Ly Anheier

“Poverty is often material scarcity piled on chronic pain piled on incarceration piled on depression piled on addiction—on and on it goes. Poverty isn’t a line. It’s a tight knot of social maladies. It is connected to every social problem we care about—crime, health, education, housing—and its persistence in American life means that millions of families are denied safety and security and dignity in one of the richest nations in the history of the world.”
― Matthew Desmond, Poverty, by America

“Daniel Kahneman once told me about the stories people tell themselves to make sense of the past. He said: Hindsight, the ability to explain the past, gives us the illusion that the world is understandable. It gives us the illusion that the world makes sense, even when it doesn’t make sense. That’s a big deal in producing mistakes in many fields.”
― Morgan Housel, The Psychology of Money

“Permafrost holds a vast amount of carbon—around 1,500 billion tons are stored in the Northern Hemisphere. That carbon accumulated from the burning of fossil fuels and from dead plants and animals decomposing over thousands of years. That means around twice as much carbon is stored in permafrost as currently exists in all the Earth’s atmosphere. When the permafrost melts, everything falls apart.”
― Nicole Stott, Back to Earth: What Life in Space Taught Me About Our Home Planet―And Our Mission to Protect It

“Poverty is the feeling that your government is against you, not for you; that your country was designed to serve other people and that you are fated to be managed and processed, roughed up and handcuffed. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, cities passed “ugly laws” banning “unsightly beggars” from public places. In the first half of the twentieth century, vagrancy and loitering ordinances were used to expel the poor from park benches and street corners. Today, municipal regulations still allow the police to arrest the homeless for being seen in public, criminalizing abject poverty.”
― Matthew Desmond, Poverty, by America