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Seoul fell Wednesday, and the ROK defenders retreated to the Han River. In Long Island’s Stockholm Restaurant that noon, three unlikely diplomats—Trygve Lie, Jacob Malik, and Ernest Gross—met to keep a long-standing luncheon date. Naturally they talked about the war; there was nothing else to talk about. Malik held that Sunday’s Security Council resolution was “illegal” because no Russian delegate had been present and Red China had not been admitted. While Gross waited tensely, Lie met his responsibilities as a scrupulous Secretary General. Forget about Sunday, he advised Malik; come to this afternoon’s Council meeting and hear the new American resolution. “Won’t you join us?” he asked. “The interests of your country would seem to me to call for your presence.” But the Russian shook his head. He said vehemently, “No, I will not go there.” Outside, Gross mopped his brow. He said to Lie, “Think what would have happened if he had accepted your invitation.” What would have happened would have been a Soviet veto of the new U.S. move and then, in all probability, American intervention in Korea unsupported by the U.N.—in short, an earlier Vietnam.
The Glory and the Dream
William Manchester
It is still a fairly astounding notion to consider that atoms are mostly empty space, and that the solidity we experience all around us is an illusion. When two objects come together in the real world—billiard balls are most often used for illustration—they don't actually strike each other. “Rather,” as Timothy Ferris explains, “the negatively charged fields of the two balls repel each other . . . were it not for their electrical charges they could, like galaxies, pass right through each other unscathed.” When you sit in a chair, you are not actually sitting there, but levitating above it at a height of one angstrom (a hundred millionth of a centimeter),
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Bill Bryson
Figure out what you do, then do it. And do it better than anyone else. And then let everything else you do build around that; stay with what you know. Being great at one thing doesn’t mean you can also run a restaurant or a car dealership or a line of sportswear. Bill Gates is not going to launch a line of sportswear. Most likely, neither should you.
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