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“Today we are now thrown into contact all the time with people whose assumptions, perspectives, and backgrounds are different from our own. The modern world is not two brothers feuding for control of the Ottoman Empire. It is Cortés and Montezuma struggling to understand each other through multiple layers of translators. Talking to Strangers is about why we are so bad at that act of translation.”
― Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know About the People We Don’t Know
― Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know About the People We Don’t Know
“Sheriff Joe has built a jail that he refers to publicly as his “concentration camp,” and presidential candidates flock here during election campaigns, emerging full of praise. Anslinger said addicts were “lepers” who needed to be “quarantined,” and so Arpaio has built a leper colony for them in the desert.”
― Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs
― Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs
“Tell him that we have fucking reprogrammed reality. Tell him that language is a virus and that religion is an operating system and that prayers are just so much fucking spam.”
― American Gods
― American Gods
“There’s never been a true war that wasn’t fought between two sets of people who were certain they were in the right. The really dangerous people believe that they are doing whatever they are doing solely and only because it is without question the right thing to do. And that is what makes them dangerous.”
― American Gods
― American Gods
“Pronin calls this phenomenon the “illusion of asymmetric insight.” She writes: The conviction that we know others better than they know us—and that we may have insights about them they lack (but not vice versa)—leads us to talk when we would do well to listen and to be less patient than we ought to be when others express the conviction that they are the ones who are being misunderstood or judged unfairly.”
― Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know About the People We Don’t Know
― Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know About the People We Don’t Know
Alexander’s 2025 Year in Books
Take a look at Alexander’s Year in Books, including some fun facts about their reading.
1,222 books
|
12 friends
1,418 books
|
67 friends
385 books
|
24 friends
107 books
|
39 friends
1,222 books
|
184 friends
161 books
|
3 friends
775 books
|
49 friends
250 books
|
10 friends
More friends…
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