Tracey Jones

Umberto Eco, who owned 50,000 books, had this to say about home libraries: “It is foolish to think that you have to read all the books you buy, as it is foolish to criticize those who buy more books than they will ever be able to read. It would be like saying that you should use all the cutlery or glasses or screwdrivers or drill bits you bought before buying new ones. “There are things in life that we need to always have plenty of supplies, even if we will only use a small portion. “If, for example, we consider books as medicine, we understand that it is good to have many at home rather than a few: when you want to feel better, then you go to the ‘medicine closet’ and choose a book. Not a random one, but the right book for that moment. That’s why you should always have a nutrition choice! “Those who buy only one book, read only that one and then get rid of it. They simply apply the consumer mentality to books, that is, they consider them a consumer product, a good. Those who love books know that a book is anything but a commodity.”

Harvard study found that hiring one highly productive ‘toxic worker’ does more damage to a company’s bottom line than employing several less productive, but more cooperative, workers.

Bombshell sex harassment suit against Lorna Hajdini, JPMorgan branded 'complete fabrication' as John Doe unmasked trib.al/lwsWCbT

My life verse 😇😍

Don’t worry I have another one 😂😆😂😆

🚨TODAY: The Task Force to Eradicate Anti-Christian Bias published a report detailing how the Biden Administration’s prosecutions, policies, and practices demonstrated anti-Christian bias throughout the federal government. The report details the Biden Administration’s radical efforts to punish Christians and highlights @POTUS’s efforts to restore religious liberty. Read the report here: justice.gov/opa/media/1438…

Your superpower is personal growth. You can grow your way out of most of the problems you face.

Fewer than half of US adults read a book last year. Even fewer read an actual novel, and the trend is looking worse still for teenagers. Why is nobody talking about this??

One of my favorite prayer books!

Sergeants Irons and Lewis joined students at Little Moore Nursery School in Danielsville, Northampton County. The children learned about safety, stranger danger, and being a good helper. They toured a police cruiser and had story time with the Troopers.

When everyone hates a question, the problem isn't bias. It's the question itself. The craft is broken. New blog on the words leaders use, the questions we shouldn't ask out loud before we ask ourselves first, and what mature leadership looked like under fire this week. @tremendousbooks blog is out! tremendousleadership.com/blogs/tremendo…

What happened to No Kings?!

@AntiFraudClub This is amazing 😂 RIP to the LEARING center 😭

I am a senior coordinating producer for the White House Correspondents' Association Dinner. I have worked eleven of these. I was backstage at the Washington Hilton when the shots were fired. The first thing I heard was not the gunfire. It was glass. A champagne flute hit the floor of the International Ballroom at approximately 9:47 PM. Then a second. Then the sound that I have since been told was a 12-gauge shotgun, which from inside the ballroom sounded like a heavy door slamming in a parking garage. Then the Secret Service moved. They moved the President, the Vice President, the First Lady through the east corridor in under ninety seconds, which is protocol, which is practiced, which is the one part of the evening that worked exactly as it was designed. Everything else was improvised. I know this because I ordered the wine. 94 tables. Two bottles per table. 188 bottles of a Willamette Valley pinot noir that the Association selected in February after a tasting committee spent three meetings debating between Oregon and Burgundy. Oregon won. The budget was $14,200. I signed the invoice. I can tell you the vintage. I can tell you the distributor. I can tell you the per-bottle cost because I negotiated it down from $89 to $76. What I cannot tell you is how 147 of those bottles left the building during an active shooter evacuation. I can tell you what I saw. A correspondent from a network I will not name picked up two bottles on her way to the east exit. Full bottles. One in each hand. She was wearing heels and she did not spill. A man in a tuxedo tucked one inside his jacket the way you'd shoplift a paperback at an airport bookstore. A woman picked up a bottle, looked at the label, put it back, and took a different one. She checked the vintage. During an evacuation. That's editorial judgment under pressure. The theme of the dinner was "A Free Press for a Free People." The banners were still hanging when the evacuation began. I know because I hung them. Twenty-three banners, navy blue, gold serif lettering, $11,400 for the set. They were still hanging when 2,600 guests were directed to the exits by Secret Service agents, one of whom had just taken a shotgun round in his ballistic vest and walked to the ambulance on his own feet. The agent's vest costs approximately $800. The wine that left the building was worth $11,172 at Association cost. At restaurant markup, roughly $29,000. The guests saved more in wine than the vest that saved the agent. That's priority. The video went viral by 10:15 PM. Not the video of the evacuation. Not the Secret Service response. The wine. Three guests in formalwear grabbing bottles off white tablecloths while being told to move toward the exits, while a man with a shotgun stood in the same motor entrance where John Hinckley shot Ronald Reagan 45 years ago. A woman near the service entrance was crying. She said "I just wanna go home." She was not holding wine. She was holding her phone. She was the only person I saw that night who looked afraid rather than inconvenienced. That's the distinction. The rest of the ballroom did not look afraid. They looked interrupted. An active shooter at the WHCD is a logistical problem. The dinner was disrupted. The timeline was off. The after-party at the French Ambassador's residence would need to be rescheduled. These are contingency matters. Contingency matters have solutions. Fear is for people who attend events without security details. I have produced eleven of these dinners. I have managed seating charts that require diplomatic-grade negotiations. I have handled comedians, cabinet secretaries, network anchors, and the editor of a major newspaper who once threatened to leave because his table was behind a column. I have never, in eleven years, seen a guest leave a $76 bottle on the table during an evacuation. I have also never seen a guest check the label first. Both observations are consistent. The bottle is worth taking. The evacuation is worth surviving. The instinct is to do both simultaneously. 188 bottles placed. 41 recovered. 147 unaccounted for. One agent shot. Zero guests injured. Zero bottles broken. A free press for a free people. The press is free. The wine was $76 a bottle. They took it anyway.

Tomorrow I tell the story of Manny. He called the wrong number. She had a PhD, a call sign, and had already had her coffee. 🐱⚡ The Wildcat Factor — Mechanicsburg Chamber, tomorrow AM. @tremendousbooks RSVP: info@mechanicsburgchamber.org mechanicsburgchamber.org/events/

"I am no longer willing to permit a pedophile, rapist, and traitor to coat my hands with his crimes." This would be a great time for Democrats to admit Trump is not actually a pedophile, rapist or traitor. Just telling the truth would go a long way to reducing the insanity.

As my colleagues and I walked toward the Hilton for the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, a man shouted “F*** you!” right at us — simply because we were attending. Later that night, after the shooting, we were running to the White House for the briefing when we passed three teenage girls glued to their phones, reacting to the news. One of them said, “Aw man, I wish they got him,” and her two friends giggled. That moment stopped me cold. When our young people casually cheer for violence like it’s a game, we have a serious problem. Radicalization isn’t some abstract issue — it’s showing up casually in everyday conversations and in our kids’ attitudes.

It is worth noting that the many Democratic leaders being protected last night by Secret Service agents (including the one who took a shot to his vest) are still refusing to pay them unless ICE and Border Protection are defunded...

Time for the Presiding Officer of the Senate, Vice President Vance, to take the gavel and keep the Senate in continuous session until it takes its job to fund homeland security seriously.

We were there front and center. That venue wasn’t built to accommodate an event with the line of succession for the U.S. government. After witnessing last night, drop the TDS and build the White House ballroom for events exactly like these.