[quotes] A Darker Shade of Magic - V.E. Schwab 2015

 

"Aren't you afraid of dying?" He asked Lila now.
She looked at him as if it were a strange question. And then she shook her head. "Death comes for everyone," she said simply. "I'm not afraid of dying. But I am afraid of dying here." She swept her hand over the room, the tavern, the city. "I'd rather die on an adventure than live standing still."

"She'd wanted freedom. She'd wanted adventure. And she didn't think she minded dying for it. She only wished dying didn't hurt so much."

[quotes] In the Dream House - Carmen Maria Machado 2019

 

"... and here you are learning that lesbian relationships are, somehow, different - more intense and beautiful but also more painful and volatile, because women are all of these things too."

"A house is never apolitical. It is conceived, constructed, occupied, and policed by people with power, needs, and fears. Windex is political. So is the incense you burn to hide the smell of sex, or a fight."

"Fantasy is, I think, the defining cliche of female queerness. No wonder we joke about U-Hauls on the second date. To find desire, love, everyday joy without men's accompanying bullshit is a pretty decent working definition of paradise."

"Most types of domestic abuse are completely legal."

"You agree to go to the museum because art has always had a balancing effect on your mind; it is a reminder that you are more than a body and its accompanying grief."

"You are not a parent; no one has ever told you that they hated you."

"This is what I keep returning to: how people decide who is or is not an unreliable narrator. And after that decision has been made, what do we do with people who attempt to construct their own vision of justice?"

"Queer folks fail each other too. This seems like an obvious thing to say; it is not, for example, a surprise to nonwhite queers or trans queers that intracommunity loyalty goes only so far, especially when it must confront the hegemony of the state. But even within ostensibly parallel power dynamics, the desire to save face, to present a narrative of uniform morality, can defeat every other interest."

"You did not believe that this was a battle that would be won in your lifetime, and so you resolved yourself to live in that wobbly space where your humanity and rights were openly debated on cable news, and the defense of them was not a requirement for the presidency."

"Donald Trump was elected president. People cried at the dinner table."

"I imagine that, one day, I will invite young queers over for tea and cheese platters and advice, and I will be able to tell them: you can be hurt by people who look just like you. Not only can it happen, it probably will, because the world is full of hurt people who hurt people. Even if the dominant culture considers you an anomaly, that doesn't mean you can't be common, common as fucking dirt."

"That there's a real ending to anything is, I'm pretty sure, the lie of all autobiographical writing. You have to choose to stop somewhere. You have to let the reader go."

[quotes] Effective Data Storytelling - Brent Dykes 2020

 

"If literacy is defined as the ability to read and write, data literacy can be defined as the ability to understand and communicate data."

"I have observed five key steps to driving value from analytics: data, information, insight, decision, and action."

"The right fact at the right moment may catch your attention, but it may not speak as well to other people as it does to you. On its own, data often doesn't possess the inherent strength needed to be more than just noise - let alone to drive action. Without the right context and explanation, it can easily be misunderstood, forgotten, or dismissed."

"Only when the facts are inconsistent with our preferred judgments do we question their accuracy or demand more data."

"Two key tools in their handbook underline the importance of telling stories with data. First, when you seek to correct a myth or misconception, you must be mindful to craft an alternative narrative around your new facts. Otherwise, your audience will be left with a gap in their mental model where the myth was debunked with nothing to fill it."

"Whenever we are fortunate enough to come across a valuable insight, we have a responsibility as its steward or guardian to see it realize its full potential."

"Each event serves a purpose in advancing the story and developing the characters. Similarly, how you structure and sequence the information forms the backbone of your data story. Sometimes, what is left out is just as critical to the story's success as what is included."

"On closer examination, it is hard to separate the storyteller from the story. The insights or ideas that someone shares through visual narratives represent discoveries that have enlightened that individual's mind. A data story can never be just an arbitrary collection of facts that is passively disseminated. Each data story is prepared and told by someone who cares about the numbers and sees a purpose in sharing the data with others."

"Digital marketing evangelist and author Avinash Kaushik recommends evaluating each insight in the following three ways, which form the foundation of his 'so what' test:
1. Why should your audience care?
2. What should they do about it?
3. What's the potential business impact?"

"Whenever possible you want to place data elements that are being compared in close proximity to each other."

"You start by confirming you have the right data to visualize each story point. Your choice of what data to visualize can mute or amplify the points you're trying to make."

"Basically, this means you need to limit your scene to feature only one visual. You can have multiple charts in the same scene as long as they're tied to a single story point."

"The natural consequence of sharing an insight is change."

"As this is a relatively new field within the ancient discipline of storytelling, we'll continue to see new innovations and approaches in data storytelling as our capabilities and creativity evolve."

[quotes] The Slum Dreamer - Wilfred Mwangi 2013

 

"I had not sought these expectations but I had always fulfilled them."

"This culture of sharing was very interesting to me because in the urban town where I lived with my dad, this never happened. If you ran out of an ingredient, you had to go buy it or do without it. Nobody would even think to borrow salt from their neighbor."

"So out of necessity, portions in Kibera are just large enough to get you through the immediate moment of need, for the next moment is not guaranteed... In Kibera you buy a cube of cooking fat just enough for whatever meal you are making at that particular moment for nobody knows what the next meal would be or what it will bring with it. In the townships, French fries are portioned by the plate, but in Kibera you buy French fries by the teaspoon; just enough to trick your taste buds after months of salivating."

"The joke around our family was that my dad had the greatest ideas until he actually got the means to implement them, at which point they magically disappeared."

"For the first time now, I understand that the people living in Kibera are not losers as I had always thought of them. They are the people courageous enough to face indignation in an effort to keep their hopes of a better life alive. Kibera offers them the only real chance of living in Niarobi where all the jobs are, and while they could go back to their rural areas and not have to shit in plastic bags or pee on their door steps, they have chosen instead not to give up on their dreams and have taken a slap from Kibera smack in the face, but still keep going."

"So Kibera was really where people with nothing but hope and the audacity to do what it takes moved to keep their dreams alive."

"I will finally join the all those people waking up early in the morning to begin the long walk from Kibera to their various work places. I too have a job to go to. I too have something to walk for. It is not much, but it is everything. It is also a starting point. I will pour my heart and blood into it. I will cherish it and treasure it, because it is a job that will afford me the privilege of continuing my stay in Kibera,"

"Kibera had first shocked me, then welcomed me, toughened me, seasoned me, opened my eyes to a world beyond my imagination, chewed me, and finally threatened to take my will and desire to live again, to swallow me. With its stinking air that I had twitched my nose to and its infested waters that had given me bilharzias, I had come to rely on Kibera to live, just one day at a time, one moment at a time, penny after penny. I had learned to appreciate the now."

[quotes] Zero to One - Peter Thiel 2014

 

"Google's motto - 'Don't be evil' - is in part a branding ploy, but it's also characteristic of a kind of business that's successful enough to take ethics seriously without jeopardizing its own existence."

"In business, money is either an important thing or it is everything."

"Then monopolies can keep innovating because profits enable them to make the long-term plans and to finance the ambitious research projects that firms locked in competition can't dream of."

"As a good rule of thumb, proprietary technology must be at least 10 times better than its closest substitute in some important dimension to lead to a real monopolistic advantage."

"Therefore, every startup should start with a very small market. Always err on the side of starting too small. The reason is simple: it's easier to dominate a small market than a large one. If you think your initial market might be too big, it almost certainly is."

"As you craft a plan to expand to adjacent markets, don't disrupt: avoid competition as much as possible."

"A business with a good definite plan will always be underrated in a world where people see the future as random."

"In 1906, economic Vilfredo Pareto discovered what became the 'Pareto principle,' or the 80-20 rule, when he noticed that 20% of the people owned 80% of the land in Italy - a phenomenon that he found just as natural as the fact that 20% of the peapods in his garden produced 80% of the peas... And monopoly businesses capture more value than millions of undifferentiated competitors."

"Anyone who prefers owning a part of your company to being paid in cash reveals a preference for the long term and a commitment to increasing your company's value in the future. Equity can't create perfect incentives, but it's the best way for a founder to keep everyone in the company broadly aligned."

"A startup is a team of people on a mission, and a good culture is just what that looks like on the inside."

"Just cover the basics like health insurance and then promise what no others can: the opportunity to do irreplaceable work on a unique problem alongside great people. You probably can't be the Google of 2014 in terms of compensation or perks, but you can be the Google of 1999 if you already have good answers about your mission and team."

"Most businesses get zero distribution channels to work: poor sales rather than bad product is the most common cause of failure."

"The most valuable businesses of coming decades will be built by entrepreneurs who seek to empower people rather than try to make them obsolete."

"Progress isn't held back by some difference between corporate greed and nonprofit goodness; instead, we're held back by the sameness of both. Just as corporations tend to copy each other, nonprofits all tend to push the same priorities."

"Doing something different is what's truly good for society - and it's also what allows a business to profit by monopolizing a new market. The best projects are likely to be overlooked, not trumpeted by a crowd; the best problems to work on are often the ones nobody else even tries to solve."

"Founders are important not because they are the only ones whose work has value, but rather because a great founder can bring out the best work from everybody at his company."

"Our task today is to find singular ways to create the new things that will make the future not just different, but better - to go from 0 to 1. The essential first step is to think for yourself. Only by seeing our world anew, as fresh and strange as it was to the ancients who saw it first, can we both re-create it and preserve it for the future."

[quotes] The New Jim Crow - Michelle Alexander 2010

 

"Sociologists have frequently observed that governments use punishment primarily as a tool of social control, and thus the extent or severity of punishment is often unrelated to actual crime patterns."

"The colorblind public consensus that prevails in America today - i.e., the widespread belief that race no longer matters - has blinded us to the realities of race in our society and facilitated the emergence of a new caste system."

"Following the collapse of each system of control, there has been a period of confusion - transition - in which those who are most committed to racial hierarchy search for new means to achieve their goals within the rules of the game as currently defined."

"Competing images of the poor as 'deserving' and 'undeserving' became central components of the debate. Ultimately, the racialized nature of this imagery became a crucial resource for conservatives, who succeeded in using law and order rhetoric in their effort to mobilize the resentment of white working-class voters, many of whom felt threatened by the sudden progress of African Americans."

"Condemning 'welfare queens' and criminal 'predators,' he rode into office with the strong support of disaffected whites - poor and working-class whites who felt betrayed by the Democratic Party's embrace of the civil rights agenda."

"... the president signed the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986 into law. Among other harsh penalties, the legislation included mandatory minimum sentences for the distribution of cocaine, including far more severe punishment for distribution for crack - associated with blacks - than powder cocaine, associated with whites."

"The War on Drugs, cloaked in race-neutral language, offered whites opposed to racial reform a unique opportunity to express their hostility toward blacks and black progress, without being exposed to the charge of racism."

"Ninety percent of those admitted to prison for drug offenses in many states were black or Latino, yet the mass incarceration of communities of color was explained in race-neutral terms, an adaptation to the needs and demands of the current political climate. The New Jim Crow was born."

"Relatively little organized opposition to the drug war currently exists, and any dramatic effort to scale back the war may be publicly condemned as 'soft' on crime. The war has become institutionalized. It is no longer a special program or politicized project; it is simply the way things are done."

"Racial discrimination, the Court seemed to suggest, was something that simply must be tolerated in the criminal justice system, provided no one admits to racial bias."

"... the impact of the biased treatment is magnified with each additional step into the criminal justice system. African American youth account for 16 percent of all youth, 28 percent of all juvenile arrests, 35 percent of the youth waived to adult criminal court, and 58 percent of youth admitted to state adult prison. A major reason for these disparities is unconscious and conscious racial biases infecting decision making."

"A hundreds years ago, our nation put those considered less than human in shackles; less than one hundred years ago, we relegated them to the other side of town; today we put them in cages. Once released, they find that a heavy and cruel hand has been laid upon them."

"They don't have to call you a nigger anymore. They just say you're a felon."

"The notion that ghetto families do not, in fact, want those things, and instead are perfectly content to live in crime-ridden communities, feeling no shame or regret about the fate of their young men is, quite simply, racist. It is impossible to imagine that we would believe such a thing about whites."

"If we had actually learned to show love, care, compassion, and concern across racial lines during the Civil Rights Movement - rather than go colorblind - mass incarceration would not exist today."

"The widespread and mistaken belief that racial animus is necessary for the creation and maintenance of racialized systems of social control is the most important reason that we, as a nation, have remained in deep denial."

"Under the usual-residence rule, the Census Bureau counts imprisoned individuals as residents of the jurisdiction in which they are incarcerated. Because most new prison construction occurs in predominately white, rural areas, white communities benefit from inflated population totals at the expense of the urban, overwhelmingly minority communities from which the prisoners come."

"... white ex-offenders may actually have an easier time gaining employment than African Americans without a criminal record. To be a black man is to be thought of as a criminal, and to be a black criminal is to be despicable - a social pariah."

"At its core, then, mass incarceration, like Jim Crow, is a 'race-making institution.' It serves to define the meaning and significance of race in America."

"Laws that said nothing about race operated to discriminate because those charged with enforcement were granted tremendous discretion, and they exercised that discretion in a highly discriminatory manner."

"This system of control depends far more on racial indifference (defined as a lack of compassion and caring about race and racial groups) than racial hostility - a feature it actually shares with its predecessors."

"It is fair to say that we have witnessed an evolution in the United States from a racial caste system based entirely on exploitation (slavery), to one based largely on subordination (Jim Crow), to one defined by marginalization (mass incarceration)."

"The colorblindness ideal is premised on the notion that we, as a society, can never be trusted to see race and treat each other fairly or with genuine compassion. A commitment to color consciousness, by contrast, places faith in our capacity as humans to show care and concern for others, even as we are fully cognizant of race and possible racial differences."

"We should hope not for a colorblind society but instead for a world in which we can see each other fully, learn from each other, and do what we can to respond to each other with love. That was King's dream - a society that is capable of seeing each of us, as we are, with love. That is a goal worth fighting for."

"Black success stories tend to credence to the notion that anyone, no matter how poor or how black you may be, can make it to the top, if only you try hard enough. These stories 'prove' that race is no longer relevant. Whereas black success stories undermine the logic of Jim Crow, they actually reinforce the system of mass incarceration. Mass incarceration depends for its legitimacy on the widespread belief that all those who appear trapped at the bottom actually chose their fate."

"People of color, because of the history of racial subjugation and exclusion, often experience success and failure vicariously through the few who achieve positions of power, fame, and fortune."

"Perhaps the time has come to give up the racial bribes and begin an honest conversation about race in America. The topic of the conversation should be how us can include all of us."

[quotes] Naked Statistics - Charles Wheelan 2013

 

"It's easy to lie with statistics, but it's hard to tell the truth without them."

"The real problem is that the average income in America is not equal to the income of the average American."

"The Democrats, who engineered this tax increase, pointed out (correctly) that the state income tax rate was increased by 2 percentage points (from 3 percent to 5 percent). The Republicans pointed out (also correctly) that the state income tax had been raised by 67 percent."

"The key lesson is to pay attention to the unit of analysis. Who or what is being described, and is that different from the 'who' or 'what' being described by someone else?"

"Nominal figures are not adjusted for inflation. A comparison of the nominal cost of a government program in 1970 to the nominal cost of the same program in 2011 merely compares the size of the checks that the Treasury wrote in those two years - without any recognition that a dollar in 1970 bought more stuff than a dollar in 2011."

"There is a common business aphorism: 'You can't manage what you can't measure.' True But you had better be darn sure that what you are measuring is really what you are trying to manage."

"But you had better be darn certain that the folks being evaluated can't make themselves look better (statistically) in ways that are not consistent with the goal at hand."

"When you solicit public opinion, the phrasing of the question and the choice of language can matter enormously."

"According to this research, it is not the stress associated with major responsibilities that will kill you; it is the stress associated with being told what to do while having little say in how or when it gets done."

"The problem is that the mechanics of regression analysis are not the hard part; the hard part is determining which variables ought to be considered in the analysis and how that can best be done. Regression analysis is like one of those fancy power tools. It is relatively easy to use, but hard to use well - and potentially dangerous when used improperly."

"An association between two variables is like a fingerprint at the scene of the crime. It points us in the right direction, but it's rarely enough to convict. (And sometimes a fingerprint at the scene of a crime doesn't belong to the perpetrator.) Any regression analysis needs a theoretical underpinning. Why are the explanatory variables in the equation? What phenomena from other disciplines can explain the observed results?"

"In the case of a randomized, controlled experiment, the control group is the counterfactual. In cases where a controlled experiment is impractical or immoral, we need to find some other way of approximating the counterfactual. Our understanding of the world depends on finding clever ways to do that."

[quotes] The Three-Body Problem - Cixin Liu 2006 (trans. Ken Liu 2014)

 

"The abbot shook his head and said, 'No, emptiness is not nothingness. Emptiness is a type of existence. You must use this existential emptiness to fill yourself.'"

"Does it represent the yearning for order, or the surrender to chaos?"

"We can have no sea birds, but we can't be without oil. Can you imagine life without oil?"

"These are the rules of the game of civilization: The first priority is to guarantee the existence of the human race and their comfortable life. Everything else is secondary."

"'I don't care if this is meaningless. I can't stop. If I stop I'll fall apart.' Evans cut down a crooked branch with a practiced swing."

"A society with such advanced science must also have more advanced moral standards."

[quotes] The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood 1986

 

"But there's a literary form I haven't mentioned yet: the literature of witness. Offred records her story as best she can; then she hides it, trusting that it may be discovered later, by someone who is free to understand it and share it. This is an arc of hope: every recorded story implies a future reader."

"I avoid looking down at my body, not so much because it's shameful or immodest but because I don't want to see it. I don't want to look at something that determines me so completely."

"Maybe none of this is about control. Maybe it isn't really about who can own whom, who can do what to whom and get away with it, even as far as death. Maybe it isn't about who can sit and who has to kneel or stand or lie down, legs spread open. Maybe it's about who can do what to whom and be forgiven for it. Never tell me it amounts to the same thing."

"Even though some of them no more than fourteen - Start them soon is the policy, there's not a moment to be lost - still they'll remember. And the ones after them will, for three or four or five years; but after that they won't. They'll always have been in white, in groups of girls; they'll always have been silent."

"Falling in love, I said. Falling into it, we all did then, one way or another.... It was the central thing; it was the way you understood yourself; if it never happened to you, not ever, you would be like a mutant, a creature from outer space. Everyone knew that."

[quotes] Nudge - Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein 2008

  

"The clear lesson here is that consistent and unwavering people, in the private or public sector, can move groups and practices in their preferred direction."

"Small interventions and even coincidences, at a key stage, can produce large variations in the outcome."

"It turns out that if you ask people, the day before the election, whether they intend to vote, you can increase the probability of their voting by as much as 25 percent!"

"One way to start thinking about incentives is to ask four questions about a particular choice architecture:
Who uses?
Who chooses?
Who pays?
Who profits?"

"One solution to the political problem of getting such bills passed may be to use some mental accounting. For example, the revenues from a carbon tax might be paired with a cut in personal tax rates, the funding for Social Security and Medicare, or the provision of universal health insurance. Similarly, the "rights" to pollute in a cap-and-trade system can be auctioned off, and the revenues used in the same way. This linking of costs and benefits might help the pill go down more easily."

"People who want to signal their green credentials are much happier in a Prius than a hybrid Camry because no one will know that the Camry is a hybrid unless she carefully examines some labeling on the car."

"So put it simply, forcing people to choose is not always wise, and remaining neutral is not always possible."

"It is not possible to avoid choice architecture, and in that sense it is not possible to avoid influencing people."