R.J.

“At the risk of stating the obvious: nobody is going to make America great again. Nobody even seriously imagines it to be a possibility. America might, it is true, eventually stop outsourcing its manufacturing to China, but if those jobs are ever brought back home, they will return in the form of automated labor. Robots and algorithms will not make America great again—unless by “America” you mean billionaires, and by “great” you mean even richer. Its middle class has been gutted, sold off for scrap. Trump is only the most visible symptom of a disease that has long been sickening the country’s blood—a rapidly metastasizing tumor of inequality, hyper-militarism, racism, surveillance, and fear that we might as well go”
― Mark O'Connell, Notes from an Apocalypse: A Personal Journey to the End of the World and Back

“Simple things are found in ordinariness - but extraordinariness lives inside things that are loved.”
― Laura Chouette

“The facts are really not at all like fish on the fishmonger’s slab. They are like fish swimming about in a vast and sometimes inaccessible ocean; and what the historian catches will depend, partly on chance, but mainly on what part of the ocean he chooses to fish in and what tackle he chooses to use – these two factors being, of course, determined by the kind of fish he wants to catch. By and large, the historian will get the kind of facts he wants.”
― Edward Hallett Carr, What Is History?

“The world would end neither with a bang nor with a whimper, but with a push notification—a buzzing I wasn’t even sure I’d felt, but figured I’d better check anyway, to see if it was real, and what it might portend.”
― Mark O'Connell, Notes from an Apocalypse: A Personal Journey to the End of the World and Back