The Unwinding

floodlit Bojangles’ up the hill from his house, and that meat would be drowned in the bubbling fryers by employees whose hatred of the job would leak into the cooked food, and that food would be served up and eaten by customers who would grow obese and end up in the hospital in Greensboro with diabetes or heart failure, a burden to the public, and

back to where we were before, but yet we will

“Our destiny is not written for us, but by us.

There was a problem, of course, which was that usually no one made it into the room to argue the other side—and never anyone able to put up anything like the kind of money the corporations paid to lobbyists and campaigns.

He was seeing beyond the surfaces of the land to its hidden truths. Some nights he sat up late on his front porch with a glass of Jack and listened to the trucks heading south on 220, carrying crates of live chickens to the slaughterhouses—always under cover of darkness, like a vast and shameful trafficking—chickens pumped full of hormones that lef

“Bandwidth” means the amount of information one can absorb.

“If my mind can conceive it, and my heart can believe it, I know I can achieve it.

That’s the way nature works. Whether you have the persistence, determination, dedication to see it through—that’s a different story.”

“If this is a one-hundred-fifty-year anomaly,” Dean said, “where we took all the cheap, affordable oil out of the ground, and used it to get us to where we are today—when that starts to unwind, we will go back to where we were before, but yet we will have learned so much in the process of all this new technology that we take with us.