Nabila Tabassum Chowdhury > Recent Status Updates

“For people like myself colonized by fascinatingly aggressive bacteria, there can be no hearkening back wistfully to past golden ages, because in all those pasts I would be thoroughly dead.”

“What’s absurd is reducing workplace productivity by using precious fossil fuels to excessively cool an office building so that men wearing ornamental jackets will feel more comfortable.”

“But when people point out the bias of AC settings in office buildings—especially when women point it out—they’ve often been mocked for being overly sensitive. After the journalist Taylor Lorenz tweeted that office air-conditioning systems are sexist, a blog in the Atlantic wrote, “To think the temperature in a building is sexist is absurd.” But it’s not absurd.”

“Perhaps because the definition of “room temperature” has historically been established by analyzing the temperature preferences of forty-year-old, 154-pound men wearing business suits. Studies have consistently found that on average women prefer warmer indoor temperatures.”

“I am not alone in this respect. A Cornell University study in 2004 found that office temperatures affect workplace productivity. When temperatures were increased from 68 degrees Fahrenheit to 77, typing output rose by 150 percent and error frequency dropped by 44 percent.”

“I remember thinking that I would never be a kid again, not really, which was the first time I can recall feeling that intense longing for the you to whom you can never return. Sarah Dessen once wrote that home is “not a place, but a moment.””

“That’s the wonder and terror of computer-generated images for me: If they look real, my brain isn’t nearly sophisticated enough to understand they are not. We’ve long known that images are unreliable—Kafka wrote that “nothing is as deceptive as a photograph”—and yet I still can’t help but believe them.”

“But the weird thing to me about velociraptors is that even though I know they were feathered scavengers about the size of a swan, when I imagine them, I can’t help but see the raptors of Jurassic Park. Knowing the facts doesn’t help me picture the truth.”

“The brontosaurus was real in the late nineteenth century, only to become a fiction for much of the twentieth, only to become real again in the last few years. History is new. Prehistory is newer. And paleontology is newer still.”

“The Tyrannosaurus rex wasn’t named until 1905. The first velociraptor fossil was discovered in 1924. Scientists have been debating for more than a century whether the long-necked brontosaurus of the Jurassic age even existed or is just a misidentified apatosaurus.”

“So Diet Dr Pepper probably isn’t a health risk for me. And yet I feel as if I’m committing a sin whenever I drink Diet Dr Pepper. Nothing that sweet can be truly virtuous. But it’s an exceptionally minor vice, and for whatever reason, I’ve always felt like I need a vice.”

“God, I loved scratch ’n’ sniff bananas. They didn’t smell like bananas, of course. They smelled like the Platonic ideal of bananas. If real bananas were a note played on a home piano, scratch ’n’ sniff bananas were that same note played on a church’s pipe organ”

“To me, though, the hand stencils say, “I was here.” They say, “You are not new.”“

+“These communities hunted and gathered, and there were no large caloric surpluses, so every healthy person would have had to contribute to the acquisition of food and water—and yet somehow, they still made time to create art, almost as if art isn’t optional for humans.”

“But the hand stencils also remind us that humans of the past were as human as we are. Their hands were indistinguishable from ours. More than that, we know they were like us in other ways."+

“Marveling at the perfection of that leaf, I was reminded that aesthetic beauty is as much about how and whether you look as what you see. From the quark to the supernova, the wonders do not cease. It is our attentiveness that is in short supply, our ability and willingness to do the work that awe requires.”

“History, like human life, is at once incredibly fast and agonizingly slow.”

“It’s no coincidence that the scientific revolution in Britain coincided with the rise of British participation in the Atlantic slave trade and the growing wealth being extracted from colonies and enslaved labor.”

“But back then it was common for humans to forget over time what they had already learned. Maybe not only back then, come to think of it.”

“The American writer Mark Twain, for instance, was born as the comet blazed above the Missouri sky. Seventy-four years later, he wrote, “I came in with Halley’s Comet in 1835. It is coming again next year, and I expect to go out with it.” And he did, dying in 1910 as Halley reappeared.”

“Well, that Human Pox wasn’t great, but at least I didn’t get Large Asteroid Syndrome.”“

“for many forms of life, humanity is the apocalypse.”

“And yet, I did nothing to prepare. The future, even in its inevitabilities, always feels vague and nebulous to me—until it doesn’t”

“How could the world possibly survive the death of its single most important inhabitant—me?”

“I’m reminded of something my religion professor Donald Rogan told me once: “Never predict the end of the world. You’re almost certain to be wrong, and if you’re right, no one will be around to congratulate you.”“

“A 2012 survey conducted across twenty countries found wide variance in the percentage of people who believe humanity will end within their lifetimes. In France, 6 percent of those polled did; in the United States, 22 percent.”

“What a word that is, encourage. Though our dreams be tossed and blown, still we sing ourselves and one another into courage.”

“I’m forever blowing bubbles, pretty bubbles in the air / They fly so high, nearly reach the sky / Then like my dreams, they fade and die.”

“We are also told to “walk on with hope in your heart,” which feels aggressively trite. And it reports that “at the end of the storm, there’s a golden sky and the sweet silver song of a lark.” But in reality, at the end of the storm, there are tree branches strewn everywhere, and downed power lines, and flooded rivers.”

“I want to feel what there is to feel while I am here.”