Xs Quotes

[Calvin and Hobbes are playing Scrabble.] Calvin: Ha! I've got a great word and it's on a "Double word score" box! Hobbes: "ZQFMGB" isn't a word! It doesn't even have a vowel! Calvin: It is so a word! It's a worm found in New Guinea! Everyone knows that! Hobbes: I'm looking it up. Calvin: You do, and I'll look up that 12-letter word you played with all the Xs and Js! Hobbes: What's your score for ZQFMGB? Calvin: 957.

Xs and Os Love is a game of tic-tac-toe, constantly waiting, for the next x or o.

I am plenty romantic. Just this morning while he slept, I had left Carter a box of his favorite candy next to his pillow - Globs: piles of white chocolate covered, crushed potato chips and pretzels drizzled with caramel. I figured it would soften him up to the note I placed next to the box telling him if he left the toilet seat up one more time and my ass got an involuntary bath at six in the morning, I would put super glue on the head of his penis while he slept. I had even signed the note with a couple of Xs and Os. Who says romance is dead?

I know the X’s and O’s of football. I just don’t know the other 24 letters. And as a writer, this bothers me.

happened as I listened: I felt pain. Not in my head, not in my arm, not in my leg; everywhere at once. I told myself there was no difference between being “inside” and being “outside,” that it all came down to X’s and O’s that could be acquired in any number of different ways, but the pain increased to a point where I thought I might collapse, and I limped away.

Sitting at his desk Remy filled out two forms and then played a few games of Tic-Tac-Toe against himself. Playing the “X’s”, he lost a seven game tournament four games to one.

Coaching doesn’t start with X’s and O’s. It starts with believing that players win games and coaches win players.

…The Antilles and Horn clans sat at a folding table between two StealthXs, playing what looked like a cutthroat game of sabacc.

Why X?” Libby asked. “Because X is the most mysterious letter,” May told her. “And things with X’s in them are pretty cool.

It looks like a seagull’s face,” Percy said. “And we’re the eye.” Hazel glared at him. “It’s a map, Percy.” (...) She drew a dotted line between the two X’s. “You just cut off the seagull’s head,” Percy noted. Hazel sighed.

The dismal fact is that self-respect has nothing to do with the approval of others — who are, after all, deceived easily enough; has nothing to do with reputation, which, as Rhett Butler told Scarlett O’Hara, is something people with courage can do without. To do without self-respect, on the other hand, is to be an unwilling audience of one to an interminable documentary that deals with one’s failings, both real and imagined, with fresh footage spliced in for every screening. There’s the glass you broke in anger, there’s the hurt on X’s face; watch now, this next scene, the night Y came back from Houston, see how you muff this one. To live without self-respect is to lie awake some night, beyond the reach of warm milk, the Phenobarbital, and the sleeping hand on the coverlet, counting up the sins of commissions and omission, the trusts betrayed, the promises subtly broken, the gifts irrevocably wasted through sloth or cowardice, or carelessness. However long we postpone it, we eventually lie down alone in that notoriously uncomfortable bed, the one we make ourselves. Whether or not we sleep in it depends, of course, on whether or not we respect ourselves.

What does it mean when a girl texts you a bunch of x’s and o’s?” I ask, frowning at my screen. “Are you for real right now?” When I send Shep a helpless look he shakes his head, muttering under his breath. “It means hugs and kisses, dumbass. Jesus, where have you been? Living under a rock?

There was a message at the top from aboyd@cinnamon.com. I clicked. XXXXX. That was it, just a line of Xs. I thought it was spam at first, until I realized that they were kisses. It

What the fuck?” Dima had two guns out, the one in his left hand pointed at X’s forehead, the other at the room. “Goddamn it, Mr. Storm. I almost shot you. That would have pissed me off.

Once on yellow sheet of paper with green lines, he wrote a poem and he called it “Spot” because that was the name of his dog and that’s what it was all about and his teacher gave him an “A” and a big gold star and his mother hung it on the kitchen cupboard and showed it to his aunt and that was the year his sister was born-and his parents kissed all the time and the little girl around the corner sent him a postcard with a row of X’s on it and his father tucked him into bed at night and was always there. Then on a white sheet of paper with blue lines, he wrote another poem and he called it “Autumn” because that was the time of year and that’s what it was all about and his teacher gave him an “A” and told him to write more clearly and his mother told him not to hang it on the kitchen cupboard because it left marks and that was the year his sister got glasses and his parents never kissed anymore and the little girl around the corner laughed when he fell down with his bike and his father didn’t tuck him in at night. So, on another piece of paper torn from a notebook he wrote another poem and he called it “Absolutely Nothing” Because that’s what it was all about and his teach gave him an “A” and a hard searching look and he didn’t show it to his mother and that was the year he caught his sister necking on the back porch and the little girl around the corner wore too much make-up so that he laughed when he kissed her but he kissed her anyway and he tucked himself in bed at three AM with his father snoring loudly in the next room Finally, on the inside of a matchbook he wrote another poem and he called it “?” because that’s what it was all about And he gave himself an “A” and a slash on each wrist and hung it on the bathroom mirror Because he couldn’t make it to the kitchen.

Biologically, humans are divided into males and females. A male Homo sapiens has one X chromosome and one Y chromosome; a female Homo sapiens has two Xs. But ‘man’ and ‘woman’ name social, not biological, categories.

On May 19, Malcolm X’s birthday, two police had been machine-gunned on Riverside Drive. I felt sorry for their families, sorry for their children, but i was relieved to see that somebody else besides Black folks and Puerto Ricans and Chicanos was being shot at. I was sick and tired of us being the only victims, and i didn’t care who knew it. As far as i was concerned, the police in the Black communities were nothing but a foreign, occupying army, beating, torturing, and murdering people at whim and without restraint. I despise violence, but i despise it even more when it’s one-sided and used to oppress and repress poor people.

When one early employee wanted to see the company’s organization chart, Noyce made an X in the center of a page and then drew a bunch of other Xs around it, with lines leading to each. The employee was at the center, and the others were people he would be dealing with.

There are hundreds of political prisoners right now in America’s jails who were so taken by Malcolm [X’s} spirit that they became warriors and the powers that be understood them as warriors. They knew that a lot of these other middle-class [black] leaders were not warriors; they were professionals; they were careerists. But these warriors had callings, and they have paid an incalculable and immeasurable price in those cells.

Each week I plot your equations dot for dot, xs against ys in all manner of algebraical relation, and every week they draw themselves as commonplace geometry, as if the world of forms were nothing but arcs and angles. God’s truth, Septimus, if there is an equation for a curve like a bell, there must be an equation for one like a bluebell, and if a bluebell, why not a rose? Do we believe nature is written in numbers? Septimus We do. Thomasina Then why do your equations only describe the shapes of manufacture? Septimus I do not know. Thomasina Armed thus, God could only make a cabinet.

As long as our eyes are on the problem, and the solution lies within ourselves, the X’s are going to pile up on the calendars of our fight, marking the days little to nothing has changed. But all that changes the day Jesus enters our Valley of Elah. The moment we stop staring at our giant and lock eyes with Jesus. The moment our hope shifts from us to him.

The quill swirled and lunged over the page, in a slow but relentless three steps forward, two steps back sort of process and finally came to a full stop in a tiny pool of its own ink. Then, Louis Phelypeaux, First Compte de Pontchartrain, raised the nib, let it hover for an instant, as if gathering his forces, and hurled it backwards along the sentence, tiptoeing over “i’s” and slashing through “t’s” and “x’s” nearly tripping over an umlaut, building speed and confidence while veering through a slalom course of acute and grave accents, pirouetting through cedillas and carving vicious snap-turns through circumflexes. It was like watching the world’s greatest fencing master dispatch twenty opponents with a single continuous series of maneuvers.

Nevertheless, there was something extraordinary about it when a man so young, with so little experience in flight test, was selected to go to Muroc Field in California for the XS–1 project. Muroc was up in the high elevations of the Mojave Desert. It looked like some fossil landscape that had long since been left behind by the rest of terrestrial evolution. It was full of huge dry lake beds, the biggest being Rogers Lake. Other than sagebrush the only vegetation was Joshua trees, twisted freaks of the plant world that looked like a cross between cactus and Japanese bonsai. They had a dark petrified green color and horribly crippled branches. At dusk the Joshua trees stood out in silhouette on the fossil wasteland like some arthritic nightmare. In the summer the temperature went up to 110 degrees as a matter of course, and the dry lake beds were covered in sand, and there would be windstorms and sandstorms right out of a Foreign Legion movie. At night it would drop to near freezing, and in December it would start raining, and the dry lakes would fill up with a few inches of water, and some sort of putrid prehistoric shrimps would work their way up from out of the ooze, and sea gulls would come flying in a hundred miles or more from the ocean, over the mountains, to gobble up these squirming little throwbacks. A person had to see it to believe it: flocks of sea gulls wheeling around in the air out in the middle of the high desert in the dead of winter and grazing on antediluvian crustaceans in the primordial ooze. When

Your name like two X’s like punched-in eyes, like a drunk cartoon passed out in the gutter, your name with two X’s to mark the spots, to hold the place, to keep the treasure from becoming ever lost.

At least fifty people were taken down to the Trinity River bottoms in Dallas for whippings and acid brandings. Should they call the police, they would be reporting something already known and even encouraged within the blue wall, for a majority of Dallas officers were now oath-bound members of the hooded order. Proof of Malcolm X’s later observation that the Klan had ‘changed its bedsheets for a policeman’s uniform

want relationships to work like an ATM. I give to others, and they spit out exactly what I request. Instead, it’s more like a slot machine. I never know what I’m going to get in return, and sometimes I get nothing but X’s across the board.

Most of the time your employer doesn’t really care about your career. All you are to them is a skilled and loyal resource. So don’t expect HR to regularly track a file marked “X’s Career.” Grasping this harsh reality should be the beginning of change.

As it happened, the first three major advances in my life—and I will list all the advances here— 1. shoe-tying 2. pulling up on Xs 3. steadying hand against sneaker when tying 4. brushing tongue as well as teeth 5. putting on deodorant after I was fully dressed 6. discovering that sweeping was fun 7. ordering a rubber stamp with my address on it to make billpaying more efficient 8. deciding that brain cells ought to die —have to do with shoe-tying, but I don't think that this fact is very unusual.

I’m starting to think the Watch isn’t a real place, like Hogwarts, or Dr. X’s academy for mutants,” Adam said. “Tell the truth, you’re just living in the desert getting high all the time and spinning these elaborate fairy tales about psychopathic Gen Zs.

It had taken Nick most of his life and mine, but he’d finally quit drinking. After he got sober he began to send me birthday cards—signed with many Xs and Os, pink and flowery with effusive definitions of wonderful daughters. He’d send me these cards even though I had never been a wonderful daughter to him. Did he know from my mother that I could be when I wanted to? Or was it just the kind of magical thinking he and I had always been so good at—conjuring up a story and believing it in an attempt to make it true?

Would you take it back?” “What?” “If you could go back in time, would you change anything with you and Sera? Telling Carter doesn't count. I’m talking about you guys.” Everything flashed before my eyes in a single breath. The first time I laid eyes on her dressed as Tinker Bell at XS. Moving in day. Our near kiss in the kitchen. Picking her up from Rob's the night she called me. The time she lost her keys. The way her nose scrunches up when she laughs. Movie nights. Twenty-one questions. Falling asleep with her in my arms. Coconut shampoo. And so much pink. “No. I wouldn’t change a single thing.

to test. Would weightlessness put them off their game? It did. The turtles moved “slowly and insecurely” and did not attack a piece of bait placed directly in front of them. Then again, the water in which they swam was repeatedly floating up out of the jar and forming an “ovoid cupola.” Who could eat? Von Beckh quickly moved on from turtles to Argentinean pilots. Under the section heading “Experiments with Human Subjects”—a heading that, were I a doctor previously employed by Nazi Germany, I might have rephrased—von Beckh reports on the efforts of the pilots to mark X’s inside small boxes during regular and weightless flight. During weightlessness, many of the letters strayed from the boxes, indicating that pilots might experience difficulties maneuvering their planes and doing crossword puzzles during air battles. The following year, von Beckh was recruited by the Aeromedical Research Laboratory at Holloman Air Force

No wonder kids grow up crazy. A cat’s cradle is nothing but a bunch of X’s between somebody’s hands, and little kids look and look and look at all those X’s…” “And?” “No damn cat, and no damn cradle.” 75 GIVE MY REGARDS TO ALBERT SCHWEITZER And then angela hoenikker conners, Newt’s beanpole sister, came in with Julian Castle, father of Philip, and founder of the House of Hope and Mercy in the Jungle.

He retrieves a fluffy white robe from the bathroom and drapes me in it. Then he sits next to me and opens the black folder. Inside, there’s a single sheet of paper, covered in words and symbols. There’s a rough square in the center of the page, surrounded by wavy lines. Is that supposed to be water? Inside the square, there are small symbols: cliffs, mountains, an oval lake. The symbols are labeled. The Pillowy Mountains. Shipwreck Cove. Bathtub Lake. Pirate’s Lookout. Rum-un Cliffs. There are three fancy Xs on the map, drawn with curlicues and shaded in. One in Rum-un Cliffs, one in the Pillowy Mountains, and one in Pirate’s Lookout. “Is this a treasure map?” I ask, tracing my fingers over it. “Did you draw this? It’s so cool.” He nods. “X marks the spot, see? You have an hour to find the three treasures and bring them back to me.” A treasure hunt? He’s made a treasure hunt for me? A n4ked treasure hunt? “Pirate treasure?” I ask, blinking up at him. “Uh-huh.” I can play pirates. I have the perfect thing.

Anyone who was there that day will tell you the concert really started when Scotty stood up. That’s when he began singing the songs he’d been writing for years underground, songs no one had ever heard, or anything like them—“Eyes in My Head,” “X’s and O’s,” “Who’s Watching Hardest”—ballads of paranoia and disconnection ripped from the chest of a man you knew just by looking had never had a page or a profile or a handle or a handset, who was part of no one’s data, a guy who had lived in the cracks all these years, forgotten and full of rage, in a way that now registered as pure. Untouched.

never so happy in my whole life. Once on a yellow piece of paper with green lines he wrote a poem And he called it “Chops” because that was the name of his dog And that’s what it was all about And his teacher gave him an A and a gold star And his mother hung it on the kitchen door and read it to his aunts That was the year Father Tracy took all the kids to the zoo And he let them sing on the bus And his little sister was born with tiny toenails and no hair And his mother and father kissed a lot And the girl around the corner sent him a Valentine signed with a row of X’s and he had to ask his father what the X’s meant And his father always tucked him in bed at night And was always there to do it Once on a piece of white paper with blue lines he wrote a poem And he called it “Autumn” because that was the name of the season And that’s what it was all about And his teacher gave him an A and asked him to write more clearly And his mother never hung it on the kitchen door because of its new paint And the kids told him that Father Tracy smoked cigars And left butts on the pews And sometimes they would burn holes That was the year his sister got glasses with thick lenses and black frames And the girl around the corner laughed when he asked her to go see Santa Claus And the kids told him why his mother and father kissed a lot And his father never tucked him in bed at night And his father got mad when he cried for him to do it. Once on a paper torn from his notebook he wrote a poem And he called it “Innocence: A Question” because that was the question about his girl And that’s what it was all about And his professor gave him an A and a strange steady look And his mother never hung it on the kitchen door because he never showed her That was the year that Father Tracy died And he forgot how the end of the Apostle’s Creed went And he caught his sister making out on the back porch And his mother and father never kissed or even talked And the girl around the corner wore too much makeup That made him cough when he kissed her but he kissed her anyway because that was the thing to do And at three A.M. he tucked himself into bed his father snoring soundly That’s why on the back of a brown paper bag he tried another poem And he called it “Absolutely Nothing” Because that’s what it was really all about And he gave himself an A and a slash on each damned wrist And he hung it on the bathroom door because this time he didn’t think he could reach the kitchen.

People of color in the internal colonies of the US cannot defend themselves against police brutality or expropriate the means of survival to free themselves from economic servitude. They must wait for enough people of color who have attained more economic privilege (the “house slaves” of Malcolm X’s analysis) and conscientious white people to gather together and hold hands and sing songs. Then, they believe, change will surely come. People in Latin America must suffer patiently, like true martyrs, while white activists in the US “bear witness” and write to Congress. People in Iraq must not fight back. Only if they remain civilians will their deaths be counted and mourned by white peace activists who will, one of these days, muster a protest large enough to stop the war. Indigenous people need to wait just a little longer (say, another 500 years) under the shadow of genocide, slowly dying off on marginal lands, until-well, they’re not a priority right now, so perhaps they need to organize a demonstration or two to win the attention and sympathy of the powerful. Or maybe they could go on strike, engage in Gandhian noncooperation? But wait-a majority of them are already unemployed, noncooperating, fully excluded from the functioning of the system. Nonviolence declares that the American Indians could have fought off Columbus, George Washington, and all the other genocidal butchers with sit-ins; that Crazy Horse, by using violent resistance, became part of the cycle of violence, and was “as bad as” Custer. Nonviolence declares that Africans could have stopped the slave trade with hunger strikes and petitions, and that those who mutinied were as bad as their captors; that mutiny, a form of violence, led to more violence, and, thus, resistance led to more enslavement. Nonviolence refuses to recognize that it can only work for privileged people, who have a status protected by violence, as the perpetrators and beneficiaries of a violent hierarchy.

The fact that a human nose (use the letter X to symbolise the nose) is a necessary condition for spectacles to be perched in front of the eyes (use the letter Y to symbolise ‘spectacles being perched in front of the eyes’) does not entail that, because Y is the case, X is in itself necessary. ‘Necessity’ in the logical sense of ‘having to be so’ is not the same thing as the necessity involved in a ‘necessary condition’ – here things have to be so only relative to something else’s being the way it is. In the case of X’s being a necessary condition relative to Y, but not in itself necessary, X could have been different, and if it were so, there would, or at least might, be no Y. For example: if humans did not have noses, spectacles might be worn as goggles are, held before the eyes by an elastic strap. This is just how it is with the universe. We humans are the Y of which nature’s parameters are the X. We exist because the parameters are as they are; had they been different, we would not be here to know it. The fact that we exist because of how things happen to be with the universe’s structure and properties entails nothing about design or purpose. Depending on your point of view, it is just a lucky or unlucky result of how things happen to be. The universe’s parameters are not tuned on purpose for us to exist. It is the other way round: we exist because the laws happen to be as they are

Our neighbors would rise early and visit the malls, snatching up gift-wrapped Dustbusters and the pom-pommed socks used to protect the heads of golf clubs. Christmas would arrive and we, the people of this country, would gather around identical trees, voicing our pleasure with worn clichés. Turkeys would roast to a hard, shellacked finish. Hams would be crosshatched with x’s and glazed with fruit — and it was fine by me. Were I to receive a riding vacuum cleaner or even a wizened proboscis monkey, it wouldn’t please me half as much as knowing we were the only family in the neighborhood with a prostitute in our kitchen. From this moment on, the phrase “ho, ho, ho” would take on a whole different meaning; and I, along with the rest of my family, could appreciate it in our own clannish way. It suddenly occurred to me. Just like that.

Even if you come up with Y-matches that are distant, but they all have the same name, you can say that is probably Mr. X’s last name and he belongs to the same extended family as those matches (along the direct line), maybe going back many generations. But in this case, there are a variety of names, so you can’t pin one down. The ‘flavor’ of the names can sometimes give you some ethnicity for your Mr. X. Say, if his list is made of all Irish names, you can say he’s probably Irish. That is what I did on the canal murders. Not only did I come up with the name Miller for their Canal Murderer, I also told the Phoenix PD that he was a Miller of Irish extraction. A few weeks later, they arrested Bryan Patrick Miller. That’s where I got the idea that the EAR had a German name but was from the UK. In the tests I ran for Michelle, that’s the ‘flavor’ of names I was coming up with.” So we were looking for a guy with a German name whose family at some point lived in the UK. Of course, he could have been adopted; then all bets are off.

Once on a yellow piece of paper with green lines he wrote a poem And he called it “Chops” because that was the name of his dog And that’s what it was all about And his teacher gave him an A and a gold star And his mother hung it on the kitchen door and read it to his aunts That was the year Father Tracy took all the kids to the zoo And he let them sing on the bus And his little sister was born with tiny toenails and no hair And his mother and father kissed a lot And the girl around the corner sent him a Valentine signed with a row of X’s and he had to ask his father what the X’s meant And his father always tucked him in bed at night And was always there to do it Once on a piece of white paper with blue lines he wrote a poem And he called it “Autumn” because that was the name of the season And that’s what it was all about And his teacher gave him an A and asked him to write more clearly And his mother never hung it on the kitchen door because of its new paint And the kids told him that Father Tracy smoked cigars And left butts on the pews And sometimes they would burn holes That was the year his sister got glasses with thick lenses and black frames And the girl around the corner laughed when he asked her to go see Santa Claus And the kids told him why his mother and father kissed a lot And his father never tucked him in bed at night And his father got mad when he cried for him to do it. Once on a paper torn from his notebook he wrote a poem And he called it “Innocence: A Question” because that was the question about his girl And that’s what it was all about And his professor gave him an A and a strange steady look And his mother never hung it on the kitchen door because he never showed her That was the year that Father Tracy died And he forgot how the end of the Apostle’s Creed went And he caught his sister making out on the back porch And his mother and father never kissed or even talked And the girl around the corner wore too much makeup That made him cough when he kissed her but he kissed her anyway because that was the thing to do And at three A.M. he tucked himself into bed his father snoring soundly That’s why on the back of a brown paper bag he tried another poem And he called it “Absolutely Nothing” Because that’s what it was really all about And he gave himself an A and a slash on each damned wrist And he hung it on the bathroom door because this time he didn’t think he could reach the kitchen.

Once on a yellow piece of paper with green lines he wrote a poem And he called it “Chops” because that was the name of his dog And that’s what it was all about And his teacher gave him an A and a gold star And his mother hung it on the kitchen door and read it to his aunts That was the year Father Tracy took all the kids to the zoo And he let them sing on the bus And his little sister was born with tiny toenails and no hair And his mother and father kissed a lot And the girl around the corner sent him a Valentine signed with a row of X’s and he had to ask his father what the X’s meant And his father always tucked him in bed at night And was always there to do it Once on a piece of white paper with blue lines he wrote a poem And he called it “Autumn” because that was the name of the season And that’s what it was all about And his teacher gave him an A and asked him to write more clearly And his mother never hung it on the kitchen door because of its new paint And the kids told him that Father Tracy smoked cigars And left butts on the pews And sometimes they would burn holes That was the year his sister got glasses with thick lenses and black frames And the girl around the corner laughed when he asked her to go see Santa Claus And the kids told him why his mother and father kissed a lot And his father never tucked him in bed at night And his father got mad when he cried for him to do it. Once on a paper torn from his notebook he wrote a poem And he called it “Innocence: A Question” because that was the question about his girl And that’s what it was all about And his professor gave him an A and a strange steady look And his mother never hung it on the kitchen door because he never showed her That was the year that Father Tracy died And he forgot how the end of the Apostle’s Creed went And he caught his sister making out on the back porch And his mother and father never kissed or even talked And the girl around the corner wore too much makeup That made him cough when he kissed her but he kissed her anyway because that was the thing to do And at three A.M. he tucked himself into bed his father snoring soundly That’s why on the back of a brown paper bag he tried another poem And he called it “Absolutely Nothing” Because that’s what it was really all about And he gave himself an A and a slash on each damned wrist And he hung it on the bathroom door because this time he didn’t think he could reach the kitchen. That was the poem I read for Patrick. Nobody knew who wrote it, but Bob said he heard it before, and he heard that it was some kid’s suicide note. I really hope it wasn’t because then I don’t know if I like the ending.

With only a single X chromosome, males need every one of those 1,500 genes. With two X chromosomes, females have double the necessary amount. You can think of it like a cake recipe calling for only one cup of flour. If you decide to put in two, it will change the results in a most unpleasant fashion. The female embryo uses what may be the most time-honored weapon in the battle of the sexes to solve the problem of two Xs: She simply ignores one of them. This chromosomal silent treatment is known as X inactivation. One of the chromosomes is tagged with the molecular equivalent of a “Do Not Disturb” sign. Because males require all 1,500 X genes to survive, and they have only one X chromosome, X inactivation does not occur in guys. And because males must get their X from Mom, all men are literally, with respect to their X chromosome, Momma’s Boys—unisexed

The metaclimate in America during gen X’s youth was marked by declining national self-esteem. We grew up in the shadow of Watergate and the Vietnam War (the first war America ever lost), we watched the Iran hostage crisis stretch on through 1979 and 1980, and we feared the potential nuclear apocalypse of the long Cold War with the Soviet Union, which seemed as powerful as America, or perhaps more so, making it difficult for us to cling to the image our parents had taken for granted. Even Henry Kissinger said that we had passed our historic high point. It appeared as though we were in the twilight of America as a dominant nation; you didn’t have to be paying close attention to geopolitics to see that. At home, in the 1970s, we had three

rhythmic philosophy. This philosophy argues that the easiest way to consistently start deep work sessions is to transform them into a simple regular habit. The goal, in other words, is to generate a rhythm for this work that removes the need for you to invest energy in deciding if and when you’re going to go deep. The chain method is a good example of the rhythmic philosophy of deep work scheduling because it combines a simple scheduling heuristic (do the work every day), with an easy way to remind yourself to do the work: the big red Xs on the calendar. Another common way to implement the rhythmic philosophy is to replace the visual aid of the chain method with a set starting time that you use every day for deep work.

While the Gregorian chant in its afterlife has flourished as the authentic music of the Roman Church, its original character still remains in doubt. Not until the twentieth century did the Gregorian chant come back into its own. The old melodies had been mutilated into a monotonous plainchant to facilitate organ accompaniment. In 1889 the scholarly Benedictine monks of Solesmes in France undertook to rediscover the medieval practice. Their product was numerous volumes of “Gregorian chants” in a free-flowing nonrhythmic style. By 1903 they had recaptured the Gregorian chant to the satisfaction of Pope Pius X, himself a scholar of musical history, who established their versions of the Gregorian melodies by his encyclical motu proprio. But the rhythms still remain a puzzle. Pius X’s purified Gregorian chant banned the “theatrical style” of recitation, forbade the use of instruments, replaced women by boys in the church choir, and restricted the use of the organ. A Vatican Edition provided an authorized corpus of plainchant, which would prevail in the modern Catholic world.

the photographs, as if the hand that held the marker had pressed hard enough to break the felt tip. The last photograph was an eight-by-ten shot of Morgan’s face. Instead of red Xs, bullet holes

Magnus pondered the twelve people taking up residence at the Hawk and Spear Inn, realizing that nearly half of them wanted him dead. “And you’re definitely one of them,” he muttered as Nic trudged through the meeting hall, glaring as he passed the prince. Magnus was sitting alone at a table in front of a sketchbook he’d found in a drawer in his room. “Cassian, look,” he called. “I drew a picture of you.” Magnus raised the sketchbook. His fingers smeared with charcoal, he held up a page on which he’d drawn an image of a skinny boy hanging from a noose, his tongue dangling from his mouth, two morbid Xs where the eyes should have been. Nic, allegedly a very friendly fellow to everyone else in the world, shot Magnus a look of sheer hatred. “You think that’s funny?” “What? You don’t like it? Well, they do say art is subjective.

I looked over everything, and it seemed pretty good. I called my mother over. She sat in her chair and placed the notebook in front of her, holding a red pen. I assumed my proper place—standing at attention to her left, hands folded in front of me—and watched as she began the edit. She dotted my work with fierce red X’s, circles, and strikethroughs. Each progressive pen mark was a punch to the chest, until I was barely breathing. Oh no. I’m so dumb. Oh no. At the end of the entry, my mother sighed. She wrote an assessment at the bottom of the page: There can only be one “first.” You are still writing too much “Then.” Then I went on a ferris wheel. Then I played two frog games. Try to use other words. And I did it well. Very well. Not good! Then she slapped a large grade at the top: C-minus. She turned to me. “The last two entries, I already told you to write then less. I told you to be more interesting. Are you slow? And what are you talking about here at the end, about whatever you did for fun? I don’t get it.

Ryder showed me his left wrist, the Scorpio tattoo now embellished with intricate feathers surrounding it and the words My Hope curving underneath it. I followed the line of his forearm up to the Leo tattoo surrounded by flames with the words My Joy beneath it. Beyond that, he’d inked the Gemini symbol to his flesh with lightning daggering around it and the words My Mercy under it. Next was the Aquarius symbol with a rainbow arching over it like the stroke of a paintbrush and beneath it were the words My Duty, and finally Elise’s symbol of Libra with small Xs all around it like the mark he had branded on his chest. The words My Life sat beneath it and I looked up at Ryder with a frown.

To get the xs to compose something, one need only bring them into contact; if the xs are in contact, they compose something; and if they are not in contact, they do not compose anything.

all the other Giants players were X’s or O’s. Lawrence was the only one who had a number: fifty-six. He was a little

Type I’s like being recognized for their accomplishments—because recognition is a form of feedback. But for them, unlike for Type X’s, recognition is not a goal in itself.

A 1968 calendar, large X’s marking various dates (April 4, July 19); a letter written in blood so smeary its satanic message cannot be deciphered; an astrology chart; a fedora tilted on the plastic neck of a female torso, and, in a place that once housed Christians—well, Catholics anyway—not a cross of Jesus anywhere.

All three men are in masks. They’re those LED purge-looking masks, with X’s for eyes and stitched mouths. As far as masks go, they’re pretty hot. I know faceless streamers have been a thing for years, but I didn’t realize they actually attended events.

Like the fact that I’m in love with you. That’s pretty new. And it’s terrifying,” he says. My heart skips a beat. “You—you love me?” He nods. “I do. I think I have for a while now.

She offers him a brilliant smile that sends my heart into overdrive. Not fair. She shouldn’t give her smiles out to just anyone. I want them all to myself.

He growls and scoops me up, throwing me over his shoulder. He palms my ass with one hand as he opens the door and throws me onto his bed. “Take your pants off,” he demands, locking the door behind him. I prop myself up onto my elbows. “Excuse me?” I’m not some sex toy that opens my legs on command. That’s not how this works. “Please,” he says thickly. “Please take your pants off so I can eat your pussy.

How can I make myself be more interesting without sacrificing who I am?

I don’t care. I want her. I want her so bad my hands shake and my palms itch and my stomach churns with anxiety over never getting a chance to be with her.

This is all I wanted, to be held by him and to relax in the comforting circle of his embrace. A sense of calm washes over me. He soothes my aches and comforts my hurts. He doesn’t magically make my life better. I’m not a better person or more whole because I have a boyfriend. I’m still me.

But now I have someone who loves me—and lets me love them in return. It’s still early days. We have a lot of road to cover. We’re going to have blips. We’re going to fight. Life is hard. Relationships are hard. I’m confident we can get through it together.

I like you. I want to be with you. This isn’t some trick. Being with you makes me happy. It doesn’t need to be any more complicated than that.

It is best to illustrate entropy first in a simple case. The mathematical theory of communication treats the message source as an ergodic process, a process which produces a string of symbols that are to a degree unpredictable. We must imagine the message source as selecting a given message by some random, i.e., unpredictable means, which, however, must be ergodic. Perhaps the simplest case we can imagine is that in which there are only two possible symbols, say, X and Y, between which the message source chooses repeatedly, each choice uninfluenced by any previous choices. In this case we can know only that X will be chosen with some probability p0 and Y with some probability p1, as in the outcomes of the toss of a biased coin. The recipient can determine these probabilities by examining a long string of characters (X’s, Y’s) produced by the source. The probabilities p0 and p1 must not change with time if the source is to be ergodic.

Rosa Parks personified “unshouted courage” in her unpretentious act of civil disobedience on a Montgomery bus over fifty years ago and the calm, though deliberate, manner in which she recalled her act in countless interviews thereafter. What a stunning contrast to Martin Luther King Jr.’s and Malcolm X’s volcanic vocal pronouncements. Rosa Parks reminds us that courage comes in many shapes, sizes, and voices, even a voice just above a whisper. The question is not will you or I be courageous like Rosa Parks or any of the sung and unsung champions of the civil rights movement, but will we be true to our convictions in ways that are true to who we are? Will I listen to and own my unique courageous voice? Will you?

No matter how many red Xs we write on our hands to end slavery, as long as these same hands are clicking on pornographic websites and scrolling through sexual pictures and videos, we are frauds to the core.

THE QUILL SWIRLED and lunged over the page in a slow but relentless three-steps-forward, two-steps-back sort of process, and finally came to a full stop in a tiny pool of its own ink. Then Louis Phélypéaux, first comte de Pontchartrain, raised the nib; let it hover for an instant, as if gathering his forces; and hurled it backwards along the sentence, tiptoeing over i’s, slashing through t’s and x’s, nearly tripping over an umlaut, building speed and confidence while veering through a slalom-course of acute and grave accents, pirouetting though cedillas and carving vicious snap-turns through circumflexes. It was like watching the world’s greatest fencing-master dispatch twenty opponents with a single continuous series of maneuvers.

This yields a practical help for Bible study: read the Bible with a red pen in hand. I suggest that you put a question mark in the margin beside every passage that you find unclear or hard to understand. Likewise, put an X beside every passage that offends you or makes you uncomfortable. Afterward, you can focus on the areas you struggle with, especially the texts marked with an X. This can be a guide to holiness, as the Xs show us quickly where our thinking is out of line with the mind of Christ. If I don't like something I read in Scripture, perhaps I simply don't understand it. If so, studying it again may help. If, in fact, I do understand the passage and still don't like it, this is not an indication there is something wrong with the Bible. It's an indication that something is wrong with me, something that needs to change. Often, before we can get something right, we need to first discover what we're doing wrong.

the paper was covered with circles and x’s, big sweeping lines and arrows. “Libs, you and me are like when the Razorbacks played Kansas in the Cotton Bowl in 2012. The Razorbacks hadn’t beaten the Jayhawks since 1967. They used this quarterback sneak play.” He held it against his chest and pointed to it. “And do you know what happened?” She stared at him in shock. What was happening? “They whooped some Jayhawk ass and became the Cotton Bowl champions!” Then Mitch and his friends let out another Woo Pig Sooie. Had it been possible to die from embarrassment, she would have collapsed to the floor at that very moment.

crunching. The amount of introgression from Neanderthals is proportionally lower on the modern X than on the rest of the chromosomes. X chromosomes are only passed on by males half of the time because we also have a Y, but all of the time by women, who have two Xs. The observation that there is less Neanderthal DNA on our Xs implies that the first encounters we had with them that resulted in procreation were male Neanderthals with female Homo sapiens.

Q: What did one math book say to the other? A: Man I got a lot of problems! Q: How can you spell too much with two letters? A: XS (excess) Q: What’s black and white all over and difficult? A: An exam paper!

This chain method (as some now call it) soon became a hit among writers and fitness enthusiasts—communities that thrive on the ability to do hard things consistently. For our purposes, it provides a specific example of a general approach to integrating depth into your life: the rhythmic philosophy. This philosophy argues that the easiest way to consistently start deep work sessions is to transform them into a simple regular habit. The goal, in other words, is to generate a rhythm for this work that removes the need for you to invest energy in deciding if and when you’re going to go deep. The chain method is a good example of the rhythmic philosophy of deep work scheduling because it combines a simple scheduling heuristic (do the work every day), with an easy way to remind yourself to do the work: the big red Xs on the calendar. Another common way to implement the rhythmic philosophy is to replace the visual aid of the chain method with a set starting time that you use every day for deep work. In much the same way that maintaining visual indicators of your work progress can reduce the barrier to entry for going deep, eliminating even the simplest scheduling decisions, such as when during the day to do the work, also reduces this barrier.

Anyone who was ever fortunate enough to be a part of X’s life had to accept this hazard—she lived in a play without intermission in which she’d cast herself in every role.

Relevant to planning and scheduling, available and reliable plant capacity is a y, encountering less reactive work is a y, completing more proactive work is a y, and even increasing labor productivity is a y. Plants have to be careful about overly focusing on KPIs for them. But plants can make themselves do planning and scheduling because they are x’s, and plants can also make themselves generate (not complete) more proactive work, which is another x. This chapter makes extensive use of the concept of y = f(x) to explain the KPIs for best planning and scheduling performance.

I am! Cross my heart.” I start drawing crosses over my heart with my finger, but then I get confused. “Am I supposed to draw Jesus crosses or X’s?” “Sometimes I wonder if we speak the same language.” “X’s,” I say with a nod, ignoring his slight. “Definitely X’s.

It’s the first snow of the season. Isn’t it beautiful?” It’s October. She’s beautiful. Her cheeks are flushed, her hair is pulling out of her braid, and she’s never looked more gorgeous in her life.

She gets her shoes on, and I fold up the blanket. It smells like her perfume now. I’m never washing it again.

I love you,” he says. “I don’t deserve you, but I’m going to spend every day trying to be worthy of you.

Only the fool would take trouble to verify that his sentence was composed of ten a’s, three b’s, four c’s, four d’s, forty-six e’s, sixteen f’s, four g’s, thirteen h’s, fifteen i’s, two k’s, nine l’s, four m’s, twenty-five n’s, twenty-four o’s, five p’s, sixteen r’s, forty-one s’s, thirty-seven t’s, ten u’s, eight v’s, eight w’s, four x’s, eleven y’s, twenty-seven commas, twenty-three apostrophes, seven hyphens and, last but not least, a single !” —Lee Sallows

In linguistics, a hyponym is a word that is a more specific subset of a larger, more general word. The more general word is called a hypernym. Tequila is a hyponym of mezcal. Mezcal is the hypernym of tequila.8 In the abstract, that relationship reads like: All Xs are Ys; not all Ys are Xs. What it means here is that all tequilas are mezcal, but not all mezcals are tequila. HOPE YOU’RE NOT IN A RUSH Now, it’s true that many wines are aged for a number of years, and many of the best whiskies can be aged anywhere from six to twenty years before they’re released.

Two yard-high Xs slashed in white paint on the passenger door of the third truck’s cab and repeated on banners flapping from the framework sheltering the bed. The TERFs were headed north.

Exciting! Have been waiting long for Job One Day Job One turns out per Jer is: high and noble as all getout Per Jer: I will stand for freedom For poor and sick Will defend weak From oppressors. More Defining, with help of HandiPics: Freedom = cartoon bird flies above land, smile on beak. Poor = sad child, pockets sticking out of pants. Sick = thin guy in bed, “X”s for eyes. Weak = guy in desert, trying to reach water glass, failing. Oppressor = tall guy with monster face sticks stick into body of weak as, in four HandiPics in row, weak gets more weak with each poke. Why do oppressors wish to poke weak? I say. They’re bad, says Jer. Have to be stopped. From doing that, I say. Correcto, says Jer. And you’re a big part of the solution. What the what! as Jer might say. Never have I felt being me to be so worth it so far.

But nothing was more compelling than Malcolm X’s unstinting humanism: “I’m for truth, no matter who tells it. I’m for justice, no matter who it is for or against. I’m a human being first and foremost, and as such I’m for whoever and whatever benefits humanity as a whole.

Difficulty is not, of course, a reason to reject or ignore a poem. Especially in reading the poetry of the twentieth century, one often willingly assents to Allen Tate’s statement that “poetry . . . demands both in its writing and in its reading all the intellectual power that we have.” There is a distinction, however, between the difficulty of obscurity and the difficulty of complexity. The latter emerges naturally from any attempt to capture a new feeling or idea for poetry. But with Graham, as with so many self-consciously modernist poets, the difficulty seems to fall into the first category. Her poems are obscure because they seem unfinished, because they reside in the privacy of the poet’s mind and not in the public realm where poet and reader discuss things in common. As long as Graham asks the reader to fill in her blanks and solve for her x’s, she has not realized poetry’s greatest and most enduring possibilities.

That title had been succeeded by X’s first two albums, Los Angeles and Wild Gift (the latter of which was named album of the year by the critics of the Los Angeles Times); the soundtrack for the wild, intimate 1980 L.A. punk documentary The Decline of Western Civilization (directed by Biggs’s then wife, Penelope Spheeris); The Blasters; and The Record, the debut of the ultra-provocative, tongue-in-cheek quartet Fear. Chris D.’s Ruby subsidiary had issued A Minute to Pray, A Second to Die and the Gun Club’s debut, The Fire of Love.

The best friend has sent me a present. It is a stuffed doll with yellow yarn for hair and two Xs for eyes and a line for a mouth. It is called a Dammit

The great breakthrough that permitted man to count far beyond 10 with just ten different symbols was the invention of this turning point—a concept that mathematicians call positional notation. Positional notation means that each digit in a number has a particular value based on its position. In a decimal number, the first (farthest right) digit represents 1’s, the next digit 10’s, the next 100’s, and so on. The number 206 stands for six 1’s, no 10’s, and two 100’s: Add it all up: and you get 206. This number, incidentally, demonstrates why mathematicians consider the invention of a symbol that represents nothing (i.e., the number 0) to have been a revolutionary event in man’s intellectual history. Without zero, there would be no positional notation, because there would be no difference between 26 and 206 and 2,000,006. The Romans, for all their other achievements, never hit on the idea of zero and thus were stuck with a cumbersome system of M’s, C’s, X’s, and I’s which made higher math just about impossible. With

smiled, and Melody knew she was impressed. Val pointed at a small window that looked down on the room. “What’s that?” she asked. “Who’s up there?” “That’s the control room,” he said. “Those are the sound engineers, and they hear everything.” Dwayne got up and crossed the room, motioning Melody to follow. “See these X’s back here on the floor? This is where you’ll stand. This microphone will be yours. Phil and Artie will be over here. I’ll be at the piano.” “How come Melody’s so far from the piano?” Lila asked suspiciously. Dwayne smiled. “Those folks who work up in that control room know their business. Trust me, you’ll hear Dee-Dee. And us and the instruments, too. It’s what they call mixing the sound.” Just then, Artie and Phil came into the studio. Phil stopped and said hello to Lila. Then he turned to Dwayne. “I know we only planned for lil sis to do backup, but how about if the others hang out with us and dance? That will give us a great vibe.” Sharon’s and Val’s eyes grew wide. Lila smiled.

the big red Xs on the calendar.

proof of Malcolm X’s later observation that the Klan had “changed its bed sheets for a policeman’s uniform.

When the last drop of energy flicks from my limbs, they feel heavy. I collapse onto X’s chest, our sweaty bodies pressed together, our chests heaving against each other like a heartbeat. I start to drift off as my breathing steadies. I’m so tired, so drained from everything that’s happened. “Thank you,” I swear I hear X whisper before I pass out.

Every day that he writes jokes he crosses out the date on the calendar with a big red X. “After a few days you’ll have a chain,” Seinfeld said. “Just keep at it and the chain will grow longer every day. You’ll like seeing that chain, especially when you get a few weeks under your belt. Your only job next is to not break the chain.” This chain method (as some now call it) soon became a hit among writers and fitness enthusiasts—communities that thrive on the ability to do hard things consistently. For our purposes, it provides a specific example of a general approach to integrating depth into your life: the rhythmic philosophy. This philosophy argues that the easiest way to consistently start deep work sessions is to transform them into a simple regular habit. The goal, in other words, is to generate a rhythm for this work that removes the need for you to invest energy in deciding if and when you’re going to go deep. The chain method is a good example of the rhythmic philosophy of deep work scheduling because it combines a simple scheduling heuristic (do the work every day), with an easy way to remind yourself to do the work: the big red Xs on the calendar.

I stood there, frozen as I stared at Mr. X’s unmoving body. Fear and disbelief wouldn’t let me look away. Was it over? Was I free?

THE QUILL SWIRLED and lunged over the page in a slow but relentless three-steps-forward, two-steps-back sort of process, and finally came to a full stop in a tiny pool of its own ink. Then Louis Phélypéaux, first comte de Pontchartrain, raised the nib; let it hover for an instant, as if gathering his forces; and hurled it backwards along the sentence, tiptoeing over i’s, slashing through t’s and x’s, nearly tripping over an umlaut, building speed and confidence while veering through a slalom-course of acute and grave accents, pirouetting though cedillas and carving vicious snap-turns through circumflexes. It was like watching the world’s greatest fencing-master dispatch twenty opponents with a single continuous series of maneuvers. He drew his hand up with great care, lest his lace cuff drag in the ink; it inflated for a moment as it snatched a handful of air, then flopped down over his hand, covering all but the fingertips that pinched the pen, and giving them an opportunity to warm up. Twin jets of steam unfurled from Pontchartrain’s cavernous elliptical nostrils as he re-read the document.

I’m starting to think the Watch isn’t a real place, like Hogwarts, or Dr. X’s academy for mutants,” Adam said. “Tell the truth, you’re just living in the desert getting high all the time and spinning these elaborate fairy tales about psychopathic Gen Zs.” “Don’t be jealous,” Archer said, blowing him a kiss. “You can come visit whenever you want.” “He’s just sad he didn’t get his owl,” Noah said, patting Adam on the head like a puppy.

the hospital to tape it to the closed door of Dr. X’s office. I had signed it and on the way back to my bed I began to worry. What if I had done something really foolish? If the surgical resident didn’t care about such things, why should Dr. X? I was off call the next day and, exhausted, I spent most of the time asleep. When I returned to the hospital for the evening shift, the pediatric day resident told me that Immy was no better. For the next few hours I took care of whatever was most urgently needed on the service, but later in the evening I stopped by the Intensive Care Unit to examine Immy and speak with her family. I found her parents in the waiting room. Together we went to see Immy. She was still unconscious. Leaning over to listen to her chest, I suddenly noticed a medal pinned to her hospital gown. Turning to her parents in relief, I asked if it was another one. “No,” her mother said, “it was the same one that was lost.” Dr. X had come that afternoon and brought it to them. I told them how glad I was that it had been found. “Yes,” her father said. “We are too.” Then he smiled. “She is safe now, no matter what happens,” he told me.

clicked to the next slide. It showed the same skateboard, only now the wheels had big red X’s over them. “What if you could get rid of the wheels entirely—and make a skate board that could float on air?” I paused dramatically and pulled up my next slide. “Introducing the ZG Board. ‘ZG’ stands for ‘zero gravity,’ of course. It is my belief that not only will every existing skater buy—

He heard them crying the news in the street. And shrugging his shoulders applied himself to the great green board on which were pinned sheets of symbols: a frolic of xs controlled by ys and embraced by more cryptic symbols still: which, if juggled together would eventually, he was sure, positive, produce the one word, the simple, the sufficient the comprehensive word which will solve all problems forever. It was time to begin. He began.”26

Months beforehand I started focusing my Manhattanite efficiency on getting registered in Italy, Andrea leading me by the hand through the wilderness of Old World red tape. The first step was “getting my documents together,” an Italian ritual repeated before every encounter with officialdom. Sticking to a list kindly provided by the Italian Consulate, I collected my birth certificate, passport, high school diploma, college diploma, college transcript, medical school diploma, medical school transcript, certificates of internship and residency, National Board Examination certificates, American Board of Internal Medicine test results, and specialization diploma. Then I got them transfigured into Italian by the one person in New York authorized by the Italian Consulate to crown his translation with an imprimatur. We judiciously gave him a set of our own translations as crib notes, tailored by my husband to match the Rome medical school curriculum. I wrote a cover letter from Andrea’s dictation. It had to be in my own hand, on a folded sheet of double-sized pale yellow ruled Italian paper embossed with a State seal, and had to be addressed “To the Magnificent Rector of the University of Rome.” You have to live in Italy a while to appreciate the theatrical elegance of making every fiddler a Maestro and every teacher a Professoressa; even the most corrupt member of the Italian parliament is by definition Honorable, and every client of a parking lot is by default, for lack of any higher title, a Doctor (“Back up, Dotto’, turn the wheel hard to the left, Dotto’”). There came the proud day in June when I got to deposit the stack of documents in front of a smiling consular official in red nail polish and Armani. After expressing puzzlement that an American doctor would want to move to her country (“You medical people have it so good here”), she Xeroxed my certificates, transcripts, and diplomas, made squiggles on the back to certify the Xeroxes were “authentic copies,” gave me back the originals, and assured me that she’d get things processed zip zip in Italy so that by the time I left for Rome three months later I’d have my Italian license and be ready to get a job. Don’t call me, I’ll call you. When we were about to fly in September and I still hadn’t heard from her, I went to check. Found the Xeroxes piled up on Signora X’s desk right where I’d left them, and the Signora gone for a month’s vacation. Slightly put out, I snatched up the stack to hand-carry over (re-inventing a common expatriate method for avoiding challenges to the efficiency of the Italian mails), prepared to do battle with the system on its own territory.

On Nov. 11 of 1998, a physician in San Francisco invested $50,000 in a mutual fund called BT Investment Pacific Basin Equity. In January, scarcely seven weeks after he had bought the BT fund—he got the shock of his investing life. On his original $50,000 investment, BT Pacific Basin had paid out $22,211.84 in taxable capital gains. Every penny of the payout was a short-term gain, taxable at Dr. X’s ordinary income tax rate of 39.6 percent. He suddenly owed nearly $9,000 in federal taxes. As a California resident, he was also in the hole for $1,000 in state tax.