June

“Empathy makes good people better, then, because kind people don’t like suffering, and empathy makes this suffering salient. If you made a sadist more empathic, it would just lead to a happier sadist, and if I were indifferent to the baby’s suffering, her crying would be nothing more than an annoyance.”
― Paul Bloom, Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion – How Emotion Undermines Morality, Justice, and Good Policy

“Faces are constantly moving, and your brain relies on many different factors at once—body posture, voice, the overall situation, your lifetime of experience—to figure out which movements are meaningful and what they mean.”
― Lisa Feldman Barrett, How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain

“In this chapter I have tried to call your attention to many of the writerly habits that result in soggy prose: metadiscourse, signposting, hedging, apologizing, professional narcissism, clichés, mixed metaphors, metaconcepts, zombie nouns, and unnecessary passives. Writers who want to invigorate their prose could try to memorize that list of don’ts.”
― Steven Pinker, The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century

“protection is not guaranteed because some insects (known as parasitoids) specialise in developing in, or on, the body of the gall-inducing insect while it is in the gall. Other insects (inquilines) invade the gall chamber and force the gall-inducing insect to share its home with these intruders. There are also thieving insects (kleptoparasites) that take over the gall and displace the original gall-inducing insect.”
― Rosalind Blanche, Life in a Gall: The Biology and Ecology of Insects that Live in Plant Galls