Chris House

“the ache changed into the sharp, gripping, radiating cramps in the back and side of “kidney colic,” a pain that comes and goes in waves so intense that medical textbooks describe it as “agonizing” and “unbearable”; “few bodily complaints … demand immediate relief so urgently,”
― Robert A. Caro, Means of Ascent

“In American Homicide, Roth attributes the sharp spike in murder rates during the late 1840s and 1850s to the fact that “Americans could no longer coalesce.…Disillusioned by the course the nation was taking, people felt increasingly alienated from both their government and their neighbors.”
― Miles Harvey, The King of Confidence: A Tale of Utopian Dreamers, Frontier Schemers, True Believers, False Prophets, and the Murder of an American Monarch

“In his book American Homicide, Roth notes that in the 1850s “aggression and vitriolic language invaded personal as well as political relationships and turned everyday encounters over debts or minor offenses like trespassing into deadly ones.” Fellow citizens, he writes, “killed each other over card games, races, dogfights, wrestling matches, and raffles.”
― Miles Harvey, The King of Confidence: A Tale of Utopian Dreamers, Frontier Schemers, True Believers, False Prophets, and the Murder of an American Monarch

“In recent years, researchers have determined that most cases of autism are not rooted in rare de novo mutations but in very old genes that are shared widely in the general population while being concentrated more in certain families than others. Whatever autism is, it is not a unique product of modern civilization. It is a strange gift from our deep past, passed down through millions of years of evolution.”
― Steve Silberman, NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity