A banker at a Wall Street investment bank said that as business ground to a halt this fall, "There were a lot of football catches on the trading floor, and occasionally you'd hear the sound of footballs crashing into monitors." In November, he was sacked in a fourth round of layoffs.

"What do you think you are doing?" Madoff demanded. Eating a pear, the employee replied.

What you can do is signal a sense of motion, a sense of ferment and activity and direction.

Bloated, depressed, hooked on empty optimism. Will anyone finally escape this floating slaughterhouse? Do you even care?

Dissolving bodies is gaining increasing popularity ... They are mostly in pieces, stored in stacked plastic boxes marked with phrases like "One Eye" or "Mouths With Teeth."

"If you don't measure it, you can't improve it." She laughs. "It sounds more awful than it is."

There's got to be a pony in there someplace.

Want It!

People will reject material compensation for dropping their commitment to sacred values and will defend those values regardless of the costs.

Expecting a young woman to sacrifice her reproductive fitness for the sake of career advancement is simply too much, and yet the structure of academic research can demand exactly that.

So worrisome has the situation become that students at prestigious universities are even talking about becoming butchers.

If you spent six or seven years and hundreds of thousands of dollars getting a graduate degree and you end up doing this, that is not a happy thought.

How does it feel?

You've gone to the finest school all right, Miss Lonely
But you know you only used to get juiced in it
And nobody has ever taught you how to live on the street
And now you find out you're gonna have to get used to it
You said you'd never compromise
With the mystery tramp, but now you realize
He's not selling any alibis
As you stare into the vacuum of his eyes
And ask him do you want to make a deal?