Superorganism. A biologist coined that word for our great African ant colonies, claiming that consciousness and intelligence resided not in the individual ant but in the collective ant mind. The trail of red taillights stretching to the horizon as day broke around us made me think of that term. Order and purpose must reside somewhere other than within each vehicle. That morning I heard the hum, the respiration of the superorganism. It's a sound the new immigrant hears but not for long. By the time I learned to say "6-inch Number 7 on rye with Swiss hold the lettuce," the sound, too, was gone. It became part of the what the mind would label silence. You were subsumed into the superorganism.

How the prisoner and the immigrant are treated by the government, how the poor are treated and those without influence: this is secretly how the government would like to treat us all.

Doomed to Hell. Every last one of you.

People floating like pollen in search of more fertile soil.

As we encounter each other, we see our diversity _ of background, race, ethnicity, belief _ and how we handle that diversity will have much to say about whether we will in the end be able to rise successfully to the great challenges we face today.

Champions realise that defeat - and learning from it even more than from winning - is part of the path to mastery.