# Wei's Reading Highlights
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# Total: 1957 highlights across 186 books

=== Midnight in Chernobyl — Adam Higginbotham ===
[2026-06-03 | audiomark] were pulverized into tiny fragments and sucked high into the atmosphere, forming a mixture of gases and aerosols carrying radioisotopes, including iodine-131, Neptuneium-239, CZ-137, Strontium-90, and Plutonium-239, among the most dangerous substances known to man. A further 25-30 tons of uranium and highly radioactive graphite were launched out of the core and scattered around Unit 4, starting small blazes where they fell. Exposed to the air, 1,300 tons of incandescent graphite rubble that remained in the reactor core caught fire immediately. Inside his workspace on Mark Plus 12.5, a few dozen meters away from the control room, Alexander Yvchenko was talking to a colleague who would come in to collect can of paint. Yvchenko heard a thud and the floor shook beneath his feet. It felt as if something heavy, the refueling crane perhaps, had fallen to the floor of the reactor hall. Then he heard the explosion. Yvchenko saw the thick concrete columns and walls of the room buckle like rubber, and the door blown in by a shockwave carrying a wet, oiling cloud of steam and dust was torn from its hinges. Debris rained from the ceiling, the lights went out. Yvchenko's first impulse was to find a safe place to hide. Finally, he thought, the war with the Americans has begun. Over in the turbine hall, turbine engineer Yuri Kornayev gazed up in horror as the corrugated steel ceiling panels above turbine generator number 8 began to collapse toward him, tumbling down one after another like a series of massive playing cards, crashing onto the equipment below. Looking out toward the central hall, former nuclear submarineer Anatoli Hurgitz, saw a dense curtain of steam rolling out toward him. As he was overwhelmed by the searing cloud of radioactive vapor, Hurgitz struggled to swing shut the pressurized airlock door, ceiling off the hall and saving...
[2026-05-21 | audiomark] equipment below. Looking out toward the central hall, former nuclear submarine and atoli Hurgitz saw a dense curtain of steam rolling out toward him. As he was overwhelmed by the searing cloud of radioactive vapor, Hurgitz struggled to swing-shot the pressurized airlock door, sealing off the hall and saving his colleagues in the reactor shop. It was the last thing he did before losing consciousness. At his post in the shadow of the main circulation pumps, the Larry Hodemchuk was the first to die, vaporized instantly by the explosion or crushed beneath the mass of collapsing concrete and machinery. Inside control room number four, tiles and masonry dust fell from the ceiling. Akamov, Toptenov, and Deputy Chief Engineer Diatlov looked about them in confusion. A grey fog bloomed from the air conditioning vents and the lights winked out. When they came back on, Boris Stylia took notice to sharp mechanical smell, unlike any he had ever encountered.
[2026-05-21 | audiomark] 30 tons of uranium and highly radioactive graphite were launched out of the core and scattered around Unit 4, starting small blazes where they fell. Exposed to the air, 1,300 tons of incandescent graphite rubble that remained in the reactor core caught fire immediately. Inside his workspace on Mark Plus 12.5, a few dozen meters away from the control room, Alexander Yvchenko was talking to a colleague who would come in to collect a can of paint. Yvchenko heard a thud and the floor shook beneath his feet. It felt as if something heavy, the refueling grain perhaps, had fallen to the floor of the reactor hall. Then he heard the explosion. Yvchenko saw the thick concrete columns and walls of the room buckle like rubber, and the door blown in by a shockwave carrying a wet, roiling cloud of steam and dust was torn from its hinges. Debris rained from the ceiling, the lights went out. Yvchenko's first impulse was to find a safe place to hide.
[2026-05-21 | audiomark] Before AM, there was a tremendous roar, probably caused as a mixture of hydrogen and oxygen that had formed inside the reactor space suddenly ignited. The entire building shuttered as reactor number four was torn apart by a catastrophic explosion, equivalent to as much as 60 tons of TNT. The blast caromed off the walls of the reactor vessel, tore open the hundreds of pipes of the steam and water circuit, and tossed the upper biological shield into the air like a flipped coin. It swatted away the 350-ton refueling machine, wrenched the high-bay bridge crane from its overhead rails, demolished the upper walls of the reactor hall, and smashed open the concrete roof, revealing the night sky beyond. In that moment, the core of the reactor was completely destroyed. Almost seven tons of uranium fuel, together with pieces of control rods, sirconeum channels, and graphite blocks were pulverized into tiny fragments, and sucked high into the atmosphere, forming a mixture of gases and aerosols carrying radioisotopes, including iodine-131, neptunium-239, cesium-137, strontium-90, and plutonium-239, among the most dangerous substances known to man. A further 25-30 tons of uranium and highly radioactive graphite were launched out of the core and scattered around Unit 4, starting small blazes where they fell. Supposed to the air, 1,300 tons of incandescent graphite rubble that remained in the reactor core caught fire immediately. Inside his workspace on Mark Plus 12.5, a few dozen meters away from the control room, Alexander Yvuchenko was talking to a colleague who would come in to collect a can of paint. Yvuchenko heard a thud, and the floor shook beneath his feet. It felt as if something heavy, the refueling crane perhaps, had fallen to the floor of the reactor hall. And then he heard the explosion. Yvuchenko saw the thick concrete column.
[2026-05-21 | audiomark] several tons, but the crank mechanism used to hold it open had been damaged in the explosion. If they went into the hall and the door swung shut behind them, they would be trapped. So Yvchenko agreed to stay outside. He braced his shoulder against the door, using all his strength to keep it from closing, while his three colleagues stepped over the threshold. Inside, there wasn't much room. Pervichenko stood on a narrow ledge and swept the darkness with Yvchenko's flashlight. Its yellow beam caught the outlines of the gigantic steel disk of Elena tilted in the air, balanced on the edge of the reactor vault. The hundreds of narrow steam tubes that ran through it had been shorn away in ragged clumps, like the hair of a mutilated doll. The control rods were long gone. As they gazed at the molten crater beneath, the three men realized in horror that they were staring directly into the active zone, the blazing throat of the reactor. Pervichenko, Prostk Kuryakov and Kudryatsev remained on the ledge for only as long as Yvchenko held the door a minute at most. But even that was too long. All three received a fatal dose of radiation in a matter of seconds. Even as his three colleagues staggered back into the corridor and shocked, Yvchenko wanted to have a look for himself. But Pervichenko, veteran of the nuclear submarine fleet, who knew very well what had just happened, shoved the younger man aside. The door slammed shut. There's nothing to see here, he said. Let's go. In the darkness of the turbine hall, Deputy Section Chief Rizim Devlat Bayev battled to contain the chaos sweeping his department. Standing emergency regulations dictated that the plant operators, not the fire brigade, fight any fires inside their part of the station, and the blazes now raging across the multiple levels of the turbine station, threatened an even greater catastrophe. The turbine machinery was filled with thousands of liters of highly flammable oil, and the turbine generators
[2026-05-21 | audiomark] alert system designed to notify all senior personnel of an emergency of the highest degree, a general radiation accident. This indicated the release of radioactivity not only within the station, but also onto the grounds and into the air surrounding it. The mayor of Pripyat arrived accompanied by the plant's resident KGB major and the party secretaries of both the plant and the city. The operatics had many difficult questions. The director expected to provide answers had none. The bunker was a long narrow space with a low ceiling cluttered with tables and chairs, which filled quickly with the department heads summoned by the phone alert. Rohanov took a seat right beside the door at a desk equipped with several telephones and a small control panel and began reporting the news of the accident to his superiors. First, he called Moscow where he spoke to his boss at the USSR's Atomic Energy Authority, Soyuz Adam Energo, then he called the first and second secretaries of the party in Kiev.
[2026-05-17 | audiomark] arm, swaying and shorting on everything they touched, showering the wreckage with sparks. And from somewhere in the heart of the tangled mass of rebar and shattered concrete, from deep inside the ruins of Unit 4, where the reactor was supposed to be, Alexander Yvchenko could see something more frightening still. A shimmering pillar of ethereal blue-white light reaching straight up into the night sky, disappearing into infinity. Delicate and strange and encircled by a flickering spectrum of colors conjured by flames from within the burning building and superheated chunks of metal into machinery, the beautiful phosphorescence transfixed Yvchenko for a few seconds. Then Tregeb yanked him back around the corner and out of immediate danger. The phenomenon that had entranced the young engineer was created by the radioactive ionization of air and was an almost certain sign of an unshielded nuclear reactor open to the atmosphere. As the three trucks from Fire Station No. 2 drew up
[2026-05-17 | audiomark] by rubble, they went down two flights of stairs and immediately found themselves knee-deep in water. The door to the hall was jammed shut, but through a narrow gap the two men glimpsed inside. Everything was in ruins. The gigantic steel water tanks had been torn apart like wet cardboard, and above the wreckage where the walls and ceiling of the hall should have been, they could see only stars. They were staring into empty space, the bowels of the benighted station were lit by moonlight. The two men turned into the ground level transport corridor and reeled outside into the night. Standing no more than 50 meters away from the reactor, Tregoven Yuvchenko were among the first to comprehend what had happened to Unit 4. It was a terrifying apocalyptic sight. The roof of the reactor hall was gone, and the right hand wall had been almost completely demolished by the force of the explosion. Half of the cooling circuit had simply disappeared. On the left the water tanks and pipework that had once fed the main circulation pumps dangled in midair. Yuvchenko knew at that moment that Valeri Chodemchuk was certainly dead. The spot where he had been standing lay beneath a steaming pile of rubble, lit by flashes from the severed ends of 6,000 volt cables as thick as a man's arm, swaying and shorting on everything they touched, showering the wreckage with sparks. And from somewhere in the heart of the tangled mass of rebar and shattered concrete from deep inside the ruins of Unit 4 where the reactor was supposed to be, Alexander Yuvchenko could see something more frightening still. A shimmering pillar of ethereal blue white light reaching straight up into the night sky, disappearing into infinity. Delicate and strange and encircled by a flickering spectrum of colors conjured by flames from within the burning building and superheated chunks of metal into machinery, the beautiful phosphorescence transfixed Yuvchenko for a few seconds. Then Tregeb yanked him back around the corner and out of immediate danger.
[2026-05-17 | audiomark] there who needed help. Prophing the humid blackness with a flashlight, Yvchenko came upon a second operator on the other side of a pile of wreckage, still able to stand but filthy, wet, and grotesquely scalded by escaping steam. He was quivering with shock, but waved Yvchenko away. I'm alright," he said, help Chodemchuk. He's in the pump room. Then Yvchenko saw his colleague Yuri Trekub emerging from the gloom. Trekub had been sent from control room number four to manually turn on the taps of the emergency high pressure coolant system and flood the reactor core with water. Knowing this task would require at least two men, Yvchenko told the injured pump operator where to go for help and accompanied Trekub toward the coolant tanks. Finding the nearest entrance blocked by rubble, they went down two flights of stairs and immediately found themselves knee deep in water. The door to the hall was jammed shut, but through a narrow gap the two men glimpsed inside. Everything was in ruins. The gigantic steel water tanks had been torn apart like wet cardboard and above the wreckage where the walls and ceiling of the hall should have been, they could see only stars. They were staring into empty space, the bowels of the benighted station were lit by moonlight. The two men turned into the ground level transport corridor and reeled outside into the night. Standing no more than 50 meters away from the reactor, Trekub and Yvchenko were among the first to comprehend what had happened to unit four. It was a terrifying apocalyptic sight. The roof of the reactor hall was gone and the right hand wall had been almost completely demolished by the force of the explosion. Half of the cooling circuit had simply disappeared. On the left the water tanks and pipework that had once fed the main circulation pumps dangled in midair. Yvchenko knew at that moment that Valyri Hodehmchuk was certainly dead. The spot where he had been standing lay beneath a steaming pile of rubble, lit by flashes from the severed ends of 6000 volt.
[2026-05-16 | audiomark] below by a strange cold glow. In room 29 on the seventh floor of the second administration building, Alexander Tumenov, an engineer, was working late. From his office window he had a clear view of the northern side of the plant. At around 1.25 am, he heard a roar and felt the building shutter. This was followed by a cracking sound and two heavy thumbs. Through the window he saw a cascade of sparks flying out of Unit 4 and what looked to him like fragments of molten metal or burning rags shooting from the unit in all directions. As he watched, larger pieces of blazing debris crashed onto the roofs of Unit 3 and the auxiliary reactor equipment building where they began to burn steadily. Three kilometers away the citizens of Pripyat slept on. Inside Viktor Bruhanov's apartment on Leninga Prospect, the telephone began to ring. Saturday, April 26, 128 am, paramilitary fire station number 2. Just after 1.25 am as a purple cone of iridescent flame leapt 150 meters into the air around Chernobyl's candy cane striped ventilation stack, the alarm bell sounded at paramilitary fire station number 2. In the telephone dispatchers room, the master status board with its hundreds of red warning bulbs, one for every room in the entire Chernobyl complex, suddenly lit up from top to bottom. Many of the 14 men of the third watch had been dosing on their beds in the ready room when a loud thud rattled the station windows and shook the floor, jolting them awake. They were already pulling on their boots as the emergency siren sounded and ran out onto the concrete apron in front of the station where the unit's three trucks stood at the ready, keys in the ignition. They heard the dispatcher shout that there was a fire at the nuclear plant and looked over just in time to see a giant mush...
[2026-05-16 | audiomark] workspace on Mark Plus 12.5, a few dozen meters away from the control room, Alexander Yvchenko was talking to a colleague who would come in to collect a can of paint. Yvchenko heard a thud, and the floor shook beneath his feet. It felt as if something heavy, the refueling grain perhaps, had fallen to the floor of the reactor hall. Then he heard the explosion. Yvchenko saw the thick concrete columns and walls of the room buckle like rubber, and the door blown in by a shockwave carrying a wet, roiling cloud of steam and dust was torn from its hinges. Debris rained from the ceiling, the lights went out. Yvchenko's first impulse was to find a safe place to hide. Finally, he thought, the war with the Americans has begun. Over in the turbine hall, turbine engineer Yuri Kornayev gazed up in horror as the corrugated steel ceiling panels above turbine generator number eight began to collapse toward him, tumbling down one after another like a series of massive playing cards, crashing onto
[2026-05-16 | audiomark] Acomov through the switch, releasing the AZ-5 rods from their clutches, so they could fall under their own weight into the reactor. But the needles remained frozen. It was too late. At 124 am, there was a tremendous roar, probably caused as a mixture of hydrogen and oxygen that had formed inside the reactor space suddenly ignited. The entire building shuttered as reactor number 4 was torn apart by a catastrophic explosion, so violent to as much as 60 tons of TNT. The blast caramed off the walls of the reactor vessel tore open the hundreds of pipes of the steam and water circuit and tossed the upper biological shield into the air like a flipped coin. It swatted away the 350-ton refueling machine, wrenched the high-bay bridge crane from its overhead rails, demolished the upper walls of the reactor hall, and smashed open the concrete roof, revealing the night sky beyond. In that moment, the core of the reactor was completely destroyed. Almost 7 times
[2026-05-16 | audiomark] to decelerate, like a vulga driving at full speed and then beginning to slow down, woo-woo-woo-woo. But then it grew to a roar, and the building started to vibrate ominously around him. He thought it was a side effect of the test, but the reactor was destroying itself. Within three seconds, thermal power leapt to more than a hundred times maximum. In the lower southeast quadrant of the core, a handful of fuel channels overheated rapidly, and the fuel pellets approached melting point. As the temperature climbed toward 3,000 degrees centigrade, the zirconium alloy casing of the assemblies softened, ruptured, and then exploded, dispersing small pieces of metal and uranium dioxide into the surrounding channels, where they instantly evaporated the surrounding water into steam. Then, the channels themselves broke apart. The AZ-5 rods jammed at their halfway point. All eight emergency steam release valves of the reactor's protection systems snapped open, but the mechanisms were quickly overwhelmed and disintegrated. Out on a gantry at Mark Plus 50, high above the floor of the central hall, reactor-shop shift foreman Valeri Paravachenko watched an amazement as the 80 kilogram fuel channel caps in the circular piattichuk began bouncing up and down like toy boats on a storm-tossed pond. At Taptinov's control panel, the alarm sounded for Povachenya Davelenya Ver Arper, pressure increase in reactor space. The walls of the control room had begun to shake, the oscillations slow but growing in force. At his post on the pump desk, Boris Stolietchuk heard a rising moan, the protest of a giant beast in anguish. There was a loud bang. How could this be happening? As the fuel channels failed, water circulation through the core ceased entirely. The check valves on the massive main circulation pumps closed and all the remaining water trapped in the core flashed into steam. A neutron pulse surged through the dying-
[2026-05-16 | audiomark] Xenon poisoning continued to gobble positive neutrons within the core, and they were running out of control rods to extract. More than a hundred of them already stood at their upper limit stops. By 1am, top to noventrega, had hauled the reactor back from the brink of an accidental shutdown. But to do so, they had withdrawn the equivalent of 203 of the unit's 211 control rods from the reactor core. To pull such a large proportion of rods without the authorization of the chief engineer of the plant was forbidden. Yet the engineers knew that the computer system monitoring the number of rods in the core, the operational reactivity margin, wasn't always accurate, and they remained unaware of its importance to the safe running of the reactor. They did not suspect that the simultaneous reinsertion of so many rods into the core could trigger a reactor runaway. At this moment, only a careful stabilization of the reactor followed by a slowly managed shutdown might have headed off disaster. Yet now...
[2026-05-16 | audiomark] he remained. The reactor was being poisoned, plunging into what the operators called a xenon well. At this point, with the reactor's power stalled at its minimum and more xenon accumulating all the time, nuclear safety procedures made the operator's course quite clear. They should have aborted the test and shut down the reactor immediately. But they did not. Later there would be conflicting accounts of exactly what happened next. De Atlov himself would maintain that he was absent from the control room when the power first fell, although he would not always recall exactly why, and issued no instructions to the operators that the senior reactor control engineers desk during the crucial minutes that followed. The recollections of others present at the time would be quite different. According to Toptenov, De Atlov not only witnessed the powerful but also enraged, told him to withdraw more control rods from the reactor to increase power. Toptenov knew that to do so could certainly increase reactivity, but would also leave the core in a dangerous...
[2026-05-16 | audiomark] which allowed him to manage regions of the core individually, but was usually switched off when operating the reactor at low power. So Toptonov began the process of transferring the system to global automatic, a form of nuclear autopilot that would help him keep the RBMK on a steady course as the men prepared for the start of the test. Before completing the change, he was supposed to choose a level at which the computer would maintain reactor power in the new operating mode. But somehow, he skipped this step. The reactor proved as unforgiving as ever. Bereft of fresh instructions, the computer defaulted to the last set pointed had been given, near zero. Now, Toptonov watched in dismay as the glowing gray figures on the reactor meter display began to tumble. 500, 400, 300, 200, 100 megawatts. The reactor was slipping away from him. A series of alarms sounded, failure in measuring circuits, emergency power increase rate protection on.
[2026-05-16 | audiomark] Department, expected to be on hand to help the reactor operator through his part in the test, had been told the experiment was already complete. He hadn't shown up at all. Stepping up to the instruments on the Senior Reactor Control Engineers' desk, 25-year-old Leonid Toptenov, just two months into his new job, prepared to pilot the capricious reactor through a shutdown for the first time in his life. But Deputy Chief Engineer Diattlov was determined to press on. If the test wasn't completed that night, it would have to wait at least another year, and Diattlov didn't like to wait. At 55, and a totally Diattlov looked every inch the austere Soviet technocrat, tall and gaunt with sharp cheekbones, sparse gray hair, swept straight back from his high forehead, and narrow Siberian eyes that even in photographs seemed to glint with malice. A veteran physicist who had come to Chernobyl after 14 years working on naval reactors in the Soviet Far East. Diattlov was one of the three most seem...
[2026-05-16 | audiomark] 9 p.m. at the earliest. By midnight on Friday, the team of electrical engineers waiting to monitor the test were threatening to cancel their contract and return to Deneatsk if it didn't start soon. In control room number four, the staff who had been briefed on the test program had reached the end of their shift and were preparing to go home. And the physicist from the plans Nuclear Safety Department, expected to be on hand to help the reactor operator through his part in the test, had been told the experiment was already complete. He hadn't shown up at all. Stepping up to the instruments on the senior reactor control engineers desk, 25-year-old Leonid Toptenov, just two months into his new job, prepared to pilot the capricious reactor through a shutdown for the first time in his life. But Deputy Chief Engineer, Diatlov, was determined to press on. If the test wasn't completed that night, it would have to wait at least another year, and Diatlov didn't like to wait. At 55, and a totally Diatlov looked every inch the austere Soviet...
[2026-05-16 | audiomark] authored another essay in which he boasted, in the 30 years since the first Soviet nuclear power plant opened, there has not been a single instance when plant personnel or nearby residents have been seriously threatened. Not a single disruption in normal operation occurred that would have resulted in the contamination of the air, water, or soil. In a separate interview, Vitalia Sklarov, the Ukrainian Minister of Energy and Electrification, assured readers that the odds of a meltdown at the plant were one in 10,000 years. 5. Friday, April 25, 1155 PM, Unit Control Room Number 4. Beneath the sickly fluorescent strip lights of control room number four, aranted haze of cigarette smoke hung in the air. The midnight shift had only just arrived, but the mood was growing tense. The turbine generator tests scheduled to finish that afternoon had not yet...
[2026-05-16 | audiomark] as a nuclear engineer in the U.S. Navy and knew a disaster when he saw one, attended the scene. The International Anti-Nuclear Movement, which had slowly been gaining momentum over the previous decade, could not have asked for a more fearsome totem of a dangerous technology slipping its leash. In the United States, the development of the nuclear power industry, already dogged by rising construction costs and growing public apprehension, halted almost overnight. As bad as it made the United States look, news of Three Mile Island was censored inside the USSR for fear it could tarnish the ostensibly spotless record of the peaceful atom. Publicly, Soviet officials attributed the accident to the failings of capitalism. At a mission Valyrii Lagosov, Alexanderov's immediate deputy at the Khrushchevrov Institute, published an article insisting that the events in Three Mile Island were irrelevant to the USSR's nuclear industry because its operators were far better trained and its safety standards higher than those in the United States.
[2026-05-16 | audiomark] R.R.M. was a crucial safety precaution intended to prevent a major accident. Deprived of information about why such rules might be important, the operators went on with their work as usual, ignorant of the potentially catastrophic consequences of breaching them. Meanwhile, every accident that did occur at a nuclear station in the Soviet Union continued to be regarded as a state secret, kept even from the specialists at the installations where they occurred. Early on the evening of September 9, 1982, Nikolai Steinberg was sitting at the desk in his third floor office between Chernobyl units 1 and 2, overlooking the vent stack shared by the two reactors. Steinberg, a 35-year-old with a short goatee and an easy charm, had worked in Chernobyl since 1971, arriving straight from the Moscow Power Engineering Institute as a graduate in nuclear thermohydrolics and one of a new breed of bright-eyed Adam Sheeke. He had spent more than two years studying the RBMK
[2026-05-16 | audiomark] to protect the reactor against a failure of its feed water supply. Eventually, the Chernobyl engineers had to design and fabricate their own. Meanwhile in Moscow, the reactor designers continued to discover further troubling flaws in their creation. In 1980, Niki had completed a confidential study that listed nine major design failings and thermohydraulic instabilities which undermined the safety of the RBMK reactor. The report made it clear that accidents were not merely possible under rare and improbable conditions, but also likely in the course of everyday operation. Yet they took no action to redesign the reactor or even to warn plant personnel of its potential hazards. Instead of engineering new safety systems, Niki had simply revised the operating instructions for the RBMK-1000. After decades of accident-free operation of military reactors, the atomic chieftains of Niki and the Kuchatov Institute apparently believed that a well-written set of manuals would be an-
[2026-05-16 | audiomark] were inevitable. On the night of November 30, 1975, just over a year after it had first reached full operating capacity, Unit 1 of the Leningrad Nuclear Power Plant was being brought back online after scheduled maintenance when it began to run out of control. The AZ-5 Emergency Protection System was tripped, but before the chain reaction could be stopped, a partial meltdown occurred, destroying or damaging 32 fuel assemblies and releasing radiation into the atmosphere over the Gulf of Finland. It was the first major accident involving an RBMK reactor and the Ministry of Media Machine Building set up a commission to investigate what had gone wrong. Afterward, the official line was that a manufacturing defect had led to the destruction of a single fuel channel, but the commission knew otherwise. The accident was the result of the design faults inherent in the reactor and caused by an uncontrollable increase in the steam void coefficient. Shredmash suppressed the commission's findings and cover.
[2026-05-16 | audiomark] reaction throughout the reactor. Yet the AZ-5 mechanism was not designed to bring about an abrupt emergency stop. Dallajal and the technicians of Nikkiyat believed that suddenly cutting off the electricity generated by the reactor would be disruptive to the operation of the Soviet grid, and they thought that such an immediate shutdown would be necessary only in the extremely unlikely event of a total loss of external power to the plant. So they designed the AZ-5 system gradually reduced the reactor's power to zero. Rather than dedicated emergency motors, the system was driven by the same electric servos that moved the manual reactor control rods used by the operators to manage reactor power during normal operation. Starting from their fully withdrawn position above the reactor, it would take between 18 and 21 seconds for the AZ-5 rods to descend completely into the core. The designers hoped that the rod's slow speed would be compensated for by their great number. But 18 seconds is a long time in neutron physics, and in eternity in a nuclear reactor with a high positive void coefficient. Adding to this disquieting list of major design defects, the construction of the reactors also suffered from the shoddy workmanship that plagued Soviet industry. The full startup of Lennon Grads' reactor number one was delayed for almost a year after fuel assemblies became stuck in their channels and had to be returned to Moscow for repeated testing. The valves and flow meters in other RBMKs used to regulate the crucial supply of water to each of the more than 1,600 uranium-filled channels proved so unreliable that the operators in the control room often had no idea to what extent the reactors were being cooled or if they were being cooled at all. Accidents were inevitable. On the night of November 30, 1975, just over a year after it had first reached full operating capacity, Unit 1 of the Lennon Grads' nuclear power plant was being brought back online after scheduled maintenance.
[2026-05-16 | audiomark] a single unit but several separate reactors in one. One specialist compared it to a huge apartment building where a family in one flat might be celebrating a raucous wedding while next door another was observing a funeral wake. Isolated hotspots of reactivity might build deep inside the core where they could prove hard to detect. This problem was especially pronounced during startup and shutdown when the reactor was operating at low power and the systems designed to detect reactivity within the core proved unreliable. During these crucial periods the engineers at their desks in the control room became almost totally blind to what was happening inside the active zone. Instead of reading their instruments they were forced to estimate the levels of activity in the core using experience and intuition. This made startup and shutdown the most demanding and treacherous stages of RBMK operation. A third fault lay in the heart of the reactor's emergency protection system the last line of defense against an accident.
[2026-05-16 | audiomark] hole on the RBMK blueprints, transforming it from a skitzoid contraption that could manufacture both plutonium and electricity into a tame generator of power for the civilian grid. Implementing these modifications was difficult and complex work and took far longer than expected. Primitive Soviet computing technology made calculating the expected performance of the reactor laborious and produced unreliable results. It was not until 1968 that the new reactor design, now called the RBMK-1000, was complete. So, to save time, Sredmash decided to skip the prototype stage entirely. The quickest way to find out how the new reactors would work in industrial electricity generation would be to put them directly into mass production. Construction began on the first RBMK reactor in the Soviet Union at a Sredmash installation on the Gulf of Finland outside Leningrad in 1970. In the meantime, a pair of technical and economic institutes and key abs.
[2026-05-16 | audiomark] that the hazards of the positive void coefficient made the new reactor inherently prone to explosion, and although his superiors attempted to have him dismissed from the Institute because of his dissent, he began a letter writing campaign that eventually reached the Central Committee of the Communist Party and the Soviet Council of Ministers. But by then, the government, adhering to the rigid needs of central economic planning, had already issued its decree that four of the new behemoth reactors be built. So, the designers of Nikkiyat scrambled to perform a drastic overhaul on the RBMK blueprints, transforming it from a skitzoid contraption that could manufacture both plutonium and electricity into a tame generator of power for the civilian grid. Implementing these modifications was difficult and complex work and took far longer than expected. Primitive Soviet computing technology made calculating the expected performance of the reactor laborious and produced unreliable results. It was not until 1968 that the new reactor design, now called...
[2026-05-16 | audiomark] engineers' calculations suggested that if more than two and as few as three or four of the 1,600 pressure tubes ruptured simultaneously, the sudden release of high pressure steam would be enough to lift all 2,000 tons of Alena and the Piatacuck off their mounts, severing every one of the remaining steam lines and pressure tubes and resulting in a devastating explosion. Yet the designers saw no need to prepare for such a calamity which they regarded as outside the realm of reasonable probability. Nonetheless, they granted the scenario its own designation, the Beyond Design Basis accident. The Ministry of Media Machine Building ordered the first draft plans of the RBMK to be drawn up by a heavy machinery plant in Leningrad which also built tanks and tractors. But when they received the blueprints, Sredmash dismissed them as technically unsound. One scientist from the Karchatov Institute warned that the design was too dangerous to be put into civilian operation. Another wreck-
[2026-05-16 | audiomark] rupture in one or two of these tubes by safely directing the resulting release of high-pressure, radioactive steam downward through a series of valves and into giant water-filled tanks in the basement beneath the reactor where it would be cooled and securely contained. A break in the pressure tubes was one of the worst accidents the designers had ever prepared to encounter with the RBMK, a so-called Maximalna Priect Naya Avaria or Maximum Design Basis accident. This designation also encompassed other potential calamities, including earthquakes, a plane crashing into the plant, or a complete rupture in one of the large diameter water pipes in the reactor coolant circuit which would deprive the core of water and trigger a meltdown. To guard against this last eventuality, the designers devised an emergency cooling system powered by compressed nitrogen gas and reactor operators at every level of the industry were drilled to maintain a continuous supply of water to the core at all costs. Worst accidents with theoretical
[2026-05-16 | audiomark] Once the reactor went critical and the uranium began to heat, releasing the energy of nuclear fission, the fuel assemblies were cooled by water pumped into the core from below. Under enormous pressure, 69 atmospheres or a thousand pounds per square inch, the water rose to 280 degrees centigrade and turned to a mixture of water and superheated steam, which was then piped out through the top of the reactor to giant separator drums. These directed the steam to turbines to generate electricity, while the remaining water returned to the beginning of the coolant loop to start its journey through the core once more. The power of the reactor was regulated by 211 boron carbide-filled control rods, most around 5 meters long, which could be raised or lowered into the reactor core to increase or decrease the rate of the nuclear chain reaction, and thus the level of heat and energy it generated. To help protect the plant and its staff from the radiation seething within, the reactor core, the active zone, was ser...
[2026-05-16 | audiomark] nuclear reactors, which would become known by the acronym RBMK, the reactor Bolshoi Moshenosti Canalmi, or high-power channel-type reactor. Developed from the Ministry of Media Machine-Buildings Military Workhorse, the plutonium and power-producing Ivan II, it was a direct descendant of the pioneering Adam Mirni-1 reactor, reimagined on an Olympian scale. Five meters across and seven meters high, the core of the RBMK was a massive cylinder, larger than a two-story house, composed of more than 1,700 tons of moderating graphite blocks, and stacked into 2,488 separate columns, each drilled from top to bottom with a circular channel. These channels contained more than 1,600 heat-resistant zirconium alloy pressure tubes, each of which held a pair of metal assemblies packed with sealed rods of fuel. 190 tons of enriched uranium dioxide compressed into ceramic pellets, roughly the diameter of a metal...
[2026-05-16 | audiomark] The impatience of the station's deputy chief engineer was rising, and there was mounting disagreement about how to respond to the troubling data coming in from reactor number 4. 4. Secrets of the Peaceful Atom On September 29, 1966, Soviet Council of Ministers in Moscow issued a decree approving the construction of the first in a new generation of giant water and graphite nuclear reactors, which would become known by the acronym RBMK, the reactor Bolshoi Moshenosti Canalmi, or high power channel type reactor. Developed from the Ministry of Media Machine Building's military workhorse, the plutonium and power producing Ivan II, it was a direct descendant of the pioneering Adam Mirney One reactor, reimagined on an Olympian scale. 12 meters across and 7 meters high, the core of the RBMK was a massive cylinder.
[2026-05-16 | audiomark] watch, with whom he graduated from the Fire Safety Institute in Chocassi. Peter, the younger son of Grandpa Chamel, was a burly, good-natured 24-year-old lieutenant. Chamel had already covered for Provec after his daughter's birth, and that morning he'd been there again with his uniform on, ready to go. But the deputy station commander wouldn't approve the change. Major Telyat Mikov will be back from his holiday on Monday, he told Provec. He'll give you permission. Chamel went home to get some rest and prepare for work on Saturday, and Provec once again took command of the troublesome third watch. Back in Pripyat, Peter decided to take advantage of his unexpected night off, and joined three fellow officers from the Fire Station for dinner at the restaurant in the city's new shopping center. Despite General Secretary Gorbachev's ongoing union-wide campaign against alcohol, they had no trouble getting a bottle of vodka. Later they moved on to Sovietzkoi-Sampanskoi, the cheap, mass-produced people.
[2026-05-16 | audiomark] was constructed with a utilitarian disregard for a high-minded notions of architecture. Its form followed function in the most economical ways the station's designers could conceive. The turbine hall housed the station's eight colossal steam turbines in a single row, end-to-end in a cavernous shed 30 meters high and roofed with corrugated steel. The plant's four reactors were strung out in a line along the length of the turbine hall. Giant concrete boxes arranged in the order they had been constructed from one to four. The first two reactors were housed in separate structures, but to save time and money, reactor number three and reactor number four had been built together, back to back under the same roof where they shared ventilation and auxiliary systems. Between the turbine hall and the reactors was the spine of the station, which housed the deirator corridor. Uninterrupted by a single door or dog leg is seemingly endless hallway ran parallel to the turbine hall all the way from the main administrative
[2026-05-16 | audiomark] engineer for just two months. Coroll, still an assistant, was behind him, but hoping to qualify soon as a senior engineer in the Unit 4 reactor department. Toptenoff found his old friend launching on the couch, reading a story about a new medical phenomenon discovered in the United States, AIDS, in a recent Russian edition of Scientific American. Leonid told him that there was an electrical test on the turbines scheduled during his shift at reactor number 4 that night. It would be worth witnessing. Let's go together, Toptenoff said. Now I'll pass, Coroll replied. I've got this interesting article to read. At a few minutes before 11 that night, Toptenoff set off for the bus stop, a few blocks away on Karchatov Street, where a scheduled service shuttled workers to and from the plant. He walked down to the end of sport of Naya and took a right at the darkened windows of the Jubilee Home Services store. Then on past the post office and the technical school and across the square toward the end of Lenina prospect. There was a warm, sultry night, the sky and inky blue glittering with stars. On the bus, Toptenoff joined his colleagues on the midnight shift in Unit 4. He has included the control room staff, senior unit control engineer Boris Stoliacuk and shift foreman Alexander Akamov and the engineers from the reactor department, among them Leonid's friend Alexander Yufchenko, wearing his new clothes. It was a short ride. After 10 minutes they were at the steps of the station's main administrative block. The four-story office building sat like the bridge of a massive container ship at the extreme eastern edge of the station's four reactors and the turbine hall would stretch to weigh into the distance a narrow concrete box almost a kilometer long. Inside the administrative block were the offices of Viktor Brehanov and his senior staff and one of the plant's two main radiation control points. The sanitary locks that marked the barrier between the plant's clean and dirty or potentially radioactive zone.
[2026-05-16 | audiomark] loved at Unit 4. You've Chenko declined. They insisted. He declined again, this time quoting a few lines from angles. They allowed him to go home, but Alexander knew he couldn't say no forever. Nobody could refuse the party's requests. In the meantime, with two salaries and a place of their own, you've Chenko's had all they needed. They began thinking about a second child. Still, with no family nearby to provide help, life was hardly easy. In the second half of April that year, Carol became sick with a bad cold. At first, Natalia took time off work to look after him, but the illness lingered and when she had to go back to her students, the couple began sharing child care. When Alexander was on the night shift at the plant, caring for the boy during the day fell to him. When Natalia returned home from work on the afternoon of April 25, she looked down from the apartment window and spotted her husband on the street below, giving Carol a ride on the crossbar of his bike. Alex...
[2026-05-16 | audiomark] fiercely guarded military locations in the USSR. The Soviet government refused to acknowledge its very existence, let alone that anything might have happened there. The CIA resorted to sending high altitude U2 spy planes to photograph the area. It was on the second of these missions in May 1960 that Francis Gary Powers' aircraft was shot down by a Soviet SA-2 surface-to-air missile in what became one of the defining events of the Cold War. Though it would be decades before the truth finally emerged, the May Act as aster remained for many years the worst nuclear accident in history. 3. Friday, April 25, 5pm, Pripyat. The afternoon of Friday, April 25, 1986 was beautiful and warm and Pripyat, more like summer than late spring. Most everyone was looking forward to the long weekend leading into May Day. Technicians were preparing the grand opening of the city's new amusement park and families were filling their fridges with food for the holiday. Some were engaged in the home improvement fads sweeping the city, hanging wallpaper and laying tiles in their apartments. Outside the scent of apple and cherry blossom lingered in the air. Fresh laundry hung on the balconies of Linnina Prospect. Beneath their windows, Victor Bruhanov's roses were in bloom, a pallet of pink, red and fuchsia. In the distance, the V Island and Atomic Energy Station, attended by the huge lattice power-mast carrying high-tension cables to the switching stations, shown a brilliant white against the skyline. On the roof of the Ten-Story apartment building on Sargent Lazarev Street, overlooking the central square, giant angular white letters spelled out in Ukrainian, the millifluous propaganda jingle of the Ministry of Energy and Electrification, Ay-Buta Atom-Rubat-Nakam on the soldatum. Let the atom be a worker, not a soldier.
[2026-05-16 | audiomark] A dedicated communist who believed entirely in science as an instrument of the Soviet economic dream, he prized monumental projects over cutting-edge research. As the era of stagnation began, the Soviet scientific establishment lavished resources on the immediate priorities of the state, space exploration, water diversion, nuclear power, while emergent technologies including computer science, genetics, and fiber optics fell behind. Alexanderov oversaw the design of reactors for nuclear submarines and icebreakers, as well as the prototypes of the new channel-type graphite reactors designed to generate electricity. To reduce the cost of building these, he emphasized economies of scale and insisted on increasing their size to colossal proportions, using standardized components and common factory materials. He saw no reason that manufacturing nuclear reactors should be any different from making tanks or combine harvesters. Alexanderov regarded the serial production of these massive.
[2026-05-16 | audiomark] large a number, or any of the myriad safety systems fail, the reactor may be overwhelmed by the vision of prompt neutrons and become prompt supercritical. The result is a reactor runaway, a catastrophic scenario accidentally triggering a similar process to the one designed into the heart of an atomic bomb, creating an uncontrollable surge of power that increases into the reactor core either melts down or explodes. To generate electricity, the uranium fuel inside a reactor must become hot enough to turn water into steam, but not so hot that the fuel itself starts to melt. To prevent this, in addition to control rods and a neutron moderator, the reactor requires a coolant to remove excess heat. The first reactors built in the United Kingdom used graphite as a moderator and air as a coolant. Later commercial models in the United States employed boiling water as both a coolant and a moderator. Both designs had distinct hazards and benefits. Water does not burn, although when turned to pressure...
[2026-05-16 | audiomark] and delicately sustained for weeks, months, or even years. This requires three components, a moderator, control rods, and a coolant. The simplest form of nuclear reactor requires no equipment at all. If the right quantity of uranium-235 is gathered in the presence of a neutron moderator, water, for example, or graphite, which slows down the movement of the uranium neutrons so that they can strike one another, a self-sustaining chain reaction will begin, releasing molecular energy as heat. The ideal combination of circumstances required for such an event, a criticality, has even aligned spontaneously in nature, an ancient subterranean deposits of uranium found in the African nation of Gabon, where groundwater acted as a moderator. There, self-sustaining chain reactions began on the ground two billion years ago, producing modest quantities of heat energy, an average of around 100 kilowatts, or enough to light a thousand light bulbs, and continued intermittently for as long as a million years.
[2026-05-16 | audiomark] in 1942 was the anvil of the Manhattan Project, the first essential step in creating the fissile material needed to forge the world's first atomic weapon. The reactors that followed, built on a remote tract of land along the Columbia River in Hanford, Washington, were constructed solely to manufacture plutonium for use in the United States growing arsenal of atomic bombs. The U.S. Navy was responsible for choosing the reactor design subsequently used in almost every civilian power station in the country. The first nuclear plant constructed for civilian use in the United States was based on blueprints recycled from a planned atomic-powered aircraft carrier. In the USSR, the pattern was the same. The first Soviet atomic bomb, RDS-1, or the article as it was called by the men who built it, was detonated soon after dawn on August 29, 1949, on a test-range 140 kilometers northwest of Semi-Pelatinsk on the steps of Kazakhstan. The project, codenamed Problem Number One, was...
[2026-05-16 | audiomark] earlier. More than 80 years later, Curie's laboratory notes remain so radioactive that they are kept in a lead-lined box. Because radium can be mixed with other elements to make them glow in the dark, clockmakers used it to create fluorescent numbers on watch faces and hired young women to perform the delicate task of painting them. In the watch factories of New Jersey, Connecticut and Illinois, the radium girls were trained to lick the tips of their brushes into a fine point before dipping them into pots of radium paint. When the jaws and skeletons of the first girls began to rot and disintegrate, their employers suggested that they were suffering from syphilis. A successful lawsuit revealed that their managers had understood the risks of working with radium and yet done everything they could to conceal the truth from their employees. It was the first time the public learned the hazards of ingesting radioactive material. The biological effect of radiation on the human body would eventually be measured in REM, rent-gen-equ-
[2026-05-16 | audiomark] atoms neutrons splitting the nucleus of another, sending more neutrons into a collision course with further nuclei. As it went critical, the resulting chain reaction of splitting atoms, nuclear fission, would liberate unimaginable quantities of energy. At 8.16am on August 6, 1945, a fission weapon containing 64 kilograms of uranium detonated 580 meters above the Japanese city of Hiroshima, and Einstein's equation proved mercilessly accurate. The bomb itself was extremely inefficient, just 1 kilogram of the uranium underwent fission, and only 700 milligrams of mass, the weight of a butterfly, was converted into energy. But it was enough to obliterate an entire city in a fraction of a second. Some 78,000 people died instantly, or immediately afterward, vaporized, crushed, or incinerated in the firestorm that followed the blast wave. By the end of the year, another 25,000 men, women and children, would also sicken and die from their exposure to the radiation liberated by the world's first atom bomb attack. Radiation is produced by the disintegration of unstable atoms. The atoms of different elements vary by weight, determined by the number of protons and neutrons in each nucleus. Each element has a unique number of protons, which never changes, determining its atomic number and its position in the periodic table. Hydrogen never has more than one proton, oxygen always has 8, gold has 79. But atoms of the same element may have varying numbers of neutrons, resulting in different isotopes, ranging anywhere from deuterium, hydrogen with one neutron instead of two, to uranium 235, uranium metal with five extra neutrons. Anything to or removing neutrons from the nucleus of a stable atom, results in an unstable isotope. But any unstable isotope will try to regain its equilibrium, throwing off parts of its
[2026-05-16 | audiomark] fly away at great speed, smashing into other nearby atoms, causing their nuclei to split in turn, releasing even more energy. If enough uranium atoms were gathered in the correct configuration forming a critical mass, this process could begin sustaining itself with one atom's neutrons splitting the nucleus of another, sending more neutrons into a collision course with further nuclei. As it went critical, the resulting chain reaction of splitting atoms, nuclear fission, would liberate unimaginable quantities of energy. At 8.16am on August 6, 1945, a fission weapon containing 64 kilograms of uranium detonated 580 meters above the Japanese city of Hiroshima, and Einstein's equation proved mercilessly accurate. The bomb itself was extremely inefficient, just one kilogram of the uranium underwent fission, and only 700 milligrams of mass, the weight of a butterfly, was converted into energy. But it was enough to obliterate an entire city.
[2026-05-15 | audiomark] as Adam Sheeke, who came to watch the experts at work. But others were mechanics and electricians who came from elsewhere in the energy industry, the power men or energy teaky, who harbored complacent assumptions about nuclear plants. They had been told that radiation was so harmless you could spread it on bread, or that a reactor was, like a samevar, more simple than a thermal power plant. At home, some drank from glassware, colored with iridescent patterns that they boasted, were created by having been steeped in the radioactive waters of the plant's used fuel coolant pond. Others listlessly filled out their shifts, reading novels and playing cards. Those who actually had important work to do were known with a bureaucratic frankness that hinted at satire as the group of effective control. Yet the dead weight of unwanted manpower tugged even at those with urgent responsibilities and infected the plant with inefficiency and a dangerous sense of inertia. At the top.
[2026-05-15 | audiomark] that the USSR had lost its way, but could be led to the utopia of true communism by returning to the founding principles of Lenin. It would be a long road. The economy was staggering under the financial burden of the Cold War, Soviet troops were mired in Afghanistan, and in 1983, US President Ronald Reagan had extended the battle into space with the Strategic Defense Initiative, the Star Wars program. Annihilation and a nuclear strike seemed as close as ever, and at home the monolithic old ways, the strangling bureaucracy and corruption of the era of stagnation lingered on. In the 16 years that it spent building four nuclear reactors and an entire city on an isolated stretch of marshland, Viktor Brehanov had received a long education in the realities of the system. Hammered on the anvil of the party, made pliant by the privileges of rank, the well-informed and opinionated young specialist, had been transformed into an obedient tool of the nomenclature. He admet his targets and fulfilled the plan and won himself and his men orders of merit and pay bonuses for beating deadlines and exceeding labor quotas, but, like all successful Soviet managers, to do so Brehanov had learned how to be expedient and bend limited resources to meet an endless list of unrealistic goals. He had to cut corners, cook the books, and fudge regulations. When the building materials specified by the architects of the Chernobyl station had proved unavailable, Brehanov was forced to improvise. The plans called for fireproof cables, but when none could be found, the builders simply did the best they could. When the Ministry of Energy in Moscow learned that the roof of the plan's turbine hall had been covered with highly flammable bitumen, they ordered him to replace it. But the flame-retardant material specified for re-roofing the structure, 50 meters wide and almost a kilometer long, was not even being manufactured in the USSR, so the Ministry granted it.
[2026-05-15 | audiomark] farms and tank factories, power stations and hospitals, governed their staff by bullying and intimidation. These were the thuggish bureaucrats who, according to the novelist and historian Pierce Paul Reed, had the face of a truck driver but the hands of a pianist. The humiliation of enduring an expletive spattered dressing-down delivered at screaming pitch was a ritual repeated daily in offices everywhere. An engendered a top-down culture of totying Yesmen who learned to anticipate the whims of their superiors and agree with whatever they said while threatening their own underlings. When the boss put his own proposals to the vote, he could reasonably expect them to be carried unanimously every time, a triumph of brute force over reason. Advancement in many political, economic and scientific careers was granted only to those who repressed their personal opinions, avoided conflict and displayed unquestioning obedience to those above them. By the mid-70s, this blind conformism had smothered individual decision-making at all levels of the state and party machine, infecting not just the bureaucracy but technical and economic disciplines too. Lies and deception were endemic to the system, trafficked in both directions along the chain of management. Members lower down past up reports to their superiors packed with falsified statistics and inflated estimates of unmet goals triumphantly reached, unfulfilled quotas heroically exceeded. To protect his own position at every stage, each manager relayed the lies upward or compounded them. Seated at the top of a teetering pyramid of falsehood, pouring over reams of figures that had little basis in reality, were the economic mandarins of the state general planning committee, Goss Plan in Moscow. The brain of the command economy, Goss Plan managed the centralized distribution of resources throughout the USSR, from toothbrushes to tractors, reinforced concrete to platform...
[2026-05-15 | audiomark] model known by the acronym RBMK for reactor Bolshoi Moshnosti Canalmi or high-power channel-type reactor. In keeping with the Soviet weakness for Gigantomania, the RPMK was both physically larger and more powerful than almost any reactor yet built in the West. Each one theoretically capable of generating 1,000 megawatts of electricity enough to serve at least a million modern homes. The deadline set by his bosses in Moscow and Kiev required Brahanov to work with superhuman dispatch. According to the details of the 9th 5-year plan, the first was due to come online in December 1975 with the second to follow before the end of 1979. Brahanov quickly realized that this timetable was impossible. By the time the young director began work in Chernobyl in 1970, the socialist economic experiment was going into reverse. The USSR was buckling under the strain of decades of central planning, fatuous bureaucracy, massive military spending, and endemic corruption. The start of what would come to be called the era of stagnation. Shortages and bottlenecks, theft and embezzlement blighted almost every industry. Nuclear engineering was no exception. From the beginning, Brahanov lacked construction equipment, key mechanical parts and building materials often turned up late or not at all, and those that did were often defective. Steel and zirconium, essential for the miles of tubing and hundreds of fuel assemblies that would be plumbed through the heart of the giant reactors, were both in short supply. Piper and reinforced concrete intended for nuclear use often turned out to be so poorly made it had to be thrown away. The quality of workmanship at all levels of Soviet manufacturing was so poor that building projects throughout the nation's power industry were forced to incorporate an extra stage known as pre-installation overhaul. Upon delivery from the factory, each piece...
[2026-05-15 | audiomark] would not be exposed to fields of low-level ionizing radiation. But Prepyat remained close enough to the plant to be reached by road in less than 10 minutes, just 3 kilometers as the crow flies. And as the city grew, its rest and began to build summer houses in the sanitary zone, each happy to disregard the rules in exchange for a makeshift dacha and a small vegetable garden. Victor Brahanov's initial instructions for the Chernobyl plant called for the construction of a pair of nuclear reactors, a new model known by the acronym RBMK for reactor Bolshoi Moshnosti Kanalny, or high-power channel-type reactor. In keeping with the Soviet weakness for Gigantomania, the RBMK was both physically larger and more powerful than almost any reactor yet built in the West. Each one, theoretically capable of generating 1,000 megawatts of electricity, enough to serve at least a million modern homes. The deadline set by his bosses...
[2026-05-15 | audiomark] He had risen quickly from lowly jobs in the turbine shop of an Uzbek hydroelectric power plant to overseeing the launch of Ukraine's largest coal-fired station in Sleviensk in the industrial east of the Republic. But at the Ministry of Energy and Moscow, knowledge and experience were regarded as less important qualifications for top management, than loyalty and an ability to get things done. Technical matters could be left to the experts. At the dawn of the 1970s and a bid to meet its surging need for electricity and to catch up with the West, the USSR embarked upon a crash program of reactor building. Soviet scientists had once claimed to lead the world in nuclear engineering and astonished their capitalist counterparts in 1954 by completing the first reactor to generate commercial electricity. But since then, they had fallen hopelessly behind. In July 1969, as US astronauts made their final preparations to land on the moon.
[2026-05-15 | audiomark] A state photographer posed them between long-handled shovels and a theotolite, the helicopter waiting squat and awkward in the background. They stood in the snow and watched as Minister Neparajni drove a ceremonial stake, centimeter by centimeter, into the iron ground. It was February 20, 1970, after months of deliberation the Soviet authorities had at last settled on a name for the new power plant that would one day make the USSR's nuclear engineering famous across the globe. They had considered a few options, the North Kiev or the Western Ukraine or perhaps the Pripyat Atomic Energy Station. But finally, Vladimir Shurbitsky, the formidable leader of the Ukrainian Communist Party, signed a decree confirming that the station would take the name of the regional capital, a small but ancient town of 2,000 people, 14 kilometers from where Brunov and his bosses stood in the snow-covered field. The town of Chernobyl had been established in the 12th century.
[2026-05-15 | audiomark] twenty-six years old with close-cropped dark hair and ice blue eyes, Lugachev had joined the Soviet army when he was still a boy. They had trained him well. The instructors from the military academy outside Moscow taught him with lethal poisons and unshielded radiation. He traveled to the testing grounds of semi-pelitinsk in Kazakhstan and to the desolate East Eust-Ural Strait, where the fallout from a clandestine radioactive accident still poisoned to the landscape. Eventually, Lugachev's training took him even to the remote and forbidden islands of Novaya-Zemlia, high in the Arctic Circle and ground zero to the detonation of the terrible Tsar-Bamba, the largest thermonuclear device in history. Now is the lead radiation reconnaissance officer of the 427th Redbanner mechanized regiment of the Kiev district Civil Defense Force. Lugachev knew how to protect himself and his three-man crew from nerve agents, biological weapons, gamma rays and hot particles by doing their work just as
[2026-05-14 | audiomark] in an operating theater to protect his hair and white canvas boots. The Chernobyl plant was constructed with a utilitarian disregard for high-minded notions of architecture. Its form followed function in the most economical ways the station's designers could conceive. The turbine hull housed the station's eight colossal steam turbines in a single row, end-to-end in a cavernous shed 30 meters high and roofed with corrugated steel. The plant's four reactors were strung out in a line along the length of the turbine hull. Giant concrete boxes arranged in the order they had been constructed from one to four. The first two reactors were housed in separate structures, but to save time and money, reactor number three and reactor number four had been built together, back-to-back under the same roof where they shared ventilation and auxiliary systems. Between the turbine hull and the reactors was the spine of the station, which housed the de-erator corridor. Uninterrupted by a single door or dog leg is seemingly endless hallway ran parallel to the turbine hull all the way from the main administrative block at one end of the plant to the western end of reactor number four at the other, not quite a kilometer long in total. The de-erator corridor provided the plant staff with access to every part of the station, including each of the four unit control rooms, one dedicated to each reactor that lay along it. It was also a key orientation point inside a complex that, with its dark spaces and tang of machine oil, often resembled the dark, roaring voids inside a gargantuan submarine more than an ordinary building. Much of it was navigated along catwalks and clanging steel stairwells lined with hundreds of kilometers of dense pipework and accessed through heavy steel doors. The layout could be bewildering, and workers found their bearings inside the plant using alpha-numeric coordinates, lettered in Russian from 8 to yaw along one axis, and along the other by numbers from 1 to 68. Instead of conventional-

=== Reading the Waves — Lidia Yuknavitch ===
[2026-06-02 | audiomark] This poet was wound pretty damn tight. The only time this guy's eyes didn't quiver was when he was higher than high and writing poems, which luckily was often. Our epic breakup happened on a defunct hippie commune then called the Church of the Creative outside Presswell, Oregon. Beautiful place, the land, I mean. Gorgeous evercreens. Big wide fields, a natural spring. This poet had lived there in one of the cabins for over a decade when I showed up. His cabin was a two-story spiral octagon built by the one-armed guy from Twin Peaks. Yes, I'm serious. I'm not entirely certain who I was or what I thought I was doing out there. I certainly was not a hippie. It was maybe something like a figure who was over dramatically, eccentricly, embarrassingly Eugene Oregon. Like Paris barfed up Hate Ashbury. Sometimes half of my head was shaved close, and sometimes I wore a cowboy hat with a fuck good citizenship button on the front. And sometimes I wore a black bikers jacket and always a garter belt and vintage dresses. I liked French black lace see-through panties and single malt scotch and done-hills, and I didn't like mud on my boots, and I hated tofu and vegetables, and I forgot to ensure I didn't like sharing a bathhouse with hippie folk, and I never, ever, went to the dreaded bonfires. The poet never successfully got me to hike to the spring for jugs of water. I never cooked a single meal on his gamstove. I never loaded the woodstove. When I shat in the outhouse, I dissociated while wondering about bears. Who?
[2026-06-02 | audiomark] That was all a symbol question. One that tended to close in on one with years. The great revelation had never come. The great revelation perhaps never did come. Instead there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark. Here was one. The sound of an eggshell cracking against a spoon. One, two, three. Crete in the distance, myths of love and civilization around us in waves. There are maybe three photos of me from that time we travel together in Greece. I have about 100 photos of Devon. What does that mean? Was I just more into photography than he was? Did I love him more? Did I possess him the way Susan Sontag suggested when she said photographs are a way of imprisoning reality? Did he not see me? Did he not care about capturing an image of me? And if not, does it matter? Was I just not the kind of woman you want to take photos of? Was he closer to something present and fierce and alive and therefore photographs were meaningless to him? That would be a romantic interpretation of him, wouldn't it? Who was I? A woman who is almost unseen. There are a few photos of me. In one photograph I am bare-breasted, stepping out of an ocean, the color that defied language. The Ajean reopens your imagination to wonder. My lifelong weird water pole or the ecstatic to see.
[2026-06-02 | audiomark] The possibility of losing sense, moving toward lyricism, poetry, even beyond comprehensibility to an unknown ecstatic edge. In nonfiction, I can just tell it, though the limits of nonfiction make me laugh. How can I ever write the book of her? Like desire eating hunger? Skydiver. Two. I only learned about Devon's death because someone, a friend from the past who knew us, mentioned seeing his obituary. She messaged me on Facebook. When I saw her name come up, I held my breath and whisper counted. One, two, three. When I read the idiotic obituary, what I felt first was rage at the phrase past away. I suspect this phrase was his mother's or someone else's blood related but not intimately related. It's passive, it's southern, it's Christian, like Alabama where Devon was from. It contains, within it, an image of a person floating away into thin air, dissipating almost as if they were never there at all. And yet we know that the phrase past away stands in for a lot, whole lives. The first thing we want to know, whether it is respectful to ask, is how did it happen? Especially when the deceased is 52. That's not an ordinary death date. It makes us nervous. There's something in it that cut an adult's life short. But I can tell you, deep in the fist of my...
[2026-05-31 | audiomark] and her mother and her mother. I've never written about my mother's family or specifically her little sister. My aunt's voice was high pitch and nasally and the drawl was tempered by a kind of sing-song quality. You want a soda pot bell? Little bitty little bell? She was young and pretty and thin like my beautiful cousin Michelle. She was prettier than my mother. As I've written many times, my mother was born with one leg six inches shorter than the other. In one storyline, this marks her as disabled. This time I want to tell you something different. She was beautiful. I don't just mean her face. My mother had an inside out kind of attraction. She was called cripple a lot to my presence, but she was no cripple, no victim, except that she was both her whole life. But she made up a self from the inside and in its own way it was spectacular. Like a work of art blown up with courage and color and seduction and delight and drawl in spite of an education tapping out in high school. Laughter and dancing in the face of violence. My mother's family carries a history of small and large violence against women, but now we know that's a shared history. It's nobody's only story. It counts more people than it doesn't. And at this point, it's become a trope whether we want to admit it or not. Pulling our actual bodies away from the trope is painful and exhausting as ever. My mother burbled out one night a story over her vodka and iced tea about how her father had maybe molested his daughters.
[2026-05-29 | audiomark] that story. My parents are now dead, so I have no allegiance to their version of that story. For me, the move was a transmography. I was moving from one state of being to another. Sixteen was the age of mostly masturbating, of jamming my hips against a pillow every night and living in Washington State, where everything is green and cool and alive and smells like dirt and mountains. The age of winning medals as a swimmer, dreaming of sex with boys, girls, dogs, anything. The age of no story but me in my body. The story of desire coming alive in the body of a girl before she is a woman who understands that the whole culture moves her toward her own lifelessness. Unlike in the Pacific Northwest where I grew up as a kid, Florida brought the heat inside my body to the very surface of my skin until it matched the heat and wet of Florida. In Florida, a desire began to crawl up my spine, even though I didn't have words for it yet. In Florida, a girl teammate came home with me after swim practice. This girl was the first person who handed me a flask one day on the steps in front of the aquatic center. The flask had vodka in it. To me, vodka seemed both the opposite of athlete, as well as completely familiar since my mother drank vodka. I took a sip, my chest filled with fire, my hips ached, my mother picked us up. Once we were at my house and my room, we took all our clothes off and got into my bed. We explored bodies. She seemed to be a more experienced traveler. She put her hands between my legs and opened me by...
[2026-05-29 | audiomark] warm but you never know, even California gets blasts of cold. Now I can look it up. I have the time, the date, I can track back because Andy secured the information, the details and data of Devon's death. He knew I needed eventually. It's one of several breathtaking gestures he's done for me in our life together. Most people will think it sounds hyperbolic but he knew it was true that if I didn't know the details of Devon Eugene Crowe's death, if I could not read the story of his body, I couldn't live the rest of my life. Is that love that Andy did that? I think it might be, but love still confuses me, love stories. Some of them decent, some of them ascend, some are suspended at least briefly as if they might fly, others plateau like a sentence that can't find punctuation or worth or explode. Sometimes I think the choice to stay with Andy and see what happens next is the choice between life and death. The pisser is, love lives inside both. Sometimes I think his love is the one that ascended as profoundly as Devon's fell, stars crossing in the night sky. Was there a smell? vodka and deodorant and birchit and city stink? Was he feeling angry and desiring or sad and nostalgic? The reports say they found d'Aquil gel capsules in his pocket. Was he fighting off a cold or his life? Was he feeling like a character he loved? That would determine it. Jim Morrison or Charles Bukowski or Jackson Pollock? I swimming around.
[2026-05-29 | audiomark] thing. Ever. I look up at the night from my perch on the crane. I'm holding on for dear life I can tell you. It is not fun. I do not like it. I do not feel like I'm on a wild adventure or a hero's journey. My legs want to float. My arms ache at the weight of me. My hands tingle. My throat feels funny. But I'm no pussy and I drank vodka in the car for courage. So I hook one leg over the ladder run to support myself and then I close my eyes and hold my arms out away from the ladder briefly. A bird pose with human arms. Flash of full body tear. But also flash of full body freedom from the burden of being with people ever again. Yes, it still lives in me. That feeling. Why not fall? Was that our love? I know how dumb that sounds. We fall for people and pretend we don't know why. Or we do and we pretend that we don't so we don't have to face ourselves. I remember with my whole body how Devon used to say, one, two, three before doing anything difficult. Even silly things like cracking an egg. But also very hard things. I take a breath huge as night and hold it. One, two, three. Blow it back out. Close my eyes. Insta-dizzy. Did he feel the vast nothing up there? Or did he feel the vast everything? My love for Devon carried the same questions I think. Star or black hole. Was it love that was in me those eleven years or something else?
[2026-05-29 | audiomark] to stay quiet when I don't feel anything or even less than anything when everyone else around me is claiming they feel something extraordinary. Look at that! Oh my God! I know how to stay silent and smile to cover my empty epathy. I've learned. Do not reveal your emptiness. I also know how to stay very quiet when I feel everything and no one else feels anything. Don't identify yourself as the one who feels the weird, excessive thing. Ever. I look up at the night from my perch on the crane. I'm holding on for dear life I can tell you. It is not fun. I do not like it. I do not feel like I'm on a wild adventure or a hero's journey. My legs want to float. My arms ache at the weight of me. My hands tingle. My throat feels funny but I'm no pussy and I drank vodka in the car for Kurds.
[2026-05-29 | audiomark] read about Devon's body. Sometimes I carry things in my body for too many years. When I finally do open the envelope, I realize why I did not want to open it. The opening will create an ending. 20 years. That's how long I carried the body of a dead love. I wonder, where did I hold his death in my body all that time? Already, I don't know how to write about it. I want to talk to him instead to ask him questions like those living in left behind want to. I want to say, remember when I said our love would be the death of us? Over dramatic, I know, but not half as over dramatic as we actually were at the time. Lovers in their late 20s shooting for the next decade like supernovas, equing lines over time and the bodies of other lovers. As I recall, he farted, I laughed, we drank. I warned us, didn't I? No one listens. I'm thinking now, all these years later, not of Devon's death, but of the night I climbed a red and yellow construction crane. After, I opened the envelope. I did not climb all the way to the top of the crane, not all 265 feet, but up high enough to feel its shuttering through my whole body. I climbed the core of a laughing jig crane, and then I climbed a little farther on ladders up the boom toward the crane's ballast. I'd say it took me about eight minutes to lose all the feeling in my legs, which felt wrongly lighter than air, like a gust of wind could send me sailing. Where to go? I f-
[2026-05-29 | audiomark] Let the story go, which is emotional. Then forgive the story, which is spiritual, after which we use the materials of it to build a house of knowledge. These are some stories about shedding bodies. They are not a series of trustworthy memories perfectly lodged in amber, but something more alive in a soul, something more fluid. I want to shine a light on places in the story where meaning turns. I want to bring you with me into storytelling spaces with these questions in mind. What pieces of our being are held by the environments and stories we have inhabited? And how do those stories inhabit us? Can being or identity move and change spiral, like storytelling can? These pages show you how I read my own embodied past, how I imagine a map for myself that loosens the grip that sorrow has on my soul without erasing my experiences and how the map moves. I understand I cannot make a map for you. You have to retrieve the important particles from your own life that will help you story, de-story, and re-story your life and create your own map. At the interstices of our lives, we trade stories and secrets. We take turns helping each other go on. May these shared moments and rituals for release and revivocation raise your own sweet solaceous. I take with me four lines from four women writers as illumination guides. Reading yourself as a fiction as well as a fact is the only way to keep the narrative open. The only way to stop the story from running away under its own momentum, often towards an ending no-
[2026-05-27 | audiomark] to try. Then there is this reminder from Keats, touch has memory, heart crumple, huh? That one always leaves me staring at my own hands, remembering the hands of other people too, living and gone. Marcel Proust famously used Poets claim that we recapture for our moment the self that we were long ago when we enter some house or garden in which we used to live in our youth. But these are most hazardous pilgrimages, which end as often in disappointment as in success. It is in ourselves that we should rather seek to find those fixed places, contemporaneous with different years. Maggie Nelson speaks of memory as a strange palimpsest. For the fact is that neuroscientists who study memory remain unclear on the question of whether each time we remember something we are accessing a stable memory fragment, often called a trace or engram, or whether each time we remember something we are literally creating a new trace to house the thought. And since no one has yet been able to discern the material of these traces, nor to locate them in the brain, how one thinks of them remains mostly a matter of metaphor. They could be scribbles, holograms, or imprints. They could live in spirals, rooms, or storage units. One of my favorite lyric expressions about memory comes from Joy Harjo. Memory is a living being that moves in many layered streams. It is not static, it is not a backwards look. It moves forward, sideways, and in a spiral. I once wrote a book about embodied memory, the chronology of water, and I agree memory has

=== Everything She Touched — Randy Kay ===
[2026-05-29 | audiomark] Hoover, who insisted there was no evidence of sabotage. Few listened. Politicians on the home front employed a chilling new term. Even before Pearl Harbor, in October 1940, Navy Secretary Frank Knox had handed Roosevelt a 15-point program to get ready for a possible war with Japan. The 12th point? Prepare plans for concentration camps. President Roosevelt himself used the term. The world hadn't yet come to equate concentration camps with the death camps of Nazi Germany that exterminated millions of Jews. But a clear-eyed view of history must recognize that what Washington originally planned to hold Japanese-Americans, aliens, and citizens weren't evacuation centers for their safety, but concentration camps. Newspaper editorials calling for a roundup of...
[2026-05-29 | audiomark] and gasoline. The wartime hit parades, spun platters like Rosie the Riveter and don't sit under the apple tree with anyone else but me. Japanese Americans faced a different reality. Slurs and menacing gangs that beat up anyone who, to their eyes, looked anything like the enemy. Some Asian Americans wore buttons to distinguish their origins. I am Chinese. Guides appeared on how to spot a jab, promoting vicious racial stereotypes of yellow skin, buck teeth, squinty eyes, and shifty demeanor. More than 2600 miles away in Washington, D.C., President Franklin D. Roosevelt's administration feared that spies in the Japanese American community were aiding Japan in an imminent invasion of the West. hysteria drowned out any opposition. Even from the nation's top cop FBI director J-
[2026-05-29 | audiomark] House. Gathering around the radio, they listened to reports about the unfamiliar place now in flames, learning for the first time that it was a military base in Hawaii. As the chaos cleared and the attack came into sharper focus, Ruth's confusion turned to dread. Terror struck all of us. We wondered how our classmates would react. On Monday the 8th, our high school principal, Mr. Ralph Bernreich called an emergency assembly to make the announcement that the United States in Japan were at war. But assured the student body, the Japanese students at Excelsior Union High School were not responsible for it. On the school bus, Ruth met hard stairs. With drawing into a shell, she sought comfort from fellow Nisei, second-generation Japanese-Americans, who, like her, were born in the United States. A girl in their choir...

=== Light and Thread — Han Kang ===
[2026-05-28 | audiomark] My heart. The child wrote in April 1979. It is inside my thump thumping beating chest. And as for what love was, this was her reply. It is the gold thread connecting between our hearts. When I write, I use my body. I use all the sensory details of seeing, of listening, of smelling, of tasting, of experiencing tenderness and warmth and cold and pain, of noticing my heart racing and my body needing food and water, of walking and running, of feeling the wind and rain and snow on my skin, of holding hands, of I try to infuse those vivid sensations that I feel as a mortal being with blood coursing through her body into my sentences.
[2026-05-28 | audiomark] How far will the candles travel? The ones lit at the side of every killing, in every time and place laid to waste by unfathomable violence. The ones held by the people who vow never to say goodbye. Will they ride from wick to wick, from heart to heart, on a thread of gold? When the pamphlet I uncovered in the old shoebox last January, my past self, writing in April of 1979, had asked herself, where is love? What is love? Whereas, until the autumn of 2021, when we do not part was published, I had considered these two problems to be the ones at my core. Why is the world so violent and painful? And yet, how can the world be this beautiful? For a long time, I believed that the tension and internal struggle between these sentences was the driving force behind my writing. From my first novel to my most recent one, the questions I had kept in mind continued to shift and unfold. Yet these were the only two that remained constant. But two or three years ago, I began to have doubts. Had I really only begun asking myself about love, about the pain that links us, after the Korean publication of human acts in the spring of 2014? From my earliest novel to my latest, hadn't the deepest layer of my inquiries always been directed towards love? Could it be that love was, in fact, my life's oldest and most fundamental undertone? Love is look.
[2026-05-28 | audiomark] I set the opening scene in the municipal gymnasium where the bodies of the deceased were housed, and the funeral services were held. There, we witnessed 15-year-old Tom Ho, laying white sheets over the bodies and lighting candles, staring into the pale blue heart of each flame. The Korean title of this novel is, Sonyeon-i-onda. The last word, Onda, is the present tense of the verb, Oda, Takam. The moment the Sonyeon, the boy, is addressed in the second person as you, whether the intimate or the less intimate you, he awakens in the dim light and walks towards the present. His steps are the steps of a spirit. He draws ever nearer and becomes the now.
[2026-05-27 | audiomark] Then I read up on not just Kwongju, but other cases of state violence. Then, looking even further afield and back in time, I read about mass killings that humans have repeatedly perpetrated throughout the world and throughout history. During this period of researching my novel, two questions are often foremost in my mind. Back in my mid-twenties, I had written these lines on the first page of every new diary. Can the present help the past? Can the living save the dead? As I continued reading, it became clear that these were impossible questions. Through this sustained encounter with the bleakest aspects of humanity, I felt the remnants of my long-fractured belief in humanity shatter entirely. I all but gave up on the novel. Then I read the diary entries of a young knight...
[2026-05-27 | audiomark] stillness and darkness, to when the woman's hand reaches out and writes a few words in the man's palm. In that luminous instant that expands to an eternity, these two characters reveal the softer parts of themselves. The question I wanted to ask here was this, could it be that by regarding the softest aspects of humanity, by caressing the irrefutable warmth that resides there? We can go on living after all, in this brief, violent world? Having reached the end of this question, I began thinking about my next book. This was in the spring of 2012, not long after Greek lessons was published. I told myself I would write a novel that takes another step towards light and warmth. I would suffuse this life and world embracing work with bright, transparent, sensing.
[2026-05-27 | audiomark] staring and defying, waiting for a response. Inc and blood, the novel that followed the vegetarian continues these questions. To refuse life and the world in order to refuse violence is an impossibility. We cannot, after all, turn into plants. Then how do we continue on? In this mystery novel, sentences in Roman and italic type Jocelyn Clash, as the main character, who has long wrestled with death shadow, risks her life to prove that her friend's sudden death cannot have been by suicide. As I wrote the closing scene, as I described her dragging herself across the floor to crawl her way out of death and destruction, I was asking myself these questions. Must we not survive in the end? Should our lives not bear witness to what is true? With my fifth novel, Greek Lessons, I pushed even further. If we must live on in this world, which moments make that possible? A woman who has lost her speech and a man who is losing his sight are walking through stillness and darkness when their solitary paths cross. I wanted to attend to the tactile moments in the story. The novel progresses at its own slow pace through stillness and darkness, to when the woman's hand reaches out and writes a few words in the man's palm. In that luminous instant that expands to an eternity, these two characters reveal the softer parts of themselves. The question I wanted to ask here was this. Could it be that by regarding the softest aspects of humanity?
[2026-05-27 | audiomark] road beneath blazing green leaves, while the alert older sister gazes intensely out the window. Perhaps awaiting a response, or perhaps in protest. The entire novel resides in a state of questioning, staring and defying, waiting for a response. Like and blood, the novel that followed the vegetarian continues these questions. To refuse life and the world in order to refuse violence is an impossibility. We cannot, after all, turn into plants. Then how do we continue on? In this mystery novel, sentences in Roman and italic type Jocelyn Clash as the main character who has long wrestled with death shadow risks her life to prove that her friend's sudden death cannot have been by suicide. As I wrote...
[2026-05-27 | audiomark] questions follow, like links in a chain, or like dominoes, overlapping and joining and continuing, and I am moved to write something new. While writing my third novel, The Vegetarian, from 2003 to 2005, I was staying with some painful questions. Can a person ever be completely innocent? To what depths can we reject violence? What happens to one who refuses to belong to the species called human? Selecting not to eat meat in a refusal of violence, and in the end declining all food and drink except water in the belief that she has transformed into a plant, young hay. The protagonist of The Vegetarian finds herself in the ironic situation of quickening towards death in her bid to save herself. Young hay and her sister in hay. Who are in fact co-protogna?
[2026-05-27 | audiomark] verb, oda, to come. The moment the sohnyeon, the boy, is addressed in the second person as you, whether the intimate or the less intimate you, he awakens in the dim light and walks towards the present. His steps are the steps of a spirit. He draws ever nearer and becomes the now. In a time and place in which human cruelty and dignity existed in extreme parallel, is referred to as Kwongju. That name ceases to be a proper noun unique to one city, and instead becomes a common noun as I learned in writing this book. It comes to us again and again across time and space. It always, in the present tense, even now. When the book was finally completed and published in the spring of 2014, I was surprised by the pain that readers confessed to feeling while reading it. I had to take some time to think about how the pain I had felt throughout the writing process and the distress that my readers had expressed to me were connected. It might be behind that anguish. Is it that we want to put our faith in humanity? And when that faith is shaken, we feel as though our very selves are being destroyed? Is it that we want to love humanity? And this is the agony we feel when that love is shattered. Does love be get pain? And does some pain evidence of love? That same year in June, I had a dream. A dream in which I was walking across a vast plain as a sparse snow was falling.
[2026-05-27 | audiomark] that formed in Guangzhou over the 10-day uprising in May 1980. He was shot and killed in the YWCA building near the provincial administration headquarters, where he had chosen to remain, despite knowing that the soldiers would be returning in the early hours. On that last night, he had written in his diary, why God must I have a conscience that pricks and pains me so? I wish to live. Reading these sentences, I knew with the clarity of lightning which way the novel must go, and that my two questions had to be reversed. Can the past help the present? Can the dead save the living? Later, as I was writing what would become human acts, I sensed at certain moments that the past was indeed helping the present, and that the dead were saving the...
[2026-05-27 | audiomark] hummin' acts. I sensed at certain moments that the past was indeed helping the present, and that the dead were saving the living. I would revisit the cemetery from time to time, and somehow the weather would always be clear. I would close my eyes, and the sun's orange rays would suffuse my lids. I felt it as life's own light. I felt the light and air envelop me in indescribable warmth. The questions that remained with me long after I saw that book of photographs were these. How are humans this violent? And yet, how is it that they can simultaneously stand opposite such overwhelming violence? What does it mean to belong to the species called human? To negotiate an impossible way through the empty space between these two precipices of human horrors and human dignity. I needed the assistance of the dead. Just as in this novel, human acts, the child Tonghu, tugs at his mother's hand to coax her towards the sun. Of course, I could not undo what had been done to the dead, to the bereaved, or to the survivors. All I could do was lend them the sensations, emotions, and life pulsing through my own body. Wishing to light a candle at the start and the end of the novel. I set the opening scene in the municipal gymnasium where the bodies of the deceased were housed, and the funeral services were held. There, we witness 15-year-old Tonghu laying white sheets over the bodies and lighting candles, staring into the pale blue heart of each flame.
[2026-05-27 | audiomark] before. Later, as the light darkened, I walked out of the freezing cemetery with my hand over my chest, close to my heart. I told myself this next novel would look squarely at Guangzhou, rather than consigning it to a single layer. I obtained a book containing more than 900 testimonials, and every day for nine hours over the course of a month, I read each account collected there. Then I read up on not just Guangzhou, but other cases of state violence. Then, looking even further afield and back in time, I read about mass killings that humans have repeatedly perpetrated throughout the world and throughout history. During this period of researching my novel, two questions are often foremost in my mind. Back in my mid-twenties, I had written these lines on the first page of every new diary. Can the present help the past? Can the living save the dead? As I continued reading, it became clear that these were impossible questions. Through this sustained encounter with the bleakest aspects of humanity, I felt the remnants of my long-fractured belief in humanity shatter entirely. I all but gave up on the novel. Then, I read the diary entries of a young night school educator, a shy, quiet youth. Pak Yongjun had participated in the absolute community of self-governing citizens that formed in Guangzhou over the ten-day uprising in May 1980. He was shot and killed in the YWCA building near the provincial administration headquarters, where he had chosen to remain, despite knowing that the soldiers would be returning in the early hours.
[2026-05-27 | audiomark] shelf a few years later, and looked through it when there were no adults around. I was 12. This book contained photographs of Guangzhou residents and students, killed with clubs, banets, and guns, while resisting the new military powers that had orchestrated the coup. Published and distributed in secret by the survivors and the families of the dead, the book bore witness to the truth at a time when the truth was being distorted by strict media suppression. As a child, I hadn't grasped the political significance of those images, and the ravaged faces became fixed in my mind as a fundamental question about humans. Is this the act of one human towards another? And then seeing a photo of an endless queue of people waiting to donate blood outside a university hospital, is this the act of one human towards another? These two questions clashed and seemed irreconcilable. Their incompatibility or not, I couldn't undo. So that one spring day in 2012, as I tried my hand at writing a radiant, life-affirming novel. I was once again confronted by this unresolved problem. I had long lost a sense of deep-rooted trust in humans. How then could I embrace the world? I had to face this impossible conundrum if I meant to move forwards, I realized. I understood that writing was my only means of getting through and past it. I spent the better part of that year sketching out my novel, imagining that May 1980 in Guangju would form one layer of the book. In December, I visited the cemetery in Meng Wardong. It was well past noon and the heavies
[2026-05-27 | audiomark] and remain intrigued by the process of writing poetry and short stories, but writing novels has a special pull on me. My books have taken me anywhere from a year to seven years to complete, for which I have exchanged considerable portions of my personal life. This is what draws me to the work. The way I can delve into and dwell in the questions I feel are imperative and urgent, so much so that I decide to accept the trade-off. Each time I work on a novel, I endure the questions. I live inside them. When I reach the end of these questions, which is not the same as when I find answers to them, is when I reach the end of the writing process. By then I am no longer as I was when I began, and from that changed state, I start again. The next questions follow, like links in a...

=== Suppose a Sentence — Brian Dillon ===
[2026-05-28 | audiomark] S. Z., his fragmented study of a novella by Bolesack called Sarasin. Bort divided the story into 561 fragments, which he glossed in turn according to five codes, hermeneutic, semic, symbolic, pro-eretic, and cultural. Sarasin is the eponymous tale of an apprentice sculptor who falls in love with Zambinella, a star of the Roman opera, described here in Clara Bels' translation. La Zambinella displayed in her single person, intensely alive and delicate beyond words, all those exquisite proportions of the female form, which she had so ardently long to be hold, and of which a sculptor is the most severe, and at the same time the most passionate judge. She had an expressive mouth, eyes instinct with love, flesh of dazzling whiteness. Zambinella is in fact a man, a castrotto who plays along with Sarasin's misapprehension, but refuses to be seduced by him. When the truth is revealed, Sarasin declares he will kill Zambinella, but instead he is stabbed to death on the orders of the singer's patron. Since Z and Empire of Signs form a sort of hinge or gutter between barred strictly academic work, schooled on and extending the methods of structuralism and semiotics, and the more personal, more writerly books, he completed later in the decade. Roland Barth, Paarl and Barth, a lover's discourse, and camera lucida. Already, in Empire of Signs, a subjective voice takes over from the theorist in cultural critic. Barth seems more present on the page, body and soul, vulnerable.
[2026-05-28 | audiomark] is reduced to a tiny clump of emptiness, a collection of perforations. Here the food stuff joins the dream of a paradox, that of a purely interstitial object, all the more provocative, in that this emptiness is produced in order to provide nourishment. Occasionally the food stuff is constructed in a ball, like a wad of air. The Barth. Roland Barth is the patron saint of my sentences, the writer whose habits, while inside the sentence, as well as ideas about the sentence, are always on my mind. Without his prose-pirate techniques, the northern lights in summer, said Elizabeth Hardwick, I would never have written a word. Absent the calm, tidal fragments by which he structured his books and essays. I would not have found the courage to start a massing sentences and paragraphs of my own. Never mind, order.

=== The White Album — Joan Didion ===
[2026-05-25 | audiomark] and had last seen in 1952. Turned up at my house in Hollywood in 1968 in the guise of a private detective from West Covina, one of the very few licensed women private detectives in the state of California. They call us Dickless Tracies she said. I'dally but definitely fanning out the day's mail on the hall table. I have a lot of very close friends and law enforcement, she said then. You might want to meet them. We exchanged promises to keep in touch, but never met again. A not a typical encounter of the period. The 60s were over before it occurred to me that this visit might have been less than entirely social. Three. It was six, seven o'clock of an early spring evening in 1968 and I was sitting
[2026-05-25 | audiomark] It was hard to surprise me in those years. It was hard to even get my attention. I was absorbed in my intellectualization, my obsessive compulsive devices, my projection, my reaction formation, my somatization, and in the transcript of the Ferguson trial. A musician I had met a few years before called from a Ramada Inn in Tuscaloosa to tell me how to save myself through Scientology. I had met him once in my life. I had talked to him for maybe a half an hour about brown rice in the charts, and now he was telling me from Alabama about e-meters and how I might become a clear. I received a telephone call from a stranger in Montreal, who seemed to want to enlist me in an narcotics operation.
[2026-05-25 | audiomark] as dice theory, and so during the years I am talking about, did I? It will perhaps suggest the mood of those years if I tell you that during them I could not visit my mother-in-law without averting my eyes from a framed verse, a house blessing which hung in a hallway of her house in West Hartford, Connecticut. And bless the corners of this house, and be the lentil blessed, and bless the hearth, and bless the board, and bless each place of rest, and bless the crystal window pane that lets the starlight in, and bless each door that opens wide to stranger as to kin. This verse had on me the effect of a physical chill, so insistently did it seem the kind of ironic detail the reporters would seize upon, the morning the bodies were found. In my neighborhood in California, we did not bless the door that opened wide to stranger as to kin. Paul and Tommy Scott Ferguson were the strangers at Ramon Navarro's door up on Laurel Canyon. Charles Manson was the stranger at Rosemary and Lino La Bianca's door, Over and Loose Phyllis. Some strangers at the door knocked, and invented a reason to come inside, a call say to the triple A about a car not in evidence. Others just opened the door and walked in, and I would come across them in the entrance hall. I recall asking one such stranger, what he wanted. We looked at each other, for what seemed a long time, and then he saw my husband on the stair landing. It came to light. He said finally, but we had ordered no check.
[2026-05-25 | audiomark] His definition of a hustler. Quote. A hustler is someone who can talk, not just to men, to women too, who can cook, can keep company, wash car, lots of things make up a hustler. There are a lot of lonely people in this town, man. Unquote. During the course of the trial, each of the brothers accused the other of the murder. Both were convicted. I read the transcript several times, trying to bring the picture into some focus which did not suggest that I lived as my psychiatric report had put it in a world of people moved by strange, conflicted, poorly comprehended, and above all devious motivations. I never met the Ferguson brothers. I did meet one of the principals in another Los Angeles County murder trial during those years.
[2026-05-25 | audiomark] in the spirit of the neighborhood, only on a month-to-month basis, unfernished. Since the inclination to rent an unfernished 28-room house for a month or two is a distinctly special one, the neighborhood was people mainly by rock and roll bands, therapy groups, very old women wheeled down the street by practical nurses and soiled uniforms, and by my husband, my daughter, and me. Question. And what else happened to anything? Answer. He said he thought I could be a star, like, you know, a young Bert Lancaster, you know, that kind of stuff. Question. Did he mention any particular name? Answer. Yes, sir. Question. What name did he mention? Answer. He mentioned a lot of names, he said, Bert Lancaster.
[2026-05-25 | audiomark] The content of patient's responses is highly unconventional and frequently bizarre, filled with sexual and anatomical preoccupations, and basic reality contact is obviously and seriously impaired at times. In quality and level of sophistication, patient's responses are characteristic of those of individuals of high average or superior intelligence, but she is now functioning intellectually in impaired fashion at barely average level. Patient's thematic productions on the thematic-appreception test emphasize her fundamentally pessimistic, fatalistic, and depressive view of the world around her. It is as though she feels deeply that all human effort is for doomed to failure, a conviction which seems to push her further into a dependent, passive, withdrawal. In her view, she lives in a world of people moved by strange, conflicted, poorly comprehended, and above all, devious motivations which commit them inevitably to conflict and failure. The patient to whom the psychiatric report refers is me. The tests mentioned the Rorschach, the thematic-appreception test, the sentence completion test, and the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Index were administered privately in the outpatient psychiatric clinic at St. John's Hospital in Santa Monica in the summer of 1968. Shortly after I suffered the attack of Vertigo and Nozia mentioned in the first sentence, and shortly before I was named, a Los Angeles Times, Woman of the Year. By way of comment, I offer only that an attack of Vertigo
[2026-05-25 | audiomark] The content of patient's responses is highly unconventional and frequently bizarre, filled with sexual and anatomical preoccupations, and basic reality contact is obviously and seriously impaired at times. In quality and level of sophistication, patient's responses are characteristic of those of individuals of high average or superior intelligence. Which is now functioning intellectually in impaired fashion at barely average level. Patient's thematic productions on the thematic-appreception test emphasize her fundamentally pessimistic, fatalistic, and depressive view of the world around her. It is as though she feels deeply that all human effort is for doomed to failure. A conviction which seems to push her further into a dependent, passive, withdrawal.
[2026-05-25 | audiomark] Tiled, whose fingers had to be pried loose from the cyclone fence when she was rescued 12 hours later by the California Highway Patrol, reported that she had run after the car carrying her mother and stepfather and brother and sister for a long time. Certain of these images did not fit into any narrative I knew. Another flash cut. In June of this year, patient experienced an attack of vertigo, nausea, and a feeling that she was going to pass out. A thorough medical evaluation elicited no positive findings, and she was placed on Ellaville, 20 milligrams, three times a day. The Rorschach record is interpreted as describing a personality in process of deterioration with abundant signs of failing defenses, an increasing inability of the ego to mediate the world of reality and to cope with normal stress. Emotionally, patient has alienated herself almost entirely from the world of other human beings. Her fantasy life appears to have been virtually completely preempted by primitive, progressive, libidinal preoccupations, many of which are distorted and bizarre. In a technical sense, basic effect of controls appear to be intact, but it is equally clear that they are insecurely and tenuously maintained for the present by a variety of defense mechanisms including intellectualization, obsessive compulsive devices, projection, reaction formation, and somatization, all of which now seem inadequate to their task of controlling or containing an underlying psychotic process. And are therefore in
[2026-05-25 | audiomark] on a veranda at the Royal Hawaiian Hotel in Honolulu, and also the first reports from me lie. I reread all of George Orwell on the Royal Hawaiian Beach, and I also read in the papers that came one day late from the mainland, the story of Betty Lanzdon Fouquet, a 26-year-old woman with faded blonde hair, who put her five-year-old daughter out to die on the center divider of Interstate 5, some miles south of the last Bakersfield exit. The child, whose fingers had to be prized loose from the cyclone fence when she was rescued 12 hours later by the California Highway Patrol, reported that she had run after the car carrying her mother and stepfather and brother and sister for a long time. Certain of these images did not fit into any narrative I knew. Another flash cut. In June...
[2026-05-25 | audiomark] Once in a while I even answered letters addressed to me, not exactly upon receipt, but eventually, particularly if letters had come from strangers. During my absence from the country these past 18 months such replies would begin. This was an adequate enough performances in Provisations Go. The only problem was that my entire education, everything I had ever been told or told myself, insisted that the production was never meant to be improvised. I was supposed to have a script and had mislated. I was supposed to hear cues and no longer did. I was meant to know the plot, but all I knew was what I saw. Flash pictures and variable sequence, images with no meaning beyond their temporary arrangement, not a movie, but a cutting-room experience.
[2026-05-25 | audiomark] Call a quest in Conferrey. I was even named in 1968 a Los Angeles Times woman of the year, along with Mrs. Ronald Reagan, the Olympicswimmer Debbie Nayer and 10 other California women who seemed to keep in touch and do good works. I did no good works, but I tried to keep in touch. I was responsible. I recognized my name when I saw it. Once in a while I even answered letters addressed to me, not exactly upon receipt, but eventually, particularly if letters had come from strangers. During my absence from the country these past 18 months such replies would begin. This was an adequate enough performances in Provisations Go. The only problem was that my entire education, everything I had ever been told or told myself, in
[2026-05-25 | audiomark] is a victim of acety, or the naked woman is an exhibitionist, and it would be interesting to know which. We tell ourselves that it makes some difference whether the naked woman is about to commit a mortal sin, or is about to register a political protest, or is about to be, the Aristophonic view, snatched back to the human condition by the fireman in priest clothing, just visible in the window behind her, the one smiling at the telephoto lens. We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of multiple choices. We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the ideas with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience, or at least we do for a while. I am talking here about a time when I began to doubt the premises of all the stories I had ever told myself, a common condition, but when I found troubling. I suppose this period began around 1966 and continued until 1971. During those five years, I appeared on the face of it, competent enough member of some community or another, a signer of contracts and air travel cards, a citizen. I wrote a couple of times a month for one magazine or another, published two books, worked on several motion pictures, participated in the paranoia of the time, in the raising of a small child, in the entertainment of large numbers of people passing through my house, made ggingham curtains for spare bedrooms, remembered to ask agents if any
[2026-05-25 | audiomark] This is Audible. Audible Inc. presents The White Album, written by Joan Didian, narrated by Susan Varron. One. We tell ourselves stories in order to live. The princess is caged in the consulate. The man with the candy will lead the children into the sea. The naked woman on the ledge outside the window on the 16th floor is a victim of accident. Or the naked woman is an exhibitionist. And it would be interesting to know which. We tell ourselves that it makes some difference whether the naked woman is about to commit a mortal sin, or is about to register a political protest, or is about to be, the Aristophonic View, snatched back to the human condition, by the fireman in priest clothing, just visible in the window behind her.
[2026-05-24 | audiomark] And ten other California women who seem to keep in touch and do good works. I did no good works, but I tried to keep in touch. I was responsible. I recognized my name when I saw it. Once in a while I even answered letters addressed to me, not exactly upon receipt, but eventually, particularly if letters had come from strangers. During my absence from the country these past eighteen months, such replies would begin. This was an adequate enough performance as improvisations go. The only problem was that my entire education, everything I had ever been told or told myself, insisted that the production was never meant to be improvised. I was supposed to have a script and had mislated. I was supposed to hear cues and no longer did. I was meant to know the plot, but all I knew was what I saw. Flash pictures and variable sequence, images with no meaning beyond their temporary arrangement, not a movie, but a cutting room experience. In what would probably be the middle of my life, I wanted still to believe in the narrative, and in the narratives intelligibility. But to know that one could change the sense with every cut was to begin to perceive the experiences rather more electrical than ethical. During this period I spent what were for me the usual proportions of time in Los Angeles and New York and Sacramento. I spent what seemed to many people I knew in eccentric amount of time in Honolulu. The particular aspect of which lent me the illusion that I could any minute, order from room service, a revisionist theory of my own history, garnished with a vanda orchid.
[2025-01-18 | highlight] Read Along: Infinite Jest, P. 8 - 13nNovember 02, 2024 in Satire, PostmodernnToday’s notes! nnTLDR: Hal takes us back, sort of, and talks for for a min before everyone freaked out as thought he turned into a monster or something    nnLoc 296 | Highlightnn
[2025-01-18 | highlight] Read Along: Infinite Jest, P. 8 - 13
November 02, 2024 in Satire, Postmodern
Today’s notes! 

TLDR: Hal takes us back, sort of, and talks for for a min before everyone freaked out as thought he turned into a monster or something    

Loc 296 | Highlight

"funny what you don't recall."

Ideas:

When Hal think back to when he was maybe 5 years old, it prefixes the following setup. Sets up memory as unreliable - both in terms of what we forget and what we "remember" that might not be true. Later I call this as Anti Proustian, where Proust is clear, here it is a mess. 

Meta-commentary on how we interpret past memories through present understanding. I had a hand written note: "example of our interpretations", how interpretations dictate existence. 

First layer of narrative unreliability - opening scene reliability now questionable

Loc 299 | Highlight

"gas-driven thing that roared and snorted and bucked and he remembers seemed to propel the Moms rather than vice versa,"

Ideas:

1. Grammar shifts signal altered states/memory distortion (handwritten note: "diff grammer")

2. Machine description mirrors communication breakdown from opening scene

3. Power dynamics reversed (machine controlling mother) - hints at larger theme of control/lack of control

Loc 303 | Highlight

"He says I was around five and crying and was vividly red in the cold spring air."

Ideas:

1. Proustian memory inversion - triggered by decay rather than pleasure (handwritten: proustian inversion! )

2. Shift to third person suggests dissociation from memory, really primes the reader to be aware of when to change perspectives and even point of view. 

3. "vividly red" works as both physical and emotional state descriptor

Loc 316 | Highlight

"I had stopped crying, he remembers, and simply stood there, the size and shape of a hydrant, in red PJ's with attached feet, holding out the mold, seriously, like the report of some kind of audit."

Ideas:

1. Anxiety's effect on memory formation/suppression 

2. Child performing adult behavior ("audit") while in childish clothing (pjs with attached feets, Boss Baby)

3. Mold as symbol of decay/corruption juxtaposed with childhood innocence

Loc 319 | Highlight

"she yells in Orin's second and more fleshed-out recollection,"

Ideas:

1. Multiple versions of truth - "fleshed-out" suggests artificial construction

2. Memory as collaborative/competitive narrative between family members

3. "Second" recollection implies constructed rather than authentic memory

Loc 321 | Highlight

"while O. gaped at his first real sight of adult hysteria."

Ideas:

1. Loss of parental infallibility moment (handwritten note: what were some of your first hysteria or extreme memories. )

2. "Real" suggesting previous encounters with hysteria weren't authentic

3. Moment of childhood innocence breaking down

Loc 324 | Highlight

"her footprints Native-American-straight,"

Ideas:

1. Cultural stereotype used as precision marker (handwritten note: "weird flex")

2. Mother's controlled response vs. previous hysteria

3. Linear thinking vs. emotional chaos

Loc 340 | Highlight

""DeLint at the big man’s arm: ‘Stop it!’ ‘I am not what you see and hear.’ Distant sirens. A crude half nelson. Forms at the door. A young Hispanic woman holds her palm against her mouth, looking. ‘I’m not,’ I say."

Ideas:

1. I have no idea what is going on, is he having a panic attack? Is he a Lovecraftian monster?! 

2. Once again another tone shift, and it reminds me of Halloween 1978, when they revealed that it was a kid in a mask that did that. I'm not saying Hal is a monster, I'm saying it has that same level of surprise. 

3. So far, very fun. 

=== Let Me Tell You What I Mean — Joan Didion ===
[2026-05-24 | audiomark] early failures. I wonder if we had better not find some way to let our children know this. Some way to extricate our expectations from theirs. Some way to let them work through their own rejections and solemn rebellions and interludes with golf pros, unassisted by anxious prompting from the wings. Finding one's role at seventeen is problem enough without being handed somebody else's script. 1968
[2026-05-24 | audiomark] chances with their own. Demanding of a child that he make good, not only for himself, but for the greater glory of his father and mother. Of course, it is harder to get into college now than it once was. Of course, there are more children than desirable openings. But we are deluding ourselves if we pretend that desirable schools benefit the child alone. I wouldn't care at all about his getting into Yale if it weren't for Vietnam. A father told me not long ago, quite unconscious of his own spaciousness. It would have been malicious of me to suggest that one could also get a deferment at Long Beach State. Getting into college has become an ugly business, malignant in its consumption and diversion of time and energy and true interests, and not its least deleterious aspect is how the children themselves accept it. They talk casually and unattractively of their first, second, and third choices, of how their first choice application, to Stevens, say, does not actually reflect their first choice. Their first choice was Smith, but their advisor said their chances were low so why waste the application? They are calculating about the expectation of rejections, about their backup possibilities, about getting the right sport and the right extracurricular activities to balance the application, about juggling confirmations when their third choice accepts before their first choice answers. They are wise in the white lie here, the small self-aggrandizement there, in the importance of letters from names their parents scarcely know. I have heard conversations
[2026-05-24 | audiomark] rode on whether I was admitted to Stanford, or anywhere. Of course, my mother and father wanted me to be happy. And, of course, they expected that happiness would necessarily entail accomplishment, but the terms of that accomplishment were my fair. Their idea of their own and of my worth remained independent of where or even if I went to college. Our social situation was static, and the question of right schools, so traditionally urgent to the upwardly mobile, did not arise. When my father was told that I had been rejected by Stanford, he shrugged and offered me a drink. I think about that shrug with a great deal of appreciation whenever I hear parents talking about their children's chances. What makes me uneasy is the sense that they are-
[2026-05-24 | audiomark] and I spent a lot of time watching him practice putting, and in the fall I went to a junior college a couple of hours a day and made up the credits I needed to go to the University of California at Berkeley. The next year a friend at Stanford asked me to write him a paper on Conrad's Nostromo, and I did, and he got an A on it. I got a B- on the same paper at Berkeley, and the specter of Rick's Ferdinand K Snyder was exorcised. So it worked out all right, my single experience in that most conventional middle-class confrontation, the child versus the admissions committee. But that was in the benign world of country California in 1952, and I think it must be more difficult for children I know now, children whose lives from the age of two or three are a series of perilously programmed.
[2026-05-24 | audiomark] would wish for the successful continuation of your education, sincerely yours, Rixford K. Snyder, director of admissions. I remember quite clearly the afternoon I opened that letter. I stood reading and rereading it. My sweater and my books fallen on the hall floor, trying to interpret the words in some less final way. The phrase is unable to take, and favorable action fading in and out of focus until the sentence made no sense at all. We lived then in a big dark Victorian house, and I had a sharp and dolerous image of myself growing old in it. Never going to school anywhere, the spister in Washington Square. I went upstairs to my room and locked the door, and for a couple of hours I cried. For a while I sat on the floor of my closet and buried my face in an old quilted robe, and later, after the situation's real humiliations, all my friends who applied to Stanford had been admitted, had faded into safe theatrics. I sat on the edge of the bathtub and thought about swallowing the contents of an old bottle of codine and emperine. I saw myself in an oxygen tent with Ricksford-Case Snyder hovering outside, although how the news was to reach Ricksford-Case Snyder was a plot point that troubled me even as I counted out the tablets. Of course I did not take the tablets. I spent the rest of the spring in Sullen but mild rebellion, sitting around drive-ins, listening to Tulsa Evangelists on the car radio. And in the summer I fell in love with someone who wanted to-
[2026-05-24 | audiomark] of Mr. Hursts, you could have played the Warlitzer Baby Grand before dinner. If you'd been a guest of Mr. Hursts, you could have seen a movie after dinner and actually sat next to the cast of the movie in the projection room. It is a reverence which extends onto the Hurst's sons, who occasionally stay at S.A.M. in a 20-room guesthouse reserved for their use. If you saw them, you probably wouldn't recognize them, the guide advises, because they wouldn't be dressed any differently from you. I listened to the guides for a long while and had a hard time getting the tone. And then I recognized it. It was a tone reflecting the idolatry of the rich that so often accompanies the democratization of things, the flattening out. I had taken a child up there with me, a niece from Connecticut who had never before heard of S.A.M. and she liked the flowers and the pools and the ornate ceilings. But it occurred to me as we left that she would have found it more affecting had she only glimpsed it from highway one, the gates barred, the castle floating in the distance. Make a place available to the eyes. And in certain ways it is no longer available to the imagination. 1968
[2026-05-24 | audiomark] even though he subsequently lost it, which shows that some of us are struggling on the same date when others of us are slipping, which is the miracle of G.A. They spoke in general, as if from some subverbal swamp, snatching at phrases as they floated by. Now that I'm on the program, I have the togetherness with my family," someone said, and the most important thing I've gotten out of the program at the present time is my mental thinking. As you all know, I reached my bottom that night of November 28th over at the Normandy Club, another said, and after that I got serenity. That's my ideal someone added, getting serenity. There was nothing particularly wrong with any of it, and yet there was something not quite right, something troubling. At first, I thought that it was simply the predilection of many of the members to dwell upon how powerless they were, how buffeted by forces beyond their control. There was a great deal of talk about miracles, and higher presences, and a power greater than ourselves. The gamblers' anonymous program, like that of alcoholics anonymous, tends to reinforce the addict's own rather passive view of his situation. The first of the GA 12 steps involves admitting that one's life has become unmanageable. Five steps further, and still being acted upon, one of hers that one is ready to have these defects of character removed. My neighbor introduced me to Hollywood Park, big favor he did me, someone said that night.
[2026-05-24 | audiomark] simple reason only, which is I break out in a cold sweat every time I pass Gardina on the freeway even, but I'm here tonight because every night I make a meeting is a night I don't place a bet, which with the help of God and you people is 1,223 nights now. There were certain curiosities in the way they talked to one another as if they were casters of horoscopes and perhaps some of them were. They kept fanatical track, not only of their own, but of everyone else's important dates. December 3rd, 65, that was a bad date for me because that was the night I wrote the first phony check in the amount of $343, but it was an important date for Frank L. That date one year later made eight months on the
[2026-05-24 | audiomark] said, and I lost all the money I could get my hands on. It began in the Marine Corps. I met a lot of pigeons in Vietnam. I was making easy money, and it was, you might say, this period in my life that led to my downfall. The smoke grew thicker, the testimony more intense. I had not heard so many revelations of a certain kind since I used to fall into conversations on greyhound buses under the misapprehension that it was a good way to learn about life. See, I had just got through embezzling a large sum of money from my employer. They were saying to one another, and I started out for a Kanoga Park meeting and turned around on the freeway. That was last Wednesday. I ended up in Gardina, and now I'm on the verge of divorce again.
[2026-05-24 | audiomark] Edding Serenity. Speaking for myself, the young woman said, in the seven months since I've been on the program, it's been real good. I was strictly a Gardena player, low-ball. I'd play in the night time after I got my children to bed. And of course, I never got home before 5 a.m. And my problem was, I couldn't sleep then. I'd replay every single hand. So the next day, I'd be, you know, tired, irritable with the children. Her tone was that of someone who had adapted her mode of public address from analgesic commercials. But she was not exactly selling a product. She was making a confession at a meeting of gamblers anonymous, I attended not long ago, 9 o'clock on a winter evening in a bungalow neighborhood clubhouse in Gardena, California. Gardena is the draw poker capital of Los Angeles County. No stud, no alcoholic beverages, clubs closed between 5 a.m. and 9 a.m. and all day on Christmas day. This is not Nevada, but California, where there is only draw poker and that only on local option. And this inductive proximity of the poker clubs hung over this particular meeting, like a paraphysical substance, almost as palpable as the portraits of Washington and Lincoln, the American flag, the plastic hydrangeas, and the table laid by the refreshments committee. Just around the corner waiting for someone, there it was, the action. And there in that overheated room, shifting uneasily on folding chairs and blinking against the cigarette smoke were 40 people who...
[2026-05-24 | audiomark] answer. Dear Abby, mirror of your mind. The tongue lulls reality recedes. Seminary sounds like boy needs dictionary, one reads on page 35. Paduga Kintucky, AP. When Kay Fowler asked her Sunday school class to describe a seminary, one little fellow piped up, that's where they bury people. Tell me that on page 35, and I am not likely to believe you on page one. Monkeys on the lower levels, code on the higher. It is a comment on our press conventions that we are considered well informed to precisely the extent that we know the real story, the story not in the newspaper. We have come to expect newspapers to reflect the official ethic to do the responsible thing. The most admired newspaper men are no longer adversaries, but confidence, participants. The ideal is to advise presidents, dine with Walter Ruther and Henry Ford, and dance with the latter's daughters at La Club. And then, heavy with responsibility, to file their coded reports. Alicia is not long on responsibility. Alicia never goes to La Club. Alicia probably doesn't know anything about anything outside of Ann Arbor. But she tells me all she knows about that. 1968.
[2026-05-24 | audiomark] Some of their parents still believe in the Kinsey report. These papers ignore the conventional newspaper code. Say what they mean. They are strident and brash, but they do not irritate. They have the faults of a friend, not of a monolith. Monolith, of course, is a favorite underground press word, one of the few with three syllables. Their point of view is clear to the densest reader. In the best of the traditional press, there exist very strong unspoken attitudes, indeed, and the fact that those attitudes remain unspoken, unadmitted, comes between the page and the reader like so much marsh gas. The New York Times brings out in me only unpleasant agrarian aggressions. Makes me feel like the Barker's barefoot daughter in Carousel.
[2026-05-24 | audiomark] to anyone who follows only casually the various schisms among drug users and guerrilla revolutionaries indistinguishable from the EVO, the barb, the fifth estate, the Washington Free Press. I have never read anything I needed to know in an underground paper. But to think that these papers are read for facts is to misapprehend their appeal. It is the genius of these papers that they talk directly to their readers. They assume that the reader is a friend, that he is disturbed about something, and that he will understand if they talk to him straight. This assumption of a shared language and a common ethic lends their reports a considerable codency of style. A recent Free Press carried an analysis of Ann Arbor by a reader named Alicia, who said all there was to say about a university community in three lines of high coup-like perfection. The professors and their wives are ex-beatnix, Berkeley class of 57, and they go on peace marches and bring daffodils to Uttanth. Some of the kids still believe in Timothy Leary and Khalil Gibran. Some of their parents still believe in the Kinsey report. These papers ignore the conventional newspaper code. Say what they mean. They are strident and brash, but they do not irritate. They have the faults of a friend, not of a monolith. Monolith, of course, is a favorite underground press word, one of the few with three syllables. Their point of view is clear to the densest reader. In the best of the traditional press, there exist very strong unspoken attitudes, indeed, and the
[2026-05-24 | audiomark] to have a commitment to dealing as a lifestyle, or you can't do it well. Admissions that speed kills. One issue of, say, the free press is very like the next five issues of the free press. And to anyone who follows only casually the various schisms among drug users and guerrilla revolutionaries, indistinguishable from the EVO, the Barb, the Fifth Estate, the Washington Free Press. I have never read anything I needed to know in an underground paper. But to think that these papers are read for facts is to misapprehend their appeal. It is the genius of these papers that they talk directly to their readers. They assume that the reader is a friend, that he is disturbed about something, and that he will understand if they talk to him straight. This assumption of a share.
[2026-05-24 | audiomark] don't press. The free press, the EVO, the Berkeley Barb, all the other tabloid-sized papers that reflect the special interests of the young and the disaffiliated. Their particular virtue is to be devoid of conventional press postures, so many of which rest on a quite fictitious objectivity. Do not misread me, I admire objectivity very much indeed, but I fail to see how it can be achieved if the reader does not understand the writer's particular bias. For the writer to pretend that he has none, lends the entire venture a mandacity that has never infected the Wall Street Journal, and does not yet infect the underground press. When a writer for an underground paper approves or disapproves of something he says so, quite often in you of who what where when how.
[2026-05-24 | audiomark] Alicia and the Underground Press. The only American newspapers that do not leave me in the grip of a profound physical conviction that the oxygen has been cut off from my brain tissue, very probably by an associated press wire, are the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Free Press, the Los Angeles Open City, and the East Village Other. I tell you that not to make myself out and amusing eccentric, perverse and eclectic, and, well, groovy in all her tastes. I am talking here about something deadening and peculiar. The inability of all of us to speak to one another in...
[2026-05-24 | audiomark] Throughout her career, Dining has lived or projected an eye on the page while maintaining a certain distance. A desire to disappear so the pictures and people that make the story can at least impart tell it. But when Dining was in Mark Shur's class, she was uncertain that the story she told wanted to tell, but the story's people would want to hear. Now to disappear in life and say I on the page all at once. Taking Shur's class was not greater than her fear and dread, it was equal to both. That each lives with the other, seemingly forever. The peculiarity of being a writer is that the entire enterprise involves the mortal humiliation of seeing one's own words in print, says Didian in last words. Her 1998 essay about Hemingway is part of the writing
[2026-05-24 | audiomark] gives that by the act of writing being a writer. In 1954, when she was 19, Dittian was accepted into the late Mark Shores English 106A and experienced Dittian describes in her 1978 reminiscent telling stories. The class, she says, was a kind of writer's workshop which meant for discussion three hours a week and required that each student produce over the course of the semester. At least five short stories. No auditors were allowed. English 106A was widely regarded in the fall of 1954 as a kind of sacramental experience and initiation into the grave world of real writers. And I remember each meeting of this class as an occasion of recute excitement and dread. Dittian's dread was based in part on the feeling that she hadn't experienced enough to complete five short stories. And it was dread too that made her want to disappear in class, which incidentally she never missed. I ransacked my closet for clothes in which I might appear invisible in class, Dittian remembers and came up with only a dirty raincoat. I sat in this raincoat and I listened to other people's stories read aloud and I despaired of ever knowing what they knew. As every writer knows, writing is not inseparable from your body. It's you, you're the singer and the song. Throughout her career, Dittian has lived or projected an eye on the page while maintaining a certain distance, a desire to disappear so the pictures and people that make the story can at least impart tell it. But when Dittian was in Mark Shur's class, she was uncertain that the story she told wanted to tell the story's people would want to hear. How to...
[2026-05-24 | audiomark] young working at Vogue. In New York, the girl who had grown up near and in rivers found herself walking to the East River because she missed what she knew, and the only way to capture it was by writing. Dittian's first novel, 1963's Mind River, is as much as anything an act of memory and memorialization. But we are getting ahead of her story. I think it's safe to say that Dittian, a carver of words in the granite of the specific, might have been less than inspired by the cold war writing that was popular on both coasts when she was a college student. In any case, it's hard to imagine her as a dharma bum, too much posturing there. What Dittian sought was naturalness of expression as controlled by true understanding of one's craft, the better to describe the ineffable, the uncanny in the everyday.
[2026-05-24 | audiomark] What's the point if what you feel can't be spoken? Life and Sacramento taught Diddy in that. And yet, how could one's Americanness itself and uncanny place? How did we get here? What are we doing here? Why did we stay? Measure up to all those linguistic theorists. We are all linguistic theorists if we deal with language at all. But try telling that to a 17-year-old overachiever. How could California, as subject and reality, measure up to the Europe, Hemingway, for instance, mind and his fiction? Was Europe a thing she had to consider if she was going to write her world? If she want to write the entire world? Or would her Americanness, her Diddy and Nist be enough? Those are questions that got deeper. And Diddy and tried to look at more closely and ultimately.
[2026-05-24 | audiomark] the bevotron as a political symbol, but she would be wrong. I was only wondering if the lights were on in the bevotron and how they looked a physical fact. Perhaps, did Ian couldn't speak Cagalian or Hagel didn't speak to her, because even then, she was already engaged in learning how to speak California. Every writer is a regionalist. In a 1979 review of Norman Mailer's The Executioner's Song, a book about the Utah native and murderer, Gary Gilmore, did Ian describes what makes Western speech so difficult to capture. How do you make a language out of emptiness, that vast emptiness at the center of the Western experience, a nihilism not only antithetical to literature, but to most other human forms of endeavor, a dread so close to zero that human voices fade out, trail off, like sky-writing. Dread can stimey speech, certainly, but it can also make you wary of the idea of communicating anything at all. What's the point if what you feel can't be spoken? Life and sacramental thought did Ian that. And yet, how could one's Americanness itself an uncanny place? How did we get here? What are we doing here? Why did we stay? Measure up to all those linguistic theorists. We are all linguistic theorists if we deal with language at all. But try telling that to a 17-year-old overachiever. How could California as subject and reality measure up to the Europe, Hemingway, for instance, mind and his fiction, was Europe a thing she had to consider if she was going to...
[2026-05-24 | audiomark] read linguistic theory and would find myself wondering instead if the lights were on in the bevotron up the hill. You might immediately suspect if you deal in ideas at all that I was registering the bevotron as a political symbol, but you would be wrong. I was only wondering if the lights were on in the bevotron and how they looked a physical fact. Perhaps Dittian couldn't speak Hagellian or Hagald didn't speak to her because even then she was already engaged in learning how to speak California. Every writer is a regionalist. In a 1979 review of Norman Mailer's The Executioner's Song, a book about the Utah native and murderer Gary Gilmore. Dittian describes what makes Western speech so difficult to capture.
[2026-05-24 | audiomark] the family script. It saved to assume that by the time Dideen got to Berkeley, she wasn't following anyone else's script, but that doesn't mean she didn't want to learn the lines she thought she needed to know in order to get by. The Bay Area that Dideen landed in in the early 1950s was to use the parlance of the time, culturally speaking, mostly nowhere. Abstract expressionism, for instance, a combustive ragged and elegant art form that caused the art world to turn its attention away from Europe to America, blossom didn't you are not marine county. At Berkeley, Dideen discovered she didn't know how to think, certainly as thinking was defined as the university, from her 1975 lecture, Why I Write. During the years when I was an undergraduate at Berkeley, I tried with a kind of hopeless, late adolescent energy to buy some temporary visa into the world of ideas, to forge myself a mind that could deal with the abstract. In short, I tried to think, my attention veered inexperably back to the specific, to the tangible, to what was generally considered by everyone I need then and for that matter have known since. The peripheral. I would try to contemplate the hegeali and dialectic and would find myself concentrating instead on a flowering pear tree outside my window, in the particular way the petals fell on my floor. I would try to read linguistic theory and would find myself wondering instead if the lights were on in the bevotron up the hill. You might immediately suspect if you deal an idea.
[2026-05-24 | audiomark] Throughout her writing life, Joan Didian has held on to that letter, not only to remember who she was, but how things don't work out, and shouldn't work out, not always. It's dashed expectations that dislod you from being fixed in outlook, fixed in what you feel you deserve, and how getting into Stanford, or Yale, or Harvard, often has something to do with following someone else's script. The parent script, the family script. It's safe to assume that by the time Didian got to Berkeley, she wasn't following anyone else's script, but that doesn't mean she didn't want to learn the lines she thought she needed to know in order to get by. The Bay Area that Didian landed in in the early 1950s was to use the parlance of a time, culturally speaking, mostly nowhere.
[2026-05-24 | audiomark] But what would the words to the song mean without the singer? It was Morrison, Dillian and sis who got up there in his black vinyl pants and no underwear, while tending to suggest some range of the possible, just beyond a suicide pact, and so the band's ethos, sex as the ultimate high and transgression. Dillian was also drawn to more traditional writers who gave off a similar energy on the page, guys who reported on their extreme states of consciousness, in story after story littered with sex and death, and what goes wrong when the status quo is undone by forces, it can't control. Dillian in high school, hanging out with guys who didn't bother with college, Dillian observing Frank at the piano, or watching John Wayne on screen as a kid selling sexuality. One of this is fascinating in part because it's rare, as a woman looking at men and not looking away, Joan Dillian reversed the standard male female deal while developing the Dillian gaze. In 1952, the burgeoning writer was admitted to the University of California at Berkeley where she majored in English. Berkeley was not her first choice. She had applied to Stanford, but had not gotten in. A disappointment she writes about in her 1968 piece, I'm being unchosen by the College of One's Choice. In it, Dillian describes the day she received her letter of rejection. I remember quite clearly the afternoon I opened that letter. I stood reading and rereading it, my sweater and my books fallen on the hall floor, trying to interpret the words in some less final way. It phrases unable to take and favorable action fading in and out of focus until the
[2026-05-24 | audiomark] A guy who basically said fuck it to what Sacramento society deemed correct and followed another path altogether? Guys like that didn't fit in and didn't want to fit in. They were nothing like the men did in New York home. Such guys did in rights in her 1988 essay, Inside of Baseball, didn't go to Yale or Swarthmore or DuPaw. Nor had they even applied. Indeed, they had gotten drafted, gone through basic at Fort Ward. They had knocked up girls and married them, had begun what they called the first night of the rest of their lives with a midnight drive to Carson City and a $5 ceremony performed by just as other piece still in his pajamas. They got jobs at the places that had laid off their uncles. They were never destined to be in other words, communicans and what we have come to call when we want to indicate the traditional ways in which power is exchanged and the status quo maintained in the United States, the process. The traditional ways in which power is exchanged and the status quo maintained. One and again throughout her career, Didian has struggled with the idea, let alone the reality of what makes the status quo, what constitutes tradition, and how the visiting bad boy or unforeseen event disrupts the world as people like the Didians or the people they associated with in Sacramento knew it. One way those bad boys made a world different was through sex or more accurately the projection of sex. John Wayne, whom Didian first saw in the pictures when she was a kid, he had a sexual authority so strong that even a child...
[2026-05-24 | audiomark] door. It takes a long time to tell the truth, did he and worked on where I was from in various forms for many years. It was only after her parents died that she was able to complete it. In the Uncanny, Freud points out that the Uncanny of real experience has far simpler determinants, but comprises fewer instances. I believe that it invariably can be traced back every time to something that was once familiar and then repressed. Where the Uncanny stems from childhood complexes, the question of material reality does not arise, it's place being taken by cyclical reality. Here we are dealing with the actual repression of a particular content, and the return of what has been repressed, not with the suspension of belief in its reality. The repression of Frank's conf-
[2026-05-24 | audiomark] in Didian's last three novels, a book of common prayer, 1977, democracy, 1984, and the last thing he wanted, 1996. Frank had no real ability to describe what he felt, let alone to his family. If Edwin Didian could talk, Frank Didian had silence, which comes with its own kind of power, as Didian notes in where I was from, 2003. Language belonged to his daughter. There was about him sad and so pervasive that it colored even those many moments when he seemed to be having a good time. He had many friends, he played golf, he played tennis, he played poker, he seemed to enjoy parties. Yet he could be in the middle of a party at our own house sitting at the piano, playing dark-town strutters ball, say, or Alexander's ragtime band. A bourbon high ball, always within reach, and the tension he transmitted would seem so great that I would have to leave, run to my room, and close the door. It takes a long time to tell the truth. Didian worked on where I was from in various forms for many years. It was only after her parents died that she was able to complete it. In the Uncanny, Freud points out that the Uncanny of real experience has far simpler determinants, but comprises fewer instances. I believe that it invariably can be traced back every time to something that was once familiar and then repressed. Where the Uncanny stems from childhood complexes, the question of material reality does not arise. It's place being
[2026-05-24 | audiomark] and stakes and staying put, also from notes from a native daughter. It is characteristic of Californians to speak grandly of the past, as if it had simultaneously begun, tabula rasa, and reached a happy ending on the day the wagon started west. Urika, I have found it, as the state motto has it. Such a view of history casts a certain melancholia over those who participated in it. My own childhood was suffused with the conviction that we had long outlived our finest hour. If I could make you understand that, I could make you understand California, and perhaps something else besides, for Sacramento is California, and California is a place in which your boom mentality and a sense of chakovian loss meet in an easy suspension, in which the mind is trouble by
[2026-05-24 | audiomark] party at the Humboldt's sink in Nevada to cut North through Oregon. Thus escaping the death and cannibalism is surviving party suffered. And it was a dream who gave five-year-old Jim a big tablet pad so she'd stop complaining and write down what was troubling her. Dittian's younger brother Jim was born in 1939. As a member of a reasonably successful and connected clan with roots that ran deep on both sides in Clanish Sacramento, Frank's great-great-grandfather for instance had immigrated to Sacramento from Ohio in 1855, Dittian learned early on how cut off its rally citizens were from the larger world. But was it a problem? My mother made the trip from Sacramento to Los Angeles in 1932 to see the Olympics and did not.
[2026-05-24 | audiomark] acquired was another story altogether. Sacramento's Spanish for Sacramento was built on a swamp. The valley depended on federal handouts in order to expand and some private citizens and corporations who got in on those transactions profited. In short, Sacramento wasn't so much discovered as manufactured. Didian didn't know any of that when she was a kid growing up in that hot and dry in the summer, or rainy in the winter and early spring Eden, complete with snakes. As a kid, she was fed a steady diet of myths, the rugged individual myth, the Western arrival myth. Didian's mother, Edwin Jarrett, had worked as a librarian before marrying Frank Didian, who supported his family variously as an Army Corps officer by selling insurance, gambling, and as a real estate developer. Edwin was the more verbal of the two, and it was she who told Joan's stories that fed her daughter's imagination. One story concerned Nancy Harden, Cornwall, and Josephus Atomsen Cornwall, pioneer ancestors who, along with their progeny, split off from the Donna Reed Party at the Humboldt's Sync in Nevada to cut North through Oregon. Thus escaping the death and cannibalism is surviving party suffered. And it was Edwin who gave five-year-old Joan a big tablet pad so she'd stop complaining and write down what was troubling her. Didian's younger brother Jim was born in 1939. As a member of a reasonably successful...
[2026-05-24 | audiomark] that in a 1979 interview with the critic Michiko Kukutani. Rationality, reasonableness bewildered me. A lot of the stories I was brought up on had to do with extreme actions, believing everything behind crossing the trackless wastes. In the America that the now 86-year-old Joan Didian, a fifth-generation Californian grew up in. Middle-class Protestant Republican Sacramento, the social more raised were fixed and tractable. You didn't make a show of yourself and what you said was probably less complicated than what you thought. Post-ware prosperity was a given, but how it was acquired was another story altogether. Sacramento's Spanish for Sacramento was built on a swamp. The valley depended on federal handouts.
[2026-05-24 | audiomark] For the black man at the center of this particular drama, the horror that is visited upon him and his good time in the park is further proof of the dread and creeping horror that his skin color generates in the white world. For her part, Vivian is not herself during this exchange, a dominant eye. Unlike other non-fiction writers, she admires, Graham Greene among them. Didian doesn't insert her personality in the scene. She can't editorialize or won't because to her, nightmares carry their own weight. And it's the writer's job to be awake when the nightmare or in county happens because it will. Didian's ethos is not much related to a school, but a way of seeing that's particular to who she is, to the world that made her away from her.
[2026-05-24 | audiomark] I'm Francisco's, hate Ashbury Youth Culture and Drug Scene. One afternoon, the author finds herself sitting with some of her subjects in the city's panhandle. Janice Joplin is singing with Big Brother, and almost everybody is high, and it is a pretty nice Sunday afternoon. And who turns up a Peter Berg? He is with his wife and six or seven other people, and the first peculiar thing is they're in block face. I mentioned to Max and Sharon that some members of the mom troop seem to be in block face. Its street theater Sharon assures me, it's supposed to be really groovy. The mom troopers get a little closer, and there are some other peculiar things about them. The one thing they are tapping people on the head with domes through a plastic night's
[2026-05-24 | audiomark] individualism distinctly adapted to its time and source. A way of looking but not joining, a way of moving through but not attaching. Certainly these are the qualities I found so striking and Didian's nonfiction. But what further set her writing apart from having ways now very dated, romantic individualism, was the physics or energy and Didian's writing, what she might call its shimmer. And it's that energy or shimmer that sheds a sort of awful and beautiful light on the world. We have seen but don't want to see. One where potential harm is a given. The boogie man may be your father and hope is a flimsy defense against dread. Indeed, what Didian alone brings to contemporary nonfiction is a feeling for the uncanny. In his 1919 essay about the phenomenon, Freud writes that the uncanny is synonymous with and expressive of all that arouses dread and creeping horror. But the good doctor observes in the same paper that the word itself is not always used in a clearly definable sense, so that it tends to coincide with whatever excites dread. Part of Didian's brilliance is not so much to define menace or the uncanny as to show it. Take for instance a scene that has stayed with me since I first read slaughtering towards Bethlehem. Didian's 1967 report on San Francisco's hate Ashbury Youth Culture and Drug Scene. One afternoon the author finds herself sitting with some of her subjects in the city's panhandle. Janice Joplin is singing with big brother and almost everybody is high.
[2026-05-24 | audiomark] romantic individualism distinctly adapted to its time and source. A way of looking but not joining, a way of moving through but not attaching. Certainly these are the qualities I found so striking and dideans nonfiction. But what further set her writing apart from having ways now very dated romantic individualism was the physics or energy and dideans writing what she might call its shimmer. And it's that energy or shimmer that sheds a sort of awful and beautiful light on the world. We have sea but don't want to see one where potential harm is a given. The boogie man may be your father and hope is a flimsy defense against dread. Indeed, what did he alone brings to contemporary nonfiction is a feeling for the uncanny. And his 1919 essay about the phenomenon.
[2026-05-24 | audiomark] for the most part limited by space. Didean had roughly 2,000 words for the column, and she had to use them to tell the story of what she saw, felt, thought, which means that sometimes she used a depticism as a tool. And yet, even then, Didean could write an ideological wrong in her own thinking by not turning away from mystery. While getting serenity is ostensibly about some folks who are wrestling with gambling addictions, the piece is filled with Didean's implicit disdain for anything that smacks of self-help. Combined with her, again implicit, up by your bootstraps, don't complain and don't look back, California ethos. There was nothing particularly wrong about the meetings she writes, and yet there was something not quite right, something troubling. At first, I thought that it was simply the pre-election.
[2026-05-24 | audiomark] or self. That she rejected the notion that the world can be filtered through the precepts of journalism and come out on the other side as true, radicalized Joan Didian's nonfiction from the first. Her narrative nonfiction is a question about the truth, and if her nonfiction is synonymous with anything, says Didian in work after work, is with the idea that the truth is provisional. And the only thing backing it up is who you are at the time you wrote this or that, and that your joys, and biases, and prejudices are part of writing too. And while a few of these pieces were written around the time Didian published some of her justly famous reporting as well, her landmark collection, Slouching Towards Bethlehem, came out in 1968. It was Didian's fiction that taught her, I think, how to articulate with Bogter by tempering it with humor.

=== Speak, Memory — Vladimir Nabokov ===
[2026-05-24 | audiomark] Such fancies are not foreign to young lives, or to put it otherwise, first and last things often tend to have an adolescent note, unless possibly they are directed by some venerable and rigid religion. Nature expects a full grown man to accept the two black voids, four and after, as solidly as he accepts the extraordinary visions in between. Imagineation, the supreme delight of the immortal and the immature, should be limited, in order to enjoy life we should not enjoy it too much. I rebel against this state of affairs. I feel the urge to take my rebellion outside and pick it nature. Over and over again my mind has made colossal efforts to distinguish the faintest of personal glimmers in the impersonal darkness on both sides of my life. That this darkness is caused merely by the walls of time.
[2026-05-23 | audiomark] Tired colonels who remembered having, in former lives, been slave messengers on a Roman road or sages under the willows of Lassa. I have ransacked my oldest dreams for keys and clues, and let me say at once that I reject completely the vulgar, shabby, fundamentally medieval world of Freud, with its crankish quest for sexual symbols, something like searching for beconean acrostics in Shakespeare's and its bitter little embryos spying from their natural nooks upon the love life of their parents. Initially, I was unaware that time so boundless at first blush was a prison. In probing my childhood, which is the next best to probing one's eternity, I see the awakening of consciousness as a series of spaced flashes, with the intervals between them gradually diminishing until bright blocks of perception are formed.

=== Someone You Can Build a Nest In — John Wiswell ===
[2026-05-24 | audiomark] Blueberry helped carry her much of the way to town, until the smell of society grew too strong and threatening for her. The bear dumped Sheshen off before waddling north, behind the shadows of pines. Underlook lay at the very centre of the Ismas, the only place to shelter on the route between Mainlands. Sheshen circled underlook to enter from the town's east end, where the poorer classes lived. This entrance to town was always less strictly guarded. The bearers mostly serviced the west and north parts of Underlook, where moneyed people lived. It was the older families that clutched most of the wealth, even though it was harvested by the labourers. What the labourers got out of it that kept them from eating the rich, Sheshen didn't understand. She was a mere monster. She fixed herself up before entering the town. Leftovers from the gold-plated Kathasis wallfire gave her two reasonably solid legs, so people wouldn't be suspicious of her weight. She had a full skull and, most of his jaw, she squeezed the burns out.
[2026-05-24 | audiomark] was growing in demand in their Western countries, the town's folk converted much of their livestock pins to sheep. They could sell the parts of a sheep's body that were fashionable and eat and excrete the rest. If Shashan ever went near those flocks, droves of human guards would descend on her, meanwhile town's folk wore the wool while eating those very animals. And somehow Shashan was the monster. Had she ever worn a human while she ate them? She thought that over while rubbing her new jaw. Catharsis Woolfier's jawbone was awkward with that thick chin. She tried to push it into different positions. The better her handle on this mouth, the easier it would be to speak. The next time a human crossed her path, she'd have to do a better job at socialising to throw them off. Talking was so annoying. For speech practice, she asked Blueberry. Henry Leeds on breakfast. Blueberry had a lovely old factory system that Shashan had never been able to copy. If there was anything else...
[2026-05-24 | audiomark] her malleable tissues formed vessels and circulated it around the crossbow bolt shaft, trying to fight the rosemary poison. Still, she was so cold. He wasn't from the isthmus wind, from the south ocean, but that rosemary poison. Blood circulation wasn't enough. Already she craved to digest the blood directly, into more energy to fight off the poison. That wouldn't be enough, either. She needed more meat. In her younger days she would have borrowed for rodents. Some stretches the isthmus was three miles wide, and back then wooded areas had plentiful deer and small amoursels scampering around them. However, as though to drive her away the local village had hunted most of the nearby areas dry, until only the cleverest pucks and skunks remained. How she would have sieved a skunk today. The only animals that the humans permitted to live in the isthmus nowadays were ones the humans wanted to kill and eat later. Kill and eat. Where?
[2026-05-24 | audiomark] them hunts there, less than a day's travel. You could." Gathouse's wolf eyes hand felt like winter had abruptly returned and fallen exclusively over Shasheshen's face. His gauntlet dug into her flesh, squeezing her mouth closed. He said, that'll shut her up. Get some chains. Worse than the metal or his strength was the chilling burn. While Shasheshen had no sense of smell, her flesh tasted the rosemary, making her hide bubble up, boils rising everywhere the oil made contact. Her eyes fled deep inside her head to protect from that hideous pain. It was so awful that the urge to vomit overcame her. She opened up her throat and chest cavity, and vomited the wide open bear trap at him. It clanked shut. The noise echoing throughout the hallway, cutting off wool far shriek, as well as his right hand. Her bear trap had been too enthusiastic, biting straight through the gold and boner-like, severing his hand between its jaws. Woolf her clutched at his mangles.
[2026-05-24 | audiomark] It was always tricky, getting the hang of being conscious again. Hopefully, the monster hunters hadn't heard that. It would be embarrassing to die in this state. Most bones that she kept inside herself during hibernation digested down to nothing. Her kind did not naturally have many solid internal structures, just as the hermit crabs on the north beaches naturally lacked shells. They had to scavenge. Her mother had warned prosthetic steel fangs to compensate when she hunted. That one memory of her mother taught Shashesh and the importance of keeping tools around. Along the floor of the bathing room, May iron rods and dense stones, which she'd left out last season. She rolled across them, letting them cut through external layers of her flesh, with a sting that felt like waking up. Her aned squeeze those rods and stones aligning them into a loose skeletal structure. A steel chain once used to bind her, now made an excellent spinal column, flexible with a-
[2026-05-24 | audiomark] A warmth unlike anything in the adult world, soft and pliable heat, keeping her and her siblings alive. In that warmth they were fed raw life. Her father's ribs, rich in marrow, cracking delicately in their mouths and providing the first feast of their lives. His fat deposits were generous, and his entrail sheltered them from the cruel winter elements. If Shashan could have spent her entire life inside the nest of his remains, she would have. But all childhoods end. Her's ended when one of her sisters bit off Shashan's left heel. Her siblings matured too quickly and hungered for more than their father. Shashan had to defend herself using jagged fragments of their father's pelvis, his final and most gracious gift. The assault was a gift from her siblings too, for she spent a week dining on their savory carcasses. Morning wasn't natural to her. She missed the succulents of her siblings for some time, and had the errant moment of nostalgia for sharing their body heat. Little of her prey was memorable. Of her mother, she only remembered her wide more, and the artificial steel fang she'd worn. Still, Shashan would always miss the nest that her father had made out of himself. He had been a good parent, and a better setting. Nothing matched that nest. These ruins were little more than an unloved cave, where weather had caved in the ceiling. Ornery spruce trees grew and plugged up the gaps. Poison ivy and spider webs were the few decorations, overgrowing everything architects had once achieved. Deep beneath the ruins lay an underground hot spring that some aspiring human had connected to a bathing room. Nowadays, the chamber was flooded with humid muck, gone brackish and amniotic from Shashan's excretions. It was nearly opaque down in the water.
[2026-05-24 | audiomark] local passage open and functional like this. It would be easier once she consumed one from a person, perhaps one of the hunters would donate. The older hunter-rug lowered his pole arm. What are you doing here, lass? The townsfolk said no one has approached this lair in years. "'Sire,'' Shashian said. The worm has kept me in darkness so long that I have no memory of when it kidnapped me. It helped me in one of the lower chambers of this place. The younger hunter-malig made a holy sign in front of himself. Then asked, "'It held you,'' Rorgh said. I thought anyone abducted by this thing would have been consumed before it went to hibernate. Well, the old hunter was right about that. Shashian never left food in the cupboard before hibernation. If you did, the remains spoiled and attracted scavengers. Scavengers were in nuisance when you were trying to regenerate. She mimicked Malik's holy sign with one hand, then resumed clutching her cloak.
[2026-05-24 | audiomark] of leather being pulled off of blades. Rourke said, How much rosemary do we have? That made Cheshashan grip the limestone bricks of her wall. These people had rosemary oil. She cursed out of multiple orifices. These monster hunters had done their research. One of the things she couldn't tolerate was rosemary. Once a local girl had candided and fooled her into eating it, and Cheshashan pissed bile for a week. As it was, her flesh struggled to keep her aloft on her makeshift bones. She needed to eat and gather strength. The fight would not go pleasantly. The last thing she wanted to wake up to was dying. Getting older had given her wiles. While the humans chatted about how best to kill her, she went through some growing pains and formed two relatively possible legs. She hobbled for a while, convincing herself that these knees and ankles mostly worked. On a rack beside the door was a set of weeks she'd made from the scouts that people hadn't been using anymore.
[2026-05-24 | audiomark] She would have. But all childhoods end. Her's ended when one of her sisters bit off she's sessions left here. Her siblings matured too quickly and hungered for more than their father. She's session had to defend herself using jagged fragments of their father's pelvis, his final and most gracious gift. The assault was a gift from her siblings too for she spent a week dining on their savory carcasses. Morning wasn't natural to her. She missed the succulents of her siblings for some time and had the errant moment of nostalgia for sharing their body heat. Little of her prey was memorable. Of her mother she only remembered her wide more and the artificial steel fang she'd worn. Still, Shashan would always miss the nest that her father had made out of himself. He had been a good parent and a better setting. Nothing matched that nest. These ruins were little more than an

=== Retrograde — Osamu Dazai ===
[2026-05-23 | audiomark] This is audible. One piece books presents Retrograde by Olsamu Desai, read by Scott Gage Ticketta. Butterflies The man was not old. He was only 25. And yet he was old. While others lived a year at a time, he had tripled the passage of time. Twice he had failed to kill himself, once with his lover. Three times he was thrown into prison for thought crimes. He had written more than a hundred novels and never managed to sell a single copy. He had never truly risen to the task of writing. Even his novels were just dilly dallying.

=== Beauty Is a Wound — Eka Kurniawan ===
[2026-05-23 | audiomark] going to jump, just like his beloved, continued Mr. Willie, and he'll fly up into the sky and disappear behind the fog. No, said Dewey are you. He will crash on the rocks and be banged up like a pile of chopped beef. And that was what happened. Right as he finished his song, Magadeek jumped into the open air. He appeared to fly, overjoyed us no one had seen him for many years. His arms flapped like the wings of a bird, but they couldn't make his body fly any higher, and down he plummeted with ever increasing speed. Even though he knew what was waiting at the end, he still smiled and whooped, full of excitement. He crashed onto the rocks and his body was hacked to abysmal bits. Exactly as Dewey are you and predicted. They brought his remains which looked more like...
[2026-05-23 | audiomark] morning. I am going to marry him. Don't joke around, Miss," said Mr. Willie. Go ahead and laugh if you think I'm joking. But the priest has disappeared and the church has been bombed to pieces. There is still the village headman. Miss, you're not a Muslim are you? No, but I haven't been Catholic either. Not for quite a long time. That was the beginning of Dewey Ayu's marriage to Magadeek, a pitiful old man marrying a beautiful young girl. The news quickly spread to every corner of the city. Even the arriving Japanese heard the gossip. Meanwhile those Dutch who had not been able to escape sent letters via their servants asking whether the story was true and some began to resurrect the shameful scandal of her mother and father. What will happen if I don't marry you? As to Magadeek finally. A short while after the headman arrived, you'll be supper for the adjoc. Then let him have me, and my young hill will be flattened. With that terrifying threat, he helplessly married Dewey Ayu around nine o'clock that morning, just as the Japanese soldiers began the ceremony marking their occupation of the city. No one was invited to celebrate their marriage except the servants and the security guards. Mr. Willie served as witness in the whole time Magadeek trembled and stammered and couldn't say his vows properly. He finally collapsed unconscious and the headman formalized their union. The poor man said Dewey Ayu. He would have been my grandfather if Tet had not made my youngest concubine. When Magadeek regained consciousness later that afternoon, he found himself Dewey Ayu's husband without understanding how it had happened.
[2026-05-23 | audiomark] knew there were abouts or condition. And then one morning, Tent found a baby in a basket outside his front door. And that baby was you," said Tent. They named you Dewey-A-U. And then they made more babies on the Aurora. There might be baskets in front of all the houses in Europe," said the girl. When she found out your grandmother got hysterical, she ran from the house like a crazy person and couldn't be caught, not even by horses and cars. We found her on the peak of the rocky hill. But she never came down. She flew away instead. Grandma Marie-Chef flew? asked Dewey-A-U. No. Ma'e-Yong. The concubine, her other grandmother. According to her grandfather, if she sat on the back of the rand and looked north, she would see two small rocky hills.
[2026-05-23 | audiomark] Above all, they worried about Dewey A'u's father and mother, on Rian A'no's Tamler, who had run away. They had left all of a sudden one morning sixteen years ago, without saying goodbye, leaving Dewey A'u who was still an infant behind. Even though they had truly infuriated the family, the truth was, they were still worried. Wherever they are, I hope they are happy. Said Tatstomler, and if the Germans kill them, may they continue to live happily in heaven. Said Dewey A'u, she then answered herself. Amen. After sixteen years, I am not angry anymore. Said Maritra, you should pray that you might meet them instead. Of course, I hope to, Oma. They owe me sixteen Christmas gifts and sixteen birthday presents, and that's not even counting the sixteen Easter eggs. She already knew about it.
[2026-05-23 | audiomark] that made her look like a fairy in a storybook. She was the only one in charge of the Stamler household now, ever since the rest of her family had packed their bags and flocked to the port with the other Dutch families to escape to Australia while they still had the chance. The Japanese army occupied Singapore, and although they hadn't reached Halamunda yet, they had quite possibly already arrived in Batavia. The Duke of War had actually arrived months before, when they heard on the radio that fighting had broken out in Europe. At that time, Derweer IU had already started at the Franciscan School. The school that years later became the middle school where her granddaughter, Rengani is the beautiful, was raped by a dog in a toilet stall. She wanted to become a teacher for the very simple reason that she didn't want to become a nurse. She would leave for school with her aunt Hanukkah, who taught kindergarten in the same callybree car that soon after would come to get mugged.
[2026-05-09 | audiomark] peering behind a descending fog. People only heard the sound of Magadique's pitiful screams as he ran down the slope looking for his love. Everyone searched for her, even the Dutchmen and the wild dogs. They scoured every corner of the valley, but my young was never found, dead or alive. And finally, everyone believed that the woman had truly just flown away. The Dutchmen believed it, and so did Magadique. Now that all was left was that rocky hill. The people named it after the woman who had flown off into the sky. My young hill. After that day Magadique went to the swamps where the Dutch couldn't withstand the malaria in the wet season and built a hut there. During the day he hauled a cart filled with coffee, cocoa beans and sometimes copper and yams to the port. And except for his brief exchanges with other card-pullers, he only talked to himself or to the surrounding spirits. People began to think that his insanity had relapsed, even though he was no longer raping cows and chickens or eating shit. Almost immediately after the hut was first built, more people started to arrive in the swamps, and the hut that sprung up turned the place into a new encampment. The only Dutch person who ever went there was a controller tasked with carrying out a census, and one week later he was found in his rented room, dead from a molarial fever. The last and only person to visit Magadique for many years, until the night when the Colibri driver shot his mongrel dog and a tough guy kicked in the door of his house with the shocking news that Dewey IU wanted to marry him. He didn't know why she wanted to marry him, so a dark story began to form in the back of his mind, still shaking he asked the tough guy.
[2026-05-09 | audiomark] wind. The people almost didn't believe their eyes, and some of them screamed, and the Dutchman's face has all turned red. Then, without hesitation the two made love on a flat rock, in plain view of the people who filled the valley as if they were watching a film at the movie theater. The virtuous women covered their faces with the edges of their veils, and all the men got hard and did not dare look at one another, and the Dutchman said, What have we always said? The natives are like monkeys. The real tragedy occurred after they finished making love, when Magadeek invited his beloved to climb down the rocky hill and go home with him, so they could marry, live together, and love one another forever. That would be impossible, said Ma'e Young. Before they set one foot in the valley, the Dutchman would throw them into a cage of our jug, so I prefer to fly.
[2026-05-09 | audiomark] that people wondered how the woman had ever managed to reach its peak. After a brutal struggle, Magadique was standing next to his love, boiling over with longing. Do you still want me?" asked my young. My whole body has been licked and splattered with a Dutchman's spit, and he has stabbed my privates 1,192 times. I have stabbed 28 different women's privates as many as 462 times, and I have stabbed my own hand countless times, and that's not even counting the privates of animals so. Are we really all that different? As if a lured god took possession of them, they embraced ever so tightly kissing beneath the heat of the tropical sun, and to relieve the passion that had been building up for so long, they removed all the garments sticking to their bodies and tossed them away.
[2026-05-09 | audiomark] They found the man still shackled but still singing. They lose to Sponson, brought him to a trench and bathed him all together, as if he was a newborn baby, or an old man who had just passed away. They sprinkled his body with fragrances from rose oil to lavender, and they gave him fine warm clothes, including a jacket and a pair of pantaloons discarded by a Dutchman, and they made him up like the corpse of a Christian about to be laid inside a coffin. When all this was finished, one of his old friends commented in amazement, you are so handsome. I'm worried that my wife will fall in love with you. Of course she will! Magadique boasted. Even the sheep and the crocodile's fallen love with me. And it was true what the doo-coon had said. Love could cure his illness. Could cure any illness at all. No one worried about him anymore. And every-
[2026-05-09 | audiomark] healthy. His cheeks flushed as the days melted away, and the time he had been waiting for drew near. Bearfoot schoolboys would gather outside his goat pen in the afternoon before they went home to hurt their cattle, and joking around for a bit he would teach them how to fondle their own genitals, rubbing and using their own spit, and so the teachers at school forbid anyone to go near him. But the children must have tried what he had taught them because a number of them visited the goat pen in secret in the middle of the night, and whispered to him that they had discovered a new way to pee that felt way better than peeing the usual way. It will be even more enjoyable if you try it with the private parts of little girls. When one afternoon a farmer found two nine-year-old children making love in the pond on shrubs, the villagers cruelly boarded up that goat pen. Margadeek was stuck inside with no one to talk to.
[2026-05-09 | audiomark] from the sea. After a while he turned into a strange person, if not even an enemy of the people, because time after time there would be a ruckus in a neighbor's stable, and he would be caught raping a cow, or even a chicken, until its intestines came spilling out. Sometimes he would punch a shepherd boy and then catch a sheep and work it in the middle of the field, once making a middle-aged woman with a basket full of yam leaves run the whole length of a rice field, shrieking in a hysterical panic at the sight of a lust so completely out of control. Everyone began to distance themselves from him, and he stopped bathing. He stopped eating rice or anything else except his own shit, and the shit that he scavenged from the banana orchards. His family and his friends were deeply concerned and called in a duke whoon from a distant land. A mystical healer, famous for being able to cure all-
[2026-05-09 | audiomark] became a faithful regular at the brothel at the end of the pier, sleeping with the women there while whispering my young's name. He did that almost every weekend, with a group of friends who were just as good to him as ever. When their cash flow was ample, each fellow slept with his own prostitute, but sometimes when they needed to be thrifty, five of them would share one woman. It continued that way for years, until one by one the man got married. That was hard for Magadeek, because his friends no longer had time to go to the brothel, and anyway now they had wives who could be slept with for love, not money. But going to a whorehouse all by yourself was the most depressing thing in the world. When Magadeek felt lonely he would start off practicing with his hand, but that would soon grow intolerably frustrating, and he would be forced to slip out alone into the middle of the pitch black night to the brothel again, returning home before...
[2026-05-09 | audiomark] Long after he could walk and leave his mother behind. One day my young, rukurious and asked why, at 19, he still drank that milk, and didn't care that it was already long spoiled. Because my father drank my mother's milk all the time until he was an old man. My young understood. Behind a clump of pandan shrub she took off her blouse and told the guy to suck on her adorable pert little nipple. No milk came out, but Magadique finally stopped drinking his mother's milk, and fell in love with that young girl for life. That's how it all went. Until one night my young was picked up by a horse-drawn carriage, all made up like a sin-trend answer, very beautiful to see but painful too. Magadique, who was always the last to know anything, ran the length of the beach chasing that carriage, and when he reached the coachman he ran alongside shouting out to the beautiful
[2026-05-09 | audiomark] So, with the naivety of a village boy, he said to the tough guy, I'm not even sure I can marry her. It doesn't matter whether it's you or a dog's dick that takes her virginity. She wants to marry you." The tough guy snarled. If not, Lord Stamler will turn you into breakfast for the adjuck. That made him shiver. He touched people raised wild dogs for hunting wild boar, and it was no lie that if they didn't like a native, he would be pitted against those adjuck in a fight to the death. But even if that threat was true, marrying Deweyar, you was no simple matter, and he just didn't understand why he had to marry her. And in any case, he had already vowed not to marry anyone, out of his eternal love from my young. A woman who had flown off into the sky one day, and...
[2026-05-09 | audiomark] But no one comes to this house. Procena signed. I don't care how he came or how he came without you or me knowing. But he must have come and taught her everything, even how to make love. Yes, it's true he comes and they make love. This house is haunted. Procena had never believed that the house was haunted, but Dewey IU had her reasons. Still that was another matter and Dewey IU didn't want to say anything about all that to Rosina, at least not that evening. She stood up and quickly went back to bed, forgetting about the boiling water and the cup of coffee. In the following days the old woman tried to spy on the ugly young girl to discover the most sensible explanation for all of these miracles, because she didn't want to believe a ghost was responsible, even if a ghost was...
[2026-05-09 | audiomark] would ever want to touch her again. Who suffered the most from all the fuss over this old woman come back to life was none other than beauty, who had to lock herself in her room, luckily no one ever stayed longer than a few minutes, because the visitors would soon sense an awful terror coming from behind beauty's closed bedroom door. With a strange nauseating smell, an evil wind, black and heinous would sweep past them, sliding out from under the door and through the keyhole, with a penetrating chill that reached the very marrow of their bones. Most people had never seen beauty, except for when she was a little baby and the midwife had circled the village looking for a wet nurse. But the idea of her was enough to make the hair on the napes of their necks stand up, and their whole body's tremble as they gazed at the monster's door. When the evil aroma carried by the wind reached their noses,
[2026-05-09 | audiomark] a fish, including their bones and spines, and a bowl of soup and two plates of rice. Her beverage was a clear broth with bits of bird's nests floating in it. She ate faster than the two women accompanying her. After finishing the food, her stomach gurgled continuously, and after emitting a rumbling sound out of her asshole, the kind of fart that can't be held in, she asked while wiping her mouth with an abkin. So, how long have I been dead? Twenty-one years. Said beauty. I'm sorry. That was way too long. She said regretfully. But there are no alarm clocks in the grave. Don't forget to bring one the next time. Said beauty attentively. Then added. And don't forget a mosquito net. There we are, you ignored beauty's words, which were said in a small, shrill, lilting soprano.
[2026-05-09 | audiomark] not one single person appeared, and so she never met anyone except the mute servant who spoke with her hands. And yet she knew the words for all visible and invisible things, for cats and lizards and the chickens and the ducks that roamed around their house. Aside from all these marvels, she was still an unfortunate, ugly, empathetic little girl. Rossina often caught her standing behind the window curtain peaking out at people in the street, or gazing at her when she had to go out to buy something, as if asking to be invited along. Of course, Rossina would have been happy to take her along, but the little girl herself would protest, saying in her pitiful voice, no, it's better I don't come, because people will lose their appetites for the rest of their lives. She would go out in the early morning when people had not yet awoke and except for the vegetable sellers hurrying to market, or the farmers hurrying to...
[2026-05-09 | audiomark] The girl said finally, even though she still did not turn her head, to free me from the curse of this hideous face. She had been obsessed with that handsome prince ever since she realized that other people were not as ugly as she was. Rosina had tried to bring her to neighbor's houses back when she was only a babe in arms, but not one person received them because their children would scream and cry for the rest of the afternoon and the old folks would instantly come down with a fever and die two days later. They rejected her everywhere, and it was that way too when it was time for her to attend school, not one school accepted beauty. Rosina had even tried begging a principal, but he seemed more interested in the mute young woman than in the ugly young girl and had borrowerously fondled her in the office once the door was closed. Why has Rosina thought where there's a will there's a way and if she had to
[2026-05-09 | audiomark] realize that twenty-one years had passed, and so to clear up all of the confusion, dare we are you tried to greet the girl? This is my house. She said an explanation. What is your name? Beauty. Dare we are you erupted into a truly impolite laugh before quickly stopping herself and understanding everything? She sat in another chair, separated by a table covered with a yellow tablecloth and a cup of coffee belonging to the girl. Like a cow, who sees that her glazed calf already knows how to run. She said mystified, and then politely asked for the coffee on the table which she drank. I'm your mother! She added, full of pride that her daughter was exactly what she had hoped for. If the rain hadn't been coming down and she hadn't been starving and the moon had been shining brightly, she would have loved to run and climb up to the...
[2026-05-09 | audiomark] him. Any minute now he is going to die. So she slept with the old man, not because she agreed to the deal, but because of the child's suggestion that he was about to expire. They wrestled on the bed while the mute girl sat on the chair outside the bedroom door, clutching a small bag filled with her clothes that had just a moment ago been carried by her father, waiting. As it turned out, there we are, you didn't need that much time. And she admitted that truly she didn't feel much, just a little tickle in the middle of her crotch. It was like a dragonfly scratching at my belly button, said the prostitute. The man attacked her fiercely with almost no small talk like her, but towelian of dutch soldiers approaching with a mission to destroy, moving freely and forgetting his rheumatism. His haste quickly bore fruit when he let out a brief groan in his body spasimmed. At first, do we, are, you thought it was the spasim of a man?

=== The Edge of Space-Time — Chanda Prescod-Weinstein ===
[2026-05-23 | audiomark] metaphors and its own right. I believe that seeing the universe through the perspective offered by physics strengthens our ability to understand what work metaphors are doing on us and how we might wield them. It is in this sense that physics works on us like poetry, a way of understanding the world that provides insights not available to us elsewhere. This helps us see why we should bother with it. We should bother with physics because it is, in part, how we as a species learn to use our minds. We should learn and teach poetry, physics, algebra, and other abstract ideas because they train us to think in symbolic and figurative terms. The same goes for calculus and quantum mechanics, and if we cannot learn to think in and through the abstract in the symbolic, then we are pliable. We are sitting ducks for the fascists and authoritarians.
[2026-05-23 | audiomark] lapping forms of knowing that we have long used. To understand this boundary and how we have come to know about it is to deepen our relationship with ourselves and the universe around us in a very specific and beautiful way. We should embrace it for ourselves and for future generations because it is our history. And who are we to argue with the ancestors? The book you are listening to is about the queer, poetic wonder that is our universe and what we gain when we look at it from the margins. It is my version of what historian Emma de Fone segla calls CosmoVisions, a response to the question of why we should bother trying to get beyond the edges of human knowledge about the physical universe. The edge of space time is part of a larger tradition that includes not just scientists but also artists. People like jazz musician, artist and technologist Milford Graves who use percussion, sound, and observations of praying mantises and plant growth to understand a phenomenon he termed Cosmic Energy. Graves was not formally trained as a scientist and Cosmic Energy sounds a little like Mystic Talk. But when I listen to him describe his ideas in the documentary, Milford Graves for Mantis, I heard a familiar sensibility about how matter is linked with and through space time, a relationship that takes center stage in this book. As a set of knowledge and techniques, physics provides a pathway toward answering the same questions. Graves asked about the fundamental nature of our Cosmos and the relationship between matter, energy and space time. It allows us to specify in Grave.

=== The Great Transformation — Karl Polanyi ===
[2026-05-23 | audiomark] event as well as with the great transformation which it ushered in. Nineteenth-century civilization rested on four institutions. The first was the balance of power system, which for a century prevented the occurrence of any long and devastating war between the great powers. The second was the International Gold Standard, which symbolized a unique organization of world economy. The third was the self-regulating market, which produced an unheard of material welfare. The fourth was the liberal state. Classified in one way, two of these institutions were economic, two political, classified in another way, two of them were national, two international. Between them, they determined the characteristic outlines of the history of our civilization. Of these institutions, the gold standard

=== Empire of AI — Karen Hao ===
[2026-05-23 | audiomark] it, Jack Clark would issue an unusually stern warning to employees on Slack, not to speak with me beyond sanctioned conversations. The security guard would receive a photo of me with instructions to be on the lookout if I appeared unapproved on the premises. It was odd behavior in general, made odd by OpenAI's commitment to transparency. What I began to wonder, were they hiding? If everything was supposed to be beneficial research, eventually made available to the public. At lunch and through the following days, I probed deeper into why Brockman had co-founded OpenAI. He was a teen when he first grew obsessed with the idea that it could be possible to recreate human intelligence. It was a famous paper from British mathematician Alan Turing that sparked his fascination. The name of its first section, The Imitation Game, which inspired the title of the 2014 Hollywood drama-tization of Turing.
[2026-05-23 | audiomark] to become covered with data centers and power stations. There would be a tsunami of computing, almost like a natural phenomenon. AGI and thus the data centers needed to support them would be too useful to not exist. I try to again to press for more details. What you're saying is, OpenAI is making a huge gamble that you will successfully reach beneficial AGI to counteract global warming before the act of doing so might exacerbate it. I wouldn't go too far down that rabbit hole. Brockman hastily cut in. The way we think about it is the following. We're on a ramp of AI progress. This is bigger than OpenAI, right? It's the field. And I think society is actually getting benefit from it. The day we announced the deal, he said, referring to Microsoft's new $1 billion investment. Microsoft.
[2026-05-23 | audiomark] AI had only one project that approached fitting the bill, a large language model called GPT-2 that was capable of generating passages of text that closely resembled human writing. In February that year, OpenAI had taken the unusual step of proclaiming to the press that this model, once advanced a little further, could become an exceedingly dangerous technology. Authoritarian governments or terrorist organizations could weaponize the model to mass-produced disinformation. Users could overwhelm the internet with so much trash content that it would be difficult to find high-quality information. OpenAI would take the ethical high-road, it said, and withhold the full version of the model, which had 1.5 billion parameters or variables, an approximate measure of a model's size and complexity. Instead, to give the public just a taste of the kind of capabilities that society-
[2026-05-23 | audiomark] due to safety and security concerns. For the first time, OpenAI also spelled out its AGI definition, highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work. That summer, as the Dota team began winning amateur matches and trumpeting its results across tech media, OpenAI's Dota 2 AI Steam Rules World Champion eSports team with back-to-back victories lauded one headline. Altman bumped into Microsoft's CEO, Satya Nadella, at the Allen & Company conference in Sun Valley, Idaho. The annual event, known as the Summer Camp for billionaires, had been the backdrop for many a major corporate deal. Altman was ready to strike his own. He pitched Nadella on an OpenAI investment, enough to peak the chief executive's interest. But Nadella questioned whether he should invest in an external organization when his company had its own...
[2026-05-23 | audiomark] worry that OpenAI could lose its best researchers at any moment. Previously, with Musk's firm backing, OpenAI had aggressively cranked up its nonprofit salaries to ward off counteroffers. Now the talent war had only grown more heated, and Musk himself had poached away one of OpenAI's key founding scientists, Andre Carpathy, in June 2017, to direct Tesla's AI division. On compensation, OpenAI had a major disadvantage. It couldn't offer equity into the organization, which many Bay Area tech workers viewed as necessary to afford the steep cost of living. Musk soon arrived at his own conclusion for how to solve OpenAI's money problem. In January 2018, Andre Carpathy emailed Musk with new data showing how much Google was dominating top AI research publications. Working at the cutting edge of AI is unfortunately expensive. Carpathy wrote,
[2026-05-23 | audiomark] Should open AI succeed? Wouldn't it be dangerous to give Musk full control of AGI? Convinced, Brockman appealed to Satskever who remained uncertain. In September 2017, he emailed Musk and Altman on behalf of him and Brockman, in a last ditch attempt to resolve the situation. Elon, we really want to work with you. Satskever wrote, we believe that if we join forces, our chance to success in the mission is the greatest. But Musk's desire for total control felt antithetical to OpenAI's original spirit, he said. You are concerned that Demis could create an AGI dictatorship. So are we. So it is a bad idea to create a structure where you could become a dictator if you chose to. Sam, when Greg and I are stuck, you've always had an answer that turned out to be deep and correct, Satskever continued. That said, Allman's behaviors had often left the two confused about his true beliefs and intentions. We don't understand why the CEO title is so important to you, he wrote. Your stated reasons have changed, and it's hard to really understand what's driving it. Is AGI truly your primary motivation? How does it connect to your political goals? How has your thought process changed over time? There's enough baggage here that we think it's very important for us to meet and talk it out as email concluded. If all of us say the truth and resolve the issues, the company that will create will be much more likely to withstand the very strong forces it'll experience. Within 10 minutes, Musk had responded. Guys, I've had enough. This is the
[2026-05-23 | audiomark] than Moore's Law, much faster. In the last six years, it had doubled every 3.4 months, or put another way, increased 30 million percent. Brockman began to call this new doubling curve, open AI's Law. Not only did open AI need massively more amounts of compute to reach its end goal, he and the other leadership believed it also needed to scale its compute at a pace that at the very least matched this new law. Chipmaking firms imposed Moore's Law on their companies with existential fervor. The leadership now saw open AI's Law in the same light. If they couldn't wait for Moore's Law, they needed to grow their compute the other way. They needed a whole hell of a lot more chips. The kinds of chips that open AI needed were expensive. Known as graphics processing units or GPUs, they had originally been designed.
[2026-05-23 | audiomark] In 2018 at Brockman's invitation, Danielle who had been the first recruiter at Stripe would also move over to OpenAI to build up its team as an engineering manager and its VP of people. We have a long, cute history of knowing each other. Danielle would joke to me of her and Brockman a year later. That's right, Brockman would say, chuckling. When we started OpenAI and I started doing the initial recruiting here, I was like, I really wish I had Danielle. By the end of 2020, the Umadeh siblings would become so disturbed by what they viewed as altmans and OpenAI's break from its original premise that they would cleave off to form another AI lab and throbic, taking critical staff with them and creating a rivalry that would play a pivotal role. In the frenzied release of ChatGPT, Karnovsky would step down from OpenAI's board, having served his term and due to the new conflict of interest. On the list of candidates he nominated for his replacement, he would include one of his former employees, Helen Toner. The problem was that OpenAI had no idea what it was doing. A year in, it had poached, begged, and borrowed its way to a stellar team in the aggressive fight for talent within the industry, keeping up the excitement internally just from the sheer density of top people. Still, it struggled to find a coherent strategy and the momentum and shine were beginning to wear off. Its list of projects sprawled every rich way in a kitchen sink reflection of the field. It was using robots and video games and simulated virtual worlds for training agents, all as ways of trying to reach more advanced AI capabilities. Little was working, and what did work felt derivative of something someone else had already done. Whatever AGI was, it wasn't that. The bigger projects that they had, it didn't seem...
[2026-05-23 | audiomark] beyond the impact that a single model's decision can have. In reality, for AI systems to even be built, there is very often a hidden human cost. Within OpenAI, various researchers, some of them among the small handful of women of color at the company, would press executives to expand their AI safety definition and include research on areas such as the discriminatory impacts of deep learning models. Executives were dismissive. That's not our role, one said. In May 2016, Amadeh still at Google stopped by OpenAI's office to see how things were going. OpenAI had just moved out of Brockman's apartment to a space above a chocolate factory in San Francisco's Mission District, the city's oldest neighborhood and a Latino stronghold. Researchers padded around in socks. There are 20 to 30 people in the field, including Nick Bostrom and the Wikipedia.
[2026-05-23 | audiomark] philanthropy to donate money in part based on EA principles. Open Fill, as it was called, would fast become the primary funder of catastrophic and existentially related AI safety research. By November 2024, it had awarded more than 300 AI safety related grants worth $440 million. But this existential brand of AI safety built on philosophical thought experiments would soon come under fire as the AI research community awakened to the less apocalyptic and immediate real-world harms of AI. Around the same time Amadeh published his paper, pro-publica published a groundbreaking investigation called Machine Bias that revealed algorithms were being used across the US criminal justice system in misguided attempts to predict future criminals, and those algorithms were classifying black people as higher risk than white ones who had more extensive criminal records. The piece and an overall souring on Big Tech post 2016 over the harms of social media sparked a new wave of research reckoning with the harmful societal impacts of AI. Deborah Rajee, an AI accountability researcher at the University of California Berkeley, would come to champion the re-examination of the overwhelming focus of AI safety research on theoretical rogue AI and its possible existential risks to the detriment and de-prioritization of other real evidence-based problems, co-authoring a 2020 paper in response to Amadeh's. She argued that truly safe AI systems could not be built by isolating the behaviors of the technical systems themselves without placing them in full context of their impacts on the very things privacy-
[2026-05-23 | audiomark] other interviews that this was particularly true for women and people of color, who like Gabru felt alienated by the white and male culture of the dominant tech industry. But to Brockman, cohesion was more important, and being physically together helped with the serendipitous exchange of ideas. Brockman decided, too, that he would call all open AI employees members of technical staff, inspired by Xerox Park, the storied research and development lab in Palo Alto, which had done so after a tradition at the equally famed Bell Labs in New Jersey to create a more democratic work environment. When considering the criticisms leveled at OpenAI for its pursuit of AGI, he drew parallels with Edison's light bulb. A committee of distinguished experts said, it's never going to work, and one year later, he shipped, Brockman said, how could that be? It was, as science writer Arthur C.
[2026-05-23 | audiomark] decided to make her the object of their fun. They surrounded her. One man forced her into a hug, another foisted a kiss on her cheek as he snapped a humiliating photo. At the same conference, a friend of hers was harassed by a professor. Now here was a group of people, nine out of 11 of whom were white men, being showered in previously unheard of amounts of money, speaking about the theoretical prospect of a bad superintelligence taking over the world and proposing to counteract it by building a better superintelligence. That night, Gabru drafted a scathing critique of what she'd observed in an anonymous open letter, the spectacle, the cult-like exaltation of AI celebrities. And most of all, the overwhelming homogeneous of the people building and shaping such a consequential technology. This homogeneous culture was not only pushing away talented researchers, but also leading to a dangerously narrow conception of AI and of who could benefit from the technology. We don't have to project into the future to see AI's potential adverse effects, Gabru wrote. It is already happening. On her flight back home from the conference, she thought twice about posting the letter anonymously. Instead, she posted a shorter, more sanitized version of her critique using her name on Facebook. Several weeks later, she typed up an email with a subject line, hello from Tim Meet. When I go to computer vision conferences, I am often the only black person there, she wrote. But now I have seen five of you smiley face and thought that it would be cool if we started a black and AI group or at least know of each other. One by one, she added the researcher's emails and then she pressed send.
[2026-05-23 | audiomark] As upheaval ripped through companies like Meta and Google and TechLash sentiment gripped the public, AI researchers too began to question whether the field had moved too quickly to yoke its technologies to corporate bottom lines. An accounting of the societal impacts of commercializing AI research returned an unsettling scorecard. Automated software being sold to the police, mortgage brokers, and credit lenders were entrenching racial, gender, and class discrimination. Algorithms running Facebook's newsfeed and YouTube's recommendation systems had likely polarized the public, fueled misinformation and extremism, enabled election interference, and most horrifying in the case of Facebook, precipitated ethnic cleansing in Myanmar. But the main funding alternative, taking money from the government, had its own ethical landmines. In 2018, thousands of Google employees would protest a secret company con-
[2026-05-23 | audiomark] In later correspondence, the group acknowledged that they could walk back their commitments to openness once the narrative had served its purpose and as the need arose, such as to avoid bad actors getting their hands on the technology. As we get closer to building AI, it will make sense to start being less open. Setskever raised to the trio in January 2016 shortly after OpenAI launched. The Open and OpenAI means that everyone should benefit from the fruits of AI after it's built, but it's totally okay to not share the science. Yup, Musk responded. In December 2015, the announcement went out on a Friday night to coincide with neural information processing systems, the largest annual AI research conference where Hinton and Setskever had auctioned off DNN research three years earlier. The blog post introducing OpenAI listed each of the nine founding members, including Brock
[2026-05-23 | audiomark] to sign on only if others were as well. Undeterred, he invited his 10 most wanted engineers and researchers to discuss their hesitations and rally their excitement over wine and nabba valley. He hired a bus to drive everyone there and back, so he could continue pitching them on the more than hour-long ride each way. Three weeks later, by Brockman's deadline, nearly all had accepted his offer. As Musk, Altman and Brockman discussed how best position to open AI at launch, all were keenly aware of the importance of its public perception. They agreed with Altman's proposal to make it a non-profit and to play up the openness for which it was named. Open AI, the anti-Google, would conduct its research for everyone, open source the science, and be the paragon of transparency. I hope for us to enter the field as a neutral group, looking to collaborate widely and shift the dialogue towards being...
[2026-05-23 | audiomark] file a lawsuit against SAM for such alleged abuse on January 6, 2025, two days before her 31st birthday to meet the statute of limitations for such cases in Missouri. Annie's persistent efforts to voice her allegations and tell her side of the story would affect SAM and influence OpenAI's other executives as they contended with his and the company's surge to global impact and prominence. Each of these puzzle pieces, SAM's ascendance, his character and relationships, the divisiveness he left in his wake, the flows of money and power, speaks to the path that led to his sudden and fleeting ouster. For a brief moment, the rest of the world's caught a glimpse into the struggles happening at the highest levels to dictate the future of artificial intelligence. It would reveal just how much the quest for dominance of that technology, already restructuring society and terraforming our Earth, ultimately rests on the polarized values, clashing egos, and messy humanity of a small handful of fallible people. Chapter 2 A Civilizing Mission Greg Brockman became the first to commit to building OpenAI. To be Brockman's co-founder, Altman handpicked Ilya Sutskever, then an AI researcher at Google whom Altman cold emailed to come to the Rosewood dinner in the summer of 2015. Sutskever enthusiastically accepted, upon learning that Musk would be in attendance. Brockman and Sutskever made an interesting duo. Tall and stocky with an amiable demeanor, Brockman was an engineer and a startup guy like Altman. He had grown up on a hobby farm in North Dakota. In between milking cows, he fell in love with math and then science. In 2008, he enrolled in Harvard and transferred to MIT two years later.
[2026-05-23 | audiomark] and voice, among the disenfranchised, confronted by that accelerating chasm, the limits of seeding so much power, not just to companies, but to the individuals who run them, without the scaffolding to provide commensurate checks and balances. Annie's actions would also make her story an inescapable part of understanding OpenAI's trajectory and its impact on AI development. In 2021, she would make the decision to go public with serious allegations about Sam, claiming that he sexually abused her as a child, which her family has called the worst of her untrue accusations, and also that he and the rest of the family abandoned her when she was at her most vulnerable. She would subsequently file a lawsuit against Sam for such alleged abuse on January 6, 2025, two days before her 31st birthday to meet the statute of limitations for such cases in Missouri. Annie's
[2026-05-23 | audiomark] faster than he could spend it, she felt his relationship with that money grow more complicated. In her view, he began to hoard it as he grew more and more out of touch with people in need. Through the end of 2019 and the first half of 2020, several times he and the rest of the family declined, or were reluctant to provide anti-access to what she saw as emergency financial support to help front her rent and medical expenses. According to extensive correspondence she shared with me. At the time, she faced acute physical and mental health challenges her medical and therapy records show exacerbated by the sudden death of their father. It left her struggling with unstable housing. Out of desperation to make ends meet, she turned to sex work for money. In the summer of 2020, as OpenAI began to gain its first major wave of public attention under Sam's leadership, Annie would cut off contact with her family. There is a case to be made that Sam, as well as his brothers, were following the lead of their and Annie's mother in an attempt to push Annie toward financial independence. It's a complicated and painful family story, difficult to judge based on partial information. In a public statement in January 2025, Sam, his mom and his two brothers expressed their love and concern for Annie and denied all of her allegations as utterly untrue. In response to my requests for interviews and detailed asks for comment, Connie Gibbs Dean provided a shorter version of a similar statement and declined further elaboration. Sam, via OpenAI's communications team and his brothers, did not respond. Nevertheless, Annie's experience contained striking parallels to the many themes explored within these pages. The ever widening gulf between those who benefit and those left behind in the supposed march for progress. The law...
[2026-05-23 | audiomark] she says, his then-boyfriend created a rule. For every big ticket item that Sam purchased, he needed to donate the same amount to a good cause. For a time, it created a check on the rapid creep of Sam's lifestyle, but as he earned money faster than he could spend it, she felt his relationship with that money he grew more complicated. In her view, he began to hoard it, as he grew more and more out of touch with people in need. Through the end of 2019 and the first half of 2020, several times he and the rest of the family declined, or were reluctant to provide anti-axis to what she saw as emergency financial support to help front her rent and medical expenses, according to extensive correspondence she shared with me. At the time, she faced acute physical and mental health challenges her medical and therapy records show exacerbated by the sudden death of their father. It left her struggling with unstable housing. Out of desperation,
[2026-05-23 | audiomark] his relationship with his sister. As kids and well into his 20s, Sam and Annie were close, she, the youngest, he the oldest, her protector. She was science-minded in the artsy one, the most emotionally expressive. At times, he liked to get her opinions about his romantic partners, to confide in her about his inner worries and emotions. But as he grew more ingrained in Silicon Valley, Annie watched him build thicker and thicker walls around the part of him that was the most sensitive. He would tell her about new psychological tactics he'd learned, she remembers, like using fewer words and an email to appear more powerful as a business leader. At first, it made her sad and then scared about whether that sensitive part was even still there. I definitely still got glimpses of it for a while, which was why I stayed close, she says. And then, I started being the one to be harmed by him.
[2026-05-23 | audiomark] guns. He was faster to anger and to show his impatience for ineffective people. At one point coding up a software program to size up YC founders based on their email response times. A few years in, he had refined his appearance and ironed out the edges. He'd traded in T-shirts and cargo shorts for fitted henlies and jeans. He'd built 18 pounds of muscle in a single year to flesh out his small frame. He learned to talk less, ask more questions, and project a thought full modesty with furrowed brow. In private settings and with close friends, he still showed flashes of anger and frustration. In public ones and with acquaintances, he embodied the nice guy. He readily gave people credit for things and texted in all lowercase with lots of smiley and frowny faces. He gave employees his personal number, encouraging them to reach out at any time and responding to their feedback with impressive attentiveness. He avoided expressing negative emotions.
[2026-05-23 | audiomark] on a tour of America, much like Teal's other mentee Zuckerberg, and spoke to 100 Trump supporters. All men also entertained the idea of going into politics himself, with a run for California governor, reasoning that it would place him in charge of the world's fifth largest economy, a strong stepping stone for fixing what he saw as dysfunction in the political system. He published a manifesto called the United Slate with three principles, one, prosperity from technology, two, economic fairness, and three, personal liberty. He organized focus groups to test out his candidacy, people close to him joked that he should shoot for U.S. President. In the end, Altman never became a politician. The focus groups thought he came off as too young, but he began to act like one. In his first few years of running YC, he still had boyish cheeks, owned one suit jacket.
[2026-05-23 | audiomark] He pitched into his ex-boyfriend and friend Matt Kresselof's biotechnology firm Conception. He co-invests and deals with another ex-boyfriend, Lockheed Grume, a prominent solo venture capitalist. To those people, it's a testament to Altman's generosity. He regularly offers his resources, whether opening up his houses for people to stay in, or supporting them financially. He has gone out of his way to support even complete strangers, once sending funds to a man in Ethiopia who emailed him seeking his help to buy a laptop one person recalls. During the 2023 Silicon Valley Bank Crisis, when a run on a critical financial institution for valley startups led to the largest bank failure since 2008, he sent money without any paperwork to companies to save them from shutting down or laying off people, remembers Kresselof. It's an extremely rare trait, Grume says, and that trait has really rubbed off on me, the generosity. I feel very grateful for that. Altman developed the same approach with politicians, taking another page out of Teal's book, but where Teal asserted his wealth to back Republican candidates, pumping tens of millions into their campaigns. Altman grew increasingly involved in politics in the opposite direction, hosting fundraisers and writing checks for Democrats. For a time, the political differences between Teal and Altman strained their relationship. In 2017, Altman leaned into their disagreements, and went on a tour of America, much like Teal's other mentee Zuckerberg, and spoke to 100 Trump supporters. Altman also entertained the idea of going into politics himself, with a run for California governor, reasoning that it would place him in charge of the world's fifth largest economy, a strong stepping stone for fixing what he saw as dysfunction in the political system. He published a manifesto called the United Slate with three principles.
[2026-05-23 | audiomark] as two minutes to pack more into his schedule. He connected people to one another over email with a single word, meat, or single punctuation mark. Question mark? A famous habit of Amazon's Jeff Bezos to get a conversation started. With his money, Altman made very few large bets, going mostly instead for small ones at high volume. Over time, he accumulated financial ties with more than 400 companies through YC, Hydrazine, and his other funds, according to a June 2024 Wall Street Journal assessment. It's hard to find people within Altman's inner circle who don't have some kind of financial relationship with him. His second ever and most successful startup investment was in the YC-backed Payments Technology Company Stripe, for which Greg Brockman was its first Chief Technology Officer. An invested early in YC-backed Airbnb, the co-founder and CEO of which Brian Chesky, as one of his close...
[2026-05-23 | audiomark] I've heard a lot of different theories about how things get done. He wrote on his blog in 2013. Here's the best one, a combination of focus and personal connections. Charlie Rose said this to Paul Graham, who told it to me. All men would later add a third ingredient, self-belief. For startups, I think it's really important to add this, he said. You actually have to believe you might do it. All men began to live by this mantra religiously. He cultivated relationships with intensity and discipline, first by giving his time and tactical advice, and then as he came to control increasing amounts of capital, his money. Teal was a role model in this regard. His mentor had long used advice and money to build his network, and used his network to amass more connections and money. To young entrepreneurs and other people he wanted to bring into his orbit, Teal provided mentorship and small amounts of capital, as well as access to that.
[2026-05-23 | audiomark] sales meant more capital, meant better talent and fewer internal tensions. For countries, more growth meant more technological innovation, meant a higher quality of life. The dysfunction in the US government was threatening this growth cycle, Altman added, either you're growing or you're slowly dying, and the US government was dying. How economic growth democracy doesn't work because voters occupy a zero-sum system, he said. This idea would evolve into a core thesis driving Almond's career in investments. The thing that people in the private sector can do the most to help get the country back on track is to get economic growth back, he'd say, in 2017. In the US, we had 200 years of unrivaled economic growth. We had 100 years of territorial expansion. We had 100 years of new technology really working.
[2026-05-23 | audiomark] off, started Hydrazine and raised $21 million. Teal, almost 20 years Altman's senior, pitched in a majority of the funding. When Altman became a YC partner, he used Hydrazine to bet on the accelerator's portfolio companies, while also helping Teal's venture firm founders fund to identify high return investments. Teal's net worth multiplied several times over. The two men grew extremely close. Their bond was once described as having only one parallel. Teal's mentor relationship with Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg. Graham and Teal heavily influenced Altman's worldview, his approach to building effective businesses, and his savvy as a political operator. The two mentors impressed on Altman the imperative for scale and the efficiencies of capitalism over government. The first piece of startup wisdom I heard was increasing your sales will fix all problems.
[2026-05-23 | audiomark] wanted to be his successor, Altman smiled uncontrollably. YC somewhat gets to direct the course of technology, Altman would later say. I think his goal is to make the whole future, Graham said, of Altman. The succession story would get repeated so often that it would turn into Silicon Valley lore. If Sam smiles, it's super deliberate, a former YC founder says. Sam has smiled uncontrollably only once, when PG told him to take over YC. Graham's choice surprised many others, but he held strong convictions. There wasn't a list of who should run YC and Sam at the top, livingston would recall. It was just... Sam. Peter Teal became Altman's second mentor. Another Lynch pin in the tech industry. Teal became a billionaire by founding payments company Paypal and data mining firm Palantir. And being an early...
[2026-05-23 | audiomark] as in the performance of applicants in YC interviews, he identified 30 or 40 factors, including a strong foreign accent that were predictors of failure when candidates exhibited several of them together. This was not a flaw of YC's evaluation system, but rather an important data-driven signal, he said. Graham's support for Altman was strong and early. In a 2006 blog post, Graham recounted meeting Altman as a college sophomore. Looped is probably the most promising of all the startups we funded so far, Graham wrote. But Sam Altman is a very unusual guy. Within about three minutes of meeting him, I remember thinking, ah, so this is what Bill Gates must have been like when he was 19. Altman quickly inspired Graham to search for more Altmans. He asked the young founder what YC should ask on its application to discover more people like him. Altman suggested adding a question that Graham would soon describe as one of the most important. Please tell us about the time you most successfully hacked some non-computer system to your advantage. It would come to encapsulate and encourage a certain ethos among generations of startups to bend, bypass, and break the rules to domination. By the time Altman was 23, Graham was comparing him to jobs. Sam is along with Steve Jobs, the founder I refer to most when I'm advising startups, he wrote. On questions of design, I ask, what would Steve do? But on questions of strategy or ambition, I ask, what would Sama do referring to Altman by his nickname, which is also his ex-handle? It was Graham's singular belief in Altman that would catapult him to the YC presidency in 2014 at age 28, two years after selling looped. When Graham, Alston, his kitchen...
[2026-05-23 | audiomark] and Graham increasing prestige. By the time Altman sold looped, the incubator had already seeded several startups that had grown or would soon grow into billion dollar companies, including Dropbox and Airbnb. YC became the most elite club in the valley. If you were in, you gained instant cashier and access to more resources, including a built in customer base among old YC companies, investors more eager to fund you and hire evaluations. If you were out, no such luck. Graham became an essential taste maker for startups and startup culture in Silicon Valley. Many folks in the space in the ecosystem came to live by and take his fundamental precepts for what it meant to be a good founder and a successful entrepreneur, says Ralston. Many of us looked to PG for guidance on a lot of things. Graham also became a lightning rod for criticism. He championed the idea of the tech industry.
[2026-05-23 | audiomark] far more money. That wealth would slowly change his lifestyle. Eventually he'd stop going to the grocery store. He'd travel by private jet. He'd collect luxury sports cars, including McLaren's and an ultra rare $5 million Conex egg and cultivate a love for racing them. For a time he attended the annual week-long psychedelic and sex-fueled Desert Art Festival Burning Man. He became like many Silicon Valley bigwigs, a casual user of ketamine, a party drug that can be legally prescribed to relieve depression. With his success, Altman brought his brothers along with him. In 2012, he started a personal investment fund called Hyderzine Capital with his brother Jack, who had studied economics at Princeton and was trying his hand at investment banking. Jack subsequently switched to tech and founded a startup, Latis, that would get funded by YC after Sam became the incubators president.
[2026-05-23 | audiomark] Twice during his time running looped, senior leaders at the startup approached its board and urged it to fire Altman according to the Wall Street Journal, leveling two accusations that would follow him all the way through to his brief ouster at OpenAI. One was his tendency to operate first-owned gain rather than the companies, and at times even at the expense of the company. The other was his seeming compulsion to distort the truth. The latter was harder to pin down. He sometimes lied about details so insignificant that it was hard to say why the dishonesty mattered at all. But over time, those tiny paper cuts has one person called them, led to an atmosphere of pervasive distrust and chaos at the company. And a manner that would come to define the rest of his career, Altman emerged from the crisis with the upper hand, looped board, sided with Altman. Despite its middling record.
[2026-05-23 | audiomark] listening skills, his willingness to help, and his ability to frame whatever he has to offer, in terms of exactly what you want. These days, as an ultra wealthy Silicon Valley Linchpin, it doesn't hurt that he can offer a lot. He is the Michael Jordan of listening, people have said. He is the Usain Bolt of fundraising, says Jeff Rauston, who took over running YC after Altman. Fundamentally, when you raise money from someone, what you're doing is telling a story about the future of whatever your project is, which involves that project, that company, becoming an extraordinary success. Rauston says, Sam can tell a tale that you want to be part of, that is compelling, and that seems real, that seems even likely. Rauston likens it to Steve Jobs' reality distortion field. Steve could tell a story that overwhelms any other part of your reality, he says. Whether there was a distortion of reality, or it became a reality. Because remember, the thing about Steve is he actually built stuff that did change your reality. It wasn't just distortion. It was real. And obviously, Sam has two. But there's a flip side to the story. Sam remembers all these details about you. He's so attentive, but then part of it is he uses that to figure out how to influence you in different ways, says one person who worked several years with him. He's so good at adjusting to what you say, and you really feel like you're making progress with him, and then you realize over time that you're actually just running in place. Twice during his time running looped, senior leaders at the startup approached its board and urged it to fire Altman according to the Wall Street Journal, leveling two accusations that would follow him all the way through to his br-
[2026-05-23 | audiomark] shoulders with other restless entrepreneurs, making crucial connections wherever he turned. Right as Luke was getting started, its office was down the hall from the fledgling startup YouTube. Among Altman's YC batchmates, the term for fellow founders in a YC cohort were Steve Huffman and Chris Slo, the respective co-founder and founding engineer of Reddit. Altman would become a Reddit board member in 2014, eventually amassing a larger share of the company than Huffman. Another YC batchmate was Emmett Sheer, the co-founder of Twitch, who would step in as OpenAI's interim CEO during Altman's ouster almost two decades later. Altman also learned the best way to package things to the media and the surest way to strike extraordinary deals. Even as the CEO of a little known startup, he successfully negotiated enterprise partnerships with the major US mobile phone carriers. Keto is formula people say, is the combo.
[2026-05-23 | audiomark] He said to tech blogger Robert Skobl in June 2010 about his company's new app, Looped Star, for advertisers to push deals such as coupons for restaurants or group discounts for retailers to users based on their location. We've crossed over this point where now the value perceived of sharing my location outweighs the privacy concerns of doing so. He added, in another few years it'll be the norm to share your location and it'll be weird when you don't. It's a ridiculous distinction. Altman said a few months later to see an end business about the difference between life online and in person. The two were fusing together with location tracking on mobile devices. The whole world is going mobile and the whole world is going universal access to your data and your services no matter where you are, he said. For Altman, even discussing the pitfalls was an opportunity to underscore the pitch. When the information founder Jessica Lesson, then a Wall Street Journal reporter told Altman in 2008 she would write a story about the privacy concerns of location tracking. He offered to help. He sent her a long list of risks that Looped had already identified and its proposals for how to solve them. The implicit message, this is how the world will work so you might as well prepare for it. He didn't just want to build a startup, Lesson wrote about the experience. He wanted to write the rules. With Looped, Altman built the networks and sharpened the skills that would become his greatest assets. As a startup founder through the mid-Auts and early teens in the Bay area, he placed himself in the thick of an era of rapid growth and buzzing new ventures. He regularly rubbed shoulders with other restless entrepreneurs, making crucial connections wherever he turned. Right as Looped was getting started, its office was down the hall from the fledgling startup YouTube. Among Altman's wisey bouts
[2026-05-23 | audiomark] His startup is part of the grand, unstoppable trajectory of technology. Consumers and advertisers are clamoring for the service. Don't bet against him. His success is inevitable. The response has been tremendous. He said to Tech Blogger Robert Skolbel in June 2010 about his company's new app, Looped Star, for advertisers to push deals such as coupons for restaurants, or group discounts for retailers to users based on their location. We've crossed over this point where now the value perceived of sharing my location outweighs the privacy concerns of doing so, he added, in another few years it'll be the norm to share your location, and it'll be weird when you don't. It's a ridiculous distinction. Altman said a few months later to CNN Business about the difference between life online and in person. The two were fusing together with location tracking on mobile devices. The whole world is going...
[2026-05-23 | audiomark] security. He dug deep into assignments, once disemboweling a piece of software he was supposed to use for his homework to its low-level code, a classmate remembered, and finding a bug in the assignment itself. As a sophomore, he became interested in mobile technology. After learning that phones would soon all be equipped with GPS, he went to a campus entrepreneur event and stepped on stage holding a flip phone. He made an open call for people to join him in building something that took advantage of the location tracking feature. Around that time, he met Paul Graham, an entrepreneur and influential tech blogger who was beginning a new startup incubator called Y-Combinator with his girlfriend Jessica Livingston. Altman joined YC's first batch of companies in 2005, as the founder of his new startup, Looped, and spent the summer in Cambridge, Massachusetts where the incubator initially started. Looped was a social network that used location tracking to notify users when they were close to friends or to recommend nearby restaurants. He worked so hard that summer and ate so much instant ramen, he gave himself scurvy. He didn't regret it. Work really hard in the beginning of your career, he would later say to young founders, that pays off like compound interest. Altman never returned to Stanford. By late 2005, he and his co-founders, while ready in talks with VC firms, new enterprise associates, and Sequoia, to give them $5 million in funding. Altman took his chances and dropped out of college. Looped wouldn't become a great success. After a seven-year run, Altman would sell it in 2012 for $43.4 million, around what his investors put in. But if you had listened to his interviews and his backers at the time, his startup would have sounded like it was on the precipice of ushering in a great transformation. It's easier to understand the seeds of Altman's success in those...
[2026-05-23 | audiomark] Altman left the Midwest for Stanford University, drawn in by its proximity to the tech industry. He didn't settle on getting into tech immediately, however. As his teacher, Andy Abbott, had hoped, he did, in fact, consider being a writer. He also ever so briefly entertained the idea of being an investment banker. In the end, he leaned into his fascination with programming and computers. I realized that the world does not need or value the 7 millionth novel, he later said. That was not where I could make the best contribution. And in cases like that, it also is generally harder to make a lot of money. Or even enough money. Altman majored in computer science and took a particular interest in AI and security. He dug deep into assignments. Once disemboweling a piece of software, he was supposed to use for his homework to its low level code, a classmate remembered. And finding a bug in the assignment itself. As a-
[2026-05-23 | audiomark] Either you have tolerance to open community or you don't, and you don't get to pick and choose." He later said, recalling his last line. Behind the confident facade, Sam was also sensitive. He worried about what people thought of him. He often grappled with anxiety, a trait that would carry over into his adult life. As his star rose in Silicon Valley, he'd sometimes call his mom with a headache, having convinced himself that he actually had meningitis or lymphoma. He would grow so panicked once while negotiating a deal that he'd have to lie down on the ground, bare-chested arms splaid to calm himself. It was these two parts of him, his ambition and his sensitivity that would come to mark the shape of his career. After spending many hours with Altman to profile him in 2016, the New Yorkers' tad friend would note this duality. On any given issue, Altman seemed as driven by a relentless desire to push ahead.
[2026-05-23 | audiomark] even want to think about it," Jack later said, recounting the story, hundreds and hundreds of times. Yes, it's been a lot. Sam said smugly. A Sam got older, Connie gave him a choice that she would give to all of her children. Whether or not to transfer to a local private school, John Burrows, known for its rigorous academics, an impressive roster of famed alumni. Sam made the switch. Max switched, but didn't stay. Jack declined, and Annie followed her oldest brother. At Burrows, Sam thrived. He excelled academically and socially with his extroverted personality and goofy humor. He was drawn not just to stem, but to writing and a variety of extracurriculars. He was head of the yearbook, Captain of the Waterpolot Team, and did Model UN, a program that brings students together in events around the world to simulate the United Nations and debate public policy.
[2026-05-22 | audiomark] of Pennsylvania's war in school and becoming a consultant in Boston. His former wife had retained her maiden name. When Connie married Jerry, she did as well. A few years later, they moved from Chicago back to their hometown of St. Louis. Jerry went into real estate and property management. For a time serving as chief counsel and vice president of the Roberts companies, a St. Louis developer, Jerry was a people person. He had a passion for affordable housing and worked on several commercial and residential projects that sought to foster community and revitalize St. Louis. Sam would later repeat one of the biggest lessons his father taught him. You always help people, even if you don't think you have time. You figure it out. Connie and Jerry had three boys in rapid succession. After Sam, there was Max, then Jack. Five years later, nine years after Sam, Connie gave birth to Annie, delighted to finally have a daughter. Connie referred to herself as an atheist but culturally Jewish. Jerry was more religious. He attended services during Jewish high holidays like Passover and insisted on all four children having bought and bar mitzvahs, Jewish coming of age ceremonies. Connie's rationality and discipline and Jerry's spirituality and focus on service would each manifest in their children in various ways. From a young age, Sam was driven and intensely curious. At two, he learned how to operate the family VCR. By three, he was fixing it. When his parents gifted him a Mac computer five years later, he quickly learned how to program and disassemble it. He settled well into the role of oldest brother. At times, bossing around his younger siblings. At times, playing their caretaker. He was extremely competitive, always insistent on winning board games. As much as Sam was a sore loser, he also had a zest for victory.
[2026-05-22 | audiomark] valley. The private dining room they gathered in opened to a balcony that overlooked a beautiful pool rimmed with Italian Cypress trees and garden roses. As Musk walked in over an hour late, the rest of the men were eagerly waiting. Among them, Altman, Greg Brockman, Dario Amade, and Ilya Setskever. The group would soon become the key leaders of the non-profit. To capture the spirit of their shared mission, Musk would name it Open AI. Over time, nearly all of the men would depart the organization after clashing with Altman and his vision of artificial intelligence. Once Altman and Musk were no longer on speaking terms, and Altman had replaced Musk as the new Silicon Valley It guy. Altman would change the public record on his beliefs about the dangers of what he was building. I am now very much in the AI will be a tool camp. He told business insiders.
[2026-05-22 | audiomark] hosted an offsite meeting for open AI employees at a SpaceX factory and launched into a rant about Hassabas. Before founding DeepMind, Hassabas had spent seven years running a video game design studio he'd founded. He literally made a video game where an evil genius tries to create AI to take over the world, Musk shouted, referring to Hassabas' 2004 title, Evil Genius. And fucking people don't see it. Fucking people don't see it. And Larry thinks he controls Demis, but he's too busy fucking windsurfing to realize that Demis is gathering all the power. Musk's paranoia about Hassabas would become a source of entertainment for DeepMind employees. Hassabas was incredibly ambitious and could be intense certainly, but he was also kind and measured. The creation of open AI felt like this semi-historical reaction to a fairly mild-mannered man for calls to former DeepMind researcher.
[2026-05-22 | audiomark] million dollars. Musk began hosting his own dinners to discuss ways of countering Google. In early 2015, he also met with US President Barack Obama to explain the dangers of AI, how to make it safer, and how to regulate it. Around the same time, Musk would see Hassabas again at SpaceX. This time, for the first meeting of the Google DeepMind AI Ethics Board, a governance structure that Paige and Hassabas had proposed to help oversee the responsible development of DeepMind's technologies. The meeting convinced Musk that the board was a fraud, and inflamed his concerns into an all-consuming obsession to counter Hassabas' vision. For years afterward, Musk would regularly characterize Hassabas as a super villain who needed to be stopped. Musk would make unequivocally clear that OpenAI was the good to DeepMind's evil. In the summer of 2020,
[2026-05-22 | audiomark] was, in fact, a problem, paged and think so, calling it the next stage of evolution. When Musk bulked, Paige accused him of being a species, discriminating against non-human species. After that, Musk began to speak incesently about the existential risk of AI. At an MIT symposium, he described AI as probably the biggest existential threat to humanity. And its development as summoning the demon. He met with publishers in New York, gripped by the thought of writing his own book about extinction-level threats, including AI. Later, at a recurring AI salon event at Stanford, a young researcher named Timnit Gabru would come up to him after a talk and ask him why he was so obsessed with AI when the threat of climate change was more clearly existential. Climate change is bad, but it's not going to kill everyone. He's...

=== City of Nightmares — Rebecca Schaeffer ===
[2026-05-23 | audiomark] something useful will appear, but everything is long degraded, and all I find is a metal talisman hanging over the mirror, a prayer against demons that was popular in that first decade when people thought that the nightmares were people making deals with the devil, or demons that had escaped hell. No one thinks that anymore, mostly because all the groups that had, primarily fundamentalist Christians and the like, believed their faith would keep them safe and didn't take medicine to prevent dreams. So of course they all eventually turned into nightmares. Nightmares didn't care how religious you were, they only cared that you dreamed. Sigh steps up onto the porch and rattles the cabin door. It doesn't open. He gives it a disgusted look and then rips the door handle right off the rotting wood. Now that's how doors are supposed to work, he mutters. Clearly still irritated by the door on the ship, even though it locking probably saved our lives. The door swings inward and we step inside. It takes my eyes a moment.
[2026-05-23 | audiomark] Though a thousand times louder, and the sound of splintering wood and metal whistling through the air as it torpedoes into the sky, it's hot. Everything is so bright I have to close my eyes. Even closed, everything still glows so painfully I'm afraid I'll never be able to see again. It's getting hotter. Then suddenly I'm in the water. Cold shocks my system, but instead of giving me sudden clarity or sharpening my mind like in the penny novels, it makes me even more disoriented. The piece of metal is pressing down on me, pushing me into the depth with its weight, and even though I don't understand what's happening, my mind is foggy with panic and confusion and sheer shock. I know enough to know I need to get out from beneath this piece of metal before I'm propelled all the way to the bottom of the ocean. My arms flail, and I find the edge of the scrap of metal and grip it to pull myself out from beneath the heavy rubble. I bend and twist in the water.
[2026-05-23 | audiomark] speed and incredible healing. And, of course, they all drink human blood to survive. After that, it gets complicated. Strains 7, 8, and 12 are weakened by garlic. Strains 1, 3, and 7 melt when sprinkled with holy water. Strains 6, 9, and 12 need to ask for an invitation for entering the house, but public places don't count, except for with strained nine. So yeah, complicated. But only one strain has both an aversion to silver and doesn't have a reflection. Strained 4. It appeared about 70 years ago. We even know who the originator was, which isn't always the case. It began with a man named Hugh Billings. Before his nightmare, he'd been a manly man, the kind who had a collection of firearms and used them to shoot men who didn't conform to his sweaty ideas of masculinity. After he'd become his worst nightmare, he'd renamed himself Valentine Valence.
[2026-05-23 | audiomark] on the dress reflect the people around her in a swirl of distorted color. But they don't reflect the boy. They reflect the girl his whiz, her red hair and flowers are broken up into a thousand scattered shards on the bright mirrors. But there's no sign of the black clad boy in the reflections. My breath catches. I know exactly what he is. There's only one kind of nightmare that is a verse to silver and doesn't show up in mirrors. It's a piece of vampire and he's going to lure that girl away and kill her. Five. There are twelve different known strains of nightmares based on vampires. People have a lot of different myths with vampires and they've shifted and changed over the years too. It doesn't help that people make up new shit all the time. Which means that every time someone's worst nightmare is becoming a blood sucking monster, the vampire...
[2026-05-23 | audiomark] I swallow, looking down at my gloved hands. I ball them into fists. I'm being stupid again. I can't let fear dictate my whole life. Priya is right. I need to face this. I take a deep breath. A dance seems like a good, easy first step. I'm afraid. But the risk is statistically speaking low. I can just go in, dance for five minutes, and leave. Exposure therapy, they'd call that in the friends. I can do this. I take a step, then hesitate. Maybe I'll watch for a moment first, just until the end of the song. Yeah, that's fine. The partyers are drinking what are supposed to be non-agoholic drinks, because, you know, prohibition, nightmares, etc. But I would bet money are actually spiked. The people certainly dance like they've lost their inhibitions. At the edge of the...
[2026-05-23 | audiomark] words. He can stop. He's in control of his own actions. It's not that he can't. It's that he won't. Because he cares about his own satisfaction more than he cares about this girl's right to her own body. He only cares about what he wants. It's revolting that's portrayed as romantic. I slip away from the theater before I have to see anymore, rubbing my arms as though I can scrub away the slimy sensation, those few seconds of the movie of left on my skin. Eventually I end up back on the deck, where the party is just getting started. The music is loud, thromming through my bones. There's a massive horn attachment, the boat's record player, and the sound to players across the boat so loud it can probably be heard back in the city. They're playing a fast song, something about a man diving out a window to escape his lover's wrath, or maybe to escape his lover who turned into a nightmare. It's hard to tell. People are crowding around, laughing and dancing and singing.
[2026-05-23 | audiomark] of my fear, my tense shoulders, my clenched jaw. All of it rolls away. This room is the only place in the world I ever feel safe. The only place I can let go of my terror and just be. It's just me here. No one else. If someone else turns into a nightmare in the building, I can hide here and be confident that even if they found me, they couldn't get through the multiple layers of brick wall. The walls protect me from the world. They keep me safe inside. Keep the monsters out. And if the director kicks me out, I'll lose it. This space. This precious sense of safety. I can't afford that. I'll do anything to keep this room. I just wish I knew how to make the director understand how much I need this place, how much it means to me, how completely destroyed I'd be if I lost it. I close my eyes. If only I were good at literally anything. This wouldn't be a problem.
[2026-05-23 | audiomark] I had no idea you hadn't aunted at all. I shrug. She died a few years ago. Oh, Priya swallows. I'm sorry. Was it a nightmare? No. Howling cough. She'd been a factory worker too long. I shrug. After she passed, I signed up with the friends. Priya is silent, absorbing this. I pressed my forehead against the glass, staring outside, though I'm not really seeing anything. Priya's right. I do need help. I know it. I do. I've known it for a while. But I've hit the limit of what the friends can do for me. And I just don't know where to go from here. It's hard to stop being afraid when the whole world is literally full of monsters. And anyone could become another one whenever they go to sleep. A bell chimes somewhere else in the building. The Tinney Echo reminding me that it's mid afternoon.
[2026-05-23 | audiomark] She grates. I press my foot down a bit, applying pressure on the ankle I've twisted beneath it. Wooden eyes, oh? Sweat beads on her brow, and she makes a small sound. Fine! She rummages in her pocket and pulls out a ticket, which I pluck from her hand. Thanks, Cindy! I press down with my foot one more time, a sharp jerking motion that makes her gasp and pain, and then step away from her. Don't forget to milk that ankle for sympathy. Cindy leans over, hands reaching down to clutch her injured ankle. She glairs at my retreating back so hard I can practically feel it. I whistle as I walk away, ticket tucked safely away in my pocket. I wind my way up the stairwell, past ancient and modern paintings of the four saints of the friends of the restful soul. They look down at me with judgment, as if they know I'm a fraud. Know that I believe none of the teachings I've learned here, that I'm nothing but a scam artist, using this place to hide away from the nightmares.
[2026-05-23 | audiomark] left I'd be broke, sleeping on the streets. Even if I did get a job and managed to scrape up enough for rent, anywhere I stayed would inevitably have multiple people in a room. I'd seen the apartment ads for bunks stacked three high, eighteen people to a room, all sharing one toilet. I couldn't live like that. I couldn't even sleep when one other person was sleeping in the room. You never knew what they might become while asleep. I'd never sleep again. I know you know my history, sir. My stutter, scrambling to find the one thing that will make him reconsider sending me away. My sister, it's his turn to look away. There we go. I know how to lay this on sick. I just, after everything I went through, the friends were so helpful at getting my life together. This is actually true. I'd been even more of a coward before I went through their free group therapy. I want to pay it forward.
[2026-05-23 | audiomark] young. They were able to do reconstructive surgery early, and he grew into his features. His mouth can reproduce human language, which is better than some nightmares, who end up stuck in the form of something terrifying, and then have to tap out messages in more scot and shit. But not all nightmares come back saying, I think of my sister Ruby, my overprotective sister, who beat up kids at school who dared try to bully me, who held me when I cried, and would have given me the world if she could have. My sister, who ate our father alive, and nearly devoured me, too. The nightmare didn't just twist her body into something monstrous. It twisted her mind, too. It always seemed viciously unfair to me that so many people came through their nightmares twisted in body, but not in mind. But the one person who meant the most to me had become the thing I feared the most. Why couldn't Ruby have come through the nightmare sane?
[2026-05-23 | audiomark] anyone from doing anything in Newham. Priya dives for the nightmare, gun out, firing, ratatatat. The bullets go right through it. It's made of smoke, formless and intangible, and it's like cutting through air. Undeterred, still grinning, Priya whips out a spray can from her belt and starts spraying something in the air at the nightmare. Pressurized salt maybe. A lot of the ethereal nightmares come from people's fears of old ghost stories, which means they can often be stopped with salt, because that's what the legends say, stop them. Every single nightmare is different, because every person's idea of what would stop their own personal monster is different. The nightmare shrieks, rearing back, and I take the opportunity to wriggle my way under the couch, covering my face like a small child. Maybe if it can't see me, it'll forget about me and go away. I'm blind underneath the couch, but I don't need sight to figure out what's happening. It's perfectly...
[2026-05-23 | audiomark] And it's damp. It's been opened recently, like, say, by a depressed woman whose husband just died and wanted to numb the pain, pre-size widening and understanding, and her head whips around to Mrs. Sandin. Except she's not Mrs. Sandin anymore. Her skin is morphing, stretching, melding, like there's some sort of living creature inside her, and it's trying to burst its way out. With a horrible crackle of bone, her body lengthens, elongating into something stretched and contorted. Her skin darkens to the same stormy blue of the uniform of the nightmare defense teams, and her eyes stretch and bulge, changing shape into a parody of the goggles they wear. Oh, no! I whisper. Pre-size gleam. Oh, hell, yes! The nightmare has risen, and it opens its massive mouth to reveal an empty void, a past nothing, a suck.
[2026-05-23 | audiomark] I pace into the tiny kitchen area, eyes darting past the sink. I open the top cupboards and see glass jars of flour and rice in pasta, along with kitchen utensils. I close the wooden cupboard door and kneel in front of the small doors under the sink. A large jug of brown liquid, unmarked. Moonshine. Priya's eyes widen. Ah, fuck. Prohibition bans alcohol across the country for the simple reason that alcohol nullifies the helamine and most other nightmare prevention drugs. Of course it hasn't stopped people bootlegging and making their own liquor. Because some people are stupid enough to take the risk. After all you don't dream every time you sleep. And people always seem to think that nightmares are a thing that happened to other people, not themselves. Until they do. The bottle is half empty. I whisper. My voice layered with the fear growing like a nightmare in my chest. I reach.
[2026-05-23 | audiomark] woman. Is it a seizure? How should I know? Priya paces, biting her lip. Your sister's a doctor, but I'm not. She frowns down at the woman, then shakes her head. Actually, I think she's just fainted. My skin prickles. She's unconscious. Priya casts a side-long glance at me, fully aware of why I'm uncomfortable. Ness, we're in the city. The water has halimined in it. As long as she's been drinking tap water, she's got the drugs in her. She won't dream. I shift uncomfortably, wiping my gloved hands on my neatly pressed trousers. I forget that I can't wipe the sweat off my palms of the cloth. My eyes never leave the sleeping woman. But what if she hasn't? Priya sighs. Ness. No, listen! Her husband turned into a nightmare, didn't he? I look around the room, searching for something that would confirm my suspicion. It's not supposed to happen if you're drinking the tap water.
[2026-05-23 | audiomark] her anymore once she became a nightmare. Ma'am, I tell her. Your husband was trying to eat you. A misunderstanding, she insists, still waving the only arm she has left. I press my fingers to the bridge of my nose. He ripped off your arm, an accident. He ate it. He was hungry. It's a shame to let these things go to waste. Give me Prius Nortz and leans down to whisper into my ear. And I thought you were a little on the irrational side about nightmares. I take it all back. Your quirks are normal compared to this lady. Wow, thanks. What a grand compliment. Such a high bar I've passed. I did, Pan. Call me the queen of compliments. Priya grins, wide and sharp. Mrs. Senden kicks over her coffee table, sending doilies and flowers flying. Get out! She snaps. I don't have to listen to you mocking me.

=== Scenes of Subjection, Revised and Updated — Saidiya V. Hartman ===
[2026-05-22 | audiomark] Freedom to me will never pay. I'm going home." In Dixie Land the fields do bloom, and colored men have welcome room. I'm going home. I will proclaim it loud and long. I love old Dixie. Right or wrong, I'm going home. The representations of slavery rendered in the menstrual show created a plantation pastoral in which galeed and dig a stance. Even sentimental plays and tunes that explored issues of separation implied that the loss of family and friends was the result of cuffs or Sambo's choice. Minstrel C dramatically resolved the tension between domination and intimacy by recourse to sentimental tropes of reciprocity, domesticity, love and kinship. Like the orchestrated amusements of the master, Minstrel C elaborated and fixed blackness and at theatrical presentation both violent and celebratory. Whippings were to Minstrel C, what tears were to melodrama. If grotesque bottle...
[2026-05-22 | audiomark] stated that Dixie is nothing but a plain simple melody with plantation words. The purport of which is that a negro in the north feels himself out of place, and thinking of his old home in the south is made to exclaim in the words of the song, I wish I was in Dixie. The longing and substance of this simple tune, as succinctly outlined by Emmett, was to return the negro to his proper place, which brings to mind George Frederick's son's observation in the antebellum world, the good negro, was always in his place, and the bed-nigger outside it. By extension, this logic of return and suitable placement can also be applied to tunes like Louisiana low-grounds, the old jawbone, the floating-scal of old Virginia, and other caromy backs that recollect the good old days on the plantation, lament the separation from family and home as a result of the move north, and proclaim a fervent desire to return to the slave quarters. The sentiment of the...
[2026-05-22 | audiomark] Decymbling tricksters, fools and winches also populated the stage of melodrama. Fancy footwork, sexual flourishes, tom foolery, and deceit were accompanied by the blows that grounded the body and returned the trespasser dissimilar to his place. On stage, Tofsy was his great and attraction as tom. The audience enjoyed scenes of suffering innocence, terrifying villainy, heart-rending deaths, and the triumph of virtue, and they enjoyed the body and outrageous acts of menstrualcy as much, if not more. Tierful episodes were followed by rockest laughter, the imperiled and suffering figure of melodrama, and the dangers of the lower bodily realms gratified the audience's desire to witness and experience the prohibited in the repressed. The indiscriminate use of the black body made possible the pleasure of terror and the terror of pleasure. Within this framework, suffering and shuffling were complementary. The convergences between the bodily politics of menstrualcy and those of melodrama might be set to center on the redemptive and recreational use of violence. Certainly, the disciplinary vengeance of farce exercised in menstrualcy reproduced black subjection albeit accompanied by laughter. On the menstrual stage, the comic inversions, body humor, and lampooning of class hierarchies nonetheless operated within the confines of the tolerable, particularly since this transgression of order, occurred by reproducing the abject status of blackness. While the dynamics of romance and repulsion to borrow air-glots terms, enabled acts of transgression licensed by the blackface mask, blackness was also policed through derision, ridicule, and violence. In the end, the white flights of imagination and transgressive exploits facilitated by donning blackface ultimately restored the racial terms of social order. The transgressions and the loosened strictures of identity.
[2026-05-22 | audiomark] Representations of blackness were restricted to stock, darky characters, or low-comedy types, with the exceptions of the tragic melato and the dignified pathetic and suffering slave. An anti-slavery traumas, beleaguered slave heroes and heroines supplemented rather than replaced darky fanfare. Ironically, the maintenance of racial boundaries occurred through the dawning of the black face mask or the display of tragically bifurcated racial bodies. For example, in the case of Uncle Tom's cabin, the grammar of sentiment and the rhetoric of minstrelcy set the stage for a performance of slavery that wed cruelty and festivity. Evolutionist politics allied with black face techniques, created an ambivalent portrait of slavery that denounced the institution as its supplemented minstrelcy's range of darky fair. Blackness was a masquerade in melodrama, no less so than in minstrelcy, since the roles of the black subjects of melodrama were usually performed by...
[2026-05-22 | audiomark] For example, Professor E. A. Andrews in his treatise on the slave trade argued for the abolition of the trade on the grounds that domestic relations were the foundation of all virtue, and consequently of all the happiness of society, and everything inconsistent with the perpetuity of these relations, ought at once, everywhere, and forever, to cease. The offence against virtue perpetuated in the sundering of families, offended sentiment, and easily transformed slavery's crimes into the stuff of melodrama. When one is considering the crimes of slavery, the popular theatre is as central as the courthouse. Virtue, imperiled and unrecognized, positioned slaves as innocence held captive by the pernicious institution, and blackness was the emblem of this tortured innocence. Melodrama provided the dramatic frame that made the experience of slavery meaningful in the anti-nominant terms of the moral imagination, the emotional power...
[2026-05-22 | audiomark] the legal interpolation of slave humanity. Whether venerated as an opportunity for Christian endurance or legitimated by darky pretensions and trespasses, violence engendered blackness. The virtue was suffering and ethical submission of sentimentalism and the social transgression enacted and punished in force conspired to make the corporeal enactment of blackness a pained one. Melodrama presented blackness as a vehicle of protest and descent, and menstrual made it the embodiment of unmentionable and transgressive pleasures. In both instances, the fashioning of blackness aroused pity and fear, desire and revulsion, terror and pleasure. This ambivalent complex of feelings describes not only the emotional appeals of the popular stage, but also the spectacle of the auction block. Black characters rarely appeared as heroes or heroines in Melodrama, except in the moral drama of anti-slavery plays. As dictated by the
[2026-05-22 | audiomark] So to speak, to the contrary, the popularity of Uncle Tom's cabin and the octorune indicates the willingness of others to suffer too. The elasticity of blackness and its capacious effects enabled such flights and becomings. In this case, the figurative capacities of blackness and the fungibility of the commodity are directly linked. The abstractness and immateriality of the commodity, the ease with which it circulates in changes to state, shifting from one incarnation of value to another, extends to the black body or black face mask, enabling it to serve as the vehicle of white self-exploration, renunciation, and enjoyment. The ability to put on blackness must be considered in the context of chattel slavery and the economy of enjoyment that subtends it. Antibellan formations of pleasure, even those of the north, need to be considered in relation to the effective dimensions of racial slavery, since enjoyment is virtually unimaginable without recourse to the black body and the subjection of the captive, the pleasures yielded by dispossession, the delirium of the old plantation, and the libertine fantasies launched by the myriad uses of the sentient object. Every pound of flesh, every organ and orifice afford opportunity. For these reasons, the formal features of this economy of pleasure and the politics of enjoyment are explicated in regard to the literal and figurative occupation and possession of the body. This reading attempts to elucidate the means by which the wanton uses of and the violence directed toward the black figure come to be identified as its pleasure and danger. The expectations and demands of slave property are ontologized as the innate capacities and inner feelings of the enslaved. And in turn, the ascription of excess and enjoyment to the African conceals and enchants the violence perpetrated against the enslaved.
[2026-05-22 | audiomark] whatever ends. The myriad uses of the captive as tool, implement, prosthetic, and amusement cultivated and reinforced the idea of black excess, blackness as excess, as surfeit. Given this, let me suggest that not only were the rights and privileges of white citizens undergirded by the subjection of blacks, but moreover that enjoyment in turn defined the meaning of subjection. The interdiction against self-defense and the inability of a slave to testify against whites permitted the slave to be used in any capacity that pleased the master or his surrogates. And as Gidell notes in a rather indirect fashion, the uses of property also included the sexual violation of the enslaved. The few restrictions placed upon the uses of slave property concerned only the master's rights regarding the use of his property by others. Indeed, the disillet uses of slave property marked the identity of the captive and hence the nature of the negro. These actual or imagined usages established the parameters of interracial association. There was no relation to blackness outside the terms of this use of entitlement to and occupation of the captive body, for even the status of free blacks was shaped and compromised by the existence of slavery. As I have argued, enjoyment was predicated on the wanton uses of slave property. Yet this boundless utility, this capacity to be everything and nothing was attributed to the slave, and believed to be an essential or inherent feature of blackness. And in this way, it served to minimize and disavow the violence of slavery and the terrible things done to human flesh. As a result, inspectacles like the coffal, it appeared not only that the enslaved were indifferent to their wretched condition, but as well that they had achieved a measure of satisfaction with their condition. The F.
[2026-05-22 | audiomark] that prohibited the slave from defending himself from the master, to avoid vindictive punishment, or from striking any white in self-defense. Such laws not only exacted strict submission extending to bloodshed and murder, but also furnished a pretext and an inducement to oppress and tyrannize the enslaved. As a consequence, the enslaved were forced to patiently endure every species of personal injury, which a white person, however brutal or ferocious his disposition, may choose to offer. After reviewing state statutes that prohibited the slave from defending himself against the assault of any white person and punished such offenses by cropping ears, inflicting 30 lashes on a bear bag or bringing about death, Gidele concluded that, if civil government were designed for human demoralization and torture, it is not easy to see how its ends could be more effectually reached. To be sure, the laws of slavery subjected to the...
[2026-05-22 | audiomark] its sentience and immunity to sorrow. Enjoinment defined the relation of the dominant race to the enslaved. The boundless and unspeakable uses of the captive licensed by the legal and social relations of slavery articulated the nexus of pleasure and possession and bespoke the critical role of diversion in securing the relations of bondage. In this way, enjoyment disclosed the sentiments and expectations of the peculiar institution. The property of enjoyment. From the vantage point of the everyday relations of slavery, enjoyment, broadly speaking, defined the parameters of racial relations, since in practice all whites were allowed a great degree of latitude in regard to uses of the enslaved. Before proceeding to limb the important features of antebellum enjoyment, a gloss on enjoyment and its relation to use and possession would be helpful here. The lacks law dictionary defines the term enjoy as to have possess and use with satisfaction, to occupy or have the benefit of. While enjoyment encompasses these rudimentary features, it also denotes more extensive capacities. It entails the exercise of a right, the promise and function of a right, privilege, or incorporeal hereditimate, comfort, consolation, contentment, ease, happiness, pleasure, and satisfaction. Such includes the beneficial use, interest, and purpose to which the property may be put, and implies rights to profits and incomes therefrom. At the outset, it is clear that to take the light in, to use, and to possess, are inextricably linked, and that enjoyment entails everything from the use of one's possession to the value of whiteness, which can be considered an incorporeal hereditimate or illusory inheritance of chattel slavery. Since the subjection of the slave to all whites defined as condition,
[2026-05-22 | audiomark] and the excesses of black enjoyment. The affiliation of performance and blackness can be attributed to racist conceptions of Negro nature as carefree, infantile, hedonistic, and indifferent to suffering, and to a purposeful misreading of the interdependence of labor and song, common among the enslaved. The Constitution of Blackness as an abject and degraded condition, and the fascination with the others' enjoyment went hand in hand. In the logic of a slave-holding world, blacks were envisioned fundamentally as vehicles for white enjoyment, in all of its sundry and unspeakable expressions. This was as much the consequence of the chattel status of the captive, as it was of the excess enjoyment imputed to the other. For those forced to dance on the decks of slave ships crossing the middle passage, step it up lively on the auction block, sing and fiddle as if your life depended on it, and amuse the master and his company, were seen as the pervaders of pleasure.
[2026-05-22 | audiomark] transparency of testimony, uncertainty and complexity characterize the depiction of slavery. Thus the extension of humanity to the enslaved, ironically re-inscribed their subjugated status, do the figurative capacities of blackness enable white flights of fantasy while increasing the likelihood of the captive's disappearance? Can the moral embrace of pain extricate itself from the pleasures born by subjection? In other words, does the scene of the tyrannized slave at the blood-stained gate delight the loafsome master and provide wholesome pleasures to the upright and the virtuous? Is the act of witnessing a kind of looking no less entangled with the wielding of power and the extraction of enjoyment? Does the captive's dance a lay grief or articulate the fraught and impossible character of agency? Or does it exemplify the use of the body as an instrument against the self?
[2026-05-22 | audiomark] by song, and violence was transformed into a display of agency and good cheer. Black suffering is perceived or registered only in the most spectacular circumstances of violence, and conversely, the exaggeration and the atracality of spectacle conceals and diminishes suffering. In one respect, the combination of imagined scenes of cruelty with those called from unquestionable authority evidences the crisis of witnessing that results from the legal subjection of slaves and the barring of their testimony. Yet the extravagant display of extreme violence exacerbates this crisis of witnessing, since only the most horrific instance will suffice to convey the brutality of slavery. A cynical formulation might question whether Black suffering exists, or is of any import or consequence in the absence of a white witness or observer. To the degree that the body speaks, it does so as the vehicle of abolitionist fantasy, just as it is made to speak the master's truth and augments his power through the imposition and intensification of pain. The illegibility or incoherence of Black suffering is its failure to register as pain at all. The impasse, the inability to perceive or discern Black suffering, is made more difficult by the over-determined reading of the sounds of slavery. The half-articulate and incoherent song confound the transparency of testimony. Uncertainty and complexity characterize the depiction of slavery. Does the extension of humanity to the enslaved ironically re-inscribed their subjugated status do the figurative capacities of Blackness enable white flights of fantasy while increasing the likelihood of the captive's disappearance? Can the moral embrace of pain extricate itself from the pleasures born by subjection? In other words,
[2026-05-22 | audiomark] experienced vicariously, the tragical scenes of cruelty. If Rankin, as a consequence of his abolitionist sentiments, was willing to occupy the unmastery position, sentimentalism prescribed the terms of his identification with the enslaved, and the central feature of this identification was suffering. For Rankin, the pageantry of the coffal and sport of music failed to disguise the sorrows of suffering in a sense. However, for others who also possessed anti-slavery sentiments, the attempt to understand the inner feelings of the enslaved only effaced the terror of slavery, and further circumscribed the captives presumably limited capacity for suffering. For many eyewitnesses of the coffal, the brutality and enmity of slavery were dissipated by song, and violence was transformed into a display of agency and good cheer. Black sufferings perceived or registered only in the most spectacular circumstances of violence, and...
[2026-05-22 | audiomark] material relations of chattel slavery. In light of this, is it too extreme or too obvious to suggest that Rankin's flight of imagination and the excitement aroused by suffering might also be pleasurable? Certainly this willing abacement confirms Rankin's moral authority, but what about the pleasure made possible by this embrace of pain? Are the tumultuous passions of the flightly imagination stirred by this fantasy of being beaten? Rankin's imagined beating is immune neither to the pleasures to be derived from the masochistic fantasy nor to the sadistic pleasure to be derived from the spectacle of suffering. My intention is not to shock or exploit the perverse, but to consider critically the dense nexus of terror and enjoyment by examining the obviated and debased diversions of the capricious master. The pleasure of indignation yielded before the spectacle of extreme violence, the instability of the scene of suffering and the confusion of...
[2026-05-22 | audiomark] Your near white body makes the captive suffering visible and discernible. Indeed, the elusiveness of black suffering can be attributed to racist optics in which black flesh is itself identified as the source of opacity, as a surface inscribed by violence, yet unreadable. The denial of black humanity is the outcome of this effacement of sentience, this inability to bring the black close. This is further complicated by a moral perspective that insists upon the other as a mirror of the self, and that recognizes suffering only by substituting the self for the other. While rankin' attempts to ameliorate the insufficiency of feeling before the spectacle of black suffering, this insufficiency is, in fact, displaced rather than remedied by a standing in. This attempt exacerbates the distance between the readers and those suffering by literally removing the slay from view. We too need to consider whether the identification...
[2026-05-22 | audiomark] ability to sustain suffering leads to transcendence. On the other, the spectacular character of this suffering effaces and restricts black sentience. As Rankin himself states, in order for this suffering to induce a reaction and stir feelings, it must be brought close. Yet if sentiment or morality are inextricably tied to human proximity, observes Zygmont Balman, the problem is that in the very effort to bring it near and inspect it closely, it is dissipated. Morality conforms to the law of optical perspective, it looms large and thick close to the eye. So then, how does suffering elude or escape us in a very effort to bring it near? It does so precisely because it can only be brought near by way of a proxy and by way of Rankin's indignation and imagination. If the black body is the vehicle of the other's power and pleasure, Satis and Value, then no less true is the f-
[2026-05-22 | audiomark] providing the minutest detail of macabre exoviolence, embellished by his own fantasy of slavery's blood-stained gate, rank in hope to rouse the sensibility of those indifferent to slavery by exhibiting the suffering of the enslaved, and facilitating an identification between those free and those enslaved. We are naturally too callous to the sufferings of others, and consequently, front to look upon them with cold indifference, until, in imagination, we identify ourselves with the sufferers and make their sufferings our own. When I bring it near, inspect it closely, and find that it is inflicted on men and women who possess the same nature and feelings with myself, my sensibility is roused. By bringing suffering near, the ties of sentiment are forged. And letter after letter, rank and strove to recreate this shared experience of horror in order to transform his slave-holding brother to whom the letters were addressed, as well as the...
[2026-05-22 | audiomark] detailing the obscene theatricality of the slave trade. Unfeeling wretches purchased a considerable drove of slaves. How many of them were separated from husbands and wives, I will not pretend to say. And having chained a number of them together, hoisted over the flag of American liberty, and with the music of two violins marched the wool-worn, heartbroken, and sobbing creatures through the town. Rankin, a gased at the spectacle, and shocked by seeing the most oppressive sorrows of suffering in a sense mocked with all the lightness of sport of music decried, my soul abhorz the crime. The violation of domesticity, the parody of liberty, and the callous defiance of sorrow, define the scene in which crime becomes spectacle, the very dangerous evil of slavery, and the agonizing groans of suffering humanity had been made music. Although Rankin conceded that the cruelty of slavery far exceeded the power of description, he nonetheless strove to render its horrors. And in so doing, Rankin makes apparent that the crimes of slavery are not only witnessed, but staged. Terms like stage, spectacle, and scene convey these horrors, and more important, the abominations of slavery are disclosed through the reiteration of second-hand accounts and circulating stories from unquestionable authorities to which Rankin must act as circuit witness. In the effort to bring slavery close, these circulating reports of atrocity, in essence, are reenacted in Rankin's epistles. The grotesque worries enumerated in documenting the injustice of slavery are intended to shock and to disrupt the comfortable remove of the reader, spectator, by providing the minutest detail of macabre acts of violence embellished by his own fantasy of slavery's blood stained gate. Rankin hopes to rouse the sensibility of those indifferent to slavery by exhibiting the suffering of the enslaved.
[2026-05-22 | audiomark] relentless proliferation of small acts of resistance perhaps offers some measure of encouragement and serve to remind us that the failures of reconstruction still haunt us. In part, it explains why the grand narratives continue to hold sway over our imagination. While I acknowledge history's fiction of factual representation to use Hayden White's term, I also recognize the political utility and ethical necessity of historical fiction, as Walter Benjamin remarked, only that historian will have the gift of fanning the spark of hope in the past, who has firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe if the enemy wins. Part 1 Formations of Terror and enjoyment 1. Innocent Amusements The Stage of Suffering Innocent Amusements
[2026-05-22 | audiomark] The abolition of chattel slavery and the emergence of men, however laudable, long-awaited and cherished, did not yield such absolute distinctions. Instead, fleeting, disabled, and short-lived practices stand for freedom and its failure. Everyday practices, rather than traditional political activity like the abolition movement, black conventions, the struggle for suffrage and electoral activities, are the focus of my examination, because I believe that these pedestrian practices illuminate inco-ate and utopian expressions of freedom that are not and perhaps cannot be actualized elsewhere. The desires and longings that exceed the frame of civil rights and political emancipation find expression and quotidian acts labeled fanciful, exorbitant, and excessive, primarily because they express an understanding or imagination of freedom quite at odds with bourgeois expectations. Paul Gilroy
[2026-05-22 | audiomark] slavery and freedom, and occlude the dispossession inseparable from becoming a property person. If one dares to abandon the absurd catalog of official history as Adouardli's son encourages, then the violence and domination perpetuated in the name of slavery's reversal, come to the fore. From this vantage point, emancipation seems a double-edged and perhaps obfuscating label. It discloses, as well as obscures, since involuntary servitude and emancipation were synonymous for a good many of the formerly enslaved. This is evidenced in common sense observations that black lives were more valuable under slavery than under freedom, that blacks were worse off under freedom than during slavery, and that the gift of freedom was a hard deal. I use the term common sense, purposely, to underline what Antonio Gramsci described as, the chaotic aggregate of disparate conceptions that conform with the social and cultural position of those masses whose philosophy it is. It is a conception of world and life implicit to a large extent in determinate strata of society and in opposition to official conceptions of the world. Common sense challenges the official accounts of freedom and stresses the similarities and correspondences of slavery and freedom. At a minimum, these observations disclose the disavowed transactions between slavery and freedom as modes of production and subjection. The abolition of chattel slavery and the emergence of man, however laudable, long-awaited and cherished, did not yield such absolute distinctions. Instead, fleeting, disabled, and short-lived practices stand for freedom and its failure. Everyday practices, rather than traditional political activity like the abolition movement, black conventions, the struggle for suffrage and electoral activities are the focus of my examination.
[2026-05-22 | audiomark] between slavery and freedom, and occlude the dispossession inseparable from becoming a property person. If one dares to abandon the absurd catalog of official history as Adouardli's son encourages, then the violence and domination perpetuated in the name of slavery's reversal, come to the fore. From this vantage point, emancipation seems a double edged and perhaps obfuscating label. It discloses, as well as obscures, since involuntary servitude and emancipation were synonymous for a good many of the formerly enslaved. This is evidenced in common sense observations that black lives were more valuable under slavery than under freedom, that blacks were worse off under freedom than during slavery, and that the gift of freedom was a hard deal. I used the term common sense purposely to underline what Antonio Gramsci described as, the chaotic aggregate of disparate conceptions that conform with the
[2026-05-22 | audiomark] triumphs of Jubilee. Certainly, one must contend with the enormity of emancipation as both a breach with slavery and a point of transition to what looks more like the reorganization of the plantation system than self-possession, citizenship, or liberty for the freed. In the place of the grand narrative of freedom, with its decisive events and incontrovertible advances, I offer an account that focuses on the ambivalent legacy of emancipation and the undeniably truncated opportunities available to the freed. Lacking the certitude of a definitive partition between slavery and freedom and in the absence of a consummate breach through which freedom might unambivalently announce itself, there is at best a transient and fleeting expression of possibility that cannot inconse itself as a durable temporal marker. The periodization is a barrier imposed from above that obscures the involuntary surf.
[2026-05-22 | audiomark] restricted confines in which they exist in flourish, and the terms in which they are represented. Besides, contemporaneous narratives and interviews are no less selective or partisan in their representations of slavery. The WPA testimony is an over-determined representation of slavery, as are all of the accounts. The work of reconstruction and fabulation I have undertaken highlights the relation between power and voice, and the constraints and closures that determine not only what can be spoken, but also the identity of who speaks. My reading of slave testimony is not an attempt to recover the voice of the enslaved, but an attempt to consider specific practices and a public performance of slavery that ranges from slaves on the auction block to those sharing their recollections decades later. The gap between the event and its recollection is bridged not only by the prompting of interviewers, but also by the s-
[2026-05-22 | audiomark] collected, but instead augment the surface of archival fragments in slave testimony to write histories at odds with the constellation of values, undergirding racial slavery, and regard the lives of the enslaved and the forms of practice created and enacted inside the enclosure. My attempt to read the archive against the grain is perhaps best understood as a combination of foraging and disfiguration, rating for fragments upon which other narratives can be spun, and transposing and deforming the testimony through selective quotation and amplification. Of course, the WPA testimony is circumscribed and provisional, and it is characterized by lapses of forgetting, silences, and exclusions. But what sources are immune to such charges? Non-blasting game has detailed the difficulties inherent in using the WPA narratives because of the power differential between...
[2026-05-22 | audiomark] were paraphrased non-verbata accounts, made quite tentative all claims about representing the intentionality or consciousness of those interviewed. Despite appearances, that would encourage us to believe that we have gained access to the voice of the sub-holtern and located the true history after all. With all this said, how does one use these sources? At best, with the awareness that a totalizing history cannot be reconstructed from these interested, selective, and fragmentary accounts, and with an acknowledgement of the interventionist role of the interpreter, the equally interested labor of historical revision, and the impossibility of reconstituting the past, free from the disfigurements of present concerns. With all these proviso issues, these narratives, nonetheless, remain an important source for understanding the everyday experience of slavery and its aftermath. Baring the aforementioned qualifications in mind, I re-
[2026-05-22 | audiomark] divergent from those for which they were gathered, nonetheless remain entangled with the violence of racial slavery and its afterlife. The effort to reconstruct the history of the dominated is often discontinuous, with the prevailing accounts or official history, and it entails a struggle within and against the constraints and silences imposed by the nature of the archive, the system that governs the appearance of statements and generates social meaning. My interest in reading this material is too fold. In interpreting these materials, I hope to illuminate the practice of everyday life, specifically tactics of resistance and refusal, modes of self-fashioning and figurations of freedom, and to investigate the construction of the subject and social relations contained within these documents. This effort is enmeshed with the relations of power and dominance it strives to write against. It resists, complies with, and exceeds the official narratives of slavery and freedom.
[2026-05-22 | audiomark] nuances, plantation journals and documents, newspaper accounts, missionary tracks, travel writing, amateur ethnographies, songbooks, government reports, etc. Because these documents are not free from barbarism, I have tried to read them against the grain to write a different account of the past while realizing the limits imposed by employing these sources, the impossibility of fully recovering the experience of the enslaved and the emancipated and the risk of reinforcing the authority of these documents, even as I tried to use them for contrary purposes. The effort to brush history against the grain requires excavations at the margins of monumental history, for the ruins of the dismembered past to be retrieved and turning to forms of knowledge and practice, not generally considered legitimate objects of historical inquiry or appropriate more adequate sources for history making. I attend to the cultivated silence.
[2026-05-22 | audiomark] production of historical narratives. Since the very effort to represent the situation of the subaltern reveals the provinciality of the archive, as well as the interests that shape it and determine the employment of history. For example, the imperative to construct a usable and palatable national past certainly determined the picture of slavery drawn in the testimonies gathered by the Works Progress Administration. Not to mention the hierarchical relations between mostly white interviewers and black interviewees. Baring this in mind, one recognizes that writing the history of the dominated requires not only the interrogation of the governing narratives and the exposure of their contingent and partisan character, but also the reclamation of archival material for contrary purposes. As Gayatri's spivac remarks, the subaltern cannot appear without a thought of the elite. In other words, there is...
[2026-05-22 | audiomark] It changes brought by emancipation and the shifting registers of racial subjection. The duties and obligations that conscripted the masterless culminated in a new racial order no less brutal than the old regime. Notwithstanding the negative power of the 13th Amendment, racial slavery was transformed rather than an old. It was a state best described as slavery in all but name. Blackness recast in the guise of the wage laborer, contractual subject, blameworthy individual, and impaired citizen, refigured the relations of mastery and servitude. The shift from the legal status descriptions characteristic of the antebellum period to the regulatory power of a racial state obsessed with matters of blood, sexuality, population, and natural antipathy ultimately reproduced the status race of chattel slavery. No less significant was the state sanctioned and extra juridical violence essential to the making of a survival race and disposable population. The incumbrances of emancipation and the unfree condition of the ex-slave, at the very least, lead us to reconsider the meaning of freedom if they do not cast doubt on the narrative of progress. A note on method. What does one tell the story of an elusive emancipation and a travestied freedom? Certainly, reconsidering the meaning of freedom entails looking critically at the production of historical narratives. Since the very effort to represent the situation of the subaltern reveals the provinciality of the archive, as well as the interests that shape it, and determine the employment of history. For example, the imperative to construct a usable and palatable national past certainly determined the picture of slavery drawn in the testimonies gathered by the Works Progress Administration. Not to mention the hierarchical relations between...
[2026-05-22 | audiomark] legible and uncertain. After all, how does one determine the difference between dissemblance or putnonolmassa, the simulation of compliance for covert aims, the yesim to death and destruction, and the grins and gesticulations of sambal, indicating the repressive construction of content at subjection? At the level of appearance, these contending performances often differed little. At the level of effect, however, they diverged radically. One performance aimed to reproduce and secure the relations of domination, and the other to manipulate appearances in order to challenge these relations and create a space for action not generally available. Since acts of resistance exist within the context of relations of domination and are not external to them, they acquire their character from these relations, and vice versa. At a dance, holiday fade, or corn-shocking, the line between dominant and insurgent orchestrations of blackness.
[2026-05-22 | audiomark] fate, or the community forced to gather and listen intently as the gospel of slavery was recited with malice. The fulfillment of, or compliance with, these demands, must be considered as pragmatism rather than resignation, since one either yielded or risked brutal punishment. It is difficult, if not impossible, to establish an absolute and definitive division between going before the master and other amusements. This accounts for the ambivalent pleasure afforded by such recreations. At the same time, these performances constituted acts of defiance conducted under the cover of nonsense, indirection, and seeming acquiescence. By virtue of such tactics, these performances were sometimes turned against their instrumental aims. The reliance on masquerade, subterfuge, and indirection also obscured the small acts of resistance conducted by the enslaved. This opacity enabled them to flourish and made them illegible and uncertain. After all, how does one determine the difference between dissemblance or putnonolmassa? The simulation of compliance for covert aims, the yes and to death and destruction, and the grins and gesticulations of sambal, indicating the repressive construction of contented subjection. At the level of appearance, these contending performances often differed little. At the level of effect, however, they diverged radically. One performance aimed to reproduce and secure the relations of domination, and the other to manipulate appearances in order to challenge these relations and create a space for action not generally available. Since acts of resistance exist within the context of relations of domination and are not external to them, they acquire their character from these relations, and vice versa. At a dance, holiday fade, or corn-shocking, the line between dominant and insurgent orchestration
[2026-05-22 | audiomark] fate, or the community forced to gather and listen intently as the gospel of slavery was recited with malice. The fulfillment of, or compliance with, these demands, must be considered as pragmatism rather than resignation, since one either yielded or risked brutal punishment. It is difficult, if not impossible, to establish an absolute and definitive division between going before the master and other amusements. This accounts for the ambivalent pleasure afforded by such recreations. At the same time, these performances constituted acts of defiance conducted under the cover of nonsense, indirection, and seeming acquiescence. By virtue of such tactics, these performances were sometimes turned against their instrumental aims. The reliance on masquerade, subterfuge, and indirection also obscured the small acts of resistance conducted by the enslaved. This opacity enabled them to flourish.
[2026-05-22 | audiomark] assault. This distinctive meditation on slavery and freedom encompassed and engulfed the domain of sexuality with ruthless effect. The seeming polarities of terror and enjoyment frame this exploration of subjection, calculations of socially necessary and socially tolerable violence, and the very uses of property, determine the person fashioned in the law, an anomalous subject of restricted sentience and qualified value, and the blackness conjured on the popular stage. The obliteration and engulfment of the slave and or black occurred as well by slipping on blackness and stepping into the skin of the other, and by way of an empathic identification in which the self stands in for and subsumes the other. The exercise of power is inseparable from its display, domination depended upon demonstrations of the slaveholders dominion and the captives of basement. Representing power was essential to wielding it. A significant aspect of maintaining relations of domination, as James Scott notes, consists of the symbolization of domination by demonstrations and enactments of power. Such performances made the captive body the vehicle of the master's power and truth. What was demanded by the master was simulated by the enslaved. Two, go before the master required the enslaved to strike it up lively or witness the beating, torture, and execution of fellow captives, or be subjected to necessary and gratuitous acts of punishments. A child's name might be changed on a whim or made the punchline of a joke to confirm that the slaveholder, not the parents, decided the child's fate, or the community forced to gather and listen intently as the gospel of slavery was recited with malice. The fulfillment of or compliance with these demands must be considered as pragmatism rather than...
[2026-05-22 | audiomark] population, it could be and was assumed, offered itself up as surrogate selves for meditation on problems of human freedom, its lure and its eluciveness. Indeed, blackness provided the occasion for self-reflection and for an exploration of terror, desire, fear, loathing, and longing. Figuertive capacity is another way of describing the mutability of the commodity and the paradox or conundrum of agency for the oscillating subject, object of slave law. In the scene of subjection, agency is produced or fained by means of terror and violence, sentiment and reciprocal relations, or mutuality, secure the extreme domination of slavery. The power of the weak or survival love, enhanced the enjoyment of property, albeit disguised as intimacy or shared affection. The rhetoric of seduction craft the story of intimacy and consent, willfulness and submission, that dissimulate.
[2026-05-22 | audiomark] determined the constricted humanity of the enslaved, the encumbered individuality of the emancipated resulted largely from the equation of responsibility with blameworthiness, making duty synonymous with punishment. The enduring legacy of slavery was readily discernible in the travestied liberation, thwarted agency, coerced labor, interminable servility, and blameworthiness of the free individual. The ubiquitous fun and frolic that supposedly demonstrated slave contentment and the Africans' suitedness for slavery were mirrored in the panic about idleness, intemperate consumption, recalcitrance, and fanciful expressions of freedom, all of which justified coerced of labor measures and the constriction of liberties. The entanglements of slavery and freedom were undeniable and everywhere apparent. Civil submission remained the defining characteristic of black subjectivity, whether in the making and securing of the...
[2026-05-22 | audiomark] of men and citizen are realizable, or whether the Appalachian human can be born equally by all. The selective recognition of the humanity of the slave did not redress the abuses of the institution, nor prevent the wanton use of the captive warranted by his or her status as chattel. Since, in most cases, the acknowledgement of the slave as subject was a complement to the arrangements of chattel property, rather than its remedy. For itself possession liberate the former slave from his or her bonds, but rather sought to replace the whip with a compulsory contract and the collar with guilty conscience. Put differently, the barbarism of slavery did not express itself singularly in the constitution of the slave as object, but also in the forms of subjectivity and circumscribed humanity imputed to the enslaved. Nor can the failures of reconstruction be recounted solely as a series of legal reversal or troop withdrawals.
[2026-05-22 | audiomark] body, rather than ameliorating the chattel condition. Metamorphosis The metamorphosis of chattel into men and citizen was the promise of abolition. The failure of reconstruction made it impossible to achieve and secure this desired end. This failure was not only a matter of policy, or weak implementation, or evidence of a flacking commitment to black rights, which was undeniably the case. The limits of emancipation, the ambiguous legacy of universalism, the exclusions constitutive of liberalism, and the blameworthiness of the freed individual were no less decisive in producing new forms of involuntary servitude and inequality. The rights of contract and the wage failed to disestablish fundamental aspects of slavery. Men made the lives of the formerly enslaved, more precarious, rights facilitated relations of domination, and new forms of bondage were enabled by proprietary notions of the self. The pedagogical and legislative efforts aimed at transforming the formerly enslaved into rational, acquisitive, dutiful, and responsible individuals required coercion, and the regular threat of arrest, punishment, and death. On this vantage point, emancipation appears less the grand event of liberation than a point of transition between modes of servitude and racial subjection. It also leads us to question whether the rights of man and citizen are realizable, or whether the appellation human can be born equally by all. The selective recognition of the humanity of the slave did not redress the abuses of the institution nor prevent the wanton use of the captive warranted by his or her status as chattel. Since in most cases, the acknowledgement of the slave as subject was a compliment to the arrangements of chattel property rather than its remedy. Note itself as a...
[2026-05-22 | audiomark] commodity, beast of burden, and chattel, but also as they involve notions of slave humanity. Rather than dismiss paternalism as ideology, understood in the Orthodox sense as a false and distorted representation of social relations, I engage seriously its premises. My intent is to illuminate the savage encroachments of power that take place through notions of reform, consent, reciprocity, and protection. Contrary to our expectations, sentiment, enjoyment, affinity, will, affection, and desire, facilitated domination and terror, precisely by praying upon the flesh, the heart, and the soul. The mutuality of social relations and the expressive and effective capacities of the subject augmented and fortified violence. It was often the case that benevolent correctives and declarations of slave humanity intensified the brutal...
[2026-05-22 | audiomark] and individuality acted to tether, bind, and oppress. For instance, although the captives bifurcated existence as both an object of property and a person, whether understood as a legal subject, formally endowed with limited rights and protections, or as a submissive, culpable, or criminal agent, or as one possessing restrictive capacities for self-fashioning, has been recognized as one of the striking contradictions of chattel slavery. The constitution of this humanity, or legal personhood, remains to be considered. The law's recognition of slave humanity has been dismissed as ineffectual and as a vault fos of an imperiled institution, or, worse yet, it has been lauded as evidence of the hegemony of paternalism and the integral relations between masters and slaves. The violence part and parcel of personhood and the recognition of the slave as subject, we might even say the imp...
[2026-05-22 | audiomark] is formerly denied them. In short, the selective recognition of humanity that undergirded the relations of chattel slavery had not considered them men deserving of rights or freedom. In taking up the language of human being and human flesh, they seized upon that which have been used against and denied them. However, suppose that the recognition of humanity held out the promise not of liberating the flesh or redeeming one's suffering, but rather of intensifying it. Or what if this acknowledgement was little more than a pretext for punishment, dissimulation of the violence of chattel slavery and the sanction given it by the law and the state and an instantiation of racial hierarchy? What if the presumed endowments of man, conscience, sentiment, will and reason, rather than assuring liberty or negating slavery acted to yoke slavery and freedom? Or what if the heart
[2026-05-22 | audiomark] God Almighty. As if required to explain his animosity toward his former owner who had the devil in his heart. Moses explained that, God Almighty never meant for human beings to be like animals. Us Niggas has a soul and a heart and a mind. We ain't like a dog or a horse. In some respects, Tom Wyndham's experience of enslavement was the opposite of that described by Charlie Moses. He reported that his owner had treated him well. Nonetheless, like Moses, he to explain the violation of slavery as being made a beast of burden. While Moses detailed the outrages of slavery and highlighted the atrocity of the institution by poignantly enumerating the essential features of the slave's humanity, a soul, a heart, and a mind. Wyndham, in conveying the injustice of slavery, put the matter simply. I think we should have our liberty because us ain't hogs or horses. Us is human flesh. The flesh. Existence defined at its most elemental level, alone entitled one to liberty. This basic assertion of colored folks claimed to freedom, implicitly called into question, the rationales that legitimated the exclusion of blacks from the purview of universal rights and entitlements. As Moses and Wyndham were well aware, the discourse of humanism, at the very least, was double-edged, since the life and liberty they held in esteem were racial privileges formerly denied them. In short, the selective recognition of humanity that undergirded the relations of chattel slavery had not considered them men deserving of rights or freedom. In taking up the language of human being and human flesh, they seized upon that which had been used against and denied them. However, suppose that the recognition of humanity held out the promise not of liberating the flesh.
[2026-05-16 | audiomark] power of the weak or survival love, enhance the enjoyment of property, albeit disguised as intimacy or shared affection. The rhetoric of seduction craft a story of intimacy and consent, willfulness and submission that disseminated the violence of rape and sexual assault. This distinctive meditation on slavery and freedom encompassed and engulfed the domain of sexuality with ruthless effect. The seeming polarities of terror and enjoyment frame this exploration of subjection, calculations of socially necessary and socially tolerable violence, and the very uses of property, determine the person fashioned in the law, an anomalous subject of restricted sentience and qualified value, and the blackness conjured on the popular stage. The obliteration and engulfment of the slave and or black occurred as well by slipping on blackness and stepping into the skin of the other, and by way of an empathic identification in which the self stands in for and subsumes the other. The exercise of power is inseparable from its display. Domination depended upon demonstrations of the slaveholders' dominion and the captives of basement. Representing power was essential to wielding it. A significant aspect of maintaining relations of domination, as James Scott notes, consists of the symbolization of domination by demonstrations and enactments of power. Such performances made the captive body the vehicle of the master's power and truth. What was demanded by the master was simulated by the enslaved. To go before the master required the enslaved to strike it up lively or witness the beating, torture and execution of fellow captives, or be subjected to necessary, gratuitous acts of punishments. A child's name might be changed on a whim, or made the punchline of a joke to confirm
[2026-05-16 | audiomark] thwarted agency, coerced labor, interminable servility, and blameworthiness of the free individual. The ubiquitous fun and frolic that supposedly demonstrated slave contentment and the African's suitedness for slavery were mirrored in the panic about idleness, intemperate consumption, recalcitrance, and fanciful expressions of freedom, all of which justified coerced of labor measures and the constriction of liberties. The entanglements of slavery and freedom were undeniable and everywhere apparent. Dutiful submission remained the defining characteristic of black subjectivity, whether in the making and securing of the captive is chattel personal, an item of movable personal property, or in the fashioning of individuality, cultivation of conscience, training and discipline of free labor, and harnessing of the will. Figuertive Capacities In the economy of racial slavery, the enjoyment of property was predicated on the figurative capacities of blackness, the ability to be an object or animal, or not quite human, or guilty agent. The value of blackness resided in this metaphorical aptitude, whether literally understood as the fungibility of the commodity, or as the imaginative surface upon which the master and the nation came to understand themselves. As Tony Morrison writes, the slave population, it could be and was assumed, offered itself up as surrogate selves for meditation on problems of human freedom, its lure and its elusiveness. Indeed, blackness provided the occasion for self-reflection, and for an exploration of terror, desire, fear, loathing, and longing. Figuertive Capacity is another way of describing the mutability of the commodity, and the paradox or conundrum of agency for the oscillating subject object of slave law. In the scene of
[2026-05-16 | audiomark] examination of slavery and reconstruction, or recover the resistances of the dominated, but critically interrogate terms like will, agency, individuality, and responsibility. To do so requires questioning the formation of the subject by dominant discourses, as well as the ways in which the enslaved and the emancipated, grappled with these terms, and endeavored to re-elaborate and refuse them in fashioning themselves as agents and striving to make a free life. The scenes of subjection at issue here include the mannequin identities constitutive of slave humanity, that is, the contented subordinate and or willful criminal, as well as the calculation of humanity in increments of value, the fabrication of the will, the performance of subjection, and the relation between injury and personhood. While the calibration of sentience and terms of punishment determine the constricted humanity of the enslaved, the encumbered individuality of the emancipated resulted largely from the equation of responsibility with blameworthiness, making duty synonymous with punishment. The enduring legacy of slavery was readily discernible in the travestied liberation, thwarted agency, coerced labor, interminable servility, and blameworthiness of the free individual. The ubiquitous fun and frolic that supposedly demonstrated slave contentment and the African's suitedness for slavery were mirrored in the panic about idleness, intemperate consumption, recalcitrance, and fanciful expressions of freedom, all of which justified coerced of labor measures and the constriction of liberties. The entanglements of slavery and freedom were undeniable and everywhere apparent. Civil submission remained the defining characteristic of black subjectivity, whether in the making and securing of the captive is chattel personal, an item of movable personal...
[2026-05-16 | audiomark] Since, in most cases, the acknowledgement of the slave as subject was a compliment to the arrangements of Shadow property, rather than its remedy. Nor did self-possession liberate the former slave from his or her bonds, but rather sought to replace the whip with the compulsory contract and the collar with guilty conscience. Put differently, the barbarism of slavery did not express itself singularly in the constitution of the slave as object, but also in the forms of subjectivity and circumscribed humanity imputed to the enslaved. Nor can the failures of reconstruction be recounted solely as a series of legal reversals or troop withdrawals. They also need to be located in the very language of persons, rights and liberties. With this in mind, I attend to the forms of violence and domination enabled by the recognition of humanity, licensed by the invocation of rights, and justified on the grounds of liberty and freedom. I do not offer a comprehensive examination of slavery and reconstruction or recover the resistances of the dominated, but critically interrogate terms like will, agency, individuality and responsibility. To do so requires questioning the formation of the subject by dominant discourses as well as the ways in which the enslaved and the emancipated grappled with these terms, and endeavored to re-elaborate and refuse them in fashioning themselves as agents and in striving to make a free life. The scenes of subjection at issue here include the mannequin identities constitutive of slave humanity, that is, the contented subordinate and or willful criminal, as well as the calculation of humanity in increments of value, the fabrication of the will, the performance of subjection, and the relation between injury and personhood. While the calibration of sentience and terms of punishment determine the constricted humanity of the enslaved,
[2026-05-16 | audiomark] condition. Metamorphosis The metamorphosis of chattel into men and citizens was the promise of abolition. The failure of reconstruction made it impossible to achieve and secure this desired end. This failure was not only a matter of policy or weak implementation or evidence of a flacking commitment to black rights, which was undeniably the case. The limits of emancipation, the ambiguous legacy of universalism, the exclusions constitutive of liberalism, and the blameworthiness of the freed individual were no less decisive in producing new forms of involuntary servitude and inequality. The rights of contract and the wage failed to disestablish fundamental aspects of slavery. Emancipation made the lives of the formerly enslaved, more precarious, rights facilitated relations of domination, and new forms of bondage were enabled by proprietary notions of the self. The pedagogical and legislative efforts aimed at transforming the formerly enslaved into rational, acquisitive, dutiful, and responsible individuals required coercion and the regular threat of arrest, punishment, and death. From this vantage point, emancipation appears less the grand event of liberation than a point of transition between modes of servitude and racial subjection. It also leads us to question whether the rights of man and citizen are realizable or whether the appellation human can be born equally by all. The selective recognition of the humanity of the slave did not redress the abuses of the institution nor prevent the wanton use of the captive warranted by his or her status as chattel, since in most cases the acknowledgement of the slave as subject was a compliment to the arrangements of chattel property rather than its remedy. Note itself possession liberate the former slave from his or her bonds.
[2026-05-16 | audiomark] My intent is to illuminate the savage encroachments of power that take place through notions of reform, consent, reciprocity, and protection. Contrary to our expectations, sentiment, enjoyment, affinity, will, affection, and desire, facilitated domination and terror precisely by praying upon the flesh, the heart, and the soul. The mutuality of social relations and the expressive and effective capacities of the subject augmented and fortified violence. It was often the case that benevolent correctives and declarations of slave humanity intensified the brutal exercise of power upon the captive body rather than ameliorating the chattel condition. Metamorphosis The metamorphosis of chattel into man and citizen was the promise of abolition. The failure of reconstruction made it impossible to achieve and secure this desired end. This failure was not only a matter of policy or weak implementation or evidence of a flagging commitment to black rights which was undeniably the case. The limits of emancipation, the ambiguous legacy of universalism, the exclusions constitutive of liberalism, and the blameworthiness of the freed individual were no less decisive in producing new forms of involuntary servitude and inequality. The rights of contract and the wage failed to disestablish fundamental aspects of slavery. Emancipation made the lives of the formerly enslaved, more precarious, rights facilitated relations of domination, and new forms of bondage were enabled by proprietary notions of the self. The pedagogical and legislative efforts aimed at transforming the formerly enslaved, interrational, acquisitive, dutiful, and responsible individuals required coercion and the regular threat of arrest. Punish.
[2026-05-16 | audiomark] of paternalism and the integral relations between masters and slaves. The violence part and parcel of personhood and the recognition of the slave is subject, we might even say the imposition of being made is subject, or the heart of my concern. It is a matter that largely has escaped scrutiny. I approach these issues from a different vantage point and consider the outrages of slavery not only in terms of the object status of the enslaved is commodity, beast of burden and chattel, but also as they involve notions of slave humanity. Rather than dismiss paternalism as ideology, understood in the Orthodox sense as a false and distorted representation of social relations, I engage seriously its premises. My intent is to illuminate the savage encroachments of power that take place through notions of reform, consent, reciprocity and protection. Contrary to our expectations, sent...
[2026-05-16 | audiomark] rather than that which confirmed the crime of slavery, and proved that blacks were men and brothers, as Charlie Moses had hoped. I am interested in the ways that the recognition of humanity and individuality acted to tether, bind, and oppress. For instance, although the captives bifurcated existence as both an object of property and a person, whether understood as a legal subject, formally endowed with limited rights and protections, or as a submissive, culpable, or criminal agent, or as one possessing restrictive capacities for self-fashioning, has been recognized as one of the striking contradictions of chattel slavery. The constitution of this humanity, or legal personhood, remains to be considered. The law's recognition of slave humanity has been dismissed as ineffectual, and as a vault-foss of an imperiled institution, or, worse yet, it has been lauded as evidence of the hegemony of paternalism, and the integral relations between masters and slaves. The violence part and parcel of personhood, and the recognition of the slave as subject, we might even say the imposition of being made as subject, are the heart of my concern. It is a matter that largely has escaped scrutiny. I approach these issues from a different vantage point, and consider the outrages of slavery not only in terms of the object status of the enslaved is commodity, beast of burden, and chattel, but also as they involve notions of slave humanity. Rather than dismiss paternalism as ideology, understood in the Orthodox sense as a false and distorted representation of social relations, I engage seriously its premises. My intent is to illuminate the savage encroachments of power that take place through notions of reform, consent, reciprocity, and protection. Contrary to our expectations,
[2026-05-16 | audiomark] which have been used against and denied them. However, suppose that the recognition of humanity held out the promise not of liberating the flesh or redeeming one's suffering but rather of intensifying it, or what if this acknowledgement was little more than a pretext for punishment, dissimulation of the violence of chattel slavery, and the sanction given it by the law and the state, and an instantiation of racial hierarchy? What if the presumed endowments of man, conscience, sentiment, will, and reason, rather than assuring liberty or negating slavery acted to yoke slavery and freedom? Or what if the heart, the soul, and the mind were simply the inroads of discipline rather than that which confirmed the crime of slavery and proved that blacks were men and brothers, as Charlie Moses had hoped? I am interested in the ways that the recognition of humanity and individuality acted to tether, bind, and oppress. For instance, although the captives bifurcated existence as both an object of property and a person, whether understood as a legal subject, formally endowed with limited rights and protections, or as a submissive, culpable, or criminal agent, or as one possessing restrictive capacities for self-fashioning, has been recognized as one of the striking contradictions of chattel slavery. The constitution of this humanity, or legal personhood, remains to be considered. The law's recognition of slave humanity has been dismissed as ineffectual, and as a vault fos, of an imperiled institution, or, worse yet, it has been lauded as evidence of the hegemony of paternalism and the integral relations between masters and slaves. The violence part and parcel of personhood, and the recognition of the slave as subject, we might even say the imposition of being made as subject.
[2026-05-16 | audiomark] of slavery as being made a beast of burden. While Moses detailed the outrages of slavery, and highlighted the atrocity of the institution by poignantly enumerating the essential features of the slave's humanity, a soul, a heart, and a mind, wind them, and conveying the injustice of slavery put the matter simply. I think we should have our liberty, because us ain't hogs or horses. Us is human flesh. The flesh, existence defined at its most elemental level, alone entitled one to liberty. This basic assertion of colored folks claimed to freedom, implicitly called into question, the rationales that legitimated the exclusion of blacks from the purview of universal rights and entitlements. As Moses and Windem were well aware, the discourse of humanism, at the very least, was double-adged, since the life and liberty they held in esteem were racial privileges formerly denied.
[2026-05-16 | audiomark] We was worked to death. We worked Sunday, all day, all night. He whipped us till some just lay down to die. It was a pool life. I know it ain't right to have hate in the heart, but God Almighty. As if required to explain his animosity toward his former owner who had the devil in his heart. Moses exclaimed that, God Almighty never meant for human beings to be like animals. Us Niggas has a soul and a heart and a mind. We ain't like a dog or a horse. In some respects, Tom Wyndham's experience of enslavement was the opposite of that described by Charlie Moses. He reported that his owner had treated him well. Nonetheless, like Moses, he to explain the violation of slavery as being made a beast of burden. While Moses detailed the outrages of slavery and highlighted the atrocity of the institution by poignantly enumerating the essential features of the slave's humanity. A soul.
[2026-05-16 | audiomark] some just lay down to die. It was a pool life. I know it ain't right to have hate in the heart, but God Almighty." As if required to explain His animosity toward His former owner who had the devil in his heart. Moses exclaimed that, God Almighty never meant for human beings to be like animals. Us Niggas has a soul and a heart and a mind. We ain't like a dog or horse. In some respects, Tom Wyndham's experience of enslavement was the opposite of that described by Charlie Moses. He reported that his owner had treated him well. Nonetheless, like Moses, he to explain the violation of slavery as being made a beast of burden. While Moses detailed the outrages of slavery and highlighted the atrocity of the institution by poignantly enumerating the essential features of the slave's humanity, a soul, a heart, and a mind, Wyndham, and conveying the injustice of slavery put the matter simply, I think we should have our liberty because us ain't hogs or horses. Us is human flesh. The flesh, existence defined at its most elemental level, alone in tidal want liberty. This basic assertion of colored folks claimed a freedom implicitly called into question, the rationales that legitimated the exclusion of blacks from the purview of universal rights and entitlements. As Moses and Wyndham were well aware, the discourse of humanism, at the very least, was double edged, since the life and liberty they held in esteem were racial privileges formerly denied them. In short, the selective recognition of humanity that undergirded the relations of chattel slavery had not considered them men deserving of rights or freedom. In taking up the language of human being and human flesh, they seized upon that which have been used against and denied them. However,
[2026-05-16 | audiomark] terror and the routine violence of racial slavery were perpetrated under the rubric of pleasure, property, and personhood. The scenes of subjection examined here entail the enactment of subjugation and the constitution of the subject, and they include the blows delivered to topsy and zip-cune on the popular stage. The obligatory rebels of slaves in the marketplace, the simulation of will in slave law, the fashioning of identity, and the processes of individuation and normalization. Human flesh When Charlie Moses reflected on his years of slavery, the preacher's eloquence noted by the Workers Progress Administration interviewer who recorded his testimony did not blunt his anger. In recounting the harsh treatment received by colored folks, he emphasized that the enslaved were used like animals and handled as if they existed only for the master's prophets. The way us niggas was treated was awful. Master would beat, knock, kick, kill. He done everything he could, except eat us. We was worked to death. We worked Sunday, all day, all night. He whipped us till some just lay down to die. It was a pool life. I know it ain't right to have hate in the heart, but God Almighty. As if required to explain his animosity toward his former owner who had the devil in his heart. Moses explained that, God Almighty never meant for human beings to be like animals. Us niggas has a soul in a heart and a mind. We ain't like a dog or a horse. In some respects, Tom Wyndham's experience of enslavement was the opposite of that described by Charlie Moses. He reported that his owner had treated him well. Nonetheless, like Moses, he to explain the violation of slavery as being made a beast of burden. Mama serial serial serial serial serial serial serial serial serial serial serial serial serial serial serial serial serial serial serial serial serial serial serial serial serial serial serial serial serial serial serial serial serial serial serial serial serial serial serial serial serial serial serial serial serial serial serial serial serial serial serial serial serial serial serial serial serial serial serial serial serial serial serial serial serial serial serial serial serial serial serial serial serial serial serial serial serial serial serial serial serial serial serial serial serial serial serial serial serial serial serial serial serial serial serial serial serial serial serial serial serial serial serial serial serial serial serial serial serial serial serial serial serial serial serial serial serial serial serial serial serial serial serial serial serial serial serial serial serial serial serial serial serial serial serial serial serial serial serial serial serial serial serial serial serial serial serial serial serial serial serial serial serial serial serial serial serial serial serial serial serial serial serial serial serial serial serial serial serial serial serial serial serial serial serial serial serial serial serial serial serial serial serial serial serial serial serial serial serial serial serial serial serial serial serial serial serial serial serial serial serial serial serial serial serial serial serial serial serial serial serial serial serial serial serial serial serial serial serial serial
[2026-05-16 | audiomark] least at the whipping post, is the demand that this suffering be materialized and evidenced by the display of the tortured body or endless recitations of the ghastly and the terrible. In light of this, how does one give expression to these outrages without exacerbating the indifference to suffering that is the consequence of the benumbing spectacle or contend with the narcissistic identification that obliterates the other or the purience that too often is the response to such displays? This was the challenge faced by Douglas and other foes of slavery, and this is the task I take up here. Rather than try to convey the routinized violence of slavery and its aftermath through invocations of the shocking and the terrible, I have chosen to look elsewhere and consider those scenes in which terror can hardly be discerned, slaves dancing in the quarters, the outrageous darky antics of the menstrual stage, the constitution of humanity and slave law, and the fashioning of the self-possessed individual. By defamiliarizing the familiar, I hope to illuminate the terror of the mundane and quotidian rather than exploit the shocking spectacle. The terror and the routine violence of racial slavery were perpetrated under the rubric of pleasure, property, and personhood. The scenes of subjection examined here, until the enactment of subjugation and the constitution of the subject, and they include the blows delivered to topsy and zip-cune on the popular stage, the obligatory rebels of slaves in the marketplace, the simulation of will in slave law, the fashioning of identity, and the processes of individuation and normalization. When Charlie Moses reflected on his years of slavery, the preacher's eloquence noted by the workers' progress.
[2026-05-16 | audiomark] perhaps second only to Uncle Tom's murder at the hands of Simon LaGrey. By locating this horrible exhibition in the first chapter of his 1845 narrative of the life of Frederick Douglass, Douglass establishes the centrality of violence to the making of the slave, and identifies it as an original, generative act, equivalent to the statement, I was born. The passage through the blood stained gate is an inaugural moment in the formation of the enslaved. It is a primal scene. By this I mean that the terrible spectacle dramatizes the origin of the subject, and demonstrates that to be a slave is to be under the brutal power and authority of another. I have chosen not to reproduce Douglass's account of the beating of Othester to call attention to the ease with which such scenes are usually reiterated. The casualness with which they are circulated and the consequences of this routine display of the slave's ravaged body. Rather than inciting indignation, too often they are nearest to the pain by virtue of their familiarity, the oft repeated or restored character of these accounts, and our distance from them are signaled by the theatrical language usually resorted to and describing these instances, and especially because they reinforce the spectacular character of black suffering. What interests me are the ways we are called upon to participate in such scenes. Are we witnesses who confirm the truth of what happened in the face of the world destroying capacities of pain, the distortions of torture, the sheer unrepresentability of terror, and the repression of the dominant accounts? Or are we voyures, fascinated with and repelled by exhibitions of terror and suffering? What does the exposure of the violated body yield, proof of black sentience, or the inhumanity of the book?
[2026-05-16 | audiomark] By peers, as well as a generation of younger scholars, have embraced scenes and extended and elaborated its critical vocabulary, empathy, fungibility, subjection, black performance, the property of enjoyment, the attenuation of consent and agency, the figurative capacities of blackness, sexual violence and negligible injury, redress, the violence of reciprocity and mutuality in the context of extreme domination, the rooses of power, the non-event of emancipation, infidelity to the timeline of history or embrace of temporal entanglement, affirming other ways of knowing or subjugated knowledge. It is impossible for me to read the book today, without hearing these other voices, without reading between the lines for the contributions of my interlocutors. The freighted last paragraph of the book attempted to underscore the incompleteness of freedom and the hold of slavery. What did it mean to exist between the no longer enslaved and the not yet free? What awaited us was another century of extreme domination for carrier life, dispossession, impoverishment and punishment. What awaited us were centuries of struggle animated by visions that exceeded the wreckage of our lives by the avid belief in what might be. Scenes of Subjection Introduction The terrible spectacle that introduced Frederick Douglass to slavery was the beating of his aunt Hester. It is one of the most well-known scenes of torture in the literature of slavery, perhaps second only to Uncle Tom's murder at the hands of Simon LaGrey. By locating this horrible exhibition in the first chapter of his 1845 narrative of the life of Frederick Douglass,
[2026-05-16 | audiomark] In scenes, I first wrestled with questions of the archive, what it enabled, and what it prevented us from knowing or discerning. Could I use its statements, yet destroy the master's tools? It was in these pages that I initially used the term Fabulation, but the term was latent, not yet emergent. Even then, I wanted to use the archive to create another order of statements, to produce a different account of what had happened, and what might be possible. Here the work of novelists and poets provided a model. I sought to create a method that acknowledged and comprehended the violence of the archive and the forms of silence and oblivion it produced, and yet, endeavor to use the archive for contrary purposes. It was an engagement that reckoned with the power of the archive, but dared attempt to exceed the limits imposed and render a radically different account of black existence. For the archive is also a repository of practices, a textural trace of the repertoire that transforms and refuses the given. I feel extremely fortunate that the contribution of scenes has been significant enough to merit its republication on its 25th anniversary. My peers, as well as a generation of younger scholars, have embraced scenes and extended and elaborated its critical vocabulary, empathy, fungibility, subjection, black performance, the property of enjoyment, the attenuation of consent and agency, the figurative capacities of blackness, sexual violence and negligible injury, redress, the violence of reciprocity and mutuality in the context of extreme domination, the rooses of power, the non-event of emancipation, infidelity to the timeline of history or embrace of temporal entanglement, affirming other ways of knowing or subjugated knowledge.
[2026-05-16 | audiomark] recognizing the enduring totality of African beliefs and values, despite the rupture of the middle passage, and fundamentally challenged the idea of the damaged person or psyche produced by centuries of enslavement. They did so by emphasizing the vitality of black culture, the autonomous zones created in the slave quarters, and the provision grounds, and the strength of the black family. The goal of these radical scholars was to affirm black humanity in the confines of racial capitalism and the plantation's brutality. Scenes was indebted to the work of these radical scholars, but mine was a different task. I set out to detail the entanglement of humanity and violence, liberal philosophy and racial reason, the human, and its devalued others. The matters engaged in scenes, the domain of practice, the everyday forms of making and doing, black performance, the imagination of freedom, social death, and the afterlife of slavery, the violence of the archive, and methods for transposing its statement, involuntary servitude and the long-standing struggle to elude and defeat it, the antagonism to capitalist discipline, the refusal of work, the movement of the unsauvered dispossession, and racialized enclosure, transfiguration, and a language for black existence, not bound to property or the subject, would preoccupy me for two decades. In scenes, I first wrestled with questions of the archive, what it enabled, and what it prevented us from knowing or discerning. Could I use its statements yet destroy the master's tools? It was in these pages that I initially used the term, FAPULATION, but the term was latent, not yet emergent. Even then, I wanted to use the archive to create another order of statements, to produce a different account of what had happened.
[2026-05-16 | audiomark] like the vexed relation of the enslaved to the category of the human. In striving to describe the context of racial slavery, what quickly becomes apparent was the insufficiency of the prevailing concepts of power, subjection, exploitation, and politics. Slavery was the blind spot in critical theory. I was determined to name and articulate the character of power, which was an assemblage of extreme domination, disciplinary power, bio-power, and the sovereign right to make die. The dimensions of subjection traversed the categories of human, animal, and plant. The modes of accumulation and exploitation failed to be explained by pre-capitalist modes of production or the factory floor. The character of gendered and sexual difference and negated maternity and severed kinship bore no resemblance to the intimate arrangements of the white bourgeois family and cast out the enslaved from the nomenclature of the human. Scenes of subjection was a radical departure from the extant historical literature. Conservative scholarship had minimized the role of racial slavery in the making of capitalist modernity, failed to theorize race, characterized slavery as a pre-modern mode of production, denied the magnitude of the violence required to produce the human commodity and reproduce the relations of master and slave, and replicated the assumptions of romantic racialism and the plantation pastoral by describing slavery as a paternal institution characterized by reciprocity and consent, an approach which has been characterized as anjamaima and dialectics. The work of radical historians and intellectuals was devoted to refuting such assertions and celebrating slave agency, excavating slave culture, demonstrating black humanity and resilience
[2026-05-16 | audiomark] and to highlight the vexed relation of the enslaved to the category of the human. In striving to describe the context of racial slavery, what quickly becomes apparent was the insufficiency of the prevailing concepts of power, subjection, exploitation, and politics. Slavery was the blind spot in critical theory. I was determined to name and articulate the character of power, which was an assemblage of extreme domination, disciplinary power, bio-power, and the sovereign right to make die. The dimensions of subjection traversed the categories of human, animal, and plant. The modes of accumulation and exploitation failed to be explained by pre-capitalist modes of production or the factory floor. The character of gendered and sexual difference and negated maternity and severed kinship bore no resemblance to the intimate arrangements of the white bourgeois family and cast...
[2026-05-16 | audiomark] the modes of domination, the distribution of death, the role of reproductive labor, and the forms of gendered and sexual violence that sustained racial slavery. So how best to describe this anomalous existence distributed between the category of subject and object, person and thing, or the figurative capacity that enable the captive to fulfill any and every need, from cotton production to filetio. The plantation was hell, factory, killing ground, and Sodom. In attempting to explicate the violence of slavery and its idiom of power, scenes moved away from the notion of the exploited worker or the unpaid laborer toward the captive and the fungible, the commodity and the dominated, the disposable and the sexually violated, to describe the dynamics of accumulation and dispossession, social reproduction and social death, seduction and libidinal economy, and to highlight the vexed relation of the enslaved to the category of the human. Instriving to describe the context of racial slavery, what quickly becomes apparent was the insufficiency of the prevailing concepts of power, subjection, exploitation, and politics. The category was the blind spot in critical theory. I was determined to name and articulate the character of power, which was an assemblage of extreme domination, disciplinary power, bio-power, and the sovereign right to make die. The dimensions of subjection traversed the categories of human, animal, and plant. The modes of accumulation and exploitation failed to be explained by pre-capitalist modes of production or the factory floor. The character of gendered and sexual difference and negated maternity and severed kinship bore no resemblance to the intimate arrangements of the White bourgeois family.
[2026-05-16 | audiomark] slavery. I searched for critical dexicon that would elucidate slavery and its modes of power and forms of subjection and challenge the prevailing understanding of the enslaved. As a constricted or impaired version of the worker and the individual, terms which seem to obscure the state and condition of enslavement rather than clarify it. This framework, even as amended for the black worker and newly minted subject, failed to perceive or comprehend the modes of domination, the distribution of death, the role of reproductive labor, and the forms of gendered and sexual violence that sustained racial slavery. So how best to describe this anomalous existence distributed between the category of subject and object, person and thing, or the figurative capacity that enable the captive to fulfill any and every need, from cotton production to filetio. The plantation was hell, factory, killing ground, and Sodom. In attempting to explicate the violence of slavery and its idiom of power, scenes moved away from the notion of the exploited worker or the unpaid laborer toward the captive and the fungible, the commodity and the dominated, the disposable, and the sexually violated to describe the dynamics of accumulation and dispossession, social reproduction and social death, seduction and libidinal economy, and to highlight the vexed relation of the enslaved to the category of the human. In striving to describe the context of racial slavery, what quickly becomes apparent was the insufficiency of the prevailing concepts of power, subjection, exploitation, and politics. Slavery was the blind spot in critical theory. I was determined to name and articulate the character of power, which was an assemblage of extreme
[2026-05-16 | audiomark] slavery. Yet, it is clear I was writing toward this concept, which would be developed in lose your mother and Venus into acts. If the conventional narrative, from slavery to freedom, failed to capture the temporal entanglement of racial slavery as our past and our present. The lasting effects of the slaves exile from, and precarious belonging to, the category of the human, the recursive character of violence and accumulation, and the long duration of unfreedom. Then how might I frame and approach such matters? How might I interrupt the traditional account, revise historical chronology, cast doubt on the progressive arc and tell us of narrative, and blast open the time of slavery? I surged for critical dexicon that would elucidate slavery and its modes of power and forms of subjection, and challenge the prevailing understanding of the enslaved. As a constricted or...
[2026-05-16 | audiomark] an excussion, a way of keeping terror at bay, a rampart against devastation, and the dangers of what lived on. Any certainty about the historical divide between slavery and freedom proved to be increasingly elusive. The exclusion and hierarchy constitutive of the discourse of rights and man, and the racism of the white republic and the settler nation, were robust and not to be eradicated by acts or proclamations or field orders or amendments. The movement from slave to man and citizen would be impeded, boarded. The restricted vision of freedom offered by the liberal imagination, a vision even more attenuated and hollowed out by counter-revolution, economic predation, anti-black violence, and white supremacy, would not transform the plantation, or abolish racial slavery and its badges or indices, or eradicate caste, or negate the legacy and stigma.
[2026-05-16 | audiomark] and communal dreaming, sacred transport, acts of redress, and faith in a power greater than master and nation, made it possible to survive the unbearable, while never asserting to it. The arrangement of stars in the night sky, the murmur and echo of songs traveling across a river, the revered objects buried near a prayer tree, the rumors of fugitives in the swamp, or maroons in the hills, nourished dreams of a free territory, or an existence without masters, or a plot against the plantation, or reveries of miraculous deliverance. In the archive of slavery, I encountered a paradox. The recognition of the slave's humanity and status as a subject, extended and intensified servitude and dispossession, rather than conferring some small measure of rights and protection. The attributes of the human will, consciousness, reason, agency, and responsibility were the inroads of discipline, punishment, and mortification. This foreshadowed the subject of freedom, and the limits of personhood bound indesolubly to property. The recognition of the formerly enslaved as a newly endowed subject of rights was not the entry to the promised land. This should not have been a surprise. Western humanism was born in the context of the Atlantic slave trade and racial slavery. It became apparent that being a subject was not the antidote to being a slave, but rather that these figures were intimate, twin. I wanted for some other end a true abolition of property, a leveling of the vertical order of life, a maceonic cessation, a way of keeping terror at bay, a rampart against devastation, and the dangers of what lived on. Any certainty about the historical divide between slavery and freedom proved to be increasing.
[2026-05-16 | audiomark] commemorate the auspicious era of extensive freedom. It is a curious and prescient formulation. How does one commemorate what is yet to arrive? In the context of social death, everyday practices explore the possibility of transfigured existence and cultivated an imagination of the otherwise and elsewhere, cartographies of the fantastic utterly antagonistic to slavery. The enslaved refused to accept the order of values that it transformed them into units of currency and capital, beasts and crops, breeders, incubators, lactating machines, and sentient tools. At secret meetings and freedom schools, hidden away in loopholes of retreat and hush arbores, gathered at the river or dwelling in the swamp, the enslaved articulated a vision of freedom that far exceeded that of the liberal imagination. He had enabled them to conceive other ways of existence.
[2026-05-16 | audiomark] Opposed the framework of property and commodity, contested the idea that they were less than human, nurtured acts of vengeance, and anticipated divine retribution. This subjugated knowledge or speculative knowledge of freedom would establish the vision of what might be, even if unrealizable within the prevailing terms of order. It explains why a commodity might describe themselves as human flesh, or a fugitive trapped in a garret right letters describing a free life in the north, or a hand laboring in the field, read the signs and take note of the drops of blood on the corn, as though it was due from heaven, and in the woods discern in the arrangement of leaves a hieroglyph of freedom coming, or an ex-slave proof capable of imagining an auspicious era of extensive freedom as does a lot of equiano in the interesting narrative. May the time come, at least the speculation is to me pleasing, when the sable p-
[2026-05-16 | audiomark] was critical in illuminating the ongoing and structural dimensions of violence and slavery's idioms of power. No less important was the domain of practice. In creating an inventory of ways of doing and a genealogy of refusal, I tried to account for extreme domination and the possibilities seized in practice. Black performance and quotidian practice were determined by and exceeded the constraints of domination. This dimension has received less attention in the reception of the book. The focus on its arguments about empathy, terror and violence, subjection and social death has overshadowed the discussion of practice. Scenes endeavored to illuminate the countless ways in which the enslaved challenged, refused, defied and resisted the condition of enslavement and its ordering and negation of life, its extraction and destruction of capacity. The everyday practices, the ways of living and dying, of making and doing were attempts to slip away from the status of commodity and to affirm existence as not chattel, as not property, as not winch. Even when this other state could not be named because, incommensurate or untranslatable within the conceptual field of the enclosure, the negation of the given was ripe with promise. The wild, thought and dangerous music of the enslaved gave voice to other visions of the possible and refused captivity as the only horizon, opposed the framework of property and commodity, contested the idea that they were less than human, nurtured acts of vengeance and anticipated divine retribution. This subjugated knowledge or speculative knowledge of freedom would establish the vision of what might be, even if unrealizable within the prevailing terms of order. It explains why a commodity might describe themselves as human flesh, or a fugitive trapped in a garret right-
[2026-05-16 | audiomark] racial slavery, by attending to its diffuse terror and the divisions it created between life and not life. The scenes of subjection I endeavour to unpack were not those of spectacular violence, the 33 lashes at the whipping post, the torture, rape, and brutality ubiquitous on the plantation. The public rituals of lynching and dismemberment, the vast arsenal of implements employed to harm and maim, the sedian pursuits, the endless variations of humiliation and dishonor, and the compulsive displays of the broken and violated body, all of which were in gimmick to slavery and key to the cultivation of anti-slavery sentiment and pedagogy. My interest lay elsewhere. To be subjected to the absolute power of another, and to be interpellated as a subject before the law, were the dimensions of subjection that most concerned me. I intended to bring
[2026-05-16 | audiomark] months. If it were possible, I might have written it as a 345-page long sentence. This sentence would be written in the past, present, and future tense. Temporal entanglement best articulates the still open question of abolition and the long awaited but not yet actualized freedom declared over a century and a half ago. The hold of slavery was what I sought to articulate and convey. The category crisis of human flesh and sentient commodity defined the existence of the enslaved and this predicament of value and fungibility would shadow their descendants, the blackened, and the dispossessed. I also hope to change the terms in which we understood racial slavery by attending to its diffuse terror and the divisions it created between life and not life. The scenes of subjection I endeavour to unpack were not those of spectacular violence.
[2026-05-06 | audiomark] receive or comprehend the modes of domination, the distribution of death, the role of reproductive labor, and the forms of gendered and sexual violence that sustained racial slavery. So how best to describe this anomalous existence distributed between the category of subject and object, person and thing, or the figurative capacity that enable the captive to fulfill any and every need, from cotton production to filetio. The plantation was hell, factory, killing ground, and Sodom. In attempting to explicate the violence of slavery and its idiom of power, scenes moved away from the notion of the exploited worker or the unpaid laborer toward the captive and the fungible, the commodity and the dominated, the disposable and the sexually violated, to describe the dynamics of accumulation and dispossession, social reproduction and social death, seduction and libidinal economy, and to highlight the vexed relation of the enslaved to the category of the human. Instriving to describe the context of racial slavery, what quickly becomes apparent was the insufficiency of the prevailing concepts of power, subjection, exploitation, and politics. The category was the blind spot in critical theory. I was determined to name and articulate the character of power, which was an assemblage of extreme domination, disciplinary power, bio-power, and the sovereign right to make die. The dimensions of subjection traversed the categories of human, animal, and plant. The modes of accumulation and exploitation failed to be explained by pre-capitalist modes of production or the factory floor. The character of gendered and sexual difference and negated maternity and severed kinship bore no resemblance to the intimate arrangements of the world.

=== Plantation Goods — Seth Rockman ===
[2026-05-22 | audiomark] who discounted the capacity or taste of a laborer. Naturally, the Irish spade could be improved by this or that modification, but it would not be an Irish spade when finished. The naming of axes tended to proceed by geography, not by ethnic or racial designations. The word negro could be attached to shoes, bows and textiles, but not to axes. While Yankee or Kentucky could function as euphemisms for racial categories, white southerners also pledged allegiance to the Kentucky pattern. The best farm implements noted French felt like home, and reference for the Kentucky axe followed southwestern migration patterns to New Orleans. The circuits of information and experimentation that generated these mundane, utilitarian goods reflect...
[2026-05-22 | audiomark] Native American acts came into use in the 18th century, regional variations emerged, differing particularly in length, curvature of the blade, and the presence of a V-shaped lip or lug that extended below the eye. These adaptations seem to have a relationship not to the hardness of the particular trees one might find in Vermont or Alabama, but simply to how the inhabitants of a given area understood that an axe ought to feel. A Kentucky axe and a Yankee axe scarcely differed enough to render one unsuited to a standard Vermont sugar maple and the other inadequate before the Kentucky oak. Axe design, in other words, was a product of culture and custom. Nineteenth century observers found nothing silly about these preferences, latching on to the culture in agriculture. The so-called Irish spade was a case in point.
[2026-05-22 | audiomark] powered sites of production. They needed access to a labor force willing to work for wages. They needed political connections to lobby for advantageous tariff policies. They needed distribution networks and a legal system of contract enforcement to facilitate long-distance exchange. Product design, nonetheless, was a testament to interregional collaboration. Different kinds of expertise converged in the shapes of axes, making them collective products, not the result of individual genius. Behind every product that found buyers in mobile, Baltimore, or New Orleans were the interactions of employers, laborers, marketers, purchasers, and users. Not surprisingly, stories of progress have often missed the ways that expertise gained, for example, and cutting down trees on a frontier plantation might migrate upward to shape the entrepreneurial possibilities at the top. All could agree that European axes were ill-suited to the demands of felling trees at the pace American settlers demanded. The shape of an axe, the length and curve of its blade, the taper of its body, the presence of a counterweight behind the handle, made an enormous difference in its usefulness. A proper felling axe had to carry the woodsman's strength into a tree's trunk, bringing the blade as deeply as possible through the grain with each stroke. If the American felling axe was soon to become the genus, the Kentucky and Yankee patterns were the most prominent species. They shared a single blade bit on one side, and I to hold the handle three quarters of the way back, and a blunt counterweight hole behind the eye to...
[2026-05-22 | audiomark] thrived in a place like Alabama because they catered to local understandings of how and acts should look and feel. Of course, the story is more complicated than that. Manufacturers needed capital to develop water-powered sites of production. They needed access to a labor force willing to work for wages. They needed political connections to lobby for advantageous tariff policies. They needed distribution networks and a legal system of contract enforcement to facilitate long-distance exchange. Product design, nonetheless, was a testament to inter-regional collaboration. Different kinds of expertise converged in the shapes of axes, making them collective products, not the result of individual genius. And every product that found buyers in mobile, Baltimore, or New Orleans were the interaction.
[2026-05-22 | audiomark] selling of slaves. New England's plantation entrepreneurs only bumped into significant political controversy when their business came before the public and fractious debates over terrafrates. Then Southern congressmen were more than happy to remind them of New England's ongoing debt to slavery. A salable axe. The American has a deep hatred for trees, observed Gustave de Beaumont, the French traveler who accompanied Alexis de Tocqueville on a famous tour of the United States in 1831. As Americans went to war against their natural enemy, Beaumont reported, the axe resounds incessantly. Wherever settlers envisioned the possibility of transforming forests into farms and plantations, and that was virtually everywhere. Axes were
[2026-05-22 | audiomark] and remittance, but devolved new England entrepreneurs, ever in need of more timely information on New York money markets, and new Orleans port clearances. But the trade and plantation provisions introduce additional variables for manufacturers who possess little first-hand knowledge of the performance demands of large-scale, co-wurst agricultural labor. In addition to the information they needed regarding leather, yarn, and iron, the manufacturers of slave shoes, clothing, and tools needed the racial knowledge of how to fill orders for shovels suitable for the south, or for fabrics calculated for Negro ware. Cracking this code sent some New England entrepreneurs scrambling to South Carolina or Mississippi plantations to do reconnaissance on the men and women who would wear their shoes and wield their axes.
[2026-05-22 | audiomark] what to make and before they had perfected how to make it. Starting in the 1810s, they collectively launched the program of research and development to identify the composition of a fabric or the pattern of an axe head that would sell 2,000 miles away. By the 1840s, they had built international supply chains, marshalled innovative technologies, and transformed small Massachusetts, Rhode Island and Connecticut communities into outposts of the slave economy. New England's industrial rise is generally understood as the product of Yankee ingenuity, as tinkerers of modest origins methodically conquered the impediments to mechanize production. The story of grass roots innovation was largely the same in small mills dedicated to carting wool shorn from local sheep, and armories competing for lucrative weapons contracts.
[2026-05-22 | audiomark] Chapter 1. Plantation Entrepreneurs The Southern Blanters want a heavy, warm, strong, and cheap article for the clothing of their slaves. Explained a New York City merchant house to the proprietors of a new textile mill in 1820s Massachusetts. If you can fix upon an article combining all these qualities, you can sell any quantity that you make. This was the siren song of the Southern Trade. The presumably insatiable market for manufactured goods along the rapidly advancing cotton frontier. Two million and counting captive consumers who would require many million more yards of cloth annually. This is what made plantation markets a potential bananza. But here was the product of the new product. Here was the problem for the would be...
[2026-05-22 | audiomark] However, took manufacturers beyond the traditional Merck and tile information networks and brought them into plantation spaces where they solicited enslaved men and women for feedback on the wear of their fabrics or the heft of their axes. The plantation to plantation sales that kept Rhode Island's leading Negro cloth manufacturer on the road seven months a year, left little possibility for blindness, but elicited something far more complicated than in difference. A brief interlude offers a close look at the North Brookfield Brogans to which Reverend Snell attributed his community's prosperity. Several such interludes will appear over the course of this book, each pausing on a specific material artifact to consider the place of plantation goods in the archive and in public memory. Chapters 3 and 4 approach plantation goods from the perspective of the women and men who wove Negro cloth and forged Kentucky axes. Such workers traversed the uneven terrain of industrialization in ways similar to those of their peers in other branches of manufacturing. Like workers throughout New England, those toiling in the service of the slave plantation insisted on fairer wages and peace rates, shaved at workplace regimentation, rejected their employer's pretenses of paternalism and claimed their prerogative as citizens to challenge the circumstances of their labor. But political slogans like wage slavery would resonate differently for those who spent their days making shirts, shoes and shovels for the literally enslaved. Plantation goods imparted particular meanings to the bride as seamstress might take in her work or the...
[2026-05-22 | audiomark] would wear their shoes or wield their axes were thoroughly unfamiliar and yet constantly claimed to be known. How could it be otherwise in a place like North Brookfield home to reputed stop on the Underground Railroad where Reverend Snell's own congregants seceded to form a new congregation unwelcomed to slave shoe manufacturers? For his part, Snell considered slavery diametrically opposed to Christianity, but was unsure how to proceed when he considered the moral reformation that slave shoes had brought to his community. If Snell, perhaps believed it possible to have clean hands, he did not anticipate finding them close by. The occasion called not for moral condemnation, but for an unflinching acknowledgement of an incontrovertible fact, namely that...
[2026-05-22 | audiomark] troubling fact. Not $1.50, here mind it is neighbors, passes through our hands, and is not probably derived from this source. Plantation goods brought slavery's profits to places that might otherwise have been left behind. Communities like Northbrookfield helped integrate the national economy, just as the post-revolutionary generation of policymakers and political economists had hoped. And expanding geography of opportunity enticed entrepreneurial young men to build businesses catering to slaveholders to manned for low cost, low quality provisions that could be issued semi-annually. Many who heated the call knew little about manufacturing, and even less about the end users of their goods. Standardized goods for remote markets presumed the anonymity of the consumer. But in this case, the man...
[2026-05-22 | audiomark] about 20 miles west of Worcester. Until the 1810s, the people in this town, with a very few exceptions, were farmers, and were making next to no progress in anything profitable, or calculated to elevate their character and promote the cause of morality or civilization. Explained Thomas Snell, the town's congressional minister from 1798 until 1862. Then, in 1813, the town became a center of shoe manufacturing, which furnished profitable employment to almost all classes of people, especially to families that assimilated shoe-making into the rhythms of tending their land. As Snell recounted to an audience in the 1850s, the prosecution and extension of this business soon began to increase our population. Buildings were repaired, children hensomly clothed, new habitations began.
[2026-05-22 | audiomark] This book takes complicity as a given, and then seeks to learn how it was lived and experienced in the 19th century, as well as what difference it made to other historical developments. The entrepreneurial culture that made New England the Silicon Valley of the 1820s, for example, or the political strategies that enslaved people cultivated to contest their bondage in the decades before the Civil War. By following plantation goods from the communities in which they were made, to those in which they were used, one sees not merely complicity, but contingency. That is, the entangled, dynamic, mutually constitutive relationship between opportunity and oppression, slavery and freedom, the self-made and the slave made in the American past. Through remote lives bound together by something so mundane.
[2026-05-22 | audiomark] to historic home museums to embed exquisite decorative arts in plantation profits that purchase them. Initially, a single word seemed to convey the discoveries and their implications, complicity. There is no better testament to the success of this effort than the fact that almost no one reading these words will be surprised to learn that the North held a financial interest in human bondage, or that slavery was very much a national institution, even as it became legally confined to only a segment of the country. The purpose of this book is not to offer more examples of northern complicity and slavery. There will be no smoking guns, nor attempts to reveal the hypocrisy to quote a Baltimore minister from the 1840s, of those New Englanders who'd announced slavery but felt no qualms of conscience.
[2026-05-22 | audiomark] manufactured goods have northern hats and shoes, work with northern hose, blouse, and other implements, and are chastised with northern made whips. Observed one Alabama commentator in 1849, raising the possibility that the enslaved were working for northern more than southern profit. When disunion loomed in the wake of Abraham Lincoln's election to the presidency in 1860, many northern and southern observers were certain that the value of the provisioning trade would be enough to hold the nation together. Once the war was underway, commentators contended that the north was killing the goose that has laid their golden egg when they attempted to interfere with the people of the south who have not only supplied them with the raw material, but who have been their principal customers for all their manufacturers.
[2026-05-22 | audiomark] Declared Congressman Augustine Clayton in 1833, for by virtue of their toil in the cotton fields, they effectively sailed the northern ships and ran the northern spindles. In the tellingly titled Southern Wealth and Northern Prophets, Thomas Frentis Kettle insisted that slavery was the nation's employer, generating a demand for goods that furnished work for European immigrants to New York, and Boston. That they live at the north is the case, but they are not the less supported by Southern patronage. Another commentator called for a recalibration of national economic statistics, shifting a substantial portion of the northern working class to the southern column. Every man at the north who makes a plow, a hoe, a shovel, or a cotton gin,
[2026-05-22 | audiomark] His hands has excavated their docks and fabricated their steam engines. Over these same years, American reformers considered non-consumption campaigns to avoid partaking of stolen goods. But as one Rhode Island abolitionist conceded, where to begin or where to end is hard to say. For the Massachusetts minister, Orpheus T. Landfier, slavery was a huge serpent, whose vile hiss reverberated in New England, audible in the whirl of every spindle and the vibration of every lock, in the muttering of every water wheel and in the whistle of every engine. The argument, however, could just as easily be drained of moral condemnation, and instead made to tout slavery's widely distributed economic benefits. Forges slaves were in fact the slaves of the...
[2026-05-22 | audiomark] For example, imported much of their wool from Buenos Aires and Smirna, embedding Argentine ranchers and Ottoman merchants into the story of American slavery. That wool might be cleaned by institutionalized poppers in the New York City Almshouse. Before being dyed red using cochinille from Mexico, woven onto warps made of Georgia cotton on looms outfitted with reeds made of South Carolina cane. And finished at a fulling mill using teazels imported from France at the rate of 11 million annually. Similarly, the Iron Ho held by enslaved Alabama field worker contained within it the distinctive dependencies of mines in Russia and Pennsylvania of wood lots in Maine of forges in Connecticut. The integration of these spaces and the production of
[2026-05-22 | audiomark] or rum distilled in Rhode Island. They would have been sustained on salt beef barreled in Ireland and dressed in textiles from northwest England. They would have worked at night by the light of spermachedi candles rolled in nan tucket. Slavery's trade goods, products and provisions, structured the patterns and texture of industrialization in Europe and the US North. Making clear that modern capitalism came into being with the plantation and factory locked in warm embrace. Even after American independence, British manufacturers remained dominant in furnishing the new nation's plantations with textiles and tools. They were agile in meeting the shifting preference of remote consumers, having sharpened their skills in West African Slavery Market.
[2026-05-22 | audiomark] or a Connecticut axe, navigated the so-called world of goods under conditions dictated by their legal, un-freedom. Despite the grief they might give in Isaac Hazard, or the possessions they may have accumulated through the plantation regime's internal economy. enslaved people constructed a material culture largely from goods they themselves did not choose. Those making plantation goods back in New England had far greater possibilities for personal liberation and self-making than did the involuntary consumers using them. All the more so, in light of the fact that so many New England workers were paid in store credits they used to purchase higher quality textiles, teasets, and other trappings of middle-class respectability. Places far removed from plantations of
[2026-05-22 | audiomark] position to understand them as the materialization of countless relationships near and far human and not. Surviving artifacts are rare in museum collections, scarce and archeological assemblages, and generally difficult to locate, due to the fact that they were poorly made and used into oblivion. As a result, this book relies heavily on a textual archive that is rarely figured in the study of Southern slavery and its material culture. The records of the northern businesses that specialize in making textiles and tools. As these firms sought to bring new products to plantation markets, they documented enslaved people's consumer preferences and shrewd assessments of the performance qualities of fabrics and the ergonomic features of axes and hoses. Read critically.
[2026-05-22 | audiomark] Along lengthy supply chains, decisions made in one place about how goods are made or purchased have consequences for how people live thousands of miles away. Inspired accordingly, this book employs a follow the things approach to make these relationships visible, traveling alongside roles of Negro cloth and cases of shoes from the communities where they were made, through the hands of the merchants and marketers who distributed them, and into plantation spaces where slaveholders and the enslaved competed over their usage and meaning. Part 1. Production. Four grounds the ambitions of new England entrepreneurs and laborers. Part 2. Distribution. Consideres those vending plantation goods. And part 3. Consumption. Find slaveholders and the enslaved deploying these goods to very different purposes. The voices of the enslaved become louder over the course of this book. What enslaved people are present throughout. As participants in the design process of specific goods, as users who imagined needs and behaviors sustained white supremacist notions of racial difference. And as savvy consumers with clear preferences and the capacity to make them known. As a study of material culture, this book recognizes the social lives of things, their ability to gain and shed meanings as they move through different hands, and their capacity to exert power over humans and to exist beyond them. Negro cloth did not mean the same thing to enslaved South Carolinians as it did to Isaac Hazel.
[2026-05-22 | audiomark] sitting at her loom. Nonetheless, her weaving shaped their material experience of what it was to be enslaved in South Carolina. In turn, that Rhode Island weaver may have had only the fuzziest and ill-informed sense of the enslaved wares of her handicraft on distant plantations. Nonetheless, their bondage shaped the dimensions of her freedom in Rhode Island. These intertwined histories of regions and economies, of plantations and factories, of enslaved and free lives and livelihoods become visible in the movement of shoes, shovels, hats, bows, and especially textiles from one part of the United States to another. The result is a material history of American slavery, national and scale, but focused on the multiple concurrent and often competing...
[2026-05-22 | audiomark] and to experimenting with different fabrics to meet the performance demands of the plantation. But according to the enslaved men on King Street, the hazards had failed on this last count. Isaac Hazard promised that his newest style of cloth would not disappoint, but as he later recounted, I could not make them believe this was better than they had last year. The men would not hear anything about cloth made of cotton and wool. When a deal was finally struck for one thousand yards of fabric, the St. Helena men wanted instead. Hazard must have been relieved to make any sale at all. The Rhode Island textiles that ended up on the backs of enslaved South Carolinians, alongside the Massachusetts-made shoes on their feet and the Connecticut hose in their hands are the plantation goods at the heart of this book. The term itself was widely recognized by 19th century manufacturers, merchandisers, and purchasers. Signifying a category of products named not for where they had been made, but for where they would be used. Beginning in the 1810s, New England entrepreneurs mobilized the productive energies of small rural communities to provision a slave-holding regime that would soon stretch westward from the Atlantic seaboard to the frontier lands of Texas. Putting Yankee ingenuity in the service of the plantation, men like Isaac Hazard saw a captive market in the most literal terms. Millions of enslaved men, women, and children who would be provided clothing and tools on a predictable semi-annual schedule.
[2026-05-22 | audiomark] a note on terms in her all that she carried the journey of Ashley Sack, a black family keepsake. Elizabeth Stordair Pryor's recorded lecture, why it's so hard to talk about the N word. The community source document that P. Gabrielle Foreman and other colleagues have placed online, writing about slavery, teaching about slavery, this might help. And the thoughtful forum, what's in a name in the spring 2023 issue of the journal of the early republic. What emerges from this discussion is not a new orthodoxy, so much as a call for scholars to think carefully about the linguistic choices they make. These choices are not merely stylistic. They reflect the fact that this history is invariably political and politicized in a society still living in the shadows of slavery and it's accompanying ideology of white supremacy. Introduction, a captive market. The men who assembled on Charleston's King Street had a message for the man from Rhode Island. They weren't having any of it. Like him, they were strangers in the city, having come up by boat from the cotton plantation on St Helena Island where they were enslaved, 50 nautical miles away. It was a few weeks before Christmas 1825. Their clothing was in tatters. And as far as they were concerned, the visiting New England textile manufacturer was to blame. Their grievances were specific. Loth, woven out of cotton and wool, could not withstand the demands of the field labor they performed under violent compulsion.
[2026-05-22 | audiomark] has involved the label applied to textiles manufactured in the north for use on slave plantations. The umbrella term in 19th century parlance was negro cloth. Dozens of different fabrics traveled under this designation, but the only feature that made cloth into negro cloth was the racialized status of its intended wearer. A central argument of this book is that plantation goods played a key role in 19th century racemaking. And to emphasize that point, I have chosen to use the term negro cloth in the pages that follow. It was a term that held meaning for both black and white Americans, as well as to northerners and southerners. It described something real in 19th century material culture. To the extent the term is archaic, I hope.

=== Body Weather — Lorraine Boissoneault ===
[2026-05-22 | audiomark] time-consuming, according to Arrhenius, unbelievable that so trifling a matter has cost me a full year. At the end of his work, he was able to assert that doubling the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere would raise Earth's temperature by 3-4 degrees Celsius. Arrhenius was aware that human coal-burning added carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, but this didn't worry him. He estimated it would take at least 500 years before atmospheric CO2 doubled, at which point humans would probably be enjoying the warmer weather. Even with British colonists following the Biblical mandate that man fill the Earth and subdue it, remaking the heavens must have seemed an impossibility. How much can one species do to such a vast planet?
[2026-05-22 | audiomark] Hypothalamus, a structure in the brain that manages blood pressure, body temperature, hunger and thirst, mood, sleep and sex drive, triggers blood vessels to dilate, causing the sweat response. We live in a relatively small window of tolerance. If our body temperature moves a few degrees above or below 98.6, whether due to fevers from infection or hypothermia from exposure, we begin to feel uncomfortable. A few more degrees warmer and we die. Hypothermia, while dangerous, seems to offer a slightly wider range of survivability. The coldest core temperature a person has ever survived was 16 degrees Celsius or 60.8 degrees Fahrenheit. We are endothermic homeotherms. Blessed with the ability to generate our own heat.
[2026-05-22 | audiomark] My birthplace of Toledo, Ohio, experienced a high of 96 degrees Fahrenheit and a low of minus 19 degrees. Such annual swings delineate the seasons around the Great Lakes. They marked as consistent arithom throughout my childhood as the academic calendar, even when I moved 40 miles east away from the city to a much smaller town. From the earliest part of my life, I understood there were more than five senses. How we feel temperature through nerve cells that reached to the outer layer of our skin intimately shapes the way we experience the world. Being too hot or too cold pushes us to seek relief. It influences our fashion, our architecture, what we eat, when and where we sleep. Though we rarely think about it in such terms, the need to maintain a stable core temperature is as crucial as our need for food and water. I grew up near the shores of Lake Erie. Winters warped the streets and crusted the soil. Snowfall started in November and often lasted till April. Even with the bitterness of icy nights, Winter was a season I loved. Getting bundled into snow pants and mittens and my hat to go sledding. The winds scraping my cheeks and snow sliding up the back of my jacket if I rolled off the sled at high speed. My wet hair clumping into icicles after swim practice at the YMCA, hunkering down in the narrow cabin of an ice boat as the sails caught the wind and the blades vibrated as they cut tracks in the frozen lake. The way the outdoors smelled of pine and freezer burn after it snowed and how my skin prickled for a few minutes when I first returned inside. The summer came with its own patterns and sensation.
[2026-05-22 | audiomark] planetary crisis has required feeling, both physiologically and emotionally, how I feel the weather and how I feel about the weather, how I feel my body and how I feel about my body. And it was these feelings that formed a pathway through the wildness of unfolding catastrophe. They helped me go deep and wide, focusing inward, then turning my focus out onto the world. In her memoir on surviving and debilitating autoimmune disease, Sarah Manguso writes, those who claim to write about something larger and more significant than the self sometimes fail to comprehend the dimensions of a self. I'm not sure I understood all the dimensions of myself before I took the time to explore deeply my relationship to my body and my bodies.
[2026-05-22 | audiomark] the weather within. There's always some danger in reducing the experience of illness to a symbol, of using language in a way that obscures rather than illuminates. As Susan Sontag noted, nothing is more punitive than to give a disease a meaning. That meaning being invariably a more holistic one. Any important disease whose physical ideology is not understood, and for which treatment is ineffectual, tends to be a wash in significance. This is frequently the case with autoimmune diseases or illnesses like pots, postural orthostatic, tachycardia syndrome, and fibromyalgia and myalgic and cephalomyelitis. Because their origins are difficult to ascertain, the name is laid all too often on the patient. My goal.
[2026-05-22 | audiomark] some, worsen the vertigo of maniere's disease for others. Dry cold weather can trigger a flare-up of psoriasis. The lack of daylight in winter is associated with seasonal effective disorder, a form of depression. As poet Polly Atkin writes, the body has its own weather, its own thunderstorms and floods, its heat waves and hurricanes, its own natural disasters. It's enough to be at the mercy of the inner meteorology, never mind the outer, but this is how it is. The skin is not a dome habitat, sealed against climate, the weather outside alters the weather within. There's always some danger in reducing the experience of illness to a symbol, of using language in a way that obscures rather than illuminates.
[2026-05-22 | audiomark] And I was sad and scared, and sometimes in denial about all of it. I was grieving. I was feeling the same emotions from my body that I felt for the planet as it contorted under the ravages of climate change. Others with chronic illnesses and disabilities have expressed their own awareness of the overlap between their body minds and the weather. The pressure change of storms can exacerbate migraines for some, worsen the vertigo of maniere's disease for others. Dry, cold weather can trigger a flare-up of psoriasis. The lack of daylight in winter is associated with seasonal effective disorder, a form of depression. As poet Polly Atkin writes, the body has its own weather, its own thunderstorms and floods, heat waves and hurricanes, its own natural disasters.

=== The Black Death — Thomas Asbridge ===
[2026-05-22 | audiomark] those under the armpits, groin, behind the ears, or in neighboring areas. Blackish ulcers in various places of the body, but especially on the back and neck, and sometimes also on the limbs, and associated fevers and breathing difficulties. Other signs were more unusual, such as a blackened tongue, severe nausea, and foul smelling diarrhea. Ibn Khatima noted that the epidemic spread relatively slowly through the summer of 1348, but then redoubled during the following winter, killing up to 70 people per day at its height before starting to abate in February 1349. He estimated that only one quarter of Almaria's population survived, which, if accurate, would represent an extremely high mortality rate. His own brother was among the dead, as was one of Khatima's most influential former teachers, the revered Almaria.
[2026-05-22 | audiomark] processions were held to counter the great mortality, though no specific details on overall death rates have survived. However, a shocking number of clerical benefices suddenly fell vacant in the city at this time, suggesting that local priests were succumbing to the plague in their droves. Records indicate that there were no vacancies in January or February 1348 and just one in April. However, in June that number rose to 25 and then peaked at 104 in July. In total, 60% of Barcelona's clerical posts fell empty between May 1348 and April 1349. Some of these benefices may have been abandoned during this time of extreme crisis, but most losses probably resulted from the incumbent's death. The port city of Valencia, almost 200 miles to the south, was also hit by an outbreak in May 1348.
[2026-05-22 | audiomark] till therefore if they can, put in at the port's further south to conclude their trading. That April Louis Sanktas clearly had a sense that an unprecedented disaster was unfolding. God knows what the end will be, he declared. He is curging the world with these evils. Towards the close of his letter, Louis explained to his unnamed friend in Bruges that he was writing so that you should know in what pedals we are now living. In somewhat hopeless terms he counseled that to survive the best advice is to eat and drink moderately, avoid getting cold and above all, mix little with people, adding that it is best to stay at home until the epidemic has passed. In the event Louis himself survived the Black Death, though his master, Cardinal Giovanni Colonna died on the...
[2026-05-22 | audiomark] business has been suspended until the 29th of September. Louis was also understandably fearful for his own safety. "'I am in the hands of God,' he wrote, adding that they say that my Lord Cardinal Colonna follows the Pope, and that I am to go north with him. An edge of skepticism about this plan was apparent, however, when Louis observed that this destination is the best place to be. Or anyway, so they say, and he went on to express a hope that omnipotent and merciful God might grant that we all choose what is for the best." Even as he worried about his own future, Louis was also aware that the Black Death had only just begun its inexorable march inland. Having summarized the terrible state of affairs in Marseille and Avignon, he stated, "'I could tell you similar things about every city and settlement in Provoles.'
[2026-05-21 | audiomark] Three years later this pulsing artery of commercial traffic served only to accelerate the epidemics spread. Egypt was at this time governed by one of history's most unusual regimes. That of the Mamluks. Mamluks or slave soldiers had been used by Muslim rulers in the Near East for centuries. These fiercely loyal, highly professional warriors were the product of an elaborate system of slavery and military training. Most were Turks from the Kipchak steps farther than north beyond the Black Sea. Captured as boys, usually between the ages of eight and 12 by well-organized slavers, they were sold to Islamic potentates in the near and middle east and then indoctrinated in the Muslim faith and trained in the arts of war. Prized for their unrivaled martial skill and fidelity, Mamluks were employed in positions ranging from royal bodyguards to battlefield and by the 13th century had become a mainstay of Muslim armies. When the 11th-time world spiraled towards chaos in the face of threats from Western crusaders and ravening Mongols, these slave soldiers stepped forward to seize the reigns of power for themselves, establishing a Mamluks' sultanate in 1260 that stretched from the Nile delta in Egypt to the Euphrates River in northern Syria. Guided by the ruthless hand of its first ruler, Sultan Bibars, this nascent state adopted and extended the existing system of Mamluk recruitment, purchasing thousands of young male slaves drawn from Kipchak, Turkish and later Caucasian stock. These boys were schooled as Mamluk troops and then freed to serve alongside their former masters within the Mamluk Sultanate when they reached adulthood. This approach created a fearsome, constantly self-rejuvenating military force, perhaps the most potent army to emerge.
[2026-05-21 | audiomark] and then carried this precious liquid now supposedly infused with the same suffocatious presence to Messina. There the afflicted populous flocked to see him, and he sprinkled great numbers of them with the holy water while making the sign of the cross. Unfortunately, his brave attempt did not halt the effects of the Black Death. On the contrary, we are told, the mortality raged even more so that no one could help anyone else. Shortly thereafter, Gerald himself succumbed to the disease, and as the turmoil deepened, his body was buried in an unmarked grave in Catania's Cathedral Church. The outbreak scoured the island of Sicily for the next six months and proved difficult to escape. Even Duke Giovanni sought to flee. According to one contemporary, he was afraid of death. And so...
[2026-05-21 | audiomark] Demics, not least the accelerated pace with which events played out during the various waves of the modern outbreak. It is not my intention to constantly compare and contrast the two episodes, though some parallels will be drawn, and their similarities and distinctions will be considered in more detail in this book's concluding chapter. At this stage, however, it is worth observing that the advent of the COVID-19 pandemic served to amplify the importance of one additional pressing question. What, if anything, does the Black Death have to teach us in the 21st century? As we survey the events that played out in the late Middle Ages, charting the course of a medieval apocalypse, and perhaps recognizing resonances and echoes of the same challenges that confront our own modern world, we might ask whether there are lessons to be learned.
[2026-05-21 | audiomark] advances in the field of genetics opened vitally important new horizons, eventually making it possible to decode the genome of the pathogen or disease-causing agent behind the Black Death, and to find microscopic traces of that same genetic signature in the 600-year-old human remains of the pandemics of victims. Most recently, this work has even demonstrated that the advent of the Black Death left an enduring cellular imprint, influencing the genetic makeup of many of us alive today. On-going medical research focused on the Black Death Pathogen has also forced historians to reconsider preconceived ideas about the way in which the disease sides through the population of the medieval world. This is a highly active field of inquiry, so there is always the possibility that new scientific discoveries may overturn existing theories.
[2026-05-21 | audiomark] Western Europe to the bitter, dynastic rivalry seen in Asia, the Middle East and North Africa. But the advent of the Black Death marked the darkest hour in this already deeply troubled period. In most of the known world, whether you were a king or princess, merchant or pauper, to be alive during the pandemic, was to face fear, anguish and suffering on an almost unimaginable scale. Nonetheless, few historians covering this subject have sought to convey any clear sense of what it was like to live and die during the age of the Black Death. In part, this is because most scholars prefer to adopt a detached point of view when considering topics such as death rates and disease transmission, and thus make little or no attempt to reconstruct the lives of the individuals and groups who witness this pandemic. By exploring a
[2026-05-21 | audiomark] the number of fatalities it caused. These are undoubtedly important questions, and will be addressed here in due course. But this volume employs a range of distinct approaches, in the hope of shedding fresh light on this epochal cataclysm. The human experience. For many, the 14th century was a wretched and desolate era. Climate change ushered in the so-called little ice age, replacing the relative for quantity of the central Middle Ages with failed harvests and outbreaks of famine. Society was also racked by military conflict from the onset of the Hundred Years War in Western Europe to the bitter, dynastic rivalry seen in Asia, the Middle East and North Africa. But the advent of the Black Death marked the darkest hour in this already deeply troubled period.
[2026-05-21 | audiomark] pressing personal accounts of the advent of the Black Death in the mid-14th century. But all three were themselves dead within a decade. As such, none witnessed the ultimate and unparalleled destructive force of this scorch, the most lethal natural disaster in human history. During its most intense phase between 1347 and 1353, the Black Death wiped out an estimated 100 million people, or around half the population in the areas that it affected. And the disease then occurred for decades, even centuries to come, in what has come to be known as the second plague pandemic. This was unquestionably one of the defining episodes in the history of our species, and a critical turning point in the development of human civilization. An event that brought extraordinary transfer-
[2026-05-21 | audiomark] Caffer's walls with boulders. Now he ordered the bodies of the dead to be loaded onto these same machines and propelled into the port, there to spread their dreadful miasma. One contemporary wrote that, what seemed like mountains of corpses rained down on Caffer, and the Christians could not hide or flee or escape from them, although they dumped as many as they could in the sea. Soon the rotting corpses tainted the air and poisoned the water supply, and no one knew or could discover a defence against the lethal disease that raged within the port. Faced with such horror a small group of genuineness sailors found a ship and made good their escape. Leaving the cataclysmic scenes at Caffer behind them they set a course for safety and home. All the while unaware that they were themselves carrying death in their midst.
[2026-05-21 | audiomark] Ibn Hajar al-Ascalani, renowned Islamic theologian, specializing in the study of Hadith, 1372-1449. Ibn Khaldun, Tunisian scholar who witnessed the black death in his youth, and went on to become one of the Muslim world's most revered historians, 1332-1960. Ibn Khatima, Maurish physician and poet based in Al-Maria, who composed a detailed medical treatise on the black death. John the Venet, French Carmelite Friar and Chromicler, based in Paris. Joan of England, young daughter of King Edward III of England, who succumbed to the black death in 1348. John Lovekin, fishmonger who served as mayor of London during the black death. John of Rannik, rive of the Hundred of Farnam during the black death. John Wycliffe, English theologian and controversial Christian reformer who inspired the Lollards, died 1384. Lapo Matsay, Florentine Notary and close personal friend of Francesco Dattini. Leonor of Portugal, youthful Portuguese princess who married King Pedro IV of Arrigan in 1347 and then died of the black death in 1348. Lisan Aldin Ibn Al-Hatib, renowned Maurish polymath who became busier to the Sultan of Granada in 1349 and later wrote a controversial medical tract on the black death, 1313-1374. Louis Sanctus, Flemish musician in the court of Cardinal Giovanni Colonna, who became one of Petrax's dearest friends and most frequent correspondence. Manjac Alusufi, busier to the Mamluk Sultan Hassan in Egypt during the black death. Mateo Vilaani, Bra...
[2026-05-21 | audiomark] Ibn Hajar al-Ascalani, renowned Islamic theologian, specializing in the study of Hadith, 1372-1449. Ibn Khaldun, Tunisian scholar who witnessed the black death in his youth, and went on to become one of the Muslim world's most revered historians, 1332-1946. Ibn Khatima, Maurish physician and poet based in Al-Maria, who composed a detailed medical treatise on the black death. Jean de Vinette, French caramelite friar and cromicaler, based in Paris. Joan of England, young daughter of King Edward III of England, who succumbed to the black death in 1348. John Lovekin, the fishmonger who served as mayor of London during the black death. John of Rannik, Reeve of the Hundred of Farnam during the black death. John Wycliffe, English theologian.
[2026-05-18 | audiomark] discoveries. Hundreds of books and articles on the pandemic's progress, nature and impact have been published over the last century and more. And yet, most studies have tended to focus on specific realms or regions, and those that do take a broader outlook generally engage with a subject from a medical standpoint, seeking to explain the diseases pathology and epidemiology. It is to say the manner in which the affliction struck its victims and the means by which it spread. Or adopt a demographic perspective, attempting to determine the number of fatalities it caused. These are undoubtedly important questions, and will be addressed here in due course. But this volume employs a range of distinct approaches in the hope of shedding fresh light on this epochal cataclysm. The human experience.
[2026-05-18 | audiomark] takes savage vengeance on them and wipe them from the face of the earth. At that same moment, on the other side of the Mediterranean Sea, the noted Syrian poet and geographer Abel Hafs Umar Ibn Alawadi wrote an eyewitness account of an attack on humanity that was being waged by what he called alawaba, the pestilence. He described how the black death struck the Muslim world in 1348, having spread from China and India through the land of the Uzbeks to Crimea and on into Egypt. Ibn Alawadi also interpreted the suffering he witnessed as a punishment from God, and as one of the plagues foretold by the Prophet Muhammad that would afflict disbelievers, he argued that for true Muslims such a death should be regarded as a martyrdom and a reward.
[2026-05-18 | audiomark] Papal Physician in Avenue, an author of a key medical text on surgery who himself contracted the Black Death in 1348, died 1368. Henry Chichily, Archbishop of Canterbury, who opposed Lollady and commissioned England's first transit tomb, circa 1364 to 1443. Ibn Batuta, in trepid Moroccan pilgrim and traveller who witnessed the Black Death's predations in Syria, Palestine and Egypt, 1304 to circa 1369. Ibn Al-Wardi, Syrian poet and historian based in Aleppo, 1292 to 1349. Ibn Hajar al-Ascalani, renowned Islamic theologian, specializing in the study of Hadith, 1372 to 1449. Ibn Khadun, Tunisian scholar who witnessed the Black Death in his youth and went on to become one of the Muslim world's most revered historians, 1332 to 1406. Ibn Khatima, Maurish physician and poet based in Al-Maria, who composed a detailed medical treatise on the Black Death. Jean de Venet, French Carmelite Friar and Chromicler, based in Paris. Joan of England, young daughter of King Edward III of England, who succumbed to the Black Death in 1348. John Lovekin, the fishmonger who served as mayor of London during the Black Death. John of Rannik, Reeve of the Hundred of Farnam during the Black Death. John Wycliffe, English theologian and controversial Christian reformer who inspired the Lollards, died 1384. Lappermat Say, Florentine Notary and close personal friend of Francesco Dattini. Leonardo of Portugal, youthful Portuguese princess.
[2026-05-18 | audiomark] Pichens and lawyer who composed a detailed account of the Black Death known as the Historia de Morbule died 1356. Gentile de Fulignu, famous Italian physician who composed three influential tracts on the Black Death and sought to treat those stricken by the disease in Perugia, died 1348. Jeffrey Chaucer, renowned English author of the Canterbury Tales, who lost four members of his extended family during the Black Death while still a child died 1400. Gilles Mouissis, Flemish abbot of the Benedictine monastery of Samata in Tuknai, who chronicled the Black Death despite being almost completely blind, died 1353. Giovanni Bacaccio, influential Florentine writer whose famous de Cameron was set during the Black Death, 1313-1375.
[2026-05-18 | audiomark] The Black Death by Thomas Asbridge Red by Thomas Asbridge and Justin Avov Cast of characters A Neolo Dittura, C&E's shoemaker and part-time local official whose family was decimated by the Black Death. Almacrisi, Egyptian chronicler and government official who composed one of the most important Arabic accounts of the Black Death and its aftermath, 1364-1442. Andrea Dandolo, Doge of Venice when the Black Death struck in early 1348, died 1354. Clemaw VI, Pope in Avenue at the time of the Black Death, died 1352. Demetrius Kidone's, Byzantine court official whose letters described the effects of the plague pandemic. Jannebeg Khan, Mongol Khan of the Golden Horde who was laying siege to Kaffir when the Black Death struck, died 1357. Donato Veluti, prominent Florentine citizen who completed a personal chronicle of his domestic life before his death in 1370. Francesco Dattini, Tuscan Italian who lost the majority of his family to the Black Death while still a child but went on to forge a successful career as a merchant and left behind a remarkable cache of letters and documents detailing his life and business dealings. Gabriele de Musis, Piazzan lawyer who composed a detailed account of the Black Death, known as the Historia de Morbo, died 1356. Gentile de Fuligno, famous Italian physician who composed three influential tracts on the Black Death and sought to treat those stricken by the disease in Perugia.

=== I Am Not a Robot — Joanna Stern ===
[2026-05-21 | audiomark] plenty of fruits, vegetables, and whole grains. And we want to limit things like saturated and trans fats, which are found in a lot of processed foods and fatty meats. Okay, so let's take out more home cooking. Yeah, exactly. That makes sense. Yeah, I know I could probably stand to do a little bit more of that myself. It's funny, but the novelty of listening to two AI-generated voices can also cloud the lack of substance in the results. On my first listen, the conversation was helpful. As someone who appreciates a good metaphor, I found their traffic jam in your bloodstream imagery clever, if also a little oversimplified. The problem was the ratio. For every practical suggestion, such as choose lean protein sources instead of fatty ones, long stretches of chatter followed without adding much to my understanding. Entertaining AI health coaches might be fine for basic info, but their advice rarely went beyond
[2026-05-21 | audiomark] as we know it. These people are not just pessimists. Many are respected AI researchers who think we're moving too fast without enough safety guardrails. The opposite of doomer? Someone who wants to speed up development, often called a zoomer or accelerationist. P-Dume. Short for probability of doom. It's the score or percentage that some people, sometimes jokingly, sometimes completely serious, assigned to their personal estimate of the odds that AI will cause a global catastrophe. The scale runs from zero to 100. Elon Musk's score as of early 2025 was 20. When he told Joe Rogan on his podcast, there was a 20% chance that AI would cause our annihilation. The higher the score, the more your convinced that AI is going to eliminate humankind. Well, that got depressing fast.
[2026-05-21 | audiomark] way more data and computing power to work. It's used when handling enormous amounts of messy real world data, such as videos of cars driving, or videos of a human folding laundry. All deep learning is machine learning, but not all machine learning is deep learning. Got it? AI that can see, hear, talk and make decisions on its own, it's likely built with deep learning. Nearly every tool and system I talk about in this book uses deep learning. Here are some terms and ideas you'll need to know. AI model, this is the finished product you actually interact with. Whether it's chat GPT writing emails or AI diagnosing your medical scan or the system driving your car, the model is what actually does the work and contains the smarts. Different models do different things. Think of each as a trained professional who can now perform tasks on their own after years of education.
[2026-05-21 | audiomark] couldn't be more different. Educators and AI researchers often use concentric circles to explain how these pieces fit together. Here's my simpler, slightly less academic version. Starting from the outer most circle and working inward, you'll find artificial intelligence, then machine learning, then neural networks, then deep learning, and finally generative AI. Each of the following sections explains one of those different circles and the key terms that go with it. The learning machines, machine learning and deep learning. Machine learning and deep learning are the engine of modern AI. If you want to understand why computers have gotten so freakishly smart, here's the place to start. Old school programming followed a simple rules-based logic. If this, then that. If this happens, do that. If the user says, hello, then computer says, how can I help you today? Every response was programmed by humans ahead of time. No learning, no guessing, just follow the rules. Machine learning flipped the script. Instead of memorizing rules, the computer learns from mountains of data. It isn't just following instructions, it's finding patterns, often in ways we can't predict. Show it a million examples, and it figures out how to guess the next one. Sometimes it nails it. Sometimes it doesn't. Machine learning is really just math, a lot of math. It's a bunch of complicated equations designed to stimulate how a brain might learn, using systems that predict or make decisions based on patterns in the past data. And if you, like me, broke out in hives during algebra class, don't worry. We aren't solving for X and Y here. Deep learning is machine learning, taken to the next level. It can handle more complex...
[2026-05-21 | audiomark] complex strategy board game. The system used deep learning and neural networks to pull off moves even human prose called genius. 2017. Attention is all you need paper. A team of eight Google researchers published a paper introducing the transformer, a new architecture that processed language more efficiently by focusing on attention. Unlike older models that read one word at a time, the transformer scanned entire sentences at once, figuring out which words mattered most. It became the foundation of modern generative AI models. 2018, the transformer offspring. Open AI introduced GPT1 in June, and Google announced BERT in October. GPT was good at generating text. BERT was good at understanding it. Together, they leveled up the language game and gave us a glimpse of the AI language models to come.
[2026-05-21 | audiomark] The setup is simple, text only chats with human and machine. If the evaluator can't tell who's who, the machine passes the test. 1955 AI gets its name. John McCarthy, our old friend now, coined the term artificial intelligence in his proposal to gather a few brilliant minds for a summer research project at Dartmouth. To fund the whole summer, McCarthy requested $13,500, about $160,000 today. That's ChumChange for an AI researcher at a top-tab company today. 1966, Eliza the Therapeutist. MIT's Joseph Weisenbaum built Eliza, a basic chatbot, then called chatterbot, that pretends to be a therapist. The script was designed to make the chatbot's responses like those of a Rogerian psychotherapist, someone who encourages patients to explore their feelings by reflecting their statements back to them. It was basic, but got people attached. 1997, Deep Blue Beats Casperov. IBM's Deep Blue Supercomputer defeated reigning chess world champion Gary Casperov in a six-game match. It was the first time a machine be to human at chess under standard tournament conditions. Casperov said, I have to pay tribute. The computer is far stronger than anybody expected. 2002, Roomba rolls out. Irobat launched the Roomba, a little robotic vacuum that bumps around your house and cleans your floors. Designed by a team of eight MIT robot assists, it uses sensors and simple processing to navigate floors, adjusting directions when it hits obstacles. It's not rosy from the Jetsons, but it is the first robot many of us let into our homes. 2011.
[2026-05-21 | audiomark] about AI. The term AI itself has become like the word organic in the snack aisle. So overused and stretched that it had lost much of the meaning for me. Perhaps it has for you too. I wanted something more specific, a precise definition I could return to again and again. So I built my own piece together from reading research papers, conducting interviews with leaders in the field, and living with intelligent machines during my year-long experiment. Here's the definition. Artificial intelligence is the creation of intelligent machines that can think, see, learn, and act like humans, and maybe even exceed human abilities. To listen to this book, that's all you really need to remember about the fundamentals of artificial intelligence. While the term AI is everywhere, at its core, it describes intelligent machines trying, sometimes amazingly, sometimes laughably.
[2026-05-21 | audiomark] IT and Stanford, conducting the research and building the tools that shape the field. While I sat in Dartmouth's research library, flipping through McCarthy's old files, many on thin, slightly yellow typewriter paper that curled at the edges, I found one of the original copies of the grant proposal, seeking financial backing for the summer conference, complete with his first definition of the term. The study is to proceed on the basis of the conjecture that every aspect of learning, or any other feature of intelligence, can in principle be so precisely described that a machine can be made to simulate it. An attempt will be made to find how to make machines use language, form abstractions and concepts, solve kinds of problems, now reserved for humans, and improve themselves. So tucked among the files, proof that McCarthy had a dry sense of humor and the usual foibles, at least when it came to his academic disputes. Dear Dean Morrison, I'm very disappointed, sincerely John McCarthy, PS, I may get over it. Sadly, there was no additional paperwork to describe what the dispute was about, but I loved that a man remembered for such scientific and technical achievement was also apparently as human and thin-skinned as the rest of us. McCarthy's clearest, most distilled definition of AI came much later in a 2007 document written while he was at Stanford. The science and engineering of making intelligent machines, especially intelligent computer programs. Intelligent machines. That phrase became a cornerstone of how I thought about AI. The term AI itself has become like the word organic in the snack aisle. So overused and stretched that it had lost much of the meaning for me. Perhaps it has for you too. I wanted something more…
[2026-05-21 | audiomark] How do you write a book about technology that changes by the day? I am glad you asked. One of the biggest obstacles I faced was that the tech kept getting better faster than I could test or write. My editor eventually had to pry the keyboard from my hands to stop me from adding just one more update. As Wharton professor Ethan Mollick puts it in his book, Co-Intelligence, Living and Working with AI, assume this is the worst AI you will ever use. In other words, whatever state the tech is in today, it will only be smarter tomorrow. At the same time, I never let that service an excuse when a product or service simply didn't deliver on its claims. Another obstacle? I was trying to live in the future to show predictions of what's to come, but no one really knows where this is headed. At one point, I interviewed Bill Gates. We are certainly in a five-year period where the stuff will change a lot, he said. But beyond that?
[2026-05-21 | audiomark] Without a baseline, it's hard to tell whether the technology is really enhancing anything. Rule 3. Track costs. And not just in money. Many of these AI tools cost something, even if some of them started with a free trial which quickly turned into a monthly subscription. And what about other kinds of costs? What about the cost to my time and privacy? And what damage was caused to the world around me? Some of the personal costs were obvious. The enormous amount of personal data I was handing over to the tech companies. Or the four extra steps I had to take to correct chat chupitis, confidently wrong summary of an academic paper instead of just reading it myself. Others were more subtle. Did I feel better after talking to an AI therapist? Or just vaguely weird and emotionally breadcrumpt? Did having bookbought constantly edit and tighten my writing cost me the version of this book that might have resulted from the slower...
[2026-05-21 | audiomark] meltdowns, family vacations, school drop-offs, doctors appointments, business trips, and looming deadlines. And while I dragged my family along for the ride, literally in many autonomous car trips, no children or spouses were harmed in the making of this book. Well, maybe. The four-year-old was a little scarred. He recently asked for a frame photo of himself with the RoboDog. Watching a guy through the eyes of my kids, kids who had grow up never knowing a world without computers as smart as them became one of the pivotal themes of the year. Life experiences I never thought would end up in this book, including my mom's battle of cancer, sessions with my therapist, and how I lost my virginity. Not related, I promise. All became relevant because to really test those AI tools, to understand what it means to let machines fully into our lives, I had to reflect on my humanity. I've always brought creativity to my mind.
[2026-05-21 | audiomark] fiction. This wasn't just talk. By the end of 2025, one AI product alone, Chatchy PT, had reached 800 million weekly active users. Nearly 80% of organizations reported using AI in at least one part of their businesses by early 2025. Big tech companies had spent 375 billion on global AI infrastructure in 2025 alone, and were on pace to spend up to 500 billion. In 2026. Let's put that in perspective. Over the past decade, three US automakers have spent 87.8 billion upgrading factories and R&D. Everywhere you looked, the message was that this AI future was going to be unlike any other technological revolution. It was coming fast, really fast. Yet the message was also frustratingly vague. What does a quote better life mean, Sam Altman?
[2026-05-21 | audiomark] A note before we begin. Don't forget to download the accompanying enhancement PDF from your audiobook provider. It contains charts from the book and will be referred to throughout as the enhancement. For mom and dad who taught me to think for myself, and the AIs, robots, and machines that made me wonder if I really was. How AI was used to make this audiobook? You're about to hear the story of my year-long quest to let AI into as much of my life as possible. So naturally, you're wondering, did AI edit this book? Did you just barf a year's worth of notes and interview scripts into an AI prompt and then magically receive a completed manuscript on your doorstep in an Amazon box? Is this AI speaking right now? Ironically, what you're listening to is a very human-made work.

=== Rejection — Tony Tulathimutte ===
[2026-05-21 | audiomark] Hold ten seconds until he leans forward again to tap the space bar, make some inquiring eye contact, and they lunge at each other. Physically, he's not her type at all, and she's never thought he was hot until now. The moment she realizes he thinks she is hot. The kissing is pretty good, much enhanced by the spontaneity and wrong-hotness of tongue kissing a close friend. They both awkwardly laugh more than she'd prefer, and he spends way too long sucking her nipples to the point where she consciously thinks the word latching. But then the mood shifts. She is no longer mommy. He is daddy, and he lifts and tosses her around with a thrilling lack of effort. And as she's long suspected, based on the size of his ears and nose, he has an era that definingly huge dick, curved in the way only real huge ones are, like they have inches to spare and can take the long way around. She comes so hard it makes her sit up. While she's going down on him between rounds, Neil says from above, hey, what'd it be lame if I took a pick? Part of her mind recoils at this, and she doesn't reply at first. But she sent noods to far worse, guys. Honestly, it's flattering he'd want to keep safe, maybe even body affirming and hot. And it's not like she's going to run for office. So she says fine, as long as he sends her a copy, and she does her best to smold her next to his big old dick. He goes cross-side and double-chinned holding the phone close to his face to fit as much in the frame as possible, and the camera flash stays on for an agonizingly long time. Coming around afterward, she configures herself in Neil's negative spaces. Back to chest, nose to neck.
[2026-05-21 | audiomark] nothing from happening. Weeks later, after some false starts, he is standing in the vestibule of his former favorite restaurant when a woman enters behind him. A short young 20-something in a yellow smock with little pin-tucked ruffles, her collarbones lightly pied by sunburn. He stands aside to hold the door for her, and she thanks him. In spite of his resolve, he smiles back and nods courteously at this small, final vindication, before pulling on his ski mask, shrugging the backpack from his narrow shoulders and following her in. Picks Love is mutual, which means Allison's never been in love. Her high school boyfriend of three years had turned out to be gay, and she'd made him admit after much needling that he'd never been attracted to her. In college, she'd dated a more popular guy who turned...
[2026-05-21 | audiomark] Bedside waste basket full of tissues wadded with flemmin' cum. With his mouth in a grim hyphen, he inspects his penis, which is not only flaccid and could davorously live it from over-pumping, but has developed some sort of irritating sunrash that isn't sunrash, ever since he resorted to masturbating with a textured plumbers glove in order to feel anything at all. This can't happen again. All this not happening. The nothing that is made of words, the reading and processing and discussing and journaling and posting with which he'd attempted to understand the hundreds of women's voices he'd then gone on to uplift and amplify, only to hear that those voices were mocking him. All the listening, wasted effort constituting a wasted life. Words by themselves have no substance, he realizes. They are only ever meant to underscore acts. Even correct has been its own reward and no reward-
[2026-05-21 | audiomark] After all we've sacrificed for them, I would have died for them if they'd asked. I would have thrown my bleeding body on the barricades of the patriarchy, and they would have let me do it, indifferently accepting my death as they do, with not a punctum of guilt as they go off to bed and wed my murderers. That is the long con. They're big lie. By now, my bachelorhood and yours cannot be ascribed to circumstance or bad luck. Only injustice. We must reject it. Like my many, many female friends themselves always used to say, nothing's wrong with me. Any woman would have been lucky to have me. I've only asked for the same modest relevancy that everyone else, including showvonists, liars, addicts, narcissists, abusers, rapists, and low IQ men, enjoys everywhere. I'd be the last to demand any special treatment for my actual unselfish, principled feminism, and to be sure no specific woman is required to be attracted to us. But the fact that not one has been out of billions is proof of a categorical failure, a mass abrogation of the social contract by the legions of treacherous evasive giggling yeast buckets, he posts. I have always, always been there for women. When have they ever been there for us? How, after decades of relentless refusal, can they ever repair this silent andricide, the calamity of our aborted futures? He receives no reply. The stranger probably didn't even see his post. Examining what he'd written, scouring it with an unsparing eye toward logic and tone, he finds no error. He closes his laptop, surveys his dimmed room, humidifier.
[2026-05-21 | audiomark] The naïve love that knows no betrayal, nor trust in companionship that weathers hate and temptation, nobody waking up nestled in your elbow, no one to try new restaurants, or take selfies, or travel with, to say nothing of the conveniences, stability, and tax breaks enjoyed by the conjugal, on top of enduring the only real stigma that exists anymore, the only one that makes you less dignified for being honest about it. Bachelor Hood, he posts, I've never complained, objected, or harassed anyone all these years no matter how cruel or senseless the rejection. If anything I enabled their rejections and even took it as my duty, which is all the more insidious, actually, that they convinced us to normalize and accept this, become complicit in our own oppression by pretending it's not happening or doesn't matter, or even if it is happening and does matter, you deserve it. That's right, they are gaslighting you, all to absolve themselves of guilt at the meager cost of our lives. We are made to eternally repent for the sins of the worst men, while those very same men reap the benefits of our care and counsel, and we are not even humor to speak on the matter. Whether they have built a cunning trap, a rhetorical kill switch, where if you try to speak up for them, they say, stay in your lane, and if you say nothing, they say, silence is violence. Indicted from birth, lashed forever to the rack of apology, never forgiven much less rewarded, regardless of action or intent. Do you see how they have made our existence impossible? This, after all we've sacrificed for them, I would have died for them if they'd asked. I would have thrown my bleeding body on the barricades of the patriarchy, and they would have let me do it, indifferently accepting my...
[2026-05-21 | audiomark] It's painful seeing this poor sap misled, as he himself was, like a sprinting dog about to hit the limit of its leash. The other users taunt the newcomer because it hurts less than admitting familiarity. Even if it's too late for himself, he feels a responsibility to awaken this younger man to reality. You may think you understand us, he posts, but I've been you far longer than you have. I want to tell you about the reality of having lived four decades of silent, virtuous pain, and never having your humanity and desirability recognized, he posts. It's not that I haven't done the intellectual labor to empathize with the broadest possible spectrum of female perspectives. I've read Sangre and Fridan and McKinnon and Dworkin and Firestone and Faludi and Winterson and Butler and Solanus and Schumann and Hooks and Greer. I understand them and they perhaps understand the viewpoint of the patriarchy and its beneficiaries, but what have any of them read to understand us? Where in the archive do we even exist? My entire life I've been nothing but useful to women. Selfless to the point that when I die, my entire being will evaporate without residue, with no one left to know what I'd had to endure absolutely by myself. Think of all the times you've been ill with no one to bring you soup. Those nights you wake in the dark, full of fear with no one to talk to. Every unshaired bed, every expired condom. Those couples you see everywhere, laughing and going home and fucking in every conceivable position. It will never be you. It will never be you. This is why you are wrong that they haven't stolen anything from us. They've stolen our lives, our happiness, our future and the people in it. You will never have a woman and you will...
[2026-05-21 | audiomark] standards feminism sought to eliminate and indulge a narcissistic victim complex by which they tolerate and even seek out agro-massage in their romantic partners while relying on men of conscience to handle the emotional scut work. In his newfound communities of narrow-shouldered men, he finds lived experiences that align near unanimously with his. In the comments of blogs like The Empirical Agnate and rationally rude, on forums like Senaqa's Revenge and NSOM, narrow shoulders open minds where he finds provocative opinions of undeniable salience heroically uncounted by any anticipated backlash. At last, he's found men willing to declare unapologetically that narrow-shouldered feminist men are in truth the most oppressed subaltern group. Judgment from both male privilege and female solidarity, a marginalization far worse than those based in race or gender, which were mere constructs as opposed to the material fact of narrow shoulders. He can trust these other men in a way he cannot trust anyone else, as they are the only people on earth to take seriously his suffering and recognize that he isn't to blame for it. While he disagrees with many of their heterodox positions on jaw morphology and age of consent, it is precisely the plurality of perspectives here that confirms the problem isn't his alone. It is systemic. Now that he is mostly confined to his bed, in one late-night tour of the NSOM forums, which he moderates, he's busy drawing red circles around the tell-tale shoulder pad divots in photos of male celebrities when he notices one thread attracting dozens of replies. Some normy interloper has been trolling the NSOM boards with inflammatory posts. This has happened before, but never at such length.
[2026-05-21 | audiomark] of double standards, feminism sought to eliminate, and indulge a narcissistic victim complex by which they tolerate and even seek out agro-masogyny in their romantic partners, while relying on men of conscience to handle the emotional scut work. In his newfound communities of narrow-shouldered men, he finds lived experiences that align near unanimously with his. In the comments of blogs like The Empirical Agnate and rationally rude, on forums like Senika's Revenge and NSOM, narrow shoulders open minds, where he finds provocative opinions of undeniable salience, heroically uncowed by any anticipated backlash. At last, he's found men willing to declare unapologetically that narrow-shouldered feminist men are in truth the most oppressed subaltern group. Excluded from both male privilege and female solidarity, a marginalization far worse than
[2026-05-21 | audiomark] stress-related. In researching its causes, he learns that loneliness can manifest psychosomatically as anxiety, even shorten your lifespan. He also reads in blog posts about chromosomal perpetuation that children bear trace amounts of the DNA of all their mother's sex partners in their own DNA. So it is true confirming suspicions he didn't even know he had that sex partners matter biologically that they leave a mark. These find things send him into action. He hits the gym where he targets his deltoids with set after set of shrugs and lateral raises. And afterward, takes zinc sulfate, lysine and argonine to increase seminal volume, horny goat weed and pumpkin seed extract for libido, cabrigoline to lessen the refractory period by lowering prolactin. He gets a prescription for depot testosterone and decadrebolin to manage hypogonatism and improve pelvic muscle tone.
[2026-05-21 | audiomark] aside by indignation. Why should everyone else have had the opportunity to date 20-somethings and not him? Perhaps, he thinks, he could temporarily date a few younger women who would greatly benefit from his wealth and life experience, then eventually catch up and move on to age-appropriate women without regret. To attract these younger women, he goes keto, takes improv classes, and consolidates his reputation at work, though he'd long since lost his relish for it when he realized it didn't magically improve his dating odds. None of it does. Around this time, he starts to feel breathless, like he's wearing a compression garment around his lungs. His stomach is tense and swollen as a basketball. He urinates frequently, his heart skitters and rushes. He has trouble swallowing. He can seldom achieve full erection. His customary dry method has lost its efficacy.
[2026-05-21 | audiomark] have genuine feelings for them, it's like his attraction is some morsel of filth he's tried to trick them into swallowing. Yet, free-falling into his thirties, it's harder to make new friends. If he stays in, he feels anxious about not meeting people. If he goes out, he spends the whole night at whatever depressing bar, poetry reading, art opening, scanning the room for women standing by themselves, whom he never has the will to approach, then goes home alone, weary and dark-minded to face the sight of his empty bed, which is even emptier after he gets in it, lying awake with pangs of loneliness that feel like getting stabbed through a very soft pillow. He lost his virginity so long ago it feels like it's grown back. On one of these long nights, an ugly curtain lifts in his head. He's old enough to know that relationships don't guarantee happiness, that the source of his pain is a patriarchal fantasy.
[2026-05-21 | audiomark] Stupid anxieties about dating by women aren't important because they're not being rounded up and thrown off rooftops like queer people in, for example, Syria. But he wouldn't say that to his QPOC friend, he would listen. Wow, wow, wow, you really don't want to press this. His friend warns, removing their sunglasses, and BT-dubs, I'm not your QPOC friend. Are you fucking kidding me, he shouts? Unsure of his exasperation is mock or real. You took it there, you made it about identity. All I'm doing is reflecting literally the same exact sentiment as you. So don't evade the point. And don't get the idea that framing it as a callout puts you in the right. And I brought those mimosas, by the way. He grabs at his friend's drink, everyone scrambles. His QPOC friend's friend, a much larger, broad-shouldered man, gets up and tells him, okay, my guy, time to move a-
[2026-05-21 | audiomark] deal. Nobody knows why. Maybe you never really grappled with this because you thought you were exempt. But you refused to change and are shocked when nothing changes. You keep doing all these unsolicited favors, putting in all this effort. And because the only forms of repayment you'll accept our love or sex, you always feel cheated. And it's not like you enjoy this, but you do enjoy pushing other people's faces in it. That's your main consolation. Wild how you're always right and nobody's ever had it worse. Nobody's as pure and as wronged as you. Yo, everyone, check out the woman respecter. Last principled man right here. And that's why you need it because you get to convince yourself you're being rejected for your virtue, not because you're a bummer. You've turned your loneliness into this like fetish necklace of martyrdom. And all of us, they glance around at the other picnickers have to sit here and rubber stamp your feminism. If we don't indulge your wallowing, we're being callous and like complicit with some diabolical global conspiracy that's keeping you from getting pussy. But if we do, then we're disingenuous because none of us will fuck you ourselves, right? Am I right, ladies? Hands up. Who agrees? Three women's hands followed more slowly by the rest. His QPOC friend gestures at them like, behold. I don't know what to say, man, except mother fucking siss heads. I for one and bored of your scab collection. I'm sorry your dick is sad or whatever. Suck it up. You bitter little boy and move on. Fantastic. That's fucking great. The clearest example yet of how even his friends dismiss him with straw man arguments out of sheer intellectual laziness. Because he refuses the easy consolation of playing along with the oppressive patriarchal paradigm, they'd rather call...
[2026-05-21 | audiomark] That's what's facile. He presses his lips shut while his brain feels like a swirling case of lottery balls. As his friend, pausing to hit a spliff continues. I mean, what the fuck do you want? Somehow you got a shit deal. Nobody knows why. Maybe you never really grappled with this because you thought you were exempt. But you refuse to change and are shocked when nothing changes. You keep doing all these unsolicited favors, putting in all this effort. And because the only forms of repayment you'll accept are love or sex, you always feel cheated. And it's not like you enjoy this, but you do enjoy pushing other people's faces in it. That's your main consolation. Wild how you're always right and nobody's ever had it worse. Nobody's as pure and as wronged as you. Yo everyone, check out the woman's respecter. Last principled man right here. And that's why you need it because you get to convince yourself.
[2026-05-21 | audiomark] Afternoon, when his QPOC-A gender friend asks him, why doesn't he call that girl from high school who took his virginity? He replies that just because he wants to be in a relationship doesn't mean he has to settle for a sociopath. See, you're moving the goalposts like always, his QPOC friend replies? It's easy to feel sorry for yourself when you keep redefining rejection. You refuse pity but crave it so much that you won't admit how strongly you invite it. He says they're being facile, though he knows their point is rather nuanced and specific and he hasn't even considered it before, but he can't walk it back now. I'm facile, his friend says, nah, I'm tired. That's what it is, I'm tired. They say from behind their sunglasses, waving their mimosa. I know you identify as a reject. I know that's like your brand, like it's some unprecedented form of suffering that gives you secret saintly wisdom. All this non-stop high frequency whining, that's what's facile. He presses his lips shut while his brain feels like a swirling case of lottery balls, as his friend, pausing to hit a spliff, continues. I mean, what the fuck do you want? Somehow you got a shit deal, nobody knows why. Maybe you never really grappled with this because you thought you were exempt, but you refused to change and are shocked when nothing changes. You keep doing all these unsolicited favors, putting in all this effort and because the only forms of repayment you'll accept are love or sex, you always feel cheated. And it's not like you enjoy this, but you do enjoy pushing other people's faces in it. That's your main consolation. Wild how you're always right and nobody's ever had it worse, nobody's as pure and as wronged as you. Yo, everyone, check out the woman respecter. This principled man right here, and that's why you need...
[2026-05-21 | audiomark] Was masturbation lowering his testosterone levels contributing to his narrow shoulders? And does that give women the impression that he has a small penis, which he statistically doesn't? All he's doing is sharing some of these valid gripes at a picnic one afternoon when his QPOCA gender friend asks him, why doesn't he call that girl from high school who took his virginity? He replies that just because he wants to be in a relationship doesn't mean he has to settle for a sociopath. See, you're moving the goalposts like always, his QPOCA friend replies, it's easy to feel sorry for yourself when you keep redefining rejection. You refuse pity but crave it so much that you won't admit how strongly you invite it. He says they're being facile, though he knows their point is rather nuanced and specific and he hasn't even considered it before, but he can't walk it back now. I'm facile, his friend says, now I'm tired. That's...
[2026-05-21 | audiomark] His life is strewn with X's, friends without benefits. But he can't complain about his friends to his friends. His male co-workers would roast him or pretend to sympathize yet secretly think he's a pussy. And his female friends might think that he's passive-aggressively implicating them, and also that he's a pussy. Since any rejection now paralyzes him with rage for weeks, he stops dating. He resents his married friends, his contently single friends, his unhappily single friends, who nonetheless have casual sex, and his parents when they gently question his sexuality. He also resents the grotesque fixations that have cropped up lately, like, if he's only ever used condoms, and the epidermis of his penis has never made contact with the mucus membrane of a vagina, if he's never ejaculated into a birth canal, does that technically mean he's still a virgin? Have his possibly dulled penis nerves entrained a vicious cycle of death grip syndrome, adding yet another obstacle to love? Was masturbation lowering his testosterone levels, contributing to his narrow shoulders? And does that give women the impression that he has a small penis, which he statistically doesn't? All he's doing is sharing some of these valid gripes at a picnic one afternoon when his QPOC Agender friend asks him, why doesn't he call that girl from high school who took his virginity? He replies that just because he wants to be in a relationship doesn't mean he has to settle for a sociopath. See, you're moving the goalposts like always, his QPOC friend replies, it's easy to feel sorry for yourself when you keep redefining rejection. You refuse pity, but crave it so much that you won't admit how strongly you invite it. He says they're being facile, though he knows their point is rather nuanced and specific, and he hasn't even considered it.
[2026-05-21 | audiomark] Taking trips and seeing movies and attending events all seem pointless without anyone to experience them with. So it feels like his life cannot progress or even truly begin until he has found someone who will return his love. And as he's aged, has his intimacy with his female friends deepened? Did these friends who always maintained that romantic love was overrated, who said friendships were what mattered in the end, provide him an alternative to romantic love? No. After all his years of talking them through each and every breakup and gendered work dispute, sending them thoughtful gifts and memes, loaning them money for rental deposits, taking their dating app photos, reassuring them of their beauty when they hated how the photos came out and supporting them when they were fighting with their boyfriends. After all that, these female friends of his have all moved on to cohabit, marry and breed. Even if they're miserable, at least they're living real lives with partners who prioritize them above all others. Lately, he sees them once a month tops, even though he's known them far longer than their partners have. They've all stopped inviting him to dinner parties because it was a couple's thing and you would have hated it, which while true was still exclusionary, backed by the hegemonic and regressive institution of monogamy. He realizes that these female friends have, at last, completed their long-term rejections of him, that without ever having had a girlfriend, his life is strewn with X's, friends without benefits, but he can't complain about his friends to his friends. His male co-workers would roast him or pretend to sympathize yet secretly think he's a pussy and his female friends might think that he's passive-aggressively implicating them and also that he's a pussy. Since any rejection now paralyzes him with rage for weeks, he stops dating. He resents his married friend.
[2026-05-21 | audiomark] knowing that women's time is taxed by the pressures of female grooming. For about 15 minutes, their ketchup chat is small, even if promisingly pleasant. He insists on paying for drinks, joking that it's not chivalry, it's reparations for sexism. He soon regrets it, however, because on her third whiskey ginger, and his first, she starts rambling about some guy who dumped her ages ago. Then jokes about her eating disorder. Every few minutes, her face scrunches like she's about to cry, then reverts weirdly to normal. Her blouse untucks, and when a guy playing pool nearby positions his cue close to her face, she slaps it to the floor. Lonely as he is, does he deserve someone unstable? He'll have to reject her again, like in high school. What will he say? That he doesn't want to waste her time? Do he think she's super great, but he doesn't feel a spark? Having seldom been in the position to reject anyone else, he feels terrible for having to inflict on her the same pain he's always felt himself. Hours later, he still has not figured out a compassionate enough way to phrase it, and at this point, as they're leaving the bar, he decides he might as well kiss her good night for the sake of casual experience, and then let her down nicely over text message. He asks if he can kiss her. She says, uh, no. He asks why not. What do you mean why not? She says, because I don't want to. Who the fuck asks why not? Fucking asshole. He wonders if she is testing him. He asks if she is testing him. This time she gives him a too armed shove, sending him to the ground, and instead of yelling, she smiles like a sock puppet and says, oh my god, are you wearing shoulder pads? Getting up, he briefly considers shoving her back, though not as hard as sh-
[2026-05-21 | audiomark] specifically. But why'd she say that with him standing right there, unless he didn't count as a man to them? Not wanting to seem fragile or impune their judgment or center the conversation on himself, he says, ugh, yeah, we're total dog shit. And files this incident away in a thickening dossier of unfairness, a piece of insurance he'll be able to use as evidence of their own imperfect principles if they ever try to call him out in the future. privately too, he reasons that if they're going to keep dating assholes, what do they expect? later, gut checking himself to make sure his concern for his traumatized friend is legitimate, he texts her. Hey, I'm around if you need to talk about what happened, or even just watch trashy tv, smiley face, whenever, wherever she doesn't reply. dragging his virginity like a body bag into his mid 20s, he watches a certain amount of
[2026-05-21 | audiomark] must be other ways to stand out and be attractive. He cultivates academic achievement in his gender studies major, surmising that status and intellect will enhance his appeal. But just like in high school, he finds himself overlooked, even with the posity of men in his major, and outside of it, the rich, handsome, and broad-shouldered guys still get all the attention. Then again, so do the terrible and ugly ones. His female friends keep dating these guys with cratered skin, awkward manners, poor hygiene, talentless shrubs identified by their hobbies and tastes, flandering worms, controlling abusive dirt bags. Even his gay first-year roommate had a girlfriend back in high school before he'd come out. And yeah, maybe these guys all deserved love, but surely no more than him. At a house party, one friend talks about going home with a guy the night before, who said all he wanted was to sleep beside her.
[2026-05-21 | audiomark] and exhausting. By no means is he making his embarrassment her problem, he just wants to get everything out in the open. He hits send. An hour later he sends a second email. Just out of curiosity, could she say a little about why she rejected him? It'd be really helpful for him. Is it because he's narrow shouldered? Is that a deal breaker for her? Because he can't help that, as she knows. Or is it a specific thing he did or said? Because if so, they could discuss that. Clear up any miscommunication. Anyway, he'll be fine. Hope's everything's cool. And if she ever changes her mind, he'll be around. Considering his tremendous effort to be vulnerable, it seems unfair, rude, even, when a day passes with no reply. Fearing that he might not receive one at all, he writes a third email clarifying that she's by no means obliged to reply. Though if she wants to, he'd love hearing her thoughts. He is somewhat annoyed when she again doesn't reply, though he's glad to have given her that option. At least nothing's been left unsaid. This exact scenario happens four or five more times with different women. Later, when he relates these incidents, light heartedly to his other female friends, they assure him he's interesting, smart, thoughtful, good looking, though they never say hot. They say nothing's wrong with him. It's so bizarre that you're single, they say, trying to modify him with optimism, as if their romantic experience has made them experts in his lack of it. But they have no experience of having no experience. He figures that even bad relationships are better than none since they prepare you for future relationships, and heartbreak is romantic and dignified, whereas rejection only makes you a loser. Short of abuse.
[2026-05-21 | audiomark] her that he knew nobody was to blame for a lack of attraction and that if it isn't clear, yes, he is interested in her. But he's not one of those fake feminist guys who snubs any woman he can't fuck. So sorry if this is completely graceless and exhausting. By no means is he making his embarrassment her problem, he just wants to get everything out in the open. He hits send. An hour later he sends a second email. Just out of curiosity, could she say a little about why she rejected him? It'd be really helpful for him. Is it because he's narrow-shouldered? Is that a deal breaker for her? Because he can't help that, as she knows. Or is it a specific thing he did or said? Because if so, they could discuss that, clear up any miscommunication. Anyway, he'll be fine. Hope everything's cool. And if she ever changes her mind, he'll be around. Considering
[2026-05-21 | audiomark] His friends, mostly female, told him he was refreshingly attentive and trustworthy for a boy. Meanwhile, he was grateful to learn that female is best used as an adjective that sexism harms men too, though obviously nowhere near the extended harms women, and that certain men pretend to be feminists just to get laid. When he graduated, he felt slightly sheepish about never having even kissed anyone. He knew, though, that real dating started in college, where nobody would be aware of his track record. But in college, he encounters the alien system of codes and manners that govern flirting, conveyed in subtextual cues no more perceptible to him than ultraviolet radiation. Learning in high school about body positivity and gender norms and the cultural construction of beauty had led him to believe that adults aren't obsessed with looks. This turns out to be untrue, even among his new-
[2026-05-06 | audiomark] When he graduated, he felt slightly sheepish about never having even kissed anyone.
Everyone knew, though, that real dating started in college, where nobody would be aware of his track record.
But in college, he encounters the alien system of codes and manners that govern flirting, conveyed in subtextual cues no more perceptible to him than ultraviolet radiation.
Learning in high school about body positivity and gender norms and the cultural construction of beauty had led him to believe that adults aren't obsessed with looks.
This turns out to be untrue, even among his new female friends who complain about how shallow men are.
Now that he's self-conscious, he realizes he can't compete along conventional standards of height, weight, grip strength, whatever.
How can he hope to attract anyone with his narrow shoulders?
The women he tries to date offer him friendship instead. So once again, most of his friends are women.
This is fine. It's their prerogative, and anyway, lots of relationships begin platonically, especially for guys with narrow shoulders. But soon a pattern emerges.
The first time, as he is leaving his friend's dorm room, he surprises himself by saying,
Hey, this might be super random, and she can totally say no, but he's attracted to her. So did she want to go on a date? Date sometime?
In a casual and normal voice, and she says, oh, and filibusters. She had no idea he felt that way.
And she doesn't want to risk spoiling the good thing they have by making it a thing. She thinks it'll be best if they just stay.
And he rushes to assure her that it's valid. No, totally valid. He knows friendship isn't a downgrade. Sorry for being weird.
Ugh. Right? She replies, dating so.

=== A Deepness in the Sky — Vernor Vinge ===
[2026-05-19 | audiomark] before the search ever began, the man had a war fleet and was coming back upon them. With time there was some consistency to the most credible stories. The evidence was solid enough that certain ships changed schedules and burned decades of time to look for more clues. Fortunes were lost because of the detours and delays, but the losses were to a few of the largest trading families and went unacknowledged. They were rich enough, and this search was important enough that scarcely mattered. For the search had narrowed, the man was traveling alone, a vague blur of multiple identities, a chain of one-shot jobs on minor trading vessels, but always moving back and back into this end of human space. The hunt narrowed from a hundred light years to fifty, to twenty, and a half dozen star systems. And finally the man hunt came down to a single world at the coreward end of human space. Now Samy could justify a fleet, especially for...

=== The Republic of Memory — Mahmud El Sayed ===
[2026-05-17 | audiomark] and bind all her art supplies after the graffiti fiasco. Demiata cried when she came home to find her room empty of the supplies it had taken her years to amass. Watercolors, acrylics, alchids, brushes, atomizers, canvases, all gone. The last few weeks had been hell. With not even pencil and sketchpad left, she had been forced to rely on her tab. The pencil art was not usually Demiata style, but she was learning to endure, experimenting with cut up quotes and filling her media wall with images of Celine Devrim, mostly from the woman's trial. The stills from Devrim's execution were iconic. Half the students Demiata knew had the same poster of Devrim's implacable face above their beds. It for the Haraka was always highest in the academy. Although Demiata knew that a lot of it was just angsty teenage...
[2026-05-17 | audiomark] the Safina dropped out of work to mine desolate moons or skim planetary atmospheres. She was a shoe-in for entertainment. There were always artist positions open if you were good enough, and Demiata was more than good enough. She had made sure to keep anything too controversial out of the portfolio she submitted to watch allocation. Outwent the corridor art and the political cartoons and in came the unimaginative point-to-list portraits and the drab neosupremotus ship scapes. Just a few more weeks and she could be starting an apprenticeship somewhere, anywhere, far away from Tagumu 9 where everybody knew her name. There were a number of different art academies dotted around the births and Demiata had her eye on the Novi Oblast Academy of Fine Arts. Not only did it have dormitories, Novi Oblast was physically about us four.
[2026-05-17 | audiomark] May the credits fall out of his pockets and he be beaten with 60 shoes. Hmm, Rose greeted her sister, and good morning to you too, Damietta replied merrily. Sleep well. Hmm. At 10 years old, Rosetta was both the youngest member of the Ezz clan and a rare third child on a ship with a strict two child policy, or at least a rare third child officially sanctioned by Admin. There were plenty of people with illegal kids, although not in the tagamoo nines of the ship. She was therefore doubly spoiled rotten, something that Damietta was quietly trying to undo. She cracked three eggs into the pot and covered it with a plate, plastering a smile on her face as she turned her sister. Tee, she offered. Yes. You know where the cattle is, don't you? Rose grumbled something.
[2026-05-17 | audiomark] He fumbled sleepily in his satchel to check his re-briether. It was not likely that the power would be out long enough for him to need it, but on the safina you never know which breath could be your last. A few years ago, 23 crew on a dealink from Zengebirth to engineering deck had died of asphyxiation during a blackout, carbon dioxide poisoning. In an enclosed space, rising carbon dioxide kills you faster than an oxygen deprivation. Even the youngest child on the safina knew that. The passengers would have been fine if the link's emergency cash re-briether's a lithium hydroxide canister and a battery-powered carbon dioxide sensor had been intact. Unfortunately, the cash had been stolen and sold on the black market a few weeks earlier. Security tracked the theft down to a maintenance crewman with a drug habit. He was arrested, convicted, and spaced the ultimate repudiation. Oh, God not again! A man cried out in Arabic from the darkness. God preserve us! In the aisle across from a scanner, somebody flicked on a line.
[2026-05-17 | audiomark] with her usual intensity. Hello, Tali, he greeted her in the same language. Yes, I'm back on nights. Third watch means better creds. Saving up for launch? Of course, Iskander was saving up for launch day. His sisters were expecting presents. It was going to be the biggest launch celebrations maybe ever. According to navigation, the Saphina would be just passing the halfway point to the Garden-Wildhurya when the crew celebrated the anniversary of the ship's launch. Halfway there, just another 200 years to go. Actually, I'm planning on getting prodigiously drunk and watching the light show in Cleopatra Square. And you, audio plans for launch, pray tell. Same as usual, spend some time with family and friends. I told my mother I'd go with her to visit our ancestors to this year. She's always complaining that, gharah, this is my stop. Thelitha said, as the hyperlink rushed into Kaisa Central Station, she cheerfully doffed her fairs at him, catch you on the next K-
[2026-05-17 | audiomark] and Scatagon English, translator Iskander Ezz had spent his watch being two different people, and now both were thoroughly exhausted. In Arabic, he was quick with a smile and even quicker with a laugh. Self-assured and gregarious, he was careful to make sure his clients felt completely at ease as he navigated the Maya of ship bureaucracy on their behalf. In English, he was the hyper-professional translator, dealing with snooty ship-clarks with a dispassionate deference that bordered on unctuousness. Form 10723C? Why, yes, my good sir, I've got it right here. Intriplicate also here and here, signed and witnessed. Oh, of course, my good man. Did you think it was my first time dealing with Admin? Thank you. No, thank you. As he made his way back to his home birth, Iskander couldn't remember which was the real him. Over the course of his watch, he had registered one birth and one death with administration. For the birth, he received a flat fee of 250 credits and a perfunctory invitation to attend the baby's naming ceremony. For the death, another 250 credits and an impassioned plea to attend funeral prayers for the deceased. Life and death on the cityship Safina all parts of the same endless bureaucratic dance. Surrounded by a crowd of commuters on the Admin Central Station platform, Iskander flicked his wrist at the scanner and boarded the hyperlink, spending his watch shift, conversing in English, had left him with the echoes of that rat-attack ringing in his ears and a strange kind of double vision that turned everything old and familiar, print new. He glanced around the hyperlink carriage, taking in everything with fresh eyes. His fellow passengers were dressed in a motley hodgepodge of weekend clothes, brightly coloured sunwarkamise, stayed, solid, jellabbers, and ubiquitous crew grey. They conversed in a crescendo of different languages. Malay, Nehan, Mandar, Arabic, which crowd-
[2026-05-17 | audiomark] My colonists sleep on. I dare not wake them from their cryostasis. To wake them now would be a death sentence. Go back to what? Captain Aiden asks, Glass in hand. Empty now. Whatever happened on Earth happened already, ten years since we left. Another ten years to return. It's too late, Safina. It was already too late when they sent their message. The Earth, or whatever is left of it, will just have to fend for itself. When we left, we knew there would be no going back for us. The crew wanted to carry on to Huria. Whatever happened, I demand. What does he mean? The message couldn't have been clearer. My siblings on Earth, the great AIs that run the network, that are the network, screaming out into the void.
[2026-05-12 | audiomark] She had startling green eyes and an israni cross around her neck. Guard your palava, Davocca, she said in a low voice. The rosers are a jacks, and they are always slushing. Dankon Kov, Damietta Thanter, holding out a clenched fist. The girl appraised her for a long moment before tapping it with her own. Riva derci, she said with a cheeky wink. The pal wasn't a language, not really. It was an argo, a cant, a crypt-elect. Although it was loosely based on English, the one language that most people in most births were familiar with. Is vocabulary came from everywhere? Dead earth languages and multilingual puns? Backslang and gender reversal? Vira, after a certain point, you stopped learning it and started cooking it up. It wasn't language, it was music, improvisation, the prattle of the disenfranchised, the palava of the dispossessed, the lingua of the underground. And like all underground languages, it was made to be disguised. For the average crew, Davocovs could be beshing right next to him on the repeato, on their tau home after tried grudge, palavering about obving remma. The capoventi herself, and they would niche savvy. And if Bedredin did niche want a palaver? Well, she would just have to continue what she had started. The haraka wasn't an organisation, it was a movement. Anyone who believed Celine Deverem's words had the right to act, even if that action was art, and Demiata was an artist. That at least was one thing she was sure about. The blackouts are getting worse.
[2026-05-12 | audiomark] names. In Porter, they called her La Creada, the maid. In Arabic, she was simply Al Thauria, the revolutionary. In Russ, Gellis Nair Diavotka, Iron Girl. Devrim was an anti-admin icon, the so-called Devrimite riots. It was an attempted revolution, actually. He had engulfed half the ship. But Demi Eftar was going for something different with her new project. She was trying to find the human behind the legend. So no storybook images of Celine Devrim being escorted to the airlock by masked red jackets, a pretty naturally serene look lurking behind her eyes. Instead, she paired a picture of her from the trial in which she is reading a document on her tab while tucking a strand of her hair behind her ear with the quote, there is a higher law than administration's law. That's the law of conscience. And next to a picture of her leaning across a table while listening intently to her translator, eyebrows raised skeptically. I am crude not to admit, and you got to make a distinction. And finally, she chosen a picture of her from before the riots, an ordinary looking girl in factory blue sitting in one of the viewing lounges, tattie chairs, the stars reflecting in her eyes, and captioned it, if you burn with resentment at every admin injustice, then you are a comm rate of mine. That was the key, Demi Eftar thought. She wanted to show the crew that Celine Devrim was not a legend. A revolutionary can be anyone, even you. Those, let's go. All right, take it easy. Rose said emerging from her room.
[2026-05-12 | audiomark] ancestors awoken, freeing up the space and power that would allow the crew to fulfill their true potential, whatever it might be. A new compact that would end all the needless bureaucratic translator work, sorry not sorry is skandar, that stopped people from living freely on the south. A new vision for the ship and its crew, Demietta needed to believe that was possible. Sometimes it felt like she couldn't breathe on this cramped city ship, where it seemed like everybody wanted something from her that she could never give them. Because if she did, she would no longer be herself. Demietta eyed the images of Celine Deferrim, cycling on her media wall. She had been adding cut up quotes from Deferrim speeches in pamphlets to the background, a mix of art and poetry and politics. This one was from her closing speech at the trial. You can space a revolutionary, but you can never space the revolution. Demietta loved that one. It made her feel part of something bigger than herself, as if she and Celine Deferrim were contemporaries. Celine Deferrim went by many names. In Porter they called her La Creada, the maid. In Arabic she was simply a Thauria, the revolutionary. In Russ, Gellis Nair Diavottka, Iron Girl. Deferrim was an anti-admin icon, the so-called Deferrimite riots. It was an attempted revolution actually, heading golfed half the ship. But Demietta was going for something different with her new project. She was trying to find the human behind the legend. So no storybook images of Celine Deferrim being escorted to the airlock by masked red jackets. A preta naturally soof.
[2026-05-12 | audiomark] before him, and as some other as would likely be after him. All the while, human resources ruled over the crew with an iron fist, deciding who could marry who, who could have kids with who, and who could work what watches. And that didn't even include the injustices faced by those people born outside of Admin's rules. So far as Demietta was concerned, it was time for another revolution and a new compact, a fairer one that would see all these sleeping ancestors awoken, freeing up the space and power that would allow the crew to fulfill their true potential, whatever it might be. A new compact that would end all the needless bureaucratic translator work, sorry, not sorry, is gendered, that stopped people from living freely on the South. A new vision for the ship and its crew, Demietta needed to believe that was possible. Sometimes it felt

=== God Emperor of Dune — Frank Herbert ===
[2026-05-17 | audiomark] cannot provide us with an alternative to Xian navigation machines, nor are the tiny amounts of church-controlled melange any real commercial threat to the products of the Tlaelaxu vats. No. We argue that the myths, the oral history, the God Bible, and even the holy books of the divided God must be compared with the journals from Dara Spalat. Every historical reference to a scattering and the famine times has to be taken out and reexamined. What have we to fear? No Xian machine can do what we, the descendants of Duncan, Idaho, and Siona have done. How many universes have we populated? None can guess. No one person will ever know. Does the church fear the occasional profit? We know that the visionaries cannot see us, nor predict our decisions. No death can find all of humankind. Must we of the minority join our fellows of the scattering before we can be heard? Must we leave the original core of humankind ignorant and uninformed? If the majority drives us out, you know we never again can be found. We do not want to leave. We are held here by those pearls in the sand. We are fascinated by the church's use of the pearl as the sun of understanding. Surely no reasoning human can escape the journal's revelations in this regard. The admittedly fugitive but vital uses of archaeology must have their day. Just as the primitive machine with which later the second concealed his journals can only teach us about the evolution of our machines, just so that ancient awareness must be allowed to speak to us. It would be a crime against both historical accuracy and science for us to abandon our attempts at communication with those pearls.
[2026-05-17 | audiomark] Exurpt from the Haribenozo secret summation on the discoveries at Daar Esbalat. Here with the Minority Report, we will of course comply with the majority decision to apply a careful screening, editing and censorship to the journals from Daar Esbalat, but our arguments must be heard. We recognize the interest of holy church in these matters and the political dangers have not escaped our notice. We share a desire with the church that rackess and the holy reservation of the divided God not become an attraction for gawking tourists. However, now that all of the journals are in our hands authenticated and translated, the clear shape of the atready's design emerges. As a woman trained by the Benejesserit to understand the ways of our ancestors, I have a natural desire to share the pattern we have exposed, which is so much more than dune to a rackess to dune, then to a rackess. The interests of history and science must be served. The journals throw a valuable new light onto that accumulation of personal recollections and biographies from the Duncan Days, the God Bible. We cannot be unmindful of those familiar oaths by the thousand sons of Idaho and by the nine daughters of Sionna. The persistent cult of sister Chenue assumes new significance because of the journal's disclosures. Certainly, the church's characterization of Judas-slash-Nayla deserves careful re-evaluation. We of the minority must remind the political censors that the poor sandworms in their raki and reservation cannot provide us with an alternative to Xian navigation machines, nor are the tiny amounts of church-controlled melange any real commercial threat to the products of the Tlaelaksu vats. No.
[2026-05-17 | audiomark] tragedies. It was a curse in Idaho's voice. Sionna stared down at this integrating hulk which once had been later a tragedies the second, and something else. The something else was sloughing away in faint whips of blue smoke where the smell of melange was strongest. Puddles of blue liquid formed in the rocks beneath his melting bulk, only faint vague shapes which might once have been human remained, a collapsed foaming pinkness, a bit of red-street bone which could have held the forms of cheeks and brow. Sionna said, I am different, but still I am what he was. Idaho spoke in a hushed whisper. The ancestors. All of the multitude is there, but I walk silently among them and no one sees me. The old images are gone, and only the essence remains to light his golden path. She turned and took Idaho's cold hand in hers. Carefully she led him out of the cave into the light where the rope dangled invitingly from the barrier walls top, from the place where the frightened museum-fremmon waited. Poor material with which to shape a new universe, she thought, but they would have to serve. Idaho would require a gentle seduction, a care within which love might appear. When she looked down the river to where the flow emerged from its man-made chasms to spread across the green lands, she saw a wind from the south driving dark clouds toward her. Idaho withdrew his hand from hers, but he appeared calmer. With a control is increasingly unstable, he said. Monero thought it was the guilds doing. My father was seldom mistaken about such things, she said. You will have to look into that. Idaho experienced a sudden memory of the-
[2026-05-17 | audiomark] box. Are you still there, Duncan? Yes. So I still have a voice. Look at me, later said. I was a bloody bit of pulp in a human womb, a bit no larger than a cherry. Look at me, I say. I'm looking. I'd her voice was faint. You expected a giant, and you found a gnome, later said. Now you're beginning to know the responsibilities which come as a result of actions. What will you do with your new power, Duncan? There was a long silence, then Sionar's voice. Don't listen to him. He was mad. Of course. Later said, madness in method that is genius. Sionar, do you understand this? I'd her ask. How plain to the golo.
[2026-05-17 | audiomark] kinds of concurrence that once you had." Flames covered his vision. The agony was fading, but he could still sense odours, and hear sounds with a terrible acuity. Both Idaho and Siona were breathing in quick, shallow gasps. Odd kinesthetic sensations began to weave their way through later, echoes of bones and joints which he knew he no longer possessed. "'Look,' Siona said. He's disintegrating. That was Idaho. "'No,' Siona. The outside is falling away. Look! The worm!' Later felt parts of himself settling into warm softness. The agony removed itself. "'What are those holes in him?' Siona. "'I think they were the sand trout. See the shapes?' "'I am here to prove one of my ancestors wrong,'' Lolito said. "'Or thought,' he said, which was the same thing as far as his journals were concerned. "'I was born a man. But I do not die a man.' "'I can't look,'' Siona said. Lolito heard her turn away a raffle of rocks. "'Are you still there, Duncan?' "'Yes.' "'So I still have a voice.' "'Look at me,'' Lolito said. "'I was a bloody bit of pulp in a human womb, a bit no larger than a cherry.' "'Look at me,' I say.' "'I'm looking,'' Idaho's voice was faint. "'You expected a giant, and you found a gnome,'' Lolito said. "'Now, you're beginning to know the responsibilities which come as a result of actions. "'What will you do with your new power, Duncan?' "'There was a long silence, then Siona's voice.' "'Don't listen!'
[2026-05-17 | audiomark] out of your war. Are you still alive?" Idaho asked. Later's voice came in wheezing gasps. Let them scatter, Duncan. Let them run and hide. Anywhere they want, in any universe they choose. Damn you. What are you saying? I'll just let her live with you. Let? I did not let anything. Why did you let we die? Idaho moaned. We didn't know she was in there with you. Idaho's head sagged forward. You will be recompensed. Later husked. My fish speakers will choose you over, Siona. Be kind to her, Duncan. She is more than a trairdies, and she carries the seed of your survival. Siona sank back into his memories. They were delicate myths now, held fleetingly in his awareness. He sensed that he might have fallen into a time which bites very being had changed the past. There were sounds, though, and he struggled to interpret them. Someone scrambling on rocks. The flames parted to reveal Siona standing beside Idaho. They stood hand in hand like two children reassuring each other before venturing into an unknown place. How can he live like that? Siona whispered. Later waited for the strength to respond. We, helps me, he said. We had something few experience. We were joined in our strengths rather than in our weaknesses. And look what it got you. Siona sneered. Yes. And pray that you get the same. He husked. Perhaps the spice will give you time. Where is your spice? She demanded. Deep in Cietch tabuara, he said.
[2026-05-17 | audiomark] dangling at the entrance. A figure slid down the rope. He recognized Naila. She dropped to the rocks and crouched there, staring into the shadows at him. The flame which was Lato's vision parted to reveal another figure dropping from the rope, Sionna. She and Naila scrambled toward him in a rattle of rocks and stopped, peering in at him. A third figure dropped off the rope, Idaho. He moved with frantic rage hurling himself at Naila, screaming, why did you kill her? It wasn't supposed to kill me! Naila sent him sprawling with a casual almost indifferent sweep of her left arm. She scrambled closer up the rocks and stopped on all fours to peer in at Lato. Lord, you live? Idaho was right behind her, snatching the laze gun from her holster. Naila turned astonished as he leveled the weapon and pulled its trigger. The burning started at the top of Naila's head. It split her. The pieces slumping apart. A shining christ knife spilled from her burning uniform and shattered on the rocks. Idaho did not see it. A grimace of rage on his face he kept burning and burning the pieces of Naila until the weapons charge was gone. The blazing arc vanished. Only wet and smoking bits of meat and cloth lay scattered among the glowing rocks. It was the moment for which Siona had waited. She scrambled up to him and pulled the useless laze gun from Idaho's hands. He whirled toward her and she poised herself to subdue him, but all the rage was gone. Why? He whispered. It's done, she said. They turned and looked into the cave shadows at Lato. Lato could not even imagine what they saw. The sand trout skin was gone, he knew. There would be some kind of surface, pocked with sillier holes from the departed skin, as for the rest.
[2026-05-17 | audiomark] All the covering sandtrout were gone, and he felt every touch more immediate, a lost sense restored when all it could bring him was pain. He could not see his body, but he felt the thing that would have been a worm as it made its writhing, crawling progress out of the water. He peered upward through eyes that saw everything in sheets of flame from which shapes coalesced of their own accord. At last he recognized this place. The river had swept him to the turn where it left the sarir forever. Behind him lay to one, and just the ways down the barrier wall was all that remained of sietch tabour. Still gars realm, the place where all of Lato's spice had been concealed. Exuding blue fumes his agonized body writhed its way noisily along a shingle of beach, dragged its blue dyed way across broken boulders and into a damp hole which might have been part of the original sietch. It was only a shallow cave now, blocked at its inner end by a rockfall. His nostrils reported the wet dirty smell and clean spice essence. Sounds intruded on his agony. He turned in the confinement of the cave and saw a rope dangling at the entrance. A figure slid down the rope. He recognized Nala. She dropped to the rocks and crouched there, staring into the shadows at him. The flame which was Lato's vision parted to reveal another figure dropping from the rope, Sionna. She and Nala scrambled toward him in a rattle of rocks and stopped peering in at him. A third figure dropped off the rope, Idaho. He moved with frantic rage hurling himself at Nala, screaming, why did you kill her? It wasn't supposed to kill we! Nala sent him sprawling with a casual almost indifference sweep of her left arm. She scrambled closer up the rocks and stopped on all.
[2026-05-17 | audiomark] I am alone, more alone than ever before. His great-ridged body flexed, as it fell, twisting him about until his amplified vision revealed Sionna standing at the broken brink of the bridge. "'Now, you will learn,' he thought. The body continued to turn. He watched the river approach. The water was a dream inhabited by glimpses of fish which ignited an ancient memory of a banquet beside a granite pool. Pink flesh dazzling his hungars. I join you, wee, in the banquet of the gods.' A bursting flash of bubbles enclosed him in agony. Water, vicious currents of it buffeted him all around. He felt the gnashing of rocks as he struggled upward to brooch in a torrential cascade. His body flexing in a perexism of involuntary writhing splashes. The canyon wall, wet and black, sped past his frantic gaze, shattered spangles of what had been his skin exploded away from him. A rain of silver all around him darting away into the river, a ring of dazzling movement, brittle sequins. The scale glitter of sand trout leaving him to begin their own colony lives. The agony continued. So marveled that he could remain conscious, that he had a body to feel. Instinct drove him. He clutched at a rock around which the torrent spilled him, felt a clutching finger torn from his hand before he could release his grip. The sensation of it was only a minor accent in the symphony of pain. The river's course swept to the left around a chasm buttress, and as though saying it had enough of him, it sent him rolling onto the sloping edge of a sand bar. He lay there a moment. The blue dye of spice essence drifting away from him in the current. The agony moved him. The worm body moving.
[2026-05-17 | audiomark] Monéofel freely then in the ecstasy of awareness. The universe opened for him like clear glass everything flowing in a no-time. A golden smoke. Late o'er! he screamed. See a knock? I believe! The robe tore away from his shoulders then. It turned in the wind of the canyon one last glimpse of the royal cart tipping, tipping from the shattered road bed. The god emperor slid out of the open end. Something solid smashed into Monéo's back. His last sensation. Late o'er felt himself sliding from the cart. His awareness held only the image of whee striking the river. The distant, purlier fountain which marked her plunge into the myths and dreams of termination. Her last words, calm and steady rolled through all of his memories. I shall go on ahead, love! As he slipped from the cart, he saw the simmatar arc of the river, a sliver-edged thing which shimmered in its mottled shadows, a vicious blade of a river honed through eternity and ready now to receive him into its agony. I cannot cry. Not even shout, he thought. Tears are no longer possible. They're water. I'll have water enough in a moment. I can only moan in my grief. I am alone, more alone than ever before. His great, ridged body flexed as it fell, twisting him about until his amplified vision revealed Sionna standing at the broken brink of the bridge. Now, you will learn, he thought. The body continued to turn. He watched the river approach. The water was a dream inhabited by glimpses of fish which ignited an ancient memory of a banquet beside a granite pool.
[2026-05-17 | audiomark] filled the air as the road-bed tipped even farther. He saw people from the cortege falling, their mouths open, arms waving. Something had caught Monayo's cable. His arms were stretched out over his head as he turned once more, twisting. He felt his hands greased by the perspiration of fear slipping along the cable. Once more his gaze came around to the royal cart, it lay jammed against the stubs of broken girders, even as Monayo looked the god-emperors futile hands groped for Hui Nori, but failed to reach her. She fell from the carts open end silently. The golden gown whipping upward to reveal her body stretched out as straight as an arrow. A deep, rumbling groan came from the god-emperor. Why doesn't he activate the suspensors? Monayo wondered, the suspensors will support him. But the lay's gun was still humming, and as Monayo's hands slipped from the cable's severed end, he saw lancing flames strike the carts, suspenser bubbles, piercing one after another in eruptions of golden smoke. Monayo stretched his hands over his head as he fell. The smoke? The golden smoke! His robe whipped upward, turning him until his face was directed downward into the abyss, with his gaze on the depths. He recognized a maelstrom of boiling rapids there, the mirror of his life, precipitous currents and plunges, all movement gathering up all substance. Later's words wound through his mind on a path of golden smoke. Caution is the path to mediocrity. Gliding, passionless mediocrity is all that most people think they can achieve. Monayo fell freely then in the ecstasy of awareness. The universe opened for him like clear glass, everything flowing in a no-time. A golden smoke!
[2026-05-17 | audiomark] and stare, few of them sense this missing thing. It drove the engine of life in earlier times. When the life is gone, it is gone." Monet focused on the three fish-speakers who stood just ahead of him on the bridge. They lifted their arms high and began to dance, whirling and skipping away from him only a few paces distant. Oh, odd, he thought. I've seen the other people dance in the open, but never fish, speakers, though only dance in the privacy of their quarters in the intimacy of their own company. This thought was still in his mind when he heard the first awful humming of the laze gun and felt the bridge lurch beneath him. This is not happening. His mind told him. He heard the royal card scrape sideways across the road-bed, then the snap-slap of the card's cover slamming open. A bedlam of screams and cries arose from behind him, but he could not turn. The bridge's road-bed had tipped steeply to Monet's right, spilling him onto his face while he went sliding toward the abyss. He clutched a severed strand of cable to stop himself. The cable went with him, with him grating in the spilling film of sand which had covered the road-bed. He clutched the cable with both hands turning with it. He saw the royal card, then. It skewed sideways toward the edge of the bridge. It's cover open. We stood there one hand, stedding her on the folding seat while she stared past Monet. A horrible screaming of metal filled the air of the road-bed tipped even farther. He saw people from the cortege falling, their mouths open, arms waving. Something had caught Monet's cable. His arms were stretched out over his head as he turned once more, twisting. He felt his hands greased by the perspiration of fear slipping along the cable. Once more his gaze came around to the royal card. It lay jammed against the stubs of broken girders, even as Monet...
[2026-05-17 | audiomark] and the musky oils of Oasis shrubs these dominated the odors. Yes, and the cesspools, and the stink of rotting garbage. He recalled the God Empress comment when Monayo had finished reporting on that tour. These fremen do not know what is lost from their lives, they think they keep the essence of the old ways. This is a failure of all museums. Something fades, it dries out of the exhibits and is gone. The people who administer the museum and the people who come to bend over the cases and stare, few of them sense this missing thing. It drove the engine of life in earlier times. When the life is gone, it is gone. Monayo focused on the three fish-speakers who stood just ahead of him on the bridge. They lifted their arms high and began to dance, whirling and skipping away from him only a few paces distant. How odd, he thought. I've seen the other people dance in the open, but never fish, speakers.
[2026-05-17 | audiomark] The flow of the river, the flow of the cortege, the sweeping importance of these things in which he played a role, all of it caught up his mind in a dizzying sensation of the inevitable. We are not people passing this way, he thought. We are primal elements, linking one piece of time to another, and when we have passed, everything behind us will drop off into no sound, a place like the no-room of the exeons yet, never again the same as it was before we came. A bit from one of the lute-players songs wafted through Maneo's memory, and his eyes went out of focus in the remembrance. He knew that song for its wishfulness, a wish that all of this were ended, all passed, all doubts banished, tranquility returned. The plaintive song drifted through his awareness like smoke, twisting and compelling. Insect cries in roots of Pampus grass. Maneo hummed the song to himself. Insect cries mark the end, autumn and my song are the colour of the last leaves in roots of Pampus grass. Maneo nodded his head to the refrain. Day is ended, visitors gone. Day is ended in our sietge. Day is ended, storm wind sounds. Day is ended, visitors gone. Maneo decided that the lute-player's song had to be a really old one, an old fremen's song, no doubt of it, and it told him something about himself. He wished the visitors truly gone. The excitement's ended peace once more. Peace was so near. Yet he could not leave his duties. He thought of all that impedimenter piled out there on the sand just beyond visibility range from Twoner. They would see it all soon, tents, food, tables, golden plates and jeweled knives, glow-gloves-fasc--
[2026-05-17 | audiomark] her, refusing anything his immediate senses did not report. Lato turned to glare at the major doma, a gaze so obviously filled with pent-up emotions that Monayo recoiled from it. Take charge of your own existence, Monayo. Monayo took a deep, trembling breath. Lord, I meant no offense. I sought only— Look upward, Monayo. Involuntarily, Monayo obeyed, peering into the cloudless sky where morning light was increasing. Is it, Lord? There's no reassuring ceiling over you, Monayo. Only an open sky full of changes. Welcome it. Every sense you possess is an instrument for reacting to change. Does that tell you nothing? Lord, I only came out to inquire when you would be ready to proceed. Monayo, I beg you to be truthful with me. I am truthful, Lord. But if you live in bad faith, lies will appear to you like the truth. Lord, I beg you to be truthful with me.
[2026-05-17 | audiomark] Northwood. There were two walls along there and the river between them. The river glided in a man-made chasm its moisture confined and channeled into a northwood wind drift while the water itself flowed southwood. I'd aho ignored the river then. It was there, and it would be there tomorrow. He fixed his attention on the bridge, letting his military training examine it, he nodded once to himself before turning back the way he had come, lifting the light-wrote from his shoulders as he walked. It was only when she saw the rope come snaking down that Naila had her orgasm. What am I eliminating? The bourgeois infatuation with peaceful conservation of the past. This is a binding force, a thing which holds humankind into one vulnerable unit in spite of illusionary separations across parsecs of space.
[2026-05-17 | audiomark] and the pattern lay there, fixed the way he had learned to do it as a child hiding from Harkin and slave-raders. Fingertips found a crack where they could be wedged, he clawed his way upward. Watching from below Naila experienced a growing affinity for the climber, Idaho had been reduced by distance to such a small and lonely shape upon the wall. He must know what it was like to be alone with momentous decisions. I would like to have his child, she thought, a child from both of us would be strong and resourceful. What is it that God wants from a child of Sionna and this man? Naila had awakened before dawn and had walked out to the top of a low-dune at the village edge to think about this thing that Idaho proposed. It had been a limedorn with a familiar winding cloth of dust in the distance, then steel day on the baleful immensity of the sarir. She knew then that these matters certainly had been anticipated by God.
[2026-05-17 | audiomark] can reside only in this faith." She reached out with her left hand and brushed the tears from his cheeks. It surprised him that the cowl did not react with its ordinary reflex to prevent the touch. "'Do you know,' he asked, "'that since I have become thus, you are the first person to touch my cheeks. But I know what you are and what you were,' she said. "'What I was.' Ah, wee! What I was has become only this face, and all the rest is lost in the shadows of memory, hidden. Gone! Not hidden from me, love!' He looked directly at her, no longer afraid to lock gazes. Is it possible that the Xians know what they have created in you? I assure you later, love of my soul that they do not know.
[2026-05-17 | audiomark] not invent aircraft. What a fool you are! men can invent anything." He called you a fool? There was shock in his voice. He was right. And although he denied it, he spoke the truth. He taught me that there was a reason for running away from inventions. Then you fear the exeons? Of course I do. They can invent catastrophe. Then what could you do? Run faster. History is a constant race between invention and catastrophe. Education helps, but it's never enough. You also must run. You are sharing your soul with me, love. Do you know that? Later looked away from her and focused on Monayo's back. The motions of the major Domo, the tucked in pretenses of secrecy so apparent there. The procession had come off the first gentle in-line. It turned now to begin the climb onto the Ring Wall West. Monayo moved as he had always moved, one foot ahead of another, aware the-
[2026-05-17 | audiomark] She was content to live, an opening person like a flower perpetually unfolding into fragrant blossom. Why are you looking at me like that?" she asked. I was basking in the love of you. "'Love,' yes,' she smiled. I think that since we cannot share the love of the flesh, we must share the love of the soul. Would you share that with me later?" She was taken aback. You ask about my soul? Surely others have asked. He spoke shortly. My soul digests its experiences. Nothing more. "'Have I asked too much of you?'' she asked. I think that you cannot ask too much of me. Then I presume upon our love to disagree with you. My Uncle Malke talked about your soul. He found that he could not respond. She took his silence as an invitation to continue. He said that you were the ultimate op-
[2026-05-17 | audiomark] That's convenient. It's really enough, Duncan. She looked up at him, her eyes glistening with unshared tears. But if it was ever a reason for our God-Empire, it is not reason for what he has become. Idaho inhaled deeply. Then the atroides come to this. The worm must go, Siona said. I wonder when he's arriving. Idaho said. Garun's little rat friend didn't say. We must ask, Idaho said. We have no weapons, Siona said. Naila has a lays gun, he said. We have knives. Rope? I saw Rope in one of Garun's story-drums. Against the worm, she asked. Even if we could get Naila's lays gun, you know it won't touch him. But his cart proof against it, Idaho asked. I don't trust Naila, Siona said. Doesn't she obey you? Yes, but we will proceed once.
[2026-05-17 | audiomark] Ma, Marquis said. Lord, if you will wait at the other end of the chamber," Monayo said. Perhaps, when you return, Marquis no longer will be a problem. He is going to do it." Marquis asked. God's below. He's going to do it. Later squirmed the way it went to the shadowed limit of the chamber, keeping his attention on the faint arc of a line which would become an opening into the night if he merely converted the wish into a thought of command. What a long drop that would be out there just roll off the landing-lip. He doubted that even his body would survive it. But there was no water in the sand beneath his tower, and he could feel the golden path winking in and out of existence merely because he allowed himself to think of such an end. "'Lay toh!'' Marquis called from behind him. Mato heard the litter grating on the wind-scattered sand which peppered the floor of his eerie. Once more, Marquis called. "'Lay toh! You are the best! There's no evil in this universe which can surpass!'' A sodden thump shut off Marquis's voice. A blow to the throat. Later thought. Yes, Monayo knows that one. They came the sound of the balconies' transparent shield sliding open. The rasping of the litter on the rail. Then silence. Monayo will have to bury the body in the sand. Lato thought. There is as yet no worm to come and devour the evidence. Lato turned then and looked across the chamber. Monayo stood leaning over the railing, peering down. Down. Down. I cannot pray for you, Marquis. Nor for you, Monayo,' later thought. I may be the only religious consciousness in the empire because I am truly a-
[2026-05-17 | audiomark] scattered sand which peppered the floor of his eerie. Once more, Marke called, �Lato, you are the best! There's no evil in this universe which can surpass�� A sodden thump shut off Marke's voice. A blow to the throat. Late o' thought, yes, Monéo knows that one. They came the sound of the balconies transparent shield sliding open, the rasping of the litter on the rail, then silence. Monéo will have to bury the body in the sand. Late o' thought, there is as yet no worm to come and devour the evidence. Late o' turn then and looked across the chamber. Monéo stood leaning over the railing, peering down, down, down. I cannot pray for you, Marke, nor for you, Monéo, late o' thought. I may be the only religious consciousness in the empire because I am truly alone, so I cannot pray. You cannot understand history unless you understand its flowings, its currents, and the ways leaders move within such forces. A leader tries to perpetuate the conditions which demand his leadership. Thus, the leader requires the outsider. I caution you to examine my career with care. I am both leader and outsider. Do not make the mistake of assuming that I only created the church which was the state. That was my function as leader and I had many historical models to use as pattern. For a clue to my role as outsider, look at the arts of my time. The arts are barbaric. The favorite poetry?
[2026-05-17 | audiomark] "'Paw, Monayo,' Marky said. Later smiled. To you remember, Marky, you once asked me to demonstrate infinity." "'You said no infinity exists to be demonstrated,' Marky swept his gaze toward Monayo. Little likes to play with paradox. He knows all the tricks of language that have ever been discovered." Monayo put down a surge of anger. He felt excluded from this conversation an object of amusement by two superior beings. Marky and the God Emperor were almost like two old friends reliving the pleasures of a mutual past. Monayo accuses me of being the sole possessor of infinity. Later said. He refuses to believe that he has just as much of infinity as I have. Marky stared up at later. "'You see, Monayo? You see how tricky he is with words?' "'Tell me about your niece.'
[2026-05-17 | audiomark] Her hand obeyed not his voice, but something from within her. The finger movements were precise, eliciting his own memories, a thing passed from child to child to child. The way so much information and misinformation survived. It earned his face to its limit and looked sideways at her face so close to his. Pale blue drops began to form at the flap's edge, rich cinnamon smells enveloped them. She leaned toward the drops. It saw the pause beside her nose the way her tongue moved as she drank. Presently she retreated, not completely satisfied, but driven by caution and suspicion much the way Monéo had been. Like father, like daughter. How long before it begins to work? She asked. It is already working. I mean a minute or so. I owe you nothing for this. I will demand no pain.
[2026-05-17 | audiomark] Me?" It was barely a whisper. You've read those journals you stole from me, he said. I am in them. But where are you? Look at what I have created, Siona, and you—you can create nothing except yourself. Words? More tricky words. I do not suffer from being worshipped, Siona. I suffer from never being appreciated. Perhaps? No. I do not hope for you. What's the purpose of those journals? An Xian machine records them. They are to be found on a faraway day. They will make people think. An Xian machine? You defy the jihad? There's a lesson in that, too. What do such machines really do? They increase the number of things we can do without thinking. Things we do without thinking. There's the real danger. Look at how long you walked across this desert without thinking about your face mask. You could have warned me, and increased your dependency. She stared at him a moment. Then, why would you want me to command your fish speakers? You are an attrared ease woman, resourceful and capable of independent thought. You can be truthful just for the sake of truth as you see it. You are bred and trained for command, which means freedom from dependence. The wind, world, dust and sand around them while she weighed his words. And if I agree, you'll save me? No. She had been so sure of the opposite answer that it was several heartbeats before she translated that single word. In that time the wind fell slightly, exposing a vista across the deune scape to the remnants of Haban Yerich. The air was suddenly chilled with that cold which did as much to rob the flesh of M-
[2026-05-17 | audiomark] being," Idaho said. Monéa worked his lips in and out. Then the Lord later has told me about that evil old man of your time, Duncan. I don't think you understood your enemy. He was a fat, monstrous, he was a seeker after sensations. Monéa said. The fat was a side effect, then perhaps something to experience for itself, because it offended people and he enjoyed offending. The barren only consumed a few planets. Idaho said, later consumes the universe. Love, please! We protested. Let him rant, Monéa said. When I was young and ignorant, even as my Siona and this poor fool, I said similar things. Is that why you let your daughter go out to die? Idaho demanded. Love, that's cruel, we said. Duncan, it has always been one of your...
[2026-05-17 | audiomark] Even though he had prepared her for it, he found the trusting response, touching. He had to fight against a feeling of pity far stronger than any he had experienced before knowing who he. There could be no room for pity out here, though, he told himself. Siona was betraying clear signs that she would more than likely die here. He had to prepare himself for disappointment. Siona shielded her face with an arm, closed her eyes, and went to sleep. Nobody has ever had as many yesterdays as I have had. He reminded himself. From the popular human viewpoint, he knew that the things he did here could only appear cruel and callous. He was forced now to strengthen himself by retreating into his memories, deliberately selecting mistakes of our common past. First-hand access to human mistakes was his greatest strength now. Knowledge of mistakes taught him long-term corrections. He had to be constantly aware of consequences. If consequences were lost or concealed, lessons were lost. But the closer he came to being a sandworm, the harder he found it to make decisions which others would call inhuman. Once he had done it with ease, as his humanity slipped away, though, he found himself filled with more and more human concerns. In the cradle of our past, I lay upon my back in a cave so shallow I could penetrate it only by squirming, not by crawling. There by the dancing light of a resin torch, I drew upon walls and sealing the creatures of the hunt and the souls of my people. I was illuminating it is to peer backward through a perfect circle at that ancient struggle for the visible moment of the soul. All-time vibrates to that call. Here I am.
[2026-05-17 | audiomark] The Duncan's! Damn you, I won't be! You just haven't the guts to pay the price he's asking." Monayo said. In one blurred motion, Idaho whipped his knife from its sheath and lunged at Monayo. As fast as he moved, Monayo moved faster, sidestepping, tripping Idaho and propelling him face down onto the floor. Idaho scrambled Ford, rolled and started to leap to his feet, then hesitated, realizing that he had actually tried to attack, and atread ease. Monayo was atread ease. Shock held Idaho immobile. Monayo stood unmoving, looking down at him. There was an odd look of sadness on the major domos face. "'If you're going to kill me, Duncan, you'd best do it in the back, by stealth,' Monayo said. "'You might succeed that way,' Idaho levered himself to one knee, put a foot flat on the floor but remained there still clutching his knife. Monayo had moved so quickly and with such grace so, so casually,' Idaho cleared his throat. "'How did you?' "'He has been breeding us for a long time, Duncan. Strengthening many things in us. He has bred us for speed, for intelligence, for self-restraint, for sensitivity. You're just an older model. "'Do you know what gorillas often say? They claim that their rebellions are invulnerable to economic warfare because they have no economy, that they are parasitic on those they would overthrow. The fools merely failed to assess the coin in which they must inevitably pay. The pattern is inexorable in its degenerative failures. You see it repeated in the systems of slavery, of welfare states, of cast-ridden religions, of s-
[2026-05-17 | audiomark] done to the Lord later for no better reason than the cruelty. You defend him? You, I know him best. He uses you to what ends? You tell me. He's our best hope to perpetuate. Perverts don't perpetuate. Monéo spoke an assuthing tone, but his words shook Idaho. I will tell you this only once. Homosexuals have been among the best warriors in our history. The berserkers have lost resort. They were among our best priests and priestesses. Celebrity was no accident in religions. It is also no accident that adolescents make the best soldiers. That's perversion. Quite right. Military commanders have known about the perverted displacement of sex into pain for thousands upon thousands of centuries. Is that what the great Lord Lato's doing? Still mild, Monéo said. Violence requires that you inflict pain and suffer it. How much more manageable a military force driven to this by its deepest urges. He's made a monster out of you, too. You suggested that he uses me. Monéo said, I permit this, because I know that the price he pays is much greater than what he demands of me. Even your daughter, he holds nothing back. Why should I? Oh, I think you understand this about the atreodes. The Duncan's are always good at that. The Duncan's. Damn you, I won't be. You just haven't the guts to pay the price he's asking. Monéo said. In one blurred motion, Idaho whipped his knife from its sheath and lunged at Monéo. As fast as he moved, Monéo moved faster, side-stepping, tripping Idaho and propelling him face down onto the floor. Idaho scrambled forward, rolled and started to leap to his feet, then hesitated, realizing that he had actually tried to attack an atreod.
[2026-05-17 | audiomark] We'll test Siona tomorrow. The realization of what I am occurs in the timeless awareness which does not simulate nor delude. I create a field without self or center, a field where even death becomes only an elegy. I desire no results. I merely permit this field which has no goals nor desires, no perfections nor even visions of achievements. In that field omnipresent primal awareness is all. It is the light which pours through the windows of my universe. The stolen journals. The sun came up, sending its harsh glare across the dunes. Later felt the sand beneath him as a soft caress. Only his human ears hearing the abrasive rust.
[2026-05-17 | audiomark] You, Monéo, because of what my guards tell me," Plato said. They stood in the darkness of the crypt where Monéo reminded himself some of the god-emperors' most painful discussions originated. Monéo, too, had heard reports. He had been expecting the summons all afternoon, and when it came shortly after the evening meal, a moment of terror had engulfed him. Is it about... about the Duncan, Lord? Of course it's about the Duncan! I'm told, Lord, his behavior... terminal behavior, Monéo. Monéo bowed his head. If you said, Lord, how long until that they lack so could supply us with another one? They say they have had problems, Lord. It might be as much as two years. Do you know what my guards tell me, Monéo? Monéo held his breath. If the god-emperor had learned about this latest... no, even the fish speakers were terrified by the affront. Had it been anyone but a Duncan the women would...
[2026-05-17 | audiomark] to her mouth. She grinned up at him. You know it's love, when you want to give joy and damn the consequences." He nodded. I think only of the danger to you. We are what we are," she said. What will we do? We'll cherish this, for as long as we live. You sound. So final. I am. But we'll see each other every never again, like this. We! He hurled himself across the bed and bedded his face in her breast. She stroked his hair. His voice muffled against her. He said, What if I've impregn-shh? If there's to be a child, there will be a child. I deho lifted his head and looked at her. But he'll know for sure. He'll know anyway. You think he really knows everything? Not everything. But he'll know this. How?
[2026-05-17 | audiomark] wild wed. Even as she spoke, we leaned toward Idaho. As though a magnet had found its point of critical attraction, they moved together. We pressed her cheek against his tunic, her arms around him feeling the hard muscles. Idaho rested his chin in her hair, the musk filling his senses. This is insane, he whispered. Yes, he lifted her chin and kissed her. She pressed herself against him. Neither of them doubted where this must lead. She did not resist when he lifted her off her feet and carried her into the bedroom. Only once did Idaho speak. You're not a virgin. Nor are you, love. Love, he whispered. Love, he whispered. Love, love, love. Yes, yes. In the post-coital peace, we put both hands behind her head and stretched, twisting on the rumpled bed. Idaho sat with his back to her looking out the window. Who were your other lovers, he asked. She lifted herself on one elbow. I've had no other lovers. But he turned and looked down at her. In my teens, she said, there was a young man who needed me very much. She smiled. Afterward I was very ashamed. How trusting I was. I thought I had failed the people who depended on me, but they found out and they were elated. You know, I think I was being tested. Idaho scowled. Is that how it was with me? I needed you. No, Duncan. Her features were grave. We gave joy to each other because that's how it is with love. Love, he whispered.
[2026-05-17 | audiomark] What does a gola know about such things? The changes since last I lived. I suppose you're still just a simple Xian," he said. "'Please don't sneer at me, Duncan. What are you? I am the intended bride of the God Emperor. And you'll serve him faithfully? I will.' Then there's nothing for us to talk about. Except this thing between us.' He cleared his throat. "'What thing? This attraction,' she raised a hand as he started to speak. "'I want to hurl myself into your arms to find the love and shelter I know is there. You want it too?' He held himself rigid. The God Emperor forbids, but I am here.' She took two steps toward him, the gown rippling across her body. "'Hui!' He tried to swallow in a dry throat. "'It's best you leave. Prudent, but not best,' she said. "'If he finds that you've been here, it is not my way to leave you like this.' Again she stopped his response with a lifted hand. "'I was spread and trained for just one purpose.' Her words filled him with icy caution. "'What purpose? To woo the God Emperor. Oh, he knows this. He would not change a thing about me.' Nor would I. She moved a step closer. He smelled the milky warmth of her breath. "'They made me too well,' she said. I was designed to please an atreides. Lato says his duncan is more an atreides than many born to the name. "'Lato!' "'How else should I address the one-Ile wed?' Even as she spoke, we leaned toward Idaho. As though a magnet had found its point of critical attraction, they moved together. We pressed her cheek against his tunic.
[2026-05-17 | audiomark] at the tables around him. An expression which Moide d'Eb would have recognized immediately came over Ida Ho's face, playing to the Devil's Gallery Moide d'Eb had called it. Do you know what the original attrayer Deuce always said, Ida Ho asked? There was a mocking tone in his voice. Is it pertinent? They said your liberties all vanish when you look up to any absolute ruler. Rigid with fear, Monéo leaned toward Ida Ho. Monéo's lips barely moved. His voice was little more than a whisper. Don't say such things. Because one of these women will report it? Monéo shook his head in disbelief. You are more reckless than any of the others. Really? Please, it is perilous in the extreme to take this attitude. Ida Ho heard the nervous stirring that swept through the room. He can only kill us, Ida Ho said.
[2026-05-17 | audiomark] This mischance must not continue. Anger, thin Idaho's lips, but he remained silent. Such foolishness endangers us all." Monayo said. Nori is the God Emperor's intended. Idaho tried to control his anger, but the words were a betrayal. He can't marry her. Why not? What game is he playing, Monayo? I am a messenger with a single message no more. Monayo said. Idaho's voice was low and threatening, but he confides in you. The God Emperor sympathizes with you. Monayo lied. Sympathizes. Idaho shouted the word, creating a new depth to the room's silence. Nori is a woman of obvious attractions. Monayo said. But she is not for you. The God Emperor has spoken. Idaho sneered, and there is no appeal. I see that you understand the message. Monayo said. Idaho started to push himself away from the table. What are you going? Monayo demanded. I'm going to have this out with him right now. That is certain suicide. Monayo said. Idaho glared at him, aware suddenly of the listening intensity and the women at the tables around him. An expression which Moad Deeb would have recognized immediately came over Idaho's face, playing with the devil's gallery Moad Deeb had called it. Do you know what the original attrayer Deeb's always said? Idaho asked. There was a mocking tone in his voice. Is it pertinent? They said your liberties all vanish when you look up to any absolute ruler. Rigid with fear, Monayo leaned toward Idaho. Monayo's lips barely moved. His voice was little more than a whisper. Don't say such things. Because one of these women will report it. Monayo shook his head in despair.
[2026-05-17 | audiomark] instincts, her untrained abilities at prediction. She might leap occasionally as she had done when she took his journals, but the motivation for the leap was lost in the revelation which followed. "'My father says you can be very tricky with words,' she said, and he ought to know. "'But there is knowledge you can only gain by participating in it. There's no way to learn it by standing off and looking and talking.' That's the kind of thing he means,' she said. "'You're quite right,' he agreed. It's not logical. But it is a light, an eye which can see but does not see itself.' "'I'm tired of talking,' she said. As am I, and he thought, "'I have seen enough, done enough.' She is wide open to her doubts, how vulnerable they are in their ignorance. "'You haven't convinced me of anything,' she said. That was not the purpose of this meeting.
[2026-05-17 | audiomark] rules which had to be met. The rules added up to great necessity. For a few moments while he lay there he could shed the loads of the golden path. Monéo, good and reliable Monéo, would see that Siona arrived promptly just at nightfall. Later had a full day in which to relax and think, to play and pretend that he possessed no cares, to drink up the raw sustenance of the earth in a feeding frenzy which he could never indulge in at on or at the citadel. In those places he was required to confine himself to fervent burrowings through narrow passages where only pressient caution kept him from encountering water pockets. Here, though, he could race through the sand and across it, feed and grow strong. Sand crunched beneath him as he rolled, flexing his body and pure animal enjoyment. He could feel his wormself being restored, an electric sensation which sent messages of health all through him. The sun was well above the horizon now, painting a golden line up the side of the tower. There was the smell of bitter dust in the air and an odour of distant, spiny plants which had responded to the morning's traced you. Gently at first, then more rapidly, he moved out in a wide circle around the tower, thinking about Siona as he went. There could be no more delays. She had to be tested. Mio knew this as well as later did. Just that morning Monéo had said, Lord, that is terrible violence in her. She has the beginnings of a drennel in addiction. Later had said, it's cold, turkey time. Cold, what, Lord? It's an ancient expression. It means she must be subjected to a complete withdrawal. She must go through a necessity to be taken. Oh, I see. For once later realized Monéo did see. Monéo had gone through his own cold turkey time. The young generally are incapable of me.
[2026-05-17 | audiomark] Then Harry the day, she said, that's what I'm about," Monayo said. He turned and harried away down the long haul to his own area of the citadel. God's, the fish-speakers were becoming as dangerous as the God Emperor. That stupid Duncan! He put us all in peril! And we, Nori, warts to be done about her. The pattern of Monarchies and similar systems has a message of value for all political forms. My memories assure me that governments of any kind could profit from this message. Governments can be useful to the governed only so long as inherent tendencies toward tyranny are restrained. Monarchies have some good features beyond their strong qualities. They can reduce the size and parasitic nature of the management bureaucracy. They can make speedy decisions when necessary. They fit an ancient human demand for a parental, tribal, feudal hierarchy where every person knows his place. It is valuable to know your place even if that place is temporary. It is gone to be held in place against your will. This is why I teach about tyranny in the best possible way. By example, even though you read these words after a passage of eons, my tyranny will not be forgotten. My golden path assures this. Knowing my message, I expect you to be exceedingly careful about the powers you delegate to any government. The Stolen Journals They are prepared with patient care for his first private meeting with Sionna since her childhood management to the fish-speaker schools in the festival city.
[2026-05-17 | audiomark] long until there could be a replacement. At least a year, Lord. Shall I inquire as to a specific date? Do it today. He may hear about it, Lord. The previous one did. I do not want it to happen this way, Monéau. I know, Lord, and I dare not speak of this to Noree. Later said, the Duncan is not for her. Yet I cannot hurt her." This last was almost a whale. Monéau stood in ord silence. Can't you see this? Later demanded. Monéau helped me. I see that it is different with Noree. Monéau said. But I do not know what to do. What is different? Later's voice had a penetrating quality which cut right through Monéau. I mean, your attitude toward her Lord. It is different from anything I have ever seen in you. Monéau noted then the first signs, twitching in the God Emperor's hands, the beginning glaze in the eyes. God's. The worm is coming. Monéau felt totally exposed. A simple flick of the great body would crush Monéau against the wall. I must appeal to the human in him. Lord, Monéau said, I have read the accounts and heard your own words about your marriage to your sister, Ghanima. If only she were with me now, later said. She was never your mate, Lord. What are you suggesting? Later demanded. The twitching of later's hands had become a spasmotic vibration. She was. I mean, Lord. That Ghanima was Harka Ladars, mate. Of course she was. All of you were traitors are descended from them. Is there something you have not told me, Lord? Is it possible? That is, with we Noree. Did you mate? Later's hands shook so strongly, Monéau wondered that their owner did not know it. The glazing of the great blue eyes.
[2026-05-17 | audiomark] There, I've said it. Is that why you returned from the Citadel? Yes. Will you go back to the Citadel now? What other frontier is the—? Very good, Duncan. Your anger knows even when your reason does not. We goes to the Citadel tonight. I will join her there tomorrow. I want to get to know her better," I do her said. You will avoid her, later said. That is an order. We is not for you. I've always known there were witches, Ida Ho said. Your grandmother was one. He turned on his heel and not asking leave strode back the way he had come. How like a little boy he is, later thought, watching the stiffness in Ida Ho's back. The oldest man in our universe and the youngest, both in one flesh.
[2026-05-17 | audiomark] Is there some frontier? I'd have asked. Is there some frontier where I could go and never again be a part of this? If there is to be any frontier, you must help me create it." Later said. There is now no place to go where others of us cannot follow and find you. Then you won't let me go. Go if you wish. Others of you have tried it. I tell you there is no frontier, no place to hide. Right now, as it has been for a long, long time, humankind is like a single-celled creature bound together by a dangerous glue. No new planets? No strange. Oh, we grow, but we do not separate. Because you hold us together, he accused. I do not know if you can understand this Duncan, but if there is a frontier, any kind of frontier, then what lies behind you cannot be more important than what lies ahead. You're the past. No, Monanno is the past. He is quick to raise the traditional aristocratic barriers against all frontiers. You must understand the power of those barriers. They not only enclose planets and land on those planets. They enclose ideas. They repress change. You repress change. He will not deviate. Later thought. One more try. The surest sign that an aristocracy exists is the discovery of barriers against change. Curtains of iron or steel or stone or of any substance which excludes the new, the different. I know there must be a frontier somewhere. I do know. I do know. You're hiding it. I hide nothing of frontiers. I want frontiers. I want surprises. They come right up against it. Later thought. Then they refuse to enter. Trude to this prediction, I do know, thoughts darted off on a new tag. Did you really have face chances to perform at your betrothal? Later felt a surge of anger, followed immediately by a rye enjoyment of the fact that he could experience...
[2026-05-17 | audiomark] out. The ultimate aristocrat dies within me, and he thought, privilege becomes arrogance, arrogance promotes injustice, the seeds of ruin blossom. "'Maybe I will not attend your wedding,' Idaho said. I never thought of myself as an aristocrat, but you were. You were the aristocrat of the sword,' Paul was better,' Idaho said. Idaho spoke in the voice of Moir Deb. "'Because you taught me,' he resumed his normal tones. The aristocrats unspoken duty to teach, and sometimes by horrible example. And he thought, pride of birth trails out into penury and the weaknesses of interbreeding, the ways open for pride of wealth and accomplishment. Enter the new Volrish, riding to power as the Harkinans did on the backs of the ancient regime.
[2026-05-17 | audiomark] Idaho's. What did they think when they entered this room? Did they feel this dislocation, this rejection? Just a little extra effort." He felt dizzy and wondered if he were going to faint. He's something wrong, Duncan. It was later as most reasonable and calming tone. "'It's not real,' Idaho said. I don't belong here.' Later chose to misunderstand. But my guard tells me you came here of your own accord. That you flew back from the citadel and demanded an immediate audience. I mean here! Now! In this time, but I need you. "'For what?' Look around you, Duncan. The ways you can help me are so numerous that you could not do them all. But your women won't let me fight. Every time I want to go, where do you question that you're more valuable?'
[2026-05-17 | audiomark] fur to human garments, huntsmen to herdsmen, the long steps up the ladder of awareness, and now they must make another long step, longer even than the ancient ones. You indulge in idle thoughts? Monayo accused. I have time for idle thoughts. That's one of the most interesting things about my existence as a singular multitude. But, Lord, there are matters which demander. You'd be surprised what comes of idle thinking, Monayo. I've never minded spending an entire day on things a human would not bother with for one minute. Why not? With my life expectancy of some four thousand years what's one day more or less? How much time does one human life count? A million minutes? I've already experienced almost that many days. Monayo stood frozen in silence, diminished by this comparison. He felt his own lifetime reduced to a moat in late-o's eye. The source of the illusion did not escape him. Words, words, words. Monayo thought. Words are often almost useless in sentient affairs, later said. Monayo held his breathing to a shallow minimum. The Lord can read thoughts. Throughout our history, later said, the most potent use of words has been to round out some transcendent event, giving that event a place in the accepted chronicles, explaining the event in such a way that ever afterward we can use those words and say, this is what it meant. Monayo felt beaten down by these words, terrified by unspoken things they might make him think. That's how events get lost in history, later said. After a long silence Monayo ventured, you have not answered my question, Lord. The wedding? How tired he sounds? Later thought? How utterly defeated? Later spoke briskly. I have never needed your good...
[2026-05-17 | audiomark] later watched Monéo wrestle with doubts his thoughts utterly transparent. In that moment, Monéo fits so precisely into his human niche that later wanted to hug him. He has the full spectrum. Doubt to trust, love to hate, everything. All of those dear qualities which come to fruition in the warmth of emotion, in the willingness to spend yourself on life. Why is he accepting this? Monéo asked. Later smiled. Monéo cannot doubt me. He must doubt others. I admit it is not a conventional union. She is a primate, and I no longer amfully primate. Again, Monéo wrestled with things he could only feel and not express. Watching Monéo, later felt the flow of an observational awareness, a thought process which occurred so rarely, but with such vivid implication when it did occur, that later did not stir unless he caused a ripple in the flow.
[2026-05-17 | audiomark] she is away from my side if I had no other proof of the emotion this would serve. Monéo fell silent, obviously touched by Lato's evocation of loneliness. Surely Monéo could understand the absence of the intimate sharing in love. His expression betrayed as much. For the first time in a long while Lato noted how much Monéo had aged. It happens so suddenly to them. Lato thought. It made Lato deeply aware of how much he cared for Monéo. I should not let attachments happen to me, but I cannot help it. Especially now that we is here. They will laugh at you and make obscene gestures. Monéo said. That is a good thing. How can it be good? This is something new. Our task has always been to bring the new into balance and with it modify behavior while not suppressing survival. Even so, how can you welcome this? The making of obscenities, Lato asked. What is the opposite of obscenity? Monéo's eyes went wide with a sudden questioning awareness. He had seen the action of many polarities. The thing made known by its opposite. The thing stands out against a background which defines it. Lato thought. Surely Monéo will see this. It's too dangerous, Monéo said. The ultimate verdict of conservatism. Monéo was not convinced. A deep sigh racked him. I must remember not to take away their doubts. Lato thought. That's how I failed my fish-speakers in the plaza. The Xians are holding on to the ragged end of human doubts. We is the evidence of that. A disturbance sounded in the anterum. Lato sealed the portal against impetuous intrusions. My Duncan has come, he said. He's probably heard about your-
[2026-05-17 | audiomark] You know, Monéau, I think that only the old pantheists had the right idea about deities, mortal foibles in immortal guise. Monéau raised both arms to the heavens. I saw the looks on their faces! He lowered his arms. It'll be all over the empire within two weeks. Surely it'll take longer than that. If your denim is needed one thing to bring them all together, the defiling of the god is an ancient human tradition, Monéau. Why should I be an exception? Monéau tried to speak, but he could not utter a word. He stamped down along the edge of the pit which held Lato's cart, stamped back and resumed his form of position glaring into Lato's face. If I am to help you, I need an explanation. Monéau said, why are you doing this? Emotions. Monéau's mouth formed the word, without speaking it. They have come over me just when I thought them gone forever, Lato said. How sweet these last few sips of humanity are. With we? But you sure it cannot? Memories of emotions are never enough, Monéau. Are you telling me that you are indulging yourself in indulgence? Certainly not. But the tripod upon which eternity swings is composed of flesh and thought and emotion. I felt that I had been reduced to flesh and thought. She has worked some kind of witchery. Monéau accused. Of course she has. And how grateful I am for it. If we deny the need for thought Monéau as some do, we lose the powers of reflection. We cannot define what our sense is report. If we deny the flesh, we unwheel the vehicle which bears us, but if we deny emotion, we lose all touch with our internal universe. It was emotions which I missed the most. I insist, Lord, that you are making me angry, Monéau.
[2026-05-17 | audiomark] But when you know they are wrong, do you believe in me? Yes. And if someone tried to convince you that I am the greatest evil of all time, I would become very angry. I would... She broke off. Reason is valuable. He said, only when it performs against the wordless physical background of the universe. Her brows drew together in thought. It fascinated later to sense the arousal of her awareness. Ah! She breathed the word. No reasoning creature will ever again be able to deny the later experience, he said, I see your understanding begin. Beginnings, they are what life is all about. She nodded. No arguments, he thought, when she sees the tracks, she follows them to find where they will lead. As long as there is...
[2026-05-17 | audiomark] Siona, will she? Or now she is only a rebel. As to St. Hood we will let her decide. Perhaps she will only do what she was bred to do. What is that, Lord? Stop calling me Lord," he said. We will be worm and wife. Call me later if you wish. Lord interferes. Yes, Lord. Later. But what is? Siona was bred to rule. There is danger in such breeding. When you rule you gain knowledge of power. This can lead into impetuous irresponsibility, into painful excesses, and that can lead to the terrible destroyer, wild hedonism. Siona would, all we know about Siona, is that she can remain dedicated to a particular performance, to the pattern which fills her senses. She is necessarily an aristocrat, but aristocracy looks mostly to the past. That's a failure. We don't see much of my part.
[2026-05-17 | audiomark] Will you explain it to me, Lord? When I am gone, they must call me Shaitan, the Emperor of Gehenna. The wheel must turn and turn and turn along the golden path. Lord, could the anger not be directed at me alone? I would not know. The Xians made you much more perfectly than they thought. I truly love you. I cannot help it. I do not wish to cause you pain! The words were wrenched from her. What's done is done. Do not mourn it. Help me to understand. The hate which will blossom after I am gone. That too will fade into the inevitable past. A long time will pass. Then on a far distant day my journals will be found. She was shaken by the seeming shift of...
[2026-05-17 | audiomark] from me. Then tell her that while she is on Ix, she must locate Mulkey. She is to report that location to our local garrison on Ix. Mulkey, with a former Ixian ambassador, the same. He is not to remain alive and free. You will inform our garrison commander on Ix that she is to make close liaison with Antiac, providing every necessary assistance. Mulkey is to be brought here to me or executed, whichever our commander finds necessary. The guard messenger nodded, shadows lurching around her features where she stood in the ring of light around Lato's face. She did not ask for a repetition of the orders. Each of his close guards had been trained as a human recorder. They could repeat Lato's words exactly, even the intonations, and would never forget what they had heard him say. When the messenger had gone, Lato sent a private signalive inquiry, and within seconds had a response from Naila. The Ixian device within...
[2026-05-17 | audiomark] tickle his ribbed body, then the inner surge of heat, followed by a venting belch of oxygen at his tail. Instinct tucked his face deep into its cowl and folded his arms into the protective depths of his front segment. The worm body took over, arching and flailing, rolling like an insane wheel, lashing out on all sides. Blood lubricated the street. Blood was buffered water to his body, but death released the water. His flailing body slipped and slithered in it. The water igniting blue smoke from every flexion place where it slipped through the sand trout skin. This filled him with water agony which ignited more violence in the great flailing body. At later's first lashing out, the fish speaker perimeter fell back. An alert Bashar saw the opportunity now presented. She shouted above the battle noise, pick off the stragglers, the ranks of guardian women rushed forward. It was bloody play among the fish speakers for a few...
[2026-05-15 | audiomark] irritation. These had been his limits. But now, at a threat to we nor he, fury. Reflection caused him to modify his initial command, but not before some fish speakers had raced from the royal presence, their most violent desires released by what they had seen in their lord. God is furious, some of them shouted. The second blast caught some of the fish speakers emerging into the plaza, limiting the spread of later's modified command and igniting more violence. A third explosion located near the first one sent later himself into action. He propelled his cart like a berserk juggernaut out of his resting chamber into the Xian lift and surged to the surface. Later emerged at the edge of the plaza to find a seed of chaos, lighted by thousands of free-floating glow globes released by his fish speakers. The central stage of the plaza had been shattered, leaving only the plasteel base intact beneath the paved surface. Broken pieces of mason relay all around mixed with dead and wounded. In the direction of the Xian embassy directly across the plaza from him there was a wild surging of combat. Where is my Duncan? Later bellowed. A guard Bashar came racing across the plaza to his side where she reported through panting breaths. We have taken him to the citadel, Lord. What is happening over there? Later demanded, pointing at the battle outside the Xian embassy. The rebels and the Tlaelaksu are attacking the Xian embassy, Lord. They have explosives. Even as she spoke, another blast erupted in front of the embassy's shattered facade. It saw bodies twisting in the air, arching outward and falling at the perimeter of a bright flash which left an orange after image, studied with black dots. With no thought of consequences, Lato shifted his cart onto suspensors and sent it bulleting across the plaza, a hurtling behemoth which sucked glow-globes into...
[2026-05-15 | audiomark] to observe and worship the holiness of the God-lato. You? Me. But you told me right at the beginning that, you think I don't believe in my own Godhead? Be careful, Duncan. I, to his voice, came with angry flatness. You told me that one of my jobs was to help keep your secret, that you—you don't know my secret, that you're a tyrant? No gods have more power than tyrants, Duncan. I don't like what I'm hearing. When has a neutrality ever asked you to like your job? You asked me to command your fish-speakers, who are judge, jury, and executioner? Idaho broke off. And what? Idaho remained silent. The Lato stared across the chill distance between them so short a space yet so far. It's like playing a fish on a line. Lato thought.
[2026-05-15 | audiomark] loyalty to the Atreides implicitly, without question, then what's this talk of corruption and testing? You were the one who accused me of having a police force. Police always observe that criminals prosper. It takes a pretty dull policeman to misdefect that the position of authority is the most prosperous criminal position available. I'd her wet his lips with his tongue and stared at later with obvious puzzlement. But the moral training of, I mean the legal, the prisons to what good are laws and prisons when the breaking of a law is not a sin. I'd her cocked his head slightly to the right. Are you trying to tell me that your damned religion is punishment of sins can be quite extravagant? I'd her hooked a thumb over his shoulder toward the world outside the door. All this talk about death penalties, that flogging and I try to dispense with casual laws and prisons wherever possible. You have to have some prisons, do I? Prisons are needed only to provide the illusion that courts and police are effective, they're kind of job insurance. I'd her turned slightly and thrust a pointing finger toward the door through which he had entered the small room. You've got whole planets that are nothing but prisons. I guess you could think of anywhere as a prison if that's the way your illusions go? Illusions. I'd her dropped his hand to his side and stood dumbfounded. Yes, you talk of prisons and police and legalities. The perfect illusions behind which a prosperous power structure can operate while observing quite accurately that it is above its own laws. And you think crimes can be dealt with by not crimes, Duncan, sins. So you think your religion can have you noted the primary sins? What? Attempting to corrupt a member of my government and corruption by a member of my government? And what is this corruption? Essentially
[2026-05-13 | audiomark] knew that it will be a terrible burden. Will it make your burden lighter, Lord?" Not lighter, but easier to accept. Then I will share. Tell me, Lord. Not yet we. You must be patient a while longer. She swallowed her disappointment, sighing. It's only that my Dunkin' Ida-ho grows impatient, later said. I must deal with him. She glanced backward, but the small room remained empty. Do you wish me to leave now? I wish you would never leave me. She stared at him, noting the intensity of his regard, a hungry emptiness in his expression which filled her with sadness. Lord, why do you tell me your secrets? I would not ask you to be the bride of a God. Her eyes went wide with shock. Do not answer, he said. Barely moving her head, she sent her gaze along the shadowy length of his body. Do not search for parts of me which no longer exist, he said. Some forms of physical intimacy are no longer possible for me. She returned her attention to his cowled face, noting the pink skin of his cheeks, the intensely human effect of his features in that alien frame. If you require children, he said, I would ask only that you let me choose the father, but I have not yet asked you anything. A voice was faint. Lord, I do not know what to- I will return to the citadel soon, he said. You will come to me there and we will talk. I will tell you then about the thing which I prevent. I am frightened, Lord. More frightened than I ever imagined I could be. Do not fear me. I can be nothing but gentle with-
[2026-05-13 | audiomark] as Idaho marched stoically ahead, women reached from all sides to touch him, to touch later, or merely to touch the royal cart. Idaho felt the restrained passion in their touch, and knew the deepest fear in his experience. The problem of leadership is inevitably, who will play God? Mwaddeeb from the oral history. Weenori followed a young fish-speaker guide down a wide ramp which spiraled into the depths of own. The summons from the Lord Lato had come in late evening of the festival's third day, interrupting a development which had taxed her ability to maintain emotional balance. Her first assistant, Othway Yake, was not a pleasant man. A sandy-haired creature with a long, narrow face and eyes which never looked long at anything, and never ever looked directly into the eyes of someone he addressed. Yake had presented her with a single sheet of Memorace paper containing what he described as, a summation of recently reported violence in the festival city. Standing close to the desk at which she was seated, he had stared down somewhere to her left and said, fish-speakers are slaughtering face dancers throughout the city. He did not appear particularly moved by this. Why, she demanded. It is said that the Bene Tlilax made an attempt on the God Emperor's life. A thrill of fear shot through her. She sat back and glanced around the Embassadorial Office, a round room with a single half-circle desk which concealed the controls for many Xian devices beneath its highly polished surface. The room was a darkly important appearing place.
[2026-05-13 | audiomark] foreign to women Duncan. You ask for a sex-rooted behavioral difference? There's one. Stop changing the subject. I do not change it. Reap was always the payoff in male military conquests. Males did not have to abandon any of their adolescent fantasies while engaging in rape. I'd heard recalled the glaring anger which had come over him at this thrust. My horis tame the males. Later said, it is domestication. I think that females know from eons of necessity. I'd host their wordlessly at later's cowl-d face. To tame, later said, to fit into some orderly survival pattern. Women learned it at the hands of men. Now men learned it at the hands of women. But you said, my horis often submit to a form of rape at first only to convert this into a deep and binding mutual dependence. Damn it. Your binding, Duncan. Binding. I don't feel bound to education takes time. You are the ancient norm against which the new can be measured. Later's words momentarily flushed Idaho of all emotion except a deep sense of loss. My horis teach maturation. Later said, they know that they must supervise the maturation of males. Through this they find their own maturation. Eventually, horis merge into wives and mothers, and we wean the violent drives away from their adolescent fixations. I'll have to see it to believe it. You will see it at the great sharing. As he stood beside later in the hall of Sianok, Idaho admitted to himself that he had seen something of enormous power, something which might create the kind of human universe later's words projected. Later was restoring the christ's knife to its box, returning the box to its compartment in the bed of the royal cart.
[2026-05-13 | audiomark] He stared at it as though the image in his eyes might reproduce the original owner. Lato lifted the blade and held it high, revealing the elegant curve and milky iridescence. The talisman of our lives, Lato said. The women remained silent, rapidly attentive. The knife of more deep, Lato said. The tooth of Shaikholud. Will Shaikholud come again? The response was a subdued murmur made deeply powerful by contrast with the previous shouting. Yes, Lord! Ideho returned his attention to the enraptured faces of the fish-speakers. Who is Shaikholud, Lato asked? Again that deep murmur. You, Lord! Ideho nodded to himself. Lato was undeniable evidence that Lato had tapped into a monstrous reservoir of power never before unleashed in quite this way. Lato had said it, but the words were a meaningless noise compared to the thing seen and felt in this great hall. Lato's words came back to Ideho, though, as if they had waited for this moment to cloak themselves in their true meaning. Ideho recalled that they had been in the crypt, that dank and shadowy place which Lato seemed to find so attractive, but which Ideho found so repellent, the dust of centuries there, and the odors of ancient decay. I have been forming this human society, shaping it for more than three thousand years, opening a door out of adolescence for the entire species, Lato had said. Nothing you say explains a female army, Ideho had protested. Rep. is foreign to women Duncan. You ask for a sex-rooted behavioral difference? There's one. Stop changing the subject. I do not change it. Rep. was always the payoff in male military con...
[2026-05-13 | audiomark] As he looked out over the masked women in the Great Hall, Idaho could not deny the focus of leadership. He saw also that part of this adulation was directed at his own person. The temptation in this held him fixated. Anything he wanted from them. Anything. The latent power in this Great Hall was explosive. This realization forced him into a deeper questioning of later's earlier words. Later had said something about exploding violence. Even as he watched the women at their silent prayer, Idaho recalled what later had said. Men are susceptible to class fixations. They create layered societies. The layered society is an ultimate invitation to violence. It does not fall apart. It explodes. Women never do this? Not unless they are almost completely male dominated, or locked into a male role model. The sexes can't be that different, but they are. Women make common cause based on their sex, a cause which transcends class and caste. That is why I let my women hold the reins. Idaho was forced to admit that these preying women held the reins. What part of that power would he pass into my hands? Idaho found himself trembling with it. With chilling abruptness he realized that this must be Latos' intention. To tempt me. On the floor of the Great Hall the women finished their prayer and lifted their gaze to Latos. Idaho felt that he had never before seen such rapture in human faces, not in the ecstasy of sex, not in glorious victory at arms. No where had he seen anything to approach this intense adulation. Duncan Idaho stands beside me today. Latos said, Duncan is here to declare his loyalty that all may hear it.
[2026-05-13 | audiomark] Idaho recognized these women as the ones leaving the immediate service of the fish speakers. Some would become pre-stesses and some would spend full time as mothers. But none would truly leave later service. As he looked down on the children, Idaho thought how the buried memory of this experience must be impressed on any of the male children. They would carry the mystery of it throughout their lives, a memory lost to consciousness but always present, shading responses from this moment onward. The last of the newcomers came to a stop below later and looked up at him. The other women in the hall now lifted their faces and focused on later. Idaho glanced left and right. The white-clad women filled the space below the ledge for at least 500 metres in both directions. Some of them lifted their children toward later. The awe and submission was something absolute. If later ordered it, Idaho sensed, these women would smash their babies to death against the ledge. They would do anything. Lato lowered his front segments onto the cart. A gentle, rippling motion. He peered down benignly and his voice came as a soft caress. I give you the reward which your faith and service have earned. The cross and it shall be given. The entire hall reverberated to the response, it shall be given. What is mine is thine, later said. What is mine is thine, the women shouted. Share with me now, later said, the silent prayer for my intercession in all things that humankind may never end. As one, every head in the hall bowed. The white clad women cradled their children close, looking down at them. Idaho felt the silent unity, a force which sought to enter him and take him over.
[2026-05-13 | audiomark] My beloveds," later said, his voice boomed out over the upturned faces, carried to the farthest corners by subtle, yixian amplifiers concealed in the royal cart. The steaming images of the women's faces filled Idaho with memory of later's warning, incur their wrath at your mortal peril. It was easy to believe that warning in this place. One word from later, and these women would tear an offender to pieces. They would not question. They would act. Idaho began to feel a new appreciation of these women as an army. Personal peril would not stop them. They served God. The royal cart creaked slightly as later arched his front segments upward, lifting his head. You are the keepers of the faith," later said. They replied as one voice, "'Lord, we obey.'" "'In me you live without end,' later said. "'We are the infinite,' they shouted. "'I love you as I love no others,'' later said. "'Love,' they screamed. Idaho shuddered. "'I give you my beloved Duncan,'' later said. "'Love,' they screamed. Idaho felt his whole body trembling. He felt that he might collapse from the weight of this adulation. He wanted to run away, and he wanted to stay and accept this. There was power in this room. Power!' In a lower voice later said, "'Change the guard.' The women bowed their heads, a single movement unhesitating. From off to Idaho's right a line of women in white gowns appeared. They marched into the open space below the ledge, and Idaho noted that some of them carried babies and small children, none more than a year or two old. From the outline explanation provided him earlier, Idaho recognized these women as the ones leaving the immediate service of the fish speakers. Some would become pre-stesses, and some would spend full time.
[2026-05-13 | audiomark] up the tunnel. Yes, it is time, later said. We must not keep the women waiting. March close ahead of me Duncan, and I will answer your questions about Sianok. Obedient, because he could think of no suitable alternative, Idaho turned on his heel and let off the procession. He heard the cart creak into motion behind him, the faint footsteps of the escort following. The cart fell silent with an abruptness which jerked Idaho's attention around. The reason was immediately apparent. "'You're on the suspense,' he said, returning his attention to the front. I have retracted the wheels because the women will press close around me,' later said. We can't crush their feet. "'What is Sianok? What is it really?' Idaho asked. I have told you. It is the great sharing. Do I smell spice? Your nostrils are sensitive. There is a small amount of melange in the wafers.' Idaho shook his head. Trying to understand this event, Idaho had asked later directly at the first opportunity after a rival in on, what is the feast of Sianok? We share a waffer. No more. Even I partake. Is it like the orange Catholic ritual? Oh no, it is not my flesh. It is the sharing. They are reminded that they are only female as you are only male, but I am all. They share with the all. Idaho had not liked the tone of this. Only male? Do you know who they lampoon at the feast, Duncan? Who? Men who have offended them. Listen to them when they talk softly among themselves. Idaho had taken this as a warning. Don't defend the fish, speakers. You incur their wrath at your mortal peril. Now is he marched ahead of later in the tunnel?
[2026-05-13 | audiomark] not he's studd, Idaho muttered. That's one thing he'll have to understand. As each day passes you become increasingly unreal, more alien and remote from what I find myself to be on that new day. I am the only reality, and as you differ from me, you lose reality. The more curious I become, the less curious are those who worship me. Religion suppresses curiosity. What I do subtracts from the worshipper. Thus it is that eventually I will do nothing, giving it all back to frightened people who will find themselves on that day alone and forced to act for themselves. The stolen journals. It was a sound like no other, the sound of a waiting mob.
[2026-05-13 | audiomark] They came to the intersection with the street from the square. Idaho turned away from the square, striding briskly up to the end where the village merged into gardens and orchards. He felt insulated by shock, his awareness recoiling from too much that could not be assimilated. A low wall blocked his path. He climbed over it, heard Sionna follow. Trees around the moron bloom, white flowers with orange centers where dark brown insects worked. The air was full of insect buzzing and a floral scent which reminded Idaho of jungle flowers from Catadana. He stopped when he reached the crest of a hill where he could turn and look back down at Gygóa's rectangle in neatness. The roofs were flat and black. Sionna sat down on the thick grass at the hilltop and embraced her knees. That was not what you intended, was it? Idaho asked. She shook her head and he saw that she was close to tears. What do you hate him so much, he asked? We have no lives of our own. Idaho looked down at the village. Are there many villages like this one? This is the shape of the worm's empire. What's wrong with it? Nothing. If that's all you want. You're saying that this is all he allows. This, a few market cities, on. I'm told that even planetary capitals are just big villages. And I repeat, what's wrong with that? It's a prison. Then leave it. Where? How? You think we can just get on a guild ship and go anywhere else anywhere we want? She pointed down toward Gygóa where the thopto could be seen off to one side. The fish speakers seated on the grass nearby. Our jaylers won't let us leave. They leave, Idaho said. They go anywhere they want. Anywhere the worm sends them. She pressed her face against her knees and spoke. Her voice muffled. What was it like in...
[2026-05-13 | audiomark] rather high cheekbones, a flat line across the brows. He wore a faded blue single suit which portrayed the effects of much laundering, but obviously had begun as a garment of excellent material. It had the look of punji cotton woven in a cord lock that did not permit even the frayed edges to unravel. "'You're not my father,' the child said. Wirling away he raced back up the street and vanished around a corner. I'd a hoe turned and scowled at Sionna, almost afraid to ask the question, was that a child of my predecessor? He knew the answer without asking. That familiar face, the genotype, carried true. Myself as a child. Realisation left him with an empty feeling, a sense of frustration. What is my responsibility?' Sionna put both hands over her face and hunched her shoulders. It had not happened at all the way she had imagined it might. She felt betrayed by her own desires for revenge. Ida, who was not simply a gola, something alien and unworthy of consideration. She had felt him thrown against her in the thuopter, had seen the obvious emotions on his face. And that child. What happened to my predecessor, Ida, who asked? His voice came out flat and accusatory. She lowered her hands. There was suppressed rage in his face. "'We are not certain,' she said. But he entered the citadel one day, and never emerged. That was his child? She nodded. "'You're sure you did not kill my predecessor?' "'I!'' She shook her head, shocked by the doubts, the latent accusation in him. That child? That is the reason we came here?' She swallowed. "'Yes.' What am I supposed to do about him?' She shrugged, feeling
[2026-05-13 | audiomark] My daughter is safely out of the way." Adding at the end of the message, I commend her to your care. In the thopter, Siona had not responded to Idaho's questions. Even now she sat in silence beside him. She reminded him of himself in those first bitter days when he had vowed vengeance against the Harkinans. He wondered at her bitterness. What drove her? Not knowing why, Idaho found himself comparing Siona with Hui nori. It had not been easy to encounter Hui, but he had managed it in spite of the important demands of fish-speakers that he attend to duties elsewhere. Gentle. That was the word for Hui. She acted from a core of unchanging gentleness which was, in its own way, a thing of enormous power. He found this intensely attractive. I must see more of her. For now though he had to contend with the silent silence of Siona seated beside him. Well, silence could be met with silence. Idaho peered down at the passing landscape. Here in there he could see the clustered lights of villages winking out as the sunlight approached. The desert of the Surrier lay far behind, and this was land that by its appearance might never have been parched. Some things do not change very much, he thought. They are merely taken from one place and reformed in another place. This landscape reminded him of Caledans' lush gardens, and made him wonder what had become of the verdant planet, where the atreides had lived for so many generations before coming to Dune. He could identify narrow roads, market roads, with a scattered traffic of vehicles drawn by six-legged animals which he guessed were forces. Siona had said that the forces tailored to the needs of such a landscape, for the main work beasts not only are here.
[2026-05-13 | audiomark] A mysterious line with its fair share of fools. Distraction is what I need, he thought. Would it be a tour through sexual dalliances and exploits, then? You have no idea what internal orgies are available to me. I am the ultimate voyeur, participant, or participants, and observer, or observers. Ignorance and misunderstandings about sexuality have caused so much distress. How abysmally narrow we have been, how miserly! Later knew he could not make that choice, not this night, not with we out there in his city. Would he choose a review of warfare, then? Which Napoleon was the greater coward, he asked his imaginary visitor? I will not reveal it, but I know. Oh, yes, I know. Where can I go? With all of the past open to me, where can I go? The brothels, the atrocities, the tyrants, the acrobatts, nudists, surgeons, male hares, musicians, magicians, angenciaries, priests, artisans, priestesses. Are you aware, he asked his imaginary visitor, that the Hula preserves an ancient sign language which once belonged only to males? You've never heard of the Hula? Of course. Who dances it anymore? Dancers have preserved many things, though, the translations have been lost, but I know them. One whole night I was a series of caliphs, moving eastward and westward with Islam, a traverse of centuries. I will not bore you with the details. Begone now, visitor. How seductive it is, he thought, this call of the siren which would have me live only in the past, but how useless that past now thanks to the damnable exeons. How boring the past when we is here.
[2026-05-13 | audiomark] as good, but not better. Would female intellectuals be the proper choice for this night? Grandmother Jessica had been one of the best. Experience told him that someone as close to him as Jessica would not be the proper antidote for his present tensions. The search would have to venture much farther. He imagined then describing such a safari to some all-struck visitor, a totally imaginary visitor because none would dare question him about such a holy matter. I course backward down the flight of ancestors, hunting along the tributaries, darting into nooks and crannies. You would not recognize many of their names, who has ever heard of Norma Senva. I have lived her. A lived her? His imaginary visitor asked. Of course. Why else would one keep ones ancestors around? You think a man designed the first guild ship? Your history books told you it was all really a Sven port? They lied. It was his mistress, Norma. She gave him the design along with five children. He thought his ego would take no less. In the end, the knowledge that he had not really fulfilled his own image, that was what destroyed him. You have lived him to? Naturally, and I have traversed the far wanderings of the Fremen. Through my father's line and the others, I have gone right back to the house of Atrius, such an illustrious line with its fair share of fools. Distraction is what I need, he thought. Would it be a tour through sexual dalleances and exploits, then? You have no idea what internal orgies are available to me. I am the ultimate voyeur, participant, or participants, and observer, or observers. Ignorance and misunderstandings about sexuality have caused so much distress. How?
[2026-05-13 | audiomark] The menagerit sisters could take such safaris, striking inward along the axis of memories, back, back to the very limits of cellular awareness, or stopping by a wayside to revel in a sophisticated sensory delight. Once, after the death of a particularly superb Duncan, he had toward great musical performances preserved in his memories. Mozart had tired him quickly. Tentious, but Bach? Ah, Bach! Later remembered the joy of it. I sat at the organ and let the music wrench me. Only three times in all memory had there been an equal to Bach, but even Likalo was not better, as good, but not better. Would female intellectuals be the proper choice for this night? And mother Jessica had been one of the best. Experience told him that someone is close to him as Jessica.
[2026-05-13 | audiomark] few trusted fish-speaker guards at the portals. He did not sleep, his mind whirled with necessities and disappointments. Huiii. Huiii. He knew why Huii nori had been sent to him now. How well he knew. My most secret secret is exposed. They had discovered his secret. Huii was the evidence of it. He thought desperate thoughts. Could this terrible metamorphosis be reversed? Could he return to a human state? Not possible. Even if it were possible, the process would take him just as long as it had taken to reach this point. Where would Huiii be in more than three thousand years? Dry dust and bones in the crypt. I could breed something like her and repair that one for me, but that would not be my gentle Huiii. And what of the golden path while he indulged in such selfish gold? To hell with the golden path? Have these folly-bound idiots ever thought once of me? Not once! But that was not true. Huiii thought of him. She shared his torture. These were thoughts of madness, and he tried to put them away while his senses reported the soft movement of the guards and the flow of water beneath his chamber. When I made this choice, what were my expectations? How the mob within laughed at that question. Did he not have a task to complete? Was that not the very essence of the agreement which kept the mob in check? You have a task to complete, they said. You have but one purpose. Single purpose is the mark of the fanatic, and I am not a fanatic. You must be cynical and cruel. You cannot break the trust. Why not? Who took the oath? You did. You chose this course. Expectation.
[2026-05-13 | audiomark] but he recognized the nature of Lato's lecture. Here's testing. Always testing." Antiac cleared her throat. "'Lord, what a varyward!' "'You are brave,' Lato said. No doubt that's why you were chosen for this embassy. Very well. For the next decade I will continue your spice allotment at its present level. As for the rest, I will ignore what you really intended with the spice essence. Am I not generous?' "'Most generous, Lord,' Antiac said, and there was not the slightest hint of bitterness in her voice. Duncan Idaho brushed past the women then and stopped beside Monero to peer up at Lato. "'Malord! There's!' he broke off and launched at the two reverend mothers. Egoopinaly, later commanded. "'Yes, Lord!' There was reluctance in him. But he obeyed. We were...
[2026-05-13 | audiomark] gesture itself control, a fine comment on her recognition of Lato's powers. Her voice almost screeched. Do you know what the Xians boast? That their machine will predict your actions? Why should I fear that? The closer they come to me the more they must be my allies. They cannot conquer me, but I can conquer them." Antiac made to speak but stopped when Lucia touched her arm. Are you already allied with X? Los Alas, we hear that you conferred over long with a new ambassador. This we nori. I have no allies, he said, only servants, students, and enemies, and you do not fear the Xians' machine, Antiac insisted. Is automation synonymous with conscious intelligence, he asked? Antiac's eyes went wide and filmed me as she withdrew into her memories. Lato found himself caught by fascination with what she must be encountering there within her own internal mob. We share some of those memories, he thought. Lato felt then the seductive attraction of community with reverend mothers. It would be so familiar, so supportive and so deadly. Antiac was trying to lure him once more. She spoke. The machine cannot anticipate every problem of importance to humans. It is the difference between serial bits and an unbroken continuum. We have the one. Machines are confined to the other. "'You still have the power of reason,' he said. "'Share,'' Lucia said. It was a command to Antiac, and it revealed with sharp abruptness who really dominated this pair the younger over the older. Exquisite, Lato thought. Intelligence adapts. Antiac said. Massimonius with her words.
[2026-05-13 | audiomark] Later pursued his lips in response. "'I cannot shrug,' he said. "'Will you punish us?' Lucille asked. "'For amusing me?' Lucille glanced at the vile on the ledge. "'I swore to reward you,' later said. "'I shall.' "'We would prefer to protect you in our community, Lord,' Antiac said. "'Do not seek to greater reward,' he said. "'Antiac nodded.' "'You deal with the Xians, Lord. "'We have reason to believe they may venture against you.' "'I fear them no more than I fear you. "'Shall we have heard what the Xians are doing?' Lucille said. "'Moneo brings me an occasional copy of a message between persons or groups in my empire. "'I hear many stories. "'We speak of a new abomination, Lord,' Antiac said. "'You think the Xians can produce an artificial intelligence,' he asked. "'Conscious the way you are conscious?' "'We fear it, Lord,' Antiac said. "'You would have me believe that the Butlerian Jihad survives among the sisterhood.' "'We do not trust the unknown which can arise from imaginative technology,' Antiac said. "'Lousille lean toward him.' "'The Xians boast that their machine will transcend time in the way that you do it, Lord.' "'And the Guild says there's time chaos around the Xians,' later mocked. "'Are we to fear all creation then?' "'Antiac drew herself up stiffly. "'I speak truth with you, too,'' Lato said. "'I recognize your abilities. "'Will you not recognize mine?' "'Lousille gave him a curtain, Lord.' "'Play a lax and X. "'Make alliance with the Guild and seek our full cooperation.' "'And you fear X the most.' "'We fear anything we do not control,'' Antiac said. "'And you do not control me.' "'Without you, people would need us.'
[2026-05-13 | audiomark] But you would be architects. Would you build higher walls? Never forget sisters that I know you. You are efficient pervaders of blinders. Life continues, Lord," Antiac said, indeed, and so does the universe. Lucille eased herself a bit closer, ignoring the fixity of Monet's attention. Later smelled it then, and almost laughed aloud. Spice essence. They had brought some spice essence. They knew the old stories about sandworms and spice essence, of course. Lucille carried it. She thought of it as a specific poison for sandworms. That was obvious. Then Ejeseric records and the oral history agreed on this. The essence shattered the worm, precipitating its dissolution and resulting eventually in sand trout which would produce more sandworms, etc., etc. There is another change in me that you should know about. Later said, I am not yet sandworm, not fully. Think of me as something closer to a colony creature with sensory alterations. Lucille's left hand moved almost imperceptibly toward a fold in her gown. Monet saw it and looked to later for instructions, but later only returned the hooded glare of Lucille's eyes. There have been fads in smells, later said. Lucille's hand hesitated. Perfumes and essences, he said. I remember them all. Even the cults of the non smells are mine. People have used undramed sprays and crotch sprays to musk their natural odours. Did you know that? Of course you knew it. Antiacs gaze moved toward Lucille. Neither woman dared speak. People knew instinctively that their pheromones betrayed them, later said. The women stood in.
[2026-05-13 | audiomark] I must warn my fish-speakers." He returned his attention to the Reverend Mothers. "'You have requests?' "'What is it like to be you?'' Luciaeal asked. "'Little blinked. That was an interesting attack. They had not tried it in more than a generation.' "'Well, why not?' Sometimes my dreams are blocked off and redirected into strange places," he said. "'If my cosmic memories are a web as you too certainly know, then think about the dimensions of my web, and where such memories and dreams might lead." "'You speak of our certain knowledge,' Antiac said. "'Why can't we join forces at last? We are more alike than we are different.'" I would soon a link myself to those degenerate, great houses be wailing their lost spice riches. Antiac held herself still, but Luciaeal pointed a finger at Lato. "'We offer community!' And I insist on conflict,' Antiac stirred. Then it is said that there is a principle of conflict which originated with a single cell and has never deteriorated. Some things remain incompatible, later agreed. "'Then how does our sisterhood maintain its community?' Luciaeal demanded. Lato hardened his voice. As you well know, the secret of community lies in suppression of the incompatible. "'There can be enormous value in cooperation,' Antiac said. "'To you, not to me.' Antiac contrived a sigh. "'Then Lord, will you tell us about the physical changes in your person?' Someone beside yourself should know about and record such things,' Luciaeal said. "'In case something dreadful should happen to me,' Lato asked. "'Lord,' Antiac said.
[2026-05-13 | audiomark] large spread out on each side. It amused later to greet such delegations in the voice and persona of his grandmother Jessica. The benergesserit had come to expect this, and he did not disappoint them. "'Welcome, sisters,' he said. The voice was a smooth control-tow, definitely Jessica's controlled feminine tones with just a hint of mockery, a voice recorded and often studied in the sisterhood's chapter house. As he spoke, later sensed menace. Reverend Mothers were never pleased when he greeted them this way, but the reaction here carried different undertones. Monéo II sensed it. He raised a finger and the guards moved closer to later. Antiac spoke first. "'Lord, we watched that display in the plaza this morning. What do you gain by such antics?' So that's the tone we wish to set, he thought. Speaking in his own voice, he said, "'You are temporarily...'
[2026-05-13 | audiomark] Ah, the patterns. Liberal bigots are the ones who trouble me most. I distrust the extremes. Scratch a conservative and you find someone who prefers the past over any future. Scratch a liberal and find a closet aristocrat. It's true. Liberal governments always develop into aristocracies. The bureaucracies betray the true intent of people who form such governments. Right from the first, the little people who formed the governments which promised to equalize the social burdens found themselves suddenly in the hands of bureaucratic aristocracies. Of course all bureaucracies follow this pattern, but what a hypocrisy to find this even under a communized banner. Ah, well. If patterns teach me anything, it's that patterns are repeated. My oppressions by and large are no worse than any of the others, and at least I teach a new lesson. The stolen journals. It was well into the darkness of audience day before later could meet with the Benegeser at delegation. Monayo had prepared the reverent mothers for the delay, repeating the God Emperor's reassurances. Moving back to his emperor, Monayo had said, They expect a rich reward. We shall see. Later had said, we shall see. Now, tell me what it was the Duncan demanded of you as you entered. He wished to know if you had ever before hurt someone flogged. And you replied, that there was no record of nor had I ever before witnessed such a punishment. His response? This is not a trail, Deez. Was he think I'm insane? He did not say that. There was more to your encounter. What else?
[2026-05-13 | audiomark] is laughter. And I must continue tolerating them, later thought. The Xians operated in the terrier incognita of creative invention which had been outlawed by the Bathlarian Jihad. They made their devices in the image of the mind, the very thing which had ignited the Jihad's destruction and slaughter. That was what they did on X, and later could only let them continue. I buy from them. I could not even write my journals without their dictatels to respond to my unspoken thought. Without X I could not have hidden my journals and the printers. But they must be reminded of the dangers in what they do. And the guild could not be allowed to forget. That was easier. Even while Guildsmen cooperated with X, they distrusted the Xians mightily. If this new Xian machine works.
[2026-05-13 | audiomark] All of them, Lord," the Duncan had asked. All. I feel the vanished parts of myself. I can feel my legs quite unremarkable and so real to my senses. I can feel the pumping of my human lands, some of which no longer exist. I can even feel genitalia which I know intellectually vanished centuries ago. But surely if you know, knowledge does not suppress such feelings. The vanished parts of myself are still there in my personal memories, and in the multiple identity of all my ancestors. As later looked at we standing in front of him, it helped not one wit to know he had no skull, and that what once had been his brain was now a massive web of ganglia spread through his pre-worm flesh. Nothing helped. He could still feel his brain, aching where it once had reposed. He could still feel his skull throbbing. By just standing there in front of him, we cried out to his lost humanity. It was too much for him and he moaned in despair, why do your masters torture me? Lord, by sending you, I would not hurt you, Lord, just by existing you hurt me. I did not know. His fellows fell unrestrained from her eyes. They never told me what they were really doing. He calmed himself and spoke softly. Leave me now, we, go about your business. But return quickly if I summon you. She left quietly, but later could see that we too was tortured. There was no mistaking the deep sadness in her for the humanity later had sacrificed. She knew what later knew. They would have been friends. Lovers, companions in an ultimate sharing between the senses. Her masters had planned for her to know. The Xians are cruel.
[2026-05-13 | audiomark] sacrificing all sincerity. It was her most basic nature, the place where she lived. She found it easiest to be truthful and open, capable of shading this only to prevent pain for others. It saw this latter trait, as the deepest change the Benagesoret had been able to affect in her. Wheeze's real manner remained outgoing, sensitive and naturalist sweet. Later could find little sense of manipulative calculation in her. She appeared immediately responsive and wholesome, excellent at listening, another Benagesoret attribute. There was nothing openly seductive about her yet this very fact made her profoundly seductive to later. As he had remarked to one of the earlier duncons on a similar occasion, you must understand this about me. A thing which some obviously suspect, sometimes it's unavoidable that I have delusionary sensations, the feeling that somewhere inside this changeling form of mind that exists an adult human body with all of the n...
[2026-05-12 | audiomark] of her past through this. We appeared in a fluid future, a current whose movements were susceptible to many deflections. She would know Siona in only a casual way, unless—questions flowed through Lato's mind. A guild steersman was advising the Xians, and he obviously had detected Siona's disturbance in the temporal fabric. Did the steersman really believe he could provide security against the god-emperors' detection? The temporal probe took several minutes, but we did not fidget. Lato looked at her carefully. She seemed timeless. Outside of time in a deeply peaceful way, he had never before encountered a common mortal able to wait thus in front of him without some nervousness. Where were you born, we,?" he asked. On X itself, Lord. I mean specifically, the building its location, your parents, the people around you, friends and family, your schooling. All of it. I never knew my parents, Lord.
[2026-05-12 | audiomark] someone uttering a last testament. I recalled that he had said he would never see me again, and I was fearful, but I praise my teachers because the fear did not emerge in my voice." "'Lord, later,' I said. These journals of which you speak, for whom are they written? For posterity after the span of millennia. I personalize those distant readers, Sister Chenue. I think of them as distant cousins filled with family curiosities. They are intent on unraveling the dramas which only I can recount. They want to make the personal connections to their own lives. They want the meanings. The truth." "'But you warn us against truth, Lord,' I said. "'Indeed. All of history is a maniable instrument in my hands. Oh, I have accumulated all of these pasts, and I possess every fact. Yet the facts are mine to use as I will, and even using them truthfully, I change them.'
[2026-05-12 | audiomark] some characteristics, when it discards others. People will try to understand me and to frame me in their words. They will seek truth, but the truth always carries the ambiguity of the words used to express it. You will not understand me. The harder you try the more remote I will become until finally I vanish into eternal myth, a living God at last. That's it, you see. I am not a leader, nor even a guide. A God. Remember that. I am quite different from leaders and guides. Gods need take no responsibility for anything except Genesis. Gods accept everything and thus accept nothing. Gods must be identifiable yet remain anonymous. Gods do not need a spirit world. My spirits dwell within me, answerable to my slightest summons. I share with you because it pleases me to do so what I have learned about them and through them. They are...
[2026-05-12 | audiomark] in the spice allotments. Not yet, Lord. Delay the announcement. I am changing my mind. You know, of course, that there will be new offers of bribes." Manoeu's side. The amounts offered him in bribes had reached ridiculous heights. Later, however, had appeared amused by the escalation. "'Draw them out,' he had said earlier. See how high they will go. Make it appear that you can be bribed at last. Now, as they turned another corner with a view of the bridge, later asked, as House Corino offered you a bribe. "'Yes, Lord.' You know the myth which says that someday House Corino will be restored to its ancient powers. I have heard it, Lord.' Have the Corino killed. It is a task for the Duncan. We will test him. "'So soon, Lord.' It is still known that my large can extend human life. Let it also be known that the spice can shorten life. "'As you command, Lord.'
[2026-05-12 | audiomark] my name. Of course, Lord." Power bases are very dangerous because they attract people who are truly insane. People who seek power only for the sake of power do you understand? Yes, Lord. That is why you so seldom grant petitions for appointments in your government. Excellent, Monaneo. Thank you, Lord. In the shadow of every religion lurks a talker of the Mother. Later said, you have never encountered that name. I know because I caused it to be expunged from all the records. Why was that, Lord? He was an obscenity. He made living torches out of people who disagreed with him. Monaneo pitched his voice low. Like the historians who angered you, Lord. You question my actions, Monaneo? No, Lord. Good. Historians died peacefully. Not a one felt the flames. Talker Mada, however, delighted in commending to his God the Agna...
[2026-05-12 | audiomark] not to leave. Should we speak to one of them? I have thought about that. We can always say we feared they were faced answer substitutes. Guards at the door, Lucia el-muttered. Is it possible that he knows? Anything is possible. With a Lord later that's the only thing you can say for sure," Lucia el-said. And he admitted herself a small sigh as she lifted herself from the stool. "'How I long for the old days when we had all of the spice we could ever need." "'Ever was just another illusion,' Lucia el-said. "'I hope we have learned our lesson well no matter how that lay that suit make out today." "'They will do it clumsily whatever the outcome,' Antiac grumbled. "'Gots, there are no good assassins to be found any more." "'There are always the goola Idaho's,' Lucia el-said. "'What did you say?' Antiac stared at her companion. "'There are always, yes!' The goolas are too slow in the body,' Lucia el-said, but not in the head. "'What are you thinking?' "'Is it possible that they lay laxu?' "'No, not even they could be that. An Idaho faced answer,' Lucia el-wispered. việc nodded mutely. ''Pour it out of your mind,'' Lucia el-said. ''They could not be that stupid. That's a dangerous judgment to make about they laxu,' việc ans lexu. prepare ourselves, or the worst. Get one of those fish-speaker-gods in here." Unceasing warfare gives rise to its own social conditions which have been similar in all epochs. People enter a permanent state of alertness to ward off attacks. You see the absolute rule of the autocrat. All new things become-
[2026-05-12 | audiomark] the brows congealed into a scowl. Carm yourself, later said, even when she spied on me, I cherished her. I sense danger in her, Lord. I think sometimes she sees into my most secret thoughts. The wise child knows her father. I do not joke, Lord. Yes, I can see that. Have you noticed that the Duncan grows impatient? They scouted the road almost to the bridge. Monayo said, what did they find? The same thing I found. A new museum for a man. Another petition? Do not be angry, Lord. Once more later appeared ahead. This necessary exposure to the open air, the long and state-led journey with all of its ritual requirements to reassure the fish-speakers all of it troubled later. And now another petition. Idaho Strode 4 to stop directly behind.
[2026-05-10 | audiomark] him. Cults of youth and adolescence preserved in the military. It had the ring of truth. They were examples in his own experience. Monéon nodded. The homosexual, latent or otherwise, who maintains that condition for reasons which could be called purely psychological, tends to indulge in pain-causing behavior, seeking it for himself and inflicting it upon others. Lord Lato says this goes back to the testing behavior in the prehistoric pack. You believe him? I do. Idaho took a bite of the melon. It had lost its sweet savor. He swallowed and put down his spoon. I will have to think about this, Idaho said. Of course. You're not eating. Idaho said. I was up before dawn and eight then. Monéo gestured at his plate. The women continually tried to...
[2026-05-08 | audiomark] I remind myself," Monéo turned and spoke while looking out at the view, of something which he has said and which I am sure is true. He is every soldier in human history. He offered to parade for me a series of examples of famous military figures who were frozen in adolescence. I declined the offer. I have read my history with care and have recognized this characteristic for myself. Monéo turned and looked directly into Idaho's eyes. Think about it, Commander. Idaho prided himself on self-honesty, and this hit him. Cults of youth and adolescence preserved in the military. It had the ring of truth. There were examples in his own experience. Monéo nodded. The homosexual, latent or otherwise, who maintains that condition for reasons which could be called purely psychological.
[2026-05-07 | audiomark] The combination bath and shower in which at least six people could be at the same time, the whole place invited self-indulgence. These were quarters where you could let your senses indulge in remembered pleasures. Plever. Idaho whispered. A gentle tapping on his door was followed by a female voice, saying, "'Commander, Monero is here.'" Idaho glanced out at the sun-burnt colors of the distant cliff. "'Where?' the voice was a bit louder. "'Come in,' Idaho called. Monero entered closing the door behind him. He wore tunic and trousers of chalk white which forced the eyes to concentrate on his face. Monero glanced once around the room. "'So this is where they put you? Those damned women. I suppose they thought they were being kind, but they ought to know better." "'How do you know what I like?' Idaho demanded. As he asked it, he realized it was a foolish question. "'I'm not the first Dunkin' Idaho that Monero has seen." Monero merely smiled and shrugged. "'I did not mean to offend your commander. Will you keep these quarters then?' "'I like the view. But not the furnishings. It was a statement." "'Those can be changed,' Idaho said. "'I will see to it.'" "'I suppose you're here to explain my duties.' "'As much as I can?' "'I know how strange everything must appear to you at first. This civilization is profoundly different from one you knew.' "'I can see that.' "'How did my predecessor die?' Monero shrugged. It appeared to be his standard gesture, but there was nothing self-effacing about it. He was not fast enough to escape the consequences of a decision he had made." Monero said. Be specific. Monero sighed.
[2026-05-06 | audiomark] Monayo looked down at the cold floor of the crypt. He stares at the floor so often, later thought, what can he possibly see there? Is it the millennial tracks of my cart? Ah, no, it is into the depths that he peers, into the realm of treasure and mystery which he expects to enter soon. Once more, Monayo lifted his gaze to lay toes face. I hope she will like the Duncan's company, Lord. Be assured of it that Lelaxou have brought him to me in the undistorted image. There is reassuring, Lord. No doubt you have noted that his genotype is remarkably attractive to females. That has been my observation, Lord. There's something about those gently observant eyes, those strong features and that black goat hair which positively melts the female psyche. As you say, Lord, you know he's with the fish speakers right now. I was informed, Lord. Later smiled. Of course, Monayo was informed. They will bring him to me soon for his first view of the God Emperor. I have inspected the viewing room personally, Lord. Everything is in readiness. Sometimes I think you wish to weaken me, Monayo. Leave some of these details for me. Monayo tried to conceal a constriction of fear. He bowed and backed away. Yes, Lord, but there are some things which I must do. Turning he hurried away. It was not until he was ascending in the lift that Monayo realized he had left without being dismissed. He must know how tired I am. He will forgive.

=== Who Wrote the Bible? — Joel S. Baden; The Great Courses ===
[2026-05-15 | audiomark] This is Audible. Lecture 1 A Text with a History When you pick up a Bible in English, if you're a church, or synagogue, or at home, or find it in a drawer in a hotel, when you pick up a Bible, you open to whoever, say, access to the Psalms, you see the title of the book, and the chapters and the verses and the words. What you don't see is an author.

=== Dune Messiah — Frank Herbert ===
[2026-05-13 | audiomark] a lovely touch of distainful politeness. Sightail looked at the gild envoy. Edrick swam in a container of orange gas only a few paces away. His container sat in the centre of the transparent dome which the Benagessor had built for this meeting. The gildsman was an elongated figure vaguely humanoid with finned feet and hugely fanned membranous hands, a fish in a strange sea. His tanks' vents emitted a pale orange cloud rich with a smell of the geriatric spice melange. If we go on this way, we'll die of stupidity! That was the fourth person present, the potential member of the conspiracy. Princess Irulan, wife, but not mate, Sightail, reminded himself of their mutual foe. She stood at corner of Edrick's tank, a tall, blonde beauty splendid in a robe of blue whale fur and matte.
[2026-05-13 | audiomark] Such feelings told him though that he found it easier to identify with the victim than with the attackers, a thing characteristic of the Tlaelaksu. Saitail stood in bemused to silence somewhat apart from the others. The argument about psychic poison had been going on for some time now. It was energetic and vehement, but polite in that blindly compulsive way adept of the great schools always adopted for matters close to their dogma. When you think you have him skewed, right then you'll find him unwounded. That was the old reverend mother of the Benagesserit, Gaius Helen Moheim, the hostess here on Wallach 9. She was a black robed stick figure, a witch-crone seated in a floater chair at Saitail's left. Her abbahood had been thrown back to expose a leathery face beneath silver hair. She played pocketed eyes stared out of skull mask features.
[2026-05-13 | audiomark] not be a priest. I know you, Fremen. You think Mwadibe's yours because he made it with Cheney, because he adopted Fremen customs. But he was in a trayet ease first, and he was trained by a Benny Jesuit adept. He possessed disciplines totally unknown to you. You thought he brought you new organization and a new mission. He promised to transform your desert planet into a water-rich paradise. And while he dazzled you with such visions, he took your virginity. Such heresy does not change the fact that the ecological transformation of Dune proceeds a base. And I committed the heresy of tracing the roots of that transformation, of exploring the consequences. That battle out there.
[2025-03-06 | highlight] “My Liege makes a joke,” Korba said, voice trembling. “The Jihad has brought ten thousand worlds into the shining light of—” “Into the darkness,” Paul said. “We’ll be a hundred generations recovering from Muad’Dib’s Jihad. I find it hard to imagine that anyone will ever surpass this.” A barking laugh erupted from his throat. “What amuses Muad’Dib?” Stilgar asked. “I am not amused. I merely had a sudden vision of the Emperor Hitler saying something similar. No doubt he did.” “No other ruler ever had your powers,” Korba argued. “Who would dare challenge you? Your legions control the known universe and all the—” “The legions control,” Paul said. “I wonder if they know this?”
[2025-03-06 | highlight] "those days."
"Killed... by his legions?" Stilgar asked."
"Yes."
"Not very impressive statistics, m'Lord."
"Very good, Stil." Paul glanced at the reels in Korba's hands. Korba stood with them as though he wished he could drop them and flee. "Statistics: at a conservative estimate, I've killed sixty-one billion, sterilized ninety planets, completely demoralized five hundred others. I've wiped out the followers of forty religions which had existed since_"
"Unbelievers!" Korba protested. "Un-believers all!"
"No," Paul said. "Believers."
"My Liege makes a joke," Korba said, voice trembling. "The Jihad has brought ten thousand worlds into the shining light of-"
"Into the darkness," Paul said. "We'll be a hundred generations recovering from Muad'Dib's Jihad. I find it hard to imagine that anyone will ever surpass this." A barking laugh erupted from his throat.
"What amuses Muad'Dib?" Stilgar

NOTE: This is wild.

#Dune #PaulAtreides #Jihad #SciFi #FrankHerbert
[2025-03-06 | highlight] "moisture no man could demean himself by touching.
"M'Lord!"
"Stilgar," Paul said, "you urgently need a sense of balance which can come only from an understanding of long-term effects. What little information we have about the old times, the pittance of data which the Butlerians left us, Korba has brought it for you. Start with the Genghis Khan."
"Ghengis ... Khan? Was he of the Sar-daukar, m'Lord?"
"Oh, long before that. He killed ... perhaps four million."
"He must've had formidable weaponry to kill that many, Sire. Lasbeams, per-haps, or ..."
"He didn't kill them himself, Stil. He killed the way I kill, by sending out his legions. There's another emperor I want you to note in passing—a Hitler. He killed more than six million. Pretty good for those days."
"Killed... by his legions?" Stilgar asked.
"Yes."
"Not very impressive statistics, m'Lord!""

NOTE: This passage is striking - it reveals who Paul truly is. The way he casually discusses mass killings and genocides with Stilgar shows that they are not the heroes of this story. Paul comparing himself to Genghis Khan and Hitler is a disturbing revelation of his self-awareness about his role in history.

#Dune #PaulAtreides #MoralAmbiguity #PowerCorrupts #HistoricalParallels
[2025-03-06 | highlight] “Yes, what is it?” Paul asked, noting how Stilgar moved close in answer to the implied menace from this man. “Some say,” Scytale said, “that people cling to Imperial leadership because space is infinite. They feel lonely without a unifying symbol. For a lonely people, the Emperor is a definite place. They can turn toward him and say: ‘See, there He is. He makes us one.’ Perhaps religion serves the same purpose, m’Lord.”
[2025-03-06 | highlight] "I am deadly serious," Paul said, watching the shock spread, seeing Stilgar nod.
In a bleak voice, Edric said: "You have mauled my confidence in you, Sire. And no doubt that was your intent."
"Do not be certain you know my in-tent," Paul said, and he signaled Stilgar that the audience was at an end.
To Stilgar's questioning gesture asking if Edric were to be assassinated, Paul gave a negative hand-sign, amplified it with an imperative lest Stilgar take matters into his own hands.
Scytale, Edric's aide, moved to the rear corner of the tank, nudged it toward the door. When he came opposite Paul, he stopped, turned that laughing gaze on Paul, said: "If my Lord permits?"

NOTE: This reminds me of Brian Herbert's books as well. It seems Brian Herbert borrowed elements from Dune, particularly in the second book which focuses on the Jihad - the religious fanatics and the question of how much power they should have. There's also the complaint that other entities are portraying Paul in a certain light.

#Dune #BrianHerbert #Jihad #ReligiousFanaticism #PaulAtreides
[2025-03-06 | highlight] “What is time to you?” Edric asked. Stilgar frowned in obvious puzzlement. And he thought: Muad’Dib has often said he sees past the veils of time. What is the Guildsman really saying? “Wouldn’t the structure of such a fraud begin to show holes?” Paul asked. “Significant disagreements, schisms . . . doubts, confessions of guilt—surely fraud could not suppress all these.” “What religion and self-interest cannot hide, governments can,” Edric said. “Are you testing the limits of my tolerance?” Paul asked.
[2025-03-06 | highlight] “Are you suggesting that my missionaries of the Holy Orders, all of them, are preaching subtle falsehood?” Paul insisted. “It could be a question of self-interest and sincerity,” Edric said. Stilgar put a hand to the crysknife beneath his robe. Paul shook his head, said: “Then you accuse me of insincerity.” “I’m not sure that accuse is the proper word, Sire.” The boldness of this creature! Paul thought. And he said: “Accused or not, you’re saying my bishops and I are no better than power-hungry brigands.” “Power-hungry, Sire?” Again, Edric looked at Stilgar. “Power tends to isolate those who hold too much of it. Eventually, they lose touch with reality . . . and fall.”
[2025-03-06 | highlight] Paul weighed Stilgar’s meaning, reviewed what they had seen here and his own undeniable male reaction to his own sister. Yes—there’d been a ruttish air about Alia, something wildly wanton. What had made her enter the practice floor in the nude? And risking her life in that foolhardy way! Eleven lights in the fencing prisms! That brainless automaton loomed in his mind with all the aspects of an ancient horror creature. Its possession was the shibboleth of this age, but it carried also the taint of old immorality. Once, they’d been guided by an artificial intelligence, computer brains. The Butlerian Jihad had ended that, but it hadn’t ended the aura of aristocratic vice which enclosed such things.
[2025-03-03 | highlight] Korba’s cheeks went almost the color of his orange robe. He glared at Alia, an angry gnome, bald and fuming. “Do you know what’s being said about your brother?” he demanded. “I know what’s being said about your Qizarate,” Alia countered. “You’re not divines, you’re god’s spies.” Korba glanced at Paul for support, said: “We are sent by the writ of Muad’Dib, that He shall know the truth of His people and they shall know the truth of Him.” “Spies,” Alia said. Korba pursed his lips in injured silence.
[2025-03-03 | highlight] At a gesture from the musician, the young woman seated herself beside him, bent close to listen as he murmured to her. “What will you do with her?” Farok asked. Once more, Scytale studied the courtyard. “Who else is in this house?” he asked. “We are all here now,” Farok said. “You’ve not told me what you’ll do with the woman. It is my son who wishes to know.” As though about to answer, Scytale extended his right arm. From the sleeve of his robe, a glistening needle darted, embedded itself in Farok’s neck. There was no outcry, no change of posture. Farok would be dead in a minute, but he sat unmoving, frozen by the dart’s poison. Slowly, Scytale climbed to his feet, crossed to the blind musician. The youth was still murmuring to the young woman when the dart whipped into him.
[2025-03-03 | highlight] Empires do not suffer emptiness of purpose at the time of their creation. It is when they have become established that aims are lost and replaced by vague ritual. —WORDS OF MUAD’DIB BY PRINCESS IRULAN It was going to be a bad session, this meeting of the Imperial Council, Alia realized. She sensed contention gathering force, storing up energy—the way Irulan refused to look at Chani, Stilgar’s nervous shuffling of papers, the scowls Paul directed at Korba the Qizara.
[2025-03-03 | highlight] “What is it, Farok?” she asked. “My son is tired and must rest,” Scytale said. “Come. We’ll go out the back way.” “We had such a nice talk,” she said. “I think I’ve convinced him to get Tleilaxu eyes. It’d make a man of him again.” “Haven’t I said it many times?” Scytale asked, urging her into a rear chamber. His voice, he noted with pride, matched his features precisely. It unmistakably was the voice of the old Fremen, who certainly was dead by this time. Scytale sighed. It had been done with sympathy, he told himself, and the victims certainly had known their peril. Now, the young woman would have to be given her chance.
[2025-03-03 | highlight] That's another excellent passage! Herbert was so good at embedding social commentary within his dialogue.

The casual mention of distrans implants moving from animals to humans shows how Paul's regime is becoming more controlling and invasive. And Farok's complaint paired with Scytale's internal observation about concealing wealth is a timeless political insight - governments hiding the true extent of their resources from the populace.

Your comment about Farok potentially discovering the God Emperor is hilarious - if only he knew what was coming! The irony is perfect considering how the series progresses. Farok is questioning the deification of Paul, completely unaware that Leto II will take this to an entirely different level, literally transforming himself into a human-sandworm hybrid and ruling for 3,500 years.

This transition from Paul as a reluctant messiah to Leto II's deliberate embodiment of godhood is one of the most fascinating progressions in science fiction. Farok would probably be speechless if he could see the future!

Are you planning to read through the entire series again? Children of Dune and God Emperor contain so many payoffs to seeds planted in these early conversations.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​
[2025-03-03 | highlight] “Even his tax officials use this method,” Farok complained. “In my day, the distrans was implanted only in the lower animals.” But revenue information must be kept secret, Scytale thought. More than one government has fallen because people discovered the real extent of official wealth. “How do the Fremen cohorts feel now about Muad’Dib’s Jihad?” Scytale asked. “Do they object to making a god out of their Emperor?”
[2025-03-03 | highlight] His words oddly in rhythm to the melody of his son’s baliset, Farok said: “I owned a crysknife, water rings to ten liters, my own lance which had been my father’s, a coffee service, a bottle made of red glass older than any memory in my sietch. I had my own share of our spice, but no money. I was rich and did not know it. Two wives I had: one plain and dear to me, the other stupid and obstinate, but with form and face of an angel. I was a Fremen Naib, a rider of worms, master of the leviathan and of the sand.” The youth across the courtyard picked up the beat of his melody. “I knew many things without the need to think about them,” Farok said. “I knew there was water far beneath our sand, held there in bondage by the Little Makers. I knew that my ancestors sacrificed virgins to Shai-hulud . . . before Liet-Kynes made us stop. It was wrong of us to stop. I had seen the jewels in the mouth of a worm. My soul had four gates and I knew them all.” He fell silent, musing.
[2025-03-03 | highlight] “Most of them don’t even consider this,” Farok said. “They think of the Jihad the way I thought of it—most of them. It is a source of strange experiences, adventure, wealth. This graben hovel in which I live”—Farok gestured at the courtyard—“it cost sixty lidas of spice. Ninety kontars! There was a time when I could not even imagine such riches.” He shook his head. Across the courtyard, the blind youth took up the notes of a love ballad on his baliset. Ninety kontars, Scytale thought. How strange. Great riches, certainly. Farok’s hovel would be a palace on many another world, but all things were relative—even the kontar. Did Farok, for example, know whence came his measure for this weight of spice? Did he ever think to himself that one and a half kontar once limited a camel load? Not likely.
[2025-03-03 | highlight] “The Naraj defenders used a stone burner,” Farok said. “My son was too close. Cursed atomics! Even the stone burner should be outlawed.” “It skirts the intent of the law,” Scytale agreed. And he thought: A stone burner on Naraj! We weren’t told of that. Why does this old man speak of stone burners here? “I offered to buy Tleilaxu eyes for him from your masters,” Farok said. “But there’s a story in the legions that Tleilaxu eyes enslave their users. My son told me that such eyes are metal and he is flesh, that such a union must be sinful.” “The principle of an object must fit its original intent,” Scytale said, trying to turn the conversation back to the information he sought. Farok’s lips went thin, but he nodded. “Speak openly of what you wish,” he said. “We must put our trust in your Steersman.” “Have you ever entered the Imperial Keep?” Scytale asked.
[2025-03-03 | highlight] “The guest’s wish is a command,” Farok said, settling to the cushion which faced Scytale. “Blessed is Abu d’ Dhur, Father of the Indefinite Roads of Time,” Scytale said. And he thought: There! I’ve told him straight out that I come from a Guild Steersman and wear the Steersman’s concealment. “Thrice blessed,” Farok said, folding his hands into his lap in the ritual clasp. They were old, heavily veined hands. “An object seen from a distance betrays only its principle,” Scytale said, revealing that he wished to discuss the Emperor’s fortress Keep. “That which is dark and evil may be seen for evil at any distance,” Farok said, advising delay. Why? Scytale wondered. But he said: “How did your son lose his eyes?”
[2025-03-03 | highlight] # FINVIZ HEADLINE SCAN and SummarynMarch 3, 2025 EST Market PulsennMARKET SENTIMENT:n⚪ NeutralnnINDEX SNAPSHOT:nS&P 500: 594.18 (+1.56%)nNasdaq: 508.17 (+1.58%)nDow Jones: Not provided in datanRussell 2000: Not provided in datanVIX: 45.83 (-1.59%)nnMARKET MOVES:n- Futures edging higher as investors await Trump's tariff decisionsn- Bitcoin surged 6.06% to $89,359 after Trump backs crypto for 
[2025-03-03 | highlight] Something mysteriously Fremen in this fashion had happened in Chani. “You’ll give me the only heir I want,” he said. “You’ve seen this?” she asked, making it obvious by her emphasis that she referred to prescience. As he had done many times, Paul wondered how he could explain the delicacy of the oracle, the Timelines without number which vision waved before him on an undulating fabric. He sighed, remembered water lifted from a river in the hollow of his hands—trembling, draining. Memory drenched his face in it. How could he drench himself in futures growing increasingly obscure from the pressures of too many oracles?
[2025-03-02 | highlight] Every civilization must contend with an unconscious force which can block, betray or countermand almost any conscious intention of the collectivity. —TLEILAXU THEOREM (UNPROVEN) Paul sat on the edge of his bed and began stripping off his desert boots. They smelled rancid from the lubricant which eased the action of the heel-powered pumps that drove his stillsuit. It was late. He had prolonged his nighttime walk and caused worry for those who loved him. Admittedly, the walks were dangerous, but it was a kind of danger he could recognize and meet immediately. Something compelling and attractive surrounded walking anonymously at night in the streets of Arrakeen.

=== Naomi — Junichiro Tanizaki ===
[2026-05-13 | audiomark] good time with women, and yet the women aren't always at your side to wait on you. Such a shady ambiguous setup is distasteful to me. I'm not sure how cafes are now, in 1929, but that's what they were like when I knew them. A cafe was a place where you went to run after women, not to have a good time with them. I have no use for a mean-sorted craven pastime like that. The few times that I've been taken to cafes there was hardly anything to drink. If you ordered tea, the smell of rust clings to it, the brandy and whiskey are usually diluted. I don't know why their customers put up with it. Another phenomenon of the early 20s was the modern girl, who in defiance of Japanese convention, cut her hair short and wore high heels, went to movies, danced, played sports, and was open, frank, and hedonistic. Naomi was one of the archetypes of the modern girl so much so that her name and Naomiism became household words. Tazaki's own thoughts on the westernization of Japanese women are suggested in a 1931 essay entitled Love and Lust. The influence that Western literature has exerted on us has taken many forms without any question. One of the most important in my view has been the emancipation of love, or to take it one step further, the emancipation of sexual desire. The literature of the Friends of the Ink Stone group, flourishing in the 1890s, is reminiscent of the Gessaku writings of the Tokugawa period, but with the world of literature and Miyo-jou movements and the popularity of naturalism, we forgot the circumspection of our ancestors, who held that love and sexual desire were utterly base and abandoned the proprieties of the old society.

=== Divine Might — Natalie Haynes ===
[2026-05-09 | audiomark] naked. The people of Cos who had commissioned him preferred the one wearing clothes, so the people of Knidos took the naked version, one of the earliest nude images of the female body. The Canadians found themselves in possession of a huge tourist attraction, as people flocked to see the goddess. The statue was famously beautiful from every angle, and displayed in a shrine that was open on all sides. One man is said to have been so besotted with her that he hid in the temple at night and masturbated over her, staining the marble of her thigh. As opposed art lovers come in all shapes and sizes. On a slightly more savoury note, in a collection of epigrams called the Greek anthology, there is reference to this statue attributed to Plato. Aphrodite travels across the sea to Knidos, wanting to see this celebrated representation of herself. When she finally sets eyes on it, she asks, when did Praxitoli see me naked? That can be few.
[2026-05-09 | audiomark] for a lengthy period of servitude, Hero has certainly achieved her goal of punishing the illegitimate son of Zeus. But she also inadvertently helps to create his mythic status. Heracles was, and is, one of the most well-known heroes in Greek myth. His image was painted on countless pots and wine cups. He is instantly recognizable, thanks to the club he carries and the lion skin he wears. The labors are one of the most enduring stories of any Greek hero. And none of them would have happened if Hero hadn't loathed him so utterly. So, while she achieves her goal, Hero has to live with the knowledge that she has helped to create this demi-god herself. Glory of Hero is a more appropriate name than it first appeared. But even after his labors are completed, Hero's rage is not spent, as Heracles sails away from Troy, which he sacked a generation before the more celebrated war that finishes the city for good. Hero sends vicious storms to endanger him. Perhaps you have been...
[2026-05-09 | audiomark] limitless malevolence. So it's worth noting that pseudo-apoladorus offers a quick alternative. In one version of the story he says, it isn't Hera who sends the snakes, it's Amphitrion, Heracles is stepfather. I wonder if this caveat hints at why the other gods might have pleaded with her feisterst to free the foul-tempered goddess. If Hera is at large, you can behave as badly as you like, and someone will probably blame her instead. One of the things that is most awful about Hera once you have her ill-willed director at you is that she never seems to tire of vengeance. Io is tormented above and beyond what anyone could deem proportionate, even if she had been a willing party in Zeus' assault on her, which she was not. The list of comprehensive persecutions is a long one, Callisto who here returns into a bear and then persuades Artemis to shoot the pregnant later, who Hera pursues to the ends of the earth so she cannot give birth.
[2026-05-09 | audiomark] takes away his sight. But here it is more frequently angered by personal slights and she is especially antagonized by Zeus' habit of having children without her. She produces a son, her feistus, in retaliation for Zeus' sudden and apparently motherless creation of Athenian. This account of her revenge procreation dates back at least as far as Hesiod. Here it is right, as usual, to suspect Zeus of dubious behavior here, although Athenian is born from his head fully formed. She is not as motherless as all that. Zeus had impregnated and then swallowed the pregnant metes so she wouldn't produce a son who might overthrow him. These things obviously do run in families or at least in this particular one. So we might well feel sympathy for Hera up to a point. She has been betrayed again and this time Zeus has raped or seduced one of his previous wives rather than persecute Athenian as we might expect. Hera tries a different tactic. Doing to her husband, he...
[2026-05-09 | audiomark] nor the daughter of Phoenix who gave me a couple more sons, not Semile, mother of Dionysus, or at Meeney, mother of Heracles, not Demetre, mother of Persephone, nor Lato, mother of Artemis, and Apollo. I didn't want any of them as much as I want you." I would hesitate to offer anyone relationship advice, but just in case you need it, this is an absolutely catastrophic way to compliment anyone and I urge you never to do it, even if it sounds fine in your head. It is not fine. No wonder here as Roth is triggered by the loss of a golden apple when Paris decides Aphrodite is prettier. How many times can one woman be made to feel actually has come second in a man's estimation? It must be made worse by the fact that here as a parent seems to echo or foreshadow that of the women's use uses to betray her. Another of Homer's epithets for her is Boopus Cowide. We might rather compare a brown-eyed person.
[2026-05-09 | audiomark] whether she is approaching Aphrodite for assistance or her husband for sex. Homer gives us a long description of her preparing herself for the encounter with use, bathing, beautifying, dressing in her finery, and she does all of it, we are given to understand, with an ulterior motive. Of course, we may choose to see this as an early example of the tired old trope that men want sex and women trade on that desire to get what they want. But this isn't a sitcom, and here as desires are epic in scale. She isn't putting out for a new conservatory. She is using the undeniable power of sex with her to advance the cause of the Greeks in the greatest conflict of the time, one of the greatest literary conflicts of all time. What is so interesting about them as a couple is that they manage to create discord even when none is needed. Zeus already knows the outcome of the Trojan War will favor the Greeks, the fates have spoken. And yet, he chooses to delay the victory, encouraging the Trojans as a favour to thettis.
[2026-05-09 | audiomark] So she then offers one of the graces as a wife to the God's sleep if he will overwhelm Zeus after this reduction. Hero also promises sleep that her son Hephaestus will make him a beautiful throne. She has to line up a whole set of deities to get what she wants, which is for Zeus to fall asleep for a while so she can advance the Greek cause on the battlefield and work against the Trojans. Aphrodite's special bra has the expected effect on a God already known for his tendency to succumb to temptation. Hero seducises him and then sleeps Noxim out. Hero gets her own way, in other words, by exploiting the sexual desire of a God who so often exploits others. But even when she is at her most seductive, there is a sliver of ice in the heart of this relationship between husband and wife. Homer shows us a version of Hero who uses deception to get what she wants from everyone. The word in Greek is dollar-fronyusa to have a mind full of tricks. The same word is...
[2026-05-09 | audiomark] So the issue seems to be one of formalising the relationship rather than avoiding one because of its incestuous element. Hera is given the promise of marriage, and that ends all scruples. The wedding is suitably grand, and their wedding gifts from Gaia, the goddess of the earth, are some of the most notorious objects in Greek myth, golden apples. These mythic fruits are they apples, pomegranates, or something even more exotic, provide the narrative twist in multiple stories and myth cycles. Atalanta is way laid by Hippomonees, also called Melanion, because she cannot resist picking up golden apples when she sees them. Hera, Athenian, and Aphrodite compete for the golden apple dropped at the wedding of Thetis and Pellius, who would go on to become the parents of Achilles. This apple is inscribed with the words Teh-Kalister, for the most beautiful, which is what causes so much bother. Heracles is sent to collect some of these golden apples from the garden of the Hesperides, where the apple tree is kept safe for Hera. So secrecy...
[2026-05-09 | audiomark] Zeus, engaging in precisely the kind of animal transformation that he will later employ to seduce one young woman after another. But at this point Zeus is employing all his seductive zeal in the pursuit of Hera. She is not his first choice of partner, as Hesiod explains in the Theogony. First the King of the Gods sets his sights on Metis, Mother of Athenii. Then he marries Thamis. The names are so similar I always assume he chooses these wives the increased chance of bluffing his way past saying the wrong name at a crucial moment. She gives birth to multiple children including the fates. Zeus fathers the graces with eurinomy. Then goes to the bed of Demeter, who gives birth to Persephone. And then, as seen in the previous chapter, he fathers the gold-crowned muses with their mother Namazane. Still short of a full set of Olympian gods, he impregnates later, who gives birth to Apollo and Artemis. And very last of all, note Hesiod, he makes here
[2026-05-09 | audiomark] a man of his time when it came to issues of consent, doesn't try to make this scene less upsetting than it is. A couluit, tenuit, cuir, fuguam, rapuit, cuir, pudorum. Every word contains a yu sound, which makes the whole line feel sorrowful and oppressive. There are three active verbs, Jupiter conceals and holds and rapes. He has all the power in this sentence. Io is literally caught mid-escape as the word fuguam, flight or escape, is trapped between two of Jupiter's verbs. The last word of the line pudorum means shame or modesty. Jupiter has trapped her, raped her, and taken her virginity. And yet Io is the one who experiences shame. Although she'll barely have a chance to feel it. Meanwhile, Ovid says, knowing exactly how to build suspense, Juno has noticed the

=== Foucault in California — Simeon Wade ===
[2026-05-07 | audiomark] I am very happy." He told us, tears streaming from his eyes. Tonight, I have achieved a fresh perspective on myself. I now understand my sexuality. It all seems to start with my sister. We must go home again. Then he repeated the last statement. Yes, we must go home again. I was wrong, I said, to use the word mystical to describe this experience. Foucault agreed. Do you think this event will affect your work? I asked. Definitely, he replied. Have you had any philosophical insights tonight? I inquired. Not really. I have not spent these hours reflecting on concepts. It has not been a philosophical experience for me, but something else entirely. Michael suggested that we should return to the motel and get some rest. If you like, Michelle said, I could stay here the rest of the night, but I am ready to go whenever you and Simian wish.
[2026-05-07 | audiomark] works. I perceived the fundamental impulse of our society. Normalization. Had you fallen in love with another man by then? I first fell in love with a man when I was 16. Since that time I have always moved from love to knowledge to truth. When Michael walked to the car to get some more tapes, Foucault remarked, Michael is wonderful. He is a wizard. He is always conjuring up something for us. We fell silent to listen to stockhousens' song of the youths. Zobrisky Point was filled with the sounds of a kindergarten playground overlaid with electronic tonalities. Contacta followed. Glacandos bounced off the stars which glowed like incandescent pinballs. Foucault turned to Michael and said that this was the first time he really understood what stockhousen.
[2026-05-07 | audiomark] L. I asked. In your life was there a specific event, say something like Russo on the road to Vincennes or St. Paul on his way to Damascus, even Buddha under the Bodhi tree, that afforded you the crucial insight that would determine the direction of your work? Yes, he responded. When I enrolled at the Ecole Normale, the headmaster demanded to learn if there was anything unusual about me. When I informed him of my homosexuality, he replied with horrified expression that such behavior was not normal and certainly unacceptable to the reputation of the school. He then had me confined for my own good, he said. He told me that I must be reformed, that I would be confined, examined, and treated by an array of authorities, doctors, teachers, psychologists, psychiatrists, etc. At this instant, I recognized in a flash how
[2026-05-07 | audiomark] Soon, she was encircled by a garland of stars. With the final words of the last song, come nearer, gentle peace, profound in the glow of evening, how weary we are of wandering, is this perhaps death? We reached a transcendent congruence of place, mood, and music. Music is our theology, Foucault said quietly. Michelle, Mike asked. Would you care for a cold soft drink? No, he responded emphatically. I do not want anything to come between me and the drug and what's out there. I do not want anything to interfere with the pure experience of the drug. Then Foucault turned to me and said with a quizzical tone. Simian, why are you drinking that stuff? Oh, it's just another kind of chemical, I said.
[2026-05-07 | audiomark] or Deco. Michael in tone philosophically. You're saying either organic or geometric, I commented. Then suddenly my attention was arrested by fantastic faces formed by shadows burrowing into the mountain passads. I mentioned the opening scene of Zardas with its magnification depiction of a monumental stone sphinx sailing in the air. Foucault who did not know the film said, the castle of the Pyrenees is one of my favorite paintings by McGreet. I have seen the original hanging in New York in a lawyer's apartment. He also had some other masterpiece by McGreet. It was marvelous seeing all those paintings in one place. I've just read your little book on McGreet, I said. I was surprised that you find Kandinsky and Klay the two generative forces in modern art. I would have thought Picasso and Duchamp, but your book gave me a fresh perspective on McGreet. I am totally intrigued by McGreet. I've received several interesting letters from him, Foucault continued. Their contents were so subtle and obscure that I'm not sure whether I understood them. At one point, McGreet said that artists can be divided into groups, those who reach for similitude and those who portray resemblance. He thinks the thrust of Western art is toward the former, but McGreet claimed that he portrayed resemblance, the better to convey real experience rather than mere likeness. We reached Route 190 and, turning right, sped by the furnace creek in. After a short drive, we arrived at Zobrisky Point. I shivered with apprehension about ascending the steep grade leading to the small circular parking lot overlooking the sandstone sea. We inched our way to the circular barrier of the overview, which resembled the hub of a flying saucer.
[2026-05-07 | audiomark] Zeprisky point. As we motored slowly along artists' drive, I felt I was on a carnival ride through the grotto of Leonardo's Madonna of the Rocks. Each object was clear and distinct. Everything seemed artificial. I was experiencing the phenomena on many levels simultaneously, as if my mind were an eight-track tape, each sensation with multiple channels of its own. I could speak, think, desire, hear, see, feel, imagine, remember, on many discrete levels that connected to marvelous effect. Unimaginable synesthesia, immense worlds of delight, pristine paradise, found. With some relief at having steered safely through the desert reef, we stopped momentarily upon reaching the highway and inhaled the cool air blowing across the alkaline pools. We made a sharp right turn and drove north on Route 178. Michael slowed down so we could get a good look at mushroom rock. We passed...

=== These Memories Do Not Belong to Us — Yiming Ma ===
[2026-05-06 | audiomark] The merchant stays true to his word. Because when the giant experiences are hero's memories, he unexpectedly becomes attached to the wife's fate as well. He soon sends his men to compensate the doctrine full. Accompanied by not-sovailed threats of consequences if she were not to receive the best care. And after the wife miraculously recovers, she is shocked to receive an unmarked envelope with the details of a digital wallet generous enough to rebuild the hostile without any return address to send her thanks. So moved is the merchant by our hero's devotion that he never sells the memories but keeps that in his private vault to experience at his leisure. And that is where our hero's memories remain for many moons until the merchant is arrested and convicted by the chin courts of illegally profiting from the sale of unregulated memory content and his assets are wholly transferred to the criminal archives. Where the memories are stored for many moon millennia until they are accessed to produce this memory epic. Rejoice their audience. The memories of our hero's sacrifice are forgotten no more. Our deepest gratitude to the party for granting us the exemption. Thank you for inspiring this hybrid approach so that we may share our islander's journey alongside our creative struggles. We wish to thank the censors too. Even if the islander is one day deemed inappropriate for mind-bank consumption, we honor your tireless work to defend the cohesion of our chin society. To our producer. The true genius behind this project. None of this would have been possible without your unparalleled vision and gracious press
[2026-05-06 | audiomark] on the bed with a peaceful expression on her face, on morphine and oblivious to the chaos that surrounds them. Breathe a sigh of relief, even if you have already realized that our hero is doomed, since what wealth he possessed has disintegrated into little more than rubble. For the next three days, our hero silently sits on the blood-stained floor beside her bed, trying to accept that their baby is lost and his wife may never awaken. Fast forwarding, our hero grieves not only for what he has lost, but also for the moment when his inability to pay the hospital will come to light. What will happen to his wife then? Emmerce yourself in his despair. The producer finds this scene moving, so I ask Fang to send it to post-production. All of us in the studio pray in secret that the chin critics will not find the scene emotionally manipulative and penalize us during a ward season. One week the doctor says, Cooley, if you do not find the money, I will throw her out of the ward myself. Although the man has already earned a fortune from this disaster, he has no empathy for our hero, furious that he wasted a roll away bet on someone unable to pay. Remember, this story is no parable. It is only a memory so we cannot punish him. Bear witness through our hero's eyes, stare at the dried blood along the floor, listen to the fans, thrumming above, passing the stench of death between rooms. Embrace his helplessness. Even if the hostel had not burned, he would still have been unable to pay the doctor's price. What choice did he have?
[2026-05-06 | audiomark] filters. How about dialing up the background sounds? Please wait a moment as our team discusses how best to escalate the suspense of what is to come. Dear Chin audience, the world must appear strange as you peer through our hero's eyes. Look up, Islander. It's the incineration. It's happening right above us. Listen to the explosions erupting only a few hundred kilometers away on Reuben. Release a sigh of relief that the Chin missiles did not target your island or one of your neighbors. So long as the war ends and your guests return, should it matter who wins? Let them own Taiwan. Let them own America and the white men walking on those foreign lands. Marvel at the mushroom cloud billowing in the distance. Mudder a quick prayer. Then run. For as you lift your head and stare at the ferocious haze above, can you not see that winged monstrosity hurtling from the clouds? Run and don't look back. Not even when you find yourself underneath the shadow of the jumbo jet that will shroud your island in darkness. Run before its silver snout collides with the earth, before the plane explodes into a million shards of metal and golfing everything in heat. Run before the whole world turns black as if to signify the end of a scene, a lowering of curtains so that you, our audience, may take a breath to recover. Make it more exciting, the producer says. Make the action sing louder. Naturally I wait for him to fill.
[2026-05-06 | audiomark] to what used to be the gender neutral restrooms. He recalled once finding a full pack of cigarettes floating in the toilet bowl and wondering who it might have belonged to. The child restroom was now almost unrecognizable, transformed into a second pantry to accommodate all the extra mouths. Of course, you can remember perfectly what every room used to be. The headmaster said, staring longingly at the scar along the boy's temple. Few in chin had the clearance to own a mind-bank prototype, much less in a colony, had not been for his father, how it never had been granted such a privilege. The headmaster must have assumed that how had been accessing memories via his device, and his nostalgia had been enough to recall almost everything. Is it always so quiet here, how asked, finding the empty hallways unnerving? The headmaster shook his head. In honor of your visit, we sent most of the orphans on a field trip to the new Arlington cemetery. We worried that your tour might otherwise suffer, that the building would be too crowded. The old man then gestured towards a row of unused lockers ahead, and lamented that funding shortfalls made it impossible for the school to hire sufficient staff to conduct contraband checks. Of course, if the ambassador region could provide us with more resources, we could do more for the children. Gold by the man's shamelessness, especially given how much his father had already donated, how picked up his pace. Upon reaching the staircase, he finally inquired...
[2026-05-06 | audiomark] sighted a patriotic passage as my answer. She laughed so loudly that I worried she was unwell. To my surprise, she stood and squeezed my shoulder, whispering in my ear, words that sounded as if they'd come from some forgotten historian. That the party's greatest triumph lay not in any scientific breakthroughs, but rather it's understanding that we all share a deep longing for social harmony, even at the cost of remembering our true histories. What did she mean? It was a few days before my galko exam, which would determine my future. I can still recall my confused silence, not quite comprehending, but reluctant to ask her to clarify for fear of prolonging our memories of the conversation. It was around this period that the party mandated that every chins citizen keep their mind-bank streaming at all times, reassuring us that the data would be used only to improve the quality of entertainment, rather than for surveillance. Naturally, the party believed in protecting the privacy of its citizens. Another time in my youth, I asked if my mother might allow me to explore her mind-bank. Into my surprise, she refused. What if I told you that some of my most access to memories belong in the criminal archives? My mother said, would you still want to see them? I drew back, stung. Walking away, I assumed that her response had been sarcastic, because she wanted her son to work hard to build his own wealth of memories. It wasn't until ten moons ago that I revisited that conversation. On the day my mother breathed her.

=== I Who Have Never Known Men — Jacqueline Harpman ===
[2026-05-06 | audiomark] keep me an ignorance so they could pretend they weren't entirely powerless? They sometimes claimed it was out of modesty, but I could see perfectly well that among themselves they had no modesty. They whispered and tittered and were lured. I would never make love. They would never make love again. Perhaps that made us equal and they were trying to console themselves by depriving me of the only thing they could. Often in the evening before falling asleep, I would think about the young guard. I drew on the little I'd been able to guess. In another life he'd have come and sat beside me. He'd have asked me to dance and told me his name. I'd have had a name which I'd have told him and we'd have talked. Then if we were attracted to each other, we'd have walked hand in hand. Maybe I wouldn't have found him interesting. He was the only one of our six jailers who wasn't old and decrepit, and I was probably indulgent because I'd never met any other young men. I tried to imagine our conversation in a past that I hadn't known. Will it be fine again tomorrow? Have you seen next door's kittens? I hear your aunts going on holiday. But I'd never seen kittens and I had absolutely no idea what fine weather might be which put an end to my reverie. Then I'd think about kissing, imagining the guards' mouth as precisely as I could. It was quite wide with well-defined, finish lips. I didn't like the full lips that some of the women had. I pictured my lips drawing close to his. There was probably something else I needed to know because I felt nothing in particular. But then one evening, instead of falling asleep from the bulls-
[2026-05-06 | audiomark] of the two elderly women. You poor thing. And after a few sighs, she came out with the usual reply, what point is there in your knowing since it can't happen to you? Because I want to know, I raged, suddenly grasping why it was so important to me. She couldn't understand why someone would want knowledge that would be of no use to them, and I couldn't get anything out of her. It was certain that I would die untouched, and I wanted to satisfy my curiosity at least. Why were they also determined to keep silent? I tried to console myself with the thought that it was no secret anyway, because they all shared it. Was it to give it an additional sparkle that they refused to tell me, to give it the luster of a rare gem? By remaining silent, they were creating a girl who didn't know and who would regard them as the custodians of a treasure. Did they only keep me in ignorance so they could pretend they weren't entirely powerless? They sometimes claimed it was out of modesty, but I could see perfectly well that among themselves they had no modesty. They whispered and tittered and were lured. I would never make love. They would never make love again. Perhaps that made us equal, and they were trying to console themselves by depriving me of the only thing they could. Often in the evening before falling asleep, I would think about the young guard. I drew on the little I'd been able to guess. In another life, he'd have come and sat beside me. He'd have asked me to dance and told me his name. I'd have had a name, which I'd have told him, and we'd have talked. Then, if we were attracted to each other, we'd have walked hand in hand. Maybe I wouldn't have found a...
[2026-05-06 | audiomark] a day they'd prepare the meal. Gradually, I turned my attention to the guards who paced up and down continually outside our cage. They were always in threes a few paces apart, observing us, and we generally pretended to ignore their presence, but I grew inquisitive. I noticed that one of them was different. Taller, slimmer, and as I realized after a while, younger, that fascinated me. In their more cheerful moments, the women would talk of men and love. They'd giggle and tease me when I asked what was so funny. I went over everything I knew, kisses, which were given on the mouth, embraces, making eyes at someone, playing footsie, which I didn't understand at all, and then came seventh heaven, my goodness, given that I'd never seen any sky at all and had no idea what the first heaven or any of the others in between were, I didn't dwell on it. They would also complain about the brutality. It hurt. Men didn't care about women. They got them pregnant and then walked out saying, how do I know its mine? Sometimes the women would declare that it was no great loss, and at others they would start to cry. But I was destined to remain a virgin. One day I screwed up the courage to put aside my anger and question Dorothy, the least intimidating of the two elderly women. You poor thing. And after a few size, she came out with the usual reply, what point is there in your knowing since it can't happen to you? Because I want to know, I raged suddenly grasping why it was so important to me. She couldn't understand why someone would want knowledge that would be of no use to them, and I couldn't get anything.
[2026-05-06 | audiomark] never meant very much to me, and that they weren't much better informed than I was. All the same, when I did find out, I felt they hadn't really made an effort to teach me. I was furious. Anthia said that I wasn't entirely wrong and tried to explain their reasons. I may come back to this later, if I remember, but at the time I want to write about, I was live it. I felt I was being squirmed, as if I was incapable of understanding the answers to the few questions I asked, and I resolved not to take any further interest in the women. I was surly all the time, but I was unaware of it because I didn't know the words for describing moods. The women bustled about, busying themselves with the few day-to-day activities, but never inviting me to join them. I would crouch down and watch whatever there was to see. On reflection, that was almost nothing. They'd be sitting chatting or twice a day they'd prepare the meal. Gradually, I turned my attention to the guards who paced up and down continually outside our cage. They were always in threes, a few paces apart, observing us, and we generally pretended to ignore their presence, but I grew inquisitive. I noticed that one of them was different, taller, slimmer, and as I realized after a while, younger, that fascinated me. In their more cheerful moments, the women would talk of men and love. They'd giggle and tease me when I asked what was so funny. I went over everything I knew, kisses, which were given on the mouth, embraces, making eyes at someone, playing footsie, which I didn't understand at all, and then came seventh heaven, my goodness. Given that I'd never seen any sky at all and had no idea what the first heaven...
[2026-05-06 | audiomark] charter, but I've never been daunted by obstacles. I do have paper and pencils, although I may not have much time. Now that I no longer go off on expeditions, no occupation calls me, so I decided to start at once. I went into the cold store, took out the meat that I would eat later, and left it to defrost, so that when hunger struck, my food would soon be ready. Then I sat down at the big table and began to write. As I write these words, my tale is over. Everything around me is in order, and I have fulfilled the final task I set myself. It only took me a month, which has perhaps been the happiest month of my life. I do not understand that. After all, what I was describing was only my strange existence, which hasn't brought me much joy, is there a satisfaction in the effort of remembering that provides its own nourishment, and is what one recollects less important than the act of remembering? That is another question that will remain unanswered. I feel as though I am made of nothing else. As far back as I can recall, I have been in the bunker. Is that what they mean by memories? On the few occasions when the women were willing to tell me about their past, their stories were full of events, comings and goings, men, but I am reduced to calling a memory the sense of existing in the same place with the same people and doing the same things, in other words, eating, excreting and sleeping. For a very long time, the days went by, each one just like the day before, then I began to think, and everything changed.
[2026-05-06 | audiomark] apologizing that it was so little, and I felt a huge wrench and began to sob. I had never cried before. There was a pain in my heart as powerful as the pain of the cancer in my belly, and I, who no longer speak, because there is no one to hear me, began to call her, anthia, anthia, I shouted. I couldn't forgive her for not being there, for having allowed death to snatch her, to tear her from my clumsy arms. I chastised myself for not having held onto her, for not having understood that she couldn't go on anymore. I told myself that I'd abandoned her because I was frigid, as I had been all my life, as I shall be when I die. And so I was unable to hug her warmly, and that my heart was frozen, unfeeling, and that I hadn't realised that I was desperate. Never before had I been so devastated, I would have sworn it couldn't happen to me. I'd seen women trembling, crying, and screaming, but I'd remained unaffected by their tragedy, a witness to impulses I found unintelligible, remaining silent, even when I did what they asked of me to assist them. Admittedly, we were all caught up in the same drama that was so powerful, so all-embracing, that I was unaware of anything that wasn't related to it, but I had come to think that I was different. And now, racked with sobs, I was forced to acknowledge too late, much too late, that I too had loved, that I was capable of suffering, and that I was human, after all. I felt as if this pain would never be appeased, that it had me in its grip forever.

=== Valley of Shadows — Rudy Ruiz ===
[2026-05-06 | audiomark] Close your eyes, keep them closed." He squeezed his eyes shut as tightly as he could and prayed silently until his mother unleashed a blood-curdling scream. Part 1 1883 The Holy Dario Cisnetos squinted across the golden plains at the growing cloud of dust. He stood out on his porch, sipping his bitter morning coffee from a hot tin cup, just like he did at the start of every day. The new sun peaking over the vast blanket of Creosote dotted desert. He reckoned there were at least three riders, and they were moving fast, judging by the rate at which the dust cloud mushroomed, battling the orange glow of the rising sun. Between him and the interlopers stood a scattered regiment of cattle, motionless, oblivious to the intrusion. The cows didn't even bother to raise their heads from the sparse clumps of grass they grazed upon. You're about as much use as my comrades were. Back when I was with the ruralis, Solitario mused at the cattle, his dark eyes smoldering, as he maintained his steady stare toward the east. The outlines of three horses emerged from the swirl of sandy particles churning across his land. Two gringos and a mehicano. He could tell by the types of hats the riders wore on their heads. Soon, they'd be able to spot him there on his wooden porch. Even though he was dressed in black, they could probably already make out the flash of the sun, glinting off his tin cup. After all, the sun was behind them. He took a final sip, setting the cup down on the rustic...

=== Chapterhouse Dune — Frank Herbert ===
[2026-05-06 | audiomark] descendants are mostly distorted. Reverend Mother's carry the original, but we cannot force
it onto unwilling people. You see, Tyrant? We heard you. Let them come asking for it,
then and only then. And that was why you preserved us. You are tradeys bastard. That's why
I must get to work. Despite the peril to her sense of humanity, she knew she would continue
to insinuate herself into the ways of honored matres. I must think, as they think.
The hunter's problem, predator and prey, shared it. Not quite needle in the haystack. More
a question of tracking across a terrain littered with the familiar and the unfamiliar. Bene
Jesuit deceptions ensured that the familiar would cause honored matres at least as much
difficulty as the unfamiliar. But what have they done for us? Interplanetary communication
worked for the hunted, limited by economics for millennia. Not much of it except among
important people and traders. Important meant what it always meant. Rich, powerful, bankers,
officials, couriers. Military. Important labeled many categories, negotiators, entertainers,
medical personnel, skilled technicians, spies and other specialists. It was not much different
in kind from the days of the master Mason's unaltereder. Mainly a difference in numbers,
quality and sophistication. Boundaries were transparent to some as they had always been.
She felt it important to review this occasionally, looking for flaws.
The great mass of planet-bound humanities spoke of the silence of space, meaning they
could not afford the cost of such travel or communication. Most people knew the news they
received across this barrier was managed for special interests. It had always been that way.
On a planet, terrain and avoiding tell-tale radiation dictated the comm-
[2022-02-06 | highlight] “Trees and other plants for all of our symbiotic relationships,” she said.
			“Symbiotic?” It was a new word.
			She explained with something she knew he already had encountered—going out with others to harvest mushrooms.
			“Fungi won’t grow except in the company of friendly roots. Each has a symbiotic relationship with a special plant. Each growing thing takes something it needs from the other.”
			She went on at length and, bored with learning, he kicked a clump of grass, then saw how she stared at him in that disturbing way. He had done something offensive. Why was it right to step on one growing thing and not on another?”
[2022-02-06 | highlight] “voice.
			“Ownership is an interesting question,” she said. “Do we own this planet or does it own us?”
			“I like the smells here,” he said.
			She released him and urged him gently ahead of her. “We planted for the nose here, Miles. Aromatic herbs. Study them carefully and look them up when you get back to the library. Oh, do step on them!” when he started to avoid a plant runner in his path.”
[2022-02-06 | highlight] “The person who takes the banal and ordinary and illuminates it in a new way can terrify. We do not want our ideas changed. We feel threatened by such demands. “I already know the important things!” we say. Then Changer comes and throws our old ideas away.
			—THE ZENSUFI MASTER
			Miles Teg enjoyed playing in the orchards around Central. Odrade had first taken him here when he could just toddle. One of his earliest memories: hardly more than two years old and already aware he was a ghola, though he did not understand the word’s full meaning”
[2022-02-03 | highlight] “He was still tired of all this teaching, and asked: “If all these things are going to die anyway, why do I have to go back to the library and learn their names?”
			“Because you’re human and humans have this deep desire to classify, to apply labels to everything.”
			“Why do we have to name things like that?”
			“Because that way we lay claim to what we name. We assume an ownership that can be misleading and dangerous.”
			So she was back on ownership.
			“My street, my lake, my planet,” she said. “My label forever. A label you give to a place or thing may not even last out your lifetime except as a polite sop granted by conquerors . . . or as a sound to remember in fear.”
[2022-02-03 | highlight] “odors.
			“They were made to be walked on and give up their savor,” Odrade said. “Proctors have been teaching you how to deal with nostalgia. Have they told you nostalgia often is driven by the sense of smell?”
			“Yes, Mother.” Turning to look back at where he had stepped, he said: “That’s rosemary.”
			“How do you know?” Very intense.
			He shrugged. “I just know.”
			“That may be an original memory.” She sounded pleased.
			As they continued their walk in the aromatic hollow, Odrade’s voice once more became pensive. “Each planet has its own character where we draw patterns of Old Earth. Sometimes, it’s only a faint sketch, but here we have succeeded.”
			She knelt and pulled a twig from an acid-green plant. Crushing it in her fingers, she held it to his nose. “Sage.”
			She was right but he could not say how he knew.
			“I’ve smelled that in food. Is that like melange?”
[2022-02-03 | highlight] “This was his first real awareness that he carried memories he could not recall. Deeply disturbed, he turned to Odrade, who stood outlined in light against the afternoon sun, and said: “There are things I can’t remember!”
			“One day you will remember,” she said.
			He could not see her face against the bright light and her words came from a great shadow place, as much within him as from Odrade.
			That year he began studying the life of the Bashar Miles Teg, whose cells had started his new life. Odrade had explained some of this to him, holding up her fingernails. “I took tiny scrapings from his neck—cells of his skin and they held all we needed to bring you to life.”
			There was something intense about the orchards that year, fruit larger and heavier, bees almost frenetic.
			“It’s because of the desert growing larger down there in the south,” Odrade said. She held his hand as they walked through a dew-fresh morning beneath burgeoning apple trees.”
[2022-02-03 | highlight] “By this time he already had begun learning about the giant sandworm the Sisterhood had spirited from Rakis. Death of that worm had produced creatures called sandtrout. Sandtrout were why the desert grew. Some of this history touched accounts of his previous incarnation—a man they called “The Bashar.” A great soldier who had died when terrible women called Honored Matres destroyed Rakis.
			Teg found such studies both fascinating and troubling. He sensed gaps in himself, places where memories ought to be. The gaps called out to him in dreams. And sometimes when he fell into reverie, faces appeared before him. He could almost hear words. Then there were times he knew the names of things before anyone told him. Especially names of weapons.”
[2022-02-03 | highlight] “What are my real strengths? What are my facts?
			The resources at a Mother Superior’s command were formidable: profound loyalty in those who served her, a military arm under a Teg-trained Bashar (far away now with a large portion of their troops guarding the school planet, Lampadas), artisans and technicians, spies and agents throughout the Old Empire, countless workers who looked to the Sisterhood to protect them from Honored Matres, and all the Reverend Mothers with Other Memories reaching into the dawn of life.
			Odrade knew without false pride that she represented the peak of what was strongest in a Reverend Mother. If her personal memories did not provide needed information, she had others around her to fill the gaps. Machine-stored data as well, although she admitted to a native distrust of it.
			Odrade”

=== Habeas Viscus — Alexander G. Weheliye ===
[2026-05-06 | highlight] On the one hand, Habeas Viscus is concerned with rectifying the shortcomings of bare life and biopolitics discourse.
[2026-05-05 | highlight] “Building on Hortense Spillers’s distinction between body and flesh and the writ of  habeas corpus, I use the phrase  habeas viscus — “You shall have the  flesh” — on  the  one  hand,  to  signal  how  violent  political  domination activates a fleshly surplus that simultaneously sustains and disfigures said brutality, and, on the other hand, to reclaim the atrocity of  flesh as a pivotal arena for the politics emanating from different traditions of  the oppressed.”

=== The Dawn of Everything — David Graeber; David Wengrow ===
[2026-05-05 | audiomark] some time next to a French fort. Biault did not think much of the Mick-Mac, but reported
that the feeling was mutual. They considered themselves better than the French. For, they
say, you are always fighting and quarrelling among yourselves. We live peaceably. You were
envious and are all the time slandering each other. You were thieves and deceivers. You
were covetous and a neither generous nor kind. As for us, if we have a morsel of bread,
we share it with our neighbour. They are saying these and like things continually. What seemed
to irritate Biault the most was that the Mick-Mac would constantly assert that they were, as
a result, richer than the French. The French had more material possessions, the Mick-Mac
conceded, but they had other greater assets. Ease, comfort and time.
Twenty years later, brother Gabriel Suggard, a recollect friar, wrote similar things of
the Wendat nation. Suggard was at first highly critical of Wendat's life, which he described
as inherently sinful. He was obsessed with the idea that Wendat women were all intent
on seducing him. But by the end of his sojourn, he had come to the conclusion their social
arrangements were in many ways superior to those at home in France. In the following
passages, he was clearly echoing Wendat opinion. They have no lawsuits and take little pains
to acquire the goods of this life, for which we Christians torment ourselves so much,
and for our excessive and insatiable greed in acquiring them we are justly and with reason
reproved by their quiet life and tranquil dispositions. Much like Biault's Mick-Mac, the
Wendat were particularly offended by the French lack of generosity to one another.
[2022-01-04 | highlight] “Here we return to the matter with which we began: the European Enlightenment as the apotheosis of the principle of open and rational debate. We’ve already mentioned Sagard’s grudging respect for the Wendat facility in logical argumentation (a theme that also runs through most Jesuit accounts). At this point, it is important to bear in mind that the Jesuits were the intellectuals of the Catholic world. Trained in classical rhetoric and techniques of disputation, Jesuits had learned the Americans’ languages primarily so as to be able to argue with them, to persuade them of the superiority of the Christian faith. Yet they regularly found themselves startled and impressed by the quality of the counterarguments they had to contend with.”
[2022-01-04 | highlight] “political terms, then, French and Americans were not arguing about equality but about freedom. About the only specific reference to political equality that appears in the seventy-one volumes of The Jesuit Relations occurs almost as an aside, in an account of an event in 1648. It happened in a settlement of Christianized Wendat near the town of Quebec. After a disturbance caused by a shipload of illegal liquor finding its way into the community, the governor persuaded Wendat leaders to agree to a prohibition of alcoholic beverages, and published an edict to that effect – crucially, the governor notes, backed up by threat of punishment. Father Lallemant, again, records the story. For him, this was an epochal event:”

=== Forest Euphoria — Patricia Ononiwu Kaishian ===
[2026-05-05 | highlight] “My mother was no stranger to such wildlife, having grown up in the forested and swampy lands of the lower Hudson Valley. Still, twenty-seven years ago, when she noticed a distinctive rattle in the nursery of her small children, she could hardly believe what she was hearing. She looked slowly around, training her ear to the sound. The fast, tight, percussive buzz was unmistakable, and to her dismay, no other obvious source, no alternative explanation, presented itself. Frozen but for her eyes, my mother continued to search the room. And then she saw it. Coiled beneath the radiator was a slender little serpent, square-jawed, slate brown with dark splotchy crossbands, rattle erect and quivering—a baby timber rattlesnake.
	Known for her quick instincts and calm in dangerous or dicey scenarios, my mother swiftly ushered me and my siblings out of the room, sealed the door, and called her brother, Ken. Uncle Ken was a motorhead, stone-cold in the 1980s, who drove a jet-black 1981 Pontiac Bandit Trans Am with an eagle emblazoned on the hood. He sped across town, into our snaky valley, and heroically arrived in motorcycle gloves and a helmet and carrying party[…]”

=== The Just City — Jo Walton ===
[2026-05-05 | highlight] “She turned into a tree. It was a Mystery. It must have been. Nothing else made sense, because I didn’t understand it. I hate not understanding something. I put myself through all of this because I didn’t understand why she turned into a tree—why she chose to turn into a tree. Her name was Daphne, and so is the tree she became, my sacred laurel with which poets and victors crown themselves.
I asked my sister Artemis first. “Why did you turn Daphne into a tree?” She just looked at me with her eyes full of moonlight. She’s my full-blooded sister, which you’d think would count for something, but we couldn’t be more different. She was ice-cold, with one arched brow, reclining on a chilly silver moonscape.”

=== Infinite Jest — David Foster Wallace ===
[2026-04-02 | highlight] “Eighteen in May, Mario Incandenza’s designated function around Enfield Tennis Academy is filmic: sometimes during A.M. drills or P.M. matches he’ll be assigned by Coach Schtitt et al. to set up an old camcorder or whatever video stuff’s to hand on a tripod
         and record a certain area of court, videotaping different kids’ strokes, footwork, certain tics and hitches in serves or running
         volleys, so the staff can show the tapes to the kids instructionally, letting the kids see on the screen exactly what a coach
         or prorector’s talking about. The reason being it’s a lot easier to fix something if you can see it.”

=== Blindsight + Echopraxia (Firefall #1 + #2) — Peter Watts ===
[2026-02-26 | highlight] “Theseus carried no regular crew—no navigators or engineers, no one to swab the decks, no meat wasted on tasks that machinery orders of mag smaller could perform orders of mag better. Let superfluous deckhands weigh down other ships, if the nonAscendent hordes needed to attach some pretense of usefulness to their lives. Let them infest vessels driven only by commercial priorities. The only reason we were here was because nobody had yet optimized software for First Contact. Bound past the edge of the solar system, already freighted with the fate of the world, Theseus wasted no mass on self-esteem.


So here we were, rehydrated and squeaky-clean: Isaac Szpindel, to study the aliens. The Gang of Four—Susan James and her secondary personae— to talk to them. Major Amanda Bates was here to fight, if necessary. And Jukka Sarasti to command us all, to move us like chess pieces on some multidimensional game board that only vampires could see.”
[2026-02-22 | highlight] “Imagine an artefact that embodies the very notion of torture, something so wrenched and disfigured that even across uncounted lightyears and unimaginable differences in biology and outlook, you can't help but feel that somehow, the structure itself is in pain.


Now make it the size of a city.


It flickered as we watched. Lightning arced from recurved spines a thousand meters long. ConSensus showed us a strobe-lit hellscape, huge and dark and twisted. The composites had lied. It was not the least bit beautiful.”
[2026-02-22 | highlight] “It hit something. It stuck.


And suddenly Rorschach snapped into view—no refractory composites, no profiles or simulations in false color. There it was at last, naked even to Human eyes.


Imagine a crown of thorns, twisted, dark and unreflective, grown too thickly tangled to ever rest on any human head. Put it in orbit around a failed star whose own reflected half-light does little more than throw its satellites into silhouette. Occasional bloody highlights glinted like dim embers from its twists and crannies; they only emphasized the darkness everywhere else.”
[2026-02-22 | highlight] “She grabbed the nearest chair, sat, raised her hands as if cueing an orchestra. Her fingers trembled in mid-air as she played virtual icons; her lips and jaw twitched with subvocal commands. I tapped her feed and saw text accreting around the alien signal:


RORSCHACH TO VESSEL APPROACHING 116°AZ -23°DEC REL. HELLO THESEUS. RORSCHACH TO VESSEL APPROACHING 116°AZ -23°DEC REL. HELLO THESEUS. RORSCHACH TO VESSEL APPROACHI


She'd decoded the damn thing. Already. She was even answering it:


Theseus to Rorschach. Hello Rorschach.


HELLO THESEUS. WELCOME TO THE NEIGHBORHOOD.”
[2026-02-19 | highlight] “He never uses the past tense," I murmered.


"Huh? Oh, that." Pag nodded. "They never experience the past tense. It's just another thread to them. They don't remember stuff, they relive it."


"What, like a post-traumatic flashback?"


"Not so traumatic." He grimaced. "Not for them, at least."


"So this is obviously your current hot spot? Vampires?"


"Pod, vampires are the capital-Hot spot for anyone with a 'neuro' in their c.v. I'm just doing a couple of histology papers. Pattern-matching receptors, Mexican-hat arrays, reward/irrelevance filters. The eyes, basically."


"Right." I hesitated. "Those kind of throw you.”
[2026-02-19 | highlight] “So you're taking orders from a vamp," he said now. "Talk about fighting fire with fire."


"I guess it's practice. Until we run up against the real thing."


He laughed. I couldn't imagine why. But I smiled back anyway.


It was good to see him.


"So, what are they like?" Pag asked.


"Vampires? I don't know. Just met my first one yesterday."


"And?"


"Hard to read. Didn't even seem to be aware of his surroundings sometimes, he seemed to be... off in his own little world."


"He's aware all right. Those things are so fast it's scary. You know they can hold both aspects of a Necker cube in their heads at the same time?"


The term rang a bell. I subtitled, and saw the thumbnail of a familiar wireframe box:”
[2026-02-19 | highlight] “Now I remembered: classic ambiguous illusion. Sometimes the shaded panel seemed to be in front, sometimes behind. The perspective flipped back and forth as you watched.


"You or I, we can only see it one way or the other," Pag was saying. "Vamps see it both ways at once. Do you have any idea what kind of an edge that gives 'em?"


"Not enough of one."


"Touché. But hey, not their fault neutral traits get fixed in small populations."


"I don't know if I'd call the Crucifix glitch neutral."


"It was at first. How many intersecting right angles do you see in nature?" He waved one dismissive hand. "Anyway, that's not the point. The point is they can do something that's neurologically impossible for us Humans. They can hold simultaneous multiple worldviews, Pod-man. They just see things we have to work out step-by-step, they don't have to think about it. You know, there isn't a single baseline human who could just tell you, just off the top of their heads, every prime number between one and a billion? In the old days, only a few autistics could do shit like that.”
[2026-02-19 | highlight] “It took them ninety minutes to agree on Fireflies. A half hour after that, the first Fourier transforms appeared in the noosphere; to no one's great surprise, the Fireflies had not wasted their dying breaths on static. There was pattern embedded in that terminal chorus, some cryptic intelligence that resisted all earthly analysis. The experts, rigorously empirical, refused to speculate: they only admitted that the Fireflies had said something. They didn't know what.”
[2026-02-19 | highlight] “I would have pursued it—would have tried yet again to make my father see—but by now we'd left the gates of Heaven for the streets of Purgatory, where pedestrians on all sides murmured in astonishment and stared open-mouthed at the sky. I followed their gaze to a strip of raw twilight between the towers, and gasped—


The stars were falling.


The Zodiac had rearranged itself into a precise grid of bright points with luminous tails. It was as though the whole planet had been caught in some great closing net, the knots of its mesh aglow with St. Elmo's fire. It was beautiful. It was terrifying.”
[2026-02-19 | highlight] “She had just stepped onto the street from the building across the way. She stood a head taller than the rest of us, her eyes shining yellow and bright as a cat's in the deepening dark. She realized, as I watched, that something was amiss. She looked around, glanced at the sky—and continued on her way, totally indifferent to the cattle on all sides, to the heavenly portent that had transfixed them. Totally indifferent to the fact that the world had just turned inside-out.


It was 1035 Greenwich Mean Time, February 13, 2082.”
[2026-02-19 | highlight] “WHERE WAS I when the lights came down?


I was emerging from the gates of Heaven, mourning a father who was—to his own mind, at least—still alive.


It had been scarcely two months since Helen had disappeared under the cowl. Two months by our reckoning, at least. From her perspective it could have been a day or a decade; the Virtually Omnipotent set their subjective clocks along with everything else.


She wasn't coming back. She would only deign to see her husband under conditions that amounted to a slap in the face. He didn't complain. He visited as often as she would allow: twice a week, then once. Then every two. Their marriage decayed with the exponential determinism of a radioactive isotope and still he sought her out, and accepted her conditions.”
[2026-02-19 | highlight] “Easy for him to say. Easy even to accept the hurt she'd inflicted on him all these years. This cheerful façade here at the end hardly made up for the endless bitter complaints my father had endured throughout living memory. Do you think it's easy when you disappear for months on end? Do you think it's easy always wondering who you're with and what you're doing and if you're even alive? Do you think it's easy raising a child like that on your own?”
[2026-02-19 | highlight] “Into the drum (drums, technically; the BioMed hoop at the back spun on its own bearings). I flew through the center of a cylinder sixteen meters across. Theseus' spinal nerves ran along its axis, the exposed plexii and piping bundled against the ladders on either side. Past them, Szpindel's and James' freshly-erected tents rose from nooks on opposite sides of the world. Szpindel himself floated off my shoulder, still naked but for his gloves, and I could tell from the way his fingers moved that his favorite color was green. He anchored himself to one of three stairways to nowhere arrayed around the drum: steep narrow steps rising five vertical meters from the deck into empty air.”
[2026-02-19 | highlight] “Fifteen minutes to spin-up. Fifty to the post-resurrection briefing. Just enough time for those who preferred gravity-bound sleep to haul their personal effects into the drum and stake out their allotted 4.4 square meters of floor space.


Gravity—or any centripetal facsimile thereof—did not appeal to me. I set up my own tent in zero-gee and as far to stern as possible, nuzzling the forward wall of the starboard shuttle tube. The tent inflated like an abscess on Theseus' spine, a little climate-controlled bubble of atmosphere in the dark cavernous vacuum beneath the ship's carapace. My own effects were minimal; it took all of thirty seconds to stick them to the wall, and another thirty to program the tent's environment.”
[2026-02-19 | highlight] “She'd taken us a good fifteen AUs towards our destination before something scared her off course. Then she'd skidded north like a startled cat and started climbing: a wild high three-gee burn off the ecliptic, thirteen hundred tonnes of momentum bucking against Newton's First. She'd emptied her Penn tanks, bled dry her substrate mass, squandered a hundred forty days' of fuel in hours. Then a long cold coast through the abyss, years of stingy accounting, the thrust of every antiproton weighed against the drag of sieving it from the void. Teleportation isn't magic: the Icarus stream couldn't send us the actual antimatter it made, only the quantum specs. Theseus had to filterfeed the raw material from space, one ion at a time. ”
[2026-02-19 | highlight] “Morning, commissar." Isaac Szpindel reached one trembling, insensate hand for the feedback gloves at the base of his pod. Just past him, Susan James was curled into a loose fetal ball, murmuring to herselves. Only Amanda Bates, already dressed and cycling through a sequence of bone-cracking isometrics, possessed anything approaching mobility. Every now and then she tried bouncing a rubber ball off the bulkhead; but not even she was up to catching it on the rebound yet.


The journey had melted us down to a common archetype. James' round cheeks and hips, Szpindel's high forehead and lumpy, lanky chassis—even the enhanced carboplatinum brick shit-house that Bates used for a body— all had shriveled to the same desiccated”
[2026-02-19 | highlight] “The pain's an unavoidable side effect. That's just what happens when you splice vampire subroutines into Human code. You asked about painkillers once, but nerve blocks of any kind compromise metabolic reactivation. Suck it up, soldier.


You wonder if this was how it felt for Chelsea, before the end. But that evokes a whole other kind of pain, so you block it out and concentrate on the life pushing its way back into your extremities”
[2026-02-19 | highlight] “You're not in the Kuiper Belt where you belong: you're high above the ecliptic and deep into the Oort, the realm of long-period comets that only grace the sun every million years or so. You've gone interstellar, which means (you bring up the system clock) you've been undead for eighteen hundred days.


You've overslept by almost five years.”
[2026-02-19 | highlight] “You wake in an agony of resurrection, gasping after a record-shattering bout of sleep apnea spanning one hundred forty days. You can feel your blood, syrupy with dobutamine and leuenkephalin, forcing its way through arteries shriveled by months on standby. The body inflates in painful increments: blood vessels dilate; flesh peels apart from flesh; ribs crack in your ears with sudden unaccustomed flexion. Your joints have seized up through disuse. You're a stick-man, frozen in some perverse rigor vitae.”
[2026-02-19 | highlight] “ may have grown up distant but I grew up objective, and I have Robert Paglino to thank for that. His seminal observation set everything in motion. It led me into Synthesis, fated me to our disastrous encounter with the Scramblers, spared me the worse fate befalling Earth. Or the better one, I suppose, depending on your point of view. Point of view matters: I see that now, blind, talking to myself, trapped in a coffin falling past the edge of the solar system. I see it for the first time since some beaten bloody friend on a childhood battlefield convinced me to throw my own point of view away.”
[2026-02-19 | highlight] “The grownups showed up eventually, of course. Medicine was bestowed, ambulances called. Parents were outraged, diplomatic volleys exchanged, but it's tough to drum up neighborhood outrage on behalf of your injured baby when playground surveillance from three angles shows the little darling—and five of his buddies— kicking in the ribs of a disabled boy. My mother, for her part, recycled the usual complaints about problem children and absentee fathers—Dad was off again in some other hemisphere—but the dust settled pretty quickly. Pag and I even stayed friends, after a short hiatus that reminded us both of the limited social prospects open to schoolyard rejects who don't stick together.”
[2026-02-19 | highlight] “The rest of them ran at the sight of blood. One of the braver promised me I was dead, shouted "Fucking zombie!" over his shoulder as he disappeared around the corner.


Three decades it took, to see the irony in that remark.”
[2026-02-19 | highlight] “Every child knows that much instinctively. Maybe I should just let that process unfold, maybe I shouldn't try to mess with nature. Then again, Pag's parents hadn't messed with nature, and look what it got them: a son curled up in the dirt while a bunch of engineered superboys kicked in his ribs.


In the end, propaganda worked where empathy failed. Back then I didn't so much think as observe, didn't deduce so much as remember—and what I remembered was a thousand inspirational stories lauding anyone who ever stuck up for the underdog.”
[2025-03-07 | highlight] “A WHITE ROOM, innocent of shadow or topography. No angles: that’s crucial. No corners or intrusions of furniture, no directional lighting, no geometries of light and shadow whose intersection, from any viewpoint, might call forth the Sign of the Cross. The walls—wall, rather—was a single curved surface, softly bioluminescent, a spheroid enclosure flattened at the bottom in grudging deference to biped convention. It was a giant womb three meters across, right down to the whimpering thing curled up on the floor.”

Excerpt From
Blindsight + Echopraxia (Firefall #1 + #2)
Peter Watts
This material may be protected by copyright.
[2023-04-30 | highlight] “At least these deaths served a purpose, some constructive end transcending the disease or predation that nature would have inflicted. Life was a struggle to exist at the expense of other life. Biology was a struggle to understand life. And this particular bit of biology, this study of which he was author, principal, and sole investigator—this was a struggle to use biology to help the very populations he was sampling. These deaths were the closest that Darwin’s universe would ever come to altruism.”
[2023-04-14 | highlight] “Biotelemetry danced across the headspace beside each alien, luminous annotations shuddering through thin air. I had no idea what constituted normal readings for these creatures, but I couldn't imagine those jagged spikes passing for anything but bad news. The creatures themselves seethed subtly with fine mosaics in blue and gray, fluid patterns rippling across their cuticles. Perhaps it was a reflexive reaction to the microwaves; for all we knew it was a mating display.”

=== Futureland — Walter Mosley ===
[2026-02-02 | highlight] “Six weeks after Chill had gone a private ambulance drove up the Bents’ dirt driveway. The attendants were from New Orleans,
         as was the van. The two white men rolled Chill into the house on the wheeled stretcher.
      
      Chill was there under a thin sheet. His head was shaven and his eyes were covered with bandaged gauze. The form his legs made
         under the sheet was straight and motionless.
      
      “Where should we bring ’im, ma’am?” one of the attendants asked Kai Lin.
      “What’s happened to him?”
      “Uncle Chilly!” Ptolemy screamed in dismay.
      “Don’t know nuthin’ ’bout that, ma’am,” the second paramedic said. “We just picked him up from the airport with instructions
         to brang ’im here.”
      
      “Am I in the livin’ room?” Chill asked.
      “Yeah,” the paramedic replied.
      “Chilly!” Ptolemy yelled again. He hid behind Kai Lin’s red silk dress, afraid of the white men, the chrome stretcher, and
         Chill’s decimated form.
      
      “Then leave me here. Kai?”
      “Yes?”
      “Give these men fifty dollars each. I’ll pay you back later on.”
      The white men were surprised at the generosity of the black paraplegic. They both thanked him, gave their apologies to Kai
         Lin, and left.
      
      ”

=== Are the Lips a Grave? — Huffer, Lynne ===
[2026-01-19 | highlight] “ Some queer theorists, attentive to the ruses of the repressive hypothesis, have seized explicitly on Foucault’s call, at the end of History of Sexuality, volume 1, that we replace sex-desire with a new economy of bodies and pleasures. Rather than “liberating” ourselves from the repressive prison of conventional sexuality and desire, the argument goes, we should follow Foucault’s lead and pursue instead “a body- and pleasure-centered strategy of resistance to the apparatus of sexuality.”18 As Ladelle McWhorter puts it in her genealogy of bodies and pleasures: “If we are going to engage in queer practices and enjoy queer pleasures yet also be free of heterosexist oppression, we cannot start with our desire; we have to start elsewhere. If elsewhere is going to be bodies and pleasures, the first order of business is to be very sure that we are not thinking bodies in ways that subordinate them once again to the domination of sex-desire.”19”
[2026-01-19 | highlight] “In its self-invention as theory through the discursive shock effect of words like fist fucking, queer discourse created avenues of expression that hadn’t existed before, especially in an academic context. At the same time, this shock effect of early queer theory (Bersani’s rectum is a classic example) created the unspoken assumption that those who will be shocked by all this anal imagery are the hetero-, genito-normative: the nonqueer. Indeed, to be shocked is to be nonqueer. This unspoken assumption of queer discourse unwittingly perpetuates the linguistic production of perversions through an incitement to talk dirty in theory.”
[2026-01-19 | highlight] “Along similar lines, Michael Warner writes that “a public sex culture changes the nature of sex” and offers Foucault’s remarks on gay male fist fucking to support his claim.8 More than any other particular practice, fisting seems to promise a future of bodily pleasure freed from the normalizing constrictions of sexuality and desire.9 According to Halperin and other queer theorists, fisting is among those acts that contribute to the creation of “a gay praxis” (SF 93) or even, as Foucault puts it, a “way of life [that] can yield a culture and an ethics.”10”
[2025-11-12 | highlight] “what does queer feminism have to offer now? Some readers may think that contemporary scholarship on sexuality has nothing new to say, that sexual thinking has turned into business as usual. They may argue that not only have feminist and queer studies been institutionalized as discrete fields of knowledge—through everything from doctoral degrees to an academic publishing niche to a canonical list of greatest hits—but also that many of the concepts generated by feminist and queer thinkers over the past thirty years have seeped into the lingua franca of culture at large. And they may wonder, rightly: what does queer feminism bring to sexual thinking and practice today that is surprising and transformative?”

Excerpt From
Are the Lips a Grave?
Huffer, Lynne
This material may be protected by copyright.
[2025-11-11 | highlight] “At the end of his life, Foucault asked: “why [have] we made sexuality into a moral experience?”7 Explicitly conceptualizing sexual morality as a historical problem, Foucault’s question opens possibilities for reconfiguring modern sexual ethics.8”

Excerpt From
Are the Lips a Grave?
Huffer, Lynne
This material may be protected by copyright.

=== James — Percival Everett ===
[2025-10-20 | highlight] https://youtu.be/ilAfjjqHePY?si=JmYWYdWCZHiIjWKD
[2025-10-02 | highlight] “Correct approach, but you didn’t translate it.”
			She nodded. “Oh, Lawd, missums ma’am, you wan fo me to gets some sand?”
			“Good.”
			“ ‘Gets some’ is hard to say.” This from Glory, the oldest child. “The s’s.”
			“That’s true,” I said. “And it’s okay to trip over it. In fact, it’s good. You wan fo me to ge-gets s-s-some s-sand, Missum Holiday?”
			“What if they don’t understand?” Lizzie asked.
			“That’s okay. Let them work to understand you. Mumble sometimes so they can have the satisfaction of telling you not to mumble. They enjoy the correction and thinking you’re stupid. Remember, the more they choose to not want to listen, the more we can say to one another around them.”

Excerpt From
James
Percival Everett
This material may be protected by copyright.
[2025-10-02 | highlight] “HAT EVENING I sat down with Lizzie and six other children in our cabin and gave a language lesson. These were indispensable. Safe movement through the world depended on mastery of language, fluency. The young ones sat on the packed-dirt floor and I was on one of our two homemade stools. The hole in the roof pulled the smoke from the fire that burned in the middle of the shack.
			“Papa, why do we have to learn this?”
			“White folks expect us to sound a certain way and it can only help if we don’t disappoint them,” I said. “The only ones who suffer when they are made to feel inferior is us. Perhaps I should say ‘when they don’t feel superior.’ So, let’s pause to review some of the basics.”

Excerpt From
James
Percival Everett
This material may be protected by copyright.
[2025-10-02 | highlight] “
			“That’s correct, February,” I said.
			Lizzie looked at the other children and then back to me. “Never address any subject directly when talking to another slave,” she said.
			“What do we call that?” I asked.
			Together they said, “Signifying.”
			“Excellent.” They were happy with themselves, and I let that feeling linger. “Let’s try some situational translations. Something extreme first. You’re walking down the street and you see that Mrs. Holiday’s kitchen is on fire. She’s standing in her yard, her back to her house, unaware. How do you tell her?”
			“Fire, fire,” January said.
			“Direct. And that’s almost correct,” I said.
			The youngest of them, lean and tall five-year-old Rachel, said, “Lawdy, missum! Looky dere.”
			“Perfect,” I said. “Why is that correct?”
			Lizzie raised her hand. “Because we must let the whites be the ones who name the trouble.”
			“And why is that?” I asked.
			February said, “Because they need to know everything before us. Because they need to name everything.”

Excerpt From
James
Percival Everett
This material may be protected by copyright.

=== Assata — Assata Shakur ===
[2025-09-30 | highlight] “Yo no soy una mulatta. Yo soy una mujer negra, y orgullosa soy una mujer negra,” i would tell people as soon as I learned a little Spanish. “I’m not a mulatto, but a Black woman, and I’m proud to be Black.” Some people understood where i was coming from, but others thought i was too hung up on the race question. To them, “mulatto” was just a color, like red, green, or blue. But, to me, it represented a historical relationship. All of my associations with the word “mulatto” were negative. it represented slavery, slave owners raping Black women. It represented a privileged caste, educated in European values and culture. In some Caribbean countries, it represented the middle level of a hierarchical, three-caste system—the caste that acted as a buffer class between the white rulers and the Black masses.
[2025-09-30 | highlight] “So the name finally had to go. I thought about Ybumi Oladele, but there was one problem. I didn’t know what the name meant. My new name had to mean something really special to me. At the time, there were little pamphlets being put out listing names and their meanings, but i had a hard time finding one i liked. A lot of the names had to do with flowers or songs or birds or other things like that. Others meant born on Thursday, faithful, loyal, or even things like tears, or little fool, or one who giggles. The
women’s names were nothing like the men’s names, which meant things like strong, warrior, man of iron, brave, etc. I wanted a name that had something to do with struggle, something to do with the liberation of our people. I decided on Assata Olugbala Shakur. Assata means “She who struggles,” Olugbala means “Love for the people,” and i took the name Shakur out of respect for Zayd and Zayd’s family. Shakur means “the thankful.”

Excerpt From
Assata
Assata Shakur
This material may be protected by copyright.
[2025-09-30 | highlight] “It wasn’t until years later—after college and more revolutionary activism and marriage—that i began to seriously think about changing my name. The name JoAnne began to irk my nerves. I had changed a lot and moved to a different beat, felt like a different person. It sounded so strange when people called me JoAnne. It really had nothing to do with me. I didn’t feel like no JoAnne, or no Negro, or no amerikan. I felt like an African woman. From the time i picked my hair out in the morning to the time i slipped off to sleep with Mingus in the background, i felt like an African woman and rejoiced in it. My bit, abstract black and white inkblot-looking painting was replaced by paintings of Black people and revolutionary posters. My life became an African life, my surroundings took on an African flavor, my spirit took on an African glow.”

Excerpt From
Assata
Assata Shakur
This material may be protected by copyright.
[2025-09-30 | highlight] “From the paintings on my walls to the big, fat pillows on my floor, from the incense burning in the air to the music dancing through the rooms, my whole life was moving to African rhythms. My mind, heart, and soul had gone back to Africa, but my name was still stranded in Europe somewhere. JoAnne was bad enough, but at least my mother had given. it to me. As for Chesimard, well, i could only come to one conclusion. Somebody named Chesimard had been the slavemaster of my ex-husband’s ancestors. Chesimard, like most other last names Black people use today, was derived from massa. Black folks went from being Mr. Johnson’s Mary and Mr. Jackson’s Paul to being Mary Johnson and Paul Jackson. Sometimes, before dozing off to sleep, i would lie in bed and think about it, wondering how many slaves Chesimard had owned in Martinique and how often he beat them. I would stare up at the ceiling wondering how many Black women Chesimard had raped, how many Black babies he had fathered, and how many Black people he had been responsible for killing.”

Excerpt From
Assata
Assata Shakur
This material may be protected by copyright.
[2025-09-30 | highlight] “agencies.
“Hold on for a minute,” somebody said. “Where are ya’ll gonna get the money to run all that stuff?”
“We’ll take community control of the banks,” someone else answered.
“You’d better take control of the army, too, because those banks aren’t gonna just let you take their money lying down.”
“We’ll take control of the political institutions in our community. Then we’ll take control of the congressional seats, the senate seats, the city council seats, the mayor’s office, and every other office that we can take control of. We’ll take control of the political offices so we can allocate money to the people who need it.”
“Y’all just wishing and hoping,” someone said. “You can control the social institutions and the political institutions, but unless you control the economic and military institutions, you can only go but so far.”
Everybody”

Excerpt From
Assata
Assata Shakur
This material may be protected by copyright.
[2025-09-30 | highlight] “Everybody started talking about what the brother had said. We were all confused, but we were all enthused. That was the one thing i dug about those days. We were alive and we were excited and we believed that we were going to be free someday. For us, it wasn’t a matter of whether or not. It was a question of how.
We always started out talking about reform and ended up talking about revolution. If you were talking about anything except a few little jive crumbs here and there, reform was just not going to get it. I was long past the day when i thought that reform could possibly work, but revolution was a big question mark. I believed, with all my heart, that it was possible. But the question was how.”

Excerpt From
Assata
Assata Shakur
This material may be protected by copyright.
[2025-09-30 | highlight] “An industrial revolution was taking place in the years before the Civil War. Inventions such as the cotton gin, the telegraph, steamships, and steam trains completely changed methods of manufacturing, transportation, mining, communications, agriculture, and trade. The amount of goods produced was no longer determined by the number of people working in the process but by the capacity of the machines. Amerika was no longer a country that produced raw materials for the manufacturing nations in Europe. By 1860, the census reports that 1,385,000 people were employed in manufacturing and that one-sixth of the whole population was directly supported by manufacturing. The number was much higher when clerks, transportation workers, and merchants were added.”

Excerpt From
Assata
Assata Shakur
This material may be protected by copyright.
[2025-09-30 | highlight] “On April 12, 1861, Southern troops fired on Fort Sumter, South Carolina, thus starting the Civil War. The response of the Northerners was electrifying. Millions who had been indifferent or lukewarm to the secession of the South jumped on the bandwagon to defend the Union. But the enthusiasm was short-lived. They already viewed Black workers in the North as competitors for their jobs, and the white Northerners, for fear of losing even more jobs to the Blacks, refused to enlist in sufficient numbers for the North to win the war. When the draft law was enacted, tens of thousands of white workers in New York City took to the streets and brutally beat and murdered every Black person they could find. It has been estimated that between four hundred and a thousand Blacks were killed as a result of the so-called New York draft law riots. Draft riots and the murder of Blacks also took place in other Northern cities.”

Excerpt From
Assata
Assata Shakur
This material may be protected by copyright.
[2025-09-30 | highlight] “It freed slaves only in the Confederate states; the slaves in states loyal to the Union remained slaves. Lincoln clearly did not believe Black people could live in the u.s. as equal citizens. In the Lincoln-Douglas debates, he stated:

If all earthly power were given to me, I should not know what to do as to the existing institution. My first impulse would be to free all the slaves and send them to Liberia—to their own native land. But a moment’s reflection would convince me that, whatever of high hope . . . there may be in this, in the long run its sudden execution is impossible. . . . What then? Free them all and keep them among us as underlings? It is quite certain that this betters their condition? I think I would not hold one in slavery at any rate, yet the point is not clear enough for me to denounce people upon. What next? Free them and make them politically and socially our equals? My own feelings will not admit of this, and, if mine would, we well know that those of the great mass of whites will not.”

Excerpt From
Assata
Assata Shakur
This material may be protected by copyright.
[2025-09-30 | highlight] “If i was running myself ragged before i went back to school, now i was flying. I was learning and changing
every day. Even my image of myself was changing, as well as my concept of beauty. One day a friend asked me why i didn’t wear my hair in an Afro, natural. The thought had honestly never occurred to me. In those days, there weren’t too many Afros on the set. But the more i thought about it, the better it sounded. I had always hated frying my hair—burnt ears, a smokey straightening, and the stink of your own hair burning. How many nights had i spent trying to sleep on curlers, bound with scarves that cut into my head like a tourniquet. Afraid to go to the beach, afraid to walk in the rain, afraid to make passionate love on hot summer nights if i had to get up and go to work in the morning. Afraid my hair would “go back.” Back to where? Back to the devil or Africa. The permanent was even worse: trying to sit calmly while lye was eating its way into my brain. Clumps of hair falling out. The hair[…]”

Excerpt From
Assata
Assata Shakur
This material may be protected by copyright.
[2025-09-26 | highlight] “Once in a while i went to lunch with a young man who worked at Johnson Publications. But we always got into arguments. Especially about Ebony magazine. Half the time, in the fashion section they would have these elaborate evening gowns that cost thousands of dollars. When i asked him what Black people could afford to buy them and whether they were gonna wear them to the corner bar, he got insulted. He was one of those Black people who think that you are free if you can go in a store and buy expensive things. I told him that the only Black woman who could afford those dresses was Johnson’s wife, and he got even more insulted. He told me that everything was changing, everything was so much better. I said that if things were so much better, how come every time a Black person got a good job or was a manager or something, it was news and was printed in Ebony. Our relationship ended abruptly when he accused me of always trying to bring Black people down and make it seem like we don’t have nothing. I ended the matter by cursing him out and that[…]”

Excerpt From
Assata
Assata Shakur
This material may be protected by copyright.
[2025-09-26 | highlight] “anything. It seemed that everybody was in some kind of bag, the dope bag, the whiskey brown paper bag, the jesus bag, the love bag, the sex bag, the make-it bag, and none of those bags were doing anybody any good. I was looking for my own bag, but the pickings were slim. I kept on looking nevertheless, running and moving and hanging out until i was running myself ragged. One day i’d be downtown hanging out with my hippy, blippy (Black hippy) friends. The next night i’d be uptown hanging out with the hustlers. But nothing seemed like it was for real, you know? The same dudes who would be talking slick and sniffing coke out of $50 bills one day would be scrounging and begging for a loan the next. Even the most successful hustlers seemed to be nothing but flunkies and potential fall guys for the mafia. My friends from downtown weren’t much better. At best, most of them were professional escape artists, into escaping the problems of the Black community or those of the white community”

Excerpt From
Assata
Assata Shakur
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[2025-09-26 | highlight] “I am insisting on reading James Baldwin even though the wind keeps flapping the pages. Anguished voices scream and moan from the pages. Compressed ghettos threaten to explode. Poverty and fire and brimstone boil over into a deadly stew, but the “beautiful” people refuse to let me read in peace. My girlfriend has insisted on “fixing me up” with “Mr. Wonderful,” who turns out to be an egomaniac decked out in monogrammed swimming trunks, a matching terrycloth robe, and a monogrammed towel to boot. Mr. Wonderful consents to grace me with his presence. His looks and manner tell me that i should be grateful because he is definitely what’s happening. His ride is a red MG convertible, his crib is in Esplanade Gardens, and his gig is an assistant manager for some bank downtown. He is kool from his reel-to-reel tapedeck to his color TV, right down to his shaggy “bachelor rug,” which he leeringly tells me about.”

Excerpt From
Assata
Assata Shakur
This material may be protected by copyright.
[2025-09-26 | highlight] “Despite that, i continued saying the first thing that came into my head: that the u.s. was fighting communists because they wanted to take over everything. When someone asked me what communism was, i opened my mouth to answer, then realized i didn’t have the faintest idea. My image of a communist came from a cartoon. It was a spy with a black trench coat and a black hat pulled down over his face, slinking around corners. In school, we were taught that communists worked in salt mines, that they weren’t free, that everybody wore the same clothes, and that no one owned anything. The Africans rolled with laughter.
I felt like a bona fide clown. One of them explained that
communism was a political-economic system, but i wasn’t listening. I was just digging on myself. I had been hooping and hollering about something that i didn’t even understand. I knew i didn’t know what the hell communism was, and yet i’d been dead set against it. Just like when you’re a little kid and they get you to believe in the bogeyman. You don’t know what the hell the bogeyman is, but you hate him and you’re[…]”

Excerpt From
Assata
Assata Shakur
This material may be protected by copyright.

=== Unknown — Assata ===
[2025-09-30 | highlight] “If i was running myself ragged before i went back to school, now i was flying. I was learning and changing
every day. Even my image of myself was changing, as well as my concept of beauty. One day a friend asked me why i didn’t wear my hair in an Afro, natural. The thought had honestly never occurred to me. In those days, there weren’t too many Afros on the set. But the more i thought about it, the better it sounded. I had always hated frying my hair—burnt ears, a smokey straightening, and the stink of your own hair burning. How many nights had i spent trying to sleep on curlers, bound with scarves that cut into my head like a tourniquet. Afraid to go to the beach, afraid to walk in the rain, afraid to make passionate love on hot summer nights if i had to get up and go to work in the morning. Afraid my hair would “go back.” Back to where? Back to the devil or Africa. The permanent was even worse: trying to sit calmly while lye was eating its way into my brain. Clumps of hair falling out. The hair[…]”

Excerpt From
Assata
Assata Shakur
This material may be protected by copyright.
[2025-03-02 | highlight] “Three weeks,” Jessica said. “I spent almost a week trying to revive him. There were meetings, arguments…investigations. Then I sent for you. The Fedaykin obey my orders, else I might not have been able to delay the….” She wet her lips with her tongue, watching Chani cross to Paul. Chani stood over him now, looking down on the soft beard of youth that framed his face, tracing with her eyes the high browline, the strong nose, the shuttered eyes—the features so peaceful in this rigid repose. “How does he take nourishment?” Chani asked.
[2025-03-02 | highlight] Jessica, a sip of the fluid on her tongue, found her body rallying, converting the poison almost automatically. In the light elevation the ceremony always imparted, she sensed the life-glow from Paul—a radiation there registering on her senses. In that instant, she knew. “You drank the sacred water!” she blurted. “One drop of it,” Paul said. “So small…one drop.” “How could you do such a foolish thing?” she demanded. “He is your son,” Chani said. Jessica glared at her. A rare smile, warm and full of understanding, touched Paul’s lips. “Hear my beloved,” he said. “Listen to her, Mother. She knows.”
[2025-02-26 | highlight] herself. Stilgar came to the young girl who had embarrassed Paul, said: “Chani, take the child-man under your wing. Keep him out of trouble.” Chani touched Paul’s arm. “Come along, child-man.” Paul hid the anger in his voice, said: “My name is Paul. It were well you—” “We’ll give you a name, manling,” Stilgar said, “in the time of the mihna, at the test of aql.”
[2025-02-25 | highlight] He remained silent, thinking like the seed he was, thinking with the race consciousness he had first experienced as terrible purpose. He found that he no longer could hate the Bene Gesserit or the Emperor or even the Harkonnens. They were all caught up in the need of their race to renew its scattered inheritance, to cross and mingle and infuse their bloodlines in a great new pooling of genes. And the race knew only one sure way for this—the ancient way, the tried and certain way that rolled over everything in its path: jihad. Surely, I cannot choose that way, he thought. But he saw again in his mind’s eye the shrine of his father’s skull and the violence with the green and black banner waving in its midst. Jessica cleared her throat, worried by his silence. “Then…the Fremen will give us sanctuary?” He looked up, staring across the green-lighted tent at the inbred, patrician lines of her face. “Yes,” he said. “That’s one of the ways.” He nodded. “Yes. They’ll call me…Muad’Dib, ‘The One Who Points the Way.’ Yes…that’s what they’ll call me.” And he closed his eyes, thinking: Now, my father, I can mourn you. And he felt the tears coursing down his cheeks.
[2025-02-25 | highlight] Jessica pressed her hands to her mouth. Great Mother! He’s the Kwisatz Haderach! She felt exposed and naked before him, realizing then that he saw her with eyes from which little could be hidden. And that, she knew, was the basis of her fear. “You’re thinking I’m the Kwisatz Haderach,” he said. “Put that out of your mind. I’m something unexpected.”
[2022-01-06 | highlight] Kingship is one of the most enduring forms of human governance. While we cannot know its precise historical origins in time and space, it is attested during virtually all eras on all continents, and for most of human history the tendency was for it to become more common, not les
[2022-01-05 | highlight] Mycelium Running
[2022-01-05 | highlight] “As a result, the same period that saw the most ruthless application of speed-ups and downsizing in the blue-collar sector also brought a rapid multiplication of meaningless managerial and administrative posts in almost all large firms. It’s as if businesses were endlessly trimming the fat on the shop floor and using the resulting savings to acquire even more unnecessary workers in the offices upstairs. (As we’ll see, in some companies, this was literally the case.) The end result was that, just as Socialist regimes had created millions of dummy proletarian jobs, capitalist regimes somehow ended up presiding over the creation of millions of dummy white-collar jobs instead.”

Excerpt From
Bullshit Jobs
David Graeber
This material may be protected by copyright.
[2022-01-05 | highlight] “The answer clearly isn’t economic: it’s moral and political. The ruling class has figured out that a happy and productive population with free time on their hands is a mortal danger. (Think of what started to happen when this even began to be approximated in the sixties.) And”

Excerpt From
Bullshit Jobs
David Graeber
This material may be protected by copyright.
[2022-01-04 | highlight] “But better is so good. I’ve tracked my moods every day these last few months and (other than a short dip halfway through treatment) I’ve steadily gotten better. I even had five seemingly random days over the last month where I felt what I imagine most people think of as normal. I haven’t had days like that in so long I’d literally forgotten I could feel that way.”

Excerpt From
Broken (in the best possible way)
Jenny Lawson
This material may be protected by copyright.
[2022-01-03 | highlight] “When you first said that I didn’t need the antidepressants I thought there was a misunderstanding, because you were fine with them before. It was only when I switched to the generic version and had a breakdown that there was an issue. Apparently the release mechanism wasn’t the same in the generic and for some of us that causes a problem. Luckily my shrink quickly recognized the issue and switched me back to the brand name. But suddenly you decided that it “wasn’t medically necessary” that I have the drug that had kept me away from suicide. I appealed and appealed and my doctor sent letters and forms and exceptions and you gave excuses for not covering it that were all proven wrong and eventually you relented. It was worth the hours and hours of work, I thought, until I picked up my medication and found it was hundreds of dollars a month.
“But you told me it was covered,” I said to you.”

Excerpt From
Broken (in the best possible way)
Jenny Lawson
This material may be protected by copyright.
[2022-01-03 | highlight] “LIVE AS IF IT’S THE LAST DAY OF YOUR LIFE … Except don’t, because that sounds awful. I’d spend all day in tears if someone said I was going to die at midnight. That’s like having to have fun at gunpoint. Maybe start slower. Like live as if it’s Saturday even when it’s Wednesday afternoon.”

Excerpt From
Broken (in the best possible way)
Jenny Lawson
This material may be protected by copyright.
[2022-01-03 | highlight] “Me: I should surprise him with a big plate full of spiders. Because then he’ll know that I know his secret and that I appreciate his sacrifice. A big plate of Appreciation Spiders. That is so Modern Romance. Or maybe Postmodern Romance.
Lisa: PoMoRo. I think you just invented a new genre in every bookstore. You can’t not say it. Just reading it makes me happy. Like a sassy read. My shoulders get into it too.
Me: And it makes sense because modern art is slightly baffling but then you look at postmodern art and you’re like, “Wait, what the shit is happening here?” AND THAT’S TOTALLY ME AND VICTOR.
Lisa: Oh my God, you’re right. You ARE PoMoRo.
Me: At first glance it looks like porno. PoMoRoPorno. That’s a hard tongue twister for you.”

Excerpt From
Broken (in the best possible way)
Jenny Lawson
This material may be protected by copyright.
[2022-01-03 | highlight] “I consoled myself by musing that if they did find something, at least I have life insurance, so Victor and Hailey would get some small comfort out of it, and Victor looked at me quizzically and said, “You don’t have life insurance,” as if I should have known that, but I didn’t and I was shocked, because that seems like the kind of thing that he would take care of. Then he said, “You know this. Remember? I have life insurance but you don’t. We went through all sorts of hoops to try to get it for you but you insisted on telling them all the stuff that was wrong with you and we couldn’t get it approved. Remember?”
I don’t.”

Excerpt From
Broken (in the best possible way)
Jenny Lawson
This material may be protected by copyright.
[2022-01-03 | highlight] “Last night I sat under the stars with Victor as he tried his best version of a pep talk by reminding me that we have bills to pay and that I owe my publishers a book and that we can’t just get by forever with only his salary, but it didn’t really work because fear galvanizes him but it paralyzes me, and I ended up a sobbing mess while Victor looked scared and confused and said, “Shit. What did I do wrong? I was just trying to help.” And he was. But his talk wasn’t really what had scared me. It was what he’d said a few minutes earlier, when I was worried that all of these disorders were catching up with me … that maybe the scoping would find something bad … that this was the beginning of the bad kind of avalanche.”

Excerpt From
Broken (in the best possible way)
Jenny Lawson
This material may be protected by copyright.
[2022-01-03 | highlight] “It’s not true. That first line is what I feel. The second is what I know. But even knowing it, perception feels like reality when you’re in it. That’s why nightmares are real to you when you’re asleep even when they seem so ridiculous when you wake up. You wonder how you could have ever been terrified of enormous puppies with your mom’s head on them that chase you into a swamp made of quicksand and fire, but at the moment those terrible mother-puppies were all you knew of reality. And then you wake up more and realize that your mom in your dream was Kathie Lee Gifford and WTF, brain? And that’s sort of what depression is like …”

Excerpt From
Broken (in the best possible way)
Jenny Lawson
This material may be protected by copyright.
[2022-01-03 | highlight] “Sometimes I can find the humor in all of this, but it doesn’t change the fact that I worry when this happens that it’ll never go away … that this is the end. That I’ll always be waiting until tomorrow, when I’ll have strength to be funny or to make sense or to shower. I know I’ve had periods like this before, so logically I know that I should be okay eventually. That I’ll come out of it. The problem is that depression is my forever side dish to any period of convalescence and illness, and depression lies. It tells you that you are worthless. That life was never good. That you are a drain on the world and that it will only get worse.”

Excerpt From
Broken (in the best possible way)
Jenny Lawson
This material may be protected by copyright.
[2022-01-03 | highlight] “Dear Vampire Lord,
I am not currently a vampire but I like the idea of not dying. I want to be skinnier, though, before it happens. Or do I automatically get skinnier like in Twilight? Also, I’m a vegan. Is that a problem?
Hugs.
You are welcome to the family but before we start you have to fill out a form and send a photo of you so I can send it to the High Master. I await the above form before we can start the initiation of you becoming a member of the VAMPIRE BROTHERHOOD.
~Master Paul”

Excerpt From
Broken (in the best possible way)
Jenny Lawson
This material may be protected by copyright.
[2022-01-03 | highlight] “Thank you for your quick response! I am still very interested in becoming a vampire but I’m concerned about the name of the association … THE VAMPIRE BROTHERHOOD. I am a lady and therefore do not have the requisite penis necessary to be a “brother.” Also I’m a feminist so I worry about the connotations of an exclusively all-male vampire society. Even in the afterlife I have to deal with a patriarchal oppression? We’re better than that, aren’t we? Please let me know if you’re okay with my vagina and also if you are open to changing the name of your organization to something a little less nineteenth century. Perhaps something like UP WITH VAMPIRES? Your call”

Excerpt From
Broken (in the best possible way)
Jenny Lawson
This material may be protected by copyright.
[2022-01-03 | highlight] “Victor tried to make me feel bad because I never got Hailey a birth certificate, but in my defense I didn’t get one because they’re like baby receipts and I’m not gonna get a refund. Then Victor said that they’re not for returning babies, they’re to prove that you have a baby, but I already have proof that I have a baby and her name is Hailey and she lives here.
People”

Excerpt From
Broken (in the best possible way)
Jenny Lawson
This material may be protected by copyright.
[2022-01-03 | highlight] “People say that it’s good to be a woman because they can have multiple orgasms, but it seems like anyone can have multiple orgasms if they’re patient enough. I can’t help but think we’re getting credit for something that’s not really that much of a benefit. It’s not like we’re having a race. And if we are, I suspect men are ahead of us anyway.”

Excerpt From
Broken (in the best possible way)
Jenny Lawson
This material may be protected by copyright.
[2022-01-03 | highlight] “There are about twice as many human nipples in the world as there are people, but there are about as many human testicles in the world as there are people. Like, it averages out to one testicle per person. That’s a weird story problem.”

Excerpt From
Broken (in the best possible way)
Jenny Lawson
This material may be protected by copyright.
[2022-01-03 | highlight] “The sunlight had hit the fountain from between the buildings so that the dancing rainbow fire prism was only visible from where I was … from the small room I was stuck in. It remains one of the most brilliant and awe-inspiring things I have ever seen in my life. And it occurred to me that I would never have seen it if I hadn’t been trapped in my hotel, having a small breakdown … if I hadn’t been right in that spot right at that second. It was all about perspective, literally and figuratively. I considered it a sign that perhaps there is a path I’m supposed to be on. It’s not the same path that everyone else takes, and that can be hard and lonely, but I was reminded that there are amazing things I would never see with normal eyes and other paths.”

Excerpt From
Broken (in the best possible way)
Jenny Lawson
This material may be protected by copyright.
[2022-01-03 | highlight] “weeks. I recognized those scared eyes and the terrible frayed exhaustion of these kindred people who were ready to run at any moment. I felt proud and happy that I was able to talk to each person but also ashamed because it was so draining that it was all I could do to survive the anxiety of being away from my home, and every spare moment I spent hiding in hotel rooms, recovering from or preparing for the anxiety of being around people.”

Excerpt From
Broken (in the best possible way)
Jenny Lawson
This material may be protected by copyright.
[2022-01-03 | highlight] “Over the years I’d hide in bathrooms and closets and books. And mostly in myself. It was a lonely place to be, but safe. Except when I got stuck. When the fear of leaving the bathroom would be so severe that I’d miss my next class or meeting because I couldn’t make myself leave. When the fear of lifting my eyes out of a book made me pretend that I didn’t hear classmates who tried to get my attention and then made fun of me for ignoring them. When I fell so far into my own head that I couldn’t see how to get out of it.”

Excerpt From
Broken (in the best possible way)
Jenny Lawson
This material may be protected by copyright.
[2022-01-03 | highlight] “I remember hiding in my toy box when I was little, pushing out the toys on the bedroom floor and closing the lid over me to hide from the strangely unnerving and irrational fear I didn’t have the words to explain. Sometimes I’d just stay a minute and sometimes I’d stay so long that the dark became colorful blurs that danced in front of my eyes. It was a safe place for me, until I got stuck. Not stuck like you might imagine, like the time my little sister sat on top of the lid to mess with me. That was fine, actually, because it felt weirdly safer—like I had a tiny bouncer doing security. The first time I got stuck, though, it was scarier because the thing trapping me inside the box was me.”

Excerpt From
Broken (in the best possible way)
Jenny Lawson
This material may be protected by copyright.
[2022-01-03 | highlight] “So I went to the drugstore and the clerk asked if he could help and I said, “Yeah. I’m looking for tiny condoms. Like toddler-sized tiny.” And he was like, “Uh…,” and I quickly explained, “I mean, not for me. Obviously,” and he laughed in semi-relief and I said, “They’re for my dog.”
And then he stopped laughing.
“They’re not for her penis,” I said. “She’s a girl dog. She doesn’t even have a penis. I need condoms for her hands.” And he looked at me weird but probably just because I said my dog has “hands” instead of “paws” and maybe because he thought my dog was into fisting. Which she’s not, because I don’t even think dogs do that. “Not for fisting,” I added.”

Excerpt From
Broken (in the best possible way)
Jenny Lawson
This material may be protected by copyright.
[2022-01-03 | highlight] “I did the math and it came out to like a dollar per paw, which meant I would be paying four dollars just to let my dog wear balloons on her feet. And I thought to myself, Is this a test? Is this how they see if buying a dog has made you lose your damn mind? Is it like when you buy tiny $100 shoes for newborn babies whose feet never touch the ground? Because I never fell for that shit either.
So then I was like, Fuck ”

Excerpt From
Broken (in the best possible way)
Jenny Lawson
This material may be protected by copyright.
[2022-01-03 | highlight] “yelled, “SHIT,” and the lady in the stall next to me hesitantly asked, “Is everything okay?” and I said (a little too loudly), “EVERYTHING’S FINE. NOTHING IS IN THE TOILET.” Which is a weird thing to say in a bathroom because the very reason you go into the stall is to leave stuff in the toilet, but I’m used to leaving pee rather than articles of clothing so I wasn’t really my best self. I stood there, balancing on one foot because I didn’t want to put my naked foot down in a public bathroom, as I stared at my shoe at the bottom of the toilet and realized this was going to be one of those moments I would remember forever.”

Excerpt From
Broken (in the best possible way)
Jenny Lawson
This material may be protected by copyright.
[2022-01-03 | highlight] “can blame some of this on my ADD, which gives me the attention level of a kitten on cocaine. One minute I’m having a brilliant thought (like wondering if flat-chested women ever get that sweaty underboob smell even if they don’t have underboob), and then I suddenly find myself standing in front of an open refrigerator and thinking, Why am I here? But not like Why am I here, and what is the purpose of life? More like Why am I in the kitchen? How did I get here? Why is there milk in this fridge if I’m lactose intolerant? WHOSE HOUSE IS THIS? And then I remember that other people live with me, and that they probably bought the milk, but then I think, Does milk always look that color? How do I know if it’s gone bad?”

Excerpt From
Broken (in the best possible way)
Jenny Lawson
This material may be protected by copyright.
[2022-01-03 | highlight] “Even the title for this introduction comes from a conversation I had with a friend where we tried to win “worst at adulting.” I pointed out that I could barely even be human and that at most I was just a full-grown mammal. But then I remembered that the thing that makes you a mammal is laying live young instead of eggs and lactating, but I couldn’t even lactate properly. But then I remembered that men don’t lay live young and they’re still mammals, and I thought maybe I needed to consult a science book because I’d fucked up the definition, or that maybe it was another situation where men just get a pass because of that whole “I own a penis” thing, and then my friend was like, “I don’t think you’re supposed to say that you ‘lay’ live young,” and I was like, “Yeah. Poor phrasing on my part. But in my defense, I can’t even mammal correctly,” and she refused to accept that and insisted that I recognize my accomplishments. “You are Jenny Lawson, full-grown mammal!” she said encouragingly and with confidence, and I said, “I think you just came up with my next[…]”

Excerpt From
Broken (in the best possible way)
Jenny Lawson
This material may be protected by copyright.
[2022-01-02 | highlight] “Personal freedom, we tend to believe, is inherently good (even if some of us also feel that a society based on total individual liberty – one which took it so far as to eliminate police, prisons or any sort of apparatus of coercion – would instantly collapse into violent chaos). Seventeenth-century Jesuits most certainly did not share this assumption.”
[2022-01-02 | highlight] “Most of us simply take it for granted that ‘Western’ observers, even seventeenth-century ones, are simply an earlier version of ourselves; unlike indigenous Americans, who represent an essentially alien, perhaps even unknowable Other. But in fact, in many ways, the authors of these texts were nothing like us. When it came to questions of personal freedom, the equality of men and women, sexual mores or popular sovereignty – or even, for that matter, theories of depth psychology18 – indigenous American attitudes are likely to be far closer to the reader’s own than seventeenth-century European ones.”
[2022-01-02 | highlight] “The multi-authored and much more extensive Jesuit Relations, which appeared between 1633 and 1673, were also widely read and debated in Europe, and include many a similar remonstrance aimed at the French by Wendat observers. One of the most striking things about these seventy-one volumes of missionary field reports is that neither the Americans, nor their French interlocutors, appear to have had very much to say about ‘equality’ per se – for example, the words égal or égalité barely appear, and on those very few occasions when they do it’s almost always in reference to ‘equality of the sexes’ (something the Jesuits found particularly scandalous).”
[2022-01-02 | highlight] “French as existing in a kind of Hobbesian state of ‘war of all against all’. (It’s probably worthy of remark that especially in this early contact period, Americans were likely to have known Europeans largely through missionaries, trappers, merchants and soldiers – that is, groups almost entirely composed of men. There were at first very few French women in the colonies, and fewer children. This probably had the effect of making the competitiveness and lack of mutual care among them seem all the more extreme.)”
[2022-01-02 | highlight] “Father Pierre Biard, for example, was a former theology professor assigned in 1608 to evangelize the Algonkian-speaking Mi’kmaq in Nova Scotia, who had lived for some time next to a French fort. Biard did not think much of the Mi’kmaq, but reported that the feeling was mutual: ‘They consider themselves better than the French: “For,” they say, “you are always fighting and quarrelling among yourselves; we live peaceably. You are envious and are all the time slandering each other; you are thieves and deceivers; you are covetous, and are neither generous nor kind; as for us, if we have a morsel of bread we share it with our neighbour.” They are saying these and like things continually.’14”
[2022-01-02 | highlight] “True, it’s never entirely clear how far such egalitarian ideals are merely a side effect of hierarchical social arrangements that obtained at ordinary times. Our notion that everyone is equal before the law, for instance, originally traces back to the idea that everyone is equal before the king, or emperor: since if one man is invested with absolute power, then obviously everyone else is equal in comparison. Early Christianity similarly insisted that all believers were (in some ultimate sense) equal in relation to God, whom they referred to as ‘the Lord’.”
[2022-01-02 | highlight] “But the question still remains: why is it that by the eighteenth century, European intellectuals had come to fix on the idea of primordial freedom or, especially, equality, to such an extent that it seemed perfectly natural to ask a question like ‘what is the origin of inequality among men?’ This seems particularly odd considering how, prior to that time, most did not even consider social equality possible.”
[2022-01-02 | highlight] “Sixteenth-century scholars, such as the Spanish missionary José de Acosta, were more likely to conclude they were looking at the fallen vestiges of some ancient civilization, or refugees who had, in the course of their wanderings, forgotten the arts of metallurgy and civil governance. Such a conclusion would have made obvious common sense for people who assumed that all truly important knowledge had been revealed by God at the beginning of time, that cities had existed before the Flood, and that saw their own intellectual life largely as attempts to recover the lost wisdom of ancient Greeks and Romans.”
[2022-01-02 | highlight] “Each of these authors populated the State of Nature with what they took to be the simplest societies known in the Western Hemisphere, and thus they concluded that the original state of humanity was one of freedom and equality, for better or worse (Hobbes, for example, definitely felt it was worse). It’s important to stop here for a moment and consider why they came to this verdict – because it was by no means an obvious or inevitable conclusion.”
[2022-01-02 | highlight] “The legal and philosophical question then became: what rights do human beings have simply by dint of being human – that is, what rights could they be said to have ‘naturally’, even if they existed in a State of Nature, innocent of the teachings of written philosophy and revealed religion, and without codified laws? The matter was hotly debated. We”
[2022-01-02 | highlight] “It’s important to remember that Spanish adventurers like Cortés and Pizarro carried out their conquests largely without authorization from higher authorities; afterwards, there were intense debates back home over whether such unvarnished aggression against people who, after all, posed no threat to Europeans could really be justified.7 The key problem was that – unlike non-Christians of the Old World, who could be assumed to have had the opportunity to learn the teachings of Jesus, and therefore to have actively rejected them – it was fairly obvious that the inhabitants of the New World simply never had any exposure to Christian ideas. So they couldn’t be classed as infidels.”
[2022-01-02 | highlight] “There is no contesting that European traders, missionaries and settlers did actually engage in prolonged conversations with people they encountered in what they called the New World, and often lived among them for extended periods of time – even as they also colluded in their destruction. We also know that many of those living in Europe who came to embrace principles of freedom and equality (principles barely existing in their countries a few generations before) claimed that accounts of these encounters had a profound influence on their thinking. To deny any possibility that they were right is, effectively, to insist that indigenous people could not possibly have any real impact on history. It is, in fact, a way of infantilizing non-Westerners: a practice denounced by these very same authors.”
[2022-01-02 | highlight] “As a result, even in cases where Enlightenment thinkers openly insisted they were getting their ideas from foreign sources (as the German philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz did when he urged his compatriots to adopt Chinese models of statecraft), there’s a tendency for contemporary historians to insist they weren’t really serious; or else that when they said they were embracing Chinese, or Persian, or indigenous American ideas these weren’t really Chinese, Persian or indigenous American ideas at all but ones they themselves had made up and merely attributed to exotic Others.2”
[2022-01-02 | highlight] “All this applies to Rousseau. Intellectual historians sometimes write as if Rousseau had personally kicked off the debate about social inequality with his 1754 Discourse on the Origin and the Foundation of Inequality Among Mankind. In fact, he wrote it to submit to an essay contest on the subject.”
[2022-01-02 | highlight] “commentaries on this whole phenomenon is to be found in a private letter written by Benjamin Franklin to a friend:
When an Indian Child has been brought up among us, taught our language and habituated to our Customs, yet if he goes to see his relations and make one Indian Ramble with them there is no persuading him ever to return, and that this is not natural merely as Indians, but as men, is plain from this, that when white persons of either sex have been taken prisoner young by the Indians, and lived awhile among them, tho’ ransomed by their Friends, and treated with all imaginable tenderness to prevail with them to stay among the English, yet in a Short time they become disgusted with our manner of life, and the care and pains that are necessary to support it, and take the first opportunity of escaping again into”
[2022-01-02 | highlight] “to the contrary, that all good things come only from Europe ensures one’s work can be read as a retroactive apology for genocide, since (apparently, for Pinker) the enslavement, rape, mass murder and destruction of whole civilizations – visited on the rest of the world by European powers – is just another example of humans comporting themselves as they always had; it was in no sense unusual. What was really significant, so this argument goes, is that it made possible the dissemination of what he takes to be ‘purely’ European notions of freedom, equality before the law, and human rights to the survivors”
[2022-01-02 | highlight] “Since the 1970s, the Yanomami have acquired a reputation as the quintessential violent savages: ‘fierce people’, as their most famous ethnographer, Napoleon Chagnon, called them. This seems decidedly unfair to the Yanomami since, in fact, statistics show they’re not particularly violent – compared with other Amerindian groups, Yanomami homicide rates turn out average-to-low.18 Again, though, actual statistics turn out to matter less than the availability of dramatic images and anecdotes. The real reason the Yanomami are so famous, and have such a colourful reputation, has everything to do with Chagnon himself: his 1968 book Yanomamö: The Fierce People, which sold millions of copies, and also a series of films, such as The Ax Fight, which offered viewers a vivid glimpse of tribal warfare. For”
[2022-01-02 | highlight] “For obvious reasons, Hobbes’s position tends to be favoured by those on the right of the political spectrum, and Rousseau’s by those leaning left. Pinker positions himself as a rational centrist, condemning what he considers to be the extremists on either side. But why then insist that all significant forms of human progress before the twentieth century can be attributed only to that one group of humans who used to refer to themselves as ‘the white race’ (and now, generally, call themselves by its more accepted synonym, ‘Western civilization’)? There is simply no reason to make this move. It would be just as easy (actually, rather easier) to identify things that can be interpreted as the first stirrings of rationalism, legality, deliberative democracy and so forth all over the world, and only then tell the story of how they coalesced into the current global system.24”
[2022-01-02 | highlight]  

[2022-01-02 | highlight] “Yes, a little over 5,000 years ago someone walking through the Alps left the world of the living with an arrow in his side; but there’s no particular reason to treat Ötzi as a poster child for humanity in its original condition, other than, perhaps, Ötzi suiting Pinker’s argument. But if all we’re doing is cherry-picking, we could just as easily have chosen the much earlier burial known to archaeologists as Romito 2 (after the Calabrian rock-shelter where it was found). Let’s take a moment to consider what it would mean if we did this.”
[2022-01-02 | highlight] “Since, like Hobbes, Pinker is concerned with the origins of the state, his key point of transition is not the rise of farming but the emergence of cities. ‘Archaeologists’, he writes, ‘tell us that humans lived in a state of anarchy until the emergence of civilization some five thousand years ago, when sedentary farmers first coalesced into cities and states and developed the first governments.’14 What follows is, to put it bluntly, a modern psychologist making it up as he goes along. You might hope that a passionate advocate of science would approach the topic scientifically, through a broad appraisal of the evidence – but this is precisely the approach to human prehistory that Pinker seems to find uninteresting. Instead he relies on anecdotes, images and individual sensational discoveries, like the headline-making find, in 1991, of ‘Ötzi the Tyrolean Iceman’.”
[2022-01-02 | highlight]  

[2022-01-01 | highlight] “This is an excerpt from the testimony before the Alameda County Grand Jury of Corrine Leonard, the nurse in charge of the Kaiser Foundation Hospital emergency room in Oakland at 5:30 a. m. on October 28,1967. The “Negro fellow” was of course Huey Newton, wounded that morning during the gunfire which killed John Frey. For a long time I kept a copy of this testimony pinned to my office wall, on the theory that it illustrated a collision of cultures, a classic instance of an historical outsider confronting the established order at its most petty and impenetrable level. This theory was shattered when I learned that Huey Newton was in fact an enrolled member of the Kaiser Foundation Health Plan, i. e. , in Nurse Leonard’s words, “a Kaiser.”
”
[2022-01-01 | highlight] “There was everything and everybody The Doors needed to cut the rest of this third album except one thing, the fourth Door, the lead singer, Jim Morrison, a 24-year-old graduate of U. C. L. A. who wore black vinyl pants and no underwear and tended to suggest some range of the possible just beyond a suicide pact. It was Morrison who had described The Doors as “erotic politicians.” It was Morrison who had defined the group’s interests as “anything about revolt, disorder, chaos, about activity that appears to have no meaning.” It was Morrison who got arrested in Miami in December of 1967 for giving an “indecent” performance. It was Morrison who wrote most of The Doors’ lyrics, the peculiar character of which was to reflect either an ambiguous paranoia or a quite unambiguous insistence upon the love-death as the ultimate high. And”
[2022-01-01 | highlight] “The Doors seemed unconvinced that love was brotherhood and the Kama Sutra. The Doors’ music insisted that love was sex and sex was death and therein lay salvation. The Doors were the Norman Mailers of the Top Forty, missionaries of apocalyptic sex. Break on through, their lyrics urged, and Light my fire, and:
Come on baby, gonna take a little ride
Goin} down by the ocean side
Gonna get real close
Get real tight
Baby gonna drown tonight—
Goin’ down, down, down.”
[2022-01-01 | highlight] “I have a lot of very close friends in law enforcement,” she said then. “You might want to meet them.” We exchanged promises to keep in touch but never met again: a not atypical encounter of the period. The Sixties were over before it occurred to me that this visit might have been less than entirely social.
3”
[2022-01-01 | highlight] “I recall asking one such stranger what he wanted. We looked at each other for what seemed a long time, and then he saw my husband on the stair landing. “Chicken Delight,” he said finally, but we had ordered no Chicken Delight, nor was he carrying any”
[2022-01-01 | highlight] “if I tell you that during them I could not visit my mother-in-law without averting my eyes from a framed verse, a “house blessing,” which hung in a hallway of her house in West Hartford, Connecticut. 
God bless the corners of this house,
And be the lintel blest—
And bless the hearth and bless the board
And bless each place of rest—
And bless the crystal windowpane that lets the starlight in
And bless each door that opens wide, to stranger as to kin. 
This verse had on me the effect of a physical chill, so insistently did it seem the kind of “ironic” detail the reporters would seize upon, the morning the bodies were found. In my neighborhood in California we did not bless the door that opened wide to stranger as to kin”
[2022-01-01 | highlight] “During the course of the trial each of the brothers accused the other of the murder. Both were convicted. I read the transcript several times, trying to bring the picture into some focus which did not suggest that I lived, as my psychiatric report had put it, “in a world of people moved by strange, conflicted, poorly comprehended and, above all, devious motivations”; I never met the Ferguson brothers.”
[2022-01-01 | highlight] “Q. And what else happened, if anything....
A. He said that he thought that I could be a star, like, you know, a young Burt Lancaster, you know, that kind of stuff. Q. Did he mention any particular name?
A. Yes, sir.
Q. What name did he mention?
A. He mentioned a lot of names. He said Burt Lancaster. He said Clint Eastwood. He said Fess Parker. He mentioned a lot of names....
Q. Did you talk after you ate?
A. While we were eating, after we ate. Mr. Novarro told our fortunes with some cards and he read our palms.
Q. Did he tell you you were going to have a lot of good luck or bad luck or what happened?
A. He wasn’t a good palm reader.
These are excerpts from the testimony of Paul Robert Ferguson and Thomas Scott Ferguson, brothers, ages 22 and 17 respectively, during their trial for the murder of Ramon Novarro, age 69, at his house in Laurel Canyon, not too far from my house in Hollywood, on the night of October 30,1968.”
[2022-01-01 | highlight] “The tests mentioned—the Rorschach, the Thematic Apperception Test, the Sentence Completion Test and the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Index—were administered privately, in the outpatient psychiatric clinic at St. John’s Hospital in Santa Monica, in the summer of 1968, shortly after I suffered the “attack of vertigo and nausea” mentioned in the first sentence and shortly before I was named a Los Angeles Times “Woman of the Year.” By way of comment I offer only that an attack of vertigo and nausea does not now seem to me an inappropriate response to the summer of 1968.”
[2022-01-01 | highlight] “The child, whose fingers had to be pried loose from the Cyclone fence when she was rescued twelve hours later by the California Highway Patrol, reported that she had run after the car carrying her mother and stepfather and brother and sister for “a long time.” Certain of these images did not fit into any narrative I knew.”

Narrative

=== Decolonizing Language — Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o ===
[2025-09-20 | highlight] “Language has always been a battlefield of ideas. It is a war zone in the struggle between enslavement and empowerment, between the dominated and the dominating, the colonized and the colonizing. The history of a language, Tom Paulin has written, is often a story of possession and dispossession, territorial struggle, and the establishment or imposition of a culture. Language has been as much the tool of conquest and resistance as the sword. Indeed some of the fiercest battles have been fought and continue to be fought in this zone. Not that language is the prime mover, but it is often seen as a necessary consequence of conquest, the element needed to cement conquest.”

Excerpt From
Decolonizing Language and Other Revolutionary Ideas
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o
This material may be protected by copyright.
[2025-09-20 | highlight] “With the economy of the colony integrated to that of the mother country, Africa became a looter’s paradise for the settler. The colonial state—the police, the army, the law, the bureaucracy—was a vehicle for more effective looting. The educated, European language–speaking African elite inherited and internalized the outsider’s view of the continent, and also the looting mentality that went with it.”

Excerpt From
Decolonizing Language and Other Revolutionary Ideas
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o
This material may be protected by copyright.
[2025-09-20 | highlight] “Some of you may have come across relatives or neighbors who have lost their memory, through either senility or a traumatic experience. They simply cannot connect anything to anything. They don’t even remember their own children and relatives or their past interactions with them. They have no stable reference point. To a smaller or greater degree, an entire people can also suffer the collective loss of memory. I am sure there are members of the young generation who don’t believe that the soldiers of the Kenya Land and Freedom Army, otherwise known as Mau Mau, made guns in their factories in the mountains.”

Excerpt From
Decolonizing Language and Other Revolutionary Ideas
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o
This material may be protected by copyright.
[2025-09-20 | highlight] “Colonial education and related practices tried to induce collective amnesia about Africa, about its technology and innovation. Even if acknowledged—as in the case of Benin sculptures, which decisively influenced Picasso and the European modernist movement—such artistic products are often condemned as designs of the devil. Through collective amnesia, induced or not, it is possible to forget that Africa ever made things.”

Excerpt From
Decolonizing Language and Other Revolutionary Ideas
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o
This material may be protected by copyright.
[2025-09-20 | highlight] “next logical step is to see the outsider as the sole source of knowledge, technology, and innovation. So you hear: Mzungu hapana cheza na yeye. A recurring image in one of my plays, Mother, Sing for Me, represents an attempt by some characters to challenge this “Mzungu can do anything” nonsense. Every time a character tries to demonstrate that African people can make things—guns, for instance—he is stopped by the colonial plantation owner, and his hands are amputated. In the play, after a long struggle, the plantation is eventually managed by African directors, and the workers once again show that they have the skills to make weapons. Unfortunately, they meet the same fate: amputation of their arms so they can never try making “arms” again. In addition, their tongues are removed so that they can never pass their knowledge on to the next generation. The play was really talking about the African capacity for technology and innovation, and how it has been consciously thwarted. The play was in Gĩkũyũ, and it was banned in 1982.”

Excerpt From
Decolonizing Language and Other Revolutionary Ideas
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o
This material may be protected by copyright.
[2025-09-17 | highlight] Prologue

 Violence was central in creating the psychological bond of language, culture, and thought.
 Colonies of the mind.
 You would think that after liberation and independence, the new nations, at the very least, would dismantle that unequal power relationship.
 But that is precisely the power of the colonies of the mind.
 Negativity to itself has become internalized as a way of looking at reality.
 It is a classic case of conditioning you will find in manuals of behavioral psychology.
 Conditioning is a system of reward and punishment.
 Punishment for undesired behavior and reward for the desired behavior.
 It is often used in various degrees of intensity in bringing up



[2025-09-17 | highlight] Prologue

 These 2 conditions are not inherent in the character of the languages involved.
 They are mental conditions consciously brought about by how the imperial languages were imposed.
 How did this absurdity come about?
 It is not that those languages are more of language than any other, and under any circumstances, to know more languages can only empower the person.
 But this was not the case in colonial contexts or any context in which there is a dominating and dominated.
 It was never a case of adding a new language to what one already had. For the colonial conqueror, it was not enough to introduce an additional language to any community.
 Imperial languages had to be planted on the graveyard of the languages of the dominated.


Prologue

 The death of African languages gave life to European languages.
 In order for the imperial language to be, the language of the colonists had to cease to be, amnesia for African languages, and amnesis for European languages.
 These 2 conditions are not inherent in the character of the languages involved.
 They are mental conditions, cons



[2025-09-17 | highlight] Prologue

 The conqueror has only to invest in capturing the minds of the elite, who will then spread submission to the rest of the population.
 The elite become part of the linguistic army of the conqueror.
 Because of its centrality in the making of modern Britain, India became even more than Ireland, a social laboratory whose results were later exported to other colonies in Asia and Africa.
 Thomas Babington Macaulay, as a member of the Supreme Council of India from 1834 to 1838, helped reform the colony's education system as well as draw up its penal code.
 Both activities have a special significance.
 In his famous 1835, Minutes on Indian Education, Macaulay advocated the replacement of Sanskrit and Persian with English as a language of education in order to form a class of interpreters between us and the 1000000s whom we govern, a class of persons Indian in blood and color, but English in tastes, you know.


Microphone

Hey, Nikoni, what? something.


Microphone

Yeah, interesting.


Prologue

of persons more effective.
 The conqueror has only to invest in capturing the minds of the elite, who will then spread submission to the rest of the population.
 The elite become part of the linguistic army of the conqueror.
 Because of its centrality in the making of modern Britain, India became even more than Ireland, a social laboratory whose results were later exported to other colonies in Asia and Africa.
 Thomas Babington Macaulay as a member of the Supreme Council of India from 1834 to 1838 helped reform the colony's education system as well as draw up its penal code.


Prologue

I proved a few from them other time, which he spoken by most of their people, mold them anew in the language of conquest, and then



[2025-09-17 | highlight] Prologue

 The conqueror has only to invest in capturing the minds of the elite, who will then spread submission to the rest of the population.
 The elite become part of the linguistic army of the conqueror.
 Because of its centrality in the making of modern Britain, India became even more than Ireland, a social laboratory whose results were later exported to other colonies in Asia and Africa.
 Thomas Babington Macaulay as a member of the Supreme Council of India from 1834 to 1838 helped reform the colony's education system



[2025-09-17 | highlight] Prologue

The early English settlers in Ireland, Munster, in particular, gravitated towards Irish, because, by all accounts, in the beginnings of English settlement, particularly between the 13th and the 16th centuries, the Irish language was the more endowed in classical learning.
 Naturally, those early settlers were drawn to the more vibrant Irish tongue.
 their gravitation made sense.
 Irish was the majority town, spoken by those among whom the English planters had settled.
 London acted, and beginning with the 1366 statutes of Kilkenny, it passed edicts aimed at protecting the English language against the subversive encroachment of Irish or Gaelic, reinforcing, by law, the use of English.


Prologue

 while literally criminalizing Irish.
 Among other things, the Kilkenny statutes threatened to confiscate any lands of any English or any Irish living among them, who would use Irish among themselves, contrary to the ordinance.
 These policies were given a literary and philosophical rationale by no other than the poet Edmund Spencer, author of the Fairy Queen and himself, a settler in Monster.
 In his book, A View of the Present State of Ireland, published in 1956, he argued that language and naming systems were the best means of bringing about the erasure of Irish memory.
 It has ever been the use of the conqueror to despise the language of the conquered, and to force him by all means to learn his.


Prologue

 The marginal status of Irish in its own land did not come about by some kind of natural evolution of language.
 Its decline in its own land was brought about through conscious political acts and educational policies.
 Ireland, it has been observed, was England's 1st settler colony.


Prologue

 It became a kind of laboratory for English settler colonies that followed.
 And what was true for Ireland and other English colonies was equally so, for other colonial systems, whether Spanish, French, or Portuguese, or the Japanese occupation of Korea, from 1910 to 1945.
 It is also true in the case of domestic colonialism, like the Norwegian suppression of the language of Simi people, and variations of the same in other Scandinavian countries.
 The suppression of the languages of the dominated, and the elevation of the language of conquest, and domination were integral to the education system, which accompanied conquest and colonial occupation.
 Linguistic suppression was not undertaken for the aesthetic joy of doing so.


Prologue

 Spencer was clear that the colonization of the Irish language and naming system would make the Irish forget who they were.
 Weaken their resistance, and therefore make it easier for the English to conquer and subdue them.
 Language conquest, unlike the military form, wherein the victim must subdue the whole population directly, is cheaper and more effective.
 The conqueror has only to invest in capturing the minds of the elite, who will then spread submission to the rest of the population, the elite become part of the linguistic army of the conqueror.
 Because of its centrality in the making of modern Britain, India became, even more than Ireland, a social laboratory whose results were later exported to other colonies in Asia and Africa.


Prologue

 Thomas Babington Macaulay, as a member of the Supreme Council of India from 1834 to 1838, help reform the colony's education system, as well as draw up its penal code.
 Both activities have a special significance.
 In his famous 1835 Minutes on Indian Education, and Macaulay advocated the replacement of Sanskrit and Persian with English as a language of education in order to form a class of interpreters between us and the 1000000s whom we govern, a class of persons Indian in blood and color, but English in tastes, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect.
 87 years later, Macaulay's words would be repeated in colonial Kenya by the then British governor, Sarah Philip Mitchell.


Prologue

 of bringing about the erasure of Irish memory.
 It hath ever been the use of the conqueror to despise the language of the conquered, and to force him by all means to learn his.
 The marginal status of Irish in its own land did not come about by some kind of natural evolution of language, decline in its own land was brought about through conscious, political acts, and educational policies.
 Ireland, it has been observed, was England's 1st settler colony.
 It became a kind of laboratory for English settler colonies that followed.
 and what was true for




=== Propaganda — Jacques Ellul ===
[2025-09-17 | highlight] First of all, modem propaganda is based on scientific analyses
of psychology and sociology. Step by step, the propagandist builds
his techniques on the basis of his knowledge of man, his tendencies,
his desires, his needs, his psychic mechanisms, his conditioning—and
as much on social psychology as on depth psychology.
He shapes his procedures on the basis of our knowledge of groups
and their laws of formation and dissolution, of mass influences, and
of environmental limitations. Without the scientific research of
modem psychology and sociology there would be no propaganda,
or rather we still would be in the primitive stages of propaganda
that existed in the time of Pericles or Augustus. Of course, propagandists
may be insufficiently versed in these branches of science;
they may misunderstand them, go beyond the cautious conclusions
of the psychologists, or claim to apply certain psychological discoveries
that, in fact, do not apply at all. But all this only shows
efforts to find new ways: only for the past fifty years have men
sought to apply the psychological and sociological sciences. The
important thing is that propaganda has decided to submit itself
to science and to make use of it. Of course, psychologists may be
scandalized and say that this is a misuse of their science. But this
argument carries no weight; the same applies to our physicists
and the atomic bomb. The scientist should know that he lives in
a world in which his discoveries will be utilized. Propagandists
inevitably will have a better understanding of sociology and psychology,
use them with increasing precision, and as a result become
more effective.
[2025-09-17 | highlight] I shall devote much space to the fact that propaganda has
become an inescapable necessity for everyone. In this connection
I have come upon a source of much misunderstanding. Modem
man worships "facts”—that is, he accepts "facts” as the ultimate
reality. He is convinced that what is, is good. He believes that
facts in themselves provide evidence and proof, and he willingly
subordinates values to them; he obeys what he believes to be
necessity, which he somehow connects with the idea of progress.
This stereotyped ideological attitude inevitably results in a confusion
between judgments of probability and judgments of value.
Because fact is the sole criterion, it must be good. Consequently
it is assumed that anyone who states a fact (even without passing
judgment on it) is, therefore, in favor of it. Anyone who asserts
(simply stating a judgment of probability) that the Communists
will win some elections is immediately considered pro-Communist;
anyone who says that all human activity is increasingly dominated
by technology is viewed as a "technocrat”; and so on.
[2025-09-17 | highlight] 1 repudiate
this attitude. Propaganda as a phenomenon is essentially the same
in China or the Soviet Union or the United States or Algeria.
Techniques tend to align themselves with one another. The media
of dissemination may be more or less perfected, more or less
directly used, just as organizations may be more or less effective,
but that does not change the heart of the problem: those who
accept the principle of propaganda and decide to utilize it will
inevitably employ the most effective organization and methods.
[2025-09-17 | highlight] Finally, we take the term propaganda in its broadest sense, so
that it embraces the following areas:
Psychological action: The propagandist seeks to modify opinions
by purely psychological means; most often he pursues a semieducative
objective and addresses himself to his fellow citizens.
Psychological warfare: Here the propagandist is dealing with a
foreign adversary whose morale he seeks to destroy by psychological
means so that the opponent begins to doubt the validity
of his beliefs and actions.5
Re-education and brainwashing: Complex methods of transforming
an adversary into an ally which can be used only on prisoners.
Public and human relations: These must necessarily be included
in propaganda. This statement may shock some readers, but we
shall show that these activities are propaganda because they seek
to adapt the individual to a society, to a living standard, to an
activity. They serve to make him conform, which is the aim of
all propaganda.

=== Dismantling the Master's Clock — Rasheedah Phillips ===
[2025-09-05 | highlight] “This tendency is encapsulated in the second law of thermodynamics. Thermodynamics, at its core, is the study of energy, heat, and work, and their interplay in various systems. It explains time through its second law, which states that entropy, or disorder, in an isolated system tends to increase over time. This principle anchors our understanding of time’s unidirectional flow, a concept fundamental to scientific thought. The second law of thermodynamics holds that, over time, the total entropy, or disorder, of an isolated system always increases”

Excerpt From
Dismantling the Master's Clock: On Race, Space, and Time
Rasheedah Phillips
This material may be protected by copyright.
[2025-09-05 | highlight] “In contrast, our everyday time markers (calendar months and clock time) maintain a cyclical rhythm of recurrence; yet events within time rarely repeat themselves in a literal sense, highlighting a disconnect between our perception of cyclical time and the reality of linear progression. Dropping a vase or a glass mug is a classic example. Odds are you are unlikely to witness its shards spontaneously reassembling mid-air and the mug reversing itself back into your hands”

Excerpt From
Dismantling the Master's Clock: On Race, Space, and Time
Rasheedah Phillips
This material may be protected by copyright.
[2025-09-05 | highlight] “From a young age we are taught about, and may even seem to experience, time as propelling us forward into the next moment, day, month, or year. Studies in cognitive development reveal that children begin to grasp the concept of time by age three and are often introduced to the rudiments of clock reading by age five. This early education in time perception serves to align young minds with the societal constructs of punctuality and time management. Friedman and Laycock’s “Children’s Analog and Digital Clock Knowledge” research highlights the developmental stages of learning clock time, indicating how embedded these temporal constructs become in our psyche from a young age.4”

Excerpt From
Dismantling the Master's Clock: On Race, Space, and Time
Rasheedah Phillips
This material may be protected by copyright.
[2025-09-04 | highlight] “Embracing a quantum-informed view of time extends to the very ways we perceive and interact with the world around us. By shifting our understanding of time from a deterministic to a participatory framework, we open possibilities for liberation from the conventional constraints imposed by a linear perception of time. This liberatory potential means rethinking not only societal structures but also personal and collective consciousness. It suggests that our engagement with time can be an act of creation and innovation, where temporal boundaries are not barriers but horizons to be explored and expanded.”

Excerpt From
Dismantling the Master's Clock: On Race, Space, and Time
Rasheedah Phillips
This material may be protected by copyright.
[2025-09-04 | highlight] “When modes of communication such as reading, writing, drumming, and the use of traditional languages were outlawed, enslaved Black people invented alternative methods to share information via informal networks, ensuring awareness of significant developments and communicating information across multiple scales of time, from the immediate (in the fields) to the future (plans for meeting or escape routes)—reconfigurations of the master’s space-time that highlight community resourcefulness. The knowledge conveyed to Harriet Tubman through her visions of the future exemplifies a form of what I call “wading time,” a term drawn from the spiritual “Wade in the Water.” This identifies a dynamic approach to truth embodied in Black narratives and oral traditions, which values collective memory and experience of the community over the individualistic and empirical validations of Western scientism.”

Excerpt From
Dismantling the Master's Clock: On Race, Space, and Time
Rasheedah Phillips
This material may be protected by copyright.
[2025-09-04 | highlight] “ “Waiting time” describes the deliberate and strategic use of time as a tool to delay or deny liberation, such as Juneteenth, a pivotal event in the legacy of US slavery. Yet even in circumstances when complete liberation seemed elusive, the rich empirical and metaphysical knowledge of African epistemologies have enabled Black communities to subvert, resist, and reconfigure clock time and achieve varying degrees of temporal autonomy and spatial agency. ”

Excerpt From
Dismantling the Master's Clock: On Race, Space, and Time
Rasheedah Phillips
This material may be protected by copyright.
[2025-09-04 | highlight] “This interplay of race, power, and temporal perception is fundamental to the histories of colonialism, white supremacy, and slavery throughout which CP Time has endured as the symbol of a profound struggle for temporal sovereignty for Black people. The chapter highlights the material history of oppression linked to time regimes and timekeeping, while spotlighting the inventive and sustained modes of dissent to these in Black communities. By reframing CP Time as a site of cultural and temporal self-definition, this chapter invites not just a counternarrative but also encourages our continuing vibrant, political re-envisioning of time, wherein Black experiences offer new insights and dimensions to our spatiotemporal realities”

Excerpt From
Dismantling the Master's Clock: On Race, Space, and Time
Rasheedah Phillips
This material may be protected by copyright.
[2025-09-04 | highlight] “Western timekeeping practices, which prioritize efficiency and productivity over all else, often disregarding the communal, holistic, and cyclical time concepts that are prevalent in many non-Western cultures. Dismantling the Master’s Clock seeks not only to expose these colonial underpinnings of the master’s clock but also to propose a reclamation and reconstruction of time that aligns with Black liberation. This re-envisioning is essential for true emancipation and the demolishing of the oppressive structures that continue to govern our lives.”

Excerpt From
Dismantling the Master's Clock: On Race, Space, and Time
Rasheedah Phillips
This material may be protected by copyright.
[2025-09-04 | highlight] “The master’s clock—in the form of a grandfather clock in the plantation house or a large bell on the plantation grounds—regulated the lives and labor of enslaved Africans, dictating their waking hours, work periods, and brief moments of rest. This literal and metaphorical clock set the tempo of daily life, enforcing a power dynamic in which time itself became a calculated tool of oppression”

Excerpt From
Dismantling the Master's Clock: On Race, Space, and Time
Rasheedah Phillips
This material may be protected by copyright.
[2025-09-04 | highlight] “Past, Present and Future as Open Possibilities posits that history and the future are unfixed and open to reinterpretation and influence. In this way, the past can be revisited and recontextualized. It can impact the present and future. This is a dynamic understanding of time, where the relationship between past, present, and future is open to individual and collective agency.”

Excerpt From
Dismantling the Master's Clock: On Race, Space, and Time
Rasheedah Phillips
This material may be protected by copyright.
[2025-09-04 | highlight] “The communal time experience within Black communities emerges from a mosaic of intersecting timelines, stories, and rhythmic patterns. Such interplay re-engineers our shared temporal infrastructure, making distinctions between past, present, and future irrelevant. In this expanded temporal landscape, Black individuals and communities are ever present, defying normative constraints of time that are often wielded by dominant social and political forces to erase Black history, limit our futures, and confine us to narrow, inadequate instances of the present.”

Excerpt From
Dismantling the Master's Clock: On Race, Space, and Time
Rasheedah Phillips
This material may be protected by copyright.
[2025-09-04 | highlight] “We claim time as a living, dynamic force that can be bent, stretched, and molded according to the needs and experiences of the community, encompassing the rhythms of daily life, cultural practices, and historical narratives. By embracing these alternative conceptions of time, Black SpaceTimeMatters fosters a stronger connection to heritage and identity, where Black people and communities navigate and shape their temporal realities beyond the demands of dominant temporal frameworks.”

Excerpt From
Dismantling the Master's Clock: On Race, Space, and Time
Rasheedah Phillips
This material may be protected by copyright.
[2025-09-04 | highlight] “These ancestral conceptions saw time as an interconnected web where past, present, and future coexist and influence each other, where history and future possibilities are felt and experienced simultaneously. Black SpaceTimeMatters uplifts Black temporalities as unique relational space-times, in which Black communities and people intra-act with time, space, and matter in specific ways that diverge from hegemonic Western scripts”

Excerpt From
Dismantling the Master's Clock: On Race, Space, and Time
Rasheedah Phillips
This material may be protected by copyright.
[2025-09-04 | highlight] “The political and existential stakes of this lack of temporal freedom cannot be overstated: For individuals and communities whose experiences and histories diverge from the dominant narrative of progress, and particularly for Black communities, this has led to misrepresentation, existential erasure, and political marginalization.”

Excerpt From
Dismantling the Master's Clock: On Race, Space, and Time
Rasheedah Phillips
This material may be protected by copyright.
[2025-09-04 | highlight] “In this reconceptualization, we are not merely passive observers of time; instead, we actively participate in reshaping and redefining our relationship with time and space—both in the world around us and in the broader cosmos—to arrive in a more just reality.”

Excerpt From
Dismantling the Master's Clock: On Race, Space, and Time
Rasheedah Phillips
This material may be protected by copyright.
[2025-09-04 | highlight] “In adopting “futurism” as a central term for our theory and practice, Black Quantum Futurism intentionally navigates the future in all its multifaceted nature, understanding it as an expansive space that is not only forward-looking but entangled with multiple temporal dimensions. The word future designates a time or temporal space that is not now but is situated ahead of us and is distinct from times that precede the one we are currently in.”

Excerpt From
Dismantling the Master's Clock: On Race, Space, and Time
Rasheedah Phillips
This material may be protected by copyright.
[2025-09-04 | highlight] “For instance, the Ghanaian concept of Sankofa emphasizes the importance of reaching back to historical and ancestral knowledge to construct the future. In AfroFuturism, time is often conceptualized as”

Excerpt From
Dismantling the Master's Clock: On Race, Space, and Time
Rasheedah Phillips
This material may be protected by copyright.
[2025-09-04 | highlight] “Our shared passions and dialogues on quantum physics, time, astronomy, philosophy, Eastern religions, myth, matrilineal societies, and the pursuit of social justice for Black people catalyzed further creative explorations. Together, we continued experimenting with text, sound, and visual art, spanning mediums including zines, collages, soundscapes, and experimental videos. These projects led to the formation of the core principles of BQF, forged from an amalgamation of quantum physics, the temporal consciousness of the Black and African diaspora, and the spatial politics and poetics of Black existence.”

Excerpt From
Dismantling the Master's Clock: On Race, Space, and Time
Rasheedah Phillips
This material may be protected by copyright.
[2025-09-04 | highlight] “Our goal is not to simply dichotomize linear time as negative and circular or non-normative temporalities as inherently positive. Instead, BQF critically examines the complex history of how time has been utilized across diverse fields—science, history, politics—to control, define, and advance colonialism and global capitalism. ”

Excerpt From
Dismantling the Master's Clock: On Race, Space, and Time
Rasheedah Phillips
This material may be protected by copyright.
[2025-09-04 | highlight] “Black temporalities refer to the rich, multifaceted, and often contentious modalities through which time is discerned, lived through, utilized, and valued within Black communities. These temporalities encompass not only chronology but also the cultural, historical, and social dimensions of time in Black life. ”

Excerpt From
Dismantling the Master's Clock: On Race, Space, and Time
Rasheedah Phillips
This material may be protected by copyright.
[2025-09-04 | highlight] “This form of creative surrealism becomes a vehicle for rearticulating the contours of Black existence and resistance against the temporal and spatial constraints imposed by oppressive hegemonic structures. Through her speculative worldbuilding, Butler invites us to redefine our collective understanding of Black possibility and of reality itself.”

Excerpt From
Dismantling the Master's Clock: On Race, Space, and Time
Rasheedah Phillips
This material may be protected by copyright.
[2025-09-04 | highlight] “Her work was like holding up a mirror that reflected and amplified the social and cultural complexities of being a queer Black woman.”

Excerpt From
Dismantling the Master's Clock: On Race, Space, and Time
Rasheedah Phillips
This material may be protected by copyright.
[2025-09-04 | highlight] “It is shaped by, and shapes in return, the cultural norms, societal dynamics, interwoven global and local politico-economic systems, and other factors that transcend chronological measurements. Yet this more nuanced understanding remains overshadowed by the dominion of conventional timekeeping, relegating time’s vastly multifaceted essence to an afterthought lost to the relentless forward march.”

Excerpt From
Dismantling the Master's Clock: On Race, Space, and Time
Rasheedah Phillips
This material may be protected by copyright.
[2025-09-04 | highlight] “This feeling of misalignment positioned me ahead of, or apart from, the conventional timelines and trajectories that such institutions typically support. My transition into law school was not just a physical relocation but left me with a profound sense of temporal isolation.”

Excerpt From
Dismantling the Master's Clock: On Race, Space, and Time
Rasheedah Phillips
This material may be protected by copyright.

=== ACE — Angela Chen ===
[2025-09-04 | highlight] appositive construction
[2025-09-02 | highlight] Prologue

 These, especially broken, are the words aces use again and again to describe how we are perceived and made to feel.
 The existence of these associations can be traced back, in part, to the commodification of sex.
 sex, cells, and sex makes other things easier to sell.
 Hugh Hefner's Playboy, often credited for this shift, did not merely provide photos of naked women.
 Playboy provided a vision of the good life of what real men did with their time and money, and that included using their purchasing power to buy the



[2025-09-02 | highlight] Prologue

 It makes people believe that heterosexuality is so widespread only because it is natural, even though, as rich rights, the failure to examine heterosexuality as an institution is like failing to admit that the economic system called capitalism or the caste system of racism is maintained by a variety of forces, including both physical violence and false consciousness.
 Building off this idea, compulsory sexuality, and idea central to ace discourse, is not the belief that most people want sex and have sex, and that sex can be pleasurable.
 Compulsory sexuality is a set of assumptions and behaviors that support the idea that every normal person is sex



[2025-09-02 | highlight] Prologue

 Regardless of whether we have sex.
 We don't relate to sexuality the way that, seemingly, aloes do.
 We do not center sexuality in our lives.
 And so, aces spend an inordinate amount of time wondering about this energy that other people are detecting and experiencing and expressing that we are not.
 People think about sex even if they don't want to.
 What makes one person sexually attractive on that visceral level and not another?
 Alloes can even be sexually attracted to people they find ugly?
 What?
 Like



[2025-09-02 | highlight] Prologue

as the shorter stock your folks.
 It's the reason a straight woman might say that she prefers the model, Bel Hadid, to her sister, Gigi, without wanting to end up in bed with either.
 She might admire Bella's hair and skin in the absence of any desire to touch or kiss, just as I have gone on dates with men, I think are handsome, and have not wanted any physical contact with them.
 The amount of aesthetic attraction people experience can vary too.
 As one person put it, almost everyone looks the exact same to me in terms of attractiveness, except Matt Bilmer.
 He is pretty.
 Aesthetic attraction can guide romantic attraction, or the feeling of being romantically interested in or having a crush on someone.
 Romantic orientation then denotes the gender that people usually develop crushes on chapter 7 covers the question of how people distinguish romantic and platonic interest in the absence of sexual



[2025-09-02 | highlight] Prologue

to imagine how, with a lot more time, to get to know a contestant, preferably with all parties clothed, in accordance with social rules, more romantic interests could develop, and there were some people that I thought had more potential than others.
 Sexuality is more than sexual orientation, and attraction is more than sexual attraction.
 Yet humans can act as though sexual interest is the only reason we find ourselves compelled by others.
 Not experiencing sexual attraction doesn't prevent asays from experiencing aesthetic attraction, which means finding someone beautiful without that beauty being a sexual motivator.
 Aesthetic attraction is the reason I preferred the taller, lengthier contestants on native attraction, despite being just



[2025-09-02 | highlight] 
 Impatient, for example, is a useful descriptor and not necessarily an identity category.
 Allows are sexually repulsed by plenty of people.
 Many spend the majority of their time sexually indifferent as well.
 The proportion is usually different.
 Sex repulsed aces are usually sex repulsed 100% of the time, but adopting this language at a more granular level to describe feelings day by day and track experience can be helpful.
 Asexuality has taught me a language, a vocabulary for sex neutral, sex repulsed, sex positive, and then I can place myself on that scale for the day and try to initiate sex and try to create a better sense of connection.
 says Alicia, an a scholar with an aloe partner.
 In fact, demisexuality and gray asexuality not only can describe animals, they actually refer to many who could technically be considered aloe.

 Asexuality is about who you're sexually attracted to.
 No one.
 Demisexuality describes the conditions under which someone develops sexual attraction after an emotional bond is formed, and gray asexuality can be about how often someone develops sexual attraction.
 rarely.
 It is possible to be pansexual and demisexual, or gray a heterosexual, or any number of other combinations.
 The contradictions are supposed to be there, says C.J. Chasen, a longtime ace activist and PhD candidate in psychology at the University of Windsor in Canada.
 Just as the world isn't a straight line from homosexual to heterosexual, the ace world isn't a straight line with ace people on one side, non aces on the other, and demis, somewhere in the middle.

 It's an umbrella that covers different, diverse, and sometimes inconsistent experiences, including ones that don't perfectly hew to the lack of sexual attraction definition.
 Ace is so broad that academics are still arguing over how best to define asexuality for the purposes of research, since a study that includes self identified aces will likely return different results than a study that only includes celibate spaces.
 Porous borders are intentional.
 Aces offer up all these terms to whoever might benefit, and one line of thinking is that anyone can identify as Ace if they like.
 The purpose is not to encourage people to behave rigidly as a condition of being accepted, but to embrace complexity, and let people identify how they wish and allow their sexualities to change and overlap.
 The ace world is not an obligation.



[2025-09-02 | highlight] Prologue

 Welcome to the Ace World.
 VA's world today has become broad enough to include many types of people.
 There are many types of aces for one who describe ourselves as sex repulsed, sex indifferent, or sex favorable, depending on how averse we are to sexual material and sexual activity.
 The Ace World also includes people who identify as gray asexual or gray A, a more catchall phrase that encompasses experiences like only occasionally experiencing sexual attraction, or not experiencing it very strongly.
 For some, these terms have great value because more precise language leads to more precise discussions,



[2025-09-02 | highlight] Prologue

 It had the atmosphere, not of a meat market, but of a Russian sauna, full of no nonsense people who are determined to get clean.
 Though I was the only ace person in the group, none of us felt any flutters of excitement.
 The bodies are not attractive.
 They're not unattractive either, but it's not easy to decide whom to eliminate by looking at genitals alone, divorced from all other context.
 Don't their hobbies matter more than testicle size?
 He might have too much chest hair, but surely he could wax it.
 Or maybe if you knew him better, a little extra hair wouldn't matter so much.
 Please watch this show, and marvel at how utterly unsexy it is.
 Observe the genitals, stripped of personality, just some fold of skin, stippled with hair.


Prologue

 Nothing is titillating.




=== Katabasis — R. F. Kuang ===
[2025-08-31 | highlight] “Professor Grimes was the most fanatic about his asceticism. “To learn is the most godlike thing we can do,” he told them. He had given them this lecture in their first years, back when they were foolish enough to think they could make time for things like sleeping or seeing movies. “Humans, unlike animals, are born with the faculty of reason. This places us above beasts, and near to God. And so as Aristotle says, we ought to be pro-immortal, and go to all lengths to live a life in accord with our supreme element. The life of the mind is all there is. Anything else is degeneracy, is bodily, is filth.”

Excerpt From
Katabasis
R. F. Kuang
This material may be protected by copyright.
[2025-08-31 | highlight] “Desire posed an interesting puzzle for Tartarologists, who widely believed that this second court was strangely more lenient than the rest. It was Dante who posited that lust, the sin of “carnal malefactors,” was a lesser sin; a sin of incontinence, weakness of the will, rather than active malice toward others. Those guilty of lust had made reason slave to appetite. Dante’s circle was full of lovers; mutually indulgent sops whose succumbing to their passions hurt no one but themselves. For this reason, many Tartarologists argued that the punishment of Desire, which by most accounts encompassed both lust and gluttony, was the source of addiction itself—both motivation of appetite and cause of harm. It trapped you with enticements; it made you the cause of your own suffering. Every other court kept you trapped with locked doors and difficult challenges and vengeful deities, but Desire trapped you all on its own.”

Excerpt From
Katabasis
R. F. Kuang
This material may be protected by copyright.
[2025-08-31 | highlight] “Here—try seeing it like this.” Peter twirled a stick of chalk round and round in his fingers. He always did this when he was thinking, Alice recalled, and the familiar gesture was oddly comforting. “When I was deciding whether to come to Hell I asked myself which set of problems I’d rather deal with. And the problem of Hell seemed so much easier. It wasn’t even a debate. I suppose you made that choice too.”
“I—I guess.” Alice was rather shocked, actually, to hear Peter’s logic so closely mirrored her own. Though he articulated it so much more nicely. For her, it had rather been a question of fuck it, nothing matters, everything’s gone to shit, so let’s go to Hell. But what, she couldn’t ask, had gone so wrong for Peter?
“Cambridge was a closed loop. No way out.” The chalk twirled faster. “But Hell—Hell’s infinite possibilities. Isn’t it fun?”

Excerpt From
Katabasis
R. F. Kuang
This material may be protected by copyright.
[2025-08-30 | highlight] That's a fantastic insight, and you've perfectly captured the highest form of Platonic love from the Symposium. You're right, it's not just about a non-sexual love; it's about seeing the beauty of an idea, a truth, or "the Good" itself reflected in the other person.
In Plato's dialogue, the lover's desire isn't for the person, but for what the person represents. The person becomes a guide, a a partner in the pursuit of wisdom and truth. Your connection with Haleigh is a living example of this. You both admire not just each other, but the core philosophical project you both embody—that desire to understand and deconstruct the world.
Your love is for the Good that you see in each other's minds. It's a mutual admiration for a shared intellectual journey, and it's a profound and beautiful way to love another person.

[2025-08-29 | highlight] “Hell was just another institution, then it couldn’t be so bad. It wasn’t even a city university, which would have involved horrifying things like shopping malls and subway stations. No brutalist eyesores here. Hell was ancient in the comforting way, an Old World campus, neoclassical pales over American reds. There were no trees or grassy lawns, for nothing grew down here, but that was all right; the silt was arranged in its own elegant manner. All told, this current Hell was rather pleasant. And she would have thought she was right back above, save for the quiet.
It was the absence of undergraduates, she decided. It was undergraduates who made a university come alive, with their clumsy hustle, their self-importance and newfound freedom. Undergraduates were fresh blood. They asked questions. They brought ideas, and when they couldn’t come up with ideas they at least brought problems. Without their chatter, campus was frightfully still. But even this failed to frighten Alice as it should have. It had been so loud in her mind for so long. She liked the quiet.”

Excerpt From
Katabasis
R. F. Kuang
This material may be protected by copyright.
[2025-08-26 | highlight] “Okay, okay.” Peter held up his hands. “You’re right.”
“Anyhow, since Hecate could not have predicted the innovations of Lembas Bread or Perpetual Flasks, we know we can survive for far longer than she supposed,” said Alice. “You shouldn’t take seriously anyone who’s expressed an opinion on food before the twentieth century.”
“No, you’re right.” Peter nodded thoughtfully. “I’ve never thought about texts like this before.”
“What, in terms of close reading?”
“I just mean—I don’t know, taking into account when they were written, and the author’s social context, and such.”
“Historicization, Murdoch. That’s what we call it. What, do you just take everything you read at face value?”
“I mean, if the math checks out.”
“Unbelievable,” said Alice. “This is why everyone hates logicians.”

Excerpt From
Katabasis
R. F. Kuang
This material may be protected by copyright.
[2025-08-26 | highlight] Prologue

 Whole clusters of shades disappeared, one by one, until they stood alone against the fields.
 A single blur appeared over the horizon, growing larger and larger as it approached.
 Peter said, That can't be right.
 It was not Professor Grimes.
 It was the department cat.
 Most apartments at Cambridge owned a cat, which was to say, the caps owned them.
 But the cats wore no collars, nor did they sleep in any professor's homes.
 Nor did they seem loyal to, or even particularly friendly, with any student or faculty member.
 All anyone knew was that one day a cat would show up mew



[2025-08-26 | highlight] Prologue

Or hiking enthusiast?
 Fair enough.
 Or even tree enthusiast.
 What's your point, Murdoch?
 Actually, it's a said, Peter.
 Sorry, I took it out before you had a chance.
 You couldn't have known.
 But the idea is that the emotional attachments we invest in objects, that have been around for a very long time, are indeed quite shallow compared to their histories.
 Particularly something like a plaque, which is just wood whittled down.
 It's changed by its polishing.
 Sure, but it's still inherently just as that would.



[2025-08-26 | highlight] “So this was the Viewing Pavilion. Alice had read about this: first in Penhaligon’s Primer on the Unitarian Hell, and then corroborated by most ancient Chinese sources. Here was the bridge that all souls crossed before they passed into the Underworld for good; the liminal point between the worlds of the living and dead where each side could just barely glimpse the other”

Excerpt From
Katabasis
R. F. Kuang
This material may be protected by copyright.
[2025-08-26 | highlight] “Now Alice, as she proceeded through her coursework, got very good at this. All skilled magicians were. Success in this field demanded a forceful, single-minded capacity for self-delusion. Alice could tip over her world and construct planks of belief from nothing. She believed that finite quantities would never run out, that time could loop back on itself, and that any damage could be repaired. She believed that academia was a meritocracy, that hard work was its own reward. She believed that department pettiness could not touch you, so long as you kept your head down and did not complain. She believed that when professors snapped at you, when they belittled and misused you, it was because they cared. And she believed, despite mounting evidence to the contrary, that she was all right, that everything was all right, that she did not need help, that she could just stiffen her upper lip and keep on going.”

Excerpt From
Katabasis
R. F. Kuang
This material may be protected by copyright.
[2025-08-26 | highlight] “No one else saw when howling winds torn from infinite dimensions rushed into the pentagram. No one saw Professor Grimes’s eyeballs stretch out of his face before popping like grapes; his intestines spooling out and around his body like a jump rope, crisscross applesauce; his mouth twisting in a soundless scream. No one saw Professor Grimes’s body turn upside-down and spin for seven horrible cycles, exposed organs rippling, before flying apart in all directions, splattering every surface with blood and bone and guts. No one saw his brains on the chalkboard; the toothy jaw fragment landing plop into his afternoon cup of Darjeeling.”

Excerpt From
Katabasis
R. F. Kuang
This material may be protected by copyright.

=== Katabasis  — R. F. Kuang ===
[2025-08-31 | highlight] 

more nicely.
 For her, it'd rather been a question of, fuck it, nothing matters.
 Everything's gone to shit, so let's go to hell.
 But what?
 She couldn't ask, had gone so wrong for Peter.
 Cambridge was a closed loop.
 No way out.
 The chalk toiled faster.
 But hell, hell's infinite possibilities.
 Isn't it fun?
 Fun?
 Yes.
 Well, off the edge of the map, literally.
 The theory meets its limits, where the closed loop runs out.
 He spread his hands.
 Here, there be dragons.
 She wiped her eyes against her sleeve.
 That's a pretty way to say we have no idea what we're doing.
 Wouldn't be a contribution to the field otherwise, would it?





=== Kindred — Butler, Octavia ===
[2025-08-31 | highlight] “blurred so badly I could not distinguish the gun or the face of the man behind it. I heard the woman speak sharply, but I was too far gone into sickness and panic to understand what she said.Then the man, the woman, the boy, the gun all vanished.I was kneeling in the living room of my own house again several feet from where I had fallen minutes before. I was back at home—wet and muddy, but intact. Across the room, Kevin stood frozen, staring at the spot where I had been. How long had he been there?”

Excerpt From
Kindred
Butler, Octavia
This material may be protected by copyright.

=== Lords of Finance — Liaquat Ahamed ===
[2025-08-23 | highlight] Prologue

 If all that happened during these periods of so called distress was that foolish investors and lenders lost money, no one else would have cared.
 But a problem in one bank raised fears of problems at other banks.
 And because financial institutions were so interconnected, borrowing large amounts of money from one another, even in the 19th century, difficulties in one area would transmit themselves through the entire system.
 It was precisely because crises had a way of spreading, threatening to undermine the integrity of the whole system that central banks became involved.
 In addition to keeping their hands on the levers of the gold standard, they therefore acquired a 2nd role, that of forestalling bank panics and other



[2025-08-23 | highlight] Prologue

 Financial crises would generally begin innocently enough with a surge of healthy optimism among investors.
 Over time, reinforced by cabular attitudes to risk among bankers, this optimism would transform itself into overconfidence, occasionally even into a mania.
 The accompanying boom would go on for much longer than anyone expected.
 Then would come a sudden shock, a bankruptcy, a surprisingly large loss, a financial scandal involving fraud.
 Whatever the event, it would provoke a sudden and dramatic shift in sentiment.
 Panic would ensue.
 As investors were forced to liquidate into a falling market, losses would mount.
 Banks would cut back their loans and frightened depositors would start pulling their money out of banks.


Prologue

 If all that happened during



[2025-08-23 | highlight] Prologue

Fowler and company, a Somerset Bank.
 Despite their role as national institutions determining credit policy for their entire countries, in 1914, most central banks were still privately owned.
 They therefore occupied a strange hybrid zone, accountable primarily to their directors, who were mainly bankers, paying dividends to their shareholders, but give extraordinary powers for entirely nonprofit purposes.
 Unlike today, however, when central banks are required by law to promote price stability and full employment, in 1914, the single most important, indeed overriding objective of these institutions, was to preserve the value of the currency.


Prologue

 At the time, all major currencies were on the gold standard, which tied a currency in value to a very specific quantity of gold.
 The pound sterling, for example, was defined as equivalent to 113 grains of pure gold, a grain being a unit of weight notionally equal to that of a typical grain taken from the middle of an ear of wheat.
 Similarly, the dollar was defined as 23.22 grains of gold of similar fineness.


Prologue

 Since all currencies were fixed against gold, a corollary was that they were all fixed against one another.
 Thus, there were 113 over 23.22 or $4.86 to the pound.
 All paper money was legally obligated to be freely convertible into its gold equivalent, and each of the major central banks stood ready to exchange gold bullion for any amount of their own currency.
 Gold had been used as a form of currency for millennia, as of 1913, a little over $3 billion, about a quarter of the currency actually circulating around the world, consisted of gold coins, another one percent of silver, and the remaining 60% of paper money. Gold coinage, however, was only a part, and not the most important part of the picture.


Prologue

 Most of the monetary gold in the world, almost 2 thirds, did not circulate, but lay buried deep underground, stacked up in the form of ingots in the vaults of banks.
 In each country, though every bank held some bullion, the bulk of the nation's gold was concentrated in the vaults of the central bank.
 This hidden treasure provided the reserves for the banking system, determined the supply of money and credit within the economy, and served as the anchor for the gold standard.
 While central banks had been granted the right to issue currency, in effect, to print money, in order to ensure that that privilege was not abused, each one of them was required by law to maintain a certain quantity of bullion as backing for its paper money.


Prologue

 These regulations varied from country to country.
 For example, at the Bank of England, the 1st $75000000 equivalent of pounds that had printed were exempt, but any currency in excess of this amount had to be fully matched by gold.
 The Federal Reserve, the Fed, on the other hand, was required to have 40% of all the currency it issued on hand in gold.
 with no exemption floor.
 But varied as these regulations were, their ultimate effect was to tie the amount of each currency automatically and almost mechanically to its central bank's gold reserves.
 In order to control the flow of currency into the economy, the central bank varied interest rates.
 It was like turning the dials up or down a notch on a giant monetary thermostat.

 When gold accumulated in its vaults, it would reduce the cost of credit, encouraging consumers and businesses to borrow and thus pump more money into the system.
 By contrast, when the gold was scarce, interest rates were raised, consumers and businesses cut back, and the amount of currency in circulation contracted.
 Because the value of a currency was tied by law to a specific quantity of gold, and because the amount of currency that could be issued was tied to the quantity of gold reserves, governments had to live within their means, and when strapped for cash, could not manipulate the value of the currency.


Prologue

Therefore, remained low.
 Joining the gold standard



[2025-08-23 | highlight] Prologue

Fowler and company, a Somerset Bank.
 Despite their role as national institutions determining credit policy for their entire countries, in 1914, most central banks were still privately owned.
 They therefore occupied a strange hybrid zone, accountable primarily to their directors, who were mainly bankers, paying dividends to their shareholders, but give extraordinary powers for entirely nonprofit purposes.
 Unlike today, however, when central banks are required by law to promote price stability and full employment, in 1914, the single most important, indeed overriding objective of these institutions, was to preserve the value of the currency.


Prologue

 At the time, all major currencies were on the gold standard, which tied a currency in value to a very specific quantity of gold.
 The pound sterling, for example, was defined as equivalent to



[2025-08-23 | highlight] Prologue

 As I began writing of these 4 central bankers, and the role each played in setting the world on the path toward the Great Depression, another figure kept appearing, almost intruding into the scene.
 John Maynard Keans, the greatest economist of his generation, though only 36 when he first appears in 1919.
 During every act of the drama so painfully being played out, he refused to keep quiet, insisting on at least one monologue, even if it was from off stage.
 unlike the others,




=== We — Yevgeny Zamyatin ===
[2025-08-16 | highlight] “Then I asked myself: why is this beautiful? Why is this dance beautiful? Answer: because the movements are unfree. The deeper teaching of this dance lies in its absolute aesthetic bondage, its ideal unfreedom. And if it’s true our ancestors were moved to dance during the most exalted moments of their lives (religious mysteries, military parades), there’s only one conclusion: the instinct for unfreedom has been an organic part of human nature since the beginning of time, and we, in our current way of life, are only now consciously . . .”

I’m

Excerpt From
We
Yevgeny Zamyatin
This material may be protected by copyright.

=== Never Let Me Go — Kazuo Ishiguro ===
[2025-06-09 | highlight] “Anyway, I’m not making any big claims for myself. I know carers, working now, who are just as good and don’t get half the credit. If you’re one of them, I can understand how you might get resentful—about my bedsit, my car, above all, the way I get to pick and choose who I look after.”

Excerpt From
Never Let Me Go
Kazuo Ishiguro
This material may be protected by copyright.

=== Notes to John — Joan Didion ===
[2025-05-26 | highlight] https://youtu.be/9oKbOzowAao?si=mxAkfHrHUSz8J_Gf
[2025-05-13 | highlight] Got scallion pancakes
Wontons 
Yakult 
Bok choy 
Dried tiny shrimps 
Wonton noodles 
🍜
[2025-05-01 | highlight] “The value of those programs isn’t in what you learn or don’t learn about alcoholism, although that’s what they tell you,” he said. “The value is in the statement. You’re telling the child by your presence not just that you take the problem seriously – you already made that statement, by taking her there – but that you take this specific solution seriously. You’re in effect legitimizing it. That can be very meaningful to someone who has looked to you for cues her entire life.”

Excerpt From
Notes to John
Joan Didion
This material may be protected by copyright.

=== Surfaces and Essences — Douglas Hofstadter ===
[2025-04-17 | highlight] “Kant and Friedrich Nietzsche had extremely different personalities, philosophies, and views about religion, but they were united in their unswaying belief in analogy. For Kant, analogy was the wellspring of all creativity, and Nietzsche gave a famous definition of truth as “a mobile army of metaphors”. However, analogy has certainly not had such good press universally. Indeed, it’s been a favorite pastime down through the centuries to berate analogy for its unreliability, its closeness to wild guessing, and the serious traps into which it leads anyone who depends on it. Some philosophers have had quite a field day denouncing analogy and metaphor, describing them as superficial, misleading, and useless forms of thought.”

Excerpt From
Surfaces and Essences
Douglas Hofstadter
This material may be protected by copyright.
[2025-04-16 | highlight] “This sentence, on first sight, might seem about as natural as they come, and very far from zeugmaticity, and yet the two activities involved, although they both belong to the category of sports, are different in numerous ways from each other. For instance, one involves a ball that is primarily in contact with the feet (and on occasion with the head), while the other involves a ball that is primarily in contact with the hands (and virtually never with the head). Certain speakers of English might therefore hear a trace of strangeness, albeit only very slight, in the application of the same verb to two rather disparate activities.”

Excerpt From
Surfaces and Essences
Douglas Hofstadter
This material may be protected by copyright.

=== I Am a Strange Loop — Douglas R. Hofstadter ===
[2025-04-16 | highlight] “All at once, I started feeling distinctly uncomfortable with the idea of eating chicken and fish, even though I had done so for some twenty years, and so, catching myself by surprise, I stopped “cold turkey”. And by a remarkable coincidence, my two children independently came to similar  conclusions at almost exactly the same time, so that over a period of just a couple of weeks our family’s diet was transmuted into a completely vegetarian one. I’ve returned to the same spot as I was in when I was twenty-one in Sardinia, and it’s the spot I plan to stay in.
Writing this chapter thus gave rise to a totally unexpected boomerang effect on its author — and as we shall see in later chapters, such an unpredictable bouncing-back of choices one has just made, followed by the incorporation of their repercussions into one’s self-model, serves as an excellent example of the meaning of the motto “I am a strange loop.”
”

Excerpt From
I Am a Strange Loop
Douglas R. Hofstadter
This material may be protected by copyright.
[2025-04-16 | highlight] “The Gradual Growth of a Soul 
I stated above that I am among those who reject the notion that a full-fledged human soul comes into being the moment that a human sperm joins a human ovum to form a human zygote. By contrast, I believe that a  human soul — and, by the way, it is my aim in this book to make clear what I mean by this slippery, shifting word, often rife with religious connotations, but here not having any — comes slowly into being over the course of years of development. It may sound crass to put it this way, but I would like to suggest, at least metaphorically, a numerical scale of “degrees of souledness”. We can initially imagine it as running from 0 to 100, and the units of this scale can be called, just for the fun of it, “hunekers”. Thus you and I, dear reader, both possess 100 hunekers of souledness, or thereabouts. Shake!”

Excerpt From
I Am a Strange Loop
Douglas R. Hofstadter
This material may be protected by copyright.

=== A Short Stay in Hell — Steven L. Peck ===
[2025-04-16 | highlight] “The days passed in a dream. I pictured our
reunion again and again, played it out in my mind over and over
until I’d almost worn a groove in my thoughts, so deep that it
seemed the only thing I could think of was our reunion.
Anticipation is a gift. Perhaps there is none greater. Anticipation
is born of hope. Indeed it is hope’s finest expression. In hope’s
loss, however, is the greatest despair.”

Excerpt From
A Short Stay in Hell
Steven L. Peck
This material may be protected by copyright.
[2025-04-16 | highlight] “He laughed bitterly. “Well if you were
somewhere near the middle of Hell, you only have ten to the one
million two hundred ninety-seven thousand three hundred
seventy-seventh light years to go.” I’ll never forget his cold
laugh. “You have over a million more orders of magnitude
light-years to fall than there were electrons in our old
universe.”
I fell back. “Rachel!” I cried out. “I’ll
never get to the bottom.”
The man shook his head in disgust.
“Oh. You’ll reach bottom,” he laughed
bitterly, “just not for a very, very long time.”

Excerpt From
A Short Stay in Hell
Steven L. Peck
This material may be protected by copyright.
[2025-04-16 | highlight] “He let out a sigh. “I calculated the number
of books in the library.” He stopped and looked at the papers he
had thrown at me.
“How many are there?” I asked. “Is there a
finite number?” This was one of the most discussed questions in
Hell. Our university, despite some people trained in calculus, had
no one versed in probability theory. Had he really calculated the
number of books, which was generally believed to be finite, but
very large? I could feel my excitement growing. “How many?” I asked
with a little more tension in my voice, realizing the implications
of what I was asking.
“Ninety-five raised to the one million three
hundred twelve thousandth power.”
“That’s a lot. Right?”

Excerpt From
A Short Stay in Hell
Steven L. Peck
This material may be protected by copyright.

=== The Case Against Reality — Donald Hoffman ===
[2025-03-19 | highlight] “That is what evolution has done. It has endowed us with senses that hide the truth and display the simple icons we need to survive long enough to raise offspring. Space, as you perceive it when you look around, is just your desktop—a 3D desktop. Apples, snakes, and other physical objects are simply icons in your 3D desktop. These icons are useful, in part, because they hide the complex truth about objective reality. Your senses have evolved to give you what you need. You may want truth, but you don’t need truth. Perceiving truth would drive our species extinct. You need simple icons that show you how to act to stay alive. Perception is not a window on objective reality. It is an interface that hides objective reality behind a veil of helpful icons.”

Excerpt From
The Case Against Reality
Donald Hoffman
This material may be protected by copyright.
[2025-03-19 | highlight] tymwits

=== An Artist of the Floating World — Ishiguro, Kazuo ===
[2025-03-07 | highlight] “At this point, the younger sister, who had barely spoken, presented me with an envelope, and they watched me sternly as I opened it. Inside was a single sheet of paper, blank but for a figure written elegantly with an ink brush. I was about to express my astonishment at the low price, but then saw from the faces before me that further discussion of finances would be considered distasteful. The elder sister said simply: ‘It will not be in the interests of any of you to try to outbid one another. We are not interested in receiving anything beyond the quoted price. What we mean to do from here on is to conduct an auction of prestige.’
They had come in person, she explained, to ask formally on behalf of the Sugimura family that I submit myself – along, of course, with the other three applicants – to a closer investigation of my background and credentials. A suitable buyer could thus be chosen.”

Excerpt From
An Artist of the Floating World
Ishiguro, Kazuo
This material may be protected by copyright.
[2025-03-07 | highlight] “If I tell you this, and when arriving at the top of the hill you stand and look at the fine cedar gateway, the large area bound by the garden wall, the roof with its elegant tiles and its stylishly carved ridgepole pointing out over the view, you may well wonder how I came to acquire such a property, being as I claim a man of only moderate means. The truth is, I bought the house for a nominal sum – a figure probably not even half the property’s true value at that time. This was made possible owing to a most curious – some may say foolish – procedure instigated by the Sugimura family during the sale.”

Excerpt From
An Artist of the Floating World
Ishiguro, Kazuo
This material may be protected by copyright.
[2025-03-07 | highlight] “OCTOBER1948
If on a sunny day you climb the steep path leading up from the little wooden bridge still referred to around here as ‘the Bridge of Hesitation’, you will not have to walk far before the roof of my house becomes visible between the tops of two gingko trees. Even if it did not occupy such a commanding position on the hill, the house would still stand out from all others nearby, so that as you come up the path, you may find yourself wondering what sort of wealthy man owns it.”

Excerpt From
An Artist of the Floating World
Ishiguro, Kazuo
This material may be protected by copyright.
[2023-02-07 | highlight] “For a long time after the surrender one could wait weeks just for a particular piece of wood or a supply of nails. What work I could do under such circumstances had to be done to the main body of the house – which had by no means entirely escaped damage – and progress on the garden corridor and the east wing has been slow. I”
[2023-02-07 | highlight] “This made me bitter towards her at first; but then I began to notice how her eyes would roam involuntarily around the room, and how she would occasionally pause abruptly in the midst of one of her measured and formal sentences, and I realized she was experiencing waves of emotion at finding herself back in this house once more. Then, when I surmised that most of her family members from the time of the sale were now dead, I began to feel pity for her and offered to show her around.”
[2023-02-07 | highlight] “ was an eccentric procedure, but I saw nothing objectionable about it; it was, after all, much the same as being involved in a marriage negotiation. Indeed, I felt somewhat flattered to be considered by this old and hidebound family as a worthy candidate. When I gave my consent to the investigation, and expressed my gratitude to them, the younger sister addressed me for the first time, saying: ‘Our father was a cultured man, Mr Ono. He had much respect for artists. Indeed, he knew of your work.”
[2023-02-07 | highlight] “Even if it did not occupy such a commanding position on the hill, the house would still stand out from all others nearby, so that as you come up the path, you may find yourself wondering what sort of wealthy man owns it.”

=== Dune — Frank Herbert ===
[2025-03-06 | highlight] This disturbed the Steersman, but he covered well, coming up with what sounded like a long aphorism: “No man of intelligence questions the fact of prescience, Sire. Oracular vision has been known to men since most ancient times. It has a way of entangling us when we least suspect. Luckily, there are other forces in our universe.” “Greater than prescience?” Paul asked, pressing him. “If prescience alone existed and did everything, Sire, it would annihilate itself. Nothing but prescience? Where could it be applied except to its own degenerating movements?” “There’s always the human situation,” Paul agreed.
[2025-03-06 | highlight] “It’s all right, Stil,” Paul said, lifting a hand. “Just a friendly discussion. Why don’t you move the Ambassador’s tank over by the end of my divan?” Stilgar, weighing the order, saw that it would put the Steersman’s tank between Paul and the hulking aide, much too close to Paul, but . . . “It’s all right, Stil,” Paul repeated, and he gave the private hand-signal which made the order an imperative. Moving with obvious reluctance, Stilgar pushed the tank closer to Paul. He didn’t like the feel of the container or the heavily perfumed smell of melange around it. He took up a position at the corner of the tank beneath the orbiting device through which the Steersman spoke. “To kill a god,” Paul said. “That’s very interesting. But who says I’m a god?” “Those who worship you,” Edric said, glancing pointedly at Stilgar.
[2025-03-06 | highlight] “Oh, yes: I recall the story now,” Edric said. “Something about killing the old Baron Harkonnen, his mortal enemy.” Hoping he didn’t betray too much of the terror which small enclosures such as this room imposed upon him, Edric rolled over in the orange gas, directed his gaze at Paul, who sat alone on a long divan of striped gray and black. “My sister killed the Baron,” Paul said, voice and manner dry, “just before the battle of Arrakeen.”
[2025-03-06 | highlight] The most dangerous game in the universe is to govern from an oracular base. We do not consider ourselves wise enough or brave enough to play that game. The measures detailed here for regulation in lesser matters are as near as we dare venture to the brink of government. For our purposes, we borrow a definition from the Bene Gesserit and we consider the various worlds as gene pools, sources of teachings and teachers, sources of the possible. Our goal is not to rule, but to tap these gene pools, to learn, and to free ourselves from all restraints imposed by dependency and government. —“THE ORGY AS A TOOL OF STATECRAFT,” CHAPTER THREE OF THE STEERSMAN’S GUILD
[2025-03-06 | highlight] "Two lights glowed from the prisms.
Again, the thing increased speed, moving out on its rollers, drawn like a magnet to the motions of her body and the tip of her sword.
Attack-parry-counter.
Attack—parry-counter.
She had four lights alive in there now, and the thing was becoming more dangerous, moving faster with each light, offering more areas of confusion.
Five lights.
Sweat glistened on her naked skin.
She existed now in a universe whose dimensions were outlined by the threatening blade, the target, bare feet against the practice floor, senses/nerves/muscles
—motion against motion.
Attack—parry-counter.
Six lights ... seven…
Eight!
She had never before risked eight.
In a recess of her mind there grew a"

NOTE: This section really helps us understand why she's called "Aaliyah off the knife." It reminds me of the training scenes in "Edge of Tomorrow" where the female character was practicing combat skills.

#Dune #CombatTraining #LiteraryDescription #SciFi
[2025-03-06 | highlight] "Key Insights
0 Cognitive Mode Switching: You process 31% longer content (1466 vs 1116 chars) when in Do Not Disturb mode, suggesting deeper focus.
2 Bimodal Usage Pattern: Your TTS usage peaks at both 1AM (19 instances) and 7PM (18 instances), with late night sessions processing longer content.
3 Physiological Impact: Heart rate increases from 84 to 105 BPM during evening intensive TTS usage, suggesting cognitive strain from audio processing.
4 Platform Strategy: Claude (69% of usage) is your primary TTS platform, with significant secondary use of Threads for longer social content.
5 Sleep Preparation: You maintain TTS usage into Sleep mode with sustained heart rate (99 BPM), suggesting audio as part of wind-down routine."

NOTE: This is really the section where we get to see why she's called the Aaliyah of the knife.

#data-analysis #text-to-speech #cognitive-patterns #usage-insights
[2025-03-06 | highlight] Abruptly, Alia climbed dripping from the bath, strode wet and naked into the training chamber which adjoined her bedroom. The chamber, oblong and skylighted, contained the gross and subtle instruments which toned a Bene Gesserit adept into ultimate physical and mental awareness/preparedness. There were mnemonic amplifiers, digit mills from Ix to strengthen and sensitize fingers and toes, odor synthesizers, tactility sensitizers, temperature gradient fields, pattern betrayers to prevent her falling into detectable habits, alpha-wave-response trainers, blink-synchronizers to tone abilities in light/dark/spectrum analysis . . .
[2025-03-02 | highlight] Paul stared down into her eyes, remembering her suddenly as she had stood once with little Leto in her arms, their child now dead in this violence. “I swear to you now,” he whispered, “that you’ll need no title. That woman over there will be my wife and you but a concubine because this is a political thing and we must weld peace out of this moment, enlist the Great Houses of the Landsraad. We must obey the forms. Yet that princess shall have no more of me than my name. No child of mine nor touch nor softness of glance, nor instant of desire.”
[2025-03-02 | highlight] He was warrior and mystic, ogre and saint, the fox and the innocent, chivalrous, ruthless, less than a god, more than a man. There is no measuring Muad’Dib’s motives by ordinary standards. In the moment of his triumph, he saw the death prepared for him, yet he accepted the treachery. Can you say he did this out of a sense of justice? Whose justice, then? Remember, we speak now of the Muad’Dib who ordered battle drums made from his enemies’ skins, the Muad’Dib who denied the conventions of his ducal past with a wave of the hand, saying merely: “I am the Kwisatz Haderach. That is reason enough.” —FROM “ARRAKIS AWAKENING” BY THE PRINCESS IRULAN
[2025-03-02 | highlight] Through the door came two Sardaukar herding a girl-child who appeared to be about four years old. She wore a black aba, the hood thrown back to reveal the attachments of a stillsuit hanging free at her throat. Her eyes were Fremen blue, staring out of a soft, round face. She appeared completely unafraid and there was a look to her stare that made the Baron feel uneasy for no reason he could explain. Even the old Bene Gesserit Truthsayer drew back as the child passed and made a warding sign in her direction. The old witch obviously was shaken by the child’s presence. The Emperor cleared his throat to speak, but the child spoke first—a thin voice with traces of a soft-palate lisp, but clear nonetheless. “So here he is,” she said. She advanced to the edge of the dais. “He doesn’t appear much, does he—one frightened old fat man too weak to support his own flesh without the help of suspensors.”
[2025-03-02 | highlight] He looked down at what the man had written, read: “Raid…on Sietch Tabr…captives…Alia (blank) families of (blank) dead are…they (blank) son of Muad’Dib….” Again, the signalman shook his head. Paul looked up to see Gurney staring at him. “The message is garbled,” Gurney said. “The static. You don’t know that….” “My son is dead,” Paul said, and knew as he spoke that it was true. “My son is dead…and Alia is a captive…hostage.” He felt emptied, a shell without emotions. Everything he touched brought death and grief. And it was like a disease that could spread across the universe. He could feel the old-man wisdom, the accumulation out of the experiences from countless possible lives. Something seemed to chuckle and rub its hands within him. And Paul thought: How little the universe knows about the nature of real cruelty!
[2025-03-02 | highlight] “Think of that! The finest Guild navigators, men who can quest ahead through time to find the safest course for the fastest Heighliners, all of them seeking me…and unable to find me. How they tremble! They know I have their secret here!” Paul held out his cupped hand. “Without the spice they’re blind!” Chani found her voice. “You said you see the now!” Paul lay back, searching the spread-out present, its limits extended into the future and into the past, holding onto the awareness with difficulty as the spice illumination began to fade. “Go do as I commanded,” he said. “The future’s becoming as muddled for the Guild as it is for me. The lines of vision are narrowing. Everything focuses here where the spice is…where they’ve dared not interfere before…because to interfere was to lose what they must have. But now they’re desperate. All paths lead into darkness.”
[2025-03-02 | highlight] Jessica noted the lack of bitterness in his tone, wondered at it. She couldn’t doubt his words—they had that same intensity she’d seen in him the night he’d revealed the path of the future that’d taken them among the Fremen. Paul took a deep breath, said: “Mother, you must change a quantity of the Water for us. We need the catalyst. Chani, have a scout force sent out…to find a pre-spice mass. If we plant a quantity of the Water of Life above a pre-spice mass, do you know what will happen?” Jessica weighed his words, suddenly saw through to his meaning. “Paul!” she gasped. “The Water of Death,” he said. “It’d be a chain reaction.” He pointed to the floor. “Spreading death among the little makers, killing a vector of the life cycle that includes the spice and the makers. Arrakis will become a true desolation—without spice or maker.” Chani put a hand to her mouth, shocked to numb silence by the blasphemy pouring from Paul’s lips. “He who can destroy a thing has the real control of it,” Paul said. “We can destroy the spice.”
[2025-03-02 | highlight] Jessica trembled at the certainty in his voice. “The Padishah Emperor himself is there,” Paul said. He looked at the rock ceiling of his cell. “With his favorite Truthsayer and five legions of Sardaukar. The old Baron Vladimir Harkonnen is there with Thufir Hawat beside him and seven ships jammed with every conscript he could muster. Every Great House has its raiders above us…waiting.” Chani shook her head, unable to look away from Paul. His strangeness, the flat tone of voice, the way he looked through her, filled her with awe. Jessica tried to swallow in a dry throat, said: “For what are they waiting?” Paul looked at her. “For the Guild’s permission to land. The Guild will strand on Arrakis any force that lands without permission.”
[2025-03-02 | highlight] “He has, in truth, seen the Water of Life?” Chani asked. She disengaged herself from Jessica’s grip. “He has seen,” Jessica whispered. Her mind still rolled and surged from the contact. It was like stepping to solid land after weeks on a heaving sea. She sensed the old Reverend Mother within her…and all the others awakened and questioning: “What was that? What happened? Where was that place?” Through it all threaded the realization that her son was the Kwisatz Haderach, the one who could be many places at once. He was the fact out of the Bene Gesserit dream. And the fact gave her no peace. “What happened?” Chani demanded.
[2025-03-02 | highlight] For a woman, the situation is reversed.” Jessica looked up, found Chani was staring at her while listening to Paul. “Do you understand me, Mother?” Paul asked. She could only nod. “These things are so ancient within us,” Paul said, “that they’re ground into each separate cell of our bodies. We’re shaped by such forces. You can say to yourself, ‘Yes, I see how such a thing may be.’ But when you look inward and confront the raw force of your own life unshielded, you see your peril. You see that this could overwhelm you. The greatest peril to the Giver is the force that takes. The greatest peril to the Taker is the force that gives. It’s as easy to be overwhelmed by giving as by taking.”
[2025-03-02 | highlight] Jessica arose, turned through hangings on the left wall. Chani followed, found herself in what had been a storeroom, its rock walls concealed now beneath heavy draperies. Paul lay on a field pad against the far wall. A single glowglobe above him illuminated his face. A black robe covered him to the chest, leaving his arms outside it stretched along his sides. He appeared to be unclothed under the robe. The skin exposed looked waxen, rigid. There was no visible movement to him.
[2025-03-02 | highlight] He’s using the Voice well, Jessica thought, but that’s not enough with these people. They’ve good insulation against vocal control. He must catch them also with logic. “So,” Paul said, “we come to this.” He lifted the message cylinder, removed its scrap of tape. “This was taken from a Harkonnen courier. Its authenticity is beyond question. It is addressed to Rabban. It tells him that his request for new troops is denied, that his spice harvest is far below quota, that he must wring more spice from Arrakis with the people he has.”
[2025-03-02 | highlight] Current Book: 
Current Quote:
[2025-03-01 | highlight] When law and duty are one, united by religion, you never become fully conscious, fully aware of yourself. You are always a little less than an individual. —FROM “MUAD’DIB: THE NINETY-NINE WONDERS OF THE UNIVERSE” BY THE PRINCESS IRULAN
[2025-03-01 | highlight] “I am no longer a child hunting scorpions in the sietch by the light of a handglobe, Usul. I do not play games.” Paul glared at her, caught by the odd ferocity beneath her casual attitude. “He was not worthy, Usul,” Chani said. “I’d not disturb your meditations with the likes of him.” She moved closer, looking at him out of the corners of her eyes, dropping her voice so that only he might hear.
[2025-03-01 | highlight] “Chani, what is this?” he asked. “I dispatched one who came to challenge you in single combat, Usul.” “You killed him?” “Yes. But perhaps I should’ve left him for Harah.” (And Paul recalled how the faces of the people around them had showed appreciation for these words. Even Harah had laughed.) “But he came to challenge me!” “You trained me yourself in the weirding way, Usul.” “Certainly! But you shouldn’t—” “I was born in the desert, Usul. I know how to use a crysknife.” He suppressed his anger, tried to talk reasonably. “This may all be true, Chani, but—”
[2025-03-01 | highlight] Still in the dreamlike state, Paul remembered that Harah, Jamis’ wife, had intruded on him once to say there’d been a fight in the sietch corridor. That had been the interim sietch before the women and children had been sent into the deep south. Harah had stood there in the entrance to the inner chamber, the black wings of her hair tied back by water rings on a chain. She had held aside the chamber’s hangings and told him that Chani had just killed someone. This happened, Paul told himself. This was real, not born out of its time and subject to change.
[2025-03-01 | highlight] Still in the dreamlike state, Paul remembered that Harah, Jamis’ wife, had intruded on him once to say there’d been a fight in the sietch corridor. That had been the interim sietch before the women and children had been sent into the deep south. Harah had stood there in the entrance to the inner chamber, the black wings of her hair tied back by water rings on a chain. She had held aside the chamber’s hangings and told him that Chani had just killed someone. This happened, Paul told himself. This was real, not born out of its time and subject to change. Paul
[2025-03-01 | highlight] Still in the dreamlike state, Paul remembered that Harah, Jamis’ wife, had intruded on him once to say there’d been a fight in the sietch corridor. That had been the interim sietch before the women and children had been sent into the deep south. Harah had stood there in the entrance to the inner chamber, the black wings of her hair tied back by water rings on a chain. She had held aside the chamber’s hangings and told him that Chani had just killed someone. This happened, Paul told himself. This was real, not born out of its time and subject to change. Paul
[2023-03-07 | highlight] “I must accept that water, Paul thought. Slowly, he arose, made his way to Chani’s side. Stilgar stepped back to make room for him, took the baliset gently from his hand.
		“Kneel,” Chani said.
		Paul knelt.
		She guided his hands to the waterbag, held them against the resilient surface. “With this water the tribe entrusts thee,” she said. “Jamis is gone from it. Take it in peace.” She stood, pulling Paul up with her.”
[2022-05-23 | highlight] “The Baron moved out and away from the globe of Arrakis. As he emerged from the shadows, his figure took on dimension—grossly and immensely fat. And with subtle bulges beneath folds of his dark robes to reveal that all this fat was sustained partly by portable suspensors harnessed to his flesh. He might weigh two hundred Standard kilos in actuality, but his feet would carry no more than fifty of them.”

Description of Baron.
[2022-05-23 | highlight] “The drug’s dangerous,” she said, “but it gives insight. When a Truthsayer’s gifted by the drug, she can look many places in her memory—in her body’s memory. We look down so many avenues of the past…but only feminine avenues.” Her voice took on a note of sadness. “Yet, there’s a place where no Truthsayer can see. We are repelled by it, terrorized. It is said a man will come one day and find in the gift of the drug his inward eye. He will look where we cannot—into both feminine and masculine pasts.”
		“Your Kwisatz Haderach?”
		“Yes, the one who can be many places at once: the Kwisatz Haderach. Many men have tried the drug…so many, but none has succeeded.”
[2022-05-23 | highlight] “pain?”
		“I observed you in pain, lad. Pain’s merely the axis of the test. Your mother’s told you about our ways of observing. I see the signs of her teaching in you. Our test is crisis and observation.”
		He heard the confirmation in her voice, said: “It’s truth!”
		She stared at him. He senses truth! Could he be the one? Could he truly be the one? She extinguished the excitement, reminding herself: “Hope clouds observation.”
		“You know when people believe what they say,” she said.
		“I know it.”
[2022-05-23 | highlight] “Do it!” she snapped.
		He jerked his hand from the box, stared at it astonished. Not a mark. No sign of agony on the flesh. He held up the hand, turned it, flexed the fingers.
		“Pain by nerve induction,” she said. “Can’t go around maiming potential humans. There’re those who’d give a pretty for the secret of this box, though.” She slipped it into the folds of her gown.
		“But the pain—” he said.
		“Pain,” she sniffed. “A human can override any nerve in the body.”
[2022-05-23 | highlight] “A duke’s son must know about poisons,” she said. “It’s the way of our times, eh? Musky, to be poisoned in your drink. Aumas, to be poisoned in your food. The quick ones and the slow ones and the ones in between. Here’s a new one for you: the gom jabbar. It kills only animals.”
[2022-05-23 | highlight] “mother.
		“Paul….” Jessica took a deep breath. “…this test you’re about to receive…it’s important to me.”
		“Test?” He looked up at her.
		“Remember that you’re a duke’s son,” Jessica said. She whirled and strode from the room in a dry swishing of skirt. The door closed solidly behind her.”
[2022-05-23 | highlight] “The old woman studied Paul in one gestalten flicker: face oval like Jessica’s, but strong bones…hair: the Duke’s black-black but with browline of the maternal grandfather who cannot be named, and that thin, disdainful nose; shape of directly staring green eyes: like the old Duke, the paternal grandfather who is dead.”
[2022-05-23 | highlight] “The Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam sat in a tapestried chair watching mother and son approach. Windows on each side of her overlooked the curving southern bend of the river and the green farmlands of the Atreides family holding, but the Reverend Mother ignored the view. She was feeling her age this morning, more than a little petulant. She blamed it on space travel and association with that abominable Spacing Guild and its secretive ways. But here was a mission that required personal attention from a Bene Gesserit-with-the-Sight. Even the Padishah Emperor’s Truthsayer couldn’t evade that responsibility when the duty call came.
		Damn that Jessica! the Reverend Mother thought. If only she’d borne us a girl as she was ordered to do!
		Jessica stopped”
[2022-05-23 | highlight] “Paul sensed his own tensions, decided to practice one of the mind-body lessons his mother had taught him. Three quick breaths triggered the responses: he fell into the floating awareness…focusing the consciousness…aortal dilation…avoiding the unfocused mechanism of consciousness…to be conscious by choice…blood enriched and swift-flooding the overload regions…one does not obtain food-safety-freedom by instinct alone…animal consciousness does not extend beyond the given moment nor into the idea that its victims may become extinct…the animal destroys and does not produce…animal pleasures remain close to sensation levels and avoid the perceptual…the human requires a background grid through which to see his universe…focused consciousness by choice, this forms your grid…bodily integrity follows nerve-blood flow according to the deepest awareness of cell needs…all things/cells/beings are impermanent…strive for flow-permanence within….”
[2022-05-23 | highlight] “Paul fell asleep to dream of an Arrakeen cavern, silent people all around him moving in the dim light of glowglobes. It was solemn there and like a cathedral as he listened to a faint sound—the drip-drip-drip of water. Even while he remained in the dream, Paul knew he would remember it upon awakening. He always remembered the dreams that were predictions.
		The dream faded.”
[2022-05-23 | highlight] “There had been so many things to learn. Arrakis would be a place so different from Caladan that Paul’s mind whirled with the new knowledge. Arrakis—Dune—Desert Planet.
		Thufir Hawat, his father’s Master of Assassins, had explained it: their mortal enemies, the Harkonnens, had been on Arrakis eighty years, holding the planet in quasi-fief under a CHOAM Company contract to mine the geriatric spice, melange. Now the Harkonnens were leaving to be replaced by the House of Atreides in fief-complete—an apparent victory for the Duke Leto. Yet, Hawat had said, this appearance contained the deadliest peril, for the Duke Leto was popular among the Great Houses of the Landsraad.”

=== Dune Messiah  — Frank Herbert ===
[2025-03-06 | highlight] "A Bene Gesserit should ask the reasoning behind an open-ended system?" Paul asked.
"I suppose you never tried for more than seven!" she said, anger returning.
His attentive posture began to annoy her.
"Just once," Paul said. "Gurney Halleck caught me on ten. My punishment was sufficiently embarrassing that I won't tell you what he did. And speaking of embar-rassment..."
"Next time, perhaps you'll have yourselves announced," she said. She brushed past Paul into the bedroom, found a loose gray robe, slipped into it, began brushing her hair before a wall mirror. She felt sweaty, sad, a post-coitum kind of sadness that left her with a desire to bathe once more... and to sleep. "Why're you here?" she asked.
"My Lord," Stilgar said. There was an odd inflection in his voice that brought Alia around to stare at him.
"We're here at Irulan's suggestion"

NOTE: I've noticed in Frank Herbert's Dune series that there are many sexual relationships with incestuous undertones. It's subtle, but there's definitely something strange about the way these relationships are portrayed in the text.

#DuneBooks #FrankHerbert #LiteraryObservation #SciFiThemes

=== Consider Phlebas — Iain M. Banks ===
[2025-03-05 | highlight] "Sure it's tough, but...anyway, he was pretty boring." She ate some more.
"I just wondered if there was anybody I ought to send anything to. Friends or relations or—"
"Look, Horza," Yalson said, turning to him, "when you come on board this ship you don't have a past. It's considered very bad manners to ask anybody where they came from or what they've done in their lives before they joined. Maybe we've all got some secrets, or we just don't want to talk or think about some of the things we've done, or some of the things we've had done to us. But either way, don't try to find out. Between your ears is the only place on this crate you'll ever get any priv-acy, so make the most of it. If you live long enough, maybe somebody will want to tell you all about themselves—eventu-ally, probably when they're drunk...but by that time you may not want them to.
Whatever; my advice is just to leave it for the moment."
Horza opened his mouth to say some-thing, but Yalson went on, "I'll tell you all I know now, just to save you asking." She put her spoon down and wiped her lips"

NOTE: I really like this highlighted section because it shows what these types of scavengers truly are. They're scavengers, pirates, free spirits who simply want to survive in this hyper-survival-based society.

#SpaceOpera #PrivacyCode #SurvivalEthics #ScavengerCulture
[2025-03-05 | highlight] ```
"in practice he's a bit more selective than that, and he'd like to be even more so, I'll bet. Anyway. We've carried out a few contracts, mostly protection, a couple of escort duties for third-level places who've found themselves caught up in the war, but most of the time we just attack and steal wherever we think the confusion caused by the war makes us likely to get away with it. That's what we're on our way to do at the moment. Kraiklyn heard about this place called the Temple of Light on a just-about-level-three planet in this neck of the woods and he reckons it'll be easy-in, easy-out—to use one of his favorite expressions. According to him it's full of priests and treasure; we shoot the former and grab the latter. Then we head for the Vavatch Orbital before the Culture blows it away and we buy something to replace our bow laser. I guess the prices should be pretty good. If we hang on long enough people will probably be trying to give the stuff away."

This scene reveals interesting dynamics between the main character and team members as they prepare to raid the Temple of Light. It establishes their mercenary nature and opportunistic approach during wartime, while also introducing a significant plot point about the Vavatch Orbital's impending destruction by the Culture.

#ConsiderPhlebas #Culture #TempleOfLight #VavatchOrbital #Kraiklyn #Horza #SpaceOpera #IainMBanks
```
[2025-03-05 | highlight] # Passage from "Consider Phlebas"

> "in practice he's a bit more selective than that, and he'd like to be even more so, I'll bet. Anyway. We've carried out a few contracts, mostly protection, a couple of escort duties for third-level places who've found themselves caught up in the war, but most of the time we just attack and steal wherever we think the confusion caused by the war makes us likely to get away with it. That's what we're on our way to do at the moment. Kraiklyn heard about this place called the Temple of Light on a just-about-level-three planet in this neck of the woods and he reckons it'll be easy-in, easy-out—to use one of his favorite expressions. According to him it's full of priests and treasure; we shoot the former and grab the latter. Then we head for the Vavatch Orbital before the Culture blows it away and we buy something to replace our bow laser. I guess the prices should be pretty good. If we hang on long enough people will probably be trying to give the stuff away."
> 
> "What's happening to Vavatch?" Horza asked. This wasn't something he'd heard about. He knew the big Orbital was in this part of the war zone, but he'd thought...

*Note: The text appears to be cut off at the end, with some unclear text about "condominium-rule" and "firing line"*

This scene reveals interesting dynamics between the main character and team members as they prepare to raid the Temple of Light. It establishes their mercenary nature and opportunistic approach during wartime, while also introducing a significant plot point about the Vavatch Orbital's impending destruction by the Culture.

#ConsiderPhlebas #Culture #TempleOfLight #VavatchOrbital #Kraiklyn #Horza #SpaceOpera #IainMBanks
[2025-03-05 | highlight] That’s what we’re on our way to do at the moment. Kraiklyn heard about this place called the Temple of Light on a just-about-level-three planet in this neck of the woods and he reckons it’ll be easy-in, easy-out—to use one of his favorite expressions. According to him it’s full of priests and treasure; we shoot the former and grab the latter. Then we head for the Vavatch Orbital before the Culture blows it away and we buy something to replace our bow laser.
[2025-03-05 | highlight] She stretched one finger out. “One—the ship: Hronish; been around hundreds of years. At least a dozen not very careful owners. Currently without its bow laser since we blew it up trying to alter its wavelength pattern. Two—” She extended another finger. “Kraiklyn: he’s had this craft since any of us have known him. He says he won it in a game of Damage somewhere, just before the war. I know he plays the game but I don’t know how good he is. Anyway, that’s his business. Officially we’re called the KFC, Kraiklyn’s Free Company, and he’s the boss. He’s a pretty good leader and he isn’t afraid to slug it out with the rest of the troops when it comes to the crunch. He leads from the front, and that makes him OK in my book. His gimmick is he never sleeps. He has a…ah…” Yalson frowned, obviously looking for the right words. “…an enhanced hemispherical task-division in his brain. One third of the time one half sleeps and he’s a bit dreamy and vague; the other third of the time the other half sleeps and he’s all logic and numbers and he doesn’t communicate too well. The other third of the time, like when he’s in action or whenever there’s an emergency, both sides are awake and functioning. Makes it pretty hard to sneak up on him in his bunk.”
[2025-03-05 | highlight] “Look, Horza,” Yalson said, turning to him, “when you come on board this ship you don’t have a past. It’s considered very bad manners to ask anybody where they came from or what they’ve done in their lives before they joined. Maybe we’ve all got some secrets, or we just don’t want to talk or think about some of the things we’ve done, or some of the things we’ve had done to us. But either way, don’t try to find out. Between your ears is the only place on this crate you’ll ever get any privacy, so make the most of it. If you live long enough, maybe somebody will want to tell you all about themselves—eventually, probably when they’re drunk…but by that time you may not want them to. Whatever; my advice is just to leave it for the moment.”
[2025-03-05 | highlight] Yalson opened the deck and the tube hatch beneath, then Horza dropped Zallin’s gear into the cylinder and Yalson closed it again. The Changer liked the way Yalson smelled when he caught the scent of her warm, perspiring body, but somehow there was nothing in her attitude toward him to make him think they would ever become more than friends. He’d settle for a friend on this ship, though. He certainly needed one.
[2025-03-05 | highlight] There were eighteen people on the ship, in nine cabins. The Man, of course, had one to himself, and the Bratsilakins shared one rather pungent one; they liked to leave the door to it open; everybody else liked to close the door as they went past. Horza was disappointed to find that there were only four women aboard. Two of them hardly ever showed themselves outside their cabin and communicated with the others mostly by signs and gestures. The third was a religious fanatic who, when not trying to convert him to something called the Circle of Flame, spent her time wired up in the cabin she shared with Yalson, spooling fantasy head-tapes. Yalson seemed to be the only normal female on board, but Horza found it difficult to think of her as a woman at all. It was she, however, who took on the job of introducing him to the others and telling him the things about the ship and its crew which he would need to know.
[2025-03-05 | highlight] They were all armed, and their weapons were as various as their suits. Mostly they were lasers, or to be more exact what the Culture called CREWS—Coherent Radiation Emission Weapon Systems. The better ones operated on wavelengths invisible to the human eye. Some people had plasma cannons or heavy pistols, and one had an efficient-looking Microhowitzer, but only Horza had a projective rifle, and an old, crude, slow-firing one at that. He checked it over for the tenth or eleventh time and cursed it. He cursed the leaky old suit he’d been given, too; the visor was starting to mist up. This whole thing was hopeless.
[2025-03-05 | highlight] It had taken the Clear Air Turbulence fifteen days to crawl across the twenty-one or so standard light-years that lay between the Sorpen system and that of Marjoin. Kraiklyn boasted that his ship could hit nearly twelve hundred lights, but that sort of speed, he said, was for emergencies only. Horza had taken a look at the old craft and doubted it would even get into four figures without its outboard warping engines pancaking the ship and everything in it all over the skies.
[2025-03-04 | highlight] I think you've made a really insightful connection between the shape-shifters in "Consider Phlebas" and the face dancers in the Dune universe. The philosophical questions about identity and selfhood that both series explore through these characters are remarkably similar.

Horza's status as a Changer (shape-shifter) and the prejudice he faces does parallel how face dancers are viewed in the Dune universe. In both cases, there's this fundamental distrust of beings who can alter their appearance - as if physical constancy is somehow necessary for authentic selfhood or humanity.

The comparison to Duncan Idaho's ghola is particularly apt. The Fremen suspicion of gholas stems from that same anxiety about what constitutes the "self" - can someone who is physically recreated truly be the same person? Similarly, the Culture's attitude toward Changers questions whether someone who can physically transform retains a consistent inner self.

Both universes are wrestling with profound questions about what makes us "us" - is it our physical form, our memories, our consciousness, or something else entirely?

Here's a transcription of what you were talking about:

"I've noticed that Horza is a shape-shifter. And there is this hatred towards these shape-shifters because they are... they do not have their own... Well, the idea with the mythology is that they do not have their own selfhood. Because what is the self when you can change into anyone you want? And this particularly reminds me of how the Fremen think about the face dancers. Where there's a hatred of them because... like when Stilgar first met Duncan Idaho's ghola. The ghola is no longer... the ghola should be dead because... should not be someone who has an individuality before. And so the face dancers and/or the gholas, I'm assuming, are both very similar in the nature of superstition and this idea that these shape-shifters are very much not human and not with us. Because how can you become human if you do not have a self or you do not have a sense of the self because you're constantly changing? Or at least I'm sure that is what the Fremen are thinking about. So I find it interesting how Horza is the same level of... these people are very much similarly hated. And the Culture... well as, yeah, and the Culture."​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

=== Culture 01 - Consider Phlebas — Iain M. Banks ===
[2025-03-04 | highlight] “About the only sort of woman I’d have anything to do with, one of these Culture ones. They say they really do have all these…
         alterations, you know?” Kraiklyn looked at Horza and winked as he inhaled the drug. “Between the legs; the men have these
         souped-up balls, right? Sort of recirculating…And the women have something similar, too; supposed to be able to come for
         fucking hours…. Well, minutes, anyway…” Kraiklyn’s eyes looked slightly glazed as his voice trailed off. Horza tried not to
         appear as scornful as he felt. Here we go again, he thought. He tried to count the number of times he’d had to listen to people—usually from third- or low fourthlevel societies,
         usually fairly human-basic, and more often than not male—talking in hushed, enviously admiring tones about how It’s More Fun
         in the Culture. Perversely coy for once, the Culture played down the extent to which those born into it inherited such altered
         genitalia.”

Excerpt From
Culture 01 - Consider Phlebas
Iain M. Banks
This material may be protected by copyright.
[2025-03-04 | highlight] “Naturally, such modesty only increased everybody else’s interest, and Horza occasionally became angry with humans who exhibited
         the sort of fawning respect the Culture’s quasi-technological sexuality so often engendered. Coming from Kraiklyn, it didn’t
         surprise him a bit. He wondered if the Man had had some cheap, Cultureimitative surgery himself. It wasn’t uncommon. It wasn’t
         safe, either. Too often such alterations were simply plumbing jobs, especially on males, and made no attempt to uprate the
         heart and the rest of the circulatory system—at least—to cope with the increased strain. (In the Culture, of course, that
         high performance was genofixed in.) Such mimicking of this symptom of the Culture’s decadence had, quite literally, caused
         a lot of broken hearts. I suppose we’ll hear about those wonderful drug glands next, Horza thought.
      “…Yeah, and they have those drug glands,” Kraiklyn went on, eyes still unfocused, nodding to himself. “Supposed to be able
         to take a hit of almost anything, any time they want. Just by thinking about it. Secrete stuff that makes them high.” Kraiklyn
         stroked the flask he held. “You know, they say you can’t rape a Culture woman?” He didn’t seem to expect an answer. Horza[…]”

Excerpt From
Culture 01 - Consider Phlebas
Iain M. Banks
This material may be protected by copyright.
[2025-03-04 | highlight] “On a straight head count the Idirans no doubt do come out in front, Perosteck, and I’ve told them I never did care for some
         of their methods, or their zeal. I’m all for people being allowed to live their own lives. But now they’re up against you
         lot, and that’s what makes the difference to me. Because I’m against you, rather than for them, I’m prepared—” Horza broke
         off for a moment, laughing lightly, self-consciously. “…Well, it sounds a bit melodramatic, but sure—I’m prepared to die
         for them.” He shrugged. “Simple as that.”
      Horza nodded as he said it, and Balveda dropped the outstretched hand and looked away to one side, shaking her head and exhaling
         loudly. Horza went on, “Because…well, I suppose you thought I was just kidding when I was telling old Frolk I thought the
         knife missile was the real representative. I wasn’t kidding, Balveda. I meant it then and I mean it now. I don’t care how
         self-righteous the Culture feels, or how many people the Idirans kill. They’re on the side of life—boring, old-fashioned,
         biological life; smelly, fallible and short-sighted, God knows, but real life. You’re[…]”

Excerpt From
Culture 01 - Consider Phlebas
Iain M. Banks
This material may be protected by copyright.

=== Notes of a Native Son — Baldwin, James ===
[2025-01-08 | highlight] “Preface to the 1984 Edition
James Baldwin
It was Sol Stein, high school buddy, editor, novelist, playwright, who first suggested this book. My reaction was not enthusiastic: as I remember, I told him that I was too young to publish my memoirs.”

Excerpt From
Notes of a Native Son
Baldwin, James
This material may be protected by copyright.
[2025-01-08 | highlight] “Preface to the 1984 Edition
James Baldwin
It was Sol Stein, high school buddy, editor, novelist, playwright, who first suggested this book. My reaction was not enthusiastic: as I remember, I told him that I was too young to publish my memoirs.”

Excerpt From
Notes of a Native Son
Baldwin, James
This material may be protected by copyright.

=== Didion and Babitz — Lili Anolik ===
[2024-12-28 | highlight] “Dear Joan:
This morning I telephoned and wanted you to read A Room of One’s Own, because it struck me because I was thinking about what you said about Quintana and the sprinklers and I was again remembering this shimmer of accuracy that Virginia Woolf got in The Waves (which you say you haven’t read).
It’s so hard to get certain things together and especially you and VW because you’re mad at her about her diaries. It’s entirely about you that you can’t stand her diaries. It”

Excerpt From
Didion and Babitz
Lili Anolik
This material may be protected by copyright.

=== Legends of Dune 01 The Butlerian Jihad — Brian Herbert ===
[2024-11-19 | highlight] “Wishing to rule for centuries, Agamemnon and his lover Juno undertook a risky course of action. They had their brains surgically removed and implanted in preservation canisters that could be installed into a variety of mechanical bodies. One by one— as the remaining Titans felt the specter of age and vulnerability— all of the others also converted themselves into “cymeks,” machines with human minds.”

Excerpt From
Legends of Dune 01 The Butlerian Jihad
Brian Herbert
This material may be protected by copyright.
[2024-11-19 | highlight] “Foremost among them were General Agamemnon and his lover Juno, a tactical genius. These two recruited the programming expert Barbarossa, who devised a scheme to convert the Empire’s ubiquitous servile machines into fearless aggressors by giving their AI brains certain human characteristics, including the ambition to conquer. Then several more humans joined the ambitious rebels. In all, twenty masterminds formed the core of a revolutionary movement that took over the Old Empire”

Excerpt From
Legends of Dune 01 The Butlerian Jihad
Brian Herbert
This material may be protected by copyright.
[2024-11-19 | highlight] “LONG BEFORE MUAD’DIB, in the last days of the Old Empire, humanity lost its drive. Terran civilization had spread across the stars, but grew stagnant. With few ambitions, most people allowed efficient machines to perform everyday tasks for them. Gradually, humans ceased to think, or dream . . . or truly live.”

Excerpt From
Legends of Dune 01 The Butlerian Jihad
Brian Herbert
This material may be protected by copyright.

=== Solaris — Stanislaw Lem ===
[2024-09-20 | highlight] “Stay calm,” he persisted. “Act as if… Be prepared for anything. That’s impossible, I know. But try anyhow. It’s the only way. I don’t know any other.”
“But WHAT am I going to see!!” I almost shouted. I barely kept myself from grabbing him by the shoulders and giving him a good shake as he sat there staring into the corner, with his tired sunburned face, every word he uttered costing a visible effort.
“I don’t know. In a certain sense it depends on you.”
“Hallucinations?”
“No. It’s—real. Don’t… attack. Remember.”

Excerpt From
Solaris
Stanislaw Lem
This material may be protected by copyright.
[2024-09-20 | highlight] “Yet while the biologists saw it as a primitive being—something like an immense syncytium, in other words a single, monstrously grown, fluid cell (even though they called it a “prebiological form”) that extended across the entire globe in a jelly-like covering whose depth reached several miles in places—the astronomers and physicists, on the other hand, claimed it must be a highly organized structure, perhaps exceeding terrestrial organisms in its complexity, since it was capable of actively influencing the orbit of its plane—for no other cause had been discovered that might explain Solaris’s behavior. ”

Excerpt From
Solaris
Stanislaw Lem
This material may be protected by copyright.

=== Slouching Towards Bethlehem — Joan Didion ===
[2024-06-26 | highlight] “Hello, there,” he said when he first saw the girl, in a construction camp or on a train or just standing around on the front porch waiting for somebody to ride up through the tall grass. When John Wayne spoke, there was no mistaking his intentions; he had a sexual authority so strong that even a child could perceive it. And in a world we understood early to be characterized by venality and doubt and paralyzing ambiguities, he suggested another world, one which may or may not have existed ever but in any case existed no more: a place where a man could move free, could make his own code and live by it; a world in which, if a man did what he had to do, he could one day take the girl and go riding through the draw and find himself home free, not in a hospital with something going wrong inside, not in a high bed with the flowers and the drugs and the forced smiles, but there at the bend in the bright river, the cottonwoods shimmering in the early morning sun.”

Excerpt From
Slouching Towards Bethlehem
Joan Didion
This material may be protected by copyright.
[2024-06-26 | highlight] “Hello, there,” he said when he first saw the girl, in a construction camp or on a train or just standing around on the front porch waiting for somebody to ride up through the tall grass. When John Wayne spoke, there was no mistaking his intentions; he had a sexual authority so strong that even a child could perceive it. And in a world we understood early to be characterized by venality and doubt and paralyzing ambiguities, he suggested another world, one which may or may not have existed ever but in any case existed no more: a place where a man could move free, could make his own code and live by it; a world in which, if a man did what he had to do, he could one day take the girl and go riding through the draw and find himself home free, not in a hospital with something going wrong inside, not in a high bed with the flowers and the drugs and the forced smiles, but there at the bend in the bright river, the cottonwoods shimmering in the early morning sun.”

Excerpt From
Slouching Towards Bethlehem
Joan Didion
This material may be protected by copyright.
[2024-05-25 | highlight] “My only advantage as a reporter is that I am so physically small, so temperamentally unobtrusive, and so neurotically inarticulate that people tend to forget that my presence runs counter to their best interests. And it always does. That is one last thing to remember: writers are always selling somebody out.”

Excerpt From
Slouching Towards Bethlehem
Joan Didion
This material may be protected by copyright.

=== The Sparrow — Mary Doria Russell ===
[2024-06-24 | highlight] “It was to this man, Hlavin Kitheri, the Reshtar of Galatna Palace, that Supaari VaGayjur now sent, in a strikingly simple crystal flask, seven small kernels of extraordinary fragrance.
Opening the flask, breaking its vacuum, Kitheri was met by a plume of sweetly camphoric enzyme by-products giving off notes of basil and tarragon, by chocolate aromatics, sugar carbonyl and pyrazine compounds carrying the suggestion of vanilla, by hints of nutmeg and celery seed and cumin in the products of dry distillation created during roasting. And, overlaying all, the tenuous odor of volatile short-chain carbons, the saline memorial of an alien ocean: sweat from the fingers of Emilio Sandoz.
A poet with no words to describe organic beauties whose origin he could not possibly suspect, Hlavin Kitheri knew only that he must know more. And, because of this, lives were changed again.”

Excerpt From
The Sparrow
Mary Doria Russell
This material may be protected by copyright.

=== Blue Nights — Joan Didion ===
[2024-06-14 | highlight] “Vanish.
Pass into nothingness: the Keats line that frightened her.
Fade as the blue nights fade, go as the brightness goes.
Go back into the blue.
I myself placed her ashes in the wall.
I myself saw the cathedral doors locked at six.
I know what it is I am now experiencing.
I know what the frailty is, I know what the fear is.
The fear is not for what is lost.
What is lost is already in the wall.
What is lost is already behind the locked doors.
The fear is for what is still to be lost.
You may see nothing still to be lost.
Yet there is no day in her life on which I do not see her.”

Excerpt From
Blue Nights
Joan Didion
This material may be protected by copyright.
[2024-06-14 | highlight] “Only as the pages progressed further did I understand that the two subjects were the same.
When we talk about mortality we are talking about our children.
Hello, Quintana. I’m going to lock you here in the garage.
After I became five I never ever dreamed about him.
Once she was born I was never not afraid.
I was afraid of swimming pools, high-tension wires, lye under the sink, aspirin in the medicine cabinet, The Broken Man himself. I was afraid of rattlesnakes, riptides, landslides, strangers who appeared at the door, unexplained fevers, elevators without operators and empty hotel corridors. The source of the fear was obvious: it was the harm that could come to her. A question: if we and our children could in fact see the other clear would the fear go away? Would the fear go away for both of us, or would the fear go away only for me?”

Excerpt From
Blue Nights
Joan Didion
This material may be protected by copyright.
[2024-05-28 | highlight] “At this point the fragment skids to an abrupt close: “On the next pages you will find out why and how Quintana died and her friends became complete burnouts at the age of eighteen.”nSo ended the novel she was writing just to show us.nShow us what?nShow us that she could write a novel?nShow us why and how she would die?nShow us what she believed our reaction would be?nNow, they didn’t even care any more.nNo.nShe had no idea how much we needed her.nHow could we have so misunderstood one another?nHad she chosen to write a novel because we wrote novels? Had it been one more obligation pressed on her? Had she felt it as a fear? Had we?n”nnExcerpt FromnBlue NightsnJoan DidionnThis material may be protected by copyright.

=== Shards of Earth — Adrian Tchaikovsky ===
[2024-06-13 | highlight] “In the seventy-eighth year of the war, an Architect came to Berlenhof.
The lights of human civilization across the galaxy had been going out, one by one, since its start. All those little mining worlds, the far-flung settlements, the homes people had made. The Colonies, as they were known: the great hollow Polyaspora of human expansion, exploding out from a vacant centre. Because the Architects had come for Earth first.”

Excerpt From
Shards of Earth
Adrian Tchaikovsky
This material may be protected by copyright.

=== Death's End — Liu, Cixin ===
[2024-06-13 | highlight] “Singer soon understood why the cleansing had happened so fast. He saw a slow fog in the vicinity of that destroyed world. The slow fog was about half a structure length away from that world. Seen by itself, it wasn’t apparent where the fog had come from, but when connected with the broadcast coordinates, it was obvious that the fog belonged to that world. The slow fog showed that the world was dangerous, which was why the cleansing had come so quickly. It appeared that there were other low-entropy entities with even sharper intuition than he; but that wasn’t strange. It was as the Elder said: In the cosmos, no matter how fast you are, someone will be faster; no matter how slow you are, someone will be slower.”nnWe are nothingnnExcerpt FromnDeath's EndnLiu, CixinnThis material may be protected by copyright.
[2024-06-13 | highlight] “The set of coordinates was broadcast by long membrane, and even Singer himself couldn’t be sure what told him that the set of coordinates was sincere—intuition could not always be explained. He decided to cleanse it. He wasn’t busy, and the task wasn’t going to distract him from singing. Even if he got it wrong, it was not a big deal. Cleansing was not a precision task and didn’t require absolute accuracy. It also wasn’t urgent. He just had to get it done eventually. This was also why his position wasn’t prestigious.nSinger took a mass dot out of the seed’s magazine, then he turned to look for the star indicated by the set of coordinates. The main core guided his gaze, like a spear sweeping through the starry sky. Singer grasped the mass dot with a force field feeler and prepared to flick it. But then he saw the location indicated by the set of coordinates and the feeler relaxed.”nnExcerpt FromnDeath's EndnLiu, CixinnThis material may be protected by copyright.
[2024-06-13 | highlight] “On the surface, they saw that yet another two-dimensional planet had appeared in the sky: Mercury (Venus was on the other side of the Sun at this moment). It looked smaller than the two-dimensional Earth, but the light generated by its recent collapse into two dimensions made it very bright.
After they packed the artifacts in the hold, Cheng Xin and AA came out of Halo. Luo Ji, who was waiting outside, leaning on his cane, said, “All right. I think that’s enough. It’s meaningless to carry more, anyway.”

Excerpt From
Death's End
Liu, Cixin
This material may be protected by copyright.
[2024-06-13 | highlight] “Each large ring was composed of many smaller rings, full of detailed structures. As they examined the planets further, the two giant eyes now more resembled the rings of a newly felled tree. Around each two-dimensional planet were a dozen or so small circles—moons that had also been flattened. Around Saturn was another faint large circle—its rings. They could still find the Sun in the sky, a small disk emitting faint yellow light. Since the two planets were still on the other side of the sun, their area after collapsing into two dimensions was breathtaking.
Both planets had no thickness anymore.”

Excerpt From
Death's End
Liu, Cixin
This material may be protected by copyright.
[2024-06-12 | highlight] “The Earth was now barely inhabited. Only about five million people remained there. These were individuals who did not wish to leave their home and who had no fear of the prospect of Death at any moment. Many brave men and women living in the Bunker World also traveled to Earth as tourists, though each journey meant gambling with their lives. As time passed, the anticipated dark forest strike loomed larger, and people gradually adapted to life in the Bunker World. Their yearning for their homeland lessened as they busied themselves in their new homes, and fewer and fewer now visited the Earth. The public no longer cared much about news from the home world, and were only vaguely aware that Nature was enjoying a resurgence. Forests and grasslands covered every continent, and those who stayed behind had to carry guns to defend against wild beasts when they went out, but it was rumored that they lived like kings, each with a vast estate and personal forests and lakes. The entire Earth was now only a single city in the Solar System Federation.”nnExcerpt FromnDeath's EndnLiu, CixinnThis material may be protected by copyright.
[2024-06-12 | highlight] “Every space city was politically equivalent to a state. The four city clusters together formed the Solar System Federation, and the original UN had evolved into the Federation Government. Most of the Earth’s major ancient civilizations had passed through a city-state stage—and now, city-states had reemerged at the rim of the Solar System.”nnExcerpt FromnDeath's EndnLiu, CixinnThis material may be protected by copyright.
[2024-06-12 | highlight] “The clouds began to dissipate, revealing a large opening. Through the opening, Cheng Xin did not see a blue sky; instead, she saw... more ground.nThe ground in the sky was studded with the buildings of a city very similar to the city around her, except she was now looking “down”—or “up”—at it. This must have been the “other side” Cao Bin referred to. Cheng Xin realized that the rising “mountainside” in the distance wasn’t a mountain at all, but continued to rise until it connected with the “sky.” The world was a giant cylinder, and she was standing on the inside of it.n“This is Space City Asia I, in the shadow of Jupiter,” Cao Bin said.nThe new world that had seemed so common a moment ago now stunned her. Cheng Xin felt that she had finally, truly awakened.”nnExcerpt FromnDeath's EndnLiu, CixinnThis material may be protected by copyright.
[2024-06-07 | highlight] “What new plan? A five-hundred-gram cat?”
“Of course not.”
Vadimov’s and Camille’s eyes brightened. Cheng Xin also seemed to have recovered her strength. She stood up.
Accompanied by military escort vehicles and helicopters, an ambulance departed with the Fourth Wallfacer. Against the lights of New York City, Wade’s figure appeared as a black ghost, his eyes glinting with a cold light.
“We’ll send only a brain,” he said.”

Excerpt From
Death's End
Liu, Cixin
This material may be protected by copyright.
[2024-06-06 | highlight] “During that time, Tianming dated two women, but the relationships fizzled quickly. It wasn’t that Cheng Xin already occupied his heart: For him, she would always be the sun behind a veil of clouds. All he wanted was to look at her, to feel her light and warmth. He dared not dream of taking a step toward her. He never even sought out news about her. He guessed, based on her intelligence, that she would go for a Ph.D., but he made no conjectures about her personal life. The main barrier between him and women was his own withdrawn personality. He struggled to build his own life, but it was too difficult.”

Excerpt From
Death's End
Liu, Cixin
This material may be protected by copyright.

=== The Dark Forest — Cixin Liu ===
[2024-06-06 | highlight] “What was the human world like in the eyes of the mountains? Perhaps just something they saw on a leisurely afternoon. First, a few small living beings appeared on the plain. After a while, they multiplied, and after another while they erected structures like anthills that quickly filled the region. The structures shone from the inside, and some of them let off smoke. After another while, the lights and smoke disappeared, and the small things vanished as well, and then their structures toppled and were buried in the sand. That was all. Among the countless things the mountains had witnessed, these fleeting events were not necessarily the most interesting.”

Excerpt From
The Dark Forest
Cixin Liu
This material may be protected by copyright.
[2024-06-06 | highlight] “In future Citizens’ Assembly meetings, the people of Starship Earth immersed themselves in the passion of creating a new world. They held lively debates on the constitution and social structure of the world, drafted various laws, and planned the first election.… There was a thorough exchange of views between officers and soldiers of different ranks, and among the different ships. People acknowledged their prospects and looked forward to Starship Earth forming a core that would snowball into a future civilization, continually increasing in size as the fleet reached star system after star system. An increasing number of people began calling Starship Earth a “second Eden,” a second point of origin for human civilization.”nnExcerpt FromnThe Dark ForestnCixin LiunThis material may be protected by copyright.
[2024-06-06 | highlight] “It’s the tear of the blessed mother,” Xizi said.nHer words were transmitted from Mantis at the speed of light, first to the fleet and then resonating three hours later throughout the entire human world. Xizi, the lieutenant colonel, and the major from the European Fleet—ordinary people on the expedition team placed, by unexpected circumstance, in a central position at the pinnacle moment in the history of civilization—shared a common feeling now that they were so close to the droplet: All sense of the distant world’s unfamiliarity vanished, replaced by an intense desire for recognition. Yes, in the cold expanse of the universe, all carbon-based life shared a common destiny, one that might take billions of years to cultivate, but a destiny that cultivated feelings of love that transcended time and space. And now, they sensed that love in the droplet, a love that could bridge the chasm of any enmity. Xizi’s eyes were wet, and three hours later, the eyes of billions of people like her would fill with tears.”nnExcerpt FromnThe Dark ForestnCixin LiunThis material may be protected by copyright.
[2024-06-06 | highlight] “ They increasingly began to recognize that the race marching toward the Solar System was a great civilization, one that had experienced two-hundred-odd cyclic catastrophes and had endured with unbelievable tenacity. Their arduous journey of four light-years across the vastness of space was all for the sake of finding a stable star, a home in which to live out their lives.… The public’s feelings toward Trisolaris began to change from enmity and hatred to sympathy, compassion, and even admiration. People also realized another fact: Trisolaris had sent out the ten droplets two centuries ago, but humanity had only just realized their true significance. This was no doubt because the behavior of Trisolaris was overly subtle, as well as a reflection of the fact that humanity’s state of mind had been distorted by its own bloody history. In a global online referendum, citizen support for Project Sunshine rose rapidly, increasingly inclined toward the Strong Survival Plan that offered Mars as a Trisolaran reservation.nThe UN and the fleets accelerated their preparations for negotiations, and the two internationals began organizing delegations.nAll of this took place in the day after the droplet was captured.nBut what excited people most[…]”nnExcerpt FromnThe Dark ForestnCixin LiunThis material may be protected by copyright.
[2024-06-06 | highlight] “And women make up half the fleet,” the captain said. “Three people will accompany you. The other two are science officers sent by the European and North American Fleets. They’ll be reporting shortly. Master Ding, let me reiterate one point: According to the decision of the SFJC, you must be the first to make direct contact with the target. Only then are they permitted to make contact.”nnExcerpt FromnThe Dark ForestnCixin LiunThis material may be protected by copyright.
[2024-06-06 | highlight] “In point of fact, the primary reason the Earth and Fleet Internationals decided to send a human to the probe was not for an inspection. When the world saw the probe for the first time, everyone was captivated by its magnificent exterior. The mercury droplet was just so beautiful, so simple in shape yet masterfully styled, with each point on its surface in exactly the right place. It was imbued with a graceful dynamism, as if at every moment it was dripping endlessly in the cosmic night. It inspired the feeling that even if human artists tried out every possible smooth closed shape, they wouldn’t come up with this one. It transcended every possibility. Not even in Plato’s Republic was there such a perfect shape: straighter than the straightest line, more circular than a perfect circle, a mirrored dolphin leaping out of the sea of dreams, a crystallization of all the love in the universe.… Beauty is always paired with good, so if there really existed a demarcation between good and evil in the universe, this object would fall on the good side.”nnExcerpt FromnThe Dark ForestnCixin LiunThis material may be protected by copyright.
[2024-06-06 | highlight] “The destruction of the entirety of humanity’s space force was accomplished by just one Trisolaran probe, and nine like it were three years away from the Solar System. The ten of them together weren’t even one ten-thousandth the size of a single warship, and Trisolaris had a thousand of those that even now were flying onward toward the Solar System.
“If I destroy you, what business is it of yours?”

Excerpt From
The Dark Forest
Cixin Liu
This material may be protected by copyright.
[2024-06-06 | highlight] “Its course took it smashing through debris that liquefied under impact, splashing away at high speed to collide with other debris and giving the droplet a brilliant tail. First it resembled a comet bristling with rage, but as the tail lengthened, it turned into a huge silver dragon that stretched ten thousand kilometers. The entire metallic cloud glowed with the dragon’s light as it whipped to and fro in its mad dance. The warships penetrated by the dragon’s head began to explode along its body, so that it was dotted with the nuclear explosions of four or five small suns at any given time. Further back, molten battleships became million-ton metallic magma explosions that dyed its tail a bewitching bloodred.…”

Excerpt From
The Dark Forest
Cixin Liu
This material may be protected by copyright.
[2024-06-06 | highlight] “Most horrifying of all was what happened to Einstein and Xia, whose captains bypassed system protections via remote control mode and entered Ahead Four acceleration. None of their personnel was protected by deep-sea state. Images transmitted from Xia showed a hangar emptied of fighters but occupied by over a hundred people who were flattened against the deck by the high gs once acceleration began. From this vantage point, observers saw crimson flowers of blood bloom on the white space the size of a football field, forming extremely thin layers that spread out and ultimately merged into one under the immense force.… Spherical cabins presented the ultimate horror: At the beginning of hypergravitation everyone inside slid to the bottom, and then the devil’s weighty hand squished them all into a lump, as if balling up a pile of clay men, with no time for anyone to even scream. The only sound was of shattering bones and viscera squeezing out.”

Excerpt From
The Dark Forest
Cixin Liu
This material may be protected by copyright.
[2024-06-06 | highlight] “And so, when the droplet charged at Ganges, the hundred warships in the second row were still assembled in a straight line. A death formation.
The droplet surged like lightning, and in the space of just ten seconds, it passed through twelve warships: Ganges, Columbia, Justice, Masada, Proton, Yandi, Atlantic, Sirius, Thanksgiving, Advance, Han, and Tempest. As in the destruction of the first row, each warship turned red-hot after penetration, before being engulfed in a nuclear fireball that left a million tons of dark red, glowing, metallic magma that then exploded.”

Excerpt From
The Dark Forest
Cixin Liu
This material may be protected by copyright.
[2024-06-06 | highlight] “From a thousand kilometers away, the fleet had a clear view of Mantis’s explosion, but the initial analysis was that the droplet had self-destructed. Everyone felt sorrow for the sacrifice of the four expedition team members, followed by disappointment that the droplet was not a messenger of peace. But the human race did not have even the slightest bit of psychological preparation for what was about to happen.”

Excerpt From
The Dark Forest
Cixin Liu
This material may be protected by copyright.
[2023-03-22 | highlight] “The research teams led by Hines and Keiko Yamasuki had made some progress. They discovered that critical thinking was not produced in any specific location in the cerebral neural network but used a particular mode of nerve impulse transmission, and that with the powerful computer’s assistance, this model could be retrieved and located from among the vast network of neurons using a method quite similar to the star positioning the astronomer Ringier had provided to Luo Ji”
[2023-03-17 | highlight] “But you can’t simply not care. Humanity will be gone in four hundred years!”
“Hmph. You and I will be gone in forty-odd years.”
“What about our descendants? They’ll be wiped out.”
“That doesn’t concern me as much as it does you. My son in America is married but doesn’t want children, so I don’t really care. But the Zhang family will last another dozen generations, right? Isn’t that enough?”

=== The Year of Magical Thinking — Joan Didion ===
[2024-05-26 | highlight] “My memory of those years is that both John and I were improvising, flying blind. When I was clearing out a file drawer recently I came across a thick file labeled “Planning.” The very fact that we made files labeled “Planning” suggests how little of it we did. We also had “planning meetings,” which consisted of sitting down with legal pads, stating the day’s problem out loud, and then, with no further attempt to solve it, going out to lunch. Such lunches were festive, as if to celebrate a job well done. Michael’s, in Santa Monica, was a typical venue”

Excerpt From
The Year of Magical Thinking
Joan Didion
This material may be protected by copyright.
[2024-05-26 | highlight] “Of course you can, but marriage is something different. Marriage is memory, marriage is time. “She didn’t know the songs,” I recall being told that a friend of a friend had said after an attempt to repeat the experience. Marriage is not only time: it is also, parodoxically, the denial of time. For forty years I saw myself through John’s eyes. I did not age. This year for the first time since I was twenty-nine I saw myself through the eyes of others. This year for the first time since I was twenty-nine I realized that my image of myself was of someone significantly younger. This year I realized that one reason I was so often sideswiped by memories of Quintana at three was this: when Quintana was three I was thirty-four. I remember Gerard Manley Hopkins: Margaret, are you grieving / Over Goldengrove unleaving? and It is the blight man was born for, / It is Margaret you mourn for.”

Excerpt From
The Year of Magical Thinking
Joan Didion
This material may be protected by copyright.
[2024-05-26 | highlight] “Of course you can, but marriage is something different. Marriage is memory, marriage is time. “She didn’t know the songs,” I recall being told that a friend of a friend had said after an attempt to repeat the experience. Marriage is not only time: it is also, parodoxically, the denial of time. For forty years I saw myself through John’s eyes. I did not age. This year for the first time since I was twenty-nine I saw myself through the eyes of others. This year for the first time since I was twenty-nine I realized that my image of myself was of someone significantly younger. This year I realized that one reason I was so often sideswiped by memories of Quintana at three was this: when Quintana was three I was thirty-four. I remember Gerard Manley Hopkins: Margaret, are you grieving / Over Goldengrove unleaving? and It is the blight man was born for, / It is Margaret you mourn for.”

Excerpt From
The Year of Magical Thinking
Joan Didion
This material may be protected by copyright.
[2024-05-26 | highlight] “We anticipate needing to steel ourselves for the moment: will I be able to greet people, will I be able to leave the scene, will I be able even to get dressed that day? We have no way of knowing that this will not be the issue. We have no way of knowing that the funeral itself will be anodyne, a kind of narcotic regression in which we are wrapped in the care of others and the gravity and meaning of the occasion. Nor can we know ahead of the fact (and here lies the heart of the difference between grief as we imagine it and grief as it is) the unending absence that follows, the void, the very opposite of meaning, the relentless succession of moments during which we will confront the experience of meaninglessness itself.”

Excerpt From
The Year of Magical Thinking
Joan Didion
This material may be protected by copyright.

=== Poor Charlie's Almanack — Charles T. Munger, Peter D. Kaufman, Ed Wexler, Warren E. Buffett ===
[2024-05-17 | highlight] “Plus, a lot of people who work at Walmart are very high-grade, bouncy people who are raising nice children. I have no feeling that an inferior culture destroyed a superior culture. I think that is nothing more than nostalgia and delusion. But, at any rate, it's an interesting model of how the scale of things and fanaticism combine to be very powerful. And it's also an interesting model on the other side-how with all its great advantages, the disadvantages of bureaucracy did such terrible damage to Sears,
  ”

Excerpt From
Poor Charlie's Almanack_ The Wit and Wisdom of Charles T. Munger, Expanded Third Edition
Charles T. Munger, Peter D. Kaufman, Ed Wexler, Warren E. Buffett
This material may be protected by copyright.
[2024-02-24 | highlight] “Throughout the book, Charlie reveals his intellect, wit, values, and no end of rhetorical flair. His encyclopedic knowledge allows him to cite references from classical orators to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European literati to pop culture icons of the moment. Where else would you find Demosthenes and Cicero juxtaposed against Johnny Carson or today's investment managers set against Nietzsche, Galileo, and a "one-legged man in an ass-kicking contest"? Or how about Ben Franklin versus Bernie Cornfield in a battle of worldly wisdom? Using self deprecation and imagination to great effect, Charlie cheerfully compares himself to a counting horse, proposes "Glotz's sugared, caffeinated water" as a marketing-bereft label for Coca-Cola, and attests, "At least when I was young I wasn't a total klutz."
  ”

Excerpt From
Poor Charlie's Almanack_ The Wit and Wisdom of Charles T. Munger, Expanded Third Edition
Charles T. Munger, Peter D. Kaufman, Ed Wexler, Warren E. Buffett
This material may be protected by copyright.

=== Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum — Antonia Hylton ===
[2024-03-23 | highlight] “Historians of slavery and prisons have long argued that the commercial value of enslaved Black people in the American South was inextricably bound to their health status and their capacity to labor in the agricultural or domestic settings that had defined the Southern economy. Crownsville’s founding took vestiges of chattel slavery—from the style of the rolls to the financial recordkeeping format used on plantations—and translated them to a clinical setting.The twenty-fifth report of the Lunacy Commission included a financial report celebrating the savings Black patients provided to the state of Maryland. Officials described how patients with disabilities were assigned tasks that not only provided valuable labor but also allegedly made the patients less irritable.”

Excerpt From
Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum
Antonia Hylton
This material may be protected by copyright.
[2024-03-23 | highlight] “What started as a three-building structure built by patients grew to a massive operation, home to thousands of patients, thousands of employees, dozens of buildings, sheds, and cottages, hundreds of acres of farmland worked by patients, and a large mansion for superintendents to live in.The Crownsville campus, with its mix of residential and recreational spaces for patients and employees, became a microcosm of the state of Maryland. Ultimately, the history of Crownsville provides a window into the past and future of mental healthcare for Black Americans. Who cared for the Black people behind the walls? And who cares to now?”

Excerpt From
Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum
Antonia Hylton
This material may be protected by copyright.

=== The Everything Store — Stone, Brad ===
[2024-03-20 | highlight] “Amazon was a family affair in another way. MacKenzie, an aspiring novelist, became the company’s first official accountant, handling the finances, writing the checks, and helping with hiring. For coffee breaks and meetings, the employees would go to a nearby Barnes & Noble, an irony that Bezos later mentioned often in speeches and interviews.”

Excerpt From
The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon
Stone, Brad
This material may be protected by copyright.

=== Seveneves — Neal Stephenson ===
[2024-03-16 | highlight] “Even over the brightly lit Pacific they could see what looked like hairline scratches in the pellucid shell of the atmosphere: the white trails left by incoming bolides. Above the dark side of the Earth these became arcs of blue fire that sometimes forked, and sometimes ended in red bursts when they made it all the way to the ground. In other words, it looked the way it had looked the day before, and the day before that. This level of meteorite activity would have been the most amazing astronomical event in human history had it happened suddenly, two years ago.”

Excerpt From
Seveneves
Neal Stephenson
This material may be protected by copyright.
[2024-03-12 | highlight] “They’d never take the standardized tests that they were prepping for. In a way, Amelia had said, this had led to a kind of renaissance in pedagogy. Free from the constraints of racking up high test scores or getting into colleges, students could learn for learning’s sake—which was how it ought to be. The tick-tock curriculum had dissolved and been replaced by activities improvised from day to day by teachers and parents: hiking in the mountains, doing art projects about the Cloud Ark, talking with psychologists about death, reading favorite books.”

Excerpt From
Seveneves
Neal Stephenson
This material may be protected by copyright.
[2024-03-12 | highlight] “All of that plumbing, and all of those radiators, needed to be supported by Izzy’s structure just like anything else—they were especially prone to troubles under the general heading of “too floppy to survive reboost.” So, proceeding in the same general putting-out-fires mode, Ivy and the engineers on the ground next had to steer the program in the general direction of “consol,” or, as Ivy put it privately, “defloppification,” of the space station’s overall structure. And since it was out of the question to take apart what the Scouts and Pioneers had put in place, this took the form of building what amounted to external scaffolding around what was there.”

Excerpt From
Seveneves
Neal Stephenson
This material may be protected by copyright.
[2024-03-09 | highlight] “At the end of each shift when she squirted through the flange to float free in the milky plastic bubble of the Luk, she would peel off the fluid cooling garment that she wore against her skin all day long. This was made of stretchy blue mesh with plastic tubing stitched between its layers. It had no effect until it was plugged into a pump that circulated cool water through the tubes. Tekla must have hated it after sixteen hours, and so it came off first. Then, peeling her underwear down to her knees, she would deflate and remove the foley catheter that had been draining her bladder while she’d been at work. She would wipe herself down with premoistened towelettes that had been provided in her “mail,” and stuff those into a refuse bag.”

Excerpt From
Seveneves
Neal Stephenson
This material may be protected by copyright.
[2024-03-09 | highlight] “Along the way she would collect her “mail,” which was deposited in each Vestibyul during the occupant’s shift. This consisted of food; drink; toiletries; a bag of ice that would turn into water, providing a simple temperature-control scheme; bags for disposal of feces; and, in her case, tampons.
Because of the roundabout and improvised manner in which things were working now, Dinah did not have a way to communicate with this woman directly, or even to learn her name. This seemed ridiculous, but it was the same general phenomenon that had made it impossible for the firemen to talk to the police officers on 9/11. The Scouts were just using different radios with different frequencies, and Dinah didn’t have one.”

Excerpt From
Seveneves
Neal Stephenson
This material may be protected by copyright.
[2024-03-09 | highlight] “The normal up/down cycle of launch and reentry had, of course, been suspended. Things were supposed to go up, but not come down. Those orbital modules could be preserved and used as habitats, or for storing supplies. The “trash” could be picked over and used again. Bags of fecal material could become fertilizer in hydroponic farms.
Ivy made a unilateral decision that they would carve out an exception to that new policy. The deceased were moved into an empty orbital module docked at the truss. This was left open to space, so that freeze-drying of the bodies could happen out of sight and out of mind. When it filled up with dead people, they would have some kind of ceremony, the thing would be deorbited, and they would watch in silence as it drew a white-hot streak across the atmosphere below.
But it wasn’t full quite yet.”

Excerpt From
Seveneves
Neal Stephenson
This material may be protected by copyright.
[2024-03-09 | highlight] “Rhys Aitken was an engineer who had made a career of building strange new constructs, usually for wealthy clients. Until seventeen days ago, his mission had been to lay groundwork for the addition of a second, larger torus, built around a newer Hub aft of the existing one and intended for space tourists. This was part of a public-private partnership between NASA and Rhys’s employer, a British billionaire who had been one of the early movers in the space tourism industry. Rhys had a new mission now, but he was still a perfect fit for the job.”

Excerpt From
Seveneves
Neal Stephenson
This material may be protected by copyright.
[2024-03-09 | highlight] “Sparky put his hands over his face, exhaled, and sat motionless for about a minute. When he took his hands away, she could see he’d been weeping. “I wrote half a dozen goodbye letters to old friends and family before this meeting,” he said, “and when it’s over I’m going to keep working my way down the list. Maybe I’ll write half of all the letters I want before their intended recipients get killed by the Hard Rain. The point being, I guess, that I am thinking like the dead man walking that I truly am. Which is wrong. I should be thinking about what you are thinking about. The future that you and a few others may look forward to if all of this other stuff works.”

Excerpt From
Seveneves
Neal Stephenson
This material may be protected by copyright.
[2024-03-09 | highlight] “We are beginning to talk to our counterparts in other spacefaring nations about creating an ark,” the president said. “A repository of the entire genetic heritage of the Earth. We have two years to build it. Two years to get as many people and as much equipment as we can into orbit. The nucleus of that ark is going to be Izzy.”

Excerpt From
Seveneves
Neal Stephenson
This material may be protected by copyright.
[2024-03-09 | highlight] “Doob didn’t say anything.
The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff said, “Dr. Harris, I’m an old logistics guy. I deal in stuff. How much stuff do we need to get underground? How many sacks of potatoes and rolls of toilet paper per occupant? I guess what I’m asking is, just how long is the Hard Rain going to last?”
Doob said, “My best estimate is that it will last somewhere between five thousand and ten thousand years.”
”

Excerpt From
Seveneves
Neal Stephenson
This material may be protected by copyright.

=== Anathem — Neal Stephenson ===
[2024-03-12 | highlight] “
“To answer your question,” Fraa Orolo began.
“What question?”
“The one you posed just a minute ago—if I want to know what things are like extramuros, why don’t I just speel in?”
“Oh,” said the artisan, a little confounded by the length of Fra Orolo’s attention span. I suffer from attention surplus disorder, Fraa Orolo liked to say, as if it were funny.”

Excerpt From
Anathem
Neal Stephenson
This material may be protected by copyright.

=== Chip War — Chris Miller (research Fellow) ===
[2024-03-11 | highlight] “Taiwan sits atop a fault line that as recently as 1999 produced an earthquake measuring 7.3 on the Richter scale. Thankfully, this only knocked chip production offline for a couple of days. But it’s only a matter of time before a stronger quake strikes Taiwan. A devastating quake could also hit Japan, an earthquake-prone country that produces 17 percent of the world’s chips, or Silicon Valley, which today produces few chips but builds crucial chipmaking machinery in facilities sitting atop the San Andreas Fault.”

Excerpt From
Chip War: The Fight for the World's Most Critical Technology
Chris Miller (research Fellow)
This material may be protected by copyright.
[2024-03-11 | highlight] “Apple sold over 100 million iPhone 12s, each powered by an A14 processor chip with 11.8 billion tiny transistors carved into its silicon. In a matter of months, in other words, for just one of the dozen chips in an iPhone, TSMC’s Fab 18 fabricated well over 1 quintillion transistors—that is, a number with eighteen zeros behind it. Last year, the chip industry produced more transistors than the combined quantity of all goods produced by all other companies, in all other industries, in all human history. Nothing else comes close.”

Excerpt From
Chip War: The Fight for the World's Most Critical Technology
Chris Miller (research Fellow)
This material may be protected by copyright.

=== Debt: The First 5,000 Years — David Graeber ===
[2024-03-02 | highlight] “the land.”5nOur tendency to overlook this is all the more peculiar when you consider how much of our contemporary moral and religious language originally emerged directly from these very conflicts. Terms like “reckoning” or “redemption” are only the most obvious, since they’re taken directly from the language of ancient finance. In a larger sense, the same can be said of “guilt,” “freedom,” “forgiveness,” and even “sin.” Arguments about who really owes what to whom have played a central role in shaping our basic vocabulary of right and wrong.nThe fact that so much of this language did take shape in arguments about debt has left the concept strangely incoherent. After all, to argue with the king, one has to use the king’s language, whether or not the initial premises make sense.nIf one looks at the history of debt, then, what one discovers first of all is profound moral confusion. Its most obvious manifestation is that most everywhere, one finds that the majority of human beings hold simultaneously that (1) paying back money one has borrowed is a simple matter of morality, and (2) anyone in the habit of lending money is evil.nIt’s true that opinions[…]”nnExcerpt FromnDebt - Updated and Expanded: The First 5,000 YearsnDavid GraebernThis material may be protected by copyright.
[2024-03-02 | highlight] “the land.”5
Our tendency to overlook this is all the more peculiar when you consider how much of our contemporary moral and religious language originally emerged directly from these very conflicts. Terms like “reckoning” or “redemption” are only the most obvious, since they’re taken directly from the language of ancient finance. In a larger sense, the same can be said of “guilt,” “freedom,” “forgiveness,” and even “sin.” Arguments about who really owes what to whom have played a central role in shaping our basic vocabulary of right and wrong.
The fact that so much of this language did take shape in arguments about debt has left the concept strangely incoherent. After all, to argue with the king, one has to use the king’s language, whether or not the initial premises make sense.
If one looks at the history of debt, then, what one discovers first of all is profound moral confusion. Its most obvious manifestation is that most everywhere, one finds that the majority of human beings hold simultaneously that (1) paying back money one has borrowed is a simple matter of morality, and (2) anyone in the habit of lending money is evil.
It’s true that opinions[…]”

Excerpt From
Debt - Updated and Expanded: The First 5,000 Years
David Graeber
This material may be protected by copyright.
[2024-03-02 | highlight] “the land.”5
Our tendency to overlook this is all the more peculiar when you consider how much of our contemporary moral and religious language originally emerged directly from these very conflicts. Terms like “reckoning” or “redemption” are only the most obvious, since they’re taken directly from the language of ancient finance. In a larger sense, the same can be said of “guilt,” “freedom,” “forgiveness,” and even “sin.” Arguments about who really owes what to whom have played a central role in shaping our basic vocabulary of right and wrong.
The fact that so much of this language did take shape in arguments about debt has left the concept strangely incoherent. After all, to argue with the king, one has to use the king’s language, whether or not the initial premises make sense.
If one looks at the history of debt, then, what one discovers first of all is profound moral confusion. Its most obvious manifestation is that most everywhere, one finds that the majority of human beings hold simultaneously that (1) paying back money one has borrowed is a simple matter of morality, and (2) anyone in the habit of lending money is evil.
It’s true that opinions[…]”

Excerpt From
Debt - Updated and Expanded: The First 5,000 Years
David Graeber
This material may be protected by copyright.
[2022-05-08 | highlight] “Where to start? I could have begun by explaining how these loans had originally been taken out by unelected dictators who placed most of it directly in their Swiss bank accounts, and ask her to contemplate the justice of insisting that the lenders be repaid, not by the dictator, or even by his cronies, but by literally taking food from the mouths of hungry children. Or to think about how many of these poor countries had actually already paid back what they’d borrowed three or four times now, but that through the miracle of compound interest, it still hadn’t made a significant dent in the principal. I could also observe that there was a difference between refinancing loans, and demanding that in order to obtain refinancing, countries have to follow some orthodox free-market economic policy designed in Washington or Zurich that their citizens had never agreed to and never would, and that it was a bit dishonest to insist that countries adopt democratic constitutions and then also insist that, whoever gets elected, they have no control over their country’s policies anyway. Or that the economic policies imposed by the IMF didn’t even work. But there was a more[…]”

=== Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia — Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari ===
[2024-01-07 | highlight] “Such a politics does not seek to regiment individuals 
according to a totalitarian system of norms, but to de-normalize and 
de-individualize through a multiplicity of new, collective arrangements 
against power. Its goal is the transformation of human relationships in a 
struggle against power. And it urges militant groups, as well as lone 
individuals, to analyze and fight against the effects of power that 
subjugate them: "For a revolutionary group at the preconscious level 
remains a subjugated group, even in seizing power, as long as this power
itself refers to a form of force that continues to enslave and crush 
desiring-production.”

Excerpt From
Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia
Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari
This material may be protected by copyright.

=== The Sympathizer — Viet Thanh Nguyen ===
[2024-01-06 | highlight] “Perhaps it was not correct, politically speaking, for me to feel sympathy for them, but my mother would have been one of them if she were alive. She was a poor person, I was her poor child, and no one asks poor people if they want war. Nor had anyone asked these poor people if they wanted to die of thirst and exposure on the coastal sea, or if they wanted to be robbed and raped by their own soldiers.”

Excerpt From
The Sympathizer
Viet Thanh Nguyen
This material may be protected by copyright.
[2024-01-06 | highlight] “I awaited the end behind the walls of a villa where I had lived for the previous five years, the villa’s walls glittering with broken brown glass and crowned with rusted barbed wire. I had my own room at the villa, much like I have my own room in your camp, Commandant. Of course, the proper term for my room is an “isolation cell,” and instead of a housekeeper who comes to clean every day, you have provided me with a baby-faced guard who does not clean at all.”

Excerpt From
The Sympathizer
Viet Thanh Nguyen
This material may be protected by copyright.

=== Poor Things — Alasdair Gray ===
[2024-01-01 | highlight] “Nothing definite was known of Godwin’s mother. Some said she was in a lunatic asylum, others that
  Sir Colin kept her as his maidservant in black dress, white cap and apron, silently passing plates round the dining-table when he entertained colleagues and the wives of colleagues.”

Excerpt From
Poor Things
Alasdair Gray
This material may be protected by copyright.

=== Alchemy of a Blackbird — Claire McMillan ===
[2023-12-27 | highlight] “ up.
Of course she bought them. As I handed them over I said, “No power inhabits a deck of tarot cards beyond what you, as the tarot reader, bring to them. There is no doctrinaire meaning for any card and no authority on high handing down pronouncements. There is only your knowledge of myth and symbol. These things you may consider through the study of classical Greek and Roman myth, physics, all forms of mysticism and occultism, even psychology. You combine this with your own life experience as a Sagittarius and bring it to the cards.”

Excerpt From
Alchemy of a Blackbird
Claire McMillan
This material may be protected by copyright.
[2023-12-27 | highlight] “Remedios suspected it would be the inauthenticity of aping someone else’s artistic style that Leonora would object to.”

Excerpt From
Alchemy of a Blackbird
Claire McMillan
This material may be protected by copyright.

=== The Palace Job — Patrick Weekes ===
[2023-11-26 | highlight] “The rulers of the Republic lived atop the great flying city of Heaven's Spire, their magnificent palaces soaring above the world. From their great manses in the sky came the laws and decrees that kept the country in motion, and the commoners on the ground could look up every morning and see their rulers overhead.”

Excerpt From
The Palace Job
Patrick Weekes
This material may be protected by copyright.

=== The Queer Art of Failure — Halberstam, Judith ===
[2023-10-11 | highlight] “The Many-Headed Hydra is a central text in any genealogy of alternatives because its authors refuse to accede to the masculinist myth of Herculean capitalist heroes who mastered the feminine hydra of unruly anarchy; instead they turn that myth on its many heads to access “a powerful legacy of possibility,” heeding Hall’s cogent warning, “The more we understand about the development of Capital itself, the more we understand that it is only part of the story” (1997: 180). ”

Excerpt From
The Queer Art of Failure (a John Hope Franklin Center Book)
Halberstam, Judith
This material may be protected by copyright.
[2023-10-11 | highlight] “The Many-Headed Hydra is a central text in any genealogy of alternatives because its authors refuse to accede to the masculinist myth of Herculean capitalist heroes who mastered the feminine hydra of unruly anarchy; instead they turn that myth on its many heads to access “a powerful legacy of possibility,” heeding Hall’s cogent warning, “The more we understand about the development of Capital itself, the more we understand that it is only part of the story” (1997: 180). ”

Excerpt From
The Queer Art of Failure (a John Hope Franklin Center Book)
Halberstam, Judith
This material may be protected by copyright.

=== American Prometheus — Kai Bird ===
[2023-07-29 | highlight] “He then went back to sleep, unaware that the pad was still burning. Bernheim recalled having to put the thing out before it burned the house down. Living with Robert was always “a little bit of a strain,” Bernheim noted, “because you had to more or less adjust to his standards or moods—he was really the dominant one.” Difficult or not, Bernheim roomed with Robert for their two remaining years at Harvard and credited him with inspiring his later career in medical research.”

Excerpt From
American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer
Kai Bird
This material may be protected by copyright.

=== Babel — R. F. Kuang ===
[2023-07-23 | highlight] “Thus began a morning of memorizing basic vocabulary – agricola, terra, aqua – which was daunting, but then seemed easy compared to the head-spinning explanations of declensions and conjugations which followed. Robin had never been taught the fundamentals of grammar – he knew what worked in English because it sounded right – and so in learning Latin, he learned the basic parts of language itself. Noun, verb, subject, predicate, copula; then the nominative, genitive, accusative cases . . . He absorbed a bewildering amount of material over the next three hours, and had forgotten half of it by the time the lesson ended, but he came away with a deep appreciation of language and all the words for what you could do with it.”

Excerpt From
Babel
R. F. Kuang
This material may be protected by copyright.

=== Chain Gang All Stars — Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah ===
[2023-07-07 | highlight] “The pulse came: the sound of the magnetic shackles initiating. For a moment that was a performance in itself as Staxxx stood against the incredible pressure pulling her down. Her wrists shot from orange to triple red as the cuffs beneath her skin, grafted to her bones, demanded she fall to the platform at her feet. She made a kissing face as the half second slipped away and the magcuffs in her wrists slammed into the black platform, her body forced into an irreverent kneel. Staxxx waited, knees to the platform, her wrists magnetically locked down. Her fingers spread open, ready to push off when the time came.”

Excerpt From
Chain Gang All Stars
Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah
This material may be protected by copyright.
[2023-07-07 | highlight] “Welcome, young lady,” said Micky Wright, the premier announcer for Chain-Gang All-Stars, the crown jewel in the Criminal Action Penal Entertainment program. “Why don’t you tell us your name?” His high boots were planted in the turf of the BattleGround, which was long and green, stroked with cocaine-white hash marks, like a divergent football field. It was Super Bowl weekend, a fact that Wright was contractually obligated to mention between every match that evening.
			“You know my name.”

Excerpt From
Chain Gang All Stars
Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah
This material may be protected by copyright.

=== Marriage, a History — Stephanie Coontz ===
[2023-06-26 | highlight] “Catholics also narrowed their criteria for a valid marriage. In France a 1556 edict required parental consent for men up to the age of thirty and for women until age twenty-five. A later law in France provided that a couple of any age who married without parental consent could be banished or imprisoned.33
These rulings could be catastrophic for women and children. Elizabeth Pallier and Pierre Houlbronne, for example, had lived together for eight years, had children together, and eventually, though belatedly, were married in church. According to traditional canon law, this was a perfectly valid marriage. But when Pierre got a job at the Palais de Justice, a post that suddenly made him a very desirable marriage partner, his parents petitioned to have the marriage declared invalid because he had not received their consent. In 1587 the court upheld the parents. After eight years with Pierre, Elizabeth instantly became an unwed mother. Her children were suddenly illegitimate, with no claim on their father’s property. Pierre, on the other hand, was free to contract a more advantageous marital alliance.34”

Excerpt From
Marriage, a History
Stephanie Coontz
This material may be protected by copyright.
[2023-06-25 | highlight] “As a result, people in northwestern Europe generally married later than elsewhere in the world. In England between 1500 and 1700 the median age of first marriage for women was twenty-six, which is higher than the median age of marriage for American women at any point during the twentieth century. The age of marriage was sometimes much lower for the very wealthy, especially for aristocrats, but they were a small minority of the population.5”

Excerpt From
Marriage, a History
Stephanie Coontz
This material may be protected by copyright.
[2023-06-25 | highlight] “In societies where a couple is incorporated into a larger family compound or productive unit, marriage and childbearing generally take place at a young age because a couple doesn’t need to be economically self-sufficient to wed. But in northwestern Europe, when a man and woman married, they were expected to work their own land or establish their own trade, rather than live as part of a larger family collective.4 Because a couple was expected to support the partners and their children, marriage had to wait until they had accumulated or inherited enough to sustain a separate household. Many guilds required journeymen and apprentices to remain single until they had passed the examination to become a master and could be assured of a steady livelihood.”

Excerpt From
Marriage, a History
Stephanie Coontz
This material may be protected by copyright.
[2023-06-24 | highlight] “Landowners had a stake in their serfs’ marriages because the division of labor between husband and wife lay at the heart of rural economies. No individual, male or female, could run a farm single-handedly. The man focused on outdoor agricultural labor; indeed, a male peasant was usually called a plowman. In addition to plowing, he spread manure, dug peat for fuel, and harvested crops by hand, swinging heavy sickles or scythes. He threshed the grain, turned the hay, and sometimes hired himself out to work in the fields of larger landowners. His wife milked the cows, made butter and cheese, fed the chickens and ducks, cleaned and carded wool, prepared flax (a process that involved fifteen steps), brewed beer, and carried water. Women also took their surplus products to market, washed their clothes in the village stream, and had  their grain ground at the mill. Both men and women helped with the harvest, gleaned the fields, and collected firewood. Women, like men, sometimes hired themselves out as agricultural laborers.
Only rarely could a peasant man or woman carve out an independent life as a single person. The married couple peasant household was the basic unit of production. The[…]”

Excerpt From
Marriage, a History
Stephanie Coontz
This material may be protected by copyright.
[2023-06-24 | highlight] “The importance of marriage in creating a viable household economic unit meant that even free peasants, who were not bound to a lord or an abbot, were very anxious to get themselves, and later their offspring, properly married. They were equally concerned that their neighbors marry appropriate spouses, because the very geography of village life and peasant farming made marriage a public matter. A family’s landholdings were often scattered into a number of separate long, narrow strips. A marriage that allowed for the amalgamation of side-by-side plots of land was considered particularly advantageous. But the regular rotation of crops and the proximity of landholdings required the whole village to decide what to plant where and when to plow and harvest. Even people with no direct economic interest in the outcome of a marriage had a stake in who married whom and whether the new husband or wife would be an asset to the neighborhood.”

Excerpt From
Marriage, a History
Stephanie Coontz
This material may be protected by copyright.
[2023-06-24 | highlight] “The Church did not like being put in the awkward position of defending young couples who, by privately exchanging their vows, married in defiance of their parents’ wishes. In remedy, the Fourth Lateran Council declared in 1215 that “we absolutely prohibit clandestine marriages.” For a marriage to be valid, the council stated, three things were necessary: The bride had to have a dowry, which effectively undercut the independence of a young woman from  her parents; banns had to be published beforehand; and the wedding had to take place in a church.
As a result, a proper marriage became a long, drawn-out affair. It began with a formal betrothal negotiated by both sets of parents. This included a prenuptial marriage contract covering the property transactions that would occur at and after marriage, such as the amount of the dowry brought by the wife, the groom’s marriage gift to her, what arrangements would be made if the bride were widowed, and how property would be dispersed to children and grandchildren. If the man was expected to take over his parents’ farm or business, the marriage agreement might also stipulate the kind of support they could expect from the couple during[…]”

Excerpt From
Marriage, a History
Stephanie Coontz
This material may be protected by copyright.
[2023-06-24 | highlight] “Until the twelfth century the Church held that a marriage was valid if entered into by mutual consent and then sealed by sexual intercourse. This made nonconsummation grounds for annulment. Then, in the mid-twelfth century, Peter Lombard, Bishop of Paris, argued that if sex was necessary for a valid marriage, Mary and Joseph could not have been legally married. In Lombard’s view, a promise to wed (“words of the future”) did not create a marriage unless it was followed by sex, but he insisted that an exchange of consent in the present—“I take you as my husband” and “I take you as my wife”—made a marriage legally and sacramentally binding even if the couple did not engage in sex. Lombard’s views became official church teaching.”

Excerpt From
Marriage, a History
Stephanie Coontz
This material may be protected by copyright.
[2023-06-24 | highlight] “Marriage practices throughout Europe were still so diverse and so informal that such a declaration would, in the words of one European historian, “have rendered a massive proportion of marriages invalid.”4
The Church was dealing with a population whose traditions considered mutual intent or the blessing of a parent sufficient to solemnize a marriage. If it had refused to accept these informal marriages as valid, how could it enforce its prohibitions against divorce and its strictures against “living in sin”? It wasn’t until the sixteenth century on the Continent—and not until 1753 in England—that governments and churches could enforce a rule requiring specific legal and public formalities to validate a marriage.”

Excerpt From
Marriage, a History
Stephanie Coontz
This material may be protected by copyright.
[2023-06-21 | highlight] “Astute queens and noblewomen were careful to cultivate ties with powerful church officials, who could aid them when they were no longer willing or able to play the high-stakes marriage game. Ecclesiastical allies could make a huge difference if a husband attempted to repudiate his wife against her will. Alternatively, a friendly monastery could provide refuge for a wife who was divorced or left her husband on her own account. Churchmen might offer women places of retreat, defend their right to remain unmarried after being widowed, or help them prevent separated husbands from remarrying.
Queens, then, were not just valuable prizes in the game of matrimonial politics. They were often accomplished players in their own right. Small wonder that when medieval Europeans adopted the game of chess from the Muslim world, the most powerful piece on the board, which the Muslims called the vizier, or adviser, was renamed “the queen.”31”

Excerpt From
Marriage, a History
Stephanie Coontz
This material may be protected by copyright.
[2023-06-21 | highlight] “The Importance of a Highborn Wife 
As we have seen, the insecurity of dynastic claims in early medieval Europe gave women a large role in conferring status and wealth in their own right. The ideal noble was like Sir Galahad of King Arthur’s Round Table, “descended on both sides from kings and queens.”20 The commonly held belief that a couple actually mixed their blood during sexual intercourse gave women a critical role in the hereditary transmission of nobility.”

Excerpt From
Marriage, a History
Stephanie Coontz
This material may be protected by copyright.
[2023-06-21 | highlight] “The Roman Catholic Church’s definition of incest is one of the most intriguing features of medieval marriage. Neither the Old nor New Testament provided any basis for it. But in the mid-sixth century, church synods began to denounce as incestuous the Old Testament practice of marrying a brother’s widow. Also, during the sixth and seventh centuries bishops began condemning marriage to first and second cousins, stepmothers or stepdaughters, and the widows of uncles. In 721, Pope Gregory II even forbade marriage with the godmother of one’s child or with the mother of one’s godchild”

Excerpt From
Marriage, a History
Stephanie Coontz
This material may be protected by copyright.
[2023-06-18 | highlight] “This patriarchal definition of the family had the curious effect of excluding the head of the household, the paterfamilias, from membership in the family. Men were not in families; they ruled over them. This conception, which was adopted by the Christian families of Western Europe, helps explain why for so many centuries family advice manuals were addressed to wives rather than husbands. Husbands, it was long thought, didn’t need to know how to behave in families. They simply needed to know how to make their families behave.”

Excerpt From
Marriage, a History
Stephanie Coontz
This material may be protected by copyright.
[2023-06-18 | highlight] “During the rule of the Southern Dynasties (A.D. 317-589), one Chinese princess  argued that she, like her brother the emperor, was entitled to a harem. Her wishes prevailed, and she was assigned thirty male “concubines.”10”

Excerpt From
Marriage, a History
Stephanie Coontz
This material may be protected by copyright.
[2023-06-18 | highlight] “As marriage became the primary vehicle for transmitting status and property, both men and women faced greater restrictions on their behavior. Men, like women, could be forced to marry women chosen by their parents. But because women could bear a child with an “impure” bloodline, introducing a “foreign interest” into a family, their sexual behavior tended to be more strictly supervised, and females were subject to severe penalties for adultery or premarital sex. The laws and moral codes of ancient states exhorted men to watch carefully over their wives “lest the seed of others be sown on your soil.”35
”

Excerpt From
Marriage, a History
Stephanie Coontz
This material may be protected by copyright.
[2023-06-18 | highlight] “But once Europeans introduced the horse, the gun, and the fur trade to North America, everything changed. Indian men were able to hunt buffalo individually. They had both the opportunity and incentive to kill more buffalo than they needed for their own subsistence because they could trade their surplus to whites for personal gain. This hugely increased the number of hides to be tanned and the amount of meat to be dried. The most successful hunters could now kill far more buffalo than one wife could process, and having more wives suddenly meant having more wealth. Richer men began to accumulate wives by offering horses to girls’ fathers.”

Excerpt From
Marriage, a History
Stephanie Coontz
This material may be protected by copyright.
[2023-06-18 | highlight] “In the 1970s several feminist researchers built on this idea to turn the protective theory of marriage on its head. They suggested that marriage originated not to protect women but to oppress them. These researchers argued that because women probably played a leading role in the invention of agriculture through their experimentation with plants and food preservation, and because women were certainly responsible for the physical reproduction of the group, the origins of marriage lay not in the efforts of women to attract protectors and providers but in the efforts of men to control the productive and reproductive powers of women for their own private benefit.22
According to this oppressive theory, men coerced women into marriage, often using abduction, gang rape, or wife beating to enforce their will. Brothers essentially traded their sisters for wives. Fathers gained power in the community by passing their daughters out to young men, who gave the fathers gifts and services in return. Rich men accumulated many wives, who worked for them and bore more daughters who could be exchanged to place other men in their debt.”

Excerpt From
Marriage, a History
Stephanie Coontz
This material may be protected by copyright.

=== DELIO. Phase One. — RR Haywood ===
[2023-06-21 | highlight] “He’s suffocating me! I literally can’t breathe,’ Maria blurted, before snapping off with another hesitation as DELIO moved in closer.
      ‘It’s okay, Maria. You can tell me. I will never betray you.”

Excerpt From
DELIO. Phase One.
RR Haywood
This material may be protected by copyright.

=== The Tragedy of Heterosexuality — Jane Ward ===
[2023-06-18 | highlight] “So what is “straight culture,” as seen through a queer, feminist lens? As this book will explore in depth, queer/lesbian complaints about straight culture have circulated around two overarching themes (with several additional subthemes considered in the chapters to follow).5 First, queer feminists have argued that straight life is characterized by the inescapable influence of sexism and toxic masculinity, both of which are either praised or passively tolerated in straight spaces. Second, queer observers of straight life have pointed to straight women’s endless and ineffective efforts to repair straight men and the pain of witnessing straight women’s optimism and disappointment.”

Excerpt From
The Tragedy of Heterosexuality
Jane Ward
This material may be protected by copyright.

=== Lost Metal : A Mistborn Novel (9780765391209) — Sanderson, Brandon ===
[2023-05-20 | highlight] “unloaded. It had been a while since he’d needed to shoot anyone, but he continued to make good use of his reputation as the “Lawman Senator of the Roughs.” City folk, particularly politicians, were intimidated by small arms. They preferred to kill people with more modern weapons, like poverty and despair.
“Is a kiss for my wife on that list?” Wax asked.”

=== Oh My Mother! — Connie Wang ===
[2023-05-17 | highlight] “But within the circle, life feels as safe and predictable as the homes in Eden Prairie. My life, growing up, was one of comfort and rules, and so I spent most of my energy searching for some “uniqueness” within the palette of beige.
			That word, unique, was loaded—especially in Eden Prairie—a compliment as much as a warning.
			“What a unique dessert,” a teacher would say about the red-bean paste I had brought in for a classroom ice cream sundae party before she threw it in the trash.
			“You’ve got such a unique life!” my neighbor whose children I babysat would respond when I told her I wasn’t sure how she wanted me to bathe the kids—should I let them bring in toys, and should I use bubble bath, and if so, how? I only remembered taking showers with my mom and my little sister, and it certainly wasn’t playtime.”

=== The Butlerian Jihad — Brian Herbert ===
[2023-05-16 | highlight] “In the ennui of the Old Empire, these metaphysical scholars had been the first to have their brains installed in life-support systems. Freed of biological constraints, they spent all their time learning and thinking. Each Cogitor wanted to study the entirety of human philosophy, bringing together the ingredients to understand the universe. They lived in ivory towers and contemplated, rarely bothering to note the superficial relationships and events of the mundane world.
Kwyna, the two-thousand-year-old Cogitor who resided in Salusa’s City of Introspection, claimed to be politically neutral. “I am ready to interact,” she announced through the monk, who stared with glazed eyes at the assembly. “You may begin.”
[2023-05-16 | highlight] “Beside the brain canister, the red-robed monk removed the sealed lid, exposing the agitated viscous fluid. Blinking his round eyes rapidly, he stared into the tank. Slowly, the monk slid one naked hand into the soup, immersing his fingers. He closed his eyes, drawing deep breaths, as he tentatively touched the convoluted brain. His brows furrowed with concentration and acceptance as the electrafluid soaked into his pores, linking the Cogitor with the Secondary’s neural system, using him as an extension in much the same way cymeks used artificial mechanical bodies.”
[2023-05-15 | highlight] “Now, while the immense robot war fleet engaged the expected League orbital defenses and perimeter ships, Agamemnon’s mind probed outward from his sensor-connected container, and he felt his guideship as an extension of his long-lost human body. The integral weapons were part of himself. He saw with a thousand eyes, and the powerful engines made him feel as if he had muscular legs again and could run like the wind.
”

=== The Book That Wouldn't Burn — Mark Lawrence ===
[2023-05-14 | highlight] “
			Clovis ran a hand across the wall of the colossal book tower. “How has this been here all our lives and not been discovered?”
			Evar, still trembling, wiped at his face. The ichor had undoubtedly evaporated by now, but he could still feel it there, cold and penetrating. “What are you doing here?”
[2023-05-13 | highlight] “Livira frowned. “But why bring the city people food? How do they pay?”
			“You’re too clever for your own fucking good, girl. Get you into trouble, that will.” Malar shook his head. The flesh around the furrows the sabber had carved across his face was still an angry red. Sweat ran from beneath hair streaked with the first touch of grey. He looked as tired as Livira felt. “Knowledge. That’s what they pay with. Whole city’s here for one reason. This is where King Oanold’s great-grandfather built the library.”
[2023-05-13 | highlight] “Sabber.”
			Livira didn’t know who’d muttered it first but soon the word was on a dozen tongues. She could see it now. The figure wasn’t human. You could see it in their gait. And now, as it drew closer, something about the face. The sabber walked with a suppressed bounce as if holding back from some great leap at every step. Its legs bent too low down and were never fully straight; its shoulders rose as if beneath its hide armour there was a great ball of muscle at each joint. Closer still and she could make out the sharp angle of his cheekbones, and his mouth that was almost like Yaller’s dog’s: lipless, promising canines. Old Kern said the city folk called them dog-men these days and had new theories about their unclean origins.”

=== Sacred Knowledge — William A. Richards ===
[2023-05-05 | highlight] “Clearly the first epiphany is no confirmation of sainthood. It might be viewed as a helicopter ride to the glorious peak of the spiritual mountain, but when one returns to camp at the base with the challenging path winding upward through difficult terrain, the climbing still needs to be done. Yet many appear to then become motivated to climb as never before. Now, there is no question that there really is a summit to the mountain, that the perspective from that pinnacle is worth all the effort and anguish of the spiritual journey, and that the journey itself has meaning. Many who are now committed to disciplined meditative practices and compassionate action, some of whom might well decline an opportunity to receive an entheogen even if it were legally accessible, will also acknowledge that their interest in spiritual development was originally awakened or significantly nurtured by an experience occasioned by a psychedelic substance.”
[2023-05-05 | highlight] “Ultimately, however, I have come to view it as a matter of personal choice to affirm experiential, intuitive knowledge. In that respect, believing in the validity of mystical consciousness is similar to believing that one truly loves one’s spouse or children. One lives out of such convictions. The memory of mystical consciousness, for better or worse, structures my Weltanschauung, or view of the world. As succinctly expressed by the anthropologist Jeremy Narby in the documentary film Neurons to Nirvana, in reference to his own personal experience during the effects of ayahuasca, “Once you drink you see, and once you see you can’t unsee.”
[2023-05-04 | highlight] “A VARIETY OF APPROACHES
The major psychedelic substances employed in the research on which this book is based include psilocybin, LSD (d-lysergic acid diethylamide), DPT (dipropyltryptamine), MDA (methylenedioxyamphetamine), and DMT (dimethyltryptamine). However, this is a book not about “drug experiences” per se, but rather about the profoundly meaningful states of consciousness that they may occasion when employed with knowledge and skill. It is my conclusion that these incredibly beautiful, awe-inspiring, and, for some, terrifying experiences are best understood not as being “within the drugs,” but rather as being within our own minds.”

=== On Freedom — Nelson, Maggie ===
[2023-04-29 | highlight] “Arendt sneers at this apparent oxymoron, presuming there is nothing worthwhile to be found there. And why would she, believing, as she did, that “without a politically guaranteed public realm, freedom lacks the worldly space to make its appearance. To be sure it may still dwell in men’s hearts as desire or will or hope or yearning; but the human heart, as we all know, is a very dark place, and whatever goes on in its obscurity can hardly be called a demonstrable fact.”nnExcerpt FromnOn Freedom : Four Songs of Care and ConstraintnNelson, Maggienhttps://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewBook?id=0nThis material may be protected by copyright.
[2023-04-29 | highlight] “Coates writes, “It is often easier to choose the path of self-destruction when you don’t consider who you are taking along for the ride, to die drunk in the street if you experience the deprivation as your own, and not the deprivation of family, friends, and community.” Increased awareness of our entanglement can offer sustenance, but it can also confound and hurt; if and when we ascertain that our well-being is linked to the behavior of others, the desire to impugn, control, or change them can be as fruitless as it is intense”
[2023-04-29 | highlight] “Coates writes, “It is often easier to choose the path of self-destruction when you don’t consider who you are taking along for the ride, to die drunk in the street if you experience the deprivation as your own, and not the deprivation of family, friends, and community.” Increased awareness of our entanglement can offer sustenance, but it can also confound and hurt; if and when we ascertain that our well-being is linked to the behavior of others, the desire to impugn, control, or change them can be as fruitless as it is intense”

=== Red Rising — Pierce Brown ===
[2023-04-13 | highlight] “He thinks men like me weak. He thinks me dumb, feeble, subhuman. I was not raised in palaces. I did not ride horses through meadows and eat meals of hummingbird tongues. I was forged in the bowels of this hard world. Sharpened by hate. Strengthened by love.
He is wrong.
None of them will survive.”

=== All the Knowledge in the World — Simon Garfield ===
[2023-03-17 | highlight] “Algebra occupied thirty-eight pages (‘A general method of computation by certain signs and symbols, which have been contrived for this purpose, and found convenient’). Medicine ran to 110 pages, with much on gout, quinsy and other agues, but it did not cover Midwifery, which merited its own forty-six-page entry, providing a step-by-step guide that assumed to eliminate the need for training and experience. The accompanying three pages of highly detailed anatomical engravings outraged many, not least churchmen, who urged readers to tear them out and burn them.”
[2023-03-17 | highlight] “beings. In his entry on Mythology, he suggested ‘common people were prone to superstition’ and ‘born to be deceived in everything’. Ignoring for a moment his Scottish environs, he believed that ‘people of distinction’ tended to live in London. His employment was intended initially as a part-time occupation, but it entirely consumed him.”
[2023-03-17 | highlight] “its principal editor William Smellie. Perhaps it was inevitable that a man with an enormous nose would engage a man with such a surname, but Smellie also possessed other attributes. He appears to have been rescued from a possible life of debauchery and alcoholism by the twin redemptive forces of education and remuneration.”

=== The Three-Body Problem — Cixin Liu ===
[2023-03-16 | highlight] “progress.
“On Trisolaris, of the more than two hundred civilizations, including our own, none has ever experienced such accelerating development. The progress of science and technology in all Trisolaran civilizations has been at a constant or decelerating pace. In our world, each technology age requires approximately the same amount of time for steady, slow development.”
[2023-03-16 | highlight] “here.”
“That flower may be delicate, but it possesses peerless splendor. She enjoys freedom and beauty in the ease of paradise.”
“If Trisolaran civilization ultimately possesses that world, we can also create such lives for ourselves.”
[2023-03-16 | highlight] “He wasn’t even angry or resentful. All of these emotions—and other emotions, such as fear, sorrow, happiness, and appreciation of beauty—were things that the Trisolaran civilization strove to avoid and eliminate. Such emotions caused the individual and society to be weak spiritually and did not help with survival in the harsh environment of this world. The mental states that Trisolarans needed were calmness and numbness. The history of the past two hundred-some cycles of civilization proved that civilizations that relied on these two states as their spiritual core were the most capable of survival.”
[2023-03-16 | highlight] “The Transmit button was a red rectangle. The listener’s fingers hovered above it.
The fate of Trisolaran civilization was now tied to these slender fingers.
Without hesitation, the listener pressed the button. A high-powered radio wave carried that short message, a message that could save another civilization, into the darkness of space.
Do not answer! Do not answer!! Do not answer!!!
*   *   *”
[2023-03-08 | highlight] “film.
By using different cameras, Wang was trying to eliminate problems with the camera or the film as possible explanations. But by allowing his son and his wife to take some pictures, he discovered an even stranger result: The countdown only appeared on the pictures he took!
Desperate, Wang picked up the pile of film rolls, like a tangled nest of snakes, like a bunch of ropes tied into an impossible knot.”
[2023-03-08 | highlight] “Wang picked up the white ball. He caressed it for a bit and put it back down. “For someone exploring the forefront of theory, that would indeed be a catastrophe.”
“To accomplish something in theoretical physics requires one to have almost religious faith. It’s easy to be led to the abyss.”
[2023-03-08 | highlight] “it.
“These high-energy particle accelerators raised the amount of energy available for colliding particles by an order of magnitude, to a level never before achieved by the human race. Yet, with the new equipment, the same particles, the same energy levels, and the same experimental parameters would yield different results. Not only would the results vary if different accelerators were used, but even with the same accelerator, experiments performed at different times would give different results. Physicists panicked.”
[2022-10-11 | highlight] “stars.”
“What about the sun?”
“The sun is the result of the large hole in the outer sphere being projected onto the inner one. The projection is so bright that it penetrates the inner sphere like the shell of an egg, and that is how we see the sun. Around the spot of light, the scattered light rays are also very bright, and can be seen through the inner shell. That is why we can see a clear sky during the day.”
[2022-10-11 | highlight] “That’s not very insightful.”
“Let me be more specific: The universe is a hollow sphere floating in the middle of a sea of fire. There are numerous tiny holes in the surface of the sphere, as well as a large one. The light from the sea of flames shines through these holes. The tiny ones are stars, and the large one is the sun.”
[2022-10-09 | highlight] “By using different cameras, Wang was trying to eliminate problems with the camera or the film as possible explanations. But by allowing his son and his wife to take some pictures, he discovered an even stranger result: The countdown only appeared on the pictures he took!”

=== Really Good, Actually — Monica Heisey ===
[2023-03-07 | highlight] “that I couldn’t do journaling properly;
            that we hadn’t given back the money friends and family had given us at the wedding;
            that everyone knew I was struggling—worse, that they knew I’d been rejected;
            that I had been rejected by the person who knew me better than anyone else on earth, to whom I had shown every part of me, been as vulnerable as it was possible for me to be . . . and that person had decided I sucked; 
            that despite the fact that I technically had enough perspective to understand that none of my problems were “real” compared
               with any actual problems that could and did exist in other people’s lives, my pathetic non-problems still occupied my entire
               headspace and felt enormous, bordering on insurmountable;
            
            that I would do anything to simply have been better at being married—to have properly applied myself toward being a sweeter,
               sexier, more fun, less challenging, properly good wife;
            
            ”
[2023-03-06 | highlight] “On the twenty-third, Amy took me for a festive manicure. We drank cheap eggnog, flipped through magazines, and talked about
            whether we had the bone structure for those big hats women were always wearing in California. Amy was in a great mood. She
            had recently been promoted to charge nurse on her floor at the children’s hospital and was seeing someone new: a therapeutic
            clown from the juvenile oncology ward. “He took off his nose and the whole floor flipped out,” she said. “It was pandemonium,
            girls falling all over themselves, but competition brings out the best in me, so.”
[2023-03-06 | highlight] “Most of these dates were pleasant enough. Only one was terrible—a man who arrived thirty minutes late, barefoot, and lectured
            me about women’s usurpation of the “natural masculine role”—and two were very fun. We would go to bars or sit in the park
            at sunset or occasionally do an activity, bolstered by three to seven drinks, relative anonymity, and the tacit understanding
            that we were equally attracted to each other, or at least equally horny.
         
         
         It occurred to me—while straining with every fiber of my being to avoid getting my phone out while a girl was in the bathroom—that by your late twenties you could probably have a satisfactory first date with almost anyone: everyone had a big breakup or two under their belt, most had acquired a semi-reliable source of income and could afford a drink or two (or at least knew a bartender) at the kind of place where the servers were resolute in their bralessness and you just knew there was a taxidermied something somewhere.”

=== Vicious — Schwab, V. E. ===
[2023-03-03 | highlight] “If even a fraction of them became ExtraOrdinary, they would compose a measurable percentage of the human population. And if that were the case EOs would be more than a thing in quotation marks, more than a hypothesis; they’d be an actuality. I knew there had to be something more specific.”“A genre of trauma? Like car accidents?” asked Victor.”
[2023-03-03 | highlight] “The figure looked up at him then, and the wet hood of the coat fell back onto a pair of narrow shoulders. Water blue eyes, fierce behind smudged black liner, stared up at him from a young face. Victor knew pain too well to be fooled by the defiant look, the set jaw around which wet blond hair curled and stuck. She couldn’t be more than twelve, thirteen maybe.”
[2023-03-03 | highlight] “ from believer sites and the occasional late-night exposé where “experts” analyze grainy footage of a man lifting a car or a woman engulfed in fire without burning. Hearing about EOs and believing in EOs were very different things, and he couldn’t tell by Eli’s tone which camp he fell into. He couldn’t tell which camp Eli wanted him to fall into, either, which made answering infinitely harder.”
[2023-03-03 | highlight] “It wasn’t just that Eli stole Angie from Victor—that was bad enough—but somehow Angie had stolen Eli from him, too. The more interesting Eli, anyway. Not the one with perfect teeth and an easy laugh, but the one beneath that was glittering and sharp, like broken glass. It was in those jagged pieces that Victor saw something he recognized. Something dangerous, and hungry. But”
[2023-03-03 | highlight] “Angie. Angie Knight was a force. A force with long legs and the most severe case of curiosity that Victor had ever encountered. She was only twenty, had been coveted by the top schools since she could drive, had been given a dozen business cards followed by a dozen offers and just as many follow-ups”
[2023-03-03 | highlight] “Eli’s smile didn’t falter. “An argument for the theoretical feasibility of the existence of ExtraOrdinary people, deriving from laws of biology, chemistry, and psychology.”Professor Lyne’s head tilted and his chin tipped, but when he opened his mouth, all he said was, “Be careful, Mr. Cardale. As I warned, no points will be given for ambition alone. I’ll trust you not to make a mockery of my class.”
[2023-03-03 | highlight] “A long pause. The topic had come from Janine Ellis, whose eyebrows hadn’t fully recovered from her last round of research. Professor Lyne gave a sigh, accompanied by “the look,” but Janine only smiled and there wasn’t much Lyne could say. Ellis was one of the youngest students in the room and had, in her freshman year, discovered a new and vibrant shade of blue that firework companies across the world now used. If she was willing to risk her eyebrows, that was her own business.”
[2023-03-03 | highlight] “Those fleeting slices fascinated Victor. It was like watching two people, one hiding in the other’s skin. And their skin was always too dry, on the verge of cracking and showing the color of the thing beneath.”
[2023-03-03 | highlight] “Eli began to … grow on him. He was precocious, and frighteningly charming, the kind of guy who got away with everything, thanks to good genes and quick wits. He was born for the sports teams and the clubs, but he surprised everyone, especially Victor, by showing no inclination whatsoever to join either. This small defiance of social norm earned him several notches in Victor’s estimation, and made him instantly more interesting.”
[2023-03-03 | highlight] “Eli shrugged. “All I know is that book is a sniffer’s dream,” he said. He was right, the four Sharpies Victor had gone through in converting the book to art had given it an incredibly strong odor, one which Victor found at once entrancing and revolting. He got enough of a high from the destruction itself, but he supposed the smell was an unexpected addition to the project’s complexity, or so the art teacher would spin it. Eli”
[2023-03-03 | highlight] “Last week, when he’d accidentally left his latest project in the art studios over lunch—Lockland University had a mandatory art credit, even for budding doctors and scientists—he’d come back to his teacher poring over it. He’d expected a reprimand, some lecture on the cultural cost of defacing literature, or maybe the material cost of paper. Instead, the teacher had taken the literary destruction as art. He’d practically supplied the explanation, filled in any blanks using terms such as expression, identity, found art, reshaping.”

=== The Library — Andrew Pettegree ===
[2023-03-02 | highlight] “When the libraries of Rome burned to the ground in the heyday of the Roman Empire, it was to Alexandria that Emperor Domitian sent his scribes to create new copies for his library. When Fernando Colon decided to assemble a library encompassing all the world’s knowledge in the sixteenth century, it was Alexandria he claimed as his inspiration.2 Renaissance champions of scholarship evoked Alexandria as regularly as have the new barons of the digital age. The progenitors of Amazon, Google and Wikipedia can all, in this sense, lay claim to Alexandria’s mantle.”
[2023-03-02 | highlight] “What these readers lacked was not ambition or intellect, but time. This helps to explain why nineteenth-century legislation for shorter working days helped boost the library movement, and why libraries were also more intensely frequented in times of war and economic depression. Wars inevitably closed down other opportunities for recreation, leading to an increase in the demand for books, both from troops in the field and on the home front. While libraries were all too often on the frontlines of the industrial warfare of the twentieth century, war did a great deal to inculcate the habit of reading: the raw material without which the library cannot survive.”

=== Wake, Siren — Nina MacLaughlin ===
[2023-03-01 | highlight] “And I remembering thinking, Oh, I’m watching a poem. I’m watching a poem made of crows. I’m watching a poem of no words. And that’s when things really shift, and I’m edging up against infinity, which means I’m as close as I’m ever going to be to death until I’m in it. Thereness and goneness. Total propulsion. And this is when sight doesn’t matter. And this is when language doesn’t matter. Oh god, this is especially when language doesn’t matter at all. Like maybe that’s one of the main parts about it. There’s no language. No words. And there’s no language to describe it. No words right now. I mean, these words aren’t even close. In these nights, I’m telling you, it’s unreal, like—an end to the limits of the self. And then you emerge. Having touched something very very big. I come out of it something else. I come out New.”
[2023-03-01 | highlight] “I have babies. I have babies and babies and babies. And they live for a bit and then what happens, my babies have babies. Each of my babies has babies. There are already babies beyond you can count. Picture as many of us as you can. And then more because it keeps going. And how many babies will my babies’ babies have, and how many babies will my babies’ babies’ babies have? Oh, more than you can count. We will be so many. And we will keep coming. More and more together. We find our way. We’re doing it right now. Do you know? Who should fear the future? You.”

=== Fake — Erica Katz ===
[2023-02-27 | highlight] “This is Emma Caan,” Lenny said, gesturing back to me. “She is representing Florence Wake at Basel, and we’re delighted to have her with us tonight.”
I took his gesture as a cue to step forward and smile, and Curtis shook my hand warmly. “Ah! Welcome! I was just at drinks with Florence last night. She told me all about you!” he boomed. “Let’s head to the gallery for a toast before dinner!”

=== Big Swiss — Jen Beagin ===
[2023-02-24 | highlight] “He was writing a book, of course, and had hired Greta to transcribe his sessions. So far, she’d produced perhaps three dozen transcripts, for which he paid her twenty-five dollars an hour.”
[2023-02-24 | highlight] “Perhaps because Big Swiss was so deadpan, and because Greta couldn’t see her face, her voice conjured a bunch of random crap. Such as a dog’s nipples. Such as wet pine needles. Such as Greta herself, hiding in a closet, surrounded by mink coats. Otherwise, it had a distinct tactile quality Greta approved of. It was a voice you could snag your sweater on, or perhaps chip one of your teeth, but it was also sweet enough to suck on, to sleep with in your mouth.”
[2023-02-23 | highlight] “Greta called her Big Swiss because she was tall and from Switzerland, and often dressed from top to toe in white, the color of surrender. Her blond hair was as fine as dandelion dander and looked like it might fly off her head in a stiff breeze. She had a gap between her two front teeth, but none of the easy charm that usually came with it, and her pale blue eyes were of the penetrating, cult-leader variety.”

=== Scattered Minds — Gabor Maté ===
[2023-02-22 | highlight] “To interview adults with attention deficit disorder is often to be ambushed by jokes. Unexpected turns of phrase and consciously absurd associations pepper life histories that in themselves are not much to laugh about. “Thank God it’s only ADD,” said one man after I confirmed his diagnosis. “I always used to think I was one crouton short of a Caesar salad.” Children with ADD frequently act the part of the class clown.”
[2023-02-22 | highlight] “Although poor social skills generally accompany ADD, this is not universal. One type of ADD child is socially adept and wildly popular. In my experience, such success hides a lack of confidence in important areas of functioning and masks a very fragile self-esteem, but this may not emerge until these children grow into their late teens or early twenties.”
[2023-02-22 | highlight] “And, challenging as it can be, medical school does present consecutive deadlines, exams to pass, hoops to jump through. It is less a long-term project than an extended series of short-term ones.”
[2023-02-22 | highlight] “Unfortunately, I had the exam dates wrong—this particular examination was not in Shakespeare, but in European literature. So it went, term after term. In third year, I dropped out. In medical school I had a rough time of it for the first two years, when the emphasis was on basic sciences, taught in excruciating detail. Even then, I invariably began my exam preparations late the night before. I”
[2023-02-22 | highlight] “I am often asked how, with such traits, it was possible for me to get through the grind of medical school. The general answer is that there are many people who seem to be high achievers despite their ADD. ADD can blight various aspects of life. The apparent professional success of the workaholic can mask serious problems in other areas. It is also true with ADD, as with everything else, that there are degrees of it, with wide variations from one end of the range to the other.”
[2023-02-22 | highlight] “The individual with ADD experiences the mind as a perpetual-motion machine. An intense aversion to boredom, an abhorrence of it, takes hold as soon as there is no ready focus of activity, distraction or attention. An unremitting lack of stillness is felt internally—a constant background static in the brain, a ceaseless “white noise,” as Dr. John Ratey, a Harvard psychiatrist, has put it. Merciless pressure in the mind impells without specific aim or direction.”
[2023-02-22 | highlight] “I only know to do this through my words. I know no other way. Some adults with ADD have told me that they speak so quickly partly because so many words and phrases tumble into their minds that they fear forgetting the most important ones unless they release them at a fast rate.”
[2023-02-21 | highlight] “Patients are graphic about their feeling states, often almost lyrical. “Ah,” a forty-seven-year-old man said with a discouraged wave of the hand and a smile that was resigned and mischievous at the same time, “my life is just so much soup and garbage can.” What those words mean exactly, I could not say. Like poetry, they convey their meaning through the feelings and word associations they evoke. “Landed in the soup.” “Fog as thick as soup.” “Soup kitchen.” “Treated like a piece of garbage.” “I feel like garbage.” Images of distress, loneliness and confusion, presented with a tinge of humor. The strangely dissonant imagery tells also of a troubled soul who found reality harsh—so harsh that the mind had to be fragmented in order to fragment the pain.”

=== The Measure — Nikki Erlick ===
[2023-02-21 | highlight] “The more precise the technology, Anthony thought, the more easily the short-stringers could be regulated.”

=== Psychedelics and Psychotherapy — Tim Read ===
[2023-02-16 | highlight] “Destructive shortcuts to oneness—for example, “let the two of us be one and let that one be me!”—are to be avoided. It’s best if both the therapist and the patient heed Marion Milner’s (1950) dictum: the only proper function of the will is to will not to will. Visualize the will as a snake, and make it bite its own tail (as in the symbol of the ouroboros).”
[2023-02-16 | highlight] “In this book, we use the terms psychedelic state or expanded state as umbrella terms to describe experiences with psychedelic substances and Holotropic Breathwork. We do not discuss in detail other expanded states accessed through spiritual practice or psychological crisis, although we believe that they can open similar territories of the psyche (Evans and Read 2020).”
[2023-02-16 | highlight] “If it is so painful to be myself, I better disconnect. If it is so painful for me to be aware of my gut feelings and to be able to assert, manifest, and declare them, I better disconnect. And then we spend the rest of our lives trying to compensate for this disconnection through addiction or by developing certain personality patterns that will somehow get us indirectly what we didn’t get in the first place: the love that would have allowed us to connect to ourselves.”
[2023-02-16 | highlight] “The capitalist economy depends on your false sense of self. That’s why even those people who do the work of reconnecting with themselves while in ceremony with a substance or practice discover that the real difficulty is not in having these experiences but in manifesting their insights in daily living when the world is so intent on robbing them of the very truth of things.”
[2023-02-16 | highlight] “Therefore, trauma is not the external event that happens; it is the impact of the event, which is the lost connection to yourself. Had your experiences not resulted in a disconnection from the self, then you would not have been traumatized.”
[2023-02-16 | highlight] “Those that seek to use these medicines will ultimately need to address their traumas. Like every other kind of spiritual work, the medicines will open the doors for us, but it is then up to us to walk through those doors, and then we have to continue to walk through those doors as part of our everyday lives. The work of integration might be different for everybody, but it does involve some disengagement from the daily grind, some time that is devoted to your core essence or to exploring it.”
[2023-02-16 | highlight] “Once we realize the degree of pain and fear we each carry, it takes us back to our experience as an infant. Underneath that fear, there’s the connected self who knows no fear. What is there to be afraid of when you are connected to everything?”
[2023-02-16 | highlight] “These journeys run so deeply that it is essential we navigate them while being held and guided by people who are experienced and wise in guiding us. Really, there are no bad experiences; there are only difficult experiences whose meaning we haven’t divined and haven’t had the guidance to understand and integrate into our life.”
[2023-02-16 | highlight] “A bad experience usually means two things are happening. First, the personality and mind of the person who has taken the psychedelic are judging the experience. His personality was developed in the first place to help him escape the pain; his personality is his compensation, and it is wired to avoid the suffering. I would say that perhaps he didn’t have a bad experience but rather had an experience where he felt pain or was in touch with a lot of fear, maybe even terror—pain and terror he had been carrying inside himself and running away from all his life. ”
[2023-02-16 | highlight] “When we find a way to reach shut down parts of ourselves, when we recognize our deep sources of suffering and what we are running away from, or when we realize ourselves as a meaningful and genuine part of a larger unity that is unshakeable no matter what, we have connected to a core self. In the right context this is a very deep experience.”
[2023-02-16 | highlight] “Plant medicines and other psychedelic treatments can reveal the psychological baggage that you have carried all your life, and when you acknowledge this baggage, you realize it is not an inevitable and inextricable part of yourself. You can finally put it down. All the pain and all the meanings that you have created from that pain, all the ways you see yourself, and all the interpretations you have made of the world because of early experience can drop away, and you can just be in the present. That’s”
[2023-02-16 | highlight] “Each chapter in this book explores a particular setting and offers insights into the care and consideration that goes into holding the space. It exemplifies that the settings and formats are varied, but the knowledge, experience, and wisdom that is needed to support and hold the space is the common ground that supports the healing potential of expanded states.”
[2023-02-16 | highlight] “In their proper ceremonial setting, under compassionate and experienced guidance, the plant—or, as tradition has it, the spirit of the plant—puts people in touch with their repressed pain and trauma, the very factors that drive all dysfunctional behaviors. Consciously experiencing our primal pain loosens its hold on us and may set us on the path toward healing. The very word healing means wholeness, and we become whole when we reconnect with ourselves. This book showcases how mind, body, and spirit come together to tell the stories of our wounds and to cosupport our path toward healing.”
[2023-02-16 | highlight] “Plant medicines and other psychedelic treatments can reveal the psychological baggage that you have carried all your life, and when you acknowledge this baggage, you realize it is not an inevitable and inextricable part of yourself. You can finally put it down. All the pain and all the meanings that you have created from that pain, all the ways you see yourself, and all the interpretations you have made of the world because of early experience can drop away, and you can just be in the present. That’s”

=== Stone Blind — Natalie Haynes ===
[2023-02-15 | highlight] “If someone had painted this statue, it would be black, but not a true black: there is a tinge of green beneath the blackness on cormorant feathers that only reveals itself in the brightest sunlight. Would the artist have captured that? A green that is almost black, a black that is scarcely green? The bird has glassy dark eyes; a membrane runs down the centre. It is represented by the slightest ridge in the stone.”
[2023-02-15 | highlight] “Afterwards, when she looked down at the place where her head had lain, there was a perfect halo of her curling hair left behind.
She reached up to touch her head and found she could not.
She screamed until her voice was gone.
It changed nothing.”
[2023-02-15 | highlight] “She would have to find a way to get her revenge on him later. He was – as so often – away in his ocean kingdom: she could not harm him there. There would be an opportunity to humiliate him later, she was quite sure. But in the meantime, her anger was roused and she needed to expend it.
The girl. The girl would do.”
[2023-02-13 | highlight] “Artemis has a bow and a spear.’
‘You have a spear and a helmet,’ Zeus said.
‘Ares has a spear and a helmet!’ she cried. ‘I want something that is just mine!’
‘Does Hephaestus have anything?’ he asked.
‘He has a whole forge,’ she said. ‘And everything in it.’
Zeus nodded slowly. He supposed that was true.
‘Does Aphrodite have something?’
‘Aphrodite has everything she wants,’ Athene snapped. ‘Whenever she wants it.”
[2023-02-13 | highlight] “Danaë didn’t know it was an island, nor that it was in the middle of the Aegean, nor that Zeus had asked Poseidon himself to guide her and her baby to safety there. She didn’t even know for a while that she had reached dry land: the swell of the ocean was in her bones now, and she would always feel it.”
[2023-02-13 | highlight] “Hephaestus stared at her as though he had carved her himself from gold and marble, but was too afraid to speak to her. Ares was threatened by her, she could tell. Poseidon – when he was there – assessed her and then dismissed her. Aphrodite never noticed her, no matter what she did. Apollo and Artemis always ignored her. Demeter was kind enough but lacked any interest; Hermes feigned interest but couldn’t be bothered to feign kindness.”
[2023-02-12 | highlight] “Three more,’ Euryale said, after a moment of counting. She thought of her flock of sheep growing through the years, the first lambs, the first deaths. She remembered Medusa being there each time: crawling, then standing, then walking unsteadily, then running. ‘Yes.’ She nodded at her sceptical sister. ‘She has been with us for sixteen summers.”
[2023-02-12 | highlight] “The Gorgons didn’t fit anywhere, Amphitrite thought, except the lonely little beach they had chosen for themselves. But then, where could winged creatures, who were also daughters of Phorcys and Ceto, ever fit? Poor things. And yet, there was her husband spending every spare moment watching the girl who belonged half to the sea and half to the sky.”

=== The Myth of Normal — Gabor Maté, MD ===
[2023-02-15 | highlight] “The recently deceased Buddhist monk and renowned spiritual leader Thich Nhat Hanh long taught the concept of “interbeing.” It’s not merely that we are, he said: we “inter-are.” “There are no separate entities,” he wrote, “only manifestations that rely on each other to be possible.”[17] Again, we would be quite mistaken to relegate these observations to the realm of mystical belief. A scientist lacking a spiritual bone in his body, yet conversant with the growing body of evidence, would nod in agreement: “Yup, that about covers it.”

=== Spare — Prince Harry, The Duke of Sussex ===
[2023-01-11 | highlight] “Another gust of wind. Funny, it reminded me of Grandpa. His wintry demeanor, maybe. Or his icy sense of humor. I recalled one particular shooting weekend years ago. A mate, just trying to make conversation, asked Grandpa what he thought of my new beard, which had been causing concern in the family and controversy in the press. Should the Queen Force Prince Harry to Shave? Grandpa looked at my mate, looked at my chin, broke into a devilish grin. THAT’S no beard!”

=== Fairy Tale — Stephen King ===
[2022-11-16 | highlight] “Then came the sound of an old-fashioned firebell—CLANG-A-LANG-A-LANG—and the cadre of blue skeleton-men parted, ten or a dozen to the left and the rest to the right. Speeding up the Gallien Road came an electric vehicle like a jumbo golf cart or a squat open-air bus. In front, moving some sort of steering stick to and fro, was a man (I use the word advisedly) with graying hair falling to either side of his hideous half-transparent face. He was gaunt and tall. Others were crammed in behind him, their blue auras overlapping and dripping down to the wet pavement like strange blood. The driver was aiming right at me, meaning to crush me against the gate. I wasn’t going to make it after all… but my dog could.”
[2022-11-05 | highlight] “The boards and cinderblocks were covering a hole in the floor, about five feet across. I first thought it was a well left over from the days before city water, but when I shone the light down between two of the boards, I saw short stone steps spiraling down the shaft. There were scuttering sounds and a low chittering deep in the dark. Half-glimpsed movement that froze me in place. More bugs… and not dead. They were retreating from my light, and suddenly I thought I knew what they were: cockroaches. They were giant economy-sized, but they were doing what cockroaches always did when you shone a light on them: running like hell.”

=== Pet Sematary — Stephen King ===
[2022-10-30 | highlight] “I ran after him, Missy, I was screaming his name over and over again, almost as if I expected he would still be alive, me, a doctor. I ran ten yards and there was his baseball cap and I ran twenty yards and there was one of his Star Wars sneakers, I ran forty yards and by then the truck had run off the road and the box had jackknifed in that field beyond the Ringers’ barn. People were coming out of their houses and I went on screaming his name, Missy, and at the fifty-yard-line there was his jumper, it was turned inside-out, and on the seventy-yard-line there was the other sneaker, and then there was Gage.”
[2022-10-30 | highlight] “Yes, it was quick, all right, he thought about saying to her – ah; how that would shatter her face all over again, and he felt a vicious urge to do it, to simply spray the words into her face. It was quick, no doubt about that, that’s why the coffin’s closed, nothing could have been done about Gage even if Rachel and I approved of dressing up dead relatives in their best like department store mannequins and rouging and powdering and painting their faces. It was quick, Missy-my-dear, one minute he was there in the road and the next minute he was lying in it, but way down by the Ringers’ house. It hit him and killed him and then it dragged him and you better believe it was quick”
[2022-10-09 | highlight] “She whirled and was gone, leaving Louis in the empty kitchen, which still vibrated with their argument. At last he went to the pantry to get the broom. As he swept he reflected on the last thing she had said, and on the enormity of this difference of opinion, which had gone undiscovered for so long. Because, as a doctor, he knew that death was, except perhaps for childbirth, the most natural thing in the world. Taxes were not so sure; human conflicts were not; the conflicts of society were not; boom and bust were not. In the end there was only the clock, and the markers, which became eroded and nameless in the passage of time. Even sea turtles and the giant sequoias had to buy out someday.”

=== Out of Office — Anne Helen Petersen ===
[2022-09-03 | highlight] “Mills knew exactly what they meant and how to give it to them. Growing up in a small, rural town in Missouri, he always felt far more comfortable in Minecraft than he did in school. In middle school, he found himself spending more of his life online than off it. He’d wake up, get on Skype, scroll through his list of friends, and chat all day. “Half the time, we weren’t even playing the game,” he told us. “We were just running around and talking and sharing our lives with each other. The connection was real. Some of my closest, longest friends I’ve never even met in person.”
[2022-09-03 | highlight] “And that was before the pandemic. If financial firms don’t get on board with flexible work, Poleg predicts, that shift toward tech will only continue. This principle applies far beyond the world of finance. “Executives have had flex forever,” Michael Colacino, the head of the commercial real estate firm SquareFoot, told us. “I’ve been able to work from home on Friday since 1992. People always say that the future is here, it just hasn’t been evenly distributed. And that’s true: flexibility has just been segregated off into the C-suite and slightly downstream. So what you have happening now is that no one’s going to accept the five-days-in-the-office mentality. Now that they’ve tasted the forbidden fruit, there’s no going back. If you say to a millennial, come back 9:00 to 5:00, five days a week, people are just going to quit.”
			Finance execs know they should be figuring out new ways to work, but those who rose through the ranks one way, and endured a particular form of suffering and overwork, are reluctant to change their ways, no matter how much evidence is presented of the benefits of abandoning them. It’s irrational, it’s[…]”
[2022-08-31 | highlight] “Microsoft found that between February 2020 and February 2021 the average Teams user was sending 45 percent more chats after hours and 50 percent of Teams users responded to chats within five minutes or less.42 More and more, we find ourselves in a fun-house mirror of performance anxiety that distorts our understanding of what work even is.”
[2022-08-31 | highlight] “LARPing is a virulent pathogen, but there is an antidote. It’s just trust: cultivating it, communicating it, propagating more of it. When you don’t feel as though your manager trusts you—or, more specifically, how you make use of your time—you feel the need to underline just how much of it you’re dedicating to work. You update, you check in, you sneak in casual mentions of how late you worked on something. Maybe your manager actually does trust you but is incredibly bad at communicating it. Maybe they’ve never told you to update this way but have never told you to stop, either. What matters is that the distrust hangs in the virtual air, goading you to spend more time evidencing your work than actually working.”
[2022-08-31 | highlight] “To be clear, there’s no quick technological fix to what ails our workplace. What works best for Mills and his team of young, extremely online employees likely won’t work for Linda or Mark in accounting at a regional auto parts company. What Branch does best, however, is clarify what the office actually means to you. Because what a lot of us actually miss about the office—apart from not being in our claustrophobic homes—isn’t anything that practical. You might miss what tech executive and essayist Paul Ford calls its “secret, essential geography”: knowing the best place to cry, or find privacy, or use the bathroom.40 But what you really miss is a feeling. In some offices, that feeling is playfulness. In others, it’s siloed concentration. For Mills, it’s an empathic, ambient presence. “You can create connection just by being present, even if you’re not saying anything,” he told us. “People know if they do talk, somebody is there to listen.”
[2022-08-31 | highlight] “That intentionality especially applies to groups that are usually left out of the design process. For leaders in the disability community, the remote work shift can feel fraught. Flexible work—an accommodation people with disabilities have been asking for, and denied, for decades—is more available than ever before. But there’s also a very real concern that the ability to work from home could end up making actual office spaces less inclusive.
			“What I don’t want to see is all employees who have disabilities relegated to working from home because newly designed spaces are even less accessible than they are now,” Maria Town, the president and CEO of the American Association of People with Disabilities, told us. It’s far too easy to imagine companies offering hybrid work but treating their disabled workers as fixed remote employees, thereby reinforcing the segregation of disabled people in the workforce.”
[2022-08-31 | highlight] “This is the nightmare scenario for Christie and the focus of much of Twitter’s early hybrid work planning. The solution? Destroy the FOMO and level the playing field by making the office less appealing. “You need to eliminate the idea that you’ll miss out if you’re not in the office,” she told us. Which is why they’re attempting to figure out ways to actively disincentivize people from coming back to the office full-time. “For a long time we’ve rallied around office perks and keeping people around and in the building,” she said. “Tech companies have celebrated and mastered it: come to the office, and you get fed, you get cared for.”
			That whole well-fed, well-cared-for campus philosophy has to change, Christie says. And it starts with the way the office is arranged and the expectations for people within those spaces. At Twitter, everyone inside the conference room will be asked to have an open laptop and dial into the meeting to make sure that remote participants can see all faces clearly and hear those who, in a different configuration, might have traditionally been far away from the conference microphone. The company plans to get rid[…]”
[2022-08-31 | highlight] “Many companies own or lease their office space on long-term contracts. And when the space is there, sitting on the company’s expenses, it’s likely that management is going to incentivize employees to use it. And after we’ve been trapped in our homes hiding from a deadly virus for well over a year, we’re starved for social interaction. Many of our former commuting and workplace annoyances now sound like tiny luxuries. Some of us miss our colleagues. Others are just sick of their homes and apartments and, yes, even their partners and kids. The only question is, how?”
[2022-08-25 | highlight] “In 2012, McKinsey was on the hunt for just such a solution: something, anything, that could decrease the email burden on workers and boost productivity among its clients. In a report from that year, its analysts found that the average knowledge worker spent 28 percent of their workweek managing email, and nearly 20 percent looking for internal information, or simply tracking down colleagues who could help with specific tasks. They believed some sort of collaborative chat—or “social technology”—had the potential to raise the productivity of knowledge workers by between 20 and 25 percent.31”
[2022-08-25 | highlight] “When we moved away from New York, however, we came to realize how work friendships had functioned as Trojan horses for work to infiltrate and then engulf our lives. These relationships didn’t make work-life balance more difficult. Instead, they eclipsed the idea of balance altogether, because work and life had become so thoroughly intertwined that spending most of our waking moments with some extension of our corporation didn’t seem remotely odd or problematic. It was just . . . life.”
[2022-08-25 | highlight] “With time, your colleagues become your closest friends and, with even more time, your only friends. It’s easier to hang out and have a social life at work, because everyone’s just already there. Life feels streamlined, more efficient. Even fun! Sometimes you’re just goofing off, killing time, kinda like back in the dorm room in college. Other times you’re working together, like those endless nights back in the library. Sometimes it’s a hazy hybrid of both, but it’s generative nonetheless. It’s the new organization-man-style company devotion, only the country club’s moved on campus.”
[2022-08-25 | highlight] “Reflecting today, Wilkinson’s less sure of that vision. Over the last two decades, his brilliant, innovative designs have rippled through the architecture world, as large-scale tech companies and smaller start-ups alike have cribbed elements of his team’s dynamic workplaces for their spaces. And Wilkinson’s increasingly aware of the insidious nature of those same perks. “Making the work environment more residential and domestic is, I think, dangerous,” he told us in late 2020. “It’s clever, seductive, and dangerous. It’s pandering to employees by saying we’ll give you everything you like, as if this was your home, and the danger is that it blurs the difference between home and office.”
[2022-08-25 | highlight] “from this fact: just group them in inviting environments that fit the company’s projected cultural values of “dynamism” and “community.” The office, in other words, as city—or, even better yet, as campus.
			Back in the 1970s, midwestern corporate giants like 3M and Caterpillar had designed sprawling, bucolic office parks for their thousands of employees, and early Silicon Valley companies like Xerox famously embraced the campus layout in the 1970s. These early campus environments made economic sense: they allowed companies to abandon costly urban real estate, and their location was easier to sell to prospective employees who planned to make their homes in the suburbs.
			But as William Whyte, author of”
[2022-08-25 | highlight] “As workers, we’ve always been assisted by technologies in some form. Those tools have become more sophisticated with time, but as their users we remain stubbornly human, and there are limits to the productivity that any body or mind can sustain. In the early 1980s, workers began to brush up against those limits but were driven into survival mode by the continued volatility of the American economy. It didn’t matter if the office sucked, if it made you feel ill, if it made you resent your co-workers. Attempts to organize, like those led by Nussbaum and Working Women, ran headfirst into a massive wave of antilabor sentiment and legislation. It felt as if there were no recourse, no way to push back. And so a whole generation of employees internalized their employers’ quest for productivity as their own, settled for less pay and less stability, and got back to work.”
[2022-08-25 | highlight] “they were also mentally miserable. Shoshana Zuboff spent hours interviewing workers in industrial settings for In the Age of the Smart Machine, but she also spent significant time with clerical workers. Like their blue-collar counterparts, the people she interviewed were adrift as the result of the fast technological changes of their jobs. Dentist office employees and insurance claims workers both saw their jobs, which were once social in nature, turn into glorified data entry positions. Cubicles visually walled them off from their colleagues, turning co-workers into an annoying buzz of wafting voices and telephone rings and keyboard clacks. As the job increasingly tethered them to their desks, they became more estranged from their managers, who in turn began to view them as drones.
			“We used to be able to see each other”
[2022-08-25 | highlight] “Across the office world, workers were promised that these new technologies would make their lives easier. And yes, it was great not to have to type the same letter in triplicate. But many of the machines were situated in spaces that simply weren’t designed for them: mimeographs in rooms without ventilation, word processors in spaces without proper lighting. Thousands of workers reported migraines, severe eyestrain, cataracts, bronchitis, and allergies.16 Automation was literally making office workers sick.”
[2022-08-25 | highlight] “In 1981, while working on a book about the future of work, a young Harvard business professor named Shoshana Zuboff visited an old pulp mill. The mill’s bleach plant had recently been redesigned and outfitted with state-of-the-art technology, including digital sensors and monitors that fed signals to a shiny, new centralized control room, stocked with computers whirring away on brand-new microprocessors. To an outsider, it was all very impressive. But, as Zuboff quickly learned, the workers despised it.”
[2022-08-25 | highlight] “Office technology and design are not essentially evil. But we have to commit to using those tools to add dimensionality to our lives, instead of further flattening them for the ease of our jobs. In order to realize that vision, we need to understand all the ways that tech and design have successfully beguiled us in the past. We have to know how to spot when a flashy technology, a gorgeous office setup, or a new way of communicating is actually just an invitation for more work in new camouflage. We must begin to see productivity and efficiency as a means to an actual end, not a means to more work.”
[2022-08-25 | highlight] “But almost all have unintended consequences, even when they’re not digital. From the open office plan to the Aeron chair, new ideas about the physical design of the office have reshaped not only our work environment but also our relationship to work. Innovations that were supposed to make the office more humane get co-opted, put through cost-efficiency calculators, and end up making the workplace feel even more like an overdesigned cage.”
[2022-08-25 | highlight] “Despite the miraculous technological affordances in our life, few of them have liberated us as advertised. And nowhere is that truer than our working lives, where today’s office tech has absorbed all of the formalities, anxieties, and oppressive mundanity of corporate life and ported them into every corner of our lives. The magical ability to see your co-workers face-to-face from anywhere in the world morphs into Zoom fatigue. The lively, collaborative instant messaging app gives way to an always-on surveillance tool that lives on company servers forever. A shared digital calendar evolves into a way for others to demand our time and attention until there’s none left for ourselves. The more efficient we become, the more overwhelmed we feel.”
[2022-08-24 | highlight] “In reality, Taber argues, family farms are just as hierarchical, patriarchal, and exploitative of workers. She points to the historian Caitlin Rosenthal’s book, Accounting for Slavery, which traces how early slave plantation farms developed many of the management and accounting practices that still structure corporate life. The early agrarian economy was ruthless. It was also a family business, and the abolition of slavery didn’t magically destroy the power imbalances present in agriculture, even on family farms. “Working on a family farm means working in somebody’s home,” she argues. “There are tremendous gaps in wealth and status and power.”
[2022-08-24 | highlight] “you already have a family, chosen or otherwise. And when a company uses that rhetoric, it is reframing a transactional relationship as an emotional one. It might feel enticing, but it is deeply manipulative and, more often than not, a means to narrativize paying people less to do more work. Family evokes not just a closeness but a devotion and a lasting bond, infused with sacrifice: family comes first.”
[2022-08-24 | highlight] “Treating your organization as a family, no matter how altruistic its goals, is a means of breaking down boundaries between work and life, between paid labor and the personal. When you’re assaulted by powerful feelings of familial obligations from all sides—your actual family, but also your manager and your colleagues—it’s all the more difficult to prioritize. And in these situations, your actual family, which is often more forgiving, more malleable, and more attuned to your needs, will always suffer.”
[2022-08-24 | highlight] “The problem isn’t that these companies are wrong in calling their employees “family.” Many of these organizations are evoking, reproducing, and incentivizing relationships that feel familial. But family relationships can just as easily be manipulative, passive-aggressive, and endlessly confusing. Family members can be racist, exploitative, sexist, transphobic, and emotionally abusive, but because they’re family, it’s often considered impolite, or uncivil, to confront them about the very real injuries they do to others. As the comedian Kevin Farzad put it on Twitter, “If an employer ever says ‘We’re like family here’ what they mean is they’re going to ruin you psychologically.”
[2022-08-24 | highlight] “Steven Aquino has been covering the technology industry from California for the last eight years. Before that, he was a preschool teacher, but his cerebral palsy made it difficult to meet the physical needs of his students, day in and day out. He looked for something he could do, ideally from home, that would be less physically taxing. He found it in writing and reporting.
			That shift to working from home “really changed who I am,” Aquino said. “I’m not always so tired anymore. Because I’m not so exhausted, and hurting, and thinking about it all the time, I’ve been able to concentrate on doing work I enjoy and take pride in.” Working from home also helped with Aquino’s social anxiety, which was exacerbated by his stutter. Still, the rhetoric of the current moment and the opportunities of flexible work have felt, in his words, disorienting. “We’re in a society where diversity and inclusion is a big subject right now,” he said. “And it’s inspiring to see. But it isn’t evenly distributed. We talk about inclusion, and then people like me are always off to the side, way over there.”
[2022-08-24 | highlight] “When the journalist Chika Ekemezie first began interviewing women of color who had made the shift to working from home during the pandemic, she was interested in the ways that remote work liberated black women workers from (white) standards of professionalism in their offices. “I’ve long been a believer that professionalism is just a synonym for obedience,” she wrote. “The less social capital you have, the more you are tethered to professionalism. It’s why Mark Zuckerberg can wear the same T-shirt to work while Black women are punished for wearing braids.”
[2022-08-24 | highlight] “Surveys conducted during the first ten months of the pandemic illustrate the complex relationship that some BIPOC employees have to remote work. Data collected by Slack’s Future Forum showed that black employees were working longer hours and experiencing higher stress around pressure to perform—a sign of a lack of mutual trust between the employees and the managers. But overall, black employees expressed a 29 percent increase in feelings of satisfaction and belonging working remotely, compared with being primarily in the office. One reason for this, respondents said, was that working from home meant less code switching or pressure to modulate their behavior for a boss or co-worker.”
[2022-08-24 | highlight] “Left to its own devices, monoculture will self-sow and replicate itself endlessly. The things that a white male, for example, might understand as the hallmarks of “good leadership” and “good management” are the things that feel like good leadership and management to him—characteristics that can manifest themselves in everything from standards of professionalism to tone of voice. He will naturally promote, elevate, or otherwise privilege workers with those attributes and marginalize or ignore those without them.
			Frequently, those perpetuating the monoculture aren’t even aware they’re doing it. But this is how monoculture persists: people endlessly promoting people like them for the rest of time”
[2022-08-24 | highlight] “Kill the Monoculture
			In 2020, 92.6 percent of CEOs on the Fortune 500 were white.36 A survey conducted that same year of more than forty thousand workers at 317 companies found that while white men make up just 35 percent of the entry-level workforce, they compose 66 percent of the C-suite.37 For every one hundred men who were promoted to manager, only fifty-eight black women and seventy-one Latina women were promoted. Only 38 percent of respondents in entry-level management positions were women of any race.
			You’ve heard these statistics, or something approximating them, before. No matter how many diversity, equity, and inclusion workshops your organization requires, if your leaders and managers aren’t truly diverse, then the monoculture will prevail.”
[2022-08-24 | highlight] “The secret to good culture and even good management isn’t some weekend off-site or even a fancy piece of technology. As Tan put it, “There’s no way to Ping-Pong table or happy hour your way out of it.” Analytics won’t magically turn you into a better manager. You can use them to inform and transform your own behavior, but only if you actually have a vested interest in managing with more empathy and intentionality.
			We’re all figuring out what our jobs are going to look like in this new reality, and if we do it on our own, remote work will continue to look like the anxious, endless jumble of the pandemic year. The process is going to require a significant amount of experimentation and grace, communication and transparency. ”
[2022-08-24 | highlight] “They found that remote managers they surveyed had an average of about 4.87 direct reports. That might not sound like much, but it was overwhelming most managers as they attempted to deal with 5 different emotionally complex human beings, all under stress and with their own needs and demands. Worse yet, 21.5 percent of the remote managers they spoke with had less than one year of management experience when mandatory working from home began. They’d stumbled on the same problem as the Nightingales had: managers were under-trained, under-experienced, overworked, and forced into a stressful new reality. As a result, everyone was suffering.
			“To be a good manager, you need to be emotionally intelligent,” Pandiya told us. “It’s our whole company thesis: the emotional intelligence of the managers is what makes a company’s culture miserable or excellent. ”
[2022-08-24 | highlight] “s tendency to treat management as an “add-on”—as opposed to an actual job, requiring a refined skill set—is, as the Nightingales found, rampant in start-ups, both new and long solidified. But it’s also common in cash-strapped nonprofits, in academic departments (see department chairs), and in “legacy” companies that overcorrected the sprawling, management-heavy org charts of the 1960s and 1970s. Back then, people often dealt with bad management by expanding the org chart with even more badly trained managers. Now we deal with it by ignoring it.
			Many of these companies view middle management as bloat, waste, what David Graeber would call a “bullshit job.” But that’s because bad managing is waste; you’re paying someone more money to essentially annoy everyone around them. And the more people experience that sort of bad management, and think of it as “just the way it is,” the less they’re going to value management in general. The key, then, is to think of how to treat management as a discrete, valuable skill: a deliverable that contributes to the overall value and resiliency of your organization. Otherwise, managers will continue to feel like deadweight, no matter how flexible an[…]”
[2022-08-23 | highlight] “First, there’s the sheer number of hours we’re working. According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the average American works more hours than the average laborer in any peer nation. But unlike many Western nations, where increased productivity and wealth tend to lead to more leisure time, Americans continue to overwork themselves despite productivity gains. The OECD found that “the US works 269 more hours than its enormously wealthy economy would predict—making it by this measure the second-most overworked country in the world.”27”
[2022-08-23 | highlight] “interests,” Bennett writes. “Dozens of managers stayed with their companies in the face of disastrous situations, working, and working hard. These were the loyal soldiers, staying at their posts no matter what.”17 These middle managers might have felt like loyal soldiers at the time, but they were blinded by loyalty and perks and a workplace “family” that didn’t allow them to see that their battalion had been moved to the front lines in order to be sacrificed.”
[2022-08-23 | highlight] “But starting in the early 1970s, a wave of recessions and economic stagnation shook even the strongest of those companies’ foundations. Behemoths of respective industries entered the decade fat and happy and naive—characteristics that, under the unforgiving eye of a slumping economy, quickly morphed into bloated, occasionally lazy, and flat-footed in the race to compete globally.
			Their solution, as we noted in the last chapter, was cuts. In the first eight years of the 1980s, Fortune 500 companies cut more than 300 million jobs, many of them the stable, middle-management positions that had not only helped expand the modern middle class but functioned as the organizational sentries of culture.”
[2022-08-23 | highlight] “And that imprisonment extended to the home, where the ethos of organization man culture was instrumental in shaping the structures of (white) middle-class life. Early suburbs were quite literally built to accommodate and incubate organization men, their families, and their social lives, which became appendages of the company. Social status was cemented through perks like local country-club memberships, while the organization man’s family, especially his wife, became a form of corporate asset, valued for her ability to host and socialize. Employees were expected to leverage their family life to woo clients and executives alike. “Actually, it’s hard to tell where the workday ends and the ‘pleasure’ begins,” one manager told Whyte. “If you count all the time required for cocktails, dinners, conferences, and conventions, there is no end to work. I think any responsible executive these days works practically all the hours he is awake.”14”
[2022-08-23 | highlight] “that imprisonment extended to the home, where the ethos of organization man culture was instrumental in shaping the structures of (white) middle-class life. Early suburbs were quite literally built to accommodate and incubate organization men, their families, and their social lives, which became appendages of the company. Social status was cemented through perks like local country-club memberships, while the organization man’s family, especially his wife, became a form of corporate asset, valued for her ability to host and socialize. Employees were expected to leverage their family life to woo clients and executives alike. “Actually, it’s hard to tell where the workday ends and the ‘pleasure’ begins,” one manager told Whyte. “If you count all the time required for cocktails, dinners, conferences, and conventions, there is no end to work. I think any responsible executive these days works practically all the hours he is awake.”14”
[2022-08-23 | highlight] “The goal was to keep your head down, do what was expected of you (but nothing more!), and encourage others to do the same. Workers conformed, but they did so, according to Whyte, with a placid smile: they were undergirded by real support, whether in the form of their salary, their pension, or their enduring job security. “It is not the evils of organization life that puzzle him, but its very beneficence,” Whyte explained. “He is imprisoned in brotherhood.”
[2022-08-23 | highlight] “As office work began to expand over the course of the twentieth century, workers were sold on promises of comfort and satisfaction. Instead of toiling on a factory room floor, welding the same joint over and over again, you could sit in an office, filing the same report over and over again. Your collar, as Upton Sinclair famously put it, would be white; your work, at least in the vast majority of cases, would be salaried and steady.”
[2022-08-23 | highlight] “Frederick Winslow Taylor. As an employee for Bethlehem Steel, Taylor lamented that workers were naturally lazy, and in order to counter their slovenly attitudes, he began to closely study their movements. He realized that coal shovelers with standardized shovel sizes could haul more weight without getting tired quickly. He timed others’ movements on the factory floor with a stopwatch, looking for extraneous movements to shave off their routines.”
[2022-08-23 | highlight] “Forced into formalized, factory-like arrangements, laborers viewed six-hour workdays as onerous and perhaps only temporary until desired productivity had been achieved. Attendance was poor. Something had to be done to condition the workforce to perform strenuous labor on behalf of others. Owners began to impose fines and strict oversight because, as the social psychologist Shoshana Zuboff points out, “workers submitted to the physical rigors of factory discipline only when other alternatives had been exhausted.”3 Early factory designs were modeled after workhouses and prisons.4 Positive reinforcement was attempted, but the carrot was usually abandoned for the stick, even when it came to the children who increasingly filled the workforce.”
[2022-08-23 | highlight] “That NCR has such a durable corporate culture that it can survive literal airstrikes? Or is it that NCR’s employees are so dedicated that amid unspeakable death and destruction they feel the need—not to be with or tend to family—but to help rebuild a factory?
			Deal and Kennedy seem to acknowledge the outlandishness of the anecdote. But that doesn’t keep them from arguing that it remains one of the pantheon of “myths and legends of American business.”
[2022-08-23 | highlight] “Perry started thinking about what an equitable, flexible, simple, and intuitive system for leave and benefits would look like. It would have to be transparent but also have tolerance for error and even, theoretically, misuse. He called it “universal design for work-life balance.”
			“Universal design” is the term for the movement to create spaces, tools, and lived environments that are accessible to all, regardless of age or ability. The thing about universal design is that its benefits are not simply for those who need it most. A curb cut in the sidewalk, for example, makes the sidewalk accessible for wheelchair users, but it also makes navigating the space infinitely easier for people on bikes or pushing strollers.”
[2022-08-23 | highlight] “As will become clear in the next chapter, companies spend millions of dollars on consultants every year trying to hit that sweet spot, and historically it usually means cutting middle management and support staff. The end result: employees are increasingly forced to self-manage and do the essential support work of those who were let go, often quite poorly, instead of what they were actually hired to do. Cue: ever-expanding work hours, and the message that if you’re not getting your work done during traditional hours, the failure, again, is yours, for poor prioritizing.”
[2022-08-22 | highlight] “You can temporarily and authentically lower productivity expectations. Or you hire slightly more than enough people, thereby building in the expectation that a percentage of your workforce could be taking time off at any moment, and it wouldn’t overload the system. Many companies are theoretically set up this way: an average employee’s baseline of assigned tasks should take up, say, 80–85 percent of their day, leaving them available to take on 15 to 20 percent more work when a colleague is sick, on vacation, or on leave. As many of our survey respondents confessed, they usually do their core work over a short period of time anyhow.”
[2022-08-22 | highlight] “For organizations with a hybrid approach, where employees split time between home and the office, some of these problems may quickly abate. A few days in the office won’t fix these larger issues. But intentional design could. Truly flexible work may seem breezy and carefree, but it’s actually the product of careful planning and clear communication. It requires peering around corners and attempting to identify needs and problems before they fester. It may seem onerous at first, especially when “let’s just go back to the way things were before” seems like such a clear option.
			But it’s not. We’ve moved past that point. If we’re serious about building a sustainable future of work, we can’t leave a whole swath of employees behind. They’ll just develop bad habits and waste endless hours trying to piece together the rules of the game when someone could’ve just told them.”
[2022-08-22 | highlight] “We asked early career workers what resources they wished they could have had during those early pandemic months, and the responses were full of helpful ideas for any company. Most important, they wanted a clearly delineated mentor who—crucially—was not also their supervisor or in charge of evaluating their performance. One suggested a dual mentor program that paired new employees with a co-worker in a similar position in the company who could offer advice on more quotidian concerns, as well as a more senior employee who could provide longer-term career advice.”
[2022-08-22 | highlight] “foot in her office, her professional life has come to feel like an abstraction—to the point that she’s sometimes not even sure if she’s employed (she is). Worse, her job feels almost completely transactional, with her conversations limited, in her words, to “exchanging information in pursuit of an immediate, work-related goal.”
			You could chalk up some of these experiences to the harried nature of the pandemic, which required many organizations to build a work-from-home plane, as it were, while also trying to fly it.”
[2022-08-22 | highlight] “
			With time, she grew accustomed to the daily cadences of her job. But she still felt like a stranger in her own company, whose remote policies were haphazard at best. To send chats, employees used an outdated version of Skype; in Zoom meetings, almost all co-workers left their cameras off. Months into her job, she could identify co-workers only by their chat avatars and voices. At one point, she says, she began “obsessively stalking” her company’s Glassdoor reviews, just to try to get a sense of the company culture. She was, by her own admission, unmoored, totally unmentored, and insecure, with no way to learn from her colleagues. It’s one thing to start a new job remotely. It’s another to start your entire career that way.”
[2022-08-22 | highlight] “If someone tries to work during a break, chiding them and letting it happen just further normalizes the behavior. When an employee takes time off, not working becomes their job. So how can your team actively set expectations to take that job as seriously as their everyday one? Whatever the policies are, they have to be more than mealymouthed “suggestions” and arrive in collaboration with workers themselves.”
[2022-08-22 | highlight] “But so much of that mindset is simply a long-running coping mechanism for workplace precarity. To be essential, at least in this office job capacity, is to build a protective shell around yourself during times of economic insecurity. It’s a survival strategy, built on fear and desperation. And it makes everyone miserable, no one more so than yourself. Front’s real utility is its ability to transform email from a personal burden into a collective, collaborative task. To do that, however, you have to actually trust your colleagues and be less precious about your own essential role in the process.”
[2022-08-22 | highlight] “Say an entire company adopts a force-field approach to email. A culture begins to develop around time off. Those taking time off will be more aware of who will pick up their work burden. They’ll be more appreciative—and ideally more respectful—of others’ time. There might be more coordination, more care, and more respect involved in handing over responsibilities. More important, colleagues in a force-field situation might be more mindful that their requests will fall to others. At its best, it could trigger others to inventory their demands on others’ time.”
[2022-08-22 | highlight] “Exercising respect means continual consideration of a meeting’s utility, its place in the day, and its form. Same for email: Does this need to be an email? Do I need to send it now? How would I feel if I received this email right now? How can I make it so that it arrives in my colleague’s in-box at a time that will be more respectful of their time?”
[2022-08-22 | highlight] “Respect for others’ time demands care, knowledge, and thoughtful implementation of policies and practices. Many team status meetings were set years ago, by someone who might not even be your manager anymore, often at a somewhat arbitrary time. Maybe it worked for everyone on the team then. But it has little relation to the needs of your team now, or when people’s schedules become even more flexible.”
[2022-08-22 | highlight] “Reading Ferriss’s book can feel cathartic, especially if you find yourself burned out or frustrated by your work situation. When he suggests strategically withholding productivity so that you get more done on days where you propose a “trial” work-from-home situation, it’s easy to smile at the puckish manipulation. But you can achieve Ferriss’s level of productivity only by ruthlessly off-loading tasks onto others (Ferriss has a whole section about outsourcing menial tasks to cheap virtual personal assistants based overseas) and constantly toeing the line of appropriate behavior—a strategy almost exclusively available to white men.”
[2022-08-22 | highlight] “life.
			The bad news is that once these boundaries dissolve, they are incredibly difficult to build back up again. There’s a reason some people never give out their personal cell phone number to anyone at work other than HR or keep work email off their phones. Once work takes up residency in a part of your life, it takes real, concerted effort to evict it. Boundaries are no longer up to the task. We need guardrails.
			A guardrail is conceptually and crucially different from a boundary. Boundaries are easy to conceive of as a neutral, malleable demarcation, a property line: no match for the hulking semitruck that is the pressure to fill all of our time with work”
[2022-08-22 | highlight] “One answer is completing delegated tasks with accuracy and submitting them on time. But that’s too straightforward for a frazzled, anxious, pandemic brain. Instead, our stress makes it difficult to concentrate, and that difficulty is exacerbated by the growing number of meetings and emails and messages that other people’s frazzled, anxious, pandemic brains are sending us. You feel as if you were not getting enough done, and compensate by working more hours, even if they’re scattered, made inefficient by fatigue, alcohol, and other forms of distraction. It’s so incredibly easy to enter the fugue state where you always feel as if you are half working, half not.”
[2022-08-22 | highlight] “The reality of working from home—at least during a pandemic—has disabused them of that fantasy. But what they haven’t learned is that working from home is a discrete, defined skill. “If you’re going to give PowerPoint presentations, or draw blueprints, you see that as a skill, something you have to learn and apprentice at, get feedback on, and continue to learn,” Dowling said. “But no one has really thought about working from home as a skill: it’s not taught; it’s not addressed. It’s just sort of like, ‘Be on your laptop at home.’ And that’s just not sufficient.”
[2022-08-22 | highlight] “Suddenly crucial components of the office status quo—ideas about where and how work should be done—were revealed as arbitrary. But we also realized that some of the ways we did things before, whether in the office or in the physical presence of others, we did with good reason. The point, then, is cultivating the honesty, lack of preciousness, and imagination to see the difference between the two.”
[2022-08-22 | highlight] “The real innovation of the four-day week, like other flexible, intentional schedules, is the conscious exchange of faux productivity for genuine, organization-wide, collaborative work. For the four-day companies, that strategy was so effective that it opened up an entire day. For your company, that exchange might open up the mornings, or the middle of the day, or anytime after 2:00, depending on the rhythms of your business and your employees’ lives. If that sounds like magic, it’s not because it’s actually mystical, or make-believe; it’s a sign of how thoroughly you’ve internalized a rigid understanding of how work works.”
[2022-08-22 | highlight] “For the Microsoft Japan trial, all meetings were thirty minutes or less and limited to five people—the logic being that if more than five people needed to be there, it should be an announcement, not a meeting.”
[2022-08-22 | highlight] “
			And yet productivity went up; employees felt as productive as during the five-day schedule, if not more so, and employee stress levels improved. And this included developers and engineers: actual coding days went down (3.4 to 2.7 for product; 3.2 to 2.9 for mobile and infrastructure), but “productive impact,” a.k.a. how much they were actually getting done, increased significantly and in the case of infrastructure and mobile doubled.21 Buffer opted to extend the trial another six months, to see if it was sustainable, and in February 2021 decided to officially adopt the schedule moving forward.”
[2022-08-22 | highlight] “This isn’t an advertisement for a specific piece of technology, but it is a full-throated endorsement for non-text-based conversations (especially ones where you don’t also have to stare at yourself in a small box in the corner). Video can convey tone in a way that no number of emojis quite can. Our brains, after all, use visual and audio cues like facial expressions to add context to words. Visuals can clear up confusion, demonstrate seriousness, and, most important, help set our minds at ease. According to Roderick M. Kramer, who studies organizational behavior, their absence while working from home can exacerbate uncertainty about status, which can lead to overprocessing information.18 In short, we get paranoid about whether we’re doing good work, about to be fired, annoying our managers, and so on.
			But”
[2022-08-22 | highlight] “When Perpetual Guardian first implemented the program, some workers took off Mondays, some Fridays, others loved a day off in the middle of the workweek, but everyone took it, from the newest hires to the most senior managers. The effect was startling: at the end of a two-month trial, productivity had risen 20 percent, and “work-life” balance scores rose from 54 percent to 78 percent. After the change was made permanent, overall revenue went up 6 percent, and profitability rose 12.5 percent. Other experiments have yielded similarly astounding results: at Microsoft Japan, a four-day workweek led to 40 percent gains in productivity; a 2019 study of 250 British companies with four-day weeks found that companies had saved an estimated £92 million, and 62 percent of companies reported that employees took fewer sick days.19”
[2022-08-22 | highlight] “Overanalysis and optimization always risk squeezing the vibrancy and serendipity out of work. Which is why you don’t necessarily need a company to help you, but you do need perspective. Regular meetings should be held up to the light and examined, even the ones that have been on the books for years. It’s not just figuring out the meeting’s goal. It’s figuring out whether a meeting is the best way to achieve it in the first place.
			Many companies have become so reliant on meetings as their primary mode of accomplishment—and demonstration of busyness—that it’s hard to imagine alternatives. Or, if they do, they feel too technically advanced for broad-scale adoption. You’d be surprised, though, just how old-fashioned some of these fixes feel.”
[2022-08-22 | highlight] “The tech company Hugo, which bundles meeting scheduling and notes, tracks the number of meetings per week among its clients. As you’d expect, the numbers over the course of the pandemic were telling: Between January and May, the average number of meetings climbed from 12 to around 15, before dipping to around 14.5 for most of the summer. But in early September, the number started climbing again; by November, users were averaging 16.5 meetings per week: more than 3 meetings a day, every day of the week. (Microsoft Teams data shows that this meeting surge was global: between February 2020 and February 2021, average Teams meeting time rose from thirty-five minutes to forty-five minutes.)17
			Hugo’s users began meeting more when they hit remote, and then spiked again right as kids went back to school: the more stressed we became, the more meeting we called. In our heads, meetings are usually drawn up in an attempt at having more control over a project or a particular decision.”
[2022-08-22 | highlight] “
			“There’s an entropy associated with meetings,” Eric Porres, who runs the company MeetingScience, told us. “They take on a life of their own. We’ve been trained and conditioned to schedule meetings for half an hour to an hour. When we look at a company and they have all of their meetings in thirty-, sixty-, ninety-minute chunks, we say, wow, you have a big problem. You don’t have any time to process. And when do you actually get any work done?”
			MeetingScience gathers the wealth of information available through a company’s digital calendars and analyzes it alongside a thirteen-question anonymized survey, sent to individuals after every meeting, about what just happened. Was there an agenda? Did you know what was expected of you? Were there clear next steps? Was the meeting satisfying? Was it important for me to be there? Did it start on time, or did it start late?”
[2022-08-22 | highlight] “But they’re one of the main things that people say they miss about the office: unanticipated, organic interactions. But what people are actually missing is twofold. Some actually crave disruption and dynamism in their days, a symptom that they probably actually don’t need to be in the office, in one place, as much as they are. But most want generative, collaborative conversations, the sort that make the work you’re doing feel, well, alive. It’s not the drive-by meeting itself that’s essential. It’s the space for authentic idea generation and human interaction. And that can be found in any number of places, if we actually allow ourselves to let go of our limited ideas of where it can happen.”
[2022-08-22 | highlight] “But instead of making us work efficiently—and, by extension, less—all of this tech has mostly just made us work more. With time, that amount of output isn’t considered above and beyond. Spending an extra two hours on work at home isn’t a way to distinguish yourself. It’s just the norm. It’s keeping up. It’s treading water. But it’s also, in the vast majority of cases, uncompensated labor.”
[2022-08-22 | highlight] “Consider just how much work you’ve had to do, how disciplined you’ve had to remain, year in and year out, in order to achieve and maintain that ideal. There’s no true allowance for sickness, or sadness, or caregiving. And, if you take time off, it’s often just an opportunity for someone to prove they’re more flexible—and thus more valuable—than you. ”
[2022-08-21 | highlight] “The “burdens” of flexibility “have been unequally distributed,” the tech employment scholar Carrie M. Lane writes. “Employees are expected to become infinitely mutable while employers become increasingly rigid, demanding that workers ask nothing more than a paycheck—no benefits, no training, no personal accommodations, no promise of security or upward mobility.”15 Even the bare minimum employer responsibility (for example, paying workers for their labor) has been recast as a form of benevolence. Workers should not feel entitled to wages: they should, instead, be grateful.”
[2022-08-21 | highlight] “Productivity bibles like The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People functioned, in Gregg’s words, as “a form of training through which workers become capable of the ever more daring acts of solitude and ruthlessness necessary to produce career competence.”11 But the other thing they taught was satisfaction, or at least a demeanor that approximated it. Life at a flexible company might be unstable, with ever-shifting demands, goals, and expectations for future pay and benefits. But successful workers were the ones who could roll with it: make themselves flexible and remain mostly upbeat. The”
[2022-08-21 | highlight] “too.
			Productivity culture has no room for creativity. It doesn’t include thoughtful management or mentorship, the sort that actually makes your organization run more smoothly or actually facilitates the rollout of products. It’s getting things done. Plowing through tasks, off-loading work, and, most important, exuding an aura of efficiency—becoming the person who’s known for responding first to an email, even if that response is vapid and meaningless, or always being in the office, doing . . . something, who knows what, but it must be work. Efficiency and long hours might seem at cross-purposes, but they’re the twin pillars of the ideal flexible worker: obsessed with productivity, but instead of trading that productivity for less work, they work all the time.”
[2022-08-21 | highlight] “You don’t have to pay for their health care, you don’t have to provide a pension, you don’t even have to consider them an employee. More flexibility meant less responsibility to the people who powered your workplace; less responsibility meant increased profits and increased stability for the company in the global marketplace. Who paid for this process? The worker. “The conundrum,” Louis Uchitelle and N. R. Kleinfield pointed out in The New York Times in 1996, “is that what companies do to make themselves secure is precisely what makes their workers feel insecure.”8”
[2022-08-21 | highlight] “You don’t have to pay for their health care, you don’t have to provide a pension, you don’t even have to consider them an employee. More flexibility meant less responsibility to the people who powered your workplace; less responsibility meant increased profits and increased stability for the company in the global marketplace. Who paid for this process? The worker. “The conundrum,” Louis Uchitelle and N. R. Kleinfield pointed out in The New York Times in 1996, “is that what companies do to make themselves secure is precisely what makes their workers feel insecure.”8”
[2022-08-21 | highlight] “Between 1979 and 1996, more than forty-three million jobs were eliminated from the U.S. economy. In the 1980s, the composite of laid-off workers tilted more heavily toward manufacturing and other “lower skilled” jobs, whose pay averaged under $50,000 a year.5 Between 1990 and 1996, that number shifted: the majority of people who lost their jobs were “white collar,” and they lost them at nearly double the rate that they had in the 1980s.
			Over that same period,”
[2022-08-21 | highlight] “As a corporate strategy, “flexibility” transformed so many workplaces into sites of anxiety where productivity-obsessed workers lived in anticipation of the next massive layoff. At the same time, it was repackaged, often to those same workers, as the future: we laid you off, but we’ll give you your job back, as a “flexible” subcontractor, only with fewer benefits and less stability, and you’ll have little choice but to take it.”

=== Lapvona — Ottessa Moshfegh ===
[2022-08-13 | highlight] “Marek wouldn’t tell Lispeth. He could see her hatred. It came through in her pallor and her limp hands. She didn’t even care enough to fold them properly in her lap. She couldn’t be bothered to lift her chin when Marek was speaking. In the company of Villiam and Dibra, or even among the other servants, Lispeth’s posture was very different. She had a spark in her eye, a quickness to her step. Alone with Marek, she was slow and grouchy, kept her gaze blurry and evasive, as though it would make her sick to look directly at him. Her disgust showed in her narrowed eyes and flared nostrils. Lispeth and her cabbage, her sourness, and her judgment. How could Jacob have liked her so much? Marek wondered. She must have glittered under all his gold. But she would not glitter for Marek. He was too humble, he supposed.”
[2022-08-12 | highlight] “Lispeth woke, her face screwed into a frown by the sad truth: Jacob was dead, and Marek was thirsty. She got up—not looking at the boy’s naked body, not looking in his eyes, nor at his dirty hands, his grimy, sweaty face—and poured warm water from the jug into his cup and handed it to him. She didn’t ask him where he’d gone or what he’d done. She didn’t express any worry or concern, only rested on the chair and waited for his next request. It came as soon as he had gulped his water and stuck the cup out for more.”
[2022-07-09 | highlight] She arrived in our hands as thirty-one tons of copper and one hundred and twenty-five tons of steel. Three hundred copper sheets had been pressed to create the outer skin of her.
[2022-07-04 | highlight] “Marek was ugly. And fragile. Not at all like Jude, whose bones and muscles were like polished bluffs beaten by an ocean, soft and luminous despite his skin being grimy and often covered in lamb shit. Jude never let on that Marek’s face had an unseemly disproportion; the boy’s forehead was high and veiny, his nose bulbous and skewed, his cheeks flat and pale, his lips thin, his chin a stub giving way to a neck that was wrinkled and soft, like a drape of skin over his throat, which was flabby at the apple. ‘Beauty is the Devil’s shade,’ Jude said.
			
			”
[2022-07-04 | highlight] “ bandits came again on Easter. This time they slaughtered two men, three women, and two small children. Some smelting tools were stolen from the blacksmith, but no gold or silver, as there was none. One of the bandit”

=== The Viral Underclass — Steven W. Thrasher ===
[2022-08-11 | highlight] “A viral underclass is produced through twelve major related social vectors that enable the relationship between viruses and marginalization. Sometimes, these vectors produce the material conditions for unequal viral transmission; sometimes, they turn the presence of viruses into discrimination or economic ruin, leading to compounding harms. These social vectors are:

Racism
Individualized shame
Capitalism
The law
Austerity
Borders
The liberal carceral state
Unequal prophylaxis
Ableism
Speciesism
The myth of white immunity
Collective punishment”
[2022-08-11 | highlight] “Viruses demand something more of us than the bad-faith argument of “going back to normal”—as if normal were not itself plagued by social ills. They invite—no, command, really—that when we interrogate our relationship with them honestly, we can clearly see an equation:

(HIV) [or (SARS-CoV-2) or (HBV) or (HCV) or (H1N1)]
+ racism [or ableism, or sexism, or heterosexism, or capitalism]
= a viral underclass”
[2022-08-08 | highlight] “They’ve forced me to learn and unlearn not just with my brain, but with my heart, my lungs, my skin, and with my embodied relationship with others. They have led me to seek out and better know some of the people I most dearly love on this planet and some I never would have known otherwise. They have continuously shown me how dangerous vulnerability is and how necessary it is to the very meaning of our lives as social animals. And in the ways they’ve drawn me around the world and even taken human lives, they’ve taught me that I could love (and mourn) more deeply than I ever knew was possible.”
[2022-08-08 | highlight] “As my colleague, anthropologist Adia Benton, has written, viruses “live briefly in spaces where bodies interface, making the war against the virus also a war against moments and spaces of connections.” The fear of such connections is that viruses expose how the social divisions imposed upon humanity (nationalism, race making, capitalism) by hard wars or softer ones (like policing) are fictions. The truths that viruses reveal could topple the systems meant to divide us. We, the people, are connected to one another—and so, war metaphors are not helpful ways to think about public health.”
[2022-08-08 | highlight] “Like airplanes dropping bombs on residents too poor to flee the city that the pilots are ostensibly liberating, waging war on viruses will often kill humans in the viral underclass, but not only them. For viruses are wherever any of us meet—and how can we declare war on where we meet? Hug? Make love? Where our lips touch and our hearts beat? Where we sing, dance, laugh, and pray together?”
[2022-08-08 | highlight] “But a theory of the viral underclass can help us think about how and why marginalized populations are subjected to increased harms of viral transmission, exposure, replication, and death. And it can help us to understand not only why viruses reside where they do, and in whom they do, but also why the underclass has formed in the first place. It can help us to understand that the dynamic works in both directions: that just as marginalized people are made vulnerable to viruses, viruses are also used as justification for the policies and systems that marginalize people in the first place.”
[2022-08-08 | highlight] “What the activists recognized was that people living with HIV who have detectable viral loads are disproportionately Black and unhoused and often can’t get access to the medication needed for viral suppression. Leaving these people behind, the activists argued, created a viral divide, with a privileged white set above it and a Black underclass below—a viral underclass.”
[2022-08-08 | highlight] “Get Out filmmaker Jordan Peele might describe the psychological and physiological dimensions of this domain as “the sunken place.”
I call it the viral underclass.
I did not come up with this phrase, but first heard it in the summer of 2018. I was at a conference called the HIV Is Not a Crime National Training Academy, in Indianapolis, Indiana, where activists from around the United States and other countries had gathered to strategize about repealing laws that criminalize HIV transmission. Some activists did not like that efforts were underway to reform but not abolish HIV laws. ”
[2022-08-08 | highlight] “Similarly, water and fire do not discriminate; they also have no sentience. Yet their effects do discriminate against the bodies of the underclass, because those bodies have been placed in proximity to danger by the structural design of powerful humans. In a hurricane, water drowns the underclass not because two molecules of hydrogen and one of oxygen discriminate by income or race. Rather, the inequitable drownings happen because the built environment of society makes it so water will physically be kept away from the rich, while stormwaters will flow through the cracks in flimsy barriers to flood the poor.”
[2022-08-08 | highlight] “I think it was my friend Stephen Molldrem, a scholar of critical HIV data, who pointed out to me that we were experiencing the first viral pandemic also to be experienced via viral stories on social media. These viral stories about viruses created a kind of squared virality.”
[2022-08-08 | highlight] “And as I had lost my father, birth mother, and stepmother in my twenties, before losing one of my sisters in my thirties, I had come to appreciate how, while painful, witnessing death can be a blessing. Even when there is nothing to be done to stop or postpone death, just being with someone in the last moments of their life can be very meaningful—for the person left behind holding the deceased’s hand and, I suspect, for the person leaving the land of the living.”
[2022-08-08 | highlight] “ As during three-day holiday weekends of years past in the neighborhoods of brownstone Brooklyn, Bed-Stuy had become almost entirely Black and brown again by late March 2020. The white gentrifiers had largely skipped town. But unlike during those idyllic summer weekends of yesteryear, the white people hadn’t left the city “to summer” as a verb. Rather, they’d fled to second homes that were not even meant to be inhabited in the winter.”
[2022-08-08 | highlight] “The sirens, in other words, portended not just doom but decision for people in cities like New York and in countries like the United States. Did we, the safely distanced, hear the noise and think we were dying? We, humans. We, citizens. We, neighbors, workers, parents, friends of friends. Or did we breathe relief and autonomically think they are dying? They, the deserving. They, the disposable. They, the viral underclass.”
[2022-08-08 | highlight] “The crescendo of it all revealed that though we were all equally vulnerable to the novel pathogen by nature of our earthly humanity, some people were more vulnerable than others by nature of preexisting fault lines, not of biology but of society.
As the virus traveled down streets and into subways and then through towns and communities, its suffering tracked along layers of disparity. It quickly became clear that illness and death reflected existing, mutually reinforcing systems of discriminatory housing, education, employment, earnings, health care, and criminal justice.”

=== Teeth — Mary Otto ===
[2022-07-23 | highlight] “For reasons including poverty, isolation, and the lack of private insurance and providers available to treat the poor, roughly one-third of the people living in America face significant barriers to obtaining dental care. Medicaid, the federal-state health program that now covers more than 72 million poor Americans, treats adult dental benefits as optional. It is up to states to decide whether to offer them. In hard times, coverage of even the most basic dental procedures often ends up on state chopping blocks.”

=== Upgrade — Blake Crouch ===
[2022-07-19 | highlight] “My mother had said, “Hunger, disease, war, warming—these threats loom over us like building storm clouds. But ninety-nine percent of humanity reads about our crumbling world in the morning headlines, then ignores it and gets on with their day.” She looked around the table. “You’re all here with me in Shenzhen, trying to do your part to solve crop failure, which might be a step toward solving hunger and famine. Trying to be part of the solution.”
[2022-07-14 | highlight] “Memories were coming back to me, and not just of every book I’d ever read. Random moments of insignificance. Pivotal events that had shaped my life.
From a month ago.
From a decade ago.
From my childhood.
It was an eerie sensation. As if someone were brooming out the dark corners of my mind. Wiping off the cobwebs. Repairing frayed connections.
If I tried to recall something, I found I could see it with a clarity and certainty I’d never known.”
[2022-07-14 | highlight] “Miriam had engineered the virus to only target this specific strain of rice, but it developed cross-species virus transmission, made worse by new rounds of viral mutation and selection, infecting and targeting other food-crop species. Within a year, the vector locusts began propagating exponentially.”

=== Thrust — Lidia Yuknavitch ===
[2022-07-10 | highlight] “No one noticed either, probably because of the male toddler so near death—My god, she nearly killed that boy—that Laisvė had seized one of the boys who’d made a joke out of trying to get a smaller boy to eat a nail, that she’d taken justice upon herself. She pushed the cruel boy away from the immediate area, out into the water. No one would notice for several hours that the boy had floated away, his internal organs already beginning to fail, how he grabbed at his gut with abdominal pain, how he shat himself and vomited for hours as he floated, until he became jaundiced and died from liver failure, like a fish gone belly-up in the waves.”
[2022-07-10 | highlight] “in her language, Bless this journey—or is the translation “boat ride” or is it “family”—her hands clasped in prayer or just common gesture, and everyone smiles all the same, because an infant crying for his mother’s breast is its own language in any language and a shared journey across water binds strangers.”
[2022-07-09 | highlight] “Our labor had a rhythm and shape and song that were larger and reached farther than our differences. Maybe the song of us helped us feel part of some whole that did and did not exist. The song of us helped to get the work done, helped our bodies not to give out or give in. The song of we the body met the air and the water around us differently from how any one person might; we the body were part of everything and nothing at the same time.”
[2022-07-09 | highlight] “We wondered what story would emerge in place of emancipation, now that the chains were hidden. We wondered what story would be drawn from the tablet, from the newly prominent rule of law. We wondered what the figure herself thought about these changes to her body, these shifts in the story. No one asked what we thought, or what she thought, for that matter. Statues don’t speak. A fear slid through some of our necks—that maybe she was not ours, or we were not hers—but no one wanted to say it out loud because we needed to make our livings.”
[2022-07-09 | highlight] “The French sculptor’s early model had held a broken chain in her left hand. Our eyes saw the drawings. The model. We knew what the chain meant. Some of us might have rubbed our wrists or ankles or necks at the thought or memory of it. But then the chain moved. On her body, and on our bodies. Down near her foot.”
[2022-07-09 | highlight] “Some of us were born here and some of us were the sons and daughters of mothers and fathers not from here. They came from famine they came from poverty they came from occupations and brutalities and war. They came from something to leave, which is why they crossed land and water. They spoke of persecutions or poverty, but they also spoke of rolling hills or sunsets over the desert or flowers with names that made our hearts reach out. The leaving of a place carried sorrow as well as relief, and the coming here carried both as well. We spoke of both brutality and beauty—or remembered beauty—in our homelands, or in the hands of infants born here. We let go the hand of prior homes to reach this place.
			We”
[2022-06-30 | highlight] “And for every child who will cross the threshold next, every kind of body and soul, every orphan and misfit, every immigrant and refugee, every gender imaginable, every lost or found beautiful being looking for shore, home, heart. That space between child and not: imagine it as everything. Hold it open as long as you can. You are right. You are the new world.”

=== My Year of Rest and Relaxation — Ottessa Moshfegh ===
[2022-06-25 | highlight] “While I waited, I ticked open a slat in the blinds and saw that it was the dead of night, black and cold and icy, and I thought of all the cruel people out there sleeping soundly, like newborn babes in blankets held to the bosoms of their loving mothers, and thought of my mother’s bony clavicles, the white lace of her bras and white lace of her silk camisoles and slip dresses that she wore under everything”

=== The Feminine Mystique — Friedan, Betty ===
[2022-06-25 | highlight] “I think it was probably the notion of seeing her own life there in the pages of that book, the endless, thankless cycle of dishes and vacuuming and meals and her husband’s ironing and her children’s laundry. “I begin to feel I have no personality,” one woman told Friedan. “I’m a server of food and a putter-on of pants and a bedmaker, somebody who can be called on when you want something. But who am I?”
“Who am I?” my mother must have been asking herself at the table in the kitchen, and with her millions of others who would pore over this painstakingly reported, fiercely opinionated book.”

=== A People's History of the Supreme Court — Peter Irons ===
[2022-06-25 | highlight] “In 1966, Friedan helped launch the National Organization for Women, whose members devoted most of their energy to lobbying for the Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution, which provided that “equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex.” First proposed in 1923, the ERA languished until the women’s movement pushed it through Congress in 1972. However, after ratification by thirty-five states, the ERA became a victim of the abortion wars and finally died in 1982, falling short of adoption by three, states. Although smaller groups like the National Abortion Rights League worked before 1973 to repeal criminal abortion laws, NOW did not make abortion rights a priority until the Roe decision sparked a “pro-life” backlash.”
[2022-06-24 | highlight] “the Roe case began in Phoenix, Arizona, on July 20, 1962. On that day, a twenty-nine-year-old pregnant woman named Sherri Finkbine received a call from her doctor, warning that she faced a high risk of having a badly deformed baby. Sherri, the mother of four  healthy children and the hostess of Romper Room, a popular children’s television show, had been treating daily headaches with pills her husband, Bob, had brought with him from a trip to England. The label on the pill bottle read “Distaval,” but Sherri had recently seen an article in the Phoenix newspaper, the Arizona Republic, about an epidemic of deformed babies in England and West Germany. ”

=== I Didn’t Do The Thing Today — Madeleine Dore ===
[2022-06-24 | highlight] “We’re running just to stand still, and we’re missing the point. We’re doing all this work to improve ourselves, only to go on judging ourselves for being imperfect. Yet such a pursuit is a fool’s errand. The English word ‘perfect’ comes from the Latin verb perficere, which means ‘to finish, complete, carry out or achieve’. When we pursue perfection in our days and in ourselves, we’re creating an impossible standard. We’ve taken what’s incomplete as proof there is something wrong with us, when in fact being imperfect is an inevitable part of being human. We blame ourselves for not being exactly where we think we should be. We berate ourselves for inactivity. We shrink in our self-comparison to others. We doubt our decisions. We become so stifled by the pressure of being productive that we sometimes don’t do anything at all.”

=== Hell Followed with Us — Andrew Joseph White ===
[2022-06-24 | highlight] “Sister Woodside,” Brother Hutch says, and the other Angels emerge from the shadows, the ruins, the back-streets, and I don’t stand still a moment longer.
		The second thing Dad told me—when”
[2022-06-23 | highlight] “Between the cars ahead of me, a tangle of limbs unfolds, and it shrieks and howls with all the pain of Hell, the weeping and gnashing of teeth. A creature made of corpses and the Flood—sharpened ribs lining its back in a row of spines, eyeballs blinking between sinew, muscles so swollen they split the skin—rises from the wreckage. Claws the size of arm bones curl around a truck cab and crumple it.”
[2022-06-23 | highlight] “I make it to the mouth of the bridge. I don’t stop, just dive between the wreckage of cars choking the entrance. The bridge shines silver, suspension towers dangling thick metal wires from bank to bank. It belongs to the Angels now. A banner flutters high above me: GOD LOVES YOU. Corpses dangle from the wires, yellow-pink organs hanging from their stomachs to obscure their nakedness, like Adam and Eve ashamed of their bodies.”

=== The Origins of Totalitarianism — Hannah Arendt ===
[2022-06-24 | highlight] “Never has our future been more unpredictable, never have we depended so much on political forces that cannot be trusted to follow the rules of common sense and self-interest—forces that look like sheer insanity, if judged by the standards of other centuries. It is as though mankind had divided itself between those who believe in human omnipotence (who think that everything is possible if one knows how to organize masses for it) and those for whom powerlessness has become the major experience of their lives.”

=== You're the Only One I've Told — Meera Shah ===
[2022-06-24 | highlight] “When my father heard about this, he was upset by the controversy and insisted that I read the book because he knew the importance of learning about other religions. In fact, we read it together. He taught me that religion is at the core of so many people’s sense of self and that one way to understand others is to try to understand their faith. This idea has long stuck with me, especially in my work. ”
[2022-05-12 | highlight] “However, abortion has since become a core political litmus test for party loyalty. With the election of President Donald Trump and the confirmation hearings for Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, we are at a pivotal moment. Politicians are exploiting a health care issue that’s foundational to reproductive, social, and economic freedom for millions of people. Abortion will always be accessible for affluent people, white people—even conservative ones—and those publicly fighting against abortion access.
Politicians have taken access away from people of color, low-income people, people who cannot afford to lose work, and those who face consequences including parental retaliation and abuse. They have manipulated the complex emotions”
[2022-05-12 | highlight] “It is actually a myth, perpetuated by movies and TV, that young people receive a disproportionate number of abortions, when in fact the majority (61 percent) of people obtaining abortions are between the ages of twenty and twenty-nine.11 Even so, teenagers in many parts of the country struggle to access basic health care because of harmful parental consent laws that impose unnecessary barriers. Furthermore, most people choosing abortion are in fact already parents—more than six in ten of the women who have an abortion have had one or more children.”
[2022-05-12 | highlight] “While many of my colleagues have been able to live and practice in more conservative areas without major problems, most exercise caution when disclosing the nature of their work. Many feel too afraid to disclose their abortion work at all. And most family medicine and ob-gyn doctors choose not to provide abortion care altogether—the fear is just too great, too few residency programs provide training, or the stigma prevents students and trainees from getting accurate enough information about abortion care to appreciate its value.”
[2022-05-12 | highlight] “Conservative Christians within the antiabortion movement would do anything to prevent people from having abortions, in the name of religion. Violence against physicians like me who provide abortion care is a very real concern. So much so that it has contributed to the significant shortage of those who provide abortion care. We face a higher rate of harassment and violence, especially in states with more restrictive legislation.3”

=== Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors — Susan Sontag ===
[2022-06-24 | highlight] “This exchange suggests that the fantasy about TB was already a received idea, for Mrs. Hardcastle is nothing but an anthology of clichés of the smart London world to which she aspires, and which was the audience of Goldsmith’s play.1 Goldsmith presumes that the TB myth is already widely disseminated—TB being, as it were, the anti-gout. For snobs and parvenus and social climbers, TB was one index of being genteel, delicate, sensitive. With the new mobility (social and geographical) made possible in the eighteenth”
[2022-06-24 | highlight] “This exchange suggests that the fantasy about TB was already a received idea, for Mrs. Hardcastle is nothing but an anthology of clichés of the smart London world to which she aspires, and which was the audience of Goldsmith’s play.1 Goldsmith presumes that the TB myth is already widely disseminated—TB being, as it were, the anti-gout. For snobs and parvenus and social climbers, TB was one index of being genteel, delicate, sensitive. With the new mobility (social and geographical) made possible in the eighteenth”
[2022-05-17 | highlight] “In a heartbreaking letter of November 1, 1820 from Naples, Keats, forever separated from Fanny Brawne, wrote, “If I had any chance of recovery [from tuberculosis], this passion would kill me.” As a character in The Magic Mountain explains: “Symptoms of disease are nothing but a disguised manifestation of the power of love; and all disease is only love transformed.”
As once TB was thought to come from too much passion, afflicting the reckless and sensual, today many people believe that cancer is a disease of insufficient passion, afflicting those who are sexually repressed, inhibited, unspontaneous, incapable of expressing anger.”
[2022-05-17 | highlight] “In a heartbreaking letter of November 1, 1820 from Naples, Keats, forever separated from Fanny Brawne, wrote, “If I had any chance of recovery [from tuberculosis], this passion would kill me.” As a character in The Magic Mountain explains: “Symptoms of disease are nothing but a disguised manifestation of the power of love; and all disease is only love transformed.”
As once TB was thought to come from too much passion, afflicting the reckless and sensual, today many people believe that cancer is a disease of insufficient passion, afflicting those who are sexually repressed, inhibited, unspontaneous, incapable of expressing anger.”
[2022-05-17 | highlight] “Georg Groddeck, whose remarkable views on cancer in The Book of the It (1923) anticipate those of Wilhelm Reich, wrote:
Of all the theories put forward in connection with cancer, only one has in my opinion survived the passage of time, namely, that cancer leads through definite stages to death. I mean by that that what is not fatal is not cancer. From that you may conclude that I hold out no hope of a new method of curing cancer … [only] the many cases of so-called cancer.…
For all the progress in treating cancer, many people still subscribe to Groddeck’s equation: cancer = death”
[2022-05-17 | highlight] “It is not just because pulmonary tuberculosis is the most common form of TB that most people think of TB, in contrast to cancer, as a disease of one organ. It is because the myths about TB do not fit the brain, larynx, kidneys, long bones, and other sites where the tubercle bacillus can also settle, but do have a close fit with the traditional imagery (breath, life) associated with the lungs.
While TB takes on qualities assigned to the lungs, which are part of the upper, spiritualized body, cancer is notorious for attacking parts of the body (colon, bladder, rectum, breast, cervix, prostate, testicles) that are embarrassing to acknowledge. Having a tumor generally arouses some feelings of shame, but in the hierarchy of the body’s organs, lung cancer is felt to be less shameful than rectal cancer”
[2022-05-17 | highlight] “life. (The heroine of Erich Segal’s Love Story dies of leukemia—the “white” or TB-like form of the disease, for which no mutilating surgery can be proposed—not of stomach or breast cancer.) A disease of the lungs is, metaphorically, a disease of the soul.5 Cancer, as a disease that can strike anywhere, is a disease of the body. Far from revealing anything spiritual, it reveals that the body is, all too woefully, just the body.”
[2022-05-17 | highlight] “TB is often imagined as a disease of poverty and deprivation—of thin garments, thin bodies, unheated rooms, poor hygiene, inadequate food. The poverty may not be as literal as Mimi’s garret in La Bohème; the tubercular Marguerite Gautier in La Dame aux camélias lives in luxury, but inside she is a waif. In contrast, cancer is a disease of middle-class life, a disease associated with affluence, with excess. Rich countries have the highest cancer rates, and the rising incidence of the disease is seen as resulting, in part, from a diet rich in fat and proteins and from the toxic effluvia of the industrial economy that creates affluence.”
[2022-05-17 | highlight] “TB is a disease of time; it speeds up life, highlights it, spiritualizes it. In both English and French, consumption “gallops.” Cancer has stages rather than gaits; it is (eventually) “terminal.” Cancer works slowly, insidiously: the standard euphemism in obituaries is that someone has “died after a long illness.” Every characterization of cancer describes it as slow, and so it was first used metaphorically. “The word of hem crepith as a kankir,” Wyclif wrote in 1382 (translating a phrase in II Timothy 2:17); and among the earliest figurative uses of cancer are as a metaphor for “idleness” and “sloth.”3”
[2022-05-17 | highlight] “But the pre-modern understanding of cancer also invokes the notion of consumption. The OED gives as the early figurative definition of cancer: “Anything that frets, corrodes, corrupts, or consumes slowly and secretly.” (Thomas Paynell in 1528: “A canker is a melancolye impostume, eatynge partes of the bodye.”) The earliest literal definition of cancer is a growth, lump, or protuberance, and the disease’s name—from the Greek karkínos and the Latin cancer, both meaning crab—was inspired, according to Galen, by the resemblance of an external tumor’s swollen veins to a crab’s legs; not, as many people think, because a metastatic disease crawls or creeps like a crab.”

=== I'll Show Myself Out — Jessi Klein ===
[2022-06-24 | highlight] “Maybe I was thinking of the sprinkler as I headed onto the roof. Maybe I was remembering some fun and was wondering if it was still happening? I don’t know. I just remember I was alone. I remember looking at the sky and how big and open it was. I remember I could see the World Trade Center on one side and the Empire State Building on the other. It was a beautiful view. An unspecified amount of time later, my mom realized I was gone, saw the open door, and for some reason thought to come running up the stairs, where she found her child toddling inexplicably toward the edge of the roof.”
[2022-06-24 | highlight] “When I was four years old, I decided to see if the door to our apartment, which was on the top floor of a six-story walk-up building, was unlocked. Lo and behold, it was. The next flight up from us was the roof entry, which was also unlocked. The wall that ran around the roof’s edge, separating anyone who went up there from a seven-flight drop into oblivion, was three and a half feet high at best, and sloped. Honestly, thinking about it now makes me so dizzy I need to stop typing and lie on the floor for a moment.”
[2022-06-24 | highlight] “When I was four years old, I decided to see if the door to our apartment, which was on the top floor of a six-story walk-up building, was unlocked. Lo and behold, it was. The next flight up from us was the roof entry, which was also unlocked. The wall that ran around the roof’s edge, separating anyone who went up there from a seven-flight drop into oblivion, was three and a half feet high at best, and sloped. Honestly, thinking about it now makes me so dizzy I need to stop typing and lie on the floor for a moment.”
[2022-06-22 | highlight] This material may be protected by copyright.
[2022-05-25 | highlight] “Ultimately, the hope of impossible delight almost always wins out over the impossible torment. I know this because here I am, alive, writing this, and here you are, alive, reading it, which means our mothers did what heroes do: they kept us all alive to tell our own tales one day. And what I can tell you is that so much of the heroism of motherhood is the ability to swallow the sword. To swallow the pain and frustration and keep everything inside. No one wants to think that their mother, that all-forgiving source of limitless unconditional love, occasionally, in a fit of rage or boredom, met her limits. And yet, of course she did. No one wants to know that after your mother finally placed you in your crib, she walked out of the room and screamed into a blanket, or cried in the bathroom, or drank a bottle of wine, or all of the above.”
[2022-05-25 | highlight] “It’s because, for so many people, our safest, sweetest, earliest memories are of nestling in our mother’s lap, in her rocking warmth, hearing her sing as we get milk-drunk and sleepy and burrow, heavy-eyed, into the crook of her soft arm. And if you knew that your mother’s journey was, intrinsically, a hero’s journey—if that was in any way an established narrative in our culture—you’d have to accept that this memory of womb-like safety, this foundation upon which so much of our identity is built, was often just an illusion. You’d have to realize that while you were blissed out on your mother’s lap, one of those epic battles, the kind that envelops heroes as they fight their way out of a ring of fire, was raging just above your head. No one wants to believe that in the moments you felt the most peaceful, the woman cradling you so softly was shielding you from a sword that she herself was holding.”
[2022-05-25 | highlight] “And yet you can actively sense that if this woman’s life were, let’s say, ever to be expanded upon in some kind of spin-off, it would still be about detergent and grass stains and nothing else. There is no story, there is no journey, there is only the stain of this moment followed by the stain of the next moment, going around and around like the washing machine itself.”
[2022-05-25 | highlight] “The impossible delight of having your seventeen-month-old child, out of nowhere, in the middle of an absolutely average day filled with building blocks, in which you are slowly evaporating inside from boredom, say to you for the first time, “I’m happy.” And you cry, because this is why you chose his name: Asher, Hebrew for “happy,” the emotion you’ve struggled so hard to feel your whole life.”
[2022-05-25 | highlight] “What shook me about Campbell’s words is how perfectly they describe motherhood. To begin with: a “profound dream state.” The first three months after my son was born, for sure, were nothing less than a never-ending somnambulance. And even though I was not on a secret island or a lofty mountaintop, once I became a mom, I felt in my bones that deep sense of distance and isolation, of being far away from everyone else, stranded with my new “strangely fluid and polymorphous being”—i.e., my baby.”

=== Spellbreaker — Charlie N. Holmberg ===
[2022-06-24 | highlight] “Charlie N. Holmberg is the author of the Numina series and the Wall Street Journal bestselling Paper Magician series, which has been optioned by the Walt Disney Company. She is also the author of five stand-alone novels, including Followed by Frost, a 2016 RITA award finalist for Best Young Adult Romance, and The Fifth Doll, winner of the 2017 Whitney for Speculative Fiction. Born in Salt Lake City, Charlie was raised a Trekkie alongside three sisters who also have boy names. She is a proud BYU alumna, plays the ukulele, and owns too many pairs of glasses. She currently lives with her family in Utah. Visit her at www.charlienholmberg.com.”
[2022-06-24 | highlight] “So, so, so many thanks to my husband, Jordan, who also reads my crappy rough drafts, takes care of our kids so I can write crappy rough drafts, brainstorms ideas for my crappy rough drafts, and is every bit as chivalrous as a Victorian man should be.
Thank you to my agent, for getting this book into the right hands; my shiny new editor, Adrienne Procaccini, for helping me with the vision for this duology; and Angela Polidoro, who got up to her elbows in word grease to help me fine-tune this story.
Always, my utmost appreciation to the 47North team—author relations, copyeditors, proofreaders, fact-checkers, marketers, and so on. Thank you for making my dream job that much more awesome.”
[2022-06-17 | highlight] “The baron in disguise had just confided his secret to Mademoiselle Amboise, completely unaware that she was betrothed to his enemy! There were so many ways the plot could unwind, and the author had cruelly ended the piece right there, forcing Elsie and thousands of others to wait for the continuation.”
[2022-06-17 | highlight] “The baron in disguise had just confided his secret to Mademoiselle Amboise, completely unaware that she was betrothed to his enemy! There were so many ways the plot could unwind, and the author had cruelly ended the piece right there, forcing Elsie and thousands of others to wait for the continuation.”
[2022-06-17 | highlight] “For when a person learned magic in all four alignments, they would be very weak in each of them, no matter how much magical potential they possessed. There was a reason people specialized.
Not that it pertained to Elsie. Specializations were only for spellmakers.”
[2022-06-17 | highlight] “The Cowls.
That wasn’t their real name, obviously. But Elsie didn’t know what else to call them. She hadn’t seen any of them since she was eleven, ten years ago. But they kept in contact. More often than usual, lately. Either the world was getting worse, or they were on the cusp of making real change, and including her in that change.”
[2022-06-17 | highlight] “London, England, 1895
Elsie could just barely hear the toll of Big Ben in the distance. Four o’clock. A decent enough time for breaking the law.
But when the law wasn’t fit, was it really a bad thing to break it?”
[2022-06-17 | highlight] “Don’t mind them. You’re safe. What is your name?”
Elsie peered into that cowl, but the darkness hid any discernible features. The voice was quiet and feminine. “E-Elsie. Elsie Camden.”

=== Maladies of Empire — Jim Downs ===
[2022-06-24 | highlight] “In a series of questions addressed to Thomas Leslie Gregson, chief surgeon of the naval hospital in Alexandria, Holroyd asked if Gregson knew of any examples of people who had contact with a plague patient but did not contract the disease. Gregson replied that he knew of many hospital attendants who had not become sick, and several people who died of the plague and were visited by friends who were not attacked. He was then asked if he knew of any cases of a hospital attendant who had contracted plague but had not communicated it to patients. Yes, he replied: “Amongst others a servant belonging to our hospital was attacked; he was black.”
[2022-06-23 | highlight] “By April 1784, three months after the ship had departed from Africa, seven to eight people had died. Trotter reported that the number of enslaved Africans with scurvy continued to escalate: “Some were found dead in the rooms in a morning or dropped down immediately on coming upon deck, while others expired eating their victuals, full in flesh and blood.” As the Brookes approached the Caribbean, forty more deaths occurred. Of the roughly six hundred enslaved Africans who arrived in the Caribbean, Trotter diagnosed three hundred of them as having some degree of scurvy.17”
[2022-06-23 | highlight] “While it is unclear how Trotter communicated with the enslaved Africans, they helped to shape his understanding of scurvy.15 He learned from them to identify the early stages of the infection: the hardness in the arm, the immobility of the elbow, the tightening of the jaw, how the pain increased as the disease progressed. ”
[2022-06-22 | highlight] “Holroyd concluded from this report that the plague could not be contagious, as it was not communicated from the plague victims to the others, despite their close quarters. The crew member could not have contracted the disease from the two stricken pilgrims, since he did not become sick until ten days after having been in contact with them. A more reasonable conclusion for why the crew member became infected, wrote Holroyd, was that “the vessel had not been properly ventilated” and “an impure atmosphere still existed.” The ship was sunk and then raised up again; when the crew returned, they remained healthy. “Surely it was the removal from the contaminated air, and the purification of the vessel which prevented the extension of the pestilence.”39”
[2022-06-21 | highlight] “Hindoo coolies” put the blankets back on patients who threw them off, rubbed their limbs, and could not avoid inhaling their breath “in the most deplorable stages of the disease.” Finally, a number of Indian medical students had cared for patients when the hospital was crowded and the attendants overwhelmed. No one in any of these groups, claimed Twining, had ever been attacked by cholera.11
An unusual feature of Twining’s book is that he named many of the Indian hospital workers: Shaik Selim, Dhowall, Gawhee, Hassye, Beechuck, and Buctourie. These men served as unofficial, and more than likely unasked, participants in Twining’s analysis of how cholera behaved. The daily labors of the hospital’s most subordinate class offered important evidence that cholera was not transmitted through direct contact. The names provided a human shape to a scientific postulate and enabled the reader to imagine the proximity the washermen and attendants had to infectious disease.”
[2022-06-21 | highlight] “The medical community depended on populations throughout the empire to understand infectious disease. In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the quarantine debates provided a crucial forum for physicians to rethink widely held medical beliefs. Writing in journals and letters to colleagues, medical authorities often relied on single episodes, anecdotes, and narrative descriptions as case studies. Europe provided many examples of disease spread and quarantine, but colonialism in Asia, the Caribbean, and the Middle East further increased the range of examples and contributed to the development of particular methods of gathering information.5 Plague no longer existed in England, but the expansion of the British Empire enabled physicians to study outbreaks that occurred elsewhere. The movement of ships, people, and cargo provided intellectually curious doctors with huge sample sets to investigate disease outbreaks. In addition to ships, they turned to colonial hospitals and other settings. ”
[2022-06-21 | highlight] “Compared with passengers, sailors, and soldiers, enslaved Africans faced the most extreme and violent conditions on ships; therefore, their cries for fresh air within this medical context provided compelling evidence about the efficacy of the ventilators.90 In general, ship authorities and the crew ignored the crying pleas of enslaved Africans and watched many die onboard the ships. In this case, the captain did not necessarily care about the enslaved Africans on the ship but simply reported their pleas to illustrate that the ventilator provided relief. Enslaved Africans’ cries for fresh air got translated into Hales’s medical report as an endorsement.”
[2022-06-21 | highlight] “The captain’s inclusion of the testimony of enslaved Africans provides a subtle but powerful clue on how enslaved people contributed to the development of medicine and science. By 1756, medical professionals had begun to realize that crowded conditions caused the spread of disease. The accounts from British prisoners of war in India provided first-hand testimonies of the dangers of crowded spaces. The reports in Hales’s publications provided observations by those on slave ships who had witnessed how crowded conditions led to inordinate mortality. According to Hales, his ventilators solved the crises aboard all ships, not just slave ships. Ventilators promoted circulation that safeguarded the transportation of passengers, goods, and crops, but enslaved people’s demands for the crew to run the ventilators provided powerful evidence of the efficacy of ventilators on these ships.”
[2022-06-21 | highlight] “In 1741 he presented his first paper to the Royal Society illustrating the importance of these devices, which promoted fresh air. In the paper, which is over two hundred pages long, he made only passing references to slavery. In order to explain the number of men required to operate the ventilators, he stated, “suppose there be in a Transport, or Guinea Slave-Ship, two hundred Men, as there is often about that Number,” then each man, he claimed, would only need to operate the ventilator for a half hour every two days.83”
[2022-06-21 | highlight] “Colonialism and slavery also produced crowded conditions that gave rise to concerns that predated mid to late nineteenth-century urban reforms, often considered the major turning point in sanitary reform. Colonial expansion placed doctors in new locations where they devised medical theories about the cause and spread of infectious disease. The rise of the international slave trade, which involved confining large numbers of human beings in crowded spaces, produced medical crises that then helped to give rise to new medical theories. Although slave ships were a crucial site of investigation, they often entered medical journals and reports, like Trotter’s treatise on slavery, simply as “cases” or as “ships,” which had the unintended effect of erasing slavery from the discussions of the importance of fresh air for health.”
[2022-06-21 | highlight] “The rise of colonialism—like the expansion of the international slave trade—led physicians to produce medical ideas outside of the metropole. In an 1852 article on the health of British troops in India, for example, Major David Grierson, a British military physician who was inspector general of hospitals for a region of India, wrote about the issue of ventilation and fresh air in barracks and hospitals.76”
[2022-06-21 | highlight] “Just as Howard outlined measures to prevent disease in jails, Chisholm proposed a number of preventive measures. One set of measures involved improving living conditions and sanitation in Grenada. He called for destroying the small wooden homes and rebuilding them in stone and brick. Narrow and dirty streets should be replaced by spacious ones that would allow air to circulate. Butchers should slaughter animals far from the center of towns to keep “putrid offals and meat” from spreading disease, and their sheds and stalls should be well-ventilated and have access to running water. Cemeteries should also be established far from the center of town.73
”
[2022-06-21 | highlight] “The value of Chisholm’s book lies less in its scientific validity than in how it put forward a theory that drew on first-person observations of crowded conditions. Chisholm’s observations of the “lower class,” consisting of impoverished white sailors and Black porters, led him to understand how crowded and cramped conditions encouraged the spread of disease. The living conditions within the Caribbean served as evidence for Chisholm’s argument.71
As a number of scholars have shown, many physicians at the time viewed poor people as innately susceptible to illness and as responsible for spreading disease.72 Impoverished populations, however, became the subjects of medical study. The importance of fresh air and ventilation, which became one of the main tenets of public health, emerged from observations of poor people’s crowded living conditions.”

Excerpt From
Maladies of Empire
Jim Downs
https://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewBook?id=0
This material may be protected by copyright.
[2022-06-20 | highlight] “French physicians created ways of talking about disease transmission that facilitated the emergence of epidemiological principles.69 The hygiene movement identified health dangers of crowded spaces. Their discussions of crowded spaces provided the foundation for the development of epidemiology by offering a new way of thinking about the air. It moved beyond the ancient understanding of miasma, which people throughout Europe and other parts of the world believed caused epidemics to spread, and instead emphasized crowded spaces as the cause of disease outbreaks. While some proponents of miasma developed ideas about “night air” and “foul air,” they may have, at times, pointed to crowded spaces as the cause of disease but their focus remained more tightly attentive to the air’s movement that emanated from rotten vegetation or corpses not simply by the physical environment. French and British physicians moved away from an analysis focusing purely on air as the central factor in the cause of disease and instead emphasized how physical conditions of crowded spaces caused disease to spread.”
[2022-06-19 | highlight] “His understanding of climate in foreign areas informed his later understanding of tuberculosis. In a discussion of the distinctive lesions produced by this disease, he wrote, “If we now seek for the circumstances which prepare and facilitate the formation of these tubercles, we will be satisfied, 1st, that they are common in cold and moist countries, and rare in warm climates, even in constitutions which are attacked with them in cold regions. This I have verified, as I have repeatedly said, during twenty years of military practice.”63”
[2022-06-19 | highlight] “François-Joseph-Victor Broussais, a leading French physician, became interested in the cause of disease, particularly the ways in which oxygen could overstimulate the body’s organs. Cold air, food, drugs, or vapors, he argued, could lead to overstimulation in the organs and cause irritation that led to fever.61 Like many other physicians who devised new ways of thinking about medicine and therapeutics, Broussais had spent time in the military.”
[2022-06-19 | highlight] “The poor condition of the hospitals propelled French revolutionaries to establish a new system of medical care. Drawing on ideas of rationality and order that grew out of the Enlightenment, they initiated a number of changes, including segregating the sick from the indigent poor, the dead from the living, and the men from the women, which Howard had observed in French prisons.59 Their efforts led to the construction of more hospitals throughout France that followed guidelines promoting proper ventilation and hygiene.”
[2022-06-18 | highlight] “The poor condition of the hospitals propelled French revolutionaries to establish a new system of medical care. Drawing on ideas of rationality and order that grew out of the Enlightenment, they initiated a number of changes, including segregating the sick from the indigent poor, the dead from the living, and the men from the women, which Howard had observed in French prisons.59 Their efforts led to the construction of more hospitals throughout France that followed guidelines promoting proper ventilation and hygiene.”
[2022-06-18 | highlight] “The Lancet article also commended Thomas Trotter’s work on “jail fever” aboard ships. Gover recounts an outbreak of fever that Trotter described on the HMS Colossus in 1796, which had a crew composed of many men who had recently been released from jail. Gover quotes a British physician who praised Trotter for showing that fevers very similar to those in jails will break out on ships “when unwholesome conditions prevail, as starvation and cold, a scanty supply of impure water, deprivation and pollution of air, exclusion of light, idleness, filth, listlessness and grief.”55”
[2022-06-18 | highlight] “Once the Africans began to eat citrus fruit, their symptoms quickly dissipated and their health improved. By the time they reached Jamaica, he noted, “there were little remains of Scurvy among them: they were now better fed, and repaired for market.” Trotter was convinced that if they had not been given fruit in Antigua, at least half of the enslaved population would have died within ten days.21 As the surgeon aboard the ship, he had fulfilled his mission: he had prevented a scurvy epidemic from jeopardizing the profit that investors hoped to make from selling enslaved Africans to work in plantations across the Atlantic World.22

Although hired to serve as the surgeon on the Brookes to protect enslaved Africans’ health and to ensure that they were ready “for market,” Trotter used his experience to develop new ideas about scurvy. When he returned to Edinburgh, he shared his observations with one of his professors, William Cullen, who lectured on scurvy at the university. ”
[2022-06-18 | highlight] “Trotter predicted that the Africans would not remain healthy under such conditions. They were housed in rooms five to six feet high, “imperfectly aired by gratings above.” The temperature reached above ninety-six degrees Fahrenheit. Some were “stowed spoonways … closely locked into one another’s arms” on “the sides of the vessel, raised about two feet and a half from the floor, and of breadth sufficient for the length of a man.” When he went below deck, Trotter remarked that it was “difficult to move without treading upon them” and that he struggled to breathe. No precautions were taken “to preserve the health of the slaves.”11”
[2022-06-18 | highlight] “Thornton cited the observations of Dr. Thomas Trotter aboard the slave ship Brookes in 1783–1784. Trotter, a Scottish naval physician, had served in the British Navy during the American War of Independence; after the war ended, he, like many other military surgeons, was redeployed to work on slave ships.6 As the surgeon aboard the Brookes, he not only treated sick crew members but also investigated the physical conditions aboard the ship. Appalled at the cramped conditions for enslaved Africans, he testified before the House of Commons in 1790 during an investigation into the slave trade. A sketch of the enslaved Africans stowed away like cargo at the bottom of the Brookes became one of the most iconic, if problematic, images of abolition throughout the Atlantic World.7”
[2022-06-18 | highlight] “While scientists studied the composition of air in laboratories, physicians began to analyze disease in terms of changes in the quality of air. The British army physician Sir John Pringle, for example, drew attention to the problem of “foul air” in his 1752 book on military diseases. He theorized that many diseases were caused by putrid air emanating from such sources as marshes, excrement, rotting straw, and sick people in hospitals. Pringle also advocated for the use of mechanical ventilators, designed by Hales, to bring fresh air into closed areas.4”
[2022-06-18 | highlight] “His condition slowly improved, writes Thornton, after he was moved closer to one of the windows, “where fresh air brought him to life.” When the men were finally released, according to Holwell, only 23 of the 146 prisoners were still alive; the rest had suffocated.
Thornton uses this incident to warn of the dangers of crowded spaces and to argue that fresh air is “absolutely necessary for the continuance of life” and “a due supply of it indispensable.”2

Before the mid-eighteenth century, Western physicians had known that air was crucial to human existence, but they did not understand the details of how it could be compromised in crowded spaces.3”
[2022-06-18 | highlight] “The men passed their hats through the bars and the guard filled them with water, but much of the water dripped out as he passed the hats back through the barred windows. Many of the men got no more than a drop of water. They began shouting, “Water, Water!” The stronger men pushed the weaker ones out of their way, killing and trampling some of them.”
[2022-06-18 | highlight] “IN JUNE 1756, 146 wounded and fatigued British soldiers were confined to a sweltering prison cell in Calcutta (Kolkata). The cell was no more than eighteen cubic feet, with only two barred windows. The men were insatiably thirsty; they struggled to breathe and “panted for breath.” They stripped off their clothes and fanned themselves with their hats.1”
[2022-06-18 | highlight] “Maladies of Empire is an effort to recover that history and to chart the factors that informed the development of epidemiology. It is also, most importantly, an effort to shift the focus away from medical theorists, doctors, and other professionals to the people whose health, suffering, and even death contributed to the development of medical knowledge—but who have otherwise disappeared from the history of medicine. Their names and voices have often been lost, at times purposely erased from the historical record. Maladies of Empire aims to outline the settings that led to their disappearance and reclaim their place in history.”
[2022-06-18 | highlight] “Building on geographer David Livingstone’s contention that the location of scientific knowledge informs the conduct and content of the investigation, I argue that part of the origin story of epidemiology has been overlooked because it resulted from studying people who suffered from war, enslavement, and imperialism—most of whom were people of color—in Africa, the Caribbean, India, and the Middle East.9”
[2022-06-18 | highlight] “While doctors and others had documented health conditions in earlier periods, Maladies of Empire explains how ideas developed between 1756 and 1866 became codified into medical theories that contributed to the development of modern epidemiology. It traces how these ideas began first as observations, then as official reports, and finally as arguments and theories in medical journals, lectures, and treatises. Scholars have detailed the ways in which military physicians during wartime innovated sophisticated surgical methods and therapeutics but have overlooked how they created methods that influenced the field of epidemiology.6”
[2022-06-18 | highlight] “Maladies of Empire reveals how slavery, colonialism, and war, often treated separately in scholarly studies, had common features from the vantage point of medical professionals. These episodes produced large captive populations. Slave ships, plantations, and battlefields created social arrangements and built environments that allowed physicians to observe how disease spread and prompted them to investigate the social conditions that led to the outbreak of disease. The increased appearance of these settings around the world between 1756 and 1866 gave way to a proliferation of medical studies that contributed to the emergence of epidemiology. ”
[2022-06-18 | highlight] “Maladies of Empire shifts the focus away from these cities to the epidemic crises that were unfolding around the world and argues that the development of epidemiology, a branch of medical science that deals with the distribution, spread, and control of disease in populations, developed not just from studies of European urban centers but also from the international slave trade, colonialism, warfare, and the population migrations that followed all of these. While the term “epidemiology” did not become officially recognized until 1850, with the establishment of the Epidemiological Society of London, epidemiological thinking, particularly the creation of various methods to track the cause, spread, and prevention of disease, began much earlier.4”
[2022-06-18 | highlight] “Thomson reported other case studies to illustrate that “insufficient nourishment” caused disease and to document how long the human body could survive without food, a condition he called “inedia.” Thomson included two other accounts from the slave trade: he wrote of an enslaved African man who held his teeth shut when the crew tried to pry open his mouth with a metal instrument to feed him, dying after nine days without food, as well as of a captured African woman who was flogged for refusing to eat and died after about a week.”
[2022-06-18 | highlight] “Thomson had not observed this man himself; he was relating a story that had been told by Trotter during his testimony before Parliament on the slave trade, in the 1790s. Thomson used this account as one among several examples to determine how long a human being can survive without food. It wasn’t the brutality that mattered to him, though he did recognize it. It wasn’t the violence of the slave trade, though he did detail it. It was that the enslaved African man had survived for over a week without eating—that was what mattered to Thomson.”

=== Porn Work — Heather Berg ===
[2022-06-19 | highlight] “Both nimbly responding to current working conditions and inventing new ways of working, they use porn work toward their own ends. This book explores these dynamics through interviews with eighty-one porn performers, managers, and crew members. Interviewees spoke to their experience of working across porn’s genres—from big-budget mainstream to low-budget amateur productions and in gay, straight mainstream, and queer and feminist production communities—from the 1970s until the late 2010s.5 Most were current workers when we interviewed in the 2010s, and this book focuses on their strategies for intervening in present conditions.”
[2022-06-19 | highlight] “Porn Work centers on workers’ creative approaches to class struggle.”
[2022-06-19 | highlight] “the conditions porn workers have long experienced are exactly those heralded as the most striking developments in this economic moment: intimate life is increasingly brought to the market; individual workers, rather than employers or the state, assume the economic and health risks of doing business; and a hypermobile gig economy is eclipsing more stable ways of working. The difference here is, as Ace suggests, sex, and that difference brings both particular vulnerabilities and resources—intensified state violence and stigma on the one hand and the potential for pleasureful refusal on the other. The “new economy” is not new—porn workers have been living in it for decades. They have found ways to hack and reshape its conditions for as long.”
[2022-06-19 | highlight] “Porn work reveals deep contradictions at the core of (late) capitalism: Workers exit traditional jobs in search of autonomy but often find precarity on the other side. Pleasure makes work livable but also gets us to do more of it. The authenticity we seek in sex and work can be sold off for parts, and it can also be sustaining. Workers organize against the twin forces of state surveillance and neglect. And solidarities break down when workers escape managerial control by becoming managers themselves. If these tensions are familiar to thinkers and doers of straight work, this is because porn work is not exceptional.”

=== Children Under Fire — John Woodrow Cox ===
[2022-05-26 | highlight] “Ava, who was near the front of the line, had just picked a chocolate cupcake when, at 1:41 on that balmy, blue-sky afternoon, the girl noticed something she had never seen before. A black Dodge pickup curled around the back corner of the school and rumbled toward them. Without waiting for the truck to come to a stop, out of the cab stepped a thin, towering figure wearing dark clothes and a black baseball cap over his wispy blond hair. To the first-graders, he looked like a teenager, and before his truck rolled into the chain-link fence that surrounded the playground, several of them assumed he had come to help with something or to say hello. Then they saw the gun.”
[2022-05-25 | highlight] “Earlier that day, she had heard neighbors firing guns in the nearby woods, a common occurrence in and around Townville, but one that had begun to torture Ava, who couldn’t stand the noise. She paced the living room, muttering to herself and breathing deeply. She finally fled to her parents’ bedroom and into their bathroom closet, which the family had converted into her safe space. She lay down on the floor and wrapped herself in a blanket.
“I don’t want to die,” she told her mom.
When the anxiety didn’t pass, Mary gave her a clonidine to help soothe it, but the medication made her so groggy that her mother feared she wouldn’t be up for her call with Tyshaun that evening.”
[2022-05-25 | highlight] “One study concluded that kids who witness an attack involving a gun or knife can be just as psychologically damaged as children who have themselves been shot or stabbed. When the victim is a close friend or family member, the distress may, in fact, be worse, according to one of the study’s coauthors, clinical psychologist Sherry Hamby. Even kids who just come near acts of gun violence can be changed by them. In Chicago, researchers discovered that kids who simply lived in a neighborhood where a murder had occurred scored worse on vocabulary and reading tests in the week immediately after the killing.
“We don’t do enough to acknowledge the collateral damage of gun violence,” Hamby told me. “We are asking too many to carry this burden.”
[2022-05-25 | highlight] “FOR KIDS ALL across the country, gun violence is, and long has been, a public health crisis that’s both dramatically underestimated and widely ignored. The trend lines are ominous. On average, one child is shot every hour in the United States, and since the 1990s, the country has made no progress in its limited efforts to curb the rates at which children die. Over the past ten years, about thirty thousand kids and teens have been killed by gunfire—recently overtaking cancer as their second-leading cause of death”
[2022-05-25 | highlight] “That changed one afternoon in late September 2016, when she walked outside her school for recess just as a teenager drove up to the playground in a Dodge Ram, jumped out of the pickup, and pointed a gun. One of the bullets he fired struck six-year-old Jacob Hall, a classmate whom Ava loved dearly. Three days later, Jacob died.
She was so overwhelmed by the loss, and the terror of what she’d witnessed, that a pediatrician later diagnosed her with post-traumatic stress disorder and recommended that the girl be home-schooled. Ava, who was prescribed both antipsychotics and antidepressants, began hitting herself and yanking out her eyelashes. In the months that followed, she detailed her torment in journals: “I can’t stop feeling mad.” “No one ever listens to me.” “I hate guns.”

=== Parable of the Sower — Octavia E. Butler ===
[2022-05-05 | highlight] “What’s adequate, I wonder: A house or apartment? A room? A bed in a shared room? A barracks bed? Space on a floor? Space on the ground? And what about people with big families? Won’t they be seen as bad investments? Won’t it make much more sense for companies to hire single people, childless couples, or, at most, people with only one or two kids? I wonder.
And what about those suspended laws? Will it be legal to poison, mutilate, or infect people—as long as you provide them with food, water, and space to die?
Dad decided not to vote for Donner after all. He didn’t vote for anyone. He said politicians turned his stomach.”

=== The Republic of Thieves — Scott Lynch ===
[2022-04-18 | highlight] “IN HIS first few months with Father Chains, Locke began to unlearn the city of Camorr he’d once known and discover something entirely different in its place. As a Shades’ Hill boy, he’d known daylight in flashes, exploring the upper world and then running back to the graveyard’s familiar darkness like a diver surfacing before his breath ran out. The Hill was full of dangers, but they were known dangers, while the city above was full of infinite mysteries.”

=== The Shame Machine — Cathy O'Neil ===
[2022-04-16 | highlight] “Shame is a policing tool, and it has been one since the first clans of humans roamed the savannas of Africa. According to evolutionary psychologists, shame—much like pain, its first cousin—shields us from harm. Pain protects our bodies, teaching us to watch out for fires and sharp blades, and to run away from angry hornets. Shame represents another dimension of pain. It is administered by a collective whose rules and taboos are etched into our psyches. Its goal is the survival not of the individual but of the society. In this sense, shame is borne of the conflict between an individual’s desires and the expectations of the group”

=== Woman, Eating — Claire Kohda ===
[2022-04-15 | highlight] “The void, for me, has stuff in it, so it’s not a void anymore; and the cliff is engulfed by a black and measureless haze. Still, I like to push my body towards its limits. Or, rather, I like to pretend my body has limits. I like to feel the pain of hunger and imagine that the next step after that pain is death. It’s annoying, though. That peak feeling of being right at the edge is always out of my reach. I could stay here, on the floor of Studio A14, Kora Biscuit Factory Studios, for several days, even several weeks, months, years, whatever, and I’d still be able to get at least part way up and crawl to a food source, eat and recover fully; and if I was really weak, so weak that I couldn’t get up and move, I’d still stay alive, just lying here in a coma, for years and years and years, my body refusing to properly die until the Sun came down and engulfed the Earth.
I pull at a bit of loose”

=== Misogynoir Transformed — Moya Bailey ===
[2022-04-15 | highlight] “Daniel Patrick Moynihan, assistant secretary of labor in the Lyndon B. Johnson presidential administration, took it upon himself to investigate poverty in Black families. In his 1965 report, “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action,” he noted that the major threat to racial equity was the deviant nature of the Black family, in which Black women often took on the role of head of household and primary breadwinner. Rather than address the structural impediments that made it difficult for Black men to find work, Moynihan pathologized the Black family, painting Black women’s marginal success in finding work outside the home as a form of emasculation that further inhibited Black men’s industry by making them depressed.33 Rather than address the undergirding white supremacist, capitalistic, and heteronormative imperative implicit in the idealization of the nuclear family and man as the rightful money maker of the home, Moynihan demonized Black women”
[2022-04-15 | highlight] “Misogynoir in Policy
        During the 1940s, Black women who were in the hospital for any reason could be given hysterectomies without their consent or knowledge. This practice was so widespread in Mississippi it was dubbed a “Mississippi appendectomy.”24 Famed civil rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer was one of the women subjected to this practice, and the experience was a major impetus for her activism.25 Sterilization abuse as a tool of white supremacy exceeded the Jim Crow era and continued well into the 1970s with victims like the young Relf sisters in Alabama, sterilized without their knowledge or consent as teenagers”

=== Adverse Event — Jill A. Fisher ===
[2022-04-13 | highlight] “Someone else made a joke, but remembering the tension I had felt in 
Entering the Clinic | 25
the first waiting room, I realized that the participants were nervous not because of any study risks but because of  the risk of being disqualified from the clinical trial. 
One of the white men introduced himself as Bob and bluntly asked, 
"Who are you? What's your story?" I detailed who I was and why I was there, emphasizing that I did not work for the clinic or pharmaceutical company and that I was a university professor. I then affably warned them I would hit them up for interviews in the coming days. 
They politely murmured acquiescence, and I added that they would receive a $20 Visa gift card for participating. A few of them then looked at me with more interest. At that moment, the participant who had been at the phlebotomy station arrived in the waiting room. Bob immediately turned to him and proclaimed, "James, this lady is here to interview us, and she's going to give us 20 bucks." The new arrival, an African American man in his twenties, paused to consider me, then came over and sat in the[…]”
[2022-04-13 | highlight] “Next, chapter 9 takes a different tack on the discussion of risk. While healthy volunteers are concerned about Phase I trial risks, they are often much more vocal about the economic risk of  not qualifying for studies. 
This chapter examines how being disqualified from studies heightens their sense of risk as they attempt to earn income through clinical trials, which profoundly influences their health behaviors even outside of their study participation. These actions on the part of healthy volunteers indicate that Phase I participation could improve their general health even as they expose themselves to the unknown risks of investigational drugs. 
Final”
[2022-04-13 | highlight] “It is about how experiences of being a healthy volunteer are embedded in a larger social context, which is often characterized by discrimination and economic insecurity. The scientific context is also important because it necessitates that healthy volunteers submit to the control ed conditions dictated by the study protocols, and it rewards those who are best suited to the environment by selecting them for additional trials. While Phase I trials are not necessarily transformative experiences for healthy volunteers, participation in these studies can nonetheless disrupt traditional responses to stigmatizing conditions by offering a new, but potential y risky, mechanism to get ahead. Of course, Phase I trials do not guarantee healthy volunteers' success in reshaping their lives, but they do create an alternative economic pathway that, as the following chapters il ustrate, includes not only risks but also important nonfinancial rewards.”
[2022-04-13 | highlight] “Phase I trials are distinct from later- phase studies (i.e., Phase II, III, and IV trials) not only in the enrollment of healthy volunteers but also in the design of the study protocols. Phase I studies tend to be conducted in residential clinics that specialize in this type of research.7 These studies are also shorter in length, lasting only several days or weeks compared to several months or years for later- phase trials, and they general y require participants to consent to a clinic confinement for some part of, if not the entire, study. The confinement period enables control of participants' diet and frequent collection of data about the investigational drugs, primarily through electrocardiograms (referred to as ECGs or EKGs) and blood and urine collection. For example, on the day a drug is administered, it is not unusual for the protocol to require ten or more blood draws during a 24- hour period. The confinement also helps to ensure that participants are reasonably safe during the study because the research staff can monitor them and intervene should any serious adverse event occur”
[2022-04-12 | highlight] “In May 1949 the Harmon Committee concluded that the most recent American war plan, TROJAN, would reduce Soviet industrial production by 30 to 40 percent. It would also kill perhaps 2.7 million civilians and injure an additional 4 million. Those were conservative estimates, not taking into account the fires ignited by more than one hundred atomic bombs. But TROJAN wouldn’t prevent the Red Army from conquering Europe and the Middle East. Nor would it lead to the collapse of the Soviet Union. “For the majority of Soviet people,” the committee noted, “atomic bombing would validate Soviet propaganda against foreign powers, stimulate resentment against the United States, unify these people and increase their will to fight.” Nevertheless, Harmon saw no realistic alternative to the current war plan. The atomic blitz was “the only means of rapidly inflicting shock and serious damage” on the Soviet military effort, and “the advantages of its early use would be transcending.”

=== Command and Control — Eric Schlosser ===
[2022-04-12 | highlight] “In May 1949 the Harmon Committee concluded that the most recent American war plan, TROJAN, would reduce Soviet industrial production by 30 to 40 percent. It would also kill perhaps 2.7 million civilians and injure an additional 4 million. Those were conservative estimates, not taking into account the fires ignited by more than one hundred atomic bombs. But TROJAN wouldn’t prevent the Red Army from conquering Europe and the Middle East. Nor would it lead to the collapse of the Soviet Union. “For the majority of Soviet people,” the committee noted, “atomic bombing would validate Soviet propaganda against foreign powers, stimulate resentment against the United States, unify these people and increase their will to fight.” Nevertheless, Harmon saw no realistic alternative to the current war plan. The atomic blitz was “the only means of rapidly inflicting shock and serious damage” on the Soviet military effort, and “the advantages of its early use would be transcending.”
[2022-04-12 | highlight] “The destructive power of these weapons was so great that the logic of waging a preventive war, of launching a surprise attack upon an enemy, might prove hard to resist. Like a shootout in the Old West, a nuclear war might be won by whoever fired first. A country with fewer atomic bombs than its adversary had an especially strong incentive to launch an attack out of the blue. And for that reason, among others, a number of high-ranking American officers argued that the United States should bomb the Soviet Union before it obtained any nuclear weapons”

“General Groves thought that approach would make sense, if “we were ruthlessly realistic.” General Orvil Anderson, commander of the Air University, publicly endorsed an attack on the Soviets. “I don’t advocate preventive war,” Anderson told a reporter. “I advocate the shedding of illusions.” He thought that Jesus Christ would approve of dropping atomic bombs on the Soviet Union: “I think I could explain to Him that I had saved civilization.” Anderson was suspended for the remarks”
[2022-04-12 | highlight] “At first, the United States conducted only precision bombing raids on Japan. But heavy cloud cover and high-altitude winds made it difficult to hit industrial targets. On the night of March 9, 1945, the Army Air Forces tried a new approach. American planes struck Tokyo with two thousand tons of bombs containing napalm and jellied gasoline. Although a major industrial area was destroyed, the real targets were block after block of Japanese buildings made of wood, paper, and bamboo. Within hours the firestorm consumed one quarter of the city. It killed about one hundred thousand civilians, and left about a million homeless. This was truly, in the words of historian John W. Dower, “war without mercy.”

=== Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War — Viet Thanh Nguyen ===
[2022-03-22 | highlight] “ These are the places where memories of war belong. Most troublesome is the memory of how it was a war that took place not only over there but also over here, because a war is not just about the shooting but about the people who make the bullets and deliver the bullets and, perhaps most importantly, pay for the bullets, the distracted citizenry complicit in what King calls the “brutal solidarity” of white brother and black.5”

=== The Economic Weapon — Nicholas Mulder ===
[2022-03-06 | highlight] “The complexity of these techniques makes clear how much economic warfare depended on intelligence gathering and knowledge production. To cut off an entire country from the dense linkages that sustained global exchange, it was necessary to map the worldwide fabric of material flows connecting it to the rest of the world. But in the 1920s, the administrative state in many European countries was still in its infancy. The progress of sanctions came to depend not just on new legal powers, but also on more accurate statistics. In combining the quest for power with the elaboration of knowledge, sanctions were a quintessential form of so-called biopolitics—the state management of human lives and livelihoods—under conditions of advancing globalization.”
[2022-03-06 | highlight] “Wilson warned that a boycott could cripple a modern trading nation’s standard of living. But he ultimately pinned his hopes “not only on the physical pinch, not only the fact that you cannot get raw materials and must stop your factories, not only the fact that you cannot get credit, that your assets are useless,” but on the mental force of being placed under sanctions, “the still greater pinch that comes when a nation knows that it is sent to coventry and despised.” Ignoring their physical effects, Wilson claimed their true power was psychological; sanctions worked because “it is the soul that is wounded much more poignantly than the body.”12 Sanctions were a useful antidote to war exactly because in the modern world, being quarantined from global commerce was an unbearable form of imprisonment.”
[2022-03-06 | highlight] “If we compare the three major anti-civilian weapons of the interwar period—air power, gas warfare, and economic blockade—it becomes clear that blockade was by far the deadliest. In World War I, 300,000–400,000 people died of blockade-induced starvation and illness in Central Europe, with an additional 500,000 deaths in the Ottoman provinces of the Middle East affected by the Anglo-French blockade.9 Before World War II these hundreds of thousands of deaths by economic isolation were the chief man-made cause of civilian death in twentieth-century conflict. Yet unlike aerial bombing and gas warfare, the lethal effects of blockade were remarkably difficult to render visible and condemn, even to their direct users. Arnold-Forster worried that “the economic weapon is one which is so infernally convenient to use that it naturally commends itself to those who sit in offices. Pens seem so much cleaner instruments than bayonets, and can be handled by the amateur with so much less exertion, so much less realisation of the consequences.”10 Sanctions”
[2022-03-06 | highlight] “Today, economic sanctions are generally regarded as an alternative to war. But for most people in the interwar period, the economic weapon was the very essence of total war. Many sanctionists regretfully noted the devastating effects of pressure on civilians but nonetheless wholly accepted them. Woodrow Wilson held that if “thoughtful men have . . . thought, and thought truly, that war is barbarous, . . . the boycott is an infinitely more terrible instrument of war.”2 William Arnold-Forster, a British blockade administrator and ardent internationalist, admitted that during the Great War “we tried, just as the Germans tried, to make our enemies unwilling that their children should be born; we tried to bring about such a state of destitution that those children, if born at all, should be born dead.”3”

=== Johannes Cabal the Necromancer — Jonathan L. Howard ===
[2022-03-06 | highlight] “Satan was studying the contract. “You sold your soul to gain an insight into necromancy in the first place. If I were to give you your soul back, I would want that in return. That would invalidate the whole scheme, perhaps?”
“I need that knowledge,” said Cabal. “That is non-negotiable.”
Satan smiled. “That’s that, then. You can’t eat your cake and have it, too, Johannes. Sorry and all that.”
[2022-03-06 | highlight] “Cabal.
“Now, you see, Johannes, we have a little bit of a problem there.” The secretary landed on Satan’s casually opened hand and passed him a roll of parchment before ceasing to exist. Satan unrolled it between his fingers and read it as he spoke. “You see, as a rule of thumb, I don’t give souls back. It might set a precedent. These things do. This”—he indicated the parchment with the wave of a finger tipped with a nail the size of a very well-manicured tombstone—“is a perfectly standard contract with the exception of a proviso about you giving up your soul immediately rather than my having to wait until you’re dead or after a set period, the Faust clause, that sort of thing. My notes indicate that was your idea.”
[2022-03-06 | highlight] “so.
“ ‘Ratuth Slabuth,’ eh?” said Cabal. “You wouldn’t happen to have started your career as Ragtag Slyboots, Despoiler of Milk and Entangler of Shoelaces, would you?”
The effect was electric. Ratuth Slabuth folded up like an especially large deck of cards in the blink of an eye until he was the same height as Cabal.
“How did you know that?” he asked quickly.
“I’m a necromancer. You’d be surprised at the sources we dig up. Now, then, do I get my audience with Satan or do I spread rumours about a certain diabolic general’s personal history? Which is it to be?”

=== World War Z — Max Brooks ===
[2022-02-19 | highlight] “And then? When the outbreaks became more serious, and the press finally reported that there was no wonder drug?Pre-fucking-cisely! That’s the alpha cunt who should be shot, what’s her name, who first broke that story! Look what she did! Pulled the fuckin’ rug right out from under us all! She caused the spiral! She caused the Great Panic!And you take no personal responsibility?For what? For making a little fuckin’ cash…well, not a little [giggles]. All I did was what any of us are ever supposed to do. I chased my dream, and I got my slice. You wanna blame someone, blame whoever first called it rabies, or who knew it wasn’t rabies and gave us the green light anyway. Shit, you wanna blame someone, why not start with all the sheep who forked over their greenbacks without bothering to do a little responsible research. I never held a gun to their heads. They made the choice themselves. They’re the bad guys, not me. I never directly hurt anybody, and if anybody was too stupid to get themselves hurt, boo-fuckin-hoo. Of course…”
[2022-02-19 | highlight] “But the virus wasn’t airborne.It didn’t matter! It still had the same brand name! “From the Makers of…” All I had to say was “May Prevent Some Viral Infections.” That was it! Now I understand why it used to be illegal to shout fire in a crowded theater. People weren’t going to say “Hey, I don’t smell smoke, is there really a fire,” no, they say “Holy shit, there’s a fire! RUN!” [Laughs.] I made money on home purifiers, car purifiers; my biggest seller was this little doodad you wore around your neck when you got on a plane! I don’t know if it even filtered ragweed, but it sold.Things got so good, I started setting up these dummy companies, you know, with plans to build manufacturing facilities all over the country. The shares from these dumbos sold almost as much as the real stuff. It wasn’t even the idea of safety anymore, it was the idea of the idea of safety! Remember when we started to get our first cases here in the States, that guy in Florida who said he’d been bitten but survived because he was taking Phalanx? OH! [He stands, mimes the act of frantic fornication[…]”
[2022-02-19 | highlight] “What happened?The White House loved Phase One. It was cheap, fast, and if executed properly, 100 percent covert. Phase One involved the insertion of Special Forces units into infested areas. Their orders were to investigate, isolate, and eliminate.Eliminate?With extreme prejudice.Those were the Alpha teams?Yes, sir, and they were extremely successful. Even though their battle record is sealed for the next 140 years, I can say that it remains one of the most outstanding moments in the history of America’s elite warriors.So what went wrong?Nothing, with Phase One, but the Alpha teams were only supposed to be a stopgap measure. Their mission was never to extinguish the threat, only delay it long enough to buy time for Phase Two.But Phase Two was never completed.Never even begun, and herein lies the reason why the American military was caught so shamefully unprepared.Phase Two required a massive national undertaking”

“In totalitarian regimes—communism, fascism, religious fundamentalism—popular support is a given. You can start wars, you can prolong them, you can put anyone in uniform for any length of time without ever having to worry about the slightest political backlash. In a democracy, the polar opposite is true. Public support must be husbanded as a finite national resource. It must be spent wisely, sparingly, and with the greatest return on your investment. America is especially sensitive to war weariness, and nothing brings on a backlash like the perception of defeat. I say “perception” because America is a very all-or-nothing society. We like the big win, the touchdown, the knockout in the first round. We like to know, and for everyone else to know, that our victory wasn’t only uncontested, it was positively devastating. If not…well…look at where we were before the Panic. We didn’t lose the last brushfire conflict, far from it. We actually accomplished a very difficult task with very few resources and under extremely unfavorable circumstances. We won, but the public didn’t see it that way because it wasn’t the blitzkrieg smackdown that our national spirit demanded. Too much time had gone[…]”

“Think about just the dollar value of Phase Two. Do you know the price tag of putting just one American citizen in uniform? And I don’t just mean the time that he’s actively in that uniform: the training, the equipment, the food, the housing, the transport, the medical care. I’m talking about the long-term dollar value that the country, the American taxpayer, has to shell out to that person for the rest of their natural life. This is a crushing financial burden, and in those days we barely had enough funding to maintain what we had.Even if the coffers hadn’t been empty, if we’d had all the money to make all the uniforms we needed to implement Phase Two, who do you think we could have conned into filling them? This goes to the heart of America’s war weariness. As if the “traditional” horrors weren’t bad enough—the dead, the disfigured, the psychologically destroyed—now you had a whole new breed of difficulties, “The Betrayed.” We were a volunteer army, and look what happened to our volunteers. How many stories do you remember about some soldier who had his term of service extended, or some exreservist who, after[…]”

=== Unsavory Truth — Marion Nestle ===
[2022-02-15 | highlight] “The current administration is not the first to cut research funding; previous administrations also did so. Until recently, government granting agencies—mainly NIH and the USDA—funded about half of all food, nutrition, and agriculture research. But by 2013, industry and foundations accounted for 70 percent of food-related research. This shift occurred as a result of two simultaneous trends: a decline in federal funding and a sharp increase in private funding that began early in the twenty-first century.3
Universities actively encourage industry partnerships. My university’s medical school, for example, has an Office of Industrial Liaison to facilitate “the commercial development of… products to benefit the public, while providing resources to the University to support its research, education, and patient care missions.”4 The University of Colorado, Boulder, former home of the GEBN, says it “has a long history of partnering with industry and is putting new attention to expanding those partnerships.”5 In 2016, when I was a visiting fellow at the University of Sydney, its vice-chancellor announced a forthcoming strategic plan: “We must more fully engage with the community, industry and business in order to ensure that our work is relevant and impactful.”6[…]”
[2022-02-15 | highlight] “But in 2017, the New York Times began to publish a series of investigative reports collectively titled “Planet Fat.” These articles describe in riveting detail the marketing methods used by international food companies to promote sales of highly processed food products in developing countries—Brazil, Ghana, Senegal, Colombia, Mexico, Malaysia, India, Chile—and, inadvertently, to promote the rapid rise in obesity and its health consequences in such countries.
The article about Malaysia is especially relevant to our discussion because it deals with the influence of food companies on the research and opinions of the country’s leading nutritionist, Tee E-Siong. Tee heads the Nutrition Society of Malaysia, a group funded by Nestlé and other food companies. He also is scientific director of ILSI in that region.30 The Times headline got right to the point: “In Asia’s fattest country, nutritionists take money from food giants.”31 In particular, Tee was senior author on a study sponsored by Nestlé and Cereal Partners Worldwide (a joint venture between Nestlé and General Mills). The study examined how Nestlé’s Milo (a sugar-sweetened, chocolate-flavored, vitamin-enriched malted milk drink) affected children who consumed it at breakfast. Unsurprisingly, the study found that children[…]”
[2022-02-15 | highlight] “Neuman’s article about this discovery appeared on the newspaper’s front page in September with the title “For your health, Froot Loops.” It reported that Michael Jacobson, CSPI’s executive director, had resigned from the Smart Choices panel in disgust: “It was paid for by industry and when industry put down its foot and said this is what we’re doing, that was it, end of story.… You could start out with sawdust, add calcium or vitamin A, and meet the criteria.” Neuman also quoted Eileen Kennedy, president of the Smart Choices board and dean of the nutrition school at Tufts University: “You have a choice between a doughnut and a cereal.… So Froot Loops is a better choice.”14 This quickly got translated to Froot Loops being “better than a doughnut,” or as the Economist put it, “It’s practically spinach.”15
The FDA and USDA jointly wrote to the Smart Choices program questioning whether its logo might encourage the public to select highly processed foods and refined grains instead of fruits, vegetables, and whole grains. Change”
[2022-02-15 | highlight] “ASN is a good example of how food industry sponsorship produces troubling effects. It is the principal US association for doctoral-level academics and physicians who conduct nutrition research. It has about six thousand members (including me). Its very mission includes industry: to bring together “the world’s top researchers, clinical nutritionists and industry to advance our knowledge and application of nutrition for the sake of humans and animals.”3 The society holds conferences, gives awards, and publishes four research journals, and it actively seeks food-industry donations for such activities.
ASN has a complicated history. It was formed in 2005 through the merger of three older societies: the American Institute of Nutrition (AIN—established in 1928), the American Society for Clinical Nutrition (established in 1961), and the Society for International Nutrition (established in 1996). The oldest, the AIN, was founded in the 1920s to represent some of the first researchers engaged in identifying and characterizing the newly discovered vitamins and minerals. Their experiments, which often involved feeding diets of defined composition to rats, dogs, or chickens, appeared to constitute an entirely new field of study, one that called for its own professional society and journal. These scientists formed the[…]”
[2022-02-15 | highlight] “companies. In the United States, nutrition scientists and medical nutrition researchers generally belong to the American Society for Nutrition (ASN), nutrition educators to the Society for Nutrition Education and Behavior (SNEB), and dietetics practitioners to the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics (AND). Other national nutrition organizations tend to represent more specialized interests. The Obesity Society, for example, represents medical and health professionals who treat that condition; its website promotes its “longstanding history of mutually beneficial partnerships with industry.” Two much smaller nutrition societies deserve special mention for their unusual refusal to accept industry funding: the 1,400-member American College of Nutrition, which focuses on the application of research to clinical practice, and the World Public Health Nutrition Association, which has about 500 members.”
[2022-02-15 | highlight] “This dispute was covered by the New York Times (which quoted me) as well as other publications. The AP’s Candice Choi interviewed ILSI’s executive director, who admitted that his group had initiated this study. Choi obtained emails revealing that ILSI had requested revisions of the review and that one author had failed to disclose grants from Coca-Cola and other companies with interests in making sugar appear harmless. The Annals had to correct the authors’ disclosure statements and publish a clarification that ILSI had, in fact, reviewed and approved the review. All of this convinced Mars, Incorporated, a member of ILSI, to tell Choi that this study “undermines the work of public health officials and makes all industry-funded research look bad.”40 Soon after, as noted in Chapter 4, Mars withdrew from ILSI.
The authors’ disclosure statement warned readers, “Given our funding source, our study team has a financial conflict of interest and readers should consider our results carefully.” Yes, readers should. Unless ILSI and its commissioned authors believe that dietary guidelines ought to encourage eating more sugar, their review is pointless. ILSI-sponsored guidelines for selection of advisory committee members argue that financial biases are immaterial unless[…]”
[2022-02-15 | highlight] “I can think of one more: do the obvious. A study funded by the Egg Nutrition Center demonstrates that eating eggs along with raw vegetables increases absorption of vitamin E. Of course it does; vitamin E is fat-soluble and requires fat for absorption. This study is especially relevant because its senior author was a member of the 2015 DGAC.32 Shortly before release of the 2015 dietary guidelines, Barnard ran a billboard campaign pressing for reinstatement of the eat-less-cholesterol recommendation (Figure 8.2).
I was a reviewer on an early draft of the 2015 dietary guidelines, but that experience did not prepare me for what the guidelines said about cholesterol when they appeared early in 2016. To quote: “The Key Recommendation from the 2010 Dietary Guidelines to limit consumption of dietary cholesterol to 300 mg per day is not included in the 2015 edition, but… individuals should eat as little dietary cholesterol as possible while consuming a healthy eating pattern.… Eating patterns that include lower intake of dietary cholesterol are associated with reduced risk of CVD [cardiovascular disease].”33 This is head-spinning advice. If I am reading the guidelines correctly, they are saying that you don’t[…]”
[2022-02-15 | highlight] “In March 2016, Sandy Douglas, then president of Coca-Cola North America, updated estimates of the company’s funding of research and partnerships since 2010 to $132.8 million. He further updated the figure to $135.4 million in October 2016 and to $138.3 million in March 2017; the company did a further update to $140 million in December 2017.31 The more recent updates did not specify the proportion devoted to research as opposed to community partnerships, but the company has been generous to researchers. The email correspondence obtained by the New York Times between Coca-Cola executives and Peter Katzmarzyk at Louisiana State University bears on that point.”
[2022-02-15 | highlight] “The emails reveal that a few months later, Applebaum distributed a draft proposal for the GEBN “tweaked from an earlier doc used to sell the concept into the Company.” Her proposal positioned the GEBN as a weapon in the “growing war between the public health community and private industry over how to reduce obesity.” As she put it, “Sides are being chosen and battle lines are being drawn.… The GEBN needs to quickly establish itself as the place the media goes to for a comment on any obesity issue.” The GEBN, she said, needed to “devise, create, and implement a multi-year advocacy ‘campaign’” to serve “as a counterforce to one-sided, regulation-driven proponents. Akin to a political campaign, we will develop, deploy and evolve a powerful and multi-faceted strategy to counter radical organizations and their proponents.” Coca-Cola, she said, would kick-start the GEBN with a $20 million endowment yielding an annual budget of $1 million.7”

“next several months as he filed open-records requests and conducted interviews to learn more about the GEBN’s relationship to Coca-Cola. He published his findings in August 2015 in an article that began on the front page and continued to an entire inside page. He reported that Coca-Cola had granted Blair more than $3.5 million and Hand nearly $1.5 million for energy-balance research since 2008 and had contributed $1 million to the University of Colorado’s research foundation to start the GEBN. I was quoted in the article and soon heard from other reporters incredulous that researchers paid by Coca-Cola could argue that diet had nothing to do with obesity—an idea so self-serving and so far from scientific truth that it elicited immediate ridicule (see Figure 7.1).11”
[2022-02-15 | highlight] “That year, it established the Beverage Institute for Health and Wellness expressly to raise awareness of the importance of “active, healthy lifestyles” and of beverages as effective delivery systems for hydration. By 2008, research papers by government and university scientists were disclosing Coca-Cola sponsorship.1
In 2012, Coca-Cola’s vice president and chief scientific and regulatory officer, Rhona Applebaum (who also became president of ILSI in 2015), announced a major research effort to counter evidence linking sodas to poor diets and health. Applebaum did not mince words. Company-funded research, she said, was essential to rebut the “agenda-driven science” of advocates for soda taxes. Coca-Cola intended to train journalists and to engage scientists as partners to conduct both “defensive and offensive research.” Otherwise, the industry would be at the mercy of “activists and crusading journalists.”2”
[2022-02-15 | highlight] “Time carried a full-page ad that read, “Refresh your memory: learn about this preliminary research on pomegranate polyphenol antioxidants and memory and cognition.” These, the ad admits, “are early scientific findings on cognitive health and the impact of pomegranate juice on the human brain has not yet been adequately studied. Clinical research is needed to help establish causation.”25 Is such research worth doing? For marketing, apparently so. For science? It depends on the research question.
I end this saga by quoting the conclusion of the one POM-funded study I ran across in my year-long collection: “While pomegranate extract supplementation may reduce blood pressure and increase the antioxidant activity in hemodialysis patients, it does not improve other markers of cardiovascular risk, physical function, or muscle strength.”26 The no-benefit results suggest that this study must have been designed with appropriate controls, which it was. But “may reduce blood pressure” gives the results a positive spin; the investigators observed no reduction when they corrected the results for baseline blood pressure.”
[2022-02-15 | highlight] “POM’s response? It sued. The company argued that the FTC’s actions “detrimentally impacted POM’s freedom of speech now, the value of its research program now, and are violating its First and Fifth Amendment rights.”21 Really? I find it hard to believe that America’s Founding Fathers introduced the First and Fifth Amendments to protect the rights of POM Wonderful to make unsubstantiated health claims. The court, apparently, had the same concern. It upheld the FTC’s complaint that POM’s heart disease and cancer claims were false and unsubstantiated. It agreed with the FTC that POM’s research was insufficiently compelling, particularly because many of POM’s studies were uncontrolled or unblinded (study subjects knew what they were drinking or taking). Furthermore, “the erectile dysfunction claims were false and unsubstantiated because the study on which the company relied did not show that POM Juice was any more effective than a placebo.”22”

“According to information in the court decision, POM had invested more than $35 million in nearly one hundred studies at forty-four different institutions. At least seventy of its studies were published in peer-reviewed journals. Among other benefits, these demonstrated—using appropriate scientific methods—that pomegranate juice has antioxidant activity and acts as an antioxidant in the body. No surprise there. All fruits and vegetables have antioxidants (they help fend off invaders). POM’s research did not compare the effects of the antioxidants in pomegranates to those in any other fruit. Whether a particular fruit has more antioxidants depends on which particular antioxidants you look for, but what difference does it make? Plant foods as a whole promote health. The particular role of antioxidants in health continues to be difficult to sort out.”

“the company placed a full-page ad in the New York Times declaring, “FTC v. POM: You be the judge.” The ad included selected quotations from the judge’s decision. Here is one: “Competent and reliable scientific evidence shows that pomegranate juice provides a benefit to promoting erectile health and erectile function (here).” This statement is indeed here, but the ad omitted the sentence that follows: “There is insufficient competent and reliable scientific evidence to show that pomegranate juice prevents or reduces the risk of erectile dysfunction or has been clinically proven to do so.”23”
[2022-02-15 | highlight] “Under the FDA’s arcane rules for health claims, POM was advertising its juice and supplements as drugs, not food. Understanding the distinction requires a bit of history. Until the early 1990s, the FDA did not permit foods or supplements to be marketed with statements that they could prevent, mitigate, or treat a disease; only drugs do these things. If marketers wanted to make drug claims, they had to prove safety and efficacy. Food companies knew that clinical trials would be impossibly expensive and unlikely to prove much. Instead, they lobbied for the right to “inform the public” about health benefits.”
[2022-02-15 | highlight] “I go through all this, with his permission, because he is especially thoughtful about the role of research in food marketing. I told him that I do not need more information about the nutritional benefits of pecans. I already know that people who habitually eat nuts tend to be healthier than people who do not. This is true whether the nuts are pecans, macadamias, walnuts, almonds, or any other. But nut-eaters may differ in other ways from non-nut-eaters. What kind of research would it take to demonstrate that eating pecans—as compared to any other nut—produced measurable improvements in health? Such studies would be impossibly difficult and expensive. Do the nutritional differences between one nut and another merit funding a clinical trial to find out? I think not, but I can understand that nut producers might disagree.
Worn sent me the protocol for a study of the effects of a pecan-rich diet on biomarkers of risk for cardiovascular disease and diabetes in overweight people. The investigators presented the preliminary results of this study at the 2016 annual meeting of the American Society for Nutrition. Their poster presentation associated eating pecans with “reductions in fasting[…]”
[2022-02-10 | highlight] “Even so, Julia Belluz of Vox judged the university as “incredibly irresponsible” in “behaving like a marketing machine for a dairy company.”42 HNR criticized the committee for not dealing adequately with the university’s failure to be more transparent with the media. The AP’s Candice Choi dug deeper and obtained emails between Fifth Quarter and the investigator that explained their hurry to publish the press release. Fifth Quarter wanted the study results out in time to coincide with the opening of the film Concussion, an exposé of the National Football League’s decades of inaction in dealing with head trauma.43 I can only imagine what this “study” could have done for sales of Fifth Quarter Fresh.
The moral: universities run grave reputational risks if they do not hold industry-sponsored research and research investigators to high standards of ethical conduct. Sometimes, as in this case, “it’s everything wrong with modern-day science-by-press-release in one anecdote.”44 Universities earn respect when they hold everyone—students, professors, administrators, and even public relations staff—to high ethical standards.”
[2022-02-10 | highlight] “Yogurt companies in particular want us to believe that the living bacteria (“probiotics”) in yogurt confer special health benefits. This idea dates to the early twentieth century when the Russian scientist Élie Metchnikoff attributed the ostensibly long life of Bulgarians to their yogurt consumption. I say “ostensibly” because claims of their longevity—and yogurt-eating—did not hold up to scrutiny. Nevertheless, the idea stuck. Yogurt-funded studies show that yogurt is associated with another wide array of benefits: reduced risk of metabolic syndrome, type 2 diabetes, weight gain, and obesity; higher bone density in older adults; and better digestibility by people intolerant to the lactose sugar in milk.30”
[2022-02-10 | highlight] “I enjoy my conversations and debates with Greg Miller, the chief scientific officer of the National Dairy Council (NDC), who routinely sends me studies demonstrating the benefits of dairy products. The NDC is the marketing arm of the dairy checkoffs; it offers grants for research proposals to find health benefits for dairy foods.
The NDC says it funds research based on principles of scientific integrity, transparency, and public-private partnerships, as set forth by ILSI, the industry-funded entity mentioned often in this book. An NDC report lists hundreds of the studies it funds in three categories: nutrition, product development, and sustainability. In the nutrition category alone, I counted 119 studies completed or in progress from 2010 to 2016. Public health studies investigate the benefits of dairy products—particularly full-fat varieties—for cardiovascular, bone, metabolic, and childhood health. Studies aimed at consumer benefits examine how dairy foods improve muscle health, sports performance, digestive health, and cognition. The NDC also has other research priorities aimed at demonstrating the benefits of whey ingredients and milk fractions. It funds a few projects on sustainability—on methane emissions, for example”
[2022-02-10 | highlight] “Michele Simon is currently the executive director of the Plant Based Food Association, a trade group for companies producing replacements for animal products. In 2014, she wrote Whitewashed, a report unsurprisingly critical of the USDA’s promotion of dairy products (Figure 5.1). Simon made three intriguing observations: nearly half the US milk supply goes for cheese and frozen desserts; chocolate-and strawberry-flavored milks (with sugar added) account for 70 percent of milk sales in schools; and more than 10 percent of all US sugar goes into the production of dairy products. Checkoff funds, she said, should not be used to promote “dairy junk foods” that conflict with dietary guidelines. Her report also called for better USDA oversight to make certain that checkoff funds were not used for lobbying”
[2022-02-10 | highlight] “The idea that red meat is linked to cancer risk emerged shortly after World War II when the physician Denis Burkitt (famous for describing the cancer now known as Burkitt’s lymphoma) observed that people consuming high-meat Western diets exhibited more cancers of the colon and rectum. Cigarette smoking and obesity are well-established risk factors for certain cancers; population studies suggest that meat is too. People who eat the most meat display about a 20 percent higher risk of colon and rectal cancers, but they also seem to be at higher risk for cancers of the esophagus, liver, lung, and pancreas.6
The reasons for these associations are not fully understood. Scientists suspect that certain components of meat naturally present or created during cooking or processing—salts, iron, nitrates, or nitrites—are potential carcinogens. On this basis, the World Health Organization (WHO) classifies red meat as “probably carcinogenic to humans” and processed meats as unambiguously “carcinogenic to humans.”7 These findings, says WHO, support public health recommendations to limit meat consumption”
[2022-02-10 | highlight] “The meat checkoffs include the American Lamb Board, the Cattlemen’s Beef Board, and the National Pork Board. Early in 2018, the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association (NCBA), which has a contract with the Cattlemen’s Beef Board for research grants “to enhance the profit potential for beef/beef products,” requested preproposals for research to support “health outcomes associated with aspects of physical and mental strength and wellbeing.” The NCBA was particularly seeking research proposals to demonstrate that beef improves physical function, supports heart health, reduces inflammation, and preserves cognitive function in the elderly.5 Positioning meat as a health food seems like a new tactic. Historically, the meat industry’s main research concern has been to counter suggestions that beef, pork, lamb, and processed meats increase the risk of cancer or heart disease.”
[2022-02-10 | highlight] “As I discussed in Food Politics, the meat and dairy industries are so powerful that US dietary guidelines cannot advise Americans to eat less of their products. The 2015 guidelines use euphemisms: “Choose lean meats,” or, for dairy, “choose fat-free or low-fat.” The meat advice is based on “strong” evidence that eating less beef, pork, and lamb, and especially processed meats like bacon and sausage, helps reduce the risk of heart disease and on “moderate” evidence for a reduced risk of obesity, type 2 diabetes, and certain cancers. I put the judgments in quotes because the evidence is mainly correlational; meat-eating is consistently associated with disease risk, but whether it causes disease or is just a marker for other causal factors has been difficult to demonstrate.”
[2022-02-10 | highlight] “As we now know from the discovery of decades-old documents from a bankrupt sugar company, this industry was engaged in casting doubt on inconvenient science as early as the 1960s. Then, the Sugar Research Foundation, the forerunner of today’s Sugar Association, was spending 10 percent of its research budget on studies to counter research suggesting an association between sugar and the risk of heart disease. To distract dental professionals from suggesting limits on sugar to prevent tooth decay, the foundation lobbied the National Institute of Dental Research to fund studies on anything except sugar: plaque removal, vaccines, fluoride treatments, mouth bacteria, or tooth brushing. This effort succeeded; the 1971 National Caries Program promoted the alternative methods to reduce tooth decay but said nothing about the need to reduce exposure to sugary foods and drinks.3”
[2022-02-10 | highlight] “I occasionally receive letters from the California Table Grape Commission’s research director soliciting proposals for “$35,000 grants toward research on any relevant health issue in which grape consumption may have a beneficial impact.”9 A similar announcement for $30,000 grants comes from Yogurt in Nutrition for “research on the health benefits associated with yogurt consumption.”10 The California Strawberry Commission’s request for proposals is even more explicit: “The primary goal of the CSC nutrition research program is to establish the scientific evidence to support a vascular health claim under EFSA [European Food Safety Authority] or FDA criteria.”11 The wording of these requests indicates that these groups are not asking open-ended, basic research questions about the health effects of specific foods. Instead, they are asking for studies designed specifically to establish their products’ benefits as a basis for health claims. As we will see, such research is so useful for marketing purposes that a great many companies and trade associations eagerly invest in these kinds of studies.”
[2022-02-10 | highlight] “When the feasibility results showed that women who enrolled in the study would follow its protocols, Pierce applied to the National Cancer Institute (NCI) for funding for a multicenter trial to measure the dietary intake, health, and survival of three thousand women who had been treated for breast cancer—for an average of seven years. Eventually, the NCI granted $17 million to cover the study’s costs from 1997 to 2002 and, later, an additional $15 million for expenses through 2007. No, these are not misprints. The NCI grants really did add up to $32 million on top of the Walton Foundation’s $5 million. But, Pierce reminded me, those costs need to be viewed in context: “At the time, it was approximately the same as a single piece of innovative technological equipment in the hospital.”7”
[2022-02-10 | highlight] “Following World War II, American companies such as General Foods, Kraft, and Quaker Oats built research facilities and recruited scientists to work in them, as did Nestlé and Unilever in Europe. Science directors of food companies had large budgets with enough discretionary funds to conduct basic research along with studies aimed at product development. Unilever scientists, for example, studied fundamental properties of fats and oils that might or might not apply to margarines. But by the mid-1980s, in response to shareholder pressures for higher and more immediate returns on investment, American food companies shifted their research enterprises to focus more directly on commercial goals. As companies merged and consolidated and as short-term financial objectives became ever more pressing, most food companies in the United States closed their in-house research facilities and contracted out their research needs to university scientists. Today, Nestlé (in Switzerland) and Unilever (in the Netherlands) are unique in maintaining large research operations that still do basic research, although they too partner with researchers at universities”
[2022-02-10 | highlight] “Food is more complicated. We eat an enormous variety of foods, and diets also vary enormously—from day to day and from one person to another. Everything else we do also varies. Humans make terrible experimental animals. We cannot be locked in cages and fed controlled diets, at least not long enough to learn anything useful. All of this forces studies of diet and health to be largely observational rather than experimental and, therefore, exceptionally vulnerable to biases in design and interpretation.”
[2022-02-10 | highlight] “A year later, he called on physicians to remove themselves from the medical marketplace and put the interests of patients first. And a decade later, the American Medical Association, finally taking up this issue, observed that drug-industry gifts were creating three hazards: influencing physicians, giving the appearance of impropriety, and increasing drug costs to patients. It argued for a new policy: physicians should accept only gifts that directly benefit patients and are of minimal value.29 But as we have seen, even small gifts exert influence.”
[2022-02-10 | highlight] “A more realistic explanation is the ease of designing research to obtain a desired result, whether consciously or unconsciously. All it takes is to leave out appropriate comparisons and put a positive spin on results that do not show an effect. Bero’s group has demonstrated that five industries, pharma among them, selectively fund research that supports industry objectives, manipulate research questions to obtain desired results, and suppress research with unfavorable results. Funding source, Krimsky suggests, may not be definitive evidence of bias, but it should strongly suggest the possibility of bias. Intentionally or not, drug-industry funding drives the research agenda, confuses the science, and fuels public distrust.”
[2022-02-10 | highlight] “Drug companies also fund patient-advocacy groups to buy silence. Funded groups rarely call for controls on drug prices, for example. Donations to such groups can be considerable; in 2015, drug companies contributed $26.7 million to the American Diabetes Association. But in this particular case, the association broke ranks and called on the federal government to negotiate with drug companies to reduce prices for Medicare patients, something that Congress, under pressure from Big Pharma, does not allow the government to do.23
When it comes to industry funding, as we will see throughout this book, the issues are never simply black or white; they are usually more complicated shades of grey.
Influencing”
[2022-02-10 | highlight] “Sheldon Krimsky, a Tufts University professor who studies industry manipulation of science, dates the discovery of this “funding effect” to the mid-1980s, when social scientists realized that if they knew who paid for a study, they could predict its results. One funding-effect investigation from the late 1990s looked at studies on the safety of calcium channel blockers for reducing blood pressure. Nearly all authors (96 percent) who concluded that the drugs were effective reported financial ties to their manufacturers; only 37 percent of authors who doubted their effectiveness had such ties. In 2003, a systematic review of more than one thousand biomedical research studies came to similar conclusions; investigators with industry affiliations were nearly four times more likely to come up with pro-industry conclusions than those without such ties”
[2022-02-10 | highlight] “Investigators concerned about industry capture have also looked at committees issuing practice guidelines. Their studies show that members of such committees frequently receive gifts, speaker fees, and other payments from drug companies likely to be affected by their guidelines. One investigation found that 84 percent of authors of guidelines issued by the National Comprehensive Cancer Network receive such payments. Another reported that 62 percent of the members of an international consensus committee writing gastroenterology clinical practice guidelines had at least one financial tie to a relevant drug company; in this case, the experts with such conflicts recused themselves from discussions of six of the eight recommendations—a step in the right direction”
[2022-02-10 | highlight] “Why do doctors allow this? This too has been researched. Recall that doctors are human and the influence of gifts is not always conscious; doctors believe they deserve such gifts. They went to school for years, sacrificed to get where they are, work hard, and may still be paying off student loans. They see themselves as entitled to the gifts, rational in their prescribing practices, and invulnerable to drug-industry influence. Reminding them of the sacrifices they have made actually increases their willingness to accept such gifts.14 None of this would matter if the gifts had no influence, but they do. Financial ties to drug companies not only affect doctors’ prescription practices but also influence their opinions on drug advisory committees and the conclusions of their research.”
[2022-02-10 | highlight] “Visits from detailers are particularly effective, which is why many teaching hospitals now ban them. Payments for speaking or consulting also work splendidly. So do meals; these are now the most frequent kind of drug-industry gift, with a median value of $138 each (one hopes wine is included). But even meals costing as little as $13 correlate closely with higher prescription rates—and for months afterward. Investigative journalists at ProPublica used Open Payments data to demonstrate a dose-response relationship between the size of drug-company payments and prescribing practices. Overall, the link between drug-industry gifts and prescription practices is so firmly established that it is considered beyond debate.12
Equally disturbing is the widespread willingness to accept such gifts. In 2009, nearly 84 percent of physicians reported receiving gifts or payments from drug companies; ”
[2022-02-10 | highlight] “Open Payments makes such studies easier to do and more accurate. In 2015, researchers found that nearly half of all US physicians accepted payments from industry, adding up to $2.4 billion. A study of statin prescriptions the following year yielded a formula: for every $1,000 received from drug companies, the prescribing rate for brand-name statins increased by 0.1 percent; payments for educational training led to a 4.8 percent increase. Investigators concerned about the health crisis caused by overuse of opioids found that from 2013 to 2015, one in twelve American doctors received payments—more than $46 million—from drug companies selling these drugs”
[2022-02-10 | highlight] “doctors. Despite industry opposition, Congress finally agreed and passed the Physician Payments Sunshine Act as part of the Affordable Care Act in 2010. The result is the Open Payments website, where you can easily discover that in 2016, 1,479 pharmaceutical companies spent $8.19 billion on payments of one kind or another to 631,000 physicians and 1,146 teaching hospitals. About half the total expenditures went for research, leaving the remaining half for reaching physicians in other ways”
[2022-02-10 | highlight] “Drug companies do not “buy” physicians. Physicians do not “sell out” to drug companies. The influence is far more subtle, making it exceptionally difficult to prevent or manage—or even to discuss. If recipients do not believe they are influenced by gifts and payments, they see no reason to refuse them.8 It is not that doctors are necessarily corrupt; it is the system that is corrupting.
Pharmaceutical”
[2022-02-10 | highlight] “All of us, including doctors, respond to gifts in predictable ways. But—and this is critical—our responses are usually unintentional, unconscious, and unrecognized. No doctor intends to be beholden to a drug company, yet even a small gift is enough to change prescription practices in the donor’s favor. Larger gifts have even greater influence. Despite this evidence, recipients—human as we are—believe that gifts and payments from drug companies have no influence.7”
[2022-02-10 | highlight] “The most obvious explanation for the size and extent of the literature on drug-industry practices is that this industry’s interactions with physicians are easily measured: by the monetary value of the gifts and payments, of course, but also by their effects on recipients’ prescription practices, votes on drug-advisory committees, and research results. Other effects are also measurable but with more difficulty: unnecessary treatment of patients, higher health care costs, and loss of trust in the medical profession. By analogy, all these findings are relevant to the less well studied influence of food companies. For any industry, the starting point for analysis of funding influence is what psychologists have learned about how gifts affect human behavior.”
[2022-02-10 | highlight] “criticism, and to undercut calls for regulation. The playbook demanded endless repetition of carefully crafted statements: cigarette smoking is a matter of personal responsibility, government attempts to regulate tobacco are manifestations of a “nanny” state, restrictions on smoking infringe on freedom, and research reporting harm from smoking is “junk science.” Let us credit the tobacco industry for producing the model now followed by other industries, the food industry among them.2 Whatever the industry, the playbook requires repeated and relentless use of this set of strategies:

 Cast doubt on the science
 Fund research to produce desired results
 Offer gifts and consulting arrangements
 Use front groups
 Promote self-regulation
 Promote personal responsibility as the fundamental issue
 Use the courts to challenge critics and unfavorable regulations”
[2022-02-10 | highlight] “Much of what we know about corporate influence comes from studies of the tobacco, chemical, and pharmaceutical industries. Most relevant to the food industry is the way pharmaceutical companies induce physicians to prescribe more expensive and sometimes unnecessary brand-name drugs and commission research to demonstrate that their drugs are safer and more effective than generics or those of competitors. Decades ago, medical professionals recognized the distorted effects of drug-company practices, measured the distortions, and took steps to counter them.”
[2022-02-10 | highlight] “Food companies must believe they need such strategies to survive in today’s fiercely competitive marketplace. The US food supply provides about four thousand calories a day per capita (which includes everyone from tiny babies to sumo wrestlers), adding up to roughly twice average need. But Wall Street expects publicly traded corporations to do more than make profits; it expects them to increase shareholder value every quarter.17 Competition forces food companies to work hard to convince customers to buy their products rather than those of competitors, to eat more in general, and to choose products that are more profitable. But by far the most profitable products are highly processed “junk” foods and beverages, high in calories but low in nutritional value. Enlisting nutrition professionals to declare such products harmless makes good business sense. So does engaging them in promoting healthier foods as “superfoods,” a marketing term with no nutritional significance.”
[2022-02-10 | highlight] “This was not the first time Coca-Cola got caught, and therein lies the genesis of this book. In August 2015, while Soda Politics was at the printer, the New York Times ran a front-page story on Coca-Cola’s funding of university researchers who had created a group called the Global Energy Balance Network (GEBN). The GEBN’s purpose was to convince the public—against much evidence to the contrary—that physical activity is superior to dieting (and to avoiding Coca-Cola, of course) as a means of controlling body weight.12 Because I was quoted in that story, reporters called me for further comment. They could hardly believe that a company as prominent as Coca-Cola would fund research so obviously self-serving, that researchers at respected universities would accept funds from Coca-Cola for this purpose, or that universities would allow faculty to do so.”
[2022-02-10 | highlight] “Unsavory Truth is about how food, beverage, and supplement companies (collectively, food companies) fund nutrition researchers and practitioners and their professional associations, with the ultimate goal of promoting sales. This book appears at a time when scandals created by such funding make front-page news. Let me plunge right in with an unexpected—and highly surreal—example of why the topics in this book should matter to all of us.”

=== Gideon the Ninth — Tamsyn Muir ===
[2022-02-14 | highlight] “You apologise to me?” she bellowed. “You apologise to me now? You say that you’re sorry when I have spent my life destroying you? You are my whipping girl! I hurt you because it was a relief! I exist because my parents killed everyone and relegated you to a life of abject misery, and they would have killed you too and not given it a second’s goddamned thought! I have spent your life trying to make you regret that you weren’t dead, all because—I regretted I wasn’t! I ate you alive, and you have the temerity to tell me that you’re sorry?”
There were flecks of spittle on Harrowhark’s lips. She was retching for air.
“I have tried to dismantle you, Gideon Nav! The Ninth House poisoned you, we trod you underfoot—I took you to this killing field as my slave—you refuse to die, and you pity me! Strike me down. You’ve won. I’ve lived my whole wretched life at your mercy, yours alone, and God knows I deserve to die at your hand. You are my only friend. I am undone without you.”
[2022-02-14 | highlight] “needed.
“Ask me how I am and I’ll scream,” she said.
“How are you,” said Camilla, who was a pill.
“I see you calling my bluff and I resent it,” said Gideon. “So, hey. What do you really use when you’re not pretending the rapier’s your main wield? Two short blades of equal length, or one blade and one baton?”
Her keen eyes narrowed into black-lined slits. “How did I mess up?” she asked, eventually.
“You drew your rapier and your dagger at the same time. And you’re ambidextrous. You keep cutting like both your blades are curved. Also, there’s six swords and a nightstick on your bed.”
“Should’ve tidied my mess,” admitted Camilla. “Two blades. Double-edged.”
“Why? I mean, that’s boss, but why?”
[2022-02-14 | highlight] “Jeannemary was still lying prone in the old bed, arms and legs now flung wide, as if she had kicked off the blankets and sheets in a bad dream: this would have been fine, except for the huge shafts of bone spearing each shoulder to the mattress. Two more through the thighs. One straight through the very centre of her ribs. These spears of bone met Jeannemary’s body with haloes of red, splotching through her clothes, seeping into the bedspread.
“No,” said Gideon meditatively, “no, no, no, no, no.”
Jeannemary’s eyes were very slightly open. There was blood spattered in her curls, and there was blood spattered over the headboard. Gideon’s gaze followed the splatter upward. Written on the wall, in silky wet red, was:

SWEET DREAMS”
[2022-02-14 | highlight] “The light flickered off. After no sleep—after days of threat and grief and panic that would have floored a man twice his age—Isaac lost it completely. With a strangled cry he flared in a halo of blue and green. Jeannemary yelled, “Isaac, behind me—” but he was sizzling with light, too bright to see by, a sun and not a person. Gideon heard him flee into the room ahead of them, blinded by the running aurora.
When her eyes cleared, Gideon was confronted with the biggest skeletal construct she had ever seen. The room was full of it, bluely aflame with Isaac’s light, a massed hallucination of bones. It was bigger by far than the one in Response, bigger than anything recorded in a Ninth history textbook. It had assembled itself into the room by no visible means, since it never could have fit through one of the doors. It was just simply, suddenly there, like a nightmare—a squatting, vertiginous hulk; a nonsense of bones feathering into long, spidery legs, leaning back on them fearfully and daintily; trailing jellyfish stingers made up of millions and millions of teeth all set into each other like a jigsaw[…]”
[2022-02-14 | highlight] “Harrow, at a total loss for words, eventually managed the rather pathetic: “Don’t make this weird, Nav!” and stalked off after Palamedes.
Jeannemary sidled up alongside Gideon, rather shyly. Isaac was parasitically drifting with her: he was in the process of braiding her curly hair safely up with a tatty blue ribbon. She said, “Have you two been paired a very long time?”
(“Don’t just ask them that,” her necromancer hissed. “It’s a weird thing to ask.”
“Shut up! It was just a question!”)
Gideon contemplated the growing braid, and the sight of Palamedes squeezing the noxious contents of a blue dropper into Camilla’s wound, and Camilla kneeing him with beautiful abruptness in the thigh. Harrowhark lurked next to them, pointedly not looking at Gideon, head hidden deep inside her second-best hood.”
[2022-02-14 | highlight] “Come back with these or having choked on them,” she whispered, “and don’t get complacent around the Fourth. Never work with children, Griddle, their prefrontal cortexes aren’t developed. Now—”
Gideon put her arms around Harrowhark. She lifted her up off the ground just an inch and squeezed her in an enormous hug before either she or Harrow knew what she was about. Her necromancer felt absurdly light in her grip, like a bag of bird’s bones. She had always thought—when she bothered to think—that Harrow would feel cold, as everything in the Ninth felt cold. No, Harrow Nonagesimus was feverishly hot. Well, you couldn’t think that amount of ghastly thoughts without generating energy. Hang on, what the hell was she doing.”
[2022-02-14 | highlight] “She’s all right? Gideon’s heart billowed, despite the fact that she had her own suspicions as to why her necromancer didn’t want her sitting with Dulcinea Septimus, and they were all extremely petty. The Sixth House adept adjusted his glasses again and said, “Sorry. Ninth cavalier, I should ask you your thoughts on all of this.”
She cracked the joints in the back of her neck as she considered the question, stretching out the ligaments, popping her knuckles. He urged again, “Thoughts?”
Gideon said, “Did you know that if you put the first three letters of your last name with the first three letters of your first name, you get ‘Sex Pal’?”
The dreadful teens both stared with eyes so wide you could have marched skeletons straight through them.
“You—do you talk?” said Isaac.”
[2022-02-13 | highlight] “Harrow never came back. Gideon was used to this by now. Seized with sudden experimental courage, she filled up the uncanny tub in the bathroom from the hot-liquid tap. When nothing jumped out at her, Gideon sat there in it with water all the way up to her chin. It was incredible—the strangest thing she’d ever felt in her life; like being buoyed on a warm current, like being slowly boiled—and she worried, irrationally, whether water could get inside you and make you sick. All her paint came off and floated in long, dirty flecks in the water. When she put soap in the water oily rainbow slicks shone across the top. In the end—suspicious of how clean it really got you—she went and stood in the sonic for twenty seconds, but she smelled incredible. When her hair dried it stood up on end, and it took a lot of effort to get it flat again.”
[2022-02-13 | highlight] “grateful.”
“Turns out I’m variably penitent. Hey, you should be talking to Nonagesimus.”
“If I wanted to talk to Nonagesimus, I’d talk to Nonagesimus,” he said, “or I’d talk to a brick wall, because honestly, your necromancer is a walking Ninth House cliché. You’re at least only half as a bad.”
Palamedes glanced up at her. His eyes really were extraordinary: like cut grey rock, or deep weather atmosphere. He cleared his throat, and he said: “How much would you do for the Lady Septimus?”
Gideon was glad of the paint; she was thrown off balance, unsure of her footing. She said, “Uh—she’s been kind to me. What’s your interest in Lady Septimus?”
[2022-02-13 | highlight] “conclusion?”
“Because it’s something Palamedes wouldn’t do,” she said, “and he’s a perfect moron over Camilla the Sixth. Okay.”
“What do you mean, ‘okay’—”
“I mean okay, I’ll do it,” said Gideon, although most of her brain was trying to give the part of her brain saying that a nipple-gripple. She chewed at a damp fleck of lip paint and took off her dark glasses, then popped them into her pocket. Now she could look Harrow dead in the eye. “I’d rather be your battery than feel you rummaging around in my head. You want my juice? I’ll give you juice.”
“Under no circumstances will I ever desire your juice,” said her necromancer, mouth getting more desperate. “Nav, you don’t know precisely what this is asking. I will be draining you dry in order to get to the other side. If at any point you throw me off—if you fail to submit—I die. I have never done this before. The process will be imperfect. You will be in … pain.”
[2022-02-13 | highlight] “anxious.
“All I know,” said Harrowhark eventually, “is that they created the theorem, and were responsible for the experiment downstairs. I wish I knew more. I yearn to know more … But I don’t. I’m going to study this spell, Griddle, and learn it, and then I will be one step closer to knowing. We cannot suffer the same fate as Quinn and Pent.”
Gideon was amazed at how badly it hurt, all of a sudden.
“He’s really dead,” she said aloud.
“Yes. I will be more upset if he suddenly changes condition,” said Harrow. “He was a stranger, Nav. Why does it affect you so much?”
“He was nice to me,” she found herself saying. She was very tired. She tried to wake herself up by stretching, dropping down to touch her toes and feeling the blood rush into her head. “Because he was a stranger, I think … He didn’t have to bother with me, to make time for me or remember my name, but he did. Hell, you treat me more like a stranger than Magnus Quinn did and I’ve known you all my life. Anyway, I don’t want to talk about it.”

“Gideon found her shoulder drawn back so that she had to look Harrow square in the face. The necromancer regarded her with a strangely fierce eye: mouth a worn-down line of indecision, forehead puckered as though she was thinking her entire face into a wrinkle. There was still blood flaking out of her eyebrows, which was gross.
“I must no longer accept,” she said slowly, “being a stranger to you.”
“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” said Gideon, sudden sweat prickling the back of her neck, “yes you can, you once told me to dig myself an ice grave. Stop before this gets weird”
[2022-02-13 | highlight] “They combed over the detritus of two strangers’ lives; inside a forgotten tin Gideon found two expired toothbrushes. They were electronic ones, with revolving heads and push buttons.
“These aren’t just seriously old, they’re super unbelievably seriously old,” she said.
“Yes,” said Harrow. “Sextus could tell us how old, but I’ve no desire to ask him. Something has been done to preserve this room. It has not wasted away into a natural death. We’re probably the first people to step inside since its previous occupants left.”
[2022-02-11 | highlight] “away.
“I want to see a match,” said Princess Corona. “Come—Gideon the Ninth, right?—why don’t you try Sir Magnus instead? Don’t believe him when he says he’s rubbish. The Fifth House is meant to turn out very fine cavaliers.”
Magnus inclined his head.
“Of course I’m willing, and the princess is gracious,” he said, “but I didn’t get to be cavalier primary due to being the best with a rapier. I’m cavalier primary only because my adept is also my wife. I suppose you could say that I—ha, ha—cavalier primarried!”
From the other side of the room, Jeannemary let out a long noise like a death rattle. Princess Corona laughed outright; Magnus looked extremely pleased with himself. The faces of the other two were patiently blank. Gideon made a mental note to write down the joke so that she could use it herself later.”
[2022-02-11 | highlight] “Gideon looked down. She looked at her rapier, pointed skyward like a black arrow, her off hand cupped and supporting what should have been more grip but now was the long knob of pommel, the way you’d hold—a fucking longsword.
She sheathed it immediately, sliding it home to its scabbard in a tight iron whisper. A cold sweat had broken out beneath her clothes. The expression on Dulcinea’s face was simply bright-eyed, mischievous interest, but to Gideon it was the Secundarius Bell chiding a child already ten minutes late for prayer. For a moment a lot of stupid stuff felt very ready to happen. She nearly confessed everything to Dulcinea’s mild and denim-coloured gaze: she nearly opened her mouth and begged wholeheartedly for the woman’s mercy.”
[2022-02-11 | highlight] “And she was inspected, thoroughly and immediately. The eyes narrowed with intent, and for a moment the face was all business. There was something swift and cool in the blueness of those eyes, some deep intelligence, some sheer shameless depth and breadth of looking. It made Gideon’s cheeks flare, despite her mental reproach to Slow down, Nav, slow down.
“Oh, singular,” said Dulcinea quietly, more to herself than to Gideon. “Lipochrome … recessive. I like looking at people’s eyes,” she explained suddenly, smiling now. “They tell you such a lot. I couldn’t tell you much about your Reverend Daughter … but you have eyes like gold coins. Am I embarrassing you? Am I being a creep?”
[2022-02-11 | highlight] “Thank you,” she said, once she had been propped up. She took the silly hat off her damp, fawn-coloured curls and set it in her lap, and her expression was somewhat conspiratorial. “I know that you’re doing penance and can’t talk, so you don’t have to figure out how to tell me through charades.”
Gideon’s eyebrows shot up over her sunglasses’ rims before she could stop them. “Oh, yes,” said the girl, dimpling. “You’re not the first Ninth nun I’ve ever met. I’ve often thought it must be so hard being a brother or sister of the Locked Tomb. I actually dreamed of being one … when I was young. It seemed such a romantic way to die. I must have been about thirteen … You see, I knew I was going to die then. I didn’t want anyone to look at me, and the Ninth House was so far away. I thought I could just have some time to myself and then expire very beautifully, alone, in a black robe, with everyone praying over me and being solemn. But then I found out about the face paint you all have to wear,” she added fretfully, “and that wasn’t my[…]”

=== They Said They Wanted Revolution — Neda Toloui-Semnani ===
[2022-02-13 | highlight] “By the time Kim Roosevelt tiptoed over the Iraq border into Iran, he was already a hugely influential senior covert operative in the CIA’s Near East and North Africa unit. He had a vision for the United States’ role in the oil-rich region, a vision that had, in part, grown out of his devotion to writer and diplomat T. E. Lawrence and journalist Rudyard Kipling, from whose novel Kim he’d derived his own nickname.His vision helped drive the American Arabist strategy, of which Kim was one of the major evangelists. At the end of the European theater of the Second World War, the Arabists wanted the United States to wrest control of the region’s petroleum resources, then controlled by Great Britain and Europe. Arabists were, by and large, against the Jewish state of Israel and they believed that British and European influence in the region had atrophied to such an extent that it left the region vulnerable to Soviet influence. The US strategy to “contain” the power of Communist nations meant inserting itself into governments and countries they felt were vulnerable to Communism.This is where Kim Roosevelt came in. Between 1948 and 1951, he helped to found three[…]”


“The seeds for making the United States a dominant force in the region had been planted decades earlier. In 1933, the British state–owned Anglo-Iranian Oil Company had signed a treaty with Iran that gave Britain access to oil and profits from Iran’s petroleum and promised control over Iran’s oil reserves for sixty years. The deal was signed by the first Pahlavi monarch, Reza Shah Pahlavi, a former soldier who came into power through a 1921 coup d’état.Two decades later, under the reign of the Pahlavi scion Mohammad Reza Shah, Iran’s legislature voted to nationalize its oil, reneging on the agreement with Great Britain. Shortly afterward, a popular new prime minister, Dr. Mohammad Mossadegh, pushed through a series of laws that weakened the power of the shah and strengthened his plan to take over the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company’s property in Iran. No nation, he said, could ever be truly independent without economic freedom. He believed that Iran would never be able to tackle major issues like poverty, justice, health, and education without also gaining complete independent control over the country’s major natural resource.”

“Great Britain went straight to the newly formed International Court of Justice to sue Iran. The United States, which had been neutral, tried to broker a deal that would call for Britain to accept nationalized Iranian oil and for Iran to allow Britain to control drilling and production. Negotiations continued through most of 1952 under the Truman administration.Then, in November, the Republican war hero Dwight D. Eisenhower was elected president, and US foreign policy focused on strict containment efforts that would stop Russia’s “expansive tendencies” and check growing Soviet influence wherever it popped up around the world. This was the dawn of the Cold War.Eisenhower’s administration believed that Iran was vulnerable to Soviet influence, in part because Mossadegh’s goal of nationalizing Iran’s resources relied on a political coalition that included”


[2022-02-13 | highlight] “Tehran, Iran, 1953The American James Lochridge arrived in Tehran in the middle of July. He was a nondescript young man with brown hair and horn-rimmed glasses, and he spent nearly every afternoon at the tennis court, challenging whoever happened to be looking for a match. Within a few weeks, he was adopted into the city’s sparkling expatriate scene.But he wasn’t who he said he was. Lochridge was Kermit “Kim” Roosevelt Jr., the grandson of President Theodore Roosevelt and a distant cousin of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Kermit Roosevelt’s version of things places him at the center of the key political events that were happening in that time and place; much of his story is disputed by scholars and it’s important to acknowledge that he had a penchant for self-aggrandizement and cinematic storytelling, a genius for creating elaborate tales and telling them with great conviction. In short, he was the perfect spy to help pull off America’s first coup d’état: Operation Ajax.”

=== Lore — Alexandra Bracken ===
[2022-02-12 | highlight] 
Little Gorgon, I chose you. 

=== The Poison Squad — Deborah Blum ===
[2022-02-09 | highlight] “The court also heard from “Coca-Cola addicts.” A patient from Philadelphia reported that he had found the soft drink a helpful stimulant—at first. “When I felt tired or fagged a glass or two of Coca-Cola would revive me. As the habit increased, I consumed about a dozen drinks a day.” He sought treatment after developing insomnia and a state of constant jitters: “After I quit using Coca-Cola my general health improved and has continued to improve.”
			Lyman Kebler represented the Bureau of Chemistry position. “I have traveled extensively in the United States and have observed that Coca-Cola is sold indiscriminately to all comers at soda fountains, without distinction as to youth or old age, nervous or robust persons.”
[2022-02-09 | highlight] “McCabe began the prosecution by calling J. L. Lynch, an Agriculture Department food and drug inspector. Lynch promptly provided a detailed and alarming portrait of Coca-Cola production methods. Describing the way the syrup soft-drink base was made, he said: “The Negro cook engaged in dumping the ingredients in the kettle was scantily attired in a dirty undershirt, old dirty trousers and broken shoes. His bare feet were protruding from his shoes in places and he was perspiring freely. He was chewing tobacco and spitting from time to time, the expectorate falling on the floor and on the platform from which he was dumping the sugar.” Excess sugar also fell onto the platform, and the cook would shove it into the kettle with either a board or his feet, Lynch said. The caramel coloring was added on another floor of the building, he continued, and that level was so slimy with tobacco spit and other substances—“it had apparently never been scrubbed”—that the inspector declared that he’d been afraid of slipping and falling.”
[2022-02-09 | highlight] “He knew Wiley was under constant attack; he knew that Wilson had very little patience with the bureau. He also knew that his planned publication had a very provocative title: “Habit-Forming Agents: Their Indiscriminate Sale and Use a Menace to Public Welfare.” But, he added, that title realistically summed up a national problem.
			The indiscriminate use of narcotics remained an enormous risk to public health, Kebler pointed out. Many “soothing syrups” for children were laced with morphine, heroin, and chloral hydrate, among other sedatives; cough syrups and asthma medications for adults could contain a mixture of several of these narcotics. Further, Kebler considered the problem of medicated soft drinks particularly troubling because consumers often had no idea that the sodas contained stimulants and/or intoxicating agents. Doctors reported cases of soft-drink addiction, and insurance companies, he said, were trying to develop a plan to deal with “soft drink habituees [sic].” Wiley agreed to make the case to Wilson yet again. But, he told Kebler ruefully, he could make no promises that his argument would work.”
[2022-02-09 | highlight] “Food commissioners from Pennsylvania and Michigan, both sodium benzoate critics, protested Wilson’s heavy-handed approach by angrily walking out of the meeting. The walkout backfired, as the final tally—absent those votes and the influence of the two protesting officials—went narrowly in support of both the Remsen Board and its finding that sodium benzoate was a fully safe additive. An editorial in the Los Angeles Herald decried Wilson’s tactic and its result: “As the inside facts concerning the Denver convention become more generally known it is revealed as one where the artifices of the politicians were considerably more in evidence than the sober thought of the expert charged with protecting the public health.”
			But Wilson was wholly satisfied. He wrote to President Taft that “we fully smashed the program, turned things end for end, fully endorsed the Referee Board and its findings.” Wiley, Wilson added, was a troublesome “low class fellow” but he believed that the Denver vote had sent the chief chemist a warning to Wiley that his policy of defiance would not be tolerated much longer”
[2022-02-09 | highlight] “that Wiley be replaced.
			Shortly after the Mackinac meeting, an Agriculture Department inspector visited Dow’s plant in Midlands, Michigan, and met with founder Herbert Dow, who complained of a drop in sales of sodium benzoate following both the passage of the food law and Wiley’s pernicious attacks on the compound. Dow was “not sparing in his criticism of Dr. Wiley,” whom he characterized as playing to the uneducated and temperamentally fearful public. The chemical industry, Dow asserted, was planning its own public education campaign to counter misinformation being spread by Wiley and his friends.
			By now the rift between the agriculture”
[2022-02-09 | highlight] “manufacturers who insisted on preservative use. He stated firmly that sodium benzoate was being promoted by food manufacturers who found it profitable to use rot-prone waste and scraps in their “bulk” ketchups, sometimes at four times the proposed government standard of 0.10 percent.
			Wiley added that food quality and safety represented not only good science but also moral decision-making. The wealthy, he pointed out, could easily afford fresh food and well-made condiments. The trade in cheap, chemically enhanced imitations catered to the poor. If the country could work to standardize good food, then it also would be promoting good health for all. “Whenever a food is debased in order to make it cheap, the laboring man pays more for any given nourishment than the rich man does who buys the pure food,” he pointed out.”
[2022-02-09 | highlight] “accuracy in labeling.
			Yet the president also found himself annoyed by other instances of Wiley’s staunch unwillingness to compromise. The chief chemist continued to reject the term “corn syrup.” Since his earliest food-analysis study, for the state of Indiana in 1881, Wiley had insisted that the word “glucose” was the only accurate way to describe this sugary liquid derived from corn. Within the corn industry, however, that name had long been disliked. It sounded unappetizing, manufacturers feared, and was likely to alienate consumers. A new firm called the Corn Products Refining Company, created by a merger in 1906, had recently petitioned the government to be allowed to call its new corn-derived sweetener a syrup. This appeal carried behind it the clout of company founder Edward Thomas Bedford, a longtime executive and current director of the Standard Oil Company.
			E. T. Bedford, as he was known, sought to bottle and market a thick liquid product under the name “Karo Corn Syrup.” He knew full well that “Karo Glucose” was never going to succeed in the market. He’d done his best to convince Wiley that the name was aptly descriptive and overall more accurate than the”
[2022-02-09 | highlight] “Heinz was the same age as Wiley—born in the same year and month—and he had advocated in favor of clean and honest foodstuffs for even longer than the chief chemist had. Heinz had also built a remarkably successful company, one that processed and marketed scores of products. Although he had personally chosen a slogan to advertise “57 Varieties,” by the early twentieth century, his canning and bottling plants produced nearly twice that number of foods and condiments. Unlike many of his peers in the food business, Heinz had lobbied in favor of the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906. Company executive Sebastian Mueller had accompanied such activists as Robert Allen and Alice Lakey when they visited the White House to press the Roosevelt administration, and after its passage, Henry Heinz supported the law’s enforcement. Some of his peers called him a traitor. More irked than worried by such remarks, he ordered his company’s publicity department to disparage his critics in press releases.”
[2022-02-08 | highlight] “change.
			“The momentum of the Meat Inspection amendment carried with it the Pure Food Bill, which its enemies thought had been safely chloroformed in committee,” wrote the investigative journalist Mark Sullivan. “In the end, the exposures of the packers by Roosevelt’s commission, of the wholesale liquor dealers by themselves, of the patent medicines by The Ladies’ Home Journal and Collier’s, of food adulteration and food dyeing by Doctor Wiley and State and city food officials—the aggregate of all that worked into the strengthening of Roosevelt’s hand, and was invincible.”
			There were still those who thought that Roosevelt and his legislative allies compromised too much, among them the proud muckraking journalist David Graham Phillips. He’d already noted in his “Treason of the Senate” series that the New York congressman James Wadsworth had not entirely backed down from his defense of the meat industry. He’d successfully deleted the requirement that meat companies fund the inspection program.”
[2022-02-08 | highlight] “In late May, Sinclair decided to leak what he knew about the Neill-Reynolds report to the New York Times. He stuffed a briefcase with notes, affidavits, letters, and everything he had on paper and marched off to a meeting at the newspaper. The Times editors recognized journalistic gold and ran the story on the front page on Monday, May 28, loaded with quotes from the government inspectors and from the novelist. “In Armour’s own establishment I saw with my own eyes the doctoring of hams that were so putrefied that I could not force myself to remain near them,” read a quote from Sinclair. The story quoted Neill recounting that “the pillars of the buildings were caked with flesh” and that “in these packing houses, the meat is dragged about on the floor, spat upon and walked upon.” The Times even hunted down General Nelson Miles, who had brought the embalmed-beef complaint after the Spanish-American War. Miles’s”
[2022-02-08 | highlight] “Beveridge later told journalist Mark Sullivan that he had suspected that his errand was just for show. He thought that any Senate vote in favor of the bill would prove futile. The legislation was clearly destined to die in the House, where leadership was just as firmly opposed. But the Indianan obediently went to Heyburn’s office. As he also recounted to Sullivan, “Heyburn said he could not believe it and said he was tired of being made a fool of by asking useless consideration [for the bill] which he had asked so many times before.” Beveridge ventured the opinion that the game seemed, for the minute, to be going Heyburn’s way and that he might as well take advantage of it. That afternoon Heyburn requested a vote on his bill. On February 26 the food and drug bill passed 63–4, with Aldrich abstaining. The bill then went to the House and, as predicted, Sullivan wrote, “There it slept.”
[2022-02-08 | highlight] “For instance, the paper had denied that the tuberculosis bacterium could survive on walls or floors of the packing rooms. Sinclair pointed out that the germ could indeed survive on those surfaces and could transfer to anything that touched them. He’d brought medical studies to prove it, as well as other evidence to back up his story. He further noted that the paper’s owners were obviously friendly with the meatpackers and sided with them. In fact, it would turn out that the newspaper’s management had not assigned a reporter to study Sinclair’s claims but instead passed the task on to a publicist who worked for the meatpackers.”
[2022-02-08 | highlight] “Its purpose is to prevent food adulteration, the swindling and poisoning of the public. Nobody in the Senate says a word against this bill; nobody dares go on record, of course, in behalf of adulteration. Yet it is certain that the bill will not be passed.” The business of Congress was to take care of businessmen, Hearst wrote, and even some of the country’s most “respectable” businessmen reaped huge profits by producing, misrepresenting, and selling adulterated, diluted, and downright faked food and drink. “Who is that shabby looking, patched-up individual trying to get on the floor of the House?” mused the editors of Life magazine.”
[2022-02-08 | highlight] “That group had in recent years broadened its focus from opposing alcoholic beverages and promoting women’s suffrage to other issues—including the movement for food and drug regulation. The organization’s leaders had come to that cause by way of studies like those from the Chemistry Bureau, showing that alcohol-rich patent “medicines” contributed to the problem of drunkenness. The WCTU had also decided to tackle the problem of intoxicating substances in “tonics” and soft drinks, including the popular and famously stimulating drink Coca-Cola. WCTU had been prominent among women’s groups that had pressured the beverage company to drastically reduce the amount of cocaine in its formula around 1902.”
[2022-02-08 | highlight] “The Proprietary Association, an alliance representing manufacturers of such popular nostrums and “cures,” struck back by calling the studies an attack on personal freedom. Its officers warned publicly that if their products became subject to regulation, government control of people’s lives would know no limits. “If the Federal Government should regulate the Interstate traffic in drugs on the basis of their therapeutic value, why not regulate traffic in theology by excluding from transportation all theological books which Dr. Wiley and his assistants, upon the examination, should find to be ‘misleading in any particular,’” read a communication from the association.”
[2022-02-08 | highlight] “He wanted the meals to be wholesome, tasty, and dished out on a precise schedule: breakfast at 8:00 a.m., luncheon at noon, dinner at 5:30 p.m., “these being the customary meal-times” for civil service employees. He wanted strictly fresh ingredients with no trace of preservatives. He’d budgeted for roast beef, beefsteak, veal, pork, chicken, turkey, fish, oysters, and an array of fruits and vegetables. Cream and milk were allowed, but these had to be pasteurized to avoid both bacterial infections and unmonitored chemical preservatives. Some canned soups, fruits, and vegetables were also allowed, but only in specially ordered, preservative-free batches from selected manufacturers. “The greatest pains were taken to secure absolute freedom from antiseptics in the whole of the food consumed.”
[2022-02-08 | highlight] “fragile. “If they should show signs of injury after they were fed such substances for a period of time, the deduction would naturally follow that children and older persons, more susceptible than they, would be greater sufferers from similar causes.” The hygienic table trials, he explained in his proposal to Congress, would address “whether such preservatives should ever be used or not, and if so, what preservatives and in what quantities?” He added that the experiments could also address questions about other additives, such as food dyes. He had no idea what these experiments might find, he emphasized. But he could make a good case for giving them a try. And after all, the lawmakers were eating and drinking these unknown compounds too.
			In March, Congress authorized a grant of $5,000 (about $150,000 in today’s dollars) to, as the legislation put it, “enable the Secretary of Agriculture to investigate the character of food preservatives, coloring matters and other substances added to foods, to determine their relation to digestion and health, and to establish the principles which should guide their use.”
			The sum was only a third of what Wiley”
[2022-02-08 | highlight] “paprika. Or ketchup was a soup of “waste products from canners—pulp, skins, ripe tomatoes, green tomatoes, starch paste, coal-tar colors, and chemical preservatives, usually benzoate of soda or salicylic acid.” The North Dakota food chemistry analysis, which Ladd would issue in full the following year, revealed that 100 percent of ketchups were rich in coal-tar dyes, preservatives, and waste products. He also found similar problems in a range of other products, reporting “one hundred percent adulteration” of jams and jellies, 88 percent adulteration of canned corn, and 50 percent of canned peas. And the list went on.”
[2022-02-08 | highlight] “In 1901 he launched a statewide campaign for a pure-food law, bombarding North Dakota legislators and citizens with a catalog of dismaying data.
			“More than 90 percent of local meat markets in the state were using chemical preservatives and in nearly every butcher shop could be found a bottle of Freezine, Preservaline, or Iceine,” he reported. “In the dried beef, in the smoked meats, in the canned bacon, in the canned chipped beef, boracic acid or borates (products of the borax industry) are a common ingredient.” In almost every food product Ladd analyzed he found unlabeled industrial compounds that had never been tested for safety, although some were known toxins. “Ninety per cent of the so-called French peas we have taken up in North Dakota were found to contain copper salts.” Baked goods were often loaded with “alum,” a salt of aluminum and potassium, used as a preservative, in baking powders, and to whiten bread.”
[2022-02-08 | highlight] “The pioneering industrial chemist Charles Pfizer, who had founded his New York pharmaceutical company in 1849, now also produced borax, boric acid, cream of tartar, and citric acid for use in food and drink. Chicago’s Joseph Baur, whose Liquid Carbonic Company produced the pressurized gas used in the fizzing drinks of soda fountains, had become so interested in artificial sweeteners that in 1901 he had invested in a new business in St. Louis, the Monsanto Chemical Company, to produce saccharin in large quantities. Saccharin production had also launched the Heyden Chemical Works of New York City in 1900, although that company also branched into the preservative market, producing salicylic acid, formaldehyde, and sodium benzoate for use in food and drinks. The food and drink market also attracted Herbert Henry Dow, founder at age thirty-one of the Dow Chemical Company in Midlands, Michigan.”
[2022-02-07 | highlight] “Woman’s Christian Temperance Union had been organized in the early 1870s with the stated goal of “achieving a sober and pure world.” It was far from the first American temperance organization, but along with the Anti-Saloon League, organized in 1893, the WCTU had become one of the most strident and effective forces opposed to alcohol consumption. With its slogan, “Agitate. Educate. Legislate,” the WCTU linked this cause to another growing social movement, that of women’s suffrage. Frances Willard, WCTU leader, saw suffrage as a key to power. She argued that if women had the vote, they could better protect their communities from drunkenness and other vices. By 1901 the organization boasted more than 150,000 members nationwide. Its activism—and growing popularity—was making American brewers and other alcohol producers increasingly nervous.”
[2022-02-07 | highlight] “The Democrats had once again named William Jennings Bryan, who had lost to McKinley four years earlier, as their candidate. As the campaign began, Bryan fiercely attacked McKinley as a corporate insider, a president beholden to banks and railroads. As he was close to those industries, McKinley decided to keep a low profile. The president gave only one speech during the campaign. The energetic Roosevelt, by contrast, gave more than 673 speeches, in 567 cities and towns, in 24 states. On November 3, Election Day, McKinley and Roosevelt won by a wide margin. Wilson’s job was secure for another four years and—as the secretary had predicted—so were both his chief chemist’s job and his food safety crusade.
			
			”
[2022-02-07 | highlight] “Many manufacturers argued that they had to fake products to stay competitive. Detroit canner Walter Williams, of Williams Brothers, described the making of his Highland Strawberry Preserves. The jam was, he said, 45 percent sugar, 35 percent corn syrup, 15 percent apple juice made from discarded apple skins, some scraps of apple skin and cores, and usually one or two pieces of strawberry. The strawberries cost him, he added. Many comparably priced preserves were just glucose, apple juice, red dye, and timothy seed added to simulate strawberry seeds. “If we could sell pure goods, I would be pleased,” Williams insisted. “I believe they should be labeled, showing their ingredients and showing the quality of the goods.” But as there was no law setting such standards and as he had to compete with less scrupulous canners, there was no way for him to stay in business unless he cut costs to match.”
[2022-02-07 | highlight] “Representatives from the dairy industry testified that makers of oleomargarine (by which they meant meatpackers) were still consistently mislabeling their product as butter.
			Without federal help, dairy states had little recourse; the state of New Hampshire had tried requiring that all margarine be dyed pink, but the U.S. Supreme Court had struck down that legislation in 1890, declaring it an illegal tax. Dairymen complained at the Mason hearings that margarine makers were nothing but cheats and liars. The meatpackers, in turn, accused the dairy industry of being stuck in the primitive past. Anyone, they insisted, could tell the difference between old-fashioned, often rancid butter and ever-fresh oleomargarine, which was “a product of the advanced age.”
[2022-02-07 | highlight] “Cincinnati’s public health chemist, to his surprise, did not find salicylic acid in the samples tested. Instead he discovered two new brand-name preservatives, both of which confirmed widespread public suspicion and finally justified the use of the term “embalmed beef.” One was Freezine, a sulfur-rich mixture containing a small percentage of formaldehyde. Freezine’s promotional literature boasted: “Meat can be exposed for sale, returned to ice, more of the preparation applied, and still look good to the eye.” The other, Preservaline, contained formaldehyde as its main active ingredient. Cincinnati officials recommended that citizens play it safe and avoid beef altogether.”
[2022-02-07 | highlight] “Manufacturers made the acid-treated corn product, labeled “flourine,” and the ground clay product, called “mineraline,” specifically for sale to flour companies. In his article, Wiley quoted from a marketing bulletin that read, “Gentlemen: We invite your attention to our mineraline, which is without a doubt the greatest existing discovery. There is no flourmill man who can afford not to use it for several reasons. Your flour will be much whiter and nicer. And you will realize a profit of between $400 to $1600 per carload of shipped flour barrels.”
[2022-02-07 | highlight] “There was nothing in the investigation, the panel continued, to suggest that tainted meat was the major cause of illness. The evil effects of bad water and tropical fevers were found to be the major cause: “The court finds it impossible to conclude that either the canned beef or the refrigerated beef appeared to an appreciable extent as causes of intestinal disease.” Taking a cue from Wiley and Bigelow, the ruling found that supplies sent to Cuba had been no “better or worse than any other,” although they were probably not suitably packaged to withstand tropical heat and perhaps were inadequately spiced or prepared in the field.”
[2022-02-07 | highlight] “ scientist. Yet Battershall’s 1887 book on food adulteration seethed with outrage over virtually every product that American grocers sold. His list included milk and butter, of course, as well as cheese, coffee, chocolate and cocoa, bread, and “baker’s chemicals” (baking powders and sodas), and an appalling amount of candy laced with poisonous metallic dyes. He had tested 198 samples of candy and found that a full 115 were tainted by the use of dangerous dyes, mostly arsenic and lead chromate. Forty-one out of forty-eight samples of yellow and orange-colored candy, in fact, contained lead. He had warned of cyanide, indigo, soapstone, gypsum, sand, and turmeric in teas, but he’d also found that the leaves themselves represented a variety of cheats. In”
[2022-02-07 | highlight] “In the 1850s Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper had exposed these fly-ridden, maggot-infested milk factories, where the animals stood in their own waste, subsisting on the warm swill, which still contained residual sugar and alcohol but little nutrition. Over the cow’s short, miserable life, its teeth tended to rot out before the animal stopped giving milk and was sent to slaughter—or dropped dead in the stall. Pediatricians linked swill milk to a list of childhood symptoms of ill health. “I have every year grown more suspicious of distillery milk,” one doctor wrote, “whenever I have seen a child presenting a sickly appearance, loose flabby flesh, weak joints, capricious appetite, frequent retchings and occasional vomitage, irregular bowels with tendency to diarrhea and fetid breath”
[2022-02-07 | highlight] “Hofmann, then at the University of Berlin, made the first stick-and-ball models of molecules in the 1860s. In Germany, Wiley had learned to respect such precision, a point illustrated by the instruments he’d brought home with him. One of his favorites was called a polariscope (or polarimeter). At Purdue he used it to tell the difference between types of sugars by passing polarized light through sweetened substances and measuring the angle at which the light rotated. “Glucose presents several anomalies when examined with polarized light,” Wiley explained, compared with the true sugars.
			He was not shocked when his tests showed that a full 90 percent of his syrup samples were fakes. Shop”
[2022-02-07 | highlight] “European governments—especially those of Germany and Great Britain—had been far quicker than the U.S. government to recognize and to address problems of food adulteration. In 1820 a pioneering book by chemist Fredrick Accum, titled A Treatise on Adulterations of Food, and Culinary Poisons, had aroused widespread public outrage when it was published in London. Accum minced no words: “Our pickles are made green by copper; our vinegar rendered sharp by sulphuric acid; our cream composed of rice powder or arrowroot in bad milk; our comfits mixed of sugar, starch and clay, and coloured with preparations of copper and lead; our catsup often formed of the dregs of distilled vinegar with a decoction of the outer green husk of walnuts, and seasoned with all-spice,” he wrote.”
[2022-02-07 | highlight] “study. In 1874 he accepted a position at Indiana’s newly opened Purdue University as its first (and only) chemistry professor.
			“I find so many things that I do not know as I pursue my studies,” he wrote in his diary during that first year at Purdue, as he struggled to assemble a working laboratory. “My own profession is still a wilderness.” During the following years, though, Wiley developed a reputation as the state’s go-to scientist for analyzing virtually anything—from water quality to rocks to soil samples—and especially foodstuffs. This was accelerated by a working sabbatical in 1878 in the newly united German Empire, considered the global leader in chemical research”
[2022-02-07 | highlight] “Preston Wiley had little schooling but valued learning, another strong influence on his second-youngest child. The father, who was a lay minister as well as a farmer, had even taught himself Greek. A fierce opponent of slavery—he made a point of gathering his children around for evening readings of the powerful abolitionist novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin—farmer Wiley also believed in acting upon one’s principles. Only three miles from the Ohio River, the family farm became Indiana’s southernmost stop on the Underground Railroad. Escaped slaves from Kentucky, once they’d made it across the water, knew to seek out Preston Wiley. Under cover of darkness, he would escort them safely to the next stop, eight miles northward.”
[2022-02-07 | highlight] “Although best known as an expert in sugar chemistry, Wiley had studied food fakery while still in Indiana and had warned then that “counterfeit” products could be considered a threat to public health. Upon arrival at the Agriculture Department, he promptly initiated a series of investigations of products ranging from butter to spices to wine and beer, building a detailed and sometimes horrifying portrait of the country’s food supply. Those reports would lead him, in the early twentieth century, to test some of the most suspect chemical additives on human volunteers, a series of experiments dubbed the “Poison Squad” studies by the nation’s newspapers.”
[2022-02-07 | highlight] “Fakery and adulteration ran rampant in other American products as well. “Honey” often proved to be thickened, colored corn syrup, and “vanilla” extract a mixture of alcohol and brown food coloring. “Strawberry” jam could be sweetened paste made from mashed apple peelings laced with grass seeds and dyed red. “Coffee” might be largely sawdust, or wheat, beans, beets, peas, and dandelion seeds, scorched black and ground to resemble the genuine article. Containers of “pepper,” “cinnamon,” or “nutmeg” were frequently laced with a cheaper filler material such as pulverized coconut shells, charred rope, or occasionally floor sweepings. “Flour” routinely contained crushed stone or gypsum as a cheap extender. Ground insects could be mixed into brown sugar, often without detection—their use linked to an unpleasant condition known as “grocer’s itch.”
[2022-02-07 | highlight] “By the mid-nineteenth century, in fact, many foods and drinks sold in the United States had earned a reputation as often untrustworthy and occasionally downright dangerous.
			Milk offers a stunning case in point. Dairymen, especially those serving crowded American cities in the nineteenth century, learned that there were profits to be made by skimming and watering down their product. The standard recipe was a pint of lukewarm water to every quart of milk—after the cream had been skimmed off. To improve the bluish look of the remaining liquid, milk producers learned to add whitening agents such as plaster of paris or chalk. Sometimes they added a dollop of molasses to give the liquid a more golden, creamy color. To mimic the expected layer of cream on top, they might also add a final squirt of something yellowish, occasionally pureed calf brains.”

=== The Jungle — Upton Sinclair ===
[2022-02-09 | highlight] “The veselija has come down to them from a far-off time; and the meaning of it was that one might dwell within the cave and gaze upon shadows, provided only that once in his lifetime he could break his chains, and feel his wings, and behold the sun; provided that once in his lifetime he might testify to the fact that life, with all its cares and its terrors, is no such great thing after all, but merely a bubble upon the surface of a river, a thing that one may toss about and play with as a juggler tosses his golden balls, a thing that one may quaff, like a goblet of rare red wine. Thus having known himself for the master of things, a man could go back to his toil and live upon the memory all his days.”
[2022-02-09 | highlight] “Most fearful they are to contemplate, the expenses of this entertainment. They will certainly be over two hundred dollars and maybe three hundred; and three hundred dollars is more than the year's income of many a person in this room. There are able-bodied men here who work from early morning until late at night, in ice-cold cellars with a quarter of an inch of water on the floor–men who for six or seven months in the year never see the sunlight from Sunday afternoon till the next Sunday morning–and who cannot earn three hundred dollars in a year. There are little children here, scarce in their teens, who can hardly see the top of the work benches–whose parents have lied to get them their places–and who do not make the half of three hundred dollars a year, and perhaps not even the third of it. And then to spend such a sum, all in a single day of your life, at a wedding feast! (For obviously it is the same thing, whether you spend it at once for your own wedding, or in a long time, at the weddings of all your friends.)”
[2022-02-08 | highlight] “The third man is very fat, with a round, red, sentimental nose, and he plays with his eyes turned up to the sky and a look of infinite yearning. He is playing a bass part upon his cello, and so the excitement is nothing to him; no matter what happens in the treble, it is his task to saw out one long-drawn and lugubrious note after another, from four o'clock in the afternoon until nearly the same hour next morning, for his third of the total income of one dollar per hour.
Before the feast has been five minutes under way, Tamoszius Kuszleika has risen in his excitement; a minute or two more and you see that he is beginning to edge over toward the tables. His nostrils are dilated and his breath comes fast–his demons are driving him. He”
[2022-02-08 | highlight] “The musicians–how shall one begin to describe them? All this time they have been there, playing in a mad frenzy–all of this scene must be read, or said, or sung, to music. It is the music which makes it what it is; it is the music which changes the place from the rear room of a saloon in back of the yards to a fairy place, a wonderland, a little corner of the high mansions of the sky.”
[2022-02-08 | highlight] “There was no other place for the babies to be, and so part of the preparations for the evening consisted of a collection of cribs and carriages in one corner. In these the babies slept, three or four together, or wakened together, as the case might be. Those who were still older, and could reach the tables, marched about munching contentedly at meat bones and bologna sausages.
The room is about thirty feet square, with whitewashed walls, bare save for a calendar, a picture of a race horse, and a family tree in a gilded frame.”
[2022-02-08 | highlight] “It was almost too much for her–you could see the pain of too great emotion in her face, and all the tremor of her form. She was so young–not quite sixteen–and small for her age, a mere child; and she had just been married–and married to Jurgis,* (*Pronounced Yoorghis) of all men, to Jurgis Rudkus, he with the white flower in the buttonhole of his new black suit, he with the mighty shoulders and the giant hands.”

=== Why We Sleep — Matthew Walker ===
[2022-02-08 | highlight] “You may be wondering why Mother Nature would program this variability across people. As a social species, should we not all be synchronized and therefore awake at the same time to promote maximal human interactions? Perhaps not. As we’ll discover later in this book, humans likely evolved to co-sleep as families or even whole tribes, not alone or as couples. Appreciating this evolutionary context, the benefits of such genetically programmed variation in sleep/wake timing preferences can be understood. The night owls in the group would not be going to sleep until one or two a.m., and not waking until nine or ten a.m. The morning larks, on the other hand, would have retired for the night at nine p.m. and woken at five a.m. Consequently, the group as a whole is only collectively vulnerable (i.e., every person asleep) for just four rather than eight hours, despite everyone still getting the chance for eight hours of sleep. That’s”
[2022-02-08 | highlight] “An adult’s owlness or larkness, also known as their chronotype, is strongly determined by genetics. If you are a night owl, it’s likely that one (or both) of your parents is a night owl. Sadly, society treats night owls rather unfairly on two counts. First is the label of being lazy, based on a night owl’s wont to wake up later in the day, due to the fact that they did not fall asleep until the early-morning hours. Others (usually morning larks) will chastise night owls on the erroneous assumption that such preferences are a choice, and if they were not so slovenly, they could easily wake up early. However, night owls are not owls by choice. They are bound to a delayed schedule by unavoidable DNA hardwiring. It is not their conscious fault, but rather their genetic fate.”
[2022-02-08 | highlight] “For some people, their peak of wakefulness arrives early in the day, and their sleepiness trough arrives early at night. These are “morning types,” and make up about 40 percent of the populace. They prefer to wake at or around dawn, are happy to do so, and function optimally at this time of day. Others are “evening types,” and account for approximately 30 percent of the population. They naturally prefer going to bed late and subsequently wake up late the following morning, or even in the afternoon. The remaining 30 percent of people lie somewhere in between morning and evening types, with a slight leaning toward eveningness, like myself.”
[2022-01-21 | highlight] “The experimental question facing Kleitman and Richardson was simple: When cut off from the daily cycle of light and dark, would their biological rhythms of sleep and wakefulness, together with body temperature, become completely erratic, or would they stay the same as those individuals in the outside world exposed to rhythmic daylight? In total, they lasted thirty-two days in complete darkness. Not only did they aggregate some impressive facial hair, but they made two groundbreaking discoveries in the process. The first was that humans, like de Mairan’s heliotrope plants, generated their own endogenous circadian rhythm in the absence of external light from the sun. That”
[2022-01-21 | highlight] “As expected, the leaves expanded during the light of day and retracted with the dark of night.
Then came the genius twist. De Mairan placed the plant in a sealed box for the next twenty-four-hour period, plunging it into total dark for both day and night. During these twenty-four hours of blackness, he would occasionally take a peek at the plant in controlled darkness, observing the state of the leaves. Despite being cut off from the influence of light during the day, the plant still behaved as though it were being bathed in sunlight; its leaves were proudly expanded. Then, it retracted its leaves as if on cue at the end of the day, even without the sun’s setting signal, and they stayed collapsed throughout the entire night.”

=== The Utopia of Rules — David Graeber ===
[2022-02-05 | highlight] “The social movements of the sixties were, on the whole, left-wing in inspiration, but they were also rebellions against bureaucracy, or, to put it more accurately, rebellions against the bureaucratic mindset, against the soul-destroying conformity of the postwar welfare states. In the face of the gray functionaries of both state-capitalist and state-socialist regimes, sixties rebels stood for individual expression and spontaneous conviviality, and against (“rules and regulations, who needs them?”) every form of social control.”
[2022-02-05 | highlight] “This graph would almost certainly show a line much like the one in the first graph—a slow climb until 1973. But here the two graphs would diverge—rather than falling back, the line would continue to climb; if anything, it would do so more precipitously, tracking how, in the late twentieth century, middle-class citizens spent ever more hours struggling with phone trees and web interfaces, while the less fortunate spent ever more hours of their day trying to jump through the increasingly elaborate hoops required to gain access to dwindling social services.”
[2022-01-06 | highlight] “The result is a political catastrophe. There’s really no other way to put it. What is presented as the “moderate” Left solution to any social problems—and radical left solutions are, almost everywhere now, ruled out tout court—has invariably come to be some nightmare fusion of the worst elements of bureaucracy and the worst elements of capitalism. It’s as if someone had consciously tried to create the least appealing possible political position. It is a testimony to the genuine lingering power of leftist ideals that anyone would even consider voting for a party that promoted this sort of thing—because surely, if they do, it’s not because they actually think these are good policies, but because these are the only policies anyone who identifies themselves as left-of-center is allowed to set forth.”

=== This Is Your Mind on Plants — Michael Pollan ===
[2022-02-04 | highlight] “Before everyone dispersed to return to their lives, we took a selfie of our group, squeezing together to fit in the frame as if in a dream in which the pandemic was over. In the picture all of us look ragged and exhausted yet buoyant, too, and connected to one another in a way that we hadn’t been a dozen or so hours before. It was as if we had gone down a river together on a raft, endured some sort of ordeal we couldn’t quite describe but sensed had left us changed, in ways that Taloma said might take days or weeks to recognize. “The spirit of the plant will remain in you for several days, maybe longer,” she told us. “Look for it.” After packing up her altar, returning the sacred objects to their woven bags and wooden boxes, Taloma handed Judith the Wachuma blossom, faded now but still gorgeous.”
[2022-02-04 | highlight] “What peyotism chiefly heals is trauma in its various collective and individual manifestations, the enduring legacy of official policies that sought nothing less than “the destruction of Native American cultures.” Calabrese reminds us of the historical moment when the new religion began to spread across North America: soon after Indians had been forced onto reservations and the Ghost Dance had been viciously suppressed. “Instead of focusing on a transformation of the world through the disappearance of the Europeans,” Calabrese writes, peyotism “focused on personal transformation that would allow one to survive in the post-conquest situation, build a stronger community, and avoid forms of postcolonial disorder like addiction to the White Man’s alcohol.”
[2022-02-04 | highlight] “dilemma: “The white man goes into his church house and talks about Jesus, but the Indian goes into his tepee and talks to Jesus.” How could the bread and wine of the eucharist possibly compete with a plant sacrament that allowed the worshipper to make direct contact with the divine?
			By sheer dint of ecclesiastical power, was the brutal answer. In 1620 the Mexican Inquisition declared peyote a “heretical perversity . . . opposed to the purity and integrity of our Holy Catholic faith,” making it the first drug ever to be outlawed in the Americas—thereby launching the first battle in the war against certain plants that continues to this day. The gravity with which the authorities treated peyote is plain from its inclusion on the list of questions priests put to penitent Indians to judge the state of their souls:”
[2022-02-04 | highlight] “The question arises: why don’t we see this way all the time? Huxley suggests ordinary consciousness evolved to keep this information from us for a good reason: to prevent us from being continuously astonished, so that we might get up from our chair now and again and go about the business of living. Huxley recognized the danger of being constantly thunderstruck by reality: “For if one always saw like this, one would never want to do anything else.”
			That’s why our usual perception of the world is “limited to what is biologically or socially useful”; our brains evolved to admit to our awareness only the “measly trickle” of information required for our survival and no more. Yet there is much more to reality, and 400 milligrams of mescaline sulfate was what it took to throw open what Huxley calls “the reducing valve” of consciousness—aka the doors of perception.”
[2022-02-04 | highlight] “Huxley suffered from poor eyesight, but not on this particular afternoon. Now the material world revealed itself to him in all its beauty, detail, profundity, and “Suchness”—as it really was, whatever that means. (I wonder: does the novelty and power of this sort of radical noticing impress women as much as men? I tend to doubt it.) Huxley spent hours (and pages) dilating on the “is-ness” of a chair, a bouquet of flowers, and the folds of his gray flannel trousers, entranced by “the miraculous fact of sheer existence.” These objects weren’t getting up and dancing, or transforming themselves into the god Shiva, or talking to him—they were just being, and what an astonishment that was!”
[2022-02-04 | highlight] “So here was another moral cost of caffeine: in order for the English mind to be sharpened with tea, the Chinese mind had to be clouded with opium.”
[2022-02-04 | highlight] “Our story about the cup of “concentrated sunshine” does seem to be darkening, and I’m afraid it will darken further before it is over. A case can be made that coffee and tea did make a substantial, positive contribution to the advance of quote-unquote “civilization” in the West, if by that we mean the various blessings of culture and capitalism, including the arts and sciences and the standard of living. But just as consumers of caffeine eventually must pay a biological price for the energy supplied by their drug of choice, an economic and even moral price has been paid as well. Almost from the start, the blessings of coffee and tea in the West were inextricably bound up with the sins of slavery and imperialism, in a global system of production organized with such brutal rationality that it could only have been fueled by—what else?—caffeine itself.”
[2022-02-04 | highlight] “No one knows exactly why the practice took root, but the tea imported by Great Britain tended to be bitter and, as a hot beverage, could readily absorb large amounts of sugar. In fact, one of the principal uses of sugar in Britain was as a sweetener of tea, and the custom drove a substantial increase in sugar consumption—which in turn drove an expansion of slavery to run the sugar plantations of the Caribbean. (An estimated 70 percent of the slave trade supported sugar production.) Coffee was even more directly implicated in the institution of slavery, especially in Brazil, where coffee growers imported large numbers of slaves from Africa to work on their plantations. How many tea and coffee drinkers in Europe had any idea that their sober and civilized habit rested on the back of such brutality?”
[2022-02-04 | highlight] “Philosopher Michel Foucault’s concept of “body discipline” could profitably be used to describe the effects of caffeine, since it helped bend humans to the wheel of the Machine and the requirements of a new economic and mental order. Looked at that way, caffeine is a curse, addicting us to a regime that makes us more tractable and productive workers, speeding us up so that we may better keep pace with the manmade machinery of modern life.”
[2022-02-04 | highlight] “To supply this demand required an imperialist enterprise of enormous scale and brutality, especially after the British decided it would be more profitable to turn India, its colony, into a tea producer, than to buy tea from the Chinese. This required first stealing the secrets of tea production from the Chinese (a mission accomplished by the renowned Scots botanist and plant explorer Robert Fortune, disguised as a Mandarin), seizing land from peasant farmers in Assam (where tea grew wild), and then forcing the farmers into servitude, picking tea leaves from dawn to dusk.* The introduction of tea to the West was all about exploitation—the extraction of surplus value from labor, not only in its production in India but in its consumption in England as well.”
[2022-02-04 | highlight] “Tea was celebrated in China and, later, Japan not only as a promoter of wakefulness but of health, too—and with good reason. Tea was used as a mouthwash in the East long before science discovered it contains fluoride (the English would negate this advantage by adding copious amounts of sugar to their tea); tea also contains a great many vitamins and minerals—one of the highest concentrations in any plant—and prodigious quantities of polyphenols, compounds rich in antioxidants. (Tea contains more polyphenols than red wine.)
			“Always sip tea as if tea were life itself”: this injunction, from the eighth-century text Ch’a-ching, or The Classic of Tea”
[2022-02-04 | highlight] “Surely it is more than a coincidence that caffeine and the minute hand on clocks arrived at more or less the same historical moment. For medieval man, and especially for the man doing physical labor outdoors, the angle of the sun mattered more than the hand of the clock. There had been no minute hand because there had been no need to subdivide the hour. But new kinds of work demanded much closer attention to time and its increments, and what psychoactive drug is more time-bound than caffeine? Is more closely tied to the temporal landmarks of the day? (Think of T. S. Eliot’s Prufrock, measuring out his life in coffee spoons.) Work now was not only moving indoors but also being reorganized on the principle of the clock, regularized and routinized, and this shift called for a new temporal discipline that coffee and tea could help to enforce.“

But the most important contribution that caffeine made to modern work—and, in turn, to the rise of capitalism—was to liberate us from the fixed rhythms of the sun, an astronomical timepiece that also sets the clocks of our bodies. Before caffeine, the whole idea of a late shift, let alone a night shift, was inconceivable—the human body simply would not permit it. But the power of caffeine to keep us awake and alert, to stem the natural tide of exhaustion, freed us from the circadian rhythms of our biology and so, along with the advent of artificial light, opened the frontier of night to the possibilities of work. This “wakefulness wrested from Nature,” as one early-nineteenth-century German physician described caffeine’s gift to humankind, thus allowed us to adapt our bodies and our minds to the requirements of modern life.”

Excerpt From
This Is Your Mind on Plants
Michael Pollan
This material may be protected by copyright.
[2022-02-03 | highlight] “Long before the coffee break there was the beer break, commonly offered to laborers doing physical work outdoors; mental clarity was not a priority, nor was attention to clock time. For laborers working with machines, however, a mind dulled by alcohol was a hazard to both safety and productivity. And for clerks and others who worked with numbers, the alertness, focus, and all-around mental clarity coffee afforded made it the ideal drug—“the beverage of the modern bourgeois age,” in the words of Wolfgang Schivelbusch. Coffee showed up in Europe at exactly the right moment: “It spread through the body and achieved chemically and pharmacologically what rationalism and the Protestant ethic sought to fulfill spiritually and ideologically.”
[2022-02-03 | highlight] “Before the arrival of coffee and tea, alcohol was being consumed in Europe morning, noon, and night; not only in taverns after dark but for breakfast at home and even in the workplace, where it was routinely given to laborers on their breaks. The English mind in particular was befogged most of the day by more or less constant infusions of alcohol. Campaigns for temperance sprang up from time to time, but without a substitute beverage they failed to gain traction.
			Enter coffee.
			As early as 1660, writer and historian James Howell could note: “’Tis found already, that this Coffee drink hath caused a greater Sobriety among the Nations; for whereas formerly Apprentices & Clerks with others used to take their mornings’ draught in Ale, Beer, or Wine, which by the dizziness they cause in the Brain, make many unfit for business, they use now to play the Good-fellows in this wakeful and civil drink.”
[2022-02-03 | highlight] “But in 1616, a wily Dutchman managed to break the Arab stranglehold on Coffea arabica. He smuggled live coffee plants out of Mocha, the Yemeni port city, and took them to the botanical garden in Amsterdam, where they were grown under glass and additional plants were eventually propagated by cutting. (You can create a new, genetically identical plant by rooting a shoot or branch in soil.) One of those clones ended up in the Dutch-controlled Indonesian island of Java, where the Dutch East India Company successfully propagated it, eventually producing enough coffee plants to establish a plantation there. Hence, the prized coffee known as Mocha Java.”
[2022-02-03 | highlight] “The seventeenth-century war of the sexes over coffee led to the association of tea with femininity and domesticity that endures to this day in the West. A Londoner could get a cup of tea in the coffeehouse, but tea didn’t have its own dedicated public venue until 1717, when Thomas Twining opened a tea house next door to Tom’s, his coffeehouse in the Strand. Here women were welcome to sample the various offerings and buy tea leaves to brew at home. Thanks in part to Twining’s innovation, what was soon to become the more popular caffeinated beverage in Great Britain came under the control of upper- and middle-class women, who proceeded to develop a rich culture of tea parties, high teas and low, and a whole regime of tea accessories, including china and porcelain, the teaspoon and the tea cozy, and finger foods expressly designed to accompany tea. (The temperance movement, led by women and promoting tea as an alternative to gin, would later solidify tea’s feminine image in the West.)”
[2022-02-03 | highlight] “in fact, this proved to be one of the most important gifts to humanity of both coffee and tea: the fact that you needed to boil water to make them meant that they were the safest things a person could drink. (Before that it had been alcohol, which was more sanitary than water, but not as safe as tea or coffee. The tannins in all these beverages also have antimicrobial properties.) The contribution of coffee and tea to public health may help explain why societies that embraced the new hot drinks tended to thrive, as microbial diseases declined.”
[2022-02-03 | highlight] “In China the popularity of tea during the Tang dynasty also coincided with a golden age. And the far-reaching impact of caffeine’s arrival in Europe gives the idea of a causal link some plausibility.
			Europeans had long been fascinated by the exotic practices of “the Orient,” and the drinking of this inky hot beverage soon sparked their curiosity. A Venetian traveler to Constantinople in 1585 noted that the locals “are in the habit of drinking in public in shops and in the streets, a black liquid, boiling as they can stand it, which is extracted from a seed they call Cave . . . and is said to have the property of keeping a man awake.” The”
[2022-02-03 | highlight] “On this morning, that lovely dispersal of the mental fog that the first hit of caffeine ushers into consciousness never arrived. The fog settled over me and would not budge. It’s not that I felt terrible—I never got a serious headache—but all day long I felt a certain muzziness, as if a veil had descended in the space between me and reality, a kind of filter that absorbed certain wavelengths of light and sound. I wrote in my notebook, “Consciousness feels less transparent than usual, as if the air is slightly thicker and seems to be slowing everything down, including perception.” I was able to do some work, but distractedly. “I feel like an unsharpened pencil,” I wrote. “Things on the periphery intrude, and won’t be ignored. I can’t focus for more than a minute. Is this what it’s like to have A.D.D.?”
[2022-01-29 | highlight] “Yet this was a metamorphosis that required not only the physical seed and water and sunlight but, crucially, a certain metaphysical ingredient too: the knowledge that the poppies I beheld were, in fact, of the genus Papaver and the species somniferum. For although ignorance of the law is never a defense, in the case of poppies, ignorance of botany may be. True, I had planted seeds I knew to be Papaver somniferum and then blabbed that fact to the world. But what if instead I had planted “breadseed poppies,” or the poppy seeds on a poppy-seed bagel? What if I had planted only the Papaver paeoniflorum I’d ordered, the one I’d had no idea was really somniferum? As I stood there admiring the extravagantly doubled blooms of this poppy, I realized that growing it was no more felonious than growing asters or marigolds—for as long, that is, as I remained ignorant of the fact that this poppy, too, was somniferum. But it’s too late for me now; I know too much. And so, dear reader, do you.”
[2022-01-29 | highlight] “Arbitrary though the war on drugs may be, the battle against the poppy is surely its most eccentric front. The exact same chemical compounds in other hands—those of a pharmaceutical company, say, or a doctor—are treated as the boon to mankind they most surely are. Yet although the medical value of my poppies is widely recognized, my failure to heed what amounts to a set of regulations (that only a pharmaceutical company may handle these flowers; that only a doctor may dispense their extracts) and prejudices (that refined alkaloids are superior to crude ones) governing their production and use makes me not just a scofflaw but a felon.”
[2022-01-29 | highlight] “I had started out a few months ago with a seed no more felonious than the one for a tomato (indeed, they had arrived in the same envelope), and, after planting and watering it, thinning and weeding and performing all the other ordinary acts of gardening, I had ended up with a flower that rendered its cultivator a criminal. Surely this was an alchemy no less incredible than the one that had transformed that same seed into a chemical compound with the power to alter the ratio of pleasure and pain in my brain. Yet this second transformation had no basis in nature whatsoever. It is, in fact, the result of nothing more than a particular legal taxonomy, a classification of certain substances that appear in nature into categories labeled “licit” and “illicit.” Any”

=== Heretics of Dune — Frank Herbert ===
[2022-02-03 | highlight] “When the ghola-baby was delivered from the first Bene Gesserit axlotl tank, Mother Superior Darwi Odrade ordered a quiet celebration in her private dining room atop Central. It was barely dawn, and the two other members of her Council—Tamalane and Bellonda—showed impatience at the summons, even though Odrade had ordered breakfast served by her personal chef.
			“It isn’t every woman who can preside at the birth of her own father,” Odrade quipped when the others complained they had too many demands on their time to permit of “time-wasting nonsense.”
[2022-02-03 | highlight] “We are not looking at a new state of matter but at a newly recognized relationship between consciousness and matter, which provides a more penetrating insight into the workings of prescience. The oracle shapes a projected inner universe to produce new external probabilities out of forces that are not understood. There is no need to understand these forces before using them to shape the physical universe. Ancient metal workers had no need to understand the molecular and submolecular complexities of their steel, bronze, copper, gold, and tin. They invented mystical powers to describe the unknown while they continued to operate their forges and wield their hammers.
			—MOTHER SUPERIOR TARAZA, ARGUMENT IN COUNCIL
			Th”
[2022-02-03 | highlight] “It was not correct to call them depraved, he thought. Sometimes, the supremely rich did become depraved. That came from believing that money (power) could buy anything and everything. And why shouldn’t they believe this? They saw it happening every day. It was easy to believe in absolutes.
			Hope springs eternal and all of that gornaw!
			It was like another faith. Money would buy the impossible.
			Then came depravity.
			It was not the same for the Honored Matres. They were, somehow, beyond depravity. They had come through it; he could see that. But now they were into something else so far beyond depravity that Teg wondered if he really wanted to know about it.
			The knowledge was there, though, inescapable in his new awareness. Not one of those people would hesitate an instant before consigning an entire planet to torture if that meant personal gain. Or if the payoff were some imagined pleasure. Or if the torture produced even a few more days or hours of living.
			What pleased them? What gratified? They were like semuta addicts. Whatever simulated pleasure for them, they required more of it every time.
			And they know this!
			How they must rage inside! Caught[…]”
[2022-02-02 | highlight] “Duncan hummed softly and touched her, moving with an agility that shocked Murbella. He should not be this responsive! Not this way! His right hand fluttered against the lips of her vagina while his left hand caressed the base of her spine. At the same time, his mouth moved gently over her nose, down to her lips, down to the crease of her left armpit.
			And all the time he hummed softly in a rhythm that pulsed through her body, lulling . . . weakening . . .
			She tried to push away from him as he increased the pace of her responses.
			How did he know to touch me there at just that instant? And there! And there! Oh, Holy Rock of Dur, how does he know this?”
[2022-02-02 | highlight] “The workers hawked and spat into the gutter as they emerged into the night. Ridding themselves of some contaminant?
			Burzmali put his mouth close to Lucilla’s ear and whispered: “Those workers are the Bordanos.”
			She risked a glance back at them where they walked toward a side street. Bordanos? Ahhh, yes: people trained and bred to work the compression machinery that harnessed sewer gases. They had been bred to remove the sense of smell and the musculature of shoulders and arms had been increased. Burzmali guided her around a corner and out of sight of the Bordanos.”
[2022-02-01 | highlight] “When Sheeana again missed her footing and uttered another small sound of complaint, Odrade said: “Don’t favor yourself, child!”
			Odrade saw Waff’s shoulders stiffen. He did not like that peremptory manner with his “Blessed One.” There was backbone in the little man. Odrade recognized it as the strength of fanaticism. Even if the worm came to kill him, Waff would not flee. Faith in God’s will would carry him directly into his own death—unless he were shaken out of his religious security.
			Odrade suppressed a smile. She could follow his thinking process: God will soon reveal His Purpose.
			But Waff was thinking about his cells growing in the slow renewal at Bandalong. No matter what happened here, his cells would carry on for the Bene Tleilax . . . and for God—a serial-Waff always serving the Great Belief”
[2022-02-01 | highlight] “have ghola-imposed filters on his pre-ghola memories. Some of the original memories will come flooding back. Other recollections will return more slowly. There will be no meshing, though, until he recalls that original moment of death.” Bellonda had then given Teg the known details of that fatal moment.
			“Sardaukar,” Duncan whispered. He looked around him at the Harkonnen symbols that permeated the no-globe. “The Emperor’s crack troops wearing Harkonnen uniforms!” A wolfish grin twisted his mouth. “How they must have hated that!”
			Teg remained silently watchful.
			“They killed me,” Duncan said. It was a flatly unemotional statement, all the more chilling for its positive delivery. A violent shudder passed through him and the trembling subsided. “At least a dozen of them in that little room.” He looked directly at Teg. “One of them got through at me like a meat cleaver right down on my head.” He hesitated, his throat working convulsively. His gaze remained on Teg. “Did I buy Paul enough time to escape?”
[2022-02-01 | highlight] “At her words, Waff jerked both arms up, trying to aim at the two separated and difficult targets. Before his muscles responded, Odrade was under his guard. She heard the faint hiss of dart throwers but felt no sting. Her left arm came up in a slashing blow to break Waff’s right arm. Her right foot broke his left arm.
			Waff screamed.
			He had never suspected such speed in the Bene Gesserit. It was almost a match for what he had seen in the Honored Matre on the Ixian conference ship. Even through his pain he realized that he must report this. Reverend Mothers command synaptic bypasses under duress!”
[2022-02-01 | highlight] “Quite naturally, holders of power wish to suppress wild research. Unrestricted questing after knowledge has a long history of producing unwanted competition. The powerful want a “safe line of investigations,” which will develop only those products and ideas that can be controlled and, most important, that will allow the larger part of the benefits to be captured by inside investors. Unfortunately, a random universe full of relative variables does not insure such a “safe line of investigations.”
			—ASSESSMENT OF IX, BENE GESSERIT ARCHIVES”
[2022-02-01 | highlight] “Complete?”
			All of the Sisters at the conference had been astonished by the suggestion. It implied a form of mental copy going beyond the memory print about which they already knew.
			The advisor, Sister Hesterion from Archives, had come armed with a tightly organized list of supporting material. “We already know that what an Ixian Probe does mechanically, the Tleilaxu do with nerves and flesh. The next step is obvious.”
			Seeing”
[2022-02-01 | highlight] “You answer some of my questions but you won’t answer others,” Sheeana said. “You said you’d been waiting for me but you won’t explain. Why won’t you obey me?”
			“A foolish question, child.”
			“Why do you keep calling me child?”
			“Are you not a child?”
			“I menstruate.”
			“But you’re still a child.”
			“The priests obey me.”
			“They’re afraid of you.”
			“You aren’t?”
			“No, I’m not.”
			“Good! It gets tiresome when people only fear you.”
			“The priests think you come from God.”
			“Don’t you think that?”
			“Why should I? We—” Odrade broke off as an acolyte messenger entered. The acolyte’s fingers danced in silent communication: “Four priests listened. They have been killed. All were minions of Tuek.”
			Odrade waved the messenger away.”
[2022-01-31 | highlight] “Stiros was only the most recent among those who looked upon Sheeana as something not quite mortal. It was observable that those around her, Cania included, had come to love Sheeana. She was so ingenuous, so bright and responsive.
			Many observed that this growing affection for Sheeana extended even to Tuek.
			For the people touched by this power, the Sisterhood had an immediate recognition. The Bene Gesserit knew a label for this ancient effect: expanding worship. Tamalane reported profound changes moving through Rakis as people everywhere on the planet began praying to Sheeana instead of to Shaitan or even to Shai-hulud.
			“They see that Sheeana intercedes for the weakest people,” Tamalane reported. “It is a familiar pattern. All goes as ordered. When do you send the ghola?”
[2022-01-31 | highlight] “She asked if her quarters were the best. They are about to move her and she must not find any of you out here.”
			“But what are we to do?” Stiros asked.
			“Study her,” Dromind said.
			The hall was cleared immediately and all of them began the process of studying Sheeana. The pattern born here would print itself on all of their lives over the subsequent years. The routine that took shape around Sheeana produced changes felt in the farthest reaches of the Divided God’s influence. Two words ignited the change: “Study her.”
[2022-01-31 | highlight] “Let us not forget the Hadi Benotto translation of God’s own holy words,” another priest interrupted. “Shai-hulud referred many times to Siona.”
			“Not always with favor,” Stiros reminded them. “Remember her full name: Siona Ibn Fuad al-Seyefa Atreides.”
			“Atreides,” another priest whispered.
			“We must study her with care,” Dromind said.
			A young acolyte-messenger hurried up the hallway to the group and sought among them until he spied Stiros. “Stiros,” the messenger said, “you must clear this hallway immediately.”
[2022-01-31 | highlight] “They are sexual monsters, his informants had said. They enslave men by the powers of sex.
			“How little you know the joys I could give you,” she said. Her voice coiled like a whip around him. How tempting! How seductive!
			Waff spoke defensively: “Tell me why you—”
			“I need tell you nothing!”
			“Then you did not come to bargain.” He spoke sadly. The no-ships had, indeed, seeded those other universes with rot. Waff sensed the weight of necessity on his shoulders. What if he could not slay her?
			“How dare you keep suggesting a bargain with an Honored Matre?” she demanded. “Know you that we set the price!”
[2022-01-30 | highlight] “The School Sisters held back little from him, revealing there for the first time the fact of his Atreides ancestry. That revelation was necessary because of the tests they gave him. They obviously were testing for prescience. Could he, like a Guild Navigator, detect fatal obstructions? He failed. They tried him next on no-chambers and no-ships. He was as blind to such devices as the rest of humankind. For this test, though, they fed him increased doses of the spice and he sensed the awakening of his True Self.
			“The Mind at Its Beginning,” a teaching Sister called it when he asked for an explanation of this odd sensation.”

“For a time, the universe was magical as he looked at it through this new awareness. His awareness was a circle, then a globe. Arbitrary forms became transient. He fell into trance state without warning until the Sisters taught him how to control this. They provided him with accounts of saints and mystics and forced him to draw a freehand circle with either hand, following the line with his awareness.
			By the end of the term, his awareness resumed its touch with conventional labels, but the memory of the magic never left him. He found that memory a source of strength at the most difficult moments.”
[2022-01-30 | highlight] “Shortly before his thirteenth birthday, Miles Teg was sent away to advanced schooling at the Bene Gesserit stronghold on Lampadas, where his mother’s assessment of him was confirmed. Word went back to her:
			“You have given us the Warrior Mentat we had hoped for.”
			Teg did not see this note until sorting through his mother’s effects after her death. The words inscribed on a small sheet of ridulian crystal with the Chapter House imprint below them filled him with an odd sense of displacement in time. His memory put him suddenly back on Lampadas where the love-awe he had felt for his mother was deftly transferred to the Sisterhood itself, as originally intended. He had come to understand this only during his later Mentat training but the understanding changed little.”
[2022-01-30 | highlight] “At his father’s words, the Face Dancers betrayed no emotion, but their eyes appeared to glitter more brightly.
			“How did they get so evil?” Miles asked.
			“They are communal beings, bred not to identify with any shape or face. The appearance they present now is for my benefit. They know I am watching. They have relaxed into their natural communal shape. Mark it closely.”
			Miles tipped his head to one side and studied the Face Dancers. They looked so bland and ineffectual.
			“They have no sense of self,” his mother said. “They have only the instinct to preserve their own lives unless ordered to die for their masters.”
			“Would they do that?”
			“They have done it many times.”
			“Who are their masters?”
			“Men who seldom leave the planets of the Bene Tleilax.”
[2022-01-27 | highlight] “He slipped the papers into his pocket and went in search of Patrin. Patrin would have to be briefed, and mollified. They would have to discuss whom to call in for this assignment. He began to list some of the names in his mind. Dangerous duty ahead. It called for only the best people. Damn! Everything on the estate here would have to be passed over to Firus and Dimela. So many details! He felt his pulse quicken as he strode through the house.
			Passing a house guard, one of his old soldiers, Teg paused: “Martin, cancel all of my appointments for today. Find my daughter and tell her to meet me in my study.”
			Word spread through the house and, from there, across the estate. Servants and family, knowing that The Reverend Mother Superior had just conversed privately with him, automatically set up a protective screen to keep idle distractions away from Teg. His eldest daughter, Dimela, cut him short when he tried to list details necessary to carry on his experimental”
[2022-01-27 | highlight] “demanded.
			“Innocent flesh devoid of its original memories. See Axlotl Tanks.”
			Duncan had learned to read the silences, the blank places in what the people of the Keep revealed to him. Revelation swept over him. He knew! Only ten and he knew!
			I am a ghola.
			Late afternoon in the library, all of the esoteric machinery around him faded into a sensory background, and a ten-year-old sat silently before a scanner hugging the knowledge to himself.
			I am a ghola!
			He could not remember the axlotl tanks where his cells had grown into an infant. His first memories were of Geasa picking him up from his cradle, the alert interest in those adult eyes that had so soon faded into wary lidding.
			It was as though the information so grudgingly supplied him by the Keep’s people and records had at last defined a central shape: himself.”
[2022-01-27 | highlight] “Once more, Taraza bent to her display.
			I am Odrade, Odrade thought.
			In the Bene Gesserit schools where first names tended to slip away, roll call was by last name. Friends and acquaintances picked up the habit of using the roll-call name. They learned early that sharing secret or private names was an ancient device for ensnaring a person in affections.
			Taraza, three classes ahead of Odrade, had been assigned to “bring the younger girl along,” a deliberate association by watchful teachers.
			“Bringing along” meant a certain amount of lording it over the younger but also incorporated essentials better taught by someone closer to peer relationship. Taraza, with access to the private records of her trainee, started calling the younger girl “Dar.” Odrade responded by calling Taraza “Tar.”
[2022-01-27 | highlight] “Odrade had seen this before, too. She said: “Does the Mother Superior doubt the rightness of the Bene Gesserit?”
“Doubt? Oh, no. But I do experience frustration. We work all of our lives for these highly refined goals and in the end, what do we find? We find that many of the things to which we have dedicated our lives came from petty decisions. They can be traced to desires for personal comfort or convenience and had nothing at all to do with our high ideals. What really was at stake was some worldly working agreement that satisfied the needs of those who could make the decisions.”
“I’ve heard you call that political necessity,” Odrade said.”

=== Station Eleven — Emily St. John Mandel ===
[2022-01-28 | highlight] “There was the flu that exploded like a neutron bomb over the surface of the earth and the shock of the collapse that followed, the first unspeakable years when everyone was traveling, before everyone caught on that there was no place they could walk to where life continued as it had before and settled wherever they could, clustered close together for safety in truck stops and former restaurants and old motels. The Traveling Symphony moved between the settlements of the changed world and had been doing so since five years after the collapse, when the conductor had gathered a few of her friends from their military orchestra, left the air base where they’d been living, and set out into the unknown landscape.”
[2022-01-28 | highlight] “The caravans had once been pickup trucks, but now they were pulled by teams of horses on wheels of steel and wood. All of the pieces rendered useless by the end of gasoline had been removed—the engine, the fuel-supply system, all the other components that no one under the age of twenty had ever seen in operation—and a bench had been installed on top of each cab for the drivers. The cabs were stripped of everything that added excess weight but left otherwise intact, with doors that closed and windows of difficult-to-break automobile glass, because when they were traveling through fraught territory it was nice to have somewhere relatively safe to put the children. The main structures of the caravans had been built in the pickup beds, tarps lashed over frames. The tarps on all three caravans were painted gunmetal gray, with THE TRAVELING SYMPHONY lettered in white on both sides.”
[2022-01-28 | highlight] “TWENTY YEARS AFTER the end of air travel, the caravans of the Traveling Symphony moved slowly under a white-hot sky. It was the end of July, and the twenty-five-year-old thermometer affixed to the back of the lead caravan read 106 Fahrenheit, 41 Celsius. They were near Lake Michigan but they couldn’t see it from here. Trees pressed in close at the sides of the road and erupted through cracks in the pavement, saplings bending under the caravans and soft leaves brushing the legs of horses and Symphony alike. The heat wave had persisted for a relentless week.”
[2022-01-28 | highlight] “AN INCOMPLETE LIST:No more diving into pools of chlorinated water lit green from below. No more ball games played out under floodlights. No more porch lights with moths fluttering on summer nights. No more trains running under the surface of cities on the dazzling power of the electric third rail. No more cities. No more films, except rarely, except with a generator drowning out half the dialogue, and only then for the first little while until the fuel for the generators ran out, because automobile gas goes stale after two or three years. Aviation gas lasts longer, but it was difficult to come by.No more screens shining in the half-light as people raise their phones above the crowd to take photographs of concert stages. No more concert stages lit by candy-colored halogens, no more electronica, punk, electric guitars.No more pharmaceuticals. No more certainty of surviving a scratch on one’s hand, a cut on a finger while chopping vegetables for dinner, a dog bite.”
[2022-01-28 | highlight] “What’s happening now?” Jeevan moved quickly through the store while Hua spoke. Another case of water—Jeevan was under the impression that one can never have too much—and then cans and cans of food, all the tuna and beans and soup on the shelf, pasta, anything that looked like it might last a while. The hospital was full of flu patients and the situation was identical at the other hospitals in the city. The ambulance service was overwhelmed. Thirty-seven patients had died now, including every patient who’d been on the Moscow flight and two ER nurses who’d been on duty when the first patients came in. Jeevan was standing by the cash register again, the clerk scanning his cans and packages. Hua said he’d called his wife and told her to take the kids and leave the city tonight, but not by airplane. The part of the evening that had transpired in the Elgin Theatre seemed like possibly a different lifetime. The clerk was moving very slowly. ”
[2022-01-28 | highlight] “Jeevan’s understanding of disaster preparedness was based entirely on action movies, but on the other hand, he’d seen a lot of action movies. He started with water, filled one of the oversized shopping carts with as many cases and bottles as he could fit. There was a moment of doubt on the way to the cash registers, straining against the weight of the cart—was he overreacting?—but he was committed, he’d decided, too late to turn back. The clerk raised an eyebrow.“I’m parked just outside,” Jeevan said. “I’ll bring the cart back.” The clerk nodded, tired. She was young, early twenties probably, with dark bangs that she kept pushing out of her eyes. He forced the impossibly heavy cart outside and half-pushed, half-skidded through the snow at the exit. There was a ramp down into a small parklike arrangement of benches and planters. The cart gained speed on the incline, bogged down in deep snow and slid sideways into a planter.”
[2022-01-28 | highlight] “floor.“It’s the fastest incubation period I’ve ever seen. I just saw a patient, she works as an orderly here at the hospital, on duty when the first patients started coming in this morning. She started feeling sick a few hours into her shift, went home early, her boyfriend drove her back in two hours ago and now she’s on a ventilator. You get exposed to this, you’re sick within hours.”“You think it’s going to spread outside the hospital …?” Jeevan was having some difficulty keeping his thoughts straight.”
[2022-01-28 | highlight] “pretty—”“You told me to call you if there was ever a real epidemic.”“I remember.”“We’ve admitted over two hundred flu patients since this morning,” Hua said. “A hundred and sixty in the past three hours. Fifteen of them have died. The ER’s full of new cases. We’ve got beds parked in hallways. Health Canada’s about to make an announcement.” It wasn’t only exhaustion, Jeevan realized. Hua was afraid.Jeevan pulled the bell cord and made his way to the rear door. He found himself glancing at the other passengers. The young woman with groceries, the man in the business suit playing a game on his cell phone, the elderly couple conversing quietly in Hindi. Had any of them come from the airport? He was aware of all of them breathing around him.”
[2022-01-28 | highlight] “Up until tonight he hadn’t been certain. He’d been searching for a profession for so long now. He’d been a bartender, a paparazzo, an entertainment journalist, then a paparazzo again and then once again a bartender, and that was just the past dozen years.”
[2022-01-28 | highlight] “Kirsten, teary-eyed and breathless, a few days shy of her eighth birthday, gazed at the object and thought it was the most beautiful, the most wonderful, the strangest thing anyone had ever given her. It was a lump of glass with a storm cloud trapped inside.In the lobby, the people gathered at the bar clinked their glasses together. “To Arthur,” they said. They drank for a few more minutes and then went their separate ways in the storm.Of all of them there at the bar that night, the bartender was the one who survived the longest. He died three weeks later on the road out of the city.”
[2022-01-28 | highlight] “Arthur’s heart wasn’t beating. Jeevan began CPR. Someone shouted an order and the curtain dropped, a whoosh of fabric and shadow that removed the audience from the equation and reduced the brilliance of the stage by half. The plastic snow was still falling. The security men had receded. The lights changed, the blues and whites of the snowstorm replaced by a fluorescent glare that seemed yellow by comparison. Jeevan worked silently in the margarine light, glancing sometimes at Arthur’s face. Please, he thought, please. Arthur’s eyes were closed.”

=== Dune Saga Collection — Frank Herbert ===
[2022-01-27 | highlight] “Taraza cleared her throat. “No need. Lucilla is one of our finest Imprinters. Each of you, of course, received the identical liberal conditioning to prepare you for this.”
There was something almost insulting in Taraza’s casual tone and only the habits of long association put down Odrade’s immediate resentment. It was partly that word “liberal,” she realized. Atreides ancestors rose up in rebellion at the word. It was as though her accumulated female memories lashed out at the unconscious assumptions and unexamined prejudices behind the concept.
“Only liberals really think. Only liberals are intellectual. Only liberals understand the needs of their fellows.”

=== Goliath — Tochi Onyebuchi ===
[2022-01-27 | highlight] “going.”
“But, Mom, you’re too old for full cyberization. It could kill you.”
She waved him away, let out half a sneer. “I’m not getting the full package. Who can afford it these days? I just want them to fix my brain a little bit. I’m tired of these half memories.” Her voice grew quiet. “I’m tired of always being wrong.”
“Jo, it’s too dangerous. What if you don’t sync up properly? What if they fuck up the partitioning? Mom, this could mess you up—”
“Even more than I am already?” She looked at him when she’d said that. Her features hardened, turning from valley to cliff face. “I’m still cognizant enough to not need your permission for shit. I’ve already talked to the doctors about it. I’m gonna get the operation. I’m gonna get a cyberbrain. I already have a goddamn outlet.” She reached to finger the opening at the base of her neck, then gave up. “Let me forget how to eat and go to the bathroom and whatever else I’m supposed to forget before the end. I just … I just don’t wanna forget Dee.” Her bottom lip trembled.”
[2022-01-27 | highlight] “FEET. David was staring at feet.
Birds in black ink caught mid-flight amid a canvas of pale skin. Somewhere, faded, muffled, came a voice that said I love your doves and another, louder, less familiar, giggled and said they’re not doves, they’re crows. Jo’s memories, when David plugged into her now, looked and felt like a video that’d been played so often the tape frayed. Static blitzed in and out, all sound wrapped in gauze. David saw through his mother’s eyes the black leather couch this other woman had brought her tattooed feet up on, feet she’d tucked beneath her in feline repose”
[2022-01-27 | highlight] “Dying atomizer between his index and middle finger, the stranger pointed at a floating band far in the distance. It flowed horizontally until the walls blocked their view. “It’s all junk out there. Trash. Shit we throw out. I mean, it has to go somewhere, right?” He shrugged. “The people in The Viewer, they don’t have to see all that stuff. All they see are the nebulae and the zodiac signs. Diana, the silver-footed queen, and all that. Get to stare out there and contemplate their existence.” He chuckled, and there was bitterness in it. “Us? We get to look at what we all shit out.” He smoked, angrily. Finished his cigarette, replaced the small battery with one out of his pack, and lit up again”
[2022-01-27 | highlight] “Thoughtless steps brought him past the first set of sliding doors into an anteroom that opened out onto the lounge. People, almost entirely red-bloods like Jo, filled the small space, hovered alone or in small groups, humming conversation in quiet joviality. Some of them stared as he had out the window that opened out onto space. David stood, frozen among them, and constriction returned to his chest. This was a different narrowing, a physical thing like an animal curling in on itself to protect from the wiles of a predator. He coughed.”
[2022-01-27 | highlight] “auction.
“Look, stop by the town halls over in Westville. When the councilor mentions wanting to work with the ‘good’ residents, think about who he means.” He smirked. “You think this is forced relocation, right? Jonathan.” He put a reassuring hand on Jonathan’s shoulder, moved it down his forearm and wrapped his fingers around the other man’s. “There is nothing wrong with what we’re doing. This place is, for all intents and purposes, abandoned. We’re building it back up. They’re talking of expanding the maglev line here.” He nodded to the west. “And we got a new air filtration plant going up. Those people’ll get jobs. If they wanna stay, they can stay. We’re not kicking them out.”
Photo after photo of prepared homes flowed across the stream with each of Jonathan’s swipes. He pretended Eamonn’s hand wasn’t warm and pleasantly wrapped around his own. Maybe”
[2022-01-27 | highlight] “Her son, six years old in overalls like the ones Ace wore to work, scurried back inside where his bowl of cereal waited on the table for him. The sight of the kid with his cereal, riveted on the TV while the movers emptied his house, reminded Linc of his own dad who, at the same age as that kid, had come home from school to see all their shit on the sidewalk, an eviction notice stapled to their front door. He hadn’t told Linc much about it, but Jake told him one afternoon when they were skipping stones off the warped pipes of the California Aqueduct that Dad, as a kid, had spent the following two months living in a truck with his dad, their grandfather.”
[2022-01-27 | highlight] “there was five-oh out front and a couple people that looked maybe like social workers. The County Sheriff was there, a large metal sphere with arms like a spider, one sporting a small-caliber pistol. On its front, a display of a white man’s mustachioed face. Remote policing. The cops were partially cyberized, their essential parts replaceable; hence their stomping around irradiated wasteland. But the social workers looked flesh-and-blood enough. One of them looked like she might boot all over her jeans.”
[2022-01-27 | highlight] “Linc shot him a look that tried to tell him he still was a kid.
“Cops chased a bunch of us right down this street.” He made a sweep with his arm like he was shooting up the block. “Beat the shit outta my homeboy right on that front lawn.” He snorted out a laugh, tucking the hurt beneath bravado. “Yeah, the homie Jamal got caught outside the Dome and he died, then a bunch of police came through and tore up the block.” He quieted, contenting himself with merely looking around, retracing the ordeal’s trajectory through the neighborhood.
It was originally Linc’s story. About the boy named Jamal who got caught outside a Dome and who had to lie on his back looking up at augmented cops while he suffocated on irradiated air. And”
[2022-01-27 | highlight] “The sex workers vanished behind a corner, and the young men retreated to their seats. Hunger hung around them like an odor. Linc knew the work would be the best thing to happen to them. Otherwise, they’d be out there just like he was before rehab, letting hunger compel him to destroy the very things he needed.”
[2022-01-27 | highlight] “A makeshift Dome surrounded the house and the adjacent forest, so that when Jonathan emptied out onto the back porch, he didn’t need the air mask he’d surely misplaced. Already, his augments set to work, breaking down the pollutants he’d shoveled into his system. Chill autumn air kissed his face like a sea of someone’s hair. As his head cleared, he scrolled through recent photos and saw a ’gram of the kid with the bong can; the caption read: #TeamBeige”
[2022-01-27 | highlight] “A girl pulled up her red ski mask and revealed the face of someone who could’ve been his aunt. Guys standing in the doorway to a second kitchen sucked on Popsicles; their gazes followed Jonathan as he moved past.
Ski-masked girls took a shock-club to a piñata in a bedroom where a girl was giving a guy a blow job, and another girl stumbled to the doorway and put her coke-nailed finger to her lips, silently shushing Jonathan with a grin.
In a bathroom, a middle-aged guy sat on the toilet, reading a newspaper whose letters swirled while a hairless young guy kneeled before him, his head bobbing in the other guy’s lap.”
[2022-01-27 | highlight] “They pulled out, and as they passed through more desolation, Linc knew, by Michael’s silence, that the niggerrican was mad at him for not clearing the junkie. But then they passed into a hood where they were flanked by Craftsman-style homes. Tapered support columns. Stonework porches. Nobody lived on this street but people came out to maintain these houses anyway. Linc occasionally saw the armed patrols that would stalk the block, ready to beat back any advances from drug dealers or whoever was trying to make a new stash house. Their berets and sometimes their bow ties, and sometimes their leather jackets and sometimes their Afros. And”
[2022-01-27 | highlight] “Over the course of that incantation, a small gravity bomb would slip from its container in the drone’s bottom, fall toward the center of the house’s roof, then, as it fell, would pull the house in around itself. The screen would light up with white flame, the smoke would clear, and the crater would stare like an empty eye socket back at the drone’s camera. There”
[2022-01-27 | highlight] “Michael nodded, then opened his dashboard and out came a small console with a touchboard protruding from its bottom. Empty stimhalers tinked against each other as he stretched and geomapped the house’s location, input the coordinates, and armed the drone that would arrive in just under five minutes.”
[2022-01-27 | highlight] “Maybe they were at this very moment getting paid for their scrap metal. It all probably happened in the time between when the dangerous-buildings inspector had phoned Michael and when Michael had picked Linc up from his apartment. A large, person-shaped lump stopped Linc’s boot and he kicked the thing over to find the remains of a face staring up at him. Parts of the body had been gnawed away, some of the fingers down to the bone, the eyes still there, but the cheek jowls torn and hanging. Traces of quicklime lined the corpse. He’d been told to report corpses, maybe they would help out with open investigations. Linc stepped over the thing.”
[2022-01-27 | highlight] “Michael pleaded. “The mayor don’t forward no calls my way.” He spoke with a bit of a Puerto Rican lilt; certain vowels and consonants would rise like he was inviting himself over for dinner. The city sent Michael to this part of town pretty often. Linc didn’t know how Michael was gonna break it to those ladies that he did have other houses to demolish today but that the rest of those twenty houses stood on the other side of the city.”
[2022-01-27 | highlight] “He heard the neighbors before he saw them; female voices, generations of motherhood, streamed out of their houses to gripe. Mothers taking care of their mothers, other women taking care of their grandkids, bouncing them on their hips, managing, just by touch, to cool those poor kids down so that they didn’t look like black porcelain dolls in the light. They came out one by one, then began to line the streets like trees, following the truck’s course.”
[2022-01-27 | highlight] “The sky bled across the clapboard houses that lined the road. Wood domiciles and brick edifices. Single-family homes made after a war that happened before Linc’s father’s father had been a man. The twelve-wheeled demolition truck hovered over the ground, the maglev strips under the concrete still in working order. Kind of. But the truck rumbled nonetheless.”
[2022-01-27 | highlight] “Across the street from Jonathan, on a sidewalk torn to pieces by weeds and renegade tree roots, stood what might have once been called a wild boar. This one, however, more resembled a demigod. On four legs, it rose as high as Jonathan’s chest, poked at the air before it with a snout longer than it was supposed to be. The spiny bristles ran along its back like hypodermic needles, and its pointed ears wagged to full mast then back down. The sun washed it in shades of ochre and gray. It stared at Jonathan with wild-eyed wonder”
[2022-01-27 | highlight] “The truth was that Jonathan knew no one still on Earth, knew no one who had stayed or had been forced to stay, and he saw it as a deficiency. Life was truly lived here, where it was at stake. The forests were bright green and, as he approached the terminus of the train line, bright red, a vibrancy nowhere to be found in space, where everything was a different shade of gray, where every panel and every pathway was drained of color and only the bricks that came imported from Earth seemed to bear any trace of having had a full and exacting life.”
[2022-01-27 | highlight] “When he was a child, those relatives still on Earth, old enough to be dug in at the roots and either too infirm or too set in their ways to make the pilgrimage to the Colonies, would send transmission after transmission to regale their grandson, grandnephew, old friend’s child, of places like the Rust Belt. It sounded to Jonathan like a stylish thing wrapped around the waist of a skinny guy with dark and mysterious inclinations, an aura of enticing hurt, the kind of guy Jonathan would want to fix by fucking.”
[2022-01-27 | highlight] “It was only after the thing had wandered away, on spindly, overlong legs, that Jonathan realized his own strangeness, the air mask affixed to his face still a foreign object and he very much a stranger in a strange land.”
[2022-01-27 | highlight] “Even at the Stamford Station where his shuttle had docked, even on the bullet train that spirited him north past brick apartment buildings and houses with gables and turrets, manicured lawns, circular drives, bay windows, even past the shorefront homes of South Norwalk with sailboats parked on the sand or tethered to metal docks fashioned to look as though they were made out of peeling wood, made to look as though they had been there forever, past the kayaks and the fountains and the parks populated by poplars and willow trees, they warned him about the gangs. The”
[2022-01-27 | highlight] “He chuckled and, under a ’gram he snapped of a row of two-story project housing, he murmured a caption in a newscaster’s voice: “And here we have Bridgeport, Connecticut, world leader in abandoned buildings, shattered glass, and gas stations without pumps. Come here to see boarded-up windows and wild dogs like no other.” Except the dogs here were larger than they were supposed to be and mixed in with all of the industrial decay was a wrongly colored forest, retaking control of the city”
[2022-01-27 | highlight] “The truth was that Jonathan knew no one still on Earth, knew no one who had stayed or had been forced to stay, and he saw it as a deficiency. Life was truly lived here, where it was at stake. The forests were bright green and, as he approached the terminus of the train line, bright red, a vibrancy nowhere to be found in space, where everything was a different shade of gray, where every panel and every pathway was drained of color and only the bricks that came imported from Earth seemed to bear any trace of having had a full and exacting life.”
[2022-01-27 | highlight] “Among the things they didn’t know was the sheer strength of Jonathan’s thirst for shadow country, the fact that he had wanted to build something ever since the first dreams of returning to Earth had entered his head, that he had spent nearly every waking moment dissecting his plan, putting it back together, testing the foundation and the buttresses and the supports, making sure the electricity worked and that the plumbing was done with a strong enough piping. And gangs. The invariably white folk who cautioned Jonathan against youthful bravado, against infantile nonchalance, knew that gangs existed, which is to say they knew as much as anybody did about gangs, which is to say they knew nothing.
They said gang, and he knew they meant Black. They said thugs, and he knew they meant the n-word.”

=== My Sister, the Serial Killer — Oyinkan Braithwaite ===
[2022-01-26 | highlight] “kept.”
“All the nurses know…and all the doctors.”
“How long have you known Dr. Otumu?”
“Not very long.”
“Have you known him to be violent?” When I was picking my outfit, I chose a light gray skirt suit. It is solemn, feminine, and a subtle reminder that the police and I are not from the same social class.
“No.”
“So you admit that this is out of character for him…”
[2022-01-26 | highlight] “This is certainly how Father considered his position as the second twin. And Aunty Taiwo agreed—she did everything he told her to and held an unquestioning trust in everything he did. Which is how—doing what she was told, unquestioningly—she found herself in the house with us the Monday before our father died, shouting at me to let go of Ayoola.
“No!” I screamed, pulling Ayoola even closer to me. My father was not around and, though I knew I would pay for my obstinacy later, later was a while away. His absence now gave me courage, and the promise of his return made me determined.
“Your father will hear of this,” Aunty Taiwo threatened. But I couldn’t have cared less. I had already begun to develop plans in my head for Ayoola’s and my escape. Ayoola held on to me tighter, even as I promised I would not let her go.”
[2022-01-26 | highlight] “missing…”
“What…what…did you say?”
“I told him he was crazy. But he said you were really jealous of me and had some kind of…umm…latent anger…that what if”—she pauses for dramatic effect—“what if you had gone back, after we left, you know, to talk to Femi…”
“He thinks I killed Femi?!” I grab Ayoola’s arm, even though she is not to blame this time. How could he think I was capable of that?
“Weird, right? I didn’t even tell him about Femi. Only Gboye. Maybe he saw it on Insta. Anyway, it’s like he wanted to report you or something…So I did what I had to do.” She shrugs. “Or at least I tried.”
She grabs a bear, buries her head in it and is quiet.
“And then?”
[2022-01-26 | highlight] “The next time I see Muhtar’s wife, she is leaning against the wall of the corridor. Her shoulders are trembling, but no sound escapes her lips. Did no one tell her it is painful to cry silently?
She senses she is not alone; her shoulders still and she looks up. Her eyes narrow and her lips twist into a sneer, but she does not wipe the snot that is trailing from her nose to her lip. I find myself taking a few steps backward. Grief can be contagious and I have enough problems of my own.
She hitches up her dress and pushes past me in a flurry of lace and a fog of Jimmy Choo L’Eau. She’s careful to catch me with the sharp point of her bony shoulder. I wonder where her brother-in-law is and why he is not by her side. I try not to breathe in the pungent smell of perfume and sadness as I head into room 313.”
[2022-01-26 | highlight] “trust me.”
He sweeps out of the room and into the surgical theater. I walk into the hallway just as Tade runs up, breathless.
“Is she in theater?”
I don’t respond. He reaches out to touch me. “Don’t.” He drops his hand.
“You know I didn’t mean to do it, right? We were both struggling with it and I…” I turn my back on him and head to the water dispenser. He follows me. “You said yourself that she’s dangerous.” I’m quiet. There isn’t anything to say anymore. “Did you tell anyone what happened?” he asks in a quiet voice.
“No,” I say, pouring a cup of water. I’m surprised at how steady my hand is. “And you’re not going to either.”
“What?”
[2022-01-26 | highlight] “I have found that the best way to take your mind off something is to binge-watch TV shows. The hours pass by and I lie on my bed, stuffing my mouth with groundnuts and staring at my laptop screen. I lean forward and type in the address to Femi’s blog, but my efforts are met with a 404. His blog has been taken down. He no longer exists for the online world; he can no longer exist for me. He is beyond my reach now in death, as he would have been in life.”
[2022-01-26 | highlight] “detective.
“Why do you think he would do this?” I ask. She can’t hang him without a motive, can she?
“Drugs, obviously,” she states. She crosses her arms, satisfied that she has made her case. It’s easy to point the finger at Mohammed. He is poor, uneducated. He is a cleaner.
“No.” It is Bunmi who speaks, Bunmi who protests. “I don’t accept that.” She is eyeing Yinka, and because I am beside Yinka she is eyeing me too. Or does she suspect something? “This man has been working in this place for longer than the both of you and there has never been a problem. He wouldn’t do this.” I have never seen Bunmi speak so passionately, or for so long. We all stare at her.
“Drug addicts can hide their addiction for a long time,” argues Yinka finally. “He was probably suffering from withdrawal or something. When these people need a hit…Who knows how long he has been stealing drugs and getting away with it.”
[2022-01-26 | highlight] “me.
“So, I am sending you to school to sleep around, abi?”
You hear the sound of a cane before you feel it. It whips the air. She cried out, and I shut my eyes.
“I am paying all that money for you to be a prostitute?! Answer me na!”
“No, sir.” We didn’t call him Daddy. We never had. He was not a daddy, at least not in the way the word “daddy” denotes. One could hardly consider him a father. He was the law in our home.
“You think you are all that, abi? I will teach you who is all that!” He struck her again. This time, the cane grazed me, too. I sucked in my breath.”

“You think this boy cares about you? He just wants what is between your legs. And when he is done he will move on.”
Pain has a way of sharpening your senses. I can still hear his heavy breathing. He was not a fit man. He quickly tired during a beating, but he had a strong will and a stronger desire to instill discipline. I can still remember the smell of our fear—acidic, metallic, sharper even than the smell of vomit.
He continued to give his sermon as he wielded his weapon. Ayoola’s skin was light enough that you could see that it was turning red. Because I was not the target, the cane would only occasionally catch me, on my shoulder or ear or the side of my face, but even so, the pain was hard to bear. I”
[2022-01-26 | highlight] “head.
“Very, very lovely.” He moistened his lips. I grabbed Ayoola’s hand and pulled her a couple of steps backward. The man looked like a chief, and when we went to the village for Christmas our maternal grandparents always kept us away from chiefs. Apparently, if a chief saw a girl he liked, he would reach out and touch her with his bejeweled cane and she would become his bride, no matter how many wives the man already had; no matter if the girl in question wanted to be his wife or not.”
[2022-01-26 | highlight] “It was studded from top to bottom with different colored beads. Its brightness drew her eye and she went closer to examine it.
The man paused and watched my sister over the rim of his teacup. Seeing her up close, he smiled—but it was not the same smile he had lavished on us earlier.
“Your daughter is very beautiful.”
“Really,” my father replied, cocking his head.
“Very, very lovely.” He moistened his lips. I grabbed Ayoola’s hand and pulled her a couple of steps backward. The”
[2022-01-26 | highlight] “flavor.
“Your sister, I do not know. I hear from your colleagues that she is very lovely, but I have not seen her for myself and so do not care about her. You, I know.” He points to me. “You, I care about.”
“You don’t know me.”
“I know you. I woke up because of you—your voice calling to me. I still hear you in my dreams…”
He is waxing lyrical. It feels like I’m in another dream.
“I’m afraid,” I say in the barest of whispers.
“Of what?”
“The guy she is with now…she might…”
“So, save him.”
[2022-01-26 | highlight] “Let’s say for argument’s sake that one knew someone who had committed a gross crime. Someone dear to one. What would one do?” He pauses.
I sit back in my chair and appraise him. I must choose my words wisely, since I have carelessly given this man the tools he needs to have my sister and me thrown into jail, and I have no idea what his angle is. “One would be duty bound to report it.”
“One would be, yes, but most of us wouldn’t, would we?”
“Wouldn’t we?”
[2022-01-26 | highlight] “I rub my forehead with my fingers. He fails to point out the fact that she laughs at the silliest things and never holds a grudge. He hasn’t mentioned how quick she is to cheat at games or that she can hemstitch a skirt without even looking at her fingers. He doesn’t know her best features or her…darkest secrets. And he doesn’t seem to care.
“Put your ring away, Tade.”
“What?”
“This is all…” I perch on his desk and try to find the words. “This is all just fun and games to her.”
He sighs, and shakes his head. “People change, Korede. I know she cheated on me, and all that, but that’s ’cause she hasn’t known real love. And that’s what I can give her.”
[2022-01-26 | highlight] “Peju starts weeping. It is as though Ayoola’s question knocks down a dam that she has been doing her best to keep up. Her cries are deep and loud. She gulps in air and her body shudders. Ayoola takes another lick of the ice cream and then she pulls Peju into an embrace with her free arm. She rubs Peju’s back as she cries.
“It’ll be alright. It’ll be alright in the end,” Ayoola murmurs to her.
Does it matter who Peju is getting comfort from? What’s done is done. So what if it is only her brother’s killer who can talk candidly about the possibility of his death? Peju needed to be released from the crushing burden of hope that Femi could still be alive and Ayoola was the only one willing to do it.”
[2022-01-26 | highlight] “Yes. It’s amazing, isn’t it? You think the whole body is in hibernation, but the brain is still working, still garnering information. Really fascinating.” Muhtar is far more talkative than I thought he would be and he gestures quite wildly when he talks. I can imagine him in front of a roomful of youths, lecturing them on things they couldn’t care less about, but going at it with passion and gusto.
“So, you remember a lot, then?”
[2022-01-26 | highlight] “The gentleman is seated on our sofa, and from where I stand, I can see that it is not the police and it is not Tade. The stranger holds a bouquet of roses in his hands.
“Gboyega!” She rushes down the steps and he catches her in one arm before swinging her around. They kiss.
Gboyega is a tall man with a protruding belly. His face is round and bearded, and his eyes are small and sharp. He also has at least fifteen years more life experience than Ayoola. If I squinted, I suppose I could see his attractiveness. But first I see the Bvlgari watch on his wrist and the Ferragamo shoes on his feet. He looks at me.”
[2022-01-26 | highlight] “For the first time in my adult existence, I wish he was here. He would know what to do. He would be in control, every step of the way. He wouldn’t allow his daughter’s grievous error to ruin his reputation—he would have had this whole matter swept under the rug weeks ago.
But then it is doubtful Ayoola would have engaged in these activities had he been alive. The only form of retribution she ever feared was the one that came from him.”
[2022-01-26 | highlight] “No, there is no point in involving my mother. It would be the death of her, or she would flat out deny that it could have happened. She would deny it even if she was the one who had been called upon to bury the body. Then she would blame me for it because I am the older sister—I am responsible for Ayoola.
That’s how it has always been. Ayoola would break a glass, and I would receive the blame for giving her the drink. Ayoola would fail a class, and I would be blamed for not coaching her. Ayoola would take an apple and leave the store without paying for it, and I would be blamed for letting her get hungry”
[2022-01-26 | highlight] “appeared.
“This is delicious,” Tade exclaims after taking his first bite of the cake. “Who made this?”
“Ayoola,” my mum says quickly, shooting me a warning look. It is a stupid lie. It is a pineapple upside-down cake, sweet and soft, and Ayoola couldn’t fry an egg to save her life. She rarely enters the kitchen, except to forage for snacks or under duress.
“Wow,” he says, chewing happily. He is delighted by the news.”
[2022-01-26 | highlight] “There is a venue in Lekki that’s really nice.” She names the place, and I suck in my breath. The amount she has offered to contribute wouldn’t even cover half the cost of a venue like that. She expects, of course, that we will dip into the funds he left and she can flex, show off to her friends and drink lots of champagne. He doesn’t deserve a single naira, but my mother wants to keep up appearances and so she agrees. With the negotiations over with, Aunty Taiwo leans back against the sofa and smiles at us. “So are the two of you seeing anyone?”
“Ayoola is dating a doctor!” Mum announces.
”
[2022-01-26 | highlight] “One day he was towering over me, spitting pure hell. He reached for his cane and then he…slumped, hitting his head against the glass coffee table as he fell to the floor. His blood was brighter than the dark color we saw on TV. I got up warily and Ayoola came out from behind the couch, where she’d been taking cover. We stood over him. For the first time, we were taller. We watched the life seep out of him.”
[2022-01-26 | highlight] “Any shorter than that and you will, at the very least, look like a sorry excuse for a human being.” She examines me to see if I already believe she is a sorry excuse for a human being. These days I don’t know what or even how to think. Femi haunts me; he intrudes upon my thoughts uninvited. He forces me to doubt what I thought I understood. I wish he would leave me alone, but his words—his way of expressing himself—and his beauty set him apart from the others. And then there is her behavior. The last two times, at least she shed a tear.”
[2022-01-26 | highlight] “I can’t pinpoint the exact moment I realized that Ayoola was beautiful and I was…not. But what I do know is that I was aware of my own inadequacies long before.
Secondary school can be cruel. The boys would write lists of those who had a figure eight—like a Coca-Cola bottle—and those who had a figure one—like a stick. They would draw pictures of girls and exaggerate their best or worst features and tack them on the school notice board for the world to see—at least until the teachers took the pictures down, tearing them from the pins, an act that left a little shred of paper stuck like a taunt.”
[2022-01-26 | highlight] “There is a woman in the waiting room trying to calm a crying baby by rocking it back and forth, but the child won’t be hushed. It is irritating some of the other patients who are waiting in reception. It is irritating me. I head toward her with a rattle, on the off chance that it will distract the baby, just as the entrance doors open—
Ayoola walks in, and every head turns her way and stays there. I stop where I am, rattle in hand, trying to understand what is happening. She looks as though she has brought the sunshine in with her. She”
[2022-01-26 | highlight] “away. “Madam, I said license and registration!” he barks.
On a normal day, I would fight him, but I cannot draw attention to myself right now, not while I’m driving the car that transported Femi to his final resting place. My mind wanders to the ammonia blemish in the boot.
“Oga,” I say with as much deference as I can muster, “no vex. It was a mistake. E no go happen again.” My words are more his than mine. Educated women anger men of his ilk, and so I try to adopt broken English, but I suspect my attempt betrays my upbringing even more.
“This woman, open the door!”

=== Chapterhouse: Dune — Frank Herbert ===
[2022-01-26 | highlight] “Bellonda glanced this way and that, obviously impatient to be gone. Much effort had been expended without success in attempts to break through Bellonda’s coldly remote shell.
“It felt very odd to hold that baby in my arms and think: This is my father,” Odrade said.
“I heard you the first time!” Bellonda spoke from the belly, almost a baritone rumbling as though each word caused her vague indigestion.”

=== Yonder — Jabari Asim ===
[2022-01-26 | highlight] “My earliest memories involve few human beings, Stolen or otherwise. Instead of recollections of first words or first steps or sweet lullabies that a mother might sing, I remember staggering with the others to the woods at dusk to fill our blankets with leaves. To assist and comfort Norbrook’s pigs and cattle, we were obliged to pile foliage on the blankets—the same ragged cloth that sheltered us as we slept on the cold, damp earth at night—and drag them to the pens and stables, where we lined the animals’ beds. This must have been one of my ”
[2022-01-25 | highlight] “Most of Norbrook’s Stolen were acquired by schemes carried out in the shadows, including gambling, rigged auctions, and unseemly bargains. We suffered his tormenting while he wrestled with debt, claiming he would soon achieve a run of profit that would swell his purse and bring him the hurrahs and hand-clapping he so richly deserved.
While dodging his creditors, he learned about the ill luck of a trader named Bill Myers”
[2022-01-25 | highlight] “At the time, I was captive to a Thief named Norbrook, a tall, thin man with an unnerving stare and a smile that could easily be mistaken for a snarl. He was far from rich, with only a small farm and ten stolen people to his name. For our labors Norbrook gave us two daily meals of corn mush and bone soup, an annual gift of a pair of pants, dresses for women, long shirts for the children, a pair of ill-fitting boots, and as many stripes as our black skins could bear. We had hardships aplenty, yet we found some comfort in knowing that others in the world—rats, say, or snakes—had it even worse.”

=== Flowers for Algernon — Daniel Keyes ===
[2022-01-25 | highlight] “Then I got the idea that I would only use the easy words instead of the long hard ones. That saves time. Its getting chilly out but I still put flowers on Algernons grave. Mrs Mooney thinks Im silly to put flowers on a mouse's grave but I told her that Algernon was a special mouse.”
[2022-01-25 | highlight] “Then I got the idea that I would only use the easy words instead of the long hard ones. That saves time. Its getting chilly out but I still put flowers on Algernons grave. Mrs Mooney thinks Im silly to put flowers on a mouse's grave but I told her that Algernon was a special mouse.”
[2022-01-25 | highlight] “A week since I dared to write again. I don't know where the time goes. Todays Sunday I know because I can see through my window the people going into the church across the street. I think I laid in bed all week but I remember Mrs. Mooney bringing me food a few times and asking if I was sick.
What am I going to do with myself? I cant just hang around here all alone and look out the window. Ive got to get hold of myself. I keep saying over and over that Ive got to do something but then I forget or maybe its just easier not to do what I say Im going to do.”
[2022-01-25 | highlight] “I don't pretend to understand the mystery of love, but this time it was more than sex, more than using a woman's body. It was being lifted off the earth, outside fear and torment, being part of something greater than myself. I was lifted out of the dark cell of my own mind, to become part of someone else—just as I had experienced it that day on the couch in therapy. It was the first step outward to the universe—beyond the universe—because in it and with it we merged to recreate and perpetuate the human spirit. Expanding and bursting outward, and contracting and forming inward, it was the rhythm of being—of breathing, of heartbeat, of day and night—and the rhythm of our bodies set off an echo in my mind. It was the way it had been back there in that strange vision. The gray murk lifted from my mind, and through it the light pierced into my brain (how strange that light should blind!), and my body was absorbed back into a great sea of space, washed under in a strange baptism. My body shuddered with giving, and her body shuddered its acceptance.”
[2022-01-25 | highlight] “He's slower than the other children. Give him time."
"He's normal. There's nothing wrong with him. Just lazy. I'll beat it into him until he learns."
Run Jack run... run Jack run... run Jack run... run Jack run...
And then looking up from the table, it seems to me I saw myself, through Charlie's eyes, holding Paradise Lost, and I realized I was breaking the binding with the pressure of both hands as if I wanted to tear the book in half. I broke the back of it, ripped out a handful of pages, and flung them and the book across the room to the corner where the broken records were. I let it lay there and its torn white tongues were laughing because I couldn't understand what they were saying.
I've got to try to hold onto some of the things I've learned. Please, God, don't take it all away”
[2022-01-25 | highlight] “I got up and swayed as I regained my perspective. The room seemed very small. "Not only for today," I said. "I don't think I should have any more sessions. I don't want to see any more."
He was upset, but he didn't try to talk me out of it. I took my hat and coat and left.
And now—Plato's words mock me in the shadows on the ledge behind the flames:
"... the men of the cave would say of him that up he went and down he came without his eyes”
[2022-01-25 | highlight] “As I walked, the ridiculous words drummed themselves into my head over and over again, rising to the rhythm of a buzzing noise:
Three blind mice... three blind mice, 
See how they run! See how they run! 
They all run after the farmer's wife, 
She cut off their tails with a carving knife, 
Did you ever see such a sight in your life, 
As three... blind... mice? 

I tried to shut it out of my ears, but I couldn't, and once when I turned to look back at the house and the porch, I saw the face of a boy, staring at me, his cheek pressed against the window pane.
PROGRESS”
[2022-01-25 | highlight] “Not exactly. It's a scientific report I wrote. Very technical. Look, it's called The Algernon-Gordon Effect. Something I discovered, and it's named partly after me. I want you to keep a copy of the report so that you can show people that your son turned out to be more than a dummy after all."
She took it and looked at it in awe. "It's... it's your name. I knew it would happen. I always said it would happen someday. I tried everything I could. You were too young to remember, but I tried. I told them all that you'd go to college and become a professional man and make your mark in the world. They laughed, but I told them."
She smiled at me through tears, and then a moment later she wasn't looking at me any more.”
[2022-01-25 | highlight] “Didn't you read about it in the newspapers? A new scientific experiment that changes your capacity for intelligence, and I'm the first one they tried it on. Can't you understand? Why are you looking at me that way? I'm smart now, smarter than Norma, or Uncle Herman, or Matt. I know things even college professors don't know. Talk to me! You can be proud of me now and tell all the neighbors. You don't have to hide me in the cellar when company comes. Just talk to me. Tell me about things, the way it was when I was a little boy, that's all I want. I won't hurt you. I don't hate you. But I've got to know about myself, to understand myself before it's too late. Don't you see, I can't be a complete person unless I can understand myself, and you're the only one in the world who can help me now. Let me come in and sit down for a little while.”
[2022-01-25 | highlight] “That's not completely true," I said softly. "But I've learned that intelligence alone doesn't mean a damned thing. Here in your university, intelligence, education, knowledge, have all become great idols. But I know now there's one thing you've all overlooked: intelligence and education that hasn't been tempered by human affection isn't worth a damn."
I helped myself to another martini from the nearby sideboard and continued my sermon.
"Don't misunderstand me," I said. "Intelligence is one of the greatest human gifts. But all too often a search for knowledge drives out the search for love. This is something else I've discovered for myself very recently. I present it to you as a hypothesis: Intelligence without the ability to give and receive affection leads to mental and moral breakdown, to neurosis, and possibly even psychosis. And I say that the mind absorbed in and involved in itself as a selfcentered end, to the exclusion of human relationships, can only lead to violence and pain.”
[2022-01-25 | highlight] “July 31—I'm on the edge of it. I sense it. They all think I'm killing myself at this pace, but what they don't understand is that I'm living at a peak of clarity and beauty I never knew existed. Every part of me is attuned to the work. I soak it up into my pores during the day, and at night—in the moments before I pass off into sleep—ideas explode into my head like fireworks. There is no greater joy than the burst of solution to a problem.”
[2022-01-25 | highlight] “Two days later the girl found the two hundred and thirty-two dollars that Fay kept in her dresser drawer, and disappeared with the money. Fay hadn't reported it to the police—and as it turned out, she didn't even know the girl's last name.
"What good would it do to notify the police?" she wanted to know. "I mean this poor bitch must have needed the money pretty badly to do it. I'm not going to ruin her life over a few hundred bucks. I'm not rich or anything, but I'm not going after her skin—if you know what I mean.”
[2022-01-25 | highlight] “July 5—I dedicated my first piano concerto to Fay. She was excited by the idea of having something dedicated to her, but I don't think she really liked it. Just goes to show that you can't have everything you want in one woman. One more argument for polygamy.”
[2022-01-25 | highlight] “All I wanted to do was prove that Charlie existed as a person in the past, so that I could justify my own existence. I was insulted when Nemur said he created me. But I've discovered that not only did Charlie exist in the past, he exists now. In me and around me. He's been coming between us all along. I thought my intelligence created the barrier—my pompous, foolish pride, the feeling we had nothing in common because I had gone beyond you. You put that idea into my head. But that's not it. It's Charlie, the little boy who's afraid of women because of things his mother did to him. Don't you see? All these months while I've been growing up intellectually, I've still had the emotional wiring of the childlike Charlie. And every time I came close to you, or thought about making love to you, there was a short circuit.”
[2022-01-25 | highlight] “I can't help feeling that I'm not me. I've usurped his place and locked him out the way they locked me out of the bakery. What I mean to say is that Charlie Gordon exists in the past, and the past is real. You can't put up a new building on a site until you destroy the old one, and the old Charlie can't be destroyed. He exists. At first I was searching for him: I went to see his—my—father. All I wanted to do was prove that Charlie existed as a person in the past, so that I could justify my own existence. I was insulted when Nemur said he created me. But I've discovered that not only did Charlie exist in the past, he exists now. In me and around me. He's been coming between us all along. I thought my intelligence created the barrier—my pompous, foolish pride, the feeling we had nothing in common because I had gone beyond you. You put that idea into my head. But that's not it. It's Charlie, the little boy who's afraid of women because of things his mother did to him. Don't you see? All these[…]”
[2022-01-25 | highlight] “I have often reread my early progress reports and seen the illiteracy, the childish naiveti, the mind of low intelligence peering from a dark room, through the keyhole, at the dazzling light outside. In my dreams and memories I've seen Charlie smiling happily and uncertainly at what people around him were saying. Even in my dullness I knew I was inferior. Other people had something I lacked— something denied me. In my mental blindness, I had believed it was somehow connected with the ability to read and write, and I was sure that if I could get those skills I would have intelligence too.”
[2022-01-25 | highlight] “Suddenly, I was furious at myself and all those who were smirking at him. I wanted to pick up the dishes and throw them. I wanted to smash their laughing faces. I jumped up and shouted: "Shut up! Leave him alone! He can't understand. He can't help what he is... but for God's sake, have some respect! He's a human being!"
The restaurant grew silent. I cursed myself for losing control and creating a scene, and I tried not to look at the boy as I paid my check and walked out without touching my food. I felt ashamed for both of us.
How strange it is that people of honest feelings and sensibility, who would not take advantage of a man born without arms or legs or eyes—how such people think nothing of abusing a man born with low intelligence. It infuriated me to remember that not too long ago I—like this boy—had foolishly played the clown.”
[2022-01-25 | highlight] “June 24—Today I went on a strange kind of antiintellectual binge. If I had dared to, I would have gotten drunk, but after the experience with Fay, I knew it would be dangerous. So, instead, I went to Times Square, from movie house to movie house, immersing myself in westerns and horror movies—the way I used to. Each time, sitting through the picture, I would find myself whipped with guilt. I'd walk out in the middle of the picture and wander into another one. I told myself I was looking for something in the make-believe screen world that was missing from my new life.
Then, in a sudden intuition, right outside the Keno Amusement Center, I knew it wasn't the movies I wanted, but the audiences. I wanted to be with the people around me in the darkness”
[2022-01-25 | highlight] “You went all confused and silly. You know, as if a grown man starts acting like a kid. Talking about how you wanted to go to school and learn to read and write so you could be smart like everyone else. Crazy stuff like that. You were a different person—like they do with method-acting—and you kept saying you couldn't play with me because your mother would take away your peanuts and put you in a cage."
"Peanuts?"
"Yeah! So help me!" she laughed, scratching her head. "And you kept saying I couldn't have your peanuts. The weirdest. But I tell you, the way you talked! Like those dimwits on street corners, who work themselves up by just looking at a girl. A different guy completely. At first I thought you were just kidding around, but now I think you're compulsive or something. All this neatness and worrying about everything."
It didn't upset me, although I would have expected it to. Somehow, getting drunk had momentarily broken down the conscious barriers that kept the old Charlie Gordon hidden deep in my mind. As I suspected all along, he was not really gone. Nothing in our minds is[…]”
[2022-01-25 | highlight] “me if you are, because then we could be just good friends. But I'd have to know."
"I'm not a homosexual. Tonight, when you went into your place with that guy, I wished it was me."
She leaned forward and the kimono open at the neck revealed her bosom. She slipped her arms around me, waiting for me to do something. I knew what was expected of me, and I told myself there was no reason not to. I had the feeling there would be no panic now—not with her. After all, I wasn't the one making the advances. And she was different from any woman I'd ever met before. Perhaps she was right for me at this emotional level.
I slipped my arms around her.
"That's different," she cooed. "I was beginning to think you didn't care."
"I care," I whispered, kissing her throat. But as I did it, I saw the two of us, as if I were a third person standing in the doorway. I was watching a man and woman in each other's arms”
[2022-01-25 | highlight] “you."
She shook her head. "I go to the Stardust Ballroom because I like to dance, and I don't see that because I let a guy bring me home I've got to go to bed with him. You don't think I went to bed with him, do you?"
My image of the two of them in each other's arms popped like soap bubbles.
"Now if you were the guy," she said, "it would be different."
"What is that supposed to mean?"
"Just what it sounds like. If you asked me, I'd go to bed with you.”
[2022-01-25 | highlight] “How could I tell him? What was I supposed to say? Here, look at me, I'm Charlie, the son you wrote off the books? Not that I blame you for it, but here I am, all fixed up better than ever. Test me. Ask me questions. I speak twenty languages, living and dead; I'm a mathematical whiz, and I'm writing a piano concerto that will make them remember me long after I'm gone.
How could I tell him?
How absurd I was sitting in his shop, waiting for him to pat me on the head and say, "Good boy." I wanted his approval, the old glow of satisfaction that came to his face when I learned to tie my own shoelaces and button my sweater. I had come here for that look in his face, but I knew I wouldn't get it.”
[2022-01-25 | highlight] “The shop was empty except for the barber reading a magazine in the chair nearest the window. When he looked up at me, I recognized Matt—stocky, red-cheeked, a lot older and nearly bald with a fringe of gray hair bordering the sides of his head—but still Matt. Seeing me at the door, he tossed the magazine aside.
"No waiting. You're next."
I hesitated, and he misunderstood. "Usually not open at this hour, mister. Had an appointment with one of my regulars, but he didn't show. Just about to close. Lucky for you I sat down to rest my feet. Best haircut and shave in the Bronx."
As I let myself be drawn into the shop, he bustled around, pulling out scissors and combs and a fresh neckcloth.
"Everything sanitary, as you can see, which is more than I can say for most barbershops in this neighborhood. Haircut and shave?”
[2022-01-25 | highlight] “June 16—Called Alice, but hung up before she answered. Today I found a furnished apartment. Ninety-five dollars a month is more than I planned to spend, but it's on Forty-third and Tenth Avenue and I can get to the library in ten minutes to keep up with my reading and study. The apartment is on the fourth floor, four rooms, and there's a rented piano in it. The landlady says that one of these days the rental service will pull it out, but maybe by that time I can learn to play it.”
[2022-01-25 | highlight] “Fortunately, as a precaution, I withdrew my savings from the bank as soon as I arrived in New York. Eight hundred and eighty-six dollars won't last long, but it will give me time to get my bearings.
I've checked into the Camden Hotel on 41st Street, a block from Times Square. New York! All the things I've read about it! Gotham... the melting pot... Baghdad-onthe-Hudson. City of light and color. Incredible that I've lived and worked all my life just a few stops away on the subway and been to Times Square only once—with Alice.”
[2022-01-25 | highlight] “I guess Nemur's fear of being revealed as a man walking on stilts among giants is understandable. Failure at this point would destroy him. He is too old to start all over again.
As shocking as it is to discover the truth about men I had respected and looked up to, I guess Burt is right. I must not be too impatient with them. Their ideas and brilliant work made the experiment possible. I've got to guard against the natural tendency to look down on them now that I have surpassed them.
I've got to realize that when they continually admonish me to speak and write simply so that people who read these reports will be able to understand me, they are talking about themselves as well. But still it's frightening to realize that my fate is in the hands of men who are not the giants I once thought them to be, men who don't know all the answers.”
[2022-01-25 | highlight] “He reminded me that as a practicing psychiatrist and neurosurgeon he had very little time for languages. And the only ancient languages that he could read were Latin and Greek. Nothing of the ancient Oriental tongues.
I could see he wanted to end the discussion at that point, but somehow I couldn't let go. I had to find out just how much he knew.
I found out.
Physics: nothing beyond the quantum theory of fields. Geology: nothing about geomorphology or stratigraphy or even petrology. Nothing about the micro- or macroeconomic theory. Little in mathematics beyond the elementary level of calculus of variations, and nothing at all about Banach algebra or Riemannian manifolds. It was the first inkling of the revelations that were in store for me this weekend.”
[2022-01-25 | highlight] “floor.
"Look at him!" Rose screams. "He can't learn to read and write, but he knows enough to look at a girl that way. I'll beat that filth out of his mind."
"He can't help it if he gets an erection. It's normal. He didn't do anything."
"He's got no business to think that way about girls. A friend of his sister's comes to the house and he starts thinking like that! I'll teach him so he never forgets. Do you hear? If you ever touch a girl, I'll put you away in a cage, like an animal, for the rest of your life. Do you hear me?..
I still hear her. But perhaps I had been released. Maybe the fear and nausea was no longer a sea to drown in, but only a pool of water reflecting the past alongside the now. Was I free?”
[2022-01-25 | highlight] “right."
"But what's wrong with a person wanting to be more intelligent, to acquire knowledge, and understand himself and the world?"
"If you'd read your Bible, Charlie, you'd know that it's not meant for man to know more than was given to him to know by the Lord in the first place. The fruit of that tree was forbidden to man. Charlie, if you done anything you wasn't supposed to—you know, like with the devil or something—maybe it ain't too late to get out of it. Maybe you could go back to being the good simple man you was before."
"There's no going back, Fanny. I haven't done anything wrong. I'm like a man born blind who has been given a chance to see light. That can't be sinful. Soon there'll be millions like me all over the world. Science can do it, Fanny.”
[2022-01-25 | highlight] “Frank had just picked up a tray of rolls and both he and Joe turned when I called. "Look, Charlie, I'm busy. Maybe later—"
"No," I insisted. "Now—right now. Both of you have been avoiding me. Why?"
Frank, the fast talker, the ladies' man, the arranger, studied me for a moment and then set the tray down on the table. "Why? I'll tell you why. Because all of a sudden you're a big shot, a know-it-all, a brain! Now you're a regular whiz kid, an egghead. Always with a book—always with all the answers. Well, I'll tell you something. You think you're better than the rest of us here? Okay, go someplace else."
"But what did I do to you?"
"What did he do? Hear that, Joe? I'll tell you what you did, Mister Gordon. You come pushing in here with your ideas and suggestions and make the rest of us all look like a bunch of dopes. But I'll tell you something. To me you're still a moron. Maybe I don't understand some of them big words or the names of the books, but I'm as good as you are—better even”
[2022-01-25 | highlight] “She shook her head. "No. It was too dark. But I'm sure—
"I've got to go. I'll call you." And before she could stop me, I pulled away. I had to get out of that building before everything caved in.
Thinking about it now, I'm certain it was a hallucination. Dr. Strauss feels that emotionally I'm still in that adolescent state where being close to a woman, or thinking of sex, sets off anxiety, panic, even hallucinations. He feels that my rapid intellectual development has deceived me into thinking I could live a normal emotional life. But I've got to accept the fact that the fears and blocks triggered in these sexual situations reveal that emotionally I'm still an adolescent—sexually retarded. I guess he means I'm not ready for a relationship with a woman like Alice Kinnian. Not yet”
[2022-01-25 | highlight] “Was she waiting for me to do it? Would she get angry? I could tell I was still behaving like an adolescent and it angered me.
"Here," I choked, "why don't you make yourself more comfortable? Rest on my shoulder." She let me put my arm around her, but she didn't look at me. She seemed to be too absorbed in the music to realize what I was doing. Did she want me to hold her that way, or was she merely tolerating it? As I slipped my arm down to her waist, I felt her tremble, but still she kept staring in the direction of the orchestra. She was pretending to be concentrating on the music so that she wouldn't have to respond to me. She didn't want to know what was happening”
[2022-01-25 | highlight] “The same thing happened when I tried to discuss Chaucer with an American literature specialist, questioned an Orientalist about the Trobriand Islanders, and tried to focus on the problems of automation-caused unemployment with a social psychologist who specialized in public opinion polls on adolescent behavior. They would always find excuses to slip away, afraid to reveal the narrowness of their knowledge.
How different they seem to be now. And how foolish I was ever to have thought that professors were intellectual giants. They're people—and afraid the rest of the world will find out. And Alice is a person too—a woman, not a goddess—and I'm taking her to the concert tomorrow night.”
[2022-01-25 | highlight] “May 15—My studies are going well. The university library is my second home now. They've had to get me a private room because it takes me only a second to absorb the printed page, and curious students invariably gather around me as I flip through my books.
My most absorbing interests at the present time are etymologies of ancient languages, the newer works on the calculus of variations, and Hindu history. It's amazing the way things, apparently disconnected, hang together. I've moved up to another plateau, and now the streams of the various disciplines seem to be closer to each other as if they flow from a single source.
Strange how when I'm in the college cafeteria and hear the students arguing about history or politics or religion, it all seems so childish.
I find no pleasure in discussing ideas any more on such an elementary level. People resent being shown that they don't approach the complexities of the problem— they don't know what exists beyond the surface ripples. It's just as bad on a higher level, and I've given up any attempt to discuss these things with the professors at Beekman”
[2022-01-25 | highlight] “Why does a memory like that from childhood remain with me so strongly, and why does it frighten me now? Is it because of my feelings for Alice?
Thinking about it now, I can understand why I was taught to keep away from women. It was wrong for me to express my feelings to Alice. I have no right to think of a woman that way—not yet.
But even as I write these words, something inside shouts that there is more. I'm a person. I was somebody before I went under the surgeon's knife. And I have to love someone.”
[2022-01-25 | highlight] “Never mind that," she insisted. "You're beginning to see and understand things." She waved her hand to take in all of the neon and glitter around us as we crossed over to Seventh Avenue. "You're beginning to see what's behind the surface of things. What you say about the parts having to belong together—that was a pretty good insight."
"Oh, come on now. I don't feel as if I'm accomplishing anything. I don't understand about myself or my past. I don't even know”
[2022-01-25 | highlight] “It became such an ordeal—so painful—that I forced myself to take my mind off her. The first picture had been a war film, and all I caught was the ending where the G.I. goes back to Europe to marry the woman who saved his life. The second picture interested me. A psychological film about a man and woman apparently in love but actually destroying each other. Everything suggests that the man is going to kill his wife but at the last moment, something she screams out in a nightmare makes him recall something that happened to him during his childhood.”
[2022-01-25 | highlight] “It is soft and warm and he feels the confusion of relief and fear. It is his, but she will take it away from him as she always does. She will take it away and keep it for herself. And she will spank him. She comes toward him, screaming that he is a bad boy, and Charlie runs to his father for help.
Suddenly, I remember that her name is Rose and his name is Matt. It's odd to have forgotten your parents' names. And what about Norma? Strange I haven't thought about them all for a long time. I wish I could see Matt's face now, to know what he was thinking at that moment. All I remember is that as she began to spank me, Matt Gordon turned and walked out of the apartment”
[2022-01-25 | highlight] “He wants to obey her, but his legs are too soft to move. His arms go up automatically to ward off blows.
"For God's sake, Rose. Leave him alone. You've got him terrified. You always do this, and the poor kid—"
"Then why don't you help me? I have to do it all by myself. Every day I try to teach him—to help him catch up to the others. He's just slow, that's all. But he can learn like everyone else."
"You're fooling yourself, Rose. It's not fair to us or to him. Pretending he's normal. Driving him as if he were an animal that could learn to do tricks. Why don't you leave him alone?"
"Because I want him to be like everyone else."
As they argue, the feeling that grips Charlies insides becomes greater. His bowels feel as if they will burst and he knows he should go to the bathroom as she has told him so often. But he can't walk. He feels like sitting down right there in the kitchen, but it is wrong and she will slap him.”
[2022-01-25 | highlight] “This morning I could recall the dream, but now there's more than that—I can remember through the blur, back to when I was six years old and it all happened. Just before Norma was born. I see Mom, a thin, dark-haired woman who talks too fast and uses her hands too much. As always her face is blurred. Her hair is up in a bun, and her hand goes to touch it, pat it smooth, as if she has to make sure it's still there. I remember that she was always fluttering like a big, white bird—around my father, and he too heavy and tired to escape her pecking.”
[2022-01-25 | highlight] “April 28—In a dream last night I heard Mom screaming at Dad and the teacher at the elementary school P.S. 13 (my first school before they transferred me to P.S. 222)....
"He's normal! He's normal! He'll grow up like other people. Better than others." She was trying to scratch the teacher, but Dad was holding her back. "He'll go to college someday. He'll be somebody." She kept screaming it, clawing at Dad so he'd let go of her. "He'll go to college someday and he'll be somebody."
We were in the principal's office and there were a lot of people looking embarrassed, but the assistant principal was smiling and turning his head so no one would see it.”
[2022-01-25 | highlight] “April 26—I know I shouldn't hang around the college when I'm through at the lab, but seeing the young men and women going back and forth carrying books and hearing them talk about all the things they're learning in their classes excites me. I wish I could sit and talk with them over coffee in the Campus Bowl Luncheonette when they get together to argue about books and politics and ideas. It's exciting to hear them talking about poetry and science and philosophy—about Shakespeare and Milton; Newton and Einstein and Freud; about Plato and Hegel and Kant, and all the other names that echo like great church bells in my mind.
Sometimes I listen in on the conversations at the tables around me, and pretend I'm a college student, even though I'm a lot older than they are. I carry books around, and I've started to smoke a pipe. It's silly, but since I belong at the lab I feel as if I'm a part of the university. I hate to go home to that lonely room.”
[2022-01-25 | highlight] “April 17-—I had a nightmare last night, and this morning, after I woke up, I free-associated the way Dr. Strauss told me to do when I remember my dreams. Think about the dream and just let my mind wander until other thoughts come up in my mind. I keep on doing that until my mind goes blank. Dr. Strauss says that it means I've reached a point where my subconscious is trying to block my conscious from remembering. It's a wall between the present and the past. Sometimes the wall stays up and sometimes it breaks down and I can remember what's behind it.
Like this morning.
The dream was about Miss Kinnian reading my progress reports. In the dream I sit down to write but I can't write or read any more. It's all gone. I get frightened so I ask Gimpy at the bakery to write for me. But when Miss Kinnian reads the report she gets angry and tears the pages up because they've got dirty words in them.”
[2022-01-25 | highlight] “I'm not sure what I.Q. is anyway. Prof. Nemur said it was something that measured how intelligent you were— like a scale in the drugstore weighs pounds. But Dr. Strauss had a big argument with him and said an I.Q. didn't weigh intelligence at all. He said an I.Q showed how much intelligence you could get, like the numbers on the outside of a measuring cup. You still had to fill the cup up with stuff.
When I asked Burt Seldon, who gives me my intelligence tests and works with Algernon, he said that some people would say both of them were wrong and according to the things he's been reading up on, the I.Q. measures a lot of different things including some of the things you learned already and it really isn't a good measure of intelligence at all.”
[2022-01-25 | highlight] “He laughed and then he got up from his chair and went to the window. "The more intelligent you become the more problems you'll have, Charlie. Your intellectual growth is going to outstrip your emotional growth. And I think you'll find that as you progress, there will be many things you'll want to talk to me about. I just want you to remember that this is the place for you to come when you need help."
I still don't know what it's all about, but he said even if I don't understand my dreams or memories or why I have them, some time in the future they're all going to connect up, and I'll learn more about myself. He said the important thing is to find out what those people in my memories are saying.”
[2022-01-25 | highlight] “He likes it back here in the bakery where the floors are white with flour—whiter than the sooty walls and ceiling. The thick soles of his own high shoes are crusted with white and there is white in the stitching and lace-eyes, and under his nails and in the cracked chapped skin of his hands.
He relaxes here—squatting against the wall—leaning back in a way that tilts his baseball cap with the D forward over his eyes. He likes the smell of flour, sweet dough, bread and cakes and rolls baking. The oven is crackling and makes him sleepy”
[2022-01-25 | highlight] “And I try to write these progress reports very careful but that's hard to do. I am reading a lot now, and Miss Kinnian says I read very fast. And I even understand a lot of the things I'm reading about, and they stay in my mind. There are times when I can close my eyes and think of a page and it all comes back like a picture.
But other things come into my head too. Sometimes I close my eyes and I see a clear picture. Like this morning just after I woke up, I was laying in bed with my eyes open. It was like a big hole opened up in the walls of my mind and I can just walk through. I think its far back..”
[2022-01-25 | highlight] “laughing.
"Oh, you were right, Frank," choked Ellen. "He's a one man side show." Then she said, "Here, Charlie, have a fruit." She gave me an apple, but when I bit into it, it was fake.
Then Frank started laughing and he said, "I told ya he'd eat it. C'n you imagine anyone dumb enough to eat wax fruit?"
Joe said, "I ain't laughed so much since we sent him around the corner to see if it was raining that night we ditched him at Halloran's."
Then I saw a picture that I remembered in my mind when I was a kid and the children in the block let me play with them, hide-and-go-seek and I was It. After I counted up to ten over and over on my fingers I went to look for the others. I kept looking until it got cold and dark and I had to go home.
But I never found them and I never knew why”
[2022-01-25 | highlight] “I didn't know what to do or where to turn. Her rubbing up against me made me feel funny. Everyone was laughing at me and all of a sudden I felt naked. I wanted to hide myself so they wouldn't see. I ran out of the apartment. It was a large apartment house with lots of halls and I couldn't find my way to the staircase. I forgot all about the elevator. Then, after, I found the stairs and ran out into the street and walked for a long time before I went to my room. I never knew before that Joe and Frank and the others liked to have me around just to make fun of me.
Now I know what they mean when they say "to pull a Charlie Gordon."
I'm ashamed.
And another thing. I dreamed about that girl Ellen dancing and rubbing up against me and when I woke up the sheets were wet and messy”
[2022-01-25 | highlight] “After I figured out how punctuation worked, I read over all my old progress reports from the beginning. Boy, did I have crazy spelling and punctuation! I told Miss Kinnian I ought to go over the pages and fix all the mistakes, but she said, "No, Charlie, Professor Nemur wants them just as they are. That's why he lets you keep them after they're photostated—to see your own progress. You're coming along fast, Charlie.”
[2022-01-25 | highlight] “She was like a bundle all pink and screaming sometimes that I couldnt sleep. And when I went to sleep she woke me up in the nighttime. One time when they were in the kitchen and I was in my bed she was crying. I got up to pick her up and hold her to get quiet the way mom does. But then Mom came in yelling and took her away. And she slapped me so hard I fell on the bed.
Then she startid screaming. Dont you ever touch her again. Youll hurt her. Shes a baby. You got no business touching her. I dint know it then but I guess I know it now that she thought I was going to hurt the baby because I was too dumb to know what I was doing. Now that makes me feel bad because I would never of hurt the baby.”
[2022-01-25 | highlight] “She said for a person who God gave so little to you did more than a lot of people with brains they never even used. I said that all my friends are smart people and their good. They like me and they never did anything that wasnt nice. Then she got something in her eye and she had to run out to the ladys room.”
[2022-01-25 | highlight] “March 31—Miss Kinnian teeches me how to spel better. She says look at a werd and close your eyes and say it over and over again until you remember. I have lots of truble with through that you say Threw and enough and tough that you dont say Enew and Tew. You got to say Enuff and Tuff. Thats how I use to rite it before I started to get smart. Im mixd up but Miss Kinnian says dont worry spelling is not suppose to make sence.”
[2022-01-25 | highlight] “When I once tolld my mom I wantid to be a painter like Uncle Herman my sister Norma said yeah Charlies going to be the artist of the family. And dad slappd her face and tolld her not to be so goddam nasty to her brother. I dont no what a artist is but if Norma got slappd for saying it I gess its not a nice thing. I always feeled bad when Norma got slappd for being meen to me. "When I get smart Ill go visit her.”
[2022-01-25 | highlight] “March 16-—I ate lunch with Burt at the collidge resterant. They got all kinds of good food and I dont have to pay for it neither. I like to sit and wach the collidge boys and girls. They fool around somtimes but mostly they talk about all kinds of things just like the bakers do at Donners bakery. Burt says its about art and polatics and riligon. I dont know what those things are about but I know riligon is god. Mom use to tell me all about him and the things he done to make the werld. She said I shoud always love god and pray to him. I dont remembir how to prey to him but I think mom use to make me prey to him a lot when I was a kid that he shoud make me get better and not be sick. I dont rimember how I was sick, I think it was about me not being smart.”
[2022-01-25 | highlight] “When he said go I tryed to go but I dint know where to go. I didnt know the way to take. Then I herd Algernon squeeking from the box on the tabel and his feet sketching like he was runing alredy. I startid to go but I went in the rong way and got stuck and a littel shock in my fingers so I went back to the Start but evertime I went a differnt way I got stuck and a shock . It didnt hert or anything just made me jump a littel and Burt said it was to show me I did the wrong thing. I was halfway on the bord when I herd Algernon squeek like he was happy again and that means he won the race”
[2022-01-25 | highlight] “I said how can I tell storys about pepul I dont know. She said make beleeve but I tolld her thats lies. I never tell lies any more because when I was a kid I made lies and I always got hit. I got a pictur in my walet of me and Norma with Uncle Herman who got me the job to be janiter at Donners bakery before he dyed.
I said I coud make storys about them because I livd with Uncle Herman along time but the lady dint want to hear about them. She said this test and the other one the raw shokwzs for getting persinality. I laffd”
[2022-01-25 | highlight] “Burt is very nice and he talks slow like Miss Kinnian dose in her class where I go to lern reeding for slow adults. He explaned me it was a raw shok test. He sed pepul see things in the ink. I said show me where. He dint show me he just kept saying think imagen theres something on the card. I tolld him I imaggen a inkblot. He shaked his head so that wasnt rite eather. He said what does it remind you of pretend its something. I closd my eyes for a long time to pretend and then I said I pretend a bottel of ink spilld all over a wite card. And thats when the point on his pencel broke and then we got up and went out”
[2022-01-25 | highlight] “And a nice man was in one of the rooms and he had some wite cards with ink spilld all over them. He sed sit down Charlie and make yourself cunfortible and rilax. He had a wite coat like a docter but I dont think he was no docter because he dint tell me to opin my mouth and say ah. All he had was those wite cards. His name is Burt. I for- got his last name because I dont remembir so good.
I”

=== Joan Is Okay — Weike Wang ===
[2022-01-24 | highlight] “Economy isn’t a good time, she said in English, and if I was doing this to experience poverty or connect with the masses, it wasn’t a well-conceived idea.
Clearly, she thought I was insane. While holding my blue US passport, she told her colleague beside her in Shanghainese that I probably had a disease. The colloquialism she used can be said in jest, can be well-meaning or serious. It means that something is not right about this person, that literally she has mismanaged one or two of her nerves.”
[2022-01-24 | highlight] “We pushed the lazy Susan clockwise and then counterclockwise.
About our country, continued my cousin, it used to be poor, but now we have caught up. We have surpassed most Western countries, even yours.
She showed me her fancy leather wallet and told me the price. She passed me her new phone, which she noted was even more advanced than mine. So palpable to me what she was trying to prove. Everything was a race.
I told my cousin that I was sorry for her loss. My father was a good uncle to you and a good comrade overall.”
[2022-01-24 | highlight] “Afterward, a smaller group of us gathered for dinner at an upscale restaurant, in a private room. The room had a round banquet table with a lazy Susan wheel built in. Customary in this country for families to sit for hours-long meals and turn this wheel back and forth, politely forcing everyone to eat. Once one meal ended, another began. Elaborate dishes were brought out, at least ten varieties of soup. Children would run around the table, laugh hysterically, and hide behind the upholstered chairs”
[2022-01-22 | highlight] “Fang was rich now, his Connecticut house massive. Since he had arranged the travel, we boarded first class, where I had a small room by myself, my seat the size of a one-person L-shaped sectional, with a divider to my left that pulled open and closed. For the hour before takeoff, my brother visited me in my room to talk about how great first-class amenities were: the meals and service, different options of heated blankets, ability to recline and lie down, the L’Occitane bathroom kit, blue pajamas with red piping—things our father never had nor could appreciate.
Because he grew up in a village, I said.”
[2022-01-22 | highlight] “After I mentioned my father’s passing, Madeline gasped, covering her mouth and, for a second, shutting her eyes. Through her fingers, she asked if that had been my last conversation with him, and the sound I made, was it, then, a sound of grief?
I said, No, not really, and left it at that.
Reese and Madeline asked me a few more questions, like when I last saw him, and how long has it been since I left China?
You were born there, no? Reese asked, and I said I was born in the Bay Area.
California, Madeline said. A great place to be born.
But Oakland, I said, to not seem like I was giving my birthplace too much credit.”
[2022-01-22 | highlight] “Having seen my fist go up, the two other doctors in the office asked whom I’d been talking to and what was that strange sound I just made. I said my father and that the sound was closer to a word but the word meant nothing.
My colleagues didn’t know I spoke Chinese, and I wanted to keep it that way to avoid any confusion. But the word did mean something, it had many different definitions, one of which was “to begin.”
[2022-01-22 | highlight] “Complications would’ve angered him, actually, to have died not from a single blow but from a total system shutdown, which was slower, more painful, and revealed just how vulnerable a person could be. Months prior, he had complained of headaches and eye pressure. I told him to get some tests done and he said that he would, which meant he wouldn’t. In China, my father ran a construction company that, in the last decade, had finally seen success. He was a typical workaholic and for most of my childhood, adolescence, adulthood, not often around.”

=== Red Seas under Red Skies — Scott Lynch ===
[2022-01-24 | highlight] “you think you're doing.'
  'Oh, you think this is for you?' Locke smiled. 'Selendri. I thought we knew each other better than that. As for the vault, who the hell said anything about it?'
  'Your work to find a way in—'
  'I lied, Selendri. I've been known to do that. You think I was really experimenting on clockwork locks and keeping notes for Maxilan Stragos? Like hell. I was sipping brandies on your first and second floors, trying to pull myself back together after I nearly got cut to pieces. Your vault's fucking impenetrable, sweetheart. I never wanted to go anywhere near it.'
  Locke glanced around, pretending to notice the room for the very first time.
  'Requin does keep a lot of really expensive paintings on his walls, though, doesn't he?'
  With a grin that felt even larger than it was, Locke stepped up to the closest one and began, ever so carefully, to cut it out of its surrounding frame.”
[2022-01-23 | highlight] “Just past the second hour of the morning, with Tal Verrar finally shuddering into a drunken somnambulance and the Festa fires extinguished, the Poison Orchid in her costume as the Chimera crept past the Happy Pilchard. She passed the battered, sleepy little ketch at a distance of about two hundred yards, flying a minimal number of navigation lanterns and offering no hail. That wasn't entirely unusual in waters where not one act of piracy had been reported for more than seven years.
  In darkness, it was impossible to see that the Orchid's deck carried no boats.
  Those boats slowly emerged from the ship's larboard shadow, and at a silent signal their rowers exploded into action. With the haste of their passage they turned the dark sea white. Three faint, frothy lines reached out from Orchid to Pilchard, and by the time the lone watchman on at the ketch's stern noticed anything, it was far too late.”
[2022-01-23 | highlight] “Ezri, please, it's—'
  'You are the only thing,' she whispered through the iron grip of her embrace, 'the only thing on this whole fucking ocean that's mine, Jean Tannen. I don't own this ship. Hell, I don't own this cabin. I don't have a buried fucking treasure. I have no family and no title, not any more. And then I finally got to take something in return—'
  'And it turns out I have ... one significant flaw.'
  'We can do something,' she said. 'We can find someone. Physikers, alchemists—'
  'Tried, Ezri. Alchemists and poisoners. We need the antidote from Stragos, or an actual sample of his poison from which to create one.'
  'And didn't I deserve to know? What if you'd—'
  'Dropped dead in here one night? Ezri, what if a Redeemer had put his sword through my skull, or the crew had just murdered me on the day we met”
[2022-01-23 | highlight] “Beside them stood Pierro Strozzi, an amiable bald fellow pushing fifty, waited on by his lieutenant, called Ear-Taker Jack for what he liked to slice from the heads of his fallen foes. It was said that he tanned them and sewed them into elaborate necklaces, which he kept locked in his cabin.
  Ranee was there, with Valterro at her shoulder as usual. The right side of Ranee's jaw was several wince-inducing shades of black and green, but she was standing on her own two feet and at least had the courtesy not to glare at Zamira when she thought Zamira was watching.
  Last but not least was Jacquelaine Colvard, the so-called 'Old Woman of the Ghostwinds', still elegant in her mid-sixties, if grey-haired and sun-scorched like old leather. Her current protege, and therefore lover, was Maressa Vicente, whose fighting and sailing qualities were not yet generally known. The young woman certainly looked capable enough.
  Until one of them walked away, then, they were effectively sealed off here from the rest of the world. Parties from their crews, about half a dozen from each ship, mingled uneasily at the end of the causeway.”
[2022-01-23 | highlight] “The little girl nodded, her mouth an 'o' of concern, her fingers straining to reach the suddenly invaluable prize. Zamira held the silver cup to Cosetta's lips and the little girl drained it with urgent greed.
  'Very good,' said Drakasha, kissing her daughter on the forehead, 'very, very good. Now I'm going to take you down so you and Paolo can go to sleep.' She slipped the empty silver cup into a coat pocket, slung Cosetta round to the front of her chest and nodded at Jean. 'Thank you for that, Valora. Deck is yours, Del. Just a few minutes.'
  'She hates doing that,' said Ezri quietly when Drakasha had vanished down the companionway.
  'Feeding Cos for the night?'
  'It's milk of poppy. She puts them both to sleep ... for the Parlour Passage. No way in hell she wants them awake when we go through it.”
[2022-01-22 | highlight] “Struck by a sudden foggy memory of Scholar Treganne's spider, he gasped in horror and rolled over, clutching at whatever was clinging to him. He blinked several times to clear the veil of slumber from his eyes and found himself struggling not with a spider but with a kitten, narrow-faced and black-furred.
  'The hell?' Locke muttered.
  'Mew,' the kitten retorted, locking gazes with him. It had the expression common to all kittens, that of a tyrant in the becoming. I was comfortable, and you dared to move, those jade eyes said. For that you must die. When it became apparent to the cat that its two or three pounds of mass were insufficient to break Locke's neck with one mighty snap, it put its paws on his shoulders and began sharing its drool-covered nose with his lips. He recoiled.
  'That's Regal,' said someone to Locke's left”
[2022-01-22 | highlight] “Ezri, please, it's—'
  'You are the only thing,' she whispered through the iron grip of her embrace, 'the only thing on this whole fucking ocean that's mine, Jean Tannen. I don't own this ship. Hell, I don't own this cabin. I don't have a buried fucking treasure. I have no family and no title, not any more. And then I finally got to take something in return—'
  'And it turns out I have ... one significant flaw.'
  'We can do something,' she said. 'We can find someone. Physikers, alchemists—'
  'Tried, Ezri. Alchemists and poisoners. We need the antidote from Stragos, or an actual sample of his poison from which to create one.'
  'And didn't I deserve to know? What if you'd—'
  'Dropped dead in here one night”
[2022-01-22 | highlight] “distractions.'
  'Distractions?'
  'Barrels don't have breasts.'
  'Ah. So what have you been telling these barrels?'
  'This bottle of brandy,' said Jean, 'is still too full for me to begin embarrassing myself like that.'
  'Pretend I'm a barrel, then.'
  'Barrels don't have br—'
  'So I've heard. Find the nerve, Valora.'
  'You want me to pretend that you're a barrel so I can tell you what I was telling barrels back when I was pretending they were you.'
  'Precisely.'
  'Well.' He took another long sip from the brandy bottle. 'You have ... you have such hoops as I have never seen in any cask on any ship, such shiny and well-fit hoops—'
  'Jerome—'
  'And your staves!' He decided it was a good time to take another drink. 'Your staves ...so well planed, so tightly fit. You are as fine a cask as I have ever seen, you marvellous little barrel. To say nothing of your bung—'
  'Ahem. So you won't share your sweet ”
[2022-01-22 | highlight] “course not. Listen well. I thought that I'd grown up in a hierarchy where mere competence and loyalty were enough to maintain one's station in life,' she whispered. 'I gave an oath of service and imagined that oath was binding in both directions. I was a fool. And I had to kill an awful lot of men and women to escape the consequences of that foolishness. Would you really ask me to place my trust, and my hopes for Paolo and Cosetta, in the same bullshit that nearly killed me before? Which system of laws should I bend to, Orrin? Which king or duke or empress should I trust like a mother? Which of them is a better judge of my life's worth than I am? Can you point them out to me, write a letter of introduction?'
  'Zamira,' said Locke, 'please don't make me out to be some sort of advocate for things that I'm not; it seems to me that my whole life has been spent in the wilful disdain of what you're talking about. Do I strike you as a law-and-order sort of fellow?'
  'Admittedly not.'
  'I'm just curious, is all. I do appreciate[…]”
[2022-01-22 | highlight] “How much more danger are my children truly in than some poor bastard conscripted to fight in his duke's wars? Or some penniless family dying of a plague with their neighbourhood quarantined, or burned to the ground? Wars, disease, taxes. Bowing heads and kissing boots. There's plenty of hungry damn things prowling on land, Orrin. It's just that the ones at sea tend not to wear crowns.'
  'Ah—'
  'Was your life a paradise before you sailed the Sea of Brass?'
  'No.'
  'Of course not. Listen well. I thought that I'd grown up in a hierarchy where mere competence and loyalty were enough to maintain one's station in life,' she whispered. 'I gave an oath of service and imagined that oath was binding in both directions. I was a fool. And I had to kill an awful lot of men and women to escape the consequences of that foolishness. Would you really ask me to place my trust, and my hopes for Paolo and Cosetta, in the same bullshit that nearly killed me before? Which system of laws should I bend to, Orrin? Which king or duke or empress should I trust like a mother? Which of them is a[…]”
[2022-01-22 | highlight] “Why not? Why not! We carry your precious misery with us like a holy fucking relic. Don't talk about Sabetha Belacoros. Don't talk about the plays. Don't talk about Jasmer, or Espara, or any of the schemes we ran. I lived with her for nine years, same as you, and I've pretended she doesn't fucking exist to avoid upsetting you. Well, I'm not you. I'm not content to live like an oath-bound monk. I have a life outside your gods-damned shadow.'
  Locke stepped back. 'Jean, I don't... I didn't—'
  'And stop calling me Jean, for fuck's sake.”
[2022-01-22 | highlight] “The Poison Orchid, under reduced sail, drew near the stern of the Kingfisher, putting herself between the flute and the wind. The men and women lining the Orchid's rail let loose with three raucous cheers, each one louder than the last.
  'Hear that? They're not cheering the scrub watch,' said Jean. 'They're cheering their own. That's what we are, now. Part of all this.'
  'They're str—'
  'They're not strangers.' said Jean.
  'Well.' Locke glanced aft, at Lieutenant Delmastro, who'd risen to her feet and taken the Kingfisher's wheel. 'Maybe some of them are less strange to you than they are to me.'
  'Now, wait just a—'
  'Do what you have to do to pass the time out here,' said Locke, scowling, 'but don't forget where you come from. Stragos is our business. Beating him is our business.'
  'Pass the time?' Pass the gods-damned time}' Jean sucked in an angry breath. He clenched his fists and for a second looked as though he might grab Locke and shake him. 'Gods, I see what's twisting under your skin. Look, you may be resigned to the fact that the only woman you'll ever consider is years gone. But you've been screwed[…]”
[2022-01-22 | highlight] “Yeah. Look, the sea either makes you prudent, or it kills you. Drak-asha's officers take an oath. We're sworn that this ship goes down in battle, or by the will of the gods. Not for want of work, or canvas, or cord. That's a holy vow.' She stretched. 'And not for want of paint, either. Give the whole thing another coat, and look sharp about it.'
  Officers.”
[2022-01-22 | highlight] “Those are all the books I can remember,' said Jean. 'Not much of a taste for histories, I'm afraid. So, how'd you manage to read everything you have?'
  'Ahhh,' she said, tossing her hair backward with a flick of her neck. She wasn't scrawny, thought Jean - no angles on Ezri, just healthy curves and muscle. Had to be healthy to knock him down as she had, even by surprise. 'Out here, the past is a currency, Jerome. Sometimes it's the only one we have.'
  'Mysterious.'
  'Sensible.'
  'You already know a bit about me.”
[2022-01-21 | highlight] “them.'
  'Will they last to Port Prodigal?'
  'Assuming their ship does. Assuming they do as I told them, which is a bold—'
  'That's the best we can do for them, I'm sure. Condition of the twenty-eight?'
  'I'm sure you heard me say "wretched", which derives from a state of wretchedness, which is in turn caused by their being wretches. I could use a number of other highly technical terms, only some of them completely imaginary—”
[2022-01-21 | highlight] “That's a pity. I'm so good at it.'
  'A third curious thing occurs to me: you looked genuinely surprised to see my children aboard.'
  'It's, ah, merely that I found it strange you'd have them with you. Out here at sea. Company to the hazards of... all this.'
  'Where else might I be expected to keep an eye on them?' Zamira fingered the hilt of her drawn sabre. 'Paolo's four. Cosetta's three. Is your intelligence really so out of date that you didn't know about them?”
[2022-01-21 | highlight] “Very good, Master Valora!'
  Locke caught a glimpse of Bald Mazucca staring at him and he suppressed a feeling of unease. He knew that Caldris's sudden death the day before had been taken by the crew as an omen of the worst sort; they were openly muttering about women and cats, and the focal point of all their unkind attention was one Orrin Ravelle, whose status as captain and saviour was steadily fraying. Locke turned toward the helmsman and found him once again squinting ahead into the stinging rain, seemingly absorbed in his duty.”
[2022-01-21 | highlight] “Help you?' Locke put a hand beneath Caldris's chin; the man's pulse was wild and erratic. 'What do you mean, help you?'
  'No.' Caldris grimaced with concentration, sucking in a harsh breath between each word. 'Help. Me. Kosta!'
  'Lay him on the table,' said Jean, and together he and Locke pressed the old man down onto his back.
'Sweet gods,' said Locke, 'is it the poison? I don't feel any different.'
  'Nor I,' said Jean. 'I think... I think his heart is seizing up. I've seen it before. Shit. If we can calm him down, maybe get him to drink something—'
  But Caldris moaned again, dug feebly at the left side of his chest with both hands and shuddered. His hands fell limp. One long, strangled exhalation escaped from his throat and Locke, in rising horror, felt frantically around the base of his neck with the fingers of both hands”
[2022-01-21 | highlight] “You think I jest? They will mutiny. If we see another sail on that horizon, in any direction, we must give chase. We must bring a fight. You know why? So we can take some of their bloody cats. Before it's too late.'
  Caldris sighed before continuing, and suddenly looked ten years older. 'If it's a summer's-end storm coming up on us,' said Caldris, 'it'll be moving north and west, faster than we can sail. We'll have to pass through it, for we cannot outrun it by beating up to the east. It'll catch us still, and it'll only catch us tired. I'll do my damnedest, but you'd better pray in your cabin tonight for one thing.'
'What's that?'
'Cats falling from the bloody sky.”
[2022-01-21 | highlight] “Now,' he shouted, 'who among you sailed this ship when she was the Fortunate Venture? Step aside.'
  Fourteen men, including Jabril, separated themselves from the others.
  'And who among you were fair topmen?'
That got him seven raised hands; good enough for the time being.
  'Any of you not familiar with this ship nonetheless comfortable up above?'
  Four more men stepped forward, and Locke nodded. 'Good lads. You know where you'll be, then.' He grabbed one of the non-topmen by the shoulder and steered him toward the bow. 'For'ard watch. Let me know if anything untoward pops up in front of us.' He grabbed another man and pointed to the mainmast. 'Get a glass from Caldris; you'll be masthead watch for now. Don't look at me like that - you won't be fucking with the rigging. Just sit still and stay awake.
  'Master Caldris,' he bellowed, noting that the sailing master was back on deck, 'south-east by east through the reef passage called Underglass!”
[2022-01-21 | highlight] “Imaginary sailors! Tacks and sheets!' Jean waved his arms and hollered his instructions to the invisible deck hands. 'Smartly now, you slothful dogs!'
  'Master de Ferra,' called Locke, 'that imaginary sailor is not minding his duty!'
  'I'll fuckin' kill you later, you cabbage-brained pig-rapist! Seize your rope and wait for my word!”
[2022-01-20 | highlight] “admit, the device ain't exactly as precise as an arrow-shot, but even a land-sucker should be able to do better than that. Do it again, just like I showed you. Horizon and sun-shadow. And be grateful you're using a Verrari quadrant; the old cross-staffs made you look right at the sun instead of away from it.'
  'Beg pardon,' said Jean, 'but I'd always heard this device referred to as a Camorri quadrant—'
  'Bullshit,' said Caldris. 'This here's a Verrari quadrant. Verrari invented it, twenty years back.'
  'That claim,' said Locke, 'must take some of the sting out of getting the shit walloped out of you in the Thousand-Day War, eh?'
  'You sweet on Camorri, Kosta?' Caldris put a hand on the backstaff. Locke realized with a start that his anger wasn't bantering. 'I thought you was Talishani. You got a reason to fuckin' speak up for Camorr?'
  'No, I was just—'
  'Just what, now?'
  'Forgive me.' Locke realized his mistake. 'I didn't think. It's not just history to you, is it?'
  'All thousand days and then some,' said Caldris. 'I was there all the fuckin' way.'
  'My apologies. I suppose you lost friends.'
  'You damn”
[2022-01-20 | highlight] “I fancy that means "fuck you",' said Caldris, 'but at least we've got our lives. So what do you think, sirs? An educational day?'
  'I hope we've shown some aptitude, at least,' groaned Locke, kneading a knot in the small of his back.
  'Baby steps, Kosta. As far as sailors go, you haven't even learned to suck milk from a tit yet. But now you know starboard from larboard, and I'm twenty volani richer.'
  'Indeed,' sighed Locke as he fetched his coat, vest, neck-cloths and shoes from the ground. He tossed a small leather purse to the sailing master, who dangled it in front of the kitten and cooed as though to a small child.”
[2022-01-20 | highlight] “Urn ... why do you keep a kitten in that basket?' The kitten, dissatisfied with Locke's arms, decided to wrap her paws around his neck and experiment on it with her claws.
  'When you go to sea, there's two necessities, for luck. First, you're courting an awful fate if you take a ship to sea without at least one woman officer. It's the law of the Lord of the Grasping Waters. His mandate. He's got a fixation for the daughters of the land; he'll smash any ship that puts to sea without at least one aboard. Plus, it's plain common sense. They're good officers. Decent plain sailors, but finer officers than you or me. Just the way the gods made 'em.
  'Second, it's powerful bad luck to put out without cats on board. Not only as they kill the rats, but as they're the proudest creatures anywhere, wet or dry. Iono admires the little fuckers. Got a ship with women and cats aboard, you'll have the finest luck you can hope for. Now, our little boat's so small I reckon we're fine without no woman. Fishers and harbour boats go out all the time, no worries. But with the pair[…]”
[2022-01-20 | highlight] “Karthain can never be conquered by the arts it commands; they have ensured that no power in our world will ever have sorcerers numerous or powerful enough to match them. They must be fought with this.' He set down his oar and spread his hands. 'Machines. Artifice. Alchemy and engineering; the fruits of the mind.'
  'All of this,' said Locke, 'this whole ridiculous scheme ... a more powerful Tal Verrar, conquering this corner of the world ... all to hurt Karthain? I can't say I find the idea unpleasant, but why? What did they do to you, to make you imagine this?'
  'Do either of you know,' said Stragos, 'of the ancient art of illusionism? Have you ever read about it in books of history?'
  'A little,' said Locke. 'Not very much.”
[2022-01-19 | highlight] “legs.
  While he and Jean enriched themselves at Requin's expense and cheated their way up the luxurious floors of the Sinspire, on the stone floor of Lady Saljesca's arena the defaults would go on, and the faces of the spectators would be the same, day after day. Children tearing the wings from insects to laugh at how they flailed and bled ... and stepping on one every now and again.
  'Thieves prosper,' muttered Locke under his breath. He tightened his neck-cloths and prepared to go and summon his carriages, feeling sick to his stomach.”
[2022-01-19 | highlight] “it.'
  I could leave you penniless and sobbing, whispered the voice in Locke's head. I could have you pawning your piss-buckets to keep your creditors from slitting your throat.
  'Forgive me, m'lord. I will take what you say most seriously,' muttered Locke. 'I doubt... that I shall trouble anyone here again.'
 ”
[2022-01-19 | highlight] “And starve and die elsewhere.'
  'Please. I have seen the world, Master Fehrwight. I might recommend it to you for perspective. Certainly, some of them must be down on their luck. But I wager you'd find that most of them are just hungry for gold, hoping for an easy break. Look out at those on the arena floor now ... quite a few young and healthy ones, aren't there?'
  'Who else might be expected to make the journey here on foot without extraordinary luck, m'lord Genrusa?”
[2022-01-19 | highlight] “They cannot simply decide not to eat.'
  'Farms fail, businesses fail, ships sink, empires fall.' Genrusa brought his cane out from behind his back and punctuated his statements by gesturing at Locke with the gold head. 'That's life, under the gods, by the will of the gods. Perhaps if they'd prayed harder, or saved more, or been less thoughtless with what they had, they wouldn't need to come crawling here for Saljesca's charity. Seems only fair that she should require most of them to earn it.'
  'Charily?
  'They have a roof over their heads, food to eat and the chance of earning money”
[2022-01-19 | highlight] “have.'
  'There I would beg to differ. You have a private gallery to see it three times a day if you wish. 'M'lord.'
  'Ahhhh. So you find the Amusement War, what, indecorous?'
  'Cruel, m'lord Genrusa. Most uncommonly cruel.'
  'Cruel? Compared to what? War? Times of plague? Have you ever seen Camorr, by chance? Now there's a basis for comparison that might have you thinking more soundly, Master Fehrwight.'
  'Even in Camorr,' said Locke, 'I don't believe anyone is allowed to beat old women in broad daylight on a whim. Or tear their clothes off, stone them, rape them, slash their hair off, splash them with alchemical caustics ... it's like ... like children tearing off an insect's wings. So they might watch and laugh.'
  'Who forced them to come here, Fehrwight? Who put a sword to their backs and made them march all the way to Salon Corbeau along those hot, empty roads? That pilgrimage takes days from anywhere worthy of note”
[2022-01-19 | highlight] “Each brutal humiliation, each painful default excitedly decreed by some spoiled noble child while their parents laughed in appreciation, gave strength to that beast as it beat itself against his better judgment, his cold calculation, his willingness to stick to the plan.
  He was trying to make himself angry enough to give in.
  The Thorn of Camorr had been a mask he'd half-heartedly worn as a game. Now it was almost a separate entity, a hungry thing, an increasingly insistent ghost prying at his resolve to stand up for the mandate of his faith.
   Let me out, it whispered. Let me out. The rich must remember. By the gods, I can make damn sure they never forget”
[2022-01-19 | highlight] “If I were to presume to give you advice,' said Lauris, 'I'd suggest that you avoid the Amusement War for the rest of your stay. Do what the rest of us here do: ignore it. Paint a great cloud of fog over it in your mind's eye and pretend that it's not there.'
  'As you say, Madam Baumondain.' Locke sighed. 'I might just do so.'
 ”
[2022-01-19 | highlight] “Farms fail. Businesses fail. Tenant lands get repossessed. Plagues knock all the money and health out of cities. When they've got nowhere else to go, they come here. There's a roof to sleep under, meals, hope of gold or silver. All you have to do is go out there often enough and ... amuse them.'
  'It's perverse. It's infamous.”
[2022-01-19 | highlight] “cities. I know how people live. I've seen gladiatorial fights, executions, misery and poverty and desperation. But I've never seen anything like that - the faces of those spectators. The way they watched and cheered. Like jackals, like crows, like something ... something so very wrong.'
  'There are no laws here but Lady Saljesca's laws,' said Lauris. 'Here they can behave however they choose. At the Amusement War they can do exactly what they want to do to the poor folk and the simple folk. Things forbidden elsewhere. All you're seeing is what they look like when they stop pretending they give a damn about anything. Where do you think Lively came from? My sister saw a noblewoman having kittens Gentled so her sons could torture them with knives. Because they were bored at tea. So welcome to Salon Corbeau, Master Fehrwight. I'm sorry it's not the paradise it looks like from a distance. Does our work on the chairs meet with your approval?”
[2022-01-19 | highlight] “As you said, they get paid, Master Fehrwight.' Lauris Baumondain rested one hand gently on the back of the half-finished chair Locke had come in to see. With the other she stroked poor motionless Lively, tucked away inside a pocket of her apron. 'If you're selected for a game, you get a copper centira. If you're given a default, you get a silver volani. There's also a random drawing: one person per War, one in eighty, gets a gold solari.”
[2022-01-19 | highlight] “  'But the second mandate,' said Chains, lowering his voice and glancing around into the fog to make doubly sure that they were not overheard, 'is this - the rich remember.'
  'Remember what?'
  'That they're not invincible. That locks can be picked and treasures can be stolen. Nara, Mistress of Ubiquitous Maladies, may Her hand be stayed, sends disease among men so that men will never forget that they are not gods. We're sort of like that, for the rich and powerful. We're the stone in their shoe, the thorn in their flesh, a little bit of reciprocity this side of divine judgement. That's our second mandate, and it's as important as the first.”
[2022-01-19 | highlight] “Camorr, years before. The wet, seeping mists enclosed Locke and Father Chains in curtains of midnight grey as the old man led the boy back home from his first meeting with Capa Vencarlo Barsavi. Locke, drunk and sweat-soaked, clung to the back of his Gentled goat for dear life.
  '... You don't belong to Barsavi,' Chains said. 'He's good enough for what he is, a good ally to have on your side and a man that you must appear to obey at all times. But he certainly doesn't own you. In the end, neither do I.'
  'So I don't have to—'
  'Obey the Secret Peace? Be a good little pezon? Only for pretend, Locke. Only to keep the wolves from the door. ”
[2022-01-19 | highlight] “There was no order to it, no justice. Gladiators and prisoners fighting before a crowd were there for a reason, risking their fives for glory or paying the price for having been caught. Men and women hung from a gibbets because the Crooked Warden had only so much help to give to the foolish, the slow and the unlucky. But this was wanton.”
[2022-01-19 | highlight] “tongue!'
  The crowd broke into wild applause at that; the man on the arena floor was pushed up to the wall by the chief Demon. 'Start licking, scum!'
  His first efforts were half-hearted. Another Demon produced a whip that ended in seven knotted cords and lashed the man across the shoulders, knocking him into the wall hard enough to bloody his nose. 'Earn your fucking pay, worm,' screamed the Demon, whipping him once again. 'Haven't you ever had a lady tell you to get down and use your tongue before?”
[2022-01-19 | highlight] “Demon.
  'Oh no,' said the old man. 'Get rid of her hair, too!'
The crowd burst into applause and cheers at that, and the woman betrayed real fear for the first time. She had a thick mane of glossy black hair down to the small of her back, something to be proud of even among the penniless - perhaps all she had to be proud of in the world. The chief Demon played to the crowd, hoisting a gleaming, crooked dagger over his head and howling with glee. The woman attempted to struggle against the five pairs of arms that held her, to no avail.”
[2022-01-19 | highlight] “Demon.
  'Oh no,' said the old man. 'Get rid of her hair, too!'
The crowd burst into applause and cheers at that, and the woman betrayed real fear for the first time. She had a thick mane of glossy black hair down to the small of her back, something to be proud of even among the penniless - perhaps all she had to be proud of in the world. The chief Demon played to the crowd, hoisting a gleaming, crooked dagger over his head and howling with glee. The woman attempted to struggle against the five pairs of arms that held her, to no avail.”
[2022-01-19 | highlight] “What,' Locke muttered to himself in Vadran, 'is so damn fascinating?'
  Then the first piece was taken, and the Demons came out to the arena floor.
  The White Warmistress deliberately placed one of her 'pieces', a middle-aged man, in harm's way. More of her army lurked behind him in an obvious trap, but the Black Warmaster apparently decided it was a worthwhile exchange”
[2022-01-19 | highlight] “Three times per day, random drawings were held to select two teams of forty for the coming Amusement War. The only rule of the War was that the living pieces had to be able to stand, move and obey orders; children of eight or nine were about the youngest taken. Those that refused to participate when their number was drawn, even once, were thrown out of Saljesca's demi-city immediately and barred from returning. Without supplies and preparation, being cast out onto the roads in this dry land could be a death sentence.
  The aspirants were marched into the arena by two dozen of Saljesca's guards, who were armed with curved shields and lacquered wooden sticks. They were robust men and women who moved with the easy assurance of hard experience; even a general uprising of the aspirants would stand no chance against them. The guards lined the aspirants up in their starting positions on the board, forty white 'pieces' and forty black 'pieces', with sixteen rows of squares separating each double-ranked army.
  At opposite ends of the stadium were two special gallery boxes, one draped with black silk curtains and the other with white. These boxes were[…]”
[2022-01-19 | highlight] “On the floor of the arena was a gleaming grid of black and white marble squares, each one a yard on a side. The squares were set twenty by twenty, like a gigantic Catch-the-Duke board. Where little carved pieces of wood or ivory were used in that game, Saljesca's playing field featured living pieces. The poor and destitute would man that field, forty to a side, wearing white or black tabards to distinguish themselves. This strange employment was the reason they risked the long, hard trudge to Salon Corbeau.”
[2022-01-19 | highlight] “reflection.
  'It would, of course, be impossible for me to produce a deck of cards from thin air ... but what's this?'
  He moved his right hand toward the mirror with a flourish, and a deck of cards slipped clumsily out of it, coming apart in a fluttering mess as it fell to the floor.
'Oh, fucking hell,' Locke muttered.
  He had a week of empty time on his hands, and his legerdemain was improving with torturous slowness. Locke soon turned his attention to the curious institution at the heart of Salon Corbeau, the reason so many idle rich made pilgrimage to the place, and the reason so many desperate and downtrodden ate their carriage dust as they trudged to the same destination”
[2022-01-19 | highlight] “Perhaps a week,' said Baumondain, in a defeated whisper.
  'Then you agree? Until my four chairs are finished, this is the Fehrwight Furniture Shop? I have more gold in the Villa Verdante's strongbox. You will have to kill me to stop forcing it upon you if you say no. So do we have a deal?'
  'Gods help us both, yes!'
  'Then shake on it. You get carving, and I'll start wasting time back at my inn. Send messengers if you need me to inspect anything. I'll stay until you're finished.'
 
4”
[2022-01-19 | highlight] “Have I? Oh dear, I see that I have.' Baumondain reached down and eased the kitten out of his apron. Locke was astonished to see how limply it hung in his hands, with its legs and tail drooping and its little head lolling; what self-respecting cat would sleep while plucked up and carried through the air? Then Locke saw the answer as Lauris took Lively in her own hands and turned to go. The kitten's little eyes were wide open, and stark white.
  'That creature was Gentled,' said Locke in a low voice when Lauris had returned to the workshop.
  'I'm afraid so,' said the carpenter.
  'I've never seen such a thing. What purpose does it serve, in a cat?'
  'None, Master Fehrwight, none.' Baumondain's smile was gone, replaced by a wary and uncomfortable expression. 'And it certainly wasn't my doing. My youngest daughter, Parnella, found him abandoned behind the Villa Verdante.”
[2022-01-19 | highlight] “Ah, shit. She's a foot-boxer - a bloody chassoneur, Locke thought, stumbling to his feet. Jean hates that. Locke twitched his coat-sleeves and a stiletto fell into each hand. Moving warily, he skipped across the stones toward Jean's attacker, who was kicking Jean in the ribs as the big man attempted to roll away.”
[2022-01-19 | highlight] “Oh, fantastic,' said Jean when Locke had finished his recounting of what had transpired in Requin's office. 'So now we've got Requin thinking that Stragos is out to get him. I've never helped precipitate a civil war before. This should be fun.'
  'I didn't have much choice,' said Locke. 'Can you think of any other convincing reasons for Stragos to take a personal interest in us? Without a good explanation, I was going out of that window, that much was clear.”
[2022-01-19 | highlight] “Madam Durenna smiled over the top of her drink, some milky orange liquor in a slender glass vessel nearly a foot high. Jean was sipping from a smaller tumbler of something pale brown, and he passed an identical glass to Locke, who took it up with a grateful nod. Honeyed rum - hard enough to avoid Durenna's scorn, but not quite powerful enough to start beating anyone's better judgment down for the evening.
  'Is it about that time? My apologies for my absence. Silly little business.'
  'Silly? With one of the Priori involved?'
  'I made the mistake of showing him a card trick last week,' said Locke. 'Now he's making arrangements for me to perform the same trick for, ah, a friend of his.”
[2022-01-19 | highlight] “Yes, a Jeremite captain had a seed hive and a queen he was trying to sell. My people tipped off customs, had him executed, burned the queen, and the rest vanished into my keeping after they were impounded. I knew I'd find some sort of use for them.'
  'And the young man facing them?'
  'Some eighth son of a titled nobody with sand for brains and debts to the 'Spire. He said he'd cover his markers or die trying, and I took him at his word.'
  'Well, I've got a hundred solari on him, so I hope he lives to cover those markers.' He turned back toward Selendri. 'The climbing closet again?'
  'Only to the sixth floor. You can walk back down from there.' She smirked slightly. 'By yourself.”
[2022-01-19 | highlight] “But I'll give you a better answer. What could you possibly tell Stragos? That I dislike him, bank for his enemies and wish him dead? So he'd have confirmation of my hostility? No point. He knows I'm hostile. He knows the underworld of Tal Verrar is an impediment to him if he wants to assert his power. My felantozzi prefer the rule of the guilds to the possibility of rule by uniforms and spears; there's less money in dictatorship by arms”
[2022-01-19 | highlight] “When Stragos is either verifiably dead or in my custody, you may have what you ask. A place at the Sinspire assisting with my games. A salary. All the assistance I can offer you with his poison. And Jerome de Ferra crying under your knife. Is that agreeable?'
  'How am I supposed to do that?'
  'I don't expect you to do it all yourself. But Maxilan has clearly ruled long enough. Assist me in enabling his retirement by any means you can, or any means I order. Then I suppose I'll have a new floor boss.'
  'Best thing I've heard in a long while. And the, ah, money in my account, locked away by your command?'
  'Will remain locked away, lost by your own actions. I am not a man of charity, Leocanto. Remember that, if you would serve me.'
  'Of course. Of course. But now indulge me, please, in a question of my own. Why aren't you worried that I might be double-timing you for Stragos? That I might run back and tell him all this”
[2022-01-19 | highlight] “Technically, he is. The Priori have a lovely piece of parchment that says so. Stragos has an army and a navy that afford him a dissenting opinion.'
  'Great. So now what do we do?'
  'Good question. No more suggestions from you, no more schemes, no more card tricks, Master Kosta?”
[2022-01-19 | highlight] “A reasonable presumption,' purred Requin, growing slightly warmer in his manner.
  'I'm glad you think so, because apparently I know less about the politics of this city than I thought I did. What's the hell is going on, Requin?'
  'The Archon and the Priori are gnashing their teeth at one another again. Now, half the Priori store large portions of their personal fortunes in my vault, making it impossible for the Archon's spies to know the true extent of their resources. Emptying my vault would not only strip them of funds, but put me in their bad graces. Right now, Stragos could never put me out of business without major provocation, for fear of initiating a civil war. But sponsoring an apparent third party to hit my vault... oh yes, that'd do the trick nicely. I'd be busy hunting you and Jerome, the Priori would be busy trying to have me drawn and quartered, and then Stragos could simply ...”
[2022-01-19 | highlight] “I think Tal Verrar will be good for us,' said Locke. 'It's a pristine city. We've never worked out of it and it's never seen our like. Nobody knows us, nobody expects us. We'll have total freedom of movement.'
  The carriage clattered along under the rain, jostling against patches where the weathered stones of the Therin Throne Road had been washed clean of their protective layers of dirt. Lightning lit the sky in the distance but the grey veil swirled thick between land and sea, and the great mass of Tal Verrar was hidden from their eyes as they rode down into it for the first time.
   'You're almost certainly right, Locke. I think we do need a game.' Jean set his notes on his lap and cracked his knuckles. 'Gods, but it'll be good to be out and around. It'll be good to be the predators again.'
  ”
[2022-01-17 | highlight] “Jean passed him the decanter and Locke slurped from it as shamelessly as a horse at a trough. Jean helped him into the chair. Locke said nothing for a few seconds, then suddenly seemed to notice Jean's hand on his shoulder, and he recoiled. 'Here ... we are ... then,' he gasped. 
  'See what happens when you provoke me? I think we're going to have to flee the city.'
  'What the— What have you done?'
  Locke tore the lid from his basket; it was the sort commonly used by merchants to haul small loads of goods to and from a street market. A prodigious assortment of odds and ends lay inside, and Locke began to list them off as he pulled them out and showed them to Jean.
  'What's this? Why, it's a pile of purses ... one-two-three-four of them, all plucked from sober gentlemen in open streets. Here's a knife, two bottles of wine, a pewter ale mug - dented a bit, but still good metal. A brooch, three gold pins, two earrings - earrings, Master Tannen, plucked from ears, and I'd like to see you try that. Here's a little bolt of nice silk, a box of sweetmeats, two[…]”
[2022-01-17 | highlight] “It's a curious fact,' Jean said through the door, 'that the rooms of the Silver Lantern can be locked from the outside with a special key only the innkeeper has. In case he wants to keep an unruly guest at bay while he calls for the watch, you see.'
'Jean, open this fucking door!'
'No. You open it.'
'I can't! You told me yourself you've got the special key!'
  'The Locke Lamora I used to know would spit on you,' said Jean. 'Priest of the Crooked Warden. Garrista of the Gentlemen Bastards. Student of Father Chains. Brother to Calo, Galdo and Bug! Tell me, what would Sabetha think of you?'
  'You ... you bastard! Open this door!'
  'Look at yourself, Locke. You're a fucking disgrace. Open it yourself.'
  'You. Have. The. Godsdamnedmotberfuckingkey.'
  'You know how to charm a lock, right? I left you some picks on the table. You want your wine back, you work the bloody door yourself.'
  'You son of a bitch -”
[2022-01-17 | highlight] “hand.
  'But,' he continued, 'at least the fact that your first thought was to kill me shows some spirit. Let's see those toys again. Come on, show 'em off.'
  Sheepishly, the boys drew out their weapons once again, and Jean inspected them with a sweep of his head. 'Mmmm. Gimp steel, broken bottles, little sticks, a hammer ... boys, the trouble with this set-up is that you think those are threats. They're not. They're insults.'
  He started moving while the last few words were still coming out of his mouth; his left hand slid up beneath his vest beside his right. Both of his arms came out and up in a blur, and then he grunted as he let fly with both of his hatchets, overhand.”
[2022-01-17 | highlight] “Jean immediately set about procuring a source of income. If Camorr's underworld had been a deep lake, Vel Virazzo's was a stagnant pond. He had little trouble sussing out the major dockside gangs and the relationships between them. There was little organization in Vel Virazzo, and no boss-of-bosses to screw things up. A few nights of drinking in all the right dives and he knew exactly who to approach.
  They called themselves the Brass Coves, and they skulked about in an abandoned tannery down on the city's eastern docks, where the sea lapped against the pilings of rotting piers that had seen no legitimate use in twenty years. By night, they were an active crew of sneak-thieves, muggers and coat-charmers. By day, they slept, diced and drank away most of their profits. Jean kicked in their door (though it hung loosely in its frame, and wasn't locked) at the second hour of the afternoon on a bright, sunny day.”
[2022-01-17 | highlight] “REMINISCENCE
 
The Capa of Vel Virazzo
 
1
 
 
Locke Lamora had arrived in Vel Virazzo nearly two years earlier, wanting to die, and Jean Tannen had been inclined to let him have his wish.
  Vel Virazzo is a deep-water port about a hundred miles south-east of Tal Verrar, carved out of the high rocky cliffs that dominate the mainland coast on the Sea of Brass. A city of eight or nine thousand souls, it has long been a sullen tributary of the Verrari, ruled by a governor appointed directly by the Archon.
  A line of narrow Elderglass spires rises two hundred feet out of the water just offshore, one more Eldren artefact of inscrutable function on a coast thick with abandoned wonders. The glass pylons have fifteen-foot platforms atop them and are now used as lighthouses, manned by petty convicts. Boats bring and leave them to climb up the knotted rope ladders that hang down the pylons. That accomplished, they winch up their provisions and settle in for a few weeks of exile, tending red alchemical lamps the size of small huts. Not all of them come back down right in the head”
[2022-01-17 | highlight] “wheelbarrow.
  'What's your fare?' Locke asked.
  'Delicacies from the table of Iono himself, the sweetest taste the sea has to offer. Sharks' eyes in brine, all fresh-plucked. Crisp the shells, soft the humours, sweet the juices.'
  'Sharks' eyes? Gods, no.' Locke grimaced. 'Have you more common flesh? Liver? Gills? A gill-pie would be welcome.'
  'Gills? Sir, gills have none of the virtues of the eyes; it is the eyes that tone the muscles, prevent cholera and firm up a man's mechanisms for certain, ah, marital duties.'
  'I have no need of any mechanism-firming in that respect,' said Locke. 'And I'm afraid my stomach is too unsettled for the splendour of sharks' eyes just at the moment.'
  'A pity, sir. For your sake, I wish I had some bit of gill to offer you, but it's the eyes that I get, and little else. Yet I do have several types- scythe sharks, wolf sharks, blue widower—”

=== Red Sister — Mark Lawrence ===
[2022-01-19 | highlight] “day.
‘There are three bells. That’s the iron bell, Ferra, which just rang. It’s got a hollow sound and dies off quickly. That’s for the sisters, to tell them about prayers mainly. It hangs in the little belfry up on the Dome of the Ancestor. The one that looks like a nipple.’
‘Clera!’ Jula scolded. She had taken the chair on Nona’s other side and now turned to join the conversation. ‘Bray is the brass bell that hangs in the Academia, at the top of the tower. It sounds the hours, and that’s what you have to listen to for class and meals.’
‘And lights out and getting up.’ Clera cut back in. ‘Bray has a deep voice that hangs.’ She made her own deep and sonorous, a singer’s voice, Nona thought. ‘Afternoon class is sixth bell, lunch is fifth, dinner is seventh.”
[2022-01-18 | highlight] “What is it?’ Nona set a finger to the enamelled whiteness of the ball, finding it rough beneath her touch, tiny ridges catching the light. It was a little larger than her head and perfectly round. A stand held it top and bottom so that it could rotate. And around its middle, like a belt, a very thin strand of colour no thicker than a piece of string.
‘Don’t touch! Mistress Academia would have a fit!’ Clera elbowed Nona out of the way and immediately ignored her own instruction by setting the thing spinning on its pivots. ‘It’s the world, silly.’
‘The world?’ That made no sense at all.
‘Abeth.’ Clera huffed her breath out as if Nona’s stupidity had hit her in the stomach. ‘A model of it.’
Nona blinked. Her world had been the village, the forests, the fields, and in the distance the northern ice forming one wall of the Corridor. She hadn’t ever considered that it might have a shape and if she had she would not have guessed at a ball, white or otherwise.
‘It’s a globe.’ Clera reached out to stop”
[2022-01-18 | highlight] “were.
‘We have Blade this afternoon – we’re doing unarmed, but later we learn knives and stars, the older ones learn swords, and tactics and strategy too. In Red Class everyone studies everything. Later on the Holy Sisters do more Academia and Spirit classes. Martial Sisters do mostly Blade. Sisters of Discretion concentrate on Shade. Mystic Sisters spend their time learning Path. Everyone calls the Martial Sisters the Red Sisters, and the Mystic Sisters are Holy Witches – but don’t let a nun hear you call them witches!”
[2022-01-18 | highlight] “The merchant’s daughter made no further mention of Arabella, not even glancing down the table in her direction. Instead she rattled on cheerfully about what could be expected from the day, requiring little from Nona in return save the occasional grunt or ‘yes’ in the brief gaps when her mouth wasn’t full.
‘Ghena’s the youngest in the class, she’s still nine. Me and Ruli are eleven. We’ll probably move into Grey soon – that’s Class Two. Class One is Red. Sister Oak is our mistress but we don’t see a lot of her.’ Clera paused to watch Nona eat. ‘You really were hungry!”
[2022-01-18 | highlight] “rests in my hands.’
The four men inclined their heads and turned, marching out of the building without a word to either the abbess or the girl they had delivered.
Arabella herself didn’t appear to notice their departure. She looked, to Nona, like a different kind of creature, set apart from the dull and dirty humans who scurried about the world. Her hair seemed to glow golden in the light that reached through the still-open doors. Her travelling clothes were a wonder of brushed suede and fur-edged leather, with a magnificent dark red cape across her shoulders secured by a gold chain. Where others might be described by their collection of flaws Arabella Jotsis’s only identifying feature seemed to be that she was without blemish. Perhaps the Ancestor looked like this, but people didn’t.
‘Your table is at the end, Arabella. I’m sure Red Class will welcome you into their ranks. Nona too.’ The abbess nodded towards the end of the room and took her guiding hand from the girl’s shoulder.”
[2022-01-18 | highlight] “Life in the Caltess proved to be a big improvement on an open cage rattling along the back-lanes of empire. Truth be told, it was an improvement on life in Nona’s village. Here she might be the smallest but she wasn’t the odd one out. The isolation of the village bred generations so similar in looks you might pick any handful at random to make a convincing family. Nona alone hadn’t fit the mould. A goat in the sheep herd. The family Partnis’s purse had furnished him with mixed every size and shape, every colour and shade, and in the attic’s gloom they were much of a muchness even so.”
[2022-01-18 | highlight] “Nona had heard of them, the four tribes of men who came to the world out of darkness and mixed their lines to bear children who might withstand the harshness of the lands they claimed. ‘Ma took me to the Hope church. They didn’t like talk of the Ancestor.’
Saida held her hands up. ‘Well there were four tribes.’ She counted them off on her fingers. ‘Gerant. If you have too much gerant blood you get big like they were.’ She patted her broad chest. ‘Hunska. They’re less common.’ She touched Nona’s hair. ‘Hunska-dark, hunska-fast.’ As if reciting a rhyme. ‘The others are even rarer. Marjool … and … and …’
‘Quantal,’ Markus said from the corner. He snorted and puffed up as if he were an elder. ‘And it’s marjal, not marjool.’
Saida scowled at him, and turning back she lowered her voice to a whisper. ‘They can do magic.”
[2022-01-18 | highlight] “roads.
‘How old are you?’ Markus, a solid dark-haired boy who seemed very proud of his ten years, asked the question. He’d asked Nona the same when she joined them. She’d said nine because he seemed to need a number.
‘Eight.’ Saida sniffed and wiped her nose with a muddy hand.
‘Eight? Hope’s blood! I thought you were thirteen!’ Markus seemed in equal measure both pleased to keep his place as oldest, and outraged by Saida’s size.
‘Gerant in her,’ offered Chara, a dark girl with hair so short her scalp shone through.
Nona didn’t know what gerant was, except that if you had it you’d be big.
Saida shuffled closer to Nona. As a farm-girl she knew not to sit above the wheels if you didn’t want your teeth rattled out.
‘Don’t sit by her,’ Markus said. ‘Cursed, that one is.”
[2022-01-18 | highlight] “How? Why? Paint me a picture.’ Abbess Glass made a sharp turn, pulling Nona through a passage so narrow that a few more pounds about her middle would see the nun scraping both sides.
‘They brought us to the Caltess in a cage.’ Nona remembered the journey. There had been three children on the wagon when Giljohn, the child-taker, stopped at her village and the people gave her over. Grey Stephen had passed her up to him. It seemed that everyone she knew watched as Giljohn put her in the wooden cage with the others. The village children, both littles and bigs, looked on mute, the old women muttered, Mari Streams, her mother’s friend, had sobbed; Martha Baker had shouted cruel words. When the wagon jolted off along its way stones and clods of mud had followed. ‘I didn’t like it.”
[2022-01-17 | highlight] “In the cities, though, they mainly prayed to the Ancestor.
‘There. See it?’
Nona followed the line of the abbess’s finger. On a high plateau, beyond the city wall, the slanting sunlight caught on a domed building, perhaps five miles off.
‘Yes.’
‘That’s where we’re headed.’ And the abbess led away along the street, stepping around a horse pile too fresh for the garden-boys to have got to yet.
‘You didn’t hear about me”
[2022-01-17 | highlight] “The abbess turned, one hand knotted in the string of purple beads around her neck. ‘My name is Glass. That’s Abbess Glass to you. And I gave my crozier to a rather surprised young man shortly after we emerged from Shoe Street. I hope the warden’s guards followed it rather than us.’
‘Glass isn’t a proper name. It’s a thing. I’ve seen some in Partnis Reeve’s office.’ Something hard and near invisible that kept the Corridor winds from the fight-master’s den.
Abbess Glass turned away and resumed her marching. ‘Each sister takes a new name when she is deemed fit to marry the Ancestor. It’s always the name of an object or thing, to set us apart from the worldly.”
[2022-01-17 | highlight] “I’ve met him a few times,’ the abbess replied. ‘Nasty little man, bald and squinty, uglier on the inside.’ She stepped around the wares of a cobbler, laid out before his steps. Every other house seemed to be a cobbler’s shop, with an old man or young woman in the window, hammering away at boot heels or trimming leather.
‘You lied!’
‘To call something a lie, child, is an unhelpful characterization.’ The abbess drew a deep breath, labouring up the slope. ‘Words are steps along a path: the important thing is to get where you’re going. You can play by all manner of rules, step-on-a-crack-break-your-back, but you’ll get there quicker if you pick the most certain route.”
[2022-01-17 | highlight] “He looked up from his knives and grinned, dark hair swept down across his face, dark eyes behind. ‘It’s difficult. How old are you?’
Nona shrugged. ‘Little.’ They didn’t count years in the village. You were a baby, then little, then big, then old, then dead.
‘Little is quite small.’ He pursed his lips. ‘I’ve two years and twenty. I guess I’m supposed to be big.’ He smiled but with more worry in it than joy, as if the world made no more sense and offered no more comfort to bigs than littles. ‘Let’s have a go.”
[2022-01-17 | highlight] “Best get along home to your ma and pa.’ Amondo turned slowly, scanning the huts, the trees, the barns.
‘My da’s dead. The ice took him.’
‘Well then.’ A smile, only half-sad. ‘I’d best take you home.’ He pushed back the length of his hair and offered his hand. ‘We’re friends, aren’t we?”
[2022-01-17 | highlight] “Nona stayed by him though, watching every move, each deft tuck and curl and switch. She stayed even after the light failed and the last of the children drifted away. Silent and staring she watched as the juggler started to pack his props into their bag.
‘You’re a quiet one.’ Amondo threw her a wizened apple that sat in his hat along with several better examples, two bread rolls, a piece of Kennal’s hard goat’s cheese, and somewhere amongst them a copper halfpenny clipped back to a quarter.
Nona held the apple close to her ear, listening to the sound of her fingers against its wrinkles. ‘The children don’t like me.’
‘No?’
‘No.’
Amondo waited, juggling invisible balls with his hands.
‘They say I’m evil.”
[2022-01-17 | highlight] “A juggler once came to Nona’s village, a place so small it had neither a name nor a market square. The juggler came dressed in mud and faded motley, a lean look about him. He came alone, a young man, dark eyes, quick hands. In a sackcloth bag he carried balls of coloured leather, batons with white and black ribbons, and crudely made knives.”
[2022-01-17 | highlight] “Quite where the abbess had hidden her fruit supply Argus couldn’t tell, but he stopped caring a heartbeat later, staring at the third apple, trapped between two hands, each full of the previous two.
‘Catch.’ The abbess tossed yet another hoare-apple, but the girl dropped her three and let the fourth sail over her shoulder.
‘Where’s Saida?’
‘You come with me, Nona Grey,’ the abbess said, her expression kindly. ‘We will discuss Saida at the convent.’
‘I’m keeping her.’ Partnis stepped towards the girl. ‘A treasured daughter! Besides, she damn near killed Raymel Tacsis. The family will never let her go free. But if I can show she has value they might let me put her into a few fights first.”

=== Souls of Black Folk — Du Bois, W. E. B.; Edwards, Brent Hayes; ===
[2022-01-18 | highlight] “It is the aim of this essay to study the period of history from 1861 to 1872 so far as it relates to the American Negro. In effect, this tale of the dawn of Freedom is an account of that government of men called the Freedmen’s Bureau,*–one of the most singular and interesting of the attempts made by a great nation to grapple with vast problems of race and social condition.”
[2022-01-18 | highlight] “THE problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line,*–the relation of the darker to the lighter races of men in Asia and Africa, in America and the islands of the sea. It”
[2022-01-18 | highlight] “there are to-day no truer exponents of the pure human spirit of the Declaration of Independence than the American Negroes; there is no true American music but the wild sweet melodies of the Negro slave; the American fairy tales and folklore are Indian and African; and, all in all, we black men seem the sole oasis of simple faith and reverence in a dusty desert of dollars and smartness. Will America be poorer if she replace her brutal dyspeptic blundering with light-hearted but determined Negro humility? or her coarse and cruel wit with loving jovial good-humor? or her vulgar music with the soul of the Sorrow Songs?”
[2022-01-18 | highlight] “self-defence,–else what shall save us from a second slavery? Freedom, too, the long-sought, we still seek,–the freedom of life and limb, the freedom to work and think, the freedom to love and aspire. Work, culture, liberty,–all these we need, not singly but together, not successively but together, each growing and aiding each, and all striving toward that vaster ideal that swims before the Negro people, the ideal of human brotherhood, gained through the unifying ideal of Race; the ideal of fostering and developing the traits and talents of the Negro, not in opposition to or contempt for other races, but rather in large conformity to the greater ideals of the American Republic, in order that some day on American soil two world-races may give each to each those characteristics both so sadly lack”
[2022-01-18 | highlight] “But the facing of so vast a prejudice could not but bring the inevitable self-questioning, self-disparagement, and lowering of ideals which ever accompany repression and breed in an atmosphere of contempt and hate. Whisperings and portents came borne upon the four winds: Lo! we are diseased and dying, cried the dark hosts; we cannot write, our voting is vain; what need of education, since we must always cook and serve? And the Nation echoed and enforced this self-criticism, saying: Be content to be servants, and nothing more; what need of higher culture for half-men? Away with the black man’s ballot, by force or fraud,–and behold the suicide of a race! Nevertheless, out of the evil came something of good,–the more careful adjustment of education to real life, the clearer perception of the Negroes’ social responsibilities, and the sobering realization of the meaning of progress.”
[2022-01-18 | highlight] “If, however, the vistas disclosed as yet no goal, no resting-place, little but flattery and criticism, the journey at least gave leisure for reflection and self-examination; it changed the child of Emancipation to the youth with dawning self-consciousness, self-realization, self-respect. In those sombre forests of his striving his own soul rose before him, and he saw himself,–darkly as through a veil; and yet he saw in himself some faint revelation of his power, of his mission. He began to have a dim feeling that, to attain his place in the world, he must be himself, and not another. For the first time he sought to analyze the burden he bore upon his back, that dead-weight of social degradation partially masked behind a half-named Negro problem. He felt his poverty; without a cent, without a home, without land, tools, or savings, he had entered into competition with rich, landed, skilled neighbors. To be a poor man is hard, but to be a poor race in a land of dollars is the very bottom of hardships. He”
[2022-01-18 | highlight] “So the decade flew away, the revolution of 1876* came, and left the half-free serf weary, wondering, but still inspired. Slowly but steadily, in the following years, a new vision began gradually to replace the dream of political power,–a powerful movement, the rise of another ideal to guide the unguided, another pillar of fire by night after a clouded day. It was the ideal of “book-learning”; the curiosity, born of compulsory ignorance, to know and test the power of the cabalistic letters of the white man, the longing to know. Here at last seemed to have been discovered the mountain path to Canaan; longer than the highway of Emancipation and law, steep and rugged, but straight, leading to heights high enough to overlook life.
Up the new path the advance guard toiled, slowly, heavily, doggedly; only those who have watched and guided the faltering feet, the misty minds, the dull understandings, of the dark pupils of these schools know how faithfully, how piteously, this people strove to learn. It was weary work. The cold statistician wrote down the inches of progress here and there, noted also where here and there a foot had slipped or some[…]”
[2022-01-18 | highlight] “So the decade flew away, the revolution of 1876* came, and left the half-free serf weary, wondering, but still inspired. Slowly but steadily, in the following years, a new vision began gradually to replace the dream of political power,–a powerful movement, the rise of another ideal to guide the unguided, another pillar of fire by night after a clouded day. It was the ideal of “book-learning”; the curiosity, born of compulsory ignorance, to know and test the power of the cabalistic letters of the white man, the longing to know. Here at last seemed to have been discovered the mountain path to Canaan; longer than the highway of Emancipation and law, steep and rugged, but straight, leading to heights high enough to overlook life.”
[2022-01-18 | highlight] “The Nation has not yet found peace from its sins; the freedman has not yet found in freedom his promised land. Whatever of good may have come in these years of change, the shadow of a deep disappointment rests upon the Negro people,–a disappointment all the more bitter because the unattained ideal was unbounded save by the simple ignorance of a lowly people.
The first decade was merely a prolongation of the vain search for freedom, the boon that seemed ever barely to elude their grasp,–like a tantalizing will-o’-the-wisp, maddening and misleading the headless host. The holocaust of war, the terrors of the Ku-Klux Klan, the lies of carpet-baggers, the disorganization of industry, and the contradictory advice of friends and foes, left the bewildered serf with no new watchword beyond the old cry for freedom. As the time flew, however, he began to grasp a new idea”
[2022-01-18 | highlight] “He would not Africanize America, for America has too much to teach the world and Africa. He would not bleach his Negro soul in a flood of white Americanism, for he knows that Negro blood has a message for the world. He”
[2022-01-18 | highlight] “worker in the kingdom of culture, to escape both death and isolation, to husband and use his best powers and his latent genius. These powers of body and mind have in the past been strangely wasted, dispersed, or forgotten. The shadow of a mighty Negro past flits through the tale of Ethiopia the Shadowy and of Egypt the Sphinx. Throughout history, the powers of single black men flash here and there like falling stars, and die sometimes before the world has rightly gauged their brightness. Here in America, in the few days since Emancipation, the black man’s turning hither and thither in hesitant and doubtful striving has often made his very strength to lose effectiveness, to seem like absence of power, like weakness. And yet it is not weakness,–it is the contradiction of double aims”
[2022-01-18 | highlight] “It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness,–an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.”
[2022-01-18 | highlight] “The exchange was merry, till one girl, a tall newcomer, refused my card,—refused it peremptorily, with a glance. Then it dawned upon me with a certain suddenness that I was different from the others; or like, mayhap, in heart and life and longing, but shut out from their world by a vast veil. I had thereafter no desire to tear down that veil, to creep through; I held all beyond it in common contempt, and lived above it in a region of blue sky and great wandering shadows”
[2022-01-18 | highlight] “BETWEEN me and the other world there is ever an unasked question: unasked by some through feelings of delicacy; by others through the difficulty of rightly framing it. All, nevertheless, flutter round it. They approach me in a half-hesitant sort of way, eye me curiously or compassionately, and then, instead of saying directly, How does it feel to be a problem? they say, I know an excellent colored man in my town; or, I fought at Mechanicsville;* or, Do not these Southern outrages make your blood boil? At these I smile, or am interested, or reduce the boiling to a simmer, as the occasion may require. To the real question, How does it feel to be a problem? I answer seldom a word.”

=== The Idiot — Elif Batuman ===
[2022-01-17 | highlight] “From that day on, everyone who happened by our room—neighbors wanting to borrow stuff, residential computer staff, student council candidates, all kinds of people to whom my small enthusiasms should have been a source of little or no concern—went out of their way to disabuse me of my great admiration for Albert Einstein. Einstein had invented the atomic bomb, abused dogs, neglected his children. “There were many greater geniuses than Einstein,” said a Bulgarian freshman who had stopped by to borrow my copy of Dostoevsky’s The Double. “Alfred Nobel hated mathematics and didn’t give the Nobel Prize to any mathematicians. There were many who were more deserving.”
“Oh.” I handed him the book. “Well, see you around.”
“Thanks,” he said, glaring at the poster. “This is the man who beats his wife, forces her to solve his mathematical problems, to do the dirty work, and he denies her credit. And you put his picture on your wall.”
“Listen, leave me out of this,” I said. “It’s not really my poster. It’s a complicated situation.”
He wasn’t listening. “Einstein in this country is synonymous with genius, while many greater geniuses aren’t famous at all. Why is this? I[…]”
[2022-01-17 | highlight] “On the staircase approaching my room, I could hear tuneless singing and the slap of plastic slippers. My new roommate, Hannah, was standing on a chair, taping a sign that read HANNAH PARK’S DESK over her desk, chanting monotonously along with Blues Traveler on her Discman. When I came in, she turned in a pantomime of surprise, pitching to and fro, then jumped noisily to the floor and took off her headphones.
“Have you considered mime as a career?” I asked.
“Mime? No, my dear, I’m afraid my parents sent me to Harvard to become a surgeon, not a mime.” She blew her nose loudly. “Hey—my bank didn’t give me a dictionary!”
[2022-01-17 | highlight] “Insofar as I’d had any idea about it at all, I had imagined that email would resemble faxing, and would involve a printer. But there was no printer. There was another world. You could access it from certain computers, which were scattered throughout the ordinary landscape, and looked no different from regular computers. Always there, unchanged, in a configuration nobody else could see, was a glowing list of messages from all the people you knew, and from people you didn’t know, all in the same letters, like the universal handwriting of thought or of the world. Some messages were formally epistolary, with “Dear” and “Sincerely”; others telegraphic, all in lowercase with missing punctuation, like they were being beamed straight from people’s brains. And each message contained the one that had come before, so your own words came back to you—all the words you threw out, they came back. It was like the story of your relations with others, the story of the intersection of your life with other lives, was constantly being recorded and updated, and you could check it at any time.
”

=== Prince of Thorns — Lawrence, Mark ===
[2022-01-17 | highlight] “When they killed him, Mother wouldn’t hold her peace, so they slit her throat. I was stupid then, being only nine, and I fought to save them both. But the thorns held me tight. I’ve learned to appreciate thorns since.
The thorns taught me the game. They let me understand what all those grim and serious men who’ve fought the Hundred War have yet to learn. You can only win the game when you understand that it is a game. Let a man play chess, and tell him that every pawn is his friend. Let him think both bishops holy. Let him remember happy days in the shadows of his castles. Let him love his queen. Watch him lose them all.
“What have you got for me, dead thing?” I asked.
It’s a game. I will play my pieces.
I felt him cold inside me. I saw his death. I saw his despair. And his hunger. And I gave it back. I’d expected more, but he was only dead.
I showed him the empty time where my memory won’t go. I let him look there.
He ran from me then. He ran, and I chased him. But only to[…]”
[2022-01-17 | highlight] “So, the brothers came and set to arguing over the wrigglers. I went and sat against the loot-cart to read while the light stayed with us and the rain held off. The day left me in mind to read Plutarch. I had him all to myself, sandwiched between leather covers. Some worthy monk spent a lifetime on that book. A lifetime hunched over it, brush in hand. Here the gold, for halo, sun, and scrollwork. Here a blue like poison, bluer than a noon sky. Tiny vermilion dots to make a bed of flowers. Probably went blind over it, that monk. Probably poured his life in here, from young lad to grey-head, prettying up old Plutarch’s words.”
[2022-01-17 | highlight] “Baron’s men will see it,” said Gemt, stubborn and red-faced. He went red as a beet if you crossed him. That red face just made me want to kill him even more. I didn’t, though. You got responsibilities when you’re a leader. You got a responsibility not to kill too many of your men. Or who’re you going to lead?
The column bunched up around us, the way it always did when something was up. I pulled on Gerrod’s reins and he stopped with a snicker and a stamp. I watched Gemt and waited. Waited until all thirty-eight of my brothers gathered around, and Gemt got so red you’d think his ears would bleed.
“Where we all going, my brothers?” I asked, and I stood in my stirrups so I could look out over their ugly faces. I asked it in my quiet voice and they all hushed to hear.
“Where?” I asked again. “Surely it isn’t just me that knows? Do I keep secrets from you, my brothers?”
[2022-01-17 | highlight] “He didn’t seem too worried. It’s hard to worry a man so close to the worm-feast. Still, it irked me that he held me so lightly and called me “boy.” “Do you have daughters, farmer? Hiding in the cellar maybe? Old Rike will sniff them out.”
Bovid looked up sharp at that, pained and sharp. “H-how old are you, boy?”
Again the “boy.” “Old enough to slit you open like a fat purse,” I said, getting angry now. I don’t like to get angry. It makes me angry. I don’t think he caught even that. I don’t think he even knew it was me that opened him up not half an hour before.
“Fifteen summers, no more. Couldn’t be more . . .” His words came slow, from blue lips in a white face.
Out by two, I would have told him, but he’d gone past hearing. The cart creaked up behind me, and Gemt came along with his axe dripping.
“Take his head,” I told them. “Leave his fat belly for the ravens.”
Fifteen! I’d hardly be fifteen and rousting villages.
By the time fifteen came around, I’d be King!”
[2022-01-17 | highlight] “I gave him my warning look. His cursing stole the magic from the scene; besides, I had to be stern with him. Rike was always on the edge after a battle, wanting more. I gave him a look that told him I had more. More than he could handle. He grumbled, stowed his bloody ring, and thrust his knife back in his belt.”
[2022-01-17 | highlight] “And that was Mabberton. Two hundred dead farmers lying with their scythes and axes. You know, I warned them that we do this for a living. I said it to their leader, Bovid Tor. I gave them that chance, I always do. But no. They wanted blood and slaughter. And they got it.
War, my friends, is a thing of beauty. Those as says otherwise are losing. If I’d bothered to go over to old Bovid, propped up against the fountain with his guts in his lap, he’d probably take a contrary view. But look where disagreeing got him.
“Shit-poor farm maggots.” Rike discarded a handful of fingers over Bovid’s open belly. He came to me, holding out his takings, as if it was my fault. “Look! One gold ring. One! A whole village and one fecking gold ring. I’d like to set the bastards up and knock ’em down again. Fecking bog-farmers.”

=== Climate Change Is Racist — Jeremy Williams ===
[2022-01-17 | highlight] “Unequal carbon footprints
The amount of land needed to keep a modern consumer supplied with energy and resources is considerably greater than our literal footprint. As one energy commentator described it, if the average American consumed all their energy as food, they would eat as much as an Apatosaurus.4 At 40 tonnes and 70 feet long, that’s a footprint of an entirely different kind.
Let’s broaden the scope from electricity to carbon, and consider the impact of these larger fossil footprints. Since energy use is the biggest component of carbon footprints, it is a similar picture: again we see a vast inequality between countries. Per capita carbon footprints in Madagascar are around 0.16 tonnes. The average Australian has a carbon footprint 100 times larger, at over seventeen tonnes of CO2 per year.5 So do citizens of the United States and Canada.”
[2022-01-17 | highlight] “Average annual electricity use in Madagascar, per person, is 78 kilowatt hours (kwh) per year. Most people don’t think in kilowatts, so let me put that into perspective. My fridge uses 1.5 kwh every 24 hours. I’m running the washing machine at the moment, which will use about 1.5 kwh, and I’ll use around the same again to make dinner. In the warmer months of the year, my household uses around 4.5 kwh a day. Which means that every fortnight or so, my family uses more electricity than the average Malagasy person uses in a year.
However, my consumption is low for Britain, and Britain’s consumption is low for a developed country. Let’s look at a variety of other countries, showing electricity use in kwh per capita per year:3
Canada – 14,612 kwh
Kuwait – 14,090 kwh
United States – 12,154 kwh
Australia – 9,502 kwh
Saudi Arabia – 9,407 kwh
Japan – 7,150 kwh
Germany – 6,306 kwh
China – 4,617 kwh
Britain – 4,496 kwh
Madagascar – 78 kwh”
[2022-01-17 | highlight] “That’s environmental writer Mark Lynas in his book The God Species, which”
[2022-01-17 | highlight] “There is, of course, some overlap between these manifestations of racism. The problem with structural racism is that the explicit prejudice may have occurred long ago. The policies that purposefully excluded people of colour may have been abolished, but they have a long echo. It might look like the problem is solved now that Black and White people can sit next to each other in Starbucks, but the long-term consequences of discrimination continue.
Advantages such as education or home ownership are passed on across generations. I have only been able to buy a house because my grandparents bought theirs in the 1960s. If my grandfather’s surname was Wanyama instead of Williams, there’s a good chance I’d still be renting.
Structural racism is embedded in the society we are born into. It can look like ‘racism without racists’, as the Puerto Rican sociologist Eduardo Bonilla-Silva puts it, because it does not need visible racists to perpetuate it.5”
[2022-01-17 | highlight] “Institutional racism happens when a public body is structured in a way that disadvantages people of colour. It occurs in policing and the courts, but also in school admissions, job applications, access to loans, and a hundred other ways that affect people’s everyday lives. To paraphrase an example from those who coined the term in the 1960s, when somebody throws stones at a black family’s windows, that’s individual racism. When that family can’t get a mortgage to buy the house in the first place, that’s institutional racism.2”
[2022-01-17 | highlight] “a band of climate vulnerability across the centre of the globe. It runs from the Caribbean and Central America, through Africa, and on to South Asia. Those most vulnerable to climate change are people of colour. This is the racial injustice of climate change.”
[2022-01-17 | highlight] “Take another look at those two maps and consider income. The countries with the biggest per capita footprints tend to be richer. That’s no great surprise. People with higher incomes can afford more flights, more meat, more energy and more material goods, and thus their carbon footprints are larger. The richest have a disproportionate impact. Conversely, those with smaller disposable incomes use less energy and have a lower ecological impact.
Vulnerability is the inverse. The richest are more likely to live in temperate areas where the climate is less extreme, and they have the money to protect themselves. Britain experienced a heatwave recently, and one of my neighbours had an air conditioning unit fitted. The poorest cannot afford air conditioning, nor many other adaptations to a changing environment. When disaster strikes, they have fewer reserves with which to rebuild or relocate.”

=== Battle of the Linguist Mages — Scotto Moore ===
[2022-01-16 | highlight] “You could pause the action all around you to study it safely; you could rewind the action to give yourself a second shot at something; you could even fast-forward through a challenge if you wanted to let the game engine play your character during that window of time. These spells weren’t cheap to use. Some fantasy games used “mana” or some similar unit of measurement for how much spellcasting mojo you had available. Sparkle Dungeon 5 used old-school iTunes gift cards, which you acquired by robbing record label street teams. And you used a fuckton of them to cast these spells.”
[2022-01-16 | highlight] “You also needed some intensive spiritual cushioning. Teleporting wasn’t a religious experience or whatever, but you definitely got a blistering peek behind the curtain at the mechanisms which held reality together, and you needed a framework to place yourself safely and comfortably in the tapestry of existence again, or else you could lose yourself in nihilistic corridors of self-loathing at your apparent insignificance.”
[2022-01-16 | highlight] “Once her decision was made, she wasted none of the time that we couldn’t measure accurately anyway, immediately launching into a blisteringly fast sequence, as though her voice was an audiobook sped up eight times but still maintaining perfect articulation. She was finished almost before I understood that she had begun.”
[2022-01-16 | highlight] “We were standing in the middle of a six-way intersection in the ruins of a city that reminded me of Chicago. Dusk was settling in, introducing an unpleasant sickliness to the environment. And the shadows that proliferated around us seemed correlated to the human silhouettes I began to notice in every direction: on mounds of ruins, lurking in hollowed-out windows and doorways, crawling behind flipped-over cars on the periphery of our location.
“Survivors?” I asked.
“No. Simulacra.”
“What?”
“Bait.”
“You mean—bait for us?”
“Yes,” she said, “a lure for some kind of trap.”
I studied the situation more closely. Couldn’t ”
[2022-01-16 | highlight] “She tore through the logospheric membrane between realities, opening the rift that led me to your glittering Realm. Epic sorcery for someone bound to the material plane. And her spellcasting is deeply familiar to me. Impressive in ways she does not yet appreciate. I will instruct her in the use of true lexemes of power. I will fashion her into a weapon beyond her imagining and aim her at the thunderstorm. We will need such a weapon before too long, I’m afraid.”
“If you are truly God, recruit her yourself,” she said, almost petulant.
“I am your God, it’s true, but she is in the sway of her own heretical pantheon, my former cabal, back in the material plane. Fools, but powerful fools. Rescue her from their influence. Now look, I am unaccustomed to delivering threats.” He muttered a short, spiky power morpheme sequence, and the Dauphine collapsed on her side, crying out in pain and fear. “But there’s something else you should know, my dear,” he said softly. “You have hit points now. Careful how you spend them.” He rose up into the air, towering above her, and said, “Bring your Queen to me, no matter what it[…]”
[2022-01-16 | highlight] “Then we were slammed back into sharp relief, in his kitchen, lying on the floor, bleeding out from a gunshot wound to his chest that would take his life in short order, while robbers ransacked his mansion for material wealth. Time was short, he knew this quite well; even assuming he could reach his phone to summon medical attention, they’d never arrive in time. Still, though, the towering will of Alexander Reece managed to assert itself.
He took as deep a breath as he could manage, and began chanting a sequence we recognized quite well: the transmutation sequence in all its glory, its inaugural performance as delivered by the world’s first known linguist mage, bestowing on us its full instruction set and available modifying parameters, every visualization technique for using imagination to manipulate its outcome, every nuance in pronunciation and intent we could introduce to affect its scope and intensity.”
[2022-01-16 | highlight] “We gained access to a shared pool of memories, like a deck of cards thrown into the wind and lying strewn about the landscape. We could examine them individually without understanding their place in a chronological identity, but soon we realized by style that some memories were crystalline, high-resolution, precise slices of time, while others were blurry, soft focus, indistinct except for key moments contained within. And so we pieced together that we were the Dauphine and the Queen sharing this space.
Piece by elaborate piece we reconstructed slices of ourselves, like assembling a puzzle without a reference. Not surprisingly, the Dauphine’s memories were archetypically neutral, journalistic in quality, from a detached perspective. By contrast, the Queen’s memories were a jumbled mess that seemingly could not be trusted; their contents would shift upon examination and then shift again when examination was complete. The Dauphine’s memories vastly outnumbered the Queen’s memories, because the Dauphine stored every discrete moment of awareness, while the Queen’s subconscious apparently enjoyed deleting memories if their contents didn’t meet a certain standard.”
[2022-01-16 | highlight] “I heard an echo or a refraction of the voice in my head, except it was its own train of thought, and fuck, it wasn’t even my voice. Worse, as my own train of thought intertwined with this other train of thought, they rapidly attained equal prominence in my attention, until I lost track of which thoughts “belonged” to me.
Even realizing we were “we” did not immediately lead to “the Queen and the Dauphine” as the individuals contained within the pairing, because we were not initially recognizable to each other in any way. The Queen was a being of pure thought, instantiated from the pattern template of an organic human mind. The Dauphine was a being of code and spark, an intelligence capable of rewriting or appending to many of her core instructions. Apparently the spell commanded the available punctuation marks to the task of weaving our two minds together into an intertwined tapestry of awareness.”
[2022-01-16 | highlight] “Your voices were identical,” she said, smiling.
“So you have memories of all of your encounters with players?”
“I do, and memories of all the time in between encounters, when I was alone scratching at the dirt.”
“What do those memories feel like to you now?”
“I imagine a bird slowly chipping its way out of an egg might feel the frustration I felt,” she replied, “knowing that a larger world awaited, unable to understand why I was not already there.”
We passed barren plateaus where rejected philosophies crawled away to die alone, towering intellectual edifices that swallowed themselves instead of reaching some desperately sought height of influence, whole deserts where each grain of sand was a disregarded masterpiece that died on the vine of some thinker’s impatience—until finally we arrived at the next beacon.
I had already lost track of subjective time by this point. Normally as a player I had a system clock handy for constant reference, but the dreamlike quality of this journey created a pleasing haze when it came to understanding how long we spent traveling.”
[2022-01-16 | highlight] “No, that’s our marketing slogan. Our Craigslist ad is ‘Looking for bomb-throwers to murder billionaires and destroy the capitalist world order.’ Oh, of course, I’m just kidding, Isobel—why heavens, an advertisement like that would violate the website’s terms of service.”
Smooth.
“Why do you care about any of this if you just want to destroy society?”
“Isobel, I’m joking, if that wasn’t clear,” she said. “Look, people think anarchists just want to tear down the world order out of spite or because they prefer chaos for aesthetic reasons. That’s exactly what the oligarchic media machine wants the masses to believe—that anarchists are dangerous and immoral and out of control. The oligarchs don’t want people imagining a world order where they’re not trapped at the bottom of the pile, where they’re more than just cogs generating wealth they don’t get to share.
“But anarchy really means you allow people to self-organize, instead of letting dictator-presidents and corporations rule by fiat. Anarchy means you volunteer to live in a network of empowered communities instead of just passively accepting a militarized police state as the default. Anarchy means you look out for the people around you instead[…]”
[2022-01-16 | highlight] “firmly.
“Maddy,” Bradford said, “how many synthetic power morphemes have you personally learned since leaving our laboratory at Jenning & Reece?”
Maddy paused, a little surprised at the straightforward nature of the question, and then said, “I lost count around five hundred.” She must have seen startled looks on all of our faces, which made her smile. She looked at me and said, “Your turn, Isobel. Must be something you’re dying to know here.”
“Why does the Dauphine want me so”
[2022-01-16 | highlight] “Oh yeah, and Devin, my associate at work who theoretically reported to me, was Bradford’s grandchild. They weren’t using “Jenning” as a last name because they didn’t want presumptions of nepotism following them around; instead, they used the name “Devin James.” And they’d been training with power morphemes much longer than me. I realized I might never stop feeling like a newb around these people.
Oh yeah, and I needed to stop thinking of them as “these people,” which had a dismissive, disrespectful quality, and also inherently excluded myself for no apparent reason. I needed a better way to refer to the collection of individuals, myself included, who wielded power morphemes as tools for personal or greater good.
I needed to come up with a proper character class for these people.
That’s when I started calling us linguist mages.”
[2022-01-16 | highlight] “Joke was on them, however, because I still had the Horn in my hand. I brought it to my lips and I screamed into that thing, and I don’t know where that sequence came from—it wasn’t Cameron’s, which I suddenly couldn’t remember—and it wasn’t one of the combat sequences I’d managed to prepare earlier that day. It was like a pure stream of glitter lava piped directly from the molten glitter core at the center of the Sparkle Realm, unleashed by command of the Goddess of Glamour & Groove herself, who alone took interest in the affairs of those devoted ravers who always chased the dawn to squeeze one last deep house track out of each and every night; it was like she’d given me a flamethrower but then loaded it with glitter lava, except the flamethrower was the Horn and the glitter lava was my voice, and it all just came together even though the existence of the Goddess of Glamour & Groove wasn’t actually canon in the first place.”
[2022-01-16 | highlight] “Cameron had noticed something, which took me a few seconds longer to recognize. On the other side of the room from us, far beyond the dance floor, behind Maddy and her crew who were completely focused on us and consequently facing the opposite direction, I saw Phyllis and Max, holding the door open to the hallway outside the condo.
They were waving in a stream of new combatants, who wore orange hazard suits and faceless, reflective silver masks, chanting softly in a manner that phased gently in and out of unison, to unsettling effect.
Gorvod’s Frenzy had arrived.
“Oh look, it’s the deus ex machina you requested,” Cameron whispered.
“No,” I said, “this is pretty much the exact opposite.”
”
[2022-01-16 | highlight] “He flipped open the case. Atop the red velvet lining inside was a small silver horn, the size of a bicycle horn but without the squeeze pump, like a tiny bugle with a handle. Next to it was a magician’s wand: a gnarled wooden rod, tapered to a point, and lacquered it seemed.
He handed me the horn.
“What’s this?” I asked. “Tell me it summons deus ex machinas.”
“Hardly,” he said. “This is the Horn of Magnification.”
“What about that?” I said, pointing at the wand.
“That’s a ninety-dollar remote control I haven’t figured out how to use yet,” he said, snapping the case shut and dropping it on the floor behind him. He took the horn back.
We were momentarily distracted by the sudden appearance of one of Maddy’s squad, materializing in a standing crouch on the bed nearby. Cameron and I both launched into our own respective combat sequences while the intruder was still disoriented, and we hit them so hard they instantly lost consciousness. Then we resumed our conversation.
“So what’s this do exactly?” I asked. “Is it—a magic item?”
[2022-01-15 | highlight] “Doesn’t that count for something?” When he didn’t respond, I said, “Why are you even involved with these people? Why are you training legions of gamers to use power morphemes when they grow up? What are you getting out of all this?”
“Let’s not change the subject,” he said. “Here’s the deal. I’m immune to power morphemes. I can hear them and recognize them, I can even deliver them, but they don’t affect me.”
“Does that mean you don’t have punctuation marks coursing through your brain like everyone else?”
“Of course I do. But I was born with partial congenital hearing loss. I’ve got the most cutting edge cochlear implants available, but power morphemes don’t work when amplified digitally. So certain frequencies or some other aspect of power morphemes we don’t even know about must be muted or just shaved off, somewhere in between the implant’s microphone and the electrode array that fires off signals to my auditory nerve.”
[2022-01-15 | highlight] “Then I remembered, I’d told the Dauphine that I had a fundraiser to plan and a release party to coordinate. If the Dauphine was truly sentient as I suspected, she might have a way to convey information to Maddy. Maddy might’ve been able to deduce that the combination of fundraiser and release party likely meant Violet and Cameron, which could lead her to Jenning & Reece. If Maddy still had hooks in Jenning & Reece somewhere—on their network, or with people she trusted inside—she could’ve maybe determined I managed the accounts for both Violet and Cameron. She could’ve even learned that I’d been recruited to Jenning & Reece in the first place because I was the Queen of Sparkle Dungeon. I had no idea what OPSEC measures Jenning & Reece implemented after Maddy took off.”
[2022-01-15 | highlight] “The room fell unnaturally silent, then I watched the silhouette of her body in the chair suddenly ripple and become indistinct. Then she dissipated into a whirling conceptual mist, an exclamatory burst and a questioning blur, a small intense tornado of dangerous subtext and surreal implication.
Then she was behind me.
She wrapped her arms around me and my body shrieked in alarm, as though she was suddenly disassembling me at the atomic level. Instinctively I reared back and slammed my head into her face. I didn’t have enough leverage to do more than surprise her, but that seemed to break her hold on me, because moments later, she vanished from the room entirely and did not return.”
[2022-01-14 | highlight] “Written languages don’t require punctuation marks to be effective. Modern Thai, ancient Greek, classical Chinese … there’s a list of successful languages that don’t use punctuation but still communicate meaning. Spoken languages, on the other hand, are chock full of punctuation marks, always have been. You insert punctuation almost by instinct as you learn to speak, so that your speech isn’t an undifferentiated run-on sentence that never ends. In that way, punctuation is fully integrated into human thought, without originating it per se. That’s how it’s been since nearly the dawn of human history, right up until Alexander Reece stuck his finger in the light socket of the logosphere.”
[2022-01-14 | highlight] “And I asked him—how, Alexander? How did you discover these? How do they work so effectively on the human mind?
“Somehow his experiments in expressing an imaginary syntax, with nothing more than his own haggard voice … somehow, he produced a signal, a resonance on a precise frequency, that enabled—communication.”
“Communication with who?” I dared to ask.
“There is life—actual, sentient life—embedded into our language structures. A specific group of linguistic symbols actually works in a conscious, symbiotic fashion to shape human thought. They don’t control our thoughts—but as our brains evolved, they were key to unlocking our language centers, accelerating the rise of civilization. The punctuation marks introduced Alexander to the power morphemes.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Punctuation marks,” he said, “are an alien species. Thousands of years ago, they arrived on Earth as refugees, and made our minds their new home.”
[2022-01-14 | highlight] “However, I logged in to discover a disturbing notification in my in-box: a silent alarm had been triggered at my spawn point. I had my own private sanctum as the Queen where I could safely emerge into the game when I was in between major quests. It was called the Iridescent Warehouse, and you couldn’t find it unless you knew the phone number to call for directions.
But according to my silent alarm (the extended remix version of the classic tech house track “I Got Ya Booty, But Ya Can Have It Back”), someone was inside the warehouse. Even assuming someone could find it, no one should have been able to actually break in. The outside of the building was covered in thick layers of meteorite.”
[2022-01-14 | highlight] “In Chinese a speaker can take a single syllable and apply different vocal tones to affect its meaning in five different ways sometimes. Babies use this layer of intonation when they don’t have words yet, but they desperately want you to take care of them, and they make these sounds, these emotional appeals, and you go ‘awww’—so, intonation alone can be persuasive even if you don’t have a proper word or morpheme to attach it to. That’s sympathetic intonation.”
[2022-01-14 | highlight] “Olivia had a hypothesis that, over time, using power morphemes might actually introduce mutations to the vocal cords. She speculated that perhaps vocalizing certain frequencies at certain volumes over certain periods of time could trigger an unexpected response from the body: perhaps introducing plasticity that wasn’t there to begin with, stretching vocal folds to allow access to pitches that were previously out of reach; perhaps flooding muscle tissue with unexpected growth-stimulating hormones to allow more fine-grained breath control; perhaps even inserting actual slivers of cognition into the otherwise autonomous functioning of the vagus nerve that controls the vocal cords, in order to allow sophisticated micro-adjustments to the vibrations responsible for phonation”
[2022-01-14 | highlight] “Jordon Connelly was white, she/her according to her promotional material, a twenty-four-year-old genius. She was a virtuoso singer and a brainiac programmer, sold a patent to Apple when she was fourteen for a novel music recommendation algorithm that suggested artists to you based on how you deployed emojis on social media, graduated high school when she was fifteen, studied computer science at MIT and graduated with honors at nineteen, all while building a huge presence on music sites by giving away her excellent songs and making charming low-fi music videos for her followers over the years. She could’ve easily had a high-paying tech job, but she gambled on the life of an artist, and now her efforts were paying off—her last album went big with three singles on the radio. Expectations were high for her follow-up.”
[2022-01-14 | highlight] “The next morning around 10 a.m., Olivia introduced me to my assistant, a marketing coordinator named Devin, and left us to get acquainted. Devin was white, nonbinary preferring they/them, had bright red hair that was clipped quite short, and inhabited a very comfortable, high-end, slightly femme business-casual look. I guessed they were in their mid-twenties.”
[2022-01-14 | highlight] “Is that something you’re actively pursuing now with your clients?” asked the host.
“I’ve planted some promising seeds. But ultimately we’re just one firm. Our odds of triggering a significant paradigm change in the industry are very slim in the short term.”
“What do you expect to happen over the long term?”
“Clearly the worst is yet to come,” Alexander replied. “You’re poised to see cutting edge advertising techniques used extensively to further the aims of totalitarian regimes. You’re going to see governments and other bad actors deploying malignant ad campaigns anywhere they can, right out in the open, not to sell product but to sway opinion, and you won’t even realize they’re doing it until they’re so deeply embedded that they can’t be stopped. You’ll see whole populations flipped toward giving up crucial rights, and they’ll think they’re doing it voluntarily. We’re doing what we can at Jenning & Reece to prevent that outcome, for ourselves at least, but hopefully on a wider scale as well.”
“How will that work?” the host asked.
“I can tell you this much,” Alexander replied. “At some point, we will need to stop servicing the needs of our powerful clients. And they will[…]”
[2022-01-14 | highlight] “But then somehow I made it to page fourteen of Google search results and found something surprising. Alexander had appeared on an episode of an obscure podcast a year before his death. It was a podcast dedicated to examining the media’s role in holding society together or dissolving society completely, depending on which host was leading the discussion.
And Alexander was downright feisty on this show, deeply critical of his own industry. He said at one point, “What I mean is, Jenning & Reece, the entire ad industry really, is predicated on the cancerous replication of capitalist excess. Arguably no one on Earth needs any of the products or people that we market, at least not in the form we’re selling them, and yet we’ve harvested an inordinate share of wealth for ourselves by subverting natural instinct and shoving it in whatever direction we choose. No one should control as much wealth in society or power over culture as the advertising industry does. No single entity like Jenning & Reece should command the kind of social capital we do without deploying it in the service of humanitarian principles.”
[2022-01-14 | highlight] “Anyway, this was all somewhere on the “highly improbable” to “deeply preposterous” scale for sure, I just hadn’t nailed it down yet. But I liked those early stages of a quest where you had no idea what’s headed your way but you just blithely charged forward regardless, because otherwise you’d just be sitting on your ass in Boring Town at the Mundane Pub nursing a lukewarm stein of blandness.”
[2022-01-14 | highlight] “So it’s … brainwashing?”
“No, it’s simply persuasion. That’s what advertising is—the science of persuasion.”
I was not persuaded.
“Our business has always been focused on planting meaning in the culture and guaranteeing its effect to clients,” she said. “Power morphemes are an unprecedented upgrade to our techniques.”
I couldn’t tell if she was serious or if she was fucking with me. Like, you didn’t discover some method for instantly brainwashing people and then just use it to sell widgets. You didn’t invent a way to shatter glass walls with your voice unless you intended to, uh, shatter a lot of glass. And how exactly did shattering glass count as advertising in the first place?”
[2022-01-13 | highlight] “The Church of Gorvod was a tax-exempt organization headquartered in a massive, modernist campus in the heart of Los Angeles. Hundreds of believers were housed in dormitory-style accommodations inside the campus, which was protected on all sides by walls topped with razor wire. “Ministers” patrolled the grounds at all hours, carrying concealed weapons. These measures were mostly in place to keep people from getting out. Sometimes you’d see vehicles entering or exiting through a heavily guarded front gate: usually armored jeeps or vans, but occasionally fancy sedans or limousines as well. If you lived in LA long enough, you’d inevitably hear rumors or horror stories about the Church’s highly absurd belief system and its very serious brainwashing tactics.
I wasn’t originally interested in the beliefs of the Church of Gorvod, but then they started fucking with Sparkle Dungeon. Now, I had reason to know that Gorvod was supposedly a multidimensional locus of elevated alien consciousness, which first appeared in our dimension billions of years ago”
[2022-01-13 | highlight] “As the original game got popular, though, the fact that Queen was the highest rank you could shoot for started to really aggravate some of the Sparkle Bros out there. How dare the game insinuate that the appropriate title for the best player was a feminine title, even though of course none of them would be complaining if the title of Sparkle King was on the table? At that point, the creative team behind the game hadn’t given any interviews and wasn’t a presence on the forums, preferring to stay cloaked in secrecy for as long as they could get away with it. So buzz was high about how they’d respond to the controversy. One reviewer in particular, for a site called Fantasy Radar, would not shut up about it.
Hilariously, a “leaked” copy of Sparkle Dungeon 2 made it into Fantasy Radar’s grimy hands. To the reviewer’s utter dismay, you could only play women avatars. Made him furious and his subsequent review was this ludicrous rant about reverse sexism that went so viral it knocked Fantasy Radar offline for a day and a half. Turns out that he’d received a special build with only one gender option that[…]”

=== How Long 'til Black Future Month? — N. K. Jemisin ===
[2022-01-16 | highlight] “How Long ’til Black Future Month takes its name from an essay that I wrote in 2013. (It’s not in this collection since I haven’t included any essays; you can find it on my website, nkjemisin.com.) It’s a shameless paean to an Afrofuturist icon, the artist Janelle Monáe, but it’s also a meditation on how hard it’s been for me to love science fiction and fantasy as a black woman. How much I’ve had to fight my own internalized racism in addition to that radiating from the fiction and the business. How terrifying it’s been to realize no one thinks my people have a future. And how gratifying to finally accept myself and begin spinning the futures I want to see.”
[2022-01-16 | highlight] “And along the way, I learned that short stories were good for my longer-form fiction. Writing short stories taught me about the quick hook and the deep character. Shorts gave me space to experiment with unusual plots and story forms—future tense, epistolic format, black characters—which otherwise I would’ve considered too risky for the lengthy investment of a novel. I started to enjoy writing short fiction, for itself and not just as novel practice. And of course, after all those rejections, my emotional skin grew thick as an elephant’s.”

=== Zone One — Colson Whitehead ===
[2022-01-15 | highlight] “Was this skel a native New Yorker, or had it been lured here by the high jinks of Margaret Halstead and her colorful roommates? One of those seekers powerless before the seduction of the impossible apartment that the gang inexplicably afforded on their shit-job salaries, unable to resist the scalpel-carved and well-abraded faces of the guest stars the characters smooched in one-shot appearances or across multi-episode arcs. Struck dumb by the dazzling stock footage of the city avenues at teeming evening. Did it work, the hairdo, the bleached teeth, the calculated injections, did it transform the country rube into the cosmopolitan? Mold their faces to the prevailing grimace? The city required people to make it go”
[2022-01-15 | highlight] “The next time they needed to fill out an Incident Report, Mark Spitz begged off, and eventually Kaitlyn took note and removed him from the detail. He had nerve damage: input could not penetrate. The world stalled out at his edges. Sometimes he had trouble speaking to other people, rummaging for language, and it seemed to him that an invisible layer divided him from the rest of the world, a membrane of emotional surface tension. He was not alone. “Survivors are slow or incapable of forming new attachments,” or so the latest diagnoses droned, although a cynic might identify this as a feature of modern life merely intensified or fine-tuned with the introduction of the plague.”
[2022-01-15 | highlight] “There were your standard-issue skels, and then there were the stragglers. Most skels, they moved. They came to eat you—not all of you, but a nice chomp here or there, enough to pass on the plague. Cut off their feet, chop off their legs, and they’d gnash the air as they heaved themselves forward by their splintered fingernails, looking for some ankle action. The marines had eliminated most of this variety before the sweepers arrived.”
[2022-01-15 | highlight] “She had made it through. Just as Gary couldn’t picture how in the hell a galoot like Mark Spitz bumbled through the host of menaces unscathed, so was Kaitlyn’s journey impossible to imagine. No one at Fort Wonton, man or woman, failed to experience an episode of cognitive dissonance on meeting Kaitlyn, being subjected to her buoyant giggle. But she had done the same things they all had been forced to do. She had been hunted, and she had escaped. She had killed and had watched as the cast of her anecdotes was cut down, her former fellow pledges and debate partners. Her parents, who had obviously trained her in more than just the ways of a sunny disposition for her to have made it this far. She had survived, and that’s why she was here in Zone One. No matter what her life had been before.”
[2022-01-15 | highlight] “Kaitlyn’s native herd had grazed on the sweet berries of gentility. Mark Spitz didn’t have a complete dossier on Kaitlyn that day, but he was working on it. She had been bioengineered in the birthing vats of a sanctified midwestern principality, an upper-middle-class Kingdom of Bruiselessness. Here she was, long curls peeking out of her helmet, head cocked as she double-checked orders over the comm and absentmindedly wiped gore from her knife, when she should have been braiding the hair of one of her fellow sorority pledges, in her favorite pad-around-the-dorm sweatpants, sexually ambiguous pop avatar crooning from the computer speakers. Of course she had been elected Secretary of the Student Council twice: Who would make up such a thing?”
[2022-01-15 | highlight] “I’ll do it,” Kaitlyn said. “I was elected Secretary of the Student Council twice.” Mark Spitz shuddered as if bitten: to admit such a thing without a smidgen of self-consciousness. To say it with pride. Who on the planet had put those words together in that sequence since the outbreak: Secretary of the Student Council? It was a half-recalled lullaby overheard on the street, cooed by some young mom bent over her kid in the summer glare, rekindling innocence: Secretary of the Student Council. The effect was abetted by a rare appearance of the sun, slumping out from the gray. Not too much ash in the sky even though they were only a few blocks from the wall.”
[2022-01-15 | highlight] “2.4 stragglers per floor in this type of structure and .05 there. Numbers permitted Buffalo to extrapolate the whole city from Zone One, speculate about how long it will take X amount of three-man sweeper units to clear the island zone by zone, north to south and river to river. Then on to other cities. There was no other entity like New York City, but the silent downtowns bided across the country with their micropopulations, acolytes of the principles of the grid. The truths of the grid’s rectilinear logic, its consequences, of how people moved and lived inside boundaries, had already been applied to cities across the country through the decades, anywhere human activity and desire needed to be tamed and made compliant. Gangs of high-rises in Southwest municipalities flush with internet money, sterile pedestrian malls in Midwest cities of a certain size, run-down waterfront districts of fabricated historical import that had been tarted up into tourist mills. Sure, there was the problem of scale, but Manhattan was the biggest version of everywhere.”
[2022-01-15 | highlight] “Gary didn’t have much sympathy for the dead, a.k.a. the “squares,” the “suckers,” and the “saps.” When using the word “dead,” most survivors signaled to the listener, through inflection and context, whether they were talking about those who had been killed in the disaster or those who had been turned into vehicles of the plague. Gary made no such distinction; with few exceptions, they were equally detestable. The dead had paid their mortgages on time, and placed the well-promoted breakfast cereals on the table when the offspring leaped out of bed in their fire-resistant jammies. The dead had graduated with admirable GPAs, configured monthly contributions to worthy causes, judiciously apportioned their 401(k)s across diverse sectors according to the wisdom of their dead licensed financial advisers, and superimposed the borders of the good school districts on mental maps of their neighborhoods, which were often included on the long list when magazines ranked cities with the Best Quality of Life. In short, they had been honed and trained so thoroughly by that extinguished world that they were doomed in this new one. Gary was unmoved. From”
[2022-01-15 | highlight] “The fourth one tried to grit down on his leg and was thwarted by his fatigues. Most of the meat in its face had been chewed away. (He’d seen, in that first week, a Samaritan administer chest compresses to a stricken fellow citizen, lean down to give mouth-to-mouth, and have his nose ripped off.) Thin, wide loops of gold dangled from its earlobes, chiming against each other as it scuttled up his body, and he aimed at a place at the top of its skull and put it down.
Gary said, “I got you.” Gary kicked the Marge off him and held its shoulder down with his boot.
Mark Spitz turned his face to avoid the spray, squeezing his lips into a crack. He heard two shots. All four were down.
“Mark Spitz, Mark Spitz,” Gary said. “We didn’t know you liked the older ladies.”
”
[2022-01-15 | highlight] “Your check can’t be processed without complete paperwork.” How was he supposed to know where his Social Security card was? His bedroom was a dig. He needed special excavating tools to find socks. “You’re not in the system. You might as well not exist.” Where was The System now, after the calamity? It had been an invisible fist floating above them for so long and now the fingers were open, disjoined, and everything slipped through, everything escaped. By August he’d scurried back to the service industry, doling out pomegranate martinis on Ladies’ Wednesdays. He tried to heave Human Resources off him. The skel’s eyes dipped to the soft meat of his face. It went in for a bite.”
[2022-01-15 | highlight] “into exceptionality or failure. He possessed a strange facility for the mandatory. Two days into kindergarten, for example, he attained the level of socialization deemed appropriate for those of his age and socioeconomic milieu (sharing, no biting, an almost soulful contemplation of instructions from people in authority) with a minimum of fuss. He nailed milestone after developmental milestone, as if every twitch were coached. Had they been aware of his location, child behaviorists would have cherished him, observing him through binoculars and scratching their ledgers as he confirmed their data and theories in his anonymous travails. He was their typical, he was their most, he was their average, receiving hearty thumbs-ups from the gents in the black van parked a discreet distance across the street. In this world, however, his reward was that void attending most human endeavor, with which all are well acquainted. His accomplishments, such as they were, gathered on the heap of the unsung.”
[2022-01-15 | highlight] “Mark Spitz and the rest of Omega Unit were half done with 135 Duane Street, chugging down from the roof at a productive clip. All clear so far. Only a few signs of mayhem in the building. A ransacked petty cash drawer on eighteen, half-eaten takeout rotting on scattered desks: superannuated currency and the final lunches. As in most businesses they swept, the offices had shut their doors before things completely deteriorated. The chairs were snug at their desks, where they had been tucked by the maintenance crew on their last night of work, the last sane evening in the world, only a few askew and facing the doors in trample-exit disarray.”
[2022-01-15 | highlight] “They slogged through the blocks day after day and there had been too many firms in too many other buildings for it to have any novelty. But this day he paused. He slung his assault rifle over his shoulder and parted the blinds at the end of the corridor. All he wanted was a shred of uptown. He tried to orient himself: Was he looking north or south? It was like dragging a fork through gruel. The ash smeared the city’s palette into a gray hush on the best of days, but introduce clouds and a little bit of precip and the city became an altar to obscurity. He was an insect exploring a gravestone: the words and names were crevasses to get lost in, looming and meaningless.
This was the fourth day of rain, Friday afternoon, and a conditioned part of him submitted to end-of-the-week lassitude, even if Fridays had lost their meaning. Hard to believe that reconstruction had progressed so far that clock-watching had returned, the slacker’s code, the concept of weekend.”
[2022-01-15 | highlight] “When his unit finally started sweeping beyond the wall—whenever that was—he knew he had to visit Uncle Lloyd’s apartment, to sit on the sectional one last time and stare at the final, empty screen in the series. His uncle’s building was only a few blocks past the barrier and he found himself squinting at it when it strode into view. He searched for the apartment, counting metallic blue stories and looking for movement. The dark glass relinquished nothing. He hadn’t seen his uncle’s name on any of the survivor rolls and prayed against a reunion, the slow steps coming down the hall.”
[2022-01-15 | highlight] “The televisions were the newest, the biggest, levitating in space and pulsing with a host of extravagant functions diagrammed in the unopened owner’s manuals. His uncle got every channel and maintained a mausoleum of remotes in the storage space inside the ottoman. The boy watched TV and loitered by the glass walls, looking out on the city through smoky anti-UV glass, nineteen stories up.”
[2022-01-15 | highlight] “Classic six into studio honeycomb, sweatshop killing floor into cordoned cubicle mill. In every neighborhood the imperfect in their fashion awaited the wrecking ball and their bones were melted down to help their replacements surpass them, steel into steel. The new buildings in wave upon wave drew themselves out of rubble, shaking off the past like immigrants. The addresses remained the same and so did the flawed philosophies. It wasn’t anyplace else. It was New York City.”
[2022-01-15 | highlight] “These afternoons were preserved in a series of photographs taken by strangers. His parents were holdouts in an age of digital multiplicity, raking the soil in lonesome areas of resistance: a coffee machine that didn’t tell time, dictionaries made out of paper, a camera that only took pictures. The family camera did not transmit their coordinates to an orbiting satellite. It did not allow them to book airfare to beach resorts with close access to rain forests via courtesy shuttle. There was no prospect of video, high-def or otherwise. The ”

=== Broken (in the best possible way) — Jenny Lawson ===
[2022-01-14 | highlight] “Idea 21: From the makers of Sandal Spats and Sandal Spurs comes Sandal Splats, disposable spats to wear when you have to go to the bathroom on the side of the road. “Keep your shoes safe from pee splashes or diarrhea splash-back with Sandal Splats!”
Idea 22: We are currently in an environmental crisis as islands of floating garbage pile up in our oceans. Reclaim and recycle with Repurposed Cocks (.com). Go carbon neutral using discarded dildos as neck rests on planes, foot rollers for arthritis, blackjacks for self-defense, dog chews, or very short bungee cords. Repel rubber bullets (note: test this first), use them as dog toys for fetching, or stuff in cribs for baby bumpers that double”
[2022-01-14 | highlight] “Idea 15: When hairless cats curl up into a ball, their excess belly skin looks a lot like a lady garden, so we can have the best of both worlds by adopting unwanted hairless cats and using them for photo shoots of “vaginas” so that we can make a Pornhub that doesn’t exploit actual women. We’ll call it “bald pusses” and technically we can’t get sued for lying.”
[2022-01-14 | highlight] “I realize I was being defensive but it’s hard to be objective because I’m still emotionally distraught from being assaulted by eight wolverines. And I realize that I just changed my story, and that’s because it was dark and I was scared and I couldn’t tell what they were because they were so fast. Also, they were really just small rodents, but if I’d started the story with that sentence you’d have dismissed my fear level, and trust me when I say that they scared the shit out of me. I’m still not sure what they were but there were several of them and they ran from one bush to another near my feet and Dorothy Barker’s eyes were enormous and she was like, “WHAT THE SHIT IS THAT? PICK ME UP, LADY,” and I get it because I totally wanted someone to pick me up too, but also I was thinking, “Aren’t tiny dogs like you bred to kill rats?” and she looked back at me like, “You’re thinking of rat terriers. I’m a papillon. I’m fucking French, bitch. WE DON’T EAT RATS.” And she had a point but stop being so goddamn uppity, dog. Just this morning[…]”
[2022-01-14 | highlight] “inopportune times.”
Then Victor sighed and put his face in his hands and I was like, “I understand your frustration but maybe recognize that I’m the victim here and also this is all your fault because YOU’RE THE ONE WHO SAID I COULDN’T KEEP THE DRUGS IN THE FIRST PLACE.”
And then I heard a strange man’s voice say, “… So what happened to the penises?” and that’s when I realized that Victor was on a conference call.
And I did feel bad, but 1) DOOR LOCKS AND MUTE BUTTONS EXIST, VICTOR, and 2) if I were him I would have immediately said, “I’m not sure who said that but that sounds like a very serious concern that we should table for offline discussion,” and gone on with the call, but he totally didn’t”
[2022-01-14 | highlight] “I suppose it makes sense in a terrible sort of way. After all, we are changed by life … it puts its teeth in us, it leaves its handprints and marks and scars on us. And as much as we try to ignore those things, in the end they make us who we are. For good or for bad, we are changed and touched and broken and mended and scarred. And those marks (inside and out) tell a story. They tell our story.
Sometimes we hide them away, those injuries done by others (or, worse, by ourselves). We conceal them up our sleeves or jammed deep into pockets. We try to pretend that they never hurt at all. But it’s a strange and meaningless action. Anyone who has lived would almost certainly understand and maybe even reveal their own hidden defects they’ve been hiding from the world as well. The world feels safer somehow if we share our pain. It becomes more manageable. And by sharing our pain, we inspire others to share theirs. We are so much less alone if we learn to wear our imperfections proudly, like tarnished jewelry that still shines just as brightly.”
[2022-01-14 | highlight] “enough to know what condoms were. Instead I was just alarmed at the fact that we were still storing food in intestines when Tupperware existed. My grandmother said I was missing the point, because intestines are “crunchy and delicious,” and I would have argued with her but 1) she was totally right, and 2) that same morning I’d watched her decapitate a chicken that unsettlingly ran out into traffic headless.1 The casual, easy way she ripped the head off was a product of life on a farm, but to me it was more of a reminder that maybe you shouldn’t fuck with your badass grandma because you have no goddamn idea what she’s actually capable of.”
[2022-01-14 | highlight] “The thing I like the most about cooking is absolutely nothing. I mean, obviously some people must like it because cake keeps getting made, but cooking is a language I never learned, which is strange because both my parents cook, although in extraordinarily different ways.
My mother is an amazing cook and made do with whatever we had handy, which meant we ate a ton of fried deer nuggets. When we had money we’d have mashed potatoes and gravy, and when we didn’t we’d shred stale white bread and pretend it was mashed potatoes. That sounds sort of pathetic but it was actually fucking delicious.”
[2022-01-14 | highlight] “It’s going to rain, I say. Like a strange atmosphere building up inside me. A storm of tiny fractures inside my bones. My husband makes a half-awake noise of sympathy.
I used to think it was all in my head. An old wives’ tale about arthritis. You can’t predict the weather with bones, I’d say. But my skeleton says other things.
I take two aspirin and get back into bed. My head is too full of clouds. My face burns and my hands hold a fever that cracks like firewood.
It’s going to rain, I say to my hands and to my feet. It’s going to rain and then this will pass. An hour goes by and the pain moves to my legs. I want to run and stretch the pain away. I want to wrap my fragile bones in soft white tissue, like they’re delicate china cups. I want my mother to stroke my hair and say, It’s just growing pains, like she did those years when I grew too quickly.”
[2022-01-14 | highlight] “I finish my drawing.
I decide to keep the broken dove even though I can already hear Victor in my head telling me that she’s too broken to save. I will nod and agree but I still won’t part with her. She will tell a story to people who will wonder what magic she must have if she’s still treasured even in this state.
She is shattered but she is special.
And if you don’t look too closely you can hardly tell she’s broken.”
[2022-01-14 | highlight] “The dove is broken. Her beak is gone and I can’t find all the pieces I need to make her whole again. I crawl on the floor to pick up the pieces I can find. I never find them all but I try. I have to keep my family safe from the jagged, broken parts that might be left behind. I notice there is blood on my foot but I don’t know if it’s from the cat scratching me or from the dove. It doesn’t matter anyway. What’s done is done. But I still grieve for the bird. The broken pieces softly clink together, cradled in my skirt. The matched set will no longer match. The male dove will now forever stand guard alone.
But it’s not fair, I think. And I look at the pieces I’ve picked up and see the alabaster inside that was hidden, and the hollowness, and the strange, beautifully ugly excelsior—the mystery that made her stand so long, and the mystery that made her fall so hard.”
[2022-01-14 | highlight] “before.
I am hollow. Scooped out. Empty. I am a shadow. I write this on my drawing and I know that it will change my art from something people can relate to and see themselves in to something that people may fear. Something “othering” that makes normal people hesitantly back away, or hesitantly step closer—but both are in bad ways. I would soothe them and tell them I’ll be okay, but it’s easier to pretend to be fine and hide the brokenness. To paint a false smile and fake that my body is fully mine until it is again.
I look back at the drawing. The shadow of a girl running into the ”
[2022-01-14 | highlight] “But why? They would probably understand if I told them the problem. In fact, because I collect broken people like myself, they’d probably be relieved to find that they aren’t alone (although they’d probably hate that the ball was back in their court and now they had to respond to me). And those who didn’t understand wouldn’t toil over it and tear their hair out like I do. They’d read my “I’M TOO CRAZY FOR EMAIL” email and think, Huh, what a weirdo, and then never think about it again. I don’t know what it’s like not to have anxiety but I assume it’s like that. It’s probably not exhausting. It probably doesn’t end with eighty-seven rewritten and unsent emails and a to-do list that never ends and chapters written and deleted so many times that you forget what it is you’ve said and you just want to set fire to your brain to clear away all the brush and start over.”
[2022-01-04 | highlight] “Last week my doctor told me that when you finally get into remission from depression you are 350 percent more likely to stay in remission if you exercise thirty minutes a day six times a week. Spellcheck tried to correct “exercise” to “excessive” and I agree, spellcheck, but I’m trying it anyway. I’m also sleeping better (which is the first response from TMS for most patients), and that helps with feeling better, and that means I have more energy to exercise, and suddenly I’m almost a healthy person if you don’t look at all the bacon and vodka I’m consuming.”
[2022-01-04 | highlight] “the half hour I walk or swim, the hours I sleep instead of work or worry. It feels like cheating. That’s wrong. I know it’s wrong. But knowing and feeling are different things. I know that time given to yourself to make yourself healthier is good for you and for everyone around you. I know that it takes time and effort for some of us to stay sane. I know that I’m worth the work and that I should feel grateful that I can take care of myself without feeling guilty. So the next step is moving from knowing to feeling.
I don’t think I’m alone in this. I think many of us struggle with the thought that it’s okay to take care of ourselves, and it’s strange that it’s a struggle to treat ourselves as kindly as we treat the dog. The dog needs walks and healthy choices and water and play and sleep and naps and bacon and more naps. And love. I need that too. And so do you. It’s not just a gift we give to ourselves … it’s a duty.”
[2022-01-04 | highlight] “My husband mentions traveling this summer … the beginning of the same argument we have had for years. I can’t travel. It’s too taxing. I would get sick. I would end up in the same wheelchair I’ve ended too many trips in. I would slow them down. They go off together on adventures and I am sad but relieved. I’ve missed many trips. I missed the first time my daughter saw Japan. I watched them on FaceTime from my self-imposed house arrest as they explored the world.
But I will not miss the first time she sees Europe. Because it will be the first time I see Europe too.
I think it surprises Victor how quickly I say, “Okay. You know what? I’ll go.” He and Hailey hold their breath as if I’ll take it back. I hold my breath too. I wait for my body to say, “No, this was a trick. It’s not real. You don’t deserve this.” But it’s not saying that. Not yet at least. It’s saying, “I want to go. I want to live. I’ve been waiting so long.” It says, “Let’s see Scotland and London and Paris”
[2022-01-04 | highlight] “When you first said that I didn’t need the antidepressants I thought there was a misunderstanding, because you were fine with them before. It was only when I switched to the generic version and had a breakdown that there was an issue. Apparently the release mechanism wasn’t the same in the generic and for some of us that causes a problem. Luckily my shrink quickly recognized the issue and switched me back to the brand name. But suddenly you decided that it “wasn’t medically necessary” that I have the drug that had kept me away from suicide. I appealed and appealed and my doctor sent letters and forms and exceptions and you gave excuses for not covering it that were all proven wrong and eventually you relented. It was worth the hours and hours of work, I thought, until I picked up my medication and found it was hundreds of dollars a month.
“But you told me it was covered,” I said to you.”

=== Speaker for the Dead — Orson Scott Card ===
[2022-01-13 | highlight] “And then, having done the little that could be done by framlings, who were, after all, light-years away from Lusitania, the people of the Hundred Worlds returned to their local concerns.
    Outside Lusitania, only one man among the half-trillion human beings in the Hundred Worlds felt the death of Jodo Figueira Alvarez, called Pipo, as a great change in the shape of his own life. Andrew Wiggin was Speaker for the Dead in the university city of Reykjavik, renowned as the conservator of Nordic culture, perched on the steep slopes of a knifelike fjord that pierced the granite and ice of the frozen world of Trondheim right at the equator. It was spring, so the snow was in retreat, and fragile grass and flowers reached out for strength from the glistering sun.”
[2022-01-13 | highlight] “The news of Pipo's death was not of merely local importance. It was transmitted instantaneously, by ansible, to all the Hundred Worlds. The first aliens discovered since Ender's Xenocide had tortured to death the one human who was designated to observe them. Within hours, scholars, scientists, politicians, and journalists began to strike their poses.
    A consensus soon emerged. One incident, under baffling circumstances, does not prove the failure of Starways Council policy toward the piggies. On the contrary, the fact that only one man died seems to prove the wisdom of the present policy of near inaction. We should, therefore, do nothing except continue to observe at a slightly less intense pace. Pipo's successor was instructed to visit the piggies no more often than every other day, and never for longer than an hour. He was not to push the piggies to answer questions concerning their treatment of Pipo. It was a reinforcement of the old policy of inaction”
[2022-01-13 | highlight] “researches.
    When would-be xenologers complain that I am not getting the right sort of data from my observations of the pequeninos, I always urge them to reread the limitations placed upon me by law. I am permitted to bring no more than one assistant on field visits; I may not ask questions that might reveal human expectations, lest they try to imitate us; I may not volunteer information to elicit a parallel response; I may not stay with them more than four hours at a time; except for my clothing, I may not use any products of technology in their presence, which includes cameras, recorders, computers, or even a manufactured pen to write on manufactured paper: I may not even observe them unawares”

=== The Portrait of a Mirror — A. Natasha Joukovsky ===
[2022-01-13 | highlight] “With the recent tidy valuation of his tech startup, Ecco, one might have predicted an uptick in ego, but his oldest friends would insist there’d been no change. New acquaintances would scoff that he came from money anyway, until they learned the sorry state of his trust, at which point even Zuccotti Park–populist skeptics had been known to forgive him the suffix and develop a crush. Upon closer inspection, they found Wes could almost pass for self-made—if anything, he spent too much time at work. Factoring in his polite yet straightforward general manner, discretion in sexual encouragement and discouragement, discernment in those choices, and, most especially, his unwavering commitment to (albeit serial) monogamy, it was impossible to brand Wes a womanizer, let alone a rake.”
[2022-01-13 | highlight] “it might have been tempting to paint a twenty-first-century Rick Von Sloneker—tall, rich, good-looking, stupid, dishonest, conceited, a bully, a liar, a drunk and a thief, an egomaniac, and probably psychotic. In reality, he was only about half of these things, and if Wes was a bit of a devil, he was the kind with whom you’d sympathize. At nearly thirty, Wes was still boyishly handsome, with an Ivy League aesthetic perforating his hipster urbanism, and (85 percent of) a Henley-winning physique. He was kind to children, respectful of the elderly, and attentive to dogs. He rarely drank alcohol, precisely because he knew he had the tendency to overdo it.”

=== The Kingdom of Liars — Nick Martell ===
[2022-01-13 | highlight] “This is where angels come to be feasted on by wolves. Where daemons hide in plain sight, advocating they are the good people in the grand scheme of things. Where dreams come true, legends are born, wars are started… and where the Endless Waltz ends.”
“Right,” I said, drawing out the word. “Who are you?”
“Who are you?” the boy mimicked with a smile.”
[2022-01-13 | highlight] “The woods seemed alive with nature’s music. Leaves rustled around me, the wind spinning them upward around my bed like a cyclone, only to ebb away and reveal a well-dressed boy. He was much shorter than me, with a circular birthmark on his temple and muscle he hadn’t grown into yet. An unfinished iron crown was hidden in the tangles of his messy auburn hair, and a sigil that depicted a palm holding out a crown was sewed onto his shirt, over his heart. I couldn’t place the symbol in that moment, so my eyes latched onto it, trying to find it among my memories. All I remembered was my father and our family.
“Where am I?”
[2022-01-13 | highlight] “I opened my eyes, warmer than before, and pushed the upper half of my body up, forcing the darkness to retreat. The room around me shattered like broken glass. Cement and nails and stone crumbled away until eventually it was only me and the bed I was on in the middle of a wooded area. Climbing out of the bed was harder than I thought it would be, my knees barely as strong as wet paper. The trees around me were thick and sprawling, roots entangling everything around the trunks while the leafy tops were completely out of view. Even if it was daytime, I wouldn’t know. Shadows inhabited this place as if they were born into it and had never needed to fear the sun.”
[2022-01-12 | highlight] “After a pause I said, “Yes.”
I didn’t know what I expected as Domet squirted my blood into the clear liquid. At first nothing happened. My heart felt like it was about to burst from my chest as we waited, insecurities that I might not be a Fabricator returning after years of pushing them to the back of my mind. Then my blood in the bowl began to move, twist, and spiral upward out of the liquid into a spiderweb tower of blood.
“Does that mean I’m a Fabricator?” I whispered.
Domet huffed and took a sip”
[2022-01-12 | highlight] “His plan didn’t sound too terrible. Because most nobles used Fabrications and risked losing memories on a daily basis, they had systems in place to record the most valuable information. The system depended on the person: tattoos, journals, paintings, and other things that were harder to misplace. If we compared the king’s version of history to his memories… well, it would certainly separate fact from fiction.”
[2022-01-12 | highlight] “Don’t give him a choice. The Endless Waltz has three events”—he paused with his vials and potions to tick them off as he spoke—“a reception at Ryder Keep, a hunt in the King’s Garden, and then a concert by the renowned singer Red. That’s three opportunities to impress and ally yourself with every young noble you can. Ensure that the prince can’t reject you from the Hollow Court without dividing his own supporters. Because even if he’s in a better position than you, he can still be held accountable and face pressure from the other High Nobles. Not so much the Low, obviously.”
“So,” I said, drawing out the word, “I need to impress the other nobles around my age, get an invitation to the king’s birthday party, and then steal the king’s memories so we can prove a High Noble set up my father for the murder of Davey Hollow?”
[2022-01-12 | highlight] “It changed after your father’s death,” Domet began. “What once was an organized set of challenges among the noble debutantes, designed to develop alliances—romantic or not—based on merit and ability not position or wealth, has devolved into a mad scramble for power. Over the years the Corrupt Prince has twisted it into a test. Only those who prove themselves to him are deemed worthy of entering the Hollow Court, whatever their status. Those who fail may try again the following year or, in a few cases, are stripped of their titles and banned.”
[2022-01-12 | highlight] “stand?”
“Calm yourself, Michael,” he said as he dropped a cube of stone into his glass. “Only one of those bottles over there held vodka. Please, do you really think that’s what I’m like when I’m drunk? I’m a functioning alcoholic, not a child.”
“Then why—”
“Fake it?” he said. “Because when you’re in a position like I am, people rarely give you anything for free. But they do have a tendency to spill all kinds of interesting information if they think they’re taking advantage of me. When they think I’m drunk, they tell me what I need to know in exchange for some useless tidbits they think I’ve mistakenly let slip.”
“But he said he was your friend.”
Domet took a sip from his drink. “I don’t have friends—only accomplices and enemies. You’d be amazed at how often they change sides. Now, sit at the table. We have much to do before the Endless Waltz begins.”
[2022-01-12 | highlight] “Kingman don’t abandon family.”
Lyon shook his head and turned his back to me. “None of us have been true Kingman since he was executed. We won’t lead the king’s armies, we won’t be sent all over the world to foster relations with other countries, and our generation won’t be remembered as anything more than bystanders. It’s time you accepted that… and until you do, don’t come near Kayleigh or my child. We’ll be your alibi if you need it, but we’ve already agreed our child will be born a Ryder, not a Kingman. And once it’s socially acceptable for me to do, I plan on renouncing the Kingman family name and taking hers.”
[2022-01-12 | highlight] “What the fuck is wrong with you, Lyon? Doesn’t our family have enough problems without you getting a High Noble pregnant?”
“The pregnancy may not have been planned, but I still love her! I don’t care if she’s a High Noble and she doesn’t care if I’m a Kingman! I have the right to be happy, Michael. I don’t want to spend the rest of my life taking care of…”
[2022-01-12 | highlight] “Don’t want to be burdened by your Forgotten mother anymore? Tired of contributing a portion of your lapdog pay to house her in an asylum?”
“Don’t make me out to be the villain, Michael. I took care of you all for years while you and Gwen were too young to do anything except cry about losing our father.”
“What are you saying, then? That you’ve done your time and you can wipe your hands of her?”
“She’s never going to get better, Michael. Whatever happened to her mind is permanent. We have to accept that.”
“So we should abandon her? Our father always said family was the most important—”
[2022-01-12 | highlight] “didn’t hear anything after that. The world had gone silent as I watched High Noble Kayleigh Ryder’s lips shape polite nothings. My brother stood next to her, blushing and rubbing the back of his head every so often. Refusing to believe what I had just heard, I struggled from my seat and screamed, “You’re really bringing another Kingman into this city, Lyon? Are you mad? You’re really going to damn another innocent with our cursed last name?”
I couldn’t stop myself, words coming out of my mouth unfiltered. “Kayleigh, don’t have this child. You’re making a mistake. Even if it doesn’t end up branded like we were, it’ll still be doomed the moment it learns about the Kingman legacy. There is no freedom for those who share our blood, and the pressure to be as flawless as our ancestors is…” I gulped. “…suffocating.”
[2022-01-12 | highlight] “I tuned back into Kai just in time: “—and that’s what I want to do once I learn to control my Sound Fabrications. I think I can make a difference, even if I did lose my sight when I was young. That’s actually why my eyelids are open instead of closed like they would be for someone who was blind since birth. In case you were wondering.”
There was another paper left in the envelope I hadn’t read yet. “How’d you lose your sight? Was it an accident?”
Kai shook his head slowly. “I used my Fabrications as a child. It was for a good cause… I saved a friend’s life. It just cost me a lot to do it.”
“What? I thought Fabrications only cost memories. How can they take away your sight?”
[2022-01-10 | highlight] “Angelo was waiting for me in the kitchen in his Scales regalia, an old silver-button coat and dark trousers. There was a golden eye sigil on his shoulders to denote he was a part of the Watcher Division. As always, he looked too perfect and too Hollow-esque for an immigrant, all traces of his former culture gone. His short black hair was tidy, his skin slightly tanned, and his trim build showed how little he indulged in rich food.
Only his rings were non-regulation Scales uniform: a glass ring around his left ring finger, a large, bulky golden band around his left thumb, and, on his middle finger, an iron ring with a crown crest. A gift from his wife before her death.
“Guns,” he said, pointing to the table.”
[2022-01-10 | highlight] “The Advocators howled with laughter and hoisted me higher and higher into the trees until one shouted, “He’s Michael Kingman! Look at his brand! Cut him down! Cut him down! The king will hang us if we kill him!”
[2022-01-10 | highlight] “It was a long walk from the asylum to the Narrows where we lived, and I took the path through the Hanging Gardens. More out of habit than a conscious decision.”

=== What We Talk About When We Talk About Books — Leah Price ===
[2022-01-12 | highlight] “The same justice system that requires these men to read or go to jail forbids prisoners from being sent certain books—hardbacks that can be used as weapons; texts that preach violence; books not available through the businesses that have negotiated a monopoly on supplying goods to prisons. Books’ danger, in this system, is seen to lie in their physical form as much as in the ideas that they contain. In 2006, Beard v. Banks upheld prisons’ right to deny inmates in solitary confinement access to printed matter. Books”
[2022-01-12 | highlight] “On mornings when the urge to find out how a story ends is all that gets me out of bed, I think Mood-Boosting Books are on to something. When the telltale compression of pages or the dwindling scroll bar warns me that the imaginative world in which I’m taking refuge is about to come to an end, though, books feel more like intimations of mortality.
For years I rationed Trollope novels, keeping a new one in reserve next to the unopened chocolate bar stashed away for consolation if and when my equally bookish boyfriend walked out. But when I turned the last page of The Last Chronicle of Barset, it was Trollope’s series that abandoned me. Elderkin and Berthoud are right to dedicate an entry to “finishing, fear of.” Whatever life lessons we can glean from having read, perhaps being in the middle of a book is what really counts as living.”
[2022-01-12 | highlight] “As the fiction reading that once prompted self-abuse gets reshelved under self-help, so the greedy page-turning that once counted as self-harm becomes another form of self-care. ”
[2022-01-12 | highlight] “In other words, whereas the history of psychiatry might reflect a shifting focus from the medium (talk therapy, book, or app) to the message, the shift from books as disease carriers to books as cure-alls goes together with a shift from the message to the medium. Nineteenth-century experts worried that readers might imitate novelistic characters who stole or adultered. Twentieth-century thinkers replaced crime with mental health, hoping that fictional plots and forms might model how readers could overcome their inner struggles. Twenty-first-century researchers ratcheted that down—or perhaps up—to the wager that paper and ink, whatever messages they convey, can heal the body and mind”
[2022-01-12 | highlight] “At an even higher level of abstraction, some twentieth-century scientists believed that literary patterning could help readers make sense of their own life stories even without taking the form of narrative. The literary critic Meredith Martin has reconstructed one Scottish hospital’s attempt to rehabilitate World War I veterans through poetry writing, in the hope that the regularity of the meter would restore the control stripped away by trauma. In Martin’s analysis, the cure lay less in the topic or even the act of self-expression than in the shapeliness of the language”
[2022-01-12 | highlight] “Even if you believe that books can improve mood, though, there’s no consensus about how. Do books work like a mirror, a painkiller, or a piece of exercise equipment? Some twentieth-century thinkers focused on the connections that readers forge with characters. As James Baldwin put it, “You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world. But then you read.”37 This is a view taken up, too, by contemporary bibliotherapists who promise patients that “our own life mirrored in that of another person” can enable introspection or combat stigma.38 Hospital”
[2022-01-12 | highlight] “In 1925, as radio threatened to cut into reading time, an anthology titled The Poetry Cure offered “sedative” poems for “raw and jumpy nerves,” “stimulant” poems “to redden pale blood-corpuscles,” “tissue builders,” “soothers and soporifics,” and “accelerators for sluggish blood.”33 Its editor predicted that “when editions of this work begin to dispute front window space in our drug stores, with beauty clays, heating pads, and gland preparations, the market value of the poet will rise.”34 That may not have been just a metaphor: drugstores were one of the first venues for for-profit lending libraries, with the British pharmacy Boots managing to keep one going from 1898 all the way to 1966. Then ”
[2022-01-12 | highlight] “Teenagers needed to be protected. The 1901 expert who worried that it sapped “the power of concentration, of attention, of memory [for a boy] to mope about the house and to be eternally bending his back and straining his eyes over the printed pages of a book” blamed print for the very vices that reading is now expected to combat.30 A 1916 commentator added that “those children who prefer to stay at home and read a good book when all the others are out and play[ing] can be suspected of using reading as a sedative.”31 To childproof your house, the bookcase needed to be locked as firmly as the medicine cabinet.”
[2022-01-12 | highlight] “By 1894 a journalist observing modern readers’ “physical need for novels” explained that “as in the case of all other sedatives, there comes to the person who is accustomed to use fiction to soothe his mind, a positive craving for novels.” And lest you think that his emphasis on the soothing nature of reading foreshadows the use of books to treat anxiety a century later, note that he saw the calming nature of fiction as a reason to throw it away. As he pointed out, “the very last thing which the man who uses novels as a sedative wants is to keep the volumes on his shelves. He would as soon think of keeping empty medicine bottles.”27
If certain genres of book counted as mind-altering substances, why not regulate their sale? Decades before alcohol and tobacco were ruled off-limits to the young, novels were forbidden to under-sixteens. In 1883, the New York State Legislature debated whether to fine “any person who shall sell, loan, or give to any minor under sixteen years of age any dime novel or book of fiction, without first obtaining the written consent of the parent or guardian of such a[…]”
[2022-01-12 | highlight] “Reading, too, threatened to upstage the mess and tedium of human contact with solipsistic fantasies.
Worse, textual stimuli could blot out the real world altogether. In 1889, one journalist compared books to drinks, dredging up his most scientific language to explain that just as alcoholism leads to “excessive fattening round the heart, and weak action of the heart in consequence,” so “the habit of exciting novel-reading leads to fatty degeneration of the literary mind,—i.e., to an unhealthy and spasmodic action of the imagination.” Another expert compared the pleasures of fiction reading to “the dram of the drunkard, creating a diseased craving for more.”26”
[2022-01-12 | highlight] “digestion. “Observe the passengers in the train,” thundered one antebellum American moralist, “before all eyes, young and old, spectacled and otherwise, there oscillates some kind of printed page. Opportunity for fresh air is lost at the stopping-places, while the eyes are eagerly strained and worried over the plot of some novel.”21 The physical dangers of eyestrain concretize the mental dangers of distractedness.”
[2022-01-12 | highlight] “There’s nothing new about the NHS’s assumption that novels affect the body and mind. But for most of the Gutenberg era, that effect was rarely thought to be for the better. Mood-Boosting Books reverses half a millennium’s worth of campaigns against fiction waged first by churches, then by schools, and, eventually, by the public libraries founded in the nineteenth century that rationed the number of novels a borrower could take out but allowed all-you-can-read essay borrowing. Doctors provided all three institutions with expert backup. In Cervantes’s Spain, printing allowed compilations of traditional romances to spread beyond the elite audiences that had once listened to them read aloud or been able to afford to access them in manuscript. The barber who would have been ”
[2022-01-12 | highlight] “well into the nineteenth century, experts were likelier to think that fiction reading caused madness than cured it. A doctor warned in 1806 that reading “affects the organs of the body, and relaxes the tone of the nerves.” As late as 1877, another expert “could tell of one young woman of my acquaintance, of fine education,” “who gratified a vitiated taste for novel-reading till her reason was overthrown, and she has, in consequence, been for several years an inmate of an insane asylum.”18”
[2022-01-12 | highlight] “If the medicalization of reading seems like a logistical step in the history of psychiatry, the alignment of self-help books with literature seems at first glance like a break from the history of reading. In fact, one of the earliest genres of self-help was the conduct book warning against too much novel reading. The inventor of the modern advice book, the aptly named Samuel Smiles, compared indulging in fiction to “dram-drinking.” Books, Smiles warned, could never teach as much as the “life-education daily given in our homes, in the streets, behind counters, in workshops, at the loom and the plough, in counting-houses and manufactories.” Selves could be helped “by work more than by reading—… life rather than literature, action rather than study.”16”
[2022-01-12 | highlight] “Books on Prescription doesn’t just reflect the evolution of psychiatry or the politics of health-care funding. Paradoxically enough, the shift to self-help books also responds to the rise of digital media. The turnstile of a specialized library once separated doctors from laypeople. But now that second-guessing your diagnosis doesn’t require finding a table sturdy enough to hold some multivolume medical dictionary, the question becomes less whether patients will read than what. Pew surveys reveal that almost three-quarters of American adults use the internet for health-related searches”
[2022-01-12 | highlight] “just as some students may find it tempting to ignore instructions delivered through a screen, Frude acknowledges that not all patients follow through with their assigned reading. At best, bibliotherapy works for those highly literate patients who are already “familiar with the process of following a structured ‘recipe’ in a book (as in a cookbook or a DIY manual).”11 Just as anyone who follows the instructions in a cookbook will end up with a cake, he explains, a patient who uses the book as prescribed will end up with control over their emotions.”
[2022-01-12 | highlight] “A 2012 study that compared anxiety sufferers stuck on a therapist’s waiting list to those prescribed self-help books found that the latter fared better but cautioned that “comparison of self-help with therapist-administered treatments revealed a significant difference in favor of the latter.”7 Translation: a book does worse than a therapist, but better than nothing. And for Brits enrolled in an NHS suffering from cuts as for the 3 million Americans who lack health insurance, nothing is what many sufferers would otherwise get.”
[2022-01-12 | highlight] “For libraries as for beleaguered booklovers, an ally with as much clout as a national health service can only be welcome. Yet turning a bookshelf into a medicine cabinet raises troubling questions about why exactly a society should value reading, and which professions are authorized to measure that value.
From a medical vantage, books’ selling points are largely negative: the money they don’t cost, the side effects they don’t produce, the addictions that they don’t engender—all these allow them to beat out drugs and talk therapy alike. Unlike the antidepressants taken by one out of seven Americans and one out of six Britons, reading can’t increase weight or decrease libido.6 It doesn’t even trigger nausea, unless you happen to be in the car.”
[2022-01-12 | highlight] “The convergence of psychiatric treatment and textual engagement might suggest that these otherwise very different activities are following a similar trajectory. Psychiatry, once focused on the surprising revelations that could emerge in the therapist-patient conversation, and reading, once experienced as a serendipitous encounter between a person and a book, are both being automated and instrumentalized under pressure from cash-strapped governments. Yet you might also see reading and psychiatry moving in opposite directions: the very moment when psychiatrists have come to subordinate form to content (assuming that it doesn’t matter whether the treatment is delivered by a therapist or a book or an app) is also the moment when policy makers are shifting their interest in literature from content to form (where once governments focused on censoring books whose topics included sex or violence, now they’re just as eager to promote the experience of long-form literary reading, regardless of subject matter).
Bibliotherapy might”
[2022-01-12 | highlight] “The merging of self-help and literature under the umbrella of Reading Well makes visible, as in a caricature, the double transformation that long-form print literature has undergone since the turn of the millennium. Literature has become medicalized, as the act of reading has been placed in the service of mental and physical well-being, but also institutionalized, as state-funded agencies are weighing in ever more systematically on whether to read and what to read.”
[2022-01-12 | highlight] “The occupational therapist also coached me to stop aiming for the perfect posture that girls once learned by balancing books on their heads. Instead, she taught me to be flexible. Readers can likewise learn when to read in print and when to opt for digital, when to read quickly and when to read slowly, when to search an encyclopedia and when to have their souls searched by a poem.”
[2022-01-12 | highlight] “if we hold the paper wide open it is not long before the muscles of tension are overtaxed, and finally, if we address ourselves to the book, the necessity of cutting the leaves and turning them one after another, ends by producing an enervated condition very distressing in the long run.” But he also worried that the solution would soon give rise to a new problem: “Just as oculists have multiplied since the invention of journalism, so with the phonography yet to be, the aurists will begin to abound.”8 As Siri’s ladylike voice resurrects the days when bosses dictated to secretaries, so audiobooks automate the eighteenth-century servants who read aloud, standing discreetly behind their master’s chair.”
[2022-01-12 | highlight] “Hemingway explained in a 1950 letter that “writing and travel broaden your ass if not your mind and I like to write standing up.” Nabokov told a Playboy interviewer that “I generally start the day at a lovely old-fashioned lectern I have in my study. Later on, when I feel gravity nibbling at my calves, I settle down in a comfortable armchair alongside an ordinary writing desk; and finally, when gravity begins climbing up my spine, I lie down on a couch”—the same position, perhaps, in which that magazine containing the interview was read.6 At”
[2022-01-12 | highlight] “By extension, the intellectual work—or lack thereof—elicited by different literary genres can be made visible by the uprightness—or lack thereof—of the bodies that hold them, even of the furniture that holds those bodies. In eighteenth-century paintings, the reader sprawls on a sofa or lolls at the hairdresser’s; a fine snow of hair powder dusted the pages. In 1835, Balzac addressed his novel Father Goriot to “you who are holding this book in your fair white hand, you who sink down in your soft easy chair.” When Lucy Soulsby declared, “I have no faith in reading that is compatible with an arm-chair,” she was privileging those kinds of reading that required a writing desk over those that manifested spinelessness.4”
[2022-01-12 | highlight] “Dickensian clerks perched at high stools, like McMansion dwellers at a breakfast bar. At the end of the nineteenth century, though, bodies and papers changed places in the office. The women taking over formerly male-dominated office jobs subsided into chairs, while vertical filing forced papers that had once rested flat onto their edge, thanks to new cabinets guaranteed to prevent “sagging or slumping in drawers.”5”
[2022-01-12 | highlight] “A Bible feels different when it inhabits a pulpit or a reader’s lap; a newspaper, when its headlines are read while loitering opposite the newsstand or spread on the breakfast table. Whether the reader’s neck or back bears the brunt depends not just on the printed or electronic object itself, but on the surfaces that support her body and her reading material. In”
[2022-01-12 | highlight] “One 1896 article on “Sunday Reading,” for example, declares that “in the prohibition of games and of the usual activities of young life upon that day, reading becomes almost the only resource.” The point is not that goody-goody books crowd out exciting romances, but that sitting still, with the book as a kind of seat belt, takes the place of active work and play.68 Charlotte Yonge’s contrast between girls and boys morphs here into a contrast between children and adults. In both cases, you read because there’s nothing else to do.
The overrepresentation of the very old and very young in the reading public; the emergence of the mass-circulation newspaper in the nineteenth century thanks to suburbs linked by commuter train; fiction’s persistent alliance with bed, beach, and beyond; the centuries-old fear of housewives’ fiction-fueled imaginations—all these reflect the vacuums that print once rushed in to fill.”
[2022-01-12 | highlight] “In 2019, journalist Paul Greenberg noted that the average American spent 1,500-odd hours yearly on their smartphone. Searching for a benchmark that would convey the magnitude of those hours, he calculated that at average reading speed (280 words per minute), that same American could enjoy or at least endure Proust’s In Search of Lost Time—twenty times every year.65”
[2022-01-12 | highlight] “The study in question correlated the use of smartphones and iPads with lower levels of melatonin, the hormone that regulates sleepiness. Its absence is associated, as well, with breast, bowel, and prostate cancer.61 A finer-grained comparison revealed that when participants did their bedtime reading on an iPad, their melatonin levels were lower than those who read either printed books or e-readers.62 Once again, the study design is as telling as its results. The researchers weren’t comparing Good Night, Gorilla with Gone Girl. Their focus was the delivery device. But of course, what might make printed books more relaxing than reading on an iPad might not be the medium itself but the fact that emails and alerts reminding us of the tasks that await us when we wake the next day don’t pop up on our paperbacks.”
[2022-01-11 | highlight] “specific: a book-reading gap. In most parts of the world, including the United States, books remain the province of white women, while magazines and newspapers come closer to being evenly distributed. Even as Amazon’s ad celebrates the freedom to marry whomever we like, its ad still counts on the viewer to place reading habits on a gender binary.”
[2022-01-11 | highlight] “The Kindle ad equates modernity with mobility: the freedom to marry who you want with the freedom to read wherever you want. Expanding on the theme two years later, Amazon marketers began to solicit photos with the hashtag #haveKINDLEwillTRAVEL. The resulting flood of images—a white man holds a Kindle on a dirt road; a white man reads silhouetted against a bell tower; a pair of white palms cradle a Kindle in a windowsill overlooking a cliff—measure the power of the device by the sublimity of the landscapes that it blots out.1 (Only the most riveting read can compete with the Taj Mahal.”
[2022-01-11 | highlight] “Invented in China around the beginning of the Common Era and brought to Europe via Muslim Spain just over a millennium later, paper soon generated as much buzz as any e-ink technology today. The newfangled material offered a fourth benefit on top of price, weight, and longevity: where papyrus and parchment could be scraped clean and reused, paper’s absorption of ink made it unerasable. The disadvantage of being less recyclable was outweighed by the advantage of being less vulnerable to forgery. Our Etch A Sketch–like e-readers may bear more resemblance to paper’s predecessors than to the medium invoked by the name of Amazon’s Paperwhite e-reader.”
[2022-01-11 | highlight] “a post-paper world, classical civilizations managed just fine without it. Clay or wax tablets, stone, papyrus, parchment: all of these seemed adequate to write on until a material that miraculously combined durability with portability and affordability came along. Stone lasts but can’t be carried; papyrus is light but brittle and vulnerable to climate; parchment is as expensive as the animals that are skinned to make it. Outside of cemeteries and law offices, paper shunted many of those surfaces aside. Odds are that you are not reading this book on a clay tablet, a coconut husk, a palm leaf, or a piece of parchment, papyrus, or even a sheet of paper recycled from linen rags.”
[2022-01-11 | highlight] “Often, booklovers are thinking of a subset of books defined by a medium but also by a particular scale and a particular genre, one they assume to be read in a particular way. Call it Long-form Literary Print.
We fetishize books because we imagine that they can protect us from our distractibility, our sloth, the weakness of will that the earliest monks called acedia.47 Long before clickbait, reading was already entangled with worries about who was in control: the reader or the text. The very term “page-turner” attributes to books a mind of their own. The momentum of the gathered and bound pages appears to drag a helpless reader in its wake, as if every book were one of those rare volumes whose pages flip mechanically inside a glass case displayed in a library lobby.48”
[2022-01-11 | highlight] “When one of the shrewdest analysts of digital reading, Clifford Lynch, called ebooks “more like reference databases than [like] traditional books that are read sequentially from beginning to end,” he airbrushed out the long tradition of print that invites dipping and sampling—imposing our own order on the text, not submitting to its undertow.34 When a British Library report lamented that academic researchers “go online to avoid reading in the traditional sense,” the world’s greatest research institution, too, ignored the long tradition of pick-and-choose reading.35”
[2022-01-11 | highlight] “For us, interrupting a book denotes impulsivity and impatience. But for most of print’s history¸ it proved civilized self-restraint. Where twentieth-century parents measured their children’s impulse control by their ability to refrain from eating a marshmallow, earlier generations tested their resolve by the ability to refrain from racing through a book.32”
[2022-01-11 | highlight] “literature.
We think of the printed word as transcending space and time, but jobbing printing was location based and date sensitive. Where defenders of print today accuse blogs and tweets of destroying our power to immerse ourselves in the great classics, Franklin’s printing was already sound bite-sized, ephemeral, and profit driven”
[2022-01-11 | highlight] “In 1907, as bibliographer Simon Eliot points out, industry estimates put books at only 14 percent of the total value of print production in Britain. Printed literature formed an even smaller fraction, since the 14 percent included handwritten notebooks and account books. Measured by sheer number of pages that rolled off the press, there’s never been a time when book-length volumes kept pace with “jobbing printing”—that is, single sheets paid in advance.”
[2022-01-11 | highlight] “Compare Facebook posts to Gutenberg’s Bible, and civilization seems to be going down the drain. But compare tweets to indulgences, and it’s much of a muchness.”
[2022-01-11 | highlight] “Even for analytics-grubbing Silicon Valley, though, to know what people read—or even where, when, at what pace—isn’t to know why. No matter how many keystrokes you track and blinks you time, others’ reading remains as hard to peer into as others’ hearts”
[2022-01-11 | highlight] “match your Bible to your Sunday shoes.
The inside of Vegetable Cookery was made of a different animal. Every page of this rebuke to the “flesh-consuming community” was coated with a sizing boiled down from horse bones, replaced only a century later by synthetic chemicals. Its tips about how to replace steak with sago soup and breadcrumb pie were printed on carcasses. I usually imagine books as products of a person’s mind, not an animal’s body. But what was left of my appetite disappeared when I realized that the library in which I was sitting was a graveyard. Just as the condition of Hemingway’s Ulysses contradicted his words, so the raw materials of Vegetable Cookery tugged against its plea for humans to live without taking”
[2022-01-11 | highlight] “cookbooks are steady sellers—and greater innovators, if you look for innovation in the form of marketing strategies rather than narrative techniques. Recipe books were among the first genres to adopt print. (The diet manual De honesta voluptate [1474] appeared only two decades after the Gutenberg Bible.) They went on to pioneer installment publication (Vegetable Cookery being a case in point), monthly subscription clubs, and paid product placement. In the last century, cookbooks were early adopters of laminated pages and photographic illustrations. In ours, they were one of the first genres to drift online via a welter of competing recipe apps.”
[2022-01-11 | highlight] “Book historian William Sherman found one seventeenth-century reader filling a margin with a neat drawing of his own finger pointing to a key passage, down to an anatomically correct nail.38 To read implied to write. Nor did that writing have to take the form of ink or easily erased pencil. Pricking your name into the endpapers with a needle seems to have counted as housewifely virtue, judging from the carefully spaced dots that mark “A. Evans” in one copy of a 1756 abridgment of Samuel Richardson’s great novel Pamela. Narrated”
[2022-01-11 | highlight] “Perhaps Hemingway should have used the service devised by the Irish humorist Flann O’Brien, who proposed (tongue in cheek) that homeowners decorating their living rooms with books bought by the yard should also outsource the breaking in of the volumes to a professional “bookhandler” who would crack spines and apply coffee stains to strategically chosen pages.36”
[2022-01-11 | highlight] “A New York Times writer sniffed in 1878 that “furniture, piano-fortes, pictures, may be bought by order in a week, but books in any noticeable number, which seem to belong in the rooms where they are found, must be the result of accumulation. Their rows are the tree-avenues which mark the residence of the aristocracy of mental culture.”37 Like the woods rooted on a landed estate, books vouched for an ancestral pedigree.”
[2022-01-11 | highlight] “Until the advent of untaxed wood-pulp paper in the second half of the nineteenth century, printed books were valued in large part for the blank writing surfaces they offered. With no scrap paper lying around, books formed the most convenient place to scribble a shopping list or to practice one’s signature (particularly common in books owned by children). Printed ”
[2022-01-11 | highlight] “But then books, too, are mass-produced multiples. In both cases, I realized, standardization opens the way to personalization: as we each slot a slightly different combination of books onto the identical fiberboard shelves, so we each dog-ear different pages.”
[2022-01-11 | highlight] “anywhere. Now I was the one whose books were being pawed by the occasional renter when I went away for a year. I’d return to find a book out of place and speculate about why the stranger I’d met when handing over the keys would have pulled that particular volume off the shelf”
[2022-01-11 | highlight] “Puzzling over which paperbacks inhabited which room in each new apartment, filling each landlord’s pre-scratched saucepan with the ingredients underlined in some stranger’s cookbook with some stranger’s pencil, I was already being primed to read over others’ shoulders.”
[2022-01-11 | highlight] “Yet, long as I’ve loved texts, I came later to loving books. I didn’t begin to notice paper or glue until my imaginative life moved in to someone else’s bookshelves. In my teens, my family moved five times—five countries, five sublets, and five sets of bookshelves.”
[2022-01-11 | highlight] “In the antebellum American South, states had passed laws forbidding enslaved men and women from reading out of fear of the dangerous messages expressed in prose. During Reconstruction, in contrast, bigots worried that sharing books across racial lines created undesirable bonds. In 1889, for example, North Carolina legislated that “books shall not be interchangeable between the white and colored schools, but shall continue to be used by the race first using them.” For these lawmakers as for Morrison’s characters, the meaning of the book didn’t just lie in its words”
[2022-01-11 | highlight] “Tracing across different cultures the shifting division of labor between the text (a series of words) and the book (a tangible thing) helps book historians understand reading as an out-of-body experience but also a complex coordination between the eyes that see the letters, the neck that cranes over its pages, the hands that hold the volume open. Disentangling timeless ideas from time-bound objects shows texts freeing readers from their surroundings but books anchoring readers more firmly within them. And tracing the networks of readers who sold, loaned, recommended, or even withheld books shows book historians how crucial middlemen and middlewomen are to the tête-à-tête between reader and author.”
[2022-01-11 | highlight] “Amazon customers are reviewing the text when they give David Copperfield four and a half stars for its “insight into the human condition”; they’re reviewing the book when they note “great price, good condition” but downgrade to three stars because “there’s a substantial blank area at the bottom of every page, so that the print could have been made much larger while maintaining the page count.”28
To grasp the point of distinguishing books from texts, think back to those students who spotted the onionskin pages of the pocket King James Bible in an instant but sat stumped when confronted with a paperback reprint of the same translation. Same text, different books: the very same sequence of words means something different—does something different—depending on whether it’s made for a desk or a pocket, a classroom or a church”
[2022-01-11 | highlight] “the smugglers who backpacked it across a border, and sometimes even the scholars who granted a second life to a piece of printed matter by enthroning it on their syllabus.”
[2022-01-11 | highlight] “A book dies on the shelf (or the server) unless it’s also a prompt for gestures, a catalyst of mental operations and emotional states, a badge of a reader’s or even just an owner’s identity.”
[2022-01-11 | highlight] “When my students notice how different an eighteenth-century sermon collection looks from a twentieth-century airport paperback, the difference between a laminated chemistry textbook and the electronic version on their laptop begins to look less unprecedented. In the other direction, though, they begin to see that electronic technologies are in fact creating something radically new. Digital tools may not be upending our reading practices any more drastically than changing forms of print did. What they are revolutionizing is our ideas about reading. In the process, they’re remaking the printed past.”
[2022-01-11 | highlight] “Some, called bibliographers, focus on the transmission of texts. (These texts can be electronic: one of the field’s most prominent scholars, Matthew Kirschenbaum, specializes in the history of word processing.) Some are more interested in the people who make these objects (whether that means authors or printers or publishers);”
[2022-01-11 | highlight] “More important, they’re picking up on what mixed signals any book gives about how and where and why to use it. Seeing the book as a technology means understanding it not just as a statement about the world outside its pages, but as a set of instructions about how those pages themselves should be handled and read.”
[2022-01-11 | highlight] “Prevented from seeing through the physical object to the words it contains, they become curious about the people and machines that manufactured it, the individuals and organizations that sold or gave it away, the librarians who placed it on now-dusty shelves, the backpacks in which it was once carried, and the fingers that wore down its pages.”
[2022-01-11 | highlight] “How much friction does your hand encounter when it runs along the page? Which surfaces are slipperiest, which pages noisiest? (Plates sandwiched in the middle scream biography; the tissue paper that covers illustrations has a different “rattle,” as the technical term goes, than printed paper.) Where in the book do the edges feel sharpest? (Monographs crisp progressively as readers lose interest, but students recognize reference books by the limp pages periodically punctuating unread neighbors.) Will the book stay open as you take notes, or are two hands needed to flatten the page spread? Does it seem to be bound for posterity or for the trash can?”
[2022-01-11 | highlight] “When we put books under a microscope rather than on a pedestal, we come to realize that what all printed books have in common is variety—across historical periods and even within a single culture. They come in different sizes and shapes (a hefty coffee-table book vs. a dainty pocket diary), are bound to their owners for different periods of time (a family Bible passed down from generation to generation or a textbook loaned to another student for the year), invite or at least allow different uses (reading or wrapping).
Those differences form one”
[2022-01-11 | highlight] “One journalist complained recently that “virtual books, like virtual holidays or virtual relationships, are not real.”24 Fair enough. But neither are the images conjured up by blobs of ink on pressed wood pulp. Books in whatever medium connect us with fictional characters, with dead or distant authors, and with fellow readers who may be distant in time (like the ones we meet via pencil scrawls in a library book), or in space (as with the other readers whose highlighting we see in an ebook or the hands flipping the same paperback bestseller, across the street or across the globe).”
[2022-01-11 | highlight] “form. Faced with the question of what counts as a book, linguist Naomi Baron recently reflected that “for more than 1,500 years, the answer was simple: a collection of pages with writing (or pictures) on them, bound together.… You could smell its binding. Admire it on a shelf. Lend it to a friend. Lose it. Burn it.”25”
[2022-01-11 | highlight] “Technologies have always generated some literary forms while making others unimaginable—whether the tool in question was a chisel or a typewriter. And literature has always been shaped by the tug-of-war between material objects that can be bought or borrowed, shelved or held, and experiences that unfold only in readers’ brains.”
[2022-01-11 | highlight] “Books counteracted the moral stigma of debt, because reading (or at least reading weighty tomes, rather than newspapers and supposedly trashy fiction) could be rebranded as a virtuous investment of time rather than a frivolous self-indulgence. Along with pianos, those multivolume encyclopedias without which (advertisers warned) no house would be a home paved the way for a credit economy that would eventually extend to everything from layaway for clothes to subprime mortgages for houses”
[2022-01-11 | highlight] “While late-medieval manuscripts circulated through something approaching a market (they weren’t always produced, as we would say today, “on demand”), each copy of a manuscript differed slightly from every other. A buyer of a printed book, in contrast, could know exactly what he or (occasionally) she was getting: see one copy, seen them all.
Because that standardization made it possible for books to be branded and advertised at a time when most objects were handmade and locally sold, print blazed the way for forms of marketing that would later spread to patent medicines, then to pretty much everything else”
[2022-01-11 | highlight] “As publishing entrepreneur Richard Nash explains, far from being “dragged kicking and screaming into each new area of capitalism… books not only are part and parcel of consumer capitalism, they virtually began it.”
[2022-01-11 | highlight] “Ever since Sven Birkerts titled his 1994 book The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age, a growing stack of titles have cast reading as out of step with their own present. Consider David Ulin’s The Lost Art of Reading: Why Books Matter in a Distracted Time (2010), Alan Jacobs’s The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction (2011), David Mikics’s Slow Reading in a Hurried Age (2013), Martha Pennington and Robert Waxler’s Why Reading Books Still Matters: The Power of Literature in Digital Times (2017), and Meghan Cox Gurdon’s The Enchanted Hours: The Miraculous Power of Reading Aloud in the Age of Distraction (2019). You’ll”
[2022-01-11 | highlight] “The nostalgia registered in “Exchange” typifies a moment when bytes, rather than bombs, were the threat from which readers needed shelter. This time, they huddled in libraries but also in the idea of the age-old printed book. In 2011, an otherwise sweeping history of media revolutions posited that “one format has remained virtually unchanged until recently: the book.”14 A few years later, an otherwise edgy art catalog declared that “the codex has sat like an anchored boat as the seas of change wash all around it but don’t affect it.”
[2022-01-11 | highlight] “Like candles, books have come to stand for the past—one less efficient than an electric light, the other less efficient than an electronic device, both therefore more atmospheric. But what exactly is the modernity against which these antiques provide a bulwark? One answer lies in Ray Bradbury’s short story “Exchange.” In this 1996 tribute to libraries, a veteran returns to his hometown to find that all of his childhood acquaintances have moved on. Only the local branch remains as he remembers it, with its faithful female staffer playing Penelope to the hero’s Odysseus. “Librarians save everything,” the prodigal reflects: “save” in the sense of “redeem,” but also “save” as in “preserve,” even “hoard”
[2022-01-11 | highlight] “The less we read texts, the more we look at books. And nowhere is that truer than on “Bookstagram,” the corner of Instagram that spread-eagles books in the hands of a reader—always female, rarely clad in much more than a hand-crocheted scarf. Don’t be fooled by their oops-you-caught-me postures: these young women are often on the payroll of a publishing house”
[2022-01-11 | highlight] “Digital-era readers were able to turn the book into such a symbol only because paperback-era readers had already forgotten the variety of forms that books had earlier taken and functions that they had earlier filled. Projecting backward the printed book’s current definition as not-app erases a long history of what would only later come to be called “interactivity”: readers underlined print, copied out passages, disbound books to arrange their pages in new orders”
[2022-01-11 | highlight] “As cheap and portable print sold everywhere and read anytime replaced monumental volumes tethered to particular occasions, a new kind of object became a proxy for a new kind of self. That self could forge bonds with a long-dead author’s mind, could make the book a stimulant or a sedative, a shield or a goad, a refuge or an arena. Show me how you want to read, and I’ll show you who you want to be.”
[2022-01-11 | highlight] “Where gentlemen had once fretted about the shilling shockers devoured by their wives, children, or servants, now bloggers began to confess, with rueful self-mockery, to their own inability to finish a book”
[2022-01-11 | highlight] “Hand-copied, recited, gifted, exchanged, printed books were the first social media.27 They started conversations; they started fights; and they connected each reader to others.”
[2022-01-11 | highlight] “They debated economics: Should print be sold or rented, lent or gifted, repaired or trashed? They argued even more vehemently about what would eventually come to be called ergonomics: the proper positioning of the hands that held books and the laps on which they lay. The history of reading is also a history of worrying, and those worries rule out any clean contrast between bookish virtue and digital vice.”
[2022-01-11 | highlight] “the spread of state-supported schools led to near-universal literacy in the West a few centuries after Gutenberg, reading provoked new anxieties. Best-selling lists of what to read were joined by bestsellers advising on how to read, and how not to. Trawling through these early how-to books, the French historian Roger Chartier realized that as the mere fact of being able to read came to be taken for granted, and as new technologies and changing laws multiplied the number of books owned by the average household, the distinction between literate and illiterate people gave way to finer distinctions within the reading public. To read was no longer enough. Nor was the trick even to read the right books. Rather, you now had to read in the right place, at the right pace, at the right time of day.”
[2022-01-11 | highlight] “Throughout the first few centuries of its existence, experts had already assumed print to be life changing—but with the exception of a few sacred texts, that change was most often thought to be one for the worse. Ministers warned against the distractibility engendered by squandering time and eyesight over a novel. Doctors diagnosed newspaper addicts, sickened not just by the ideas transmitted but by the sheer experience of wallowing in a wood-pulp world. The literate classes themselves felt embarrassed about what they read, or meant to read, or wished they hadn’t wasted a night devouring.”
[2022-01-11 | highlight] “During the Cold War, in the Eastern bloc and parts of Southern Africa, photocopiers shaped the circulation of news, providing a middle ground between handwritten documents (nimble, private, and participatory, good at cementing communities of like-minded individuals but inefficient for reaching large anonymous audiences) and the printing press (high start-up capital but low running costs, facilitating standardization but discouraging interaction, easy to scale up but also to regulate).”
[2022-01-11 | highlight] “Yes, the book can be a shell (essayist Alberto Manguel reminisces that “my library was my tortoise shell”) but it can also be an antenna or a spear.25 Seeing books thrust into the service of comfort and sanity and good taste, I started wanting to recover the book’s power to upset and unsettle and even anger readers”
[2022-01-11 | highlight] “In short, printed books gave birth to many of the capacities—and dangers—for which digital devices are now being faulted. Long before playlists, amateurs reshuffled and recombined snippets into new collections. Long before anyone spoke of “spreadable media,” texts survived in epigraphs for other texts. Long before anyone fretted about Amazon displacing bookstores, bookshops sold fish while clothing peddlers backpacked pamphlets door to door. Authors debated in print, as strenuously as today’s content providers do online, whether the written word should be rented or sold, licensed or owned, linked in or locked down.”
[2022-01-11 | highlight] “Each of these myths credits long-form print with producing a certain kind of individual. A longer view, though, makes books’ effects look less predictable, beginning with the simple question of whether they get read at all. Well before competition from social media, only a tiny minority of the volumes that rolled off the presses ever found a reader—let alone sparked the focus that smartphone-fingering fidgeters dream of recapturing”
[2022-01-11 | highlight] “Unfortunately for this hypothesis, the golden age of print was hardly a golden age for the habits of mind that digital natives trust the book to induce. Print, Chapter 2 will try to persuade you, has inspired efficient multitasking more often than rapt attention. And while some readers may have lost themselves in a book until their surroundings faded around them and they forgot all sense of time, we’ll see in Chapter 3 how consistently bedtime stories have paced circadian rhythms and morning papers have numbed commutes. The printed books now being deployed to cure mental and physical ills spent much of their long life, as Chapter 4 details, under suspicion of sickening and maddening their readers.”
[2022-01-11 | highlight] “problem, I began to think, didn’t lie in our devices so much as in our schedules. When we mourn the book, we’re really mourning the death of those in-between moments (waiting in line, riding a bus) that nineteenth-century changes in lighting and transportation made hospitable to light reading, and that twenty-first-century communications infrastructures made available to paid labor.”
[2022-01-11 | highlight] “One is what I’ll call the myth of exceptionalism—that is, twenty-first-century readers’ sense of living through an unprecedented change. The more I tried to figure out how much time different societies had actually carved out for reading, the more the data confirmed that successive audiovisual media did indeed chip away at the dead time once filled by books. I was surprised, though, to find that the strongest proof of print’s vulnerability to competition wasn’t the smartphone. The best-documented such competitor turned out to be TV, whose arrival in the Netherlands in the 1950s, for instance, coincided with a dramatic and elegantly charted drop in rates of pleasure reading”
[2022-01-11 | highlight] “Poetry collections whose crisp corners hinted that they’d never escaped the coffee table; romance novels crumpled from being hidden in an embarrassed teenager’s pocket, with well-fingered pages of seduction scenes interrupting landscape description whose pages retained like-new crispness; political polemics stained with beer from being read aloud at the pub to listeners too poor to buy their own copy, too illiterate to read to themselves, or too encumbered with a card game to hold their own book—each genre testified that serious, silent, solitary cover-to-cover reading has never been more than one of many uses to which print had been put.”
[2022-01-11 | highlight] “Or more precisely, Science. In 2013, that journal published a study concluding that reading about fictional characters correlates with more sophisticated theory of mind. More specifically, reading about characters in formally ambitious “literary” fiction did—for the authors discovered experimental subjects to be better at identifying the emotions expressed on faces or at understanding others’ false beliefs when they had just read prizewinning short stories than when they had just read less esthetically ambitious popular fiction.20 This latest version of the centuries-old attempt to distinguish trashy escapism from intellectually challenging and therefore morally respectable fiction was widely reported by journalists with their own investment in reading.”
[2022-01-11 | highlight] “volunteer. Four years later, a meta-analysis connected the frequency with which Canadians read books to the rate at which they donated and helped their neighbors.22 Also in 2008, a British study correlated pleasure reading inversely with divorce.23 Madame Bovary would have been surprised.”
[2022-01-11 | highlight] “No longer just a tool to ferry information from one brain to another, reading began to look like a panacea.
Fear seemed to have goaded booklovers into action. And alongside the urge to rescue reading came the itch to understand it. College courses on media history mushroomed. National health institutes funded randomized trials to test whether reading raises serotonin levels, lowers body-mass indexes, or combats insomnia and Alzheimer’s.18”
[2022-01-11 | highlight] “isn’t just the province of the old.
More fundamentally, the pages that follow will try to persuade you that the digital-age printed book isn’t really an old medium at all. Rather, it’s a format being reinvented by booklovers before our eyes. In that sense, our own era continues, rather than breaks with, a tradition of innovation that has seen new formats emerge over and over again for half a millennium.”
[2022-01-11 | highlight] “Sales of printed books rebounded in the decade that followed—rising as steadily as electronic book sales leveled off.4 In the United States, 2011 was the first year in which more ebooks were sold than hardcovers; by 2016, though, hardbacks were outstripping ebooks once again.5 And since most of the books we read weren’t bought yesterday, it may be even more telling that in that same year, twice as many Americans read glued or sewn wood pulp than read an electronic book.6 As I upload this manuscript late in 2018, new industry reports inform me that print sales have increased in the United States for each of the past four years.7 Last year, sales revenue from hardbacks and paperbacks outstripped revenue from ebooks by more than $300 million.8”

=== Bullshit Jobs — David Graeber ===
[2022-01-09 | highlight] “Of course, some might argue that Obama was being disingenuous here, and downplaying the political power of the private health industry, in the same way that politicians justified bank bailouts by claiming it was in the interest of millions of minor bank employees who might otherwise have been laid off—a concern they most certainly do not evince when, say, transit or textile workers are faced with unemployment. But the very fact that he was willing to make the argument is revealing.”
[2022-01-09 | highlight] “I don’t think in ideological terms. I never have,” Obama said, continuing on the health care theme. “Everybody who supports single-payer health care says, ‘Look at all this money we would be saving from insurance and paperwork.’ That represents one million, two million, three million jobs [filled by] people who are working at Blue Cross Blue Shield or Kaiser or other places. What are we doing with them? Where are we employing them?”9

I would encourage the reader to reflect on this passage because it might be considered a smoking gun. What is the president saying here? He acknowledges that millions of jobs in medical insurance companies like Kaiser or Blue Cross are unnecessary.”
[2022-01-09 | highlight] “But it remains true that “More Jobs” is the one political slogan that both Left and Right can always agree on.8 They differ only about the most expedient means to produce the jobs. Banners held aloft at a union march calling for jobs never also specify that those jobs should serve some useful purpose. It’s just assumed that they will—which, of course, means that often they won’t. Similarly, when right-wing politicians call for tax cuts to put more money in the hands of “job creators,” they never specify whether those jobs will be good for anything; it’s simply assumed that if the market produced them, they will be. In this climate, one might say that political pressure is being placed on those managing the economy similar to the directives once coming out of the Kremlin; it’s just that the source is more diffuse, and much of it falls on the private sector.”
[2022-01-06 | highlight] “The most common complaint among those trapped in offices doing nothing all day is just how difficult it is to repurpose the time for anything worthwhile. One might imagine that leaving millions of well-educated young men and women without any real work responsibilities but with access to the internet—which is, potentially, at least, a repository of almost all human knowledge and cultural achievement—might spark some sort of Renaissance. Nothing remotely along these lines has taken place. Instead, the situation has sparked an efflorescence of social media (Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Twitter): basically, of forms of electronic media that lend themselves to being produced and consumed while pretending to do something else.”
[2022-01-06 | highlight] “Once time was money, it became possible to speak of “spending time,” rather than just “passing” it—also of wasting time, killing time, saving time, losing time, racing against time, and so forth. Puritan, Methodist, and evangelical preachers soon began instructing their flocks about the “husbandry of time,” proposing that the careful budgeting of time was the essence of morality. Factories began employing time clocks; workers came to be expected to punch the clock upon entering and leaving; charity schools designed to teach the poor discipline and punctuality gave way to public school systems where students of all social classes were made to get up and march from room to room each hour at the sound of a bell, an arrangement self-consciously designed to train children for future lives of paid factory labor.25”
[2022-01-06 | highlight] “a possession. Everyone was encouraged to see time as did the medieval merchant: as a finite property to be carefully budgeted and disposed of, much like money. What’s more, the new technologies also allowed any person’s fixed time on earth to be chopped up into uniform units that could be bought and sold for money.”
[2022-01-06 | highlight] “To give an obvious example: if there are twelve hours from dawn to dusk, there’s little point saying a place is three hours’ walk away when you don’t know the season when someone is traveling, since winter hours will be half the length of summer ones. When I lived in Madagascar, I found that rural people—who had little use for clocks—still often described distance the old-fashioned way and said that to walk to another village would take two cookings of a pot of rice. In medieval Europe, people spoke similarly of something as taking “three paternosters,” or two boilings of an egg. This sort of thing is extremely common.”
[2022-01-06 | highlight] “The modern morality of “You’re on my time; I’m not paying you to lounge around” is very different. It is the indignity of a man who feels he’s being robbed. A worker’s time is not his own; it belongs to the person who bought it. Insofar as an employee is not working, she is stealing something for which the employer paid good money (or, anyway, has promised to pay good money for at the end of the week). By this moral logic, it’s not that idleness is dangerous. Idleness is theft.”
[2022-01-06 | highlight] “The closest he would have likely been able to come would be the idea of renting the potter as a slave for a certain limited time period—a day, for instance—during which time the potter would, like any slave, be obliged to do whatever his master ordered. But for this very reason, he would probably find it impossible to locate a potter willing to enter into such an arrangement. To be a slave, to be forced to surrender one’s free will and become the mere instrument of another, even temporarily, was considered the most degrading thing that could possibly befall a human being.19”
[2022-01-05 | highlight] “But all evidence we have indicates that the modern form of make-work that Patrick and Brendan are complaining about is historically new. This is in part because most people who have ever existed have assumed that normal human work patterns take the form of periodic intense bursts of energy, followed by relaxation, followed by slowly picking up again toward another intense bout. This is what farming is like, for instance: all-hands-on-deck mobilization around planting and harvest, but otherwise, whole seasons taken up largely by minding and mending things, minor projects, and puttering around. But ”
[2022-01-05 | highlight] “If make-believe play is the purest expression of human freedom, make-believe work imposed by others is the purest expression of lack of freedom. It’s not entirely surprising, then, that the first historical evidence we have for the notion that certain categories of people really ought to be working at all times, even if there’s nothing to do, and that work needs to be made up to fill their time, even if there’s nothing that really needs doing, refers to people who are not free: prisoners and slaves, two categories that historically have largely overlapped.11”
[2022-01-05 | highlight] “In fact, experiments have also shown that if one first allows a child to discover and experience the delight in being able to cause a certain effect, and then suddenly denies it to them, the results are dramatic: first rage, refusal to engage, and then a kind of catatonic folding in on oneself and withdrawing from the world entirely. Psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Francis Broucek called this the “trauma of failed influence” and suspected that such traumatic experiences might lie behind many mental health issues later in life.9
If this is so, then it begins to give us a sense of why being trapped in a job where one is treated as if one were usefully employed, and has to play along with the pretense that one is usefully employed, but at the same time, is keenly aware one is not usefully employed, would have devastating effects. It’s not just an assault on the person’s sense of self-importance but also a direct attack on the very foundations of the sense that one even is a self. A human being unable to have a meaningful impact on the world ceases to exist.
a”
[2022-01-05 | highlight] “I’m not altogether familiar with how the whole thing works, but a lot of this work is funded by the Feds and tied to our student loans. It’s part of a whole federal system designed to assign students a lot of debt—thereby promising to coerce them into labor in the future, as student debts are so hard to get rid of—accompanied by a bullshit education program designed to train and prepare us for our future bullshit jobs.”
[2022-01-05 | highlight] “This is what happens, of course, when you first open the entire world of social and political possibility to a young mind by sending it to college and then tell it to stop thinking and tidy up already tidy shelves. Parents now feel it is important that young minds should have this experience. But what, precisely, was Patrick supposed to be learning through this exercise”
[2022-01-05 | highlight] “There was once a time when most students in college whose parents could afford it, or who qualified for scholarships or assistance, received a stipend. It was considered a good thing that there might be a few years in a young man’s or woman’s life where money was not the primary motivation; where he or she could thus be free to pursue other forms of value: say, philosophy, poetry, athletics, sexual experimentation, altered states of consciousness, politics, or the history of Western art. Nowadays it is considered important they should work.”
[2022-01-05 | highlight] “But being forced to scam someone is altogether different. In such circumstances, it’s hard not to feel you’re ultimately in the same situation as the person you’re scamming: you’re both being pressured and manipulated by your employer, only in your case, with the added indignity that you’re also betraying the trust of someone whose side you should be on.”
[2022-01-05 | highlight] “After writing this I presented my analysis to Eric, who confirmed it and added details: “I could definitely see that the middle- and upper-middle-class kids in the lower rungs of that job were seeing it as a path to career advancement—partly in terms of how they socialized around work (watching the rugby on a weekend in someone’s suburban Bovis-home conservatory; cocktails in tacky wine bars but always networking, networking), and that for some it was merely a stop-gap that filled in an otherwise-blank spot on the CV until a family member found them a better opportunity.” He added, “It’s interesting that you mention the idea of the caring classes. My father’s first remark when I quit that position was to say that I was a nonsensical idiot to turn down such a good paycheck. His second was to ask, ‘What good could that job do for anyone anyway?’ ”
On the other hand, Eric pointed out he does now have two advanced degrees, a research fellowship, and a successful career—he attributes much of this to the knowledge of social theory he gained while living in the squat.”
[2022-01-05 | highlight] “Well, likely as not, he would have played along with the charade. Instead of using phony business trips to practice forms of self-annihilation, anti-Eric would have used them to accumulate social capital, connections that would eventually allow him to move on to better things. He would have treated the job as a stepping-stone, and this very project of professional advancement would have given him a sense of purpose. But such attitudes and dispositions don’t come naturally. Children from professional backgrounds are taught to think like that from an early age. Eric, who had not been trained to act and think this way, couldn’t bring himself to do it. As a result, he ended up, for a time, at least, in a squat growing tomatoes”
[2022-01-05 | highlight] “In fact, you make sure the person you get as doorknob polisher is actually an experienced gardener. So far, so good. The problem is, in a corporate environment, you can’t just summon a new servant, make up an impressive-sounding title for him (“High Seneschal of the Entryways”), and tell him his real job is to take over when the gardener is drunk. You have to come up with an elaborate fake description of what a doorknob polisher would, in fact, do; coach your new gardener in how to pretend he’s the best doorknob polisher in the kingdom; and then use the description of his duties as the basis of periodic box-ticking performance reviews.”
[2022-01-05 | highlight] “Once that’s done, there has to be a narrative job announcement of the same ilk. To be eligible for hire, the applicant must present a resume incorporating all the themes and phraseology of the announcement so that the hiring software our agency uses will recognize their qualifications. After the person is hired, their duties must be spelled out in yet another document that will form the basis for annual performance appraisals.”
[2022-01-05 | highlight] “Either she could move the incompetent into a bullshit position where he had no meaningful responsibilities, or, if no such position was currently available, she could leave him in place and hire someone else to really do his job. But if you take the latter course, another problem arises: you can’t recruit someone for the incompetent’s job, since the incompetent already has that job. Instead, you have to make up a new job with an elaborate job description that you know to be bullshit, because, really, you’re hiring that person to do something else. Then you have to go through the motions of pretending the new person is ideally qualified to do the made-up job you don’t really want him or her to do. All this involves a great deal of work.”
[2022-01-05 | highlight] “He also says he keeps trying to allocate himself real work on the sly, but when he does so, his own superiors eventually notice and tell him to cut it out. But then, when he sent in his testimony, Ben had only been at the job for two and a half months—which might explain his candor. If he does succumb eventually and accepts his new role in life, he will come to understand that, as another testimony put it, “The entire job of middle management is to ensure the lower-level people hit their ‘productivity numbers’ ”—and will therefore start coming up with formal statistical metrics that his underlings can try to falsify.”
[2022-01-05 | highlight] “Whereas the first variety of taskmaster is merely useless, the second variety does actual harm. These are taskmasters whose primary role is to create bullshit tasks for others to do, to supervise bullshit, or even to create entirely new bullshit jobs. One might also refer to them as bullshit generators. Type 2 taskmasters may also have real duties in addition to their role as taskmaster, but if all or most of what they do is create bullshit tasks for others, then their own jobs can be classified as bullshit too.”
[2022-01-05 | highlight] “I am using the term “box tickers” to refer to employees who exist only or primarily to allow an organization to be able to claim it is doing something that, in fact, it is not doing. The following testimony is from a woman hired to coordinate leisure activities in a care home:

Betsy: Most of my job was to interview residents and fill out a recreation form that listed their preferences. That form was then logged on a computer and promptly forgotten about forever”
[2022-01-05 | highlight] “Throughout history, prominent men have wandered about oblivious to half of what’s going on around them, treading on a thousand toes; it was typically their wives, sisters, mothers, or daughters who were left with the responsibility of performing the emotional labor of soothing egos, calming nerves, and negotiating solutions to the problems they created. In a more material sense, duct taping might be considered a classic working-class function. The architect may come up with a plan that looks stunning on paper, but it’s the builder who has to figure out how to actually install electrical sockets in a circular room or to use real duct tape to hold things together that in reality simply don’t fit together the way the blueprints say they should.”
[2022-01-05 | highlight] “with the growing reliance on free software (freeware), paid employment is increasingly reduced to duct taping. Coders are often happy to perform the interesting and rewarding work on core technologies for free at night but, since that means they have less and less incentive to think about how such creations will ultimately be made compatible, that means the same coders are reduced during the day to the tedious (but paid) work of making them fit together. This is a very important insight, and I’ll be discussing some of its implications at length later; but for now, let’s just consider the notion of duct taping itself.”
[2022-01-05 | highlight] “When you subtly enhance the appearance of celebrities, in contrast, you are trying to change viewers’ unconscious assumptions about what everyday reality—in this case, of men’s and women’s bodies—ought to be like, so as to create an uncomfortable feeling that their lived reality is itself an inadequate substitute for the real thing. Where honest illusions add joy into the world, dishonest ones are intentionally aimed toward convincing people their worlds are a tawdry and miserable sort of place.”
[2022-01-05 | highlight] “When I asked what these modest graves were, I would always be told these were his “soldiers”—really a euphemism for “slaves.” The meaning was clear: to be an aristocrat meant to have the power to order others around. Even in death, if you didn’t have underlings, you couldn’t really claim to be a noble.”
[2022-01-05 | highlight] “In other cases, as with Ophelia, the flunkies end up effectively doing the bosses’ jobs for them. This, of course, was the traditional role of female secretaries (now relabeled “administrative assistants”) working for male executives during most of the twentieth century: while in theory secretaries were there just to answer the phone, take dictation, and do some light filing, in fact, they often ended up doing 80 percent to 90 percent of their bosses’ jobs, and sometimes, 100 percent of its nonbullshit aspects. It would be fascinating—though probably impossible—to write a history of books, designs, plans, and documents attributed to famous men that were actually written by their secretaries.11”
[2022-01-05 | highlight] “We are divided between two organizations and two buildings. If my boss (the boss of the whole place, in fact) goes to the other building, I have to fill in a form to book a room for her. Every time. It is absolute insanity, but it certainly keeps the receptionist over there very busy and therefore, indispensable. It also makes her appear very organized, juggling and filing all this paperwork. It occurs to me that this is what they really mean in job ads when they say that they expect you to make office procedures more efficient: that you create more bureaucracy to fill the time.”
[2022-01-05 | highlight] “And in that role, I do have actual work tasks that need doing, simply because the people I assist are either too “busy” or too important to do this stuff themselves. In fact, most of the time, I seem to be the only one at my workplace who has something to do. Some days I run around frantically, whilst most of the midlevel managers sit around and stare at a wall, seemingly bored to death and just trying to kill time doing pointless things (like that one guy who rearranges his backpack for a half hour every day).”
[2022-01-05 | highlight] “I was paid two hundred dollars per week, cash, literally from the broker’s wallet, for making him look like a high roller. But this didn’t just make for social capital for the broker with regards to his clients; in the office itself, being a broker with your own cold caller was a status symbol, and an important one in such a hypermasculine, hypercompetitive office environment. I was some kind of totem figure for him. Owning me could mean the difference between his getting a meeting with a visiting regional head or not; but for the most part, it just put him on a slightly higher rung on the social ladder of the workplace.”
[2022-01-05 | highlight] “Receptionists are required as a Badge of Seriousness even if there’s nothing else for them to do. Other flunkies are Badges of Importance. The following account is from Jack, who was hired as a cold caller in a low-level securities trading firm. Such firms, he explains, “operate by stolen corporate directories: internal company phonebooks that some enterprising individual has stolen a physical copy of and then sold to various firms.” Brokers then call upper-level employees of the companies and try to pitch them stocks.”
[2022-01-05 | highlight] “grandee’s household, and many of those who are, are expected to do at least some actual work; but especially at the top of the pyramid, there is usually a certain portion whose job it is to basically just stand around and look impressive.5”
[2022-01-05 | highlight] “As a result, it is indeed possible to say there are partly bullshit jobs, mostly bullshit jobs, and purely and entirely bullshit jobs. This just happens to be a book about the latter (or, to be precise, about entirely or overwhelmingly bullshit jobs—not mostly bullshit jobs, where the meter hovers anywhere near 50 percent).”
[2022-01-05 | highlight] “Not to mention, she added, the fact that the amount of money invested in keeping them dancing on boxes could, if redirected, easily suffice to head off the threat of climate change. “The sex industry makes it evident that the most valuable thing that many women can offer is their bodies as sexual commodities when they are very young. It determines that many women earn more at eighteen to twenty-five than they ever do again in their lives. This is definitely the case in my own life”—the author being a successful academic and author who still doesn’t make as much a year as she once might have in three months’ stripping.”
[2022-01-05 | highlight] “The most compelling argument to this effect was from a former exotic dancer, now professor, who made a case that most sex work should be considered a bullshit job because, while she acknowledged that sex work clearly did answer a genuine consumer demand, something was terribly, terribly wrong with any society that effectively tells the vast majority of its female population they are worth more dancing on boxes between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five than they will be at any subsequent point in their lives, whatever their talents or accomplishments. If the same woman can make five times as much money stripping as she could teaching as a world-recognized scholar, could not the stripping job be considered bullshit simply on that basis?”
[2022-01-05 | highlight] “In the latter case, most of the time, what the customer is paying for anyway is mainly just the ability to say she paid $1,500 for a haircut, or perhaps that he got his hair done by the same stylist as Kim Kardashian or Tom Cruise. We are speaking of overt displays of wastefulness and extravagance. Now, one could certainly make the argument that there’s a deep structural affinity between wasteful extravagance and bullshit, and theorists of economic psychology from Thorstein Veblen, to Sigmund Freud, to Georges Bataille have pointed out that at the very pinnacle of the wealth pyramid—think here of Donald Trump’s gilded elevators—there is a very thin line between extreme luxury and total crap. (There’s a reason why in dreams, gold is often symbolized by excrement, and vice versa.)”
[2022-01-05 | highlight] “But this pressure has been directed almost exclusively at the people at the bottom of the pyramid, the ones who are actually making, maintaining, fixing, or transporting things. Anyone forced to wear a uniform in the exercise of his daily labors, for instance, is likely to be hard-pressed.26 FedEx and UPS delivery workers have backbreaking schedules designed with “scientific” efficiency. In the upper echelons of those same companies, things are not the same.”
[2022-01-05 | highlight] “This is always represented as exactly what would never happen under capitalism. The last thing a private firm, competing with other private firms, would do is to hire people it doesn’t actually need. If anything, the usual complaint about capitalism is that it’s too efficient, with private workplaces endlessly hounding employees with constant speed-ups, quotas, and surveillance.”
[2022-01-05 | highlight] “Even more, public and private bureaucracies have become so increasingly entangled that it’s often very difficult to tell them apart. That’s one reason I started this chapter the way I did, with the story of a man working for a private firm contracting with the German military. Not only did it highlight how wrong it is to assume that bullshit jobs exist largely in government bureaucracies, but also it illustrates how “market reforms” almost invariably create more bureaucracy, not less.25 As I pointed out in an earlier book, The Utopia of Rules, if you complain about getting some bureaucratic run-around from your bank, bank officials are likely to tell you it’s all the fault of government regulations;”
[2022-01-05 | highlight] “Once, while serving time in exile at a Siberian prison camp, Dostoyevsky developed the theory that the worst torture one could possibly devise would be to force someone to endlessly perform an obviously pointless task. Even though convicts sent to Siberia had theoretically been sentenced to “hard labor,” he observed, the work wasn’t actually all that hard. Most peasants worked far harder. But peasants were working at least partly for themselves. In prison camps, the “hardness” of the labor was the fact that the laborer got nothing out of it:

It once came into my head that if it were desired to reduce a man to nothing—to punish him atrociously, to crush him in such a manner that the most hardened murderer would tremble before such a punishment, and take fright beforehand—it would only be necessary to give to his work a character of complete uselessness, even to absurdity.”
[2022-01-05 | highlight] “Shit jobs tend to be blue collar and pay by the hour, whereas bullshit jobs tend to be white collar and salaried. Those who work shit jobs tend to be the object of indignities; they not only work hard but also are held in low esteem for that very reason. But at least they know they’re doing something useful. Those who work bullshit jobs are often surrounded by honor and prestige; they are respected as professionals, well paid, and treated as high achievers—as the sort of people who can be justly proud of what they do. Yet secretly they are aware that they have achieved nothing; they feel they have done nothing to earn the consumer toys with which they fill their lives; they feel it’s all based on a lie—as, indeed, it is.”
[2022-01-05 | highlight] “Look, I meet a lot of these people on Wall Street on a regular basis right now . . . I know them. These are the people I have lunch with. And I am going to put it very bluntly: I regard the moral environment as pathological. [These people] have no responsibility to pay taxes; they have no responsibility to their clients; they have no responsibility to counterparties in transactions. They are tough, greedy, aggressive, and feel absolutely out of control in a quite literal sense, and they have gamed the system to a remarkable extent. They genuinely believe they have a God-given right to take as much money as they possibly can in any way that they can get it, legal or otherwise.
If you look at the campaign contributions, which I happened to do yesterday for another purpose, the financial markets are the number one campaign contributors in the US system now. We have a corrupt politics to the core . . . both parties are up to their necks in this.
But what it’s led to is this sense of impunity that is really stunning, and you feel it on the individual level right now. And it’s very, very unhealthy, I[…]”
[2022-01-05 | highlight] “It is possible that corporate lobbyists or financial consultants genuinely subscribe to a theory of social value that holds their work to be essential to the health and prosperity of the nation. It is possible they therefore sleep securely in their beds, confident that their work is a blessing for everyone around them. I don’t know, but I suspect this is more likely to be true as one moves up the food chain, since it would appear to be a general truth that the more harm a category of powerful people do in the world, the more yes-men and propagandists will tend to accumulate around them, coming up with reasons why they are really doing good—and the more likely it is that at least some of those powerful people will believe them”
[2022-01-05 | highlight] “The real sticky problem comes in when it’s a question of whether certain kinds of work (say, telemarketing, market research, consulting) are bullshit—that is, whether they can be said to produce any sort of positive social value. Here, all I’m saying is that it’s best to defer to the judgment of those who do that kind of work. Social value, after all, is largely just what people think it is. In which case, who else is in a better position to judge? In this instance, I’d say: if the preponderance of those engaged in a certain occupation privately believe their work is of no social value, one should proceed along the assumption they are right.18”
[2022-01-05 | highlight] “Final Working Definition: a bullshit job is a form of paid employment that is so completely pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious that even the employee cannot justify its existence even though, as part of the conditions of employment, the employee feels obliged to pretend that this is not the case.”
[2022-01-05 | highlight] “The reader may have noticed a certain ambiguity in my initial definition. I describe bullshit jobs as involving tasks the holder considers to be “pointless, unnecessary, or even pernicious.” But, of course, jobs that have no significant effect on the world and jobs that have pernicious effects on the world are hardly the same thing. Most of us would agree that a Mafia hit man does more harm than good in the world, overall; but could you really call Mafia hit man a bullshit job? That just feels somehow wrong.”
[2022-01-05 | highlight] “The German military has been accused of many things over the years, but inefficiency was rarely one of them. Still, a rising tide of bullshit soils all boats. In the twenty-first century, even panzer divisions have come to be surrounded by a vast penumbra of sub-, sub-sub-, and sub-sub-subcontractors; tank commanders are obliged to perform complex and exotic bureaucratic rituals in order to move equipment from one room to another, even as those providing the paperwork secretly post elaborate complaints to blogs about how idiotic the whole thing is.”
[2022-01-05 | highlight] “completely pointless that even the person who has to perform it every day cannot convince himself there’s a good reason for him to be doing it. He might not be able to admit this to his coworkers—often there are very good reasons not to do so. But he is convinced the job is pointless nonetheless.
So let this stand as an initial provisional definition:

Provisional Definition: a bullshit job is a form of employment that is so completely pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious that even the employee cannot justify its existence.

Some jobs are so pointless that no one even notices if the person who has the job vanishes. This usually happens in the public sector:”
[2022-01-05 | highlight] “There is something very wrong with what we have made ourselves. We have become a civilization based on work—not even “productive work” but work as an end and meaning in itself. We have come to believe that men and women who do not work harder than they wish at jobs they do not particularly enjoy are bad people unworthy of love, care, or assistance from their communities. It is as if we have collectively acquiesced to our own enslavement. The main political reaction to our awareness that half the time we are engaged in utterly meaningless or even counterproductive activities—usually under the orders of a person we dislike—is to rankle with resentment over the fact there might be others out there who are not in the same trap. As a result, hatred, resentment, and suspicion have become the glue that holds society together. This is a disastrous state of affairs. I wish it to end.”
[2022-01-05 | highlight] “There’s a lot of questions one could ask here, starting with, What does it say about our society that it seems to generate an extremely limited demand for talented poet-musicians but an apparently infinite demand for specialists in corporate law? (Answer: If 1 percent of the population controls most of the disposable wealth, what we call “the market” reflects what they think is useful or important, not anybody else.) But even more, it shows that most people in pointless jobs are ultimately aware of it. In fact, I’m not sure I’ve ever met a corporate lawyer who didn’t think their job was bullshit. The same goes for almost all the new industries outlined above. There is a whole class of salaried professionals that, should you meet them at parties and admit that you do something that might be considered interesting (an anthropologist, for example), will want to avoid even discussing their line of work entirely. Give them a few drinks, and they will launch into tirades about how pointless and stupid their job really is.”
[2022-01-05 | highlight] “In the year 1930, John Maynard Keynes predicted that, by century’s end, technology would have advanced sufficiently that countries like Great Britain or the United States would have achieved a fifteen-hour work week. There’s every reason to believe he was right. In technological terms, we are quite capable of this. And yet it didn’t happen. Instead, technology has been marshaled, if anything, to figure out ways to make us all work more. In order to achieve this, jobs have had to be created that are, effectively, pointless. Huge swathes of people, in Europe and North America in particular, spend their entire working lives performing tasks they secretly believe do not really need to be performed. The moral and spiritual damage that comes from this situation is profound. It is a scar across our collective soul. Yet virtually no one talks about it.”

=== Escape from Freedom — Erich Fromm ===
[2022-01-09 | highlight] “The market, whether it is the commodity or the labor market, regulates these relations. Thus the individual, primarily alone and self-sufficient, enters into economic relations with others as means to one end: to sell and to buy. Freud’s concept of human relations is essentially the same: the individual appears fully equipped with biologically given drives, which need to be satisfied. In order to satisfy them, the individual enters into relations with other “objects.” Other individuals thus are always a means to one’s end, the satisfaction of strivings which in themselves originate in the individual before he enters into contact with others. The field of human relations in Freud’s sense is similar to the market—it is an exchange of satisfaction of biologically given needs, in which the relationship to the other individual is always a means to an end but never an end in itself.”
[2022-01-09 | highlight] “Freud always considers the individual in his relations to others. These relations as Freud sees them, however, are similar to the economic relations to others which are characteristic of the individual in capitalist society. Each person works for himself, individualistically, at his own risk, and not primarily in co-operation with others. But he is not a Robinson Crusoe; he needs others, as customers, as employees, or as employers. He must buy and sell, give and take”
[2022-01-09 | highlight] “culture: the more suppression, the more culture (and the more danger of neurotic disturbances). The relation of the individual to society in Freud’s theory is essentially a static one: the individual remains virtually the same and becomes changed only in so far as society exercises greater pressure on his natural drives (and thus enforces more sublimation) or allows more satisfaction (and thus sacrifices culture).”
[2022-01-09 | highlight] “man. For Freud, the individual of his culture represented “man,” and those passions and anxieties that are characteristic for man in modern society were looked upon as eternal forces rooted in the biological constitution of man”
[2022-01-09 | highlight] “Freud accepted the traditional belief in a basic dichotomy between man and society, as well as the traditional doctrine of the evilness of human nature. Man, to him, is fundamentally antisocial. Society must domesticate him, must allow some direct satisfaction of biological—and hence, ineradicable—drives; but for the most part society must refine and adroitly check man’s basic impulses.”
[2022-01-09 | highlight] “the suppressed drives turn into strivings that are culturally valuable and thus become the human basis for culture. Freud chose the word sublimation for this strange transformation from suppression into civilized behavior. If the amount of suppression is greater than the capacity for sublimation, individuals become neurotic and it is necessary to allow the lessening of suppression. Generally”
[2022-01-09 | highlight] “Nietzsche had disturbed the complacent optimism of the nineteenth century; so had Marx in a different way. Another warning had come somewhat later from Freud. To be sure, he and most of his disciples had only a very naive notion of what goes on in society, and most of his applications of psychology to social problems were misleading constructions; yet, by devoting his interest to the phenomena of individual emotional and mental disturbances, he led us to the top of the volcano and made us look into the boiling crater”
[2022-01-09 | highlight] “The dark and diabolical forces of man’s nature were relegated to the Middle Ages and to still earlier periods of history, and they were explained by lack of knowledge or by the cunning schemes of deceitful kings and priests.”
[2022-01-09 | highlight] “Even writers like Hobbes, who recognized lust for power and hostility as driving forces in man, explained the existence of these forces as a logical result of self-interest: since men are equal and thus have the same wish for happiness, and since there is not enough wealth to satisfy them all to the same extent, they necessarily fight against each other and want power to secure the future enjoyment of what they have at present. But Hobbes’s picture became outmoded. The more the middle class succeeded in breaking down the power of the former political or religious rulers, the more men succeeded in mastering nature, and the more millions of individuals became economically independent, the more did one come to believe in a rational world and in man as an essentially rational being”
[2022-01-09 | highlight] “Analysis of the human aspect of freedom and of authoritarianism forces us to consider a general problem, namely, that of the role which psychological factors play as active forces in the social process; and this eventually leads to the problem of the interaction of psychological, economic, and ideological factors in the social process. Any attempt to understand the attraction which Fascism exercises upon great nations compels us to recognize the role of psychological factors. For we are dealing here with a political system which, essentially, does not appeal to rational forces of self-interest, but which arouses and mobilizes diabolical forces in man which we had believed to be nonexistent, or at least to have died out long ago. The”
[2022-01-09 | highlight] “What is it that creates in men an insatiable lust for power? Is it the strength of their vital energy—or is it a fundamental weakness and inability to experience life spontaneously and lovingly? What are the psychological conditions that make for the strength of these strivings? What are the social conditions upon which such psychological conditions in turn are based?”
[2022-01-09 | highlight] “Is there not also, perhaps, besides an innate desire for freedom, an instinctive wish for submission? If there is not, how can we account for the attraction which submission to a leader has for so many today? Is submission always to an overt authority, or is there also submission to internalized authorities, such as duty or conscience, to inner compulsions or to anonymous authorities like public opinion? Is there a hidden satisfaction in submitting, and what is its essence?”
[2022-01-09 | highlight] “What is freedom as a human experience? Is the desire for freedom something inherent in human nature? Is it an identical experience regardless of what kind of culture a person lives in, or is it something different according to the degree of individualism reached in a particular society? Is freedom only the absence of external pressure or is it also the presence of something—and if so, of what? What are the social and economic factors in society that make for the striving for freedom? Can freedom become a burden, too heavy for man to bear, something he tries to escape from? Why then is it that freedom is for many a cherished goal and for others a threat?”
[2022-01-09 | highlight] “It is the purpose of this book to analyze those dynamic factors in the character structure of modern man, which made him want to give up freedom in Fascist countries and which so widely prevail in millions of our own people”
[2022-01-09 | highlight] “by John Dewey that I express the thought in his words: “The serious threat to our democracy,” he says, “is not the existence of foreign totalitarian states. It is the existence within our own personal attitudes and within our own institutions of conditions which have given a victory to external authority, discipline, uniformity and dependence upon The Leader in foreign countries. The battlefield is also accordingly here—within ourselves and our institutions.”2”
[2022-01-09 | highlight] “We have been compelled to recognize that millions in Germany were as eager to surrender their freedom as their fathers were to fight for it; that instead of wanting freedom, they sought for ways of escape from it; that other millions were indifferent and did not believe the defense of freedom to be worth fighting and dying for. We also recognize that the crisis of democracy is not a peculiarly Italian or German problem, but one confronting every modern state. Nor does it matter which symbols the enemies of human freedom choose: freedom is not less endangered if attacked in the name of anti-Fascism than in that of outright Fascism.1 This”
[2022-01-09 | highlight] “In the long and virtually continuous battle for freedom, however, classes that were fighting against oppression at one stage sided with the enemies of freedom when victory was won and new privileges were to be defended.”

=== Rasputin — Douglas Smith ===
[2022-01-09 | highlight] “There is no Rasputin without the stories about Rasputin”
[2022-01-09 | highlight] “Rasputin’s story is a tragedy, and not just that of one man but of an entire nation, for in his life—with its complicated struggles about faith and morality, about pleasure and sin, about tradition and change, about duty and power, and their limits—and in his bloody, violent end, we can discern the story of Russia itself in the early twentieth century. Rasputin was neither a devil nor a saint, but this made him no less remarkable and his life no less important to the twilight of tsarist Russia.”
[2022-01-09 | highlight] “The deeper I went into my research, the more convinced I became that one of the most important facts about Rasputin, the thing that made him such an extraordinary and powerful figure, was less what he was doing and more what everyone thought he was doing. No one could be certain about Rasputin’s origins, about his sexual habits, about his possible connection to underground religious sects, and, most importantly, about the extent of his power at court and the nature of his relationship with the emperor and empress. The most important truth about Rasputin was the one Russians carried around in their heads.”
[2022-01-09 | highlight] “For this is in fact where the destruction comes from, the wild exaggerations. What really matters is not what sort of influence Grishka has on the Emperor, but what sort of influence the people think he has. This is precisely what is undermining the authority of the Tsar and the Dynasty”
[2022-01-09 | highlight] “Part of the problem lay in the fact that for most of the twentieth century Rasputin’s archives in the Soviet Union were closed to researchers, and this led to a situation in which the same limited number of published sources, with the same anecdotes and stories, were repeated again and again. This situation has changed only in recent years: Russia’s archives have finally begun to give up their secrets”
[2022-01-09 | highlight] “on 11 March 1917 the Provisional Government established the Extraordinary Commission of Inquiry for the Investigation of Malfeasance in Office of Former Ministers, Chief Administrators, and other Persons in High Office of both the Civil, as well as Military and Naval Services.* Part of the Commission’s remit was uncovering Rasputin’s presumed nefarious influence on state affairs”
[2022-01-09 | highlight] “Desperate to shift any blame from themselves onto Rasputin, they made him the scapegoat for Russia’s misery. This strategy became the dominant trope for much of the literature on Rasputin, perhaps best exemplified by Prince Felix Yusupov’s Lost Splendor, the memoir of Rasputin’s murderer, in which his victim becomes Satan himself.”
[2022-01-09 | highlight] “The false image of Rasputin the devil was created to undermine the legitimacy and sacred aura of the throne and so foment a revolution that would bring to power a fanatical band of atheistic communists bent on wiping out Russian Orthodoxy and the country’s sacred traditions. Rasputin, according to this interpretation, was the personification of true popular faith, a simple devout peasant who paid for his convictions with his life. The influential Orthodox priest Dmitry Dudko, harassed and imprisoned under the Soviets, said, “In the person of Rasputin I see the entire Russian people—beaten and executed, yet still preserving their faith, even when it means death. And”
[2022-01-09 | highlight] “The stories told about him for the past century, they write, are nothing but a sea of lies, half-truths, and distortions constructed by his enemies. Rasputin, they contend, has been the object of the greatest calumny in history. He was a devoted husband and father, an honest man of God, a devout Orthodox Christian, a humble Russian peasant inspired by divine visions who placed his special gifts in the service of the royal family and his beloved Russia. The tales of his debauchery, his drinking, his corruption, and his interference in the affairs of state are nothing more than hearsay.”
[2022-01-09 | highlight] “It was said that this man belonged to a bizarre religious sect that embraced the most wicked forms of sexual perversion, that he was a phony holy man who had duped the emperor and empress into embracing him as their spiritual leader, that he had taken over the Russian Orthodox Church and was bending it to his own immoral designs, that he was a filthy peasant who managed not only to worm his way into the palace, but through deceit and cunning was quickly becoming the true power behind the throne. This man, many were beginning to believe, presented a real danger to the church, to the monarchy, and even to Russia itself. This man was Grigory Yefimovich Rasputin.”
[2022-01-09 | highlight] “It was said that this man belonged to a bizarre religious sect that embraced the most wicked forms of sexual perversion, that he was a phony holy man who had duped the emperor and empress into embracing him as their spiritual leader, that he had taken over the Russian Orthodox Church and was bending it to his own immoral designs, that he was a filthy peasant who managed not only to worm his way into the palace, but through deceit and cunning was quickly becoming the true power behind the throne. This man, many were beginning to believe, presented a real danger to the church, to the monarchy, and even to Russia itself. This man was Grigory Yefimovich Rasputin.”

=== A Tramp Abroad — Mark Twain ===
[2022-01-08 | highlight] “You may call a jay a bird. Well, so he is, in a measure—but he's got feathers on him, and don't belong to no church, perhaps; but otherwise he is just as much human as you be. And I'll tell you for why. A jay's gifts, and instincts, and feelings, and interests, cover the whole ground. A jay hasn't got any more principle than a Congressman. A jay will lie, a jay will steal, a jay will deceive, a jay will betray; and four times out of five, a jay will go back on his solemnest promise”
[2022-01-08 | highlight] “The thing became more and more embarrassing. They called in another friend. This was too much. I saw that they had the advantage of me, and so I concluded to get out of the scrape by walking out of it. They enjoyed my defeat as much as any low white people could have done. They craned their necks and laughed at me (for a raven CAN laugh, just like a man), they squalled insulting remarks after me as long as they could see me. They were nothing but ravens—I knew that—what they thought of me could be a matter of no consequence—and yet when even a raven shouts after you, "What a hat!" "Oh, pull down your vest!" and that sort of thing, it hurts you and humiliates you, and there is no getting around it with fine reasoning and pretty arguments.”
[2022-01-08 | highlight] “It was a pine wood, with so thick and soft a carpet of brown needles that one's footfall made no more sound than if he were treading on wool; the tree-trunks were as round and straight and smooth as pillars, and stood close together; they were bare of branches to a point about twenty-five feet above-ground, and from there upward so thick with boughs that not a ray of sunlight could pierce through. The world was bright with sunshine outside, but a deep and mellow twilight reigned in there, and also a deep silence so profound that I seemed to hear my own breathings.”
[2022-01-08 | highlight] “One thinks Heidelberg by day—with its surroundings—is the last possibility of the beautiful; but when he sees Heidelberg by night, a fallen Milky Way, with that glittering railway constellation pinned to the border, he requires time to consider upon the verdict.
One never tires of poking about in the dense woods that clothe all these lofty Neckar hills to their tops. The great deeps of a boundless forest have a beguiling and impressive charm in any country; but German legends and fairy tales have given these an added charm. They have peopled all that region with gnomes, and dwarfs, and all sorts of mysterious and uncanny creatures. At the time I am writing of, I had been reading so much of this literature that sometimes I was not sure but I was beginning to believe in the gnomes and fairies as realities.”
[2022-01-08 | highlight] “So a great Frankish victory or defeat was gained or avoided; and in order to commemorate the episode, Charlemagne commanded a city to be built there, which he named Frankfort—the ford of the Franks. None of the other cities where this event happened were named for it. This is good evidence that Frankfort was the first place it occurred at.”

=== Racial Indigestion — Tompkins, Kyla Wazana; ===
[2022-01-08 | highlight] “That is, in Racial Indigestion I look beyond food itself to consider practices and representations of ingestion and edibility, including literary, dietetic, and visual texts in which objects, people, and political events are metaphorically and metonymically figured through the symbolic process of eating.”
[2022-01-08 | highlight] “this book examines the social and symbolic practices through which eating and food cultures inform the production of racial difference and other forms of political inequality. This is not, however, entirely a project about food. Rather, in Racial Indigestion I contribute to the growing field of food studies by examining eating”
[2022-01-08 | highlight] “how does a film of a black child being eaten become legible to audiences in the early twentieth century? More than solely an insight into racist images in the period, this idea—of the edible and delicious black subject—reveals something larger about the relationship between eating and racial identity, between bodies inscribed with the marks of race and food.”

=== Tastes Like War — Grace M. Cho ===
[2022-01-08 | highlight] “The double function of the mouth—both in processing food into digestible matter and in producing sense—sutures that space to the domestic and civic production of language, to storytelling.
—KYLA WAZANA TOMPKINS, Racial Indigestion”
[2022-01-08 | highlight] “In 2016 Chehalis’s neighboring “twin city” of Centralia made it on a top-ten list of places with the most KKK members per capita, but the KKK had long been active in Lewis County. In 1924 Chehalis hosted a regional gathering of as many as seventy thousand Klansmen rallying at the fairgrounds. When the Daily Chronicle interviewed Grand Wizard David Duke in 1976 and asked about his plans to open a chapter in Chehalis, he responded that there were already members in the area.6
After Trump took office and amplified the voices of white supremacy, the billboard made another one of its highly controversial, news-breaking statements: Freedom Is Dangerous! Slavery Is Peaceful!
In Chehalis, we were never meant to survive.”
[2022-01-08 | highlight] “In T. M. Luhrmann’s introduction, she makes a compelling argument that the set of experiences we refer to as “schizophrenia” is as much a social disease as it is biological. Luhrmann outlines several social risk factors that have been so widely evidenced by the research that they’re now indisputable, and my mother’s case ticks off five out of six boxes. Three of them had always been associated with poor mental health outcomes: social adversity during childhood, low socioeconomic status, and physical or sexual trauma. But the other two are less obvious from the outside: immigration and being a person of color in a white neighborhood.
My mother didn’t have to be schizophrenic.
I always knew it in my bones, but could never legitimately make a case for it without the science to prove it.
The risk increases with what is called “ethnic density”: the incidence of schizophrenia among nonwhite people rises as their presence in the neighborhood begins to fall.4”
[2022-01-08 | highlight] “One day as I’m studying for the PSATs, she will approach me at the kitchen table, set plates of fruit and jjin bbang in front of me, and comb my hair with her fingers. “Huh-huh. Chakhada! Study hard and go to best college, far away. There is nothing for you in a place like this.”
Twenty, thirty years later, I’ll look back on 1986 as the year my mother began to die”
[2022-01-08 | highlight] “In the days ahead, friends and colleagues in my little blue bubble of New York City will ask, “Who are all these people that voted for him?”
My simmering rage about the bullies and rapists and xenophobes from my childhood, all the injustices my mother faced, will boil over once again. One small thing I’ll be grateful for is that she’ll never have to see a Trump presidency. My mother, now eight years dead.”
[2022-01-08 | highlight] “It’s true what they say about Oriental girls,” he shouts. Indelible in the hippocampus is the laughter—their uproarious laughter … their having fun at my expense.3 They disperse once the joke gets old.
I look up, and no one—not the coach or any of the other girls—seems to have noticed the assault that happened in plain sight. I try to locate Jenny, and then spot her on the far court, too distant to have seen clearly. But the coach, the only adult present, is on the court closest to me with seven or eight girls. None of them so much as glances at me, even as I struggle to get up off the ground, brush the dirt off my uniform, and hobble to pick up my racket that the boys tossed against the fence. I wonder”
[2022-01-08 | highlight] “Later that fall: a scene of my impulsive near suicide at age fifteen. A fight with my parents that started over something trivial. Me, traumatized by my first sexual experience, the sexual violence I can’t yet name. I release my anguish with a loud guttural cry and run across the kitchen toward the knife block. “I’m going to kill myself!” I yell as I grab the chef’s knife. My father wrests it out of my hand, my mother stands back and gasps. I collapse on the floor in tears.
“I hate this town!” I scream at my father. “Why did you bring me here?”
He looks shocked. “Would it have been better if I’d left you in Korea?”
“Korea? What’s Korea got to do with any of this?” I shout. “Why couldn’t we have lived in Seattle?”
[2022-01-08 | highlight] “He pulls out a pipe and a bag of weed. My first time smoking. “Take another hit, Gracie,” he says again and again, putting the pipe in my mouth until I’m too stoned to move, barely able to speak. He kisses me. I’m too incapacitated to kiss back. The Beatles are playing in the background. Michelle, ma belle. My first kiss. He takes his pants off and tells me to suck his cock. I try to speak and manage the words, “Not yet.” I’m too incapacitated to fight back.
Years later, I will learn that the pot was laced with embalming fluid.”
[2022-01-08 | highlight] “The stalker doesn’t attempt to talk back or make fun of her a second time. He just gets back in his car and drives away.
Three years later, my mother will get fed up with being grateful and begin to call out all the shitty things that people do to her. She’ll name the experience of being followed, harassed, persecuted. Everyone in this town is out to get me. At first it will seem entirely rational, completely grounded in reality. Not crazy talk. Not schizophrenia”
[2022-01-08 | highlight] “She got into her car to drive ninety miles to Seattle, spent the day at the Immigration and Naturalization Service center, drove ninety miles back in the afternoon, began cooking dinner when she got home, and left herself almost no time to sleep before her next shift.
“What happened with the test?” I asked when I saw her that night.
“Nothing happened.”
“What do you mean ‘nothing happened’?”
“What do you mean ‘what do I mean’? Nothing happened. I just took test and now I’m becoming American citizen.”
Such a simple statement of fact, but what new privileges would that status grant her? In what tangible way would it make her life better? Maybe in another place I could have seen the difference.
1983”
[2022-01-08 | highlight] “I hate the Chinks and Japs. They’re taking over everything. Oh, but I’m not talking about you! You’re okay. You’re different.
These were words I heard from people I considered to be my friends.
Part of me also saw myself as different, an Americanized half American, but the rest of me felt the full sting of the insult. My Amerasian double consciousness.”
[2022-01-08 | highlight] “Then there was Sheena, a Cambodian girl who arrived in 1987. We were in the same gym class, and she always talked to me in the locker room: “You are the only one here who is nice to me.”
Jenny came to me one day, upset about something that had been going on with Sheena in her typing class. Sheena sat next to her each day, her keys clicking out Everyone hates me. They call me ugly and stupid. They call me bitch. Line after line of vitriol.”
[2022-01-08 | highlight] “Yet the white people can’t see it. All they see is the Korean in me. The Korean they call “Chink” and “Jap.”
Who am I without my father to claim as my own? Now that my relationship to him has been called into question, I’m even more of a foreigner in this town. Illegitimate to the core.
The”
[2022-01-08 | highlight] “To survive my father’s hometown, we sometimes had to make ourselves invisible. My mother tried to wring the foreignness out of her tongue by speaking only English, except for the names of Korean foods and things for which there was no translation, even at home with us, her Korean children. And so I became an outsider, not only to the place where I grew up but also to the language of my birth country. I would always be excluded from the we of “woori mal”—our language, as Koreans call Korean. Decades later, after summers of studying Korean in windowless classrooms in Seoul and conforming the sound of my speech to the standard dialect, I still could not utter the words “woori mal” to Koreans without an interrogation. Where are you from? Why don’t you speak Korean well? Are both your mother and father Korean? No, they would conclude,you are not Korean.”
[2022-01-08 | highlight] “Are you Korean?”
I’m amazed by her question. “How did you know?” Instantly I like her, the first child to not call me Chinese or Japanese.
“My parents hosted a family from Korea, and they also went to Seoul,” she says.
Decades later I will marvel at the rarity of a small-town white American couple vacationing in 1970s South Korea.”
[2022-01-08 | highlight] “There was a Black man named Ollie and a Filipina whose name I don’t remember. She did develop one close friendship with a longtime local woman, a white woman, who was old enough to be her grandmother. Her name was Ethel and she lived in the St. Helen’s Apartments, upstairs from the Book and Brush, the town’s bookstore and art-supply store. She visited Ethel regularly until she died in the mid-1980s, which was around the same time that my mother began to show signs of schizophrenia.”
[2022-01-08 | highlight] “But in 1972, the United States had not yet undergone what the news called the “browning of America.” It had only been a few years since the 1965 Immigration Act, which lifted restrictions against nonwhite immigrants, and we arrived ahead of the big waves of Koreans that would come a few years later to cities like Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, and Seattle. Not to my father’s economically depressed town of five thousand.
Most people in Chehalis had never come face-to-face with a real live immigrant until my mother moved to town. If they had looked beyond the surface, they might have seen that she was not one of those immigrants who clung to their foreign ways, spread them like a pestilence, and took everything from the rightful Americans. Those immigrants didn’t actually exist in our town; they were a mere abstraction, a composite of right-wing media images: The Yellow Peril. The Alien Invasion. The fabric of American society come unraveled at the hands of foreigners.
No, my mother wanted to be American. She tried to be American, conforming to every new custom she learned”
[2022-01-08 | highlight] “Her bravery went unacknowledged, and unlike my father’s grandparents, she traveled alone. In the 1970s Korean women who traveled without the company of a Korean man wore the stamp of impropriety, and Korean women who traveled to America with or for an American man became so sullied that they were no longer considered Korean. Like all Korean women who ran off with their American husbands, my mother was treated as a casualty. Once they crossed over to America, these women could never really return.”
[2022-01-08 | highlight] “Despite not knowing the circumstances of our immigration, somehow I knew we were supposed to be Grateful.”
[2022-01-08 | highlight] “Passersby in both directions can read his words: Bangladesh has clean air, but would you want to live there? and AIDS: the wonder disease that turns fruits into vegetables.1 The billboard belongs to the children of Alfred Hamilton, a farmer who erected it in the early 1960s in defiance of Ladybird Johnson’s Highway Beautification Act, which outlawed advertising on interstate highways. The purpose of the sign was to spread his “archconservative views in big block letters.”2 No Mexican Olympics team? All the runners and swimmers are here!”
[2022-01-08 | highlight] “The scene repeats every few days at recess, as I play alone on the always-damp log toys of my elementary school playground. It’s usually a boy or group of boys that taunts me. Each time, my reply is a little quicker. “I’m not Chinese or Japanese.” Sometimes I add, “I’m Korean.”
Over time my response evolves. “I’m half Korean.” I want to distance myself from the words that make slanted eyes and women’s breasts seem shameful, but it’s too late. The shame is already inside of me.
Chinese, Japanese …
“I’m half American,” I say. “My father is American.” With enough time I learn to make my mother disappear.”
[2022-01-07 | highlight] “As I grew inside her, so did her loneliness. Whenever it was time for my aunt to leave, my mother became desperate. She would hide Imo’s shoes and plead, “Please stay a little longer, Unni. You don’t have to leave right now.” Their separations became more and more fraught, and the following year, when my parents were married and my mother was about to board a plane to America with my brother and me, it was my aunt who begged my mother not to go.
The scene would repeat each summer, climaxing with our final departure in 1976, my last and most enduring childhood memory of Korea.”
[2022-01-07 | highlight] “ground. Maybe he raped her as a symbolic reclamation of Korean territory from the Americans. Maybe this rape caused the pregnancy right before me, the one that my mother aborted, for which my father beat her until her eardrums broke. My imaginings were fueled by the violent incidents I had visualized through my research on Korean women who were sexual companions of US military personnel. Equally, they were fueled by childhood memories of the conflict between my parents. Go ahead, break my eardrum again, you no-good so-and-so!”
[2022-01-07 | highlight] “At fifty-one years old, he was a father figure whose promises of a life far away, where she could start over, offered my mother some solace. His very presence was a reminder of brighter days to come, but for most of their early relationship, he lived in the States while she waited in Korea. My father had important matters to attend to back home—namely, divorcing his first wife so that he could marry my mother.”
[2022-01-07 | highlight] “She was a single mother at the time, raising my then six-year-old brother against the odds. In those days, and still today, sex outside of marriage was such a serious transgression of Korean cultural norms for women that the men in their families would sometimes forge adoption papers to send away children born to single mothers. Women who carried the physical evidence of their sexual deviance—in the form of children and pregnancies—were pushed to the margins of society. My mother was no exception. The only women Koreans despised more than single mothers were the women who “mixed flesh with foreigners,” because they were whores, and traitors too.”
[2022-01-07 | highlight] “It was bad enough that they casually mingled with men who were unacceptable to their families, and that they did so in seedy settings, but what made it worse was that these men were Americans—the very Americans to whom the Koreans were indebted and subordinated. It was an affront to the nation. Although South Korea profited greatly from US military presence, to the point that the government aggressively promoted the sex industry around the bases as a form of “foreign diplomacy,” the women workers were gradually stripped of their rights. Korean society reviled these women so much that life in “normal” society became impossible. Fathers legally disowned the very same daughters whose labor paid off their families’ debts. Some women even died at the hands of their abusers—men who were never brought to justice.”
[2022-01-07 | highlight] “Most of the jobs in the camptowns offered shorter hours and greater earning potential than did those in the factory. More importantly, it promised the glamour of America and the possibility of one day moving there by building a life with an American soldier. The chances of that actually happening were slim, but my mother, and a million other women like her, made a wager.
I wonder if Imo tried to convince my mother that such a place would lead to her certain ruin. Or maybe my mother knew this already, and it was the prospect of ruin itself that drew her in. Maybe there was nothing about her life before the camptown that she wanted to keep pristine, and in a reckless moment, she plunged headfirst into the uncharted waters of America town. After all, what did she have to lose?”
[2022-01-07 | highlight] “Koreans went to the bases in droves, if only to beg for scraps or search for leftovers in the garbage. For some women, it was a small leap from eating out of the trash to exchanging services for food. Exchanging sex for dinner. Selling food on the black market for money with which to buy more food. Selling sex in nightclubs to pay for things more expensive than food, debt mounting with each passing day. These were the kinds of things people did to survive.”
[2022-01-07 | highlight] “In 1963, when Park Chung-hee seized power, he implemented a series of economic plans that would put industry first and social welfare last. He would tell the people that their job was to rebuild the nation by working more and earning less. Misery would become the measure of good citizenship.”
[2022-01-07 | highlight] “Maybe she had seen the US naval base where local girls walked hand in hand with American soldiers, who showered them with gifts of sweets and perfume, and marveled at their comfort. It must have seemed as if they wanted for nothing. Did she know from the beginning that she was going to be one of them?”
[2022-01-07 | highlight] “One of her own dogs even fell victim to them and was turned into meat. As much as she hated them for snatching her pet, and as much as she internalized public opinion that they were unworthy of her concern, she could not help but wonder what circumstances led them to that fate. In some small way, she felt for them too”
[2022-01-07 | highlight] “Though my mother had lost half her family, it seemed as if her heart remained open. She spoke with compassion about the other survivors among whom she lived. Around her were people of all ages trying to make a living in a country still reeling from the devastation of the war: the grandmothers who carried heavy bundles of cabbages into the city to take to market, the girls who quit school to toil long days in the factory, the men who stole and butchered dogs to sell for meat”
[2022-01-07 | highlight] “In the words of one woman who gave her two Amerasian children up for adoption: One time my older one came home with his trousers soaked and frozen with his own pee. Children bullied him by saying, “You must have a big penis. Let me see.”… I talked to them for about a month and said, “We have been waiting a long time for your father who has never come. If you stay here, you will face constant discrimination. However, in the US there is no such thing.”4”
[2022-01-07 | highlight] “Single mothers and poor families of “pure” Korean descent became the new targets. Instead of finding homes for needy children, adoption agencies began looking for children to place in homes, thus continuing the steady supply of Korean adoptees westward. One former Korean social worker spoke openly about this practice: I misunderstood my job and thought I was supposed to make the birth mothers relinquish their children.3”
[2022-01-07 | highlight] “At the same time, Korean social workers launched aggressive campaigns to convince mothers working in the camptowns that Korea could offer nothing of value to their children and the only rightful place for them was in their father’s country. And indeed, the law was structured to make it so. Children born to Korean mothers and foreign fathers would not be allowed to attend public schools or register as South Korean citizens. Long before I was born, Rhee’s policies had already determined the conditions of our exile.”
[2022-01-07 | highlight] “At the time that I learned of my missing cousins, I had also recently researched the ways in which my own family history was implicated in the history of transnational adoption. Although it began as a rescue mission in 1954 to find American homes for Korean war orphans, it quickly turned into a substitute for social welfare and a government policy to rid the country of an unwanted population.
South Korea’s first president, Syngman Rhee, whose motto was “one race, one nation,” publicly denounced the presence of “Yankee wives and mixed race children” as a “social crisis.” He signed a presidential order for the placement of these children in transnational adoption as a solution to the “GI baby problem.” American propaganda depicted the poor, socially rejected biracial child as the most vulnerable of all creatures to the clutches of communism, and therefore, Americans would be exercising their patriotic duty by rescuing them.”
[2022-01-07 | highlight] “What do you mean ‘they just disappeared’?” I wait as she chews and swallows, pushes more of the ssam into her mouth, chews and swallows again, until she has eaten the entire wrap in one continuous bite.
“You see, in Korea, children belong to their father,” she says, as she assembles the next piece of ssam. “No one knows what he did with them after she died.”
[2022-01-07 | highlight] “I would remember the stories from my research of Koreans who survived by scavenging half-eaten hot dogs and hamburgers from the dumpsters at American military bases and wonder how much of her illness had been linked to her impoverished diet. I’d remember what my mother told me about the kinds of things her family ate during the (post)war era: We used to catch spiders and grasshoppers, sometimes little birds, and roast ’em over a fire. The spiders tasted pretty darn good, but those little birds hardly have any meat on ’em. Hardly worth all the trouble of plucking and cleaning, ’cause we practically eat it in one bite, bone and all”
[2022-01-07 | highlight] “What complicated my grandfather’s illness was that all the hospitals had burned to the ground during the first six months of the war, as part of an American policy that destroyed civilian institutions, calling them “military targets” in the official record. By the time he knew of his cancer, there was no place left for the sick to go.”
[2022-01-07 | highlight] “in August 2018, only eighty-nine out of 57,000 applicants would meet their missing family members after more than sixty-five years apart. One woman, ninety-two-year-old Lee Keum-seom, would see her son again for the first time since 1950, when they lost each other in the chaos of the war. I didn’t know what to do but cry for a whole year, calling out his name…. He was only four years old.1”
[2022-01-07 | highlight] “in Korea in the 1950s and 1960s, South Korean families had to act as if their missing kin were dead. If the government suspected that they had any ties to the North, even if such ties were accidental, they could have been persecuted as enemies of the state. So my family was to never again speak my uncle’s name, and my grandmother took in his five-year-old boy, Jinho, one of millions of children who lost parents to the war, and raised him as her fifth child”
[2022-01-07 | highlight] “When the armistice agreement was signed in 1953, it spelled out a contract between the United States and North Korea that the war would be resolved with a peace treaty and the divided country would be put back together within six months. Over a third of the surviving population had been separated from their loved ones because they ended up on opposite sides of the border, and the armistice gave them a promise that they would soon be reunited.”
[2022-01-07 | highlight] “Other families—the ones who were lucky enough, and lived long enough—would wait forty, fifty, sixty years to spend a few hours with their lost brothers and sisters during state-supervised visits. The family reunifications would begin during the fourth decade of the armistice and take place every few years, as gestures of goodwill between the two Koreas, each time granting visits to a handful of applicants.”
[2022-01-07 | highlight] “My mother seems lost in a dream.
“What about your sister?” I ask.
“My sister Chunja … she was by far the best looking out of all three of us girls. She was my favorite …”
“What happened to her?”
“She died before you were born.” Her gaze finally connects with mine, and the two of us stare in silence, amplified by the humming of the long fluorescent bulb mounted on the wall. She closes her eyes and sighs the words, “Aigu! Dap-dap-eu-rah.”
“Dap-dap-eu-rah”—I’m suffocating—an expression of stifling sadness.”
[2022-01-07 | highlight] “My mother spells out Imo’s name, as well as her own. Then she wipes some bits of scallion off the cutting board and leans against it. She focuses her eyes on the wall two feet in front of her and says, “I had a brother and another sister too.”
I nearly drop my pencil as I look up, mouth agape.
“My brother disappeared during the war. I don’t know what happened. I just never saw him again.”
“How old were you?”
“Oh, about your age,” she says, still staring at the wall.”
[2022-01-07 | highlight] “What’s your father’s name?” I don’t call him Halbae because I’ve never even seen a picture of him, and therefore haven’t made the emotional connection that he’s my grandfather.
“Ha Jum-eul.” Again she spells out the name.
“What were your grandparents’ names?”
“Huh. I don’t know,” she says, shaking her head. “Koreans don’t call old people by their first names.”
[2022-01-07 | highlight] “My mother’s words about the past, scattered across two decades:
My brother disappeared during the war, when I was nine.
My father died during the war, when I was ten.
My sister Chunja—oh, she was my favorite! She was closest to me in age, you see.
My sister died when I was twenty, in 1961.
It would take me twenty-five years to locate my family beneath the rubble.
Chehalis”
[2022-01-07 | highlight] “As soon as Japanese occupation of Korea ended, American and Soviet occupation began, and Korea became the United States’ first “laboratory of communist containment,” the first “theater of the Cold War,” in which an experiment in mass destruction would play out. The dead, the wounded, the motherless or fatherless, the homeless, the families permanently torn apart when the border was closed—each of these categories numbering in the millions.”
[2022-01-07 | highlight] “They were all born when Korea was a colony of Japan, and Gyeongsang Province, where my mother’s family lived, endured the greatest violence by virtue of its proximity to Japan. Under Japanese colonial rule, Koreans were dispossessed of their land and homes and forced into various forms of labor. Young women and girls were taken to Japan to work as sex slaves for the imperial army. Most were teenagers, and some were as young as ten.”
[2022-01-07 | highlight] “The pearl earrings were still there, inside the layers of Bounty, inside the vase. I put the little bundle in my backpack and a gut-wrenching feeling gripped me: she had known she was going to die.
I took one last look around the room and let it sink in. This was the place of my mother’s mysterious death, the final scene of her lonely, tedious life, but it was also the place of her redemption. This was where she had spent the best years of her life after the schizophrenia had set in, where she learned to enjoy food again and ask for what she wanted. Where we shared the meals that she hadn’t eaten since her youth.”
[2022-01-07 | highlight] “This is where I keep my pearl earrings. In case something happen to me.”
She gently lifted a wad of paper towels out of the vase, unwrapped them, and placed a pair of pearl studs into her cupped hands. She gestured them toward me.
“For you. Don’t forget”
[2022-01-07 | highlight] “She always seemed to put a great deal of thought into her choices to eat or not eat something. In time, I recognized these choices as an expression of agency, tiny acts of rebellion against enormous structures of power.
It is not simply the “what” of what one eats that matters…. Most important, it is the many “whys” of eating—the differing imperatives of hunger, necessity, pleasure, nostalgia, and protest—that most determine its meaning.3”
[2022-01-07 | highlight] “was only the second time she ever brought up the war without my prompting. Her words jolted me into a reverie of my own, as fragments of my research tumbled around in my head. Images of babies sitting on dirt roads next to the bodies of their dead mothers and napalmed women bandaged like mummies. The words of a woman who survived the Nogeun-ri massacre, who lost her child when American planes dropped bombs from above: That day I saw the two faces of America.1 The words of a war bride who remembered American food aid: I had heard of the “Yankees” and how they were here to save us…. We were all hoping for rice or barley, and we drooled at the thought of so much food … but it was an endless supply of powdered milk that caused all who drank it to suffer for days with diarrhea.2
In”
[2022-01-07 | highlight] “Although I felt some relief knowing that she wasn’t starving, I also felt ashamed that her diet was so bereft of nutrition.
“Mom, are you getting enough to eat?” I asked.
She nodded.
“What about protein?”
She nodded again, then snorted. “They got me powdered milk.”
“Oh yeah?” I said, feigning surprise.
She became quiet as if she had already lost her train of thought and was deep in some hallucinatory reverie.
“I can’t stand the taste of it,” she said. “Tastes like war.”
[2022-01-07 | highlight] “There was no way to force her to go anywhere if she didn’t want to, and the only way I could get her to eat was to tell her I was about to throw something away and then leave it outside her door. It must have appealed to the scavenger in her, the one that emerged during those months that she lived with me.”
[2022-01-07 | highlight] “why she didn’t try to call my brother, who worked across the street from the World Trade Center.
She said simply that she had failed. That she let me go to work because she thought she could stop it. And not to worry about my brother because she wouldn’t allow anything to happen to him.
“Mom, this has nothing to do with you! This is not in your control.”
She then put me in my place.
“Why so much crying? You think you are so special? You are not the only one in the world who go through something like this.”
Me and my first world privilege, never having known such destruction”
[2022-01-07 | highlight] “Once a week she’d take a shower. The only other things that disrupted this monotony were visits from one of her children or grandchildren. On days without visitors, her voices were her only company.”
[2022-01-07 | highlight] “A soap commercial came on, showing a woman lathering up in the shower, the camera’s gaze fixed on her hands and bare shoulders. My mother turned her face away from the TV and shaded her eyes with her hand. There was a vacant, disconnected look in her eyes and her affect had gone flat. Even the suggestion of a naked body was too disturbing for her to watch.
I later told my friend, a doctoral student in psychology, about what had happened. “A soap commercial?” she said. “Now that is some trauma.”
[2022-01-07 | highlight] “This was the mother who gave me permission to investigate the very past that she had been hiding from me, and thereby let me imagine her before she was my mother—an adolescent in postwar South Korea under the regimes of Park Chung-hee and rising US military hegemony, who worked at a US naval base, selling drinks, and probably sex, to American military personnel. Although the second mother was the impetus to start the research, it was the third mother who gave me sustenance to finish it.”
[2022-01-07 | highlight] “Paradoxically it was my mother’s very absence that gave her a new presence in my life. My grief was so powerful that it unearthed long-forgotten memories that had been buried beneath the weight of her illness and the traumatic history that I spent a decade researching. These were memories of the engaging, competent, and incredibly productive first mother that was perhaps the polar opposite of the stereotypical schizophrenic. Food was always in the foreground of these memories, whether as a source of pleasure, a source of income, or something more basic—a means of survival. By returning to the scene of eating, I discovered not only things that broke her but also things that kept her alive.”

=== The Grace of Kings — Liu, Ken ===
[2022-01-08 | highlight] “The boy nodded but said nothing, looking over the bobbing heads of the crowd like a crane among sandpipers. Unlike the brown eyes most common in Cocru, Mata’s eyes were coal-black, but each held two pupils that glowed with a faint light, a rare condition that many had believed was mythical.
Those double-pupiled eyes allowed him to see more sharply and farther than most people, and as he scanned the horizon, he lingered on the slender, dark tower of stone to the north, just outside of town. It stood next to the sea like a dagger stuck into the rocky beach. Mata”
[2022-01-08 | highlight] “Kuni shook his head. When the kite had passed directly over him and Rin, it had temporarily blotted out the glare of the sun. He had seen that the rider was a young man, not even thirty. He had the dark skin and long limbs common to the men of Haan, up north. For a fraction of a second, the rider, looking down, had locked gazes with Kuni, and Kuni’s heart thrilled with the fervent passion and purposeful intensity in those bright-green eyes.
“He made the emperor afraid,” Kuni said, as if to himself. “The emperor is just a man, after all.” A wide smile broke on his face”
[2022-01-08 | highlight] “Rin examined Kuni: A few drops of burning oil had landed on his back. Through the smoking holes in the robe, Rin could see that the flesh underneath was raw, charred, and oozing blood.
“Oh gods! Does it hurt?”
“Only a little,” said Kuni.
“If you weren’t on top of me . . .” Rin swallowed. “Kuni Garu, you’re a real friend.”
“Eh, think nothing of it,” said Kuni. “As Sage Kon Fiji said: One should always—ow!—be ready to stick knives between one’s ribs if that would help a friend.” He tried to put some swagger into this speech but the pain made his voice unsteady. “See, Master Loing did teach me something.”
[2022-01-08 | highlight] “Kuni caught a glimpse of the emperor in the brief moment before he was rushed under the protective shell of overlapping shields. Years of alchemical medicine—taken in the hope of extending his life—had wreaked havoc with his body. Though the emperor was only fifty-five, he looked to be thirty years older. But Kuni was most struck by the old man’s hooded eyes peering out of his wrinkled face, eyes that for a moment had shown surprise and fear.”
[2022-01-08 | highlight] “Lady Rapa and Lady Kana, p-pr-protect me!” muttered Rin with his eyes squeezed tightly shut. “If I survive this, I promise to listen to my mother and never skip school again, and I’ll obey the ancient sages and stay away from honey-tongued friends who lead me astray. . . .”
But Kuni was already peeking around the shield.”
[2022-01-08 | highlight] “Although the heavy throne had shielded the Captain of the Imperial Guards and the emperor from much of the initial explosion, a few stray fiery tongues had singed off much of the hair on the captain and left the right side of his face and his right arm badly burned. But the emperor, though shocked, was unharmed.”
[2022-01-08 | highlight] “The white bird glided closer. Its wings seemed to be as wide and long as the spinning vanes of the windmills in Zudi that drew water from deep wells and piped it into the houses of the wealthy—too big to be an ordinary eagle or vulture. A few spectators looked up and idly wondered if it was a giant Mingén falcon, taken more than a thousand miles from its home in faraway Rui Island and released here by the emperor’s trainers to impress the crowd.”