If pressed, Cook will disagree, politely, with the portrait painted by some that he is a spreadsheet guy, a suit running a company built by a man who disdained suits. “Steve saw this—one of the things I loved about him was he didn’t expect innovation out of just one group in the company or creativity out of one group,” Cook says. “He expected it everywhere in the company.” Including in operations, where Cook worked: “When we were running operations, we tried to be innovative in operations and creative in operations, just like we were creative elsewhere. We fundamentally had to be in order to build the products that we were designing.”
Pot odds are the payout offered by the pot expressed in comparison to the price to call a bet. For example, if there was $100 in the pot and the player had to put in $20, the pot was offering 5-to-1 odds. These odds were then compared to the likelihood the player making the decision would win the hand, either by having the best cards or drawing to the best hand.
When I looked up at my father as a boy, I thought being a man was having control. Being the master and commander of your own destiny. How could any boy know that freedom is lost the moment you become a man. Things start to count. To press in. Constricting slowly, inevitably, creating a cage of inconveniences and duties and deadlines and failed plans and lost friends.
The Soviet regime manufactured a famine in Ukraine that would kill 3.9 million people, a tragedy of unimaginable scope that’s known today as the Holodomor, a combination of the Ukrainian words for “hunger” and “extermination.”
In war, men lose what makes them great. Their creativity. Their wisdom. Their joy. All that’s left is their utility. War is not monstrous for making corpses of men so much as it is for making machines of them. And woe to those who have no use in war except to feed the machines.
In his Inaugural Address in March, Lincoln did not object to the proposed Thirteenth Amendment, which would make slavery untouchable and potentially reunite the union. But Lincoln did swear that he would never allow the extension of slavery. On March 21, the Confederacy’s vice president, Alexander Stephens, responded to Lincoln’s pledge in an extemporaneous speech. The Confederate government, he declared, rested “upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.” This “great… truth,” Stephens said, was the “corner-stone” of the Confederacy. The speech became known as his “Cornerstone Speech.”
Weeks after passing the most antiracist bill of the decade over Reagan’s veto—the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act with its strict economic sanctions—Congress passed the most racist bill of the decade. On October 27, 1986, Reagan, “with great pleasure,” signed the Anti-Drug Abuse Act, supported by both Republicans and Democrats.
“My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery,” Lincoln replied in Greeley’s rival paper, Washington’s National Intelligencer. “If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do that. What I do about slavery, and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save the Union.”
Alexander H. Jones of eastern North Carolina helped organize the 10,000-man Heroes of America, which laid an “underground railroad” for White Unionists in Confederate territories to escape. “The fact is,” Jones wrote in a secret antiracist circular, referring to the rich planters, that “these bombastic, highfalutin aristocratic fools have been in the habit of driving negroes and poor helpless white people until they think… that they themselves are superior; [and] hate, deride and suspicion the poor.”
nothing was more compelling than Malcolm X’s unstinting humanism: “I’m for truth, no matter who tells it. I’m for justice, no matter who it is for or against. I’m a human being first and foremost, and as such I’m for whoever and whatever benefits humanity as a whole.”
Goldwater’s tract deeply massaged those Americans who had outgrown (or never needed) government assistance. Welfare “transforms the individual from a dignified, industrious, self-reliant spiritual being into a dependent animal creature without his knowing it,” Goldwater wrote without a shred of evidence. Many proud, dignified, industrious, self-reliant members of the White middle class, who had derived their wealth from the welfare of inheritance, the New Deal, or the GI Bill, accepted Goldwater’s dictum as truth, despite the fact that parental or government assistance had not transformed them or their parents into dependent animal creatures. After looking at White mothers on welfare as “deserving” for decades, these Goldwater conservatives saw the growing number of Black mothers on welfare as “undeserving”—as dependent animal creatures.
On the presidential campaign trail, Reagan shared the story of Chicago’s Linda Taylor, a Black woman charged with welfare fraud. “Her tax-free cash income is over $150,000,” Reagan liked to say. Actually, Taylor had been charged with defrauding the state of $8,000, an exceptional amount for something that rarely happened.
