Ivy Mertel

“Para concluir, quiero dejar muy claro que los peligros de la brujería, de las cartas del tarot, de la religión y del ocultismo son muy reales.”
― John Ramirez, FUERA DEL CALDERO DEL DIABLO

“We cannot train ourselves to be perfect, but we can ensure we have better intuition when it comes to human behavior.”
― Milan Kordestani, I'm Just Saying: A Guide to Maintaining Civil Discourse in an Increasingly Divided World

“I later learned that while Elsie was at Crownsville, scientists often conducted research on patients there without consent, including one study titled “Pneumoencephalographic and skull X-ray studies in 100 epileptics.” Pneumoencephalography was a technique developed in 1919 for taking images of the brain, which floats in a sea of fluid. That fluid protects the brain from damage, but makes it very difficult to X-ray, since images taken through fluid are cloudy. Pneumoencephalography involved drilling holes into the skulls of research subjects, draining the fluid surrounding their brains, and pumping air or helium into the skull in place of the fluid to allow crisp X-rays of the brain through the skull. The side effects—crippling headaches, dizziness, seizures, vomiting—lasted until the body naturally refilled the skull with spinal fluid, which usually took two to three months. Because pneumoencephalography could cause permanent brain damage and paralysis, it was abandoned in the 1970s. There”
― Rebecca Skloot, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

“He could not understand how a person born in the United States who knew the English language and culture and was educated with at least a high school degree failed to provide for his own subsistence without government assistance.”
― Rafael Polo, Growing Up American