Hannah > Recent Status Updates

... about it, it ain't even a problem, it's just a aggravation. And the truth is, I don't have no more idea of the world that is brewing out there than what Harold did."

"But the thing about them letters was you could tell that the world she was planning on him coming back to was not ever going to be here. Easy to see now, 60 some years on. But they just had no notion at all. You can say you like it or you don't like it, but it don't change nothing. I've told my deputies more than once that you fix what you can fix and you let the rest go. If there ain't nothing to be done about...

"It was like a ball player told me one time. He said that if he had some slight injury and it bothered him a little bit, nagged at him, he generally played better. It kept his mind focused on one thing instead of a hundred. I can understand that. Not that it changes anything.
I thought if I lived my life in the strictest way I knew how, that I would not ever again have a thing that would eat on me that away."

"Neil even knows that by being beyond God’s awareness, he is not loved by God in return. This doesn’t affect his feelings either, because unconditional love asks nothing, not even that it be returned.
And though it’s been many years that he has been in Hell, beyond the awareness of God, he loves Him still. That is the nature of true devotion.”

"Of course, everyone knew that Heaven was incomparably superior, but to Neil it had always seemed too remote to consider, like wealth or fame or glamour. For people like him, Hell was where you went when you died, and he saw no point in restructuring his life in hopes of avoiding that. And since God hadn’t previously played a role in Neil’s life, he wasn’t afraid of being exiled from God.”

“Like every other non-devout person, Neil had never expended much energy on where his soul would end up; he’d always assumed his destination was Hell, and he accepted that... Hell, after all, was not physically worse than the mortal plane.
It meant permanent exile from God, no more and no less… Neil was one of those who were unmoved; as far as he could tell, the lost souls as a group were no unhappier than he was..."

ORKIDEH:
“What I want to say is that I was happy. Not always, not even mostly. But I did know real, deep joy. Maybe everyone gets a certain amount to use up over a lifetime, and I just used my lifetime's allotment especially quickly, with Leila. But I don't think it was a tragedy, my life. Tragedies are relentless. Nobody could ask for more than what I've had.”

... glimpses of ourselves near sacred… it means, in my humble opinion, we got to cubism hundreds of years before Braque or Picasso or any European. That maybe we’ve been training for a long time in sitting in the complicated multiplicities of ourselves, of our natures.”

... these incredible mosaics, shrines, prayer niches… I think about this a lot, Cyrus. These centuries of Persians trying to copy the European vanity, really their self-reflection. How it arrived to us in shards. How we had to look at ourselves in these broken fragments, and how these mirror tiles found themselves in all these mosques, the tilework, these ornate mosaics. How those spaces made the fractured...

... explorers to go back to Europe and bring him mirrors, giant mirrors, buy them for any price. And so they do, but of course as they bring these massive mirrors back across the world, they shatter, they fracture into a billion little mirror pieces. Instead of great panes of mirrors, the shah’s architects in Isfahan had all this massively expensive broken mirror glass to work with. And so they begin making these...

“…Your project reminds me of all the great Persian mirror art… Some centuries ago all these Safavid explorers from Isfahan go to Europe—France, Italy, Belgium—and they see all these gargantuan mirrors all over. Ornate, massive mirrors everywhere in palaces, in the great halls. Building-sized mirrors. They come back and they tell the Shah about them and of course he wants a bunch for himself. So he tells his...

… contaminated by the awareness, or ignorance, of the bodies turning to soil beneath it?
And then, if the girl herself was rubbled by an errant mortar shell, her eyes full of tears and aimed in their final living moment at that flower, which would weigh more on the cosmic scales: a tear of gratitude at the great beauty of a flower lifting through ash, or a tear of delirious rage?”

“Cyrus also worried that the whole idea of gratitude was possibly classist, or worse. Did a poor Syrian child, whose living and dying had been indelibly shaped by the murderous whims of evil men, qualify for grace only if she possessed a superhuman ability to look beyond her hardship and notice the beauty of a single flower growing through a pile of rubble? And would the gratitude for that flower be contaminated…

… that serves it, is also just a canary. It foretells how the technologies produced atop this logic will devalue the labor of everyone else. In fact, for the artists, writers, and coders who’s labor the empires of AI turned into free training data, that is already happening.”

“Behind promises of [AI empires’s] technologies enhancing productivity, unlocking economic freedom, and creating new jobs that would emilurlarate automation, the present day reality has been the opposite. Companies pad their bottom lines while the most economically vulnerable lose out, and more and more highly educated people become ventriloquists for chat bots. The empire’s devaluing of the human labor that…

… So what is God? Just another name for whatever makes you feel special and protected?
There’s a big, early-season storm blowing itself out in the Gulf of Mexico. There are over 700 known dead so far. One hurricane. And how many people has it hurt? That’s nature. Is it God? Most of the dead are the street poor who have nowhere to go and who don’t hear the warnings. Is it a sin against God to be poor?”

“A lot of people seem to believe in a big-daddy-God or a big-cop-God or a big-king-God. They believe in a kind of super person. A few believe God is another word for nature. And nature turns out to me just about anything they happen to not understand or feeling control of.
Some say God is a spirit, of force, an ultimate reality. Ask seven people what all of it means and you’ll get seven different answers. So…

… perpetrators who haven’t reckoned with their guilt. This is the tragedy of true crime.”

“The stories we tell about the worst of humanity are a reflection on all of us. True crime is the antithesis of the notion that we are more than our crimes. It turns back the clock and replays the worst moments of someone’s life, reconstructs and reenacts it all for entertainment, usually by exploiting the people most affected by the violence — victims whose wounds haven’t healed, perpetrators who…

… of my story. It brings me back to my earlier question: does illuminating human darkness increase the desire for punishment? I’m now convinced that one thing, more than anything else, is keeping me in prison: true crime…
The good vs evil binary is lazy storytelling. It’s also an inaccurate depiction of why violence occurs.”

“The prosecutors on the panel were split on my petition. According to one of his deputies, DA González was ‘really spooked’ by the Inside Evil episode. When the governor’s clemency folks took a meeting with my legal team, most of their questions fixated on Inside Evil too. It devastated me. I couldn’t believe that people at the highest levels of government were so influenced by this lurid rendering of…

“In typical true crime, people who kill are reduced almost entirely to the parts of themselves that supposedly explained what made them kill. The saga ends at the crime and punishment phase, but that’s only half the story. I contend that the lives lived in prison after a crime are just as fascinating and important as those that were spiraling before it.”

“What does it mean for a swath of Americans to fall asleep to murder? What are the consequences of illuminating human darkness? Does it increase our desire for punishment? Does true crime hinder the progress of criminal justice writers and activists, reformers and policy makers?”

Johnson refutes the idea that Frankenstein is based on Mary Shelley’s husband, listing the ways in which he is more similar to Mary than Shelley.

As a creature of id, the monster “kills those whom Frankenstein wants to kill. At a still deeper level, the monster’s actions express the emotional intention of the author herself.”

From the introduction by Diane Johnson:

The monster’s “own history, mirrors that of the progress from innocence to guilt of the whole human race. The structure implies that the monster’s (man’s) guilt is finally greatest, but the explicit moral terms specify that the greatest skill is the Creator’s Frankenstein’s).”

… (the twisting of matter in the fourth dimension). Just as the Square is forced to admit that the plane figures in Flatland in fact must have some additional three-dimensional ‘height’ even if it cannot be measured (at least not by Flatlandera), our failure to perceive the fourth dimension could result from the fact that it is too immeasurably small, probably inhering in the smallest particles of matter.”

I’m 1892, “Karl Pearson hypothesized that matter might result from ether (the unseen medium that 19th century physicists posited to explain action at a distance like gravitation) squirting into our world from the fourth dimension. Hinton speculated on the way the fourth dimension could explain physical phenomenon like light (a manifestation of vibration in an unseen dimension) and static electricity (the…

I want to try to find the “mind-destroying” computer graphic program that mathematician Thomas Banchoff made that can project images of how higher dimensional objects would appear as they rotate through lower dimensional space.

… one whit the better morally or spiritually’ (Abbott); only the practice of faith, hope, and love can make us better people.”

“In European visual art… artists like Picasso and Braque attempted to transcend Renaissance perspectival conventions by portraying multiple dimensions simultaneously.”

Philosophers in the 1870s “attempted to justify Christian belief in God and immortality by imagining a continuity between our visible universe and a spiritual one in the the fourth dimension. Physicist James Clerk Maxwell imagined his soul as a trefoil knot that could be untied only in the fourth dimension.”
Even if we could actually conceive of a fourth dimension, ‘we would not be one whit better’ (Abbott).