kaliflower > Recent Status Updates

"There is another wave coming. This book is sympathetic to the idea that the climate crisis is going to get worse before it gets better - and that we are drastically underestimating (and failing to articulate) many of the risks therein."

- Prologue: Tension, page 17

What if humans didn't believe viruses and bacteria were at the bottom of the food pyramid, but at the top of it? Or between every step? What if we didn't imagine a species pyramid at all, but a species cycle - a round map without beginning or end, which we all share?

- Chapter Ten: Ride-Along, pages 227-228

We cannot continue with a world that warehouses people who are disabled or elderly, hiding them from view; that allows them to fester physically and emotionally and leaves them for dead when viruses circulate.

- Chapter Nine: Disability as Disposability, page 207

With America's HIV approach, the priority became protecting private pharma profits and intellectual property over providing public prophylaxis. Those who controlled the means of pharmacological production controlled access to life itself, and the ongoing AIDS crisis has continued to kill up to an estimated one million people a year globally.

- Chapter Eight: One in Two, page 185

Liberalism has built into the law many of the vectors that drive viral transmission, especially via the carceral state. This must be undone if we are to reduce the trauma of our current and future plagues, expand access to prophylaxis, and mitigate the trauma of social death.

- Chapter Seven: Cages, page 174

The United States has long viewed itself as a nation defined by its lack of pathogens and has required people to be "clean" to lay claim to its lands. This is ableist, revisionist, and ironic.

- Chapter Six: Borderlands, page 135

[ you're dirty . . . Just degenerate .] Not clean . Whether a person is queer, experiencing homelessness, struggling with addiction, or moving across borders to avoid war or starvation, the same few words are used to disparage the members of viral underclass around the world.

- Chapter Five: From Athens to Appalachia, page 127

[ you're dirty . . . Just degenerate . Not clean . Whether a person is queer, experiencing homelessness, struggling with addiction, or moving across borders to avoid war or starvation, the same few words are used to disparage the members of viral underclass around the world.

- Chapter Five: From Athens to Appalachia, page 127

Especially during times of austerity, laws in spots ranging from Athens to Appalachia serve as a tool for cementing people in their place, directing resources to the upper class and viruses to the lower.

- Chapter Four: Guilty Until Proven Innocent, page 106

Karl Marx asserted that history is driven by class conflict - by the creation of different classes and by the tension between them in gaining access to the resources necessary to live well that help define the very meaning of live on earth.

- Chapter Three: Parasite, Page 73

It is grotesque and irresponsible for news media to equate, even linguistically, people living with viruses with some of the most violent seconds in human history.

- Chapter Two: The Infinite Weight of Zero, page 51

But I started using a third metric as my guiding cartography, viral transmission - and I found that wherever you find people living with viruses and dying of disease, you're bound to find Black people dying of police violence or poverty, too.

- Chapter One: Mandingo, page 41

I think maybe there is no borderline between countries now because we all live in the same country, it's called capitalism. - Bong Joon-Ho, Part I - Blame

Adulting sucks. I just want to relax and read my books but noooooo life gets in the way

The sirens, inescapable and penetrating in those early days, weeks, and months, piercingly announced that social psychology was irrelevant to the new apex predator in our city. It didn't care how you felt, who you were, what sports team you liked, or what you ate for lunch that day. It just wanted to infect humans.

- Foreword by Jonathan M. Metzl, page xii

The delay, of course, did not go down well with the Trump White House. [...] When asked if Pfizer was playing politics by postponing an announcement, [Moncef Slaoui] replied, "With all due respect , Mr. President, I don't care."

- Chapter Eight: On our Own, page 210