Kathleen E. > Recent Status Updates

"One of Revere's windows featured a depiction of the bleeding ghost of Christopher Seider, a twelve-year old boy who two weeks before the Boston Massacre had been killed by a customs officer-causing great outrage and a massive public funeral and leading in a way to the 'massacre' itself."

"It might be argued [...] that indeed it was here, in a parish in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, that the Revolutionary War began. Here at Fort William and Mary, where Royal soldiers fired shots at a Patriot militia for the first time and from whose stores the rebels armed themselves[...] Given all that it engendered, was this the ride of Paul Revers' that launched America's rebellion past the point of no return?"

"In 1774, King George sent Gage back to America to take over as the military governor of Massachusetts Bay. Gage was to continue to lead the Royal Army and to enforce the Coercive Acts (known to outraged rebel Americans as the Intolerable Acts), the measures that led to the Suffolk Resolves. The hope was that Gage, well-liked by both sides, might impose some discipline..."

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."