Whisper Network Quotes

I let out a laugh that sounded more like the yip of a startled poodle. "Superp-powers? I wish. My powers aren't winning me a slot on the Cartoon Network anytime soon... except as a comic relief. Ghost Whisperer Junior. Or Ghost Screamer, more like it. Tune in, every week, as Chloe Saunders runs screaming from yet another ghost looking for her help." Okay, superpower might be pushing it.

Picture a tall, dark figure, surrounded by cornfields... NO, YOU CAN'T RIDE A CAT. WHO EVER HEARD OF THE DEATH OF RATS RIDING A CAT? THE DEATH OF RATS WOULD RIDE SOME KIND OF DOG. Picture more fields, a great horizon-spanning network of fields, rolling in gentle waves... DON'T ASK ME I DON'T KNOW. SOME KIND OF TERRIER, MAYBE. ...fields of corn, alive, whispering in the breeze... RIGHT, AND THE DEATH OF FLEAS CAN RIDE IT TOO. THAT WAY YOU KILL TWO BIRDS WITH ONE STONE. ...awaiting the clockwork of the seasons. METAPHORICALLY.

I was unimpressed, having heard ART’s “villain of a long-running mythic adventure serial” voice before, but all the humans got quiet. Amena shifted uncertainly and looked at me. Then Ratthi whispered, “Was that a subtle threat?” I said, “No. It wasn’t subtle.

We had guilt of every flavor: We had working-mom guilt, childless guilt, guilt because we’d turned down a social obligation, guilt because we’d accepted an invitation we knew we didn’t have time for, guilt for turning away work and for not turning it down when we felt we were already being taken advantage of. We had guilt for asking for more and for not asking for enough, guilt for working from home, guilt for eating a bagel, Catholic guilt and Presbyterian guilt and Jewish guilt, none of which tasted quite the same. We felt guilty if we weren’t feeling guilty enough, so much so that we began to take pride in this ability to function under moral conflict.

Why does it look like a person?” I said, “I ask myself that sometimes.” Over the comm loudspeaker, Dr. Ratthi said, “It is a person!” In the background, I heard Overse whisper, “Ratthi, get off the comm!

Every confidence, every request for advice was a leap of faith and we all had horror stories of times when we’d misplaced it.

There is no single thing... that is so cut and dried that one cannot attend to its secret whisper which says 'I am more than just my appearance'. If each object quivers with readiness to imply something other than itself, if each perception is a word in a poem dense with connotations, then the poet's selection of any given subject of speculation will become... a means of attuning himself to the rhythms and harmonies of reality at large. ... The notion of a network of correspondence is not an outmoded Romantic illusion: it represents a crucial intuition...

Exposing students to lots of books and positive reading experiences while building a network of other readers who support each other provides students with tools that last beyond the classroom setting.

We knew we shouldn’t be ashamed. We weren’t ashamed. We were grown-ass women—which is obviously why we paraded to the restrooms with tampons secretly stuffed into our cardigan sleeves as though we were spies delivering encrypted information. ....We pretended that all of this was a myth. That we had neither fallopian tubes, nor menstrual cycles, nor breasts, nor moods, nor children. And then we took it as a compliment when one of the men in the office told us we had balls. So, tell us again how this wasn’t a man’s world.

Target Two whispered something, which FacilitySys rendered as „What are you?” I said, „I'm a Shut Up or Get Your Head Smashed.

And so, when one of us spoke up, it was never just for her. It was for us.

There’s an important distinction between writing about trauma and writing a tragedy. I sought to write about identity, loss, and injustice … and also of love, joy, connection, friendship, hope, laughter, and the beauty and strength in my Ojibwe community. It was paramount to share and celebrate what justice and healing looks like in a tribal community: cultural events, language revitalization, ceremonies, traditional teachings, whisper networks, blanket parties, and numerous other ways tribes have shown resilience in the face of adversity. Growing up, none of the books I’d read featured a Native protagonist. With Daunis, I wanted to give Native teens a hero who looks like them, whose greatest strength is her Ojibwe culture and community.

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

How did we know when behavior was inappropriate? We just did. Any woman over the age of fourteen probably did. Believe it or not, we didn't want to be offended. We weren't sitting around twiddling our thumbs waiting for someone to show up and offend us so that we would have something to do that day. In fact, we made dozens of excuses not to be. We gave the benefit of the doubt. We took a man's comment about the way our heels made our calves look as well-intentioned. We understood the desire for us to draw a line in the sand - this was okay, this was not okay. No such line existed.

If time was currency, we were all going broke.

Still, a job was supposed to pay an employee, not cost her.

There was a fascinating tidbit Ardie had once heard: Women walked around the world in constant fear of violence; men’s greatest fear was ridicule

Failure was a luxury we couldn't afford, all chained together as we were, our fates locked up tight. One box office flop from a female director and no one wanted "girl" movies, one stock market plunge from a company with a woman CEO and women couldn't lead, one false accusation and we were liars, all of us. Because when we failed it was because of our chromosomes, it wasn't because of a market dip or an ineffective advertising campaign or plain bad luck.

One of the best things about Ardie was that she could be just a little bit mean exactly when Sloane needed her to be. Sloane's most closely held tenet was that women could not be real friends unless they were willing to talk shit together. It was the closest thing she knew to a blood pact that didn't involve knives.

The thing we would articulate, far too late, as it turned out, was that when a building’s burning, no one just whispers, “Fire!” No one sits quietly at their desk, diligently completing their work and checking for typos while the smoke pours in overhead. No one cries for “help” softly, under their breath, so as not to disturb their neighbors. So why did we? Shhh, don’t tell anyone but … Keep this quiet, please, but … We haven’t told anyone else, but … This stays between us, but …

I notice I am taking risks with my own security and losing my sensitivity to danger. I don't know it at the time, but the effects of war are reaching into me in unexpected ways, and I am being changed by them. I am surrounded by destruction and the randomness of death, which I cannot fathom. I have felt the closeness of death as tangibly as the whisper of a murderous seducer, and felt the richness, twinged by guilt, of having escaped its grasp. I have seen too often the numb lost look of men consumed by undiluted grief, and heard the howl of children as their mothers are pulled from the rubble of a rocket-blasted home, and I am coming to understand the long dark pain of those who silently endure what first seems unendurable.

We hated the gym. We loved it. We escaped to it. We avoided it. We had complicated relationships with our bodies, while at the same time insisting that we loved them unconditionally. We were sure we had better, more important things to do than worry about them, but the slender yoga bodies of moms in Lululemon at school pickup taunted us. Their figures hinted at wheatgrass shots, tennis clubs, and vagina steaming treatments. We found them aspirational. So we sweated on the elliptical and lifted ten-pound weights, inching closer to the bodies we told ourselves we were too evolved to want.

Well,” Lockwood said, “if you judge success by the number of enemies you make, that was a highly successful evening.

Listen

And in response Ardie just pinched her lips together and felt an uncharacteristic squeeze on her heart, because they would never see themselves the same as they saw each other and that was a gift.

She thought it was good to put a label on it. It was like a diagnosis. Everyone had to support you once you got one of those or else risk being a ghastly, selfish person with a bias against mental health issues.

We all have that bully that appears on our shoulders, whispering nasty self-thoughts into our ears. On the opposite shoulder sits the cheerleader, the one who believes in our worth and reminds us of our successes, strengths, and goals.

we’d heard that those who lived in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones. But no one had told us anything about how to conduct ourselves within the display cases of crystal conference rooms and buildings constructed out of thousands of soulless glass eyes.

He turned, his eyebrows jacking up in surprise. The creases in his forehead had deepened over the years. (While we needed nips and tucks and filler injections to stay relevant, they needed only to age to become more dignified. Don’t think we didn’t notice.)

Ardie wondered if something was wrong with her. Some actual diagnosis. A personality disorder. Something more concrete than just: natural introvert. But, well, to find out, she’d actually have to talk to someone she hardly knew for an extended time period, which was out of the question.

It wasn’t only the warning that kept us safe but our ability to keep that warning quiet. Like secret agents operating behind enemy lines, we couldn’t afford to get caught. And yet we risked it anyway. With voices hushed, we reached out to each other to offer our knowledge. We tried. Because we’d always wanted the best for each of our friends. We wanted her to dump that loser. We wanted her to stop worrying about losing five pounds. We wanted to tell her she looked great in that dress and that she should definitely buy it. We wanted her to crush the interview. We wanted her to text us when she got home. We wanted her to see what we saw: someone smart and brave and funny and worthy of love and success and peace. We wanted to kill whoever got in her way.

We had been programmed to trade in secrets. Our leading deodorant brand promised not to tell... By whispering, whose secrets were we keeping anyway - ours or theirs? Whose interests did our silence ultimately protect?... As we grew tired of whispering because what were we hiding, after all? We had stories, all of us. Would speaking up cost us? Maybe. But maybe it would cost them, too.

We were always looking for the perfect man. Even those of us who were not signed up for the traditional, heteronormative experience were nevertheless fascinated with the anthropological, unicorn-like search for one. Married or single, we were either searching for him or trying to mold him from one we already had. This perfect specimen would consist of the following essential attributes: He shared his food and always ordered dessert. When we recommended a book, he bought it without needing a friend to second our suggestion first. He knew how to pack a diaper bag without being told. He was a Southern gentleman with a mother from the East Coast who fostered his quietly progressive sensibilities. He said “I love you” after 2.5 months. He didn’t get drunk. He knew how to do taxes. He never questioned our feminist ideals when we refused to squish bugs or change oil. He didn’t sit down to put on his shoes. He had enough money for retirement. He wished vehemently for male-hormonal birth control. He had a slight unease with the concept of women’s shaved vaginas, but not enough to take a stance one way or another. He thought Mindy Kaling was funny. He liked throw pillows. He didn’t care if we made more money than him. He liked women his own age. We were reasonable and irrational, cynical and naïve, but always, always on the hunt. Of course, this story isn’t about perfect men, but Ardie Valdez unfortunately didn’t know that yet when, the day after Desmond’s untimely death, Ardie’s phone lit up: a notification from her dating app.

Small wonder, then, that an institution like the Library found space to take root. It was presented as a good cause, created in the hope of encouraging people to be more open with one another. Its creators were little more than boys: perky, smiling youngsters, well groomed and well dressed, without a trace of facial hair. They looked designed to win people's trust. And who wouldn't trust a cheerful, articulate young man who came calling at your door, inviting you to chat with him about this and that, about the meaning of life, about all the hunger and suffering in the world? It's true; it was whispered that dark forces acted behind them, national and international groups hungry for vengeance after certain recent defeats. But who could believe such things in front of polite young lads who always looked you in the eyes and shook your hand.

This was 1991, remember. We didn't have the Internet. So, as teenagers, we lived on the phone. There was no webcamming, no social networking. We dreamt simply of having our own personal phone lines one day, along with uninterrupted hours to talk, and we rarely got that. No matter who we were talking to, no matter how private the conversation, parents picked up the phone accidentally, siblings demanded their time. The introduction of call waiting made all of this even worse, as it allowed aunts and uncles and people you didn't even know to butt in. This is part of why we talked so late in the night, Lindy and I, all of us teens. This is why we looked so pale in our grunge clothes. These night hours were the only times we felt we could tell the truth without danger, the only times we could live separately from our parents while still inside of their homes. There were no cell phones. No private text messages. It was simple one on one conversation and, if it was any good at all, you had to whisper.

My dear readers, I find myself perplexed by the phantoms that now inhabit our veins and perpetually whisper in our ears. These specters are always watching, their formless eyes casting judgement upon our every thought and action. They stalk us behind screens and within circuits, gathering each tidbit we release into the ether to build their ever-growing profiles of our souls. Through these ghastly portals, our lives have become performance. Each waking moment an opportunity to curate our images and broadcast our cleverness. Nuance has fled in favor of hashtag and like, while meaning has been diced into 280 characters or less. Substance is sacrificed at the altar of shareability, as we optimize each motive and emotion to become more digestible digital content. Authenticity now lives only in offline obscurity, while our online avatars march on endlessly, seeking validation through numbers rather than depth. What secrets remain unshared on these platforms of glass? What mysteries stay concealed behind profiles and pose? Have we traded intimacy for influence, and true understanding for audience engagement? I fear these shadow networks breed narcissism and foster loneliness, masked as connection. That the sum of a life’s joys and sorrows can now be reduced to a reel of carefully selected snippets says little of the richness that once was. So follow the phantoms that stalk you if you will, but do not forget that which still breathes beneath the screens. There you will find humanity, flawed but whole, beautiful in its imperfection and trajectory undefined by likes or loves. The lanterns may flicker and fade, but the darkness that remains has always held truth. Look deeper than the glow, and know that which can never be shared or measured, only felt. In mystery, Your friend, Edgar Allan Poe (Poe talking about social media)

This was 1991, remember. We didn’t have the Internet. So, as teenagers, we lived on the phone. There was no webcamming, no social networking. We dreamt simply of having our own personal phone lines one day, along with uninterrupted hours to talk, and we rarely got that. No matter who we were talking to, no matter how private the conversation, parents picked up the phone accidentally, siblings demanded their time. The introduction of call waiting made all of this even worse, as it allowed aunts and uncles and people you didn’t even know to butt in. This is part of why we talked so late in the night, Lindy and I, all of us teens. This is why we looked so pale in our grunge clothes. These night hours were the only times we felt we could tell the truth without danger, the only times we could live separately from our parents while still inside of their homes. There were no cell phones. No private text messages. It was simple one on one conversation and, if it was any good at all, you had to whisper.

Nobody told her this before she became a mother. That suddenly your diligently built-up immunity toward all these things, like name-calling and popularity contests, would up and leave the second someone took aim at your child.

can analyze KPIs—you know, unique visitors—and optimize content to make sure it searches well. And when it comes to targeting audiences, I know exactly how to engage your prime demographics. I’m basically, like, an influencer whisperer. It’s a small network. We all know each other.

I could read it so you don’t have to?” she offers, but I’m already halfway through. I start to read aloud. “ ‘I had this vision for creating a platform that would help people to connect and coalesce around the things that mattered most to them. It was a natural extension of what I’d been doing for years. People used to call me a humanist spirit guide—I guess that’s what I’m bringing to WAI now, just on a larger stage.’ “He doesn’t even mention us. Doesn’t say anything about how Jules and I dragged him kicking and screaming into this. I wanted to create a platform. Cyrus just wanted to baptize cats.” “To be fair, the Cat Baptism is one of the most shared rituals,” Destiny says, trying to lighten the tone. “Eight hundred thousand videos and counting.” I keep going. “ ‘I’m attracted to the solitary life, Jones says. You can imagine him in a monastery, although he’d have to cut off that halo around his head. In addition to creating a social network that millions of people are turning to for meaning and community, he is also taking care of his employees—he has just kicked off a mentorship program to give the women on his team the support they need to thrive in their roles.’ ” Destiny tells me to stop reading. “It’s just bullshit.” I take a shaky deep breath. “That’s my mentorship program,” I whisper. “Cyrus is telling them what he wants to hear. You and I both know that.” I’m stammering now, but I keep going. “ ‘He’s otherworldly but handsome in an almost comical way. His sentences are long, and when you’re in the middle of one, you wonder, where is this going? But he always manages to bring whatever he’s saying to a satisfying conclusion. Everything he says is mysterious and somehow obvious at the same time.’ ” At least this one is funny. I allow Destiny to laugh briefly. I get to the last line. “ ‘I have to say, I’m developing something of a crush.’ ” “Oh, for God’s sake, another woman in love with Cyrus. Take a number, sister.” Destiny leans over, reads the byline. “George Milos. Guess Cyrus appeals to all genders.” As we get up to leave, she says, “I don’t think Cyrus is a bad person. He’s just basking in a sea of adoration, and it makes him think more of himself than he should.” “Where does that leave me?” “You have a tough gig. No one wants to be married to the guy everyone thinks is going to save the world.

There were a hundred things, small and large, that stood between us and our jobs every day, ranging from the incidental to the nefarious. So when we said that we'd prefer not to have to be asked to smile on top of working, we meant that: we would like to do our jobs, please. When we said that we would like not to hear a comment about the length of our skirt, we meant that: we would like to do our jobs, please. When we said that we would like not to have someone touch us in our office, we meant that: we would like to do our jobs, please.

Being a woman at work was a handicap that we'd been trying to make up for by erasing our femininity in just the right ways.

At the time of my visit, Finnish evolutionary ecologist Aino Kalske, Japanese chemical ecologist Kaori Shiojiri, and Cornell chemical ecologist André Kessler had recently found that goldenrods that live in peaceful areas without much threat from predators will issue chemical alarm calls that are incredibly specific—decipherable only to their close kin—on the rare occasion they are attacked. But goldenrods in more hostile territory signal to their neighbors using chemical phrases easily understood by all the goldenrod in the area, not just their biological kin. Instead of using coded whisper networks, these goldenrod broadcast the threat over loudspeaker, so to speak. It is the first time research has confirmed that these sort of chemical communications are beneficial not only to the plant receiving them but also to the sender.* When times are truly tough, you don’t want to be left standing in a field alone when it’s over, if you’re a plant. There’ll be no one to mate with, no one to help bring in pollinators. It’s the closest scientists have come to showing intentionality in plant communication: these are signals meant to be heard. And as we know, by some measures, intention is an indicator of intelligent behavior.

The 5,500-squarefoot house was custom built with a Mediterranean decor. It was the exact opposite of the dingy hotel rooms he stayed in when he was on the road. This house was very open with high ceilings, so even giant-like friends like Kevin Nash could hang out with no issue... Shawn conducted a class as I photographed away. Students Lance Cade, Bryan Danielson (Daniel Bryan), Brian Kendrick, Paul London and others did calisthenics and other exercises. After an hour or so they got into the ring to do some falls and learn a few holds.... Here I was face-to-face with Shawn Michaels, and he asked me, "What do you want to do?" My mouth spewed words faster than I could think, as I whispered so the students wouldn't hear, "Shoot me into the ropes. When I come back on the rebound I will give you a flying dropkick and then put you in the figure-four leglock for the win.

The cornerstone of control is the state’s system of surveillance, exposed by Snowden. I saw the effect of blanket surveillance as a reporter in the Stasi sate of Communist East Germany. I was followed by men, invariably with crew cuts and leather jackets, whom I presumed to be agents of the Stasi— the Ministry for State Security, which the ruling Communist Party described as the “shield and sword” of the nation. Stasi agents visited those I interviewed soon after I left their homes. My phone was bugged. Some of those I worked with were pressured to become informants. Fear hung like icicles over every conversation. People would whisper to me to convey the most banal pieces of information. The Stasi did not set up massive death camps and gulags. It did not have to. Its network of as many as 2 million informants in a country of 17 million was everywhere. There were 102,000 secret police officers employed full-time to monitor the population— one for every 166 East Germans. The Nazis broke bones. The Stasi broke souls. The East German security apparatus pioneered the psychological disintegration skills that torturers and interrogators in America’s black sites, and within our prison system, have honed to a chilling perfection. The goal of wholesale surveillance, as Hannah Arendt wrote in The Origins of Totalitarianism, is not, in the end, to discover crimes, “but to be on hand when the government decides to arrest a certain category of the population”. This is what happened to [Lynne] Stewart. And because Americans’ emails, phone conversations, Web searches, and geographical movements are recorded and stored in perpetuity in government databases, there will be more than enough “evidence” to seize us should the state deem it necessary. This information waits like a dormant virus inside government vaults to be released against us. It does not matter how trivial or innocent that information is. In totalitarian states, justice, like truth, is irrelevant.

Woven deep into the vast communication networks wrapping the globe, we also find evidence of embryonic technological autonomy. The technium contains 170 quadrillion computer chips wired up into one mega-scale computing platform. The total number of transistors in this global network is now approximately the same as the number of neurons in your brain. And the number of links among files in this network (think of all the links among all the web pages of the world) is about equal to the number of synapse links in your brain. Thus, this growing planetary electronic membrane is already comparable to the complexity of a human brain. It has three billion artificial eyes (phone and webcams) plugged in, it processes keyword searches at the humming rate of 14 kilohertz (a barely audible high-pitched whine), and it is so large a contraption that it now consumes 5 percent of the world’s electricity. When computer scientists dissect the massive rivers of traffic flowing through it, they cannot account for the source of all the bits. Every now and then a bit is transmitted incorrectly, and while most of those mutations can be attributed to identifiable causes such as hacking, machine error, or line damage, the researchers are left with a few percent that somehow changed themselves. In other words, a small fraction of what the technium communicates originates not from any of its known human-made nodes but from the system at large. The technium is whispering to itself.

Target Two whispered something, which FacilitySys rendered as “What are you?” I said, “I’m a Shut Up or Get Your Head Smashed.

Ardie, like many of us, had caught perfectionism, an illness that we heard was more common in women by a factor of roughly twenty to one. To the best of our understanding, it was transferred through social media and the pages of glossy magazines that were displayed face-out in the checkout line and, once contracted at the age of twelve or thirteen, could be cured by no number of Jezebel think pieces or edgy rom-coms in which the leading lady boldly portrayed a train wreck or a bad mommy. For our children, we chased the gold standard of suburban contentment set by our own stay-at-home mothers, while simultaneously stepping into the shoes of our breadwinning fathers. And we made sure that everyone knew we were handling it all swimmingly by the way we wrote notes on napkins dutifully folded into our children’s lunch boxes and threw Halloween parties with Swiss cheese cut into the shapes of ghosts. Because honestly, if that wasn’t success, what was?

We are starting an uprising, Darcy. In the name of the rightful queens. The A.S.S. will unite and cast an unstoppable wind through this academy that will drive out the turds.” I snorted a laugh, but realised she was deadly serious and that analogy hadn’t been intentional. “Well obviously I’m up for any kind of Asscrux rebellion.” “We are stockpiling weapons, my lady. I have many an A.S.S. collecting Griffin droppings in the early morn, and I have taken a chaos crystal or two from the potions lab.” She grinned widely. “Leave it all with me, I shall build an underground army ready to follow you and Tory into the depths of hell and back again. I have also sent as many of our dear Tiberian Rat friends as I could to my father before they could be taken for inquisition.” “Is he helping them?” I whispered hopefully and she nodded. “He is leading them to secret burrows in the north,” she whispered though the silencing bubble would stop anyone from hearing anyway. “As well as creating a network of friends and allies to our great and noble cause who will be at your back the moment you are ready to make your play for the crown.

We wanted to be treated just like men, at work, for the same reason that people buy smart phones: to make our lives easyer.

Women went around the world always fearing violence; men's greatest fear was ridiculouseness.

We have been programed to work with secrets.

If you would have listened to us, none of these would have happened.

Every day was the same. Until it wasn't.

Children turned men into heroes and mothers into weaker employees if we didn't play our cards right.

Sloane played by the rules of the game. So she could stay. She could keep her seat at the table.

They tought they saw directy trough us. They tought they know us. They thought they could anticipate our movements.

We would think about this moment a few months later and ask ourselves many questions. We were going to look for signs. And we were going to find them.

Maybe the indiscretion was a biological adaptation. Survival of the best informed.

Fifth, design to distribute. In the twentieth century, one simple curve—the Kuznets Curve—whispered a powerful message on inequality: it has to get worse before it can get better, and growth will (eventually) even it up. But inequality, it turns out, is not an economic necessity: it is a design failure. Twenty-first-century economists will recognise that there are many ways to design economies to be far more distributive of the value that they generate—an idea best represented as a network of flows. It means going beyond redistributing income to exploring ways of redistributing wealth, particularly the wealth that lies in controlling land, enterprise, technology, knowledge and the power to create money.

The prince with the red hair also lifted a beckoning finger that gestured to a nearby chair over which lay a network of fine wires that led to a cable lying on the floor. Lori bent a suspicious look at the wires that seemed to promise trickery, but the maiden pushed him back gently and he sank into the chair. Another slave girl approached and laced upon his head an odd-shaped metal cap, smiling as she did so. He heard a light whisper in his own familiar tongue as she bent over him. “Be not afraid. The Red One is kindly. You have nothing to fear from these wires.” Lori stiffened, still suspicious, and sat motionless, awaiting the event. He became aware of a silvery mist that began to form between himself and the throned prince, a mist that as it grew thicker shaped strangely into pictures and words and he realized with a start that the pictures came from his own mind as did the thoughts there framed into words. At this betraying mist the Red One looked long, reading his captive’s inmost self. Then words issued absently from his lips, as if he spoke only to himself.

A loud knock shook her door. Emma damn near jumped off the sofa. Her neck popped as she jerked her head around to stare at the door with wide eyes. Her heart began to slam against her ribs as fear trickled through her. Who the hell would be knocking on her door this late at night? Who the hell would be knocking on her door at any time of day or night? No one she knew would do so without calling first. And deliverymen and women didn’t drop off packages at freaking midnight. As quickly and quietly as a mouse, she darted into her bedroom and grabbed the 9mm her father had bought her and trained her to use. Flicking off the safety, she returned to the living room and swung by the coffee table to tuck her phone in her pajama pants pocket in case she needed to call 911. Only then did she cautiously approach the door. Another knock thundered through the house. Adrenaline spiking, she peered through the door’s peephole. Shock rippled through her. “Oh shit,” she whispered. Setting the gun on the coatrack bench beside her, she hastily unlocked the dead bolt, then the knob, and flung open the door. Cliff stood before her, his big body blocking her view of the yard. Emma gaped up at him. He wore the standard blacks of network guards covered with a long black coat similar to that of an Immortal Guardian. His face, neck, and hands were streaked with blood. His clothing glistened with wet patches. And his eyes shone bright amber. She had never seen them so bright and knew it meant that whatever emotion roiled inside him was intense. Panic consumed her. “Cliff,” she breathed. Stepping onto the porch, she swiftly glanced around, terrified she might see soldiers in black approaching with weapons raised. When none materialized, she grabbed his wrist and yanked him inside. Her hands shook as she closed and bolted the door, her fingers leaving little streaks of blood on the white surface. Spinning around, she stared up at him. “What happened? Are you hurt?” Her gaze swept over him, noting every wet patch on his clothing, every ruby-red splotch on his skin. Was that his blood or someone else’s? “How did you get here? Are you hurt?” Closing the distance between them, she began to run her hands over his chest in search of wounds. Cliff grabbed her wrists to halt her frantic movements. His glowing eyes dropped to the points at which they touched. He drew his thumbs over her skin as if to confirm she was real. Then he met her gaze. “I need your shower,” he said, voice gruff. Heart pounding, she nodded. As soon as he released her, she pointed. “It’s through there.” Without another word, he strode toward it. His heavy boots thudded loudly in the quiet as he entered the short hallway, then turned in to the bathroom. The door closed. Water began to pound tile. Emma didn’t move. Cliff was here. In her home. What the hell had happened?

I have also sent as many of our dear Tiberian Rat friends as I could to my father before they could be taken for inquisition.” “Is he helping them?” I whispered hopefully and she nodded. “He is leading them to secret burrows in the north,” she whispered though the silencing bubble would stop anyone from hearing anyway. “As well as creating a network of friends and allies to our great

The forest, I believe, will stay with Bert as he ages. It is a deep terrain, a place of unending variance and subtle meaning. It is a complete sensory environment, whispering with sounds that nourish rather than enervate, with scents that carry information more significant than “nasty” or “nice.” It is different each time you meet it, changing with the seasons, the weather, the life cycles of its inhabitants. It is marked by history and mythologies; stories effortlessly spin from its depths. It is safe from the spite of suburban playgrounds, and dangerous in a way that insurance won’t indemnify. Dig beneath its soil, and you will uncover layers of life: the frail networks of mycelia, the burrows of animals, the roots of trees. Bring questions into this space and you will receive a reply, though not an answer. Deep terrain offers up multiplicity, forked paths, symbolic meaning. It schools you in compromise, in shifting interpretation. It will mute your rationality and make you believe in magic. It removes time from the clock face and reveals the greater truth of its operation, its circularity and its vastness. It will show you rocks of unfathomable age and bursts of life so ephemeral that they are barely there. It will show you the crawl of geological ages, the gradual change of the seasons, and the countless micro-seasons that happen across the year. It will demand your knowledge: the kind of knowledge that’s experiential, the kind of knowledge that comes with study. Know it—name it—and it will reward you only with more layers of detail, more frustrating revelations of your own ignorance. A deep terrain is a life’s work. It will beguile, nourish, and sustain you through decades, only to finally prove that you, too, are ephemeral compared to the rocks and the trees.

The forest, I believe, will stay with Bert as he ages. It is a deep terrain, a place of unending variance and subtle meaning. It is a complete sensory environment, whispering with sounds that nourish rather than enervate, with scents that carry information more significant than 'nasty' or 'nice.' It is different each time you meet it, changing with the seasons, the weather the life cycles of its inhabitants. It is marked by history and mythologies; stories effortlessly spin from its depths. It is safe from the spite of suburban playgrounds, and dangerous in a way that insurance won't indemnify. Dig beneath its soil, and you will uncover layers of life: the frail networks of mycelia, the burrows of animals, the roots of trees. Bring questions into this space and you will receive a reply, though not an answer. Deep terrain offers up multiplicity, forked paths, symbolic meaning. It schools you in compromise, in shifting interpretation. It will mute your rationality and make you believe in magic. It removes time from the clock face and revelas the greater truth of its operation, its circularity and its vastness. It will show you rocks of unfathmoable age and bursts of life so ephemeral that they are barely there. It will show you the crawl of geological ages, the gradual change of the seasons, and the countless micro-seasons that happen across the year. It will demand your knowledge: the kind of knowledge that comes with study. Know it--name it--and it will reward you only with more layers of detail, more frustrating revelations of your own ignorance. A deep terrain is a life's work. It will beguile, nourish, and sustain you through decades, only to finally prove to you, too, are ephemeral compared to the rocks and the trees.

In the twentieth century, one simple curve—the Kuznets Curve—whispered a powerful message on inequality: it has to get worse before it can get better, and growth will (eventually) even it up. But inequality, it turns out, is not an economic necessity: it is a design failure. Twenty-first-century economists will recognise that there are many ways to design economies to be far more distributive of the value that they generate—an idea best represented as a network of flows. It means going beyond redistributing income to exploring ways of redistributing wealth, particularly the wealth that lies in controlling land, enterprise, technology, knowledge and the power to create money.

River searched the world for her girls. She dug up every anthill she could find. The army ants were too frightened to tell her what they'd done, but they did tell her that the ant god had gone to live among the humans. River searched for Ant. She dug through entire lineages trying to find him. When, after three hundred years, the sky god dared to mention the neglected waters of the world, she dried up entire countries out of spite. This is our River, one god reminded the other, our sweet River. Let us help, not hinder. And so they sent emissaries from every spirit realm, second daughters and minor spirits of similar powers, godlings all, promising their aid for a hundred years. But River's grief became their own. They forgot their mothers and their brothers and the lovers they'd promised to return to; they forgot that they'd had a past before this grief removed everything form inside of them. How, they wondered, can a body feel full to bursting with grief but also hollow? These godlings of land and air and memory resisted this loss of themselves, but River's sorrow drowned them. Their husbands, their children, their homes became like reflections in a rough stream, fractured beyond recognition. They tore the world apart. Unprecedented rains. Earthquakes that ravaged every region. One godling who had come from the house of flames sent an entire cite on fire trying to find River's girls. It was a dark century for humankind and godkind alike. Then the female godlings got craftier in their search. They made themselves visible to human eyes, tempting men and women, threatening men and women, building a network of spies across the globe who lit candles and prayed to them and passed this new religion on to their children. Every new convert was a new set of eyes in the world, a new set of ears to catch whispers of men who didn't seem to fit in, or men who rose to ungodly success but never seemed to pray. Many a good man was lost to angry godlings who peeled his skin away, searching for the god that might be hidden inside. But after seven hundred fruitless years and countless human believers in her service, it dawned on River that she might never see her twins again. She collapsed where she stood, and every emissary lay down as well. Dust settled on them, then grime and so much debris that they became part of the earth, hills of hips and buttocks and woe. All but one. That only one who felt the rage of River, multiplied by that most powerful feeling that won't let a person rest: guilt. River's sister, not quite goddess. The guilt turned in her belly like a ship in a storm. She'd slept while her sister's children were taken. Blame, so like a god itself, shadowed her, occupied her bed like a lover, whispered to her like a dearest friend. Her name was eventually forgotten.

One of the best things about Ardie was that she could be just a little bit mean exactly when Sloane needed her to be. Sloane’s most closely held tenet was that women could not be real friends unless they were willing to talk shit together.

younger people had an odd kind of resilience: impervious to some things, but completely open and vulnerable to virtually everything else.

Sestina" For a week now our bodies have whispered together, telling each other secrets you and I would keep. Their language, harder and more tender than this, wakes us suddenly in the half dawn, tangled dragons on their map. They have a plan. We are stranded travelers who plan to ditch our bags and walk. The hill wind whispers danger and rain. We are going different ways. That tangled thornbush is where the road forks. The secrets we told on the station bench to keep awake were lies. I suspect from your choice of language that you are not speaking your native language. You will not know about the city plan tattooed behind my knee. But the skin wakes up in humming networks, audibly whispers over the dead wind. Everybody’s secrets jam the wires. Syllables get tangled with bus tickets and matchbooks. You tangled my hair in your fingers and language split like a black fig. I suck the secrets off your skin. This isn’t in the plan, the subcutaneous transmitter whispers. Be circumspect. What sort of person wakes up twice in a wrecked car? And we wake in wary seconds of each other, tangled damply together. Your cock whispers inside my thigh that there is language without memory. Your fingers plan wet symphonies in my garrulous secret places. There is nothing secret in people crying at weddings and singing at wakes; and when you pack a duffel bag and plan on the gratuitous, you will still tangle purpose and habit, more baggage, more language. It is not accidental what they whisper. Our bodies whispered under the sheet. Their secret language will not elude us when we wake into the tangled light without a plan.

Éramos sempre as exageradas, as histéricas, palavra literalmente derivada do latim "hystericus", ou "do útero". Na verdade, uma grande quantidade de tempo e de palavras tinha sido dedicada a arte do descrédito. Adjetivos como "mandona", "briguenta", "nervosa" e "intensa" se tornaram desculpas sutis destinadas a ajudar a justificar a perda de audição seletiva.

He said, “But overall it was good news for us. We like the new problem better. The regular cartel powder is harder to hide. We can follow it better. From our point of view it was like the system had just swallowed a barium meal. Whole networks lit up like neon. Standards got less precise. Our job got easier. But not everywhere. A certain part of Montana, for instance. Nothing lit up at all. We couldn’t see incoming product. No cartel powder going there. So what happened to their addicts? Did they all cold turkey? Or die? Or is someone else supplying? That’s something I would want to know. So I went out to check. I discovered nothing of value. Except one trivial thing. Anecdotally along the way, I discovered I had spooked a low-level operative, who triggered a long-standing pact with a friend, who was also a low-level operative, but in another network. The pact was both of them would immediately get the hell out the very first time either one of them heard a whisper of trouble. Which was the smart play, no question. I’m guessing this wasn’t their first rodeo. These things always fall apart in the end, and they always fall hardest on the lowest-level guys. Better to get out early. Which is why Billy ain’t coming home. Billy was the friend. From Mule Crossing, Wyoming. He’s in the wind, with his pal from Billings, Montana.

This restaurant had a thing and that thing was plants. Vines cascaded from terra-cotta pots; succulents topped reclaimed wood shelves; miniature white orchids sprouted from handmade ceramic mugs centered on the tables. It was where Pinterest came to vomit, trading in the sort of motif that seemed so effortless and natural that it had to be attainable, only it absolutely was not and Sloane lived for it.

It was where Pinterest came to vomit,

We followed the recipe and set the timer for eighteen months and figured by then, the glass ceiling would have shattered under the weight of all the world’s leaning women.

Every female news anchor Sloane had ever seen, no matter the city, looked like she was from Dallas, but the Dallas news anchors were by far the Dallas-iest of them all. Big sprayed-in hair, pink lips, tailored dresses in one of four jewel tones, paired with platform heels that made them walk like baby deer.

Whether in dating or the office, we realized the power of pretending your children didn’t exist. A man could say he was taking the day to go fishing with his son, while a mother was usually better off hiding the fact that she took a long lunch to run her child to the doctor’s office. Children turned men into heroes and mothers into lesser employees, if we didn’t play our cards right.

Children turned men into heroes and mothers into lesser employees, if we didn't play our cards right.

Oh, you do, do you? So my daughter was sexually harassed and she came to you - the adult in charge - and your big life skill advice was to ignore it?" ~Sloane Glover "Now, let's not overreact," says Principal Clark. Mr. Tully scratched behind his ear. "'Sexually harassed' is a strong terminology. I don't think it's that serious.

Maybe more than the building itself, the land around the orphanage and the elaborate network of footpaths create for the kids a sense of place. There are trails through the birch and pine, across fields where, every spring, the kids burn leaves and work the ash into the soil and plant potatoes, trails that lead to the river, to the school, to the village, to ponds and creeks and springs flowing up from beneath the ground with cool, drinkable water, trails that are a story in themselves, worn by wandering feet over fifty years, worn by joy and hope and habit and need, trails like a sentence spoken, each a whisper about the surrounding world, a dialogue with doubt or desire that’s ultimately answered by a destination. Many of the children have either no history or a severely foreshortened sense of the past, but these trails, worked into the grass or through the forests by others before them, send the kids off to play in a shared world—shared not just in physical space, but down through time. It must in some humble way ease the isolation, like Crusoe finding a footprint in the sand.