“I’ve just never met someone like you," as if I were a stranger from another town or an eccentric guest accompanying a mutual friend to a dinner party. It was a strange thought to hear from the mouth of the woman who had birthed and raised me, with whom I shared a home for eighteen years, someone who was half me. My mother had struggled to understand me just as I struggled to understand her. Thrown as we were on opposite sides of a fault line—generational, cultural, linguistic—we wandered lost without a reference point, each of us unintelligible to the other’s expectations, until these past few years when we had just begun to unlock the mystery, carve the psychic space to accommodate each other, appreciate the differences between us, linger in our refracted commonalities. Then, what would have been the most fruitful years of understanding were cut violently short, and I was left alone to decipher the secrets of inheritance without its key.”
― Crying in H Mart
― Crying in H Mart
“I was struck, and not for the first time, by how much easier it is to ruin an ecosystem than to run one.”
― Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future
― Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future
“Pissing in your pants will only keep you warm for so long.”
― Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future
― Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future
“The strongest argument for gene editing cane toads, house mice, and ship rats is also the simplest: what's the alternative? Rejecting such technologies as unnatural isn't going to bring nature back. The choice is not between what is and what was, but between what is and what will be, which, often enough, is nothing.”
― Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future
― Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future
“Declining emissions and rising atmospheric concentrations point to a stubborn fact about carbon dioxide: once it’s in the air, it stays there. How long, exactly, is a complicated question; for all intents and purposes, though, CO2 emissions are cumulative. The comparison that’s often made is to a bathtub. So long as the tap is running, a stoppered tub will continue to fill. Turn the tap down, and the tub will still keep filling, just more slowly. To”
― Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future
― Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future
Karen’s 2025 Year in Books
Take a look at Karen’s Year in Books, including some fun facts about their reading.
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