Barbara McVeigh > Recent Status Updates

What makes the bars of that jail? I said. your pride in the glories you have accomplished. But if your worth depends on your glories, it must also depend on your sins…

However: forswear the glory, forswear the culpability. The self is the culprit. With the self disavowed, what blame or glory can possibly affix it?

Comfort, for all else is futility.

His feelings…were all real & he must suffer them every day, & why? Because he had been born him. But he had not chosen to be born him. That had just happened to him. And then life had happened to that him…

He had been done badly, by fate, from the beginning, having been born with certain disadvantages...&…as he grew, had acquired a host of concomitant disadvantages, such as:…a predisposition to be offended

Let’s see how far I get in this book before the library wants it back.

“I know the curl of desire when I feel it.”

Started reading this title in conjunction with my husband. Dua Lipa announced this book as her November choice for her Service95 book club. He’s been enjoying the books she has recommended.

I’ve been meaning to re-read The Handmaid’s Tale along with some other classics.

Interesting to read HT just after finishing Isola by Allegra Goodman. I realize now what Isola was missing!

“That the academy was sexist was such a boring truism that Alice was no longer disturbed by the fact.”

List of conformity experiments
-Stanley Milgram at Yale
-Solomon Asch at Swarthmore
-Philip Zimbardo at Stanford

We can scrutinize, what, in a mind, an ideology fractures or silences; which biological and mental processes an ideology distorts…

When an ideology demands rigid and ritualistic thinking, it demands that we bias our vision, twist our gnawing doubts into silence, surrender our subjectivities and creative possibilities. When an ideology demands rigid and ritualistic thinking, it demands that we become someone else.

“He believed in science even if he couldn’t fully grok it.”

Chronological age vs biological age

“This is really about investing in health and education. Most nations do not do it adequately.
“Adolescence is the most important period.”