List post – Lisa Marie Blair

The Week’s End // Coronavirus Edition

This week has been overwhelming, to say the least. A lot of us have been away from work, friends and family, and a lot of us have been working overtime to keep society moving and to care for those most in need. The weekend is on the way now, and my hope is that all of us get a chance to rest and to catch up.

I know we’re all tired of hearing about the coronavirus but I felt it was important to do my part this week by sharing a round up of thoughtful, informative, and trustworthy articles and information on the rapidly spreading virus and our current situation.

I promise that if I post a round-up next week, it will be about anything but this pandemic, but for now, here are some interesting things on the coronavirus outbreak I found around the web this week:

Ballet dancer and performer Ashlee Montague of New York wears a gas mask while she dances in Times Square as the coronavirus outbreak continues in Manhattan, New York City, on March 18, 2020. — The Atlantic, Photos of the Week

1. “‘The Plague’ isn’t trying to panic us, because panic suggests a response to a dangerous but short-term condition from which we can eventually find safety. But there can never be safety—and that is why, for Camus, we need to love our fellow damned humans and work without hope or despair for the amelioration of suffering. Life is a hospice, never a hospital.” — Opinion | Camus on the Coronavirus Bonus: What We Can Learn (and Should Unlearn) From Albert Camus’s The Plague

2. “The Centers for Disease Control recommends we all take steps to clean and sanitize high-touch surfaces in our homes. Below, we get into the weeds of how long the virus might last on surfaces, which disinfectants may kill it, and the steps you should take to keep clean.” — How to Disinfect Everything: Coronavirus Home Cleaning Tips

3. “But social distancing is really better characterized as physical distancing — the social part of it just needs to become more virtual for the time being. Social solidarity has never been more needed.” — Coronavirus: Why social distancing is a thankless task

4. “No one would ever wish for a pandemic to create this scene, which is inextricable from an unfolding financial collapse, extreme social isolation and an untold cost in lives. Yet as leaders grapple with how to heal society in the wake of this extraordinary crisis, and prepare for a future that still includes climate change, it might offer an image of what is possible.” — The Mobility Impacts of Coronavirus

5. “This is not the last major outbreak we’re ever going to see. There’s going to be more outbreaks, and there’s going to be more epidemics. That’s not a maybe. That’s a given. And it’s a result of the way that we, as human beings, are interacting with our planet.” — Why COVID-19 is hitting us now—and how to prepare for the next outbreak

6. “The novel coronavirus is affecting more and more people every day. Businesses are closing. Jobs are on the line. The Red Cross is running low on blood supply. Fortunately, there are ways to help ease some of the burden for others.” — Coronavirus pandemic: 6 things you can do to help Bonus: Go to smile.amazon.com and choose a charity to support with a small percentage of anything you buy.

7. “So now isn‘t a time for panic, but it is a time for preparation—to be ready for weeks or even months when much is shut down.” — Preparing to shelter in place for coronavirus: A printable guide to what you need at home

8. “All over America, the coronavirus is revealing, or at least reminding us, just how much of contemporary American life is bullshit, with power structures built on punishment and fear as opposed to our best interest. Whenever the government or a corporation benevolently withdraws some punitive threat because of the coronavirus, it’s a signal that there was never any good reason for that threat to exist in the first place.” — The coronavirus is exposing the arbitrary, cruel realities of America’s rules.

9. “Hence, today, there is almost no sphere or arena of American life in which the values of predatory capitalism don’t predominate or monopolize. Because society is made up more or less only of predatory capitalism, only those values can ever be expressed. Not even in, say, media, not healthcare, not education — which, in other rich countries, because they are not run for profit, are arenas in which softer and gentler qualities can be expressed, like decency, reason, dignity, purpose, meaning, belonging, truth, care, mercy.” — The Origins of America’s Unique and Spectacular Cruelty

10. “That said, the president and his administration are responsible for grave, costly errors, most especially the epic manufacturing failures in diagnostic testing, the decision to test too few people, the delay in expanding testing to labs outside the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and problems in the supply chain. These mistakes have left us blind and badly behind the curve, and, for a few crucial weeks, they created a false sense of security.” — Peter Wehner: The Trump Presidency Is Over

Have you read, watched, written, or posted an interesting or inspiring thing this week? Has something on the internet made you feel strongly, think deeply, or see the world in a new light? If so, drop a link in the comments, we’d love to check it out!

Photo by Roman Kraft on Unsplash

The Week’s End // A Thought-Provoking Round-Up

Happy weekend readers! If you’re looking for some interesting things to read, watch, and think about while you kick back and relax, look no further, here are my favorite things from around the web this week:

1. “Remembering some of the artists, innovators and thinkers we lost in the past year.” — The Lives They Lived 2019 // The New York Times

2. “But even if I frame death in that way, I’m still afraid of my experiences being discontinued. I enjoy waking up in the morning and learning things and doing things, and I enjoy thinking, and even sometimes interacting with other people. Death marks the end of that, and it’s the end of that for a long time. Other people will continue having experiences while I do not, and that sucks.” — Talking Through A Fear of Death // LessWrong

3. “The first challenge is casting doubt on the tendency to see personality traits—patterns of behaviour that are stable across time—as parts of our identities that are inevitable and arising from within. While it’s true that people are the products of genes interacting with the environment (the answer to the question ‘Is it nature or nurture?’ is always ‘Yes’)…” — Personality is not only about who but also where you are // Aeon Magazine

4. “Morality begins as a competitive weapon between societies. Now the really interesting question is can we make the jump to universal morality and start to turn non-sentient things into the enemy” — Can universal morality exist? // The Minimalists

5. “What I failed to realise is that in the absence of that empathetic connection, scripts, boundaries and prompts become absolutely essential. If someone is vulnerable for health reasons—physical or mental—because of something going on in their lives or for some other reason, we shouldn’t wait for some grand ethical revolution to give them the time and space they need to preserve their own sense of wellbeing.” — Sometimes you need to put your friends on hold, and I now understand that’s OK // The Guardian

6. “Epistemology is the branch of philosophy that has to do with knowledge how we know things how we come to know things what counts as fact vs opinion. Tribal epistemology was my attempt to capture this phenomenon where a group identity becomes so strong and… once tribalism takes over a group you have what’s called tribal epistemology which is instead of assessing new facts and knowledge based on their correspondence to factual reality or their credibility in the scientific community you accept as true what is good for your tribe.” — Republicans vs. the planet // The Ezra Klein Show

7. “Because the attention schema streamlines the complex noise of calculations and electrochemical signals of our brains into a caricature of mental activity, we falsely believe that our minds are amorphous and nonphysical. The body schema can delude a woman who has lost an arm into thinking that it’s still there, and Graziano argues that the ‘mind’ is like a phantom limb: ‘One is the ghost in the body and the other is the ghost in the head.’” — Do We Have Minds of Our Own? // The New Yorker

8. “As these people’s role in creating a physical and digital world built on surveillance, harassment, and child labor has become more clear, we’ve seen a wave of pseudo apologies for the tools and decisions that got us here. For the past few years, the men (and it’s almost entirely men) who built this digital hellscape have been on a veritable atonement tour.” — The Architects of Our Digital Hellscape are Very Sorry // WIRED

9. “A 16-month investigation by Searchlight New Mexico has found that when it comes to human trafficking, indigenous women and girls are the least recognized and least protected population in a state that has long struggled to address the issue. An almost total lack of protocols, mandated training, and coordination between law enforcement systems as well as medical institutions has ensnared victims in cycles of exploitation.” — Stolen and Erased // Searchlight New Mexico

10. “Paris Opera dancers perform in front of the Palais Garnier, protesting against the French government’s plan to overhaul the country’s retirement system, in Paris, on December 24, 2019.” — Photos of the Week // The Atlantic

Have you read, watched, or written an interesting or inspiring thing this week? Has something on the internet made you feel strongly, think deeply, or see the world in a new light? If so, drop a link in the comments, we’d love to check it out!

Photo by Roman Kraft on Unsplash

The Week’s End // A Thought-Provoking Round-Up

Happy Saturday everyone! If you’re looking for some interesting things to read or watch while you kick back and relax, look no further, here are my favorite things from around the web this week:

1. “A wealth tax is a tax on accumulated fortunes, not on [the income of] people that are going out and working every day. It’s time for us to look at those fortunes and think about the kind of country we want to be. Do we think it’s more important to keep [the people who own] those fortunes from paying two cents on the dollar or to have the money to invest in an entire generation?” — Elizabeth Warren Interview // Rolling Stone

2. “On the way we talk about ‘the economy,’ as if it were a natural force, he elaborates: ‘People make it sound like it’s some monster living in the woods that you have to make sacrifices to, but the economy is just us. How am I doing? That’s how the economy is really doing.’” — Forgive Us Our Debts // Buzzfeed

3. “Death is like painting rather than like sculpture, because it’s seen from only one side. Monochrome—like the mausoleum-gray former Berlin Wall, which kids in West Berlin glamorized with graffiti. What I’m trying to do here.” — The Art of Dying // The New Yorker

4. “Our job was to step out of the closet and become warriors and demand equality. Now that they see us as human beings, I think it really brought a lot of people over to our side.” — How gay marriage won America // Vox

5. “Every three or four months or so she’d see something that she just couldn’t stand. Something that made her feel utterly disgusted and terrified. Sometimes it was cracks, but other times it was patterns of holes or dots, or scenes from underwater nature programmes showing things like groups of barnacles. She’d shake, pour with sweat and end up lying on the floor in tears.” — Why Do Holes Horrify Me? // The Good Men Project

6. “After a year of removing terrorism and child abuse from Google’s services, she suffered from anxiety and frequent panic attacks. She had trouble interacting with children without crying. A psychiatrist diagnosed her with post-traumatic stress disorder. She still struggles with it today.” — The Terror Queue // The Verge

7. “Building a counternarrative, then, necessitates not simply making visible ‘a problem,’ but beginning where most master narratives retreat: the margins. For Hartman and Dunbar, marginalia become the center: so-called minor figures become the key players, witnesses, and protagonists.” — A Black Counternarrative // Public Books

8. “When illusionists argue that what we experience as qualia are ‘nothing like’ our actual internal mental mechanisms, they are, in a sense, right. But they also seem to forget that everything we perceive about the outside world is a representation and not the thing-in-itself.” — Consciousness is Real // Aeon

9. “The winter is a season in waiting. Waiting for the sun to melt what’s frozen. To grow what is buried. To reveal life’s own determination for itself. And so we wait, in the tenebrous space. Not because the darkness is a punishment but because darkness is the promise of light.” — It’s Not The Dark’s Fault We’re Afraid // Free People Blog

10. “In 2009, Folgers released a commercial meant to be a modern reimagining of their classic ad ‘Peter Comes Home For Christmas.’ Little did they know, it would become a classic of its own—for a very different reason.” — “You’re My Present This Year”: An Oral History of the Folgers Incest Ad // GQ

Photo by Roman Kraft on Unsplash

The Week’s End // A Thought-Provoking Round-Up

Happy Saturday everyone! If you’re looking for some interesting things to read or watch while you kick back and relax, look no further, here are my favorite things from around the web this week:

1. “Thunberg is 16 but looks 12. She usually wears her light brown hair pulled into two braids, parted in the middle. She has Asperger’s syndrome, which means she doesn’t operate on the same emotional register as many of the people she meets. She dislikes crowds; ignores small talk; and speaks in direct, uncomplicated sentences. She cannot be flattered or distracted. She is not impressed by other people’s celebrity, nor does she seem to have interest in her own growing fame. But these very qualities have helped make her a global sensation. Where others smile to cut the tension, Thunberg is withering. Where others speak the language of hope, Thunberg repeats the unassailable science: Oceans will rise. Cities will flood. Millions of people will suffer.” — TIME 2019 Person of the Year | Greta Thunberg

2. “Our long, sometimes tumultuous relationship with octopuses…has settled into something nearing reverence. We once called them ugly monsters. Now we plaster their likeness on our restaurants and tattoo it onto our arms. We once bludgeoned them with oars and brawled with them for sport. Now we’ve elevated octopuses to what in this secular era passes for gods: extraterrestrials.” — The Octopus from Outer Space // Seattle Met

3. “Half of employees don’t take paid time off due to high workloads or worries about job security, and 49% don’t take their allotted vacation days, yet nearly three-quarters agree that paid time off makes them feel more productive and healthier at work, and a quarter of employees would be willing to take a pay cut to get more of it. In other words: desire to do it more, guilt for doing it, guilt for not doing it, repeat. Hmm.” — Americans have a psychologically twisted relationship with paid time off // Fast Company

4. “Demonstrators hold placards during a protest against Chile’s government, in Santiago, Chile, on December 10, 2019. ” — Photos of the Week // The Atlantic

5. “Individuals commonly have to decide what they absolutely swear they will do and what they promise with equal sincerity they will never do. Whatever activity it covers, that covenant beckons to hypocrisy. And then cheating.” — Why Do People Cheat? (Because They Often Win) // Literary Hub

6. “We have words to describe the flu, or depression, or the common cold. We know the contours and symptoms of these illnesses. But when it comes to climate grief, the experience can be hard to define, and thus harder to understand and demonstrate. If climate sickness exists in the overlap of the physical and the emotional, we need words for those feelings, a dictionary of sorts that allows us to see patterns in the experiences of individual people. Fortunately, that’s exactly what a group of motley philosophers, artists, and doctors are currently working to devise. ” — Under the Weather // Believer Magazine

7. “Lately, I think I’m experiencing democracy grief. For anyone who was, like me, born after the civil rights movement finally made democracy in America real, liberal democracy has always been part of the climate, as easy to take for granted as clean air or the changing of the seasons. When I contemplate the sort of illiberal oligarchy that would await my children should Donald Trump win another term, the scale of the loss feels so vast that I can barely process it.” — Democracy Grief is Real // The New York Times

8. “I think it’s complicated. There seems to have developed in the last 20 years these public conceptions of sex work and trafficking as being dichotomous…and there were arguments there between the various groups about whether trading sex was something that could be done consensually or whether it was always coerced.” — Sex Work // Call Your Girlfriend

9. “For the most part, my questioners have already presupposed a fairly limited set of acceptable answers to the question of what’s worth doing—answers that generally bottom out in the material wellbeing of oneself and others. But those answers, innocuous as they might seem to the speaker, are philosophical answers to a philosophical question.” — Is there anything especially expert about being a philosopher? // Aeon

10. “Everybody is familiar with the feeling that things are not as they should be. That you are not successful enough, your relationships not satisfying enough. That you don’t have the things you crave. In this video we want to talk about one of the strongest predictors of how happy people are, how easily they make friends and how good they are at dealing with hardship. An antidote against dissatisfaction so to speak: Gratitude.” — An Antidote to Dissatisfaction // Kurzgesagt—In a Nutshell

Photo by Roman Kraft on Unsplash

The Week’s End // A Thought-Provoking Round-Up

Happy Saturday everyone! If you’re looking for some interesting things to read or watch while you kick back and relax, look no further, here are my favorite things from around the web this week:

1. “I’m just a guy who’s had 21 years worth of anxiety fixes tried on him by doctors and cognitive behavioral therapists. I’d like to share with you which ones have worked for me over the next 30 days.” — 30 Practical Tactics to Decrease Your Anxiety (Intro) // CJ Chilvers

2. “Our energies are overwhelmingly directed toward material, scientific, and technical subjects and away from psychological and emotional ones. Much anxiety surrounds the question of how good the next generation will be at math; very little around their abilities at marriage or kindness. We devote inordinate hours to learning about tectonic plates and cloud formations, and relatively few fathoming shame and rage.” — Alain de Botton on Existential Maturity and What Emotional Intelligence Really Means // Brain Pickings

3. “Neurosymphony explores three distinct perspectives on the brain, using videos of the scans made freely available by the NICC. The video pairs the imagery with an excerpt from the album Chapel by the US electronic musician and music-cognition researcher Grace Leslie, in which she converts her brainwaves into music.” — Neurosymphony // Aeon

4. “Training is based on deep-dive EI activities, such as mindfulness and meditation, as well as empathy and compassion exercises to strengthen their relationship with guests. Employees are entrusted to make on-the-spot decisions to improve a client’s experience.” — New research suggests this is the best way to teach emotional intelligence // Fast Company

5. “There is an overflowing pipeline of “feel-good” stories traveling from local to national news, showcasing inspirational tales about adversity and how community members support each other in times of need. However, these pieces, seemingly easy to report out because of their surface-level levity, often eclipse overarching, unexplored narratives about labor, health care, education, and more, indicated by the lack of public or private support detailed in these stories themselves.” — Beware of the feel-good news story // Vox

6. In absolutely sickening news: “A bill to ban abortion introduced in the Ohio state legislature requires doctors to ‘reimplant an ectopic pregnancy’ into a woman’s uterus–a procedure that does not exist in medical science–or face charges of ‘abortion murder’.” — The Guardian

7. “A general view shows a statue among abandoned items and debris in an entry area for the canteen inside Hong Kong Polytechnic University on November 20, 2019.” — Photos of the Week // The Atlantic

8. “Maybe you’ve heard Biden talk about his boyhood stutter. A non-stutterer might not notice when he appears to get caught on words as an adult, because he usually maneuvers out of those moments quickly and expertly. But on other occasions, like that night in Detroit, Biden’s lingering stutter is hard to miss.” — What Joe Biden Can’t Bring Himself to Say // The Atlantic

Bonus: More notes on stuttering // Austin Kleon

9. “You might think that in everyday life, the things you see and hear influence what you feel, but it’s mostly the other way around: What you feel alters your sight and hearing.” — The Wisdom Your Body Knows // The New York Times

10. A re-aired episode of The Ezra Klein Show I missed from last year with Lilliana Mason. From the synopsis “…Mason offers one of the best primers I’ve read on how little it takes to activate a sense of group identity in human beings, and how far-reaching the cognitive and social implications are once that group identity takes hold.”

Bonus: Uncivil Agreement: How Politics Became Our Identity by Lilliana Mason

Photo by Roman Kraft on Unsplash

The Week’s End // A Thought-Provoking Round-Up

Happy Saturday everyone! If you’re looking for some interesting things to read and see while you kick back and relax, look no further, here are my favorite things from around the web this week:

1. “Our story is a tragedy. I know it sounds odd, but that belief does not depress me. It focuses me.” — Ta-Nehisi Coates, On Being: Imagining a New America

2. “There are plenty of well-documented reasons to distrust Instagram—the platform where one is never not branding, never not making Facebook money, never not giving Facebook one’s data—but most unnerving are the ways in which it has led me to distrust myself.” — Tavi Gevinson, Who Would I Be Without Instagram? An investigation.

3. “Should our society be capitalist, socialist, or something in between? To adjudicate this debate, we must understand the definitions of ‘capitalism’ and ‘socialism.’” — Defining Capitalism and Socialism Bonus: Arguments for Capitalism and Socialism

4. “There is something peculiarly—even paradoxically—appealing about taking a dim view of human nature, a view that has become unquestioned dogma among many evolutionary biologists.” — David P Barash, Do human beings have an instinct for waging war?

5. “So mindful are we of the risks of selfishness, we run into an opposite danger: an abnegation of the self, a modesty that borders on self-erasure, an automatic impulse to give everything over to competing parties, a shyness about pressing oneself forward and a manic inability to say ‘no’ or cause the slightest frustration to others.” — The School of Life

6. “the thing beyond the body which is you is peeled back and massive barely anything at all” — Robin Richardson, Origin Story Ad Nauseam (via Grace)

7. “…it’s interesting and instructive that you’ve named your theory terror management theory as opposed to death management theory. It’s not about avoiding death. It’s about avoiding the fear of death.” — Shankar Vedantam, Hidden Brain

8. “Having existential anxiety is what it means to be a human being” — Olessa Pindak, 4 Ways To Cope With Existential Anxiety, According To A Psychiatrist

9. “That pain is incommunicable is a lie in the face of the near-constant, trans-species, and universal communicability of pain. So the question, finally, is not whether pain has a voice or appearance: the question is whether those people who insist that it does not are interested in what pain has to say, and whose bodies are doing the talking.” — Anne Boyer, What is the Language of Pain?

10. “It may be that life is just an example of Grover’s quantum search at work, and that this algorithm is itself a fundamental property of nature. That’s a Big Idea if ever there was one.” — An important quantum algorithm may actually be a property of nature, MIT Technology Review

Laure Prouvost, Ideally this sign would take you outside (via This Isn’t Happiness)

Photo by Roman Kraft on Unsplash

The Week’s End

Happy Saturday everyone! If you’re looking for some interesting things to read and see while you kick back and relax, look no further, here is the best from around the web this week, according to me.

1. “What you do is you keep all of your passions at play in your life. So, if there are three things that you love more than anything in this world you spend time on those three things and then they start to talk to each other and that’s when your life begins to form.” — Austin Kleon // SXSW interview with Debbie Millman

Bonus: You don’t have to write about the bad stuff.

2. “Think of the world’s Five Big Problems. Climate change, mass extinction, inequality, stagnation, and extremism. The money that’s piled up in the hands of richest 1% of the richest 10% of people on earth should be used to solve those problems. In a very real sense, those problems are just different names for ‘too much money piling up in too few hands.’” — umair haque // (How) Capitalism Turned Life, the Planet, and Civilization into Money — and Our Challenge is Turning it Back

3. “Do It; You Can Always Apologise Later.” and other rules for radicals.

4. “But we have a solution. We decided to be irreverent to this idea that only lawyers can impact the courts. And to penetrate the judicial system with the power, intellect and ingenuity of community organizing. We call the approach ‘participatory defense.’” — Raj Jayadev // TEDxBinghamtonUniversity

5. “People look at my story and applaud me and wonder what I did to ‘beat the odds.’ I wish they were more curious about why my brother did not. I wish they would ask, ‘What trap lay before this talented, bright boy so that he was bound to fall into it?’” — Akintunde Ahmad // I Went to Yale. My Brother Went to Prison

6. “The claim of democracy doesn’t negate meritocracy, but they’re in tension. One values equality and openness, the other achievement and security. Neither can answer every need. To lose sight of either makes life poorer. The essential task is to bring meritocracy and democracy into a relation where they can coexist and even flourish.” — George Packer // When the Culture War Comes for the Kids

7. “That’s what our phones have become. An instant escape, and a constant burden.” — Ryan Holiday // A Radical Guide to Spending Less Time on Your Phone

8. “What did they want? More than anything? Violent things. Unattainable things.” — Courtney Zoffness // Hot for Teacher

9. “But unfortunately the embarrassing message has already been received, and probably wedged deep into her teenage brain: there are always going to be people leering at parts of your body that you may not even be thinking about.” — Hannah Smothers // An Adult Pointing out Exposed Parts of Your Body Can Haunt You For a Lifetime

10. “This is all to say that the closer I look at the evidence regarding how our brains function, the more I’m convinced that we’re designed to be single-threaded, working on things one at a time, waiting to reach a natural stopping point before moving on to what’s next.” — Cal Newport // Our Brains Are Not Multi-Threaded

11. “This September, millions of us will walk out of our workplaces and homes to join young climate strikers on the streets and demand an end to the age of fossil fuels.”

12. “We have this affinity toward animals that are closer to us. We want to protect them. And the closer they are to us, the more we say that they must feel pain — that they’re worthy of protection. And the further they are evolutionary from us, the easier it is to morally excuse abuse of them.” — Leah Garcés // Battle-tested lessons from the animal rights struggle

13. Throwback: “In the most photographed and videotaped day in the history of the world, the images of people jumping were the only images that became, by consensus, taboo—the only images from which Americans were proud to avert their eyes.” — Tom Junod // The Falling Man

Photo by Roman Kraft on Unsplash

The Week’s End // A Collection of Inspiring Art and Words

1. The simple, yet expressive digital illustrations of Sharia Barzilay.

View this post on Instagram

Shira Barzilay [@koketit] digitally doodles on fashion editorials to give each figure a new dimension. See more on Colossal, link in bio.

A post shared by Colossal (@colossal) on Aug 15, 2019 at 11:05am PDT

2. “Here’s one way to discourage people from indulging in a damaging habit: tax the hell out of it. Cigarettes and alcohol are already taxed. In some cities, soda is too. Is it time to embrace a meat tax?”

3. “We may not do good for the sake of being noticed, but in a world that seems to be growing in hostility more than ever before, we desperately need to see yours.”

4. “The real task of a trauma victim—the task that makes life worth living again—is to reconnect the self to the world.”

5. “State briefly the ideas, ideals, or hopes,
the energy sources, the kinds of security,
for which you would kill a child.
Name, please, the children whom
you would be willing to kill.”

6. “…it’s very easy to be wrong about other people’s motivations. You might assume that they share your perspective or context, think like you do, or have circumstances similar to yours. With such assumptions, you may conclude that they should also behave like you would or hold your beliefs. Unfortunately, often these assumptions are wrong.”

7. “In August of 1619, a ship appeared on this horizon, near Point Comfort, a coastal port in the British colony of Virginia. It carried more than 20 enslaved Africans, who were sold to the colonists. No aspect of the country that would be formed here has been untouched by the years of slavery that followed. On the 400th anniversary of this fateful moment, it is finally time to tell our story truthfully.”

8. “Write what you know,” goes the adage, but you don’t really know what you know until you write about it…It’s one thing to write to find out what you don’t know, but to write to find out what you don’t want to know takes guts.”

9. “I don’t want to become a better man, because you all know, what I’ve been told manhood is, it’s not anything I’m trying to aspire to. I want to become a better human person.”

10. “The hardest time to practice kindness is, of course, during a fight—but this is also the most important time to be kind. Letting contempt and aggression spiral out of control during a conflict can inflict irrevocable damage on a relationship.”

11. “Look, I’ve read and enjoyed a lot of books by men, I just get…tired.”

12. “The idea here is simple. Scratch your own itch…if you want to create something that solves your own problem, something you plan to love and use yourself, you already have a head start.”

13. “A liberal-minded couple, Amy and Peter Edgar, are forced to reconsider their image of their adopted son after they discover he has written an extremely disturbing essay for his class at school.”

Photo by Roman Kraft on Unsplash