Tenth Class Quotes

That better not be what I think it is," Joe mumbled in the dark. It was. "It's not. Jeez, woman, someone's paranoid. It's my pocket light," he said, wincing. Ah, he was only human after all. It wasn't the first time she got him hard nor would it be the last time. The physical discomfort was a small price to pay to have her in his arms. "Well, then your flashlight is growing. Jeez, Eric, put a leash on that thing before it stabs me!" she teased. "But it likes you," he pouted. She giggled. "I seem to remember a certain tenth grade math class where it liked standing up in front of the entire class." He sucked in a breath. "Hey, that traumatized me!

But remember in tenth grade, when I wanted to go out with that junior and you said, ‘Eh. I don’t think she’s the right girl for you’?” “She wasn’t.” “Because she was setting things on fire!” Ric announced loudly, making Gwen burst out laughing and Lock roll his eyes. “I’m serious, Gwen.” Ric went on. “And when I say setting things on fire, I mean entire buildings. Mostly schools. She’d been setting them on fire or trying to, for weeks. I didn’t find out until the cops came and arrested her during gym class. But does he say to me, ‘She’s setting things on fire! She’s crazy! Stay away from her!’ No. He says, ‘Eh. I don’t think she’s the right girl for you.’ And he’s all calm about it over our chocolate pudding in the cafeteria.” “I don’t see the point of getting hysterical.

How do you do it?" "Do what?" "All of it. You know. Go to class and practice. Make it through the day. Act like ... like none if it mattered." Jason swore beneath his breath and pulled the car over. Then he reached across the seat and brushed his thumb over her cheek; until then, she hadn't been aware she was crying. "Trix," he sighed, "it mattered.

Finally, we can congratulate ourselves on the unprecedented accomplishments of modern Sapiens only if we completely ignore the fate of all other animals. Much of the vaunted material wealth that shields us from disease and famine was accumulated at the expense of laboratory monkeys, dairy cows and conveyor-belt chickens. Over the last two centuries tens of billions of them have been subjected to a regime of industrial exploitation whose cruelty has no precedent in the annals of planet Earth. If we accept a mere tenth of what animal-rights activists are claiming, then modern industrial agriculture might well be the greatest crime in history. When evaluating global happiness, it is wrong to count the happiness only of the upper classes, of Europeans or of men. Perhaps it is also wrong to consider only the happiness of humans.

We live in the wealthiest nation in the history of the world, but that reality means little because almost all of that wealth is controlled by a tiny handful of individuals. There is something profoundly wrong when the top one-tenth of 1 percent owns almost as much as the bottom 90 percent, and when 99 percent of all new income goes to the top 1 percent. There is something profoundly wrong when one family owns more wealth than the bottom 130 million Americans. This type of immoral, unsustainable economy is not what America is supposed to be about. This has got to change, and together we will change it. The change begins when we say to the billionaire class: “You can’t have it all. You can’t get huge tax breaks while children in this country go hungry. You can’t continue sending our jobs to China while millions are looking for work. You can’t hide your profits in the Cayman Islands and other tax havens, while there are massive unmet needs in every corner of this nation. Your greed has got to end. You cannot take advantage of all the benefits of America if you refuse to accept your responsibilities as Americans.

For the inhabitant of a country has at least nine characters: a professional, a national, a civic, a class, a geographic, a sexual, a conscious, an unconscious, and possibly even a private character to boot. He unites them in himself, but they dissolve him, so that he is really nothing more than a small basin hollowed out by these many streamlets that trickle into it and drain out of it again, to join other such rills in filling some other basin. Which is why every inhabitant of the earth also has a tenth character that is nothing else than the passive fantasy of spaces yet unfilled [....] prevent[ing] precisely what should be his true fulfillment.

If we accept a mere tenth of what animal-rights activists are claiming, then modern industrial agriculture might well be the greatest crime in history. When evaluating global happiness, is it wrong to count the happiness only of the upper classes, of Europeans or of men? Perhaps it is also wrong to consider only the happiness of humans.

Much of the vaunted material wealth that shields us from disease and famine was accumulated at the expense of laboratory monkeys, dairy cows and conveyor-belt chickens. Over the last two centuries tens of billions of them have been subjected to a regime of industrial exploitation whose cruelty has no precedent in the annals of planet Earth. If we accept a mere tenth of what animal-rights activists are claiming, then modern industrial agriculture might well be the greatest crime in history. When evaluating global happiness, it is wrong to count the happiness only of the upper classes, of Europeans or of men. Perhaps it is also wrong to consider only the happiness of humans.

In fact the system of collective contribution, levy of a tenth, and redistribution to the participants, is the schema of the sacrificial rite (one provides the victim; the god, the temple, the priests levy a tenth, then redistribution takes place: redistribution that imparts a new strength and power to those who benefit from it, deriving from the sacrifice itself). The game — sacrifice, division, levy, redistribution — is a religious form of individual and group invigoration which has been transposed into a social practice involving the resolution of a class conflict.

Punishment for acting above your station was a central principal in Harriet's interpretation of the world. In the hospital, Elwood wondered if the viciousness of his beating owed something to his request for harder classes...Now he worked on a new theory: There was no higher system guiding Nickel's brutality, merely an indiscriminate spite, one that had nothing to do with people. A figment from tenth-grade science struck him: a Perpetual Misery Machine, one that operated by itself without human agency. Also, Archimedes, one of his first encyclopedia finds. Violence is the only lever big enough to move the world

Ironic, isn’t it! A group of socialists who had espoused the values of New Labour and who were loudly beating the drum for equality of opportunity and education were ready to pile onto a working-class kid who’d never had one-tenth of the privilege of their own son.

Seven-tenths of the free population of the country were of just their class and degree: small “independent” farmers, artisans, etc.; which is to say, they were the nation, the actual Nation; they were about all of it that was useful, or worth saving, or really respect-worthy, and to subtract them would have been to subtract the Nation and leave behind some dregs, some refuse, in the shape of a king, nobility and gentry, idle, unproductive, acquainted mainly with the arts of wasting and destroying, and of no sort of use or value in any rationally constructed world.

A mood of constructive criticism being upon me, I propose forthwith that the method of choosing legislators now prevailing in the United States be abandoned and that the method used in choosing juries be substituted. That is to say, I propose that the men who make our laws be chosen by chance and against their will, instead of by fraud and against the will of all the rest of us, as now... ...that the names of all the men eligible in each assembly district be put into a hat (or, if no hat can be found that is large enough, into a bathtub), and that a blind moron, preferably of tender years, be delegated to draw out one... The advantages that this system would offer are so vast and obvious that I hesitate to venture into the banality of rehearsing them. It would in the first place, save the commonwealth the present excessive cost of elections, and make political campaigns unnecessary. It would in the second place, get rid of all the heart-burnings that now flow out of every contest at the polls, and block the reprisals and charges of fraud that now issue from the heart-burnings. It would, in the third place, fill all the State Legislatures with men of a peculiar and unprecedented cast of mind – men actually convinced that public service is a public burden, and not merely a private snap. And it would, in the fourth and most important place, completely dispose of the present degrading knee-bending and trading in votes, for nine-tenths of the legislators, having got into office unwillingly, would be eager only to finish their duties and go home, and even those who acquired a taste for the life would be unable to increase the probability, even by one chance in a million, of their reelection. The disadvantages of the plan are very few, and most of them, I believe, yield readily to analysis. Do I hear argument that a miscellaneous gang of tin-roofers, delicatessen dealers and retired bookkeepers, chosen by hazard, would lack the vast knowledge of public affairs needed by makers of laws? Then I can only answer (a) that no such knowledge is actually necessary, and (b) that few, if any, of the existing legislators possess it... Would that be a disservice to the state? Certainly not. On the contrary, it would be a service of the first magnitude, for the worst curse of democracy, as we suffer under it today, is that it makes public office a monopoly of a palpably inferior and ignoble group of men. They have to abase themselves to get it, and they have to keep on abasing themselves in order to hold it. The fact reflects in their general character, which is obviously low. They are men congenitally capable of cringing and dishonorable acts, else they would not have got into public life at all. There are, of course, exceptions to that rule among them, but how many? What I contend is simply that the number of such exceptions is bound to be smaller in the class of professional job-seekers than it is in any other class, or in the population in general. What I contend, second, is that choosing legislators from that populations, by chance, would reduce immensely the proportion of such slimy men in the halls of legislation, and that the effects would be instantly visible in a great improvement in the justice and reasonableness of the laws.

By a sarcasm of law and phrase they were freemen. Seven-tenths of the free population of the country were of just their class and degree: small “independent” farmers, artisans, etc.; which is to say, they were the nation, the actual Nation; they were about all of it that was useful, or worth saving, or really respectworthy, and to subtract them would have been to subtract the Nation and leave behind some dregs, some refuse, in the shape of a king, nobility and gentry, idle, unproductive, acquainted mainly with the arts of wasting and destroying, and of no sort of use or value in any rationally constructed world.

You hear it in every political speech, “vote for me, we’ll get the dream back.” They all reiterate it in similar words—you even hear it from people who are destroying the dream, whether they know it or not. But the “dream” has to be sustained, otherwise how are you going to get people in the richest, most powerful country in world history, with extraordinary advantages, to face the reality that they see around them? Inequality is really unprecedented. If you look at total inequality today, it’s like the worst periods of American history. But if you refine it more closely, the inequality comes from the extreme wealth in a tiny sector of the population, a fraction of 1 percent. There were periods like the Gilded Age in the 1890s and the Roaring Twenties and so on, when a situation developed rather similar to this, but the current period is extreme. Because if you look at the wealth distribution, the inequality mostly comes from super-wealth—literally, the top one-tenth of a percent are just super-wealthy. This is the result of over thirty years of a shift in social and economic policy. If you check you find that over the course of these years the government policy has been modified completely against the will of the population to provide enormous benefits to the very rich. And for most of the population, the majority, real incomes have almost stagnated for over thirty years. The middle class in that sense, that unique American sense, is under severe attack. A significant part of the American Dream is class mobility: You’re born poor, you work hard, you get rich. The idea that it is possible for everyone to get a decent job, buy a home, get a car, have their children go to school . . . It’s all collapsed.

To cover all the bases, I also signed up for a class on psycholinguistics, which had a prerequisite in neural networking. In addition to not having taken it, I also didn’t know what neural networking was. For some reason, this didn’t really bother me, or seem like a problem. The handsome Italian professor wore the most elegant suits I had ever seen, in the most subtle colors—gray with a hint of smoky blue so elusive that you had to keep looking to be sure you hadn’t imagined it. The class met on the tenth floor of the psychology building, most of which was devoted to an institute for bat study and smelled accordingly. It was total sensory discord to see the handsome professor in his elegant suits stepping out of the elevator into the hall of stinky bats.

And I cannot remember anything from a single history class I’ve ever taken, so unless tenth graders are being tested on BuzzFeed listicles and how to keep track of all the bogus e-mail addresses you’ve created to sign up for multiple thirty-day Tidal trials and ModCloth discount codes, I do not know anything of use to a modern-day child. I can show a kid how to make a satisfying meal out of stale saltines and leftover aloo gobi, but that is basically it.

On the SB5 Stanford-Binet intelligence test Isaiah’s reasoning scores were near genius levels. His abilities came naturally but were honed in his math classes. He was formally introduced to inductive reasoning in geometry, a tenth-grade subject he took in the eighth. His teacher, Mrs. Washington, was a severe woman who looked to be all gristle underneath her brightly colored pantsuits. Lavender, Kelly green, peach. She talked to the class like somebody had tricked her into it. “All

Daniel had been inside the Bethel police station only once, when he'd chaperoned Trixie's second-grade class there on a field trip. He remembered the quilt that hung in the lobby, stars sewn to spell out "PROTECT AND SERVE" and the booking room where the whole class had taken a collective grinning mug shot. He had not seen the conference room until this morning-a small, gray cubicle with a reverse mirrored window that some idiot contractor had put in backward so that from inside, Daniel could see the traffic of cops in the hallway checking their reflections.

FAILURE CAN BE A GREAT TEACHER “When I was in tenth grade I decided to take an AP computer science class. I ended up failing the AP exam. But I would not accept the failure, so I took the class and the test again the following year. Somehow, staying away from programming for nearly a year and then coming back to it made me realize how much I truly enjoyed it. I passed the test easily on the second try. If I had been too afraid of failure to take the computer science class the first time, and then a second time, I would certainly not be what I am today, a passionate and happy computer scientist.

For it was not only dislike of one’s fellow-citizens that was intensified into a strong sense of community; even mistrust of oneself and of one’s own destiny here assumed the character of profound self-certainty. In this country one acted—sometimes indeed to the extreme limits of passion and its consequences—differently from the way one thought, or one thought differently from the way one acted. Uninformed observers have mistaken this for charm, or even for a weakness in what they thought was the Austrian character. But that was wrong. It is always wrong to explain the phenomena of a country simply by the character of its inhabitants. For the inhabitant of a country has at least nine characters: a professional one, a national one, a civic one, a class one, a geographical one, a sex one, a conscious, an unconscious and perhaps even too a private one; he combines them all in himself, but they dissolve him, and he is really nothing but a little channel washed out by all these trickling streams, which flow into it and drain out of it again in order to join other little streams filling another channel. Hence every dweller on earth also has a tenth character, which is nothing more or less than the passive illusion of spaces unfilled; it permits a man everything, with one exception: he may not take seriously what his at least nine other characters do and what happens to them, in other words, the very thing that ought to be the filling of him. This interior space—which is, it must be admitted, difficult to describe—is of a different shade and shape in Italy from what it is in England, because everything that stands out in relief against it is of a different shade and shape; and yet both here and there it is the same, merely an empty, invisible space with reality standing in the middle of it like a little toy brick town, abandoned by the imagination. In so far as this can at all become apparent to every eye, it had done so in Kakania, and in this Kakania was, without the world’s knowing it, the most progressive State of all; it was the State that was by now only just, as it were, acquiescing in its own existence. In it one was negatively free, constantly aware of the inadequate grounds for one’s own existence and lapped by the great fantasy of all that had not happened, or at least had not yet irrevocably happened, as by the foam of the oceans from which mankind arose. Es ist passiert, ‘it just sort of happened’, people said there when other people in other places thought heaven knows what had occurred. It was a peculiar phrase, not known in this sense to the Germans and with no equivalent in other languages, the very breath of it transforming facts and the bludgeonings of fate into something light as eiderdown, as thought itself. Yes, in spite of much that seems to point the other way, Kakania was perhaps a home for genius after all; and that, probably, was the ruin of it.

With the rise of the state all of this was swept away. For the past five or six millenia, nine-tenths of all the people who ever lived did so as peasants or as members of some other servile caste or class. With the rise of the state, ordinary men seeking to use nature's bounty had to get someone else's permission and had to pay for it with taxes, tribute or extra labor. The weapons and techniques of war and organized aggression were taken away from them and turned over to specialist-soldiers and policemen controlled by military, religious, and civil bureaucrats. For the first time there appeared on earth kings, dictators, high priests, emperors, prime ministers, presidents, governors, mayors, generals, admirals, police chiefs, judges, lawyers, and jailers, along with dungeons, jails, penitentiaries, and concentration camps. Under the tutelage of the state, human beings learned for the first time how to bow, grovel, kneel, and kowtow. In many ways the rise of the state was the descent of the world from freedom to slavery.

I’m going to spank you for each time you disobeyed me in class, Miss Irons. Do you remember how often that was?” “I think it was twenty times,” I answered immediately. “Hmm, don’t think so. Let’s try ten.” The first crack of the wooden ruler slapped against my ass with a loud thwack. It rocked me forward against King’s erection in a delicious way that had me thrusting back for the next strike. “Good fuckin’ girl,” he growled, losing his character as he beat back and forth over my ass cheeks with the wicked little ruler. My ass was on fire by the time the tenth spank landed and I was about to beg King to fuck me, but he was already lifting me off his lap to stand before him. He stared up at me with his desire bright in his eyes, a flush streaked high across his brutal cheekbones. “Take out my cock and ride me. Wanna see you fuck yourself on my cock.” Immediately, my hands were at his belt and I was straddling his lap, hissing when I slammed myself down on his cock. I couldn’t take him all the way, a fact that made me writhe and moan helplessly on top of him.

Flattery was a prime department store strategy for cultivating customers, and men got a heavy dose. Males could expect to be treated like busy executives and discriminating men of the world. Men’s sections, floors, and entire stores were designed to resemble opulent clubs, often outfitted with wood-paneled grills that women customers were not permitted to enter. Vandervoort’s and Filene’s went to somewhat unusual lengths in furnishing a men’s lounge and smoking room, oddly working against the prevailing assumption that men had no time to spare. In Halle’s new men’s store of the late 1920s, dark mahogany paneling and carved marble detailing created the ambience of a priestly inner sanctum. Filene’s furnished an indoor putting green in its men’s store of 1928. Wanamaker’s outdid itself in 1932, the unlucky Depression year it opened its luxurious six-story men’s store in the Lincoln-Liberty building, with stocks of British imports and an equestrian shop too. Both Wanamaker’s and Marshall Field sold airplanes. Lord & Taylor reserved its tenth floor in New York City for men, with heman departments for cutlery, the home bar, and barbecue equipment. Gimbels, Macy’s, and Hearn’s stuck to more basic appeals, using their large liquor departments to attract men.

You love the sea, don’t you, Captain?”“Yes, I love it! The sea is everything. It covers seven-tenths of the globe. Its breath is pure and healthy. It is an immense desert where a man is never alone, for he can feel life quivering all about him. The sea is only a receptacle for all the prodigious, supernatural things that exist inside it; it is only movement and love; it is the living infinite, as one of your poets has said. And in fact, Professor, it contains the three kingdoms of nature—mineral, vegetable and animal. This last is well represented by the four groups of zoophytes, by the three classes of articulata, by the five classes of mollusks, by three classes of vertebrates, mammals and reptiles, and those innumerable legions of fish, that infinite order of animals which includes more than thirteen thousand species, only one-tenth of which live in fresh water. The sea is a vast reservoir of nature. The world, so to speak, began with the sea, and who knows but that it will also end in the sea! There lies supreme tranquillity. The sea does not belong to tyrants. On its surface, they can still exercise their iniquitous rights, fighting, destroying one another and indulging in their other earthly horrors. But thirty feet below its surface their power ceases, their influence dies out and their domination disappears! Ah, Monsieur, one must live—live within the ocean! Only there can one be independent! Only there do I have no master! There I am free!

The sky was so blue. It’s only been five years. My skyline was never marked with an absence. Remember that wine school? Windows on the World? I had been underneath them, on the F train coming from Brooklyn just one hour before. I was late for high school but glued to the TV. I had taught a class there - on Rioja - on the night of September tenth. Chef made soup. So I heard something and looked out my window - you know I’m on the East Side. It was too low. But it was steady and went by almost in slow motion. The Owner set up a soup kitchen on the sidewalk. No, I haven’t been down there. The smoke. The dust. But the sky was so blue. My buddy was the somm at the restaurant - we came up at Tavern on the Green together. You guys never talk about it. I was going into a class called, I’m not joking, Meanings of Death. I always wondered: If I had been here, would I have stayed? And I thought, New York is so far away. My cousin was a firefighter, second-wave responder. Nothing on television is real. But am I safe? Because what else is there to do but make soup? But I really can’t imagine it. I was pouring milk into my cereal, I looked down for one second… I was asleep, I didn’t even feel the impact. A tide of people moving up the avenues on foot. Blackness. Sometimes it still feels too soon. It’s our shared map of the city. Then the sirens, for days. We never forget, really. A map we make by the absences. No one left the city. If you were here, you were temporarily cured of fear.

The experience of the common worship of God is such a moment. It is in this connection that American Christianity has betrayed the religion of Jesus almost beyond redemption. Churches have been established for the underprivileged, for the weak, for the poor, on the theory that they prefer to be among themselves. Churches have been established for the Chinese, the Japanese, the Korean, the Mexican, the Filipino, the Italian, and the Negro, with the same theory in mind. The result is that in the one place in which normal, free contacts might be most naturally established—in which the relations of the individual to his God should take priority over conditions of class, race, power, status, wealth, or the like—this place is one of the chief instruments for guaranteeing barriers. It is in order to quote these paragraphs from a recently published book, The Protestant Church and the Negro, by Frank S. Loescher: There are approximately 8,000,000 Protestant Negroes. About 7,500,000 are in separate Negro denominations. Therefore, from the local church through the regional organizations to the national assemblies over 93 per cent of the Negroes are without association in work and worship with Christians of other races except in interdenominational organizations which involves a few of their leaders. The remaining 500,000 Negro Protestants—about 6 per cent—are in predominantly white denominations, and of these 500,000 Negroes in “white” churches, at least 99 per cent, judging by the surveys of six denominations, are in segregated congregations. They are in association with their white denominational brothers only in national assemblies, and, in some denominations, in regional, state, or more local jurisdictional meetings. There remains a handful of Negro members in local “white” churches. How many? Call it one-tenth of one per cent of all the Negro Protestant Christians in the United States—8,000 souls—the figure is probably much too large. Whatever the figure actually is, the number of white and Negro persons who ever gather together for worship under the auspices of Protestant Christianity is almost microscopic. And where interracial worship does occur, it is, for the most part, in communities where there are only a few Negro families and where, therefore, only a few Negro individuals are available to “white” churches. That is the over-all picture, a picture which hardly reveals the Protestant church as a dynamic agency in the integration of American Negroes into American life. Negro membership appears to be confined to less than one per cent of the local “white” churches, usually churches in small communities where but a few Negroes live and have already experienced a high degree of integration by other community institutions—communities one might add where it is unsound to establish a Negro church since Negroes are in such small numbers. It is an even smaller percentage of white churches in which Negroes are reported to be participating freely, or are integrated

If we accept a mere tenth of what animal-rights activists are claiming, then modern industrial agriculture might well be the greatest crime in history. When evaluating global happiness, it is wrong to count the happiness only of the upper classes, of Europeans or of men. Perhaps it is also wrong to consider only the happiness of humans.

Dannon was there, thirty feet away, pinned by the dazzling light like a frog on a tenth-grader’s dissection tray. Unlike those frogs . . . Jenkins shouted, “Freeze, freeze or we’ll shoot.” . . . Unlike those frogs, Dannon leaped sideways back into the swamp reeds and then, scrambling on his hands and knees, still clinging to his pistol, began running mindlessly through the brush. The cops all turned on their lights and played them through the brush, and caught flashes of Dannon, the movement of the swamp weeds and brush as he tore through them, and Lucas shouted, “Jenkins, Shrake, Del, go after him, take care, take care . . .” Lucas turned and in the light of his own flash, ran back up the dirt track toward the gravel road, pulled his handset and said, “Sarah, Jane, he’s coming right at you. Watch out, watch out, he’s on foot, I think he’s coming for the road. . . .” •   •   • NOTHING AT ALL WENT through Dannon’s head. He’d had some escape and evasion classes, and one of the basics was simply to put distance between yourself and your pursuer. Distance was always good; distance gave you options. He didn’t think about it, though, he just ran, fast and as hard as he could, and he was in good shape. Good shape or not, he fell three or four times—he wasn’t counting—and the small shrub and grasses tore at him and tried to catch his feet; he went knee-deep into a watery hole, pulled free, and ran on, looking back once. He was out of the light, now, he was gaining on them, he was almost there . . . And he broke free into the road. He couldn’t see it, except as a kind of dark channel in front of him. The lights were now a hundred yards back, but still coming, and he ran down the dark channel. When he got far enough out front, he’d cut across country again, and then maybe turn down toward the river. . . . He ran a hundred yards down the channel, heedless of the sounds of his footfalls, breathing hard. . . . •   •   • LUCAS WAS ON THE ROAD, moving faster than Dannon, but at the wrong angle—Dannon, though in the swamp, was cutting diagonally across the right angle of the gravel road and the dirt track. Lucas could tell more or less where he was because of the brilliant lights of the cops behind him, and the sound of Dannon’s thrashing in the brush. Then the thrashing stopped, and Lucas stopped, trying to figure out where he’d gone.

D’aron the Daring, Derring, Derring-do, stealing base, christened D’aron Little May Davenport, DD to Nana, initials smothered in Southern-fried kisses, dat Wigga D who like Jay Z aw-ite, who’s down, Scots-Irish it is, D’aron because you’re brave says Dad, No, D’aron because you’re daddy’s daddy was David and then there was mines who was named Aaron, Doo-doo after cousin Quint blew thirty-six months in vo-tech on a straight-arm bid and they cruised out to Little Gorge glugging Green Grenades and read three years’ worth of birthday cards, Little Mays when he hit those three homers in the Pee Wee playoff, Dookie according to his aunt Boo (spiteful she was, misery indeed loves company), Mr. Hanky when they discovered he TIVOed ‘Battlestar Galactica,’ Faggot when he hugged John Meer in third grade, Faggot again when he drew hearts on everyone’s Valentine’s Day cards in fourth grade, Dim Dong-Dong when he undressed in the wrong dressing room because he daren’t venture into the dark end of the gym, Philadelphia Freedom when he was caught clicking heels to that song (Tony thought he was clever with that one), Mr. Davenport when he won the school’s debate contest in eighth grade, Faggot again when he won the school’s debate contest in eighth grade, Faggot again more times than he cared to remember, especially the summer he returned from Chicago sporting a new Midwest accent, harder on the vowels and consonants alike, but sociable, played well with others that accent did, Faggot again when he cried at the end of ‘WALL-E,’ Donut Hole when he started to swell in ninth grade, Donut Black Hole when he continued to put on weight in tenth grade (Tony thought he was really clever with that one), Buttercup when they caught him gardening, Hippie when he stopped hunting, Faggot again when he became a vegetarian and started wearing a MEAT IS MURDER pin (Oh yeah, why you craving mine then?), Faggot again when he broke down in class over being called Faggot, Sissy after that, whispered, smothered in sniggers almost hidden, Ron-Ron by the high school debate team coach because he danced like a cross between Morrissey and some fat old black guy (WTF?) in some old-ass show called ‘What’s Happening!!’, Brainiac when he aced the PSATs for his region, Turd Nerd when he hung with Jo-Jo and the Black Bruiser, D’ron Da’ron, D’aron, sweet simple Daron the first few minutes of the first class of the first day of college.

Turing was able to show that there are certain classes of problem that do not have any algorithmic solution (in particular the 'halting problem' that I shall describe shortly). However, Hilbert's actual tenth problem had to wait until 1970 before the Russian mathematician Yuri Matiyasevich-providing proofs that completed certain arguments that had been earlier put forward by the Americans Julia Robinson, Martin Davis, and Hilary Putnam-showed that there can be no computer program (algorithm) which decides yes/no systematically to the question of whether a system of Diophantine equations has a solution. It may be remarked that whenever the answer happens to be 'yes', then that fact can, in principle, be ascertained by the particular computer program that just slavishly tries all sets of integers one after the other. It is the answer 'no', on the other hand, that eludes any systematic treatment. Various sets of rules for correctly giving the answer 'no' can be provided-like the argument using even and odd numbers that rules out solutions to the second system given above-but Matisyasevich's theorem showed that these can never be exhaustive.

I would, from time to time, sit in the humble homes of black people in that city who were entering their tenth decade of life. These people were profound. Their homes were filled with the emblems of honorable life-citizenship awards, portraits of husbands and wives passed away, several generations of children in cap and gown. And they had drawn these accolades by cleaning big houses and living in one-room Alabama shacks before moving to the city. And they had done this despite the city, which was supposed to be a respite, revealing itself to simply be a more intricate specimen of plunder. They had worked two and three jobs, put children through high school and college, and become pillars of their community. I admired them, but I knew the whole time that I was encountering merely the survivors, ones who’d endured the banks and their stone-faced contempt, the realtors and their fake sympathy – ‘I’m sorry, that house just sold yesterday’ – the realtors who steered them back towards ghetto blocks or blocks earmarked to be ghettos soon, the lenders who found this captive class and tried to strip them of everything they had. In those homes I saw the best of us but behind each of them I knew that there were so many millions gone.

Starting in the tenth and eleventh centuries, petty nobles and former serfs banded together in towns that gradually became powerful enough to ignore the local feudal lords.10 Like serfs, the middle class made a living largely by creating wealth. (In port cities like Genoa and Pisa, they also engaged in piracy.) But unlike serfs they had an incentive to create a lot of it. Any wealth a serf created belonged to his master. There was not much point in making more than you could hide. Whereas the independence of the townsmen allowed them to keep whatever wealth they created.

CJ just flashed her the smirk again. Then, for the tenth time since they’d magically arrived in Auradon, CJ reached into the pocket of her coat and ran her fingertips over the very special object she’d been keeping with her since she was a little girl. Fortunately, it had survived the trip. Her whole secret plan depended on it. Freddie sighed in surrender and stood up. “Well, maybe they’ll have a music class I can take or something. Singing will be a good distraction from whatever horrors Headmistress Fairy Godmother has in store for me.” She turned back to CJ and pouted. “Whatever it is you’re planning, can you at least try not to get caught? The last time you plotted secretly, you got us both in huge trouble.” CJ shook her head. “Two minutes in Auradon and you’ve already gone soft on me? Since when do you care about getting in trouble?” Freddie seemed to think about that for a second.

This was the country impoverished by British conquest. The India that succumbed to British rule enjoyed an enormous financial surplus, deployed a skilled artisan class, exported high-quality goods in great global demand, disposed of plenty of arable land, had a thriving agricultural base, and supported some 100 to 150 million without either poverty or landlessness. All of this was destroyed by British rule. As Wilson points out: ‘In 1750, Indians had a similar standard of living to people in Britain. Now, average Indian incomes are barely a tenth of the British level in terms of real purchasing power. It is no coincidence that 200 years of British rule occurred in the intervening time.

Unaware of New York City’s budget shenanigans, taxpayers expected city officials to keep the transit fare low and expand the city’s already generous municipal services. Making matters worse, the city had fewer middle-income taxpayers to pay for rising government expenses. New York City’s loss of manufacturing jobs meant fewer employment opportunities for the low-skilled, poorly educated workers who were attracted to the city. While middle-class taxpayers moved from the city out to the suburbs, the poor people who moved in required more expensive city services. In the early 1970s, the city had more than one million residents receiving welfare benefits, nearly a tenth of the nations’ recipients. More than three-quarters of the city’s welfare recipients had not even been born in New York City. Although the state and federal government paid for three-quarters of the welfare costs, the city’s share created a huge burden on its budget.82

Labor’s dominance applies more broadly still among the million jobs listed by name in the earlier discussion of elite hours—finance-sector professionals, vice presidents at S&P 1500 firms, elite management consultants, partners at highly profitable law firms, and specialist medical doctors. These specifically identified workers collectively constitute a substantial share—fully half—of the 1 percent. The terms of trade under which they work—the economic arrangements that underwrite their incomes—are well known. All these workers contribute effectively no capital to their businesses and therefore again owe their income ultimately to their own industrious work, which is to say to labor. Comprehensive data based on tax returns corroborate that the new economic elite owes its income predominantly not to capital but rather, at root, to selling its own labor. The data themselves can be technical and even abstruse, but a clear message emerges from them nevertheless. The data confirm that the meritocratic rich (unlike their aristocratic predecessors) get their money by working. Even guarded estimates, which defer to tax categories that treat some labor income as capital gains, show a stark increase in the labor component of top incomes. According to this method of calculating, the richest 1 percent received as much as three-quarters of their income from capital at midcentury, and the richest 0.1 percent received up to nine-tenths of their income from capital. These shares then declined steadily over four decades beginning in the early 1960s, reaching bottom in 2000. In that year, both the top 1 percent and the top 0.1 percent received only about half of their incomes from capital (roughly 49 percent and 53 percent, respectively). The capital shares of top incomes then rose again, by about 10 percent, over the first decade of the new millennium, before beginning to fall again at the start of the second decade (when the data series runs out).

It is a well-documented fact that pornography as a separate category did not exist until the nine-tenth century, when lawmakers throughout Europe ostensibly sought to protect a predominantly white, middle-class female population from sexually explicit material and - by extension - knowledge of their own sexuality.

Kinsey’s dogmatic atheism supported his eugenicist ideology. In fact, Jones says Kinsey called for mass sterilization of “perhaps a tenth of our population” to reduce “the birth rate of the lowest classes.

From Reconstruction to the civil rights era, southern school boards spent as little as one-tenth the money on black schools as for white schools, openly starving them of resources that might afford them a chance to compete on level ground. School terms for black students were made shorter by months, giving them less time in class and more time in the field for the enrichment of the ruling caste.

Critique of the 1 percent’s domination predates, it should be recalled, the “Occupy” movement’s popularizing of the notion. In fact, Martin Luther King, Jr. remarked often on the notion of the 1 percent in his early speeches of the 1950s: “They tell me that one tenth of one percent of the population controls more than forty percent of the wealth. Oh America, how often have you taken necessities from the masses to give luxury to the classes.

Next to knowledge, commerce was the mainspring of the mobility of Muslim society. The power of money was fully understood by scholars. Their own relative poverty as contrasted to the wealth of the commercial and landholding segments of society remained for them an article of faith - rmly to be believed in and constantly to be proclaimed. Not very many among them might have shown appreciation for the sentiment that the principal merit of knowledge was to help a poor man to be satisfi ed with his lot. As so many other vital concerns, the bitterness of the poorly rewarded intellectual was most vividly put into words by Abû Hayyân at-Tawhidî in the tenth century. From later times, we can document what no doubt had always been the actual situation, namely, that a certain middle-class prosperity based on commercial activity was the background from which scholars most commonly came (unless, perhaps, they happened to be born into a scholarly family of established standing, but even these usually possessed commercial connections). Those who overcame grinding poverty to become prominent in scholarship were but a small minority, albeit a remarkable one. It would be diffi cult to venture any kind of general statement on the social background of Muslim mystics. Whatever it was, they quite naturally rejected wealth in favor of spiritual values, at least in theory.

It interests me that there is no end of fictions, and facts made over in the forms of fictions. Because we class them under so many different rubrics, and media, and means of delivery, we don't recognize the sheer proliferation and seamlessness of them. I think at some level of scale or perspective, the police drama in which a criminal is shot, the hospital in which the doctors massage a heart back to life, the news video in which jihadists behead a hostage, and the human-interest story of a child who gets his fondest wish (a tourist trip somewhere) become the same sorts of drama. They are representations of strong experience, which, as they multiply, began to dedifferentiate in our uptake of them, despite our names and categories and distinctions... I say I watch the news to "know". But I don't really know anything. Certainly I can't do anything. I know that there is a war in Iraq, but I knew that already. I know that there are fires and car accidents in my state and in my country, but that, too, I knew already. With each particular piece of footage, I know nothing more than I did before. I feel something, or I don't feel something. One way I am likely to feel is virtuous and "responsible" for knowing more of these things that I can do nothing about. Surely this feeling is wrong, even contemptible. I am not sure anymore what I feel. What is it like to watch a human being's beheading? The first showing of the video is bad. The second, fifth, tenth, hundredth are—like one's own experiences—retained, recountable, real, and yet dreamlike. Some describe the repetition as "numbing". "Numbing" is very imprecise. I think the feeling, finally, is of something like envelopment and even satisfaction at having endured the worst without quite caring or being tormented. It is the paradoxically calm satisfaction of having been enveloped in a weak or placid "real" that another person endured as the worst experience imaginable, in his personal frenzy, fear, and desperation, which we view from the outside as the simple occurrence of a death... I see: Severed heads. The Extra Value Meal. Kohl-gray eyelids. A holiday sale at Kohl's. Red seeping between the fingers of the gloved hand that presses the wound. "Doctor, can you save him?" "We'll do our best." The dining room of the newly renovated house, done in red. Often a bold color is best. The kids are grateful for their playroom. The bad guy falls down, shot. The detectives get shot. The new Lexus is now available for lease. On CNN, with a downed helicopter in the background, a peaceful field of reeds waves in the foreground. One after another the reeds are bent, broken, by boot treads advancing with the camera. The cameraman, as savior, locates the surviving American airman. He shoots him dead. It was a terrorist video. They run it again. Scenes from ads: sales, roads, ordinary calm shopping, daily life. Tarpaulined bodies in the street. The blue of the sky advertises the new car's color. Whatever you could suffer will have been recorded in the suffering of someone else. Red Lobster holds a shrimp festival. Clorox gets out blood. Advil stops pain fast. Some of us are going to need something stronger.

If you made a country out of all the companies founded by Stanford alumni, it would have a GDP of roughly $ 2.7 trillion, putting it in the neighborhood of the tenth largest economy in the world. Companies started by Stanford alumni include Google, Yahoo, Cisco Systems, Sun Microsystems, eBay, Netflix, Electronic Arts, Intuit, Fairchild Semiconductor, LinkedIn, and E* Trade. Many were started by undergraduates and graduate students while still on campus. Like the cast of Saturday Night Live, the greats who have gone on to massive career success are remembered, but everyone still keeps a watchful eye on the newcomers to see who might be the next big thing. With a $ 17 billion endowment, Stanford has the resources to provide students an incredible education inside the classroom, with accomplished scholars ranging from Nobel Prize winners to former secretaries of state teaching undergraduates. The Silicon Valley ecosystem ensures that students have ample opportunity outside the classroom as well. Mark Zuckerberg gives a guest lecture in the introductory computer science class. Twitter and Square founder Jack Dorsey spoke on campus to convince students to join his companies. The guest speaker lineups at the myriad entrepreneurship and technology-related classes each quarter rival those of multithousand-dollar business conferences. Even geographically, Stanford is smack in the middle of Silicon Valley. Facebook sits just north of the school. Apple is a little farther south. Google is to the east. And just west, right next to campus, is Sand Hill Road, the Wall Street of venture capital.

Every reality-tunnel or neurosemantic system encourages us to "see" (and give importance to) some information — to pay close attention to a certain kind of signals. The astronomers who believe in the tenth planet beyond Pluto (for mathematical reasons) are, for instance, looking very closely at signals from that part of space-time. A painter is looking very closely, meanwhile, at a different class of signals, involving a different space-time game. A poet, or a certain kind of poet, is more interested in sounds and connotations than in purely visual stimuli. Etc.

Then I ask you: Once, during Buddha's lifetime, a woman was sitting in samadhi—very deeply into samadhi. She didn't wake up, only samadhi, as if she were dead. The Bodhisattva Manjushri, who is a tenth-class Bodhisattva, the highest class, tried to wake her, but couldn't. Finally a first-class Bodhisattva appeared, walked around her three times, and hit her on the back. She woke up immediately. Why couldn't this great Bodhisattva bring her out of samadhi, while the low-class Bodhisattva could? If you understand this, you will have a true understanding of samadhi and enlightenment. Do you understand?” The student was silent. Soen-sa said, “You must understand this. There is another kong-an with the same meaning. An eminent teacher said, ‘If I kill my parents, I can repent to Buddha. But if I kill all Buddhas and eminent teachers, to whom can I repent?’” The student said, “Myself?” Another student called out from the back of the room, “Go drink tea!” Soen-sa said, “Who said that?” The student raised her hand. Soen-sa said, “Oh, very good! Wonderful! These two kong-ans are the same kong-an. If you understand this, you understand samadhi and enlightenment.

As part of it, some teachers created a behavioral checklist for her in tenth grade. It was a prescription for how to fit in: Don’t talk so much in class; keep it to a sound bite. Don’t be so aggressive. Don’t answer all the questions. Don’t discuss things so much. Tone it down. Don’t challenge the classroom status quo.

It was a wordless song Mouse sang. Alicia’s formal musical education extended to a single music appreciation class taken in the tenth grade. Despite that, she knew the hitchhiker’s range was extraordinary. The soprano that flowed from Mouse’s throat was pure as spring ice, and just as clear. In actuality Mouse’s voice was effortlessly spanning six octaves. This was quite impossible, but no one in the motor home knew enough about music to realize it.

From then on the disorder became her secret friend. She became not only an anorexic-bulimic, but the absolute best anorexic-bulimic she could be. She was strategic, clean, informed. She knew, for example, that the worst kind of vomit is the kind that isn’t properly chewed up. Lobes of steak that rise up your throat like Lincoln Logs. Ice cream is also a problem. It’s too soft and comes back up like liquid; it doesn’t feel like expelling anything at all and you can’t be sure it didn’t stick to the walls of your stomach. Then of course there is the question of timing. Everything in life is timing and with vomiting it’s no different. Too soon after you eat, and nothing comes up. You wreck your throat trying to regurgitate. Too late, and only the tail end of the meal comes; your finger is slicked in fawn fluid for nothing. You do it too soon or too early and you make too much noise because your body isn’t prepared. With vomiting, you have to work with your body. There is no working against it. You have to respect the process. The hope each morning was that she would barely eat—a pan-cooked chicken breast, an orange, lemon water. But if she failed—peanut M&M’s, a bite of someone’s birthday cake—then she would accept the failure at the same time that she would not accept the failure. She would go to the bathroom. Flush twice. Clean up. And reenter the conversation. It worked, for the most part. Field hockey suffered. In the ninth grade she had been a pretty serious athlete, but by the spring of tenth grade she was so skinny she could barely make varsity. School, in general, suffered. She stopped doing homework and stopped paying attention in class. Her family didn’t question her new body or her new habit. The closest her mother came to Why are you trying to kill yourself? was Why do you flush the toilet so many times?

animals “have been subjected to a regime of industrial exploitation whose cruelty has no precedent in the annals of planet Earth. If we accept a mere tenth of what animal-rights activists are claiming, then modern industrial agriculture might well be the greatest crime in history. When evaluating global happiness, it is wrong to count the happiness only of the upper classes, of Europeans, or of men. Perhaps it is also wrong to consider only the happiness of humans.” [Harari, 2011].

Over the years, my brain trust of more than twenty-five people has included a guy who was number one in his class at Caltech, a department chair of economics at a major U.S. university, mathematical savants, computer wizards, PhDs, and quantitative and database handicappers who live and breathe algorithms and theoretical angles not found in your average textbook. Our team members act like hedge fund analysts, assigning a numerical value to every conceivable factor or variable capable of affecting sporting events to within a tenth of a point. In the NFL alone, I have several teams of experts working independently. They have never met each other, even though most have worked with me for more than thirty years, funneling their information to one common denominator: me.

Kennan argued that even if a purge of Nazis could theoretically be successful, “we would not find any other class of people competent to assume the burdens [of leading Germany]. Whether we like it or not, nine-tenths of what is strong, able and respected in Germany has been poured into those very categories which we have in mind” for removal from power, namely those persons who had been “more than nominal members of the Nazi party.

Over the last two centuries tens of billions of them have been subjected to a regime of industrial exploitation whose cruelty has no precedent in the annals of planet Earth. If we accept a mere tenth of what animal-rights activists are claiming, then modern industrial agriculture might well be the greatest crime in history. When evaluating global happiness, it is wrong to count the happiness only of the upper classes, of Europeans or of men. Perhaps it is also wrong to consider only the happiness of humans.

To allow for the varied learning rates of the children, the classes were combined into what were called "neighborhoods," where children of different ages would progress at their own rates. The early plans envisioned classrooms broken down into fairly narrow age ranges: kindergarten through second grade in one neighborhood, another sixth and seventh together, eighth and ninth in another, and tenth to twelfth grades together.

Perhaps the hardest part of the job was simply being attached to and dependent on people who didn’t think much of you. Virginia Woolf’s diaries are almost obsessively preoccupied with her servants and the challenge of maintaining patience with them. Of one, she writes: “She is in a state of nature: untrained; uneducated … so that one sees a human mind wriggling undressed.” As a class they were as irritating as “kitchen flies.” Woolf’s contemporary Edna St. Vincent Millay was rather more blunt: “The only people I really hate are servants. They are not really human beings at all.” It was unquestionably a strange world. Servants constituted a class of humans whose existences were fundamentally devoted to making certain that another class of humans would find everything they desired within arm’s reach more or less the moment it occurred to them to desire it. The recipients of this attention became spoiled almost beyond imagining. Visiting his daughter in the 1920s, in a house too small to keep his servants with him, the tenth Duke of Marlborough emerged from the bathroom in a state of helpless bewilderment because his toothbrush wasn’t foaming properly. It turned out that his valet had always put the toothpaste on the brush for him, and the Duke was unaware that toothbrushes didn’t recharge automatically. The servants’ payoff for all this was often to be treated appallingly. It was common for mistresses to test the honesty of servants by leaving some temptation where they were bound to find it—a coin on the floor, say—and then punishing them if they pocketed it. The effect was to instill in servants a slightly paranoid sense that they were in the presence of a superior omniscience. Servants were also suspected of abetting burglars by providing inside information and leaving doors unlocked. It was a perfect recipe for unhappiness on both sides. Servants, especially in smaller households, tended to think of their masters as unreasonable and demanding. Masters saw servants as slothful and untrustworthy. Casual humiliation was a regular feature of life in service. Servants were sometimes required to adopt a new name, so that the second footman in a household would always be called “Johnson,” say, thus sparing the family the tedium of having to learn a new name each time a footman retired or fell under the wheels of a carriage. Butlers were an especially delicate issue. They were expected to have the bearing and comportment of a gentleman, and to dress accordingly, but often the butler was required to engage in some intentional sartorial gaucherie—wearing trousers that didn’t match his jacket, for instance—to ensure that his inferiority was instantly manifest.* One handbook actually gave instructions—in fact, provided a working script—for how to humiliate a servant in front of a child, for the good of both child and servant.