Anxiety

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From The Sexual Life of Catherine M. (2001)

  I really can’t remember whether our host penetrated me, on the other hand I do know that I apathetically let Lucien have me. The eiderdown was a deep chasm, and my tummy sank deeper into it. My vagina, worked on smoothly by Lucien (who must have realised I wasn’t feeling well), softened and sank, drawn into that great depth, while a paralysing force kept my head, neck, shoulders and even my partially spread arms flat on the bed. I did somehow find the strength to get up. How many times in the night? Four, five times? I crossed the kitchen naked, and went into the garden. It was pouring with rain. I stood and vomited straight onto the ground in the middle of the alley, not looking for somewhere to hide. It has to be said that each spasm converted the blacksmith’s hammering inside my skull into something that felt like a final disintegration of the beaten piece of metal. The whole body flows into the mass of the head and forms a fist tightly grasping a lacerating blade. The cold rain momentarily appeased the pain. On my way back to the bedroom, I rinsed my mouth out in the kitchen sink. The following morning, when the life-saving medicine had been brought from the chemist when it was all over, Lucien assured me that he had fucked me several times during the night and that I had seemed to enjoy it. It is one of the rare situations when I was not conscious of what I was doing. A few months later the young woman came to see me. She and her boyfriend had had a terrible car crash. He had died and his family had turned her out of the house they had lived in together. I felt genuine compassion for her while at the same time having a strange feeling that this was just the continuation of a nightmare.

• From The Great Transformation (2006)

  Many saw this imminent catastrophe as a divine punishment for the irreligion of the philosophers. They regarded Socrates’ teaching as blasphemous, even though he was traditionally devout and attended the public rituals as scrupulously as he performed his military service. But anxiety was about to turn into hysteria. In 416, Alcibiades made an emotional speech in the assembly, arguing that Athens should go to the aid of its ally Segesta, in Sicily, which was being attacked by the nearby city of Selinus. The general Niceas (Socrates’ sparring partner) was against the expedition, but Alcibiades and the younger generation carried the day. It was a disastrous decision, since most of the citizens who voted for the war had no idea of the size and power of Sicily. Just before the fleet disembarked, somebody vandalized the Herms, the phallic statues of the god Hermes that were placed throughout the city to protect streets and houses. Nobody knew who was responsible, but the incident shook Athens to the core. People were convinced that this blatant sacrilege would call down divine vengeance. There were witch hunts, suspects were executed, and eventually Alcibiades himself was recalled from Sicily to answer charges of blasphemy. There ensued a series of disasters. The Athenian navy was blockaded in the harbor at Syracuse, and the troops were incarcerated in nearby stone quarries. At a stroke, Athens lost about forty thousand men and half its fleet. In 411, a pro-Spartan cabal overturned the democratic government in Athens. The coup was short-lived, and democracy was restored the following year, but it was a sign of Athens’s new vulnerability. The war with Sparta continued until 405, when the Spartan general Lysander forced Athens to surrender. Yet again, an oligarchy was established under a government of thirty pro-Spartan aristocrats, who killed so many citizens in the ensuing reign of terror that it was overthrown, and democracy reestablished after only a year. Athens had regained its independence, its democracy, and its fleet, but its power was broken, the empire dismantled, and Pericles’ great defensive wall demolished. Against this terrifying backcloth, two great tragedies were enacted in Athens. Just before Athens conceded defeat in 406, Euripides died, and his final dark, bitter plays, lurid with a sense of looming catastrophe, were performed posthumously. The last was The Bacchae, presented in 402. 42 As the play opened, the god Dionysus arrived incognito in Thebes, the city that had rejected his mother, Semele, when she had fallen pregnant, and had consistently prohibited his cult. But now most Thebans were enchanted by the fascinating stranger who had suddenly turned up in their midst. The women of the city, who had not been properly initiated into the Dionysian mystery, abandoned themselves to unbridled frenzy, roaming through the woods, clad in animal pelts.

• From The Great Transformation (2006)

  Aeschylus had depicted a torn society, painfully caught between two irreconcilable worlds. Like Eteocles and the philosophers, some citizens looked down on the old religion, but could not entirely shake it off. It still held sway in the deeper, less rational regions of their minds. At the end of the play, the Erinyes, the ancient chthonian Furies, triumphed over the modern forces of logos. Athenians might regard themselves as rational men of the polis, in charge of their own destiny, but they still felt that they could be overtaken by a divinely inspired pollution that had a life of its own. Would Athenian hubris in Naxos produce fresh miasma and bring their city to ruin? The Greek mind was straining in two directions, and Aeschylus did not propose an easy solution. In their final lament, the chorus was split, half siding with Polynices, the others attending the funeral of Eteocles. In 461 a group of young Athenians led by Ephialtes and his friend Pericles mounted a concerted attack on the elders in the Assembly, which then deprived the Areopagus Council of all its powers. Their slogan was demokratia (“government by the people”). The coup completely overturned the political order. The Areopagus was replaced by the Council of Five Hundred and decisions were henceforth made by all citizens in the Popular Assembly. But the new democracy was not entirely benign. Debates were often rude and aggressive. The courts were made up of citizens, who were both judge and jury. There was no rule of law, and a trial was essentially a battle between the accused and his accusers. The Oresteia, a trilogy written by Aeschylus shortly afterward, shows how deeply Athens had been shaken by this revolution. Again, Aeschylus depicted a clash between old and new—between the Erinyes and the more modern, “political” gods of Olympus. The trilogy traced the emergence of the polis from tribal chaos and vendetta to the relative order of Athens, where citizens could take control of their lives; it marked the painful passage from an ethos of blind force to nonviolent debate. Yet Aeschylus made it clear that the ideal differed from the reality, that there were no easy answers, and that the final vision of law and order could only be an aspiration rather than an achieved fact.

• From Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence (2014)

  The Zhou king was supported by a four-tier aristocracy of “gentlemen” (junzi); Western scholars have translated their titles as “duke,” “marquis,” “earl,” and “baron.” The shi, children of younger sons and second-class wives, served as men-at-arms but also as scribes and ritual experts, forming an early “civil” wing of government. The Zhou confederacy of more than a hundred small principalities survived until 771, when their western capital was overrun by the Qong Rang barbarians. The Zhou fled to the east but never fully recovered. Yet the succeeding period witnessed not merely the decline of a dynasty but also the decay of the feudal system. The kings remained nominal rulers but were increasingly challenged by the more aggressive “gentlemen” in the principalities, who were casting aside the deference on which feudalism depended.25 The boundaries of the Chinese states were also shifting. By this time, the Chinese had absorbed several “barbarian” populations, all with very different cultural traditions that challenged the old Zhou ethos. Cities located far away from the traditional centers of Chinese civilization were becoming locally prominent, and by the end of the eighth century, when Chinese history starts to emerge from the mists of legend, they had become capitals of kingdoms: Jin in the north, Qi in the northwest, and Chu in the south. These states ruled thousands of barbarian subjects, whose grasp of Chinese custom was at best superficial. The small principalities in the center of the great plain had now become extremely vulnerable, because these peripheral states were determined to expand. During the seventh century, they broke with tradition and began to mobilize peasants as fighting foot soldiers; Jin and Chu even brought barbarians into the army, offering them land in return for military service. Deeply threatened by these aggressive kingdoms, some of the traditional principalities were also riven by internal conflict. With the decline of the Zhou, public order had deteriorated, and increasingly, brute force was becoming the norm. It was not uncommon for princes to kill ministers who dared to challenge their policies; ambassadors could be murdered and rulers assassinated during visits to another principality. To add to the tension, it seems that there was also an environmental crisis.26 Centuries of aggressive hunting and land clearance that destroyed animal habitats meant that huntsmen were returning empty-handed and there was far less meat at the bin banquets, so the old carefree extravagance was no longer possible. In this climate of uncertainty, people wanted clear directives, so the shi ritual experts of the principality of Lu recodified the traditional Chinese custumal law to provide guidance.27

• From Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble (2014)

  ReadWrite’s offices are on Townsend Street, in the South of Market neighborhood, where all of the hot tech start-ups are located—Twitter, Uber, Dropbox, Airbnb. While the rest of the country is still licking its wounds from the worst recession in nearly a century, things here are buzzing. Start-ups are everywhere, and they’re all raising money. For a few years after the stock market crash in 2008, it was impossible for companies to pull off initial public offerings of stock. Without IPOs, the venture capital firms that put money into start-ups could not get a return on their investments, so venture funding fell off. But now things are loosening up. In May 2011, LinkedIn, a social network, went public and saw its shares more than double in their first day of trading. Later in 2011 Groupon and Zynga floated the biggest IPOs since Google in 2004. In May 2012 Facebook went public, in the biggest IPO in the history of the tech industry, one that placed a value of more than $100 billion on the social network that Mark Zuckerberg had started on a lark in his Harvard dorm room eight years before. Now everyone is trying to spot the next Facebook, and a new tech frenzy is taking shape. Back on the East Coast, where I spend my weekends, there is a vague sense that maybe things are getting a little bit frothy out in the Bay Area. Here in San Francisco there is no doubt. There’s money everywhere. Any college dropout with a hoodie and a half-baked idea can raise venture funding. Scooter rentals, grilled cheese sandwiches, a company that sends subscribers a box of random dog-related stuff every month—they’re all getting checks. Blue Bottle Coffee, popular among the cool kids in San Francisco, has raised $20 million (and over the next two years will raise $100 million more) and brews coffee using Japanese machines that cost $20,000 each. A cup of joe costs seven bucks. There is always a line. Thanks to all this new disposable income, San Francisco is bubbling with weirdo delights, like twee little shops selling liquid nitrogen ice cream and trendy bakeries making artisanal toast. Every morning, walking to work, I dodge a river of hipsters in skinny jeans and chunky eyewear riding skateboards—grown men! riding skateboards!—while carrying five-dollar cups of coffee to their jobs at companies with names that sound like characters from a TV show for little kids: Kaggle and Clinkle, Vungle and Gangaroo. The place feels a bit too much like it did back in the late 1990s, during the first dotcom bubble. I have the eerie sense that we are about to live through that nightmare all over again. Back then I was a technology reporter at Forbes . I had spent years writing about business and learning the traditional methods by which companies are valued. During the bubble I felt like a sane person who had been thrown into an asylum. The economics of these companies made no sense.

• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  As soon, however, as we see our way to a familiar classification, we are at ease again. In action as in reasoning, then, the great thing is the quest of the right conception. The concrete dilemmas do not come to us with labels gummed upon their backs. We may name them by many names. The wise man is he who succeeds in finding the name which suits the needs of the particular occasion best. A 'reasonable' character is one who has a store of stable and worthy ends, and who does not decide about an action till he has calmly ascertained whether it be ministerial or detrimental to any one of these. In the next two types of decision, the final fiat occurs before the evidence is all 'in.' It often happens that no paramount and authoritative reason for either course will come. Either seems a case of a Good, and there is no umpire as to which good should yield its place to the other. We grow tired of long hesitation and inconclusiveness, and the hour may come when we feel that even a bad decision is better than no decision at all. Under these conditions it will often happen that some accidental circumstance, supervening at a particular movement upon our mental weariness, will upset the balance in the direction of one of the alternatives, to which then we feel ourselves committed, although an opposite accident at the same time might have produced the opposite result. In the second type of case our feeling is to a certain extent that of letting ourselves drift with a certain indifferent acquiescence in a direction accidentally determined from without, with the conviction that, after all, we might as well stand by this course as by the other, and that things are in any event sure to turn out sufficiently right. In the third type the determination seems equally accidental, but it comes from within, and not from without. If often happens, when the absence of imperative principle is perplexing and suspense distracting, that we find ourselves acting, as it were, automatically, and as if by a spontaneous discharge of our nerves, in the direction of one of the horns of the dilemma. But so exciting is this sense of motion after our intolerable pent-up state, that we eagerly throw ourselves into it. 'Forward now!' we inwardly cry, 'though the heavens fall.'

• From The Diary of a Young Girl (The Definitive Edition) (2020)

  Invasion fever is mounting daily throughout the country. If you were here, I’m sure you’d be as impressed as I am at the many preparations, though you’d no doubt laugh at all the fuss we’re making. Who knows, it may all be for nothing! The papers are full of invasion news and are driving everyone insane with such statements as: “In the event of a British landing in Holland, the Germans will do what they can to defend the country, even flooding it, if necessary.” They’ve published maps of Holland with the potential flood areas marked. Since large portions of Amsterdam were shaded in, our first question was what we should do if the water in the streets rose to above our waists. This tricky question elicited a variety of responses: “It’ll be impossible to walk or ride a bike, so we’ll have to wade through the water.” “Don’t be silly. We’ll have to try and swim. We’ll all put on our bathing suits and caps and swim underwater as much as we can, so nobody can see we’re Jews.” “Oh, baloney! I can just imagine the ladies swimming with the rats biting their legs!” (That was a man, of course; we’ll see who screams loudest!) “We won’t even be able to leave the house. The warehouse is so unstable it’ll collapse if there’s a flood.” “Listen, everyone, all joking aside, we really ought to try and get a boat.” “Why bother? I have a better idea. We can each take a packing crate from the attic and row with a wooden spoon.” “I’m going to walk on stilts. I used to be a whiz at it when I was young.” “Jan Gies won’t need to. He’ll let his wife ride piggyback, and then Miep will be on stilts.” So now you have a rough idea of what’s going on, don’t you, Kit? This lighthearted banter is all very amusing, but reality will prove otherwise. The

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  thus leading to breakaway movements. Prophecy has, in fact, become the characteristic form of Christianity in Africa, the only large area (apart from Latin America) where Christian missions were faced not with other imperial cults but with primitive pagan religions which could be overborne. Christianity is thus making headway in Africa, but in ways which the official Christian churches find disturbing or even horrific. The history of separatist native Christian churches in Africa now goes back nearly a century, to the Native Baptist Church (1888) organized in West Africa by David Vincent. The motive was, from the start, independence from white-controlled churches, and the emotional framework was nationalist and racialist. Vincent renamed himself Mojola Agbebi, and he wrote: ‘. . . when no bench of foreign bishops, no conclave of cardinals lord over Christian Africa, when the Captain of Salvation, Jesus Christ himself, leads the Ethiopian host, and when our Christianity ceases to be London-ward and New York-ward, but Heaven-ward, then will be an end to Privy Councils, Governors, Colonels, Annexations, Displacements, Partitions, Cessions and Coercions.’ Vincent defended secret societies, human sacrifice and cannibalism, and he was plainly anxious to bring about a Christian absorption of African customs; but he was not strictly speaking prophetic since he did not claim a personal revelation. The Liberian episcopalian, William Wade Harris, did. He appeared on the French Ivory Coast about 1914, preaching orthodox morality but claiming a direct line to the Deity and urging immediate repentance, rather like John the Baptist. A French observer, Captain Marty, described him as ‘an impressive figure, adorned with a white beard, of magnificent stature, clothed in white, his head enturbaned with a cloth of the same colour, wearing a black stole; in his hand a high cross and on his belt a calabash containing dried seeds, which he shakes to keep rhythm for his hymns.’ The Prophet Harris was immensely successful, and set a completely new pattern for African Christianity. He himself did not attempt to found a personal church, and the orthodox Baptists were the beneficiaries of his converts when he disappeared. But those who followed in his wake had higher ambitions, or less altruistic ones. In the 1920s, Isiah Shembe created the black Nazarite Church, which flourished near Durban in South Africa, and from this point native churches multiplied. Christian native charismatics often fell foul of the colonial authorities. The Congolese baptist Simon Kimbangu, creator of the Church of Christ on Earth, which now has over three million members and is affiliated to the

• From Anxious: Using the Brain to Understand and Treat Fear and Anxiety (2015)

  Self-report is often used in research on consciousness in general, 16 as well as in studies of fear and anxiety in particular, 17 including fear and anxiety disorders. 18 Again, as Rachman noted, self-report is “definitional and essential.” Thus, feelings, being conscious experiences, can be studied experimentally using information-processing approaches such as those that explore the role of attention and working memory in consciousness (Lang, in fact, turned to an information-processing perspective in his later work 19 ). We also know that the discordance between what one says about one’s feelings and how one’s body is reacting in the face of a threat is a natural consequence of brain organization. Bodily responses are products of survival circuits that operate nonconsciously, and working memory, which is crucial to self-reports about consciousness, does not have direct, inside-the-brain access to the implicit systems that control these responses. 20 Working memory acquires information about these states indirectly, by monitoring their noticeable consequences. A verbal report about the way one feels is thus not just another measure. The essence of an emotion like anxiety is, as Freud said, “that we should feel it” (see Chapter 1 ) and conscious states are best assessed via verbal reports. As I’ve argued throughout this book, nonreportable nonconscious factors that contribute to anxiety should not be equated with the conscious experience of anxiety. They are part of the brain’s means of coping with challenges and opportunities, a capacity that, as I’ve noted, has ancient biological roots and is not in the brain to make conscious fear or anxiety. Efforts to redefine fear and anxiety in nonsubjective terms (e.g., as behavioral or physiological responses or nonconscious central states) have complicated and, in fact, impeded the goal of understanding what fear and anxiety really are. 21 The default meanings of mental-state terms like “fear” and “anxiety,” which are borrowed from common usage, will always be the mental state (i.e., phenomenal, subjective, conscious) meaning—the actual feeling of fear or anxiety. When such terms are used as labels for nonconscious states or responses for scientific purposes, it is all too easy to unwittingly slip from talking about fear and anxiety in nonconscious terms to talking about conscious feelings. This leads to confusion about what is meant when fear and anxiety are discussed among scientists and also when scientists communicate with nonscientists; scientists have to guard against these conceptual slippages, which are so natural that they often go unnoticed. 22 More important, they can also lead to research that purports to be about anxiety but turns out to be about something controlled separately in the brain (e.g., defense responses). Scientists have an obligation to communicate their work in a clear and accurate way, even if it is less sexy.

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  The villa was older than the streets of the Puerto, though much grass grew between their venerable cobbles. It was older than the oldest villas on the hill, the hill that was known as old Orotava, though their green latticed shutters were bleached by the suns of innumerable semi-tropical summers. It was so old indeed, that no peasant could have told you precisely when it had come into being; the records were lost, if they had ever existed—for its history one had to apply to its owner. But then its owner was always in Spain, and his agent who kept the place in repair, was too lazy to bother himself over trifles. What could it matter when the first stone was laid, or who laid it? The villa was always well let—he would yawn, roll a cigarette in his fingers, lick the paper with the thick, red tip of his tongue, and finally go to sleep in the sunshine to dream only of satisfactory commissions. The Villa del Ciprés was a low stone house that had once been tinted a lemon yellow. Its shutters were greener than those on the hill, for every ten years or so they were painted. All its principal windows looked over the sea that lay at the foot of the little headland. There were large, dim rooms with rough mosaic floors and walls that were covered by ancient frescoes. Some of these frescoes were primitive but holy, others were primitive but distinctly less holy; however, they were all so badly defaced, that the tenants were spared what might otherwise have been rather a shock at the contrast. The furniture, although very good of its kind, was sombre, and moreover it was terribly scanty, for its owner was far too busy in Seville to attend to his villa in Orotava. But one glory the old house did certainly possess; its garden, a veritable Eden of a garden, obsessed by a kind of primitive urge towards all manner of procreation. It was hot with sunshine and the flowing of sap, so that even its shade held a warmth in its greenness, while the virile growth of its flowers and its trees gave off a strangely disturbing fragrance. These trees had long been a haven for birds, from the crested hoopoes to the wild canaries who kept up a chorus of song in the branches. 2 Stephen and Mary arrived at the Villa del Ciprés, not very long after Christmas.

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  And now Monsieur Pujol was laughing himself, cracking jokes as he covertly watched his clients. From where she and Mary sat near the door, Stephen could hear his loud, jovial laughter. ‘Lord,’ sighed Pat, unenlivened as yet by the beer; ‘some people do seem to feel real good this evening.’ Wanda, who disliked the ingratiating Pujol, and whose nerves were on edge, had begun to grow angry. She had caught a particularly gross blasphemy, gross even for this age of stupid blaspheming. ‘Le salaud!’ she shouted, then, inflamed by drink, an epithet even less complimentary. ‘Hush up, do!’ exclaimed the scandalized Pat, hastily gripping Wanda’s shoulder. But Wanda was out to defend her faith, and she did it in somewhat peculiar language. People had begun to turn round and stare; Wanda was causing quite a diversion. Dickie grinned and skilfully egged her on, not perceiving the tragedy that was Wanda. For in spite of her tender and generous heart, Dickie was still but a crude young creature, one who had not yet learnt how to shiver and shake, and had thus remained but a crude young creature. Stephen glanced anxiously at Mary, half deciding to break up this turbulent party; but Mary was sitting with her chin on her hand, quite unruffled, it seemed, by Wanda’s outburst. When her eyes met Stephen’s she actually smiled, then took the cigarette that Jeanne Maurel was offering; and something in this placid, self-assured indifference went so ill with her youth that it startled Stephen. She in her turn must quickly light a cigarette, while Pat still endeavoured to silence Wanda. Valérie said with her enigmatic smile: ‘Shall we now go on to our next entertainment?’ They paid the bill and persuaded Wanda to postpone her abuse of the ingratiating Pujol. Stephen took one arm, Dickie West the other, and between them they coaxed her into the motor; after which they all managed to squeeze themselves in—that is, all except Dickie, who sat by the driver in order to guide the innocent Burton. 3 At le Narcisse they surprised what at first appeared to be the most prosaic of family parties. It was late, yet the mean room was empty of clients, for Le Narcisse seldom opened its eyes until midnight had chimed from the church clocks of Paris. Seated at a table with a red and white cloth were the Patron and a lady with a courtesy title. ‘Madame,’ she was called. And with them was a girl, and a handsome young man with severely plucked eyebrows. Their relationship to each other was . . . well . . . all the same, they suggested a family party. As Stephen pushed open the shabby swing door, they were placidly engaged upon playing belotte.

• From The Great Transformation (2006)

  Israel, rely on Yahweh, Now and for always! 49 Now Isaiah told Ahaz that he should not depend on human strength, foreign alliances, or military superiority, but on Yahweh. It was idolatry to depend arrogantly upon mere human armies and fortifications. This reliance on Yahweh alone was a Judean version of the northern cultic movement to worship Yahweh exclusively, and Isaiah’s insistence on humility and surrender seems at first sight similar to the Axial spirituality of kenosis. Yet it also inflated the national ego of Judah at a perilous juncture of history. Isaiah’s revolutionary idea that Yahweh was not simply the patronal god of Israel, but could control the gods of other nations, was based upon a defiant patriotism. In many ways, Isaiah belonged to the old cultic world. He preached a violent, agonistic vision, which absorbed and endorsed the aggressive politics of the time. It was also an essentially magical theology, which encouraged people to believe that a divine potency made Jerusalem invincible. Reliance upon Yahweh alone would prove to be a very dangerous basis for foreign policy. The northern kingdom did not wish to leave everything in Yahweh’s hands. When Tiglath-pileser died, in 724, King Hoshea of Israel joined other vassals in a resistance movement, refused to pay tribute, and appealed to Egypt for support. Immediately, the new Assyrian king, Shalmaneser V, threw Hoshea into prison and besieged Samaria. The city capitulated in 722, the ruling class was deported to Assyria, and new settlers were drafted in to rebuild the region according to the Assyrian worldview. Now, instead of two official Yahweh traditions, there was only one. The little kingdom of Judah was one of a handful of nations to retain a degree of independence after the Assyrian campaigns. The archaeological record shows that Jerusalem expanded dramatically at the end of the eighth century. 50 New suburbs were built to house the Israelite refugees from the north, and within a few years Jerusalem was transformed from a modest highland town of ten to twelve acres to a city of 150 acres of densely packed houses and public buildings. The countryside surrounding the city was also developed extensively. The refugees brought their own northern traditions to Judah, including, perhaps, the prophecies of Amos and Hosea, who had foretold the catastrophe of 722. The destruction of the kingdom of Israel was a painfully recent memory, and there was at this time a desire to preserve the northern traditions. Like other kings in the region, the kings of Judah began to assemble a royal library that probably included J and E, which may have been fused into a single text at this time. There was a longing to restore the united kingdom of David and Solomon, merging what remained of the kingdom of Israel with the resurgent kingdom of Judah. This desire was reflected in the reform of King Hezekiah, who succeeded his father in 715.

• From The Great Transformation (2006)

  This is the first time we hear of the doctrine of “action” (karma), which was about to become crucial to Indian spirituality. In Yajnavalkya’s time, however, it was a new and controversial idea. When his Brahmin friend Artabhaga asked Yajnavalkya what happened to a person after death, he replied, “We cannot talk about this in public. Take my hand, Artabhaga, let’s go and discuss this in private.”20 The new doctrine of karma seemed subversive. Sacrifice was supposed to ensure permanent residence in heaven, but some people were losing faith in the efficacy of ritual. Yajnavalkya and the other Upanishadic sages were beginning to believe that, however many perfectly executed sacrifices he performed, a person might have to return to this world of pain and death again and again. He would not only have to undergo a traumatic death once, but would have to endure sickness, old age, and mortality repeatedly, with no hope of final release. He would be liberated from this ceaseless cycle (samsara) of rebirth and redeath only by the ecstatic knowledge of the self, which would free him of the desire for ephemeral things here below. But to become free of desire and attachment is extremely difficult. We instinctively cling to this life and to our personal survival. We think that our individuality is worth preserving, but, the sages insisted, this is an illusion. Once a person became aware that his or her self was identical with the brahman, which contained the whole universe, it became crystal clear that there was nothing to be gained by hanging on to this present, limited existence. Some of the sages were convinced that the best way to attain this liberating knowledge was to become a renouncer, giving up worldly gain, and eliminating desire by a life of austerity. This was not yet considered obligatory, but eventually Yajnavalkya embraced the life of a “striver” (shramana), leaving his wife, departing from the court, and going into “homelessness” in the forest.21

• From Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble (2014)

  This is where the money gets made. VORP may be heartless, but it works. Halligan never lets up the pressure. Then again, Halligan is under pressure himself. He has taken $100 million from venture capital firms and is expected to deliver a return. His investors include Sequoia Capital, a firm with a reputation for throwing out founders who fail to meet expectations. HubSpot needs to pull off a big IPO, and to do that, the company must keep growing. By the strange rules of bubble economics, companies do not have to generate a profit before they can go public, but they do have to demonstrate revenue growth. Every month, every quarter, HubSpot’s sales must keep rising. A start-up that stops growing is like a shark that stops swimming: dead in the water. Unfortunately that is what has been happening at HubSpot in the autumn of 2013, when I arrive in the spider monkey room. Our growth rate has dropped. Nobody is panicking, but Halligan is concerned. One day in October he calls a come-to-Jesus meeting for everyone in sales and marketing, and he makes a big announcement—he’s booting out Karl, the guy who runs sales, and has started searching for a replacement. Karl is not being fired; he is being moved onto a special project. Still, this is a huge deal. Karl was one of Halligan’s first hires. He’s practically a co-founder. He is also one of HubSpot’s top executives. Halligan runs through a litany of problems. The biggest one is growth. HubSpot’s sales grew more than 80 percent in each of the past two years, but in 2013 the growth rate has slowed to about 50 percent. That’s still a lot but apparently it’s not enough. Our rivals are growing faster than we are, Halligan says. We’ve just hit the end of the third quarter, which means results are in for the first nine months of the year and management can estimate what full-year 2013 results will be. My guess is that Halligan and his board of directors have looked at the numbers and are not pleased—and the board has told Halligan to do something about it. That’s the second big piece of news: Halligan says that until he finds a new head of sales he is going to run the sales department himself. He makes it sound like he’s coming back ready to kick ass and take names. “I don’t want to get up in everyone’s shorts, but I’m going to be taking the wheel here for a couple of months,” he says. “The machine is just not working that well.” Slowing growth is only one problem. Our churn rate is too high, meaning too many customers fail to renew. Our close rate is too low, meaning we generate a lot of leads but don’t turn enough of them into customers. Zendesk, a software company on the West Coast that HubSpot’s executives recently visited, has a close rate that is far better than ours.

• From Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble (2014)

  Part of me figures that if Brandon the pool installer can become Brandon the multimillionaire author and motivational marketing speaker, why can’t I? To become a marketing wizard, I will first have to survive here for a few years, and that means finding a way to fit in, which won’t be easy, not only because I’m fifty-two years old, which is exactly twice the age of the average HubSpot employee, but also because the atmosphere is so different from that of a newsroom. I had expected the transition might be rough, but even so, I’m taken aback by how much I’m struggling. The weird language and the relentlessly chipper attitudes are both the polar opposite of the world I know. Reporters are trained to hate corporate jargon and to eliminate it, not to engage in it. We’re expected to be cynical and skeptical, not to be cheerleaders. Another challenge is that HubSpot has so many meetings. Like most journalists—and, I would argue, most sane people—I detest meetings. At HubSpot they have meetings all the time, even for little things. Instead of just pulling up a chair and talking for five minutes, at HubSpot people will scan your calendar—everyone keeps their calendars online—and send you an invitation for a meeting in a block of time that you’ve left open. Anyone can call a meeting for pretty much any reason. I don’t want to look like a grumpy old man, so I just click yes on every invitation. Some mornings I come to work and find my calendar packed with back-to-back meetings for random things that have nothing to do with my job: brainstorm with the funnel team; learn what the e-book team has planned for next quarter; listen in on a conference call with our “social media scientist,” a competitive weightlifter who lives in Las Vegas and basically does nothing; talk to a salesperson who thinks she can sell our software to a newspaper in Orange County, California. I attend everything. I’m here to learn. I want to be a team player. At HubSpot people use Gmail calendar invites for everything, even for making lunch plans. One Monday morning, Zack, who sits facing me, asks me if I’ve been to the burrito place on First Street. I tell him I haven’t. He says maybe we can go there tomorrow, on Tuesday. Sure, I say. “Great, I’ll send you a calendar invite,” he says. “No need,” I say. “We can just go. I’ll be free.” “But this will remind you.” “I won’t forget. It’s tomorrow. I can just put in my calendar myself. See? I just did it. It’s now on my calendar.” “I’ll send you one anyway.” He does, and a few seconds later the email arrives, and I click yes, and now the appointment is on my calendar twice.

• From Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble (2014)

  They’re in their early fifties and once held senior-level positions, and then got downsized only to discover that no one wants them. Those guys have all been where I am now—freshly out of work, still hopeful, going on interviews. But six months goes by, and then a year, and at some point people stop taking your calls. I’m not there yet. I’ve landed some freelance work, I’m still making money doing speaking gigs, and my lecture agent has promised that he will try to keep me working, but he also has warned me that without the word Newsweek in front of my name those speaking gigs are probably going to dry up. What happens then? Sure, we have savings. But those won’t last forever. For now we’re doing our best to economize. The kids know what’s going on. We don’t talk about it a lot around them, but I have to say something. I don’t know if talking makes things better or worse. I get the sense that they are a bit freaked out, especially my son. He’s a sensitive kid. One night when I’m putting him to bed I recognize something in his eyes that I’ve never seen before—it’s not that he’s scared, it’s that he knows what I’m going through and he feels sorry for me. It’s almost too much to take. “Come here, dude,” I say, and I give him a hug and try to make him laugh, and he does laugh, and I laugh, too, but I’m also trying not to cry. I realize that the way he sees me now is different from the way he saw me before. For the rest of my life I’m going to remember that flash of pity in his eyes. That look is going to haunt me. I need a job. Any job. Soon enough, I get one. This happens in September 2012. It’s not a great job. It’s not even a good one. There are a lot of drawbacks, chief among them that the job will take me away from home, but I don’t hesitate. I jump on it. Suddenly I am the editor-in-chief of a struggling technology news website called ReadWrite, a tiny blog with three full-time employees and a half-dozen woefully underpaid freelancers. ReadWrite is based in San Francisco, which means I fly out on Monday and take a redeye back to Boston on Thursday or Friday. On weeks when I’m not in San Francisco I’m either in New York, where ReadWrite’s parent company is based, or in some other city, making sales calls, trying to get tech companies to buy ads from us. It’s not a lot of fun, but I’m making a paycheck and keeping my eyes open for something better. ReadWrite’s offices are on Townsend Street, in the South of Market neighborhood, where all of the hot tech start-ups are located—Twitter, Uber, Dropbox, Airbnb.

• From Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble (2014)

  In a way I actually start to feel bad for her, even though I’m the one getting fired. I tell her I understand. I’m a business reporter, after all. This is the stuff I write about—legacy companies getting disrupted by new technologies, slowly going under, laying off workers. If I were running a magazine that was losing money, I would be looking to cut costs, too. I’d get rid of the expensive old guys and hire a bunch of hungry young kids. It makes sense. I went into this job knowing that it probably wouldn’t last forever. Back in 2008, when I joined, Newsweek veterans were being offered buyouts and early retirement packages. And it wasn’t just Newsweek. Newspapers and magazines were dying out all over the place, disrupted by the Internet. Despite all that, Newsweek was still an amazing place, and even if the magazine only had a few years left in it, I still wanted to work there. Now, on this sunny Friday morning, it’s over. My last day will be in two weeks, Abby says. I will get no severance package, just two weeks of pay and whatever vacation time I’m owed. At the end of two weeks I’ll also lose my health insurance, but the HR people will help me figure out how to set up COBRA to continue my benefits. Some of my colleagues who left when the magazine was sold in 2010 received packages equal to a year’s salary. I’d expected that if or when I got cut, I’d be given enough severance to provide a cushion. Two weeks seems inordinately harsh. I try to bargain. I ask Abby if they will keep me on for six months while I look for a new job. That will let me save face and make it easier for me to find my next job. Sorry, she tells me, but no. I offer to take a pay cut. That won’t fly either, she says. How about I take a different job, I say. It doesn’t have to be much, but it will keep me on staff, with benefits, while I look for something else. Abby is not having any of it. “Abby, I have kids.” There’s a quaver in my voice. I take a breath. I don’t want to sound panicked. “I’ve got twins. They’re six years old.” She says she’s sorry, she understands, but there’s nothing she can do. I tell her that my wife has just left her teaching job. I’ve just finished sending in the paperwork to move us from Sasha’s insurance to the insurance plan offered by Newsweek. The HR department at Newsweek must be aware of this.

• From The Great Transformation (2006)

  These developments were positive but also unsettling. Urbanization involved massive social change that left many people feeling obscurely disoriented and lost. Some families had become rich and powerful, others had started to decline. Towns and trade encouraged greater personal mobility, and while it was stimulating to make new contacts with people in other regions, this also undermined the smaller, more parochial communities. There were new class divisions. Brahmins and kshatriyas tended to band together against vaishyas and shudras. The old rural elites felt alienated from the emerging urban classes, which had strong vaishya and shudra elements. The rich vaishyas, who had become merchants and bankers, were increasingly estranged from the agricultural vaishyas in the countryside. The rules that had governed relations between the four classes now seemed incongruous, and people had to learn fresh ways of living together. The loss of tribal identity left some feeling bereft and cast into a void. These social tensions were particularly acute in the east, where urbanization was more advanced, and it was in this region that the next phase of the Indian Axial Age began. Here the Aryan settlers were in a minority, and indigenous traditions were still very much alive. People felt free to explore novel solutions. The rapid material developments in the towns made city dwellers more conscious of the pace of change than in the countryside, where people did the same thing at the same time, year after year. Life probably seemed even more ephemeral and transient, and this confirmed the now-ingrained belief that life was dukkha, as did the prevalence of disease and anomie in the crowded, disturbing cities. Traditional values had crumbled, and the new ways seemed frightening and alien. The cities were exciting; their streets were crowded with brilliantly painted carriages; huge elephants carried merchandise to and from distant lands; and merchants from all parts of India mingled in the marketplace. The urban class was powerful, thrusting, and ambitious. But the gambling, theater, dancing, prostitution, and rowdy tavern life of the towns seemed shocking to people who leaned toward the older values.

• From Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble (2014)

  We’re marketing people. We need to do marketing! We need to create an email campaign and send spam to thousands of people urging them to click on a link and subscribe to the podcast. If enough people do that, we can trick Apple into thinking that we have a huge audience, and Apple will put our podcast near the top of its ratings. Numbers: We need them! How many listeners will we have in six months, and in a year? Where will the podcast rank in the iTunes Store? How soon will we get into the top ten? At what point can I promise that this will be the number- one business podcast in the entire world? These are projections that I need to make, and once I make them, I have to hit them—or else! As far as my career at HubSpot goes, everything is riding on the podcast. “It’s a very simple situation,” Trotsky says. “If the podcast succeeds, you keep your job.” “And if it doesn’t, then what? I get fired?” Trotsky scowls. “Just make sure it’s a success,” he says. Left unspoken is how we will define success. My guess is success is whatever Trotsky and Cranium decide it will be, and no matter what I do, I will never achieve it. Meanwhile, Trotsky rides me. Constantly. Why haven’t I scheduled meetings with a dozen different people across the marketing department to get them on board with the podcast? Why have I not solicited their help? So I do have those meetings. The question then becomes, Why didn’t I do that sooner? When is our deadline? When do we go live? Why can’t we start sooner? Do I not realize that I am now a project manager, responsible for every step of this project? Why have I not sent Trotsky a full report on my progress, in writing? Why have I not created a full podcast marketing campaign document and shared it via Google Docs with everyone in the marketing department so they can read the marketing plan and add comments? Once I do create that document, why am I not responding to comments immediately? Where are my responses to the list of comments that Trotsky has placed into the document? We’re creating a dedicated web page for the podcast. It looks great, but the designers miss their deadline and ask for a few extra days. I tell them that’s fine. Why did I do that? Why did I tell them they could have those days? Why did they miss the deadline in the first place? Did I fail to communicate the deadlines clearly enough to them? There’s a person I think would be great as a guest on the show. I send an email to Cranium asking him what he thinks. Trotsky leaps in: Why am I writing directly to Cranium? Why am I asking him to get involved in minor details like this?

• From Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence (2014)

  In fact, he believed that a martyr could be a “witness” to divine truth even if he died peacefully in bed. 11 Azzam’s classical jihadism was condemned by some scholars, but it had strong appeal for young Sunnis who were embarrassed by the success of the Shii revolution in Iran. Yet not all the volunteers were devout; some were not even observant, although in Peshawar many would be influenced by such hard-line Islamists as Zawahiri, who had suffered arrest, torture, and imprisonment in Egypt for alleged involvement in the Sadat assassination. And so Afghanistan became a new Islamist hub. Young militants from East Asia and North Africa were sent to the front to increase their commitment, and the government of Saudi Arabia actually encouraged its own young to volunteer. 12 To understand the Saudi influence, one must reckon with what may seem a contradiction. On the one hand, after the Iranian Revolution, the kingdom had become one of America’s chief regional allies. On the other hand, it subscribed to an extremely reductive form of Islam, which had been developed in the eighteenth century by the Arabian reformer Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab (1703–92). Ibn Abd al- Wahhab had preached a return to the pristine Islam of the Prophet and repudiated such later developments as the Shiah, Sufism, Falsafah, and the jurisprudence (fiqh) on which all other Muslim ulema depended. He was particularly distressed by the popular veneration of holy men and their tombs, which he condemned as idolatry. Even so, Wahhabism was not inherently violent; indeed, Ibn Abd al-Wahhab had refused to sanction the wars of his patron, Ibn Saud of Najd, because he was fighting simply for wealth and glory. 13 It was only after his retirement that Wahhabis became more aggressive, even to the point of destroying Imam Husain’s shrine in Karbala in 1802 as well as monuments in Arabia connected with Muhammad and his companions. At this time too, the sect insisted that Muslims who did not accept their doctrines were infidels (kufar). 14 During the early nineteenth century, Wahhabis incorporated the writings of Ibn Taymiyyah into their canon, and takfir, the practice of declaring another Muslim an unbeliever, which Ibn Abd al-Wahhab himself had rejected, became central to their practice. 15 The oil embargo imposed by the Gulf States during the 1973 October War had sent the price soaring, and the kingdom now had all the petrodollars it needed to find practical ways of imposing Wahhabism on the entire ummah. 16 Deeply disconcerted by the success of the Shii revolution in Iran, which threatened their leadership of the Muslim world, the Saudis intensified their efforts to counter Iranian influence and replaced Iran as the chief ally of the United States in the region.