Columbine

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pages: 519 words: 142,851

Columbine by Dave Cullen

Columbine, David Brooks, gun show loophole, Kickstarter, McMansion, mutually assured destruction, New Journalism, Timothy McVeigh, white flight

Neither did the wave of upscale suburbanites who began flooding into Jeffco in the late 1970s, overwhelming Columbine’s student body. New Columbine went for fern bars and Bennigan’s, or private parties in their split-level “ranch homes” and cathedral-ceilinged McMansions. Cassie Bernall’s family was New Columbine, as were the Harrises and the Klebolds. Mr. D arrived as Old, but evolved with the majority to New. Old Columbine remained, outnumbered but unfazed by the new arrivals. Many older families lived in actual ranch houses built half a century earlier on the small horse ranches occupying most of the area when the high school was constructed. Columbine High School was built in 1973 on a dirt road off a larger dirt road way out in horse country.

Independently, and collectively, most of the thirteen families came to that conclusion quickly. Students reached the opposite consensus. They spent the spring battling for the idea of Columbine, as well as the proper noun: the name of a high school, not a tragedy. They were repulsed by phrases bandied about like “since Columbine” or “prevent another Columbine.” That was one day in the life of Columbine High School, they insisted. Then the tourists arrived. Just weeks after the tragedy, even before students returned, tour buses started rolling up to the school. Columbine High had leapt to second place, behind the Rocky Mountains, as Colorado’s most famous landmark, and tour operators were quick to capitalize.

“When you’re thinking about doing something that could get you in trouble, remember, I care about you,” he said. “I love you, but remember, I want us all together. We are one large family, we are—” He left the phrase dangling. That was the students’ signal. They leapt to their feet and yelled: “COL-um-BINE!” Ivory Moore, a dynamo of a teacher and a crowd rouser, ran out and yelled, “We are…” “COL-um-BINE!” It was louder now, and their fists were pumping in the air. “We are…” “COL-um-BINE!” “We are…” “COL-um-BINE!” Louder, faster, harder, faster—he whipped them into a frenzy. Then he let them go. They spilled into the hallways to wrap up one last day of classes. Just a few hours until the big weekend.


pages: 368 words: 108,222

Parkland: Birth of a Movement by Dave Cullen

3D printing, Albert Einstein, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Columbine, crisis actor, gun show loophole, impulse control, Lyft, megaproject, side project, Skype, Snapchat, uber lyft

Word of the trip spread, and more students wanted to come—mostly low-income kids who could never afford a trip like this. The congregation had been through Columbine, and was happy to support them. More signed on, and eventually about fifty came. The Douglas and Columbine students would perform a service day together on the anniversary: making a stone garden path at a local memory care facility, and upgrading the landscaping at Dave Sanders Memorial Softball Field just outside the school. It was named for the Columbine teacher who died saving students. The weather was gorgeous, the trees just leafing out for spring. Columbine students took them up to Lookout Mountain, and scrambled around Red Rocks Amphitheater.

Much of the team had drama class with these kids every day. 4 The Douglas group traveling to Columbine was supportive of the MFOL kids. Some came from undocumented families, so they were keeping a low media profile. Others just didn’t feel comfortable in the role. But they wanted gunmen to stop shooting them. Many echoed Brian’s sentiment appreciating the MFOL kids speaking up for them. They all appeared onstage at the Columbine rally that night, and a few gave rousing speeches. The highlight of the trip was a meeting with Columbine survivors. About a dozen, plus a handful from other mass shootings, met them in a private session in the Columbine auditorium. Frank DeAngelis told them how pissed off he got at all the people telling him what he should feel.

The iconic photograph was published in the Rocky Mountain News, which deservedly won the 2000 Pulitzer for Breaking News Photography for its collection of twenty Columbine photographs. The Rocky went bankrupt and its site disappeared, but the photos are all collected at the Pulitzer site mentioned in the bibliography. The CNN ratings I document are from 1999, and which I included in Columbine. We rechecked the number of consecutive New York Times front pages from its archives. All information on the Columbine shooting in this book comes from Columbine, which we carefully vetted at the time. Many basic logistical details about the attack in it come from the Jefferson County sheriff’s report, but see the endnotes for details.


pages: 240 words: 109,474

Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture by David Kushner

AOL-Time Warner, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, book scanning, Colossal Cave Adventure, Columbine, corporate governance, Free Software Foundation, game design, glass ceiling, Hacker Ethic, informal economy, Marc Andreessen, market design, Marshall McLuhan, Neal Stephenson, Saturday Night Live, side project, Silicon Valley, SimCity, slashdot, Snow Crash, software patent, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, X Prize

Stuart Fischoff, founder of the Media Psychology lab at California State University in Los Angeles, said in an address to the American Psychological Association later in 1999, “but because two phenomena are both disturbing and coincident in time does not make them causally connected… There is not, I submit, a single research 211 study which is even remotely predictive of [events like] the Columbine massacre.” Murderers, after all, had proven that they could find inspiration in anything–the White Album, Taxi Driver, Catcher in the Rye. How many acts of violence had the Bible inspired? After Columbine, however, few had the nerve or the knowledge to defend games. Jon Kate, a writer for Rolling Stone and the tech community Slashdot, posted several essays that assailed the media’s stereotypes of geeks and gamers.

As Carmack returned to his desk, he went back to work on a game that was going to be id’s most gleeful shooter yet: Quake III Arena. But, after Columbine, would people want–would the market allow–his or Romero’s games again? Jonn Schuneman gripped his bowling ball tighter as the talk turned to Doom. Romero’s stepfather, now in his sixties, had been coming to this bowling alley more frequently since retiring, and he could usually count on relaxing with a good game. But not today. The people next to him, like millions across the country, were talking about the horrific events at Columbine High School. Kids today, they’re being corrupted by these violent videogames like Doom.

Romero had long relished the day he could sit down with his boys, Steven and Michael, and play through the worlds he created. They were ready for that day, Romero decided, when they were eight. After Columbine, though, Romero kept these opinions to himself. He wasn’t being sued like id, but why say anything anyway? You talk to journalists and they’re going to take what you say and twist it any way they want into their story and it will only end up looking bad. The last thing Romero wanted was more bad press. Even before Columbine, after all, he’d been getting more than his share. The avalanche of trash talking–in the press and in the community–broke the moment the eight members of the Daikatana team, or, as they became known, the Ion Eight, had walked out Ion Storm’s emerald doors a few months earlier, in November 1998.


pages: 465 words: 134,575

Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America's Police Forces by Radley Balko

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", anti-communist, call centre, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, desegregation, edge city, mass incarceration, Menlo Park, moral panic, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Timothy McVeigh

The other major incident from the late 1990s that proponents of militarization often cite in justifying SWAT teams is the 1999 mass shooting at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado. But if the justification for SWAT teams is to have a team of brave, highly trained, highly professional, well-armed, and well-protected cops to intervene in such tragedies, Columbine is a particularly unfortunate example. Though there were eventually eight hundred police officers and eight SWAT teams on the Columbine campus, the SWAT teams held off from going inside to stop shooters Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris because they deemed the situation too dangerous.

When the town of Ithaca, New York, reformulated its SWAT team in 2000, for example, Assistant Commander Peter Tyler was asked why a college town with virtually no violent crime needed a SWAT team in the first place. He pointed to Columbine and similar mass shootings. “I think it’s naive for anyone to think it couldn’t happen here in Ithaca,” he said. Perhaps. But in a different context, Ithaca Police Chief Richard Basile later explained that the reformulated SWAT team would save taxpayers money because its smaller size made it more efficient at its primary duty—serving drug warrants.65 A 2002 Miami Herald article on the spread of SWAT teams in Florida noted that “police say they want [SWAT teams] in case of a hostage situation or a Columbine-type incident. But in practice, the teams are used mainly to serve search warrants on suspected drug dealers.

University of Virginia psychologist and education professor Dewey Cornell, who studies violence prevention and school safety, has estimated that the typical school campus can expect to see a homicide about once every several thousand years—hardly justification to rush out to get a SWAT team.68 Yet many college campuses now have their own paramilitary police teams, and many cited Columbine and Virginia Tech as the reason they needed one. A recent example is the University of North Carolina–Charlotte Campus Police Department, which started a SWAT team in 2011. Lt. Josh Huffman explained why it was necessary: “The purpose for creating the UNCC SWAT Team is to protect the community and prevent the loss of life. We must be prepared to respond to high risk situations such as those tragedies that occurred at Virginia Tech and Columbine.”69 The number of campuses that will ever host a mass shooting or hostage taking may be vanishingly small, but most campuses produce more than enough pot smokers—and thus dealers to supply them—to keep the SWAT team busy once it’s up and running.


Home Grown by Joan Smith

autism spectrum disorder, Boris Johnson, Charlie Hebdo massacre, Columbine, Donald Trump, drone strike, G4S, ghost gun, Jeremy Corbyn, microaggression, no-fly zone, operational security, post-materialism, Shamima Begum, Skype

Horrifying in itself, the Toronto incident also signalled the risk of copycat attacks by adherents of what appears to be a growing cult, just as the Columbine massacre has been referenced by a whole series of school shooters. * Santa Fe High School, Texas Shortly before eight a.m. on Friday, 18 May 2018, a teenage boy opened fire in an art class at a school in Texas. The suspect, who was wearing a black trench coat like the ones worn by the Columbine killers, used a Remington shotgun and a revolver legally owned by his father to murder eight students and two teachers, while another thirteen people were injured.

He was accused alongside his friend, Alex Bolland, but Wylie was described as the ringleader in a plot to shoot teachers and blow up the school they attended in Northallerton. Both boys, who were only fourteen when they were arrested in 2017, hero-worshipped Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, perpetrators of one of the most notorious school shootings in American history at Columbine High School in Colorado in 1999. Wylie carried out Internet searches on how to make nail bombs, boasting in his diary that he intended to commit ‘one of the worst atrocities in British history’. Despite his youth, he was already a committed racist and right-wing extremist, telling the police that he wanted to kill people who were ‘infecting the gene pool’.29 But what most commentators missed was the key role of domestic abuse in the build-up to the plot, with some of the most disturbing evidence coming from Wylie’s ex-girlfriend.

Tragically, his victim broke down while she was giving evidence and talked about how much she missed him, suggesting that she had become habituated to abuse. Wylie was convicted of unlawful wounding as well as conspiracy to murder, and was sent to prison for twelve years, while his accomplice, Bolland, got ten years. The case aroused huge interest, but press reports focused on the Columbine angle, demonstrating how easy it is to miss the close connection between private and public violence. * The next generation Just as the number of adults affected by domestic violence tends to be underestimated by the general public, the same is true of the proportion of children living in abusive households.


pages: 504 words: 129,087

The Ones We've Been Waiting For: How a New Generation of Leaders Will Transform America by Charlotte Alter

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, "World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean water, collective bargaining, Columbine, corporate personhood, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, data science, David Brooks, deepfake, deplatforming, disinformation, Donald Trump, double helix, East Village, ending welfare as we know it, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, Ferguson, Missouri, financial deregulation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, gentrification, gig economy, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, Google Hangouts, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, housing crisis, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), job-hopping, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, Lyft, mandatory minimum, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, McMansion, medical bankruptcy, microaggression, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, obamacare, Occupy movement, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, passive income, pre–internet, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, sexual politics, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, Snapchat, Social Justice Warrior, Steve Bannon, TaskRabbit, tech bro, too big to fail, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, unpaid internship, We are the 99%, white picket fence, working poor, Works Progress Administration

THOUGHTS & PRAYERS “another high school: Columbine”: Michael Elizabeth Sakas, “In 1999, Columbine Felt Like a Galvanizing Moment for Gun Control,” NPR, All Things Considered, April 20, 2018, npr.org/2018/04/20/604070881/19-years-ago-columbine-felt-like-a-galvanizing-moment-for-gun-control. “gunshots to the chest.”: ABC News Special Report on the Columbine High School shootings, April 20, 1999, youtube.com/watch?v=ejBrRrTJbS4. “shot her in the neck.”: Mark Obmascik, “Columbine High School Shooting Leaves 15 dead, 28 Hurt,” The Denver Post, April 21, 1999, denverpost.com/1999/04/21/columbine-high-school-shooting/.

Before: the peace and prosperity of the 1980s and 1990s, the sense of safety, the widespread illusion that America was on top of the world. Millennials would be the first to grow up in the After. THOUGHTS & PRAYERS APRIL 20, 1999 LITTLETON, COLORADO “Good evening, everyone. The reaction of so many people today was, oh, no, not again—another high school: Columbine.” . . . COLUMBINE HIGH SCHOOL SHOOTING LEAVES 15 DEAD, 28 HURT: The shootings were the latest in a series of school shootings since 1997 that have shocked the nation and led to calls for tighter security and closer monitoring of troubled students. . . . We currently have four, Peter. We have two girls and two boys, they’re all in serious condition.

VIRGINIA TECH SHOOTING LEAVES 33 DEAD: She walked toward her class, preoccupied with an upcoming exam and listening to music on her iPod. On the way, she said, she heard some loud cracks, and only later concluded they had been gunshots from the second round of shootings. . . . “All this comes at a sobering moment, just five days before the anniversary of the Columbine high school massacre.” . . . THAT WAS THE DESK I CHOSE TO DIE UNDER: The first thing he saw was a gun, then the gunman. “I quickly dove under a desk.” . . . After every shot, he thought, “OK, the next one is me.” But shot after shot, and he felt nothing. He played dead. . . . “He came into our class, shot the person who was sitting next to me, shot our professor, and then I hid under the desk, and then he proceeded to shoot everyone else in our class.” . . .


pages: 509 words: 147,998

The Geeks Shall Inherit the Earth: Popularity, Quirk Theory, and Why Outsiders Thrive After High School by Alexandra Robbins

airport security, Albert Einstein, Columbine, game design, hive mind, it's over 9,000, Larry Ellison, messenger bag, out of africa, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Skype, Slavoj Žižek, social intelligence, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, The Wisdom of Crowds, trickle-down economics

Because Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold wore Goth-like fashion, demonstrated technological sophistication, and were social outcasts, each of those characteristics came to be suspect in other students; the combination became a dreaded stereotype. “We needed to know who was a good guy and who was a bad guy, and nerds and geeks seemed to be mostly in the enemy camp,” psychologist David Anderegg observed. Columbine “changed the world in many ways but one of the most immediate ways was a nationwide persecution of Goths, nerds, geeks, and perceived misfits of all kinds. . . . The nationwide panic that set in after Columbine had all the characteristics of a witch hunt.” Panicked and pressured to implement politically expedient measures to prevent further massacres, schools mobilized to root out potential killers.

Recent studies have called the link between relational aggression and perceived popularity “robust” and “remarkable.” Psychologists point out that high-status cliques teach the exclusionary behavior that may be the foundation for eventual racism, anti-Semitism, sexism, and other forms of bigotry. Eric Harris, one of the two Columbine murderers, had a secret too. He wasn’t raised in Columbine; his family moved there from Plattsburgh, New York, where he played soccer and Little League baseball, earned good grades, and was a boy scout. In Plattsburgh, administrators would not have singled out Harris as a potential school shooter. Harris’s secret? Before he moved to Colorado, he was popular.

There has to be a plan to reduce exclusionary behavior and harassment. Even three years after two alleged bully victims orchestrated the Columbine massacre, the school still did not have an anti-bullying program in place. No matter how ineffective students claim these programs might be—and even if the programs do fall short—it is nevertheless crucial to have an adult whom kids can turn to for help. As the mother of a friend of the shooters said in 2002, “There has to be, in every school, someone these troubled kids can go to . . . Columbine does not have an anti-bullying program. One lady said to me, ‘You can’t expect them to do it this fast.’


pages: 261 words: 71,798

Dangerous Personalities: An FBI Profiler Shows You How to Identify and Protect Yourself From Harmful People by Joe Navarro, Toni Sciarra Poynter

Bernie Madoff, business climate, call centre, Columbine, delayed gratification, impulse control, Louis Pasteur, Norman Mailer, Peoples Temple, Ponzi scheme, social intelligence, Steve Jobs, Ted Kaczynski, Timothy McVeigh

Bovsun, Mara. “14 Years and Nine Tiny Corpses Later, Authorities Finally Took Action on Murderous Mother.” New York Daily News, March 20, 2011. Accessed August 20, 2013. http://www.nydailynews.com/news/crime/14-years-tiny-corpses-authorities-finally-action-murderous-mother-article-1.122089. Brooks, David. “The Columbine Killers.” New York Times, April 24, 2004. Accessed June 1, 2013. http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/24/opinion/the-columbine-killers.html?pagewanted=print&src=pm. Brown, Robbie, and Campbell Robertson. “Standoff in Alabama Ends in Boy’s Rescue and Kidnapper’s Death.” New York Times, February 4, 2013. Accessed May 8, 2013. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/05/us/boy-is-safe-after-alabama-hostage-standoff.html?

And after each of these events, after the mayhem is over and the victims are buried or patched up (the latter no doubt traumatized for life, as are their families), the question is asked: “Who could do something like this, and could it have been prevented?” When these violent events happen, they dominate the news and preoccupy us for months (the massacres at Virginia Tech; at Columbine High School and Sandy Hook Elementary School; and in Oslo, Norway, to name just a few). Unfortunately, these horrible mass killings happen all too often. In America alone, they occur on average 18 to 20 times per year.1 Coming at us with almost metronomic frequency—more than one per month—such events are almost numbing.

Combine rigid thinking, a fixed ideology, and selective memory with irrational fear and you have the toxic broth of hate—not the dislike you or I might feel, but an uncompromising, dehumanizing hate.8 Add pathological narcissism to the mix and you have people willing and able to act on their hatred with horrific cruelty: walking into classrooms and calmly gunning down students as they scream and cower. This is exactly what happened at Columbine High School (1999), thanks to two paranoid teenagers, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, who narcissistically saw themselves as special and entitled to take the lives of others. For many of these paranoid personalities, violence becomes the solution because nothing else will achieve their out-of-bounds aims or do so fast enough for them.


Urban Gardening: How to Grow Food in Any City Apartment or Yard No Matter How Small by Will Cook

Columbine

BALCONIES COVERED BY PINE TREES When you have pine trees surrounding your balcony, you’re going to have to deal with the extra shade and annoying pine needles that will litter your balcony floor. You don’t want pine needles inside of your potted plants because it will turn the soil acidic. Make sure to remove them as soon as possible. If you don’t have time to maintain your plants frequently, you can choose plants like astilbe, columbine, azaleas, bleeding heart, hosta and heuchera (along with some other perennials), which love acidic soil and shady conditions. BALCONIES THAT ARE DAMP AND COOL For the gardeners who live in areas of the world that aren’t hot and dry, and have a balcony that faces the northeast, you can plant ferns and perennials that like shade.

You can either purchase a seed starting kit or just use a homemade one using an egg carton with drainage holes at the bottom. Just set the egg carton on top of a tray or plastic bag, so that the excess water is captured. Keep in mind that not all seeds have to be started indoors. Some you can go ahead and plant into the soil of your outdoor containers and they will sprout just fine (such as sunflowers, columbine, poppies and a variety of others). Plants that you will need to start indoors include petunias, broccoli, peppers, snapdragons, marigold, coleus, lettuce, tomatoes and zinnias. It can’t be stressed enough how important it is to first research the plants that you plan to grow, so that you can know exactly how to start their seedlings.

Here is a list of others: Browallia Oxalis Polka-Dot Plant Fuchsia Sweet Potato Vine Lobelia Viola Balsam Beefsteak Plant LIST OF SHADE-LOVING PLANTS Here is a list of shade-loving plants: Pothos (Epipremnum aureum) Peace lily (Spathiphyllum floribundum) Bush lily (Clivia miniata) Spider plants (Chlorophytum comosum ‘Variegatum’) Primrose (Oenothera speciosa) Jacob’s ladder (Polemonium caeruleum) Meadowsweet (Astilbe spp.) Virginia bluebell (Mertensia virginica) Columbine (Aquilegia spp.) Foxglove (Digitalis spp.) Flax lily (Dionella spp.) English ivy (Hedera helix) Coleus (Solenostemon spp.) Fuchsia (Fuchsia spp.) Impatiens species Variegated ground ivy (Glechoma hederacea 'Variegata') Variegated lily turf (Liriope muscari) Bleeding heart (Lamprocapnos spectabilis, formerly classified as Dicentra spectabilis) Hosta (Hosta plantaginea) Solomon’s seal (Polygonatum biflorum) Jumpseed (Persicaria virginata) Japanese anemone (Anemone hybrida) Azalea (Rhododendron spp.)


The America That Reagan Built by J. David Woodard

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Boeing 747, Bonfire of the Vanities, business cycle, colonial rule, Columbine, corporate raider, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, friendly fire, glass ceiling, global village, Gordon Gekko, gun show loophole, guns versus butter model, income inequality, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, Jeff Bezos, junk bonds, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, laissez-faire capitalism, late capitalism, Live Aid, Marc Andreessen, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, Neil Kinnock, Nelson Mandela, new economy, no-fly zone, Oklahoma City bombing, Parents Music Resource Center, postindustrial economy, Ralph Nader, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Rubik’s Cube, Savings and loan crisis, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, stem cell, Strategic Defense Initiative, Ted Kaczynski, The Predators' Ball, Timothy McVeigh, Tipper Gore, trickle-down economics, women in the workforce, Y2K, young professional

From their vantage point they could see the first floor cafeteria, just filling with students, and each was covering a main exit from the school.48 Columbine was a school, like hundreds of others in the suburban United States, where athletic prowess was granted a license. An investigative report subsequently found that athletes could bully, haze, and harass other students without fear of reprisal. The homecoming king, a star football player, was on parole for burglary, yet still was permitted to play. The school’s state wrestling champ was allowed to compete, despite being on court-ordered probation.49 The fact that Harris and Klebold were social outcasts probably made them conspicuous targets for taunting. One Columbine student said the ‘‘trench coat mafia’’ ‘‘didn’t look like other people’’ and ‘‘didn’t dress or act like other people.’’

The ‘‘jocks,’’ the ‘‘preps,’’ the ‘‘rednecks,’’ the ‘‘artists,’’ the ‘‘cheerleaders,’’ the ‘‘non–college prep,’’ and the ‘‘nerds’’ all existed in a kind of tense adolescent association of nonconformity. At 11:10 A.M. on Tuesday, April 20, 1999—Hitler’s 110th birthday—two students who were notorious outsiders arrived at Columbine High School in Littleton, a suburb of Denver, Colorado. The school had 1,800 students; about half were beginning to go to the ‘‘A’’ lunch. Eric Harris, eighteen, and Dylan Klebold, seventeen, found their identity in what was known as the ‘‘trench coat mafia,’’ a group that boasted about owning guns and taking pride in their social alienation.

It is impossible to say in retrospect, but it is known that they were both fans of the rock group Rammstein and favored violent video games like Doom. Harris was on an antidepressant, and the two maintained a web site where they openly showed hatred for people in Littleton, especially their teachers at Columbine High School. The crime story, reconstructed from interviews and security tapes after the massacre, read like something from a fictional Stephen King horror script. Dylan Klebold shot one student in the head at close range without a second thought. In the library the gunmen shouted, ‘‘All jocks stand up!


pages: 542 words: 132,010

The Science of Fear: How the Culture of Fear Manipulates Your Brain by Daniel Gardner

Atul Gawande, availability heuristic, behavioural economics, Black Swan, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, correlation does not imply causation, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Brooks, Doomsday Clock, feminist movement, haute couture, hindsight bias, illegal immigration, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), lateral thinking, Linda problem, mandatory minimum, medical residency, Mikhail Gorbachev, millennium bug, moral panic, mutually assured destruction, nuclear winter, Oklahoma City bombing, placebo effect, precautionary principle, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, social intelligence, Stephen Hawking, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, the long tail, the scientific method, Timothy McVeigh, Tunguska event, uranium enrichment, Y2K, young professional

Shortly after the Jonesboro massacre, an NBC/Wall Street Journal poll found that 71 percent of Americans said it was likely or very likely that a school shooting would happen in their community, while a USA Today poll taken following the Columbine massacre got almost the same result. One month after Columbine, a Gallup poll found that 52 percent of parents feared for their children’s safety at school; five months later, that number was almost unchanged at 47 percent. As hideous as the Columbine massacre was, it didn’t change the fact that most schools, and most students in them, were perfectly safe—a fact that politicians could have hammered home but did not.

So the story inside America’s schools was clear when Indicators of School Crime and Safety was first issued in 1998, and it remains clear today: Murdersin schools are so rare that the risk to any one student is effectively zero, and rates of serious violence have dropped steadily and dramatically. Of course this isn’t people’s sense of reality—thanks mainly to the fact that on April 20, 1999, two heavily armed teenagers walked into Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado. They murdered one teacher and twelve students, wounded twenty-four, and stunned hundreds of millions of people around the world. The Columbine massacre got massive news coverage. The Pew Research Center found that almost seven out of ten Americans said they followed the event “very closely,” making it by far the biggest story of 1999 and the third-biggest story of the entire decade.

In part, that’s because of a calculation every political adviser makes in crises like these: The politician who says the event is tragic but doesn’t change the fact that we remain safe will be hit by his opponents with the accusation that he does not understand how serious the situation is, or worse, that he does not care. It’s a huge political risk, with no reward for those who take it. Few do. And so politicians do not struggle to quell the “unreasoning fear” Roosevelt warned against. They embrace and amplify it. The furor after Columbine faded eventually, but in the fall of 2006, the whole terrible scenario—from tragedy to panic—was revisited. On September 13, a former student entered Dawson College in Montreal with a rifle. One student was killed, nineteen injured. On September 27, a fifty-three-year-old man entered a high school in Colorado, took six girls hostage and killed one.


Frommer's Denver, Boulder & Colorado Springs by Eric Peterson

airport security, Columbine, Easter island, Ford Model T, glass ceiling, life extension, machine readable, Maui Hawaii, Ronald Reagan, Skype, sustainable-tourism, transcontinental railway, upwardly mobile, young professional

down Interstate 25 from Wyoming to New Mexico and strands thousands at Denver International Airport. 1997 Gary Lee Davis, convicted of the 1986 abduction and murder of a Colorado farm wife, is executed by lethal injection, the state’s first execution in 30 years. 1998 The Denver Broncos win the Super Bowl, defeating the Green Bay Packers. ■ ■ The stunning victory saves the Broncos the indignity of becoming the first team to lose five Super Bowls. 1999 The Broncos win the Super Bowl again, this time defeating the Atlanta Falcons. 1999 The worst school shooting in United States history takes place in suburban Denver inside Columbine High School, leaving 15 dead. 12/19/08 11:39:51 PM 2002 One of the worst wildfire seasons in history hits Colorado, with about 1,000 fires burning some 364,000 acres across the state. The biggest fire, southwest of Denver, burns 138,000 acres and destroys 133 homes. 06_382288-ch02.indd 17 ■ ■ ■ 17 2 LO O K I N G B A C K ■ there was a great deal of prejudice against those of Japanese ancestry throughout the United States at the time, Colorado Gov.

Supreme Court struck down the measure in a 6-to-3 vote, saying that, if enforced, it would have denied homosexuals constitutional protection from discrimination in housing, employment, and public accommodations. On April 20, 1999, in a suburb of Denver, two students shook the city, state, and nation when they went on a shooting spree through Columbine High School. They killed 12 students and one teacher before turning their guns on themselves in the worst school shooting in the nation’s history. Now in the 21st century, the state’s attention has turned to controlling population growth. With Colorado’s growth rate well over the national average, both residents and government leaders question how this unabated influx of outsiders can continue without causing serious harm to the state’s air, water, and general quality of life. 3 T H E L AY O F T H E L A N D First-time visitors to Colorado’s Front Range are often awed by the looming wall of the Rocky Mountains, which come into sight a good 100 miles away, soon after you cross the border from Kansas.

Pa E-470 225 Glendale 20 Englewood 285 Race St. E 18th Ave. E 14th Ave. P I T O L E 22nd Ave. U P T O W N 40 287 40 287 City Park Municipal Golf Course Gilpin St. Ogden St. 16th Ave. Lakewood 88 E 27th St. E 21st Ave. olorado ate Capitol 70 DENVER 6 E 25th Ave. E 23rd Ave. E 17th Ave. 21 Columbine St. E 24th Ave. 23 22 area of main map 85 Lafayette St. E 20th Ave. 27th / Welton h Ave. Josephine St. E 26th Ave. St . Emerson St. Clarkson St. Washington St. on E 29th Ave. 29th / Welton 25th / Welton ve . 30th / Downing Vine St. th DIA 121 Arvada M.L.K. Jr. Blvd. St . 2 Wheat Ridge High St. 25 th St . 30 th S t.


pages: 456 words: 185,658

More Guns, Less Crime: Understanding Crime and Gun-Control Laws by John R. Lott

affirmative action, Columbine, crack epidemic, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, G4S, gun show loophole, income per capita, More Guns, Less Crime, Sam Peltzman, selection bias, statistical model, the medium is the message, transaction costs

Thirteen were killed in the Columbine High School shooting in 1999; twenty-three were shot dead at Luby’s Cafeteria in Killeen, Texas, in 1991; and twenty-one were slain at a McDonald’s in Southern California in 1984.180 Similar horrible incidents occur in other gun-free zones around the world. The Mumbai massacre left 165 victims dead.181 Since 2001, many European countries—including Finland, France, Germany, and Switzerland—have each suffered at least two major multiple-victim shootings. The worst school shooting in Germany resulted in seventeen killed (four more than were killed at the Columbine High School attack); in Switzerland, one attacker fatally shot fourteen legislators in a regional parliament building; in Finland in 2008, an attack took the lives of ten victims.182 During a period of just a couple of weeks in April 2009, there were multiple-victim public shootings at a college in Athens, a crowded café in Rotterdam, and a supermarket in Moscow.183 Overall, the problem with gun-control laws is not too little regulation, but rather that the regulations disarm law-abiding citizens.

These two cases also involved the fewest people harmed in any of the attacks. The armed citizens managed to stop the attackers well before UPDATING THE RESULTS IN 2000 | 195 the police even had arrived at the scene—4½ minutes before in the Pearl, Mississippi, case and 11 minutes before in Edinboro. In a third instance, at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, an armed guard was able to delay the attackers and allow many students to escape the building, even though he was assigned to the school because he had failed to pass his shooting proficiency test. The use of homemade grenades, however, prevented the guard from fighting longer.

Another puzzle is the lack of coverage given to cases in which citizens with guns have prevented multiple-victim public shootings from occurring. Given the intense concern generated by these attacks, one would think that people would be interested in knowing how these attacks were stopped. 230 | CHAPTER NINE For a simple comparison, take the justified news coverage accorded the heroic actions of Dave Sanders, the Columbine High School teacher who helped protect some of the students and was killed in the process. By the Sunday morning five days after the incident, a Lexis-Nexis search (a type of on-line computer search that includes news media databases) indicates that over 250 of the slightly over 1,000 news stories around the country on this tragedy had mentioned this hero.


pages: 924 words: 198,159

Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army by Jeremy Scahill

"World Economic Forum" Davos, air freight, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, business climate, business intelligence, centralized clearinghouse, collective bargaining, Columbine, facts on the ground, Fall of the Berlin Wall, independent contractor, Kickstarter, military-industrial complex, multilevel marketing, Naomi Klein, no-fly zone, operational security, private military company, Project for a New American Century, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, school choice, school vouchers, Seymour Hersh, stem cell, Timothy McVeigh, urban planning, vertical integration, zero-sum game

On April 20, 1999, Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris walked into their high school, Columbine High, in Littleton, Colorado, wearing black trench coats and armed to the teeth with semiautomatic weapons and shotguns. The two proceeded to go on a killing rampage that took the lives of twelve of their fellow students and one teacher. The incident would quickly be dubbed the “Columbine massacre.” Despite the fact that the number of school shootings had dropped from thirty-two during the 1992-1993 school year to nineteen during 1998-1999, the hype around Columbine encouraged a panic about such incidents that spread throughout the country.50 It also caused law enforcement agencies at all levels to review their ability to respond to such incidents.

Despite the fact that the number of school shootings had dropped from thirty-two during the 1992-1993 school year to nineteen during 1998-1999, the hype around Columbine encouraged a panic about such incidents that spread throughout the country.50 It also caused law enforcement agencies at all levels to review their ability to respond to such incidents. “Nobody thought that Columbine could have happened,” Ron Watson, a spokesman for the National Tactical Officer’s Association (NTOA), said at the time. “So Columbine has changed thinking. It has thrown a new wrinkle into training.”51 In September 1999, some four hundred SWAT team officers found their way to Moyock for exercises at Blackwater’s newly constructed “R U Ready High School.”52 The NTOA kicked in $50,000 to construct the fifteen-room, 14,746-square-foot mock school, but the project likely cost Blackwater much more.53 As with future projects, Prince had the means and the motivation to spend if he thought there would eventually be a payoff.

The event drew tactical teams and police officers from every state, Canada, Haiti, Belgium, and England. By April 2000, the NTOA had put more than one thousand officers through training at “R U Ready” as police departments across the country started more and more to hear the name Blackwater. At an NTOA soiree at the time, Prince commented that events like Columbine are “a reminder that vigilance is the price of liberty, and we need well-trained law enforcement and military. There is no shortage of evil in the world.”56 On February 1, 2000, with its name spreading across the law enforcement community, Blackwater took a huge leap forward as it landed its first General Services Administration contract, creating a government-approved list of services and goods Blackwater could sell to federal agencies and the prices it could officially charge.


pages: 70 words: 22,682

Einstein's Dreams by Alan Lightman

Brownian motion, Columbine

• 10 May 1905 It is late afternoon, and, for a brief moment, the sun nestles in a snowy hollow of the Alps, fire touching ice. The long slants of light sweep from the mountains, cross a restful lake, cast shadows in a town below. In many ways, it is a town of one piece and a whole. Spruce and larch and arolla pine form a gentle border north and west, while higher up are fire lilies, purple gentians, alpine columbines. In pastures near the town graze cattle for making butter, cheese, and chocolate. A little textile mill produces silks, ribbons, cotton clothes. A church bell rings. The smell of smoked beef fills the streets and alleyways. On closer look, it is a town in many pieces. One neighborhood lives in the fifteenth century.

From the urgency in his voice and the look in his eyes, the woman knew that he meant soon. So she waits for him, not impatiently, passing the time with a book. Some time later, perhaps on the following day, he arrives, they lock arms, walk to the gardens, stroll by the groupings of tulips, roses, martagon lilies, alpine columbines, sit on a white cedar bench for an unmeasurable time. Evening comes, marked by a change in the light, a reddening of the sky. The man and woman follow a winding path of small white stones to a restaurant on a hill. Have they been together a lifetime, or only a moment? Who can say? Through the leaded windows of the restaurant, the mother of the man spots him sitting with the woman.


Confronting Gun Violence in America by Thomas Gabor

classic study, Columbine, demand response, Ferguson, Missouri, income inequality, mandatory minimum, More Guns, Less Crime, RFID, Silicon Valley, traumatic brain injury, urban sprawl, work culture

Several hours later, police pursued their vehicle and killed them in a shootout. 14 killed—August 20, 1986—In Edmond, Oklahoma, part-time mail carrier, Patrick Henry Sherrill, armed with three handguns, killed 14 postal workers in 10 minutes and then took his own life with a bullet to the head. 13 killed—November 5, 2009—At Fort Hood, Texas, Major Nidal Malik Hasan killed 13 people and injured 32. He was convicted and sentenced to death. 13 killed—April 3, 2009—In Binghamton, New York, Jiverly Wong killed 13 people and injured 4 at an immigrant community center. He then committed suicide. 13 killed—April 20, 1999—Columbine High School—Littleton, Colorado. 18-year-old Eric Harris and 17-year-old Dylan Klebold killed 12 fellow students and 1 teacher before committing suicide. (continued) 68 Confronting Gun Violence in America Table 5.1 (continued) 13 killed—February 18, 1983—In Seattle, three men entered the Wah Mee gambling and social club, robbed the 14 occupants, and then shot each in the head, killing 13.

However, as illustrated in Chap. 13, the view that guns promote feelings of safety tends to erode when people are asked specifically about gun carrying in their community as opposed to gun possession in the home.76 While it is just the story of one individual, Heidi Yewman’s story, while perhaps not representative of how the average owner responds to gun ownership, illustrates some of the anxieties and insecurities that may be associated with gun possession.77 Yewman, an author who attended Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, the site of one of America’s worst school massacres, decided to experiment with gun possession and carrying for one month. Her experience also indicates some of the risks associated with these activities, even where the owner is a responsible individual. Only two days into my experiment … I put my purse on the counter and then spent the next hour out on the back deck.

., expanded background checks, assault weapons ban).14,15 Duke University’s Philip Cook and Kristen Goss conducted a statistical analysis, referred to as multiple regression, to isolate the impact of several factors on attitudes toward different gun control measures.16 They found household gun ownership to be a strong predictor of gun rights, but party affiliation (Republicans are more pro-gun) and gender are also strong independent predictors of one’s position on gun policy. Highprofile shootings, such as those at Columbine High School and Virginia Tech, tend to produce a brief surge in support for gun control measures, 13 Public Opinion: An Impediment to Reform? 245 but this support tends not to last and is dwarfed by an apparent longterm shift toward a greater emphasis on gun rights.17 While a number of polls of gun owners show that they tend to support several key gun control measures, owners’ misunderstanding of laws pertaining to firearms may help account for some of their opposition to less intrusive forms of gun regulation.


pages: 436 words: 125,809

The Way of the Gun: A Bloody Journey Into the World of Firearms by Iain Overton

air freight, airport security, back-to-the-land, British Empire, Chelsea Manning, clean water, Columbine, David Attenborough, disinformation, Etonian, Ferguson, Missouri, gender pay gap, gun show loophole, illegal immigration, interchangeable parts, Julian Assange, knowledge economy, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, More Guns, Less Crime, offshore financial centre, Ronald Reagan, Ross Ulbricht, WikiLeaks, Y2K, Yom Kippur War

It’s the sniper bullet that killed JFK. It’s Colt and Smith & Wesson. Custer’s Last Stand and Annie Get Your Gun. Quentin Tarantino, drive-by shootings and SWAT teams. It’s the deaths of John Lennon and Martin Luther King, and the oiled-up swagger of Stallone and Schwarzenegger. It’s Sandy Hook, Columbine, Virginia Tech, Fort Hood, Aurora and school shootings in Oregon. And it’s endless, endless figures about guns and violence that are so disturbing they just blunt you. But perhaps it is best to start with those hard facts. Just take one decade of gun statistics in the US.1 Between 2004 and 2013, according to data from the US Bureau of Justice, over 4.5 million people were the victims of gun crime in the United States.

He was just bothered that I was here, stumbling about in the forest with my video camera. Because my presence, in this remote province of this little-visited country, was a clear signal to him of what was to come: a bloody media spectacle. The modern mass shooter and the modern media are intrinsically linked. Columbine, Dunblane, Sandy Hook: journalists, responding to the final performance of a lone shooter, have ensured that these place names are forever marked. In news ‘if it bleeds, it leads’, so the saying goes, and that evening the news the world over led with the blood Saari had shed and the name of Kauhajoki.

As one psychologist put it: ‘Although mass murderers often do exhibit bizarre behavior, most people who exhibit bizarre behavior do not commit mass murder.’24 Nonetheless, it is fair to say that mass shooters are often very focused outsiders who plan their actions obsessively. Many massacres have been in the pipeline for months, sometimes years: the Columbine shooting took thirteen months to plan.25 Anders Behring Breivik in Norway claimed he had been plotting his actions for five years. This planning reflects a fixated and resentful view of the world. Mass shooters want to fix their ideas in history: a sort of personal vindication through gunfire. Whereas terrorists use guns and the media to promote political or religious beliefs, mass shooters use guns and the media to highlight their own personal grievances.


Colorado by Lonely Planet

big-box store, bike sharing, California gold rush, carbon footprint, Columbine, company town, East Village, fixed-gear, gentrification, haute couture, haute cuisine, Kickstarter, megaproject, off-the-grid, payday loans, restrictive zoning, Steve Wozniak, Timothy McVeigh, trade route, transcontinental railway, young professional

Millwood Junction SEAFOOD $$ ( 970-533-7338; www.millwoodjunction.com; cnr Main St & Railroad Ave; mains $10-20; 11am-2pm daily, 5:30-10:30pm Mon-Fri; ) This is a popular steak and seafood dinner joint. Folks from miles around come to Mancos on Friday night for the seafood buffet ($14). The restaurant often doubles as a club, showcasing live music. Columbine Bar PUB ( 970-533-7397; 123 W Grand Ave; 10am-2am) More than a century after Columbine Bar first opened its doors, the saloon, established in 1903 and one of Colorado’s oldest continuously operating bars, is still going strong. Locals come for pints of ice-cold local brews and good pub food (mains $5), but visitors will love the Old West feel this smoky old saloon oozes.

Giampetro ITALIAN, PIZZA $$ ( 970-453-3838; www.giampetropizza.com; 100 N Main St; mains $9-15; 11am-9:30pm; ) Dig into some consistently good, honest and soulful New York–style pizza. It’s sold by the slice and pie, along with dishes such as baked ziti with meatballs (among a dozen pasta dishes), submarine sandwiches (good trail grub) and calzones. It’s all served in a bright corner room, decorated with those kitschy red-checkered tablecloths. Columbine Cafe DINER $ ( 970-547-4474; 109 S Main St; mains $6-10; 7:30am-2pm; ) If you’re looking for a more tasteful, flavorful breakfast dive, duck into this cozy stonewall nook. It does eggs Benedict six ways, huevos and Texas-style French toast flavored with vanilla, cinnamon and nutmeg! Mimi’s Fried Pies PIES $ ( 970-547-8330; www.mimisfriedpies.com; 411 S Main St; pies $3.95-4.95; 10am-6pm; ) These pies are a cross between Aussie meat pies and Southern-style pot pies, but being handheld there’s an empanada influence, and they were dreamt up long-ago in Oklahoma by Mimi’s grandmother, who most likely had never seen an empanada, so there’s that.

Pub grub is served all day and late into the night, but you’re here for beer, no? There are four other Colorado locations, including three in Denver, but this is where their heart is. Green Fairy Bar ABSINTHE BAR ( 970-968-2222; www.greenfairybar.com; 325 S Main St; 7pm-late) A basement bar tucked into the Columbine Square building. It’s a simple spot with Spanish tile floors, wood tables and dark-wood bar and it pours absinthe, the once forbidden aperitif. Labels include St George, Leopold Brothers and Kubler. Downstairs at Eric’s BAR ( 970-453-1401; www.downstairsaterics.com; 111 S Main St; 11am-midnight; ) Downstairs at Eric’s is a Breckenridge institution.


pages: 257 words: 72,251

Nothing to Hide: The False Tradeoff Between Privacy and Security by Daniel J. Solove

Albert Einstein, cloud computing, Columbine, hindsight bias, illegal immigration, invention of the telephone, Marshall McLuhan, national security letter, Oklahoma City bombing, security theater, the medium is the message, Timothy McVeigh, traffic fines, urban planning

The legal scholar Stephen Vladeck notes that the concept of national security has a distorting effect on the law: “[O]ne can find national security considerations influencing ordinary judicial decision making across the entire gamut of contemporary civil and criminal litigation.”6 Although claims of national security don’t directly eliminate rights or civil liberties, they severely weaken them. National-security claims are often accompanied by calls for deference (which, as I argued in Chapter 4, are unjustified), as well as demands for secrecy. What Precisely Is “National Security”? In 1999 two high school students, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, went on a rampage at the Columbine High School near Denver. 64 The National-Security Argument They killed thirteen people, injured twenty-one others, and then committed suicide. The crime, though, wasn’t categorized as a national-security matter even though it involved guns, terror, mass murder, bombs, and suicidal perpetrators.

He was designated an “enemy combatant” and detained and tortured for years without being charged with a crime or accorded the right to a hearing. Ultimately, the dirty-bomb allegations were dropped, and he was convicted of conspiracy to provide material support to terrorists and sentenced to seventeen years in prison.7 Padilla was a U.S. citizen. Why was his crime deemed a national-security issue while the Columbine rampage wasn’t? The line between national-security and regular criminal activities is quite blurry. What about the Beltway snipers of 2002, who terrorized people in Maryland, Virginia, and the District of Columbia? What about Timothy McVeigh, the man who bombed the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 people?

., 107 Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), 3, 8, 63, 76, 78, 84, 95; El-Masri lawsuit, 67–68; illegal torture, 67–68 Chaplin, Charlie, 7 Chertoff, Michael, 200 Chesney, Robert, 218n17 Church, Frank, 10 Church Committee, 10, 70 civil liberties, 34, 40, 55–61, 78, 80, 208; crime-espionage distinction and, 71–80; pendulum argument, 55–61; post 9/11, 59–60, 67–68, 71, 155; in times of crisis, 55–61, 66, 71–72 civil rights movement, 8 Civil War, 58, 61 Clinton, Bill, 149–50 cloud computing, 105–106, 107 Code of Hammurabi, 4 Cohen, Julie, 178 Cold War, 7–8, 58, 59, 61, 72 Colonial America, 4, 147 Columbine shootings, 64–65 communism, 7–8, 59, 61 computers, 11; cloud computing, 105–106, 107; data mining, 182–98; Internet privacy, 13, 102–110, 156–62, 164–73, 189–90; rise of, 166–67; third party doctrine and, 102–110. See also email; Internet Concurring Opinions (blog), 22–23 confidentiality, 107, 108 Congress, U.S., 5, 7, 9, 11, 40, 62, 70, 76, 129, 165, 166, 200; Church Committee, 10, 70; on national security surveillance, 10–11, 82–90, 176; on new technologies, 166–67, 173, 176; Patriot Act and, 12, 76, 155; TSP authorization, 82–90 Constitution, U.S., 3, 4, 7, 13, 42, 52, 55, 63, 80, 84, 89, 94, 95, 110, 146; privacy protection, 2–3, 6–7, 9, 11, 12–13, 35, 91–152.


And Never Stop Dancing: Thirty More True Things You Need to Know Now by Gordon Livingston

Charles Lindbergh, Columbine, desegregation, follow your passion, Maui Hawaii, Oklahoma City bombing

We may long to win the lottery or appear on national TV. What would really improve our lives is to laugh more, think about why we’re here, and let each other merge. 12. 0738212494-text.qxd:0738212494-text.qxd 7/10/08 9:34 AM Page 13 3. Forgiveness is a gift we give ourselves. or a time after the massacre in 1999, on a hill overlooking Columbine High School, stood fifteen crosses, memorials to both the victims and the perpetrators. Then the father and stepfather of one of the dead children removed the two crosses bearing the names of the shooters. They questioned the propriety of honoring murderers in the same place as their victims. And so, while we were still struggling with the meaning, if any, of this tragedy, we were confronted with the question F 13. 0738212494-text.qxd:0738212494-text.qxd 7/10/08 9:34 AM Page 14 And Never Stop Dancing of what attitude we should take toward it.

Widely confused with forgetting or reconciliation, it is neither. Forgiveness is an act of letting go, of relinquishment. It is not something we 14. 0738212494-text.qxd:0738212494-text.qxd 7/10/08 9:34 AM Page 15 Forgiveness is a gift we give ourselves. do for others; it is a gift to ourselves. The shooters at Columbine High inflicted the death penalty on themselves. What is left for us to do to them? We do not release them from accountability by forgiving; we free ourselves from the burden of bitterness. In this sense forgiveness is a selfish rather than an altruistic act. People present themselves for psychotherapy burdened by grievances.


pages: 318 words: 82,452

The End of Policing by Alex S. Vitale

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, anti-communist, Black Lives Matter, Broken windows theory, citizen journalism, Columbine, deindustrialization, desegregation, Donald Trump, drug harm reduction, Edward Snowden, equal pay for equal work, Ferguson, Missouri, gentrification, ghettoisation, hiring and firing, Housing First, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, independent contractor, Laura Poitras, mandatory minimum, mass immigration, mass incarceration, moral panic, Occupy movement, open borders, open immigration, rent-seeking, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, strikebreaker, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, traumatic brain injury, white flight

One of the immediate consequences was a rash of new laws lowering the age of adult criminal responsibility, making it easier to incarcerate young people in adult jails, in keeping with the broader politics of incapacitation and mass incarceration. It was also at the center of efforts to tighten school discipline policies and increase police presence in schools. The second major factor was the Columbine school massacre of 1999, in which two Colorado high school students murdered twelve classmates and a teacher, despite the presence of armed police on campus. This tragic incident received incredible attention due to its extreme nature and the fact that it occurred in a normally low-crime white suburban area.

Its annual convention is a panoply of military contractors trying to sell schools new security systems, train officers in paramilitary techniques, and make the case that students are at constant risk from themselves and outsiders. Annette Fuentes attended one such convention and was appalled at the keynote speaker, an “anti-terrorism expert” with no domestic law enforcement or pedagogical training who warned the hundreds of officers present, You’ve got people in your schools right now planning a Columbine. Every town, every university now has a Cho [the Virginia Tech shooter] and in every state, we have Al-Qaeda cells thinking of it. Every school is a possible target of attack … You’ve got to be a one-man fighting force … You’ve got to have enough guns and ammunition and body armor to stay alive … You should be walking around in school every day in complete tactical equipment, with semi-automatic weapons and five rounds of ammo … You can no longer afford to think of yourselves as peace officers … You must think of yourself as soldiers at war, because we’re going to ask you to act like soldiers.31 This mindset is permeating school policing.

This eBook is licensed to Edward Betts, edward@4angle.com on 06/08/2020 Index Abbott, Greg 189 Advancement Project 71, 170, 238n7 AFL-CIO 192 Alexander, Michelle 50–2, 142, 229, 237n41, 248n8, 249n28, 250n37 Alvarado, Daniel 66 American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) 14, 63, 138, 165, 179, 208–10, 213, 217, 234n47, 234n54, 239n26, 239n28, 254n10, 254n20, 257n26, 257n28, 258n29, 258n35, 258n37 American Federation of Teachers 71–2, 240n51 American Friends Service Committee 209 American Immigration Council 188, 255n35 American Legion 206 American Indian Movement 49 American Party 176 American Protective League 206 Americans with Disabilities Act 63, 147 Anslinger, Harry 132 Anthracite Coal Strike 40 Apuzzo, Matt, 213, 229, 258n43 Asset forfeiture 25, 135–6 Bacon, David 256n46 Balko, Radley 135, 229, 231n11, 232n28, 248n14, Banfield, Edward 5–6, 232n13 Baum, Dan 248n9 Bayley, David 32, 235n1 Beck, Charlie 159, 169–70 Becker, Howard 248n7 Beckett, Katherine 92–3, 229, 243n2, 245n2 Belafonte, Harry 55 Belenko, Steven 248n5 Bernal, Joe 236n28 Bernstein, Elizabeth 247n21 Biasotti, Michael 87 Bittner, Egon 76–7, 241n2 Black Lives Matter 55, 208, 218, 226 Black Panthers 49 Black Youth Project 154–5, 225, 259n2 Blackmon, Douglas 237n35 Body cameras 17, 22, 23–4, 188, 222 Boone, Levi 38 Boyd, James 94 Bracero Program 177, 191–2 Bratton, William 4, 15, 169 Broeker, Galen 235n7 Broken Windows Theory 5–7, 13, 22, 51, 53, 56, 60, 93–4, 97, 148, 168, 184, 222 Brooklyn College 213 Brown, David 27–8 Brown, Michael 11, 18, 216 Bush, George W. 22, 59–60, 123, 180, 219 Butler, Smedley 42 Calavita, Kitty 253n4 Calderon, Felipe 144 Cantu, Aaron 236n26 Carrigan, William 43, 236n5 Center for Court Innovation 101, 146, 250n48 Center for Media and Democracy 210 Central Intelligence Agency 49, 144 Coal and Iron Police 40 Colorado Campaign for Middle East Peace 209 Cox, Mike 43, 236n24 Charleston City Guard and Watch 46 Chartists 36 Children’s Defense Fund 62 Chinese Exclusion Act 176 Clear, Todd 252n27 Clinton, Bill 51, 61, 129, 134, 179–80, 194 Coates, Ta-Nehisi 155, 251n63 Columbine school shooting 57 Comey, James 15 Community policing 16–17, 22, 222 Congress for Racial Equality (CORE) 49 Counter Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO) 202, 206–7 Crabapple, Molly 120, 247n20 Crawford, John 1, 10 Critical Resistance 165 Cruz, Alvin 2 Csete, Joanne 248n13 Cure Violence 174 Currie, Elliott 171, 229, 253n24 Czitrom, Daniel 229, 236n17 Daley, Robert 248n17 Dashboard cameras 22–3 de Blasio, Bill 4 Death penalty 28 Decriminalization of drugs 134, 145, 148–50; of sex work 109, 118–19, 124–8 Denver Peace and Justice Committee 209 Dewey, Susan 125, 229, 245n1, 247n23 DiIulio, John 56 Domanick, Joe 159, 229, 252n5, 253n21 Donner, Frank 203, 257n21 Drug Abuse Resistance Education (DARE) 67, 151 Drug courts 145–8 Drug Enforcement Agency 49, 130, 134, 137, 178 Drug Policy Alliance 148, 250n47, 251n55, 251n57, 251n60 Dukakis, Michael 51 Dunn, Robert 257n16 Elliot, Samuel 37 Empower Chiang Mai 122–3, 247n22 Engle, Byron 50 Evans, Rob 256n11 Fagan, Jeffrey 249n29 Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) 15, 49, 123, 137–8, 157, 178, 188, 201–3, 205–6, 209, 211–12 Ferdaus, Rezwan 212 Ferguson, Missouri 2, 11, 15, 18–20, 22, 215–217 Focused Deterrence 167–8 Food and Drug Administration 130 Fortner, Michael 172, 253n26 Fosdick, Raymond Blaine 236n12 Friedman, Barry 24, 229, 234n52 Friedman, Milton 5 Fuentes, Annette 59, 64, 229, 238n11, 239n31 Fusion centers 210–11 Geller, Amanda 249n29 Gage, Beverly 257n14 Gang databases 164–165; injunctions 163–5 Garcia, Ramon 189 Garriot, William 154, 229, 248n2 Garner, Eric 1, 4–5, 7 Garwood, Jesse 42 Gates, Daryl 158, 169 Gates, Henry Louis 3 General Trade Union 37 German, Michael 258n35, 258n37 Gilje, Paul 235n11 Glenn, Brendon 95 Glick, Brian 257n20 Global AIDS Act 123 Goldman, Adam 213, 229, 258n43 Goldman, Emma 202 Gottschalk, Marie 255n26 Grandin, Greg 256n49 Graham, Ramarley 141–2 Graham v.


pages: 295 words: 89,280

The Narcissist Next Door by Jeffrey Kluger

Albert Einstein, always be closing, Anthropocene, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Columbine, dark triade / dark tetrad, delayed gratification, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, impulse control, Jony Ive, longitudinal study, meta-analysis, mirror neurons, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Nader, Ronald Reagan, Schrödinger's Cat, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, the scientific method, theory of mind, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, twin studies, Walter Mischel, zero-sum game

NATURAL SELECTION. fucker should be shot.” As it happened, the van owner wasn’t shot, but a lot of other people were. It happened more than a year later, and the boy himself—Eric Harris—along with his friend, Dylan Klebold, pulled the triggers, killing fifteen people, including themselves, and wounding twenty-one others at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, on April 20, 1999. It was a shooting spree that until the slaughter of first-graders in Newtown, Connecticut, in 2012 was the most savage mass killing Americans had ever experienced. And too few saw it coming. Harris’s first therapist was not the only one gulled by his easy charm and humble mien.

That Harris and Klebold were inept—that their propane tanks fizzled and their pipe bombs were puny and they wound up doing their murderous work armed with little more than their guns and their hate—changes nothing about their monstrousness. “Peekaboo,” said Harris at one point during the rampage, as he slammed his hand on a table in the Columbine library under which students Emily Wyant and Cassie Bernall were hiding. Then he bent down, thrust the gun under the table and shot Cassie in the head. “Who’s next? Who’s ready to die?” one of the boys asked as they prowled the library; the survivors can’t say which killer said what, because they were hiding as best they could and dared not look up.

But it was the library that would forever be remembered as the center of the carnage—where they shot or killed twenty-two of their victims. It was in the library, too, that, their rage finally spent, Harris and Klebold took their own lives, leaving a mountain of evidence—and a mountain of mystery—behind. “The slaughter at Columbine High School opened a sad national conversation about what turned two boys’ souls into poison,” wrote Time’s Nancy Gibbs in the week that followed. “It promises to be a long, hard talk, in public and in private, about why smart, privileged kids rot inside.” That was true then, and it’s true a decade and a half later.


pages: 347 words: 90,234

You Can't Make This Stuff Up: The Complete Guide to Writing Creative Nonfiction--From Memoir to Literary Journalism and Everything in Between by Lee Gutkind

airport security, Albert Einstein, Atul Gawande, Columbine, David Sedaris, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, Joan Didion, Mark Zuckerberg, New Journalism, non-fiction novel, Norman Mailer, out of africa, personalized medicine, publish or perish, Ronald Reagan, Stephen Hawking, synthetic biology, working poor, Year of Magical Thinking

Yet documentary films don’t claim to be objective or balanced. The director chooses what to show a reader and what footage to leave on the cutting room floor. And the narrator or writer interprets for viewers the meaning of the footage they’re seeing—at least from his or her point of view. Michael Moore (Bowling for Columbine, Sicko, Fahrenheit 9/11, and many more) insists all of his documentaries are fact-checked, which is undoubtedly true. But he selects which ideas, characters, and incidents to present—and which to leave out. The writer of creative nonfiction can be subjective and establish a personal point of view, as Michael Moore does.

The Knock at the Door: A Journey Through the Darkness of the Armenian Genocide. New York: Beaufort, 2007. Berendt, John. Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. New York: Random House, 1994. Bissinger, Harry Gerard, Friday Night Lights. New York: Da Capo, 1990. Bouton, Jim. Ball Four. New York: Macmillan, 1970. Bowling for Columbine. Directed by Michael Moore. Dog Eat Dog Films, 2002. Burroughs, Augustine. Running with Scissors. New York: Picador, 2002. Capote, Truman. In Cold Blood. New York: Random House, 1965. Churchill, Winston. Speech to Students. Harrow School, October 1941. Clancy, Tom. The Hunt for Red October. Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1984.

(Buzz) Black Hawk Down (Bowden) Blair, Jayson blogger.com Blogging, personal The Blood Runs Like a River Through My Dreams (Nasdijj) Book proposals Bookstore categorization The Botany of Desire (Pollan) BOTS (based on a true story) Bouton, Jim Bowden, Mark Bowling for Columbine (film) The Boys of Summer (Kahn) Brando, Marlon Breslin, Jimmy Brevity (online journal) Briggle, Adam Burch, Rueben Burroughs, Augusten Bush, George H. W. Cader, Michael Campanella, Roy Capote, Truman Carson, Rachel Carter, Jimmy Carville, James Catch 22 (Heller) Causey, Chap “Centre Court” (McPhee) “Charging Lions” (Phillips) “Chick lit,” Chronology, altering Churchill, Winston Clancy, Tom Clarity in writing Clinton, Bill Clinton, Hillary Rodham Code Name, “Mary” (Gardiner) Cod (Kurlansky) Coffee House Colbert, Stephen The Colbert Report (television program) Collier’s (magazine) Collins, Addie Mae Colorado Review (journal) Color (Finlay) Composites Compression Conroy, Pat Conscience, author’s Cooke, Janet The Corrections (Franzen) Cousteau, Jacques Cox, Billy Creative nonfiction coining term covering yourself credibility and defining disseminating/marketing ethical and moral boundaries in fakers/exaggerators finding ideas for flexibility and freedom offered by goal of graduate programs in legitimacy in libel and defamation markets for name changing in objectivity debate personal/private poetry and public/issue-oriented publishing role of scenes in as second genre for authors selecting subjects for sharing with subjects prior to publication story and structure of (see Structure of creative nonfiction) subgenres time line of truth and Vanity Fair article on See also Immersion nonfiction; Memoir Creative nonfiction cinema Creative Nonfiction Foundation, mentoring help from Creative Nonfiction (magazine) creative nonfiction time line definition of creative nonfiction editing essays for factual mistake in on Frey controversy on introspection and interiority PodLit Twitter contest Creative writing degree programs Creative writing fellowships Credibility, fact checking and Criticism, Wilde on Croft, Steve The Curve of Binding Energy (McPhee) D’Agata, John Davis, Wade Dead persons defamation and writing about recreation and Death in the Afternoon (Hemingway) Death of a Salesman (Miller) Defamation Defoe, Daniel Defonseca, Misha DeLillo, Don Description The Devil in the White City (Larson) The Devil Wears Prada (Weisberger) de Wael, Monique Dialogue The Diary of Anne Frank Diction Didion, Joan “Difficult Decisions” (Gutkind) deconstructing focus and frame of Dillard, Annie DiMaggio, Joe Dinesen, Isak Disaster nonfiction Disclaimers Dixon, Jo Dobler, Bruce Docudrama/documentary films Don’t Let Me Be Lonely (Rankine) Dostoyevsky, Fyodor Down and Out in Paris and London (Hemingway) Dramatic reading skills Dutch (Morris) Easy Rider (film) Eat, Pray, Love (Gilbert) Eberstadt, Mary Editing line Eggers, Dave Ehrenreich, Barbara Einstein, Albert Eire, Carlos Eisenberg, Jesse The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (Wolfe) Ellison, Harlan Embedded information Endings Entertainment Weekly (magazine) The Epic Story of the Building of the Brooklyn Bridge (McCullough) Esquire (magazine) Essays formal and informal lyric personal segmented Ethical and moral boundaries in creative nonfiction Exodus (Uris) Experience, writing and Experts, citing in creative nonfiction Fabrication The Fabulist (Glass) Fact checking D’Agata and David Sedaris personal truth vs.


pages: 142 words: 47,993

The Partly Cloudy Patriot by Sarah Vowell

Alan Greenspan, Columbine, cuban missile crisis, David Sedaris, financial independence, Michael Milken, Oklahoma City bombing, Ralph Nader, Rosa Parks, Saturday Night Live, slashdot, stem cell, Upton Sinclair, white picket fence

Democracy and Things Like That It all started in 1999, when Joanne McGlynn’s media literacy class at Concord High School in Concord, New Hampshire, invited all the presidential candidates to speak. Known to loiter in New Hampshire ceaselessly before the state’s primary elections, a whopping 50 percent of the eight major candidates accepted: Alan Keyes, Orrin Hatch, Gary Bauer, and Al Gore. They were asked to speak on the subject of school violence, not just because of the murders at Columbine earlier that year but also because a Concord High student was killed at school a couple of years earlier. Gore spoke to the student body on November 30, 1999. And, contrary to conventional wisdom regarding his charisma deficiency, he was a hit. Students Lucas Gallo, Ashley Pettengill, and Alyssa Spellman recall the event.

He was kind of a neat speaker to see.” While the students were impressed by Gore’s easygoing manner—his form—Joanne McGlynn was pleased with his content, the way he talked about school violence. “He was very careful to describe the complicated nature of what might have caused what happened at Columbine,” she recalls. “He didn’t say, ‘It is just because those two boys played video games.’ He used a little analogy about when you catch a cold or when you don’t. He said that some kids in this auditorium had the insulation of a loving family, of teachers who cared about them, of a supportive school system and said perhaps they were insulated from some of these outside forces.


pages: 588 words: 193,087

And Here's the Kicker: Conversations with 21 Top Humor Writers on Their Craft by Mike Sacks

Albert Einstein, Charles Lindbergh, Columbine, David Sedaris, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, Exxon Valdez, fake news, fear of failure, game design, illegal immigration, In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, index card, Joan Didion, Martin Parr, Norman Mailer, out of africa, pre–internet, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, upwardly mobile

The same thing sort of happened after we did the issue about the Columbine High School shooting in 1999. I personally was really, really freaked out when Columbine happened. That hit me really close to home, because that's the kind of kid I was in high school. Wearing the black trench coat and getting picked on by other kids and feeling like an outsider. That's who my friends were. What article did you write for the Columbine issue? “Columbine Jocks Safely Resume Bullying.” It was an article about how everything was supposedly great again in Columbine. You know, “We've got metal detectors and it's all safe and we can just go back to everything the way it was before.”


pages: 375 words: 106,536

Lost at Sea by Jon Ronson

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Columbine, computer age, credit crunch, Douglas Hofstadter, Downton Abbey, Dr. Strangelove, East Village, Easter island, Etonian, false memory syndrome, Gödel, Escher, Bach, income inequality, Internet Archive, Jeff Bezos, Jon Ronson, Kickstarter, late fees, Louis Pasteur, obamacare, Peter Thiel, Saturday Night Live, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Skype, subprime mortgage crisis, telemarketer

Each week in November and December, a box of Santa letters is sent over to the nearby middle school, where the town’s eleven- and twelve-year-olds—the sixth graders—write back in the guise of elves. It is part of the curriculum. Six of last year’s middle school elves, now aged thirteen, were arrested back in April for being in the final stages of plotting a mass murder, a Columbine-style school shooting. The information is sketchy, but apparently they had elaborate diagrams and code names and lists of the kids they were going to kill. I’ve come to North Pole to investigate the plot. What turned those elves bad? Were they serious? Was the town just too Christmassy? I need to tread carefully.

We stay on track and we move on forward! We don’t let anything get us down. That’s the spirit of North Pole and the spirit of Christmas. People here are willing to put their best foot forward and be the best kind of people they can be.” “I heard about the thing with the kids over at the middle school plotting a Columbine-style massacre,” I said. At this, James let out a noise the likes of which I’ve never really heard before. It was an “Aaaaaah.” He sounded like a balloon being burst by me, with all the joy escaping from him like air. “That was a, uh, shock. . . .” said James. “You have to wonder why. . . .”

“Pretty much all summer,” he says. “What do you do to redress the balance?” I ask. “I come here and shoot people all day,” he shrugs. “Doug,” I say as we leave the computer shop, “do you think that if the town had been more Christmassy back in April, those kids at the middle school wouldn’t have wanted to plot their Columbine-style massacre?” “Let’s just say that if the spirit of Christmas were permeating the entire soul of this community, no child would be feeling that despondent,” Doug replies. “What is the spirit of Christmas? Isn’t it peace on earth? Good will to men?” • • • WEDNESDAY LUNCHTIME. I call Jessie Desmond, my North Pole Myspace friend who hates Christmas.


pages: 236 words: 62,158

Marx at the Arcade: Consoles, Controllers, and Class Struggle by Jamie Woodcock

4chan, Alexey Pajitnov wrote Tetris, anti-work, antiwork, augmented reality, barriers to entry, battle of ideas, Boris Johnson, Build a better mousetrap, butterfly effect, call centre, capitalist realism, collective bargaining, Columbine, conceptual framework, cuban missile crisis, David Graeber, deindustrialization, deskilling, Donald Trump, emotional labour, game design, gamification, gentrification, gig economy, glass ceiling, global supply chain, global value chain, Hacker Ethic, Howard Zinn, Ian Bogost, independent contractor, Jeremy Corbyn, John Conway, Kickstarter, Landlord’s Game, late capitalism, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, microaggression, military-industrial complex, Minecraft, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, Oculus Rift, pink-collar, planned obsolescence, scientific management, sexual politics, Silicon Valley, SimCity, Steve Bannon, systems thinking, tech worker, union organizing, unpaid internship, V2 rocket, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War

Of the game that emerged, a reviewer wrote, “Not just a shoot ’em up, it offers miniature history lessons while you play, offering background on everything from the OSS to the Gestapo to V2 rockets while nostalgic art and video clips convey a sense of the period.” As such, the “original Medal of Honor remains arguably the most educational FPS ever made.”12 However, in a sign of the future controversies over videogame violence, following the Columbine massacre the game also went through last-minute changes, in which all blood and gore was removed.13 Continuing the Second World War theme, the Battlefield series started with Battlefield 1942 in 2002. It took the FPS genre in a more team-focused direction, providing larger multiplayer battles in which two teams fight over control points.

., 115 Blizzard, 28 Bogost, Ian, 51, 152 Bond, James, 115 Borderlands, 30 Brazil, 98 Brecht, Bertolt, 142–43 Breitbart News, 154–55 Brentano’s Bookstore, 139 Brexit, 145 British Army, 54, 57 British Petroleum, 25 Broderick, Matthew, 19–20 Bungie, 47 Burgeson, John, 20 C Caillois, Roger, 16–17, 125, 139, 151 California, 39 Call of Duty, 30, 55, 58, 117, 123 Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, 118 Call of Duty: Black Ops, 119 Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, 118 Call of Duty: WWII, 39 Cambridge, 19 Campbell, Colin, 131 Canada, 98 Capital (Marx), 8, 53, 67–69, 74 Carbo-Mascarell, Rosa, 145 Carleton College, 22 Castells, Manuel, 75 Chapman, Adam, 118 China, 35, 37–39, 46–47, 53, 73, 140, 155 Chomp, 23 CIA, 119 Civilization, 2, 31, 129–33 CivilizationEDU, 132 Civilization VI, 131 Clancy, Tom, 120 Clash of Clans, 32 Class Struggle, 139, 145 Cleaver, Harry, 67 Cold War, 20, 28, 119 Columbine, 116 Commander Keen, 1 Communism, 131 Condition of the Working Class in England, 67 Congo, 140 Conservative Party, 40, 42, 145 Conviction, 121 Cook, Mike, 137 Corbyn, Jeremy, 145 Corbyn Run, 145 Counter-Strike, 2, 31, 39, 52, 70, 122, 150, 154, 156–57 Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, 39, 122 Crash Bandicoot, 152 Creative Skillset, 87 Croft, Lara, 29, 152 CrossFire, 32, 38 Crusades, 4 Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly, 114 Cuban Missile Crisis, 20 D DARPA.


pages: 542 words: 161,731

Alone Together by Sherry Turkle

Albert Einstein, Columbine, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, fake news, Future Shock, global village, Hacker Ethic, helicopter parent, Howard Rheingold, industrial robot, information retrieval, Jacques de Vaucanson, Jaron Lanier, Joan Didion, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, lifelogging, Loebner Prize, Marshall McLuhan, meta-analysis, mirror neurons, Nicholas Carr, Norbert Wiener, off-the-grid, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Paradox of Choice, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Rodney Brooks, Skype, social intelligence, stem cell, technological determinism, technoutopianism, The Great Good Place, the medium is the message, the strength of weak ties, theory of mind, Turing test, Vannevar Bush, Wall-E, warehouse robotics, women in the workforce, Year of Magical Thinking

Branscomb High School has metal detectors at its entrance. Uniformed security guards patrol the halls. There have been flare-ups; students have gotten into fights. As she and I speak, Julia’s thoughts turn to Columbine and Virginia Tech: “I’m reading a book right now about a school.... It’s about two kids who brought a gun to a dance and keep everyone hostage, and then killed themselves. And it’s a lot like Columbine.... We had an assembly about Columbine just recently.... At a time like that, I’d need my cell phone.” We read much about “helicopter parents.”5 They hail from a generation that does not want to repeat the mistakes of its parents (permitting too much independence too soon) and so hover over their children’s lives.

.: Artificial Intelligence (film) AIBO aggression toward categorizing gives way to everyday routines care by, fantasies of creature and machine, views of it as caring for companion, role as “feelings” attributed to “growing up,” appearance of playing with projection and teaching it, experience of Alcott, Louisa May Aldiss, Brian “Alive enough,” as milestone for digital creatures Aliveness, children’s theories of Alterity, robots and Alzheimer’s disease, and robotic companions America Online Anger, as way of relating to robots Anthropomorphism, robots and Anxiety, online life, as provoking “of always,” privacy and Apologies confessions and online Appiah, Kwame Anthony Apple Artificial intelligence (AI) limits in understanding Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (MIT) Artificial life Aryananda, Lijin Asperger’s syndrome, robots and Attention, children’s desire for continual partial Authenticity, robotic companionship and illusion of, in social network profiles online life and Autism, robots and “Avatar of me,” Facebook profile as Avatars building relationships among Babysitters consideration of robots as Baird, Freedom Beatles: Rock Band Behaviorism, of robotic moment Bell, Gordon Bentham, Jeremy Bio Bugs (toy), robots and BIT (Baby IT) BlackBerry and sense of control excluding others and turning off Blade Runner (film) Blogs and the loss of the particular Bohr, Niels Boundaries, sense of personal, technology and Breakups face-to-face online Breazeal, Cynthia Brooks, Rodney Buber, Martin Bullying, online Bush, Vannevar Caper, Robert Caretakers, ideas about robots as Caring for a robot performance of substitutes for “Caring machines,” development of Cell phones (smartphones) and autonomy, development of people as “pausable” and avoiding calls and demands of documenting life using sense of emergency and identity (as collaborative) and photographs and private time on, desire for safety (feeling of), and turning off Chat logs “Chat people,” Chat rooms Chatroulette, playing Chess, computers and Churchill, Winston Civilization (game) Coach, robot as Cog seeking “affection” from building demystifying of meeting relationships, range of, with talking to teaching Cold comforts, robots as source of Collaborative self Collection, recollection and Columbine Communication (digital) in abbreviations (emoticons) versus connection choice among genres and nostalgia for letters volume and velocity of and simplification of responses from substitution to preference for hiding as affordance of and “discontents,” Community confessional sites and seeking Companionship, confusions in digital culture Complicity, with robot Computer psychotherapy, attitudes toward Computers as evocative object holding power of as mechanical and spiritual (soul in the) subjective versus instrumental as caring machines and cyborg self Connectivity and global consciousness and new symptoms of connection/disconnection Confessional sites, online apologies and communities, contrast to critical comments about and discussion of abuse reading, experience of as symptoms and venting cruelty of strangers and Connections on backchannels during meetings communication versus constant disconnection and online power of stepping back from, desire to seductions of Connectivity anxiety worries of parents culture discontents of global reach of robots merged with Conversations beginning/ending face-to-face online private robots and text messages as Crocodiles, real and robotic Csíkszentmihalyi, Mihaly Cubism, as metaphor for simultaneous vision of robot as machine and creature Communications culture, digital characteristics of cyborg sensibility and “dumbing down,” (emotional) in “networked” sensibility, characteristics of Walden images in sacred spaces and Damasio, Antonio Darwin, Charles “Darwinian Buttons,” eye contact track motion gesture in encounter with Cog De Vaucanson, Jacques Dean, Howard Death, simulation and Deep Thought (computer program) Democracy, privacy and Dertouzos, Michael Dick, Philip K.


pages: 677 words: 121,255

Giving the Devil His Due: Reflections of a Scientific Humanist by Michael Shermer

Alfred Russel Wallace, anthropic principle, anti-communist, anti-fragile, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, Boycotts of Israel, Chelsea Manning, clean water, clockwork universe, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, Columbine, cosmological constant, cosmological principle, creative destruction, dark matter, deplatforming, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, fake news, Flynn Effect, germ theory of disease, Great Leap Forward, gun show loophole, Hans Rosling, heat death of the universe, hedonic treadmill, helicopter parent, Higgs boson, hindsight bias, illegal immigration, income inequality, intentional community, invisible hand, Johannes Kepler, Joseph Schumpeter, Kim Stanley Robinson, laissez-faire capitalism, Laplace demon, luminiferous ether, Mars Society, McMansion, means of production, mega-rich, Menlo Park, microaggression, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, moral panic, More Guns, Less Crime, Multics, Oklahoma City bombing, Peter Singer: altruism, phenotype, positional goods, power law, public intellectual, race to the bottom, Richard Feynman, Ronald Coase, Silicon Valley, Skype, social intelligence, Social Justice Warrior, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Suez crisis 1956, TED Talk, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Timothy McVeigh, transaction costs, WikiLeaks, working poor, Yogi Berra

Restoring the federal ban on assault weapons will not stop Sandy Hook Events because “The overwhelming majority of mass murderers use firearms that would not be restricted by an assault-weapons ban. In fact, semiautomatic handguns are far more prevalent in mass shootings.” Mass murders are unlikely to be deterred by increasing security in public places because “Most security measures will serve only as a minor inconvenience for those who are dead set on mass murder,” as in the case of Columbine, whose armed guard was unable to stop Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold. Is There Nothing We Can Do? If we cannot predict or prevent Sandy Hook Events, what can we do? I suggest three evidence-based actions we can take right now that could save lives. 1. Run, Hide, or Fight. There is an excellent video on self-defense on YouTube called “Run.

Of the many proposals on the table for discussion, there is one that can be implemented today by the media: Don’t name or show the mass murderers. A September 2017 article in American Behavioral Scientist by Adam Lankford and Eric Madfis reported that as many as twenty-four mass murderers admitted that they went on their killing rampage in order to gain fame. The 1999 Columbine shooters, for example, fantasized about movies that would be made about them, which happened. The 2007 Virginia Tech assassin made a martyrdom video and sent it to NBC News, which aired clips from it. The 2011 Tucson murderer proclaimed online “I’ll see you on National T.V.!” and sure enough, there he was.

., 150–152 Coddington, Jonathan, 59 cognitive biases, 23–24 cognitive dissonance, 95–96 Colavito, Jason, 321 collective action problem, 198–201 college faculty political bias among, 75–76 college students consequences of left-leaning teaching bias, 75–76 drive to censor controversial subjects, 64–78 Free Speech Movement of the late 1960s, 64–65 Generation Z and how they handle challenges, 64–65 microaggressions, 68–70 provision of safe spaces for, 67–68 trigger warnings, 66–67 views on freedom of speech, 64–78 colleges avoidance of controversial or sensitive subjects, 25 causes of current campus unrest, 71–76 disinvitation of controversial speakers, 25 lack of viewpoint diversity, 75–76 speaker disinvitations, 70–71 ways to increase viewpoint diversity, 76–78 Collins, Francis, 60 Collins, Jim, 263–264 Columbine murders, 169 Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP), 271 communication microaggressions, 68–70 competitive victimhood, 132 Conan Doyle, Arthur, 280, 283 confirmation bias, 24, 316–318 conjecture and refutation, 8, 23 conscription as slavery, 1–2 conservatism, 134–136 conservatives Just World Theory, 255 Strict Father metaphor for the nation as a family, 193–197 consistency bias, 24 conspiracy theories Intelligent Design advocates, 55–63 contingency influence on how lives turn out, 258–264 Copernican principle, 120 Core Theory of forces and particles, 118 correspondence theory of truth, 305, 306 Cosmides, Leda, 238 Costly Signaling Theory, 208 Coulter, Ann, 13 Cowan, David, 263 Craig, William Lane, 104, 108–109 Craig’s Categorical Error, 109 Creation Science, 50 creationism freedom of speech issue, 44–54 level of support in America, 46 question of equal coverage in science teaching, 50–54 variety of creationist theories, 50–52 view of Richard Dawkins, 293–294 why people do not support evolution, 47–50 Cremo, Michael, 316 Crichton, Michael, 123 Cruise, Tom, 100 cry bullies, 77 cults Scientology as a cult, 96–98 culture of honor, 73 culture of victimhood, 73 Darley, John, 317 Darrow, Clarence, 52–53 Darwin, Charles, 280connection with Adam Smith, 203–205 development of the theory of evolution, 44–46 impact of the Darwinian revolution, 44–47 on science and religion, 90 On the Origin of Species, 104–105 problem of the peacock’s tail, 200 skepticism, 270, 287–288 Darwin Awards, 207 Darwin economy, 199–201 Darwinian literary studies, 306 Darwinian universes, 122 Darwinism misinterpretation for ideological reasons, 60–61 neo-Darwinism, 62 scientific questioning, 61–63 Dawkins, Richard, 55, 61, 87, 89, 104at the Humanity 3000 event (2001), 289–291 influence of, 287–289 on creationism, 293–294 on pseudoscience, 292–294 on religion, 287–289, 293–295 scientific skepticism, 291–295 sense of spirituality, 295–296 Day-Age Creationists, 51 de Tocqueville, Alexis, 139 Debs, Eugene V., 2 Declaration of Independence, 27, 72 Defant, Marc, 314 Del Ray, Lester, 95 delegative democracy, 149 Dembski, William, 49, 55, 63, 280 democracy delegative democracy, 149 direct democracy, 149–150, 153 freedom of speech and, 26 impact of cyber-technology, 153 representational democracy, 149 Dennett, Daniel, 87, 287 Denying History (Shermer and Grobman), 38, 42, 78 Descartes, René, 230 Deutsch, David, 287 devil what he is due, 8–9 who he is, 8–9 Diamond, Jared, 147–148, 208–209, 228, 314, 321, 322 Diderot, Denis, 270 direct democracy, 149–150, 153 Dirmeyer, Jennifer, 215 District of Columbia v.


pages: 317 words: 79,633

Buzz: The Nature and Necessity of Bees by Thor Hanson

airport security, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, British Empire, Columbine, Gregor Mendel, Honoré de Balzac, if you build it, they will come, Nelson Mandela, new economy, out of africa, wikimedia commons

For their part, bees don’t exactly pollinate flowers out of generosity or some sense of botanical affection. They simply want nectar, pollen, or whatever other enticements are on offer, and will take them in the most efficient manner possible. Short-tongued bumblebees, for example, don’t hesitate to chew through the base of a columbine spur or honeysuckle blossom, cutting a direct path to nectar that completely bypasses the flower’s carefully crafted pollination scheme. (And once that hole is made, all sorts of other bees and insects quickly learn to use it.) Honeybees accomplish the same thing on mustards, not by chewing holes, but by sneaking up on the blossoms from behind and poking their tongues in through gaps between the petals.

One thing is certain—the scents alone don’t attract females, since females never visit the flowers. 23 “… I cannot conjecture”: Darwin 1877, 56. 24 begets new species: For one of many fascinating studies of this process in Ophrys, see Breitkopf et al. 2015. 25 tongue length and the depth of flower spurs: The trend toward longer tongue length ranks among the strongest evolutionary signals in bees and presumably resulted from a continuing need to reach inside deepening flower spurs. For plants, developing spurs attracts a narrower, more dedicated group of pollinators and apparently leads to diversification. Spurred lineages like monkshood (Aconitum spp.) and columbine (Delphinium spp.), for example, both contain dozens of species, while a close relation, love-in-the-mist (Nigella spp.), lacks spurs and includes only a handful of species. 26 corresponding risks of dependence: Many plants in specialized pollinator relationships hedge against the downside by retaining some level of self-fertility, the ability to produce seed from their own pollen.


pages: 277 words: 70,506

We Are Bellingcat: Global Crime, Online Sleuths, and the Bold Future of News by Eliot Higgins

4chan, active measures, Andy Carvin, anti-communist, anti-globalists, barriers to entry, belling the cat, Bellingcat, bitcoin, blockchain, citizen journalism, Columbine, coronavirus, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deepfake, disinformation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, failed state, fake news, false flag, gamification, George Floyd, Google Earth, hive mind, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, lateral thinking, off-the-grid, OpenAI, pattern recognition, post-truth, rolodex, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, Skype, Tactical Technology Collective, the scientific method, WikiLeaks

Someone had either impersonated Roman with a fake passport, or had otherwise compromised the security of MTS, the leading mobile operator in Russia.33 The danger to open-source investigators goes beyond physical and digital threats; there is also the psychological damage. After the Christchurch mosque shootings, Andy Carvin – by then a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab – wrote a powerful warning. Like me, he had watched hours and hours of violent imagery online, from the Columbine massacre, to the Boston bombings, to the Libyan conflict, to the Syrian civil war. How else to gather open-source evidence, if not by looking unsparingly? After each story, Carvin moved to the next. Until, walking down a street in Washington, he noticed a head of cauliflower squashed on the road.

N. here Blair, Tony here Boogaloo movement here Borden, Dan here Boshirov, Ruslan, see Chepiga, Anatoliy Boston bombings here, here Brace, Chris here Braha, Sébastien here Breaking the Silence here Brega here Brennan, Fredrick here Browne, Malachy here, here Buk missile system here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Bulgarian assassination attempt here BuzzFeed News here Cameron, David here Cameroon here Carvin, Andy here, here, here, here, here Catalonian independence movement here Channel here, here, here ‘channers’ (4chan and here, here Charlottesville, Virginia here, here, here Chechnya here, here Check here, here Checkdesk here, here, here Chepiga, Anatoliy (‘Ruslan Boshirov’) here, here, here, here, here, here, here Chepur, Sergey here child sexual abuse here China here, here Chivers, C. J. here, here chlorine gas here Christchurch shootings here, here, here, here Christian Science Monitor here citizen journalism, rise of here, here, here climate-change denial here Clinton, Hillary here, here CNN here, here, here, here Columbine massacre here Colvin, Marie here, here confirmation bias here Congo here Counterfactual Community here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Covid-19 pandemic here, here, here Cracked here Crimea, Russian annexation of here, here, here, here criminal justice here CrowdStrike here cyberspace, US domination of here Czuperski, Maks here Dagestan here Daily Mail here Damascus here, here, here, here, here chemical attacks here, here, here, here, here Daraa here Dawes, Kevin here Dawson, Ryan here de Kock, Peter here De Wereld Draait Door here ‘death flights’ here Deep State here Deepfake Detection Challenge here ‘deepfakes’ here, here Democratic National Convention here Denmark here Detroit street gangs here ‘digilantism’ here DigitalGlobe here, here Discord here disinformation here, here, here, here resistance to here and Skripal poisoning here and social media here and Syrian conflict here, here, here see also Counterfactual Community diversity, and online community here Dix, Jacob here DNA profiling here Dobrokhtov, Roman here, here, here, here Donetsk here, here, here, here Douma, see Damascus, chemical attacks Dowler, Milly here doxxing here, here drones here drugs cartels here Duke, David here Dutch Safety Board here, here El Paso shooting here Ellis, Hannah here ‘elves’ here emergency-dispatch calls here Encyclopedia Dramatica here environmental damage here Escher, Federico here ethnic cleansing here European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights (ECCHR) here Europol here Evans, Robert here, here, here, here Extreme Toxicology here fact-checking projects here Faktenfinder here ‘false triangulation’ here Falun Gong here Fancy Bear here, here Far Eastern Military Command Academy here, here Fedotov, Sergey, see Sergeev, Denis 53rd Anti-Aircraft Missile Brigade here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Financial Times here Finland here First Draft News here Firth, Sara here Fisk, Robert here Fitzpatrick, Catherine A. here Floyd, George here Flynn, General Michael here Foley, James here, here Fontanka here Foreign Policy here, here, here Forensic Architecture here, here Forensic Science Centre of Lithuania here Fox News here, here Free Syrian Army here, here, here, here, here Freeman, Lindsay here FSB here, here, here, here Full Fact here Gab here Gaddafi, Muammar here, here, here, here, here, here Galustian, Richard here Gamergate here, here geolocation here, here, here, here, here, here, here GetContact here Ghouta, see Damascus, chemical attacks Global Legal Action Network (GLAN) here GlobalResearch here Google Digital News Initiative here Gorelyh, Ilya here Grant, Hugh here Graph Search here Gray, Freddie here ‘Great Replacement, The’ here Gregory, Sam here Grozev, Christo here, here, here, here, here, here, here GRU here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Guardian here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here gun control here Hadi, Abdrabbuh Mansur here Haftar, General Khalifa here Haggard, Andrew here, here, here, here Hague, William here Hama here, here, here, here al-Hamwi, Sami here Hanham, Melissa here Hayden, General Michael here Hebron here Helsingin Sanomat here Henderson, Ian here, here Hersh, Seymour here Heyer, Heather here Hitchens, Peter here Hitler, Adolf here Holocaust here, here Homs here, here, here, here, here, here Houla massacre here, here, here Houthis here Human Rights Center here Human Rights Watch here, here, here, here Hunchly here Hussein, Saddam here Identity Evropa here Ilovaysk, Battle of here IMINT (imagery intelligence) here India here Information Wars here, here, here, here InfoWars here, here, here, here Insider, The here, here, here, here, here, here, here International Criminal Court here, here international criminal law, and technological advances here Internet Research Agency here Interpreter, The here Iran here, here, here Iraq here, here, here, here, here ISIS here, here, here, here, here, here Israel here, here Issacharoff, Dean here ITAR-TASS here Ivannikov, Oleg Vladimirovich here Jabal Shashabo here, here Jabhat al-Nusra here Jespersen, Bjørn here Joint Investigation Team here, here, here, here, here Jones, Alex here, here Jukes, Peter here, here Kahn Sheikhoun sarin attack here, here Kaszeta, Dan here KGB here, here, here Khashoggi, Jamal here, here Al Khatib, Hadi here, here, here Khrushchev, Colonel Evgeny here King, Shaun here Kivimäki, Veli-Pekka (VP) here, here, here Koenig, Alexa here Koettl, Christoph here, here Kommersant here Kovalchuk, Alexander here Krasnodon here Ku Klux Klan here, here, here Kuhotkin, Sergey here Kursk here, here Al-Laham, Mimi here Lane, David here Las Vegas shootings here Lavrov, Sergey here, here, here Lebanon here Leicestershire Police here Lens Young Homsi here Leroy, Aliaume here, here Les Décodeurs here Libya here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Al-Saiq Brigade atrocities here Libyan National Army here, here Litvinenko, Alexander here LiveJournal here London Review of Books here Loyga here Luhansk here, here, here Lyons, Josh here, here McClatchy DC Bureau here Macron, Emmanuel here Magnitsky, Sergei here Makarenko, Vladimir here Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, here Mamontov, Arkady here Martin, Ryan here mass shootings, conspiracy theories here Matrix, The here May, Theresa here Medvedev, Dmitri here Mein Kampf here Middle East Live here Military Medical Academy here Millerovo here, here MintPress News here, here ‘miserabilism’ here, here, here Mishkin, Alexander (‘Alexander Petrov’) here, here, here, here, here Misrata here, here Mnemonic here Moldova here Montenegro coup plot here, here, here Morgan, Daniel here Moussa, Jenan here Mubarak, Hosni here Münster here Murdoch, Rupert here Musk, Elon here al-Musulmani, Ahmad here Myanmar here Mystery Munitions here, here National Center for Media Forensics here NATO here, here, here Navalny, Alexey here Nayda, Vitaly here Nazi affiliations here, here, here, here New York Times here, here, here, here News Provenance Project here New Yorker here News of the World here Newsweek here Newtral here Nimmo, Ben here North Korea here, here NPR here, here Nuremberg trials here Obama, Barack here, here, here, here, here Odnoklassniki here, here Oliphant, Roland here OpenAI here Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) here, here, here OSINT (open-source intelligence) here Ostanin, Iggy here, here, here, here Owens, Candace here paedophiles here Pagella Politica here Pakistan here Pandora Intelligence here Panoramio here Paris Match here, here, here, here, here Paris terrorist attacks here Patriot Prayer here Peele, Jordan here Pelosi, Nancy here, here Pepe the Frog here, here Periscope here Peskov, Dmitry here Petrov, Alexander, see Mishkin, Alexander phone-hacking scandal here, here, here, here, here, here Pinochet, General Augusto here Pittsburgh synagogue attack here Postal, Chris here post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) here Poway synagogue attack here Press TV here Prison Planet here Professional Pilots Rumour Network here Protocol on Open Source Investigations here ProtonMail here Proud Boys here Putin, Vladimir here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty here Radio Svoboda here Rapp, Stephen here Reddit here, here ‘red-pilling’ here, here Rees, Gavin here Regular Contributor, The here Reporters’ Lab here Respekt here Reuters here, here reverse image searches here Revolution Man here rhino poaching here Roberts, Zach D. here Romein, Daniel here, here, here, here, here Rosen, Jay here Roshka, Georgy Petrovich here RosPassport database here Rostov Oblast here RTL Nieuws here Russia-1 here Russia Today (RT) here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Petrov/Boshirov interview here, here, here, here, here Russian databases, leaked here, here Russian Defence Ministry here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Russian Foreign ministry here Rwanda here St Petersburg here Saleh, Ali Abdullah here, here Saoud, Sari here sarin gas here, here, here, here satellite imagery here, here, here, here Saudi Arabia here, here, here, here, here, here, here Schiphol Airport here Schmitt, Eric here Second Life here Second World War here, here Senezh here Sergeev, Denis (‘Sergey Fedotov’) here shabiha here Shaif, Rawan here Shikhany institute here ‘shitposting’ here, here Simon, Scott here Simonyan, Margarita here Skripal poisoning here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Sky News here Slack here, here Snizhne here, here, here, here, here, here Snopes here, here social media algorithms here archiving here ISIS and here searching here Sofronov, G.


pages: 252 words: 73,387

Mini Farming: Self-Sufficiency on 1/4 Acre by Brett L. Markham

active measures, classic study, clean water, Columbine, coronavirus, fixed income, Mason jar, place-making

Tachanid flies help keep cabbage worms and stink bugs in check; a planting of parsley or pennyroyal will give them a home. Beneficial insect attractors that bloom early include sweet alyssum, columbine, and creeping thyme. Intermediate bloomers include common yarrow, cilantro, edging lobelia, and mints. Late bloomers include dill, wild bergamot, and European goldenrod. An easy plan is to plant a few marigolds throughout the bed, a columbine plant, a bit of cilantro, and some dill. You should familiarize yourself with the properties of beneficial plant attractors before planting them in your beds. Don’t just run out Table 12: Preventative Plantings Beneficial Insect Controlled Pests Plants to Provide Parasitic wasps Moth, beetle, and fly larvae and eggs, including caterpillars Dill, yarrow, tansy, Queen Anne’s lace, parsley Hoverflies (syrphid flies) Mealybugs, aphids As above, plus marigold Lacewings Aphids, mealybugs, other small insects Dandelion, angelica, dill, yarrow Ladybugs Aphids Dandelion, hairy vetch, buckwheat, marigold Tachanid flies Caterpillars, cabbage loopers, stink bugs, cabbage bugs, beetles Parsley, tansy, pennyroyal, buckwheat and plant mint in the garden bed directly, for example, because it will take over the entire bed.


pages: 389 words: 81,596

Quit Like a Millionaire: No Gimmicks, Luck, or Trust Fund Required by Kristy Shen, Bryce Leung

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Apollo 13, asset allocation, barriers to entry, buy low sell high, call centre, car-free, Columbine, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, digital nomad, do what you love, Elon Musk, fear of failure, financial independence, fixed income, follow your passion, Great Leap Forward, hedonic treadmill, income inequality, index fund, John Bogle, junk bonds, longitudinal study, low cost airline, Mark Zuckerberg, mortgage debt, Mr. Money Mustache, obamacare, offshore financial centre, passive income, Ponzi scheme, risk tolerance, risk/return, side hustle, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, subprime mortgage crisis, supply-chain management, the rule of 72, working poor, Y2K, Zipcar

Pencils rolled onto the floor and exam papers fluttered in the air. You know how when there’s bad turbulence, everyone turns to look at the flight attendant? Well, our teacher looked even paler than the walls of the classroom. That’s how I knew this wasn’t a drill. A kid at my high school had been spotted with a gun. It was June 2000, just one year after the Columbine shootings, so the police—understandably—took it seriously. It took thirty minutes, which felt like forever, to search everyone, classroom by classroom, until our principal announced over the intercom that the SWAT team had cleared the building. With shaky legs, we filed out and assembled at a designated area on the football field.

See kids China/Chinese becoming wealthy, 259 middle class, 70, 78–79, 113 poverty, 3–4, 6–7, 8, 10, 13–14, 15, 17, 20, 22–24, 26, 34–35, 36–37, 46–47, 49 ChooseFi (Facebook group), 251 clay (Guan Yin), eating, 6–7 closet map, 18–20, 19, 70 closing the loop, 213–17, 214, 216 Coates, Dan, 63 Coca-Cola, 10–11, 20, 57, 67, 90, 96, 97, 107, 156, 157, 183 cocaine, 65 Colby’s story, 201, 259 Collins, JL, vii–x, 93, 94, 251, 273 Colorado, 82, 234, 235, 246 Columbine shootings, 21 commissions, 91, 98, 109 common stock vs. preferred shares, 180 Communists, viii, 6, 22, 34, 107, 111, 121 community, loss of, the fear it generates, 248, 249–51 compound interest, 35–36, 45 computer engineering, 15, 16, 27, 28, 28, 29, 47, 48, 156, 160, 164, 186, 253, 273 constraints, importance of, 11–12 consumer debt, 37–39, 44 contribution-matching program, 125, 130 contributions, 124, 124, 130–33, 130–34 control theory, 213–14, 214 corporate bonds, 182–83, 183, 185, 187 cost of living increases, 220–21 CRAP (creativity, resilience, adaptability, perseverance), 12–16, 20 creative writing, 27–28, 28, 29 creativity, 13–14 credit card international medical insurance, 198 credit cards, 34–35, 36, 38, 45, 196–97, 202 Cultural Revolution, 22, 23 Current-Year Spending Bucket, 204, 205, 206, 206–7, 210, 212, 217 deadline, writing a paper under a, 11 debt, avoiding at all costs, 34–45, 78–79, 197 debt, using to reduce risk (Investors), 271 deductible contributions, 123, 124, 124, 125, 126, 126–27, 127–29, 130–33, 130–34, 135 defaulting on debt, 38, 39, 41 Deng Xiaoping, 23 designing a portfolio, 104–5, 104–10, 107–8, 110, 120 diabetes and rich people, 17 digging, medical waste, 3–4, 9, 111, 157, 189 diminishing happiness effect, 64–65 discount stores, taking advantage of, 235 dividends, 123, 124, 137, 137, 178, 183–84, 184–86, 187.


pages: 1,351 words: 385,579

The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined by Steven Pinker

1960s counterculture, affirmative action, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, availability heuristic, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, Bonfire of the Vanities, book value, bread and circuses, British Empire, Broken windows theory, business cycle, California gold rush, Cass Sunstein, citation needed, classic study, clean water, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, Columbine, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, confounding variable, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, crack epidemic, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Brooks, delayed gratification, demographic transition, desegregation, Doomsday Clock, Douglas Hofstadter, Dr. Strangelove, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, experimental subject, facts on the ground, failed state, first-past-the-post, Flynn Effect, food miles, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, fudge factor, full employment, Garrett Hardin, George Santayana, ghettoisation, Gini coefficient, global village, Golden arches theory, Great Leap Forward, Henri Poincaré, Herbert Marcuse, Herman Kahn, high-speed rail, Hobbesian trap, humanitarian revolution, impulse control, income inequality, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, lake wobegon effect, libertarian paternalism, long peace, longitudinal study, loss aversion, Marshall McLuhan, mass incarceration, McMansion, means of production, mental accounting, meta-analysis, Mikhail Gorbachev, mirror neurons, moral panic, mutually assured destruction, Nelson Mandela, nuclear taboo, Oklahoma City bombing, open economy, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Singer: altruism, power law, QWERTY keyboard, race to the bottom, Ralph Waldo Emerson, random walk, Republic of Letters, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Saturday Night Live, security theater, Skinner box, Skype, Slavoj Žižek, South China Sea, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Stanford prison experiment, statistical model, stem cell, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, sunk-cost fallacy, technological determinism, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, the long tail, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Timothy McVeigh, Tragedy of the Commons, transatlantic slave trade, trolley problem, Turing machine, twin studies, ultimatum game, uranium enrichment, Vilfredo Pareto, Walter Mischel, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

The nearly 3,000 deaths from the 9/11 attacks were literally off the chart—way down in the tail of the power-law distribution into which terrorist attacks fall.181 According to the Global Terrorism Database of the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (the major publicly available dataset on terrorist attacks), between 1970 and 2007 only one other terrorist attack in the entire world has killed as many as 500 people.182 In the United States, Timothy McVeigh’s bombing of a federal office building in Oklahoma City in 1995 killed 165, a shooting spree by two teenagers at Columbine High School in 1999 killed 17, and no other attack has killed as many as a dozen. Other than 9/11, the number of people killed by terrorists on American soil during these thirty-eight years was 340, and the number killed after 9/11—the date that inaugurated the so-called Age of Terror—was 11. While some additional plots were foiled by the Department of Homeland Security, many of their claims have turned out to be the proverbial elephant repellent, with every elephant-free day serving as proof of its effectiveness.183 Compare the American death toll, with or without 9/11, to other preventable causes of death.

Though we can’t interpret every zig or zag in the graphs at face value, because some may represent seams and overlaps between databases with different coding criteria, we can try to get a general sense of whether terrorism really has increased in the so-called Age of Terror.199 The safest records are those for terrorist attacks on American soil, if for no other reason than that there are so few of them that each can be scrutinized. Figure 6–9 shows all of them since 1970, plotted on a logarithmic scale because otherwise the line would be a towering spike for 9/11 poking through a barely wrinkled carpet. With the lower altitudes stretched out by the logarithmic scale, we can discern peaks for Oklahoma City in 1995 and Columbine in 1999 (which is a dubious example of “terrorism,” but with a single exception, noted below, I never second-guess the datasets when plotting the graphs). Apart from this trio of spikes, the trend since 1970 is, if anything, more downward than upward. FIGURE 6–9. Rate of deaths from terrorism, United States, 1970–2007 Source: Global Terrorism Database, START (National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism, 2010, http://www.start.umd.edu/gtd/), accessed on April 6, 2010.

The victims, for their part, had nowhere to turn, because complaining to a teacher or parent would brand them as snitches and pantywaists and make their lives more hellish than ever. But in another of those historical gestalt shifts in which a category of violence flips from inevitable to intolerable, bullying has been targeted for elimination. The movement emerged from the ball of confusion surrounding the 1999 Columbine High School massacre, as the media amplified one another’s rumors about the causes—Goth culture, jocks, antidepressants, video games, Internet use, violent movies, the rock singer Marilyn Manson—and one of them was bullying. As it turned out, the two assassins were not, as the media endlessly repeated, Goths who had been picked on by jocks.193 But a popular understanding took hold that the massacre was an act of revenge, and childhood professionals parlayed the urban legend into a campaign against bullying.


pages: 487 words: 147,238

American Girls: Social Media and the Secret Lives of Teenagers by Nancy Jo Sales

4chan, access to a mobile phone, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Black Lives Matter, British Empire, collateralized debt obligation, Columbine, dark pattern, digital divide, East Village, Edward Snowden, feminist movement, Golden Gate Park, hiring and firing, impulse control, invention of the printing press, James Bridle, jitney, Kodak vs Instagram, longitudinal study, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, moral panic, San Francisco homelessness, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, Social Justice Warrior, tech bro, TechCrunch disrupt, The Chicago School, women in the workforce

With school shootings up nearly 70 percent in the 1990s over the ’80s, the Secret Service and the Department of Education conducted an investigation into the causes of thirty-seven attacks since 1974, finding that, “in several cases, individual attackers had experienced bullying and harassment that was long-standing and severe.” In the case of Columbine, however, bullying was not ultimately seen as a contributing factor. A lengthy FBI investigation found that Harris was a classic “psychopath” and Klebold a depressive in his thrall. Since Columbine, school shootings have continued to plague the nation; there were thirty-five with fatalities in 2014, almost all of them committed by teenage boys and young men. Cyberbullying has been increasingly discussed in the news as a possible cause, because of its concurrent rise.

Because Jazz wasn’t blaming anyone, she was just being real; but Jazz had parents who supported her in her decision to be who she wanted to be, and Jazz’s parents had money to make that happen. The subway doors opened up and Montana slid into the sea of people. Online The problem of bullying came to national attention in 1999, with the mass shooting at Columbine High School. Media reports alleged that Eric Harris, eighteen, and Dylan Klebold, seventeen, had been the victims of bullying, and that this had contributed to their horrible massacre. After another school shooting at a California high school a year later, Attorney General John Ashcroft bemoaned an “onerous culture of bullying.”


pages: 574 words: 148,233

Sandy Hook: An American Tragedy and the Battle for Truth by Elizabeth Williamson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, 4chan, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, anti-communist, anti-globalists, Asperger Syndrome, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Cambridge Analytica, citizen journalism, Columbine, Comet Ping Pong, coronavirus, COVID-19, crisis actor, critical race theory, crowdsourcing, dark triade / dark tetrad, deplatforming, disinformation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, estate planning, fake news, false flag, Ferguson, Missouri, fulfillment center, illegal immigration, index card, Internet Archive, Jon Ronson, Jones Act, Kevin Roose, Mark Zuckerberg, medical malpractice, messenger bag, multilevel marketing, obamacare, Oklahoma City bombing, Parler "social media", post-truth, QAnon, Robert Mercer, Russian election interference, Saturday Night Live, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, source of truth, Steve Bannon, Susan Wojcicki, TED Talk, TikTok, Timothy McVeigh, traveling salesman, Twitter Arab Spring, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, WikiLeaks, work culture , Works Progress Administration, yellow journalism

“People like these who are doing these shootings are being put in place by some agency or the government to promote a gun grab or keep the public in fear,” John said. He noted that mass shootings seemed to be happening “like every weekend” that year. To him, that was evidence not of a societal problem but of a government plot. “Well, we know Columbine was staged,” Jones said, hedging by retreating to a well-worn theory. “They reported four different gunmen, there were one hundred and twenty-seven bombs in the building, half the school was empty, there was a stand-down, there were government mind control programs connected to both of the youth . . .

Indeed it would have been, had King not been assassinated in 1968, six years before Halbig joined the police. Halbig bounced around the Florida public school system, working as a teacher, a coach, and an assistant principal. From 1995 to 1999, he was Seminole County Public Schools’ security director; an Orlando Sentinel article quoted him after Columbine as saying a school shooting “can happen any time [sic], anywhere.’’[5] Halbig worked as Lake County Public Schools’ risk management director from 2005 to 2009; when his position was eliminated, he said it was because he’d blown the whistle on mold issues.[6] In retirement Halbig cast about for a second act.

Wayne, 6, 20–21, 22, 134, 144–47, 170, 296, 402, 403 Center for Countering Digital Hate, 419 Center for Trauma Recovery and Juvenile Justice, University of Connecticut, 28 Chang, Maria Hsia, 106–8, 115 Chobani lawsuit against Infowars, 278–80, 320 Choose Love Movement, 381 Clinton, Bill, 241 Clinton, Hillary: “alt-right” speech of, 262–65; and conspiracy theories, 241, 258; and Infowars’ interview with Trump, 213–14, 215; and Jones, 243, 429; and Pizzagate, 240–41, 242–43; and QAnon, 250–51; and Wikileaks’ email dump, 241–42, 253 CNN, 16–17, 96, 98, 118–20 Cohn, James, 221 college professors as conspiracy theorists, 104–16. See also Fetzer, James; Tracy, James Columbine massacre (1999), 83 Comet Ping Pong: aftermath of attack, 246–48, 251–54; arson attempt at, 250, 251; gunman at, 244, 245–47; and Infowars’ video, 243, 249–50, 254–56, 277, 320; and Pizzagate, 241, 242–43, 245, 250 Comey, James, 242 conspiracy theorists: claims massacre was a hoax, 72, 73, 83–84, 93, 99, 103, 106–8, 111–12, 120–22, 156, 196, 198, 264–65; continual adaptation of, 306–7, 425; on Cooper’s interview with Haller, 157, 161; copyright violations of, 195–96, 197–98, 199–200; countering misinformation, 424–25; death threats issued by, 106–7, 169–71, 218–20, 221, 236, 302, 343, 406; defense strategies against lawsuits, 415; demands for proof of massacre, 109, 170, 190, 303, 392, 407; development of conspiracy theories, 150–53; disbelief as post-traumatic stress, 168; doxxing practices of, 106, 107–8, 198, 199, 200–201, 219, 277, 303, 304, 351, 443; and errors/discrepancies in media coverage, 36–37, 99; Facebook group of, 148–50, 153–60, 163–64, 166–69, 170, 226, 328, 392, 440; FEMA theory of, 105, 176; and First Amendment protections, 204–10; and gun control, 135; harrassment by, 103, 170, 177, 183, 184, 231–34, 236–38, 239, 331, 343–44, 382; and Heslin, 287, 289; and HONR’s efforts, 199, 306; and immediate aftermath of massacre, 98–99; internet as medium of, 160; Israeli psyop theory of, 105, 176; and Lanza house site, 29; Miller on three types of, 124; in Newtown, 102–4, 147–48, 184; and NSA Utah Data Center, 268–69; and Pizzagate, 242; Pozner’s attempts to engage, 124–25, 142–43, 147, 148–50, 153–60, 166–69; and Pozner’s counteroffensive, 162–65; predictors of alignment with, 92–93professors as, 104–16 (see also Fetzer, James; Tracy, James); profiting from conspiracy content on social media, 194, 253; psychological traits of, 153, 419, 425, 426–28; public confrontations of, 231–34, 236, 238, 239; and Pulse nightclub massacre, 93; records demanded by, 181, 185, 187–90; reformed, 173–75, 222–30; Sandy Hook as first mass tragedy triggering, 2, 85; social media’s amplification/spread of, 93, 177, 191; and survivors of massacre, 100, 184, 186; threats to dig up victims’ graves, 143; toxic changes in, 431–32; and Trump, 274, 426.


pages: 864 words: 222,565

Inventor of the Future: The Visionary Life of Buckminster Fuller by Alec Nevala-Lee

Adam Neumann (WeWork), Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, American energy revolution, Apple II, basic income, Biosphere 2, blockchain, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, Charles Lindbergh, cloud computing, Columbine, complexity theory, Computer Lib, coronavirus, cotton gin, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, declining real wages, digital nomad, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, East Village, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, Frank Gehry, gentrification, gig economy, global village, Golden Gate Park, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, hydraulic fracturing, index card, information retrieval, James Dyson, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Kitchen Debate, Lao Tzu, lateral thinking, Lean Startup, Lewis Mumford, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, megastructure, Menlo Park, minimum viable product, Mother of all demos, Neil Armstrong, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, Norman Mailer, Own Your Own Home, Paul Graham, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, reality distortion field, remote working, Ronald Reagan, side project, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Ted Nelson, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the medium is the message, Thomas Malthus, universal basic income, urban planning, urban renewal, We are as Gods, WeWork, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks

As they grew bolder, he and Lincoln ventured to the Blue Hills Reservation state park and the girls’ dorm at Milton Academy, the nearby prep school, where they hung a flower basket as a May Day prank and were almost caught when Fuller lost his glasses there. The backdrop to these memories was Fuller’s family home, which had been the first house built on Columbine Road. Its architect was Alexander Wadsworth Longfellow Jr., his father’s cousin, and although Fuller dismissed it later as “a rather large Gay Nineties Victorian,” its elegant lines bore the influence of the Japanese Pavilion at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. Sunlight entered the dining room through diamond panes, and Fuller was once sent upstairs without supper for cutting his initials in a window with his mother’s ring.

New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2003. ———. Listening to Stone: The Art and Life of Isamu Noguchi. London: Thames & Hudson, 2015. Hession, Jane King, and Debra Pickrel. Frank Lloyd Wright in New York: The Plaza Years, 1954–1959. Salt Lake City: Gibbs Smith, 2007. Howard, Jane. Margaret Mead: A Life. New York: Fawcett Columbine, 1984. Howland, Llewellyn, III. No Ordinary Being: W. Starling Burgess, Inventor, Naval Architect, Poet, Aviation Pioneer, and Master of American Design. Jaffrey, NH: David R. Godine, 2015. Hubbard, L. Ron. Adventurer/Explorer: Daring Deeds & Unknown Realms. Commerce, CA: Bridge, 1996. Indlu Geodesic Research Project.

family home: Architectural background on the Milton house and the Big House on Bear Island is drawn from Margaret Henderson Floyd, Architecture After Richardson: Regionalism Before Modernism—Longfellow, Alden, and Harlow in Boston and Pittsburgh (University of Chicago, 1994), 123–25 and 430–35. The current address of the Milton house is 85 Columbine Road (RBF, “The Bear Island Story,” Series 7, B6-F14, 12). “a rather large Gay Nineties Victorian”: AMS, 9. “to get rid of the evil fairies”: Hugh Kenner, “Bucky Fuller and the Final Exam,” New York Times Magazine, July 6, 1975, 10. “gypsy camps”: RBF, “What It Was Like to Grow Up in the Boston Area,” May 1, 1979, Series 1, B2-F2, 7.


pages: 350 words: 96,803

Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution by Francis Fukuyama

Albert Einstein, Asilomar, assortative mating, Berlin Wall, bioinformatics, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, classic study, Columbine, cotton gin, demographic transition, digital divide, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Flynn Effect, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, impulse control, life extension, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, out of africa, Peter Singer: altruism, phenotype, precautionary principle, presumed consent, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, Scientific racism, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), sexual politics, stem cell, Steven Pinker, Stuart Kauffman, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, Turing test, twin studies

But what we notice in the first instance is that random violence against other members of the community is prohibited in every known human cultural group: while murder is universal, so are laws and/or social norms that seek to prohibit murder. This is no less true among man’s primate cousins: a troop of chimpanzees will occasionally experience violent aggression from a younger male that, like the Columbine High School shooters, is lonely, peripheral, or seeking to make a point.29 But the older members of the community will always take measures to control and neutralize that individual because community order cannot tolerate such violence. Primate violence, including human violence, is legitimated primarily at higher social levels—that is, on the part of in-groups that compete with out-groups.

Planned Parenthood Castro, Fidel Catholic Church Cavalli-Sforza, Luigi Luca Celera Genomics cell division cells, ageing of germ cells CHADD (Children and Adults with Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder) characteristics, continuum of Chernobyl children drugging of interests of, safeguarded by parents parents’ desire to maximize the happiness of rights of, limitations on chimeras, creation of chimpanzees genome of, overlap with human genome China Chomsky, Noam Christianity chromosomes, artificial Ciba Seeds class war, biotechnology and Clinton administration cloning of animals biological harm of harm to cloned child legality of moral objections to reproductive, proposed ban on research therapeutic cocaine Codex Alimentarius Commission cognition innate forms of species-typical forms of Colapinto, John Cold War Collins, Francis color, perception of Columbine High School shooters communism failure of communitarian life plans compassion, the word competitiveness and cooperativeness, co-evolution of complex adaptive systems predicting the behavior of computers, consciousness in, possibility of Confucianism consciousness as source of human dignity conservatives.


pages: 329 words: 102,469

Free World: America, Europe, and the Surprising Future of the West by Timothy Garton Ash

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Albert Einstein, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, BRICs, British Empire, call centre, centre right, clean water, Columbine, continuation of politics by other means, cuban missile crisis, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, Eratosthenes, European colonialism, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, illegal immigration, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), James Watt: steam engine, Kickstarter, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, Peace of Westphalia, postnationalism / post nation state, Project for a New American Century, purchasing power parity, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Suez crisis 1956, Thomas Malthus, trade liberalization, Washington Consensus, working poor, working-age population, World Values Survey

The profusion of guns is a real difference between America and Europe—except for parts of Europe’s “Wild East,” in the Balkans and today’s eastern Europe (Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova), where handguns are still freely toted. It’s tempting to extrapolate from this American domestic phenomenon to foreign policy: cowboys at home, cowboys abroad. The American satirist Michael Moore does this vividly in his film Bowling for Columbine, drawing an imaginative connection between the shootings at Columbine High School in Colorado and the Clinton administration’s bombing of Serbia. A slightly more serious version of this argument is advanced by Robert Kagan: Americans retain a readiness to use military force in a dangerous “Hobbesian” world. Except that, from the end of the Vietnam War to the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, France and Britain were generally more willing to send their soldiers into dangerous action than the United States.


pages: 251 words: 44,888

The Words You Should Know to Sound Smart: 1200 Essential Words Every Sophisticated Person Should Be Able to Use by Bobbi Bly

Albert Einstein, Alistair Cooke, Anton Chekhov, British Empire, Columbine, Donald Trump, George Santayana, haute couture, Honoré de Balzac, Joan Didion, John Nash: game theory, Network effects, placebo effect, Ralph Waldo Emerson, school vouchers, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, three-masted sailing ship

.” – Freeman Dyson, English-born American physicist and mathematician serendipity (ser-en-DIP-it-ee), noun Attaining success, good fortune, or the object of your desire more through luck and random circumstance than deliberate effort. What made him an Internet billionaire was SERENDIPITY more than brains or talent. serpentine (SUR-pen-teen), adjective Snake-like in shape or movement. “For it is not possible to join SERPENTINE wisdom with columbine innocency, except men know exactly all the conditions of the serpent.” – Francis Bacon, English philosopher, author, and statesman sesquipedalian (ses-kwi-pih-DAL-yin), adjective A writer or speaker who prefers big, complex words and arcane jargon to plain, simple English, or a piece of writing containing such prose.


pages: 545 words: 137,789

How Markets Fail: The Logic of Economic Calamities by John Cassidy

Abraham Wald, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, Andrei Shleifer, anti-communist, AOL-Time Warner, asset allocation, asset-backed security, availability heuristic, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black-Scholes formula, Blythe Masters, book value, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, capital asset pricing model, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, centralized clearinghouse, collateralized debt obligation, Columbine, conceptual framework, Corn Laws, corporate raider, correlation coefficient, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, debt deflation, different worldview, diversification, Elliott wave, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial intermediation, full employment, Garrett Hardin, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Gunnar Myrdal, Haight Ashbury, hiring and firing, Hyman Minsky, income per capita, incomplete markets, index fund, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, Landlord’s Game, liquidity trap, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, market bubble, market clearing, mental accounting, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Minsky moment, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, Naomi Klein, negative equity, Network effects, Nick Leeson, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Northern Rock, paradox of thrift, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Phillips curve, Ponzi scheme, precautionary principle, price discrimination, price stability, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, proprietary trading, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, random walk, Renaissance Technologies, rent control, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, statistical model, subprime mortgage crisis, tail risk, Tax Reform Act of 1986, technology bubble, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The Market for Lemons, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Two Sigma, unorthodox policies, value at risk, Vanguard fund, Vilfredo Pareto, wealth creators, zero-sum game

Experiments suggest that once a person gets “anchored” on a certain number, or argument, he may well try to cling to it by mistakenly interpreting any evidence that is presented to him as supportive, even if it is actually contradictory. (In the literature, this is known as the “confirmation bias.”) In the aftermath of the latest Columbine-style mass shooting, supporters of gun control invariably say, “I told you so,” but so do supporters of maintaining an armed citizenry. In 1977–1978, Kahneman and Tversky spent the academic year at Stanford, where they became friends and collaborators with Richard Thaler, a young economist who had done his Ph.D. at Rochester, a bastion of mathematical orthodoxy.

Citigroup Associated First Capital purchased by compensation of CEOs of credit default swaps of dereguation and disaster myopia of Federal Reserve and government safety net for reduction in assets of risk-management system at shadow banking system and suprime mortgage securities issued by Citron, Bob City College classical economics new Clayton Antitrust Act (1914) climate change Clinton, Bill CLSA Emerging Markets CNBC television network Coase, Ronald Coase theorem Cobden, Richard Coca-Cola Corporation Cohen, Jonathan collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) collateralized mortgage obligations (CMOs) Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) Columbia University Earth Institute Columbine massacre Columbus, Christopher Commerce Department, U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) communism collapse of Community Reinvestment Act (1977) Comptroller of the Currency, Office of Congress, U.S. bailouts authorized by deregulation efforts in health care reform in Joint Economic Committee and savings and loan industry collapse tax legislation in Congressional Budget Office Conservative Party, British Constitution of Liberty, The (Hayek) Consumer Financial Protection Agency Consumer Product Safety Commission Contimortgage Corporation Continental Illinois Bank conventional wisdom Corcoran Group Corn Laws Corrigan, E.


pages: 457 words: 128,838

The Age of Cryptocurrency: How Bitcoin and Digital Money Are Challenging the Global Economic Order by Paul Vigna, Michael J. Casey

Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, altcoin, Apple Newton, bank run, banking crisis, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, blockchain, Bretton Woods, buy and hold, California gold rush, capital controls, carbon footprint, clean water, Cody Wilson, collaborative economy, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Columbine, Credit Default Swap, cross-border payments, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, decentralized internet, disinformation, disintermediation, Dogecoin, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, Firefox, Flash crash, Ford Model T, Fractional reserve banking, Glass-Steagall Act, hacker house, Hacker News, Hernando de Soto, high net worth, informal economy, intangible asset, Internet of things, inventory management, Joi Ito, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, Kuwabatake Sanjuro: assassination market, litecoin, Long Term Capital Management, Lyft, M-Pesa, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, means of production, Menlo Park, mobile money, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, new economy, new new economy, Nixon shock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, payday loans, Pearl River Delta, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, pets.com, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, price stability, printed gun, profit motive, QR code, RAND corporation, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Robert Shiller, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, seigniorage, shareholder value, sharing economy, short selling, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart contracts, special drawing rights, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, Ted Nelson, The Great Moderation, the market place, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, transaction costs, tulip mania, Turing complete, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, underbanked, Vitalik Buterin, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, Y2K, zero-sum game, Zimmermann PGP

At fifteen, Lands had made his first serious money—serious for a teenager, that is—running a large “guild” connected to the video game EverQuest and selling virtual goods for real money. He was already an entrepreneur. He just didn’t know it yet. “I didn’t know anything about business,” Lands said. “I didn’t even know anybody who had a business. My spreadsheet was a notepad.” This was the time of the Columbine shooting, and a gamer with long hair who had a predilection for wearing black soon found himself the focus of authorities at his school, who worried he might have similar inclinations as the two young killers who orchestrated that massacre. Having money in his pocket gave him the courage to simply quit school rather than deal with the harassment.

Buffett, Warren Buterin, Vitalik Butterfly Labs Jalapeño Buyer’s Best Friend Byrne, Patrick Caban, Glorivee Canada capital, mystery of Caribbean car loan payments Carroll, Lewis Cary, Nicolas Casares, Wences Cassano, Chris CBW Bank CDS contracts centralization CEX.IO Chain chartalists Chase Bank Chaum, David CheapAir.com China cipher Circle Financial Circuit House Citibank Citicorp Citigroup Clear, Michael Clearstone Venture Partners Clinton, Bill cloud mining Coca-Cola Code of Hammurabi coffee Coinbase coincidence of wants CoinDesk Coinfloor Coinist CoinLab CoinMKT coinometrics.com coins CoinsFriendly CoinTerra CoinVox Colas, Nicolas Collins, Reeve Colored Coins Columbine shooting commodities communication technologies community, and currency bitcoin Concern Worldwide Conditional Access for Europe (CAFE) Congress contracts smart ConvergEx corruption Corzine, John Counterparty Cowen, Tyler Craig, Austin and Beccy Craigslist Creandum creation myths credit bad credit and debit cards American Express fraud and MasterCard Visa Credit Suisse First Boston Crook, Colin Cross River Bank Crowd Companies crowdfunding “Crypto-Anarchist Manifesto” (May) cryptocurrencies: future of labeling of ledger and mainstreaming of mining of regulation of roots of trust and value of see also bitcoin cryptographers Cypherpunks political differences among cryptography systems Cryptsy CubeSpawn Cummings, E.


Yosemite, Sequoia & Kings Canyon by Fodor's

Columbine, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, space junk, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Works Progress Administration

At the edge of a logged sequoia grove, some trees still stand at this site. Near the park’s entrance, the area is paved and next to the road. It’s the only picnic area in either park that is plowed in the wintertime. Restrooms, grills, and drinking water are available, and the area is entirely accessible. | Just inside Rte. 180, Big Stump entrance 93633. Columbine. This shaded picnic area near the sequoias is relatively level. Tables, restrooms, drinking water, and grills are available. | Grant Tree Rd., just off Generals Hwy. (Rte. 198), ½ mi northwest of Grant Grove Visitor Center 93633. Grizzly Falls. This little gem is worth a pull-over, if not a picnic.


pages: 179 words: 49,805

I Want to Be Where the Normal People Are by Rachel Bloom

4chan, call centre, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, COVID-19, gentrification, imposter syndrome, Snapchat, telemarketer

ADOLESCENT RACHEL BLOOM No one will ever understand me and that’s the way it has to be. I am an underdog whose sheer talent will someday prove everyone wrong. And then they’ll all be sorry. (pause, then) Just to be clear, I mean that they’ll be sorry in an “I’m gonna be successful” way, not in a Columbine way. A BUNCH OF FLYERS come down from the ceiling. ADOLESCENT RACHEL BLOOM What’s this? Our school’s beloved drama and English teacher is starting a YEAR-ROUND MUSICAL THEATER CLASS? Wow, I’ll finally get to spend all of my time doing theater instead of just little community productions in the summer?


Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide by Henry Jenkins

barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, collective bargaining, Columbine, content marketing, deskilling, digital divide, disinformation, Donald Trump, game design, George Gilder, global village, Howard Rheingold, informal economy, means of production, military-industrial complex, moral panic, new economy, no-fly zone, profit motive, Robert Metcalfe, Saturday Night Live, search costs, SimCity, slashdot, Steven Pinker, tacit knowledge, technological determinism, the long tail, the market place, Y Combinator

., 219 Cloudmakers, 123,125,127, 232 C N N , 1-3,124,140,192, 225 Coca-Cola Company, 60, 68-69, 70, 73, 87-88, 91, 92, 207 co-creation, 105-107 code, 163 Cohen, Ben, 206 cokemusic.com, 72 Cold Mountain, 200 Cole, Jeanne, 150 collaborationism, 134,167, 169-170, 187 collaborative authorship, 96,108¬ 113 Collective Detective, 233 collective intelligence, 2, 4, 20, 22, 26-27, 29, 50, 52-54, 63, 95,100, 127, 129,170,184, 208, 226, 235, 245-247, 254 Colson, Charles, 201-202 Columbine, 192 C o m e d y Central, 224-225 comics, 14, 96,101-102,108-109, 111, 132,164, 249-250 commercial culture, 135 commodity, 27 commodity exploitation, 62-63 communal media, 245 Comparative M e d i a Studies program, 12, 68, 80, 85,151 complexity, 33, 94-95, 259 Concepción, Bienvenido, 143 Concrete, 101, 111 consensus, 86 consensus culture, 236 convergence, 2-8,10-12, 14-24, 26, 59, 64, 68, 83, 95,104,114,170, 208, 212, 220, 242 convergence, corporate, 18,109-110, 157, 259 convergence culture, 15, 21, 23,132, 137,176-177, 204, 212, 242, 247, 259-260, 248, 257 convergence, grassroots, 18, 57, 109-110, 136-137, 157, 215, 259 Coombe, Rosemary J., 189 Coors Brewing Company, 69 Cops, 132 copyright, 137-138,154,167,189-190, 248 Corliss, Richard, 127 "cosplay," 113-114 Counterstrike, 163 Cowboy Bebop, 101 Creative Artists Agency, 60, 67 Crest toothpaste, 70 critical pessimism, 247-248 critical utopianism, 247-248 Crossfire, 225 Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, 109, 112-113 cult films, 97-98 cultural activator, 95 cultural attractor, 95 culture.

., 142 Zsenya, 178 Skenováno pro studijní úcely 307 About the Author The founder and director of MIT's Comparative M e d i a Studies Program, H e n r y Jenkins is the author or editor of ten books on various aspects of media and popular culture, including Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture, From Barbie to Mortal Kombat: Gender and Computer Games, The Children's Culture Reader, and Hop on Pop: The Politics and Pleasures of Popular Culture. H i s career so far has included testifying before the U.S. Senate Commerce Committee hearing into Marketing Violence for Youth following the Columbine shootings, promoting media literacy education before the Federal Communications Commission, speaking to the Governor's Board of the World Economic F o r u m about intellectual property and grassroots creativity, heading the Education Arcade w h i c h promotes the educational uses of computer and video games, writing monthly columns for Technology Review and Computer Games magazines, and consulting w i t h leading media companies about consumer relations.


How to Be Black by Baratunde Thurston

affirmative action, carbon footprint, Columbine, dark matter, desegregation, drone strike, gentrification, high-speed rail, housing crisis, phenotype, plutocrats, Rosa Parks, shareholder value, supply-chain management, the scientific method, transatlantic slave trade, W. E. B. Du Bois

Beware of the white man; I’m not saying to be scared of him or to cut off communication, but beware, because when we realize that we should not be fighting each other, the tide will turn. I was thirteen years old when I wrote that and handed it in to my English teacher. If a middle school student turned in such a document today, he would immediately be sent to a counselor or detention facility, but this was pre-Columbine 1991. The number one song on the Billboard charts was the upbeat Someday by Mariah Carey, and the top television show was Cheers. It was a happier time. After class the next day, my teacher pulled me aside to discuss my manifesto. “You would never have written this if I weren’t black, would you?”


pages: 250 words: 9,029

Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Popular Culture Is Making Us Smarter by Steven Johnson

Columbine, complexity theory, corporate governance, delayed gratification, edge city, Flynn Effect, game design, Golden age of television, Marshall McLuhan, pattern recognition, profit motive, public intellectual, race to the bottom, sexual politics, SimCity, social intelligence, Steve Jobs, the market place

If the subj ect matter of popular entertainment truly had a significant impact on our behavior (and especially the be­ havior of the younger generations) then logically we should expect to see very different trends in real-world society. Over the last ten years-a period of unprecedented fictional vio­ lence i n the American household, thanks to Quake and Quentin Tarantino films and Tony Soprano-the country simultaneously experienced the most dramatic drop in vio­ lent crime in its history. Yes, the Columbine shooters were most likely infl uenced by playing violent games like Quake, but as tragic as that event was, we don't analyze soci a l trends b y looking at isolated single examples; we l o o k at 1 92 ST E V E N J O H N S O N broad patterns in the society, and the broad pattern of the last decade is less violence, not more.


pages: 239 words: 62,005

Don't Burn This Book: Thinking for Yourself in an Age of Unreason by Dave Rubin

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, An Inconvenient Truth, battle of ideas, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Burning Man, butterfly effect, centre right, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, deplatforming, Donald Trump, failed state, fake news, gender pay gap, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, illegal immigration, immigration reform, job automation, Kevin Roose, low skilled workers, mutually assured destruction, obamacare, off-the-grid, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, school choice, Silicon Valley, Social Justice Warrior, Steven Pinker, Susan Wojcicki, Tim Cook: Apple, unpaid internship, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

It found that major depression has almost doubled for 21-year-olds from 2009 to 2017, while the number of 22-year-olds who attempted suicide has doubled from 2008 to 2017. This sort of information is important because the root of our gun problem isn’t the weapon itself but the human beings behind them. After all, it’s a person who pulls the trigger. If you think this isn’t relevant, it may be worth noting that one of the Columbine, Colorado, shooters, Eric Harris, had Luvox (a Prozac-like, psychotropic medicine) in his bloodstream. Likewise, Stephen Paddock, the man who slaughtered fifty-eight people in the Las Vegas shooting—the worst in modern American history—had antianxiety medication in his system and had previously been prescribed diazepam.


pages: 684 words: 173,622

Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief by Lawrence Wright

Albert Einstein, call centre, Columbine, hydroponic farming, Jeff Hawkins, military-industrial complex, Naomi Klein, Peoples Temple, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, Ronald Reagan, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, WikiLeaks, yellow journalism

Eli Lilly, for instance, suppressed data showing that patients who were taking the popular drug Prozac—the only antidepressant certified as safe for children—were twelve times more likely to attempt suicide than patients taking similar medications. Antidepressants have been implicated in a number of schoolyard shootings, such as the 1999 Columbine High School massacre, where two students killed twelve of their classmates and a teacher. One of the killers was taking Luvox at the time. Adderall—one of the drugs cited by Cruise—is an amphetamine often prescribed for attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder; it sometimes causes increased aggression in children and adolescents.

Child Care Org, 4.1, 4.2 child labor laws Childs, Joe China, 2.1, 4.1 Chinese Communists, 4.1, 4.2 Christensen, Erika Christian Science Christman, Tory Christofferson Titchbourne, Julie Church of American Science Church of Latter Day Saints; see also Mormonism Church of Satan Church of Scientology International Church of Spiritual Engineering Church of Spiritual Technology, itr.1, 7.1 CIA, 3.1, 3.2, 3.3, 3.4n, 3.5, 4.1 Cine Org Citizens Commission on Human Rights Clarke, Stanley, 5.1, 5.2 Clear Body, Clear Mind Clears, 2.1, 2.2, 3.1, 7.1, 7.2 qualities of, 1.1, 2.1 Clearwater, Fla., itr.1, 3.1, 4.1 Clearwater Sun Clinton, Bill, 7.1, 8.1 Coale, John Coast Guard, U.S. Cohen, Leonard Collateral Collective Unconscious Colletto, Diane Colletto, John Columbia New Port Richey Hospital Columbia Pictures Columbine High School Commodore’s Messengers Organization, 3.1, 3.2, 4.1, 5.1, 5.2, 5.3, 6.1, 8.1, 9.1 confabulation confession conscious mind Contact Assist Contagion of Aberration “contra-survival action” Conway, Peggy Cook, Debbie, 8.1, 9.1 Cooley, Earle Cooper, Gary Cooper, Paulette, 3.1, 4.1, 5.1, 7.1 Corea, Chick, 1.1, 4.1, 5.1, 5.2, 7.1, 7.2 Corfu, 3.1, 3.2 “counter-intentions” Covertly Hostile personality Cowboy Stories Crash, 8.1, 9.1, 10.1 Creedance Clearwater Revival Creston ranch, 5.1, 5.2, epl.1 “crew chief” Crowe, Russell Crowley, Aleister, 2.1, 2.2, 2.3, 2.4, 7.1 Cruise, Connor, 7.1, 8.1 Cruise, Isabella, 7.1, 8.1 Cruise, Lee Anne Cruise, Tom, 6.1, 6.2, 6.3, 7.1, 7.2, 7.3, 8.1, 8.2, 8.3, 8.4, 8.5, 9.1, 9.2, 9.3, 9.4, 9.5, 9.6, 9.7, 9.8, 10.1, 10.2, 11.1, epl.1 Cruz, Penélope, 8.1, 9.1, 9.2 Cuba “cult” Cult Awareness Network, 7.1, 7.2n, 7.3 Curaçao Cusack, John Customs, U.S.


pages: 577 words: 171,126

Light This Candle: The Life & Times of Alan Shepard--America's First Spaceman by Neal Thompson

Apollo 11, Apollo 13, built by the lowest bidder, Charles Lindbergh, Columbine, cuban missile crisis, Donald Trump, low interest rates, military-industrial complex, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Neil Armstrong, Norman Mailer, place-making, Silicon Valley, William Langewiesche

page 163, “short-arm” inspection: Author interview with Jig Dog Ramage. page 163, Friends called him a . . . “liberty hound”: Author interview with Ralph Stell. page 163, “Shep never revealed . . . who he screwed”: Author interview with John Mitchell. page 164, nearly a million men subscribed to Playboy David Halberstam, The Fifties (New York: Fawcett Columbine, 1994), p. 573. page 164, wondered why she stayed with him: Author interview with Betty Whisler. page 165, still managed to reach Mach .93: Author interview with John Mitchell. page 166, Rooney . . . “a little stinker first class”: Griffin, oral history. page 167, unauthorized happy hour: Author interview with Bill Geiger.

., Apollo 14: The NASA Mission Reports. Ontario: Apogee Books, 2001. Grissom, Betty, and Henry Still. Starfall. New York: Ty Crowell Co., 1974. Grossnick, Roy, and William J. Armstrong. United States Naval Aviation: 1910–1995. Washington, D.C.: Naval Historical Center, 1997. Halberstam, David. The Fifties. New York: Fawcett Columbine, 1994. Ivins, Molly. Molly Ivins Can’t Say That, Can She? New York: Random House, 1991. Jacobus, Donald Lines, ed. The Shepard Families of New England. Vol. III. New Haven: The New Haven Colony Historical Society, 1973. Kennedy, John F. Profiles in Courage. New York: HarperCollins, 1956. Kennedy, Paul.


pages: 196 words: 65,045

Art of Creative Nonfiction: Writing and Selling the Literature of Reality by Lee Gutkind, Purba

Apollo 13, Columbine, Donald Trump, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, friendly fire, In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, Joan Didion, Mason jar, New Journalism, Norman Mailer, Ronald Reagan

This is where the largest f lower beds are and the place I try out new plants just for fun. This is my favorite room because this is where most of my perennials are, or at least where most of them were born before they got transplanted to other beds. Bleeding heart, red cloud spiderwort, edelweiss, columbine, bee balm, sea pink, salvia, silver mound, primrose, lavender, hosta by the ton, yarrow, lythrum, astilbe in many colors and heights-and countless others. My cat sleeps in a huge mat of coreopsis on summer's hottest days, and at night when I get home I have to comb it upward and help it stand up straight again.


pages: 207 words: 64,598

To Show and to Tell: The Craft of Literary Nonfiction by Phillip Lopate

Charles Lindbergh, Columbine, David Sedaris, desegregation, fear of failure, index card, Jane Jacobs, Joan Didion, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Lewis Mumford, Nelson Mandela, Norman Mailer, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Republic of Letters, Ronald Reagan, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, urban planning, W. E. B. Du Bois, white flight

The opening essay, “Small Silences,” is a superb demonstration of Hoagland at his most appealing and unfettered. He begins with lyrical recollections of his childhood move to Connecticut during World War II, and the discovery of the pond. “ ‘I’m going to the pond,’ I’d say casually to my mother; then dodge carefully past” the neighbor’s servant toward the trillium and columbine, the toadstools and fairy-ring mushrooms, the nematodes and myriapods, the blueberries or blackberries, near the opaque yet shiny stretch of hidden water, deep here, shallow there, with the wind ruffling the surface to conceal such factual matters, and cold at its inlet but warm where it fed into a creek that ran to the Silvermine River and finally the ocean.


Rough Guide DIRECTIONS Dublin by Geoff Wallis

Celtic Tiger, Columbine, gentrification, glass ceiling, haute cuisine

The Book of Kells Pre-eminent for the scale, variety and colour of its decoration, the Book of Kells probably originated at the monastery on Iona off the west coast of Scotland, which was founded around 561 by the great Irish scholar, bard and ruler St Colum Cille (St Colmcille in English). After a Viking raid in 806, the Columbines moved to the monastery of Kells in County Meath, and around 1653, the manuscript was moved to Dublin for safekeeping during the Cromwellian Wars. The 340 calfskin folios of the Book of Kells contain the four New Testament gospels along with preliminary texts, all in Latin. It’s thought that three artists created the book’s lavish decoration, which shows Pictish, Germanic and Mediterranean, as well as Celtic influences. 03 Places Dublin 61-184.indd 67 1/4/08 6:38:13 PM Trinity College, Grafton Street and around P L A C E S 68 HOUSE OF LORDS An Irish parliament had existed in one limited form or another since the thirteenth century, but achieved its greatest flowering here in 1782 – “Grattan’s Parliament” after the prime mover behind the constitutional reform – when it was granted legislative independence from the British Parliament.


pages: 249 words: 66,546

Protecting Pollinators by Jodi Helmer

Anthropocene, big-box store, clean water, Columbine, crowdsourcing, Donald Trump, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Kickstarter, Maui Hawaii, meta-analysis, the scientific method, urban sprawl, zero-sum game

Their tenacious behavior isn’t limited to their own species; rufous hummingbirds will direct their aggression toward species weighing twice as much. The rufous hummingbird prefers nectar from flowers as colorful as their plumage; the nimble pollinators seek out plants with tubular flowers, such as Columbine (Aquilegia), Indian paintbrush (Castilleja), and larkspur (Delphinium), using their superior flight skills to move from one flower to the next at remarkable speeds. Though nectar makes up the bulk of their diet, they also nosh on insects for protein; gnats and aphids are among their favorites. The rufous hummingbird has a more extensive breeding range than other species and has been spotted from Alaska to Mexico, breeding in open areas, including mountainsides, and nesting along the West Coast, traveling more than 2,000 miles to overwinter in warmer climates.


pages: 264 words: 68,108

Daily Rituals: How Artists Work by Mason Currey

Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Buckminster Fuller, Columbine, Honoré de Balzac, index card, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Paul Erdős, placebo effect

New York: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1922); Pamela Neville-Sington, Fanny Trollope: The Life and Adventures of a Clever Woman (New York: Viking, 1997). 62. “It was my practice”: Trollope, 236–7. 63. mother, Francis Trollope: Neville-Sington, 255. 64. Jane Austen: Park Honan, Jane Austen: Her Life (New York: Fawcett Columbine, 1987); James Edward Austen-Leigh, Memoir of Jane Austen (1926; repr. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967); Carol Shields, Jane Austen (New York: Viking Penguin, 2001). 65. “subject to all”: Austen-Leigh, 102. 66. Austen rose early: Honan, 264. 67. “Composition seems to”: Quoted in Shields, 123. 68.


pages: 225 words: 70,241

Silicon City: San Francisco in the Long Shadow of the Valley by Cary McClelland

affirmative action, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, Apple II, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Black Lives Matter, Burning Man, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, computer vision, creative destruction, driverless car, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, Fairchild Semiconductor, full employment, gamification, gentrification, gig economy, Golden Gate Park, Google bus, Google Glasses, high net worth, housing crisis, housing justice, income inequality, John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Loma Prieta earthquake, Lyft, mass immigration, means of production, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, open immigration, PalmPilot, rent control, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, Social Justice Warrior, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, TaskRabbit, tech bro, tech worker, transcontinental railway, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, urban planning, vertical integration, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, young professional

They’re just going with them wherever they want to go, being of support and helping them make sense of things. You don’t have to be a therapist to be able to do that. You have to have a certain makeup, and then you have to be trained well. But sometimes ways that people get trained as therapists can interfere with just listening. It makes me think about a scene in Bowling for Columbine. Marilyn Manson was being interviewed, and the interviewer asked him if he could have talked to Dylan Klebold, and whoever the other kid was, what would he have said to them? And he said something like, “I wouldn’t have said a thing. I would have listened. Because that’s what no one did.” In particular, there’s one subset of kids that have a really hard time accessing services: the kids who would tell you they’d known about the center for years before they ever set foot in it.


pages: 536 words: 79,887

A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains by Isabella Lucy Bird, Daniel J. Boorstin

Columbine, Donner party, Internet Archive, Open Library

The wild flowers are gorgeous and innumerable, though their beauty, which culminates in July and August, was over before I arrived, and the recent snow flurries have finished them. The time between winter and winter is very short, and the flowery growth and blossom of a whole year are compressed into two months. Here are dandelions, buttercups, larkspurs, harebells, violets, roses, blue gentian, columbine, painter's brush, and fifty others, blue and yellow predominating; and though their blossoms are stiffened by the cold every morning, they are starring the grass and drooping over the brook long before noon, making the most of their brief lives in the sunshine. Of ferns, after many a long hunt, I have only found the Cystopteris fragilis and the Blechnum spicant, but I hear that the Pteris aquilina is also found.


pages: 262 words: 78,781

A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy by William Braxton Irvine

classic study, Columbine, fear of failure, hedonic treadmill, Lao Tzu

These days, after doing what they can to save lives, authorities are quick to call in grief counselors to help those who survived the disaster, those who lost loved ones in it, and those who witnessed it. When, for example, the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City was bombed in 1995, killing 168, a horde of grief counselors descended on the city to help people work through their grief. Likewise, in 1999, when three dozen people were shot by two rampaging students at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, a team of grief counselors was brought in to help the surviving students, their parents, and members of the community deal with their grief.12 It is instructive to contrast these responses to disaster with the way authorities responded to disasters in the middle of the twentieth century.


pages: 296 words: 76,284

The End of the Suburbs: Where the American Dream Is Moving by Leigh Gallagher

Airbnb, big-box store, bike sharing, Burning Man, call centre, car-free, Celebration, Florida, clean water, collaborative consumption, Columbine, commoditize, crack epidemic, demographic winter, East Village, edge city, Edward Glaeser, extreme commuting, Ford Model T, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, helicopter parent, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, Jane Jacobs, Kickstarter, Lewis Mumford, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, Menlo Park, microapartment, mortgage tax deduction, negative equity, New Urbanism, peak oil, Peter Calthorpe, Ponzi scheme, Quicken Loans, Richard Florida, Robert Shiller, Sand Hill Road, Seaside, Florida, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, streetcar suburb, TED Talk, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Tony Hsieh, Tragedy of the Commons, transit-oriented development, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban sprawl, Victor Gruen, walkable city, white flight, white picket fence, young professional, Zipcar

After a tragic gang rape: Aliyah Shahid, “Girl, 11, Lured into Park Bathroom in Moreno Valley, Calif. and Gang Raped by 7 Teens: Cops,” New York Daily News, March 29, 2011. While overall homicides: Cameron McWhirter and Gary Fields, “Crime Migrates to Suburbs,” Wall Street Journal, December 30, 2012. Many of the nation’s highest-profile shootings have occurred in the suburbs as well, from Columbine to Aurora, Colorado, to, of course, the horrific shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, on December 14, 2012. The urban scholar Richard Florida studied data from mass shootings in recent years and found that, while the data does not cover every single episode and the geographic information is limited, the “wide majority” of such shootings, and especially mass school killings, have occurred not in urban centers of large cities but in the “small towns, burgs and villages of our suburban and rural areas.”


pages: 226 words: 71,540

Epic Win for Anonymous: How 4chan's Army Conquered the Web by Cole Stryker

4chan, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Chelsea Manning, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, commoditize, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, eternal september, Firefox, future of journalism, Gabriella Coleman, hive mind, informal economy, Internet Archive, it's over 9,000, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, lolcat, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Mason jar, pre–internet, Silicon Valley, slashdot, social bookmarking, social web, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Streisand effect, technoutopianism, TED Talk, wage slave, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks

A few years ago, this sort of collaborative metahumor would have been found only on 4chan (or maybe Something Awful), but the rest of the Internet, with Reddit leading the charge, has caught up. Reddit has also reappropriated 4chan’s Ask Me Anything, or AMA threads, which have attracted some major celebrities in addition to nerd icons like moot. The all-time top verified AMA threads include those of 74-time Jeopardy! champion Ken Jennings, actor Bruce Campbell, Columbine shooting survivor Brooks Brown, and a former Marine One crew chief. Unverified AMA threads, which are often even more interesting, include a military whistleblower, a girl who spent 16 months as a full-time BDSM slave, a person who was caught and tortured during recent rioting in Egypt, a man who only answers questions using MS Paint, a brain cancer victim with 2–6 months to live, and a four-year-old girl (with help from her dad).


pages: 291 words: 73,972

What Every Body Is Saying: An Ex-FBI Agent's Guide to Speed-Reading People by Joe Navarro, Marvin Karlins

cognitive load, Columbine, margin call

Many carnivores go after moving targets and exercise the “chase, trip, and bite” mechanism exhibited by large felines, the primary predators of our ancestors. Many animals not only freeze their motion when confronted by preda-LIVING OUR LIMBIC LEGACY 27 tors, but some even play dead, which is the ultimate freeze reaction. This is a strategy that opossums use, but they are not the only animals to do so. In fact, accounts of the school shootings at Columbine and Virginia Tech demonstrate that students used the freeze response to deal with deadly predators. By holding still and playing dead, many students survived even though they were only a few feet away from the killer. Instinctively, the students adopted ancient behaviors that work very effectively.


The Ledge: An Adventure Story of Friendship and Survival on Mount Rainier by Jim Davidson, Kevin Vaughan

Columbine, index card, Kim Stanley Robinson

Formerly an environmental geologist with his own consulting firm, Jim is now a professional speaker with Speaking of Adventure (www.speakingofadventure.com). Jim lives in Colorado with his two adventurous kids and his very tolerant wife. KEVIN VAUGHAN is a staff writer at The Denver Post. A graduate of Metropolitan State College, he has written extensively on the sports supplement industry, the tragedy at Columbine High School, and the criminal justice system. He has been honored numerous times for his journalism. He lives in Colorado with his wife and their three children.


pages: 252 words: 80,636

Bureaucracy by David Graeber

a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airport security, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, banking crisis, barriers to entry, borderless world, Bretton Woods, British Empire, collateralized debt obligation, Columbine, conceptual framework, Corn Laws, David Graeber, Future Shock, George Gilder, High speed trading, hiring and firing, junk bonds, Kitchen Debate, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, means of production, music of the spheres, Neal Stephenson, new economy, obamacare, Occupy movement, Oklahoma City bombing, Parkinson's law, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, pneumatic tube, post-work, price mechanism, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, stock buybacks, technological determinism, transcontinental railway, union organizing, urban planning, zero-sum game

In fact the only reference I could find to the term “postalization” in contemporary literature is an essay on workplace violence called “the postalization of corporate America,” decrying how an epidemic of violent attacks on bosses and co-workers was spreading from the public sector into private corporations, too. In a fascinating book called Going Postal: Rage, Murder, and Rebellion from Reagan’s Workplaces to Clinton’s Columbine and Beyond, Mark Ames carefully picked through journalistic accounts of such events (which did, indeed, quickly spread from the Post Office to private offices and factories, and even to private postal services like UPS, but in the process, became so commonplace that many barely made the national news) and noted that the language they employ, which always described these events as acts of inexplicable individual rage and madness—severed from any consideration of the systematic humiliations that always seem to set them off—bears an uncanny resemblance to the way the nineteenth-century press treated slave revolts.126 Ames notes that there were remarkably few organized slave rebellions in American history.


pages: 294 words: 86,601

Mind Wide Open: Your Brain and the Neuroscience of Everyday Life by Steven Johnson

Columbine, double helix, epigenetics, experimental subject, Great Leap Forward, Gödel, Escher, Bach, James Watt: steam engine, l'esprit de l'escalier, lateral thinking, mirror neurons, pattern recognition, phenotype, social intelligence, Steven Pinker, theory of mind, zero-sum game

The few studies of laughter that preceded this one had assumed that laughing and humor were linked inextricably, but Provine’s early research suggested that the connection was only an occasional one. People certainly laughed at jokes, but that was only a small part of the story. “There’s a dark side to laughter that we sometimes are too quick to overlook,” he says. “The kids at Columbine were laughing as they walked through the school shooting their peers.” As his research progressed, Provine began to suspect that laughter was in fact about something else-not humor or gags or incongruity, but social interaction. He found support for this assumption in a study that had already been conducted, analyzing people’s laughter patterns in social and solitary contexts.


pages: 281 words: 79,464

Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion by Paul Bloom

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, Asperger Syndrome, Atul Gawande, autism spectrum disorder, classic study, Columbine, David Brooks, Donald Trump, effective altruism, Ferguson, Missouri, Great Leap Forward, impulse control, meta-analysis, mirror neurons, Paul Erdős, period drama, Peter Singer: altruism, public intellectual, publication bias, Ralph Waldo Emerson, replication crisis, Ronald Reagan, social intelligence, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steven Pinker, theory of mind, Timothy McVeigh, Walter Mischel, Yogi Berra

Just as we can come to ignore the hum of a refrigerator, we become inured to problems that seem unrelenting, like the starvation of children in Africa—or homicide in the United States. Mass shootings get splashed onto television screens, newspaper headlines, and the Web; the major ones settle into our collective memory—Columbine, Virginia Tech, Aurora, Sandy Hook. The 99.9 percent of other homicides are, unless the victim is someone you know, mere background noise. Such biases are separate from empathy. But the spotlight nature of empathy means that it is vulnerable to them. Empathy’s narrow focus, specificity, and innumeracy mean that it’s always going to be influenced by what captures our attention, by racial preferences, and so on.


pages: 295 words: 82,786

The Harm in Asking: My Clumsy Encounters With the Human Race by Sara Barron

An Inconvenient Truth, Burning Man, Columbine, East Village, medical residency

Charlie got belligerent on promotional vodka samples, and when the overweight lady bartender cut him off and told him it was time to leave, he screamed, “You’re a fat fucking cunt, you know that? You’re really fucking fat.” It was awful hearing him talk this way. I mean, I enjoy a joke about incest, rape, farts, Hitler, pedophiles, September 11, Columbine, midgets, bestiality, pediatric cancer, wealthy Russians, spousal abuse, the word “Mongoloid,” the mentally disabled, homosexuals, hookers, dead hookers, anything pertaining to Jewish culture, and a large portion of race-related issues as long as the audience for whom the joke is performed isn’t entirely white.


Power by Shahida Arabi

cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, false memory syndrome, microaggression, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), traumatic brain injury, twin studies

Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 8(7), 294-300. doi:10.1016/j.tics.2004.05.010 Ferster, C. B., & Skinner, B. F. (1957). Schedules of reinforcement. Appleton-Century Crofts. doi:10.1037/10627-000 Fisher, H. E. (1994). Anatomy of love: The mysteries of mating, marriage, and why we stray. New York: Fawcett Columbine. Fisher, H. E. (2016). Love Is Like Cocaine – Issue 33: Attraction – Nautilus. Retrieved from http://nautil.us/issue/33/attraction/love-is-like-cocaine Georgia Health Sciences University. (2011, February 28). Brain’s Reward Center Also Responds to Bad Experiences. Retrieved from https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/02/110222121913.htm Harvard Health. (2007).


pages: 998 words: 211,235

A Beautiful Mind by Sylvia Nasar

Al Roth, Albert Einstein, Andrew Wiles, Bletchley Park, book value, Brownian motion, business cycle, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, Dr. Strangelove, experimental economics, fear of failure, Gunnar Myrdal, Henri Poincaré, Herman Kahn, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, John Conway, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, linear programming, lone genius, longitudinal study, market design, medical residency, Nash equilibrium, Norbert Wiener, Paul Erdős, Paul Samuelson, prisoner's dilemma, RAND corporation, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, second-price auction, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Simon Singh, spectrum auction, Suez canal 1869, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, upwardly mobile, zero-sum game

Even in the three years since the publication of this book, the transformations in Nash’s life have been as remarkable as any that will be portrayed on screen. Princeton Junction, New Jersey, June 1, 2001 Notes Prologue 1. George W. Mackey, professor of mathematics, Harvard University, interview, Cambridge, Mass., 12.14.95. 2. See, for example, David Halberstam, The Fifties (New York: Favycett Columbine, 1993). 3. Mikhail Gromov, professor of mathematics, Institut des Hautes-Etudes, Bures-sur-Yvette, France, and Courant Institute, interview, 12.16.97. The claim that Nash ranks among the greatest mathematicians of the postwar era is based on judgment of fellow mathematicians. The topologist John Milnor expressed a nearly universal opinion among mathematicians when he wrote: “To some, the brief paper, written at age 21, for which he has won a Nobel prize in economics, may seem like the least of his achievements.”

Goldstein, Rebecca. The Mind-Body Problem. New York: Penguin, 1993. Gottesman, Irving I. Schizophrenia Genesis: The Origins of Madness. New York: W. H. Freeman & Co., 1991. Grob, Gerald N. The Mad Among Us. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994. Halberstam, David. The Fifties. New York: Fawcett Columbine, 1993. Hale, Nathan G., Jr. The Rise and Crisis of Psychoanalysis in the United States. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995. Halmos, Paul R. “The Legend of John von Neumann.” American Mathematical Monthly, vol. 80 (1973), pp. 382–94. Hardy, G. H. A Mathematician’s Apology, with foreword by C.


pages: 356 words: 91,157

The New Urban Crisis: How Our Cities Are Increasing Inequality, Deepening Segregation, and Failing the Middle Class?and What We Can Do About It by Richard Florida

affirmative action, Airbnb, back-to-the-city movement, basic income, Bernie Sanders, bike sharing, blue-collar work, business climate, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, clean water, Columbine, congestion charging, creative destruction, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, declining real wages, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, East Village, edge city, Edward Glaeser, failed state, Ferguson, Missouri, gentrification, Gini coefficient, Google bus, high net worth, high-speed rail, income inequality, income per capita, industrial cluster, informal economy, Jane Jacobs, jitney, Kitchen Debate, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, land value tax, low skilled workers, Lyft, megacity, megaproject, Menlo Park, mortgage tax deduction, Nate Silver, New Economic Geography, new economy, New Urbanism, occupational segregation, off-the-grid, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paul Graham, plutocrats, RAND corporation, rent control, rent-seeking, restrictive zoning, Richard Florida, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, secular stagnation, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, SimCity, sovereign wealth fund, streetcar suburb, superstar cities, tech worker, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the High Line, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, white flight, young professional

Furthermore, the violent crime rate—which has been declining across the United States—fell three times faster in America’s primary cities than it did in their suburbs between 1990 and 2008. Murders actually rose by 16.9 percent in the suburbs between 2001 and 2010, while falling by 16.7 percent in cities.11 And the suburbs have been the sites of many, if not most, of America’s mass shootings, from Columbine to Sandy Hook. Suburban governments and police departments have been slow to adjust to these new realities. That became agonizingly apparent to the whole world when Ferguson, Missouri, a St. Louis suburb of 21,000, spun out of control in the wake of the police killing of Michael Brown in 2015. Over two-thirds (67 percent) of Ferguson’s population is black, but only four of the town’s fifty-four police officers were black at the time.


pages: 289 words: 87,137

What Patients Say, What Doctors Hear by Danielle Ofri

big-box store, Columbine, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, medical residency, meta-analysis, Nelson Mandela, placebo effect, randomized controlled trial, stem cell, sugar pill

., “The Impact of Patient and Physician Computer Mediated Communication Skill Training on Reported Communication and Patient Satisfaction,” Patient Education and Counseling 88 (2012): 406–13. 5. J. K. Rao et al., “Communication Interventions Make a Difference in Conversations Between Physicians and Patients: A Systematic Review of the Evidence,” Medical Care 45 (2007): 340–49. 6. Anatole Broyard, Intoxicated by My Illness: And Other Writings on Life and Death (New York: Fawcett Columbine, 1992), 43. 7. D. E. Epner et al., “Difficult Conversations: Teaching Medical Oncology Trainees Communication Skills One Hour at a Time,” Academic Medicine 89 (2014): 578–84. CHAPTER 16: CAN WE TALK? 1. Broyard, Intoxicated by My Illness, 52. 2. Ibid., 44. 3. From “Gaudeamus Igitur” in Stone, Renaming the Streets.


pages: 318 words: 93,502

The Two-Income Trap: Why Middle-Class Parents Are Going Broke by Elizabeth Warren, Amelia Warren Tyagi

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, business climate, Columbine, declining real wages, equal pay for equal work, feminist movement, financial independence, labor-force participation, late fees, low interest rates, McMansion, mortgage debt, new economy, New Journalism, payday loans, restrictive zoning, Savings and loan crisis, school choice, school vouchers, telemarketer, urban sprawl, women in the workforce

Today’s parents must also confront another frightening prospect as they consider where their children will attend school: the threat of school violence. The widely publicized rise in shootings, gangs, and dangerous drugs at public schools sent many parents in search of a safe haven for their sons and daughters. Violent incidents can happen anywhere, as the shootings at lovely suburban Columbine High School in Colorado revealed to a horrified nation. But the statistics show that school violence is not as random as it might seem. According to one study, the incidence of serious violent crime—such as robbery, rape, or attack with a weapon—is more than three times higher in schools characterized by high poverty levels than those with predominantly middle- and upper-income children.41 Similarly, urban children are more than twice as likely as suburban children to fear being attacked on the way to or from school.42 The data expose a harsh reality: Parents who can get their kids into a more economically segregated neighborhood really improve the odds that their sons and daughters will make it through school safely.


pages: 362 words: 95,782

Stephen Fry in America by Stephen Fry

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, Bretton Woods, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, Charles Lindbergh, Columbine, Donald Trump, illegal immigration, intermodal, jimmy wales, Jony Ive, junk bonds, Kickstarter, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Neil Armstrong, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Stephen Fry, Steve Jobs, Upton Sinclair, urban sprawl, Yogi Berra

Do they respond to beauty in nature, for example? Can they detect, appreciate and value the difference between a dull urban sprawl and a mighty mountain landscape? * * * COLORADO KEY FACTS Abbreviation: CO Nickname: The Centennial State Capital: Denver Flower: Rocky Mountain columbine Tree: Colorado blue spruce Bird: Lark bunting Mineral: Rhodochrosite Motto: Nil Sine Numine (‘Nothing Without Providence’) Well-known residents and natives: John Kerry, Horace ‘Go West Young Man’ Greeley, James Michener, Allen Ginsberg, Clive Cussler, Antoinette ‘Tony Award’ Perry, Ken Kesey, Douglas Fairbanks, Lon Chaney, Bill Murray, Roseanne Barr, Tim Allen, Don Cheadle, Trey Parker, Matt Stone, Paul Whiteman, Glenn Miller, John Denver


pages: 383 words: 92,837

Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain by David Eagleman

Ada Lovelace, Albert Einstein, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Charles Babbage, Columbine, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, delayed gratification, endowment effect, facts on the ground, impulse control, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jeff Hawkins, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, out of africa, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Robert Shiller, Rodney Brooks, Saturday Night Live, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Steven Pinker, Stuart Kauffman, subprime mortgage crisis, Thales of Miletus, trolley problem

As the neuroscientist Wolf Singer recently suggested: even when we cannot measure what is wrong with a criminal’s brain, we can fairly safely assume that something is wrong.23 His actions are sufficient evidence of a brain abnormality, even if we don’t know (and maybe will never know) the details.24 As Singer puts it: “As long as we can’t identify all the causes, which we cannot and will probably never be able to do, we should grant that for everybody there is a neurobiological reason for being abnormal.” Note that most of the time we cannot measure an abnormality in criminals. Take Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, the shooters at Columbine High School in Colorado, or Seung-Hui Cho, the shooter at Virginia Tech. Was something wrong with their brains? We’ll never know, because they—like most school shooters—were killed at the scene. But we can safely assume there was something abnormal in their brains. It’s a rare behavior; most students don’t do that.


pages: 422 words: 89,770

Death of the Liberal Class by Chris Hedges

1960s counterculture, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Berlin Wall, call centre, clean water, collective bargaining, Columbine, corporate governance, deindustrialization, desegregation, disinformation, Donald Trump, Fall of the Berlin Wall, food desert, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, hive mind, housing crisis, Howard Zinn, Ida Tarbell, illegal immigration, independent contractor, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Lao Tzu, Lewis Mumford, military-industrial complex, Murray Bookchin, Pearl River Delta, Plato's cave, post scarcity, power law, profit motive, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, Ronald Reagan, strikebreaker, the long tail, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tobin tax, union organizing, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, W. E. B. Du Bois, WikiLeaks, working poor, Works Progress Administration

But you can’t fully grasp this unless you have been in combat, and combat is something the liberal class has been able to hand off to the working class since World War II. The solitary voices of dissent that condemned the war at its inception were attacked as fiercely by the liberal class as by the right wing. When documentary filmmaker Michael Moore accepted the Oscar for his film Bowling for Columbine on March 23, 2003, he used the occasion to denounce the war, which had begun a few days earlier, as well as the legitimacy of the Bush presidency. “We live in a fictitious time,” Moore, dressed in an ill-fitting tuxedo, told an increasingly hostile audience:We live in a time when we have fictitious election results that elect a fictitious president.


Hiding in Plain Sight: The Invention of Donald Trump and the Erosion of America by Sarah Kendzior

4chan, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, borderless world, Brexit referendum, Cambridge Analytica, Carl Icahn, Chelsea Manning, Columbine, corporate raider, desegregation, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, gentrification, Golden arches theory, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, income inequality, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, Julian Assange, junk bonds, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, Mohammed Bouazizi, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, new economy, Oklahoma City bombing, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, payday loans, plutocrats, public intellectual, QAnon, Robert Hanssen: Double agent, Ronald Reagan, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steve Bannon, Thomas L Friedman, trickle-down economics, Twitter Arab Spring, unpaid internship, white flight, WikiLeaks, Y2K, zero-sum game

Sympathy was a junk bond emotion. Sympathy was reserved for only the most virtuous victims—and even then, they always implied, it must have been the victim’s fault. Occasionally a great horror would shake Americans out of their smug voyeurism, a tragedy so awful it could not be sold as spectacle—the Oklahoma City bombing, the Columbine massacre—but these were dismissed as anomalies instead of sparks for future flames. Their predecessors—Ruby Ridge and the school shootings that first emerged in the early 1990s—were minimized outside the fringes, where they were immortalized with a cult-like intensity. The 1990s was a paranoid era, relentlessly unsentimental.


pages: 901 words: 234,905

The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature by Steven Pinker

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, anti-communist, behavioural economics, belling the cat, British Empire, clean water, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, conceptual framework, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Defenestration of Prague, desegregation, disinformation, Dutch auction, epigenetics, Exxon Valdez, George Akerlof, germ theory of disease, ghettoisation, glass ceiling, Gregor Mendel, Hobbesian trap, income inequality, invention of agriculture, invisible hand, Joan Didion, language acquisition, long peace, meta-analysis, More Guns, Less Crime, Murray Gell-Mann, mutually assured destruction, Norman Mailer, Oklahoma City bombing, PalmPilot, Peter Singer: altruism, phenotype, plutocrats, Potemkin village, prisoner's dilemma, profit motive, public intellectual, QWERTY keyboard, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Robert Bork, Rodney Brooks, Saturday Night Live, Skinner box, social intelligence, speech recognition, Stanford prison experiment, stem cell, Steven Pinker, tacit knowledge, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, the new new thing, theory of mind, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Timothy McVeigh, twin studies, Tyler Cowen, ultimatum game, urban renewal, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

If humans are accidental products of the mutation and selection of chemical replicators, they worry, morality would have no foundation and we would be left mindlessly obeying biological urges. One creationist, testifying to this danger in front of the U.S. House Judiciary Committee, cited the lyrics of a rock song: “You and me baby ain’t nothin’ but mammals / So let’s do it like they do it on the Discovery Channel.”27 After the 1999 lethal rampage by two teenagers at Columbine High School in Colorado, Tom Delay, the Republican Majority Whip in the House of Representatives, said that such violence is inevitable as long as “our school systems teach children that they are nothing but glorified apes, evolutionized out of some primordial soup of mud.”28 The most damaging effect of the right-wing opposition to evolution is the corruption of American science education by activists in the creationist movement.

.), Being humans: Anthropological universality and particularity in transdisciplinary perspectives. New York: Walter de Gruyter. Brown, R. 1985. Social psychology: The second edition. New York: Free Press. Browne, K. 1998. Divided labors: An evolutionary view of women at work. London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson. Brownmiller, S. 1975. Against our will: Men, women, and rape. New York: Fawcett Columbine. Brownmiller, S., & Merhof, B. 1992. A feminist response to rape as an adaptation in men. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 15, 381–382. Bruer, J. 1997. Education and the brain: A bridge too far. Educational Researcher, 26, 4–16. Bruer, J. 1999. The myth of the first three years: A new understanding of brain development and lifelong learning.


Rogue State: A Guide to the World's Only Superpower by William Blum

anti-communist, AOL-Time Warner, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, British Empire, collective bargaining, Columbine, disinformation, experimental subject, Fall of the Berlin Wall, it's over 9,000, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Joseph Schumpeter, land reform, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, Nelson Mandela, Oklahoma City bombing, profit motive, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, Timothy McVeigh, union organizing

. • In various schools students are being suspended for: bringing a bottle of the nonprescription painkiller Advil to school; dying their hair an "unacceptable" color; giving a classmate a Midol tablet for relief of menstrual cramps; bringing "drugs" to school—lemon drops; bringing a gift-wrapped bottle of wine as a Christmas gift for a teacher; another is punished for carrying a small paring knife to cut her lunch fruit; yet another, a 9-year-old boy, is punished for waving his drawing of a gun in class; a sixyear-old boy is sent home for planting a kiss on a girl's cheek; eight-year-old girls are strip-searched in school, in a search for stolen money (not found); pre-schoolers to 6th grade students are given genital exams as part of their physicals; high schools employ random Breathalyser testing to ferret out students who have imbibed alcohol; a 14-yearold girl is strip-searched and suspended for two weeks because she tells her classmates she understands how the Columbine shooters felt; and high school students are questioned by police who want to know if a chemistry textbook was for bomb-making. This while an eleven-year-old boy is being arrested and accused of incest because a neighbor saw him touching his younger sister "sexually" in their yard. He was held six weeks in a juvenile detention center and shackled in court on at least one occasion.


pages: 358 words: 95,115

NurtureShock: New Thinking About Children by Po Bronson, Ashley Merryman

affirmative action, classic study, cognitive load, Columbine, delayed gratification, desegregation, hedonic treadmill, impulse control, index card, job satisfaction, lake wobegon effect, language acquisition, longitudinal study, meta-analysis, randomized controlled trial, social intelligence, Steven Pinker, telemarketer, theory of mind

That’s largely due to the fact that the focus on the archetypal negative results of aggression helped papers get published and research dollars flow: grants were readily available to study the plight of aggressive kids, in the hope the findings might help society prevent aggressive kids from becoming our future prison population. The 1999 Columbine High School massacre opened more floodgates for grant dollars, as the government made it a priority to ensure students would never again open fire on their peers. There was also a tendency, according to Dr. Allen, for social scientists to assume bad behaviors are uniformly associated with bad outcomes; aggression was considered bad behavior, so scientists were really only looking for the negative consequences of it.


pages: 330 words: 99,226

Extraterrestrial Civilizations by Isaac Asimov

Albert Einstein, Cepheid variable, Columbine, Eddington experiment, Edward Charles Pickering, Future Shock, Harvard Computers: women astronomers, invention of radio, invention of the telescope, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, Louis Pasteur, Magellanic Cloud, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, time dilation

Also by Isaac Asimov: EARTH: OUR CROWDED SPACESHIP REALM OF NUMBERS EXTRATERRESTRIAL CIVILIZATIONS THIS BOOK CONTAINS THE COMPLETE TEXT OF THE ORIGINAL HARDCOVER EDITION. Published by Fawcett Columbine Books, a unit of CBS Publications, the Consumer Publishing Division of CBS Inc., by arrangement with Crown Publishers, Inc. Copyright ©1979 by Isaac Asimov ALL RIGHTS RESERVED eISBN: 978-0-307-79230-3 v3.1 To the memory of Paul Nadan (1929-1978) for whom I should have started the book sooner. Contents Cover Other Book by This Author Title Page Dedication Copyright 1 ·The Earth Spirits Animals Primates Brains Fire Civilization 2 · The Moon Phases Another World Waterlessness Moon Hoax Airlessness 3 · The Inner Solar System Nearby Worlds Venus Martian Canals Mars Probes 4 · The Outer Solar System Planetary Chemistry Titan Jupiter 5 · The Stars Substars The Milky Way The Galaxy The Other Galaxies 6 · Planetary Systems Nebular Hypothesis Stellar Collisions Nebular Hypothesis Again The Rotating Stars The Wobbling Stars 7 · Sunlike Stars Giant Stars Midget Stars Just Right 8 · Earthlike Planets Binary Stars Star Populations The Ecosphere Habitability 9 · Life Spontaneous Generation Origin of Life?


pages: 339 words: 100,075

Pump Six and Other Stories by Paolo Bacigalupi

Columbine, hiring and firing, messenger bag, price stability, profit maximization, VTOL

Lidia sighed and turned from the windows, obedient finally to Nia's anxious hope that she would dress. Stephen and Lidia went on picnics together when Belari was away from the fief. They would leave the great gray construct of Belari's castle and walk carefully across the mountain meadows, Stephen always helping her, guiding her fragile steps through fields of daisies, columbine, and lupine until they peered down over sheer granite cliffs to the town far below. All about them glacier-sculpted peaks ringed the valley like giants squatting in council, their faces adorned with snow even in summer, like beards of wisdom. At the edge of the precipice, they ate a picnic lunch and Stephen told stories of the world before the fiefs, before Revitia made stars immortal.


Fresh Off the Boat by Eddie Huang

affirmative action, back-to-the-land, Columbine, cuban missile crisis, East Village, Howard Zinn, Lao Tzu, rent control, Telecommunications Act of 1996, W. E. B. Du Bois, walkable city

I lifted up my head, opened my eyes, and to the right I saw Emery coming out of the bathroom and that motherfucker that punched him was waiting. I was shook from the moment of silence, but I knew what I had to do and dropped my backpack. Warren was right behind me so I knew he’d scoop it. Those were the days right after Columbine so we all had to wear student IDs around our necks. I took my ID off, wrapped it around my hands, crept behind this kid, and yoked him right in front of Emery. All the Tangelo Park cats hung by the bathroom so as soon as they saw it, you heard the motherfuckin’ bird call. Kids surrounded us and formed a wall so the cops couldn’t break it up.


pages: 416 words: 100,130

New Power: How Power Works in Our Hyperconnected World--And How to Make It Work for You by Jeremy Heimans, Henry Timms

"Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, 4chan, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, algorithmic management, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, battle of ideas, benefit corporation, Benjamin Mako Hill, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, British Empire, Chris Wanstrath, Columbine, Corn Laws, crowdsourcing, data science, David Attenborough, death from overwork, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, future of work, game design, gig economy, hiring and firing, holacracy, hustle culture, IKEA effect, impact investing, income inequality, informal economy, job satisfaction, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Jony Ive, Kevin Roose, Kibera, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Minecraft, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, obamacare, Occupy movement, post-truth, profit motive, race to the bottom, radical decentralization, ride hailing / ride sharing, rolling blackouts, rolodex, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, sharing economy, side hustle, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Snapchat, social web, subscription business, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, TED Talk, the scientific method, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, upwardly mobile, web application, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler

Two Colorado state senators who had helped to pass laws aimed at limiting gun violence were unceremoniously removed from office in a special recall election held to target them for their stance on guns. This victory for gun rights advocates was remarkable coming nine months after a massacre in a Newtown, Connecticut elementary school had left twenty-six dead, most of them small children, and in a state still haunted by the 1999 killing spree at Columbine High School. Just two months after the recall election, a third Colorado state senator, Evie Hudak, preemptively resigned, simply because she knew she had stepped into the same crosshairs. The Colorado recall election is an example of the remarkable power of the National Rifle Association (NRA) and its allies to foil those who cross them, and thus send a warning sign to others tempted to do so.


Vertical Gardening: Grow Up, Not Out, for More Vegetables and Flowers in Much Less Space by Derek Fell

Columbine, upwardly mobile

Even common groundcovers like ‘Purple Wave’ petunias in sun and evergreen blue periwinkle in shade are better than bare soil. At garden centers and nurseries, you will mostly find ankle-high, knee-high, waist-high, and even chest-high plants, often identified on plant labels as dwarf (such as alyssum), semi-dwarf (such as columbine), standard-size (such as New England asters), and tall (such as foxgloves and delphinium). Vines are more of a rarity, because most gardeners haven't experimented enough with them to know all of their wonderful attributes. Even if you've planted or are planning to plant your garden with bedding or tall plants, consider adding ornamental vines to any bare space above chest height, and definitely think about including vines in addition to tall shrubs or trees to create the vertical component so necessary in a field of vision.


pages: 336 words: 97,204

The Mystery of Charles Dickens by A. N. Wilson

British Empire, Columbine, Corn Laws, Etonian, Fellow of the Royal Society, George Santayana, Honoré de Balzac, James Watt: steam engine, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, Ralph Waldo Emerson, sexual politics, spinning jenny, Thomas Malthus

He had grown up stage-struck. When he was seven, his mother and father took him up to London to see the Christmas pantomime, and he had been entranced by the make-up of the clowns, their thick white face-paint, and their appetite for sausages. Harlequin and Pantaloon held him in raptures, and he ‘thought that to marry a Columbine would be to attain the highest pitch of all human felicity!’22 A little later, a troupe of them had visited Chatham, where his improvident father was working as a naval clerk, and the child had stared with wonder at the little boys ‘with frills as white as they could be washed’,23 smelling of sawdust and orange peel, and accompanied by ‘a crafty magician holding a young lady in bondage’.24 Even after he had begun to enjoy great success as a writer, after the publication of Pickwick, and in the middle of writing Oliver Twist, Dickens, at a publisher’s request, took on the task of revising a clumsily written biography of the great clown Grimaldi,25 whom he had seen perform at the Theatre Royal, Chatham.


Hormone Repair Manual by Lara Briden

Columbine, crowdsourcing, meta-analysis, microbiome, mouse model, Multics, placebo effect, randomized controlled trial, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), stem cell, traumatic brain injury, ultra-processed food

.: C Moran, ‘Me, drugs and the perimenopause’, The Times, 4 July 2020, thetimes.co.uk/article/caitlin-moran-me-drugs-and-the-perimenopause-mpzn2cdh2 36: In a beautiful essay called ‘The wildness of girlhood’ . . .: BM Liston, ‘The wildness of girlhood’, Overland, 2 July 2019, overland.org.au/2019/07/the-wildness-of-girlhood 37: Liston’s description of girls is in line with . . .: E Hancock, The Girl Within, New York: Fawcett Columbine, 1989; Los Angeles Daily News, ‘Girls lose their sense of self before their teens, research shows’, Baltimore Sun, 2 March 1993, baltimoresun.com/news/bs-xpm-1993-03-02-1993061035-story.html 38: For example, in a study of women . . .: Y Beyene, From Menarche to Menopause: reproductive lives of women in two cultures, Albany, New York: State University of New York Press, 1989. 38: According to grief expert David Kessler . . .: P Picardi, ‘What to do with the sadness you’re feeling right now’, GQ, 12 May 2020, gq.com/story/david-kessler-on-grief-and-sadness 39: It’s even more of a relief to hear it said by others . . .: J Mazziotta, ‘Gillian Anderson on dealing with early menopause: “I felt like somebody else had taken over my brain”’, People, 13 March 2017, people.com/bodies/gillian-anderson-perimenopause-depression 39: ‘When the 50-year-old woman says to herself . . .’: G Greer, The Change: women, aging, and the menopause, New York: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2018. 40: ‘It’s weird that women and whales . . .’: B Alex, ‘The grandmother hypothesis could explain why women live so long’, Discover, 2 April 2019, blogs.discovermagazine.com/crux/2019/04/01/grandmothers-remain-an-evolutionary-mystery/-.XWcgPugzbb2 40: According to Stanford historian Walter Scheidel . . .: A Ruggeri, ‘Do we really live longer than our ancestors?’


pages: 308 words: 97,480

The Undertow: Scenes From a Slow Civil War by Jeff Sharlet

2021 United States Capitol attack, Airbnb, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, Columbine, Comet Ping Pong, coronavirus, COVID-19, critical race theory, disinformation, drone strike, Elon Musk, fake it until you make it, fake news, false flag, gentrification, George Floyd, Howard Zinn, intentional community, Jeffrey Epstein, lockdown, Occupy movement, operation paperclip, Parler "social media", prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, QAnon, sensible shoes, social distancing, Upton Sinclair, W. E. B. Du Bois, We are the 99%, white flight, white picket fence, young professional

The 2018 school shooting in Parkland, Florida, where a young Trump supporter who had expressed interest online in killing Blacks, Jews, and immigrants murdered seventeen people, was one of twenty-four such shootings resulting in death or injury that year. “Parkland” for a while became synonymous with the horror, but like “Sandy Hook” before it—2012, twenty-seven dead—and “Columbine” before that—1999, seventeen dead—“Parkland” will soon enough fade, just as “January 6,” may, by the time you read this, be relegated to a footnote within an ongoing timeline of such “patriotism.” 9 In 2008 I published a history of an elite Christian nationalist movement called The Family.


pages: 344 words: 110,684

Flame Trees of Thika by Elspeth Huxley

Columbine, Etonian

Although it is so long ago, and afterwards she changed so much, I can still remember Lettice Palmer as I saw her then for the first time: friendly, eager, and above all handsome in a stylish, natural, and entirely unselfconscious manner. Her skin was the finest I have ever seen, as fresh and translucent as the petal of a columbine. Her eyes were amber-brown and her hair an unusual colour, like a dark sherry; she had the spring and cleanliness of health about her, and a trick of tilting her head back and arching her nostrils, almost wrinkling them, when attentive or amused. Major Breeches practically fawned on her, like an ecstatic dog.


pages: 329 words: 106,831

All Your Base Are Belong to Us: How Fifty Years of Video Games Conquered Pop Culture by Harold Goldberg

activist lawyer, Alexey Pajitnov wrote Tetris, Apple II, cellular automata, Columbine, Conway's Game of Life, Fairchild Semiconductor, G4S, game design, Ian Bogost, In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, Mars Rover, Mikhail Gorbachev, PalmPilot, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Oldenburg, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, SimCity, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, The Great Good Place, Thorstein Veblen, urban planning

The name Wii said, “Forget them, those executives with the high-tech boxes who yearn for the eighteen-to-thirty-four-year-old hard-core gamer.” The Wii, posited Reggie, was about the rest of us, the silent majority who’d left games when they became all about shooting and violence. This wasn’t Doom or Columbine or Grand Theft Auto. This was a gaming experience for us, Nintendo would say. The Wii wasn’t about me-ness. It was about we-ness. Those who bought the Wii would come together in a tight social network that was all-inclusive. Nintendo targeted the blogosphere, particularly the so-called mommy blogs, and the moms loved it and the word spread virally across the Web.


pages: 387 words: 111,096

Enigma by Robert Harris

Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Bletchley Park, British Empire, Columbine, index card, invention of the printing press, sensible shoes, Turing machine

'Akelei . . . That's a flower, isn't it?' 'Ha!' Logie clapped his hands. 'You are a bloody marvel, Tom. See how much we miss you? We had to go and ask one of the German swots on Z-watch what it meant. Akelei: a five-petalled flower of the buttercup family, from the Latin Aquilegia. We vulgarians call it columbine.' 'Akelei? repeated Jericho. 'This is a prearranged signal of some sort, presumably?' 'It is.' 'And it means?' 'It means trouble, is what it means, old love. We found out just how much trouble at midnight yesterday.' Logie leaned forwards. The humour had left his voice. His face was lined and grave.


pages: 289 words: 112,697

The new village green: living light, living local, living large by Stephen Morris

Alan Greenspan, An Inconvenient Truth, back-to-the-land, Buckminster Fuller, carbon tax, clean tech, clean water, collective bargaining, Columbine, Community Supported Agriculture, company town, computer age, cuban missile crisis, David Sedaris, deindustrialization, discovery of penicillin, distributed generation, Easter island, energy security, energy transition, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial independence, Firefox, Hacker Conference 1984, index card, Indoor air pollution, intentional community, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, John Elkington, Kevin Kelly, Louis Pasteur, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, McMansion, Menlo Park, messenger bag, Negawatt, off grid, off-the-grid, peak oil, precautionary principle, rolodex, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review

The NEW VILLAGE GREEN 245 Dan Chiras is an award-winning nonfiction writer who has published two dozen books, including Lessons From Nature: Learning to Live Sustainably on the Earth, The Homeowner’s Guide to Renerwable Energy and EcoKids: Raising Children who Care for the Earth The Bonds That Tie Dan Chiras B esides lifting our spirits, improving our health, and providing inspiration for design and guidance for creating a sustainable future, visits to natural areas provide valuable opportunities to create deep and lasting connections with the life-support system of the planet. The beauty of a grand vista, the gentle curve of the feather-soft petals of a columbine, and the eerie cry of the loon through the misty morning air – these are the things that inspire awe and open young hearts to the world outside cities and suburbs. When our hearts open, our minds quickly follow. We become allies of nature, interested in voting the conservation ticket and living our lives consistently with the love we hold for the living world.


pages: 465 words: 103,303

The Cancer Chronicles: Unlocking Medicine's Deepest Mystery by George Johnson

Apollo 11, Arthur D. Levinson, Atul Gawande, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, Cepheid variable, Columbine, dark matter, discovery of DNA, double helix, Drosophila, epigenetics, Gary Taubes, Gregor Mendel, Harvard Computers: women astronomers, Helicobacter pylori, Isaac Newton, Magellanic Cloud, meta-analysis, microbiome, mouse model, Murray Gell-Mann, phenotype, profit motive, seminal paper, stem cell

We started with one small patch, clearing it of brush and scattering a packet of Beauty Beyond Belief wildflower seeds, a mix recommended for northern New Mexico. There were seeds for Colorado aster, goldfields, arroyo lupine, desert lupine, desert marigold, California poppy, alyssum, baby blue eyes, baby’s breath, bachelor button, black-eyed Susan, candytuft, catchfly, columbine, purple coneflower, yellow coneflower, coreopsis, cosmos, African daisy, Shasta daisy, blue flax, scarlet flax, mountain garland, gaillardia, larkspur, perennial lupine, Mexican hat, Rocky Mountain penstemon, corn poppy, sweet william pinks, and wallflower. We raked them into the dirt and let nature take its course.


The Long Weekend: Life in the English Country House, 1918-1939 by Adrian Tinniswood

British Empire, Charles Lindbergh, Columbine, Etonian, gentleman farmer, land reform, off-the-grid, plutocrats, spinning jenny, upwardly mobile

The group of friends also played at interior decoration, extending their games until the edge between life and stage set was dangerously blurred. One wet Sunday afternoon in May 1932, Beaton’s bedroom was transformed into an astonishingly garish circus, with flowered mirrors and murals executed by his guests: Rex Whistler painted a superb “fat woman,” Lord Berners a Columbine with performing dogs (a very ungainly mastiff was caught in the agonising act of jumping through a paper hoop), Christopher Sykes [the biographer and orientalist] painted a tumbler, upside down, balancing, among other objects, a goldfish bowl on his feet. Oliver Messel created a small Negro, naked except for a pink flamingo ostrich feather worn on his head.


pages: 367 words: 117,340

America, You Sexy Bitch: A Love Letter to Freedom by Meghan McCain, Michael Black

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, An Inconvenient Truth, carbon footprint, Columbine, fear of failure, feminist movement, gentrification, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, income inequality, independent contractor, obamacare, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Timothy McVeigh, Tony Hsieh, too big to fail, white picket fence

Who hasn’t met the paranoid, angry white guy with the buzz cut muttering about black helicopters? Most of the time, that dude is a harmless crank. When he does end up doing the unthinkable, we shrug him off as crazy. If two Muslim teenagers had gone through their high school spraying bullets like Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris did at Columbine, we would have blamed the whole religion instead of the kids. We would have said they were terrorists instead of maniacs. Is that fair? Even so, Muslims haven’t done themselves any great service in the years since 9/11. Why don’t we hear them decrying violence? Part of the problem is that they are a disparate group.


Discover Great Britain by Lonely Planet

British Empire, carbon footprint, centre right, colonial rule, Columbine, congestion charging, G4S, gentrification, global village, Haight Ashbury, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, New Urbanism, Stephen Hawking

Roseleigh Hotel B&B ££ ( 01298-24904; www.roseleighhotel.co.uk; 19 Broad Walk; s/d incl breakfast from £38/72; ) This gorgeous family-run B&B in a roomy old Victorian house has lovingly decorated rooms, many with fine views out over the Pavilion Gardens. The owners are a welcoming couple, both seasoned travellers, with plenty of interesting tales to tell. Eating Columbine Restaurant Modern British ££ ( 01298-78752; 7 Hall Bank; mains £11-17; dinner Mon-Sat, closed Tue Nov-Apr) On the lane leading down beside the Town Hall, this understated restaurant is top choice among Buxtonites in the know. The chef conjures up some imaginative dishes using mainly local produce and there’s a sinful list of fattening puddings.


pages: 467 words: 116,902

The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander

affirmative action, cognitive bias, Columbine, Corrections Corporation of America, critical race theory, deindustrialization, desegregation, different worldview, ending welfare as we know it, friendly fire, Gunnar Myrdal, illegal immigration, land reform, large denomination, low skilled workers, mandatory minimum, mass incarceration, means of production, new economy, New Urbanism, pink-collar, power law, profit motive, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, trickle-down economics, upwardly mobile, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

Today, the most common use of SWAT teams is to serve narcotics warrants, usually with forced, unannounced entry into the home. In fact, in some jurisdictions drug warrants are served only by SWAT teams—regardless of the nature of the alleged drug crime. As the Miami Herald reported in 2002, “Police say they want [SWAT teams] in case of a hostage situation or a Columbine-type incident, but in practice the teams are used mainly to serve search warrants on suspected drug dealers. Some of these searches yield as little as a few grams of cocaine or marijuana.”39 The rate of increase in the use of SWAT teams has been astonishing. In 1972, there were just a few hundred paramilitary drug raids per year in the United States.


pages: 404 words: 115,108

They Don't Represent Us: Reclaiming Our Democracy by Lawrence Lessig

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, Aaron Swartz, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, blockchain, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, Columbine, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, data science, David Brooks, disinformation, do-ocracy, Donald Trump, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Free Software Foundation, Gabriella Coleman, illegal immigration, income inequality, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, John Gilmore, Joi Ito, Mark Zuckerberg, obamacare, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Parag Khanna, plutocrats, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Skype, speech recognition, Steven Levy, surveillance capitalism, Upton Sinclair, Yochai Benkler

Their demand was to continue to weaken competition among broadband providers. The consequence of weakened competition is always higher prices and lower quality. Congress will never respond to this obviously absurd policy choice because the power of the telecoms, even among the Democrats, ensures that a reversal of FCC policy will not happen. And twenty years after the Columbine massacre, we still to this day have no comprehensive regulation to keep dangerous weapons from deranged men—again, and obviously, because of this vetocracy. The list is endless—and too depressing to continue. You get the point: Other nations can govern themselves. Their policies might be flawed; their insights might be incomplete.


pages: 358 words: 119,272

Anatomy of the Bear: Lessons From Wall Street's Four Great Bottoms by Russell Napier

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, asset allocation, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, book value, Bretton Woods, business cycle, buy and hold, collective bargaining, Columbine, cuban missile crisis, desegregation, diversified portfolio, fake news, financial engineering, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, global macro, hindsight bias, Kickstarter, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, Money creation, mortgage tax deduction, Myron Scholes, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, oil shock, price stability, reserve currency, risk free rate, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, short selling, stocks for the long run, yield curve, Yogi Berra

And he added that ‘any time a pickup in the market has occurred recently there’s been a ground-swell in the consumer stocks.’ 28 July: ‘The historical implications of the drops in interest rates we’ve seen since last year combined with the assumption that corporate profits won’t decline further would indicate the stock market has reached a bottom.’ John S. Brush of Columbine Capital Services, Colorado Springs, Colo. He added: ‘It seems crystal clear that inflation is going to be cooling for the next few years.’ 30 July: Leon G. Cooperman, investment policy committee chairman at Goldman Sachs & Co., asserted that ‘entry into a classical bull market must be validated by a further and sustained decline in interest rates.’


pages: 358 words: 112,735

Getting Past Your Past: Take Control of Your Life With Self-Help Techniques From EMDR Therapy by Francine Shapiro

Columbine, D. B. Cooper, epigenetics, fear of failure, financial independence, longitudinal study, meta-analysis, Oklahoma City bombing, randomized controlled trial, traumatic brain injury

We have helped to fill the void in mental health services for inner-city communities from Bedford-Stuyvesant to Oakland and for underserved populations in rural and suburban communities, Native American reservations, Hungary, Poland, China, South Africa, Ukraine, Mexico, Nicaragua, El Salvador and beyond. We have treated and trained and sowed the seeds for healing in the aftermaths of the TWA Flight 800 crash, the school shootings at Columbine High and Dunblane, Scotland, and the 9/11 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington. EMDR-HAP volunteers typically donate at least one week per year of therapy or training time to make healing available to those who are suffering but who can least afford to pay for treatment. However, funding is required to get the clinicians to where they are most needed.


pages: 432 words: 128,944

Falling Upwards: How We Took to the Air by Richard Holmes

Apollo 11, colonial exploitation, Columbine, disinformation, Edmond Halley, Fellow of the Royal Society, friendly fire, Google Earth, Isaac Newton, Louis Blériot, low earth orbit, music of the spheres

Their aeronauts were Gabriel Mangin (his second attempt), Louis Godard and Gaston Tissandier, and they took off from the gasworks at La Villette and Vaugirard. All three of these balloons crossed the Seine and landed safely to the west of Paris carrying mail. They also carried baskets of carrier pigeons provided by a patriotic ‘columbine’ society, L’Espérance, to see if replies to the despatches could be flown back into Paris from the sorting office in Tours. When several of the pigeons returned over the next few days, it was clear that a complete outward-and-return postal service was now possible. The Defence Council now officially announced the formation of the Paris Balloon Post.26 There were to be two kinds of delivery: monté and non-monté – by manned and by unmanned balloons.


pages: 392 words: 122,282

Generation Kill by Evan Wright

Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Columbine, friendly fire, oil shale / tar sands, time dilation, working poor

Many are on more intimate terms with video games, reality TV shows and Internet porn than they are with their own parents. Before the “War on Terrorism” began, not a whole lot was expected of this generation other than the hope that those in it would squeak through high school without pulling too many more mass shootings in the manner of Columbine. But since the 9/11 attacks, the weight of America’s “War on Terrorism” has fallen on their shoulders. For many in the platoon, their war started within hours of the Twin Towers falling, when they were loaded onto ships to begin preparing for missions in Afghanistan. They see the invasion of Iraq as simply another campaign in a war without end, which is pretty much what their commanders and their president have already told them.


pages: 468 words: 123,823

A People's History of Poverty in America by Stephen Pimpare

affirmative action, British Empire, car-free, clean water, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, dumpster diving, East Village, Frederick Winslow Taylor, George Gilder, green new deal, hedonic treadmill, hiring and firing, Howard Zinn, illegal immigration, impulse control, income inequality, index card, it's over 9,000, Jane Jacobs, low skilled workers, Mahatma Gandhi, mass incarceration, meta-analysis, moral panic, Naomi Klein, New Urbanism, payday loans, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, subprime mortgage crisis, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, union organizing, urban renewal, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, white flight, working poor, Works Progress Administration

Alexander, Render Them Submissive: Responses to Poverty in Philadelphia, 1760–1800 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1980), 94–99, 116–17. 17 Monique Bourque, “Poor Relief ‘Without Violating the Rights of Humanity’: Almshouse Administration in the Philadelphia Region, 1790–1860,” in Down and Out in Early America (see note 3), 197. 18 Mary Roberts Smith, “Almshouse Women: A Study of Two Hundred and Twenty-Eight Women in the City and County Almshouse of San Francisco,” Publications of the American Statistical Association 4, no. 31 (September 1895): 219–62. 19 Ben Reitman, Sisters of the Road: The Autobiography of Boxcar Bertha (Edinburgh: AK Press/Nabat, 1937 [2002]) , 95–96. 20 Edmund Wilson, The American Earthquake: A Chronicle of the Roaring Twenties, the Great Depression, and the Dawn of the New Deal (New York: Da Capo, 1958 [1996]), 461–62. 21 Jonathan Kozol, Rachel and Her Children: Homeless Families in America (New York: Fawcett Columbine, 1988), 27–30. 22 Steven VanderStaay, Street Lives: An Oral History of Homeless Americans (Philadelphia: New Society Publishers, 1992), 14. 23 Elliot Liebow, Tell Them Who I Am: The Lives of Homeless Women (New York: Penguin, 1993 [1995]), 121, fn 7. 24 Gwendolyn A. Dordick, Something Left to Lose: Personal Relations and Survival Among New York’s Homeless (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1997), 162. 25 Ibid., chap. 4. 26 Liebow, Tell Them Who I Am, 123. 27 Ibid., 127. 28 “Flophouses,” said one wag, are a “cheap hotel or relief station where the homeless sleep poorly and the bedbugs live well.”


pages: 497 words: 124,144

Red Moon Rising by Matthew Brzezinski

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Columbine, company town, cuban missile crisis, guns versus butter model, Kitchen Debate, military-industrial complex, Neil Armstrong, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, skunkworks, trade route, Vanguard fund, walking around money, white picket fence

Space: The Life of Wernher von Braun (Annapolis, Md.: Naval Institute Press, 2005), p. 67. 89 when three hundred thousand sorties were flown: http://www.usafe.af.mil/berlin/quickfax.htm. “when we might have completely destroyed Russia and not even skinned our elbows”: David Halberstam, The Fifties (New York: Fawcett Columbine, 1993), p. 25. “greatest act of stupidity of the McCarthyist period”: Dickson, Sputnik, p. 138. The historic hamlet was home to fifteen thousand genteel southerners: http://www.redstone.army.mil/history/cron2a.html. 90 “We had some concerns here”: Ward, Dr. Space, p. 77. The fledgling ABC network was backing the venture with $4.5 million in loan guarantees: Piszkiewicz, Wernher von Braun, p. 84. 91 whose hourly pay in 1954 had just been increased from seventy cents to a dollar: Ambrose, Eisenhower, p. 386.


pages: 476 words: 124,973

The Desert and the Sea: 977 Days Captive on the Somali Pirate Coast by Michael Scott Moore

Albert Einstein, British Empire, clean water, Columbine, drone strike, European colonialism, Filipino sailors, fixed income, half of the world's population has never made a phone call, military-industrial complex, Nelson Mandela, South China Sea, UNCLOS

Pirates of old, I figured, were no less mean than Somalis. Of course I was right. What I didn’t realize was how much all pirates had in common. In the 1980s, Lou Reed wrote a song about “video violence,” about an irrational pop-fueled world where people were in thrall to explosions and gunfire on TV. His prophetic bit of doggerel came before Columbine-style gun massacres were a routine irruption of evil in everyday American life. It came before the Twin Towers fell, before the Iraq invasion, before the most lurid scenes of cinematic imagination had oozed like gore into our headlines. The rise of modern pirates buzzing off Somalia was an example of entropy in my lifetime, and it seemed important to know why there were pirates at all.


pages: 427 words: 30,920

The Autoimmune Connection by Rita Baron-Faust, Jill Buyon

Columbine, Helicobacter pylori, mouse model, placebo effect, randomized controlled trial, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), stem cell

The Arthritis Bible: A Comprehensive Guide to Alternative Therapies and Conventional Treatments for Arthritic Diseases, Leonid Gordon and Craig Weatherby, 1999, Healing Arts Press, Rochester, VT. The Arthritis Foundation’s Guide to Alternative Therapies, Judith Horstman, 1998, Arthritis Foundation, Atlanta. The Duke University Book of Arthritis, David S. Pisetsky, MD, PhD, and Susan Flamholtz Trien, 1992, Fawcett Columbine, New York. The Rheumatoid Arthritis Handbook, Stephen Paget, MD, Michael Lockshin, MD, and Susanne Loebl, 2002, John Wiley & Sons, New York. Autoimmune Hepatitis Dr. Melissa Palmer’s Guide to Hepatitis and Liver Disease: What You Need to Know, Melissa Palmer, MD, 2000, Avery, New York. Autoimmunity At War Within: The Double-Edged Sword of Immunity, William R.


pages: 692 words: 127,032

Fool Me Twice: Fighting the Assault on Science in America by Shawn Lawrence Otto

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, anthropic principle, Apollo 11, Berlin Wall, biodiversity loss, Brownian motion, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Cepheid variable, clean water, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, commoditize, cosmological constant, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Dean Kamen, desegregation, different worldview, disinformation, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, energy security, Exxon Valdez, fudge factor, Garrett Hardin, ghettoisation, global pandemic, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, Harlow Shapley and Heber Curtis, Harvard Computers: women astronomers, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Large Hadron Collider, Louis Pasteur, luminiferous ether, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, ocean acidification, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, shareholder value, sharing economy, smart grid, stem cell, synthetic biology, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, University of East Anglia, War on Poverty, white flight, Winter of Discontent, working poor, yellow journalism, zero-sum game

In April of 2002, then-House majority whip Tom DeLay (R-TX) quoted the evangelical Christian authors of a 1999 book when he told a Texas church group, “Only Christianity offers a comprehensive worldview that covers all areas of life and thought, every aspect of creation.”†20 DeLay, who would soon become House majority leader, said he wanted to promote “a biblical worldview” in American politics.21 “Our entire system is built on the Judeo-Christian ethic, but it fell apart when we started denying God,” he had said in 2001.22 After the 1999 Columbine school shootings, he gave a speech on the House floor in which he sarcastically suggested the tragedy “couldn’t have been because our school systems teach our children that they are nothing but glorified apes who have evolutionized out of some primordial soup of mud, by teaching evolution as fact.”23 Ironically, DeLay’s bachelor of science degree, from the University of Houston, is in biology.


pages: 538 words: 141,822

The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom by Evgeny Morozov

"World Economic Forum" Davos, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Alvin Toffler, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, borderless world, Buckminster Fuller, Californian Ideology, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, computer age, conceptual framework, crowdsourcing, digital divide, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, don't be evil, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, global village, Google Earth, Herbert Marcuse, illegal immigration, invention of radio, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, lolcat, Marshall McLuhan, Mitch Kapor, Naomi Klein, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, off-the-grid, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, peer-to-peer, pirate software, pre–internet, Productivity paradox, public intellectual, RAND corporation, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Sinatra Doctrine, Skype, Slavoj Žižek, social graph, Steve Jobs, Streisand effect, technological determinism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Wisdom of Crowds, urban planning, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce

Geography, Economics, Environment, and Jurisdiction in Cloud Computing.” First Monday 14, no. 5 (2009). Jakobsen, P. V. “Focus on the CNN Effect Misses the Point: The Real Media Impact on Conflict Management Is Invisible and Indirect.” Journal of Peace Research 37, no. 2 (2000): 131. Jenkins, Henry. “The Chinese Columbine.” Technology Review, August 2, 2002. www.technologyreview.com/read_article.aspx?id=12913&ch=infotech. Johnson, D. G. “Is the Global Information Infrastructure a Democratic Technology?” Readings in Cyberethics 18 (2004): 121. Katz, J. E., and C. H. Lai. “News Blogging in Cross-Cultural Contexts: A Report on the Struggle for Voice.”


pages: 441 words: 135,176

The Edifice Complex: How the Rich and Powerful--And Their Architects--Shape the World by Deyan Sudjic

Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, bread and circuses, British Empire, call centre, colonial rule, Columbine, cuban missile crisis, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Frank Gehry, glass ceiling, Great Leap Forward, Guggenheim Bilbao, haute couture, haute cuisine, megastructure, Mikhail Gorbachev, Neil Armstrong, new economy, New Urbanism, oil shock, Peter Eisenman, Ronald Reagan, Socratic dialogue, urban planning, urban renewal, V2 rocket, Victor Gruen

Polshek wasn’t going to risk letting the job slip out of his hands by limiting himself to just one sketch. He and his partner worked on three different designs, drew them up, and built three detailed models to explain them to an audience unfamiliar with architectural drawings. ‘We presented on the night of the Columbine massacre. He was late, which was unusual. He came in very agitated and red eyed. His first words; “Here as we speak, they are killing our children.” He gave us 45 minutes in the map room.’ Polshek advised against the greenfield site the city had offered. It was too obvious and too easy. ‘We ended up on brownfield railroad land that could act as a catalyst for development.’


pages: 493 words: 139,845

Women Leaders at Work: Untold Tales of Women Achieving Their Ambitions by Elizabeth Ghaffari

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, Bear Stearns, business cycle, business process, cloud computing, Columbine, compensation consultant, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, dark matter, deal flow, do what you love, family office, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial independence, follow your passion, glass ceiling, Grace Hopper, high net worth, John Elkington, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, Long Term Capital Management, longitudinal study, Oklahoma City bombing, performance metric, pink-collar, profit maximization, profit motive, recommendation engine, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, thinkpad, trickle-down economics, urban planning, women in the workforce, young professional

All six of the states in the Tenth Circuit, plus the federal government, had the death penalty, so we got a fair amount of capital litigation. __________ 3 “Hearing Her Story: Reflections of Women Judges,” see: http://law.pepperdine.edu/newsevents/events/hearing-her-story/ When I was in the circuit, there were a lot of tragedies—horrible things happened. We had the Oklahoma City bombing, the Los Alamos Labs case, and the Columbine case, to name just a few. Even so, it felt as if the time went by in an instant. Ghaffari: When you were on the American Bar Association's Commission on Women in the Profession, what was that experience like? Tacha: That was from 1987 to about 1993 or 1994. Hillary Clinton chaired that commission.


pages: 642 words: 141,888

Like, Comment, Subscribe: Inside YouTube's Chaotic Rise to World Domination by Mark Bergen

23andMe, 4chan, An Inconvenient Truth, Andy Rubin, Anne Wojcicki, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, book scanning, Burning Man, business logic, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, citizen journalism, cloud computing, Columbine, company town, computer vision, coronavirus, COVID-19, crisis actor, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, David Graeber, DeepMind, digital map, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, fake news, false flag, game design, gender pay gap, George Floyd, gig economy, global pandemic, Golden age of television, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Googley, growth hacking, Haight Ashbury, immigration reform, James Bridle, John Perry Barlow, Justin.tv, Kevin Roose, Khan Academy, Kinder Surprise, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, Minecraft, mirror neurons, moral panic, move fast and break things, non-fungible token, PalmPilot, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, QAnon, race to the bottom, recommendation engine, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, slashdot, Snapchat, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, speech recognition, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, surveillance capitalism, Susan Wojcicki, systems thinking, tech bro, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, TikTok, Walter Mischel, WikiLeaks, work culture

Even darker moments occurred, including a tragedy that echoed the horrors to come in Christchurch years later. In the fall of 2007 an eighteen-year-old walked into a high school in Finland with a semiautomatic pistol and murdered eight people before shooting himself. He was a YouTuber. He uploaded under the handle Sturmgeist89, posting about metal music and the Columbine school shooters. In videos he held a gun and wore a black shirt that read “Humanity Is Overrated.” He described on camera how his shooting would proceed, but his footage wasn’t flagged by viewers or YouTube’s machines, so moderators never saw it. Soon after the tragedy an email arrived in Schaffer’s in-box.


pages: 357 words: 130,117

Homegrown: Timothy McVeigh and the Rise of Right-Wing Extremism by Jeffrey Toobin

2021 United States Capitol attack, 4chan, affirmative action, Columbine, Donald Trump, false flag, George Floyd, gun show loophole, off-the-grid, Oklahoma City bombing, Pepto Bismol, pre–internet, QAnon, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, Steve Bannon, Ted Kaczynski, The Turner Diaries, Timothy McVeigh, white flight, Y2K

Armistead and a colleague waited at the funeral home for several hours while the cremation took place. He received the box of McVeigh’s ashes, known as cremains, placed them in a backpack, and flew to Denver that night. Back at his office, Armistead placed the box in an evidence locker. (It was next to a box containing the cremains of Eric Harris, one of the two gunmen in the Columbine High School massacre; Armistead worked on that case, too.) Months passed. Finally, Nigh came to Denver to pick up the box containing McVeigh’s cremains. According to the deal he had struck with McVeigh, there would be no single final resting place. Nigh would scatter the ashes to the winds in the Rocky Mountains.


pages: 592 words: 152,445

The Woman Who Smashed Codes: A True Story of Love, Spies, and the Unlikely Heroine Who Outwitted America's Enemies by Jason Fagone

Albert Einstein, Bletchley Park, Charles Lindbergh, Columbine, cuban missile crisis, Drosophila, Easter island, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Fellow of the Royal Society, General Magic , index card, Internet Archive, Neil Armstrong, pattern recognition, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, side project, Silicon Valley, two and twenty, X Prize

They hadn’t told their friends about the twenty-five-year milestone but somehow the secret leaked, and that evening, to their delight, colleagues and friends knocked on their door, offering silver-anniversary gifts. Fred and Claire Barkley brought a sterling silver round sandwich tray; Jean Chase Ramsay wore a stunning silver dinner gown; Stub and Enid Perkins appeared with an array of flowers in a glass bowl, yellow and blue and white irises, blue delphinium, flame-colored columbine, white gypsophila. To these Elizebeth added pink and yellow roses she thought to pluck from her own rosebushes, and some white and yellow honeysuckle, too, and by the time the next-door neighbor brought two huge armfuls of his own scarlet roses, the house was dizzy with fragrance. All day long, telegrams of congratulations arrived from friends near and far.


pages: 514 words: 152,903

The Best Business Writing 2013 by Dean Starkman

Alvin Toffler, Asperger Syndrome, bank run, Basel III, Bear Stearns, call centre, carbon tax, clean water, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, Columbine, computer vision, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crowdsourcing, Erik Brynjolfsson, eurozone crisis, Evgeny Morozov, Exxon Valdez, Eyjafjallajökull, factory automation, fixed income, fulfillment center, full employment, Future Shock, gamification, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, hiring and firing, hydraulic fracturing, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, jimmy wales, job automation, John Markoff, junk bonds, Kickstarter, late fees, London Whale, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Mahatma Gandhi, market clearing, Maui Hawaii, Menlo Park, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), Parag Khanna, Pareto efficiency, price stability, proprietary trading, Ray Kurzweil, San Francisco homelessness, Silicon Valley, Skype, sovereign wealth fund, stakhanovite, Stanford prison experiment, Steve Jobs, Stuxnet, synthetic biology, tail risk, technological determinism, the payments system, too big to fail, Vanguard fund, wage slave, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Y2K, zero-sum game

PATRICIA CALLAHAN is an investigative reporter on the Chicago Tribune’s Watchdog Team and was part of a team that won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting. Before joining the Tribune in 2006, she was a beat reporter at the Wall Street Journal in Chicago. She shared a Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News Reporting for coverage of the Columbine High School shootings. She graduated from Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism. THOMAS CATAN is a staff reporter in the Washington bureau of the Wall Street Journal covering the Justice Department and legal affairs. He joined the paper in October 2008 as the correspondent in Madrid.


pages: 582 words: 160,693

The Sovereign Individual: How to Survive and Thrive During the Collapse of the Welfare State by James Dale Davidson, William Rees-Mogg

affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, bank run, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, borderless world, British Empire, California gold rush, classic study, clean water, colonial rule, Columbine, compound rate of return, creative destruction, Danny Hillis, debt deflation, ending welfare as we know it, epigenetics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, feminist movement, financial independence, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, George Gilder, Hernando de Soto, illegal immigration, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, information retrieval, Isaac Newton, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, market clearing, Martin Wolf, Menlo Park, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, new economy, New Urbanism, Norman Macrae, offshore financial centre, Parkinson's law, pattern recognition, phenotype, price mechanism, profit maximization, rent-seeking, reserve currency, road to serfdom, Ronald Coase, Sam Peltzman, school vouchers, seigniorage, Silicon Valley, spice trade, statistical model, telepresence, The Nature of the Firm, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, trade route, transaction costs, Turing machine, union organizing, very high income, Vilfredo Pareto

Langins, op. cit., p.143. 30. Ibid., p.139. 31. See Rheal Seguin, "PQ Ready to Harden Laws on Language: English Signs Face Ban in Quebec," Globe and Mail, August 29, 1996, p. Al. 32. Billig, op. cit., p.35. 33. Jack Weatherford, Savages and Civilization.' Who Will Survive? (New York: Fawcett Columbine, 1994), p.143. 34. Geofftey Parker and Lesley M. Smith, The General Crisis of the Seventeenth Century (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1985), p.122. 35. Weatherford, op. cit., p.144. 36. Anderson, op. cit., p.90. 37. Ibid., p.91. 38. Ibid. 39. E H. Kantorowicz, quoted by Llobera, op. cit., p.83. 40.


pages: 470 words: 144,455

Secrets and Lies: Digital Security in a Networked World by Bruce Schneier

Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, Bletchley Park, business process, butterfly effect, cashless society, Columbine, defense in depth, double entry bookkeeping, drop ship, fault tolerance, game design, IFF: identification friend or foe, information security, John Gilmore, John von Neumann, knapsack problem, macro virus, Mary Meeker, MITM: man-in-the-middle, moral panic, Morris worm, Multics, multilevel marketing, mutually assured destruction, PalmPilot, pez dispenser, pirate software, profit motive, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, Russell Brand, Silicon Valley, Simon Singh, slashdot, statistical model, Steve Ballmer, Steven Levy, systems thinking, the payments system, Timothy McVeigh, Y2K, Yogi Berra

This type of attack is relatively new in the digital world: A few years ago, computer hacks weren’t considered newsworthy, and I can’t think of any other technology in history that people would try to break simply to get their names in the paper. In the physical world, this attack is ancient:The man who burned down the Temple of Artemis in ancient Greece did so because he wanted his name to be remembered forever. (His name was Herostratus, by the way.) More recently, the kids who shot up Columbine High School wanted infamy. Most attackers of this type are hackers:skilled individuals who know a lot about systems and their security. They often have access to significant resources, either as students of large universities or as employees of large companies. They usually don’t have a lot of money, but sometimes have a lot of time.


pages: 466 words: 146,982

Venice: A New History by Thomas F. Madden

big-box store, buy low sell high, centre right, colonial rule, Columbine, Costa Concordia, double entry bookkeeping, facts on the ground, financial innovation, indoor plumbing, invention of movable type, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Murano, Venice glass, spice trade, trade route, upwardly mobile, urban planning

Fifteenth-century Venice had seen the invention of the commedia dell’arte, a decidedly lowbrow entertainment in which a troupe of actors performed an improvisational comedy using stock characters that the audience knew well. Most such comedies revolved around a pair of lovers thwarted by an old man who eventually married with the help of a wise and witty servant. The actors wore masks that clearly defined their roles: Harlequin, a clever, humorous rake; Pantalone, a greedy, hook-nosed old miser; Columbine, the beautiful love interest; and so on. The story was, in any case, unimportant. The crowds gathered to see the acrobatic slapstick, hear the music, and laugh at the dirty jokes. And since the entire play was improvised, it was worth attending more than once. Beginning in 1738 the Venetian playwright Carlo Goldoni cleaned up the commedia dell’arte and brought it into the theaters for the amusement of the tourists and Venetian nobles.


Poking a Dead Frog: Conversations With Today's Top Comedy Writers by Mike Sacks

Bernie Madoff, Columbine, David Sedaris, Dr. Strangelove, fake it until you make it, hive mind, index card, iterative process, Neil Armstrong, Norman Mailer, period drama, Peter Pan Syndrome, Ponzi scheme, pre–internet, Saturday Night Live, Upton Sinclair

It makes the fall of Saigon look tame. It’s all happening so, so quickly. My favorite example is from 2003, when Steve was hosting. Now, this goes back to something happening just before the commercial break that you can work off of. Michael Moore had won for Best Documentary Feature for Bowling for Columbine, and he made a speech against the second Gulf war. Some in the audience booed, but we also noticed that some of the stagehands started booing him, too. When we returned from commercial break, Steve came out and said, “It’s so sweet backstage, you should have seen it. The Teamsters are helping Michael Moore into the trunk of his limo.”


The Hero With a Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell

affirmative action, Columbine, game design, Lao Tzu, Maui Hawaii, music of the spheres, place-making, the scientific method, trade route

I have seen too, from years of teaching sections of Campbell's work and the work of other writers concerned with spiritual and mythic life to high-school students, that, as it has ever been, the psyche cannot awaken to deeper motifs and grasp these all by itself. Most recently, while fulfilling a three-year commitment to teach and assist verv dear, very smart, and tough young people recovering from the massacre at Columbine High School, I noted once again, often within just a few pages of focusing on the language and concepts of any ancient mythic journey, that even the badly injured can regain hope to restore their hearts. They are thus inspired to find new energy for their torn spirits, tying these matters to the spiritual belief-systems they have already, or seeking out new systems that make sense to them at the soul level.


pages: 524 words: 155,947

More: The 10,000-Year Rise of the World Economy by Philip Coggan

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Ada Lovelace, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, anti-communist, Apollo 11, assortative mating, autonomous vehicles, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, basic income, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Bletchley Park, Bob Noyce, Boeing 747, bond market vigilante , Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, Carmen Reinhart, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, Charles Babbage, Charles Lindbergh, clean water, collective bargaining, Columbian Exchange, Columbine, Corn Laws, cotton gin, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, cross-border payments, currency peg, currency risk, debt deflation, DeepMind, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of the americas, Donald Trump, driverless car, Easter island, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, eurozone crisis, Fairchild Semiconductor, falling living standards, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, floating exchange rates, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Fractional reserve banking, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, general purpose technology, germ theory of disease, German hyperinflation, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, global value chain, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, Greenspan put, guns versus butter model, Haber-Bosch Process, Hans Rosling, Hernando de Soto, hydraulic fracturing, hydroponic farming, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, income inequality, income per capita, independent contractor, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, inflation targeting, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, job automation, John Snow's cholera map, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Jon Ronson, Kenneth Arrow, Kula ring, labour market flexibility, land reform, land tenure, Lao Tzu, large denomination, Les Trente Glorieuses, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Blériot, low cost airline, low interest rates, low skilled workers, lump of labour, M-Pesa, Malcom McLean invented shipping containers, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, McJob, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, mittelstand, Modern Monetary Theory, moral hazard, Murano, Venice glass, Myron Scholes, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, Northern Rock, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, Paul Samuelson, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, Phillips curve, popular capitalism, popular electronics, price stability, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, railway mania, Ralph Nader, regulatory arbitrage, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, scientific management, Scramble for Africa, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, special drawing rights, spice trade, spinning jenny, Steven Pinker, Suez canal 1869, TaskRabbit, techlash, Thales and the olive presses, Thales of Miletus, The Great Moderation, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, universal basic income, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, V2 rocket, Veblen good, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce, world market for maybe five computers, Yom Kippur War, you are the product, zero-sum game

Libecap, eds, University of Chicago Press, 1994 —— “The role of World War II in the rise of women’s work”, NBER working paper 3203, https://www.nber.org/papers/w3203.pdf, 1991 Goldin, Claudia, and Margo, Robert “The great compression: the wage structure in the United States at mid-century”, NBER working paper 3817, https://www.nber.org/papers/w3817.pdf, 1991 Gollin, Douglas, Hansen, Casper Worm, and Wingender, Asger “Two blades of grass: the impact of the green revolution”, Centre for Economic Policy Research, November 2016 Gordon, John Steele The Business of America, Walker Books, 2001 Gordon, Robert The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The US Standard of Living since the Civil War, Princeton University Press, 2016 —— “The demise of US economic growth: restatement, rebuttal, and reflections”, NBER working paper 19895, 2014 Greenspan, Alan, and Wooldridge, Adrian Capitalism in America: A History, Allen Lane, 2018 Guendelsberger, Emily On the Clock: What Low-Wage Work Did to Me and How It Drives America Insane, Little, Brown and Company, 2019 Guest, Robert The Shackled Continent: Africa’s Past, Present and Future, Pan Macmillan, 2004 Haensch, Stephanie, et al. “Distinct clones of Yersinia pestis caused the Black Death”, PLOS Pathogens, October 7, 2010 Halberstam, David The Fifties, Fawcett Columbine, 1993 Hanawalt, Barbara The Ties That Bound: Peasant Families in Medieval England, Oxford University Press, 1986 Hansen, Valerie The Silk Road: A New History, Oxford University Press, 2012 Harari, Yuval Noah Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, Vintage, 2015 Harford, Tim Fifty Things That Made the Modern Economy, Abacus, 2017 Harrison, Mark “The Economics of World War II: An Overview”, in Mark Harrison, ed., The Economics of World War II: Six Great Powers in International Comparison, Cambridge University Press, 1998 Haskel, Jonathan, and Westlake, Stian Capitalism Without Capital: The Rise of the Intangible Economy, Princeton University Press, 2017 Hatton, Timothy, and Williamson, Jeffrey Global Migration and the World Economy: Two Centuries of Policy and Performance, MIT Press, 2008 Heather, Peter “The Huns and the end of the Roman Empire in Western Europe”, The English Historical Review, vol. 110, no. 435, 1995 Heffer, Simon The Age of Decadence: Britain 1880 to 1914, Random House, 2017 Hellebrandt, Tomáš and Mauro, Paolo, “The future of worldwide income distribution”, working paper 15–7, Peterson Institute for International Economics, April 2015 Hobbes, Thomas Leviathan, Penguin Classics, 2016 (originally published in 1651) Hodkinson, Stephen “Female property ownership and status in Classical and Hellenistic Sparta”, University of Manchester, 2003 Hourani, Albert A History of the Arab Peoples, Faber & Faber, 2013 Hsu, Jinn-Yuh, and Cheng, Lu-Lin “Revisiting economic development in post-war Taiwan: the dynamic process of geographical industrialization”, Regional Studies, vol. 36, no. 8, 2002 Hu-Dehart, Evelyn “Chinese coolie labor in Cuba in the nineteenth century: free labour or neo-slavery?”


The Mission: A True Story by David W. Brown

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Berlin Wall, Columbine, Gregor Mendel, heat death of the universe, Isaac Newton, James Webb Space Telescope, Kickstarter, Kuiper Belt, low earth orbit, Mars Rover, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, obamacare, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, Pluto: dwarf planet, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Silicon Valley, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Strategic Defense Initiative, transcontinental railway, urban planning, women in the workforce, Y2K, zero-sum game

A place like that, connecting continental companies, cargo, and cattle, is going to bring people, and Katy grew as the pages of calendars fluttered away. The oil and natural gas helped, and there were crops, too—citrus and cotton and rice—but if you want to give someone a reason to pull up stakes and move to Nowhere, Texas, just plant a natural energy well on an open patch of ground and watch what happens. Workers drifted in first like bees to columbine and soon swarmed like hornets around a hive. Katy wasn’t the only place with rising population figures. Houston to the east had more than doubled from 1920 to 1930, reaching two hundred ninety-two thousand, after nearly doubling in size the decade before and the decade before that.173 This growth didn’t stop at people, but also the things they carried, and the things that carried them, specifically: the automobile, now affordable to the masses and eventually to eclipse the passenger rail once vital to Katy’s success.


pages: 1,280 words: 384,105

The Best of Best New SF by Gardner R. Dozois

back-to-the-land, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, call centre, Columbine, congestion charging, dark matter, Doomsday Book, double helix, Extropian, flag carrier, Future Shock, gravity well, hydroponic farming, Kim Stanley Robinson, language acquisition, lateral thinking, Mason jar, military-industrial complex, offshore financial centre, out of africa, pattern recognition, phenotype, pneumatic tube, Silicon Valley, slashdot, Stephen Hawking, telepresence, three-masted sailing ship, Turing machine, Turing test, Winter of Discontent, Y2K, zero-sum game

Ben preferred a head shot only for his proxy, slightly larger than actual size to make it subtly imposing. “Why didn’t you inform me of Annie’s change of status?” “Didn’t seem like an emergency,” said his proxy, “at least in the light of our contract talks.” “Yah, yah, okay. Anything else?” said Ben. “Naw, slow day. Appointments with Jackson, Wells, and the Columbine. It’s all on the calendar.” “Fine, delete you.” The projection ceased. “Shall I have the doctor call you in the morning?” said the Roth proxy when Ben reanimated it. “Or perhaps you’d like me to summon her right now?” “Is she at dinner?” “At the moment, yes.” “Naw, don’t bother her. Tomorrow will be soon enough.

Lidia sighed and turned from the windows, obedient finally to Nia’s anxious hope that she would dress. Stephen and Lidia went on picnics together when Belari was away from the fief. They would leave the great gray construct of Belari’s castle and walk carefully across the mountain meadows, Stephen always helping her, guiding her fragile steps through fields of daisies, columbine, and lupine until they peered down over sheer granite cliffs to the town far below. All about them glacier-sculpted peaks ringed the valley like giants squatting in council, their faces adorned with snow even in summer, like beards of wisdom. At the edge of the precipice, they ate a picnic lunch and Stephen told stories of the world before the fiefs, before Revitia made stars immortal.


pages: 522 words: 162,310

Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History by Kurt Andersen

affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, animal electricity, anti-communist, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, augmented reality, back-to-the-land, Bernie Sanders, British Empire, Burning Man, California gold rush, Celebration, Florida, centre right, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, corporate governance, cotton gin, Credit Default Swap, David Brooks, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, disinformation, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Donner party, Downton Abbey, Easter island, Edward Snowden, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, failed state, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, God and Mammon, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Herman Kahn, high net worth, illegal immigration, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, large denomination, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, McMansion, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Minecraft, moral panic, mutually assured destruction, new economy, New Urbanism, Norman Mailer, off-the-grid, Oklahoma City bombing, placebo effect, post-truth, pre–internet, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, reality distortion field, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, smart meter, Snapchat, South Sea Bubble, Steve Jobs, sugar pill, Ted Kaczynski, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Timothy McVeigh, trade route, transcontinental railway, urban renewal, We are all Keynesians now, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, Y2K, young professional

And I loved that the game transformed me when I was in its world, made me feel actually scared (the adrenaline) and actually as sharp as Bond (the dopamine), in ways that reading a novel or watching a movie generally don’t. I played with my daughters, who were seven and nine at the time, each of us taking turns playing different characters. I called it quits after two years, however, because the Columbine massacre made our father-daughter pleasure in shooting and killing each other feel less fun. The strictly children’s hobby of collecting and trading baseball cards became a primarily adult thing in the 1980s, the same time that Rotisserie League Baseball was invented and became the prototype for fantasy sports.


pages: 836 words: 158,284

The 4-Hour Body: An Uncommon Guide to Rapid Fat-Loss, Incredible Sex, and Becoming Superhuman by Timothy Ferriss

23andMe, airport security, Albert Einstein, Black Swan, Buckminster Fuller, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, carbon footprint, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, confounding variable, correlation does not imply causation, Dean Kamen, game design, Gary Taubes, Gregor Mendel, index card, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, language acquisition, life extension, lifelogging, Mahatma Gandhi, messenger bag, microbiome, microdosing, p-value, Paradox of Choice, Parkinson's law, Paul Buchheit, placebo effect, Productivity paradox, publish or perish, radical life extension, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, Richard Feynman, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, stem cell, Steve Jobs, sugar pill, survivorship bias, TED Talk, The future is already here, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, Vilfredo Pareto, wage slave, William of Occam

John Romano and Dave Palumbo, on the other hand, have been on the inside of professional bodybuilding and physique enhancement for decades. Both have seen the best and the worst outcomes in athletic chemical warfare. RXMuscle is where you can ask professionals your questions related to AAS and other performance-enhancing drugs (PED). Bigger, Stronger, Faster DVD (www.fourhourbody.com/bigger) From the producers of Bowling for Columbine and Fahrenheit 9/11, this outstanding documentary explores steroid use in the biggest, strongest, fastest country in the world: America. The cast of characters ranges from Carl Lewis and MDs to Louis Simmons of Westside Barbell. It has an astounding 96% positive rating on rottentomatoes.com. Medibolics (www.medibolics.com) This site, published by Michael Mooney, provides a wealth of information on the medical use of anabolic steroids, growth hormone, and unorthodox supplementation for the prevention of lean-tissue loss in persons with muscle-wasting diseases, including HIV.


pages: 571 words: 162,958

Rewired: The Post-Cyberpunk Anthology by James Patrick Kelly, John Kessel

back-to-the-land, Columbine, dark matter, Extropian, Firefox, flag carrier, Future Shock, gravity well, haute couture, Internet Archive, Kim Stanley Robinson, military-industrial complex, Neal Stephenson, pattern recognition, phenotype, post-industrial society, price stability, Silicon Valley, slashdot, Stephen Hawking, technological singularity, telepresence, the scientific method, Turing test, urban renewal, Vernor Vinge, wage slave, Y2K, zero day

Ben preferred a head shot only for his proxy, slightly larger than actual size to make it subtly imposing. “Why didn’t you inform me of Annie’s change of status?” “Didn’t seem like an emergency,” said his proxy, “at least in the light of our contract talks.” “Yah, yah, okay. Anything else?” said Ben. “Naw, slow day. Appointments with Jackson, Wells, and the Columbine. It’s all on the calendar.” “Fine, delete you.” The projection ceased. “Shall I have the doctor call you in the morning?” said the Roth proxy when Ben reanimated it. “Or perhaps you’d like me to summon her right now?” “Is she at dinner?” “At the moment, yes.” “Naw, don’t bother her. Tomorrow will be soon enough.


pages: 607 words: 168,497

Sex, Time, and Power: How Women's Sexuality Shaped Human Evolution by Leonard Shlain

agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Asperger Syndrome, British Empire, Columbine, delayed gratification, double helix, experimental subject, Flynn Effect, George Santayana, Great Leap Forward, invention of writing, Lao Tzu, Marshall McLuhan, open borders, out of africa, sexual politics, social intelligence, Steven Pinker, the medium is the message

“Technological and Social Dimensions of ‘Aurignacian-Age’ Body Ornaments Across Europe,” in H. Knecht, A. Pike-Tay, and R. White, eds., Before Lascaux: The Complex Record of the Upper Paleolithic. Boca Raton: CRC, pp. 277–99. Williams, G. C. 1975. Sex and Evolution. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Wilson A. N. 1997. Paul: The Mind of the Apostle. New York: Fawcett Columbine. Wilson, E. O. 1978. On Human Nature. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Wilson, Frank R. 1998. The Hand: How Its Use Shapes the Brain, Language, and Human Culture. New York: Pantheon. Winter, Ernst F., trans. and ed. 1961. Erasmus, D., and Luther, M.: Discourses on Free Will. New York: Frederick Ungar.


pages: 684 words: 188,584

The Age of Radiance: The Epic Rise and Dramatic Fall of the Atomic Era by Craig Nelson

Albert Einstein, Brownian motion, Charles Lindbergh, clean tech, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, continuation of politics by other means, corporate governance, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, Doomsday Clock, Dr. Strangelove, El Camino Real, Ernest Rutherford, failed state, Great Leap Forward, Henri Poincaré, Herman Kahn, hive mind, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, John von Neumann, Louis Pasteur, low earth orbit, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, music of the spheres, mutually assured destruction, nuclear taboo, nuclear winter, oil shale / tar sands, Project Plowshare, Ralph Nader, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Skype, Strategic Defense Initiative, Stuxnet, technoutopianism, Ted Sorensen, TED Talk, too big to fail, uranium enrichment, William Langewiesche, éminence grise

He did not believe in bombs, feeling that they killed both the innocent and the guilty, and continued his work on radar at Columbia. He did, however, travel to the Los Alamos sporadically to offer advice as a visiting consultant, as did Einstein. North-central New Mexico is today as green as any artificially irrigated desert in the world, but during World War II it was home to columbines, gentians, ponderosa, aspens, indifferent porcupines, tender marmot, determined badger, and fearless skunk. Ruth Marshak: “Behind us lay the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, at sunset bathed in changing waves of colors—scarlets and lavenders. Below was the desert with its flatness broken by majestic palisades that seemed like the ruined cathedrals and palaces of some old, great, vanished race.


pages: 634 words: 185,116

From eternity to here: the quest for the ultimate theory of time by Sean M. Carroll

Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, anthropic principle, Arthur Eddington, Brownian motion, cellular automata, Claude Shannon: information theory, Columbine, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, cosmological principle, dark matter, dematerialisation, double helix, en.wikipedia.org, gravity well, Great Leap Forward, Harlow Shapley and Heber Curtis, heat death of the universe, Henri Poincaré, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Lao Tzu, Laplace demon, Large Hadron Collider, lone genius, low earth orbit, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, pets.com, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, Schrödinger's Cat, Slavoj Žižek, Stephen Hawking, stochastic process, synthetic biology, the scientific method, time dilation, wikimedia commons

Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001. Christenson, J. H., Cronin, J. W., Fitch, V. L., and Turlay, R. “Evidence for the 2π Decay of the K20 Meson.” Physical Review Letters 13 (1964): 138-40. Coveney, P., and Highfield, R. The Arrow of Time: A Voyage Through Science to Solve Time’s Greatest Mystery. New York: Fawcett Columbine, 1990. Crick, F. What Mad Pursuit: A Personal View of Scientific Discovery. New York: Basic Books, 1990. Cutler, C. “Global Structure of Gott’s Two-String Spacetime.” Physical Review D 45 (1992): 487-94. Danielson, D. R., ed. The Book of the Cosmos: Imagining the Universe from Heraclitus to Hawking.


pages: 613 words: 181,605

Circle of Greed: The Spectacular Rise and Fall of the Lawyer Who Brought Corporate America to Its Knees by Patrick Dillon, Carl M. Cannon

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", accounting loophole / creative accounting, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, AOL-Time Warner, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, buy and hold, Carl Icahn, collective bargaining, Columbine, company town, computer age, corporate governance, corporate raider, desegregation, energy security, estate planning, Exxon Valdez, fear of failure, fixed income, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, illegal immigration, index fund, John Markoff, junk bonds, mandatory minimum, margin call, Maui Hawaii, McDonald's hot coffee lawsuit, Michael Milken, money market fund, new economy, oil shale / tar sands, Ponzi scheme, power law, Ralph Nader, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, Savings and loan crisis, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Steve Jobs, the High Line, the market place, white picket fence, Works Progress Administration, zero-sum game

Then they told him to get an intermediary lawyer, which he did. The class action lawsuit, Howard J. Vogel v. Valero Energy, was filed in San Antonio on August 20, 1991. Vogel recruited Gary Lozow, his fraternity brother at Indiana University, to be his go-between. Lozow was practicing criminal law in Denver. (He would later represent the family of Columbine killer Dylan Klebold.) Like Paul Selzer, Lozow had never represented members of a class action securities claim. Two months from filing the lawsuit, Bershad sent Lozow a retainer agreement, promising to pay him 14 percent of its Valero fee, should it earn a jury award or settlement. Two months later, the case settled for nearly $20 million.


pages: 812 words: 180,057

The Generals: American Military Command From World War II to Today by Thomas E. Ricks

affirmative action, airport security, amateurs talk tactics, professionals talk logistics, Charles Lindbergh, Columbine, continuation of politics by other means, cuban missile crisis, hiring and firing, MITM: man-in-the-middle, no-fly zone, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, South China Sea, Yom Kippur War

when one Vietnamese sniper: Charles Krohn, The Lost Battalion of Tet: Breakout of the 2/12th Cavalry at Hue (Pocket Star, 2008), 149. saw a battalion commander call in air strikes: Michael Lee Lanning and Dan Cragg, Inside the VC and the NVA: The Real Story of North Vietnam’s Armed Forces (Fawcett Columbine, 1992), 221. On one day alone: George MacGarrigle, Taking the Offensive: October 1966 to October 1967 (U.S. Army Center of Military History, 1998), 56. “With one salvo” . . . “they could not control”: Stuart Herrington, e-mail message to author, November 21, 2011; see also Stuart Herrington, Silence Was a Weapon: The Vietnam War in the Villages (Ballantine, 1987), 43.


pages: 666 words: 189,883

1491 by Charles C. Mann

agricultural Revolution, Alfred Russel Wallace, Atahualpa, Bartolomé de las Casas, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, clean water, Columbian Exchange, Columbine, European colonialism, Francisco Pizarro, Gary Taubes, Hernando de Soto, invention of agriculture, land tenure, Menlo Park, Neal Stephenson, New Journalism, phenotype, plutocrats, Silicon Valley, stem cell, technological determinism, trade route, zoonotic diseases

Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press (1988). Wauchope, R. 1962. Lost Tribes and Sunken Continents: Myth and Method in the Study of the American Indians. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Weatherford, J. 1988. Indian Givers: How the Indians of the Americas Transformed the World. New York: Fawcett Columbine. Weber, K. T. 2001. “Historic Bison Populations: A GIS Estimate.” Proceedings of the 2001 Intermountain GIS Users’ Conference. Online at http://giscenter.isu.edu/Research/Projects/BisonPaper.pdf. Webster, D. 2002. The Fall of the Ancient Maya: Solving the Mystery of the Maya Collapse. New York: Thames and Hudson.


Frommer's England 2011: With Wales by Darwin Porter, Danforth Prince

airport security, Ascot racecourse, British Empire, carbon footprint, centre right, Charles Babbage, Columbine, congestion charging, country house hotel, double helix, Edmond Halley, gentrification, George Santayana, haute couture, high-speed rail, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Murano, Venice glass, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan, Skype, Sloane Ranger, spinning jenny, Stephen Hawking, sustainable-tourism, the market place, tontine, University of East Anglia, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, young professional

Menu items are straightforward and unpretentious, but fresh and flavorful, served in a bistro-style setting. Some of the best items are likely to include baked saddle of monkfish with a fresh crab risotto, filet of wild sea bass with stir-fried noodles, or sautéed filets of red mullet with tiger prawns in a light basil-and-white-wine sauce, a specialty. Columbine Restaurant 7 Hall Bank. & 01298/78752. www.buxtononline.net/columbine. Reservations recommended. Main courses £11–£15. MC, V. May–Oct Mon–Sat 7–10pm; Nov–Apr Wed–Mon 7–10pm. SEEING THE SIGHTS Water from nine thermal wells is no longer available for spa treatments, but you can visit the 9.3-hectare (23-acre) Pavilion Gardens, St.


pages: 612 words: 200,406

The Last Spike: The Great Railway, 1881-1885 by Pierre Berton

banking crisis, business climate, California gold rush, centre right, Columbine, company town, death from overwork, financial independence, God and Mammon, Khartoum Gordon, mass immigration, transcontinental railway, unbiased observer, young professional

For the future tourists, swaying down this dramatic slope from the vantage point of an observation car in what was shortly to become Glacier National Park, the experience would be electrifying – the awesome cedars rising like great pillars from the thick beds of ferns, the mountainsides sprinkled with wild columbine and pigeonberry, the glittering ice-fields, the sword points of the mountain peaks, the cataracts pouring off the cliffs as airily as wood-smoke, and the shining track coiling through the dark cuts and over the slender bridges on its journey to the Columbia. This was the same trail, bestrewn with devil’s club and skunk cabbage, that Major Rogers and his nephew Albert had toiled up on their voyage of discovery in 1881, that Fleming and Grant, badly lacerated from thorns, had managed to negotiate in 1883, and that a hungry Van Horne had struggled over in 1884.


Vegetable Literacy by Deborah Madison

Columbian Exchange, Columbine, Maui Hawaii

Its not that they don’t taste good—they do, and pickled bulbils are lovely—but they are very tiny and need peeling, which means lots of time during the busy part of the summer. I appreciate them more for their green-onion-like stalks earlier in the season. They are not from Egypt, despite their name, but they do walk, moving along in the garden as they drop their little bulbs. I started with one plant that was stuck in with some columbines and now I have many—very many. (Note the word proliferum embedded in their species name.) They march along, forming vertical green colonies. They’ve also cropped up here and there through my own carelessness while carrying spent flower arrangements to the compost and losing a bulb or two along the way.


pages: 1,445 words: 469,426

The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money & Power by Daniel Yergin

anti-communist, Ascot racecourse, Ayatollah Khomeini, bank run, Berlin Wall, book value, British Empire, Carl Icahn, colonial exploitation, Columbine, continuation of politics by other means, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, do-ocracy, energy security, European colonialism, Exxon Valdez, financial independence, fudge factor, geopolitical risk, guns versus butter model, Ida Tarbell, informal economy, It's morning again in America, joint-stock company, junk bonds, land reform, liberal capitalism, managed futures, megacity, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, Monroe Doctrine, new economy, North Sea oil, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, old-boy network, postnationalism / post nation state, price stability, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, stock buybacks, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, Thomas Malthus, tontine, vertical integration, Yom Kippur War

Boone Pickens, "The Restructuring of the Domestic Oil and Gas Industry," in Yergin and Kates-Garnick, Reshaping of the Oil Industry, pp. 60-61. [7] Interviews with Jesus Silva Herzog and Patrick Connolly ("eating our lunch"); Fausto Alzati, "Oil and Debt: Mexico's Double Challenge," Cambridge Energy Research Associates Report, June 1987; Philip L. Zweig, Belly Up: The Collapse of the Penn Square Bank (New York: Fawcett Columbine, 1986), pp. 198-99 (Gucci loafers); William Greider, Secrets of the Temple: How the Federal Reserve Runs the Country (New York: Touchstone, 1989), pp. 518-25 ("bank to beat"), 628-31; Mark Singer, Funny Money (New York: Knopf, 1985). [8] Wall Street Journal, September 15, 1983, p. 1; December 5, 1983, p. 60; April 19, 1984, p. 1; Interviews with Richard Bray and P.

Stalingrad to Berlin: The German Defeat in the East. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Army, Center of Military History, 1968. Zimmermann, Erich W. Conservation in the Production of Petroleum: A Study in Industrial Control. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957. Zweig, Philip L. Belly Up: The Collapse of the Penn Square Bank. New York: Fawcett Columbine, 1985. Data Sources American Petroleum Institute. Basic Petroleum Data Book. ---------. Petroleum Facts and Figures: Centennial Edition, 1959. New York: API, 1959. Arthur Andersen & Co. and Cambridge Energy Research Associates. World Oil Trends. ---------. Natural Gas Trends. ---------.


pages: 669 words: 210,153

Tools of Titans: The Tactics, Routines, and Habits of Billionaires, Icons, and World-Class Performers by Timothy Ferriss

Abraham Maslow, Adam Curtis, Airbnb, Alexander Shulgin, Alvin Toffler, An Inconvenient Truth, artificial general intelligence, asset allocation, Atul Gawande, augmented reality, back-to-the-land, Ben Horowitz, Bernie Madoff, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Beryl Markham, billion-dollar mistake, Black Swan, Blue Bottle Coffee, Blue Ocean Strategy, blue-collar work, book value, Boris Johnson, Buckminster Fuller, business process, Cal Newport, call centre, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, Carl Icahn, Charles Lindbergh, Checklist Manifesto, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, Columbine, commoditize, correlation does not imply causation, CRISPR, David Brooks, David Graeber, deal flow, digital rights, diversification, diversified portfolio, do what you love, Donald Trump, effective altruism, Elon Musk, fail fast, fake it until you make it, fault tolerance, fear of failure, Firefox, follow your passion, fulfillment center, future of work, Future Shock, Girl Boss, Google X / Alphabet X, growth hacking, Howard Zinn, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Lao Tzu, lateral thinking, life extension, lifelogging, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mason jar, Menlo Park, microdosing, Mikhail Gorbachev, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Neal Stephenson, Nelson Mandela, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, off-the-grid, optical character recognition, PageRank, Paradox of Choice, passive income, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Singer: altruism, Peter Thiel, phenotype, PIHKAL and TIHKAL, post scarcity, post-work, power law, premature optimization, private spaceflight, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, rent-seeking, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, selection bias, sharing economy, side project, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, Skype, Snapchat, Snow Crash, social graph, software as a service, software is eating the world, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, superintelligent machines, TED Talk, Tesla Model S, The future is already here, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas L Friedman, traumatic brain injury, trolley problem, vertical integration, Wall-E, Washington Consensus, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

(doc), Planet Earth (doc), Jiro Dreams of Sushi (doc) Palmer, Amanda: Alive Inside: A Story of Music and Memory (doc), Happy (doc), One More Time with Feeling (doc) Patrick, Rhonda: Happy People: A Year in the Taiga (doc), Planet Earth (doc) Paul, Caroline: Maidentrip (doc) Polanco, Martin: The Crash Reel (doc), Waste Land (doc), Lo and Behold: Reveries of the Connected World (doc) Poliquin, Charles: The Last Samurai, Gladiator, The Imitation Game, 22 Bullets. Also: The History Channel and documentaries from National Geographic, and Tarantino movies Potts, Rolf: Grizzly Man (doc) Reece, Gabby: Food Inc. (doc), Roger and Me (doc), Bowling for Columbine (doc), Crumb (doc) Richman, Jessica: The Edge Robbins, Tony: Inside Job (doc) Rogen, Seth: Pulp Fiction, Clerks, Rushmore, Bottle Rocket, Adaptation, The Princess Bride, Fawlty Towers (TV), Kids in the Hall (TV), Monty Python’s Flying Circus (TV), Second City Television (TV) Rose, Kevin: Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy, Inglourious Basterds, Food Inc.


pages: 767 words: 208,933

Liberalism at Large: The World According to the Economist by Alex Zevin

"there is no alternative" (TINA), activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, bank run, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business climate, business cycle, capital controls, carbon tax, centre right, Chelsea Manning, collective bargaining, Columbine, Corn Laws, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, credit crunch, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, desegregation, disinformation, disruptive innovation, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Snowden, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, guns versus butter model, hiring and firing, imperial preference, income inequality, interest rate derivative, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, Jeremy Corbyn, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Julian Assange, junk bonds, Khartoum Gordon, land reform, liberal capitalism, liberal world order, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, Martin Wolf, means of production, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, Monroe Doctrine, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, new economy, New Journalism, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, no-fly zone, Norman Macrae, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, Philip Mirowski, plutocrats, post-war consensus, price stability, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, railway mania, rent control, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Seymour Hersh, Snapchat, Socratic dialogue, Steve Bannon, subprime mortgage crisis, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, trade liberalization, trade route, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, unorthodox policies, upwardly mobile, War on Poverty, WikiLeaks, Winter of Discontent, Yom Kippur War, young professional

In 1996 the paper came out for gay marriage, inflaming the religious right, though its reasons had little to do with romantic love: ‘single people were more likely to fall into the arms of the welfare state’, and marriage was a ‘great social stabiliser of men’.37 It repeatedly called for stricter gun laws, especially after the Columbine shooting in 1999, earning it the ire of America’s second amendment enthusiasts.38 Even ‘hard’ drugs ought to be legalized, it explained in 2001, with reference to the US, where one in four prisoners was locked up for minor drug offences. Had not John Stuart Mill written: ‘Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign’?


pages: 706 words: 237,378

Full Catastrophe Living (Revised Edition): Using the Wisdom of Your Body and Mind to Face Stress, Pain, and Illness by Jon Kabat-Zinn

airport security, Albert Einstein, carbon footprint, classic study, clean water, Columbine, digital rights, epigenetics, fear of failure, Higgs boson, impulse control, Lao Tzu, Mahatma Gandhi, Mars Rover, medical residency, mirror neurons, New Journalism, placebo effect, randomized controlled trial, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, Stewart Brand, sugar pill, traumatic brain injury, Whole Earth Catalog, Yogi Berra

For many children, real life pales in comparison to the excitement of the movies and computer games, and it becomes harder and harder, even for the moviemakers, to maintain their viewers’ interest unless they make the images more graphic and more violent with each new release. This pervasive diet of violence for American children must be having effects on their psyches. It is certainly having its effects in the society—witness the epidemic of bullying in our schools, and the horrifying litany of mass killings in schools and public places. Just think of Columbine, Aurora, Tucson, and Milwaukee, the latter three within a few years of each other, and the latter two within a few weeks. And then came the massacre of children at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. There are already far too many reports of adolescents and young adults killing other people, some after seeing movies that they used as inspiration, as if real life were just an extension of the movies in their own minds, and as if other people’s lives and fear and pain were of no value or consequence.


pages: 2,323 words: 550,739

1,000 Places to See in the United States and Canada Before You Die, Updated Ed. by Patricia Schultz

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Boeing 747, Bretton Woods, Burning Man, California gold rush, car-free, Charles Lindbergh, Columbine, company town, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cotton gin, country house hotel, David Sedaris, Day of the Dead, Donald Trump, East Village, El Camino Real, estate planning, Ford Model T, Frank Gehry, gentrification, glass ceiling, Golden Gate Park, Guggenheim Bilbao, Haight Ashbury, haute cuisine, indoor plumbing, interchangeable parts, Mars Rover, Mason jar, Maui Hawaii, Mikhail Gorbachev, Murano, Venice glass, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, new economy, New Urbanism, Norman Mailer, out of africa, Pepto Bismol, place-making, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Saturday Night Live, scientific management, sexual politics, South of Market, San Francisco, Suez canal 1869, The Chicago School, three-masted sailing ship, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, wage slave, white picket fence, Works Progress Administration, Yogi Berra, éminence grise

MOUNTAIN ARTS CENTER: Prestonsburg. Tel 888-622-2787 or 606-886-9125; www.macarts.com. An Unchanged Corner of the Appalachians CUMBERLAND GAP & DANIEL BOONE COUNTRY Kentucky Springtime is sublime in Cumberland Gap National Historical Park. The winding path to Pinnacle Overlook is awash in wildflowers—colorful columbine, bloodroot, and trillium. No less glorious are the second and third weeks of October, when the hazy mountainsides are ablaze in scarlet and gold foliage. And then there are all the months in between. Cumberland Gap, at 20,000 acres, is one of the largest national historic parks in America, part of an expanse of land in southeastern Kentucky near the Virginia and Tennessee borders, loosely known as Daniel Boone country.

The legendary 40-mile Pearl Pass that crests at 12,700 feet is only for the experienced and confident. Crested Butte is home to the Mountain Biking Hall of Fame and hosts the original Fat Tire Week in late June. Hiking, climbing, horseback riding, rafting, kayaking, and fishing are other summer options, and the unrivaled display of columbine and Indian paintbrush has earned the town the title “Wildflower Capital of Colorado” and spawned a special festival held in their honor every July. Crested Butte’s Maroon Avenue is home to lots of lively and quaint establishments. Once the snow starts falling, things really take off. Free shuttles run the 3 miles from town to the Crested Butte Mountain Resort and some of the steepest lift-served terrain in North America, with a separate trail guide for double-black-diamond runs.


pages: 1,034 words: 241,773

Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress by Steven Pinker

3D printing, Abraham Maslow, access to a mobile phone, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Alignment Problem, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-communist, Anton Chekhov, Arthur Eddington, artificial general intelligence, availability heuristic, Ayatollah Khomeini, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, biodiversity loss, Black Swan, Bonfire of the Vanities, Brexit referendum, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Charlie Hebdo massacre, classic study, clean water, clockwork universe, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, conceptual framework, confounding variable, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark matter, data science, decarbonisation, degrowth, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, distributed generation, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, double helix, Eddington experiment, Edward Jenner, effective altruism, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, end world poverty, endogenous growth, energy transition, European colonialism, experimental subject, Exxon Valdez, facts on the ground, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, first-past-the-post, Flynn Effect, food miles, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, frictionless, frictionless market, Garrett Hardin, germ theory of disease, Gini coefficient, Great Leap Forward, Hacker Conference 1984, Hans Rosling, hedonic treadmill, helicopter parent, Herbert Marcuse, Herman Kahn, Hobbesian trap, humanitarian revolution, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, income inequality, income per capita, Indoor air pollution, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of writing, Jaron Lanier, Joan Didion, job automation, Johannes Kepler, John Snow's cholera map, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, knowledge economy, l'esprit de l'escalier, Laplace demon, launch on warning, life extension, long peace, longitudinal study, Louis Pasteur, Mahbub ul Haq, Martin Wolf, mass incarceration, meta-analysis, Michael Shellenberger, microaggression, Mikhail Gorbachev, minimum wage unemployment, moral hazard, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, Nate Silver, Nathan Meyer Rothschild: antibiotics, negative emissions, Nelson Mandela, New Journalism, Norman Mailer, nuclear taboo, nuclear winter, obamacare, ocean acidification, Oklahoma City bombing, open economy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, paperclip maximiser, Paris climate accords, Paul Graham, peak oil, Peter Singer: altruism, Peter Thiel, post-truth, power law, precautionary principle, precision agriculture, prediction markets, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, radical life extension, Ralph Nader, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, rent control, Republic of Letters, Richard Feynman, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Rodney Brooks, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Rory Sutherland, Saturday Night Live, science of happiness, Scientific racism, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Simon Kuznets, Skype, smart grid, Social Justice Warrior, sovereign wealth fund, sparse data, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, supervolcano, synthetic biology, tech billionaire, technological determinism, technological singularity, Ted Kaczynski, Ted Nordhaus, TED Talk, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, total factor productivity, Tragedy of the Commons, union organizing, universal basic income, University of East Anglia, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment, urban renewal, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, women in the workforce, working poor, World Values Survey, Y2K

Because “terrorism” is an elastic category, the trend lines look different depending on whether a dataset includes civil war crimes, multiple murders (which include robberies or mafia hits in which several victims are shot), or suicidal rampages in which the killer ranted about some political grievance beforehand. (The Global Terrorism Database, for example, includes the 1999 Columbine school massacre but not the 2012 Sandy Hook school massacre.) Also, mass killings are media-driven spectacles, in which coverage inspires copycats, so they can yo-yo up and down as one event inspires another until the novelty wears off for a while.7 In the United States, the number of “active shooter incidents” (public rampage killings with guns) has wobbled with an upward trend since 2000, though the number of “mass murders” (four or more deaths in an incident) shows no systematic change (if anything, it shows a slight decline) from 1976 to 2011.8 The per capita death rate from “terrorism incidents” is shown in figure 13-1, together with the messy trends for Western Europe and the world.


pages: 1,028 words: 267,392

Wanderers: A Novel by Chuck Wendig

Black Swan, Boston Dynamics, centre right, citizen journalism, clean water, Columbine, coronavirus, crisis actor, currency manipulation / currency intervention, disinformation, fake news, game design, global pandemic, hallucination problem, hiring and firing, hive mind, Internet of things, job automation, Kickstarter, Lyft, Maui Hawaii, microaggression, oil shale / tar sands, private military company, quantum entanglement, RFID, satellite internet, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, supervolcano, tech bro, TED Talk, uber lyft, white picket fence

It wasn’t the prettiest stone, but Shana found it captivating just the same: The strata of colors were flecked with bits of shiny pyrite, and they glimmered when you moved your head this way and that. Someone, and here Shana recognized Nessie’s script even as a carving, had etched a name into the stone: CHARLIE STEWART, RIP. The stone sat surrounded by flowers: purple columbines, white laurel, a few devil-red Indian paintbrushes. “Did you do this?” Shana asked. “You did.” “Yeah.” “When? I…I don’t understand. It just happened.” Nessie did this thing with her face, an old thing that Shana had forgotten about—but now, seeing this expression, she wanted to die for it, she’d missed it so bad.


pages: 913 words: 265,787

How the Mind Works by Steven Pinker

affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Alfred Russel Wallace, Apple Newton, backpropagation, Buckminster Fuller, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, combinatorial explosion, complexity theory, computer age, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, delayed gratification, disinformation, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, experimental subject, feminist movement, four colour theorem, Geoffrey Hinton, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, Gregor Mendel, hedonic treadmill, Henri Poincaré, Herman Kahn, income per capita, information retrieval, invention of agriculture, invention of the wheel, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, lake wobegon effect, language acquisition, lateral thinking, Linda problem, Machine translation of "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak." to Russian and back, Mikhail Gorbachev, Murray Gell-Mann, mutually assured destruction, Necker cube, out of africa, Parents Music Resource Center, pattern recognition, phenotype, Plato's cave, plutocrats, random walk, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Saturday Night Live, scientific worldview, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, sexual politics, social intelligence, Steven Pinker, Stuart Kauffman, tacit knowledge, theory of mind, Thorstein Veblen, Tipper Gore, Turing machine, urban decay, Yogi Berra

Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Brown, D. E. 1991. Human universals. New York: McGraw-Hill. Brown, R. 1985. Social psychology: The second edition. New York: Free Press. Brown, R., & Kulik, J. 1977. Flashbulb memories. Cognition, 5, 73–99. Brownmiller, S. 1975. Against our will: Men, women, and rape. New York: Fawcett Columbine. Bruce, V. 1988. Recognizing faces. Hillsdale, N.J.: Erlbaum. Bülthoff, H. H., & Edelman, S. 1992. Psychophysical support for a two-dimensional view interpolation theory of object recognition. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 89, 60–64. Buss, D. M. 1992a. Mate preference mechanisms: Consequences for partner choice and intrasexual competition.


Into the Silence: The Great War, Mallory, and the Conquest of Everest by Wade Davis

British Empire, Columbine, Etonian, Fellow of the Royal Society, Khartoum Gordon, Khyber Pass, Mahatma Gandhi, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route

Howard-Bury, like others before him, found Phari to be a miserable place, a windswept hovel built on its own waste with mud streets as open sewers and only the frozen air of morning to offer a respite from the all-pervading stench of human waste. But beyond Phari, the white summit of Chomolhari brightened the sky, and his track carried him up a marshy valley between grassy hills and then across the Kambu La, a 16,000-foot pass that led to a deep, narrow valley literally colored blue with wildflowers, gentians and bluebells, columbine, monkshood, and forget-me-nots. Farther up the valley he came upon a series of nine sacred springs, all sulfur, in one of which bathed a high lama, surrounded by his attendants. They welcomed him warmly, with butter tea and a plate of English biscuits. More food followed, minced mutton and diced vegetables, eggs and macaroni, which Howard-Bury, to the delight of all, attempted to eat with a pair of chopsticks.


Southwest USA Travel Guide by Lonely Planet

1919 Motor Transport Corps convoy, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, Berlin Wall, Biosphere 2, Burning Man, carbon footprint, Columbine, Day of the Dead, Donner party, El Camino Real, friendly fire, G4S, haute couture, haute cuisine, housing crisis, illegal immigration, immigration reform, indoor plumbing, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), low earth orbit, machine readable, off grid, off-the-grid, place-making, SpaceShipOne, supervolcano, trade route, transcontinental railway, Virgin Galactic, walkable city, Works Progress Administration, X Prize

Fahrenheit Coffee Roasters COFFEE SHOP (201 W Grand Ave; 7am-5pm Mon-Sat, 7am-2pm Sun; ) Surrounded by the aroma of fresh roasted beans, this espresso house also serves slices of homemade pie and breakfast burritos to go. Arborena WINE BAR (970-533-1381; 114 W Grand Ave; 4-9pm Mon, Thu-Sat) A welcome alternative to another brewery, in this stylish art gallery you can sip wines by the glass, accompanied by cheese plates, baguettes and salads. Thursday is Girls’ Night Out – women save a dollar on drinks. Columbine Bar BAR (970-533-7397; 123 W Grand Ave; 10am-2am) This smoky old saloon, established in 1903, is one of Colorado’s oldest continuously operating bars. Join locals shooting pool over pints of ice-cold local brews. Mancos Valley Distillery DISTILLERY (www.mancosvalleydistillery.com; 116 N Main St; hours vary) If you’re interested in tasting something really local, make your way to this alleyway where artisan distiller Ian James crafts delicate rum (and chocolate).


The Rough Guide to Ireland by Clements, Paul

Berlin Wall, bike sharing, British Empire, Celtic Tiger, Columbine, country house hotel, digital map, East Village, haute couture, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Kickstarter, Murano, Venice glass, plutocrats, Ronald Reagan, sustainable-tourism, the market place, three-masted sailing ship, trade route, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl

Pre-eminent for the scale, variety and colour of its decoration, the Book of Kells probably originated at the monastery on Iona off the west coast of Scotland, which had been founded around 561 by the great Irish scholar, bard and ruler St Colmcille (St Columba in English). After a Viking raid in 806 the Columbines moved to the monastery of Kells in County Meath, which in its turn was raided four times between 920 and 1019. Although they looted the book’s cumdach or metal shrine cover, the pagan Norsemen did not value the book itself, however, and despite spending some time buried underground and losing thirty folios, it survived at Kells up to the seventeenth century when it was taken to Dublin for safekeeping during the Cromwellian Wars.


The Rough Guide to England by Rough Guides

active transport: walking or cycling, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, bike sharing, Bletchley Park, Bob Geldof, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, car-free, Columbine, company town, congestion charging, Corn Laws, country house hotel, Crossrail, deindustrialization, Downton Abbey, Edmond Halley, Etonian, food miles, gentrification, Great Leap Forward, haute cuisine, housing crisis, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jeremy Corbyn, John Harrison: Longitude, Kickstarter, low cost airline, Neil Kinnock, offshore financial centre, period drama, plutocrats, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, the market place, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, University of East Anglia, upwardly mobile, urban sprawl

. £75 Roseleigh 19 Broad Walk, SK17 6JR 01298 24904, roseleighhotel.co.uk; map. This classic, three-storey gritstone Victorian townhouse, overlooking Pavilion Gardens, is an excellent place to stay. The trim public rooms are decorated in attractive Victorian style, and the en-suite bedrooms are well appointed. Family-run and competitively priced. £75 Eating Columbine 7 Hall Bank, SK17 6EW 01298 78752, columbinerestaurant.co.uk; map. The menu at this small and intimate restaurant, right in the centre of Buxton, is short but imaginative; main courses, such as saddle of monkfish with crab risotto, average £17. Pre-theatre dinners, from about 5pm, can be reserved in advance.


pages: 769 words: 397,677

Frommer's California 2007 by Harry Basch, Mark Hiss, Erika Lenkert, Matthew Richard Poole

airport security, Asilomar, Bay Area Rapid Transit, car-free, Charles Lindbergh, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean water, Columbine, Donald Trump, Donner party, East Village, El Camino Real, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Frank Gehry, gentleman farmer, gentrification, Golden Gate Park, Guggenheim Bilbao, Haight Ashbury, high-speed rail, indoor plumbing, Iridium satellite, Joan Didion, Maui Hawaii, retail therapy, Silicon Valley, South of Market, San Francisco, sustainable-tourism, transcontinental railway, upwardly mobile, urban sprawl, white picket fence, Works Progress Administration

Rental equipment (including snowshoes) and lessons are available at the Grant Grove Market. For more information on cross-country skiing, sledding, or snowshoeing at Grant Grove, call the visitor center at & 559/565-4307; for Wolverton, call & 559/565-3435. Kids can sled and play in the snow-play areas near Wolverton and at Big Stump, Columbine, and Azalea in Grant Grove. The Sequoia Natural History Association operates the Pear Lake Ski Hut for snowshoers and cross-country skiers, which can accommodate up to 10 people. Use of the facility is by lottery. For further information, call & 559/565-3759. WHITE-WATER BOATING The Kaweah and Upper Kings rivers in the parks are not open to boating (neither kayaks nor inflatable rafts), but several companies run trips just outside the parks.


California by Sara Benson

airport security, Albert Einstein, Apple II, Asilomar, back-to-the-land, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Berlin Wall, Blue Bottle Coffee, Burning Man, buy and hold, California gold rush, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, Columbine, company town, dark matter, Day of the Dead, desegregation, Donald Trump, Donner party, East Village, El Camino Real, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Fillmore Auditorium, San Francisco, Frank Gehry, gentrification, global village, Golden Gate Park, Haight Ashbury, haute cuisine, Joan Didion, Khyber Pass, Loma Prieta earthquake, low cost airline, machine readable, McDonald's hot coffee lawsuit, McMansion, means of production, megaproject, Menlo Park, Neil Armstrong, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, off-the-grid, planetary scale, retail therapy, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, South of Market, San Francisco, SpaceShipOne, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, the new new thing, trade route, transcontinental railway, Upton Sinclair, urban sprawl, Wall-E, white picket fence, Whole Earth Catalog, working poor, Works Progress Administration, young professional

Tree-marked trails connect with those in the Giant Sequoia National Monument and the 50 miles of groomed terrain maintained by the private Montecito Lake Resort ( 559-565-3388, 800-227-9900; www.mslodge.com; 8000 Generals Hwy; day pass incl lunch $30). Equipment rentals are available at Grant Grove Village, the Wuksachi Lodge and the Montecito Lake Resort. There are also snow-play areas near Columbine and Big Stump in the Grant Grove region, and at the Wolverton Picnic Area & Parking Lot. In winter, cross-country skiers with reservations can stay in one of the 10 bunks at Pear Lake Ski Hut ( 559-565-3759; www.sequoiahistory.org; dm $26; mid-Dec–Apr), a 1940-era pine-and-granite building run by the Sequoia Natural History Association.


England by David Else

active transport: walking or cycling, Albert Einstein, back-to-the-land, Berlin Wall, Bletchley Park, Boris Johnson, British Empire, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, colonial rule, Columbine, company town, congestion charging, country house hotel, Crossrail, David Attenborough, David Brooks, Edward Jenner, Etonian, food miles, gentrification, glass ceiling, haute cuisine, high-speed rail, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Kickstarter, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, Nelson Mandela, new economy, New Urbanism, out of africa, period drama, place-making, retail therapy, sceptred isle, Skype, Sloane Ranger, South of Market, San Francisco, Stephen Hawking, the market place, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, unbiased observer, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, Winter of Discontent

Art Cafe ( 01298-23114; sandwiches & snacks £3-7; 9.30am-5pm Apr-Sep, to 3pm Oct-Mar) Housed on the 2nd floor of the Pavilion, with beautiful views over the gardens, this little spot is a great place to enjoy a coffee and some homemade cakes while perusing the works by local artists that are splashed across the walls. Columbine Restaurant ( 01298-78752; Hall Bank; mains £11-13; dinner 7-10pm Mon & Wed-Sat) Perched on the slope leading down to the Crescent, this excellent understated restaurant is top choice among Buxtonites in the know. It delivers large portions of excellent local produce including some good vegetarian choices.


Frommer's California 2009 by Matthew Poole, Harry Basch, Mark Hiss, Erika Lenkert

airport security, Asilomar, Bay Area Rapid Transit, California gold rush, call centre, car-free, Charles Lindbergh, clean water, Columbine, Donald Trump, Donner party, East Village, El Camino Real, European colonialism, Frank Gehry, gentleman farmer, gentrification, Golden Gate Park, Haight Ashbury, high-speed rail, housing crisis, indoor plumbing, Joan Didion, machine readable, Mason jar, mass immigration, Maui Hawaii, post-work, retail therapy, rolling blackouts, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Skype, South of Market, San Francisco, sustainable-tourism, transcontinental railway, urban sprawl, white picket fence, Works Progress Administration, Y Combinator

Rental equipment (including snowshoes) and lessons are available at the Grant Grove Market. For more information on cross-country skiing, sledding, or snowshoeing at Grant Grove, call the visitor center at & 559/565-4307; for Wolverton, call & 559/ 565-3435. Kids can sled and play in the sno w-play ar eas near Wolverton and at B ig Stump, Columbine, and Azalea in Grant Grove. The Sequoia Natural History Association operates the Pear Lake Ski Hut for snowshoers and cr oss-country skiers, which can accommodate up to 10 people. U se of the facility is by lottery. For further information, call & 559/565-3759. WHITE-WATER BOATING The Kaweah and Upper Kings rivers in the parks are not open to boating (neither kayaks nor inflatable rafts), but several companies run trips just outside the par ks.


France (Lonely Planet, 8th Edition) by Nicola Williams

active transport: walking or cycling, back-to-the-land, bike sharing, British Empire, car-free, carbon footprint, centre right, Charles Lindbergh, Columbine, company town, double helix, flag carrier, gentrification, Guggenheim Bilbao, haute couture, haute cuisine, Henri Poincaré, Herbert Marcuse, high-speed rail, Honoré de Balzac, illegal immigration, industrial robot, information trail, Jacquard loom, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Kickstarter, Louis Blériot, Louis Pasteur, low cost airline, Mahatma Gandhi, means of production, Murano, Venice glass, pension reform, post-work, QWERTY keyboard, ride hailing / ride sharing, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Skype, Sloane Ranger, Suez canal 1869, supervolcano, three-masted sailing ship, trade route, urban renewal, urban sprawl, V2 rocket

Larch trees, mountain and arolla pines, rhododendrons and junipers stud shrubby subalpine zones between 1500m and 2000m; and a brilliant riot of spring and summertime wildflowers carpet grassy meadows above the tree line in the alpine zone (up to 3000m). Alpine blooms include the single golden-yellow flower of the arnica, which has long been used in herbal and homeopathic bruise-relieving remedies; the flame-coloured fire lily, which flowers from December until May; and the hardy Alpine columbine, with its delicate blue petals. The protected ‘queen of the Alps’ (aka the Alpine eryngo) bears an uncanny resemblance to a purple thistle but is, in fact, a member of the parsley family (to which the carrot also belongs); you will find it on grassy ledges. The rare twinflower only grows in the Parc National de la Vanoise.


Lonely Planet France by Lonely Planet Publications

banking crisis, bike sharing, British Empire, car-free, carbon footprint, centre right, Charles Lindbergh, Columbine, David Sedaris, double helix, Frank Gehry, G4S, gentrification, glass ceiling, haute couture, haute cuisine, Henri Poincaré, Herbert Marcuse, high-speed rail, Honoré de Balzac, illegal immigration, Jacquard loom, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Kickstarter, Louis Blériot, Louis Pasteur, low cost airline, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, Murano, Venice glass, ride hailing / ride sharing, sensible shoes, Silicon Valley, Suez canal 1869, supervolcano, three-masted sailing ship, trade route, urban renewal, urban sprawl, V2 rocket

Larch trees, mountain and arolla pines, rhododendrons and junipers stud shrubby subalpine zones between 1500m and 2000m; and a brilliant riot of spring and summertime wildflowers carpets grassy meadows above the treeline in the alpine zone (up to 3000m). Alpine blooms include the single golden-yellow flower of the arnica, which has long been used in herbal and homeopathic bruise-relieving remedies; the flame-coloured fire lily; and the hardy Alpine columbine, with its delicate blue petals. The protected ‘queen of the Alps’ (aka the Alpine eryngo) bears an uncanny resemblance to a purple thistle but is, in fact, a member of the parsley family (to which the carrot also belongs). The rare twinflower only grows in the Parc National de la Vanoise. Of France’s 150 orchids, the black vanilla orchid is one to look out for – its small red-brown flowers exude a sweet vanilla fragrance.


Great Britain by David Else, Fionn Davenport

active transport: walking or cycling, Albert Einstein, Beeching cuts, Boris Johnson, British Empire, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, clean water, colonial rule, Columbine, congestion charging, country house hotel, credit crunch, Crossrail, David Attenborough, Etonian, food miles, gentrification, glass ceiling, global village, haute cuisine, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Kickstarter, land reform, Livingstone, I presume, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, mega-rich, negative equity, new economy, North Ronaldsay sheep, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, period drama, place-making, retail therapy, Skype, Sloane Ranger, South of Market, San Francisco, Stephen Hawking, the market place, three-masted sailing ship, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, Winter of Discontent

Old Hall Hotel ( 01298-22841; www.oldhallhotelbuxton.co.uk; the Square; s/d incl breakfast £65/100 wi-fi) There is a tale to go with every creak of the floorboards at this genial, history-soaked establishment, supposedly the oldest hotel in England. Mary, Queen of Scots, was held here from 1576 to 1578, and the wood-panelled corridors and rooms are as well appointed and as elegant as they must have been in her day. Eating & Drinking Columbine Restaurant ( 01298-78752; Hall Bank; mains £11-13; 7-10pm Mon & Wed-Sat) Perched on the slope leading down to the Crescent, this excellent understated restaurant is top choice among Buxtonites in the know. It delivers large portions of excellent local produce including some good vegetarian choices.