Nona Williams

“Mirror-touch synesthesia. My brain re-creates the sensory experiences of living creatures, of all people and even sometimes animals; if I see it I feel it, and for just a moment I am them, we are one and their pain or pleasure is my own. It can seem like magic and for a long time I thought it was, but really it’s not so far removed from how other brains behave: the physiological response to witnessing someone’s pain is a cringe, a recoil, a wince. We are hardwired for empathy.”
― Charlotte McConaghy, Once There Were Wolves

“A lot of the financial players since the 1970s have indeed evolved into parasites, like tapeworms. Tapeworms live in the gut, to which they attach themselves by “hooks” and “suckers,” then “get food by eating the host’s partly digested food, depriving the host of nutrients.” They can grow hideously large, many feet long, and live inside hosts for decades. Thinking about the future of our political economy, though, I was heartened when I read that “hosts also develop ways of getting rid of or protecting themselves from parasites.”
― Kurt Andersen, Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America

“she wore exactly the sort of high heels with red soles Melania Trump favored when visiting prisons for toddlers.”
― Katie Crouch, Embassy Wife

“Lead levels in American children and adults are seen to be declining rapidly, beginning in 1992. At the same time, the crime rate falls, the largest plunge in recorded history. Epidemiologists superimpose graphs of lead and crime over each other, the lines rising and falling in tandem so closely that a theory is born: the lead–crime hypothesis.[”
― Caroline Fraser, Murderland: Crime and Bloodlust in the Time of Serial Killers