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Rather than finding such apocalyptic descriptions derogatory, Genghis Khan seemed to have encouraged them. With his penchant for finding a use for everything he encountered, he devised a powerful way to exploit the high literacy rate of the Muslim people, and turned his unsuspecting enemies into a potent weapon for shaping public opinion. Terror, he realized, was best spread not by the acts of warriors, but by the pens of scribes and scholars. In an era before newspapers, the letters of the intelligentsia played a primary role in shaping public opinion, and in the conquest of central Asia, they played their role quite well on Genghis Khan’s behalf. The Mongols operated a virtual propaganda machine that consistently inflated the number of people killed in battle and spread fear wherever its words carried. By August 1221, only a year into the campaign, Mongol officials sent their Korean subjects a demand for one hundred thousand sheets of their famous paper. The volume of paper shows how rapidly Mongol record keeping was increasing as the size of the empire grew, but the order also symbolized the Mongol emphasis on writing their history. Increasingly, paper was the most potent weapon in Genghis Khan’s arsenal. He showed no interest in having his accomplishments recorded or in panegyrics to his prowess; instead, he allowed people to freely circulate the worst and most incredible stories about him and the Mongols. From every conquered city, the Mongols sent forth delegations to the other cities to tell them of the unprecedented horrors inflicted by the nearly supernatural abilities of Genghis Khan’s warriors.

Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World

Jack Weatherford

It’s vital to make things more complicated for the opponent. There are two ways you can do that to a defense: One is to have a whole bunch of plays. But the trouble there is that your offense has to deal with as much complexity as their defense does. The other way is to have less plays, and run them out of lots of formations. That way you don’t have to teach a player a new assignment every single time, just a new place to stand. Simply put: If you wanna screw with the defense, screw with formations, not plays. We also decided we were going to let our quarterback check to other plays at the line of scrimmage. Play calling is important, but the more control we could give our quarterback at the line of scrimmage, the more flexible we could be. After all, he was the one in the middle of it. We knew that he could see the defense better than we could from where we were standing. He had information from ground zero.

Swing Your Sword

Mike Leach, Bruce Feldman, Michael Lewis, and Peter Berg

What’s the best way to boost your mental endurance? Marcora’s idea, as he proposed back in 2011 at the conference in Bathurst, is that specially tailored cognitive challenges like the Stroop task, repeated over and over, constitute a form of “brain endurance training” that can give athletes an edge. As I’ll describe in Chapter 11, I visited the University of Kent for a brain-training boot camp, and then tried out the technique for twelve weeks while preparing for a marathon. Marcora has also run a series of military-funded trials of the technique—and the initial results suggest he’s onto something big.

Endure

Alex Hutchinson

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