Bailey Thornton > Recent Status Updates

The book is a story about a choice. Specifically, the choice of one man as to the sort of life he wanted to live. Theo made the decision to live a life that was deeply generous, whimsically creative, self forgetful, and full of kindness. In short, a life of love…more than a mere feeling. His was a love, to quote CS Lewis, maintained by will and deliberately strengthened by habit.

There’s justice and there’s mercy. If you’re not sure what to do and you’ve got to choose one or the other, I say always go the mercy way. If you make a mistake, make it for mercy. Bad mercy doesn’t hurt nearly like bad justice.

…for anything to be good, truly good, there must be love in it… There must be love for the gift itself. Love for the subject being depicted or the story being told. And love for the audience. Whether the art is sculpture, farming, teaching, law making, medicine, music, or raising a child. If love is not in it—at the very heart of it—it might be skillful, marketable, or popular. But I doubt it is truly good.

Re: nationwide strain on energy grids:
A survey found that more than half of US families saw no connection between the energy shortage and their own households…and 36% of households thought that there was no energy crisis at all.

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Happy to know, I guess, that hyper individualized thinking has always been a theme in our country and isn’t unique to now 🙃

Houston’s mayor later said that, “without air conditioning, Houston would not have been built at all. It just wouldn’t exist, that’s all.” 🤠

The “cold air cure” …owed less to temperatures than it did to the filtered air provided by most cooling systems. With the spread of air conditioned movie theaters, doctors often prescribed a double feature for allergy sufferers.

That July, the country endured a murderous heat wave that claimed an estimated 9,500 lives. More than 700 people died in New York alone.

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He had defined the period for all Victorians when he insisted that, “self control was an essential quality,” and this included an ability to ignore or at least seem to ignore discomfort about the weather.

Tuberculosis is so often and in so many ways a disease of vicious cycles. It’s an illness of poverty that worsens poverty. It’s an illness that worsens other illnesses, from HIV to diabetes. It’s an illness of weak healthcare systems that weakens healthcare systems. It’s an illness of malnutrition that worsens malnutrition. And it’s an illness of the stigmatized that worsens stigmatization.

Between 1985 and 2005, roughly as many people died of tuberculosis as in World Wars 1 and 2 combined.

People who are treated as less than fully human by the social order are more susceptible to tuberculosis, but it’s not because of their moral codes or choices or genetics, it’s because they are treated as less than fully human by the social order.

I understand if this all feels like ancient history, but it’s really not. As of 2025, 117 billion modern humans have lived. Over 100 billion were born before 1804. Almost everything that ever happened to us and almost everyone who ever happened, happened before 1804.

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My brain HURTS after reading that little factoid

To me, tuberculosis was a disease of history— something that killed depressive 19th century poets, not present tense humans. But as a friend once told me, “nothing is so privileged as thinking history belongs to the past.”

There is nothing permanent or unalterable about health inequities.

These events also established the bedrock principles that have governed our system for regulating potentially harmful substances ever since. First, that industry can be trusted to serve as an unbiased arbiter of science. And second, that products are presumed to be safe until proven otherwise. A principle now known in public health circles as the Kehoe Principle.

How alive your heart, to feel such sorrow.

“Just because it’s hard for you, doesn’t mean you’re doing any work to make it better.”

Today, as we stand here, memories of Emmett echo around us. Memories that have become emblematic of a national struggle with racial justice. But it is essential that we remember that Emmett was not just a symbol, he was a boy.

This book is for the ignorant boy I was and all the ignorant boys like him, like me. For the white kid in the delta of Mississippi, or in the bedroom suburb of Birmingham or charlotte or Atlanta. Everywhere the poison of the lost cause is spread.

I read Willy Morris’s “North Toward Home,” which showed me that it was possible to both love and hate a place. It taught me to be suspicious of those who did only one of the two.

Sending a message to Black folks is one of the key factors that separates a lynching from a murder. In a lynching, it’s not just the killers who are guilty, it’s the dominant culture. Thousands of people created the dominant culture that killed Emmett, and many thousands more benefitted from it. And while there’s no way to unravel the complicated web…there is a way now to say I’m sorry. It was wrong.”

The southern farming class lived in mortal fear of black men doing to them what the planters and overseers had done to black women for over 200 years. The accusation, as it often is in Mississippi, was the confession.

By the summer in 1955, a long battle came to a head over the issue of southern integration…they had been chipping away at segregation. He understood, though, that schools were more fraught. The unspoken issue at the core of the debate was always sexual. It had always been about white girls sitting in desks next to black boys.

Many of these [statues] were placed quite intentionally on the lawns of local courthouses, sending a message about the law and who it was designed to protect. Most of the monuments around the state were built during the brief, but emotionally powerful cotton boom. Not a single courthouse status in the state of Mississippi was erected after 1923. The lost cause was always about cotton and money.

Farming in the delta had always been a profit center for outsiders who controlled the dirt but never had to endure living on it or dying in it or being buried under it. The arrival of the English industrialists was part of a long tradition.

He was white and black. He was Mississippi. One part of himself at war with another part. Mississippi was killing itself, and the blues was the soundtrack.

“After the war, a fifth of Mississippi’s budget would be spent on artificial limbs.”

Wild stat alert!!!

Why did a bright, hopeful child get murdered for whistling in 1955? What about the intersection of Emmett and the Mississippi delta at that specific time led to his death.

The attitudes and intentions are why we should bring it up. To interrogate the present to see what of the past remains.

Re: integrating schools:

The real heroes of township 22 north, any thorough history reveals, were determined mothers who refused to let the state limit their children.

Her mother especially seemed to understand that the line all white southerners needed to see or be shown wasn’t between good and bad, but between cowardly and brave.