Luke > Recent Status Updates

Gotta keep up my streak of reading books whose last 100 pages are end notes.

I know I haven't posted many status updates, but this is how you write drama.

Requiring evidence that the drug being administered meets or exceeds the standard of medical care is de rigueur for Western trials, but university IRBs now employ an ethical sleight of hand to stipulate that the tested drug must meet or exceed the standard of care in the country where the study is being evaluated. In impoverished, medically underserved sub-Saharan African countries, that standard of care...

That feeling when work has you page a book one of your GR friends has recently reviewed.

I seeeeeee youuuuuuu.

South Africa's systematic murders via biological agents are important to this book because so many of the scientists involved in crafting South Africa's racist bioterror were Americans. In fact, the science of the apartheid could not have existed without the avid participation and guidance of a handful of American scientific renegades.

But that's the sort of thing one hears about in detective stories—in real life, it doesn't happen often.

I'm looking forward to figuring out in my review why this is one of the best pieces of nonfiction I've ever read.

Having a major depressive episode in this society means spending days trying to defeat it with productivity while thinking you're faking it up until you wake up one morning and realize that if you came across a loaded gun, you'd use it to shoot yourself in the head. Death is convenient. Asking for help when everyone thinks you're better off dead is not.

Silence governs those risk factors that cannot be laid to a blame-the-victim paradigm that emphasizes patients' high-risk behaviors.

Medicaid gives more money to hospitals which forcibly incarcerate "the sick" against their will than those which utilize voluntary routine doctor visits. Imagine that.

People complaining about the prose in A Brief History of Seven Killings and I'm like...you could've had a different language translated into English, but instead you had to try to colonize the entire damn planet and force English down everyone's throats, so lie in the bed you made and shaddup.

During World War II, prisoners had been commonly used as research subjects, and after the war, the United States was the only nation in the world continuing to legally use prisoners in clinical trials.

More stuff about why Me Before You is eugenicist trash: http://ndpsych.tumblr.com/post/147246...

His confidence in the tonics he prescribed was increased by the fact that no one, as of this moment, had yet died from them.

There are many necessary compainion reads to Snow Flower and the Secret Fan, but this is the one I currently have access to.

We now know, where we could only surmise before, that we have contributed to their ailments and shortened their lives.

It's never a good sign when something is compared to Memoirs of a Geisha, unless you like stuff that the author was successfully sued for libel for writing.

I can only say that given my home and professional life, I'd had years to learn how to speak in a way that made a person feel she had no option but to obey.

Most of the bodies used by New York City's Columbia University and New York University were from the Negros Burying Ground. In 1712 and again in 1741, New York slave rebellions were actuated in part by the refusal of slave owners to allow slaves to bury their dead.

I'm sure there are things that kill my interest in a person faster than them saying "But why does it have to be called FEMINIST," but they're not coming to mind at the moment. That kind of exposure is worse than useless.

The British government has long since adopted license instead of prohibition, and the statue proposed among the final acts of my goverment was drawn from one in use in the British colonies; yet I have still to learn that there has been any proposition on the part of the pious people of London to dethrone Her Majesty Queen Victoria for issuing such licenses.

Finally, Rebecca.

God is change. I hate God. I have to write.

It's been a while since I bought books from stores in bulk. Figures this is what I'd spend my reward for graduation on first.

'Science without conscience is the soul's perdition.'

—François Rabelais, Pantagruel

Welp, I can now cross "know the pain of a delayed flight" off my bucket list. Time to do some reading.

It may be true that they really believed us unfit to be trusted to administer the growing wealth of the Islands in a safe and proper way. But if we manifested any incompetency, it was in not forseeing that they would be bound by no obligations, by honor, or by oath of allegiance, should an opportunity arise for seizing our country, and bringing it under the authority of the United States.

Ever wonder whom the Nazis were inspired by?

The fastest way to ruin a potential read is to call it 'balanced'. If I wanted 'balanced', I'd read nutrition labels and news about reparation efforts of the Tower of Pisa, not quality writing.

All these people obsessing over sports and I'm over here counting the days till I can start talking about the Nobel Prize for Lit 2016 in public.