Francesca Cassinelli

“He called it a proteinaceous infectious particle, or prion. Prusiner’s paper fared well in peer review, but the editors of Science hesitated for months before publishing it, afraid of a backlash. The idea was outlandish—​but it was also right. Prusiner received a Nobel Prize for his heresy in 1997. Further work by Prusiner and others revealed that prions behave something like the secret weapon from Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Cat’s Cradle. Vonnegut imagined a form of water called ice-nine, a “super-crystal” that froze at room temperature and turned any normal water it touched into itself. A single crystal would set off a chain reaction, causing the oceans to ice over, ending all life on Earth.”
― Michio Kaku, The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2020

“Bookstores shared “a cultivative interest” with publishers: more book buyers were good for both of them. But search engines and Internet ad providers don’t share that interest, or at least not in the same way. They truck in a type of user engagement that dictionaries are historically not good at. As Emily said, people now pay with their eyes, not with their wallets, which means that an online dictionary that runs ads needs to keep eyeballs on its pages longer. The craft of writing a good definition isn’t important in the click economy: what is important is being agile enough to do what it takes to get to the top of an Internet search results page. It’s a very sudden shift for the staid lexicographer who likes to keep low to the ground.”
― Kory Stamper, Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries

“En la actualidad, son cada vez menos los que defienden o niegan los hechos ocurridos durante la dictadura. Sin embargo, nuestra historia también se traduce en que nuestro estándar sea uno especialmente elevado. Si el ejemplo que pensamos al escuchar la frase «violación a los derechos humanos» es el de las atrocidades cometidas durante la dictadura, cualquier cosa que no sea así de grave podría parecer irrelevante.”
― Catalina Fernández Carter, Los límites de la fuerza: Mitos y verdades sobre derechos humanos

“Pero para resolverlo tenemos que tomárnoslo en serio, darnos cuenta que no podemos seguir creyendo que orden público y derechos humanos son incompatibles, ni podemos seguir ridiculizando el problema diciendo que la alternativa al uso arbitrario y excesivo de la fuerza es que la policía no haga nada o que arroje pétalos de flores.”
― Catalina Fernández Carter, Los límites de la fuerza: Mitos y verdades sobre derechos humanos