Barbara Feiner

“Staying alive, as it turns out, is mostly common sense.”
― Judy Melinek, Working Stiff: Two Years, 262 Bodies, and the Making of a Medical Examiner

“When we decide what community is worthy of epistemic trust, we are implicitly also deciding what it means to know something. Reflecting on Donald Trump’s historical mishmash of a statement that Andrew Jackson was angry about the Civil War (which began sixteen years after Jackson’s death), George Will dissected the president’s words to underscore the essential character of his thought. It is not that Trump suffers the disability of an untrained mind tied to “stratospheric self-confidence,” Will wrote, or that he is intellectually slothful and misinformed or totally ignorant of ordinary matters of history and of the fact that he has no knowledge of that about which he speaks, or that he is indifferent to being bereft of information. It is not that he is cognitively impaired. “The problem isn’t that he does not know this or that, or that he does not know that he does not know this or that. Rather, the dangerous thing is that he does not know what it is to know something.” This is dangerous in a president, Will observes, for it “leaves him susceptible to being blown about by gusts of factoids that cling like lint to a disorderly mind.”1 And when that mind demands that its reality be accepted as how things are, we are embattled by an assault on our sense of what it means to know something.”
― Russell Muirhead, A Lot of People Are Saying: The New Conspiracism and the Assault on Democracy

“In indigenous cultures including those of Native Americans, menstruation is viewed a time of positive power, rather than evidence of sin and negative power, or as a feminine inconvenience.”
― Joan Borysenko, A Woman's Book of Life: The Biology, Psychology, and Spirituality of the Feminine Life Cycle

“Never trust to general impressions, my boy, but concentrate yourself upon details.”
― Arthur Conan Doyle, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes