Tufanza Primos

“One of the biggest shifts in the last decade of anthropology, one of the discoveries in the field that has changed everything, is the realization that we evolved as cooperative breeders. Bringing up kids in a nuclear family is a novelty, a blip on the screen of human family life. We never did child rearing alone, isolated and shut off from others, or with just one other person, the child’s father. It is arduous and anomalous and it’s not the way it “should” be. Indeed, for as long as we have been, we have relied on other females—kin and the kindly disposed—to help us raise our offspring. Mostly we lived as Nisa did—in rangy, multifamily bands that looked out for one another, took care of one another, and raised one another’s children. You still see it in parts of the Caribbean today, where any adult in a small town can tell any kid to toe the line, and does, and the kids listen. Or in Hawaii, where kids and parents alike depend on hanai relationships—aunties and uncles, indispensible honorary relations who take a real interest in an unrelated child’s well-being and education. No, it wasn’t fire or hunting or the heterosexual dyad that gave us a leg up, anthropologists now largely concur; it was our female Homo ancestors holding and handling and caring for and even nursing the babies of other females. That is in large part why Homo sapiens flourished and flourish still, while other early hominins and prehominins bit the dust. This shared history of interdependence, of tending and caring, might explain the unique capacity women have for deep friendship with other women. We have counted on one another for child care, sanity, and survival literally forever. The loss of your child weighs heavily on me in this web of connectedness, because he or she is a little bit my own.”
― Wednesday Martin, Primates of Park Avenue

“Pianos should never go out of tune. The true sin is something different than what we’ve been taught; the true sin is living so far removed from absolute harmony. That is more powerful than the truths and lies we tell every day. I”
― Paulo Coelho, The Spy

“the financial market is not something that exists like you or I, Karin, or this bottle of water on the table. The moment we stop believing in it, it ceases to exist.”
― David Lagercrantz, The Girl Who Takes an Eye for an Eye

“Relations among women on the Upper East Side are charged as they are perhaps nowhere else in the country or the world, and handbags, like cars, just might serve a lot of different functions all at once. A communication about where one stands in the inevitable hierarchy of Manhattan, a barometer of your wealth and connectedness and clout in a city where money and connections and clout are everything. A fashion statement. A security blanket, a way of self-soothing in a uniquely stressful town.”
― Wednesday Martin, Primates of Park Avenue