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That was why he was here after all, to rest a finger on the scale, to give history a nudge in the right direction. Or in his client’s direction anyway.
What does Dag do? Who is his client?
anathema.
mimetic
effete
Federico Alvarez
The bubble burst.
Hmmm? What is he implying. Bubble burst makes me think of the dot com or housing bubble.
naiads.
yakuza
variegated
novel title -- wonder what it means here
Sean’s
It was the woman in the dress, scarlet silk hanging loosely over porcelain skin.
Who is she? How will she play into the novel?
bacchanal,
suffusing
quotidian
vizslas
bespoke
the feed
Hmmm! Instead of having to login and view Facebook like feeds, they are simply seen by people in their sub-conscious.
maquiladoras
building something meaningful requires you to let go of the obsession with perfection. It requires empowering others and trusting them to do their part, even if they do it differently than you might have. But trust is a two-way street. Autonomy means you’re held accountable.”
matryoshka
Diana, surely an alias,
despots
riposte
cairns
copse
accretive.
droll
The feed was your personal lens through which to gaze into the digital abyss, the algorithmic curator that delivered what you needed when you needed it from the surfeit.
frisson
“Shankar Vedantam wrote that those who travel with the current will always feel they are good swimmers, while those who swim against the current may never realize they are better swimmers than they imagine,”
school. The tragedy of the commons—overexploitation of a shared but underregulated resource by individuals for selfish gain screwed over the community as a whole. What made matters worse was that the loss was widely distributed, diffusing political will, while those few who captured the gain fought tooth and nail to maintain their benefit as free riders.
“But even something as inconsequential as wanting a lawn in front of our homes isn’t a true choice. It’s the product of a never-ending series of historical accidents. We take the world we’re born into for granted. We imagine that we control our thoughts and dreams. We think we’re free to be who we want to be. But there’s this vast hidden architecture that shapes us, and we don’t even know it. It’s like we’re actors in a play who don’t realize we’re working off a script.”
“Ultimately, the only power we have is to choose how we see the world,” she continued. “We don’t control what happens. But we do get to decide how to interpret what happens, how to synthesize it, what to do next.”
You had her, he said. You just needed to let her decide it was her idea. Never sell past the close.
meritocratic
obelisk
Verdant
accoutrement
surfeit
We might have invented chocolate and sent a woman to Mars, but humans still couldn’t figure out how to collaborate on fundamental things, like making sure our own planet would support future generations. Science had cut away technical problems like a hot scalpel through butter, but social problems persisted because there was no perfect solution, only the messy ongoing processes of commerce and politics.
moraines
Pyrrhic.
poutine.
copse
Were his thoughts really his own, or just the output of a carefully constructed and intentionally warped digital-fun-house version of reality? He found what he was looking for and retreated to sit on the edge of the bed.
Pillow talk to change the course of history. There had been a plan. Of course there had. Afterward, tangled in sweaty sheets, consciousness tentatively returning from oblivion, she had laid it all out. The global carbon tax initiative might have failed, but they could attack from the flank. Instead of a top-down international agreement, they would dismember the fossil fuel juggernaut one limb at a time.
A casual observer would have missed the key detail. Hidden away in a far corner and obscured by shadow, the face of a small boy peered out from the depths of the kelp forest, eyes directed not at the wondrous sight above him but out toward the viewer. Dag pulled away from the drawing, but the boy’s eyes followed him until he snapped the sketchbook shut.
The multipronged counterattack required them to control one very specific variable. The Island hackers and psychologists could work their magic on the Hill as long as Lowell and his allies didn’t catch the scent. If the industry suspected that the various initiatives were coordinated, the major oil companies would immediately overcome their vicious internal competition in order to bring the collective threat to a halt. And there was one man who the industry relied on more than anyone else for such high-level political insight and guidance. Feeling at once piqued and guilty, Dag opened the
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Is that sad? We work to acquire all this stuff and then don’t spend any time actually enjoying it.”
