You can have your gender

Perhaps we should pause here for a moment and clarify something that I'm often asked about and that seems to be a point of grave misunderstanding. I don't want to take away your gender. I don't want to abolish gender roles, or even gender rules. I do want to abolish gender assumptions, and therein lies the most exciting part of my identity: I am a metaphor. I am not a metaphor for how "you too can be genderfluid." If you aren't inherently fluid, I would never suggest that you try to be or you pretend to be. I'm a metaphor for being free, for a grander ideal. I am a walking, breathing representation of the fruits of self-acceptance.

Jeffrey Marsh, "Life Threats," in Micah Rajunov & Scott Duane eds., Nonbinary: Memoirs of Gender and Identity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2019), p. 76

It looked like infectious diseases were conquered

Writing in the heady days of new antibiotics and immunizations, esteemed microbiologists Macfarlane Burnet and David White predicted in 1972 that “the most likely forecast about the future of infectious diseases is that it will be very dull.”¹ They acknowledged that there was always a risk of “some wholly unexpected emergence of a new and dangerous infectious disease, but nothing of the sort has marked the last fifty years.” Epidemics, it seemed, were of interest only to historians.

David S. Jones, History in a Crisis—Lessons for Covid-19, New Eng. J. Med. (April 30, 2020) (quoting Macfarlane Burnet & David O. White, Natural History of Infectious Disease, 4th ed. (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1972)

Email messes with priorities

I think email has been a disaster for all of us. The idea of letting the inbox determine your order of priority is utterly ridiculous,but it's very, very hard to resist.

Michèle Lamont (sociologist), quoted in Helen Sword, Air & Light & Time & Space: How Successful Academics Write (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 2017), p. 37