#book_extracts
The Battle Against Evil
When I got saved, I thought I’d spend my life walking beside still waters and lying down in green pastures. I had no idea embracing Jesus as the captain of my salvation meant I was enlisting as a soldier in the army of God.
I’ve since learned that believers are soldiers and Jesus did not come to bring peace but a sword. I’ve discovered that I’m more than a conqueror in Christ, which also tells me ungodly and unseen forces are trying to conquer me.
Keep this truth in mind: the enemy comes to kill, steal, and destroy. Every demon has the same mission. How they go about it—their strategies and tactics—are different. A spirit of fear attacks your faith, for example, while a spirit of rejection attacks your identity. Satan is strategic. His army is highly organized, and he is sending specific spirits against believers to derail them from their kingdom purpose.
My prayer is that you will gain discernment to identify spirits opposing your life—and the lives of those you love—and develop spiritual skills to battle back. Spiritual bondage can manifest in many ways, but the good news is that victory can be ours. By walking in our God-given authority, we can effectively do battle and win in warfare.
Holy Bible
The Battle Against Evil
When I got saved, I thought I’d spend my life walking beside still waters and lying down in green pastures. I had no idea embracing Jesus as the captain of my salvation meant I was enlisting as a soldier in the army of God.
I’ve since learned that believers are soldiers and Jesus did not come to bring peace but a sword. I’ve discovered that I’m more than a conqueror in Christ, which also tells me ungodly and unseen forces are trying to conquer me.
Keep this truth in mind: the enemy comes to kill, steal, and destroy. Every demon has the same mission. How they go about it—their strategies and tactics—are different. A spirit of fear attacks your faith, for example, while a spirit of rejection attacks your identity. Satan is strategic. His army is highly organized, and he is sending specific spirits against believers to derail them from their kingdom purpose.
My prayer is that you will gain discernment to identify spirits opposing your life—and the lives of those you love—and develop spiritual skills to battle back. Spiritual bondage can manifest in many ways, but the good news is that victory can be ours. By walking in our God-given authority, we can effectively do battle and win in warfare.
Holy Bible
#book_extracts
“Just as we look back in horror at the lives of people five hundred years ago, I imagine people five hundred years from now will laugh at us and our certainties today. They will laugh at how we let our money and our jobs define our lives. They will laugh at how we were afraid to show appreciation for those who matter to us most, yet heaped praise on public figures who didn’t deserve anything. They will laugh at our rituals and superstitions, our worries and our wars; they will gawk at our cruelty. They will study our art and argue over our history. They will understand truths about us of which none of us are yet aware.
And they, too, will be wrong. Just less wrong than we were.”
Excerpt From
The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck
Mark Manson
This material may be protected by copyright.
“Just as we look back in horror at the lives of people five hundred years ago, I imagine people five hundred years from now will laugh at us and our certainties today. They will laugh at how we let our money and our jobs define our lives. They will laugh at how we were afraid to show appreciation for those who matter to us most, yet heaped praise on public figures who didn’t deserve anything. They will laugh at our rituals and superstitions, our worries and our wars; they will gawk at our cruelty. They will study our art and argue over our history. They will understand truths about us of which none of us are yet aware.
And they, too, will be wrong. Just less wrong than we were.”
Excerpt From
The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck
Mark Manson
This material may be protected by copyright.
#book_extracts
“At the heart of a sulk lies a confusing mixture of intense anger and an equally intense desire not to communicate what one is angry about. The sulker both desperately needs the other person to understand and yet remains utterly committed to doing nothing to help them do so. The very need to explain forms the kernel of the insult: if the partner requires an explanation, he or she is clearly not worthy of one. We should add: it is a privilege to be the recipient of a sulk; it means the other person respects and trusts us enough to think we should understand their unspoken hurt. It is one of the odder gifts of love”
Excerpt From
The Course of Love
By “Alain de Botton”
This material may be protected by copyright.
“At the heart of a sulk lies a confusing mixture of intense anger and an equally intense desire not to communicate what one is angry about. The sulker both desperately needs the other person to understand and yet remains utterly committed to doing nothing to help them do so. The very need to explain forms the kernel of the insult: if the partner requires an explanation, he or she is clearly not worthy of one. We should add: it is a privilege to be the recipient of a sulk; it means the other person respects and trusts us enough to think we should understand their unspoken hurt. It is one of the odder gifts of love”
Excerpt From
The Course of Love
By “Alain de Botton”
This material may be protected by copyright.
#book_extracts
“We too often act from scripts generated by the crises of long ago that we’ve all but consciously forgotten. We behave according to an archaic logic which now escapes us, following a meaning we can’t properly lay bare to those we depend on most. We may struggle to know which period of our lives we are really in, with whom we are truly dealing, and what sort of behavior the person before us is rightfully owed. We can be a little tricky to be around.”
Excerpt From
The Course of Love
Alain de Botton
“We too often act from scripts generated by the crises of long ago that we’ve all but consciously forgotten. We behave according to an archaic logic which now escapes us, following a meaning we can’t properly lay bare to those we depend on most. We may struggle to know which period of our lives we are really in, with whom we are truly dealing, and what sort of behavior the person before us is rightfully owed. We can be a little tricky to be around.”
Excerpt From
The Course of Love
Alain de Botton
#Book_Extracts
“He becomes aware, for the first time in his life, of the beauty of flowers. He remembers harboring a near hatred of them as an adolescent. It seemed absurd that anyone should take joy in something so small and so temporary when there were surely greater, more permanent things on which to pin ambitions. He himself wanted glory and intensity. To be detained by a flower was a symbol of a dangerous resignation. Now he is beginning to get the point. The love of flowers is a consequence of modesty and an accommodation with disappointment. Some things need to go permanently wrong before we can start to admire the stem of a rose or the petals of a bluebell. But once we realize that the larger dreams are always compromised in some way, with what gratitude we may turn to these minuscule islands of serene perfection and delight.”
Excerpt From
The Course of Love
Alain de Botton
This material may be protected by copyright.
“He becomes aware, for the first time in his life, of the beauty of flowers. He remembers harboring a near hatred of them as an adolescent. It seemed absurd that anyone should take joy in something so small and so temporary when there were surely greater, more permanent things on which to pin ambitions. He himself wanted glory and intensity. To be detained by a flower was a symbol of a dangerous resignation. Now he is beginning to get the point. The love of flowers is a consequence of modesty and an accommodation with disappointment. Some things need to go permanently wrong before we can start to admire the stem of a rose or the petals of a bluebell. But once we realize that the larger dreams are always compromised in some way, with what gratitude we may turn to these minuscule islands of serene perfection and delight.”
Excerpt From
The Course of Love
Alain de Botton
This material may be protected by copyright.
#Book_Extracts
“The Chinese harvest in 1960 was smaller than planned because of a bad season combined with poor governmental advice about how to grow crops more effectively. The local governments didn’t want to show bad results, so they took all the food and sent it to the central government. There was no food left. One year later the shocked inspectors were delivering eyewitness reports of cannibalism and dead bodies along roads. The government denied that its central planning had failed, and the catastrophe was kept secret by the Chinese government for 36 years. It wasn’t described in English to the outside world until 1996. (Think about it. Could any government keep the death of 15 million people a global secret today?)”
Excerpt From
Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World – and Why Things Are Better Than You Think
Hans Rosling
This material may be protected by copyright.
“The Chinese harvest in 1960 was smaller than planned because of a bad season combined with poor governmental advice about how to grow crops more effectively. The local governments didn’t want to show bad results, so they took all the food and sent it to the central government. There was no food left. One year later the shocked inspectors were delivering eyewitness reports of cannibalism and dead bodies along roads. The government denied that its central planning had failed, and the catastrophe was kept secret by the Chinese government for 36 years. It wasn’t described in English to the outside world until 1996. (Think about it. Could any government keep the death of 15 million people a global secret today?)”
Excerpt From
Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World – and Why Things Are Better Than You Think
Hans Rosling
This material may be protected by copyright.
#Book_Extracts
“Of all the judgments we pass in life, none is as important as the one we pass on ourselves.”
Excerpt From
The Six Pillars of Self-Esteem
Branden, Nathaniel
This material may be protected by copyright.
“Of all the judgments we pass in life, none is as important as the one we pass on ourselves.”
Excerpt From
The Six Pillars of Self-Esteem
Branden, Nathaniel
This material may be protected by copyright.
#Book_Extracts
“Traditionally, when academics or businesspeople wanted data, they conducted surveys. The data came neatly formed, drawn from numbers or checked boxes on questionnaires. This is no longer the case. The days of structured, clean, simple, survey-based data are over. In this new age, the messy traces we leave as we go through life are becoming the primary source of data.”
Excerpt From
Everybody Lies
Seth Stephens-Davidowitz
This material may be protected by copyright.
“Traditionally, when academics or businesspeople wanted data, they conducted surveys. The data came neatly formed, drawn from numbers or checked boxes on questionnaires. This is no longer the case. The days of structured, clean, simple, survey-based data are over. In this new age, the messy traces we leave as we go through life are becoming the primary source of data.”
Excerpt From
Everybody Lies
Seth Stephens-Davidowitz
This material may be protected by copyright.
“In his book Zero to One, Peter Thiel, an early investor in Facebook, says that great businesses are built on secrets, either secrets about nature or secrets about people. Jeff Seder, as discussed in Chapter 3, found the natural secret that left ventricle size predicted horse performance. Google found the natural secret of how powerful the information in links can be.
Thiel defines “secrets about people” as “things that people don’t know about themselves or things they hide because they don’t want others to know.” These kinds of businesses, in other words, are built on people’s lies.
You could argue that all of Facebook is founded on an unpleasant secret about people that Zuckerberg learned while at Harvard. Zuckerberg, early in his sophomore year, created a website for his fellow students called Facemash. Modeled on a site called “Am I Hot or Not?,” Facemash would present pictures of two Harvard students and then have other students judge who was better looking.
The sophomore’s site was greeted with outrage. The Harvard Crimson, in an editorial, accused young Zuckerberg of “catering to the worst side” of people. Hispanic and African-American groups accused him of sexism and racism. “Yet, before Harvard administrators shut down Zuckerberg’s internet access—just a few hours after the site was founded—450 people had viewed the site and voted 22,000 times on different images. Zuckerberg had learned an important secret: people can claim they’re furious, they can decry something as distasteful, and yet they’ll still click.”
Excerpt From
Everybody Lies
Seth Stephens-Davidowitz
This material may be protected by copyright.
Thiel defines “secrets about people” as “things that people don’t know about themselves or things they hide because they don’t want others to know.” These kinds of businesses, in other words, are built on people’s lies.
You could argue that all of Facebook is founded on an unpleasant secret about people that Zuckerberg learned while at Harvard. Zuckerberg, early in his sophomore year, created a website for his fellow students called Facemash. Modeled on a site called “Am I Hot or Not?,” Facemash would present pictures of two Harvard students and then have other students judge who was better looking.
The sophomore’s site was greeted with outrage. The Harvard Crimson, in an editorial, accused young Zuckerberg of “catering to the worst side” of people. Hispanic and African-American groups accused him of sexism and racism. “Yet, before Harvard administrators shut down Zuckerberg’s internet access—just a few hours after the site was founded—450 people had viewed the site and voted 22,000 times on different images. Zuckerberg had learned an important secret: people can claim they’re furious, they can decry something as distasteful, and yet they’ll still click.”
Excerpt From
Everybody Lies
Seth Stephens-Davidowitz
This material may be protected by copyright.
“Stuyvesant High School (known as “Stuy”) is housed in a ten-floor, $150 million tan, brick building overlooking the Hudson River, a few blocks from the World Trade Center, in lower Manhattan. Stuy is, in a word, impressive. It offers fifty-five Advanced Placement (AP) classes, seven languages, and electives in Jewish history, science fiction, and Asian-American literature. Roughly one-quarter of its graduates are accepted to an Ivy League or similarly prestigious college. Stuyvesant trained Harvard physics professor Lisa Randall, Obama strategist David Axelrod, Academy Award–winning actor Tim Robbins, and novelist Gary Shteyngart. Its commencement speakers have included Bill Clinton, Kofi Annan, and Conan O’Brien.
The only thing more remarkable than Stuyvesant’s offerings and graduates is its cost: zero dollars. It is a public high school and probably the country’s best. Indeed, a recent study used 27 million reviews by 300,000 students and parents to rank every public high school in the United States. Stuy ranked number one. It is no wonder, then, that ambitious, middle-class New York parents and their equally ambitious progeny can become obsessed with Stuy’s brand.
“For Ahmed Yilmaz,* the son of an insurance agent and teacher in Queens, Stuy was “the high school.”
“Working-class and immigrant families see Stuy as a way out,” Yilmaz explains. “If your kid goes to Stuy, he is going to go to a legit, top-twenty university. The family will be okay.”
So how can you get into Stuyvesant High School? You have to live in one of the five boroughs of New York City and score above a certain number on the admission exam. That’s it. No recommendations, no essay, no legacy admission, no affirmative action. One day, one test, one score. If your number is above a certain threshold, you’re in.
Each November, approximately 27,000 New York youngsters sit for the admission exam. The competition is brutal. Fewer than 5 percent of those who take the test get into Stuy.”
Excerpt From
Everybody Lies
Seth Stephens-Davidowitz
This material may be protected by copyright.
The only thing more remarkable than Stuyvesant’s offerings and graduates is its cost: zero dollars. It is a public high school and probably the country’s best. Indeed, a recent study used 27 million reviews by 300,000 students and parents to rank every public high school in the United States. Stuy ranked number one. It is no wonder, then, that ambitious, middle-class New York parents and their equally ambitious progeny can become obsessed with Stuy’s brand.
“For Ahmed Yilmaz,* the son of an insurance agent and teacher in Queens, Stuy was “the high school.”
“Working-class and immigrant families see Stuy as a way out,” Yilmaz explains. “If your kid goes to Stuy, he is going to go to a legit, top-twenty university. The family will be okay.”
So how can you get into Stuyvesant High School? You have to live in one of the five boroughs of New York City and score above a certain number on the admission exam. That’s it. No recommendations, no essay, no legacy admission, no affirmative action. One day, one test, one score. If your number is above a certain threshold, you’re in.
Each November, approximately 27,000 New York youngsters sit for the admission exam. The competition is brutal. Fewer than 5 percent of those who take the test get into Stuy.”
Excerpt From
Everybody Lies
Seth Stephens-Davidowitz
This material may be protected by copyright.
Upper Intermediate
#Book_Extracts “Of all the judgments we pass in life, none is as important as the one we pass on ourselves.” Excerpt From The Six Pillars of Self-Esteem Branden, Nathaniel This material may be protected by copyright.
“Yilmaz explains that his mother had “worked her ass off” and put what little money she had into his preparation for the test. After months spending every weekday afternoon and full weekends preparing, Yilmaz was confident he would get into Stuy. He still remembers the day he received the envelope with the results. He missed by two questions.
I asked him what it felt like. “What does it feel like,” he responded, “to have your world fall apart when you’re in middle school?”
His consolation prize was hardly shabby—Bronx Science, another exclusive and highly ranked public school. But it was not Stuy. And Yilmaz felt Bronx Science was more a specialty school meant for technical people. Four years later, he was rejected from Princeton. He attended Tufts and has shuffled through a few careers. Today he is a reasonably successful employee at a tech company, although he says his job is “mind-numbing” and not as well compensated as he’d like.
“More than a decade later, Yilmaz admits that he sometimes wonders how life would have played out had he gone to Stuy. “Everything would be different,” he says. “Literally, everyone I know would be different.” He wonders if Stuyvesant High School would have led him to higher SAT scores, a university like Princeton or Harvard (both of which he considers significantly better than Tufts), and perhaps more lucrative or fulfilling employment.
It can be anything from entertaining to self-torture for human beings to play out hypotheticals.”
“What would my life be like if I made the move on that girl or that boy? If I took that job? If I went to that school? But these what-ifs seem unanswerable. Life is not a video game. You can’t replay it under different scenarios until you get the results you want.”
Excerpt From
Everybody Lies
Seth Stephens-Davidowitz
This material may be protected by copyright.
I asked him what it felt like. “What does it feel like,” he responded, “to have your world fall apart when you’re in middle school?”
His consolation prize was hardly shabby—Bronx Science, another exclusive and highly ranked public school. But it was not Stuy. And Yilmaz felt Bronx Science was more a specialty school meant for technical people. Four years later, he was rejected from Princeton. He attended Tufts and has shuffled through a few careers. Today he is a reasonably successful employee at a tech company, although he says his job is “mind-numbing” and not as well compensated as he’d like.
“More than a decade later, Yilmaz admits that he sometimes wonders how life would have played out had he gone to Stuy. “Everything would be different,” he says. “Literally, everyone I know would be different.” He wonders if Stuyvesant High School would have led him to higher SAT scores, a university like Princeton or Harvard (both of which he considers significantly better than Tufts), and perhaps more lucrative or fulfilling employment.
It can be anything from entertaining to self-torture for human beings to play out hypotheticals.”
“What would my life be like if I made the move on that girl or that boy? If I took that job? If I went to that school? But these what-ifs seem unanswerable. Life is not a video game. You can’t replay it under different scenarios until you get the results you want.”
Excerpt From
Everybody Lies
Seth Stephens-Davidowitz
This material may be protected by copyright.
#Joke
If laziness was an Olympic sport, I would come fourth to save walking up to the Podium.
If laziness was an Olympic sport, I would come fourth to save walking up to the Podium.
Media is too big
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#ted
Why is this painting so shocking?
Why is this painting so shocking?
Upper Intermediate
#ted Why is this painting so shocking?
Tapescript:
On April 26th, 1937, Fascist forces bombed the Basque village of Guernica in Northern Spain. It was one of the worst civilian casualties of the Spanish Civil War, waged between the democratic republic and General Franco’s fascist contingent.
For Pablo Picasso, the tragedy sparked a frenzied period of work in which he produced a massive anti-war mural, aptly titled "Guernica." The painting is a powerful work of historical documentation and political protest. But while Picasso’s artistic motivations are clear, the symbolism of the painting can be as confusing and chaotic as war itself. How can we make sense of this overwhelming image, and what exactly makes it a masterpiece of anti-war art?
The painting’s monumental canvas is disorienting from the start, rendered in the abstracted Cubist style Picasso pioneered. Cubism deliberately emphasized the two-dimensionality of the canvas by flattening the objects being painted. This afforded viewers multiple and often impossible perspectives on the same object; a technique considered shocking even in Picasso’s domestic scenes.
But in this context, the style offers a profoundly overwhelming view of violence, destruction, and casualties. Multiple perspectives only compound the horror on display– sending the eyes hurtling around the frame in a futile hunt for peace.
On the far left, a woman holding her dead child releases a scream; her eyes sliding down her face in the shape of tears and her head bending back unnaturally to echo her baby’s. There is the statue of a soldier present below, but he is unable to defend the woman and child. Instead his broken body lies in pieces, his arm clutching a splintered sword in a signal of utmost defeat.
The tip of his sword meets a woman’s foot as she attempts to flee the devastation. But her other leg appears rooted to the spot, locked in the corner of the canvas even as she stretches to move it. Another victim appears behind this slouching figure. Falling helplessly as flames lick around her, she too is caught in her own hopeless scene.
Each of these figures bordering the painting are horribly trapped, giving the work an acute sense of claustrophobia. And where you might expect the canvas’ massive size to counteract this feeling, its scale only highlights the nearly life-sized atrocities on display.
Some possible relief comes from a lamp held tightly by a ghostly woman reaching out her window. But is her lantern’s hopeful glow truly lighting the scene? Or is it the jagged lightbulb– thought to represent the technologies of modern warfare– which illuminates her view of the chaos below?
From the coffin-like confines of her window, her arm guides the viewer back into the fray, to perhaps the most controversial symbols of all– two ghostly animals caught in the destruction. Does the screaming horse embody the threat of Franco’s military nationalism; or does the spike running through its body convey its victimhood? Does the white bull represent Spain, the country of matadors and a common theme in Picasso’s work– or does it stand for the brutality of war?
In this scene of strife, these animals raise more questions than answers. And additional elements hidden throughout the frame offer even more secrets for close observers. At the top of the canvas flashes a bird desperate to escape the carnage. And the abundance of animals on display may hint at the bombing’s date– a market day which flooded the streets with villagers, animals, and other potential causalities.
On April 26th, 1937, Fascist forces bombed the Basque village of Guernica in Northern Spain. It was one of the worst civilian casualties of the Spanish Civil War, waged between the democratic republic and General Franco’s fascist contingent.
For Pablo Picasso, the tragedy sparked a frenzied period of work in which he produced a massive anti-war mural, aptly titled "Guernica." The painting is a powerful work of historical documentation and political protest. But while Picasso’s artistic motivations are clear, the symbolism of the painting can be as confusing and chaotic as war itself. How can we make sense of this overwhelming image, and what exactly makes it a masterpiece of anti-war art?
The painting’s monumental canvas is disorienting from the start, rendered in the abstracted Cubist style Picasso pioneered. Cubism deliberately emphasized the two-dimensionality of the canvas by flattening the objects being painted. This afforded viewers multiple and often impossible perspectives on the same object; a technique considered shocking even in Picasso’s domestic scenes.
But in this context, the style offers a profoundly overwhelming view of violence, destruction, and casualties. Multiple perspectives only compound the horror on display– sending the eyes hurtling around the frame in a futile hunt for peace.
On the far left, a woman holding her dead child releases a scream; her eyes sliding down her face in the shape of tears and her head bending back unnaturally to echo her baby’s. There is the statue of a soldier present below, but he is unable to defend the woman and child. Instead his broken body lies in pieces, his arm clutching a splintered sword in a signal of utmost defeat.
The tip of his sword meets a woman’s foot as she attempts to flee the devastation. But her other leg appears rooted to the spot, locked in the corner of the canvas even as she stretches to move it. Another victim appears behind this slouching figure. Falling helplessly as flames lick around her, she too is caught in her own hopeless scene.
Each of these figures bordering the painting are horribly trapped, giving the work an acute sense of claustrophobia. And where you might expect the canvas’ massive size to counteract this feeling, its scale only highlights the nearly life-sized atrocities on display.
Some possible relief comes from a lamp held tightly by a ghostly woman reaching out her window. But is her lantern’s hopeful glow truly lighting the scene? Or is it the jagged lightbulb– thought to represent the technologies of modern warfare– which illuminates her view of the chaos below?
From the coffin-like confines of her window, her arm guides the viewer back into the fray, to perhaps the most controversial symbols of all– two ghostly animals caught in the destruction. Does the screaming horse embody the threat of Franco’s military nationalism; or does the spike running through its body convey its victimhood? Does the white bull represent Spain, the country of matadors and a common theme in Picasso’s work– or does it stand for the brutality of war?
In this scene of strife, these animals raise more questions than answers. And additional elements hidden throughout the frame offer even more secrets for close observers. At the top of the canvas flashes a bird desperate to escape the carnage. And the abundance of animals on display may hint at the bombing’s date– a market day which flooded the streets with villagers, animals, and other potential causalities.