\n\n\nSo I left to go to India, and I took a bottle of LSD with me, with the idea that I’d meet holy men along the way, and I’d give them LSD and they’d tell me what LSD is. Maybe I’d learn the missing clue. ^ref-57733
\n
\n\n\n“If you wear shoeleather, the whole earth is covered with leather.” ^ref-60154
\n
\n\n\nIt is a truth clearly demonstrable from both reason and revelation, as well as from the principle defended in the late War of Independence, Edwards concluded, that opposing slavery is “a duty which we owe to mankind, to ourselves, and to God too. It is but doing as we would that men should do to us.” Owen Brown read Reverend Hallock’s copy of this sermon and declared himself an abolitionist. Years later, his son, stumping through Massachusetts, Connecticut, New York, Pennsylvania, and Ohio in an effort to gather money, arms, and recruits for a patriotic war against slavery, would tell his audiences, “I believe in the Golden Rule and the Declaration of Independence. I think they both mean the same thing.” ^ref-59731
\n
\n\n\nEphesians 6 also fired the Sunday school teacher’s vague aspiration to bolder initiatives. “Finally, my brethren, be strong in the Lord, and in the power of his might. Put on the whole armor of God, that ye may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil. For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places. Wherefore take unto you the whole armor of God, that ye may be able to withstand in the evil day, and having done all, to stand.” ^ref-31759
\n
\n\n\nThe town was soon rechristened Richmond, its post office was a shelf in Brown’s kitchen, and when letters had gathered for neighbors on outlying farms, he rode out along a wide-arching mail route to deliver them. Of these local residents, and of each new settler in Richmond, Brown wished to know three things, and asked his questions directly at the first opportunity. Were they observers of the Sabbath? Were they antislavery? Did they support common, or publicly funded, schools? ^ref-22853
\n
\n\n\nIn the day’s waning hours, the children might join Brown and his tannery workers in the yard for athletic exercises or tests of strength: footraces, leaping contests, rope pulls, arm-wrestling matches. On long winter evenings, after supper and prayers, family members and journeymen sat or sprawled around the roaring fire in the combination kitchen and living room, reading, mending clothes, and listening to or taking part in organized debates on questions such as whether Washington or Napoleon was the superior general and whether human beings, taken collectively, were fulfilling the end for which they were created. Brown loved staging such debates, which he valued for the mental and moral exercise they afforded. ^ref-14222
\n
\n\n\nBrown would call for “my babies” and have the younger ones recite the couplet that he taught them all as soon as they could understand it: “Count that day lost, whose low descending sun / Views from thy hand no worthy action done.” ^ref-739
\n
\n\n\nWilliam Lloyd Garrison ^ref-5056
\n
\n\n\nMoving beyond the negro issue, the federal government officially confirmed that America was reserved for whites in the first major achievement of the Jackson administration, the Indian Removal Act. The projects of removing Indians to the other side of the Mississippi and of returning free blacks to Africa shared the aim of clearing the geographic and economic field for the American common man. ^ref-46528
\n
\n\n\nhe prefaced his thanksgiving for the meal his household was about to receive with a scripturally inspired commentary on the subject. Standing at the end of the long table, speaking with his eyes closed, Brown catalogued the sufferings of the enslaved negroes in the south. It was their duty, he explained to his children, to do whatever they could to relieve these sufferings and help the slaves gain their freedom. ^ref-53205
\n
\n\n\nsaid, “I pledge myself, with God’s help, that I will devote my life to increasing hostility to slavery.” ^ref-1736
\n
\n\n\nSlavery was nothing but the most diabolical and cowardly form of warfare that human beings had devised, Brown told his family. ^ref-19104
\n
\n\n\nNonresistants such as Mr. Garrison, he continued, could never bring this unholy war to an end. Those who wielded words alone could never end it. Only force could end slavery—force brought by white men as well as black who were willing to take up arms against it and, if necessary, die in the fight. He knew it to be his duty, Brown told his wife and sons, to make war on slavery. ^ref-55360
\n
\n\n\nShould that be the will of Providence, I know of no other way but we must consider ourselves very poor; for our debts must be paid, if paid at a sacrifice. Should that happen (though it may not), I hope God, who is rich in mercy, will grant us grace to conform to our circumstances with cheerfulness and true resignation.” ^ref-32825
\n
\n\n\nWhen the spectacle [of society] stops talking about something for three days, it’s as if it didn’t exist. The spectacle has gone on to talk about something else, and now that is what exists. The practical consequences are enormous.” The disappearance of history is the primary source of the power of the spectacle. ^ref-4551
\n
\n\n\n(Biden is never not boring.) ^ref-14296
\n
\n\n\nIt is all very well to say that the crystal of quartz is a hexagonal prism. The statement is quite true in so far as an ideal crystal is envisaged. But in nature one finds no two crystals exactly alike, although all are unmistakably hexagonal. The actual form, however, seems to appeal more to the Chinese sage than the ideal one. The jumble of natural laws constituting empirical reality holds more significance for him than a causal explanation of events that, moreover, must usually be separated from one another in order to be properly dealt with. ^ref-3181
\n
\n\n\nThis is the reason why the teacher must wait to be sought out instead of offering himself. Only thus can the instruction take place at the right time and in the right way. ^ref-16253
\n
\n\n\nIf a time of scanty resources brings out an inner truth, one must not feel ashamed of simplicity. ^ref-2724
\n
\n\n\nThis hexagram indicates a situation in which the principle of darkness, after having been eliminated, furtively and unexpectedly obtrudes again from within and below. Of its own accord the female principle comes to meet the male. It is an unfavorable and dangerous situation, and we must understand and promptly prevent the possible consequences. The hexagram is linked with the fifth month [June–July], because at the summer solstice the principle of darkness gradually becomes ascendant again. THE JUDGMENT COMING TO MEET. The maiden is powerful. One should not marry such a maiden. The rise of the inferior element is pictured here in the image of a bold girl who lightly surrenders herself and thus seizes power. This would not be possible if the strong and light-giving element had not in turn come halfway. The inferior thing seems so harmless and inviting that a man delights in it; it looks so small and weak that he imagines he may dally with it and come to no harm. The inferior man rises only because the superior man does not regard him as dangerous and so lends him power. If he were resisted from the first, he could never gain influence. The time of COMING TO MEET is important in still another way. Although as a general rule the weak should not come to meet the strong, there are times when this has great significance. When heaven and earth come to meet each other, all creatures prosper; when a prince and his official come to meet each other, the world is put in order. It is necessary for elements predestined to be joined and mutually dependent to come to meet one another halfway. But the coming together must be free of dishonest ulterior motives, otherwise harm will result. THE IMAGE Under heaven, wind: The image of COMING TO MEET. Thus does the prince act when disseminating his commands And proclaiming them to the four quarters of heaven. The situation here resembles that in hexagram 20, Kuan, CONTEMPLATION (VIEW). In the latter the wind blows over the earth, here it blows under heaven; in both cases it goes everywhere. There the wind is on the earth and symbolizes the ruler taking note of the conditions in his kingdom; here the wind blows from above and symbolizes the influence exercised by the ruler through his commands. Heaven is far from the things of earth, but it sets them in motion by means of the wind. The ruler is far from his people, but he sets them in motion by means of his commands and decrees. ^ref-7319
\n
\n\n\n“What bothers me about the whole concept of pacifism,” says Mac, “is that it’s fundamentally elitist. Poor people—people who have to live every day with violence by police, who are used to it, who expect it… they’re not going to see anything admirable, let alone heroic, in inviting police violence, and then facing it passively.” ^ref-47569
\n
\n\n\nThe footpaths of some ancient indigenous societies, like the Cherokee, were no more than a few inches wide. When Europeans invaded North America, they slowly widened parts of the native trail network, first to accommodate horses, then wagons, then automobiles. Now, much of that network is buried beneath modern roadways, though remnants of the old trail system can still be found when you know where—and how—to look. ^ref-61000
\n
\n\n\nThere are, it is often said by the more ecumenical prophets, many paths up the mountain. So long as it helps a person navigate the world and seek out what is good, a path, by definition, has value. ^ref-32138
\n
\n\n\nHere is where the notion of the spiritual path, as portrayed in countless holy books, falters: scriptures tend to present the image of an unchanging route to wisdom, handed down from on high. But paths, like religions, are seldom fixed. They continually change—widen or narrow, schism or merge—depending on how, or whether, their followers elect to use them. Both the religious path and the hiking path are, as Taoists say, made in the walking. ^ref-28826
\n
\n\n\nEven the dumbest animals are experts at finding the most efficient route across a landscape. Our languages have grown to reflect this fact: In Japan, desire lines are called kemonomichi, or beast trails. In France, they call them chemin de l’âne, or donkey paths. In Holland, they say Olifantenpad, elephant paths. In America and England, people sometimes dub them “cow paths.” ^ref-45553
\n
\n\n\nIn Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Annie Dillard recounts the horror she felt while reading Fabre’s portrait of these soulless, circling automatons. “It is the fixed that horrifies us,” she wrote. “It is motion without direction, force without power, the aimless procession of caterpillars round the rim of a vase, and I hate it because at any moment I myself might step to that charmed and glistening thread.” ^ref-4994
\n
\n\n\nIt was not until the advent of computing that this circle was finally broken; early computers opened up a new path forward. By programming computers to perform insect-like tasks, and by studying the (previously, overwhelmingly complex) behavior of swarms using computers, we began to understand that simple machines following a simple set of rules can ultimately make highly intelligent decisions. They are not either simple or smart; they’re both. ^ref-58114
\n
\n\n\n“I would like to see the emergence of the town,” he said. “If I was the mayor—and the probability of that happening is quite low—my attitude would be very liberal. My objective would be to offer different types of material to help the citizens find the solution that they prefer.” I found this answer somewhat surprising. By all accounts, he was an expert in the design of efficient systems. And yet he would withhold his expertise and allow the town’s residents to plan their own town? “Yes,” he replied, with a look of impish mirth. “To believe that you have the solution for another person is a form of stupidity.” ^ref-20439
\n
\n\n\nYet more striking is Budiansky’s panoramic description of how humans and domesticated animals, having locked themselves into a symbiotic blood pact, proceeded to colonize the earth. What unites humans and our motley alliance of herd animals, he suggested, is that we are all “edge-dwellers,” opportunists who continually exploit new and shifting landscapes. Our flexibility is our chief weapon; we are “the scavenger or grazer that can eat a hundred different foods, not the panda exquisitely adapted to living off nothing but huge quantities of bamboo.” ^ref-37887
\n
\n\n\nWhen I was younger I used to see the earth as a fundamentally stable and serene place, possessed of a delicate, nearly divine balance, which humans had somehow managed to upset. But as I studied trails more closely, this fantasy gradually evaporated. I now see the earth as the collaborative artwork of trillions of sculptors, large and small. Sheep, humans, elephants, ants: each of us alters the world in our passage. When we build hives or nests, mud huts or concrete towers, we re-sculpt the contours of the planet. When we eat, we convert living matter into waste. And when we walk, we create trails. The question we must ask ourselves is not whether we should shape the earth, but how. ^ref-17257
\n
\n\n\nFor the federal government, the destruction of the buffalo held a certain monstrously efficient logic: it removed one nuisance (cutting down on the pesky buffalo, which ate up valuable grass, muddied ponds, and derailed trains), while weakening another (depriving the Plains Indians of their staple food source and forcing them to end their roaming existence). President Ulysses S. Grant wrote in 1873 that he “would not seriously regret the total disappearance of the buffalo from our western prairies,” as their extinction might increase native people’s “sense of dependence upon the products of the soil and their own labors” (i.e., agriculture and capitalism). ^ref-42893
\n
\n\n\nThough his research was best known for helping reveal the startling degree to which our road network was inherited (or more accurately, purloined) from Native Americans, Marshall’s top priority was to find those few remaining ancient Cherokee trails that had remained undisturbed. His motivations were (at least, in part) environmentalist: if he could locate a historical Cherokee footpath, federal legislation mandates that the Forest Service must protect a quarter of a mile of land on either side of the trail until it has undergone a proper archaeological survey (which, in certain cases, can take decades). And if the site is ultimately found to be historically significant, then the state can take steps to ensure that the trail’s historical context—which just so happens to be old-growth forest—remains intact. By locating and mapping old Cherokee trails, Marshall had so far been able to protect more than forty-nine thousand acres of public land from logging and mining operations. ^ref-47796
\n
\n\n\n“You can tell the story without ever going to Mount Mitchell, it’s still an entertaining story. But when you go up on top of that mountain and you see that landform, you’re like ‘Oh, this is what they’re describing.’ It’s amazing.” “Almost every prominent rock and mountain, every deep bend in the river, in the old Cherokee country has its accompanying legend,” noted the ethnographer James Mooney. “It may be a little story that can be told in a paragraph, to account for some natural feature, or it may be one chapter of a myth that has its sequel in a mountain a hundred miles away.” ^ref-53335
\n
\n\n\nStanding there, the cruel irony of not just the Trail of Tears, but all Native trails, hit home. Over the course of thousands of years, Native Americans devised a beautifully functional network of paths, not knowing that those same trails would later be used by a foreign empire in its slow invasion. ^ref-43873
\n
\n\n\nPeople fighting to preserve indigenous cultures tend to fall into one of two camps. Some believe that technology (being malleable and agnostic) will continue to evolve to better perpetuate elements of indigenous culture, like the Cherokee keyboard, and to situate traditional knowledge in the landscape (using digital maps). Others, like Jackson, counter that without time spent learning directly from the land, no amount of technology would halt the cultural erosion. Somewhat ironically, given his general aversion to technology, Lamar Marshall had ultimately been converted by the techno-evangelists. In response to the loss of land-based learning, he has begun importing over a thousand miles of trails into digital maps—along with the stories, wild foods, and medicine to be found along those trails—so they could one day be accessed by future generations of Cherokees. ^ref-64993
\n
\n\n\nMarshall’s program was a small but meaningful attempt to resituate the story in its rightful place. However, it still lacked the immediacy of terra firma. Marshall knew this, so he hoped to one day build an application that incorporated augmented reality technology with stories and maps, so that children could stand on the slopes of Rattlesnake Mountain while watching the tale of the Uktena unfold through virtual-reality goggles, or visit the sacred Kituwah mound and see a digital rendering of the site as it once was, four centuries earlier, aglow with the light of the sacred fire. ^ref-52715
\n
\n\n\nThey recognized the land’s bounty and grandeur, but they largely ignored the work the indigenous people had put into making it that way; having come from a place where most of the large trees had been razed, they wondered at the towering forests, without realizing they were coaxed upward by Native hands; they exulted at the profusion of wild deer without realizing that they were the result of tactical brush fires and careful hunting. ^ref-64100
\n
\n\n\nHow, one must wonder, had a human being—indeed, a whole generation of human beings—become so abstracted from the land (the solid earth! the actual world!) as to warrant such an epiphany? The answer, as we’ve seen, stretches back through our ancestral past: through agriculture, which obviated the hunter-gatherer’s need to walk, study, and interact with whole ecosystems; through writing, which replaced the landscape as an archive of communal knowledge; through monotheism, which vanquished the animist spirits and erased their earthly shrines; through urbanization, which concentrated people in built environments; and through a snug pairing of mechanical technology and animal husbandry, which allowed people to travel over the earth at blurring speeds. Euro-Americans had been working for millennia to forget what an unpeopled planet looked like. ^ref-24701
\n
\n\n\nAs the anthropologist Tim Ingold has pointed out, instead of being immersed in an endless continuum of landscapes, we increasingly experience the world as a network of “nodes and connectors”: homes and highways, airports and flight routes, websites and links. ^ref-5248
\n
\n\n\nHowever, a desk full of a million tiny books would not on its own solve the problem of information overload; if anything, it would exacerbate it. To remedy this problem, Bush envisioned that the texts could be strung together into “associative trails.” ^ref-31137
\n
\n\n\nHowever, as the first successful web browsers, like Mosaic, began rolling out, Berners-Lee found, to his dismay, that they were composed of fixed columns of text surrounded by dazzling images, more like a magazine spread than a chalkboard—and, thus, more like a highway than a trail. ^ref-35024
\n
\n\n\nWE MOVE through this world on paths laid down long before we are born. From our first breath, there is a vast array of structures already in place—“spiritual paths,” “career paths,” “philosophical paths,” “artistic paths,” “paths to wellness,” “paths to virtue”—which ^ref-47819
\n
\n\n\nFor children of the Land of Opportunity—beset on all sides by what the psychologist Barry Schwartz has called “the paradox of choice”—the newfound freedom from choices comes as an enormous relief. This form of freedom is a curious thing, at once an expansion and a constriction of one’s options. ^ref-52071
\n
\n\n\nThe problem, he said, was that hikers tended to divide their lives into compartments: wilderness over here, civilization over there. “The walls that exist between each of these compartments are not there naturally,” he said. “We create them. The guy that has to stand there and look at Mount Olympus to find peace and quiet and solitude and meaning—life has escaped him totally! Because it’s down there in Seattle, too, on a damn downtown street. I’ve tried to break those walls down and de-compartmentalize my life so that I can find just as much peace and joy in that damned homebound rush-hour traffic that we were walking through yesterday.” ^ref-32159
\n
\n\n\nShaving down one’s pack weight, he said, was a process of sloughing off one’s fears. Each object a person carries represents a particular fear: of injury, of discomfort, of boredom, of attack. ^ref-11980
\n
\n\n\nOld age brings with it another kind of liberation: freedom from the doubt, angst, and restlessness of youth. The old can look back and see their decisions as a single concatenation, sheared of all the ghostly, untaken routes. ^ref-14343
\n
\n\n\nShe split in order to experience herself as a separate, innocent individual—a perpetual little girl picking flowers in a meadow—AND, then to subsequently have the super-edgy, kinky experience of duality and sexuality and violence and all the terrifying thrills and chills that come with it. ^ref-27955
\n
\n\n\nThe Underworld Mystery is this: Pluto, the Unconscious Divine, hateful as he seems, is in truth our own creation, a kind and devoted lover, and that all the vast power of Pluto becomes available to us when we remember this, forgive him, take responsibility for our own experience of his power (which was really ours all along), and love him. ^ref-41021
\n
\n\n\nIt's just that habitually, humans tend to do magic that's either just plain boring or destructive (there's that shadow again). ^ref-39398
\n
\n\n\nTo do this, we have to greatly humble our ego's denial and fictional (if we were feeling feisty we might even say delusional) sorting of all experience into “good” (what appears to benefit me) and “bad” (what appears to not benefit me). When we succeed in this, the ego loses layers of its absorption in the fiction of separation, and comes more and more to see itself as just a particular (rather funny) expression of a much larger divine whole, the Self. ^ref-5315
\n
\n\n\nTo cast a spell is to communicate with your personal unconscious and the collective unconscious in a way that generates specific results through synchronicity. Believe it or not, you are casting spells at every single moment. ^ref-42643
\n
\n\n\nAnd since your performance of your identity entails a perpetual communication with your unconscious and the collective unconscious, you perpetually generate circumstances, relationships, and synchronicities that mirror and affirm and elaborate your identification. ^ref-40023
\n
\n\n\nIn the process of Existential Kink you invite your spirit to have the realization that your life on earth—right now, right here, in this animal, human body—is actually exactly what it has always wanted to celebrate with its exultant songs of perfection. ^ref-48254
\n
\n\n\nJohn Milton observed in Paradise Lost, “The mind is its own place and in itself, can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.” ^ref-15567
\n
\n\n\nAll we need to do is shift the context in our imagination from one of “awful thing happening to me against my will” to “kinky fun thing happening that I fully consent to.” Get off on this thing, this situation, this feeling that your ego thinks that you hate. Feel the freedom of that, the liberation of it. Allow yourself to be touched by the magnetism and electric spark of the “awful” thing that's present. ^ref-62128
\n
\n\n\nAny time I'm anxious about something, I'm actually tenderly caressing the possibility of it, pushing on it with my tongue like it's a loose tooth, savoring the little jolts of misery it gives. Like “Ooooooh, what if I somehow forget something totally important and then I just FAIL and everyone, the whole internet, just hates me, for good reason, because I completely suck. . . .” ^ref-47051
\n
\n\n\nWe get stuck when we look for “reasons” to motivate us to action, because some part of us knows that there simply is no “reason.” ^ref-52931
\n
\n\n\nPeople have various sorts of havingness level or “upper limit” imprints based on their karma and their childhood experiences. Some folks, for example, are willing to feel highly valued with money but are totally unwilling to be highly valued with love, or vice versa. Other folks are massively uncomfortable with all kinds of “being valued” sensations. ^ref-51587
\n
\n\n\n“Is it possible that these judgments, complaints, criticisms, resentments are meaningless mechanisms whose sole purpose is to help me avoid feeling tremendously good, loved, valued, inspired?” ^ref-52321
\n
\n\n\nI'm saying: Adopt an aesthetic rather than a moral attitude to your feeling states. In doing this, you practice being the artist of your life rather than the judge of it. ^ref-32181
\n
\n\n\nFeeling wildly offended at the slightest slight (A way to cover up awareness of masochistic desire to receive insult) Feeling tremendously guilty when you've disappointed someone (A way to cover up awareness of sadistic desire to inflict pain) Feeling very anxious in social situations (A way to cover up feelings of budding connection and intimacy, and also vicious aggression—usually both) ^ref-55929
\n
\n\n\nThe thing about the ego is that it needs a sense of opposition, of refusal, of rejection in order to maintain itself. It has to say: “No! That is awful! I don't like that! No, that's not me!” to something in order to define itself as separate from the undulating whole of the weird fractal hologram of life. ^ref-54224
\n
\n\n\nWhen you perceive life as a comedy, you receive rich infusions of energy that give you the strength to move mountains. ^ref-21697
\n
\n\n\nThere is a centuries-long investment in research, development, and deployment of techniques to ensure that survival is only ever a right for some. This right for some, more often than not, is ensured at the expense of the self-determination and continuation of living for the overwhelming majority of the planet’s human population. ^ref-3568
\n
\n\n\nI ask the question of what it would mean to consider warfare as a form of life, that is, an ordinary practice for many people rather than the ways we often characterize war as an anomalous or rare event that suddenly breaks out. ^ref-31793
\n
\n\n\nClimate modeling, for instance, allows researchers to experience scales of time and space that individual embodied humans cannot. Oral traditions similarly compress and extend time across lifetimes but are too often dismissed because of their nonmodern means of informatic storage and retrieval. ^ref-49378
\n
\n\n\nComputers, like archives and books, are vital prosthetics in research. They allow us to encounter things in ways that extend our experience beyond ourselves and our native sensory capabilities. ^ref-12201
\n
\n\n\nHow do we get from horror to critique? Rucker recommends that we can “turn off the TV (or now ubiquitous internet), eat something, and go for a walk, with infinitely many thoughts and perceptions mingling with infinitely many inputs.” ^ref-2266
\n
\n\n\nStill, the United States of America continues to follow the advice of “the best and the brightest,” testing the imperial waters, not quite ready to commit out loud to empire but completely unwilling to abandon it. ^ref-45077
\n
\n\n\nescapes the fact that everything can come to a sudden and arbitrary end thanks to the whim of an American drone operator, nuclear catastrophe, or macroeconomic manipulation like sanctions. There are other ways to die and other organized forms of killing outside the control of the United States; however, no other single apparatus can make everyone or anyone die irrespective of citizenship or geographic location. For me, this is the most inescapable philosophical provocation of our moment in time. ^ref-36082
\n
\n\n\nNo one is in control, there is no conspiracy, and yet the killing continues. A pessimistic reading of U.S. empire and the geopolitical history that precedes it is neither tragedy nor farce. It is a catastrophic banality lacking in any and all history, a pile of nonevents so suffocating that we often hope for a conspiracy, punctuating event, or villain worthy of the scale of violence. ^ref-34136
\n
\n\n\nWhat would failed scholarship do? Learn to die, learn to live, learn to listen, learn to be together, and learn to be generous. These virtues are useless in that they do not prevent or manage things. They do not translate into learning objectives or metrics. Virtues of this order are selfsame, nontransferable experiences. They are meaningful but not useful. These are luxurious virtues. Like grieving or joy, they are ends unto themselves. But how will these ideas seek extramural grants, contribute to an outcomes-based education system, or become a policy recommendation? They will not, and that is part of their virtue. ^ref-48663
\n
\n\n\nFrom the atom bomb to the untold billions of martial artifacts, including shells, planes, and fallen soldiers, the last five hundred years will certainly be characterized by an accelerating rate of organized and disorganized murder and violence. ^ref-8150
\n
\n\n\nTo put it a bit more bluntly, politics, colonialism, settlement, capitalism, ecological destruction, racism, and misogynies are not wars by other means—they are war. ^ref-63147
\n
\n\n\nWhile it is valuable to investigate how leaders can function to amplify conflict, what is striking is how quickly any one leader can be replaced and how little the trajectory of war changes. ^ref-8215
\n
\n\n\nOne might take a lesson from the electrification of sound. In order to amplify or magnify a sound and preserve the fidelity of a particular harmonic arrangement, one cannot simply “turn up” the volume. It requires a certain interface between the means of amplification, the ambient qualities of the room, the number of people present, and the resonant capabilities of those people, the furniture, the walls, the floor, and the ceiling. Similarly, political decrees or decisions to produce effects must reverberate and interface with complex assemblages of institutions, economies, ethical dispositions, affective discourses, and other machinic operators. ^ref-60986
\n
\n\n\nFrom an ecological perspective, “wholes” and “singularities” are not ontologically real. Only relations and processes are real; wholes and singularities are at best fleeting and nodal like knots in a string. ^ref-22450
\n
\n\n\nTherefore, the body is charged no less by hate, anger, rage, and fear than it is by joy, pleasure, and generosity. It is just charged differently. ^ref-49145
\n
\n\n\nOne’s right to lead among the Gauls came from one’s ability to survive and excel in combat. The leader often actually led, in the physical sense, the troops into battle. The leaders were the front line or tip of the cannae or wedge shape that fighters formed as they raced toward their enemy. The metaphorical meaning of “leading” a battle in which verbal and later cybernetic commands or leadership replaces the physical presence of commanders on the field of battle tracks with the deskilling, depersonalization, and democratization of warfare into a quantitative enterprise.11 The faith in overwhelming force over strategic or limited ends explains a great deal about contemporary practices of combat wreaking havoc with little success around the globe. ^ref-17432
\n
\n\n\nJust as we grow to understand the purpose of customs that seemed pointless to us in our youth, Hassan realized that there was merit in withholding information as well as in disclosing it. “No,” he said, “it was good that you did not warn me.” ^ref-64519
\n
\n\n\nHearing each other out: Conflict is not always bad. Sometimes you need to have healthy debates to come up with the best plan and outcome. You can only do this when there’s trust in the group and between team members. ^ref-3692
\n
\n\n\nYou may notice that I say this again and again: you as a leader have to go first. You have to show you can be trusted, and you have to be trusting. This means being okay with being vulnerable with your team. It means explaining to them how and why you care about their well-being, in words and in actions. ^ref-65215
\n
\n\n\nIf you’re strong and care about your team as people, it can feel unnatural to teach someone to advocate for themselves instead of moving things out of their way. ^ref-7921
\n
\n\n\nTry to work on aligning people instead to the outcomes you are looking for from them. You don’t have to code it all yourself, you need to articulate why the code is necessary, and what it will need to do in order to accomplish this. Trust in them to figure out the hows and consult when they need guidance. ^ref-63772
\n
\n\n\nIt’s tempting to think that over-performers need less guidance, but I’ve found that they tend to need more clarity on tasks, not less, in order to define scope and help point them in a good direction. ^ref-61222
\n
\n\n\nIf the very nature of advancement is making sure everyone around you is supported, people start to look out for one another. They can no longer “hero in” to a situation and expect a reward, they have to take everyone along with them. ^ref-33718
\n
\n\n\nIn his retirement, walking the streets of Bordeaux, Montaigne wore a pewter medallion inscribed with the words Que sais-je? (“What do I know?”)—thereby forming and backforming a tradition: Lucretius to La Rochefoucauld to Cioran. ^ref-7050
\n
\n\n\nAs recently as the late eighteenth century, landscape paintings were commonly thought of as a species of journalism. Real art meant pictures of allegorical or biblical subjects. A landscape was a mere record or report. As such, it couldn’t be judged for its imaginative vision, its capacity to create and embody a world of complex meanings; instead, it was measured on the rack of its “accuracy,” its dumb fidelity to the geography on which it was based. Which was ridiculous, as Turner proved, and as nineteenth-century French painting went on to vindicate: realist painting focused on landscapes and “real” people rather than royalty. ^ref-6932
\n
\n\n\nSuddenly everyone’s tale is tellable, which seems to me a good thing, even if not everyone’s story turns out to be fascinating or well told. ^ref-13510
\n
\n\n\nBiography and autobiography are the lifeblood of art right now. We have claimed them the way earlier generations claimed the novel, the well-made play, the language of abstraction. ^ref-26156
\n
\n\n\nTruth, uncompromisingly told, will always have its ragged edges. ^ref-42262
\n
\n\n\nCopies have been dethroned; the economic model built on them is collapsing. In a regime of superabundant free copies, copies are no longer the basis of wealth. Now relationships, links, connection, and sharing are. Value has shifted away from a copy toward the many ways to recall, annotate, personalize, edit, authenticate, display, mark, transfer, and engage a work. ^ref-32190
\n
\n\n\nCopies of their texts, however, will gain in meaning as they multiply by the millions and are flung around the world, indexed, and copied again. What counts are the ways in which these common copies of a creative work can be linked, manipulated, tagged, highlighted, bookmarked, translated, enlivened by other media, and sewn together in the universal library. ^ref-55879
\n
\n\n\nOh how we Americans gnash our teeth in bitter anger when we discover that the riveting truth that also played like a Sunday matinee was actually just a Sunday matinee. ^ref-13776
\n
\n\n\nDon’t waste your time; get to the real thing. Sure, what’s “real”? Still, try to get to it. ^ref-26324
\n
\n\n\nI’ve always had a hard time writing fiction. It feels like driving a car in a clown suit. You’re going somewhere, but you’re in costume, and you’re not really fooling anybody. You’re the guy in costume, and everybody’s supposed to forget that and go along with you. ^ref-34199
\n
\n\n\nAll the best stories are true. ^ref-2818
\n
\n\n\nHuman memory, driven by emotional self-interest, goes to extraordinary lengths to provide evidence to back up whatever understanding of the world we have our hearts set on—however removed that may be from reality. ^ref-58232
\n
\n\n\nFiction doesn’t require its readers to believe; in fact, it offers its readers the great freedom of experience without belief—something real life can’t do. Fiction gives us a rhetorical question: “What if this happened?” (The best) nonfiction gives us a statement, something more complex: “This may have happened.” ^ref-55076
\n
\n\n\nNow you may ask: Just what is the relation of your memoir to the truth? It is as close as it can be. The moment you put pen to paper and begin to shape a story, the essential nature of life—that one damn thing after another—is lost. ^ref-56050
\n
\n\n\nMeaning, ultimately, is a matter of adjacent data. ^ref-37396
\n
\n\n\nAlgorithmic recommendations are the latest iteration of the Mechanical Turk: a series of human decisions that have been dressed up and automated as technological ones, at an inhuman scale and speed. ^ref-28483
\n
\n\n\nFilterworld is the culture of presets, established patterns that get repeated again and again. The technology limits us to certain modes of consumption; you can’t stray outside of the lines. “Maniac fun,” as Yuri says, is gone—that is to say, a certain degree of originality, unprecedentedness, creativity, and surprise disappears when so much weighs on culture’s ability to spread through digital feeds. ^ref-10006
\n
\n\n\nIn other words, anything that can be turned into something like data—a series of numbers—could be manipulated in a formulaic way. That might include text, music, art, or even a game like chess. ^ref-2664
\n
\n\n\nthe law is its own kind of algorithm, ^ref-52064
\n
\n\n\nThe Right, at least, has a critique of bureaucracy. It’s not a very good one. But at least it exists. The Left has none. As a result, when those who identify with the Left do have anything negative to say about bureaucracy, they are usually forced to adopt a watered-down version of the right-wing critique. ^ref-31464
\n
\n\n\nThe mercantile classes in the Middle Ages undermined the old feudal order like termites munching from below—termites, yes, but the good kind. ^ref-44756
\n
\n\n\nIn most times and places, the way one goes about doing something is assumed to be the ultimate expression of who one is. ^ref-62935
\n
\n\n\nHe patted the thing he wore on his belt, a metal object like a deformed penis, and looked patronizingly at the unarmed woman. ^ref-42548
\n
\n\n\nmaybe all of us can feel it: our bosses and tormentors are afraid of what they would do without us, and their threat is a promise — the best parts of our lives are anarchy already. ^ref-21158
\n
\n\n\nFree people do not request the changes they want to see in the world; they make those changes. ^ref-43329
\n
\n\n\nMost of the societies and organizations that have successfully lived free of government have not called themselves “anarchist”; that term originated in Europe in the 19th century, and anarchism as a self-conscious social movement is not nearly as universal as the desire for freedom. It is presumptuous to assign the label “anarchist” to people who have not chosen it; instead, we can use a range of other terms to describe examples of anarchy in practice. ^ref-27107
\n
\n\n\nTemporary gain: Many of the examples in this book no longer exist. Of course, anarchists are not trying to create permanent institutions that take on lives of their own; specific organizations should come to an end when they are no longer helpful. Realizing that, how can we make the most of bubbles of autonomy while they last, and how can they continue to inform us after they have ceased to be? How can a series of temporary spaces and events be linked to create a continuity of struggle and community? ^ref-36466
\n
\n\n\nSomeone who read over this text pointed out to us that reciprocity is a fundamental value of indigenous worldviews. The question he posed to us was, if anarchists who are mostly Euro/American are going to take lessons from indigenous or other communities, cultures, and nations, what will we offer in return? ^ref-25502
\n
\n\n\nTherefore, perhaps the most important lesson to take from the story of the Mbuti is not that anarchy — a cooperative, free, and relatively healthy society — is possible, but that free societies are not possible so long as governments try to crush any pocket of independence, corporations fund genocide in order to manufacture cell phones, and supposedly sympathetic people are more interested in writing ethnographies than fighting back. ^ref-36141
\n
\n\n\n“After the cataclysm, social bonds will strengthen, volunteerism will explode, violence will be rare…” ^ref-50375
\n
\n\n\nUpon her expulsion Anne Hutchinson organized a group, in 1637, to form a settlement named Pocasset. They intentionally settled near to where Roger Williams, a progressive theologian, had founded Providence Plantations, a settlement based on the idea of total equality and freedom of conscience for all inhabitants, and friendly relations with the indigenous neighbors. ^ref-7856
\n
\n\n\nJudith Van Allen “Sitting On a Man”: Colonialism and the Lost Political Institutions of Igbo Women.” Canadian Journal of African Studies. Vol. ii, 1972, pp. 211–219. ^ref-44130
\n
\n\n\nWar may be the result of natural human behavior, but so is peace. Violence certainly existed before the state, but the state developed warfare and domination to unprecedented levels. As one of its great proponents pointed out, “war is the health of the state.” ^ref-56759
\n
\n\n\nIn certain situations some form of leadership is inevitable, as some people have more skills or a more charismatic personality. Consciously egalitarian societies respond to these situations by not institutionalizing the position of leader, by not affording a leader any special privileges, or by fostering a culture that makes it shameful for that person to flaunt his or her leadership or try to gain power over others. ^ref-3125
\n
\n\n\nAlthough the movement kicked off with the most widely attended day of protest in human history on February 15, 2003, the organizers deliberately channeled the energy of the participants into rigidly controlled rituals that did not challenge the war machine. Within two years, the anti-war movement had completely squandered the momentum built up during the anti-globalization era. ^ref-27622
\n
\n\n\nBut it is eurocentric, to say the least, to assume that a hunter-gatherer who knows the uses of a thousand different plants is less sophisticated than an operator at a nuclear power plant who knows how to push a thousand different buttons but doesn’t know where his food comes from. ^ref-8441
\n
\n\n\nIf humans are naturally selfish and competitive, we cannot expect to live in a cooperative society. When we see how differently other cultures have characterized human nature, we can recognize human nature as a cultural value, an idealized and normative mythology that justifies the way a society is organized. ^ref-40340
\n
\n\n\nThe Western idea of human nature functions as a part of this social control, discouraging rebellion against authority. We are taught from childhood that without authority human life would descend into chaos. ^ref-42650
\n
\n\n\nSeeing our relationships with our friends and nature as fundamental parts of ourselves expands our sense of connection with the world and our responsibility for it. It is not in our self-interest to be dominated by authorities, or to dominate others; in developing a broader sense of self, we can structure our lives and communities accordingly. ^ref-24261
\n
\n\n\nMany groups also use a “vibes-watcher,” someone who volunteers to pay special attention to emotions and interactions within the group, recognizing that the personal is political and that the tradition of suppressing emotions in political spaces derives from the separation of public and private, a separation on which patriarchy and the state are based. ^ref-24990
\n
\n\n\nAccording to this principle, it is better to respect the differing views of the members of a group than to enforce a decision that leaves some people excluded or silenced. ^ref-3803
\n
\n\n\nIn a horizontal society, people enforce decisions according to how enthusiastic they are about those decisions. If almost everybody strongly supports a decision, it will be upheld vigorously, whereas if a decision leaves most people feeling neutral or unenthusiastic, it will only be partially enforced, ^ref-7127
\n
\n\n\nBut this ultimate sanction differs from the coercive tactics used by the state in a key respect: voluntary groups only exist because everyone involved wants to work with everyone else. A person who is excluded is not deprived of the ability to survive or maintain relationships, as there are many other groups she can join. ^ref-42348
\n
\n\n\nMarxism is meant to be a strictly provisional affair, which is why anyone who invests the whole of their identity in it has missed the point. That there is a life after Marxism is the whole point of Marxism. ^ref-27624
\n
\n\n\nThe stage was thus set for Reagan and Thatcher, who would help to dismantle traditional manufacture, shackle the labour movement, let the market rip, strengthen the repressive arm of the state and champion a new social philosophy known as barefaced greed. ^ref-61010
\n
\n\n\nIt was not this that led them to ditch Marxism along with their sideburns and headbands, but the growing conviction that the regime they confronted was simply too hard to crack. It was not illusions about the new capitalism, but disillusion about the possibility of changing it, which proved decisive. ^ref-30367
\n
\n\n\nought to be well accustomed to defeat. ^ref-37620
\n
\n\n\nTaken overall, Maoism and Stalinism were botched, bloody experiments which made the very idea of socialism stink in the nostrils of many of those elsewhere in the world who had most to benefit from it. ^ref-52255
\n
\n\n\nis true that capitalism works some of the time, in the sense that it has brought untold prosperity to some sectors of the world. But it has done so, as did Stalin and Mao, at a staggering human cost. This ^ref-25037
\n
\n\n\nThe system has also proved incapable of breeding affluence without creating huge swathes of deprivation alongside it. ^ref-47406
\n
\n\n\nYou cannot reorganise wealth for the benefit of all if there is precious little wealth to reorganise. ^ref-33964
\n
\n\n\nHow would one avoid the chronic short-termism of markets, their habit of ignoring the overall social picture and the long-term antisocial effects of their own fragmented decisions? ^ref-24899
\n
\n\n\nUnder capitalism, we are deprived of the power to decide whether we want to produce more hospitals or more breakfast cereals. ^ref-50506
\n
\n\n\nAs Oscar Wilde once remarked, the trouble with socialism is that it takes up too many evenings. Yet one needs at least to take account of the role of modern information technology in oiling the wheels of such a system. Even the former vice-president of Procter & Gamble has acknowledged that it makes workers’ self-management a real possibility. ^ref-59785
\n
\n\n\nWell-meaning people can save me from myself, but they cannot save me from being alive. Only my god can do that. Sometimes my god speaks through well-meaning people. Sometimes I am so lonely. ^ref-60693
\n
\n\n\nhelp. My god is a horizontal god who works sideways on earth rather than vertically from heaven down. ^ref-64092
\n
\n\n\nWhen I’m sleeping, the committee stays up all night and then greets me at dawn with really bad ideas. It’s like, Good morning! Everything is shit! Time to act impulsively. But first let’s start by getting into fights with imaginary people from the past. Next let’s catalog everything that’s wrong with you and your life. Also, I want to remind you of everything you don’t have—and everything you should be scared of losing. Let’s begin. ^ref-22508
\n
\n\n\nI preferred to chain-smoke in isolation rather than not smoke among others. ^ref-12020
\n
\n\n\nAnd while the gum may have an adverse effect on my physical heart, it does wonders for my emotional one. It ballasts and buffers, nurtures and excites. I guess I value my emotional heart more. ^ref-18641
\n
\n\n\nI still hold a somewhat sacred sexual ideal: a union where I experience orgasm with another person based solely on what is happening in the moment, and not on what is going on in my head. I’ve ^ref-63800
\n
\n\n\nI’M TRYING TO QUIT GETTING high on people. It’s really fucking hard. I’m a romantic and an addict. I crave eros, fantasy, and intrigue. I’m wired for longing. But I keep getting really sick. Longing-sick. ^ref-31404
\n
\n\n\nThe truth is, distance and unavailability—flecked with short-lived, gorgeous IRL binges—were what made the drug-person so intoxicating. I wanted more of the drug-person than could ever be available. When I didn’t get a text, I was, as junkies say, sick. When I received a text it made me well. But it only made me well until the next text I sent. Then I was waiting for him. I was sick again. ^ref-62140
\n
\n\n\nIt was then I realized that he, too, is probably an addict of some sort. Anyone who can meet my level of intensity can’t be totally normal. ^ref-17840
\n
\n\n\nIt was the least satisfying ending ever. Now I want to contact him and be like, Just one more thing! I want to give it the perfect ending. But there will never be a perfect ending. The perfect ending is a romantic ending and thus is not an ending. ^ref-4419
\n
\n\n\nBut now I am sick again. I have holes in my brain where I want to hide from life. The holes are filled with voices that tell me we were nirvana, over and over. The voices seem like truth to me, because I am an addict and I want being high to be the truth. I don’t know if I will ever fill the holes. But I am trying really hard not to enter them again. ^ref-55964
\n
\n\n\nAs has been said, I am not a human being trying to be spiritual. I am a spiritual being having a human experience. ^ref-44159
\n
\n\n\nOne form of romantic obsession is to become infatuated with someone who actually exists. With this type of romantic obsession, you project your entire fantasy narrative onto a person in your life and attempt to get them to comply. You take a living, breathing human being and try to stuff them into the insatiable holes inside you. These holes are in no way shaped like that person (or any person). But you believe that this fantasy person will fill you, because he or she possesses all the imaginary qualities you seek in a lover. And how do you know that he or she possesses all of these qualities? You put them there. ^ref-9406
\n
\n\n\nSo many of us exist in a state of unconsciousness. We navigate through the world running on blind autopilot, carrying out automatic, habitual behaviors that don’t serve us or reflect who we fundamentally are and what we deeply desire. ^ref-21153
\n
\n\n\nNot everyone wants to get better. And that’s okay. Some people have an identity tied to sickness. Others fear true wellness because it is the unknown and the unknown is unpredictable. There is comfort in knowing exactly what your life will look like, even if that reality is making you sick. ^ref-42705
\n
\n\n\nMy mom, a wounded child herself, had never been shown the love she craved deeply. As a result, she was unable to express love to her own children, whom she did love deeply. ^ref-28062
\n
\n\n\nUnfortunately, Western medicine is constrained by the belief that the mind and body are separate entities—clinicians treat the mind (psychology or psychiatry) or the body (every other branch of medicine) and rarely incorporate treatment for both at the same time. This arbitrary separation of mind and body holds medicine back from its potential for healing and sometimes even makes us sicker in the process. ^ref-2310
\n
\n\n\nWe are not merely expressions of coding but products of remarkable arrays of interactions that are both within and outside of our control. ^ref-8393
\n
\n\n\nThe subconscious mind loves existing in a comfort zone. The safest place, it turns out, is one you’ve been before because you can predict the familiar outcome. Habits, or behaviors that we repeatedly return to, become the subconscious’s default mode. ^ref-17813
\n
\n\n\nI imagine it may be becoming easier to see how trauma is intergenerational, passed down from one parent-figure to the next to the next to the next—to us. Central to this process is the concept of conditioning, in which beliefs and behaviors are unconsciously imprinted onto us. Anyone who’s ever spent time with a young child knows that children mimic others’ behaviors: whether influenced by a friend or classmate or cartoon character, they do as they see. This is how conditioning works. We learn what is modeled to us by others, especially our primary parent-figures. Our attachments in our earliest years set the groundwork for our subconscious beliefs. We learn what a relationship looks like from watching those closest to us in relationships. We learn how to feel about our bodies by observing how our parents feel about their bodies. We learn whether or not to prioritize self care. We learn spending habits, worldviews, and beliefs about ourselves, others, and the world. We stored these beliefs as well as countless other messages in our subconscious. ^ref-37264
\n
\n\n\nThis “survival brain” (as opposed to the social engagement’s “learning brain”) is hyperfocused on perceived threats, thinks about things in hard-and-fast black and white, and is often circular, obsessive, and panic driven. ^ref-7108
\n
\n\n\nAt the party, for example, we likely couldn’t escape our vagal response, because we were passing that state along to people whose paths we crossed. The others at the party then reflected our activated state back to us, keeping us stuck and leading us along a path of emotional addiction. ^ref-6326
\n
\n\n\nThis is why we are drawn to vent to friends and chronically complain; these behaviors help us remain in a heightened state. Nonactivated peace is dull and unfamiliar. ^ref-53529
\n
\n\n\nSpiritually, our individual souls have three basic needs: To be seen To be heard To uniquely express our most authentic Selves ^ref-14645
\n
\n\n\n“My childhood wasn’t that bad. I shouldn’t complain.” I hear that a lot. I have to remind you: you are looking backward in time from the perspective of your adult brain with the awareness and maturity that can put things into proper perspective and alignment. Our child brains did not have these capabilities. ^ref-35565
\n
\n\n\nThat’s why the ego is so defensive and fear based. It views everything within the context of a rigid dichotomy: good versus bad or right versus wrong. It is staunchly attached to its opinions and believes that we are our opinions. ^ref-25438
\n
\n\n\nEgo stories come naturally to us because uncertainty is frightening. ^ref-5621
\n
\n\n\nThoughts happen to us. They don’t mean anything about who we are. They’re simply our ego attempting to defend our identity and protect us from pain. ^ref-47876
\n
\n\n\nWe are always subconsciously seeking to relive our past because we are creatures of comfort, who love to be able to predict the future, even if that future is certain to be painful, miserable, or even terrifying. It’s safer than the unknown. ^ref-13573
\n
\n\n\nIt is a grounded state. You do not need to perform in a certain way or hide parts of yourself to receive love. You will still feel bored or unsettled. You will still find yourself attracted to other people and may even mourn the loss of the single life. Conscious relationships aren’t fairy tales. There’s no “You complete me.” ^ref-13720
\n
\n\n\n“If I want a better-than-average career, I can’t simply ‘go with the flow’ and get it. Most people do just that: they wish for an outcome but make no intention-driven actions toward that outcome. If they would just do something most people would find that they get some version of the outcome they’re looking for. ^ref-57810
\n
\n\n\n“We are what we do repeatedly.” A mere five times (five workouts, five meals, five of whatever we want) will be our goal. ^ref-21843
\n
\n\n\nUse minimal arm movement and consider keeping your wrists near your nipples the entire time. During the initial 100-meter repeats, I purposefully ran directly behind the best ultra-distance runner in our group, matching his tempo and form. He ran with the shortest, most contained arm movements of all. ^ref-36229
\n
\n\n\nOne lesson I learned stands out: Always do the minimum—the simplest, easiest experiment that will make progress. Few professional scientists seem to know this. ^ref-17014
\n
\n\n\nAs Thorstein Veblen emphasized in The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899), useless research has higher status than useful research. Doing useless work, Veblen said, shows that you are higher-status than those who must do useful work. So researchers prefer useless research, thus the term “ivory tower.” ^ref-29238
\n
\n\n\nGregor Mendel was a monk. He was under no pressure to publish; he could say whatever he wanted about horticulture without fear for his job. Charles Darwin was wealthy. He had no job to lose. He could write On the Origin of Species very slowly. Alfred Wegener, who proposed continental drift, was a meteorologist. Geology was a hobby of his. Because they had total freedom and plenty of time, and professional biologists and geologists did not (just as now), Mendel, Darwin, and Wegener were able to use the accumulated knowledge of their time better than the professionals. The accumulated knowledge of our time is more accessible than ever before. Self-experimenters, with total freedom, plenty of time, and easy access to empirical tests, are in a great position to take advantage of it. ^ref-18003
\n
\n\n\nWhat is the heart of the matter in pottery making? To call into being an object and to ask the object to have qualities that evoke in the viewer a sense of rightness, beauty, or vitality is to tinker with the divine. ^ref-594
\n
\n\n\nEstablish the rim shape early in the throwing process, as early as the second pull, when you still have plenty of clay to work with. Setting the rim is an extension of compressing the top edge after every pull, which you want to do to keep the clay in good health. ^ref-3342
\n
\n\n\nWhatever the shape and structure of a cylinder, whatever the beginning and ending treatments, whatever the gesture and mood, all of the components must be unequivocal. They must manifest what they suggest and avoid what Henry James called the flaw of “weak specification.” 3 This demands decision making at every second of the throwing process and well-thought-out ideas that inform those decisions. ^ref-57671
\n
\n\n\nTrue goodness is like water. Water’s good for everything. It doesn’t compete. It goes right to the low loathsome places, and so finds the way. ^ref-18455
\n
\n\n\nCan you keep the deep water still and clear, so it reflects without blurring? Can you love people and run things, and do so by not doing? ^ref-55667
\n
\n\n\nTo give birth, to nourish, to bear and not to own, to act and not lay claim, to lead and not to rule: this is mysterious power. ^ref-6646
\n
\n\n\nThe five colors blind our eyes. The five notes deafen our ears. The five flavors dull our taste. ^ref-22246
\n
\n\n\nBe broken to be whole. Twist to be straight. Be empty to be full. Wear out to be renewed. Have little and gain much. Have much and get confused. So wise souls hold to the one, and test all things against it. Not showing themselves, they shine forth. Not justifying themselves, they’re self-evident. Not praising themselves, they’re accomplished. Not competing, they have in all the world no competitor. ^ref-44901
\n
\n\n\nYou can’t keep standing on tiptoe or walk in leaps and bounds. You can’t shine by showing off or get ahead by pushing. Self-satisfied people do no good, self-promoters never grow up. ^ref-61584
\n
\n\n\nSo wise souls are good at caring for people, never turning their back on anyone. They’re good at looking after things, never turning their back on anything. There’s a light hidden here. ^ref-21447
\n
\n\n\nKnowing other people is intelligence, knowing yourself is wisdom. Overcoming others takes strength, overcoming yourself takes greatness. Contentment is wealth. ^ref-57553
\n
\n\n\nTo live till you die is to live long enough. ^ref-34265
\n
\n\n\nWhat seeks to shrink must first have grown; what seeks weakness surely was strong. What seeks its ruin must first have risen; what seeks to take has surely given. ^ref-48176
\n
\n\n\nWhat’s softest in the world rushes and runs over what’s hardest in the world. The immaterial enters the impenetrable. So I know the good in not doing. The wordless teaching, the profit in not doing— not many people understand it. ^ref-22301
\n
\n\n\nTo run things, be undiplomatic. No diplomat is fit to run things. ^ref-5295
\n
\n\n\nThe wise have no mind of their own, finding it in the minds of ordinary people. They’re good to good people and they’re good to bad people. Power is goodness. They trust people of good faith and they trust people of bad faith. Power is trust. ^ref-15070
\n
\n\n\nTo have without possessing, do without claiming, lead without controlling: this is mysterious power. ^ref-46612
\n
\n\n\nThe great way is low and plain, but people like shortcuts over the mountains. The palace is full of splendor and the fields are full of weeds and the granaries are full of nothing. ^ref-26462
\n
\n\n\nPeople wearing ornaments and fancy clothes, carrying weapons, drinking a lot and eating a lot, having a lot of things, a lot of money: shameless thieves. ^ref-10916
\n
\n\n\nIt is in this sense that I understand how the natural, inevitable cycle of youth, growth, mature vigor, age, and decay can be “not the Way.” The Way is more than the cycle of any individual life. We rise, flourish, fail. The Way never fails. We are waves. It is the sea. ^ref-2784
\n
\n\n\nWell planted is not uprooted, well kept is not lost. The offerings of the generations to the ancestors will not cease. To follow the way yourself is real power. To follow it in the family is abundant power. To follow it in the community is steady power. To follow it in the whole country is lasting power. To follow it in the world is universal power. ^ref-18107
\n
\n\n\nWho knows doesn’t talk. Who talks doesn’t know. ^ref-53432
\n
\n\n\nThe more restrictions and prohibitions in the world, the poorer people get. The more experts the country has the more of a mess it’s in. The more ingenious the skillful are, the more monstrous their inventions. The louder the call for law and order, the more the thieves and con men multiply. ^ref-55489
\n
\n\n\nIn the last verse most translators say the Taoist is square but doesn’t cut, shines but doesn’t dazzle. Waley says that this misses the point. The point is that Taoists gain their ends without the use of means. That is indeed a light that does not shine—an idea that must be pondered and brooded over. A small dark light. ^ref-55338
\n
\n\n\nStudy the hard while it’s easy. Do big things while they’re small. The hardest jobs in the world start out easy, the great affairs of the world start small. So the wise soul, by never dealing with great things, gets great things done. ^ref-40220
\n
\n\n\nLiving people are soft and tender. Corpses are hard and stiff. The ten thousand things, the living grass, the trees, are soft, pliant. Dead, they’re dry and brittle. So hardness and stiffness go with death; tenderness, softness, go with life. ^ref-38396
\n
\n\n\nNothing in the world is as soft, as weak, as water; nothing else can wear away the hard, the strong, and remain unaltered. Soft overcomes hard, weak overcomes strong. Everybody knows it, nobody uses the knowledge. ^ref-3438
\n
\n\n\nSome interconnections in systems are actual physical flows, such as the water in the tree’s trunk or the students progressing through a university. Many interconnections are flows of information—signals that go to decision points or action points within a system. These kinds of interconnections are often harder to see, but the system reveals them to those who look. ^ref-37714
\n
\n\n\nSystems can be nested within systems. Therefore, there can be purposes within purposes. ^ref-49361
\n
\n\n\nStocks change over time through the actions of a flow. Flows are filling and draining, births and deaths, purchases and sales, growth and decay, deposits and withdrawals, successes and failures. A stock, then, is the present memory of the history of changing flows within the system. ^ref-26028
\n
\n\n\nYou’ll be thinking not in terms of a static world, but a dynamic one. You’ll stop looking for who’s to blame; instead you’ll start asking, “What’s the system?” The concept of feedback opens up the idea that a system can cause its own behavior. ^ref-24283
\n
\n\n\nThere’s an important general principle here, and also one specific to the thermostat structure. First the general one: The information delivered by a feedback loop can only affect future behavior; it can’t deliver the information, and so can’t have an impact fast enough to correct behavior that drove the current feedback. A person in the system who makes a decision based on the feedback can’t change the behavior of the system that drove the current feedback; the decisions he or she makes will affect only future behavior. ^ref-26576
\n
\n\n\nSexual energy is like a river of magma. Respect it, honor it, and delight in the fiery flow, but don’t expect to control it. You can’t. Instead, learn to open to the tide and channel its power. ^ref-50220
\n
\n\n\nSan Francisco–based dream researcher and artist Fariba Bogzaran told me that people who meditate have an easier time of it because they have practiced being both subject and observer at once. She says the important thing is not crashing; instead, go to sleep consciously, and really try to notice the process of falling asleep. The result: a poor man’s psychedelic trip. ^ref-42316
\n
\n\n\nParasomnias are incredibly important in understanding consciousness because they show that, in the words of one group of researchers, “wake and sleep are not mutually exclusive states, and that sleep is not necessarily a global brain phenomenon.” In a sense, consciousness can be remixed—there is an alchemic quality to the way different physiological mechanisms interact to produce oddball subjective variations. ^ref-32516
\n
\n\n\nTherefore the wise person lives without effort in his daily life. He practices a wordless doctrine. Good and bad come to him and he refuses neither. ^ref-40490
\n
\n\n\nThe wise person acts but does not take credit. Leads, but does not rule. This is a profound virtue. ^ref-65476
\n
\n\n\nA bowl is useful because it is molded around emptiness, waiting to be filled. A house is useful because of its doors and windows, that allow people to enter and live happily. Therefore the 'what is' is benefited by the 'what is not'. Each is served by the other. ^ref-5329
\n
\n\n\nThe wise person is excellent at helping others, and does not reject any of them. ^ref-11567
\n
\n\n\nAlthough the Tao seems insignificant, no one can command it. The leader that can act in accordance with it will find that everything is naturally in accord with him. ^ref-24629
\n
\n\n\nOne who is well planted in the Tao cannot be uprooted, one who has a firm grasp of the Tao will not let it slip away. Your descendants will not cease in their honour of you. ^ref-11602
\n
\n\n\nToday mankind is locked into stealing ravenously from the future. ^ref-8368
\n
\n\n\nMan has recognized the many-faceted interdependence of diverse organisms, their impact upon their habitat, their impermanence, and their inability to foresee and evade the processes leading to their own displacement by successors. ^ref-45341
\n
\n\n\nThe paramount need of post-exuberant humanity is to remain human in the face of dehumanizing pressures. To do this we must learn somehow to base exuberance of spirit upon something more lasting than the expansive living that sustained it in the recent past. But, as if we were driving a car that has become stuck on a muddy road, we feel an urge to bear down harder than ever on the accelerator and to spin our wheels vigorously in an effort to power ourselves out of the quagmire. This reflex will only dig us in deeper. ^ref-27356
\n
\n\n\nLet us begin with the fact that all the many forms of life on this planet have the same ultimate chemical basis. In many and varied ways, their life processes are also interdependent. Each form (including man) takes certain substances from its environment and puts certain substances into its environment; these affect other organisms. The influences of various species upon each other are often intricate, indirect, and subtle. ^ref-19726
\n
\n\n\nI’ve never had the courage to want the world. I’ve always let it come to me, which of course is a rather passive approach to existence, but the funny thing is: inevitably, it comes. Sooner or later, whether I wanted it or not, the world came to me; it came at me, it keeps coming at me. ^ref-15080
\n
\n\n\nGirls with asses like mine do not talk to boys with faces like yours. [Karen McCullah Lutz] ^ref-33935
\n
\n\n\n(I wasn’t in love with you when we got married, but I am now, whereas I suspect the opposite is true for you.) ^ref-45275
\n
\n\n\nOnce, I asked Jack if he loved me. “Of course I love you,” he said. “Then why don’t you ever tell me?” “It would be like having to tell you I’m breathing,” he said. “It would be like if, in a movie, the hero turned to the woman just before they ran into a barrage of gunfire, took her hand, and said, ‘Doris, I’m breathing.’ I’ve always been breathing. It would be like having her say, ‘I know. I’m breathing, too.’” [Linker] ^ref-21482
\n
\n\n\nWhile women today think the ’90s was when the look became popular, the first Playboy centerfold featuring a shaved vagina didn’t take place until about 2002. ^ref-35336
\n
\n\n\nThere is one woman whom fate has destined for each of us; if we miss her, we are saved. ^ref-404
\n
\n\n\nThe love that lasts the longest is the love that is never returned. ^ref-11707
\n
\n\n\nEverything she said was filtered through her own awareness of how good her ass looked, the words she spoke merely an afterthought compared to the glory at the bottom of those shorts. ^ref-56208
\n
\n\n\nEverything was so strange. Life was okay, though. Life was maybe even kind of cute. You simply had to expect nothing from it. ^ref-52820
\n
\n\n\nMy propensity was to strip off masks as quickly as possible, lay everything out, so as to relieve the discomfort of having to wear one in the first place. ^ref-52116
\n
\n\n\nIt was as though some wonderful future event were being extended backward in time. The future event needed only to exist so that I could have this excitement and anticipation now. ^ref-33378
\n
\n\n\nWas this how everything was now? Just nice? I wondered if other people felt comfortable within niceness, or whether they didn’t even notice that things were nice. Maybe they expected everything to be nice. Maybe nice was like air to them. ^ref-16371
\n
\n\n\nMaybe I didn’t need someone else to define me, but oh, I still wanted it. How vacuous was I? How empty was I that I needed a border drawn by someone else to tell me who I was? ^ref-39019
\n
\n\n\nMaybe once that person became too real, too familiar, they could no longer get you high—no longer be a drug—and that was why you grew tired of them. That was what had happened to me and Jamie. It was only when he was pushing me away—and then after he was gone—that he became a drug. It was so much easier for someone to be the drug before or after the relationship. When they were absent they were exciting. When they were right there it was a different story. ^ref-43391
\n
\n\n\nWhat if everything was natural? What if there was no wrong or right action in terms of who you loved, who you wanted, or who you were drawn to? If the will of the universe was the will of the universe, and if everything was happening as it was, then wasn’t everything you could possibly do all right? ^ref-57612
\n
\n\n\n“I don’t know if that’s love or something else,” I said. “But I don’t think it’s love if the person disappears.” “I wouldn’t say it’s not love,” he said. “But it’s hard. That is a very painful experience.” ^ref-15077
\n
\n\n\nHe intuitively knew exactly what to say to have me writhing. Or perhaps I planted the words in him, as so much of what our lovers do and say is imagined. We turn them into who we want them to be. We fill in their bodies and words for them. ^ref-54468
\n
\n\n\nIn some ways, my moods did and did not exist. People said that you could will a mood into being or will it away. Just think positively. But I never felt that way. My moods were their own entities, even if no one could understand why they were there. That was what made me scared of feelings. ^ref-14586
\n
\n\n\nHe wasn’t missing my predictability. He was wanting me because he could no longer have me. He could tell I was gone and that was a new spell for him. ^ref-4343
\n
\n\n\nThose women instinctively knew how to get a man and keep a man, each man interchangeable with the next: a torso, a dick, a pair of hands. Those women knew how to embrace whichever assembly-line man they were given. They knew how to breathe new life into him day after day and see what they had as special. They were like living psalms. There were no holes in their lives. Those women had never met a void a day in their life. They simply didn’t see any. ^ref-57368
\n
\n\n\nIf I was dead and he wasn’t dead, did that mean he had all the power? If I died for him, it was kind of like him not texting me back on a cosmic level. ^ref-39817
\n
\n\n\nHow much beauty was I projecting upon him, and how much was the moon? And if I was not projecting the beauty, and it was not the moon, how much of him was real beyond the beauty? I wondered if we were ever not projecting. We think we’ve grown or learned something, but maybe it’s always just a new projection. ^ref-24528
\n
\n\n\nAfter Christ was crucified, dead, and buried, he ascended into heaven after three days. Just so, the Sun remains for three days in transit at the equinoctial point before it begins its ascent into the northern hemisphere. ^ref-6883
\n
\n\n\npower based their actions on astrological advice. It is said that the Incas submitted to the Spanish almost without a fight because the arrival of the conquistadors happened to coincide with an astrological prophecy that their civilization was coming to an end. Depending on how one cares to interpret this, the prophecy fulfilled itself or, by acquiescence, was fulfilled. Either way, astrology had power. ^ref-28834
\n
\n\n\nThe indisputable power of the Sun over all living things, the Moon’s effect on the tides, the repetition of weather patterns such as the stormy periods around the equinoxes, or the coincidence between the rising of Sirius, the Dog Star, and the summer’s hottest weeks—helped to make plausible the impact of the planets and stars. ^ref-61055
\n
\n\n\nRoger Bacon, a Franciscan and the greatest scientist the Middle Ages produced, was expert in judicial or mundane astrology, which seeks to correlate planetary cycles and patterns with world events, and devoted to the study of “elections.” ^ref-64676
\n
\n\n\nAnother garbled astrological idea was that certain days in the month were automatically auspicious while others brought ill luck. These were sometimes presented in tabular form for reference, as in a table ascribed to Tycho Brahe, which he had supposedly left in a monastery wall on Hven. It contained thirty-two days in the year when “nothing important should be undertaken or brought to term.” ^ref-40417
\n
\n\n\nShakespeare is expert in astrology here, and letting the knowledgeable reader know that Edmund was born under just those aspects that in fact describe who he is—a perverse and degenerate soul. Unlike Sir Toby and Sir Andrew, Shakespeare had his astrology right. Edmund’s position is that of the modern “realist”: a person born with any other horoscope would be the same. That sounds perfectly sensible to us, because Edmund’s point of view is the respectable one today. But to Lear the disparate characters of his three daughters can only be explained by the astrological distinctions at their birth. “It is the stars / The stars above us,” he cries, “govern our conditions; / Else one self mate and make could not beget / Such different issues.” If Shakespeare had wanted to debunk astrology he would have given Edmund a wholly different chart. In sifting all this, it might be useful to remember Juliet’s famous lines: “What’s in a name? that which we call a rose / By any other name would smell as sweet.” Readers today tend to take that as common sense. But there, too, Shakespeare is playing another game. In the play, it turns out that there is a great deal in a name: in Verona, the names of “Montague” or “Capulet” could get you killed. As often as not, he is teaching the audience to rethink some common assumption they are prone to make. ^ref-43982
\n
\n\n\n“If you do but consider the whole universe,” he wrote, “as one united body, and man as an epitome of this body, it will seem strange to none but madmen and fools that the stars should have influence upon the body of man, considering he, be[ing] an epitome of the Creation, must needs have a celestial world written in himself…Every inferior world is governed by its superior, and receives influence from it.” ^ref-38112
\n
\n\n\nTwo years later, he published an important guide,The Astrological Judgment of Diseases, as well asA Directory for Midwives, with advice for women and mothers at every stage of their childbearing years. His magnum opus, however, appeared in 1653. This wasThe English Physician, or an Astrologo-physical Discourse on the Vulgar [Common] Herbs of This Nation, a compendious astrological primer for herbal cures. Known today asCulpeper’s Herbal, it is the only book in English other than the King James Bible from the 1600s that has been continually in print since it appeared. ^ref-25012
\n
\n\n\nthere is no fatal necessity in the stars; but that they rather incline than compel. We will add one thing more (wherein I shall certainly seem to take part with astrology, if it were reformed); that we are certain the celestial bodies have other influences besides light and heat. ^ref-9227
\n
\n\n\nIn an essay entitled “Of Celestial Influences or Effluviums in the Air,” he expressed his stubborn conviction that “celestial bodies (according to the angles they make upon one another, but especially with the sun or with the earth in our meridian, or with such and such other points in the heavens) may have a power to cause such…changes, and alterations…that shall at length be felt in every one of us.” ^ref-30807
\n
\n\n\nAt the same time, being wholly traditional in some things, Gadbury regarded comets as “beacons, whose use and office is to give warning to mankind of approaching dangers.” ^ref-39156
\n
\n\n\nThough death was his special dominion, he could also be right on other fronts. Eleven years before the defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo, Worsdale predicted that if Napoleon Bonaparte and the Duke of Wellington ever met in battle, Napoleon would lose. He thought so because Wellington’s tenth-house Jupiter was exactly conjunct the place occupied by Saturn in Napoleon’s chart. ^ref-58115
\n
\n\n\nTheir disposition, as to modest or vicious habits, very much depends on the positions and configurations of Mars, for, if he be separating from Saturn and Venus, and applying to Jupiter, men born at that time will be discreet and modest, decent in their intercourses with the other sex, and disposed only to the natural use. If Jupiter and Venus be configurated to Saturn and Mars, the native will be easily moved on, and have a secret desire to acts of venery; but will have an external show of chastity, and labor to avoid the shame. If Mars and Venus are alone configurated together, or if Jupiter bears testimony, the native will be openly lascivious, and indulge in the most luxuriant enjoyments of the opposite sex. ^ref-64467
\n
\n\n\nMethod of Thought? ^ref-54750
\n
\n\n\nWe can’t actually be aware unless we pay attention. No exceptions. Yes, awareness may require only minimal attention, but it does require some attention. Nothing happens quite automatically. We can’t be aware of something if we don’t attend to it. ^ref-9526
\n
\n\n\nWrite a checklist of steps to follow when making a diagnosis of a problem, be it a sick patient, a broken car, writer’s block, or whatever it is you face in your daily life, instead of trying to do it by so-called instinct. Checklists, formulas, structured procedures: those are your best bet—at least, according to Kahneman. ^ref-48942
\n
\n\n\nthese techno-boosters are at the same time reproducing some of the most atavistic features of American society, especially those derived from the bitter legacy of slavery. ^ref-59135
\n
\n\n\nbadly designed AI can harm vulnerable and marginalized groups even when it “works,” by subjecting them to new forms of data-gathering and surveillance and encoding historical patterns of discrimination into automated systems. ^ref-31475
\n
\n\n\nPaul R. Daugherty and H. James Wilson, two executives at the consulting firm Accenture, write in their book Human + Machine that human-AI collaborations will be a cornerstone of the twenty-first-century economy. “AI systems are not wholesale replacing us,” they write. “Rather, they are amplifying our skills and collaborating with us to achieve productivity gains that have previously not been possible.” ^ref-7964
\n
\n\n\nAccenture, the consulting firm, surveyed one thousand large corporations in 2018 and found that AI-related jobs were being created in three categories, which they called “trainers, explainers, and sustainers.” These are the people who help guide and oversee machines, explain the decisions made by algorithms to other humans, and do the messy work of integrating AI into corporate IT departments. ^ref-38695
\n
\n\n\nOne should shoot the subject from several different points and in varying positions in different photographs, as if encompassing it—not peer through one keyhole. Don’t make photo-pictures, make photo-moments of documentary (not artistic) value. ^ref-27110
\n
\n\n\nIt seems to me it would be pretty difficult to be a portrait photographer for customers who order and pay since, apart from a Maecenas or two, they want to be flattered, and the result is no longer real. ^ref-44744
\n
\n\n\nI am what time, circumstance, history, have made of me, certainly, but I am, also, much more than that. So are we all. ^ref-16622
\n
\n\n\nThe only real change vividly discernible in this present, unspeakably dangerous chaos is a panic-stricken apprehension on the part of those who have maligned and subjugated others for so long that the tables have been turned. Not once have the Civilized been able to honor, recognize, or describe the Savage. He is, practically speaking, the source of their wealth, his continued subjugation the key to their power and glory. ^ref-46425
\n
\n\n\nFor the morning writing, her ritual is to rise around 5
, make coffee, and “watch the light come.” This last part is crucial. “Writers all devise ways to approach that place where they expect to make the contact, where they become the conduit, or where they engage in this mysterious process,” Morrison said. “For me, light is the signal in the transaction. It’s not being in the light, it’s being there before it arrives. It enables me, in some sense.” ^ref-7127\n
\n\n\n“For each insight he wished to remember, he would pin a small piece of paper on a particular part of his clothes, which he would associate with the thought. When he returned home he would unpin these and write down each idea. At the ends of trips of several days, his clothes might be covered by quite a few of these slips of paper.” ^ref-29776
\n
\n\n\n“His beliefs don’t start with the idea that it’s okay to kid yourself you’re a special snowflake who deserves more cookies than all the other kids. It starts with the idea that it’s human nature to kid yourself and take the last cookie, so if he doesn’t, someone else will, so he had better be the most lavishly self-deluded of all, the most prolific taker of cookies, lest someone more horrible, immoral, and greedy than he gets there first and eats all the cookies, takes the plate, and charges rent to drink the milk.” ^ref-29500
\n
\n\n\n“Look, there are as many walkaway philosophies as there are walkaways, but mine is, ‘the stories you tell come true.’ If you believe everyone is untrustworthy, you’ll build that into your systems so that even the best people have to act like the worst people to get anything done. If you assume people are okay, you live a much happier life.” ^ref-38068
\n
\n\n\n“That’s the walkaway dilemma. If you take without giving, you’re a mooch. If you keep track of everyone else’s taking and giving, you’re a creep scorekeeper. It’s our version of Christian guilt—it’s impious to feel good about your piety. You have to want to be good, but not feel good about how good you are. The worst thing is to be worrying about what someone else is doing, because that has nothing to do with whether you’re doing right.” ^ref-9576
\n
\n\n\nWe both know plenty of read-only people who always say the same thing no matter what we say.” ^ref-49837
\n
\n\n\n“If you need to pay me to do math, that’s because a) you’ve figured out how to starve me unless I do a job, and b) you want me to do boring, stupid math with no intrinsic interest. A ‘job creator’ is someone who figures out how to threaten you with starvation unless you do something you don’t want to do. ^ref-21734
\n
\n\n\n“We have cultural as well as genetic traits. We pass them on. When we come up with a society like default, it selects for people who are wasteful jerks that succeed by stabbing their neighbors in the back, even though we’ve got a species-wide priority of not going extinct through environmental catastrophe, pandemic, and war.” ^ref-20711
\n
\n\n\n“I told myself I was making the world better. I thought there were ‘useful’ and ‘useless’ people and if you didn’t keep the useful people happy, the useless ones would starve. Of course I put myself in the useful group. I knew this important secret thing about useless and useful people, and if that’s not useful, what is? I told myself I was making more of everything for everyone. We just needed to let people who were worth the most do whatever they wanted. It was fucked up. I fucked up. That’s what I’m trying to say sorry for.” ^ref-19864
\n
\n\n\nBit by bit, she learned to surf the moods. She recognized the furies as phenomena separate from objective reality. They were real. She really felt them. They weren’t triggered by any real thing in the world where everyone else lived. They were private weather, hers to experience alone or share with others as she chose. She treasured her weather and harnessed her storms, turning into a dervish of productivity when the waves crested; using the troughs to retreat and work through troubling concepts. ^ref-8413
\n
\n\n\nPast that, he didn’t need any more money—so he’d stop working when he hit his “enough” amount and travel for the rest of the year. He didn’t want to grow his accounting business into a bigger company with employees and offices in every city. If he did, his “enough” number would also grow, from having to manage more employees and a bigger business. ^ref-4910
\n
\n\n\nIt’s assumed that hard work and smart thinking always result in business growth. But the opposite is often true: not all growth is beneficial, and some growth can actually reduce your resilience and your autonomy. ^ref-6684
\n
\n\n\nYou can scale up revenue, enjoyment, raving fans, focus, autonomy, and experiences while resisting the urge to blindly scale up employee payroll, expenses, and stress levels. ^ref-56189
\n
\n\n\nJust as Michael Pollan’s food ideology is summarized in three simple rules—“eat food, not too much, mostly plants”—the “company of one” model can be laid out in a similar fashion: “start small, define growth, and keep learning.” ^ref-27712
\n
\n\n\nThe research on most of these cannabinoids is still in its infancy. Even though these minor cannabinoids are typically present in much lower amounts in most cannabis varieties, they each play a role in the overall entourage effect. Just as background actors are important to the overall effect of a movie scene, the tiniest amount of a minor cannabinoid can boost the strength and power of the others. ^ref-20503
\n
\n\n\nSome say the scent you’re most attracted to is the one your body needs the most at that time. While I can’t prove this, I really like that idea. It’s like when you gravitate to or crave different vegetables or nutrients at different times, they might be something your body needs, nutritionally. With this in mind, it can be interesting to notice which scents you’re most attracted to when you visit a dispensary. ^ref-16748
\n
\n\n\nBut the presses were already rolling and the eight-column headline said: HELL’S ANGELS GANG RAPE. The Masons haven’t had that kind of publicity since the eighteenth century, when Casanova was climbing through windows and giving the brotherhood a bad name. Perhaps the Angels will one day follow the Freemasons into bourgeois senility, but by then some other group will be making outrage headlines: a Hovercraft gang, or maybe some once-bland fraternal group tooling up even now for whatever the future might force on them. ^ref-59418
\n
\n\n\nIf you were going to paint a landscape in fine, subtle watercolors, would you use a soft, flexible brush, or a cumbersome, unwieldy roller? A woman’s orgasm is complex and often elusive, and many men are unable to control their penises with enough precision to properly guide a woman through the stages of arousal. ^ref-33815
\n
\n\n\nIn Taoist sex practices, a woman’s vaginal secretions are considered an essential part of her “yin” energy, a libation that should be savored in the pursuit of yin/yang harmony and is referred to as “moon flower.” ^ref-23957
\n
\n\n\nAccording to the teachings of Tantra, a woman’s upper lip is considered one of the most erogenous areas on her body because of a special nerve that connects it to the clitoris, and is said to channel erotic energy. ^ref-14497
\n
\n\n\nNever, under any circumstances, blow into a woman’s vagina as though trying to fill it with air. Doing so is seriously dangerous. Blowing into a woman’s vagina may cause an embolism and lead to death. Breathe on her; blow lightly on her; never blow into her. ^ref-64784
\n
\n\n\nAs Kundera explains, the title, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, comes from a meditation on the philosophy of Nietzsche, who said that we should live every moment of our lives as though we were sentenced to repeat it over and over, forever and ever, for all eternity. We should live each moment as though we were creating an eternal, unchangeable work of art. ^ref-38364
\n
\n\n\nDuring the Edo period, the ruling samurai class protected the trees that grew in the Kiso valley. They were only to be cut for the houses and temples of the powerful families. The rule of one head for one tree was brought in – which meant, as you have no doubt correctly guessed, that if you cut down a tree, your head would be cut off. ^ref-45535
\n
\n\n\nEvergreens like pine trees, cedars, spruces and conifers are the largest producers of phytoncides. We will look more at what the forest smells like in the next chapter. For now, it will be enough to explain that the main components of phytoncides are terpenes, and these are what you can smell when you do shinrin-yoku in the forest. The major terpenes are: D-limonene – which smells, you guessed it, lemony Alpha-pinene – this is the most common terpene in nature and has a very fresh, piney scent Beta-pinene – smells more herby, like basil or dill Camphene – which has a turpentiney, resinous smell ^ref-34768
\n
\n\n\nBullshit is not a modern invention. In one of his Socratic dialogues, Euthydemus, Plato complains that the philosophers known as the Sophists are indifferent to what is actually true and are interested only in winning arguments. ^ref-41835
\n
\n\n\nIt just makes sense that motorcycles and camping go hand in hand. The same sensory connection to the world we get from motorcycling—the same elements we love, of being in the wind and leaning through the curves—can take place around camp. This both adds to your motorcycle adventures and contributes an entirely new passion to the mix. ^ref-29222
\n
\n\n\nI like to set up camp in a way that creates the perfect opening scene to the movie I am recording as a memory. I place the bike just right, against a beautiful vista as a backdrop, noting where the sun will make its first appearance and angling my tent in an ideal way. This is like a gift for me to open in the morning. ^ref-4396
\n
\n\n\nThey can be found by either checking with the land management bureau or by venturing into a national forest and turning down a dirt road to search for one. Word of mouth is another great way to find these; talk to locals and others camping in the area to find out the best spots. ^ref-18277
\n
\n\n\nMake sure you are covering the common roadside troubles, that are not only likely but also possible to fix on the side of the road. The most likely problems to encounter are tire punctures, broken chains, fuses, batteries, cables (brake and clutch), and fouled spark plugs. ^ref-7062
\n
\n\n\nThis ice is especially dangerous on a motorcycle as you will have little to no control over the motorcycle when riding over it. The best course of action other than avoiding it completely, is to remain calm, avoid changes in speed or direction, and keep the bike as straight up as possible while passing over it. ^ref-25684
\n
\n\n\nHow and when-did gods and humans become separated? Where did Indians get certain important elements in their daily life—foodstuffs like salt or corn, animals like the buffalo or horse, religious artifacts and ceremonies? Why are men and women different, and when did the separation take place? Where did the different races come from? How did evil enter the world? What is death and how does it move in and out of life? ^ref-63800
\n
\n\n\n“All living things,” one Sioux elder says, “are tied together with a common navel cord”—the tall mountains and streams, the corn and the grazing buffalo, the bravest hero and the deceitful Coyote. ^ref-34319
\n
\n\n\nAnd at the spot where they had burned First Mother’s bones, there grew another plant, broad-leafed and fragrant. It was First Mother’s breath, and they heard her spirit talking: “Burn this up and smoke it. It is sacred. It will clear your minds, help your prayers, and gladden your hearts.” ^ref-33444
\n
\n\n\nAmong the Cheyenne there were certain medicine men of extraordinary wisdom and superhuman powers. Sometimes they would come together and put up a lodge. Sitting in a large circle, they chanted and went through curious rituals, after which each man rose and performed wonders before the crowd. ^ref-20043
\n
\n\n\nThe Tsis-tsistas people have danced the great medicine dance for a long, long time, longer than anyone can remember or even imagine. The dance represents the making of this universe and was conceived and taught to the people by the Creator, Maheo, and his helper, Great Roaring Thunder. It portrays the making of the sun, moon, and stars; of rain, wind, and snow; of Grandmother Earth and the blue sky above her; of the mountains and rivers; of all living things, big and small. The dance is performed especially in times of starvation, distress, and widespread death. ^ref-5489
\n
\n\n\nOne night she said: “How is this? You made me run away with you, but you never approach me as man approaches woman. Why did you make me go with you, then?” He answered: “We must abstain from embracing until we enter the great mountain of the north and receive the sacred medicine dance. After we emerge from the mountain, I shall embrace you in a renewal-of-all-life ceremony by which people will continue to be born, generation after generation, through the woman-power of perpetuation.” ^ref-5637
\n
\n\n\nThe white ear of corn had become the man, the yellow ear the woman, First Man and First Woman. It was the wind that gave them life, and it is the wind that comes out of our mouths now that gives us life. When this ceases to blow, we die. ^ref-18929
\n
\n\n\nSo Old Man went back to his camp and told the men what he had seen. When they heard about all the useful and beautiful things the women had, the men said: “Let’s go over there and get together with these different human beings.” “It’s not only those things that are worth having,” said Old Man. “There’s something else—a very pleasurable thing I plan on creating.” ^ref-36110
\n
\n\n\n“With this holy pipe,” she said, “you will walk like a living prayer. With your feet resting upon the earth and the pipestem reaching into the sky, your body forms a living bridge between the Sacred Beneath and the Sacred Above. Wakan Tanka smiles upon us, because now we are as one: earth, sky, all living things, the two-legged, the four-legged, the winged ones, the trees, the grasses. Together with the people, they are all related, one family. The pipe holds them all together. ^ref-8033
\n
\n\n\nthe one holy object in the making of which both men and women have a hand. The men carve the bowl and make the stem; the women decorate it with bands of colored porcupine quills. When a man takes a wife, they both hold the pipe at the same time and red trade cloth is wound around their hands, thus tying them together for life. ^ref-32391
\n
\n\n\nHe grew up into a fine young hunter, tall and good-looking in the quilled buckskin outfit the chief’s wife made for him. He helped his grandfather in everything and became a staff for Good Running to lean on. ^ref-29942
\n
\n\n\nBut nawak’osis made them powerful and wise and clear-minded, and they did not want to share it with others. They planted the sacred weed in a secret place that only they knew. They guarded the songs and prayers and rituals that went with smoking. They formed a Tobacco Society, just the four of them. So there was anger, there was war, there was restlessness of spirit, there was impiety. Nawak’osis was meant to calm anger, to make men worship, to make peace, to ease the mind. But without the sacred herb, unity and peace were lacking. ^ref-58809
\n
\n\n\n“Well, you did find out one thing,” said the older of the two, who was his uncle. “You went after your vision like a hunter after buffalo, or a warrior after scalps. You were fighting the spirits. You thought they owed you a vision. Suffering alone brings no vision nor does courage, nor does sheer will power. A vision comes as a gift born of humility, of wisdom, and of patience. If from your vision quest you have learned nothing but this, then you have already learned much. Think about it.” ^ref-59634
\n
\n\n\nMy side hurts. A stitch? Kidney disease? Appendicitis? Cancer? It’s been hurting for some time now. On and off. When it stops hurting, I forget about it, focus on some other pain. Then it comes back and I think, Why is it coming back? I should go to a doctor but I don’t want to know if something is wrong. It would only hasten my demise. I would feel hopeless, give up. I know this. I wouldn’t be able to work. I need to work. It is the thing that keeps me alive, this hope that the next thing will be the one to get me noticed. It is always the next one. ^ref-39186
\n
\n\n\nEVELYN, WHOM I loved once upon a time, who is gone, with whom there was a chance of something human, if such a thing was ever possible in my existence—Evelyn, who is long gone, who, even now, I think perhaps today will call, but she doesn’t, she won’t, she can’t, she doesn’t want to, she’s no longer interested, she’s dead, she’s laughing right now with somebody else, she’s old and unattractive, she’s still amazingly youthful, she doesn’t think of me at all, she went back to school and now she’s a psychologist, a lawyer, the head of acquisitions for an art museum. There’s no way to know. ^ref-57487
\n
\n\n\nI sigh and treat myself to a smallish break to check email. To check Facebook. To check Twitter. To check the various Internet sites I frequent: Clipboard, Chapstick, Nimrod, William’s Anomalies, Punching Bag, The Clerk Report, Peptide, Hollywood Blabb, Pimbleton’s, Work-a-Doodle, Chim-Chim-Cheree, Poli-Techs, Boop Archives, and Ladies Only. ^ref-29574
\n
\n\n\nIN MY APARTMENT, I check Poems and Curios. No comments. Then, for the purpose of convincing him, I try to google biblical passages about a black man letting a white man see a miniature city. There’s not that much. I do find a thing in Luke saying you should give to anyone who asks, but it’s not specific enough (not to mention it’s from Luke, the most namby-pamby of the gospels). Ideally, the passage would say something like, Show thy crafts to those in need of seeing them, so sayeth the Lord. But there is nothing even close. So much for finding all the answers in the Bible. ^ref-42124
\n
\n\n\nTo program a drumbeat is to align an external rhythmic device to an individual’s biorhythm. ^ref-19092
\n
\n\n\nTrigger sound. Trigger gun. Drum machine. Machine gun. ^ref-52402
\n
\n\n\nThe wind plays the world like an instrument. Blows through trees like flutes. But trees won’t grow in cement. And as heart beats bring percussion fallen trees bring repercussions. Cities play upon our souls like broken drums. ^ref-5228
\n
\n\n\nSlaves to city streets. Where hearts get broken when heartbeats stop. Broken heartbeats become break-beats for NGHs to rhyme on top. ^ref-50923
\n
\n\n\nNGH WHT, I represent the truth you claim to be. The hero of the eastern sky, the storm’s eye, westerly. Rough, rugged, raw, eternal law recited over beats. Some poetry to oversee the dance floor and the streets. ^ref-48845
\n
\n\n\nI am no earthling. I drink moonshine on Mars and mistake meteors for stars ’cause I can’t hold my liquor. But I can hold my breath and ascend like wind to the black hole and play galaxophones on the fire escape of your soul. ^ref-43771
\n
\n\n\nAs is the science of the aroma of sleeping women.” ^ref-43683
\n
\n\n\nIn the beginning her tears were the long awaited rains of a parched Somali village. Red dusted children danced shadows in the newfound mounds of mascara that eclipsed her face, reflected in the smogged glass of Carlos’ East Street bodega. ^ref-15019
\n
\n\n\nBeneath the surface of our purpose lies rumor of ancient rain. Dressed in cloud-face, minstrels the sky. The moon’s my mammy. The storm holds my eye. ^ref-31213
\n
\n\n\nThe pipe is a kind of portable altar, and when it’s lighted it’s not being smoked for fun, typically, but as a sacred act. When it is lighted the incense is, as it were, going to heaven. The pipe stem is lifted so that the sun smokes first, then it’s addressed to the four quarters so you know where you are: the central mountain is right here, which is everywhere. And the celebrant smokes and then the pipe is passed around. This orientation of the quarters, I guess one could say, is the basic high cultural myth form: the center, the quarters. And then wherever you go: find the center. That establishes the sacred point, where the high point is, and then you have the four quarters. ^ref-37052
\n
\n\n\nAnd yet this other thing had been built in. The problem was to work it out without losing the symbols. Joyce helped release me into an understanding of the universal sense of these symbols, the deep human sense. Not the anecdotal historical symbolization of the sense of these great universal symbols that come to us through our Christian heritage. But on the wings of art, an opening out of a mythological reading of these symbols. ^ref-65380
\n
\n\n\nReading what you want, and having one book lead to the next, is the way I found my discipline. I’ve suggested this to many of my students: When you find a writer who really is saying something to you, read everything that writer has written and you will get more education and depth of understanding out of that than reading a scrap here and a scrap there and elsewhere. Then go to people who influenced that writer, or those who were related to him, and your world builds together in an organic way that is really marvelous. Whereas the way these things are taught normally in college and school is a sampler of what this one wrote and that one wrote and you’re asked to be more interested in the date of the publication of Keats’s sonnets than in what’s in them. ^ref-45450
\n
\n\n\nAnd I didn’t have to write a thesis. I didn’t have to write anything. All I did was underline sentences and take notes. It’s funny, I spent about forty years taking notes—I have fourteen file drawers packed full of notes—and I never bother with them now anymore. The thing comes in that way. ^ref-43271
\n
\n\n\nCAMPBELL: An artist is not in the field to achieve, to realize, but to become fulfilled. It’s a life-fulfilling, totally different structure. ^ref-31755
\n
\n\n\nYet they often concluded that “rioting” was a pathological impulse, rooted in spontaneous, uncontrollable emotion. In this view, the “riots” were ultimately counter-productive: the violence only alienated allies and intensified anti-Black sentiment. ^ref-54936
\n
\n\n\nThe 1968 legislation, with its additional $400 million outlay (or about $3 billion today) for crime control, allowed cities to flood with police those urban areas that seemed prone to rebellion. By 1970, federal policymakers had allocated some $40 million worth (or about $300 million today) of military-grade equipment for local law enforcement. ^ref-53027
\n
\n\n\nThey looked back on the heyday of the civil rights movement, and they looked at the conditions they were currently living in, with police watching them from the other side of the park, and they rebelled. ^ref-40007
\n
\n\n\nThe national strategy set the tone, even in places that did not receive federal funds. Policing became more aggressive and intrusive in Black communities everywhere. Police often claimed to be responding to a tip, which the newspapers later reported to justify the officers’ actions and their presence in the community in the first place. ^ref-31253
\n
\n\n\nUnderlying data feminism is a belief in and commitment to co-liberation: the idea that oppressive systems of power harm all of us, that they undermine the quality and validity of our work, and that they hinder us from creating true and lasting social impact with data science. ^ref-16557
\n
\n\n\nData feminism requires us to challenge the gender binary, along with other systems of counting and classification that perpetuate oppression. ^ref-33662
\n
\n\n\nSo what were these complications, more precisely? And how many women had actually died as a result? Nobody was counting. A 2014 United Nations report, coauthored by SisterSong, described the state of data collection on maternal mortality in the United States as “particularly weak.” ^ref-24631
\n
\n\n\nThe chief of the CDC’s Maternal and Infant Health branch, William Callaghan, makes the significance of this “embarrassing” data more clear: “What we choose to measure is a statement of what we value in health,” he explains.7 We might edit his statement to add that it’s a measure of who we value in health, too.8 ^ref-53282
\n
\n\n\nExamining power means naming and explaining the forces of oppression that are so baked into our daily lives—and into our datasets, our databases, and our algorithms—that we often don’t even see them. ^ref-1470
\n
\n\n\nThe civil rights, psychedelic, women’s rights, ecology, and antiwar movements all contributed to the emergence of a counterculture that rejected many of America’s cherished postwar ideals. ^ref-41906
\n
\n\n\nThe computer technologies that we take for granted today owe their shape to this unruly period, which was defined by protest, experimentation with drugs, countercultural community, and a general sense of anarchic idealism. ^ref-25910
\n
\n\n\nStewart Brand has argued in his essay “We Owe It All to the Hippies” that “the counterculture’s scorn for centralized authority provided the philosophical foundations of not only the leaderless Internet but also the entire personal-computer revolution.” ^ref-41020
\n
\n\n\ntechnophiles. Some espoused an antitechnology, back-to-the-land philosophy. Others believed that better tools could lead to social progress. Brand’s tool-centric worldview, epitomized by one of the decade’s most popular and influential books, the Whole Earth Catalog (1968), made the case that technology could be harnessed for more democratic and decentralized uses. The catalog ultimately helped shape the view of an entire generation, which came to believe that computing technologies could be used in the service of such goals as political revolution and safeguarding the environment. ^ref-46865
\n
\n\n\nThe methods used for valuing life depend on the purpose of the costing, what exactly the costs are meant to represent, and the perspective taken for the costing. ^ref-42592
\n
\n\n\nThis book uses a broad set of examples to explain a few critical points: (1) that price tags are routinely placed on human lives, (2) that these price tags have major ramifications on our lives, (3) that these price tags are often neither transparent nor fair, and (4) that this lack of fairness is critical since undervalued lives are left underprotected and more exposed to risks than more highly valued lives. ^ref-7916
\n
\n\n\nThe analysis cliché of “garbage in, garbage out”45 truly holds for estimating the Value of a Statistical Life, yet these methods are used to produce price tags. Despite the fact that these price tags are flawed and illogical, they are regularly employed, with substantial real-world implications. ^ref-15925
\n
\n\n\nThe suggestion that a top hedge fund manager, earning over $100 million a year, adds one thousand or more times value to society, to his family, and to his loved ones than these other hardworking individuals is ridiculous. Relying on income to estimate the value of someone’s life produces this type of illogical conclusion, with its resulting immoral consequences. ^ref-44842
\n
\n\n\nEvery step along the way—from the criminal investigation to the last parole hearing or the execution—is open to judgment calls that provide opportunities for potential discrimination based on who the defendant is and who the victim was. Being impartial to the race, sex, lifestyle, socioeconomic class, and family status of the victim and the defendant is difficult, and consistent biases indicate that some lives are more valued, and consequently more protected, than others. ^ref-40564
\n
\n\n\nJustifiable homicide is the formal recognition that it is reasonable and legally acceptable for you to value your own life more than the life of someone who is threatening you with potentially fatal consequences. ^ref-42093
\n
\n\n\nBut the choice of being pro-tech industry or anti-tech is a false dilemma. The tech industry in its current form — with billion-dollar corporations, venture capitalists, and a few boy geniuses running the show — is not the only way of developing technology. ^ref-32988
\n
\n\n\nOf course, this instinct isn’t entirely misguided; more ethical founders would certainly be better than the status quo. But the problems go deeper than the idiosyncrasies of individuals. There’s a cold underlying rationality which corrupts the motives of even the most well-meaning, and in the absence of strong accountability mechanisms, individual ethics can only go so far. Ultimately the problem is structural, and the solutions will need to be structural, too. ^ref-22208
\n
\n\n\nCapitalism requires a particular social arrangement which takes advantage of divisions that predate capitalism, including those based on race, gender, geography, and other accidents of birth. ^ref-55110
\n
\n\n\nA society where most people are subject to the whims of unimaginably powerful technology corporations isn’t so bad if you’re an executive at one of those corporations. ^ref-46115
\n
\n\n\nArenberg ends his book by linking Congress’s current failures back to the fundamentals of democracy. He argues, as I would, that “Our democratic process operates on the assumption that both parties will come to the table and negotiate in good faith. Congress must negotiate, moderate, and compromise. In other words, ‘legislate.’” ^ref-30463
\n
\n\n\nYou see things vacationing on a motorcycle in a way that is completely different from any other. In a car you’re always in a compartment, and because you’re used to it you don’t realize that through that car window everything you see is just more TV. You’re a passive observer and it is all moving by you boringly in a frame. On a cycle the frame is gone. ^ref-57816
\n
\n\n\nThe truth knocks on the door and you say, “Go away, I’m looking for the truth,” and so it goes away. Puzzling. But once we caught on, of course, nothing could keep us off these ^ref-13506
\n
\n\n\nand then, with the trees behind her a deep green, ^ref-57668
\n
\n\n\non a cycle you’re in the scene, not just watching it, and storms are definitely part of it. ^ref-51805
\n
\n\n\nWhen you want to hurry something, that means you no longer care about it and want to get on to other things. ^ref-50797
\n
\n\n\nIt’s just a feeling. On a cycle you trust them and we stay at fifty-five. ^ref-28092
\n
\n\n\nEVERY CHAUTAUQUA SHOULD HAVE A LIST SOMEWHERE OF valuable things to remember that can be kept in some safe place for times of future need and inspiration. Details. ^ref-38943
\n
\n\n\n“This is the hardest stuff in the world to photograph. You need a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree lens, or something. You see it, and then you look down in the ground glass and it’s just nothing. As soon as you put a border on it, it’s gone.” ^ref-12887
\n
\n\n\nDespite its so-called progress, our modern society tends to look back to a simpler time, even though pioneer days were probably harder and more isolated than life today. This yearning isn’t nostalgia, which is a longing for an airbrushed memory. It is a genuine subconscious draw to knowledge that has been obscured by innovation, progress, and improvement. We don’t need to remove or reverse modern innovation and give up our sidewalks and television sets and computers. What we need to do is discover how to connect in our modern environment to that earlier knowledge that is waiting for us to find it again. ^ref-47217
\n
\n\n\nWhereas alternative religions promote the idea that humanity is a steward or custodian of the planet, the green witch understands that she is the manifestation of the earth itself, not merely a caretaker. That close sense of identification allows her to work in partnership with the earth’s energies. ^ref-59239
\n
\n\n\nIf you live in Massachusetts, for example, and then move to New Mexico, your practice will shift as you adapt to your new environment, the new flora and fauna around you, and the new energies of the landscape. You yourself will adapt as well. As you settle into a new relationship with the earth as it manifests in New Mexico, you will discover yourself evolving to reflect it in a different fashion than you reflected the environment of Massachusetts. ^ref-12424
\n
\n\n\nyou carry a sacred responsibility not only to watch over the harmony of your environment, but also to remember that, as author Poppy Palin says in Craft of the Wild Witch, “every positive gesture has the potential to become a spell.” ^ref-39055
\n
\n\n\nThere are seven basic areas or energies on which the green witch’s practice focuses: 1. Harmony: within the self; between humanity and nature; between individuals; within a community or family 2. Health: of the body, mind, and spirit; of the immediate natural environment; of the larger environment 3. Love: for the self; for other individuals; for humanity 4. Happiness: in oneself; in others; in the natural world 5. Peace: within oneself; within a community or family; between factions; between nations 6. Abundance: personal; familial; community; nation; nature; also includes prosperity and fertility, both of which are aspects of abundance 7. Protection: personal; familial; community; nature ^ref-37369
\n
\n\n\nLoving others is an example of honoring and respecting nature and all nature’s creatures: it is an act of honoring their very existence and their place within nature’s energy. ^ref-23134
\n
\n\n\nRecording what you learn and do means that your information will probably be organized by date. You will thus remember and understand what you did when and why; the journal provides a context for your evolution. Don’t worry about the apparent mishmash of subjects you write about. ^ref-59423
\n
\n\n\nIf you live in an urban setting, then that city’s energy is the energy to which you must open yourself in order to be in tune with your neighborhood and your environment. It is crucial to interact with your natural environment as it actually is, not the nature you imagine or idealize. ^ref-35323
\n
\n\n\n• How do the seasons change where you live? What changes can you see and feel? • What influence does the moon have on you? What is the phase of the moon right now? • What wild plants are common to your neighborhood? Name at least ten local plants. • Of those ten plants, which are indigenous to your area and which were imported? When were they imported and by whom? • What trees are most commonly found in your neighborhood? Again, which are indigenous and which were deliberately introduced? When and by whom? • What wildlife is native to your area? • Is the water that’s channeled to your tap hard or soft? • What type of soil does your neighborhood have? Is it chalky, clay, sandy, or other? Is it alkaline or acidic? ^ref-36435
\n
\n\n\nTry Stuff. When you have a bias to action, you are committed to building your way forward. There is no sitting on the bench just thinking about what you are going to do. There is only getting in the game. Designers try things. They test things out. They create prototype after prototype, failing often, until they find what works and what solves the problem. ^ref-27991
\n
\n\n\nA well-designed life is a marvelous portfolio of experiences, of adventures, of failures that taught you important lessons, of hardships that made you stronger and helped you know yourself better, and of achievements and satisfactions. ^ref-13551
\n
\n\n\nThe answer is that the artist rarely has a specific goal in mind when he begins work, so that the process of visualization is actually the search for a goal rather than the attainment of one. ^ref-31416
\n
\n\n\nLike a magnetized needle floating on a surface of oil, Resistance will unfailingly point to true North — meaning that calling or action it most wants to stop us from doing. We can use this. We can use it as a compass. We can navigate by Resistance, letting it guide us to that calling or action that we must follow before all others. Rule of thumb: The more important a call or action is to our soul's evolution, the more Resistance we will feel toward pursuing it. ^ref-59828
\n
\n\n\nOften couples or close friends, even entire families, will enter into tacit compacts whereby each individual pledges (unconsciously) to remain mired in the same slough in which she and all her cronies have become so comfortable. The highest treason a crab can commit is to make a leap for the rim of the bucket. ^ref-29799
\n
\n\n\nWhen we drug ourselves to blot out our soul's call, we are being good Americans and exemplary consumers. We're doing exactly what TV commercials and pop materialist culture have been brainwashing us to do from birth. Instead of applying self-knowledge, self-discipline, delayed gratification and hard work, we simply consume a product. Many pedestrians have been maimed or killed at the intersection of Resistance and Commerce. ^ref-45319
\n
\n\n\nThe professional concentrates on the work and allows rewards to come or not come, whatever they like. ^ref-25758
\n
\n\n\nNow consider the amateur: the aspiring painter, the wannabe playwright. How does he pursue his calling? One, he doesn't show up every day. Two, he doesn't show up no matter what. Three, he doesn't stay on the job all day. He is not committed over the long haul; the stakes for him are illusory and fake. He does not get money. And he overidentifies with his art. He does not have a sense of humor about failure. You don't hear him bitching, \"This fucking trilogy is killing me!\" Instead, he doesn't write his trilogy at all. ^ref-53525
\n
\n\n\nThe professional cannot live like that. He is on a mission. He will not tolerate disorder. He eliminates chaos from his world in order to banish it from his mind. He wants the carpet vacuumed and the threshold swept, so the Muse may enter and not soil her gown. ^ref-54711
\n
\n\n\nWhy have I stressed professionalism so heavily in the preceding chapters? Because the most important thing about art is to work. Nothing else matters except sitting down every day and trying. Why is this so important? Because when we sit down day after day and keep grinding, something mysterious starts to happen. A process is set into motion by which, inevitably and infallibly, heaven comes to our aid. Unseen forces enlist in our cause; serendipity reinforces our purpose. This is the other secret that real artists know and wannabe writers don't. When we sit down each day and do our work, power concentrates around us. The Muse takes note of our dedication. She approves. We have earned favor in her sight. When we sit down and work, we become like a magnetized rod that attracts iron filings. Ideas come. Insights accrete. ^ref-50092
\n
\n\n\nHere's Socrates, in Plato's Phaedrus, on the \"noble effect of heaven-sent madness\": The third type of possession and madness is possession by the Muses. When this seizes upon a gentle and virgin soul it rouses it to inspired expression in lyric and other sorts of poetry, and glorifies countless deeds of the heroes of old for the instruction of posterity. But if a man comes to the door of poetry untouched by the madness of the Muses, believing that technique alone will make him a good poet, he and his sane compositions never reach perfection, but are utterly eclipsed by the performances of the inspired madman. ^ref-56831
\n
\n\n\nIn so many photographs of Pepi or my father or me is a certain quality of mugging hungrily, of pretty-boyness (me till I was twelve, my father deep into middle age—“Your dad is a really distinguished-looking man!”—Schildkraut until he was dead), of stilted posedness, of on-your-knees-before-the-camera obsequiousness, of needing to be liked by the lens, of peasant smilingness, of overreliance upon previous modes of appearing in pictures…. ^ref-21582
\n
\n\n\nI thought I was sneezing because I’d finally developed an allergy to Rachel, whereas Rachel, who’d learned all about psychosomatic disorders when she was in analysis, assumed I was sneezing because I’d developed an allergy to my family, whereas it turned out I’d developed an allergy to the dust I’d encountered the night before, searching for my suitcase in the basement. ^ref-13340
\n
\n\n\nHer goal seemed to be to burn images of herself into my retina forever. Mission accomplished: I could never tell how much genuine feeling there was in her brilliant performance, and yet I still have quite specific sense-memories of these events, which occurred more than thirty years ago. Humankind cannot bear very much reality. ^ref-61520
\n
\n\n\nThe arrogance implied in believing that one’s beauty can afford to be concealed is entrancing. By contrast, people not wearing glasses sometimes seem preposterously accessible, uncomplicated, unmysterious, trampy. ^ref-1524
\n
\n\n\n“You should sweat like you’re being chased by the police daily.” ^ref-36739
\n
\n\n\nWhen deal-making, ask yourself: Can I trade a short-term, incremental gain for a potential longer-term, game-changing upside? Is there an element here that might be far more valuable in 5 to 10 years (e.g., ebook rights 10 years ago)? Might there be rights or options I can explicitly “carve out” and keep? If you can cap the downside (time, capital, etc.) and have the confidence, take uncrowded bets on yourself. You only need one winning lottery ticket. ^ref-1712
\n
\n\n\n“How to thrive in an unknowable future? Choose the plan with the most options. The best plan is the one that lets you change your plans.” ^ref-24178
\n
\n\n\nBeing busy is most often used as a guise for avoiding the few critically important but uncomfortable actions. ^ref-20690
\n
\n\n\nI now often ask myself, “Is this really a problem I need to think my way out of? Or is it possible I just need to fix my biochemistry?” ^ref-53955
\n
\n\n\nHow can you make your bucket-list dreams pay for themselves by sharing them? This is, in effect, how I’ve crafted my entire career since 2004. It’s modeled after Ben Franklin’s excellent advice: “If you would not be forgotten as soon as you are dead and rotten, either write things worth reading, or do things worth writing.” ^ref-47879
\n
\n\n\n“My suggestion is, whenever possible, ask yourself: What’s the smallest possible footprint I can get away with? What is the smallest possible project that is worth my time? What is the smallest group of people who I could make a difference for, or to? Because smallest is achievable. Smallest feels risky. Because if you pick smallest and you fail, now you’ve really screwed up. “We want to pick big. Infinity is our friend. Infinity is safe. Infinity gives us a place to hide. So, I want to encourage people instead to look for the small. To be on one medium in a place where people can find you. To have one sort of interaction with one tribe, with one group where you don’t have a lot of lifeboats.” ^ref-20092
\n
\n\n\nFrom Time Enough for Love: “A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.” ^ref-13602
\n
\n\n\nXerxes listens patiently, but objects that “if you were to take account of everything . . . , you would never do anything. It is better to have a brave heart and endure one half of the terrors we dread than to [calculate] all of the terrors and suffer nothing at all. . . . Big things are won by big dangers.” ^ref-17527
\n
\n\n\nIn an effort to determine the roots of accuracy and inaccuracy in forecasting, the American political psychologist Philip E. Tetlock and his assistants collected 27,451 predictions on world politics between 1988 and 2003 from 284 “experts” in universities, governments, think tanks, foundations, international institutions, and the media. Replete with tables, graphs, and equations, Tetlock’s 2005 book, Expert Political Judgment, reports the findings of this most rigorous study ever done on why some people get the future right and others don’t. ^ref-51842
\n
\n\n\nStartled by this outcome, Tetlock sought what distinguished his foxes from his hedgehogs. The foxes relied, for their predictions, on an intuitive “stitching together [of] diverse sources of information,” not on deductions derived from “grand schemes.” They doubted “that the cloudlike subject of politics” could ever be “the object of a clocklike science.” The best of them “shared a self-deprecating style of thinking” that “elevate[d] no thought above criticism.” ^ref-61642
\n
\n\n\nTaking an idea, a central point, and pursuing it, turning it into a story that tells something about the way we live today, is the essence of narrative journalism. ^ref-60575
\n
\n\n\nYou don’t “hype up” in the wake of tragedy. You underwrite, letting the events speak for themselves. ^ref-7657
\n
\n\n\nWhen you find a reporter whose work you admire, break his or her code. Examine the story and figure out what the reporter did, where he or she went, how that reporter constructed the story, and why it worked. ^ref-21443
\n
\n\n\nIt is just as unsatisfactory to constantly underrate yourself as it is to give yourself too much credit. ^ref-26442
\n
\n\n\nThinking too much about the present will lead you to ask the wrong questions about the past. Take the past on its own terms, not on ours. ^ref-20013
\n
\n\n\nYou need to provide readers two things in this sort of journalism: a detailed picture of the social setting and at least some insight into the psychology of the principals. I think of the setting as a horizontal plane and the individual as a vertical plane. The line created by their intersection—there lies the story. ^ref-46601
\n
\n\n\nI write in the first person a lot. The “I” in my stories is the reader’s proxy. My great ambition is to take readers out of their comfort zones and put them in positions of discomfort. I want them to see and smell and taste and touch and hear the things that I did in their place as the reporter. ^ref-58294
\n
\n\n\nSome people hallucinate text or music. But by far the commonest hallucinations are the geometrical ones: squares, checkerboards, rhomboids, quadrangles, hexagons, bricks, walls, tiles, tessellations, honeycombs, mosaics. ^ref-13303
\n
\n\n\nIn the last decade or two, Dominic ffytche and his colleagues in London have done pioneering research on the neural basis of visual hallucinations. Based on the detailed reports of dozens of subjects, they developed a taxonomy of hallucinations, including categories like figures with hats, children or small people, landscapes, vehicles, grotesque faces, text, and cartoonlike faces. (This taxonomy is described in a 2000 paper by Santhouse et al.) ^ref-57663
\n
\n\n\nThey also found themselves unable to sustain and organize in the long term in a manner proportional to the energy they had been able to attract initially and the legitimacy they enjoyed in their demands. Having arisen so suddenly and grown so quickly, they hit their first curve requiring agile tactical shifts at great speeds, with little or no prior experience in collective decision making and little resilience. Thus, they often faced greatest peril in their infancy when they were both powerful and large, but also underprepared and fragile. ^ref-31623
\n
\n\n\nThroughout the eighteen days of the initial Tahrir uprising, I turned on the television only once, wanting to see how networks were covering the historic moment of Mubarak’s resignation. CNN was broadcasting an aerial shot of the square. The camera shot from far above the square was jarring because I had been following it all on Twitter, person by person, each view necessarily incomplete but also intimate. On television, all I could see was an undifferentiated mass of people, an indistinct crowd. It felt cold and alienating. The television pictures did not convey how today’s networked protests operate or feel. ^ref-65012
\n
\n\n\nJealousy at once bred with rage inside of me, and made such an inward clamour that I heard the next bit of the conversation as through a hailstorm. ^ref-13643
\n
\n\n\nWhen you just wing it, you are aware of the risk and the uncertainty, and inclined to be more cautious. When you have a high-tech tool giving you an illusion of omniscience, I am concerned that it will lead to greater risk-taking. ^ref-48724
\n
\n\n\nIt was classic witch real estate: close enough to the village to allow commerce and social contacts but sufficiently remote to afford separation and privacy. ^ref-6299
\n
\n\n\nThe conventionally accepted explanation for this is that storytellers have a power of imagination that makes them good at inventing counterfactual narratives. In the light of everything we’ve learned about Strands at DODO, however, we can now see an alternate explanation, which is that storytellers are doing a kind of low-level magic. Their “superpower” isn’t imagining counterfactuals, but rather seeing across parallel Strands and perceiving things that actually did (or might) happen in alternate versions of reality. ^ref-54483
\n
\n\n\nFor surely the destruction of magic is not only bad for witches, but bad for Ireland and such like nations that are relying heavily on magic for self-defense from oppressors. ^ref-27682
\n
\n\n\n“For each district of the treasure-town, A Roman rune written, raised high For each lane lying below it, An Arabic number to know it. “South face the glass gates; the fat fool Northward led me, shouldering them aside Greeting a guard, vested in blue, Scarcely strength to stand had that old ogre. “To our right, ranks of clashing carts Waiting to be wheeled and weighed down By Fatlanders too frail for fardels. Sight-seers only, we spurned these. “Till-keepers’ tables cluttered our view. Beyond them, still north-questing, Kiosks and cairns covered the place, Towers of trifles. ^ref-43616
\n
\n\n\nScience has brought good and evil to the table, in equal measure. I have watched that happen. To have the world without scientific developments is not to have a better world or a worse world—just a different world from the one we know.” ^ref-3448
\n
\n\n\nThe essence of the city is its people. By their actions and interactions they determine the shape it assumes, the flow of its daily life, and the aspirations and dreams it has. ^ref-44298
\n
\n\n\nBronx. An interesting statistic charts their progress. In 1985 New York City had one tortilla store; by 2001 Mexicans owned six tortilla factories, with a combined weekly output of one million tortillas, all produced in the “Tortilla Triangle,” a small slice of Brooklyn between Bushwick and Williamsburg. ^ref-44137
\n
\n\n\nYou can hear German music in Glendale; Irish ballads in the Woodlawn section of the Bronx; do the polka in a Greenpoint, Brooklyn, Polish club; and attend a Jewish music festival in Flatbush, Brooklyn, where men and women sit separately, as required by their religious beliefs. What is distinctive about the city is the variety. It’s almost as though you don’t have to travel to another country, because so many cultures are represented in one place. And each of these places welcomes outsiders. ^ref-14595
\n
\n\n\nNo one standing there claimed to know what the altercation was about, but since neither of the combatants seemed to be getting seriously hurt, the crowd simply stood and watched as though it were a prearranged match designed for the pleasure of the local residents. ^ref-37867
\n
\n\n\nOne of the most unusual sports in New York is rooftop pigeon flying. In the past this activity was engaged in primarily by Italians and other white males, hailing mostly from Brooklyn and Queens. Today’s flyers are predominantly African American and Puerto Rican. What’s interesting is that the remaining older white ethnics mingle with the minorities and develop relationships across group boundaries through this activity. All this is chronicled by Colin Jerolmack, who spent three years studying the group in Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant and Bushwick neighborhoods.15 ^ref-38537
\n
\n\n\nVon Briesen was a big supporter of democratic ideals, believing that immigrants would become better citizens if treated fairly, and with that in mind he created the German Legal Aid Society in 1876. This eventually morphed into the famous Legal Aid Society that has lasted until this very day and helps thousands of indigent people in New York City every year. What unites these two activities is a concern for both the unprotected trees and flowers and the indigent. What makes this story relevant for our purposes is that, based on my own observations, the park elevates the social lives of residents and others by providing a beautiful setting for walking and socializing. ^ref-14683
\n
\n\n\nThe crown jewel of what nature has to offer in New York City is Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge, which is also a great recreational site. It’s part of the National Park Service and is the only wildlife refuge in the country accessible by subway. In an in-depth New York Times article describing people’s increasing awareness of its ecological importance, Alan Feuer points out that Jamaica Bay is “the city’s largest open space.” He describes the bay as sitting “at the literal and figurative edge where the natural and manmade worlds collide.” ^ref-19639
\n
\n\n\nTypically they are dressed in flannel shirts and plain pants, wearing windbreakers that may read “Korean War Vet” or “Mets,” and thick, square work shoes. The words on their caps often reflect where they worked, the beers they favored, and the teams they loved, most often the standard white B for Brooklyn Dodgers on their blue, often faded caps. ^ref-64618
\n
\n\n\n“The cDc people were, at least for the most part, up until the later 1990s, more interested in writing, music, art, and that sort of thing,” Paul said. “The technical issues were subsidiary to that.” He embraced the do-it-yourself publishing culture that overlapped with music and zines like Boing Boing, which morphed from paper to electronic form and is one of the few still around from back in the day. ^ref-45030
\n
\n\n\nThe political divide in America at the end of the 1960s was the worst until the 2000s, and that helped push phreaking in a radical direction. The phone companies were very clearly part of the establishment, and AT&T was a monopoly to boot. That made it a perfect target for the antiwar left and anyone who thought stealing from some companies was more ethical than stealing from others. ^ref-3463
\n
\n\n\nEven before the Dead had their name, they were a part of Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters, the eclectic and idealistic group that drove through America to have fun messing with people and to spread the good news about LSD. Another Prankster, visionary writer and marketer Stewart Brand, would also help spread the good news about the coming age of computing. ^ref-49390
\n
\n\n\n“Humor is one of the great binding things in the world,” Barlow said, and something that cDc shared with the Pranksters was using humor to question the legitimacy of power. As with hackers, Barlow said, “the thing about acidheads is, they think authority is funny.” ^ref-6824
\n
\n\n\ncDc survived those sweeps because it was more of a social space, a refuge for hackers blowing off steam, than a place to plot actual hacks that ran afoul of the law. ^ref-62805
\n
\n\n\nAfter Stoll complained that hackers should not be free to enter networks to obtain financial histories from the big credit bureaus, Barlow said he was far more bothered that unaccountable corporations had gathered such data in the first place, which he equated with thievery: “Anybody who wants to inhibit that theft with electronic mischief has my complete support.” ^ref-3082
\n
\n\n\nWith informants everywhere, it was hard to build trust, especially online. In person, it was easier. “There were a lot of drugs, a lot of people on acid, but you bond through that,” Bednarczyk said. “Now you have someone you’ve met and trust, and that builds relationships that are pretty strong.” In those relationships, people gave information and received it. Everyone learned more about what was doable and how to do it. ^ref-31534
\n
\n\n\n“Our main priority is to create and continuously evolve an environment that fosters an atmosphere of dynamic creativity, coupled with access to information and ideas, that present you with a far greater spectrum of possibility.” ^ref-44602
\n
\n\n\nAt least five from cDc were there, including founder Kevin Wheeler and Matt Kelly, all of whom gathered to live-write some of what would be cDc’s two hundredth text file overnight. After slick homages to Phrack, teen girl magazine Tiger Beat, and the Encyclopedia Brown mysteries for kids, the file described the gogo dancers, drugs, and mayhem of the event, as well as telling an absurdist origin story for the cult that involved monster trucks. Not much of that part made sense, yet file #200 would prove the most popular among cDc’s own members. ^ref-19128
\n
\n\n\nIndustries. For those handling information as sensitive as unpublished software flaws, twelve or thirteen was too young to trust. So the more experienced hackers would wait until the 2600 meeting wound down and then head off to a nearby bar for what they called 2621—the meeting of the subset old enough to be served alcohol. ^ref-4707
\n
\n\n\nBecause cDc wanted maximum impact, it needed maximum press. For that to happen, it had to have a touch of evil, Kevin reasoned, the same way a punk or metal band craved condemnation. “The hip press has to love us and the square press has to hate us for this to work. That’s the eternal conflict in society to play off and ride,” he wrote to the group. “The day [evangelist] Pat Robertson says something positive about cDc is the day we’re over. The conflict, the drama is what makes this interesting and worth writing about.” ^ref-46132
\n
\n\n\n“If your security is not strong enough to stop script kiddies with publicly available tools, then you have no hope of securing your network from professionals waging war,” he wrote. “Wake up people, it’s going to get much, much worse.” ^ref-13854
\n
\n\n\nThe Chinese government provided the perfect catalyst to push cDc into politics. It hated the free flow of information, a core value of cDc and the hacker movement it helped lead. China also naturally opposed the US government, where some of cDc and many of their friends and relatives worked. And China was doing business with the same companies cDc loved to hate, chief among them Microsoft. ^ref-14191
\n
\n\n\n“I knew the arrival of the net was liable to be as powerful in a very negative way as it was powerful in a very positive way. If it was possible for everything to be known for everyone curious about it, it was also going to be possible for just about anyone everywhere to devise turnkey totalitarianism, where they could flip a switch and see everything you are up to.” Barlow wanted to “set cultural expectations,” he said, to strengthen the side of righteousness for the battles to come. ^ref-46453
\n
\n\n\nFor all its calculated omissions and excesses of passion, Barlow’s howl resonated with a burgeoning crowd of technologists, aspirants, and consumers who badly wanted the government to do anything other than screw up the greatest invention of their lifetimes. ^ref-61602
\n
\n\n\nA key idea was citing not just the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which was nonbinding, but also the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which was less well-known but had the force of a treaty. ^ref-2182
\n
\n\n\nBut the culture of the unkempt rebels in the rank and file clashed with that of the suits making sales pitches and controlling the budget. Sketchy pasts and big personalities abounded. Some employees missed a major customer meeting because they had been up all night doing drugs. ^ref-45838
\n
\n\n\nThe analyst asked for the street address of the café. When Rodriguez told him exactly where he was, the analyst laughed. “No problem, you don’t have to send anything,” he explained. “Back Orifice is on all of those machines.” To signal where he wanted Rodriguez to sit, he remotely ejected the CD tray from one machine. Then he read everything Rodriguez wrote as he typed out the best on-the-ground reporting from Beijing. Rodriguez erased what he had typed and walked out, leaving no record of the writing. ^ref-38351
\n
\n\n\n“It occurs to me how severely the trajectory of my own career has taken me from idealistic anarchist, to corporate stooge, to ambitious entrepreneur, to military/intelligence/defense/law enforcement adviser,” wrote one. “Many cyber guys started out somewhere completely different and then somehow found themselves in the center of the military-industrial complex in ways they would never have been prepared for.” ^ref-43595
\n
\n\n\nAnd when they ran out of ideas, they rented out their botnets to strangers who could try other tricks. On top of all that, international espionage was kicking into higher gear, sometimes with allies in the criminal world aiding officials in their quests. ^ref-63709
\n
\n\n\nCareful thought went into what tasks they took on and for whom. “We were pirates, not mercenaries,” Beck said. “Pirates have a code.” ^ref-10950
\n
\n\n\nGoing deeper, Snyder argued that criminals would target Apple users less if the company held less data about them. But more data also made for a seamless user experience, a dominant theme at Apple, and executives kept pressing Snyder for evidence that consumers cared. ^ref-13786
\n
\n\n\nIn large part due to Snyder, Apple implemented new techniques that rendered iPhones impenetrable to police and to Apple itself, to the great frustration of the FBI. It was the first major technology company to declare that it had to consider itself a potential adversary to its customers, a real breakthrough in threat modeling. ^ref-64901
\n
\n\n\n“It was a time of moral reckoning. People realized the power that they had,” Song said. Hundreds of focused tech experts with little socialization, let alone formal ethics training, were suddenly unleashed, with only a few groups and industry rock stars as potential role models and almost no open discussion of the right and wrong ways to behave. ^ref-17775
\n
\n\n\nHe opposed the denial-of-service attacks as censorship, arguing that the cure for bad speech is more speech. ^ref-45454
\n
\n\n\nDavis explained why he thought LulzSec had so much of the public behind it: “What we did was different from other hacking groups. We had an active Twitter (controlled by me), cute cats in deface messages, and a generally playful, cartoonlike aura to our operations. We knew when to start, we knew when to stop, and most of all we knew how to have fun.” ^ref-6470
\n
\n\n\nThe Russians had the motive to steal US hacking tools, the means to do it, and the opportunity. Russia was also one of the few suspects with so many of its own tools that it could afford to dump those of the US instead of hoarding them for its own use. The timing is particularly interesting, since the NSA dumps began in August 2016, two months after the DNC breach was disclosed. Russia created chaos and distraction inside the agencies best able to find the source of the DNC hack and strike back, helping to paralyze the Obama administration and mute its response. ^ref-13774
\n
\n\n\nOthers were beginning to think more about the meaning of free speech when the immediate problem in many countries was not the inability to speak but the propensity to get drowned out by manufactured voices directed by governments and big economic forces. ^ref-49628
\n
\n\n\nOthers in cDc, looking at the mixed motives as geopolitical priorities ascended, opted to go back to basics on defense. By making the internet safer for everyone, they could chip away at the unfair advantage the net had been giving to attackers since the beginning. ^ref-7405
\n
\n\n\nthe Defending Digital Democracy project at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, ^ref-1976
\n
\n\n\nIN ITS EARLIEST days, the chief moral issues for the teens in the Cult of the Dead Cow were how badly to abuse long-distance calling cards and how offensive their online posts should be. But as they matured, the hackers quickly became critical thinkers in an era when that skill was in short supply. ^ref-38704
\n
\n\n\nOne lesson from the Cult of the Dead Cow’s remarkable story is that those who develop a personal ethical code and stick to it in unfamiliar places can accomplish amazing things. ^ref-42717
\n
\n\n\nAnother is that small groups with shared values can do even more, especially when they are otherwise diverse in their occupations, backgrounds, and perspectives. In the early days of a major change, cross sections of pioneers can have an outsize impact on its trajectory. After that, great work can be done within governments and big companies. Other tasks critical for human progress need to be done elsewhere, including small and mission-driven companies, universities, and nonprofits. ^ref-18819
\n
\n\n\n“Security is about how you configure power, who has access to what. That is political,” Song said. ^ref-34586
\n
\n\n\nfuture. If, as blockbuster audiences seem to both fear and relish, America is quickly headed for full-fledged dystopia, it will have gone through us Millennials first, and we will have become the first generation of true American fascists. On the other hand, were someone to push the American oligarchy off its ledge, the shove seems likely to come from this side of the generation gap, and we will have become the first generation of successful American revolutionaries. The stakes really are that high: In the coming decades, more Americans will be forced to adapt in larger, stranger ways to an increasingly hostile environment. ^ref-56449
\n
\n\n\nWashington’s program for higher education accessibility isn’t based on the “No one turned away for lack of funds” logic of a punk show at a Unitarian church; it’s closer to “At no money down, anyone can get behind the wheel of a brand-new Mustang.” This is how the president can call an escalation in average student debt an achievement in accessibility. ^ref-48635
\n
\n\n\nHigher education is, in addition to other things, an economic regime that extracts increasingly absurd amounts of money from millions of young people’s as-yet-unperformed labor. For anyone who takes out a student loan—and that’s two-thirds of students—succeeding at contemporary American childhood now means contracting out hours, days, years of their future work to the government, with no way to escape the consequences of what is barely a decision in the first place. ^ref-52958
\n
\n\n\nEmployers convince kids and their families to invest in training by holding out the promise of good jobs, while firms use this very same training to reduce labor costs. The better workers get, the more money and time we put into building up our human capital, the worse the jobs get. And that’s a big problem because, as we’ve seen over the last two chapters, America is producing some damn good workers. ^ref-49679
\n
\n\n\nEmployers didn’t just awake one day and decide to treat their workers worse. Capitalism encourages owners to reduce their labor costs until it becomes unprofitable. The minimum wage exists to put an extramarket basement on how low the purchasers of labor can drive the price. As Chris Rock famously put it: “Do you know what it means when someone pays you minimum wage? I would pay you less, but it’s against the law.” ^ref-19180
\n
\n\n\nThere’s also a cultural aspect: Kids trained from infancy to excel and compete to their fullest potential under all circumstances are ill-suited for traditional union tactics that sometimes require intentionally inefficient work, like the slowdown strike or work-to-rule. Instead, we’re perfect scabs, properly prepared to seize any opportunity we can. ^ref-6588
\n
\n\n\nMany schools offer credit for internships, treating them as if they had the educational value of a course. What this three-party relationship means is that students are paying their colleges and working for companies (or the state or nonprofits), and in return both will confirm for anyone who asks that the student indeed paid for the credits and performed the labor. Interns are like Danny Dunn, getting paid in homework stickers. ^ref-53403
\n
\n\n\nIn the 1940 cohort, approximately 90 percent out-earned their parents. But for Millennials, the mobility number is down to 50 percent: It’s a coin-flip whether or not we’ll out-earn Mom and Dad.41 The analysts conclude that the drastic change comes from the shifting, increasingly unequal distribution of GDP, rather than a lack of growth itself. The American dream isn’t fading (as the title of the NBER paper says), it’s being hoarded. ^ref-37102
\n
\n\n\nCollege-educated households without student debt had a median net worth just shy of $65,000, far higher than the three other categories combined, and over seven times greater than the $8,700 median wealth for college-educated households with debt. The average wealth for households without a bachelor’s and without student debt is actually higher than that for the indebted graduates, at just under $11,000. ^ref-25416
\n
\n\n\nA March 2014 Pew study of Millennial attitudes toward entitlements revealed that a paltry 6 percent believe they will receive the full Social Security benefits that they’ve been promised, and 51 percent believe they will see no benefits at all.14 Think about that for a moment: The average dual-earner couple will pay over a million dollars in taxes into a system that more than half of Millennials think will leave them high and dry.15 Whether it’s generosity of spirit, utilitarian analysis, or plain old resignation, the so-called entitled generation doesn’t even feel entitled to our own entitlements. ^ref-17396
\n
\n\n\nA lot is riding on a poor school’s ability to achieve the quantitative standards set up at the state and federal levels. The law is effective at incentivizing school administrations to meet their yearly progress goals, but that’s not the same as incentivizing them to improve instruction or learning. Instead, it’s about compelling schools to generate the right kind of data. The state accepts these assessment reports as valid representations of educational quality, so administrators and teachers—and most of all, students—have to generate the right reports. ^ref-2477
\n
\n\n\nClassrooms and teachers that look alike on paper might very well be totally different in ways the test can’t see. Meanwhile, anything that’s enjoyable or nurturing about school falls away if it can’t be made to serve the tests. ^ref-53934
\n
\n\n\nStandardization, as we’ve seen in the labor market, is an important part of a rationalization process that’s ultimately about lowering costs. Once we’ve turned educational achievement into a set of comparable returns, the policymakers and bureaucrats can focus on getting the same returns for less money. ^ref-1231
\n
\n\n\nit’s clear the American public education system is a rapidly rationalizing factory for producing human capital. They think once every school is on the same page, they can turn up output like they’re producing bottle caps or bars of steel. If employers need a lot of skilled workers, then the state will provide. The workers might not be happy, but they’ll know how to work. For kids who don’t (or can’t) fit the mold, however, getting along has become more difficult. We can draw a straight line between the standardization of children in educational reform and the expulsion, arrest, and even murder of the kids who won’t adapt. ^ref-57339
\n
\n\n\nBringing the police into schools to patrol the hallways and intervene in noncriminal matters, along with the increased use of suspensions, is an intensification of school discipline, analogous to the intensification of the production of human capital. The system is geared to churn out more skilled workers, but it’s also meant to produce prisoners. This harsh reality lurks behind every “joke” all the teachers, counselors, and administrators tell their students about ending up in prison if they don’t work hard. ^ref-40828
\n
\n\n\nAmerica’s criminal justice system needs lives to process, and our schools are obliging by marking more kids as bad, sometimes even turning them over directly to the authorities. ^ref-2998
\n
\n\n\nInstead of imagining that the current state of school discipline is a malfunction in a fundamentally benevolent system, it seems more likely that one of the education system’s functions is to exclude some kids. When I look at school discipline in the context of declining violence and a lack of evidence that suspensions are effective at improving students’ learning conditions, I can only conclude that the actual purpose of such discipline, at a structural level, is to label and remove black kids (disproportionately) from the clearly defined road to college and career. Just as they have increased human capital production, schools have increased the production of future prisoners, channeling kids from attendance to lockdown. The school system isn’t an ineffective solution to racial and economic inequality, it’s an effective cause. ^ref-5230
\n
\n\n\nThe problem with the relationship between poor black and brown children and the state, liberals contend, is that it’s not tight enough. Analysts speak of “underserved” communities as if the state were an absentee parent. If kids are falling behind, they need an after-school program or longer days or no more summer vacation. ^ref-3721
\n
\n\n\n“The poor,” Rios writes, “at least in this community, have not been abandoned by the state. Instead, the state has become deeply embedded in their everyday lives, through the auspices of punitive social control.” ^ref-7245
\n
\n\n\nFar from being the carefree space cadets the media likes to depict us as, Millennials are cagey and anxious, as befits the most policed modern generation. Nuisance policing comes down hard on young people, given as they are to cavorting in front of others. Kids don’t own space anywhere, so much of their socializing takes place in public. The police are increasingly unwilling to cede any space at all to kids, providing state reinforcement for zero-risk childhood. What a few decades ago might have been looked upon as normal adolescent hijinks—running around a mall, horsing around on trains, or drinking beer in a park at night—is now fuel for the cat-and-mouse police games that Victor Rios describes. It’s a lethal setup. ^ref-4510
\n
\n\n\nThe systematic exclusion of young black and brown Americans reaches its most visible and horrific level when the state’s armed guards execute them in public, only to face the most minimal consequences, if any at all. Extrajudicial and pseudojudicial violence against racial minorities has always been a flashpoint in American society, but the qualitative change in policing over the past few decades (combined with new communications technologies) has caused this particular form of injustice to take on new resonance. ^ref-653
\n
\n\n\nThe way we talk about how children become athletes downplays the work they do. There’s no question that a coach is doing labor when she tells a kid to run another lap, but once again the pedagogical mask prevents us from seeing the kids running around as working too. At a certain point they must decide to compete. ^ref-11705
\n
\n\n\nThe labor that goes into star athletes doesn’t just come from them or their coaches, trainers, consultants, or parents. The competition from the other 99.9 percent of players allows them to be great, but in a winner-take-all system devoted to cutting labor costs, there’s more money for profiteers and the institutions that employ them if that work goes uncounted and unpaid. The pedagogical mask is an all-purpose tool for discounting young people’s labor, and it’s all the NCAA has left to hide behind. ^ref-40341
\n
\n\n\nIt is now much cheaper in terms of manpower, equipment, space, and difficulty to make an electronic track than to record a rock song, which means it’s likely to be a more vibrant genre. That doesn’t necessarily make it better, but there are more people doing it, and the form evolves more quickly as a result. ^ref-24135
\n
\n\n\nThe ways we interact with each other and think about the people around us are highly mutable, and they shift with a society’s material conditions. We aren’t dumb, we’re adaptable—but adapting to a messed-up world messes you up, whether you remain functional or not. ^ref-45103
\n
\n\n\nGiven the psychological burden that Millennials bear compared to earlier generations, we can also expect an increase in depression. The competitive system is designed to turn everyone into potential losers; it generates low self-esteem like a refinery emits smoke. It’s very difficult to imagine that the changes in the American sociocultural environment have not led to more of the population suffering from depression. ^ref-56383
\n
\n\n\nYoung people’s creativity is a mine for finance capital, and social media companies (usually built and maintained by young people) are the excavation tools. Precisely targeted advertisements refine the raw attention into money. From this perspective, technology firms are motivated to maximize user engagement, regardless of its impact on their lifestyle. ^ref-704
\n
\n\n\nFrom the perspective of decreasing labor costs, it’s a no-brainer: A page view earned by user-created content costs less to produce than a click on employee-created content. With a large enough user base willing to upload or publish their work for free, it’s cheaper to host than to employ—even as these conditions drive down worker compensation and drive up productivity. ^ref-22432
\n
\n\n\nTech profiteers believe the same social instability that enables their rise will settle just in time for them to get comfortable on top. It’s possible they’re right, but a stable “disrupted” America means further developing the tendencies we’ve seen in the past chapters: more polarization and inequality, declining worker compensation, increased competition, deunionization, heavier anxiety, less sleep, wider surveillance, and lots of pills and cops to keep everything manageable. ^ref-39032
\n
\n\n\nWhen she asked teens why they use social media, boyd heard that “they would far rather meet up in person, but the hectic and heavily scheduled nature of their day-to-day lives, their lack of physical mobility, and the fears of their parents have made such face-to-face interactions increasingly impossible.”30 Asking why teens use Facebook is a lot like asking why teens like talking to each other. “The success of social media must be understood partly in relation to this shrinking social landscape,” boyd writes.31 Driven from public spaces like parks and malls, teens have found refuge online, where their flirting, fighting, and friending can be monitored and sold to investors and advertisers. ^ref-62877
\n
\n\n\nAt first glance, the numbers suggest this is the case: Lifetime illicit drug use among high schoolers is up, after a long and precipitous decline between 1980 and the early 1990s. But not all illegal drugs are created equal: When you factor out marijuana (the most popular and least harmful of controlled substances), there’s a different picture: Teen drug use excepting weed has continued to decline since the 1990s, pushing historical lows. ^ref-54961
\n
\n\n\nGrowing up in expanding postwar America, Baby Boomers (born between 1946 and 1964) crafted the mold for how following generations have imagined “youth,” and many of our media stereotypes about teens and young adults flow from the Boomer experience. This is no surprise given the age cohort that owns and manages media companies. But Boomers are their own special group of Americans, with their own predilections. The Wall Street Journal broke down the numbers on accidental drug overdoses over time by age and didn’t find a consistent pattern: In the early 1970s, fifteen-to-twenty-four-year-olds overdosed most, then it was young and middle-aged adults, and now the forty-five-to-sixty-four-year-olds have taken over.49 It didn’t make much sense, until they looked at how the Boomer cohort traveled through those numbers. ^ref-876
\n
\n\n\nPerhaps increased anxiety and depression means decreased teen libidos, or maybe it’s a side effect of the medication. A decline in unsupervised free time probably contributes a lot. At a basic level, sex at its best is unstructured play with friends, a category of experience that the time diaries in Chapter 1 tell us has been decreasing for American adolescents. It takes idle hands to get past first base, and today’s kids have a lot to do. ^ref-41330
\n
\n\n\nWe’ve seen how central workers’ ability to work has become to the economy, and to the lives of young Americans. Human capital is the government’s largest financial asset and the population’s largest source of debt that isn’t backed by land. But right now, with the student lending system nationalized, private capital is more or less locked out of the market. Capitalists could invest in workers as employees, but that’s risky, as employees are free to go work elsewhere. What they want is to invest in workers as capital, to get a return no matter where the worker works, the way the government gets returns on student loans now. And if they invest in the next Zuckerberg, they want a piece of that multibillion-dollar upside, not just a 4 percent return. ^ref-52505
\n
\n\n\nMaking school blatantly preprofessional dispenses with nice fuzzy liberal notions of what education is for, but it’s easy to see how a childhood spent preparing for a secure career in, say, home electronics repair might be more enjoyable than being set up to fail in a giant contest for a tiny number of really good lives. ^ref-12103
\n
\n\n\nThe algorithms see us less as individuals than as confluences of probabilities. We don’t have races per se, we have “ethnic affiliations” based on how our observed behavior compares to large data sets of other people’s observed behavior. Americans will understand less and less the exact ways in which we’re being profiled and discriminated against (or in favor of), and even when we do know, we’ll have a hard time proving it. ^ref-50437
\n
\n\n\nMy real fear is that authorities will find a way to break down the perceptual distinction between being alive and doing work. Maybe it will be Black Mirror’s rows of treadmills, but I’m thinking more like very advanced video game design. Tech enthusiast Shane Snow controversially suggested that we’d be better off if prison inmates were just sucking on Soylent dispensers and living through Oculus headsets.3 Giving asylum inmates games to play all day will seem generous, and if we can somehow extract value from their playing (the way Google uses CAPTCHA verification to gather street addresses for their Maps program), then it’s a win-win, at least compared to incarceration as it exists. This puts us on the Matrix path, where living in reality is itself a privilege. ^ref-61645
\n
\n\n\nJodi Dean, Blog Theory: Feedback and Capture in the Circuits of Drive, Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2010, pp. 3– ^ref-31539
\n
\n\n\nI told them that when I was in good spiritual shape I ate off one dish and then washed it immediately. ^ref-45496
\n
\n\n\n“You’re a whore.” “Yeah? Well, if there’s anything worse than a whore it’s a bore.” ^ref-2342
\n
\n\n\nI disliked weekends. Everybody was out on the streets. Everybody was playing Ping-Pong or mowing their lawn or polishing their car or going to the supermarket or the beach or to the park. Crowds everywhere. ^ref-56387
\n
\n\n\n“Are you famous? If you went to New York City, would anybody know you?” ^ref-24918
\n
\n\n\nI was proud to be with Mindy. She walked with style. So many women with good bodies just slouched along like overloaded creatures. Mindy flowed. ^ref-39670
\n
\n\n\nI figured that anybody who would read their novel aloud to others had to be suspect. If that wasn’t the old kiss of death, nothing was. ^ref-20367
\n
\n\n\nThere were at least a dozen of them at the track every day, who told attractive women what big winners they were, hoping that somehow they would end up in bed with them. Maybe they didn’t even think that far; maybe they only hoped vaguely for something without being quite sure what it was. ^ref-32955
\n
\n\n\nThe truth, however, was that there was very little greatness. It was almost nonexistent, invisible. But you could be sure that the worst writers had the most confidence, the least self-doubt. ^ref-47239
\n
\n\n\nThat’s the problem with drinking, I thought, as I poured myself a drink. If something bad happens you drink in an attempt to forget; if something good happens you drink in order to celebrate; and if nothing happens you drink to make something happen. ^ref-7185
\n
\n\n\nNothing was ever in tune. People just blindly grabbed at whatever there was: communism, health foods, zen, surfing, ballet, hypnotism, group encounters, orgies, biking, herbs, Catholicism, weight-lifting, travel, withdrawal, vegetarianism, India, painting, writing, sculpting, composing, conducting, backpacking, yoga, copulating, gambling, drinking, hanging around, frozen yogurt, Beethoven, Bach, Buddha, Christ, TM, H, carrot juice, suicide, handmade suits, jet travel, New York City, and then it all evaporated and fell apart. People had to find things to do while waiting to die. I guess it was nice to have a choice. ^ref-36820
\n
\n\n\nThere were some pretty girls there but they just looked and smiled, or they didn’t look and they didn’t smile. I figured the ones who didn’t smile hated me because of my attitude towards women. Fuck them. ^ref-42077
\n
\n\n\nSomewhere on the freeway the instructions got confusing or I became confused. I have a great dislike both for freeways and for instructions. ^ref-19497
\n
\n\n\nThey looked as if nothing had ever touched them—all well-mothered, protected, with a soft sheen of contentment. None of them had ever been in jail, or worked hard with their hands, or even gotten a traffic ticket. ^ref-4544
\n
\n\n\nI walked out, got in the Volks and drove up to the liquor store next to the supermarket. I like to change liquor stores frequently because the clerks got to know your habits if you went in night and day and bought huge quantities. I could feel them wondering why I wasn’t dead yet and it made me uncomfortable. ^ref-37092
\n
\n\n\nThe only time a man needed a lot of women was when none of them were any good. ^ref-35740
\n
\n\n\nThe moment when the partisans of riot exceed the police capacity for management, when the cops make their first retreat, is the moment when the riot becomes fully itself, slides loose from the grim continuity of daily life. ^ref-37445
\n
\n\n\nAt the peak of its reputation in the late 1960s, Bell Labs employed about fifteen thousand people, including some twelve hundred PhDs. ^ref-19622
\n
\n\n\nit was believed that basic research preceded applied research, and applied research preceded development. In turn, development preceded manufacture. ^ref-7507
\n
\n\n\nAn industrial lab, he said, “is merely an organization of intelligent men, presumably of creative capacity, specially trained in a knowledge of the things and methods of science, and provided with the facilities and wherewithal to study and develop the particular industry with which they are associated.” ^ref-8538
\n
\n\n\nThe industrial lab showed that the group—especially the interdisciplinary group—was better than the lone scientist or small team. ^ref-41582
\n
\n\n\nTo grow up that way, he would later explain, made you “pay attention to the natural world, to work with machinery, and to know how to solve practical problems and fix things innovatively, with what is on hand.” In Townes’s view, those “farms and small towns are good training grounds for experimental physics.” ^ref-41614
\n
\n\n\nThere were no telephone ringers at the very start; callers would get the attention of those they were calling by yelling loudly (often, “ahoy!”) into the receiver until someone on the other end noticed. ^ref-23180
\n
\n\n\nMeasurement devices that could assess things like loudness, signal strength, and channel capacity didn’t exist, so they, too, had to be created—for it was impossible to study and improve something unless it could be measured. ^ref-55207
\n
\n\n\nThe 512A was an example of how, if good problems led to good inventions, then good inventions likewise would lead to other related inventions, and that nothing was too small or incidental to be excepted from improvement. ^ref-35512
\n
\n\n\nHe likewise found that at the Labs the experimentalists and theoreticians were encouraged to work together, and that chemists and metallurgists were welcome to join in, too. ^ref-28070
\n
\n\n\nEngineering, however, was different. Kelly defined it as the application of science to a problem affecting society. Engineers dipped into the “common reservoir” of science on behalf of their own industries and countries. ^ref-10216
\n
\n\n\nBy intention, everyone would be in one another’s way. Members of the technical staff would often have both laboratories and small offices—but these might be in different corridors, therefore making it necessary to walk between the two, and all but assuring a chance encounter or two with a colleague during the commute. ^ref-55615
\n
\n\n\nThey were not to work with their doors closed. They were not to refuse help to a colleague, regardless of his rank or department, when it might be necessary. And perhaps most important, the supervisor was authorized to guide, not interfere with, the people he (or she) managed. “The management style was, and remained for many years, to use the lightest touch and absolutely never to compete with underlings,” ^ref-21560
\n
\n\n\nAs Jack Morton had said, if you hadn’t sold anything you hadn’t innovated, and without an affordable price you could never sell anything. ^ref-62115
\n
\n\n\nALL WRITTEN AND SPOKEN EXCHANGES, to some degree, depend on code—the symbolic letters on the page, or the sounds of consonants and vowels that are transmitted (encoded) by our voices and received (decoded) by our ears and minds. With each passing decade, modern technology has tended to push everyday written and spoken exchanges ever deeper into the realm of ciphers, symbols, and electronically enhanced puzzles of representation. ^ref-36325
\n
\n\n\nOne of his paper’s underlying tenets, Shannon would later say, “is that information can be treated very much like a physical quantity, such as mass or energy.” ^ref-47480
\n
\n\n\nThe bit, Shannon explained, “corresponds to the information produced when a choice is made from two equally likely possibilities. If I toss a coin and tell you that it came down heads, I am giving you one bit of information about this event.” ^ref-9912
\n
\n\n\nThe environmentalists of coastal California may have made their own region more pleasant, but they are harming the environment by pushing new building away from Berkeley suburbs, which have a temperate climate and ready access to public transportation, to suburban Las Vegas, which is all about cars and air-conditioning. ^ref-41859
\n
\n\n\nExterminate all the brutes, he thinks, remembering his Conrad. Exterminate all rational thought, he thinks, remembering his Burroughs. And between those two lines written sixty years apart, you have the entire canon of Western liter . . ^ref-14508
\n
\n\n\nNo one ever accuses America of being a nation of historians. ^ref-3050
\n
\n\n\nDo I count whores when I count the number of women I’ve slept with? Do they count toward my number? Is it demeaning to them, antifeminist, not to count them as part of my total number of sexual partners? ^ref-6352
\n
\n\n\nHe had pursued the life of a great writer because he wanted to be a great writer. Isn’t this what they did? Screw whores and get shot at and ingest large quantities of booze and drugs? ^ref-53033
\n
\n\n\n“A belief in war,” Justina says, “is like a belief in God. Comforting until you look too closely at the facts.” Peoria doesn’t quite know what to say, but he does know he should write this down. “Science,” Justina says, “science is a religion that can prove its miracles.” ^ref-25062
\n
\n\n\nA desire to be noticed and to criticize the criticizers of the world, to gain its acceptance by rejecting it, breeding a strange kind of apathy and nihilism and ambition, floating in a kind of morally barren world where they say, Look, here is the asshole’s asshole of the world, the New York media, and we will show you, minute by minute, post by post, what the rectum walls feel and taste like, and you will know even better these sensations because we ourselves are part ^ref-49766
\n
\n\n\nThe first line of attack in this campaign was poetry. ^ref-45180
\n
\n\n\nHis personal physician, Ibn Uthal, a Christian and a noted alchemist, was an expert on poisons, as was his successor, Abu al-Hakam, also a Christian. Their records no longer exist, but Ibn Washiya’s Book on Poisons, written in ninth-century Baghdad as a guide for his son, has survived. ^ref-53577
\n
\n\n\nThe Sunnis, in effect, would honor history as it had taken shape; the Shia would honor it as they believe it should have taken shape, and as they maintain it indeed did in a realm other than the worldly one. ^ref-9602
\n
\n\n\nThere was a cobbler in Rockridge named Alonzo, who took all of these oddballs under his wing and had their VA checks diverted to his little storefront. Then he would pay them piecemeal, either in cash after taking a percentage for himself, or in cocaine that he stuffed into a shoe and passed to them, like a Brothers Grimm tale gone grimmer. Alonzo was a crooked cobbler. That’s life in Oakland. ^ref-27118
\n
\n\n\nBizarrely, for instance, we’ve become numb to the idea that rights aren’t absolute but are enjoyed on a kind of sliding scale. ^ref-47647
\n
\n\n\nWe have a profound hatred of the weak and the poor, and a corresponding groveling terror before the rich and successful, and we’re building a bureaucracy to match those feelings. ^ref-62191
\n
\n\n\nWhich defendant gets put in jail, and which one gets away with a fine? Which offender ends up with a criminal record, and which one gets to settle with the state without admitting wrongdoing? Which thief will pay restitution out of his own pocket, and which one will be allowed to have the company he works for pay the tab? Which neighborhoods have thousands of police roaming the streets, and which ones don’t have any at all? ^ref-55943
\n
\n\n\nBut no police anywhere were officially asked to weigh the collateral consequences of arrests for prostitution, stealing cars, assault, selling weed, jumping turnstiles, even the simple offense of being homeless. There’s no memo in the Justice Department that wonders aloud what happens to the families of those sorts of arrestees. Instead, the new trend in policing is and has been to aggressively no longer care about any of it. ^ref-16273
\n
\n\n\nThe architects of Collateral Consequences seemingly didn’t realize they were starting a revolution. They were accelerating a government-sponsored sorting of the entire population into arrestable and nonarrestable classes. ^ref-49206
\n
\n\n\nThe aide nicknamed Breuer “Jon Lovitz” because of his voice and “the overall impression that the guy was a pussy,” as he put it. When Breuer was appointed in Obama’s first term to head the Department of Justice’s Criminal Division, staffers on the Hill were shocked. “This is a corporate flack who was such a zero, you had twenty-five-year-olds in Congress who wouldn’t return his phone calls,” ^ref-1584
\n
\n\n\nThis meant the very lowest kind of offender in the illegal drug business, the retail consumer at the very bottom of the drug food chain, had received a far stiffer sentence than officials at HSBC who were hundreds of millions of dollars deep into the illegal drug business, not for any excusable reason but just to seek profits to pile on top of profits. ^ref-45026
\n
\n\n\nWhy couldn’t he be tougher? “Our goal here,” he said finally, “is not to destroy a major financial ^ref-20972
\n
\n\n\nme to ^ref-29142
\n
\n\n\nIn high finance, a few arenas are subject to some light and transparency—regulated stock exchanges like the NYSE and the NASDAQ, for example, places fit for day traders and suburban retirees and other such PG-rated softies. But for the most part, high finance is a night game where anything goes. This is the legacy of a generation of brilliant lawyers who’ve turned Wall Street into a perfect black box, the industry surrounded by the legal equivalent of tinted windows. ^ref-37947
\n
\n\n\nAnd then it headed into the late 2000s led by one of the most unlikable characters in American business, a man whose very name sounds like a thesaurus entry for “grasping, narcissistic creep”: Dick Fuld. Nicknamed “the Gorilla,” Fuld is a tall, cavern-eyed, hollow-cheeked bully who was famous for his quick-twitch meanness, his screaming intransigence, and his apparently congenital inability to blame himself for any problem. Fuld is the kind of person who would fall drunk down a spiral staircase and then sue the architect for building blurry steps. ^ref-9932
\n
\n\n\nThe young woman had turned toward him and thrust her pink gloves up in the air in a gesture that, from a man, meant “Touchdown!” and, from a woman, “I will hug you now!” ^ref-41393
\n
\n\n\nIn the wake of a financial crisis in 1873, much of the German bourgeoisie blamed the Jews for its newfound financial woes. Although the “[a]ristocrats were . . . as greedy as anyone else . . . in the prevailing myth . . . aristocrats remained great statesmen, valiant soldiers, and devoted public servants. In the aftermath of the crash, popular fury was directed not at them and the government they dominated but at the Jews.”8 ^ref-9276
\n
\n\n\nHerzl’s first encounter with the central idea that would consume his life—the need for a Jewish state—may well have been in the Hungarian Parliament. Győző Istóczy, a Hungarian nationalist and founder of the National Anti-Semitic Party, is said to have proposed that to solve Hungary’s “Jewish problem,” Jews ought to establish a state of their own and go there.13 “Jew, Go to Palestine!” became a slogan of the Hungarian anti-Semitic movement. Ironically, Istóczy’s motto would eventually become Herzl’s, too. ^ref-10134
\n
\n\n\nBut Hirsch, who feared for the Jews’ future in eastern Europe, had an alternate solution to the “Jewish problem” in mind. The baron, who had earlier written off Palestine as an impractical option, had already helped finance the relocation of some of Russia’s Jews to Argentina. ^ref-10271
\n
\n\n\nFor them, he composed a much more detailed and well-organized exposition of the plan he had already begun writing. It was this version that would become the foundation of his best-known book, The Jewish State. His case was quite straightforward. A Jewish state—in a location yet to be determined, either Argentina or Palestine—would solve the “Jewish problem.” In contrast to what Hirsch believed, Herzl was convinced that the goal was eminently attainable. In fact, he argued, it was in everyone’s best interest that the Jews should secure themselves a state. ^ref-28775
\n
\n\n\nIt possessed those who read it no less. A short book of approximately one hundred pages, The Jewish State made Herzl a household name across the Jewish world. Published in February 1896, it caused a stir worldwide. It was printed, translated, and read more quickly and more widely than any other Jewish work of the modern era. “In 1896 alone, it appeared in English, Hebrew, Yiddish, Romanian, Bulgarian, Russian and French. Students, in particular, were enthused by his proposal; almost overnight, the appearance of The Jewish State transformed Herzl from a lone voice into the leader of an international movement.” ^ref-63573
\n
\n\n\nno culture exists in isolation. No culture is ever really original; every culture is, we might say, always on a nomadic path. ^ref-48599
\n
\n\n\nfieldwork also served to underscore the importance of “being there” because culture had to be observed in situ: culture and place were two sides of the same coin. ^ref-29683
\n
\n\n\nBut even if diffuse, a strong emphasis in his approach was on what he called the “cultural glasses” (Kulturbrille) we all wear. It is through these glasses that we make sense of and order the world. In the Boasian rendering, culture is about meaning. “Perception” has to do with the world’s ordering in some set of localized terms. ^ref-14282
\n
\n\n\nAbove all for Geertz, as for Boas, if you wanted to understand what a culture “meant,” if you wanted to understand what was important about it, what made it tick, what gave it significance and (inasmuch as this is possible) order, you have to focus on the particular, not the general. ^ref-15601
\n
\n\n\nYou would certainly be hard-pressed to find a society in which the literal and figurative objectification of culture didn’t matter. Humans use material culture and other things (trees, rocks, and oceans) to make sense of, express, and sum up who they are. ^ref-7144
\n
\n\n\nWe even make words into things. We objectify language in projects of nationalism by trying to fix the meaning of particular words or phrases; we also objectify language in ritual, especially in statements that are repeated over and over (which has the social effect of making the statements seem “truer” than we might otherwise take them to be). ^ref-38007
\n
\n\n\nBecause the man in the top hat is not only more culturally evolved than the naked savage—he is not only a more “complex organism”; he is better. Social evolutionism is moral philosophy masquerading as science. Darwin never turned his nose up at the barnacle because it wasn’t the blue whale. ^ref-49603
\n
\n\n\nBut culture was, in Tylor’s more capacious definition, “that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, law, morals, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society.” ^ref-6835
\n
\n\n\nAt a core level this state of mind was both constant and universal. In this tradition of culture theory, the endpoint was not a celebration or recognition of difference for difference’s sake but rather the uncovering of the mental architecture that linked all peoples to one another. “The savage mind is logical in the same sense and the same fashion as ours,” he wrote.16 ^ref-32535
\n
\n\n\nthe denial of coevalness is still an anthropological prejudice. It mostly comes across as a romantic sensibility—maybe harmless enough. But work in Africa, or lowland South America, or the Mongolian steppes often has more cachet than work in the United States or Germany.e This is because anthropology is still partly under the sway of the idea that to truly understand the human condition, we need to strip away the trappings of civilization and modernity. ^ref-61368
\n
\n\n\nWhy is this so dangerous? Because it prevents us from seeing that the lives of Katine villagers are not trapped in the fourteenth century but lived out in a twenty-first-century world shaped by a host of colonial and postcolonial economic and political dynamics. ^ref-25275
\n
\n\n\nKatine is contemporary because it is shaped by the legacies of British colonial policies, by the regime of Idi Amin, by an ongoing regional insurgency, by the agricultural subsidies for farmers in the European Union, by the strategic plans of the International Monetary Fund, and more. If we can place the African Other in an earlier age, we don’t have to face up fully to the reasons why their lives don’t look like ours. ^ref-55375
\n
\n\n\nWhat I prefer recording at the end—or, more recently, at the start—of my day are remarkable events I have observed (fistfights, accidents, a shopper arriving with a full cart of groceries in the express lane), bits of overheard conversation, and startling things people have told me. ^ref-56786
\n
\n\n\nI wondered why the rent and bill situation always has to be so desperate. Then I realized I made it desperate. I am desperate. ^ref-18284
\n
\n\n\nApparently the Supreme Court ruled in Bush’s favor, so last night Al Gore conceded. I had to call Dad for some information and the conversation got scary when he started talking about the election. He’s always been a Republican, but it saddened me when he started quoting Rush Limbaugh and trashing what he called “the liberal mainstream media.” It’s always the papers’ fault. Conservatives tell the truth. Everyone else lies. Dad was foaming at the mouth over how Gore tried to steal the election. “I’ve been so upset I haven’t been able to sleep,” he said. ^ref-34009
\n
\n\n\nWhile I was gone Hugh, Manuela, and Dario attended Franck’s surprise fortieth-birthday party. One of the guests was a sophisticated mother of three who announced that she hated the zoo at the Jardin des Plantes because it was cruel to keep the animals in such small cages. She went on and on and then, at the end of the evening, she unlocked her car and released her golden retriever, who’d spent the last six hours in the trunk. ^ref-9168
\n
\n\n\nHugh said the move will be difficult, especially if they smoke, and Tini said, “No, they have finished their smoking.” She said it as though when born, they’d been allotted a certain number of cigarettes. They’d depleted their supply and now it’s all behind them. ^ref-40552
\n
\n\n\nNoise is any pattern we don’t understand. ^ref-13571
\n
\n\n\nThey are on the same order as learning to drive a car, play the mandolin, or multiply seven times seven. We learn the underlying patterns, grok them fully, and file them away so that they can be rerun as needed. The only real difference between games and reality is that the stakes are lower with games. ^ref-24004
\n
\n\n\nLife doesn’t happen along interstates. It’s against the law. ^ref-29079
\n
\n\n\na road so crooked it could run for the legislature, ^ref-50592
\n
\n\n\nAs soon as my worries became only the old immediate worries of the road—When’s the rain going to stop? Who can you trust to fix a waterpump around here? Where’s the best pie in town?—then I would slow down. ^ref-2542
\n
\n\n\nI had nothing to lose but the chains, and I hoped to find down the county roads Ma in her beanery and Pap over his barbecue pit, both still serving slow food from the same place they did thirty years ago. Where-you-from-buddy restaurants. ^ref-48232
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\n\n\nsystem. To a generation that had grown up in a world beset by massive armies and by the threat of nuclear holocaust, the cybernetic notion of the globe as a single, interlinked pattern of information was deeply comforting: in the invisible play of information, many thought they could see the possibility of global harmony. ^ref-23399
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\n\n\nBrand quickly became what sociologist Ronald Burt has called a \"network entrepreneur.\"7 That is, he began to migrate from one intellectual community to another and, in the process, to knit together formerly separate intellectual and social networks. ^ref-10875
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\n\n\nBrand and other writers and editors associated with the Whole Earth publications developed extraordinary reputations as journalists, winning, among other prizes, the National BookAward (for the Whole Earth Catalog) and the National Magazine Award (for Wired).They did so, however, by building the communities on whose activities they were reporting. ^ref-38018
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\n\n\nhad given rise to a new economic era. Individuals could now no longer count on the support of their employers; they would instead have to become entrepreneurs, moving flexibly from place to place, sliding in and out of collaborative teams, building their knowledge bases and skill sets in a process of constant self-education. ^ref-48532
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\n\n\nCognitive psychologists in turn began to imagine that the brain was a form of digital hardware and its actions a form of software, that thinking was a type of computing and memory simply a matter of data retrieval. ^ref-54760
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\n\n\nIn the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities; in the expert’s mind there are few. ^ref-45988
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\n\n\nWhen your mind becomes demanding, when you long for something, you will end up violating your own precepts: not to tell lies, not to steal, not to kill, not to be immoral, and so forth. If you keep your original mind, the precepts will keep themselves. ^ref-45458
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\n\n\nThe teaching which is written on paper is not the true teaching. Written teaching is a kind of food for your brain. Of course it is necessary to take some food for your brain, but it is more important to be yourself by practicing the right way of life. ^ref-8599
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\n\n\nYou should not be absent-minded. But to be aware of the movement does not mean to be aware of your small self, but rather of your universal nature, or Buddha nature. This kind of awareness is very important, ^ref-63839
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\n\n\nThe only effort that will help you is to count your breathing, or to concentrate on your inhaling and exhaling. ^ref-34329
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\n\n\nWe say, “A good father is not a good father.” Do you understand? One who thinks he is a good father is not a good father; one who thinks he is a good husband is not a good husband. ^ref-10139
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\n\n\nAt first you will have various problems, and it is necessary for you to make some effort to continue our practice. For the beginner, practice without effort is not true practice. For the beginner, the practice needs great effort. Especially for young people, it is necessary to try very hard to achieve something. ^ref-64592
\n
\n\n\nAfter you have practiced for a while, you will realize that it is not possible to make rapid, extraordinary progress. Even though you try very hard, the progress you make is always little by little. It is not like going out in a shower in which you know when you get wet. ^ref-28678
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\n\n\nWe ourselves cannot put any magic spells on this world. The world is its own magic. ^ref-36733
\n
\n\n\nThere is a saying, “To catch two birds with one stone.” That is what people usually try to do. Because they want to catch too many birds they find it difficult to be concentrated on one activity, and they may end up not catching any birds at all! ^ref-9742
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\n\n\nRepeating his recollections in this way, his personality will be twisted more and more, until he becomes quite a disagreeable, stubborn fellow. This is an example of leaving a trace of one’s thinking. ^ref-16169
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\n\n\nIt is necessary to remember what we have done, but we should not become attached to what we have done in some special sense. ^ref-25839
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\n\n\nIn order not to leave any traces, when you do something, you should do it with your whole body and mind; you should be concentrated on what you do. You should do it completely, like a good bonfire. You should not be a smoky fire. You should burn yourself completely. If you do not burn yourself completely, a trace of yourself will be left in what you do. ^ref-7172
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\n\n\nIf you practice zazen with your whole body and mind, even for a moment, that is zazen. So moment after moment you should devote yourself to your practice. ^ref-43190
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\n\n\nUsually everyone forgets about zazen. Everyone forgets about God. They work very hard at the second and third kinds of creation, but God does not help the activity. How is it possible for Him to help when He does not realize who He is? ^ref-62163
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\n\n\nOf course, to live is to create problems. If we did not appear in this world, our parents would have no difficulty with us! Just by appearing we create problems for them. This is all right. Everything creates some problems. ^ref-63829
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\n\n\nAnd we should do something new. To do something new, of course we must know our past, and this is all right. But we should not keep holding on to anything we have done; we should only reflect on it. And we must have some idea of what we should do in the future. But the future is the future, the past is the past; now we should work on something new. This is our attitude, and how we should live in this world. ^ref-21793
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\n\n\nEven in wrong practice, when you realize it and continue, there is right practice. Our practice cannot be perfect, but without being discouraged by this, we should continue it. This is the secret of practice. ^ref-17677
\n
\n\n\nThe way to practice without having any goal is to limit your activity, or to be concentrated on what you are doing in this moment. Instead of having some particular object in mind, you should limit your activity. ^ref-23605
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\n\n\nWhen you bow, you should just bow; when you sit, you should just sit; when you eat, you should just eat. If you do this, the universal nature is there. ^ref-3731
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\n\n\nI think some of you who practice zazen here may believe in some other religion, but I do not mind. ^ref-2392
\n
\n\n\nThe purpose of studying Buddhism is not to study Buddhism, but to study ourselves. It is impossible to study ourselves without some teaching. If you want to know what water is you need science, and the scientist needs a laboratory. In the laboratory there are various ways in which to study what water is. Thus it is possible to know what kind of elements water has, the various forms it takes, and its nature. But it is impossible thereby to know water in ^ref-28465
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\n\n\nitself. It is the same thing with us. ^ref-5934
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\n\n\nSo to find the meaning of your life in the zendo is to find the meaning of your everyday activity. To be aware of the meaning of your life, you practice zazen. ^ref-51296
\n
\n\n\nOn April 9, 2013, Baghdadi announced a merger of ISI and al Nusra, calling the new group the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS). In effect Baghdadi was unilaterally establishing himself as the leader of both organizations (ISI and al Nusra), now merged into one. The announcement surprised both Zawahiri and Jawlani. Neither of them had signed off on the decision, and neither was enthusiastic about it. ^ref-3656
\n
\n\n\nSimilarly, the less educated the master, the less intelligent the slave had to appear, so as to remain the master’s inferior while keeping him amused; and since American slave owners were usually less educated than Europeans, the kind of comedy that arose in American life featured a more dim-witted fool than had ever been seen on stage before. Every idiocy had to be exaggerated for effect, from misuse of language to physical ineptitude. ^ref-23001
\n
\n\n\n1865, ^ref-4097
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\n\n\nAgain and again, critics noted that black minstrelsy was not a show; it was a display of natural impulses. ^ref-39356
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\n\n\nappellation in its most pejorative sense. ^ref-61623
\n
\n\n\n, upped the ante with an ^ref-3942
\n
\n\n\nBy 1954 criticism of the Zulus as minstrels had grown. Manuel Wilson, Zulu king that year, announced: “Zulu is going to be modern from the word go. Some of our folks have been kicking about how the parade . . . is a disgrace to the Negroes. So . . . we’re going to be a comic strip right on.” The next year a new king appeared wearing silk clothes and no blackface; as soon as more traditional members saw this, they hurriedly painted his face, and did so again when he wiped it off. ^ref-17710
\n
\n\n\nHe believed that the only true failure was not attempting the audacious. “Even if you fail at your ambitious thing, it’s very hard to fail completely,” he says. “That’s the thing that people don’t get.” ^ref-30029
\n
\n\n\nA former administration official who worked with the NSA chief told Harris that “Alexander’s strategy” was clear: “I need to get all of the data.” And, Harris added, “He wants to hang on to it for as long as he can.” ^ref-14765
\n
\n\n\nThe Tailored Access Operations (TAO) division responsible for this work is, in effect, the agency’s own private hacker ^ref-47445
\n
\n\n\nAlexander notes that practically all famous military maneuvers in history were made against the enemy's flank, whether real or psychological. ^ref-18470
\n
\n\n\nA truly successful commander executes a plan that avoids battle altogether and merely seeks victory. ^ref-33770
\n
\n\n\nAristotle gave him an annotated copy of the Iliad, and Alexander read it voraciously, always keeping it – and a short sword – underneath his pillow. ^ref-33615
\n
\n\n\nWhen told by his generals that crossing the Alps with elephants was impossible, he responded with the Latin phrase Aut viam inveniam aut faciam (“I will either find a way, or make one”). ^ref-15827
\n
\n\n\nDedicated enemies of organized labor, the welfare state, and radical politics of all varieties, the Knowlands helped to set the political tone for many of the city’s other downtown property owners, their patrons and guardians, and those with a vested interest in downtown as a site of capital accumulation. ^ref-42512
\n
\n\n\nIn this sense, the postwar black struggle in America represented one of the world’s most sustained and militant engagements with the modern state apparatus.13 ^ref-13476
\n
\n\n\nAcross the board, regardless of the recipe, we tend to season our food at a level of 0.5 percent of the weight of what we are cooking. There are a few exceptions where the level creeps up to 0.75 percent or down to 0.4 percent, but generally speaking, our palates are amazingly consistent. Now that we know this, when creating recipes we can calculate the necessary salt content based on the total weight of the ingredients, and we hit the bull’s-eye every time. ^ref-58001
\n
\n\n\n“I just want to break that song into pieces,” she said, “and love them all to death. ^ref-28585
\n
\n\n\nHuman beings are rule-following animals by nature; they are born to conform to the social norms they see around them, and they entrench those rules with often transcendent meaning and value. ^ref-26497
\n
\n\n\nOnce a society fails to confront a major fiscal crisis through serious institutional reform, as the French monarchy did after the failure of the Grand Parti in 1557, it is tempted to resort to a host of short-term fixes that erode and eventually corrupt its own institutions. ^ref-50522
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\n\n\nMoreover, the natural human propensity to favor family and friends—something I refer to as patrimonialism—constantly reasserts itself in the absence of strong countervailing incentives. Organized groups—most often the rich and powerful—entrench themselves over time and begin demanding privileges from the state. ^ref-16822
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\n\n\nBasically, practice pulls weeds and plants flowers in the garden of your mind—and thus in your brain. That improves your garden, plus it makes you a better gardener: you get more skillful at directing your attention, thinking clearly, managing your feelings, motivating yourself, getting more resilient, and riding life’s roller-coaster. ^ref-36282
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\n\n\nYou’re offering beautiful gifts to your future self—the one being in the world you have the most power over and therefore the greatest duty to. ^ref-61350
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\n\n\na ^ref-24929
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\n\n\nAs the saying has it, their lack of planning does not make it your emergency. ^ref-13270
\n
\n\n\nEmotions, we now know, change the way the human mind solves problems—the emotional system changes how the cognitive system operates. So, if aesthetics would change our emotional state, that would explain the mystery. ^ref-2154
\n
\n\n\nGenerally speaking, our stuff can be divided into three categories: useful stuff, beautiful stuff, and emotional stuff. ^ref-45373
\n
\n\n\nCultivating an attitude of gratitude is far more conducive to a minimalist lifestyle. If we recognize the abundance in our lives, and appreciate what we have, we will not want for more. We simply need to focus on what we have, rather than what we don’t have. ^ref-35452
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\n\n\nhouse ^ref-29734
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\n\n\ncommit to ^ref-8847
\n
\n\n\nThere was one day when my only goal was to verify three numbers in a dataset, because when The New York Times graphics desk creates a graphic, it makes sure what it reports is accurate. Only after we knew the data was reliable did we move on to the presentation. It’s this attention to detail that makes its graphics so good. ^ref-18691
\n
\n\n\nA label or legend can completely mess up the vibe of a piece of work, but at the least, you can include some information in a short description paragraph. It helps others appreciate your efforts. ^ref-42545
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