Kathleen E. > Recent Status Updates

Don't want to add quote because of spoilers but dang the close of this chapter is haunting, wounding, and beautiful all at once. The language is perfection.

tiny gravedigger. I want to be joined / to her words, but how many times are you allowed / to need your mother?

Snow filled the corridor /where we prayed her luminous / and gestured toward heaven, / blessed her, but she didn't answer.

"[Looking at Arizona as an example, in the context of rising temperatures] In the very worst version of what a 15-minute city might mean, something along these lines could emerge as the only option. For personal safety from intolerable temperatures, a quarter of an hour would be the only practicable time frame in which to carry out daily errands."

"Pre-pandemic Manhattan would see its population more than double during the day, with 1.64 million people using trains, buses, and ferries to show up for work on the island. There are also more than four hundred subway stations and a ridership of around 1.6 billion people per year... 52 percent of the daytime Manhattan population, according to census data, are commuters..."

"The average distance of an American commuting trip has changed little at about ten miles, but the speed has decreased from nearly forty miles an hour in the early 1980s to less than thirty miles an hour in 2017. The roads are getting slower and more congested..."

'What do they want of us?' I asked again. She shrugged.
'All we know is what they don't want.'

"The reason the literary sources are so dehumanising is that they didn't perceive killing enslaved people to be particularly wrong. It was the purpose of killing which was wrong, not the death itself."

"It was...disruptive innovator Julius Caesar with his brilliant mind who found a way around this funeral situation and changed things forever. In 65 BCE, when JC was a low-key magistrate with a profile to match the amount of fucks he gave about tradition, but an unstoppable ambition, he held some gladiatorial games in the Forum Romanum in honour of his dad who had died two decades previously. It was genius."

"The existence of multiple overbearing women who kill their husbands for their sons in Roman literature did not mean that they did not exist, nor that they were the only husband-murderers who existed. It merely means that they were the only ones the Romans were afraid of."

"...there was no written law. What was and wasn't legal was up to the king, and then, when kings were booted to the kerb, to the priests. In 451 BC, however, it was decided, for whatever reason, that this situation was not a sustainable or useful way forward for Rome. [...a] committee of ten men with consular imperium, put together ten tablets of laws and then bolted on another two tablets the following year."