Karyl > Recent Status Updates

In the 1988 biography of Burnley, Margaret Anne Doody said as much: "It's as if there were a quota for female fiction writers, preferably no more than one per century or at most per half-century. We gave one already in Austen, the position is filled." Today we call this phenomenon "the Smurfette Principle," a phrase coined by the critic Katha Pollitt in 1991 in the New York Times.

Shackleton is conventionally seen as the last in the "Age of Heroism", but of course heroism of all kinds continues in the Antarctic as everywhere else, and it would be foolish to give weight to Nostalgia for the days when Polar exploration was—and celebrated being—male, white and frequently dead.

"The search for a Northeast or Northwest Passage was a remarkable triumph of greed over experience, and it killed thousands of strong and healthy young men in slow and messy ways without achieving anything more lucrative than better cartography."

It was around that time that I regained an early obsession with polar exploration. It was an old interest of mine; I had always enjoyed an Arctic saga, but I began to buy them in bulk. There was something about the starkness of life in the snow, the terrible risks of traveling across ice plains, it seemed to supply a release from the sameness of my days, the relentless round of my hours.

"It was always the same story, she thought tiredly. Just small, angry men, clinging to fading power. They feared living without privilege because they'd abused it against others, and were now terrified of suffering the same cruelty they'd routinely dealt out."

Evangelicals tend to impugn those who have been killed by law enforcement as lawbreakers... only 13% of white Evangelical support the Black Lives Matter movement, while 76% are inclined to say "all lives matter." By placing the blame on victims rather than perpetrators, evangelicals couple an idealized vision of law enforcement with scriptural admonitions.

Graham's take on the linked fate of citizens, government, and nation held the seeds of a nationalistic Christianity, predicated on Christian morals and beliefs as the cornerstone and foundation of the nation, despite the fact that the founders wanted religious freedom for people of all faiths.

Evangelicals’ use of morality in the nineteenth century forged the pathway by which racism and white supremacy became part and parcel of evangelical history, informing how they interpreted scripture, how they constructed a public and nationalistic vision for America, and how they used morality to both convert and oppress African Americans in slavery and in freedom.

For evangelicals, “Christian race,” America, and belief are synonymous. Christianity is whiteness as well as belief… [and] causes evangelicals to ignore their racism. They truly believe that their Christianity is a race, and this comprises an all-encompassing identity. That is why when some evangelicals say they don’t see color, they really mean it. They just see whiteness. No color but the dominant one.

The election [of 2016] would set the United States on a course toward isolationism, tribalism, the walling in and protecting of one's own, the worship of wealth and acquisition at the expense of others, even of the planet itself.

Live long enough, and you learn how to read a person. To ease them open like a book, some passages underlined and others hidden between the lines.

Books, she has found, are a way to live a thousand lives—or to find strength in a very long one.

It is the scene between winter and spring—though seam suggests an even hem, and March is more like a rough line of stitches sewn by an unsteady hand, swinging wildly between January gusts and June greens.

...cycling through schools as I did, I learned young that friendships, clubs, and activities would go on without me, would forget me, just as a year prior they'd never known I existed. In our obsession with home as a material thing, we forget that primal needs can be met even as the human spirit is hurt. Belonging is, on a psychological level, a primal need too.

The more I experienced, the more experiences she [my mother] knew were out there for her to try. And the more she experienced, the more open she became to experiencing other things.

"Jesus is the only viable excuse a young woman can use to deny the penis."

"Taking books away from a culture is to take away its shared memory. It's like taking away the ability to remember your dreams. Destroying a culture's books is sentencing it to something worse than death: It is sentencing it to seem as if it never lived."

Almost one third of young women would trade a year of their lives to have the perfect body. This is not because women are shallow, or because they have their priorities out of whack. It is because society makes life miserable for women who are not thin.

"After experiencing such awful mind-consuming fear continuously for three days," I wrote, "I wonder if the real definition of courage is the ability to deal successfully with one's fears. At the end of this expedition I hope not only to be alive, but also able to say I have courage."

When the popular will becomes paramount in a nation's political life, the manipulation of public opinion also becomes a necessary art and evil, thus giving rise to a new army of confidence man, crooks, tricksters, charlatans, swindlers, fakers, frauds, cheats, hustlers, bilkers, sharks, racketeers, mountebanks, and humbugs, who pervade every trade and every walk of life.

We remember a place not just for its beauty but for the way that beauty made us feel; those feelings are woven into the emotional tapestry we called self. The most special places are the ones that give texture to our dreams, that ground us, make us whole, remind us of what is real.

And suddenly I realize that civilization is suffering from a severe vitamin deficiency, because it cannot drop its strength directly from nature, eternally young and eternally true. Humanity has lost itself in the unnatural and in the speculative.

It's terribly boring to be a lady but such great fun to be a mister.

Old people, like children, are always losing things, but they no longer have a mom to tell them where to look.

Children can hold hope for a long time without it burning their hands, far longer than adults can, which is what allows them to complete the act of up in a world where people lie, where people let you down all the time, a world where love isn't always enough, a world where, sometimes, you have to give up on someone else in order to save yourself.

Part of music was for sharing—the part people can experience together—a live performance, a mixtape, the kinship you feel when you make music with other people. But part of it was private—the love you feel for it. The surging swell of emotion that you can't name when it plays, the way it is almost religious, wordlessly so, in its power.

... and you see, in a turn of their thin shoulders, that you will not be able to fix anything in their lives, that there will be no Band-Aid or mothers' embrace for what they will one day endure. There is so little to control in life.

For the Patriots of 1776 sought to build their free and independent nation on certain self-evident truths that human beings are created equal in the eyes of God and are endowed by their creator with rights that government did not create and can never take away...They shouted, with their lives on the line, that a government that acts without the consent of the governed is illegitimate and may be changed or overthrown.

For the Patriots of 1776 sought to build their free and independent nation on certain self-evident truths that human beings are created equal in the eyes of God and are endowed by their creator with rights that government did not create and can never take away...They shouted, with their lives on the line, that a government that acts without the consent of the governed is illegitimate and may be changed or overthrown.