Daniel Cox

“Neither Jefferson nor Madison asked whether a generation of men has the right to bind a generation of women, even though women like Abigail Adams and Eliza Harriot and Olympe de Gouges and Mary Wollstonecraft were asking that question in letters, speeches, and treatises. The answer has implications into the twenty-first century: if women could neither ratify, reject, nor amend the Constitution in the founding era, if the Constitution, in a fundamental sense, did not recognize women as persons, can it truly be said to bind their posterity? The same question can be asked of enslaved Black men, women, and children, like Sally Hemings, and the poor, and free Black men: could any of these people in any sense ratify, reject, or amend the original Constitution?”
― Jill Lepore, We the People: A History of the US Constitution

“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

“Gun rights are claimed as an American birthright and clothed in the dignity of the Constitution, but this is a false and fabricated history. To believe in the gun, you have to subscribe to a series of fantasies about the American past. You have to believe Theodore Roosevelt when he says that guns civilized the West and that the men who died “generally” deserved their fate. You have to believe Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas when he writes that firearms brought “possibilities of salvation” to African Americans after the Civil War. You would have to believe that, for two hundred years, every court in the land got the Second Amendment wrong, until Antonin Scalia rode in with his dictionaries in 2008.”
― Dominic Erdozain, One Nation Under Guns: How Gun Culture Distorts Our History and Threatens Our Democracy

“Our simplified celebration of King comes at a cost. It saps the strength of his philosophical and intellectual contributions. It undercuts his power to inspire change. Even after Americans elected a Black man as president and after that president, Barack Obama, placed a bust of King in the Oval Office, the nation remains racked with racism, ethno-nationalism, cultural division, residential and educational segregation, economic inequality, violence, and a fading sense of hope that government, or anyone, will ever fix those problems.”
― Jonathan Eig, King: A Life