Tragedy Versus Merely Bad News

Taking a deep breath, George began. "Someone backing out of the driveway and running over their child is a tragedy. The Holocaust is a tragedy. People abusing their children is a tragedy. None of those things have to happen. But it's in the nature of things for people to get sick ad die, sometimes of cancer. And the outliers get it young. It's just statistics. Contrary to what you might believe, even I am nowhere near optimistic enough to believe that we can ever have a world in which there's no disease. That's the realm of science fiction.

"George, listen to me for once. James is dying. Don't you care?"

"I hear that he's dying, and of course I care. What kind of person do you think I am that I wouldn't care? I feel terrible that James is dying. I feel terrible for Marla and the girls. And you, I feel terrible for you too, because I know how much he means to you. And I feel terrible for me, because he's become a good friend. All our lives are going to change because of his death. But that's not a tragedy. Don't you see that?"

Nancy Pearl, George & Lizzie (New York: Touchstone, 2017), p. 270

The winners of the War on Drugs

The only winners of the War on Drugs are gun makers, gravediggers, and politicians.

John Washington, "Introduction," in Anabel Hernández, A Massacre in Mexico: The True Story Behind the Missing Forty-Three Students (John Washington trans.) (London: Verso, 2018), p. xvii

Two Styles of Readers

George thought of himself as being quite intelligent (he'd always gotten high scores on standardized tests), but he'd never been quick. He liked to read books slowly and carefully (he was virtually incapable of skimming), with frequent pauses to think about what he had just read; Lizzie devoured books, one after another, like a chain-smoker with her cigarettes. She was like a lightning streak across the sky, picking up and remembering odd and interesting facts about whatever interested her, and a lot did. George would never call Lizzie a deep thinker, but, boy, she was the ideal Trivial Pursuit or Jeopardy! partner. George was frequently srprised at what Lizzie knew or didn't know. Perfectly ordinary facts like what latitude meant were beyond her, while the sort of minuscule details of someone's life—the name of Albert Einstein's first wife (it was Mileva Einstein-Maricé, George learned from Lizzie—were on the tip of her tongue.

Nancy Pearl, George & Lizzie (New York: Touchstone, 2017), p. 209

Lessons of Mexican Students' Disappearance

The disappearance of the forty-three students revealed the brutal reality of the Mexican state, which is rife with disappearances, murder, corruption, impunity, and the systematic use of torture by law enforcement agencies to lock up innocent people and protect the guilty.

Anabel Hernández, A Massacre in Mexico: The True Story Behind the Missing Forty-Three Students (John Washington trans.) (London: Verso, 2018), p. 243