Ingrid Ellis > Recent Status Updates

Such a fine balance in risk assessment for a neurosurgeon. Is it worth it to “save a life” if that life doesn’t have language or understanding? What gives a life meaning?

Chilling statistics: About half of the original Nanking population fled the city before the massacre. A safety Zone was established, and half of the remaining population made it there. Almost everyone who didn’t make it to the safety zone died at the hands of the Japanese.

It’s honestly such a crime that they’ve coined the term “comfort women” for the women the Japanese stole for their military brothels. Some were raped until they died from wounds or disease. Some had to please up to 40 men a day. Many who survived ended up killing themselves because of the shame. Nothing “comforting” about what they did to these women.

The author keeps comparing these atrocities to the Holocaust and contemplating why we know so much about the Holocaust and so little about The Rape of Nanking. In addition to her thoughts, I can’t help but wonder, what if historians (typically men, historically) simply do not care much about women being raped.

Gosh I shouldn’t read this before bed. Content warning: violence.

“soldiers impaled babies on bayonets and tossed them still alive into pots of boiling water.”

And the Yangtze river literally ran red with blood…

“I wanted to tell Betty's granddaughter that it wasn't too late. That I had been like her, once, resentful of any interruptions. Later, I learned that life lay in the interruptions-that I had been wrong about life, entirely.”

One of my favorite book lessons in a long time. Wow, i need this on my bathroom mirror.

Whenever Betty needed something, her granddaughter seemed inconvenienced, acted as though Betty were interrupting her very important life. Of course she was interrupting. As people we interrupted one another's lives-that was what we did. If you sought to live your life without interruption you wound up like me: living life without interruption, totally alone.

The "news" was often not news at all but sayings from Mao. If it was music, we were to break into a rehearsed, identical dance. "No matter how close our parents are to us, they are not as close as our relationship with Mao," went one song.

“So sickening was the spectacle that even the Nazis in the city were horrified…”

“Hitler killed about 6 million Jews, and Stalin more than 40 million Russians, but these deaths were brought about over some few years. In the Rape of Nanking the killing was concentrated within a few weeks.”

“To the children I went to school with, these efforts didn’t matter. Even if I ate the same bologna-and-white-bread sandwiches the other kids did and spoke perfect English, I had a face that marked me as different.”

“My mother and father had spoken English in the house, never Chinese. Every Christmas Eve, a plate of chocolate chip cookies materialized on our mantel, with a glass of milk that neither of my parents could drink, because they were lactose intolerant. They must have poured Santa’s milk down the drain. It was as though they followed a guidebook on how to be American. (cont.)

it’s good but i’m not into it. putting down for now.

Women leave factory jobs for domestic life as wives -> women have leisure time to involve themselves with politics -> they feel slavery i’d just as much a women’s issue -> learn to petition, public speaking, etc -> sets them up to later support women’s rights movement

“We’re going to be hungry. But nothings worse than being caught.” :(

“A person who is happy will make others happy. A person who has courage and faith will never die in misery.”

So far this hasn’t been what I expected: so much more coming of age, parental frustration, learning sexuality. But duh, it’s a diary! It’s an interesting surprise to be in Anne Frank’s mind.

“Some of the girls wear these fuzzy Shetland sweaters and plaid skirts and knee socks. I guess they’re sorority girls.” ok Leni we get it, you’re not like other girls!

this book went from fabulous to unbearable. or am i just sleepy today?

“the way female politicians were treated by the media made them less likely to run for office. … And, as we have seen, this decline in female representation will give rise to a gender data gap that in turn will result in the passing of less legislation that addresses women’s needs.”

The author makes the argument that women’s unpaid labor should be calculated into GDP, and at first I was skeptical. But she makes a good point: when government cuts spending on social programs, a lot of that work (like care work) falls to women and leads to female underemployment, which hurts GDP.

“Every morning, Mozart and his men tinkered with the machines to fix the outcomes—there could only be a few winners and a lot of losers. And yet we played on, because we had hope that we might be the lucky ones.”

God I am LOVING this book

“The rallying cry ‘America first’ is just as hubristic as the rallying cry ‘Humans first.’”

“Fungi and trees are so interconnected that some scientists believe they should not be viewed as separate organisms; instead, the forest functions as an integrated entity. … Everyone is deeply entangled with everyone else. Humans are no exception.”

“If chimpanzees had transformed the world but in doing so jeopardized this own livelihood, not to mention that of countless other species, would we be praising their intellect?”

“Studies on prison inmates reveal significant cognitive and emotional deficits as a result of incarceration. It would thus be unthinkable to represent human cognition based on this population. So why doesn’t a similar logic apply to other species?”

“Researchers found that news articles written about Black people convicted of capital crimes were more likely to contain ape-relevant language” — wow every book I’ve read this past week seems to tie back to white supremacy as a major problem.

“Some fish are more closely related to us than they are to other fish. … The vast majority of modern fish species evolved hundreds of millions of years after humans shared a common ancestor with them.”

“Facebook rewards candidates who post inflammatory content that drives engagement. We charge less money for ads that are more incendiary and reach more people. Trump is using our system the way it’s designed to be used.”

“A quick Google search confirms my suspicion that you are not supposed to be given a performance review of your maternity leave. ‘You weren’t responsive enough,’ he says. In my defense, I was in a coma for some of it.”

as a 39-wk pregnant woman, brb while I go throw up!

“She never shares images of her children on social media. Silicon Valley is awash in wooden Montessori toys and shrouded in total screen bans. Parents at work talk about how they don’t allow their teens to have mobile phones, which only underscores how well these executives understand the real damage their product inflicts on young minds.”