Daniel Cox

“This much is undeniably true: we’ve thrown open the black box of the cell. To snap the lid shut now might be to foreclose the possibility of a magnificent future. To keep it jammed open without guidelines and rules would be to assume that we’ve reached some tacit global agreement about what is permissible and impermissible in the manipulation of human reproduction and development—which, assuredly, we have not.....The arguments won’t be resolved easily, for they impinge not just on the fundamental features of cells, but also on the fundamental features of humans. The only way to find a reasonable answer, or even a compromise, lies in a continuous engagement with evolving debate about the limits of scientific intervention, and the advancing front of cellular technologies. Every human is a stakeholder in this debate. It involves the one, the many, and the “many many.”
― Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Song of the Cell: An Exploration of Medicine and the New Human

“Out of a bleak world of enmity and despair had come a tall, blond, blue-eyed Texan who loved Russia and its music with humble reverence. He had old-fashioned courtliness, a touchingly eager manner, and a spectacular way with the piano that transported them to a half-remembered past. Music that depicted the many cruelties and brutalities of that past was not for him: the Russia he summoned up with his hands was a place of magnificence, beauty, and romance.”
― Nigel Cliff, Moscow Nights: The Van Cliburn Story-How One Man and His Piano Transformed the Cold War

“They all agreed on the following set of facts, as laid out by the defense: Emmett Till had been hidden by the NAACP in the North, in either Chicago or Detroit, and Willie Reed and Moses Wright had been coached by professional, probably communist agitators, and Mamie Till had played along with the plot in exchange for a life insurance payout for her not-dead son, and she’d flown down and lied about recognizing her son, lied about her tears and emotion, and all of this had been arranged by shadowy powers who wanted to overthrow the southern way of life as a precursor to an attack on the United States itself. The body pulled from the Tallahatchie River had been donated to the cause by a helpful mortician. These people had access to bodies, the defense attorneys had said. They would stop at nothing to attack Mississippi.”
― Wright Thompson, The Barn: The Secret History of a Murder in Mississippi

“Through centuries of effort, people have learned much about the sensory worlds of other species. But in a fraction of the time, we have upended those worlds. We now live in the Anthropocene—a geological epoch defined and dominated by the deeds of our species. We have changed the climate and acidified the oceans by releasing titanic amounts of greenhouse gases. We have shuffled wildlife across continents, replacing indigenous species with invasive ones. We have instigated what some scientists have called an era of “biological annihilation,” comparable to the five great mass extinction events of prehistory. And amid this already dispiriting ledger of ecological sins, there is one that should be especially easy to appreciate and yet is often ignored—sensory pollution. Instead of stepping into the Umwelten of other animals, we have forced them to live in ours by barraging them with stimuli of our own making.”
― Ed Yong, An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us