Rob

“Paul S. Kozemchak (1948–2017), DARPA’s longest-serving employee, shared a shocking story with me, in a 2014 interview, that planted a seed for this book. “Guess how many nuclear missiles were detonated during the Cuban Missile Crisis?” he asked, then continued: “I can tell you that the answer is not ‘none.’ The answer is ‘several,’ as in four.” Two by the U.S. (on October 20 and October 26, 1962), and two by the Soviet Union (on October 22 and October 28, 1962), each of which was exploded in space. Firing off nuclear weapons tests in a DEFCON 2 environment was testing fate.”
― Annie Jacobsen, Nuclear War: A Scenario

“Halfway home I stopped at a deli and had soup and a sandwich and coffee. There was a bizarre story in the Post. Two neighbors in Queens had been arguing for months because of a dog that barked in its owner’s absence. The previous night, the owner was walking the dog when the animal relieved itself on a tree in front of the neighbor’s house. The neighbor happened to be watching and shot at the dog from an upstairs window with a bow and arrow. The dog’s owner ran back into his house and came out with a Walther P-38, a World War II souvenir. The neighbor also ran outside with his bow and arrow, and the dog’s owner shot him dead. The neighbor was eighty-one, the dog’s owner was sixty-two, and the two men had lived side by side in Little Neck for over twenty years. The dog’s age wasn’t given, but there was a picture of him in the paper, straining against a leash in the hands of a uniformed police officer.”
― Lawrence Block, Eight Million Ways to Die

“To all the millions of discontented Hitler in a whirlwind campaign offered what seemed to them, in their misery, some measure of hope. He would make Germany strong again, refuse to pay reparations, repudiate the Versailles Treaty, stamp out corruption, bring the money barons to heel (especially if they were Jews) and see to it that every German had a job and bread.”
― William L. Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany

“Trailer park residents rarely raised a fuss about a neighbor’s eviction, whether that person was a known drug addict or not. Evictions were deserved, understood to be the outcome of individual failure. They “helped get rid of the riffraff,” some said. No one thought the poor more undeserving than the poor themselves.2”
― Matthew Desmond, Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City