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He employed underhanded tactics to win debates, and he constantly aggrandized his own achievements. Personality-wise, you could think of him as the Donald Trump of ancient Rome.
All of these details can blur together a bit, so take a minute to consider what it would be like to see wild dogs dragging around human remains in front of your house.
It’s perfectly possible to be smarter than everyone else and still be polite and even deferential—women have been doing it for centuries.
To my fellow late risers: if every Aztec could have slept in until noon even one day, they would have realized the sun rose without requiring still-beating hearts, and countless lives would have been saved. Remember this the next time anyone criticizes your sleeping habits.
Isobel Grundy, Lady Mary Montagu’s biographer, notes, “Smallpox discourse was gendered, referring to men it spoke of the danger to life, referring to women, of the danger to beauty.”
The only part of this lifestyle that sounds terrible is the “dying in agony” part, which is—always—glossed over.
Whitehead kept over his desk a portrait of Snow, which, he noted, “ever serves to remind me that in any profession the highest order of work is achieved not by fussy demand for ‘something to be done,’ but by patient study of the eternal laws.”33
Richardson remarks that a biography of Snow would “be scanty in its details; it is of but little count that the life of him who is about to be shadowed forth is destitute of incident fitted for the taste of wonder-loving, passion-courting, romance-devouring readers. Biographies for these are common. Good men are scarce.”
The biggest disease today is not leprosy or tuberculosis, but rather the feeling of being unwanted, uncared for, and deserted by everybody. —MOTHER TERESA
Anyone who has ever spilled scalding hot water on themselves will tell you that’s a good time to leap, swear, and threaten legal proceedings against water manufacturers, but Damien felt nothing at all.
Whatever your opinion of Wilson at this moment (he’s awful), we have the advantage of looking at his actions from a hundred years in the future. He was focused on the war at hand.
You may say, “Wait. He tried, but he did not succeed! There are no points for trying! Do or do not, there is no try!” To which I will say, “No, that’s silly. The world is not dictated by Yoda’s quips. Yoda is just a little monster who lives in a backpack. Of course there are points for trying.” Dr. Anders tried to warn people, and that was more than anyone else was doing. He did the right thing, at a time when it was certainly easier to stay silent. This is my book, and I say he is a hero for trying. He did fail, though.
As someone who is afraid of literally everything, I can assure you that fear does not have such a successful kill rate.
And although better coverage of the outbreak’s evolution in the press couldn’t have stopped the influenza virus, a single newspaper headline in Philadelphia saying “Don’t Go to Any Parades; for the Love of God Cancel Your Stupid Parade” could have saved hundreds of lives.
Despite Lippmann’s claims to the contrary, we are smart, and we are good, and we are always stronger when we work together. If there is a next time, it would be very much to our benefit to remember that.
If you are tempted to exclaim, “That sounds like me on a Monday morning! I hate Mondays!” then: 1. I assume you are Jim Davis. Congratulations on Garfield’s success. 2. No, it does not sound like you. You can chew your food without physically collapsing.
In 1949 Freeman took to the road to demonstrate his procedure at hospitals across the country. He traveled in a custom-fitted Lincoln Continental he dubbed the lobotomobile—like an ice cream truck manned by a demon.
There’s a story called “Zombies” by Chuck Palahniuk. It’s possibly the most Palahniuk tale ever written (readers of his work will understand). It features teenagers inflicting lobotomies on themselves. They do it so they don’t have “to keep track of all three hundred Kardashian sisters and eight hundred Baldwin brothers” and can instead “be thrilled with penny candy and reruns of Fraggle Rock.” So Chuck Palahniuk clearly has no idea in what year this story is taking place.
People don’t seem to regard giving up their higher reasoning for a life of untroubled bliss as a good trade. If you want to read more into that statement, you could probably say this implies something great about humanity. Perhaps we prioritize a life of meaning over one of simple happiness.
They got lucky. If their vaccine had not worked and if the patients had died, Salk and Francis would be monsters. If it did not work and they had screamed, “It works if I say it works!” then they would be Walter Jackson Freeman II.
Those men each acknowledged the seriousness of their crises and went about bravely confronting the disease in their midst head-on. They did not ignore it or glamorize it or shame people for having it, because that never works. That strategy just gives diseases more time to multiply and kill people. Diseases are delighted when you refuse to take them seriously.
I believe there will be a day when we will see diseases as what they are—an enemy of all of humanity. Not of perceived sinners, not of people who are poor or have a different sexual orientation, not of those who we somehow decided “have it coming” because they’re “not like us.”
