Team Lunch Quotes

THE FIRST TEN LIES THEY TELL YOU IN HIGH SCHOOL 1. We are here to help you. 2. You will have time to get to your class before the bell rings. 3. The dress code will be enforced. 4. No smoking is allowed on school grounds. 5. Our football team will win the championship this year. 6. We expect more of you here. 7. Guidance counselors are always available to listen. 8. Your schedule was created with you in mind. 9. Your locker combination is private. 10. These will be the years you look back on fondly. TEN MORE LIES THEY TELL YOU IN HIGH SCHOOL 1. You will use algebra in your adult lives. 2. Driving to school is a privilege that can be taken away. 3. Students must stay on campus during lunch. 4. The new text books will arrive any day now. 5. Colleges care more about you than your SAT scores. 6. We are enforcing the dress code. 7. We will figure out how to turn off the heat soon. 8. Our bus drivers are highly trained professionals. 9. There is nothing wrong with summer school. 10. We want to hear what you have to say.

Fine, if you see no reason to worry about bisonbecks who do the bidding of Risto'-- he sat down on a log and pulled out his lunch--'or mordakleeps who team up with anything nasty and currently have a wonderful working relationship with that same evil wizard Risto, then why should I worry? Why should we warn Kale?' Leetu's scowl turned darker. Dar lifted his sandwich to his mouth, but had one more thing to say before he bit into it. 'Actually, I agree with you. Worrying now over an encounter that might occur later would only ruin our digestion.

I think of all that is happening elsewhere, as I lie here. Nearby, I can hear the sounds of a road crew. Somewhere else, monkeys chatter in trees. A male seahorse becomes pregnant. A diamond forms, a bee dances out directions, a windshield shatters. Somewhere a mother spreads peanut butter for her son's lunch, a lover sighs, a knitter binds off the edge of a sleeve. Clouds gather to make rain, corn ripens on the stalk, a cancer cell divides, a little league team scores. Somewhere blossoms open, a man pushes a knife in deeper, a painter darkens her blue. A cashier pours new dimes into an outstretched hand, rainbows form and fade, plates in the earth shift and settle. A woman opens a velvet box, male spiders pluck gently on the females' webs, falcons fall from the sky. Abstracts are real and time is a lie, it cannot be measured when one moment can expand to hold everything. You can want to live and end up choosing death; and you can want to die and end up living. What keeps us here, really? A thread that breaks in a breeze. And yet a thread that cannot be broken

If you're anything like me, You bite your nails, And laugh when you're nervous. You promise people the world, because that's what they want from you. You like giving them what they want... But darling, you need to stop, If you're anything like me, You knock on wood every time you make plans. You cross your fingers, hold your breath, Wish on lucky numbers and eyelashes Your superstitions were the lone survivors of the shipwreck. Rest In Peace, to your naive bravado... If life gets too good now, Darling, it scares you. If you're anything like me, You never wanted to lock your door, Your secret garden gate or your diary drawer Didn't want to face the you you don't know anymore For fear she was much better before... But Darling, now you have to. If you're anything like me, There's a justice system in your head For names you'll never speak again, And you make your ruthless rulings. Each new enemy turns to steel They become the bars that confine you, In your own little golden prison cell... But Darling, there is where you meet yourself. If you're anything like me You've grown to hate your pride To love your thighs And no amount of friends at 25 Will fill the empty seats At the lunch tables of your past The teams that picked you last... But Darling, you keep trying. If you're anything like me, You couldn't recognize the face of your love Until they stripped you of your shiny paint Threw your victory flag away And you saw the ones who wanted you anyway... Darling, later on you will thank your stars for that frightful day. If you're anything like me, I'm sorry. But Darling, it's going to be okay.

The last thing we want to admit is that the forbidden fruit on which we have been gnawing since reaching the magic age of twenty-one is the same mealy Golden Delicious that we stuff into our children’s lunch boxes. The last thing we want to admit is that the bickering of the playground perfectly presages the machinations of the boardroom, that our social hierarchies are merely an extension of who got picked first for the kickball team, and that grown-ups still get divided into bullies and fatties and crybabies. What’s a kid to find out? Presumably we lord over them an exclusive deed to sex, but this pretense flies so fantastically in the face of fact that it must result from some conspiratorial group amnesia. […] In truth, we are bigger, greedier versions of the same eating, shitting, rutting ruck, hell-bent on disguising from somebody, if only from a three-year-old, that pretty much all we do is eat and shit and rut. The secret is there is no secret. That is what we really wish to keep from our kids, and its supression is the true collusion of adulthood, the pact we make, the Talmud we protect.

The night in question, I had put aside my perpetual lavatory read, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, because of all the manuscripts (inedible green tomatoes) submitted to Cavendish-Redux, my new stable of champions. I suppose it was about eleven o'clock when I heard my front door being interfered with. Skinhead munchkins mug-or-treating? Cherry knockers? The wind? Next thing I knew, the door flew in off its ruddy hinges! I was thinking al-Queda, I was thinking ball lightning, but no. Down the hallway tramped what seemed like an entire rugby team, though the intruders numbered only three. (You'll notice, I am always attacked in threes.) "Timothy," pronounced the gargoyliest, "Cavendish, I presume. Caught with your cacks down." "My business hours are eleven to two, gentlemen," Bogart would have said, "with a three-hour break for lunch. Kindly leave." All I could do was blurt, "Oy! My door! My ruddy door!

You see, the Mets are losers, just like nearly everybody else in life. This is a team for the cab driver who gets held up and the guy who loses out on a promotion because he didn't maneuver himself to lunch with the boss enough. It is the team for every guy who has to get out of bed in the morning and go to work for short money on a job he does not like. And it is the team for every woman who looks up ten years later and sees her husband eating dinner in a t-shirt and wonders how the hell she ever let this guy talk her into getting married. The Yankees? Who does well enough to root for them, Laurence Rockefeller?

Tasks are the real-world activities people think of when planning, conducting, or recalling their day. That can mean things like brushing their teeth, preparing breakfast, reading a newspaper, taking a child to school, responding to e-mail messages, making a sales call, attending a lecture or a business meeting, having lunch with a colleague from work, helping a child with homework, coaching a soccer team, and watching a TV program. Some tasks are mundane, some complex.

Too few people asked, “What is true?” Too few people actually considered the possibilities and asked what might be going on, even if they believed I was out to lunch. Instead, folks rushed to their team, their side. Very few voices in the public square took the time to ask, “So what is this guy worried about and what is he saying, exactly?

BY HIGH SCHOOL, the names no longer shocked her but the loneliness did. You could never quite get used to loneliness; every time she thought she had, she sank further into it. She sat by herself at lunch, flipping through cheap paperbacks. She never received visits on the weekends, or invitations to Lou’s for lunch, or phone calls just to see how she was doing. After school, she went running alone. She was the fastest girl on the track team, and on another team in another town, she might have been captain. But on this team in this town, she stretched alone before practice and sat by herself on the team bus, and after she won the gold medal at the state championship, no one congratulated her but Coach Weaver.

A person without discipline is in a prison without bars.

In the long term, if you have a habit of working through lunch, then science shows us you’re more likely to be emotionally exhausted, suffer sleep problems, and you’ll take more time off due to illness. Leave your work behind at lunchtime to release the brain into its most relaxed firing patterns: memories form, emotions settle, thoughts consolidate, tense muscles relax, and stress responses calm. Wherever possible, taking a lunch break outdoors and around green spaces enhances its restorative effects. Bosses take note: a team lunch results in improved teamwork, morale, and productivity.

Because that’s what you’re starting to remind me of—without the bloody sores. I mean, Fitz gave you another box of pudding puffs at lunch and you didn’t even blush. And you’ve been walking around with this stuck to your shoulder all day.” He peeled off a bold-lettered sign that said, ALL HAIL TEAM FOSTER-KEEFE!

Right around this same time—give or take a few years, I can't remember—Camila got a call from this guy from her high school. Some guy that was on the baseball team and took her to the prom and all that. I think his name was Greg Egan or Gary Egan? Something like that. She said to me, "I'm gonna go get lunch with Gary Egan." And I said, "Okay." And she went and got lunch with him and she was gone for four hours. No one eats lunch for four hours. When she got back, she gave me a kiss and she, you know, started doing laundry or something and I said, "How was your lunch with Greg Egan?" And she said, "Fine." And that's all she said. In that moment, I knew that what happened between her and Gary Egan—whether she still felt anything for him, how he felt about her, anything that might have taken place—all of that wasn't my business. It wasn't anything she wanted to share. That was a singular moment for her and it had nothing to do with me. I'm not saying that I didn't care. I cared a lot. I'm saying that when you really love someone, sometimes the things they need may hurt you, and some people are worth hurting for. I had hurt Camila. God knows I had. But loving somebody isn't perfection and good times and laughing and making love. Love is forgiveness and patience and faith and every once in a while, it's a gut punch. That's why it's a dangerous thing, when you go loving the wrong person. When you love somebody who doesn't deserve it. You have to be with someone that deserves your faith and you have to be deserving of someone else's. It's sacred.

A marriage is like a hockey season, darling, okay? Even the best team can’t be at their best in every game, but they’re good enough to win even when they play badly. A marriage is the same: you don’t measure it by the holiday where you drink wine before lunch and have great sex and your biggest problem is that the sand is too hot and the sun is shining too brightly on the screen when you want to play games on your phone. You measure it from everyday life, at home, at its lowest level, from how you talk to each other and solve problems.

If God didn't want me sitting by myself, I wouldn't be sitting by myself. I mean they say God is all powerful. So if I'm sitting by myself, then its cause God wants me to sit by myself. Which is pretty awful if you think about it, cause no kid should have to feel alone. And if God really dose control everything then that means that God wants me to be poor and not be on the football team. It also means God lets people go without meals and get sick and get punched around. And of God was a good guy, he wouldn't let that stuff happen right?

Life of a software engineer sucks big time during project release. Every single team member contribution is very important. At times, we have to skip breakfast, lunch and even dinner, just to make sure the given ‘TASK’ is completed. Worst thing, that’s the time we get to hear wonderful F* words. It can be on conference calls or on emails, still we have to focus and deliver the end product to a client, without any compromise on quality. Actually, every techie should be saluted. We are the reason for the evolution of Information Technology. We innovate. We love artificial intelligence. We create bots and much more. We take you closer to books. Touch and feel it without the need of carrying a paperback. We created eBook and eBook reader app: it’s basically a code of a software engineer that process the file, keeps up-to-date of your reading history, and gives you a smoother reading experience. We are amazing people. We are more than a saint of those days. Next time, when you meet a software engineer, thank him/her for whatever code he/she developed, tested, designed or whatever he/she did!

But there’s never been anyone? Really?” Sarah shrugs. “Penny and I were tutored at home when we were young . . . but in year ten, there was this one boy.” I rub my hands together. “Here we go—tell me everything. I want all the sick, lurid details. Was he a footballer? Big and strong, captain of the team, the most popular boy in school?” I could see it. Sarah’s delicate, long and lithe, but dainty, beautiful—any young man would’ve been desperate to have her on his arm. In his lap. In his bed, on the hood of his car, riding his face . . . all of the above. “He was captain of the chess team.” I cover my eyes with my hand. “His name was Davey. He wore these adorable tweed jackets and bow ties, he had blond hair, and was a bit pale because of the asthma. He had the same glasses as I and he had a different pair of argyle socks for every day of the year.” “You’re messing with me, right?” She shakes her head. “Argyle socks, Sarah? I am so disappointed in you right now.” “He was nice,” she chides. “You leave my Davey alone.” Then she laughs again—delighted and free. My cock reacts hard and fast, emphasis on hard. It’s like sodding granite. “So what happened to old Davey boy?” “I was alone in the library one day and he came up and started to ask me to the spring social. And I was so excited and nervous I could barely breathe.” I picture how she must’ve looked then. But in my mind’s eyes she’s really not any different than she is right now. Innocent, sweet, and so real she couldn’t deceive someone if her life depended on it. “And then before he could finish the question, I . . .” I don’t realize I’m leaning toward her until she stops talking and I almost fall over. “You . . . what?” Sarah hides behind her hands. “I threw up on him.” And I try not to laugh. I swear I try . . . but I’m only human. So I end up laughing so hard the car shakes and I can’t speak for several minutes. “Christ almighty.” “And I’d had fish and chips for lunch.” Sarah’s laughing too. “It was awful.” “Oh you poor thing.” I shake my head, still chuckling. “And poor Davey.” “Yes.” She wipes under her eyes with her finger. “Poor Davey. He never came near me again after that.” “Coward—he didn’t deserve you. I would’ve swam through a whole lake of puke to take a girl like you to the social.” She smiles so brightly at me, her cheeks maroon and round like two shiny apples. “I think that’s the nicest thing anyone’s ever said to me.” I wiggle my eyebrows. “I’m all about the compliments.

Goucher *never* eats lunch. If he is hungry, he will have a granola bar or another light snack. The guys, especially Reese, kid him that he does not eat enough. He used to eat more. Standing 5'9" to 5'10", he weighs in at just under 140 pounds. At the Olympic Trials in Atlanta in 1996, he weighed 145. After the 5000-meter final, where he finished a disappointing fourteenth, Wetmore told him he was fat. Goucher was livid. When he calmed down he realized Wetmore was right, and he made a conscious effort to lose any excess weight since then. He feels the difference. "My chest was bigger, my arms were bigger. Losing the five pounds has helped me thin out, and it's cut me more. It's made a big difference.

On one particularly hot summer afternoon, Rizzolatti and his team observed the strangest thing of all when one of Dr. Rizzolatti’s grad students returned to the lab after lunch holding an ice cream cone, and noticed that the macaque was staring at him, almost longingly. And as the grad student raised the cone to his mouth and took a tentative lick, the electronic monitor hooked up to the macaque’s premotor region fired—bripp, bripp, bripp. The monkey hadn’t done a thing. It hadn’t moved its arm or taken a lick of ice cream; it wasn’t even holding anything at all. But simply by observing the student bringing the ice cream cone to his mouth, the monkey’s brain had mentally imitated the very same gesture.

How’s the kid?” asked Ailes, referring to Trump’s son-in-law and paramount political adviser, thirty-six-year-old Jared Kushner. “He’s my partner,” said Bannon, his tone suggesting that if he felt otherwise, he was nevertheless determined to stay on message. “Really?” said a dubious Ailes. “He’s on the team.” “He’s had lot of lunches with Rupert.” “In fact,” said Bannon, “I could use your help here.” Bannon then spent several minutes trying to recruit Ailes to help kneecap Murdoch. Ailes, since his ouster from Fox, had become only more bitter towards Murdoch. Now Murdoch was frequently jawboning the president-elect and encouraging him toward establishment moderation—all a strange inversion in the ever-stranger currents of American conservatism. Bannon wanted Ailes to suggest to Trump, a man whose many neuroses included a horror of forgetfulness or senility, that Murdoch might be losing it.

The team is showing its appreciation to the host families by taking them to a water park on Sunday. I know Mac is going out of town, but I thought you might still want to go. I mean, not as a date or anything. I’m going to invite the whole family.” “You don’t have to work Sunday?” “I got scheduled off.” “Sounds like fun. We could pack a picnic lunch--” “I’ll take care of that. As my thank you. All you have to do is bring yourself.” “And a bathing suit.” He grinned. “Yeah, and a bathing suit.” “And a towel. And suntan lotion…” “Maybe it’d be simpler if I just said I’ll take care of the tickets and eats.” “Okay, but I’ll go ahead and warn you not to take it personally that Mom and Dad aren’t really into water parks. It’s that whole not-using-the-exercise-equipment-as-intended thing Dad has going.” His grin grew. “I won’t take it personally.” “Okay, then, Sunday.” As though suddenly realized how intimate it seemed to be in my bedroom, he cleared his throat and took a step back. He gave my room one more look and took another step back. “It’s amazing what a room can reveal.” Then he walked down the hallway and knocked on Tiffany’s door. I wondered what he’d discover looking into her room.

Dear Lucas, I never met a boy with manners as good as yours. You ought to have a British accent. At homecoming, you wore a cravat and it suited you so well I think you could wear one all the time and get away with it. Oh, Lucas! I wish I knew what kind of girls you liked. As far as I can tell, you haven’t dated anyone…unless you have a girlfriend at another school. You’re just so mysterious. I hardly know a thing about you. The things I know are so unsubstanial, so unsatisfying, like that you eat a chicken sandwich every day at lunch, and you’re on the golf team. I guess the one remotely real thing I know about you is you’re a good writer, which must mean you have deep reserves of emotion. Like that short story you wrote in creative writing about the poisoned well, and it was from a six-year-old boy’s perspective. It was so sensitive, so keen! That story made me feel like I knew you at least a little bit. But I don’t know you, and I wish I did. I think you’re very special. I think you are probably one of the most special people at our school, and I wish more people knew that about you. Or maybe I don’t, because sometimes it’s nice to be the only one who knows something. Love, Lara Jean

Mattis and Gary Cohn had several quiet conversations about The Big Problem: The president did not understand the importance of allies overseas, the value of diplomacy or the relationship between the military, the economy and intelligence partnerships with foreign governments. They met for lunch at the Pentagon to develop an action plan. One cause of the problem was the president’s fervent belief that annual trade deficits of about $500 billion harmed the American economy. He was on a crusade to impose tariffs and quotas despite Cohn’s best efforts to educate him about the benefits of free trade. How could they convince and, in their frank view, educate the president? Cohn and Mattis realized they were nowhere close to persuading him. The Groundhog Day–like meetings on trade continued and the acrimony only grew. “Let’s get him over here to the Tank,” Mattis proposed. The Tank is the Pentagon’s secure meeting room for the Joint Chiefs of Staff. It might focus him. “Great idea,” Cohn said. “Let’s get him out of the White House.” No press; no TVs; no Madeleine Westerhout, Trump’s personal secretary, who worked within shouting distance of the Oval Office. There wouldn’t even be any looking out the window, because there were no windows in the Tank. Getting Trump out of his natural environment could do the trick. The idea was straight from the corporate playbook—a retreat or off-site meeting. They would get Trump to the Tank with his key national security and economic team to discuss worldwide strategic relations. Mattis and Cohn agreed. Together they would fight Trump on this. Trade wars or disruptions in the global markets could savage and undermine the precarious stability in the world. The threat could spill over to the military and intelligence community. Mattis couldn’t understand why the U.S. would want to pick a fight with allies, whether it was NATO, or friends in the Middle East, or Japan—or particularly with South Korea.

The truth is, the vanity of protective parents that I cited to the court goes beyond look-at-us-we’re-such-responsible-guardians. Our prohibitions also bulwark our self-importance. They fortify the construct that we adults are all initiates. By conceit, we have earned access to an unwritten Talmud whose soul-shattering content we are sworn to conceal from “innocents” for their own good. By pandering to this myth of the naïf, we service our own legend. Presumably we have looked the horror in the face, like staring into the naked eye of the sun, blistering into turbulent, corrupted creatures, enigmas even to ourselves. Gross with revelation, we would turn back the clock if we could, but there is no unknowing of this awful canon, no return to the blissfully insipid world of childhood, no choice but to shoulder this weighty black sagacity, whose finest purpose is to shelter our air-headed midgets from a glimpse of the abyss. The sacrifice is flatteringly tragic. The last thing we want to admit is that the forbidden fruit on which we have been gnawing since reaching the magic age of twenty-one is the same mealy Golden Delicious that we stuff into our children’s lunch boxes. The last thing we want to admit is that the bickering of the playground perfectly presages the machinations of the boardroom, that our social hierarchies are merely an extension of who got picked first for the kickball team, and that grown-ups still get divided into bullies and fatties and crybabies. What’s a kid to find out? Presumably we lord over them an exclusive deed to sex, but this pretense flies so fantastically in the face of fact that it must result from some conspiratorial group amnesia. To this day, some of my most intense sexual memories date back to before I was ten, as I have confided to you under the sheets in better days. No, they have sex, too. In truth, we are bigger, greedier versions of the same eating, shitting, rutting ruck, hell-bent on disguising from somebody, if only from a three-year-old, that pretty much all we do is eat and shit and rut. The secret is there is no secret. That is what we really wish to keep from our kids, and its suppression is the true collusion of adulthood, the pact we make, the Talmud we protect.

productive two-way relationship with their manager and their team. 3) Have the opportunity to use their natural abilities and are growing to new levels of success.

It’s simple: Happy customers reward you with their loyalty. Exceptional customer service converts into customer loyalty. It converts into raving fans who will praise your team on Twitter, and Facebook, and talk about their experience over lunch with friends. There is no greater marketing for your product than happy, surprised, raving fans, and no reason you can’t start now.

People would ask, "Why don't you put her in a nursing home?" I always answered, "I feel it is my responsibility, because she's my wife and Heather's mother. I love her and it's my job to take care of her for as long as I physically and mentally can." Every day, I would rush home at lunch, prepare her something to eat and drive her around a little, too. She loved to ride in the car and that seemed to keep her smiling. By late October, she had really gone down. We were playing Ole Miss in Oxford, in a game that is probably best remembered for David Palmer replacing an injured Jay Barker and putting on a show that had Heisman voters buzzing. Sadly, what I remember most was getting off the team plane and calling home. Charlotte didn't answer and I began to panic and started calling some of our neighbors. I finally reached one of the neighbors and she went to the house and found Charlotte just staring ahead. I don't think Charlotte ever answered the phone again.

Although baseball, basketball, football, and hockey teams are all privately held, they disclose limited information about their finances. From that data, one crucial fact can be distilled: while some teams are profitable, overall the sports-team industry does not earn any profit from the market. Industry profits all come from the taxpayers. In a market economy, the team owners would have to adjust or cover the losses out of their own deep pockets. Instead they rely on the kindness of taxpayers to enrich themselves at the expense of the vast majority who never attend these sporting events.

The huge gifts of money that wealthy owners of sports teams wheedle out of taxpayers are a free lunch that someone must fund. Often that burden falls on poor children and the ambitious among the poor. Sports-team subsidies undermine a century of effort to build up the nation’s intellectual capacity and, thus, its wealth. Andrew Carnegie poured money from his nineteenth-century steel fortune into local libraries across America because he was certain it would build a better and more prosperous nation, which indeed it did. These libraries imposed costs on taxpayers, but they also returned benefits as the nation’s store of knowledge grew. That is, library spending is a prime example of a subsidy adding value.

Many people born into modest circumstances have risen to great heights because they could educate themselves for free, and stay out of trouble, at the public library. To cite one example, Tom Bradley, the son of a sharecropper, learned enough at the local library as a boy to join the Los Angeles Police Department. He rose to become its highest ranking black officer in 1958 when he made lieutenant. Bradley went on to be mayor for two decades. But today library hours, as well as budgets to buy books, have been slashed in Los Angeles, Detroit, Baltimore, and other cities, yet there is plenty of money to give away to sports-team owners.

Art Modell, who pitted Cleveland and Baltimore against each other in a bidding war for his football team, was asked in 1996 about tax money going into his pocket at a time when libraries were being closed. It was a well-framed question. His Baltimore Ravens is the only major sports team whose name is a literary allusion, to the haunting poem by Edgar Allan Poe for his lost love Lenore. “The pride and the presence of a professional football team is far more important than 30 libraries,” Modell said. He spoke without a hint of irony or any indication that he had ever upon a midnight dreary, pondered weak and weary the effect of his greed on the human condition.

Threatening to move a team unless the public pays up has become a finely developed enterprise. Arranging to collect this legal loot employs lobbyists, economists, and marketing firms, all charging hefty fees for their help in digging into the pockets of taxpayers. When Modell was playing Cleveland off against Baltimore, Betty Montgomery, then the Ohio attorney general, came up with a one-word description of this tactic: blackmail.

The crucial issue when a subsidy is proposed is the impact on the finances of the local government, known as fiscal impact. Unless the annual flows of tax revenues more than pay for the bonds being issued, then some other part of the municipal budget will suffer. Even then it will probably suffer because people’s budgets for recreation are limited. A dollar spent at the ballpark is a dollar not spent at a restaurant, bar, or other place of leisure time activity, thus transferring the jobs and economic effects from many businesses to a single sports team.

The list of intended features was long and seemingly unrealistic for a team so fatigued by the past years’ effort—but they all sounded like good ideas. The producer’s schedule was a bit ambitious, but the September 15 deadline was the first hard date the team had ever discussed…however, we still couldn’t tell if we were near the top of the mountain or if there was yet another rise over the ridge. One thing was true: We were exhausted and sick of WoW. We worked on it all day, played the test on weekends, and talked about it over every lunch and dinner. When we talked to someone outside the company, it was often the only topic of conversation they were interested in. It was decided for the last two weeks of February the team would work only forty hours a week—late nights would return again in March. But some were working those hours anyway. For the most part, morale was low among half of the employees. Some were doubting that our workload would subside after shipping, because there would be so many bugs to fix and pressure to create more content. With the game still unfinished, and with the imminent expansions and live updates ahead, we were beginning to wonder if we were ever going to reach a conclusion. The team’s spirits were somewhat buoyed by the enthusiasm of the design staff, who were coming in to work on weekends. But even the designers agreed that they never wanted to work on another MMO. They were just too hard and too risky, and took too much time and effort to make.

We assign a buddy or a mentor to help them with questions. We’ll schedule time with our executive director for the first day. We’ll schedule welcome lunches with their team and various other people.” But it starts on the first day. “We make certain the manager welcomes the new hire at the front door.” New hires are introduced at staff devotions, and their new coworkers pray for them and thank God that they are an answer to prayer. The whole experience is designed to give the new employees total confidence that they made the right decision and have truly taken the right next step in God’s pathway for their calling. The third stage is true onboarding, which takes place over the first ninety days. It revolves around not only role-centered training but also organizational mission, vision, values, and history, delivered in dialogue with multiple voices in the organization

Happy birthday, dear Maria,” sang Lizzie, along with everyone else. “Happy birthday to you!” Lizzie gave Maria a special smile as she sang. There were a lot of kids at the party — almost everybody in their class was there — but everyone knew that Lizzie Peterson and Maria Santiago were best friends. They sat next to each other in class, played on the same kickball team at recess, and always ate lunch together. They had the same favorite color (purple) and the same lucky number (eight). They both loved fudge ripple ice cream, cool socks, snowstorms, and reading. Most of all, Lizzie and Maria loved animals. That was why Maria had decided to have her birthday party at Caring Paws,

Happy birthday, dear Maria,” sang Lizzie, along with everyone else. “Happy birthday to you!” Lizzie gave Maria a special smile as she sang. There were a lot of kids at the party — almost everybody in their class was there — but everyone knew that Lizzie Peterson and Maria Santiago were best friends. They sat next to each other in class, played on the same kickball team at recess, and always ate lunch together. They had the same favorite color (purple) and the same lucky number (eight). They both loved fudge ripple ice cream, cool socks, snowstorms, and reading. Most of all, Lizzie and Maria loved animals. That was why Maria had decided to have her birthday party at Caring Paws, the animal shelter where she and Lizzie both volunteered. It was Lizzie’s idea: she had gotten all excited when she had read about a boy who had his party at a shelter. “Instead of presents,” she’d told Maria, “everybody brought donations for the animals.” Maria wasn’t so sure at first. “Why don’t you do it for your birthday?” she’d asked Lizzie. “I will, but mine’s not for months and yours is coming right up. I know your real birthday isn’t until Monday, but we can have the party on Saturday. Come on, it’ll be fun! We can play animal-themed games, and decorate the meeting room with colorful paw prints, and have a dog bone–shaped cake, and everything.” Lizzie was full of ideas, and she could be very convincing. “It’s a great Caring Club activity, too. Think of all the donations you’ll get for the shelter. Ms. Dobbins will be very happy.” Ms. Dobbins was the shelter’s director. When Lizzie had started the Caring Club, Maria had been one of the first to join. Caring Club was for kids who loved animals and wanted to help them. Maria’s favorite animals were horses. She loved to ride, and she spent a lot of time at the stable. Lizzie had gone with her a few times, and had even taken riding lessons for a while, but she had never learned to love horses as much as she loved dogs. Lizzie really, really loved dogs. In fact, Lizzie was dog-crazy.

Team Musk would grow to include Mike Griffin, and meet with the Russians three times over a period of four months.* The group set up a few meetings with companies like NPO Lavochkin, which had made probes intended for Mars and Venus for the Russian Federal Space Agency, and Kosmotras, a commercial rocket launcher. The appointments all seemed to go the same way, following Russian decorum. The Russians, who often skip breakfast, would ask to meet around 11 A.M. at their offices for an early lunch. Then there would be small talk for an hour or more as the meeting attendees picked over a spread of sandwiches, sausages, and, of course, vodka. At some point during this process, Griffin usually started to lose his patience. “He suffers fools very poorly,” Cantrell said.

You're just so mysterious. I hardly know a thing about you. The things I know are so unsubstantial, so unsatisfying, like that you eat a chicken sandwich every day at lunch, and you're on the golf team. I guess the one remotely real thing I know about you is you're a good writer, which must mean you have deep reserves of emotion.

You're just so mysterious. I hardly know a things about you. The things I know are so unsubstantial, so unsatisfying, like that you eat a chicken sandwich every day at lunch, and you're on the golf team. I guess the one remotely real thing I know about you is you're a good writer, which must mean you have deep reserves of emotion.

8 Sam insisted they stop off at the baker’s on their way back; she had a feeling they were in for a long day. Once they arrived at the station, she told Bob to go on ahead while she hung around to speak to the desk sergeant. “Do you have anyone free, Nick?” “I can always find someone to help you out, Inspector. What do you need?” “A team of officers, actually. They need to go out to the Chatley farm in Mosser, more to the point, the surrounding area. Knock on the neighbours’ doors, see if they saw any suspicious vehicles in the area in the last few days.” “I can instigate that for you. Leave it with me.” “Good, thanks, Nick. Let me know if they come up with anything. I won’t be holding my breath. I think we have a crafty killer in our midst.” Nick tilted his head and winked. “They all slip up sooner or later, you know that as well as I do.” “How true.” She smiled, turned and tapped the number on the security keypad which released the door. Wearily, she made her way up the stairs to the incident room. She paused, wondering whether she should take a detour to the chief’s office, to keep him up to date. Her stomach rumbled which helped to make up her mind. The chief could wait. The incident room was buzzing, but it quietened down as soon as she entered the room. “Don’t let me stop you. Let’s get lunch underway and chuck around a few ideas while we eat, yes?” Bags rustled and Bob joined Sam at the drinks’ area. He added sugar to the cups. She touched his forehead. “Are you feeling all right?” He tutted. “Bugger off. I thought I’d better show willing, considering you bought the sandwiches.” “Thanks, it’s appreciated. I’m sure the rest of the team will agree.” Between them they handed around the drinks. In between bites and sips, Sam ran through what they had discovered up at the farmhouse. Crap, I wish I’d finished my lunch first. Her stomach objected and she placed half of her sandwich aside, to maybe go back to later. “That’s what we have, ladies and gents. Any suggestions?” Claire raised a hand, lettuce poking out from the corner of her mouth. She finished what she was chewing on and wiped her lips with a serviette. “Sorry about that, boss. Messy eater, I know, Scott’s always saying the same. Going back to the case, do you want me to delve into their backgrounds, the three who knew each other? Would that help?” “Anything we can find out about the three of them is going to help, Claire, so go for it. They’ve been friends for over fifty years, I seem to recall, so they might have a few skeletons in the cupboard to

Russia was not waiting for rapprochement with the United States. They could see that Trump’s chaotic White House was creating numerous financial opportunities worldwide, and they were going to scoop them up. On December 5, 2018, the Middle East and North Africa representative for the Russian state atomic energy company Rosatom went to Riyadh to meet with MBS. Its representative, Alexander Voronkov, said Russia would supply Generation 3+ VVER-1220 reactors for the kingdom, which he said were the most advanced ones Russia offered.26 It’s worth noting here that in 1994 Russia built the first nuclear reactor in Iran, also a VVER model. The reactors in Bushehr nuclear station were to be the same VVER-1220 as those Russia promised to Saudi Arabia.27 Even more interesting, Russian arms exporter Rosobornexport, a sanctioned arms company, sold S-300 air defense systems to Iran to protect Iran’s reactors, and one could imagine this could be part of the package to Saudi Arabia as well.28 The Russians were brilliantly offering regional parity and stability to both Iran and Saudi Arabia if the reactors were bought. It came with a tacit guarantee neither side could attack the other since they would have the same air defense system. On January 22, 2019, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) delivered a report on what Saudi Arabia needed to do to stay within international norms if it pursued a nuclear power program. Mikhail Chudakov, a former head of Russian nuclear programs and IAEA deputy director, delivered the report that gave the kingdom the green light to move forward.29 The following day, the kingdom received offers from five nations for construction of the project: the United States, Russia, France, South Korea, and China.30 The Saudis originally wanted sixteen reactors but have scaled that back to two as part of a larger effort to diversify its energy grid.31 The “tilt” seems to be toward the Russians, with the Russian IAEA official paving the way and the Rosatom folks working over the royal family. Like their arms sales, the Russians promised a fairly cheap but stable deal that comes with massive long-term costs. But it was Team Trump that started this game, trying to cheat, abuse ethics, and lie its way into potentially gaining billions of Arab sheikdom money under the guise of a major foreign policy initiative. In the end, they got played by Russia, who knew corruption at a master-class level. Trump was a piker. And Russia ate America’s lunch… again.

From the word go, the two of us have been a team. I was not an experienced trainer, but she and I worked through it all together, both learning as we went. She is the most loyal dog I will ever own. She will sit and gaze into my eyes. I am her world. She does not have the strength of some sheepdogs, but what she lacks in raw power she more than makes up for in pure effort. If I were to set her an impossible task, she would persevere to her last breath rather than let me down. Whether we are out checking the sheep, gathering lambs for dosing or just sitting together in my car, having lunch and listening to Radio 1, we are inseparable. I doubt I will ever own another dog like her.

And don’t think of networking as a means to an end—as a tit-for-tat exchange where if you do someone a favor they may do you one in return. Nobody wants to feel like they’re being used. You should talk to people and make connections because you’re naturally curious. You want to know how other teams at your company work and what people do. You want to talk to your competitors because you’re all working to solve the same problems and they’re taking a different approach. You want your projects to be successful, so you don’t just talk to your immediate teammates at lunch—you grab lunch with your partners, your customers, their customers, their partners. You talk to everyone: get their ideas and their perspectives. In doing so you may be able to help someone or make a friend or strike up an interesting conversation.

Viewed from a distance, Nantucket Island is everything Karen Otis dreamed it would be: tasteful, charming, nautical, classic. The ferry passes inside a stone jetty, and Karen squeezes Bruce’s hand to let him know she would like to stand and walk the few feet to the railing now. Bruce places an arm across Karen’s back and eases her up out of her seat. He’s not a big man but he’s strong. He was the Pennsylvania state champion wrestler at 142 pounds in 1984. Karen first set eyes on him sitting in the Easton Area High School pool balcony. She was swimming the butterfly leg for the varsity relay team, which routinely practiced during lunch, and when she climbed out of the water, she spied Bruce, dressed in sweatpants and a hooded sweatshirt, staring at an orange he held in his hands

My feet are weird , i suck at nhl gm my partner is better, I am a bad sprayer and get carried from being on a good team , I look like Shane but I used to have a weird pony tail and no one would have lunch with me

After lunch, Frank called everybody together again, and then organized us into teams, each with an Important Job. Cody and I were assigned to the firewood-collecting group, and we stood by the fire circle and listened dutifully as Frank lectured us thoroughly about making sure we gathered only deadwood, and remember that sometimes it could look dead but it wasn’t, and that to injure a living tree in this area was not only bad for the planet but an actual crime; and don’t forget to be very careful about poison oak, poison ivy, and something called manchineel. I

How’s the kid?” asked Ailes, referring to Trump’s son-in-law and paramount political adviser, thirty-six-year-old Jared Kushner. “He’s my partner,” said Bannon, his tone suggesting that if he felt otherwise, he was nevertheless determined to stay on message. “Really?” said a dubious Ailes. “He’s on the team.” “He’s had lot of lunches with Rupert.” “In fact,” said Bannon, “I could use your help here.” Bannon then spent several minutes trying to recruit Ailes to help kneecap Murdoch. Ailes, since his ouster from Fox, had become only more bitter towards Murdoch. Now Murdoch was frequently jawboning the president-elect and encouraging him toward establishment moderation—all a strange inversion in the ever-stranger currents of American conservatism. Bannon wanted Ailes to suggest to Trump, a man whose many neuroses included a horror of forgetfulness or senility, that Murdoch might be losing it. “I’ll call him,” said Ailes. “But Trump would jump through hoops for Rupert. Like for Putin. Sucks up and shits down. I just worry about who’s jerking whose chain.

When I started sixth grade, the other kids made fun of Brian and me because we were so skinny. They called me spider legs, skeleton girl, pipe cleaner, two-by-four, bony butt, stick woman, bean pole, and giraffe, and they said I could stay dry in the rain by standing under a telephone wire. At lunchtime, when other kids unwrapped their sandwiches or bought their hot meals, Brian and I would get out books and read. Brian told everyone he had to keep his weight down because he wanted to join the wrestling team when he got to high school. I told people that I had forgotten to bring my lunch. No one believed me, so I started hiding in the bathroom during lunch hour. I’d stay in one of the stalls with the door locked and my feet propped up so that no one would recognize my shoes. When other girls came in and threw away their lunch bags in the garbage pails, I’d go retrieve them. I couldn’t get over the way kids tossed out all this perfectly good food: apples, hard-boiled eggs, packages of peanut-butter crackers, sliced pickles, half-pint cartons of milk, cheese sandwiches with just one bite taken out because the kid didn’t like the pimentos in the cheese. I’d return to the stall and polish off my tasty finds. There was, at times, more food in the wastebasket than I could eat. The first time I found extra food—a bologna-and-cheese sandwich—I stuffed it into my purse to take home for Brian. Back in the classroom, I started worrying about how I’d explain to Brian where it came from. I was pretty sure he was rooting through the trash, too, but we never talked about it. As I sat there trying to come up with ways to justify it to Brian, I began smelling the bologna. It seemed to fill the whole room. I became terrified that the other kids could smell it, too, and that they’d turn and see my overstuffed purse, and since they all knew I never ate lunch, they’d figure out that I had pinched it from the trash. As soon as class was over, I ran to the bathroom and shoved the sandwich back in the garbage can.

IV. Real techies don’t worry about forced eugenics. I learned this from a real techie in the cafeteria of a software company. The project team is having lunch and discussing how long it would take to wipe out a disease inherited recessively on the X chromosome. First come calculations of inheritance probabilities. Given a population of a given size, one of the engineers arrives at a wipe-out date. Immediately another suggests that the date could be moved forward by various manipulations of the inheritance patterns. For example, he says, there could be an education campaign. The six team members then fall over one another with further suggestions. They start with rewards to discourage carriers from breeding. Immediately they move to fines for those who reproduce the disease. Then they go for what they call “more effective” measures: Jail for breeding. Induced abortion. Forced sterilization. Now they’re hot. The calculations are flying. Years and years fall from the final doom-date of the disease. Finally, they get to the ultimate solution. “It’s straightforward,” someone says. “Just kill every carrier.” Everyone responds to this last suggestion with great enthusiasm. One generation and—bang—the disease is gone. Quietly, I say, “You know, that’s what the Nazis did.” They all look at me in disgust. It’s the look boys give a girl who has interrupted a burping contest. One says, “This is something my wife would say.” When he says “wife,” there is no love, warmth, or goodness in it. In this engineer’s mouth, “wife” means wet diapers and dirty dishes. It means someone angry with you for losing track of time and missing dinner. Someone sentimental. In his mind (for the moment), “wife” signifies all programming-party-pooping, illogical things in the universe. Still, I persist. “It started as just an idea for the Nazis, too, you know.” The engineer makes a reply that sounds like a retch. “This is how I know you’re not a real techie,” he says.

14. Procrastinator’s Clock. For those who are chronically late to meetings, there’s the Procrastinator’s Clock, a downloadable program for your computer, that displays a digital clock that is guaranteed to be up to fifteen minutes fast. How fast? Well, that’s the nudge. You are never exactly sure because the clock unpredictably speeds up and slows down. That assures that users can’t game the system. We think that this device might help the lawyer of this team (who shall remain nameless) get to Noodles on time for lunch. A physical version of this clock has already been patented by a company called Emergent Technologies.

In his first class of the day, correlated language arts, a class for students at least two years below their grade level in English, Boobie Miles spent the period working on a short research paper that he called “The Wonderful Life of Zebras.” He thumbed through various basic encyclopedia entries on the zebra. He ogled at how fast they ran (“Damn, they travel thirty miles”) and was so captivated by a picture of a zebra giving birth that he showed it to a classmate (“Want to see it have a baby, man?”). By the end of the class, Boobie produced the following thesis paragraph: Zebras are one of the most unusual animals in the world today. The zebra has many different kind in it nature. The habitat of the zebra is in wide open plain. Many zebras have viris types of relatives. He then went on to algebra I, a course that the average college-bound student took in ninth grade and some took in eighth. Because of his status as a special needs student, Boobie hadn’t taken the course until his senior year. He was having difficulty with it and his average midway through the fall was 71. After lunch it was on to creative writing, where Boobie spent a few minutes playing with a purple plastic gargoyle-looking monster. He lifted the fingers of the monster so it could pick its nose, then stuck his own fingers into its mouth. There were five minutes of instruction that day; students spent the remaining fifty-odd minutes working on various stories they were writing. They pretty much could do what they wanted. Boobie wrote a little and also explained to two blond-haired girls what some rap terms meant, that “chillin’ to the strength,” for example, meant “like cool to the max.” Boobie enjoyed this class. It gave him an unfettered opportunity to express himself, and the teacher didn’t expect much from him. His whole purpose in life, she felt, was to be a football player. “That’s the only thing kids like that have going for them, is that physical strength,” she said.

Saudi ambassador in 2011. Is this payback? I don’t know. So they can’t be ruled out. But the National Counterterrorism Center is working on the problem as we speak.” “Look, I’m meeting with the Director of National Intelligence. He’ll want some details. He’ll also want to know how this was possible. How could this happen?” “That’s what I intend to find out.” “Then again,” O’Donoghue said, shaking his head, “is it possible there’s a problem in our ranks?” Meyerstein saw where this was going. “I hear what you’re saying.” O’Donoghue shrugged. “Just playing devil’s advocate.” “I agree we can’t discount such a possibility.” The Director leaned back in his seat and stared at her. “I’m intrigued you think a foreign government might be behind this. What’s your rationale?” “Luntz’s area of expertise makes him valuable to any government. But the fact that he specifically asked to speak to the FBI so urgently makes me think something else is afoot—and that’s why they want to silence him.” O’Donoghue nodded. “Taken from right under our noses. Very audacious. And dangerous.” Meyerstein nodded. “Tell me more about Connelly. Was he new?” “Just a few months with us, sir. Was based in Seattle for a couple of years before being posted here.” “Married?” “Young wife, two kids.” O’Donoghue turned and stared out of his window over the Washington skyline. “I want the bastards who did this, Martha. You have whatever resources you want.” “Sir, my team will also be alive to the possibility another story is playing out. I’m of course talking about national security. We can’t rule that out.” Meyerstein got up out of her seat. “Oh, Martha?” he said. “Yes, sir?” “Let’s do this right. And let’s nail those responsible.” “Count on it, sir.” Meyerstein walked out of the office and took the elevator down two floors to where Roy Stamper was standing waiting for her, unsmiling. He was wearing his customary navy suit, white shirt, navy silk tie, and highly polished black leather shoes. He had been with the FBI since he was headhunted after graduating from Duke, coming top of his class at law school. They had both started training at the FBI’s academy at Quantico at the same time. He wasn’t a great mixer. Never had been. He was quiet, but unlike her errant husband, he was a great family man. Her own father, despite being a workaholic like her, was the same, trying to take time out of his punishing schedule to meet her mother for lunch or supper. Her father was devoted to her mother. He liked being with her. He liked being around her. They looked relaxed in each other’s company. Martha could see that. She’d never felt that with her own husband. He’d never wanted to share a glass of wine with her when

Your team will take a short morning break (around 11:30 a.m.), an hour-long lunch (around 1 p.m.), and a short afternoon break (around 3:30 p.m.). These breaks are a sort of “pressure-release valve,” allowing people to rest their brains and catch up on work happening outside the sprint. Inside the sprint room, everybody will be 100 percent focused on the sprint’s challenge. The entire team must shut their laptops and put away their phones.

Maddy stared at the backs turned to her, the reflection of the two smirking faces that watched in the mirror. Watched the way kids watched all day long – sideways in their desks, sneering over their lunches, and tossing endless comments as they passed in the halls. Gone was the memory of Leanne and the team; gone was the inner voice telling her to keep cool, to shut the hell up and get out of there. Inside her brain, heat swelled, fused into quantum thermodynamics, and exploded.

I have earmarked in my schedule a certain percentage of my time that I’m always out talking to customers and prospects and learning from them. I try to organize these meetings to happen in-person because I want to see the customer in their natural environment. If I can’t get it in-person in their of office, then I’ll try to do it over coffee, or over a walk, or over lunch, because I want to get them in an environment where their guard is down and we can get them talking about things.

The first hints of this emerged in the early and mid-1990s, at the tail end of the crack epidemic. Suniya Luthar is now sixty-two, with an infectious smile, bright brown eyes, and short snow-white hair. Back then, she was a fledgling psychologist working as an assistant professor and researcher in the department of psychiatry at the Yale School of Medicine. She was studying resiliency among teenagers in low-income urban communities, and one of her early findings was that the most popular kids were also among the most destructive and aggressive at school. Was this a demographic phenomenon, she wondered, or merely an adolescent one, this tendency to look up to peers who acted out? To find out, she needed a comparison group. A research assistant suggested they recruit students from his former high school in an affluent suburb. Luthar’s team ultimately enlisted 488 tenth graders—about half from her assistant’s high school and half from a scruffy urban high school. The affluent community’s median household income was 80 percent higher than the national median, and more than twice that of the low-income community. The rich community also had far fewer families on food stamps (0.3 percent vs. 19 percent) and fewer kids getting free or reduced-price school lunches (1 percent vs. 86 percent). The suburban teens were 82 percent white, while the urban teens were 87 percent nonwhite. Luthar surveyed the kids, asking a series of questions related to depression and anxiety, drug use ranging from alcohol and nicotine to LSD and cocaine, and participation in delinquent acts at home, at school, and in the community. Also examined were grades, “social competence,” and teachers’ assessments of each student. After crunching the numbers, she was floored. The affluent teens fared poorly relative to the low-income teens on “all indicators of substance use, including hard drugs.” This flipped the conventional wisdom on its head. “I was quite taken aback,” Luthar recalls.

Checketts picked up on just how deeply Riley believed in being on the same page within months of working with him. During the team’s first training camp in Charleston, in 1991, Checketts and Riley were having lunch when Checketts’s cell phone rang, interrupting the talk. It was his wife, Deborah, who was about to buy a Chevy Suburban sport-utility vehicle, and wanted her husband’s input on color. Deborah had all but decided on the color green, and asked her husband if he was okay with that option. He was, and told her that would be a perfectly fine choice. But then Riley, who was sitting next to Checketts and had listened in enough to know the couple was choosing a color for a new vehicle, butted in. “What are you talking about? She can’t buy a green car, Dave. Green is the Celtics,” Riley said, referring to the team that had served as the archrival of his Showtime Lakers during the 1980s. Checketts laughed, before realizing Riley’s facial expression hadn’t changed. “I’m dead serious,” Riley said. So Checketts, still on the phone with his wife, told her she couldn’t get a green Suburban. When Deborah asked what other colors were available, the car salesman suggested red. So she asked Checketts how he felt about red. Again, Checketts was fine with that option. Again, Riley wasn’t. “What? Red is the Bulls,” said Riley, almost annoyed Checketts would even ask his take on the color. Checketts relented. “Don’t come home with anything but a blue one,” he told his wife, before hanging up. This was how Riley was wired. You were either all the way in on supporting his vision—down to the color of your car—or you weren’t.

People join companies. They leave managers. Therefore, to keep your team happy and engaged, you need one thing above all else: great managers — not free lunches or yoga classes! As Gallup notes, “Managers account for at least 70% of variance in employee engagement scores.” And great managers are not just born; they are continually advancing their skills and those of their employees.

We can also surface milestones that would have gone unnoticed. • What if every member of a youth sports team got a “before-and-after” video of their progress? • Number-heavy organizational goals are fine as tools of accountability, but smart leaders surface more motivational milestones en route to the target. 8. Moments when we display courage make us proud. We never know when courage will be demanded, but we can practice to ensure we’re ready. • The protesters involved in the Nashville lunch counter sit-ins didn’t just show courage, they rehearsed it. 9. Practicing courage lets us “preload” our responses. • Gentile’s approach to ethics says we usually know WHAT is right but don’t know HOW to act. 10. Courage is contagious; our moments of action can be a defining moment for others.

What i quickly discovered is that high school running was divided into two camps: those who ran cross-country and those who ran track. There was a clear distinction. The kind of runner you were largely mirrored your approach to life. The cross-country guys thought the track runners were high-strung and prissy, while the track guys viewed the cross-country guys as a bunch of athletic misfits. It's true that the guys on the cross-country team were a motley bunch. solidly built with long, unkempt hair and rarely shaven faces, they looked more like a bunch of lumberjacks than runners. They wore baggy shorts, bushy wool socks, and furry beanie caps, even when it was roasting hot outside. Clothing rarely matched. Track runners were tall and lanky; they were sprinters with skinny long legs and narrow shoulders. They wore long white socks, matching jerseys, and shorts that were so high their butt-cheeks were exposed. They always appeared neatly groomed, even after running. The cross-country guys hung out in late-night coffee shops and read books by Kafka and Kerouac. They rarely talked about running; its was just something they did. The track guys, on the other hand, were obsessed. Speed was all they ever talked about....They spent an inordinate amount of time shaking their limbs and loosening up. They stretched before, during, and after practice, not to mention during lunch break and assembly, and before and after using the head. The cross-country guys, on the the other hand, never stretched at all. The track guys ran intervals and kept logbooks detailing their mileage. They wore fancy watched that counted laps and recorded each lap-time....Everything was measured, dissected, and evaluated. Cross-country guys didn't take notes. They just found a trail and went running....I gravitated toward the cross-country team because the culture suited me

Fuck, I never got enough of my wife. She was the sexiest woman alive. I loved every inch of her. I loved her stretch marks and her scars, the specks in her eyes and the birthmark on her neck. All her flawless imperfections. I was grateful every moment of every single day that Brandon brought me to her. She was my everlasting gift from a man I’d never forget for the rest of my life. I broke away and put my forehead to hers. “So you want In-N-Out for lunch and steaks for dinner, right?” She nodded and put her hand over my heart where the tattoo of her name was. “Josh? I think I could be ready again to keep trying. Should we start talking about surrogacy? Carmen is still down for it, right?” I knew why she was asking. She still wanted to give me my baseball team. But my dreams had changed. Seeing the strain of the in vitro process and how much it took out of her emotionally and physically—I just wanted her to be happy. I wanted her to enjoy our son. She never complained, but I knew she was tired of the doctor’s visits and the hormone injections and the disappointment. If she was up for it in a few years, maybe we’d try again or look into the other options. We were young—we had time. But I didn’t want her to do it for me because she thought she owed it to me. She’d done enough. I put my hands on her face. “Let’s take a break, Kristen. I’m happy where we are. And if this is our family, I’m good with that.” The relief was visible in her eyes. “Are you sure?” My mouth curved up into a smile. “I’m very sure. I have everything I need.

manipulation through the tactic of mass assignation. Silvia, a CIO for a logistics agency, described the tactic in the following manner. “Behind closed doors I assemble the team and we plan how to best maneuver the multitude of stakeholders we have to influence to get large-scale change done. We create a highly detailed power map that includes their priorities, relationships, likes, dislikes — even their hobbies and favorite foods. This power map file is encrypted and kept only on my personal laptop, which no one may access but me.” Then she explains, “We continuously analyze their communication styles and who they relate to both on and off the team to determine the best person, channel and information to sway them. If they need to meet with Paul on a project, but they dislike Paul but like Mary, for example, we have Mary set up the meeting and Paul just shows up with her. If they like golf, the information we provide them includes golf analogies. If they like seafood, I take them out for lunch at the local oyster bar. I learned to do this when I worked for a consumer products company. This is how we analyzed the relationships between multiple target customers at the same time to determine how to sell more, and it made sense to apply it internally here.” As noted, mass

All scientists, regardless of discipline, need to be prepared to confront the broadest consequences of our work—but we need to communicate its more detailed aspects as well. I was reminded of this at a recent lunch I attended with some of Silicon Valley’s greatest technology gurus. One of them said, “Give me ten to twenty million dollars and a team of smart people, and we can solve virtually any engineering challenge.” This person obviously knew a thing or two about solving technological problems—a long string of successes attested to that—but ironically, such an approach would not have produced the CRISPR-based gene-editing technology, which was inspired by curiosity-driven research into natural phenomena. The technology we ended up creating did not take anywhere near ten to twenty million dollars to develop, but it did require a thorough understanding of the chemistry and biology of bacterial adaptive immunity, a topic that may seem wholly unrelated to gene editing. This is but one example of the importance of fundamental research—the pursuit of science for the sake of understanding our natural world—and its relevance to developing new technologies. Nature, after all, has had a lot more time than humans to conduct experiments! If there’s one overarching point I hope you will take away from this book, it’s that humans need to keep exploring the world around us through open-ended scientific research. The wonders of penicillin would never have been discovered had Alexander Fleming not been conducting simple experiments with Staphylococci bacteria. Recombinant DNA research—the foundation for modern molecular biology—became possible only with the isolation of DNA-cutting and DNA-copying enzymes from gut- and heat-loving bacteria. Rapid DNA sequencing required experiments on the remarkable properties of bacteria from hot springs. And my colleagues and I would never have created a powerful gene-editing tool if we hadn’t tackled the much more fundamental question of how bacteria fight off viral infections.

Just come back before it gets dark, okay?” “Yes, ma’am. I’ll handle this as fast as I can.” “Thank you, Doc.” Doc stood and smiled at Rhonda before leaving the kitchen and heading out to the barn to harness the mules. Before he did, though, he swung by the bunkhouse and picked up his Winchester ’73 and the Sharps along with a box of cartridges for each. He may not have expected that any visitors to arrive at the ranch, at least not anyone from the Double L, but it never hurt to be prepared. He walked back out to the barn, set the two carbines in the wagon’s footwell, then pulled an axe from the wall, checked its edge and found it acceptable, although it would need sharpening when he returned. He set it on the wagon’s bed then began harnessing the mules. After the mules were in harness, he stepped up, released the wagon’s hand brake and drove the team out of the barn and headed northeast to the stand of cottonwoods that he had seen near the creek. What made his job easier was that two of the trees were already down and were devoid of leaves meaning that they had been down for a while, and if they’d been down long enough, the wood would already be seasoned. _____ Rhonda finished cleaning up after lunch, still savoring the lingering taste of Doc’s choice in food. She entered her bedroom, took out her sewing

For me, writing any piece of advertising is unnerving. You sit down with your partner and put your feet up. You read the strategist's brief, draw a square on a pad of paper, and you both stare at the damned thing. You stare at each other's shoes. You look at the square. You give up and go to lunch. You come back. The empty square is still there. Is the square gonna be a poster? Will it be a branded sitcom, a radio spot, a website? You don't know. All you know is the square's still empty. So you both go through the brand stories you find online, on the client's website, what people are saying in the Amazon reviews. You go through the reams of material the account team left in your office. You discover the bourbon you're working on is manufactured in a little town with a funny name. You point this out to your partner. Your partner keeps staring out the window at some speck in the distance. (Or is that a speck on the glass? Can't be sure.) He says, “Oh.” Down the hallway, a phone rings. Paging through an industry magazine, your partner points out that every few months the distillers rotate the aging barrels a quarter turn. You go, “Hmm.” On some blog, you read how moss on trees happens to grow faster on the sides that face a distillery's aging house. Now that's interesting. You feel the shapeless form of an idea begin to bubble up from the depths. You poise your pencil over the page…and it all comes out in a flash of creativity. (Whoa. Someone call 911. Report a fire on my drawing pad 'cause I am SMOKIN' hot.) You put your pencil down, smile, and read what you've written. It's complete rubbish. You call it a day and slink out to see a movie. This process continues for several days, even weeks, and then one day, completely without warning, an idea just shows up at your door, all nattied up like a Jehovah's Witness. You don't know where it comes from. It just shows up. That's how you come up with ideas. Sorry, there's no big secret. That's basically the drill.

On Friday, April 6, Bostic and two other journalists escorted Thomas and McDuffie to Bear Mountain. Startled Dodgers officials immediately refused to grant a tryout, claiming it could not be fitted into the day’s activities. While team president-general manager Branch Rickey invited the group to lunch, he angrily berated Bostic for his confrontational approach

Raskin was just a dreamer, whereas he was a doer and would get the Mac done in a year. It was clear he wanted vindication for having been ousted from the Lisa group, and he was energized by competition. He publicly bet John Couch $5,000 that the Mac would ship before the Lisa. “We can make a computer that’s cheaper and better than the Lisa, and get it out first,” he told the team. Jobs asserted his control of the group by canceling a brown-bag lunch seminar that Raskin was scheduled to give to the whole company in February 1981. Raskin happened to go by the room anyway and discovered that there were a hundred people there waiting to hear him;