Leila > Recent Status Updates

“Out there, electromagnetic vibrations ripple through the vacuum as bodies in space give out light. If these vibrations are translated into sounds then the planets each have their own music, the sound of their light. The sound of their magnetic fields and ionospheres, their solar winds, the radio waves trapped between the planet and its atmosphere.”

“Maybe against all the odds we’ll migrate to Mars where we’ll start a colony of gentle preservers … we’ll devise a planetary flag because that’s the thing we lacked on earth and we’ve come to wonder if that’s why it all fell apart, and we’ll look back at the faint dot of blue that is our old convalescing earth and we’ll say, Do you remember? Have you heard the tales?”

“He seems to know that something is ending, that all good things must go this way, towards fracture and fallout… And it will end through the restless spirit of endeavor that made it possible in the first place. Striking out, further and deeper. The moon, the moon. Mars, the moon. Further yet. A human being was not made to stand still.”

… likewise Russia and Alaska are nose to nose, barely a spit of water to hold them apart. Europe runs into Asia with not a note of fanfare. Continents and countries come one after the other and the earth feels – not small, but almost endlessly connected, an epic poem of flowing verses. It holds no possibility of opposition.”

“Before they came here there used to be a sense of the other side of the world, a far-away-and-out-of-reach. Now they see how the continents run into each other like overgrown gardens – that Asia and Australasia are not separate at all but are made continuous by the islands that trail between …

“Our lives here are inexpressively trivial and momentous…We matter greatly and not at all. To reach some pinnacle of human achievement only to discover that your achievements are next to nothing and that to understand this is the greatest achievement of any life, which itself is nothing, and also much more than everything. Some metal separates us from the void; death is so close. Life is everywhere, everywhere”

The history of the earth plotted over a year, and all of the things of humanity coming in in the late afternoon of New Year’s Eve (and what a crazy thing to read on New Year’s Eve) and only in “the closing second of the cosmic year there’s” and a whole list of

Really really gorgeous

… by some miracle of being, to simplify their inner lives so that outer things can be ambitious and limitless. Those people can swap out a house for a spaceship, a field for universe. And though he’s good, he’d give his leg to be the latter, it’s not the kind of thing you can trade a leg for – in any case who’d want his leg if they already had limitlessness?”

“There are people like him (so he says) who complicate their inner lives by feeling too much all at once, by living in knots, and who therefore need outer things to be simple. A house, a field, some sheep for example. And there are those who managed somehow …

… louder, bigger, more ostentatious, more unscrupulously wanting of the play of power than those around them, if that were the beginning and the end of the story it would not be so bad. Instead, they come to see that it’s not a pantomime, or it’s not just that. It’s a force so great that it has shaped every single thing on the surface of the earth that they had thought, from here, so human-proof.”

“But then one day something shifts. One day they look at the earth and they see the truth. If only politics really were a pantomime. The politics were just a farcical, inane, at times insane entertainment provided by characters who for the most part have got where they are, not by being in any way revolutionary or percipient or wise in their views, but by being …

“ When they look at the planet, it’s hard to see a place for or a trace of the small and babbling pantomime of politics on the newsfeed, and it’s as though that pantomime is an insult to the august stage on which it all happens, an assault on its gentleness, or else too insignificant to be bothered with… The Earth shrugs it off with its every rotation.”

“Here came Europe, there went Europe. What a shame, says the voice still warmly, that you exist in all time zones and none at all, that you shift across longitudes in this great metal albatross, that more is asked of your brain than it knows how to do. Too bad for you that it all goes so quickly. That a continent lapses, and gives way to another, that the earth, so beloved, never stays in your grasp.”

“The seconds dissolve and mean less and less. Time shrinks to a dot on a field of blank white, specific and senseless, then bloats without edges and loses shape. They pounce on the cursor whenever they’re asked, quick as a flash, not quick at all. Europe moves below in an afternoon haze, and the clouds mark out the shape of coastlines.”

Stunning page

“The thoughts run into a wall and expire. Then are reborn into a sudden apprehension, for the hundredth time today, of those four souls, his colleagues and friends, on their way to the moon.”

“Why would you do this? Trying to live where you can never thrive? Trying to go where the universe doesn’t want you when there’s a perfectly good earth just there that does. He’s never sure if man’s lust for space is curiosity or ingratitude. If this weird hot longing makes him a hero or an idiot. Undoubtedly something just short of either.“

… He has an equilibrium that has been there since childhood, an extraordinary ease and presence of mind that made him bypass most of the shit-slinging tantrums of toddler-dom and rebellions of adolescence. A deep curiosity, a brain of ornate architecture, a focus, an optimism and a pragmatism; an astronaut to his bones before he even knew what an astronaut was.”

“For years an astronaut trains in pools and caves and submarines and simulators, every flaw or weakness located, tested and winnowed away until what’s left is a near-perfect unflappable triangulation of brain, limbs and senses. For some it comes hard and for others more easily. For Pietro, more easily; he is a natural-born astronaut…

“What are you anyway as an astronaut but a conduit - you are selected for your non-stick temperament, maybe one day a robot could do your job and maybe it will; you have to wonder. They do sometimes wonder… But what would it be to cast out into space creations that has no eyes to see it and no heart to fear or exult in it?”

… and the existence of sex disaggregated data would certainly make it much harder to keep insisting, in the face of all the evidence to the contrary, that women’s needs can safely be ignored in pursuit of a greater good”

“Closing the gender data gap will not magically fix all the problems faced by women, whether or not they are displaced. That would require a wholesale restructuring of society and an end to male violence. But getting to grips with the reality that gender neutral does not automatically mean gender equal would be an important start …

“Gender sensitive provision is not just about safety, however. It’s also about health. In the UK, homeless shelters can and do request free condoms from the NHS, but they cannot request free menstrual products. As a result, shelters can only provide menstrual products for free if they happen to have spare funds—unlikely—or if they receive a donation”

“Given the steady stream of abuse reports from around the world, perhaps it’s time to recognize the assumption that male staff can work in female facilities as they do in male facilities is another example of where gender neutrality turns into gender discrimination. Perhaps sex segregation needs to extend beyond sanitation facilities…perhaps no male staff should be in positions of power over vulnerable women”

No and of course women are 4-5x more likely to die in a natural disaster across a wide range of countries bc that totally makes sense

… to a hidden male bias, and it is the current system that is antidemocratic”

“British governments have historically been opposed to [quotas]…as anti democratic. But evidence…shows that political gender quotas don’t lead to the monstrous regiment of incompetent women. In fact, in line with the LSE study on workplace quotas, studies on political quotas have found that…they increase the competence of the political class in general… [they] are nothing more than a corrective …

“In 2015, unpaid care and domestic work in Mexico was valued at 21% [of GDP], higher than manufacturing, commerce, real estate, mining, construction, and transport and storage. An Australian study found that unpaid childcare should… be regarded as [its] largest industry, generating… 345 billion dollars or almost 3 times the financial and insurance services industry, the largest industry in the formal economy”

“The UN estimates that the total value of unpaid childcare services in the US was 3.2 trillion dollars in 2012. Or, approximately, 20% of GDP, valued at 16.2 trillion dollars that year.”