Gabriella > Recent Status Updates

“In this parable of debt and governance, dependence on the federal government was dangerous, while dependence on the bond market, credit appraisers, bankers, and fickle investors was virtuous. The story spoke to the ways in which advice could masquerade as ideology. Indeed, at the heart of technical advice about debt were moral arguments about governance, democracy, responsibility, and integrity.”

“…the breakdown of public housing does not make sense without exploring bondholder guarantees; the revenue problems of major American cities do not make sense without considering escalating fixed expenditures for debt-service payments; and the prioritization of some infrastructural projects and the steady decline of others is not legible without discussing the evaluative rubrics of bond rating agencies.”

“It didn’t really concern her. She had always known that sex was not really for her. Sex was painful and lame. What was the point? She’d once done it out of some sense of obligation, but now she was content to grind against a Hitachi wand and think about abstract concepts, like financial success or home ownership.”

This lady was unprecedented levels of horny like what is going ONNNNNN

“Lorde tried to turn her attraction to Rich and Cliff into opportunities to bed them, separately. She once told Rich she could not, in principle, trust a white woman she had not slept with. Neither Rich nor Cliff was interested in Lorde sexually and both resisted her persistent attempts at seduction.”

“As [Lorde] and Rich individually shaped their public identities as lesbians over time and their friendship became a matter of public record, they were often asked to read together, to appear on the same bill at benefits, speak-outs, and conferences, linked as feminists, cultural icons, and poets…One black, the other Jewish, they conveniently fit a desire within the movement to be seen as integrated.”

“Hunter was a microcosm of 1950s America, a decade characterized by rigid gender roles, the rise of the nuclear family as critical to social harmony, laws against “sexual psychopaths,” and state-sanctioned harassment of homosexuals. Cold War America nurtured an antihomo¬ sexual culture in which “deviance” was suppressed.”

“As we moved farther downtown through rows of dressed-up, dark silhouettes, we made small talk about people we hardly knew. All there was to do, it seemed, was talk about other people. To talk about ourselves, our shortcomings, our bad books and bad paintings, our parents who we were not talking to, these significant others who we were treating badly, would have been too much.”

“She’d been looking for her father. Now she’d found him, but of course only on TV did these things go as desired. The Bible, TV, movies, were full of prodigal sons coming home, full of seamless repair, resurrection, outlandish reunions at the last minute, but in life you were lucky if even one person said sorry + meant it. If someone walked out of your life + humbly came back, you were lucky + surprised.”

I just started one of those “I read it so you don’t have to” YouTube videos that was summarizing this book

10 minutes into the video, I was like WAIT A MINUTE I need to read this trainwreck for myself!!!

“Fortified by a strong sense of their options and entitlements, many of today’s young mothers see their decision to give up paid work and stay home with their families as a positive choice that reflects their values…But the real issues involved here can no longer be assessed in [such] terms...It has become inescapably clear that choosing economic dependency as a lifestyle is the classic feminine mistake.”

“The truth is that no one is going to hand us the gentrification-proof city we want. We have to imagine it, we have to believe in it, and we have to do it. Even if the doing is simply an action that saves one family from displacement, keeps one affordable food supplier open, or maintains one bench where seniors can gather, it is a necessary piece of the puzzle…Another city is possible.”

“How we talk about gentrification matters. Although it is important to be clear about the violence of displacement…there is a fine line between diagnosing harm and offering a prognosis of unavoidable demise…We have to be aware of the danger of ceding the cause, which ultimately lets those in power off the hook and solidifies…capitalist modes of development and the inequalities it produces.”

“[gentrification] needs to be understood alongside careful attention to factors like gender, race, heteronormativity, age, and colonialism…When researchers insist on foregrounding class at the expense of other power relations, we are not just missing something. We are misunderstanding the process itself…this will not actually help us move toward the end goal of all this research: resisting gentrification.”

“She thought of how little the witch had trusted anyone. How loneliness had eaten at her, made her turn to bitterness…distrust even herself. If the witch had reached out…could the Prince have been freed long ago, and the archives too?

…her heart…demanded she seek a new path. Maybe even a better one. The one Vina had given her: allies, and family, and friends to accompany them both on the quest ahead.”

“Besides, a tale cannot be a simple answer placed neatly into the palm of your hand. Truth must be earned and wrestled with and fought for. Tales are ritual. You had to walk this path.”

“We’re two sides of the same coin,” said Cora. “We’re called to it, archivist and librarian alike—protecting stories, preserving them, keeping them safe in their books. But the archivists want to control stories—destroy the ones that don’t suit them, and shape the others the way they like. They only care about bloody propaganda. We save everything. We save what they try to kill.”

“He shook his head. “It doesn’t matter now. What’s done is done.” And I recognized that response. The irrationality of some unnamed emotion in the driver’s seat mixed with the power to make things that cause discomfort disappear. White dude signature.”

“To my surprise, this time I found a photograph.

It was tucked into a Bible. The one object I did my best not to even touch during previous searches. They creeped me the hell out, Bibles did: people shaping their entire existence around a text written at a completely different time in a completely different part of the world just felt weird to me. The Constitution gave me a similar ick.”

“I have a habit of looking for heretical art in churches. I’ve always loved the way people bestow their own stories on those who are trying to destroy them. How, as hard as they try, the conquerors can never really erase the vanquished. But here, in this chapel where my grandmother was forced to her knees to pray, I want more than anything to find something rebellious.”

“What the hell is an eco-terrorist?” I ask, taking the newspaper and reading the rest of the article.

“A word the white folks made up to make people afraid of us,” Mala responds.

“People like us?”

“People who know we need the earth more than it needs us.”

“By the mid-1970s, the CDC model had proven that it could grow well in the arid soil of austerity…CDCs thrived because they cross-fertilized the neighborhood-based, community-control impulses of the War on Poverty with market-oriented economic development…it departed from its forebears by replacing poverty with property as its center of gravity, [routing] community action through the property relation…”

“When CDCs eclipsed sweat equity in the late 1970s, funded…by insurance companies, they became the primary agents of affordable housing construction...The story of their ascendance is the story of financialization…before the subprime lending of the 1990s and 2000s, the world of finance courted the affordable housing sector in search of tax shelters and good PR. The CDC was a crucial conduit in that process.”

“As one industry insider put it…’The insurance mechanism is being made the dumping ground for…unsolved social problems’ [Although] such disavowals sprang from rank self-interest…property insurance would never rectify the violence of racial capitalism; insurance serves only one master, and that master is property itself…the presence of insurance does not in turn guarantee better housing conditions.”

“Though tenant organizing would play a pivotal role in suppressing the arson wave, it could not singlehandedly keep out a threat that was built into the financial foundations of the Bronx’s brownlined neighborhoods…Stopping arson meant diminishing its profitability, and under racial capitalism, that was a role only state and corporate actors could perform. But it took tenants to force their hand.”

“The devastated landscape of the 1970s Bronx heralded the triumph of the FIRE industries…fire insurance was unyoked from fire safety [and] fire safety entered into a paradoxical relationship with the financial world: as the insurance and financial firms of Wall Street expanded their reach, a wave of incendiary fires erupted across the Bronx.”

“The Bronx is not typically imagined as a site of financialization. In the popular imagination, the rise of finance took place under the fluorescent lights of Wall Street trading floors, in the corner offices of coked-up junk bond traders…[but] financialization was not just in lower Manhattan or the City of London; it was also in Morrisania…More precisely, it could be found in the uneven flows between them.”

“‘…Until the 1960s…insurance companies made money on underwriting; investments were merely a way to protect capital and surplus from inflation.’ Financialization meant the bow of the economy was pointed toward capital markets…For insurers, the underwriting function that had historically determined company profits became merely a means of raising capital—through premiums—for investment.”

“It should have been a proud moment, but Ellie also felt profoundly sad. The Leech was the last of its kind. The monsters of her ancestors had been replaced by different threats. Invasive creatures, foreign curses, cruel magics, and alchemies. Vampires were the new big bloodsuckers.”

“The history of insurance redlining and brownlining shows us that entering into an insurance contract is never a neutral act. Insurance is, at its core, an apparatus for spreading and sharing risks; industry judgments about which risks are pooled together, who receives what type of coverage, and at what rates they are covered are all political decisions.“

“Across the 1970s, the policies sold by the NYPIUA came to have less and less of a direct relationship with the safety and well-being of their corresponding properties. In the growing space between the building and the policy, between the property and its protection, between the thing and the abstraction dwelled the tenants of the Bronx, stranded in the brownlined American city.”