Steven > Recent Status Updates

I’m only a short way into this book and I’m already annoyed by the weird anthropomorphic and/or sexist way Winegard refers to mosquitos as “she.” I get that all biting mosquitos are female. Point made. But we’re talking about insects here. Can’t you use the pronoun “it” for these flying invertebrates like everyone else?

A wonderful sentence: “... the older she grew the more she came to recognize falsehood as the preservative that allowed the world to maintain its shape.”

“ that we could live on a patch of Kansas dirt with a tub of Crisco lard and a $1 rebate coupon in an envelope on the kitchen counter and call ourselves middle class was at once a triumph of contentedness and a sad comment on our country’s lack of awareness about its own economic structure.

“We can think of the world as made up of things. Of substances. Of entities. Of something that is. Or we can think of it as made up of events. Of happenings. Of processes. Of something that occurs.”

“The library is a whispering post. You don’t need to take a book off a shelf to know there is a voice inside that is waiting to speak to you, and behind that was someone who truly believed that if he or she spoke, someone would listen. It was that affirmation that always amazed me.”

“The library is a gathering a pool of narratives and of the people who come to find them. It is where we can glimpse immortality; in the library, we can live forever.”

“ One of the great ironies of how democracies die is that the very defense of democracy is often used as a pretext for its subversion. Would-be autocrats often use economic crises, natural disasters, and especially security threats — wars, armed insurgencies, or terrorist attacks — to justify antidemocratic measures.”

"History doesn't repeat itself. But it rhymes."

“If the Académie is going to refer to English as Anglo-Saxon, as if it’s a relic of the Dark Ages, they shouldn’t be surprised if we get medieval on their derrières.”

“...and rejoicing in the storks of Lamia, that nested on every house and minaret, clattering with their beaks so that it seemed the whole town was playing backgammon.”

“There is no reason to believe that the love of ballet, or of any other human artform, is based on how much pain and effort they cost to the performers. Likewise, there is no reason to believe that the female of the Great Argus [pheasant]or any other species choose a mate because of how much he endures in the course of his courting performance.”

“Swearing is a bellwether — a foul-beaked canary in the coalmine — that tells us what our societal taboos are. A “Jesus Christ!” 150 years ago was as offensive then as a “fuck” or “shit” today. Conversely, there are words used by authors from Agatha Christie to Mark Twain — words that used to be sung in nursery rhymes — that these days would not pass muster in polite society.”

"If I went to a library and lobbed a microbiology textbook out the window, I could easily concuss a passer-by. If I tore out all the pages that dealt with beneficial microbes, I could just about give someone a nasty paper cut. The narrative of disease and death still dominates our view of microbiology."

“With evolution, shit happens you could never imagine.”

"It was obviously out of the question to take an owl on a foreign holiday in the back of a vintage armoured scout car – – even British eccentricity has its limits."

"The teeth are the tools we have been given to survive. We use them for eating, for speaking, even for defending ourselves. Their mineral beauty is a kind of gift. There is the uncanny way they are part of us. The unsettling ways they leave us."

People are held personally accountable for the state of their teeth in ways they are not held accountable for many other health conditions."

A researcher in a British study about perceptions of dental health noted, "I don't think people feel the same way about knee replacements, do they?"

"When you turn an election into a three-ring circus, there's always a chance that the dancing bear will win."

"Because of the new ways it wove continents together, cotton provides the key to understanding the modern world, the great inequalities that characterize it, the long history of globalization, and the ever-changing political economy of capitalism."

"The rooms were small, airless, and cramped. To make matters worse, somebody in our group was making the most dreadful silent farts. Fortunately, it was me, so I wasn’t nearly as bothered as the others."

"No matter how eloquently the Declaration of Independence had attempted to justify the American rebellion, a residual guilt hovered over the circumstances of the country's founding. Arnold changed all that. By threatening to destroy the newly created republic through, ironically, his own betrayal, Arnold gave this nation of traitors the greatest of gifts: a myth of creation."

"It [the 15th century] was an auspicious moment in Europe for papermaking, occurring at a time when there was a marked rise in the cultivation of both flax and hemp, used to produce linen and ropes –- and of course paper. Europeans started wearing linen underwear instead of wool. There is no record indicating that this made Europeans less irritable, but it did make a lot more rags available."

"Nevertheless, it was true that the South trailed the nation by many measures, particularly in the sciences. In the 1910s and 1920s, not a single university in the deep South offered a Ph.D. in chemistry."

Regarding the oak at the end of his garden: "Standing in its aqueous shade is like being inside some immense beached cetacean. Tawny owls, flocks of fieldfares, rising moons, the sentence I was mulling over as I wandered up to look at it, can vanish in a trice in its surf of flickering leaves."