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The cultural center of Asia Minor, Pergamon boasted a vast library of 200,000 scrolls, a spectacular 10,000-seat theater, and a monumental Great Altar decorated with sculptures of the Olympian gods defeating the Giants. People came from all around the Mediterranean seeking cures at the famous Temple of Asclepius, god of medicine.
Everyone has a different path. I knew no one in the acting industry growing up. I never did a play until college. I was not outspoken when I was younger and I hated being the center of attention. But I had a dream of being an actor. I went to NYU and studied theatre. I learned a craft. And began my career straight out of college.
Probably around 14, when I was finishing primary school. I'm coming from a pretty small city in Croatia, not too many options to train, not too many players. So I had to either choose to stay at home to do more school or move to Zagreb to the national training center. That was when I made decisions to do something better in tennis.
Harvey and I grew up in Queens, N.Y. My brother and I shared a room for 18 years until we went away to college. When we were kids, after our father said, 'Lights out,' he also exclaimed, 'No more talking. Time for sleep.' But we'd stay up late, arguing over statistics, who the best center fielder was - Willie Mays or Mickey Mantle.
Basically, we've grown up very focused on the institution. The institution tells me what to do. It tells me where to go. It tells me what my career path is, and then I, sort of, attach my own personal desires, my own personal interests. I think we're living in a time where we're going to have to change - to put people in the center.
In a small town, everyone works together and does life together, and because of that everyone takes care of each other. That's Iowa. Whether it's Des Moines or Sioux Center, Decorah or Davenport, Iowans exhibit those small-town values. They work hard, but not so much for themselves. They're ambitious, but not at the expense of others.
I was in New York on September 11 when those planes hit the World Trade Center. At the time, it seemed like it was a local thing. But three or four days later, by the time we drove across the country in the bus, we realized it wasn't a local thing. You could really feel the states become united. We became the United States of America.
In America, the stories we tell ourselves and we tell each other in fiction have to do with individualism. Every person here is the center of his or her own story. And our job as people and as characters is to find our own motivations and desires, to overcome conflicts and obstacles toward defining ourselves so that we grow and change.
Some of the companies we helped start are names you know. An office supply company called Staples - where I'm pleased to see the Obama campaign has been shopping; The Sports Authority, which became a favorite of my sons. We started an early childhood learning center called Bright Horizons that First Lady Michelle Obama rightly praised.
Leo Durocher was our manager and he brought Willie up to me and said, 'This is Willie Mays and he's your new roommate.' You could see right away that this young man was a natural. He had those real big hands, great power and speed and would catch everything hit in his direction. He's the best center fielder that ever lived, no question.
Tennis players we're always playing in center courts that feel like arenas. And when we get on the court and the crowd cheers your name or salutes you - it's like you're a gladiator in the arena. And everyone is cheering - and you're fighting, you're screaming, during your strokes - it feels like you're an animal, fighting for your life.
I had a really hard time after 9/11. I was basically living across the street from the World Trade Center, and a big chunk of debris fell on top of my building, and the roof caved in. I thought I was going to die. Really. I'd never thought that before, but on that day I sat there and thought 'I cannot believe it's going to end this way.'
As a former Commander, I gave an oath to defend the Constitution against all enemies foreign and domestic. As a state senator, I gave that same oath. As a Congressman, I gave an oath to defend the Constitution. There are some things that are not negotiable: Faith, my family, and the Constitution are dead center. It is nonnegotiable to me.
I think that when we're looking at things when we're right in the center of things, as opposed to being a bit unmoored from what's going on around us, we see things through a kind of dulling lens of convention, and there's something about extreme emotional experiences that gives us a heightened clarity, I think, of thought and of feeling.
I'm trying to get a lower center of gravity. I think, when I play at a lower level, it helps my overall game, just my explosiveness to the rim with the ball in my hands. When I play with a lower center of gravity, my legs are always in my shot instead of playing vertical out there where I don't get the same explosion or legs into my shot.
I've seen terrorism close up, but I don't live in a state of terror at all. I'm comfortable going to the Manhattan Thanksgiving Day Parade, the tree lighting at Rockefeller Center, Times Square on New Years Eve. For perspective, the world today is a safer place than it was during the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Berlin Airlift, World War II.
We were trying to get all of the planes down out of the sky. And we watched as the towers of the World Trade Center collapsed - something no one expected and anticipated. And you could sit there and see and be aware that thousands of people were at that moment being killed as a result of the terrorist attacks that struck the United States.
I came when I was in high school as part of a student exchange program with the Jewish Community Center in New Jersey, to Ramat Eliyahu. You come and volunteer for five weeks at a day camp. I was a teenager - I couldn't really appreciate it as much, and now I come back as an adult and I can really get the flavor of the city, and I love it.
Now, as the world's scientists focus with increasing intensity on transforming the genetic codes of every living creature into information that can be used to treat and ultimately prevent disease, Shenzhen is home to a different kind of factory: B.G.I., formerly called Beijing Genomics Institute, the world's largest genetic-research center.
This is more than just the rebuilding of the Globe, creating some kind of monument to Shakespeare which he doesn't need. His books are his monuments. But this will be a major center for the study of Shakespeare in performance. We are making the only faithful effort to restore the theater in every respect as close to the original as possible.
It's a funny thing. I'll be in my home town of Columbus at a restaurant or something, and the waiter maybe asks, 'What do you do?' and I say, 'Oh, I'm in a band... Twenty One Pilots,' and he'll say, 'Cool, I'll check it out. I never heard of them.' And then I say, 'In September we're playing the Schottenstein Center,' and it's like, 'What?!'
With The King Center as her base, my mother pressed on to fulfill a role that changed lives and legislation. She was a woman who refused to surrender the reigns of what she knew to be her assignment, even when male civil rights and business leaders tried to convince her that she should leave the work of building her husband's legacy to them.
When a child comes in, I believe that it's a 'multipersonhood,' and it knows it, its consciousness knows it, and it has a nuclei in the center of its consciousness that is the repository of all experience and all knowledge. And when you look in the eyes of your baby and you feel this sense that they are an old soul, I believe indeed they are.
I made one contribution to a film about the 11th of September: there were 11 directors and everyone had a different take on that. Some I thought were valid and some less so, but there was a substantial point that knitted all the films together - a comment on the bombing of the World Trade Center - so there was something to get your teeth into.
Working on 'The War Room' was a thrill, not only because we were given such exquisite access to the nerve center of Bill Clinton's first presidential campaign, but for me personally, it was so exciting to be producing my first film and working with documentary filmmaking legends D.A. Pannebaker and Chris Hegedus, who were the film's directors.
I wasn't a jock in school, and by the 10th grade, when I was in boarding school I was carrying water buckets for the girls' hockey team. I was the kid with long hair and glasses and acne trying to learn how to play guitar and piano in the music center. I was not an athlete past the age of 13 or 14 when they start throwing the ball really fast.
I'm a little left of center, for sure, with Angels & Airwaves. But even when I get really weird, it's not that weird. It's not like some obscure Sonic Youth record or something. We don't take it quite that far. But what we do like are crescendos, and we do like when a song catches you off guard and it gives you the chills up and down your arms.
The buckyball, with sixty carbon atoms, is the most symmetrical form the carbon atom can take. Carbon in its nature has a genius for assembling into buckyballs. The perfect nanotube, that is, the nanotube that the carbon atom naturally wants to make and makes most often, is exactly large enough that one buckyball can roll right down the center.
Learning how to get in tune with your field of energy and understand how to create your energy, expand that energy, and move that energy through your body. Coming back to your center, and approaching life from that center-to-line place... That to me gave me strength and understanding and hopefully wisdom to solve life's problems and challenges.
The advice I like to give to drummers is that there's no right or wrong way of playing the drums. I think the drumming community can be very antiquated and very stuck in the past of, like, this Neil Peart style, technical Guitar Center drum video kind of approach. That you need to have played for 15 years before you ever do anything worthwhile.
With 'Dawn,' I wanted the slick look; I wanted to bring out the nature of the shopping center, the retail displays, the mannequins. There are times when maybe you reflect that the mannequins are more attractive but less real - less sympathetic, even - than the zombies. Put those kinds of images side by side, and you raise all sorts of questions.
I was the center on our fraternity team, but I was a center-eligible, so I was known for my ability to go out, and I was pretty sure-handed catching a pass in the flat about ten yards down the field. My father played high school football and was pretty good. He also played center, so I always relished the idea that we both ended up playing center.
My microphone went out in the 2009 Tony Awards. It was my big moment, and I was so excited to perform and lead the cast; I sang 'Sit Down, You're Rockin' the Boat.' Every actor dreams of standing front and center on the Tony Awards, and I start to sing, and you hear this crackling. I had no idea what to do - were they going to stop a live telecast?
