The Game Has Begun Quotes

So scared of getting older I'm only good at being young So I play the numbers game to find a way to say that life has just begun.

I intercepted Chaol, and he informed me of your ‘condition.’ You’d think a man in his position wouldn’t be so squeamish, especially after examining all of those corpses.” Calaena opened an eye and frowned as Dorian sat on her bed. “I’m in a state of absolute agony and I can’t be bothered.” “It can’t be that bad,” he said, fishing a deck of cards from his jacket. “Want to play?” “I already told you that I don’t feel well.” “You look fine to me.” He skillfully shuffled the deck. “Just one game.” “Don’t you pay people to entertain you?” He glowered, breaking the deck. “You should be honored by my company.” “I’d be honored if you would leave.” “For someone who relies on my good graces, you’re very bold.” “Bold? I’ve barely begun.” Lying on her side, she curled her knees to her chest. He laughed, pocketing the deck of cards. “Your new canine companion is doing well, if you wish to know.” She moaned into her pillow. “Go away. I feel like dying.” “No fair maiden should die alone,” he said, putting a hand on hers. “Shall I read to you in your final moments? What story would you like?” She snatched her hand back. “How about the story of the idiotic prince who won’t leave the assassin alone?” “Oh! I love that story! It has such a happy ending, too—why, the assassin was really feigning her illness in order to get the prince’s attention! Who would have guessed it? Such a clever girl. And the bedroom scene is so lovely—it’s worth reading through all of their ceaseless banter!” “Out! Out! Out! Leave me be and go womanize someone else!” She grabbed a book and chucked it at him.

For two hundred years, human economic activity has largely consisted of digging up fossil fuels and setting them alight

A writer doesn’t owe a reader hope—the only obligation is honesty...

In fact, there are half as many wild animals on the planet as there were in 1970, an awesome and mostly unnoticed silencing.

Sejanus. “My friend, your life has just begun!” And then Coriolanus was laughing; they both were. “So this isn’t our ruin?” “I’d call it our salvation.

It is a highly valued function of society to prevent changes in the rules of the many games it embraces... Deviancy, however, is the very essence of culture. Whoever merely follows the script, merely repeating the past, is culturally impoverished. There are variations in the quality of deviation; not all divergence from the past is culturally significant. Any attempt to vary from the past in such a way as to cut the past off, causing it to be forgotten, has little cultural importance. Greater significance attaches to those variations that bring the tradition into view in a new way, allowing the familiar to be seen as unfamiliar, as requiring a new appraisal of all that we have been- and therefore all that we are. Cultural deviation does not return us to the past, but continues what was begun but not finished in the past... Properly speaking, a culture does not have a tradition; it is a tradition.

Neither the Pilgrims nor the Indians new what they had begun. The Pilgrims called the celebration a Harvest Feast. The Indians thought of it as a Green Corn Dance. It was both and more than both. It was the first Thanksgiving. In the years that followed, President George Washington issued the first national Thanksgiving proclamation, and President Abraham Lincoln proclaimed the last Thursday in November a holiday of “thanksgiving and praise.” Today it is still a harvest festival and Green Corn Dance. Families feast with friends, give thanks and play games. Plymouth Rock did not fare as well. It has been cut in half, moved twice, dropped, split and trimmed to fit its present-day portico. It is a mere memento of its once magnificent self. Yet to Americans, Plymouth Rock is a symbol. It is larger than the mountains, wider than the prairies and stronger than all our rivers. It is the rock on which our nation began.

Climate change has become such a familiar term that we tend to read past it- it's part of our mental furniture, like urban sprawl or gun violence.

Put simply, between ecological destruction and technological hubris, the human experiment is now in question.

A world without death is a world without time, and that in turn is a world without meaning, at least human meaning.

Speaking about time’s relentless passage, Powell’s narrator compares certain stages of experience to the game of Russian Billiards as once he used to play it with a long vanished girlfriend. A game in which, he says, “...at the termination of a given passage of time...the hidden gate goes down...and all scoring is doubled. This is perhaps an image of how we live. For reasons not always at the time explicable, there are specific occasions when events begin suddenly to take on a significance previously unsuspected; so that before we really know where we are, life seems to have begun in earnest at last, and we ourselves, scarcely aware that any change has taken place, are careering uncontrollably down the slippery avenues of eternity."

His games have a deeper meaning and fascination that adults can no longer fathom and require nothing more than three pebbles, or a piece of wood with a dandelion helmet, perhaps; but above all they require only the pure, strong, passionate, chaste, still-untroubled fantasy of those happy years when life still hesitates to touch us, when neither duty nor guilt dares lay a hand upon us, when we are allowed to see, hear, laugh, wonder, and dream without the world's demanding anything in return, when the impatience of those whom we want so much to love has not yet begun to torment us for evidence, some early token, that we will diligently fulfill our duties. Ah, it will not be long, and all that will rain down upon us in overwhelming, raw power, will assault us, stretch us, cramp us, drill us, corrupt us.

I am usually classed as a progressive, a liberal. But it seems to me that what I care most about is preserving a world that bears some resemblance to the past—a world with some ice at the top and bottom and the odd coral reef in between, a world where people are connected to the past and future (and to one another) instead of turned into obsolete software.

One of the great privileges of living in the affluent parts of the modern world is that we've been able to forget that the natural world even exists...a great city seems to produce wealth out of thin air. This is illusion, of course, but powerful illusion.

So: global warming is the ultimate problem of oil companies because oil causes it, and it's the ultimate problem for government haters because without government intervention, you can't solve it. Those twin existential threats, to cash and to worldview, meant that there was never any shortage of resources for the task of denying climate change.

The human game is a team sport.

The game has already begun.

Privilege lies in obliviousness. (White privilege, for instance, involves being able to reliably forget that race matters.)

Day to day, we forget that if the billions of years of life on Earth were scaled to a twenty-four-hour day, our settled civilizations began about a fifth of a second ago.

So scared of getting older I'm only good at being young So I play the numbers game To find a way to say that life has just begun

Let's be, for a while, true optimists, and operate on the assumption that human beings are not grossly defective. Let's assume we're capable of acting together to do remarkable things.

We have, in other words, changed the energy balance of our planet, the amount of the sun’s heat that is returned to space. Those of us who burn lots of fossil fuel have changed the way the world operates, fundamentally.

And the third, of course, is climate change, perhaps the greatest of all these challenges, and certainly the one about which we’ve done the least. It may not be quite game-ending, but it seems set, at the very least, to utterly change the board on which the game is played, and in more profound ways than almost anyone now imagines. The habitable planet has literally begun to shrink, a novel development that will be the great story of our century.

Not everyone who uses machinery is a killer. But when the use of machinery springs from our attempt to respond to the indifference of nature with an indifference of our own to nature, we have begun to acquire the very indifference to persons that has led to the century's grandest crimes by its most civilized nations.

Surprise in infinite play is the triumph of the future over the past. Since infinite players do not regard the past as having an outcome, they have no way of knowing what has been begun there. With each surprise, the past reveals a new beginning in itself. Inasmuch as the future is always surprising, the past is always changing.

when investigative reporters proved that Exxon had known all about global warming and had covered up that knowledge. Plenty of people on the professionally jaded left told me, in one form or another, “Of course they did,” or “All corporations lie,” or “Nothing will ever happen to them anyway.” This kind of knowing cynicism is no threat to the Exxons of the world—it’s a gift. Happily, far more people reacted with usefully naïve outrage: before too long, people were comparing the oil giants with the tobacco companies, and some of the biggest cities in the country were suing them for damages. We don’t know yet precisely how it will end, only that giving them a pass because of their power makes no sense.

I thought you were dead,” I say. “It almost killed me.” “Did it?” His voice is neutral. “You made a pretty fast recovery.” “No. You don’t understand.” My throat is tight; I feel as though I’m being strangled. “I couldn’t keep hoping, and then waking up every day and finding out it wasn’t true, and you were still gone. I—I wasn’t strong enough.” He is quiet for a second. It’s too dark to see his expression: He is standing in shadow again, but I can sense that he is staring at me. Finally he says, “When they took me to the Crypts, I thought they were going to kill me. They didn’t even bother. They just left me to die. They threw me in a cell and locked the door.” “Alex.” The strangled feeling has moved from my throat to my chest, and without realizing it, I have begun to cry. I move toward him. I want to run my hands through his hair and kiss his forehead and each of his eyelids and take away the memory of what he has seen. But he steps backward, out of reach. “I didn’t die. I don’t know how. I should have. I’d lost plenty of blood. They were just as surprised as I was. After that it became a kind of game—to see how much I could stand. To see how much they could do to me before I’d—” He breaks off abruptly. I can’t hear any more; don’t want to know, don’t want it to be true, can’t stand to think of what they did to him there. I take another step forward and reach for his chest and shoulders in the dark. This time, he doesn’t push me away. But he doesn’t embrace me either. He stands there, cold, still, like a statue. “Alex.” I repeat his name like a prayer, like a magic spell that will make everything okay again. I run my hands up his chest and to his chin. “I’m so sorry. I’m so, so sorry.” Suddenly he jerks backward, simultaneously finding my wrists and pulling them down to my sides. “There were days I would rather they have killed me.” He doesn’t drop my wrists; he squeezes them tightly, pinning my arms, keeping me immobilized. His voice is low, urgent, and so full of anger it pains me even more than his grip. “There were days I asked for it—prayed for it when I went to sleep. The belief that I would see you again, that I could find you—the hope for it—was the only thing that kept me going.” He releases me and takes another step backward. “So no. I don’t understand.

Actually, the worst possible plan would also include trying to squash action in every other country, too. And that’s what the entire government-hating network managed to achieve in 2017, when President Trump pulled the United States out of the Paris climate accords. It was as shameful a moment as any in our recent history: the country that produces more carbon than any other announcing that it was now the only country on earth not willing to make even a modest international commitment to solving climate change.

Once upon a time there was a little king, whose dreams always brought him new wings, but his fate never knew what he could bring, so carried on a life that just delivered stings. One day he met the song he wished to sing, but didnt seem to understand this one little thing, how can the wind stop at the sound of broken strings, how can he spend a childhood alone on a swing. He stands alone empty with a promise in waiting, his story has just begun tall and refusing, he knows his game well but no dream is he using, but the sleep fate has taken has his dreams aging.

In the bourgeois democratic countries the need for using intrinsically good means to achieve desirable ends is more clearly realized than in Russia. But even in these countries enormous mistakes have been made in the past and still greater, still more dangerous mistakes are in process of being committed today. Most of these mistakes are due to the fact that, though professing belief in our ideal postulates, the rulers and people of these countries are, to some extent and quite incompatibly, also militarists and nationalists. The English and the French, it is true, are sated militarists whose chief desire is to live a quiet life, holding fast to what they seized in their unregenerate days of imperial highway-robbery. Confronted by rivals who want to do now what they were doing from the beginning of the eighteenth to the end of the nineteenth century, they profess and doubtless genuinely feel a profound moral indignation. Meanwhile, they have begun to address themselves, reluctantly but with determination, to the task of beating the Fascist powers at their own game. Like the Fascist states, they are preparing for war. but modern war cannot be waged or even prepared except by a highly centralized executive wielding absolute power over a docile people. Most of the planning which is going on in the democratic countries is planning designed to transform these countries into the likeness of totalitarian communities organized for slaughter and rapine. Hitherto this transformation has proceeded fairly slowly. Belief in our idea postulates has acted as a brake on fascization, which has had to advance gradually and behind a smoke screen. But if war is declared, or even if the threat of war becomes more serious than at present, the process will become open and rapid. "The defence of democracy against Fascism" entails inevitably the transformation of democracy into Fascism.

Then call me Pierce because we're friends." He bent in close in the turn, eyes gleaming as they dropped to her lips. "Intimate friends, if I get my wish." This time there was no mistaking his meaning. But he was so practiced and smooth that she couldn't help herself-she laughed. When that made him frown, she tried to suppress her amusement, but that only made her laugh harder. "What's so funny?" he muttered. "I'm sorry," she said, swallowing her amusement. "It's just that I've heard my brothers make such insinuations to women in that tone of voice for years, but I've never been on the receiving end." Pierce's smile would rival that of Casanova. "I don't know why not," he said in a lazy drawl. His gaze raked her appreciatively as they swirled about the room. "Tonight, in that purple gown, you look particularly fetching. The color suits you." "Thank you." Minerva had been trying to get her to stop wearing browns and oranges for years, but Celia had always pooh-poohed her sister's opinions. It was only after Virginia had said exactly the same thing last month that she'd begun to think she should listen. And to order new gowns accordingly. "You're a lovely woman with the figure of a Venus and a mouth that could make a man-" "You can stop now." Her amusement vanished. She'd be flattered if he meant a single word, but clearly this was just a game to him. "I don't need the full rogue treatment, I assure you." Interest sparked in his eyes. "Hasn't it occurred to you that I might be sincere?" "Only if you're sincerely trying to seduce me." He cast her a blatantly carnal glance as he held her tighter. "Well, of course I'm trying to seduce you. What else would I be doing?" She pitched her voice over the music. "I'm a respectable woman, you know." "What has that got to do with anything?" She arched an eyebrow at him as they moved in consort. "Even a respectable woman might be tempted into, say, slipping out with a gentleman for a walk in the moonlit courtyard. And if said gentleman should happen to steal a kiss or two-" "Lord Devonmont!" "Fine." He smiled ruefully. "Bu you can't blame me for trying. You do look ravishing this evening." "There you go again," she said, exasperated. "Can you never talk to a woman as if she's a normal person?" "How dull that would be." When she frowned, he shook his head. "Very well. What scintillating topics of conversation did you have in mind?

I pull on her tether all the time but it won’t sink in. I have a feeling I’m using too much magic. I can’t hold so many under my control and pull them in deep. Dean is the only one I have fully immersed. I am the puppet master. I am the only player on the board. Pacey doesn’t even know that the game has begun."-Lilith

An arranged marriage. His bratty, meddling sister. A potential loose-lipped man. Nothing will snuff out what has begun to rage between us. An inferno. A fiery explosion of epic proportions.

Nothing will snuff out what has begun to rage between us. An inferno. A fiery explosion of epic proportions. We are the sun

Silent Lucidity" Hush now, don't you cry Wipe away the teardrop from your eye You're lying safe in bed It was all a bad dream Spinning in your head Your mind tricked you to feel the pain Of someone close to you leaving the game of life So here it is, another chance Wide awake you face the day Your dream is over... or has it just begun? There's a place I like to hide A doorway that I run through in the night Relax child, you were there But only didn't realize and you were scared It's a place where you will learn To face your fears, retrace the years And ride the whims of your mind Commanding in another world Suddenly you hear and see This magic new dimension I- will be watching over you I- am gonna help you see it through I- will protect you in the night I- am smiling next to you, in Silent Lucidity (Visualize your dream) (Record it in the present tense) (Put it into a permanent form) (If you persist in your efforts) (You can achieve dream control) (Dream control) (How are we feeling today, better??) (Dream control, dream control) (Help me) If you open your mind for me You won't rely on open eyes to see The walls you built within Come tumbling down, and a new world will begin Living twice at once you learn You're safe from pain in the dream domain A soul set free to fly A round trip journey in your head Master of illusion, can you realize Your dream's alive, you can be the guide but... I- will be watching over you I- am gonna help to see it through I- will protect you in the night I- am smiling next to you.... Queensryche, Empire (1990)

I said before that the human game we’ve been playing has no rules and no end, but it does come with two logical imperatives. The first is to keep it going, and the second is to keep it human.

the carrier to elevate the benefit of hanging out in the carrier. Offer A Treat. Many cats respond well to treat rewards. To make the carrier an even better experience, try tossing a few inside for your kitten to discover. If he figures out that every now and then, going inside brings a bonus of yummies, your kitten will be more likely to explore and figure out the crate is a terrific place. Make sure that the treats you use for crate training are irresistible, and reserve them for this situation only. Once your cat has begun to visit the crate on his own, try offering an occasional high-value meal (like pungent canned food) but only when he’s inside. Teach Him Tolerance. After your kitten spends time willingly inside, try shutting the door briefly. Most kitties tolerate the door shut at least as long as they have something to munch. Praise the dickens out of him! He should know that staying calmly inside the crate earns him good things, maybe even a game of chase-the-red-dot. Repeat several times over the next few days, each time letting the kitten out after a few minutes. Extend Crate Time. By the end of the first week, you can begin increasing the time the kitten spends in the crate. Some cats feel calmer when inside the carrier if you cover it with a towel because this shuts out at least the visual cues that may raise stress. Scent the towel with the Feliway. Carry Kitty Around. Once your kitten feels comfortable in the carrier with the door shut, drop in a couple of treats and then pick up the carrier while he’s in it and carry him around. Give him another treat or play a favorite game as soon as you let him out.

The situation becomes even more fraught for women in their late thirties and forties whose biological clocks are ticking. Donovan told me that women at such gatherings often try to get to eligible men they want to meet early on, lest someone else get to them first and make a connection. On the rare instance when a new single guy enters the room, Donovan described an 'almost palpable, heightened state of awareness' among the women. They know - even if they're loath to admit it - 'that a competition has just begun

I was fortunate to have begun my career in the jewelry industry, where character is the most important aspect of the game. Often the people who look and feel the most honest are not. They’re simply selling the perception of honesty. Diamonds have their own set of four c’s, as anyone who has purchased an engagement ring knows: cut, clarity, carat, and color. But that fifth unspoken c—character—also matters in buying a diamond. You want to trust the person selling you the rock, as it’s the most asymmetrical deal you’ll ever do, in which you have no information and they have it all. A salesperson can be masterful at smiling and putting you at ease and selling you whatever he or she wants, yet because buying a diamond is a rare and special occasion, with little or no opportunity to build a relationship of trust through repeat business, you want to believe in the salesperson’s quality of character.

Hope and Fear Are Inseparable.” ― Francois De La Rochefoucau Ludlum There is some good in this world, and it's worth fighting for. - J.R.R. Tolkien “For in the day of trouble he will keep me safe in his dwelling; he will hide me in the shelter of his sacred tent and set me high upon a rock. ― Psalms Twenty Seven : Five “ You will never forget a person who came to you with a torch in the dark.” ― Unknown “Everyone is a moon and has a dark side which he never shows to anybody.” ― Mark Twain “The battle between good and evil is endlessly fascinating because we are participants every day.”― Mark Twain “Family isn’t always blood, It's the people in your life who want you in theirs; the ones who accept you for who you are. The ones who would do anything to see you smile and who love you no matter what. “ ― Maya Angelo “In spite of the shame, in spite of the sleepless nights, I'm coping. I'm not pretending it wasn't real. I'm not playing games in my mind. I wouldn't go back to the way I was, naive. I'm a different person now. I know I'm courageous, and without blame. I’ve realized I have it in me to stand up against this horror. — ADC "For I know the plans I have for you,” declares the Lord, “plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future." ― Jeremiah Twenty-Nine: Eleven “The universe doesn’t give you what you ask for with your thoughts - it gives you what you demand with your actions.” ― Steve Maraboli Hoo-hoo-hoo, go on, take the money and run, Go on, take the money and run! - Steve Miller Band “What separates us from the other killers, is we only kill bad people.”― Vigilante and “Some people just need killing.” ― Barry Eisler “In real life, the hardest aspect of the battle between good and evil is determining which is which.” ― George R. R. Martin “Wherever there is abuse there is also corruption. Politics, philosophy, theology, science, industry, any field with the potential to affect the well-being of others can be destroyed by abuse or saved by good will.” ― Criss Jami “True life is lived when tiny changes occur." ― Leo “You do not know what will happen tomorrow. For what is your life, really? It is a vapor that appears for a little time, and then vanishes away” ― James Four: Fourteen “In a controversy the instant we feel anger we have already ceased striving for the truth, and have begun striving for ourselves.” Buddha

17 In any event the First Amendment preserves one’s right to lie, though in the fall of 2018 the New York attorney general, Barbara Underwood, filed suit against Exxon for lying to investors, which is a crime.

Had we begun cutting global emissions in 1990, we could still have tackled the climate crisis with confidence,” he writes. “The back of the envelope take is that we could then have cut emissions by something on the order of one quarter per decade and kept within our CO2 budget.” It “wouldn’t have been child’s play,” but “well-understood incremental regulatory reforms and well-designed carbon trading or pricing systems” would have done the trick.

The path now is steep as hell—the new curve we’re on demands downright disruptive emissions cuts” of as much as 50 percent a decade. As the geophysicist Michael Mann put it, “what would have been a bunny slope was now a double black diamond.” That means, Steffen explained, that “climate action can no longer be orderly, gradual, or even continuous with our expectations

fended off shareholder pressure by agreeing to have his executives write a report disclosing the company’s “climate risk.” When that report was released in the winter of 2018, it found that Exxon faced no need to change at all. The team at InsideClimate News, which had broken the original story about Exxon’s lies, summarized the company’s statement: “Exxon insists it would be able to produce all the oil in its existing fields and to keep investing in new reserves.

Do you understand why Donald Trump identifies so dearly with him, this mighty Roark, who “had not made or sought a single friend on the campus”?

It’s not big enough. There’s not enough action.

I’ve lived the last thirty years inside that lie, engaged in an endless debate over whether global warming was “real”—a debate in which both sides knew the answer from the beginning. It’s just that one of those sides was willing to lie. And so, we need to understand where that lie came from.

Within days of the UN special rapporteur’s report on extreme American poverty, the U.S. Congress responded by passing a massive tax cut that virtually every economist predicted would make that inequality much worse. As the UN expert noted in his official report to the world body, “The strategy seems to be tailor-made to maximize inequality.… It seems driven by contempt, and sometimes even hatred, for the poor, along with a ‘winner-takes-all’ mentality.

These are the same people, or at least the same class of people, who have kept us from taking action on climate change.

make sure that they wouldn’t be able to contract the HIV infection, even though, as the AIDS researcher Anthony Fauci quickly pointed out, “there are so many ways to adequately, efficiently, and definitively protect yourself against HIV that the thought of editing the genes of an embryo to get to an effect that you could easily do in so many other ways in my mind is unethical.

For his part, Mark Zuckerberg has described Musk’s worries as “hysterical,” and indeed, a few weeks after the Tesla baron made public his fears, the Facebook baron announced that he was building a helpful AI to run his house. It would recognize his friends and let them in. It would monitor the nursery. It would make toast. Unlike Musk, Zuckerberg perkily explained, he chose “hope over fear.

For the moment, let’s assume that we won’t create Frankenstein’s monsters and that we will make sure that all people have equal access to the fertility lab. Let’s assume that, to the degree AI is real, careful programmers will manage to make it into a benign and helpful force that reliably does our bidding. Let’s assume that everything goes absolutely right. Let’s assume the ads come true. And then let’s ask a more metaphysical, and maybe more important, question: What does that do to the human game? What it does, I think, is begin to rob it of meaning.

This is not an attempt to be pure, to meet some philosophical ideal. We mix people and machines, for instance, in all kinds of ways. I love Vermont’s local stock car track (“Thunder Road, the nation’s site of excitement!”) because the men and women at the wheel show skill and courage. But I don’t think I’d bother going if the races were run by driverless cars. They could doubtless go faster, just as runners genetically altered to have more red blood cells can doubtless go faster. But faster isn’t really the point. The story is the point.

In the early summer of 2018, researchers at Columbia and Yale announced they’d discovered the “neurobiological home” for spirituality somewhere in the parietal cortex, directly behind the frontal lobe.

Here’s the first thing it feels like: disconnected. Because time doesn’t stop. You get one chance to improve your child, there in the fertility clinic before the egg is implanted, and then she’s stuck for the rest of her life with whatever enhancements you’ve selected. Meanwhile, science marches

Nectome is one of the handful of start-ups chosen to be part of Y Combinator, the most important of California’s tech incubators. (They’re the people who first championed Dropbox, Airbnb, and Reddit.) In fact, Y Combinator head Sam Altman has already plunked down his $10,000 for Nectome’s service,

Remember, this is the chief scientist at what is by some measures the biggest company in the planet’s history.

They don’t understand that some sadness and loss is not just bearable; it’s essential. There is an everyday heroism, if you think about it, in bringing up your children fully aware that they will supplant you. That’s what human civilization is. If it weren’t—if your children were just going to be other beings who perpetually trailed you through infinity by twenty or thirty years—then the most powerful of human connections would in effect be severed.

They don’t threaten the game we’ve been playing all these years. Indeed, they threaten to make it more beautiful.

The rapid spread of renewable energy across the developing world annoyed fossil fuel executives to no end.

solar panels has become so efficient that the panels pay back the energy used to make them in less than four years.

But it made little progress until Earth Day in 1970, when twenty million Americans (a tenth of the population) joined in demonstrations in every corner of the country.

You’ll be pleased to know that not everyone is worried. Steven Pinker ridicules fears of “digital apocalypse,” insisting that “like any other technology,” artificial intelligence is “tested before it is implemented and constantly tweaked for safety and efficacy.

If we don’t limit the ability of parents to push and harass and love their children in a particular direction, why would we limit their ability to accomplish the same thing more efficiently with genetic engineering?

Here’s James Watson, discoverer of the double helix, who describes himself as a libertarian: “I don’t believe we can let the government start dictating the decisions people make about what sort of families they’ll have.

As climate change has shrunk the effective size of our planet, the creation of designer babies shrinks the effective range of our souls.

the artificial intelligence pioneer Marvin Minsky once explained, are simply “machines that happen to be made out of meat.

In the political realm, they’ve learned that we respond to an ever-greater sense of outrage; hence, Trump.

Our lives now are only partly biological, with no clear split between the organic and the technological, the carbon and the silicon,” the venerable National Geographic intoned in a recent special issue on “the next human.” “We may not know yet where we’re going, but we’ve already left where we’ve been.

Eighth-graders who are heavy users of social media increase their risk of depression by 27 percent. Teens who spend three hours a day or more on electronic devices are 35 percent more likely to be at risk of suicide;

None of this is an indictment of young people. Millennials can use their connectedness to do remarkable things, as everyone saw in the months after the Parkland, Florida, school shootings in the winter of 2018.

Or we could just smoke weed.

We know of no story older than Gilgamesh,

The great psychologist Ernest Becker was convinced that Freud had it wrong: it wasn’t sex that our minds repress, but the fear of death, and from that fear we’ve constructed everything from mighty pyramids to the mightier idea of heaven. The pattern of our lives is set by the span we hope to live: we know how much time we can allot to education, and we can tell the prime of our lives, and if we’re brave enough to acknowledge it, we can prepare for our approaching

The great psychologist Ernest Becker was convinced that Freud had it wrong: it wasn’t sex that our minds repress, but the fear of death, and from that fear we’ve constructed everything from mighty pyramids to the mightier idea of heaven. The pattern of our lives is set by the span we hope to live: we know how much time we can allot to education, and we can tell the prime of our lives, and if we’re brave enough to acknowledge it, we can prepare for our approaching death.

Insisting that some horror is inevitable no matter what you do is the response of people who don’t want to be bothered trying to stop it, and I’ve heard it too often to take it entirely seriously.

But our little campaign became the largest of its kind in history—endowments and portfolios worth nearly $8 trillion have joined in—and it has clearly stung: recent academic studies have proved that it has helped move the climate issue to the fore and reduced the capital the fossil fuel companies can mobilize for new exploration

(That’s why Exxon hates solar: you put up a solar panel and the energy comes for free, which to the corporate mind is the stupidest business plan ever.)

That’s the job of movements.

When I say “nonviolence,” I do not mean only, or even mainly, the dramatic acts of civil disobedience that end in jail or a beating. I mean the full sweep of organizing aimed at building mass movements whose goal is to change the zeitgeist and, hence, the course of history. (Indeed, Gandhi made it clear that his satyagraha also included “constructive work” to build local economies. In his day, the key symbol was the spinning wheel, but now his old ashram at Sevagram boasts not only solar panels but a biodigester to make cooking gas from cow manure.)

One of the finest theoreticians of nonviolence was Jonathan Schell, who, with his book The Fate of the Earth, had suggested that nuclear weapons, because they were so powerful, were rendering wars unfightable. In a subsequent book, The Unconquerable World, he advanced the idea further. Violence was increasingly dysfunctional, he wrote, and “forms of non-violent action can serve effectively in the place of violence at every level of political affairs.” Or, more eloquently, it was the method by which “the active many can overcome the ruthless few.

Musk,

We actually have a fairly good idea of what makes human beings happy, thanks in large part to Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the longtime head of the psychology department at the University of Chicago. Back in the 1960s, he was studying painters and noted the “almost trance-like state” they entered when their work was going well. They didn’t seem to be motivated by finishing the painting, or by the money they’d get for selling it. It seemed to be the work itself that spurred them on, even in the face of hunger or fatigue.

We are already capable of being as absorbed and engaged as we ever could be. We’re good

It’s no longer possible, he insisted, “to live by the idea that there is something special, unique, or even sacred about living organisms

then you need to listen to them speak. You need to sense precisely how freaked out they are.

That is of course true sometimes, though not, I think, if someone has lived what seems a full life. You can read the obituary page with a sense of dread, but you can also read it as the chronicle of a world that works.

A world without death is a world without time, and that in turn is a world without meaning, at least human meaning. Go far enough down this path and the game is up.

But the opposite of libertarian hyperindividualism is not necessarily the Red Army kicking in the door of your father’s drugstore. It could also be a sense of social solidarity, an ethic of “We’re all in this together.” As Pope Francis said, after a closed-door meeting with oil company executives about climate change in 2018, “Decisive progress on this path cannot be made without an increased awareness that all of us are part of one human family, united by bands of fraternity and solidarity.

One is the solar panel, and the other is the nonviolent movement. Obviously, they are not the same sort of inventions: the solar panel (and its cousins the wind turbine and the lithium-ion battery) is hardware,

It’s not too late, not quite. Fossil fuel came to dominate our economy a century before we realized that global warming was a threat. That’s one reason climate change has been so hard to bring under control.

Our Alexa is significantly less competent than our mutt, who is unflummoxed by breezy doors.

The sight stuck in Carnegie’s mind—his steelworks having used by far the largest share of the world’s coal supply, he predicted the best hope for humanity’s future lay in “the sun-motor,” whose “rays render the globe habitable, and may yet be made to produce power through solar engines.

But I didn’t really grasp the power of a solar panel

to change lives until I got to rural Africa on a recent reporting trip.

But solar—solar is suddenly cheap.

Some of the new electrical current gets used in ways everyone would approve of: I met five-year-old girls practicing their alphabet in exercise books by the bright new glare of an LED lamp.

And as we have seen, the utilities that provide that power don’t want us to change—they’ve been willing to use their money and clout to dramatically slow down the trend toward renewable energy.

It’s not that renewable energy is our only task. We also need to eat lower on the food chain, build public transit networks, densify cities, and start farming in ways that restore carbon to soils. But renewable energy may be the easiest of these tasks, especially since it’s suddenly so cheap.