just admit the existence of an ordinary doctor like myself to assist the apothecary. But I am considered rather a juvenile innovation, because I am only fifty-seven years old and have only been in the county for twenty-eight years. The solicitor looks as if he had known it for twenty-eight thousand years. Then there is the old Admiral, who is just like a Dickens illustration; with a house full of cutlasses and cuttle-fish and equipped with a telescope.’ ‘I suppose,’ said Father Brown, ‘there are always a certain number of Admirals washed up on the shore. But I never understood why they get stranded so far inland.’ ‘Certainly no dead-alive place in the depths of the country is complete without one of these little creatures,’ said the doctor. ‘And then, of course, there is the proper sort of clergyman; Tory and High Church in a dusty fashion dating from Archbishop Laud; more of an old woman than any of the old women. He’s a white-haired studious old bird, more easily shocked than the spinsters. Indeed, the gentlewomen, though Puritan in their principles, are sometimes pretty plain in their speech; as the real Puritans were. Once or twice I have known old Miss Carstairs-Carew use expressions as lively as anything in the Bible. The dear old clergyman is assiduous in reading the Bible; but I almost fancy he shuts his eyes when he comes to those words.

is dead. ‘You’re on your own now, baby,’ he informed me more than once and gleefully from his hospital bed. I miss the discipline they all imposed on my days and I find it hard to structure life around myself, despite the necessary impositions of work. This perhaps will come with practice. But from this new freedom I have learned a great deal about what I do and don’t need; I have also learned to be careful about wishes, for they often come true. And I realise now that this is a fine time. I don’t care about being young or old or whatever. I am past the anxieties of earlier days, no longer concerned about image or identity or A-levels, no longer fearful of shop assistants or doctors’ receptionists. I can admit, without giving a damn, to being a slut, liking salad cream, holding certain politically incorrect views. I can still change and grow, mentally and physically. At this interesting point in life, one may be whoever and whatever age one chooses. One may drink all night, smash bones in hunting accidents, travel the spinning globe. One may teach one’s grandchildren rude rhymes and Greek myths. One may also move very slowly round the garden in a shapeless coat, planting drifts of narcissus bulbs for latter springs.

We do not murder," he said. It was a soft voice; the doctor never raised his voice, but he had a way of giving it the pitch and spin that could make it be heard through a hurricane. "We do not execute. We do not massacre. We never, you may be very certain, we never torture. We have no truck with crimes of passion or hatred or pointless gain. We do not do it for a delight in inhumation, or to feed some secret inner need, or for petty advantage, or for some cause or belief; I tell you, gentlemen, that all these reasons are in the highest degree suspect. Look into the face of a man who will kill you for a belief and you nostrils will snuff up the scent of abomination. Hear a speech declaring a holy war and, I assure you, your ears should catch the clink of evil's scales and the dragging of its monstrous tail over the purity of the language. "No, we do it for the money. "And, because we above all must know the value of a human life, we do it for a great deal of money.

The young because they had no idea how awful and corrupting life could be, and the old because they had survived the worst life could throw at them.

In any case, there are still times when willful blindness nonetheless produces more serious catastrophes, more easily rationalized away, than the active or the unconscious repression of something terrible but understood (the latter being a sin of commission, because it is known). The former problem—willful blindness—occurs when you could come to know something but cease exploring so that you fail to discover something that might cause you substantial discomfort. Spin doctors call this self-imposed ignorance “plausible deniability,” which is a phrase that indicates intellectualized rationalization of the most pathological order.

Other fandoms—from Batman fans to James Bond fans to Doctor Who fans to Scooby-Doo fans—are all debating the same set of characters and circumstances. For example, in 2019, Scooby-Doo fans—including noted critic Nathan Rabin—were outraged that Matthew Lillard was not returning to play the voice of Shaggy for a new reboot of Scooby-Doo called Scoob! If you were to talk about this in terms of Star Trek post-TOS, it would require you to imagine a variety of Scooby-Doo sequels which took place in the same shared universe, featured zero talking dogs, no Velma, Fred, Daphne, or Shaggy, and only occasionally featured anyone driving a van called “The Mystery Machine,” which, in some versions, may not even be a van. The hypothetical Deep Space Nine of an expanded Scooby-Doo universe is a cartoon about kids living in a different city, who don’t have a van, who don’t solve mysteries, but were visited by Scrappy-Doo in the pilot episode. Now, imagine this hypothetical Scooby-Doo spin-off having its own fandom inside of “regular” Scooby-Doo fandom. That’s right. You can’t.

In the village where I was born, most people were quite simple folk, as were my parents. There were only a few prominent residents: the mayor, the doctor, the notary and some members of the aristocracy who lived in manor houses on the edge of the village. The children of these prominent citizens were different. They didn’t run; they walked upright and bashed their knees in falls a lot less frequently. They had different toys as well. We had spinning tops, balls and elastic. They had a diabolo, walked with books on their heads and later they were given a horse. Our kind of children played from the age of ten in the brass band; they were given piano lessons at home and on Sundays they would listen to Peter and the Wolf. There were differences: you could see that instantly. But ours was the majority and from belonging to the majority we derived our pride and strength. Looking back, this strikes me as odd. At university, all the prominent children of the country had come together and now they formed the majority. They had walked about with books on their heads and they all knew >Peter and the Wolf backwards. Theirs were tales about the decline of the aristocracy – some of these were quite hilarious. It’s the way you tell ‘em.

In the village where I was born, most people were quite simple folk, as were my parents. There were only a few prominent residents: the mayor, the doctor, the notary and some members of the aristocracy who lived in manor houses on the edge of the village. the children of these prominent citizens were different. They didn’t run; they walked upright and bashed their knees in falls a lot less frequently. They had different toys as well. We had spinning tops, balls and elastic. They had a diabolo, walked with books on their heads and later they were given a horse. Our kind of children played from the age of ten in the brass band; they were given piano lessons at home and on Sundays they would listen to Peter and the Wolf. There were differences: you could see that instantly. But ours was the majority and from belonging to the majority we derived our pride and strength. Looking back, this strikes me as odd. At university, all the prominent children of the country had come together and now they formed the majority. They had walked about with books on their heads and they all knew Peter and the Wolf backwards. Theirs were tales about the decline of the aristocracy – some of these were quite hilarious. It’s the way you tell ‘em.

Oh, how comely its clothed vices Best performing spin-doctors leads and devices With devious fables slicing golden knights Deafening all golden pleas for betterment with golden coins Where the highest payers echoes sevenfold the others

you’re gonna die, so what’s the point in knowing?” Literally, a doctor said that to me.

In this story, or “narrative” to use the technical term, history is something of a foundation and bedrock and this is why rewriting history is as important as writing the news. What you believe today depends on what you believe about the past. In that sense it is important for the “political technologists,” to use the pithy and apt term popular in post-Soviet countries, who might be understood by Westerners as turbo-spin doctors, to fashion a past which suits the future they are trying to create.

Spin doctors in every era have known that perception is infinitely more potent than mere fact.

But my mother was a spin doctor before they were invented. All her clouds came with silver linings and I watched her eyes perform their familiar scan for something to talk up.

The spin doctors in the health care industry say this is because, unlike a factory or a school, the facility doesn’t close when workers vote to strike in a health care setting. Patients still need care. Health care employers use the excuse that the agencies that specialize in recruiting scab labor (strikebreaker workers, usually hired from Southern states) require them to sign contracts that schedule this replacement labor for a minimum of five days. The scab agencies say it’s worth it only if they can charge for at least five days because they have to pay strikebreakers top dollar (often twice as much as the regular staff), put them in premium hotels, give them equally premium meal per diems, fly them last minute, and generally spend a ton of money—all to defeat mostly women workers demanding an end to income inequality and fighting for fair work rules.

Every politician I talk to seems to say the same thing: "Now is not the time to point fingers." Spin doctors even come up with the term blame game. "I'm not going to play the blame game," they say, dismissing you when you ask for answers, for the names of officials who made key decisions. I notice that some reporters start using the term too. I can't understand why. Demanding accountability is no game, and there's nothing wrong with trying to understand who made mistakes, who failed. If no one is held accountable for their decisions, for their actions, all of this will happen again. Not one person has yet to stand up and admit wrongdoing. No politician, no bureaucrat, has admitted a specific mistake. Some have made blanket statements, saying they accept responsibility for whatever went wrong. But that's not good enough. We need to know specifics. What was done wrong? What were the mistakes? I ask any official I can. No one will answer. The only "mistakes" they admit to are actually veiled criticisms of others. The mayor should have declared a mandatory evacuation on Saturday, instead of waiting until Sunday. Precious hours were lost. The governor could have done that as well, but didn't. They could have moved hundreds of city buses and local school buses to higher ground and used them to evacuate the nearly one hundred thousand residents who had no access to private transportation. They didn't. There were plenty of mistakes to go around. I just want someone to admit to them.

Libby doesn’t do well under pressure. All that came to mind was rutabaga. “Is that even a vegetable?” Libby asked, spinning the top button of her shirt between her fingers. “It doesn’t matter.” The doctor typed something into his computer. “Keep going.” Hesitation. Then: “Rutabaga?” Libby asked. Today, five weeks later, she will officially be told what is preventing her from recalling green beans and Brussels sprouts on demand. But because she does not like waiting—not for food in restaurants, not to “get to know” people, and definitely not for the endings of books, even her own—she has googled her symptoms and deduced the problem herself. She is sure she has a rubbery tumor called a meningioma lurking in her brain.

Yeah. Though you might have more fun if you weren’t such a dick and asked the maid of honor for a little spin on the dance floor.” “Ahh. The bride put you up to this?” Fionn scoffs. Rolls his eyes. “I’m a doctor, you wanker. Observational skills are kind of my thing.” “So are crochet and a shocking inability to say no to dumb shit.

You know, when I caught him with my sister, what I had done is drive out to the store and then before I got there, I turned around and coasted home, cutting the engine off so they couldn't hear. And sure enough, her car was right there. I just bust in there and let them both have it. I remember I took my ring and threw it at him. It was the worst moment of my life. And then no more than two weeks later we're back together and he's sleeping with me. And I was thinking, ‘How does this man have the nerve to sleep with me again when he knows I can just slice it off with my knife and hand it back to him and say that's what you get for sleeping around?’ Abraham, I don't understand how he was able to attract those women, how I even forgave him. Why, he hardly spoke a word – he was backward, to tell you the truth. And I don't know why I still love him, but I do. It's almost like I'm still looking for him. I'll be driving and I'll see a dark-haired man with a mustache and my head will spin, as if it might be him. It's the strangest thing, Abraham.