“Two hundred and fifty thousand people over the road. Fifty thousand old cars––wounded, steaming. Wrecks along the road, abandoned. Well, what happened to them? What happened to the folks in that car? Did they walk? Where are they? Where does the courage come from? Where does the terrible faith come from? And here’s a story […]
“Not one single history book is objective,” Jason Ripper writes in the final chapter of American Stories, Vol. II. “Merely choosing which topics to include and which to exclude indicates an author’s personal understanding of historical significance. Choice is bias” (260). I heartily agree. This admission of bias is in especially good taste given Ripper’s […]
“Not one single history book is objective. Merely choosing which topics to include and which to exclude indicates an author’s personal understanding of historical significance. Choice is bias.” ––American Stories: Living American History, Vol. II: From 1865, by Jason Ripper, pg. 260 “‘He says it don’t do no good to read books. Says he’s […]
2022 Update: I enjoyed this book much more the second time around compared to my first reading. It’s smarter, more coherent, and more interesting than I remember. I think I understood it better, both because I’m more familiar with some of the ideas Watts was working with, and also because I’m less allergic to the […]
“Shattered civilizations breed more than flies and cholera. They also breed discontent, fear, and openness to new perspectives.” ––American Stories: Living American History, Vol. II: From 1865, by Jason Ripper, pg. 206 “The fact that their actions all seemed to serve the purposes of something else, some vast distributed network slouching toward Bethlehem––sheer coincidence, […]
“Democracy may offer a good chance at safeguarding individual liberty and freedom, but democracy is no guarantee against human frailties, particularly when the democratic process of decision making is muddled by fear and animosity. With each branch of government and the citizenry playing their parts, dislike and mistrust led to the mass incarceration of 110,000 […]
“‘Brain hack is an alternate hypothesis entirely consistent with the observed data. And Occam likes it a lot more than omnipotent sky wizard.’” ––Echopraxia, by Peter Watts, pg. 218 “In the 1920s, it was as if a second Pandora’s box had been discovered, and from inside its hidden dark leaped fads, styles, entertainers, and […]
“We cannot always adjust to our inventions as quickly as we can create them because we do not know what our inventions will do in the long run.” ––American Stories: Living American History, Vol. II: From 1865, by Jason Ripper, pg. 56 “Brüks had educated himself on the way down. He knew what he’d […]
“After a civilization has destroyed or tamed its original wilderness, the civilization then goes about memorializing all that was lost.” ––American Stories: Living American History, Vol. II: From 1865, by Jason Ripper, pg. 24 “‘I know what people tell themselves. You made Siri the man for the job before he was even born, and […]
“All those gut feelings, right or wrong, that had kept the breed alive on the Pleistocene savanna––and they were wrong, so much of the time. False negatives, false positives, the moral algebra of fat men pushed in front of onrushing trolleys. The strident emotional belief that children made you happy, even when all the data […]