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LPGA Tour expands its schedule by sending players to The Bahamas
DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. – The LPGA Tour has a new tournament this year that will be played in The Bahamas.
Commissioner Mike Whan said Monday that Pure Silk will be the title sponsor of the Bahamas LPGA Classic, to be played May 23-26 at Ocean Club Golf Course at Atlantis in Paradise Islands. The 72-hole event will have a $1.3 million purse.
Whan says there are few things more enjoyable for a commissioner than to tell his players they're going to The Bahamas for Memorial Day weekend.
Pure Silk also signed on as an official marketing partner of the LPGA. The company that makes shaving cream for women already had deals with players such as Stacy Lewis, Natalie Gulbis and Brittany Lincicome.
The full LPGA schedule is expected to be announced later this week.

subset: commoncrawl


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Hey Film Friends,
Our debut screening at Lincoln Center last month was a great success and completely sold out. Everyone had a great time. I encourage you to order tickets to our next show right now, and use the "affiliate" code to save money when you order. The café in the theater has terrific food and drink so you can make a night of it as we did last month. And of course we have another great, truly indie, film for you this coming Thursday night.
What with the bombast of Hollywood's regular fare, I find sanctuary in the true indie work that is committed to unlocking our present day reality. My next screening at The Film Society of Lincoln Center's INDIE NIGHT delivers all of this to you:
emotional truth and honesty,
clarity and discipline,
simplicity yet reach and ambition —
and most perhaps,
enjoyment and pleasure in the odd, little moments that can define a life.
Director Matthew Petock's A LITTLE CLOSER, won best feature at the Lone Star Film Festival. A remarkably assured first feature for a director barely out of film school, Petock's debut rips a page out of Raymond Carver's stories. Far more seasoned artists have struggled to capture emotional truth while not falling into the trap of sentimentality. Petock manages to walk that line.
Martin Scorcese had this to say about A LITTLE CLOSER:
"Matthew Petock's first feature shows him to be a director of depth sensitivity and assurance. He captures the quiet emotions and heartbreak of his characters with profound respect for the dignity of the everyday struggles in life and what it means to be a family. A LITTLE CLOSER is a hauntingly beautiful film and a remarkable debut."
As with last month's WITHOUT and its director Mark Jackson, Petock's A LITTLE CLOSER is part of a trend (dare I say: a movement) of naturalist micro-budget filmmaking emerging from Brooklyn, but blossoming in far off locales. They share a gaze towards the class divide that defines our time, a respect for working people and the challenges we all now face.
Matthew Petock does not wallow in the filmmaking constraints financial hardship imposes, but instead delivers a full vision, never wanting, with all the creative aspects in full service to his vision. A LITTLE CLOSER introduces us to a working mother who may be a single parent with two young sons who try her patience and test their boundaries, but we also get to share in her joy when she too gets the brief respite she's been yearning for.
Great movies! Great discussion! Discount tix! Discount food & booze! Pretty awesome if you ask me.
Check out the trailer: http://alittlecloserfilm.com/trailer
Check out A Little Closer's website: http://alittlecloserfilm.com/
Order tickets now at: http://www.filmlinc.com/films/on-sale/a-little-closer
And please come see the film Thursday April 5th at 8:00 PM at the Elinor Bunin Monroe Film Center at the Film Society of Lincoln Center.
Thursday, April 5th
144 W. 65TH St
New York, NY 10023
Take a break and come join me, director Matthew Petock, and some of his team at Film Society of Lincoln Center's "Indie Night".
Most sincerely, and forever hopeful about film,
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i have a project and i am trying to make it to jar files so i can run it from anywhere. problem is that i am trying for 3 weeks and its not working for me. i tried look up online but nothing works.
if i send you my project can some one plz make it to runable jar file? i cant attach my project here bc it too large. let me know if you can help me out and i can email you the project.


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Sometimes I feel like social media turns me into some kind of awful, gruesome caricature of a feminist. I spend waayyyy too much time jumping in on Facebook posts or tweets or blogs to explain why this specific thing, whatever it happens to be, is actually problematic. And I try not to do this, honest I do. I know that it's annoying as fuck. I know that I come off like I'm Lisa Simpson except ten times worse and with more swears. I know that. I promise I do.
All of this is to explain why I have been so quiet and patient about Dove's latest marketing campaign, Dove Real Beauty Sketches. I haven't said anything about it. Nada. Zilch. Haven't commented on anyone's links, haven't tweeted about it, haven't even whispered darkly about it to myself when I'm alone at night and unlikely to offend anyone.
But then my friend Shannon wrote this brilliant piece about it, and after seeing the reactions to her post in the comments on her blog and from people on Facebook, I've realized that I have to say something. I'm not going to talk about how their recent campaign continues to perpetuate the idea that a woman's most important asset is her appearance. I'm not going to tear apart their youtube video, with its beautiful sadly hopeful background music and its tear-jerking content. Other people have done that better than I ever could, and I'm not going to step on their toes.
I do want to tell you one thing, though:
Dove does not give a shit about whether or not you feel beautiful.
They don't. At all. Full stop.
All that Dove wants is for women to buy their products. And they've discovered that the best way to manipulate women in the Western world is to tell them that they're beautiful. And you know what? This is a really fucking effective advertising strategy. Part of this success is because it goes against just about every marketing rule out there. Traditional advertising wisdom says that we should tell people that they're lacking in something in order to make them buy it. Tell women that they'll be more attractive if they use your makeup or skin cream or expensive shampoo. As Margaret Atwood explains in her short story Hairball, advertising to women is simple:
"You bombard them with images of what they ought to be, and you make them feel grotty for being the way they are. You're working with the gap between reality and perception. That's why you have to hit them with something new, something they've never seen before, something they aren't. Nothing sells like anxiety."
This has been the way that advertising has worked, more or less, for at least the last sixty or so years.
And then Dove came and seemed to flip the whole thing on its head in a way that seemed to be totally new and brave and laudable. They've taken the formula described above and are using it backwards – for instance, they're looking at the gap between perception and reality and saying that, in fact, the perception that you are an ugly, worthless person is wrong, so let's bridge the gap back to reality where you are actually incredibly beautiful and worthy. Instead of bombarding women with images of what they ought to be, they're bombarding them with images of how they feel that they already are – curvy, wrinkled, imperfect – and telling them that this is real beauty. Instead of hitting people with something new, they're hitting them with the so-called truth about themselves, full of platitudes and love and golly-gee niceness.
And all of this has been incredibly, insanely effective. Women are now buying Dove products not because they feel that these products will improve them, but because they're loyal to a brand that sees them as truly, uniquely beautiful.
All of which would be fine, I guess, if that was actually what Dove thought.
But Dove does not give a shit about how you feel about yourself. Dove just wants to manipulate you into buying their products.
How do I know this? Well, setting my general cynicism about large corporations aside, I know this because Dove is owned by Unilever. And while Unilever uses Dove to sell warm, fuzzy, watered-down feminism to Western women, it uses several of its other companies to do the exact opposite.
Unilever also owns Axe, which is well-known for creating advertising campaigns that are, well, the opposite of empowering to women. A typical example of their preferred style of advertising is the that one I've posted below, in which a young man spraying himself liberally with Axe is suddenly surrounded by a mob of thin, bikini-clad super models. These commercials are not only degrading to women (by putting forth the idea that men are only attracted one specific body type, and that for women to fail to attain that body type means to fail to be beautiful), but they're also degrading to men (by perpetuating the stereotype that men are all sex-crazed beasts who just want to go to booty town with as many hot, sexy ladies as possible).
It is seriously such a fucking joke that Dove makes videos about how many unattainable images of beauty a young girl will be subjected to as she grows up and how this will warp her self-perception, while at the SAME FUCKING TIME Axe is creating those unattainable images of beauty.
Even worse, Unilever owns Indian brand Fair and Lovely, a skin-bleaching cream marketed especially to girls from lower-class families. This cream, which is part sunscreen, part moisturizer, and part skin-lightener, promises women with darker skin that they will be able to find better, higher-paying jobs by having fairer skin. It's even marketed as being "empowering" to women because having lighter skin gives them more "choices" in life.
Yeah, that's right. The same company that, in North America, tells you to own and love your body the way it is, tells Indian women that they need to be whiter in order to be successful.
Like I said, Unilever and, by extension, Dove do not give a shit about whether or not you feel beautiful. The only thing that they're interested in doing is manipulating women into buying their products. For North American women, they do this by telling them that they are beautiful, no matter what they look like. For North American men, they do this by promising that their products will attract droves of hot babes. And for Indian women, they do this by telling them that if only they looked more like white people, they could achieve all of their dreams.
Dove described their Campaign for Real Beauty as "a global effort is intended to serve as a starting point for societal change and act as a catalyst for widening the definition and discussion of beauty."
They've used the tagline, "Talk to your daughter before the beauty industry does."
Their website is full of criticisms of the beauty industry, self-esteem builders, and gushing comments from loyal Dove users.
All of this is bullshit.
And you know what? I feel really bad saying that because I know a lot of women who have been inspired by this campaign. I know women who feel that this campaign has helped remind them that they, too are beautiful. I know so many women who really, really love this campaign. And I don't want to tell them that they're wrong! I just want them to know that, at the end of the day, Dove doesn't care.
Dove doesn't care, but I do. And lots of other people do. There are even organizations out there, organizations that are not owned by giant corporations, that care. We think you're beautiful, and we're not standing to make any kind of profit off of that thought. More than that, we think you're smart, capable, funny, kind, all-around great people. We love everything about you.
And you know what? When I tell you that, I am not making a fucking cent off of it.
Here are a few videos of advertising campaigns from Dove, Axe and Fair and Lovely, in case you want to compare:


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Like a collection of gaudy heirlooms and brik-a-brak from a by-gone era, I have a hidden stash of yellowed and food speckled scraps of paper with recipes scrawled on them. Many of the recipes are tied to specific memories from my formative years, and though the aromas and flavors have long faded from my leaky memory, I still can't quite bring myself to toss them out.
This Kedgeree recipe is an exception in that I'm frantically rummaging through the bookshelf at least once a year to find it. I've memorized the recipe and all my alterations to it, but there's something unique about this photo-copied Australian magazine clipping that gives it a special place in my heart.
Its warm yellow and brown patina, imbued by over a decade of ketchup, curry, and oil, is a reminder of the first time I laid a fork into this beautiful pile of smoked fish and pillowy spiced rice. My heart beats a little faster when I hear the name "Kedgeree", and the recipe contained on this tattered piece of paper left an indelible mark on my taste memory. I guess you could say it was one of my first true loves.
Like its older sibling Chicken Tikka Masala and its Portuguese cousin, Lamb Vindaloo, Kedgeree is an Anglo-Indian love child, one of the few good things that came out of over two centuries of colonialism in India. Despite its common ancestry with the better known curry house staples, this one dish wonder seems to be largely unknown outside of the UK and Australia.
A hodgepodge of my favourite ingredients, Kedgeree is the zenith of what a good dish should be. It balances all five of the basic tastes, it's light yet deeply satisfying, and it has enough personality to leave a lasting impression. It's the kind of dish that has you going back for "one more bite" until suddenly you realize that you're pregger's with a food baby.
Perhaps its most beguiling quality is the leeway it gives you to improvise, using spices and smoked seafood that suits your palette and budget. Since I was making this batch for a Gujarati friend, I gave it the full spread of spices, but you would do just as well with curry powder, or perhaps an entirely different blend of spices from another region of the world.
What really set this particular Kedgeree apart though was an AMAZING side of smoked Bluefish from Acme Smoked Fish, one the last family run smoke houses in Brooklyn. The fish was melt-in your mouth tender, with just enough oil to keep things moist, but not enough to be greasy. The flavour tasted like they took a bowl of concentrated dashi, turned it back into a fish and then smoked it. One of these days, I'm going to have to grab my camera and take a field trip over the river to see just how they perform this small miracle.
📖 Recipe
- 1 ½ cups basmati rice
- 3 cups water
- 1 tablespoon vegetable oil
- 1 teaspoon black mustard seed
- 1 teaspoon cumin seed
- 3 cloves garlic minced
- 1 tablespoon ginger grated
- 1 medium onion minced
- 1 medium serrano chili (leave the seeds in if you want it spicier)
- 1 tablespoon garam masala
- 2 teaspoons turmeric
- 3 tablespoons ketchup
- ½ cups low sodium chicken stock or vegetable stock
- 2 tablespoons cream
- 14 ounces hot-smoked fish like salmon, trout or bluefish
- 3 soft-boiled eggs peeled and chopped
- cilantro pomegranate seeds minced and for garnish
- lemon (wedges) for serving
- Put the rice in a seive and wash with cold water. Add the water and rice into a heavy bottomed pot, cover, then bring to a boil. Turn down the heat to maintain a gentle simmer and cook until there is no water left (15-20 minutes). Turn the heat off and let the rice steam for an additional 10 minutes.
- Heat a large chef's pan, until very hot. Add the oil and swirl to coat. Add the mustard seed and cumin and fry until they start making a popping noise. Add the garlic and ginger and fry until fragrant. Add the onions, chili, garam masala and turmeric. Fry until the onions are soft and your kitchen is redolent with Indian spices.
- Add the ketchup and stock and boil until the mixture is thick and gluggy. Turn down the heat, then add the cream and smoked fish, breaking up the fish as you add it. Add the cooked rice and most of the chopped egg and stir it all together. Taste and add salt if needed.
- To serve, just spoon the kedgeree onto a plate and top with the remaining chopped egg as well as the minced cilantro and pomegranate seeds. Serve with a bowl of lemon wedges.


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From the publisher: "A North Country Life is the story of author Sydney Lea's powerful connection to his family, friends, and the northern outdoors. Loosely organized by the changing of seasons, different sections feature essays on such topics as childhood family fishing trips in the wilds of Maine, trophy fly-fishing the northern reaches of the Connecticut River, the opening day of turkey hunting season in Vermont, and getting lost in the deep woods while deer hunting. The essays are introspective and dramatic illustrations of the blending of the human and natural worlds; emotion is attached to both spheres and adds texture to the sketches. Readers of varied interests will be drawn to the sincerity of the author's voice."
Sydney Lea, founding editor of NER is Vermont Poet Laureate. His story "How in a lifetime?" appeared in NER 20.3, and his essay "Negative Capability in Kansas" appeared on NER Digital.
A North Country Life is available at Skyhorse Publishing.


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Who said it's easy being rich?
Looks like tough times ahead for those trust fund comic kids Richie Rich and Veronica Lodge.
In his state of the Union Address President Obama attacked what he calls the "trust fund loopholes" that allow wealthy Americans to skip some taxes when passing on money to their heirs.
Let the Republican outrage begin.
Utter the word raising taxes on the very rich will have Republicans protesting on the streets.
However Richie Rich shouldn't lose too much sleep over any of this.
With Republicans in control of the Congress and Senate, the chances of the proposals being enacted anytime soon are practically nil.
Guess middle class Archie and Betty are out of luck in getting any relief.
Copyright (©) 2015 Sally Edelstein All Rights Reserved


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Archive for PressForProgress
International Women's Day 2018 in Ericsson Ireland
The theme at Ericsson in Ireland was to #PressforProgress on International Women's Day this 8th March. We were all encouraged to pledge to concentrate on a number of areas such as to maintain a gender parity mindset, challenge stereotypes and bias, influence others' beliefs and actions and celebrate women's achievements. I'd like to share some of the photos with you here.
I hope I am living up to my personal pledge – which is to forge positive visibility of women – by congratulating Claire, Laura and Tara for organising the day so well and raising awareness of IWD in Ericsson Ireland on the day.
At Ericsson, we inspire innovation, communication and connectivity around the world. Your personal strengths are our strengths – and it is Ericsson's mission to ensure that diversity and inclusion are some of the most important building blocks of our company.
If that sounds like the kind if place you would like to be, then we'd love to hear from you. To see all our open positions, please click here.


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Breast MRI
Breast Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) is an advanced technology being used for the early detection of breast cancer. This technology uses blood flow, size and appearance to indicate whether a tumor is most likely benign (non-cancerous) or malignant (cancerous).
Early studies suggest that MRI may benefit certain women, such as those with a family history of breast cancer. For these women, Breast MRI helps physicians better find abnormal areas that may turn out to be cancerous.
Breast MRI is typically used as a screening option for women who:
- Are high-risk, defined as those who have had breast cancer in the past or have a family history of breast cancer
- Have dense breasts or breast implants
- Have inconclusive findings (not clear if cancer is present) after screening with ultrasound or mammography
A Breast MRI exam typically takes about 30 minutes and is performed as an outpatient procedure. After entering the MRI room, you will lie face down on a special device that allows your breast to be lightly compressed between two plastic plates to hold them in place. The device rests on top of a table that slides in and out of the magnet opening. While in the magnet, you may receive an injection of contrast agent. Contrast agent is a clear, non-radioactive liquid that helps your physician see the difference between normal and abnormal tissue. Several images of your breasts are taken. It is important to stay very still during this step, as any movement may affect image quality, making it harder for the physician to find suspicious areas.
After the MRI, a computer reconstructs the images, which are then reviewed and read by one of our Radiologists. Abnormal tissue absorbs contrast agent faster than normal tissue, and initially appears very bright in an MRI image.


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I just noticed I passed 2,000 likes today, exactly three months after starting this nonsense. Thank you so much to everyone who reads. There are far more of you than I ever imagined. Roughly half are in America too, which was utterly unexpected, and means I occasionally get to wake up to a lovely comment or two which absolutely makes my day.
As I write when I reached 1,000, 'likes' don't pay bills, or mean anything really, apart from being tiny, vital prods of encouragement to keep going, and that's all any of us need as writers really isn't it? Apart from cold, hard cash of course, but since that's out of the question right now – 'likes' are lovely 🙂
I was wondering today what people use as prompts to get them writing. I have tried using some of the many photo-prompt blogs that are around on WordPress, but it's strange, I find it impossible to write to a photo. There is too much information there that I can't get away from. I find it restricting, not just for me, but for my imagined reader, who will bring their own reading to the photo before they've even read my piece. I think that's just a failing and mental block on my part, but I did think it was interesting.
Instead, I find just a couple of words or phrases will get me going, whether it's someone using an odd turn of phrase or an incongruous image, such as poor old ex-banker Keith up a ladder cleaning windows. When I dry up, it's usually because I haven't been reading for a few days. Reading is the best source of inspiration I find.
I'm still having a great deal of angst over the poetry I have to submit for the MA. I need to be more bold with it, but it's difficult when I don't have the confidence in it as I do prose. I sometimes think some of the 50-word stories I've written blur the boundary between poetry and prose, but again, I'm not confident enough to explore that in terms of submission for the course.
Anyway, just some thoughts. Have a great weekend all.
P.S. If you clicked on I Want A War, Give Me A War and found it wasn't there, I took it down, for the simple reason that 30 minutes after publishing it, it didn't feel right. I wasn't happy with it, not for any political or social reasons, I just didn't like how I'd written it. It wasn't to a standard I was happy with, so it's back in the drafts folder.


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I do not drink coffee. There – I've said it. Drinking coffee makes me more tired by the end of the day, and I don't miss the hit or the taste. More importantly, I came to realise why coffee lovers talk about which brands they prefer without usually discussing the differences: it's because all types of bean juice taste roughly the same. Seriously, they do. Starbucks and your favourite independent coffee house both leave, quite literally, a bitter taste in your mouth. It's just a slightly different bitterness. So have a tea instead, guys! Any tea! Black tea, green tea, fruit teas – there's a lot more variety. And greater variety means more opportunities to indulge in cyclists' favourite pastime: arbitrary snobbery. You can't lose!
I have never looked at a carbon Colnago with envy. They look fine. Perfectly fine. Not beautiful, stunning, amazing, awesome, just… OK. Like a nice fitted kitchen or a sensible hat. To me, they appear to be just another assemblage of carbon tubes, but without the futuristic wowness of, say, a Felt, or the old-school romanticism of a hand-built steel frame. They're sit somewhere in between. With an Italian name. Total whatevvs.
I don't want to ride the Etape. One of my favourite pieces of cycling-related prose is Bill Strickland's pithy, insightful and funny article on the Etape du Tour, which appeared in Rouleur's 2008 photo annual. Bill evokes the event as a kind of living trance, where the landscape and your fellow riders recede from your immediate perception, thereby provoking a reckoning with yourself. And I can relate to that; I'm just pretty sure I don't want or need that experience from a sportive. I think sportives should be pleasant jaunts around unfamiliar locales, and the Etape always looks far too over-populated and bloody serious to provide that sort of ride. Also, for me, riding a stage from the actual Tour de France without the speed or ability of a pro would be like running around Wembley Stadium while pretending to kick an invisible football. For these reasons, I am never going to ride the Etape.
I'm not that bothered either way about disc brakes or electronic shifting. I think I'm supposed to feel strongly one way or the other, aren't I? I just can't muster the effort, fellas. I'm sorry. Look, if the industry wants it to happen, it will happen. One set of aesthetic values will shift to accommodate another. And if you're a diehard fan of rim braking or analogue gears, then you'll probably be able to stick with them. Bicycles will still be able to start and stop. Them wheels will keep on turning. Let's all have a group hug and try not to fight about it, OK?


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America Ferrera, from Ugly Betty to Hot Betty
*Ugly Betty* star America Ferrera glams it up.
America Ferrera's first real showbiz experience was something of a letdown. At 16, after a decade of acting in school plays and drifting off each night to Hollywood dreams, she was cast in a Disney Channel movie about a junior high school dance team with the somewhat hilarious name of Gotta Kick It Up. At first, she was thrilled. "I love to dance, so I couldn't believe I was getting paid to just dance all day. And there were four other girls in the cast, so that was fun. And youknow the way you think when you're a teenager: Disney Channel today, Oscars tomorrow!" she says with a laugh. But a few weeks into filming, she had what she describes as "a mini nervous breakdown." "I just felt really empty," she says. "I had achieved my dream, and it wasn't totally fulfilling. I still had school problems, and I still had boy problems. My life was still my life. I guess I had been waiting to be turned into a swan."
Seven years later, chatting over a dinner of fish cakes, fried rice and chicken curry at a Thai restaurant in New York's SoHo, Ferrera is no longer waiting for her swan moment. That sort of magical transformation doesn't happen in real life, she's realized—not even in Hollywood. But about a year ago something far better occurred: She was cast as an ugly duckling, and that lovable four-eyed, brace-faced duckling has made Ferrera into a big, big star.
Betty Suarez—the lead character in television's Ugly Betty—is a style-challenged young Latina from Queens who lands a job as assistant to the editor in chief of a fashion magazine. The show is based on a Colombian telenovela called Yo Soy Betty, la Fea, which was a cultural phenomenon in Latin America and was adapted for markets around the world—everywhere from Israel to India—before being imported to the U.S. for the fall 2006 season. American audiences fell for the series almost immediately. Drawing roughly 14 million viewers a week, the show dominates its competitive Thursday night time slot and ranks as the most watched newcomer of the season. In January Ugly Betty won the Golden Globe for best TV comedy or musical series, and Ferrera herself—who dons a wig, fake brows and snap-on faux braces for her role—walked away with the statuette for best actress, beating out such veterans as Felicity Huffman and Julia Louis-Dreyfus. Two weeks later she took home a SAG award.
According to critics and those who work with Ferrera on Ugly Betty, such accolades were well deserved. "She's one of the most charismatic people I've ever met," says Salma Hayek, an executive producer of the show. "She's also authentic. That's a rare characteristic nowadays, and that's why people are falling in love with her. I knew the minute that I saw her that she was a superstar."
Ben Silverman, one of Hayek's fellow executive producers, agrees. "There's no bulls— with her," he says. "It doesn't matter what makeup or hair or clothing she has on, she's so real that she grabs you. She's a very connected human being, and that really empowers her as an actor."
What's most interesting about America-as-Betty is the breadth of her appeal. The character has struck a chord with a remarkably diverse collection of fans— 12-year-old girls, gay men, Latinas, the fashion crowd—all of whom seem to want to adopt her as their mascot. The day after the Globes, for example, California Congresswoman Hilda Solis took to the floor of the House to, in her words, "commend America and everyone involved in Ugly Betty for helping to break down stereotypes and provide a role model for young Latinas." A few months later, Out magazine put the cast on its cover under a headline that read, HOW UGLY BETTY BECAME THE GAYEST, BEST SHOW ON TV. In the accompanying story, Ferrera recounted the surreal experience of attending the West Hollywood Halloween parade—a big night for L.A.'s gay community—and seeing scores of guys dressed up as Betty. "Anyone who's ever felt like an outsider can see themselves in her and feel represented," she says. "And who hasn't, at some point in their life, felt like they didn't belong?"
As the sixth and youngest child of Honduran immigrants, Ferrera says she had plenty of fish-out-of-water moments growing up in the predominantly Caucasian community of Woodland Hills, California. "As early as second grade I remember feeling really different and isolated," she says. "I had the hugest crush on a boy, and my best friend had a crush on him too. One day he said to me, 'I like your best friend more because she's paler and she has freckles.' And it was right then that I began to feel like, Oh wow, I'm different." At the same time, she says, she never felt like she fit in with the Latino community. "I mean, I grew up in the Valley," she says. "All my friends were white Jewish kids. So the Latino kids thought I was this white girl."
Ferrera's parents divorced when she was seven, and her father returned to Honduras, leaving her mother, a director of housekeeping for a Hilton hotel, to raise their son and five daughters on her own. Ferrera, who was named for her mother, says that her parents never encouraged her showbiz dreams. "Acting was not something that they came to this country to have me do," she explains. Still, she fell in love with the spotlight early and, despite her best efforts, was never able to shake the acting bug. "For a time I thought I could be a lawyer," she says. "As a kid I even went to law camp at UCLA. They had us watch My Cousin Vinny, which was great. But then we went to the courthouse, and we had to do these mock trials, and once I saw what it really meant to be a lawyer, I realized that it wasn't for me. I thought it was like in the movies, like, 'You can't handle the truth!' That kind of thing."
Luckily, a fallback career in the law was never necessary. At 17, after wrapping Gotta Kick It Up, Ferrera landed the role of Ana Garcia—a brainy Mexican-American teenager with a manipulative, weight-obsessed mother—in the 2002 film Real Women Have Curves. The movie won the Audience Award at Sundance, and Ferrera herself was awarded a Special Jury Prize for acting.
At that point a less grounded 18-year-old would probably have played hard at the Hollywood fame game, doing her best to be seen on the scene and lining up a slew of projects before the buzz could fade. But Ferrera, who graduated from El Camino Real High School with a 4.3 GPA, instead enrolled at the University of Southern California, where she's a semester away from her degree in international relations. "Acting is something I knew I wanted to do long term," she says. "But not going to college was not an option. I think it probably helped me as an actress as well, because actresses need real-life experiences to draw from." Though she took a break this past year to focus on Ugly Betty, she plans to start up again soon. "Once doing the show becomes more routine, I hope to fit in a class at a time and just slowly work toward my degree. I've come too far to quit one semester before graduation."
It was at USC that Ferrera met her now boyfriend, Ryan Piers Williams. A tall, handsome, Texas-born aspiring director who currently works for Steven Soderbergh, he cast her in his student film, and the two currently live together and share a golden retriever named Buddy, whom they refer to as "our baby." At Ferrera's W photo shoot, Williams sits by her side while she's being coiffed and made up, telling her how pretty she looks and bravely revealing to the crew that he once allowed her to put mascara on his lashes. Says Ferrera, giggling, "He has the longest eyelashes, but they're blond at the tips, and I just wanted to see what it would look like."
College, according to Ferrera, also served to help her focus on her career, ensuring that she signed on only for projects that she really wanted to do: movies that ranged from the well-received indie How the Garcia Girls Spent Their Summer to the feel-good teen chick flick Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants. She was living in New York, acting in an Off Broadway play and getting a few electives out of the way by taking classes at New York University when Hayek—whom she'd met in 2002, backstage at the Oprah show while promoting Real Women Have Curves—called her about the role of Betty. "Honestly I never saw myself doing TV," says Ferrera, "but Salma was so convincing. Salma is the kind of person who could sell you, like, a used stereo. She promised me that it would be done in the right way, and I just trusted her."
As it turned out, Betty's immense popularity has brought an avalanche of attention to Ferrera. Now paparazzi stalkings and demands for autographs are part of her daily life. What truly baffles her are the machinations of the tabloid press. In February one weekly gossip rag ran with a story that Ferrera and Williams were engaged, giving rise to BETTY TO WED headlines all over the Internet. "It's totally not true!" she insists of the rumor. "And his mom called me and my sisters were calling me, and I was like, 'Are you kidding? Did you not think I would tell you first?' And then I put out a statement that it wasn't true, and that became a whole news story. So now it's news when something doesn't happen? Like, news flash: California did not get hit by a hurricane today."
There's also the near constant reporting on her weight. And in that department it seems she can't win. On the one hand, reporters seem to enjoy describing her with unflattering terms like "lumpy." On the other, several Internet gossip sites have criticized her for looking less zaftig in recent months, implying that the actress lauded for promoting realistic body images had officially gone Hollywood. "I mean, of course I want to be at a weight where I'm happy," says Ferrera, who in person is neither lumpy nor emaciated but a healthy-looking, average-size woman. "There are times when I go to the gym and really try, and there are times when I just don't. I gain a pound; I lose a pound. But I think I've developed a really good sense of when I'm doing something for myself as opposed to when I'm doing something because of other people's expectations of me. And honestly, even if I wanted to be anorexic, I just don't have what it takes. After four hours of being anorexic, I'd be like, 'It's been four whole hours! Feed me!' "
Psychologically it helps that she hasn't had much time to monitor her press coverage. Her schedule at Ugly Betty is grueling, with workdays that are 12 hours long at the beginning of the week and stretch into the wee hours of the morning as Friday approaches. "Basically we're making a movie every eight days," says Ferrera, who insists that she adores every minute of it. "Last week it was only Tuesday and we were already there so late. I had to lead the crew in a cheer of 'I love my job! I love my job!' "
"We have her working 24 hours a day," concurs Silverman, who points out that such a schedule can be good for a 23-year-old actress, considering the antics of today's young Hollywood types. "I mean, we have her working so damn hard, all she probably wants to do at the end of the day is collapse in a ball." But even if she had the time, one gets the feeling that hobnobbing with Paris and Lindsay would be very low on Ferrera's to-do list. "Let's just say you're not going to see me at the PlayStation launch party," she says with a smirk. (Indeed, after the interview she heads not for Bungalow 8 but the F train, which she rides to a friend's place in Brooklyn.) As gregarious as she is, she says she has never been hypersocial. "Growing up, I never had a ton of friends. I always had two or three, but when you have four sisters and a brother all a year apart, you don't really need anyone else to play with."
Ferrera credits her five older siblings for the fact that she's always felt older than her years. "I learned the naughty words before anyone else in my class," she says, laughing. "And I think I avoided many of the pitfalls because I got to watch them live through it." Indeed, chatting with her, it's easy to forget that she's only 23. Her maturity is not just a matter of her intelligence—which becomes more and more apparent as she quotes New York Times articles over dinner and discusses genetics while having her hair done pre-photo shoot—but emotional precocity as well. "Happiness is something that you have to decide to have in your life," she says. "No amount of accolades can make you a happy person, and learning that as young as I did was a gift." Though she sounds like a poster child for the positive psychology movement that has lately dominated the self-help realm—the Oprah-endorsed best-seller The Secret being its latest missive—Ferrera says she figured out this truism on her own, as a result of her aforementioned Gotta Kick It Up experience.
Still, despite her belief that achievement isn't a one-way ticket to bliss, Ferrera remains a doer, and an intensely ambitious one at that. Rather than spend her summer hiatus resting up, she hopes to use the time to shoot a movie, though she's hesitant to talk specifics since nothing is set in stone. "When there's a film I want to do, sleep doesn't matter," she says. "Part of me would love to be sitting in the sun in Italy, but I'd be crazy by day four." One would think that, considering her recent rise in profile, offers of leading-lady roles would be rolling in, but Ferrera says that isn't the case. "When it comes to envisioning an actor in a role that they haven't seen them in, people in this business can be a little uncreative," she says. "No one is willing to take a gamble." As a result, she says, she's had to take a more proactive approach to her career: "It's been more about developing my own material, finding roles that I would like to play and figuring out a way to get those things made."
Her plans for the future are, in keeping with her just-make-it-happen attitude, huge: She wants a large family, and she wants to direct and produce and continue acting and maybe teach too. While keeping her natural drive in check can be a struggle—"The hardest part of this year has been learning to enjoy it," she says. "It's almost like a full-time job reminding myself to live in the moment and not look for more, more, more"—her recent success has only made her more likely to think big: "I see now that people who make movies, this world of creative geniuses that I grew up idolizing, are just normal people who wanted to do something and made it happen. Everything that's happened to me in the last year has only made me feel more like a normal person, more human, but in the most beautiful way."
Prada silk dress. Hair by Orlando Pita for Kérastase Paris at Orlo Salon; makeup by Gucci Westman for Lancôme; manicure by Sheril Bailey / Jed Root Inc. Set design by Tom Bell / Jed Root Inc. Fashion assistants: Rebecca Ramsey and Lauren Feldman.


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Introductory Note
James Russell Lowell, poet, essayist, diplomatist, and scholar, was born at Cambridge, Massachusetts, on February 22, 1819, the son of a Unitarian minister. Educated at Harvard College, he tried the law, but soon gave it up for literature. His poem on "The Present Crisis," written in 1844, was his first really notable production, and one that made a deep impression on the public mind. In the twenty years of troubled politics that followed, one finds it constantly quoted. The year 1848 saw four volumes from Lowell's pen - a book of "Poems," the "Fable for Critics," "The Biglow Papers," and the "Vision of Sir Launfal." The second of these exhibited the author as wit and critic, the third as political reformer, the fourth as poet and mystic; and these various sides of his personality continue to appear with varying prominence throughout his career.
On the retirement of Longfellow from the chair of belles-lettres at Harvard in 1854, Lowell was elected to succeed him, and by way of preparation spent the next two years in Europe studying modern languages and literatures. In 1857 he became the first editor of the Atlantic Monthly, and after 1864 he collaborated with Charles Eliot Norton in the editorship of the North American Review. Throughout the period of the war Lowell wrote much both in prose and verse on behalf of the Union; his work on the North American was largely literary criticism.
In 1877 Lowell went to Spain as American Minister, and in 1880 to London, where for five years he represented the United States with great distinction, and did much to improve the relations of the two countries. Six years after his return, on August 12, 1891, he died in Elmwood, the house in Cambridge where he was born.
Lowell's literary gifts were so various that it is difficult to say on which of them his final reputation will rest. But it is certain that he will long be esteemed for the grace, vivacity, and eloquence of the prose in which he placed before the world his views on such great American principles and personalities as are dealt with in the following essay on "Democracy".
On Democracy
Inaugural Address on Assuming the Presidency of the Birmingham and Midland Institute, Birmingham, England, 6 October, 1884
He must be a born leader or misleader of men, or must have been sent into the world unfurnished with that modulating and restraining balance - wheel which we call a sense of humor, who, in old age, has as strong a confidence in his opinions and in the necessity of bringing the universe into conformity with them as he had in youth. In a world the very condition of whose being is that it should be in perpetual flux, where all seems mirage, and the one abiding thing is the effort to distinguish realities from appearances, the elderly man must be indeed of a singularly tough and valid fibre who is certain that he has any clarified residuum of experience, any assured verdict of reflection, that deserves to be called an opinion, or who, even if he had, feels that he is justified in holding mankind by the button while he is expounding it. And in a world of daily - nay, almost hourly - journalism, where every clever man, every man who thinks himself clever, or whom anybody else thinks clever, is called upon to deliver his judgment point - blank and at the word of command on every conceivable subject of human thought, or on what sometimes seems to him very much the same thing, on every inconceivable display of human want of thought, there is such a spendthrift waste of all those commonplaces which furnish the permitted staple of public discourse that there is little chance of beguiling a new tune out of the one - stringed instrument on which we have been thrumming so long. In this desperate necessity one is often tempted to think that, if all the words of the dictionary were tumbled down in a heap and then all those fortuitous juxtapositions and combinations that made tolerable sense were picked out and pieced together, we might find among them some poignant suggestions towards novelty of thought or expression. But, alas! it is only the great poets who seem to have this unsolicited profusion of unexpected and incalculable phrase, this infinite variety of topic. For everybody else everything has been said before, and said over again after. He who has read his Aristotle will be apt to think that observation has on most points of general applicability said its last word, and he who has mounted the tower of Plato to took abroad from it will never hope to climb another with so lofty a vantage of speculation. Where it is so simple if not so easy a thing to hold one's peace, why add to the general confusion of tongues? There is something disheartening, too, in being expected to fill up not less than a certain measure of time, as if the mind were an hour - glass, that need only be shaken and set on one end or the other, as the case may be, to run its allotted sixty minutes with decorous exactitude. I recollect being once told by the late eminent naturalist, Agassiz, that when he was to deliver his first lecture as professor (at Zurich, I believe) he had grave doubts of his ability to occupy the prescribed three quarters of an hour. He was speaking without notes, and glancing anxiously from time to time at the watch that lay before him on the desk. "When I had spoken a half hour," he said, "I had told them everything I knew in the world, everything! Then I began to repeat myself," he added, roguishly "and I have done nothing else ever since. "Beneath the humorous exaggeration of the story I seemed to see the face of a very serious and improving moral. And yet if one were to say only what he had to say and then stopped, his audience would feel defrauded of their honest measure. Let us take courage by the example of the French, whose exportation of Bordeaux wines increases as the area of their land in vineyards is diminished.
To me, somewhat hopelessly revolving these things, the undelayable year has rolled round, and I find myself called upon to say something in this place, where so many wiser men have spoken before me. Precluded, in my quality of national guest, by motives of taste and discretion, from dealing with any question of immediate and domestic concern, it seemed to me wisest, or at any rate most prudent, to choose a topic of comparatively abstract interest, and to ask your indulgence for a few somewhat generalized remarks on a matter concerning which I had some experimental knowledge, derived from the use of such eyes and ears as Nature had been pleased to endow me withal, and such report as I had been able to win from them. The subject which most readily suggested itself was the spirit and the working of those conceptions of life and polity which are lumped together, whether for reproach or commendation, under the name of Democracy. By temperament and education of a conservative turn, I saw the last years of that quaint Arcadia which French travellers saw with delighted amazement a century ago, and have watched the change (to me a sad one) from an agricultural to a proletary population. The testimony of Balaam should carry some conviction. I have grown to manhood and am now growing old with the growth of this system of government in my native land, have watched its advances, or what some would call its encroachments, gradual and irresistible as those of a glacier, have been an ear - witness to the forebodings of wise and good and timid men and have lived to see those forebodings belied by the course of events, which is apt to show itself humorously careless of the reputation of prophets. I recollect hearing a sagacious old gentleman say in 1840 that the doing away with the property qualification for suffrage twenty years before had been the ruin of the State of Massachusetts; that it had put public credit and private estate alike at the mercy of demagogues. I lived to see that Commonwealth twenty odd years later paying the interest on her bonds in gold, though it cost her sometimes nearly three for one to keep her faith, and that while suffering an unparalleled drain of men and treasure in helping to sustain the unity and self - respect of the nation.
If universal suffrage has worked ill in our larger cities, as it certainly has, this has been mainly because the hands that wielded it were untrained to its use. There the election of a majority of the trustees of the public money is controlled by the most ignorant and vicious of a population which has come to us from abroad, wholly unpractised in self - government and incapable of assimilation by American habits and methods. But the finances of our towns, where the native tradition is still dominant and whose affairs are discussed and settled in a public assembly of the people, have been in general honestly and prudently administered. Even in manufacturing towns, where a majority of the voters live by their daily wages, it is not so often the recklessness as the moderation of public expenditure that surprises an old fashioned observer. "The beggar is in the saddle at last," cries Proverbial Wisdom. "Why, in the name of all former experience, doesn't he ride to the Devil?" Because in the very act of mounting he ceased to be a beggar and became part owner of the piece of property he bestrides. The last thing we need be anxious about is property. It always has friends or the means of making them. If riches have wings to fly away from their owner, they have wings also to escape danger.
I hear America sometimes playfully accused of sending you all your storms, and am in the habit of parrying the charge by alleging that we are enabled to do this because, in virtue of our protective system, we can afford to make better bad weather than anybody else. And what wiser use could we make of it than to export it in return for the paupers which some European countries are good enough to send over to us who have not attained to the same skill in the manufacture of them? But bad weather is not the worst thing that is laid at our door. A French gentleman, not long ago, forgetting Burke's monition of how unwise it is to draw an indictment against a whole people, has charged us with the responsibility of whatever he finds disagreeable in the morals or manners of his countrymen. If M. Zola or some other competent witness would only go into the box and tell us what those morals and manners were before our example corrupted them! But I confess that I find little to interest and less to edify me in these international bandyings of "You're another."
I shall address myself to a single point only in the long list of offences of which we are more or less gravely accused, because that really includes all the rest. It is that we are infecting the Old World with what seems to be thought the entirely new disease of Democracy. It is generally people who are in what are called easy circumstances who can afford the leisure to treat themselves to a handsome complaint, and these experience an immediate alleviation when once they have found a sonorous Greek name to abuse it by. There is something consolatory also, something flattering to their sense of personal dignity, and to that conceit of singularity which is the natural recoil from our uneasy consciousness of being commonplace, in thinking ourselves victims of a malady by which no one had ever suffered before. Accordingly they find it simpler to class under one comprehensive heading whatever they find offensive to their nerves, their taste, their interests, or what they suppose to be their opinions, and christen it Democracy, much as physicians label every obscure disease gout, or as cross - grained fellows lay their ill - temper to the weather. But is it really a new ailment, and, if it be, is America answerable for it? Even if she were, would it account for the phylloxera, and hoof - and - mouth disease, and bad harvests, and bad English, and the German bands, and the Boers, and all the other discomforts with which these later days have vexed the souls of them that go in chariots? Yet I have seen the evil example of Democracy in America cited as the source and origin of things quite as heterogeneous and quite as little connected with it by any sequence of cause and effect. Surely this ferment is nothing new. It has been at work for centuries, and we are more conscious of it only because in this age of publicity, where the newspapers offer a rostrum to whoever has a grievance, or fancies that he has, the bubbles and scum thrown up by it are more noticeable on the surface than in those dumb ages when there was a cover of silence and suppression on the cauldron. Bernardo Navagero, speaking of the Provinces of Lower Austria in 1546, tells us that "in them there are five sorts of persons, Clergy, Barons, Nobles, Burghers, and Peasants. Of these last no account is made, because they have no voice in the Diet."1
[Footnote 1: Below the Peasants, it should be remembered, was still another even more helpless class, the servile farm - laborers. The same witness informs us that of the extraordinary imposts the Peasants paid nearly twice as much in proportion to their estimated property as the Barons, Nobles, and Burghers together. Moreover, the upper classes were assessed at their own valuation, while they arbitrarily fixed that of the Peasants, who had no voice, ("Relazioni degli Ambasciatori Veneti," Serie I., tomo i., pp. 378, 379, 389.)]
Nor was it among the people that subversive or mistaken doctrines had their rise. A Father of the Church said that property was theft many centuries before Proudhon was born. Bourdaloue reaffirmed it. Montesquieu was the inventor of national workshops, and of the theory that the State owed every man a living. Nay, was not the Church herself the first organized Democracy? A few centuries ago the chief end of man was to keep his soul alive, and then the little kernel of leaven that sets the gases at work was religious, and produced the Reformation. Even in that, far - sighted persons like the Emperor Charles V. saw the germ of political and social revolution. Now that the chief end of man seems to have become the keeping of the body alive, and as comfortably alive as possible, the leaven also has become wholly political and social. But there had also been social upheavals before the Reformation and contemporaneously with it, especially among men of Teutonic race. The Reformation gave outlet and direction to an unrest already existing. Formerly the immense majority of men - our brothers - knew only their sufferings, their wants, and their desires. They are beginning now to know their opportunity and their power. All persons who see deeper than their plates are rather inclined to thank God for it than to bewail it, for the sores of Lazarus have a poison in them against which Dives has no antidote.
There can be no doubt that the spectacle of a great and prosperous Democracy on the other side of the Atlantic must react powerfully on the aspirations and political theories of men in the Old World who do not find things to their mind; but, whether for good or evil, it should not be overlooked that the acorn from which it sprang was ripened on the British oak. Every successive swarm that has gone out from this officina gentium has, when left to its own instincts - may I not call them hereditary instincts? assumed a more or less thoroughly democratic form. This would seem to show, what I believe to be the fact, that the British Constitution, under whatever disguises of prudence or decorum, is essentially democratic. England, indeed, may be called a monarchy with democratic tendencies, the United States a democracy with conservative instincts. People are continually saying that America is in the air, and I am glad to think it is, since this means only that a clearer conception of human claims and human duties is beginning to be prevalent. The discontent with the existing order of things, however, pervaded the atmosphere wherever the conditions were favorable, long before Columbus, seeking the back door of Asia, found himself knocking at the front door of America. I say wherever the conditions were favorable, for it is certain that the germs of disease do not stick or find a prosperous field for their development and noxious activity unless where the simplest sanitary precautions have been neglected. "For this effect defective comes by cause," as Polonius said long ago. It is only by instigation of the wrongs of men that what are called the Rights of Man become turbulent and dangerous. It is then only that they syllogize unwelcome truths. It is not the insurrections of ignorance that are dangerous, but the revolts of intelligence:
"The wicked and the weak rebel in vain, Slaves by their own compulsion."
Had the governing classes in France during the last century paid as much heed to their proper business as to their pleasures or manners, the guillotine need never have severed that spinal marrow of orderly and secular tradition through which in a normally constituted state the brain sympathizes with the extremities and sends will and impulsion thither. It is only when the reasonable and practicable are denied that men demand the unreasonable and impracticable; only when the possible is made difficult that they fancy the impossible to be easy. Fairy tales are made out of the dreams of the poor. No; the sentiment which lies at the root of democracy is nothing new. I am speaking always of a sentiment, a spirit, and not of a form of government; for this was but the outgrowth of the other and not its cause. This sentiment is merely an expression of the natural wish of people to have a hand, if need be a controlling hand, in the management of their won affairs. What is new is that they are more and more gaining that control, and learning more and more how to be worthy of it. What we used to call the tendency or drift - what we are being taught to call more wisely the evolution of things - has for some time been setting steadily in this direction. There is no good in arguing with the inevitable. The only argument available with an east wind is to put on your overcoat. And in this case, also, the prudent will prepare themselves to encounter what they cannot prevent. Some people advise us to put on the brakes, as if the movement of which we are conscious were that of a railway train running down an incline. But a metaphor is no argument, though it be sometimes the gunpowder to drive one home and imbed it in the memory. Our disquiet comes of what nurses and other experienced persons call growing pains, and need not seriously alarm us. They are what every generation before us - certainly every generation since the invention of printing - has gone through with more or less good fortune. To the door of every generation there comes a knocking, and unless the household, like the Thane of Cawdor and his wife, have been doing some deed without a name, they need not shudder. It turns out at worst to be a poor relation who wishes to come in out of the cold. The porter always grumbles and is slow to open. "Who's there, in the name of Beelzebub?" he mutters. Not a change for the better in our human housekeeping has ever taken place that wise and good men have not opposed it, - have not prophesied with the alderman that the world would wake up to find its throat cut in consequence of it. The world, on the contrary, wakes up, rubs its eyes, yawns, stretches itself, and goes about its business as if nothing had happened. Suppression of the slave trade, abolition of slavery, trade unions, at all of these excellent people shook their heads despondingly, and murmured "Ichabod." But the trade unions are now debating instead of conspiring, and we all read their discussions with comfort and hope, sure that they are learning the business of citizenship and the difficulties of practical legislation.
One of the most curious of these frenzies of exclusion was that against the emancipation of the Jews. All share in the government of the world was denied for centuries to perhaps the ablest, certainly the most tenacious, race that had ever lived in it - the race to whom we owed our religion and the purest spiritual stimulus and consolation to be found in all literature - a race in which ability seems as natural and hereditary as the curve of their noses, and whose blood, furtively mingling with the bluest bloods in Europe, has quickened them with its own indomitable impulsion. We drove them into a corner, but they had their revenge, as the wronged are always sure to have it sooner or later. They made their corner the counter and banking - house of the world, and thence they rule it and us with the ignobler sceptre of finance. Your grandfathers mobbed Priestley only that you might set up his statue and make Birmingham the headquarters of English Unitarianism. We hear it said sometimes that this is an age of transition, as if that made matters clearer; but can any one point us to an age that was not? If he could, he would show us an age of stagnation. The question for us, as it has been for all before us, is to make the transition gradual and easy, to see that our points are right so that the train may not come to grief. For we should remember that nothing is more natural for people whose education has been neglected than to spell evolution with an initial "r." A great man struggling with the storms of fate has been called a sublime spectacle; but surely a great man wrestling with these new forces that have come into the world, mastering them and controlling them to beneficent ends, would be a yet sublimer. Here is not a danger, and if there were it would be only a better school of manhood, a nobler scope for ambition. I have hinted that what people are afraid of in democracy is less the thing itself than what they conceive to be its necessary adjuncts and consequences. It is supposed to reduce all mankind to a dead level of mediocrity in character and culture, to vulgarize men's conceptions of life, and therefore their code of morals, manners, and conduct - to endanger the rights of property and possession. But I believe that the real gravamen of the charges lies in the habit it has of making itself generally disagreeable by asking the Powers that Be at the most inconvenient moment whether they are the powers that ought to be. If the powers that be are in a condition to give a satisfactory answer to this inevitable question, they need feel in no way discomfited by it.
Few people take the trouble of trying to find out what democracy really is. Yet this would be a great help, for it is our lawless and uncertain thoughts, it is the indefiniteness of our impressions, that fill darkness, whether mental or physical, with spectres and hobgoblins. Democracy is nothing more than an experiment in government, more likely to succeed in a new soil, but likely to be tried in all soils, which must stand or fall on its own merits as others have done before it. For there is no trick of perpetual motion in politics any more than in mechanics. President Lincoln defined democracy to be "the government of the people by the people for the people." This is a sufficiently compact statement of it as a political arrangement. Theodore Parker said that "Democracy meant not 'I'm as good as you are,' but 'You're as good as I am.'" And this is the ethical conception of it, necessary as a complement of the other; a conception which, could it be made actual and practical, would easily solve all the riddles that the old sphinx of political and social economy who sits by the roadside has been proposing to mankind from the beginning, and which mankind have shown such a singular talent for answering wrongly. In this sense Christ was the first true democrat that ever breathed, as the old dramatist Dekker said he was the first true gentleman. The characters may be easily doubled, so strong is the likeness between them. A beautiful and profound parable of the Persian poet Jellaladeen tells us that "One knocked at the Beloved's door, and a voice asked from within 'Who is there?' and he answered 'It is I.' Then the voice said, 'This house will not hold me and thee'; and the door was not opened. Then went the lover into the desert and fasted and prayed in solitude, and after a year he returned and knocked again at the door; and again the voice asked 'Who is there?' and he said 'It is thyself;' and the door was opened to him." But that is idealism, you will say, and this is an only too practical world. I grant it; but I am one of those who believe that the real will never find an irremovable basis till it rests on the ideal. It used to be thought that a democracy was possible only in a small territory, and this is doubtless true of a democracy strictly defined, for in such all the citizens decide directly upon every question of public concern in a general assembly. An example still survives in the tiny Swiss canton of Appenzell. But this immediate intervention of the people in their own affairs is not of the essence of democracy; it is not necessary, nor indeed, in most cases, practicable. Democracies to which Mr. Lincoln's definition would fairly enough apply have existed, and now exist, in which, though the supreme authority reside in the people, yet they can act only indirectly on the national policy. This generation has seen a democracy with an imperial figurehead, and in all that have ever existed the body politic has never embraced all the inhabitants included within its territory, the right to share in the direction of affairs has been confined to citizens, and citizenship has been further restricted by various limitations, sometimes of property, sometimes of nativity, and always of age and sex.
The framers of the American Constitution were far from wishing or intending to found a democracy in the strict sense of the word, though, as was inevitable, every expansion of the scheme of government they elaborated has been in a democratical direction. But this has been generally the slow result of growth, and not the sudden innovation of theory; in fact, they had a profound disbelief in theory, and knew better than to commit the folly of breaking with the past. They were not seduced by the French fallacy that a new system of government could be ordered like a new suit of clothes. They would as soon have thought of ordering a new suit of flesh and skin. It is only on the roaring loom of time that the stuff is woven for such a vesture of their thought and experience as they were meditating. They recognized fully the value of tradition and habit as the great allies of permanence and stability. They all had that distaste for innovation which belonged to their race, and many of them a distrust of human nature derived from their creed. The day of sentiment was over, and no dithyrambic affirmations or fine - drawn analyses of the Rights of Man would serve their present turn. This was a practical question, and they addressed themselves to it as men of knowledge and judgment should. Their problem was how to adapt English principles and precedents to the new conditions of American life, and they solved it with singular discretion. They put as many obstacles as they could contrive, not in the way of the people's will, but of their whim. With few exceptions they probably admitted the logic of the then accepted syllogism, - democracy, anarchy, despotism. But this formula was framed upon the experience of small cities shut up to stew within their narrow walls, where the number of citizens made but an inconsiderable fraction of the inhabitants, where every passion was reverberated from house to house and from man to man with gathering rumor till every impulse became gregarious and therefore inconsiderate, and every popular assembly needed but an infusion of eloquent sophistry to turn it into a mob, all the more dangerous because sanctified with the formality of law.2
[Footnote 2: The effect of the electric telegraph in reproducing this trooping of emotion and perhaps of opinion is yet to be measured. The effect of Darwinism as a disintegrator of humanitarianism is also to be reckoned with.]
Fortunately their case was wholly different. They were to legislate for a widely scattered population and for States already practised in the discipline of a partial independence. They had an unequalled opportunity and enormous advantages. The material they had to work upon was already democratical by instinct and habitude. It was tempered to their hands by more than a century's schooling in self - government. They had but to give permanent and conservative form to a ductile mass. In giving impulse and direction to their new institutions, especially in supplying them with checks and balances, they had a great help and safeguard in their federal organization. The different, sometimes conflicting, interests and social systems of the several States made existence as a Union and coalescence into a nation conditional on a constant practice of moderation and compromise. The very elements of disintegration were the best guides in political training. Their children learned the lesson of compromise only too well, and it was the application of it to a question of fundamental morals that cost us our civil war. We learned once for all that compromise makes a good umbrella but a poor roof; that it is a temporary expedient, often wise in party politics, almost sure to be unwise in statesmanship.
The Success Of American Democracy - Suffrage
Has not the trial of democracy in America proved, on the whole, successful? If it had not, would the Old World be vexed with any fears of its proving contagious? This trial would have been less severe could it have been made with a people homogeneous in race, language, and traditions, whereas the United States have been called on to absorb and assimilate enormous masses of foreign population, heterogeneous in all these respects, and drawn mainly from that class which might fairly say that the world was not their friend, nor the world's law. The previous condition too often justified the traditional Irishman, who, landing in New York and asked what his politics were, inquired if there was a Government there, and on being told that there was, retorted, "Thin I'm agin it!" We have taken from Europe the poorest, the most ignorant, the most turbulent of her people, and have made them over into good citizens, who have added to our wealth, and who are ready to die in defence of a country and of institutions which they know to be worth drying for. The exceptions have been (and they are lamentable exceptions) where these hordes of ignorance and poverty have coagulated in great cities. But the social system is yet to seek which has not to look the same terrible wolf in the eyes. On the other hand, at this very moment Irish peasants are buying up the worn - out farms of Massachusetts, and making them productive again by the same virtues of industry and thrift that once made them profitable to the English ancestors of the men who are deserting them. To have achieved even these prosaic results (if you choose to call them so), and that out of materials the most discordant, - I might say the most recalcitrant, - argues a certain beneficent virtue in the system that could do it, and is not to be accounted for by mere luck.
Carlyle said scornfully that America meant only roast turkey every day for everybody. He forgot that States, as Bacon said of wars, go on their bellies. As for the security of property, it should be tolerably well secured in a country where every other man hopes to be rich, even though the only property qualification be the ownership of two hands that add to the general wealth. Is it not the best security for anything to interest the largest possible number of persons in its preservation and the smallest in its division? In point of fact, far - seeing men count the increasing power of wealth and its combinations as one of the chief dangers with which the institutions of the United States are threatened in the not distant future. The right of individual property is no doubt the very corner - stone of civilization as hitherto understood, but I am a little impatient of being told that property is entitled to exceptional consideration because it bears all the burdens of the State. It bears those, indeed, which can most easily be borne, but poverty pays with its person the chief expenses of war, pestilence, and famine. Wealth should not forget this, for poverty is beginning to think of it now and then. Let me not be misunderstood. I see as clearly as any man possibly can, and rate as highly, the value of wealth, and of hereditary wealth, as the security of refinement, the feeder of all those arts that ennoble and beautify life, and as making a country worth living in. Many an ancestral hall here in England has been a nursery of that culture which has been of example and benefit to all. Old gold has a civilizing virtue which new gold must grow old to be capable of secreting.
I should not think of coming before you to defend or to criticise any form of government. All have their virtues, all their defects, and all have illustrated one period or another in the history of the race, with signal services to humanity and culture. There is not one that could stand a cynical cross - examination by an experienced criminal lawyer, except that of a perfectly wise and perfectly good despot, such as the world has never seen, except in that white - haired king of Browning's who
"Lived long ago In the morning of the world,
When Earth was nearer Heaven than now."
The English race, if they did not invent government by discussion, have at least carried it nearest to perfection in practice. It seems a very safe and reasonable contrivance for occupying the attention of the country, and is certainly a better way of settling questions than by push of pike. Yet, if one should ask it why it should not rather be called government by gabble, it would have to fumble in its pocket a good while before it found the change for a convincing reply. As matters stand, too, it is beginning to be doubtful whether Parliament and Congress sit at Westminster and Washington or in the editors' rooms of the leading journals, so thoroughly is everything debated before the authorized and responsible debaters get on their legs. And what shall we say of government by a majority of voices? To a person who in the last century would have called himself an Impartial Observer, a numerical preponderance seems, on the whole, as clumsy a way of arriving at truth as could well be devised, but experience has apparently shown it to be a convenient arrangement for determining what may be expedient or advisable or practicable at any given moment. Truth, after all, wears a different face to everybody, and it would be too tedious to wait till all were agreed. She is said to lie at the bottom of a well, for the very reason, perhaps, that whoever looks down in search of her sees his own image at the bottom, and is persuaded not only that he has seen the goddess, but that she is far better looking than he had imagined.
The arguments against universal suffrage are equally unanswerable. "What," we exclaim, "shall Tom, Dick, and Harry have as much weight in the scale as I?" Of course, nothing could be more absurd. And yet universal suffrage has not been the instrument of greater unwisdom than contrivances of a more select description. Assemblies could be mentioned composed entirely of Masters of Arts and Doctors in Divinity which have sometimes shown traces of human passion or prejudice in their votes. Have the Serene Highnesses and Enlightened Classes carried on the business of Mankind so well, then, that there is no use in trying a less costly method? The democratic theory is that those Constitutions are likely to prove steadiest which have the broadest base, that the right to vote makes a safety - valve of every voter, and that the best way of teaching a man how to vote is to give him the chance of practice. For the question is no longer the academic one, "Is it wise to give every man the ballot?" but rather the practical one, "Is it prudent to deprive whole classes of it any longer?" It may be conjectured that it is cheaper in the long run to lift men up than to hold them down, and that the ballot in their hands is less dangerous to society than a sense of wrong in their heads. At any rate this is the dilemma to which the drift of opinion has been for some time sweeping us, and in politics a dilemma is a more unmanageable thing to hold by the horns than a wolf by the ears. It is said that the right of suffrage is not valued when it is indiscriminately bestowed, and there may be some truth in this, for I have observed that when men prize most is a privilege, even if it be that of chief mourner at a funeral. But is there not danger that it will be valued at more than its worth if denied, and that some illegitimate way will be sought to make up for the want of it? Men who have a voice in public affairs are at once affiliated with one or other of the great parties between which society is divided, merge their individual hopes and opinions in its safer, because more generalized, hopes and opinions, are disciplined by its tactics, and acquire, to a certain degree, the orderly qualities of an army. They no longer belong to a class, but to a body corporate. Of one thing, at least, we may be certain, that, under whatever method of helping things to go wrong man's wit can contrive, those who have the divine right to govern will be found to govern in the end, and that the highest privilege to which the majority of mankind can aspire is that of being governed by those wiser than they. Universal suffrage has in the United States sometimes been made the instrument of inconsiderate changes, under the notion of reform, and this from a misconception of the true meaning of popular government. One of these has been the substitution in many of the States of popular election for official selection in the choice of judges. The same system applied to military officers was the source of much evil during our civil war, and, I believe, had to be abandoned. But it has been also true that on all great questions of national policy a reserve of prudence and discretion has been brought out at the critical moment to turn the scale in favor of a wiser decision. An appeal to the reason of the people has never been known to fail in the long run. It is, perhaps, true that, by effacing the principle of passive obedience, democracy, ill understood, has slackened the spring of that ductility to discipline which is essential to "the unity and married calm of States." But I feel assured that experience and necessity will cure this evil, as they have shown their power to cure others. And under what frame of policy have evils ever been remedied till they became intolerable, and shook men out of their indolent indifference through their fears?
We are told that the inevitable result of democracy is to sap the foundations of personal independence, to weaken the principle of authority, to lessen the respect due to eminence, whether in station, virtue, or genius. If these things were so, society could not hold together. Perhaps the best forcing - house of robust individuality would be where public opinion is inclined to be most overbearing, as he must be of heroic temper who should walk along Piccadilly at the height of the season in a soft hat. As for authority, it is one of the symptoms of the time that the religious reverence for it is declining everywhere, but this is due partly to the fact that statecraft is no longer looked upon as a mystery, but as a business, and partly to the decay of superstition, by which I mean the habit of respecting what we are told to respect rather than what is respectable in itself. There is more rough and tumble in the American democracy than is altogether agreeable to people of sensitive nerves and refined habits, and the people take their political duties lightly and laughingly, as is, perhaps, neither unnatural nor unbecoming in a young giant. Democracies can no more jump away from their own shadows than the rest of us can. They no doubt sometimes make mistakes and pay honor to men who do not deserve it. But they do this because they believe them worthy of it, and though it be true that the idol is the measure of the worshipper, yet the worship has in it the germ of a nobler religion. But is it democracies alone that fall into these errors? I, who have seen it proposed to erect a statue to Hudson, the railway king, and have heard Louis Napoleon hailed as the saviour of society by men who certainly had no democratic associations or leanings, am not ready to think so. But democracies have likewise their finer instincts. I have also seen the wisest statesman and most pregnant speaker of our generation, a man of humble birth and ungainly manners, of little culture beyond what his own genius supplied, become more absolute in power than any monarch of modern times through the reverence of his countrymen for his honesty, his wisdom, his sincerity, his faith in God and man, and the nobly humane simplicity of his character. And I remember another whom popular respect enveloped as with a halo, the least vulgar of men, the most austerely genial, and the most independent of opinion. Wherever he went he never met a stranger, but everywhere neighbors and friends proud of him as their ornament and decoration. Institutions which could bear and breed such men as Lincoln and Emerson had surely some energy for good. No, amid all the fruitless turmoil and miscarriage of the world, if there be one thing steadfast and of favorable omen, one thing to make optimism distrust its own obscure distrust, it is the rooted instinct in men to admire what is better and more beautiful than themselves. The touchstone of political and social institutions is their ability to supply them with worthy objects of this sentiment, which is the very tap - root of civilization and progress. There would seem to be no readier way of feeding it with the elements of growth and vigor than such an organization of society as will enable men to respect themselves, and so to justify them in respecting others.
Such a result is quite possible under other conditions than those of an avowedly democratical Constitution. For I take it that the real essence of democracy was fairly enough defined by the First Napoleon when he said that the French Revolution meant "la carriere ouverte aux talents" - a clear pathway for merit of whatever kind. I should be inclined to paraphrase this by calling democracy that form of society, no matter what its political classification, in which every man had a chance and knew that he had it. If a man can climb, and feels himself encouraged to climb, from a coalpit to the highest position for which he is fitted, he can well afford to be indifferent what name is given to the government under which he lives. The Bailli of Mirabeau, uncle of the more famous tribune of that name, wrote in 1771: "The English are, in my opinion, a hundred times more agitated and more unfortunate than the very Algerines themselves, because they do not know and will not know till the destruction of their over - swollen power, which I believe very near, whether they are monarchy, aristocracy, or democracy, and wish to play the part of all three."
England has not been obliging enough to fulfill the Bailli's prophecy, and perhaps it was this very carelessness about the name, and concern about the substance of popular government, this skill in getting the best out of things as they are, in utilizing all the motives which influence men, and in giving one direction to many impulses, that has been a principal factor of her greatness and power. Perhaps it is fortunate to have an unwritten Constitution, for men are prone to be tinkering the work of their own hands, whereas they are more willing to let time and circumstance mend or modify what time and circumstance have made. All free governments, whatever their name, are in reality governments by public opinion, and it is on the quality of this public opinion that their prosperity depends. It is, therefore, their first duty to purify the element from which they draw the breath of life. With the growth of democracy grows also the fear, if not the danger, that this atmosphere may be corrupted with poisonous exhalations from lower and more malarious levels, and the question of sanitation becomes more instant and pressing. Democracy in its best sense is merely the letting in of light and air. Lord Sherbrooke, with his usual epigrammatic terseness, bids you educate your future rulers. But would this alone be a sufficient safeguard? To educate the intelligence is to enlarge the horizon of its desires and wants. And it is well that this should be so. But the enterprise must go deeper and prepare the way for satisfying those desires and wants in so far as they are legitimate. What is really ominous of danger to the existing order of things is not democracy (which, properly understood, is a conservative force), but the Socialism, which may find a fulcrum in it. If we cannot equalize conditions and fortunes any more than we can equalize the brains of men - and a very sagacious person has said that "where two men ride of a horse one must ride behind" - we can yet, perhaps, do something to correct those methods and influences that lead to enormous inequalities, and to prevent their growing more enormous. It is all very well to pooh - pooh Mr. George and to prove him mistaken in his political economy. I do not believe that land should be divided because the quantity of it is limited by nature. Of what may this not be said? A fortiori, we might on the same principle insist on a division of human wit, for I have observed that the quantity of this has been even more inconveniently limited. Mr. George himself has an inequitably large share of it. But he is right in his impelling motive; right, also, I am convinced, in insisting that humanity makes a part, by far the most important part, of political economy; and in thinking man to be of more concern and more convincing than the longest columns of figures in the world. For unless you include human nature in your addition, your total is sure to be wrong and your deductions from it fallacious. Communism means barbarism, but Socialism means, or wishes to mean, cooperation and community of interests, sympathy, the giving to the hands not so large a share as to the brains, but a larger share than hitherto in the wealth they must combine to produce - means, in short, the practical application of Christianity to life, and has in it the secret of an orderly and benign reconstruction. State Socialism would cut off the very roots in personal character - self-help, forethought, and frugality - which nourish and sustain the trunk and branches of every vigorous Commonwealth.
Concluding Remarks
I do not believe in violent changes, nor do I expect them. Things in possession have a very firm grip. One of the strongest cements of society is the conviction of mankind that the state of things into which they are born is a part of the order of the universe, as natural, let us say, as that the sun should go round the earth. It is a conviction that they will not surrender except on compulsion, and a wise society should look to it that this compulsion be not put upon them. For the individual man there is no radical cure, outside of human nature itself, for the evils to which human nature is heir. The rule will always hold good that you must
"Be your own palace or the world's your gaol."
But for artificial evils, for evils that spring from want of thought, thought must find a remedy somewhere. There has been no period of time in which wealth has been more sensible of its duties than now. It builds hospitals, it establishes missions among the poor, it endows schools. It is one of the advantages of accumulated wealth, and of the leisure it renders possible, that people have time to think of the wants and sorrows of their fellows. But all these remedies are partial and palliative merely. It is as if we should apply plasters to a single pustule of the small - pox with a view of driving out the disease. The true way is to discover and to extirpate the germs. As society is now constituted these are in the air it breathes, in the water it drinks, in things that seem, and which it has always believed, to be the most innocent and healthful. The evil elements it neglects corrupt these in their springs and pollute them in their courses. Let us be of good cheer, however, remembering that the misfortunes hardest to bear are those which never come. The world has outlived much, and will outlive a great deal more, and men have contrived to be happy in it. It has shown the strength of its constitution in nothing more than in surviving the quack medicines it has tried. In the scales of the destinies brawn will never weigh so much as brain. Our healing is not in the storm or in the whirlwind, it is not in monarchies, or aristocracies, or democracies, but will be revealed by the still small voice that speaks to the conscience and the heart, prompting us to a wider and wiser humanity.
Harvard classics series, 1909
This text is part of the Internet Modern History Sourcebook. The Sourcebook is a collection of public domain and copy-permitted texts for introductory level classes in modern European and World history.


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Thank you to everyone who made it to our latest roundtable meet-up of The Product Group at MTV Networks / Viacom, as well as to our other sponsors, SUMMIT, Balsamiq Studios, Sunshine Suites, and Ryma Technology Solutions.
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from structuring to measuring
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If you are a Product Person and are interested in having your product featured or participating as a featured guest expert at an upcoming meetup of The Product Group, contact me (or email at jhorn (a-t.) tpgblog DoT com).
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Bert Fish Medical Center: Smokers need not apply
NEW SMYRNA BEACH — Starting Jan. 1, Bert Fish Medical Center will no longer hire tobacco users, joining two other local hospitals in telling smokers not to apply.
Applicants will be tested for a nicotine byproduct and sign an agreement to remain tobacco-free during their employment with the New Smyrna Beach public hospital. The prohibition doesn't apply to volunteers, medical staff or Bert Fish's roughly 700 employees who were hired before the implementation date.
"We are in the health care business, and we should be a role model," said Nancy Evolga, executive director of human resources for the 112-bed hospital. "There is 50 years of data that says tobacco use is bad."
The hospital's decision is its latest move in a series of steps to restrict smoking. In 2009, Bert Fish declared itself a smoke-free campus and banned lighting up on the property.
In January 2012, it began a $25 charge per paycheck for smokers who elect to take health insurance. At first, employees were on the honor system to report their smoking, but, starting this year, the hospital began testing employees for a nicotine byproduct with a mouth swab, Evolga said. Employees hired after Jan. 1 who test positive will be subject to disciplinary action up to termination.
A health-risk assessment survey found that about 22 percent of Bert Fish employees use tobacco, Evolga said. To help them quit, Bert Fish offers free tobacco-cessation counseling and nicotine-replacement therapy to employees and their families.
Money collected from tobacco users who work at Bert Fish is pooled together to fund a wellness initiative called Fit for Life. Employees can take yoga classes at the hospital, grab healthy take-home meals and join walking clubs.
Not everyone has embraced hiring practices that exclude smokers, arguing the restriction goes too far in interfering with what workers do while off duty. Critics argue that while smoking is vilified, a host of other unhealthy behavior is ignored during the hiring process, such as excessive drinking, eating too much junk food and engaging in risky activities, such as motorcycle riding.
"Not all slopes are slippery but this one really is," said Lewis Maltby, president on the National Workrights Institute, a nonprofit offshoot of the American Civil Liberties Union based in Princeton, N.J. "The starting point for us is your boss doesn't have the right to tell you what to do in your own home. The hospital can tell you what to do during the week while you are at work, but your boss has no business telling you what you can and can't do while you are at home."
In 29 states, legislation prevents employers from discriminating based on a person's smoking during the hiring process, but Florida is not one of those states.
Bert Fish officials cite high health care costs and lost productivity associated with smoking, the toll tobacco use takes on the community's health, disruptive smoke breaks and the unpleasant smell on smokers' clothes that colleagues and patients must endure as reasons why they decided to stop hiring tobacco users.
"Our mission is to improve the overall health of our Southeast Volusia community, not just treat illness," said Steve Harrell, the hospital's chief executive officer. "Bert Fish Medical Center sets an example for other businesses to improve the health of their workforce by not hiring tobacco users."
Florida Hospital Flagler in Palm Coast and Florida Hospital Fish Memorial in Orange City don't hire smokers. All hospital campuses in Volusia and Flagler are smoke free.


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Love has found me several times. Each meeting then parting took away a piece of me. After losing you I don't think there is enough of me left to ever love again. So I am just going to go on loving you even though you are not here. My heart is too tired to do anything else. C.B.
As you get older, the heart shed its leaves like a tree.
You cannot hold out against certain winds.
Each day tears away a few more leaves;
and then there are the storms
that break off several branches at one go.
And while nature's greenery
grows back again in the spring,
that of the heart never grows back.
Gustave Flaubert