Nabila Tabassum Chowdhury > Recent Status Updates

“Then there are the much bigger power-ups, like the graduating-from-college-with-no-debt power-up, or the being-white power-up, or the being-male power-up. This doesn’t mean that people with good power-ups will succeed, of course, or that those without them won’t.”

“Whether it’s climbing El Capitan or going to space, we want to do it, but we also want to do it before anyone else, or faster than anyone else. This drive has pushed us forward as a species—but I worry it has also pushed us in other directions”

“But the Indy 500 isn’t really about going fast; it’s about going faster than everyone else, which reflects one of my top-level concerns about humanity: We cannot seem to resist the urge to win.”

“If everything seems under control, you’re just not going fast enough.”

“But it’s been my experience that almost everything easy to mock turns out to be interesting if you pay closer attention.”

“Kurt Vonnegut, wrote that one of the flaws in the human character “is that everybody wants to build and nobody wants to do maintenance.””

“We two have paddled in the stream, from morning sun till dine / but seas between us broad have roared since Auld Lang Syne.””

“All serious athletes know the yips are possible, that they happen to people. But knowing something abstractly is different from knowing it experientially. Once you’ve known the yips personally, you can’t unknow them. Every time you toss a tennis ball for the rest of your life, you’ll know what could happen. How can you regain confidence when you know that confidence is just a varnish painted atop human frailty?”

“I project my expectations and fears onto everyone and everything I encounter. I believe that what I believe to be true must be true because I believe it. I imagine lives that feel distant from mine monolithically. I oversimplify. I forget that everyone has birthdays.”

“Over one hundred and fifty years ago, the American humorist Josh Billings wrote, “I honestly believe it is better to know nothing than to know what ain’t so.” And that seems to me the underlying problem—not just with CNN and other cable news networks, but with contemporary information flow in general. So often, I end up knowing what just ain’t so.”

“The constant repetition of grim milestones without any historical grounding only has a distancing effect, at least for me. But when contextualized, the grimness of the milestone comes into focus.”

“When you have the microphone, what you say matters, even when you’re just kidding. It’s so easy to take refuge in the “just” of just kidding. It’s just a joke. We’re just doing it for the memes. But the preposterous and absurd can still shape our understanding of ourselves and one another. And ridiculous cruelty is still cruel.”

“Shea said, “When we are young, we drink our coffee with milk and sugar. And as we age, we drink it with milk only, then we drink it black, then we drink it decaf, then we die. Our next eater is at decaf.””

“The mighty pulse of the throbbing today does make new things out of old—but it also makes old things out of new.”

“Forces beyond my comprehension have led me and my fellow lemmings to a precipice, and I fear the shove is coming. The lemmings myth doesn’t last because it helps us to understand lemmings. It lasts because it helps us to understand ourselves.”

“I am thoughtful—full of thoughts, all the time, inescapably, exhaustingly. But I am also mindless—acting in accordance with default settings I neither understand nor examine. To a degree I don’t want to accept, I am what we have long claimed lemmings to be.”

“Today, White Wildernessis remembered not as a documentary about lemmings, but as a documentary about us, and the lengths we will go to hold on to a lie.”

“You can’t see the future coming—not the terrors, for sure, but you also can’t see the wonders that are coming, the moments of light-soaked joy that await each of us.”

“Someone tell ten-year-old Jerzy Dudek that he is going to save two penalties in a European Cup final by making the weirdest possible choice. Someone tell twenty-one-year-old Jerzy Dudek playing for $1,800 a year that he is a decade away from lifting the European Cup.”

“I know sports don’t matter in the scheme of things, but I miss the luxury of caring about stuff that doesn’t matter. The late Pope John Paul II is reported (probably falsely) to have said, “Of all the unimportant things, football is the most important.” And I yearn for the unimportant things at the moment.”

“I’D LIKE TO TELL YOU A STORY of joy and wonder and stupidity. It’s a sports story, and I’ve been thinking about it because I am writing to you from May 2020, a moment when sports have—for the first time in my life—stopped. I miss sports.”

“To me, the most beautiful thing is vulnerability.” I would go a step further and argue that you cannot see the beauty which is enough unless you make yourself vulnerable to it.”

“Toni Morrison once wrote, “At some point in life, the world’s beauty becomes enough. You don’t need to photograph, paint, or even remember it. It is enough.””

“But every human who has lived for more than a few years on this planet has seen a beautiful sunset and paused to spend one of the last moments of the day grateful for, and overwhelmed by, the light.”

“Our distant ancestors didn’t eat like us or travel like us. Their relationship to ideas as fundamental as time was different from ours. They measured time not primarily in hours or seconds but mostly in relationship to solar cycles—how close it was to sunset, or to daybreak, or to midwinter.”

“I brought a Terry Tempest Williams book with me, but the omnipresent worry makes it impossible to read for more than a few minutes. Scanning through the book, I find a passage I highlighted years ago. “When one of us says, ‘Look, there’s nothing out there,’ what we are really saying is, ‘I cannot see.’””

“For days now,my brain has refused to allow me to finish a thought,constantly interrupting with worries.Even my worries get interrupted—by new worries,or facets of old worries I had not adequately considered.My thoughts are a river overflowing its banks,churning&muddy&ceaseless.I wish I wasn’t so scared all the time—scared of the virus,yes,but there is also some deeper fear:the terror of time passing,and me with it.”

“What does it say that I can’t imagine my life or my work without the internet? What does it mean to have my way of thinking, and my way of being, so profoundly shaped by machine logic? What does it mean that, having been part of the internet for so long, the internet is also part of me?”

“And then, as now, you could fall very far down the rabbit hole of the internet’s highly personalized information feeds until conspiracy theories began to feel more real than the so-called facts.”

“I fear I’ve been romanticizing. The early-nineties internet had many of the problems the current internet does. While I recall the Teen Forum being well moderated, the same racism and misogyny that populate today’s comments sections was prevalent thirty years ago.”