“Negroes are God’s creatures also, with all due rights and freedoms. Slavery is a moral stain against us. If anything will keep white men from their heaven, it is this.”
“Whole Foods announced it would be cutting medical benefits for its entire part-time workforce—at a total annual savings of what Bezos himself made in two hours.”
― The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It
― The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It
“In September 2019, actress Felicity Huffman was sentenced to fourteen days in jail for shelling out $15,000 to rig her daughter’s SAT scores so she could get into a top university. In 2011, Kelley Williams-Bolar, a single black mother living in public housing in Akron, Ohio, was charged with multiple felonies and sentenced to two five-year sentences for using her father’s address to enroll her daughters in a better public school. That same year, Tanya McDowell, a homeless black mother living in Bridgeport, Connecticut, was sentenced to five years in prison for enrolling her five-year-old son in a neighboring public school.”
― The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It
― The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It
“In fact, if the Soviet Union and the United States both decided to unleash their entire nuclear arsenals developed over the entire course of the Cold War, in a single location, the Chicxulub impact would still be 100,000 times more powerful.”
― The Ends of the World: Volcanic Apocalypses, Lethal Oceans, and Our Quest to Understand Earth's Past Mass Extinctions
― The Ends of the World: Volcanic Apocalypses, Lethal Oceans, and Our Quest to Understand Earth's Past Mass Extinctions
“Citizenship entails more than voting on election days. It requires ongoing engagement—knowing what needs to be done, getting the facts and understanding the arguments, and then making enough of a ruckus, and organizing and mobilizing others to join you, to do what needs to be done.”
― The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It
― The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It
“The Constitutional Convention of 1787 created the electoral college as a means of ensuring that a man with what Alexander Hamilton called “talents for low intrigue, and the little arts of popularity” could never become president of the United States. Although it eventually became a rubber-stamp body with no power—and, more recently, a mechanism that gives outsize influence to small groups of voters in a few states—the electoral college was originally meant to be something quite different: it was designed as a kind of review board, a group of elite lawmakers and men of property who would select the president, rejecting the people’s choice if necessary, in order to avoid the “excesses of democracy.”
― Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism
― Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism
Jacob’s 2025 Year in Books
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