Erin > Recent Status Updates

You may be surprised to hear that my book about humans causing mass extinction is getting sad to read.

"Asb the civil rights movement wound down, Moynihan looked out and saw a black population reeling under the effects of 350 years of bondage and plunder. He believed that these effects could be addressed through state action. They were -- through the mass incarceration of millions of black people."

"White supremacy is a crime and a lie, but it's also a machine that generates meaning. This existential gift, as much as anything, is the source of its enormous, centuries-spanning power."

The anti-Italian racism is startling and really dates the book.

"Yet if the American Negro has arrived at his identity by virtue of the absoluteness of his estrangement from his past, American white men still nourish the illusion that there is some means of recovering the European innocence, of returning to a state in which black men do not exist. This is one of the greatest errors Americans can make."

"They are, in effect, still trapped in a history which they do not understand; and until they understand it, they cannot be released from it. They have had to believe for many years, and for innumerable reasons, that black men are inferior to white men. Many of them, indeed, know better, but, as you will discover, people find it very difficult to act on what they know."

"I love America more than any other country in the world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually. I think all theories are suspect, that the finest principles may have to be modified, or may even be pulverized by the demands of life, and that one must find, therefore, one's own moral center and move through the world hoping this center will guide one aright."

I want to read more nature writing this year so I'll appreciate our planet more. I found this book to be too much of a slog to finish, though, so I'll have to try something else.

"The feeling I'm your heart: it's called mono no aware. It is a sense of the transience of all things in life. The sun, the dandelion, the chica, the Hammer, and all of us: we are all subject to the equations of James Clerk Maxwell, and we are all ephemeral patterns destined to eventually fade, whether in a second or an eon."

"Stories sneak in while no one is watching."

Is it too late to become a lexicographer?

"Joy doesn't betray but sustains activism. And when you face a politics that aspires to make you fearful, alienated, and isolated, joy is a fine initial act of insurrection."

"Critical thinking without hope is cynicism, but hope without critical thinking is naivete." -- Maria Popova

"There's no world in which I would surrender the intimidating beauty of Yoruba language poetry for, say, Shakespeare's sonnets, or one in which I'd prefer chamber orchestras playing baroque music to the koras of Mali. I'm happy to own all of it."

This is definitely interesting, but it feels like I've been reading it since the dinosaurs went extinct.

This book is stressing me out. Everyone talks constantly and never listens to anyone.

"I witness the birth on paper of sentences that have eluded my will and appear in spite of me on the sheet, teaching me something that I neither knew nor thought I might want to know."

"The cat here on earth
Modern totem
And intermittently decorative"

It's probably not a ringing endorsement that this book helped me sleep on an airplane. And yet, it did.

"This is a book about a very simple idea: where the criminal justice system fails to respond vigorously to violent injury and death, homicide becomes endemic."

"the names we hold in such reverence have been randomly selected by the broken record, and that maybe others unknown to us would have more richly deserved our awe her history troubled to remember them."

Lise Meitner was completely used by her research partner when she had to flee Germany for being Jewish. Rarr!

"[Rosalind] Franklin was precise, literal, and always more at home with data than with speculation."

This sounds like me!

""We may begin to discuss matters in the proper way, courteously as to the person, ferociously as to the thought."

"I have found that the application of a degree of ferocity to the person usually brings his thinking in line to my own."