Memorable Stuff I Read This Week

We are all, you see, toys of the life-force. It made you numerically strong, but mentally undeveloped; it made us mentally strong, but physically weak: now it has set us at one another, to see what will happen. A cruel sport, perhaps, from both our points of view, but a very, very old one. Cruelty is as old as life itself. There is some improvement: humour and compassion are the most important of human inventions; but they are not very firmly established yet, though promising well.’

— John Windham / The Midwich Cuckoos 

Sometimes I think we weigh down the people we love most when we’re trying to learn to carry ourselves.

— Brianna Madia / Nowhere for Very Long

The CDC was a gem to the world . . . That standing is gone. So much expertise is gone. People who wanted to go into public health don’t see a future. The debate that we’re all having is, will the CDC ever recover, not how long it will take. I don’t know that it can ever recover to what it was.

—   Wendy Armstrong, vice president of the Infectious Diseases Society of America / “Crisis within CDC is spilling into real world, experts say” / STAT

Oh never let them come to steal our dreams,
never let them entwine us in our bed.
Let us hold on to the shadows
to see if, from our own obscurity,
we emerge and grope along the walls,
lie in wait for the light, to capture it,
till, once and for all time,
it becomes our own, the sun of every day.

— Pablo Neruda / “Emerging”

Exposure to air pollution could increase the risk of developing Lewy body dementia(LBD), a term that includes Parkinson’s disease with dementia. An analysis of data from 56 million people suggests there is a clear link between long-term exposure to PM2.5 — particles smaller than 2.5 micrometres in diameter — and the development of LBD. These pollutants don’t necessarily induce the dementia, but “accelerates the development” in people who are already genetically predisposed to it, says clinician–neuroscientist Hui Chen.

— Flora Graham / “Air pollution raises dementia risk” / Nature Briefing

fist of this tyrant kingdom: my city
of industry, my city of atom bomb,
my city of warheads, of plutonium kept
clandestine, of slow killings
accomplished to more efficiently
kill, of truths & metals
forced underground

— Marissa Davis / “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Dead Fish”

If you want to keep alive in the jungle, you must live as the jungle does…

— John Windham / The Midwich Cuckoos 

What I’m Listening To:

I wanna feel everything
I wanna listen to the idiot sing
Until I can’t feel anything
‘Cause rock ‘n’ roll is dead
But the dead don’t die
The dead don’t die
The dead don’t die
The dead don’t die
The dead don’t die
Whooo!

— Jeff Tweedy / “Lou Reed Was My Babysitter”