Matthew Bizer > Recent Status Updates

“Failing to care about climate change is a failure to love. What is more Christian than to be good stewards of the planet and love our global neighbor as ourselves?”

“You can't play college football, *and* go to school. They tried that once, and you know what a silly mess that was."

It was already unsettling how accurate this book is… and then I got to the chapter that digresses on the state of college football in Vonnegut’s imagined future and just said “oh come ON”

“The age of information would at times offer remarkable theaters of human connection that would throw many off the scent, but the fact was that the technologies of isolation were intensifying. Nebraska, even if inadvertently, saw one kind of isolation coming as it looked back on another.”

“To me, Nebraska is an album-length description of how America has struggled to find its soul, has never had much of an identity beyond the brand that's been sold over and over again to people living here. But lives are lived behind the brand, and Springsteen is unearthing them, exposing them to the light.” - Patty Griffin

“And my husband says somebody’s just got to be maladjusted; that somebody's got to be uncomfortable enough to wonder where people are, where they're going, and why they're going there. That was the trouble with his book. It raised those questions, and was rejected. So he was ordered into public-relations duty."

“That idea of a mansion on the hill […] is potent and finds a lot of people slaving away so there can be the one guy with that house. That's what America is like. That's the toxification of this American dream. We have enough resources here for everyone, but as long as we're all dreaming of the mansion… shit. But we think about it differently when it's seen through a child's eyes.” - Matt Berninger

“Nebraska was unfinished, imperfect, delivered into a world hovering at the threshold of the digital, when technology would allow recorded music to hang itself on perfect time, carry perfect pitch, but also risk losing its connection to the unfixed and unfixable.”

Month 1 of 12: mostly songs I don’t know; one I’ve witnessed live (Going To Alaska)

“Given the choice between giving away too much or not giving away enough, I will, in my personal life, always overdisclose, and, in my professional life, always hold something back. My professional self and my personal self are barely even on speaking terms, and who can blame them? They don't really understand each other.”

“You've got something the tests and machines will never be able to measure: you're artistic. That's one of the tragedies of our times, that no machine has ever been built that can recognize that quality, appreciate it, foster it, sympathize with it.”

“So getting ocean-climate policy right in cities isn't a "coastal elite" issue, it's about 1 in 5 Americans, a diverse cross-section of our society. Local governments are often the ones making decisions about planning for sea level rise, coastal development, port operations, and more. Having strong federal policy is key, but the local level is where it gets real.”

“Things, gentlemen, are ripe for a phony Messiah, and when he comes, it's sure to be a bloody business. Sooner or later someone's going to catch the imagination of these people with some new magic. At the bottom of it will be a promise of regaining the feeling of participation, the feeling of being needed on earth—hell, dignity.“

"Makes you feel kind of creepy, don't it, Doctor, watching them keys go up and down? You can almost see a ghost sitting there playing his heart out."

“There are only so many taxpayers in the Global North who are able to put up this money. Most of the money is in the private sector. What we need to be doing is steering private sector finance and commercial finance in a cleaner way.” - Dr. Kelly Sims Gallagher

“As the aforementioned tanks poured into town, my city's mayor stood behind a podium and said, ‘This country is better than what we're seeing today.’ The hustle is that everyone talks about the ‘today’ as a single day that materialized, untethered, with no connection to any history before it or any history that will come after it. As if a moment is not within a braid of moments that defines a place.“

“We've learned the importance of community in all of these spaces, because it is a tactic of the system to individualize you.” - Xiye Bastida

“The means are the end. Odo said it all her life. Only peace brings peace, only just acts bring justice!”

That I’m reading this right now just got very timely.

“Can one dismiss either being, or becoming, as an illusion? Becoming without being is meaningless. Being without becoming is a big bore.”

"...And day to day, life's a hard job, you get tired, you lose the pattern. You need distance, interval. The way to see how beautiful the earth is, is to see it as the moon. The way to see how beautiful life is, is from the vantage point of death." [...] "I'll die, you'll die; how could we love each other otherwise? The sun's going to burn out, what else keeps it shining?"

"…And day to day, life's a hard job, you get tired, you lose the pattern. You need distance, interval. The way to see how beautiful the earth is, is to see it as the moon. The way to see how beautiful life is, is from the vantage point of death." […] “I'll die, you’ll die; how could we love each other otherwise? The sun's going to burn out, what else keeps it shining?"

“Though I am absurdly out of touch with popular culture, I appreciate that culture is the context for everything. It shapes policy, ranks priorities, guides political will. I also appreciate that a constant barrage of bad climate news is unbearable. So my North Star for climate communication is to take climate seriously, but not take *ourselves* too seriously.”

“They think if people can possess enough things they will be content to live in prison. But I will not believe that. I want the walls down. I want solidarity, human solidarity.”

“I would like to be granted an audience with the architect of longing. […] I don't believe the architect to be any kind of God, though I would be open to being proven wrong. I imagine, most likely, that we are dealing with one of God's lesser angels. One of the bored and mischievous ones, with too much time on their hands, who disrupted an otherwise reasonably stable emotional cocktail with their own whimsy.”

“In feudal times the aristocracy had sent their sons to university, conferring superiority on the institution. Nowadays it was the other way round: the university conferred superiority on the man. They told Shevek with pride that the competition for scholarships […] was stiffer every year, proving the essential democracy of the institution. He said, ‘You put another lock on the door and call it democracy.’”

“And so I set off to figure out, Well, why is that? Why do some technologies stop at the lab? What I found is that there needs to be a rabble-rouser who actually wants to commercialize it. But you also need financing to support it. It's not for the faint of heart.”

“With enough repetition, anything can become a religion. It doesn't matter if it works or not, it simply matters if a person returns.”

“I have never figured out where the line is drawn between a foolish prayer and a worthy prayer, and so I grew to believe that all of my prayers were foolish, even the ones heaved into the air in desperation, which might be the most foolish of them all.”

“I have never figured out where the line is drawn between a foolish prayer and a worthy prayer, and so I grew to believe that all of my prayers were foolish, even the ones heaved into the air in desperation, which might be the most foolish of them all.”

“It is of the nature of idea to be communicated: written, spoken, done. The idea is like grass. It craves light, likes crowds, thrives on crossbreeding, grows better for being stepped on.”

“If a book were written all in numbers, it would be true. It would be just. Nothing said in words ever came out quite even. Things in words got twisted and ran together, instead of staying straight and fitting together. But underneath the words, at the center, […] it all came out even. Everything could change, yet nothing would be lost. If you saw the numbers you could see that, the balance, the pattern.”

“Another way of saying all this is we need some real citizens. Citizenship has sort of gone out of style in our country. And partly that dates back to this Reagan-era idea that markets were going to solve all problems. And if markets were gonna solve all problems, why would we need to care about civic institutions or being citizens or whatever else?” - Bill McKibben