none of you ever get to fucking criticize poor dead Stieg Larsson's writing ever again

As a child he sought refuge in his own worlds. He immersed himself in fantasy literature, read poetry and biographies, adored Sylvia Plath, Borges and Tolkien and learned everything there was to know about computers. He dreamed of writing heart-rending novels about love and human tragedy, and was an incurable romantic who hoped that great passion would heal his wounds. He was not in the least bit interested in the outside world.

- The Girl in the Spider's Web


(Also there has been like ONE mention of Billy's Pan Pizza. Maybe two.)

....it has been unnerving to witness how the Internet's strengths -- limitless space, a 24/7 publishing schedule, precise quantity and popularity metrics -- have meshed with old-fashioned corporate imperatives of sped-up reporter productivity and indifferent journalism quality.

- The Watchdog That Didn't Bark: The Financial Crisis and the Disappearance of Investigative Journalism (Columbia Journalism Review Books), Dean Starkman

AA was a humble program. A program of suggestions, never rules. It was a place of storytelling, which operated on the same principle as great literature: Through your story, I hear my own.

- Sarah Hepola, Blackout


ETA And then this bit: "'Your problem is that you step up to every plate and expect to hit a grand slam,' a friend told me, and I said, 'Yes, exactly!' as though I were simply grateful for the diagnosis....I needed to build a new tolerance. Yes to discomfort, yes to frustration, yes to failure, because it meant I was getting stronger. I refused to be the person who only played games she could win."

'Know what must be known.'

Puritan Milton with his pagan muses. It is like a voice heard from another room, singing for the pleasure of the song, and then you know it, too, and through you it moves by accident and necessity down generations. Then, why singing? Why pleasure in it? And why the blessing of the moment when another voice is heard, dreaming to itself?....It was Keats in Cheapside, traveling his realms of gold.

- Marilynne Robinson, Home

My brain, my mind, my soul -- whatever terrestrial or transcendental organ you choose to assign responsibility for the functionality of my person -- does not work. It is broken, and it has consequently spent the duration of its existence trying to dismantle itself. My better angel is defective, and the manufacturer has been extremely uncooperative in my attempts to obtain a replacement. Indeed, much of my treatment has involved convincing myself not to approach the executive prematurely, to demand an explanation of his organization's incompetence.

- Triggered: A Memoir of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, Fletcher Wortmann

So I'm sitting there enjoying my witty fun little pop sci book, as you do, and then Bryson drops this fucking bombshell* on me:

....James Chadwick devoted eleven intensive years to hunting for neutrons before finally succeeding in 1932....As Boorse and his colleagues point out in their history of the subject, the delay in discovery was probably a very good thing as mastery of the neutron was essential to the development of the atomic bomb....Had the neutron been isolated in the 1920s, they note, it is "very likely the atomic bomb would have been developed first in Europe, undoubtedly by the Germans."

JESUS FUCKING CHRIST BILL DON'T DO THAT TO ME. //hyperventilates


*indeed

Atoms, in short, are very abundant. They are also fantastically durable. Because they are so long lived, atoms really get around. Every atom you possess has almost certainly passed through several stars and been part of millions of organisms on its way to becoming you. We are each so atomically numerous and so vigorously recycled at death that a significant number of our atoms -- up to a billion for each of us, it has been suggested -- probably once belonged to Shakespeare. A billion more each came from Buddha and Genghis Khan and Beethoven, and any other historical figure you care to name. (The personages have to be historical, apparently, as it takes the atoms some decades to become thoroughly redistributed; however much you may wish it, you are not yet one with Elvis Presley.)

So we are all reincarnations -- though short-lived ones.

- A Short History of Nearly Everything, Bill Bryson


ETA  Review: 'Most of this paragraph is correct, but because atoms are stripped of their electrons in stars, Bryson should have said, ". . . the nuclei of every atom you possess has most likely passed through several stars . . . " One might be shocked that each of the 6 trillion or so humans on Earth have so many of Shakespeare's atoms in them. However, Jupiter Scientific has done an analysis of this problem and the figure in Bryson's book is probably low: It is likely that each of us has about 200 billion atoms that were once in Shakespeare's body.' (An Estimate of the Number of Shakespeare's Atoms in a Living Human Being)

gpoy

Newton was....famously distracted (upon swinging his feet out of bed in the morning he would reportedly sometimes sit for hours, immobilized by the sudden rush of thoughts to his head).

- A Short History of Nearly Everything, Bill Bryson

go away, internet

Without paying attention I had become what I wrote and I worried what would happen if I became unable to write. And then one day it happened. And it happened the next day, and the day after that....I'd gone silent.

-- Stephen Elliott

The Octopus: A Story of California

....in December 2013 (the National Reconnaissance Office) launched a spy satellite on a rocket painted with an image of a world-straddling octopus and the words "Nothing Is Beyond Our Reach." The ODNI, the office that oversees the entire U.S. intelligence community, was so proud of this event that it even tweeted photos of the rocket and a separate one of the logo, which also served as a mission patch....No wonder, then, that the NSA and Silicon Valley have made such good partners....the NSA even refers to government agencies requesting data and analysis from it as "customers."

- Terms of Service


(Yeah, I'm still reading this. Yeah, it turned into something of a slog -- not that it's badly-written or anything, in fact, quite the opposite -- it's just really fucking depressing, and sort of like reading about climate change: this is just the way the world is now, and it's totally fucked, and the moment at which any effective change could have started has long since passed and the only thing that would get us off this track is....what? I don't know. It seems so far beyond any one person.)

what I'm reading (STILL)

Critics claim that advertising is essential to the digital economy. It's what makes so many Web sites and services free. This may be true, but consumers have no responsibility to help support a broken, if widely used, business model. Whatever implied social contract existed between advertisers and users has been torn up by the industry. Never before has so much information been collected, so much commercial surveillance performed, on such a broad cross-section of consumers, with all of it digitized and freely traded among data brokers. As the current ardor for Big Data shows, information harvesting can be an essentially endless process, with the only limits being technological.

- Terms of Service

....surveillance has become a cultural value deeply tied to our appetite for voyeurism, self-display, the public performance of identity, and confirmation of our own existences in the form of micro-affirmations from a disembodied audience.

- Terms of Service: Social Media and the Price of Constant Connection, Jacob Silverman

Even the Chechens, who lived right next door and had been decimated by a forced exile, had a real city: Grozny had fashion and music. It was from Grozny that young men would bring records and reel-to-reel tapes for Makhachkala's first diskotekas -- a fancy word for dances -- in the early 1980s. To create disco lighting, the young men stole coloured glass from traffic lights and, at great peril to themselves, flashing lights off police cars. In Grozny, young men were not too timid to wear pointy cowboy boots, which had roared into fashion; Makhachkalinians, who did not dare wear them, called them nokhchi-boots, or Chechen-boots.

- The Brothers, Masha Gessen

I just fucking love this guy

I can say from experience that some people, if they hear you're writing a book about such things -- about scary emerging diseases, about killer viruses, about pandemics -- want you to cut to the chase. So they ask: "Are we all gonna die?" I have made it my little policy to say: Yes.

Yes, we are all gonna die. Yes. We are all gonna pay taxes and we are all gonna die. Most of us, though, will probably die of something much more mundane than a new virus lately emerged from a duck or a chimpanzee or a bat.

- David Quammen, Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic

not about you

I kept remembering something Michael Fertik had said to me at the Village Pub in Woodside. 'The biggest lie,' he said, 'is "The Internet is about you." We like to think of ourselves as people who have choice and taste and personalized content. But the Internet isn't about us. It's about the companies that dominate the data flows of the Internet.'

- Jon Ronson, So You've Been Publicly Shamed

There was, of course, even for Conrad's Lord Jim, no running away. The cloud of his special discomfiture followed him like a pup, no matter what ships he took or what wildernesses he entered. In the pathways between office and home and home and the houses of settled people there are always, ready to snap at you, the little perils of routine living, but there is no escape in the unplanned tangent, the sudden turn.

- James Thurber, My Life and Hard Times

I have the flu, I have a fever, there's a cement mixer and a circular saw (? -- some kind of horrible whining droning saw-thing, I don't know what the fuck it is when it's at home) about thirty feet away from my bedroom window, and Terry Pratchett is still cracking me up with Weaver the thatcher and Carpenter the tailor.

Now that's the real magic.

....A chemotherapeutic poison was a poison was a poison, and one did not need to understand a cancer cell to poison it. So, just as a generation of radical surgeons had once shuttered the blinds around itself and pushed the discipline to its terrifying limits, so, too, did a generation of radical chemotherapists. If every dividing cell in the body needed to be obliterated to rid it of cancer, then so be it. It was a conviction that would draw oncology into its darkest hour.

- The Emperor of All Maladies


JESUS CHRIST WHY AM I READING THIS AGAIN
IT WOULD GIVE STEPHEN KING NIGHTMARES

//reads on

"organ bouquets" Mary, mother of God

"In the early days, among the first doctors to encounter and treat AIDS patients were oncologists....the first clinic to be organized for AIDS patients was thus a sarcoma clinic"

OH, THE AIDS EPIDEMIC
BECAUSE THE BOOK WASN'T HEARTBREAKING ENOUGH, SURE

from 'A Death on Diamond Mountain'

Each age had its own Buddhism, every ruler, scholar, emperor, and scribe adding their own perspective and twist on the ancient knowledge. The Buddhism of today is no different....The traditions that are taught (in the US) come from all across Asia and span millennia, and yet we absorb them as if they were a unified whole, mixing together elements of Hinduism, Buddhism, and Confucianism, and any other seemingly distant "Eastern" faith. The way we reassemble the spiritual practices of the East says a lot more about contemporary America than about their point of origin.

- Scott Carney