J. > Recent Status Updates

"And when my classmates and I arrived at the [Alamo], we were told all about how the defenders of Texas heroically gave their lives in the battle against the Mexican onslaught. The only problem was that none of it was true. The real story was that Mexico had just abolished slavery, and the slaveowners of Texas, then a Mexican state, didn't like it." Lmao bc I remember that omission from my own TX school days

"Bill Casey's unholy alliance with Iran gave birth to Reaganism and the modern conservative movement. The 'Bush' babe later became part of no fewer than five Republican administrations... Collectively, those administrations made no fewer than eight conservative Supreme Court appointments and led the way to the newly right-wing Court that made sweeping decisions."

"[Copeland later said] Jimmy Carter's sin wasn't stupidity. It was worse, he told Parry. 'Carter was a utopian. He believed literally that you must do the right thing and take your chances on the consequences. He told me that. He literally believed that.'"

"...what journalists really owe readers is the truth, but what inevitably happens instead is that politicians feed the reporters an endless string of self-serving stories, and the reporters spread them around and keep coming back for more."

"They wrote backward from the present--from what they saw as the pinnacle--to make the past a predestined prelude to the present. The story they told themselves, in other words, was one that was never intended to be factual; it was intended to be true, to reveal a hidden divine plan they saw for themselves, to demonstrate that they were inevitable."

"We know the problem; now it's time to talk about solutions."

"The world will be different a generation from now. The question is whether we will look back in gratitude at the virtuous cycles, or in horror at the vicious ones."

"It's easy to blame patients or providers or pharmaceutical companies, but really all of humanity has collectively chosen not to put more of our shared resources toward new treatments for disease."

"The disease was framed, as disease so often has been, as a moral quandary--if you don't wear high heels, and you don't live unnaturally in a city, and you don't drink, and you don't cry at night when you're four years old and miss your mother, then you will survive. But patients like Gale knew this was a lie. They knew it because they saw their friends die."

"It's hard to overstate how profound the link between consumption and creative genius was in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe and the U.S. When TB rates declined in the U.S. toward the end of the nineteenth century, some physicians worried it wild harm the quality of American literature."

"When our minds are idle, we allow ourselves to reconnect with our creativity and reengage with reflective thought--two activities that are essential to progress."

"But we cannot save those we love from suffering. This is the story of human history as I understand it--the story of an organism that can do so much, but cannot do what it most wants."

I remember Javed Akhtar once said "American movies are short stories, while Indian movies are novels." This book is the print equivalent of an American Amazon Prime show. Very little interiority, repetitious in what thoughts it does show, and with unnecessary exposition for things that are readily apparent to anyone not on their phone simultaneously.

Okay, that's the second example of inappropriate tense shift in like 3 pages. Ms Reid my editing rates are v reasonable

"Breathe deep! No hurt, no pardon / out here in the cold with you / you with your back to the wall."

Glad we're not waiting to get to the important stuff, i.e. kissing 😂

I love that Celeste has a Girl in the Chair. Her dynamic with Beatrice is fun.

"Lean out, ladies."

"Kids with helicopter parents are significantly more likely to suffer depression, and there's a strong link between a highly structured childhood and a lack of executive-function capabilities."

I love how the usage of different pronouns is explained. I don't think I've ever read a Vietnamese-influenced sf novel before!

Thank goodness that's over. I know a translator of a poem becomes by default a coauthor, but I don't really want to read poems by Dutch men in my Adrienne Rich book.

"Oh, love dull'd with paine / was n'er so wise, nor so well arm'd as disdaine."

"Our attention is now nearly always divided, because we seem to be always working on something."

"We have traded our privacy, our communities, our hobbies, and our peace of mind for habits that are more commercially profitable. The overriding question is this: Is it worth it?"

"But swear thou thinkst I love thee, and no more."