Women journalists from the United States

"America is a country ready to be taken—in fact, longing to be taken—by political leaders ready to restore democracy and trust to the political process."

"The economic game is not supposed to be rigged like some shady ring toss on a carnival midway."

"Women are the carriers of society’s values ... men are deviant in the sense that many of the qualities admired in them are also one’s that society has to regard with disapproval ... Women’s Lib portrays society and morality as a male invention to coerce and punish women ... [yet] women are a virtuous group seeking to impose their moral standards on men."

"Our current obsession with creativity is the result of our continued striving for immortality in an era when most people no longer believe in an afterlife."

"When your house is burning down, you don't worry about the remodeling."

"Isn't it really, really offensive that our president is simply not telling us the truth about what's happening in Iraq? For me, that was one of the most offensive things about the entire convention. There was no truth-telling there. It was all a complete masquerade. Both about Iraq and about the domestic economy... The problem is not that the people think the Democratic Party is not sufficiently hawkish; it's the problem that they are not sufficiently bold and sufficiently visionary. They need to go back to Bobby Kennedy and 1968. That was the last time that a Democrat truly inspired red states and blue states and everybody and the millions of people out there."

"Don't forget: our media culture failed to serve the public interest by missing (with a few honourable exceptions) the two biggest stories of our time: the run-up to the Iraq war and the financial melt­down. We've had far too many autopsies and not enough biopsies."

"Two years after launching The Huffington Post I was exhausted, burnt out. The feeling many of us have. I collapsed from exhaustion and on the way down I hit my head on the desk, broke my cheekbone and got four stitches on my right eye. And it started me on this journey of questioning what success is"

"By conventional definition of success, which means two metrics: money and power, I was successful. By any sane definition of success, I was not successful if I was lying in a pool of blood on the floor of my office"

"We need a third metric of success, which include our health and our being, first of all, because if we sacrifice that, what do we have? And our capacity to tap into our own wisdom, our own sense of wonder at the beauty of life that we so often miss, and our capacity to give, and to be kind"

"I’m asking people to realize that whatever our job in the world is, whatever our dreams are, we are bigger than that. If we can find that, who we really are and live from that place, life is truly amazing no matter what the challenges and the obstacles are"

"My mother would constantly say to me: ‘Don’t miss the moment’, because really that is all we have. And so often our minds take us to the future, either worrying about the future or judging our past"

"I started life so self-judgmental. I call the voice in my head the ‘obnoxious roommate’; always putting me down, telling me I’m not good enough. And learning to actually deal with that voice, with a sense of humor – maybe getting it to dance with you – in order to evict it from my head. Then we are much more present"

"The time-famine we are talking about is really what drains us, because it means we are not here. We are somewhere else with our minds"

"I want to look at how we can build a path forward for our lives, which is more sustainable and less fueled by burnouts, sleep deprivation, exhaustion"

"When I am not joyful, I look at what happened. I don’t mean joyful as in there are no challenges, problems etc., I mean when I’m not like ‘Hey this is great, I’m blessed, I’m doing something I love, I’m grateful’ – when I don’t have that feeling, I know that I’m off; I need to course correct"

"Tap into your creativity – even if it isn’t a part of your job. It’s one of the things that our culture has suppressed. Every child is creative; they sing, they draw. But then at some point if we can’t make a living out of our ‘creative love’, we drop it. But in fact it’s great to maintain in some way"

"I think a lot of people who would say they are atheists, when you really scratch the surface, they have a sense of spirituality or mysticism or wonder of the mystery of life, but they don’t believe in a particular creed. For me, really, what matters is to have that sense that there is something amazing and mysterious about life; that we haven’t figured it all out and the journey of exploring it is fascinating"

"Ariana Huffington is unattractive both inside and out. I fully understand why her former husband left her for a man- he made a good decision."

"I would spend a nickel on the subway and go arbitrarily to some other stop and look around there. So I was roaming the city in the afternoons and applying for jobs in the morning. And one day I found myself in a neighborhood I just liked so much…it was one of those times I had put a nickel in and just invested something. And where did I get out? I just liked the sound of the name: Christopher Street — so I got out at Christopher Street, and I was enchanted with this neighborhood, and walked around it all afternoon and then I rushed back to Brooklyn. And I said, "Betty I found out where we have to live.""

"I did have an inkling that I was going to be a writer. That was my intention."

"I was brought up to believe that there is no virtue in conforming meekly to the dominant opinion of the moment. I was encouraged to believe that simple conformity results in stagnation for a society, and that American progress has been largely owing to the opportunity for experimentation, the leeway given initiative, and to a gusto and a freedom for chewing over odd ideas."

"I was taught that the American's right to be a free individual, not at the mercy of the state, was hard-won and that its price was eternal vigilance, that I too would have to be vigilant. I was made to feel that it would be a disgrace to me, as an individual, if I should not value or should give up rights that were dearly bought. I am grateful for that upbringing."

"We must demonstrate that it is possible to overcome poverty, misery and decay by democratic means, and we must ourselves believe, and must show others, that our American tradition of the dignity and liberty of the individual is not a luxury for easy times but is the basic source of the strength and security of a successful society."

"The other threat to the security of our tradition, I believe, lies at home. It is the current fear of radical ideas and of people who propound them. I do not agree with the extremists of either the left or the right, but I think they should be allowed to speak and to publish, both because they themselves have, and ought to have, rights, and once their rights are gone, the rights of the rest of us are hardly safe. Extremists typically want to squash not only those who disagree with them diametrically, but those who disagree with them at all. It seems to me that in every country where extremists of the left have gotten sufficiently in the saddle to squash the extremists of the right, they have ridden on to squash the center or terrorize it also. And the same goes for extremists of the right. I do not want that to happen in our country."

"Great cities are not like towns, only larger. They are not like suburbs, only denser. They differ from towns and suburbs in basic ways, and one of them is that cities are, by definition, full of strangers."

"It may be that we have become so feckless as a people that we no longer care how things do work, but only what kind of quick, easy outer impression they give. If so, there is little hope for our cities or probably for much else in our society. But I do not think this is so."

"A region is an area safely larger than the last one to whose problems we found no solution."

"As for really new ideas of any kind—no matter how ultimately profitable or otherwise successful some of them might prove to be—there is no leeway for such chancy trial, error and experimentation in the high-overhead economy of new construction. Old ideas can sometimes use new buildings. New ideas must use old buildings."

"This is both a gloomy and a hopeful book. The subject itself is gloomy. A Dark Age is a culture's dead end. We in North America and Western Europe, enjoying the many benefits of the culture conventionally known as the West, customarily think of a Dark Age as happening once, long ago, following the collapse of the Western Roman Empire. But in North America we live in a graveyard of lost aboriginal cultures, many of which were decisively finished off by mass amnesia in which even the memory of what was lost was also lost. Throughout the world Dark Ages have scrawled finis to successions of cultures receding far into the past."

"The salient mystery of Dark Ages sets the stage for mass amnesia. People living in vigorous cultures typically treasure those cultures and resist any threat to them. How and why can a people so totally discard a formerly vital culture that it becomes vitally lost?"

"Writing, printing, and the Internet give a false sense of security about the permanence of culture."

"While politicians, clergy, creators of advertisements, and other worthies assert stoutly that the family is the foundation of society, the nuclear family, as an institution, is currently in grave trouble."

"Credentialing, not education, has become the primary business of North American universities."

"To science, not even the bark of a tree or a drop of pond water is dull or a handful of dirt banal. They all arouse awe and wonder."

"One wonders at the docility of the students who evidently must be satisfied enough with the credentials to be uncaring about the lack of education."

"Subsidiarity is the principle that government works best — most responsibly and responsively — when it is closest to the people it serves and the needs it addresses. Fiscal accountability is the principle that institutions collecting and disbursing taxes work most responsibly when they are transparent to those providing the money."

"Virtually all ideologues, of any variety, are fearful and insecure, which is why they are drawn to ideologies that promise prefabricated answers for all circumstances."

"Advanced cultures are usually sophisticated enough, or have been sophisticated enough at some point in their pasts, to realize that foxes shouldn't be relied on to guard henhouses."

"In wretched outcomes, the devil is in the details."

"Redundancy is expensive but indispensable."

"Beneficent spirals, operating by benign feedback, mean that everything needful is not required at once: each individual improvement is beneficial for the whole"

"I have learned yet again (this has been going on all my life) what folly it is to take any thing for granted without examining it skeptically."

"Privately run jails are a mark of American "reinvented government" that has been picked up by neoconservatives in Canada."

"Jacobs has never been political in the sense of supporting one ideology or party over another. Larger ideologies, she firmly believed then and continues to believe, only obscure the realities, which are to be found by looking around, paying attention, and trusting your eyes over what people are merely saying. In that spirit, she always supported the right of labor unions and grass roots movements to exist. "I think it is good for us to have vociferous political minorities and to know how to live with them," she wrote. But her personal support of any individual cause was always based on her absolutely unbending principles."

"In keeping with the WXLT practice of presenting the most immediate and complete reports of local blood and guts news, TV 40 presents what is believed to be a television first. In living color, an exclusive coverage of an attempted suicide."

"She had written something like 'TV 40 news personality Christine Chubbuck shot herself in a live broadcast this morning on a Channel 40 talk program. She was rushed to Sarasota Memorial Hospital, where she remains in critical condition."

"We have no leadership, no captain at the helm as it were. We are, in effect, being led from disaster to disaster by a headless horseman run amok with stuffed pockets and an empty conscience."

"I think the Internet is to MSM what TV was to yellow journalism."

"Many have defined the neocon movement based on the highly intellectual, albeit warped, musings of Strauss and Bloom. Yet one could hardly call the current leadership intellectual or even capable of digesting this philosophy. Even neocon thinkers are jumping off the ship. Do you believe this is simply trickle-down Machiavellianism in much the same way that Communism trickled down as an aberration of its original intent?"

"No oath of office or obligation of duty demands that a particular political party be supported, preserved, defended, protected, and adhered to — because no political party defines what an American is."

"Perhaps [Condoleezza Rice] would have made a more timely cameo in New Orleans had a Chevron tanker caught fire. Jane Crow seems to be just as willing as old Jim was."

"I say we pardon the turkeys, but not our elected officials."

"If you consider, for example, that democracy is much like a religion then 9/11 is akin to finding the body of God."

"Our duty - as citizens - to the Constitution transcends every other point of disagreement that every person and/or every group of people can have with one another, no matter how deeply felt. Watching our entire country implode under the self-serving ideologies of those so eager to claim everything but the Constitution as their guide leaves at least half of us without a home. We may live on the same land, but our nation and the citizens of that nation have been exiled into a national wilderness."

"Stop any person on the street and they will tell you their own version of what it means to be an American, perhaps accurately, but mostly not. Some might say that being an American means wearing the US flag as a lapel pin. Others might say that in order to be defined as an American, one must attend the right church and be the right type of Christian. Still others will tell you that supporting the troops and, above that even, supporting the President is what makes one American. Some might even venture that being born in this country or of parents who are citizens of this country is surely enough. On this last point there is some truth, but only in terms of rights, not responsibilities. As such, it presents only half of the equation."

"Fair and balanced is doublespeak for bite-out-chunks-of-truth until only irrelevancy is left, byte-sized, entertaining irrelevancy."

"If man was devolving into a psychotic pit of rotted plasma, [Karl] Rove would be the Alpha of such grime."

"The whole culture of wearing flags on our lapel and saying ‘we’ when referring to the United States and, even the ‘shock and awe’ of the initial stages, it was just too jubilant and just a little uncomfortable. And I remember feeling, when I was anchoring the ‘Today’ show, this inevitable march towards war and kind of feeling like, ‘Will anybody put the brakes on this?’ And is this really being properly challenged by the right people? And I think, at the time, anyone who questioned the administration was considered unpatriotic and it was a very difficult position to be in."

"And have the courage to accept that you’re not perfect, nothing is, and no one is — and that’s OK."

"The road less traveled is sometimes fraught with barricades, bumps, and uncharted terrain. But it is on that road where your character is truly tested"

"The person I enjoyed interviewing the most was Elmo from Sesame Street because he is so unpredictable and he is always eating my hair and my face."

"I just think it’s the world we live in and there is no real metric to measure us by because CNN is the only one that is still doing journalism."

"As the saying goes - the cost of freedom is eternal vigilance. Politicians have taken advantage of our indifference by imposing ever more draconian and restrictive laws that increase their power while diminishing ours. Asking questions of our public bodies is the best way to ensure they are working for our interests and not those of politicians. Through FOI we can go behind political rhetoric to see the true state of affairs."

"The success of any freedom of information regime depends on two main factors: A tightly drawn law with a clear statement of intent that makes clear statement of intent that makes clear a presumption of openness, and a bold regulator who is tough and not afraid to exert his authority and challenge government interests."

"The cost of making government more responsive to the people who fund it and in whose name it exists should not be attributed solely to FOI, but even if it is, surely that is a cost worth bearing? Making government transparent and accountable to the public directly increases the efficiency of the public sector more than any number of government regulators or watchdogs."

"Getting information is only the beginning. Transparency in government must be accompanied by the public's right to be heard and to influence government policy. The first objective is to get the facts, for without facts we are powerless to oppose government decisions or bring about change. The next step is to open up the decision-making process so we finally have a government accountable to those it serves. This should be our right and not a privilege."

"You should not expect politicians to promote freedom of information. Why should they? They have a vested interest in controlling the public's access to information and thereby maintaining their grip on power."

"Politicians may initially find it difficult to accept new standards of public accountability, but we must make the costs of not doing so even greater. The best way to do this is by publicly embarrassing and shaming those officials and departments who refuse to answer to the public."

"Maybe you would prefer not to be bothered with how the government is run. If that's the case then you have no right to complain when your taxes are raised, or if your children's education is substandard, or you have to wait a year for a vital operation. Good government does not happen by itself but is the result of individual effort. One of the easiest and most effective things you can do is simply to ask for information. I hope I've given you the tools and confidence to do exactly that."

"In secrecy, bureaucracies grow large, ungainly and unaccountable to those they are meant to serve. When there is no fierce spotlight of public accountability shining, there is no pressure to ensure systems are streamlined or even working. What you find throughout any bureaucracy protected by secrecy is a cesspit of illogic and waste. And because the state keeps rebranding, shifting responsibility from one set of bureaucrats to another, most of the work being done is for the purpose of keeping other bureaucrats in employment rather than satisfying the needs of the public."

"In the public sphere, perception is reality: it's more important to be seen to do something than actually to do it. At least when private companies use PR and advertising they must spend their own money and there are other corporations vying for our business. If a company doesn't give us what we want they face bankruptcy. Public institutions, however, are monopolies. We have no choice but to buy, if not use, their services. If we don't like the way our particular police force operates it's not like we can choose another one or even withhold the money used to run the one we don't like. We're forced - under threat of imprisonment - to pay for a monopoly service and for it to tell us how great it is. This is the real danger of institutional PR. In the absence of competition it is only through a diversity of opinion and public scrutiny that some level of accountability can exist. PR stifles debate and suppresses opinion through the use of centralized press offices and communication protocols."

"Bureaucracy is the business of controlling other humans, making them do what you want them to do. That may be acceptable if what you are asking them to do is reasonable, rational and for the common good, but more likely what bureaucrats ask is treasonable, nonsensical and counterproductive to the public good. This is because the primary business of a bureaucrat, left unchecked, is creating more bureaucracy to further his or her own prestige and power. The result is that rules are in place serving no function but to keep bureaucrats in work and to expand their bureaucratic fiefdom. Before you know it you can't even hold a village fete without filling out more than fifteen different forms from various arms of the government."

"There are three main things the public need to know about courts:"

"Once the right of the people to see justice being done is eroded, it is not long before there is no justice at all."

"We are at an extraordinary moment in human history: never before has the possibility of true democracy been so close to realisation. At the cost of publishing and duplication has dropped to near zero, a truly free press, and a truly informed public, becomes a reality. A new Information Enlightment is dawning where knowledge flows freely, beyond national boundaries. Technology is breaking down traditional social barriers of status, class, power, wealth and geography, replacing them with an ethos of collaboration and transparency. In this new Enlightenment it isn't just scientific truths that are the goal, but discovering truths about the way we live, about politics and power."

"Citizens around the world have long declared a desire to be trusted with the formation of their own opinions, and that can only come when they have access to the facts. This is the essence of the information war. Do we trust citizens to communicate freely and come to their own conclusions, or do we believe those in authority have a right to restrict and manipulate what we know? Do we hold to Enlightenment ideals of reason and the pursuit of truth no matter where that takes us, or put our faith in authority to make certain an uncertain world?"

"The Internet is powerful because it allows people to organise around issues at unprecedented speed, broadcast their thoughts and challenge those in charge. A wave of such groups banded together in early 2011 to demand the removal of authoritarian leaders in the Middle East as one country after another rose up with varying degrees of success. But the Internet doesn't cause revolution. It is a communications network. What people choose to do with technology - that is where we can make moral judgements. Some people will use it for ill, others for good. Security forces tend to focus on the ills, while the majority use it for good. In the name of protecting us from 'bad things on the Internet' there are increasing moves to suppress communications networks in both repressive and democratic countries. Demands to shut down, censor, filter or in other ways oversee and control the way people communicate are on the rise."

"At a time of information overload, good journalists are more important then ever. They serve as the public's hired guns to collect information from various sources and challenge it for the purpose of distilling down what is important and true. They-signpost issues that are worthy of our attention. In the past when we bought newspapers we were paying for that particular newspaper with its content- a bundle of news and entertainment. In the digital age we're buying the carriage (e.g. the Internet access) and readers decide later what information they want to view over that carrier."

"Being a professional journalist is rather like training to be a lawyer. There's a certain amount you can learn in school but largely it is a vocation learned through practice, with scepticism being a primary attribute."

"The powerful have historically tried to impose their will through mechanisms of enforced ignorance such as censorship, secrecy, threats, physical intimidation and violence. This model is difficult to sustain in a networked world based on Enlightenment values. This is not to say that Western democracies have abandoned these heavy-handed tactics, but more often the methods have shifted to more sophisticated ways of maintaining power such as media management, public relations and legal intimidation. In the midst of all this information and misinformation how can we filter out what is important and true?"

"When a politician claims for example that 'crime is down' since he implemented a certain policy, it is the professional investigative journalist who knows the raw data on which this statement is based (criminal incident reports) and who asks for verification. He or she can then go to other sources to question the veracity of the data. The reason I specialise in the intricate details of bureaucracy isn't because I have a passion for paper-pushers, but rather because I need to know all the types of information collected, by whom and where they are stored so I can get my hands on them. A statement isn't a fact. Even when the person making the statement is an authority he or she still needs to provide evidence or proof that what they say is the truth and a professional journalist should be asking for this proof and supplying it for public scrutiny. All this accumulating of statements, data and information which then has to be verified takes time. But this is the only thing a journalist does that marks him out as a professional. It's the only reason anyone would choose a well-known newspaper's website over an unknown blog. The newspaper as a brand has built up, over time, a reputation for challenging the powerful and giving people meaningful, true information. The press is not like any other business and what it sells shouldn't just be rehashed press releases or celebrity gossip, but the civic information necessary for people to understand their society and participate in it. It is a check on political and financial power, or at least it should be."

"Leaks have happened before. They are not new. But the industrial scale of leaking made possible through the digitisation of information and the ability to communicate instantly across the globe - that is new. If it is to be revolutionary, however, we need a model for a new type of politics."

"Free speech is not the great danger for humanity. Concentration of power is. We learn this lesson over and over again, and yet seem compelled eternally to repeat it. Communism, colonialism, monarchy, state socialism, tyranny- all become enemies of the people because they offer their citizens not too many opportunities to communicate or associate, but too few. Power is the dynamic force that fuels politics and it is this, not speech, which needs to be constantly monitored, controlled and checked. We view crimes against humanity as aberrations, individuals gone wild, when we should be seeing them through the prism of power. Abuse happens when a culture values some people more than others and those exercising power are not accountable for their actions."

"Authoritarians offer citizens a deal: if we hand over our freedom, they will guarantee certainty and safety. This might have been possible in a closed society with little interaction between people, but it is a false promise in a knowledge economy where citizens are interconnected. If the best chaos theorists can't model the weather beyond a week, how does the National Security Agency think it can predict which of us will turn into a terrorist? If our intelligence agencies persist in monopolising knowledge we will see continued intelligence failures."

"Over the past year I've thought a lot about censorship, surveillance and regulation of the Internet. Is it necessary? Is it really so dangerous to allow individuals an ability to associate and communicate freely? Certainly there exists a criminal minority who take advantage of the freedom of the Internet, but no one is arguing that crimes shouldn't be prosecuted. This is about allowing the vast majority of people to communicate without state intervention. Despite all the dire warnings, the prophesies of doom and destruction that were foretold by the Pentagon, the US State Department, Hosni Mubarak, even English High Court Judge Eady, I look at the fallout from all that was published in 2010, all the breaches to establishment power that occurred through a networked citizenry- and the good clearly outweighs the bad. From the uprising in Iceland to the ousting of dictators in the Middle East, free speech has fundamentally changed the world for the good."

"Why, then, are the world's governments intent on controlling and regulating the Internet? Free speech is most threatening to authoritarian systems such as autocracies, militaries, the police and security services. Security services in principle exist for our protection but that is so only when they are accountable to the public for their considerable power. We are seeing a push by these agencies to move beyond the rule of law, to be accountable to no one but themselves. National security is becoming the new word of God to which all must submit in blind obedience. The decisions made, the liberties eroded, the crimes committed in the name of national security cannot be challenged because the information on which they are based remains secret."

"We seek a saviour, someone to rescue us from the problems of the world. A saviour is the simple story, the easy option and that is why it is so compelling. You don't have to do anything except believe. There's no need to negotiate with other people, or figure out how to create a robust system within the bizarre and contradictory parameters of human nature. I must admit I fell prey to this when I first met Julian Assange. He was going to lead the way to a bold new age. Instead I learned that power when concentrated is dangerous no matter who holds it or for whatever good intention. The real revolution happens in our own minds, when we stop believing there is someone or some agency who has all the answers, who is infallible and will save us, and instead come to realise we have that ability within ourselves. We may be susceptible to cults of personality, but we can build a check against this into our political systems."

"The world may be more complex and uncertain than we would like, but giving away our freedom for the false promises of protection is not a sustainable solution. We are defined not just by what we preach, but by what we practice. We cannot claim to be an enlightened democratic society if we live in breach of these values, without the rule of law, without reason, or the rigorous commitment to truth."

"We now have a technology that unites individuals in such a way that we can create the first global democracy. Hundreds of millions of people are climbing out of poverty and the Internet gives them access to the sort of information that was previously accessible only to elite scholars. They can join a worldwide conversation and come together in infinite permutations to check power anywhere it concentrates. The greatest achievement isn't in producing technology, but using it to re-define the boundaries of what is possible."

"The secret documents that I was interested in were located in this building, the British Parliament, and the data that I wanted to get my hands on were the expense receipts of members of Parliament. I thought this was a basic question to ask in a democracy. (Applause) It wasn't like I was asking for the code to a nuclear bunker, or anything like that, but the amount of resistance I got from this Freedom of Information request, you would have thought I'd asked something like this."

"I fought for about five years doing this, and it was one of many hundreds of requests that I made, not -- I didn't -- Hey, look, I didn't set out, honestly, to revolutionize the British Parliament. That was not my intention. I was just making these requests as part of research for my first book. But it ended up in this very long, protracted legal battle and there I was after five years fighting against Parliament in front of three of Britain's most eminent High Court judges waiting for their ruling about whether or not Parliament had to release this data. And I've got to tell you, I wasn't that hopeful, because I'd seen the establishment. I thought, it always sticks together. I am out of luck. Well, guess what? I won. Hooray."

"The transparency law they'd passed earlier that applied to everybody else, they tried to keep it so it didn't apply to them. What they hadn't counted on was digitization, because that meant that all those paper receipts had been scanned in electronically, and it was very easy for somebody to just copy that entire database, put it on a disk, and then just saunter outside of Parliament, which they did, and then they shopped that disk to the highest bidder, which was the Daily Telegraph, and then, you all remember, there was weeks and weeks of revelations, everything from porn movies and bath plugs and new kitchens and mortgages that had never been paid off. The end result was six ministers resigned, the first speaker of the house in 300 years was forced to resign, a new government was elected on a mandate of transparency, 120 MPs stepped down at that election, and so far, four MPs and two lords have done jail time for fraud. So, thank you."

"I tell you that story because it wasn't unique to Britain. It was an example of a culture clash that's happening all over the world between bewigged and bestockinged officials who think that they can rule over us without very much prying from the public, and then suddenly confronted with a public who is no longer content with that arrangement, and not only not content with it, now, more often, armed with official data itself. So we are moving to this democratization of information, and I've been in this field for quite a while."

"What I've seen from being in this access to information field for so long is that it used to be quite a niche interest, and it's gone mainstream. Everybody, increasingly, around the world, wants to know about what people in power are doing. They want a say in decisions that are made in their name and with their money. It's this democratization of information that I think is an information enlightenment, and it has many of the same principles of the first Enlightenment. It's about searching for the truth, not because somebody says it's true, "because I say so." No, it's about trying to find the truth based on what you can see and what can be tested. That, in the first Enlightenment, led to questions about the right of kings, the divine right of kings to rule over people, or that women should be subordinate to men, or that the Church was the official word of God."

"I've mentioned WikiLeaks, because surely what could be more open than publishing all the material? Because that is what Julian Assange did. He wasn't content with the way the newspapers published it to be safe and legal. He threw it all out there. That did end up with vulnerable people in Afghanistan being exposed. It also meant that the Belarussian dictator was given a handy list of all the pro-democracy campaigners in that country who had spoken to the U.S. government. Is that radical openness? I say it's not, because for me, what it means, it doesn't mean abdicating power, responsibility, accountability, it's actually being a partner with power. It's about sharing responsibility, sharing accountability. Also, the fact that he threatened to sue me because I got a leak of his leaks, I thought that showed a remarkable sort of inconsistency in ideology, to be honest, as well."

"The other thing is that power is incredibly seductive, and you must have two real qualities, I think, when you come to the table, when you're dealing with power, talking about power, because of its seductive capacity. You've got to have skepticism and humility. Skepticism, because you must always be challenging. I want to see why do you -- you just say so? That's not good enough. I want to see the evidence behind why that's so. And humility because we are all human. We all make mistakes. And if you don't have skepticism and humility, then it's a really short journey to go from reformer to autocrat, and I think you only have to read "Animal Farm" to get that message about how power corrupts people."

"So what is the solution? It is, I believe, to embody within the rule of law rights to information. At the moment our rights are incredibly weak. In a lot of countries, we have Official Secrets Acts, including in Britain here. We have an Official Secrets Act with no public interest test. So that means it's a crime, people are punished, quite severely in a lot of cases, for publishing or giving away official information. Now wouldn't it be amazing, and really, this is what I want all of you to think about, if we had an Official Disclosure Act where officials were punished if they were found to have suppressed or hidden information that was in the public interest?"

"Some fairy tales have happy endings. Some don't. I think we've all read the Grimms' fairy tales, which are, indeed, very grim. But the world isn't a fairy tale, and it could be more brutal than we want to acknowledge. Equally, it could be better than we've been led to believe, but either way, we have to start seeing it exactly as it is, with all of its problems, because it's only by seeing it with all of its problems that we'll be able to fix them and live in a world in which we can all be happily ever after."

"If you ask people, ‘Do you want power?’ most will likely cringe. Especially women. That’s because our cultural view of power is conflated with domination, abuse, oppression. Unless you are a psychopath, you probably aren’t keen to meet this out on your fellow beings. Hence empathetic, caring people will shy away from taking positions of power. But actually this turning away from power is itself an abuse of power."

"The definition of power as domination is just one of many and not even the most popular or powerful form of power. In fact, that version of power is WEAK POWER. Weak because it is fragile, easily defeated, and requires constant effort to maintain usually in the form of propaganda, lies and violence. This is because weak power can’t inspire or persuade. It has no vision. It is not true power."

"There are other types of power, too. There is the power to create and grow. The power to influence outcomes and make changes. There is, as Brene Brown puts it, power to, power with, and power within. Power is relational and changing. Sometimes you might be in a situation where you hold power and in another where you don’t. Some power is deserved because you earned it and some is not because you came by it only through privilege. Power is not inherently bad or good. Power can be used to support, protect, defend and sustain life. Or it can be used to exploit, oppress, abuse and destroy life."

"When people with good intentions don't own and take power, it becomes the preserve of the heartless, ruthless, greedy, narcissistic, psychopaths. That’s why not using power can be just as bad as using it badly."

"Weak power has no vision for a world where beings are free and flourishing. It cannot conceive of a world based on pleasure, diversity and abundance, though that was life on our planet until very recently."

"Real power is the ability to imagine something better, something different and act to bring that vision to life. That’s what I want for all people. Not that we crave weak power. But that we ARE power. By our actions and our choices we re-make the world in such a way that Life and Nature are sacred once again."

"Protesting is one of our most important democratic rights. It ensures the most fair and efficient running of a country because it allows new ideas to be raised, criticisms to be vented. If you suppress all protest, societal discontent builds like a pressure cooker. Sooner or later, it’s going to blow, and in that chaos, all sorts of bad actors can try and gain power. That’s the real importance of protest. It means something for both a society and for an individual. It gives us agency when so often we can feel powerless. It is such a worthwhile thing to come together and petition for reform. In too many countries, it’s a privilege, but it should be our human right."

"It’s action, not beliefs, that matter most. Thinking is great. Thinking leads to action, but too often thinking can hijack our higher wisdom. The wisdom of the human heart. Too often we discount cruel or unjust actions because of beliefs. If an action is immoral but we want to do it anyway, or someone else wants us to do it, justifications are made. Beliefs are created about the lesser value of others."

"Does bullying feel right in your heart? Threatening people with violence? How about actual killing? Our hearts know what is right, and what is morally wrong. It’s the mind that plays tricks. It’s the mind that - without training, and given superiority over heart - leads us to do the things that make us feel small, corrupted, fearful and tight in our own skin. Propaganda exists to help us override our heart wisdom. The lies others tell us and the lies we tell ourselves can be used to justify the worst cruelty and harm."

"Violence is a moral crime not just against others but against one’s own heart. And we can only commit such crimes when we let our minds override the voice of our soul."

"With its idolising of stony-faced ‘strong men’, its fantasies of domination and control, fascism is the ideology of the insecure man. A man who feels - at base - unworthy, unwanted and powerless."

"Instead of real power - the power someone has when they know they are worthy, wanted and have what it takes to handle life - the insecure man seeks domination. He doesn’t feel worthy or wanted or that people will want to be with him on his own merits, so he sees manipulation and violence as the only way to be in relationship to others. He doesn’t feel he has what it takes to deal with life, so he seeks control."

"The oppression of women is key in fascism because insecure men don’t feel they have what it takes to attract and maintain a relationship with a woman. They believe the only way to get a woman is through manipulation or force. Why would a free woman with choices and resources, choose them? In their mind, they wouldn’t, so their solution is to take away freedom, choice and resources from women. This is also the driving insecurity of patriarchy, which is a form of fascism."

"Followers of fascism also have their own ‘daddy issues’. Are they drawn to an authoritarian father figure, as replacement for their own? The fascist leader granting a simulacrum of love, acceptance and belonging to men who feel cast out from the fatherly fraternity."

"What I see now when I visit America is the juxtaposition of wild nature and sterile humanity. People boxing themselves away - in houses, cars, offices."

"They say everything is bigger in America but when you’re barreling along a 10-lane highway with massive trucks on either side of you and an aggressive SUV shoving your rear, it’s hard not to feel insignificant in a hostile universe. The only sensible solution seems to be to supersize yourself so you don’t get run over. It’s as if insignificance was the design brief for so much of American architecture and infrastructure. It ignores the reality of human size, let alone vulnerability, preferring an egoic delusion that humans are separate and superior to nature. But this feeling of insignificance leads to an insatiable hunger. For a bigger vehicle, a bigger house, more money, more guns - anything to feel more secure, and that security never materializes."

"A brutal work culture adds to the feeling, pushing people toward transience. Jobs have primary importance not just for a necessary salary but to get health insurance."

"I would feel homesick for Federal Way, Washington where I grew up. A city both exuberant with nature but also nature’s destruction: virgin forests giving way to freeways, streams filled in to build strip malls, dams destroying ancient salmon spawning grounds."

"To solve our current dependence on fossil fuels is a complex problem that demands communication and cooperation. Taking binary stands and publicly shaming people, doesn’t seem a good way to solve this problem."

"Two things signal to me when a group is more interested in self-righteousness than making actual policy: Picking on allies and name calling."

"This moral superiority reveals something important. This group isn’t dealing with reality, which is nuanced and interdependent, but with absolutes. And they aren’t interested in compromise or solutions, but moral purity. Their idea of moral purity. You can share the same overall goal - be that an end to fossil fuels, sexism, racism, capitalism, you name it - but these groups demand fealty to their language and their specific interpretation of the problem. They aren’t interested in any views other than their own. You know what that sounds like? Totalitarianism."

"I used to be suspicious of happiness. It’s not that I yearned to be unhappy, but too often the quest for happiness was, to my mind, tied up with delusional thinking. It involved putting on blinkers, so the darker, sadder, more disturbing aspects of reality were blanked out. I’ve always had a ravenous curiosity for truth. I want to understand life and get to its essence, so putting on blinkers was not for me."

"As a newspaper reporter, I covered crime, then politics then investigations. None could be described as abundant with happiness. Yet I didn’t feel unhappy reporting on these realities. They were truths that needed to be told. Truth needs to be told regardless of how it makes people feel, and more often than not it makes people feel bad before it makes them feel good. It’s crucial to get through that initial pain, because only by doing so, and seeing reality as it is, can we learn and change."

"One of the big breakthroughs came when I started gardening. Nature is always the best teacher. It IS the universe. It IS life/death/rebirth. Trees fall, plants die, but all the time they’re also being reborn. I can’t help but notice the universe has provided all the conditions for life not just to survive but to thrive."

"In elementary school, I loved Show and Tell. I loved to hunt around my house for an object I could bring to school with a story. It’s not hard to see why I was drawn to journalism - being a reporter is the grown-up version of Show and Tell. I also loved to show off and perform bike and roller-skating stunts. Yet somewhere along the way I lost the joy of being seen. Instead, starting in my teenage years, the desire came coupled with shame, dread, anxiety, embarrassment, even outright mortification. I don’t think I’m unusual in this, especially among women."

"The need to be seen is fundamental to all humans. In healthy development, a child gets appropriate amounts of attention and recognition, which leads to a secure sense of self worth. If we are also accepted in our fullness then we’ve hit the developmental jackpot and become superbly well-adjusted adults. But many of us didn’t get that level of attention, attunement or acceptance. In my own case, I was left with a hunger and yearning to be known and valued."

"Suddenly other people thought me admirable and important. When they did, I felt good. But also nervous because what if they suddenly changed their mind? I could see other famous people fall from the public’s favour, admiration turning to envy or hatred. People wrote admiring letters to me, but I couldn’t take it in because I thought ‘they don’t really know me’. They only knew the version of me I put on display - that of the tough tenacious reporter, battling for the people’s right to know. They didn’t know my aching emptiness, my deep hunger to be known. I learned that being seen is not the same as being known. Outsourcing my self-worth to total strangers, I realised, was not a good idea."

"What to do? In therapy there’s a saying that ‘the way through is in’. Instead of avoiding pain, go through it. My investigative mindset liked this and so I decided to investigate myself. I started therapy and also began writing more creatively. It’s how I wrote as a child until shame cloaked my ability to be seen."

"Why do women go around feeling so embarrassed of ourselves? Why do we wind up feeling we have to be perfect, or pure, pretty or agreeable just to gain a modicum of acceptance? I think it’s because that’s actually the fact of being a woman in a patriarchal society."

"So shame can help protect us, but it can also become a prison. It precludes change. As long as we remain invisible, as long as we dim our light, or hide behind a persona, we curtail our ability to be truly known by others and form meaningful connections."

"Flying from Gatwick Airport recently, I noticed the absolute dearth of water fountains. I found just one in the terminal and it was hiding in a bathroom. If there are more, they’re not easily located. It’s only slightly better at Heathrow unless you happen to be a member of a private lounge (which since British Airways changed their loyalty program I no longer am). The single best way to avoid plastic pollution is for people to use their own water bottles and plenty of people had them. There were many of us hunting around the airport for a place to fill them. Why the lack? We live in a wet country where water is plentiful. When I go to America there are (and have been for decades) fountains everywhere. Yet most British airports have a distinct lack of water fountains."

"On tropical beaches from Ghana to the Caribbean and Indonesia, the most common detritus I’ve seen is the plastic water bottle. We in the West really have no excuse to continue to buy water in plastic bottles when it is a readily available resource. It’s how we know most eco-preservation chat is rhetoric rather than reality. What matters most is money not nature. Pure greed. We all fall prey to this - preferring to pay over the odds to each buy our own bottle of water from a private company rather than agreeing to collectively pay for a water fountain."

"I was being seen, yes, but fame is outsourcing your own worth onto strangers. It doesn’t solve the root problem of feeling unworthy or unloved. Nor does it do anything to heal the pain from such a feeling. Fame, money, power - they promise, or give the illusion of, being the solution to life’s pains, but in reality they are hollow. At best, they offer short-term, superficial relief from pain, but at worst they isolate a person so thoroughly they became incapable of happiness or living a meaningful life."

"Look at anyone who uses money, fame or power to fill their inner voids, and you’ll see someone in a clear addiction cycle. They can’t live without their next fix. The next headline, the next million, the next power grab."

"First, what makes a bad airport: Too few seats and a dearth of facilities apart from the inevitable duty free that you always find, no matter how dire the airport, snaking for miles, standing between airport security and your departure gates like an obstacle course that reeks of perfume. I hate these modern duty free shops that have come to infest all modern airports. Why is that? Are they all run by the same company and has that company got a monopoly on all the world’s airports? Or our airport managers so lacking in imagination they can’t imagine an airport without this mecca to materialism? If an alien came down to earth what would they make of the human race with our seeming obsession with alcohol, cigarettes, chocolate from the same multinational companies, cosmetics and perfume? The only good thing in them is the one shelf spotlighting local delicacies, but these are always massively overpriced and you can get much better quality and variety in the town itself."

"Writing - at least for me - requires quiet, stability, stillness. Some might say boredom. How to write about life when you’re too busy living it? Life fills my cup and then I need time and space to distill what’s in the cup into its essence. The challenge is to live a full, adventurous life while also finding time and space to write about it. If there’s no time or space to reflect, then what I write is just hot takes and first impressions. That’s the sort of writing I did as a reporter, but here I want to make broader sense of what I’ve experienced. Boil all those experiences of being alive into some kind of meaning."

"When death is not witnessed in its physical reality, it lives only in our imagination. I think this is one reason we fear death so much more in the West than in cultures where dead bodies are an everyday part of life. When we can see the physical dimension of death, its mystery is lessened. We can see that in death there is also a lot of peace. When death exists only in our imagination or in crime drama re-creations, it is limitless and frightening."

"It is scrutiny by the general public that keeps the powerful honest."

"By making everything secure [governments] have degraded the quality of secrecy."

"Journalists are, or ought to be, the public's hired guns sent out to collect information, question it, verify it and distil it to what is important and true. This takes time and skill, and is the only thing a journalist does that marks him or her out as a professional. It's also the reason why anyone would choose well-known newspaper's website over an unknown blog."

"The survival of journalism in the digital age rests on its unique selling point: serving this public interest. Fail or forget to do that, and it has no future."

"If you believe the promise that an authoritarian state makes that if it has enough knowledge on every citizen it will keep people safe. I think that’s a false promise. It doesn’t actually happen. If that was the case then East Germany would be a really incredible place to live and in fact it wasn’t, it was really horrible, most of these places were really horrible."

"I’m talking of the revolutionary quality of digitization. And I say it’s revolutionary because once information is no longer a bunch of box files or papers in a filing cabinet but just bits that fly through the air, it means that it’s so hard for people in power to control it. And it’s always been true that knowledge is power. And so once it becomes very difficult for people in power to keep hold of information it means that it becomes very hard for them to keep hold of power, because power just flows out. The default now is zero cost for information to spread instantly around the globe. And in fact you have to pay money to stop it now. That’s incredibly disruptive and revolutionary."

"The first thing is that you’re always at a disadvantage, because a bureaucracy is funded by the public to have permanent people there who can relentlessly advocate for their own interest. And that’s the problem: when bureaucracy stops working for the public interest."

"What’s really important is to have systemic changes. By that I mean, for example, putting into law that people have a right to access official information. Once freedom of information becomes part of the bureaucracy, the bureaucrats who are freedom of information officials have a vested interest in making sure that that law is there and that it actually works, because it kind of justifies their existence. One thing is to institutionalize rights to know."

"There doesn’t seem to be any law that’s there to protect the citizens from massive State surveillance. We have to collectively come up with some fundamental values around people’s right to privacy, the right to be left alone from government, and rights to free speech."

"We’ve come up with ways to judge the quality of a product. The thing is that we’re just getting used to the idea that information is a product, and we have to come up with criteria on which to judge which information is worth paying attention to and taking seriously and which isn’t. So we have to think: is this information new? Is it relevant? Is it trustworthy? Can I verify it? Who’s the source? If you’re a journalist you’re used to doing this as your job, but that’s going to become increasingly necessary for people online, because they just get hit with so much information, and if they don’t want to just sit there, manipulated by all different kinds of propaganda, they have to start getting tooled up on how to be a savvy information consumer."

"The problem with WikiLeaks is that it’s been taken over by Julian Assange, and that is directly opposed to what the whole movement is meant to be about: decentralized power, collaboration, equality and transparency. Under Julian Assange, WikiLeaks has become exactly the opposite of all of these things: it’s become totally centralized, it’s become a hierarchy, it’s not transparent. And it’s not collaborative, but incredibly divisive in the transparency community, because anybody who dares to challenge or criticize Julian comes under severe fire from him. A person who’s meant to be a leader of a movement, which is what he claims to be, you’re meant to be about building and accruing allies, rather than going into the movement and being divisive. But that’s exactly what he’s been."

"The movement of radical transparency and accountability is not about putting a new person in charge, it’s about getting rid of the whole idea of hierarchal politics. It’s about decentralizing power."

"A lack of government oversight hasn't hindered the internet. Quite the opposite. A hands-off approach is largely responsible for its fantastic growth and success. The tremendous innovation and economic boon produced by the free internet should be proof enough that the dead hand of government isn't needed."

"This is the information war we are now engaged in. Governments are seeking to militarise cyberspace while citizens fight for the right to communicate and assemble freely online without state surveillance."

"We need to codify our values and build consensus around what we want from a free society and a free internet. We need to put into law protections for our privacy and our right to speak and assemble."

"To be successful, a campaign to maintain the free internet and freedom of information has to go beyond vandal hackers. Stunts designed not to provoke dialogue or persuade the public of the rightness of the cause but simply to throw up a middle finger to authority are more hindrance than help."

"The public pay for and elect the government and it is only by the people’s will that those in public office hold power. Public servants’ primary responsibility is to serve the people and we have a right to know what they are doing in our name and with our money. Public accountability does not end the day after an election."

"Transparency is seen as the antidote to corruption because secrecy is, if not its cause, then at least a necessary precondition. This is especially so for corruption involving private enrichment from public goods. Transparency is a power-reducing mechanism so it matters whose affairs are made transparent and for what purpose."

"Transparency can help citizens hold the powerful to account; but it can also be used by the powerful to control citizens by making their lives transparent through surveillance. For transparency to be just, it must always be considered in relationship to power."

"Transparency helps ensure that power is not abused or used to make the powerful, or their immediate families, rich. There is also a genuine public interest in ensuring that the people who make laws and levy tax are following those laws and paying their fair share of tax."

"This is the problem with the argument that if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear: it ignores the issue of power. If we are not careful, transparency can be used to increase, rather than reduce, the information asymmetry between ruler and ruled."

"Transparency strengthens democracy only when it gives citizens information they can use. It is not just about politicians telling us what they want us to know. For it to mean anything, it must empower citizens and provide answers to the questions they ask, not merely spoon feed them meagre information rations."

"I get it. It is always easier to go after the person raising a problem than to deal with the problem itself, especially if that problem is systemic."

"One of the things that struck me most noticeably when moving to the UK from the US in 1997 was the secrecy of the state toward its citizens. Having worked as a crime reporter in America, I discovered that most of the public records and information I used to do my job were actually illegal to access in the UK. I found the secrecy wasn’t unique to law enforcement but rather a default attitude among officials. It didn’t matter if I were asking for details of food hygiene inspections, parliamentary expenses or police reports, the attitude was the same. A kind of disbelief and then a patronising disdain, by which I was meant to understand that it was not my “place” as a mere citizen — or subject as I learnt was the UK term — to ask for a full accounting from agents of the state."

"I was putting together a book, Your Right to Know, about people’s new rights under the Freedom of Information Act (FOI) 2000 that was coming into force in 2005. I thought it would be a game-changer for British democracy and I wanted to include contact details for the new FOI units in public agencies. I was used to naming public officials. In America it was no big deal; anonymity was only used if there was a valid reason. But you would have thought I’d asked for nuclear codes such was the shock and pushback I received to this simple request. The idea of providing actual names was anathema and I began to wonder who was the master here, and who the servant."

"Secrecy, in the hands of the powerful, is too easy a tool to abuse. The distance from protection to cover-up is short, and a tool initially intended to help can quickly morph into causing harm. That’s why it should never be a default for anyone in power, but rather an exception."

"What I call the ‘information war’, where through the control of information our society is being radically transformed."

"The point about digitization, just to explain what I mean by that, is the way that information is no longer a physical commodity. It doesn't have a mass like it used to. So it used to be that if you wanted to leak a bunch of documents, you physically had to carry away these huge boxes of documents and then you had to physically photocopy them somehow. And they had this physical mass, and it was through that mass that they could be controlled by people in power. When information is digitized, it loses that mass for the most part. It becomes almost ephemeral, it's like an idea; it's like a thought. And it spreads and it can be shared almost instantaneously. So you can take that, and then you combine it with the internet, which is this web in which everybody is talking to each other and sharing information. And you've got the makings of what I think is a digital revolution, which nobody quite knows how to handle it, what to do with it."

"In the same way that in freedom of information around the world, the onus is always… the balance is always on disclosure and the state has to argue why it keeps things secret. But the problem always is in enforcement and who enforces it. And it becomes particularly problematic in the intelligence agencies. Because there you've got this argument of national security and what is happening is that national security is becoming the new word of God, where you can't challenge it. You can't challenge the facts behind why we go to war or why have we put people in prison or why have we occupied a country. And that's where I do kind of think that we need to push the line further."

"I want to put paid to this idea that if you've nothing to fear, you've nothing to hide. I interviewed a really interesting guy in this book. He ran the data campaign for the Obama election, when Obama was being elected. And what they do is they just harvest huge troves of databases. And they're doing it for the basis of trying to predict who might vote for Obama in the election. And he just took me through this whole data business – data brokerage, data dealing. And he showed me this 10,000... well, it was a 464 page dictionary, a data dictionary, with 10,000 data units in it. So that's for every person, it's 10,000 things that you could find out about that person. Their political association, if they drink Coke or Diet Coke, what sort of magazines do they subscribe to, have they ever had any court cases against them. It's just like a raft of stuff. The problem is, is how these things are used. It's fine if somebody wants to sell you some products, but increasingly states are accessing all this information. And they're building algorithms to try and predict criminals. … It's pretty well-known that the National Security Agency in America is building algorithms and it's taking all of these datasets and basically trying to predict who is going to be a problem for us in future. And to me that just seems an incredibly dangerous road for us to go down, that you’re no longer innocent until proven guilty. We’re starting to imagine or predict who is going to be a problem."

"I think with all technology, people have an idea of how it will be used, but then it has a life of its own and people use it in all kinds of ways. In the same way with Facebook. I doubt when people first created Facebook they imagined it was going to help people in Egypt overthrow a dictator. So it does have a life of its own that we can’t predict."

"I’m very much a free market capitalist, actually. I don’t agree with a kind of totalitarian, one government or sort of universal law. I think what will happen and what is happening now is, in the same way as… In the way that countries make themselves attractive to investors through different pieces of legislation they offer, whether it’s secrecy in the case of the Cayman Islands or Switzerland, I think the fact that some countries now are offering very robust publishing laws, it will be that as information is global, what you might see is that these big internet companies like Google or Facebook, that have their servers, will start to relocate those servers to countries where they have less interference. In a way, you’re creating a kind of free market of freedom of information law."

"The main thing, if there is a power that the media has, it’s mostly because they represent the public in quite a direct relationship. They’re very populist in the sense that they are meant to be the public’s hired goons who go out, find information, collate it all, verify whether or not it’s true, and then signpost to the citizens that this is worth reading. And they make it in such a way that it’s interesting to read. So they are kind of spokespeople for the people. And in an interconnected age, they are definitely quicker to realize the way power has shifted. You find most journalists now are on all these social networks. They’re all about creating… they want a direct relationship with their audience, in a way that politicians have been very loathe to do."

"You find most journalists now are on all these social networks. They’re all about creating… they want a direct relationship with their audience, in a way that politicians have been very loathe to do. They don’t want to come down to the masses. They still want to be in that fortress, in that ivory tower where they can lecture down to people. They haven’t really adapted to this two-way communication."

"What I say in the book is that rather than it being the death of journalism, this whole deluge of information, it to me marks a time when journalism can really come into its own, because as we’re drowning in information, the whole point of a journalist is to signpost what’s important and then to verify whether or not it’s true."

"This is where we get into the information war - that speculative blood became more important than the actual blood. We already can see all that terrible stuff – we know about that. Let's focus on your nightmares, how all these people might die because the government's secrets have been unleashed."

"It was that whole Wizard of Oz moment. We all look at these politicians – oh wow, they're so powerful - and then it was the little dog pulling the curtain away."

"The American government said: 'You can't publish this, it's dangerous, it's going to damage world affairs, diplomacy, etc, and then you publish it anyway and it's for the greater good, telling people what they needed to know."

"The grass is always greener over the septic tank."

"If Life is a Bowl of Cherries, What Am I Doing in the Pits?"

"If you can't make it better, you can laugh at it."

"I remember thinking how often we look, but never see … we listen, but never hear … we exist, but never feel. We take our relationships for granted. A house is only a place. It has no life of its own. It needs human voices, activity and laughter to come alive."

"You have to love a nation that celebrates its independence every July 4, not with a parade of guns, tanks, and soldiers who file by the White House in a show of strength and muscle, but with family picnics where kids throw Frisbees, the potato salad gets iffy, and the flies die from happiness. You may think you have overeaten, but it is patriotism."

"It takes a lot of courage to show your dreams to someone else*"

"What is bravery, and what is bravado? Journalists covering combat shoulder great responsibilities and face difficult choices. Sometimes they pay the ultimate price."

"People want change but not too much change. Finding that balance is tricky for every politician."

"Nancy Reagan became first lady during the height of the feminist movement, and women who were battling for their rights in a male-dominated world saw her as an anachronism. Reagan said her life began when she met her husband. The adoring look she focused on her Ronnie when they were in public became known as "the gaze," adding to the caricature of her as a rich Hollywood socialite who did not understand the concerns of a generation of women coming into their own as professionals and seeking equality. What her detractors failed to understand (and I was among them) was the substantive role she played behind the scenes at the White House in keeping her husband's presidency on track. She took the long view in looking after his legacy, intervening through favored surrogates to keep conservative ideologues from driving the agenda. Her insistence that no president could be considered great without reaching out to Soviet leaders trumped resistance from the right wing of the GOP. She was fiercely protective of her husband's image, less so of her own, and she paid the price. When some of her interventions became known, particularly in the personnel department, she was cast as Lady Macbeth — even though the firings she engineered won praise. … Years later, with the benefit of hindsight and after watching Hillary Clinton's failed effort to achieve health-care reform, I came to believe Nancy Reagan deserved a fairer assessment. I wrote an op-ed piece that appeared in The Washington Post on Jan. 8, 1995, with the headline "Nancy with the centrist face: Derided as an elitist, Mrs. Reagan's impact was unequaled." I made the point that unlike Clinton, who took an office in the West Wing and was upfront about wanting to be a player, Reagan operated undercover, usually through a surrogate, and that she was a force for good. She rarely left fingerprints, but she got the job done, and her job was to play up her husband's strengths and cover for his weaknesses. She did both very well. The piece concluded with this line: "She is without doubt an effective First Lady, and she may yet win our hearts." Soon after I received a handwritten note from Mrs. Reagan saying, "I don't really know how to say this but when something very nice comes from an unexpected source, it's really appreciated — and if you see me in a different light now, I'm happy. I can only hope one day 'to win the heart.' " Later that same year, she cooperated with a NEWSWEEK cover about her reconciliation with daughter Patti Davis, and how the president's Alzheimer's disease had brought the family together after literally decades of turmoil. Another handwritten note arrived shortly after with the lighthearted comment, "We've got to stop meeting like this!" After sharing her thoughts and emotions on her family's difficult times, Reagan said, "Hopefully I'm close to 'winning the heart.' " In looking back at these notes, I realize how much it meant to her to gain a measure of affection after being treated so harshly in the public eye."

"It took her husband's long illness and her grace in caring for him to show her critics what she was made of. Rarely did she spend more than an hour or two away from him, and during the decade of his decline, she guarded his image, his legacy, and his dignity. As his cognitive powers slipped away, eldest son Michael reminded him that he used to be president. "How did I do?" Reagan replied, his characteristic humor and humility intact. In the 1994 letter to the American people in which the former president revealed his illness, he wrote, "I only wish there was some way I could spare Nancy from this painful experience. When the time comes I am confident that with your help she will face it with faith and courage." In their life together, Ronald Reagan never worried about anything; Nancy worried about everything, carrying a burden few appreciated until the end. She didn't have his gift for storytelling, but she made sure all the parts were in place, and by honoring him, she was true to herself, a woman for all times."

"As a woman, I completely reject Hillary’s brand of bourgeois feminism because it leaves out millions of immigrant women, poor women, and the women under her bombs around the world."

"The biggest terrorist organization in the world today is the U. S. Empire. ... The U. S. central command has its own death porn channel, video-logging their beheadings by drone. A drop in the bucket of the crimes and chaos the Empire has showered on this region of the world. But amidst its success in completely shredding several countries, it has also revealed a weakness – that its greed and arrogance can lead it to disaster. Any crisis for the Empire means new opportunities for the people: to expose its lies, its crimes, and to mobilize against it."

"It’s chilling to face the reality that nuclear war is not some distant Cold War era threat, but a strong possibility in our near future. Due to incompetence or belligerence, any nuclear armed country could initiate this death spiral. Right now we face an unprecedented ecological crisis in need of global cooperation. Instead of becoming a leader to reduce and dismantle nuclear weapons, the US is spending over a trillion dollars to modernize its nuclear arsenal. And despite being a signatory to the Nuclear Non Proliferation Treaty, the US is buying hundreds more. In February, the Biden administration secured a contract with Northrop Grumman for 600 new nukes, for no reason other than to line the coffers of the defense industry."

"DC think tank policy prescriptions about nuclear weapons are sponsored by the very arms companies rewarded with lucrative contracts for their recommendations, which always result in further militarization."

"We need to strategize how we can live in a world beyond nukes, because there will never be peace as long as these weapons exist."

"One just has to leave the United States and speak to people in other countries, especially those long subjugated by the US, to see how true this idea (that the US is a force for peace) really is. The United States is a global Empire, which imposes its world order through military force. A new study reveals that US “counterterrorism” operations have been active in 83 countries in the last three years alone. It does this not to spread “democracy” or “human rights”—a ridiculous assertion for an oligarchy that hosts the largest incarcerated population—but to extract resources and protect capital. Whatever the US dictates, its junior collaborators follow suit and the rest know the penalty for bucking the beast—genocidal sanctions, coups, invasions and bombing campaigns. These criminal actions depend on a compliant corporate media that make them palatable to the public."

"While both countries clearly have strategic geopolitical ambitions, Russia and China do not share the US’s imperial goals for global hegemony. China spreads its influence through production and financial investments but it only has one military base in Djibouti. When you compare this to the nearly 1,000 US bases littering the earth, the notion that the US is acting defensively is laughable."

"The US military is bigger and more costly than the next ten countries combined. It is patently absurd to think that it is Russia or China, not the US that is setting the world stage militarily."

"The US is not only an Empire, it is the biggest and most powerful Empire the world has ever seen. It has 800 military bases in more than 70 countries and it bends other countries to its will through sanctions and war. It has interfered to subvert the democratic processes more than 50 times in Latin America alone. The US is not effective at protecting and serving its own citizenry, so it has no moral leg to stand on to justify this global military presence and daily violence. It is only successful if you look at control and domination as merits of success. The system it upholds exists to benefit very few people, which becomes a tinier pool every year, while the vast majority at the bottom suffer and die preventable deaths—structural violence under capitalism."

"The US political system needs to manufacture consent for its global Empire by directing Americans’ attention and energy away from the corrupt oligarchs and corporate overlords who oppress us here at home to an external threat, like communism, terrorism, and now, Russia and China."

"When Donald Trump became president, it was imperative to rationalize how someone so unsavory to liberal sensibilities won a democratic election. Instead of having reflection or accountability for the failures of the Democratic Party, and the anointment of a candidate like Hillary Clinton, the results were blamed on sinister foreign forces like Putin’s Russia, and entities like Russia Today."

"Russia and China will continue to be hysterically fear mongered against because the arms industry needs to keep pumping out weapons to sell and the people need something, someone to blame for why our lives continue to degrade, other than our own government."

"There is no rational justification for the continuous, aggressive US military buildup and maneuvering around Russia and China. The US routinely sends in ships and aircraft into the South China Sea to flex its muscles, which China recently denounced as a “threat to peace.” It is incomprehensible to imagine China conducting military operations in the Gulf of Mexico, but apparently China should accept the US doing this on a regular basis."

"A majority of Americans now favor using US troops to defend Taiwan if it is invaded by China, according to arecent poll. There is no other rationale to explain this mindset other than corporate media propaganda steadily pumping out anti-China stories and legitimizing it as an adversary."

"The inevitability of war with China is a tacitly accepted reality, with rarely any questioning about whether or not the US should be conducting these acts of aggression or militarily backing Taiwan at all. How does any of this protect the American people? Needless to say, all of this points to the very real and growing possibility that the US will start war with China over Taiwan, and we need to speak out against this utter madness before it is too late."

"The United States functions as an oligarchy rather than a democracy. Policies like are passed not due to public support but corporate interests. The overwhelming majority of people in this countrysupport things like paid maternity leave, free college, and a higher minimum wage. Yet these things are painted as wedge issues that can never be accomplished due to the partisan divide. Corporations control the political process and the conversation around it, and they always win what they want."

"This is why during the COVID pandemic, the oligarchs siphoned two trillion dollars from the working class, while one third of small businesses shut down and the poor suffered through mass evictions and joblessness. Due to the neoliberal indoctrination of public education and mass conditioning of American Exceptionalism, most Americans haven’t given a second thought to what the US does in our names around the world."

"Many US journalists and politicians acknowledge that climate change is the largest threat facing humanity, but few point to the fact that the US military is the largest institutional polluter, and emitter of carbon emissions, and every single climate treaty excludes their responsibility."

"The need for critical media literacy and mass organizing has never been more urgent. If you want to go down the rabbit hole with me to learn more about the true nature of the US government and how we can unite to demilitarize our communities, check out The Empire Files."

"The violent confrontations are happening.. are going on every single day and night... The opposition does not denounce the violence, and they also incite the violence and use the violence and the deaths. It’s like this theater of cruelty...to bolster international support... [Opposition activists] pulled out people from 18-wheelers, stole trucks on the highway, created giant barricades, doused the freeways in gasoline, and this is where a lot of people are dying."

"As soon as it got dark, I’ve never felt like my life was more in danger... We had press jackets on, but at the same time, we knew that if we identified ourselves as Telesur journalists we could get lynched. Because that’s the climate right now. They just call you an infiltrator, and then you get killed. And they deemed many other people as infiltrators...they said, hey, black guy are you a Chavista? And they threw a Molotov cocktail on him. They also beat to death a national guardsmen, who was retired, just for being in the vicinity, thinking he was an infiltrator."

"We went into at least ten supermarkets. The shelves were fully stocked with every goddamn Nestle brand, every paper product—except toilet paper...And this is where you get into some weird territory, where there are some huge shortages of particular goods used and hoarded for propaganda purposes, to create this kind of international humiliation campaign."

"For doing my job –– for interviewing government officials, protesters at los guarimbas, average Venezuelans and peaceful marchers –– I am called a spy who should be killed by the same people called ‘peaceful freedom fighters’ by Western press...These unsuccessful attempts to intimidate us reveals how much they really fear accurate reporting that might undermine their narrative... The show [The Empire Files] is totally independent of TeleSUR...We merely sell them the content; they have zero control over anything we do."

"We — the traditional, the legacy, the mainstream media — have to change."

"Often it has been that reporter who has most skillfully played the access game — the one who has curried just enough favor with the powerful newsmaker to be smiled upon, without giving up basic credibility and integrity. That’s access journalism. Accountability journalism, by contrast, is often performed off to the side, by those who don’t have to deal with the news provider on a regular basis."

"Trump is, of course, a master of distraction and . It’s possible to resist being his chump, but it takes continued self-regulation."

"If news organizations learned anything after the campaign, they should have learned that groupthink has a tendency to miss the point and journalistic myopia requires some extra-strength corrective lenses. Do something different. Represent the interests of a broader, more ideologically diverse population. Figure out what they’re thinking and feeling — and why."

"In the wacky new world of fake news, conspiracy theories, es — and social media’s unthinking participation in spreading all of that — facts and truth get lost in the noise. A responsible media needs to be especially careful not to unwittingly spread lies by amplifying them. Some early coverage of Trump’s recent unwarranted, evidence-free blasts about the illegality of some of the popular vote fell into that trap. It’s depressing but a fact of life that a lot of people don’t know the difference between fake news and conspiracy bilge and verified fact. Nor do they seem to care."

"After spending the first three decades of my career at one of Buffett’s papers, the Buffalo News, I’m not willing to accept that. Even now, my former newsroom — down by about half from its peak — is doing critically important work, not just crucial watchdog journalism (insider trading by a congressman) but cultural coverage (memories of a concert venue) that knits the community together. Amid this nightmare financial scenario, what can be done? [Philip] Napoli, for one, thinks that American citizens and our big thinkers need to buckle down — fast — about substantial policy changes that could involve both direct and indirect public funding for local journalism. It "would take us in a more European direction," he said. That notion, once radioactive in journalism because it seems to threaten the independence of news organizations, must now be taken seriously."

""Fair and balanced" was the original Fox News lie, one of the rotten planks that built the foundation for Wednesday's democratic disaster. Over decades, with that false promise accepted as gospel by millions of devotees, Fox News radicalized a nation and spawned more extreme successors such as Newsmax and One America News. Day after day, hour after hour, Fox gave its viewers something that looked like news or commentary but far too often lacked sufficient adherence to a necessary ingredient: truth. Birtherism. The caravan invasion. Covid denialism. Rampant election fraud. All of these found a comfortable home at Fox. In the Trump era, the network — now out of favor for not being quite as shameless as the president demands — was his best friend and promoter. So to put it bluntly: The mob that stormed and desecrated the Capitol on Wednesday could not have existed in a country that hadn’t been radicalized by the likes of Sean Hannity, Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham, and swayed by biased news coverage."

"[O]ne key to running Twitter is the tricky matter of "managing up". Anyone who's ever worked in a corporation or big agency, especially as a manager, knows that you have to handle the boss. You have to keep them informed, hold off their worst instincts, tactfully set boundaries and, most of all, somehow convince them that every move you make is really their brilliant idea – or at least a fulfillment of their underlying vision. And there's the rub. Twitter’s problems are solvable. But the volatile and narcissistic Elon Musk|Musk]] may be the boss that can’t be managed."

"[[Tucker Carlson|[Tucker] Carlson]] has never been a stickler for the truth, as he proved in the run-up to this interview, when he claimed that he was the only western media figure who cared enough to get [[Vladimir Putin|[Vladimir] Putin]] on the record. That's absurd. Many American reporters have tried unsuccessfully to sit down with Putin, especially since the invasion of Ukraine. But the Russian president was waiting for the right stooge. With Carlson, he got just that."

"I cannot remember a time when I did not consider myself a writer."

"The books I loved most as a child were those that contained elements of magic—the whole series of Oz books, Mary Poppins, The Princess and the Goblin—I could name them indefinitely."

"The subject matter of today's youth novels has no boundaries. The only taboo seems to be sex discrimination... I can only guess about where we're going, but I think we have come about as far as we can in the direction of 'let-it-all-hang-out' realism. My reader-mail indicates that kids are beginning to feel bogged down with so much depressing slice-of-life. My own most successful books have been those that were high in entertainment value, especially those touching on the supernatural."

"A movie loosely based upon my novel, I Know What You Did Last Summer, opened in theaters around the country. I was ecstatic until I settled into a theater seat with my box of popcorn and discovered that Hollywood had turned my teenage suspense story into a slasher film. The setting had been changed from the mountains of New Mexico to a fishing village on the East Coast, so an insane fisherman, who wasn't in my book, could decapitate my characters with an ice hook. The first thing I did after leaving the theater was phone our daughter Kerry and warn her not to let the grandchildren see it."

"Violence is a fact of life in today’s society and therefore it has its place in books and films, but I strongly believe that the people who create those books and films have a duty to treat the subject seriously and to show the terrible consequences."

"The reasons for censorship reflect the social climate of the times. The publisher of Debutante Hill asked me to revise the manuscript because I had a 19-year-old boy (the ‘bad guy’) drink a beer. When I changed the beer to a Coke, the book was published and won the ‘Seventeenth Summer Literary Award.’"

"I started thinking about charismatic psychopaths like Charles Manson and wondering what they were like as teenagers? They didn't just spring full-blown from oyster shells -- they had to hone the "people skills" that allowed them to become so manipulative as adults. Kids like that are growing up within our school systems and can exert tremendous control over their fellow students. I consider "Griffin" a cautionary tale about the danger of peer pressure."

"Killing Mr. Griffin doesn't encourage violence in schools any more than the story of Cain and Able encourages children to kill their younger brothers."

"I was in my forties and teaching magazine writing for the Journalism Department at the University of New Mexico. I was hired on a fluke. The professor who was scheduled to teach the course became ill, so the chair of the department, my personal friend Tony Hillerman, asked me to fill in for a semester. Tony knew I’d never been to college and didn’t care; he just knew I’d written successfully for magazines for years. The original professor never returned, and someone else replaced Tony as Chair and automatically kept me on. I discovered I loved teaching writing and started to get worried that my deep dark secret, (no college!) might be discovered, so I began taking courses under my married name, Lois Arquette, hoping I could get a degree before someone “outed” me. In the course of that endeavor, I took a juvenile literature class where they were studying “Lois Duncan books.” My fellow students were excitedly writing A-plus papers about how many of my books were based on Greek myths. I had never even read those myths!"

"It came naturally. I came from a family of strong women."

"I understand the craft of writing, because it’s who and what I am. The commercial world of publishing, both in the past and today, is an ongoing mystery to me. Fads are constantly changing."

"Ironically, when it was released in 1979 it was challenged by feminists who thought it was anti-feminist and by anti-feminists who thought it was feminist. I was trying to walk a nice gray line but people who feel strongly about a subject don’t want a gray line. They want it to be all black or all white."

"The young women of today, free to study, to speak, to write, to choose their occupation, should remember that every inch of this freedom was bought for them at a great price. It is for them to show their gratitude by helping onward the reforms of their own times, by spreading the light of freedom and of truth still wider. The debt that each generation owes to the past it must pay to the future."

"Poor baby! She'll be a woman some day! Poor baby! A woman's lot is so hard!"

"I am disappointed in people on our side for being hypocrites about sexual harassers and abusers of women, who are in our party, who are sitting in the White House, who brag about their extramarital affairs, who brag about mistreating women—and because he happens to have an "R" next to his name we look the other way...This is a party that endorsed Roy Moore for the Senate in the State of Alabama even though he was a credibly accused child molester. You cannot claim that you stand for women and put up with that...Speaking of bad guys, there was quite an interesting person who was on this stage the other day. Her name is . Now, why was she here? Why was she here? She’s a young, no-longer-in-office politician from France. I think the only reason she was here is because she’s named Le Pen. And the Le Pen name is a disgrace. Her grandfather (Jean-Marie Le Pen) is a racist and a Nazi. She claims that she stands for him. And the fact that CPAC invited her is a disgrace."

"[[Racial views of Donald Trump|Let me put it this way, I think he [Donald Trump] is very eager not to upset the racists who like him. Too eager]]."

"I’ve been a conservative my entire life. ... So you’d think that the , or CPAC, would be a natural fit. It once was. But on Saturday, after speaking to this year’s gathering, I had to be escorted from the premises by several guards who seemed genuinely concerned for my safety. What happened to me at CPAC is the perfect illustration of the collective experience of a whole swath of conservatives since Donald Trump became the . We built and organized this party — but now we’re made to feel like interlopers."

"I know how encouraged I feel whenever someone simply states the truth."

"Like the Republican Party, CPAC has become heavily Trumpified. ... So it has come to this: a conservative group whose worst fault in years past may have been excessive flat tax enthusiasm now opens its doors to the nationalists of Europe."

"But this time, and particularly in front of this crowd, it felt far more urgent to point out the hypocrisy of our side. How can conservative women hope to have any credibility on the subject of or relations between the sexes when they excuse the behavior of President Trump? And how can we participate in any conversation about when the Republican president and the Republican Party backed a man (Roy Moore) credibly accused of child molestation for the United States Senate? I watched my fellow panelists’ eyes widen. And then the booing began. I’d been dreading it for days, but when it came, I almost welcomed it. There is nothing more freeing than telling the truth. And it must be done, again and again, by those of us who refuse to be absorbed into this brainless, sinister, clownish thing called Trumpism, by those of us who refuse to overlook the fools, frauds and fascists attempting to glide along in his slipstream into respectability. I spoke to a hostile audience for the sake of every person who has watched this spectacle of mendacity in disbelief and misery for the past two years. Just hearing the words you know are true can serve as ballast, steadying your mind when so much seems unreal."

"Politicians, activists and intellectuals have succumbed with numbing regularity, betraying every principle they once claimed to uphold. But there remains a vigorous remnant of dissenters. I hear from them."

"Others must do as their own consciences require, but I stand with @monacharenEPPC. She stands for true conservative, American, and Judaeo-Christian values."

"I wish we conservatives could clone Mona Charen so that we could keep one for ourselves and give the other to the liberal movement which is equally badly in need of a truth-teller to call out the hypocrites and snollygosters."

"I hope the first bootlegger I get is not the 'first woman bootlegger'"

"There you have the worst problem for prohibition officials. They resort to all sorts of tricks, concealing metal containers in their clothing, in false bottoms of trunks and traveling bags, and even in baby buggies. On the Canadian, Mexican and Florida borders inspectors are constantly on the lookout for women bootleggers, who try to smuggle liquor into the states. Their detection and arrest is far more difficult than that of the male law-breakers."

"While there are many women who had no desire to be granted the right of franchise, since the duty has been imposed upon them at this most opportune time, affording them the opportunity and privilege of mobilizing under the banner in the greatest battle ever waged in behalf of that greatest of all institutions, the American home, they will not be found wanting."

"Oh man it's kind of sick how much joy I get out of being cruel to old white men. Are white people genetically predisposed to burn faster in the sun, thus logically being only fit to live underground like groveling goblins?"

"This is the way the world ends. Not with a bang, but with an anime avatar calling you a cuck"

"America is not doing so hot right now I was hypnotized by the travel ban, the way, you know, a chicken gets hypnotized by something it's afraid of I'm a very privileged person. And I am, like, completely documented. Everything's in order, and I'm educated. I speak English. I don't have that much to be afraid of. But whenever I run into one of these — and I'm not going to again, and that's amazing — whenever I ran into those issues, my heart would start pounding. I just felt really stressed out about it every time."

"One spring day in my sixth grade … we read two articles. The first concerned the cruelty toward cattle in slaughterhouses and the second was about the detrimental effects of red meat on your body. By the time I got home later that day, I had resolved to give up red meat, to take a stand against animal cruelty and a stand for my health … At 13, I decided to give up all meat and fish. My parents were even more surprised and cautiously supportive – provided I learned how to get enough protein. … Although I now eat meat (after having not for 18 years), I have tremendous respect for people who make consistent ethical choices in their lives – people who not only don’t eat meat, but who also don’t wear fur or leather and don’t use products made from animal derivatives."

"Senator Sanders wants to dismantle Obamacare, dismantle the Children’s Health Insurance Program], dismantle Medicare, and dismantle private insurance.,, to go back to an era – before we had the Affordable Care Act – that would strip millions and millions and millions of people off their health insurance.”"

"Comparing Jews to termites is anti-Semitic, wrong and dangerous. The responsive laughter makes my skin crawl. For everyone who rightly condemned President Trump’s rhetoric when he spoke about immigrants “infesting our country,” this rhetoric should be equally unacceptable to you:"

"Co-signed as an American. We should expect all elected officials, regardless of party, and all public figures to not traffic in anti-Semitism."

"This right here is the result of a massacre stoked by people like you, and the words that you put out into the world I want you to know that, and I want you to feel that deep inside: 49 people died because of the rhetoric you put out there. i can’t believe this has to be said, but i didn’t tell chelsea clinton she was the one who put a gun to muslims’ heads. i said, & continue to say, that by jumping on the right-wing bandwagon & villifying ilhan omar, she fed into the EXACT discourse we were at the vigil to protest"

"By late 2017, Chelsea was back in the pages of Teen Vogue. There she published an open letter to her children, which may or may not have begun as a late-night Facebook screed and in any case didn't sound like the kind of thing you'd write to your kids, or that they'd voluntarily read. Teen Vogue proudly ran it anyway. In her letter, Chelsea complained about Donald Trump, came out against bullying and climate change, and fretted that transgender soldiers are no longer welcome in the military. She ended by noting that "protecting children isn’t someone else's job; it's all our jobs—even if the president doesn't think it's his." It was nothing readers hadn't seen before. What's interesting is what Chelsea didn't say. She didn't challenge the existing order, or even acknowledge its existence. She didn't wonder why an ever-shrinking number of Americans control an ever-expanding share of the country’s wealth. She didn't ask why the middle class is dying, or why our society is fragmenting. She definitely didn't pause to consider how someone so thoroughly ordinary as herself could become rich and famous in a country that claims to promote on the basis of achievement. If the meritocracy is real, why is Teen Vogue pretending a letter so stupefyingly conventional is brilliant? That would have been a good question. Chelsea didn't ask. She's not interested in the answer. She has no idea she should be. In Chelsea Clinton's world, nobody tells her she’s wrong."

"The Clinton campaign just made a serious mistake. They sent Hillary and Bill Clinton’s daughter Chelsea out on behalf of her mother to bash Senator Bernie Sanders on the issue of health care. What’s so wrong with that? Don’t all candidates use family surrogates when and where they can? The Kennedys, for example, deployed a horde of kinfolk for Jack’s campaign for president, then Bobby’s, then Teddy’s. But when it’s the first time (as this was for Clinton the younger), the surrogate should be sure whereof she speaks, and had better stick to talking about her candidate, not the opponent. Unfortunately, Chelsea Clinton misrepresented Senator Sanders’ position, and her premiere performance on the stump backfired, producing a flood of political donations to Sanders. Here’s what she said: “Senator Sanders wants to dismantle Obamacare, dismantle the [Children’s Health Insurance Program], dismantle Medicare, and dismantle private insurance.” Whew! She would have us believe that the Vermont senator is a one-man wrecking crew, an enraged King Kong – or, to be modern about it, a mendacious Darth Vader – proposing “to go back to an era – before we had the Affordable Care Act – that would strip millions and millions and millions of people off their health insurance.”"

"[D]escribed the worship of power as "the new religion in Europe." Anti-Americanism, predicated in part on fascism's mirror image, the revilement of power–especially when that power is somebody else's–answers many of the fundamental needs once filled by the Church. There is a transcendant and common goal."

"[F]ury is an emotion that I pride myself on *controlling.* Civilization depends upon the control of our instincts--aggression foremost among them. May I suggest rolling back the conversation a bit..."

"I do not like the Democrats. At all. After the year-long sex panic and the Kavanaugh spectacle, frankly, I loathe them."

"I'll be voting for the Democrats again in the coming election, however much I don't think they deserve my vote. And I'll pray that someone in America has the courage and the ability to form a new political party. This should not be beyond us. We're an accomplished nation."

"Washington is the most intensely parochial city in the world."

"It's ridiculous to say that Trump is a non-interventionist president, he's been as interventionist as all the rest and in the end, it's a state policy of the United States."

"It's a state policy of the United States... a bipartisan policy... of US dominance around the world.... During Obama we had a coup in Honduras that was clearly backed by the United States... It was the Secretary of State Hilary Clinton that...played the key role in ensuring that (Hondura's) President Manuel Zelaya, who was deposed in that coup (2009), couldn't go back to his country."

"This is a very unprecedented situation. Maduro has been the president of Venezuela. He's the one in control of government. He's the one in control of the country's institutions. He went through a presidential election, disputed as it may be, and won with the majority of votes. Juan Guaido was elected as a legislator in the National Assembly which is Venezuela's parliament and he also is a legitimately elected politician, a legislator, but for him to declare himself the executive — the head of government really is an unprecedented scenario... There is no logistical path for that unless it's done by force because as of this moment, at least, you know Nicolas Maduro and his government are not relinquishing power. They're not just going to walk out of the presidential palace and say, "Here's the key it's all yours." They're standing strong in their position saying, "Wait a minute, we are the legitimate representatives of this country." They're recognized by other powerful nations like Russia and China."

"We have to remember Venezuela has the largest oil reserves on the planet. It's sitting in Venezuelan territory. On top of that, it's a country very rich in other minerals and resources like gold, natural gas, I mean there's all kinds of strategic resources in Venezuela. It's a very geo-strategically located country. So, of course there are many powerful interests around the world — economic and political — that would like control of Venezuela. There's competing interests and now the doors have been opened over the past decade or so to Russia and China and Iran and, of course, that has not made the United States very happy. The United States considers this their sphere of influence and they want to keep it that way."

"It's not just Bolton. I think the person who's most got Trump's ear on Latin America is Florida Republican Senator Marco Rubio who has a widespread constituency of expat Venezuelans who are very wealthy... they've been wanting to do whatever's possible to provoke regime change in both Venezuela and Cuba and, I think, Rubio probably made a deal with Trump saying essentially he would back Trump's policies and agenda if Trump lets him lead on Latin America..."

"And so the confrontation begins, as I anticipated just hours ago. Maduro expels US diplomats, they refuse to leave. If he tries to force them out, US will respond, with 'all options on the table' (military intervention). This is a total reality show, invent a reason to invade."

"And so, Venezuela becomes a geopolitical battlefield. The country with the largest oil reserves on the planet."

"US hypocrisy in plain sight. The same democratic party outraged over alleged Russian interference in the US presidential election is now openly intervening in the affairs of Venezuela, supporting regime change and backing a self-proclaimed 'interim president'."

"No matter what you may think of Nicolas Maduro, this sets a dangerous precedent for every country around the world. It is an absolute violation of international law, sovereignty and self-determination for foreign leaders to determine the presidents of other nations."

"It’s a violation of international law. Not just OAS charter, but also UN Charter and basic, fundamental tenets of international law, rights to sovereignty, self determination and non intervention."

"High military command in Venezuela now publicly stating support for Nicolas Maduro as Commander in Chief. Says military backs Maduro. Without military support, the opposition cannot take control of the government and execute final stages of coup."

"Regime change happening in real time in Venezuela backed by Trump is setting a dangerous precedent for democracy and sovereign rights worldwide. This situation could quickly escalate into grave violence and become a major geopolitical battlefield. Venezuela has oil, remember."

"Will Venezuela become the test ground for Trump on Russia? Trump backs opposition, Russia backs Maduro. Both want Venezuela’s vast oil reserves."

"Cuba backs Maduro, along with Bolivia, Mexico, Russia and Turkey."

"US Senator making serious threats against the Venezuelan government. With VP Pence’s statement earlier supporting an uprising against Maduro, this is way more open and explicit support for a coup in Venezuela than during 2002 when Bush admin backed the coup against Hugo Chavez."

"While the ruling class may be good at foreclosing on middle class homes, giving closed door speeches to Goldman Sachs, and profiting off of climate catastrophe, they're not always so great at figuring out this whole politics thing. Their ego and undying faith in their own brilliance will never allow them to see what is so patently obvious to all of us: no one outside of your tiny enclave wants you. And your candidacies will only enable and inflame the exact populist movement you are so desperate to quash. Prepare to see many more billionaire tears in the days to come."

"To state it simply: [[Bernie Sanders|[Bernie] Sanders]] is a revolutionary and Warren is a reformer... [[Elizabeth Warren|[Elizabeth] Warren]] has been unequivocal that she is a capitalist and believes in markets. She identifies this as the most significant ideological split between her and Sanders."

"Sanders’ message of political revolution lands with a thud among those who are comfortable. Warren, Biden, Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.), South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg and “not sure” all outperform Sanders among those earning more than $100,000... It makes sense, though, that those who have struggled the most under our system would be the most receptive to revolutionary change. Why maintain the rules of the current order when those rules have made your life a struggle?"

"The one overlap between Sanders and Warren is their relative appeal to young people. This stands in contrast to Biden, for whom the greatest predictor of support is age. The older you are, the more likely you are to be ridin’ with Biden. This suggests that the progressive tussle between Warren and Sanders is about more than a competition for Rep. Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez’s (D-N.Y.) endorsement; it’s really about the future of the party... Already, progressives are setting the pace for new and popular policy ideas. Reformer, or revolutionary? The policies may be similar, but the results could be dramatically different."

"Polls show 70 percent of Americans support Medicare-for-all, 74 percent support a wealth tax such as the one proposed by Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s proposed 70 percent marginal tax rate finds comfortable majority support. But … socialism! Surely not..."

"[[Donald Trump|[Donald] Trump]] would have us believe that these are our only two choices: We can either have smash-and-grab capitalism, where so many hands in the cookie jar has resulted in so many government scandals, and where the top 1 percent have more wealth than the bottom 90 percent, or we can have what’s happening in Venezuela, where the economy has collapsed and humanitarian and political crises have ensued..."

"Trump's dig on socialism means he's scared, [[Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez|[Alexandria] Ocasio-Cortez]] said after his speech. What really scares the pro-plutocrats on both sides of the political aisle about her, Sanders and other democratic socialists is that they have become messengers for a compelling message with an actual vision — the simple idea that it's up to government to intervene and equalize the playing field between the capital that owns the politicians, the system and the rewards, and the general public toiling to provide those rewards."

"Everybody deserves to live a life of dignity, with their bare-minimum needs met in... 'the richest society in history of the world.' It’s an idea whose time has come..."

"We really are watching the utter destruction of even assemblance of commitment to the 'international rules based order'. This has collapsed completely in real time. [...] I really do think, and there has been lots of things that you can point to, but in the modern era it really starts to come unglued with the Iraq war and the bullshit pretext we used to go in. It's no accident that [[Vladimir Putin |[Vladimir] Putin]] pointed to the Iraq war and what we did there as his excuse for why it's okay for him to do what he does. [[Benjamin Netanyahu |[Benjamin] Netanyahu]] uses the Iraq war and the toll that took on civilians as his excuse to do what he is doing in Gaza. [...] I'm not going to deny there were horrors that we committed during the Iraq war [...] [but] it really does pale in comparison to what is unfolding in Gaza right now. But we started this started this unraveling in the modern era with the Iraq war and now we have just seen a complete disillusion of even the ability to have a pretext of commitment to these supposed higher values. Is an extraordinary and horrifying thing to watch in real time."

"Trying to suppress criticism of Israel even as Israel’s government becomes ever more repressive of Palestinian rights won’t work, especially when the White House itself is surrounded by anti-Semitism. Jewish and other progressive student groups are already asserting their intention to fight against the denial of free speech. Likewise, insisting that anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism doesn’t make it true. A new generation of young Jews — and a whole bunch of us who aren’t so young anymore — know that’s wrong."

"Public opinion polls show that Americans really do want to end these endless wars. But too many people in power—from mainstream media editorial writers to elected officials at every level, especially Democrats—ignore that reality, and end up focusing more on Trump’s fake words than on his real actions..."

"Right now, we should have broad, deep, and vibrant movements across this country challenging US support for Saudi Arabia’s ongoing massacre of civilians in Yemen. We should see teach-ins on every campus and in every house of worship on the threat of a US war against Iran resulting from Trump’s rejection of diplomacy and abandonment of the nuclear deal. And we should be cheering as every progressive social movement—supporting everything from the Green New Deal to Medicare for All to free college education to a new jobs program—is demanding that the bloated military budget be slashed to pay for those big-idea projects."

"One of the things about [John Bolton]] that I think is so crucially important is his absolute, consistent commitment to militarism. This is a man who does not believe in diplomacy anywhere. He does not believe there are any international crises that can be solved by anything other than direct military intervention, whether it’s sending troops, whether it’s bombing. His op-ed in The Wall Street Journal calling for a first strike against North Korea; his consistent years of calling for bombing Iran; his calls for regime change in Venezuela; most recently, of course, his opposition to even negotiating with the Taliban in Afghanistan, let alone a partial, small-scale troop withdrawal — all of this is of a piece. All of this is a consistent position that says, “America first means America military first and only.”"

"The flurry of favors the president did for Bibi could constrain US policy—and hurt people in the region—for a long time."

"Fine, we’re all against anti-Semitism... We fought against anti-Semitism for years in that context of fighting against white supremacy and racism. But this isn’t about what she (Ilhan Omar) said... It’s about the fact that she is a Muslim African immigrant, a Somali refugee, who is talking about Palestinian rights, who is talking about the power of the Israel lobby, and the big pharma lobby, and the lobby for fossil fuels. And that’s not OK... And that’s why she’s facing death threats."

"We’re seeing an extraordinary level of engagement because what the pro-Israel lobby has been facing for the last... eight years, is the beginnings... of a generational split, where young people, particularly young Jews–and particularly progressive young Jews, Democrats who are young Jews – do not have the same assumption about their support for Israel that you and I did growing up. We all assume that if you’re Jewish, you support Israel... Now that’s no longer the case... They... can be part of the biggest organization in the Jewish community these days in terms of how fast it’s growing, Jewish Voice for Peace, that supports rights of Palestinians."

"For nearly twenty years lynching crimes, which stand side by side with Armenian and Cuban outrages, have been committed and permitted by this Christian nation. Nowhere in the civilized world save the United States of America do men, possessing all civil and political power, go out in bands of 50 to 5,000 to hunt down, shoot, hung or burn to death a single individual, unarmed and absolutely powerless. Statistics show that nearly 10,000 American citizens have been lynched in the past 20 years. To our appeals for justice the stereotyped reply has been that the government could not interfere in a state matter. Postmaster Baker’s case was a federal matter, pure and simple. He died at his post of duty in defense of his country’s honor, as truly as did ever a soldier on the field of battle. We refuse to believe this country, so powerful to defend its citizens abroad, is unable to protect its citizens at home. Italy and China have been indemnified by this government for the lynching of their citizens. We ask that the government do as much for its own."

"If labor is withdrawn capital will not remain. The Afro-American is thus the backbone of the South. The white man's dollar is his god, and to stop this will be to stop outrages in many localities."

"The assertion has been substantiated throughout these pages that the press contains unreliable and doctored reports of lynchings, and one of the most necessary things for the race to do is to get these facts before the public. The people must know before they can act, and there is no educator to compare with the press. The Afro-American papers are the only ones which will print the truth, and they lack means to employ agents and detectives to get at the facts. The race must rally a mighty host to the support of their journals, and thus enable them to do much in the way of investigation."

"the lyncher has become so bold, he has discarded his mask and the secrecy of night, has left the out-of-the-way village and invaded the jails and penitentiaries of our largest cities, and hung and tortured his victims on the public streets."

"A fifteen year old girl in Rayville, Louisiana, suspected of poisoning a white family is promptly hung on that suspicion; three reputable citizens of Memphis, Tenn., were taken from the jail and shot to death for prospering too well in business and defending themselves and property; one of the journals which was a member of your organization has been silenced by the edict of the mob which declared there shall be no such thing as “Free Speech” in the South. Within the past two weeks, honest, hardworking, land owning men and women of the race have been hung, shot, whipped and driven out of communities in Texas and Arkansas for no greater crime than that of too much prosperity. Indeed one almost fears to pick up the daily paper in which it is an unusual thing not to see recorded some tale of outrage or blood, with the Negro always the loser. The President of the United States announces himself unable to do anything to stay this “Reign of Terror,” and the race in the localities in which these outrages occur are nearly always unable to protect themselves; the local authorities will not extend to them the protection they demand. The President and Congress have been petitioned, race indignation has vented itself in impassioned oratory and public meetings. But denouncing the flag as dirty and dishonored which does not protect its citizens, and repudiating the national hymn because it is a musical lie, has not stopped the outrages. Politics have been eschewed, civil rights given up, (rights which are dearer than life itself) and even life itself has been sacrificed on the altar of Southern hate, and still there is no peace. The assassin’s bullet and ku-klux whip is still heard and the sight of the hangman’s noose with an Afro-American dangling at the end, is becoming a familiar object to the eyes of young America."

"If indeed “the pen is mightier than the sword,” the time has come as never before that the wielders of the pen belonging to the race which is so tortured and outraged, should take serious thought and purposeful action. The blood, tears and groans of hundreds of the murdered cry to you for redress; the lamentations, distress and want, of numberless widows and orphans appeal to you to do the only thing which can be done — and which is the first step toward revolution of every kind — the creation of a healthy public sentiment."

"If it could be established, a fearlessly edited press is one of the crying necessities of the hour. Such a journal, edited in the midst of such conditions as exist in the South, can better give the facts, than out of it, or than the press dispatches will do. True, such a one might have to be on the hop, skip and jump but the seed planted even though the sower might not tarry to watch its growth, can never die. At present only one side of the atrocities against a defenceless people is given, and with all the smoothing over is a bad enough showing."

"How many such have gone down to a violent death without anything to chronicle the true facts in their case, will never be known. Besides, a respectful, yet firm demand for race rights is absolutely necessary among those whom they live, and through no agency can it so well be heard as the newspaper."

"This is the greatest need of all among the masses of the South — the need of the press as an educator. Children of a larger growth, the masses of our people have never been taught the first rudiments of an education, much less the science of civil government. The vast army who make the industrial wealth of the South to-day have had neither the experience of slavery nor the training of the school-room, to teach them some valuable lessons, yet they are citizens in name, making history every day for the race. Some of them are seemingly content with their lot, but it is the contentment of ignorance in which the white landlord strives to keep them, by pandering in all ways to the most depraved instincts, and especially by the aid of liquor can exert the influence."

"The Afro-American needs to be taught the power of union, to realize his own strength; how to utilize that strength to secure to himself his inherent rights as did the plebeians of Rome. He makes the money of the South, but has never been taught that a husbanding of resources will cease to enrich gigantic corporations at his own expense. Intelligently directed, by exercise of this power alone, the race can do much to bring about a change in race condition. The sudden withdrawal of the labor force of any one community, paralyzes the industry of that community."

"The race as such must be taught the value of emigration, both to relieve the congested condition which obtains, and to better their own condition by coming in contact with newer ideas, higher standards and people who have the desire to be something. They must be led to go out in the boundless west where they will develop the manhood which lies dormant with nothing to call it into exercise. The Afro-American must be taught that there is one potent, never-failing method of dealing with prejudice; when you touch a white man’s pocket, you touch his heart and his prejudices all melt away. Before the almighty dollar he worships as to no other deity, and through this weakness, a taking away of this idol, the Afro-American can effect a bloodless revolution."

"A religious staying off of the growing evil of the race — the excursion business — will do more to overthrow the odious Jim Crow laws of our statute books than all the railroad suits which are prosecuted."

"So imperative is the necessity for leading the race up to the clear heights of thought, then down into the valley of action, that if persecuted and driven from one place, we must set up the printing press in another and continue the great work till the evils we suffer are removed or the people better prepared to fight their own battles. Laboring to fill our columns with matter beneficial and calculated to stimulate thought, and cultivate race reading, the next move is to take all legitimate steps to circulate our journals among the people we hope to benefit. Many of our best journals adopt the first plan while ignoring the second. They do not seem to grasp the truth that they must not only champion race rights, but cultivate a taste for reading among the people whose champions they are."

"To read the white papers the Afro-American is a savage that is getting away from the restraint of the inherent fear of the white man which controlled his passions, and from whom women and children now flee as from a wild beast. This impression has gained ground from the white papers, and has blasted race reputation in many quarters. The Afro-American journal has not troubled itself to counteract that opinion — those of the South because they dare not in many cases, and those of other sections seeming to care not. But not only the reputation of individuals but that of the race is involved. The clearing of this odium attached to the race name is not only the duty of one section but belongs to all, and the National Press Association should no longer sit idly waiting for the garbled accounts of the Associated Press, which it in turn gives the world."

"So frequent and serious has the grave charge of rape become, there should be full investigation of every such accusation which is considered sufficient excuse for the most diabolical outrage and torture."

"For years this association has met and concentrated itself with talking, and we returned to our respective homes with no tangible or practical work in hand — until the thinking portion of the race has classed press conventions with all other race conventions which meet, resolve and dissolve. If in face of daily occurrences we can still do only this, the charge against us is not without foundation. The time for action has come. Let the association tax itself to hire a detective, who shall go to the scene of each lynching, get the facts as they exist in each case of outrage — especially where the charge of rape is made — furnish them to the different papers of the association and those so situated shall publish them to the world."

"Gentlemen of the National Press Association, you have the press — what will you do with it? Upon your answer depends the future welfare of your race. Can you stand in comparative idleness, in purposeless wrangling, when there is earnest, practical, united work to be done?"

"The birth of letters was witnessed on the Dark Continent, but centuries of intervening darkness have removed most of the traces of fabled lore, wealth and prowess of the ancient Egyptians, Carthaginians and Ethiopians."

"Unfavorable as were these conditions in the latter part of 1761, just before the birth of American freedom, arose our first contribution to literature. So strange were the conditions under which this race flower throve, we were not surprised at the doubt of her contemporaries as to whether she wrote the poems credited to her."

"The realm of fiction yet remains undisturbed by the Afro-Americans as a positive factor in a permanent way. This is much to be regretted, because he occupies so large a position, as a negative force. With slavery for a subject, Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe gave America its strongest work of fiction, but the Afro-American there represented, though true in its delineation to the life it represented, does not represent the Afro-American of to-day. Our best literary friends have failed to do it, so ineradicable is prejudice; it is not in their power to understand that the Afro-American is a man with all the attributes of manhood. They have viewed us with a white man’s glasses so long, seeing only the ignorant and humble side, there seems no other perspective for them. Thus it is that to the world at large the conviction is widespread that we are a menial, servile, happy-go-lucky race, given to petty thievery or humble, forgiving and submissive, as was “Uncle Tom.” The literature of the day has so portrayed us. The greatest [claim] to literary merit of the new corps of Southern writers is their skill in portraying the plantation and servant side of race character by the aid of negro dialect."

"The few contributions we have made to literature have not seemed to stem the tide of prejudice, nor have the efforts of Cable and Donelly changed the place in literature given to us by Mrs. Stowe, Joel Harris, Opie Reid. Nowhere do we find spread to the world’s gaze a work that portrays Afro-American life in its true likeness. Twenty-five years of freedom have furnished novel coloring and strange situations out of which to evolve a strong, vigorous sketch of Afro-American life at its best, and illustrate the genius which has dominated the rapid progress. The splendid mental and literary equipment of some of our finest scholars; the fragments of verse and prose of which we catch fleeting glimpses now and then, encourages the hope that from the race will yet come forth the masterpiece which, measured by the literature of the world, shall stamp its author a genius and at the same time elevate the Afro-American in literature."

"During the slave regime, the Southern white man owned the Negro body and soul. It was to his interest to dwarf the soul and preserve the body."

"In slave times the Negro was kept subservient and submissive by the frequency and severity of the scourging, but, with freedom, a new system of intimidation came into vogue; the Negro was not only whipped and scourged; he was killed."

"By an amendment to the Constitution the Negro was given the right of franchise, and, theoretically at least, his ballot became his invaluable emblem of citizenship. In a government "of the people, for the people, and by the people," the Negro's vote became an important factor in all matters of state and national politics. But this did not last long. The southern white man would not consider that the Negro had any right which a white man was bound to respect, and the idea of a republican form of government in the southern states grew into general contempt. It was maintained that "This is a white man's government," and regardless of numbers the white man should rule. "No Negro domination" became the new legend on the sanguinary banner of the sunny South, and under it rode the Ku Klux Klan, the Regulators, and the lawless mobs, which for any cause chose to murder one man or a dozen as suited their purpose best. It was a long, gory campaign; the blood chills and the heart almost loses faith in Christianity when one thinks of Yazoo, Hamburg, Edgefield, Copiah, and the countless massacres of defenseless Negroes, whose only crime was the attempt to exercise their right to vote."

"The government which had made the Negro a citizen found itself unable to protect him. It gave him the right to vote, but denied him the protection which should have maintained that right."

"The very frequent inquiry made after my lectures by interested friends is. "What can I do to help the cause?" The answer always is, "Tell the world the facts." When the Christian world knows the alarming growth and extent of outlawry in our land, some means will be found to stop it. The object of this publication is to tell the facts, and friends of the cause can lend a helping hand by aiding in the distribution of these books. When I present our cause to a minister, editor, lecturer, or representative of any moral agency, the first demand is for facts and figures. Plainly, I can not then hand out a book with a twenty-five cent tariff on the information contained. This would be only a new method in the book agents' art. In all such cases it is a pleasure to submit this book for investigation, with the certain assurance of gaining a friend to the cause. There are many agencies which may be enlisted in our cause by the general circulation of the facts herein contained. The preachers, teachers, editors and humanitarians of the white race, at home and abroad, must have facts laid before them, and it is our duty to supply these facts. The Central Anti-Lynching League, Room 9, 128 Clark St., Chicago, has established a Free Distribution Fund, the work of which can be promoted by all who are interested in this work. Anti-lynching leagues, societies and individuals can order books from this fund at agents' rates. The books will be sent to their order, or, if desired, will be distributed by the League among those whose cooperative aid we so greatly need. The writer hereof assures prompt distribution of books according to order, and public acknowledgment of all orders through the public press."

"It is a well established principle of law that every wrong has a remedy. Herein rests our respect for law. The Negro does not claim that all of the one thousand black men, women and children, who have been hanged, shot and burned alive during the past ten years, were innocent of the charges made against them. We have associated too long with the white man not to have copied his vices as well as his virtues. But we do insist that the punishment is not the same for both classes of criminals. In lynching, opportunity is not given the Negro to defend himself against the unsupported accusations of white men and women. The word of the accuser is held to be true and the excited bloodthirsty mob demands that the rule of law be reversed and instead of proving the accused to be guilty, the victim of their hate and revenge must prove himself innocent. No evidence he can offer will satisfy the mob; he is bound hand and foot and swung into eternity. Then to excuse its infamy, the mob almost invariably reports the monstrous falsehood that its victim made a full confession before he was hanged."

"Therefore, we demand a fair trial by law for those accused of crime, and punishment by law after honest conviction. No maudlin sympathy for criminals is solicited, but we do ask that the law shall punish all alike. We earnestly desire those that control the forces which make public sentiment to join with us in the demand. Surely the humanitarian spirit of this country which reaches out to denounce the treatment of the Russian Jews, the Armenian Christians, the laboring poor of Europe, the Siberian exiles and the native women of India-will not longer refuse to lift its voice on this subject. If it were known that the cannibals or the savage Indians had burned three human beings alive in the past two years, the whole of Christendom would be roused, to devise ways and means to put a stop to it. Can you remain silent and inactive when such things are done in our own community and country? Is your duty to humanity in the United States less binding?"

"The belief has been constantly expressed in England that in the United States, which has produced Wm. Lloyd Garrison, Henry Ward Beecher, James Russell Lowell, John G. Whittier¹5 and Abraham Lincoln there must be those of their descendants who would take hold of the work of inaugurating an era of law and order. The colored people of this country who have been loyal to the flag believe the same, and strong in that belief have begun this crusade. To those who still feel they have no obligation in the matter, we commend the following lines of Lowell on "Freedom.""

"Virtue knows no color line, and the chivalry which depends upon complexion of skin and texture of hair can command no honest respect."

"No class of American citizens stands in greater need of the humane and thoughtful consideration of all sections of our country than do the colored people, nor does any class exceed us in the measure of grateful regard for acts of kindly interest in our behalf."

"Ida B. Wells and Mary Church Terrell, two women who helped shape the main contours of the civil-rights movement in the United States in the twentieth century."

"The crucial event in the career of Ida Wells was the lynching of three Black men in Memphis, Tennessee, on March 9, 1892. Although she knew all the victims, one of them, Thomas Moss, was a particularly close friend. A series of racist provocations by white Memphis businessmen, who were trying to force the Black proprietors of a local grocery store out of business, finally culminated in the triple slayings. At the time of the lynching, Wells owned and edited the only Black newspaper in town, the Memphis Free Speech. In the weeks following the lynching she wrote successive editorials demanding that the murderers be arrested and tried. When the white-owned newspapers responded by alleging that Black men were lynched because they raped white women, Ida B. Wells replied with an editorial coup de grâce that almost cost her life. She wrote: "Nobody in this section of the country believes the old thread bare lie that Negro men rape white women. If Southern white men are not careful, they will over-reach themselves and public sentiment will have a reaction; a conclusion will then be reached which will be very damaging to the moral reputation of their women.""

"Reporting on mob violence in New Orleans, Ida B. Wells-Barnett looked to capture the wild freedom and impunity that white rioters felt in engaging in violent assaults and disobeying the various calls to maintain order. Writing on the practices of lynching and mob violence, Wells-Barnett stressed how white democracy gave ordinary Americans the opportunity to break the law with impunity. Du Bois aptly characterizes this era of mob violence as "a sort of permissible Roman holiday for the entertainment of vicious whites." Pointing to the fact that in the span of four days, more than a thousand African Americans in New Orleans were injured and fifteen were killed, Wells-Barnett writes, “During the entire time the mob held the city in its hands and went about holding up street cars and searching them, taking from them colored men to assault, shoot, and kin, chasing colored men upon the public square... breaking into the homes of defenseless colored men and women and beating aged and decrepit men and women to death, the police and the legally-constituted authorities showed plainly where their sympathies were, for in no case reported through the daily papers does there appear the arrest, trial and conviction of one of the mob for any of the brutalities which occurred. The ringleaders of the mob were at no time disguised.... The murderers still walk the streets of New Orleans, well known and absolutely exempt from prosecution."

"To look at Ida B. Wells, the Black woman who was the single most important figure in the development of the campaign against lynching. To encourage, for example, an awareness of this woman who traveled all over the country, sometimes nursing her baby on stage, organizing throughout the Black community, in villages and towns. Ida Wells was responsible for Black people realizing that we can stand up and say that we were not going to allow the Ku Klux Klan to deliver tens of thousands of brothers and sisters into the hands of lynch mobs."

"Dear Miss Wells: Let me give you thanks for your faithful paper on the lynch abomination now generally practiced against colored people in the South. There has been no word equal to it in convincing power. I have spoken, but my word is feeble in comparison. You give us what you know and testify from actual knowledge. You have dealt with the facts with cool, painstaking fidelity, and left those naked and uncontradicted facts to speak for themselves. Brave woman! you have done your people and mine a service which can neither be weighed nor measured. If the American conscience were only half alive, if the American church and clergy were only half Christianized, if American moral sensibility were not hardened by persistent infliction of outrage and crime against colored people, a scream of horror, shame, and indignation would rise to Heaven wherever your pamphlet shall be read. But alas! even crime has power to reproduce itself and create conditions favorable to its own existence. It sometimes seems we are deserted by earth and Heaven-yet we must still think, speak and work, and trust in the power of a merciful God for final deliverance. Very truly and gratefully yours, Frederick Douglass"

"More than a century ago, the legendary muckraking African American journalist Ida B. Wells risked her life when she began reporting on the epidemic of lynchings in the Deep South...She wrote: Georgia heads the list of lynching states." Some things never change: the American Bar Association has singled out Georgia's racial disparities in capital-offense sentencing, saying that it has allowed inadequate defense counsel and been "virtually alone in not providing indigent defendants sentenced to death with counsel for state habeas proceedings.""

"I have long said and claimed Ida B. Wells-Barnett as my spiritual godmother. She was honestly the first example of a Black woman doing the type of journalism that I wanted to do, which should tell you how undiverse or nondiverse the field of investigative reporting is, that I didn’t actually know living examples of Black women investigative reporters when I was young. So, she was a pioneering investigative journalist who really brought the scourge of lynching to a global audience. She would go into towns where a Black man or woman had just been lynched, and she would interview people, and she would document. And she was actually one of the early data reporters, because she started to collect data on how many lynchings were occurring, what were the reasons given for those lynchings, and then what did her reporting show. She also was a true intersectional woman. She was a suffragist and had to fight both for women’s rights to vote and against the racism within the suffragist movement. She was a civil rights activist. She was a co-founder of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, where she had to fight against gender discrimination as a Black woman. And so, in so many ways, she was just this pioneering woman who fought for civil rights and equal rights across many fronts. And she was a woman who was largely reviled by white media. And I have in my Twitter bio that I’m a nasty — a slanderous and nasty-minded mulattress, because that’s what The New York Times, where I work, called Ida B. Wells while she was engaging in her anti-lynching crusade. So I take great strength from knowing that the attacks on me and the attacks on my work are really just part of a lineage of what happens when Black women and Black women journalists dare to challenge power and challenge authority. So, to receive the acknowledgment for this work about the Black experience on the same day that Ida B. Wells-Barnett, who like so many Black journalists never received the acknowledgment that they deserved, was just deeply gratifying, because I do my work in service of them."

"I am not arguing that guns should be banned. Rather, I absolutely agree with journalist and anti-lynching activist Ida B. Wells when she exhorted, "a Winchester rifle should have a place of honor in every black home, and it should be used for that protection which the law refuses to give." Thankfully, the Second Amendment protects this right. My point is that no sane person can argue with a straight face that heroin use is inherently more dangerous than gun use. At the very least, this should raise the question, Why is it that guns can be legally purchased but heroin cannot?"

"The position of women has been debated in socialist and communist circles, but even there it is usually left as a question. And black women specifically? They have never been a primary subject of the American Left, always falling somewhere in the cracks between the Negro Question and the Woman Question. As we've seen, key interventions by the likes of Ida B. Wells or Claudia Jones attempted to disrupt color- and class-struggle-as-usual, but few leftists paid attention."

"As an investigative journalist, Ida B. Wells acted as a documentarian of those atrocities, risking her own life many times over to force Americans to recognize the scourge of lynching. "If the Southern people in defense of their lawlessness, would tell the truth and admit that colored men and women are lynched for almost any offense, from murder to a misdemeanor, there would not now be the necessity for this defense," she wrote in her book The Red Record: Tabulated Statistics and Alleged Causes of Lynching in the United States. "But when they intentionally, maliciously and constantly belie the record and bolster up these falsehoods by the words of legislators, preachers, governors and bishops, then the Negro must give to the world his side of the awful story." Wells devoted her life to sharing those stories, and as her career went on, she also became involved in a number of other social, political, and cultural organizations aimed at uplifting her community."

""It was a Declaration of Economic Independence, and the first united blow for economic liberty struck by the Negroes of the South!" Wells later wrote of the landowners' reaction to Black sharecroppers' efforts to unionize and bargain for higher prices. "That was their crime and it had to be avenged." Her masterful report on her findings in Elaine, The Arkansas Race Riot, helped cement the massacre and its legacy in the public consciousness, but the work of properly commemorating the Elaine Twelve themselves continues to this day."

"It is fascinating to notice that in the Montgomery boycott the various strands and origins of the idea of nonviolent resistance fused into a newly invigorated practice and theory of immense power. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., although he credited his formulation of "massive non-cooperation" to Thoreau, had been exposed to pacifist thought during his studies under the pacifist Allen Knight Chalmers, who was a Gandhian. Another long-time pacifist, Bayard Rustin, secretary of the Fellowship of Reconciliation since 1935, and later secretary of the War Resisters League, was one of the chief tacticians and organizers of the Montgomery boycott. It was he who counseled the use of nonviolent means at the outset of the boycott. Finally, probably unknown to most of the actors in the drama, there was a precedent for a bus boycott by a black community in the example of the 1892 Memphis, Tennessee, boycott of streetcars by the black community to protest a lynching. This boycott was actively supported by Ida B. Wells-Barnett and was, according to her account, highly effective."

"The importance of sexism as a means of enforcing racism can also be seen in the way racist double standards were used in the post-Civil War period to keep freedmen and later all southern Blacks in subordinate status despite the end of slavery. The rise of violence against black males and the sharp increase in lynchings, always excused as being "in defense of white womanhood," served to intimidate the free black community in the post-Reconstruction period and again at the turn of the century, when Blacks in the South were virtually disfranchised. It was African-American women in their clubs, and especially Ida B. Wells, who first uncovered the workings of this sexist-racist double standard and who exposed the falsity of the charge that white women needed protection from black men."

"Ida B Wells' constant theme was to expose lynching as an integral part of the system of racial oppression, the motives for which were usually economic or political. She hit hard at the commonly used alibi for lynchings, the charge of "rape," and dared bring out into the open the most taboo subject of all in Victorian America-the habitual sexual abuse of black women by white men. Thus, she expressed what was to become the ideological direction of the organized movement of black women-a defense of black womanhood as part of a defense of the race from terror and abuse."

"An early example of the now familiar pattern of the white liberal, accused of racism by black friends, grew out of this anti-lynching campaign and involved Frances Willard, the president of the Women's Christian Temperance Union, whose earlier abolitionist convictions and interracial work were a matter of record. Mrs. Willard was hesitant and equivocal on the issue of lynching and defended the Southern record against accusations made by Ida B. Wells on her English speaking-tour. Severe attacks on her in the women's press and a protracted public controversy helped to move Mrs. Willard to a cautious stand in opposition to lynching. Black women continued to agitate this issue and to confront white women with a moral challenge to their professed Christianity."

"They just renamed a road in Chicago after Ida B. Wells, [and] that’s powerful. You see that, and you’re like, “Well, who’s Ida B. Wells?” If you didn’t know, you’re going to learn. It’s going to be a reminder of that history."

"In the 1970s we were rediscovering women whose lives had been dropped out of history or distorted, like Susan B. Anthony, Harriet Tubman, Emily Dickinson, Marie Curie, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Hannah Senesch, Ethel Rosenberg."

"When Miss Wells, a journalist of the South, exiled for daring to use the prerogative of free speech in defence of her own race, fled to the South, it was Mr. Fortune who espoused her cause, and made it possible for her to continue the good work so nobly begun. We admire Miss Wells for her undaunted courage, we laud her zeal in so worthy a cause, we ecourage her ambition to enlighten the mind and touch the heart by a thrilling and earnest recital of the wrongs heaped upon her oppressed people in the South. We extend to her a cordial welcome, we offer her our hearty support. In suppressing Miss Wells paper, the Free Speech, tyranny has wrought a good work of which it little dreamed. The fetters placed upon truth in the South are here transformed into weapons against itself. We congratulate ourselves upon having two such efficient and zealous workers as Miss Wells and Mr. Fortune to address us tonight. The harvest truly is great but the labourers are few."

"I wanted to make it clear that the show’s about a matriarchy. I wanted it to be clear that power can be ugly, and a matriarchy is just as ugly as a patriarchy. It may look a little different, but power is bloody."

"…I also wanted to make sure no one tried to make her “save the cat.” To me, Camille is an inherently kind person despite everything that’s happened to her. And you see that when you walk through the day with Camille. You see how she treats people. But she’s not running around saving babies and kittens just so the audience can be sure she’s a good person."

"I think there’s a deep societal fear of female rage, partly because it hasn’t been experienced a lot. Men—I speak in vast generalities—are often very afraid of what they don’t know how to handle. And they haven’t had to handle female rage a lot, and they think they need to handle it."

"It’s incredibly misogynist to tell me I can only write a certain type of woman. Because that’s saying women must be a certain type of person. That puts us back to the Stone Age—like women are saints and therefore not human and if we stray beyond that model, we’ll be severely punished. It denies us any humanity. It doesn’t even bother me. It just bounces off me. It’s such a ridiculous notion that my novels are misogynist because I don’t write the kind of women you want."

"I loved being scared as a kid. I loved the darker side of humanity. That was in my brain, even from a very early age. I was always thinking, “What could be the scariest outcome of this situation?” My cousins and I were kind of raised in a pack together—all girls. They always wanted to be princesses. I always wanted to be a witch. Or a killer. My head just went in that direction. Maybe because my father was a film professor, I developed a taste for Alfred Hitchcock. Films like Psycho scared me just the right amount. They didn’t haunt my dreams in a terrible way. I like that sensation of being scared. I’ve always been one of those people who wants to know what’s underneath the rock, what’s down the corner, what’s down the blind alley."

"If you are someone who reads books to feel like you have a friend on the page, my book is not going to be the book for you…I write for people who are readers the way I'm a reader. I don't care if I dislike a character; I care if I find them interesting or they make me laugh, or if I'm trying to figure them out. I am always more interested in that."

"I am fat with love! Husky with ardor! Morbidly obese with devotion! A happy, busy bumblebee of marital enthusiasm. I positively hum around him, fussing and fixing. I have become a strange thing. I have become a wife. I find myself steering the ship of conversations—bulkily, unnaturally—just so I can say his name aloud. I have become a wife, I have become a bore, I have been asked to forfeit my Independent Young Feminist card. I don’t care."

"Sleep is like a cat: it only comes to you if you ignore it."

"…soldiers on the battlefield of consumerism, armed with vinyl-covered checkbooks and quilted handbags."

"We were the first human beings who would never see anything for the first time. We stare at the wonders of the world, dull-eyed, underwhelmed. Mona Lisa, the Pyramids, the Empire State Building. Jungle animals on attack, ancient icebergs collapsing, volcanoes erupting. I can’t recall a single amazing thing I have seen firsthand that I didn’t immediately reference to a movie or TV show. A fucking commercial."

"I can see people milling about under the fluorescent lights. It’s the kind of place where people mill about."

"I’m so much happier now that I’m dead."

"There are variations to the window dressing, but believe me, he wants Cool Girl, who is basically the girl who likes every fucking thing he likes and doesn’t ever complain. (How do you know you’re not Cool Girl? Because he says things like: “I like strong women.” If he says that to you, he will at some point fuck someone else. Because “I like strong women” is code for “I hate strong women.”)"

"The media has saturated the legal environment. With the Internet, Facebook, YouTube, there’s no such thing as an unbiased jury anymore. No clean slate. Eighty, ninety percent of the case is decided before you get in the court room. So why not use it—control the story."

"You can’t be as in love as we were and not have it invade your bone marrow. Our kind of love can go into remission, but it’s always waiting to return. Like the world’s sweetest cancer."

"I don’t want to be married to a woman like you. I want to be married to a normal person."

"She already has the righteous, eye-rolling cadence of a conspiracy crackpot. She might as well wrap her head in foil."

"“My gosh, Nick, why are you so wonderful to me? He was supposed to say: You deserve it. I love you. But he said, “Because I feel sorry for you.” “Why?” “Because every morning you have to wake up and be you.”"

"I’m typically not into thrillers, but her books are so pleasurable to read. I can stay up all night reading them because I simply can’t live without knowing what happens next. Her women characters are so flawed and broken and interesting. Those are my favorite kind of characters for reasons that are probably very obvious."

"Bridge the gap with and extend the olive branch to people from past generations, because you don’t know everything."

"The way we construct race in the States is so different from the way people construct race all across Latin America and the Caribbean. All of a sudden you come to the States and race is foisted upon you. Then my generation’s like, “Wait a minute, where do my ancestors come from?..."

"Sometimes I’ll bring that up and people will say, “Well, you can’t find a true Indian on the Dominican Republic,” and I’m like, “You can’t find a true anything.” What is it about us suppressing this part of ourselves and highlighting this other part of ourselves? I think all that leads to bad self-esteem, which has a ripple effect on society."

"My sense of self and my identity have been enhanced more than they’ve changed. I’m still Latina-American for the purposes of living here in the States. Sometimes I say I’m Dominican, or Dominican-American, depending on who I’m talking to; the codewords change depending on the community you’re engaging with. But for me, it was a very spiritual journey. It married the logos, the rational, the science, with the mythos, the spiritual."

"I was more interested in how the Spanish American War was a historical divide in terms of what happened physically to Cuba. Cuba went from having a rural economy to a largely urbanized economy. It became increasingly defoliated as more land was planted with sugarcane, tobacco, and so on. This period was one of enormous upheaval, and the changes came on the very edge of a big empire-the United States-that was increasingly throwing its weight around the world. For all of those reasons, that juncture was crucial for Cuba’s history. To this day, things are playing out that were set in motion during the Spanish American War."

"Memory is overrated. It is something that people think you can capture, but I think it is eternally elusive, subjective, and open to interpretation. That is part of its beauty, fascination, and frustration…"

"Poetry has always been the ignition for everything. It’s what ignites my brain, lights the imaginative forces. If poetry didn’t exist, I’d be doing something else entirely. That’s how crucial it is to me. For pleasure, for work, to get started in the day—I read poetry. And it’s the last thing I read at night. It fuels my dreams."

"None of my characters operate in a vacuum. You rarely see these tidy domestic dramas, mostly because of my own interest in a broader stage. I’m always interested in seeing how political events are shaking down within the individual and within the relationships between individuals, and also the kind of destruction this can cause in people’s lives and relationships…"

"Here are three meaningful actions we can all take on water: Use less. Pollute less. And from our backyards to our cities, make places that leave room for water in nature..."

"“I try to think about ways to draw the public to the story of the planet, and seashells are something we’ve always wanted to listen to. It’s sort of irresistible to pick a shell up to the ear and listen to what it’s trying to tell us — and they are telling us a profound story about what we’re doing to the ocean. The tiniest shells are beginning to disintegrate in the acidifying sea. It really is a metaphor for something much bigger.”"

"“We know on issues such as climate change, there’s a core group of deniers who are never going to change the way they think, and that’s ok, because that’s only 7 to 10 percent of the population. There’s a core group of super-worried people who know exactly what’s happening. Then there’s a really large group in the middle, and those are the people science tells us we need to reach to be able to make a difference.”"

"Nationally, water consumption peaked in 1980 and has dropped steadily, even as the economy and population have grown. That shift, in waterworks and minds, affirms Americans’ willingness to live differently once we understand how painless the better path is."

"The Globe calls Barnett’s voice “part journalist, part mom, part historian, and part optimist.”"

"Taking time to color in the people around your main characters truly does a lot of heavy lifting for you in terms of subtext and context because tiny misunderstandings and micro-aggressions or avoidance speaks volumes without requiring so much exposition…"

"The thing about sexual assault and the narrative that gets played out so often is that it’s a deadlock. It’s what one person said vs. what another person said. It’s just that my personal experience as a survivor is incredibly muddied. I was very young and had such a crush on the person. I willingly obliged so many preambles to The Moment. I felt incredibly complicit. My self-gaslighting was so sustained and calcified that I wasn’t entirely sure if it “counted.” At the time it wasn’t something I would ever have felt secure declaring as assault if the burden of proof lay with me recounting everything about my intentions vs. the other person’s. We talk about consent and it’s important to define, but it’s never this hard and fast yes/no pact that’s then committed to the stenographer…"

"Sometimes there’s nothing better in the world than talking to another creative person about where you are, because you may feel like you’re floating in outer space a lot of the time."

"It doesn’t get any less scary. All that happens is that you have less life left. It helps if you do your falling early, and it really helps if you do your reaching early."

"Vietnamese is so lyrical, and 80% percent of it is derived from Chinese, which is a language built from pictures not words. So this format and voice came out of that desire."

"They're told to gather the stories of their parents and grandparents and to honor their cultural history. And yet, as they're born in the United States, they don't identify with Vietnam and feel strongly that these are not their roots, so how can they lose them?"

"I had no idea how lonely it would be to sit in my cave and type, for years and years. I have developed a totally new personality where I talk to myself and play with my hair for entertainment. The surprise is that after much frustration and exhaustion, I do manage to finish a novel."

"Journalism is just very structured…One day I turned in a story and [an editor] said to me, ‘You can’t compare inanimate objects with animate objects,’ and I realized I had to leave."

"A writer is always so conflicted about their work, so it was liberating to be able to be in this space of my words, without being judgmental or changing anything. I vividly remembered the ideas that I had, where I was when I had them, how I imagined this moment of holding this book, I was emotionally connected to it. I reflected on the story of my arrival, and then my time as a young woman. I cried during the scene of my rape, and I found myself rooting for my character as I read on! I laugh about it now because I am the character, she is me! The process of narrating completely transformed my relationship to the memoir, even after I never imagined that it would."

"Imagine this story as if you were telling it to your mother. I always write with this in mind. Keep in mind this doesn’t necessarily work when writing a memoir, but it helps to focus on telling the story to one person. I didn’t have an image of a reader, per se, but I knew that I had to use my voice to connect to them. When you connect to somebody’s writing, it is powerful because it is such an intimate experience, but imagine an added element—the element of your voice. You can use your own voice to exude sensuality, anger, love, raw emotions. I go into the studio a lot, so doing this wasn’t particularly hard for me. I just close my eyes and go into a space."

"The hardest part of my narration was when I read about my assault. I cried. It took me a while to get through it, maybe because of the way I wrote it. It was very graphic and one of the parts of the book that I wrote while crying. It felt like the scab was off, and I was diffing deeper into my wounds when I talked about this moment and others.…"

"The problem with these sensational stories is that they dampen the sense and mute outrage over the truth. Reporters love stories about disgusting forms of torture and execution. There was one a few years back that North Koreans who stole food were being burned alive at the stake and their relatives made to light the fire. North Koreans I asked laughed it off. “Do you know how hard it is to get firewood in North Korea?’’ one retorted. The real story is this: if you are caught stealing food, you are sent to a labor camp where you will be slowly worked to death and starved. There is no need to exaggerate. The truth is bad enough."

"I want to portray history through the eyes of the people living it. I write primarily for an American audience, and, you know, Americans can sometimes be rather closed off to the outside world."

"I can’t imagine what the adjustment was like for my parents settling down in a completely foreign land without an Asian community to offer support. They are braver than I could ever be. We had a small Chinese restaurant — one of two in the town. So there was one other Chinese American family, but they didn’t have kids my age. I was the only Chinese American student in my school system. I definitely had to deal with challenges and racism throughout my upbringing, but I wouldn’t change anything because those experiences shaped who I am today. There was also a lot of kindness in our little town. I spent lots of time with my friends and their welcoming families."

"I have not experienced another incident in person, but I get messages on social media every day that include racist language and bullying. I think the best thing we can do is provide facts. The fact is the virus does not discriminate against any group of people, and Asian Americans are not more likely to spread it. It’s also important to report on hate crimes, assaults, and attacks against members of the APA community so they are not normalized."

"I think the entire time, because even though you learn how to adapt, and you become part of different friend groups and the community in some ways, just being so different from everyone else, I always felt that. And I mean, I'm not going to sugarcoat it. There were definitely times in my life throughout my childhood and growing up in West Virginia, where the other kids made sure that I felt different, and told me to go back to where I came from, and asked me if I could see because my eyes were so small. And I think that stems from a lack of education about different cultures. And also kids can be racist and bullies. And unfortunately, that's true no matter where you are in the world."

"As a journalist, you have to always have your purpose, and the reason why you are doing what you do, in your mind at all times. And so I'm constantly thinking about the fact that we're in a deadly pandemic, and people need answers, they need the truth about what the administration is doing. So that's what I really focused on and tried to allow that to drive me and not allow the distractions to get in the way."

"200,000, 300,000 or possibly 400,000 women (three sets of statistics have been variously quoted) were raped. Eighty percent of the raped women were Moslems, reflecting the population of Bangladesh, but Hindu and Christian women were not exempt. ... Hit-and-run rape of large numbers of Bengali women was brutally simple in terms of logistics as the Pakistani regulars swept through and occupied the tiny, populous land ... Rape in Bangladesh had hardly been restricted to beauty... Girls of eight and grandmothers of seventy-five had been sexually assaulted ... Pakistani soldiers had not only violated Bengali women on the spot; they abducted tens of hundreds and held them by force in their military barracks for nightly use."

"The story of Bangladesh was unique in one respect. For the first time in history the rape of women in war, and the compex aftermath of mass assault, received serious international attention. The desperate need of Sheik Mujibur Rahman's government for international sympathy and financial aid was part of the reason; a new feminist consciousness that encompassed rape as a political issue and a growing, practical acceptance of abortion as a solution to unwanted pregnancy were contributing factors of critical importance. And so an obscure war in an obscure corner of the globe, to Western eyes, provided the setting for an examination of the “unspeakable” crime. For once, the particular terror of unarmed women facing armed men had full hearing."

"War provides men with the perfect psychological backdrop to give vent to their contempt for women. The maleness of the military—the brute power of weaponry exclusive to their hands, the spiritual bonding of men at arms, the manly discipline of orders given and orders obeyed, the simple logic of the hierarchical command—confirms for men what they long suspect—that women are peripheral to the world that counts"

"The master-slave relationship is the most popular fantasy perversion in the literature of pornography. The image of a scantly clothed slave girl, always nubile, always beautiful, always docile, who sinks to her knees gracefully and dutifully before her master, who stands with or without boots, with or without whip, is commonly accepted as a scene of titillating sexuality. From the slave harems of the Orient potentate, celebrated in poetry and dance, to the breathless description of light-skinned fancy women, de rigeur in [[a particular genre of pulp historical fiction, the glorification of forced sex under slavery, institutional rape, has been a part of our cultural heritage, feeding the egos of men while subverting the egos of women- and doing irreparable damaage to the healthy sexual process. The very word "slave girl" impart to many a vision of voluptuous sexuality redolent of perfumes gardens and soft music strummed on a lyre. Such is the legacy of male-controlled sexuality under which we struggle."

"Pornography has been so thickly glossed over with the patina of chic these days in the name of verbal freedom and sophisication… Part of the problem is that those who traditionally have been the most vigorous opponents of porn are often those same people who shudder at the explicit mention of any sexual subject… There can be no equality in porn, no female equivalent, no turning of the tables in the name of bawdy fun. Pornography, like rape, is a male invention, desgined to dehumanize women… Pornography is the undiluted essence of anti-female propoganda."

"Man's discovery that his genitalia could serve as a weapon to generate fear must rank as one of the most important discoveries of prehistoric times, along with the use of fire and the first crude stone axe. From prehistoric times to the present, I believe, rape has played a critical function. It is nothing more or less than a conscious process of intimidation by which all men keep all women in a state of fear."

"In medieval times, opportunities to rape and loot were among the few advantages open to...soldiers, who were paid with great irregularity by their leaders...When the city of Constantinople was sacked in 1204, rape and plunder went hand in hand, as in the sack of almost every ancient city....Down through the ages, triumph over women by rape became a way to measure victory, part of a soldier's proof of masculinity and success, a tangible reward for services rendered...[and] an actual reward of war."

"[R]ape by a conqueror is compelling evidence of the conquered's status of masculine impotence. Defense of women has long been a hallmark of masculine success. Rape by a conquering soldier destroys all remaining illusions of power and property for men of the defeated side. The body of a raped woman becomes a ceremonial battlefield, a parade ground for the victor's trooping of the colors. The act that is played out upon her is a message passed between men - vivid proof of victory for one and loss and defeat for the other."

"Jewish women in second-wave feminism helped to provide the theoretical underpinnings and models for radical action that were seized on and imitated throughout the United States and abroad. Their articles and books became classics of the movement and led the way into new arenas of cultural and political understanding in academe, politics, and grassroots organizing. Even a partial honor roll of Jewish women's liberation pioneers must include such figures as Shulamith Firestone, Ellen Willis, Robin Morgan, Alix Kates Shulman, Naomi Weisstein, Heather Booth, Susan Brownmiller, Marilyn Webb, Meredith Tax, Andrea Dworkin, Linda Gordon, Ellen DuBois, Ann Snitow, Marge Piercy, Letty Cottin Pogrebin, and Vivian Gornick. Despite historians' acknowledgment of the salience of Jewish women in earlier social movements, their prominence within radical feminism failed to attract much attention."

"One thing I learned is that cinematography is not something you do by yourself. It’s a group [project]. You need to develop your own vision, but the key to a successful film is communication with your director and your team."

"Right now, I'm just really interested in finding fruitful collaborations. To me, it’s the collaborative effort between creative minds that elevates each other’s work."

"No. That was no good. That was no good at all."

"She had this amazing background that you just sort of instantly romanticize. She had this whole Ukrainian vibe that made her seem both super cool and serious about truth."

"Especially in developing countries, it's so important to get on the ground into the communities because the stats at the federal level, it may not be a real portrait of what's happening on the ground."

"If you’re a correspondent or if you do any field reporting, you have to be ready to travel. The extensive traveling will definitely affect your personal life. When it comes to marriage, it’s not uncommon for journalists to be divorced or to get married at a time that many cultures and societies consider ‘late.’ My inspiration Christiane Amanpour got married when she was 40."

"No one in this life can escape hardship."

"Biafran War Memories is a lifelong project for me. Most of the people who saw the war are in their mid 60’s and upwards. I’m trying to get the stories out of them while we still can, while they are still alive... We need to have a full story, which is why I’m not talking to just Igbo people."

"There is nothing wrong in using affirmative action to give a selected group of people the chance to succeed. What I propose is that chance to succeed should be given based on merit, not solely on the tribe, skin colour, gender, religion, or language. Unfortunately for Nigeria, meritocracy fell on the wayside shortly after gaining independence from the United Kingdom."

"Much of the bias against Igbo people are based on longstanding stereotypes."

"What is Africa for me? Africa is home, Africa is a treasure that has not received its due credit, Africa is a misunderstood place, Africa is ancient, and Africa has many secrets to discover."

"I think the misunderstanding (about Africa) comes from the fact that the world is split between powers. Right now Africa is really not in power when it comes to global politics. We still have the voices of the former colonialists speaking for many African countries... We still don't have Africans telling the stories of what is happening. The people telling the stories are non-Africans who have not really grasped the historical context of Africa."

"Poem has the ability to move the soul and wrap your mind around its mysterious magic."

"Being a mom felt so comfortable for me"

"I was born here [in the U.S.] but I lived in Trinidad after I was born for about 9 years. So, then I came back to the U.S. and I think that experience of living in two completely different places, having the exposure to different cultures and different perspectives - that’s fundamentally at the core of who I am - just wanting to understand people and wanting to be open to differences."

"CNN announces promotions for Jake Tapper, Abby Phillip, Dana Bash and others"

"She has been inside tunnels built by Hamas under Gaza. Hear why they might matter now (video)"

"There is nothing more important than hard work"

"There is a new Monmouth University poll out this week that shows abortion nearly tied with the economy as voter top concern going into the midterm elections"

"I grew up in a predominantly Black and Latine community where gang violence was common. My parents grew up in El Salvador, and when they took me to visit, I was struck by the level of poverty I saw. I saw that no matter where in the world my people go, they're exposed to varying levels of injustice. And I knew I had to do something about it, so I decided to write."

"For me, seeing energy and organizing from young people is incredibly motivating. I grew up feeling ambivalent to the world. I knew things were wrong, but I saw no way to change it beyond writing and reporting. The next generation can't afford such feelings of defeat. They're tackling the climate crisis from all angles, and it's so inspiring."

"For a long time, environmental justice was kept separate from the environment at large. It's become "mainstream" only recently, so it just wasn't something the general public–including reporters—really knew about. We see that slowly changing, and we're seeing more environmental reporters become more sophisticated in their understanding of environmental issues and how they impact communities of color. I pursued this because I was, first, interested in racial justice. I knew I wanted to be a reporter that uncovered societal harms right away, but it was only when I realized the severity of the climate crisis that I bridged those two interests together. Once I found out what "environmental justice" was, it was a wrap. I knew that was the beat for me. And it was clear to me that there weren't enough reporters out there covering it."

"Climate justice is racial justice. The climate crisis has always been an issue embedded in systemic racism. Where can we find fossil fuel infrastructure? In communities of color. All the pollutants and toxins those refineries and power plants emit harm the Black and brown communities nearby. Black people, in particular, have borne an unfair burden from the drivers of climate change. Changing this isn't simple. It's not something we can just snap our fingers, and it'll be gone. Solving this will require a complete transformation of social policies. All that money cities and counties spend on their police departments? They can invest it in Black communities to build public transit infrastructure, bike lanes, clean energy projects. That'll take some serious political will. While it's growing, it's not growing nearly fast enough to save the lives of the people climate change is set to harm first and worst."

"My fear is that we won't act quickly enough to leave a habitable world for the youth working so hard to save it. After all, it can't be all on them. They inherited this mess. The adults in the room created it."

"My greatest hope is the youth. They see the issue for what it is. They see it through this racial lens. They understand all the ways it's set to impact their lives, their futures, the world."

"Vote! What we need is systemic change, and that'll only happen if the right people are in office. So vote! Or if you can't vote, contribute to get-out-the-vote campaigns. Phone bank. Post to social media. Call your local representatives. Make change happen on a bigger level than yourself. Definitely do your part, too, but know that's not enough. Not at this point. The situation is too far gone to rely on individuals to clean this up. It's up to world leaders to enact policy that'll end fossil fuels for good and create a just, sustainable world for us all."

"There are no other Everglades in the world. They are, they have always been, one of the unique regions of the earth, remote, never wholly known. Nothing anywhere else is like them: their vast glittering openness, wider than the enormous visible round of the horizon, the racing free saltness and sweetness of their massive winds, under the dazzling blue heights of space. They are unique also in the simplicity, the diversity, the related harmony of the forms of life they enclose. The miracle of the light pours over the green and brown expanse of saw grass and of water, shining and slow-moving below, the grass and water that is the meaning and the central fact of the Everglades of Florida. It is a river of grass."

"(The Indian Re-Organization Act) was like the small beginning of new hope, in the century-long history of man's destructiveness here, by which long ago the parakeets and the ivory-billed woodpecker had been exterminated, the egret and the white ibis only just saved by the Audubon Society that was still trying to protect the last of the roseate spoonbill, the Everglades kite and the almost vanished crocodile."

"The Indians, before anyone else, knew that the Everglades were being destroyed. During the war there was less and less rain, in one of those long, unpredictable, unpreventable dry spells, in which year after year the fresh water, like the soil, shrank away."

"The whole Everglades were burning. What had been a river of grass and sweet water that had given meaning and life and uniqueness to this whole enormous geography through centuries in which man had no place here was made, in one chaotic gesture of greed and ignorance and folly, a river of fire."

"But the white man, in all his teeming variety, men of the farms and the Glades, men of the cities and of the sea, whose inertia and pigheadedness, greed and willfulness had caused all this, as if for the first time seeing what he had done, now, when it was almost too late, the white man was aroused. For the first time in South Florida since the earliest floods, there were mass meetings and protests, editorials, petitions, letters, and excited talk. Thousands, choking in acrid smoke, saw for the first time what the drainage of the Glades had brought to pass."

"The Everglades were one thing, one vast unified harmonious whole, in which the old subtle balance, which had been destroyed, must somehow be replaced, if the nature of this whole region and the life of the coastal cities were to be saved."

"In 1928 Mr. Ernest F. Coe, a landscape architect who was fascinated by the strange beauty of this wilderness, conceived the idea that it should be made a national park. He fought almost single-handed, through years of depression and of disinterest, to gain public backing. His tall, spare figure, his suave voice, the absent gaze of his blue eyes as he talked and wrote and argued and lectured and, as he said, "made a nuisance of himself," was the very figure of a man obsessed. He was laughed at and he laughed at himself. He sacrificed his career to keep the hope of the park going."

"It was too soon to expect that all these people would see that the destruction of the Everglades was the destruction of all. They had all cried for help in times of extreme wetness and of extreme dryness, as if they could not realize that they lived under a regular alternation of extremes. They received the help always given in emergencies. But they could not get it through their heads that they had produced some of the worst conditions themselves, by their lack of co-operation, their selfishness, their mutual distrust and their wilful refusal to consider the truth of the whole situation."

"Perhaps even in this last hour, in a new relation of usefulness and beauty, the vast, magnificent, subtle and unique region of the Everglades may not be utterly lost."

"Today, the movement of water through the Everglades is entirely unnatural, and the Everglades are considered one of the most endangered ecosystems on the planet. As 106-year-old Marjorie Stoneman Douglas, longtime Everglades advocate explains, "The lake's entire southern rim was diked by a high levee, so that the only outlets were the canals, all fitted with gates to control the waters in an effort to put man, not nature, in charge of the Everglades. All this provided an enormous area upon which agriculture, mostly sugarcane, developed to the south and southeast of the lake.""

"when one perceives that the saloon is not the cause that menaces the safety and welfare of society, that it is not the cause of poverty and crime, one must, if honest with one's self, and if possessed of a truly revolutionary spirit, transfer activities to other fields."

"For a number of years I also believed that political bondage was the cause of many of the ills endured by those of my own sex; until I discovered that the man without a job was about as badly off as the woman without a ballot. In fact, a little worse, for we can live without voting but we cannot live without eating."

"The real antagonism is not that which exists or is supposed to exist between the sexes; but between the capitalist class and the proletariat. Women are victims of class distinctions more than of sex distinctions and when I perceived this fact, I changed my course of action and whatever revolutionary spirit there is in me finds expression today in the Socialistic movement."

"During the summer of 1903, the Chief of Police of San Francisco took it into his head to stop the Socialist speaking on the streets. Comrade Holmes was the first to be arrested. His case was tried and dismissed. Upon the strength of this we proceeded to hold a meeting at the same corner where he had been arrested. Hardly had I spoken ten minutes when a couple of policemen came up and ordered me to move on. I refused to do so and was at once placed under arrest. This of course broke up the meeting and I was taken to the police station."

"The tendency of some people to confound the woman question with the sex question evidences a lack of a scientific knowledge and appreciation of the fundamental principles of the two problems."

"Biological facts cannot be overthrown, but mental viewpoints are largely affected and determined by the economic processes in life, and if we probe deep enough we will find a material basis or ground for all social and mental concepts."

"The introduction and establishment of the institution of private property completely changed the status of woman in society."

"When the pioneer woman suffrage workers began their work for equal rights the most popular argument brought against them was that they were "immoral women." Only a short time ago we celebrated the centennial anniversary of the birth of the man who first admitted women as clerks in his store in the State of Maine. This man was boycotted and the women employed by him were considered by "respectable" people of that day as "bad" women. Every effort on the part of women to break away from the narrow life determined by her sex or maternal functions is met by bitter opposition."

"The ethics of capitalism will disappear with the passing of the institution of private property."

"The Co-operative Commonwealth will give us a new and a higher standard of morality."

"Two hundred years ago one could find but few workingmen who could read or write."

"the new industrial processes which the capitalist system gave the world necessitated the education and mental training of the workers in order that they might be fit and efficient wealth producers. Capitalism therefore created the economic or material reasons far the need of the great mass of the workers to be educated: It "democratized" education."

"While economic and material benefits have accrued to the master class through the education of the workers; while large profits were only possible through a trained and skilled laboring class, yet in this very thing which makes for the triumph of the master class financially, we see a potent and powerful factor in bringing about the political and industrial supremacy of the working class."

"Only as the workers have knowledge and intelligence can they solve the problem of their own political and industrial freedom."

"The capitalist masters have educated the workers to their advantage to-day, but for their undoing tomorrow. The thing that makes for the triumph of capitalism ultimately makes for its own downfall."

"Education of the workers for the benefit of the capitalist class means gain and profit only for the few, the upper class of to-day. Education of the workers for the benefit of the working class means gain and profit for the working class and ultimately for the whole human race."

"The future victories of the working class lie not so much in their numbers (the workers have always been in the vast majority), but in the knowledge they possess and the ability to intelligently organize and act together on the political and economic fields."

"Let us ever remember that knowledge is power!"

"I believe that Labor should have a directing voice in the economic, political and social life of the nation. I believe that political and industrial changes should be brought about by democratic methods and policies."

"(I) have been an interested student of the labor and Socialist movements for more than 30 years."

"My membership in the Socialist party began in April 1902 and ended March 1st 1936, when it became a party of dictators and lost its democratic soul. I have now cast my political lot with the Peoples Party affiliated with the American Labor Party."

"During my years of membership in the Socialist Party, I have covered every state in the union except Mississippi in organization and educational work. From 1912 to Nov. 1917 excepting for the winter months of 1912-3 I spent in Alaska. During that time I organized the Alaska Territorial Socialist Party. Had charge of the Delegate to Congress campaign in 1912 and in 1916 was the candidate myself. In many of the mining camps I received the largest vote of any of the candidates. The winter of 1916 and 17 I served as vice-president of the Alaska Labor Union in Anchorage...It fell to my lot to serve as Acting President a good deal of the time. A membership of more than 3200 with some score or more nationalities required skill in handling the meetings and often interpreters were needed to explain what was said to the various language groups. In 1920 had charge of the Debs campaign in the Northwest and looked after the work of placing the tickets on the ballot in Washington and Oregon. In 1932 managed the Socialist campaign in Salt Lake City and also campaigned that year in Wyoming, Colorado, Utah and Idaho. Served as State Secretary of California Socialist Party from 1925 to 1930 and from 1925-31 inclusive was managing editor of the Labor World, official organ of the Socialist Party of California. In 1926 ran for Lieut. Governor in California and polled 10,506 votes more than Upton Sinclair who was the head of the ticket. As candidate for the U.S. Senate, I ran ahead of Norman Thomas-Presidential candidate-nearly 8,000 votes. I made a vigorous campaign for the whole ticket but apparently profited most thereby. Had a very active part in the campaign of 1924 and spoke for the LaFollette and Wheeler ticket in Michigan, Ill., Indiana, Iowa, Nebraska, Idaho and California. During periods covering time from 1922 to spring of 1924 was in New York City and served for a while as organizer for the Umbrella Workers Union. Also assisted in the work of the Paper Box workers Union and helped in their strike... Was the first woman elected to membership on the National Executive Committee of the Socialist Party and served from 1907 to 1912. Was elected by the party membership to serve as a delegate to the International Labor and Socialist Congress in Copenhagen, Denmark in 1910 and addressed a number of meetings in various parts of England enroute the Congress and return. Was active in the Leage of Women Voters when in San Francisco."

"Except where there is some very strong reason to the contrary, it is generally admitted that every man has a right to be consulted in regard to his own concerns. The laws which he has to obey and the taxes he has to pay are things that do most intimately concern him, and the only way of being directly consulted in regard to them, under our form of government, is through the ballot. Is there any very good reason why women should not be free to be consulted in this direct manner?"

"I have no doubt that if women alone had made the laws, those laws would be just as one-sided as they are to-day, only in the opposite direction."

"it is said that this movement is making no progress; that while the movements along other lines are largely succeeding, there has been no advance along this line. Twenty-five years ago, with insignificant exceptions, women could not vote anywhere. To-day they have school suffrage in twenty-three States, full suffrage in Wyoming, municipal suffrage in Kansas, and municipal suffrage for single women and widows in England, Scotland and most of the British provinces. The common sense of the world is slowly but surely working toward the enfranchisement of women."

"Alice Blackwell was an exception to me. I saw during my personal acquaintance with her that she was apt to embrace the whole world with her beautiful heart, her strong soul; to press it to her bosom, and never be tired of working for it. But she did too much for her human strength, and now she must rest a while."

"Translators, again-the most abused and patient lot of folk on earth-are helpful in making us better acquainted; though we hope the time will soon come when citizens of the twenty-one republics will no longer need translators. There is no reason for our not speaking each other's language. Among these translators we may mention Alice Stone Blackwell, Isaac Goldberg, the late Thomas Walsh..."

"For seventy years, the women leaders of this country have been asking the government to recognize this possibility. Every great woman who stands out in our history-Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Clara Barton, Mary Livermore, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Frances Willard, Lucy Stone, Jane Addams, Ella Flagg Young, Alice Stone Blackwell, Anna Howard Shaw, Mrs. Carrie Chapman Catt-all have asked the government to permit women to serve more effectively the national welfare. All have felt that the energy, the thought, and the suffering that was spent in trying to obtain permission to serve directly should as quickly as possible be turned to the actual service."

"Today, at eighty-three, she is still a vigorous champion of human rights. Just last year I had a wonderful visit with her at her home in Boston, discussing our precious heritage of great American women."

"There is an element of TV that is visual. You can’t deny, but you’re not going to be able to move to the next level without the passion, the contacts, the journalistic drive."

"There is no job that's beneath anybody."

"Take a job and learn as much as you can, and be open to that and really soak it in but when you realize is isn't meant for you don't forget to jump but you have to balance that with jumping for the right reasons."

"Hopefully, what more people will realize in this whole national conversation is that the only reason polio is quote-unquote gone is because of mass vaccinations."

"We need to keep vaccinating. This is not about choice. This is about our moral responsibility to our children and to other people's children."

"You can’t force people to become something that they aren’t and you can’t be frustrated when people aren’t exactly what you need for a specific thing or thought they would be."

"You have to adjust what it is they’re doing or just adjust and you can find a way to have people really thrive and succeed and participate on a team."

"I do think it’s important to acknowledge that a lot of things come to us."

"If I didn’t do it then, I wouldn’t be able to do it. I was trying to hit the sweet spot of ‘Ok."

"If I was allowed to invest in stocks, I would be a billionaire."

"If you go out and kill something, you get a little bite of the meat. And that’s the way traders have been compensated throughout time."

"I think maybe that’s an understandable reaction by some people, given the lack of understanding and the sort of closed doors around Wall Street. I see my job as demystifying Wall Street."

"But the banks, who are at the center of this, they’re actually the ones who’ve paid back their bailout money."

"I would say no, but banks and availability of credit are the most basic and important things for an economy."

"There are certain loopholes that should be taken away."

"We wonder, what if we got rid of cash? After all, cash is what keeps terrorists, drug dealers and gun dealers in business."

"Money’s what makes the world go round, having a business niche is who I am, and it’s crucial."

"“Erin is the kind of all-star player that knows how to connect-the-dots and translate events into relevant information for viewers.”"

"There are too many job openings, a problem compounded by too much "phantom demand" caused by all the stimulus, and also by the lack of normal immigrant workers for political and pandemic reasons."

"If public officials want to keep their credibility, they need to acknowledge this fact. No one believes that this is a great economy, or is impressed by hearing dazzling stats about job creation. People want to be reassured that our leaders see the problem, understand how they caused it, and are genuinely trying to fix it"

"The possibility of an external hit like a windfall tax, export ban, or other such political measures risk keeping potential suppliers on the sidelines"

"The oil and gas industry was decimated by the shale bubble bursting last decade, and that reticence plus labor and supply shortages are keeping it from more quickly adding to capacity now. The possibility of an external hit like a windfall tax, export ban, or other such political measures risk keeping potential suppliers on the sidelines"

"The hope now is that fiscal and monetary policy are at least both retrenching, if policymakers truly want to wrestle inflation back down. Remember, this isn't about soaring (or collapsing) lumber prices anymore. It's about a labor market running so hot it's short of millions and millions of workers, which will make everything from childcare to elder care more inflationary in the long run"

"I had seen so many cities leveled, so many people killed, and yet so little really changed. That didn’t mean that some wars weren’t worth fighting. It just meant that the goals needed to be more specific and perhaps less idealistic, grounded in the reality of how parts of the world see us and not just the ideal of how we see ourselves."

"How many times I had been reminded that people are people, that there is a shared human experience, no matter how different our societies, that connects us."

"Sometimes I wanted the call to end, not because I don't want to look at my beautiful children, but because it does become so painful at a certain point."

"What you learn over time is not to try and eliminate fear: It’s there for a good reason. But you have to learn to control it, to lean into it and to ensure that the rational brain is the one calling the shots and making the decisions and trying to get yourself and your crew out safely after, ideally, you’ve done the job that you came there to do."

"Fear is closely intertwined with panic, and panic in a war zone can get you into really, really deep trouble."

"This was a moment where there was no veneer of respectability or politeness. It was push and shove and scrape and push to get in there and get out safely."

"When you go into the cities or you talk to people who are more educated ... those women are on the verge potentially of losing everything, and their stories will rip your heart out in ways you can't imagine."

"You just realize there isn't a huge amount of space or time in their life, at this stage, in these rural areas to worry about much else. And they kind of are in acceptance of their sort of standing in the world."

"It’s a tragedy. I didn’t know her personally, but of course, I know of her. I can’t say that journalism has become more dangerous, although I will say that more and more of my colleagues and friends have lost their lives covering conflicts."

"Bearing witness to trauma can be traumatic in and of itself. There can be the risk of losing loved ones, losing colleagues, watching people die, watching children being injured or killed."

"The goal is to look polished and put together. And the goal is to have my appearance not be a distraction one way or the other."

"Education is really encouraged for men and women. I think you can call that out as an injustice. But it is arrogant to make an assumption that wearing a headscarf is an injustice."

"Good fixer can make the difference between a hellish assignment and a successful and enjoyable one."

"Frederick Douglass once said: Any man may say things that are true of Abraham Lincoln, but no man can say anything that is new of Abraham Lincoln. If that were true in the past century, in the early seventies, how much more is it true today"

"It is eminently fitting and proper that we, as Americans, celebrate the birth of the man who, by a single stroke of his pen — albeit, a reluctant stroke — gave the Negro the right to stand with his face to the sun and proclaim to the world, “I am a man!” It is our right and our duty to commemorate his birth, to mourn his death, to revere the twelfth of February as a holiday, to come together to lay laurel wreaths on his tomb. But we Americans of the darker skin have another day as dear to us as the twelfth of February, less well known, perhaps, but which we should acclaim with shouts of joy, even as we acclaim the day which has grown familiar by long usage. That day is the birthday of Frederick Douglass. Lincoln and Douglass; Douglass and Lincoln! Names ever linked in history and in the hearts of a grateful race as the two great emancipators, the two men above all other Americans, fearless, true, brave, strong, the western ideal of manhood. Is it not fitting that their natal days should come within a few hours of each other. Is it not right that when the Negro child lifts its eyes to the American flag on Lincoln’s day e should, at the same time, think of the man whose thunderous voice never ceased in its denunciation of wrong, its acclamation of right, its spurring the immortal Lincoln to be true to his highest ideals; its sorrowful wail when he seemed to fail the nation? Verily, on this day of days we of the darker hued skin have a richer heritage than our white brothers — ours the proud possession of two heroes, theirs of but one. . . ."

"Every school boy in the nation knows Abraham Lincoln — his gaunt figure, his seamed and pain lined face, with its sweetness and patience, are familiar to their eyes. His life, with its romance of poverty and toil, its tragic sorrow and tragic end, are as close to the heart of the nation as the stories of the Bible and the Christ-child. The utterances of Lincoln, the anecdotes of his life, the whimsical stories of his early days and his quaint humor furnish a never ending theme of interest to the American school boy. His sublime speeches; the delicate pathos of his first inaugural address; the splendid, stern, yet tender beauty of the second inaugural address are recited from thousands of school platforms annual, while the Gettysburg speech is as well known in America as the Lord’s Prayer and the Beatitudes, and I deem it no sacrilege to say that in point of literary beauty it stands with them. It is graven in bronze in the national cemeteries, on school walls, in the halls of colleges and universities. It is recited semi-annually by the majority of the school boys in the country, and it is right that it should be, for is not Lincoln the nation’s idol, the American ideal?"

"Yet how many Negro youths in the land know as much of the ideal of Negro manhood, Frederick Douglass? If Lincoln is the American idol, so is Douglass the Negro’s idol. If Lincoln’s was a romance of life, with its toilsome youth culminating in a splendid manhood, attaining the highest gift which the nation could be stow, how much more is Douglass’ life a romance? The slave, beaten, starved, stripped, fleeing from slavery at the most deadly peril, to become in his later manhood the guest of nobles and kings, the cynosure of the nation’s eyes, the friend of this same Lincoln, the great man of the century? If Lincoln’s utterances are inspiring, calling in clarion notes for right and justice and truth, so much more are Douglass’ inspiring to us, calling for manhood and strength and power. For he was no soft-tongued apologist,/He spoke straightforward, fearlessly, uncowed;/The sunlight of his truth dispelled the mist,/And set in bold relief each dark-hued cloud;/To sin and crime he gave their proper hue,/And hurled at evil what was evil’s due."

"The Negro youth of the land recites the Gettysburg speech, and it is right that he should do so; but does he know Douglass’ “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?” The Negro youth of the land admires Lincoln’s Second Inaugural address, but does he know Douglass’ splendid tribute to the man who wrote the Second Inaugural address, when the freedmen of this country erected the Lincoln monument at Washington? The Negro youth rolls over his tongue the witty epigrams of the mighty Lincoln, but has he been made familiar with some of the pithy aphorisms of his own Douglass?"

"Abraham Lincoln does not need the tribute we give him today; the world is paying him tributes greater than ours, more glorious and resounding. But the sweeter praise which we pay him is that of a race, profiting by the lesson of a life. Fame has written Lincoln’s name with the greatest men of the world with the statesmen, with the wisest of monarchs, with the prince of republicans — and placed his laurel wreath higher than the rest. But it remains for the descendants of slaves to give him what no man in history has ever had — the divine breath of gratitude, the determination to make the world see, centuries hence, that he was not mistaken in his greatest deed, his life work, his martyrdom."

"But Frederick Douglass, whom we honor equally, has not yet had the full meed of his praise, and we celebrate the passing of his natal day with a finer appreciation of what he has done for us, and of what his life will mean, not only to the men who were his contemporaries, nor yet to us of a later generation, but to the race of the future; to the children yet unborn. History has not yet given him his rightful place on its pages, but the history of. tomorrow will place him where he should be — with the courageous, the wise, the far-seeing. It remains for us, his own people, to pour out at his altar the incense he deserves, the praise he merits; to let his life be a beacon to light us to that higher, truer patriotism — the fearlessness of real manhood."

"Lincoln and Douglass; Douglass and Lincoln! May their names ever be welded into one memory in the hearts of every Negro in the land!"

"Hamilton Wright Mabie says that the question for each man to settle is not what he would do if he had means, time, influence, and educational advantages, but what he will do with the things he has. In all history there are few men who have answered this question. Among them none have answered it more effectively than he whom we have gathered to honor to-night — David Livingstone. The term “social service,” which is on every one’s lips now, was as yet uncoined when David Livingstone was born. But it was none the less true, that without overmuch prating of the ideal which is held up to the man of to-day as the only one worth striving for, the sturdy pioneers of Livingstone’s day and ilk realized to the highest the ideal of man’s duty to his fellow-man."

"who knew and understood them as human beings, and not as beasts, the slavery trade was, as he expressed it, “the open sore of Africa.” Over and again he voiced his belief that the Negro freeman was a hundred time more valuable than the slave. He repeatedly enjoined those who had the fitting out of his expeditions not to send him slaves to accompany him on his journeys, but freemen, as they were more trustworthy. He voiced the fundamental truth that he who is his own master is he who obeys and believes in his master. The slave trade in Africa was dealt its death-blow by Dr. Livingstone."

"Dear to his heart was Lincoln, the Emancipator, an ideal hero whom he consistently revered. Away to the southwest from Kamolondo is a large lake which discharges its waters by the important river, Lomami, into the great Lualaba. To this lake, known as the Chobungo by the natives, Dr. Livingstone gave the name of Lincoln, in memory of him for whom your noble institution was named. This was done because of a vivid impression produced on his mind by hearing a portion of Lincoln’s inauguration speech from an English pulpit, which related to the causes that induced him to issue the Emancipation Proclamation. To the memory of the man whom Livingstone revered he has contributed a monument more durable than brass or stone."

"One idea mastered him — to give Africa to the world."

"To you, of the younger generation, what a marvel, what a world of meaning in those words — “I have been taught patience.” We, who fret and chafe because the whole world will not bend its will to our puny strivings, and turn its whole course that we might have our unripe desires fulfilled, should read and re-read of the man who could wait, because he knew that time and all eternity would be bent to meet his desires in time."

"Such a man was Livingstone, not afraid to be meek in order to be great; not afraid to “fear God and work bard;” not ashamed to stoop in order that he might raise others to his high estate. He gave the world a continent and a conscience; with the lavishness almost of Nature herself he bestowed cataracts and rivers, lakes and mountains, forests and valleys, upon his native land. He stirred the soul of the civilized world to the atrocities of the slave trade, and he made it realize that humanity may be found even in the breast of a savage. When he laid down his life in the forest he loved, he laid upon the altar of humanity and science the costliest and sweetest sacrifice that it had known for many a weary age."

"The life of service; the life of unselfish giving — this must Livingstone’s life mean to us. Unselfish, ungrudging lavishing of life and soul, even to the last drop of heart’s blood. Service that does not hesitate because the task seems small, or the waiting weary; service that does not fear to be of no account in the eyes of the world. Truly, indeed, might Wordsworth’s apostrophe to Milton be ascribed to him: “Thy soul was like a star and dwelt apart;/Thou hadst a voice whose sound was like the sea;/Pure as the naked heavens, majestic, free,/So didst thou travel on life’s common way/In cheerful godliness, and yet thy heart/The lowliest duties on itself did lay.”"

"The Mexican children in Texas need to be educated. Neither our government nor that of the U.S.A. can do anything for them, and there remains no other recourse than to undertake it through our own efforts, in exchange for not continuing to be despised and humiliated by the foreigners who surround us."

"There is no doubt that education elevates the woman. The woman who possesses some knowledge always tries to keep herself at a certain moral level that helps her greatly in the fight for life, by making her better, more pure, and by guiding her steps along the path of virtue."

"Men flatter the vanity of those women who seek praise, who always want to be complimented and enthroned because they know their weak side, but the woman who is pure, with her own chastity she is protected, because men, no matter how uneducated they are, always respect the woman who shows herself to be worthy of respect. The woman should always try to acquire useful and beneficial knowledge, because in these modern times she has wide horizons; the sciences, industries, workshops, and even her very home demand her better abilities, her perseverance and consistency in her work, and her influence and aid for everything that is progress and advancement for humanity."

"The working woman, by recognizing her rights, raises her head in pride and gets ready for the struggle. The time of her degradation has passed, she is no longer the slave sold for a few coins, she is no longer the servant of, but the equal to man, his partner, by his being her natural protector, and not her lord and master."

"Nations disappear and lineage sinks into oblivion once the national language is forgotten; that is why the Aztecs do not exist anymore as a nation. Rome had so much influence in all the nations that it had conquered because of its language, and if the Jews are not a nation today it is because each one of them speaks the language of the land they inhabit. We do not say that English should not be taught to Mexican-Texan children, it is very fortunate, we do say that it should not be forgotten to teach them Spanish, just as arithmetic and grammar is useful to them, English is useful to those who live among those who speak that language. We are all shaped by our surroundings: we love the things that we have seen since our childhood and we believe in what was infused into our spirit since the first years of our lives; therefore, if in the American schools that our children attend they are taught the biography of Washington and not that of Hidalgo and if instead of the glorious acts of Juárez they are told of the accomplishments of Lincoln, no matter how noble and just they might be, that child will never know the glories of his country, he will not love it, and will even look with indifference at the countrymen of his parents."

"It is certain that we are in the country of business and that "time is money," but although history and geography are not indispensable to earn a living, they are good for the preservation of our patriotism."

"Chicana feminist activities in the 1904 to 1920 period were channeled through civil rights activities and labor organization work. Some outstanding women were Jovita Idar, a journalist and civil rights worker from Laredo, Texas; Soledad Peña, orator and educator; María Renteria; and María Villarreal. These women were speakers and participants in a historical civil rights conference, the Primer Congreso Mexicanista. On October 15, 1911 they also founded the Liga Femenil Mexicanista."

"Scholar Jose Limón explains that through the newspaper, the Idars launched a "campaign of journalistic resistance" in which the press and its contributors actively fought the "social conditions oppressing Texas-Mexicans""

"with the Mexican Revolution raging just miles away across the border, Idar's world was in flux. She and her counterparts were realizing the need to work outside the home as a means of supporting their families as well as an opportunity to gain a new sense of direction and purpose in their lives."

"As La Crónica reports, Idar's El Estudiante was "a bilingual weekly magazine... dedicated exclusively to school interests and issues" ("El Estudiante" 1)." The sheer existence of this publication signals Idar's dedicated investment in educational issues on the border and, most interestingly, her attempt to initiate a cross-cultural pedagogical conversation between both English- and Spanish-speaking writers and readers."

"At the turn of the century, Sara Estela Ramírez, the Villarreal sisters, Leonor Villegas de Magnón, Jovita Idar and the staff members of La Voz de la Mujer and Pluma Roja were organic intellectuals of their times who revealed different discursive positionings of women within their societies, positionings informed by the master narratives of nationalism, religion and anarchism. Until now these women's work as publishers and their written contributions have remained virtually unrecognized. Either because of political affiliations or gender discrimination, their work has not been recognized in Mexico. In the United States, these factors, as well as linguistic biases, have relegated their work to oblivion. These women's stories and their publishing efforts, nonetheless, capture the realities of a people, the significance of whose daily existence transcends the limitations imposed by political and national borders."

"A Brave Journalist:While many mexicanas fought for justice against the dictatorship in Mexico, others struggled against Anglo injustice in Texas. Born in Laredo to an activist family, Jovita Idar soon joined the struggle against racist discrimination inflicted on tejanos. She was enraged by school segregation, lower wages than Anglos, and horrible lynchings. Texas Rangers were responsible for 5,000 tejanos killed in 1914-19, a state investigation revealed. Working at La Crónica and three other Texas newspapers, Jovita exposed the abuse. When Rangers came to close down La Crónica, she stood in the doorway blocking them. Her courage extended to many other fronts. She also worked as a teacher and served as a nurse in the Mexican revolution."

"Tejana socialist labor leader and political activist Sara Estela Ramirez would not live to participate in El Primer Congreso Mexicanista held the following year. Ramirez's ideas, however, would resonate in the words of her compañeras. Composed of South Texas residents, this Congreso was the first civil rights assembly among Spanish-speaking people in the United States. With delegates representing community organizations and interests from both sides of the border, its platform addressed discrimination, land loss, and lynching. Women delegates, such as Jovita Idar, Soldedad Peña, and Hortensia Moncaya, spoke to the concerns of Tejanos and Mexicanos."

"We've only had multiracial democracy in this country for fewer than 60 years, meaning we've only had democracy in the US for fewer than 60 years. In places where Black people outnumbered white, we had violent minority rule. If you don't understand this, what are you reporting? We can keep pretending that economic anxiety is leading millions of Americans to be willing to subvert democracy but that is a willful blindness and an abdication of our duty to report the truth. We can keep pretending that our institutions will hold, but that defies history. Fears about eroding democracy are not abstract for the millions of Americans who will lose rights and suffer under a white Christian nationalist regime that does not believe a multiracial citizenry should be sharing power of governing."

"When politicians decided protests shouldn't happen, Black people shouldn't vote, Black children shouldn't integrate schools, they called on law enforcement to enforce their desires, even when courts had ordered compliance with these rights."

"Of course many police officers have nothing to do with white nationalist groups, but there's never been a time where significant numbers did NOT engage with and share sympathies with white supremacists. The history of American policing begins in some places w the slave patrols."

"So, what we saw yesterday, again, is both shocking and utterly within the realm of what we know this country to be. The way law enforcement responds to Black protestors compared to white insurrectionist the most predictable aspect of all of this."

"According to head of Chicago police union, assaulting police like this was fine because these folks were frustrated."

"People on the right have been very afraid of a narrative that doesn't deify our founding, that actually forces us to confront it, because that leads to change. When people know better oftentimes they do better. We are seeing that now."

"This has been a fundamental problem with news institutions, now and in the past. They attempt to cover racism and inequality without understanding it themselves."

"Do those concerns about cancel culture and McCarthyism and censorship only apply to the left or do they apply to the POTUS threatening to investigate schools for teaching American journalism? Silence is deafening here."

"I have dedicated my life’s work to excavating the modern legacy of transatlantic slavery"

"We gather here to mark the global trade that took some 15 million beloved human beings across the Atlantic in the hulls of barbaric ships, the largest forced migration in the history of the world, one that would reshape the entire Atlantic world and transform the global economy. We must never forget the scale and the depth of the horrors that people of African descent suffered in the name of profit, profit that enriched the European colonial powers and built the nascent economy of the United States. We must never forget how the systems of slavery collapsed, only to be reborn in other models of violent and racist economic exploitation, such as what we benignly call Jim Crow in the United States, but what is more aptly called apartheid."

"just as important to remembering the legacy of the transatlantic slavery are the stories of Black resistance that would, more than any other force, lead to slavery’s collapse in our hemisphere."

"As we remember our brutal enslavement by people who believed themselves to be civilized, even as they tortured, abused and murdered other human beings for profit, for sugar for their tea, for molasses for their rum, for cotton to wear and for tobacco to smoke, we must remember most the fierce Black radical tradition of resistance, that did not begin with anti-colonialism efforts on the continent or with civil rights movements in the United States and other places, but with, as the scholar Cedric Robinson argued, the Cimarrones of Mexico, who ran away to Indigenous communities or formed their own fugitive communities known as palenques..."

"We must remember that it was not merely the Enlightenment ideas, some reckoning amongst white abolitionists, that brought the end to the system that had enriched colonial powers, but that abolition was propelled by constant revolt that forced colonial powers to realize, as scholar Mary Reckford wrote, it would remain “more expensive and dangerous to maintain the old system than to abolish it.” Black people were actors in their own freedom. Obscuring and marginalizing stories of Black resistance serves to justify the hypocrisy of colonial Europe and the United States by insinuating that had slavery been so bad, surely, African peoples would have fought harder against it. These are lies of omission that in the absence of truth warp our collective memory."

"the defining story of the African diaspora in the Americas is not slavery, but our resistance to it, of people determined to be free in societies that did not believe they had a right to freedom."

"we, the people of the African diaspora, should not have to find ourselves still resisting. It is long past time for the European colonial powers, for the United States of America to live up to their own professed ideas, to become the great and moral nations that they believe themselves to be. It is not enough to simply regret what was done in the past; they are obligated to repair it."

"It is time for them to make reparations to the descendants of chattel slavery in the Americas. This is our global truth, the truth we as human beings understand with stark clarity: There can be no atonement if there’s no repair. It is time — it is long past time — for reparations for the transatlantic slave trade and all the devastation that it has wrought, and all the devastation that it continues to reap."

"the entire premise of The 1619 Project is that the legacy of slavery was not banished along with the institution of slavery in 1865, that slavery is one of the oldest institutions in our society. The English settled Jamestown in 1607. And by 1619, just 12 years later, they’re engaging in African slavery. So, that is 150 years before they even decide that they want to become their own country. And that slavery shaped everything, nearly everything, about the country that would ultimately be established."

"slavery has influenced our society in so many ways, but we’ve really invisibilized that. We’ve lost that connection and understanding. And what I argue for the project is the narrative of 1776 does not explain the insurrection on the Capitol in January. It doesn’t explain George Floyd and why a white police officer could feel that he could kill a man in front of witnesses and would not have to worry about facing any consequences. And it certainly doesn’t explain why we have a political party right now that is trying to instate minority rule. That is the legacy of 1619."

"If a patriotism has to be based on propaganda that really diminishes and tries to erase from memory the difficult parts of our past, it doesn’t seem like that is a genuine patriotism."

"When Texas seceded in 1836, it seceded in order to form a slaveholding republic. If you don’t teach that, then children are not able to understand all of the inequality that they have today."

"I have long said and claimed Ida B. Wells-Barnett as my spiritual godmother. She was honestly the first example of a Black woman doing the type of journalism that I wanted to do, which should tell you how undiverse or nondiverse the field of investigative reporting is, that I didn’t actually know living examples of Black women investigative reporters when I was young. So, she was a pioneering investigative journalist who really brought the scourge of lynching to a global audience. She would go into towns where a Black man or woman had just been lynched, and she would interview people, and she would document. And she was actually one of the early data reporters, because she started to collect data on how many lynchings were occurring, what were the reasons given for those lynchings, and then what did her reporting show. She also was a true intersectional woman. She was a suffragist and had to fight both for women’s rights to vote and against the racism within the suffragist movement. She was a civil rights activist. She was a co-founder of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, where she had to fight against gender discrimination as a Black woman. And so, in so many ways, she was just this pioneering woman who fought for civil rights and equal rights across many fronts. And she was a woman who was largely reviled by white media. And I have in my Twitter bio that I’m a nasty — a slanderous and nasty-minded mulattress, because that’s what The New York Times, where I work, called Ida B. Wells while she was engaging in her anti-lynching crusade. So I take great strength from knowing that the attacks on me and the attacks on my work are really just part of a lineage of what happens when Black women and Black women journalists dare to challenge power and challenge authority. So, to receive the acknowledgment for this work about the Black experience on the same day that Ida B. Wells-Barnett, who like so many Black journalists never received the acknowledgment that they deserved, was just deeply gratifying, because I do my work in service of them."

"I think that we are ill-prepared for the moment that we’re in. I think too many political reporters just have too much faith in our political systems, and there is no evidence to back up that faith. So, I just hope that before it’s too late, enough of us get an understanding that we can’t cover what’s happening in our country right now as politics as usual, and you can’t dismiss all of these scholars of authoritarianism who are raising the alarm. We’ve got to do better. We know that reporting, the press, is the firewall of our democracy, and I don’t think the firewall is holding right now."

"The idea that random white citizens have the authority to stop and question a Black person, and if that Black person does not comply, they can use lethal force, that is a legacy of the slave patrols, which deputized all white Americans with the ability to question and stop and detain Black people and make sure that they were not in white spaces where they weren’t supposed to be."

"I think we have to decide if we are going to grapple honestly with our country or not."

"While history is what happened, it is also, just as important, how we think about what happened and what we unearth and choose to remember about what happened"

"White Americans desire to be free of a past they do not want to remember, while Black Americans remain bound to a past they can never forget."

"Reparations amount to a societal obligation in a nation where our Constitution sanctioned slavery, Congress passed laws protecting it, and our federal government initiated, condoned, and practiced legal racial segregation and discrimination against Black Americans until half a century ago. And so it is the federal government that would pay [reparations]."

"If we are truly a great nation, the truth cannot destroy us."

"The racism we are fighting today was originally conjured to justify working unfree Black people, often until death, to generate extravagant riches for ... all the ancillary white people ... who earned their living and built their wealth from that free Black labor."

"The hundred-year period of racial apartheid and racial terrorism known as Jim Crow."

"To this day, the only Americans who have ever received government restitution for slavery were white enslavers in Washington, D.C., whom the federal government compensated after the Civil War for their loss of human property."

"We cannot make up for all the lives lost and dreams snatched, for all the suffering endured. But we can atone for it. We can acknowledge the crime. And we can do something to try to set things right, to ease the hardship and hurt of so many of our fellow Americans."

"None of us can be held responsible for the wrongs of our ancestors. But if today we choose not to do the right and necessary thing, that burden we own."

"School curricula generally treat slavery as an aberration in a free society, and textbooks largely ignore the way that many prominent men, women, industries, and institutions profited from and protected slavery."

"Astronomers mapped the motions of hundreds of stars in the in order to deduce the amount of that must be tugging on them from the vicinity of our sun. Their surprising conclusion? There's no dark matter around here. As the researchers write in a forthcoming paper in the ', the stellar motion implies that the stars, all within 13,000 light-years of Earth, are gravitationally attracted by the visible material in our solar system — the sun, planets and surrounding gas and dust — and not by any unseen matter. "Our calculations show that [dark matter] should have shown up very clearly in our measurements. But it was just not there!" said lead study author Christian Moni-Bidin, an astronomer at the in Chile."

"I decided to become a physicist when I read ' ... age thirteen. I think it was the tenth anniversary edition of the book ... So I went to Tufts University (for undergrad) ... majored in physics. ... from there I went to grad school at Berkeley — which is where I had always wanted to go. ... And I really liked it there. But then something kind of remarkable happened that I don't really understand very well. ... in the course of one sleepless night during my first year at Berkeley, I had a complete crisis — and realized that I didn't want to be a physicist. I wanted to be a physics writer."

"Above all, I am looking for a new idea or finding that scientists in the relevant community think is important. Even if it’s something really abstruse that doesn’t seem like it would have broad appeal and doesn’t have any buzzwords to speak of, if actual experts think something is a big deal, then there’s a reason for that, and it’s up to me to figure out what the story is and how to tell it. Everything else that makes a compelling story — interesting historical background, strong characters, controversy, vivid scenes — is incidental. I’m thrilled when it’s there (and it almost always is), but I’m first and foremost going after groundbreaking new developments, as judged by experts. Now to find out about those developments before everybody else does, I have to be tapped in and talk to a lot of scientists. Building and maintaining those relationships takes time and is tough to balance with all of one’s other duties as a reporter, but it’s the springboard for everything else."

"Among the brilliant theorists cloistered in the quiet woodside campus of the in Princeton, New Jersey, Edward Witten stands out as a kind of high priest."

"WHY WRITE? Reasons to do : • Societal progress • Scientific progress • Enrich people's intellectual lives • Enrich your own intellectual life"

"I started working right away as a reporter at the Wall Street Journal. They put me in the San Francisco bureau of the Journal, which was the bureau that covered technology, and my first beat was writing about Oracle, which was this big business software company, and about Larry Ellison, the CEO at the time of that company."

"I had a kind of Trump-like character, who was very much based on Trump, who I wrote into the book as part of the explanation of the process by which the new world order emerges. I wrote this character before Trump was at all a credible candidate. I think I wrote it in 2014 when there were rumbles that he wanted to run but nobody thought that he was really going to do it and be taken seriously. So, in my attempt at world-building, I thought, okay, there’s no way Trump is going to win now, but I could totally imagine a world in which somebody like him comes along and wins in a decade, or something. Then, later on, when he became President, friends would read that version of the book and be like, "I don’t understand why Trump is here when it’s supposed to be many years in the future." So, I had to change that character and turn the screw a little bit more to make it not as realistic."

"Because I had covered Silicon Valley since 2004, the year Google went public and when Facebook was started, I was able to meet and interview many young technology CEOs. For my novel, I decided to create the character King Rao, have him grow up on a coconut farm in South India in the 1950s, move to the states in the 1970s and ultimately open an Apple-like tech company.”"

"When in the fall of 2004 Chief Justice William Rehnquist fell ill with thyroid cancer, his condition set off months of conjecture over his potential replacement. Antonin Scalia's name was at the center of the speculation. On the Supreme Court for almost eighteen years, Scalia had become the intellectual leader of legal conservatives. Law students and professors- the like-minded but even many who disagreed with him- devoured his legal opinions. Of the nine sitting justices, he was most often the subject of academic law review articles. He had a celebrity quality that drew standing-room-only crowds to his appearances on college campuses. And he was held up as a model justice by President George W. Bush, who would be the one deciding on a new chief justice if Rehnquist retired. Yet Scalia was also the Court's contrarian. The speculation on Rehnquist's replacement turned on the question: Could a justice whose views of the Constitution harked back two centuries, and who routinely lost the votes of his colleagues become chief justice of the United States? Within the decorous chambers, Scalia was notorious for pushing away other justices at critical points in the decision-making process. In a close case, when he was barely holding on to a majority, he could not resist brash comments that might alienate a key vote. When he was in dissent, he did not go quietly. On critical points of law he declared that his colleagues' opinions "cannot be taken seriously"; were "beyond the absurd"; and should be considered "nothing short of preposterous." In June 2004, a few months before Rehnquist revealed the cancer, the Court ruled that the execution of mentally retarded convicts violated the Eighth Amendment prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment. Scalia, in dissent, blasted the majority: "Seldom has an opinion of this Court rested so obviously upon nothing but the personal views of its members.""

"Around this time, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said of Scalia, "I love him. But sometimes I'd like to strangle him." Justice John Paul Stevens, the eldest member of the bench, added separately, "I think everybody respects Nino's wonderful writing ability and his style and all the rest. But everybody on the Court from time to time has thought he was unwise to take such an extreme position, both in tone and position." Stevens, who expressed fondness for Scalia even when Scalia was his most rhetorically overdramatic, later elaborated, "If he thinks a position is totally indefensible, he'll say so. And sometimes I think his rhetoric is stronger than what is justified or what is actually persuasive. He's got to have the last word. But is it really worth it?""

"The Supreme Court is likely never to go as far as Scalia wants on racial policies. And in an equally explosive area of the law, he will likely never see the overturning of Roe v. Wade- Kennedy would block that. Scalia is also likely to continue on the losing side of gay rights, courtesy of Kennedy. Yet, in upcoming years, Scalia could help bring about more mingling of church and state and less government regulation of campaign financing- again, because of votes by Kennedy and fellow conservatives. Scalia will also certainly continue to nourish his originalist constitutional theory and bring it to wider audiences."

"Win or lose, Scalia remains energized. Justice Breyer has often referred to the "physical energy" and "intellectual rigor" Scalia brings to the task. And Thomas observes, "He puts on his music and gets his computer ready. It's like he's conducting a symphony... with majority opinions, and dissents, too." Scalia might be at the apex of his influence. With conservatives holding the balance of power, and still being among the younger members of the nine, these final years of the first decade of the twenty-first century might offer Scalia his best ever opportunity to prevail. This could be his best shot."

"Supreme Court eras are often identified with their chief justices, as is true of the current period that began with Roberts nearly two decades ago. But the Court can be measured also by presidential influence. Certain presidents, such as Franklin D. Roosevelt, who appointed eight justices in his twelve years in office, had a disproportionate effect on the Court. Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon also stood out for their imprint. The Trump effect, especially in terms of the individuals chosen and the resulting shift in the balance of power, has been incomparable. He is gone from office and they are here for life."

"Joan Biskupic has covered the Supreme Court since 1989. Previously the Supreme Court reporter for The Washington Post, she is the legal affairs correspondent for USA Today, a frequent panelist on PBS's Washington Week, and the author of Sandra Day O'Connor: How the First Woman on the Supreme Court Became Its Most Influential Justice. She lives in Washington, D.C., with her husband and daughter."

"I've personally learned that lies spread faster than truth. People have written entire blogs attacking my expertise and sharing clear falsehoods – such as the claim that I have no published scientific papers, or that I'm a global plant by the World Economic Forum or Gates Foundation, or that I am a philosopher rather than a scientist (because I have a DPhil from Oxford). It's easy to laugh at such obvious untruths, until it sinks in that this clickbait gets shared thousands of times. People believe it, and then they too share it. And there is no way to counter every single falsehood. These lies carry more weight among some internet communities than the fact that Edinburgh University evaluated my expertise and granted me a professorship."

"[T]he people who make up universities: students, researchers, teaching fellows, support staff, lecturers and professors. Brexit, and the associated drop in immigration, means that we are attracting less top talent at all levels than before leaving the EU. This is clear from the student numbers: roughly 40% fewer EU students applied to UK universities in 2021 than in 2020."

"Similarly, Brexit – and the wider tightening of immigration policy – has made it difficult to hire (and retain) international faculty members. This has ramifications for science collaboration and research. Building a research team is similar to building a top football team: you recruit the best players with the right skill set, expertise and training, regardless of nationality."

"Many of the arguments (and counter-arguments) made for reducing cars have centred on the environment. But the real reason that cities such as Amsterdam adopted a less car-centric approach in the mid-20th century had to do with a more immediate concern: children being killed by speeding cars. In 1971, more than 400 Dutch children died in traffic accidents. It was a parent group, Stop de Kindermoord (stop the child murder), angered by the large number of deaths that forced politicians to rethink the design of once car-dominated cities in favour of more inclusive urban planning. In 2021, 17 children across the Netherlands were killed in traffic accidents."

"There is a balance to be found between people getting to where they need to go in reasonable time and a safe travel speed. But "anti-motorist" policies aren't the real cause of traffic slowing down. There are simply too many cars on the road, resulting in jams and standstill traffic, and the obvious solution is to provide alternative, affordable options."

"But it's also true that if people want to have children, governments should remove the financial and practical blocks that often make it an impossible choice. So far, however, even extensive support hasn't put any rich country back on track to grow its population in the future. This means we must think about immigration as a solution, too, including tackling where resistance to immigration comes from – and how to have a nuanced and balanced debate without making racial concerns the focal point."

"[M]any young men feel their difficulties are often dismissed out of hand as whining from a patriarchy that they don’t feel part of."

"In terms of number, we do believe that the numbers who have been taken into Gaza is somewhere in the dozens. We have not received any sort of confirmation on specific numbers of soldiers and civilians who have been taken and how many of those are believed to be alive or dead. We know that the Israeli military is still gathering information. And, Erin in fact, Israeli police have told family members if they don't know where their family members are, if they can reach out to the Israeli police and bring them pieces of clothing or hairbrushes that have DNA samples on them so that that could potentially help them identify family members."

"We can care about things without clinging to them."

"When you give up partnership relationships you also give up a certain kind of intimacy. But you gain a lot of freedom, and you also experience a wider, less exclusive form of love."

"I am no longer submissive, no longer seductive; perhaps it is for that reason that my husband tells me sometimes that I have become hard, and that my hardness is unattractive. I would like it to be otherwise. I think that will take a long time."

"And I wonder always whether it is possible to define myself as a feminist revolutionary and still remain in any sense a wife. There are moments when I still worry that he will leave me, that he will come to need a woman less preoccupied with her rights, and when I worry about that I also fear that no man will ever love me again, that no man could ever love a woman who is angry. And that fear is a great source of trouble to me for it means that in certain fundamental ways I have not changed at all."

"I would like to be cold and clear and selfish, to demand satisfaction for my needs, to compel respect rather than affection. And yet there are moments, and perhaps there always will be, when I fall back upon the old cop-outs. Why should I trouble to win a chess game or a political argument when it is so much easier to lose charmingly? Why should I work when my husband can support me, why should I be a human being when I can get away with being a child?"

"Women's Liberation is finally only personal. It is hard to fight an enemy who has outposts in your head."

"I knew the writing came from the place that’s the closest you can get to truth. But the downside was, I became a character in a public story that resembled mine but was a huge oversimplification of a complex life."

"Writing about Cutting Loose, quoted in Sara Davidson article"

"I became a feminist as an alternative to becoming a masochist."

"When men imagine a female uprising, they imagine a world in which women rule men as men have ruled women. Most men can’t really imagine “equality.” All they can imagine is having the existing power structure inverted."

"Trump's campaign is a study in the mob mentality, how people who would normally act with kindness and compassion can turn cruel in response to the rhetoric of their leader, or in retaliation to those who oppose him. In line, I met a middle-aged woman who had quit her job to care for her ailing father, who was too weak to stand, so he rested, in his "Make America Great Again" cap, against walls along the way. Her eyes filled with tears, she professed her own dedication to Trump, whom she saw as an authentic advocate of the downtrodden. But most of all, she wanted to show her father something special, an American moment that would make him proud."

"As scholars of authoritarianism have long advised, believe the autocrat when he speaks. The problem is that too few Americans believed in the concept of an American autocrat. Pundits ignored the threat of Trump enacting these policies through executive power. Enjoy hindsight while you can, Americans, the administration of “alternative facts” may rewrite your regrets as applause."

"If a mafia state has really taken hold, wouldn't someone from our institutions do something about it? And the answer is no, they didn't, but it's the lack of that expected response that I think has led people to believe things are safer than they are, better than they are, even in the face of overwhelming evidence."

"We've seen [Trump] follow the textbook road to autocracy . . . Our institutions were very fragile and corrupt and the refusal to admit that led to the broader refusal to recognise how profoundly dangerous [Trump's] installation was."

"The dozens of women I interviewed for this article love working in tech. They love the problem-solving, the camaraderie, the opportunity for swift advancement and high salaries, the fun of working with the technology itself. They appreciate their many male colleagues who are considerate and supportive. Yet all of them had stories about incidents that, no matter how quick or glancing, chipped away at their sense of belonging and expertise."

"Such undermining is one reason women today hold only about a quarter of U.S. computing and mathematical jobs—a fraction that has actually fallen slightly over the past 15 years, even as women have made big strides in other fields. Women not only are hired in lower numbers than men are; they also leave tech at more than twice the rate men do."

"The percentage of female computer- and information-science majors peaked in 1984, at about 37 percent. It has declined, more or less steadily, ever since. Today it stands at 18 percent."

"9 years ago today, I finished a flight around the world in a single engine airplane. Today, I’m thrilled to release the book about that very flight. It’s been a long time coming, and it’s my sincere hope you connect with the stories and ideas I’ve shared within it in a meaningful way,” she posted on Instagram. “The book is available on Amazon and I’ve linked to it in my bio. Blue skies and thank you ALL for your support and encouragement through the years as I’ve worked toward this huge goal!”"

"Learn to Love the Turbulence.”"

"Adventure is worthwhile in itself,' she told USA Today. 'Whatever your version of flying is - it could be starting a business, it could be something entrepreneurial - we want to encourage people to pursue their own adventure.""

"“wanted me to have a name nobody would forget.”"

"There hasn't been a day in my life that somebody hasn't said something to me about Amelia Earhart. It's a daily connection,”"

"“People would always ask, 'Are you a pilot? Are you a pilot?'""

"In the last 24 hours, new information from a team of researchers that I hired shows that while I share a name and a passion for flying with Amelia Earhart, we are not from the same family," said Rose Earhart. "While my family and Amelia's did settle in nearby counties in the same state, the only thing we shared was our last name.”"

"Today, I’m thrilled to release the book about that very flight," Earhart said. "It’s been a long time coming, and it’s my sincere hope you connect with the stories and ideas I’ve shared within it in a meaningful way.""

"Blue skies and thank you all for your support and encouragement through the years as I’ve worked toward this huge goal!""

"We're ready to go," Earhart said early Thursday morning. "I was destined to do this.""

"adventure is worthwhile in itself" and the younger Earhart said it is "that type of attitude that spurs us to seek the unknown, push our limits and fly outside the lines."

"the whole reason she does what she does is to propel the future of women who will fly tomorrow’s airplanes," the younger Amelia Earhart said. "That’s me. I’m flying tomorrow’s planes.”"

"While my family and Amelia's did settle in nearby counties in the same state, the only thing we shared was our last name,"

""In the last 24 hours, new information from a team of researchers that I hired shows that while I share a name and a passion for flying with Amelia Earhart, we are not from the same family," says Earhart, a news traffic reporter for the NBC affiliate in Denver, Gannett-owned KUSA 9News. Gannett also owns USA TODAY."

"When I decided to re-create Amelia's flight around the world, it became clear that it was time to establish the exact connection between the two of us. So I hired a team of expert genealogists to finally establish the link," she says. "So my connection to Amelia isn't what I thought it was. And I'll admit, the last 24 hours, they've been really hard. It's tough to hear that something you've believed your whole life just isn't true.""

"The aircraft was old, filthy, smelled like a dusty old farm truck, and instilled zero confidence in its ability to keep my instructor and I safely in the sky. My instructor was the human version of this aircraft. Crotchety, grumpy, smelled of stale cigarette smoke was NOT impressed that my name was Amelia Earhart. I remember feeling very out of place at the airport, clueless, awkward, in the way. We did a pre-flight inspection on the plane, my instructor helped me buckle myself into the left seat of the Cessna 172 and we were off."

"I had a team of close to twenty-five people that I worked with on a daily basis to help me troubleshoot as we went, but no one was going to step in and do the work for me. Over the course of the two years leading up to the flight, I exchanged over sixteen thousand emails about flight logistics."

"I knew I was about to see, with my very own eyes, the one piece of land that Amelia and her navigator Fred Noonan wanted to see with every part of their being."

"Everyone has ocean’s to fly, if they have the heart to do it. Is it reckless? Maybe. But what do dreams know of boundaries?”"

"I want my legacy to evoke an emotion of curious adventure, childishly peer into the night sky, and falling deeply in love, over and over again with the beauty of the star-splattered front seat views. I want to challenge the idea that we are bound to the Earth. I want to live by example, being the author of my life-long ‘Choose Your Own Adventure’ book."

"We are a Colorado based, non-profit organization that has awarded funds to close to twenty young women so far and will continue to grow, becoming a resource of scholarships, aviation resources, aerospace opportunity, and inspiration for girls who want to fly."

"Even if you are with a group of adults in their 50s and a child, we all get that overall look on our faces,"

"It's awesome and it's invigorating. (Flying is) a great joy,"

""In high school my thing was public speaking and debate," Earhart said. "Right around that 18-20 age range I was thinking about taking my first flight lesson. During that discovery flight I began to think about the possibility that aviation could take me anywhere I wanted to go."

"As a woman named Amelia Earhart I have a unique opportunity to take.""

"Unfortunately, the number of pilots that are women are low," Amelia Rose said. "It's around 6 percent. There was an influx of women becoming pilots, but we really have seen it taper off."

"The biggest challenge for me was paying for it. I wanted to eliminate the cost and find girls who are really passionate. Flying is a huge amount of responsibility. You have to be organized and work well with others and in confined spaces. It's not just about flying it's about being a well-rounded person with an adventurous side."

"We committed last year to really integrating social media into this flight," Amelia Rose said. "We are going to remote parts of the world. You will be seeing tweets from us at 30,000 feet. You haven't seen that with around the world flights.""

""The flight around the world is to honor Amelia Earhart, to trust that adventures are still out there," she said. "We may not be using the old technology that they had in the Elektra, but look at the coordination and planning behind it. I would challenge those people to create their own adventure."

"When you live life like an adventure — like Amelia did — it makes everything very exciting. It makes me feel proud. A lot of that comes down to your willingness to put in the effort and hard work."

"Maybe their family says it's not a safe option," she said. "But it's about becoming a safe operator of your machine no matter what your adventure is — even if you were trying to be a doctor."

"The flexible education experience at Laurel Springs is a great opportunity for these students and I love how they can pursue their passions while receiving a top-flight education," Earhart said. "I can't wait to share my story with these passionate students and encourage them to continue following their dreams.""

""While we recognize people are still struggling and the last two years haven't been easy, commencement is a reminder of the bright future awaiting the Class of 2022," says Megan O'Reilly Palevich, M.Ed, head of Laurel Springs School. "Remember what you've learned in your time at Laurel Springs, celebrate what you've accomplished, and always cherish the relationships birthed here. Let the lessons you learned inside our virtual walls help you set your ambitions and drive your life forward toward them."

"They're all about turbulence," she said. "As pilots, we know that turbulence is one of many sky conditions. We agree to the chance of turbulence when we take off to go up in flight ... I think if we take a pilot's perspective on how to navigate it, it can help out a lot."

"Adventure is worthwhile in itself," "I think there's a new focus on adventure that we've only seen in the last five to 10 years. But whatever your version of flying is – it could be starting a business, it could be something entrepreneurial – we want to encourage people to pursue their own adventure.""

"The feeling I have when I get up there in the airplane is unlike anything else,""

"Discovering who I’m not has led me to fully and finally understand who I really am,”. “In the last 24 hours new information from a team of researchers that I hired shows that while I share a name and a passion for flying with the first Amelia Earhart we’re not from the same family. And while I am her namesake, nothing in life is ever really as simple as we want it to be.”"

"While the news was a jolt, it DOES NOT change my commitment to the the flight or to the mission of The Fly With Amelia Foundation, which is to enable young girls to pursue their dreams of flight,""

"I am so thankful for all the encouragement and support I have received and I am really looking forward to sharing my recreation of Amelia's flight around the world with all of you.""

"“I came to it later for reasons that were mostly financial,” she said. “I worked other jobs, I worked at golf courses, I waitressed."

"It’s a lot like packing snacks for a road trip,” she said. “A lot of granola, stuff that’s high in protein. Also, Sour Patch Kids,” she admitted. “Some of these stretches of time in the air are loooooong,” she said. “One will be about nine hours.”"

"“Luckily our iPhones will be working at certain altitudes,"

"In every successful flight,” she said, “you want to open a flight plan and close a flight plan. Amelia never had the chance to close hers, and I want to do that for her.”"

"My husband and I were separated early on in our marriage before we had children. And we just didn't feel right about [it],". "As much as I wanted to walk and as much as I wanted to be done with that marriage and move on with my life, I didn't have a peace about it."

"“Cheers to the ups, the downs, the babies, the bad hair and shockingly horrible fashion … For better and worse, I love you!”"

"“I’m excited to get my life back,” “I have three kids and working at GMA Weekend and The View has been awesome, but I’m so excited to not go to bed at 8:30 or 9 p.m. on a Friday or Saturday night because my alarm would go off for work at 3:30 a.m. every Saturday and Sunday morning."

"“What kicked it off is that I had a really tough miscarriage,” Paula continued. “I feel like it was in that moment that really repositioned my priority compass and our family’s priority compass. I realized that my kids need me in the stands and on the sidelines, my husband and I need that time to reconnect.”"

"“Children are such gifts,” “My own children have opened my heart like never before. I’m not a terribly compassionate person, but motherhood has definitely made me more empathetic; it has changed me for the good.”"

"I mean, mom guilt, it’s not just for me,” Faris said of her book’s subjects. “80-90 percent of mothers suffer from some level of mom guilt. And it’s just never feeling like we’re enough, like we’re never present enough, we’re not a good enough mom. We’re always projecting some sort of guilt upon ourselves. And so much of that is because in America motherhood isn’t really celebrated and there’s not a lot of support for being a mother.”"

"I felt like I wasn’t seeing my husband or my kids,” Faris explained. “I wanted to be with my children. My schedule was just really crazy. I really decided to try something new which is why we blew up our lives and hit that great big reset button…and I decided to pursue a company of my own.”"

"“You Don’t Have to Carry It All” a “practical” and “tactical” look at the American family dynamic and how things work best when a husband and wife are “co-produc[ing]” together."

"I learned that the Proverbs 31 woman, who we often reduce to a domestic housewife, was actually a skilled businesswoman, a negotiator, the security of her community was on her shoulders,” Faris shared. “She was a manager, she bought a field with her earnings. So often we have weaponized work as if this isn’t part of God’s plan and that’s not the case. And that’s where I think the church can do a lot better is just celebrate, look, the best families are when both the mother and the father are actively involved. We’re raising the children together. We’re co-producing.”"

"“At the end of the day, what I’m trying to do, yes, advocate for mothers in the workforce, but I’m really hoping that it strengthens families.”"

"God made it pretty clear I was supposed to do this, so I just did the next right thing and the next right thing,” she said in an interview with Baptist News. “I’m just taking one more step, and I’m stepping into my fear, and I’m stepping into my faith in highlighting motherhood. It’s my calling.”"

"Wherever I’m called, my purpose is truly to love God love people and shine my light,”"

"Our family is first. I’m able to be a mom first,” she said. “And my hustles then fit into that.”"

"We have three kids, we run in different directions. When I get him, I get him. He got what he wanted, I’m gonna get what I want. Did the plumber call?"

"I stop and I say, ‘Babe, did the plumber call today?’" she laughed. "I need to wait a little longer. Which is why I look at my phone. Give him a full five minutes before I ask him a question."

"I turned to Max and I just said, 'I'm willing to have transactional deals with you if you can just put the kids to bed please,'" she said with a laugh. "That's about how romantic the suggestion felt too: 'I will pay you in other things, other currency, if you go ahead and put those kids to bed.'""

"“Well I love Jo Koy and I thought the whole time I was so nervous for him because I think he is so funny. He is kind, he is good, you know all the things. What bothers me more in watching this is -- get a sense of humor because we need to protect these national treasures called our comedians, because life needs them. We need to stop binding them in, and fencing them in. And in that room, Jo Koy is punching up. No one feels sorry. Just smile,”"

"“We need to protect these national treasures called our comedians because life needs them. We need to stop binding them in [and] fencing them in,”"

"Is this fair, to go after Donald Trump like this in this environment?"

"[In the Abidjan cattle market during the First Ivorian Civil War in September 2002. A soldier] stood, soaked in sweat, boots too tight, pointing an AK47 at me and looking as if he had every intention of using it. There was an African man near my foot, groaning in pain, bullet wounds in his legs. A moment before, I'd squatted in the dirt and tried to drag him into my taxi. I wanted to get him to a hospital. The soldier said the man on the ground was a rebel, and I knew if I left him behind, he would kill him. The soldier raised his gun, the safety catch off, and pointed it at my heart. ... His impatience was turning to rage when Bruno [Girodon], who was on the other side of the cattle market, suddenly spotted me and pulled me roughly by the arm away. "This is Africa," he said. "Are you crazy?" He dragged me back to the car, silently fuming."

"[At the reception of the Holiday Inn, Sarajevo during the siege] "And please, madame, don't walk on this side of the building." He pointed to a wall, through which you could see the sky and buildings outside, that looked as though a truck had run into it. "And don’t go up on the seventh floor," he added cryptically. The seventh floor, I soon learned, was where the Bosnian snipers defending the city were positioned. And the forbidden side of the building faced the Serbian snipers and mortar emplacements. If you emerged from the hotel on that side and a sniper had you in his range, you got shot."

"[M]ost mainstream journalists have been refused visas to visit regime-held areas of Syria. At the start of the war, I was initially allowed into regime territory but was followed by minders from the Ministry of Information. In 2012, after I went undercover and reported a government-sponsored mass killing in the town of Daraya, which was later verified by Human Rights Watch and "characterized by the UN appointed Independent International Commission of Inquiry as a 'massacre,'" according to Amnesty International, my government visa was revoked and I was told I would be thrown in an "Assad prison" if I tried coming back."

"The Australian reporter John Pilger echoes the views of [[w:Eva Bartlett|[Eva] Bartlett]] and [[Vanessa Beeley|[Vanessa] Beeley]] in interviews. Pilger ... has a new platform on RT, which he uses to deny chemical weapons attacks such as the one at Khan Shaykhun. He, too, frequently attacks the White Helmets as Islamic extremists, and has cited Beeley's writing as if it were authoritative journalism."

"After eight brutal years, it is hard to find anything shocking about the Syrian civil war. But somehow, the government forces under President Bashar al-Assad always find a way. On May 15, Syrian bombs destroyed the Tarmala Maternity and Children’s Hospital in Idlib, the 19th medical facility attacked since late April. Mr. al-Assad’s campaign against hospitals is not just inhumane — it represents one of the most repellent aspects of modern warfare. Hospitals were once off limits; even in conflicts where the international laws of war were routinely flouted, medical facilities were spared."

"It was a dark time: the RUF was abducting children from their villages, getting them high on poyo (homemade palm wine), marijuana and heroin, and training them to kill. I later heard from a Jesuit priest who tried to rehabilitate these child-soldiers that they made excellent killers because, under the age of nine, they had not yet developed a full moral conscience. The warlords exploited their innocence. The carnage they inflicted was unspeakable. In these raids on villages, according to interviews I did later, pieced together with testimonies from human rights investigators, soldiers forced parents to choose which of their children would be taken as fighters and which would be killed on the spot. Teenagers in gangsta-style baggy pants raped and plundered, taking girls as young as nine as their "bush wives.""

"I became a journalist partly because my mother was prevented from becoming one, and also because I inherited her insatiable curiosity. She read all of my stories, even the most brutal from war zones, although I would often lie about where I was to prevent her from worrying. Recently she read a personal essay that explained in detail how I almost lost my eyesight and spent three weeks in a hospital in Paris. This time she wept, saying: "Why didn't you tell me? I was only 95 when this happened. I could have flown to Paris and taken care of you.""

"Gun-owning is a largely male phenomenon in the US. Forty-five percent of American men own guns while only 15% of women do. Sixty percent of adults with guns in America are white men, even though white men are just one third of the US population. Despite some attempts by gun lobbyists and marketers to try to sell more guns to women, the fact of the matter is that gun-owning isn't really about "safety" and "crime", so much as it's a very costly form of identity politics."

"People like [[Richard Dawkins|[Richard] Dawkins]], [[Michael Shermer|[Michael] Shermer]] and [[Sam Harris|[Sam] Harris]] are the public face of atheism. And that public face is one that is defensively and irrationally sexist. It's not only turning women away from atheism, it's discrediting the idea that atheists are actually people who argue from a position of rationality. How can they be, when they cling to the ancient, irrational tradition of treating women like they aren't quite as human as men?"

"[T]here’s a thriving online community of people who live to harass not just women, but female atheists in particular, trying to drum any women out of the movement who want to be included as equals instead of as support staff for the male stars. Feminists like Rebecca Watson and Greta Christina, who upset the image of atheism as a “guy thing," are subject to a relentless drumbeat of abuse through social media by people who prefer an atheism that’s a little more like fundamentalist Christianity, where women know their place."

"The council did find one exception to the rule: Childless couples who said they were committed to equality did split chores evenly. But when baby came, the women in these once-balanced relationships got a raw deal; not only did New Mom do more domestic work than New Dad, but New Dad did five fewer hours of housework per week than before he became a father. The implications are clear: When faced with the pressures of raising a family, couples backslide into traditional gender roles."

"No one should be surprised that it was men, especially white men, who handed [[Donald Trump|[Donald] Trump]] this election. It's been exhaustively established that the majority of white men in this country are consumed with resentment at being expected to treat women and racial minorities as equals, though of course some liberal journalists — usually white men themselves — kept valiantly trying to claim that it was "economic insecurity" that somehow drove the most prosperous group of Americans to kick angrily at those who objectively make less money and have less status than they do."

"Trump's behavior may have been on the high end of the shitty male behavior spectrum, but it still falls within the parameters of what a lot of people are socialized to accept, especially when the bully is rich and powerful like Trump. He, like many men who behave the way he does, gets away with it because far too many people believe that being a bad-tempered thug is just what being a man is about."

"Cats love to have you around, but won't come unglued if you're not around to clean up after them for a few hours. If only more men could be like cats!"

"On a surface level, this pairing of Trump's open disregard for basic marital morality with [[J.D. Vance|[J.D.] Vance]]'s sanctimony is just an extension of the larger incoherence that characterizes this year's Republican National Convention. It's certainly whiplash-inducing to be here, where attendees swing wildly between showy displays of Christian piety and vulgar and even threatening language toward fellow Americans who disagree with them politically. The shame that usually accompanies hypocrisy was abandoned years ago by this crowd. But perhaps that's because it's not really hypocrisy that drives the MAGA movement. It's an attachment to traditional hierarchies that allow such appalling double standards to flourish. Violence from Republicans, such as on January 6, is acceptable because it's enforcing the social order they support. But the attempted murder of Trump is beyond the pale because it's an assault on the only leader they accept as legitimate. In that light, it's not hard to see what holds Vance's seemingly disparate views together. It's not a faith in marriage, but an allegiance to male domination."

"It [The Nation] is a weapon in our common fight for a democratic victory and a decent peace; against reaction, isolationism, and appeasement. We have a political war to wage and win."

"To a person who sees life in clear blacks and whites the issue is doubtless a simple one: decent people don’t associate with criminals and gangsters or try to extenuate their crimes. One cannot but envy the man who is able to dispatch his social problems so easily. But to me, as to many other non-Communists and unattached liberals, the issue is a confused and troubling one. The Communists display the qualities of most fanatics, qualities that stem as directly from Cotton Mather as from Karl Marx. They are intolerant and ruthless, often unscrupulous, often violent and lacking in political judgment. They are also zealous, brave, and willing to put up with hardship and abuse. The Communist Party and its press have “assassinated”—or tried to—many a character, including that of The Nation. But they have also fought for decent conditions for workers and the unemployed, for equality of rights for Negroes, for relief and aid to the victims of the civil war in Spain. They have stood consistently for justice and nonaggression in international relations—as, indeed, has the Soviet government as well. Neither can one forget that Communists and Communist sympathizers from the United States fought in Spain in numbers out of all proportion to their numbers here; and, it might be added, they fought side by side with Socialists and Anarchists and democrats of all shades, even while political strife between all these factions poisoned the air behind the lines. The Spanish struggle taught many lessons, of which perhaps the most important was this one: It is not necessary for liberal lambs and Communist lions to lie down together. Enough if they will move ahead toward their common objectives without wasting time and strength in an attempt to exterminate each other along the way. The job of making this country unsafe for fascism calls for tremendous constructive effort as well as defensive strength. If Communists and non-Communists and even anti-Communists could forget their mutual recriminations and concentrate on the major task of our generation, there would be better hope of its successful accomplishment."

"Logic is not a vice of the fundamentalist. He is against birth control. He detests the very words. He shrinks from the thought behind the words. Birth control can hardly be considered without considering sex, and sex should be suppressed and ignored as far as possible. If children are born, let us not dwell on the incidences of their origin; let us presume that God sent them to bless our homes, and leave the matter there. Besides, says the fundamentalist under his breath, what will become of morals if people can sin without fear?...the bigots of both faiths are right; they do well to fear the effect of a widespread knowledge of birth control methods. At present such knowledge is in the hands of the upper classes-through bootleggers-and the effect of it has been to change the habits and morals and economic status of middle-class women, and to modify almost beyond recognition the middle-class home. Some of this knowledge gets through to the poorer classes. But, like bootlegged liquor, it is apt to be poisonous-the more so, the cheaper the bootlegger. So the women of the working class are dying from the effects of drugs and abortions, when they are not dying from the effects of too many children; and a bitter, passionate clamor for fair treatment is beginning to sound through muffling layers of poverty and repression. Not for the sake of the dwindling Nordic, but for their own health and happiness and security and freedom and for their children's future, these women are going to have what they want. If you doubt it, read "Motherhood in Bondage" [by Margaret Sanger (1928)]"

"In 1944, on the 25th anniversary of her association with The Nation, some 1,300 people turned out to do her honor at a testimonial dinner. Dorothy Thompson, the columnist and radio commentator, was one of a dozen speakers. She praised her friend for having fought “to throw light into dark places and to defend the peOple versus those interests that in our society have repeatedly striven to defeat the full realization of the promises of democracy.”"

"Objectivity has been the lodestar for journalism for a long time, and there’s a lot of legitimate reasons that people wanted to have a feeling of fairness and neutrality in the journalism that they’re reading."

"The debate around AI is too focused on whether AI is going to kill us or not. It’s like talking about flying cars and how we're going to regulate them when we haven't regulated the cars that are on the roads."

"We stand today on the threshold of the post-antibiotic era, in the earliest days of a time when simple s ... will kill people once again. In fact, they already are. People are dying of infections again, because of a phenomenon called antibiotic resistance."

"For most people, antibiotic resistance is a hidden , unless they have the misfortune to contract an infection themselves or have a family member or friend unlucky enough to become infected. Drug-resistant infections have no celebrity spokespeople, negligible political support, and few patients’ organizations advocating for them. If we think of resistant infections, we imagine them as something rare, occurring to people unlike us, whoever we are: people who are in nursing homes at the end of their lives, or dealing with the drain of chronic illness, or in intensive-care units after terrible trauma. But resistant infections are a vast and common problem that occur in every part of daily life: to children in day care, athletes playing sports, teens going for piercings, people getting healthy in the gym. And though common, resistant bacteria are a grave threat and getting worse. They are responsible for at least 700,000 deaths around the world each year: 23,000 in the United States, 25,000 in Europe, more than 63,000 babies in India. Beyond those deaths, bacteria that are resistant to antibiotics cause millions of illnesses — two million annually just in the United States — and cost billions in health care spending, lost wages, and lost national productivity. It is predicted that by 2050, antibiotic resistance will cost the world $100 trillion and will cause a staggering 10 million deaths per year."

"(excerpt from Big Chicken: The Incredible Story of How Antibiotics Created Modern Agriculture and Changed the Way the World Eats by Maryn McKenna, pp, 24–25 of 1st edition ((isbn|1426217668}})"

"… most people read for some combination of intellectual enchantment and emotional identification. And the challenge for so many stories around is the emotional identification. How do we find something to engage the reader’s, or viewer’s, emotion in such a way that they stick with us through the technical, didactic parts?"

"We give antibiotics to most of the meat animals on the planet on most days of their lives — and we don't give them those antibiotics because the animals are sick. We give them because, back in the 1950s, it was discovered that if you give tiny doses of antibiotics to animals — much too small to cure an infection — you will cause them to put on weight faster, which is an economic benefit to the farmer or the producer. And, then, a little while after that, it was discovered that if you gave a slightly larger dose — but still not enough to cure an infection ... what would technically be called a sub-therapeutic dose — you could protect animals from the diseases that spread in crowded barns and feedlots — those barns and feedlots becoming crowded because of this temptation to grow animals faster and faster. So that’s where we are today — all around the world."

"Studies of the quantum properties of black holes by Stephen Hawking and Jacob Bekenstein in the 1970s led to the development of the , which makes the maximum amount of that can fit into any volume of space-time proportional to roughly one quarter the area of its . The largest number of informational s a universe of our size can hold is about 10122."

"… The whole expanding universe was described by the equations of general relativity, Einstein's theory of space and time and gravity, but the singularity was the one place where the equations couldn't go. If general relativity provides a map of the universe, the singularity is the uncharted spot that the cartographers aren't sure how to draw. '. Quantum dragons, most likely. The singularity suggested that general relativity would eventually give way to a more fundamental theory, but physicists already knew that Einstein's theory wasn't compatible with quantum mechanics, the theory that describes the behavior of matter at extremely small scales. In their day-to-day lives physicists could ignore the problem by keeping the two theories separate, using general relativity to describe how big things such as planets and galaxies distort spacetime and using quantum mechanics to describe the strange dice game subatomic particles play. But at the end of the day, the separation can't hold up."

"... now I know that physics is about uncovering the reality behind appearances. It's about glimpsing this deep and hidden architecture of existence itself. It's about embracing that the world is not what it seems and that everything is stranger and simpler than we can imagine, and yet comprehensible."

"Putnam's insight was that quantum theory requires us to conceive of a world in which cognition is an active, participatory process — one that’s not mediated by internal representations. And so that’s what Putnam set out to do. He wanted to create a model of the brain and a philosophy of mind that replaced the old word “observer” with the new word “participator”."

"If stood out to voters from the rest of the , aside from a willingness to say directly the kinds of things usually carefully dogwhistled, it was in his rants about trade and his lack of interest in dismantling the remnants of the welfare state. For white Americans anxiously looking at their disappearing stability, Mr. Trump was a bomb they were willing to throw at a system they felt was failing them. He emotionally echoed their outrage and gave them a place to direct their anger, the age-old right-wing populist trick of refracting it both upward at elites and downward at minorities."

", former managing director at turned journalist and author of All the President’s Bankers, says that rather than make sincere promises Trump simply attacked weaknesses, taking advantage of widespread anger at Wall Street to score points against first his Republican opponents and then . , she points out, was his finance adviser the whole time. “There were more apparent Wall Street connections through Hillary Clinton because of the foundation, the speeches and because of that were real,” she says, “but these are bipartisan relationships; Wall Street is a bipartisan opportunist.” (That relationship is visible in New York City, where , formerly of Goldman Sachs, serves as deputy mayor to .)"

"... the expectation that we will love our jobs isn't actually all that old. Once upon a time, it was assumed, to put it bluntly, that work sucked, and that people would avoid it if at all humanly possible. From the until about about thirty or forty years ago, the tended to live off its wealth. The ancient Greeks had slaves and —a lower class of workers, including manual laborers, skilled artisans, and tradespeople—to do the work so that the upper classes could enjoy their leisure time and participate in community life. If you've ever read a novel and wondered how those people who don't seem to do much of anything (except hem and haw about whom to marry) got by, you get the general picture. Work, to the wealthy, was for someone else to do."

"I never cried about the cancer, or anything else, but I did that day."

"There were a lot of votes, as I look back, that were pretty big and important."

"I’m not looking back because there’s so much going forward that I need to get my arms around."

"I’m a fairly spiritual person, and I’ve felt I’ve been led to every job I’ve had."

"When you’re in government, there’s so much stuff that sometimes you don’t see as clearly — the specific needs and issues — because there’s so much fog that gets injected into each issue. And I think I’m able again to go back to the basics of where I was when I started in this business, which is: I’m here to represent my constituents and make life better for them. Pretty simple."

"I thought it was so unfair that they didn’t have the kind of support that we did in Moorestown, and that we should find a way to help them."

"They wanted a more youthful look. I was anchoring with men who had white hair."

"For women, once your age exceeds your bra size, they take you off the air."

"She’s been a competitor all her life, and she’s been a competitor against that disease"

"I am a woman who worked in men’s fields for a long time. I insisted on working on the city side of the paper and not the women’s pages. I did it all on my own. Women have to be willing to work and produce and not just expect favors because they are women."

"I’m tired of employing foreigners all the time in foreign countries and helping them out, who plied her district in an American-made station wagon with the license plate, I want to help out Americans."

"Women have to be willing to work and produce, and not just expect favors because they are women."

"Congresswoman Bentley worked with tenacity, energy, and passion on behalf of her constituents, making her a rare breed in politics and a role model to public servants across Maryland."

"Bentley enjoyed wide name recognition from her work as a journalist and her time on the Federal Maritime Commission."

"She was renowned as a journalist and politician, paving the way for women in journalism, advocating for the maritime community, and fighting for the people."

"There has been no one, who has championed the vital role the Port plays in both the global economy and our everyday lives more than Helen."

"Many aspects of her private life continue to remain a mystery, including whether or not she married and had children. The origins of her unusual first name also remain unknown."

"America the beautiful, Let me sing of thee; Burger King and Dairy Queen From sea to shining sea."

"There was hardly a fence left standing all the way from to . The fields were trampled down and the road was lined with carcasses of horses, hogs, and cattle that the invaders, unable either to consume or to carry away with them, had wantonly shot down to starve out the people and prevent them from making their crops. The stench in some places was unbearable; every few hundred yards we had to hold our noses or stop them with the cologne Mrs. Elzey had given us, and it proved a great boon. The dwellings that were standing all showed signs of pillage, and on every plantation we saw the charred remains of the and packing-screw, while here and there, lone chimney-stacks, " 's Sentinels," told of homes laid in ashes."

"text at archive.org (See .)"

"The miserable, money loving wretches that these Yankees are: they even have the impudence to paint their advertisements of s and s upon the and the rocks that jut from the ."

"... by far the most active agent in the dissemination of both s and seeds is man. This is the frequent result of intention on his part, in the introduction and cultivation of new grains, fruits, and s, and he works to the same end unconsciously and often to his great detriment by the transportation of the s or seeds of pernicious weeds in the dirt clinging to s and s, and the mixture of impurities with his seeds through ignorance, carelessness, or unavoidable causes. This mode of , however, is purely artificial, and except in the case of a few weeds that have adjusted themselves to the conditions of cultivation, is not correlated with any special adaptations in the plants themselves, many of our most widely distributed weeds, such as the , the , and the , possessing very imperfect natural means of dispersal."

"A very remarkable development of s takes place in the "" of Mexico and Florida, which begins life as a small , from seeds dropped by birds on the boughs or trunks of trees. When it gets well started, the young plant sends down enormous aërial roots, which find their way to the ground, and in time so completely envelop the host that it is literally strangled to death ... When this support is removed, the sheathing roots take its place and becomes to all intents and purposes the stem of the fig tree, which now leads an independent life."

"My good habits: I don’t really watch television. I read a lot. I teach, which makes me think about what makes good work. I run, which helps me work out s and combat nerves about a first book. I parent, which is radically humbling and physical and informs my characterizations. I always have a in progress. I try not to read rejection letters twice."

"As a , I want to deepen my relationship to the natural world. I have no need to dominate nature, just a desire to live a little closer to it. When I read the work of female naturalists like LaBastille and Robin Kimmerer, whose work blends the scientific, tribal and spiritual, I sense a shared love and humility in the relationship between self and nature, not the loud note of personal triumph and chest-thumping we hear so loudly in early environmental work."

"... crying at your own work is like laughing at your own joke — it's just not done."

"and I grew up, thirty years apart, in the small town of , situated on the in eastern North Carolina. A life-size portrait of Gurganus hung in our local library’s entryway, and I used to leaf through a copy of his best-known novel, “,” while waiting for my piano lessons to start. (Gurganus knew my music teacher, Gene Featherstone, socially. “A sweetheart,” he assured me.) For me, Gurganus was proof that you could come from the place where I lived—a place steeped in propriety, religion, and tradition—and become a writer."

"Vermont sort of demands humility and equanimity. No one really cares if you’re fancy or high achieving, and if you lead with that energy you will learn quickly that it’s unwelcome. There’s a coldness here that shocked me for years—but I’ve learned to appreciate the authenticity. No one’s faking much of anything; there’s no lipstick on the pigs here."

"Today the journey is ended, I have worked out the mandates of fate; Naked, alone, undefended, I knock at the Uttermost Gate. Behind is life and its longing, Its trial, its trouble, its sorrow, Beyond is the Infinite Morning Of a day without a tomorrow."

"It is only the women whose eyes have been washed clear with tears who get the broad vision that makes them little sisters to all the world."

"The women of my class were absolutely amazing. They didn’t think of themselves as pioneers in any way and integrated into the community in a great fashion and really contributed so much."

"Number one, after today, every weekday starts with an 8 a.m. class. Number two, everything costs more when you are the one who has to pay for it. And number three, in life, it’s not who you know; it’s whom you know."

"Ever since the evacuation of Americans of Japanese ancestry and Japanese along the Pacific Coast was proposed, I have pointed out that the issue was one of race and on that basis affected anyone who was physically distinguishable as ‘colored’"

"To visit evacuation [evacuated] neighborhoods and talk with neighbors of the ‘evil, treacherous, fifth column menaces’ who are being summarily moved away, who have been adjudged guilty without any trial at which to claim innocence was to acknowledge an event with all earmarks of a legalized community lynching."

"“Friends, this is how Hitler made little Nazis: by reaching the children and youth through stories and pictures, he taught them to fear and hate certain groups"

"Through friends and newspapers I have maintained a fairly close contact with the evacuee-victims of our lack of confidence in American education and government agencies. On Christmas Eve it was my pleasure to have as a houseguest an old friend who is teaching in the relocation center at Poston. I hasten to suggest that Mr. Leffingwell could find among the Japanese and Nisei internees some real characters whose story, recounted by him in picture, would set before his small readers an example of courage, sensitivity, forgiveness and humility such as would set his cartoon aside from the petty humdrum of its fellows."

"Americans of Chinese ancestry share in disproportionate measure the apprehension of other non-Whites with regard to the summary treatment of Americans of Japanese ancestry. Tightening of residential restrictions against them, for instance, in the neighborhood surrounding San Francisco’s ‘Chinatown’ gives basis for their fears."

"Joint hosts on the negroes’ invitation would be Nisei, American Indians and other Americans whose physical characteristics make them detectable. I have heard of no such observance during Brotherhood week."

"As a young woman, to speak up and to use your voice and to have a backbone, it’s not always natural. But I think it’s really a powerful tool."

"Once, while reporting out a story about Uber, I saw lots of Uber reporters and sources were on Telegram at the same time, or had been within five minutes of one another. I experienced a horrifying cocktail of anxiety and agitation. I try to use it sparingly."

"Operating system updates are like a periodic hazing ritual."

"I’m not super hopeful about returns here, since these are lower-margin businesses than software companies. But some will get out the door fast enough to make money for early investors."

"The fact that women and men are willing to talk openly about abuse, harassment and bullying is a huge improvement."

"The conversations are uncomfortable, and the discomfort is also an improvement. Few people in power who feel comfortable with the status quo push for systemic changes that level the playing field."

"I hope they’re treated as kindly as the white guys who are dead weight at their venture funds and who mismanage their companies, but are given third and fourth and fifth chances. The change is always slow and imperfect, but it has to start somewhere."

"If you believe you’ll have to try and fail a lot to make a killer product, it’s not a bad idea to work on fun, lighthearted and relatively cheap products that you can quickly learn from."

"There were classes and professors I liked, but I had no professional aspirations."

"They [Beijing journalist expatriates] liked talking to people and being in the city. They didn’t live in gated communities with maids."

"I don't buy a lot of bags or shoes, but it's easier to cut beef out of your diet than to not get the new pair of sneakers you need."

"I want people to feel they can do things. They may not be easy things, but the possibility of change exists."

"I also think the scale of the change is only going to be solved by governmental action and corporate responsibility, which often will come from governmental regulation. Which is why it's so important to be able to vote and understand these issues."

"When you are dying, at least in my limited experience, you start remembering everything. Images come in flashes — people and places and stray conversations — and refuse to stop."

"The diagnosis was acute myeloid leukemia, with a rare mutation called Inversion 3. It was mostly seen in older patients. Every doctor I saw asked me if I had spent a lot of time at Ground Zero, given how common blood cancers are among first responders. I was in New York on 9/11, in the sixth grade, but I didn’t visit the site until years later. I am not elderly — I had just turned thirty-four."

"I did not — could not — believe that they were talking about me. I had swum a mile in the pool the day before, nine months pregnant. I wasn’t sick. I didn’t feel sick. I was actually one of the healthiest people I knew. I regularly ran five to ten miles in Central Park. I once swam three miles across the Hudson River — eerily, to raise money for the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society. I work as an environmental journalist, and for one article I skied the Birkebeiner, a fifty-kilometre cross-country race in Wisconsin, which took me seven and a half hours. I loved to have people over for dinner and to make cakes for my friends’ birthdays. I went to museums and plays and got to jump in a cranberry bog for my job. I had a son whom I loved more than anything and a newborn I needed to take care of. This could not possibly be my life."

"I ended up spending five weeks at Columbia-Presbyterian, and the strangeness and sadness of what I was being told about myself made me hunt for the humor in it. I didn't know what else to do. I decided that everyone in the hospital had Munchausen syndrome by proxy, and I was their target. It was a joke that I found funnier than everyone else did. Later, when I was bald and had a scrape on my face from a fall, my joke was that I was a busted-up Voldemort."

"I know that not everyone can be married to a doctor, but, if you can, it’s a very good idea. He is perfect, and I feel so cheated and so sad that I don't get to keep living the wonderful life I had with this kind, funny, handsome genius I managed to find. My parents and my brother and sister, too, have been raising my children and sitting in my various hospital rooms almost every day for the last year and a half. They have held my hand unflinchingly while I have suffered, trying not to show their pain and sadness in order to protect me from it. This has been a great gift, even though I feel their pain every day. For my whole life, I have tried to be good, to be a good student and a good sister and a good daughter, and to protect my mother and never make her upset or angry. Now I have added a new tragedy to her life, to our family's life, and there’s nothing I can do to stop it."

"During the latest clinical trial, my doctor told me that he could keep me alive for a year, maybe. My first thought was that my kids, whose faces live permanently on the inside of my eyelids, wouldn’t remember me. My son might have a few memories, but he'll probably start confusing them with pictures he sees or stories he hears. I didn't ever really get to take care of my daughter — I couldn't change her diaper or give her a bath or feed her, all because of the risk of infection after my transplants. I was gone for almost half of her first year of life. I don't know who, really, she thinks I am, and whether she will feel or remember, when I am gone, that I am her mother."

"Meanwhile, during the CAR-T treatment, a method developed over many decades with millions of dollars of government funding, my cousin Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., was in the process of being nominated and confirmed as the Secretary of Health and Human Services. Throughout my treatment, he had been on the national stage: previously a Democrat, he was running for President as an Independent, but mostly as an embarrassment to me and the rest of my immediate family. In August, 2024, he suspended his campaign and endorsed Donald Trump, who said that he was going to "let Bobby go wild" on health. My mother wrote a letter to the Senate, to try and stop his confirmation; my brother had been speaking out against his lies for months. I watched from my hospital bed as Bobby, in the face of logic and common sense, was confirmed for the position, despite never having worked in medicine, public health, or the government. Suddenly, the health-care system on which I relied felt strained, shaky. Doctors and scientists at Columbia, including George, didn’t know if they would be able to continue their research, or even have jobs. (Columbia was one of the Trump Administration’s first targets in its crusade against alleged antisemitism on campuses; in May, the university laid off a hundred and eighty researchers after federal-funding cuts.)"

"Bobby has said, "There’s no vaccine that is safe and effective." Bobby probably doesn’t remember the millions of people who were paralyzed or killed by polio before the vaccine was available. My dad, who grew up in New York City in the nineteen-forties and fifties, does remember. Recently, I asked him what it was like when he got the vaccine. He said that it felt like freedom."

"My plan, had I not gotten sick, was to write a book about the oceans — their destruction, but also the possibilities they offer. During treatment, I learned that one of my chemotherapy drugs, cytarabine, owes its existence to an ocean animal: a sponge that lives in the Caribbean Sea, Tectitethya crypta. This discovery was made by scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, who first synthesized the drug in 1959, and who almost certainly relied on government funding, the very thing that Bobby has already cut. I won't write about cytarabine. I won’t find out if we were able to harness the power of the oceans, or if we let them boil and turn into a garbage dump. My son knows that I am a writer and that I write about our planet. Since I've been sick, I remind him a lot, so that he will know that I was not just a sick person."

"I let the memories come and go. So many of them are from my childhood that I feel as if I'm watching myself and my kids grow up at the same time. Sometimes I trick myself into thinking I'll remember this forever, I'll remember this when I'm dead. Obviously, I won't. But since I don't know what death is like and there's no one to tell me what comes after it, I'll keep pretending. I will keep trying to remember."

"What is a bore? Maxwell definition: a vacuum cleaner of society, sucking up everything and giving nothing. How do you spot one? Bores are always eager to be seen talking to you."

"Bores put you in a mental cemetery while you are still walking."

"Under pressure, people admit to murder, setting fire to the village church, or robbing a bank, but never to being bores."

"The memory of one who is taken into the heart of a little child is kept forever green."