We are obligated to make our best attempts to become the thing we wish to be, otherwise we forever remain the sorry consorts of our own defeat.

- Nick Cave

The climate catastrophe is screwing with the weather and the seasons. It is amplifying unpredictability—ginning up freak storms, early fires, unexpected mudslides, sudden heat waves. By the time a crisis hits, it is too late for places to plan, and the results will be what they always are: Everyone is rendered vulnerable, though people with money have options that people without money do not.

Our country’s response is too late and all wrong, at a fundamental level. This is the underlying issue, of course: We should have started weaning ourselves off fossil fuels earlier. We need to wean ourselves off fossil fuels faster.

But we are in an emergency now.

-Annie Lowrey

The Sachs quote ‘Death is more universal than life; everyone dies but not everyone lives’ is a bit pompous, definitely privileged, but also a reminder to try…to shake off the shackles preventing us from being our truest selves.

“Someone who grew up in a household of abuse and rejection, then being rejected by what probably felt like the whole entire world, re-traumatizing her in front of the world, it made me feel demoralized as a woman.”

Musician Kathleen Hannah on Sinéad O'Connor (and the hostility she faced after tearing up a photo of the Pope)

Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them.

In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.

-Michael Crichton

“Dear heart, try to understand a mole too used to the dark to believe in light.”

-John le Carré in a letter to Susan Kennaway, with whom he began an affair in 1964

The United States used to be called the New World. It’s a new world again, maybe the way it was becoming new in the 1910s. (Journalist Walter) Lippmann was pragmatic, in many ways conservative, in no way a utopian, but back at that chaotic, pivotal moment he quoted Oscar Wilde’s line that “a map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at,” because social progress only comes by navigating toward hopeful visions of perfection. “Our business is not to lay aside the dream,” Lippman explained, “but to make it plausible. Drag dreams out into the light of day, show their sources, compare them with fact, transform them to possibilities … a dream … with a sense of the possible.”

Kurt Andersen, Evil Geniuses

Strikers love to win; goalies hate to lose.

-Saying among soccer players.

I don’t want you to be hopeful. I want you to panic. I want you to feel the fear I feel every day, and then I want you to act. I want you to act as you would in a crisis. I want you to act as if the house was on fire. Because it is.

Greta Thunberg, 2019 World Economic Forum

An important scientific innovation rarely makes its way by gradually winning over and converting its opponents... A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.

Max Planck

I love the phrase 'character is who you are in the dark' because yeah, it applies to people who do things without seeking credit. But I think it's pretty binary (and therefore a bit unrealistic about the way the mind works and how we evolved), I think we're built to need the eyes of peers...

Jordan Thomas

The invention of the ship is also the invention of the shipwreck.

Paul Virilio, paraphrased

It's very odd to see a virus that singles out a single demographic and attacks them based on their political beliefs. But that's what we have here: a virus that preys most on the people who resist common sense public health measures. It's a vicious, brutal, ironic situation.

Vinay Gupta

[Veil] offered a piece of wisdom that has stuck with me: “I feel like there was something I wanted to communicate about the seemingly illusory nature of human identity, the criteria we use to decide when someone no longer gets our empathy, how little we actually know about each other, especially online,” she wrote in a follow-up email. In those questions about identity, both real and invented, “how strange it is to wrap all that in capital and ‘making a living.’”

- Justin Ling, writing for INPUT, quoting the artist Simone Veil

To be fully seen by somebody, then, and be loved anyhow - this is a human offering that can border on miraculous.

Elizabeth Gilbert

The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless.

Steven Weinberg

Unhealthy moralizing creeps into the most quotidian corners of society, too. When the United States started to get concerned about litter in the 1950s, the American Can Company and other corporations financed a “Keep America Beautiful” campaign to divert attention from the fact that they were manufacturing enormous quantities of cheap, disposable, and profitable packaging, putting the blame instead on individuals for being litterbugs. Willpower-based moral accusations are among the easiest to sling.

Carl Erik Fisher, Columbia University