Ingrid Ellis > Recent Status Updates

“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.”

“Framing unpaid care work as a source of individual personal satisfaction conceals the fat that it is also a public good with immense social benefits. Children grow up to pay taxes, work for public services, support the older generation, repay public debt, keep society going.”

- telling women they have “mom brain” affects how they see themselves
- the cognitive load of adapting to parenthood may constitute an “enriching environment” that actually makes the brain more resilient
- “the idea that motherhood is wrought with memory deficits and is characterized by a brain that no longer functions well is scientifically just not so”

“I thought the baby would grow inside my body, as in a flowerpot, that I would still be the same person. But that didn’t seem to be the case.” yes yes yes already feeling seen by this book

Racism = prejudice + power. “Anybody can theoretically be a racist; there is nothing special about White people. It’s just happens that, due to a number of significant events over the past four centuries or so, White people commit a disproportionate amount of prejudice and hold a disproportionate amount of power in a large number of societies.”

The per capita rate of fatal shootings by the police is about 2.5 to 3 times higher for Black Americans than for White Americans — but Black victims of shootings are twice as likely to be unarmed as White victims.

the way I would KILL to work in this newsroom

The “Overton Window”: a term describing the range of ideas tolerated in public discourse. “When politicians like Trump express ideas that might have seemed unthinkable for a former president to utter, alt-right and incel forums cheer at their perception that the Overton window has shifted, opening a wider gap for their even more extreme ideas to nudge their way into the mainstream.”

“Men hurt women. It is a fact. It is an epidemic. It is a public health catastrophe. It is not normal.”

Seriously, why is this a radical thing to say? Why can’t we talk about it? Why aren’t we doing anything about it?

Maybe we don’t label incels as terrorists because it’s white men targeting women/minorities. really horrifying stuff in here that does NOT get talked about often enough

“Why is it that when men act out it’s always someone else’s fault?”

This one is much slower than the others I’ve read in the series.